[Rep]

President seems unable to bear the sight or sound of dissent
By ROBYN E. BLUMNER
© St. Petersburg Times, published October 13, 2002


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President Bush seems to think bullying is the only way to deal with dissent. Bush has so much trouble articulating a defense for his own policies, so little capacity to formulate a reasoned response, that he resorts to shibboleths, name-calling or worse, using authorities to shut down his critics.
President Bush seems to think bullying is the only way to deal with dissent. Bush has so much trouble articulating a defense for his own policies, so little capacity to formulate a reasoned response, that he resorts to shibboleths, name-calling or worse, using authorities to shut down his critics.

Classic Bush was his attack on Senate Democrats who refused to go along with his plan to strip workers at the new Department of Homeland Security of civil service rights. He quipped that senators were "not interested in the security of the American people."

Of course, U.S. senators can take care of themselves. Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle made quick work of Bush's scurrilous claims, pointing out to the former Texas National Guardsman that a number of Senate Democrats were actually injured fighting for the security of our country.

But there are plenty of regular Joes out there who don't have access to the halls of power or C-Span, whose criticism of the administration has been sidelined by law enforcement.

In town after town where Bush has come to raise money or make a speech, his venue and the route leading up to it have been purged of protesters. This is accomplished through the combined efforts of local policing agencies and the secret service, which scour the crowd for any hint of opposition. Anyone with an anti-Bush sign is relegated into what is euphemistically called a Free Speech or Demonstration Zone -- a swath of land usually off the main thoroughfare and chained off so as to make it virtually impossible for the targets of the protest to read the signs or hear the chants. Those with pro-Bush signs are often treated very differently. They are free to cheerlead the president as he rides toward his engagement, which typically is further sanitized by being invitation-only.

This kind of censorship is indicative of a leader who lacks confidence in his own powers of persuasion and the legitimacy of his course. Why else would Bush be so interested in hiding evidence of dissent within the American populace?

The Secret Service claims that security concerns justify the use of segregated zones for protesters. That's a lot of bunk. As long as demonstrators do not impede the flow of traffic they have a right to be anywhere the general public is invited. Think about the freedom we would be giving up if police could cage anyone who wants to exercise his or her First Amendment rights.

As Bill Neel of Butler, Penn., says, "(Under the Constitution,) the whole country is a free speech zone." Neel, 65, a retired steelworker, was arrested on Labor Day for stepping outside the fence where he and a small group of protesters were cordoned off as the president made his way by motorcade for a speech to union carpenters. His sign read: "The Bushes must truly love the poor -- they've made so many of us." Bush supporters waving signs and flags were allowed to freely line the route.

Neel was charged with disorderly conduct and has a hearing on Oct. 31 at which he intends to fight the charge with the help of the Pittsburgh Chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. His story is part of a disturbing national pattern.

Peter Buckley, a 45-year-old Democratic candidate for Congress in Oregon, expressed his frustration with the Free Speech Zones in a commentary for the Oregonian. In August, Buckley was part of a group of people who had turned out to protest Bush's economic policies among other things. They were herded into a dirt compound surrounded by a six-foot cyclone fence, 200 yards from the arena where Bush spoke to 5,000 invited guests.

"We were not allowed anywhere near any kind of position where the president, or the media which follows him, would see or hear us," Buckley wrote. "What is happening everywhere Mr. Bush goes is wrong. The effort being made to hide political opposition in this country is more than cowardly. It's un-American."

In Tampa, three people, including two grandmothers, were arrested last year at a Bush rally when they held up opposition signs outside the far-flung demonstration zone. Once again, people with supportive signs went unmolested. The charges against the three were later dropped as baseless, and a civil rights suit is expected to be filed within weeks against the Tampa Police Department.

In the past, courts have ruled protest pens invalid. Americans have a right to address grievances to their president when he appears in public, even if that ruins a particular "photo op."

My advice to Bush is to thicken his skin and work on the sagacity of his arguments.


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[eggplant43]

Thanks for the article. IMO every time we try to stiffle, control, eliminate, or marginalize the opinions of others, we weaken the strengths of this country. We are who we are today, because we've always been able to express ourselves, I hope we don't ever forget that, as some would like us to.

[eggplant43]

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October 15, 2002
Goodbye to the Vietnam Syndrome
By RICK PERLSTEIN


CHICAGO — I recently returned to live in the Chicago neighborhood where I went to college over a decade ago, during the first President Bush's crusade against Saddam Hussein's Iraq. It was different then: I remember the passionate handbills clogging university cork boards; my proud participation in antiwar demonstrations on campus; and, most dramatically, the civil disobedience, as when militants desperate to change the debate over war in Iraq snarled traffic downtown by lying in front of cars on the busiest streets.

These days at the University of Chicago I can't even find a dissenting flyer. And while activists elsewhere have begun to organize students against the 2002 Iraq crusade, they are doing so a full four months after President Bush's West Point address made "preventive war" against Iraq seem all but inevitable.

So should the president conclude that, with even college campuses fairly quiet, he needn't fear an engaged public getting in the way of his war on Iraq?

That would be a mistake, because the absence of marching bodies does not indicate enthusiasm for war. Protest is occurring by other means.

Why, after all, take to the streets? You're likely to have more effect sending a strongly worded letter to a senator in one of the country's toss-up races than by lying down in front of a car.

It's a strange state of affairs, and not just for that small minority given to attending antiwar rallies. Yes, the president had his way, finally, with Congress. But the foreign policy establishment seems distinctly uneasy about war with Iraq. The military establishment is not necessarily any more enthusiastic; Gen. Anthony Zinni, President Bush's own sometime Mideast envoy, has spoken repeatedly against invasion and in favor of containment. The Central Intelligence Agency has let its coolness to the invasion idea become known.

Of all the changes to follow on the Sept. 11 tragedy, this openness must be the least anticipated. An entire set of political assumptions about how military force gets debated in America has been upset.

Something's happening here. Everyone talks about the Vietnam syndrome, referring partly to the American public's undue shyness about projecting military might abroad. This malady has always carried with it a corollary affliction among Democrats. At least since they nominated a Southern Navy man, Jimmy Carter, who began the defense buildup famously extended by Ronald Reagan, the Democrats, stereotyped as the peace party, have stepped over themselves to demonstrate they are not afraid of a little militarism.

Which is to say: the national post-Vietnam psychological complex enforced a certain triviality inappropriate to the gravest questions a nation can face. On one side, "standing tall" meant embracing heroic campaigns to rescue hapless medical students in Grenada or drive a former C.I.A. asset, Manuel Noriega, from his lair with loud rock music. On the other side, panicked Democrats stood nearly mute lest they be buried by hawkish pundits for inhabiting the ghost of George McGovern — or else they posed driving tanks.

It all came to a head with our intervention into Iraq in 1991. There was a Congressional debate, to be sure, and a very close authorizing vote on the use of force. But that debate felt unreal to us protesters. We were demonstrating in favor of reasoned debate and against the debate we were witnessing, one drenched in a neurosis that made every discussion about military force a referendum on national virility. We wanted a debate on the issues. We felt unable to force one. And so we marched.

But our very presence in the streets, in a final turn of the social-psychological screw, ended up implicating us, too, in the post-Vietnam neurosis. For by then the resolution had passed, our troops had been committed to battle and those interested in a soft coercion toward unanimity could point to us as a fifth column. Such was the perversity in the American way of debating war, further inhibiting the kind of mature consideration of war and peace we sought to inspire.

The fear in the cry of "Vietnam syndrome" was a real one, I think, and primal: what if, when American national security — real, physical, "homeland" security, not just the security of our regional arrangements or our access to oil — was truly threatened and we were somehow too enervated to defend ourselves? On Sept. 11 just such an attack was visited upon us. And though many people doubted, and still do, the effectiveness of the national mobilization in response, no one doubted our will to respond.

That cleared away a lot of the nonsense. I wonder whether it will ever again be possible for a president to rouse the nation to support any war unless the threat is far more than an abstraction. I wonder whether a president will be able to sell military action without the kind of reasoned political debate we would ideally demand of any political issue.

And that, it seems to me, is what we lately have been getting.

It has happened with startling rapidity. Last winter, when Tom Daschle ventured some mild criticisms of President Bush's foreign policy, his patriotism was impugned.

By this summer, John Kerry suffered no such baiting, and his criticisms were much stronger. A few weeks later came measured demurrals from Brent Scowcroft and James Baker, and warnings to Democrats from their political consultants of bad consequences for a headlong embrace of intervention. At the end of August the administration acknowledged the political necessity of a congressional resolution (they still deny its legal necessity); and after that plans began in earnest to court United Nations support.

Since then varieties of antiwar expression, even in mainstream political quarters, have become profligate: from the unsentimental strategic calculations of realists like the University of Chicago's John Mearsheimer to the strict-constructionist Constitutional arguments of Senator Robert Byrd. Questions of war and peace are being debated as they should have been debated all along, and as they haven't been debated since Lyndon Johnson escalated Vietnam with doctored reports of a 1964 attack in the Gulf of Tonkin. And there's no reason to expect the debate will end just because of Congress's deferential vote last week.

Which does no good for George W. Bush. So long as he could frame the issue as anything but political — in Manichean terms more appropriate to the war on terror than our present Iraq predicament — the president had the upper hand. Now when he tries that language he appears to be reading from an outdated script. For sending troops into battle is no longer a function of the post-Vietnam culture wars. Now it seems you have to make your case, all along the line. Mirabile dictu. Long may this last.


Rick Perlstein is author of "Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus.''

[Tipacanoe]

Interesting!

Musn't forget the four star generals, many of whom are less than enthusiastic about an invasion option.

[Tipacanoe]

U.N. Food Envoy Questions Safety of Gene Crops

Reuters

Oct. 15

— GENEVA (Reuters) - A U.N. human rights envoy Tuesday questioned the safety of genetically modified (GM) food and said big corporations had more to gain from its use than poor countries fighting starvation.

Jean Ziegler, the U.N. special investigator on the right to food, said he put the views of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), who say humans are at risk if they consume GM food over a period of time, before that of the World Health Organization, which says it is safe.

"All the nutritionalists, the highly qualified biologists at these NGOs say there is a risk for the human body over the long term," he told journalists. "They say we have not reached a security level and I believe them."

Hunger-stricken countries in southern Africa are torn between accepting GM food aid, mainly from the United States, and concern about its safety and its impact on agriculture and biodiversity.

U.N. agencies, including the WHO, estimate 14.4 people from Lesotho, Malawi, Swaziland, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Mozambique are threatened by famine. Zimbabwe reversed its initial rejection of GM food aid, but Zambia is still refusing to accept it.

"I'm against the theory of the multinational corporations who say if you are against hunger you must be for GMO. That's wrong," Ziegler said, "There is plenty of natural, normal good food in the world to nourish the double of humanity."

Health questions aside, Ziegler said farmers accepting GM seeds would be forced to continue buying them "for ever" from big biotechnology corporations.

"There is absolutely no justification to produce genetically modified food except the profit motive and the domination of the multinational corporations," said Ziegler, a Swiss former socialist member of parliament.

The envoy reports on the world food situation to the Geneva-based U.N. Human Rights Commission.

Copyright 2002 Reuters News Service. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

[Mulderator]

Originally posted by eggplant43:
Thanks for the article. IMO every time we try to stiffle, control, eliminate, or marginalize the opinions of others, we weaken the strengths of this country. We are who we are today, because we've always been able to express ourselves, I hope we don't ever forget that, as some would like us to.

Then I assume you will thank me for this article, Eggy! Your welcome! I hope Rep. appreciates some "thoughtful opposition"

__________________________________________________
Marvin Olasky

Chilling effects?

American editorial pages are quick to protest laws, regulations, court rulings or community pressures that could produce a "chilling effect" on free speech and freedom of the press. Why, then, are many backing efforts to cut off debate about vital religious issues?

Some background: Blunt-spoken minister Jerry Falwell on Oct. 6 called Muhammad a "terrorist." Six days later, he apologized for using that word, saying he meant no disrespect to "any sincere, law-abiding Muslim." In the meantime, newspapers across the United States jumped on him.

Example: The Washington Post was shocked, shocked that Falwell had criticized Muhammad and Islam. He and other influential ministers, the Post opined, were putting forth "perverse" teaching, a "noxious mix of religious bigotry and anti-Muslim demagoguery." Other newspapers offered similar indignation.

And yet, Falwell's comments should not have surprised anyone. Over the centuries, Christians have always strongly opposed Islam. Jonathan Edwards, often called America's leading thinker, attacked Muhammad's "pretences to intercourse with heaven, and his success in rapine, murder and violence." Ah, but Edwards wrote that 250 years ago; haven't we learned since then? Maybe, but scholarly books such as Ibn Warraq's "The Quest for the Historical Muhammad" shows how little we still know.

Muhammad said and did some impressive things. He also, by the testimony of Muslim sacred and semi-sacred texts themselves -- the Quran and ahadith -- engaged in some violent activities. New Testament books were written down while eyewitnesses to Christ's time on earth were still alive. Muslim holy books weren't written down until generations after Muhammad's death. We don't know what Muhammad was really like. We know what people two centuries afterward said he was like.

In short, the historical record concerning Muhammad is open to a wide variety of thoughtful interpretations. Readers from different worldviews can and should debate whether some violent activity led by Muhammad was proper or not. Just because Islam suppresses such debate, we should not -- especially since we miss many opportunities when we close off debate.

This past summer, another blunt Southern Baptist preacher, Jerry Vines, attacked Muhammad for (according to some records) marrying a 6-year-old and having sexual relations with her at age nine. Vines was of course jumped on by The New York Times ("hate speech against Muslims") and other newspapers. I defended Vines' right to bring up that piece of information that comes right out of Muslim sources.

My defense of free speech led to a beneficial email exchange with Dr. Aslam Abdallah, editor of Minaret, a major Muslim monthly magazine published in Los Angeles. He asked, "Where did you get the information that Muhammad married a 6 year girl?" I told him that it came from hadith collected by Sahih Bukhari, Sahih Muslim and Sunan Dawud over a thousand years ago, and gave him the page numbers. He replied, "Muslim scholars have refuted these hadith and questioned their authenticity."

That was interesting, I responded, because Bukhari is "considered the most authentic of all the hadith authors/editors. If what he writes is not authentic, don't you have to throw out a lot of the Islamic tradition?" Abdallah replied, "Any hadith that contradicts the Quran is not reliable." In essence, since the Quran opposes adults having sexual relations with children, and since the Quran states that Muhammad was sinless, any hadith to the contrary must be tossed aside.

The email exchange taught me much about how Muslim scholars interpret their sacred and semi-sacred texts -- and it was prompted by comments by Vines that, according to The New York Times and The Washington Post, never should have been made. Journalists should realize that religious debate, like football, is a collision sport, and we don't learn much when we simply "play nice" with each other.

Secular liberal journalists may consider all religious discussion to be a matter of opinion, but others believe that objective theological truth does exist and can be found. For their many readers who care, newspapers should cover theological contests, point out facemask violations and unnecessary roughness, and see who wins debates that should be rugged, because much is at stake.

_________________________________________________

[Mulderator]

Bill O'Reilly

October 12, 2002

The root of all evil

The brutal murder of Charlie Young in Milwaukee and the case of deadbeat dad David Oakley, also in Wisconsin, pinpoint the exact reason why crime in America is an enterprise that is assured for years to come.

Eleven children have been charged with beating the 36-year-old Young to death with a variety of weapons. The resumes of these indicted kids is absolutely frightening. The local Milwaukee press assembled the following data:

-- Thirteen-year-old Kenny Mays says he attends the eighth grade but doesn't know the name of his school.

-- Marlin Dixon is 14 years old and already the father of a 5-month-old baby.

-- Thirteen-year-old Don Dixon's father was recently murdered outside a methadone clinic.

-- Montreon Jordan is 15 and on probation for a robbery conviction.

-- Sixteen-year-old Lee Mays does not attend school because his mother told authorities she doesn't know where to send him. His lawyer, Michael Backes, told me the mother has "mental issues" and that Michael should be removed from the home.

Milwaukee police say that the accused murderers all lacked parental supervision and were pretty much allowed to do whatever they wanted. In fact, after the 10-year-old boy involved in the murder confessed to police, reporters heard his father say, "Kids are going to be kids."

Which brings us to David Oakley, a man that has fathered nine children with four women. Oakley owes at least $25,000 to those kids, and the Wisconsin courts have been chasing him for years. Finally, a judge sentenced him to eight years in prison but reduced the sentence to parole if Oakley would agree not to father any more children.

He did. But that's not the end of it.

Enter Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe, the man who handled Al Gore's appeal in the election mess. Tribe appealed the judge's ruling to the Wisconsin Supreme Court saying the state "failed to justify its need" to bar Oakley from having any more children.

What? The guy has nine kids -- most of whom are living in poverty -- and he can't or won't provide care for them, and the state has not "justified its need"? Ridiculous is far too mild.

But then again, we must look at this from Tribe's point of view. He firmly believes that the Constitution gives all Americans the right to have children and not support them. He believes that other Americans should support those kids in the form of welfare and assistance payments.

Counselor Tribe went on to argue that "procreation is at the very heart of the personal rights protected by the Constitution, for it by definition concerns the most intimate of human activities and relationships."

Well, you can't argue about the "intimate" nature of sex. And apparently that is more important to Tribe than the welfare of children who are being created by the sexual act.

To be fair, Laurence Tribe is right in theory -- the government should not be interfering with the act of procreation. But what Tribe and others like him ignore are the rights of the kids. Listen up, counselor: Every child born in America has the right to basic care. And if their parents will not provide that care, those parents must be criminally charged.

The solution to the problem is to prosecute deadbeat, abusive and absent parents on criminal-neglect charges, and put them in jail, or after-work house arrest. If society did that, there would be far fewer kids committing murders on the streets, and far fewer David Oakleys wandering around "procreating."

The Constitution was created to protect all Americans from harm and unfairness. Legions of kids are being harmed by their neglectful parents, and millions of taxpayers are being abused when their dollars are used to support Oakley's children.

By the way, Tribe lost his case. David Oakley either stops making babies, or he goes to prison.

[eggplant43]

An Insightful Article:


http://www.msnbc.com/news/821788.asp?cp1=1

[eggplant43]

Don't blame the west


Before last weekend, liberal Australia felt the US had brought September 11 upon itself. But, says Clive James, the bombing in Bali has smashed that argument - and thrown his country in to the war against terror

Clive James
Wednesday October 16, 2002
The Guardian

The shock wave from the car-bomb outside the nightclub on Kuta Beach in Bali went all the way to Australia in a matter of minutes. As soon as the young Australian survivors stopped trembling long enough to touch one button at a time, they were calling home to say they were all right. But there were some young Australians who did not call home, because they were not all right. The Australian casualty list is lengthening even as I compose this opening paragraph, and by the time I reach a conclusion the casualty list will be longer still. I owe it to my dead, wounded and bereaved countrymen to say straight away that I have no clear idea of what that conclusion will be. This is no time to preach, and least of all from a prepared text.

Some of Australia's commentators on politics might already be realising that. Now they, too, must feel their way forward: the bomb has done to their certainties what it did to the revellers in the nightclub. Before the bomb went off, the pundits had all the answers about the attack on the World Trade Centre in New York. In the year and a bit between September 11 2001 and October 12 2002 they had, from the professional viewpoint, a relatively easy time. One didn't question their capacity for sympathy: Australian journalists pride themselves on being a hard-bitten crew, but most of them could imagine that being trapped hundreds of feet up in a burning building was no fit way to die. What one did sometimes question was their capacity for analysis. A prepared text was rolled out, and went on unrolling.

According to the prepared text, the attack was really America's fault because of its bad behaviour elsewhere in the world. For insular Americans, the attack was a salutary illustration of what the Australian pundit Janet McCalman called their "lowly place in the affections of the poor and struggling".

Australia, unashamedly America's ally, was effectively an oppressor, too. If you took into account the behaviour of the Australian government when faced with the crisis engendered by the arrival, or non-arrival, of a Norwegian container ship full of Afghan refugees, Australia was even more guilty than America. Australia (perennially a racist country, as John Pilger's historical researches have incontrovertibly proved) was a flagrant provocation to the wretched of the earth. Imperialist America was not only treating the helpless Middle East as its personal property, it had racist Australia for its lackey. No wonder al-Qaida was angry. On Christmas Eve, in the Melbourne Age, another pundit, Michael Leunig, called for a national prayer for Osama bin Laden on Christmas Day. "It's a family day," Leunig explained, "and Osama's our relative." It is not recorded whether the aforesaid Osama, sitting cross-legged beside his Christmas tree somewhere under Afghanistan, offered up a prayer for Michael. He might have done: after all, they were on first-name terms.

The prepared text kept on unrolling. Bob Ellis, with whom I was once at university in Sydney, is famous in Australia as an engagingly erratic commentator still carrying a torch for the old Australian Labor party, the one that cared about the welfare of the workers until Bob Hawke re-educated it to care about the welfare of Rupert Murdoch and Kerry Packer.

Though Ellis's torch is a jam tin nailed to a broomstick and fuelled with household kerosene, he carries it with a certain shambolic panache. The Australian descriptive term "rat-bag" is often used of him even by his friends, but nobody doubts that his heart is in the right place. Certainly, he doesn't. He was easily able to discredit President Bush's "war on terrorism" by pointing out that terrorism is everywhere, and is especially prevalent in the allegedly civilised western democracies.

A letter from a creditor, explained Ellis, can be a terrorist act. (Considering what it must be like for a creditor trying to get Ellis's attention, this might even be true.) A concept basic to the prepared text was that there could be no end to all this deplorable but understandable Islamist outrage until the Palestinian matter was settled: a settlement which was in America's power to bring about just by picking up a telephone and instructing Sharon to back off. There was one conspicuous reason, however, why America would never do this: John Howard was prime minister of Australia. Howard, sustained in his post by nothing except a majority of the Australian electorate, was a fascist in all but name. The mere presence of Howard in Canberra, instead of in his local gaol, was overwhelming evidence of America's global power to crush the hopes of the poor and struggling.

Such was the consensus before the nightclub in Bali turned into a nightmare. Consensus might be too large a word. There are publications in Australia that dissent from the standard view: the magazine Quadrant is only one example, and so prominent a newspaper as the Sydney Morning Herald carries the opinion of several commentators who sing a different tune. Though they might enjoy promoting themselves as lone voices, the lone voices add up to a considerable choir. But they must get used to wearing a sticky label: rightwing. The consensus considers itself to be leftwing in the best sense. The appellation is one that an old-stager like me is reluctant to grant, because the consequence of granting it, and then expressing dissent, is to be classified as conservative. In my own case, the main thing I want to conserve is the welfare of the common people: in that regard I am plodding in Bob Ellis's zig-zag slipstream as he carries his ramshackle torch.

But let us allow, for the moment, that the mass outcry against American hegemony is the voice of the true, the eternal and the compassionate left. Allowing that, we can put the best possible construction on its pervasiveness. Not just the majority of the intellectuals, academics and schoolteachers, but most of the face-workers in the media, share the view that international terrorism is to be explained by the vices of the liberal democracies. Or, at any rate, they shared it until a few days ago. It will be interesting, in the shattering light of an explosive event, to see if that easy view continues now to be quite so widespread, and how much room is made for the more awkward view that the true instigation for terrorism might not be the vices of the liberal democracies, but their virtues.

The consensus will die hard in Australia, just as it is dying hard here in Britain. On Monday morning, the Independent carried an editorial headed: "Unless there is more justice in the world, Bali will be repeated." Towards the end of the editorial, it was explained that the chief injustice was "the failure of the US to use its influence to secure a fair settlement between Israelis and Palestinians." I count the editor of the Independent as a friend, so the main reason I hesitate to say that he is out to lunch on this issue is that I was out to dinner with him last night. But after hesitating, say it I must, and add a sharper criticism: that his editorial writer sounds like an unreconstructed Australian intellectual, one who can still believe, even after his prepared text was charred in the nightclub, that the militant fundamentalists are students of history.

But surely the reverse is true: they are students of the opposite of history, which is theocratic fanaticism. Especially, they are dedicated to knowing as little as possible about the history of the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians. A typical terrorist expert on the subject believes that Hitler had the right idea, that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a true story, and that the obliteration of the state of Israel is a religious requirement. In furthering that end, the sufferings of the Palestinians are instrumental, and thus better exacerbated than diminished. To the extent that they are concerned with the matter at all, the terrorists epitomise the extremist pressure that had been so sadly effective in ensuring the continued efforts of the Arab states to persuade the Palestinians against accepting any settlement, no matter how good, that recognises Israel's right to exist. But one is free to doubt by now - forced to doubt by now - that Palestine is the main concern.

The main concern of fundamentalist Islam is with moderate Islam, and especially with those Islamic states which, if they have not precisely embraced democracy, have nevertheless tried to banish theocracy from the business of government. That fundamentalism loathes the western democracies goes without saying: or rather, it goes with a lot of saying, at the top of the voice. But the real horror, for the diehard theocrats, is the country with a large number of Muslims that has been infiltrated by the liberal ideas of the west. As a rule of thumb, you can say that the terrorists would like to wreak edifying vengeance on any predominantly Islamic country where you can see even a small part of a woman's face. Starting with Pakistan, you can see more and more of a woman's face as you move east. It was therefore predictable, after September 11, that the terrorists would bend their efforts in the same direction. I only wish that I had predicted it straight away: we would all like to be blessed with as much foresight as hindsight. As things happened, it took me a few days.

A few days after the towers collapsed in New York, I flew east myself, from London to Sydney, thence to keep a speaking engagement in Adelaide. I flew by Malaysia Air, on a flight in which the crew outnumbered the passengers. The transit lounge in Kuala Lumpur was where I had my revelation. There was a prayer room for the faithful and an open bar for the rest of us. The two schools of thought were getting along fine, but it wasn't hard to imagine another breed of traveller who wouldn't stand for it. Here was an obvious target, and there were plenty more on the way to Australia, including the whole of Indonesia, where the fundamentalists were getting a lot better hearing than they were in Malaysia, but only because the Indonesian government was even more scared of what they might do.

My speech in Adelaide was supposed to entertain several hundred Australian businessmen, but I threw in a few sentences designed to register on a different kind of laugh meter. Making jokes about the Australian intellectuals is a dangerous business when your audience is anti-intellectual anyway, which, I think it fair to say, my audience was: there is too good a chance of flattering a prejudice. I had to make it clear that I was joking about my fellow professionals, not my enemies. But compelled by the memory of my revelation in Kuala Lumpur, I couldn't resist caning the Australian gauchiste commentators for their persistence in representing Australia as racist, exclusionist, illiberal and immature. I did my best to make my message funny, but I also tried hard to make it clear. Australia, though it certainly had the tragedy of the Aboriginals to haunt its conscience, was one of the most mature, generous and genuinely multicultural democracies on earth. For that reason alone, Australia would be in the firing line.

Well, now it is, and sadly our best hope will be that some of our neighbouring countries to the north and west will draw most of the fire. Next month I have to be in Australia again, to deliver a speech in Sydney and Melbourne: a speech about libraries. In the speech, which I am composing now and have put aside to write this, I will propose, among other things, the founding in Australia of an Islamic library to which all the world's genuine Islamic scholars who are free to travel might come, there to continue the work of bringing a critical scrutiny to the sacred texts - the very work that was forcibly interrupted by the theocrats in the 19th century, an interruption that led directly to the disasters of today.

But to get there in time I will have to fly there, and I can't say I'm looking forward to the trip. I will be an old man soon, and the fact that I will be flying home through a long war zone will bother me less than it would once have done, because I have had a life. But nobody wants his certainty of death pre-empted by a bunch of maniacs impelled by their certainty of heaven, and the thought of all those slain or maimed young Australians, so full of life because they were too young even to realise what it means to be born and raised in a free country, will bring me home in despair.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2002

[eggplant43]

Canada's marijuana laws worry U.S.



TORONTO, Canada (AP) --American officials caution they may be forced to drastically slow trade across the northern U.S. border if the Canadian government relaxes its marijuana laws.

The changes being considered by Prime Minister Jean Chretien's government would make the penalty for getting caught with a joint similar to a traffic ticket.

By contrast, the zero tolerance policy of the United States makes possession of even small amounts illegal.

U.S. drug policy experts say decriminalizing marijuana in Canada will increase drug use in America and trafficking by organized crime elements on both sides of the border. Washington would respond with tighter border checks that could hinder trade crucial to the Canadian economy.

"We intend to protect our citizens. We would have no choice," said John P. Walters, director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy.

The issue joins a growing list of differences between the North American neighbors that share the world's largest trade partnership, worth more than $1 billion a day.

Despite their military ties and common democratic values, Canada has traditionally adopted more liberal social policies, in part to distinguish itself from its powerful neighbor. Examples include diplomatic ties with Cuba, a ban on capital punishment and more lenient immigration policies.

Canada already has a legal industry for hemp, cannabis cultivated with very low amounts of the chemical that produces the high sought by marijuana smokers. The U.S. government prohibits hemp production.

Last year, Canada implemented a medical marijuana program that allows some patients to possess and grow pot. The Canadian Supreme Court will hear a constitutional challenge to marijuana laws this fall, and a senate committee has called for the complete legalization of pot -- a much more radical step than decriminalization.

Despite such signals, lawyer and medical marijuana advocate Alan Young said Canadians should wait before lighting that celebratory joint.

"It's actually going to be a longer battle than you think," he told a September 30 demonstration in Toronto by dozens of people seeking legal access to marijuana. "There's a lot of backward steps being taken."

Young cautioned the crowd that police had not let up against marijuana users. He cited police crackdowns in pot-rich British Columbia and other provinces, including a recent raid that shut down a Toronto club where doctor-certified patients could get marijuana.

He also said Canada has backed off from a plan to provide government-grown pot, though it allows approved patients to grow their own or designate someone to do so. He blamed the decision on American pressure.

Eight U.S. states have taken some kind of step toward permitting the medicinal use of marijuana: California, Washington, Oregon, Alaska, Hawaii, Maine, Nevada and Colorado. The U.S. Supreme Court, however, has ruled there is no exception in federal law for people to use marijuana, so even those with tolerant state laws could face arrest if they do.

Canada already is a major source of marijuana used in the United States, with hundreds of millions of dollars worth of dope with exotic names like B.C. Bud and Quebec Gold smuggled in everything from sod trucks to hockey equipment bags.

Decriminalization north of the border will create new headaches for the United States, said Rep. Mark Souder, R-Indiana., chairman of the Government Reform Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy and Human Resources.

"We're still finding it hard to believe this could actually happen," he said in a telephone interview, but added that if it does, tougher border security would follow.

"Probably it would be some sort of change in, at the very least, spot-checking, more aggressive checking, possibly background checking" of trucks and other vehicles crossing the border, he said. "Hopefully we could do it with not too much disruption, but there would be changes."

With pot valued on the street at about $3,000 a pound or more, increased smuggling is almost a certainty, Souder said.

"You're basically becoming the supplier," he said. "You're kind of the wholesaler and our guys are more like the retailers."

[eggplant43]

October 15, 2002, 9:00 a.m.
The Truth Inside
A plea from Tehran.

By Farideh Tehrani



veryday, my peers and I sit and talk. We want only one thing: Freedom. Basic human rights. The same thing those who fled Iran 20 years ago now enjoy in the suburbs of Los Angeles and Washington. Sometimes I check the Internet for news. At other times, my friends and I watch satellite television or listen to the short-wave radio broadcasts of the freed world.

We are constantly amazed, though, at how different our reality is from what some American journalists, academics, and opinion-makers portray it as. So often, we hear self-described Iran experts on CNN and reporters in America's leading newspapers explain away the dictatorship under which we suffer. We hear them talk about how young people and women still support President Khatami! No. We do not! Yes, Khatami did win elections, but those came absent any real competition. In 1997, he won the election only after his colleagues on the Guardian Council disqualified 234 other candidates. Is that a democracy? Listen to us: We no more want to be part of an Islamic Republic than did the Hungarians, Czechs, or Poles want to be part of a Communist dictatorship.

Understand we want freedom. I am still at the university, but many of my peers are in prison for nothing more than demanding freedom of speech, or waving a bloody shirt. We aspire to establish a democracy based on a modern, liberal, and, yes, the Western model of secularism.

Our reasons are quite simple and obvious: We do not follow the Arab or the Islamic model. Iranians, as a people, do not have problems with Western civilization. We are Muslims, but our sense of Iranian national identity dwarfs any religious identity we hold. We are proud heirs of a once-great civilization that brought forth the concept of tolerance and civility predating Islam. Iranians are comfortable with the simple fact that the West has the best-refined modern concepts of democracy, human rights, and individual opportunity.

To us, the Islamic revolution has failed. The system, in its entirely, is the problem; no Band-Aid reform will fix it. Iran's 23-year-old theocracy is as incapable of granting freedom and human rights as was the Soviet Union. No politician associated with the Islamic Republic is acceptable to us. There are no reformers in the clerical government. Our real reformers are among the 600,000 languishing in prison, or the hundreds of candidates who are disqualified in each election for believing in human rights or secularism. Do not sell out our freedom because of Khatami's meaningless double talk and irrelevant rhetoric. He is simply a smiling face of an ugly regime.

Secretary Colin Powell, Senators Arlen Specter and Chuck Hagel, please understand that Iranians are no less deserving of freedom and equality than are residents of Pennsylvania or Nebraska. You cannot fall for the so-called reformers who by design attempt to sway world opinion with promises, yet fail to deliver a single reform at home. Please understand that Iranians themselves have come to the conclusion that the only solution to our present dilemma is a Western-style democracy, complete with freedom of the press, secularism, equality between sexes, and respect for other religious and political beliefs.

Do not listen to the growing number of organizations like the American-Iranian Council [AIC]. The AIC and its sister groups are nothing more than circuitously funded lobby groups pushing the interest of the Islamic Republic. In America we hear money to campaigns go a long way. Shame, we say, if a few campaign dollars are able to divert the focus away from the issue of freedom and human rights for an entire people.

My peers in Tehran do not understand how the American media and certain policymakers repeatedly fall for the baseless half truths offered by such lobby groups. The streets of Tehran view Americans as good people, yet breathtakingly naive when it comes to their inability to see through the propaganda of the politicians and theocracy that oppress us.

Rather than attend their events or dine with their spokesmen, ask why AIC president, Mr. Hooshang Amirahmadi, has access to unlimited funds to hold lavish galas and conferences that only push policies surprisingly parallel to those of all-powerful Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. We want you to know that the AIC and its president in no way, shape, or form represent the Iranian people, especially the hundreds of thousands languishing in jail, nor the hungry, starved or the disenfranchised. The vast majorities of Iranians despise such groups and their leaders and view them as conscience-less business brokers for the unelected few whose days are numbered.

We also ask you: Please tune out the biased and shallow works of journalists who use their pens to editorialize rather than report news. The Los Angeles Times's Robin Wright often calls Khatami "the leading reformer in Iran." How is it that she has such open access to Iran, while her colleagues who report real and hard news are refused visas? Ms. Wright, why is it you have yet to write a single sentence critical of the abhorrent atrocities of the clerical regime? Where are you during our public executions, or the stoning of women that have doubled under Mr. Khatami? Where are your reports on the students languishing in prison, the girls detained, raped, and abused by the Islamic Republic's judges? You call Khatami a democrat yet you neglect his rejection and belittling of the very concept in the pages of Keyhan? Perhaps your Iran expertise does not include speaking Farsi? You quote his liberal speeches in Europe, yet are deafeningly silent about his televised speeches in Iran, declaring: "Those who abide by the Quran must mobilize to kill." To us as Iranians, that is unfathomable. Don't you realize that when we read your work, we ask what good is free press if it does not report the truth?

At this moment in our history, Iranians have limited means to voice our calls to the world beyond the rapidly crumbling walls of the clerical regime. We have a sense of urgency. Yet we feel left behind by the very champions of civil rights, human rights, and liberal reform who once dominated headlines. Don't abandon us now, not at this junction in our history.

— Farideh Tehrani is a 27-year-old woman and a doctoral candidate in Tehran, Iran.




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http://www.nationalreview.com/commen...rani101502.asp

[Rep]

The Progressive

McCarthyism Watch
We will be regularly updating the site with examples of the New McCarthyism that is sweeping the country.

October 10, 2002



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U.S. Military Takes Photos of D.C. Demonstrators


During the IMF-World Bank protests in Washington at the end of September, uniformed military personnel were using enormous zoom lens to photograph the protesters.


This is a potential violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, which is supposed to prevent the military from doing domestic law enforcement.


And it's also an assault on our First Amendment rights.


I asked Major Tim Blair, a spokesperson for the Pentagon, about this on October 9.


"Why were military personnel taking photos of the protesters?"


"I don't know. What's your question?


"Don't people have a right to free speech and assembly without the military personnel taking your picture?"


"It's a free country," Blair said. "If they want to take pictures of them, they can take pictures of them. The right to take a picture of someone in a public place is also protected by the First Amendment."


Attorney General John Ashcroft this spring revised FBI guidelines on such surveillance, making it legal for the FBI and police officers to snoop in public places on the grounds that there is no expectation of privacy there.


Now the military appears to be getting in on the act.

One photo was posted on September 29 by Carol Bass and Greg Burns of the Atlanta Indy Media Center. You can access it at: http://dc.indymedia.org/front.php3?a...group=webcast.

Another photo was posted on September 28 by Brian Long. You can access it at: http://dc.indymedia.org/front.php3?a...group=webcast.

-- Matthew Rothschild

[Rep]

Armey: Justice 'out of control,' violating rights
By Mimi Hall
USA TODAY


WASHINGTON -- House Majority Leader Dick Armey, R-Texas, lashed out at the Justice Department Wednesday for what he called its ''lack of regard for personal civil liberties in America'' while combating terrorism.

''I told the president I thought his Justice Department was out of control,'' the retiring lawmaker told USA TODAY's editorial board.

Armey has long expressed concerns about civil liberties violations in the name of fighting terrorism. He helped scuttle Bush's plan to set up a government hotline for delivery workers and others to report suspicious activity.

''Are we going to save ourselves from international terrorism in order to deny the fundamental liberties we protect to ourselves?'' he said. ''It doesn't make sense to me.''

Justice Department spokesman Mark Corallo said the actions have been ''well within the bounds of the Constitution and statutory authority provided by Congress.''

Armey's comments came as the American Civil Liberties Union launched a $3.5 million advertising and lobbying campaign accusing Attorney General John Ashcroft of eroding personal freedoms.

The ACLU campaign is aimed at getting Congress to repeal portions of the year-old USA Patriot Act, passed in response to Sept. 11. The act gave the government broad powers to monitor citizens suspected of having ties to terrorists.

The Justice Department has defended its new wiretapping authority and other surveillance as necessary to fight terrorism.

[Rep]

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October 19, 2002
Bush Seeks to Cut Back on Raise for S.E.C.'s Corporate Cleanup
By STEPHEN LABATON


ASHINGTON, Oct. 18 — Less than three months ago, President Bush signed with great fanfare sweeping corporate antifraud legislation that called for a huge increase in the budget of the Securities and Exchange Commission to police corporate America and clean up Wall Street.

Now the White House is backing off the budget provision and urging Congress to provide the agency with 27 percent less money than the new law authorized.

Administration officials say their proposed increase is enough and that other budgetary needs, like the military and security against terrorism, make it impossible to afford more.

The decision has angered commission officials and Democratic lawmakers, who say that it reflects the administration's calculation that corporate scandals have begun to recede as a political issue. They say that the administration's more modest increase will not be able to pay for the expanded role of the agency, bring salaries up to levels at other financial regulatory agencies, finance the start-up costs of an accounting oversight board and significantly expand a staff that is already overwhelmed.

Under the corporate clean-up legislation, the commission's budget — which for years has barely kept up with inflation, let alone the steep rise in stock ownership — was authorized to increase by 77 percent, to $776 million. But as Congress wrestles with the spending measures that actually appropriate money to federal agencies, the White House is requesting $568 million for the S.E.C., officials said, or an increase of about 30 percent over last year's budget of $438 million.

Harvey L. Pitt, the commission's chairman, has acknowledged through a spokesman that the administration's level of financing will not allow it to undertake important initiatives.

The White House has put Mr. Pitt in the awkward position of having to choose between Congressional Democrats who want a larger budget and administration officials who want less. Brian Gross, the commission's director of communications, said that Mr. Pitt was concerned that the agency would not be able to do many of the technology and enforcement projects that he would like if the commission received only what the White House has recommended.

"It doesn't allow for a lot of new initiatives," Mr. Gross said. On the other hand, he said, Mr. Pitt appreciates that the White House has to juggle other budget issues that would prompt the administration to support the lower figure.

The commission's budget became a major political issue as the wave of corporate scandals illustrated the agency's difficulties in policing major public companies and Wall Street. Through most of the year, the administration opposed calls by Democrats for bigger increases in the agency's spending allocation. But after the collapse of WorldCom this summer, the president cited the larger spending increase when he signed the corporate overhaul, known for its prime sponsors as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, at a ceremony in the East Room on July 30.

"Corporate misdeeds will be found and will be punished," Mr. Bush said then. "This law authorizes new funding for investigators and technology at the Securities and Exchange Commission to uncover wrongdoing."

The commission's finances have become a casualty of political gridlock between Congress and the administration over the budget for the entire government. Congress has passed temporary spending measures set at last year's budget levels to keep the government operating at least through the end of November.

Two months ago, the commission received an increase of $30 million over its $438 million budget from last year, which was widely considered inadequate, to begin hiring another 100 staff members to join its 3,100 current employees. As a result, nearly a year after those corporate scandals began with the collapse of Enron, commission officials say that they have struggled to keep up with their growing number of responsibilities and cases.

Senior agency officials say that they are still unable to open many of the investigations that they want and that, as cases near trial, they will be stretched thin. The agency's computer systems have not been updated in many years. The agency is unable to review the vast majority of corporate documents filed every day. And one investment house alone, Merrill Lynch, has more professionals in its legal and compliance departments than the commission's entire enforcement staff.

The problems were supposed to be fixed by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which set a $776 million authorized budget. But now, administration officials say Mr. Bush supports a more modest increase, of $130 million, to $568 million.

"The president does believe the S.E.C. has a substantial mission and we think $568 million is sufficient to carry that out," said Amy Call, a spokeswoman for the White House Office of Management and Budget.

Administration officials say that the budget figure in the law is too high considering the other needs of the budget. They say that the agency would be able to carry out more investigations, increase staff and raise pay levels with the more modest budget proposed by the White House.

Briefing reporters aboard Air Force One, Ari Fleischer, the president's spokesman, said it was a major accomplishment that Congress recessed without increasing any spending.

"Typically, when Congress leaves, they pay an exit fee, where spending is increased above and beyond what the Congressional budget authorized, and the taxpayers are always the victims," Mr. Fleischer said. "This year, the chain was broken."

Senator Paul S. Sarbanes, the Maryland Democrat who was the principal author of the legislation, called the White House position "disheartening" and said that its proposed budget would fall far short of what is necessary for the agency to be effective.

"I can't understand why they are taking this position," he said. "We didn't pull the $776 million out of a hat. The costs of increasing pay, hiring new staff and increasing the volume of their business presents a case for a higher budget that is overwhelming."

The law calls for $102 million for raises and $108 million for better computer systems and financing for restoring the agency after the Sept. 11 attacks that destroyed its New York offices. It also proposed $98 million to pay for 200 additional auditors, investigators and prosecutors. Budget officials estimate that the new accounting board will need from $25 million to $50 million to start. That money is to come from the commission's budget and be repaid later by the accounting profession.

In July, shortly before the measure was adopted, a Senate committee led by Ernest F. Hollings, Democrat of South Carolina, passed a $750.5 million appropriations measure for the commission. The measure has since languished as Democrats and Republicans have been unable to reach agreement in the House and the Senate on the federal budget.

Democrats said that the White House position reflected the calculation that the corporate scandals have moved to the back burner, and therefore the White House does not need to honor the provision in the legislation that calls for the higher financing.

"My sense is this is a White House that is sensing some political relief that this is no longer the issue on the table so they can take a political pass on this," said Senator Christopher Dodd, the Connecticut Democrat who heads the Senate banking subcommittee on securities and investment. "They touched the critical issues last summer and now it's gone. Now the issue is Iraq all the time."

"I think they are politically mistaken and also dangerous substantively," Mr. Dodd said. "You have to have the resources and do the job. You need the right cops on the beat to get it done."

[eggplant43]

Like minds. I posted this same article to Enron explained earlier today. It seems to me that a favorite strategy of 'Politicians' is to vote for a certain thing, even though they don't believe in it, but want to say they are, and then to not fund, or underfund the entity in order to insure that it is not effective.

Do you think it possible that the Bush Administration really doesn't want a strong investigative, enforcing SEC? Nawwwwwwwwwwwwww