ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR. & GREG PALAST

These days, the old west rail hub of Las Vegas, New Mexico, is little more than a dusty economic dead zone amid a boneyard of bare mesas. In national elections, the town overwhelmingly votes Democratic: More than 80 percent of all residents are Hispanic, and one in four lives below the poverty line. On February 5th, the day of the Super Tuesday caucus, a school-bus driver named Paul Maez arrived at his local polling station to cast his ballot. To his surprise, Maez found that his name had vanished from the list of registered voters, thanks to a statewide effort to deter fraudulent voting. For Maez, the shock was especially acute: He is the supervisor of elections in Las Vegas.

Maez was not alone in being denied his right to vote. On Super Tuesday, one in nine Democrats who tried to cast ballots in New Mexico found their names missing from the registration lists. The numbers were even higher in precincts like Las Vegas, where nearly 20 percent of the county’s voters were absent from the rolls. With their status in limbo, the voters were forced to cast “provisional” ballots, which can be reviewed and discarded by election officials without explanation. On Super Tuesday, more than half of all provisional ballots cast were thrown out statewide.

This November, what happened to Maez will happen to hundreds of thousands of voters across the country. In state after state, Republican operatives — the party’s elite commandos of bare-knuckle politics — are wielding new federal legislation to systematically disenfranchise Democrats. If this year’s race is as close as the past two elections, the GOP’s nationwide campaign could be large enough to determine the presidency in November. “I don’t think the Democrats get it,” says John Boyd, a voting-rights attorney in Albuquerque who has taken on the Republican Party for impeding access to the ballot. “All these new rules and games are turning voting into an obstacle course that could flip the vote to the GOP in half a dozen states.”

Investigation by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Greg Palast released today

Don’t worry about Mickey Mouse or ACORN stealing the election.  According to an investigative report out today in Rolling Stone magazine, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Greg Palast, after a year-long investigation, reveal a systematic program of “GOP vote tampering” on a massive scale.

- Republican Secretaries of State of swing-state Colorado have quietly purged one in six names from their voter rolls.

Over several months, the GOP politicos in Colorado stonewalled every attempt by Rolling Stone to get an answer to the massive purge – ten times the average state’s rate of removal.

- While Obama dreams of riding to the White House on a wave of new voters, more then 2.7 million have had their registrations REJECTED under new procedures signed into law by George Bush.

Kennedy, a voting rights lawyer, charges this is a resurgence of ‘Jim Crow’ tactics to wrongly block Black and Hispanic voters.

- A fired US prosecutor levels new charges – accusing leaders of his own party, Republicans, with criminal acts in an attempt to block legal voters as “fraudulent.”

- Digging through government records, the Kennedy-Palast team discovered that, in 2004, a GOP scheme called “caging” ultimately took away the rights of 1.1 million voters.  The Rolling Stone duo predict that, this November 4, it will be far worse.

There’s more:

- Since the last presidential race, “States used dubious ‘list management’ rules to scrub at least 10 million voters from their rolls.”

Among those was Paul Maez of Las Vegas, New Mexico – a victim of an unreported but devastating purge of voters in that state that left as many as one in nine Democrats without a vote.  For Maez, the state’s purging his registration was particularly shocking – he’s the county elections supervisor.

The Kennedy-Palast revelations go far beyond the sum of questionably purged voters recently reported by the New York Times.

“Republican operatives – the party’s elite commandos of bare-knuckle politics,” report Kennedy and Palast, under the cover of fighting fraudulent voting, are “systematically disenfranchis[ing] Democrats.”

The investigators level a deadly serious charge:

“If Democrats are to win the 2008 election, they must not simply beat McCain at the polls – they must beat him by a margin that exceeds the level of GOP vote tampering.”

Block the Vote by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. & Greg Palast in the current issue (#1064) of Rolling Stone.

[Media enquiries - Dave Falkenstein, Sunshine Sachs & Assoc, via interviews@gregpalast.com.]

Note – Kennedy and Palast are releasing, simultaneously with the Rolling Stone investigative report what they call, the vote-theft ‘antidote’: a 24-page full-color comic book, Steal Back Your Vote, which can be downloaded or obtained in print from their non-partisan website, StealBackYourVote.org

For updates and video reports, go to RollingStone.com, www.GregPalast.com and StealBackYourVote.org. ]]> http://electionfraudblog.com/2008/rolling-stone-its-already-stolen/feed/ 0 http://electionfraudblog.com/2008/mark-crispin-miller-why-they-chose-sarah-palin-and-what-to-do-about-it/ http://electionfraudblog.com/2008/mark-crispin-miller-why-they-chose-sarah-palin-and-what-to-do-about-it/#comments Wed, 17 Sep 2008 15:40:01 +0000 Organik http://electionfraudblog.com/?p=255 A Guest Editorial by author and NYU media professor, Mark Crispin Miller…

“Strategists say that Mr. McCain can now count on a more motivated social conservative base to help him in areas like southern Ohio, where the 2004 race was settled.”

–The New York Times, Sept. 7, 2008, A1

“In investigating the 2004 election in Ohio–examining pollbooks, talking to pollworkers and election officials, as well as reading local newspaper accounts –we could find no data of a late surge to the polls by born-again Christians. What we did find is certified voting totals in areas favoring Bush that didn’t match the number of voters who officially signed-in on the poll sign-in sheets.”

–Email from Bob Fitrakis of The Columbus Free Press, Sept. 7, 2008

To understand how Team McCain intends to get away with stealing this election, we must recall how Team Bush got away with it four years ago. (Those aren’t two different teams.)

The plan for stealing this contest has everything to do with the ostensibly surprising choice of Sarah Palin as McCain’s VP.

Here’s why…

1. Election Day, 2004: The Myth of Bush’s Christian “Surge”

First, let’s recall that, after the 2004 election, everybody said that Bush had won because the true believers of the Christian right had come out–or, rather, poured forth–in unprecedented numbers, often at the last minute, to support him. Of course, by “everybody,” I’m referring to the entire commentariate, both mainstream and left/liberal. On TV and in print, in news analyses and op-ed articles, they all said that Bush/Cheney had been re-elected by America’s “values voters.”

And they said it with a certain awe–as well they should, since Bush’s victory was a sort of miracle. He had disapproval ratings in the upper 40′s: higher than LBJ’s in 1968, higher than Jimmy Carter’s in 1980. Nor was he very popular in his own party, as many top Republicans came out against him–including moderates like John Eisenhower, rightists like Bob Barr, and many others such as William Crowe (chair of the Joint Chiefs under Ronald Reagan), General Tony McPeak (former Air Force chief of staff and erstwhile Veteran for Bush), libertarian Doug Bandow, neocon Francis Fukuyama, Lee Iacocca and Jack Matlock, Jr. (Reagan’s ambassador to the USSR); and many other, lesser figures in his party also publicly rejected him.

And so did sixty (60) newspapers–all in “red” states–that had endorsed Bush four years earlier: two thirds of them now going for Kerry, the others none of the above. American Conservative, Pat Buchanan’s own magazine, ran endorsements of five different candidates, only one of them for Bush. And 169 tenured and emeritus professors from the world’s top business schools all signed a full-page ad decrying his economic policies, adducing them as reasons not to vote for him. (The ad was written by top faculty at his own alma mater, Harvard Business School.) The ad ran in the Financial Times, which, like The Economist, endorsed John Kerry.

And still Bush won, despite such big defections, thanks to that enormous turnout by the Christian right, as everybody kept on saying–even though there were good reasons to be very skeptical about that notion.

2. Election Day, 2004: There Was No Christian “Surge”

First of all, that talking point came from the Christian right itself, whose members certainly had every reason to exaggerate their clout. That they thus credited themselves, and that the claim was duly amplified by their own party and its propaganda organs (Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, et al.), should have been enough to make all non-believers doubtful.

And non-believers should have been especially suspicious of that claim because there’s not a shred of evidence to back it up. On the other hand, there’s solid evidence that that immense, last-minute vote for Bush was nothing but a propaganda fiction, cooked up by Karl Rove to mask his party’s theft of that election.

To begin with, that fiction is preposterous on its face, since there were nowhere near enough of such right-wing believers to account for the incumbent’s staggering advance, as Bush reportedly received 11.5 million more votes than he had won four years before. And how many evangelicals did that surge include? According to Karl Rove himself (among others), there were 4 million evangelicals who had not voted for Bush/Cheney in 2000. So, even if Rove managed to get every single one of them to vote for Bush this time around (and it’s unlikely that he did), they could not possibly have made so big a difference–unless, of course, their numbers somehow magically increased inside the polls, like Jesus’s loaves and fishes.

In any case, Bush seems to have done worse with evangelicals than he had four years before. Consider how his “base” performed, in fact, on that Election Day, as measured by the National Exit Poll (and scrupulously analyzed by Michael Collins, whose essay, “The Urban Legend,” is included in Loser Take All). Close study of the numbers in 2004 reveals that there was no big national surge of “values voters”: on the contrary.

First of all, the nation’s rural vote declined, dropping from 23% to just 16% of the overall national vote; and Bush’s total rural vote went down from 14 million to just under 12 million. And while the nation’s small town vote increased substantially–by 88%–those voters did not favor Bush as they had done four years before, but opted in near equal numbers for John Kerry. Of those 9.5 million votes, Bush got 4.9 million, while Kerry got 4.7 million. (In 2000, Bush had won 3.1 million small town votes, to Gore’s 2 million.) And then there were the voters in the suburbs, who did come out for Bush in greater numbers than four years before–but hardly by enough to make for a decisive jump of any kind, as Bush won 28.3 million of those votes, to Kerry’s 25.6 million.

Thus was there no elevated turnout in those regions where most “values voters” live – nor did the post-election polls suggest that “moral values” drove Bush/Cheney’s startling re-election.

On Nov. 11, Pew published the results of their most precise survey of the electorate. Having asked Americans to name the issue that most concerned them as they cast their ballots, Pew found that Iraq was Number One, noted by 25 percent, followed by “jobs and the economy,” noted by 12 percent, with 9 percent invoking “terrorism.” Only 9 percent named “moral values” as their main concern–with only 3 percent of them referring specifically to “gay marriage” (and another 2 percent referring to the candidates’ own private lives).

Those numbers tell a very different story from the one hyped proudly by the men atop the Christianist machine. In particular, they said that they helped Bush prevail through their well-managed opposition to gay marriage–which Tony Perkins, head of the Family Research Council, called “the hood ornament on the family values wagon that carried the president to a second term.” That there was evidently no such wagon did not blunt the impact of such theocratic propaganda, which quickly resonated all throughout “the liberal media,” so that it now stands as the truth.

Indeed, it was accepted as the truth so quickly that it went unquestioned even after the dramatic mass reaction to the Terri Schiavo case a few months later, when Bush and the Republicans in Congress intervened in that domestic tragedy, trying to force the very outcome that the Christianists were calling for: “Americans broadly and strongly disapprove of federal intervention in the Terri Schiavo case,” ABC News reported. The public supported the removal of Schiavo’s feeding tube by 63% to 28%, according to the network’s polls.

And so it was throughout the media. According to USA Today, 76% disapproved of Congress’s handling of the case, while only 20% approved. CBS News found that 82% believed that Bush and Congress should have stayed out of it. And so it went, with poll after poll confirming that the Bush Republicans’ attempt to force their “moral values” on the situation was appealing only to a small minority, a/k/a the fringe. “When nearly 70 percent of the American public disagrees with you,” wrote Eric Boehlert at the time, “you’re out of step with the mainstream.”

That strong reaction by (at least) two-thirds of us was far more telling than the press, and most top Democrats, were willing to perceive, and so they couldn’t, wouldn’t see the awful truth: Either We the People had abruptly given up our “moral values” since Election Day, or our apparent vote for Bush was a deception, based on vote suppression and election fraud committed in Ohio and elsewhere throughout the nation.

The myth of that immense, last-minute Christian turn-out was a rationale concocted to “explain” Bush/Cheney’s re-election – and the US press immediately bought it, out of a clear eagerness to close the book on that election.

Thus the myth of that immense, last-minute Christian turn-out was a rationale concocted to “explain” Bush/Cheney’s re-election–and the US press immediately bought it, out of a clear eagerness to close the book on that election right away, and thereby black out all the glaring signs of fraud throughout Ohio (and Florida, and elsewhere). Indeed, the press at once laughed off the “theory” of widespread election fraud, dismissing all the facts as fantasy; and in their place it offered fantasy as fact (as they had done before, and have done since).

And so, because the media never did revisit the 2004 election, that groundless “explanation” quickly hardened into gospel (so to speak)–which brings us to the present, and the strategy for stealing this election, too.

3. Election Day, 2008: Another Christian “Surge”?

The choice of Sarah Palin has been widely and repeatedly assailed as evidence of John McCain’s “bad judgement.” Certainly that choice was very bad. Indeed, it may prove to be catastrophic. But to take it as a sign of John McCain’s mere recklessness is probably a big mistake. First of all, there is no reason to believe that the decision really was McCain’s, since Karl Rove’s minions are in charge of his campaign, which means that Rove himself is running it (as he evidently has been from the start). And while it surely was a rotten choice in moral and/or civic terms, it certainly was not an instance of “bad judgement” in Rove’s moral universe, where winning is the only thing that counts; and Sarah Palin was selected so that (she and) John McCain could “win”–and, even more important, get away with it.

They picked Palin not because she is a woman, and might therefore appeal to diehard Hillary supporters. They picked Palin because she is a theocratic true believer, who has the Christianists all swooning at the prospect of her reign (which will commence as soon as Jesus answers all their prayers for John McCain’s quick death). To get some sense of their millennial excitement, read this excerpt from an email recently sent out by one of them, to others of her kind:

And so on.

Such fervor, which now unifies the Christianist community, was not stoked merely by the sight of Palin’s glowing kisser on TV. More importantly, the governor became the instant darling of the Christianist far right once all the top dogs of the theocratic movement looked at her, and pronounced her good. To some extent, she was their choice–and so it’s wrong to claim, as some indignant pundits have, that Sarah Palin “was not vetted.” The governor was vetted by the Council for National Policy, the secretive and highly influential steering committee of the Christianist far right, which seeks to junk the Constitution and replace it with Leviticus and other flights of Holy Writ.

[Palin's] reckless policies derive from an apocalyptic wish to see the planet die, so that Lord Jesus will come back here, and start kicking ass and taking names.

They approved this choice, because Sarah Palin is quite willing to promote the Christianists’ apocalyptic program with a brazenness, and comprehensiveness, unprecedented in the history of American political campaigning. Her disparate crackpot policies are all expressions of the same extremist creed. There are, of course, all her Levitical sexual proscriptions: no abortions even for those women who’ve been raped (or raped by their own fathers); no sex education; no condoms. There are her incremental steps to Christianize the public schools: her moves against their secular librarians; her readiness to get Creationism into the curriculum. And then there is her mad anti-environmentalism: her tacit eagerness for further global warming, and, therefore, her passion for oil-drilling everywhere; her opposition to clean water legislation; her willingness to see the polar bears die off; her letting hunters gun down wolves and bears from low-flying planes, etc. All such reckless policies derive from an apocalyptic wish to see the planet die, so that Lord Jesus will come back here, and start kicking ass and taking names. (Palin’s pastor holds that He will set up his command post in Alaska.)

None of this insanity appeals to anyone outside the Christianist community, which is no larger than it was when Bush tried to “save” Teri Schiavo from “judicial murder”–or when he was anomalously “re-elected” by those legions of fictitious “values voters.” The choice of Sarah Palin, therefore, surely was not based on any rational calculation of some real electoral advantage; for that ferocious bloc is far too small to pull that off, no matter how firm their conviction that God wants them to.

In fact, the only way that Palin and her doddering partner can prevail in this election is by stealing it, as Bush and Cheney did (both times). Certainly the ground has been prepared for yet another stolen race, Bush/Cheney’s party having made enormous strides in sabotaging our election system (while the Democrats just sat there, whistling). Now, from coast to coast, it’s far more difficult (for Democrats) to register to vote, and far more difficult (for Democrats) to cast their votes, while countless (Democratic) voters have been stricken from the rolls, through purges carried out by the Department of Justice.

Thus Bush’s government has legally diminished the electorate (the Roberts Court approving every step). Meanwhile, the regime also continues to suppress the (Democratic) vote illegally, either through voter “caging” prior to Election Day–or, far more effectively, by fiddling with the numbers electronically at every level, and/or simply dumping countless names (of Democrats) from the electronic voter rolls, and/or putting far too few machines in (Democratic) polling places, and/or disinforming (Democratic) voters as to when and where to cast their votes, and/or simply scaring (Democratic) voters into staying home.

By arousing the hard core of vocal Christianists, they prepared the ground for the eventual redeployment of the same canard with which they justified their last unlikely “win”: that millions of believers did the trick.

That is what it takes to steal elections in America–all of that, and also something else: a quick-’n-easy explanation for the outcome. For if those final numbers are surprising, there must be some rationale that can (apparently) account for them. And that is why the Bush machine put Sarah Palin next to John McCain. By arousing the hard core of vocal Christianists, they prepared the ground for the eventual redeployment of the same canard with which they justified their last unlikely “win”: that millions of believers did the trick.

Indeed, it was not just the choice of Sarah Palin, but the whole convention, that was clearly calculated not to pull in undecided and/or independent voters, but to get the fringe alone to stomp and holler for the ticket. The party platform–crafted under the command of Christianist election-rigger J. Kenneth Blackwell–is a (literally) scorched-earth “faith-based” document, calling even for a ban on stem cell research in the private sector. And the convention spectacle itself was basically one long display of cultural resentment, with lots of loud, self-righteous jeering from the stage and on the floor (with an epic show of ridicule by that fine Christian, Rudy Giuliani).

It was strongly reminiscent of the GOP’s 1992 convention–a show that very clearly turned the nation off, and helped defeat Bush Sr.’s bid to stay in office. Team McCain decided to revive that model, not because the nation has turned Christianist since then, but as a way to motivate the fringe, and thereby make it possible to tell the pundits, on Nov. 5, that it was those Americans who turned the tide for John McCain.

4. A Word to the Wise

In fact, that claim will be the secondary “explanation” for McCain and Palin’s “win.” The first, of course, will be Obama’s race, and the sad “fact” that America’s just not ready to vote for a black man.” We will hear endlessly (as we have already) about “the Bradley effect,” and how it struck again, with millions of white folks who had openly approved Obama suddenly deciding, in the sanctum of the voting booth, to vote like Klansmen, thereby electing John McCain.

If Obama “loses,” we will also hear a lot of other “explanations,” each of which will suit the interests – the politics and/or pet theory – of the person(s) offering it.

We’ll hear from Clinton people that he lost because he didn’t put her on the ticket. We’ll hear from Michael Moore, Ralph Nader and The Nation that he lost because he ran too corporate-friendly a campaign. We’ll also hear from Mark Penn and the Wall Street Journal that he lost because his campaign was too “populist.”

George Lakoff will tell us that Obama lost because he failed to frame the issues properly, Thomas Frank will note that all those Kansas-types are still too dim to know what’s good for them, and Thomas Friedman (among others) will point out that Obama lost because he never made that crucial “gut” connection with “Joe Six-Pack” (whom Friedman and those others know so well). Meanwhile, many others will ascribe Obama’s loss to all the lies and slanders heaped upon him by McCain’s campaign and its confederates, who, we’ll hear repeatedly, “Swift-boated” him to death, just as they did to Kerry (as if Kerry really lost the last election).

Some of those assertions will be partly true–and all of them are sure to be irrelevant. For if McCain and Palin “win,” that victory will either be a miracle (which is, of course, how some of their supporters will explain it) or just another massive rip-off, perpetrated right before our eyes. And no such miracle is likely; for there is still no reason to believe that that old man and his demented running mate have any broad appeal. The polls now putting them ahead are highly dubious, based on a ten-point over-sampling of Republicans, and crafted without any calls to cell phone users (who comprise a large part of Obama’s base).

Otherwise there is no evidence of any large-scale movement toward McCain and Palin–who have to trek to theocratic enclaves, like Colorado Springs, in order to draw cheering multitudes, while Obama/Biden draw them everywhere they go. With Democrats all in a panic, let’s recall how few Americans turned out to vote in the Republican primaries, and how few new voters the Republicans have registered to date. Compare that feeble record with the vastly larger numbers who came out for Obama (and for Clinton), and all those whom the Democrats have registered to vote. Since then, the prospects for McCain have not improved, regardless of the spin on Sarah Palin–for this economy is in the crapper, and he has said repeatedly that he just doesn’t know about such things. That issue, and his wild commitment to a war that most Americans oppose, make his victory in November quite improbable, to say the least.

It is happening right now, as you sit reading this, as each day brings in new reports of voters purged, machines “malfunctioning,” ballots slyly misdesigned, and other measures meant to benefit McBush’s party.

And there you have the reason why the GOP must, once again, deploy its giant criminal machine: to cut the Democrats’ vast popular advantage. And it is happening right now, as you sit reading this, as each day brings in new reports of voters purged, machines “malfunctioning,” ballots slyly misdesigned, and other measures meant to benefit McBush’s party. (The fraud is not occurring “on both sides.”) Such evidence is far more solid than the nervous speculation that Americans might vote on racial grounds–or the fantasy that Sarah Palin’s co-religionists could really win it for McCain.

The theft of this next race is only possible because the Democratic Party and the media, and principled Republicans, have shut their eyes to this regime’s crusade against American democracy. And now the only way to stop it–or, if it does happen yet again, resist it– is to face it at long last, and talk about it openly. It’s therefore not enough to raise more money for the Democrats, and not enough to get more voters registered, and get them to the polls; and not enough to spread the word about McCain and Palin, or to try to get the media to do a decent job; and not enough to fight the smears and lies about Obama, and to demand that he and/or the Democrats get tougher.

While all of those activities are crucial, they’ll amount to nothing if the race is finally rigged, and most Americans don’t know a thing about it. And so, whatever else we’re doing, we must also speak out loud and clear about that possibility. Otherwise, if that disaster should befall us, we will be as much to blame for it as those Republicans who pulled it off, and all those Democrats who let them get away with it.

Cross-posted at Miller’s “News From Underground”…

35 ARTICLES OF IMPEACHMENT

Article I

Creating a Secret Propaganda Campaign to Manufacture a False Case for War Against Iraq.

Article II

Falsely, Systematically, and with Criminal Intent Conflating the Attacks of September 11, 2001, With Misrepresentation of Iraq as a Security Threat as Part of Fraudulent Justification for a War of Aggression.

Article III

Misleading the American People and Members of Congress to Believe Iraq Possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction, to Manufacture a False Case for War.

Article IV

Misleading the American People and Members of Congress to Believe Iraq Posed an Imminent Threat to the United States.

Article V

Illegally Misspending Funds to Secretly Begin a War of Aggression.

Article VI

Invading Iraq in Violation of the Requirements of HJRes114.

Article VII

Invading Iraq Absent a Declaration of War.

Article VIII

Invading Iraq, A Sovereign Nation, in Violation of the UN Charter.

Article IX

Failing to Provide Troops With Body Armor and Vehicle Armor

Article X

Falsifying Accounts of US Troop Deaths and Injuries for Political Purposes

Article XI

Establishment of Permanent U.S. Military Bases in Iraq

Article XII

Initiating a War Against Iraq for Control of That Nation’s Natural Resources

Article XIIII

Creating a Secret Task Force to Develop Energy and Military Policies With Respect to Iraq and Other Countries

Article XIV

Misprision of a Felony, Misuse and Exposure of Classified Information And Obstruction of Justice in the Matter of Valerie Plame Wilson, Clandestine Agent of the Central Intelligence Agency

Article XV

Providing Immunity from Prosecution for Criminal Contractors in Iraq

Article XVI

Reckless Misspending and Waste of U.S. Tax Dollars in Connection With Iraq and US Contractors

Article XVII

Illegal Detention: Detaining Indefinitely And Without Charge Persons Both U.S. Citizens and Foreign Captives

Article XVIII

Torture: Secretly Authorizing, and Encouraging the Use of Torture Against Captives in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Other Places, as a Matter of Official Policy

Article XIX

Rendition: Kidnapping People and Taking Them Against Their Will to “Black Sites” Located in Other Nations, Including Nations Known to Practice Torture

Article XX

Imprisoning Children

Article XXI

Misleading Congress and the American People About Threats from Iran, and Supporting Terrorist Organizations Within Iran, With the Goal of Overthrowing the Iranian Government

Article XXII

Creating Secret Laws

Article XXIII

Violation of the Posse Comitatus Act

Article XXIV

Spying on American Citizens, Without a Court-Ordered Warrant, in Violation of the Law and the Fourth Amendment

Article XXV

Directing Telecommunications Companies to Create an Illegal and Unconstitutional Database of the Private Telephone Numbers and Emails of American Citizens

Article XXVI

Announcing the Intent to Violate Laws with Signing Statements

Article XXVII

Failing to Comply with Congressional Subpoenas and Instructing Former Employees Not to Comply

Article XXVIII

Tampering with Free and Fair Elections, Corruption of the Administration of Justice

Article XXIX

Conspiracy to Violate the Voting Rights Act of 1965

Article XXX

Misleading Congress and the American People in an Attempt to Destroy Medicare

Article XXXI

Katrina: Failure to Plan for the Predicted Disaster of Hurricane Katrina, Failure to Respond to a Civil Emergency

Article XXXII

Misleading Congress and the American People, Systematically Undermining Efforts to Address Global Climate Change

Article XXXIII

Repeatedly Ignored and Failed to Respond to High Level Intelligence Warnings of Planned Terrorist Attacks in the US, Prior to 911.

Article XXXIV

Obstruction of the Investigation into the Attacks of September 11, 2001

Article XXXV

Endangering the Health of 911 First Responders

FULL TRANSCRIPT

ARTICLES OF IMPEACHMENT FOR PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH

Resolved, that President George W. Bush be impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors, and that the following articles of impeachment be exhibited to the United States Senate:

Articles of impeachment exhibited by the House of Representatives of the United States of America in the name of itself and of the people of the United States of America, in maintenance and support of its impeachment against President George W. Bush for high crimes and misdemeanors.

In his conduct while President of the United States, George W. Bush, in violation of his constitutional oath to faithfully execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, has committed the following abuses of power.

_____________

ARTICLE I CREATING A SECRET PROPAGANDA CAMPAIGN TO MANUFACTURE A FALSE CASE FOR  WAR AGAINST IRAQ

In his conduct while President of the United States, George W. Bush, in violation of his constitutional oath to faithfully execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional duty under Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution “to take care that the laws be faithfully executed”, has both personally and acting through his agents and subordinates, together with the Vice President, illegally spent public dollars on a secret propaganda program to manufacture a false cause for war against Iraq.

The Department of Defense (DOD) has engaged in a years-long secret domestic propaganda campaign to promote the invasion and occupation of Iraq. This secret program was defended by the White House Press Secretary following its exposure. This program follows the pattern of crimes detailed in Article I, II, IV and VIII.. The mission of this program placed it within the field controlled by the White House Iraq Group (WHIG), a White House task-force formed in August 2002 to market an invasion of Iraq to the American people. The group included Karl Rove, I. Lewis Libby, Condoleezza Rice, Karen Hughes, Mary Matalin, Stephen Hadley, Nicholas E. Calio, and James R. Wilkinson.

The WHIG produced white papers detailing so-called intelligence of Iraq’s nuclear threat that later proved to be false. This supposed intelligence included the claim that Iraq had sought uranium from Niger as well as the claim that the high strength aluminum tubes Iraq purchased from China were to be used for the sole purpose of building centrifuges to enrich uranium. Unlike the National Intelligence Estimate of 2002, the WHIG’s white papers provided “gripping images and stories” and used “literary license” with intelligence. The WHIG’s white papers were written at the same time and by the same people as speeches and talking points prepared for President Bush and some of his top officials.

The WHIG also organized a media blitz in which, between September 7-8, 2002, President Bush and his top advisers appeared on numerous interviews and all provided similarly gripping images about the possibility of nuclear attack by Iraq. The timing was no coincidence, as Andrew Card explained in an interview regarding waiting until after Labor Day to try to sell the American people on military action against Iraq, “From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.”

September 7-8, 2002:

NBC’s “Meet the Press: Vice President Cheney accused Saddam of moving aggressively to develop nuclear weapons over the past 14 months to add to his stockpile of chemical and biological arms.

CNN: Then-National Security Adviser Rice said, regarding the likelihood of Iraq obtaining a nuclear weapon, “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”

CBS: President Bush declared that Saddam was “six months away from developing a weapon,” and cited satellite photos of construction in Iraq where weapons inspectors once visited as evidence that Saddam was trying to develop nuclear arms.

The Pentagon military analyst propaganda program was revealed in an April 20, 2002, New York Times article. The program illegally involved “covert attempts to mold opinion through the undisclosed use of third parties.” Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld recruited 75 retired military officers and gave them talking points to deliver on Fox, CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, and MSNBC, and according to the New York Times report, which has not been disputed by the Pentagon or the White House, “Participants were instructed not to quote their briefers directly or otherwise describe their contacts with the Pentagon.”  According to the Pentagon’s own internal documents, the military analysts were considered “message force multipliers” or “surrogates” who would deliver administration “themes and messages” to millions of Americans “in the form of their own opinions.” In fact, they did deliver the themes and the messages but did not reveal that the Pentagon had provided them with their talking points. Robert S. Bevelacqua, a retired Green Beret and Fox News military analyst described this as follows: “It was them saying, ‘We need to stick our hands up your back and move your mouth for you.’”

Congress has restricted annual appropriations bills since 1951 with this language: “No part of any appropriation contained in this or any other Act shall be used for publicity or propaganda purposes within the United States not heretofore authorized by the Congress.”

A March 21, 2005, report by the Congressional Research Service states that “publicity or propaganda” is defined by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) to mean either (1) self- aggrandizement by public officials, (2) purely partisan activity, or (3) “covert propaganda.”

These concerns about “covert propaganda” were also the basis for the GAO’s standard for determining when government-funded video news releases are illegal:

“The failure of an agency to identify itself as the source of a prepackaged news story misleads the viewing public by encouraging the viewing audience to believe that the broadcasting news organization developed the information. The prepackaged news stories are purposefully designed to be indistinguishable from news segments broadcast to the public. When the television viewing public does not know that the stories they watched on television news programs about the government were in fact prepared by the government, the stories are, in this sense, no longer purely factual — the essential fact of attribution is missing.”

The White House’s own Office of Legal Council stated in a memorandum written in 2005 following the controversy over the Armstrong Williams scandal:

“Over the years, GAO has interpreted ‘publicity or propaganda’ restrictions to preclude use of appropriated funds for, among other things, so-called ‘covert propaganda.’ … Consistent with that view, the OLC determined in 1988 that a statutory prohibition on using appropriated funds for ‘publicity or propaganda’ precluded undisclosed agency funding of advocacy by third-party groups. We stated that ‘covert attempts to mold opinion through the undisclosed use of third parties’ would run afoul of restrictions on using appropriated funds for ‘propaganda.’”

Asked about the Pentagon’s propaganda program at White House press briefing in April 2008, White House Press Secretary Dana Perino defended it, not by arguing that it was legal but by suggesting that it “should” be: “Look, I didn’t know look, I think that you guys should take a step back and look at this look, DOD has made a decision, they’ve decided to stop this program. But I would say that one of the things that we try to do in the administration is get information out to a variety of people so that everybody else can call them and ask their opinion about something. And I don’t think that that should be against the law. And I think that it’s absolutely appropriate to provide information to people who are seeking it and are going to be providing their opinions on it. It doesn’t necessarily mean that all of those military analysts ever agreed with the administration. I think you can go back and look and think that a lot of their analysis was pretty tough on the administration. That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t talk to people.”

In all of these actions and decisions, President George W. Bush has acted in a manner contrary to his  trust as President and Commander in Chief, and subversive of constitutional government, to the prejudice of the cause of law and justice and to the manifest injury of the people of the United States. Wherefore, President George W. Bush, by such conduct, is guilty of an impeachable offense warranting removal from office.

Article II FALSELY, SYSTEMATICALLY, AND WITH CRIMINAL INTENT CONFLATING THE ATTACKS OF SEPTEMBER 11, 2001 WITH MISREPRESENTATION OF IRAQ AS AN IMMINENT SECURITY THREAT AS PART OF A FRAUDULENT JUSTIFICATION FOR A WAR OF AGGRESSION.

In his conduct while President of the United States, George W. Bush, in violation of his constitutional oath to faithfully execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional duty under Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution “to take care that the laws be faithfully executed”, has both personally and acting through his agents and subordinates, together with the Vice President, executed a calculated and wide-ranging strategy to deceive the citizens and Congress of the United States into believing that there was and is a connection between Iraq and Saddam Hussein on the one hand, and the attacks of September 11, 2001 and al Qaeda, on the other hand, so as to falsely justify the use of the United States Armed Forces against the nation of Iraq in a manner that is damaging to the national security interests of the United States, as well as to fraudulently obtain and maintain congressional authorization and funding for the use of such military force against Iraq, thereby interfering with and obstructing Congress’s lawful functions of overseeing foreign affairs and declaring war.

The means used to implement this deception were and continue to be, first, allowing, authorizing and sanctioning the manipulation of intelligence analysis by those under his direction and control, including the Vice President and the Vice President’s agents, and second, personally making, or causing, authorizing and allowing to be made through highly-placed subordinates, including the President’s Chief of Staff, the White House Press Secretary and other White House spokespersons, the Secretaries of State and Defense, the National Security Advisor, and their deputies and spokespersons, false and fraudulent representations to the citizens of the United States and Congress regarding an alleged connection between Saddam Hussein and Iraq, on the one hand, and the September 11th attacks and al Qaeda, on the other hand, that were half-true, literally true but misleading, and/or made without a reasonable basis and with reckless indifference to their truth, as well as omitting to state facts necessary to present an accurate picture of the truth as follows:

(A) On or about September 12, 2001, former terrorism advisor Richard Clarke personally informed the President that neither Saddam Hussein nor Iraq was responsible for the September 11th attacks. On September 18, Clarke submitted to the President’s National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice a memo he had written in response to George W. Bush’s specific request that stated: (1) the case for linking Hussein to the September 11th attacks was weak; (2) only anecdotal evidence linked Hussein to al Qaeda; (3) Osama Bin Laden resented the secularism of Saddam Hussein; and (4) there was no confirmed reporting of Saddam Hussein cooperating with Bin Laden on unconventional weapons.

(B) Ten days after the September 11th attacks the President received a President’s Daily Briefing which indicated that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the September 11th attacks and that there was “scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda.”  (C) In Defense Intelligence Terrorism Summary No. 044-02, issued in February 2002, the United States Defense Intelligence Agency cast significant doubt on the possibility of a Saddam Hussein- Al Qaeda conspiracy: “Saddam’s regime is intensely secular and is wary of Islamic revolutionary movements. Moreover, Baghdad is unlikely to provide assistance to a group it cannot control.”

(D) The October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate gave a “Low Confidence” rating to the notion of whether “in desperation Saddam would share chemical or biological weapons with Al Qaeda.” The CIA never informed the President that there was an operational relationship between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein; on the contrary, its most “aggressive” analysis contained in Iraq and al-Qaeda- Interpreting a Murky Relationship” dated June 21, 2002 was that Iraq had had “sporadic, wary contacts with al Qaeda since the mid-1990s rather than a relationship with al Qaeda that has developed over time.”

(E) Notwithstanding his knowledge that neither Saddam Hussein nor Iraq was in any way connected to the September 11th attacks, the President allowed and authorized those acting under his direction and control, including Vice President Richard B. Cheney and Lewis Libby, who reported directly to both the President and the Vice President, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, among others, to pressure intelligence analysts to alter their assessments and to create special units outside of, and unknown to, the intelligence community in order to secretly obtain unreliable information, to manufacture intelligence or reinterpret raw data in ways that would further the Bush administration’s goal of fraudulently establishing a relationship not only between Iraq and al Qaeda, but between Iraq and the attacks of September 11th.

(F) Further, despite his full awareness that Iraq and Saddam Hussein had no relationship to the September 11th attacks, the President, and those acting under his direction and control have, since at least 2002 and continuing to the present, repeatedly issued public statements deliberately worded to mislead, words calculated in their implication to bring unrelated actors and circumstances into an artificially contrived reality thereby facilitating the systematic deception of Congress and the American people. Thus the public and some members of Congress, came to believe, falsely, that there was a connection between Iraq and the attacks of 911. This was accomplished through well-publicized statements by the Bush Administration which contrived to continually tie Iraq and 911 in the same statements of grave concern without making an explicit charge:

(1) ” [If] Iraq regimes [sic] continues to defy us, and the world, we will move deliberately, yet decisively, to hold Iraq to account…It’s a new world we’re in. We used to think two oceans could separate us from an enemy. On that tragic day, September the 11th, 2001, we found out that’s not the case. We found out this great land of liberty and of freedom and of justice is vulnerable. And therefore we must do everything we can — everything we can — to secure the homeland, to make us safe.” Speech of President Bush in Iowa on September 16, 2002.

(2) “With every step the Iraqi regime takes toward gaining and deploying the most terrible weapons, our own options to confront that regime will narrow. And if an emboldened regime were to supply these weapons to terrorist allies, then the attacks of September 11th would be a prelude to far greater horrors.” March 6, 2003, Statement of President Bush in National Press Conference.

(3) “The battle of Iraq is one victory in a war on terror that began on September the 11, 2001 — and still goes on. That terrible morning, 19 evil men — the shock troops of a hateful ideology — gave America and the civilized world a glimpse of their ambitions. They imagined, in the words of one terrorist, that September the 11th would be the ‘beginning of the end of America.’ By seeking to turn our cities into killing fields, terrorists and their allies believed that they could destroy this nation’s resolve, and force our retreat from the world. They have failed.” May 1, 2003, Speech of President Bush on U.S.S.  Abraham Lincoln.

(4) “Now we’re in a new and unprecedented war against violent Islamic extremists. This is an ideological conflict we face against murderers and killers who try to impose their will. These are the people that attacked us on September the 11th and killed nearly 3,000 people. The stakes are high, and once again, we have had to change our strategic thinking. The major battleground in this war is Iraq.” June 28, 2007, Speech of President Bush at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island.

(G) Notwithstanding his knowledge that there was no credible evidence of a working relationship between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda and that the intelligence community had specifically assessed that there was no such operational relationship, the President, both personally and through his subordinates and agents, has repeatedly falsely represented, both explicitly and implicitly, and through the misleading use of selectively-chosen facts, to the citizens of the United States and to the Congress that there was and is such an ongoing operational relationship, to wit:

(1) “We know that Iraq and al Qaeda have had high-level contacts that go back a decade. Some al Qaeda leaders who fled Afghanistan went to Iraq. These include one very senior al Qaeda leader who received medical treatment in Baghdad this year, and who has been associated with planning for chemical and biological attacks. We’ve learned that Iraq has trained al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases.” September 28, 2002, Weekly Radio Address of President Bush to the Nation.

(2) “[W]e we need to think about Saddam Hussein using al Qaeda to do his dirty work, to not leave fingerprints behind.” October 14, 2002, Remarks by President Bush in Michigan.

(3) “We know he’s got ties with al Qaeda.” November 1, 2002, Speech of President Bush in New Hampshire.

(4) “Evidence from intelligence sources, secret communications, and statements by people now in custody reveal that Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of al Qaeda. Secretly, and without fingerprints, he could provide one of his hidden weapons to terrorists, or help them develop their own.” January 28, 2003, President Bush’s State of the Union Address.

(5) “[W]hat I want to bring to your attention today is the potentially much more sinister nexus between Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist network, a nexus that combines classic terrorist organizations and modern methods of murder. Iraq today harbors a deadly terrorist network…” February 5, 2003, Speech of Former Secretary of State Colin Powell to the United Nations.

(6) “The battle of Iraq is one victory in a war on terror that began on September the 11, 2001 — and still goes on. . . . [T]he liberation of Iraq . . . removed an ally of al Qaeda.” May 1, 2003, Speech of President Bush on U.S. S. Abraham Lincoln

(H) The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Report on Whether Public Statements Regarding Iraq By U.S. Government Officials Were Substantiated By Intelligence Information, which was released on June 5, 2008, concluded that:

(1) “Statements and implications by the President and Secretary of State suggesting that Iraq and al- Qa’ida had a partnership, or that Iraq had provided al-Qa’ida with weapons training, were not substantiated by the intelligence.”

(2) “The Intelligence Community did not confirm that Muhammad Atta met an Iraqi intelligence officer  in Prague in 2001 as the Vice President repeatedly claimed.”

Through his participation and instance in the breathtaking scope of this deception, the President has used the highest office of trust to wage of campaign of deception of such sophistication as to deliberately subvert the national security interests of the United States. His dishonesty set the stage for the loss of more than 4000 United States service members; injuries to tens of thousands of soldiers, the loss of more than 1,000,000 innocent Iraqi citizens since the United States invasion; the loss of approximately $527 billion in war costs which has increased our Federal debt and the ultimate expenditure of three to five trillion dollars for all costs covering the war; the loss of military readiness within the United States Armed Services due to overextension, the lack of training and lack of equipment; the loss of United States credibility in world affairs; and the decades of likely blowback created by the invasion of Iraq.

In all of these actions and decisions, President George W. Bush has acted in a manner contrary to his trust as President and Commander in Chief, and subversive of constitutional government, to the prejudice of the cause of law and justice and to the manifest injury of the people of the United States. Wherefore, President George W. Bush, by such conduct, is guilty of an impeachable offense warranting removal from office.

Article III

MISLEADING THE AMERICAN PEOPLE AND MEMBERS OF CONGRESS TO BELIEVE IRAQ POSSESSED WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION, SO AS TO MANUFACTURE A FALSE CASE FOR WAR

In his conduct while President of the United States, George W. Bush, in violation of his constitutional oath to faithfully execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional duty under Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution “to take care that the laws be faithfully executed”, has both personally and acting through his agents and subordinates, together with the Vice President, executed instead a calculated and wide-ranging strategy to deceive the citizens and Congress of the United States into believing that the nation of Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction in order to justify the use of the United States Armed Forces against the nation of Iraq in a manner damaging to our national security interests, thereby interfering with and obstructing Congress’s lawful functions of overseeing foreign affairs and declaring war.

The means used to implement this deception were and continue to be personally making, or causing, authorizing and allowing to be made through highly-placed subordinates, including the President’s Chief of Staff, the White House Press Secretary and other White House spokespersons, the Secretaries of State and Defense, the National Security Advisor, and their deputies and spokespersons, false and fraudulent representations to the citizens of the United States and Congress regarding Iraq’s alleged possession of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons that were half-true, literally true but misleading, and/or made without a reasonable basis and with reckless indifference to their truth, as well as omitting to state facts necessary to present an accurate picture of the truth as follows:

(A) Long before the March 19, 2003 invasion of Iraq, a wealth of intelligence informed the President and those under his direction and control that Iraq’s stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons had been destroyed well before 1998 and that there was little, if any, credible intelligence that showed otherwise. As reported in the Washington Post in March of 2003, in 1995, Saddam Hussein’s son-in- law Hussein Kamel had informed U.S. and British intelligence officers that “all weapons–biological, chemical, missile, nuclear were destroyed.” In September 2002, the Defense Intelligence Agency  issued a report that concluded: “A substantial amount of Iraq’s chemical warfare agents, precursors, munitions and production equipment were destroyed between 1991 and 1998 as a result of Operation Desert Storm and UNSCOM actions…[T]here is no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing and stockpiling chemical weapons or whether Iraq has-or will-establish its chemical warfare agent production facilities.” Notwithstanding the absence of evidence proving that such stockpiles existed and in direct contradiction to substantial evidence that showed they did not exist, the President and his subordinates and agents made numerous false representations claiming with certainty that Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons that it was developing to use to attack the United States, to wit:

(1) “[T]he notion of a Saddam Hussein with his great oil wealth, with his inventory that he already has of biological and chemical weapons . . . is, I think, a frightening proposition for anybody who thinks about it.” Statement of Vice President Cheney on CBS’s Face the Nation, March 24, 2002.

(2) “In defiance of the United Nations, Iraq has stockpiled biological and chemical weapons, and is rebuilding the facilities used to make more of those weapons.” Speech of President Bush, October 5, 2002.

(3) “All the world has now seen the footage of an Iraqi Mirage aircraft with a fuel tank modified to spray biological agents over wide areas. Iraq has developed spray devices that could be used on unmanned aerial vehicles with ranges far beyond what is permitted by the Security Council. A UAV launched from a vessel off the American coast could reach hundreds of miles inland.” Statement by President Bush from the White House, February 6, 2003.

(B) Despite overwhelming intelligence in the form of statements and reports filed by and on behalf of the CIA, the State Department and the IAEA, among others, which indicated that the claim was untrue, the President, and those under his direction and control, made numerous representations claiming and implying through misleading language that Iraq was attempting to purchase uranium from Niger in order to falsely buttress its argument that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program, including:

(1) “”The regime has the scientists and facilities to build nuclear weapons, and is seeking the materials needed to do so.” Statement of President Bush from White House, October 2, 2002.

(2) “The [Iraqi] report also failed to deal with issues which have arisen since 1998, including: . . attempts to acquire uranium and the means to enrich it.” Letter from President Bush to Vice President Cheney and the Senate, January 20, 2003.

(3) “The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa .” President Bush Delivers State of the Union Address, January 28, 2003.

(C) Despite overwhelming evidence in the form of reports by nuclear weapons experts from the Energy, the Defense and State Departments, as well from outside and international agencies which assessed that aluminum tubes the Iraqis were purchasing were not suitable for nuclear centrifuge use and were, on the contrary, identical to ones used in rockets already being manufactured by the Iraqis, the President, and those under his direction and control, persisted in making numerous false and fraudulent representations implying and stating explicitly that the Iraqis were purchasing the tubes for use in a nuclear weapons program, to wit:

(1) “We do know that there have been shipments going . . . into Iraq . . . of aluminum tubes that really are only suited to — high-quality aluminum tools [sic] that are only really suited for nuclear weapons  programs, centrifuge programs.” Statement of then National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice on CNN’s Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer, September 8, 2002.

(2) “Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production.” President Bush’s State of the Union Address, January 28, 2003.

(3) “[H]e has made repeated covert attempts to acquire high-specification aluminum tubes from 11 different countries, even after inspections resumed. …By now, just about everyone has heard of these tubes and we all know that there are differences of opinion. There is controversy about what these tubes are for. Most US experts think they are intended to serve as rotors in centrifuges used to enrich uranium.” Speech of Former Secretary of State Colin Powell to the United Nations, February 5, 2003.

(D) The President, both personally and acting through those under his direction and control, suppressed material information, selectively declassified information for the improper purposes of retaliating against a whistleblower and presenting a misleading picture of the alleged threat from Iraq, facilitated the exposure of the identity of a covert CIA operative and thereafter not only failed to investigate the improper leaks of classified information from within his administration, but also failed to cooperate with an investigation into possible federal violations resulting from this activity and, finally, entirely undermined the prosecution by commuting the sentence of Lewis Libby citing false and insubstantial grounds, all in an effort to prevent Congress and the citizens of the United States from discovering the fraudulent nature of the President’s claimed justifications for the invasion of Iraq.

(E) The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Report on Whether Public Statements Regarding Iraq By U.S. Government Officials Were Substantiated By Intelligence Information, which was released on June 5, 2008, concluded that:

(1) “Statements by the President and Vice President prior to the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate regarding Iraq’s chemical weapons production capability and activities did not reflect the intelligence community’s uncertainties as to whether such production was ongoing.”

(2) “The Secretary of Defense’s statement that the Iraqi government operated underground WMD facilities that were not vulnerable to conventional airstrikes because they were underground and deeply buried was not substantiated by available intelligence information.”

(3) Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee Jay Rockefeller concluded: “In making the case for war, the Administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when in reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even non-existent. As a result, the American people were led to believe that the threat from Iraq was much greater than actually existed.”

The President has subverted the national security interests of the United States by setting the stage for the loss of more than 4000 United States service members and the injury to tens of thousands of US soldiers; the loss of more than 1,000,000 innocent Iraqi citizens since the United States invasion; the loss of approximately $500 billion in war costs which has increased our Federal debt with a long term financial cost of between three and five trillion dollars; the loss of military readiness within the United States Armed Services due to overextension, the lack of training and lack of equipment; the loss of United States credibility in world affairs; and the decades of likely blowback created by the invasion of Iraq.

In all of these actions and decisions, President George W. Bush has acted in a manner contrary to his trust as President and Commander in Chief, and subversive of constitutional government, to the  prejudice of the cause of law and justice and to the manifest injury of the people of the United States. Wherefore, President George W. Bush, by such conduct, is guilty of an impeachable offense warranting removal from office.

Article IV

MISLEADING THE AMERICAN PEOPLE AND MEMBERS OF CONGRESS TO BELIEVE IRAQ POSED AN IMMINENT THREAT TO THE UNITED STATES

In his conduct while President of the United States, George W. Bush, in violation of his constitutional oath to faithfully execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional duty under Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution “to take care that the laws be faithfully executed”, has both personally and acting through his agents and subordinates, together with the Vice President, executed a calculated and wide-ranging strategy to deceive the citizens and Congress of the United States into believing that the nation of Iraq posed an imminent threat to the United States in order to justify the use of the United States Armed Forces against the nation of Iraq in a manner damaging to our national security interests, thereby interfering with and obstructing Congress’s lawful functions of overseeing foreign affairs and declaring war.

The means used to implement this deception were and continue to be, first, allowing, authorizing and sanctioning the manipulation of intelligence analysis by those under his direction and control, including the Vice President and the Vice President’s agents, and second, personally making, or causing, authorizing and allowing to be made through highly-placed subordinates, including the President’s Chief of Staff, the White House Press Secretary and other White House spokespersons, the Secretaries of State and Defense, the National Security Advisor, and their deputies and spokespersons, false and fraudulent representations to the citizens of the United States and Congress regarding an alleged urgent threat posed by Iraq, statements that were half-true, literally true but misleading, and/or made without a reasonable basis and with reckless indifference to their truth, as well as omitting to state facts necessary to present an accurate picture of the truth as follows:

(A) Notwithstanding the complete absence of intelligence analysis to support a claim that Iraq posed an imminent or urgent threat to the United States and the intelligence community’s assessment that Iraq was in fact not likely to attack the United States unless it was itself attacked, President Bush, both personally and through his agents and subordinates, made, allowed and caused to be made repeated false representations to the citizens and Congress of the United States implying and explicitly stating that such a dire threat existed, including the following:

(1) “States such as these [Iraq, Iran and North Korea] and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred. They could attack our allies or attempt to blackmail the United States. In any of these cases, the price of indifference would be catastrophic.” President Bush’s State of the Union Address, January 29, 2002.

(2) “Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction. He is amassing them to use against our friends our enemies and against us.” Speech of Vice President Cheney at VFW 103rd National Convention, August 26, 2002.

(3) “The history, the logic, and the facts lead to one conclusion: Saddam Hussein’s regime is a grave  and gathering danger. To suggest otherwise is to hope against the evidence. To assume this regime’s good faith is to bet the lives of millions and the peace of the world in a reckless gamble. And this is a risk we must not take.” Address of President Bush to the United Nations General Assembly, September 12, 2002.

(4) “[N]o terrorist state poses a greater or more immediate threat to the security of our people than the regime of Saddam Hussein and Iraq.” Statement of Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to Congress, September 19, 2002.

(5) “On its present course, the Iraqi regime is a threat of unique urgency. . . . it has developed weapons of mass death.” Statement of President Bush at White House, October 2, 2002.

(6) “But the President also believes that this problem has to be dealt with, and if the United Nations won’t deal with it, then the United States, with other likeminded nations, may have to deal with it. We would prefer not to go that route, but the danger is so great, with respect to Saddam Hussein having weapons of mass destruction, and perhaps even terrorists getting hold of such weapons, that it is time for the international community to act, and if it doesn’t act, the President is prepared to act with likeminded nations.” Statement of Former Secretary of State Colin Powell in interview with Ellen Ratner of Talk Radio News, October 30, 2002.

(7) “Today the world is also uniting to answer the unique and urgent threat posed by Iraq. A dictator who has used weapons of mass destruction on his own people must not be allowed to produce or possess those weapons. We will not permit Saddam Hussein to blackmail and/or terrorize nations which love freedom.” Speech by President Bush to Prague Atlantic Student Summit, November 20, 2002.

(8) “But the risk of doing nothing, the risk of the security of this country being jeopardized at the hands of a madman with weapons of mass destruction far exceeds the risk of any action we may be forced to take.” President Bush Meets with National Economic Council at White House, February 25, 2003.

(B) In furtherance of his fraudulent effort to deceive Congress and the citizens of the United States into believing that Iraq and Saddam Hussein posed an imminent threat to the United States, the President allowed and authorized those acting under his direction and control, including Vice President Richard B. Cheney, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and Lewis Libby, who reportedly directly to both the President and the Vice President, among others, to pressure intelligence analysts to tailor their assessments and to create special units outside of, and unknown to, the intelligence community in order to secretly obtain unreliable information, to manufacture intelligence, or to reinterpret raw data in ways that would support the Bush administration’s plan to invade Iraq based on a false claim of urgency despite the lack of justification for such a preemptive action.

(C) The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Report on Whether Public Statements Regarding Iraq By U.S. Government Officials Were Substantiated By Intelligence Information, which was released on June 5, 2008, concluded that:

(1) “Statements by the President and the Vice President indicating that Saddam Hussein was prepared to give weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups for attacks against the United States were contradicted by available intelligence information.”

Thus the President willfully and falsely misrepresented Iraq as an urgent threat requiring immediate action thereby subverting the national security interests of the United States by setting the stage for the loss of more than 4000 United States service members; the injuries to tens of thousands of US soldiers;  the deaths of more than 1,000,000 Iraqi citizens since the United States invasion; the loss of approximately $527 billion in war costs which has increased our Federal debt and the ultimate costs of the war between three trillion and five trillion dollars; the loss of military readiness within the United States Armed Services due to overextension, the lack of training and lack of equipment; the loss of United States credibility in world affairs; and the decades of likely blowback created by the invasion of Iraq.

In all of these actions and decisions, President George W. Bush has acted in a manner contrary to his trust as President and Commander in Chief, and subversive of constitutional government, to the prejudice of the cause of law and justice and to the manifest injury of the people of the United States. Wherefore, President George W. Bush, by such conduct, is guilty of an impeachable offense warranting removal from office.

Article V. ILLEGALLY MISSPENDING FUNDS TO SECRETLY BEGIN A WAR OF AGGRESSION

In his conduct while President of the United States, George W. Bush, in violation of his constitutional oath to faithfully execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional duty under Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution “to take care that the laws be faithfully executed”, has both personally and acting through his agents and subordinates, together with the Vice President, illegally misspent funds to begin a war in secret prior to any Congressional authorization.

The president used over $2 billion in the summer of 2002 to prepare for the invasion of Iraq. First reported in Bob Woodward’s book, Plan of Attack, and later confirmed by the Congressional Research Service, Bush took money appropriated by Congress for Afghanistan and other programs and–with no Congressional notification — used it to build airfields in Qatar and to make other preparations for the invasion of Iraq. This constituted a violation of Article I, Section 9 of the U.S. Constitution, as well as a violation of the War Powers Act of 1973.

In all of these actions and decisions, President George W. Bush has acted in a manner contrary to his trust as President and Commander in Chief, and subversive of constitutional government, to the prejudice of the cause of law and justice and to the manifest injury of the people of the United States. Wherefore, President George W. Bush, by such conduct, is guilty of an impeachable offense warranting removal from office.

Article VI. INVADING IRAQ IN VIOLATION OF THE REQUIREMENTS OF HJRes114.

In his conduct while President of the United States, George W. Bush, in violation of his constitutional oath to faithfully execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional duty under Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution “to take care that the laws be faithfully executed”, exceeded his Constitutional authority to wage war by invading Iraq in 2003 without meeting the requirements of HJRes 114, the “Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002″ to wit:

(1) HJRes 114 contains several Whereas clauses consistent with statements being made by the White House at the time regarding the threat from Iraq as evidenced by the following:  (A) HJRes 114 states “Whereas Iraq both poses a continuing threat to the national security of the United States and international peace and security in the Persian Gulf region and remains in material and unacceptable breach of its international obligations by, among other things, continuing to possess and develop a significant chemical and biological weapons capability, actively seeking a nuclear weapons capability, and supporting and harboring terrorist organizations;”; and

(B) HJRes 114 states “Whereas members of Al Qaeda, an organization bearing responsibility for attacks on the United States, its citizens, and interests, including the attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, are known to be in Iraq;”.

(2) HJRes 114 states that the President must provide a determination, the truthfulness of which is implied, that military force is necessary in order to use the authorization, as evidenced by the following:

(A) Section 3 of HJRes 114 states:

“(b) PRESIDENTIAL DETERMINATION.–In connection with the exercise of the authority granted in subsection (a) to use force the President shall, prior to such exercise or as soon thereafter as may be feasible, but no later than 48 hours after exercising such authority, make available to the Speaker of the House of Representatives and the President pro tempore of the Senate his determination that–

(1) reliance by the United States on further diplomatic or other peaceful means alone either (A) will not adequately protect the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq or (B) is not likely to lead to enforcement of all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq; and

(2) acting pursuant to this joint resolution is consistent with the United States and other countries continuing to take the necessary actions against international terrorist and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.”

(3) On March 18, 2003, President George Bush sent a letter to Congress stating that he had made that determination as evidenced by the following:

(A) March 18th, 2003 Letter to Congress stating:

Consistent with section 3(b) of the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002 (Public Law 107-243), and based on information available to me, including that in the enclosed document, I determine that:

(1) reliance by the United States on further diplomatic and other peaceful means alone will neither (A) adequately protect the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq nor (B) likely lead to enforcement of all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq; and

(2) acting pursuant to the Constitution and Public Law 107-243 is consistent with the United States and other countries continuing to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.  (4) President George Bush knew that these statements were false as evidenced by:

(A) Information provided with Article I, II, III, IV and V.

(B) A statement by President George Bush in an interview with Tony Blair on January 31st 2003: [WH]

Reporter: “One question for you both. Do you believe that there is a link between Saddam Hussein, a direct link, and the men who attacked on September the 11th?”

President Bush: “I can’t make that claim”

(C) An article on February 19th by Terrorism expert Rohan Gunaratna states “I could find no evidence of links between Iraq and Al Qaeda. The documentation and interviews indicated that Al Qaeda regarded Saddam, a secular leader, as an infidel.” [InternationalHeraldTribune]

(D) According to a February 2nd, 2003 article in the New York Times: [NYT]

At the Federal Bureau of Investigation, some investigators said they were baffled by the Bush administration’s insistence on a solid link between Iraq and Osama bin Laden’s network. “We’ve been looking at this hard for more than a year and you know what, we just don’t think it’s there,” a government official said.

(5) Section 3C of HJRes 114 states that “Nothing in this joint resolution supersedes any requirement of the War Powers Resolution.”

(6) The War Powers Resolution Section 9(d)(1) states:

(d) Nothing in this joint resolution–

(1) is intended to alter the constitutional authority of the Congress or of the President, or the provision of existing treaties; or

(7) The United Nations Charter was an existing treaty and, as shown in Article VIII, the invasion of Iraq violated that treaty

(8) President George Bush knowingly failed to meet the requirements of HJRes 114 and violated the requirement of the War Powers Resolution and, thereby, invaded Iraq without the authority of Congress.  In all of these actions and decisions, President George W. Bush has acted in a manner contrary to his trust as President and Commander in Chief, and subversive of constitutional government, to the prejudice of the cause of law and justice and to the manifest injury of the people of the United States. Wherefore, President George W. Bush, by such conduct, is guilty of an impeachable offense warranting removal from office.

Article VII.

INVADING IRAQ ABSENT A DECLARATION OF WAR

In his conduct while President of the United States, George W. Bush, in violation of his constitutional oath to faithfully execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional duty under Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution “to take care that the laws be faithfully executed”, has launched a war against Iraq absent any congressional declaration of war or equivalent action.

Article I, Section 8, Clause 11 (the War Powers Clause) makes clear that the United States Congress holds the exclusive power to decide whether or not to send the nation into war. “The Congress,” the War Powers Clause states, “shall have power…To declare war…”

The October 2002 congressional resolution on Iraq did not constitute a declaration of war or equivalent action. The resolution stated: “The President is authorized to use the Armed Forces of the United States as he deems necessary and appropriate in order to 1) defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq; and 2) enforce all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq.” The resolution unlawfully sought to delegate to the President the decision of whether or not to initiate a war against Iraq, based on whether he deemed it “necessary and appropriate.” The Constitution does not allow Congress to delegate this exclusive power to the President, nor does it allow the President to seize this power.

In March 2003, the President launched a war against Iraq without any constitutional authority.  In all of these actions and decisions, President George W. Bush has acted in a manner contrary to his trust as President and Commander in Chief, and subversive of constitutional government, to the prejudice of the cause of law and justice and to the manifest injury of the people of the United States. Wherefore, President George W. Bush, by such conduct, is guilty of an impeachable offense warranting removal from office.

Article VIII

INVADING IRAQ, A SOVEREIGN NATION, IN VIOLATION OF THE UN CHARTER AND INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL LAW

In his conduct while President of the United States, George W. Bush, in violation of his constitutional oath to faithfully execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional duty under Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution “to take care that the laws be faithfully executed”, violated United States law by invading the sovereign country of Iraq in violation of the United Nations Charter to wit:

(1) International Laws ratified by Congress are part of United States Law and must be followed as evidenced by the following:

(A) Article VI of the United States Constitution, which states “This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land;”

(2) The UN Charter, which entered into force following ratification by the United States in 1945, requires Security Council approval for the use of force except for self-defense against an armed attack as evidenced by the following:

A) Chapter 1, Article 2 of the United Nations Charter states:

“3.All Members shall settle their international disputes by peaceful means in such a manner that  international peace and security, and justice, are not endangered.

“4.All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.”

(B) Chapter 7, Article 51 of the United Nations Charter states:

“51. Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self- defense if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security.”

(3) There was no armed attack upon the United States by Iraq.

(4) The Security Council did not vote to approve the use of force against Iraq as evidenced by:

(A) A United Nation Press release which states that the United States had failed to convince the Security Council to approve the use of military force against Iraq. [UN]

(5) President Bush directed the United States military to invade Iraq on March 19th, 2003 in violation of the UN Charter and, therefore, in violation of United States Law as evidenced by the following:

(A) A letter from President Bush to Congress dated March 21st, 2003 stating “I directed U.S. Armed Forces, operating with other coalition forces, to commence combat operations on March 19, 2003, against Iraq.” [WH]

(B) On September 16, 2004 Kofi Annan, the Secretary General of the United Nations, speaking on the invasion, said, “I have indicated it was not in conformity with the UN charter. From our point of view, from the charter point of view, it was illegal.” [BBC]

( C ) The consequence of the instant and direction of President George W. Bush, in ordering an attack  upon Iraq, a sovereign nation is in direct violation of United States Code, Title 18, Part 1, Chapter 118, Section 2441, governing the offense of war crimes.

(6). In the course of invading and occupying Iraq, the President, as Commander in Chief, has taken responsibility for the targeting of civilians, journalists, hospitals, and ambulances, use of antipersonnel weapons including cluster bombs in densely settled urban areas, the use of white phosphorous as a weapon, depleted uranium weapons, and the use of a new version of napalm found in Mark 77 firebombs. Under the direction of President George Bush the United States has engaged in collective punishment of Iraqi civilian populations, including but not limited to blocking roads, cutting electricity and water, destroying fuel stations, planting bombs in farm fields, demolishing houses, and plowing over orchards.

(A) Under the principle of “command responsibility”, i.e., that a de jure command can be civilian as well as military, and can apply to the policy command of heads of state, said command brings President George Bush within the reach of international criminal law under the Additional Protocol I of June 8, 1977 to the Geneva Conventions of August 12, 1949, and Relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts, Article 86 (2). The United States is a state signatory to Additional Protocol I, on December 12, 1977.

(B) Furthermore, Article 85 (3) of said Protocol I defines as a grave breach making a civilian population or individual civilians the object of attacks. This offense, together with the principle of command responsibility, places President George Bush’s conduct under the reach of the same law and principles described as the basis for war crimes prosecution at Nuremburg, under Article 6 of the Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunals: including crimes against peace, violations of the laws and customs of war and crimes against humanity, similarly codified in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, Articles 5 through 8.

(C) The Lancet Report has established massive civilian casualties in Iraq as a result of the United States’ invasion and occupation of that country.

(D) International laws governing wars of aggression are completely prohibited under the legal principle of jus cogens, whether or not a nation has signed or ratified a particular international agreement.

In all of these actions and decisions, President George W. Bush has acted in a manner contrary to his trust as President and Commander in Chief, and subversive of constitutional government, to the prejudice of the cause of law and justice and to the manifest injury of the people of the United States. Wherefore, President George W. Bush, by such conduct, is guilty of an impeachable offense warranting removal from office  Article IX.

FAILING TO PROVIDE TROOPS WITH BODY ARMOR AND VEHICLE ARMOR

In his conduct while President of the United States, George W. Bush, in violation of his constitutional oath to faithfully execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional duty under Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution “to take care that the laws be faithfully executed”, has both personally and acting through his agents and subordinates, together with the Vice President, has been responsible for the deaths of members of the U.S. military and serious injury and trauma to other soldiers, by failing to provide available body armor and vehicle armor.

While engaging in an invasion and occupation of choice, not fought in self-defense, and not launched in accordance with any timetable other than the President’s choosing, President Bush sent U.S. troops into danger without providing them with armor. This shortcoming has been known for years, during which time, the President has chosen to allow soldiers and Marines to continue to face unnecessary risk to life and limb rather then providing them with armor.

In all of these actions and decisions, President George W. Bush has acted in a manner contrary to his trust as President and Commander in Chief, and subversive of constitutional government, to the prejudice of the cause of law and justice and to the manifest injury of the people of the United States. Wherefore, President George W. Bush, by such conduct, is guilty of an impeachable offense warranting removal from office.

Article X

FALSIFYING ACCOUNTS OF U.S. TROOP DEATHS AND INJURIES FOR POLITICAL PURPOSES

In his conduct while President of the United States, George W. Bush, in violation of his constitutional oath to faithfully execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional duty under Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution “to take care that the laws be faithfully executed”, has both personally and acting through his agents and subordinates, together with the Vice President, promoted false propaganda stories about members of the United States military, including individuals both dead and injured.

The White House and the Department of Defense (DOD) in 2004 promoted a false account of the death  of Specialist Pat Tillman, reporting that he had died in a hostile exchange, delaying release of the information that he had died from friendly fire, shot in the forehead three times in a manner that led investigating doctors to believe he had been shot at close range.

A 2005 report by Brig. Gen. Gary M. Jones reported that in the days immediately following Specialist Tillman’s death, U.S. Army investigators were aware that Specialist Tillman was killed by friendly fire, shot three times to the head, and that senior Army commanders, including Gen. John Abizaid, knew of this fact within days of the shooting but nevertheless approved the awarding of the Silver Star, Purple Heart, and a posthumous promotion.

On April 24, 2007, Spc. Bryan O’Neal, the last soldier to see Specialist Pat Tillman alive, testified before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that he was warned by superiors not to divulge information that a fellow soldier killed Specialist Tillman, especially to the Tillman family. The White House refused to provide requested documents to the committee, citing “executive branch confidentiality interests.”

The White House and DOD in 2003 promoted a false account of the injury of Jessica Dawn Lynch, reporting that she had been captured in a hostile exchange and had been dramatically rescued. On April 2, 2003, the DOD released a video of the rescue and claimed that Lynch had stab and bullet wounds, and that she had been slapped about on her hospital bed and interrogated. Iraqi doctors and nurses later interviewed, including Dr. Harith Al-Houssona, a doctor in the Nasirya hospital, described Lynch’s injuries as “a broken arm, a broken thigh, and a dislocated ankle”. According to Al-Houssona, there was no sign of gunshot or stab wounds, and Lynch’s injuries were consistent with those that would be suffered in a car accident. Al-Houssona’s claims were later confirmed in a U.S. Army report leaked on July 10, 2003.

Lynch denied that she fought or was wounded fighting, telling Diane Sawyer that the Pentagon “used me to symbolize all this stuff. It’s wrong. I don’t know why they filmed [my rescue] or why they say these things…. I did not shoot, not a round, nothing. I went down praying to my knees. And that’s the last I remember.” She reported excellent treatment in Iraq, and that one person in the hospital even sang to her to help her feel at home.

On April 24, 2007 Lynch testified before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform:

“[Right after my capture], tales of great heroism were being told. My parent’s home in Wirt County was under siege of the media all repeating the story of the little girl Rambo from the hills who went down fighting. It was not true…. I am still confused as to why they chose to lie.”  The White House had heavily promoted the false story of Lynch’s rescue, including in a speech by President Bush on April 28, 2003. After the fiction was exposed, the president awarded Lynch the Bronze Star.

In all of these actions and decisions, President George W. Bush has acted in a manner contrary to his trust as President and Commander in Chief, and subversive of constitutional government, to the prejudice of the cause of law and justice and to the manifest injury of the people of the United States. Wherefore, President George W. Bush, by such conduct, is guilty of an impeachable offense warranting removal from office.

Article XI

ESTABLISHMENT OF PERMANENT U.S. MILITARY BASES IN IRAQ

In his conduct while President of the United States, George W. Bush, in violation of his constitutional oath to faithfully execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional duty under Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution “to take care that the laws be faithfully executed”, has violated an act of Congress that he himself signed into law by using public funds to construct permanent U.S. military bases in Iraq.

On January 28, 2008, President George W. Bush signed into law the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008 (H.R. 4986). Noting that the Act “authorizes funding for the defense of the United States and its interests abroad, for military construction, and for national security-related energy programs,” the president added the following “signing statement”:

“Provisions of the Act, including sections 841, 846, 1079, and 1222, purport to impose requirements that could inhibit the President’s ability to carry out his constitutional obligations to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, to protect national security, to supervise the executive branch, and to execute his authority as Commander in Chief. The executive branch shall construe such provisions in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President.”

Section 1222 clearly prohibits the expenditure of money for the purpose of establishing permanent U.S. military bases in Iraq. The construction of over $1 billion in U.S. military bases in Iraq, including runways for aircraft, continues despite Congressional intent, as the Administration intends to force upon the Iraqi government such terms which will assure the bases remain in Iraq.  Iraqi officials have informed members of Congress in May 2008 of the strong opposition within the Iraqi parliament and throughout Iraq to the agreement that the administration is trying to negotiate with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. The agreement seeks to assure a long-term U.S. presence in Iraq of which military bases are the most obvious, sufficient and necessary construct, thus clearly defying Congressional intent as to the matter and meaning of “permanency”.

In all of these actions and decisions, President George W. Bush has acted in a manner contrary to his trust as President and Commander in Chief, and subversive of constitutional government, to the prejudice of the cause of law and justice and to the manifest injury of the people of the United States. Wherefore, President George W. Bush, by such conduct, is guilty of an impeachable offense warranting removal from office.

Article XII

INITIATING A WAR AGAINST IRAQ FOR CONTROL OF THAT NATION’S NATURAL RESOURCES

In his conduct while President of the United States, George W. Bush, in violation of his constitutional oath to faithfully execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional duty under Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution “to take care that the laws be faithfully executed”, has both personally and acting through his agents and subordinates, together with the Vice President, invaded and occupied a foreign nation for the purpose, among other purposes, of seizing control of that nation’s oil.

The White House and its representatives in Iraq have, since the occupation of Baghdad began, attempted to gain control of Iraqi oil. This effort has included pressuring the new Iraqi government to pass a hydrocarbon law. Within weeks of the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, the US Agency for International Development (USAid) awarded a $240 million contract to Bearing Point, a private U.S. company. A Bearing Point employee, based in the US embassy in Baghdad, was hired to advise the Iraqi Ministry of Oil on drawing up the new hydrocarbon law. The draft law places executives of foreign oil companies on a council with the task of approving their own contracts with Iraq; it denies the Iraqi National Oil Company exclusive rights for the exploration, development, production, transportation, and marketing of Iraqi oil, and allows foreign companies to control Iraqi oil fields containing 80 percent of Iraqi oil for up to 35 years through contracts that can remain secret for up to 2 months. The draft law itself contains secret appendices.  President Bush provided unrelated reasons for the invasion of Iraq to the public and Congress, but those reasons have been established to have been categorically fraudulent, as evidenced by the herein mentioned Articles of Impeachment I, II, III, IV, VI, and VII.

Parallel to the development of plans for war against Iraq, the U.S. State Department’s Future of Iraq project, begun as early as April 2002, involved meetings in Washington and London of 17 working groups, each composed of 10 to 20 Iraqi exiles and international experts selected by the State Department. The Oil and Energy working group met four times between December 2002 and April 2003. Ibrahim Bahr al-Uloum, later the Iraqi Oil Minister, was a member of the group, which concluded that Iraq “should be opened to international oil companies as quickly as possible after the war,” and that, “the country should establish a conducive business environment to attract investment of oil and gas resources.” The same group recommended production-sharing agreements with foreign oil companies, the same approach found in the draft hydrocarbon law, and control over Iraq’s oil resources remains a prime objective of the Bush Administration.

Prior to his election as Vice President, Dick Cheney, then-CEO of Halliburton, in a speech at the Institute of Petroleum in 1999 demonstrated a keen awareness of the sensitive economic and geopolitical role of Midde East oil resources saying: “By 2010, we will need on the order of an additional 50 million barrels a day. So where is the oil going to come from? Governments and national oil companies are obviously controlling about 90 percent of the assets. Oil remains fundamentally a government business. While many regions of the world offer great oil opportunities, the Middle East, with two-thirds of the world’s oil and lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies. Even though companies are anxious for greater access there, progress continues to be slow.”

The Vice President led the work of a secret energy task force, as described in Article XXXII below, a task force that focused on, among other things, the acquisition of Iraqi oil through developing a controlling private corporate interest in said oil.

In all of these actions and decisions, President George W. Bush has acted in a manner contrary to his trust as President and Commander in Chief, and subversive of constitutional government, to the prejudice of the cause of law and justice and to the manifest injury of the people of the United States. Wherefore, President George W. Bush, by such conduct, is guilty of an impeachable offense warranting removal from office.

ARTICLE XIII

CREATING A SECRET TASK FORCE TO DEVELOP ENERGY AND MILITARY POLICIES WITH RESPECT TO IRAQ AND OTHER COUNTRIES  In his conduct while President of the United States, George W. Bush, in violation of his constitutional oath to faithfully execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, has both personally and acting through his agents and subordinates, together with the Vice President, created a secret task force to guide our nation’s energy policy and military policy, and undermined Congress’ ability to legislate by thwarting attempts to investigate the nature of that policy.

A Government Accountability Office (GAO) Report on the Cheney Energy Task Force, in August 2003, described the creation of this task force as follows:

“In a January 29, 2001, memorandum, the President established NEPDG [the National Energy Policy Development Group] — comprised of the Vice President, nine cabinet-level officials, and four other

senior administration officials — to gather information, deliberate, and make recommendations to the President by the end of fiscal year 2001. The President called on the Vice President to chair the group, direct its work and, as necessary, establish subordinate working groups to assist NEPDG.”

The four “other senior administration officials were the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, the Assistant to the President and Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy, the Assistant to the President for Economic Policy, and the Deputy Assistant to the President for Intergovernmental Affairs.

The GAO report found that:

“In developing the National Energy Policy report, the NEPDG Principals, Support Group, and participating agency officials and staff met with, solicited input from, or received information and advice from nonfederal energy stakeholders, principally petroleum, coal, nuclear, natural gas, and electricity industry representatives and lobbyists. The extent to which submissions from any of these stakeholders were solicited, influenced policy deliberations, or were incorporated into the final report cannot be determined based on the limited information made available to GAO. NEPDG met and conducted its work in two distinct phases: the first phase culminated in a March 19, 2001, briefing to the President on challenges relating to energy supply and the resulting economic impact; the second phase ended with the May 16, 2001, presentation of the final report to the President. The Office of the Vice President’s (OVP) unwillingness to provide the NEPDG records or other related information precluded GAO from fully achieving its objectives and substantially limited GAO’s ability to comprehensively analyze the NEPDG process. associated with that process.  “None of the key federal entities involved in the NEPDG effort provided GAO with a complete accounting of the costs that they incurred during the development of the National Energy Policy report. The two federal entities responsible for funding the NEPDG effort–OVP and the Department of Energy (DOE)–did not provide the comprehensive cost information that GAO requested. OVP provided GAO with 77 pages of information, two-thirds of which contained no cost information while the remaining one-third contained some miscellaneous information of little to no usefulness. OVP stated that it would not provide any additional information. DOE, the Department of the Interior, and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) provided GAO with estimates of certain costs and salaries associated with the NEPDG effort, but these estimates, all calculated in different ways, were not comprehensive.”

In 2003, the Commerce Department disclosed a partial collection of materials from the NEPDG, including documents, maps, and charts, dated March 2001, of Iraq’s, Saudi Arabia’s and the United Arab Emirates’ oil fields, pipelines, refineries, tanker terminals, and development projects.

On November 16, 2005, the Washington Post reported on a White House document showing that oil company executives had met with the NEPDG, something that some of those same executives had just that week denied in Congressional testimony. The Bush Administration had not corrected the inaccurate testimony.

On July 18, 2007, the Washington Post reported the full list of names of those who had met with the NEPDG.

In 1998 Kenneth Derr, then chief executive of Chevron, told a San Francisco audience, “Iraq possesses huge reserves of oil and gas, reserves I’d love Chevron to have access to.” According to the GAO report, Chevron provided detailed advice to the NEPDG.

In March, 2001, the NEPDG recommended that the United States Government support initiatives by Middle Eastern countries “to open up areas of their energy sectors to foreign investment.” Following the invasion of Iraq, the United States has pressured the new Iraqi parliament to pass a hydrocarbon law that would do exactly that. The draft law, if passed, would take the majority of Iraq’s oil out of the exclusive hands of the Iraqi Government and open it to international oil companies for a generation or more. The Bush administration hired Bearing Point, a U.S. company, to help write the law in 2004. It was submitted to the Iraqi Council of Representatives in May 2007.

In all of these actions and decisions, President George W. Bush has acted in a manner contrary to his trust as President and Commander in Chief, and subversive of constitutional government, to the prejudice of the cause of law and justice and to the manifest injury of the people of the United States. Wherefore, President George W. Bush, by such conduct, is guilty of an impeachable offense warranting  removal from office.

Article XIV

MISPRISION OF A FELONY, MISUSE AND EXPOSURE OF CLASSIFIED INFORMATION AND OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE IN THE MATTER OF VALERIE PLAME WILSON, CLANDESTINE AGENT OF THE CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY

In his conduct while President of the United States, George W. Bush, in violation of his constitutional oath to faithfully execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional duty under Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution “to take care that the laws be faithfully executed”, has both personally and acting through his agents and subordinates, together with the Vice President,

(1) suppressed material information;

(2) selectively declassified information for the improper purposes of retaliating against a whistleblower and presenting a misleading picture of the alleged threat from Iraq;

(3) facilitated the exposure of the identity of Valerie Plame Wilson who had theretofore been employed as a covert CIA operative;

(4) failed to investigate the improper leaks of classified information from within his administration;

(5) failed to cooperate with an investigation into possible federal violations resulting from this activity; and

(6) finally, entirely undermined the prosecution by commuting the sentence of Lewis Libby citing false and insubstantial grounds, all in an effort to prevent Congress and the citizens of the United States from discovering the deceitful nature of the President’s claimed justifications for the invasion of Iraq.

In facilitating this exposure of classified information and the subsequent cover-up, in all of these actions and decisions, President George W. Bush has acted in a manner contrary to his trust as  President, and subversive of constitutional government, to the prejudice of the cause of law and justice and to the manifest injury of the people of the United States. Wherefore, President George W. Bush, by such conduct, is guilty of an impeachable offense warranting removal from office.

Article XV

PROVIDING IMMUNITY FROM PROSECUTION FOR CRIMINAL CONTRACTORS IN IRAQ

In his conduct while President of the United States, George W. Bush, in violation of his constitutional oath to faithfully execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional duty under Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution “to take care that the laws be faithfully executed”, has both personally and acting through his agents and subordinates, together with the Vice President, established policies granting United States government contractors and their employees in Iraq immunity from Iraqi law, U.S. law, and international law.

Lewis Paul Bremer III, then-Director of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance for post-war Iraq, on June 27, 2004, issued Coalition Provisional Authority Order Number 17, which granted members of the U.S. military, U.S. mercenaries, and other U.S. contractor employees immunity from Iraqi law.

The Bush Administration has chosen not to apply the Uniform Code of Military Justice or United States law to mercenaries and other contractors employed by the United States government in Iraq.

Operating free of Iraqi or U.S. law, mercenaries have killed many Iraqi civilians in a manner that observers have described as aggression and not as self-defense. Many U.S. contractors have also alleged that they have been the victims of aggression (in several cases of rape) by their fellow contract employees in Iraq. These charges have not been brought to trial, and in several cases the contracting companies and the U.S. State Department have worked together in attempting to cover them up.

Under the Fourth Geneva Convention, to which the United States is party, and which under Article VI of the U.S. Constitution is therefore the supreme law of the United States, it is the responsibility of an occupying force to ensure the protection and human rights of the civilian population. The efforts of President Bush and his subordinates to attempt to establish a lawless zone in Iraq are in violation of the law.

In all of these actions and decisions, President George W. Bush has acted in a manner contrary to his trust as President and subversive of constitutional government, to the prejudice of the cause of law and  justice and to the manifest injury of the people of the United States. Wherefore, President George W. Bush, by such conduct, is guilty of an impeachable offense warranting removal from office.

Article XVI

RECKLESS MISSPENDING AND WASTE OF US TAX DOLLARS IN CONNECTION WITH IRAQ CONTRACTORS

In his conduct while President of the United States, George W. Bush, in violation of his constitutional oath to faithfully execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional duty under Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution “to take care that the laws be faithfully executed”, has both personally and acting through his agents and subordinates, together with the Vice President, recklessly wasted public funds on contracts awarded to close associates, including companies guilty of defrauding the government in the past, contracts awarded without competitive bidding, “cost-plus” contracts designed to encourage cost overruns, and contracts not requiring satisfactory completion of the work. These failures have been the rule, not the exception, in the awarding of contracts for work in the United States and abroad over the past seven years. Repeated exposure of fraud and waste has not been met by the president with correction of systemic problems, but rather with retribution against whistleblowers.

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform reported on Iraq reconstruction contracting:

“From the beginning, the Administration adopted a flawed contracting approach in Iraq. Instead of maximizing competition, the Administration opted to award no-bid, cost-plus contracts to politically connected contractors. Halliburton’s secret $7 billion contract to restore Iraq’s oil infrastructure is the prime example. Under this no-bid, cost-plus contract, Halliburton was reimbursed for its costs and then received an additional fee, which was a percentage of its costs. This created an incentive for Halliburton to run up its costs in order to increase its potential profit.

“Even after the Administration claimed it was awarding Iraq contracts competitively in early 2004, real price competition was missing. Iraq was divided geographically and by economic sector into a handful of fiefdoms. Individual contractors were then awarded monopoly contracts for all of the work within given fiefdoms. Because these monopoly contracts were awarded before specific projects were identified, there was no actual price competition for more than 2,000 projects.

“In the absence of price competition, rigorous government oversight becomes essential for accountability. Yet the Administration turned much of the contract oversight work over to private companies with blatant conflicts of interest. Oversight contractors oversaw their business partners and, in some cases, were placed in a position to assist their own construction work under separate monopoly construction contracts….

“Under Halliburton’s two largest Iraq contracts, Pentagon auditors found $1 billion in ‘questioned’ costs and over $400 million in ‘unsupported’ costs. Former Halliburton employees testified that the company  charged $45 for cases of soda, billed $100 to clean 15- pound bags of laundry, and insisted on housing its staff as the five-star Kempinski hotel in Kuwait. Halliburton truck drivers testified that the company ‘torched’ brand new $85,000 trucks rather than perform relatively minor repairs and regular maintenance. Halliburton procurement officials described the company’s informal motto in Iraq as ‘Don’t worry about price. It’s cost-plus.’ A Halliburton manager was indicted for ‘major fraud against the United States’ for allegedly billing more than $5.5 billion for work that should have cost only $685,000 in exchange for a $1 million kickback from a Kuwaiti subcontractor….

“The Air Force found that another U.S. government contractor, Custer Battles, set up shell subcontractors to inflate prices. Those overcharges were passed along to the U.S government under the company’s cost-plus contract to provide security for Baghdad International Airport. In one case, the company allegedly took Iraqi-owned forklifts, re-painted them, and leased them to the U.S. government.

“Despite the spending of billions of taxpayer dollars, U.S. reconstruction efforts in keys sectors of the Iraqi economy are failing. Over two years after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, oil and electricity production has fallen below pre-war levels. The Administration has failed to even measure how many Iraqis lack access to drinkable water.”

“Constitution in Crisis,” a book by Congressman John Conyers, details the Bush Administration’s response when contract abuse is made public:

“Bunnatine Greenhouse was the chief contracting officer at the Army Corps of Engineers, the agency that has managed much of the reconstruction work in Iraq. In October 2004, Ms. Greenhouse came forward and revealed that top Pentagon officials showed improper favoritism to Halliburton when awarding military contracts to Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR). Greenhouse stated that when the Pentagon awarded Halliburton a five-year $7 billion contract, it pressured her to withdraw her objections, actions which she claimed were unprecedented in her experience.

“On June 27, 2005, Ms. Greenhouse testified before Congress, detailing that the contract award process was compromised by improper influence by political appointees, participation by Halliburton officials in meetings where bidding requirements were discussed, and a lack of competition. She stated that the Halliburton contracts represented “the most blatant and improper contract abuse I have witnessed during the course of my professional career.” Days before the hearing, the acting general counsel of the Army Corps of Engineers paid Ms. Greenhouse a visit and reportedly let it be known that it would not be in her best interest to appear voluntarily.

“On August 27, 2005, the Army demoted Ms. Greenhouse, removing her from the elite Senior Executive Service and transferring her to a lesser job in the corps’ civil works division . As Frank Rich  of The New York Times described the situation, ‘[H]er crime was not obstructing justice but pursuing it by vehemently questioning irregularities in the awarding of some $7 billion worth of no-bid contracts in Iraq to the Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown Root.’ The demotion was in apparent retaliation for her speaking out against the abuses, even though she previously had stellar reviews and over 20 years of experience in military procurement.”

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform reports on domestic contracting:

“The Administration’s domestic contracting record is no better than its record on Iraq. Waste, fraud, and abuse appear to be the rule rather than the exception….

“A Transportation Security Administration (TSA) cost-plus contract with NCS Pearson, Inc., to hire federal airport screeners was plagued by poor management and egregious waste. Pentagon auditors challenged $303 million (over 40%) of the $741 million spent by Pearson under the contract. The auditors detailed numerous concerns with the charges of Pearson and its subcontractors, such as ‘$20- an-hour temporary workers billed to the government at $48 per hour, subcontractors who signed out $5,000 in cash at a time with no supporting documents, $377,273.75 in unsubstantiated long distance phone calls, $514,201 to rent tents that flooded in a rainstorm, [and] $4.4 million in “no show” fees for job candidates who did not appear for tests.’ A Pearson employee who supervised Pearson’s hiring efforts at 43 sites in the U.S. described the contract as ‘a waste a taxpayer’s money.’ The CEO of one Pearson subcontractor paid herself $5.4 million for nine months work and provided herself with a $270,000 pension….

“The Administration is spending $239 million on the Integrated Surveillance and Intelligence System, a no-bid contract to provide thousands of cameras and sensors to monitor activity on the Mexican and Canadian borders. Auditors found that the contractor, International Microwave Corp., billed for work it never did and charged for equipment it never provided, ‘creat[ing] a potential for overpayments of almost $13 million.’ Moreover, the border monitoring system reportedly does not work….

“After spending more than $4.5 billion on screening equipment for the nation’s entry points, the Department of Homeland Security is now ‘moving to replace or alter much of’ it because ‘it is ineffective, unreliable or too expensive to operate.’ For example, radiation monitors at ports and borders reportedly could not ‘differentiate between radiation emitted by a nuclear bomb and naturally occurring radiation from everyday material like cat litter or ceramic tile.’…

“The TSA awarded Boeing a cost-plus contract to install over 1,000 explosive detection systems for airline passenger luggage. After installation, the machines ‘began to register false alarms’ and ‘[s]creeners were forced to open and hand-check bags.’ To reduce the number of false alarms, the sensitivity of the machines was lowered, which reduced the effectiveness of the detectors. Despite these  serious problems, Boeing received an $82 million profit that the Inspector General determined to be ‘excessive.’…

“The FBI spent $170 million on a ‘Virtual Case File’ system that does not operate as required. After three years of work under a cost-plus contract failed to produce a functional system, the FBI scrapped the program and began work on the new ‘Sentinel’ Case File System….

“The Department of Homeland Security Inspector General found that taxpayer dollars were being lavished on perks for agency officials. One IG report found that TSA spent over $400,000 on its first leader’s executive office suite. Another found that TSA spent $350,000 on a gold-plated gym….

“According to news reports, Pentagon auditors … examined a contract between the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and Unisys, a technology and consulting company, for the upgrade of airport computer networks. Among other irregularities, government auditors found that Unisys may have overbilled for as much as 171,000 hours of labor and overtime by charging for employees at up to twice their actual rate of compensation. While the cost ceiling for the contract was set at $1 billion, Unisys has reportedly billed the government $940 million with more than half of the seven-year contract remaining and more than half of the TSA-monitored airports still lacking upgraded networks.”

In all of these actions and decisions, President George W. Bush has acted in a manner contrary to his trust as President, and subversive of constitutional government, to the prejudice of the cause of law and justice and to the manifest injury of the people of the United States. Wherefore, President George W. Bush, by such conduct, is guilty of an impeachable offense warranting removal from office.

Article XVII

ILLEGAL DETENTION: DETAINING INDEFINITELY AND WITHOUT CHARGE PERSONS BOTH U.S. CITIZENS AND FOREIGN CAPTIVES

In his conduct while President of the United States, George W. Bush, in violation of his constitutional oath to faithfully execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional duty under Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution “to take care that the laws be faithfully executed”, has both personally and acting through his agents and subordinates, together with the Vice President, violated United States and International Law and the US Constitution by illegally detaining indefinitely and without charge persons both US citizens and foreign captives.

In a statement on Feb. 7, 2002, President Bush declared that in the US fight against Al Qaeda, “none of the provisions of Geneva apply,” thus rejecting the Geneva Conventions that protect captives in wars and other conflicts. By that time, the administration was already transporting captives from the war in Afghanistan, both alleged Al Qaeda members and supporters, and also Afghans accused of being fighters in the army of the Taliban government, to US-run prisons in Afghanistan and to the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The round-up and detention without charge of Muslim non-citizens inside the US began almost immediately after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, with some being held as long as nine months. The US, on orders of the president, began capturing and detaining without charge alleged terror suspects in other countries and detaining them abroad and at the US Naval base in Guantanamo.  Many of these detainees have been subjected to systematic abuse, including beatings, which have been subsequently documented by news reports, photographic evidence, testimony in Congress, lawsuits, and in the case of detainees in the US, by an investigation conducted by the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General.

In violation of US law and the Geneva Conventions, the Bush Administration instructed the Department of Justice and the US Department of Defense to refuse to provide the identities or locations of these detainees, despite requests from Congress and from attorneys for the detainees. The president even declared the right to detain US citizens indefinitely, without charge and without providing them access to counsel or the courts, thus depriving them of their constitutional and basic human rights. Several of those US citizens were held in military brigs in solitary confinement for as long as three years before being either released or transferred to civilian detention.

Detainees in US custody in Iraq and Guantanamo have, in violation of the Geneva Conventions, been hidden from and denied visits by the International Red Cross organization, while thousands of others in Iraq, Guantanamo, Afghanistan, ships in foreign off-shore sites, and an unknown number of so-called “black sites” around the world have been denied any opportunity to challenge their detentions. The president, acting on his own claimed authority, has declared the hundreds of detainees at Guantanamo Bay to be “enemy combatants” not subject to US law and not even subject to military law, but nonetheless potentially liable to the death penalty.

The detention of individuals without due process violates the 5th Amendment. While the Bush administration has been rebuked in several court cases, most recently that of Ali al-Marri, it continues to attempt to exceed constitutional limits.

In all of these actions violating US and International law, President George W. Bush has acted in a manner contrary to his trust as President and Commander in Chief, and subversive of constitutional government, to the prejudice of the cause of law and justice and to the manifest injury of the people of the United States. Wherefore, President George W. Bush, by such conduct, is guilty of an impeachable offense warranting removal from office.

ARTICLE XVIII

TORTURE: SECRETLY AUTHORIZING, AND ENCOURAGING THE USE OF TORTURE AGAINST CAPTIVES IN AFGHANISTAN, IRAQ, AND OTHER PLACES, AS A MATTER OF OFFICIAL POLICY

In his conduct while President of the United States, George W. Bush, in violation of his constitutional oath to faithfully execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional duty under Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution “to take care that the laws be faithfully executed”, has both personally and acting through his agents and subordinates, together with the Vice President, violated United States and International Law and the US Constitution by secretly authorizing and encouraging the use of torture against captives in Afghanistan, Iraq in connection with the so-called “war” on terror.

In violation of the Constitution, US law, the Geneva Conventions (to which the US is a signatory), and in violation of basic human rights, torture has been authorized by the President and his administration as official policy. Water-boarding, beatings, faked executions, confinement in extreme cold or extreme heat, prolonged enforcement of painful stress positions, sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation, and the  defiling of religious articles have been practiced and exposed as routine at Guantanamo, at Abu Ghraib Prison and other US detention sites in Iraq, and at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. The president, besides bearing responsibility for authorizing the use of torture, also as Commander in Chief, bears ultimate responsibility for the failure to halt these practices and to punish those responsible once they were exposed.

The administration has sought to claim the abuse of captives is not torture, by redefining torture. An August 1, 2002 memorandum from the Administration’s Office of Legal Counsel Jay S. Bybee addressed to White House Counsel Alberto R. Gonzales concluded that to constitute torture, any pain inflicted must be akin to that accompanying “serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.” The memorandum went on to state that even should an act constitute torture under that minimal definition, it might still be permissible if applied to “interrogations undertaken pursuant to the President’s Commander-in-Chief powers.” The memorandum further asserted that “necessity or self-defense could provide justifications that would eliminate any criminal liability.”

This effort to redefine torture by calling certain practices simply “enhanced interrogation techniques” flies in the face of the Third Geneva Convention Relating to the Treatment of Prisoners of War, which states that “No physical or mental torture, nor any other form of coercion, may be inflicted on prisoners of war to secure from them information of any kind whatever. Prisoners of war who refuse to answer may not be threatened, insulted, or exposed to any unpleasant or disadvantageous treatment of any kind.”

Torture is further prohibited by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the paramount international human rights statement adopted unanimously by the United Nations General Assembly, including the United States, in 1948. Torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment is also prohibited by international treaties ratified by the United States: the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT).

When the Congress, in the Defense Authorization Act of 2006, overwhelmingly passed a measure banning torture and sent it to the President’s desk for signature, the President, who together with his vice president, had fought hard to block passage of the amendment, signed it, but then quietly appended a signing statement in which he pointedly asserted that as Commander-in-Chief, he was not bound to obey its strictures.

The administration’s encouragement of and failure to prevent torture of American captives in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and in the battle against terrorism, has undermined the rule of law in the US and in the US military, and has seriously damaged both the effort to combat global terrorism, and more broadly, America’s image abroad. In his effort to hide torture by US military forces and the CIA, the president has defied Congress and has lied to the American people, repeatedly claiming that the US “does not torture.”

In all of these actions and decisions in violation of US and International law, President George W. Bush has acted in a manner contrary to his trust as President and Commander in Chief, and subversive of constitutional government, to the prejudice of the cause of law and justice and to the manifest injury of the people of the United States. Wherefore, President George W. Bush, by such conduct, is guilty of an impeachable offense warranting removal from office.

ARTICLE XIX  RENDITION: KIDNAPPING PEOPLE AND TAKING THEM AGAINST THEIR WILL TO “BLACK SITES” LOCATED IN OTHER NATIONS, INCLUDING NATIONS KNOWN TO PRACTICE TORTURE

In his conduct while President of the United States, George W. Bush, in violation of his constitutional oath to faithfully execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional duty under Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution “to take care that the laws be faithfully executed”, has both personally and acting through his agents and subordinates, together with the Vice President, violated United States and International Law and the US Constitution by kidnapping people and renditioning them to “black sites” located in other nations, including nations known to practice torture.

The president has publicly admitted that since the 9-11 attacks in 2001, the US has been kidnapping and transporting against the will of the subject (renditioning) in its so-called “war” on terror–even people captured by US personnel in friendly nations like Sweden, Germany, Macedonia and Italy–and ferrying them to places like Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan, and to prisons operated in Eastern European countries, African Countries and Middle Eastern countries where security forces are known to practice torture.

These people are captured and held indefinitely, without any charges being filed, and are held without being identified to the Red Cross, or to their families. Many are clearly innocent, and several cases, including one in Canada and one in Germany, have demonstrably been shown subsequently to have been in error, because of a similarity of names or because of misinformation provided to US authorities.

Such a policy is in clear violation of US and International Law, and has placed the United States in the position of a pariah state. The CIA has no law enforcement authority, and cannot legally arrest or detain anyone. The program of “extraordinary rendition” authorized by the president is the substantial equivalent of the policies of “disappearing” people, practices widely practiced and universally condemned in the military dictatorships of Latin America during the late 20th Century.

The administration has claimed that prior administrations have practiced extraordinary rendition, but, while this is technically true, earlier renditions were used only to capture people with outstanding arrest warrants or convictions who were outside in order to deliver them to stand trial or serve their sentences in the US. The president has refused to divulge how many people have been subject to extraordinary rendition since September, 2001. It is possible that some have died in captivity. As one US official has stated off the record, regarding the program, Some of those who were renditioned were later delivered to Guantanamo, while others were sent there directly. An example of this is the case of six Algerian Bosnians who, immediately after being cleared by the Supreme Court of Bosnia Herzegovina in January 2002 of allegedly plotting to attack the US and UK embassies, were captured, bound and gagged by US special forces and renditioned to Guantanamo.

In perhaps the most egregious proven case of rendition, Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen born in Syria, was picked up in September 2002 while transiting through New York’s JFK airport on his way home to Canada. Immigration and FBI officials detained and interrogated him for nearly two weeks, illegally denying him his rights to access counsel, the Canadian consulate, and the courts. Executive branch officials asked him if he would volunteer to go to Syria, where he hadn’t been in 15 years, and Maher refused

Maher was put on a private jet plane operated by the CIA and sent to Jordan, where he was beaten for 8  hours, and then delivered to Syria, where he was beaten and interrogated for 18 hours a day for a couple of weeks. He was whipped on his back and hands with a 2 inch thick electric cable and asked questions similar to those he had been asked in the United States. For over ten months Maher was held in an underground grave-like cell ­ 3 x 6 x 7 feet ­ which was damp and cold, and in which the only light came in through a hole in the ceiling. After a year of this, Maher was released without any charges. He is now back home in Canada with his family. Upon his release, the Syrian Government announced he had no links to Al Qaeda, and the Canadian Government has also said they’ve found no links to Al Qaeda. The Canadian Government launched a Commission of Inquiry into the Actions of Canadian Officials in Relation to Maher Arar, to investigate the role of Canadian officials, but the Bush Administration has refused to cooperate with the Inquiry.

Hundreds of flights of CIA-chartered planes have been documented as having passed through European countries on extraordinary rendition missions like that involving Maher Arar, but the administration refuses to state how many people have been subjects of this illegal program.

The same U.S. laws prohibiting aiding and abetting torture also prohibit sending someone to a country where there is a substantial likelihood they may be tortured. Article 3 of CAT prohibits forced return where there is a “substantial likelihood” that an individual “may be in danger of” torture, and has been implemented by federal statute. Article 7 of the ICCPR prohibits return to country of origin where individuals may be “at risk” of either torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.

Under international Human Rights law, transferring a POW to any nation where he or she is likely to be tortured or inhumanely treated violates Article 12 of the Third Geneva Convention, and transferring any civilian who is a protected person under the Fourth Geneva Convention is a grave breach and a criminal act.

In situations of armed conflict, both international human rights law and humanitarian law apply. A person captured in the zone of military hostilities “must have some status under international law; he is either a prisoner of war and, as such, covered by the Third Convention, [or] a civilian covered by the Fourth Convention….There is no intermediate status; nobody in enemy hands can be outside the law.” Although the state is obligated to repatriate Prisoners of War as soon as hostilities cease, the ICRC’s commentary on the 1949 Conventions states that prisoners should not be repatriated where there are serious reasons for fearing that repatriating the individual would be contrary to general principles of established international law for the protection of human beings Thus, all of the Guantánamo detainees as well as renditioned captives are protected by international human rights protections and humanitarian law.

By his actions as outlined above, the President has abused his power, broken the law, deceived the American people, and placed American military personnel, and indeed all Americans–especially those who may travel or live abroad–at risk of similar treatment. Furthermore, in the eyes of the rest of the world, the President has made the US, once a model of respect for Human Rights and respect for the rule of law, into a state where international law is neither respected nor upheld.

In all of these actions and decisions in violation of United States and International law, President George W. Bush has acted in a manner contrary to his trust as President and Commander in Chief, and subversive of constitutional government, to the prejudice of the cause of law and justice and to the manifest injury of the people of the United States. Wherefore, President George W. Bush, by such conduct, is guilty of an impeachable offense warranting removal from office.

Article XX  IMPRISONING CHILDREN

In his conduct while President of the United States, George W. Bush, in violation of his constitutional oath to faithfully execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional duty under Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution “to take care that the laws be faithfully executed”, has both personally and acting through his agents and subordinates, authorized or permitted the arrest and detention of at least 2500 children under the age of 18 as “enemy combatants” in Iraq, Afghanistan, and at Guantanamo Bay Naval Station in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention relating to the treatment of “protected persons” and the Optional Protocol to the Geneva Convention on the Rights of the Child on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict, signed by the US in 2002 . To wit:

In May 2008, the US government reported to the United Nations that it has been holding upwards of 2,500 children under the age of 18 as “enemy combatants” at detention centers in Iraq, Afghanistan and at Guantanamo Bay (where there was a special center, Camp Iguana, established just for holding children). The length of these detentions has frequently exceeded a year, and in some cases has stretched to five years. Some of these detainees have reached adulthood in detention and are now not being reported as child detainees because they are no longer children.

In addition to detaining children as “enemy combatants,” it has been widely reported in media reports that the US military in Iraq has, based upon Pentagon rules of engagement, been treating boys as young as 14 years of age as “potential combatants,” subject to arrest and even to being killed. In Fallujah, in the days ahead of the November 2004 all-out assault, Marines ringing the city were reported to be turning back into the city men and boys “of combat age” who were trying to flee the impending scene of battle — an act which in itself is a violation of the Geneva Conventions, which require combatants to permit anyone, combatants as well as civilians, to surrender, and to leave the scene of battle.

Under the Fourth Geneva Convention, to which the United States has been a signatory since 1949, children under the age of 15 captured in conflicts, even if they have been fighting, are to be considered victims, not prisoners. In 2002, the United States signed the Optional Protocol to the Geneva Convention on the Rights of the Child on the Involvement of children in Armed Conflict, which raised this age for this category of “protected person” to under 18.

The continued detention of such children, some as young as 10, by the US military is a violation of both convention and protocol, and as such constitutes a war crime for which the president, as commander in chief, bears full responsibility.

In all of these actions and decisions, President George W. Bush has acted in a manner contrary to his trust as President and Commander in Chief, and subversive of constitutional government, to the prejudice of the cause of law and justice and to the manifest injury of the people of the United States. Wherefore, President George W. Bush, by such conduct, is guilty of an impeachable offense warranting removal from office.

Article XXI MISLEADING CONGRESS AND THE AMERICAN PEOPLE ABOUT THREATS FROM IRAN, AND SUPPORTING TERRORIST ORGANIZATIONS WITHIN IRAN, WITH THE GOAL OF OVERTHROWING THE IRANIAN GOVERNMENT

In his conduct while President of the United States, George W. Bush, in violation of his constitutional  oath to faithfully execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, has both personally and acting through his agents and subordinates misled the Congress and the citizens of the United States about a threat of nuclear attack from the nation of Iran.

The National Intelligence Estimate released to Congress and the public on December 4, 2007, which confirmed that the government of the nation of Iran had ceased any efforts to develop nuclear weapons, was completed in 2006. Yet , the president and his aides continued to suggest during 2007 that such a nuclear threat was developing and might already exist. National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley stated at the time the National Intelligence Estimate regarding Iran was released that the president had been briefed on its findings “in the last few months.” Hadley’s statement establishes a timeline that shows the president knowingly sought to deceive Congress and the American people about a nuclear threat that did not exist.

Hadley has stated that the president “was basically told: stand down” and, yet, the president and his aides continued to make false claims about the prospect that Iran was trying to “build a nuclear weapon” that could lead to “World War III.”

This evidence establishes that the president actively engaged in and had full knowledge of a campaign by his administration to make a false “case” for an attack on Iran, thus warping the national security debate at a critical juncture and creating the prospect of an illegal and unnecessary attack on a sovereign nation.

Even after the National Intelligence Estimate was released to Congress and the American people, the president stated that he did not believe anything had changed and suggested that he and members of his administration would continue to argue that Iran should be seen as posing a threat to the United States. He did this despite the fact that United States intelligence agencies had clearly and officially stated that this was not the case.

Evidence suggests that the Bush Administration’s attempts to portray Iran as a threat are part of a broader U.S. policy toward Iran. On September 30, 2001, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld established an official military objective of overturning the regime in Iran, as well as those in Iraq, Syria, and four other countries in the Middle East, according to a document quoted in then- Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith’s book, “War and Decision.”

General Wesley Clark, reports in his book “Winning Modern Wars” being told by a friend in the Pentagon in November 2001 that the list of governments that Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz planned to overthrow included Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, Sudan, and Somalia. Clark writes that the list also included Lebanon.

Journalist Gareth Porter reported in May 2008 asking Feith at a public event which of the six regimes on the Clark list were included in the Rumsfeld paper, to which Feith replied “All of them.”

Rumsfeld’s aides also drafted a second version of the paper, as instructions to all military commanders in the development of “campaign plans against terrorism”. The paper called for military commanders to assist other government agencies “as directed” to “encourage populations dominated by terrorist organizations or their supporters to overthrow that domination”.

In January 2005, Seymour Hersh reported in the New Yorker Magazine that the Bush Administration had been conducting secret reconnaissance missions inside Iran at least since the summer of 2004.  In June 2005 former United Nations weapons inspector Scott Ritter reported that United States security forces had been sending members of the Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK) into Iranian territory. The MEK has been designated a terrorist organization by the United States, the European Union, Canada, Iraq, and Iran. Ritter reported that the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had used the MEK to carry out remote bombings in Iran.

In April 2006, Hersh reported in the New Yorker Magazine that U.S. combat troops had entered and were operating in Iran, where they were working with minority groups including the Azeris, Baluchis, and Kurds.

Also in April 2006, Larisa Alexandrovna reported on Raw Story that the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) was working with and training the MEK, or former members of the MEK, sending them to commit acts of violence in southern Iran in areas where recent attacks had left many dead. Raw Story reported that the Pentagon had adopted the policy of supporting MEK shortly after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and in response to the influence of Vice President Richard B. Cheney’s office. Raw Story subsequently reported that no Presidential finding, and no Congressional oversight, existed on MEK operations.

In March 2007, Hersh reported in the New Yorker Magazine that the Bush administration was attempting to stem the growth of Shiite influence in the Middle East (specifically the Iranian government and Hezbollah in Lebanon) by funding violent Sunni organizations, without any Congressional authorization or oversight. Hersh said funds had been given to “three Sunni jihadist groups … connected to al Qaeda” that “want to take on Hezbollah.”

In April 2008, the Los Angeles Times reported that conflicts with insurgent groups along Iran’s borders were understood by the Iranian government as a proxy war with the United States. Among the groups the U.S. DOD is supporting, according to this report, is the Party for Free Life in Kurdistan, known by its Kurdish acronym, PEJAK. The United States has provided “foodstuffs, economic assistance, medical supplies and Russian military equipment, some of it funneled through nonprofit groups.”

In May 2008, Andrew Cockburn reported on Counter Punch that President Bush, six weeks earlier had signed a secret finding authorizing a covert offensive against the Iranian regime. President Bush’s secret directive covers actions across an area stretching from Lebanon to Afghanistan, and purports to sanction actions up to and including the funding of organizations like the MEK and the assassination of public officials.

All of these actions by the president and his agents and subordinates exhibit a disregard for the truth and a recklessness with regard to national security, nuclear proliferation and the global role of the United States military that is not merely unacceptable but dangerous in a commander-in-chief.

In all of these actions and decisions, President George W. Bush has acted in a manner contrary to his trust as President and Commander in Chief, and subversive of constitutional government, to the prejudice of the cause of law and justice and to the manifest injury of the people of the United States. Wherefore, President George W. Bush, by such conduct, is guilty of an impeachable offense warranting  removal from office.

Article XXII

CREATING SECRET LAWS

In his conduct while President of the United States, George W. Bush, in violation of his constitutional oath to faithfully execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional duty under Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution “to take care that the laws be faithfully executed”, has both personally and acting through his agents and subordinates, together with the Vice President, established a body of secret laws through the issuance of legal opinions by the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC).

The OLC’s March 14, 2003, interrogation memorandum (“Yoo Memorandum”) was declassified years after it served as law for the executive branch. On April 29, 2008, House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers and Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Chairman Jerrold Nadler wrote in a letter to Attorney General Michael Mukasey:

“It appears to us that there was never any legitimate basis for the purely legal analysis contained in this document to be classified in the first place. The Yoo Memorandum does not describe sources and methods of intelligence gathering, or any specific facts regarding any interrogation activities. Instead, it consists almost entirely of the Department’s legal views, which are not properly kept secret from Congress and the American people. J. William Leonard, the Director of the National Archive’s Office of Information Security Oversight Office, and a top expert in this field concurs, commenting that ‘[t]he document in question is purely a legal analysis’ that contains ‘nothing which would justify classification.’ In addition, the Yoo Memorandum suggests an extraordinary breadth and aggressiveness of OLC’s secret legal opinion-making. Much attention has rightly been given to the statement in footnote 10 in the March 14, 2003, memorandum that, in an October 23, 2001, opinion, OLC concluded ‘that the Fourth Amendment had no application to domestic military operations.’ As you know, we have requested a copy of that memorandum on no less than four prior occasions and we continue to demand access to this important document.

“In addition to this opinion, however, the Yoo Memorandum references at least 10 other OLC opinions on weighty matters of great interest to the American people that also do not appear to have been released. These appear to cover matters such as the power of Congress to regulate the conduct of military commissions, legal constraints on the ‘military detention of United States citizens,’ legal rules applicable to the boarding and searching foreign ships, the President’s authority to render U.S. detainees to the custody of foreign governments, and the President’s authority to breach or suspend  U.S. treaty obligations. Furthermore, it has been more than five years since the Yoo Memorandum was authored, raising the question how many other such memoranda and letters have been secretly authored and utilized by the Administration.

“Indeed, a recent court filing by the Department in FOIA litigation involving the Central Intelligence Agency identifies 8 additional secret OLC opinions, dating from August 6, 2004, to February 18, 2007. Given that these reflect only OLC memoranda identified in the files of the CIA, and based on the sampling procedures under which that listing was generated, it appears that these represent only a small portion of the secret OLC memoranda generated during this time, with the true number almost certainly much higher.”

Senator Russ Feingold, in a statement during an April 30, 2008, senate hearing stated:

“It is a basic tenet of democracy that the people have a right to know the law. In keeping with this principle, the laws passed by Congress and the case law of our courts have historically been matters of public record. And when it became apparent in the middle of the 20th century that federal agencies were increasingly creating a body of non-public administrative law, Congress passed several statutes requiring this law to be made public, for the express purpose of preventing a regime of ‘secret law.’ “That purpose today is being thwarted. Congressional enactments and agency regulations are for the most part still public. But the law that applies in this country is determined not only by statutes and regulations, but also by the controlling interpretations of courts and, in some cases, the executive branch. More and more, this body of executive and judicial law is being kept secret from the public, and too often from Congress as well….

“A legal interpretation by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel … binds the entire executive branch, just like a regulation or the ruling of a court. In the words of former OLC head Jack Goldsmith, ‘These executive branch precedents are “law” for the executive branch.’ The Yoo memorandum was, for a nine-month period in 2003 until it was withdrawn by Mr. Goldsmith, the law that this Administration followed when it came to matters of torture. And of course, that law was essentially a declaration that few if any laws applied…

“Another body of secret law is the controlling interpretations of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that are issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. FISA, of course, is the law that governs the government’s ability in intelligence investigations to conduct wiretaps and search the homes of people in the United States. Under that statute, the FISA Court is directed to evaluate wiretap and search warrant applications and decide whether the standard for issuing a warrant has been met ­ a largely factual evaluation that is properly done behind closed doors. But with the evolution of technology and with this Administration’s efforts to get the Court’s blessing for its illegal wiretapping activities, we now know that the Court’s role is broader, and that it is very much engaged in substantive interpretations of the governing statute. These interpretations are as much a part of this country’s surveillance law as the statute itself. Without access to them, it is impossible for Congress or the public  to have an informed debate on matters that deeply affect the privacy and civil liberties of all Americans…

“The Administration’s shroud of secrecy extends to agency rules and executive pronouncements, such as Executive Orders, that carry the force of law. Through the diligent efforts of my colleague Senator Whitehouse, we have learned that OLC has taken the position that a President can ‘waive’ or ‘modify’ a published Executive Order without any notice to the public or Congress ­ simply by not following it.”

In all of these actions and decisions, President George W. Bush has acted in a manner contrary to his trust as President, and subversive of constitutional government, to the prejudice of the cause of law and justice and to the manifest injury of the people of the United States. Wherefore, President George W. Bush, by such conduct, is guilty of an impeachable offense warranting removal from office.

Article XXIII VIOLATION OF THE POSSE COMITATUS ACT

In his conduct while President of the United States, George W. Bush, in violation of his constitutional oath to faithfully execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional duty under Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution “to take care that the laws be faithfully executed”, has both personally and acting through his agents and subordinates, repeatedly and illegally established programs to appropriate the power of the military for use in law enforcement. Specifically, he has contravened U.S.C. Title 18. Section 1385, originally enacted in 1878, subsequently amended as “Use of Army and Air Force as Posse Comitatus” and commonly known as the Posse Comitatus Act.

The Act states:

“Whoever, except in cases and under circumstances expressly authorized by the Constitution or Act of Congress, willfully uses any part of the Army or the Air Force as a posse comitatus or otherwise to execute the laws shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.”

The Posse Comitatus Act is designed to prevent the military from becoming a national police force.

The Declaration of Independence states as a specific grievance against the British that the King had “kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the consent of our legislatures,” had “affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the civil power,” and had “quarter[ed] large bodies of armed troops among us . . . protecting them, by a mock trial, from punishment for any murders which they should commit on the inhabitants of these States”

Despite the Posse Comitatus Act’s intent, and in contravention of the law, President Bush

a) has used military forces for law enforcement purposes on U.S. border patrol;

b) has established a program to use military personnel for surveillance and information on criminal activities;  c) is using military espionage equipment to collect intelligence information for law enforcement use on civilians within the United States; and

d) employs active duty military personnel in surveillance agencies ,including the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

In June 2006, President Bush ordered National Guard troops deployed to the border shared by Mexico with Arizona, Texas, and California. This deployment, which by 2007 reached a maximum of 6,000 troops, had orders to “conduct surveillance and operate detection equipment, work with border entry identification teams, analyze information, assist with communications and give administrative support to the Border Patrol” and concerned “…providing intelligence….inspecting cargo, and conducting surveillance.”

The Air Force’s “Eagle Eyes” program encourages Air Force military staff to gather evidence on American citizens. Eagle Eyes instructs Air Force personnel to engage in surveillance and then advises them to “alert local authorities,” asking military staff to surveil and gather evidence on public citizens. This contravenes DoD Directive 5525.5 “SUBJECT: DoD Cooperation with Civilian Law Enforcement” which limits such activities.

President Bush has implemented a program to use imagery from military satellites for domestic law enforcement through the National Applications Office.

President Bush has assigned numerous active duty military personnel to civilian institutions such as the CIA and the Department of Homeland Security, both of which have responsibilities for law enforcement and intelligence.

In addition, on May 9, 2007, President Bush released “National Security Presidential Directive/NSPD 51,” which effectively gives the president unchecked power to control the entire government and to define that government in time of an emergency, as well as the power to determine whether there is an emergency. The document also contains “classified Continuity Annexes.” In July 2007 and again in August 2007 Rep. Peter DeFazio, a senior member of the House Homeland Security Committee, sought access to the classified annexes. DeFazio and other leaders of the Homeland Security Committee, including Chairman Bennie Thompson, have been denied a review of the Continuity of Government classified annexes.

In all of these actions and decisions, President George W. Bush has acted in a manner contrary to his trust as President, and subversive of constitutional government, to the prejudice of the cause of law and  justice and to the manifest injury of the people of the United States. Wherefore, President George W. Bush, by such conduct, is guilty of an impeachable offense warranting removal from office.

Article XXIV

SPYING ON AMERICAN CITIZENS, WITHOUT A COURT-ORDERED WARRANT, IN VIOLATION OF THE LAW AND THE FOURTH AMENDMENT

In his conduct while President of the United States, George W. Bush, in violation of his constitutional oath to faithfully execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional duty under Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution “to take care that the laws be faithfully executed”, has both personally and acting through his agents and subordinates, knowingly violated the fourth Amendment to the Constitution and the Foreign Intelligence Service Act of 1978 (FISA) by authorizing warrantless electronic surveillance of American citizens to wit:

(1) The President was aware of the FISA Law requiring a court order for any wiretap as evidenced by the following:

(A)”Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires — a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When we’re talking about chasing down terrorists, we’re talking about getting a court order before we do so.” White House Press conference on April 20, 2004 [White House Transcript]

(B) “Law enforcement officers need a federal judge’s permission to wiretap a foreign terrorist’s phone, or to track his calls, or to search his property. Officers must meet strict standards to use any of the tools we’re talking about.” President Bush’s speech in Baltimore Maryland on July 20th 2005 [White House Transcript]

(2) The President repeatedly ordered the NSA to place wiretaps on American citizens without requesting a warrant from FISA as evidenced by the following:

(A) “Months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials.” New York Times article by James Risen and Eric Lichtblau on December 12, 2005. [NYTimes]

(B) The President admits to authorizing the program by stating “I have reauthorized this program more than 30 times since the September the 11th attacks, and I intend to do so for as long as our nation faces a continuing threat from al Qaeda and related groups. The NSA’s activities under this authorization are thoroughly reviewed by the Justice Department and NSA’s top legal officials, including NSA’s general counsel and inspector general. Leaders in Congress have been briefed more than a dozen times on this authorization and the activities conducted under it.” Radio Address from the White House on December 17, 2005 [White House Transcript]  (C) In a December 19th 2005 press conference the President publicly admitted to using a combination of surveillance techniques including some with permission from the FISA courts and some without permission from FISA.

Reporter: It was, why did you skip the basic safeguards of asking courts for permission for the intercepts?

THE PRESIDENT: … We use FISA still — you’re referring to the FISA court in yourquestion — of course, we use FISAs. But FISA is for long-term monitoring. What is needed in order to protect the American people is the ability to move quickly to detect. Now, having suggested this idea, I then, obviously, went to the question, is it legal to do so? I am — I swore to uphold the laws. Do I have the legal authority to do this? And the answer is, absolutely. As I mentioned in my remarks, the legal authority is derived from the Constitution, as well as the authorization of force by the United States Congress.” [White House Transcript]

(D) Mike McConnel, the Director of National Intelligence, in a letter to to Senator Arlen Specter, acknowledged that Bush’s Executive Order in 2001 authorized a series of secret surveillance activities and included undisclosed activities beyond the warrantless surveillance of e-mails and phone calls that Bush confirmed in December 2005. “NSA Spying Part of Broader Effort” by Dan Eggen, Washington Post, 8/1/07

(3) The President ordered the surveillance to be conducted in a way that would spy upon private communications between American citizens located within the United States borders as evidenced by the following:

(A) Mark Klein, a retired AT&T communications technician, submitted an affidavit in support of the Electronic Fronteir Foundation’s FF’s lawsuit against AT&T. He testified that in 2003 he connected a “splitter” that sent a copy of Internet traffic and phone calls to a secure room that was operated by the NSA in the San Francisco office of AT&T. He heard from a co-worker that si ilar rooms were being m constructed in other cities, including Seattle, San Jose, Los Angeles and San Diego. From “Whistle- Blower Outs NSA Spy Room”, Wired News, 4/7/06 [Wired] [EFF Case]

(4) The President asserted an inherent authority to conduct electronic surveillance based on the Constitution and the “Authorization to use Military Force in Iraq” (AUMF) that was not legally valid as evidenced by the following:

(A) In a December 19th, 2005 Press Briefing General Alberto Gonzales admitted that the surveillance  authorized by the President was not only done without FISA warrants, but that the nature of the surveillance was so far removed from what FISA can approve that FISA could not even be amended to allow it. Gonzales stated “We have had discussions with Congress in the past — certain members of Congress — as to whether or not FISA could be amended to allow us to adequately deal with this kind of threat, and we were advised that that would be difficult, if not impossible.”.

(B) The fourth amendment to the United States Constitution states “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

(C) “The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 unambiguously limits warrantless domestic electronic surveillance, even in a congressionally declared war, to the first 15 days of that war; criminalizes any such electronic surveillance not authorized by statute; and expressly establishes FISA and two chapters of the federal criminal code, governing wiretaps for intelligence purposes and for criminal investigation, respectively, as the “exclusive means by which electronic surveillance . . . and the interception of domestic wire, oral, and electronic communications may be conducted.” 50 U.S.C. §§ 1811, 1809, 18 U.S.C. § 2511(2)(f).” Letter from Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Tribe to John Conyers on 1/6/06

(D) In a December 19th, 2005 Press Briefing Attorney General Alberto Gonzales stated “Our position is, is that the authorization to use force, which was passed by the Congress in the days following September 11th, constitutes that other authorization, that other statute by Congress, to engage in this kind of signals intelligence.”

(E) The “Authorization to use Military Force in Iraq” does not give any explicit authorization related to electronic surveillance. [HJRes114]

(F) “From the foregoing analysis, it appears unlikely that a court would hold that Congress has expressly or impliedly authorized the NSA electronic surveillance operations here under discussion, and it would likewise appear that, to the extent that those surveillances fall within the definition of “electronic surveillance” within the meaning of FISA or any activity regulated under Title III, Congress intended to cover the entire field with these statutes.” From the “Presidential Authority to Conduct Warrantless Electronic Surveillance to Gather Foreign Intelligence Information” by the Congressional Research Service on January 5, 2006.

(G) “The inescapable conclusion is that the AUMF did not implicitly authorize what the FISA expressly prohibited. It follows that the presidential program of surveillance at issue here is a violation of the separation of powers — as grave an abuse of executive authority as I can recall ever having  studied.” Letter from Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Tribe to John Conyers on 1/6/06

(H) On August 17, 2006 Judge Anna Diggs Taylor of the United States District Court in Detroit, in ACLU v. NSA, ruled that the “NSA program to wiretap the international communications of some Americans without a court warrant violated the Constitution. … Judge Taylor ruled that the program violated both the Fourth Amendment and a 1978 law that requires warrants from a secret court for intelligence wiretaps involving people in the United States. She rejected the administration’s repeated assertions that a 2001 Congressional authorization and the president’s constitutional authority allowed the program.” From a New York Times article “Judge Finds Wiretap Actions Violate the Law” 8/18/06 and the Memorandum Opinion

(I) In July 2007, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed the case, ruling the plaintiffs had no standing to sue because, given the secretive nature of the surveillance, they could not state with certainty that they have been wiretapped by the NSA. This ruling did not address the legality of the surveillance so Judge Taylor’s decision is the only ruling on that issue. [ACLU Legal Documents]

In all of these actions and decisions, President George W. Bush has acted in a manner contrary to his trust as President, and subversive of constitutional government, to the prejudice of the cause of law and justice and to the manifest injury of the people of the United States. Wherefore, President George W. Bush, by such conduct, is guilty of an impeachable offense warranting removal from office.

Article XXV

DIRECTING TELECOMMUNICATIONS COMPANIES TO CREATE AN ILLEGAL AND UNCONSTITUTIONAL DATABASE OF THE PRIVATE TELEPHONE NUMBERS AND EMAILS OF AMERICAN CITIZENS

In his conduct while President of the United States, George W. Bush, in violation of his constitutional oath to faithfully execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional duty under Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution “to take care that the laws be faithfully executed”, has both personally and acting through his agents and subordinates, violated the Stored Communications Act of 1986 and the Telecommunications Act of 1996 by creating of a very large database containing information related to the private telephone calls and emails of American citizens, to wit:

The President requested that telecommunication companies release customer phone records to the government illegally as evidenced by the following:  “The Stored Communications Act of 1986 (SCA) prohibits the knowing disclosure of customer telephone records to the government unless pursuant to subpoena, warrant or a National Security Letter (or other Administrative subpoena); with the customers lawful consent; or there is a business necessity; or an emergency involving the danger of death or serious physical injury. None of these exceptions apply to the circumstance described in the USA Today story.” From page 169, “George W Bush versus the US Constitution”. Compiled at the direction of Representative John Conyers.

According to a May 11, 2006 article in USA Today by Lesley Cauley “The National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth”. An unidentified source said’The agency’s goal is “to create a database of every call ever made” within the nation’s borders’.

In early 2001, Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio rejected a request from the NSA to turn over customers records of phone calls, emails and other Internet activity. Nacchio believed that complying with the request would violate the Telecommunications Act of 1996. From National Journal, November 2, 2007.

In all of these actions and decisions, President George W. Bush has acted in a manner contrary to his trust as President, and subversive of constitutional government, to the prejudice of the cause of law and justice and to the manifest injury of the people of the United States. Wherefore, President George W. Bush, by such conduct, is guilty of an impeachable offense warranting removal from office.

Article XXVI ANNOUNCING THE INTENT TO VIOLATE LAWS WITH SIGNING STATEMENTS, AND VIOLATING THOSE LAWS

In his conduct while President of the United States, George W. Bush, in violation of his constitutional oath to faithfully execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional duty under Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution “to take care that the laws be faithfully executed”, has used signing statements to claim the right to violate acts of Congress even as he signs them into law.

In June 2007, the Government Accountability Office reported that in a sample of Bush signing statements the office had studied, for 30 percent of them the Bush administration had already proceeded to violate the laws the statements claimed the right to violate.

In all of these actions and decisions, President George W. Bush has acted in a manner contrary to his  trust as President, and subversive of constitutional government, to the prejudice of the cause of law and justice and to the manifest injury of the people of the United States. Wherefore, President George W. Bush, by such conduct, is guilty of an impeachable offense warranting removal from office.

Article XXVII

FAILING TO COMPLY WITH CONGRESSIONAL SUBPOENAS AND INSTRUCTING FORMER EMPLOYEES NOT TO COMPLY

In his conduct while President of the United States, George W. Bush, in violation of his constitutional oath to faithfully execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional duty under Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution “to take care that the laws be faithfully executed”, has both personally and acting through his agents and subordinates, refused to comply with Congressional subpoenas, and instructed former employees not to comply with subpoenas.

Subpoenas not complied with include:

1. A House Judiciary Committee subpoena for Justice Department papers and Emails, issued April 10, 2007; 2. A House Oversight and Government Reform Committee subpoena for the testimony of the Secretary of State, issued April 25, 2007; 3. A House Judiciary Committee subpoena for the testimony of former White House Counsel Harriet Miers and documents , issued June 13, 2007; 4. A Senate Judiciary Committee subpoena for documents and testimony of White House Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten, issued June 13, 2007; 5. A Senate Judiciary Committee subpoena for documents and testimony of White House Political Director Sara Taylor, issued June 13, 2007 (Taylor appeared but refused to answer questions); 6. A Senate Judiciary Committee subpoena for documents and testimony of White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove, issued June 26, 2007; 7. A Senate Judiciary Committee subpoena for documents and testimony of White House Deputy Political Director J. Scott Jennings, issued June 26, 2007 (Jennings appeared but refused to answer questions); 8. A Senate Judiciary Committee subpoena for legal analysis and other documents concerning the NSA warrantless wiretapping program from the White House, Vice President Richard Cheney, The Department of Justice, and the National Security Council. If the documents are not produced, the subpoena requires the testimony of White House chief of staff Josh Bolten, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, Cheney chief of staff David Addington, National Security Council executive director V. Philip Lago, issued June 27, 2007; 9. A House Oversight and Government Reform Committee subpoena for Lt. General Kensinger.

In all of these actions and decisions, President George W. Bush has acted in a manner contrary to his trust as President, and subversive of constitutional government, to the prejudice of the cause of law and  justice and to the manifest injury of the people of the United States. Wherefore, President George W. Bush, by such conduct, is guilty of an impeachable offense warranting removal from office.

Article XXVIII TAMPERING WITH FREE AND FAIR ELECTIONS, CORRUPTION OF THE ADMINISTRATION OF JUSTICE,

In his conduct while President of the United States, George W. Bush, in violation of his constitutional oath to faithfully execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional duty under Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution “to take care that the laws be faithfully executed”, has both personally and acting through his agents and subordinates, conspired to undermine and tamper with the conduct of free and fair elections, and to corrupt the administration of justice by United States Attorneys and other employees of the Department of Justice, through abuse of the appointment power.

Toward this end, the President and Vice President, both personally and through their agents, did:

Engage in a program of manufacturing false allegations of voting fraud in targeted jurisdictions where the Democratic Party enjoyed an advantage in electoral performance or otherwise was problematic for the President’s Republican Party, in order that public confidence in election results favorable to the Democratic Party be undermined;

Direct United States Attorneys to launch and announce investigations of certain leaders, candidates and elected officials affiliated with the Democratic Party at times calculated to cause the most political damage and confusion, most often in the weeks immediately preceding an election, in order that public confidence in the suitability for office of Democratic Party leaders, candidates and elected officials be undermined;

Direct United States Attorneys to terminate or scale back existing investigations of certain Republican Party leaders, candidates and elected officials allied with the George W. Bush administration, and to refuse to pursue new or proposed investigations of certain Republican Party leaders, candidates and elected officials allied with the George W. Bush administration, in order that public confidence in the suitability of such Republican Party leaders, candidates and elected officials be bolstered or restored;

Threaten to terminate the employment of the following United States Attorneys who refused to comply with such directives and purposes;

1. David C. Iglesias as U.S. Attorney for the District of New Mexico; 2. Kevin V. Ryan as U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of California; 3. John L. McKay as U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Washington; 4. Paul K. Charlton as U.S. Attorney for the District of Arizona; 5. Carol C. Lam as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of California; 6. Daniel G. Bogden as U.S. Attorney for the District of Nevada; 7. Margaret M. Chiara as U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Michigan; 8. Todd Graves as U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Missouri; 9. Harry E. “Bud” Cummins, III as U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas; 10. Thomas M. DiBiagio as U.S. Attorney for the District of Maryland, and; 11. Kasey Warner as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of West Virginia.

Further, George W. Bush has both personally and acting through his agents and subordinates, together  with the Vice President conspired to obstruct the lawful Congressional investigation of these dismissals of United States Attorneys and the related scheme to undermine and tamper with the conduct of free and fair elections, and to corrupt the administration of justice.

Contrary to his oath faithfully to execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, George W. Bush has without lawful cause or excuse directed not to appear before the Committee on the Judiciary of the House of Representatives certain witnesses summoned by duly authorized subpoenas issued by that Committee on June 13, 2007.

In refusing to permit the testimony of these witnesses George W. Bush, substituting his judgment as to what testimony was necessary for the inquiry, interposed the powers of the Presidency against the lawful subpoenas of the House of Representatives, thereby assuming to himself functions and judgments necessary to the exercise of the checking and balancing power of oversight vested in the House of Representatives.

Further, the President has both personally and acting through his agents and subordinates, together with the Vice President directed the United States Attorney for the District of Columbia to decline to prosecute for contempt of Congress the aforementioned witnesses, Joshua B. Bolten and Harriet E. Miers, despite the obligation to do so as established by statute (2 USC § 194) and pursuant to the direction of the United States House of Representatives as embodied in its resolution (H. Res. 982) of February 14, 2008.

In all of these actions and decisions, President George W. Bush has acted in a manner contrary to his trust as President, and subversive of constitutional government, to the prejudice of the cause of law and justice and to the manifest injury of the people of the United States. Wherefore, President George W. Bush, by such conduct, is guilty of an impeachable offense warranting removal from office.

Article XXIX CONSPIRACY TO VIOLATE THE VOTING RIGHTS ACT OF 1965 In his conduct while President of the United States, George W. Bush, in violation of his constitutional oath to faithfully execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional duty under Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution “to take care that the laws be faithfully executed”, has both personally and acting through his agents and subordinates, willfully corrupted and manipulated the electoral process of the United States for his personal gain and the personal gain of his co-conspirators and allies; violated the United States Constitution and law by failing to protect the civil rights of African-American voters and others in the 2004 Election, and impeded the right of the people to vote and have their vote properly and accurately counted, in that:

A. On November 5, 2002, and prior thereto, James Tobin, while serving as the regional director of the National Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee and as the New England Chairman of Bush- Cheney ’04 Inc., did, at the direction of the White House under the administration of George W. Bush, along with other agents both known and unknown, commit unlawful acts by aiding and abetting a scheme to use computerized hang-up calls to jam phone lines set up by the New Hampshire Democratic Party and the Manchester firefighters’ union on Election Day;

B. An investigation by the Democratic staff of the House Judiciary Committee into the voting procedures in Ohio during the 2004 election found “widespread instances of intimidation and  misinformation in violation of the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act of 1968, Equal Protection, Due Process and the Ohio right to vote;”

C. The 14th Amendment Equal Protection Clause guarantees that no minority group will suffer disparate treatment in a federal, state, or local election in stating that: “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” However, during and at various times of the year 2004, John Kenneth Blackwell, then serving as the Secretary of State for the State of Ohio and also serving simultaneously as Co-Chairman of the Committee to Re-Elect George W. Bush in the State of Ohio, did, at the direction of the White House under the administration of George W. Bush, along with other agents both known and unknown, commit unlawful acts in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution by failing to protect the voting rights of African-American citizens in Ohio and further, John Kenneth Blackwell did disenfranchise African- American voters under color of law, by

D. Willfully denying certain neighborhoods in the cities of Cleveland, Ohio and Columbus, Ohio, along with other urban areas in the State of Ohio, an adequate number of electronic voting machines and provisional paper ballots, thereby unlawfully impeding duly registered voters from the act of voting and thus violating the civil rights of an unknown number of United States citizens.

E. In Franklin County, George W. Bush and his agent, Ohio Secretary of State John Kenneth Blackwell, Co-Chair of the Bush-Cheney Re-election Campaign, failed to protect the rights of African- American voters by not properly investigating the withholding of 125 electronic voting machines assigned to the city of Columbus.

F. Forty-two African-American precincts in Columbus were each missing one voting machine that had been present in the 2004 primary.

G. African-American voters in the city of Columbus were forced to wait three to seven hours to vote in the 2004 presidential election.

H. Willfully issuing unclear and conflicting rules regarding the methods and manner of becoming a legally registered voter in the State of Ohio, and willfully issuing unclear and unnecessary edicts regarding the weight of paper registration forms legally acceptable to the State of Ohio, thereby creating confusion for both voters and voting officials and thus impeding the right of an unknown number of United States citizens to register and vote.

I. Ohio Secretary of State John Kenneth Blackwell directed through Advisory 2004-31 that voter registration forms, which were greatest in urban minority areas, should not be accepted and should be returned unless submitted on 80 bond paper weight. Blackwell’s own office was found to be using 60 bond paper weight.

J. Willfully permitted and encouraged election officials in Cleveland, Cincinnati and Toledo to conduct a massive partisan purge of registered voter rolls, eventually expunging more than 300,000 voters, many of whom were duly registered voters, and who were thus deprived of their constitutional right to vote;

K. Between the 2000 and 2004 Ohio presidential elections, 24.93% of the voters in the city of Cleveland, a city with a majority of African American citizens, were purged from the voting rolls.  L. In that same period, the Ohio county of Miami, with census data indicating a 98% Caucasian population, refused to purge any voters from its rolls. Miami County “merged” voters from other surrounding counties into its voting rolls and even allowed voters from other states to vote.

M. In Toledo, Ohio, an urban city with a high African-American concentration, 28,000 voters were purged from the voting rolls in August of 2004, just prior to the presidential election. This purge was conducted under the control and direction of George W. Bush’s agent, Ohio Secretary of State John Kenneth Blackwell outside of the regularly established cycle of purging voters in odd-numbered years.

N. Willfully allowing Ohio Secretary of State John Kenneth Blackwell, acting under color of law and as an agent of George W. Bush, to issue a directive that no votes would be counted unless cast in the right precinct, reversing Ohio’s long-standing practice of counting votes for president if cast in the right county.

O. Willfully allowing his agent, Ohio Secretary of State John Kenneth Blackwell, the Co-Chair of the Bush-Cheney Re-election Campaign, to do nothing to assure the voting rights of 10,000 people in the city of Cleveland when a computer error by the private vendor Diebold Election Systems, Inc. incorrectly disenfranchised 10,000 voters

P. Willfully allowing his agent, Ohio Secretary of State John Kenneth Blackwell, the Co-Chair of the Bush-Cheney Re-election Campaign, to ensure that uncounted and provisional ballots in Ohio’s 2004 presidential election would be disproportionately concentrated in urban African-American districts.

Q. In Ohio’s Lucas County, which includes Toledo, 3,122 or 41.13% of the provisional ballots went uncounted under the direction of George W. Bush’s agent, the Secretary of State of Ohio, John Kenneth Blackwell, Co-Chair of the Committee to Re-Elect Bush/Cheney in Ohio.

R. In Ohio’s Cuyahoga County, which includes Cleveland, 8,559 or 32.82% of the provisional ballots went uncounted.

S. In Ohio’s Hamilton County, which includes Cincinnati, 3,529 or 24.23% of the provisional ballots went uncounted.

T. Statewide, the provisional ballot rejection rate was 9% as compared to the greater figures in the urban areas.

U. The Department of Justice, charged with enforcing the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, and other voting rights laws in the United States of America, under the direction and Administration of George W. Bush did willfully and purposely obstruct and stonewall legitimate criminal investigations into myriad cases of reported electoral fraud and suppression in the state of Ohio. Such activities, carried out by the department on behalf of George W. Bush in counties such as Franklin and Knox by persons such as John K. Tanner and others, were meant to confound and whitewash legitimate legal criminal investigations into the suppression of massive numbers of legally registered voters and the removal of their right to cast a ballot fairly and freely in the state of Ohio, which was crucial to the certified electoral victory of George W. Bush in 2004.

V. On or about November 1, 2006, members of the United States Department of Justice, under the control and direction of the Administration of George W. Bush, brought indictments for voter registration fraud within days of an election, in order to directly effect the outcome of that election for partisan purposes, and in doing so, thereby violated the Justice Department’s own rules against filing election-related indictments close to an election;  X. Emails have been obtained showing that the Republican National Committee and members of Bush-Cheney ’04 Inc., did, at the direction of the White House under the administration of George W. Bush, engage in voter suppression in five states by a method know as “vote caging,” an illegal voter suppression technique;

Y. Agents of George W. Bush, including Mark F. “Thor” Hearne, the national generalcounsel of Bush/Cheney ’04, Inc., did, at the behest of George W. Bush, as members of a criminal front group, distribute known false information and propaganda in the hopes of forwarding legislation and other actions that would result in the disenfranchisement of Democratic voters for partisan purposes. The scheme, run under the auspices of an organization known as “The American Center for Voting Rights” (ACVR), was funded by agents of George W. Bush in violation of laws governing tax exempt 501(c)3 organizations and in violation of federal laws forbidding the distribution of such propaganda by the federal government and agents working on its behalf.

Z. Members of the United States Department of Justice, under the control and direction of the Administration of George W. Bush, did, for partisan reasons, illegally and with malice aforethought block career attorneys and other officials in the Department of Justice from filing three lawsuits charging local and county governments with violating the voting rights of African-Americans and other minorities, according to seven former senior United States Justice Department employees.

AA. Members of the United States Department of Justice, under the control and direction of the Administration of George W. Bush, did illegally and with malice aforethought derail at least two investigations into possible voter discrimination, according to a letter sent to the Senate Rules and Administration Committee and written by former employees of the United States Department of Justice, Voting Rights Section.

BB. Members of the United States Election Assistance Commission (EAC), under the control and direction of the Administration of George W. Bush, have purposefully and willfully misled the public, in violation of several laws, by;

CC. Withholding from the public and then altering a legally mandated report on the true measure and threat of Voter Fraud, as commissioned by the EAC and completed in June 2006, prior to the 2006 mid- term election, but withheld from release prior to that election when its information would have been useful in the administration of elections across the country, because the results of the statutorily required and tax-payer funded report did not conform with the illegal, partisan propaganda efforts and politicized agenda of the Bush Administration;

DD. Withholding from the public a legally mandated report on the disenfranchising effect of Photo Identification laws at the polling place, shown to disproportionately disenfranchise voters not of George W. Bush’s political party. The report was commissioned by the EAC and completed in June 2006, prior to the 2006 mid-term election, but withheld from release prior to that election when its information would have been useful in the administration of elections across the country

EE. Withholding from the public a legally mandated report on the effectiveness of Provisional Voting as commissioned by the EAC and completed in June 2006, prior to the 2006 mid-term election, but withheld from release prior to that election when its information would have been useful in the administration of elections across the country, and keeping that report unreleased for more than a year until it was revealed by independent media outlets.

For directly harming the rights and manner of suffrage, for suffering to make them secret and  unknowable, for overseeing and participating in the disenfranchisement of legal voters, for instituting debates and doubts about the true nature of elections, all against the will and consent of local voters affected, and forced through threats of litigation by agents and agencies overseen by George W. Bush, the actions of Mr. Bush to do the opposite of securing and guaranteeing the right of the people to alter or abolish their government via the electoral process, being a violation of an inalienable right, and an immediate threat to Liberty.

In all of these actions and decisions, President George W. Bush has acted in a manner contrary to his trust as President, and subversive of constitutional government, to the prejudice of the cause of law and justice and to the manifest injury of the people of the United States. Wherefore, President George W. Bush, by such conduct, is guilty of an impeachable offense warranting removal from office.

ARTICLE XXX MISLEADING CONGRESS AND THE AMERICAN PEOPLE IN AN ATTEMPT TO DESTROY MEDICARE

In his conduct while President of the United States, George W. Bush, in violation of his constitutional oath to faithfully execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional duty under Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution “to take care that the laws be faithfully executed”, has both personally and acting through his agents and subordinates, together with the Vice President, pursued policies which deliberately drained the fiscal resources of Medicare by forcing it to compete with subsidized private insurance plans which are allowed to arbitrarily select or not select those they will cover; failing to provide reasonable levels of reimbursements to Medicare providers, thereby discouraging providers from participating in the program, and designing a Medicare Part D benefit without cost controls which allowed pharmaceutical companies to gouge the American taxpayers for the price of prescription drugs.

The President created, manipulated, and disseminated information given to the citizens and Congress of the United States in support of his prescription drug plan for Medicare that enriched drug companies while failing to save beneficiaries sufficient money on their prescription drugs. He misled Congress and the American people into thinking the cost of the benefit was $400 billion. It was widely understood that if the cost exceeded that amount, the bill would not pass due to concerns about fiscal irresponsibility.

A Medicare Actuary who possessed information regarding the true cost of the plan, $539 billion, was instructed by the Medicare Administrator to deny Congressional requests for it. The Actuary was threatened with sanctions if the information was disclosed to Congress, which, unaware of the information, approved the bill. Despite the fact that official cost estimates far exceeded $400 billion, President Bush offered assurances to Congress that the cost was $400 billion, when his office had information to the contrary. In the House of Representatives, the bill passed by a single vote and the Conference Report passed by only 5 votes. The White House knew the actual cost of the drug benefit was high enough to prevent its passage. Yet the White House concealed the truth and impeded an investigation into its culpability.

In all of these actions and decisions, President George W. Bush has acted in a manner contrary to his trust as President, and subversive of constitutional government, to the prejudice of the cause of law and justice and to the manifest injury of the people of the United States. Wherefore, President George W. Bush, by such conduct, is guilty of an impeachable offense warranting removal from office.  Article XXXI KATRINA: FAILURE TO PLAN FOR THE PREDICTED DISASTER OF HURRICANE KATRINA, FAILURE TO RESPOND TO A CIVIL EMERGENCY

In his conduct while President of the United States, George W. Bush, in violation of his constitutional oath to faithfully execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional duty under Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution “to take care that the laws be faithfully executed”, has both personally and acting through his agents and subordinates, failed to take sufficient action to protect life and property prior to and in the face of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, given decades of foreknowledge of the dangers of storms to New Orleans and specific forewarning in the days prior to the storm. The President failed to prepare for predictable and predicted disasters, failed to respond to an immediate need of which he was informed, and has subsequently failed to rebuild the section of our nation that was destroyed.

Hurricane Katrina killed at least 1,282 people, with 2 million more displaced. 302,000 housing units were destroyed or damaged by the hurricane, 71% of these were low-income units. More than 500 sewage plants were destroyed, more than 170 point-source leakages of gasoline, oil, or natural gas, more than 2000 gas stations submerged, several chemical plants, 8 oil refineries, and a superfund site was submerged. 8 million gallons of oil were spilled. Toxic materials seeped into floodwaters and spread through much of the city and surrounding areas.

The predictable increased strength of hurricanes such as Katrina has been identified by scientists for years, and yet the Bush Administration has denied this science and restricted such information from official reports, publications, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency’s website. Donald Kennedy, editor-in-chief of Science, wrote in 2006 that “hurricane intensity has increased with oceanic surface temperatures over the past 30 years. The physics of hurricane intensity growth … has clarified and explained the thermodynamic basis for these observations. [Kerry] Emanuel has tested this relationship and presented convincing evidence.”

FEMA’s 2001 list of the top three most likely and most devastating disasters were a San Francisco earthquake, a terrorist attack on New York, and a Category 4 hurricane hitting New Orleans, with New Orleans being the number one item on that list. FEMA conducted a five-day hurricane simulation exercise in 2004, “Hurricane Pam,” mimicking a Katrina-like event. This exercise combined the National Weather Service, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the LSU Hurricane Center and other state and federal agencies, resulting in the development of emergency response plans. The exercise demonstrated, among other things, that thousands of mainly indigent New Orleans residents would be unable to evacuate on their own. They would need substantial government assistance. These plans, however, were not implemented in part due to the President’s slashing of funds for protection. In the year before Hurricane Katrina hit, the President continued to cut budgets and deny grants to the Gulf Coast. In June of 2004 the Army Corps of Engineers levee budget for New Orleans was cut, and it was cut again in June of 2005, this time by $71.2 million or a whopping 44% of the budget. As a result, ACE was forced to suspend any repair work on the levees. In 2004 FEMA denied a Louisiana disaster mitigation grant request.

The President was given multiple warnings that Hurricane Katrina had a high likelihood of causing serious damage to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. At 10 AM on Sunday 28 August 2005, the day before the storm hit, the National Weather Service published an alert titled “DEVASTATING DAMAGE EXPECTED.” Printed in all capital letters, the alert stated that “MOST OF THE AREA WILL BE UNINHABITABLE FOR WEEKS…PERHAPS LONGER. AT LEAST ONE HALF OF  WELL CONSTRUCTED HOMES WILL HAVE ROOF AND WALL FAILURE. … POWER OUTAGES WILL LAST FOR WEEKS. … WATER SHORTAGES WILL MAKE HUMAN SUFFERING INCREDIBLE BY MODERN STANDARDS.”

The Homeland Security Department also briefed the President on the scenario, warning of levee breaches and severe flooding. According to the New York Times, “a Homeland Security Department report submitted to the White House at 1:47 a.m. on Aug. 29, hours before the storm hit, said, ‘Any storm rated Category 4 or greater will likely lead to severe flooding and/or levee breaching.’” These warnings clearly contradict the statements made by President Bush immediately after the storm that such devastation could not have been predicted. On 1 September 2005 the President said “I don’t think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees.”

The President’s response to Katrina via FEMA and DHS was criminally delayed, indifferent, and inept. The only FEMA employee posted in New Orleans in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Marty Bahamonde, emailed head of FEMA Michael Brown from his Blackberry device on August 31, 2005 regarding the conditions The email was urgent and detailed and indicated that “The situation is past critical…Estimates are many will die within hours.” Brown’s reply was emblematic of the administration’s entire response to the catastrophe: “Thanks for the update. Anything specific I need to do or tweak?” The Secretary of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff, did not declare an emergency, did not mobilize the federal resources, and seemed to not even know what was happening on the ground until reporters told him.

On Friday August 26, 2005, Governor Kathleen Blanco declared a State of Emergency in Louisiana and Governor Haley Barbour of Mississippi followed suit the next day. Also on that Saturday, Governor Blanco asked the President to declare a Federal State of Emergency, and on 28 August 2005, the Sunday before the storm hit, Mayor Nagin declared a State of Emergency in New Orleans. This shows that the local authorities, responding to federal warnings, knew how bad the destruction was going to be and anticipated being overwhelmed. Failure to act under these circumstances demonstrates gross negligence.

In all of these actions and decisions, President George W. Bush has acted in a manner contrary to his trust as President, and subversive of constitutional government, to the prejudice of the cause of law and justice and to the manifest injury of the people of the United States. Wherefore, President George W. Bush, by such conduct, is guilty of an impeachable offense warranting removal from office.

ARTICLE XXXII MISLEADING CONGRESS AND THE AMERICAN PEOPLE, SYTEMATICALLY UNDERMINING EFFORTS TO ADDRESS GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE.

In his conduct while President of the United States, George W. Bush, in violation of his constitutional oath to faithfully execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional duty under Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution “to take care that the laws be faithfully executed”, has both personally and acting through his agents and subordinates, together with the Vice President, ignored the peril to life and property posed by global climate change, manipulated scientific information and mishandled protective policy, constituting nonfeasance and malfeasance in office, abuse of power, dereliction of duty, and deception of Congress and the American people.

President Bush knew the expected effects of climate change and the role of human activities in driving climate change. This knowledge preceded his first Presidential term.  1. During his 2000 Presidential campaign, he promised to regulate carbon dioxide emissions.

2. In 2001, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a global body of hundreds of the world’s foremost experts on climate change, concluded that “most of observed warming over last 50 years (is) likely due to increases in greenhouse gas concentrations due to human activities.” The Third Assessment Report projected several effects of climate change such as continued “widespread retreat” of glaciers, an “increase threats to human health, particularly in lower income populations, predominantly within tropical/subtropical countries,” and “water shortages.”

3. The grave danger to national security posed by global climate change was recognized by the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Planning Research Projects Agency in October of 2003. An agency- commissioned report “explores how such an abrupt climate change scenario could potentially de- stabilize the geo-political environment, leading to skirmishes, battles, and even war due to resource constraints such as: 1) Food shortages due to decreases in net global agricultural production 2) Decreased availability and quality of fresh water in key regions due to shifted precipitation patters, causing more frequent floods and droughts 3) Disrupted access to energy supplies due to extensive sea ice and storminess.”

4. A December 2004 paper in Science reviewed 928 studies published in peer reviewed journals to determine the number providing evidence against the existence of a link between anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide and climate change. “Remarkably, none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position.”

5. The November 2007 Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report showed that global anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gasses have increased 70% between 1970 and 2004, and anthropogenic emissions are very likely the cause of global climate change. The report concluded that global climate change could cause the extinction of 20 to 30 percent of species in unique ecosystems such as the polar areas and biodiversity hotspots, increase extreme weather events especially in the developing world, and have adverse effects on food production and fresh water availability.

The President has done little to address this most serious of problems, thus constituting an abuse of power and criminal neglect. He has also actively endeavored to undermine efforts by the federal government, states, and other nations to take action on their own.

1. In March 2001, President Bush announced the U.S. would not be pursuing ratification of the Kyoto Protocol, an international effort to reduce greenhouse gasses. The United States is the only industrialized nation that has failed to ratify the accord.

2. In March0f 2008, Representative Henry Waxman wrote to EPA Administ ator Stephen Johnson: “In r August 2003, the Bush Administration denied a petition to regulate CO2 emissions from motor vehicles by deciding that CO2 was not a pollutant under the Clean Air Act. In April 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court overruled that determination in Massachusetts v. EPA. The Supreme Court wrote that ‘If EPA makes a finding of endangerment, the Clean Air Act requires the agency to regulate emissions of the deleterious pollutant from new motor vehicles.’ The EPA then conducted an extensive investigation involving 60-70 staff who concluded that ‘CO2 emissions endanger both human health and welfare.’ These findings were submitted to the White House, after which work on the findings and the required regulations was halted.”

3. A Memo to Members of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on May 19, 2008  stated “The record before the Committee shows: (1) the career staff at EPA unanimously supported granting California’s petition (to be allowed to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from cars and trucks, consistent with California state law); (2) Stephen Johnson, the Administrator of EPA, also supported granting California’s petition at least in part; and (3) Administrator Johnson reversed his position after communications with officials in the White House.”

The President has suppressed the release of scientific information related to global climate change, an action which undermines Congress’ ability to legislate and provide oversight, and which has thwarted efforts to prevent global climate change despite the serious threat that it poses.

1. In February, 2001, ExxonMobil wrote a memo to the White House outlining ways to influence the outcome of the Third Assessment report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The memo opposed the reelection of Dr. Robert Watson as the IPCC Chair. The White House then supported an opposition candidate, who was subsequently elected to replace Dr. Watson.

2. The New York Times on January 29, 2006, reported that James Hansen, NASA’s senior climate scientist was warned of “dire consequences” if he continued to speak out about global climate change and the need for reducing emissions of associated gasses. The Times also reported that: “At climate laboratories of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, for example, many scientists who routinely took calls from reporters five years ago can now do so only if the interview is approved by administration officials in Washington, and then only if a public affairs officer is present or on the phone.”

3. In December of 2007, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform issued a report based on 16 months of investigation and 27,000 pages of documentation. According to the summary: “The evidence before the Committee leads to one inescapable conclusion: the Bush Administration has engaged in a systematic effort to manipulate climate change science and mislead policy makers and the public about the dangers of global warming.” The report described how the White House appointed former petroleum industry lobbyist Phil Cooney as head of the Council on Environmental Quality. The report states “There was a systematic White House effort to minimize the significance of climate change by editing climate change reports. CEQ Chief of Staff Phil Cooney and other CEQ officials made at least 294 edits to the Administration’s Strategic Plan of the Climate Change Science Program to exaggerate or emphasize scientific uncertainties or to de-emphasize or diminish the importance of the human role in global warming.”

4. On April 23, 2008, Representative Henry Waxman wrote a letter to EPA Administ ator Stephen L r Johnson. In it he reported: “Almost 1,600 EPA scientists completed the Union of Concerned Scientists survey questionnaire. Over 22 percent of these scientists reported that ‘selective or incomplete use of data to justify a specific regulatory outcome’ occurred ‘frequently’ or ‘occasionally’ at EPA. Ninety-four EPA scientists reported being frequently or occasionally directed to inappropriately exclude or alter technical information from an EPA scientific document. Nearly 200 EPA scientists said that they have frequently or occasionally been in situations in which scientists have actively objected to, resigned from or removed themselves from a project because of pressure to change scientific findings.”

In all of these actions and decisions, President George W. Bush has acted in a manner contrary to his trust as President and subversive of constitutional government, to the prejudice of the cause of law and justice and to the manifest injury of the people of the United States. Wherefore, President George W. Bush, by such conduct, is guilty of an impeachable offense warranting removal from office.

Article XXXIII  REPEATEDLY IGNORED AND FAILED TO RESPOND TO HIGH LEVEL INTELLIGENCE WARNINGS OF PLANNED TERRORIST ATTACKS IN THE US, PRIOR TO 911

In his conduct while President of the United States, George W. Bush, in violation of his constitutional oath to faithfully execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional duty under Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution “to take care that the laws be faithfully executed”, has both personally and acting through his agents and subordinates, together with the Vice President, failed in his Constitutional duties to take proper steps to protect the nation prior to September 11, 2001.

The White House’s top counter-terrorism adviser, Richard A. Clarke, has testified that from the beginning of George W. Bush’s presidency until September 11, 2001, Clarke attempted unsuccessfully to persuade President Bush to take steps to protect the nation against terrorism. Clarke sent a memorandum to then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice on January 24, 2001, “urgently” but unsuccessfully requesting “a Cabinet-level meeting to deal with the impending al Qaeda attack.”

In April 2001, Clarke was finally granted a meeting, but only with second-in-command department representatives, including Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, who made light of Clarke’s concerns.

Clarke confirms that in June, July, and August, 2001, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) warned the president in daily briefings of unprecedented indications that a major al Qaeda attack was going to happen against the United States somewhere in the world in the weeks and months ahead. Yet, Clarke was still unable to convene a cabinet-level meeting to address the issue.

Condoleezza Rice has testified that George Tenet met with the president 40 times to warn him that a major al-Qaeda attack was going to take place, and that in response the president did not convene any meetings of top officials. At such meetings, the FBI could have shared information on possible terrorists enrolled at flight schools. Among the many preventive steps that could have been taken, the Federal Aviation Administration, airlines, and airports might have been put on full alert.

According to Condoleezza Rice, the first and only cabinet-level meeting prior to 9/11 to discuss the threat of terrorist attacks took place on September 4, 2001, one week before the attacks in New York and Washington.

On August 6, 2001, President Bush was presented a President’s Daily Brief (PDB) article titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” The lead sentence of that PDB article indicated that Bin Laden and his followers wanted to “follow the example of World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef and ‘bring the fighting to America.’” The article warned: “Al-Qa’ida members–including some who are US citizens– have resided in or traveled to the US for years, and the group apparently maintains a support structure that could aid attacks.”

The article cited a “more sensational threat reporting that Bin Laden wanted to hijack a US aircraft,” but indicated that the CIA had not been able to corroborate such reporting. The PDB item included information from the FBI indicating “patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.” The article also noted that the CIA and FBI were investigating “a call to our embassy in the UAE in May saying that a group of Bin Laden supporters was in the US planning attacks with explosives.”  The president spent the rest of August 6, and almost all the rest of August 2001 on vacation. There is no evidence that he called any meetings of his advisers to discuss this alarming report. When the title and substance of this PDB article were later reported in the press, then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice began a sustained campaign to play down its significance, until the actual text was eventually released by the White House.

New York Times writer Douglas Jehl, put it this way: “In a single 17-sentence document, the intelligence briefing delivered to President Bush in August 2001 spells out the who, hints at the what and points towards the where of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington that followed 36 days later.”

Eleanor Hill, Executive Director of the joint congressional committee investigating the performance of the US intelligence community before September 11, 2001, reported in mid-September 2002 that intelligence reports a year earlier “reiterated a consistent and constant theme: Osama bin Laden’s intent to launch terrorist attacks inside the United States.”

That joint inquiry revealed that just two months before September 11, an intelligence briefing for “senior government officials” predicted a terrorist attack with these words: “The attack will be spectacular and designed to inflict mass casualties against U.S. facilities or interests. Attack preparations have been made. Attack will occur with little or no warning.”

Given the White House’s insistence on secrecy with regard to what intelligence was given to President Bush, the joint-inquiry report does not divulge whether he took part in that briefing. Even if he did not, it strains credulity to suppose that those “senior government officials” would have kept its alarming substance from the president.

Again, there is no evidence that the president held any meetings or took any action to deal with the threats of such attacks.

In all of these actions and decisions, President George W. Bush has acted in a manner contrary to his trust as President, and subversive of constitutional government, to the prejudice of the cause of law and justice and to the manifest injury of the people of the United States. Wherefore, President George W. Bush, by such conduct, is guilty of an impeachable offense warranting removal from office.

Article XXXIV OBSTRUCTION OF INVESTIGATION INTO THE ATTACKS OF SEPTEMBER 11, 2001

In his conduct while President of the United States, George W. Bush, in violation of his constitutional oath to faithfully execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional duty under Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution “to take care that the laws be faithfully executed”, has both personally and acting through his agents and subordinates, together with the Vice President, obstructed investigations into the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on September 11, 2001.

Following September 11, 2001, President Bush and Vice President Cheney took strong steps to thwart any and all proposals that the circumstances of the attack be addressed. Then-Secretary of State Colin Powell was forced to renege on his public promise on September 23 that a “White Paper” would be issued to explain the circumstances. Less than two weeks after that promise, Powell apologized for his “unfortunate choice of words,” and explained that Americans would have to rely on “information  coming out in the press and in other ways.”

On Sept. 26, 2001, President Bush drove to Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) headquarters in Langley, Virginia, stood with Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet and said: “My report to the nation is, we’ve got the best intelligence we can possibly have thanks to the men and women of the C.I.A.” George Tenet subsequently and falsely claimed not to have visited the president personally between the start of Bush’s long Crawford vacation and September 11, 2001.

Testifying before the 9/11 Commission on April 14, 2004, Tenet answered a question from Commission member Timothy Roemer by referring to the president’s vacation (July 29-August 30) in Crawford and insisting that he did not see the president at all in August 2001. “You never talked with him?” Roemer asked. “No,” Tenet replied, explaining that for much of August he too was “on leave.” An Agency spokesman called reporters that same evening to say Tenet had misspoken, and that Tenet had briefed Bush on August 17 and 31. The spokesman explained that the second briefing took place after the president had returned to Washington, and played down the first one, in Crawford, as uneventful.

In his book, At the Center of the Storm, (2007) Tenet, refers to what is almost certainly his August 17 visit to Crawford as a follow-up to the “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the US” article in the CIA- prepared President’s Daily Brief of August 6. That briefing was immortalized in a Time Magazine photo capturing Harriet Myers holding the PDB open for the president, as two CIA officers sit by. It is the same briefing to which the president reportedly reacted by telling the CIA briefer, “All right, you’ve covered your ass now.” (Ron Suskind, The One-Percent Doctrine, p. 2, 2006). In At the Center of the Storm, Tenet writes: “A few weeks after the August 6 PDB was delivered, I followed it to Crawford to make sure that the president stayed current on events.”

A White House press release suggests Tenet was also there a week later, on August 24. According to the August 25, 2001, release, President Bush, addressing a group of visitors to Crawford on August 25, told them: “George Tenet and I, yesterday, we piled in the new nominees for the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the Vice Chairman and their wives and went right up the canyon.”

In early February, 2002, Vice President Dick Cheney warned then-Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle that if Congress went ahead with an investigation, administration officials might not show up to testify. As pressure grew for an investigation, the president and vice president agreed to the establishment of a congressional joint committee to conduct a “Joint Inquiry.” Eleanor Hill, Executive Director of the Inquiry, opened the Joint Inquiry’s final public hearing in mid-September 2002 with the following disclaimer: “I need to report that, according to the White House and the Director of Central Intelligence, the president’s knowledge of intelligence information relevant to this inquiry remains classified, even when the substance of the intelligence information has been declassified.”

The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks, also known as the 9/11 Commission, was created on November 27, 2002, following the passage of congressional legislation signed into law by President Bush. The President was asked to testify before the Commission. He refused to testify except for one hour in private with only two Commission members, with no oath administered, with no recording or note taking, and with the Vice President at his side. Commission Co-Chair Lee Hamilton has written that he believes the commission was set up to fail, was underfunded, was rushed, and did not receive proper cooperation and access to information.

A December 2007 review of classified documents by former members of the Commission found that the commission had made repeated and detailed requests to the CIA in 2003 and 2004 for documents and other information about the interrogation of operatives of Al Qaeda, and had been told falsely by a top C.I.A. official that the agency had “produced or made available for review” everything that had  been requested.

In all of these actions and decisions, President George W. Bush has acted in a manner contrary to his trust as President, and subversive of constitutional government, to the prejudice of the cause of law and justice and to the manifest injury of the people of the United States. Wherefore, President George W. Bush, by such conduct, is guilty of an impeachable offense warranting removal from office.

Article XXXV ENDANGERING THE HEALTH OF 911 FIRST RESPONDERS

In his conduct while President of the United States, George W. Bush, in violation of his constitutional oath to faithfully execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional duty under Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution “to take care that the laws be faithfully executed”, has both personally and acting through his agents and subordinates, together with the Vice President, recklessly endangered the health of first responders, residents, and workers at and near the former location of the World Trade Center in New York City.

The Inspector General of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) August 21, 2003, report numbered 2003-P-00012 and entitled “EPA’s Response to the World Trade Center Collapse: Challenges, Successes, and Areas for Improvement,” includes the following findings:

“[W]hen EPA made a September 18 announcement that the air was ‘safe’ to breathe, it did not have sufficient data and analyses to make such a blanket statement. At that time, air monitoring data was lacking for several pollutants of concern, including particulate matter and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). Furthermore, The White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) influenced, through the collaboration process, the information that EPA communicated to the public through its early press releases when it convinced EPA to add reassuring statements and delete cautionary ones.”

“As a result of the White House CEQ’s influence, guidance for cleaning indoor spaces and information about the potential health effects from WTC debris were not included in EPA- issued press releases. In addition, based on CEQ’s influence, reassuring information was added to at least one press release and cautionary information was deleted from EPA’s draft version of that press release. . . . The White House’s role in EPA’s public communications about WTC environmental conditions was described in a September 12, 2001, e-mail from the EPA Deputy Administrator’s Chief of Staff to senior EPA officials:

“‘All statements to the media should be cleared through the NSC [National Security Council] before they are released.’

“According to the EPA Chief of Staff, one particular CEQ official was designated to work with EPA to ensure that clearance was obtained through NSC. The Associate Administrator for the EPA Office of Communications, Education, and Media Relations (OCEMR) said that no press release could be issued for a 3- to 4-week period after September 11 without approval from the CEQ contact.”

Acting EPA Administrator Marianne Horinko, who sat in on EPA meetingswith the White House has said in an interview that the White House played a coordinating role. The National Security Council played the key role, filtering incoming data on ground zero air and water, Horinko said: “I think that the thinking was, these are experts in WMD (weapons of mass destruction), so they should have the coordinating role.”  In the cleanup of the Pentagon following September 11, 2001, Occupational Safety and Health Administration laws were enforced, and no workers became ill. At the World Trade Center site, the same laws were not enforced.

In the years since the release of the EPA Inspector General’s above-cited report, the Bush Administration has still not effected a clean-up of the indoor air in apartments and workspaces near the site.

Screenings conducted at the Mount Sinai Medical Center and released in the September 10, 2004, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) of the federal Centers For Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), produced the following results:

“Both upper and lower respiratory problems and mental health difficulties are widespread among rescue and recovery workers who dug through the ruins of the World Trade Center in the days following its destruction in the attack of September 11, 2001.

“An analysis of the screenings of 1,138 workers and volunteers who responded to the World Trade Center disaster found that nearly three-quarters of them experienced new or worsened upper respiratory problems at some point while working at Ground Zero. And half of those examined had upper and/or lower respiratory symptoms that persisted up to the time of their examinations, an average of eight months after their WTC efforts ended.”

A larger study released in 2006 found that roughly 70 percent of nearly 10,000 workers tested at Mount Sinai from 2002 to 2004 reported that they had new or substantially worsened respiratory problems while or after working at ground zero. This study showed that many of the respiratory ailments, including sinusitis and asthma, and gastrointestinal problems related to them, initially reported by ground zero workers persisted or grew worse over time. Most of the ground zero workers in the study who reported trouble breathing while working there were still having those problems two and a half years later, an indication of chronic illness unlikely to improve over time.

In all of these actions and decisions, President George W. Bush has acted in a manner contrary to his trust as President, and subversive of constitutional government, to the prejudice of the cause of law and justice and to the manifest injury of the people of the United States. Wherefore, President George W. Bush, by such conduct, is guilty of an impeachable offense warranting removal from office. ]]> http://electionfraudblog.com/2008/impeachbush/feed/ 0 http://electionfraudblog.com/2006/top-25-censored-stories-of-2006/ http://electionfraudblog.com/2006/top-25-censored-stories-of-2006/#comments Thu, 07 Dec 2006 17:18:41 +0000 Organik http://electionfraudblog.com/index.php/top-25-censored-stories-of-2006/ from ProjectCensored.org

#1 Bush Administration Moves to Eliminate Open Government

#2 Media Coverage Fails on Iraq: Fallujah and the Civilian Death

#3 Another Year of Distorted Election Coverage

#4 Surveillance Society Quietly Moves In 

#5 U.S. Uses Tsunami to Military Advantage in Southeast Asia

#6 The Real Oil for Food Scam

#7 Journalists Face Unprecedented Dangers to Life and Livelihood

#8 Iraqi Farmers Threatened By Bremer’s Mandates

#9 Iran’s New Oil Trade System Challenges U.S. Currency

#10 Mountaintop Removal Threatens Ecosystem and Economy

#11 Universal Mental Screening Program Usurps Parental Rights

#12 Military in Iraq Contracts Human Rights Violators

#13 Rich Countries Fail to Live up to Global Pledges

#14 Corporations Win Big on Tort Reform, Justice Suffers

#15 Conservative Plan to Override Academic Freedom in the Classroom

#16 U.S. Plans for Hemispheric Integration Include Canada

#17 U.S. Uses South American Military Bases to Expand Control of the Region

#18 Little Known Stock Fraud Could Weaken U.S. Economy

#19 Child Wards of the State Used in AIDS Experiments

#20 American Indians Sue for Resources; Compensation Provided to Others

#21 New Immigration Plan Favors Business Over People

#22 Nanotechnology Offers Exciting Possibilities But Health Effects Need Scrutiny

#23 Plight of Palestinian Child Detainees Highlights Global Problem

#24 Ethiopian Indigenous Victims of Corporate and Government Resource Aspirations

#25 Homeland Security Was Designed to Fail  

Chapter 1

The Top Censored Stories of 2004 to 2005 

#1 Bush Administration Moves to Eliminate Open Government

Source:

Common Dreams, September 14, 2004. Press release.

Title: “New Report Details Bush Administration Secrecy”

Author: Karen Lightfoot

<http://www.commondreams.org/news2004/0914-05.htm>

<http://www.democrats.reform.house.gov/story.asp?ID=692&Issue=Open+Government> 

Faculty Evaluator: Yvonne Clarke, MA

Student Researcher: Jessica Froiland 

Throughout the 1980s, Project Censored highlighted a number of alarming reductions to government access and accountability (see Censored 1982 #6, 1984 #8, 1985 #3 and 1986 #2). It tracked the small but systematic changes made to existing laws and the executive orders introduced. It now appears that these actions may have been little more than a prelude to the virtual lock box against access that is being constructed around the current administration.

“The Bush Administration has an obsession with secrecy,” says Representative Henry Waxman, the Democrat from California who, in September 2004, commissioned a congressional report on secrecy in the Bush Administration. “It has repeatedly rewritten laws and changed practices to reduce public and congressional scrutiny of its activities. The cumulative effect is an unprecedented assault on the laws that make our government open and accountable.” 

Changes to Laws that Provide Public Access  

to Federal Records

The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) gives citizens the ability to file a request for specific information from a government agency and provides recourse in federal court if that agency fails to comply with FOIA requirements. Over the last two decades, beginning with Reagan, this law has become increasingly diluted and circumvented by each succeeding administration.

Under the Bush Administration, agencies make extensive and arbitrary use of FOIA exemptions (such as those for classified information, privileged attorney-client documents and certain information compiled for law enforcement purposes) often inappropriately or with inadequate justification. Recent evidence shows agencies making frivolous (and sometimes ludicrous) exemption claims, abusing the deliberative process privilege, abusing the law enforcement exemption, and withholding data on telephone service outages.

Quite commonly, the Bush Administration simply fails to respond to FOIA requests at all. Whether this is simply an inordinate delay or an unstated final refusal to respond to the request, the requesting party is never told. But the effect is the same: the public is denied access to the information.

The Bush Administration also engages in an aggressive policy of questioning, challenging and denying FOIA requesters’ eligibility for fee waivers, using a variety of tactics. Measures include narrowing the definition of “representative of news media,” claiming information would not contribute to public understanding.

Ten years ago, federal agencies were required to release documents through FOIA––even if technical grounds for refusal existed––unless “foreseeable harm” would result from doing so. But, according to the Waxman report, an October 2001 memo by Attorney General John Ashcroft instructs and encourages agencies to withhold information if there are any technical grounds for withholding it under FOIA.

In 2003, the Bush Administration won a new legislative exemption from FOIA for all National Security Agency “operational files.” The Administration’s main rationale for this new exemption is that conducting FOIA searches diverts resources from the agency’s mission. Of course, this rationale could apply to every agency. As NSA has operated subject to FOIA for decades, it is not clear why the agency now needs this exemption.

The Presidential Records Act ensures that after a president leaves office, the public will have full access to White House documents used to develop public policy. Under the law and an executive order by Ronald Reagan, the presumption has been that most documents would be released. However, President Bush issued an executive order that establishes a process that generally blocks the release of presidential papers. 

Changes to Laws that Restrict Public Access  

to Federal Records

The Bush Administration has dramatically increased the volume of government information concealed from public view. In a March 2003 executive order, President Bush expanded the use of the national security classification. The order eliminated the presumption of disclosure, postponed or avoided automatic declassification, protected foreign government information, reclassified some information, weakened the panel that decides to exempt documents from declassification and adjudicates classification challenges, and exempted vice presidential records from mandatory declassification review.

The Bush Administration has also obtained unprecedented authority to conduct government operations in secret, with little or no judicial oversight. Under expanded law enforcement authority in the Patriot Act, the Justice Department can more easily use secret orders to obtain library and other private records, obtain “sneak-and-peek” warrants to conduct secret searches, and conduct secret wiretaps. In addition, the Bush Administration has used novel legal interpretations to expand its authority to detain, try, and deport individuals in secret. Since the September 11, 2001 attacks, the Bush Administration has asserted unprecedented authority to detain anyone whom the executive branch labels an “enemy combatant” indefinitely and secretly. It has authorized military trials that can be closed not only to the public but also to the defendants and their own attorneys. And the Administration has authorized procedures for the secret detention and deportation of aliens residing in the United States. 

Congressional Access to Information

Compared to previous administrations, the Bush Administration has operated with remarkably little congressional oversight. This is partially attributable to the alignment of the parties. The Republican majorities in the House and the Senate have refrained from investigating allegations of misconduct by the White House. Another major factor has been the Administration’s resistance to oversight. The Bush Administration has consistently refused to provide to members of Congress, the Government Accountability Office, and congressional commissions the information necessary for meaningful investigation and review of the Administration’s activities.

For example, the Administration has contested in court the power of the Government Accountability Office to conduct independent investigations and has refused to comply with the rule that allows members of the House Government Reform Committee to obtain information from the executive branch, forcing the members to go to court to enforce their rights under the law. It has also ignored and rebuffed numerous requests for information made by members of Congress attempting to exercise their oversight responsibilities with respect to executive branch activities, and repeatedly withheld information from the investigative commission established by Congress to investigate the September 11 attacks. 

Update Rep. Waxman’s companion bill, HR 5073 IH, the Restore Open Government Act of 2004, was not heard by Congress before the Winter Recess in December, and the bill was not reintroduced in the Opening Session in January 2005. However, on February 16, after the commencement of the 109th Congress, John Cornyn (R-Tex.) and Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) introduced a bill entitled the Openness Promotes Effectiveness in our National Government Act of 2005, S. 394 (the Cornyn-Leahy bill), which according to their joint statement “is designed to strengthen laws governing access to government information, particularly the Freedom of Information Act.” On the same day, an identical bill, H.R. 867, was introduced in the House of Representatives by Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tex.).¹

For more information on Rep. Waxman’s legislation and work on open government, site, please visit www.democrats.reform.house.gov. 

NOTE

1. St. Petersburg Times (Florida), February 18, 2005, “Improving access to information.” 

#2 Media Coverage Fails on Iraq:  

Fallujah and the Civilian Deathtoll 

part 1: Fallujah—War Crimes Go Unreported

Sources:

Peacework, December 2004–January 2005

Title: “The Invasion of Fallujah: A Study in the Subversion of Truth”

Authors: Mary Trotochaud and Rick McDowell 

World Socialist Web Site, November 17, 2004

Title: “U.S. Media Applauds Destruction of Fallujah”

Author: David Walsh 

The NewStandard, December 3, 2004

Title: “Fallujah Refugees Tell of Life and Death in the Kill Zone”

Author: Dahr Jamail 

Faculty Evaluators: Bill Crowley, Ph. D., Sherril Jaffe, Ph. D.

Student Researcher: Brian K. Lanphear

Over the past two years, the United States has conducted two major sieges against Fallujah, a city in Iraq. The first attempted siege of Fallujah (a city of 300,000 people) resulted in a defeat for Coalition forces. As a result, the United States gave the citizens of Fallujah two choices prior to the second siege: leave the city or risk dying as enemy insurgents. Faced with this ultimatum, approximately 250,000 citizens, or 83 percent of the population of Fallujah, fled the city. The people had nowhere to flee and ended up as refugees. Many families were forced to survive in fields, vacant lots, and abandoned buildings without access to shelter, water, electricity, food or medical care. The 50,000 citizens who either chose to remain in the city or who were unable to leave were trapped by Coalition forces and were cut off from food, water and medical supplies. The United States military claimed that there were a few thousand enemy insurgents remaining among those who stayed in the city and conducted the invasion as if all the people remaining were enemy combatants.

Burhan Fasa’a, an Iraqi journalist, said Americans grew easily frustrated with Iraqis who could not speak English. “Americans did not have interpreters with them, so they entered houses and killed people because they didn’t speak English. They entered the house where I was with 26 people, and shot people because [the people] didn’t obey [the soldiers’] orders, even just because the people couldn’t understand a word of English.” Abu Hammad, a resident of Fallujah, told the Inter Press Service that he saw people attempt to swim across the Euphrates to escape the siege. “The Americans shot them with rifles from the shore. Even if some of them were holding a white flag or white clothes over their head to show they are not fighters, they were all shot.” Furthermore, “even the wound[ed] people were killed. The Americans made announcements for people to come to one mosque if they wanted to leave Fallujah, and even the people who went there carrying white flags were killed.” Former residents of Fallujah recall other tragic methods of killing the wounded. “I watched them [U.S. Forces] roll over wounded people in the street with tanks… …This happened so many times.”

Preliminary estimates as of December of 2004 revealed that at least 6,000 Iraqi citizens in Fallujah had been killed, and one-third of the city had been destroyed.

Journalists Mary Trotochaud and Rick McDowell assert that the continuous slaughter in Fallujah is greatly contributing to escalating violence in other regions of the country such as Mosul, Baquba, Hilla, and Baghdad. The violence prompted by the U.S. invasion has resulted in the assassinations of at least 338 Iraqi’s who were associated with Iraq’s “new” government.

The U.S. invasion of Iraq, and more specifically Fallujah, is causing an incredible humanitarian disaster among those who have no specific involvement with the war. The International Committee for the Red Cross reported on December 23, 2004 that three of the city’s water purification plants had been destroyed and the fourth badly damaged. Civilians are running short on food and are unable to receive help from those who are willing to make a positive difference. Aid organizations have been repeatedly denied access to the city, hospitals, and refugee populations in the surrounding areas.

Abdel Hamid Salim, spokesman for the Iraqi Red Crescent in Baghdad, told Inter Press Service that none of their relief teams had been allowed into Fallujah three weeks after the invasion. Salim declared that “there is still heavy fighting in Fallujah. And the Americans won’t let us in so we can help people.”

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour voiced a deep concern for the civilians caught up in the fighting. Louise Arbour emphasized that all those guilty of violations of international humanitarian and human rights laws must be brought to justice. Arbour claimed that all violations of these laws should be investigated, including “the deliberate targeting of civilians, indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks, the killing of injured persons and the use of human shields.”

Marjorie Cohn, executive vice president of the National Lawyers Guild, and the U.S. representative to the executive committee of the American Association of Jurists, has noted that the U.S. invasion of Fallujah is a violation of international law that the U.S. had specifically ratified: “They [U.S. Forces] stormed and occupied the Fallujah General Hospital, and have not agreed to allow doctors and ambulances to go inside the main part of the city to help the wounded, in direct violation of the Geneva Conventions.”

According to David Walsh, the American media also seems to contribute to the subversion of truth in Fallujah. Although, in many cases, journalists are prevented from entering the city and are denied access to the wounded, corporate media showed little concern regarding their denied access. There has been little or no mention of the immorality or legality of the attacks the United States has waged against Iraq. With few independent journalists reporting on the carnage, the international humanitarian community in exile, and the Red Cross and Red Crescent prevented from entering the besieged city, the world is forced to rely on reporting from journalists embedded with U.S. forces. In the U.S. press, we see casualties reported for Fallujah as follows: number of U.S. soldiers dead, number of Iraqi soldiers dead, number of “guerillas” or “insurgents” dead. Nowhere were the civilian casualties reported in the first weeks of the invasion. An accurate count of civilian casualties to date has yet to be published in the mainstream media. 

part 2: Civilian Death Toll Is Ignored

Sources:

The Lancet, October 29, 2004

Title: “Mortality Before and After the 2003 Invasion of Iraq”

Authors: Les Roberts, Riyadh Lafta, Richard Garfield, Jamal Khudhairi and Gilbert Burnham 

The Lancet, October 29, 2004

Title: “The War in Iraq: Civilian Casualties, Political Responsibilities”

Author: Richard Horton 

The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 4, 2005

Title: “Lost Count”

Author: Lila Guterman 

FAIR, April 15, 2004

Title: “CNN to Al Jazeera: Why Report Civilian Deaths?”

Author: Julie Hollar  

Faculty Evaluator: Sherril Jaffe, Ph.D.

Student Researcher: Melissa Waybright 

In late October, 2004, a peer reviewed study was published in The Lancet, a British medical journal, concluding that at least 100,000 civilians have been killed in Iraq since it was invaded by a United States-led coalition in March 2003. Previously, the number of Iraqis that had died, due to conflict or sanctions since the 1991 Gulf War, had been uncertain. Claims ranging from denial of increased mortality to millions of excess deaths have been made. In the absence of any surveys, however, they relied on Ministry of Health records. Morgue-based surveillance data indicate the post-invasion homicide rate is many times higher than the pre-invasion rate.

In the present setting of insecurity and limited availability of health information, researchers, headed by Dr. Les Roberts of Johns Hopkins University, undertook a national survey to estimate mortality during the 14.6 months before the invasion (Jan 1, 2002, to March 18, 2003) and to compare it with the period from March 19, 2003, to the date of the interview, between Sept 8 and 20, 2004. Iraqi households were informed about the purpose of the survey, assured that their name would not be recorded, and told that there would be no benefits or penalties for refusing or agreeing to participate.

The survey indicates that the death toll associated with the invasion and occupation of Iraq is in reality about 100,000 people, and may be much higher. The major public health problem in Iraq has been identified as violence. However, despite widespread Iraqi casualties, household interview data do not show evidence of widespread wrongdoing on the part of individual soldiers on the ground. Ninety-five percent of reported killings (all attributed to U.S. forces by interviewees) were caused by helicopter gunships, rockets, or other forms of aerial weaponry.

The study was released on the eve of a contentious presidential election—fought in part over U.S. policy on Iraq. Many American newspapers and television news programs ignored the study or buried reports about it far from the top headlines. “What went wrong this time? Perhaps the rush by researchers and The Lancet to put the study in front of American voters before the election accomplished precisely the opposite result, drowning out a valuable study in the clamor of the presidential campaign.” (Lila Guterman, Chronicle of Higher Education)

The study’s results promptly flooded though the worldwide media—everywhere except the United States, where there was barely a whisper about the study, followed by stark silence. “The Lancet released the paper on October 29, the Friday before the election, when many reporters were busy with political stories. That day the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune each dedicated only about 400 words to the study and placed the stories inside their front section, on pages A4 and A11, respectively. (The news media in Europe gave the study much more play; many newspapers put articles about it on their front pages.)

In a short article about the study on page A8, the New York Times noted that the Iraqi Body Count, a project to tally civilian deaths reported in the news media, had put the maximum death count at around 17,000. The new study, the article said, “is certain to generate intense controversy.” But the Times has not published any further news articles about the paper. The Washington Post, perhaps most damagingly to the study’s reputation, quoted Marc E. Garlasco, a senior military analyst at Human Rights Watch, as saying, “These numbers seem to be inflated.” Mr. Garlasco says now that he hadn’t read the paper at the time and calls his quote in the Post “really unfortunate.” (Lila Guterman, Chronicle of Higher Education).

Even so, nobody else in American corporate media bothered to pick up the story and inform our citizens how many Iraqi citizens are being killed at the hands of a coalition led by our government. The study was never mentioned on television news, and the truth remains unheard by those who may need to hear it most. The U.S. government had no comment at the time and remains silent about Iraqi civilian deaths. “The only thing we keep track of is casualties for U.S. troops and civilians,” a Defense Department spokesman told The Chronicle.

When CNN anchor Daryn Kagan did have the opportunity to interview the Al Jazeera network editor-in-chief Ahmed Al-Sheik—a rare opportunity to get independent information about events in Fallujah—she used the occasion to badger Al-Sheik about whether the civilian deaths were really “the story” in Fallujah. CNN’s argument was that a bigger story than civilian deaths is “what the Iraqi insurgents are doing” to provoke a U.S. “response” is startling. “When reports from the ground are describing hundreds of civilians being killed by U.S. forces, CNN should be looking to Al Jazeera’s footage to see if it corroborates those accounts—not badgering Al Jazeera’s editor about why he doesn’t suppress that footage.” (MediaWatch, Asheville Global Report)

Study researchers concluded that several limitations exist with this study, predominantly because the quality of data received is dependent on the accuracy of the interviews. However, interviewers believed that certain essential charcteristics of Iraqi culture make it unlikely that respondents would have fabricated their reports of the deaths. The Geneva Conventions have clear guidance about the responsibilities of occupying armies to the civilian population they control. “With the admitted benefit of hindsight and from a purely public health perspective, it is clear that whatever planning did take place was grievously in error. The invasion of Iraq, the displacement of a cruel dictator, and an attempt to impose a liberal democracy by force have, by themselves, been insufficient to bring peace and security to the civilian population.

The illegal, heavy handed tactics practiced by the U.S. military in Iraq evident in these news stories have become what appears to be their standard operating procedure in occupied Iraq. Countless violations of international law and crimes against humanity occurred in Fallujah during the November massacre.

Evidenced by the mass slaughtering of Iraqis and the use of illegal weapons such as cluster bombs, napalm, uranium munitions and chemical weapons during the November siege of Fallujah when the entire city was declared a “free fire zone” by military leaders, the brutality of the U.S. military has only increased throughout Iraq as the occupation drags on.

According to Iraqis inside the city, at least 60 percent of Fallujah went on to be totally destroyed in the siege, and eight months after the siege entire districts of the city remained without electricity or water. Israeli style checkpoints were set up in the city, prohibiting anyone from entering who did not live inside the city. Of course non-embedded media were not allowed in the city. 

update: Since these stories were published, countless other incidents of illegal weapons and tactics being used by the U.S. military in Iraq have occurred.

During “Operation Spear” on June 17th, 2005, U.S.-led forces attacked the small cities of Al-Qa’im and Karabla near the Syrian border. U.S. warplanes dropped 2,000 pound bombs in residential areas and claimed to have killed scores of “militants” while locals and doctors claimed that only civilians were killed.

As in Fallujah, residents were denied access to the city in order to obtain medical aid, while those left inside the city claimed Iraqi civilians were being regularly targeted by U.S. snipers.

According to an IRIN news report, Firdos al-Abadi from the Iraqi Red Crescent Society stated that 7,000 people from Karabla were camped in the desert outside the city, suffering from lack of food and medical aid while 150 homes were totally destroyed by the U.S. military.

An Iraqi doctor reported on the same day that he witnessed, “crimes in the west area of the country…the American troops destroyed one of our hospitals, they burned the whole store of medication, they killed the patient in the ward…they prevented us from helping the people in Qa’im.”

Also like Fallujah, a doctor at the General Hospital of al-Qa’im stated that entire families remained buried under the rubble of their homes, yet medical personnel were unable to reach them due to American snipers.

Iraqi civilians in Haditha had similar experiences during “Operation Open Market” when they claimed U.S. snipers shot anyone in the streets for days on end, and U.S. and Iraqi forces raided homes detaining any man inside.

Corporate media reported on the “liberation” of Fallujah, as well as quoting military sources on the number of “militants” killed. Any mention of civilian casualties, heavy-handed tactics or illegal munitions was either brief or non-existent, and continues to be as of June 2005. 

For additional information:

For those interested in following these stories, it is possible to obtain information by visiting the English Al-Jazeera website at http://english.aljazeera. net/HomePage, my website at www.dahrjamailiraq.com, The World Tribunal on Iraq at www.worldtribunal.org, Peacework Magazine at www.afsc.org/pwork/0412/041204.htm , and other alternative/independent news websites. 

#3 Another Year of Distorted Election Coverage 

Source:

In These Times, 02/15/05

Title: “A Corrupted Election”

Authors: Steve Freeman and Josh Mitteldorf 

Seattle Post-Intelligencer, January 26, 2005

Title: “Jim Crow Returns To The Voting Booth”

Authors: Greg Palast, Rev. Jesse Jackson 

www.freepress.org, Nov. 23, 2004

Title: “How a Republican Election Supervisor Manipulated the 2004 Central Ohio Vote”

Authors: Bob Fitrakis, Harvey Wasserman 

Faculty Evaluator: Ann Neel, MA

Student Researcher: Mike Osipoff 

Political analysts have long counted on exit polls to be a reliable predictor of actual vote counts. The unusual discrepancy between exit poll data and the actual vote count in the 2004 election challenges that reliability. However, despite evidence of technological vulnerabilities in the voting system and a higher incidence of irregularities in swing states, this discrepancy was not scrutinized in the mainstream media. They simply parroted the partisan declarations of “sour grapes” and “let’s move on” instead of providing any meaningful analysis of a highly controversial election.

The official vote count for the 2004 election showed that George W. Bush won by three million votes. But exit polls projected a victory margin of five million votes for John Kerry. This eight-million-vote discrepancy is much greater than the error margin. The overall margin of error should statistically have been under one percent. But the official result deviated from the poll projections by more than five percent—a statistical impossibility.

Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International, the two companies hired to do the polling for the Nation Election Pool (a consortium of the nation’s five major broadcasters and the Associated Press), did not immediately provide an explanation for how this could have occurred. They waited until January 19, the eve of the inauguration.

Edison and Mitofsky’s “inaugural” report, “Evaluation of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004,” stated that the discrepancy was “most likely due to Kerry voters participating in the exit polls at a higher rate than Bush voters.” The media widely reported that this report proved the accuracy of the official count and a Bush victory. The body of the report, however, offers no data to substantiate this position. In fact, the report shows that Bush voters were more likely to complete the survey than Kerry voters. The report also states that the difference between exit polls and official tallies was far too great to be explained by sampling error, and that a systematic bias is implicated.

The Edison and Mitofsky report dismisses the possibility that the official vote count was wrong, stating that precincts with electronic voting systems had the same error rates as precincts with punch-card systems. This is true. However, it merely points to the unreliability of punch-card and electronic systems, both of which are slated for termination under the Helping America Vote Act of 2002. According to the report, only in precincts that used old-fashioned, hand-counted paper ballots did the official count and the exit poll data fall within the normal margin of error.

Also, the report shows, the discrepancy between the exit polls and the official count was considerably greater in the critical swing states. And while this fact is consistent with allegations of fraud, Mitofsky and Edison suggest, without providing any data or theory to back up their claim, that this discrepancy is somehow related to media coverage.

In precincts that were at least 80 percent for Bush, the average within-precinct error (WPE) was a whopping 10.0 percent—the numerical difference between the exit poll predictions and the official count. Also, in Bush strongholds, Kerry received only about two-thirds of the votes predicted by exit polls. In Kerry strongholds, exit polls matched the official count almost exactly (an average WPE of 0.3).

This exit poll data is a strong indicator of a corrupted election. But the case grows stronger if these exit poll discrepancies are interpreted in the context of more than 100,000 officially logged reports of irregularities and possible fraud during Election Day 2004.

Bush campaign officials compiled a 1,886-name “caging list,” which included the names and addresses of predominantly black voters in the traditionally Democratic Jacksonville, Florida. While Bush campaign spokespersons stated that the list was a returned mail log, they did not deny that such a list could be used to challenge voters on Election Day. In fact, the county elections supervisor says that he could see no other purpose for compiling such a list.

In Franklin County Ohio, Columbus voters faced one of the longest ballot lines in history. In many inner city precincts, voters sometimes had three-hour waits to get to the poll before being required to cast ballots within five minutes, as demanded by the Republican-run Board of Elections. Seventy-seven out of the county’s 2,866 voting machines malfunctioned on Election Day. One machine registered 4,258 votes for Bush in a precinct where only 638 people voted. At least 125 machines were held back at the opening of the polls, and another 68 were never deployed. While voters were rushed through the process, 29 percent of the precincts had fewer voting machines than in the 2000 election despite a 25 percent increase in turnout.

Taken together, these problems point to an election that requires scrutiny. Even if the discrepancy between exit polls and actual vote counts is simply a fluke, other flaws and questionable practices in the voting process make one wonder whether or not the people’s voice was actually heard and if we are truly a working democracy. 

Update by Josh Mitteldorf: Some news is too important to report. People might get upset, and the smooth functioning of our democracy would be jeopardized. Thus the media has collectively done the responsible thing, and refrained—at great cost to themselves, be assured—from publicizing doubts about the legitimacy of the 2004 election, in order to help assure the “orderly succession of power.”

Unfortunately, some internet sites such as Commondreams.org and Freepress.org do not realize their obligations to the commonwealth, and have thus been less responsible in maintaining silence. And there’s an upbeat radio voice from Vermont, Thom Hartmann, who would be fun to listen to if only he didn’t insist on relating so many discomfiting truths.

But so long as you stay away from these isolated derelicts, you will be gratified to receive a reassuringly consistent story line: George Bush won the 2004 election fair and square. It’s time to stop asking pointless questions. Get with the program! 

Update by Greg Palast and Reverend Jessie Jackson: There are conspiracy nuts out there on the Internet who think that John Kerry defeated George Bush in Ohio and other states. I know, because I wrote “Kerry Won” for TomPaine.com two days after the election.

“Kerry Won” was the latest in a series coming out of a five-year investigation, begun in November 2000, for BBC Television Newsnight and Britain’s Guardian papers, dissecting that greasy sausage called American electoral democracy.

On November 11, a week after TomPaine.com put the report out on the ‘Net, I received an email from the New York Times Washington Bureau. Hot on the investigation of the veracity of the vote, the Times reporter asked me pointed questions: 

Question #1: Are you a “sore loser”?

Question #2: Are you a “conspiracy nut”?  

There was no third question. Investigation of the vote was, apparently, complete. The next day, their thorough analysis of the evidence yielded a front-page story, “VOTE FRAUD THEORIES, SPREAD BY BLOGS, ARE QUICKLY BURIED.”

Here’s a bit of what the Paper of Record failed to record.

In June 2004, well before the election, my co-author of “Jim Crow” Rev. Jesse Jackson brought me to Chicago. We had breakfast with Vice-Presidential candidate John Edwards. The Reverend asked the Senator to read my report of the “spoilage” of Black votes—one million African Americans who cast ballots in 2000 but did not have their votes register on the machines.

Edwards said he’d read it over after he’d had his bagel. Jackson snatched away his bagel. No read, no bagel. A hungry Senator was genuinely concerned—these were, after all, Democrats whose votes did not tally, and he shot the information to John Kerry. A couple of weeks later, Kerry told the NAACP convention that one million African-American votes were not counted in 2000, but in 2004 he would not let it happen again.

But he did let it happen again. More than a million votes in 2004 were cast and not counted.

As a reporter, it’s not my job to help the Democratic Party learn to tie its shoes. And, as a nonpartisan journalist, I’m not out to expose the Republican Party’s new elaborate campaign to prevent voters from voting—but I must report it. However, editors and news producers in my home country, the USA, seem less than interested. Indeed, they are downright hostile to reporting this story of the shoplifting of our democracy.

America has an apartheid voting system, denying African-Americans, Hispanics and American Natives the assurance their ballots will count. Worse, America has an apartheid media which denies racial disenfranchisement a seat at the front of the news bus.

It was in November 2000 I first ran into the U.S. news lord’s benign neglect of the “new Jim Crow” methods of denying citizens of color their vote. While working with the British Guardian papers just days before the 2000 presidential election, I discovered that Governor Jeb Bush and his Secretary of State, Katharine Harris, had wrongly purged tens of thousands of Black citizens from voter rolls as “felons”—when in fact their only crime had been V.W.B.: Voting While Black.

Nothing appeared in the U.S. press. However, I admit that the Florida purge story was picked up by the New York Times … fofur years later.

Just before the November 2004 election, BBC television Newsnight discovered new, confidential “caging lists” which we got our hands on from inside the Republican National Committee headquarters. These were rosters of thousands of minority voters targeted to prevent them from voting on election day: a violation of federal law. It was big news in Europe and South America. In the USA, there was nothing except an attack on BBC’s report by ABC’s web site. ABC’s only listed source for their attack on the BBC was the Republican Party.

The story of the purge of Black voters, the million missing Black ballots cast but not counted, the caging lists, and other games used to deny the vote to the dark-skinned and the poor, would have been buried long ago if not for BBC Television, Harper’s Magazine (may it last a thousand years), Britain’s Guardian and Observer, The Nation, the op-ed editors at the San Francisco Chronicle and Seattle Post-Intelligencer and, provocatively, Hustler Magazine. Even if ignored or actively ‘dissed by U.S. “mainstream” media, the story will be continue to be reported, due to the passionate insistence of Reverend Jackson, from a thousand pulpits.

Thanks to GeorgeBush.com for capturing the ‘caging lists.’ And bless the blogs, for they shall set the truth free: TomPaine.com, Buzzflash, Working-for-Change and other Internet sites carried the story over the electronic Berlin Wall.

Finally, my gratitude to our indefatigable investigative team, particularly Oliver Shykles and Matt Pascarella for their work on this story—on which they continue today—and to Meirion Jones, producer nonpareil at BBC television’s Newsnight. 

For Additional Documentation of Voter Fraud 2004 See Chapters 2 and 3. 

#4 Surveillance Society Quietly Moves In 

Sources:

Information Management Journal, Mar/Apr 2004

Title: “PATRIOT Act’s Reach Expanded Despite Part Being Struck Down”

Author: Nikki Swartz 

LiP Magazine, Winter 2004

Title: “Grave New World”

Author: Anna Samson Miranda 

Capitol Hill Blue, June 7, 2004

Title: “Where Big Brother Snoops on Americans 24/7”

Authors: Teresa Hampton and Doug Thompson 

Faculty Evaluator: John Steiner, Ph. D.

Student Researcher: Sandy Brown, Michelle Jesolva 

“While the evening news rolled footage of Saddam being checked for head lice, the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2004 was quietly signed into law.”1 

On December 13, 2003, President George W. Bush, with little fanfare and no mainstream media coverage, signed into law the controversial Intelligence Authorization Act while most of America toasted the victory of U.S. forces in Iraq and Saddam’s capture. None of the corporate press covered the signing of this legislation, which increases the funding for intelligence agencies, dramatically expands the definition of surveillable financial institutions, and authorizes the FBI to acquire private records of those individuals suspected of criminal activity without a judicial review. American civil liberties are once again under attack.

History has provided precedent for such actions. Throughout the 1990s, erosions of these protections were taking place. As part of the 1996 Anti-Terrorism bill adopted in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing, the Justice Department was required to publish statistics going back to 1990 on threats or actual crimes against federal, state and local employees and their immediate families when the wrongdoing related to the workers’ official duties. The numbers were then to be kept up to date with an annual report.2 Members of congress, concerned with the threat this type of legislation posed to American civil liberties, were able to strike down much of what the bill proposed, including modified requirements regarding wiretap regulations.

The “atmosphere of fear” generated by recent terrorist attacks, both foreign and domestic, provides administrations the support necessary to adopt stringent new legislation. In response to the September 11 attacks, new agencies, programs and bureaucracies have been created. The Total Information Office is a branch of the United States Department of Defense’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. It has a mission to “imagine, develop, apply, integrate, demonstrate and transition information technologies, components and prototype, closed-loop, information systems that will counter asymmetric threats by achieving total information awareness.”3 Another intelligence gathering governmental agency, The Information Awareness Office, has a mission to gather as much information as possible about everyone in a centralized location for easy perusal by the United States government. Information mining has become the business of government.

In November 2002, the New York Times reported that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) was developing a tracking system called “Total Information Awareness” (TIA), which was intended to detect terrorists through analyzing troves of information. The system, developed under the direction of John Poindexter, then-director of DARPA’s Information Awareness Office, was envisioned to give law enforcement access to private data without suspicion of wrongdoing or a warrant.4 The “Total Information Awareness” program’s name was changed to “Terrorist Information Awareness” on May 20, 2003 ostensibly to clarify the program’s intent to gather information on presumed terrorists rather than compile dossiers on U.S. citizens.

Despite this name change, a Senate Defense Appropriations bill passed unanimously on July 18, 2003, expressly denying any funding to Terrorist Information Awareness research. In response, the Pentagon proposed The Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange, or MATRIX, a program devised by longtime Bush family friend Hank Asher as a pilot effort to increase and enhance the exchange of sensitive terrorism and other criminal activity information between local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies. The MATRIX, as devised by the Pentagon, is a State run information generating tool, thereby circumventing congress’ concern regarding the appropriation of federal funds for the development of this controversial database. Although most states have refused to adopt these Orwellian strategies, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Connecticut and Florida have all jumped on the TIA band wagon.

Yet, somehow, after the apparent successful dismantling of TIA, expressed concern by Representatives Mark Udall of Colorado, Betty McCollum of Minnesota, Ron Paul of Texas and Dennis Moore of Kansas, and heightened public awareness of the MATRIX, the Intelligence Authorization Act was signed into law December 13, 2003.5

On Thursday, November 20, 2003 Minnesota Representative Betty McCollum stated that, “The Republican Leadership inserted a controversial provision in the FY04 Intelligence Authorization Report that will expand the already far-reaching USA Patriot Act, threatening to further erode our cherished civil liberties. This provision gives the FBI power to demand financial and other records, without a judge’s approval, from post offices, real estate agents, car dealers, travel agents, pawnbrokers and many other businesses. This provision was included with little or no public debate, including no consideration by the House Judiciary Committee, which is the committee of jurisdiction. It came as a surprise to most Members of this body.”6

According to LiP Magazine, “Governmental and law-enforcement agencies and MATRIX contractors across the nation will gain extensive and unprecedented access to financial records, medical records, court records, voter registration, travel history, group and religious affiliations, names and addresses of family members, purchases made and books read.”7

Peter Jennings, in an ABC original report, explored the commercial applications of this accumulated information. Journalist and author Peter O’Harrow, who collaborated with ABC News on the broadcast “Peter Jennings Reporting: No Place to Hide,” states “…marketers—and now, perhaps government investigators—can study what people are likely to do, what kind of attitudes they have, what they buy at the grocery store.”8 Although this program aired on prime-time mainstream television, there was no mention of the potential for misuse of this personal information network or of the controversy surrounding the issues of privacy and civil liberties violations concerning citizens and civil servants alike. Again, the sharing of this kind of personal information is not without precedent.

On November 12, 1999, Clinton signed into law the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which permits financial institutions to share personal customer information with affiliates within the holding company. The Intelligence Authorization Act of Fiscal Year 2004 expands the definition of a surveillable financial institution to include real estate agencies, insurance companies, travel agencies, Internet service providers, post offices, casinos and other businesses as well. Due to massive corporate mergers and the acquisition of reams of newly acquired information, personal consumer data has been made readily available to any agency interested in obtaining it, both commercial and governmental.

With the application of emerging new technologies such as Radio Frequency Identification chips or RFIDs, small individualized computer chips capable of communicating with a receiving computer, consumer behavior can literally be tracked from the point of purchase to the kitchen cupboard, and can be monitored by all interested parties.  

Update by Anna Miranda: The United States is at risk of turning into a full-fledged surveillance society. The tremendous explosion in surveillance-enabling technologies, combined with the ongoing weakening in legal restraints that protect our privacy mean that we are drifting toward a surveillance society. The good news is that it can be stopped. Unfortunately, right now the big picture is grim.—ACLU⁹  

The PATRIOT Act

Fifteen ‘sunset’ provisions in the PATRIOT Act are set to expire at the end of 2005. One amendment, the “library provision” went before Congress in June. Despite President Bush’s threat to veto, lawmakers, including 38 Republicans, voted 238 to 187 to overturn the provision, which previously allowed law enforcement officials to request and obtain information from libraries without obtaining a search warrant. Although inspectors still have the “right” to search library records, they must get a judge’s approval first.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales informed Congress in April that this provision has never been used to acquire information, although the American Library Association recently reported that over 200 requests for information were submitted since the PATRIOT Act was signed into law in October 2001.

The overturning of the library provision has been seen as a small victory in the fight to reclaim privacy rights. Rep. Saunders, who was responsible for almost successfully having the provision repealed last year, commented that “conservative groups have been joining progressive organizations to call for changes.”¹⁰  

The MATRIX

The fight to the right for privacy continues to wage on with more successes, as the MATRIX program was officially shut down on April 15, 2005. The program, which consisted of 13 states—and only had four states remaining prior to its closure, received $12 million in funding from the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security. By utilizing a system called FACTS (Factual Analysis Criminal Threat Solution), law enforcement officials from participating states were able to share information with one another and utilized this program as an investigative tool to help solve and prevent crimes. According to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, “Between July 2003 and April 2005, there have been 1,866,202 queries to the FACTS application.”¹¹ However, of these queries, only 2.6 percent involved terrorism or national security.

Although the MATRIX has been shut down, Florida law enforcement officials are pursuing continuing the program and rebuilding it. Officials have sent out a call for information from vendors beginning a competitive bidding process.  

RFID Technology and the REAL ID Act

On May 10, 2005, President Bush secretly signed into law the REAL ID Act, requiring states within the next three years to issue federally approved electronic identification cards. Attached as an amendment to an emergency spending bill funding troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, the REAL ID Act passed without the scrutiny and debate of Congress.

One of the main concerns of the electronic identification card is identity theft. The Act mandates the cards to have anti-counterfeiting measures, such as an electronically readable magnetic strip or RFID chip. Privacy advocates argue that RFID chips can be read from “unauthorized” scanners allowing third parties or the general public to gather and/or steal private information about an individual. Amidst growing concerns about identity theft, the REAL ID Act has given no consideration to this drawback.

Other privacy concerns regarding the electronic identification card is the use of information by third parties once they’ve scanned the cards and accessed the information. At this time, the Act does not specify what can be done with the information. A company or organization scanning your identification card could potentially sell your personal information if strict guidelines on what to do with the information are not mandated.

Inability to conform over the next three years will leave citizens and residents of the United States paralyzed. Identification cards that do not meet the federally mandated standards will not be accepted as identification for travel, opening a bank account, receiving social security checks, or participating in government benefits, among other things. 

Notes

1. LiP Magazine. http://www.lipmagazine.org/.

2. The Washington Post December 01, 1997, Final Edition.

3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_Information_Awareness.

4. Electronic Privacy Information Center http://www.epic.org/privacy/profiling/tia/. Information Awareness Office, See HR 2417.

5. Ibid.

6.  Congressional Record: November 22,2003 pg.E2399.

http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2003_cr/h112203.html.

7. LiP Magazine. http://www.lipmagazine.org/.

8. ABC News. http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/Primetime/story.

9. http://www.aclu.org/Privacy/PrivacyMain.cfm.

10. http://bernie.house.gov/documents/articles/20050406114413.asp.

11. http://www.fdle.state.fl.us/press_releases/20050415_matrix_project.html. 

#5 U.S. Uses Tsunami to Military Advantage in Southeast Asia 

Sources:

Jane’s Foreign Report (Jane’s Defence), February 15, 2005

Title: “U.S. Turns Tsunami into Military Strategy” 

The Irish Times, February 8, 2005

Title: “U.S. Has Used Tsunami to Boost Aims in Stricken Area”

Author: Rahul Bedi 

Inter Press Service, January, 18 2005

Title: “Bush Uses Tsunami Aid to Regain Foothold in Indonesia”

Author: Jim Lobe  

Faculty Evaluator: Tony White, Ph. D., Craig Winston, Ph. D.

Student Researcher: Ned Patterson 

The tragic and devastating power of 2004’s post holiday tsunami was plastered across the cover of practically every newspaper around the world for the better part of a month. As the death toll rose by the thousands every day, countries struggled to keep pace with the rapidly increasing need for aid across the Indian Ocean Basin.

At the same time that U.S. aid was widely publicized domestically, our coinciding military motives were virtually ignored by the press. While supplying our aid (which when compared proportionately to that of other, less wealthy countries, was an insulting pittance), we simultaneously bolstered military alliances with regional powers in, and began expanding our bases throughout, the Indian Ocean region.

Long viewed as a highly strategic location for U.S. interests, our desire to curtail China’s burgeoning economic and military might is contingent upon our control of this area. In the months following the tsunami, writes Rahul Bedi in The Irish Times, the U.S. revived the Utapao military base in Thailand it had used during the Vietnam War. Task force 536 is to be moved there to establish a forward positioning site for the U.S. Air Force.

During subsequent tsunami relief operations, the U.S. reactivated its military co-operation agreements with Thailand and the Visiting Forces Agreement with the Philippines. U.S. Navy also vessels utilized facilities in Singapore, keeping with previous treaties. Further, the U.S. marines and the navy arrived in Sri Lanka to bolster relief measures despite the tsunami-hit island’s initial reluctance to permit their entry.

The U.S. also stepped up their survey of the Malacca Straits, over which China exercises considerable influence, and through which 90 percent of Japan’s oil supplies pass. The United States has had trouble expanding its military influence in the region largely due to suspicions by Indonesia and Malaysia that the U.S. is disguising imperial aims under the goal of waging war against terror. The two countries have opposed an American plan to tighten security in the vital Malacca Straits shipping lanes, which might have involved U.S. troops stationed nearby.

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell declared that U.S. relief to the tsunami-affected region would assist the war against terror and introduce “American values to the region.” The Bush Administration is also reviving its hopes of normalizing military ties with Indonesia, writes Jim Lobe for InterPress Service. The world’s most populous Muslim nation, its strategically located archipelago, critical sea lanes, and historic distrust of China have made it an ideal partner for containing Beijing.

During a January 2005 visit to Jakarta, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told reporters, “I think if we’re interested in military reform here, and certainly this Indonesian government is and our government is, I think we need to possibly reconsider a bit where we are at this point in history moving forward.”

According to an article in the Asheville Global Report, the following month the U.S. State Department made a decision to renew the International Education and Military Training (IMET) program for Indonesia, despite considerable human rights issues.

According to Bedi, Washington has long wanted a navel presence in Trincomalee, eastern Sri Lanka, or alternatively in Galle, further south, to shorten the supply chain from its major regional military base in distant Diego Garcia, which the British Ocean Territory leased to the U.S. in 1966 for the length of fifty years. The use of these bases would ring China, giving the U.S. added control over that country’s activities.

Diego Garcia’s geostrategic location in the Indian Ocean and its full range of naval, military and communications facilities gives it a critical role supporting the U.S. Navy’s forward presence in the North Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean Region. However, because of the bases’ remoteness and the fact that its lease from Britain expires in 2016, the U.S. seeks an alternative location in the region. “Clearly these new bases will strengthen Washington’s military logistical support in the region,” says Professor Anuradha Chenoy at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University. She went on to emphasize that an alternative to the Diego Garcia base must be found soon, as the lease from Britain will soon expire.

Long before the tsunami struck, an article dated April 21, 2003, by Josy Joseph on Rediff.com explained that a classified report commissioned by the United States Department of Defense expresses a desire for access to Indian bases and military infrastructures. The United States Air Force specifically wants to establish bases in India. The report, entitled “Indo-U.S. Military Relations: Expectations and Perceptions,” was distributed amongst high-ranking U.S. officials and a handful of senior members within the Indian government. It continues on about the Defense Department’s desire to have “access closer to areas of instability.”1

The report says, “American military officers are candid in their plans to eventually seek access to Indian bases and military infrastructure. India’s strategic location in the centre of Asia, astride the frequently traveled Sea Lanes Of Communication (SLOC) linking the Middle East and East Asia, makes India particularly attractive to the U.S. military.”

The report also quotes U.S. Lieutenant Generals as saying that the access to Indian bases would enable the U.S. military “to be able to touch the rest of the world” and to “respond rapidly to regional crisis.” A South Asia Area Officer of the U.S. State Department has been quoted as saying, “India’s strategic importance increases if existing U.S. relationships with Asia fail.”

Post-tsunami U.S. actions in the Indian Ocean illustrate its intention to move this agenda forward sooner rather than later.  

Note

1. Joseph, Josy; “Target Next: Indian Military Bases”; rediff.com, April 21, 2003; and Lobe, Jim; “Skepticism over renewed military ties with Indonesia”; Asheville Global Report, March 10–16, 2005. 

#6 The Real Oil for Food Scam 

Sources:

Harper’s Magazine, December 2004

Title: “The UN is Us: Exposing Saddam Hussein’s silent partner”

Author: Joy Gordon

http://www.harpers.org/TheUNisUS.html 

Independent/UK, December 12, 2004

Title: “The oil for Food ‘Scandal’ is a Cynical Smokescreen”

Author: Scott Ritter

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1212-23.htm 

Faculty Evaluator: Robert McNamara, Ph. D.

Student Researcher: Deanna Murrell  

The U.S. has accused UN officials of corruption in Iraq’s oil for food program. According to Joy Gordon and Scott Ritter the charge was actually an attempt to disguise and cover up long term U.S. government complicity in this corruption. Ritter says, “this posturing is nothing more than a hypocritical charade, designed to shift attention away from the debacle of George Bush’s self-made quagmire in Iraq, and legitimize the invasion of Iraq by using Iraqi corruption and not the now-missing weapons of mass destruction, as the excuse.” Gordon arrives at the conclusion that, “perhaps it is unsurprising that today the only role its seems the United States expects the UN to play in the continuing drama of Iraq is that of scapegoat.”

According to Gordon the charges laid by the U.S. accounting office are bogus. There is plenty of evidence of corruption in the “oil-for-food” program, but the trail of evidence leads not to the UN but to the U.S. “The fifteen members of the Security Council—of which the United States was by far the most influential—determined how income from oil proceeds would be handled, and what the funds could be used for.” Contrary to popular understanding, the Security Council is not the same thing as the UN. It is part of it, but operates largely independently of the larger body. The UN’s personnel “simply executed the program that was designed by the members of the Security Council.”

The claim in the corporate media was that the UN allowed Saddam Hussein to steal billions of dollars from oil sales. If we look, as Gordon does, at who actually had control over the oil and who’s hands held the money, a very different picture emerges. “If Hussain did indeed smuggle $6 billion worth of oil in the ‘the richest rip off in world history,’ he didn’t do it with the complicity of the UN. He did it on the watch of the U.S. Navy.” explains Gordon.

Every monetary transaction was approved by the U.S. through its dominant role on the Security Council. Ritter explains, “the Americans were able to authorize a $1 billion exemption concerning the export of Iraqi oil for Jordan, as well as legitimize the billion-dollar illegal oil smuggling trade over the Turkish border.” In another instance, a Russian oil company “bought oil from Iraq under ‘oil for food’ at a heavy discount, and then sold it at full market value to primarily U.S. companies, splitting the difference evenly between [the Russian company] and the Iraqis. This U.S. sponsored deal resulted in profits of hundreds of millions of dollars for both the Russians and the Iraqis, outside the control of ‘oil for food.’ It has been estimated that 80 percent of the oil illegally smuggled out of Iraq under ‘oil for food’ ended up in the United States.”

Not only were criminals enriched in this nefarious scheme, it also ended up sabotaging the original purpose of “oil for food.” Gordon explains, “How Iraq sold its oil was also under scrutiny, and the United States did act on what it perceived to be skimming by Hussain in these deals. The solution that it enacted, however, succeeded in almost bankrupting the entire Oil for Food Program within months.”

Harebrained Security Council policy not only succeeded in enriching the dishonest, it also virtually destroyed the program. According to Gordon, the U.S. and UK attempted to prevent kickbacks resulting from artificially low prices: “Instead of approving prices at the beginning of each sales period (usually a month), in accordance with normal commercial practices, the two allies would simply withhold their approval [of the price] until after the oil was sold—creating a bizarre scenario in which buyers had to sign contracts without knowing what the price would be.” The result was “oil sales collapsed by forty percent, and along with them the funds for critical humanitarian imports.”

What we have here, according to Gordon and Ritter, is a bare-faced attempt by criminals to shift blame to the innocent. Gordon concludes, “Little of the blame can credibly be laid at the feet of ‘the UN bureaucracy.’ Far more of the fault lies with policies and decisions of the Security Council in which the United States played a central role.” 

Update by Joy Gordon: The accusations against the Oil for Food Program have served as a springboard for general attacks on the credibility of the United Nations as a whole, as well as personal attacks on Kofi Annan. For the most part the mainstream media has seized on the accusations and repeated them, without doing any of the research that would give the discussion more integrity. For example, “the United Nations” is criticized for “its” failures, and the Secretary General is then blamed because these events “happened on his watch.” What was not mentioned at all for the first year of media coverage is that “the UN” is made up of several different parts, and that the part that designed and oversaw the Oil for Food Program was the Security Council, whose decisions cannot be overridden or modified in any way by the Secretary General. Not only that, while the most vitriolic accusations against the UN have come from the United States, the U.S. is in fact the most dominant member of the Security Council. The U.S. agreed to all the decisions and procedures of the Oil for Food Program that are now being so harshly criticized as “failures of the United Nations.”

The mainstream press, for the most part, has repeated that the Oil for Food Program lacked accountability, oversight, or transparency. What is most striking about this is that the elaborate structure of oversight that was in fact in place—and is never mentioned at all—is so easily available. It is on the program’s web site in complete detail along with huge amounts of information, making the program in fact highly transparent. Yet the mainstream press coverage reflects none of this.

Last fall we saw the beginnings of some acknowledgement of the U.S. responsibility for Iraq’s ongoing smuggling, as some Democrats introduced evidence in hearings that all three U.S. administrations knew of and supported Iraq’s illicit trade with Jordan and Turkey, two key U.S. allies. The press picked that up, but little else.

Since my article came out, there has been a good deal of press coverage from public radio stations and from foreign press. In addition, I have testified twice before Congressional committees, where the members of Congress were incredulous to hear that in fact the program operated very differently than they had been told—even though the information I provided them was obvious, basic, publicly available, and easily accessible. 

For additional information:

Organizations actively addressing these issues include the UN Association and the UN Foundation.

Information about the accusations against the program can be found at the following sites: http://www.oilforfoodfacts.org/

UN web site on Oil for Food program: http://www.un.org/Depts/oip/

The Volcker Committee investigating the accusations: http://www.iic-offp.org/ 

#7 Journalists Face Unprecedented Dangers to Life and Livelihood 

Sources:

www.truthout.org, Feb. 28, 2005

Title: “Dead Messengers: How the U.S. Military Threatens Journalists”

Author: Steve Weissman

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/022405A.shtml 

Title: “Media Repression in ‘Liberated’ Land”

InterPress Service, November 18, 2004

Author: Dahr Jamail

http://www.ipsnews.net/interna.asp?idnews=26333 

Faculty Evaluator: Elizabeth Burch, Ph.D.

Student Researcher: Michelle Jesolva 

According to the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ)1, 2004 was the deadliest year for reporters since 1980, when records began to be kept. Over a 12-month span, 129 media workers were killed and 49 of those deaths occurred in the Iraqi conflict. According to independent journalist Dahr Jamail, journalists are increasingly being detained and threatened by the U.S.-installed interim government in Iraq. When the only safety for a reporter is being embedded with the U.S. military, the reported stories tend to have a positive spin. Non-embedded reporters suffer the great risk of being identified as enemy targets by the military.

The most blatant attack on journalists occurred the morning of April 8, 2004, when the Third Infantry fired on the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad killing cameramen Jose Couso and Taras Protsyuk and injuring three others. The hotel served as headquarters for some 100 reporters and other media workers. The Pentagon officials knew that the Palestine Hotel was full of journalists and had assured the Associated Press that the U.S. would not target the building. According to Truthout, the Army had refused to release the records of its investigation. The Committee to Protect Journalists, created in 1981 in order to protect colleagues abroad from governments and others who have no use for free and independent media, filed suit under the Freedom of Information Act to force the Army to release its results. The sanitized copy of the releasable results showed nothing more than a Commander inquiry.

Unsatisfied with the U.S. military’s investigation, Reporters Without Borders, an international organization that works to improve the legal and physical safety of journalists worldwide, conducted their own investigation. They gathered evidence from journalists in the Palestine Hotel at the time of the attacks. These were eye witness accounts that the military neglected to include in their report. The Reporters Without Borders report also provided information disclosed by others embedded within the U.S. Army, including the U.S. military soldiers and officers directly involved in the attack. The report stated that the U.S. officials first lied about what had happened during the Palestine Hotel attack and then, in an official statement four months later, exonerated the U.S. Army from any mistake of error in judgment. The investigation found that the soldiers in the field did not know that the hotel was full of journalists. Olga Rodriguez, a journalist present at the Palestine Hotel during the attack, stated on KPFA’s Democracy Now! that the soldiers and tanks were present at the hotel 36 hours before the firing and that they had even communicated with the soldiers. 

There have been several other unusual journalist attacks, including: 

‰ March 22, 2003: Terry Lloyd, a reporter for British TV station ITN, was killed when his convoy crossed into Iraq from Kuwait. French cameraman Frederic Nerac and Lebanese interpreter Hussein Osman, both in the convoy, disappeared at the same time.2 

‰ June, 2003: According to Dahr Jamail, within days of the ‘handover’ of power to an interim Iraqi government in 2003, al-Jazeera had been accused of inaccurate reporting and was banned for one month from reporting out of Iraq. The ban was later extended to “indefinitely” and the interim government announced that any al-Jazeera journalist found reporting in Iraq would be detained. Corentin Fleury, a French freelance photographer, and his interpreter Bahktiyar Abdulla Hadad, were detained by the U.S. military when they were leaving Fallujah before the siege of the city began. They were both held in a military detention facility outside of the city and were questioned about the photos that were taken of bomb-stricken Fallujah. Fleury was released after five days but his interpreter, Bahktiyar Abdulla Hadad, remained. 

‰ April 8, 2004: The same day of the attack on the Palestine Hotel, Truthout writes, the U.S. bombed the Baghdad offices of Abu Dhabi TV and Al-Jazeera while they were preparing to broadcast, killing Al-Jazeera correspondent Tariq Ayyoub. August 17, 2004: Mazen Dana was killed while filming (with permission) a prison, guarded by the U.S. military in a Baghdad suburb. According to Truthout’s Steve Weissman, the Pentagon issued a statement one month later claiming that the troops had acted within the rules of engagement.3 

‰ March 4, 2005: Nicola Calipari, one of Italyís highest ranking intelligence officials, was shot dead by U.S. troops. He was driving with Italian journalist Guiliana Sgrena, who had just been released from captivity and was on her way to Baghdad’s airport. Sgrena survived the attack. She stated in an interview with Amy Goodman on KPFA’s Democracy Now! that the troops “shot at us without any advertising, any intention, any attempt to stop us before” and they appeared to have shot the back of the car.4 

In all cases, little investigation has been conducted, no findings have been released and all soldiers involved have been exonerated.

At the World Economic Forum, on a panel titled: “Will Democracy Survive the Media?,” Eason Jordan, a CNN news chief, commented that the U.S. commanders encourage hostility toward the media and fail to protect journalists, especially those who choose not to embed themselves under military control. According to Truthout, during a discussion about the number of journalists killed during the Iraq war, Jordan stated that he knew of 12 journalists who had not only been killed by U.S. troops, but had been targeted. Jordan also insisted that U.S. soldiers had deliberately shot at journalists. After the forum, Jordan recanted the statements and was forced to resign his job of 23 years at CNN.

As a matter of military doctrine, the U.S. military dominates, at all costs, every element of battle, including our perception of what they do. The need for control leads the Pentagon to urge journalists to embed themselves within the military, where they can go where they are told and film and tell stories only from a pro-American point of view. The Pentagon offers embedded journalists a great deal of protection. As the Pentagon sees it, non-embedded eyes and ears do not have any military significance, and unless Congress and the American people stop them, the military will continue to target independent journalists. Admirals and generals see the world one way, reporters another; the clash leads to the deaths of too many journalists.  

Update by Steve Weissman: When Truthout boss Marc Ash asked me earlier this year to look into the Pentagon’s killing of journalists, many reporters believed that the military was purposely targeting them. But, as I quickly found, the crime was more systemic and in many ways worse. As far as anyone has yet proved, no commanding officer ever ordered a subordinate to fire on journalists as such. Not at Baghdad’s Palestine Hotel in April 2003. Not at the Baghdad checkpoint where soldiers wounded Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena and killed her Secret Service protector in March 2005. Andnot anywhere else in Iraq or Afghanistan.

How, then, did the U.S. military end up killing journalists?

It started with a simple decision—the Pentagon’s absolute refusal to take any responsibility for the lives of journalists who chose to work independently rather than embed themselves in a British or American military unit. Despite repeated requests from Reuters and other major news organizations, Pentagon officials still refuse to take the steps needed to reduce the threat to independent journalists:

1. The military must be forced to respect the work that independent journalists do, protect them where possible, and train soldiers to recognize the obvious differences between rocket launchers and TV cameras.

2. Commanders need to pass on information about the whereabouts of journalists with a direct order not to shoot at them.

3. When soldiers do kill journalists, the Pentagon needs to hold them responsible, something that no military investigation has yet done.

4. When the military tries to forcibly exclude journalists and otherwise prevent “hostile information” about its operations, such as its destruction of Falujah, Congress and the media need to step in and force the Pentagon to back off. 

One other problem needs urgent attention. Military intelligence regularly monitors the uplink equipment that reporters use to transmit their stories and communicate by satellite phone. But, as the BBC’s Nik Gowing discovered, the electronic intelligence mavens make no effort to distinguish between journalistic communications and those of enemy forces. All the sensing devices do is look for electronic traffic between the monitored uplinks and known enemies.

In Gowing’s view, this led the Americans to order a rocket attack on the Kabul office of the Arab broadcaster Al Jazeera, whose journalists kept regular contact with the Taliban as part of their journalistic coverage.

To date, neither Congress nor the military have done what they need to do to protect unembedded journalists and the information they provide. More shamefully, the mass media continues to underplay the story.

But, for those who want it, reliable information is easily available, either from the Committee to Protect Journalists, Reporters without Borders, or the International Federation of Journalists. 

NOTES

1. www.ifj.org.

2. â€œMissing ITN Crew May Have Come Under ‘Friendly Fire,’” www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/ Story/0,2763,919832,00.html, March 23, 2003.

3. Democracy Now! March 23, 2005, Wounded Spanish Journalist Olga Rodriguez describes the U.S. Attack on the Palestine Hotel that killed two of her colleagues.

4. Democracy Now! April 27, 2005, Giuliana Sgrena Blasts U.S. Cover Up, Calls for U.S. and Italy to leave Iraq. 

#8 Iraqi Farmers Threatened By Bremer’s Mandates 

Sources:

Grain, October 2004

Title: “Iraq’s New Patent Law: A Declaration of War against Farmers”

Authors: Focus on the Global South and GRAIN 

TomPaine.com, October 26, 2004

Title: “Adventure Capitalism”

Author: Greg Palast 

The Ecologist, February 4, 2005

Title: “U.S. Seeking to Totally Re-engineer Iraqi Traditional Farming System into a U.S.-style Corporate Agribusiness”

Author: Jeremy Smith 

Faculty Evaluator: John Wingard, Ph. D.

Student Researcher: Cary Barker 

In his article “Adventure Capitalism,” Greg Palast exposes the contents of a secret plan for “imposing a new regime of low taxes on big business, and quick sales of Iraq’s banks and bridges—in fact, ‘ALL state enterprises’—to foreign operators.” This economy makeover plan, he claims, “goes boldly where no invasion plan has gone before.”

This highly detailed program, which began years before the tanks rolled, outlines the small print of doing business under occupation. One of the goals is to impose intellectual property laws favorable to multinationals. Palast calls this “history’s first military assault plan appended to a program for toughening the target nation’s copyright laws.”

It also turns out that those of us who may have thought it was all about the oil were mostly right. “The plan makes it clear that—even if we didn’t go in for the oil—we certainly won’t leave without it.”

In an interview with Palast, Grover Norquist, the “ capo di capi of the lobbyist army of the right,” makes the plans even more clear when he responds, “The right to trade, property rights, these things are not to be determined by some democratic election.” No, these things were to be determined by the Coalition Provisional Authority, the interim government lead by the U.S.

Before he left his position, CPA administrator Paul Bremer, “the leader of the Coalition Provisional Authority issued exactly 100 orders that remade Iraq in the image of the Economy Plan.” These orders effectively changed Iraqi law.

A good example of this business invasion involves agriculture. The details of this part of the “market make-over” are laid out in the Grain website article called “Iraq’s new Patent Law: a declaration of war against farmers.”

“Order 81” of the 100 is entitled “Patent, Industrial Design, Undisclosed Information, Integrated Circuits and Plant Variety.” According to Grain staff writers, this order “made it illegal for Iraqi farmers to re-use seeds harvested from new varieties registered under the law.” Plant Variety Protection (PVP)is the tool used for defining which seeds are re-useable and which are not. PVP “is an intellectual property right or a kind of patent for plant varieties which gives an exclusive monopoly right on planting material to a plant breeder who claims to have discovered or developed a new variety. So the “protection” in PVP has nothing to do with conservation, but refers to safeguarding of the commercial interests of private breeders (usually large corporations) claiming to have created the new plants.”

Dovetailing with this order is a plan to “re-educate farmers” in order to increase their production. As part of a $107 million “project” facilitated by Texas A&M, farmers will be given equipment and new high-yielding PVP protected seeds. Jeremy Smith from the Ecologist points out that, “After one year, farmers will see soaring production levels. Many will be only too willing to abandon their old ways in favor of the new technologies. Out will go traditional methods. In will come imported American seeds.” Then, based on the new patent laws, “any ‘client’ (or ‘farmer’ as they were once known) wishing to grow one of their seeds, ‘pays a licensing fee for each variety’.”

Smith explains that “Under the guise of helping Iraq back on its feet, the U.S. setting out to re-engineer the country’s traditional farming system into a U.S.-style corporate agribusiness.” In that traditional system, “97 percent of Iraqi farmers used their own saved seed or bought seed from local markets.” He continues, “Unfortunately, this vital heritage and knowledge base is now believed lost, the victim of the current campaign and the many years of conflict that preceded it.”

Of course, this project will also introduce “new chemicals—pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, all sold to the Iraqis by corporations such as Monsanto, Cargill and Dow.”

As Grain staff writers point out, “over the past decade, many countries of the South have been compelled to adopt seed patent laws through bilateral treaties” with the U.S. The Iraqi situation, however, is different in that “the adoption of the patent law was not part of negotiations between sovereign countries. Nor did a sovereign law-making body enact it as reflecting the will of the Iraqi people.” Essentially, the U.S. has reneged on its promise of freedom for the Iraqi people. The actions of the U.S. clearly show that the will of the Iraqi people is not relevant. Paul Bremer’s 100 orders make sure it will stay that way. Grain argues “Iraq’s freedom and sovereignty will remain questionable for as long as Iraqis do not have control over what they sow, grow, reap and eat.” Palast says poignantly, “The free market paradise in Iraq is not free.” 

Update by Greg Palast: In February 2003, White House spokesman Ari Fleisher announced the preparations for “Operation Iraqi Liberation”—O.I.L.

I can’t make these things up.

I’m not one of the those people who believes George Bush led us into Iraq for the oil but, from the documents I’ve obtained, it’s clear that we sure as hell aren’t leaving without it.

At BBC Television Newsnight, which has granted me journalistic asylum from the commercially-crazed madhouse of the American news market, we ran Fleisher’s announcement of operation O.I.L. (later corrected to Operation Iraqi Freedom—OIF!). More importantly, we ran a series of stories—which I also developed for Harper’s Magazine in the USA—on the pre-invasion plans to slice up and sell off Iraq’s assets, “especially the oil,” in the terms of one State Department secret document.

After we got our hands on the confidential document to “Move Iraq’s Economy Forward”—i.e. sell off its oil—we at BBC put General Jay Garner on the air. Garner, whom the president appointed as viceroy over the newly-conquered Iraq, confirmed the plan to sell off Iraq’s oil—and his refusal to carry out the deed. U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld fired him and smeared him for his dissent. This was big, big news in Europe where I reported it—but in the U.S. the story was buried.

We later discovered that the plan to sell off Iraq’s oil was replaced by another confidential plan. This one, 323 pages long and literally written by oil industry consultants, was obtained by BBC and Harper’s after a protracted legal war with the State Department. We discovered, interestingly, that this industry plan to create a state oil company favorable to OPEC was first conceived in February 2001. In other words, invasion was in the works, including stratagems for controlling Iraq’s oil, within week’s of George Bush’s first inauguration and well before the September 11 attack.

The discovery of this plan for Iraq’s oil, received exactly zero coverage by the U.S. “mainstream” press. Only Harper’s Magazine gave it full play along with those wonderful internet sites (Buzzflash, Guerrilla News, WorkingForChange, CommonDreams, Alternet and more ) that cussedly insist on printing news from abroad not approved by the Powers That Be.

Bless them. They, Project Censored, and Harper’s, have my deepest thanks for bringing my words back home.

Want to see the television you’re not supposed to see? The British Broadcasting Corporation has graciously kept my reports available as Internet video archives. Go to www.GregPalast.com and click on the “Watch BBC” buttons for the stories effectively censored by the U.S. news lords and the Bush Administration’s chorus of journalist castrati.

Finally, I must give special thanks to our team’s special investigator on Iraq, Leni von Eckardt, to brilliant BBC producer Meirion Jones, to the stalwart editors of Harper’s Magazine who withstood legal threats to publish the story, and to TomPaine.com, which has always provided a refuge for the best investigative reporting American newspapers won’t print. 

#9 Iran’s New Oil Trade System Challenges U.S. Currency  

Source:

GlobalResearch.ca, October 27

Title: “Iran Next U.S. Target”

Author: William Clark 

Faculty Evaluator: Phil Beard, Ph. D.

Student Researcher: Brian Miller 

The U.S. media tells us that Iran may be the next target of U.S. aggression. The anticipated excuse is Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program. William Clark tells us that economic reasons may have more to do with U.S. concerns over Iran than any weapons of mass destruction.

In mid-2003 Iran broke from tradition and began accepting eurodollars as payment for its oil exports from its E.U. and Asian customers. Saddam Hussein attempted a similar bold step back in 2000 and was met with a devastating reaction from the U.S. Iraq now has no choice about using U.S. dollars for oil sales (Censored 2004 #19). However, Iraq’s plan to open an international oil exchange market for trading oil in the euro currency is a much larger threat to U.S. dollar supremacy than Iraq’s switch to euros.

While the dollar is still the standard currency for trading international oil sales, in 2006 Iran intends to set up an oil exchange (or bourse) that would facilitate global trading of oil between industrialized and developing countries by pricing sales in the euro, or “petroeuro.” To this end, they are creating a euro-denominated Internet-based oil exchange system for global oil sales. This is a direct challenge to U.S. dollar supremacy in the global oil market. It is widely speculated that the U.S. dollar has been inflated for some time now because of the monopoly position of “petrodollars” in oil trades. With the level of national debt, the value of the dollar has been held artificially high compared to other currencies.

The vast majority of the world’s oil is traded on the New York NYMEX (Mercantile Exchange) and the London IPE (International Petroleum Exchange), and, as mentioned by Clark, both exchanges are owned by U.S. corporations. Both of these oil exchanges transact oil trades in U.S. currency. Iran’s plan to create a new oil exchange would facilitate trading oil on the world market in euros. The euro has become a somewhat stronger and more stable trading medium than the U.S. dollar in recent years. Perhaps this is why Russia, Venezuela, and some members of OPEC have expressed interest in moving towards a petroeuro system for oil transactions. Without a doubt, a successful Iranian oil bourse may create momentum for other industrialized countries to stop exchanging their own currencies for petrodollars in order to buy oil. A shift away from U.S. dollars to euros in the oil market would cause the demand for petrodollars to drop, perhaps causing the value of the dollar to plummet. A precipitous drop in the value of the U.S. dollar would undermine the U.S. position as a world economic leader.

China is a major exporter to the United States, and its trade surplus with the U.S. means that China has become the world’s second largest holder of U.S. currency reserves (Japan is the largest holder with $800 billion, and China holds over $600 billion in T-bills). China would lose enormously if they were still holding vast amounts of U.S. currency when the dollar collapsed and assumed a more realistic value. Maintaining the U.S. as a market for their goods is a pre-eminent goal of Chinese financial policy, but they are increasingly dependent on Iran for their vital oil and gas imports. The Chinese government is careful to maintain the value of the yuan linked with the U.S. dollar (8.28 yuan to 1 dollar). This artificial linking makes them, effectively, one currency. But the Chinese government has indicated interest in de-linking the dollar-yuan arrangement, which could result in an immediate fall in the dollar. More worrisome is the potentiality of China to abandon its ongoing prolific purchase of U.S. Treasuries/debt—should they become displeased with U.S. policies towards Iran.

Unstable situations cannot be expected to remain static. It is reasonable to expect that the Chinese are hedging their bets. It is unreasonable to expect that they plan to be left holding devalued dollars after a sudden decline in their value. It is possible that the artificial situation could continue for some time, but this will be due largely to the fact that the Chinese want it that way. Regardless, China seems to be in the process of unloading some of its U.S. dollar reserves in the world market to purchase oil reserves, and most recently attempted to buy Unocal, a California-based oil company.

The irony is that apparent U.S. plans to invade Iran put pressure on the Chinese to abandon their support of the dollar. Clark warns that “a unilateral U.S. military strike on Iran would further isolate the U.S. government, and it is conceivable that such an overt action could provoke other industrialized nations to abandon the dollar en masse.” Perhaps the U.S. planners think that they can corner the market in oil militarily. But from Clark’s point of view, “a U.S. intervention in Iran is likely to prove disastrous for the United States, making matters much worse regarding international terrorism, not to mention potential adverse effects on the U.S. economy.” The more likely outcome of an Iran invasion would be that, just as in Iraq, Iranian oil exports would dry up, regardless of what currency they are denominated in, and China would be compelled to abandon the dollar and buy oil from Russia—likely in euros. The conclusion is that U.S. leaders seem to have no idea what they are doing. Clark points out that, “World oil production is now flat out, and a major interruption would escalate oil prices to a level that would set off a global depression.” 

Update by William Clark: Following the completion of my essay in October 2004, three important stories appeared that dramatically raised the geopolitical stakes for the Bush Administration. First, on October 28, 2004, Iran and China signed a huge oil and gas trade agreement (valued between $70 and $100 billion dollars.)1 It should also be noted that China currently receives 13 percent of its oil imports from Iran. The Chinese government effectively drew a “line in the sand” around Iran when it signed this huge oil and gas deal. Despite desires by U.S. elites to enforce petrodollar hegemony by force, the geopolitical risks of a U.S. attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities would surely create a serious crisis between Washington and Beijing.

An article that addressed some of the strategic risks appeared in the December 2004 edition of the Atlantic Monthly.2 This story by James Fallows outlined the military war games against Iran that were conducted during the summer and autumn of 2004. These war-gaming sessions were led by Colonel Sam Gardiner, a retired Air Force colonel who for more than two decades ran war games at the National War College and other military institutions. Each scenario led to a dangerous escalation in both Iran and Iraq. Indeed, Col. Gardiner summarized the war games with the following conclusion, “After all this effort, I am left with two simple sentences for policymakers: You have no military solution for the issues of Iran. And you have to make diplomacy work.”3

The third and final news item that revealed the Bush Administration’s intent to attack Iran was provided by investigative reporter Seymour Hersh. The January 2005 issue of The New Yorker (“The Coming Wars”) included interviews with high-level U.S. intelligence sources who repeatedly told Hersh that Iran was indeed the next strategic target.4 However, as a permanent member of the UN Security Council, China will likely veto any U.S. resolution calling for military action against Iran. A unilateral military strike on Iran would isolate the U.S. government in the eyes of the world community, and it is conceivable that such an overt action could provoke other industrialized nations to abandon the dollar in droves. I refer to this in my book as the “rogue nation hypothesis.”

While central bankers throughout the world community would be extremely reluctant to “dump the dollar,” the reasons for any such drastic reaction are likely straightforward from their perspective—the global community is dependent on the oil and gas energy supplies found in the Persian Gulf. Numerous oil geologists are warning that global oil production is now running “flat out.” Hence, any such efforts by the international community that resulted in a dollar currency crisis would be undertaken—not to cripple the U.S. dollar and economy as punishment towards the American people per se—but rather to thwart further unilateral warfare and its potentially destructive effects on the critical oil production and shipping infrastructure in the Persian Gulf. Barring a U.S. attack, it appears imminent that Iran’s euro-denominated oil bourse will open in March, 2006.5 Logically, the most appropriate U.S. strategy is compromise with the E.U. and OPEC towards a dual-currency system for international oil trades. 

For additional information: Readers interested in learning more about the dollar/euro oil currency conflict and the upcoming geological phenomenon referred to as Peak Oil can read William Clark’s new book, Petrodollar Warfare: Oil, Iraq and the Future of the Dollar. Available from New Society Publishers: www.newsociety.com, www.amazon.com or from your local book store. 

NOTES

1. â€œChina, Iran sign biggest oil & gas deal,” China Daily, October 31, 2004. http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2004-10/31/content_387140.htm.

2. James Fallows, “Will Iran be Next?,” Atlantic Monthly, December 2004, pgs. 97-110.

3. James Fallows, ibid.

4. Seymour Hersh, “The Coming Wars,” The New Yorker, January 24th-31st issue, 2005, pgs. 40-47. Posted online January 17, 2005. Online: http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?050124fa_fact

5. â€œOil bourse closer to reality,” IranMania.com, December 28, 2004. Online: http://www.iranmania.com/News/ArticleView/Default.asp?ArchiveNews=Yes&NewsCode=28176&NewsKind=BusinessEconomy. 

#10 Mountaintop Removal Threatens Ecosystem and Economy

Source:

Earthfirst! Nov-Dec 2004

Title: “See You in the Mountains: Katuah Earth First! Confronts Mountaintop Removal”

Author: John Conner 

Faculty Evaluator: Ervand Peterson, Ph. D.

Student Researcher: Angela Sciortino 

Mountaintop removal is a new form of coal mining in which companies dynamite the tops of mountains to collect the coal underneath. Multiple peaks are blown off and dumped onto highland watersheds, destroying entire mountain ranges. More than 1,000 miles of streams have been destroyed by this practice in West Virginia alone. Mountain top removal endangers and destroys entire communities with massive sediment dams and non-stop explosions.

According to Fred Mooney, an active member of the Mountain Faction of Katuah Earth First!, “MTR is an ecocidal mining practice in which greedy coal companies use millions of pounds of dynamite a day (three million pounds a day in the southwest Virginia alone) to blow up entire mountain ranges in order to extract a small amount of coal.” He goes on to say that “Then as if that wasn’t bad enough, they dump the waste into valleys and riverbeds. The combination of these elements effectively kills everything in the ecosystems.”

Most states are responsible for permitting and regulating mining operations under the Surface Mining Control Act. Now MTR is trying to break into Tennessee, specifically Zeb Mountain in the northeast. Because Tennessee did such a poor job in the ’70s, the state renounced control, and all mining is now regulated under the federal Office of Surface Mining. This makes Tennessee unique because activists have recourse in the federal courts to stop mountaintop removal.

The coal industry has coined many less menacing names for mountaintop removal, such as cross range mining, surface mining and others. But regardless of the euphemism, MTR remains among the most pernicious forms of mining ever conceived. Blasting mountain tops with dynamite is cheaper than hiring miners who belong to a union. More than 40,000 have been lost to MTR in West Virginia alone.

Ninety-three new coal plants are being planned for construction throughout the U.S. Demand for coal will increase as these new facilities are completed. Oil is starting to run out and there are no concrete plans for a transition to renewable resources such as wind and solar energy. Coal companies therefore will be well-positioned to capitalize on their growing market. Katuah Earth First! (KEF!) is one of several groups resisting MTR.

The coal taken from Zeb Mountain is being burned by the Tennessee Valley Authority, and continues to cause environmental damage. KEF! wants to raise awareness and direct attention to the perpetrators—TVA and the Office of Surface Mining (OSM). KEF! emphasized that “the issue of mountain top removal is not just a local one. It is intertwined with many global issues such as corporate domination of communities, the homogenization of local cultures and the over consumption of our wasteful society.”

Four federal agencies that review applications for coal mines have entered an agreement that would give state governments an option that could speed up the process. The Army Corps of Engineers, Environmental Protection Agency, Fish and Wildlife Service and Office of Surface Mining said that the agreement was intended to streamline the procedures companies go through when applying for permits to start surface coal mines, including those that remove entire mountaintops to unearth coal.1

Environmental groups are beginning to challenge these policies in federal district court. The current program allows the Army Corps of Engineers to issue a general permit for a category of activities under the Clean Water Act if they “will cause only minimal adverse environmental effects” according to federal regulation. Coal companies then also must seek individual “authorizations” from the Corps for the projects for which they have received a general permit.2

According to the Bush Administration, the federal judge who blocked the streamline permitting of new mountaintop removal coal mines has overstepped his authority. Lawyers for the Army Corps of Engineers asked a federal appeals court to overturn the July 2004 ruling by U.S. District Judge Joseph R. Goodwin. Industry lawyers criticized Goodwin’s decision as the “latest unwarranted and impermissible dismantling” of mountaintop removal regulations by federal judges in Southern West Virginia.3 

Update by John Conner: The destructions of highland watersheds are a crime against the very future. The Appalachian Mountains are some of the most diverse in the world. Areas incredibly rich in biodiversity are being turned into the biological equivalent of parking lots. It is the final solution for 200 million-year-old mountains. Since dynamite is cheaper than people, MTR has broken the back of the mining unions in West Virginia, massive sediment dams threaten to bury entire communities, water tables are destroyed, and wells dry up. It is a form of cultural genocide driving a mountain people from their hills—then destroying the hills themselves.

There has been a direct impact on Marsh Fork Elementary, where a massive sediment dam looms above the elementary school. Over 18 people have been arrested for non-violent civil disobedience trying to protect the children of that school. Additionally, Mountain Justice Summer has begun a campaign modeled on Redwood and Mississippi Summers, where folks from all over North America have come to our region to help us defend our mountains.

When the Martin County coal impoundment burst, it released more than 20 times the waste volume into a community than the Exxon Valdez spill—yet the coal industry successfully suppressed the story. The coal industry is incredibly powerful, and there exists a glass ceiling on how far our stories go. The story of the folks committing civil disobedience for the first time in history in West Virginia to resist Mountain Top Removal was placed on the AP—but virtually no outlets outside of West Virginia picked it up.

People can get more information on this issue at mountainjusticesummer.org.

This site has everything—links, pictures, and state-by-state activities. From there you can sign yourself up for our electronic newsletter and find out what is going on in all the states under attack by Mountain Top Removal. 

NOTES

1. Inside Energy with Federal lands, February 7, 2005,”Environmentalists sue to block process for Ky. Mountaintop mining operations.”

2. Associated Press, February 11, 2005, “Federal agencies will work together to speed up mining permits.”

3. Charleston Gazette (West Virginia), March 22, 2005, Tuesday, “Bush, Industry seek reversal of mining ruling.” 

#11 Universal Mental Screening Program Usurps Parental Rights 

Sources:

Asheville Global Report (British Medical Journal),No. 284, June 24-30, 2004

Title: “Bush Plans To Screen Whole U.S. Population For Mental Illness”

Author: Jeanne Lenzer

http://www.agrnews.org/issues/284/#2

Truth News, September 13,2004

Title: “Forcing Kids Into a Mental Health Ghetto”

Congressman Ron Paul

http://www.truthnews.net/world/2004090078.htm 

Faculty Evaluator: David Van Nuys Ph.D.

Student Researchers: John Ferritto, Matt Johnson 

In April of 2002, President Bush appointed a 22 member commission called the President’s New Freedom Commission on Mental Health in order to “identify policies that could be implemented by Federal, State and local governments to maximize the utility of existing resources, improve coordination of treatments and services, and promote successful community integration for adults with a serious mental illness and children with a serious emotional disturbance.”1 Members of this commission include physicians in the mental health field and at least one (Robert N. Postlethwait) former employee of pharmaceutical giant Ely Lilly and Co.

In July of 2003 the commission published the results of their study. They found that mental health disorders often go undiagnosed and recommended to the President that there should be more comprehensive screening for mental illnesses for people of all ages, including pre-school age children. In accordance with their findings, the commission recommended that schools were in a “key position” to screen the 52 million students and 6 million adult employees of our nation’s schools.2

The commission also recommended linking the screenings with treatment and support. They recommended using the Texas Medication Algorithm Project (TMAP) as a model treatment system.3 TMAP, which was implemented in Texas’ publicly funded mental health care system while George W. Bush was governor of Texas,4 is a disease management program that aids physicians in prescribing drugs to patients based on clinical history, background, symptoms, and previous results. It was the first program in the United States aimed at establishing medication guidelines for treating mental health illnesses.5 Basically, it is an algorithm that recommends specific drugs which should be used to treat specific diseases. Funding for TMAP was provided by a Robert Wood-Johnson Grant as well as several major drug companies. The project began in 1995 as an alliance of individuals from pharmaceutical companies, the University of Texas, and the mental health and corrections systems of Texas.6

Critics of mental health screening and TMAP claim that it is a payoff to Pharmaceutical companies. Many cite Allen Jones, a former employee of the Pennsylvania Office of the Inspector General. He was fired when he revealed that many key officials who have influence over the medication plan in his state received monetary perks and benefits from pharmaceutical companies, which benefited from their drugs being in the medication algorithm. TMAP also promotes the use of newer, more expensive anti-psychotic drugs. Results of studies conducted in the United States and Great Britain found that using the older, more established anti-psychotic drugs as a front line treatment rather than the newer experimental drugs makes more sense. Under TMAP, the Ely Lilly drug olanzapine, a new atypical antipsychotic drug, is used as a first line treatment rather than a more typical anti-psychotic medication. Perhaps it is because Ely Lilly has several ties to the Bush family, where George Bush Sr. was a member of the board of directors. George W. Bush also appointed Ely Lilly C.E.O. Sidney Taurel to a seat on the Homeland Security Council. Of Ely Lilly’s $1.6 million political contributions in 2000, 82 percent went to Republicans and George W. Bush.7

In November of 2004, Congress appropriated $20 million8 to implement the findings of the New Freedom Commission on Mental Health. This would include mandatory screening by schools for mental health illnesses. Congressman Ron Paul, R-Texas introduced an amendment to the appropriations bills which would withhold funding for mandatory mental health screenings and require parental consent and notification. His amendment, however, was voted down by a wide margin (95-315 in the House of Representatives).9 Paul, a doctor and long-time member of the American Association of Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) states, “At issue is the fundamental right of parents to decide what medical treatment is appropriate for their children. The notion of federal bureaucrats ordering potentially millions of youngsters to take psychotropic drugs like Ritalin strikes an emotional chord with American parents.” Paul says the allegation “that we have a nation of children with undiagnosed mental disorders crying out for treatment is patently false,” and warns that mental health screening could be used to label children whose attitudes, religious beliefs, and political views conflict with established doctrine. Paul further warns that an obvious major beneficiary of this legislation is the pharmaceutical industry. The AAPS has decried this legislation, which they say will lead to mandatory psychological testing of every child in America without parental consent, and “heap even more coercive pressure on parents to medicate children with potentially dangerous side effects.” 

Update by Jeanne Lenzer: Whether it’s the pills we take or the oil we use, it would be reassuring to know that the information used to develop new medicines or to utilize natural resources wisely is based on science—not corporate spin.

But blandishments from Big Pharma to politicians and doctors have a profound effect on health care in the U.S., making medical research closer to propaganda than science at times.

One way drug companies, in collusion with doctors, increase their market share is to expand the definition of diseases. When diagnostic criteria were liberalized for attention deficit disorder in 1991, the number of children diagnosed jumped by about 60 percent.

The American Psychiatric Association (APA) acknowledged in the July 2004 issue of Advocacy News that, “The BMJ story has gained some traction in derivative reports on the Internet.” But, they boasted, “mainstream media have not touched the story, in part thanks to APA’s work, for which the [Bush] Administration is appreciative.”10

The APA’s boast is curious. The article was the most downloaded article in the history of the BMJ. It clearly struck a nerve with a public wary of doctors and politicians whose pockets are lined with drug company money.

Given the interest in the BMJ story, it would seem that the APA, instead of attempting to keep the story out of the mainstream media, would be anxious to counter the widely circulated statements in the article. It would also seem that the mainstream press could provide the Administration and the APA the best possible vehicle to counter these supposed factual errors in the BMJ article.

But, the facts might prove difficult to square with the public. More than one in every 100 toddlers and preschoolers in the United States are on powerful psychiatric drugs, such as Ritalin and Prozac, according to a study published in the February 2000 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Joseph T. Coyle, M.D., wrote in an accompanying editorial, “It appears that behaviorally disturbed children are now increasingly subjected to quick and inexpensive pharmacologic fixes, as opposed to informed mutimodal therapy.” He concluded, “These disturbing prescription practices suggest a growing crisis in mental health services to children and demand more thorough investigation.”

But instead of issuing warnings about overmedication or inappropriate prescribing, the experts on the New Freedom Commission warn ominously that too few children are receiving treatment for mental illness. They cite escalating numbers of toddlers expelled from daycare as evidence of potentially serious psychological problems—problems to be diagnosed and cured with mental health screening and pills. Social and economic reasons for the rise in kiddie expulsions are left unexamined.

As bad as this is for those put on drugs and labeled “mentally ill,” the far bigger concern is the creation of a disease for every drug, a situation made possible by the hand-in-glove relationship between industry and the government. 

NOTES

1. http://www.mentalhealthcommission.gov/.

2. http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=39078.

3. http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=39078.

4. http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=39078.

5. http://www.news-medical.net/?id=3084.

6. http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=39078.

7. http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=39078.

8. http://www.truthnews.net/world/2004090078.htm.

9. http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=41606.

10. See Medicating Aliah: http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2005/05/medicating_ aliah.html.

Alliance for Human Research Protection “http://www.ahrp.org” www.ahrp.org http://www.psych.org/join_apa/mb/newsletters/advocacy/AdvNewsJuly2004.htm#21. 

#12 Military in Iraq Contracts Human Rights Violators 

Sources:

Mother Jones, November/December 2004

Title: “Dirty Warriors: How South African Hitmen, Serbian Paramilitaries, and Other Human Rights Violators Became Guns for Hire for Military Contractors in Iraq”

Author: Barry Yeoman 

www.corpwatch.org, March 7, 2005

Title: “Intelligence, Inc.”

Author: Pratap Chatterjee 

www.law.com, May 11, 2004

Title: “Untested Law Key in Iraqi Abuse Scandal”

Author: Jonathan Groner 

Faculty Evaluator: Rick Williams, JD

Student Researcher: Danielle Hallstein 

The United States government is contracting private firms to recruit, hire, and train civilians to perform duties normally done by military personnel. These corporate employees are sent to fill empty positions as prison guards, military police, and interrogators at United States military bases worldwide, including Iraq, Afghanistan, and Cuba. Independent of the United States military, these employees are not held accountable by military law. Many of the recruits are citizens with prior experience as policemen or soldiers. However, a number of the employees have backgrounds as mercenaries and soldiers who fought for repressive regimes throughout the world, such as in South Africa, Chile, and Yugoslavia. Employees from some of these firms have recently been indicated in prisoner abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

The Pentagon claims that it can no longer fight the war on terror without enlisting the help of private contractors. The reason for this inability is that the number of active troops in the United States military has dropped from 2.1 million to 1.4 million since the end of the Cold War. This puts a lot of pressure on companies to fill positions as quickly as possible. One negative consequence of this rushed hiring is the lack of in-depth background checks on applicants. Many recruits have been implicated in past human rights violations, including torture and killing. One of these ex-soldier-turned-United States employees was Gary Branfield, who was killed in a firefight with Iraqi soldiers in the spring of 2004. In the 1980s he was a covert operations specialist working for the South African apartheid government. Branfield’s mission was to track down and assassinate members of the African National Congress living outside of South Africa. Mysteriously, this information failed to appear during background checks performed by Branfield’s employer, Hart Group. Hart Group has been hired by the United States to guard Iraqi energy facilities and to protect the engineers rebuilding Iraq’s electricity network. Retired justice of the Constitutional Court of South Africa Richard Goldstone comments, “The mercenaries we’re talking about worked for security forces that were synonymous with murder and torture.”

The Titan Corporation, which claims to provide “comprehensive information and communications products, solutions, and services for National Security” (www.corpwatch.org), has a contract with the U.S. to supply translators for the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. A 2004 military investigation into prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib concluded that “Titan employees actively participated in detainee abuse, including assault and possibly rape” (Mother Jones, 2004). However, the only legal action taken against Titan as of yet is in the U.S. district court for the Southern district of California, where the Abu Ghraib prisoners have filed a class action suit against the employees of Titan. Employees of California Analysis Center Incorporated (CACI) were also found to have participated in the abuse. Plaintiffs in this suit are demanding a jury trial, but the process is moving slowly. Jeffrey Ellefante, executive vice president at CACI, says that CACI has yet to be informed of the specific accusations against its employees. Oddly enough, the soldiers implicated in the abuse have already been court martialed under the Military Code of Conduct.

So why is there a discrepancy between the punishment of soldiers and that of independent employees for the same crime? The answer is legal ramifications. While United States military personnel are subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice, independent contractors working through the Pentagon as civilians are not. Because of this, Congress passed the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act (MEJA) in 2000 to enable the prosecution of civilians “employed by or accompanying U.S. armed forces” (www.law.com). Unfortunately, MEJA can only be applied to civilian employees who are contracted through the Department of Defense (DOD), and to crimes committed overseas that would merit a minimum one-year sentence under Federal law. Currently there is an investigation into the deaths of Iraqi prisoners after having been questioned by private interrogators hired by the CIA. If found guilty, these interrogators may be let off on a technicality because they work for the CIA, not the DOD, like MEJA requires.

This begs the question, under whose jurisdiction do these crimes fall? In an attempt to answer this, the Defense Department proposed new regulation earlier this year that “would require DOD contractors to make sure their employees comply with the Uniform Code of Military Justice where applicable” (www.law.com.) Debate over this proposal will open on May 24, 2005. Critic Daniel Guttman, fellow at John Hopkins University, questions the “where applicable” phrase saying, “it says the Uniform Code applies where applicable, but when is that?…They seem to be making policy on the run” (www.law.com). As for now, the Pentagon claims that it, “is not in the business of policing contractors’ hiring practices,” therefore it may take many more cases like Abu Ghraib before the U.S. government steps in to regulate the unlimited power that these private contractors are brandishing.  

Update by Barry Yeoman: This was the first major article to systemically link the issues of military privatization with human rights abuses. We explained how the recent growth of a private security industry, fueled by the invasion of Iraq, necessitated the hiring of former soldiers and police officers trained and experienced in assassination and torture in formerly repressive countries.

Numerous radio stations have interviewed me about this article. Among the radio shows are “Political Thought,” WMAR, Poughkeepsie NY; “The Morning Zone,” KGAB, Cheyenne WY; and Ian Masters’ Background Briefing, KPFK-FM, Los Angeles CA. The last of these interviews can be accessed at http://www.barryyeoman.com/biography.html.

A column called “Coalition of Willing is Dwindling” in the Paradise Post (CA) quoted from it. I have done extensive interviews with a European television network, which is producing a documentary on the subject.

Amnesty International has a petition drive seeking accountability for private contractors at Abu Ghraib: http://takeaction.amnestyusa.org/action/ index.asp?step=2&item=10897.

There are several excellent resources on the growth of this industry: Peter Singer’s book “Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry” (Cornell University Press, 2003) and the Center for Public Integrity’s 11-part investigation “Making a Killing: The Business of War” http://www. publicintegrity.org/bow/ are but a few. 

#13 Rich Countries Fail to Live up to Global Pledges 

Sources:

Oxfam Press Release, December 6, 2004

Title: “Poor Are Paying the Price of Rich Countries’ Failure”

Author: Caroline Green

http://www.oxfam.org/eng/pr041206_MDG.htm 

InterPress Service, OneWorld U.S., December 6, 2004

Title: “45 Million Children to Die in Next Decade Due to Rich Countries’ Miserliness”

Author: Jim Lobe

http://us.oneworld.net/article/view/99063/1/ 

Faculty Evaluator: Maureen Buckley, Ph. D.

Student Researcher: Paige Dumont 

Forty-five million children will needlessly die between now and the year 2015, reveals the report by Oxfam, “Poor Are Paying the Price of Rich Countries’ Failure.” According to this report, 97 million more children will be denied access to an education by the year 2015 and 53 million more people will lack proper sanitation facilities. Ending poverty will require assistance on many levels. For third world countries, economic growth is undermined by unfair trade rules. Without finance and support, these countries will not be able to take advantage of global trade, investment opportunities, or protect basic human rights.

Wealthy countries such as the U.S., Germany, Japan, and the UK have promised to provide a very small fraction of their wealth to third world countries. By offering .7 percent of their gross national income, they could reduce poverty and end the burden of debt that makes low income countries pay up to $100 million per day to creditors. In the years 1960-65, wealthy countries spent on average 0.48 percent of their combined national incomes on official development assistance but by the year 2003 the proportion had dropped to 0.24 percent. Vital poverty-reduction programs are failing for the lack of finance. Cambodia and Tanzania are among the poorest countries in the world, yet they will require at least double the level of external financing that they currently receive if they are to achieve their poverty-reduction targets.

Global initiatives to enable poor countries to develop provisional education and combat HIV/AIDS are starved of cash. Despite the fact that HIV infection rates are rising in sub-Saharan Africa, the global fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria is assured of only one quarter of the funds that it needs for 2005. Poor countries continue to spend more paying back their creditors than they do on essential public services. Low-income countries paid $39 billion in debt payments and interest in 2003, while they received only $27 billion in aid.

Wealthy countries can easily afford to deliver the necessary aid and debt relief. For wealthy countries such as the U.S. to spend merely 0.7 percent of gross national income on humanitarian aid is equal to one-fifth of its expenditure on defense and one half of what it spends on domestic farm subsidies. The U.S., at just 0.14 percent, is the least generous provider of aid in proportion to national income of any developed country. By comparison, Norway is the most generous provider at 0.92 percent. The U.S. is spending more than twice as much on the war in Iraq as it would cost to increase its aid budget to 0.7 percent, and six times more on its military program. Canceling the debts of the 32 poorest countries would be small change for the wealthy nations.

Millions of children are now in school in Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya, Malawi, and Zambia, thanks to money provided by foreign aid and debt relief. Because of these relief funds, Ugandans no longer have to pay for basic health care. A policy was implemented that resulted in an increase of 50 to 100 percent in attendance at Ugandan health clinics and doubled the rate on immunities. History also shows that aid has been necessary in eradicating global diseases as well as rebuilding countries devastated by war.

The wealthiest of nations have continuously signed international statements pledging to increase foreign aid to 0.7 percent of their gross national income in order to eliminate the crippling debts of third world countries. Repeatedly, they have broken their promises. 

#14 Corporations Win Big on Tort Reform, Justice Suffers 

Sources:

Dollars and Sense, Issue #252, March/April 2004

Title: “Supremes Limit Punitive Damages”

Author: Jamie Court

http://www.dollarsandsense.org/0304court.html 

Democracy now! Feb 4, 2005

Title: “Tort reform: The Big Payoff for Corporations, Curbing the Lawsuits that Hold Them Accountable”

Author: Amy Goodman et al (Juan Gonzalez interview with Joanne Doroshow)

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/02/04/1537236 

Faculty Evaluator: Perry Marker, Ph. D.

Student Researcher: Chris Bui 

On February 18, 2005, President Bush signed into law the most sweeping federal tort reform measure in more than a decade. The Class Action Fairness Act puts into effect a tort reform that will take away people’s access to the courts, undermining the constitutional right to trial by jury. These reforms weaken consumer and worker protections, denying due process of law in civil cases to all but the wealthiest in our society. The act will move many civil lawsuits from state to federal courts in an attempt to end so-called “forum shopping” by trial lawyers seeking districts most hospitable to multi-party suits against companies.

What has been lost in all the partisan rhetoric is the fact that class action suits are most often lawsuits brought by people who have been hurt by HMO abuses, civil rights violations, or workplace injuries and violations. These are the suits that allow for compensation when large numbers of people are hurt by companies in the pursuit of profit. Although, at times, individual injuries may be relatively small, they represent a pattern of behavior on the part of the defendant. While legal recourse may not be available on an individual level, by joining together at the state level, people have been able to affect responsible change in the conduct of corporations. Federal courts are not expert in these cases, are already overburdened, and are much smaller than state courts. Critics claim that the real intention of this law is to make sure these cases get buried quickly and are ultimately dismissed.

Attached to this bill is a mass tort section that will severely restrict large class action suits against pharmaceutical companies and paves the way for medical malpractice reform, effectively immunizing abusive or negligent corporations from liability.

The reform sets a cap of $250,000 per lawsuit while shielding drug companies from responsibility for punitive damages and lawsuits where the drug had been approved by the FDA. One woman who was taking the FDA approved drug Vioxx, for example, had a stroke and continued taking the drug because she wasn’t warned of its major side effect—stroke. She went on to have a second stroke. The new reform would limit her settlement to $250,000 for a lifetime of disabilities. Under this new legislation corporations will not be held accountable for their faulty products and will only be punished with a slap on the wrist in terms of financial payment.  

Update by Jamie Court: The Supreme Court ruling in Campbell seems to be an eye-glazing experience for the mainstream media. For example, the press ignored the significance of the ruling in covering the Congressional debate over 2005 legislation signed into law by President Bush that created new hurdles to class action lawsuits. Given the Campbell ruling’s limits, the new class action restrictions give a virtual guarantee to banks, insurers, drug makers, and other big industries that no matter how egregious their conduct, the penalty will always be financially manageable. Indeed if the media had taken more notice of the ruling, President Bush’s campaign plank of limiting lawsuits of all kind would be seen in a far different light.

Read the State Farm v. Campbell case at http://www.supremecourtus.gov/. 

#15 Conservative Plan to Override Academic Freedom in the Classroom 

Source: The Nation

Title: “The New PC”

Author: Russell Jacoby

Date of Publication: April 4, 2005

Student Researchers: Vanessa Dern, Theodora Ruhs 

For centuries, the higher education classroom has been a haven for honest debate and protected academic freedom. The college professor, one of the last “rugged individualists,” had the freedom to teach a given subject in his or her own manner, as he or she saw it. The interpretation of the subject matter was the professors own, not a representation of a “liberal” or “conservative” dogma.

The halls of academia have included a wide variety of perspectives, from Newt Gingrich and William F. Buckley Jr. to Noam Chomsky and Albert Einstein.

In his article “The New PC,” Russell Jacoby addresses a new extremist conservative movement to bring what they say is “political balance” to higher education. These conservatives see academia as a hotbed of liberal activity that is working to indoctrinate America’s youth with leftwing ideology, citing studies that conclude that faculty of most universities are overwhelmingly liberal. They fear that these liberal faculty members are abusing students who profess conservative belief systems, and to remedy this they are pushing for regulation of the academic world to monitor professors’ _expression of theory and opinion.

At the forefront of this movement is David Horowitz and his academic watchdog organization, Students for Academic Freedom (SAF). SAF counsels its student members that, when they come across an ‘abuse’ like controversial material in a course, they are to write down the date, class and name of the professor. They are advised to accumulate a list of incidents or quotes, obtain witnesses, and lodge a complaint. Many in the academic world see these actions as a new McCarthy-ism—an effort to sniff out those who do not subscribe to the ‘dominant’ belief structure of the nation.

Beyond his student watch group, Horowitz is also championing a “Student Bill of Rights.” Ironically, this bill claims to protect academic freedom. It proposes some ideas that are commonsense, such as, “students will be graded solely on the basis of their reasoned answers and appropriate knowledge of the subjects and disciplines they study, not on the basis of their political or religious beliefs.”1 But Jacoby warns that academic freedoms extended to students easily turn into the end of freedom for teachers. In Horowitz’s society of rights, students would have the right to hear all sides of all subjects all the time. Principle #4 of Horowitz’s academic bill of rights states that curricula and reading lists “should reflect the uncertainty and unsettled character of all human knowledge,” and provide “students with dissenting sources and viewpoints where appropriate.” The bill does not, however, distinguish when or where dissenting viewpoints are, or are not, appropriate.

The SAF website has a section for students to post ‘abuses’ and complaints about their academic experiences. Perusing these postings, Jacoby found one student reporting an ‘abuse’ in an introductory Peace Studies and Conflict Resolution class, “where military approaches were derided. The student complained that ‘the only studying of conflict resolution that we did was to enforce the idea that non-violent means were the only legitimate sources of self-defense.” Jacoby points out the irony, “presumably the professor of ‘peace studies’ should be ordered to give equal time to ‘war studies.’ By this principle, should the United States Army War College be required to teach pacifism?” From this point the movement seems to be rendered ridiculous.

Several authors, including Jacoby, point out the hypocrisy of Horowitz’s focus on the humanities and education in general. The conservatives who feel such an urgency to protect the freedoms of conservative students in the humanities and to balance out the ratio of liberal to conservative faculty are in no rush to sort out the inequalities in business schools where the trend often appears to be the opposite, with the liberals in the minority. And as Jacoby points out, “of course, they do not address such imbalances in the police force, Pentagon, FBI, CIA, and other government outfits where the stakes seem far higher and where, presumably, followers of Michael Moore are short in supply.”

Despite the apparent circus, this movement poses a real threat to the academic world. Whether or not the Student Bill of Rights passes in any of the state legislatures, where it stands as of Spring 2005, is not as important as how it influences public opinion. Already this movement has led to attacks and firings of a number of professors for their left leaning viewpoints. Ward Churchill, from the University of Colorado, was threatened with termination for using the term “little Eichmanns” to describe World Trade Center workers.2 Oneida Mernato, a political science professor at Metropolitan State College of Denver, was also harassed for her liberal bias in class.3 And more recently, self-proclaimed anarchist David Graeber was fired, he believes, for his personal political activity, and for standing up for a student organizer who he felt was being treated unfairly.4,5

Horowitz also aims to affect other areas of government involvement in academia, specifically funding. Proclaiming that academics are “a privileged elite that work between six to nine hours a week, eight months a year for an annual salary of about $150,000 a year,”6 Horowitz further claims that he is “dedicated to exposing the cowards who run our universities to the alumni and taxpayers who pay their salaries. State Senator Larry Mumper argues, “Why should we, as fairly moderate to conservative legislators, continue to support universities that turn out students who rail against the very policies that their parents voted us in for?”7 

NOTES

1. Students for Academic Freedom. “The Student Bill of Rights.” http://www.studentsforacademicfreedom.org/essays/sbor.html.

2. ibid.

3. ibid.

4. http://www.villagevoice.com/people/0523,interview,64691,24.html.

5. â€œEarly Exit” http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/05/18/yale.

6. Mattson, Kevin.

7. Mattson. Kevin. 

#16 U.S. Plans for Hemispheric Integration Include Canada 

Sources:

Centre for Research on Globalisation, November 23, 2004

Title: “Is the Annexation of Canada Part of Bush’s Military Agenda?”

Author: Michel Chossudovsky

http://globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO411C.html 

Canadian Dimension, Jan/Feb 2005, Winnipeg: Vol.39, Iss.1; pg. 12

Title: “Canada’s Chance to Keep Space for Peace”

Author: Bruce K. Gagnon

space4peace.org 

Faculty Evaluator: Sherril Jaffe, Ph. D.

Student Researcher: Christina Reski 

The U.S. and Canada have been sharing national information since the creation of NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command) in 1958. This bi-national agreement to provide aerospace warning and control for North America is scheduled to expire in May 2006. In preparation for the renewal of this contract, the U.S. and Canadian commanders are proposing to expand the integration of the two countries, including cooperation in the “Star Wars” program, cross-national integration of military command structures, immigration, law enforcement, and intelligence gathering and sharing under the new title of NORTHCOM, U.S. Northern Command.

Former Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien refused to join NORTHCOM. To circumvent his decision, this “illusive transitional military” (aka NORAD/NORTHCOM) formed an interim military authority in December 2002, called the Bi-National Planning Group (BPG.) The command structure is fully integrated between NORAD, NORTHCOM and the BPG. The BPG is neither accountable to the U.S. Congress nor the Canadian House of Commons. The BPG is also scheduled to expire in May 2006. Hence, the push for Canada to join NORTHCOM.

Donald Rumsfeld said that U.S. Northern Command would have jurisdiction over the entire North American region. NORTHCOM’s jurisdiction, outlined by the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), includes all of Canada, Mexico, parts of the Caribbean, contiguous waters in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans up to 500 miles of the Mexican, U.S. and Canadian coastlines as well as the Canadian Artic.

Under NORTHCOM, Canada’s military command structures would be subordinated to those of the Pentagon and the DoD. In December 2001, the Canadian government reached an agreement with the head of Homeland Security Tom Ridge, entitled the “Canada-U.S. Smart Border Declaration.” This agreement essentially hands over confidential information on Canadian citizens and residents to the U.S. Department of Homeland. It also provides U.S. authorities with access to tax records of Canadians. The National Intelligence Reform Act of 2004, currently debated in the U.S. Senate, centers on a so-called ‘Information Sharing Network’ to coordinate data from ‘all available sources.’”

The BPG is the interim military for NORTHCOM. Part of the BPG’s agenda is the Civil Assistance Plan (CAP) which supports the ongoing militarization of the civilian law enforcement and judicial functions in both the U.S. and Canada. Military commanders would “provide bi-national military assistance to civil authorities.” The U.S. military would have jurisdiction over Canadian territory from coast to coast, extending from the St. Laurence Valley to the Parry Island in the Canadian Arctic.

It appears that some Canadian leaders are in full support of this program. In the summer 2004, Canada agreed to amend the NORAD treaty to allow sharing satellite and radar data with the ballistic missile defense program based in Colorado. This operation center will control the 40 interceptor rockets planned for Alaska, California and at sea.

On February 22, 2005, at the NATO summit in Brussels, Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin declared that his people would not participate in the controversial Missile Defense Shield. Contradicting this message, Canadian Ambassador to the U.S. (and former board member of the Caryle Group) Frank McKenna, said “We are part of it now.”

On August 2, 2004, the U.S. Air Force quietly published a new doctrine called “Counterspace Operations.” The development of offensive counterspace capabilities provides combatant commanders with new tools for counterspace operations…that may be utilized throughout the spectrum of conflict and may achieve a variety of effects from temporary denial to complete destruction of the adversary’s space capability. It has also been noted that Canadian Military personnel are taking part in large scale American space war games designed to prepare for combat in orbit.

Under an integrated North American Command, Canada would be forced to embrace Washington’s pre-emptive military doctrine, including the use of nuclear warheads as a means of self defense, which was ratified by the U.S. Senate in December 2003.

Similar bi-national negotiations are being conducted with Mexico. U.S. military could exert strategic control over air space, land mass and contiguous territorial waters extending from the Yucatan peninsula in southern Mexico to the Canadian Arctic, representing 12 percent of the world’s land mass. The militarization of South America under the “Andean Trade Preference Act” as well as the signing of a “parallel” military cooperation protocol by 27 countries of the Americas (the so-called Declaration of Manaus) is an integral part of the process of hemispheric integration (see story #17).

Richard N. Haass, of the U.S. Department of State, said at the 2002 Arthur Ross Lecture, “In the 21st century, the principal aim of American foreign policy is to integrate other countries and organizations into arrangements that will sustain a world consistent with U.S. interests and values, and thereby promote peace, prosperity and justice as widely as possible. Integration reflects not merely a hope for the future, but the emerging reality of the Bush Administration’s foreign policy.”  

#17 U.S. Uses South American Military Bases to Expand Control of the Region 

Sources:

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Jan/Feb 2005

Title: “What’s the Deal at Manta”

Author: Michael Flynn 

NACLA Report on the Americas, Nov/Dec 2004

Title: “Creeping Militarization in the Americas”

Authors: Adam Isacson, Lisa Haugaard and Joy Olson 

Z Magazine, December 29, 2004

Title: “Colombia—A Shill (proxy) Country For U.S. Intervention In Venezuela”

Authors: Sohan Sharma and Surinder Kumar 

Faculty Evaluator: Jorge Porras, Ph. D.

Student Researchers: Adrienne Smith, Sarah Kintz 

The United States has a military base in Manta, Ecuador, one of the three military bases located in Latin America. According to the United States, we are there to help the citizens of Manta, but an article in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists says that many people tell a different story.

According to Miguel Moran, head of a group called Movimiento Tohalli, which opposes the Manta military base, “Manta is part of a broader U.S. imperialist strategy aimed at exploiting the continent’s natural resources, suppressing popular movements, and ultimately invading neighboring Colombia.” Michael Flynn reported that the military base in Ecuador is an “integral part of the U.S. counterinsurgency strategy in Colombia—and is a potential staging ground for direct American involvement in the conflict there. Ecuadorians worry that the U.S. could ultimately pull their country into conflict.” Flynn goes on to say that “the base is also at the center of a growing controversy regarding the U.S. efforts to block mass emigration from Ecuador [to the U.S.].” Policy makers have diminished the difference between police roles and military roles, stating that a police force is a body designed to protect a population through minimal use of force and the military, which aims to defeat an enemy through use of force.

According to a ten-year lease agreement between Ecuador and the United States, “… U.S. activities at the base are to be limited to counter-narcotics surveillance flights (the agreements for the other two Latin American Forward Operating Locations contain similar restrictions).” Ecuadorian citizens are not pleased with the lease or the way the U.S. has abused it. “A coalition of social and labor organizations has called for the termination of the U.S. lease in Manta on the grounds that the United States has violated both the terms of the agreement and Ecuadorian law.”

The U.S., says Flynn, is intervening in Colombia through private corporations and organizations. Most of the military operations and the spraying of biochemical agents are contracted out to private firms and private armies. In 2003, according to the article in Z Magazine, the U.S. State Department said, “…there are seventeen primary contracting companies working in Colombia, initially receiving $3.5 million.” One of these private American defense contractors, DynCorp, runs the military base at Manta. “The Pentagon’s decision to give DynCorp—a company that many Latin Americans closely associate with U.S. activities in Colombia—the contract to administer the base reinforced fears that the United States had more than drug interdiction in mind when it set up shop in Manta,” says Flynn.

In addition, say Sharma and Kumar, DynCorp was awarded a “$600 million contract to carry out aerial spraying to eliminate coca crops which also contaminates maize, Yucca, and plantains-staple foods of the population; children and adults develop skin rashes.” The chemical, the foundation for the herbicide Roundup, is sprayed in Ecuador in a manner that would be illegal in the United States.

According to the NACLA report, in 2004, the Pentagon began installing 3 substitute logistics centers (now under construction) in the provinces of Guayas, Azuay, and Sucumbios, and is currently militarizing the Ecuadorian police who are receiving “anti-terrorist” training by the FBI. The U.S. military is also aiding Colombia’s “war on drugs.” Isacson, Haugaard and Olson write that, “increased militarization of antinarcotics operation is a pretext for stepped up counterinsurgency action and extending the war against them by the U.S.” Washington also has seven security offices in Ecuador: defense (DAO), drug enforcement (DEA), military aid (MAAG), internal security, national security (NSA), the U.S. Agency for Internal Development (USAID), the Peace Corps, and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). According to the Bush Administration they are mixing military and police roles to “…govern its counter-terror efforts in the hemisphere.”

Michael Flynn offers this quote from an Ecuadorian writer as another example of the United States intervening in the operations of another country to further its own agenda: “The U.S. invasion of Iraq and the pressure on Ecuador to sign the interdiction agreement form part of a policy aimed at consolidating a unipolar world with one hegemonic superpower.” 

Update by Michael Flynn: I think one important aspect of my story about the Manta base is that it shows the arrogance that often characterizes U.S. relations with its southern neighbors. This arrogance comes with a heavy price, which the U.S. is paying now as South American leaders express an ever greater willingness to take an independent path in their affairs and reject the U.S. lead. This fact was clearly revealed recently when the Organization of American States soundly rejected a U.S. proposal to set up a mechanism to review the state of democracy in the Americas. Manta is a small part of this much larger picture. U.S. ambassadors, the head of Southcom, even representatives in Congress have shown a disregard for Ecuadorian concerns about operations at the Manta base, which has helped fan criticism of the base, and has turned into a lightning rod of criticism of U.S. policies. And this is only one of among dozens of similar bases spread out across the globe—what impact are they having on U.S. relations?

An equally important issue touched on in my story is the U.S. reaction to the migration crises that has gripped several Latin countries in recent years. Manta is a sort of quasi-outpost of the U.S. southern border, which has shown remarkable flexibility in recent years. The fact is, the border itself ceased long ago to be the front line in the effort to stop unwanted migration. The United States uses military bases located in host countries as staging grounds for detention efforts. It has funded detention centers in places like Guatemala City, and it has teamed up with law enforcement officials from other countries to carry out multi-lateral operations aimed at breaking up migrant smuggling activities. Manta is one piece in this larger puzzle.

To my knowledge, the mainstream press has not picked up on the precise story lines covered in my article. On the other hand, the press has not altogether ignored these issues either. Ginger Thompson of the New York Times has tracked the plight of migrants in several Latin American countries, and last year she teamed up with an Ecaudorean journalist to produce a remarkable story about the harrowing experience of migrants who dare to board the smuggling vessels leaving Ecuadorean shores. They did not, however, scrutinize Manta’s role in interdicting these migrants, or address the many problematic aspects of U.S. overseas interdiction practices. Regarding U.S. overseas military bases, the recent turmoil in Uzbekistan has drawn the attention of the U.S. press to contradictions in U.S. policy that have emerged between its desire to have bases in strategic spots around the world and President Bush’s promise to advocate democratic change across the globe. Also, Dana Priest of the Washington Post has done excellent work reporting on the role of U.S. bases and military commanders around the globe. See, for example, Priest’s The Mission: Waging War and Keeping Peace with America’s Military (New York: Norton, 2003). Several alternative press outlets have also tracked this issue, including for example Mother Jones magazine, which ran a story by Chalmers Johnson on this issue, and the Nation Institute’s Tom Engelhardt, who has run a number of pieces in his TomDispatch touching on U.S. overseas bases. 

For additional information: For those interested in following up on the Manta base, the best source of information online is the web site of the Ecuadorean daily: El Universo at http://www.eluniverso.com/.

I would also suggest looking at the studies about U.S. forward operation locations published by the Amsterdam-based Transnational Institute at http://www.tni.org/.

To find out more about U.S. cross-border interdiction policies, a story that has been woefully under-reported in the United States, I suggest taking a look at other stories I have written on this subject, some of which are available on the web site of the International Reporting Project: http://www.pewfellowships.org/index.htm.

Finally, to get a global perspective of U.S. basing ambitions, I suggest perusing the May 2005 report of the U.S. Overseas Basing Commission, which is available online at http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/dod/obc.pdf. 

Update by Lisa Haugaard: While the nation is focused on events in Iraq and Afghanistan, 9/11 has also had a disturbing impact on U.S. policy toward Latin America. But the growth in U.S. military programs towards Latin America and the unfortunate emphasis by the United States on encouraging non-defense related roles for militaries is part of a more general trend that the Center for International Policy, Latin America Working Group Education Fund and Washington Office on Latin America have been documenting since 1997. Latin American civil society organizations, individuals and governmental leaders have struggled hard to strictly limit their militaries’ involvement in civilian affairs, given that many militaries in the region had exercised severe repression, carried out military coups and maintained political control during several turbulent decades. After this painful history, it is troubling for the United States to be encouraging militaries to once again adopt non-defense related roles, as is the growing weight of U.S. military, rather than regional development aid in U.S. relations.

We are seeing a continuation of the general trend of declining U.S. development assistance and stable military aid to the region as well as the United States encouraging actions that blur the line between civilian police and military roles. We are also witnessing efforts by the Defense Department to exercise greater control over “security assistance”(foreign military aid programs) worldwide, which were once overseen exclusively by the State Department. This almost invisible shift-—by no means limited to Latin America—is disturbing because it removes the State Department as the lead agency in deciding where foreign military aid and training is appropriate as part of U.S. foreign policy. It will lead to less stringent oversight of military programs and less emphasis upon human rights conditionality.

Our report, which we published in Spanish, received good coverage from the Latin American press. Mainstream U.S. newspapers regularly use our military aid database. The larger story about the general trends in U.S. military aid in Latin America and changes in oversight of foreign military programs, however, is one that has been covered by only a few major media outlets.

To see our military aid database, reports and other information (a collaborative project by the three organizations) see our “Just the Facts” website, http://www.ciponline.org/facts. See also our organizations’ websites: Washington Office on Latin America, www.wola.org; Center for International Policy, www. ciponline.org; and Latin America Working Group Education Fund, www.lawg.org.

We welcome efforts by journalists, scholars and nongovernmental organizations to insist upon greater transparency and public oversight of U.S. military training programs, not just in Latin America but worldwide.  

#18 Little Known Stock Fraud Could Weaken U.S. Economy 

Sources:

San Antonio Express-News—March 2, 2005

Title: “Naked Short Selling Is A Plague For Businesses And Investors”

Author: David Hendricks 

TheMotleyFool.com—March 30, 2005

Title: “Who’s Behind Naked Shorting?”

Author: Karl Thiel 

Financial Wire—Stockgate Today Series

Title: “SEC’s Donaldson Addresses Liquidity Fraud,” September 20, 2004;

“Dateline NBC Cancelled and Attorney Accuses DTCC of Cheap Thuggery,” April 7, 2005

Author: Dave Patch 

Faculty Evaluator: Wingham Liddell, Ph.D.

Student Researcher: David Stolowitz 

The negligence of government regulatory agencies and the media is becoming worrisome as a major scandal, unknown outside the financial community, is bankrupting small businesses and investors and having a negative effect on the economy.

While the balance of supply and demand is a fairly well known principle of economic health, a related and similar relationship exists between liquidity—the availability of liquid, spendable assets such as cash, stocks and bonds—and security—the stability, endurance and trustworthiness of more long-term financial mechanisms.

A healthy economy requires both enough access to liquid assets to ensure a smooth and flexible flow of money and a system that guarantees enough stability, protection and security for investors to take a reasonable measure of risk without having excessive fears of losing their money. Unreasonable emphasis on the first requirement and not enough attention to the second is a trend that has developed in the last decade and may have more to do with ideology than sound economic policy. Liquidity fraud and naked shorting abuses as described in this article are a symptom of a greater problem within our economic culture. This lopsided philosophy of economic regulation is a significant factor in creating the kind of climate that has produced company scandals like Enron and WorldCom, as well as a careless attitude towards free trade and globalization that may create more costs than benefits in the name of “economic growth.”

The scandal coined “Stockgate” by the Financial Wire involves the abuse of a practice called “short selling.” As opposed to a traditional approach to investing in which stocks are researched and bought on the hope they will rise over the “long” term, going “short” involves a bet that a stock is about to go down in value. In a short sale, an investor sells stock that he or she technically doesn’t own. The investor borrows these shares of stock from their broker, who in turn may likely borrow the shares himself from a financial clearinghouse like a brokerage firm or hedge fund. Hoping that the price of the stock will drop, the investor is obligated to eventually “close” the short by buying back the sold shares at a hopefully lower price, thus making a profit from the fall of the stock. When the time runs out for “covering” the short and the price hasn’t dropped, the investor is forced to buy back the shares at a loss and take a financial hit. The short sale of stocks is a risky bet, usually not recommended except for speculation or hedging—to protect long-term financial positions with short-term offsets. As short-selling is a sale of stocks not owned, but loaned, it is an example of buying on margin—a category of practices whose abuses stand out clearly in many people’s minds as a significant factor in the Stock Market Crash of 1929 which ushered in the Great Depression.

Naked shorting is an illegal abuse of short selling in which investors short-sell stock that they have no intention or ability to ever cover. When allowed to occur, naked shorting drives the stock value of a company down by creating more stock shares flowing around the market than actual shares of stock that the company can back with their current earnings. Companies, their shareholders, and indeed the entire economy are hurt financially by naked shorting, as it reduces the money available to support economic growth. According to activist Dave Patch, ”Naked shorting steals some of the greatest ideas, products, and services in America. Small micro-cap companies are driven out of business by this abuse and we are left with the unknowns of what these companies and their employees had to offer our futures. The opportunities for the next Microsoft may never be felt as naked shorting snuffed out that creativity before it was ever brought to fruition. Ultimately, naked shorting steals from the very foundation of our nation as it steals the American dream of opportunity.”

Patch and other investors hurt by or concerned about the consequences of naked shorting organized, petitioned and investigated the background surrounding the Stockgate scandal. What they found was not merely a series of noteworthy cases of extravagant abuse by individual investors and professionals, but a systemic pattern of negligence by regulators that allowed the abuse to go by largely unchecked. A whole series of checks and balances was originally designed to prevent abuses like naked shorting. Yet, as their research has shown, every regulator along the way has failed its duty and led to both widespread and high-figure abuse. While investors have lost hundreds of billions of dollars in savings, the Wall Street Firms responsible for the abuse saw negligible fines that had no appreciable impact on their stock values. Some executives were even given raises in the midst of their negligence and fraud!

As more pressure has been brought against regulatory agencies to stop the fraud and enforce rules, an opposition has come forth that actually favors allowing the illegal practice to continue unchecked. These critics argue that all short sales, including illegal naked shorts, help bust the hype that can surround micro-cap companies. Excitement over new but untried ideas can artificially inflate stock prices, causing eventual losses to companies and investors when the bubble bursts, as in the case of the dot-com boom of the ’90s.

While it is true, as the critics argue, that removing naked shorting could in some cases allow hyped prices to climb further, such an effect is vastly overrated. The argument does not take many other financial factors into account, such as the increased efficiency in the flow of information and shares that eliminating naked shorting would create or the fact that legal short selling could provide the same protections. Many securities analysts say it is fallacious to assert that the only recourse to the adjustment in hype and price securities is to allow an illegal practice to continue.

The same enforcement of already existing rules by regulators could curb hype just as much as it curbs naked shorts. A proactive stance by the financial community in informing and educating the public could also prevent the pump and dump schemes that such critics say would be the consequence of ending naked shorting.

Often it is the very organizations that did little to stop the dot-com problem from getting out of hand while it was occurring that now cry out at the prospect of the SEC stepping up to protect small investors from naked shorting. Of particular interest is the fact that much of this criticism comes out of the Depository Trust Commission (DTCC), which takes a share of profits from every short sale and is currently fighting off lawsuits accusing it of impropriety in a number of areas. The DTCC is also alleged to have brought pressure to bear on media corporations such as General Electric to suppress the story from being reported. GE’s NBC Dateline program obtained an exclusivity contract to cover the Stockgate scandal over a year ago, and then postponed the episode indefinitely. Officially, Dateline claims that a slew of more important stories than this widespread financial scandal have caused the delay. At the time of this writing, however, they are preparing to air an Al Roker interview with an American Idol finalist. 

Additional References:

David Sedore, “Hedge Fund Assets Frozen”: March 4, 2005; “Hedge Fund Virtually Bare”: March 12, 2005; etc. The Palm Beach Post—KL Financial fraud series.

PrimeZone Media Network, “First American Scientific Corp. Takes Counter Measures to Stop ‘Naked Shorting’ of its Stock”—December 17, 2004. 

#19 Child Wards of the State Used in AIDS Experiments 

Sources:

UK Observer

Title: “GlaxoSmithKline Allegedly Used Children as Laboratory Animals”

Author: Antony Barnett 

Barnett’s article is based on the original research of Liam Scheff which can be viewed at:

http://www.altheal.org/texts/house.htm

Democracy Now! December 2004

Title: “Guinea Pig Kids: How New York City is Using Children to Test Experimental AIDS Drugs.” 

Mainstream Media Coverage: Fox News Network, The O’Reilley Factor, March 10, 2004, CBS Morning News, February 2, 2005. 

Faculty Evaluator: Jeanette Koshar, Ph. D.

Student Researcher: Mike Cattivera, Kiel Eorio 

Orphans as young as three months old were used as test subjects in AIDS drug trials in New York’s Incarnation Children’s Center. The Center, which is run by Catholic Charities, specializes in treating HIV sufferers, and the drug trials were performed on children with HIV or who were born to HIV-positive mothers. The New York City Health Department is looking into claims that more than 100 children at Incarnation were used in as many as 36 experiments. Most of these experiments were sponsored by federal agencies such as the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Documents obtained by the UK Observer have implicated British pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline’s involvement in at least four experiments conducted at Incarnation since 1995 using black and Hispanic children. Several trials were conducted to test the toxicity of AIDS drugs. In one trial, children as young as four received a high-dosage cocktail of seven drugs; another tested the reaction of six-month-olds to a double dosage of a measles vaccine. Other studies conducted on children included testing AZT, which can carry dangerous side effects, as well as testing the long term safety of anti-bacterial drugs on six-month old babies. GlaxoSmithKline also used children to “obtain tolerance, safety and pharmacokinetic data” for Herpes drugs.

These trials were conducted by Columbia University Medical Center doctors. A spokesperson for Columbia University said that there have been no trials at Incarnation since 2000, and that the consent for using the children as test subjects was provided by the Administration for Children’s Services. Consent was based upon a panel of doctors and lawyers who decided whether or not the benefits of allowing the child to receive the drugs outweighed the risks (although it was unclear what recipient “benefits” referred to). Though GlaxoSmithKline has acknowledged their involvement in the trials at Incarnation, they deny any wrongdoing. According to their spokesperson: “These studies were implemented by the U.S. Aids Clinical Trial Group, a clinical research network paid for by the National Institutes of Health. Glaxo’s involvement in such studies would have been to provide study drugs or funding but we would have no interactions with the patients.”

The medical community has defended these studies, saying it enabled children, normally without access to treatment, the opportunity to receive AIDS drugs. However, many, outraged at these studies, argue there is a difference between providing children with the latest AIDS drugs and using them for experimentation. According to Antony Barnett, several experiments were considered to be Phase 1 trials, which are among the most dangerous. These drugs are similar to those used in chemotherapy and carry serious side effects. Critics also argue that it is difficult to test babies for HIV, and results are often incorrect; therefore many of these trials may have been conducted on babies or children not actually infected with HIV.

These trials at New York’s Incarnation Children’s Center were part of a broader series of HIV and AIDS drug trials that were conducted in at least seven states on foster children. Some children died during the trials. However, government officials have so far found no evidence that their deaths could be directly connected to the experiments.1 

NOTE

1. http://washingtontimes.com/metro/20050511-103959-2907r.htm. 

#20 American Indians Sue for Resources; Compensation Provided to Others 

Sources:

LiP, Winter 2004

Title: “Trust Us, We’re the Government: How to Make $137 Billion of Indian Money Disappear.”

Author: Brian Awehali

News from Indian Country, March 8, 2004

Title: “Despite Wealth of Resources, Many Tribes Still Live in Poverty”

Author: Angie Wagner 

Mainstream Media Coverage: New York Times, April 7, 2004, and the Washington Post, March 14, 2004 

Community Evaluator: Keith Pike MA

Student Researcher: Kiel Eorio 

Native Americans, after more than two centuries, are still being cheated by the government and U.S. companies. Oil companies operate at Montezuma Creek in Utah. Montezuma Creek lies on a Navajo Reservation. The companies have under-compensated the Native Americans for the right to their natural resources since the 1950s. District court-appointed invesigator Alan Balaran discovered that non-Native Americans in the same area received royalties that amounted to more than 20 times the amount of the Native Americans on the reservation.

Native American reservations are filled with natural resources, but the government has routinely allowed energy companies to short-change the tribes. In Balaran’s findings it shows that the government owes Native Americans as much as $137.5 billion in back royalties. The issue of the government keeping funds from Native Americans dates back to the Dawes Act of 1887. The Dawes act created a trust fund for Native Americans over the years; since then the government has grossly mismanaged revenues from oil, timber and mineral leases on tribal land.

According to Elouise Cobell, a member of the Blackfeet tribe, many Native Americans depend on these royalty checks for the bare necessities. The Navajo Nation has more than 140,000 members and is the country’s largest tribe. It is also one of the poorest. More than 40 percent of its people live in poverty while the median household annual income is $20,000, less than half of the national median. Mary Johnson, a Navajo tribe member, who lives in a one bedroom stone house off the main highway, once received a royalty check for $5.30. These required checks are commonly paid out in sporadic intervals.

Johnson Martinez, a 68-year-old Navajo, lives out of a trailer that is pulled by his pickup truck. His “home” is just yards away from where gas pipelines sit on the family land. He has no running water and sometimes no electricity. There are even times when he doesn’t have any food. At night he builds a fire to keep him and his dogs warm. Sometimes he has received checks for only a few cents.

In 1994, Congress passed the American Indian Trust Reform Act. This required the Interior Department to account for all the money in the trust fund and clean up the accounting process. The Individual Indian Monies case, also known as Cobell V. Norton, is the largest class action suit ever filed against the federal government. Filed in 1996, Elouise Cobell is at the center of the suit that involves more than 100 years of revenues generated by government leases on Native American land held “in trust” for mining as well as oil and gas exploration. For years she has tried to get an accurate accounting of funds held in trust by the U.S. Government for individual Native American land leased by the federal government for natural resource stripping. The defendant in the Cobell V. Norton case is Interior Department Secretary Gale Norton. She has been held in contempt by Federal Judge Royce C. Lamberth for ignoring his orders to account for the fund. Lamberth stated that he had never seen greater government incompetence than the Interior Department had shown in administrating the money and representing itself in court.

In early of 2001, Alan Balaran, the investigator in the case, made a surprise visit to the Government’s warehouse. There he found papers from a shredder, which had records concerning the money paid out of the trust fund. The Bureau of Indian Affairs, which resides under the Interior Department, stated that similar documents were being shredded every day.

In March of 2004, Lamberth ordered a shutdown for the Interior Department’s internet connections due to security holes that could have allowed hackers to access hundreds of millions of dollars in royalties from Native American lands managed by the agency, according to Balaran’s findings. This was the third internet shutdown in three years. This particular shutdown was ordered after the Interior Department refused to sign sworn certificates that it had fixed major security flaws. This is the same system that processes hundreds of millions of dollars annually for Native Americans.

In April of 2004, Alan Balaran resigned under pressure as the investigator in the case. He states that the Bush Administration has been pursuing his refusal to silence criticisms of the Interior Department’s handling of individual Native American accounts. Balaran’s findings show that the Bush Administration knowingly allowed energy companies to continue to pay Native Americans far less than non-Native Americans for natural resources. Judge Royce C. Lamberth has ordered the government to complete a historic accounting for all funds in the case by January 6, 2008.  

References:

Rocky Mountain News, August 21, 2003 “Indians Underpaid for Land Leases, Official Charges; Appraisal Program Under Norton Targeted” by M.E. Sprengelmeyer.

Bismarck Tribune, April 7, 2004, “Investigator: Interior Favored Companies” by Robert Gehrke.

PR Newswire, February 24, 2005 “Cobell Litigation Team: U.S. District Court Reissues Structural Injunction in Cobell V. Norton Indian Trust Case-Full Accounting to Be Complete by January 6, 2008.” 

Update by Brian Awehali: The Cobell v. Norton case is important because the government is colossally and obviously wrong. This is evident in light of the success of Eloise Cobell’s team in successive court victories. The sheer scope of the case, its possible precedent-setting resolution, and the ways in which it highlights the current limitations of Native Americans’ dependent-yet-sovereign status, all provide opportunities for real reform and long-term re-examination of the terms of U.S.-to-Native, government-to-government relations.

Media coverage of this story has largely suffered from two main challenges. The first challenge has been the massive bureaucratic complexities of the case, which I believe insulated it from quite a lot of daily news coverage. The second, and subtler, challenge is the average American’s lack of understanding of Native sovereignty. Without a clear understanding of this, Americans literally have no meaningful framework to fit the story into, and it simply disappears.

Ongoing security flaws in the Department of the Interior’s trust accounting systems have continued for a ridiculously long time. Despite failure after failure to amend security flaws that allow for manipulation of records, and in spite of repeated documented instances of bureaucratic ill will resulting in massive theft and “loss” from trust accounts, the Department of the Interior is still in charge of them. Another investigative story on SmartMoney.com (December 3, 2004) reported that “officials in the Bush Administration had detailed knowledge of fraudulent practices that allowed energy companies to cheat impoverished Native Americans out of vast sums over dozens of years.”

Indian Country Today also reported that behind the scenes negotiations might already be happening between the White House and Congress—but not with the plaintiffs in the case. The piece also warns of the possibility of another “midnight rider” on an appropriations bill that would effectively defer justice for yet another year.

Because recent developments in this case have centered mostly around court motions and abstruse legal machinations, there hasn’t been much hard “news” for the mainstream press to grab onto. Without new and breaking “hooks,” I think the perception is that this is an old story, rather than the very urgent and pressing one that it is. I also believe the government’s strategy—stall, obfuscate and deceive—is a deliberate attempt to keep media attention largely surface and scattershot.

The best places to go for information about the case are the following sites: http://www.indiantrust.com, Indian Country Today: http://www.indiancountry.com, The Friends Committee on National Legislation: http://www.fcnl.org/issues/item.php?item_id=1266&issue_id=112 

#21 New Immigration Plan Favors Business Over People 

Sources:

Interhemispheric Resource Center IRC,

November 16, 2004,  

Washington Free Press, Nov/Dec, 2004

Title: How U.S. Corporations Won the Debate Over Immigration

Author: David Bacon

www.washingtonfreepress.org/72/howUsCorporationsWon.htm

MotherJones.com, November 11, 2004

Title: “Migrants No More”

Author: Maggie Jones

www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2004/11/11_404 

Faculty Evaluator: Francisco Vazquez, Ph.D.

Student Researchers: Joseph F. Davis 

A bi-partisan effort from the Federal government is emerging to close the borders with Mexico by increasing barriers that keep “illegal” immigrants from traveling to and from Mexico, and in turn creating a guest worker program with specific time limits for residency. Reminiscent of the defunct bracero program, the status of “guest worker” has reappeared as the preferred name for Mexican nationals working in this country.

The leading organization behind the guest worker legislation is The Essential Worker Immigration Coalition (EWIC), which was organized in 1999, while Bill Clinton was still president. The group quickly grew to include 36 of the country’s most powerful employer associations, headed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The National Association of Chain Drug Stores—including Wal Mart (which was sanctioned for employing undocumented workers last year)—belongs, as do the American Health Care Association, the American Hotel and Lodging Association, the National Council of Chain Restaurants, the National Restaurant Association, and the National Retail Federation. Each of these associations represents employers who depend on a workforce almost entirely without benefits and working at (or below) minimum wage.

Edward Kennedy, Democrat, and John McCain, Republican, are promoting a bi-partisan bill that would create the designation of “guest worker” for a three year period. About half a million workers would be eligible for the status if they are sponsored by American businesses and pay five hundred dollars. The over ten million undocumented workers residing in the United States who are not sponsored by businesses would be encouraged to come forward and pay a two-thousand-dollar fine to receive the new status. The guest worker category can be renewed after three years, or businesses could sponsor workers for green cards.

The proposed legislation does not address the growing problem of undocumented workers residing in the United States. Because of the nature of the work being offered under this program, most guest workers will be left with little more than minimum wage employment. There are no benefits or health care offered under the new program. The two-thousand-dollar price tag for uninvited potential guest workers means that most of the more than ten million undocumented workers will be unwilling to come forth. Historically, millions of Mexican laborers would return to Mexico during off-seasons to visit family. Today, with tighter border restrictions and the cost of paying a labor smuggler up to $300, few people return to Mexico, resulting in permanent under-class poverty communities spread out throughout the country.

There has been no serious discussion on Capitol Hill on realistically dealing with the undocumented worker situation in this country because U.S. corporations will continue to benefit from cheap labor sources from outside and inside the borders of the United States.

The official bracero program, negotiated in 1942 between the U.S. and Mexican governments was ended in 1964. Ernesto Galarza, a labor organizer, former diplomat and early hero of the Chicano movement, was its greatest opponent in Washington. But Cesar Chavez was also an early voice calling for abolition. Chavez later said he could never have organized the United Farm Workers until growers could no longer hire braceros during strikes. In fact, the great five-year grape strike in which the UFW was born began the year after the bracero program ended. According to the UFW’s Mark Grossman, “Chavez believed agribusiness’ chief farm labor strategy for decades was maintaining a surplus labor supply to keep wages and benefits depressed, and fight unionization.”

The organization of veterans of the bracero program, with chapters in both the U.S. and Mexico, was even more critical. “We’re totally opposed to the institution of new guest worker programs,” explained Ventura Gutierrez, head of the Union Sin Fronteras. “People who lived through the old program know the abuse they will cause.” One former bracero, Manual Herrera, told the Associated Press’s Julianna Barbassa, “they rented us, got our work, then sent us back when they had no more use for us.” Thousands of former braceros are still trying to collect money deducted from their pay during the 1940s and 1950s.

Money that was supposedly held in trust to ensure they completed work contracts, but never turned over to them. Bush’s proposal contains a similar provision. “If we accept, then our grandsons and great-grandsons will go through what we went through,” ex-bracero Florentino Lararios told Barbassa. U.S. labor opposition focused on the lack of a real amnesty. Eliseo Medina, executive vice president of the Service Employees International Union, and one of the AFL-CIO’s key policy makers on immigration, said, “Bush tells immigrants you have no right to earn citizenship, but tells corporations you have the right to exploit workers, both American and immigrant….” This proposal allows hard-working, tax-paying immigrants to become a legitimate part of our economy, but it keeps them from fully participating in our democracy—making immigrants a permanent sub-class of our society. 

Update by David Bacon: “How Corporations Won the Debate over Immigration” broke a story of national importance—how the largest U.S. corporations, dependent on a steady supply of immigrant workers, got the President and Congress to introduce legislation giving them a vastly expanded guest worker program. This program, like the old “bracero” program of the 1940s and ’50s, used a system of contract labor to exploit immigrant workers and deny them their rights, while creating an oversupply of labor to drive down wages for all workers, immigrant and non-immigrant alike.

The story was originally published in the fall of 2004. By the spring of 2005, corporate pressure for expanded guestworker programs had grown so strong that even bipartisan proposals for immigration reform included them. The word in Washington DC is now that no immigration reform is worth discussing unless corporate America gets what it wants. In mid-May, a new bill was introduced by Senators Edward Kennedy and John McCain, which includes a program even larger than that proposed by Bush.

The President’s program calls for 300,000 people to be given temporary visas for three years, renewable for another three. The Kennedy/McCain bill calls for 400,000 temporary visas. In addition, the bill calls for requiring the 9 million currently undocumented immigrants in the U.S. to enroll as guestworkers for six years to qualify for making application for a green card, and to pay a $2000 fine. Increased enforcement of employer sanctions, the law that makes it a federal crime for an undocumented worker to hold a job, would be used to force people into the program by making it even more risky to try to work without becoming a guest worker.

Despite these draconian provisions, the bill won the sponsorship of many Democrats, and almost no Republicans. In the meantime, Texas Senator Cornyn annouunced his intention to introduce an even more conservative bill in mid-July. The Cornyn bill is regarded as the legislative embodiment of the President’s program. It is a straight temporary worker bill, with no provisions for legalization.

No matter whether sponsored by Democrats or Republicans, the corporate lobby for temporary workers has legislation which corresponds to its program.

In the meantime, however, a much more liberal bill has been introduced by Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee and members of the Congressional Black Caucus. Instead of increasing job competition and pitting one group of low-wage workers against another, the bill tries to balance the needs of all low-wage workers. African-American and other minority communities suffering high unemployment would receive job training and creation programs. The bill would set up a legalization program for undocumented immigrants based on their residency, rather than employment status. It has provisions to strengthen protection for the rights of immigrant workers, ends discrimination against immigrants from countries like Haiti and Liberia, and has no guest worker program.

Republicans and many Democrats have derided the Jackson Lee bill as incompatible with the atmosphere in Congress, which seeks both to reward corporations and increase punitive measures against immigrants, especially the undocumented. But a rising tide of protest in immigrant communities and other communities of color around the country has criticized the growing wave of anti-immigrant legislation, and is callling for a movement to defend their rights instead.

Generally, the story of corporate sponsorship of the guest worker proposals has been ignored by the mainstream media. Reports on the Kennedy-McCain and Bush proposals have treated them as “pro-immigrant” because they would allow workers to cross the border legally. They’ve ignored the actual conditions for immigrants under current guest worker programs, as well as the money and influence trail leading back from these proposals to the corporate lobby, the Essential Worker Immigration Coalition. They have also ignored the Jackson-Lee bill, even though it presents the unprecedented political situation in which the country’s most progressive immigration legislation is being proposed by African-American Congress members.

Readers who want more information about the overall situation of immigrants and legislation which affects them can contact the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, at 510-465-1984, www.nnirr.org. More information on pending immigration legislation and the Jackson Lee bill is available from Nolan Rappaport, minority counsel to the House Immigration Subcommittee, 202-225-2329. 

#22 Nanotechnology Offers Exciting Possibilities But Health Effects Need Scrutiny 

Source:

The Chronicle of Higher Education September 10, 2004

Title: “The Dark Side of Small”

Author: Richard Monastersky  

Faculty Evaluator: Scott Gordon, Ph. D., Jennifer Lillig Whiles, Ph. D.

Student Researcher: Jason Piepmeier

The science of nanotechnology is rapidly advancing, but there is little research to show whether or not nano-sized molecules are safe for people and the environment.

Nanotechnology is the science of using molecules that are virtually impossible to see; one blood cell measures at 7,000 nanometers in width. Nanotechnology has virtually unlimited potential. Products such as stainless, wrinkle free pants use nanotechnology as well as transparent sunscreens and tennis balls that keep their bounce. The U.S. government spent close to $1 billion in 2004 on research and development in nanotechnology.

However, only 1 percent of it is going towards research for risk assessment, despite the fact that nanotechnology also has the potential to cause harm to people and the environment. The nano-sized molecules can damage, or kill, the skin cells of humans and also kill valuable bacteria in water. The reason little money is given to research the risks is nanotechnology’s huge upside; some estimates predict that the nanotech market will reach $1 trillion in a decade.

Thousands of papers have come out touting different developments in nanoscience, but fewer than fifty have examined how engineered nanoparticles will affect people and the environment. The studies that have been conducted to determine if nano-molecules are safe paint a grim picture for nanotechnology. In the spring of 2004, Eva Oberdorster, an adjunct scientist at Duke University, made headlines with potentially disturbing news about highly praised a nanoparticle called “fullerness,” named for the inventor R. Buckminister Fuller.

The “fullerness” is made of 60 carbon atoms, bonded together like a molecular soccer ball. Oberdorster put a solution of “fullerness” into a tank with large-mouthed bass and later examined different organs in the fish. She found signs of oxidative damage in their brains and speculated that the nanoparticles had stimulated the production of free radicals, highly reactive compounds that can cause cellular damage. “Normally,” she said, “particles can’t get into the brains of fish or people because a protective structure called the blood-brain barrier keeps out harmful materials.” But Oberdorster’s, and other experiments show that nano-size particles can slip through that barrier by traveling up nerve cells into the brain.

Oberdorster’s father also studies the effects of nanoparticles. Dr. Gunter Oberdorster, a professor of toxicology in environmental medicine at the University of Rochester, received a $5.5 million, five-year grant from the Department of Defense to study the effects of nanoparticles. Scientists at the University of Rochester looked at the titanium dioxide nanoparticles that are used as pigments in white paint. Rats and mice inhaled particles ranging in size from 12 nanometers up to 250 nanometers. The smaller particles were found to cause more inflammation than an equal amount of larger particles. “The smaller particles react differently from the larger ones,” he says, “because nano-size materials evade the normal defense system in the lungs, the macrophage cells that gobble up the irritants and clear them out.” Once nanoparticles get deep into the lungs, they can cross over into the blood stream and from there can into any organ in the body. Inhaling the nano-sized particles in titanium dioxide, which is on the market now, is unlikely because they are captured in liquid substances. However, Dr. Oberdoester suggests that it may be possible for nanoparticles to cross over through the skin.

Another study, run by Anna A. Shevedova, an adjunct associate professor at West Virginia and a senior staff scientist at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), found that carbon nanotubes generated dangerous free radicals in cultures of human skin cells. Her research team reported that the nanotubes caused oxidative damage that triggered the deaths of cells.

Almost everybody involved in nanotechnology says it is too soon to tell whether and how these materials might harm people or the environment. But early studies show that this is something that should be looked into more seriously. In a survey conducted by North Carolina State University, public perception of nanotechnology remains fairly positive. As has happened with new technologies in the past, this optimism may become accusations and lawsuits if the side effects of nanotechnology outweigh the benefits. 

#23 Plight of Palestinian Child Detainees Highlights Global Problem 

Sources:

Left Turn, December 2004

Title: “Control & Resistance: Palestinian Child Prisoners”

Authors: Catherine Cook, Adah Kay, Adam Hanieh 

The Guardian, August 28, 2004

Title: “Palestinians Want an End to Their Solitary Confinement”

Author: Karma Nabulsi 

Faculty Evaluator: Carolyn Epple, Ph. D. Maureen Buckley, Ph. D.

Student Researcher: Shatae Jones 

According to Catherine Cook, Adah Kay, and Adam Hanieh, approximately 350 Palestinian children ages 12-18, are currently being held in Israeli prisons. Over 2,000 children have been arrested since the beginning of the second Intifada, a Palestinian uprising against the Israeli occupation. This number corresponds with number given in a report by the human rights organization Defense for Children International, which adds that another 170 children are held in military detention centers.

Looking at the testimonies from hundreds of detained children, Cook et al found a pattern in the children’s experience of arrest, interrogation, sentencing and prison conditions. The children overwhelmingly reported abuse during their experience in either prison or detention camp. The consistency of these reports reveals that these patterns of abuse are not just the actions of a few bad soldiers, but perhaps reveals a broader policy. Virtually every child interviewed describes a deliberate pattern of behavior by Israeli soldiers or police characterized by violence, physical and psychological threats, and overwhelming force, often in the middle of the night. Cook, Kay and Hanieh believe that the similarity in testimonies from child prisoners points to a systematic approach to child abuse, calculated to exploit children’s vulnerability and create feelings of fear, intimidation and helplessness.

One testimony in their study states, “Because there was no one I could talk to and I felt incredibly frightened and scared, I tried to commit suicide while being in solitary confinement. On October 12, 2003, I was moved to Ofer Military Prison Camp. When I arrived the soldiers asked me to take off my clothes. They used a metal detector on my naked body. One hand was holding the metal detector, while the other hand touched my naked body, concentrating mainly on my back and bottom.”

Even without the abuses by personnel, the living conditions that children are put in are bad enough. The report by Karma Nabulsi tells us that children are “locked in cells for hours on end with, in some cases, only 45 minutes outdoor exercise allowed every two days. Many are forced to sleep on the floor due to overcrowding. Windows are boarded up with iron panels, which block out the light and intensify the heat in the rooms.” Practices, such as these, have been well documented in other troubled areas around the world, but are only beginning to be documented within occupied territories.

Also noticeable is a lack of decent healthcare. Cook, Kay and Hanieh see the abuse of children during interrogation, the notoriously poor sanitary conditions within Israeli prisons, and denial of adequate medical treatment as ways to pressure child detainees into collaboration. When conducting a series of interviews with 60 ex-prisoners from Bethlehem in 1994, the authors found that “90 percent of those interviewed claimed that the administration used the denial of medical treatment as a way of recruiting collaborators.” One former child prisoner asserted that prisoners were well aware that the prison hospitals were using the threat of withholding treatment to force detainees to collaborate.

According to the DCI report, “In many areas, Israel does not reach the standards demanded by the minimum rules [of the UN Convention of the Rights of a Child]. For instance, it is not possible for a youth in detention to work, and there are no educational facilities. In the territories, the situation is even worse.” This statement implies that the rights of all children (Israeli as well as Palestinian) are not being attended to by Israeli authorities. It seems that in Israel there is a problem in the attitude toward child welfare in general. But, according to Project Censored evaluator Maureen Buckley, “this story represents just a small piece of the larger picture of the ongoing, worldwide failure to protect the rights of children.”  

Reference:

DCI Israel Children’s Rights Monitor, 2004 Report “International Standards.”  

Update by Catherine Cook, Adah Kay and Adam Hanieh: In the 15 months since this article was written in spring 2004, little has changed for child prisoners, and the issue has been largely boycotted by the mainstream press. But the thousands of Palestinian political prisoners, including children under 18, in Israeli detention centers and jails remain high on the political agenda. The Israeli government still uses prisoners as a key bargaining chip in the so called “peace process.” But relevant human rights and international standards play no part in this ritual; Palestinian negotiators could not secure the unconditional release of all child prisoners as an issue separate from negotiations over adult prisoners. So the recent second tranche of prisoners released at the end of May included only 14 children. As in the past, most of the other 384 prisoners, had almost completed their sentences.

Last year saw the revelations of U.S. torture of Iraqi prisoners including children dubbed the biggest story of the Iraqi war by William Rivers Pitt in his article “Torturing Children.”1 Like Israel, the U.S. administration and military attempted to present this as rogue practice, but the evidence pointed to systemic abuse. We and others tried at the time to highlight the striking similarities to the abuse meted out over decades to Palestinian prisoners including children.2 But again, these parallels largely escaped the mainstream press.

Currently, out of around 7,500 Palestinian detainees, about 280 are children (including 30 boy administrative detainees held indefinitely without formal trial or charge). DCI/PS,3 who represent the majority of child prisoners, report a dramatic increase in arrests of 12-14 year-olds, most for throwing stones last year. There has also been an increase last year in the numbers of children arrested from the northern West Bank (e.g.Nablus and Jenin), in part reflecting the continued use of mass arrests as a method of control. They also note harsher sentencing policies, such as doubling of sentences of more than three years compared with 2003—only partly due to some of the charges being more serious.

There has been no improvement in detention conditions with particularly poor provision in detention/interrogation centers—bare cells and inadequate food served on bits of paper with no cutlery. In prisons,4 girls are still housed in cells with adult women prisoners with little natural light, and they get no formal education. Boys also receive no education, except in one of the prisons; many are still beaten and punished by having family visits refused or solitary confinement.

In August 2004, in protest against harsh prison conditions, Palestinian prisoners launched their largest hunger strike in decades. The Israeli prison administration did their best to undermine this by confiscating liquids and salts, setting up barbeques outside cells, raiding cells, beating up prisoners, placing them in isolation and refusing medical treatment until the strike ended. Eventually the strike petered out. As with so many other Palestinian issues, this action was largely ignored by the mainstream press.

This last year has seen Israel’s position, tacitly supported by the U.S. government, strengthened against the Palestinians. Under cover of its promise of unilateral disengagement from Gaza, Israel continues to entrench itself in the West Bank and extends its system of suppression and control in which arrest and prison play such a key role.  

For additional information:

Defence for Children International/Palestine Section, Research and International Advocacy Unit, RIA@dci-pal.org, www.dci-pal.org

Adameer Prisoners’ Support and Human Rights Association, www.addameer.org, addameer@p-ol.com

Sumoud http://sumoud.tao.ca; Email sumoud@tao.ca 

NOTES

1. William Rivers Pitt, “Torturing Children,” Truthout July 20, 2004.

2. Catherine Cook, “Torture of Iraqi Prisoners Spotlights Israeli Treatment of Palestinian Prisoners,” Information Brief # 106, May 11, 2004.

3. Defence for Children International (Palestine Section) Annual Review 2004.

4. DCI/PS’s Legal department regularly visits prisons, detention and interrogation centres in the West Bank and in Israel to monitor prison conditions for children and intercede on their behalf with the Israeli prison administration. 

#24 Ethiopian Indigenous Victims of Corporate and Government Resource Aspirations 

Sources:

World War 4 Report, Issue 97, April 2004

“State Terror in Ethiopia: Another Secret War for Oil?”

http://www.ww4report.com/97.html 

http://www.allthingspass.com

Z Magazine Online, May 2004

Author: keith harmon snow 

Faculty Evaluator: Tom Lough, Ph.D.

Student Researcher: Thedoria Grayson 

According to a report by keith harmon snow, after conducting Field observations in January, the U.S.-based organizations Genocide Watch and Survivor’s Rights International released a conclusive report on February 22, 2004. This report provides evidence that Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Defense Front (EPRDF) soldiers and “Highlander” militias in the Anuak territory of Ethiopia have killed thousands of native civilians. The Highlanders are predominantly Tigray and Amhara peoples who resettled in Anuak territory in 1974. The Highlanders are on a quest to force the Anuak from the region. Ethiopia is the latest U.S. ally in the “War on Terror” to turn its back on its own indigenous peoples. The Annuak territory is a zone coveted by corporate interests for its oil and gold. EPRDF soldiers and settlers from Ethiopian highlands initiated a campaign of massacres, repressions, and mass rape, deliberately targeting the Anuak minority.

According to Snow, the U.S. government was informed about the unfolding violence in the Gambella region as early as December 16, 2003. Massacres were reportedly ordered by the commander of the Ethiopian army in Gambella, Nagu Beyene, with the authorization of Gebrehad Barnabas, Regional Affairs Minister of the Ethiopian government.

According to Anuak sources relying on sympathetic oppositionists within the regime, the EPRDF plans to procure the petroleum of Gambella were laid out at a top-level cabinet meeting in Addis Ababa (the capital of Ethiopia) in September 2003. Prime Minister Meles Zenawi chaired the meeting, at which the militant ethnic cleansing of the Anuaks was reportedly openly discussed. December 13, 2003 marked the start of a coordinated military operation to systematically eliminate Anuaks. Sources from inside the military government’s police and intelligence network say that the code name of the military operation was: “OPERATION SUNNY MOUNTAIN.”

The killing of eight UN officials and Ethiopian government officials whose van was ambushed on December 13, 2003 sparked the recent conflict. Although there is no specific evidence about the ethnicity of the killers, the targets of the attacks have been mainly Anuaks. After this attack, EPRDF soldiers used automatic weapons and hand grenades, then attacked the Anuak villages, summarily executing civilians, burning dwellings (sometimes with people inside), and looting property. Some 424 Anuak people were reportedly killed, with over 200 more wounded. Numerous sources report that there have been regular massacres of the Anuak since 1980. Discrimination against the Anuak has been detailed in six reports published in the Cultural Survival Quarterly beginning in 1981(see e.g.: “Oil Development in Ethiopia: A Threat to the Anuak of Gambella,” Issue 25.3, 2001). There is no evidence of previous communal violence between the two indigenous groups (Anuaks and the local Nuer) as was claimed and reported by the NYT and other media, and by the EPRDF government.

As of November 4, 2004, at least 1,500 and perhaps as many as 2,500 Anuak civilians have died in the recent fighting. Intellectuals, leaders, students and other educated classes have been intentionally targeted. Hundreds of people remain unaccounted for and many have mysteriously “disappeared.” Thousands and perhaps tens of thousands of Anuak homes have reportedly been burned.

The Anuak men have been killed, arrested, or displaced, leaving thousands of women and children vulnerable. Anuak women and girls are routinely raped, gang-raped and kept as sexual slaves by EPRDF forces, often at gunpoint. Girls have been shot for resisting rape, and summary executions for girls held captive for prolonged periods as sexual slaves have been reported. Reports from non-Anuak police officials in Gambella indicate an average of up to seven rapes per day. Due to the isolation of women and girls in rural areas, rapes remain under-reported. Some 6,000 to 8,000 Anuak remain at refugee camps in Pochalla, Sudan, and there are an estimated 1,000 annual refugees in Kenya. In August 2004, approximately 25 percent (roughly 50,000 people) of Gambella’s population had been displaced.

To the Anuak and other indigenous peoples of southwestern Ethiopia, the government of Prime minister Meles Zenawi is a ruthless military dictatorship. Almost everyone links “the problem” to Gambella’s oil. “Since the problem, we are not able to farm or to fish,” said one Anuak survivor who was shot three times. He is shy, but he will show you where one bullet entered and exited his wrist. He was shot December 13, 2003—the day the EPRDF and local highlander militias launched their genocidal war on the Anuaks. “Many men ran away into the bushes and were killed since the problem began,” says one witness. “They are raping many girls. They keep some women by force.” The violence has almost completely disrupted this year’s planting season, and people believe that famine in the coming winter months (October-March, 2005) will be exacerbated by the destruction of milling machines and food stores.

In August 2003, the U.S. committed $28,000,000 to international trade enhancements with Ethiopia. Beginning July 2003, forces from the Pentagon’s Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA) held a three-month bilateral training exercise with Ethiopian forces at the Hurso Training Camp, northwest of Dire Dawa. The U.S. Army’s 10th Mountain Division recently completed a three-month program to train an Ethiopian army division in counter-terrorism attacks. Operations are coordinated through the CJTF-HOA regional base in Djibouti, where the Halliburton subsidiary KBR is the prime contractor.

Because Ethiopia is considered to be an essential partner of the U.S. in its “War on Terrorism,” the U.S. provided some $1,835,000 in International Military and Educational Training (IMET) to Ethiopia between 1995–2000. Some 115 Ethiopian officers were trained under the IMET program from 1991–2001. Approximately 4,000 Ethiopian soldiers have participated in IMET and Foreign Military Sales and Deliveries programs. The U.S. also equipped, trained, and supported Ethiopian troops under the Africa Regional Peacekeeping program. Ethiopia has remained a participant of the IMET program in 2000–2004. A U.S. AID representative asked Congress to approve some $80,000,000 in funding for Ethiopia’s programs in the Fiscal Year of 2005. Ethiopia was described as a “top priority” of the Bush Administration.

In 2000, Texas-based Sicor Inc. signed a $1.4 billion dollar deal with Ethiopia for the “Gazoil” joint venture to exploit oil and gas in the southeast Ogaden Basin. Hunt Oil Company of Dallas, Texas is also involved in the Ogaden Basin through the subsidiary Ethiopia Hunt Oil Company. Hunt Oil’s chairman of the board and CEO Ray L. Hunt is also director of Halliburton Company. U.S. Cal Tech International Corp. is also reportedly negotiating a joint venture with the China National Petroleum Corp. to operate in the same regions. The Anuak are also gold miners in the Gambella district. U.S. based Canyon Resources has gold operations in southern Ethiopia. The interest of multinational gold and oil corporations indicate alterior motives in the terror campaign against the Anuaks.

Anuak sources in Gambella state: “The Anuak people have not been involved in the discussions about the oil, our leaders have not agreed on these projects, and they will not hire any Anuaks for these jobs. If any Anuaks say anything about the oil, he will be arrested.” 

Update by keith harmon snow: It is important to recognize that the U.S. public is subject to an ongoing institutionalization of “truth” and “reality” that is premised on total information warfare. This is nowhere so starkly evident as with the stereotypes, mythologies and deceptions doled out to the U.S. public on the subject of Africa (the Arab world, and all things Islamic, run a close second). This includes mainstream reportage, policy debates, scholarly journals, tabloids, radio shows, and print magazines—from WIRED to National Geographic. This is also evident in supposed “alternative” media sources like The Nation and films like Hotel Rwanda.

Alternative? To what? Virtually all available media fall on a spectrum that serves up topics and frameworks that are tolerated and allowed, where “healthy debate,” “exposés” and (perceived) “hostility” (to what people in other countries are calling EMPIRE), are even encouraged. Hence we have Seymour Hersh offering us revealing exposés on torture in Abu Ghraib, but saying nothing about the profits being made over the dead bodies due to U.S. sponsored covert operations and destabilization in Congo during and since the Clinton regime.

Nation editor Katrina Van de Heuvel will steer sharply away from any challenge to the “humanitarian” actions of the International Rescue Committee (IRC), a strong proponent of military intervention—allied with the other two big humanitarian agencies CARE and Refugees International—in the recent massive lobbying effort to “stop genocide” in Darfur, Sudan. Is there genocide in Darfur? If so, or even not so, why has it received overwhelming press attention while the Anuak genocide has received none? What about nearby Congo? And Rwanda?

Van de Heuvel has ties with Henry Kissinger, a member of an IRC board, and one of the few U.S. officials to be publicly labeled as a war criminal. The IRC is a powerful faction in Congo, Rwanda and Sudan, and the Congolese accused them of espionage. CARE’s “partners” include aerospace and defense corporation Lockheed-Martin, who is also a major underwriter of Seymour Hersh’s regular print venue, the war advocacy journal Atlantic Monthly.

A truly “investigative” journalist might hack through the propaganda of Hotel Rwanda to get to United Artists parent company Metro Goldwyn Meyer, whose directors, not surprisingly, given what the film does not tell you about the U.S.-sponsored invasion of Rwanda (1990–1994), include current United Technologies director and U.S. General (Ret.) Alexander Haig. Recall that “I’m in charge here” Al Haig served under a Hollywood actor named Ronald Reagan. Hotel Rwanda took off from the now celebrated but wholly mythologized book We Regret To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed by Philip Gourevitch, the New Yorker’s premier Africanist, and whose brother-in-law, Jamie Rubin, was Madeleine Albright’s leading man. The Nation runs the standard nonsense on Rwanda, usually by Victoria Britain. Another pro-military interventionist on Darfur, Samantha Power could surely satisfy The Nation, given her selective and patriotic journalism on Rwanda and the Balkans, for which she won a Pulitzer.

Behind the mass hysteria whipped up in the post-September 11th America are the dirty little and not-so-little but secret wars whipped up in defense of predatory capitalism and empire in “uncivilized” and “savage” places like Djibouti, Sudan, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Congo and (Gambella) Ethiopia.

By February 21, 2002, the U.S. DOD had already purchased 79 RQ-1 Predators from General Atomics, for a per unit price of about $7 million, or some $553 million dollars. “State Terror in Ethiopia” was the first report, and WW4 Report the first venue, to illuminate the U.S. military alliance with the Ethiopian regime and the regional base of U.S. covert operations in Hurso, Ethiopia as well as the presence of RQ-1 Predator Drones being operated over the entire Horn region by the Central Intelligence Agency. Smith College students recently working to “stop genocide” in Darfur held a letter-writing campaign demanding that George Bush authorize that unmanned Predator drones—impersonal, indiscriminate killing robots—be launched against Arabs on horses, and other “undefined” targets, in Darfur.

It takes more than one party to wage a war. From Chad, Uganda and Ethiopia come weapons and logistical support for the enemies of the Islamic regime in Khartoum. At the same time, the Bush gang has reportedly “allied” with the Sudan government in its “war on terror”—if we believe the Ken Silverstein “exposé” in the L.A. Times (which is merely being expedient in its truth-telling). Off the agenda are any discussions of the U.S. regimes of terror in Uganda or Cameroon, for example, or U.S. support for the Sudan People’s Liberation Army and other warring militias and factions in Darfur, Chad, Ethiopia, Somalia, and Congo.

Like nearby Chad, Ethiopia has become a favored territory from which transnational corporate interests can be served by launching clandestine terror operations against Islamic governments, Al Queda phantoms, and other hostile enemies. The latter category, of course, includes Arabs on horseback, machete-wielding Hutus, Mai-Mai “wearing bathroom fixtures” on their heads, innocent men, women and children all over Africa, and, of course, the Anuaks of Ethiopia who, like the Ogonis in Nigeria and the Fur of Darfur, have the audacity to be living over someone else’s oil.

Shortly after “State Terror in Ethiopia” appeared in WW4 Report and Z Magazine, Marc Lacey, Nairobi Bureau Chief for the New York Times, ran some damage control, and reported from Gambella with a nasty little blame-the-victims story that deflected attention from the undesirable details: “Amid Ethiopia’s Strife, a Bathing Spot and Peace” (New York Times, 6/11/04). There was hardly a word about oil or U.S. interests, and Lacey framed the story to suggest that peace had returned to Gambella, an area rife with ancient tribal animosity, he declared, where the Anuaks “once went naked and ate rats.” (Curiously, not one New York Times link to this story is active today, perhaps because it has been widely noted for its racism, and so it is being electronically erased.)

Doug McGill of the McGill Report has done some wonderful and consistent work to report on the Anuak story. World War 4 Report also published a second follow-up story titled “Ethnic Cleansing in Ethiopia.” Soon after this appeared, Human Rights Watch finally published a major report on the Anuak genocide based on the field investigations “Today is the Day of Killing Anuaks” and “Operation Sunny Mountain?” (undertaken for Survivor’s Rights International and Genocide Watch by this author, as an unpaid volunteer). While their researcher received a copy of “Operation Sunny Mountain?” several months prior to its formal release and before traveling to Ethiopia, Human Rights Watch never cited their sources or contacts.

The U.S.-supported regime of Meles Zenawi in Ethiopia is going to fall, imminently, as widespread domestic dissent and protest, which remain underreported, further escalate. June 2005 saw massive government repression, troops firing on crowds, and torture spreading across Ethiopia after the people protested obvious election-rigging (sanctioned by Jimmy Carter and election monitors). Ethiopia’s secret U.S.-sponsored war (2000) against Eritrea has destabilized the border region, causing untold death and despair. Murder, extra-judicial execution, rape, disappearances, arrest and imprisonment of Anuaks, Oromos, Nuers and other indigenous Ethiopian people continue. What makes “State Terror in Ethiopia” so poignant is its sharp juxtaposition to the stories of genocide and crimes against humanity in Darfur, which received widespread attention, and to Congo, which is mostly off the media agenda.

With Darfur, what is really at issue is not genocide, and it is not about “humanitarian” anything, or there wouldn’t be so many people dead already—and still dying. It is about regime change, and some people will do anything to get us to support that. In Congo, the death toll has struck seven million since the U.S. invasion began, and the war rages on while both Clinton and Bush factions profit from diamond and gold and other hundreds-of-multimillion-dollars-a-month material thefts. Next to the holy wars of Congo and Darfur, the Anuaks are a mere thorn in the side of Empire. Such is the political economy of genocide. 

#25 Homeland Security Was Designed to Fail  

Sources:

Mother Jones, September/October 2004

Title: “Red Alert”

Author: Matthew Brzezinski 

NPR, September 24, 2004

Title: “Fortress America: On the Front Lines of Homeland Security” (an interview with Matthew Brzezinski)

Author Matthew Brzezinski 

Faculty Evaluators: Greg and Meri Storino

Student Researcher: Joey Tabares 

It was billed as America’s frontline defense against terrorism. But badly under-funded, crippled by special interests, and ignored by the White House, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been relegated to bureaucratic obscurity. Unveiled on March 1, 2003, the Department of Homeland Security had been touted as the Bush Administration’s bold response to the new threats facing America in the post-Cold War world of global terrorism. It is currently composed of 22 formerly separate federal agencies and it boasts 186,200 employees. Its operations are funded by a budget of nearly $27 billion.

There are 15,000 industrial plants in the United States that produce toxic chemicals. According to the Environmental Protection Agency(EPA), about 100 of these plants could endanger up to a million lives with poisonous clouds of ammonia, chlorine, or carbon disulfide that could be released into the atmosphere over densely populated areas by a terror attack. Unprotected chemical plants are possible candidates for future attacks by terrorists. These are some of the most vulnerable pieces of infrastructure in America.

Following 9/11 there was a big push to increase security at all chemical plants in the United States. Democrats put forth a Chemical Security Act, the purpose of which was to codify parameters for site security, ensure safe transport of toxic materials, and prevent further accidents from happening. But Republicans defeated the bill after oil companies pumped millions of dollars into lobbying campaigns to stop it.

Matthew Brzezinski’s article in Mother Jones asserts that President Bush doesn’t put much importance, if any at all, on Homeland Security reports. Security spending has risen just 4 percent since 9/11, and most of that increase was only to cover higher insurance programs. There are many chemical plants that have no fencing requirements, cameras, and no guards. The article points out the spending needed to insure the safety of U.S. citizens and compares it (unfavorably) to the amount spent in Iraq over the same time period.

Aside from being hamstrung by its reluctant architects, DHS simply has not been able to compete with Iraq in the battle for resources. With the President’s tax cuts trimming government revenues, and budget deficits reaching levels not seen since the Vietnam War, money is tight for programs the White House does not see as top priorities. The truth of the matter is that Homeland Security is very much a shoestring operation—so much so that worried Democrats in Congress keep trying to throw more money at it.

Brzezinski, recent author of “Fortress America” and former Wall Street correspondent, suggests the Department of Homeland Security needs a serious reassessment of its goals and operations to better protect Americans. He says the White House has decided that the Homeland Security intelligence unit should rank lower than the FBI and the CIA. Seven Republican Senators that had previously endorsed the Chemical Security Act later withdrew their support. $5.7 million in contributions from the petrochemical campaign (led by the American Petroleum Institute) helped to ensure that Republicans took the Senate in the 2002 midterm elections and that the Chemical Security Act die out. People opposing the act emphasized the economic impact of the Security Act. The argument was that Chlorine and its derivatives went into products that account for 45 percent of the nations GDP, and reductions to its production would hurt the economy.

Three years after 9/11 almost anybody can still gain entry into thousands of chemical sites across the country. If a factory spends lots of money on security spending upgrades, its products can’t compete with other factories that spend nothing. Only legislation can level the playing field.

The failure of the mainstream media to acknowledge the fact that Homeland Security has been a complete washout further signifies the cozy relationship it enjoys with the halls of power. Protection of the homeland has been an area where the president has received consistently high marks from the country—ostensibly because this is the one area where he has stayed strong and focused. It would have been helpful for the country to know if this wasn’t true. 

References:

Judy Clark, Oil and Gas Journal, June 23, 2003, “Government, Industry Forge Partnerships for Security Enhancement.”

Primedia, August 1, 2003, “An Overlooked Vulnerability?” 

Project Censored – Sonoma State University

1801 East Cotati Ave., Rohnert Park, CA 94928

(707) 664-2500

censored@sonoma.edu