The following article appeared on the website: consortiumnews.com.

Major national news outlets have gone silent in the face of evidence that they published misleading stories about the Florida presidential recount. The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, the Washington Post and other leading news organizations relied on a dubious hypothesis to craft stories last month portraying George W. Bush as the recount winner, when the recount actually showed that Al Gore won if all legally cast votes were counted.

The news outlets assumed, incorrectly as it turned out, that so-called “overvotes,” which heavily favored Gore, would have been ignored if the Florida court-ordered recount had been allowed to proceed and that therefore Bush would have won even without the intervention of five conservative allies on the U.S. Supreme Court. “Study of Disputed Florida Ballots Finds Justices Did Not Cast the Deciding Vote,” the New York Times front-page headline read. “Florida Recounts Would Have Favored Bush,” declared the Washington Post.

Difficult times demand clarity from those who have the ability to express opinions in the media. Often times, media will seek an “expert” or an “informed” opinion to add texture to a particular story of national importance. Not surprising in the least, the lead story in The Columbus Dispatch on Sunday October 14, 2001 was “Testing America’s Resolve.” Within the text, were quotes from professor of military history at The Ohio State University, Allan R. Millett. According to the professor, “The terrorists are ahead of us by 6,000 dead to begin with, and that adds up to a lot of angry Americans.”

We are always telling people how the growing prison- industrial complex (PIC) is all about making money off of prisoners, but we need to understand precisely how this is being done so that we can explain it to the general public and show them how detrimental this is to our community.

Many rural towns have traditionally sought prisons as a source of jobs and local tax money. Another way small rural towns benefit from having prisons in their communities is through the U. S. Census report. Prisoners are counted into the census report and increase the population level, which is used to determine how much federal and state funding their town, and county receives. It doesn’t matter that none of the funding is used for the imprisoned population in their areas. It’s a staggering windfall for those small towns and counties that have one or more prisons. It brings millions of dollars into rural communities, and it robs larger urban areas of much needed funds.

I arrived back from Colombia tired but very, very happy with the trip. I have nothing but the highest praise for Witness for Peace volunteers Jess and Julia who organized our delegation to travel and learn about the realities of life for ordinary people — our brothers and sisters — in Colombia. Following are a few observations from Colombia, a country with more School of the Americas (aka Assassins) graduates than any other country:

In Colombia we met with people displaced by the war, human rights workers who risk their lives for peace every day (some of whom are in hiding), campesinos whose corn, beans, banana trees, and yucca have been fumigated — sprayed from the air with Round-Up Ultra (“Ultra” because it has Cosmo-Flux 411F added to it, a chemical that our own EPA has rated as

Several years ago, while I was a student at Columbia University’s School of In- ternational and Public Affairs, one of the hottest topics of debate was an article Harvard’s Samuel Huntington wrote in Foreign Affairs magazine titled “The Clash of Civilizations?”

The article caused such a furry that a veritable “who’s who” of scholars wrote responses. Never one to pass up an opportunity, Huntington expanded his article into a book by the same title.

After the end of the Cold War, some academics, commentators, and practitioners were optimistic about the positive changes that they vigorously maintained were just over the horizon. Huntington did not see so rosy a picture. In the world now devoid of the two balancing, stabilizing superpowers, Huntington saw a coming clash of ancient, inherently adverse cultures. These cultures, suppressed by the geopolitical realities of the Cold War, would in the post-Cold War world lead to an inevitable and largely unpreventable war between civilizations.