Author: BobHiggins

The next time Michael Mukasey is called to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee I suggest that he be strapped to a stretcher, a rag placed in his mouth and water poured in the rag until he begins to answer completely and truthfully the questions put to him by the committee.

Now that waterboarding has become an accepted form of interrogation in these United States, I recommend that it be utilized not only with Mukasey, but with all future witnesses before committees of the congress. I think that there are subpoenas kicking around out there for Condi Rice and other executive department figures who have been less than forthcoming in past appearances, so perhaps as our favorite republican tough guy Rudy Giuliani says, we should question them aggressively.

It might be a good idea if the voting public were able to use the same technique in questioning the presidential candidates on their positions. For the rest of the debates all candidates should be wheeled in strapped to stretchers and aggressively questioned using this simulated drowning method.

Using these methods we may begin to get the truth from our “public servants” and declared wannabes.

This will not work in Atlanta however, they don’t have enough water at the moment to achieve any kind of satisfactory results.

Bob Higgins
Worldwide Sawdust

Is there any area of our government, over the span of the last seven years, any area, in domestic or foreign policy, national defense, public welfare, the economy, name it, where the average, reasonably informed American might point to success, to signs of progress, of improvement, something, anything, to point to with satisfaction, with pride?

Yesterday I read an article by Steve Benin on the resignation of Karen Hughes from her post as Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, a mouthful there, and a job for which she was as ill suited and unqualified as the man who appointed her and in which, during her two year tenure, she accomplished little, if anything.

In truth, she accomplished nothing, unless you want to count convincing large portions of the world that all Americans must be as out of touch with reality, as clueless and unthinking as their current Commander in Chief, and at that she excelled, as anyone might, having been dispatched to the Middle East with the rank of Ambassador, but without knowledge of the language, culture, history, religions, and general pet peeves of the various states and peoples of the region.

But Karen Hughes was tapped for her office for the same reasons as all Bush appointees are chosen, not for expertise or experience, not for performance or integrity in public service but for loyalty, for unwavering belief in the Messianic delusions of neo conservatism, and a willingness to march in lockstep, nah, goose step, against all who might disagree or dissent.

As I read Benin’s article I had the thought that he might have written a very similar piece about nearly any federal department and the Bush appointees thereto in the last seven years. Which of the various cabinet level branches of the executive department of this country have not suffered greatly under the politically connected cronyism of the Bush/ Cheney administration?

We witnessed it at Justice, the politicization of the office of the Attorney General, the perversion of law and the resulting descent into the barbarity of denial of human rights and torture.

We saw it at Defense, where the best military minds of a generation were ignored in favor of the views of sychophantic careerists who allowed a lying Vice President and a comic opera Commander in Chief and their apparatchiks to lead them over the cliff and into the abyss of an endless and disastrous war.

We have seen time and again the incompetence, indifference and criminal neglect at “Homeland” Security and FEMA.

We have seen heads of federal departments turned into agents of electioneering, where party politics takes precedence over public welfare and the machinery and energy of the state is turned to the furtherance of private goals.

Agriculture, Interior, Commerce, Treasury and the rest are now run by the industries that they are legally bound to restrain, regulate and control in the public interest.

Executive branch departments have been stripped of many of their most dedicated, long serving professionals and replaced with Bush loyalists from business and industry, or, in many cases directly from the most favored campuses, the ivy leagues of Christian evangelism. Regulatory functions have been curtailed, enforcement budgets slashed, and inspection schedules diminished to a laughable degree in nearly every regulatory corner of the federal system.

But this, after all, was the intent, to create central government that would gladly do the bidding of the corporate structure, throw aside all restraints, all regulation and increase its profits and its power.

Nearly every day I encounter a story in the media, a story of illness, injury, death or disaster befalling unsuspecting citizens due to the inattention, incompetence, lack of inspection and failures of enforcement of existing federal laws regulating consumer products, work place safety, environmental prohibitions or other areas where purity, safety and security were once almost taken for granted.

During the last seven years we have devolved into a country whose livestock, produce and other foodstuffs are ridden with bacteria and other contaminants, whose drugs and medical services are becoming untrustworthy, whose ports and borders are dangerously porous, whose bridges and highways are collapsing, whose military is being misused and abused in continuous illegal and futile adventures on behalf of corporate America, whose jobs have largely been moved to other countries and continents, whose pensions have collapsed and whose Barbie Dolls contain enough lead to write a novella. (Or, perhaps, the last paragraph)

The real problem however, the crux of the matter and what may finally deliver us stumbling and stuttering, quavering with dread at the terminus of the road to Fascist hell is the incredible damage that has been inflicted on the American spirit, the American soul, the American psyche. I may be accused of naivete’ but in my world, in my mind and in my memory there was a time when the eyes of America contained a great measure of compassion, of kindness, of simple good will.

Those days are gone. Under the current regime the eyes of America, official America, the America of the ruling oligarchy are now filled with hunger, with avarice, with an insatiable lust for resources and power, for wealth and influence. America’s eyes are no longer the warm welcoming eyes of Lady Liberty but the cold calculating gaze of the largest and most dangerous predator to ever stalk the planet, a predator to be feared and distrusted, to be resisted at all costs.

The eyes of Americans, our citizens, our electorate are filled with a mixture of apathy and fear, of meekness, a cowering attitude and a shuffling posture which is all too heavily reflected in their parliament.

America, in the brief span of my lifetime and largely in the span of a single decade has devolved into a killer of humanity, a dream slayer, despoiler of freedom, a destroyer, the destroyer of America.

Bob Higgins

Worldwide Sawdust

The “Hitler comparison” should be shouted from the rooftops, as should the Goebbels comparison, the Himmler comparison, the Mengele, Stalin, Torquemada, Beelzebub comparisons and all the rest. If it struts like a Nazi, talks like Nazi, tortures like a Nazi and wages aggressive and illegal war like a Nazi… it’s not a duck.

Eighteen months or so ago I wrote a post comparing Bush, Cheney and the boys from PNAC to Hitler, to the Nazi hierarchy and to the wonderful folks who gave the world kristallnacht, the terror bombings of Guernica, of London and conducted history’s magnum opus of human carnage, the holocaust, the destruction of two thirds of the Jews in Europe and millions of other “undesirables.”

I took a moderate amount of heat for what one local (Dayton) commenter called my “classlessness,” and received a few surly EMails from people who are probably, to this day, driving around with “Bush/Cheney” bumper stickers on their Cadillac and Lexus SUVs but since I want so badly to be loved and admired, (or at least not ignored) I resolved to try to avoid using the “Hitler Comparison” after that.

I saw it used by others on the blogs and, guardedly, in the MSM, witnessed their reception of similar treatment and I realized that a taboo (see Godwin’s law) had been created. “Disrespectful to the office of the President,” some cried, “diminishes the horror of the holocaust and the brutality unleashed on Europe’s Jews by the real Hitler,” cried others, “the ultimate ad hominem attack,” wrote one academic seeking to show that such comparisons were childish , demeaning to those who offered them and “kills dead,” scholarly internet discussions.

 
As the months dragged on and the war escalated, the deaths, the casualties, the carnage mounted, the attacks on dissent increased, civil liberties began to erode and disappear, as the regulatory bureaucracy and the judiciary were stripped of independent professionals and replaced with ideological partisans, as tens of billions of dollars of American taxpayers cash simply disappeared into the black hole of “privatization” and reason itself came under constant attack, I couldn’t help myself, I began to use the “Hitler Comparison” more often in my various rants.

I don’t pretend to scholarship, or journalism, I’m an old carpenter, not an academic, I’m content to be a pamphleteer. As long as the feedback tells me that people are reading my electronic leaflets, not ripping them from under their wiper blades and kicking them to the curb, if I sense that they are following the links, I find a small measure of hope, not a lot, just enough to make me look forward to coffee and another batch of leafleting in the morning.

The war..s continue, and as the fervor grows for another, in Iran and more evidence of official “misdeeds,” of lies, of outright criminality, of incompetence, rampant cronyism and fraud continue to seep out from under the closed doors of what has developed into the most secretive, insular, antidemocratic administration in the history of the Republic, the “Hitler comparison” has grown in my mind and, I believe, much of the public’s to the point that we need to repeal the “Godwin law” and popularize the idea in the hopes that by holding up the mirror to the tyrant we may drive him from our shores. I’m serious, we need “Hitler Comparison” T shirts, by the millions.

Sunday night I watched Naomi Wolf on PBS as she was interviewed about her recent book by “guest interviewer” Viet Dinh, a former Assistant Attorney General, and principle author of the Patriot Act, greatly admired by none other than Rupert Murdoch, in other words, as <strike>Adol</strike&gt George W is wont to say, no cream puff. Ms Wolf more than held her own, after all, she knows her book and the research on which its based and defended it well against a wholly predictable neo-con cross examination.

Her book may represent, albeit in a much more scholarly and reasoned way, the ultimate in “Comparisons,” (I confess I haven’t yet read it) She says that she charts the closing of various previously open societies, from Hitler to Stalin to Pinochet and on to our current rapidly closing system, and finds the comparisons striking, the trends frightening, ant the peril, imminent enough to cause her to run around the country like a latter day Paul Revere shouting that the <strike>redcoats</strike&gt brown shirts are coming, while making astute “comparisons” between current and past events, motives and personalities.

It is, of course, a book tour and yes, the object is to sell the book but there is much more here, I hear a clarion call in her voice and feel truth in her message.

Would that several million people, Germans perhaps, in 1933, 34 or 35 had been possessed of the poor taste and “classlessness,” had been willing to succumb to the gaucherie of loudly and publicly comparing Adolph Hitler to… well ..what the hell, lets go for it.. Adolph Hitler, I wonder what result might have ensued. Or, back in the USSR, had Russians stood up and said “hey this Stalin guy is becoming a real Hitler or maybe even a Stalin,” how many of the fifty million Russian dead might have been spared, the cold war, arms race avoided, at least greatly reduced.

There is a responsibility of those who govern to speak truth to the governed, but, when they fail in that responsibility, there is a greater responsibility on the part of the governed to speak truth to power, to spit in its eye and to dethrone it as necessary to insure the continuity of the rights, freedoms and welfare of the public, for that is what finally matters, not the government, nor the corrupt interests of the criminal oligarchs that it represents.

I listened to the GOP candidates a bit the other night, a little goes a long way with these birds, and heard the words “personal responsibility” several times, a phrase which is nothing more, on Republican lips, than a code word for racism, sexism and a continuation of the war they have waged against the “lesser classes’ for all of modern history.

I agree with them in this sense, it is time for a large percentage of the population to take personal responsibility for themselves, for their country, to unite in the name of freedom, in the name of economic, political and spiritual liberty, to rise up and seize control of the whole package, the big damn shebang, to wrest control from the five percent who have kept them enslaved, who have enforced ignorance and poverty and to throw aside the twenty percent who guard the prison.

It may be “classless” and a violation of “Godwin’s law to “Compare” George Walker Bush, the arrogant young scion of eastern establishment wealth and power, grandson of Senators and son of Presidents, cowboy of windshields and owner of chainsaws, to the beer swilling gutter scum of the beer halls of Munich and Berlin but I’m afraid it is unavoidable, it is inescapable, obvious, and it is historically necessary.

Terrorism? 9/11? The attack on the World Trade Center was their Reichstag fire, the invasion of Iraq, comparable to the blitzkrieg into eastern Europe. They share the same motives and ideology, the same vision, they exhibit the same compassion, and wield power with the same ruthless disregard for the lives, for the welfare and dignity of common humanity.

Make no mistake, these people, the architects of the last six years of international turmoil, of domestic division, of war and death, of crushing despair and hopelessness, are Nazis, perhaps not yet in the full bloom of adulthood, not yet grown to the evil proportions of their twentieth century predecessors, but they have emerged from their larval stage and are prepared for full flight, They have all the weapons, they lack nothing, nothing, but to complete their rewriting of our laws and of course, they need those handsome uniforms.

The only thing that can prevent them from fulfilling their wretched and terrible goals of oligarchy, universal slavery and domination of the world is your voice, your derision, your hand, raised in resistance, your lips mouthing a simple no.

Hurry, I think the uniforms have been ordered.

Bob Higgins

Worldwide Sawdust

I am sick to death of all the pussyfooting around the subject that has occupied the media for the duration of this premeditated, illegal war of terror that we the people of the United States have allowed to be waged against the people of Iraq, in our name, for the last several years.

No matter how much lipstick and rouge we smear on the face of this war no matter how we attempt to  dress up the evil and bestial acts that have been performed in its unholy name, it still has the hideous countenance of an evil swine from hell.

It is an illegal war, begun and conducted under false pretenses, by a group of criminal liars and thieves in the United States Government, abetted by a cowardly congress who abrogated their constitutional duties in exchange for hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign funds and furthered by a complaisant press that ignored their obligation to remain independent from government, from their sponsors and report the facts. 

The members of the completely rogue executive department acted in their own self interest in a quest for personal power and wealth, in concert with the usual domestic and international corporate pirates who, in the depths of their insatiable greed, continually amplify human conflict to their own ends and bring poverty, war, suffering and death down upon the world.

There is no such animal as extraordinary rendition, nor do I know of the existence of any beasts called enhanced interrogation methods.

The first is kidnapping, it is illegal, a felony and the second word is torture, its meaning is clear:

NOUN:

  1. Infliction of severe physical pain as a means of punishment or coercion.
  2. An instrument or a method for inflicting such pain.
  2. Excruciating physical or mental pain; agony: the torture of waiting in suspense.
  3. Something causing severe pain or anguish.

Torture is illegal in this country, a felonious act, it is illegal in the world at large, according to several conventions that we are legally bound by. Anyone committing torture, causing it to be committed, directing its commission, or training others in its techniques is guilty, guilty of war crimes, of crimes against humanity and crimes against “Nature’s God.

The people who lied us into this war are not statesmen, nor are they patriots acting out of a misguided love of country, as I have heard in some quarters. They are murderers, murderers, modern day Nazis or Fascists if you prefer, cold dispassionate sociopaths, heinous criminals, without conscience, without mercy, without humanity.

I read in the press and heard in the media yesterday and this morning of the “murky legal territory” in which the “private contractors” operate in Iraq and the murky area of law in which our dedicated public servants must operate as they determine just how far they can go in the extreme physical abuse of human beings before they stray in to a “gray area.”

Bullshit, I think that when a lying pig of a lawyer like David Addington describes a “murky legal area” it means that he thinks he can get away with it. The legal situation in Iraq was intentionally  designed to protect the mercenary scum that we send there to perform high priced serial murders as they fulfill bloated contracts to protect our criminal leadership, thieving diplomats and cowardly congressmen.

I believe that the actions of following people must be investigated and, if warranted by the evidence, tried in criminal courts, and if convicted, face the full consequences of both US and International law:

George W Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, William Kristol, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle, Eliot Abrams, Scooter Libby, John Hannah, David Wurmser, Andrew Natsios, Dan Bartlett, Mitch Daniels, George Tenet, Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice, David Addington

There are more, in every corner of the executive, the congress, among the highest levels of the military as well as the intelligence community, various think tanks, news organizations, public and private corporations and other NGOs.

This is a cancer that must be quickly, loudly and publicly removed from the heart of America.

Enough.

Bob Higgins

Worldwide Sawdust

Related stories,sources and links:

The Architects of War

Geneva Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War

Convention Against Torture

Secret U.S. Endorsement of Severe Interrogations

Red, white and mercenary in Iraq

Yet More Impeachable Revelations

Bush’s Fascist, Private Army of Paid Cutthroats, Murderers and Mercenaries

When we evaluate the facts, the use of private military contractors appears to have harmed, rather than helped, the counterinsurgency efforts of the U.S. mission in Iraq, going against our best doctrine and undermining critical efforts of our troops. Even worse, the government can no longer carry out one of its most basic core missions: to fight and win the nation’s wars. Instead, the massive outsourcing of military operations has created a dependency on private firms like Blackwater that has given rise to dangerous vulnerabilities.The dark truth about Blackwater

The idea of privatization of American public and governmental functions has been at the center of the neo conservative movement and over the last decade has been presented as the cure for everything that ails us from Social Security to Medicare, prison administration to public education, law enforcement and even the waging of war.

This idea that private enterprise can accomplish governmental functions more efficiently, at less cost while providing better service is, of course absurd and, in fact, is nothing but an enormous lie, and, like all enormous lies, if repeated often and loudly by the right authority figures and affirmed in “scholarly” studies performed by the Heritage or American Enterprise think tanks, it will take hold and seem, to a sizable portion of the uncritical public, to be the truth, simply because they have heard it so many times from so many familiar voices.

The marketing/propaganda professionals of the Cheney /Bush administration have carefully studied their Goebbels and know that the truth is what they can sell to those gullible enough to believe it especially when delivered in a climate of xenophobic, racist or religious fear, and due to the fact that a large percentage of our citizenry are either unable to look at their government and the wider corporate culture which largely dictates public policy, with a properly suspicious eye, or simply doesn’t give a damn as long as no one threatens to take away their snowmobiles, shotguns and cheap access to the mind numbing inanity of popular culture and celebrity, the great lies become public truths and “common knowledge.”

Seven years ago the people of this country nearly elected a federal administration that came to office expressing a hatred of government and an intention to reduce the size and influence of it in regulating the affairs of the ruling capitalist class, while at the same time charting a course to invade the lives and privacy and reduce the fundamental freedoms of the lesser classes. How anyone could expect those who despise government and representative democracy to govern effectively and efficiently is well beyond my understanding.

After their near election and illegal appointment to the highest offices in a government that they had absolutely no respect for, Cheney and Bush along with their corporate mafia criminal associates began to strip the federal regulatory agencies of dedicated professionals who took the job of regulating business and industry in the interest of public health and safety seriously, and started replacing them with industry cronies who simply stopped enforcing the laws so that businesses could achieve greater profits.

Pause for a brief digressive rant
“The business of America is business,” Cal Coolidge said eighty some years ago, and these guys heard the phrase in Grandpa’s Sunday sermons and Grandma’s lullabies before they learned to read.

“Need a comprehensive national energy policy? Just holler down the hall from Cheney’s office and a half dozen current and former big oil Poobahs will write it up for you including emphasis on the necessity of gaining pipeline routes through Afghanistan and control of Iraq and Iran’s oil. They’ll phony up the intelligence, everything, a turnkey operation”

“Need to increase profits for some buddies in the coal industry? No problem, we’ll put one of our boys in charge of the Mine Safety and Health Administration. Make a recess appointment, you’ll get any mining plan you need approved, no matter the cost in death and injury to the miners who have to implement it.”

“Having trouble with the EPA, the FDA, OSHA or any other pesky collection of bureaucratic acronyms? We’ll gut it for you and have our boys in industry pay for bogus scientific opinions to justify our continuing rape of the environment and pollution of our air and water supply.”

“Labor costs out of line, we’ll loan you money at low interest, what the hell, make it no interest to build factories and send the jobs offshore. We’ll get you a subsidy to take your jobs to Asia or Central America where you’ll have no environmental regulations. You’ll be able to pollute at will and you can pay people in dirt. No kidding these people will work for dirt, you’ll love it there, the government over there shoots the bastards if they’re late for work. Its an entrepreneur’s Disney World.”

“The Iraqis won’t agree to your terms for oil leases? Fuck em, We’ll send in the troops, give em a little taste of shock and awe. Iran too? No problem bring it on. If these pussy Generals drag their heels we’ll send Blackwater.

During the first Gulf War the ratio of “private contractors” to regular troops was something like 6 or 7 to one, in Iraq today it is closer to 3 to 1.

“They use their machine guns like car horns.”
America’s Private Army – Psycho Cowboys For Hire

When she saw the gunmen turn toward the bus, Ms. Sattar looked at her mother in fear. “They’re going to shoot at us, Mama,” she said. Her mother hugged her close. Moments later, a bullet pierced her mother’s skull and another struck her shoulder, Ms. Sattar recalled.

As her mother’s body went limp, blood dripped onto Ms. Sattar’s head, still cradled in her mother’s arms.

“Mother, Mother,” she called out. No answer. She hugged her mother’s body and kissed her lips and began to pray.The bus emptied, and Ms. Sattar sat alone at the back, with her mother’s bleeding body.

“I’m lost now, I’m lost,” she said days later in her simple two-bedroom home.

“They are killers,” she said of the Blackwater guards. “I swear to God, not one bullet was shot at them. Why did they shoot us? My mother didn’t carry a weapon.” 8 deadly days for Blackwater

Blackwater claims that they were attacked by armed insurgents and acted only in self defense. As reports surfaced of indiscriminate firing from Blackwater helicopters they denied that the choppers had fired at all. How to explain the large holes that had been blasted in several car roofs from above? That pesky al Oaeda in Iraq Air Force up to its usual mischief I suppose.

An Advertising Pitch For Serial Killers In Corporate-ese?

Blackwater Worldwide efficiently and effectively integrates a wide range of resources and core competencies to provide unique and timely solutions that exceed our customer’s stated need and expectations.

We are guided by integrity, innovation, and a desire for a safer world. Blackwater Worldwide professionals leverage state-of-the-art training facilities, professional program management teams, and innovative manufacturing and production capabilities to deliver world class customer driven solutions.

Our leadership and dedicated family of exceptional employees adhere to an essential system of core corporate values chief among them are integrity, innovation, excellence, respect, accountability, and teamwork.

Blackwater USA website

By now you’ve probably seen videos of Blackwater and other mercenary outfits racing down Iraqi roads firing indiscriminately at innocent civilians to the tune of rock and roll music and raucous laughter. Paid at a rate four to ten times what we pay our legitimately serving soldiers, Bush’s army of “rent a thugs” has become yet another hairy wart on the perception of America in the eyes of the international community.

A clerk in the Iraqi customs office in Diyala province, she was in the capital to drop off and pick up paperwork at the central office near busy al-Khilani Square, not far from the fortified Green Zone, where top U.S. and Iraqi officials live and work. U.S. officials often pass through the square in heavily guarded convoys on their way to other parts of Baghdad.

As Ms. Hussein walked out of the customs building, an embassy convoy of sport utility vehicles drove through the intersection. Blackwater USA security guards, charged with protecting the diplomats, yelled at construction workers at an unfinished building to move back. Instead, the workers threw rocks. The guards, witnesses said, responded with gunfire, spraying the intersection with bullets.

Ms. Hussein, who was on the opposite side of the street from the construction site, fell to the ground, shot in the leg. As she struggled to her feet and took a step, eyewitnesses said, a Blackwater guard trained his weapon on her and shot her multiple times. She died on the spot, and the customs documents she’d held in her arms fluttered down the street.

Before the shooting stopped, four other people were killed in what would be the beginning of eight days of violence Iraqi officials say bolster their argument that Blackwater should be banned from working in Iraq. 8 deadly days for Blackwater

You may have also seen pictures of hired goons from the same company swaggering their way through the streets of New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. The fact that private security firms were being hired to perform public law enforcement functions made my skin crawl two years ago and everything that I have learned since increases my sense of dread about this company, its political connections to the Cheney/Bush gang and the prospects of what its future “missions” may mean for Americans and our fundamental freedoms.

The House began a round of hearings yesterday before the Oversight and Reform Committee chaired by California Democrat Henry Waxman. The hearings come as a result of the deaths of as many as 20 Iraqi civilians in what looks like yet another in a long series of “shoot first and cover it up later” operations which seems to be the stock in trade of many of these “private security” firms. The committee will also be looking into the dozens of unanswered questions regarding the funding and even the number of “contractors” engaged in Iraq and elsewhere.
The hearings may be another toothless effort on the part of our limpwristed legislature as they have already agreed to defer to the FBI and the State Department. If they believe that they will get the truth from Blackwater’s enablers at State or any part of the Bush Department of Justice.. well, I have a bridge for sale.

So, Blackwater was a subcontractor to Regency, which was a subcontractor to ESS, which was a subcontractor to Halliburton’s KBR subsidiary, the prime contractor for the Pentagon — and each company along the way was in business to make a profit.
U.S. Pays Steep Price for Private Security in Iraq, WAPO

Privatization has led directly to the doubling of our national debt during the Cheney/Bush era. Rather than performing public business more efficiently they have embroiled the world in a series of brutal and illegal wars while engineering the rape of the American treasury in the conversion of enormous amounts of public treasure to private hands. Fraud, waste and theft abound and what is done within the confines of the law is shameful.

For all the hubbub over the recent Blackwater incident, the American public remains largely unaware of the private military industry. While private forces make up more than 50 percent of the overall operation in Iraq, according to a study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, they have been mentioned in only a quarter of 1 percent of all American media stories on Iraq.

Yet, at the same time, contractors are one of the most visible and hated aspects of the American presence in Iraq. “They seal off the roads and drive on the wrong side. They simply kill,” Um Omar, a Baghdad housewife, told Agence France Press about Blackwater in a report in mid-September. A traffic policeman at Al-Wathba square in central Baghdad concurred: “They are impolite and do not respect people, they bump other people’s cars to frighten them and shout at anyone who approaches them … Two weeks ago, guards of a convoy opened fire randomly that led to the killing of two policemen … I swear they are Mossad,” he said, referring to the Israeli spy service, which is a catch-all for anything perceived as evil in the Arab world.The dark truth about Blackwater

I don’t know what it will take for the people of this country to reverse this course, to stop this mad dash into the the abyss of fascist tyranny that I see on our horizon. Aside from responding to public opinion polls people seem to be sleepwalking through the ongoing destruction of our Constitution. During the Vietnam war the voices of protest increased every year until the government was forced to heed the crescendo and bring an end to the madness. Perhaps the press, the media in those days was more independent of the mega corporations that now determine public policy by buying every available politician, they are certainly quick to preach the Bush doctrine today, they are greatly to blame.

I don’t see anything from the general public but meekness, fear of being impolite, of creating a disturbance and that meekness is sustenance for those who would enslave us, our meekness is the very bread and wine of their existence.
I think though, that we, all of us are public enemy number one, I did not work hard enough, write effectively enough or shout loudly enough, we acquiesced quietly in the face of authority figures and “experts” when we knew better.

The fundamental rule of democracy is to distrust authority and demand accountability and somewhere along the line we forgot that and abrogated our responsibility to stand firm and demand freedom and justice in the face of would be tyrants.

I hope that I get interesting cell mates in the gulag. The guy on the left may be our guard.

Bob Higgins
Worldwide Sawdust

Related stories, sources and links:
Subcontracting the War

Blackwater Banned In Iraq

U.S. Pays Steep Price for Private Security in Iraq

Amid uproar, Blackwater stops land deal

Pentagon Issues Blackwater New $92 Million Contract

Death From All Sides

GOP Occupied America: Does the GOP “Vision Thing” Include Blackwater Patrolling America’s Cities, Innocent People Awaiting Death?

Private contractors threaten U.S. democracy

The Bush administration’s ties to Blackwater

Blackwater Portrayed As Out of Control

From Errand to Fatal Shot to Hail of Fire to 17 Deaths

Guards in Iraq Cite Frequent Shootings

The progress being made in our 4 1/2 year war of terror on Iraq is phenomenal. So impressive are our recent gains that the “top tier” Democratic candidates who have lined up in competition to become the heirs of this great struggle for freedom, for Middle Eastern democracy, for oil and gas rights for western corporations and of course for lucrative contracts in arms sales and private security for campaign contributors, last night went way out on a limb and declared their goal of removing our troops from the quagmire in Mesopotamia by the end of their first term in office in 2013.

Despite their boldness, they did not report whether or not they could guarantee the colonization of Mars, a cure for cancer, or flying pigs within that time frame.

The Congress of the United States of America, a legislative body established by the American Constitution over two centuries ago has declared itself to be toothless, spineless and ultimately meaningless. Yesterday they condemned a reputable political organization for running a completely truthful newspaper ad and voted to declare the military of a sovereign nation a terrorist organization in order to present their Fuhrer with a gift wrapped excuse for his next adventure.

They were asked by Bush’s Defense Secretary for an additional 190 billion ($190,000,000,000) dollars to continue their criminal enterprises in Iraq and Afghanistan and despite the fact that a sizable majority of the people of our country want to end this war, the cowardly swine will approve it. That will bring the total publicly reported expenditures to 800 billion dollars ($800,000,000,000). Most of this has been spent, squandered, swindled, bamboozled away since our chief arrogant little asswipe stood on the deck of an aircraft carrier and declared that the mission had been accomplished.

Hell, they sacked one of our principle Generals at the outset of this insanity for declaring that the war would cost as much as 25 billion when Rumsfeld and Cheney’s various staff were reporting that it could be done for seven billion which would be financed through the sale of, get this,Iraqi Oil.

Congress will of course, make another face saving gesture and ask for full progress reports, which will be dutifully drawn up by the neocon advertising/marketing/propaganda staff in the white House and fed to an “ass kissing little chicken shit” general for presentation to our parliament of gutless wonders and we will continue, down the same path following some vague vanishing point into a future where the only things that are certain are the deaths of thousands more of our troops and tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians.  

Since our current crop of wars of empire are progressing so swimmingly (as planned at the highest levels) they now are preparing to embroil us in another war with Iran and this time they plan to pull out all the stops and use the nukes that they have been slathering over all these long years.

Last week on television, I witnessed a room full of mostly young college students sit pacifically and watch passively as a half dozen hired goons brutalized another student with Tasers, for speaking. For Speaking.

I felt that I was seeing a vision of America’s future.

No matter what this criminal government and their corporate masters do, no matter what the excess, no matter what the crime, no matter what horrors they commit in our name the people of this country are sitting, sitting as acquiescently as that room full of meek children, sitting and cowering in the face of authority.

America in the first decade of the twenty first century is beginning to look a lot like Germany in the third decade of the last century and I’m beginning to be relieved that this is my last decade.

Bob Higgins
Worldwide Sawdust

I’m on dozens of Email lists, everybody from the New York Times to Victoria’s Secret (great articles over there) sends me Email and I spend way too much time scanning and deleting most of it daily. I subscribe to Email lists from news organizations, campaign committees, government watchdog groups and all kinds of public service organizations. I also get stuff addressing me as Dear One, with great investment opportunities in Nigeria and missives that promise to make me larger, but I delete them all summarily as I have nothing to invest and…, never mind.

Most of what I receive is of a “progressive” or “liberal” nature but in the interest of knowing what the adversary is up to, I also subscribe to publications from conservative groups, the spectrum runs from the Coulter, Limbaugh breed of invertebrates to the American Enterprise Institute and other large lizards. I”ll tell you, a little of this stuff goes a long way.

I got a real dandy this morning from the Heritage Foundation, you know, the conservative think tank that has worked so tirelessly for the Bush administration, embroiling us in various wars of empire and providing invaluable aid and advice in support of administration efforts to relieve American citizens of such pesky irritants as habeas corpus, civil liberties and due process of law, while conducting additional studies aimed at relieving us of our money.

Heritage has long fought the good fight for corporate rights and limited government. These are the guys who burn the midnight oil to come up with ways to help corporations pocket employee pension funds without exposing themselves to criminal liability while working diligently to ensure that federal regulatory agencies are toothless, and in all ways impotent. The effectiveness of their efforts on behalf of corporate America can be measured in such events as the Crandall Canyon mine collapse.

The organization, which came into existence in 1973 was bankrolled by Joseph Coors, of the Coors Brewing Company and billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife, Paul Weyrich was one of it’s founders, there were no wild eyed leftists in that circle unless they were carrying a rake, polishing the crystal or cleaning the pool.

Heritage is now funded to the tune of 30 to 40 million annually by obscenely wealthy individuals and cash bloated corporations. They also receive large sums from foreign governments and such entities (it has been reported) as the Korean Intelligence agency. In return for their generosity Heritage spends about twenty percent of the take lobbying government on their behalf and publishing studies which tell them things that they want to hear and helping them market bullshit and lies to the rest of us.

In this morning’s Email from Heritage was a featured article written by “Senior Fellow” (please pause to genuflect) Robert Rector (Photo at right) at the National Review Online and titled “Poor Politics” in which he offers the following nuggets of conservative think tank wisdom regarding persons in this country who are classified as poor. From Mr. oops, “Senior Fellow” Rector:

“The following are facts about persons defined as “poor” by the Census Bureau, taken from a variety of government reports:”

“46 percent of all poor households actually own their own homes. The average home owned by persons classified as poor by the Census Bureau is a three-bedroom house with one-and-a-half baths, a garage, and a porch or patio.”

“Senior Fellow” Rector quoting from a “variety of government reports.”

I don’t know the actual numbers but I’m guessing that most of the 46% quoted own nothing more substantial than a 30 year mortgage which they struggle mightily to pay while staying ahead of such wolves as the costs of daily living and working in America. The idea that forty percent of those below the federal poverty level “own” their homes is nonsense and “Senior Fellow” Rector knows it.

In addition, what happened to the legions of people who live in houses with fewer than 3 bedrooms and the gazillions of apartment dwellers, not to mention the many people who call the porch or patio “home.”

“80 percent of poor households have air conditioning. By contrast, in 1970, only 36 percent of the entire U.S. population enjoyed air conditioning.”

“Senior Fellow” Rector quoting from a “variety of government reports.”

I suppose that “Senior Fellow” Rector would feel more comfortable with the poor if they were sweltering in their “three bedroom houses” and dying quietly and unobtrusively of heat prostration. It must also be noted that those who rent houses or apartments don’t “own” their air conditioners any more than they own their homes. Either way they pay dearly in utility bills and taxes for the meager comfort of not sweating through their shorts.

“Only six percent of poor households are overcrowded; two thirds have more than two rooms per person.”

“Senior Fellow” Rector quoting from a “variety of government reports.”

I currently live in a five room house with my cat, which I suppose places us above “Senior Fellow Rector’s” mandatory squalor requirement average. I will soon be forced to move (due to poverty) from this spacious splendor to share an apartment with my brother and his Grandson. We will then share 5 rooms, I am doing my part to “walk the walk” of the poor by cramming myself into smaller accomodations so that the ruling class may have more room to ride their horsies.

“The typical poor American has more living space than the average individual living in Paris, London, Vienna, Athens, and other cities throughout Europe. (These comparisons are to the average citizens in foreign countries, not to those classified as poor.)”

“Senior Fellow” Rector quoting from a “variety of government reports.”

It should be noted that America as she was growing in the 19th century and the early part of the 20th, had so many more times the available land area than most European countries that there can be no comparison. Except for those unfortunate millions who were crammed into urban tenements and company “housing” “provided” by railroad, mining, factory or mill owners we have historically been able to spread our elbows regardless of economic status. It does look bad though, I admit it, all those so called poor people with so much wasted space between them. Inefficiency.

“Nearly three quarters of poor households own a car; 31 percent own two or more cars.”

“Senior Fellow” Rector quoting from a “variety of government reports.”

I own a car, It’s 12 years old and I bought it used back when I was not disabled and working six days a week to stay just above the poverty level. I still drive it to my physical therapy appointments at the VA hospital and the grocery store when I can afford to pay the fuel prices that Heritage helped to arrange.

“97 percent of poor households have a color television; over half own two or more color televisions.”

“Senior Fellow” Rector quoting from a “variety of government reports.”

I have two, one is 8 years old and works well, the other was given to me by a friend and sometimes works as well, there is nothing on them but lying news people reading scripts prepared at the Heritage foundation. If that violates my status as “poor” I’ll be happy to turn one over to the “unnecessary entertainment police.”

“78 percent have a VCR or DVD player.”

“Senior Fellow” Rector quoting from a “variety of government reports.”

My wife made me buy a DVD player a couple years before she died. She was an invalid those last several years but found joy and laughter in rented Disney movies. She’s gone now, a year next month. I do feel a bit guilty for the extravagance and promise to atone.

“62 percent have cable or satellite TV reception.”

“Senior Fellow” Rector quoting from a “variety of government reports.”

Got me again, and, I have wireless internet as well. I must have these things, they allow me to stay abreast of those who wage this unrelenting war against the middle and lower economic classes in this and other countries. I also need it to get my Email from the Heritage Foundation and Victoria’s Secret. (good articles over there)

“89 percent own microwave ovens, more than half have a stereo, and a more than a third have an automatic dishwasher.”

“Senior Fellow” Rector still quoting from a “variety of government reports.”

In all his quoting of vague “government sources,” “Senior Fellow” Rector doesn’t mention wage stagnation, the continually rising cost of living in all areas, outsourcing and offshoring of jobs in all sectors of the economy, community crippling layoffs, pension defaults, natural disasters, catastrophic illnesses, death, war and a host of other legitimate reasons why good, honest, working people have fallen into poverty yet still have that embarrassing  dishwasher in their kitchen and still reside in the three bedroom house with a patio that they lived in before their jobs were shipped off to Timbuktu.

There may be a difference between the face of poverty in Dorothea Lange’s hauntingly beautiful “Migrant Mother” from 1940 at the top of this rant and the modern version in this new century but I doubt it, you have to look at the eyes, close up, and personal to see, to know the despair.

I don’t know, Maybe “Senior Fellow” Rector hasn’t heard about those things, yeah that’s probably it.

Anyway, I’m off the hook on the last one, (is he still running on?) my ten year old nuke died and I can’t afford another, that damn poverty thing again, and alas, no dishwasher. I’ve been waiting a long time for a veteran’s disability pension to show up in my mailbox and I’m sure that it will, probably the day after they plant my butt at the VA cemetery. I’ll celebrate, maybe buy a new microwave or a … they still sell “stereos?”

Bob Higgins

Worldwide Sawdust

A rumble a loud crack, like thunder, rocks, dirt and chocking dust rain down.
A rock fall is imminent. So what is a miner to do?
“You run for your life,” said Tim Miller, who toiled in Kentucky’s mines for more than two decades.

… The goal is to eliminate the coal industry. Of course the goal is to eliminate the coal industry. Coal is filthy. It destroys ecosystems to dig it up. It kills the people who work around it. Coal plants throw particulates in the air and causes respiratory ailments. They throw mercury in the water and causes birth defects. They throw CO2 into the atmosphere and cause global warming. The coal industry corrupts the political process. It lies to the public about global warming, and mine safety, and coal reserves, and everything else. It leeches money and opportunity out of the states where it is based.
The only reason we think of coal as “cheap” is that we don’t tally all those costs in the debit column.
From David Roberts Coal is the enemy of the human race…

During the winter of my fourteenth year I had a part time job. Every morning I would get up at 5 o”clock and walk up the hill to the ancient brick home of an elderly widow where I would descend to the dimly lit basement and remove the previous day’s supply of clinkers from the firebox of an equally ancient and frightening looking furnace, shovel in a supply of fresh coal and get a good fire roaring. That was it, home to shower and head to school. She payed me two dollars a day and in 1958 when a gallon of gas was a quarter, that was a good sum of money. That is also the sum total of my life’s experience with coal.

David Roberts wrote the brief but engaging piece quoted above earlier in the summer at Huff Post, he wrote his rant in reference to a coal industry mogul who for several months had been preaching to anyone who would listen about the evils that congress, in league with environmentalists, were plotting to perpetrate on the coal industry. I had heard the name of the subject of his rant before but at the time I didn’t recognize it.

It wasn’t until two weeks ago when a mine in central Utah’s Emery County in Crandall Canyon, one of the deepest coal mines in the country collapsed, burying six miners 1500 to 1800 feet below the surface and 3 1/2 miles from the entrance point, that the name and the reason the it rang a bell popped back into my mind.

Robert Murray. The name was familiar because I had read a Washington Post article about his testimony before a congressional committee in the spring in which he took congress to task over the Clean Air Act of 1990 and declaimed on the perils of listening to the purveyors of Global warming science, which he has since referred to as “global goofiness.” (as quoted below in the New York Sun)

“Some wealthy elitists in our country,” he told the audience, “who cannot tell fact from fiction, can afford an Olympian detachment from the impacts of draconian climate change policy. For them, the jobs and dreams destroyed as a result will be nothing more than statistics and the cares of other people. These consequences are abstractions to them, but they are not to me, as I can name many of the thousands of the American citizens whose lives will be destroyed by these elitists’ ill-conceived ‘global goofiness’ campaigns.”

2007 speech to the New York Coal Trade Association

Robert Murray is one of two people that you would recognize from the nearly non stop coverage of the aftermath of the cave in, the repeated rescue attempts, and the ensuing tragedy upon tragedy when the rescuers themselves were caught in another collapse killing three and injuring six others.

Murray, is the most recognizable, at times seen castigating the press or the unions, at others in the mine, pointer in hand, explaining the rescue operation to the media, or as seen below. Murray is the owner and CEO of Murray energy which is among the dozen largest coal mining companies in the country. He owns 19 mines in Ohio and Illinois including the Crandall Canyon mine and others in Utah. In general, Murray’s operations have a far less than stellar reputation for safety, having over the years, been cited thousands of times for safety violations and fined millions of dollars. Murray says that the safety violations were trivial and included violations such as not having enough toilet paper in the restroom.

Murray claims that the Crandall Canyon collapse was caused by an earthquake, seismologists dispute his claim saying that the seismic activity they recorded was the result of the collapsing mountain not the cause of it. The head of the National Earthquake Information Center in Golden, Colorado said that an analysis of seismic waves that occurred in the area around the time the mine collapsed are consistent with what would be seen from a mine collapse, and, subsequent seismic activity that has been detected may have been related to energy being released in the aftermath of the collapse,

However its probably easy to guess which side of this question the insurance companies will land on.

If Murray has no love for environmentalists and federal regulation, he also has no love for unions and all but one of his mines are non union, a fact that probably is responsible, in large measure, for the dismal safety record. In a union atmosphere, union stewards and safety committees can report violations without fear of retaliation from management. In a non union mine reporting safety violations or unsafe practices and working conditions place the individual miner at risk of losing his job, or worse, for speaking out. This often results in an atmosphere of fear in which such conditions are overlooked, placing lives at risk.

Murray is also a serious donor to Republican candidates for office, having bequeathed over $150,000 to such notables as George Bush, Mitch McConnell, Katherine Harris and Sam Brownback among others, in the last couple of years through his Murray Energy PAC and other affiliates. This may help to explain the accommodating way he has been treated by federal regulators.

The coal in the Crandall Canyon mine is removed by what is called the room and pillar method where digging and removing coal creates a cavity or room and large pillars or columns of coal are left standing to hold up the roof which is further augmented by drilling and setting roof bolts. It is believed by many that at the time of the collapse the miners were engaged in retreat mining in which the pillars are removed and the roof is allowed to collapse as the workers retreat back to the entry.

Although considered to be a very dangerous undertaking, the mine had the necessary permits for performing retreat mining from Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) according to Robert Friend who told the Washington Post that the cause of the collapse had not yet been discovered but, “there was retreat mining where these miners are.” Asked about the conflict with Murray’s denials that the retreat method was in use he replied, “I can’t speculate as to what he meant.”

Some, including Utah’s Governor are calling for an investigation focusing on why those permits were granted in this instance and UMW says that the MSHA has been too cozy with the industry in recent years.

There are whispered reports (it’s a good idea to lower one’s voice when criticizing mine owners or their operations in central Utah) that the Crandall Canyon mine was unsafe when Murray bought it last year. Not wanting to leave behind any of the coal contained in the pillars they began the retreat mining operation. A spokesman for UMW, Phil Smith, said yesterday, “No one took the time to see that it was a recipe for disaster.

The graphic depicts retreat mining in a room and pillar operation like Crandall Canyon.
The pillars are mined from the farthest point towards the entry and the mine is allowed to collapse as it will.
Wanna try it? I’m sure the image above is a much more orderly depiction of the process than the reality.

Though it may seem strange to people outside the coal industry, generations of miners have been cutting away those pillars to increase coal production in a practice known as retreat mining. It’s legal and considered standard procedure. But it has claimed the lives of 17 coal miners in the past seven years.

In Kentucky alone, four miners have been crushed in rock falls during retreat mining in the last 14 months.

“You’re definitely playing Russian roulette,” said Miller, now an organizer for the United Mine Workers of America, which spells out in its contract that members can withdraw from any section of mine they believe is unsafe. “You remove those pillars, the roof is coming down. It’s inevitable.”

Retreat Coal Mining Comes Under Scrutiny

Which brings us to the second recognizable figure from the coverage of these horrible events, Richard Stickler the Mine Safety and Health Administrator who waited two days after the mine collapsed before taking control of the rescue efforts, a delay that reminded some of “Brownie” and Katrina.

Stickler is a former mine executive and manager whose confirmation for the position was turned down twice by the Senate.

Richard Stickler

The injury rates at coal mines Stickler managed from 1989 to 1996 were double the national average, according to statistics assembled by the Mine Workers before Stickler’s appointment to head the Pennsylvania Bureau of Deep Mine Safety.

During his confirmation hearings, Stickler said he believed the then-current mine safety laws were adequate and did not need strengthening. This spring, when coal mine deaths stood at 33?at the time the highest number killed on the job in a full year since 2001. Congress passed legislation to strengthen and improve mine safety.

AFL_CIO Blog

In spite of fierce opposition from both Democrats and Republicans as well as the United Mine Workers, George Bush made the appointment last October during a congressional recess.
The Fox was now in charge of another regulatory chicken coop.

The federal government’s power to regulate the activities of business is among it’s most sacred duties to our citizenry. The regulation of the purity of our drugs and our food, the safety of our workplaces, the safety and reliability of manufactured products, ranging from what we wear to what we drive is a responsibility that is as critical to our social health and civil order as defense. In this area, as in so many others, this administration has not only dropped the ball, they have thrown it to the opposing team.

From a candlelight vigil held in Huntington last week, focused on the six coal miners trapped in the Crandall Canyon mine. Photo by Trent Nelson Salt Lake Tribune

“We are at the mercy of the officials in charge and their so-called experts.”
Sonny Olsen, Spokesperson for the families of the trapped miners”

As I was about finish and post this article I received this Email from John Sweeney, AFL-CIO President. The timing was spooky, but he wrote the perfect postscript to what I wanted to convey here. So I’m going to use his remarks as my close, Take it Mr Sweeney:

Dear Robert,

As you may already know, the underground rescue operation to save the six coal

miners trapped in the Crandall Canyon Mine has been halted. Tragically, the miners may be buried beneath the Utah mountain

forever.

At this difficult time, I ask you for your thoughts and prayers for the miners and their families, as well as for the families of the three rescue workers who gave their lives trying to save the missing.

I also thank you for being someone who cares enough to take action to improve life for working

families on many fronts.

Last year, after 12 coal miners died in the Sago Mine in West Virginia you helped convince Congress to pass the first major overhaul to mine safety laws in more than three decades, the MINER Act.

Since the Bush administration came into office, it has been systematically dismantling workplace safety protections. But you wouldn’t allow corporate greed and Bush administration neglect and indifference to go unchallenged.

That neglect and indifference haven’t been isolated to workplace safety. Just look at our economy workers’ paychecks are stagnant while our productivity goes up and up. Just think back to the

administration’s catastrophic response to Hurricane Katrina, the poor conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, the nation’s crumbling infrastructure, our health care crisis; many, many people are wondering,What’s wrong with America?

Fortunately, in our democracy, every four years we have a chance to fix what’s wrong by electing

leaders, including a president, who put working families first. We have a very busy time ahead of us, fighting together for health care, good jobs and the freedom to form unions without employer interference and fighting for a government led by people committed to make America work for

working families.

Thank you for all that you’ve done so far in this fight and for all you will do in the months ahead.

In solidarity,

John Sweeney

President, AFL-CIO

P.S. What do you think the next president should do to make our workplaces safe and healthy? Please share your thoughts on our AFL-CIO Working Families Vote 2008Forum.

Related Stories and Links:

Columbus Dispatch

Two For The Money

The Salt Lake Tribune

Memo shows mine already had roof problems in March

I See Dead People

A sincere thank you to Marty Kaplan and David Roberts

Bob Higgins

Worldwide Sawdust

Jose Padilla, center, is escorted to a waiting police vechicle by federal marshals in this Jan. 5, 2006, file photo. He has been on trial in Miami for most of this year, charged with conspiring with al Qaeda to detonate a “dirty bomb” in the United States.

Photo by J. Pat Carter, AP

On Thurday August 16 2007 A federal jury convicted Jose Padilla of three counts of conspiracy

in a trial that was the culmination of five years of a criminal proceeding that is among the most shameful in the history of the United States justice system.

I am not an apologist for Jose Padilla, I belong to no “Free Jose” organizations nor am I a member of any “Jose Padilla defense funds,” although maybe I should have been, maybe we all should have been because when they throw away the keys to Padilla’s cell we will also throw away any pretense to being a nation of laws, a nation that respects human rights, we will throw away a large measure of what once made us a great and civilized nation.

I am also not a terrorist, nor am I a member of any terrorist organization and that declaration alone, in the modern, mandatory, cocoon of fear within which we are now required to live by governmental decree, is probably enough to have a tap placed on my phone and a couple of guys who look like the Blues Brothers parked in front of my house at odd hours. After all, if I have nothing to hide, why would I bring it up. Under the new Department of Justice rule book I must be indictable for something.

Jose Padilla was arrested over five years ago in May of 2002, picked up in Chicago after returning  from Europe and allegedly carrying over 10 grand in cash. He was held for  about a month as a material witness before Attorney General John Ashcroft delayed a trip to Moscow in order to announce that the US had discovered a plot to explode “dirty bombs” inside the country. Padilla was branded as the “Dirty Bomber” and George Bush declared him to be an illegal enemy combatant.

Padilla was a small time criminal, a US citizen born in Brooklyn, he had lived in Chicago and been a member of a street gang known as the Maniac Latin Disciples. He had been in prison at least once for aggravated assault after a gang member died as a result of fight in which he was involved. While in prison Padilla converted to Islam under the tutelage of someone who is reported to have preached a non violent, mainstream version of the religion. He attended mosques in Florida for years with one of the men who was convicted with him.

Padilla was probably a bad actor, I have seen nothing in his resume that would lead me to hire him as a youth counselor, but was he a terrorist? Who knows? That is the problem.

Had the government arrested him and presented it’s evidence in a court of law, as is done every day, in conspiracies great and small in every city in this country, had Padilla been afforded the guarantees of the constitution of the nation of which he was a citizen, we might have learned the truth.

Now we probably never will, because what the government did was search for shortcuts, the law was inconvenient, due process, criminal procedure, rights of the accused, all that stuff was an impediment to the speedy production of positive results in their war on terror public relations campaign, which followed on the heels of 9/11 and continues unabated to this day.

Padilla was shipped off to a Naval brig in Charleston to spend the next three and one half years in total isolation, held in constant darkness, or constant light, under extremes of temperature, subjected to physical and psychological “enhanced interrogation methods,” the Bush administration’s Orwellian euphemism for torture. And the government got nothing. Nothing.

When all was said and done, after more than three years of criminal treatment, the government, faced with the likelihood that the courts were about to require them to put up or shut up, finally indicted Padilla on the three conspiracy charges of which, last week, he was ultimately convicted.

Padilla was never charged with being a member of al Queada, he was never charged with being a dirty bomber, he was not indicted on nor was he ever charged with any what was alleged at the beginning of this exercise in injustice over three years before.

Our current Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales last week called the conviction of Jose Padilla and his co-conspirators ” a significant victory in our efforts to fight the threat posed by terrorists and their supporters.”

If holding an American citizen or anyone else, for years, years, in military custody, without charging him with a crime, subjecting him to torture during the entire period, and then failing to indict or convict him of anything close to what they originally alleged is “a significant victory” then it helps me to understand their constant claims of significant progress in Iraq or in the “War on Terror.”

Make no mistake, this was no victory. This was a failure of our system of justice deliberately brought about by an executive department and two Attorneys General who had, and have, nothing but, disdain, in fact, utter contempt for the American system of justice and for due process of law.

I’m not bleeding for Jose Padilla here, I doubt if Jose even knows who he is at this point.

By accounts  that I have read he has been driven insane by the circumstances of his confinement. It is reported that as part of the process of breaking him down he was forced to sign documents with the name “John Doe.” One of their goals was to relieve him of his personal identity, they succeeded, all too well.

The government on Thursday convicted “John Doe” of three counts of conspiring to participate in terrorist acts. They can do the same to me, more importantly, they can do the same to you.

They have spared no expense of time, energy and money over the last six years. they have gone to great lengths in establishing shortcuts that enable them to investigate, arrest, imprison and torture any one they want, at any time and for any reason.

To this government, this Cheney/Bush administration, this criminal enterprise that is destroying America one liberty at a time, we are all, each and every one of us “John Doe.”

Bob Higgins

Worldwide Sawdust

Related Story
Window Into a Terror Suspect’s Isolation

In a story in the LA Times this morning “Top general may propose pullbacks” Julian E. Barnes and Peter Spiegel report that Petraeus may announce pullbacks from some areas in Iraq, including al Anbar province and a turnover of those ares to Iraqi forces.

I’m somewhat mystified by this process as it appears that, at the White House, they seem to know already, in other words, today, what they are going to report in September, in other words, a month from today. In fact it seems that they began writing their “field report” weeks ago… in the White House.

I’m not sure why exactly, but this somehow reminds me of reports I hear from teachers with experience in the “no child left behind” follies, who have described to me the specter of spending weeks and weeks of classroom time devoted to “teaching to the test” in order to maintain mandated academic ratings and the flow of federal funds. Taking the test is mostly a charade, passing the test, a foregone conclusion, an exercise in making things look good on paper.

In other words, as Junior might say every few seconds, in the case of Iraq they are writing a “report” which will contain recommendations that will allow us to draw conclusions, that were decided on in the White House more than a month ago.

They will do, in this instance, what they have done so unsuccessfully for the last 7 years, they will start from a set of erroneous facts, ask for recommendations or intelligence from the field, cherry pick the recommendations and intelligence to find those nuggets that fit their assumptions, ignore the rest, have the advertising guys in the White House cook up a great big pot of bullshit stew, order the military and diplomats to sign off on it, and have Petraeus and Crocker carry the wholly fraudulent, putrid mess up to capitol hill and serve it to congress, where as we well know “they’ll eat anything.”

The LA Times says:

Despite Bush?s repeated statements that the report will reflect evaluations by Petraeus and Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, administration officials said it would actually be written by the White House, with inputs from officials throughout the government.

And though Petraeus and Crocker will present their recommendations on Capitol Hill, legislation passed by Congress leaves it to the president to decide how to interpret the report?s data.

I’m clear out here in Dayton, Ohio and I can tell you this, long before the General and the Ambassador board the plane in Baghdad next month, long before the admen in the West Wing have finished tweaking and spinning the “report from the field” I could write it myself.

In fact, for less than the price of two first class, round trip tickets from Baghdad to Washington, I’ll personally write all the General’s “field reports and recommendations” to Congress for the next calendar year, and I’ll throw this one in as well.

The situation in Iraq is steadily improving, but we still face challenges and a lot of hard work, in other words the enemy is still out there trying to hurt us, in other words the evil ones still want to kill Americans. Therefore we will continue the current troop levels through the end of the year, in other words sometime in February and the General will report back at that time.

In other words then.

Until then we will continue the hard work of writing the General’s next report.

I don’t know how much it’s going to cost the taxpayers to ship Petraeus and Crocker, their respective staffs, roadies, valets, hairdressers whatever, from Baghdad to the Hill and back to the Green Zone, but I can deliver the kind of reports that the President needs quickly, efficiently and at greatly reduced cost to the taxpayer from my world headquarters right here in Dayton, Ohio.

All they have to do is send me the conclusions… data, by telegraph is okay.

Bob Higgins

Worldwide Sawdust

Related Stories and Sources:

Top general may propose pullbacks

Petraeus: Troop Reduction Plan Seen