David Edwards and Stephen C. Webster - Raw Story
Outgoing VP says Guantanamo prison should stay open until end of terror war, but has no idea when that might be
Monday, outgoing Vice President Dick Cheney made a startling statement on a nation-wide, televised broadcast.
When asked by ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl whether he approved of interrogation tactics used against a so-called "high value prisoner" at the controversial Guantanamo Bay prison, Mr. Cheney, in a break from his history of being press-shy, admitted to giving official sanctioning of torture.
"I supported it," he said regarding the practice known as "water-boarding," a form of simulated drowning. After World War II, Japanese soldiers were tried and convicted of war crimes in US courts for water-boarding, a practice which the outgoing Bush administration attempted to enshrine in policy.
"I was aware of the program, certainly, and involved in helping get the process cleared, as the agency in effect came in and wanted to know what they could and couldn't do," Cheney said. "And they talked to me, as well as others, to explain what they wanted to do. And I supported it."
He added: "It's been a remarkably successful effort, and I think the results speak for themselves."
ABC asked him if in hindsight he thought the tactics went too far. "I don't," he said.
The prisoner in question, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who the Bush administration alleges to have planned the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, is one of Guantanamo's "high value targets" thus far charged with war crimes.
Former military interrogator Travis Hall disagrees.
"Proponents of Guantanamo underestimate what a powerful a propaganda tool Guantanamo has become for terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda, despite several Department of Defense studies documenting the propaganda value of detention centers," he said in a column for Opposing Views.
"For example, West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center has monitored numerous Al Qaeda references to Guantanamo in its recruitment propaganda materials," continued Hall. "Improvements to Guantanamo’s administration of judicial mechanisms will not make its way into Al Qaeda propaganda. Nothing short of closing Guantanamo will remove this arrow from its quiver."
President-elect Barack Obama has promised to close the prison and pull US forces out of Iraq. Cheney, however, has a different timeline for when Guantanamo Bay prison may be "responsibly" retired.
"Well, I think that that would come with the end of the war on terror," he told ABC.
Problematic to his assertion: Mr. Bush's "war on terror" is undefinable and unending by it's very nature, and Cheney seems to recognize this as fact.
Asked when his administration's terror war will end, he jostled, "Well, nobody knows. Nobody can specify that."
by David Michael Green - Common Dreams
I'm sorry, but there are moments when I just feel like a total alien who stumbled onto some planet full of bizarre life forms. They call this place America, and it sure is weird. And, lemme tell ya, I know what I'm talking about here. I've visited some pretty weird places in this part of the universe.
Try this on for size as an example. You might think that a president who is widely known for lying, who leads a party also known for the same, who is at the end of his term and virtually without any punitive power worth speaking of, and who is widely despised at home and abroad - you might think such a president would get a serious grilling when sitting down with the American media for an exit interview. And, even if that might seem like a giant leap for some, perhaps you'd at least be surprised if such an individual was allowed to continue to tell revisionist historical lies without being called to account in the slightest for doing so.
Yeah, well, different galaxy, I guess. On Planet America it seems a lot more like it's still 2002, and a frightened, compliant press is still learning how to embarrass itself by becoming a tool of a massively deceitful White House. Now that it's almost 2009, they've got it down to a science. Only today they don't even have the pathetic and shamefully flimsy excuse they did back then, in the wake of the 9/11 scare.
So here's what happens when one of America's most prominent journalists - Charles Gibson - sits down to interview George W. Bush. Bush, of course isn't doing the interview because he can't think of what else to do with himself anymore (although if you ask him what comes next after January 20, that's pretty much exactly what it looks like). He isn't just killing time, waiting for Cheney to dream up some other target for the administration's predatory instincts. He's got an agenda, which is why he's been granting a plethora of (safe) interviews lately. And that agenda is to write the first draft of history. Just like Jackie did her Camelot rap, successfully constructing the frame through which the Kennedy administration would long be seen, so a ham-fisted Burt and Ernie - er, sorry, George and Laura - are running around trying to rehabilitate, for the sake of history, the worst presidency ever.
According to the Washington Post, this is the implementation of a strategy put together at a White House meeting two months ago, where it was decided that administration officials should reiterate key talking points in their speeches and interviews. Per a memo obtained by the LA Times, those include pointing out that the president "‘kept the American people safe' after the September 11 terrorist attacks, lifted the economy after 2001 through tax cuts, curbed AIDS in Africa and maintained 'the honor and the dignity of his office'". That's a cute list, isn't it? In a certain nausea-inducing way. I don't even know where to get started with that, and it's probably better for all of us if I don't. One thing I do have to say, though. Just as in our movie rating system, what passes as the standard for honor and dignity in the White House is so very America. You can murder in cold blood as many hundreds of thousands of Iraqis as you need to to get your rocks off, and that's fine. But if you actually do get your rocks off - literally, the old-fashioned way - you're considered obscene. Go figure, eh? Like I said, it's a wacky little planet.
Of course, George W. Bush trying to save his legacy is not, in and of itself, so outlandish. A politician who doesn't spin is like a conservative who doesn't lie. It does happen. It has actually been observed in nature. Just not that often. The outlandish part is, first, the magnitude of the tales being told and sold. And, second, that a still obscenely compliant media allows these to be promulgated, without challenge, completely disregarding any notion of fulfilling a public service mandate to actually inform the people, let alone to hold the country's leaders accountable. What a concept, eh - a critical media and governmental accountability? I guess all that hardball stuff is only for Democrats.
Anyhow, here's a good example, for starters:
GIBSON: What were you most unprepared for?
BUSH: Well, I think I was unprepared for war. In other words, I didn't campaign and say, "Please vote for me, I'll be able to handle an attack." In other words, I didn't anticipate war. Presidents - one of the things about the modern presidency is that the unexpected will happen.
Leaving aside for the moment the question of whatever really happened on 9/11, the very best case scenario one might make is not that this president was unprepared for war, but rather that he was unprepared for defense. That's unforgivable, and had he been a Democrat who also ignored five-alarm warning bells prior to 9/11, and who spent the entire month prior on vacation after being warned about the danger, he would indeed never have been forgiven, least of all by Mssrs. Bush, Cheney and Rove. And then, of course, there's the impression that Bush's response to this question leaves, suggesting that the principal war of his administration - the one in Iraq - was somehow thrust upon him. A real interviewer would never have just let this statement go. This was the ultimate war of choice, conducted for the ultimate of disingenuous reasons.
Here's another:
GIBSON: Given the fact that you did start campaigning for change, said you were going to change the ways of Washington, do you feel you did in any way? Or did 9/11 really stand in the way of doing it?
BUSH: No, you know - actually, 9/11 unified the country, and that was a moment where Washington decided to work together. I think one of the big disappointments of the presidency has been the fact that the tone in Washington got worse, not better. ... I mean, there were moments of bipartisanship. But the tone was rough. And I was obviously partially responsible because I was the President, although I tried hard not to call people names and bring the office down during my presidency.
Again, this is remarkably disingenuous, all the more so because it feigns humility and quasi-responsibility. Bush may not have called his opponents names, but he sure as hell marginalized them as rarely ever before in history, and he sure as hell polarized the country. If you weren't with the president, then you were with the terrorists. If you didn't agree to his invasion of a country that had not a thing to do with 9/11 nor any other justification for attack, then you couldn't be trusted with America's national security. Let's not kid ourselves here, people. There's no Democratic equivalent to Karl Rove. There's no liberal guy called The Hammer, like Tom DeLay was for the GOP. No Democrat ever ran an ad morphing the face of a triple-amputee Republican Vietnam vet into that of Osama bin Laden. True, damn few Republicans - the folks who are so keen on maintaining American security, remember - actually made it over to the jungles of Southeast Asia forty years ago, but that ain't why ads like those used against Max Cleland in 2002 were never used against the right. It's a matter of integrity, and there was rarely an occasion when the Bush administration showed any of it. Moreover, Charles Gibson knows that.
But the greatest crime of the Bush administration, of course, was always Iraq, and it is here that the abomination-in-chief lies the most egregiously and the most shamefully. And it is here where he is given the greatest free pass by the media:
GIBSON: You've always said there's no do-overs as President. If you had one?
BUSH: I don't know - the biggest regret of all the presidency has to have been the intelligence failure in Iraq. A lot of people put their reputations on the line and said the weapons of mass destruction is a reason to remove Saddam Hussein. It wasn't just people in my administration; a lot of members in Congress, prior to my arrival in Washington D.C., during the debate on Iraq, a lot of leaders of nations around the world were all looking at the same intelligence. And, you know, that's not a do-over, but I wish the intelligence had been different, I guess.
GIBSON: If the intelligence had been right, would there have been an Iraq war?
BUSH: Yes, because Saddam Hussein was unwilling to let the inspectors go in to determine whether or not the U.N. resolutions were being upheld. In other words, if he had had weapons of mass destruction, would there have been a war? Absolutely.
GIBSON: No, if you had known he didn't.
BUSH: Oh, I see what you're saying. You know, that's an interesting question. That is a do-over that I can't do. It's hard for me to speculate.
This astonishing little dialogue packs more deceit, and more permission to engage in deceit, into one passage than any ‘blivet' (ten pounds of bullshit in a five pound bag) I've ever seen. Or a thousand blivets. Stacked in a manure warehouse. In the Republic of Crap. On the planet Turd. What an amazing string of lies. And all of it unanswered.
It starts with the intelligence "failure", which was no failure at all. Is this 2008 - nearly 2009 - or am I stuck in some sort of time warp here? With all that has been revealed about the lies that were lied, the omissions omitted, and the exaggerations exaggerated, do we still live in a country where the president can continue to tell this tall tale yet again? Is it really possible that a journalist would let such an absurd claim go unchallenged still to this day? Can we really continue to allow this rogue president to surround himself in exonerating complicity, pretending that everyone had the same intelligence reports that he did? And, even more ridiculously, that they all concurred that war was the preferred option at that point? Is that why the Bush administration couldn't get even half the votes it needed at the United Nations for a war resolution? Even after beating Security Council member-states over the head with skyscraper-sized sticks? Even after offering them more carrots than in all of Bunny Heaven?
It gets worse. To claim that Saddam was unwilling to let the weapons inspectors in is just a sickening and complete inversion of the truth, a full 180 degrees. The inspectors were, of course, absolutely in Iraq. Indeed, not only were they there, they were begging the United States government to tell them where the WMD could be found, an obvious thing to do given that the Bush administration was running around telling the world that it not only knew for sure there were WMD, but even knew where the weapons were located. This is the most massive lie. And, of course, it comes with other cool benefits as well. If you're already lying in claiming that the inspectors were refused entry, you no longer have to overtly lie about how they left. If they were never there, they could never have been forced to leave in order to avoid being obliterated by Bush's bomber squadrons. Nor, if they had never been there carrying out most of their inspections, could they ever have begged for just a few more weeks to finish their work. Doesn't it all just fit together nicely?
And where, exactly was Charles Gibson, so-called ‘journalist', throughout all this? Is this really what it means to be at the top of this profession? That you allow those whom you're supposed to be keeping watch over for the benefit of an entire country (not to mention the rest of the world) to say anything - including absolutely the worst self-serving rubbish - without challenge? Why not just sign on to the GOP payroll and get it over with? Or perhaps he already has.
Then there's Bush telling us that, gosh, he really can't "speculate" on whether or not there would have been an invasion had there been no WMD. That's just classic. As if the decision wasn't his. As if they didn't build nearly their entire case on the WMD threat. As if Saddam just absolutely had to go, but Mubarak and Musharraf and Abdullah didn't even get a good talking to about democracy. As if Saddam's depredations were enough to justify an American invasion, even though we had previously covered for him at his worst, and even as we say almost nothing while Darfur melts down into a genocidal ocean of blood.
Then, on top of all these lies, are the frustratingly silent ones that no one ever mentions, and never really did (and, excuse me for my petulance, but shouldn't journalists be doing this?). Like this one: Suppose the Bush people had been right in their lies about WMD, after all - so what? Dozens of countries have them, including now North Korea, and the Bush administration never seems to have a problem with that, except when it does. Whatever happened to deterrence, the little dynamic that kept the Soviet Union and the United States from unleashing their tens of thousands of nuclear weapons against each other for over four decades? When did that stop mattering? Does anyone seriously imagine that a nuclear Saddam would have attacked the United States? Knowing that he and his country would instantly have been atomized in response? And, speaking of inconvenient questions, what were we doing invading a country that had never attacked nor even threatened this country?
Somebody please awaken me from this nightmare! Really, I don't mind a politician acting like a politician. I suppose this is a sad fact in its own right, but truth be told, my expectations there are not huge.
But what's up with an American media, itself drenched in blood up to its earlobes, still offering this guy a free pass, and a global megaphone? Hey, Charlie Gibson - do you really earn enough to bury all that shame? Me, I wouldn't have thought there was that much money anywhere on the planet.
As for that good ol' boy, America's first cracker president, it seems he has managed to figure out a couple of things, after all. Talking about his parents, who have no doubt been in agony for eight years now (how would you like to have produced Caligula?), he offered up this slightly too accurate assessment of their feelings as he leaves the White House:
BUSH: And so, no doubt they're going to be relieved to have their boy out of the limelight. And I bet a lot of our friends will be relieved, too.
Ya got that one right, pal, albeit for all the wrong reasons. Which is no doubt what also produced the following exchange:
GIBSON: And final question, just to finish the sentence: I will leave the presidency with a feeling of?
BUSH: I will leave the presidency with my head held high.
Maybe this is the kind of nonsense Gibson had in mind when he asked, "Is the president too much in a bubble?" To which Bush responded:
BUSH: I mean, believe me you understand what's going on in the world. This idea about how the President doesn't understand this, that, or the other, just simply is not the case. I mean, there's a lot of information that comes through the White House.
Yeah, no doubt Cheney's there every morning to provide the president with "information" about how well it's all going. No doubt that makes it easy to leave the White House with your head held high, even after you've wrecked everything in sight.
That, plus a fawning press that would never dream of being so rude as to interrupt your fantasy with the cognitive dissonance provoked by a tough question or two.
Lordy, lord. Take me back to my home planet, please.
This one's way too messed up!
David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New York. He is delighted to receive readers' reactions to his articles (mailto:dmg@regressiveantidote.net), but regrets that time constraints do not always allow him to respond. More of his work can be found at his website, www.regressiveantidote.net.
by Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com / Common Dreams
The bipartisan Senate Armed Services Committee report issued on Thursday -- which documents that "former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other senior U.S. officials share much of the blame for detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba" and "that Rumsfeld's actions were 'a direct cause of detainee abuse' at Guantanamo and 'influenced and contributed to the use of abusive techniques ... in Afghanistan and Iraq'" -- raises an obvious and glaring question: how can it possibly be justified that the low-level Army personnel carrying out these policies at Abu Ghraib have been charged, convicted and imprisoned, while the high-level political officials and lawyers who directed and authorized these same policies remain free of any risk of prosecution? The culpability which the Report assigns for these war crimes is vast in scope and unambiguous:
The executive summary also traces the erosion of detainee treatment standards to a Feb,. 7, 2002, memorandum signed by President George W. Bush stating that the Geneva Convention did not apply to the U.S. war with al Qaeda and that Taliban detainees were not entitled to prisoner of war status or legal protections.
"The president's order closed off application of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which would have afforded minimum standards for humane treatment," the summary said.
Members of Bush's Cabinet and other senior officials participated in meetings inside the White House in 2002 and 2003 where specific interrogation techniques were discussed, according to the report.
The policies which the Senate Armed Services Committee unanimously concludes were authorized by Bush, Rumsfeld and several other top Bush officials did not merely lead to "abuse" and humiliating treatment, but are directly -- and unquestionably -- responsible for numerous detainee murders. Many of those deaths caused by abusive treatment have been formally characterized as "homicides" by autopsies performed in Iraq and Afghanistan (see these chilling compilations of autopsy findings on detainees in U.S. custody, obtained by the ACLU, which reads like a classic and compelling exhibit in a war crimes trial).
While the bulk of the attention over detainee abuse has been directed to Guantanamo, the U.S., to this day, continues to imprison -- with no charges -- thousands of Iraqi citizens. In Iraq an Afghanistan, detainee deaths were rampant and, to this day, detainees continue to die under extremely suspicious circumstances. Just yesterday, there was yet another death of a very young Iraqi detainee whose death was attributed to quite unlikely natural causes.
The U.S. military says a detainee has died of an apparent heart attack while in custody at a U.S. detention facility in Baghdad.
Monday's statement says the 25-year-old man was pronounced dead by doctors at a combat hospital after losing consciousness at Camp Cropper. . . .
The U.S. military is holding thousands of prisoners at Camp Cropper near the Baghdad airport and Camp Bucca in the southern desert.
For years, it has been common to attribute detainee deaths to "heart attacks" where the evidence makes clear that abusive interrogation techniques and other inhumane treatment -- the very policies authorized at the highest levels of the U.S. government -- were the actual proximate cause of the deaths. This deceptive practice was documented in this fact-intensive report -- entitled: "Medical Investigations of Homicides of Prisoners of War in Iraq and Afghanistan" -- by Steven H. Miles, Professor of Medicine and Bioethics at the University of Minnesota:
It is probably inevitable that some prisoners who reportedly die of "natural causes" in truth died of homicide. However, the nature of Armed Forces' medical investigations made this kind of error more likely. The AFME reported homicide as the cause of death in 10 of the 23 death certificates released in May 2004. The death of Mohamed Taiq Zaid was initially attributed to "heat"; it is currently and belatedly being investigated as a possible homicide due to abusive exposure to the hot Iraqi climate and deprivation of water.
Eight prisoners suffered "natural" deaths from heart attacks or atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease. Threats, beatings, fear, police interrogation, and arrests are known to cause "homicide by heart attack" or life-threatening heart failure. People with preexisting heart disease, dehydration, hyperthermia, or exhaustion are especially susceptible.[11-15] No forensic investigation of lethal "heart attacks" explores the possibility that these men died of stress-induced heart attacks. There are a number of reports of "heart attack" following harsh procedures in rounding up noncombatants in Iraq and Afghanistan.
A typically sketchy US Army report says, "Detainee Death during weekend combat .... Army led raid this past weekend of a house in Iraq ... an Iraqi who was detained and zip-locked (flexi-cuffed with plastic bands tying his wrists together) died while in custody. Preliminary information is that the detainee died from an apparent heart attack.[16]" Sher Mohammad Khan was picked up in Afghanistan in September 2004. Shortly thereafter, his bruised body was given to his family. Military officials told journalists that he had died of a heart attack within hours of being taken into custody. No investigation, autopsy, or death certificate is available.[17]
Or consider this:
Adbul Kareen Abdura Lafta (also known as Abu Malik Kenami) was admitted to Mosul prison on December 5, 2003 and died 4 days later.[20,21] The short, stocky, 44-year-old man weighed 175 pounds. He was never given a medical examination, and there is no medical record. After interrogation, a sandbag was put over his head. When he tried to remove it, guards made him jump up and down for 20 minutes with his wrists tied in front of him and then 20 minutes more with his wrists bound behind his back with a plastic binder. The bound and head-bagged man was put to bed. He was restless and "jibbering in Arabic." The guards told him to be quiet.
The next morning, he was found dead. The body had "bloodshot" eyes, lacerations on his wrists from the plastic ties, unexplained bruises on his abdomen, and a fresh, bruised laceration on the back of his head. US Army investigators noted that the body did not have defensive bruises on his arms, an odd notation given that a man cannot raise bound arms in defense. No autopsy was performed. The death certificate lists the cause of death as unknown. It seems likely that Mr. Kenami died of positional asphyxia because of how he was restrained, hooded, and positioned. Positional asphyxia looks just like death by a natural heart attack except for those telltale conjunctival hemorrhages in his eyes.
There are countless other episodes like this of human beings in American custody dying because of the mistreatment -- authorized by Bush, Rumsfeld and others -- to which we subjected them. These are murders and war crimes in every sense of the word. That the highest level Bush officials and the President himself are responsible for the policies that spawned these crimes against humanity have been long known to anyone paying minimal attention, but now we have a bipartisan Senate Report -- signed by the presidential nominee of Bush's own political party -- that directly assigns culpability for these war crimes to the President and his policies. It's nothing less than a formal declaration from the Senate that the President and his top aides are war criminals.
* * * * *
This Report was issued on Thursday. Not a single mention was made of it on any of the Sunday news talk shows, with the sole exception being when John McCain told George Stephanopoulos that it was "not his job" to opine on whether criminal prosecutions were warranted for the Bush officials whose policies led to these crimes. What really matters, explained McCain, was not that we get caught up in the past, but instead, that we ensure this never happens again -- yet, like everyone else who makes this argument, he offered no explanation as to how we could possibly ensure that "it never happens again" if we simultaneously announce that our political leaders will be immunized, not prosecuted, when they commit war crimes. Doesn't that mindset, rather obviously, substantially increase the likelihood -- if not render inevitable -- that such behavior will occur again? Other than that brief exchange, this Senate Report was a non-entity on the Sunday shows.
Instead, TV pundits were consumed with righteous anger over the petty, titillating, sleazy Rod Blagojevich scandal, competing with one another over who could spew the most derision and scorn for this pitiful, lowly, broken individual and his brazen though relatively inconsequential crimes. Every exciting detail was vouyeristically and meticulously dissected by political pundits -- many, if not most, of whom have never bothered to acquaint themselves with any of the basic facts surrounding the monumental Bush lawbreaking and war crimes scandals. TV "journalists" who have never even heard of the Taguba report -- the incredible indictment issued by a former U.S. General, who subsequently observed: "there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account" -- spent the weekend opining on the intricacies of Blogojevich's hair and terribly upsetting propensity to use curse words.
The auction conducted by Blagojevich was just a slightly more flamboyant, vulgar and reckless expression of how our national political class conducts itself generally (are there really any fundamental differences between Blagojevich's conduct and Chuck Schumer's systematic, transparent influence-peddling and vote-selling to Wall Street donors, as documented by this excellent and highly incriminating New York Times piece from Sunday -- "A Champion of Wall St. Reaps the Benefits")? But Blagojevich is an impotent figure, stripped of all power, a national joke. And attacking and condemning him is thus cheap and easy. It threatens nobody in power. To the contrary, his downfall is deceptively and usefully held up as an extreme aberration -- proof that government officials are held accountable when they break the law.
The media fixation on the ultimately irrelevant Blagojevich scandal, juxtaposed with their steadfast ignoring of the Senate report documenting systematic U.S. war crimes, is perfectly reflective of how our political establishment thinks. Blagojevich's laughable scheme is transformed into a national fixation and made into the target of collective hate sessions, while the systematic, ongoing sale of the legislative process to corporations and their lobbyists are overlooked as the normal course of business. Lynndie England is uniformly scorned and imprisoned while George Bush, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld are headed off to lives of luxury, great wealth, respect, and immunity from the consequences for their far more serious crimes. And the courageous and principled career Justice Department lawyer who blew the whistle on Bush's illegal spying programs -- Thomas Tamm -- continues to have his life destroyed, while the countless high-level government officials, lawyers and judges who also knew about it and did nothing about it are rewarded and honored, and those who committed the actual crimes are protected and immunized.
Just ponder the uproar if, in any other country, the political parties joined together and issued a report documenting that the country's President and highest aides were directly responsible for war crimes and widespread detainee abuse and death. Compare the inevitable reaction to such an event if it happened in another country to what happens in the U.S. when such an event occurs -- a virtual media blackout, ongoing fixations by political journalists with petty scandals, and an undisturbed consensus that, no matter what else is true, high-level American political figures (as opposed to powerless low-level functionaries) must never be held accountable for their crimes.
by Christopher R. Martin - Common Dreams
The Senate's failure to pass the bailout of the U.S. auto industry strikes a big blow at one of labor's last stands in manufacturing in the U.S.
What's at stake? According to the bill: 355,000 workers in the U.S. directly employed by the automobile industry; 4,500,000 employed in related industries (the auto industry has the highest job creation multiplier effect of any industry); 1,000,000 retirees (with pensions and health care benefits).
Vice President Dick Cheney, mindful of his administration's economic legacy, reportedly pleaded to fellow Republicans in the Senate, "If we don't do this, we will be known as the party of Herbert Hoover forever."
Welcome to forever, Dick.
It's too late for Cheney, as his party and their think tank associates celebrated the opportunity of Detroit's woes to pin blame on their perennial target, labor unions. In September, the conservative Heritage Foundation, with a barely concealed smirk, was already spreading disinformation:
"There are plenty of auto industry jobs being created every day right here in America - and with no government help. Toyota recently opened a new plant in Texas, and is building another factory in Mississippi. Toyota already produces more than 1.5 million cars in America, and that number is set to soar as more factories like those in Texas and Mississippi come on line. Unlike the Detroit automakers, Toyota has a union-free workforce, which gives the company a huge competitive advantage. Toyota still pays good wages but its workforce is younger, not burdened by seniority rules, and the company has smarter and lower benefit costs."
Two contentions - that foreign automakers in the U.S. have received no government help, and that union workers are grossly overpaid-are either misleading or completely untrue.
First, let's start with government assistance. It's easy to forget that there are government subsidies other than the ones asked for in Congressional hearings. For foreign automakers such as Toyota, Nissan, Honda, Hyundai, Mercedes, and BMW, the better way of wringing out public subsidies is to get Southern states to battle for your plants by offering a bevy of tax abatements, infrastructure projects, and even employee recruitment, screening and training. According to the Center for Automotive Research at the University of Michigan, between 1998 and 2003, the Southern states paid out an average of $87,700 in "government help" per nonunion auto job created-an average of $143 million per facility-compared to $50,180 per job created in the haplessly unionized North.
The second contention - that the unionized autoworkers of the north are grossly overpaid - is misleading. In fact, Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tennessee), one of the opponents of the bailout, encouraged the deception. The Chattanooga Times Free Press reported the Senator "said the automakers pay their rank-and-file employees an average of $70 to $74 an hour, including benefits, while foreign automakers pay an average of $42 to $44 an hour." The quote, repeated nearly everywhere in the news media over the past few weeks, obscures the situation.
Only a very few news organizations - Jonathan Cohn at the New Republic and David Leonhardt at the New York Times, among the few-bothered to break it down. As it turns out, the base wages are fairly close - about $29 an hour for Detroit's three automakers, and about $26 for the foreign automakers in the U.S. What nearly every Republican politician and news report fails to mention, though, is that wages in Detroit are already dropping. The UAW gave major concessions to GM, Ford, and Chrysler in 2005 and 2007, setting a new second tier starting wage at $14. This lower wage will continue to decrease the base wage cost going into the future.
Another difference in North vs. South autoworker wages is benefits. Adding in things like healthcare, training, vacation, and overtime, Big Three autoworkers make about $55 compared to about $46 for nonunion workers. True enough, unionized workers do better here. But a big part of this expense is healthcare.
Healthcare also is part of the largest difference between North and South: what the industry calls "legacy costs" - the pensions and health care of retirees. The foreign auto companies currently don't have these costs, since they've been operating in the U.S. for only about 25 years or less, and have few retirees. But, the Big Three have more than a million retirees and their families to cover. Corker and others unfairly lump this into average wage costs and arrive at something over $70 an hour.
So, when the Senate Republicans are talking about equalizing wages, what they are really talking about is taking pensions and healthcare away from retirees. That doesn't sound as nice as "equalizing" the wage of current workers, so they never say it that way.
The UAW has made a number of concessions over the years, but that's where they said no. They wouldn't sell out the dignity and well being of their retirees.
Back in 2006, GM vice president Bob Lutz famously said, "Sometimes it feels like we're a health-care company that tries to sell enough cars to pay the bills."
Exactly. Hello Washington? This is a primarily a health care problem, not an auto problem.
Corker and his colleagues might begin with a better comparison for the Big Three's unionized autoworkers -- their union colleagues in Canada. Their work and wages are similar, except that Canada has a public healthcare system that evens the playing field for all companies. According to the Canadian Labour Congress in 2006, health benefits for unionized autoworkers in Canada cost $120 per car. In the same year, health benefits for Big Three autoworkers cost $1,500, and they're still rising.
If Corker and his colleagues are truly serious about changing the structure of the auto industry, they should start by working to give people health care, not take it away. And if the news media wants to get to the bottom of Detroit's problems, health care is what they should be writing about.
Christopher R. Martin is an associate professor in journalism at the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls, Iowa. His research has been published in Journalism Studies, Journal of Communication Inquiry, Communication Research, Labor Research Journal, Popular Music and Society, Journal of Communication, Z magazine and the Web journal Images. With Richard Campbell and Bettina Fabos, he is co-author of Media and Culture: An Introduction to Mass Communication (Bedford/St. Martin's, 2008), now in its 6th edition update, and author of an award-winning book on how labor unions are covered in the news media, Framed! Labor and the Corporate Media (Cornell University Press, 2004). Martin previously taught at Miami University (Ohio), and holds a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan.
Posted by Hanna Ingber Win, Huffington Post - Alternet
Learn more about the man who threw the 'shoes heard round the world,' and find out what's happening to him now.
An Iraqi journalist who threw his shoe at President Bush has been hailed as a hero across the Middle East, and is receiving so much attention Wikipedia already has an entry for him.
Reuters reports that Muntadhar al-Zeidi will be given an award by a Libyan charity group called Wa Attassimou.
"Waatassimou group has taken the decision to give Muntazer al-Zaidi the courage award ... because what he did represents a victory for human rights across the world," the group, headed by Aicha Gaddafi, said in a statement.
The group said the Iraqi authorities should honour the journalist for his actions.
Zaidi, accused by the Iraqi government of a "barbaric and ignominious act" will be tried on charges of insulting the Iraqi state, said the Iraqi prime minister's media advisor, Yasin Majeed.
The AP reports that thousands took to the streets Monday to demand his release from jail.
Journalist Muntadhar al-Zeidi, who was kidnapped by militants last year, was being held by Iraqi security Monday and interrogated about whether anybody paid him to throw his shoes at Bush during a press conference the previous day in Baghdad, said an Iraqi official.
He was also being tested for alcohol and drugs, and his shoes were being held as evidence, said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media.
Showing the sole of your shoe to someone in the Arab world is a sign of extreme disrespect, and throwing your shoes is even worse. Iraqis whacked a statue of Saddam with their shoes after U.S. Marines toppled it to the ground following the 2003 invasion.
Al Jazeera reports that the journalist's employer, Al-Baghdadiya television, has demanded his release as well. Zeidi faces a minimum of two years in prison if he is convicted of insulting a visiting head of state, according to the report.
On Monday, al-Baghdadiya suspended its normal programming and played messages of support from across the Arab world.
A presenter read out a statement calling for his release, "in accordance with the democratic era and the freedom of expression that Iraqis were promised by US authorities".
It said that any harsh measures taken against the reporter would be reminders of the "dictatorial era" that Washington said its forces had invaded Iraq to end.
Al Jazeera also reports that Saddam Hussein's former lawyer, Khalil al-Dulaimi, is organizing a team to defend Zeidi.
"It was the least thing for an Iraqi to do to Bush, the tyrant criminal who has killed two million people in Iraq and Afghanistan," he said.
"Our defence of Zaidi will be based on the fact that the United States is occupying Iraq, and resistance is legitimate by all means, including shoes."
The AP reports that al-Zeidi's family members expressed bewilderment and pride over their brother's defiance of Bush.
"I swear to Allah, he is a hero," said his sister, who goes by the nickname Umm Firas, as she watched a replay of her brother's attack on an Arabic satellite station. "May Allah protect him."
The family insisted that al-Zeidi's action was spontaneous -- perhaps motivated by the political turmoil that their brother had reported on, plus his personal brushes with violence and the threat of death that millions of Iraqis face daily.
The New York Times Baghdad Bureau Blog quotes al-Zeidi's brother as saying that he hated the American occupation of Iraq so much he was willing to cancel his wedding over it.
Maythem al-Zaidi said his brother had not planned to throw his shoes prior to Sunday. "He was provoked when Mr. Bush said [during the news conference] this is his farewell gift to the Iraqi people," he said. A colleague of Muntader al-Zaidi's at al-Baghdadiya satellite channel, however, said the correspondent had been "planning for this from a long time. He told me that his dream is to hit Bush with shoes," said the man, who would not give his name.
Muntader al-Zaidi appears to have a long-standing dislike of the United States presence in Iraq. He used to finish his reports by saying he was in "the occupied Baghdad." His brother said that he hates the occupation so strongly that he canceled his wedding, saying: "I will marry when the occupation is over."
The AP also reports that al-Zeidi was kidnapped by gunmen while on assignment as a journalist in a Sunni district of Baghdad. he was also arrested by American soldiers. Al-Zeidi is a 28-year-old unmarried Shiite.
He was freed unharmed three days later after Iraqi television stations broadcast appeals for his release. At the time, al-Zeidi told reporters he did not know who kidnapped him or why, but his family blamed al-Qaida and said no ransom was paid.
In January he was taken again, this time arrested by American soldiers who searched his apartment building, his brother, Dhirgham, said. He was released the next day with an apology, the brother said.
Those experiences helped mould a deep resentment of both the U.S. military's presence here and Iran's pervasive influence over Iraq's cleric-dominated Shiite community, according to his family.
"He hates the American material occupation as much as he hates the Iranian moral occupation," Dhirgham said. "As for Iran, he considers the regime as the other side of the American coin."
A man holding balloons prepares for a ceremony to celebrate the first direct sea transport across the strait at Tianjin Port in northern China December 15, 2008. Political rivals China and Taiwan began direct air, sea transport and postal services on Monday for the first time since the end of the Chinese civil war in 1949.
REUTERS/Jason Lee
TIM DICKINSON - Rolling Stone
The administration is rushing to enact a host of last-minute regulations that will screw America for years to come
With president-elect Barack Obama already taking command of the financial crisis, it's tempting to think that regime change in America is a done deal. But if George Bush has his way, the country will be ruled by his slash-and-burn ideology for a long time to come.
In its final days, the administration is rushing to implement a sweeping array of "midnight regulations" — de facto laws issued by the executive branch — designed to lock in Bush's legacy. Under the last- minute rules, which can be extremely difficult to overturn, loaded firearms would be allowed in national parks, uranium mining would be permitted near the Grand Canyon and many injured consumers would no longer be able to sue negligent manufacturers in state courts. Other rules would gut the Endangered Species Act, open millions of acres of wild lands to mining, restrict access to birth control and put local cops to work spying for the federal government.
"It's what we've seen for Bush's whole tenure, only accelerated," says Gary Bass, executive director of the nonpartisan group OMB Watch. "They're using regulation to cement their deregulatory mind-set, which puts corporate interests above public interests."
While every modern president has implemented last-minute regulations, Bush is rolling them out at a record pace — nearly twice as many as Clinton, and five times more than Reagan. "The administration is handing out final favors to its friends," says Véronique de Rugy, a scholar at George Mason University who has tracked six decades of midnight regulations. "They couldn't do it earlier — there would have been too many political repercussions. But with the Republicans having lost seats in Congress and the presidency changing parties, Bush has nothing left to lose."
The most jaw-dropping of Bush's rule changes is his effort to eviscerate the Endangered Species Act. Under a rule submitted in November, federal agencies would no longer be required to have government scientists assess the impact on imperiled species before giving the go-ahead to logging, mining, drilling, highway building or other development. The rule would also prohibit federal agencies from taking climate change into account in weighing the impact of projects that increase greenhouse emissions — effectively dooming polar bears to death-by-global-warming. According to Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, "They've taken the single biggest threat to wildlife and said, 'We're going to pretend it doesn't exist, for regulatory purposes.'"
Bush is also implementing other environmental rules that will cater to the interests of many of his biggest benefactors:
BIG COAL In early December, the administration finalized a rule that allows the industry to dump waste from mountaintop mining into neighboring streams and valleys, a practice opposed by the governors of both Tennessee and Kentucky. "This makes it legal to use the most harmful coal-mining technology available," says Allen Hershkowitz, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council. A separate rule also relaxes air-pollution standards near national parks, allowing Big Coal to build plants next to some of America's most spectacular vistas — even though nine of 10 EPA regional administrators dissented from the rule or criticized it in writing. "They're willing to sacrifice the laws that protect our national parks in order to build as many new coal plants as possible," says Mark Wenzler, director of clean-air programs for the National Parks Conservation Association. "This is the last gasp of Bush and Cheney's disastrous policy, and they've proven there's no line they won't cross."
BIG OIL In a rule that becomes effective just three days before Obama takes office, the administration has opened up nearly 2 million acres of mountainous lands in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming for the mining of oil shale — an energy-intensive process that also drains precious water resources. "The administration has admitted that it has no idea how much of Colorado's water supply would be required to develop oil shale, no idea where the power would come from and no idea whether the technology is even viable," says Sen. Ken Salazar of Colorado. What's more, Bush is slashing the royalties that Big Oil pays for oil-shale mining from 12.5 percent to five percent. "A pittance," says Salazar. (continue reading)
Paul Joseph Watson - Propaganda Matrix
Troops and mercenaries will be used to detain Americans in prison camps, warns deadly accurate trends forecaster
Frighteningly accurate trends forecaster Gerald Celente says that America will see riots similar to those currently ongoing in Greece and that the cause will be a hyper-inflationary depression, leading to the inevitable use of troops and mercenaries to deal with the crisis as Americans are incarcerated in internment camps.
As we have highlighted before, Celente's accuracy is stunning - he predicted the 1987 crash, the sub-prime mortgage crisis and the "panic of 2008," and is routinely cited even by mainstream news networks as highly credible.
The cause of the riots would be a hyper-inflationary depression, Celente told interviewer Lew Rockwell, causing Americans to revolt in similar circumstances that we have witnessed recently in Iceland and Greece. The trouble would be sparked off by Obama declaring a "bank holiday" whereby people won't be able to withdraw their money.
"What's going on in Greece with these riots has nothing to do with a 15-year-old boy being killed, that was only the spark that ignited the pent up, really hatred and disdain, people have for the scandals and corrupt government and the same thing is going on in this country as well," said Celente.
Celente reiterated his prediction of a revolution and riots in America, and said that the first signs of it could even emerge before the end of the year.
Celente said that the troops now being brought back to America for "domestic security" would be used to suppress the riots.
"There's talk of opening all these detention centers and hiring the goon squads, the Blackwaters to run them, so these are realities going on as we speak," said Celente, adding that the Halliburton subsidiary KBR had been awarded a half a billion dollar contract to build "national emergency" internment camps in the name of detaining illegal immigrants but that they would be used to hold rioting Americans.
"We're really in a period of 'off with their heads' and its going to be the people against the politicians," said Celente.
Celente said that a breakup of the United States was possible and that the secessionist movement was strong.
"The government owns and runs the largest mortgage company, owns the largest insurance company, they're going to be owning a piece of the oil industry, so it's a fight against a totalitarian government...so there's going to be rebellions and things will change for the better if we break up these criminal governments that are in place now," said Celente.
The forecaster added that the government was killing people for a false reason in Iraq and robbing people blind with the bailouts at home.
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The Key to Eliminating Your Slice
Making a proper “full shoulder turn” is one of the most important fundamentals of the golf swing, yet it's one of the most common mistakes made by golfers; and why so many have slice problems. A proper shoulder turn is when you rotate the shoulders so the leading shoulder comes under your chin, without letting your hips turn much at all. Below we explain the ways this eliminates the slice:
• If your shoulder rotation is stopped too early, your arms will tend to continue by fling across the target line and causing an outside-to-inside swing path, resulting in the dreaded banana-ball. A full shoulder turn will help the club fall “on plane”, which greatly reduces the chance of cutting across the target line and slicing the golf ball.
• A full shoulder turn will promote proper weight shift. Remember too keep your lower body from moving laterally. Do not confuse the full shoulder turn as meaning you must get the club back to parallel at the top of the swing. Many great golfers have a compact swing that comes up far short of parallel at the top, but all great golfers take a full shoulder turn when executing a full shot.
• A full shoulder turn will bring you to the top of the swing and assist in getting the hands and arms into proper position.
• Keep your chin up and off your chest so the leading shoulder can rotate and pass under the chin. If the shoulder hits your chin, it will cut the shoulder rotation short and encourage a slice.
• When a golfer does not utilize a full shoulder turn, they tend to rely more on the small muscles (hands and arms) to swing the golf club. This leads to inconsistent ball striking and shots prone to slicing. With a full shoulder turn, you will use more of your big muscles, which are much more consistent, and help you square the club face and avoid a slice. Don’t be in a rush; taking the club back slow will help you to finish the back swing with a full shoulder turn. More body, less arms.
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