Wasteland of the Free

WHY BOTHER?

FASCISM

WAR

RACISM

MYTHS

LETTERS

BLOGred

HYPOCRISY

COVERUPS

ENVIRONMENT

SPORTS

IS GEORGE BUSH A PSYCHOPATHIC SADIST?

CONSEQUENCES OF ATOMIC WAR

Web Log for optimistic things worthy of mention as they arise

• 12.17.05 the world was shocked today when Bush finally accepted responsibility for one of the many high crimes and misdeanors surrounding his administration. He admitted that he had personally authorized spying on Americans through wiretaps and email intercepts without any court giving their blessing, something as blatantly illegal as illegal gets. As Senator Russell D. Feingold (D-Wis) put it, "The president does not get to pick and choose which laws he wants to follow. He is a president, not a king."

  Now that we have the admission of guilt in the commision of high crimes against the American people, in a rational world it should inevitably follow that the criminals should be prosecuted and punished. In this case it has to be impeachment of course, that's the remedy that applies. But I'm not so sure that the world is entirely rational anymore so I have to figure that Bush might weasel his way out of it, his Teflon coating has worked pretty well so far.

• George Bush Sr was in touch with reality when he said in A World Transformed (1998):

  "To occupy Iraq would instantly shatter our coalition, turning the whole Arab world against us and make a broken tyrant into a latter-day hero ... assigning young soldiers to a fruitless hunt for a securely entrenched dictator and condemning them to fight in what would be an un-winnable urban guerilla war. It could only plunge that part of the world into even greater instability."

  Obviously the father's words proved exactly correct with his son's ill-conceived invasion and occupation of Iraq. He forgot to mention though how fanning the flames of Islamic hatred must inevitably come back to us at home too. What I wonder about though, is how could the father let his son do something so stupid? Didn't want to embarass him, or what? Didn't he even try to advise him, I wonder? All that Bush Senior would have had to do is voice his opinion early on that the proposed war on Iraq was inadvisable for the reasons he had already gone on record with. But no, Bush Junior had his mind made up, or maybe the deal was already cast in stone from the start. I don't think even Repugnicans believe anymore he's fully in charge, look at all the things that aren't his fault (at least Bush isn't accepting responsibility for them): bad intelligence, torture, Valerie Plame and lying to investigators, the list is growing.

• Even conservatives with conscience are now coming forward!

  From http://www.laweekly.com/ink/printme.php?eid=51202 Soldier for the Truth
  Exposing Bush's talking-points war
  by Marc Cooper

  Busting the liars:
  Karen Kwiatkowski

  After two decades in the U.S. Air Force, Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, now 43, knew her career as a regional analyst was coming to an end when - in the months leading up to the war in Iraq - she felt she was being "propagandized" by her own bosses.

  With master's degrees from Harvard in government and zoology and two books on Saharan Africa to her credit, she found herself transferred in the spring of 2002 to a post as a political/military desk officer at the Defense Department's office for Near East South Asia (NESA), a policy arm of the Pentagon.

  Kwiatkowski got there just as war fever was spreading, or being spread as she would later argue, through the halls of Washington. Indeed, shortly after her arrival, a piece of NESA was broken off, expanded and re-dubbed with the Orwellian name of the Office of Special Plans. The OSP's task was, ostensibly, to help the Pentagon develop policy around the Iraq crisis.

  She would soon conclude that the OSP - a pet project of Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld - was more akin to a nerve center for what she now calls a "neoconservative coup, a hijacking of the Pentagon."

  Though a lifelong conservative, Kwiatkowski found herself appalled as the radical wing of the Bush administration, including her superiors in the Pentagon planning department, bulldozed internal dissent, overlooked its own intelligence and relentlessly pushed for confrontation with Iraq.

  Deeply frustrated and alarmed, Kwiatkowski, still on active duty, took the unusual step of penning an anonymous column of internal Pentagon dissent that was posted on the Internet by former Colonel David Hackworth, America's most decorated veteran.

  As war inevitably approached, and as she neared her 20-year mark in the Air Force, Kwiatkowski concluded the only way she could viably resist what she now terms the "expansionist, imperialist" policies of the neoconservatives who dominated Iraq policy was by retiring and taking up a public fight against them.

  She left the military last March, the same week that troops invaded Iraq. Kwiatkowski started putting her real name on her Web reports and began accepting speaking invitations. "I'm now a soldier for the truth," she said in a speech last week at Cal Poly Pomona. Afterward, I spoke with her.

  L.A. WEEKLY: What was the relationship between NESA and the now-notorious Office of Special Plans, the group set up by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney? Was the OSP, in reality, an intelligence operation to act as counter to the CIA?

  KAREN KWIATKOWSKI: The NESA office includes the Iraq desk, as well as the desks of the rest of the region. It is under Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Bill Luti. When I joined them, in May 2002, the Iraq desk was there. We shared the same space, and we were all part of the same general group. At that time it was expanding. Contractors and employees were coming though it wasn't clear what they were doing.

  In August of 2002, the expanded Iraq desk found new spaces and moved into them. It was told to us that this was now to be known as the Office of Special Plans. The Office of Special Plans would take issue with those who say they were doing intelligence. They would say they were developing policy for the Office of the Secretary of Defense for the invasion of Iraq.

  But developing policy is not the same as developing propaganda and pushing a particular agenda. And actually, that's more what they really did. They pushed an agenda on Iraq, and they developed pretty sophisticated propaganda lines which were fed throughout government, to the Congress, and even internally to the Pentagon - to try and make this case of immediacy. This case of severe threat to the United States.

  You retired when the war broke out and have been speaking out publicly. But you were already publishing critical reports anonymously while still in uniform and while still on active service. Why did you take that rather unusual step?

  Due to my frustration over what I was seeing around me as soon as I joined Bill Luti's organization, what I was seeing in terms of neoconservative agendas and the way they were being pursued to formulate a foreign policy and a military policy - an invasion of a sovereign country, an occupation, a poorly planned occupation. I was concerned about it; I was in opposition to that, and I was not alone.

  So I started writing what I considered to be funny, short essays for my own sanity. Eventually, I e-mailed them to former Colonel David Hackworth, who runs the Web page Soldiers for the Truth, and he published them under the title "Insider Notes From the Pentagon." I wrote 28 of those columns from August 2002 until I retired.

  There you were, a career military officer, a Pentagon analyst, a conservative who had given two decades to this work. What provoked you to become first a covert and later a public dissident?

  Like most people, I've always thought there should be honesty in government. Working 20 years in the military, I'm sure I saw some things that were less than honest or accountable. But nothing to the degree that I saw when I joined Near East South Asia.

  This was creatively produced propaganda spread not only through the Pentagon, but across a network of policymakers - the State Department, with John Bolton; the Vice President's Office, the very close relationship the OSP had with that office. That is not normal, that is a bypassing of normal processes. Then there was the National Security Council, with certain people who had neoconservative views; Scooter Libby, the vice president's chief of staff; a network of think tanks who advocated neoconservative views - the American Enterprise Institute, the Center for Security Policy with Frank Gaffney, the columnist Charles Krauthammer - was very reliable. So there was just not a process inside the Pentagon that should have developed good honest policy, but it was instead pushing a particular agenda; this group worked in a coordinated manner, across media and parts of the government, with their neoconservative compadres.

  How did you experience this in your day-to-day work?

  There was a sort of groupthink, an adopted storyline: We are going to invade Iraq and we are going to eliminate Saddam Hussein and we are going to have bases in Iraq. This was all a given even by the time I joined them, in May of 2002.

  You heard this in staff meetings?

  The discussions were ones of this sort of inevitability. The concerns were only that some policymakers still had to get onboard with this agenda. Not that this agenda was right or wrong - but that we needed to convince the remaining holdovers. Colin Powell, for example. There was a lot of frustration with Powell; they said a lot of bad things about him in the office. They got very angry with him when he convinced Bush to go back to the U.N. and forced a four-month delay in their invasion plans.

  General Tony Zinni is another one. Zinni, the combatant commander of Central Command, Tommy Franks' predecessor - a very well-qualified guy who knows the Middle East inside out, knows the military inside out, a Marine, a great guy. He spoke out publicly as President Bush's Middle East envoy about some of the things he saw. Before he was removed by Bush, I heard Zinni called a traitor in a staff meeting. They were very anti-anybody who might provide information that affected their paradigm. They were the spin enforcers.

  How did this atmosphere affect your work? To be direct, were you told by your superiors what you could say and not say? What could and could not be discussed? Or were opinions they didn't like just ignored?

  I can give you one clear example where we were told to follow the party line, where I was told directly. I worked North Africa, which included Libya. I remember in one case, I had to rewrite something a number of times before it went through. It was a background paper on Libya, and Libya has been working for years to try and regain the respect of the international community. I had intelligence that told me this, and I quoted from the intelligence, but they made me go back and change it and change it. They'd make me delete the quotes from intelligence so they could present their case on Libya in a way that said it was still a threat to its neighbors and that Libya was still a belligerent, antagonistic force. They edited my reports in that way. In fact, the last report I made, they said, "Just send me the file." And I don't know what the report ended up looking like, because I imagine more changes were made.

  On Libya, really a small player, the facts did not fit their paradigm that we have all these enemies.

  One person you've written about is Abe Shulsky. You describe him as a personable, affable fellow but one who played a key role in the official spin that led to war.

  Abe was the director of the Office of Special Plans. He was in our shared offices when I joined, in May 2002. He comes from an academic background; he's definitely a neoconservative. He is a student of Leo Strauss from the University of Chicago - so he has that Straussian academic perspective. He was the final proving authority on all the talking points that were generated from the Office of Special Plans and that were distributed throughout the Pentagon, certainly to staff officers. And it appears to me they were also distributed to the Vice President's Office and to the presidential speechwriters. Much of the phraseology that was in our talking points consists of the same things I heard the president say.

  So Shulsky was the sort of controller, the disciplinarian, the overseeing monitor of the propaganda flow. From where you sat, did you see him manipulate the information?

  We had a whole staff to help him do that, and he was the approving authority. I can give you one example of how the talking points were altered. We were instructed by Bill Luti, on behalf of the Office of Special Plans, on behalf of Abe Shulsky, that we would not write anything about Iraq, WMD or terrorism in any papers that we prepared for our superiors except as instructed by the Office of Special Plans. And it would provide to us an electronic document of talking points on these issues. So I got to see how they evolved.

  It was very clear to me that they did not evolve as a result of new intelligence, of improved intelligence, or any type of seeking of the truth. The way they evolved is that certain bullets were dropped or altered based on what was being reported on the front pages of the Washington Post or The New York Times.

  Can you be specific?

  One item that was dropped was in November [2002]. It was the issue of the meeting in Prague prior to 9/11 between Mohammed Atta and a member of Saddam Hussein's intelligence force. We had had this in our talking points from September through mid-November. And then it dropped out totally. No explanation. Just gone. That was because the media reported that the FBI had stepped away from that, that the CIA said it didn't happen.

  Let's clarify this. Talking points are generally used to deal with media. But you were a desk officer, not a politician who had to go and deal with the press. So are you saying the Office of Special Plans provided you a schematic, an outline of the way major points should be addressed in any report or analysis that you developed regarding Iraq, WMD or terrorism?

  That's right. And these did not follow the intent, the content or the accuracy of intelligence . . .

  They were political . . .

  They were political, politically manipulated. They did have obviously bits of intelligence in them, but they were created to propagandize. So we inside the Pentagon, staff officers and senior administration officials who might not work Iraq directly, were being propagandized by this same Office of Special Plans.

  In the 10 months you worked in that office in the run-up to the war, was there ever any open debate? The public, at least, was being told at the time that there was a serious assessment going on regarding the level of threat from Iraq, the presence or absence of WMD, et cetera. Was this debated inside your office at the Pentagon?

  No. Those things were not debated. To them, Saddam Hussein needed to go.

  You believe that decision was made by the time you got there, almost a year before the war?

  That decision was made by the time I got there. So there was no debate over WMD, the possible relations Saddam Hussein may have had with terrorist groups and so on. They spent their energy gathering pieces of information and creating a propaganda storyline, which is the same storyline we heard the president and Vice President Cheney tell the American people in the fall of 2002.

  The very phrases they used are coming back to haunt them because they are blatantly false and not based on any intelligence. The OSP and the Vice President's Office were critical in this propaganda effort - to convince Americans that there was some just requirement for pre-emptive war.

  What do you believe the real reasons were for the war?

  The neoconservatives needed to do more than just topple Saddam Hussein. They wanted to put in a government friendly to the U.S., and they wanted permanent basing in Iraq. There are several reasons why they wanted to do that. None of those reasons, of course, were presented to the American people or to Congress.

  So you don't think there was a genuine interest as to whether or not there really were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?

  It's not about interest. We knew. We knew from many years of both high-level surveillance and other types of shared intelligence, not to mention the information from the U.N., we knew, we knew what was left [from the Gulf War] and the viability of any of that. Bush said he didn't know.

  The truth is, we know [Saddam] didn't have these things. Almost a billion dollars has been spent - a billion dollars! - by David Kay's group to search for these WMD, a total whitewash effort. They didn't find anything, they didn't expect to find anything.

  So if, as you argue, they knew there weren't any of these WMD, then what exactly drove the neoconservatives to war?

  The neoconservatives pride themselves on having a global vision, a long-term strategic perspective. And there were three reasons why they felt the U.S. needed to topple Saddam, put in a friendly government and occupy Iraq.

  One of those reasons is that sanctions and containment were working and everybody pretty much knew it. Many companies around the world were preparing to do business with Iraq in anticipation of a lifting of sanctions. But the U.S. and the U.K. had been bombing northern and southern Iraq since 1991. So it was very unlikely that we would be in any kind of position to gain significant contracts in any post-sanctions Iraq. And those sanctions were going to be lifted soon, Saddam would still be in place, and we would get no financial benefit.

  The second reason has to do with our military-basing posture in the region. We had been very dissatisfied with our relations with Saudi Arabia, particularly the restrictions on our basing. And also there was dissatisfaction from the people of Saudi Arabia. So we were looking for alternate strategic locations beyond Kuwait, beyond Qatar, to secure something we had been searching for since the days of Carter - to secure the energy lines of communication in the region. Bases in Iraq, then, were very important - that is, if you hold that is America's role in the world. Saddam Hussein was not about to invite us in.

  The last reason is the conversion, the switch Saddam Hussein made in the Food for Oil program, from the dollar to the euro. He did this, by the way, long before 9/11, in November 2000 - selling his oil for euros. The oil sales permitted in that program aren't very much. But when the sanctions would be lifted, the sales from the country with the second largest oil reserves on the planet would have been moving to the euro.

  The U.S. dollar is in a sensitive period because we are a debtor nation now. Our currency is still popular, but it's not backed up like it used to be. If oil, a very solid commodity, is traded on the euro, that could cause massive, almost glacial, shifts in confidence in trading on the dollar. So one of the first executive orders that Bush signed in May [2003] switched trading on Iraq's oil back to the dollar.

  At the time you left the military, a year ago, just how great was the influence of this neoconservative faction on Pentagon policy?

  When it comes to Middle East policy, they were in complete control, at least in the Pentagon. There was some debate at the State Department.

  Indeed, when you were still in uniform and writing a Web column anonymously, you expressed your bitter disappointment when Secretary of State Powell - in your words - eventually "capitulated."

  He did. When he made his now-famous power-point slide presentation at the U.N., he totally capitulated. It meant he was totally onboard. Whether he believed it or not.

  You gave your life to the military, you voted Republican for many years, you say you served in the Pentagon right up to the outbreak of war. What does it feel like to be out now, publicly denouncing your old bosses?

  Know what it feels like? It feels like duty. That's what it feels like. I've thought about it many times. You know, I spent 20 years working for something that - at least under this administration - turned out to be something I wasn't working for. I mean, these people have total disrespect for the Constitution. We swear an oath, military officers and NCOs alike swear an oath to uphold the Constitution. These people have no respect for the Constitution. The Congress was misled, it was lied to. At a very minimum that is a subversion of the Constitution. A pre-emptive war based on what we knew was not a pressing need is not what this country stands for.

  What I feel now is that I'm not retired. I still have a responsibility to do my part as a citizen to try and correct the problem.

• Get Your War On great cartoons by David Rees and Colson Whitehead which appear regularly in Rolling Stone.

• An important perspective by Dav at http://community.nylf.org on January 09, 2004 11:06 PM. He articulated my feeling on these issues perfectly:

  This is where I have to add my two cents. Forget that I'm a mod for a little while, this is just me speaking.

  Why is it that people keep equating comments about current policy with "ungratefulness" for the United States of America? Is not one of the founding principles of this country that fact the each and every citizen is allowed their own opinions of their country's policies and is allow to voice such opinions? In all justice, they are actually showing their appreciation for their country in exercising their right to speak out about what they believe. Do not criticize someone for speaking what they truly believe; although their opinions may be flawed in your view, their voicing of such opinions is in every way justified. Feel free to refute their arguments, feel free to dispute their points, feel free to debate the issue for all eternity. I must, however, respectfully request that you not take fault with their truthfully-given statement of beliefs. Debate the issue, not the persons against whom you are debating.

  As for the military families - must one support the overall actions of the military in order to support those who serve in it? I have great respect for those soldiers who are willing to put their lives on the line in order to carry out the orders that they have been given. I even respect than some, many, or even most of them believe that what they have been ordered to do is right. If they die while performing their duties, I think no less of them than if they had died in any other way, in fact I pay them more respect than another individual because they are willing to risk their own lives for a cause, which is a noble quality in a person. This does not, however, mean that I support whatever orders they may have been given. Realize that disagreement with a policy is not the same as disrespect for those who carry it out.

  These things that I have said hold true for any issue, not just the current issues with Iraq and George W. Bush. Please consider them.

  Farewell and goodwill,
  ~Dav

• 11/10/03 Al Gore's call to fight for freedom See details of his speech at MoveOn.org. Mr. Gore is turning out to be a statesman of high integrity, the very opposite of George Bush Junior. Maybe there is hope for America yet...

  "I want to challenge the Bush Administration's implicit assumption that we have to give up many of our traditional freedoms in order to be safe from terrorists.

  Because it is simply not true.

  In fact, in my opinion, it makes no more sense to launch an assault on our civil liberties as the best way to get at terrorists than it did to launch an invasion of Iraq as the best way to get at Osama Bin Laden.

  In both cases, the Administration has attacked the wrong target.

  In both cases they have recklessly put our country in grave and unnecessary danger, while avoiding and neglecting obvious and much more important challenges that would actually help to protect the country.

  In both cases, the administration has fostered false impressions and misled the nation with superficial, emotional and manipulative presentations that are not worthy of American Democracy.

  In both cases they have exploited public fears for partisan political gain and postured themselves as bold defenders of our country while actually weakening not strengthening America."

  ---

  Former Vice President Al Gore's full speech can be viewed in RealPlayer at cspan for as long as they keep it in their archives.

  ---

• 6/13/03 Bush should be impeached See 'They impeach murderers, don't they?' by Ted Rall at http://www.smirkingchimp.com/print.php?sid=11818:

  NEW YORK--George W. Bush told us that Iraq and Al Qaeda were working together. They weren't. He repeatedly implied that Iraq had had something to do with 9/11. It hadn't. He claimed to have proof that Saddam Hussein possessed banned weapons of mass destruction. He didn't. As our allies watched in horror and disgust, Bush conned us into a one-sided war of aggression that killed and maimed thousands of innocent people, destroyed billions of dollars in Iraqi infrastructure, cost tens of billions of dollars, cost the lives of American soldiers, and transformed our international image as the world's shining beacon of freedom into that of a marauding police state. Presidents Nixon and Clinton rightly faced impeachment for comparatively trivial offenses; if we hope to restore our nation's honor, George W. Bush too must face a president's gravest political sanction.

  <snip>

  Nixon and Clinton escaped criminal prosecution for burglary, perjury and obstruction of justice. George W. Bush, however, stands accused as the greatest mass murderer in American history. The Lexington Institute estimates that the U.S. killed between 15,000 and 20,000 Iraqi troops during the fraudulently justified invasion of Iraq, plus 10,000 to 15,000 wounded. More than 150 U.S. soldiers were killed, plus more than 500 injured. A new Associated Press study of Iraqi civilian casualties confirms at least 3,240 deaths. Although Bush, Rumsfeld, Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice denied such legal niceties to the concentration-camp inmates captured in their illegal invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, these high-ranking Administration henchmen should be quickly turned over--after impeachment proceedings for what might properly be called Slaughtergate--to an international tribunal for prosecution of war crimes.

  Anything less would be anti-American.

  Ted Rall is the author of "Gas War: The Truth Behind the American Occupation of Afghanistan," an analysis of the underreported Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline project and the real motivations behind the war on terrorism. Ordering information is available at amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com.

  Read all of Ted Rall's impeccable logic here.

• 6/1/03 What? No Weapons of Mass Destruction? But Bush was so sure, he said!

  And here I was so off the mark, thinking that Bush was lying about the true risks posed by Saddam by understating them, but instead he was lying about the true risks by overstating them! Well at least I was right about his character.

• 4/29/03 Larger Context: What does it all mean in the post-911 world, to be forced to deal with lifethreatening risks from murderous religious fantatics? It seems to me that we are dealing very effectively with some aspects like improved airline safety but not effectively at all at dealing with root causes. If anything the Attack on Iraq will tend to inflame already glowing-hot hate disguised as religion, all across the Arab world and within our own nation. We can expect nut cases to come out of the woodwork periodically with suicide bombings and other murder-suicide scenarios as time goes by. Each one will result in increased pressure on law enforcement to prevent these atrocities from happening in the first place, and thus our civil liberties will slowly drain away.

  I want to suggest to those with a sense of responsibility that we aim to nip things like this in the bud not by becoming a police state, but instead by becoming even freer than we are already. We should rejoice in our separation of church and state that has gotten us this far so well, and then make that good thing even stronger by eliminating all vestiges of religion from our government. We ought to recognize our own Taliban (except here we call them fundamentalist Christians) and recognize the degrading things they do to our whole culture, so that we can counteract them effectively. Today they have a huge influence on our government all the way up to the White House, where we have a President who doesn't believe in evolution. That's like not believing the earth is round, harking all the way back to medieval times and before when scripture was thought to hold all the answers. As interpreted by the officials in charge of that scripture, of course. I'm talking about the kinds of people that many Muslims would call Crusaders, exploiters and death-dealers as they see them. Puppetmasters Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld wielding charismatic psychopathic murder-energy through Paul Wolfowitz to take an already-murderous George Dubya Bush down the logical steps toward global domination, with him as Emperor. (He's already said he'd like that). Could they be planning to take over the world, one state at a time? Time will tell, let's hope someone stops them before we start bombing France and Germany anyway.

  The point is that we ought to be creating opportunities to make ourselves better in the face of adversity, rather than lesser. We have the ability as a culture to decide our fate and guide it the way we choose, we do not have to let events drive us all the time. Theoretically, that is. In practical terms we are saddled with a political system that runs on the cronyism of two major parties, and there is little room for other parties even if they do exist in a few people's hearts and minds. We have to open up our political process so that many more qualified people and points of view are presented, so that the will of the majority will be the will of the majority instead of the will of the special interests that control today's twin dominant parties. The simplest and easiest way to do that is to change how we do elections, so that some minimal standard of support is required in the community (say 1000 people?) to get on the ballot in the first place, but then if no candidate gets more than 50% of the vote, the top two vote-getters go into a runoff election. That would prevent a George Bush from ever stealing another election again, much less get into office legitimately. We must have a more robust way to stop ignorant religious-oriented leaders from dominating our political system, and the best way to do that is to allow the will of the people to dominate the process. At least I have some faith in people en masse that when they have access to fuller facts and more choices, they will make better choices.

  We may therefore repudiate the religion-inspired hatred in the first place by freeing ourselves of the remainging vestiges of the same thing in our own culture. We ought to be able to recognize it because it is the mirror image of the Islamic death mullah that we see in Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson for example. They are spiritual cousins through incestuous liasons and their vile ideas should be grounds for forced institutionalization either in the prison system or the psychiatric one. The fact that we have these kinds of people actually running our government is cause for great concern, because our Crusade against the Arab world (as they see it) will certainly be met by more Jihad by them (as they see it).

  Besides fully separating church and state, we can repudiate the values of those who would make war on us by making ourselves freer in other ways, too. For example a woman's right to abortion should be guaranteed in a Constitutional amendment so that religious nuts may never attack that right through the legal system again. Drug prohibition should end once and for all as it should be obvious that it has never worked in the past (the prohibition of alcohol is an exact analog) and prohibition causes vastly more and worse problems than it solves. Americans should be free to ingest anything they choose, as long as they don't hurt anyone else by doing so, you'd think a country founded on personal freedoms would be at least that free! We have one of the highest if not the very highest incarceration rate, as a percentage of total population, in the world. That is absolutely shameful in a country that calls itself the land of the free and the home of the brave. We ought to immediately free every nonviolent prisoner, and make those responsible for physical damages pay for their mistakes monetarily. We ought to recognize that sometimes capital punishment punishes innocent people, and abandon it as most of the civilized nations have done. The damage to our collective psyche by being collective murderers is not offset by any amount of revenge, and we can punish someone far more by limiting their freedom than we can by setting their spirits free from their bodies. And we can also that way, when we make mistakes, set the poor suckers free. It's been happening more and more that condemned "killers " are being found innocent through DNA evidence, which didn't exist as a possibility just a few years ago. What it means is that we've beeing killing innocent people all along.

• 3/28/03 Whew! No nukes were used after all. Looks like Saddam didn't have any to mine American cities with. But what happened to the hundred or more missing Russian nukes, where are they now? And thank goodness Bush didn't use any nukes during his attack on Iraq.

• 3/24/03 Hooray for Michael Moore at the Oscars! He succinctly defined for a still-in-denial nation that we have a "fictitious president" who is now waging a war for fictitious reasons. Naturally the fascist right will say he should keep his mouth shut and "support the troops" as if he shouldn't exercise his First Amendment freedom of speech, but Mr. Moore spoke for me and for millions of other Americans who still have sufficient moral sense left to see that this preemptive war is no better than Hitlerian history repeating itself.

• 3/15/03 Idea: a National Referendum to ask the United Nations to inspect the United States and rid it of weapons of mass destruction. Bush himself has set a great precedent by validating that UN inspectors ought to be able to go anywhere to discover and destroy weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. It must be that they haven't thought yet about inspecting the US and other countries . . .

• 3/14/03 Brady Kiesling was on Bill Moyers' show this evening. He was an American diplomat in Athens that resigned in protest recently. He had this to say in his resignation letter to his boss Colin Powell:

  The policies we are now asked to advance are incompatible not only with American values but also with American interests. Our fervent pursuit of war with Iraq is driving us to squander the international legitimacy that has been America's most potent weapon of both offense and defense since the days of Woodrow Wilson. We have begun to dismantle the largest and most effective web of international relationships the world has ever known. Our current course will bring instability and danger, not security.

  Mr. Kiesling is an educated and cultured man who left a job he loved because he has a conscience. See the full text of his letter at http://urbanlegends.miningco.com/library/bl-resignation.htm or do a Google search on Brady Kiesling if you're interested in learning more about this remarkable person.

• 3/12/03 The Bush facade crumbled as the administration backed off from its bully talk about a March 17 deadline after it became clear at the UN that much of the world is against his war. If Tony Blair doesn't have the support of the United Nations, he will probably bail eventually too. Wouldn't it be great if he did it honorably and exposed the clandestine agenda, the parts they aren't talking about: blood for oil, the possibility and even likelihood that Saddam already has nuclear weapons, etc.

• 2/21/03 The recent worldwide antiwar demonstrations were the largest such demonstrations there have ever been and the war hasn't even officially started yet. Millions of people worldwide are strongly against Bush's transparently Hitlerian plans and horrified at the prospect of using nuclear weapons. Let us hope this trend continues to grow and that we find a way to stop both the madman Hussein and the madman Bush. Since it's only Bush who's actually threating to use weapons of mass destruction, he's the most dangerous of the two, especially when the UN inspectors are crawling all over Saddam's facilities and making him disarm. We ought to have the UN come and do the same in the US, with the goal of eliminating weapons of mass destruction wherever they are found! Of course that isn't likely to happen anytime soon, it seems much more likely that Bush will bullheadedly invade Iraq regardless of what anyone thinks, because he can. He is the Commander In Chief of all the armed forces, and Congress like a bunch of sheep gave him warmaking powers late last year. It is in his power to start a war, and we know from his record as governor of Texas that killing people doesn't faze him. The man aspires to mass murder, and millions of barbarian Americans support him. The first use of nuclear weapons in an unprovoked attack ought to be a war crime in anybody's book, and it seems to me that there ought to be a way to stop war crimes before they happen. So how can we stop George Bush before it's too late?