The Washington Spectator
1 April 2007 - Volume 33 #7
ARMY OF GOD / The Legal Muscle Leading The Fight To End The Separation of Church and State
by journalist Sarah Posner
full text of article
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Los Angeles Times
Thursday 23 June 2005
California Section / Commentary {Op-Ed} [page B-13]
The Real News in the Downing Street Memos
by Michael Smith, Sunday Times of London reporter
It is now nine months since I obtained the first of the "Downing Street memos," thrust into my hand by someone who asked me to meet him in a quiet watering hole in London for what I imagined would just be a friendly drink.
At the time, I was defense correspondent of the London Daily Telegraph, and a staunch supporter of the decision to oust Saddam Hussein. The source was a friend. He'd given me a few stories before but nothing nearly as interesting as this.
The six leaked documents I took away with me that night were to change completely my opinion of the decision to go to war and the honesty of Prime Minister Tony Blair and President Bush.
They focused on the period leading up to the Crawford, Texas, summit between Blair and Bush in early April 2002, and were most striking for the way in which British officials warned the prime minister, with remarkable prescience, what a mess post-war Iraq would become. Even by the cynical standards of realpolitik, the decision to overrule this expert advice seemed to be criminal.
The second batch of leaks arrived in the middle of this year's British general election, by which time I was writing for a different newspaper, the Sunday Times. These documents, which came from a different source, related to a crucial meeting of Blair's war Cabinet on July 23, 2002. The timing of the leak was significant, with Blair clearly in electoral difficulties because of an unpopular war.
I did not then regard the now-infamous memo – the one that includes the minutes of the July 23 meeting – as the most important. My main article focused on the separate briefing paper for those taking part, prepared beforehand by Cabinet Office experts.
It said that Blair agreed at Crawford that "the UK would support military action to bring about regime change." Because this was illegal, the officials noted, it was "necessary to create the conditions in which we could legally support military action."
But Downing Street had a "clever" plan that it hoped would trap Hussein into giving the allies the excuse they needed to go to war. It would persuade the U.N. Security Council to give the Iraqi leader an ultimatum to let in the weapons inspectors.
Although Blair and Bush still insist the decision to go to the U.N. was about averting war, one memo states that it was, in fact, about "wrong-footing" Hussein into giving them a legal justification for war.
British officials hoped the ultimatum could be framed in words that would be so unacceptable to Hussein that he would reject it outright. But they were far from certain this would work, so there was also a Plan B.
American media coverage of the Downing Street memo has largely focused on the assertion by Sir Richard Dearlove, head of British foreign intelligence, that war was seen as inevitable in Washington, where "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."
But another part of the memo is arguably more important. It quotes British Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon as saying that "the U.S. had already begun 'spikes of activity' to put pressure on the regime." This we now realize was Plan B.
Put simply, U.S. aircraft patrolling the southern no-fly zone were dropping a lot more bombs in the hope of provoking a reaction that would give the allies an excuse to carry out a full-scale bombing campaign, an air war, the first stage of the conflict.
British government figures for the number of bombs dropped on southern Iraq in 2002 show that although virtually none were used in March and April, an average of 10 tons a month were dropped between May and August.
But these initial "spikes of activity" didn't have the desired effect. The Iraqis didn't retaliate. They didn't provide the excuse Bush and Blair needed. So at the end of August, the allies dramatically intensified the bombing into what was effectively the initial air war.
The number of bombs dropped on southern Iraq by allied aircraft shot up to 54.6 tons in September alone, with the increased rates continuing into 2003.
In other words, Bush and Blair began their war not in March 2003, as everyone believed, but at the end of August 2002, six weeks before Congress approved military action against Iraq.
The way in which the intelligence was "fixed" to justify war is old news.
The real news is the shady April 2002 deal to go to war, the cynical use of the U.N. to provide an excuse, and the secret, illegal air war without the backing of Congress.
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Al Jazeera Network
Tuesday 21 June 2005
Opinion Page
The US War With Iran Has Already Begun
by Scott Ritter [former U.N. weapons inspector]
Americans, along with the rest of the world, are starting to wake up to the
uncomfortable fact that President George Bush not only lied to them about the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (the ostensible excuse for the March 2003 invasion and occupation of that country by US forces), but also about the very process that led to war.
On 16 October 2002, President Bush told the American people that "I have not
ordered the use of force. I hope that the use of force will not become necessary."
We know now that this statement was itself a lie, that the president, by late August 2002, had, in fact, signed off on the 'execute' orders authorising the US military to begin active military operations inside Iraq, and that these orders were being implemented as early as September 2002, when the US Air Force, assisted by the British Royal Air Force, began expanding its bombardment of targets inside and outside the so-called no-fly zone in Iraq.
These operations were designed to degrade Iraqi air defence and command and
control capabilities. They also paved the way for the insertion of US Special Operations units, who were conducting strategic reconnaissance, and later direct action, operations against specific targets inside Iraq, prior to the 19
March 2003 commencement of hostilities.
President Bush had signed a covert finding in late spring 2002, which authorised the CIA and US Special Operations forces to dispatch clandestine units into Iraq for the purpose of removing Saddam Hussein from power.
The fact is that the Iraq war had begun by the beginning of summer 2002, if not earlier.
This timeline of events has ramifications that go beyond historical trivia or political investigation into the events of the past.
It represents a record of precedent on the part of the Bush administration which must be acknowledged when considering the ongoing events regarding US-Iran relations. As was the case with Iraq pre-March 2003, the Bush administration today speaks of "diplomacy" and a desire for a "peaceful" resolution to the Iranian question.
But the facts speak of another agenda, that of war and the forceful removal of the theocratic regime, currently wielding the reigns of power in Tehran.
As with Iraq, the president has paved the way for the conditioning of the American public and an all-too-compliant media to accept at face value the merits of a regime change policy regarding Iran, linking the regime of the Mullah's to an "axis of evil" (together with the newly "liberated" Iraq and North Korea), and speaking of the absolute requirement for the spread of "democracy" to the Iranian people.
"Liberation" and the spread of "democracy" have become none-too-subtle code words within the neo-conservative cabal that formulates and executes American foreign policy today for militarism and war.
By the intensity of the "liberation/democracy" rhetoric alone, Americans should be put on notice that Iran is well-fixed in the cross-hairs as the next target for the illegal policy of regime change being implemented by the Bush administration.
But Americans, and indeed much of the rest of the world, continue to be lulled into a false sense of complacency by the fact that overt conventional military operations have not yet commenced between the United States and Iran.
As such, many hold out the false hope that an extension of the current insanity in Iraq can be postponed or prevented in the case of Iran. But this is a fool's dream.
The reality is that the US war with Iran has already begun. As we speak, American over-flights of Iranian soil are taking place, using pilotless drones and other, more sophisticated, capabilities.
The violation of a sovereign nation's airspace is an act of war in and of itself. But the war with Iran has gone far beyond the intelligence-gathering phase.
President Bush has taken advantage of the sweeping powers granted to him in
the aftermath of 11 September 2001, to wage a global war against terror and to initiate several covert offensive operations inside Iran.
The most visible of these is the CIA-backed actions recently undertaken by
the Mujahadeen el-Khalq, or MEK, an Iranian opposition group, once run by Saddam Hussein's dreaded intelligence services, but now working exclusively for the CIA's Directorate of Operations.
It is bitter irony that the CIA is using a group still labelled as a terrorist organisation, a group trained in the art of explosive assassination by the same intelligence units of the former regime of Saddam Hussein, who are slaughtering American soldiers in Iraq today, to carry out remote bombings in Iran of the sort that the Bush administration condemns on a daily basis inside Iraq.
Perhaps the adage of "one man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist" has finally been embraced by the White House, exposing as utter hypocrisy the entire underlying notions governing the ongoing global war on terror.
But the CIA-backed campaign of MEK terror bombings in Iran are not the only action ongoing against Iran.
To the north, in neighbouring Azerbaijan, the US military is preparing a base
of operations for a massive military presence that will foretell a major land-based campaign designed to capture Tehran.
Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld's interest in Azerbaijan may have
escaped the blinkered Western media, but Russia and the Caucasus nations understand only too well that the die has been cast regarding Azerbaijan's role in the upcoming war with Iran.
The ethnic links between the Azeri of northern Iran and Azerbaijan were long
exploited by the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and this vehicle for internal manipulation has been seized upon by CIA paramilitary operatives and US Special Operations units who are training with Azerbaijan forces to form special
units capable of operating inside Iran for the purpose of intelligence gathering, direct action, and mobilising indigenous opposition to the Mullahs in Tehran.
But this is only one use the US has planned for Azerbaijan. American military aircraft, operating from forward bases in Azerbaijan, will have a much shorter distance to fly when striking targets in and around Tehran.
In fact, US air power should be able to maintain a nearly 24-hour a day presence over Tehran airspace once military hostilities commence.
No longer will the United States need to consider employment of Cold War-dated plans which called for moving on Tehran from the Arab Gulf cities of Chah Bahar and Bandar Abbas. US Marine Corps units will be able to secure these towns in order to protect the vital Straits of Hormuz, but the need to advance inland has been eliminated.
A much shorter route to Tehran now exists – the coastal highway running along
the Caspian Sea from Azerbaijan to Tehran.
US military planners have already begun war games calling for the deployment of multi-divisional forces into Azerbaijan.
Logistical planning is well advanced concerning the basing of US air and
ground power in Azerbaijan.
Given the fact that the bulk of the logistical support and command and control capability required to wage a war with Iran is already forward deployed in the region thanks to the massive US presence in Iraq, the build-up time for a war with Iran will be significantly reduced compared to even the accelerated time tables witnessed with Iraq in 2002-2003.
America and the Western nations continue to be fixated on the ongoing tragedy and debacle that is Iraq. Much needed debate on the reasoning behind the war with Iraq and the failed post-war occupation of Iraq is finally starting to spring up in the United States and elsewhere.
Normally, this would represent a good turn of events. But with everyone's heads rooted in the events of the past, many are missing out on the crime that is about to be repeated by the Bush administration in Iran – an illegal war of aggression, based on false premise, carried out with little regard to either the people of Iran or the United States.
Most Americans, together with the mainstream American media, are blind to the tell-tale signs of war, waiting, instead, for some formal declaration of hostility, a made-for-TV moment such as was witnessed on 19 March 2003.
We now know that the war had started much earlier. Likewise, history will show that the US-led war with Iran will not have begun once a similar formal statement is offered by the Bush administration, but, rather, had already been under way since June 2005, when the CIA began its programme of MEK-executed terror bombings in Iran.
Scott Ritter is a former UN weapons inspector in Iraq, 1991-1998, and author
of Iraq Confidential: The Untold Story of America's Intelligence Conspiracy,
to be published by I.B. Tauris in October 2005.
direct link to article
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Los Angeles Times
Thursday 27 January 2005
Business Section / In Brief [page C-3]
ECONOMY - China Seeks Flexible Currency Exchange Rate
[from Associated Press]
China has lost faith in the stability of the U.S. dollar, and its first priority is to broaden the exchange rate for its currency from the dollar to a more flexible basket of currencies, a Chinese economist said at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland.
Fan Gang, director of the National Economic Research Institute at the China Reform Foundation, said [that] the issue for China wasn't whether to devalue the yaun but "to limit it from the U.S. dollar".
The dollar hit a new low against the euro and has been falling against other major currencies on concerns about the ever-growing U.S. trade and budget defecits.
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Los Angeles Times
Monday 8 November 2004
California Section / Letters [page B-10]
The President's Plan to Change Social Security
I have read several times about a supposedly Republican mandate because Bush received more votes than any other presidential candidate in history.
Well, the presidential candidate who holds second place for the most votes of anyone in history is Sen. John F. Kerry with 56 million. This also means that Bush holds the dubious record of being the president with more votes cast against him than any other president in history. Is this a mandate of satisfied or dissatisfied voters?
If Bush insists on spending his "political capital" to ram his tax and Social Security programs down our throats, all he will do is further divide an already greatly divided country.
Steve Amsden
Rialto, California
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I can't help feeling that justice was served with Bush winning another four years. This way the Republicans cannot put the blame on a Kerry administration when the Iraq war worsens, which it surely will given that no plausible solution is in sight. Bush now has the "mandate" to fix the problems he himself created. Kerry won't be the scapegoat. That's justice and that will be Bush's legacy.
Vivencio Valdez, Jr.
Victorville, California
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Methinks that before the president "spends his political capital", he should first pay back the deficit.
Owen R. Husney
Marina del Rey, California
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Los Angeles Times
Sunday 24 October 2004
Opinion / Commentary [page M-1]
Karl Rove: America's Mullah
by Neal GablerThis election is about Rovism, and the outcome threatens to transform the U.S. into an ironfisted theocracy.
Even now, after Sen. John F. Kerry handily won his three debates with President Bush and after most polls show a dead heat, his supporters seem downbeat. Why? They believe that Karl Rove, Bush's top political operative, cannot be beaten. Rove the Impaler will do whatever it takes – anything – to make certain that Bush wins. This isn't just typical Democratic pessimism. It has been the master narrative of the 2004 presidential campaign in the mainstream media. Attacks on Kerry come and go – flip-flopper, Swift boats, Massachusetts liberal – but one constant remains, Rove, and everyone takes it for granted that he knows how to game the system.
Rove, however, is more than a political sharpie with a bulging bag of dirty tricks. His campaign shenanigans – past and future – go to the heart of what this election is about.
Democrats will tell you it is a referendum on Bush's incompetence or on his extremist right-wing agenda. Republicans will tell you it's about conservatism versus liberalism or who can better protect us from terrorists. They are both wrong. This election is about Rovism – the insinuation of Rove's electoral tactics into the conduct of the presidency and the fabric of the government. It's not an overstatement to say that on Nov. 2, the fate of traditional American democracy will hang in the balance.
Rovism is not simply a function of Rove the political conniver sitting in the counsels of power and making decisions, though he does. No recent presidency has put policy in the service of politics as has Bush's. Because tactics can change institutions, Rovism is much more. It is a philosophy and practice of governing that pervades the administration and even extends to the Republican-controlled Congress. As Robert Berdahl, chancellor of UC Berkeley, has said of Bush's foreign policy, a subset of Rovism, it constitutes a fundamental change in "the fabric of constitutional government as we have known it in this country."
Rovism begins, as one might suspect from the most merciless of political consiglieres, with Machiavelli's rule of force: "A prince is respected when he is either a true friend or a downright enemy." No administration since Warren Harding's has rewarded its friends so lavishly, and none has been as willing to bully anyone who strays from its message.
There is no dissent in the Rove White House without reprisal.
Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric K. Shinseki was retired after he disagreed with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's transformation of the Army and then testified that invading Iraq would require a U.S. deployment of 200,000 soldiers.
Chief Medicare actuary Richard Foster was threatened with termination if he revealed before the vote that the administration had seriously misrepresented the cost of its proposed prescription drug plan to get it through Congress.
Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill was peremptorily fired for questioning the wisdom of the administration's tax cuts, and former U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer III felt compelled to recant his statement that there were insufficient troops in Iraq.
Even accounting for the strong-arm tactics of Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon, this isn't government as we have known it. This is the Sopranos in the White House: "Cross us and you're road kill."
Naturally, the administration's treatment of the opposition is worse. Rove's mentor, political advisor Lee Atwater, has been quoted as saying: "What you do is rip the bark off liberals." That's how Bush has governed. There is a feeling, perhaps best expressed by Georgia Democratic Sen. Zell Miller's keynote address at the Republican convention, that anyone who has the temerity to question the president is undermining the country. At times, Miller came close to calling Democrats traitors for putting up a presidential candidate.
This may be standard campaign rhetoric. But it's one thing to excoriate your opponents in a campaign, and quite another to continue berating them after the votes are counted.
Rovism regards any form of compromise as weakness. Politics isn't a bus we all board together, it's a steamroller.
No recent administration has made less effort to reach across the aisle, and thanks to Rovism, the Republican majority in Congress often operates on a rule of exclusion. Republicans blocked Democrats from participating in the bill-drafting sessions on energy, prescription drugs and intelligence reform in the House. As Rep. George Miller (D-Martinez) told the New Yorker, "They don't consult with the nations of the world, and they don't consult with Congress, especially the Democrats in Congress. They can do it all themselves."
Bush entered office promising to be a "uniter, not a divider." But Rovism is not about uniting. What Rove quickly grasped is that it's easier and more efficacious to exploit the cultural and social divide than to look for common ground. No recent administration has as eagerly played wedge issues – gay marriage, abortion, stem cell research, faith-based initiatives – to keep the nation roiling, in the pure Rovian belief that the president's conservative supporters will always be angrier and more energized than his opponents. Division, then, is not a side effect of policy; in Rovism, it is the purpose of policy.
The lack of political compromise has its correlate in the administration's stubborn insistence that it doesn't have to compromise with facts. All politicians operate within an Orwellian nimbus where words don't mean what they normally mean, but Rovism posits that there is no objective, verifiable reality at all. Reality is what you say it is, which explains why Bush can claim that postwar Iraq is going swimmingly or that a so-so economy is soaring. As one administration official told reporter Ron Suskind, "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. We're history's actors."
When neither dissent nor facts are recognized as constraining forces, one is infallible, which is the sum and foundation of Rovism. Cleverly invoking the power of faith to protect itself from accusations of stubbornness and insularity, this administration entertains no doubt, no adjustment, no negotiation, no competing point of view. As such, it eschews the essence of the American political system: flexibility and compromise.
In Rovism, toughness is the only virtue. The mere appearance of change is intolerable, which is why Bush apparently can't admit ever making a mistake. As Machiavelli put it, the prince must show that "his judgments are irrevocable."
Rovism is certainly not without its appeal. As political theorist Sheldon Wolin once characterized Machiavellian government, it promises the "economy of politics." Americans love toughness. They love swagger. In a world of complexity and uncertainty, especially after Sept. 11, they love the idea of a man who doesn't need anyone else. They even love the sense of mission, regardless of its wisdom.
These values run deep in the American soul, and Rovism consciously taps them. But they are not democratic. Unwavering discipline, demonization of foes, disdain for reality and a personal sense of infallibility based on faith are the stuff of a theocracy – the president as pope or mullah and policy as religious warfare.
Boiled down, Rovism is government by jihadis in the grip of unshakable self-righteousness – ironically the force the administration says it is fighting. It imposes rather than proposes.
Rovism surreptitiously and profoundly changes our form of government, a government that has been, since its founding by children of the Enlightenment, open, accommodating, moderate and generally reasonable.
All administrations try to work the system to their advantage, and some, like Nixon's, attempt to circumvent the system altogether. Rove and Bush neither use nor circumvent, which would require keeping the system intact. They instead are reconfiguring the system in extra-constitutional, theocratic terms.
The idea of the United States as an ironfisted theocracy is terrifying, and it should give everyone pause. This time, it's not about policy. This time, for the first time, it's about the nature of American government.
We all have reason to be very, very afraid.
Neal Gabler, a senior fellow at the Norman Lear Center at U.S.C. Annenberg, is author of "Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality."
Los Angeles Times
Tuesday 26 October 2004
California Section / Letters [page B-10]
Karl Rove and the Fight for Political Dominance
Congratulations for printing "Karl Rove: America's Mullah" (Opinion, Sept. 24). Neal Gabler's article on Rove and Rovism describes with deadly accuracy the political battle for America's soul. I hope every voter reads this article and then casts a vote for saving America's soul.
If voters understand the nature of the conservative agenda and the means being used to promote it, they will surely vote progressive by casting their vote for John Kerry.
Milton Gonsalves
Cathedral City, California
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What Gabler refers to as Rovism has a much older name. It's called fascism, which is the direction Rove, a.k.a. Bush's brain, would take this country. Though politicians are often prone to exaggeration, Kerry's assertion that this may be the most important election in his lifetime is actually an understatement. Rove seeks nothing less than the creation of a one-party state where power over the nation's discourse is increasingly controlled by consolidation of corporate control of the mass media, suppression of the opposition vote through intimidation and electronic deletion become the norm, and dissent is equated to treason. The Rove-led cabal that now occupies the world's most politically powerful office poses a threat to the very existence of constitutional democracy in these United States.
Ernest A. Canning
Thousand Oaks, California
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Los Angeles Times
Thursday 14 October 2004
California Section / Letters [page B-10]
'Must' Reading
The article by Antonia Juhasz ("A Nice Little War to Fill the Coffers", Commentary, Oct. 14) should have been published on the front page instead of the editorial section. It gives figures and facts and does not seem to be an opinion.
It is frightening to think that we will have another four years of this unbelievable immoral and evil behavior if President Bush wins. It should be mandatory reading for all.
Elinor G. Crawford
Venice, California
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Los Angeles Times
Saturday 17 July 2004
California Section / Letters [page B-18]
A Confusing Tale
America is safer, but if Al Qaeda attacks around Nov. 2 we may have to postpone the election (especially if President Bush trails in the polls).
All the intelligence on Iraq was wrong, but the war was right.
Sen. John Kerry doesn't have the combat experience to be commander in chief, but Bush's National Guard records were inadvertently destroyed.
Millionaires Kerry and John Edwards cannot speak for the common man, but millionaires Bush and Dick Cheney can.
We have given Iraq freedom from oppression, but not from getting its people killed by the dozen.
Are Lewis Carroll and George Orwell alive and kicking, writing the history of our day?
Fred Bauman
Riverside, California
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Los Angeles Times
Friday 11 June 2004
California Section / Letters [page B-12]
U.S. Focuses on Reagan Legacy & Rites
President Ronald Reagan: a man of contradictions. He bellowed against a government he felt was too large, yet government is called to accommodate his funeral procession at considerable costs of time and money. He said it was government that was the problem, yet he will lie on the Lincoln plinth.
Abraham Lincoln said it is a government of the people, by the people, for the people. If Reagan believed Lincoln's philosophy, then he must have felt that the nation's people are the problem.
With Reagan's shift of power away from government to business, we now witness the nature of unbridled business: taking the people's money through cheating accounting schemes, corruptible stock market trading practices, energy companies' faithless trading practices and businesses able to write their own rules on pollution.
Reagan got communism right; the rest of it he missed.
Matthew Hetz
Los Angeles, California
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He will be reviled for it, but [columnist Robert] Scheer did a service to rational political discourse by telling the truth about Reagan's administration.
Face it, George W. Bush has performed the miracle of making Reagan look like a good president.
Richard Starnes
Palm Springs, California
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How much better it would have been if the enormous amounts of money spent for the funeral of a man who died of Alzheimer's disease would have been spent on research toward finding a cure for it as well as for AIDS.
Gene Buday
Dana Point, California
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Los Angeles Times
Thursday 10 June 2004
California Section / Letters [page B-12]
To Some A Giant; To Others, A Big Spender
Though Reagan's death marks the end of an era in our history, it also begins the process of honoring his legacy. A man who has won such a warm place in the hearts of Americans deserves a tribute on both a grand and eternal scale. I propose we name the national debt in his honor.
Eric Danhof
Upland, California
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What was the genius of Reagan? He understood and played to the patriotism of working men and women in order to protect and make respectable the greed of the wealthy. He was plutocracy's Trojan horse to the nation.
Michael H. Weinberg
Pasadena, California
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Los Angeles Times
Friday 26 March 2004
California Section / Letters [page B-14]
9/11 Hearings Did Not Make Anyone Look Good
While the White House does its viciously personal damage control against [Richard A.] Clarke's assertions, it's worth noting that there is one good reason why Bush failed to act on Clarke's urgent recommendations and the CIA's report to the president (entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S."), delivered a month before 9/11:
After less than eight months in office, Bush was taking the entire month of August 2001 off. That sums up his sense of urgency, doesn't it?
Ken Narasaki
Venice, California
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Let me see if I can get this straight. The White House refuses to let national security advisor Condoleezza Rice give televised testimony before the 9/11 commission, then puts her on the network morning shows to ruthlessly badmouth the administration's former counterterrorism chief for criticizing the way the boss handled 9/11.
Oh, right. Nobody is under oath on the "Today" show.
Ken Wheat
Studio City, California
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Someone should alert Vice President Dick Cheney to the fact that declaring Clarke to have been "out of the loop" isn't a defense it's an admission of breathtaking incompetence and negligence. It also runs counter to Rice's insinuations that 9/11 was Clarke's fault. One cannot be both out of the loop and responsible for failing to thwart the tragedy.
Linda Cordeiro
Los Angeles, California
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Los Angeles Times
Sunday 21 March 2004
California Section / Opinion / Letters [page M-4]
President and His Friends Have a Lot to Answer For
It is so great to see Vice President Dick Cheney emerge from his undisclosed bunker for his typically precise and accurate assessment of Sen. John Kerry's leadership skills ("Clash Deepens Over Wartime Leadership," March 18). The vice president usually comes out of his hole only to do a little part-time work for Halliburton or to shoot farmed birds with his pals from the highest court of the land. This time Cheney appeared, issued his warning and saw his shadow: four more years of war.
Marty Trujillo
Westminster, California
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Politics seems to be the only place where a draft dodger from Wyoming and an AWOL guardsman from Texas can question the loyalty of an authentic war hero from Massachusetts.
Jerry Buck
Sherman Oaks, California
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Los Angeles Times
Monday 15 March 2004
California Section / Letters [page B-10]
Sen. Kennedy Points to Bush's Iraq Statements
In "The Fringe Fires at Bush on Iraq" (Commentary, March 11), Max Boot conveniently ignores the fact that my case against the decision to go to war was based on President Bush's own statements misrepresenting the threat posed by Saddam Hussein and the intelligence community's specific dissents from those statements.
On Oct. 2, 2002, as Congress was preparing to vote on authorizing the war, Bush called the Iraqi regime "a threat of unique urgency". In a speech in Cincinnati, he said, "Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud." In his 2003 State of the Union address, he said: "Evidence from intelligence sources, secret communications and statements by people now in custody reveal that Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of Al Qaeda."
A mushroom cloud. An urgent and unique threat. Close links to Al Qaeda. These were the administration's rallying cries for war. None of that was true. The intelligence community was far from unified. The administration concealed that fact by classifying the dissents in the intelligence community until after the war and continuing to make false claims about the immediacy of the danger. Iraqi exiles are bragging about how they misled us so effectively. The truth was there, but those in the Bush administration refused to see it. They wanted to go to war in the worst way, and they did.
Sen. Ted Kennedy
D-Massachusetts
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Los Angeles Times
Monday 15 March 2004
California Section / Op-Ed Page [page B-11]
Suffrage Suffers in the Land of Rights
by Jamin Raskin
You have to admire President Bush's willingness to amend the Constitution over an issue of basic principles. But before we forever deny millions of Americans the chance to marry the persons they love, shouldn't we first pass an amendment guaranteeing all of us the right to vote and the right to have those votes counted?
You may think such a right already exists, but it doesn't. In fact, among 119 electoral democracies in the world, the United States is one of only 11 whose constitutions do not include the right to vote and to be represented. This embarrassing national secret reflects our origins as a slave republic in which votes were cast only by white male property owners over 21. Universal suffrage was never on the agenda in Philadelphia, and the founders left the tricky issue of voter qualifications to state legislatures. Only gradually was the electorate broadened in the years that followed, with anti-discrimination amendments that prevent disenfranchisement based on race (the 15th), gender (the 19th) and failure to pay a poll tax (the 24th).
But these incremental stabs at voting rights fall way short of international standards requiring universal suffrage. Florida 2000 was not a fluke but a vivid glimpse behind the scenes of a fragmented and politically compromised system that, according to a Caltech and MIT study, managed to lose the votes of more than 4 million Americans in that election.
Florida highlighted several things: We have no uniform ballot for national elections, but a free-for-all of local butterfly and caterpillar ballots spawning confusion. We have no inde- pendent, nonpartisan federal commission overseeing national elections, as Mexico has, but rather partisan state officials doing the job, like Florida Secretary of State Katharine Harris, who doubled as state chair of the Bush campaign. We have no national voter registration system, as more than 100 nations do, but rather state-based systems subject to manipulation. So under the guise of centralizing Florida's voter list, Harris contracted with a private company that proceeded, under her direction, to wrongly purge more than 18,000 voters, most of them minorities, on the false grounds that they were ex-felons. We don't even have a national ballot count or tally.
Florida laid bare the undemocratic structures that constrain our politics. When the Florida Supreme Court ordered the counting of 175,000 ballots that did not register on the punch-card machines, Republican legislative leaders threatened to disregard the popular vote and choose their own electors. This threat startled much of the nation. But, in Bush vs. Gore, the Supreme Court quickly recorded that they were acting within their powers under Article II ("Each state shall appoint, such manner as the legislature thereof may direct, a number of electors
").
The court emphasized that the "individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote for electors for the president of the United States."
By defining voting as a state-conferred privilege rather than the people's inalienable right, the Constitution leaves millions outside the representative structure.
In Washington, D.C., for instance, 570,898 citizens have no representative in the Senate or the House with voting privileges even though they pay, proportionately, more federal taxes than people in every state but Connecticut and even though Washington residents have fought in every war since the Revolution. Their disenfranchisement is unique among the world's capital city residents. But the Supreme Court rejected a district voting rights challenge in 2000 on the grounds that Washingtonians are not state residents.
In all, there are more than 8 million disenfranchised U.S. citizens, a population larger than the populations of Wyoming, Vermont, Alaska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Delaware, Maine and Nebraska combined.
About 4.1 million of these people live in the territories mostly Puerto Rico, but also Guam, American Samoa and the U.S. Virgin Islands. These citizens have no voting representation in Congress and cannot vote for president, which, in the case of Puerto Rico, according to the U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, "is the cause of immense resentment."
On the mainland, especially in the Deep South, many states supervise an increasingly controversial internal political colony. More than 3.9 million citizens, 2% of the country's eligible voting population, are disenfranchised because of felony convictions. More than one-third of these people have done their time but have nonetheless lost their right to vote forever. The policy is not uniform; different states handle it in different ways.
Such political punishment is a tactic not of individual rehabilitation but of mass electoral suppression. The ex-felon group is disproportionately poor, minority and, probably, Demo- cratic. In the 2000 election, which was clinched by a little more than 500 votes, Florida had disenfranchised more than 600,000 citizens for their felony convictions. Florida takes the position that ex-felons can never get their voting rights back. Other national supreme courts, such as Canada's, have overturned similar laws, invoking universal suffrage provisions in their constitutions.
Around the world, almost all electoral democracies have written positive suffrage guarantees into their constitutions. What about us, the super-democracy that spends billions promoting elections abroad? Before we take up the idea of "one man, one woman," how about dusting off "one person, one vote"?
Jamin Raskin is a professor of constitutional law at American University and the author, most recently, of "Overruling Democracy" (Routledge, 2003).
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Los Angeles Times
Saturday 6 March 2004
California Section / Letters [page B-21]
An unjustified war, 3 million jobs lost, families allowed to go homeless and hungry and uninsured, the environment sold to the highest bidder, corporate raids on pensions unpunished, Social Security cuts threatened, education for the poor slashed to the bone these are immoral acts. Two men or two women holding hands and promising to take care of each other that's the most moral thing in the news these days.
Kate Carnell Watt
Riverside, California
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