THIS FAR AND NO FURTHER
A Timeline of Events Surrounding the Radical Right's Attempt to Subvert American Democracy
Written and Compiled by Black Max
August 2004:
Week Three
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- August 15: The Iraqi conference on democratic elections and a permanent govermnent dissolves into chaos, with Shi'ite delegates demanding that the conference be stopped because of the US military operations in the holy city of Najaf (see below). Mortar shells exploding near the site of the conference further disrupt the proceedings. In an attempt to control the media coverage of the Najaf offensive, interim president Ayad Allawi has ordered all journalists to be expelled from the city. As yet, no delegates have walked out of the conference. (New York Times/Global Security)
- August 15: The ceasefire in the Shi'ite holy city of Najaf collapses, and Shi'ite fighters are trading fire and setting off bombs throughout the city and in other Iraqi locales, especially Baghdad. Hundreds of members of the Mahdi Army, led by radical Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, are holed up in the revered Imam Ali mosque, which US and Iraqi forces are reluctant to attack for fear of further damaging the shrine and inflaming passions even more. The violence threatens to further disrupt the long-touted conference in Baghdad designed to pave the way towards establishing a constitutional democracy in Iraq. (AP/CommonDreams)
- August 15: The US strategy for pacifying Iraq has foundered on the "unexpected" backlash of resistance among the nation's Shi'ite Muslims. Formerly considered allies of the US, since the Shi'a, though the majority of Iraqis, were traditionally oppressed by Saddam Hussein and thus welcoming of his overthrow, now the same Shi'ites have turned against the American occupiers in droves. The second major uprising by Shi'ite followers of Moqtada al-Sadr has seen Shi'ites firing on American, British, and Italian troops for over 10 days so far, but the increasing numbers of violently disaffected Shi'ites makes it increasingly difficult for American officials to portray them as members of a small, embittered minority. The US intrusion into the Shi'ite holy city of Najaf is radicalizing even more members of the Islamic sect, many of whom have thrown off the restraint called for by the influential Grand Ayatollah Sistani, now seen by many as little more than an American puppet. Al-Sistani's reluctant embrace of the US-sponsored interim government, and a systematic failure by the US to produce promised improvements in basic needs such as water and electricity, add to the disaffection of many Shi'ites. And al-Sistani's recent heart surgery removes him as a direct influence on the Iraqi Shia, leaving the road clear for younger, more radical clerics like al-Sadr to gain power. (Scotsman)
- August 15: Bush announces his support for the Pentagon's plan to redeploy 70,000 troops currently stationed in Europe and Asia to Iraq. The rearrangement, announced by the Pentagon in June, is the largest redeployment of US forces since the end of the Cold War. As Pentagon policy makers envisioned the plan in June, the Army's First Armored Division and First Infantry Division, both based in Germany, would return to the United States. A brigade equipped with light armored vehicles would be deployed in Germany in their place. A typical division can number as many as 20,000 troops, or three brigades, but the First Armored Division and the First Infantry Division have only two brigades each in Germany. Pentagon officials also said in June that a wing of F-16 fighter jets could be shifted from its base in Germany to the Incirlik Air Base in Turkey, moving the aircraft closer to the Middle East. In addition, Pentagon officials said the Navy's headquarters in Europe would be transferred to Italy from Britain. Douglas Feith, the under secretary of defense for policy, has briefed German officials. "Everything is going to move everywhere," Feith said a year ago, as the administration was developing the details of the plan. "There is not going to be a place in the world where it's going to be the same as it used to be." (New York Times/Truthout)
- August 15: The report on the Pentagon's internal inquiry of the Abu Ghraib prison tortures, otherwise known as the "Fay Report" after General George Fay, who launched the inquiry, is being labeled a whitewash even before its public release. Its conclusions, leaked to the press, place the entirety of blame on low-level soldiers and intelligence officers, and covers up the involvement of senior military and civilian officials, particularly Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, whose participation in ordering and authorizing the brutal treatment of prisoners was judged to be outside the scope of the inquiry. "This is a whitewash -- a carefully orchestrated one," says a lawyer who has liaised with military officials involved in the case. "People in the Pentagon have been coming to me in a fury because of the way this has been handled. By naming military intelligence officials as well as the seven military police who have been charged, it will look like action has been taken. But basically it's still the same storyline of just a few bad apples, way down the food chain." The decision to limit the investigation to military personnel has caused huge controversy within the Pentagon. "some of the military lawyers are incandescent," says one Pentagon adviser. "There's been a deliberate attempt to make sure the buck stops well before it gets to the doors of the civilian hierarchy." A separate Pentagon investigation into the Abu Ghraib scandal, chaired by the former CIA director James Schlesinger, is expected to criticize Rumsfeld and senior aides for failing to set clear interrogation rules for Iraq. But according to the rules by which this investigation, unlike the Fay report, was set up, Schlesinger's panel is not allowed to enter into "matters of personal accountability." Pentagon officials said last week that military intelligence officials found to have orchestrated detainee abuse will face sanctions such as loss of pay and reduction in rank. The most serious misdemeanors will lead to court-martial. (Daily Telegraph)
- August 15: Under the Bush regime, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has been transformed from an agency bound to ensure the safety and well-being of American workers into a business-friendly organization where worker safety comes well behind business interests. One stunning example is the resurgence of a new and virulent strain of tuberculosis. Beginning in 1993, the government began writing rules to protect 5 million people whose jobs put them in special danger. Hospitals and homeless shelters, prisons and drug treatment centers -- all would be required to test their employees for TB, hand out breathing masks and quarantine those with the disease. These steps, OSHA predicted, could prevent 25,000 infections a year and 135 deaths. By the time Bush took office in January 2001, the tuberculosis rules were nearly complete. But the new administration did nothing on the issue for the next three years. Then, on the last day of 2003, in an action so obscure it was not mentioned in any major newspaper in the country, the administration canceled the rules. Voluntary measures, federal officials said, were effective enough to make regulation unnecessary. The demise of the decade-old plan of defense against tuberculosis reflects the way OSHA has altered its regulatory mission to embrace a more business-friendly posture. In the past three and a half years, OSHA, the branch of the Labor Department in charge of workers' well-being, has eliminated nearly five times as many pending standards as it has completed. It has not started any major new health or safety rules, setting Bush apart from the previous three presidents, including Ronald Reagan. Unlike his two predecessors, Bush has canceled more of the unfinished regulatory work he inherited than he has completed. He has also begun fewer new rules than either President Bill Clinton or President George H.W. Bush during the same period of their presidencies. Since the younger Bush took office, federal agencies have begun roughly 25% fewer rules than Clinton and 13% fewer than Bush's father during comparable periods. Sally Katzen, who oversaw all federal regulation for five years under Clinton as deputy budget director for information and regulatory affairs, says new regulations were, in those days, embraced as a means to improve the quality of water, of air, of people's lives. "Bush, or at least the people around him, are skeptical, if not hostile to that notion," she says.
- During the 2001 transition, Bush virtually ignored the entire Labor Department, slating one congressional aide to handle the entire sprawling department. He turned OSHA over to a former Monsanto director, John Henshaw; while Henshaw was originally seen as a relatively palatable choice by unions and other workers' organizations, he quickly joined Labor Secretary Elaine Chao and other Bush officials in slashing programs and regulations from the department. Two months into his term, Bush, with the help of Chao and Henshaw, canceled a huge, Clinton-era mandate for workplaces to address ergonomic injuries, which cost millions of man-hours and cause hundreds of thousands of job-related injuries and hospitalizations a year. The Clinton administration believed the standard, covering more than 6 million work sites at an estimated cost of $4.5 billion for employers, was the biggest step the government could take to protect the greatest number of employees, and one it had taken in consultation with both workers' rights organizations and industry representatives. "In the past, the business community worked to develop regulations that were acceptable," says Patrick Tyson, an Atlanta lawyer representing corporations in occupational safety matters who held senior positions at OSHA in the 1970s and '80s. "But now the game has changed, and the business community feels like they can kill any regulation they want."
- Under Bush, OSHA's budget was slashed, though Congress managed to retain some of the lost jobs and funding. "I finally couldn't take it anymore," says Peter Infante, who retired after 24 years at OSHA as the senior epidemiologist who helped to develop health standards. He had planned to stay long enough to finish years of work on rules to protect workers from beryllium, a metal that can cause cancer if inhaled in minute amounts. Instead, he left in May 2002, saying that the only US company that mines and processes beryllium ore had gained too much influence inside the agency. Instead of relying on inspections, OSHA now relies on voluntary cooperation from industries, and takes corporations' word that regulations are being followed and safety standards are being observed. Union participation is unofficially, but efficiently, discouraged. In November 2002, OSHA announced an alliance with 13 airlines and the National Safety Council to find better ways to prevent workers who handle baggage from being injured. The OSHA alliance excluded airline unions, which had asked to take part. "It is simply illogical and insulting," Sonny Hall, president of the AFL-CIO's transportation trades department, said at the time, "when the powers that be in this administration's OSHA sat down to form a private-sector group to reduce injuries to airline workers that they chose to exclude, of all people, airline workers."
- Echoing Chao and White House officials, Henshaw complained that the Clinton administration had left too many unresolved regulatory issues at the agency, and said OSHA needed to convert its agenda from a "wish list" into a "to-do list." Clinton left behind 44 incomplete rules at OSHA, only 4 more than those left behind by Bush in 1992. "I don't recall things being added just because somebody asked for them," saysKatzen, who had been the top official for regulations in the Clinton White House. Henshaw's resolutions were dramatic: by the end of 2001, OSHA had simply gotten rid of 18 of the 44 rules. By the end of 2003, six more, including the tuberculosis protections, were gone. Many of the cases involved complex arguments pitting the interests of workers against those of their employers. In August 2001, the same month Henshaw was confirmed, the agency stopped efforts to regulate chemicals used in making semiconductors and suspected of causing miscarriages in workers. The agency's written explanation at the time consisted of one sentence: "OSHA is withdrawing this entry from the agenda at this time due to resource constraints and other priorities." A month after the semiconductor decision, OSHA eliminated a proposal, dating to the Reagan administration, that would have updated lists of the amounts of industrial chemicals to which workers could be exposed. The new administration said it made more sense to regulate each substance one at a time, a slower process. That December, the agency killed a proposal on indoor air quality intended to prevent restaurant and other workers from exposure to tobacco smoke or other pollutants. State and local standards, OSHA said, had solved the problem. After Congress and Bush killed the ergonomics rules, OSHA eliminated a proposal to compel employers to single out ergonomic injuries when they report on worker injuries in general. Henshaw said at the time that such records would not help to reduce such injuries. Seminario of the AFL-CIO said that, without such records, advocates of ergonomic protections have less ability to document that federal safeguards are needed.
- But when OSHA does implement new rules, they are often for the benefit of a specific business interest. One case concerns the updating of a 25-year-old standard intended to ensure that workers do not inhale hazardous substances. The update said that employers -- from factory owners to firehouses -- must assess hazards, select appropriate safety masks, train workers to use them and periodically check to see whether they fit. After the Clinton administration finished the standard in 1998, however, a critical question lingered: What safety rating should the agency assign to the different types of masks? Those ratings, which would tell how effective a given mask was at removing contaminants from the air, would cover everything in the category -- elaborate respirators as well as inexpensive paper masks sold at any hardware store. The stakes were huge for workers and the companies that make the masks: Some type of respiratory protection is used in more than 600,000 workplaces, one in every 10 nationwide, a recent federal survey found. And no corporation had a larger stake in the decision than 3M Co., which pioneered disposable dust masks in the early 1970s and is their largest manufacturer. 3M and other companies said the disposable version deserved the same rating as the more sophisticated respirators, a decision that would increase sales of the disposable masks and provide a buffer against a growing volume of lawsuits over their effectiveness. Naturally, the disposable masks have been found less reliable, but that fact was of little import during OSHA hearings on the issue in the winter of 2003.
- An expert witness hired by the government testified that the disposable masks were as effective as the more elaborate ones, as long as they were checked periodically to ensure they fit properly. The witness, Warren Myers, mentioned in explaining his qualifications that he was an associate dean at West Virginia University's college of engineering and mineral resources and that he had worked for a dozen years testing respirators at a branch of the federal Centers for Control and Prevention. He did not mention that he had worked previously as a consultant to 3M. Myers's industry-friendly testimony was contradicted by Richard Metzler, who works for the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health in Pittsburgh; Metzler testified that researchers have not evaluated most of the disposable mask models sold today. Opposition to 3M's position also came from industrial scientist James Johnson of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. He is the chairman of an American National Standards Institutes (ANSI) committee. His views were particularly important, because under the law, OSHA is supposed to coordinate its standards with ANSI committees. Johnson testified that the committee had concluded that the dust masks deserved a lower rating -- half that of the more elaborate respirators. So 3M decided to take action. In February 2004, Tyson, Tyson, the Atlanta lawyer and former OSHA official, filed a motion on behalf of the company with the Labor Department's administrative law judge. The motion asked the agency to disregard the ANSI committee's conclusions on the grounds that they were in draft form and "currently under appeal." The reason they were under appeal: 3M and two of the company's allies had challenged ANSI's conclusions just a month earlier. The company "was screaming bloody murder," recalls Mark Nicas of the University of California at Berkeley, who had been given three contracts by OSHA during the 1990s to advise the government on respiratory issues. "It just doesn't want to upset the market share."
- In April, the administrative law judge rejected Tyson's motion, saying that OSHA was free to make its own judgments about the conflicting testimony. Still, when OSHA publicly proposed its rating scale in June, it called for all masks, including disposable ones, to get the same ranking, just as 3M wanted. The 3M gambit had apparently worked: The OSHA official who spoke on the condition of anonymity said the agency could not take Johnson's testimony or the ANSI committee's conclusions into account because it is allowed to consider only final recommendations. The agency did not want to wait for the outcome of the ANSI appeal -- even though 3M was using it to hold up the process -- because, the official said, that dispute may take "forever." "We can't be hamstrung that way," the official said.
- As OSHA has recalibrated worker protections, one word can make a big difference. In the summer of 2004, OSHA decided to review the meaning of the word "provide." That question is the result of a dispute that began in 1994, when the agency issued rules on safety equipment in dangerous jobs. The rules say an employer must determine what kind of equipment a worker needs -- hard hats, protective gloves and clothing, safety goggles -- and provide it to the employee. The regulation, however, does not specify who pays for the equipment -- or whether the employer can, as industry has argued, deduct the cost from the worker's wages. A year later, OSHA said that "provide" means "pay for," a decision appealed by industry groups. Eventually, OSHA's review commission decided employers could not be made to pay without a new rule. In 1998, a federal study found that workers in low-paying jobs more often were being charged for their safety equipment. The practice was most prevalent in the construction trades, where just slightly more than half of employers were picking up the full expense of hard hats and welding goggles. The following year, OSHA proposed a rule to make clear that "provide" meant "pay for." Fought by industry groups, the rule remained unfinished when Bush took office. And it never saw completion. Last year, after two years of OSHA inaction, a coalition of nine unions petitioned Chao demanding that the rule be issued within two months. That did not happen. Instead, Henshaw announced in July that OSHA wanted to rethink part of the issue -- particularly for equipment that employees can take from job to job -- and asked for new outside comments. Agency officials speaking on the condition of anonymity said that, in the end, the government might keep the proposed rule -- or it might decide that employers do not need to pay for certain kinds of safety equipment. Or for any at all.
- While workers are less safe and less protected from injury, disease, and on-site danger, the industry groups are celebrating their success with new attempts to roll back protective regulations. Fresh from their victory over the tuberculosis standards, the nation's hospitals and their allies have begun a new campaign seeking to block a rule requiring yearly checks to make sure that the breathing masks of their workers fit correctly. (Washington Post)
- August 15: Former Israeli Labor Party parliament speaker Avraham Burg, a co-author of the Geneva Initiative for peace between Israel and Palestine, says, "I hope personally that there will be a new president in the United States of America because that's the best interest of the state of Israel. I would like the Democrats to take over and a Democrat administration to pick up at the point where Clinton left the region." Former Palestinian information minister Yasser Abed Rabbo, Burg's counterpart on the Geneva Initiative, adds, "The position of the United States was not positive and is not helpful in moving from Gaza to Geneva. ...Without a third party guarantee, we will not have an agreement." Burg says that "a good president for Israel in the White House is not one who is doing what Israel wants but what Israel needs. ...Part of the problem that we have with the current presidency is that it speaks the same language as some of our political leadership, and therefore eventually Israel is becoming more and more seen... as a mini-America in Middle East." Secretary of State Colin Powell has stated his support for the initiative. 23 countries that back the proposal, including Europoean Union countries such as Switzerland and France, but not the US, are slated to meet in Brussels on September 8. (AFP/Turkish Press)
- August 15: New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, already under fire for his harsh actions against anti-Republican protesters, has a different take on the Constitution than others: he tells an audience at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice that freedom of speech is not a right, but a privilege that can be taken away. First Amendment rights of free speech and free assembly are "privileges that could be lost if abused," the Republican mayor says. "People who avail themselves of the opportunity to express themselves...will not abuse that privilege. Because if we start to abuse our privileges, then we lose them, and nobody wants that." "The right to protest is not nor has it ever been a privilege -- it is a constitutionally protected right that everybody in this country enjoys," says Leslie Cagan, head of United for Peace and Justice, which has locked horns with the city over its attempt to stage a 250,000-person protest in Central Park. "I have no idea what he's talking about. I'm completely flabbergasted." (Newsday/RNC Watch)
- August 15: International Olympic Committee officials are furious at Bush's hijacking of the Olympic name for his re-election campaign in using the Olympic name as part of his television ads. While IOC marketing head Gerhard Heiberg says simply, "We are following what is happening and hope the campaign will stop. ...We own the rights to the Olympic name and no one has asked our permission," in private IOC officials are reportedly seething. The ads use words and images to invoke the Athens Games. One says "This Olympics...there will be two more free nations" in a clear reference to Afghanistan and Iraq. The ads air on MSNBC, CNBC and other NBC cable networks during their Olympic programming. One senior IOC member says, "The arrogance of the US administration is quite amazing. To hijack the Olympics name...it is difficult to put it into words." Heiberg adds, "We do not want this to happen. We are politically neutral." (News24)
- August 15: Liberal commentator Thomas Oliphant explains some of the thinking behind the Democrats' decision not to actively oppose the nomination of Porter Goss to the directorate of the CIA. According to Oliphant, the entire nomination is a set piece designed to entrap John Kerry and the Democrats into opposing Goss, considered by many to be a spectacularly unsuitable nominee; that opposition would then be redefined as showing the Democrats to be weak on national security and obstructionist in rebuilding the country's intelligence apparatus. Oliphant writes, "Two years ago, Bush covered up one of the grandest flip-flops of his presidency -- his embrace of a new Department of Homeland Security after nearly a year of opposition to this enlargement of government -- with the clever insertion of a 'poison pill.' The White House framed the work rules of the new department with just enough restrictions to draw the opposition of labor-supporting Democrats and turned those work rules into a matter affecting the very security of the nation. Presto, change-o -- as fast as you could say Karl Rove -- the Democrats were portrayed as opposing their own idea, President Bush became its courageous champion, and Democrats were condemned for more weakness on national security. To this day, there are few people who can summarize the actual difference over the department's work rules." Instead, led by Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle and the Kerry campaign chiefs, Democrats have instead chosen to focus on Goss's shortcomings without actually opposing him in the upcoming confirmation hearings, and instead focusing on the Bush administration's refusal to implement the recommendations of the 9/11 commission report. Oliphant writes, "For a change, it's encouraging to see the Democrats pass up a fight not worth the effort or the pitfalls." (Boston Globe)
- August 15: New York Times columnist Dahlia Lithwick blasts the characterization, promulgated by the right and spread by the mainstream media, that "liberal judges are activists, but conservative judges merely interpret the law." Lithwick says nothing could be farther from the truth. Using the term "re-activist judges" for the conservative activists being packed into the judiciary by the Bush administration and Republican administrations before him, Lithwick writes, "Re-activist judges are the ones trying to roll back time to the 19th century. Re-activists are the judges who have reactivated federalism by rediscovering the 'dignity' of states. Re-activists view Lawrence v. Texas -- last year's gay sodomy case -- as having all the jurisprudential force of a Post-it note. When the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit upheld an Alabama ban on the sale of sex toys last month, it did so by sidestepping the logic animating Justice Anthony Kennedy's opinion in Lawrence. Ignoring Kennedy's lofty promises of sexual privacy -- his assurance that 'there is a realm of personal liberty which the government may not enter' -- the 11th Circuit framed the case as a dust-up over the constitutional right to a vibrator. Re-activists like Priscilla Owen, President Bush's nominee to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, rewrite the Texas parental notification statute in abortion cases, to make it vastly harder for young women to bypass parental consent. Re-activists like another Bush nominee, Janice Rogers Brown, have called the Supreme Court's shift toward defending New Deal legislation in 1937 the start of 'the triumph of our socialist revolution.' Re-activist judges have increasingly adopted the view that their personal religious convictions somehow obviate the constitutional divide between church and state. President Bush's recess appointment to the 11th Circuit, Bill Pryor, expended energy as attorney general of Alabama to support Judge Roy Moore in his quest to chisel the Ten Commandments directly into the wall between church and state. Pryor is entitled to be offended by case law barring government from establishing sectarian religion. But what re-activist judges may not do is use their government office to chip away at that doctrine. e-activist judges are able to present themselves as 'strict constructionists' or 'originalists' by arguing, as does Justice Clarence Thomas, that any case decided wrongly (i.e., not in accordance with the framers of the Constitution) should simply be erased, as though erasure is somehow a passive act. And while there is an urgent normative debate underlying this issue -- over whether the Constitution should evolve or stay static -- no one ought to be allowed to claim that the act of clubbing a live Constitution to death isn't activism." (New York Times/Justice at Stake)
- August 15: The media watchdog site Daily Howler exposes yet another example of press bias in favor of the Bush campaign, this time from the Washington Post. Reporter John Harris writes a story gushing over Bush's casual, shirtsleeves campaign style. He writes, "President Bush has formidable obstacles to reelection, but he served a reminder last week that he is a politician with formidable strengths. Anyone who doubts it should spend some time watching the shirtsleeves campaign. In five days of energetic campaigning through five swing states, Bush looked and sounded like someone dropping by a neighbor's lawn party -- no coat, no tie, rolled-up sleeves, and conversational speeches in which he implored voters to 'put a man in there who can get the job done.' In loosening his style, Bush tightened his message. Fielding friendly questions at 'Ask President Bush' forums, or lathering up the crowds at pep rallies like the one here on Saturday afternoon, he presented his case for reelection with a force and fluency that sometimes eluded him at important moments over the past year." The Howler reminds us of the press's excoriation of Al Gore when he appeared at campaign rallies in short sleeves, with Post reporter Ceci Connelly falsely reporting during the 2000 primaries that Gore had abandoned his suits and ties because challenger Bill Bradley was gaining in the polls. On MSNBC, Brian Williams lamented the fact that Gore was appearing in polo shirts, complaining that the shirts "don't always look natural on him," speculating that the casual look was to entice female voters, and asking his guests when Gore's clever strategy would "all start becoming so transparent [that] no one is fooled" or whether the strategy would "become absolutely transparent when they go out into the hinterlands and try to sell it." Williams harped on Gore's casual dress style for five nights of an eight-day stretch. The Howler writes, "No, there's nothing wrong with Bush's clothing. But something was wrong four years ago when the press trashed Gore for wearing such clothes. But you won't recall that in this morning's report. Stepford then -- and Stepford now! Harris is wired to 'forget.'"
- In the same report, the Howler notes that Post reporter Jodi Wilgoren objects to John Kerry's sense of humor on the stump. Her complaint: Kerry tells different jokes in different locations. She writes, "The local crowds generally eat it up, their laughter and applause drowning out the collective groan from the traveling press corps." Aside from how telling the observation is that the press corps groans over Kerry's jokes, in light of the documented convulsions of laughter from the obedient press mavens when Bush cracks a joke, the Howler writes, "Oops! Normally, reporters describe their colleagues groaning in pain when they hear the same speeches night after night. With her wiring somehow crossed, Wilgoren says the tribe now groans when they hear different jokes. May we offer an explanation? Wilgoren, like the rest of her group, is programmed to look for 'flip-flops' from Kerry. When the hopeful changed his jokes, inadequate programming led her to pen this plainly post-human report."
- In a third non-issue made into an issue by the press, several commentators, including Fox's Chris Wallace, CBS's Andrea Mitchell and Roger Simon, and others, are working tirelessly to make Kerry's use of the word "sensitive" in reference to the war on terror a problem for the candidate. Wallace plays a set of clips, with Kerry saying, "I believe I can fight a more effective, more thoughtful, more strategic, more proactive, more sensitive war on terror that reaches out to other nations," and Dick Cheney responding, "America has been in too many wars for any of our wishes, but not a one of them was won by being sensitive." Republican senator Richard Lugar, after a brief moment of resistance, bows to Wallace's pressure to criticize Kerry for using the S-word, saying, "Well, I think the word 'sensitive' has become a campaign issue itself. And you saw, as I did, the two clips that were brought at the fore. It is not an appropriate word, given, I suspect, the dangers that are involved." Commendably, MSNBC's Chris Matthews has criticized the Bush campaign for harping on this non-issue, but his is a lone voice in the wilderness. On CBS's Meet the Press, guest commentator Roger Simon sinks to a new low: "'Sensitive' is the kind of word a French candidate for president would use. It's not a word that Kerry needed. He went one adjective too far in responding to that question. George Bush has, indeed, used the same word in approximately the same context, but no one has ever accused George Bush of being overly sensitive about anything. John Kerry has been accused of being overly sensitive and overly nuanced." The Howler asks, "Could any human follow such logic? Bush has used the same word in the same context, Simon says. But it's OK for Bush, and not for Kerry, based on what people have previously charged. The merits of this don't make any difference." The only difference is obvious: if Kerry does it, complain and accuse. If Bush does it, cheer. (Daily Howler)
- August 16: Iraqi police in Najaf are routinely firing on journalists now, apparently with US approval, a fact noted by journalists trying to cover the US/Iraqi advance on the Shrine of Imam Ali in this most holy of Shi'ite cities. On August 15, the mayor gave journalists a blunt ultimatum: leave within two hours or be arrested. The excuse was that police had found a large car bomb nearby, but the real reason seems to be to prevent media coverage of what promises to be a bloody resolution of the siege. "If you do not leave by the deadline we will shoot you," says one policeman to an inquisitive journalist. Hundreds of radical Shi'ite irregulars of the Mahdi Army are holed up inside the shrine; so far US forces have been reluctant to storm the shrine, a holy place for Shi'ites, for fear of damaging it. That resolution seems to have been abandoned. (Daily Telegraph)
- August 16: Yasser Esam Hamdi, the US citizen and alleged "enemy combatant" held without representation or criminal charge for years by the US government, is now about to be released by that self-same government, after a June 28 Supreme Court ruling ordered the government to either charge Hamdi with a crime, and allow him his Constitutional rights to due process, or release him. The government is negotiating with Hamdi's lawyers for his release, if he will renounce his citizenship, move to Saudi Arabia, and agree not to file a lawsuit against the government. The Los Angeles Times's Andrew Cohen writes scathingly, "'Never mind,' the feds now say to Yaser Esam Hamdi, the alleged enemy combatant whose case was decided in June by the US Supreme Court. Never mind that we threw you into the brig and then fought like wildcats to deprive you of fundamental constitutional rights. Never mind that we told federal judges that you were a dangerous enemy of the United States."
- Cohen writes, "If Hamdi is such a minor threat today that he can go back to the Middle East without a trial or any other proceeding, it's hard not to wonder whether the government has been crying wolf all these years. The government, remember, told a federal appeals panel in June 2002 that 'Hamdi's background and experience, particularly in the Middle East, Afghanistan and Pakistan, suggest considerable knowledge of Taliban and al-Qaeda training and operations.' Government lawyers told the Supreme Court itself as late as April that Hamdi's continued detention (without charges) was necessary and appropriate. Why? Because, the feds said, Hamdi was captured when his Taliban unit surrendered to Northern Alliance forces and, at the time of his capture, Hamdi had an AK-47 rifle. Since Sept. 11, many American citizens have been indicted and prosecuted in the domestic war on terrorism for less sinister conduct (remember the Lackawanna 6?). But apparently no case ever will be brought against Hamdi. No, he did his time without a judge or a jury finding proof against him beyond a reasonable doubt. And now that his case and his cause have become an embarrassment, now that the Supreme Court smacked down the executive branch's power grab, the feds have decided that they are better off just moving on. When you think about that, and you think about what the Constitution is supposed to protect us against, Hamdi's story is a scary one even during this time of terror. ...Nothing the Supreme Court declared in the Hamdi case in June requires the government to take the action it took. All the court did was declare that Hamdi is entitled to some form of constitutional due process. The government could satisfy that obligation to Hamdi, the court suggested, by some form of military review process. But apparently Hamdi won't have to endure such a process. ...This isn't supposed to happen in a nation ruled by law." (Los Angeles Times/Truthout)
Florida law enforcement officials intimidate black voters
- August 16: Florida law enforcement officials are violating the constitutional rights of black voters in the state by entering the homes of elderly blacks in Orlando, and interrogating the residents in a manner designed to intimidate them and potentially keep them from voting in November. The interrogations supposedly are part of an investigation into voter fraud in the recent Orlando mayoral elections, apparently revolving around absentee ballots. Department of Law Enforcement spokesman Geo Morales refuses to say what, if any, criminal activities are being investigated, but does confirm that voters in black neighborhoods are being targeted. "Most of them were elderly," says Morales. "That's just the people we selected out of a random sample to interview." The New York Times's Bob Herbert observes, "Back in the bad old days, some decades ago, when Southern whites used every imaginable form of chicanery to prevent blacks from voting, blacks often fought back by creating voters leagues, which were organizations that helped to register, educate and encourage black voters. It became a tradition that continues in many places, including Florida, today. Not surprisingly, many of the elderly black voters who found themselves face to face with state police officers in Orlando are members of the Orlando League of Voters, which has been very successful in mobilizing the city's black vote. The president of the Orlando League of Voters is Ezzie Thomas, who is 73 years old. With his demonstrated ability to deliver the black vote in Orlando, Mr. Thomas is a tempting target for supporters of George W. Bush in a state in which the black vote may well spell the difference between victory and defeat. The vile smell of voter suppression is all over this so-called investigation by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement."
- According to Thomas's lawyer, Joseph Egan, says that the fear generated by state police officers going into people's homes as part of an ongoing criminal investigation related to voting is threatening to undo much of the work of the league. Egan says one woman asked him, "Am I going to go to jail now because I voted by absentee ballot?" Egan adds, "People who have voted by absentee ballot for years are refusing to allow campaign workers to come to their homes. And volunteers who have participated for years in assisting people, particularly the elderly or handicapped, are scared and don't want to risk a criminal investigation." Herbert concludes, "Florida is a state that's very much in play in the presidential election, with some polls showing John Kerry in the lead. A heavy-handed state police investigation that throws a blanket of fear over thousands of black voters can only help President Bush. The long and ugly tradition of suppressing the black vote is alive and thriving in the Sunshine State." (New York Times/Truthout)
- August 16: The gap between rich and poor is not only wider than it has ever been in modern history, it is expanding at a record pace, reports the Census Bureau. The growing disparity is even more pronounced in this recovering economy. Wages are stagnant and the middle class is shouldering a larger tax burden. Prices for health care, housing, tuition, gas and food have soared. The wealthiest 20% of households in 1973 accounted for 44% of total US income, according to the Bureau. Their share jumped to 50% in 2002, while everyone else's fell. For the bottom fifth, the share dropped from 4.2% to 3.5%. Three in five jobs pay below the national median hourly wage -- $13.53, according to Sung Won Sohn, chief economist for Wells Fargo. On a weekly basis, the average wage of $525.84 is at the lowest level since October 2001. "For those working in the bottom half of the pay scale, they're under an enormous amount of pressure," says Mark Zandi, chief economist at Economy.com. But for those at the high end, life is good. Sales of Porsche automobiles in the US are up 17%. Strong sales at Neiman Marcus, Nordstrom and Saks Fifth Avenue overshadow lackluster sales at stores such as Wal-Mart, Sears and Payless Shoes. (AP/USA Today)
- August 16: Venuzuelan president Hugo Chavez handily survives a recall election, garnering 58% of the votes cast in a record-breaking turnout. Opposition leader Henry Ramos Allup calls the vote "an incredible fraud," but international observers, including former US president Jimmy Carter, say the official results matches their counts at polling sites. Chavez, whose presidency has been fiercely opposed by the Bush administration and whose opponent, Ramos, was backed by the US, is popular with Venezuela's poor, while the upper classes largely back Ramos and Chavez's conservative opposition. Chavez survived a 2002 coup attempt instigated and financed by Washington.
- There's a simple reason why the Bush administration so actively opposed the re-election of Chavez, and it isn't because of Chavez's cordial relations with Cuba's Fidel Castro. It's over oil. Venezuela has an oil reserve the size of Iraq's, and before the belligerent Bush administration took office in 2001, had close ties with Clinton's administration. With Clinton's support, Chavez, the former head of OPEC, worked to keep oil prices down. But Bush officials, in particular Dick Cheney, advocate the oil industry's freedom to raise prices at will -- this confirmed from three different oil executives. Cheney is particularly upset at Chavez's plan to require PhillipsConoco and other American-based oil industries to reduce their profits on Venezuelan oil. Right now the oil companies get 84% of the profits, and Venezuela receives 16%. Chavez wants to increase his country's revenues to 30%, largely to use in aiding his country's poor. Cheney opposes that increase. He and administration officials also oppose Chavez's land reform program, which will reduce the amount of land owned by the wealthiest 1% of Venezuelans -- right now 1% of Venezuelans own half of Venezuela's land. Chavez wants to change that. Bush and Cheney want to change regimes in Venezuela.
- After accusations of vote fraud by the Bush administration, international observers audit the election findings and report that the vote was clean. Part of the reason is that Chavez insisted on the use of paper-trail electronic voting machines, which create a "receipt" that is stored in a lockbox for later recounts as needed. (CNN, Greg Palast/Truthout, Guardian, Greg Palast)
- August 16: The FBI is questioning, harassing, and sometimes even subpoenaing anti-war demonstrators around the country in an effort to ensure that no demonstrations disturb the upcoming Republican convention. Though the FBI insists that its intent is merely to prevent potential criminal activities and not to suppress dissent, the protesters themselves often feel differently. "The message I took from it," says Sarah Bardwell, a member of a Denver antiwar group who was visited by six investigators a few weeks ago, "was that they were trying to intimidate us into not going to any protests and to let us know that, 'hey, we're watching you.'" The FBI is acting under an unusual and potentially illegal opinion issued by the Justice Department that gave its blessing to controversial tactics used by the FBI last year in suppressing dissent, including such actions as urging local police departments to report suspicious activity at political and antiwar demonstrations. In an internal complaint, an FBI employee recently charged that bulletins that relayed that request for help improperly blurred the line between lawfully protected speech and illegal activity by suggesting suspicious activity included everything from violent resistance to Internet fund-raising and recruitment. But the Justice Department's Office of Legal Policy disagreed. The office, which also issued a now-disavowed opinion that authorized the use of torture against terrorism suspects in some circumstances, said any First Amendment impact posed by the FBI's monitoring of the political protests was negligible and constitutional.
- The opinion said: "Given the limited nature of such public monitoring, any possible 'chilling' effect caused by the bulletins would be quite minimal and substantially outweighed by the public interest in maintaining safety and order during large-scale demonstrations." Those same concerns are now central to the vigorous efforts by the FBI to identify possible disruptions by anarchists, violent demonstrators and others at the Republican National Convention, which begins August 30 and is expected to draw hundreds of thousands of protesters. In the last few weeks, beginning before the Democratic convention, FBI counterterrorism agents and other federal and local officers have sought to interview dozens of people in at least six states, including past protesters and their friends and family members, about possible violence at the two conventions. In addition, three young men in Missouri said they were trailed by federal agents for several days and subpoenaed to testify before a federal grand jury last month, forcing them to cancel their trip to Boston to take part in a protest there that same day. Interrogations have generally covered the same three questions, according to some of those questioned and their lawyers: were demonstrators planning violence or other disruptions, did they know anyone who was, and did they realize it was a crime to withhold such information. (New York Times/Infowars)
- August 16: Democratic senator Tom Harkin calls Dick Cheney's recent criticisms of John Kerry's Vietnam service "cowardly." "It just outrages me that someone who got five deferments during Vietnam and said he had 'other priorities' at that time would say that," says Harkin, a former Navy fighter pilot. Harkin says that Bush and Cheney are "resorting to dirty attacks on John Kerry's war record. They're running scared because John Kerry has a war record and they don't. What he is doing and what he is saying is cowardly. The actions are cowardly." Harkin says that Cheney has little standing to question the war record of Kerry, who was repeatedly wounded and decorated while serving as a swift boat commander in Vietnam: "When I hear this coming from Dick Cheney, who was a coward, who would not serve during the Vietnam War, it makes my blood boil. He'll be tough, but he'll be tough with someone else's kid's blood." Harkin says he has decided to speak out because of the Republicans' penchant for attacking war veterans on their patriotism, in particular their 2002 slander of Max Cleland. Too often, those who are targeted simply ignore the charges, he says. "You can't let them do that again. If you let these crazy attacks go unanswered, they take on a life of their own." Republican National Committee spokesman David James calls Harkin's statements "shrill and negative." (AP/Truthout)
- August 16: The Bush administration is using an obscure regulation called the Data Quality Act to undermine environmental protections in favor of corporate interests. One example is the EPA's intervention to block the regulation of atrazine, a popular weedkiller which has recently been proven to cause disturbing changes in the hormones of wildlife, including triggering bizarre changes in the reproductive systems of frogs. Scientists worry that atrazine might cause similar effects in humans, and the European Union has banned atrazine starting in 2005. But the EPA has set aside 10 years of contentious scientific review to allow the product to remain on the market in the US. Hormone disruption, says the EPA, cannot be considered a "legitimate regulatory endpoint at this time" -- that is, it is not an acceptable reason to restrict a chemical's use -- because the government had not settled on an officially accepted test for measuring such disruption. Those words, which effectively rendered moot hundreds of pages of scientific evidence, were adopted by the EPA as a result of a petition filed by a Washington consultant working with atrazine's primary manufacturer, Syngenta Crop Protection.
- The petition was filed under the Data Quality Act, a little-known piece of legislation that, under President Bush's Office of Management and Budget, has become a potent tool for companies seeking to beat back regulation. The DQA was written by an industry lobbyist and slipped into law as a rider on a huge appropriations bill in 2000; the act is just two sentences directing the Office of Management and Budget to ensure that all information disseminated by the federal government is reliable. But the Bush administration is using its interpretation of those two sentences to effect wide-ranging changes in industry regulation in favor of business against the citizenry. John Graham, administrator of the OMB Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), who has directed implementation of the Data Quality Act, says the law will keep the federal government hewing to "sound science." He said the act, which allows people and companies to challenge government information they believe is inaccurate, is equally accessible to "a wide diversity of interests, both in the business community and in the consumer, environmental and conservation communities." In reality, the act works in favor of industry: when industry representatives demand that the government use only data that have achieved a rare level of certainty, the act is being used to dismiss scientific information that in the past would have triggered tighter regulation.
- Some of the decisions rendered by the Bush administration under the DQA include: the blocking of a ban on wood treated with heavy metals and arsenic in playground equipment at the behest of the American Chemistry Council; challenges by logging groups against Forest Service calculations used to justify restrictions on timber harvests; challenges by the sugar industry over dietary recommendations by the Agriculture Department and the FDA to limit sugar intake; challenges by the Salt Institute and the US Chamber of Commerce against data used by the National Institutes of Health to recommend that US citizens reduce their salt intake; challenges by the Nickel Development Institute and other pro-nickel industry groups against a government report on the hazards of that metal; a petition by the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers for the Consumer Product Safety Commission to retract data that ranked the risk of lint fires in various clothes dryers. The use of the DQA to challenge scientific findings that restrict industry profits in favor of safety is part of a larger scheme by the administration to politicize science for its own uses. "It's a tool to clobber every effort to regulate," says Rena Steinzor, a professor of law and director of the Environmental Law Clinic at the University of Maryland. "In my view, it amounts to censorship and harassment." Christopher Horner of the free-market Competitive Enterprise Institute, which has used the act repeatedly to challenge scientific information, mocks such concerns as "whiny."
- Atrazine has been under scrutiny for decades. Manufactured by Swiss company Syngenta, with its US headquarters in Greensboro, North Carolina, the substance brings in hundreds of millions of dollars a year in sales, mostly to corn farmers. The chemical stays in the water and earth for decades without breaking down. The number of pounds that farmers can legally apply per acre has progressively been reduced, and users have been required to keep the chemical farther and farther away from wells, lakes and reservoirs. For years, atrazine has been recognized to cause cancer. Male workers at Syngenta's production factory in Louisiana have suffered far higher rates of prostate cancer than other men in the state. Syngenta has used questionable studies to "persuade" the EPA that atrazine isn't responsible for the high incidence of prostate cancer in its workers. But studies of the chemical's effect on amphibians are alarming. The European Union has officially declared the chemical an endocrine disrupter. Given those concerns, Syngenta's predecessor company -- Novartis Agribusiness -- decided early in the EPA's review not to leave the question up to government scientists. In 1998, it hired a private risk-assessment service, EcoRisk, to arrange experiments on atrazine's environmental impacts. EcoRisk's studies showed that male tadpoles were in effect chemically castrated by the chemical. Worse, the studies proved that miniscule amounts of the chemical -- just 0.1 parts per billion -- could trigger the effect. That's one-thirtieth the level allowed by law in US drinking water. EcoRisk didn't like the study, and told the researchers to run their tests again. When the second set of tests confirmed the first, EcoRisk refused to publish the data. Instead, team leader Tyrone Hayes, a professor of integrative biology and an expert in frog development at the University of California at Berkeley, quit the company and published his findings in Nature, in 2002, and with the National Academy of Sciences in 2003. "We showed that these animals are chemically castrated," Hayes says. The EPA slammed the Hayes findings as poorly designed. EcoRisk then turned to the Data Quality Act and industry lobbyist Jim Tozzi. Tozzi helped ensure that EcoRisk would use deliberately flawed studies to challenge Hayes's findings, and turn the atrazine hearings upside down.
- Tozzi wrote the DQA and arranged for Republican leaders in Congress to insert it into law after the 2000 elections. Today Tozzi is a Washington lobbyist and head of the Center for Regulatory Effectiveness, a watchdog group that specializes in data quality. Tozzi does not reveal his center's contributors, and the atrazine petition he filed does not have Syngenta's name on it. The petition names only the Kansas Corn Growers Association and the Triazine Network, a coalition formed in 1995 to defend atrazine and related herbicides. But Syngenta helped finance the petition process through contributions to another of Tozzi's businesses, a lobbying firm called Multinational Business Services. Tozzi is "the master craftsman when it comes to working the regulatory process," says Ken Cook of the Environmental Working Group. "He knows where the sensitive spots are and where to press and leave no fingerprints." Tozzi cut his political teeth working as the deputy administrator for the OMB under Ronald Reagan, where he ensured regulations that large corporations found objectionable never saw the light of day again. Tozzi was at the OMB when evidence arose in the 1980s that giving aspirin to children with flu symptoms increased the risk of Reye's syndrome, a potentially fatal complication. A federal health agency recommended that aspirin containers bear warnings, but Tozzi said he was not satisfied the evidence was good enough. It took years for activists and Congress to force the labeling issue, years in which almost 200 children died of Reye's. Today, with labeling, the syndrome is extremely rare. After leaving the government, Tozzi helped Philip Morris fight mounting evidence of the dangers of secondhand cigarette smoke. That is when he pioneered the tactic of attacking the science behind proposed regulations. Believing that the regulatory bar was too low, he tried repeatedly to get Congress to pass legislation that would make it easier to challenge the science used to underpin regulations. Unable to receive broad congressional support, he crafted legislative language himself and gave it to Representative Jo Ann Emerson, a Republican who is a former lobbyist and onetime deputy director of communications for the National Republican Congressional Committee. The wording -- two sentences of 32 short lines -- directed the OMB to issue guidelines "ensuring and maximizing the quality, objectivity, utility, and integrity of information...disseminated by Federal agencies."
- Emerson slipped the sentences into the 712-page Treasury and General Government Appropriations Act, which became the coming year's omnibus spending bill. Under pressure to wrap up the long-delayed budget, Clinton signed the huge bill on December 21, 2000, nine days after the Supreme Court ruled that George W. Bush was to be the next president. It is doubtful whether anyone in Congress other than Emerson and Republican senator Richard Shelby knew about the buried language. Currently Tozzi is working to pass regulations barring the National Toxicology Program from reviewing any chemicals that might cause cancer, including atrazine. (Washington Post)
- August 16: Republican Senate candidate Alan Keyes, who moved from Maryland to Illinois to run for the seat, compares abortion to terrorism in a campaign speech. He says that women who choose to undergo abortions and the physicians who perform the procedure are essentially terrorists because "the evil is the same." Keyes, an extreme anti-abortionist, recently said that the 9/11 attacks were a "warning" from God to "wake up" and stop "the evil" of abortion. Keyes is trailing badly in polls behind Democratic contender Barack Obama. (Poe News)
- August 16: Liberal Virginia churches will be monitored for possible violations of campaign and tax laws by a private evangelical organization headed by the son of famed atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair. The Big Brother Church Watch, sponsored by the Religious Freedom Action Coalition (the irony of those two sobriquets is too strong not to note), intends on sending observers into churches that they feel are likely to make endorsements of, or promote the candidacy of, John Kerry or other liberal candidates for office. The group intends no such observation of conservative churches likely to engage in political activities for Bush. "You tend to hear more about the conservatives, but no one is checking the liberal churches," says Peggy Birchfield, executive director of the RFAC in Washington. The group, functioning through its Web site, ratoutachurch.org, was created several weeks ago in response to a IRS complaint filed last month by the Americans United for Separation of Church and State against Jerry Falwell. Americans United charged that televangelist Falwell, pastor of Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, violated tax-exemption laws when he endorsed Bush on his ministry's Web site. He specifically urged conservative people of faith to vote for the president's re-election. Barry Lynn, Americans United executive director, said his organization's agenda is nonpartisan. "We have reported churches that have endorsed John Kerry as well as George Bush," he says. "We want to get all churches and religious groups to obey the law." Paige Young, the senior pastor at Ferry Farm Baptist Church in Stafford, Virginia, says he doesn't bring political situations into a church. In his 41 years as a minister, he has never even mentioned a candidate's name during a sermon. "We have a cross section of people here, liberals and conservatives," he says. "It's my responsibility to minister to their needs as individuals and not try to impose political views on them." (Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star)
