The Daily MoJo...

From Beslan to Bethlehem Americans Have No Trouble Thinking Clearly About Terrorism. . .When it Happens in Russia.
-Bradford Plumer

In the aftermath of the two-day hostage crisis in Beslan, journalists rifled through their phrasebooks and came up with simple, stark adjectives. "Horrific." "Tragic." And there's nothing more horrific or tragic than a terrorist attack on a school that leaves more than 300 children and adults dead. As after September 11, silence was the only proper response. But in the days after the attacks, as writers began to look more closely at the Chechnya situation and at Vladimir Putin's response, an odd thing happened. Americans began thinking and writing seriously about terrorism -- what it is, where it comes from, what to do about it. This reflective outburst was odd precisely because it happens so rarely when Americans think about their own war against terrorism.
To be sure, some pundits merely cast about for lofty phrases of disapproval and rage. David Brooks called the terrorists a "cult of death," and condemned the Boston Globe for even looking at Russia's policies in Chechnya. As with much writing on al Qaeda, terrorists are presented as "evildoers" who must be defeated by any means possible. Much of what Brooks said is true -- many terrorists are pathological, and beyond all reason. But in the end, bold words are just that: words. They don't explain much.
Fortunately, most commentators tried to figure out why Beslan happened, and what conditions could possibly provoke Chechen rebels to seize a school and butcher children. Richard Pipes -- hardly a pacifist -- argued in the New York Times that the Chechen rebels in fact fought because of real historical grievances -- most notably their exile in Siberia under Stalin and their thwarted drive for independence. In the Washington Post, Michael McFaul criticized Putin for refusing to consider negotiating with Chechnya, and for conducting a blind and ineffective crackdown on all things Chechen. The Economist, a generally hawkish magazine, opined that "part of the solution in Chechnya must be to break today's nexus of perverse incentives that do so much to keep the war going." It was not enough simply to show resolve; Putin, the Economist suggested, needed to fight a more sensitive war on terror.
Bush administration officials, surprisingly, agreed. True, Secretary of State Colin Powell publicly announced that there "could be no justification for what happened in Russia" and "no compromise in battle." But privately, U.S. officials were suggesting that Putin needs to address Chechnya question through political as well as military channels. What ever happened to zero tolerance towards terror?
In this case, the pundits and officials are right: the political roots of Chechen terror are a genuine factor. Chechens have endured near-continuous persecution since the days of Stalin. Only ten years ago, in 1994, Boris Yeltsin launched a war against Chechnya in part to boost his popularity and stem off an electoral challenge from Communist candidate Gennadi Zygunov. In the ensuing decade, the Russian army razed Grozny many times over and bombed Chechnya senseless. The region has become a criminal state overrun by criminals and Islamist terrorists. But rather than admit that Russia's Checnya policy was a dead-end, Vladimir Putin made a point to campaign in 2000 on his tough stance towards Chechen terrorism. Since becoming president, Putin's brutal tactics -- including detentions of Chechen males and torture-based interrogation centers -- have done little to stop the cycle of violence. It is true that there are no quick solutions to Chechnya. Granting the region independence will hardly fix the failed, terrorist state that has emerged. But pretending that Chechens fight merely because they love violence and hate freedom only exacerbates the problem.
Unfortunately, no one in the Bush administration has yet suggested that such nuance and probity might serve the U.S. well in its own war on terror. Indeed, all of the pundits who were so quick to brush up on Chechen history were equally quick to dispel any parallels between the Beslan terrorists and al Qaeda.
This misses the point -- al Qaeda certainly works off of political and historical grievances, and it is hardly moral cowardice to try to understand this. Michael Schuerer, a veteran CIA analyst and al Qaeda scholar, stressed this in his recent book, Imperial Hubris. Schurer notes that Osama bin Laden remains popular in the Muslim world because he invokes concrete grievances against the U.S., such as our support for Israel and secular Arab dictators. This is not to say bin Laden has morality on his side. Schuerer is simply arguing that the U.S. needs to understand that certain policies -- backing Ariel Sharon's expansion into the West Bank, say, or invading Iraq -- will inevitably cause resentment. That is the stark reality, and it does no good to ignore it.
Since September 11, however, the Bush administration has done everything it could to ignore this reality, and the consequences have been severe. The invasion of Iraq stands out. Al Qaeda, as a supporter of insurgent movements across the globe, has used the invasion of Iraq to rally Muslims to its cause. Samer Shehata, a professor of Arab politics at Georgetown University, recently told Mother Jones that the Iraq war convinced "many Muslims around the world, perhaps a majority, that the war on terrorism is in fact a war against Islam." And Juan Cole, an expert on Iraq, recently observed, "After the Iraq War, Bin Laden is more popular than George W. Bush even in a significantly secular Muslim country such as Turkey." It is now clear that the Bush administration was wholly unprepared for this backlash, in part because it was wholly unwilling to understand how al Qaeda works and why it remains so popular.
The alternative to a full-blown offensive, of course, is to sit down and actually resolve some of the sources of resentment. Take Israel. Pundits can argue all day about whether Bush is morally right in supporting Ariel Sharon and refusing to negotiate with Yasser Arafat. But the fact remains: if the U.S. ever orchestrated a reasonable settlement in the Middle East, creating a Palestinian state, it would remove a massive source of terrorism and resentment. Hard-line groups like Hamas would no longer garner international sympathy, and it would be harder for Osama bin Laden to build a compelling case against Israel.
The same goes for the Kashmir. The Bush administration has leaned hard on Pakistan's president, Perez Musharraf, to capture al Qaeda and Taliban fugitives residing in the region. This policy certainly furthers our aims in the war on evildoers, but in the long-term, the U.S. might be more secure by using its political capital to resolve the Kashmir conflict. Two years ago, the Christian Science Monitor discovered that al Qaeda was prospering inside Kashmir, feeding off local Muslim resentment towards India. The only way to defuse this movement is by using a bit of diplomatic muscle. If this sounds like another Chechnya, well, it should.
Are there moral problems with addressing terrorist demands? Sure, but the Bush administration has demonstrated again and again that refusing to negotiate can create even greater problems. Recall that when he first got to office, President Bush broke off all negotiations with Kim Jong Il, telling reporters that he "loathed" the North Korea dictator. This sort of moral clarity only served to dissolve the long-standing Sunshine Policy and alienate our allies, including Kim Dae Jung, then-president of South Korea. North Korea, in the end, went full speed ahead with its nuclear program. Likewise with Iran. During the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, Iran was perfectly willing to cooperate with Bush, even helping to pull together the Bonn Conference on the future of Afghanistan. But in his 2002 State of the Union Speech, Bush named Iran as a member of the "axis of evil," and promptly tossed aside any hope for rapprochement between the two countries. Now Iran has a nuclear program of its own, and the only chance of disarmament depends on Bush moving past his own moral inflexibility and addressing Iran's strategic concerns.
In Iraq, meanwhile, Bush administration officials all through the spring announced that the insurgents fighting U.S. forces were "dead-enders" or ex-Baathists who would fade away after the capture of Saddam Hussein. They were wrong -- the Sunni and Shiite insurgencies draw heavy support from the local population and have real grievances, such as the devastatingly slow reconstruction process and the constant air-raids on cities like Fallujah. Lately, the occupation forces have tried to address these concerns, through such means as showy reconstruction projects to earn the good-will of the locals. But this all might be too little, too late. The early insistence on fighting war against evil -- as opposed to figuring out why the locals were rising up -- has alienated a good deal of the Iraqi population.
All this proves is that we cannot win a "war on terror" armed only with moral clarity and resolve. Pundits and bureaucrats are willing to tell that to Vladimir Putin. Why is it so rarely mentioned at home?
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This article has been made possible by the Foundation for National Progress, the Investigative Fund of Mother Jones
© 2004 The Foundation for National Progress

this is long article but worth it, from Bill Moyers

Journalism Under Fire
by Bill Moyers
published by Common Dreams
Thank you for inviting me to share this occasion with you. Three months from now I will be retiring from active journalism and I cannot imagine a better turn into the home stretch than this morning with you. My life in journalism began 54 years ago, on my 16th birthday, in the summer before my junior year in high school, when I went to work as a cub reporter for the Marshall News Messenger in the East Texas town of 20,000 where I had grown up. Early on I got one of those lucky breaks that define a life’s course. Some of the old timers were sick or on vacation and Spencer Jones, the managing editor, assigned me to help cover the Housewives Rebellion. Fifteen women in town refused to pay the social security withholding tax for their domestic workers. They argued that social security was unconstitutional, that imposing it was taxation without representation, and that – here’s my favorite part – “requiring us to collect (the tax) is no different from requiring us to collect the garbage.” They hired a lawyer – Martin Dies, the former Congressman notorious for his work as head of the House Committee on Un-American Activities – but to no avail. The women wound up holding their noses and paying the tax. In the meantime the Associated Press had picked up our coverage and turned the rebellion into a national story. One day after it was all over the managing editor called me over and pointed to the ticker beside his desk. Moving across the wire was a “Notice to the Editor” citing one Bill Moyers and the News Messenger for the reporting we had done on the rebellion. I was hooked. Looking back on that experience and all that followed I often think of what Joseph Lelyveld told aspiring young journalists when he was executive editor of the New York Times. “You can never know how a life in journalism will turn out,” he said. “Decide that you want to be a scholar, a lawyer, or a doctor…and your path to the grave is pretty well laid out before you. Decide that you want to enter our rather less reputable line of work and you set off on a route that can sometimes seem to be nothing but diversions, switchbacks and a life of surprises…with the constant temptation to keep reinventing yourself.” So I have. My path led me on to graduate school, a detour through seminary, then to LBJ’s side in Washington, and, from there, through circumstances so convulted I still haven’t figured them out, back to journalism, first at Newsday and then the big leap from print to television, to PBS and CBS and back again – just one more of those vagrant journalistic souls who, intoxicated with the moment is always looking for the next high: the lead not yet written, the picture not yet taken, the story not yet told. It took me awhile after I left government to get my footing back in journalism. I had to learn all over again that what’s important for the journalist is not how close you are to power but how close you are to reality. I’ve seen plenty of reality. Journalism took me to famine and revolution in Africa and to war in Central America; it took me to the bedside of the dying and delivery rooms of the newborn. It took me into the lives of inner-city families in Newark and working class families in Milwaukee struggling to find their place in the new global economy. CBS News paid me richly to put in my two-cents-worth on just about anything that happened on a given day. As a documentary journalist I’ve explored everything from the power of money in politics to how to make a poem. I’ve investigated the abuse of power in the Watergate and Iran-Contra scandals and the unanswered questions of 9/11. I’ve delved into the “Mystery of Chi” in Chinese traditional medicine as well as the miracle that empowered a one-time slave trader to write the hymn, “Amazing Grace.” Journalism has been a continuing course in adult education – my own; other people paid the tuition and travel, and I’ve never really had to grow up and get a day job. I made a lot of mistakes along the way, but I’ve enjoyed the company of colleagues as good as they come, who kept inspiring me to try harder. They helped me relearn another of journalism’s basic lessons. The job of trying to tell the truth about people whose job it is to hide the truth is almost as complicated and difficult as trying to hide it in the first place. Unless you’re willing to fight and refight the same battles until you go blue in the face, drive the people you work with nuts going over every last detail to make certain you’ve got it right, and then take hit after unfair hit accusing you of “bias”, or these days even a point of view, there’s no use even trying. You have to love it, and I do. I remember what Izzy Stone said about this. For years he was America’s premier independent journalist, bringing down on his head the sustained wrath of the high and mighty for publishing in his little four-page I.F. Stone’s Weekly the government’s lies and contradictions culled from the government’s own official documents. No matter how much they pummeled him, Izzy Stone said: “I have so much fun I ought to be arrested.” That’s how I felt 25 five years ago when my colleague Sherry Jones and I produced the first documentary ever about the purchase of government favors by political action committees. When we unfurled across the Capitol grounds yard after yard of computer printouts listing campaign contributions to every member of Congress, there was a loud outcry, including from several politicians who had been allies just a few years earlier when I worked at the White House. I loved it, too, when Sherry and I connected the dots behind the Iran-Contra scandal. That documentary sent the right-wing posse in Washington running indignantly to congressional supporters of public television who accused PBS of committing – horrors! – journalism right on the air. While everyone else was all over the Monica Lewinsky imbroglio, Sherry and I took after Washington’s other scandal of the time -- the unbridled and illegal fundraising by Democrats in the campaign of 1996. This time it was Democrats who wanted me arrested. . But taking on political scandal is nothing compared to what can happen if you raise questions about corporate power in Washington. When my colleagues and I started looking into the subject of pesticides and food for a Frontline documentary, my producer Marty Koughan learned that industry was attempting behind closed doors to dilute the findings of a National Academy of Sciences study on the effects of pesticide residues on children. Before we finished the documentary, the industry somehow purloined a copy of our draft script – we still aren’t certain how – and mounted a sophisticated and expensive campaign to discredit our broadcast before it aired. Television reviewers and editorial page editors were flooded in advance with pro-industry propaganda. There was a whispering campaign. A Washington Post columnist took a dig at the broadcast on the morning of the day it aired – without even having seen it – and later confessed to me that the dirt had been supplied by a top lobbyist for the chemical industry. Some public television managers across the country were so unnerved by the blitz of dis-information they received from the industry that before the documentary had even aired they protested to PBS with letters prepared by the industry. Here’s what most perplexed us: Eight days before the broadcast, the American Cancer Society – an organization that in no way figured in our story – sent to its three thousand local chapters a “critique” of the unfinished documentary claiming, wrongly, that it exaggerated the dangers of pesticides in food. We were puzzled. Why was the American Cancer Society taking the unusual step of criticizing a documentary that it had not seen, that had not aired, and that did not claim what the society alleged? An enterprising reporter in town named Sheila Kaplan looked into these questions for Legal Times and discovered that a public relations firm, which had worked for several chemical companies, also did pro bono work for the American Cancer Society. The firm was able to cash in some of the goodwill from that “charitable” work to persuade the compliant communications staff at the Society to distribute some harsh talking points about the documentary – talking points that had been supplied by, but not attributed to, the public relations firm. Others also used the American Cancer Society’s good name in efforts to tarnish the journalism before it aired; including right wing front groups who railed against what they called “junk science on PBS” and demanded Congress pull the plug on public television. PBS stood firm. The documentary aired, the journalism held up, and the National Academy of Sciences felt liberated to release the study that the industry had tried to demean. They never give up. Sherry and I spent more than a year working on another documentary called Trade Secrets, based on revelations –found in the industry’s archives – that big chemical companies had deliberately withheld from workers and consumers damaging information about toxic chemicals in their products. These internal industry documents are a fact. They exist. They are not a matter of opinion or point of view. And they portrayed deep and pervasive corruption in a major American industry, revealing that we live under a regulatory system designed by the industry itself. If the public and government regulators had known over the years what the industry was keeping secret about the health risks of its products, America’s laws and regulations governing chemical manufacturing would have been far more protective of human health than they were. Hoping to keep us from airing those secrets the industry hired a public relations firm in Washington noted for using private detectives and former CIA, FBI, and drug enforcement officers to conduct investigations for corporations. One of the company’s founders was on record as saying that sometimes corporations need to resort to unconventional resources, including “using deceit”, to defend themselves. Given the scurrilous underground campaign that was conducted to smear our journalism, his comments were an understatement. Not only was there the vicious campaign directed at me personally, but once again pressure was brought to bear on PBS through industry allies in Congress. PBS stood firm, the documentary aired, and a year later the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences awarded Trade Secrets an Emmy for outstanding investigative journalism. ’ve gone on like this not to regale you with old war tales but to get to a story that is the one thing I hope you might remember from our time together this morning. John Henry Faulk told me this story. Most of you are too young to remember John Henry -- a wonderful raconteur, entertainer, and a popular host on CBS Radio back when radio was in its prime. But those were days of paranoia and red-baiting – the McCarthy era – and the right wing sleaze merchants went to work on John Henry with outlandish accusations that he was a communist. A fearful CBS refused to rehire him and John Henry went home to Texas to live out his days. He won a famous libel suit against his accusers and wrote a classic book about those events and the meaning of the first amendment. In an interview I did with him shortly before his death a dozen years ago John Henry told the story of how he and friend Boots Cooper were playing in the chicken house when they were about twelve years old. They spied a chicken snake in the top tier of nests, so close it looked like a boa constrictor. As John Henry told it to me, “All the frontier courage drained out our heels – actually it trickled down our overall legs – and Boots and I made a new door through the henhouse wall.” His momma came out and, learning what the fuss was about, said to Boots and John Henry: “Don’t you know chicken snakes are harmless? They can’t hurt you.” And Boots, rubbing his forehead and behind at the same time, said, “Yes, Mrs. Faulk, I know that, but they can scare you so bad, it’ll cause you to hurt yourself.” John Henry Faulk told me that’s a lesson he never forgot. It’s a good one for any journalist to tuck away and call on when journalism is under fire. Our job remains essentially the same: to gather, weigh, organize, analyze, and present information people need to know in order to make sense of the world. You will hear it said this is not a professional task – John Carroll of the Los Angeles Times recently reminded us there are “no qualification tests, no boards to censure misconduct, no universally accepted set of standards.” Maybe so. But I think that what makes journalism a profession is the deep ethical imperative of which the public is aware only when we violate it – think Jayson Blair, Stephen Glass, Jim Kelly. Ed Wasserman, once an editor himself and now teaching at Washington and Lee University, says that journalism “is an ethical practice because it tells people what matters and helps them determine what they should do about it.” So good newsrooms “are marinated in ethical conversations…What should this lead say? What I should I tell that source?” We practice this craft inside “concentric rings of duty and obligations: Obligations to sources, our colleagues, our bosses, our readers, our profession, and our community” – and we function under a system of values “in which we try to understand and reconcile strong competing claims.” Our obligation is to sift patiently and fairly through untidy realities, measure the claims of affected people, and present honestly the best available approximation of the truth – and this, says Ed Wasserman, is an ethical practice. It’s never been easy, and it’s getting harder. For more reasons then you can shake a stick at. One is the sheer magnitude of the issues we need to report and analyze. My friend Bill McKibben enjoys a conspicuous place in my pantheon of journalistic heroes for his pioneer work in writing about the environment; his bestseller The End of Nature carried on where Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring left off. Recently in Mother Jones Bill described how the problems we cover – conventional, manageable problems, like budget shortfalls, pollution, crime – may be about to convert to chaotic, unpredictable situations. He puts it this way: If you don’t have a job, “that’s a problem, and unemployment is a problem, and they can both be managed: You learn a new skill, the Federal Reserve lowers interest rates to spur the economy. But millions of skilled, well-paying jobs disappearing to Bangalore is a situation; it’s not clear what if anything the system can do to turn it around.” Perhaps the most unmanageable of all problems, Bill McKibben writes, is the accelerating deterioration of the environment. While the present administration has committed a thousand acts of vandalism against our air, water, forests, and deserts, were we to change managers, Bill argues, some of that damage would abate. What won’t go away, he continues, are the perils with huge momentum – the greenhouse effect, for instance. Scientists have been warning us about it since the 1980s. But now the melt of the Arctic seems to be releasing so much freshwater into the North Atlantic that even the Pentagon is alarmed that a weakening Gulf Stream could yield abrupt – and overwhelming – changes, the kind of climate change that threatens civilization. How do we journalists get a handle on something of that enormity? Or on ideology. One of the biggest changes in my lifetime is that the delusional is no longer marginal. How do we fathom and explain the mindset of violent exhibitionists and extremists who blow to smithereens hundreds of children and teachers of Middle School Number One in Beslan, Russia? Or the radical utopianism of martyrs who crash hijacked planes into the World Trade Center? How do we explain the possibility that a close election in November could turn on several million good and decent citizens who believe in the Rapture Index? That’s what I said – the Rapture Index; google it and you will understand why the best-selling books in America today are the twelve volumes of the left-behind series which have earned multi-millions of dollars for their co-authors who earlier this year completed a triumphant tour of the Bible Belt whose buckle holds in place George W. Bush’s armor of the Lord. These true believers subscribe to a fantastical theology concocted in the l9th century by a couple of immigrant preachers who took disparate passages from the Bible and wove them into a narrative millions of people believe to be literally true. According to this narrative, Jesus will return to earth only when certain conditions are met: when Israel has been established as a state; when Israel then occupies the rest of its “biblical lands;” when the third temple has been rebuilt on the site now occupied by the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa mosques; and, then, when legions of the Antichrist attack Israel. This will trigger a final showdown in the valley of Armageddon during which all the Jews who have not converted will be burned. Then the Messiah returns to earth. The Rapture occurs once the big battle begins. True believers” will be lifted out of their clothes and transported to heaven where, seated next to the right hand of God, they will watch their political and religious opponents suffer plagues of boils, sores, locusts and frogs during the several years of tribulation which follow. I’m not making this up. We’re reported on these people for our weekly broadcast on PBS, following some of them from Texas to the West Bank. They are sincere, serious, and polite as they tell you that they feel called to help bring the Rapture on as fulfillment of biblical prophecy. That’s why they have declared solidarity with Israel and the Jewish settlements and backed up their support with money and volunteers. It’s why they have staged confrontations at the old temple site in Jerusalem. It’s why the invasion of Iraq for them was a warm-up act, predicted in the 9th chapter of the Book of Revelations where four angels “which are bound in the great river Euphrates will be released “to slay the third part of men.’ As the British writer George Monbiot has pointed out, for these people the Middle East is not a foreign policy issue, it’s a biblical scenario, a matter of personal belief. A war with Islam in the Middle East is not something to be feared but welcomed; if there’s a conflagration there, they come out winners on the far side of tribulation, inside the pearly gates, in celestial splendor, supping on ambrosia to the accompaniment of harps plucked by angels. One estimate puts these people at about 15% of the electorate. Most are likely to vote Republican; they are part of the core of George W. Bush’s base support. He knows who they are and what they want. When the President asked Ariel Sharon to pull his tanks out of Jenin in 2002, over one hundred thousand angry Christian fundamentalists barraged the White House with emails and Mr. Bush never mentioned the matter again. Not coincidentally, the administration recently put itself solidly behind Ariel Sharon’s expansions of settlements on the West Banks. In George Monbiot’s analysis, the President stands to lose fewer votes by encouraging Israeli expansion into the West Bank than he stands to lose by restraining it. “He would be mad to listen to these people, but he would also be mad not to.” No wonder Karl Rove walks around the West Wing whistling “Onward Christian Soldiers.” He knows how many votes he is likely to get from these pious folk who believe that the Rapture Index now stands at 144 --- just one point below the critical threshold at which point the prophecy is fulfilled, the whole thing blows, the sky is filled with floating naked bodies, and the true believers wind up at the right hand of God. With no regret for those left behind. (See George Monbiot. The Guardian, April 20th, 2004.) I know, I know: You think I am bonkers. You think Ann Coulter is right to aim her bony knee at my groin and that O’Reilly should get a Peabody for barfing all over me for saying there’s more to American politics than meets the Foxy eye. But this is just the point: Journalists who try to tell these stories, connect these dots, and examine these links are demeaned, disparaged, and dismissed. This is the very kind of story that illustrates the challenge journalists face in a world driven by ideologies that are stoutly maintained despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality. Ideologues – religious, political, or editorial ideologues – embrace a world view that cannot be changed because they admit no evidence to the contrary. And Don Quixote on Rocinante tilting at windmills had an easier time of it than a journalist on a laptop tilting with facts at the world’s fundamentalist belief systems. For one thing, you’ll get in trouble with the public. The Chicago Tribune recently conducted a national poll in which about half of those surveyed said there should be been some kind of press restraint on reporting about the prison abuse scandal in Iraq; I suggest those people don’t want the facts to disturb their belief system about American exceptionalism. The poll also found that five or six of every ten Americans “would embrace government controls of some kind on free speech, especially if it is found unpatriotic.” No wonder scoundrels find refuge in patriotism; it offers them immunity from criticism. If raging ideologies are difficult to penetrate, so is secrecy. Secrecy is hardly a new or surprising story. But we are witnessing new barriers imposed to public access to information and a rapid mutation of America’s political culture in favor of the secret rule of government. I urge you to read the special report (Keeping Secrets) published recently by the American Society of Newspaper Editors (for a copy send an e-mail to publications@knightfdn.org). You will find laid out there what the editors call a “zeal for secrecy” pulsating through government at every level, shutting off the flow of information from sources such as routine hospital reports to what one United States Senator calls the “single greatest rollback of the Freedom of Information Act in history.” In the interest of full disclosure I digress here to say that I was present when President Lyndon Johnson signed the Freedom of Information Act on July 4, 1966. In language that was almost lyrical he said he was signing it “with a deep sense of pride that the United States is an open society in which the people’s right to know is cherished and guarded.” But as his press secretary at the time, I knew something that few others did: LBJ had to be dragged kicking and screaming to the signing ceremony. He hated the very idea of FOIA, hated the thought of journalists rummaging in government closets, hated them challenging the official review of realty. He dug in his heels and even threatened to pock-veto the bill after it reached the White House. Only the tenacity of a congressman named John Moss got the bill passed at all, and that was after a twelve-year battle against his elders in Congress, who blinked every time the sun shined in the dark corridors of power. They managed to cripple the bill Moss had drafted, and even then, only some last-minute calls to LBJ from a handful of newspaper editors overcame the president’s reluctance. He signed “the f------“thing,” as he called it, and then set out to claim credit for it. But never has there been an administration like the one in power today – so disciplined in secrecy, so precisely in lockstep in keeping information from the people at large and, in defiance of the Constitution, from their representatives in Congress. The litany is long: The President’s chief of staff orders a review that leads to at least 6000 documents being pulled from government websites. The Defense Department bans photos of military caskets being returned to the U.S. To hide the influence of Kenneth Lay, Enron, and other energy moguls the Vice President stonewalls his energy task force records with the help of his duck-hunting pal on the Supreme Court. The CIA adds a new question to its standard employer polygraph exam asking, “Do you have friends in the media?” There have been more than 1200 presumably terrorist-related arrests and 750 people deported, and no one outside the government knows their names, or how many court docket entries have been erased or never entered. Secret federal court hearings have been held with no public record of when or where or who is being tried. Secrecy is contagious. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has announced that “certain security information included in the reactor oversight process” will no longer be publicly available, and no longer be updated on the agency’s website. New controls are being imposed on space surveillance data once found on NASA’s web site. The FCC has now restricted public access to reports of telecommunications disruption because the Department of Homeland Security says communications outages could provide “a roadmap for terrorists.” One of the authors of the ASNE report, Pete Weitzel, former managing editor of The Miami (Fla.) Herald and now coordinator for the Coalition of Journalists for Open Government, describes how Section 2l4 of the Homeland Security Act makes it possible for a company to tell Homeland Security about an eroding chemical tank on the bank of a river, but DHS could not disclose this information publicly or, for that matter, even report it to the Environmental Protection Agency. And if there were a spill and people were injured, the information given DHS could not be used in court! Secrecy is contagious – and scandalous. The Washington Post reports that nearly 600 times in recent years a judicial committee acting in private has stripped information from reports intended to alert the public to conflicts of interest involving federal judges. Secrecy is contagious, scandalous -- and toxic. According to the ASNE report, curtains are falling at the state and local levels, too. The tiny South Alabama town of Notasulga decided to allow citizens to see records only one hour a month. It had to rescind the decision but now you have to make a request in writing, make an appointment, and state a reason for wanting to see any document. The State Legislature in Florida has adopted l4 new exemptions to its sunshine and public record laws. Over the objections of law enforcement officials and Freedom of Information advocates, they passed a new law prohibiting police from making lists of gun owners even as it sets a fine of $5 million for violation. Secrecy is contagious, scandalous, toxic – and costly. Pete Weitzel estimates that the price tag for secrecy today is more than $5 billion annual (I have seen other estimates up to $6.5 billion a year,) This “zeal for secrecy” I am talking about – and I have barely touched the surface – adds up to a victory for the terrorists. When they plunged those hijacked planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon three years ago this morning, they were out to hijack our Gross National Psychology. If they could fill our psyche with fear -- as if the imagination of each one of us were Afghanistan and they were the Taliban -- they could deprive us of the trust and confidence required for a free society to work. They could prevent us from ever again believing in a safe, decent, or just world and from working to bring it about. By pillaging and plundering our peace of mind they could panic us into abandoning those unique freedoms – freedom of speech, freedom of the press – that constitute the ability of democracy to self-correct and turn the ship of state before it hits the iceberg. I thought of this last week during the Republican National Convention here in New York -- thought of the terrorists as enablers of democracy’s self-immolation. My office is on the west side of Manhattan, two blocks from Madison Square Garden. From where I sit I could see snipers on the roof. Helicopters overhead. Barricades at every street corner. Lines of police stretching down the avenues. Unmarked vans. Flatbed trucks. Looking out his own window, the writer Nick Turse (TomDispatch.com 9/8/04) saw what I saw and more. Special Forces brandishing automatic rifles. Rolls of orange plastic netting. Dragnets. Preemptive arrests of peaceful protesters. Cages for detainees. And he caught sight of what he calls “the ultimate blending of corporatism and the police state – the Fuji blimp – now emblazoned with a second logo: NYPD.” A spy-in-the sky, outfitted “with the latest in video-surveillance equipment, loaned free of charge to the police all week long.” Nick Turse saw these things and sees in them, as do I, “The Rise of the Homeland Security State” Will we be cowed by it? Will we investigate and expose its excesses? Will we ask hard questions of the people who run it? The answers are not clear. As deplorable as was the betrayal of their craft by Jason Blair, Stephen Glass and Jim Kelly, the greater offense was the seduction of mainstream media into helping the government dupe the public to support a war to disarm a dictator who was already disarmed [see the current issue of Foreign Affairs]. Now we are buying into the very paradigm of a “war on terror” that our government – with staggering banality, soaring hubris, and stunning bravado -- employs to elicit public acquiescence while offering no criterion of success or failure, no knowledge of the cost, and no measure of democratic accountability. I am reminded of the answer the veteran journalist Richard Reeves gave when asked by a college student to define “real news.” “Real news,” said Richard Reeves “is the news you and I need to keep our freedoms.” I am reminded of that line from the news photographer in Tom Stoppard’s play Night and Day: “People do terrible things to each other, but its worse in places where everybody is kept in the dark.” I have become a nuisance on this issue – if not a fanatic -- because I grew up in the South, where for so long truth tellers were driven from the pulpit, the classroom, and the newsroom; it took a bloody civil war to drive home the truth of slavery, and still it took another hundred of years of cruel segregation and oppression before the people freed by that war finally achieved equal rights under the law. Not only did I grow up in the South, which had paid such a high price for denial, but I served in the Johnson White House during the early escalation of the Vietnam War. We circled the wagons and grew intolerant of news that did not confirm to the official view of reality, with tragic consequences for America and Vietnam. Few days pass now that I do not remind myself that the greatest moments in the history of the press came not when journalists made common cause with the state but when they stood fearlessly independent of it. That’s why I have also become a nuisance, if not a fanatic, on the perils of media consolidation. My eyes were opened wide by the Telecommunications Act of 1996 which led to my first documentary on the subject, called Free Speech for Sale. On our current weekly broadcast we’ve gone back to the subject over thirty times. I was astonished when the coupling of Time Warner and AOL – the biggest corporate merger of all time – brought an avalanche of gee-whiz coverage from a media intoxicated by uncritical enthusiasm. Not many people heard the quiet voice of the cultural critic Todd Gitlin pointing out that the merger was not motivated by any impulse to improve news reporting, magazine journalism, or the quality of public discourse. Its purpose was to boost the customer base, the shareholders’ stock, and the personal wealth of top executives. Not only was this brave new combination, in Gitlin’s words, “unlikely to arrest the slickening of news coverage, its pulverization into ever more streamlined and simple-minded snippers, its love affair with celebrities and show business, “the deal is likely to accelerate those trends, since the bottom line “usually abhors whatever is more demanding and complex, slower, more prone to ideas, more challenging to complacency.” Sure enough, as merger as followed merger, journalism has been driven further down the hierarchy of values in the huge conglomerates that dominate what we see, read, and hear. And to feed the profit margins journalism has been directed to other priorities than “the news we need to know to keep our freedoms.” One study reports that the number of crime stories on the network news tripled over six years. Another reports that in fifty-five markets in thirty-five states, local news was dominated by crime and violence, triviality and celebrity. The Project for Excellence in Journalism, reporting on the front pages of the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, on the ABC, CBS, and NBC Nightly news programs, and on Time and Newsweek, showed that from 1977 to 1997 the number of stories about government dropped from one in three to one in five, while the number of stories about celebrities rose from one in every fifty stories to one in every fourteen. What difference does it make? Well, its government that can pick our pockets, slap us into jail, run a highway through our back yard, or send us to war. Knowing what government does is “the news we need to keep our freedoms.” Ed Wasserman, among others, has looked closely at the impact on journalism of this growing conglomeration of ownership. He recently wrote: “You would think that having a mightier media would strengthen their ability to assert their independence, to chart their own course, to behave in an adversarial way toward the state.” Instead “they fold in a stiff breeze” – as Viacom, one of the richest media companies in the history of thought, did when it “couldn’t even go ahead and run a dim-witted movie” on Ronald Reagan because the current President’s political arm objected to anything that would interfere with the ludicrous drive to canonize Reagan and put him on Mount Rushmore. Wasserman acknowledges, as I do, that there is some world-class journalism being done all over the country today, but he went on to speak of “a palpable sense of decline, of rot, of a loss of spine, determination, gutlessness” that pervades our craft. Journalism and the news business, he concludes, aren’t playing well together. Media owners have businesses to run, and “these media-owning corporations have enormous interests of their own that impinge on an ever-widening swath of public policy” – hugely important things, ranging from campaign finance reform (who ends up with those millions of dollars spent on advertising?) to broadcast deregulation and antitrust policy, to virtually everything related to the Internet, intellectual property, globalization and free trade, even to minimum wage, affirmative action, and environmental policy. “This doesn’t mean media shill mindlessly for their owners, any more than their reporters are stealth operatives for pet causes,” but it does mean that in this era when its broader and broader economic entanglements make media more dependent on state largesse, “the news business finds itself at war with journalism.” Look at what’s happening to newspapers. A study by Mark Cooper of the Consumer Federation of America reports that two-thirds of today’s newspaper markets are monopolies. I urge you to read a new book – Leaving Readers Behind: The Age of Corporate Newspapering (published as part of the Project on the State of the American Newspaper under the auspices of the Pew Charitable Trust) -- by a passel of people who love journalism: the former managing editor of the New York Times, Gene Roberts; the dean of the Philip Merrill College of Journalism, Thomas Kunkel; the veteran reporter and editor, Charles Layton, as well as contributors such as Ken Auletta, Geneva Overholser, and Roy Reed. They find that a generation of relentless corporatization has diminished the amount of real news available to the consumer. They write of small hometown dailies being bought and sold like hog futures; of chains, once content to grow one property at a time, now devouring other chains whole; of chains effectively ceding whole regions of the country to one another, minimizing competition; of money pouring into the business from interests with little knowledge and even less concern about the special obligations newspapers have to democracy. They point as one example to the paper in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, with a circulation of 23,500, which prided itself on being in hometown hands since the Andrew Johnson administration. In 1998 it was sold not once but twice, within the space of two months. Two years later it was sold again: four owners in less than three years. In New Jersey, the Gannett Chain bought the Asbury Park Press, then sent in a publisher who slashed 55 people from the staff and cut the space for news, and who was by being named Gannett’s Manager of the Year. Roberts and team come to the sobering conclusion that the real momentum of consolidation is just beginning – that it won’t be long now before America is reduced to half a dozen major print conglomerates. They illustrate the consequences with one story after another. In Cumberland, Maryland, the police reporter had so many duties piled upon him that he no longer had time to go to the police station for the daily reports. But management had a cost-saving solution: Put a fax machine in the police station and let the cops send over the news they thought the paper should have. (“Any police brutality today, Officer?” “No, if there is, we’ll fax a report of it over to you.”) On a larger scale, the book describes a wholesale retreat in coverage of key departments and agencies in Washington. At the Social Security Administration, whose activities literally affect every American, only the New York Times was maintaining a full-time reporter. And incredibly, there were no full-time reporters at the Interior Department, which controls millions of acres of public land and oversees everything from the National Park Service to the Bureau of Indian Affairs. There’s more: According to the non-partisan Project for Excellence in Journalism, newspapers have 2,200 fewer employees than in 1990. The number of full-time radio news employees dropped by 44 percent between 1994 and 2000. And the number of television network foreign bureaus is down by half. Except for “60 Minutes” on CBS, the network prime time newsmagazines “in no way could be said to cover major news of the day.” Furthermore, the report finds that 68% of the news on cable news channels was “repetitious accounts of previously reported stories without any new information.” Out across the country there’s a virtual blackout of local public affairs. The Alliance for Better Campaigns studied forty-five stations in six cities in one week in October 2003. Out of 7,560 hours of programming analyzed, only l3 were devoted to local public affairs – less than one-half of one percent of local programming nationwide. A profound transformation is happening here. The framers of our nation never envisioned these huge media giants; never imagined what could happen if big government, big publishing and big broadcasters ever saw eye to eye in putting the public’s need for news second to their own interests – and to the ideology of free-market economics. Nor could they have foreseen the rise of a quasi-official partisan press serving as a mighty megaphone for the regime in power. Stretching from Washington think tanks funded by corporations to the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal to Rupert Murdoch’s far-flung empire of tabloid journalism to the nattering no-nothings of talk radio, a ceaseless conveyor belt -- often taking its cues from daily talking points supplied by the Republican National Committee – moves mountains of the official party line into the public discourse. But that’s not their only mission. They wage war on anyone who does not subscribe to the propaganda, heaping scorn on what they call “old-school journalism.” One of them, a blogger, was recently quoted in Rupert Murdoch’s Weekly Standard comparing journalism with brain surgery. “A bunch of amateurs, no matter how smart and enthusiastic, could never outperform professional neurosurgeons, because they lack the specialized training and experience necessary for that field. But what qualifications, exactly, does it take to be a journalist? What can they do that we can’t? Nothing.” ((The Weekly Standard, 9/6/2004). The debate over who and isn’t a journalist is worth having, although we don’t have time for it now. You can read a good account of the latest round in that debate in the September 26th Boston Globe, where Tom Rosenthiel reports on the Democratic Convention’s efforts to decide “which scribes, bloggers, on-air correspondents and on-air correspondents and off-air producers and camera crews” would have press credentials and access to the action. Bloggers were awarded credentials for the first time, and, I, for one, was glad to see it. I’ve just finished reading Dan Gillmor’s new book, We the Media, and recommend it heartily to you. Gilmore is a national columnist for the San Jose Mercury News and writes a daily weblog for SiliconValley.com. He argues persuasively that Big Media is losing its monopoly on the news, thanks to the Internet – that “citizen journalists” of all stripes, in their independent, unfiltered reports, are transforming the news from a lecture to a conversation. He’s on to something. In one sense we are discovering all over again the feisty spirit of our earliest days as a nation when the republic and a free press were growing up together. It took no great amount of capital and credit – just a few hundred dollars – to start a paper then. There were well over a thousand of them by 1840. They were passionate and pugnacious and often deeply prejudiced; some spoke for Indian-haters, immigrant-bashers, bigots, jingoes, and land-grabbers. But some called to the better angels of our nature -- Tom Paine, for one, the penniless immigrant from England, who, in 1776 –just before joining Washington’s army – published the hard-hitting pamphlet, Common Sense, with its uncompromising case for American independence. It became our first best seller because Paine was possessed of an unwavering determination to reach ordinary people – to “make those that can scarcely read understand” and “to put into language as plain as the alphabet” the idea that they mattered and could stand up for their rights. So the Internet may indeed engage us in a new conversation of democracy. Even as it does, you and I will in no way be relieved from wrestling with what it means ethically to be a professional journalist. I believe Tom Rosenthiel got it right in that Boston Globe article when he said that the proper question is not whether you call yourself a journalist but whether your own work constitutes journalism. And what is that? I like his answer: “A journalist tries to get the facts right,” tries to get “as close as possible to the verifiable truth” – not to help one side win or lose but “to inspire public discussion.” Neutrality, he concludes, is not a core principle of journalism, “but the commitment to facts, to public consideration, and to independence from faction, is.” I don’t want to claim too much for our craft; because we journalists are human, our work is shot through with the stain of fallibility that taints the species. But I don’t want to claim too little for our craft, either. That’s why I am troubled by the comments of the former Baltimore Sun reporter, David Simon. Simon rose to national prominence with his book Homicide, about the year he spent in Baltimore’s homicide unit. That book inspired an NBC series for which Simon wrote several episodes and then another book and an HBO series called “The Wire,” also set in Baltimore. In the current edition of the libertarian magazine Reason Simon says he has become increasingly cynical “about the ability of daily journalism to affect any kind of meaningful change….One of the sad things about contemporary journalism is that it actually matters very little.’ Perhaps. But Francisco Ortiz Franco thought it mattered. The crusading reporter co-founded a weekly magazine in Tijuana whose motto is “Free like the Wind.” He was relentless in exposing the incestuous connections between wealthy elites in Baja California and its most corrupt law enforcement agencies and with the most violent of drag cartels. Several months ago Francisco Ortiz Franco died sitting at the wheel of his car outside a local clinic -- shot four times while his two children, aged 8 and 10, looked on from the back seat. As his blood was being hosed off the pavement, more than 100 of his fellow Mexican reporters and editors marched quietly through the streets, holding their pens defiantly high in the air. They believe journalism matters. [See Marc Cooper, the LA Weekly, July 16). Manic Saha thought journalism mattered. He was a correspondent with the daily New Age in Bangladesh, as well as a contributor to the BBC’s Bengali-language service. Saha was known for his bold reporting on criminal gangs, drug traffickers, and Maoist insurgents and had kept it up despite a series of death threats. Earlier this year, as Saha was heading home from the local press club, assailants stopped his rickshaw and threw a bomb at him. When the bomb exploded he was decapitated. Manik Saha died because journalism matters. Jose Carlos Araujo thought journalism mattered. The host of a call-in talk show in northeastern Brazil, Araujo regularly denounced death squads and well-known local figures involved in murders. On April 24 of this year, outside his home, at 7:30 in the morning, he was ambushed and shot to death. Because journalism matters. Aiyathurai Nadesan thought journalism mattered. A newspaper reporter in Sri Lanka, he had been harassed and threatened for criticizing the government and security forces. During one interrogation he was told to stop writing about the army. He didn’t. On the morning of May 3l, near a Hindu temple, he was shot to death – because journalism matters. I could go on: The editor-in-chief of the only independent newspaper in the industrial Russian city of Togliatti, shot to death after reporting on local corruption; his successor stabbed to death l8 months later; a dozen journalists in all, killed in Russia over the last five years and none of their murderers brought to justice. Cuba’s fledgling independent press has been decimated by the arrest and long-term imprisonment of 29 journalists in a crackdown last year; they are being held in solitary confinement, subjected to psychological torture, surviving on rotten and foul-smelling food. Why? Because Fidel Castro knows journalism matters. The totalitarian regime of Turkmenistan believes journalism matters – so much so that all newspapers, radio, and television stations have been placed under strict state control. About the only independent information the people get is reporting broadcast from abroad by Radio Free Europe-Radio Liberty. A stringer for that service, based in the Turkmenistan capital, was detained and injected multiple times with an unknown substance. In the Ukraine, Dmitry Shkuropat, a correspondent for the independent weekly Iskra, who had been working on a story about government corruption, was beaten in the middle of the day on a main street in the city of Zaporozhy and taped interviews for his pending story were taken. The director of Iskra told the Committee to Protect Journalists (to whom I am indebted for these examples) that the newspaper often receives intimidating phone calls from local business and political authorities after publishing critical articles, but he refused to identify the callers, saying he feared retaliation. Obviously, in the Ukraine journalism matters. We have it so easy here in this country. America is a utopia for journalists. Don Hewitt, the creator of 60 Minutes, told me a couple of years ago that “the 1990s were a terrible time for journalism in this country but a wonderful time for journalists; we’re living like Jack Welch,” he said, referring to the then CEO of General Electric. Perhaps that is why we weren’t asking tough questions of Jack Welch. Because we have it so easy in America, we tend to go easy on America – so easy that maybe Simon’s right; compared to entertainment and propaganda, maybe journalism doesn’t matter. But I approach the end of my own long run believing more strongly than ever that the quality of journalism and the quality of democracy are inextricably joined. The late Martha Gellhorn, who spent half a century reporting on war and politicians – and observing journalists, too -- eventually lost her faith that journalism could, by itself, change the world. But the act of keeping the record straight is valuable in itself, she said. “Serious, careful, honest journalism is essential, not because it is a guiding light but because it is a form of honorable behavior, involving the reporter and the reader.” I second that. I believe democracy requires “a sacred contract” between journalists and those who put their trust in us to tell them what we can about how the world really works. Thank you for listening to me. Good luck to all of you in your own work.

The Daily Mislead....http://misleader.org

Administration Misleads on Prospects in Iraq
In late July, a report prepared for the President by his National Intelligence Counsel spelled out "a dark assessment of prospects for Iraq."1 According to the New York Times, "the estimate outlines three possibilities for Iraq through the end of 2005, with the worst case being developments that could lead to civil war, the officials said. The most favorable outcome described is an Iraq whose stability would remain tenuous in political, economic and security terms."2 But that didn't stop Bush and other members of the administration from telling the American people that Iraq was headed in the right direction. On August 5, President Bush said, "[Iraq is] on the path to lasting democracy and liberty."3 On August 24, Vice President Cheney told voters in Iowa that "We're moving in the right direction [in Iraq]."4 And this Tuesday, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said Iraqis were "working at making a success out of that country...And I think they've got a darned good crack at making it."

5 Sources:
1. "U.S. Intelligence Shows Pessimism on Iraq's Future," New York Times, 9/16/04.
2. Ibid.
3. "President Signs Defense Bill ," The White House, 8/05/04.
4. "Remarks by the Vice President and Mrs. Cheney Followed by Question and Answer at a
Town Hall Meeting ," The White House, 8/24/04.
5. "Secretary Rumsfeld Town Hall Meeting at Ft. Campbell, Ky.," U.S. Department of Defense,
9/14/04.

Officer who rallied UK troops condemns 'cynical' Iraq war
By Kim Sengupta
17 September 2004
Colonel Tim Collins, the British commander whose stirring speech to his troops on the eve of the Iraq invasion was reportedly hung on a wall in the Oval Office by George Bush, has criticised the British and US governments over the war.
The officer, who has now left the Army, condemned the lack of planning for the aftermath of the conflict and questioned the motives for attacking Iraq. He said abuses against Iraqi civilians were partly the result of "leaders of a country, leaders of an alliance" constantly referring to them as the "enemy ... rather than treating them as people". This attitude was inevitably adopted by some soldiers on the ground, he said.
"Either it was a war to liberate the people of Iraq, in which case there was gross incompetence, or it was simply a cynical war that was going to happen anyway to vent some form of anger on Saddam Hussein's regime with no regard to the consequences on the Iraqi people. In that case it is a form of common assault - and the evidence would point towards the latter," he said on BBC Radio 4's Today programme.
The speech of the commander of the 1st Battalion, the Royal Irish Regiment was seized on by advocates of the war. Col Collins faced allegations of misconduct during the campaign, but was cleared by an inquiry, and subsequently was appointedOBE.
Yesterday Col Collins said that "the whole international community is dismayed by the result of the Iraq war" but he felt that liberating Iraq was still "the right thing to do. There is no doubt that the country needed to be liberated. Whether it could have been done in a different way must be judged by history."
He added: "The evidence would show, in hindsight, that the preparations for a free and fair Iraq were not made and therefore one must question the motivation of the powers that went to attack it. There was very little preparation or thought given to what would follow on from the invasion.
"It is fair to say that the United States and its ally the UK are living the consequence having removed the Baathist regime without any thought about what would replace it. There's no doubt that there was a great deal of incompetence involved but ultimately I think one has to look at the reasons for going to war."
Asked about the claims of abuse of Iraqi prisoners, Col Collins said: "The abuse of any individual is to be condemned without qualification. However, I would observe that if the leaders of a country, or the leaders of an alliance, talk in terms of 'them', 'the enemy' rather than treating them as people, how can they expect the lowest common denominator, the basic soldiery, to interpret it in any other way?
"Leadership comes from the top and soldiers at the lowest level will interpret their need to act from the guidance given by leaders. They are either well led or badly led. Ultimately the responsibility for the actions of soldiers must come back to the leaders."
Col Collins was himself accused of striking an Iraqi prisoner with his pistol, although he was later exonerated. But he said: "Inevitably my decision to leave the Army was influenced by my disillusionment with the extent to which the Army supported me after I was doing my best to carry out orders as given. I don't think I was let down as much as I don't feel I was particularly well supported."

Hijacking Catastrophe
By Robert Jensen, WorkingForChange.com

I’m a former full-time journalist turned journalism professor. I continue to commit occasional acts of journalism, and I retain a deep affection for, and commitment to, the craft and its ideals. That’s why it pains me to say this: The performance of the U.S. corporate commercial news media after 9/11 has been the most profound and dangerous failure of journalism in my lifetime.
That’s the bad news. The good news is that the void is being filled by other institutions, including the Media Education Foundation with its new documentary, “Hijacking Catastrophe: 9/11, Fear & the Selling of American Empire.”
That performance of journalists in the run-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq was so abysmal that the country’s top two daily newspapers, the Washington Post and New York Times, eventually were forced to engage in a bit of self-criticism, albeit shallow and inadequate. The U.S. news media’s willingness to serve as a largely uncritical conduit for the lies, half-truths, and distortions the Bush administration used to create the pretext for war showed how easily journalists can become de facto agents of a state propaganda campaign, which in this case mobilized public support for an illegal war.
But the lies that led to the Iraq War are only part of a bigger story, the most important story of the past three years: The Bush administration’s manipulation of the tragedy of 9/11 to extend and intensify the longstanding U.S. project of empire building (and the complicity of most Democrats in that endeavor).
No publication or network in the mainstream of U.S. journalism has offered an independent, critical analysis of that project. Only a few journalists, mostly on the margins, have even dared to take a crack at it. The best consistent work has been in the foreign press or the alternative media in the United States.
This also has been the year of the political documentary, and “Hijacking Catastrophe” is the best film in this genre to date.
(Full disclosure: I was one of the people interviewed for “Hijacking Catastrophe,” and I also have appeared in two other MEF films. I agreed to participate in these projects because, after years of using MEF videos in the classroom, I have come to respect the quality of the work and the integrity of its staff.)
Until this year, MEF had focused primarily on media criticism; its videos examined the effect of mass media on U.S. politics and culture. MEF primarily took as its task the job of explaining the failures of journalists, not doing the work of journalists. With “Hijacking Catastrophe,” directors Sut Jhally and Jeremy Earp also take up that task, covering the tremendously important story of the current phase of the U.S. empire that journalists have let slip through their fingers.
The film concentrates on two major topics: The neoconservative agenda for U.S. domination of the world, which was created long before 9/11, and the selling of that agenda to the U.S. public after 9/11.
The first story goes back to the early 1990s and the end of the Cold War, when policy planners such as Paul Wolfowitz (current deputy secretary of defense) were devising a more aggressive foreign policy and military posture to allow the United States to capitalize on the collapse of the Soviet Union and to dominate the globe in ways that had not previously been possible. At the time, the plans were considered so extreme that the first Bush administration reined in these ideological fanatics; the U.S. empire could go forward but not in such radical form.
During the remainder of the 1990s, these neoconservative planners chafed at what they saw as an insufficiently aggressive approach to expansion of the empire in the Clinton administration. The Project for the New American Century, a neoconservative think tank, was created as a vehicle for promoting this ideology, which was able to take center stage with the George W. Bush administration.
Resistance to such an aggressive and dangerous project remained, however, and the project still had to be sold to the U.S. public. The attacks of 9/11 created the political climate which made that possible.
The second story told by “Hijacking Catastrophe” is how the Bush administration – again, with the Democrats either helping or standing aside, and the news media playing a compliant lapdog role – devised and executed a propaganda campaign to ratchet up and manipulate the public’s fear of terrorism to justify first an illegal, immoral, and counterproductive invasion of Afghanistan (designed to solidify U.S. control in Central Asia) and then an even more blatantly illegal and disastrous invasion of Iraq (designed to solidify U.S. control of the Middle East).
Reviews in the Washington Post and New York Times both acknowledged that the film offers a “cogent, concise and engaging” argument and makes a “convincing case” (the case, perhaps, that journalists from those papers should have been reporting all along). Both reviews also note that Jhally’s and Earp’s presentation of “the facts without any funny business” marks “Hijacking Catastrophe” as a film different from “Fahrenheit 9/11,” one that is “more sober, yet no less sobering” than Michael Moore’s movie.
These repeated failures of journalists to hold the powerful accountable should be a subject of serious discussion not just within the profession but for all of us. If journalists don’t provide a truly independent source of news and instead routinely subordinate themselves to power – especially in times of war and national crisis – it’s difficult to imagine how citizens can adequately inform themselves so that they can participate in the political arena in a meaningful way.
But when journalism fails, it’s possible for other institutions to take on some of the news media’s obligations. That doesn’t mean MEF or groups like it can replace existing journalistic institutions on their own. Nor does it mean that Jhally and Earp are holding themselves out to the public as journalists, in the same way that so-called “objective” journalists do.
Instead, films such as “Hijacking Catastrophe” provide information and analysis, coming from a political orientation (critical, dissident, progressive – historically, the hallmarks of great journalism) that is up front. The question isn’t whether the people who made the film and appear in it have a politics – of course they do, just as mainstream journalists and mainstream journalism’s institutions do. The question is whether the information presented is accurate, the judgments made are honest, and the conclusions reached are compelling.
On those criteria, “Hijacking Catastrophe” is one of the best pieces of journalism of recent years.
More information about 'Hijacking Catastrophe,' including how to purchase it, is available on the
© 2004 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

from AlterNet...

Beatboxing at the Ballot Box
By Scott Thill, AlterNetPosted

"I never really cared that much about who was president," says Fat Mike, NOFX bassist and founder of Punkvoter, a coalition of musicians, labels and activists out to effect regime change in the White House through a series of Rock Against Bush tours and record releases. "I didn't think it really mattered. But everything changed for me during the 2000 election."
That was the year when about 100 million Americans who are eligible to vote, did not. The older demographic – mostly wealthy and white – dominated that election.
Consider that the government doesn't look much like America anymore: President George W. Bush's cabinet is the wealthiest in U.S. history, with over 80 percent millionaires and nearly half of them worth more than $10 million, according to the Guinness Book of World Records.
Tom Morello, guitarist for Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave, puts it this way: "When you accept corporate contributions in the hundreds of thousands, you don't owe much to part-time schoolteachers or alternative rock journalists. You do owe something to the oil companies and the multinationals that put you where you are. And apathy is what these companies want; they want people to sit on the sideline and not realize that they are living agents of history. By either action or inaction, they will determine the present and the future."
Morello is also co-founder of Axis of Justice, a non-profit social justice organization that he formed with System of a Down's Serj Tankian. The Axis of Justice concert series is just one of many movements – like MoveOn.org's Vote For Change tour, Music For America's Voter X events, Ani DiFranco's Vote Dammit tour, and Punkvoter's Rock Against Bush Tour – formed by or working with musicians to help attract young people away from their Xboxes and into the voting booth on November 2.
The citizens who avoided the polls in 2000 like they were installments of an aborted Liza Minnelli reality TV show were primarily young people, single women and people of color. The voter mobilization groups are thirsty to reconnect the youth demographic to the political processes of a country that is often taken for granted. In fact, many of the musicians involved with these organizations claim that they understand better than anyone how young people feel about politics, mostly because they too are voting for the first time in 2004.
"I think that the younger generation we're targeting is going to turn out in record numbers," says Fat Mike. "Of course, Bush has his backers, but they're not counting on the new voters, and the youth vote just doesn't show up in polls. But I think we're looking pretty good. We just have to keep battling."
The 2000 wake-up call that Fat Mike experienced wasn't only felt by the punk community, but also the hip-hop nation so often ignored by both political parties.
"This is the first time I'll vote in an election," says El-P, the New York-bred hip-hop renaissance man behind the enormously popular and resolutely independent Definitive Jux label, which recently hosted a benefit for Music For America to counter the unpopular Republican National Convention presence in his native New York. "I'm just beaten down by it all. The worst thing you could do is not hedge your bets. At this point, being ambivalent out of fear and depression is far outweighed by the idea of putting in the minimal effort it takes to effect change."
Although that change seems to be the resounding theme among artists working to get young people involved in the 2004 election, it extends far past the growing desire to jettison Bush. Rather, artists involved with Punkvoter, Vote For Change, Music For America and more are primarily concerned with communicating to their millions of fans that the world won't change unless they actually do something about it.
"It's important for everyone to vote and be involved in the political process," explains Moby, who has championed progressive causes throughout his career. "Democracy only functions when people participate. It's particularly important for young people to be involved in the political process now, because the youth will inherit the country and the world."
It is that sense of growing responsibility that is forcing artists like El-P, Fat Mike and many more to realize that they – like their fans – can't in good conscience complain about the deteriorating state of American affairs without the kind of political participation Moby speaks of. Even when they're confronted with an overworked public looking to escape rather than encounter political sloganeering at concerts that sometimes cost an arm and a leg to attend.
"I think the opinion that dissent, art and politics shouldn't be mixed comes from those who just want their art to be entertainment, and that's totally respectable," confesses Ben Gibbard of Death Cab For Cutie, who is on the bill with Pearl Jam in the Vote For Change concerts' blast through swing states in the first week of October. "I mean, you work all week to go see a show on the weekend to get away from the world, so the last thing you want to see onstage is someone ranting and raving about politics. But I feel that this moment in time is one where anyone with a voice should be using it."
Ani DiFranco has always mixed her politics with music. The singer-songwriter, who has variously put her energies into supporting women's reproductive rights, opposing the death penalty and encouraging tolerance, is putting her typically blunt style to work on voter turnout with the Vote Dammit! tour. She's enlisted the talent of Margaret Cho, as well as former presidential contenders Dennis Kucinich and Howard Dean plus folk stalwarts the Indigo Girls.
Most artists involved in voter-mobilization efforts understand that the battle doesn't end when Bush leaves Washington for Crawford – for good. Indeed, many have expressed serious doubts that John Kerry can capably represent their needs and issues, which says less about the Democratic candidate himself and more about the hegemony of the two-party system in U.S. politics. Indeed, if you're looking for reasons for voter apathy, look no further than the lack of choices offered to the American public.
"Voter apathy is based on the fact that there are no candidates that represent the majority of the American people," argues Morello. "Both presidential and vice-presidential candidates are multimillionaires. If you were able to raise half a billion dollars or whatever it takes to mount a campaign these days, and ran for president on a platform of $15-an-hour minimum wage, human rights abroad, environmental protection at home, ending homelessness and education for everyone, you'd win in a landslide. But you can't win that election, because you can't raise that money. The doors to privilege and power are gated, and there's a bank teller there."
Inaction doesn't seem to be making sense to anyone this election year, especially since it is often the very youth who decide that their vote doesn't matter that are on the front lines of questionable wars fought often for corporate profit.
"It is the youth of this world that is being shipped around to fight wars that are not for freedom or safety, but for the Carlyle Group, Halliburton and the numerous other multinationals that have this administration in their back pocket," explains #2, bassist for Anti-Flag, a politically active punk group whose Bush-bashing "Terror Alert" was produced by Morello and released on Fat Mike's independent label in 2003. "It's crucial for us to be represented, because right now these candidates are not working for votes, but rather for the corporations that are funding them. That's not democracy, and it's time to take it back."
No matter who wins the election, one thing will never change: If the youth continue to stay away from the democratic process in 2004 as they did in 2000, there is no doubt that the White House will only get whiter and richer in the very near future. In the end, this battle is not about Democrats or Republicans, but rather Americans, especially those who do not believe their votes make any difference at all – - an odd belief considering that the presidency was indeed won in Florida by a margin of 537 votes. Even odder when you consider, as Morello does, that progressive change in America is implemented not by politicians, but rather by those ordinary American citizens that elect them.
"My heroes have not been people that have inhabited the Oval Office," Morello explains. "They've been people who have truly fought for change, from Cesar Chavez and Martin Luther King to the countless unnamed, unnumbered civil rights workers, union members and activists who fought, sweat, worked and died to provide the rights that we enjoy today. And there's no difference between those people and the people reading this article right now. Average, ordinary citizens who have stood up for their rights and refused to tolerate injustice have been the engine of change throughout history."
© 2004 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

...the reason is a lie...
Blondie

A BRIDGER-TETON OVER TROUBLED WATER

Chalk up a win for Wyoming wildlandsHere's a rare victory for the wilderness crowd: The U.S. Forest Service announced this week that it will suspend plans to open 157,000 acres of Wyoming's Bridger-Teton National Forest -- much of it roadless -- to oil and gas drilling. Enviros say the forest is one of the most important wild areas in the country to have been marked by the Bush administration for drilling. Local and national conservation groups organized resistance, as did many ranchers, hunters, and anglers. Wyoming Gov. Dave Freudenthal (D), a moderate who has long backed the natural-gas industry, also spoke out in opposition. But the turning point came when Sen. Craig Thomas (R-Wyo.) declared that the area is "inappropriate for drilling." Hours after his statement, the agency announced that it would delay implementation of the lease until concerns were resolved. Enviros hailed the decision, industry groups expressed frustration, and the world learned that a single Republican voice raised in defense of our natural resources can move mountains -- or have them left alone, as the case may be.

straight to the source: San Francisco Chronicle, Robert Collier, 16 Sep 2004

Liberal Groups Lead Effort to Modernize, Improve Public Education
By Susan Jones CNSNews.com

Public education in America starts too late; ends too soon; and is in dire need of updating, according to liberal groups that are organizing nationwide discussion groups to come up with solutions.On Sept. 22, tens of thousands of people across the country are expected to take part in small-group discussions -- hosted by parents, teachers and others -- in living rooms, schools and churches in every state, the liberal groups announced.The groups involved in the "National Mobilization for Great Public Schools" include the National Education Association; Campaign for America's Future; MoveOn.org; the NAACP Voters Fund; the U.S. Hispanic Leadership Institute; and the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now."Participants will watch a video that outlines the challenges facing schools and step up pressure on the White House and Congress to provide the right to a high-quality public education to every child in America," said a press release announcing the Sept. 22 gatherings.Those gatherings include the following:-- Oscar-winning actress Helen Hunt and author Arianna Huffington plan to attend a gathering where guests will watch a video that outlines the challenges facing schools and discuss the future of public education with other notable guests at a Hollywood residence in Los Angeles, Calif.-- Iowa's First Lady Christie Vilsack will host an education party at her Mt. Pleasant, Iowa home. Attendees include teachers, parents, students, business owners, school officials and elected officials of both parties.-- Constance Higginbotham, a teacher in Clay County, Fla., is hosting a "Community Education Party"; school employees, school board members, business leaders and members of the community are expected to attend.-- At the Waipuna Chapel in Maui, Hawaii, special education teacher Karolyn Mossman is inviting 100 colleagues, school board and other community members to attend.-- Jerry Brooks, a retired high school government teacher in Santa Rosa, Calif., will host an "AM House Party" with retired seniors, stay-at-home parents and community members who work nights and evenings. -- Education students at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, Ark., are hosting an on-campus discussion with faculty and students.-- Susan Grimm, a teacher from Lancaster, Pa., is hosting a party at the local Methodist church.-- In San Antonio, Texas, teacher J.B. Richeson is inviting more than 200 Independent School District employees. Discussions will be in both English and Spanish.Media coverage of those Sept. 22 gatherings is welcome, the press release noted.Problems and recommendationsThe National Mobilization for Great Public Schools is part of a national task force launched earlier this year by the Institute for America's Future (an organization founded to advance a populist economic agenda for the U.S.) and the Center for American Progress (led by John Podesta, former chief of staff for President Bill Clinton).The goal of the task force is to come up with a "series of concrete recommendations for modernizing and renewing public education in the United States."The task force leaders -- Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano, Philip Murphy, senior director of The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc., journalist and historian Roger Wilkins; John Podesta; and Robert Borosage, head of the Institute for America's Future -- say America's public schools "have not kept up with the times." The task force, in its written charter, says public schools revolve around an "outdated agrarian model," in which students get summers off.It says high schools prepare only a small proportion of students for college; and it notes that schools depend on single teachers lecturing to dozens of students -- "reflecting the production-line model of the Industrial Age, rather than the technological demands of our Information Age."The task force also finds fault with America's aging school buildings. It says schools "must respond to changes in the American family and the social structure since the 1950s" -- and that means greater access to after-school and summer programs.The task force charter criticizes "disparities in resources" among different racial and ethnic groups; and it says instruction should respond to each child's individual needs.The task force recommends a "P-14+" initiative, rather than the K-12 model. "We will explore and outline a realistic plan for creating such a system," the task force charter said. P-14+ would include preschool through at least two years of post-high-school education.It advocates higher "teacher quality," including approaches that "attract and retain gifted teachers." It plans to examine the idea smaller classes, smaller schools, classes of multiple grade levels; the possible elimination of middle schools; and school days that flow into after-school child care."Not every student will choose to attend college, but every student should be able to do so," the charter says. "We must ensure that students who require financial assistance have access to at least two years of college. At the same time, we should expand support for students seeking four year and graduate degrees."The task force said it expects to call for "significant" reforms: "Some of them will challenge our capacity for change and some will be costly," the task force said, but "we cannot afford to fail," the task force charter concludes.The task force rejects the idea of school vouchers, a plan endorsed by many conservatives.

Judge orders government to find, release all Bush military records
WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal judge has ordered the Pentagon to find and make public by next week any unreleased files about President Bush's Vietnam-era Air National Guard service to resolve a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by The Associated Press.
U.S. District Judge Harold Baer Jr. handed down the order late Wednesday in New York. The AP lawsuit already has led to the disclosure of previously unreleased flight logs from Bush's days piloting F-102A fighters and other jets.
Pentagon officials told Baer they plan to have their search complete by Monday. Baer ordered the Pentagon to hand over the records to the AP by Sept. 24 and provide a written statement by Sept. 29 detailing the search for more records.
"We're hopeful the Department of Defense will provide a full accounting of the steps it has taken, as the judge ordered, so the public can have some assurance that there are no documents being withheld," said AP lawyer David Schulz.
White House officials have said Bush ordered the Pentagon earlier this year to conduct a thorough search for the president's records, and officials allowed reporters to review everything that was gathered back in February.
Through a series of requests under the federal open records law and a subsequent suit, the AP uncovered the flight logs, which were not part of the records the White House released earlier this year.
Both Bush's and John Kerry's service records in Vietnam have become a major issue in the presidential race. New records that have surfaced in recent weeks have raised more questions. (Related story: Authenticity of Bush records criticized)
Bush's critics say Bush got preferential treatment as the son of a congressman and U.N. ambassador. Critics also question why Bush skipped a required medical examination in 1972 and failed to show up for drills during a six-month period that year.
Bush has repeatedly said he fulfilled all of his Air National Guard obligations.
The future president joined the Texas Air National Guard in 1968, when he graduated from Yale. He spent more than a year on active duty learning how to fly and then mostly flew in the one-seat F-102A fighters until April 1972.
The pilot logs show a shift to flights in two-seat trainer jets in March 1972, shortly before Bush quit flying. Former Air National Guard officials say that could have been because F-102A jets were not available for Bush to fly or because of other reasons, such as concerns about Bush's flight performance.
Bush skipped his required yearly medical exam in 1972 in the months after he stopped flying in April. Bush has said he moved to Alabama to work on the unsuccessful Senate campaign of a family friend.
Bush never showed up for Guard service between late April and mid-October 1972. He won approval to train with an Alabama Air National Guard unit during September, October and November 1972, but more than a dozen members of the unit at that time say they never saw him there.
The only direct record of Bush appearing at the Alabama unit's base is a January 1973 dental exam performed at that base. Bush's Texas commanders wrote in May 1973 they never saw him between May 1972 and April 1973, a time when his pay records show he trained on 14 days.
Although military regulations allowed commanders to order two years of active duty for guardsmen who missed more than three straight months of drills, that never happened to Bush. Commanders had leeway at the time to allow guardsmen to make up for missed drills.

Global Eye
Blurred Vision
By Chris Floyd, Published: September 17, 2004

By the time the dynastic manipulations of his family put Tiberius Caesar in power, the Roman Republic had long been a gutted carcass. Although the outward lineaments of state retained many of the old forms of popular government, behind these bones and tatters of hide there was nothing left but pestilent corruption and vicious court intrigue. Tiberius -- a cynical mediocrity overwhelmed by his responsibilities but too weak to give up the privileges that attended them -- knew full well the brutal reality that the ruling elite kept hidden beneath layers of pious sham and patriotic cant. When he saw how the great Senate -- where giants once clashed in fierce, open debate -- would come crawling to him, bowing and scraping, eager to act on his every whim, to accept his most brazen lies as sacred truth, he could not contain his disgust. "Men fit to be slaves," he would mutter, as they bent once again to his will.
No doubt the saturnine old ghost was smiling with grim satisfaction last week as another once-great deliberative body debased itself before a mediocre dynast. In one of the more shameless in a long series of vile and craven acts, the Republican-dominated U.S. House of Representatives smeared partisan filth across a legislative memorial to the innocents murdered on Sept. 11, 2001, by conflating that national tragedy with George W. Bush's war of aggression against Iraq.The Bushist toadies couldn't simply mark the solemn occasion with a few appropriate words of common grief and resolve. Instead, they turned the resolution into a tribute to the Dear Leader, larding it with praise for Bush's "reorganizing" of the United States (that old Constitutional malarkey had to go) "in order to more effectively wage the Global War on Terrorism" -- including, of course, the "destruction" of the "terrorist regime" in Iraq. Yet while the capture of Dick Cheney's former business partner, Saddam Hussein, was given prominent play in the resolution, the actual perpetrator of the Sept. 11 attacks, Osama bin Laden, was never mentioned.Thus this witless assemblage of bagmen and bootlickers (including, as usual, the vast majority of Democratic jellyfish) officially affirmed Bush's blood libel, his Hitlerian Big Lie: the supposed connection between Saddam and 9/11. "You can't distinguish between al Qaida and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror," Bush said in September 2002, when rolling out what his staff called the "product" -- i.e. a calculated campaign of fear and deception to drive the nation into war. "We've eliminated an ally of al Qaida," he declared in May 2003, while prancing about in military drag during his infamous "Mission Accomplished" speech. Bush and his minions have pounded this mendacious war drum so often, in so many ways, that even now, up to 50 percent of Americans still believe that Saddam was involved directly or indirectly in the 9/11 attacks -- although this canard was debunked yet again last week, this time by Colin Powell, The Washington Post reports. These lies have already led to the deaths of more than a thousand American troops -- and more than 30,000 innocent Iraqi civilians: a murderous hurricane 10 times the size of the storm that struck America on 9/11. Yet still the toadies crawled before the unelected pipsqueak, the oath-breaking coward who walked away from his own military service during wartime but now press-gangs soldiers into combat even after they've fulfilled their sworn duty requirements. The House measure slavishly regurgitated Bush's ludicrous assertion that the attack by Mr. Unnameable and his al Qaida crew was an assault on "the principles and values of the American people." But Bush knows that bin Laden doesn't care one way or another about American "values and principles," just as he didn't care about Soviet "principles and values" when he and the CIA were feasting on Red meat in Afghanistan back in the day. It's not "principles" but power politics that fuel bin Laden's aggression -- the same as with Bush. And both men's ultimate goal is the same: domination of the world's oil supply, which will bring them and their cronies untold riches and the power to further advance their harsh, perverted visions of society and religion. As we've said before, the "war on terror" is not a "clash of civilizations" or a "battle for freedom" -- it's a falling out among thieves, a gang fight over juicy turf.
To Our Readers
Has something you've read here startled you? Are you angry, excited, puzzled or pleased? Do you have ideas to improve our coverage?Then please write to us. All we ask is that you include your full name, the name of the city from which you are writing and a contact telephone number in case we need to get in touch.We look forward to hearing from you.
Email the Opinion Page EditorThe Congressional toadies are right about one thing, however: America's principles and values are under ferocious assault. But the assailant is their own little tin-pot Tiberius. Last week saw more damning revelations of the torture regime that Bush and his chief warlord, Donald Rumsfeld, have spread across the face of the earth. Seymour Hersh's new book, "Chain of Command," lays out in bone-chilling detail the system of assassination, sadism, rape and psycho-terror established by Bush, who issued secret presidential directives lifting legal constraints and even administrative oversight on his hit men and torturers. The dark heart of this black-op beast is the "Special-Access Program," created by Bush and Rumsfeld in late 2001 and sent forth with this sinister dictum, according to top intelligence officials: "Grab whom you must. Do what you want." These are the true "principles and values" that Bush is defending in his toady-lauded "war on terror" -- values he shares with his cave-dwelling doppelganger, Osama. Each uses the other to justify his own outrages, each feeds on the other to fuel his own bloodlust and political ambitions. Only a fool, or a hireling -- or a slave -- would bend to the will of such loathsome creatures. Chris Floyd's new book, "Empire Burlesque," is available at www.globaleyefloyd.com.

Annotations
Seymour Hersh: Rumsfeld's Dirty War on TerrorThe Guardian, Sept. 13, 2004
Osama: A Texas-Style Republican in Islamic ClothingOnline Journal, Sept. 12, 2004
Bush Team Knew of Abuse at GuantanamoThe Guardian, Sept. 13, 2004
House Resolution on September 11, 2001 AttacksU.S. House of Representatives, Sept. 9, 2004 Powell Sees no Direct Link Between Saddam, 9/11Washington Post, Sept. 12, 2004
Some Lawmakers Question 9/11 ResolutionWashington Post, Sept. 9, 2004
Al Qaeda Duped West Into Waging War: UK Envoy to IraqThe Scotsman, Sept. 11, 2004 Osama's Goals: September 11 and its AftermathInformed Comment, Sept. 11, 2004
Bush Has Always Been Soft on TerrorThe Guardian, Sept. 11, 2004
Operation IgnoreExcerpt, "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them," by Al Franken
The Hidden History of CIA TortureTomDispatch.com, Sept. 9, 2004
US Troops Face New Torture ClaimsThe Guardian, Sept. 14, 2004
Poll: Many Americans Still Believe Iraq Had WMDAssociated Press, Aug. 20, 2004 TiberiusEncyclopedia of Roman Emperors, Penn State University, Dec. 22, 2001
Senators Censure CIA in Iraq Abuse Probe Associated Press, Sept. 9, 2004
Reagan's WMD Connection to Saddam Hussein Freedom Foundation, June 18, 2004
Cheney Made Millions From Oil Deals With Hussein San Francisco Bay Guardian, Nov. 13, 2000

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