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, we present three items. The first is the Chalmers Johnson interview with Amy Goodman regarding America's empire-driven war on democracy. Johnson has recently published a book titled “Nemesis: the Last Days of the American Republic.” The second piece is the AlterNet 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. The last piece is Joe Conason's article entitled “It Can Happen Here!” For all we of The Scallion know, it already has! It is up to each of us not to be “good” Americans like the “good” Germans who enabled Nazi Germany.

-- By falsely praising the “rarity” of violence in Iraq, Laura Bush proves that she is just as much of an evil, out-of-touch, and possibly drugged liar as her benighted husband

-- IKEA proves that big retail can be green

-- From our WTF?!?? Department, Newt Gingrich blames Katrina victims for a “failure of citizenship” by being "so uneducated and so unprepared, they literally couldn't get out of the way of a hurricane."

-- America: still Jim Crow after all these years

-- Our tax dollars are still being used to fund right-wing meetings to assess potential presidential candidates

-- Republicans and Democrats alike have been complaining to the powers that be regarding the foul conditions at Walter Reed for years, only to be dismissed and ignored.

-- The government's solution to the foul conditions at Walter Reed: deny returning troops permission to speak to the media! We of The Scallion are sure that this sort of evisceration of the First Amendment is exactly the sort of thing the troops are happily risking their lives for when they say they are fighting for freedom. How ironic that they are fighting for the freedom of their government to suppress the freedoms of the citizenry emblazoned in the Constitution!

-- Amy Goodman wins prestigious Gracie Allen Award - for Individual Achievement for a Program Host in Public Broadcasting, from the American Women in Radio and Television

-- DN! ran the headline “Karl Rove Personally Received (And Ignored) Iranian Peace Offer in 2003.” The '03 Iranian offer handed the U.S. many significant concessions on a silver platter because, at the time, the U.S. had toppled Baghdad and appeared to be in a position of great strength. The '03 peace offer was carefully buried -- for example, Condescending Rice denied ever having heard of it, which is patently impossible -- because the U.S., which is now approaching Iran hat-in-hand, must necessarily accept a far less favorable negotiation if it chooses not to make another disastrous pre-emptive strike.

-- Seymour Hersh reports that John Negroponte's decision to resign as National Intelligence Director was made in part because of the Bush administration's covert actions including the indirect funding of radical Sunni groups -- some with ties to al-Qaeda -- to counter Shiite groups backed by Iran.

-- Hersh also reports the Pentagon has established a special planning group to plan a bombing attack on Iran and U.S. military and special-operations teams have already crossed the border into Iran in pursuit of Iranian operatives.

-- More Exxon monkeyshines

-- DN! features an interview with Robert Fisk on Osama bin Laden at 50, Iraqi death squads, and why the Middle East is more dangerous now than in past 30 years

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

We of The Scallion offer three pieces this week: the DN! interview with Chalmers Johnson lamenting the impending end of American democracy; the AlterNet interview with Noam Chomsky lamenting the Bush administration's determination to attack Iran for control of its oil; and Joe Conason's piece “It Can Happen Here.”

Read 'em and weep!

Chalmers Johnson: “Nemesis: the Last Days of the American Republic”

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/27/1454229

In his new book, CIA analyst, distinguished scholar, and best-selling author Chalmers Johnson argues that US military and economic overreach may actually lead to the nation's collapse as a constitutional republic. It's the last volume in his Blowback trilogy, following the best-selling "Blowback" and "The Sorrows of Empire." In those two, Johnson argued American clandestine and military activity has led to un-intended, but direct disaster here in the United States. [includes rush transcript]

Chalmers Johnson is a retired professor of international relations at the University of California, San Diego. He is also President of the Japan Policy Research Institute. Johnson has written for several publications including Los Angeles Times, the London Review of Books, Harper's Magazine, and The Nation. In 2005, he was featured prominently in the award-winning documentary film, “Why We Fight.”

Chalmers Johnson joined me yesterday from San Diego. I began by asking him about the title of his book, “Nemesis.”

* Chalmers Johnson, Author, scholar and leading critic of US foreign policy. Retired professor of international relations at the University of California, San Diego. He is also President of the Japan Policy Research Institute. His new book is “Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic.”

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

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AMY GOODMAN: Today, we spend the hour with the former CIA consultant, distinguished scholar, best-selling author, Chalmers Johnson. He's just published a new book. It's called Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic. It's the last volume in his trilogy, which began with Blowback, went onto The Sorrows of Empire. In those two, Johnson argued American clandestine and military activity has led to unintended but direct disaster here in the United States. In his new book, Johnson argues that US military and economic overreach may actually lead to the nation's collapse as a constitutional republic.

Chalmers Johnson is a retired professor of international relations at the University of California, San Diego. He's also president of the Japan Policy Research Institute. He's written for a number of publications, including the Los Angeles Times, The London Review of Books, Harper’s magazine and The Nation. In 2005, he was featured prominently in the award-winning documentary, Why We Fight. Chalmers Johnson joined me yesterday from San Diego. I began by asking him about the title of his book, Nemesis.

CHALMERS JOHNSON: Nemesis was the ancient Greek goddess of revenge, the punisher of hubris and arrogance in human beings. You may recall she is the one that led Narcissus to the pond and showed him his reflection, and he dove in and drowned. I chose the title, because it seems to me that she's present in our country right now, just waiting to make her -- to carry out her divine mission.

By the subtitle, I really do mean it. This is not just hype to sell books -- “The Last Days of the American Republic.” I’m here concerned with a very real, concrete problem in political analysis, namely that the political system of the United States today, history tells us, is one of the most unstable combinations there is -- that is, domestic democracy and foreign empire -- that the choices are stark. A nation can be one or the other, a democracy or an imperialist, but it can't be both. If it sticks to imperialism, it will, like the old Roman Republic, on which so much of our system was modeled, like the old Roman Republic, it will lose its democracy to a domestic dictatorship.

I’ve spent some time in the book talking about an alternative, namely that of the British Empire after World War II, in which it made the decision, not perfectly executed by any manner of means, but nonetheless made the decision to give up its empire in order to keep its democracy. It became apparent to the British quite late in the game that they could keep the jewel in their crown, India, only at the expense of administrative massacres, of which they had carried them out often in India. In the wake of the war against Nazism, which had just ended, it became, I think, obvious to the British that in order to retain their empire, they would have to become a tyranny, and they, therefore, I believe, properly chose, admirably chose to give up their empire.

As I say, they didn't do it perfectly. There were tremendous atavistic fallbacks in the 1950s in the Anglo, French, Israeli attack on Egypt; in the repression of the Kikuyu -- savage repression, really -- in Kenya; and then, of course, the most obvious and weird atavism of them all, Tony Blair and his enthusiasm for renewed British imperialism in Iraq. But nonetheless, it seems to me that the history of Britain is clear that it gave up its empire in order to remain a democracy. I believe this is something we should be discussing very hard in the United States.

AMY GOODMAN: Chalmers Johnson, you connect the breakdown of constitutional government with militarism.

CHALMERS JOHNSON: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the signs of the breakdown of constitutional government and how it links?

CHALMERS JOHNSON: Well, yes. Militarism is the -- what the social side has called the “intervening variable,” the causative connection. That is to say, to maintain an empire requires a very large standing army, huge expenditures on arms that leads to a military-industrial complex, and generally speaking, a vicious cycle sets up of interests that lead to perpetual series of wars.

It goes back to probably the earliest warning ever delivered to us by our first president, George Washington, in his famous farewell address. It’s read at the opening of every new session of Congress. Washington said that the great enemy of the republic is standing armies; it is a particular enemy of republican liberty. What he meant by it is that it breaks down the separation of powers into an executive, legislative, and judicial branches that are intended to check each other -- this is our most fundamental bulwark against dictatorship and tyranny -- it causes it to break down, because standing armies, militarism, military establishment, military-industrial complex all draw power away from the rest of the country to Washington, including taxes, that within Washington they draw it to the presidency, and they begin to create an imperial presidency, who then implements the military's desire for secrecy, making oversight of the government almost impossible for a member of Congress, even, much less for a citizen.

It seems to me that this is also the same warning that Dwight Eisenhower gave in his famous farewell address of 1961, in which he, in quite vituperative language, quite undiplomatic language -- one ought to go back and read Eisenhower. He was truly alarmed when he spoke of the rise of a large arms industry that was beyond supervision, that was not under effective control of the interests of the military-industrial complex, a phrase that he coined. We know from his writings that he intended to say a military-industrial-congressional complex. He was warned off from going that far. But it's in that sense that I believe the nexus -- or, that is, the incompatibility between domestic democracy and foreign imperialism comes into being.

AMY GOODMAN: Who was he warned by?

CHALMERS JOHNSON: Members of Congress. Republican memb--

AMY GOODMAN: And why were they opposed?

CHALMERS JOHNSON: Well, they did not want to have their oversight abilities impugned. They weren't carrying them out very well. You must also say that Eisenhower was -- I think he's been overly praised for this. It was a heroic statement, but at the same time, he was the butcher of Guatemala, the person who authorized our first clandestine operation and one of the most tragic that we ever did: the overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran in 1953 for the sake of the British Petroleum Company. And he also presided over the fantastic growth of the military-industrial complex, of the lunatic oversupply of nuclear weapons, of the empowering of the Air Force, and things of this sort. It seems to be only at the end that he realized what a monster he had created.

AMY GOODMAN: Chalmers Johnson, author of Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic. We'll come back to him in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: As we return to my interview with Chalmers Johnson -- his new book, Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic -- I asked him to talk about the expansion of US military bases around the globe.

CHALMERS JOHNSON: According to the official count right now -- it's something called the Base Structure Report, which is an unclassified Pentagon inventory of real property owned around the world and the cost it would take to replace it -- there are right now 737 American military bases on every continent, in well over 130 countries. Some apologists from the Pentagon like to say, well, this is false, that we're counting Marine guards at embassies. I guarantee you that it's simply stupid. We don't have anything like 737 American embassies abroad, and all of these are genuine military bases with all of the problems that that involves.

In the southernmost prefecture of Japan, Okinawa, site of the Battle of Okinawa in 1945, there’s a small island, smaller than Kawaii in the Hawaiian islands, with 1,300,000 Okinawans. There's thirty-seven American military bases there. The revolt against them has been endemic for fifty years. The governor is always saying to the local military commander, “You're living on the side of a volcano that could explode at any time.” It has exploded in the past. What this means is just an endless, nonstop series of sexually violent crimes, drunken brawls, hit-and-run accidents, environmental pollution, noise pollution, helicopters falling out of the air from Futenma Marine Corps Air Base and falling onto the campus of Okinawa International University. One thing after another. Back in 1995, we had one of the most serious incidents, when two Marines and a sailor abducted, beat and raped a twelve-year-old girl. This led to the largest demonstrations against the United States since we signed the security treaty with Japan decades ago. It's this kind of thing.

I first went to Okinawa in 1996. I was invited by then-Governor Ota in the wake of the rape incident. I’ve devoted my life to the study of Japan, but like many Japanese, many Japanese specialists, I had never been in Okinawa. I was shocked by what I saw. It was the British Raj. It was like Soviet troops living in East Germany, more comfortable than they would be back at, say, Oceanside, California, next door to Camp Pendleton. And it was a scandal in every sense. My first reaction -- I’ve not made a secret of it -- that I was, before the collapse of the Soviet Union, certainly a Cold Warrior. My first explanation was that this is simply off the beaten track, that people don't come down here and report it. As I began to study the network of bases around the world and the incidents that have gone with them and the military coups that have brought about regime change and governments that we approve of, I began to realize that Okinawa was not unusual; it was, unfortunately, typical.

These bases, as I say, are spread everywhere. The most recent manifestation of the American military empire is the decision by the Pentagon now, with presidential approval, of course, to create another regional command in Africa. This may either be at the base that we have in Djibouti at the Horn of Africa. It may well be in the Gulf of Guinea, where we are prospecting for oil, and the Navy would very much like to put ourselves there. It is not at all clear that we should have any form of American military presence in Africa, but we're going to have an enlarged one.

Invariably, remember what this means. Imperialism is a form of tyranny. It never rules through consent of the governed. It doesn't ask for the consent of the governed. We talk about the spread of democracy, but we're talking about the spread of democracy at the point of an assault rifle. That's a contradiction in terms. It doesn't work. Any self-respecting person being democratized in this manner starts thinking of retaliation. Nemesis becomes appropriate.

AMY GOODMAN: Chalmers Johnson, there have been major protests against US military bases. Recently in Vicenza in Italy, about 100,000 people protested. Ecuador announced that it would close the Manta Air Base, the military base there. What about the response, the resistance to this web of bases around the world?

CHALMERS JOHNSON: Well, there is a genuine resistance and has been for a long time. As I say, in the case of Okinawa, there's been at least three different historical revolts against the American presence. There's collaboration between the Japanese government and the Pentagon to use this island, which is a Japanese version of Puerto Rico. It's a place that's always been discriminated against. It's the Japanese way of having their cake and eating it, too. They like the alliance with America, but they do not want American soldiers based anywhere near the citizens of mainland Japan. So they essentially dump them or quarantine them off into this island, where the population pays the cost.

This is true, what's going on in Italy right now, where there is tremendous resistance to the CIA rendition cases. That is, kidnapping people that we've identified and flying them secretly to countries where we know they will be tortured. There's right now something like twenty-five CIA officers by name who are under indictment by the Italian government for felonies committed by agents of the United States in Italy. And, indeed, we just did have these major demonstrations in Vicenza. The people there believe that with the enlargement of the base that is already there -- I mean, this is, after all, the old Palladian city, a city of great and famous architecture, that they would become a target of terrorism, of numerous other things.

We see the resistance in the form of Prime Minister Zapatero in Spain, that he promised the people that after he came to power, he would get out of Iraq, and he was one of the few who did deliver, who does remember that if democracy means anything, it means that public opinion matters, though in an awful lot of countries, it doesn't actually seem to be the case. But he has reduced radically the American military presence in Spain.

And it continues around the world. There is a growing irritation at the American colossus athwart the world, using its military muscle to do as it pleases. We see it right now, that people of the Persian Gulf are not being asked whether or not they want anywhere between two and four huge carrier task forces in the fifth fleet in CENTCOM’s navy in the Persian Gulf, and all of which looks like preparation for an assault on Iran. We don't know that for certain by any manner of means, but there's plenty enough to make us suspicious.

Then you look back historically, probably there is no more anti-American democracy on earth than Greece. They will never forgive us for bringing to power the Greek colonels the in the late ’60s and early ’70s, and, of course, also establishing then numerous American military enclaves in Greece until the colonels themselves finally self-destructed by simply going too far.

And the cases are ubiquitous in Latin America, in Africa today. Probably still the most important area, of course, of military imperialism is the opening up of southern Eurasia, after it became available to foreign imperialistic pressure with the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Many important observers who have resigned their commissions from the Pentagon have made the case that the fundamental explanation for the war in Iraq was precisely to make it the new -- to replace the two old pillars of American foreign policy in the Middle East. The first pillar, Iran, collapsed, of course, with the revolution in 1979 against the Shah, who we had installed in power. The second pillar, Saudi Arabia, had become less and less useful to us, because of our own bungling. We put forces, military forces, ground forces, an air force, in Saudi Arabia after the Gulf War in 1991. This was unnecessary, it was stupid, it was arrogant. It caused antagonism among numerous patriotic Saudis, not least of whom, one was our former asset and colleague, Osama bin Laden -- that Saudi Arabia is charged with the defense of the two most sacred sites in Islam: Mecca and Medina. We ought to be able to do this ourselves without using infidel troops that know absolutely nothing about our religion, our country, our lifestyle, or anything else. Over time, the Saudis began to restrict the use of Prince Sultan Air Base outside Riyadh. We actually closed down our major operations headquarters there just before the invasion of Iraq and moved it to Qatar.

And then we chose Iraq as the second most oil-rich country on earth, and as a place perfectly suited for our presence. I think many people have commented on it, Seymour Hersh notably, but I think, importantly, one of the reasons we had no exit plan from Iraq is that we didn't intend to leave. And certainly the evidence of it is the now series of at least five very, very large, heavily reinforced, long double runways, five air bases in Iraq, strategically located all over the country. You can never get our ambassador, the Department of Defense, the President, or anybody to say unequivocally we don't intend to have bases there. It's a subject on which Congress never, ever opens its mouth. Occasionally, military officers -- the commander of Air Force in CENTCOM has repeatedly, in his sort of off-hand way, when asked, “How long do you think we'll be here?” and he usually says, “Oh, at least a decade in these bases.” And then, we continue to reinforce them.

Now, then, we’ve tried to build bases in Central Asia in the Caspian Basin oil-rich countries that were made independent -- not in any sense democracies -- made independent by the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. We have now been thrown out of one of them for too much heavy-handed interference. And the price of our stay in Kyrgyzstan has quadrupled, much more than that actually. It’s gone from a few million dollars to well over $100 million. But we continue to play these games, and they are games, and the game is property called imperialism.

AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Chalmers Johnson. Now, Chalmers Johnson, you were a consultant for the CIA for a period through Richard Nixon, starting with Johnson in 1967, right through 1973. And I’m wondering how you see its use has changed. You talk about, and you write in your book about the Central Intelligence Agency, the president's private army.

CHALMERS JOHNSON: I say, at one point, we will never know peace until we abolish it, or, at any rate, restrict what is the monster that it's grown into. The National Security Act of 1947 lists five functions. It creates the Central Intelligence Agency. It lists five functions for it. The purpose, above all, was to prevent surprise attack, to prevent a recurrence of the attack, such as the one at Pearl Harbor. Of these five functions, four are various forms of information-gathering through open sources, espionage, signals intelligence, things of this sort. The fifth is simply a catchall, that the CIA will do anything that the National Security Council, namely the foreign affairs bureaucracy in the White House attached directly to the president orders it to do.

That's turned out to be the tail that wags the dog. Intelligence is not taken all that seriously. It's not that good. My function inside the agency in the late ’60s, early ’70s was in the Office of National Estimates. My wife used to ask me at times, “Why are they so highly classified?” And I said, “Well, probably and mostly, simply because they’re the very best we can do, and they read like a sort of lowbrow foreign affairs article.” They're not full of great technical detail and certainty nothing on sources of intelligence.

But as the agency developed over time, and as it was made clear to the president, every president since Truman, made clear to them shortly after they were inaugurated, you have at your disposal a private army. It is totally secret. There is no form of oversight. There was no form of congressional oversight until the late 1970s, and it proved to be incompetent in the face of Iran-Contra and things like that. He can do anything you want to with it. You could order assassinations. You could order governments overthrown. You could order economies subverted that seemed to get in our way. You could instruct Latin American military officers in state terrorism. You can carry out extraordinary renditions and order the torture of people, despite the fact that it is a clear violation of American law and carries the death penalty if the torture victim should die, and they commonly do in the case of renditions to places like Egypt.

No president since Truman, once told that he has this power, has ever failed to use it. That became the route of rapid advancement within the CIA, dirty tricks, clandestine activities, the carrying out of the president's orders to overthrow somebody, starting -- the first one was the overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran in 1953. It’s from that, the After Action Report, which has only recently been declassified, that the word “blowback” that I used in the first of my three books on American foreign policy, that's where the word “blowback” comes from. It means retaliation for clandestine activities carried out abroad.

But these clandestine activities also have one other caveat on them: they are kept totally secret from the American public, so that when the retaliation does come, they're unable ever to put it in context, to see it in cause-and-effect terms. They usually lash out against the alleged perpetrators, usually simply inaugurating another cycle of blowback. The best example is easily 9/11 in 2001, which was clearly blowback for the largest clandestine operation we ever carried out, namely the recruiting, arming and sending into battle of the Mujahideen in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union during the 1980s. But this is the way the CIA has evolved.

It's been responsible for the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile and bringing to power probably the most odious dictator on either side in the Cold War, namely General Augusto Pinochet; the installation of the Greek colonels in the late ‘60s and early ’70s in Greece; the coups, one after another, in numerous Latin American countries, all under the cover of avoiding Soviet imperialism carried out by Fidel Castro, when the real purpose was to protect the interests of the United Fruit Company, and continued to exploit the extremely poor and essentially defenseless people of Central America.

The list is endless. The overthrow of Sukarno in Indonesia, the bringing to power of General Suharto, then the elimination of General Suharto when he got on our nerves. It has a distinctly Roman quality to it. And this is why I -- moreover, there is no effective oversight. There are a few, often crooked congressmen, like Randy "Duke" Cunningham, who are charged with oversight. When Charlie Wilson, the congressman, long-sitting congressman from the Second District of Texas, was named chairman of the House Intelligence Oversight Committee during the Afghan period, he wrote at once to his pals in the CIA, “The fox is in the henhouse. Gentlemen, do anything you want to.”

AMY GOODMAN: Chalmers Johnson has just finished his trilogy. The first was Blowback, then Sorrows of Empire, now Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic. We'll be back with the conclusion of the interview in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: We return to the conclusion of my interview with Chalmers Johnson. Professor Johnson is a noted expert on Asia politics. He has authored a number of books on the Chinese revolution, on Japanese economic development. In his thirty years in the University of California system, Johnson served as chair of the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. I asked him to talk about China's role as a growing world power.

CHALMERS JOHNSON: I’m optimistic about China. I think that they have shown a remarkable movement toward moderation. I believe that the public supports them, because they've done something that the public wanted done and was extremely fearful about, namely the dismantling of a Leninist economy without reducing the conditions that occurred in Yeltsin's Russia, that China has -- it’s unleashed its fantastic growth potential and is moving ahead with great power and insight.

There are many things that we do not like in the way this is developing, particularly the fear of China by the American neoconservatives. They have no alternative but to adjust to this. It's the same kind of adjustment that should have been made in the 20th century to the rise of new sources of power in Germany, in Russia, in Japan. The failure by the sated English-speaking powers -- above all, England and the United States -- to adjust led to savage and essentially worthless wars. But the Americans are again continuing to harp on China's growth, where, in fact, I’ve been impressed with the ease with which China has adjusted to the interests of countries that do not necessarily like China at all -- Indonesia, for example, Vietnam.

They are contiguously egging on the Japanese to be antagonistic toward China, which was the scene of their greatest war crimes during World War II, for which they have never adequately either responded or paid compensation. I wonder what foolishness is this. A war with China would have the same -- it would have the same configuration as the Vietnam War. We would certainly lose it.

The glue, the political glue of China today, the source of its legitimacy, is increasingly Chinese nationalism, which is passionately held. As the Hong Kong joke has it, China just had a couple of bad centuries, and it's back.

We have not been watching it with quite the hawk eyes we were during the first months of the Bush administration, when, after a spy incident in which the Chinese forced down one of our reconnaissance planes that was penetrating their coastal areas in an extremely aggressive manner -- if it had been a Chinese plane off of our coast, we would have shot it down; they simply forced it down, it was a loss of an airplane and one of their own pilots -- that, you'll recall, George Bush said on television that he would, if the Chinese ever menaced the island of Taiwan, he would use the full weight and force of the American military against China. This is insanity, genuine insanity. There's no way that -- I mean, if the Chinese defeated every single American, they'd still have 800 million of them left, and you simply have to adjust to that, not antagonize it, and I believe there's plenty of ample evidence that you can adjust to the Chinese.

AMY GOODMAN: Chalmers Johnson, in January, the Chinese launched their first anti-satellite test, and I wanted to segue into that to the militarization of space.

CHALMERS JOHNSON: Well, precisely, I have a chapter in Nemesis that I’m extremely proud of called “The Ultimate Imperialist Project: Outer Space.” It's about the congressional missile lobby, the fantastic waste of funds on things that we know don't work. But they're not intended to work. They're part of military Keynesianism, of maintaining our economy through military expenditures. They provide jobs in as many different constituencies as the military-industrial complex can place them.

We have arrogantly talked about full-spectrum dominance of control of the globe from outer space, the domination of the low and high orbits that are so necessary. We've all become so dependent upon them today for global positioning devices, telecommunications, mapping, weather forecasting, one thing after another. In fact, the Chinese, the Russians, the Europeans have been asking us repeatedly for decent international measures, international treaties, to prevent the weaponization of space, to prevent the growing catastrophe of orbiting debris that are extremely lethal to satellites, to -- as Sally Ride, one of the commanders of our space shuttle, she was in an incident in which a piece of paint, or in orbit -- that's at 17,000 miles an hour in low-earth orbit -- hit the windshield of the challenger and put a bad dent in it.

Now, if a piece of paint can do that, I hate to tell you what a lens cap or an old wrench or something like that -- so there's a whole bunch of them out there. At the Johnson Space Center, they keep a regular growing inventory of these old pieces of, some case, weaponry, some case, launch vehicles for satellites, things of this sort. They publish a very lovely little newsletter that talks about how a piece of an American space capsule from twenty years ago rear-ended a shot Chinese-launched vehicle and produced a few more debris. It's a catastrophe.

But instead, we've got -- there's no other word for it -- an arrogant, almost Roman, out-of-control Air Force that continues to serve the interests of the military-industrial complex, the space lobby, to build things that they know won't work.

AMY GOODMAN: What is a space Pearl Harbor?

CHALMERS JOHNSON: A space Pearl Harbor would mean, they believe, what the Chinese did in January, when they tested an anti-satellite weapon against one of their old and redundant satellites. Satellites do burn out. There's no way to repair them, so they simply shot it down with a rocket. This explosion produces massive amounts of debris, whizzing around the earth in low-earth orbit. If you put it higher into orbit, you would start killing off the main satellites on which, well, probably this television broadcast is going to depend on, too. And there's no way to ever get rid of things that are orbiting in high-earth orbit. Low-earth orbit, some of them will descend into the atmosphere and burn up.

But the Air Force has continuously used this so-called threat of our being blinded by -- because we have become so reliant on global positioning systems. Our so-called “smart bombs” depend on them, that we’ve -- they're not very smart, and it's not as good a global positioning system as the peaceful one the Europeans are building called Galileo. They use it to say we must arm space, we must have anti-satellite weapons in space, we have rebuffed every effort to control this, and finding out the Chinese have called our bluff.

AMY GOODMAN: Where does Fort Greely, Alaska, fit into this, the silos?

CHALMERS JOHNSON: Well, that is, there's three ways to shoot down an alleged incoming missile. This is the whole farce of whether there is a defense against a missile. I guarantee you there is no defense at all against the Topol-M, the Russian missile that goes into orbit extremely rapidly -- it goes into its arch extremely rapidly. It has a maneuvering ability that means that it's undetectable.

We're basically looking at very low-brow weapons that would be coming from a country like North Korea, in which we have three different ways of trying to intercept them. We used to only try to do with one under the Clinton administration. Under the enthusiasm of the current neoconservatives, we have three ways. One, on blastoff, this is extremely difficult to do, but we're trying to create a laser, carried in a Boeing 747, that would hit one. You've got to be virtually on top of the launch site in order to do so. It’s never worked. It probably doesn't work, and it's just expensive.

The much more common one would be to down the hostile missile, while it is in outer space, from having given up its launch vehicle and is now heading at very high speed toward the United States. This is what the interceptors that have been put in the ground at Fort Greely, Alaska, and a couple of them at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, are supposed to do. They have never once yet had a successful intercept. The radar is not there to actually track the allegedly hostile vehicle. As one senior Pentagon scientist said the other day, these are really essentially scarecrows, hoping that they would scare off the North Koreans.

This is a catastrophic misuse of resources against a small and failed communist state, North Korea. There is no easier thing on earth to detect than a hostile missile launch, and the proper approach to preventing that is deterrence. We have thought about it, worked on it, practiced it, studied it now for decades. The North Koreans have an excellent reputation for rationality. They know if they did launch such a vehicle at Japan or at the United States, they would disappear the next day in a retaliatory strike, and they don't do it.

It's why, in the case of Iran, the only logical thing to do is to learn to live with a nuclear-armed Iran. It's inevitable for a country now surrounded by nuclear powers -- the United States in the Persian Gulf, the Soviet Union, Israel, Pakistan and India. The Iranians are rationalists and recognize the only way you're ever going to dissuade people from using their nuclear power to intimidate us is a threat of retaliation. So we are developing our minimal deterrent, and we should learn to live with it.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Chalmers Johnson, you have just completed your trilogy. Your first book, Blowback, then Sorrows of Empire, and now finally Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic. What is your prediction?

CHALMERS JOHNSON: Well, I don't see any way out of it. I think it's gone too far. I think we are domestically too dependent on the military-industrial complex, that every time -- I mean, it's perfectly logical for any Secretary of Defense to try and close military bases that are redundant, that are useless, that are worn out, that go back to the Civil War. Any time he tries to do it, you produce an uproar in the surrounding community from newspapers, television, priests, local politicians: save our base.

The two mother hens of the Defense Facilities Subcommittee of the Senate Armed Services Committee, the people committed to taking care of our bases are easily Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas and Dianne Feinstein of California, the two states with the largest number of military bases, and those two senators would do anything in their power to keep them open. This is the insidious way in which the military-industrial complex has penetrated into our democracy and gravely weakened it, produced vested interests in what I call military Keynesianism, the use and manipulation of what is now three-quarters of a trillion dollars of the Defense budget, once you include all the other things that aren't included in just the single appropriation for the Department of Defense.

This is a -- it's out of control. We depend upon it, we like it, we live off of it. I cannot imagine any President of any party putting together the coalition of forces that could begin to break into these vested interests, any more than a Gorbachev was able to do it in his attempted reforms of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s.

AMY GOODMAN: Is there anything, Chalmers, that gives you hope?

CHALMERS JOHNSON: Well, that's exactly what we're doing this morning. That is, the only way -- you've got to reconstitute the constitutional system in America, or it is over. That is that empires -- once you go in the direction of empire, you ultimately lead to overstretch, bankruptcy, coalitions of nations hostile to your imperialism. We're well on that route.

The way that it might be stopped is by a mobilization of inattentive citizens. I don't know that that's going to happen. I’m extremely dubious, given the nature of conglomerate control of, say, the television networks in America for the sake of advertising revenue. We see Rupert Murdoch talking about buying a third of the Los Angeles Times. But, nonetheless, there is the internet, there is Amy Goodman, there are -- there's a lot more information than there was.

One of the things I have experienced in these three books is a much more receptive audience of alarmed Americans to Nemesis than to the previous two books, where there was considerable skepticism, so that one -- if we do see a renaissance of citizenship in America, then I believe we could recapture our government. If we continue politics as in the past, then I think there is no alternative but to say Nemesis is in the country, she's on the premises, and she is waiting to carry out her divine mission.

AMY GOODMAN: Chalmers Johnson, his new book is Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic. It's the last volume in his Blowback trilogy, following the best-selling Blowback and The Sorrows of Empire.

To purchase an audio or video copy of this entire program, click here for our new online ordering or call 1 (888) 999-3877.

Chomsky on George W. Bush's Mafia-style diplomacy

http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/48494/

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.

Michael Shank recently interviewed Noam Chomsky, noted linguist and foreign policy expert, on the latest developments in U.S. policy toward Iran, Iraq, North Korea, and Venezuela. Along the way, Chomsky also commented on climate change, the World Social Forum, and why international relations are run like the mafia.

Michael Shank: With similar nuclear developments in North Korea and Iran, why has the United States pursued direct diplomacy with North Korea but refuses to do so with Iran?

Noam Chomsky: To say that the United States has pursued diplomacy with North Korea is a little bit misleading. It did under the Clinton administration, though neither side completely lived up to their obligations. Clinton didn't do what was promised, nor did North Korea, but they were making progress. So when Bush came into the presidency, North Korea had enough uranium or plutonium for maybe one or two bombs, but then very limited missile capacity. During the Bush years it's exploded. The reason is, he immediately canceled the diplomacy and he's pretty much blocked it ever since.

They made a very substantial agreement in September 2005 in which North Korea agreed to eliminate its enrichment programs and nuclear development completely. In return the United States agreed to terminate the threats of attack and to begin moving towards the planning for the provision of a light water reactor, which had been promised under the framework agreement. But the Bush administration instantly undermined it. Right away, they canceled the international consortium that was planning for the light water reactor, which was a way of saying we're not going to agree to this agreement. A couple of days later they started attacking the financial transactions of various banks. It was timed in such a way to make it clear that the United States was not going to move towards its commitment to improve relations. And of course it never withdrew the threats. So that was the end of the September 2005 agreement.

That one is now coming back, just in the last few days. The way it's portrayed in the U.S. media is, as usual with the government's party line, that North Korea is now perhaps a little more amenable to accept the September 2005 proposal. So there's some optimism. If you go across the Atlantic, to the Financial Times, to review the same events they point out that an embattled Bush administration, it's their phrase, needs some kind of victory, so maybe it'll be willing to move towards diplomacy. It's a little more accurate I think if you look at the background.

But there is some minimal sense of optimism about it. If you look back over the record -- and North Korea is a horrible place nobody is arguing about that -- on this issue they've been pretty rational. It's been a kind of tit-for-tat history. If the United States is accommodating, the North Koreans become accommodating. If the United States is hostile, they become hostile. That's reviewed pretty well by Leon Sigal, who's one of the leading specialists on this, in a recent issue of Current History. But that's been the general picture and we're now at a place where there could be a settlement on North Korea.

That's much less significant for the United States than Iran. The Iranian issue I don't think has much to do with nuclear weapons frankly. Nobody is saying Iran should have nuclear weapons -- nor should anybody else. But the point in the Middle East, as distinct from North Korea, is that this is center of the world's energy resources. Originally the British and secondarily the French had dominated it, but after the Second World War, it's been a U.S. preserve. That's been an axiom of U.S. foreign policy, that it must control Middle East energy resources. It is not a matter of access as people often say. Once the oil is on the seas it goes anywhere. In fact if the United States used no Middle East oil, it'd have the same policies. If we went on solar energy tomorrow, it'd keep the same policies. Just look at the internal record, or the logic of it, the issue has always been control. Control is the source of strategic power.

Dick Cheney declared in Kazakhstan or somewhere that control over pipeline is a "tool of intimidation and blackmail." When we have control over the pipelines it's a tool of benevolence. If other countries have control over the sources of energy and the distribution of energy then it is a tool of intimidation and blackmail exactly as Cheney said. And that's been understood as far back as George Kennan and the early post-war days when he pointed out that if the United States controls Middle East resources it'll have veto power over its industrial rivals. He was speaking particularly of Japan but the point generalizes.

So Iran is a different situation. It's part of the major energy system of the world.

Shank: So when the United States considers a potential invasion you think it's under the premise of gaining control? That is what the United States will gain from attacking Iran?

Chomsky: There are several issues in the case of Iran. One is simply that it is independent and independence is not tolerated. Sometimes it's called successful defiance in the internal record. Take Cuba. A very large majority of the U.S. population is in favor of establishing diplomatic relations with Cuba and has been for a long time with some fluctuations. And even part of the business world is in favor of it too. But the government won't allow it. It's attributed to the Florida vote but I don't think that's much of an explanation. I think it has to do with a feature of world affairs that is insufficiently appreciated. International affairs is very much run like the mafia. The godfather does not accept disobedience, even from a small storekeeper who doesn't pay his protection money. You have to have obedience otherwise the idea can spread that you don't have to listen to the orders and it can spread to important places.

If you look back at the record, what was the main reason for the U.S. attack on Vietnam? Independent development can be a virus that can infect others. That's the way it's been put, Kissinger in this case, referring to Allende in Chile. And with Cuba it's explicit in the internal record. Arthur Schlesinger, presenting the report of the Latin American Study Group to incoming President Kennedy, wrote that the danger is the spread of the Castro idea of taking matters into your own hands, which has a lot of appeal to others in the same region that suffer from the same problems. Later internal documents charged Cuba with successful defiance of U.S. policies going back 150 years -- to the Monroe Doctrine -- and that can't be tolerated. So there's kind of a state commitment to ensuring obedience.

Going back to Iran, it's not only that it has substantial resources and that it's part of the world's major energy system but it also defied the United States. The United States, as we know, overthrew the parliamentary government, installed a brutal tyrant, was helping him develop nuclear power, in fact the very same programs that are now considered a threat were being sponsored by the U.S. government, by Cheney, Wolfowitz, Kissinger, and others, in the 1970s, as long as the Shah was in power. But then the Iranians overthrew him, and they kept U.S. hostages for several hundred days. And the United States immediately turned to supporting Saddam Hussein and his war against Iran as a way of punishing Iran. The United States is going to continue to punish Iran because of its defiance. So that's a separate factor.

And again, the will of the U.S. population and even US business is considered mostly irrelevant. Seventy five percent of the population here favors improving relations with Iran, instead of threats. But this is disregarded. We don't have polls from the business world, but it's pretty clear that the energy corporations would be quite happy to be given authorization to go back into Iran instead of leaving all that to their rivals. But the state won't allow it. And it is setting up confrontations right now, very explicitly. Part of the reason is strategic, geo-political, economic, but part of the reason is the mafia complex. They have to be punished for disobeying us.

Shank: Venezuela has been successfully defiant with Chavez making a swing towards socialism. Where are they on our list?

Chomsky: They're very high. The United States sponsored and supported a military coup to overthrow the government. In fact, that's its last, most recent effort in what used to be a conventional resort to such measures.

Shank: But why haven't we turned our sights more toward Venezuela?

Chomsky: Oh they're there. There's a constant stream of abuse and attack by the government and therefore the media, who are almost reflexively against Venezuela. For several reasons. Venezuela is independent. It's diversifying its exports to a limited extent, instead of just being dependent on exports to the United States. And it's initiating moves toward Latin American integration and independence. It's what they call a Bolivarian alternative and the United States doesn't like any of that.

This again is defiance of U.S. policies going back to the Monroe Doctrine. There's now a standard interpretation of this trend in Latin America, another kind of party line. Latin America is all moving to the left, from Venezuela to Argentina with rare exceptions, but there's a good left and a bad left. The good left is Garcia and Lula, and then there's the bad left which is Chavez, Morales, maybe Correa. And that's the split.

In order to maintain that position, it's necessary to resort to some fancy footwork. For example, it's necessary not to report the fact that when Lula was re-elected in October, his foreign trip and one of his first acts was to visit Caracas to support Chavez and his electoral campaign and to dedicate a joint Venezuelan-Brazilian project on the Orinoco River, to talk about new projects and so on. It's necessary not to report the fact that a couple of weeks later in Cochabamba, Bolivia, which is the heart of the bad guys, there was a meeting of all South American leaders. There had been bad blood between Chavez and Garcia, but it was apparently patched up. They laid plans for pretty constructive South American integration, but that just doesn't fit the U.S. agenda. So it wasn't reported.

Shank: How is the political deadlock in Lebanon impacting the U.S. government's decision to potentially go to war with Iran? Is there a relationship at all?

Chomsky: There's a relationship. I presume part of the reason for the U.S.-Israel invasion of Lebanon in July -- and it is US-Israeli, the Lebanese are correct in calling it that -- part of the reason I suppose was that Hezbollah is considered a deterrent to a potential U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran. It had a deterrent capacity, i.e. rockets. And the goal I presume was to wipe out the deterrent so as to free up the United States and Israel for an eventual attack on Iran. That's at least part of the reason. The official reason given for the invasion can't be taken seriously for a moment. That's the capture of two Israeli soldiers and the killing of a couple others. For decades Israel has been capturing, and kidnapping Lebanese and Palestinian refugees on the high seas, from Cyprus to Lebanon, killing them in Lebanon, bringing them to Israel, holding them as hostages. It's been going on for decades, has anybody called for an invasion of Israel?

Of course Israel doesn't want any competition in the region. But there's no principled basis for the massive attack on Lebanon, which was horrendous. In fact, one of the last acts of the U.S.-Israeli invasion, right after the ceasefire was announced before it was implemented, was to saturate much of the south with cluster bombs. There's no military purpose for that, the war was over, the ceasefire was coming.

UN de-mining groups that are working there say that the scale is unprecedented. It's much worse than any other place they've worked: Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, anywhere. There are supposed to be about one million bomblets left there. A large percentage of them don't explode until you pick them up, a child picks them up, or a farmer hits it with a hoe or something. So what it does basically is make the south uninhabitable until the mining teams, for which the United States and Israel don't contribute, clean it up. This is arable land. It means that farmers can't go back; it means that it may undermine a potential Hezbollah deterrent. They apparently have pretty much withdrawn from the south, according to the UN.

You can't mention Hezbollah in the U.S. media without putting in the context of "Iranian-supported Hezbollah." That's its name. Its name is Iranian-supported Hezbollah. It gets Iranian support. But you can mention Israel without saying US-supported Israel. So this is more tacit propaganda. The idea that Hezbollah is acting as an agent of Iran is very dubious. It's not accepted by specialists on Iran or specialists on Hezbollah. But it's the party line. Or sometimes you can put in Syria, i.e. "Syrian-supported Hezbollah," but since Syria is of less interest now you have to emphasize Iranian support.

Shank: How can the U.S. government think an attack on Iran is feasible given troop availability, troop capacity, and public sentiment?

Chomsky: As far as I'm aware, the military in the United States thinks it's crazy. And from whatever leaks we have from intelligence, the intelligence community thinks it's outlandish, but not impossible. If you look at people who have really been involved in the Pentagon's strategic planning for years, people like Sam Gardiner, they point out that there are things that possibly could be done.

I don't think any of the outside commentators at least as far as I'm aware have taken very seriously the idea of bombing nuclear facilities. They say if there will be bombing it'll be carpet bombing. So get the nuclear facilities but get the rest of the country too, with an exception. By accident of geography, the world's major oil resources are in Shi'ite-dominated areas. Iran's oil is concentrated right near the gulf, which happens to be an Arab area, not Persian. Khuzestan is Arab, has been loyal to Iran, fought with Iran not Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war. This is a potential source of dissension. I would be amazed if there isn't an attempt going on to stir up secessionist elements in Khuzestan. U.S. forces right across the border in Iraq, including the surge, are available potentially to "defend" an independent Khuzestan against Iran, which is the way it would be put, if they can carry it off.

Shank: Do you think that's what the surge was for?

Chomsky: That's one possibility. There was a release of a Pentagon war-gaming report, in December 2004, with Gardiner leading it. It was released and published in the Atlantic Monthly. They couldn't come up with a proposal that didn't lead to disaster, but one of the things they considered was maintaining troop presence in Iraq beyond what's to be used in Iraq for troop replacement and so on, and use them for a potential land move in Iran -- presumably Khuzestan where the oil is. If you could carry that off, you could just bomb the rest of the country to dust.

Again, I would be amazed if there aren't efforts to sponsor secessionist movements elsewhere, among the Azeri population for example. It's a very complex ethnic mix in Iran; much of the population isn't Persian. There are secessionist tendencies anyway and almost certainly, without knowing any of the facts, the United States is trying to stir them up, to break the country internally if possible. The strategy appears to be: try to break the country up internally, try to impel the leadership to be as harsh and brutal as possible.

That's the immediate consequence of constant threats. Everyone knows that. That's one of the reasons the reformists, Shirin Ebadi and Akbar Ganji and others, are bitterly complaining about the U.S. threats, that it's undermining their efforts to reform and democratize Iran. But that's presumably its purpose. Since it's an obvious consequence you have to assume it's the purpose. Just like in law, anticipated consequences are taken as the evidence for intention. And here's it so obvious you can't seriously doubt it.

So it could be that one strain of the policy is to stir up secessionist movements, particularly in the oil rich regions, the Arab regions near the Gulf, also the Azeri regions and others. Second is to try to get the leadership to be as brutal and harsh and repressive as possible, to stir up internal disorder and maybe resistance. And a third is to try to pressure other countries, and Europe is the most amenable, to join efforts to strangle Iran economically. Europe is kind of dragging its feet but they usually go along with the United States.

The efforts to intensify the harshness of the regime show up in many ways. For example, the West absolutely adores Ahmadinejad. Any wild statement that he comes out with immediately gets circulated in headlines and mistranslated. They love him. But anybody who knows anything about Iran, presumably the editorial offices, knows that he doesn't have anything to do with foreign policy. Foreign policy is in the hands of his superior, the Supreme Leader Khamenei. But they don't report his statements, particularly when his statements are pretty conciliatory. For example, they love when Ahmadinejad says that Israel shouldn't exist, but they don't like it when Khamenei right afterwards says that Iran supports the Arab League position on Israel-Palestine. As far as I'm aware, it never got reported. Actually you could find Khamenei's more conciliatory positions in the Financial Times, but not here. And it's repeated by Iranian diplomats but that's no good. The Arab League proposal calls for normalization of relations ith Israel if it accepts the international consensus of the two-state settlement which has been blocked by the United States and Israel for 30 years. And that's not a good story, so it's either not mentioned or it's hidden somewhere.

It's very hard to predict the Bush administration today because they're deeply irrational. They were irrational to start with but now they're desperate. They have created an unimaginable catastrophe in Iraq. This should've been one of the easiest military occupations in history and they succeeded in turning it into one of the worst military disasters in history. They can't control it and it's almost impossible for them to get out for reasons you can't discuss in the United States because to discuss the reasons why they can't get out would be to concede the reasons why they invaded.

We're supposed to believe that oil had nothing to do with it, that if Iraq were exporting pickles or jelly and the center of world oil production were in the South Pacific that the United States would've liberated them anyway. It has nothing to do with the oil, what a crass idea. Anyone with their head screwed on knows that that can't be true. Allowing an independent and sovereign Iraq could be a nightmare for the United States. It would mean that it would be Shi'ite-dominated, at least if it's minimally democratic. It would continue to improve relations with Iran, just what the United States doesn't want to see. And beyond that, right across the border in Saudi Arabia where most of Saudi oil is, there happens to be a large Shi'ite population, probably a majority.

Moves toward sovereignty in Iraq stimulate pressures first for human rights among the bitterly repressed Shi'ite population but also toward some degree of autonomy. You can imagine a kind of a loose Shi'ite alliance in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Iran, controlling most of the world's oil and independent of the United States. And much worse, although Europe can be intimidated by the United States, China can't. It's one of the reasons, the main reasons, why China is considered a threat. We're back to the Mafia principle.

China has been there for 3,000 years, has contempt for the barbarians, is overcoming a century of domination, and simply moves on its own. It does not get intimidated when Uncle Sam shakes his fist. That's scary. In particular, it's dangerous in the case of the Middle East. China is the center of the Asian energy security grid, which includes the Central Asian states and Russia. India is also hovering around the edge, South Korea is involved, and Iran is an associate member of some kind. If the Middle East oil resources around the Gulf, which are the main ones in the world, if they link up to the Asian grid, the United States is really a second-rate power. A lot is at stake in not withdrawing from Iraq.

I'm sure that these issues are discussed in internal planning. It's inconceivable that they can't think of this. But it's out of public discussion, it's not in the media, it's not in the journals, it's not in the Baker-Hamilton report. And I think you can understand the reason. To bring up these issues would open the question why the United States and Britain invaded. And that question is taboo.

It's a principle that anything our leaders do is for noble reasons. It may be mistaken, it may be ugly, but basically noble. And if you bring in normal moderate, conservative, strategic, economic objectives you are threatening that principle. It's remarkable the extent to which it's held. So the original pretexts for the invasion were weapons of mass destruction and ties to al-Qaida that nobody but maybe Wolfowitz or Cheney took seriously. The single question, as they kept reiterating in the leadership, was: will Saddam give up his programs of weapons of mass destruction? The single question was answered a couple of months later, the wrong way. And quickly the party line shifted. In November 2003, Bush announced his freedom agenda: our real goal is to bring democracy to Iraq, to transform the Middle East. That became the party line, instantly.

But it's a mistake to pick out individuals because it's close to universal, even in scholarship. In fact you can even find scholarly articles that begin by giving the evidence that it's complete farce but nevertheless accept it. There was a pretty good study of the freedom agenda in Current History by two scholars and they give the facts. They point out that the freedom agenda was announced on November 2003 after the failure to find weapons of mass destruction, but the freedom agenda is real even if there's no evidence for it.

In fact, if you look at our policies they're the opposite. Take Palestine. There was a free election in Palestine, but it came out the wrong way. So instantly, the United States and Israel with Europe tagging along, moved to punish the Palestinian people, and punish them harshly, because they voted the wrong way in a free election. That's accepted here in the West as perfectly normal. That illustrates the deep hatred and contempt for democracy among western elites, so deep-seated they can't even perceive it when it's in front of their eyes. You punish people severely if they vote the wrong way in a free election. There's a pretext for that too, repeated every day: Hamas must agree to first recognize Israel, second to end all violence, third to accept past agreements. Try to find a mention of the fact that the United States and Israel reject all three of those. They obviously don't recognize Palestine, they certainly don't withdraw the use of violence or the threat of it -- in fact they insist on it -- and tey don't accept past agreements, including the road map.

I suspect one of the reasons why Jimmy Carter's book has come under such fierce attack is because it's the first time, I think, in the mainstream, that one can find the truth about the road map. I have never seen anything in the mainstream that discusses the fact that Israel instantly rejected the road map with U.S. support. They formally accepted it but added 14 reservations that totally eviscerated it. It was done instantly. It's public knowledge, I've written about it, talked about it, so have others, but I've never seen it mentioned in the mainstream before. And obviously they don't accept the Arab League proposal or any other serious proposal. In fact they've been blocking the international consensus on the two-state solution for decades. But Hamas has to accept them.

It really makes no sense. Hamas is a political party and political parties don't recognize other countries. And Hamas itself has made it very clear, they actually carried out a truce for a year and a half, didn't respond to Israeli attacks, and have called for a long-term truce, during which it'd be possible to negotiate a settlement along the lines of the international consensus and the Arab League proposal.

All of this is obvious, it's right on the surface, and that's just one example of the deep hatred of democracy on the part of western elites. It's a striking example but you can add case after case. Yet, the president announced the freedom agenda and if the dear leader said something, it's got to be true, kind of North Korean style. Therefore there's a freedom agenda even if there's a mountain of evidence against it, the only evidence for it is in words, even apart from the timing.

Shank: In the 2008 presidential election, how will the candidates approach Iran? Do you think Iran will be a deciding factor in the elections?

Chomsky: What they're saying so far is not encouraging. I still think, despite everything, that the US is very unlikely to attack Iran. It could be a huge catastrophe; nobody knows what the consequences would be. I imagine that only an administration that's really desperate would resort to that. But if the Democratic candidates are on the verge of winning the election, the administration is going to be desperate. It still has the problem of Iraq: can't stay in, and can't get out.

Shank: The Senate Democrats can't seem to achieve consensus on this issue.

Chomsky: I think there's a reason for it. The reason is just thinking through the consequences of allowing an independent, partially democratic Iraq. The consequences are nontrivial. We may decide to hide our heads in the sand and pretend we can't think it through because we cannot allow the question of why the United States invaded to open, but that's very self-destructive.

Shank: Is there any connection to this conversation and why we cannot find the political will and momentum to enact legislation that would reduce C02 emissions levels, institute a cap-and-trade system, etc.?

Chomsky: It's perfectly clear why the United States didn't sign the Kyoto Protocol. Again, there's overwhelming popular support for signing, in fact it's so strong that a majority of Bush voters in 2004 thought that he was in favor of the Kyoto Protocol, it's such an obvious thing to support. Popular support for alternative energy has been very high for years. But it harms corporate profits. After all, that's the Administration's constituency.

I remember talking to, 40 years ago, one of the leading people in the government who was involved in arms control, pressing for arms control measures, détente, and so on. He's very high up, and we were talking about whether arms control could succeed. And only partially as a joke he said, "Well it might succeed if the high tech industry makes more profit from arms control than it can make from weapons-related research and production. If we get to that tipping point maybe arms control will work." He was partially joking but there's a truth that lies behind it.

Shank: How do we move forward on climate change without beggaring the South?

Chomsky: Unfortunately, the poor countries, the south, are going to suffer the worst according to most projections -- and that being so, it undermines support in the north for doing much. Look at the ozone story. As long as it was the southern hemisphere that was being threatened, there was very little talk about it. When it was discovered in the north, very quickly actions were taken to do something about it. Right now there's discussion of putting serious effort into developing a malaria vaccine, because global warming might extend malaria to the rich countries, so something should be done about it.

Same thing on health insurance. Here's an issue where, for the general population, it's been the leading domestic issue, or close to it, for years. And there's a consensus for a national healthcare system on the model of other industrial countries, maybe expanding Medicare to everyone or something like that. Well, that's off the agenda, nobody can talk about that. The insurance companies don't like it, the financial industry doesn't like and so on.

Now there's a change taking place. What's happening is that manufacturing industries are beginning to turn to support for it because they're being undermined by the hopelessly inefficient U.S. healthcare system. It's the worst in the industrial world by far, and they have to pay for it. Since it's employer-compensated, in part, their production costs are much higher than those competitors who have a national healthcare system. Take GM. If it produces the same car in Detroit and in Windsor across the border in Canada, it saves, I forget the number, I think over $1000 with the Windsor production because there's a national healthcare system, it's much more efficient, it's much cheaper, it's much more effective.

So the manufacturing industry is starting to press for some kind of national healthcare. Now it's beginning to put it on the agenda. It doesn't matter if the population wants it. What 90% of the population wants would be kind of irrelevant. But if part of the concentration of corporate capital that basically runs the country -- another thing we're not allowed to say but it's obvious -- if part of that sector becomes in favor then the issue moves onto the political agenda.

Shank: So how does the south get its voice heard on the international agenda? Is the World Social Forum a place for it?

Chomsky: The World Social Forum is very important but of course that can't be covered in the West. In fact, I remember reading an article, I think in the Financial Times, about the two major forums that were taking place. One was the World Economic Forum in Davos and a second was a forum in Herzeliyah in Israel, a right wing forum in Herzeliyah. Those were the two forums. Of course there was also the World Social Forum in Nairobi but that's only tens of thousands of people from around the world.

Shank: With the trend towards vilifying the G77 at the UN one wonders where the developing world can effectively voice their concerns.

Chomsky: The developing world voice can be amplified enormously by support from the wealthy and the privileged, otherwise it's very likely to be marginalized, as in every other issue.

Shank: So it's up to us.

Joe Conason: It Can Happen Here!

http://www.alternet.org/rights/48246/

It Can Happen Here

By Joe Conason, Thomas Dunne Books. Posted February 23, 2007.

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.

The following is excerpted from Joe Conason's new book, "It Can Happen Here" (Thomas Dunne Books, 2007).

Can it happen here? Is it happening here already? That depends, as a recent president might have said, on what the meaning of "it" is.

To Sinclair Lewis, who sardonically titled his 1935 dystopian novel "It Can't Happen Here," "it" plainly meant an American version of the totalitarian dictatorships that had seized power in Germany and Italy. Married at the time to the pioneering reporter Dorothy Thompson, who had been expelled from Berlin by the Nazis a year earlier and quickly became one of America's most outspoken critics of fascism, Lewis was acutely aware of the domestic and foreign threats to American freedom. So often did he and Thompson discuss the crisis in Europe and the implications of Europe's fate for the Depression-wracked United States that, according to his biographer, Mark Schorer, Lewis referred to the entire topic somewhat contemptuously as "it."

If "it" denotes the police state American-style as imagined and satirized by Lewis, complete with concentration camps, martial law, and mass executions of strikers and other dissidents, then "it" hasn't happened here and isn't likely to happen anytime soon.

For contemporary Americans, however, "it" could signify our own more gradual and insidious turn toward authoritarian rule. That is why Lewis's darkly funny but grim fable of an authoritarian coup achieved through a democratic election still resonates today -- along with all the eerie parallels between what he imagined then and what we live with now.

For the first time since the resignation of Richard M. Nixon more than three decades ago, Americans have had reason to doubt the future of democracy and the rule of law in our own country. Today we live in a state of tension between the enjoyment of traditional freedoms, including the protections afforded to speech and person by the Bill of Rights, and the disturbing realization that those freedoms have been undermined and may be abrogated at any moment.

Such foreboding, which would have been dismissed as paranoia not so long ago, has been intensified by the unfolding crisis of political legitimacy in the capital. George W. Bush has repeatedly asserted and exercised authority that he does not possess under the Constitution he swore to uphold. He has announced that he intends to continue exercising power according to his claim of a mandate that erases the separation and balancing of power among the branches of government, frees him from any real obligation to obey laws passed by Congress, and permits him to ignore any provisions of the Bill of Rights that may prove inconvenient.

Whether his fellow Americans understand exactly what Bush is doing or not, his six years in office have created intense public anxiety. Much of that anxiety can be attributed to fear of terrorism, which Bush has exacerbated to suit his own purposes -- as well as to increasing concern that the world is threatened by global warming, pandemic diseases, economic insecurity, nuclear proliferation, and other perils with which this presidency cannot begin to cope.

As the midterm election showed, more and more Americans realize that something has gone far wrong at the highest levels of government and politics -- that Washington's one-party regime had created a daily spectacle of stunning incompetence and dishonesty. Pollsters have found large majorities of voters worrying that the country is on the wrong track. At this writing, two of every three voters give that answer, and they are not just anxious but furious. Almost half are willing to endorse the censure of the president.

Suspicion and alienation extend beyond the usual disgruntled Democrats to independents and even a significant minority of Republicans. A surprisingly large segment of the electorate is willing to contemplate the possibility of impeaching the president, unappetizing though that prospect should be to anyone who can recall the destructive impeachment of Bush's predecessor.

The reasons for popular disenchantment with the Republican regime are well known -- from the misbegotten, horrifically mismanaged war in Iraqto the heartless mishandling of the Hurricane Katrina disaster. In both instances, growing anger over the damage done to the national interest and the loss of life and treasure has been exacerbated by evidence of bad faith -- by lies, cronyism, and corruption.

Everyone knows -- although not everyone necessarily wishes to acknowledge -- that the Bush administration misled the American people about the true purposes and likely costs of invading Iraq. It invented a mortal threat to the nation in order to justify illegal aggression. It has repeatedly sought, from the beginning, to exploit the state of war for partisan advantage and presidential image management. It has wasted billions of dollars, and probably tens of billions, on Pentagon contractors with patronage connections to the Republican Party.

Everyone knows, too, that the administration dissembled about the events leading up to the destruction of New Orleans. Its negligence and obliviousness in the wake of the storm were shocking, as was its attempt to conceal its errors. It has yet to explain why a person with few discernible qualifications, other than his status as a crony and business associate of his predecessor, was directing the Federal Emergency Management Agency. By elevating ethically dubious, inexperienced, and ineffectual management the administration compromised a critical agency that had functioned brilliantly during the Clinton administration.

To date, however, we do not know the full dimensions of the scandals behind Iraq and Katrina, because the Republican leaders of the Senate and the House of Representatives abdicated the traditional congressional duties of oversight and investigation. It is due to their dereliction that neither the president nor any of his associates have seemed even mildly chastened in the wake of catastrophe. With a single party monopolizing power yet evading responsibility, there was nobody with the constitutional power to hold the White House accountable.

Bolstered by political impunity, especially in a time of war, perhaps any group of politicians would be tempted to abuse power. But this party and these politicians, unchecked by normal democratic constraints, proved to be particularly dangerous. The name for what is wrong with them -- the threat embedded within the Bush administration, the Republican congressional leadership, and the current leaders of the Republican Party -- is authoritarianism.

The most obvious symptoms can be observed in the regime's style, which features an almost casual contempt for democratic and lawful norms; an expanding appetite for executive control at the expense of constitutional balances; a reckless impulse to corrupt national institutions with partisan ideology; and an ugly tendency to smear dissent as disloyalty. The most troubling effects are matters of substance, including the suspension of traditional legal rights for certain citizens; the imposition of secrecy and the inhibition of the free flow of information; the extension of domestic spying without legal sanction or warrant; the promotion of torture and other barbaric practices, in defiance of American and international law; and the collusion of government and party with corporate interests and religious fundamentalists.

What worries many Americans even more is that the authoritarians can excuse their excesses as the necessary response to an enemy that every American knows to be real. For the past five years, the Republican leadership has argued that the attacks of September 11, 2001 -- and the continuing threat from jihadist groups such as al Qaeda -- demand permanent changes in American government, society, and foreign policy. Are those changes essential to preserve our survival -- or merely useful for unscrupulous politicians who still hope to achieve permanent domination by their own narrowly ideological party? Not only liberals and leftists, but centrists, libertarians, and conservatives, of every party and no party, have come to distrust the answers given by those in power.

The most salient dissent to be heard in recent years, and especially since Bush's reelection in 2004, has been voiced not by the liberals and moderates who never trusted the Republican leadership, but by conservatives who once did.

Former Republican congressman Bob Barr of Georgia, who served as one of the managers of the impeachment of Bill Clinton in the House of Representatives, has joined the American Civil Liberties Union he once detested. In the measures taken by the Bush administration and approved by his former colleagues, Barr sees the potential for "a totalitarian type regime."

Paul Craig Roberts, a longtime contributor to the Wall Street Journal and a former Treasury official under Reagan, perceives the "main components of a police state" in the Bush administration's declaration of plenary powers to deny fundamental rights to suspected terrorists. Bruce Fein, who served as associate attorney general in the Reagan Justice Department, believes that the Bush White House is "a clear and present danger to the rule of law," and that the president "cannot be trusted to conduct the war against global terrorism with a decent respect for civil liberties and checks against executive abuses." Syndicated columnist George Will accuses the administration of pursuing a "monarchical doctrine" in its assertion of extraordinary war powers.

In the 2006 midterm election, disenchanted conservatives joined with liberals and centrists to deliver a stinging rebuke to the regime by overturning Republican domination in both houses of Congress. For the first time since 1994, Democrats control the Senate and the House of Representatives. But the Democratic majority in the upper chamber is as narrow as possible, depending on the whims of Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, a Republican-leaning Democrat elected on an independent ballot line, who has supported the White House on the occupation of Iraq, abuse of prisoners of war, domestic spying, the suspension of habeas corpus, military tribunals, far-right judicial nominations, and other critical constitutional issues. Nor is Lieberman alone among the Senate Democrats in his supine acquiescence to the abuses of the White House.

Even if the Democrats had won a stronger majority in the Senate, it would be naive to expect that a single election victory could mend the damage inflicted on America's constitutional fabric during the past six years. While the Bush administration has enjoyed an extraordinary immunity from Congressional oversight until now, the deepest implication of its actions and statements, as explored in the pages that follow, is that neither legislators nor courts can thwart the will of the unitary executive. When Congress challenges that presidential claim, as inevitably it will, then what seems almost certain to follow is not "bipartisanship" but confrontation. The election of 2006 was not an end but another beginning.

The question that we face in the era of terror alerts, religious fundamentalism, and endless warfare is whether we are still the brave nation preserved and rebuilt by the generation of Sinclair Lewis -- or whether our courage, and our luck, have finally run out. America is not yet on the verge of fascism, but democracy is again in danger. The striking resemblance between Buzz Windrip [the demagogic villain of Lewis's novel] and George W. Bush and the similarity of the political forces behind them is more than a literary curiosity. It is a warning on yellowed pages from those to whom we owe everything.

From "It Can Happen Here" by Joe Conason. Copyright (c) 2007 by the author and reprinted by permission of Thomas Dunne Books, an imprint of St. Martin's Press.

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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

Why Working Women Are Stuck in the 1950s
By Ruth Rosen, The Nation
Though most mothers are in the workforce, Americans remain trapped in a time warp, convinced that women should and will care for children, the elderly, homes and communities. When will policy catch up? Read more

American Democracy From the Eyes of a Democratic Fundraiser
By Terrence McNally, AlterNet
Terry McAuliffe, former head of the Democratic National Committee and chair of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, on the Democratic vision of America and why we have yet to achieve it.

Putting Jazz Back in New Orleans
By Patrik Jonsson, Christian Science Monitor
With 70 new homes in the devastated Upper Ninth Ward, Musicians' Village -- a neighborhood by musicians, for musicians -- is the city's largest redevelopment project to date.

Iraq Replaces Vietnam as Metaphor for Tragedy
By Andrew Lam, New America Media
Many comparisons have been made about the Iraq and Vietnam wars. But what Iraq may have finally done is not so much remind us of Vietnam as ultimately usurp it from our national psyche.

Black America After Jim Crow: Still Feels Like Segregation
By Yvonne Bynoe, AlterNet
Instead of recognizing Black achievements throughout the year, why do we still cram everything "Black" into one month? And what does that say about how race influences the types of politicians that American voters select?

Hand-tied or Tongue-tied?
By Sean Gonsalves, AlterNet
The goal in counter insurgency warfare should be to capture hearts and minds, which is why minimal force and humanitarian efforts are key.

Men Are Not Men
By Annalee Newitz, AlterNet
A Stanford graduate student "proved" that men in online virtual worlds behave just like men in real life. But do they really?

Unprecedented: Generals to quit if Bush attacks Iran
By Evan Derkacz
AND: UN says US nuke intel is useless...

The Conservapedia has a Racist Agenda
Jill Tubman: Schlafly's anti-feminist, ultra-conservative wiki...

Debunking a Middle East myth: Yasser Arafat wasn't solely to blame for the collapse of Camp David II
By Joshua Holland
A little reality-based analysis from Jewish Voice for Peace...

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False Choices in the Debate on Voting Technology
By Brad Friedman, AlterNet
American democracy cannot afford another questionable presidential election. So why are the Democrats getting the solution so wrong?

The Half-Trillion Dollar Solution To Getting out of Iraq
By Bruce Ackerman, David Wu, The American Prospect
Want to end the Iraq war? Place a hard and fixed limit on the president's budget for war spending.

Kucinich Comes Back for '08
By Daniel Sturm, In These Times
Dennis Kucinich explains why he decided to run for president again and how he proposes to bring American troops home from Iraq.

Hi, Tech
By Bill McKibben, Grist Magazine
Understanding the power of the Internet for progressive organizing.
PEEK and Video: The hottest buzz and videos on the web

Iran could be among our best allies
By Joshua Holland
Seriously ...

Taxpayers continue to fund right-wing meetings to assess presidential candidates
By Sarah Posner
How does the Council for National Policy continue to operate in secret?

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The War on Terror Is the Leading Cause of Terrorism
By Kim Sengupta, Patrick Cockburn, The Independent UK
It's official: A new report shows that the U.S. has made the world more dangerous -- not just for Americans, but for everyone. Read more

Queer 101: A Guide for Heteros
By Cameron Scott, AlterNet
Conservative Americans may demonize gay people -- but how much do progressives really know about queer culture?

How to Make the White House Come Clean About Plame Conspiracy
By Elizabeth de la Vega, Tomdispatch.com
Libby's trial has raised more questions than it has answered. It's time for a full-scale congressional hearing to hold the Bush administration accountable.

Why Rudy Guiliani Is Destined to Fall
By Paul Waldman, TomPaine.com
What GOP voters want to know is, are you one of us or not? And that tribal identity is formed by one thing above all else: Do you hate the right people?

IKEA: Who Says Big Retail Can't Be Good for the Environment?
By David Roberts, Grist Magazine
IKEA's environmental policies and ambitious future plans put U.S. retailers to shame.

North Korea To Suspend Plutonium Production
By Leon V. Sigal, MIT Center for International Studies
Bush decided to accept North Korea's longstanding offer to suspend plutonium production. Will this new emphasis on diplomacy in the region make a difference?

Going Back to North Korea, Hat in Hand
By Robert Scheer, Truthdig
The Bush administration came to its senses about North Korea five years too late. Now other "rogue nations" know that the best way to make peace with the U.S. is to test their own nuclear weapons.

Immigrant Families Sold Out, Locked Up
By Amy Goodman, King Features Syndicate
Private prisons make money from locking up immigrant families -- including young children -- indefinitely.

Virginia Apologizes For Slavery, Now It's Congress' Turn
By Earl Ofari Hutchinson, AlterNet
Apologizing is more than a matter of morals. It's a recognition that this country protected, nourished and profited off of slavery for a century.

Delta Dawn, What's That Frat Pin You Have On?
By Susie Bright, SusieBright.com
Want to become a bigot? Join the Greek system.

Why Can't We Talk about Peace in Public?
By Matt Taibbi, RollingStone.com
Our national love affair with high-tech weaponry is an inevitable consequence of having a military industrial complex that underwrites our economic structure.

Thousands speak out against occupation, use their bodies to call for impeachment [VIDEO]
By Joshua Holland
Rumors of the anti-war movement's demise appear to be exaggerated.

Kucinich introduces bill to immediately end Iraq occupation ...
By Joshua Holland
It's all Dennis, all day here at AlterNet.

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One Bite at a Time: A Beginner's Guide to Vegetarianism
By Kathy Freston, HuffingtonPost.com
How to become vegetarian -- and help save the environment -- in six easy steps.

Leave No Child Inside
By Richard Louv, Orion Magazine
The movement to reconnect children to the natural world has arisen spontaneously, ignoring the usual political and economic dividing lines in society.

A Preview of Bush's 'Attack Iran' Speech
By Michael T. Klare, Tomdispatch.com
Has the justification for war with Iran already been drawn up? A careful reading of Bush's statements on Iran could preview the actual list of charges he might make in his case for attack.

Iraqi Oil Law Gives Cover for Corporate Profit
By Emad Mekay, IPS News
Under Iraq's pending oil law, as much as two-thirds of Iraq's known reserves would be developed by multinationals, amounting to mass theft from the Iraqi people.

Marine with brain injury refused treatment by VA [VIDEO]
By Evan Derkacz
ABC's Bob Woodruff, who nearly died of a similar brain injury last year, files his first report...

What does your doctor sell out for?
By Heather Gehlert
Baseball tickets from a short-skirted 20-something?

Colorado replaces immigrant workers with prison (slave) labor
By Joshua Holland
What, the state got tough on immigrants but didn't turn into a workers' paradise?

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See Hillary Run (from Her Husband's Past on Iraq)
By Scott Ritter, AlterNet
It's not enough for Hillary Clinton to apologize for her Iraq vote in 2002: She was witness to years of President Bill Clinton's deception and lying about Saddam Husseins's weapons programs to justify attacks on Iraq. Read more

Marijuana Gains Wonder Drug Status
By Lester Grinspoon, Boston Globe
A new study reveals that pot relieves pain that narcotics like morphine and OxyContin have hardly any effect on, and could help ease suffering from illnesses such as multiple sclerosis and diabetes.

Are Higher Fees for Immigrants a Plan to Stall the Number of Democratic Voters?
By Rene Ciria-Cruz, New America Media
The Bush administration says it wants to raise immigration fees dramatically to improve services, but some critics see it as an effort to stall the increase in pro-Democratic Party voters.

Weakest Link: Bush v. Blair [VIDEO]
By Evan Derkacz
A nail-biter of satire! Who will get kicked out of the studio first?

Tom Friedman, straight up racist
By Evan Derkacz
The New York Times should fire him immediately.

How the Bush administration "guides" regulators over cliffs
By Lindsay Beyerstein
Another layer of apparatchiks assigned to government bureaucracies.

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60,000 Marriages Broken by Iraq, Including Mine
By Stacy Bannerman, The Progressive
When one military wife got the news that her husband was coming home from Iraq, they didn't tell her he was going to bring the war back with him. Read more

Hollywood Keeps Dissing Documentaries at the Oscars
By Danny Schechter, AlterNet
Self-satisfied movie moguls keep dissing documentaries at the Oscar ceremonies, doing a great disservice to our political culture and democracy.

Ann Coulter's 'Faggot' Remark Smears Mitt Romney Too
By Don Hazen, AlterNet
But Coulter is unlikely to go away because "she provides an outlet ... for the twisted psychological impulses and truly hateful face that drives the entire pro-Bush, right-wing spectacle."

Mothers Facing Pollution Risks Find Allies in the Religous Right
By Teresita Perez, AlterNet
The religious right and environmentalists are teaming up to protect women and their babies from the dangers of exposure to pollution and toxic waste.

Ethanol: Feed a Person for a Year or Fill Up an SUV?
By Robert Bryce, CounterPunch
While politicians and Big Agriculture insist on casting the need for ethanol in terms of national security, the larger issue is a moral one: are we going to use our precious farmland to grow food, or use it to make motor fuel?

How Long Until Iran Gets the Bomb? No One Has a Clue
By Ray McGovern, BuzzFlash
The U.S. intelligence community's performance in "assessing" Iran's progress toward a nuclear capability does not inspire confidence.

Behind the scenes at a Conservative Conference [VIDEO]
By Evan Derkacz
The Nation's Max Blumenthal confronted some of the rightwing's leading lights including, yes, Ann Coulter...

What the Right Means by "Support"
By Barbara O'Brien
On the Right, to "support" means "to weaken, neglect, or oppose."

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From the Center for American Progress

GOOD NEWS

Last year, individual donations of $100 million or more to universities, hospitals and charities hit a record 21, compared with 11 in 2005.

STATE WATCH

CALIFORNIA: State boasts a record number of Asian-American elected officials.

NEW JERSEY: Lawmakers introduce legislation to give active soldiers income tax relief while they are overseas.

TEXAS: State conservatives are pushing "some of the harshest immigration-related measures in the United States."

CIVIL RIGHTS: Minorities and the poor would benefit from legislation in several states that would make voting easier and ballots more secure.

BLOG WATCH

THINK PROGRESS: Fox News's John Gibson: Reporters who ignore Anna Nicole Smith to focus on Iraq war are "snobs."

GRIST MILL: Jerry Falwell calls global warming a "myth."

TALK LEFT: Sen. Joe Lieberman's (I-CT) "good plans" for Iraq.

OPEN CONGRESS: A new site bringing together "official government data with news and blog coverage to give you the real story behind each bill."

DAILY GRILL

"[M]any parts of Iraq are stable now. But, of course, what we see on television is the one bombing a day that discourages everybody."
-- First Lady Laura Bush, 2/26/07

VERSUS

As of Nov. 2006, there were approximately 185 insurgent and militia attacks every day in Iraq.
-- The Brookings Institution Iraq Index, 2/22/07

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GOOD NEWS

Rep. Marty Meehan (D-MA) today will re-introduce the Military Readiness Enhancement Act, a bill that would repeal "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" and allow gays to serve openly.

STATE WATCH

HAWAII: "After decades of dashed plans, Honolulu is closer than ever to building a major mass transit system."

MARYLAND: The state Senate approves legislation requiring automakers to drastically slash greenhouse emissions.

OHIO: Gov. Ted Strickland (D) calls Bush's troop escalation "an unwise decision" that would lead to the deaths of more U.S. soldiers.

BLOG WATCH

THINK PROGRESS: Fox's John Gibson attacks the "great left-wing slime machine called ThinkProgress.org."

SUBURBAN GUERRILLA: U.S. Army invites Kiefer Sutherland, star of the hit TV show 24, "to discuss why it is wrong to torture prisoners."

WINDOWS ON WASHINGTON: An anonymous "Senior Administration Official" is actually Vice President Cheney.

DAILY GRILL

"What you have seen, actually...is a nimbleness when it comes to trying to do force protection, I think, probably unprecedented in a time of warfare."
-- Tony Snow, 2/27/07, responding to questions about the military's readiness crisis

VERSUS

"Strained by the demands of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, there is a significant risk that the U.S. military won't be able to quickly and fully respond to yet another crisis, according to a new report [by Gen Peter Pace] to Congress."
-- Associated Press, 2/27/07

AND

"Virtually all of the U.S.-based Army combat brigades are rated as unready to deploy, Army officials say."
-- Washington Post, 2/16/07

AND

"A survey conducted by the Defense Department Inspector General's Office last spring found that U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan lack sufficient armored vehicles, heavy weapons such as artillery or large machine guns, devices designed to jam signals used to detonate roadside bombs, and communications equipment."
-- San Francisco Chronicle, 2/4/07

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GOOD NEWS

"The first affordable combination anti-malarial drug tailored for children will soon be available across Africa, potentially saving millions of lives," thanks to a $21 million, two-year joint effort by the Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative and pharmaceutical manufacturer Sanofi-Aventis.

STATE WATCH

OKLAHOMA: State house committee approves legislation to stop public benefits for undocumented immigrants.

SOUTH CAROLINA: State may reject the national Real ID program.

CIVIL RIGHTS: Anti-gay rights group is planning a "fifty-state strategy" to pass bans on same-sex marriage.

BLOG WATCH

WAR ROOM: White House Press Secretary Tony Snow says that U.S. troops can skip counterinsurgency training in California and get it in the deserts of Iraq.

CREW BLOG: Misleading anti-abortion ads running on the Washington, D.C. metro.

FOIA BLOG: Coalition of Journalists for Open Government's "scathing" new report on the government's record backlog of Freedom of Information Act requests.

DAILY GRILL

"I'm grateful to reporters for bringing this problem to our attention, but very disappointed we did not identify it ourselves."
-- Defense Secretary Robert Gates, 2/23/07, on poor living conditions at Walter Reed

VERSUS

"Top officials at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, including the Army's surgeon general, have heard complaints about outpatient neglect from family members, veterans groups and members of Congress for more than three years."
-- Washington Post, 3/1/07

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GOOD NEWS

Yesterday in a vote of 241-185, the House passed the Employee Free Choice Act, making it easier for workers to organize and establishing stronger penalties for employers who intimidate workers. Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-MA) will reintroduce an identical bill in the Senate soon.

STATE WATCH

WASHINGTON: "A domestic-partnership bill for gay and lesbian couples appears headed for state law."

MARYLAND: Maryland will likely become the second state to apologize for slavery.

KENTUCKY: Gov. Ernie Fletcher (R) "pardoned members of his staff in the midst of a patronage probe to try to keep the investigation from incriminating anyone in the governor's office."

LOUISIANA: Minority neighborhoods around New Orleans face "toxic threats from dump sites that have cropped up in the wake up hurricanes Katrina and Rita."

BLOG WATCH

THINK PROGRESS: Army Spokesman: Injured vets "can go to Starbucks" if they want to speak with the media.

TECH PRESIDENT: "No more McCain in MySpace."

BLOG FOR OUR FUTURE: Conservative columnist Ben Shapiro: "Lesbianism among young women" is on the rise because society has decided to "tolerate" it.

CHRONICLE NEWS WATCH: A "little tone-deaf," President Bush hands out American flags to Katrina victims.

DAILY GRILL

"I want to join you in welcoming our guests and our witnesses today, having known especially Don Arthur and General Kiley very, very well over the years. ... I know that these gentlemen are committed to providing our war heroes with the very, very best medical care that is possible."
-- Rep. Bill Young (R-FL), 1/19/07

VERSUS

"In 2004, Rep. C.W. Bill Young (R-Fla.) and his wife stopped visiting the wounded at Walter Reed out of frustration. ... 'When Bev or I would bring problems to the attention of authorities of Walter Reed, we were made to feel very uncomfortable,' said Young."
-- Washington Post, 3/1/07, noting that Young had known about the neglect at Walter Reed under Kiley for years

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GOOD NEWS

In a "first for the federal government," the Patent and Trademark Office is starting a pilot project resembling Wikipedia "that will not only post patent applications on the Web and invite comments but also use a community rating system designed to push the most respected comments to the top of the file, for serious consideration by the agency's examiners."

STATE WATCH

OREGON: A large new solar plant may position the state as a national leader in renewable energy.

MARYLAND: Legislators introduce a bill to provide more end-of-life alternatives for the state's Muslims.

VERMONT: Warmer-than-usual winters are threatening the survival of New England's maple forests.

BLOG WATCH

THINK PROGRESS: Rep. John Murtha (D-PA) laughs off Vice President Cheney: "At least he didn't blame me for the British pulling out."

CROOKS AND LIARS: Newt Gingrich blames Katrina victims for a "failure of citizenship" by being "so uneducated and so unprepared, they literally couldn't get out of the way of a hurricane."

FEMINISTING: "Wisconsin turned down a $600,000 federal grant that would have required the state to teach abstinence-only sex ed."

ENVIRONMENTAL JOURNALISM NOW: New blog examining "environmental issues and their nexus with science, policy, and journalism."

DAILY GRILL

Sen. Pete Domenici (R-NM) "refused last week to say if he had contacted [former U.S. attorney David] Iglesias, insisting in a brief interview with the Associated Press, 'I have no idea what he's talking about.'"
-- AP, 3/5/07, on Domenici denying Iglesias's allegations that the senator asked him to "rush" an "investigation before the November elections to benefit Republicans"

VERSUS

Domenici "acknowledged yesterday that he contacted the U.S. attorney in Albuquerque last year to ask about an ongoing corruption probe of Democrats, but said he 'never pressured him nor threatened him in any way.'"
-- Washington Post, 3/5/07

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From “Democracy Now!”

Amy Goodman wins prestigious Gracie Allen Award - for Individual Achievement for a Program Host in Public Broadcasting, from the American Women in Radio and Television

Press release and awardee list in PDF format:
http://www.awrt.org/press-releases/2007/Press_Release%20_Announce_Gracies_Winners.pdf


Check out the two latest columns from Amy Goodman

Clinton to Antiwar Voters: Bring It On
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20070222_clinton_to_anti_war_voters_bring_it_on/

Wolf as Underdog
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20070215_wolf_as_underdog/

note that this news site, Truthdig, allows readers to post comments. Consider posting your own.

Also, consider writing your local newspaper and asking for them to carry the column, distributed by King Features. Many papers across the US have done so already.

If you see the column in your paper, please mail us a copy of the full page, to

Democracy Now!
87 Lafayette St
New York, NY 10013

Thank you!

-----

* 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

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* Investigative Reporter Seymour Hersh: US Indirectly Funding Al-Qaeda
Linked Sunni Groups in Move to Counter Iran *

Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh joins us to talk about his explosive
new article in the New Yorker Magazine. Hersh reports that John Negroponte's
decision to resign as National Intelligence Director was made in part
because of the Bush administration's covert actions including the indirect
funding of radical Sunni groups -- some with ties to al-Qaeda -- to counter
Shiite groups backed by Iran. Hersh also reports the Pentagon has
established a special planning group to plan a bombing attack on Iran and
U.S. military and special-operations teams have already crossed the border
into Iran in pursuit of Iranian operatives.

Listen/Watch/Read
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/28/150251


* Atmosphere of Pressure: Union of Concerned Scientists Finds Widescale
Political Interference in Global Warming Research *

While experts agree the debate over global warming has long been put to
rest, climate scientists face ongoing political interference in their
research. Two members of the Union of Concerned Scientists join us to talk
about what it will take to move past climate-change denial and bring about
meaningful policy change.

Listen/Watch/Read
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/28/150257


* Headlines for February 28, 2007 *

- US to Join Iran, Syria in Talks on Iraq
- US to Reject Extradition for CIA Agents in Italy Kidnap Trial
- ICC Announces Darfur War Crimes Suspects
- Israel Continues Raids in Nablus, Jenin
- Castro Says He's Recuperating,”Gaining Energy”
- No Grand Jury Indictments in Till Case
- Climate Scientists Urge UN Action on Global Warming
- Ex-FDA Head Sentenced to Probation, Fine

Listen/Watch/Read
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/28/150231

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* Robert Fisk on Osama bin Laden at 50, Iraqi Death Squads and Why the Middle
East is More Dangerous Now Than in Past 30 Years *

Robert Fisk is a veteran war correspondent and one of the world's most
experienced journalists covering the Middle East. He has reported from across
the Arab world for the past thirty years. His latest book is “The Great War for
Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East.” He joins us in our Firehouse
studio.

Listen/Watch/Read
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/05/1515214


* Headlines for March 5, 2007 *

- Up to 25 Afghans Killed in U.S./NATO Attacks
- Iraqis Caught Torturing Prisoners Inside Gov't Building
- British Group Warns Attack on Iran Will Backfire
- U.S. Court Tosses Out Suit Over CIA Torture
- Privatization of Services at Walter Reed Questioned
- U.S. To Build New Generation of Nuclear Warheads
- Russian Critic Shot In Maryland After Appearing on NBC
- Over 640 Arrested in Denmark In Protests Over Eviction
- Canadian Politicians Call for Release of Boy Held in U.S. Jail

Listen/Watch/Read
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/05/1515205

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From Jim Hightower

JENNIFER AND THE PORK BOARD

Thursday, February 22, 2007
Posted by Jim Hightower

Now here's a thrilling story: Goliath bullies David, David slings a stone that stuns Goliath... then Goliath apologizes and gives David some money!

"David" is Jennifer Laycock of Columbus, Ohio. "Goliath" is the National Pork... [read more]

ADS EVERYWHERE

Friday, February 23, 2007
Posted by Jim Hightower

"O beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain, for purple mountain majesties... and ads from sea to sea."

Corporate advertisers used to put their ads on television and radio, in publications, and... [read more]

WHAT A DISGRACE

Monday, February 26, 2007
Posted by Jim Hightower

Let's see... where were we? Oh, yes, Iraq.

That's now a civil war, right? Well, George W's top intelligence team now says no and yes to that question. I quote: "The term 'civil... [read more]

MORE MONKEYSHINE FROM EXXON

Tuesday, February 27, 2007
Posted by Jim Hightower

Did you get your Valentine gift from Exxon Mobil?

The day before this annual celebration of romantic fantasy, Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson flitted out like a pink cupid to shoot a... [read more]

MAKING A MOCKERY OF REFORM

Wednesday, February 28, 2007
Posted by Jim Hightower

Gosh, that was a refreshing respite that congress took from corruption, wasn't it?

The first thing the new Democratic-controlled congress did in January was to pass long-overdue curbs in lobbyist-paid junkets, jet-travel, tickets to sports events,... [read more]

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From Media Savvy

Is The Media "Slowly Bleeding" Congressional Plans To Withdraw From Iraq?
"Cut and run" morphs into "slow-bleed" as the epithet du jour for anti-war politicians. Will the voice of the American people ever be heard above the partisan media-fueled din?

Bob Woodruff Reports His Own Brain Injury Saga In Iraq
The ABC News reporter tells the story of his own recovery from an Iraqi insurgent attack a little over a year ago.

Is Lt. Watada An Isolated Case Of Military Dissent?
Sarah Olson, the subpoenaed journalist who refused to testify in Lt. Watada's court-martial case, files an exclusive report for MediaChannel asking, "what do we lose when we allow the systematic exclusion of soldier's voices?"

Iranian News Site Conitunes Publishing Despite Gov't Order
Batzab, the bilingual, moderate website banned by the Ahmadinejad administration seems to be back online.

Satan Rides The Media
Watch the first ten minutes of a documentary about the Norwegian 'black metal' arson incidents and their relationship to the media--the reporter who first broke the story, and the copycats who learned about church burnings through the international coverage.

In Russia, Media Watches You
Russia's Internet community spans the globe--is Russia's media scene truly becoming more democratic? How will this affect upcoming elections?

Cheney Bombs In Afghanistan, America
The secretive and sometimes not-so-secretive Vice President has a complicated relationship with the media and foreign leaders alike.

In Wake Of Media Scandals, Walter Reed Tightens Press Access
The conditions at Walter Reed caused a scandal and review by the Pentagon. Now they're also clamping down on media access to the building--and beyond.

Confessions Of An American Media Man
Tom Plate, journalism veterean and academic, publishes a tell-all memoir about his decades in the business.

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From HuffPo

Arianna Huffington: America Supports Murtha Plan

AP

Excerpted from Arianna Huffington's Blog:

Those Democrats in the House determined to gut Jack Murtha's plan to tie Iraq funding to strict troop-readiness standards have found a great ally in the Washington Post. Hot on the heels of the hit-job editorial that Brit Hume used to buttress his senility surge assault, came Sunday's shiv-in-the-back "news story" headlined "Murtha Stumbles on Iraq Funding Curbs" (Get it?
He's old, and old guys sometime stumble on curbs. Fun With Double Entendres!)...

...Luckily, the American people are reaching their own conclusions.

According to a new Washington Post/ABC News poll, the public is coming out in favor of Murtha's plan. When asked "Would you support or oppose Congress trying to block Bush's plan by creating new rules on troop training and rest time that would limit the number of troops available for duty in Iraq?" 58 percent said they would support such efforts while 39 percent were opposed...
Click here to read more.

ON THE BLOG TODAY

Jon Robin Baitz: The Music of Anna-Nicole

Paul Slansky: Apocalypse Now

Benjamin R. Barber: Compounding our Losses: How the Iraq Obsession Costs Us Victories Elsewhere

Kathleen Reardon: Why Would Al Gore Run For President?

Rep. Jim Moran: Only Murtha Plan Supports The Troops

From news.yahoo.com

Excerpted from Rep. Jim Moran's Blog:

...To think that Mr. Murtha would take an action that is not in the best interests of our troops is lunacy. No one in the Congress has spent more years in combat nor more time listening to the young men and women and their families who serve our country than Jack Murtha...

The Democratic caucus is a very diverse body. This is a strength for our party, not a weakness. It does, however, make legislating difficult at times, especially given the narrow majority we hold in both the House and Senate. I expect there will be great debate within our caucus over Jack's proposal. But in the end, what he has crafted gives voice to the strong concerns the American people expressed at the polls last November. It is a new direction, a direction that will lead to our troops coming home and an end to this Administration's ill-fated, misguided military adventure.
Click here to read more.

ON THE BLOG TODAY

Bruce Feiler: The Jesus Hoax

Joanne Mariner: The CIA's "Disappeared"

Gabriel Rotello: The Oscar 'Memorial' Segment: Gone, and Apparently Forgotten

Robert Eisenman: The Jesus Tomb

Jon Soltz: Senator Lieberman - Take The Troops Challenge!

AP

Excerpted from Jon Soltz's Blog:

Senator Lieberman, I have a challenge for you. Let's call it the American Troops Challenge. Here's how it goes.

First, your office needs to give up the basic tools that it uses everyday to make it function and allows people to do their jobs. Let's say you'll only have one pen in your office, for starters...

...Your office staff, and you, will have to stay in the Capitol for eight months, without the chance to rest or go home. At the eight-month mark, we'll have a little surprise. You and your staff will be involuntarily extended for another few months. You know, just until you pass a couple of more pieces of legislation and complete your job...
Click here to read more.

ON THE BLOG TODAY

Arianna Huffington: Limbaugh, Hannity, and the Right's Faux Fury Over Anonymous Comments

Eric Alva: Don't Ask, Don't Tell: From the Inside Out

David Roberts: Talking Points on the Gore Pseudo-Scandal

Marty Kaplan: Sticksandstonesaphobia

Art Levine: Lt. General "Coverup" Kiley: From Abused Detainees To Neglected Soldiers

AP

Excerpted from Art Levine's Blog:

The Army Surgeon General, Lt. Gen. Kevin Kiley, may be the next person fired or forced to resign in the wake of the Walter Reed outpatient care scandal that has already cost the jobs of the Secretary of the Army, Francis Harvey, and Walter Reed's commander, Maj. Gen. George Weightman. It was Harvey's appointment of Kiley, who essentially brushed off for years concerns about the squalor and degrading care facing Walter Reed's outpatients, to replace the fired Weightman that help trigger Harvey's forced resignation on Friday...

...But the Walter Reed scandal isn't the first time that Kiley has covered up abuses. He was a point person for the Army's coverup of the torture and degrading treatment of detainees by health professionals, including psychologists, at Guantanamo and other unaccountable military detention sites. He commissioned whitewashed "studies" of the problem that concluded that there wasn't any abuse abetted by health professionals -- even though his investigators never talked to any detainees or their attorneys...
Click here to read more.

ON THE BLOG TODAY

Bob Cesca: I Like To Use The F-Word A Lot

Marty Kaplan: CNN's All-White Color on Selma

Matt Browner Hamlin: CPAC: Romney Wants Extremist Love

Max Blumenthal: CPAC: The Unauthorized Documentary

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And now for something you'll really like!