Advertisement

For whom does the Secret Service's bell toll?

Lost amid the sardonic humor of late-night TV comics and the metaphors of editorial critics of the Cheney-Whittington hunting accident is the role of Secret Service agents who accompanied Vice President Cheney to the Armstrong ranch. On the surface at least, their conduct was anything but accidental…and anything but appropriate.

Either of his own volition or on instructions from Mr. Cheney, a Secret Service man notified the local sheriff immediately after the accident. But when a sheriff’s deputy arrived at the ranch to investigate, he was barred from speaking to the vice president. It wasn’t until the next morning that Mr. Cheney spoke with any law enforcement officer. Meanwhile, President Bush, Andrew Card, and Karl Rove had all been notified that an accident had occurred and that Vice President Cheney had fired the shotgun and injured Mr. Whittington. Without having spoken to Mr. Cheney, the sheriff’s office nonetheless announced that no liquor had been involved and that it was an accident. Case closed.

Bush, Republicans, and Judas Priest: Breaking the law, breaking the law

Whenever Bush or a Republican member of either the House or Senate appears before cameras, the chorus from an old Judas Priest tune starts running through my head:

Breaking the law, breaking the law
Breaking the law, breaking the law
Breaking the law, breaking the law
Breaking the law, breaking the law

It doesn't matter what the topic is, the American people know that if Bush and Republicans are publicly discussing an issue, it is because they have or are, somehow, breaking the law. In matters large-n-small, Republicans have implemented a strategy of breaking the law, breaking the law.

1. Illegally imprisoning US citizens without a trial
2. DOD and FBI spying on Quakers and vegans
3. Torturing prisoners at Abu Ghraib
4. Torturing prisoners at Guantanamo Bay
5. Misrepresenting intelligence in order to go to war
6. Illegally outing a CIA agent (Plame) while working on Iran's nuke program
7. Trying to cover up their Katrina-related incompetence
8. Bribing the Abramoff prosecutor with a judgeship so that he leaves the case

The Iran crisis -- “Diplomacy” as a launch pad for missiles

The current flurry of Western diplomacy will probably turn out to be groundwork for launching missiles at Iran.

Air attacks on targets in Iran are very likely. Yet many antiwar Americans seem eager to believe that won’t happen.

Illusion #1: With the U.S. military bogged down in Iraq, the Pentagon is in no position to take on Iran.

But what’s on the horizon is not an invasion -- it’s a major air assault, which the American military can easily inflict on Iranian sites. (And if the task falls to the Israeli military, it is also well-equipped to bomb Iran.)

Illusion #2: The Bush administration is in so much political trouble at home -- for reasons including its lies about Iraqi WMDs -- that it wouldn’t risk an uproar from an attack on Iran.

But the White House has been gradually preparing the domestic political ground for bombing Iran. As the Wall Street Journal reported on Feb. 3, “in recent polls a surprisingly large number of Americans say they would support U.S. military strikes to stop Tehran from getting the bomb.”

A "100 percent certainty": the FBI and the myth of fingerprints

Few law enforcement institutions have been so thoroughly discredited in recent years as the FBI's forensic laboratory. In 1997, the Bureau's inspector general (IG) at the time issued a devastating report, stigmatizing one instance after another of mishandled and contaminated evidence, inept technicians, and outright fabrication. The IG concluded that there were "serious and credible allegations of incompetence" and perjured courtroom testimony.

My view is that taken as a whole, forensic evidence as used by prosecutors is inherently untrustworthy. Of course the apex forensic hero of prosecutors, long promoted as the bottom line in reliability -- at least until the arrival of DNA matching -- has been the fingerprint.

Kenyon Farrow at Monkeys Retreat

Kenyon Farrow will be at Monkeys Retreat, Tuesday 2/21/06 from 6-8 pm to promote his book LETTERS FROM YOUNG ACTIVISTS: TODAY'S REBELS SPEAK OUT

BIO: Kenyon Farrow is a writer and activist living in Brooklyn, NY. He is the culture editor for Clamor Magazine, and co-editor of Letters from Young Activists: Today's Rebels Speak Out (Nation Books 2005).His essays have appeared in print publications and online, and in the upcoming anthology, Spirited: Affirming the Soul of Black Gay and Lesbian Identity (Red Bone Press 2005). Recently named one of the nations "Movers & Shakers" in HIV/AIDS activism by The Body.com, Kenyon's work as an activist has also included prison and police brutality issues, drug policy,  LGBT, youth and homelessness issues. He is currently working on his first solo book.

Goes into its 2nd Printing in January!!! www.lettersfromyoungactivists.org

About the book:

Statisticians recommend new measures to ensure vote count accuracy, release "Ohio’s 2004 exit poll analysis for novices”

Why should Americans care about possible 2004 vote miscounts? The 2004 election is over. It’s old news. The only reason for rehashing prior elections is to ensure that our votes are counted the way voters intend in the future. Should Americans trust that our votes are counted accurately; or is wholesale electronic election tampering occurring? How could the evidence of vote tampering be hidden? Are the future of democracy and U.S. elections at stake? The U.S. press has dismissed exit polls as surprisingly inaccurate in the 2004 presidential election when exit polls conflicted with official vote counts. Were exit polls wrong or were vote counts altered?

Gonzales withholding Plame emails

Sources close to the investigation into the leak of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson have revealed this week that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has not turned over emails to the special prosecutor's office that may incriminate Vice President Dick Cheney, his aides, and other White House officials who allegedly played an active role in unmasking Plame Wilson's identity to reporters.

Moreover, these sources said that, in early 2004, Cheney was interviewed by federal prosecutors investigating the Plame Wilson leak and testified that neither he nor any of his senior aides were involved in unmasking her undercover CIA status to reporters and that no one in the vice president's office had attempted to discredit her husband, a vocal critic of the administration's pre-war Iraq intelligence. Cheney did not testify under oath or under penalty of perjury when he was interviewed by federal prosecutors.

Hubbard

http://mattbors.com

What to do with the prisoners?

Foreign policy and human rights experts appear to agree with a soon-to-be-released United Nations report calling on the U.S. to shut down its detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba – but most believe that simply closing it misses a larger point: What to do with the prisoners?

And many of those interviewed by us are fearful that the George W. Bush administration will use the source of the report – the admittedly flawed United Nations Human Rights Commission -- to discredit its findings.

Currently in draft but expected to be released shortly, the report found that U.S. treatment of Guantanamo detainees violates their rights to physical and mental health and, in some cases, constitutes torture. It urges the U.S. to close the facility and bring the captives to trial on U.S. territory, charging that Washington's justification for the continued detention is a distortion of international law.

Compiled by five U.N. envoys who interviewed former prisoners, detainees' lawyers and families, and U.S. officials, the report is the result of an 18-month investigation ordered by the Commission.

The Nader effect

Two ghosts stalk the national Democratic Party in its pitiful, 21st century incarnation. One is George McGovern, who taught them that only Republican values matter in a national election. The other is Ralph Nader, who taught them who the real enemy is.

The present hamstrung state of the party is the result of its abject fear of these ghosts, which has given it a permanent moral stammer. A party that doesn't believe in itself is doomed to lose over and over, even if it represents the majority of the people and even - as Al Gore demonstrated in 2000 - when it gets the most votes.

While the ghost of McGovern, who was mauled by Richard Nixon in 1972, is the most deeply ingrained and enfeebling, seeming to guarantee uncritical Democratic support ("we love America, honest") for every cynical Republican military or civil-liberties outrage concocted in the name of national security, the ghost of Nader is the most life-threatening. Its effect is emetic, causing an immediate discharge of rationality among the party faithful at every hint of a challenge from the party's values base. The Nader Effect causes Democrats to upchuck the very medicine that will save it.

Pages

Subscribe to ColumbusFreePress.com RSS