WASHINGTON — In June, the Supreme Court refused to hear the case of a Canadian man who contends that U.S. authorities mistook him for an al Qaida operative in 2002 and shipped him to a secret prison in Syria, where he was beaten with electrical cables and held in a grave-like cell for 10 months.

Four years earlier, however, the Canadian government had concluded an exhaustive inquiry and found that the former prisoner, Maher Arar, was telling the truth. Canada cleared Arar of all ties to terrorism and paid him $10 million in damages, and his lawyers say he’s cooperating with an investigation into the role of U.S. and Syrian officials in his imprisonment and reported torture.

Arar’s case illustrates what lawyers and human rights groups call a shameful trend: While U.S. courts and the Obama administration have been reluctant or unwilling to pursue the cases, countries that once backed former President George W. Bush’s war on terrorism are carrying out their own investigations of the alleged U.S. torture program and the role that their governments played in it.

Judges in Great Britain, Spain, Australia, Poland and Lithuania are preparing to hear allegations that their governments helped the CIA run secret prisons on their soil or cooperated in illegal U.S. treatment of terrorism suspects. Spanish prosecutors also have filed criminal charges against six senior Bush administration officials who approved the harsh interrogation methods that detainees say were employed at U.S. military prisons in Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanamo Bay and other sites.

Another former prisoner whose case the Supreme Court dismissed, Khaled El-Masri of Germany, has sued the government of Macedonia for handing him over to CIA agents, who he charges tortured him in Afghanistan. His case is pending in the European Court of Human Rights, in France.

“As a result of the passage of time and the frustration of victims … there’s a movement to see what legal options exist outside the United States,” said James Goldston, the executive director of the Open Society Justice Initiative, a legal project of George Soros’ Open Society Institute, who’s helped represent El-Masri.

The trend, although it’s slow-moving and involves disparate plaintiffs, forums and legal strategies, could represent the end of a reviled chapter of the U.S.-led war on terrorism, which ensnared hundreds of detainees with the clandestine cooperation of dozens of countries. Now, some of those countries, led by new governments or under pressure from their citizens, are trying to pry open those secrets.

“This is the remarkable thing: Other countries are reckoning with the legacy of the Bush administration’s torture program, and meanwhile the United States is not,” said Jameel Jaffer, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s national security program.
“That’s part of why we’re so concerned. The Obama administration, rather than investigate the abuses of the last eight years, has increasingly become an obstacle to accountability.”
A spokeswoman for the Justice Department, Tracy Schmaler, didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Detainees already have won one victory in a foreign court: Last November, an Italian judge convicted a CIA station chief and 22 other Americans — nearly all CIA officers and contractors — in the 2003 kidnapping of a Muslim cleric who ended up in a secret prison in Egypt. The victory was largely symbolic, however; the Americans were tried in absentia and aren’t expected to serve jail time.

The Obama administration, which said it was “disappointed” with the Italian ruling, has declined to cooperate with the investigations, making it difficult for lawyers in some cases to question witnesses or gather evidence, according to experts involved in the inquiries.
In Lithuania, a criminal investigation of a former intelligence chief who allegedly helped the CIA operate secret prisons is stalled partly because U.S. officials haven’t revealed the identities of detainees who were held there.

President Barack Obama’s approach, from his earliest days in office, has been that “we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.”

Although Obama outlawed the harsh interrogation techniques the Bush administration had approved, he’s resisted prosecuting individuals who might have practiced them. He also opposed creating a commission to investigate the interrogation methods. His Justice Department, like Bush’s, has fought to keep wrongful-imprisonment and torture cases out of court on the grounds that they’d jeopardize national security, as government lawyers successfully argued in the Arar case.

Lawyers say that the Bush and Obama administrations’ efforts to maintain executive power have swayed federal courts.

“The government is arguing that the president has a lot of leeway in foreign policy and that Congress ceded a lot of ground when it gave the authority to use military force” in the war on terrorism, said Larry Siems, author of “The Torture Report,” an online project of the ACLU. “That seems to be the framework the courts have been ruling under.”

In the Obama administration’s strongest action on torture to date, Attorney General Eric Holder said in June that a special prosecutor was close to completing a preliminary review into whether there’s enough evidence to bring criminal charges against a limited number of CIA officers and contractors. The prosecutor, John Durham, was reviewing whether those individuals had exceeded the interrogation methods the Bush administration approved in fewer than a dozen cases, some of which ended in detainees’ deaths.

Schmaler told McClatchy that she had no information on when Durham’s review would be made public. However, experts say the inquiry is too narrow in scope and ignores the role of senior Bush administration officials.

“It’s not that we don’t think they shouldn’t be held accountable,” Jaffer said of the interrogators. “It just seems indefensible to focus solely on the interrogators when the problems stemmed from leading officials.”

Arguing that “accountability for serious violations is neither a priority nor even a preference of the current administration,” the Center for Constitutional Rights, a nonprofit group in New York that’s represented many detainees, filed a brief in Spanish court in April supporting Spain’s authority to proceed with a major criminal investigation into the alleged U.S. torture program.

The case charges that six senior Bush administration officials — including former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, former Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo and David Addington, a former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney — broke international laws by promulgating harsh interrogation tactics.

A separate case is pending that involves four Spanish citizens who were held at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where they say they were subjected to sexual assault, forced nakedness, death threats, severe beatings and constant interrogations without lawyers.

Judges in both cases sent letters last May asking U.S. government lawyers whether they’re investigating these allegations; if they were, any U.S. cases probably would supersede the Spanish ones. To date, according to the center, the U.S. hasn’t responded.

“As much as they’re moving slowly, these are cases that have a pretty good shot of proceeding, particularly in face of inaction in the U.S.,” said Katherine Gallagher, a senior staff attorney with the center.

The prosecutions would mark a turnaround for Spain, which under a conservative government earlier in the decade was one of the staunchest European supporters of the Bush administration’s war on terrorism.

Lithuania and Poland — where prosecutors are considering bringing war crimes charges against the country’s former president and former prime minister over allegations of secret prisons — are part of what former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld famously called the “new” Europe. It was Rumsfeld’s way of distinguishing traditional powers such as France, which opposed the war on terrorism, from the continent’s younger democracies, which were among Bush’s early backers.

“They were strong allies, and the obstacles were very strong in the beginning,” said Wolfgang Kaleck, a civil rights attorney and the general secretary of the nonprofit European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights. “At a certain point, important people within those countries made the decision to start these investigations. This is already a big step.”
Last month, the new British prime minister, David Cameron, announced a judicial inquiry into whether British intelligence services had participated in the abuse of terrorism suspects. Cameron’s decision followed a public outcry over the case of Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian national living in Britain who charges that British authorities knew that CIA agents were torturing him in Pakistan, Morocco, Afghanistan and Guantanamo and did nothing to stop it.

“Our reputation as a country that believes in human rights, justice, fairness and the rule of law … risks being tarnished,” Cameron said.

Months earlier, when the British government bowed to a court ruling and published classified details about how Mohamed was treated, U.S. intelligence officials had said that the decision was “not helpful, and we deeply regret it.”

As a result, Cameron said that British courts wouldn’t disclose such evidence during the inquiry and suggested that foreign witnesses — such as current and former CIA officers — won’t be called to testify.

“There are foreign-policy and diplomacy considerations in how far they’re willing to push this,” said Siems of the ACLU.

However, Siems said, the cases weren’t toothless, particularly if they result in arrest warrants for U.S. officials, as they did in Italy’s conviction of the CIA officers.
“Ultimately, that’s what you could end up with: an international map with various judgments against U.S. officials which are subject to enforcement if they travel,” Siems said. “That would put us in pretty dubious company.”

This was a war started on a false pretext — that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was prepared to use them or hand them off to terrorists. At the time there were other ways to determine that and respond accordingly (international inspections were underway), but we went to war instead. The Bush Administration’s fearful predictions of “mushroom clouds” went along with insinuations that Iraq was somehow involved in 9/11 despite the fact that it was not. That Saddam Hussein was a terrible and brutal dictator was well known, but bombing his cities and people wasn’t the only way to deal with him, as many church leaders pointed out at the time. And, of course, the U.S. hadn’t made war on the countries of every other dictator who was as bad, or worse, than Saddam. But those dictators weren’t sitting on deserts full of oil — always the unspoken reality of our foreign policy and wars in the Middle Eastern region.

Of course the “shock and awe” of America’s military might easily defeated the army of Saddam Hussein, but the post-invasion strategy was horribly botched, a complete misunderstanding of Iraq’s religious and ethnic conflicts was soon revealed, incidents of prisoner abuse and torture shamed America’s image around the world, and the impact of the U.S. deciding to fight an unnecessary war in Iraq served to inflame global opinion about the United States, and caused us to lose the moral high ground we had around the world after the vicious attacks of 9/11 (remember that?). And the strategic consequences of neglecting Afghanistan and inadvertently strengthening Iran because of the U.S. war in Iraq are now being discussed by the political talking heads.

But that’s all history now, and the president asked the nation to “turn the page” last night. But what makes me so sad this morning is the enormous human cost of the war in Iraq; and how a massive number of people and families — in America and Iraq — have had their lives ended or changed forever because of this war and will have a hard time turning the page.

It is precisely because of the terrible human cost of war that Christian leaders and churches are supposed to ask the hardest questions about it. And many did about the war in Iraq. Let’s remember the fact today that most Christian leaders and churches around the world rejected the arguments for America going to war against Iraq and opposed the U.S. invasion and occupation. They applied the peace-making ministry of Jesus and the rigorous historical criteria for what constitutes a “just war” and found the Iraq war painfully lacking adequate moral justification. But the United States government didn’t heed the warnings and the objections of the international faith community, even in America, where political opinion was split about 50-50. The global church was right in rejecting this war from the outset, and the government of the United States was wrong for fighting it.

The human cost of the Iraq War is literally breathtaking. I went to a website last night that has documented the number and published the pictures of those who died, 4,400 so far. I couldn’t stop looking at their pictures — so young — so many husbands and wives, fathers, mothers, and those still almost children themselves. I kept thinking about how much they will be so sorely missed by those who loved and needed them. Then I listened to so many stories of the 35,000 wounded, many who lost their arms and legs, their strong young bodies, their long-term abilities, or their emotional and mental health. I winced when I heard there are about 18 suicides each day among returning veterans.

As people of faith or moral conscience, we must also consider the cost to the Iraqis. Even conservative estimates of Iraqi civilian causalities are now over 100,000 with some estimates peaking over 1.3 million. It’s sad that there were no websites I could find with their pictures. But just imagine them and all the families and children whose lives will be forever changed.

The unbelievable financial cost of the Iraq war also has clear human consequences. What could that $1 trillion — $745 billion in Iraq and $330 billion so far in Afghanistan — have done instead of war? How might the eventual $3 trillion in estimated costs that include long-term consequences and veteran’s needs have been better used?

On a graphic produced by the National Priorities Project, the numbers continue to fly by and rise up each second at an amazing speed. I couldn’t help think of all the things that we lost because of spending those precious resources on this war, such as not re-building our crumbling infrastructure, not making critical improvements in our schools, not paying for enough teachers, police, and firefighters, not getting health care for children who don’t have it, and not moving to a clean energy future as quickly as we need to. How about helping to prevent this recession instead of helping to cause it? Or helping to create millions of jobs and preventing millions of foreclosures? Again check websites that list the trade-offs we have made for the War in Iraq.

I watched the arguments on the talk shows about the continuing political instability in Iraq, the lack of a functioning government six months after an election, the deep worries about continuing ethnic division and conflict. The president said it was up to the Iraqis now. The truth is that it always was up to the people — both in Iraq and Afghanistan — and the mistake of “empire” is the belief than endless war and occupation can change those political realities. Leading by example would have been better, offering a whole array of non-military help to Iraq and now Afghanistan would have been more effective — and so much less costly.

The president rightly praised the sacrifice of so many in the military, many of whom served multiple tours of duty in Iraq, at great costs to their families. But as has been said countless times, the troops always end up fighting in war mostly for each other — defending and helping their brothers, and now sisters, in often heroic ways. Many also showed concern and compassion for the Iraqi people among whom they have lived and fought. But they didn’t decide to fight this war; politicians made that decision and they went. To praise them now for their sacrifice is not to praise this unnecessary war, for which none of them should have been sent in the first place.

So was the war in Iraq worth the enormous human cost? My answer is no, the results are definitely not worth the cost. That is both a political and a theological statement; but it is primarily a moral judgment — which is exactly what those of us in the faith community are supposed to make about wars.

But today, it matters less about who was right or wrong about the war in Iraq. Today I feel little celebration in America for the “end” of our combat mission in Iraq. I feel mostly relief … and sadness.

Jim Wallis is the author of Rediscovering Values: On Wall Street, Main Street, and Your Street — A Moral Compass for the New Economy, and CEO of Sojourners. He blogs at www.godspolitics.com.

by: Ray McGovern | Consortium News | Op-Ed

If independent-minded Web sites, like WikiLeaks or, say, Consortiumnews.com, existed 43 years ago, I might have risen to the occasion and helped save the lives of some 25,000 U.S. soldiers, and a million Vietnamese, by exposing the lies contained in just one SECRET/EYES ONLY cable from Saigon.

I need to speak out now because I have been sickened watching the herculean effort by Official Washington and our Fawning Corporate Media (FCM) to divert attention from the violence and deceit in Afghanistan, reflected in thousands of U.S. Army documents, by shooting the messenger(s) — WikiLeaks and Pvt. Bradley Manning.
After all the indiscriminate death and destruction from nearly nine years of war, the hypocrisy is all too transparent when WikiLeaks and suspected leaker Manning are accused of risking lives by exposing too much truth.

Besides, I still have a guilty conscience for what I chose NOT to do in exposing facts about the Vietnam War that might have saved lives.
The sad-but-true story recounted below is offered in the hope that those in similar circumstances today might show more courage than I was able to muster in 1967, and take full advantage of the incredible advancements in technology since then.

Many of my Junior Officer Trainee Program colleagues at CIA came to Washington in the early Sixties inspired by President John Kennedy’s Inaugural speech in which he asked us to ask ourselves what we might do for our country.(Sounds corny nowadays, I suppose; I guess I’ll just have to ask you to take it on faith. It may not have been Camelot exactly, but the spirit and ambience were fresh — and good.)

Among those who found Kennedy’s summons compelling was Sam Adams, a young former naval officer out of Harvard College. After the Navy, Sam tried Harvard Law School, but found it boring.
Instead, he decided to go to Washington, join the CIA as an officer trainee, and do something more adventurous. He got more than his share of adventure.

Sam was one of the brightest and most dedicated among us. Quite early in his career, he acquired a very lively and important account — that of assessing Vietnamese Communist strength early in the war. He took to the task with uncommon resourcefulness and quickly proved himself the consummate analyst.

Relying largely on captured documents, buttressed by reporting from all manner of other sources, Adams concluded in 1967 that there were twice as many Communists (about 600,000) under arms in South Vietnam as the U.S. military there would admit.

Dissembling in Saigon
Visiting Saigon during 1967, Adams learned from Army analysts that their commanding general, William Westmoreland, had placed an artificial cap on the official Army count rather than risk questions regarding “progress” in the war (sound familiar?).

It was a clash of cultures; with Army intelligence analysts saluting generals following politically dictated orders, and Sam Adams aghast at the dishonesty — consequential dishonesty.

From time to time I would have lunch with Sam and learn of the formidable opposition he encountered in trying to get out the truth.
Commiserating with Sam over lunch one day in late August 1967, I asked what could possibly be Gen. Westmoreland’s incentive to make the enemy strength appear to be half what it actually was. Sam gave me the answer he had from the horse’s mouth in Saigon.

Adams told me that in a cable dated Aug. 20, 1967, Westmoreland’s deputy, Gen. Creighton Abrams, set forth the rationale for the deception.

Abrams wrote that the new, higher numbers (reflecting Sam’s count, which was supported by all intelligence agencies except Army intelligence, which reflected the “command position”) “were in sharp contrast to the current overall strength figure of about 299,000 given to the press.”

Abrams emphasized, “We have been projecting an image of success over recent months” and cautioned that if the higher figures became public, “all available caveats and explanations will not prevent the press from drawing an erroneous and gloomy conclusion.”

No further proof was needed that the most senior U.S. Army commanders were lying, so that they could continue to feign “progress” in the war.

Equally unfortunate, the crassness and callousness of Abrams’s cable notwithstanding, it had become increasingly clear that rather than stand up for Sam, his superiors would probably acquiesce in the Army’s bogus figures. Sadly, that’s what they did.

CIA Director Richard Helms, who saw his primary duty quite narrowly as “protecting” the agency, set the tone. He told subordinates that he could not discharge that duty if he let the agency get involved in a heated argument with the U.S. Army on such a key issue in wartime.
This cut across the grain of what we had been led to believe was the prime duty of CIA analysts — to speak truth to power without fear or favor. And our experience thus far had shown both of us that this ethos amounted to much more than just slogans. We had, so far, been able to “tell it like it is.”

After lunch with Sam, for the first time ever, I had no appetite for dessert. Sam and I had not come to Washington to “protect the agency.”

And, having served in Vietnam, Sam knew first hand that thousands upon thousands were being killed in a feckless war.

What to Do?
I have an all-too-distinct memory of a long silence over coffee, as each of us ruminated on what might be done. I recall thinking to myself; someone should take the Abrams cable down to the New York Times (at the time an independent-minded newspaper).

Clearly, the only reason for the cable’s SECRET/EYES ONLY classification was to hide deliberate deception of our most senior generals regarding “progress” in the war and deprive the American people of the chance to know the truth.

Going to the press was, of course, antithetical to the culture of secrecy in which we had been trained. Besides, you would likely be caught at your next polygraph examination. Better not to stick your neck out.

I pondered all this in the days after that lunch with Adams. And I succeeded in coming up with a slew of reasons why I ought to keep silent: a mortgage; a plum overseas assignment for which I was in the final stages of language training; and, not least, the analytic work — important, exciting work on which Sam and I thrived.

Better to keep quiet for now, grow in gravitas, and live on to slay other dragons. Right?

One can, I suppose, always find excuses for not sticking one’s neck out. The neck, after all, is a convenient connection between head and torso, albeit the “neck” that was the focus of my concern was a figurative one, suggesting possible loss of career, money and status – not the literal “necks” of both Americans and Vietnamese that were on the line daily in the war.

But if there is nothing for which you would risk your career “neck” – like, say, saving the lives of soldiers and civilians in a war zone – your “neck” has become your idol, and your career is not worthy of that. I now regret giving such worship to my own neck.

Not only did I fail the neck test. I had not thought things through very rigorously from a moral point of view.

Promises to Keep?
As a condition of employment, I had signed a promise not to divulge classified information so as not to endanger sources, methods or national security. Promises are important, and one should not lightly violate them. Plus, there are legitimate reasons for protecting some secrets.

But were any of those legitimate concerns the real reasons why Abrams’s cable was stamped SECRET/EYES ONLY? I think not.
It is not good to operate in a moral vacuum, oblivious to the reality that there exists a hierarchy of values and that circumstances often determine the morality of a course of action.

How does a written promise to keep secret everything with a classified
stamp on it square with one’s moral responsibility to stop a war based on lies? Does stopping a misbegotten war not supersede a secrecy promise?

Ethicists use the words “supervening value” for this; the concept makes sense to me.

And is there yet another value? As an Army officer, I had taken a solemn oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States from all enemies, foreign and domestic.

How did the lying by the Army command in Saigon fit in with that? Were/are generals exempt? Should we not call them out when we learn of deliberate deception that subverts the democratic process? Can the American people make good decisions if they are lied to?
Would I have helped stop unnecessary killing by giving the New York Times the not-really-secret, SECRET/EYES ONLY cable from Gen. Abrams? We’ll never know, will we? And I live with that.

I could not take the easy way out, saying Let Sam Do It. Because I knew he wouldn’t.

Sam chose to go through the established grievance channels and got the royal run-around, even after the Communist countrywide offensive at Tet in January-February 1968 proved beyond any doubt that his count of Communist forces was correct.

When the Tet offensive began, as a way of keeping his sanity, Adams drafted a caustic cable to Saigon saying, “It is something of an anomaly to be taking so much punishment from Communist soldiers whose existence is not officially acknowledged.” But he did not think the situation at all funny.

Dan Ellsberg Steps In
Sam kept playing by the rules, but it happened that – unbeknown to Sam – Dan Ellsberg gave Sam’s figures on enemy strength to the New York Times, which published them on March 19, 1968.
Dan had learned that President Lyndon Johnson was about to bow to Pentagon pressure to widen the war into Cambodia, Laos and up to the Chinese border – perhaps even beyond.

Later, it became clear that his timely leak – together with another unauthorized disclosure to the Times that the Pentagon had requested 206,000 more troops – prevented a wider war.

On March 25, Johnson complained to a small gathering, “The leaks to the New York Times hurt us. … We have no support for the war. … I would have given Westy the 206,000 men.”

Ellsberg also copied the Pentagon Papers – the 7,000-page top-secret history of U.S. decision-making on Vietnam from 1945 to 1967 – and, in 1971, he gave copies to the New York Times, Washington Post and other news organizations.

In the years since, Ellsberg has had difficulty shaking off the thought that, had he released the Pentagon Papers sooner, the war might have ended years earlier with untold lives saved. Ellsberg has put it this way:

“Like so many others, I put personal loyalty to the president above all else – above loyalty to the Constitution and above obligation to the law, to truth, to Americans, and to humankind. I was wrong.”
And so was I wrong in not asking Sam for a copy of that cable from Gen. Abrams. Sam, too, eventually had strong regrets.

Sam had continued to pursue the matter within CIA, until he learned that Dan Ellsberg was on trial in 1973 for releasing the Pentagon Papers and was being accused of endangering national security by revealing figures on enemy strength.

Which figures? The same old faked numbers from 1967! “Imagine,” said Adams, “hanging a man for leaking faked numbers,” as he hustled off to testify on Dan’s behalf. (The case against Ellsberg was ultimately thrown out of court because of prosecutorial abuses committed by the Nixon adminitration.)

After the war drew down, Adams was tormented by the thought that, had he not let himself be diddled by the system, the entire left half of the Vietnam Memorial wall would not be there. There would have been no new names to chisel into such a wall.

Sam Adams died prematurely at age 55 with nagging remorse that he had not done enough.

In a letter appearing in the (then independent-minded) New York Times on Oct. 18, 1975, John T. Moore, a CIA analyst who worked in Saigon and the Pentagon from 1965 to 1970, confirmed Adams’s story after Sam told it in detail in the May 1975 issue of Harper’s magazine.

Moore wrote:
“My only regret is that I did not have Sam’s courage. … The record is clear. It speaks of misfeasance, nonfeasance and malfeasance, of outright dishonesty and professional cowardice.

“It reflects an intelligence community captured by an aging bureaucracy, which too often placed institutional self-interest or personal advancement before the national interest. It is a page of shame in the history of American intelligence.”

Tanks But No Thanks, Abrams
What about Gen. Creighton Abrams? Not every general gets the Army’s main battle tank named after him. The honor, though, came not from his service in Vietnam, but rather from his courage in the early day of his military career, leading his tanks through German lines to relieve Bastogne during World War II’s Battle of the Bulge.

Gen. George Patton praised Abrams as the only tank commander he considered his equal.

As things turned out, sadly, 23 years later Abrams became a poster child for old soldiers who, as Gen. Douglas McArthur suggested, should “just fade away,” rather than hang on too long after their great military accomplishments.

In May 1967, Abrams was picked to be Westmoreland’s deputy in Vietnam and succeeded him a year later. But Abrams could not succeed in the war, no matter how effectively “an image of success” his subordinates projected for the media.

The “erroneous and gloomy conclusions of the press” that Abrams had tried so hard to head off proved all too accurate.

Ironically, when reality hit home, it fell to Abrams to cut back U.S. forces in Vietnam from a peak of 543,000 in early 1969 to 49,000 in June 1972 — almost five years after Abrams’s progress-defending cable from Saigon. By 1972, some 58,000 U.S. troops, not to mention two to three million Vietnamese, had been killed.

Both Westmoreland and Abrams had reasonably good reputations when they started out, but not so much when they finished.

And Petraeus?
Comparisons can be invidious, but Gen. David Petraeus is another Army commander who has wowed Congress with his ribbons, medals and merit badges. A pity he was not born early enough to have served in Vietnam where he might have learned some real-life hard lessons about the limitations of counterinsurgency theories.

Moreover, it appears that no one took the trouble to tell him that in the early Sixties we young infantry officers already had plenty of counterinsurgency manuals to study at Fort Bragg and Fort Benning.
There are many things one cannot learn from reading or writing manuals — as many of my Army colleagues learned too late in the jungles and mountains of South Vietnam.

Unless one is to believe, contrary to all indications, that Petraeus is not all that bright, one has to assume he knows that the Afghanistan expedition is a folly beyond repair.

So far, though, he has chosen the approach taken by Gen. Abrams in his August 1967 cable from Saigon. That is precisely why the ground-truth of the documents released by WikiLeaks is so important.

Whistleblowers Galore
And it’s not just the WikiLeaks documents that have caused consternation inside the U.S. government. Investigators reportedly are rigorously pursuing the source that provided the New York Times with the texts of two cables (of 6 and 9 November 2009) from Ambassador Eikenberry in Kabul. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Obama Ignores Key Afghan Warning.”]

To its credit, even today’s far-less independent New York Times published a major story based on the information in those cables, while President Barack Obama was still trying to figure out what to do about Afghanistan.

Later the Times posted the entire texts of the cables, which were classified Top Secret and NODIS (meaning “no dissemination” to anyone but the most senior officials to whom the documents were addressed).

The cables conveyed Eikenberry’s experienced, cogent views on the foolishness of the policy in place and, implicitly, of any eventual decision to double down on the Afghan War. (That, of course, is pretty much what the President ended up doing.)

Eikenberry provided chapter and verse to explain why, as he put it, “I cannot support [the Defense Department’s] recommendation for an immediate Presidential decision to deploy another 40,000 here.”
Such frank disclosures are anathema to self-serving bureaucrats and ideologues who would much prefer depriving the American people of information that might lead them to question the government’s benighted policy toward Afghanistan, for example.

As the New York Times/Eikenberry cables show, even today’s FCM may sometimes display the old spunk of American journalism and refuse to hide or fudge the truth, even if the facts might cause the people to draw “an erroneous and gloomy conclusion,” to borrow Gen. Abrams’s words of 43 years ago.

Polished Pentagon Spokesman
Remember “Baghdad Bob,” the irrepressible and unreliable Iraqi Information Minister at the time of the U.S.-led invasion? He came to mind as I watched Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell’s chaotic, quixotic press briefing on Aug. 5 regarding the WikiLeaks exposures.
The briefing was revealing in several respects. Clear from his prepared statement was what is bothering the Pentagon the most. Here’s Morrell:
“WikiLeaks’s webpage constitutes a brazen solicitation to U.S. government officials, including our military, to break the law. WikiLeaks’s public assertion that submitting confidential material to WikiLeaks is safe, easy and protected by law is materially false and misleading. The Department of Defense therefore also demands that WikiLeaks discontinue any solicitation of this type.”

Rest assured that the Defense Department will do all it can to make it unsafe for any government official to provide WikiLeaks with sensitive material. But it is contending with a clever group of hi-tech experts who have built in precautions to allow information to be submitted anonymously.

That the Pentagon will prevail anytime soon is far from certain.
Also, in a ludicrous attempt to close the barn door after tens of thousands of classified documents had already escaped, Morrell insisted that WikiLeaks give back all the documents and electronic media in its possession.

Even the normally docile Pentagon press corps could not suppress a collective laugh, irritating the Pentagon spokesman no end. The impression gained was one of a Pentagon Gulliver tied down by terabytes of Lilliputians.

Morrell’s self-righteous appeal to the leaders of WikiLeaks to “do the right thing” was accompanied by an explicit threat that, otherwise, “We shall have to compel them to do the right thing.” His attempt to assert Pentagon power in this regard fell flat, given the realities.

Morrell also chose the occasion to remind the Pentagon press corps to behave themselves or face rejection when applying to be embedded in units of U.S. armed forces. The correspondents were shown nodding docilely as Morrell reminded them that permission for embedding “is by no means a right. It is a privilege.” The generals giveth and the generals taketh away.

It was a moment of arrogance — and press subservience — that would have sickened Thomas Jefferson or James Madison, not to mention the courageous war correspondents who did their duty in Vietnam.

Morrell and the generals can control the “embeds”; they cannot control the ether. Not yet, anyway.

And that was all too apparent beneath the strutting, preening, and finger waving by the Pentagon’s fancy silk necktie to the world. Actually, the opportunities afforded by WikiLeaks and other Internet Web sites can serve to diminish what few advantages there are to being in bed with the Army.

What Would I Have Done
Would I have had the courage to whisk Gen. Abrams’s cable into the ether in 1967, if WikiLeaks or other Web sites had been available to provide a major opportunity to expose the deceit of the top Army command in Saigon?

The Pentagon can argue that using the Internet this way is not “safe, easy, and protected by law.” We shall see.

Meanwhile, this way of exposing information that people in a democracy should know will continue to be sorely tempting — and a lot easier than taking the risk of being photographed lunching with someone from the New York Times.

From what I have learned over these past 43 years, supervening moral values can, and should, trump lesser promises. Today, I would be determined to “do the right thing,” if I had access to an Abrams-like cable from Petraeus in Kabul.

And I believe that Sam Adams, if he were alive today, would enthusiastically agree that this would be the morally correct decision.

Footnote: In the Tradition of Sam Adams
Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence (SAAII) is a group of former CIA colleagues and other associates of former intelligence analyst Sam Adams, who hold up his example as a model for those in intelligence who would aspire to the courage to speak truth to power.
Sam did precisely that, and in honoring his memory, SAAII confers an award each year to a lamp lighter exemplifying Sam Adam’s courage, persistence, and devotion to truth — no matter the consequences. The Washington, DC, presentations are held in the fall, usually before a large university audience; Dan Ellsberg, a charter member, is usually with us.

Sam Adams Annual Award recipients:
-Coleen Rowley of the FBI, in Washington, DC
-Katharine Gun of British Intelligence; in Copenhagen, Denmark
-Sibel Edmonds of the FBI; in Washington, DC
-Craig Murray, former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan; in NY City
-Sam Provance, former Sgt, US Army, truth teller about Abu Ghraib; in Washington, DC
-Frank Grevil, Maj., Danish Army Intelligence, imprisoned for giving the Danish press documents showing that Denmark’s Prime Minister (now NATO Secretary General) disregarded warnings that there was no authentic evidence of WMD in Iraq; in Copenhagen, Denmark
-Larry Wilkerson, Col., US Army (ret.), former chief of staff to Secretary Colin Powell at the State Department, who has exposed what he called the “Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal;” in Washington, DC
In April, the SAAII nominating committee decided unanimously to give this year’s award to Julian Assange of WikiLeaks. Stay tuned for information on the time and place of the presentation.
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. After two years as an Army infantry/intelligence officer, he served as a CIA analyst for 27 years. He also serves on the SAAII nominating committee and the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

General David Petraeus suggested that he would not
recommend large-scale withdrawals of U.S. and NATO troops
from Afghanistan starting in July 2011. “The president
didn’t send me over here to seek a graceful exit,”
Petraeus said. The U.S. military judge presiding over the
trial of Omar Khadr, a 23-year-old Canadian who was
captured in Afghanistan when he was 15, ruled that Khadr’s
confession to killing an American soldier, although made
under threat of rape and death, would be allowed as
evidence in his trial. An Army officer on the jury who
said he believed that the Guantanamo Bay detention
facility should be closed was removed from Khadr’s trial,
which was suspended for thirty days after Khadr’s
U.S.-appointed lawyer fainted during opening
arguments. Pakistan canceled official independence-day
celebrations in the aftermath of floods that have killed
1,600 people, and Russian wildfires created a cloud of
toxic smog over Moscow, where the summer death rate had
more than doubled and doctors were advised to cease
listing heatstroke as a cause of death. More than 500
people reported being bitten by vampire bats in the
Peruvian Amazon, and the Japanese government was trying to
track down almost 200 “missing” centenarians. Mountain
climbers in Sweden were unnerved by Nazi-inspired names
that were given to routes up a Stockholm crag. “It felt
rather unpleasant to climb through the ‘Crematorium,’”
said climber Cordelia Hess, “or say that ‘now I am going
to do Kristallnacht.’”

A motorist in upstate New York was arrested during a
traffic stop when police discovered a cat locked in his
trunk, “marinating” in pepper, salt, and oil. The driver
explained that Navarro, the cat, had been “mean” to him,
and was “possessive, greedy, and wasteful.” A Texas man
drove more than 12,000 miles around the United States,
using a satellite device to trace parts of his route that
spell the message “READ AYN RAND.” A Pittsburgh man asked
an Allegheny County judge to approve his request to change
his name to Boomer the Dog. To support his request, he
produced a letter addressed to Boomer from his friend, a
man who calls himself Hobnose Bordercollie. The U.S. beef
industry was testing methods of cloning dead cows from
ideal cuts of meat and mating those clones with natural
cows to create the ultimate beef-producing livestock. “We
identify carcasses that have certain carcass
characteristics that we want,” explained Brady Hicks of
the agribusiness firm J. R. Simplot. “Through cloning we
can resurrect that animal.” Reality TV star and singer
Tila Tequila was attacked by an angry mob of Juggalos,
fans of the rap group Insane Clown Posse who wear clown
makeup. “She’s pretty cut up,” said one witness, who asked
not to be identified because he feared Juggalo
reprisals. “She didn’t understand the dynamic.” Levi
Johnston, father of Sarah Palin’s grandson, announced he
would run for mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, in 2012, and that
his campaign would be the basis for a reality
show. Johnston’s manager dismissed skepticism about his
client’s political career: “People questioned Jesus
Christ, so I definitely don’t care about these mere
mortals questioning Levi Johnston.”

– Rafe Bartholemew

With each passing day, we’re leaving a trail of more and more personal data. Take cell phones, for example—90% of Americans carry one, each of which can be used as a tracking device.

At the same time, the government’s appetite for our electronic information is out-of-control. The National Security Agency is intercepting 1.7 billion emails, phone calls and other communications per day.

The combination of rapidly-advancing technology and ever-expanding government surveillance could be putting your private information at risk.

Find out how exposed you are—and what you can do about it

Do you use email services?
If you are sharing sensitive information in emails, you should know that the government is taking advantage of loopholes in outdated privacy laws to try to get its hands on email without a search warrant.

Online email services make it easy to keep in touch with friends and family. But all those emails say a lot about your interests, habits, beliefs, and concerns. And outdated privacy laws — written before the Internet even existed — mean that all this personal information isn’t being properly protected from prying eyes. Don’t pay for “free” email by giving up control of your personal information.

All those online emails are a treasure trove of details about your private life. And the government is taking advantage of loopholes and grey areas in outdated privacy laws to try to get its hands on this information without a search warrant reviewed and approved by a judge. No matter how long you keep a hard-copy letter in a shoebox, the government needs a warrant to come into your house and read it. But the government claims that under current electronic privacy law, if you leave a message in your webmail account for more than 180 days, the government can demand access without a search warrant.

Do you share photos or videos online?
The services you use to promote your fabulousness can be used to build profiles about you and your friends. What’s not so fabulous is that outdated privacy laws, written before the Web even existed, mean that all this personal information isn’t being properly protected from prying eyes.

Moving your photos from photo albums and computer hard drives to online photo services can be convenient. But the photos you upload to these sites — and what you do with them — can say a lot about your interests, habits, beliefs, and concerns.

When you keep your photos in a photo album or computer at home, you know who can get access to it. When you store them on the Internet, it’s harder to be sure. The service you use might look at your photos and other information to build a profile about you: who you are, what you do, and who your friends are. It might use tagging or facial recognition tools to extract even more information from your photos. It might use this profile for targeted advertising, or even share this information with others. And you might not even know it’s happening.

Do you use a cell phone?
Almost every American carries a cell phone, yet few think about the information these devices are collecting. Whether you’re visiting a therapist or liquor store, your location can be tracked — in real time, and months later. This is a treasure trove of information that’s valuable to companies and the government, which uses it to follow many thousands of people a year.

Location data from your cell phone or portable device can make it easy to get directions or locate the closest coffee shop. But that location data also says a lot about you — where you go, what you do, and who you know. And outdated privacy laws, written before GPS and other location-aware technologies even existed, mean that all this personal information isn’t being properly protected from prying eyes.

Your location information reveals a lot about you. Many location-based services can pinpoint your location within 30 feet — when you are at church, school, work, a political rally, or a hospital — and connect you with other people nearby. Many also record this location data, keeping a record of who you are and where you go for months or even years.

Do you shop online?
Even if you don’t purchase items online, companies keep records of online searches. Your online window shopping can sometimes be traced back to your computer, or even your name. And the government claims it can demand these records without a warrant.

We learn, share, shop, and connect online. But the more we do online, the more search histories, chat logs, tagged photos, and shopping lists we leave behind. Once our personal information is collected, analyzed, and stored, what’s to keep it from being used or abused by a snooping government?

Most online shopping services record your searches, keeping records about you and your search results for months or years. They use this information to create a profile about you — maybe to customize your shopping experience or provide targeted advertising.

Do you use online search engines to look up sensitive health information?
Many search engines keep records about you and your searches for months or even years. You should be able to use a search engine when you look up health concerns or political material without worrying that companies will keep files on you — or that the government will try to access those personal searches without a warrant.

Searching online is an amazing way to find information about anything and everything. But when you browse those online stacks of information, you leave a trail that reveals a lot about you: your interests, habits, beliefs, and concerns.

When you browse a library for information, no one watches over your shoulder, taking notes on the books you pick up and the pages you read. But most search engines record your searches, keeping records about you and your searches for months or years. They use this information to create a profile about you, maybe to customize your search experience or provide targeted advertising. They might also share it with or sell it to other companies. Your searches can sometimes be linked back to you even after they are “anonymized.”

Do you use Facebook?
Most social networking sites keep records of every friend you chat with, every status update you post and every page you visit (how often have you been checking out your old flame’s page?). Until outdated electronic privacy laws are updated (we’re working on it!), you can’t be sure that the government won’t get its hands on your personal information without a warrant.
Social networking sites are an amazing way to connect with friends and family. But the information that these sites collect about you — not just what’s on your profile but also the records of everything you do on the site — says a lot about your interests, habits, beliefs, and concerns. And outdated privacy laws, written before the Internet even existed, mean that even when you think your profile is “private,” it isn’t private from the government.

When you chat with friends in a coffee shop, no one stands next to you, taking notes on who you’re talking to or what you talk about. But most social networking sites keep records of every friend you chat with, every status update you post, and every page you visit. They might keep these records about you and your online activities for years. They use this information to create a profile about you, and maybe to “customize” your online experience or to provide targeted advertising. They might also share it with or sell it to other companies.

Do you use GPS navigation service?
You may prefer to do it the old-fashioned way, but you shouldn’t be forced to choose between using a GPS and keeping your location information private. It’s time to update electronic privacy law and make sure that the government can’t access information about where you go, what you do, and who you know, without a warrant.

Do you read books online or through an eReader?

What you choose to read says a lot about who you are, what you value, and what you believe. That’s why you should be able to learn about anything from politics to health without worrying that the government is looking over your shoulder. It’s time to update electronic privacy law so that if you ever decide to buy a digital book, you will know that your reading records will be properly protected.

The National Security Letter provision of the Patriot Act radically expanded the FBI’s authority to demand personal records like Web site visits and e-mail addresses without prior court approval. The provision also allows the FBI to forbid or “gag” anyone who receives an NSL from telling anyone about the record demand.

What your risk-assessment survey tells about you: YOU’RE MORE RECOGNIZABLE THAN JACKIE O.

That’s a phrase we’ve heard a lot lately — and will likely continue to hear for the foreseeable future. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, while the unemployment rate remained unchanged at 9.5 percent, the economy actually lost another 131,000 jobs in July. The only reason the unemployment rate didn’t go up was because so many people had quit looking and dropped out of the workforce. Tens of thousands of people throwing in the towel is definitely not good news. More “not good news”: the number of Americans unemployed for 26 weeks or more is now over 6.5 million.

Clearly, we’re not in the middle of a normal recovery. Wall Street may have its casino up and running again, but Main Street shows no signs of bouncing back anytime soon. From foreclosures to unemployment to household debt to bankruptcies, the American middle class is under assault — and America is in danger of becoming a Third World nation.

I detail all the ways this is happening — and the reasons why — in my upcoming book, Third World America. Just as important, I also talk about the steps we can all take to help stop the slide. As soon as I finished writing the book, I knew I wanted to keep telling the stories of the middle class families whose lives have been turned upside down by the economic crisis — and to provide interactive tools that would allow people to get involved.

That’s why HuffPost is launching a “Third World America” section to bear witness to what is happening to the American middle class in small towns and big cities all across the country. And we will, every day, focus on the solutions that are making a difference in the lives of ordinary Americans.

And we want you to be a big part of this section. If you or someone you know has been struggling with unemployment, foreclosure, bankruptcy, or credit card debt, we want to hear about it. Visit our interactive map, share your story, and leave your mark.

Though it is far from what dominates the debate in Washington, every day brings fresh evidence of the new reality that America is entering. And it’s not just about dismal unemployment figures and gloomy foreclosure numbers. As the New York Times reported last week, Hawaii has gone beyond laying off teachers and has begun laying off students — closing its public schools on 17 Fridays during the last school year. In the Atlanta suburb of Clayton County, the entire bus system was shut down. Colorado Springs turned off over 24,000 of its streetlights. The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that Camden, New Jersey is soon to permanently shutter its entire library system. And last month the Wall Street Journal reported on the trend of cash-strapped states and counties giving up on the idea of maintaining paved roads, allowing them instead to turn back into gravel. And those localities that can’t even afford to put gravel down are just letting the roads, as the Journal put it, “return to nature.” A seminar at Purdue University on this trend was entitled “Back to the Stone Age.”

Though the particulars of our country’s transformation are painfully real to the rest of the country, Washington and Wall Street remain blind to our trajectory toward Third World status.

Witness the joint appearance on Fareed Zakaria’s CNN show by former Treasury Secretaries Paul O’Neill and Robert Rubin. According to both of them, we don’t need a second stimulus. “We are moving forward at a pretty gradual pace,” said O’Neill, “but I don’t think things are terrible.” Is “not terrible” the new definition of success? And I don’t doubt that things are not terrible for O’Neill — in fact, I bet the roads leading to most of his houses are still paved.

As for Rubin, he “wouldn’t do a major second stimulus, because I think…we run a risk that it could be counterproductive in creating a lot of additional uncertainty and undermining confidence.”

Uncertainty? I guess that’s true in the sense that the nearly 15 million people without a job are currently quite certain they don’t have one; if a new stimulus bill were passed, there will at least be some welcome uncertainty as to whether they would be one of the lucky ones getting hired.

In Rubin’s mind, what would create more “certainty” is — drumroll, please — deficit reduction. “I would try over the next six months to put in place a very serious beginning of deficit reduction that would take effect at some specified time in the future,” he said. “I think that could do a lot for confidence.”

As Duncan Black writes:
“Can someone get me some of the Very Serious Person crack rock so I can understand the very sophisticated economic model such that all that matters is ‘confidence’ and that confidence could be undermined by fiscal stimulus?”

But Rubin’s reasoning begins to make sense when you remember that he is only concerned with the confidence of a few hundred of his friends on Wall Street. And though he wasn’t officially speaking for the Obama administration, he doesn’t have to, since so much of the economic team at Treasury and the White House is composed of Rubin’s acolytes. Here, for example, was Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner in his recent New York Times Op-Ed celebrating our wonderful recovery: “we are on a path to growth,” but “uncertainty is still inhibiting investment.”

It’s not uncertainty that is stopping business from expanding capacity — it’s a lack of customers. Because the potential customers don’t have jobs!

With this kind of muddled thinking by our “very serious” establishment, we’re in for a long, bumpy ride. But you have to at least give Rubin credit for gall — after all, he’s one of the people responsible for the continued misery that millions of Americans wake up to every morning. And now he’s back arguing against a practical solution to the mess he helped create. Talk about chutzpah.

The O’Neill and Rubin Continue-The-Misery Show certainly proves that this is not a left-right issue – the willful lack of awareness of the reality being experienced by so many Americans is truly bipartisan.

But it’s going to take more than a new stimulus to stop our slide into Third World status. While pushing those in charge to do the right thing, we’re also going to have to push ourselves.

In Waiting for Superman, his new documentary on America’s failing public school system, Davis Guggenheim (the Oscar-winning director of An Inconvenient Truth) tells how the project began. Every day, while taking his children to their top-flight private school, he would pass several troubled public schools, filled with children not nearly as lucky as his own — trying his best to not see the tragedy staring him in the face. Finally, after, as he puts it, “every morning betraying the ideals I thought I lived by,” he decided to stop not-seeing the problem and do something about it. At the moment, our country is afflicted with an epidemic of not-seeing (indeed, it would seem to be a requirement for the job of Treasury Secretary).

Which is why we created our “Third World America” section. There, the crises will be seen and the stories will be heard. And there will be many ways for you to get involved — things we can all do to make sure we never find ourselves living in Third World America.

You can start by taking our Pledge for the America Dream.

As the section continues to expand, you will also find ways to: share your story; bounce back from adversity; build your financial literacy; stay informed; become an American Dream watchdog by monitoring the behavior of business leaders and politicians; connect with others to take action; help others build skills, finds jobs, and save their homes; and more.

Unemployment, foreclosure, bankruptcy — these are all isolating experiences. And that isolation takes its toll. A 2002 study by researchers at Yale found that “high unemployment rates increase mortality and low unemployment decreases mortality and increases the sense of well-being in a community.” Indeed, the recession has coincided with an increase in the suicide rate.

So we all need to do our part. The attack on the middle class may be ignored in Washington, but we can see it — and do something about it — in our own communities.

Though we can’t let our leaders off the hook — or fail to speak out when they, and/or their former mentors who got us into this mess continue to put forth policies that will hasten the decline of America’s middle class — we have to take responsibility for our communities as well.

So take the pledge. Send us your stories. Resolve to stop not seeing what’s going on in your community. And take action.

If we don’t change course — and quickly — Third World America could very well be our future.

It’s like the ultimate back-to-school gift card: $10 billion for cash-strapped school districts to recall laid-off teachers and keep thousands of K-12 jobs.
Supporters of the extra funding say it will keep about 140,000 educators working. The money for teachers, which is part of an aviation safety bill, was approved by the Senate Thursday and will likely pass the House next week when representatives unexpectedly return from August recess.

The infusion of cash could save half the jobs that school districts were expected to have to trim, according to a June survey by the American Association of School Administrators (AASA). Seven out of 10 jobs saved are expected to be teaching positions.

It will be “a welcome infusion of money when people are in pretty desperate financial shape,” says Jeff Simering, legislative director for Council of the Great City Schools, a coalition of 66 large urban districts.

Some districts will be able to find out how much money should be coming their way before the school year starts, he says, while others could use the funds to adjust class sizes during the early weeks when enrollment numbers at each school typically become clear.

Along with money for education, the amendment that’s attached to the aviation bill would also channel $16 billion to states to help pay for Medicaid, an expense that often prompts budget cuts in other areas.

In the original stimulus package, education received more than $100 billion to be spent by the end of this coming school year.

Portions of that money have saved more than 300,000 education jobs, the US Department of Education estimates, based on quarterly reports from the states. An independent statistical analysis found similar figures: 342,000 jobs, or 5.5 percent of K-12 employment, were funded by the stimulus, the Center on Reinventing Public Education reported in March.

Most of those jobs would be wiped out this year by further declines in state and local education funding if Congress doesn’t pass the new bill, says AASA executive director Dan Domenech.

Given the hard economic choices that institutions and individuals are facing these days, that wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing, critics of the bill say.

“At a minimum [Congress should] use it as an opportunity to encourage [and] provide cover for states to start getting their fiscal houses in order in terms of education spending,” says Frederick Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. States could be required to reform costly pension and health-care structures, and districts could be required to report on their cost-effectiveness, he suggests. “Instead, what they’ve said is, ‘Hey, if you complain enough, here’s $10 billion: Spend it now, we’ll worry about the future later.’ ”

But drastic state budget cuts mean schools are running out of options, Domenech says. “Everybody has been tightening their belts,” by cutting back on energy, making transportation more efficient, and even going to a four-day week in hundreds of districts. Now cuts will go to the bone – the teaching staff, he says. “It’s important to have small class sizes to deal with the needs of children at risk.”

Democratic lawmakers have been pushing for additional education stimulus dollars since last December, and at one point said $23 billion was needed to prevent massive layoffs. Earlier versions would have paid for the jobs funding by adding to the deficit, or by trimming from money already promised for education-reform initiatives through Race to the Top and other competitive grants. The latter idea fell apart when President Obama, in defense of such reforms, threatened a veto.
The current bill would be paid for by ending an expansion of food-stamp funding in 2014 and by reducing tax credits for multinational companies.

During Senate debate earlier this week, Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky called the bill “a last-minute effort by Democrats in Washington to funnel more money to the public employee unions before an election.”

But moderate Republicans Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine voted with Democrats to end a filibuster and allow the bill to move forward for Thursday’s Senate vote of 61-39.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called on representatives to return from August recess next week to vote on the measure and send it to President Obama, who supports it.

“This investment will save jobs and help prevent districts from shortening the school year, increasing class sizes, and closing libraries in the wake of horrific and damaging budget cuts,” said Rep. George Miller (D) of California, chair of the House committee that oversees education, in a statement today. “While this latest round of funding isn’t enough to avert all layoffs, it is a critical investment in our children and in our future.”

The education money would be distributed to states and districts based on population figures, the proportion of low-income students, and other existing education funding formulae. Preliminary estimates by the Department of Education show amounts ranging from $17.5 million for Wyoming to $1.2 billion to save 13,500 jobs in California.

A rainbow flag is draped across Market Street in San Francisco at a march marking the overturn of Proposition 8. (Photo: larrybobsf)

Last week, in a stunning, carefully crafted, 136-page opinion, US District Court Judge Vaughn Walker held in Perry v. Schwarzenegger that California’s Proposition 8, which outlaws same-sex marriage, is unconstitutional. The lawsuit was filed by two gay couples who sought to overturn Proposition 8. Interestingly, the named defendant, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, did not defend Proposition 8. Neither did California’s Attorney General Jerry Brown; in fact, he conceded that Proposition 8 is unconstitutional. It was the official proponents of the ballot initiative in the California election who defended Proposition 8 in the lawsuit.

Both Schwarzenegger and Brown asked Walker to permit gay marriages to proceed in California even while the case proceeds through the appellate courts. In ruling on this request, the judge will consider whether his opinion is likely to be upheld on appeal as well as whether same-sex couples who seek to marry would suffer irreparable harm by a postponement.

In his opinion, after making 80 bullet-proof findings of fact, Walker concluded that Proposition 8 violates both the Due Process Clause and the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. The judge agreed with all of the legal arguments advanced by the plaintiffs. The forces for marriage equality hit a grand slam. It remains to be seen, however, whether Walker’s ruling will hold up on appeal.

Walker presided over the first trial in US history that raised the issue of whether same-sex marriage violates the federal Constitution. He heard testimony for two weeks, including that of plaintiffs’ myriad experts and the plaintiffs themselves. The anti-marriage equality side presented only two witnesses, who were unable to articulate any rational reason to treat straights and gays differently when it comes to the right to marry. Walker found that the opinions of one of those witnesses, David Blankenhorn, who is founder and president of the Institute for American Values, were “not supported by reliable evidence or methodology … and entitled to essentially no weight.” Kenneth Miller, a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College, also testified for the pro-Proposition 8 side. The judge noted that Miller’s research did not focus on gay and lesbian issues, and the opinions he gave at trial conflicted with his prior opinions, which undermined his credibility.

•When trial judges make factual findings, they are rarely disturbed on appeal; appellate courts usually confine themselves to reviewing legal conclusions. Walker’s detailed findings of facts included the following:

•Marriage in the United States has always been a civil matter. Civil authorities may permit religious leaders to solemnize marriages, but not to determine who may enter or leave a civil marriage.

•California, like every other state, has never required that individuals entering a marriage be willing or able to procreate.

•Individuals do not generally choose their sexual orientation.

•Same-sex couples are identical to opposite-sex couples in the characteristics relevant to the ability to form successful marital unions.

•Proposition 8 does not affect the First Amendment rights of those opposed to marriage for same-sex couples. Prior to Proposition 8, no religious group was required to recognize marriage for same-sex couples.

•The sexual orientation of an individual does not determine whether the individual can be a good parent. Children raised by gay or lesbian parents are as likely as children raised by heterosexual parents to be healthy, successful and well adjusted.

Walker determined that “Proposition 8 both unconstitutionally burdens the exercise of the fundamental right to marry and creates an irrational classification on the basis of sexual orientation.” Same-sex couples, the judge found, are situated identically to opposite-sex couples regarding their ability to perform the rights and obligations of marriage under California law. He rejected the argument that domestic partnerships are a worthy substitute for marriage, which he called “a culturally superior status.”

Because the plaintiffs sought to exercise the fundamental right to marry, their claim was subject to strict scrutiny. “The minimal evidentiary presentation made by proponents [of Proposition 8],” the judge said, “does not meet the heavy burden of production necessary to show that Proposition is narrowly tailored to a compelling government interest. Proposition 8 cannot, therefore, withstand strict scrutiny.” Thus, the judge ruled that Proposition 8 violates the Due Process Clause.

Walker then held, “Proposition 8 cannot survive any level of scrutiny under the Equal Protection Clause.” All classifications based on sexual orientation, he wrote, “appear suspect, as the evidence shows that California would rarely, if ever, have a reason to categorize individuals based on their sexual orientation.” When there is a suspect classification, the court will judge it with strict scrutiny.

But, Walker noted, strict scrutiny is unnecessary here because Proposition 8 fails even if the court uses the “rational basis” test, in which case the Proposition 8 proponents would only need to show that there was a rational basis for treating homosexuals differently than heterosexuals. This is how the judge shot down each one of the rationales the proponents set forth for denying gays the right to marry:
1.Reserve marriage as only a union between a man and a woman.
- Judge: Tradition alone cannot form a rational basis for a law.
2.Proceed with caution when implementing social changes.
- Judge: “Because the evidence showed that same-sex marriage has and will have no adverse effects on society or the institution of marriage, California has no interest in waiting and no practical need to wait to grant marriage licenses to same-sex couples.”
3.Promote opposite-sex parenting over same-sex parenting.
- Judge: The evidence shows “beyond any doubt that parents’ genders are irrelevant to children’s developmental outcomes.” Proposition 8 has nothing to do with children; it simply prevents same-sex couples from marrying.
4.Protect the freedom of those who oppose marriage for same-sex couples.
- Judge: Proposition 8 does not affect any First Amendment right or responsibility of parents to educate their children, or the rights of those opposed to homosexuality or to same-sex marriage.
5. Treat same-sex couples differently from opposite-sex couples.
- Judge: Proposition 8 creates an administrative burden on California because it must maintain a parallel institution for same-sex couples.
6.Any other conceivable interest.
- Judge: Proponents have not identified any rational basis that Proposition 8 could conceivably further. A private moral view that same-sex couples are inferior to opposite-sex couples is not a proper basis for legislation, the judge said. Thus, he held, “Proposition 8 fails to advance any rational basis in singling out gay men and lesbians for denial of a marriage license.”

To the proponents’ arguments that the purpose of marriage is procreation, Walker retorted, “Never has the state inquired into procreative capacity or intent before issuing a marriage license.”

Moreover, the fact that a majority of California voters supported Proposition 8 is irrelevant, according to Walker, who wrote that “fundamental rights may not be submitted to [a] vote.”
If this case reaches the US Supreme Court, it will likely fall to the swing Justice Anthony Kennedy to decide whether he wishes to be on the right side of history by affirming Judge Walker’s ruling. Kennedy authored Lawrence v. Texas, which overturned Texas’ anti-sodomy law, and Romer v. Evans, which struck down Colorado’s anti-gay ballot initiative. But Kennedy joined with the four conservative justices in overruling Walker’s decision to broadcast the Proposition 8 trial to some locations, although this may reflect Kennedy’s views about the effect of televising trials rather than the way he feels about same-sex marriage.

Well aware that Kennedy may cast the critical vote, Walker cited Romer and Lawrence several times in his ruling. For example, Walker held that “moral disapproval of homosexuality, animus towards gays and lesbians or simply a belief that a relationship between a man and a woman is inherently better than a relationship between two men or two women … is not a proper basis on which to legislate,” citing Romer.

Walker also wrote, “The arguments surrounding Proposition 8 raise a question similar to that addressed in Lawrence, when the Court asked whether a majority of citizens could use the power of the state to enforce ‘profound and deep convictions accepted as ethical and moral principles’ through the criminal code. The question here is whether California voters can enforce those same principles through regulation of marriage licenses. They cannot.”

Judge Walker’s ruling may or may not survive. Nevertheless, in overturning Proposition 8, he struck a mighty blow against homophobia and in favor of equality.

Elena Kagan became the 112th justice of the Supreme Court
and the fourth female justice. The Senate passed a $26
billion spending bill to aid state budget shortfalls, and
BP successfully deployed its “static kill” strategy,
plugging the blown-out Deepwater Horizon well with mud and
cement. “You want to make sure it’s really dead dead
dead,” explained Energy Secretary Steven Chu. “Don’t want
anything to rise out of the grave.” “Clearly there’s lots
of oil and gas here,” said BP Chief Operating Officer Doug
Suttles, “and we’ll have to think about what to do with
that at some point.” A piece of ice measuring 100 square
miles broke off of Greenland, and wildfires burned across
Russia, while world leaders met in Bonn, Germany, to
continue the climate change talks that stalled last winter
in Copenhagen, but again failed to produce a binding
resolution. “It’s like a flashback,” said one
environmental activist. “At this point,” said
U.S. delegate Jonathan Pershing, “I am very concerned.”
Engineers in Bristol developed a “poo-powered” Volkswagen
Beetle, the Cadillac Escalade was the most stolen vehicle
for the eighth straight year, and Caroline Giuliani, the
daughter of former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, was
arrested for shoplifting at a Sephora. Dermatologists at
the University of Edinburgh reported that the genuine
allover tan was an impossibility.

A woman in Atlanta used her toes to type for help after
burglars left her tied up in her home, and a man in
Michigan discovered he had Type 2 Diabetes after his dog
bit off his big toe while he was passed out drunk. “He ate
it,” said the man. “I mean, he must have eaten it, because
we couldn’t find it anywhere else in the house.” Snooker
world champion Alex Higgins, once described by Daily Mail
as “a belligerent narcissist, filled with self-pity and
towering anger,” who “never allowed concern for others to
put any restraint on his appetites, whether it be for
drink or drugs or sex,” died at 61. Bill Cosby denied
being dead, and Florida’s health department reported an
outbreak of Dengue Fever in Key West. A carnival in
Pennsylvania took down its “shoot a dart at Obama”
game. Michelle and Sasha Obama vacationed in southern
Spain, spending time on a hundred-yard stretch of beach
cleared by the Spanish police, while President Obama
celebrated his 49th birthday at a “finance dinner,” which
guests paid $30,400 to attend. Former Fugee Wyclef Jean,
whose hits include “Ready or Not,” “Gone Till November,”
and “We Trying to Stay Alive,” announced his intention to
run for the Haitian presidency. “If not for the
earthquake,” said Jean, “I probably would have waited
another 10 years before doing this.”

– Genevieve Smith

by: Max Ajl, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed

(Photo: talkradionews. Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada)

Last week, Senate majority leader Harry Reid glumly announced that the Democratic leadership lacked the votes to push through even truncated carbon-limiting legislation, which would have called for carbon caps on power plants. “We don’t have a single Republican to work with us … We know where we are … We don’t have the votes.” The Senate had long ago abandoned trying to pass Lieberman-Kerry (the American Power Act), the twin of the Waxman-Markey boondoggle, which the House passed last year. Reid’s admission that they couldn’t attract Republican support is basically true. What he might have added is that the bill wouldn’t have had uniform support from Democrats, either. Senators from states specializing in coal extraction and manufacturing weren’t going to support a bill against which their constituents – coal companies and industrial enterprises – were lobbying.

Immediately, chatter turned to why the bill died. The New York Times opined, “Reid abandoned the fight for meaningful energy and climate legislation. The Republicans – surprise – had been fiercely obstructionist. But the Democratic leaders let them get away with it, as did the White House.” Wily Republicans and weak Democrats – pretty familiar narrative trope, same one we see about ending the massacres in Afghanistan, too. David Roberts at Grist offered a different explanation: the undemocratic structure of the Senate, alongside the now nearly built-in requirement for a filibuster-proof supermajority, combined with a weak economy that generates suspicion over potentially expensive green climate bills. Roberts flirted a bit with a more compelling explanation – that the American people see the issue as economy versus ecology, the product of 40 years of brainwashing from the “right,” and so, as a result, they “were just bound to be indifferent and/or suspicious of grand environmental initiatives during a time of economic pain.” There’s a bit more truth there, but not enough. Roberts doesn’t quite get it: he starts off his piece with the pregnant lead-in, “With the climate bill officially dead …”
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That one line exemplifies the main problem with nearly all the commentary we’re likely to see on the death of the senatorial climate bill. The bulk of it – even by purported progressives – elides a basic logical problem. The climate bill didn’t die: it couldn’t. Death has a pre-requisite: life. In this case the bill never met that qualification.
According to the National Resources Defense Council, Lieberman-Kerry contained “major ill-advised proposals to promote new nuclear power plants and new offshore oil drilling. These include excessive subsidies for constructing new nuclear power plants and weakening changes to nuclear plant licensing requirements and safety and environmental safeguards.” It added that the bio-fuel loopholes threatened to “significantly erod[e] the bill’s carbon pollution reductions. Covered firms are allowed to ignore carbon emissions from burning ‘renewable biomass’ on the assumption that they are completely counterbalanced by carbon uptake when biomass is grown.” The inducement was to be for a switch over to bio-fuel-based energy infrastructure. Nice idea, except that there’s absolutely no evidence that bio-fuels yield net emissions reductions. The heralded reductions in CO2 emissions are mostly speculative and mostly specious. Bio-fuels aren’t worthless, but their worth will be on a small scale as a careful and circumspect replacement for some difficult-to-substitute activities: airplane flights, for instance.

Earth Track adds that the essence of the bill was willy-nilly distribution of “subsidies” to embryonic and existing energy firms, in order to try to get senatorial support, somewhat akin to passing legislation which taxes you to bribe a robber to get him to stop stealing from you. Some of those subsidies include attempts to speed up the development of clean coal technology through Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS). Another nice idea, except CCS is an unproven technology that’s at least a decade, probably far more, from implementation. Instead of making coal clean, a real climate change bill would keep it in the ground, where it’s really clean.
Environmental attorney James Handley notes that the bill provided for a “cap” that would have added 2 billion tons of offsets to the 5.4 billion tons of CO2 that the economy generated in 2009. That “means that even if the cap tightens a few percent each year, polluters will be able to buy (cheap) offsets instead of making reductions for the next two decades. By design [Kerry-Lieberman] calls it ‘cost containment’), CO2 prices will be set in the offset market, not by supply constraints of the ‘cap.’”

Researchers from the Peterson Institute for International Economics add that the Kerry-Lieberman bill would have effectively reduced “economy-wide” greenhouse gas emissions 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020 and 31 percent by 2030, assuming that offsets would have functioned as planned. They never do. Even the conservative federal General Accounting Office questions their efficacy. The researchers add, “If emissions from noncovered sources continue to grow on a business-as-usual trajectory, overall US emissions (including domestic offsets and sequestered carbon) will decline 8 percent below 2005 levels by 2020 and 17 percent by 2030.” The researchers tendentiously assume that hydropower and bio-fuels are “renewable,” and that nuclear energy contributes to net CO2 reductions. While coal, petroleum and natural gas use would have decreased in their projections, the differences would have been made up from “renewable” and nuclear energy, generously subsidized. None of those assumptions are straightforwardly true – some are untrue – and even then, projected energy use was projected to rise 5 percent by 2030.

Charles K. Ebinger of the Brookings Institute’s Energy Security Initiative adds, “The offset provisions should be significantly revised or scrapped. If we are trying to reduce carbon emissions in the U.S., let’s do it. Otherwise we simply are exporting capital and jobs. The bill’s price on carbon is unlikely to be high enough to generate any real movement away from fossil fuels. Furthermore, the provisions under schedule E for trading in carbon are too complex and as written could allow gaming of the system.” He adds that the bill was “poorly designed” and unlikely to accomplish its objectives. Ebinger isn’t exactly an eco-radical from Earth First!. When a senior establishmentarian energy bureaucrat describes energy legislation thusly, it’s time to look for a box of matches and an urn for the ashes and some new paper and pens with which to start over.
It is impossible to quantify how much warming the reductions envisioned in Kerry-Lieberman would have put us on track for. The Center for Biological Diversity comments, “the 0.7% reduction from 1990 levels envisioned under the APA [Kerry-Lieberman] is consistent with a trajectory that would result in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations of 650 ppm.”The Sustainability Institute suggests that the proposals on the table would have allowed for 715 ppm (parts per million) of CO2-equivalent (ppmCO2e), a measurement that includes other sorts of greenhouse gases, highlighting the real world results of relying on other carbon-emitting nations to offset American or Western CO2 emissions, while simultaneously expecting them to stabilize or reduce their own emissions. It just doesn’t work and, as should be clear, the bill would have done next to nothing to even arrest global warming.

The National Research Council gives some estimates of the effects of dumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The range of 650 to 715 ppmCO2e virtually locks in 3 degrees Celsius of average “transient” global warming – more in some places, less in others. That means between 15 and 30 percent changes in precipitation, 10 to 30 percent increases in torrential rainfalls, 15 to 45 percent reductions in United States and African maize and Indian wheat yields and 45 percent decreases in annually averaged sea ice. (The US produces 40 percent of the world’s maize). There’s more. Sea levels will rise 0.5 to 1 meter by 2100, while there will be extensive coral bleaching due to oceanic acidification. Wildfires will burn out of control. In the United States, “Studies are limited in number, but suggest that warming of 1°C (relative to 1950-2003) is expected to produce increases in median area burned by about 200-400%.”

Transient global warming is the nearly instant response of the oceans and atmosphere to increases in greenhouse gases, as well as net radiative forcing. The climactic changes cataloged above will be the likely effects if CO2e arrives at that point, then thereafter, decreases. They are not as large as the longer run “climate sensitivity,” which include adjustments from the oceans to the added temperature in the atmosphere. But there is also “equilibrium” warming: what happens if CO2e concentrations don’t decrease after reaching a local peak – if they plateau instead. If that happens, tack another degree Celsius onto the estimates. Then, nine out of ten summers will be warmer than the warmest summers ever experienced in the last decades of the 20th century in nearly all terrestrial land areas. Those are simply highest-likelihood estimates. Five hundred and fifty ppm CO2e could produce transient warming of 5 degrees Celsius. Such warming could cause global food prices to double. For the world’s poor, that will mean economic famine.

Clearly, the Kerry-Lieberman legislation was zombie lawmaking from the outset. No one except the deluded thought it would stop climate change. The criminals aren’t the ones who assassinated the bill. The criminals are the ones who drafted it. And they thoughtfully took the trouble to attach their names to the legislation – and they are not Republicans. Nevertheless, it’s a mistake to indict just Kerry, Lieberman and Reid. They’re only footmen for those with real power: the fossil fuel conglomerates that profit from powering our fossil-fuel based economy, and the transnational corporations intent on tricking us into thinking we need desperately the latest worthless gewgaw out of a Chinese or Korean factory, never mind the costs – a moribund planet.

So, through millions spent on advertising, on funding unthinking think-tanks devoted to denying climate change, and a compliant press, Americans are kept in a state of advanced retardation and hysteria vis-à-vis climate science. Even Iraq and Palestine place higher priorities on dealing with anthropogenic global warming. And they plausibly have other problems. So, there is a reason for our confusion, and we know who to blame: those benefiting from the economic system and the scribes who obediently draft the legislation their superiors request, senators from both sides of the aisle, bought off by transnational oil firms spreading their bribes throughout the Senate chambers (although more of it ends up in the pockets of Republican senators). Those scribe-senators are all from the “right,” as Grist’s Roberts notes. But it must be added that, in America, as Gore Vidal commented, we have “one party with two right wings.” Until that’s acknowledged as the starting point for discussion, we can pout all we wish about dead climate change bills and Republican obstructionism. But that pouting is performative at best – at worst, propaganda. Cathartic, maybe, but for those concerned about a dying planet, some more honesty would be cool.