George Orwell

I recently read the following George Orwell quote:

In a world where the prime necessities were money, titled relatives, athleticism, tailor-made clothes, neatly brushed hair, a charming smile, I was no good.

My initial impression was just WOW; what a great sentence.  My eyes lingered over the last four words, “…I am no good.”   The ending conveyed sense of worthlessness and low self esteem.  But its Orwell, “1984″ and “Animal Farm” aren’t exactly “feel good” reads.  But he “was no good” compared to what?

So I read it again; paying more attention to the list of social standards to which he was comparing himself.  This time, the quote struck me as strangely uplifting and slightly rebellious.  No, extremely rebellious.  Against the standards of great hair, fashionable clothes, bleached teeth, being “no good” takes on a different meaning doesn’t it. He is cheering you on to be yourself, undaunted by the materialistic world and the shallow impressions of others.  I had to share the quote with someone.

So I called my wife, who is always up for a good quote.  I got the first four words out of my mouth, and she bust into laughter.

In a world…

Just a little back story, I have a pretty deep voice and struggle with smoking.  So when I said “In a world..”, my wife thought I was aping the “movie trailer guy.”  You know the voice.  Read the quote again, and think of it being set to a big James Bond Hollywood action trailer.  Orwell goes from someone with low self esteem to James Bond, kicking the door down and defiantly saying “I was no good.”

George Orwell's Big Brother

I was struck by how this double meaning is rampant in Orwell’s works.  I read “1984″ during the Bush Administration and “Animal Farm” during the Clinton years.  Even though with those two periods of our history were staged in dramatically different environments (.com boom vs. real estate bust, war vs. peace etc.)  Both books were easily connected with the world around me.  Orwell is timeless.   He describes the horror that mankind is capable of and its equal capacity for being complacent in the face of such horror.

I ran across this quote, reading 120 page cliff note type booklet on Orwell’s “1984″.  The booklet was published in 1965.  I thought it would interesting to see how people in the 1960’s related to Orwell.   Quite interesting, indeed.

So what was the context of George Orwell’s quote?  He was describing his experiences at a British prep school.  Orwell was a poor kid that was making his way through the rigid educational system on scholarships and getting by on his smarts and the  goodwill of others.  He felt he was treated vastly different than the well to do, social elite that attended the same school.  This theme seems an ever present inspiration for Orwell.

In many ways his real life mirrored “Animal Farm” and “1984.”   At times his experiences left  him feeling  burdened with low esteem.  At other times, he could appreciate his indiviuality and see the shallowness of socital standards. In this quote, he shows he can elegantly be both at the same time.

This is a reprint of Mr. Kucinich’s Op/Ed statement:

America must move from the errant, retributive justice of 9/11 to a healing, restorative process of truth and reconciliation.

Before the Congress adjourns, I will bring forth a new proposal for the establishment of a National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation, which will have the power to compel testimony and gather official documents to reveal to the American people not only the underlying deception which has divided us, but in that process of truth seeking set our nation on a path of reconciliation.

We suffer in our remembrance of 9/11, because of the terrible loss of innocent lives on that grim day. We also suffer because 9/11 was seized as an opportunity to run a political agenda, which has set America on a course of the destruction of another nation and the destruction of our own Constitution. And we have become less secure as a result of the warped practice of pursing peace through the exercise of pre-emptive military strength.

Click here to view the embedded video.

It is not simply 9/11 that needs to be remembered. We also need to remember the politicization of 9/11 and the polarizing narrative which followed, locking us into endless conflict, a war on terror which has wrought further terror worldwide and which has severely damaged our standing worldwide as an honorable, compassionate nation. As we were all victims of 9/11, so we have become victims of the interpretation of 9/11.

Our government’s external response to 9/11 was to attack a nation which did not attack us. Indeed on the first anniversary of 9/11, the Bush administration issued a well-publicized stern warning to Iraq which was part of a campaign to induce people to believe Iraq had something to do with 9/11.

The deliberate, systematic connection of Iraq with 9/11 has led America into a philosophical and moral cul-de-sac as over one million Iraqis and over 4155 US soldiers have died in a war which will cost over $3 trillion. Additionally, soldiers from 23 other countries have died in the Iraq war.

We attempt to unite Iraq by further dividing it. We talk about restoring Iraq while taking steps to place control of its vast oil wealth in the hands of US oil giants. And we intend to impose upon the Iraqi people the cost of rebuilding a country which our government ruined, keeping a once prosperous nation lashed to debt and poverty for a long, long time. Iraq has paid for 9/11. We all continue to pay for 9/11.

The heartbreaking loss of the lives and injuries to America troops further binds us to the Administration’s illogic of the Iraq war: We remember our troops’ sacrifice by demanding more sacrifice; we support our troops by continuing the war.

The dominant color of our new national security since 911 is neither red, white nor blue. Everyday is orange. Everyday reminders of fear of 9/11 become banal.. Yet we no longer hear the airport announcements nor see the orange colored warnings because they have commonplace standards in our new national security state, as is the Patriot Act, wiretapping, and a host of invasions of privacy and diminution of civil liberties. The Constitution has been roundly attacked by the very people who took an oath to defend it.

There is a powerful desire across America for change, not necessarily from control by one political party to another, but a change from living with lies to living with truth.

Over two dozen nations, facing peril within and without, deeply divided by politics and war have travelled down a path of restoring civil society through a formal process of reconciliation. At some point within each of those countries it was understood that the way forward is shown through the light of truth. This process is not without pain because it requires a willingness to study evidence to which eyes had been averted and ears had been closed. But in the process of truth and reconciliation, nations found new strength, new resolve, new commitment.

The South African Truth and Reconciliation enabled that nation to come to grips with its past through a public confessional, bringing forward those who committed crimes and having the power to grant amnesty for full disclosure of crimes against the people. Of course, our path may necessarily be different: High US government officials stand accused in Impeachment petitions of violating national and international law. Our continued existence as a democracy may depend upon how thoroughly we seek the truth. I will call upon the America people to join me in supporting this effort.

The truth can move us forward, as a unified whole, so that we can one day become a re-United States. 9/11 is the day the world changed. It is the day America embraced a metaphor of war. If we are open to truth and reconciliation, we may one day be able, once again, to embrace peace.

Editor: This column appears as an op/ed piece on Congressman Dennis Kucinich’s site.

With six and a half long months left in office, President Bush and his administration, specifically the United States Department of Health and Human Services, still have time to tinker with laws and regulations that that challenge our civil liberties, human rights, and a woman’s right to choose. President Bush may soon have a new and controversial regulatory issue before him, one that flies in the face of existing laws and which does not need Congressional approval to be put in place.

“One of the most troubling aspects of the proposed rules is the overly-broad definition of “abortion.” This definition would allow health-care corporations or individuals to classify many common forms of contraception – including the birth control pill, emergency contraception and IUDs – “abortions” and therefore to refuse to provide contraception to women who need it.”

– Sen. Hillary Clinton and Sen. Patty Murray in a joint letter to HHS

Yes, the abortion/contraception issue is back on the front burner, this time in the form of a HHS draft regulation that essentially redefines “pregnancy” and could impact every single woman in the country seeking contraceptive services. While the HHS draft is still under debate with no timetable for submission or a seal of approval, its opponents suggest that the changes in regulations fall within the ideological scope of the Bush administration.

The potential law/regulation sparks debate to the most minute moment in time: when conception actually occurs, and could place the idea of “contraception” in the category of abortion. At best, the draft proposal could restrict or limit access to birth control for millions of women. The words “barefoot and pregnant” are not that far back in our legislative history.

According to the Alex Mayer of the St. Louis Dispatch (7.31.2008), “The Bush administration is attempting to re-define ‘pregnancy.’”

Mayer uses an excerpt from the Wall Street Journal:

“The Bush Administration has ignited a furor with a proposed definition of pregnancy that has the effect of classifying some of the most widely used methods of contraception as abortion.

A draft regulation, still being revised and debated, treats most birth-control pills and intrauterine devices as abortion because they can work by preventing fertilized eggs from implanting in the uterus. The regulation considers that destroying ‘The life of a human being.’”

In Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary are the following definitions:

ABORTION: The TERMINATING of pregnancy after, accompanied by or closely followed by the death of an embryo or fetus. Induced expulsion of a human fetus.

CONTRACEPTION: Deliberate PREVENTION of conception or impregnation.

The draft regulation puts both definitions on equal footing. Any change would not impact the legality of birth control pills, morning after pills or any form of contraception, but it has the potential to reduce the availability of such items to the women who need/want them.

Proposed regulations could impact access to birth control

Defenders of this proposed “adjustment’ to current regulations say it would reportedly defend pharmacists, doctors and clinicians who currently prescribe contraceptives but who, based on personal or religious beliefs, would prefer not to prescribe or dispense such medications. While more liberal states might see marginal impact from such a change, states with a stronger religious of biblical base could make a serious impact on the availability of contraception to women. The proposal has the potential to “disrupt state laws securing women’s access to birth control” and “jeopardize federal programs like Medicaid and Title X that provide family-planning services to millions of women.” It would also adversely impact woman who are victims of sexual assault.

The Wall Street Journal report noted that “some on the religious right” see this change as “creating obstacles” for women trying to access birth control and added that the draft regulation could “prompt” insurance companies to “drop coverage for prescription birth control, a move that ultra-conservative Family Research Council’s Tom McClusky said is “fantistic.” Yes, read that again: “Fantastic.” Intruding on a woman’s right to control her own health is “Fantastic.” In this case, add the concept “barefoot and pregnant.”

The proposed rule states that “the conscience of the individual or institution should be paramount in determining what constitutes abortion. This effectively places individual and institutional beliefs over patients’ rights, greatly endangering women’s health.” — David Feinwachs, chief counsel of the Minnesota Hospital Association (as reported in the Star Tribune 7.30.2008.)

In a letter to Michael Leavitt, secretary of Bush’s Health and Human Services Department, Senators Hillary Clinton and Patty Murray, both strong advocates for women’s health and most recently supportive of over-the-counter “morning after” pills, wrote the following:

Sen. Hillary Clinton

Dear Mr. Secretary:

It has come to our attention that the Department of Health and Human Services may be preparing draft regulations that would create new obstacles for women seeking contraceptive services.

One of the most troubling aspects of the proposed rules is the overly-broad definition of “abortion.” This definition would allow health-care corporations or individuals to classify many common forms of contraception – including the birth control pill, emergency contraception and IUDs – “abortions” and therefore to refuse to provide contraception to women who need it.

Sen. Patty Murray

As a consequence, these draft regulations could disrupt state laws securing women’s access to birth control. They could jeopardize federal programs like Medicaid and Title X that provide family-planning services to millions of women. They could even undermine state laws that ensure survivors of sexual assault and rape receive emergency contraception in hospital emergency rooms.

We strongly urge you to reconsider these regulations before they are released. We are extremely concerned by this proposal’s potential to affect millions of women’s reproductive health.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Sincerely yours,

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton
Senator Patty Murray

This rule change would:

• endanger a Minnesota law that requires doctors to offer rape victims emergency contraception. (Feminist Daily News Wire 7.16.2008]
• expand the definition of abortion to falsely label several types of birth control – including emergency contraception, the pill and IUDs – as abortifacients. (Feminist Daily News Wire 7.16.2008]
• deny federal funds to medical providers who will not hire doctors or nurses that object to abortion. (Feminist Daily News Wire 7.16.2008]
• affect over 500,000 medical facilities (National Partnership for Women and Families 7.30.2008)
• nullify state laws that require doctors to provide the option of emergency contraception to rape victims, would be effectively nullified.( Star-Tribune/MN)
• affect over 500,000 medical facilities (National Partnership for Women and Families 7.30.2008)

The rule change is currently being debated within HHS. There is no timetable for when the final version of the rule will be released.

Wolf enters a male-dominated political commentary arena dominated by men to make a compelling argument for civil rights. Her analysis falls closer to the bones of political discourse as presented by Emma Goldman, and presents her case with an energetic urgency as she cautions Americans of a dangerous “fascist shift” brought about by the Bush administration.

Chapters outline the “Ten Steps to Fascism” citing historical corollaries (as well as the pigs in Orwell’s Animal Farm), with headings like “Invoke an External and Internal Threat,” “Establish Secret Prisons,” “Surveil Ordinary Citizens,” “Restrict the Press,” and “Target Key Individuals,” making a case for the existence of fascism outside of a dictatorship.

Her book’s publication through the small press, Chelsea Green Publishing of White River Junction, Vermont, which is committed to politics and “sustainable living.” Here is Naomi Wolf, speaking out an this October 2007 videotaping.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I was recently shocked by a headline that read Federal Funding Changes Hit DCS. As I read each paragraph of this story, I got more and upset that our needy children will be tortured emotionally by budget cuts that precipitate the loss of 160 employees of the Department of Children and Youth Services. A budget cut by the federal government, namely the Bush administration, of $73 million dollars in unconscionable.

Governor Bredesen described this financial tragedy as “visible and painful kinds of cuts” and said budget cuts will have to be made in other areas “to keep the case management system intact.”

Our values are distorted: the pressing needs of our children must be given priority.

Where can the Bush administration find the dollars for the work of caring for our children and the workers of DCS. I suggest that some money, tax dollars, are better spent for the benefit of DCS staffs across the nation.

Presently the Bush administration is channeling huge sums of taxpayer dollars “earmarked” grants of public dollars intended for religious organizations whose tenet is pro-child. Such programs are:

• A $47,000 Justice department grant intended to “bring a life-changing message of adoration of Jesus Christ to city streets” While this message is legitimate and seen compulsory by its adherents, it does not need to be funded with tax dollars.
• A $202,000 grant to a St. Louis program called World Impact, again one of its objectives is promoting religion. While this is admirable, do so with taxpayer dollars is unfair, especially when funding is needed for the nation’s children in DCS care.
• A $500,000 HUD grant to World Impact Youth program called Christian leadership, which includes “Bible studies, devotion and evangelism” in fulfilling their mission.

The list of such mismanagement in programs promoting sectarian religious beliefs on the nickle of taxpayers is an abuse of government and a misuse of faith. Currently, our society is in need of such sums to maintain our DCS programs. I pray the faithful will stand up for one of the greatest values: self-sufficiency and God’s grace, and not the government handouts of our hard-earned tax-payer dollars.

When I was a teenager, going to private Catholic school, I was approached by military recruiters. I was encouraged to join the military and to enlist in the ROTC program, much like my father had been. For whatever reason, I declined. I was not yet a peace activist like I became after the first Gulf War, but something in my instincts told me that I could not serve in the military the way my father had served.

In 1990, while I was enrolled at the University of Minnesota, George Bush Sr. began beating the drums of war. I was enrolled in the selective service program at that time in order to get student loans to go to college. I remember clearly the night the bombs began to drop in Iraq for the first time. I was living in the student district of Minneapolis and there had been anti-war activity on campus leading up to the invasion. Students were busy organizing against the campus military center, sometimes called the stockade, holding demonstrations and putting anti-war material in front of the recruiting and training center.

The night of the first bombing and initial invasion in 1991 I witnessed something I had never seen before, a spontaneous anti-war demonstration. Demonstrators began marching from the University district and marched, without a permit, into downtown Minneapolis and over to the uptown district, several thousand people marching a distance of five or six miles. Something about that demonstration vitalized me and helped me to commit to a path of peace. I knew at the time, based on my religious convictions, that I could not kill another human being in the name of my country, no matter what the reason. Although I am no longer a person of faith, I still retain the same conviction to this day and remain a pacifist and committed to the path of non-violence.

I joined the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors at that time and met with a Quaker counselor from the American Friends Service Committee. I decided at that point in my life to begin to serve the path of peace.

My story is only one story of many paths to adulthood. Besides having deep respect for my father and his choices in life, we have something in common, we both had the opportunity to choose how to serve our country. This choice, which has been a mainstay of American life since shortly after the Vietnam war, has never been under greater threat than it is right now. Our military forces are taxed to exhaustion, and a back door draft of sort already exists with our national guard reserve. President Bush has chosen to keep one hundred forty thousand troops in Iraq in addition to the thousands already serving in Afghanistan and the hundreds of thousands serving in over one hundred and twenty countries around the world.

Nearly every person in the military today is there because they were able to choose to serve. Regardless of how one feels about the process of military recruitment, the targeting of poor and minority communities, even recruiting persons who are not yet citizens of this country in order to serve, the alternative to this is far worse. I do believe that we need to scale down the size of our military. We cannot afford the extreme financial burden that this military is costing us, both in current expenditures and obligations we have on past expenditures, such as debt from previous military expenses which is as yet unpaid, and the financial obligations that we have to the health and welfare of our nation’s veterans.

There has been talk in the military of reintroducing the draft. It is argued that we cannot afford to keep going the way we are. There has even been speculation that the very reason that our national reserve forces are being taxed to their limits is to reintroduce the draft as a socially acceptable resolution to the current crisis in Iraq. Our military forces are broken. They are being taxed to their limits, but the solution is not the reintroduction of a draft. This war in Iraq was based on lies and manipulation. There is nothing honorable about recruiting unwitting young men in order to support the lies and misdeeds of the current administration.

The solution to the crisis in Iraq is to bring the troops home now. Our national guard has served the country well. They have answered the call to serve, in spite of the betrayals of the current administration, and it is time to bring them home. Then it is time to let our military heal from the current round of conflict. We need a peacetime administration that is focused on using alternatives to violence and warfare in order to solve international conflicts. We need elected representatives who are committed to the path of peace and who are more concerned about the economic crisis at home.

I am still proud of my father and everything he has done. I am also proud of my friends who have chosen not to serve in the military. I am proud of the peace activists I know who have chosen to serve their country and the world to promote the cause of peace. I believe that there can be reconciliation and understanding between these two very different communities, each choosing to serve in the way they believe is best. The act of choosing is one of the most important rites of transitioning into adult life. Don’t our children deserve the opportunity to explore all the alternatives that life has to offer them, in education, in job training, in community service? We don’t need another draft. What we need is a new outlook on our government.

We need a government that is dedicated to the idea that serving the people is the highest priority. A draft will only reinforce the idea that Americans are cannon fodder for greedy warmongers who can’t make good foreign policy decisions and then need to sacrifice American lives in order to cover for their terrible decisions. Instead of investing more money in war let’s invest it in peace. Let’s make sure that every American graduates from high school. Let’s take the money that we would spend on guns and spend that money on health care. Let’s take the money that we would spend on military bases halfway around the world and spend that money on our own domestic infrastructure. Let’s take the money that we would spend on bombs and spend that money on social security. Finally, let’s take the money that we would spend on training our young men and women to be soldiers and instead spend that money on training them to be teachers, doctors and engineers.

We can lift this nation out of poverty. We can find alternatives to warfare and violence. We can solve our international problems without invading foreign countries and occupying them. We can have peace and security at home without resorting to a draft. It is time for us to take the steps towards peace that we have been waiting to take. It is time to look at real solutions to the economic crisis facing this country. It is time to restore the honor and dignity that is the soul of this nation. I believe we can do this. All we need is the leadership and the representation to make the right decisions in Washington DC. Let’s take the first steps toward becoming the people that we deserve to be by resisting talk of a draft and instead let’s bring the troops home now.

Chris Lugo is a candidate for the US Senate from Tennessee running on a platform of Peace.

By probing the homicide of an innocent taxi driver at the Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan, the film exposes a worldwide policy of detention and interrogation that condones torture and the abrogation of human rights. This disturbing and often brutal film is the most incisive examination to date of the Bush Administration’s willingness, in its prosecution of the “war on terror,” to undermine the essence of the rule of law. The film asks and answers a key question: what happens when a few men expand the wartime powers of the executive to undermine the very principles on which the United States was founded.

Incorporating rare and never-before-seen images from inside the Bagram, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay prisons, and interviews with former government officials such as John Yoo, Alberto Mora and Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, interrogators, prison guards, New York Times reporters Tim Golden and Carlotta Gall (who wrote the first stories about the homicides in Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan) and the families of tortured prisoners, the film dissects the progression of the Administration’s policy on torture from the secret role of key administration figures, such as Dick Cheney, Alberto Gonzales and others to the soldiers in the field.

Click here to view the embedded video.

In the face of thousands of prisoners passing through the system, an astonishing number of admitted homicides, and a hastily drafted law – the Military Commissions Act – that retroactively grants immunity to government officials for crimes against humanity while denying the fundamental right of habeas corpus to others, forces us to ask why, in the face of so much evidence of the ineffectiveness of cruelty as a means of obtaining information, we sought to insist on its use? Have we, by pursuing such ruthless means, lost the moral high ground in the war on terror and made ourselves less safe? Even more important, have we compromised our own sense of humanity, our democratic values and our effectiveness as a world leader?

MPAA Controversy

The MPAA unleashed a storm of controversy due to it’s refusal to allow the use a a movie poster showing a hooded detainee being lead off into the distance by two soldiers. They described it as being “not suitable for all audiences.”

According to ThinkFilm, which produced the documentary, the MPAA objected to the “image of the hood.” Last year, the MPAA also censored the poster for the documentary The Road to Guantanamo, because it showed a detainee “hanging by his handcuffed wrists, with a burlap sack over his head and a blindfold tied around the hood.” – Think Progress

A spokesman for the MPAA said: “We treat all films the same. Ads will be seen by all audiences, including children. If the advertising is not suitable for all audiences it will not be approved by the advertising administration.” But with the following posters having been approved for all audiences…

It leads me to believe that the actual reason might be more political. Take a look at the following movies posters which were rejected, compare the posters below with the posters above. Which do you think should have been rejected?

The only reason seems to be is, that the movies they are for are critical of the Bush Administration.

About the Production

“We also have to work through…the dark side…it’s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective.” - Vice President Dick Cheney to Tim Russert on “Meet the Press” (2001)

Taxi to the Dark Side, The latest prize-winning documentary from Oscar-nominee Alex Gibney, confirms his standing as one of the foremost non-fiction filmmakers working today. A stunning inquiry into the suspicious death of an Afghani taxi driver at Bagram air base in 2002, the film is a fastidiously assembled, uncommonly well-researched examination of how an innocent civilian was apprehended, imprisoned, tortured, and ultimately murdered by the greatest democracy on earth. By using documents and records of the incident with candid testimony from eyewitnesses and participants, the film uncovers an inescapable link between the tragic incidents that unfolded in Bagram and the policies made at the very highest level of the United States government in Washington, D.C. Combining the cool detachment of a forensic expert with the heated indignation of a proud American who holds his country to a high standard, Gibney’s stunning film reveals how the Bush administration has systematically betrayed the very ideals it professes to uphold.

Gibney first got the idea for Taxi to the Dark Side from the men who would eventually go on to serve as the executive producers of the project. “The idea of doing a film on torture was brought to me – separately – by Don Glascoff, Sid Blumenthal, and Rob Johnson,” he says. “Once I took on the assignment, with the urging of my father, I went looking for a story that could carry the burden of the subject.” He first came upon the story of Dilawar, the Afghan cab driver who died while in custody at Bagram prison, in a New York Times article by Tim Golden and, before long, he realized that this was the central story he had been searching for.

“I think that the subject of corruption unites my films,” says Gibney. “‘Enron’ was about economic corruption, and TAXI is about the corruption of the rule of law. Both are about the corruption of character—how good people can end up doing very bad things. ‘The Trial of Henry Kissinger’ fits into this model as well. I also tend to make films about perps rather than victims. It is true that Dilawar – a true innocent victim – is at the heart of the story of TAXI. But the thematic subject of the film is an investigation into how a small number of Americans took our nation to the ‘dark side.’”

Having found his subject, Gibney wisely chose not to approach it journalistically but, rather, to give it the more classically cinematic structure of a whodunit. “I think of every one of my films as a kind of detective story,” he says. “Detectives – or private eyes – are truth seekers who often discover things they didn’t expect. Putting that process at the heart of the narrative gives my films a kind of momentum, I think. ‘Enron’ was a ‘heist film;’ TAXI is a murder mystery.” And, Gibney observes, once the murder is solved, as in all true murder mysteries, you understand who was responsible. “But,” he continues, “like the best murder mysteries of, say, Raymond Chandler, TAXI is not merely a whodunit. The movie is really about the mood, the atmosphere surrounding the murder, and ‘how and why’ the murder was committed.” Obviously, in TAXI, the mystery as to who killed Dilawar is important, but far more important says Gibney, “is understanding the ‘dark side’ and how this Administration took us there with the ease of a late night taxicab ride across Constitution Avenue in Washington, D.C.”

Like a latter-day Sam Spade, Gibney hunted down dozens of potential witnesses in order to figure out all of the “who’s,” “how’s,” and “why’s” of the Dilawar case. “For films like this,” he stresses, “it is critical to get ‘inside’ the story. You don’t want experts; you want participants. I went in search of anyone who was at Bagram during the time Dilawar was imprisoned there –prisoners, guards, and interrogators. I also went in search of lawyers for detainees, the architects of the Administration policy, dissidents in the Administration, military officers, etc. In the end we did obtain interviews with some interrogators who questioned Dilawar, and some MPs who were directly responsible for his homicide. This was particularly difficult, but I think our quest was aided by the fact that these men really wanted to talk about what had happened, and they were bitter that they were being prosecuted when the men and women who ordered them to commit crimes were barely even investigated, much less prosecuted.”

While some of these people surprised Gibney with their willingness to talk, others whose testimony might have been very helpful to the “case” would not. “Carolyn Wood has consistently refused to be interviewed by anyone,” he says. “She’s not a high-ranking officer, but her testimony would reveal much about the way the Bush Administration conducted its interrogation and detention policies.” He continues, “I also tried to talk to other Administration officials who declined to be interviewed. The more that is revealed about this story, the more it makes sense why most Administration officials didn’t want to speak: they are concerned that they may be prosecuted for what they have done. A few dissident voices – like Jack Goldsmith, who declined to talk to me – have come forward more recently. One of the things that struck me was that many of the fiercest critics of the Administration (including those like Alberto Mora and Lawrence Wilkerson, who did speak to me) were conservative republicans. This story was not about left and right,” Gibney learned, “it was about right and wrong.”

In addition to interviews, Gibney unearthed photographs, videotapes and documents – particularly from the mysterious Bagram prison – that have never been seen before. And the videotape of the senior JAG officer in Afghanistan acknowledging a defacto policy of knee strikes that, according to the Army coroner, “pulpified” Dilawar’s legs, is a cathode ray vision of the banality of evil.

When a director plays detective in this fashion, there will not only be discoveries, digressions, and disappointments, there will also be difficulties. “The problem with this approach in a documentary,” observes Gibney, “is that the story has to be rewritten constantly in the cutting room. I find that the best documentaries end up being structured like good fiction films. But, this is very hard to do in practice, because the ‘script’ of a documentary is written during and after shooting.” Gibney also finds that the story he is trying to tell is often at odds with his key thematic concerns. “I always want to include key ideas,” he notes, “and am frustrated when they seem to get in the way of the story. So, there’s a tension in the cutting room. At some point, on every film, the evolving story seems to raise its head and demands to be given its due. When I don’t listen to that insistent voice, I usually do so at my peril.”

Gibney’s persistence in finding the perfect form for his material, and his desire to match the structure and narrative drive of a fiction feature to non-fiction material, makes Taxi to the Dark Side stand apart from other documentaries covering similar subject matter. It is interesting to note that, though Gibney served as executive producer on Charles Ferguson’s “No End in Sight,” providing guidance on key production and story issues, TAXI has a look that is very different from that and all of the so-called ‘Iraq films.’ Gibney cites as his unexpected chief stylistic influences a number of filmmakers who worked in dramatic films. “I love Sergio Leone,” he says, adding that “Once Upon a Time in the West” is a favorite film – for stylistic reasons – and that “the title sequence in TAXI – with its middle eastern ‘western’ look – is my doc nod to Sergio.” Other favorites are Luis Bunuel, Scorsese, Wim Wenders, Kurosawa (“High and Low” makes me think of “Enron,” he notes), and Jacques Tourneur’s intricately strucured noir thriller, “Out of the Past.” Even his non-fiction preferences are as notable for their groundbreaking form as for their significant subject matter: The Maysles’ “Gimme Shelter,” Marcel Ophuls’ “The Sorrow and the Pity,” and Alain Resnais’ “Night and Fog” (“Anyone who thinks narration doesn’t belong in docs,” he says, “should watch ‘Night and Fog!”).

Many politically-urgent documentaries are being made these days, but Alex Gibney is one of few practitioners of the genre who values timelessness as much as timeliness. He notes that “TAXI is not an ‘Iraq film.’ It’s not really about the war in Iraq, though we do include some materials and stories about it. Rather, the film is about GWOT, the acronym the Bush Administration uses to describe its ‘Global War on Terror.’ But, in a more fundamental sense, it’s not really about that either; it’s really about the American character and whether we have become something rather different from what we imagine ourselves to be.”

Acknowledging that for Taxi to the Dark Side to be of lasting quality, it must speak to audiences both now and decades from now, Gibney concludes, “In the here and now, I want viewers to get mad and make our leaders accountable for the damage they have done. Over the long haul, I hope TAXI will stand as cautionary tale of how people and their society can be corrupted by fear and rage. While I hope it will be seen as utterly irrelevant twenty years from now, I don’t think it will be.”

Here are some of the interviewees:

PFC. Willie Brand

Willie Brand was a MP Guard at Bagram Air Force Base, a detention center in Bagram, Afghanistan. Brand faced court martial for his role in the deaths of detainees Dilawar and Habibullah at Bagram. In his trial, Brand and his attorney spoke out about what they considered a lack of necessary training and clear rules for MP’s. Brand was convicted by a military jury of assault, maltreatment, maiming and making a false official statement. He was given a reduction in rank and pay to private.

Special Agent Jack Cloonan, Ret.

An FBI special agent from 1977 to 2002, Cloonan started working Al Qaeda cases in the mid-1990s. Cloonan, an advocate of the FBI’s humane methods of interrogation, cultivated former Al Qaeda operatives Jamal al-Fadl and Ali Mohammed as cooperative sources in the years before 9/11. Cloonan also interrogated Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, who ran an Al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan and who was one of the highest-ranking Al Qaeda operatives captured in the first months of the war in Afghanistan.

Now in the private sector, Cloonan is President of Clayton Consultants. Since retiring from the FBI, Cloonan has also served as a counter-terrorism consultant and commentator for ABC News.

SPC. Damien Corsetti

Corsetti, a Military Intelligence soldier in Bagram and Abu Ghraib, was given the nickname “Monster,” and “King of Torture” by soldiers in his unit, and was allegedly called upon by other interrogators to frighten prisoners using the interrogation technique known as “Fear up, harsh.” Other detainees, such as Moazzam Begg, describe Corsetti as a sympathetic interrogator who never engaged in abuse, and was helpful in enduring detention. As part of the Army’s investigation into prisoner abuse at Bagram, Corsetti was charged with dereliction of duty, maltreatment, assault and performing an indecent act with another person. Corsetti was later found not guilty of all charges.

Carlotta Gall

Carlotta Gall is a New York Times correspondent based in Kabul, assigned to cover Afghanistan and Western Pakistan. She has been covering the Taliban and Al Qaeda insurgency from the start, and led a journalistic investigation into the cause and culpability of the death of the 22-year-old Afghan detainee Dilawar.

Tim Golden

Tim Golden is an investigative reporter for the New York Times and a writer for the New York Times Magazine. Prior to joining the Times’ staff he worked for the Miami Herald and United Press International. He was a member of the Times team that won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting for articles about drug corruption in Mexico. While working at the Miami Herald, he shared a 1987 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting for stories on the Iran-Contra affair. Golden, along with Carlotta Gall, reported on the prisoner abuse of Dilawar and other detainees in Bagram, Afghanistan.

Scott Horton

Scott Horton a New York based attorney working international law, human rights law and the law of armed conflict, Horton lectures at Columbia Law School, and is a life-long human rights advocate. He is a co-founder of the American University in Central Asia, and has been involved in some of the most significant foreign investment projects in the Central Eurasian region. Scott recently led a number of studies of abuse issues associated with the conduct of the war on
terror for the New York City Bar Association, where he has chaired several committees, including, most recently, the Committee on International Law. He is also a member of the board of the National Institute of Military Justice, the Andrei Sakharov Foundation, the EurasiaGroup and the American Branch of the International Law Association.

SPC. Tony Lagouranis

Spc. Lagouranis was a U.S. Army interrogator from 2001 to 2005, and served a tour of duty in Iraq from January 2004 to January 2005. He was first stationed at Abu Ghraib; in that spring he joined a special intelligence gathering task force that moved among detention facilities around the country. There, he learned first hand about the “culture of abuse” permeating interrogations throughout Iraq. Lagouranis is one of a number of Iraq War veterans who have provided first hand accounts of torture and abuse of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. military. Other U. S. military personnel have described torture and abuse of Iraqi prisoners while shielding their identities. His book, “Fear Up Harsh: An Army Interrogator’s Dark Journey through Iraq” will be published in June 2007.

Senator Carl Levin (D-MI)

Carl Levin is the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, where he was an early and consistent advocate of efforts to prepare the American military to combat terrorism and other emerging threats of the post-Cold War world. The National Guard Association of the United States presented Senator Levin with its 2004 Harry S. Truman Award for distinguished service in support of national defense. The award cited Levin’s “long-standing, diligent and impassioned commitment on the readiness, morale and welfare of our military forces, their families and the modernization of our armed forces.” To ensure accountability in the intelligence community, Senator Levin has continued to press the Bush administration to clarify which intelligence entity is responsible for specific intelligence objectives.

Alberto Mora

In December 2002, Alberto J. Mora, then general counsel of the United States Navy, was alerted by Navy investigators to reports that detainees held by the U.S. military at Guantanamo Bay were being subjected to cruel and unlawful interrogation practices. Mora, whose civilian position accorded him a rank equal to that of a four-star general, soon came to learn that the cruel and abusive practices of United States military interrogators at Guantanamo were the result of significant policy shifts at the highest levels of the U.S. government. Over the next three years, Mora waged a campaign inside the Bush Administration to prevent military and civilian leaders from codifying any policy that might implicitly or explicitly sanction the mistreatment of Guantanamo detainees as part of the war on terror. For his moral courage and his commitment to upholding American values, Alberto Mora was honored with the 2006 John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award.

Tom Wilner

Wilner, once a schoolmate of Al Gore’s at Washington’s prestigious St. Albans School and a fraternity brother of George W. Bush’s at Yale, is now a managing partner at Shearman & Sterling, LLP. He heads their International Trade and Global Relations Practice. Wilner has represented the human rights cases of a several Kuwaiti citizens detained at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba since May 2002.

John Yoo

Yoo joined the Boalt Hall faculty at Berkeley in 1993, then clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas of the U.S. Supreme Court. He served as general counsel of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee from 1995-96. From 2001 to 2003, he served as a deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel at the U.S. Department of Justice, where he helped author a series of memos that have come to be known informally as “The Torture Memos.”

Professor Yoo has received the Paul M. Bator Award for excellence in legal scholarship and teaching from the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy. He has testified before the judiciary committees of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, and has advised the State of California on constitutional issues.

Director Alex Gibney’s Statement

“Man torturing man is a fiend beyond description. You turn a corner in the dark and there he is. You congeal into a bundle of inanimate fear. You become the very soul of anesthesia. But there is no escaping him. It is your turn now… “ – Henry Miller

Only six weeks before he died last year, my father, a journalist and author named Frank Gibney, asked me to get my video camera. He wanted me to unhook him from the oxygen machine so that he could speak to me about the film that I was trying to make about torture and the war on terror. My father had been a Naval interrogator in World War II. He questioned Japanese prisoners on Okinawa, one of the bloodiest battles of the war and had risked his life trying to persuade some of those soldiers to leave the caves from which they were launching futile last-ditch suicide missions. (Years later, bathed in the rippling neon lights of downtown Tokyo, he would introduce me to some of those former prisoners over bottles of sake in a neighborhood sushi bar.)

But on this day in Santa Barbara, overlooking the ocean on which he had sailed into battle 60 years earlier, my father was very angry at the ongoing revelations of how, in the so-called “Global War on Terror (GWOT)” American soldiers had tortured prisoners in Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanamo and in various secret sites around the world. His fury was directed at some of the top officials in the Bush Administration – George W. Bush himself, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld (whom he knew slightly) and Alberto Gonzales – who had invented and rationalized a new policy of “coercive interrogation techniques” as the only way to combat a unique, new terrorist threat from enemies brutal enough to turn commercial airliners into suicide planes.

But my father had been there before. In the waning days of the Pacific War, the Japanese had shown us the “kamikaze” – literally “wind of God” – a wave of pilots who, like the Islamic terrorists many years later, turned their airplanes into suicide bombs. Yet, in interrogating these supposedly fanatical Japanese prisoners, my father and his fellow interrogators – all of whom had extensive language training, unlike most of the interrogators in the GWOT – discovered that most of the prisoners were not so different from their interrogators. They had wives, children and dreams of a better future for themselves and their families. More important to the military mission, they were rather free with information and provided important intelligence once they had established a rapport with their interrogators. It never occurred to my father to ask for permission to employ some of the brutal techniques that the Japanese had used against our soldiers.

“Why,” I asked. “Well,” he said, “because we didn’t need to and because we thought our principles gave us a strength that our enemy didn’t have.” He was furious at the Bush Administration because he felt that, in condoning techniques like water-boarding that had once been employed by the Spanish Inquisition, they had sacrificed the very principles we were supposed to be defending. The rule of law, he told me, is what we thought we were fighting for. “It’s what made us different,” he said. He despaired that, to wage a war on terror, we were taking on the values of the terrorists. “It’s got to stop,” he said.

This film is dedicated to my father – his righteous anger and his sense of possibility. Through him, I discovered that the issue of “torture” is not really about interrogation techniques. It is about a pandemic of corruption that ensues when the rule of law is weakened. He taught me that torture is like a virulent virus – spreading, mutating, building resistance to attempts to stop it – that infects everything in its path. It haunts the psyche of the soldier who administers it; it corrupts the officials who look the other way; it discredits the information obtained from it; it weakens the evidence in a search for justice, and it strengthens a despotic strain that takes hold in men and women who run hot with a peculiar patriotic fever: believing that, because they are “pure of heart,” they are entitled to be above the law.

- Alex Gibney, filmmaker

TIMELINE

1955

• Jul. 6, 1955 – Senate unanimously gave its advice and consent to the ratification of the Geneva Conventions

1990

• Oct. 27, 1990 – Senate unanimously gave its advice and consent to the ratification of the Convention Against Torture, article 2(1) of which obligated the United States to “take effective legislative, administrative, judicial or other measures to prevent acts of torture in any territory under its jurisdiction.”

1994

• US ratifies UN Convention Against Torture.

• While the U.S. Senate ratified the United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT) on October 27, 1990, President Clinton did not deposit the United States instrument of ratification of the Convention with the United Nations Secretary General until October 21, 1994. The United States’ obligations under the Convention Against Torture took effect 30 days later, on November 20, 1994.

1996

• The US Congress passes the War Crimes Act. The law defines a war crime to include a “grave breach of the Geneva Conventions.” The law applies if either the victim or the perpetrator is a national of the United States or a member of the U.S. armed forces. The penalty may be life imprisonment or death.

Ten years later, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld that Common Article 3 of the Third Geneva Convention applied to the War on Terrorism, with the unstated implication that any interrogation techniques that violated Common Article 3 constituted War Crimes.

The text of Common Article Three: “…the following acts are and shall remain prohibited at any time and in any place whatsoever…”

• Violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture;

• Taking of hostages;

• Outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment;

• The passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples.”

2001

• Aug. 4, 2001 – US refuses entry to Mohamed al-Qahtani at Orlando Airport by an immigration official and deports al-Qahtani back to Dubai

• Sept. 25, 2001 – John Yoo writes memo stating President has “broad constitutional powers” for waging war.

• Oct. 7, 2001 – U.S. invades Afghanistan

• Oct., 2001 – Dick Cheney visits CIA to try to get legal opinion allowing greater latitude for coercive interrogation. CIA Gen. Counsel does not give Cheney the decision he wants.

• Nov. 6, 2001 – Office of Legal Counsel’s Patrick Philbin sends 35-page confidential memo to Alberto Gonzales saying the president has “inherent authority” to establish military commissions. It also says that trying terrorists under the laws of war “does not mean that terrorists will receive the protections of the Geneva Conventions or the rights that laws accord to lawful combatants.”

• Nov. 10, 2001 – While senior military JAGs are preparing a response to the draft military order, at the White House, Cheney, Ashcroft, Haynes and White House lawyers have their own meeting (according to the NY Times, Cheney advocated withholding the draft from Rice and Powell).

• November 11, 2001 – Capture of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi in Pakistan.

• Nov. 13, 2001 – Bush signs an Executive Order authorizing the Defense Secretary to hold non U.S. citizens in indefinite detention. The Military Order: “Detention, Treatment and Trial of Certain Non-Citizens in War Against Terror” authorizes detention and trial by military commissions that should not be subject to principles of law and rules of evidence recognized by US courts or the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

• Dec., 2001 – Capture of Mohamed al-Qahtani in Afghanistan

• Dec. 16, 2001 – Rumsfeld visits Afghanistan.

• Dec. 19, 2001 – Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi transferred to US control at Bagram Air Force base. FBI agents begin questioning him. But the FBI refuses to use any “coercive interrogation techniques.” According to FBI Agent Jack Cloonan, the interrogation produces information regarding Richard Reid and Zacarias Moussaoui. Despite this progress, at the request of George Tenet, the Bush Administration decides to transfer al-Libi to the custody of the CIA. (see January 2002 below.)

• Dec. 28, 2001 – Patrick Philbin (Deputy Asst. Attorney General) and John Yoo write memo on habeas corpus and Guantanamo (federal district court could not properly exercise habeas jurisdiction over an aliens detained at GBC).

• Late 2001 – Pres. Bush signs top-secret finding authorizing DOD to set up Special Access Program (SAP) known to only a few high-level folks to kidnap or assassinate terror suspects or rendition them to sympathetic nations for more “coercive” interrogation.

2002

• January 2002 – US sends Mohamed al-Qahtani to Guantanamo.

• January 2002 – In Bagram, CIA agents wrap Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi up in duct tape and put him in a plywood box “for his own protection,” according to FBI agent Jack Cloonan. Al-Libi is sent to Cairo. After being “waterboarded,” al-Libi “confesses” that Iraq had given al-Qaeda training in bomb-making and poison gas. This supposed link between al-Qaeda and Iraq will become part of Colin Powell’s speech to the UN that laid the groundwork for the invasion of Iraq. Al-Libi will later claim that this link was part of a “false confession” obtained through torture. The CIA will confirm that al-Libi’s testimony about the links between Iraq and al-Qaeda was false.

• Jan. 9, 2002 – John Yoo writes memo stating Geneva Conventions (as well as all international and US laws) do not apply to Al Qaeda and Taliban.

• Jan. 11, 2002 – William H. Taft responds to Yoo memo, calling Yoo’s opinions “seriously flawed.”

• Jan. 11, 2002 – First group of 20 detainees arrive at Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo.

• Jan. 18, 2002 – Bush decides that detainees who are classified as terrorists (soon to be classified as “unlawful combatants”) are disqualified from prisoner of war protection under the Geneva conventions.

• Jan. 19, 2002 – Rumsfeld memo declares Al Qaeda and Taliban not prisoners of war under Geneva Conventions.

• Jan. 22, 2002 – Jay Bybee authors memo stating Geneva doesn’t apply to al Qaeda and Bush has constitutional authority to “suspend our treaty obligations toward Afghanistan.”

• Jan. 22, 2002 – At the request of Alberto Gonzales, Pentagon lawyers direct INTEL officers at Gitmo to fill out a one-page form for each prisoner certifying the president’s “reason to believe” their involvement with terrorism. Within weeks, INTEL officers say that they don’t even have enough evidence on most prisoners to complete the forms.

• Jan. 25, 2002 – In memo to Bush, Gonzales refers to aspects of Geneva Conventions as “quaint.” He acknowledged that scrapping GC could cause “widespread condemnation” from other countries and increase the likelihood that U.S. servicemen would be mistreated. Mr. Gonzales calls the campaign against terrorism “a new kind of war” that makes certain provisions of the Geneva Convention “obsolete.”

• Jan. 26, 2002 – Colin Powell writes a memo to Gonzales that asks the administration to reconsider its decision that Al Qaeda and Taliban members are not entitled to prisoner-of-war status, saying that doing so would “reverse over a century of U.S. policy and practice … and undermine the protections of the laws of war for our troops, both in this specific conflict and in general.”

• Jan. 27, 2002 – Four U.S. senators accompany Rumsfeld to Guantanamo: Hawaii Sen. Daniel Inouye, Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens, California Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Texas Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison.

• Early 2002 – Don Guter (Navy Judge Advocate General) has meeting with Haynes and says, according to NY Times’s Tim Golden: “we need more information.” “No you don’t,” says Haynes.

• Early 2002 – Documents and interviews reveal that, regarding “enemy combatants,” Gonzales, David Addington and Tim Flanigan argued against presumption of innocence and participation of civilian lawyers.

• Feb. 1, 2002 – Ashcroft writes memo to Pres. Bush stating Geneva Conventions do not apply to Taliban or al Qaeda.

• Feb. 2, 2002 – In memo to White House Counsel Gonzales, Taft argues that Geneva Conventions do apply.

• Feb. 7, 2002 – Bush issues a directive defining Taliban and al Qaeda captives as “unlawful combatants,” not prisoners of war and states the “war against terror ushers in a new paradigm”

• Feb. 21, 2002 – Federal judge dismisses a challenge to the detentions.

• Feb. 27, 2002 – 1st hunger strike at Guantanamo (to protest a rule against turbans, U.S. officials decide to allow turbans).

• Mar., 2002 – Gen. Dunlavey (in charge of Guantanamo) flies to Afghanistan and Kuwait

• Mar. 21, 2002 – Guantanamo Administrators still don’t have evidence on Guantanamo detainees, so DOD indicates that they will hold them indefinitely as “enemy combatants.”

• May 2002 – FBI agents begin to complain about treatment of detainees at Guantanamo. Complaints put in writing and relayed to Haynes at DOD.

• Jul., 2002 – 519th MI company is sent to Bagram. Capt. Carolyn Wood is the officer in charge. According to Emily Bazelon, Wood rewrote interrogation policy to include more “aggressive” techniques.

• Jul., 2002 – Gitmo officials realize that al-Qahtani – now in custody at Guantanamo – may be the man intended to be the 20th highjacker. More intensive interrogation begins.

• Late summer 2002 – CIA analyst travels to Guanatnamo to find out why so little useful intelligence is being obtained. After interviewing 30 prisoners, “he came back convinced that they were committing war crimes in Guantanamo.” (Hersh Chain of Command) His report – Highly Classified – showed how badly prisoners were treated and how recklessly they had been captured, without regard to real intelligence value.

• Aug., 2002 – 377th MP Unit sent to Bagram.

• Aug. 1, 2002 – The “torture memo”, authored by Jay Bybee and John Yoo, declares that “certain acts may be cruel, inhuman, or degrading, but still not produce pain and suffering of the requisite intensity to fall within Section 2340” [of convention against torture, which bans cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment]

• Fall 2002 – General John Gordon reads the report and is very “troubled,” believing that “it was totally out of character with the American value system” and that it posed dangers for US soldiers if captured. (Hersh, COC)

• Oct. 11, 2002 – Memo from Guantanamo Administrators requesting expanded interrogation techniques travels up chain of command to Rumsfeld.

• Oct. 25, 2002 – Commander General James Hill sends memo to Gen. Myers. Hill says he is “uncertain whether all the techniques in the third category [there are three categories of techniques in the request to Rumsfeld] are legal under US law…”

• Nov., 2002 – Gen. Miller given command of Joint Task Force Guantanamo Bay.

• Nov. 23, 2002 – An approved “special interrogation plan” for Detainee 063 (Mohammed al-Qahtani) begins. The beginning of the interrogation log is 10 days prior to the official approval of expanded techniques by Donald Rumsfeld (see below).

• Nov. 27, 2002 – In response to a request for expanded interrogation techniques at Guantanamo, Haynes advises Rumsfeld to apply only Category I & II and “non-injurious physical conduct” of III.

• Nov. 30, 2002 – Detainee Habibullah arrives at Bagram

• Late 2002 – General John Gordon gets meeting with Rice and Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld said he would “look into” the issue of detainee abuse.

• Dec. 2, 2002 – Rumsfeld approves techniques in Haynes’ 11/27 memo (these techniques include: stress positions, isolation, use of hoods, removal of clothing, use of detainees’ individual phobias).

• Dec. 3, 2002 – Detainee Habibullah dies at Bagram

• Dec. 5, 2002 – Detainee Dilawar arrives at Bagram

• Dec. 10, 2002 – Detainee Dilawar dies at Bagram

• Dec. 17, 2002 – Navy General Counsel General Alberto Mora learns of abuse at Guantanamo

2003

• Jan. 11, 2003 – Aggressive interrogation of al-Qahtani stops

• Jan. 15, 2003 – After opposition to interrogation techniques by military lawyers – particularly Alberto Mora – Rumsfeld rescinds permission to use previously approved II & III techniques during Guantanamo interrogations, and approves them only on a case by case basis. Rumsfeld also convenes working group to assess legal policy and operational issues related to detainees.

• Mar. 6, 2003 – Working Group Report recommends taking Geneva Conventions into account but determines that Taliban detainees do not qualify as prisoners of war and that Geneva Conventions do not apply to anyone at Guantanamo. However, the working group also says that the US is bound to Torture Convention the of 1994 (as long as it is in accord with constitutional amendments 5, 8 &14).

• Mar. 20, 2003 – U.S. invades Iraq

• Apr. 4, 2003 – The working group argues that it may be necessary to interrogate detainees “in a manner beyond that which may be applied to a prisoner of war who is subject to Geneva Conventions.” Report details defenses for use of torture and legal technicalities that can be used to “create a good faith defense against prosecution.”

• June 2003 – Army Reserve Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski is named commander of all military prisons in Iraq

• Jul. 6, 2003 – Joseph Wilson reveals that the central reason for going to war – WMD – was false.

• July, 2003 – 519th MI Co. – with Carolyn Wood still in charge – is sent to Abu Ghraib.

• Aug. 31 – Sep. 9, 2003 – General Miller visits Abu Ghraib to “gitmoize” Iraq detention and interrogation operations.

• Sep. 10, 2003 – Chaplain James Yee is arrested.

• Dec. 3, 2003 – Australian detainee David Hicks is first prisoner Guantanamo to be given a lawyer.

• Dec. 4, 2003 – Rumsfeld visits Afghanistan.

• Dec. 6, 2003 – Rumsfeld makes a surprise visit to troops in Iraq.

2004

• Jan. 13, 2004 – MP Joseph Darby, gives army investigators a disk containing photos showing Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse. The Pentagon is informed.

• Jan. 2004 – Rumsfeld learns of Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse, tells Bush shortly after.

• Jan.16, 2004 – US Central Command issues five-sentence press release about investigation into mistreatment of prisoners. Rumsfeld claims this is when he first learned of abuses.

• Jan. 19, 2004 – Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski is formally admonished and quietly suspended.

• Jan. 19, 2004 – Gen. Sanchez orders investigation into Abu Ghraib.

• Feb. 23, 2004 – Rumsfeld visits Iraq.

• Feb.26, 2004 – Taguba report completed. It notes that, from Oct. to Dec. 2003, there were “sadistic, blatant and wanton crimnal abuses” at Abu Ghraib.

• Mar. 22, 2004 – Miller is appointed Deputy Commander for Detainee Operations, Combined Joint Task Force – 7/Multinational Force – Iraq.

• Apr. 9, 2004 – Article 32 Hearing (military equivalent of a Grand jury) for Sergeant Frederick.

• Apr. 20, 2004 – Supreme Court hears arguments on the Guantanamo detentions.

• May 13, 2004 – Rumsfeld visits Abu Ghraib prison.

• Jun. 22, 2004 – Haynes assures press that no prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan or Cuba had been tortured.

• Jun. 28, 2004 – In Rasul v Bush decision, the Supreme Court rules that Guantanamo detainees can challenge their captivity in federal courts.

• Jul. 7, 2004 – Navy General Counsel Alberto Mora sends memo to Vice Admiral Church that details his attempts to halt administration policy on detainees.

• Jul. 30, 2004 – The first hearings begin for the Pentagon created Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRTs), a non-judicial process to assess value and danger of detainees.

• Aug. 30, 2004 – Pentagon permits lawyer Gitanjali Guiterrez to meet detainees Begg, and Abassi for habeas corpus suits

• Nov. 10, 2004 – Bush administration nominates Alberto Gonzales to be Attorney General.

• Dec. 30, 2004 – Deputy Attorney General James Comey disavows Bybee torture memo

2005

• Jan. 6, 2005 – Gonzales confirmation hearings begin.

• Feb. 3, 2005 – Gonzales is sworn in as Attorney General

• May 16, 2005 – Sgt. Anthony Morden is charged with 1 count assault and 2 counts of dereliction of duty. Later Morden is sentenced to 75 days in prison, reduced in rank to private, and given a bad conduct discharge.

• May 16, 2005 – Sgt. Selena Salcedo is charged with dereliction of duty and assault. Later reduced in rank, fined $1000 and given letter of reprimand.

• Aug. 17, 2005 – Pfc. Willie Brand is convicted of assault, maiming, maltreatment, and making a false official statement. He is reduced in rank to private.

• Aug. 24, 2005 – Spc. Glendale Walls pleads guilty to dereliction of duty and assault. He is later sentenced to 2 months in prison, reduced in rank to private and a given bad-conduct discharge.

• Sep. 27, 2005 – Lynndie England is sentenced to 3 yrs in jail.

• Sep. 29, 2005 – Sgt. Duane Grubb pleads not guilty to charges of assault, maltreatment and making false official statement. Grubb is later acquitted.

2006

• Jan. 6, 2006 – Charged of dereliction of duty and making a false official statement against Capt. Christopher Beiring are dropped. He is given a written reprimand for dereliction of duty.

• Jun. 1, 2006 – Pfc. Damien Corsetti is acquitted of dereliction of duty, maltreatment, assault, wrongful use of hashish, and performing an indecent act with another person.

End of timeline.

Editor’s Note: Much of the information contained in this article is taken from the press packet distributed by Think Films and their publicity team.

Nothing could be less American than a government that can indefinitely hold people in secret torture cells, take away their protections against horrific and cruel abuse, put them on trial based on evidence that they cannot see, sentence them to death based on testimony literally beaten out of witnesses, and then slam shut the courthouse door for any habeas petition, but that’s exactly what Congress just approved. – Christopher Anders, an ACLU Legislative Counsel

Here’s a video clip showing what a difference having a Democrat controlled House and Senate will do for you!

Click here to view the embedded video.

No more and never again!

Pentagon Tracked at Least 186 Anti-Military Protests

“It cannot be an accident or coincidence that nearly 200 anti-war protests ended up in a Pentagon threat database,” said Ann Beeson, Associate Legal Director of the ACLU. “This unchecked surveillance is part of a broad pattern of the Bush administration using ‘national security’ as an excuse to run roughshod over the privacy and free speech rights of Americans.”

The ACLU report reviews hundreds of pages of Defense Department documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed last year. The documents revealed that the surveillance of peace groups and anti-war activists was more widespread than previously known.

The latest document obtained by the ACLU, and released today, is an undated 2006 memo reviewing the Defense Department’s Threat and Local Observation Notice (TALON) database, which was found to list several peaceful protesters as potential threats to the military. According to the memo, as of February 10, 2006, the Defense Department had deleted 186 TALON reports that involved “anti-military protests or demonstrations in the U.S.” In addition, the Defense Department identified 2,821 TALON reports remaining in the database that contain what the Department describes as “U.S. person information,” but it is unclear whether those reports pertain to protest activities.

The memo also states that “personnel from 28 organizations were authorized to use TALON” and 3,589 users have been authorized to submit TALON reports or access the database. Because of such wide access to the database, even deleted reports may still appear in the files of other government agencies, the ACLU said.

The ACLU said the Pentagon’s misuse of the TALON database is just one example of increased government surveillance of innocent Americans. With the help of phone companies, the National Security Agency has been conducting warrantless wiretapping of U.S. phones and reading the e-mails of countless Americans, all without a warrant. The FBI has gathered information about peace activists and recruited confidential informants inside lawful advocacy organizations like Greenpeace and PETA. Less than a month ago, President Bush signed a statement declaring that he is authorized to open the domestic mail of American citizens without a warrant. This weekend, The New York Times revealed that the Pentagon has been using “National Security Letters” to obtain banking and credit records of hundreds of Americans.

“Congress should not let this president off the hook for inappropriate surveillance by the Pentagon,” said Caroline Fredrickson, Director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office. “Americans must once again be confident we can exercise our constitutionally protected right to protest without becoming the subject of a secret government file.”

In response to the ACLU’s FOIA requests filed on February 1, 2006, the Defense Department has released dozens of TALON reports that were compiled on Americans. Many of the reports focus on anti-military recruitment events and protests, including activities organized by the Quaker organization American Friends Service Committee, United for Peace and Justice, Veterans for Peace, and Catholic Worker. The TALON reports tracked events in 13 states and the District of Columbia: Alabama, California, Georgia, Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Massachusetts, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Rhode Island, and Texas.

The ACLU said that, even though the Defense Department has conceded that much of this information should not have been retained in its TALON database, there are still many unanswered questions.

“We do not know whether the Department of Defense maintains other threat databases that include similar information, nor whether Department of Defense personnel are engaged in other information-gathering about United States citizens,” said the ACLU in its report. “We do not know the extent to which other federal agencies might have been involved in collecting this information. We do not know whether the information improperly included in the TALON database was distributed to other government agencies.”

The report added, “we have only the Pentagon’s word that the errors and misjudgments that led to widespread surveillance of U.S. citizens have been corrected.”

The ACLU report, No Real Threat: The Pentagon’s Secret Database on Peaceful Protest, is available online at: http://www.aclu.org/safefree/spyfiles/27988pub20070117.html

The Pentagon document released today as a result of the ACLU lawsuit is online at: http://www.aclu.org/safefree/spyfiles/28021lgl20070117.html

More information on government surveillance is online at: http://www.aclu.org/spyfiles

Join the Tennessee Chapter of the ACLU today to help protect your freedoms!

* This report is a press release from the American Civil Liberities Union.

The President may have started a new secret, informal war against Syria and Iran without the consent of Congress or any broad discussion with the country.

Washington intelligence, military and foreign policy circles are abuzz today with speculation that the President, yesterday or in recent days, sent a secret Executive Order to the Secretary of Defense and to the Director of the CIA to launch military operations against Syria and Iran.

The President may have started a new secret, informal war against Syria and Iran without the consent of Congress or any broad discussion with the country.

The bare outlines of that order may have appeared in President Bush’s Address to the Nation last night outlining his new course on Iraq:

Succeeding in Iraq also requires defending its territorial integrity and stabilizing the region in the face of extremist challenges. This begins with addressing Iran and Syria. These two regimes are allowing terrorists and insurgents to use their territory to move in and out of Iraq. Iran is providing material support for attacks on American troops. We will disrupt the attacks on our forces. We’ll interrupt the flow of support from Iran and Syria. And we will seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq. We’re also taking other steps to bolster the security of Iraq and protect American interests in the Middle East. I recently ordered the deployment of an additional carrier strike group to the region. We will expand intelligence-sharing and deploy Patriot air defense systems to reassure our friends and allies. We will work with the governments of Turkey and Iraq to help them resolve problems along their border. And we will work with others to prevent Iran from gaining nuclear weapons and dominating the region.

Adding fuel to the speculation is that U.S. forces today raided an Iranian Consulate in Arbil, Iraq and detained five Iranian staff members. Given that Iran showed little deference to the political sanctity of the US Embassy in Tehran 29 years ago, it would be ironic for Iran to hyperventilate much about the raid.

But what is disconcerting is that some are speculating that Bush has decided to heat up military engagement with Iran and Syria — taking possible action within their borders, not just within Iraq.

Some are suggesting that the Consulate raid may have been designed to try and prompt a military response from Iran — to generate a casus belli for further American action.

If this is the case, the debate about adding four brigades to Iraq is pathetic. The situation will get even hotter than it now is, worsening the American position and exposing the fact that to fight Iran both within the borders of Iraq and into Iranian territory, there are not enough troops in the theatre.

Bush may really have pushed the escalation pedal more than any of us realize.
– Steve Clemons

UPDATE: This exchange today in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee between Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joseph Biden and Senator Chuck Hagel with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is full of non-denial denials and evasive answers to Biden’s query about the President’s ability to authorize military operations against forces within Iran and Syria:

SEN. BIDEN: Last night, the president said, and I quote, “Succeeding in Iraq requires defending its territorial integrity and stabilizing the region in the face of extremist challenges, and that begins with addressing Iran and Syria.” He went on to say, “We will interrupt the flow of support for Iran and Syria, and we will seek out and destroy networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq.”Does that mean the president has plans to cross the Syrian and/or Iranian border to pursue those persons or individuals or governments providing that help?

SEC. RICE: Mr. Chairman, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs was just asked this question, and I think he perhaps said it best. He talked about what we’re really trying to do here which is to protect our forces and that we are doing that by seeking out these networks that we know are operating in Iraq. We are doing it through intelligence. We are then able, as we did on the 21st of December, to go after these groups where we find them. In that case, we then asked the Iraqi government to declare them persona non grata and expel them from the country because they were holding diplomatic passports.

But the — what is really being contemplated here in terms of these networks is that we believe we can do what we need to do inside Iraq. Obviously, the president isn’t going to rule anything out to protect our troops, but the plan is to take down these networks in Iraq.

The broader point is that we do have and we have always had as a country very strong interests and allies in the Gulf Region, and we do need to work with our allies to make certain that they have the defense capacity that they need against growing Iranian military build-up, that they fell that we are going to be a presence in the Persian Gulf Region as we have been, and that we establish confidence with the states with which we have long alliances, that we will help defend their interests. And that’s what the president had in mind.

SEN. BIDEN: Secretary Rice, do you believe the president has the constitutional authority to pursue across the border into Iraq (sic/Iran) or Syria, the networks in those countries?

SEC. RICE: Well, Mr. Chairman, I think I would not like to speculate on the president’s constitutional authority or to try and say anything that certainly would abridge his constitutional authority, which is broad as commander in chief.

I do think that everyone will understand that — the American people and I assume the Congress expect the president to do what is necessary to protect our forces.

SEN. BIDEN: Madame Secretary, I just want to make it clear, speaking for myself, that if the president concluded he had to invade Iran or Iraq in pursuit of these — or Syria — in pursuit of these networks, I believe the present authorization granted the president to use force in Iraq does not cover that, and he does need congressional authority to do that. I just want to set that marker.

SEN. HAGEL: I want to comment briefly on the president’s speech last night, as he presented to America and the world his new strategy for Iraq, and then I want to ask you a couple of questions.

I’m going to note one of the points that the president made last night at the conclusion of his speech. When he said, quote, “We mourn the loss of every fallen American, and we owe it to them to build a future worthy of their sacrifice” — and I don’t think there is a question that we all in this country agree with that — but I would even begin with this evaluation; that we owe the military and their families a policy, a policy worthy of their sacrifices, and I don’t believe, Dr. Rice, we have that policy today.

I think what the president said last night — and I listened carefully and read through it again this morning — is all about a broadened American involvement, escalation in Iraq and the Middle East. I do not agree with that escalation, and I would further note that when you say, as you have here this morning, that we need to address and help the Iraqis and pay attention to the fact that Iraqis are being killed, Madame Secretary, Iraqis are killing Iraqis. We are in a civil war. This is sectarian violence out of control — Iraqi on Iraqi. Worse, it is inter-sectarian violence — Shi’a killing Shi’a.

To ask our young men and women to sacrifice their lives, to be put in the middle of a civil war is wrong.

It’s, first of all, in my opinion, morally wrong. It’s tactically, strategically, militarily wrong. We will not win a war of attrition in the Middle East.

And I further note that you talk about skepticism and pessimism of the American people and some in Congress. That is not some kind of a subjective analysis, that is because, Madame Secretary, we’ve been there almost four years, and there’s a reason for that skepticism and pessimism, and that is based on the facts on the ground, the reality of the dynamics.

And so I have been one, as you know, who have believed that the appropriate focus is not to escalate, but to try to find a broader incorporation of a framework. And it will have to be, certainly, regional, as many of us have been saying for a long time. That should not be new to anyone. But it has to be more than regional, it is going to have to be internally sponsored, and that’s going to include Iran and Syria.

When you were engaging Chairman Biden on this issue, on the specific question — will our troops go into Iran or Syria in pursuit, based on what the president said last night — you cannot sit here today — not because you’re dishonest or you don’t understand, but no one in our government can sit here today and tell Americans that we won’t engage the Iranians and the Syrians cross-border.

Some of us remember 1970, Madame Secretary, and that was Cambodia, and when our government lied to the American people and said we didn’t cross the border going into Cambodia. In fact we did. I happen to know something about that, as do some on this committee.

So, Madame Secretary, when you set in motion the kind of policy that the president is talking about here, it’s very, very dangerous. Matter of fact, I have to say, Madame Secretary, that I think this speech given last night by this president represents the most dangerous foreign policy blunder in this country since Vietnam, if it’s carried out. I will resist it — (interrupted by applause.)

Worrisome.
– Steve Clemons

In this half-hour film, Greg Palast and his team travel to New Orleans to investigate what has happened since Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast last year. On his visit, he discovers that the population of New Orleans is miniscule, the reconstruction sparse, suicide rates are climbing, and many have not, nor know how to, return to the city that care forgot. He examines why residents had to leave, what really caused the flood and why they aren’t returning.

Bonus Features Include: Tomorrow’s New Orleans – Whose City Will it Be? A half-hour conversation with Amy Goodman and Greg Palast where they sit down to discuss who is accountable for the ongoing disastrous situation in New Orleans.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Since September 11th there have been those who say that what we actually saw, may not have been what we thought. Videos on this subject have been in the top 100 videos on Google video for a long time. Well after a new one recently appeared in to the top 100 videos, I felt that perhaps we should all take a look. I make no judgments on the content of these videos. I don’t advocate for them or against them, consider this simply an exercise in constructive reasoning.

9/11 Loose Change Second Edition

Click here to view the embedded video.

“Loose Change 2nd Edition” is the follow-up to the most provocative 9-11 documentary on the market today.

This film shows direct connection between the attacks of September 11, 2001 and the United States government.

Evidence is derived from news footage, scientific fact, and most important, Americans who suffered through that tragic day.

9/11 Mysteries (Full Length, High Quality)

Click here to view the embedded video.

This is a brand new public domain 9/11 Truth documentary about the controlled demolition of the World Trade Center complex.

Judge orders program to be halted!

It’s just coming out, MSNBC and the AP are reporting that U.S. District Court Judge Anna Diggs Taylor has ruled that the President’s warrantless domestic spying program is unconstitutional, and that she has ordered an immediate halt to it.

This is a serious rebuke to the Bush Administrations, and their attempt to use the State secret privilege to block an independent judicial review of the legality of this program. This is something that other judges need to take note of as well.

“Plaintiffs have prevailed, and the public interest is clear, in this matter. It is the upholding of our Constitution,” Taylor wrote in her 43-page opinion.

Of course the Bush administration argued that they have the right to do this under both the 2001 Authorization for the use of military force, and Article 2 of the Constitution. Their so called unitary executive theory of executive powers (The president as king).

The government argued that the program is well within the president’s authority, but said proving that would require revealing state secrets.

The ACLU basically argued that Bush administration already had publicly revealed enough information about the program to allow a ruling, and that their claims of state-secrets privilege was thus irrelevant.

I will try to track down more information on this and get it posted later!

There was a recent piece by MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann on his Countdown show, which covered the history of using Terrorism and Terrorists by politicians especially Republican ones for Political Gain. It’s very damning and you should really go watch it, it’s also available on Crooks and Liars where I first learned about the piece! Then come back here, and read the rest of this article!

1,000 Cellphones

We have all heard of the recent arrest of three men of middle eastern descent who were caught with over 1,000 prepaid cellphones.

There were a thousand cell phones that were inside one motor vehicle. a laptop computer, a camera. When you toss three brown skinned men into the mix, yep must be Terrorism.

“We didn’t know exactly what was going on. You hear on the news about these phones being used to detonate IED’s.” – Michigan State Police Trooper Patrick Sharkey

We then heard this ominous statement

Tuscola County Prosecutor Mark E. Reene said Monday that representatives of his office and Caro police had met with Sunday with officials from the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. attorney’s office. He said all the agencies were working together on the investigation. He thinks the men had a complex plan to attack the Mackinac Bridge.

Prosecutors charged the men with collecting or providing materials for terrorist acts and surveillance of a vulnerable target for terrorist purposes.

The three Dallas-area men arrested in Michigan on state terrorism charges are well-known to cell phone wholesale and retail shops in Texas where they live. They were a part of a brisk trade that exists in buying phones from Wal-Mart and other discount stores and reselling them to smaller shops.

It’s actually fairly lucrative they can buy the phones for 20$ at Wal-marts and resell them for up to 38$ at smaller shops in cities without a local Wal-mart

The FBI has issued their own statement on this situation:

They had no information to indicate that the three Texas men arrested with about 1,000 cell phones in their van had any connections to a known terrorist group. There is no imminent threat to the bridge linking Michigan’s upper and lower peninsulas.

We can at least hope that the charges against these men are promptly dropped and that they receive an apology from the Michigan prosecutors and from every single news organization which trumpeted these slanderous charges. I wouldn’t hold my breath if I was one of the three men. Even if they do apologize, I seriously doubt that this is reported as widely or as loudly as the initial news releases on this matter were.

The UK Airline plots

On to plot to blow up U.S. bound flights with gel explosives

Some interesting facts

U.S., U.K. at odds over timing of arrests: British wanted to continue surveillance on terror suspects, official says.

British officials knowledgeable about the case said British police were planning to continue to run surveillance for at least another week to try to obtain more evidence, while American officials pressured them to arrest the suspects sooner. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the case. -NBC News

A news organization quoted a top aid to President Bush as denying the account of the British officials while another U.S. official admitted it was in fact true.

I would bet real money that the top aid to President Bush is in fact the same man coordinating this Republican campaign of fear, Karl Rove or one of his Deputies. We all know his penchant for being an anonymous source in support of the Administrations policies, just ask Ambassador Joe Wilson and his wife Valerie Plame, the formerly clandestine CIA agent.

The plot was serious and dangerous to flyer’s according to the TSA and Bush Administration:

For that reason, the United States Government has raised the nation’s threat level to Severe, or Red, for commercial flights originating in the United Kingdom bound for the United States. This adjustment reflects the Critical, or highest, alert level that has been implemented in the United Kingdom. To defend further against any remaining threat from this plot, we will also raise the threat level to High, or Orange, for all commercial aviation operating in or destined for the United States. Consistent with these higher threat levels, the Transportation Security Administration is coordinating with federal partners, airport authorities and commercial airlines on expanding the intensity of existing security requirements. Due to the nature of the threat revealed by this investigation, we are prohibiting any liquids, including beverages, hair gels, and lotions from being carried on the airplane. This determination will be constantly evaluated and updated when circumstances warrant. These changes will take effect at 4:00 AM local time across the country. Travelers should also anticipate additional security measures within the airport and at screening checkpoints. – TSA press release

But in fact a senior British official hinted that an attack was not imminent, saying that the suspects had not purchased any airline tickets, some did not even have passports. Another little tidbit they left out was that some of these “plotters” were known to the British security services even before the London subway bombings which occurred last year.

In short this plot had absolutely no chance of success and wasn’t a real threat, and the Bush Administration knew that when they raised the terror alert levels and instigated a renewal of the publics fear in order to influence the political landscape.

A TSA supervisor and trainer was quoted in the opinion section of The Leaf Chronicle today as stating the following facts about the agency.

• Liquid explosives are not new. The concept was tested in the Bojinka terrorist plot in 1994 and was successful. Introduction aboard aircraft is still a significant threat with an extremely high probability of success. TSA has known about this threat since its inception.
• TSA did not address definitive actions to prevent explosives from being carried on passengers through checkpoints until two Russian aircraft were destroyed by suicide bombers using explosive vests. The response was a torso pat down. Passenger-carried explosives are still a significant threat. TSA has known about this threat for years.
• Numerous nonstandard explosive/incendiary devices and employment methods exist now that present a significant introduction threat with very little chance of detection. TSA has known about this for years

He dismissed shoulder-fired missiles totally saying only that the TSA has no defense against these.

In the end he concluded with:

My point? Simple. TSA knows terrorists think outside the box, yet the TSA refuses to attempt to out think the bad guys, preferring to wait until something happens before they act. Multiple threats are still out there, still viable, and will likely not be fixed until a bunch of people die. – Sam Smith, The Leaf Chronicle Letters to the Editor

As for having to remove your shoes and have them x-rayed, In a April 2005 report entitled: “Systems Engineering Study of Civil Aviation Security — Phase I,” the Homeland Security Department concluded that images on X-ray machines don’t provide the information necessary to detect explosives. They are now trying to claim otherwise.

In the end removing your shoes and having them x-rayed is all a dog and pony show to make the public feel safer about flying.

It’s time to fight back

My suggestion until they stop trying to manipulate your fears, do not fly. It’s not worth the hassle, and having to surrender your civil liberties. If enough people stop flying, the airlines will scream bloody murder, and then we will get some common sense in how airline security is handled in this country.

Politicians like to ask “Are you safer today than you were 5 years ago?” My answer is maybe not, but you are not any more at risk either.

In November, vote out of your hopes, not your fears, and by doing so show the Republicans that “We the People” will not allow them use our fears (Terrorism, Immigration, and Gay Marriage) as a tools to enable them to control us.

There is an old saying, “Fool me once, Shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Don’t allow yourself to be fooled by George Bush and the Republicans again.

If you looked behind the grandiose press conferences of the cases against Abu Ali, Jose Padilla’s, and others like theirs, you find the flimsiest of facts – Counter punch

So, take these new claims of Terrorist plots with a grain of salt.

Much like that in the terrorism conspiracy claims made against 7 men from Miami, Florida recently.

“As been reported, seven men were arrested yesterday in Miami on charges of conspiring to support the al Qaeda terrorist organization by planning attacks on numerous targets, including bombing the Sears Tower in Chicago, the FBI building in North Miami Beach, Florida, and other government buildings in Miami-Date County.” – U.S. Department of Justice Press Release

But in reality the men were not linked to any terrorist groups, attempted no terrorist actions other than reportedly swearing oaths to a terrorist organization which they had never any contact with.

Our own government privately dismissed the risk of these so called conspirators, while at the same time making sensational claims to the contrary to the press.

Buzz Flash a online progressive news organization compiled a list of quotes:

The Chicago Police told the NY Daily News that There was “No credible threat… They had no capability to (destroy the Sears tower). They never got to that point – or could have.”

The Chicago Sun-Times reported that a Sears Tower executive informed them that “Law enforcement continues to tell us that they have never found evidence of a credible terrorism threat against Sears Tower that has gone beyond criminal discussions.”

A Senior federal law-enforcement source was quite clear that the group had “No means” to attack Sears Tower or other buildings. “There was no threat at all.” according to the Chicago Tribune.

The Executive Director of the Chicago Office of Emergency Management and Communication said “The plan developed in Florida was never an actual plan, and therefore, nobody was in danger” so says a CBS News report.

Buzzflash also released a report that in June, Karl Rove ratcheted his much vaunted fear machine up again.

I am sure we all remember this the quote from Fahrenheit 9/11:

“You can make people do anything when they’re afraid.” – Jim McDermott (D-WA)

I feel that George Bush needs a dictionary. In a press conference he recently held, Bush said:

The recent arrests that our fellow citizens are now learning about are a stark reminder that this nation is at war with Islamic fascists who will use any means to — to destroy those of us who love freedom, to hurt our nation.

The Wikipedia defines fascism as “a radical totalitarian political philosophy that combines elements of corporatism, authoritarianism, extreme nationalism, militarism, anti-anarchism, anti-communism and anti-liberalism.”

Sure sounds like the George W. Bush’s vision of his ideal government. Could this be a classic example of projection?

Projection is a defense mechanism where an individual attributes to other people impulses and traits that he himself has, but cannot accept.

He also made claims that our nation is safer since 9/11

The — this country is safer than it was prior to 9/11. We’ve taken a lot of measures to protect the American people. But obviously we’re still not completely safe, because there are people that still plot and people who want to harm us for what we believe in. It is a mistake to believe there is no threat to the United States of America.

And that is why we have given our officials the tools they need to protect our people.

He doesn’t care that he’s had to trash the laws of this nation and the Constitution that he swore to protect and defend, in order to do it either.

A quote that some attribute to Benjamin Franklin says it quite well:

Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.

Our nation may be safer, but we have lost too much of the freedoms we used to take for granted in exchange. The goal of terrorism is to make the targeted society change. In this, we have given victory to the terrorists.

We nibble away at the liberties which made America the envy of the world, all in the name of protecting our citizens. Yes steps should be taken to protect our nation from terrorist attacks, but not at the cost of our personal, civil, and constitutionally protected liberties.

We have had The Constitution in Crisis; The Downing Street Minutes and Deception, Manipulation, Torture, Retribution, and Coverups in the Iraq War, and Illegal Domestic Surveillance, a recent report released by the minority members of Congress which details some of the constitutional issues created by the use of these Bush Administration tactics.

Bush also said:

It — travelers are going to be inconvenienced as a result of the steps we’ve taken. I urge their patience and ask them to be vigilant. The inconveniences occurs because we will take the steps necessary to protect the American people.

…The American people need to know we live in a dangerous world, but our government will do everything we can to protect our people from those dangers.

We lived in a dangerous world long before 2001, the only thing that changed was the people and the party in charge, and how badly they over reacted to it.

It is past time that we show the Republicans, the Bush Administration, and their enablers, that our freedoms are not something that we are willing to surrender, that they are accountable to the people of the United States, and to the rule of law. No one in our nation is above the law, and our president and his administration should not be held to a lesser standard, but to a higher one.

Here’s someone who says why this is necessary, much better than I ever could:

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