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Raising hell

AUSTIN, Texas -- Friends of liberty, raise hell! To the barricades, or at least to the post office and the emails. A British citizen named Katharine Gun faces two years in prison for revealing that the U.S. National Security Agency tried -- and succeeded -- in getting the Brits to help us with illegal spying operations at the United Nations. The targets were the delegations of the six countries on the U.N. Security Council that were undecided on how to vote on the critical Iraqi war resolution.

            Now, there are two schools of reaction to this tawdry, slimy little spy episode: It was illegal, immoral and wrong, and Katharine Gun should get a medal for exposing it. Or, some are shocked, shocked to hear of spying at the U.N., where it is apparently only slightly less common than dirt.

            Well, if it wasn't much of a secret to begin with, why is this woman going to prison for telling the truth? Give her a medal anyway.

Senator facing-both-ways

We await Michael Moore's concession speech after his hero, General Wesley Clark, tasted the ashes of defeat in Tennessee and Virginia and sensibly threw in the towel.

            If Howard Dean was the hero of the dot-coms, Clark was a creation of the Arkansas-Hollywood axis embodied in Clinton-era stage managers such as Harry and Linda Thomason, Mary Steenburgen and Ted Danson. It was supposed to be "The Man from Hope: The Sequel," this time with a genuine military officer rather than Bill the Draft Dodger. The rollout movie for the Clark campaign was Linda Thomason's "Native Son," alluding to Clark's early years in Little Rock.

Call Congress: Censor Bush

Today is the public launch of our "Censure" campaign. We're taking out a full-page ad in the Washington Post. We're also holding a press conference in Washington, including two former top intelligence officers from the CIA and the State Department, as well as:

  a.. A mother from Oregon whose daughter, a member of a National Guard unit deployed to Iraq a year ago, was injured by a mortar round; and

  b.. A father from San Diego who lost his son, a US Marine, in combat in Iraq.

Thanks to you, we've already reached well beyond our goal of 300,000 people calling on Congress to censure President Bush for misleading us in his rush to war. In fact, more than 400,000 of us have now signed on.

Can you help us make today's launch even more impactful, by calling your Representative and Senators? You can reach them at:

   Senator Mike DeWine
   DC Phone: 202-224-2315
   Local Phone: 937-376-3080

   Senator George V. Voinovich
   DC Phone: 202-224-3353
   Local Phone: 614-469-6697

   Representative Patrick J. Tiberi
   DC Phone: 202-225-5355

Editorial: Janet Jackson and morality

People and industries that are still ranting and raving about Janet Jackson's breast need to shut up.

We live every single day with our young men and women in danger and dying in a war that is proving itself each and every day to be a thousand times more obscene than a breast being shown on national TV.

If anyone was watching the commercials for the Super Bowl they would have noticed that there is a very real aggression and negative view to women in general and hints of violence and aggression permeated these thirty-second spots.

I, of course blame George Bush and the whole conservative mind set that is going on in this country right now.  Any time we are at war citizens immediately become more, "moral" and conscious.  This is a mechanism used to keep us from looking at the corruption and lies that are going on right under our noses with our government and especially the news programs that give us the information. The bandwagon that has been transported into a witch-hunt over a one-second view of Janet Jackson's breast is more disturbing than anything I can remember.

Who's the real madman?

AUSTIN, Texas -- Just for the record, since the record is in considerable peril. These are Orwellian days, my friends, as the Bush administration attempts to either shove the history of the second Gulf War down the memory hole or to rewrite it entirely. Keeping a firm grip on actual historical fact, all of it easily within our imperfect memories, is not that easy amid the swirling storms of misinformation, misremembering and misstatement. But since the war itself stands as a monument to what happens when we let ourselves get stampeded by a chorus of disinformation, let's draw the line right now.

            According to the 500-man American team that spent hundreds of millions of dollars looking for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, there aren't any and have not been any since 1991.

            Both President Bush and Sen. Pat Roberts, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, now claim Saddam Hussein provoked this war by refusing to allow United Nations weapons inspectors into his country. That is not true. Bush said Sunday: "I had no choice when I looked at the intelligence. ... The evidence we have discovered this far says we had no choice."

Sexing Up

LONDON -- In a way, it was heartbreaking to watch the Mother of Parliaments deal with half of a particularly nasty problem in an impressive way. It was sad and depressing for an American because the United States seems so unable even to begin to address the first half of the same problem -- how and why were we so badly misled about the reasons for going to war with Iraq. Did our leaders lie to us, knowingly distort or exaggerate? Or was their own intelligence that bad, and if so, why? And why isn't something being done about it.

            In Britain, the debate was over the accuracy of a British Broadcasting Co. -- the state-owned radio and television network -- report that the government had "sexed up" a prewar dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. The BBC's claim was traced to a respected weapons inspector and expert Dr. David Kelly, who was outed by the government itself and who later committed suicide. With that, the uproar became so great -- and you haven't seen uproar until you've seen the British tabloid press in full cry -- that an independent commission was named to investigate the whole mess, and Blair's political life was on the line.

McNamara: The Sequel

Apparently to Robert McNamara's mortification, Errol Morris, whose film "The Fog of War" I discussed recently, passes over his subject's 13-year stint running the World Bank, whither he was dispatched by LBJ, Medal of Freedom in hand. McNamara brandishes his Bank years as his moral redemption, and all too often his claim is accepted by those who have no knowledge of the actual ghastly record. In fact, the McNamara of the World Bank evolved naturally, organically, from the McNamara of Vietnam. The best terse account of the McNamara years is in Bruce Rich's excellent history of the Bank, "Mortgaging the Earth," published in 1994.

Ladies and Gentleman: President Edwards! (After all, he did win South Carolina)

The field of battle is littered with the dead and the dying.

            Senator Joe Lieberman had pinned his hopes on Delaware, the state of ten thousand corporations, whose motto, "nihil a me alienum puto," translates as "We don't care if they make Zyklon B, so long as they file their articles of incorporation in Wilmington." Lieberman barely broke 10 percent and finally quit.

            Dennis Kucinich had pinned his hopes on New Mexico, where his presidential ambitions flowered under the aegis of the New Age goddesses but fell to earth with a meager 5 percent. We cannot officially bury his campaign because a sepulchral silence has fallen over Camp Kucinich, but it surely cannot be long before his campaign gets carried out in a box.

Wasserman column

Harvey Wasserman is right about a lot of things in his Jan 22 column but he's wrong on forgetting the south in the presidential campaign. Only by working hard in the south and making a real contest out of it, will the democratic nominee get a national message across that will reverberate through the big electoral vote states. The nominee may not carry any southern states, but by showing that the south is part of the union from the nominee's point of view, he'll generate a huge local effort all across the south, elect democrats in close local and congressional races, cause Bush to have to spend time and resources in the south, but above all that he'll portray to the nation (and to the thousands of black and white voters in old dixie) that they count, they're important. And redneck pickup truck driving farmers (I'm one) will begin to see that voting Democratic is what they want to do.

 ivan swift -- madison county, alabama

We are not safer

Dear Harvey,

I only wish that someone would write a set of responses to those "shut them up" lines used by the conservatives today, and one of them seems to be "you can't deny that the world is safer now that Saddam Hussein is out of power".

I'd truly like to see an article entitled WE ARE NOT SAFER. It should not only show that there was no threat from Iraq in the first place, that the "gathering threat" argument is mere propaganda, and that there were no weapons of mass destruction. It shouldn't just document that our military, which in 2000 was in it's highest and strongest period of readiness in our history, is now stretched too thin for any real new threat, and that we have thousands of relatively untrained reservists working (and dying) in a desert war zone filled with terrorists. It shouldn't even stop with the fact that Iraq has become America's Palestine, a country occupied by a foreign power, filled with angry displaced people living with the perceived (and perhaps accurate) lies that swift progress will be made to return power to the people and the resources of the country will be used for their

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