A Fine Rendition

Some things are cool when they happen in the movies. They are not when they actually occur in real life.

Jet Is an Open Secret in Terror War

By Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, December 27, 2004; Page A01

The airplane is a Gulfstream V turbojet, the sort favored by CEOs and celebrities. But since 2001 it has been seen at military airports from Pakistan to Indonesia to Jordan, sometimes being boarded by hooded and handcuffed passengers.

The plane's owner of record, Premier Executive Transport Services Inc., lists directors and officers who appear to exist only on paper. And each one of those directors and officers has a recently issued Social Security number and an address consisting only of a post office box, according to an extensive search of state, federal and commercial records.

Bryan P. Dyess, Steven E. Kent, Timothy R. Sperling and Audrey M. Tailor are names without residential, work, telephone or corporate histories -- just the kind of "sterile identities," said current and former intelligence officials, that the CIA uses to conceal involvement in clandestine operations. In this case, the agency is flying captured terrorist suspects from one country to another for detention and interrogation.

The CIA calls this activity "rendition." Premier Executive's Gulfstream helps make it possible. According to civilian aircraft landing permits, the jet has permission to use U.S. military airfields worldwide.

Since Sept. 11, 2001, secret renditions have become a principal weapon in the CIA's arsenal against suspected al Qaeda terrorists, according to congressional testimony by CIA officials. But as the practice has grown, the agency has had significantly more difficulty keeping it secret.

Full Article

Tightening the noose

Torture visited upon detainees at Guantanamo Bay, in Afghanistan and Iraq may have come from the very top of our government. I am not in the least surprised, though it does make me very angry.

Read on:

The two-page e-mail that references an Executive Order states that the President directly authorized interrogation techniques including sleep deprivation, stress positions, the use of military dogs, and "sensory deprivation through the use of hoods, etc." The ACLU is urging the White House to confirm or deny the existence of such an order and immediately to release the order if it exists. The FBI e-mail, which was sent in May 2004 from "On Scene Commander--Baghdad" to a handful of senior FBI officials, notes that the FBI has prohibited its agents from employing the techniques that the President is said to have authorized.

Another e-mail, dated December 2003, describes an incident in which Defense Department interrogators at Guantánamo Bay impersonated FBI agents while using "torture techniques" against a detainee. The e-mail concludes "If this detainee is ever released or his story made public in any way, DOD interrogators will not be held accountable because these torture techniques were done [sic] the ‘FBI’ interrogators. The FBI will [sic] left holding the bag before the public."

This story is far from over. The preponderance of evidence is closing in on those people in control of our government. Torture, death. Who are we really?

Full release.

Copycat

First: I am owned by cats. I have been so for most of my life, and a generally willing captive have I been. In all of those years I have lost many a furry friend to old age, disease, or accident. I miss all of them in some small way, and each new one to put his paw on my home has been no replacement, but a new friend to know and love.

I imagine I should be quite pleased that a private company is now in the business of cloning dead cats (and, they seem to hope, dogs soon as well) for a princely sum to be paid by their bereaved owners, or ownees, as the relationship dictates. Now a favorite pet never dies, it just goes away for a while and shrinks, then returns to loving arms and a familiar home.

But how familiar can it be? True, in most cases the clone looks like the original (not always - some clones can have completely different coats), but they are not the original. Cat behavior is a virulent combination of instinct and environment, and no two will ever be the same, no matter how closely the replication of conditions from the life of the original, and that of the clone. The pint-sized regeneration is not the same animal that once graced your house, decorating it in endlessly shed fur.

To the contrary, your cloned kitty is a poor imitation by all accounts - and it took many tries just to get one to last past six weeks alive. The new little one will also grow up to have significant and nagging health problems, and probably a considerably shorter life span. Is this really worth it?

I ask this question not in monetary terms, but emotional ones. We invest a lot of ourselves into our pets - they are our unquestioning friends, companions, and playmates. When they pass, it hurts. Sometimes we never really get over it, and a new pet seems the last ting we might want. I've known some folks who lost a close animal friend and couldn't bear to ever bring home another.

There exists a larger issue within this pet cloning business, that of cloning itself. The implications of pet cloning are daunting when the focus shifts to human beings. The bereavement involved in losing a loved family member, be it child, spouse or relative far outstrips that of a pet, and the desire to being that person "back to life" could be overwhelming, even if the clone carries none of the personality traits of its parent. Another logical, if repulsive extension of human cloning is the possibility of cloning persons bred for specific purposes - to do certain dangerous or undesirable jobs, act as house servants, etc.

What would the legal status of a clone be? Other people have thought this through with more clarity and comprehension than I am capable of doing, but that furry little beast unleashed in Texas is a real eye opener.

Full article

Polishing Of The Shrub

Shrub learns to lie with a little more grace. He also learns not to talk to himself so frequently. A step forward? Another revelation of his dysfunction?

As he fielded questions on everything from Iranian nukes to presidential personnel, the often blunt and plainspoken president employed the full range of artful dodges.

Qualifications for a director of national intelligence? "I'm going to find somebody who knows something about intelligence," Bush disclosed.

Timeline for Iraq? "We'd like to achieve our objective as quickly as possible."

Vladimir Putin's turn toward autocracy? "If we disagree with decisions, we can do so in a friendly and positive way."

When the subject turned to Social Security, the president made clear that questions about his views on the subject were strictly out of bounds -- as when CNN's John King asked why Bush wasn't talking about "tough measures" such as raising the retirement age or cutting benefits.

"Now the temptation is going to be, by well-meaning people such as yourself, John, and others here as we run up to the issue, to get me to negotiate with myself in public," Bush said. Saying he was trying to "condition" reporters, he added: "I'm not going to negotiate with myself and I will negotiate at the appropriate time with the law writers, and so thank you for trying."

When another questioner asked Bush to make his case for personal Social Security accounts, a wary Bush sought to suppress the negotiator within. "Yeah, I will try to explain how without negotiating with myself," he began.

The resourceful Edwin Chen of the Los Angeles Times pointed out that Bush had already negotiated with himself by ruling out benefit cuts for retirees and near-retirees, then asked Bush to define "near-retired."

The president saw through this plea for self-negotiation. "Yeah, well, that's going to fall in the negotiating-with-myself category," he said.

For all the bobbing and weaving, yesterday's news conference hinted at an emerging new style for Bush. In his first 45 months in office, he had 15 full-fledged news conferences, fewer than any other postwar president. Bush, a stickler for discipline, didn't want to make unintended news, or to be embarrassed by an unexpected question, as when he was asked what his biggest mistake had been. But since his reelection, Bush has had two news conferences in as many months.

Bush is finding that, with some careful deflection of questions, he can hold a nearly hour-long news conference without serious gaffes or unintentionally making news. At times, his bluntness got the better of him, as when he acknowledged that "we don't have much leverage with the Iranians right now."

At one point, Bush deflected with psychoanalysis. Asked about Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's use of a signature machine on letters to the next-of-kin of slain soldiers, Bush testified that "I know Secretary Rumsfeld's heart."

And, when asked "where do you stand on regime change" in North Korea, he used the old debater's trick of rephrasing the question. "I'll tell you where I stand," Bush said. "I stand on continuing the six-party talks with North Korea to convince Kim Jong Il to give up his weapons."

When the inevitable question came about the doomed nomination of Bernard B. Kerik to be homeland security secretary, Bush deftly avoided any mention of Kerik's various personal problems and any hint that the White House's vetting process had failed.

"And so the lessons learned is: Continue to vet, and ask good questions," he said. Only the chuckle and shrug of the shoulders accompanying those words suggested there might be more to the story.

Full Article

More evidence of abuse

Yet more evidence that detainees held by the US in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay Cuba were victims of systematic torture and abuse. The Shrubites continue to characterize this as "abberant" behavior on the part of a few soldiers, but it is clear as day that the cases still becoming public are part of a larger, concerted strategy. That strategy violates certain sections of the Geneva Conventions, but the administration refuses to own up to it.

Remember that memo written by Alberto Gonzales, soon to be Attorney General? The one that described said conventions as "quaint?" Dead and maimed prisoners resulted directly from the mindset that authored that memo, and the one that accepted its contents as valid.

New Papers Suggest Detainee Abuse Was Widespread

By R. Jeffrey Smith and Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, December 22, 2004; Page A01

The Bush administration is facing a wave of new allegations that the abuse of foreign detainees in U.S. military custody was more widespread, varied and grave in the past three years than the Defense Department has long maintained.

New documents released yesterday detail a series of probes by Army criminal investigators into multiple cases of threatened executions of Iraqi detainees by U.S. soldiers, as well as of thefts of currency and other private property, physical assaults, and deadly shootings of detainees at detention camps in Iraq.

In many of the newly disclosed cases, Army commanders chose noncriminal punishments for those involved in the abuse, or the investigations were so flawed that prosecutions could not go forward, the documents show. Human rights groups said yesterday that, as a result, the penalties imposed were too light to suit the offenses.

The complaints arose from several thousand new pages of internal reports, investigations and e-mails from different agencies, which, with other documents released in the past two weeks, paint a finer-grained picture of military abuse and criminal behavior at prisons in Cuba, Iraq and Afghanistan than previously available.

The documents disclosed by a coalition of groups that had sued the government to obtain them make it clear that both regular and Special Forces soldiers took part in the abuse, and that the misconduct included shocking detainees with electric guns, shackling them without food and water, and wrapping a detainee in an Israeli flag.

The variety of the abuse and the fact that it occurred over a three-year period undermine the Pentagon's past insistence -- arising out of the summertime scandal surrounding the mistreatment at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison -- that the abuse occurred largely during a few months at that prison, and that it mostly involved detainee humiliation or intimidation rather than the deliberate infliction of pain.

After the latest revelations, including the disclosures that officials in other federal agencies had objected to these actions by soldiers -- to the point of urging, in some cases, war crimes prosecutions -- White House spokesman Scott McClellan responded yesterday with a promise that President Bush expects a full investigation and corrective actions "to make sure that abuse does not occur again."

The details of the abuse appeared to catch some administration officials by surprise, although five agencies for weeks have been culling releasable records from their files, under an agreement worked out by U.S. District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein. He was responding to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by five independent groups seeking anything pertinent to detainee deaths, abuse and transfers to other countries since Sept. 11, 2001.

McClellan said that he did not know whether the White House was informed about the incidents detailed in the documents released on Monday. These included the use of dogs to intimidate prisoners at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and the impersonation of FBI agents by military interrogators -- two of many practices that provoked concern among FBI agents stationed there.

"In terms of specifics, this information is becoming public, so we're becoming aware of more information as it becomes public, as you are," McClellan said. He also said that he did not know whether FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III has notified the Defense Department about his concerns but that the Pentagon takes abuse allegations "very seriously."

Amrit Singh -- a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, one of the four groups that sued to obtain the documents -- said that she thinks the disclosure requirement will eventually encompass hundreds of thousands of pages of internal administration documents, although only 9,000 pages have been released so far. Yesterday, the judge told the CIA that it could not delay making its own disclosures until an internal probe of the abuse is completed, Singh said.

"What the documents show so far was that the abuse was widespread and systemic, that it was the result of decisions taken by high-ranking officials, and that the abuse took place within a culture of secrecy and neglect," Singh said.

Col. Joseph Curtin, the Army's top spokesman, urged a different view of the documents released yesterday, all drawn from the Army's Criminal Investigation Command. In detailing internal probes of 46 cases of misconduct, they show "that the Army does take seriously and investigates any allegation of detainee abuse," he said.

The new documents include several incidents of threatened executions of teenage and adult Iraqi detainees. In one instance, a soldier in a unit that lacked any training in interrogation -- but was nonetheless assigned to process and question detainees -- acknowledged forcing two men to their knees, placing bullets in their mouths, ordering them to close their eyes, and telling them they would be shot unless they answered questions about a grenade incident. He then took the bullets, and a colleague pretended to load them in the chamber of his M-16 rifle.

The documents indicate that the perpetrator, who was investigated on charges of assault and a "law of war violation," was given a nonjudicial punishment by his commander. Threatening detainees with physical harm to compel their testimony is a violation of the Geneva Conventions.

In a second case, Army investigators concluded that a sergeant committed offenses including assault, dereliction of duty and cruelty when he conducted "a mock execution of an Iraqi teenager" in front of the boy's father and brother, who were suspected of looting an ammunition factory. Investigators also found that the actions were condoned by a lieutenant who conspired with the sergeant.

An investigative report also details an incident two days earlier, in which the lieutenant ordered a suspected looter to kneel, pointed a 9mm pistol at his head and then pulled the gun away just as he fired a shot. The outcome of both cases is unclear from the records released yesterday.

The documents also divulge a probe of the beatings of three mosque security guards in Baghdad in September 2003. After being arrested and cuffed during a search, the three Iraqis were kicked, stomped and dragged by a group of U.S. soldiers. Five soldiers were given reprimands and reductions in rank after being found guilty of maltreatment of prisoners, assault and other charges, the records show.

In another Baghdad case, a U.S. soldier was accused of trying to force an Iraqi civilian to hold a gun as a justification for killing him. The soldier punched the civilian in the face, held an M-16 rifle to his head and flicked the safety off to threaten him, according to the accounts of 19 witnesses. Another soldier eventually stepped in to protect the civilian, who had been hired by the U.S. Army to guard the Museum of Iraqi Military History, the records show.

Other documents describe the death in 2003 of detainee Abdul Kareem Abdureda Lafta, 44, in a U.S. Army jail in Mosul. He "appeared to be in good health" when taken into custody, and he quickly gained the attention of MPs by continually trying to remove the hood placed on his head and talking when guards told him to be silent, the documents say. One night, Lafta was put to bed with his hands tied behind him. Even so, one guard said he spent much of the night "constantly moving around on the ground" in his cell. In the morning, he was found dead.

A doctor who examined the body told investigators "he did not know what killed him." Another Army document says he was found to have a small laceration on his head. The investigators said "there is no documentation . . . explaining the lack of an autopsy."

In another case, Army investigators found probable cause to court-martial a soldier for shooting to death an Iraqi detainee, Obede Hethere Radad, without warning. But he was punished administratively and discharged.

Khalid Odah, the father of one Guantanamo detainee, said in a telephone interview from Kuwait yesterday that the new revelations make him worry even more about the fate of his son, Fawzi, who was detained by U.S. forces three years ago. "For a very long time, every day, we heard such news but nobody believed us," said Odah, head of the Kuwaiti Family Committee, a group of relatives of Guantanamo detainees. "Now it is coming from inside the government, from the FBI and others. . . . It is very frightening to my family and to other families of Kuwaiti detainees."

U.S. military officials have alleged in legal proceedings that Fawzi Odah is an admitted member of al Qaeda and had connections to the Taliban militia in Afghanistan. Khalid Odah says his son is innocent.

Full Article

Getting blue in red states.

There was a mountain of blather about the emergence of "morality and values" as the primary mover and shaker in the presidential election, and conventional wisdom had these nebulous, undefined concepts as the cause of Shrub's victory. Subsequent analysis of polling data and demographics reveal this to be wholly unsupported, though it continues to be held dear by those most invested in it - the punditocracy that invented it.

The second part of the "morals got him elected" fairy tale has those who voted solely on the "values" card as living almost exclusively in so called "red states," those that Shrub won to remain (become?) president. A closer look at county by county voting reveals the conceit behind that notion as well. Much was made of the outcry against the vulgarity of popular media, the coarsening of the culture, and the degradation of morals, all imputed to actions by those in "blue" states.

Now an excellent article in The Washington Post examines some cultural differences - and similarities - between "blue" and "red" states. The results are surprising, especially if you bought that whole false dichotomy to begin with. It also highlights the ties between the "smut" business and the giant corporations that bankroll the "values" party - the Republican Party.

GOP Corporate Donors Cash In on Smut

By Terry M. Neal
washingtonpost.com Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 21, 2004; 6:24 AM

Since the election, the e-mails from readers have poured into my mailbox. The common theme from conservatives has been that Nov. 2 was a triumph of values -- embodied by the GOP heartland over the heathens of the coastal elite.

Typical of the comments was this one from Arizona: "I do think the Democrat Party is identified -- justifiably -- with much of the vulgarization so prominently displayed by many celebrities, particularly those in the entertainment industry. Hey, we pick our friends."

In this case, the Democratic Party's "friends" are the expletive-spewing Whoopi Goldberg and her Hollywood pals, whom conservatives demonize. But Republicans have their friends, too. While not as obvious as the Goldbergs of the world, this corporate elite also profits from the peddling of lowbrow entertainment and, in some cases, outright smut.

In fact, just as the Democratic and Republican elites both profit from creating and selling popular entertainment, red states and blue states don't differ much in their consumption of it.

In my recent Yahoo Political Players interview with Tucker Carlson, the conservative writer and CNN Crossfire co-host asserted that the red/blue divide is rooted in the dismay many Americans perceive in the vast social and cultural changes happening in the country and the fact that the masses of people in middle America blame a distant, coastal elite for fostering those changes.

"The people who run the Republican Party are elites just like any other elite, and they don't share the same cultural concerns as the center of the country," said Carlson. "They don't -- they're all pro-choice on abortion, they're all pro-gay rights, they're all thrice married, you know what I mean? And they summer in the Hamptons, too. And so they don't have anything in common, that's true, with evangelicals who make up the bulk of their party."

In this world of irony, corporate leaders at companies as diverse as News Corp., Marriott International and Time Warner can profit by selling red state consumers the very material that red state culture is supposed to despise. Those elites then funnel the proceeds to the GOP, which in turn has used the money to successfully convince red state voters that the other political party is solely responsible for the decline of the civilization.

The full article is fairly long, but very worth while, to get an idea who is creating and selling TV shows depicting loose morals and human sexuality in a culturally destructive way, who is responsible for both the manufacture and the consumption of pornography.

Enjoy!

Gary Webb, R.I.P.

Journalist Gary Webb killed himself Friday, and hardly anyone has noticed.

Well, anyone who is connected to the mainstream media that villified Webb for stories he wrote in 1996 that tied the CIA to cocaine trafficking here in the US. The mentions his death received all focused on the hatchet jobs the LA Times, NY Times, and Washington Post did on him back in '96. All three newspapers attributed conclusions to Webb that he never made, then knocked them down. When the CIA's own internal investigation affirmed everything Webb had written about CIA connections to drug running, none of the above mentioned newspapers covered the story.

Now we have a raft of obituaries that rehash the same false charges and conslusions those papers made.

Here are some sharp rebuttals to the corpse-kicking now taking place.

Esquire Obit.

Investigative journalist Gary Webb was a friend of ours. And he was a damn fine reporter and writer. Gary was all you could ask for in a journalist: tough, unafraid, and honest as the day is long. He lived his life to be a check on the powerful, like any good investigative journalist worth his salt. Well, in 1996 he wrote a series of articles for the San Jose Mercury-News on the CIA and that agency's complicity in the cocaine trade in southern California in the 1980s. It wasn't flawless journalism, but it told a very important story, and in fact it prompted an investigation by the CIA's inspector general which subsequently confirmed the pillars of Webb's findings. But the funny thing is that Webb was driven from journalism because of that series. Rather than extending Webb's story by doing their own reporting, major newspapers instead turned on him and were more determined, it seemed, to attempt to undermine and discredit Webb's reporting. Indeed, the ombudsman for The Washington Post at the time, Geneva Overholser, wrote that her own paper and other major media had "shown more passion for sniffing out the flaws in the Mercury News's answer than for sniffing out a better answer themselves." In so doing, these newspapers relied on many official sources, which is odd considering the subject of Webb's stories. One can only guess as to their motivations.

From Mark Cooper at Alternet.

Kicking a Dead Man

By Marc Cooper, LA Weekly
Posted on December 18, 2004, Printed on December 19, 2004
http://www.alternet.org/story/20784/

First the L.A. Times helped kill off Gary Webb's career. Then, eight years later, after Webb committed suicide this past weekend, the Times decided to give his corpse another kick or two, in a scandalous, self-serving and ultimately shameful obituary. It was the culmination of the long, inglorious saga of a major newspaper dropping the ball journalistically, and then extracting relentless revenge on an out-of-town reporter who embarrassed it.

Webb was the 49-year-old former Pulitzer-winning reporter who in 1996, while working for the San Jose Mercury News, touched off a national debate with a three-part series that linked the CIA-sponsored Nicaraguan Contras to a crack-dealing epidemic in Los Angeles and other American cities.

A cold panic set in at the L.A. Times when Webb's so-called Dark Alliance story first appeared. Just two years before, the Times had published a long takeout on local crack dealer Rickey Ross and no mention was made of his possible link to and financing by CIA-backed Contras. Now the Times feared it was being scooped in its own backyard by a second-tier Bay Area paper.

The Times mustered an army of 25 reporters, led by Doyle McManus, to take down Webb's reporting. It was, apparently, more important to the Times to defend its own inadequate reporting on the CIA-drug connection than it was to advance Webb's important work (a charge consistently denied by the Times). The New York Times and the Washington Post also joined in on the public lynching of Webb. Webb's own editor, Jerry Ceppos, also helped do him in, with a public mea culpa backing away from his own papers stories.

Webb was further undermined by some of his own most fervent supporters. With the help of demagogues like Congresswoman Maxine Waters, a conspiracy-theory hysteria was whipped up that used Webb's series as "proof" that the CIA was more or less single-handedly responsible for South-Centrals crack plague – a gross distortion of Webb's work.

But that conspiracy theory played perfectly into the hands of the L.A. Times. When its own three-day series appeared a few months later – attempting to demolish Webb – the Times disproved a number of points that were never made by Webb, primarily that the CIA consciously engaged in a program to spread the use of crack.

The Times' Washington-based reporter McManus, who spent most of the late '80s and early '90s as one of the less-curious fourth-estate stenographers to the Reagan/Bush administrations, relied principally on CIA sources to vindicate the CIA in the anti-Webb series. Citing a "former CIA official" named Vince Cannistraro, McManus wrote that "CIA officials insist they knew nothing" about the Contra-drug dealers named by Webb. Cannistraro, however, was more fit to be a subject of the Times investigation than a source. Over the length of the Times series it was never mentioned that Cannistraro had actually been in charge of the CIA-Contra operation in the early '80s, that is, before moving on to help supervise the covert program of CIA-backed Islamic guerrillas in Afghanistan (who themselves were, and continue to be, knee-deep in the heroin trade).

Which brings us back to this week's obit written by Nita Lelyveld and Steve Hymon. The lead and body of the obit focus on the discrediting of Webb by the L.A. Times and fail to mention his Pulitzer until a dozen paragraphs down in the story.

Long before we learn of Webb's Pulitzer, won in 1990 for reporting on the Loma Prieta earthquake, Lelyveld and Hymon obediently recite their own papers indictment of Webbs expos on the CIA-drug connection. They quote the 1996 McManus slam on Webb, saying, "...the available evidence, based on an extensive review of court documents and more than 100 interviews in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Washington and Managua, fails to support any of [Webb's] allegations."

It's an astounding and nasty little piece of postmortem butchery on Webb (which never mentions that after his series appeared, Webb was voted the 1996 Journalist of the Year by the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists). Absolutely missing from Webb's obit is that it was his series that directly forced both the CIA and the Justice Department to conduct internal investigations into the scope of any links between the Agency and drug dealers.

Worse, the results of those investigations proved that the core of what Webb alleged was, indeed, true and accurate. When CIA Inspector General Frederick Hitz presented the findings of his internal investigation to Congress in 1998 (two years after Webb's piece and the ensuing Times vindication of the CIA), he revealed for the first time an eye-popping agreement that the CIA had cemented with the Justice Department: Between 1982 and 1995, the CIA was exempted from informing the DOJ if its non-employee agents, paid or unpaid, were dealing drugs. In short, it was the policy of the U.S. government to turn a blind eye to such connections.

The same report by the CIA inspector general, by the way, admitted what we all knew in any case – that those connections did, in fact, exist.

And here's the low point in this tale: After the CIA inspector general made public the second part of his investigation – the one sparked by Webb – which admitted to some links between the agency and Central American drug dealers, the L.A. Times chose not to publish a single story about the report. (No surprise here. Back in 1989, when a panel led by Senator John Kerry found similar CIA-drug-running links, the Times showed equal disinterest.)

In short, when it came to the Gary Webb series and its allegations, the L.A. Times wound up being more protective of the CIA than the CIA itself.

None of this explains why, in Webb's obit, Lelyveld and Hymon omit the on-the-record admissions by the CIA of its involvement with drug-connected Contras, an admission owed directly to Webb's work. Maybe, you say, the Times reporters are lazy and just didn't look beyond their own paper's archives. And because the Times didn't cover those admissions, Lelyveld and Hymon remain (eight years after the fact) in the dark.

No. I fear the answer is worse than that. One of the Times reporters who wrote the obit, we now learn, called veteran reporter Bob Parry the other day for comment on Webb's death. Back in 1985, Parry and his partner Bob Barger – working for the AP – were the first to break the story of CIA involvement with drug-linked Contras. Says Parry: "The Times reporter who called to interview me ignored my comments about the debt the nation owed Webb and the importance of the CIA's inspector-general findings. Instead of using Webb's death as an opportunity to finally get the story straight, the Times acted as if there never had been an official investigation confirming many of Webb's allegations."

Gary Webb's work deserved to be taken seriously and to be closely scrutinized precisely because of the scope of his allegations. As more-objective critics than the Times have pointed out, Webb overstated some of his conclusions, he too loosely framed some of his theses, and perhaps (perhaps) overestimated the actual amount of drug funding that fueled the Contra war. And for that he deserved to be criticized.

The core of his work, however, still stands. When much of the rest of the media went to sleep, Gary Webb dug and scratched and courageously took on the most powerful and arrogant and unaccountable agencies of the U.S. government. His tenacious reporting forced those same agencies to investigate themselves and to admit publicly – albeit in watered-down terms – what he had alleged.

Webb's reward was to be drummed out of the profession. After his editors cowardly recanted his stories (which they had vetted), he was demoted to a suburban bureau. After a year, Webb quit and wrote up his findings into a book. The book was mostly ignored by the press. Webb took up a job as an investigator for the California Legislature and helped spit-roast one Gray Davis. Last year, Webb lost that job and yearned, unsuccessfully for the most part, to get back into journalism. From a conservative Southern California military family, Webb was driven not by an ideological agenda but rather by a sense of fairness and justice. He was found last Friday in his Northern California home after he shot himself to death.

Recently, Webb was interviewed for a book profiling 18 journalists who found themselves discredited or censored. Let his own words be a more fitting epitaph than the hack-job L.A. Times obituary:

"If we had met five years ago, you wouldn't have found a more staunch defender of the newspaper industry than me... I was winning awards, getting raises, lecturing college classes, appearing on TV shows, and judging journalism contests....

"And then I wrote some stories that made me realize how sadly misplaced my bliss had been. The reason I'd enjoyed such smooth sailing for so long hadn't been, as I'd assumed, because I was careful and diligent and good at my job.... The truth was that, in all those years, I hadn't written anything important enough to suppress."

Gary Webb, R.I.P.

Traditional Values

Oklahoma's ban on gay marriage passed with the second highest percentage of the vote, behind only Mississippi. The spreading domaintion of reactionary fundamentalist Christians in this state cannot be overstated.

Here is a good Associated Press piece about it.

Okla. Gays Struggle to Remain Optimistic

By DAVID CRARY
AP National Writer

TULSA, Okla. (AP) -- Far from the coastal strongholds of the same-sex marriage movement, gays in the red states of the Bible Belt are struggling to maintain confidence and optimism in the aftermath of an election that many viewed as a stinging personal rebuff.

In Oklahoma, the 76 percent support for a constitutional ban on gay marriage has prompted some gays to leave the state or consider leaving. The staff of Tulsa's community center for gays and lesbians say calls to the center's help line, some of them suicidal, have tripled since the election.

In many cases, however, the dismay is accompanied by renewed determination.

"Some people talk about leaving, but there's a larger group more invested in fighting than they were before," said Mark Bonney, a gay activist who heads Tulsa Oklahomans for Human Rights. "They're saying it's time to come out to their families, to draw a line in the sand."

The resilience is evident in the launch of a $1 million fund-raising campaign for a new gay community center, in a court challenge of a new state law opposing adoptions by same-sex couples, and in the decision of two lesbian couples to file a lawsuit against the state and federal laws that deny recognition to same-sex unions.

"Tulsa is our home, and we have a strong community of family and friends," said Sue Barton, one of the plaintiffs. "Why would we pack up and leave just because we're treated unequally? We'd rather work toward being treated equally here."

Oklahoma was among 11 states that passed gay-marriage bans on Nov. 2. Only Mississippi's amendment won a higher portion of votes - 86 percent.

"We couldn't get married before, so it didn't create any larger legal hurdle," Bonney said. "But it's got to hurt, when you know that three out of four of your neighbors don't want you around. It was a statement of hate."

The author of Oklahoma's gay-marriage ban, Republican state Sen. James Williamson of Tulsa, insists hate was not a factor, but he shares the view of many in this churchgoing state that homosexuality is a sinful lifestyle choice.

"As a Christian, I don't like that behavior," Williamson said. "If they want to live their life quietly, in the privacy of their homes, that's freedom in America. But when you want to force the rest of us to accept a new definition of marriage, we're not going to stand for that."

Except for one small town, no Oklahoma municipality has joined the hundreds of cities and towns nationwide that have expanded anti-discrimination laws to cover sexual orientation.

"We'll never go there," Williamson said. "If a Christian couple here in Oklahoma doesn't want to rent property to openly in-your-face homosexuals, they should have a right to do that."

Oklahomans voted overwhelmingly Republican - red on the campaign map - in the presidential race, and also gave the GOP control of the state House for the first time in more than 80 years, increasing the likelihood of socially conservative legislation.

Tom Neal, an aspiring architect and publisher of a now-defunct monthly gay newspaper, said fears of growing intolerance have prompted him and several friends to consider moving to Canada.

Two of his friends, partners for 24 years, plan to wed next month in British Columbia, and Neal said he would join them in surveying real estate there. He's descended from Oklahoma Land Rush settlers, but Neal says that "after this election, I'm literally feeling a lot less safe."

Atlanta native Laura Belmonte says she has established a comfortable life as a history professor at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, where she lives with her lesbian partner and sometimes advises gay students.

"Some Oklahomans make this blatant assumption about sameness - that you're straight, you're an evangelical, you're conservative," she said. "If you challenge any component of that, some people just write you off."

To an extent, national gay-rights groups also wrote off Oklahoma's gay community - offering only token assistance for the longshot campaign against the marriage ban.

Bonney said he understood the pragmatism behind such decisions, although he noted that Tulsa gays have been organized and active for 20 years. Far from demanding marriage rights, many gays and lesbians in Oklahoma are still wrestling with whether to come out to family and associates, he said.

"You can't have marriage until you've gained enough self-acceptance to demand respect from your neighbors," he said. "That's still an ongoing process here."

The four women filing the lawsuit against state and federal marriage laws hope their effort will inspire boldness among others in the local gay community. They shrug off criticism from several national gay-rights groups who say their lawsuit is so certain to fail that it will be counterproductive.

"We may not prevail, but to run a marathon you have to start taking steps," said Sharon Baldwin, who - like partner Mary Bishop - is an editor at the Tulsa World. "We can't sit back and do nothing."

Baldwin and Bishop, who were heartened by their newspaper colleagues' support, say they have no interest in leaving Oklahoma. Sue Barton said she and her partner did contemplate moving to Chicago or the East Coast after getting a civil union in Vermont in 2001, but now they also intend to stay.

"We have to live smart and careful," she said. "But we don't walk around in fear."

On Dec. 13, about 125 Tulsa gays and their families gathered at a Congregational church for a holiday potluck dinner, trying to shake off the postelection blues with turkey and pie, songs by a gay-lesbian chorus, and a ceremony honoring some of their supporters.

"Each of us is unique," said one of the honorees, Rabbi Charles Sherman. "Those who'd have us fit into some neat category that makes them comfortable - they're wrong. That's not what God wants."

Freedom for security

In another philosophical blow to the concept of inalienable rights and inherent freedom, a new poll suggests close to half of all Americans think the civil rights of Muslim-Americans ought to be restricted. The question was cast against the background of terrorism and security issues, so apparently the idea is that Muslims who are American citizens (a distinction that is part of the question) are not really citizens at all, and do not qualify for certain civil liberties guaranteed to all other citizens.

While 44% is not a majority, it is a very high number. This sort of mindless, generalized fear goes hand in hand with ignorance and religious bias.

The survey conducted by Cornell University also found that Republicans and people who described themselves as highly religious were more apt to support curtailing Muslims' civil liberties than Democrats or people who are less religious.

So much for tolerance.

Researchers also found that respondents who paid more attention to television news were more likely to fear terrorist attacks and support limiting the rights of Muslim Americans.

I wonder what the breakout for categories of TV news might show. A lot of Fox and CableSpews?

Full article is here.

Strip & Tell

An odd item from Texas. Taken from The Houston Chornicle.

San Antonio requires strippers to wear permits

Associated Press

SAN ANTONIO -- The City Council today approved a measure that will require strippers to wear permits while they are on stage.

City Councilman Chip Haass pushed the amended human display ordinance as making it easier for police to identify dancers.

But a lawyer representing several strip clubs in the city said it would also create a physical danger by making it easier for an obsessed customer to find out a dancer's real name and where she lives.

Attorney Jim Deegear has said he will file a lawsuit challenging the measure, which the 11-member council passed unanimously early Friday during a marathon meeting that began Thursday afternoon.

Deegear says the city's strict rules are part of an effort to drive his clients out of business.

So it's okay to take your clothes off on stage, but you have to wear an ID?...

More FDA Flacking

Like more evidence is necessary to conclude the Food And Drug Administration's primary mission has long since been altered from consumer protection and safety to a rubber stamp for the pharmaceutical industry:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Nearly 20 percent of U.S. Food and Drug Administration scientists surveyed in late 2002 said they were pressured to approve or recommend approval of a medicine despite their reservations about the drug's risks or effectiveness, according to documents made public on Thursday.

Also, two-thirds of the scientists questioned by the Department of Health and Human Services' inspector general said they lacked full confidence in the FDA's ability to monitor side effects of prescription drugs after they hit the market.

To those of us who wound up having to buy medications from Canada due to extreme over pricing here in the US, and were warned by the FDA of dire safety issues involved in taking "foreign drugs," this intentional suppression of negative information about drugs going through the approval process comes as no surprise.

The ominous warnings FDA issued on a daily basis about the dangers of ingesting drugs from outside the US, drugs manufactured in exactly the same plants as those sold in the US but retailing for 25 - 500% less outside our borders, were issued on behalf of the most profitable industry in the world. To wit - the FDA abandoned its role as safety watchdog to assist that industry in protecting and inflating its profits.

And now we discover that information about Vioxx and other drugs recently pulled from the market, information about serious, harmful, and fatal side effects, was suppressed by those hired and paid by tax dollars to protect us from the avarice of the pharmaceutical companies.

Full article from Reuters.

Limp Missile

As the last two Star Wars "prequels" have been utter flops, so has the real world version, renamed Missile Defense by it's proponents and government financial backers, proved an utter failure of concept and execution. somewhere in the neighborhood of $130 billion have already been blown on this dead-in-the-water Cold War boondoggle, with at least $50 billion over the next five years to follow down the sinkhole.

Test Failure Sets Back U.S. Missile Defense Plan
Wed Dec 15, 2004 05:44 PM ET

By Jim Wolf

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Bush's drive to deploy a multibillion-dollar shield against ballistic missiles was set back on Wednesday by what critics called a stunning failure of its first full flight test in two years.

The abortive $85 million exercise raised fresh questions about the reliability of the first elements of the plan, an heir to former president Ronald Reagan's vision of an space-based missile defense that critics dubbed "Star Wars."

The interceptor missile never left its silo at Kwajalein Atoll in the Pacific Ocean, shutting itself down automatically because of an "anomaly" of unknown origin, the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency said.

About 16 minutes earlier, a target missile had been fired from Kodiak, Alaska, in what was to have been a fly-by test chiefly designed to gather data on new hardware, software and engagement angles, said Richard Lehner, a spokesman.

For instance, a booster built by Orbital Sciences Corp. was to have been exercised for the first time in the way it would actually be fielded. One of the test's goals was to show it was ready for production.

"Obviously it isn't," said Philip Coyle, who was the Pentagon's chief weapons tester under President Bill Clinton, "and now they also will have to fix the boosters that have been installed in silos in Alaska and Vandenberg" Air Force Base, California.

None of the tests have come off as planned. Even with the target vehicle broadcasting a GPS location signal to the missile, the latter still cannot find the former. It is unlikely that an incoming ICBM will be phoning ahead to tell Missile Defense where to locate it. It is also unlikely the system will ever work, based not only upon today's ready technology, but that of the near term future.

Consider the funds still budgeted for this defense industry giveaway - $50 billion for the coming five years. That kind of cash would buy a lot of body and vehicle armor for those embroiled, at this very instant, in a war that involves more common types of missiles - bullets, rocket propelled grenades, and shoulder fired explosive projectiles. Missile Defense ought to be killed quietly in its sleep and a portion of the proposed funding redirected so the families of soldiers in the field don't have to purchase their own body armor.

Full Story

Movie reviews that bite

My friend Chris pointed me to a site full of movie reviews unlike any I've ever read. I nearly injured myself laughing.

Speaking of Chris, he wrote a 50,000 word novel under the tight time strictures of National Novel Writing Month. You can read it here.

Gun nutz

I've never heard of Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership before, but they've written a spectacular children's guide to guns and gun control that has to be read to be believed.

I found this through a friend's pointer to apophenia.

Technical Voyeurism

Check out your home town or city.

Find your street.

Or your house.

Keyhole

Fearless Leader Part Duh

In the event the flight suit with bulging package was not enough for you, try this Shrubbery exercise in military dictatorship fashion.

Note the epaulets. Reminds me of Peter Sellers in The Mouse That Roared.

Fearless Leader

Ok, this is some spooky shit.

Clear Channel has erected a billboard in Florida depicting Shrub in all his glory. Must be seen to be believed.

See the pics.

A Different Perspective

I'm not normally a fan of movie actors and musicians mouthing off about politics. Often they have not done their homework and wind up espousing absurdities that get picked up and repeated by the media echo chamber, drowning out voices who actually have a grip on the subject.

Occasionally my narrow view of this is off. :)

Will Smith of Ali fame (and Men In Black, the first of which is a fun and funny film) is apparently the target of a one man boycott. Smith is quoted from an interview he gave to a major German newspaper. In reply to a question about 9/11, Smith had this to say:

Asked whether the 9/11 attacks had changed him, Smith said, "No. Absolutely not. When you grow up black in America, you have a completely different view of the world than white Americans. We blacks live with a constant feeling of unease. And whether you are wounded in an attack by a racist cop or in a terrorist attack, I'm sorry, it makes no difference." Smith continued, "In the '60s, blacks were continuously the victims of terrorist attacks. It was civil terrorism, but terrorism nonetheless. We are used to being attacked. That constant state of vigilance -- a sort of defensive state -- that hasn't changed at all. For me, nothing has changed at all."

Abstinence From Thinking...

...or how I learned to be ignorant, federally-funded style:

One curriculum, called "Me, My World, My Future," teaches that women who have an abortion "are more prone to suicide" and that as many as 10 percent of them become sterile. This contradicts the 2001 edition of a standard obstetrics textbook that says fertility is not affected by elective abortion, the Waxman report said.

"I have no objection talking about abstinence as a surefire way to prevent unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases," Waxman said. "I don't think we ought to lie to our children about science. Something is seriously wrong when federal tax dollars are being used to mislead kids about basic health facts."

Full article care of The Washington Post:

Some Abstinence Programs Mislead Teens, Report Says

By Ceci Connolly
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 2, 2004; Page A01

Many American youngsters participating in federally funded abstinence-only programs have been taught over the past three years that abortion can lead to sterility and suicide, that half the gay male teenagers in the United States have tested positive for the AIDS virus, and that touching a person's genitals "can result in pregnancy," a congressional staff analysis has found.

Those and other assertions are examples of the "false, misleading, or distorted information" in the programs' teaching materials, said the analysis, released yesterday, which reviewed the curricula of more than a dozen projects aimed at preventing teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease.

In providing nearly $170 million next year to fund groups that teach abstinence only, the Bush administration, with backing from the Republican Congress, is investing heavily in a just-say-no strategy for teenagers and sex. But youngsters taking the courses frequently receive medically inaccurate or misleading information, often in direct contradiction to the findings of government scientists, said the report, by Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), a critic of the administration who has long argued for comprehensive sex education.

Several million children ages 9 to 18 have participated in the more than 100 federal abstinence programs since the efforts began in 1999. Waxman's staff reviewed the 13 most commonly used curricula -- those used by at least five programs apiece.

The report concluded that two of the curricula were accurate but the 11 others, used by 69 organizations in 25 states, contain unproved claims, subjective conclusions or outright falsehoods regarding reproductive health, gender traits and when life begins. In some cases, Waxman said in an interview, the factual issues were limited to occasional misinterpretations of publicly available data; in others, the materials pervasively presented subjective opinions as scientific fact.

Among the misconceptions cited by Waxman's investigators:

• A 43-day-old fetus is a "thinking person."

• HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, can be spread via sweat and tears.

• Condoms fail to prevent HIV transmission as often as 31 percent of the time in heterosexual intercourse.

One curriculum, called "Me, My World, My Future," teaches that women who have an abortion "are more prone to suicide" and that as many as 10 percent of them become sterile. This contradicts the 2001 edition of a standard obstetrics textbook that says fertility is not affected by elective abortion, the Waxman report said.

"I have no objection talking about abstinence as a surefire way to prevent unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases," Waxman said. "I don't think we ought to lie to our children about science. Something is seriously wrong when federal tax dollars are being used to mislead kids about basic health facts."

When used properly and consistently, condoms fail to prevent pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) less than 3 percent of the time, federal researchers say, and it is not known how many gay teenagers are HIV-positive. The assertion regarding gay teenagers may be a misinterpretation of data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that found that 59 percent of HIV-infected males ages 13 to 19 contracted the virus through homosexual relations.

Joe. S. McIlhaney Jr., who runs the Medical Institute for Sexual Health, which developed much of the material that was surveyed, said he is "saddened" that Waxman chose to "blast" well-intentioned abstinence educators when there is much the two sides could agree on.

McIlhaney acknowledged that his group, which publishes "Sexual Health Today" instruction manuals, made a mistake in describing the relationship between a rare type of infection caused by chlamydia bacteria and heart failure. Chlamydia also causes a common type of sexually transmitted infection, but that is not linked to heart disease. But McIlhaney said Waxman misinterpreted a slide that warns young people about the possibility of pregnancy without intercourse. McIlhaney said the slide accurately describes a real, though small, risk of pregnancy in mutual masturbation.

Congress first allocated money for abstinence-only programs in 1999, setting aside $80 million in grants, which go to a variety of religious, civic and medical organizations. To be eligible, groups must limit discussion of contraception to failure rates.

President Bush has enthusiastically backed the movement, proposing to spend $270 million on abstinence projects in 2005. Congress reduced that to about $168 million, bringing total abstinence funding to nearly $900 million over five years. It does not appear that the abstinence-only curricula are being taught in the Washington area.

Waxman and other liberal sex-education proponents argue that adolescents who take abstinence-only programs are ill-equipped to protect themselves if they become sexually active. According to the latest CDC data, 61 percent of graduating high school seniors have had sex.

Supporters of the abstinence approach, also called abstinence until marriage, counter that teaching young people about "safer sex" is an invitation to have sex.

Alma Golden, deputy assistant secretary for population affairs in the Department of Health and Human Services, said in a statement that Waxman's report is a political document that does a "disservice to our children." Speaking as a pediatrician, Golden said, she knows "abstaining from sex is the most effective means of preventing the sexual transmission of HIV, STDs and preventing pregnancy."

Nonpartisan researchers have been unable to document measurable benefits of the abstinence-only model. Columbia University researchers found that although teenagers who take "virginity pledges" may wait longer to initiate sexual activity, 88 percent eventually have premarital sex.

Bill Smith, vice president of public policy at the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States, a comprehensive sex education group that also receives federal funding, said the Waxman report underscored the need for closer monitoring of what he called the "shame-based, fear-based, medically inaccurate messages" being disseminated with tax money. He said the danger of abstinence education lies in the omission of useful medical information.

Some course materials cited in Waxman's report present as scientific fact notions about a man's need for "admiration" and "sexual fulfillment" compared with a woman's need for "financial support." One book in the "Choosing Best" series tells the story of a knight who married a village maiden instead of the princess because the princess offered so many tips on slaying the local dragon. "Moral of the story," notes the popular text: "Occasional suggestions and assistance may be alright, but too much of it will lessen a man's confidence or even turn him away from his princess."