[Liberation News Service]: LNS Post Coup II Supplement (12/30/040

[richard power]

Next week, it all comes down. John Conyers (D-MI) will
be holding hearings, Jesse Jackson will be leading
protests, and Maxine Waters (D-CA)will stand up and
challenge the Ohio electors, IF the US Senate
Democrats capitulate as they did in 2000, IF they
refuse to sign on with the Congressional Black Caucus,
they might as well embrace the "Pro-Life" movement,
Creationism and Neo-Con National Insecurity, because
their role as a progressive force in US politics will
be utterly FORFEIT...

Here is another supplement, please review the news
items and op-ed pieces, and share them with those who
care...


Theft of the 2004 Election & Complicity of the
Corporatist News Media

Bob Fertik, www.democrats.com: January 6 is fast
approaching, and we need to convince one Senator to
support Maxine Waters and other House Democrats in
their challenge to Ohio's electors. Call your
Democratic Senators today! Cite the Moss v. Bush
lawsuit as the basis for the challenge.
Activists will be coming to DC from across the nation.
ReDefeatBush.com is helping local activists arrange
transportation. ReDefeatBush has also compiled a
target list of 77 Members of the U.S. House of
Representatives who should be core supporters.
To set the stage for the January 6 protest, Rev. Jesse
Jackson will lead a "Pro Democracy Count Every Vote
Rally" in Columbus Ohio on January 3, which is
co-sponsored by Ohio Congresswoman Stephanie
Tubbs-Jones, MoveOn.org, Progressive Democrats of
America, the anti-war coalition United for Peace and
Justice, Ohio State Senator Joyce Beatty, CASE Ohio
and others. According to Rev. Jackson, this rally will
mark the beginning of a mass movement:
“The vote recount in Ohio is underway. The election
challenge lawsuit has been filed. Subpoenas are being
prepared. Depositions are being planned. Hearings
spearheaded by Cong. John Conyers are bringing forth
new evidence of voter machine manipulation. And now
Sen. John Kerry has joined in the recount fight. We
must have a thorough investigation of voter
irregularities and the voter machines before Congress
certifies the Electoral College vote on January 6,”
Rev. Jackson said. “January 3rd will be the beginning
of a new Pro-Democracy Movement in America. Forty
years ago, the Voting Rights Act was passed as a
result of an independent, mass civil rights movement.
We will carry forward that tradition in 2005, and
continue the fight to count every vote and make sure
every vote counts.”
Gary Beckwith, http://election.solarbus.org: For those
watching the growing body of evidence concerning
election fraud in our past presidential election, one
question has remained: Why don't we hear about this on
the evening news?
As of yet it's been hard to explain why the
controversies in Ukraine make the headlines, but when
similar problems are discovered at home, you have to
scour the Internet to find the information.
It certainly isn't for lack of events on which to
report. Members of The House Judiciary Committee have
been meeting regularly reviewing evidence of
systematic voter suppression and voting machine
tampering. A coalition of lawyers have filed a lawsuit
against the Bush campaign citing deliberate
manipulation of votes. Sworn testimony and signed
affidavits have implicated companies, individuals, and
a Florida congressman…
While it's frustrating that we still can't see the
exit polls, let's thank the media for at least
resolving one thing for us today. Now we know why we
don't see stories about the election on the evening
news. Their refusal to release the exit polls shows us
categorically that there is a concerted effort on
behalf of the major media outlets to consciously
prevent the information from getting out. It's not
simple oversight, and it's not because they don't
think it's newsworthy. Now we know. They are
withholding information from us.
Now that that's been resolved, we can move on to the
next question: What are they hiding, and why?
www.bradblog.com: Congressman Tom Feeney's (R-FL)
attorneys have sent a letter threatening the editors
of Florida's Seminole Chronicle intimating possible
legal action in light of the news report filed by
Editor Alex Babcock last week concerning allegations
made in a sworn affidavit [PDF] and in sworn public
testimony before members of the U.S. House Judiciary
committee by software programmer Clint Curtis.
The story of Curtis' allegations and affidavit was
originally reported by The BRAD BLOG several weeks
ago. Curtis has alleged, among other things, that
Feeney conspired, in an October 2000 meeting, to have
a "vote-rigging software prototype" built by Yang
Enterprises, Inc. -- a company for which Feeney at the
time served as corporate counsel and registered
lobbyist even while he concurrently served as
Legislator, and eventually Speaker of the Florida
House. Feeney was the running mate to Jeb Bush during
his first failed bid for Governor of Florida, and is
now a U.S. Congressman from Florida's newly created
24th Congressional District. He also now sits on the
U.S. House's Judiciary Committee.

Jesse Jackson, Chicago Tribune: Claiming Ohio’s 2004
election results were more troubling than Florida’s
four years ago, the Rev. Jesse Jackson yesterday said
Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry
called it quits too soon.
"Kerry conceded much too quickly, before the facts
were in," Jackson said in a conference call with
reporters to discuss an ongoing challenge to Ohio’s
election results.
"When he pulled the plug, the national media left as
well," Jackson said of Kerry’s concession on Nov. 3,
the day after the election. 

Bush Abomination’s #1 Failure: National Security

Associated Press:  One of the captors from the group
calling itself the Islamic Army in Iraq said Bush's
re-election would boost their cause, Malbrunot wrote
in Friday's edition of Le Figaro, the French daily he
works for. 
"We want Bush because with him the American troops
will stay in Iraq and that way we will be able to
develop," Malbrunot cited the captor as saying…
Another captor, who described himself as the group's
head of internal intelligence, told the men that the
Islamic Army has four enemies: American and coalition
troops, "their collaborators, that is to say Italian
businessmen, or even French," as well Iraqi police and
spies. 
Reuters: A French judge has widened a probe into the
financial network surrounding the family of Osama bin
Laden after questioning his half-brother and learning
of a E241 million ($425.7million) transfer to
Pakistan.
Investigating magistrate Renaud Van Ruymbeke received
court authorisation to extend his investigation after
Yeslam bin Laden was questioned over allegations of
links with the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks
in the US. 
As a result, Mr Van Ruymbeke was adding "other
instances of money laundering" to the probe already
under way, Le Monde newspaper reported on the weekend.

On December 5, 2001, French authorities opened an
investigation into financial transfers carried out
through Paris between firms grouped within the Saudi
Investment Company (SICO) run by Yeslam bin Laden…
Although he denied having had any contact with his
half-brother for the past 20 years, the paper said,
documents held by Swiss banking authorities suggest
that Yeslam and Osama bin Laden held a joint account
in Switzerland between 1990 and 1997, according to
Jean-Charles Brisard – a private investigator hired by
families of the victims of the September 11 attacks. 

Bush Abomination’s #2 Failure: Economic Security

BOB GRAHAM, St Petersburg Times: During my lifetime,
five events have most affected Florida and its
prosperity: mosquito control; air conditioning; jet
air travel; Fidel Castro; and the creation of Social
Security and other retirement income programs. 
The first three are deeply entrenched in our society,
and I look forward to Castro passing from the scene.
Social Security, however, is at a crossroads.
President Bush and his Republican allies in Congress
seem determined to unravel the most important social
safety net in this nation's - and Florida's -
history...
In his 1998 State of the Union address, President
Clinton proposed saving Social Security first. There
was wisdom in that statement. This led to budget
surpluses, a booming economy and the opportunity to
pay off America's public debt. President Bush rejected
that opportunity - he opted for tax cuts for the rich
first. We now need to defeat ideas that would kill
Social Security as we have known it, especially when
it is sold under the banner of salvation.

Rachel Katz, Bloomberg:  Kmart Holding Corp. and
Sears, Roebuck & Co. are among the U.S. retailers
offering discounts of as much as 75 percent to lure
last-minute shoppers and salvage what's been a
sluggish holiday season. 
Sales gains in the first three weeks of December
averaged 3.1 percent, compared with 5.2 percent in the
same period last year, according to the International
Council of Shopping Centers- UBS weekly index. The
markdowns may not be enough to spur consumers to spend
more on holiday gifts, said investors including David
Keuler at Mason Street Advisors. 

Bush Abomination’s #3 Failure: Environmental Security

Geoffrey Lean, Independent/UK: George Bush's two
closest allies in his attempt to sabotage
international action to combat global warning last
week dramatically distanced themselves from him. Saudi
Arabia announced that it had approved the Kyoto
Protocol, the treaty on climate change which President
Bush has been trying to kill. And Australia, while
still rejecting it, parted company from the United
States by saying that it was prepared to negotiate its
successor.
The moves follow a tense international negotiating
session in Buenos Aires where, as The Independent on
Sunday reported last week, the US brought the talks to
the brink of collapse by obstructing even anodyne
proposals. This breached an assurance given by
President Bush in 2001, when he pulled out of the
protocol, that America would not try to stop other
countries reaching agreement.
New negotiations are due to begin next year on a
successor to Kyoto, which will come into force in
February, following Russia's decision to ratify it
last autumn. Tony Blair regards progress on climate
change as one of the top priorities of Britain's
presidency of the G8 group of the world's most
powerful nations. 

Gavin Schmidt, Earth Institute News: In a departure
from normal practice on the RealClimate.org site, this
post is a commentary on a piece of out-and-out fiction
(unlike most of the other posts which deal with a more
subtle kind). Michael Crichton’s new novel “State of
Fear” is about a self-important NGO hyping the science
of the global warming to further the ends of evil
eco-terrorists. The inevitable conclusion of the book
is that global warming is a non-problem. A lesson for
our times maybe? Unfortunately, I think not…
At the end of the book, Crichton gives us an author’s
message. In it, he re-iterates the main points of his
thesis, that there are some who go too far to drum up
support (and I have some sympathy with this), and that
because we don’t know everything, we actually know
nothing (here, I beg to differ). He also gives us his
estimate, ~0.8 C for the global warming that will
occur over the next century and claims that, since
models differ by 400% in their estimates, his guess is
as good as theirs. This is not true. The current batch
of models have a mean climate sensitivity of about 3 C
to doubled CO2 (and range between 2.5 and 4.0 degrees)
(Paris meeting of IPCC, July 2004) , i.e an
uncertainty of about 30%. As discussed above, the
biggest uncertainties about the future are the
economics, technology and rate of development going
forward. The main cause of the spread in the widely
quoted 1.5 to 5.8 C range of temperature projections
for 2100 in IPCC is actually the different scenarios
used. For lack of better information, if we
(incorrectly) assume all the scenarios are equally
probable, the error around the mean of 3.6 degrees is
about 60%, not 400%. Crichton also suggests that most
of his 0.8 C warming will be due to land use changes.
That is actually extremely unlikely since land use
change globally is a cooling effect (as discussed
above). Physically-based simulations are actually
better than just guessing.
Finally, in an appendix, Crichton uses a rather
curious train of logic to compare global warming to
the 19th Century eugenics movement. He argues, that
since eugenics was studied in prestigious universities
and supported by charitable foundations, and now, so
is global warming, they must somehow be related.
Presumably, the author doesn’t actually believe that
foundation-supported academic research ipso facto is
evil and mis-guided, but that is an impression that is
left.
In summary, I am a little disappointed, not least
because while researching this book, Crichton actually
visited our lab and discussed some of these issues
with me and a few of my colleagues…

More on the Complicity of the Corporatist Media
Danny Schecter, www.mediachannel.org: Since when did
the American Civil Liberties Union become a media
organization? Or put another way: why have so much of
our press fallen down on the job of pushing the Bush
Administration to disclose information about its
war-related practices, ranging from how it provides
for our troops to detailing military abuse of
prisoners and detainees? 
Documents pried from the government by the ACLU under
the Freedom of Information Act , and disclosed this
week, suggest that the abuse of detainees was more
systematic than we knew and ordered from on high. One
email even indicates that President Bush signed off on
the policy. While the administration disputes the
document, that famous question raised during the
Watergate investigation comes around again in a
different form: What did the President know and when
did he forget he knew it? 
The ACLU's success at breaking news also raises the
question of how aggressive our press has been in
challenging military rationales and White House
message points.
Illegitimate, Incompetent & Corrupt

Washington Post Editorial: THANKS TO a lawsuit by the
American Civil Liberties Union and other human rights
groups, thousands of pages of government documents
released this month have confirmed some of the painful
truths about the abuse of foreign detainees by the
U.S. military and the CIA -- truths the Bush
administration implacably has refused to
acknowledge…The new documents establish beyond any
doubt that every part of this cover story is false…
The record of the past few months suggests that the
administration will neither hold any senior official
accountable nor change the policies that have produced
this shameful record. Congress, too, has abdicated its
responsibility under its Republican leadership: It has
been nearly four months since the last hearing on
prisoner abuse. 

John P. O’Neill Wall of Heroes

Editors & Publishers: In a column noting the high
number of U.S. military personnel in Iraq who will be
far from home on Christmas, USA Today founder Al
Neuharth declared today that if he were eligible to
serve in Iraq, "I would do all I could to avoid it."
He also wrote in his weekly column for the paper that
America's New Year's resolution should be to bring the
troops home "sooner rather than later."
Reuters: A portrait of President Bush using monkeys to
form his image that was banished from a New York art
show last week amid charges of censorship was
projected on a giant billboard in Manhattan on
Tuesday. 
Animal Magazine, a quarterly arts publication that had
organized the month-long show, said anonymous donors
had paid for the picture to be posted on a giant
digital billboard over the entrance to the Holland
Tunnel, used by thousands of commuters traveling
between Manhattan and New Jersey. 
The original picture will be auctioned on eBay, with
part of the proceeds donated to parents of U.S.
soldiers wishing to supply their sons and daughters
with body armor in Iraq.
Kulchur War
Michael Powell, Washington Post: Lark Myers, a blond,
45-year-old gift shop owner, frames the question and
answers it. "I definitely would prefer to believe that
God created me than that I'm 50th cousin to a
silverback ape," she said. "What's wrong with wanting
our children to hear about all the holes in the theory
of evolution?"
Board members have been less guarded, and their
comments go well beyond intelligent design theory.
William Buckingham, the board's curriculum chairman,
explained at a meeting last June that Jesus died on
the cross and "someone has to take a stand" for him.
Other board members say they believe that God created
Earth and mankind sometime in the past ten thousand
years or so. 
"If the Bible is right, God created us," said John
Rowand, an Assemblies of God pastor and a newly
appointed school board member. "If God did it, it's
history and it's also science." 
This strikes some parents and teachers, not to mention
most evolutionary biologists, as loopy science…
"It's not science; it's a theocratic idea," Bryan
Rehm, a former science teacher in Dover and a father
of four. "We don't have enough time for science in the
classroom as it is - this is just inappropriate." 
Gareth Cook, Boston Globe: Stem cells have become
famous for their ability to heal, spurring hopes that
they might one day cure Parkinson's disease, spinal
cord injuries, and a wide variety of ailments. But now
a growing number of researchers are concluding that
stem cells are also the hidden force behind one of
nature's most feared killers: cancer.
Within each tumor, they believe, lurks a small
population of elusive, highly potent cells that drive
the tumor's growth. Under a microscope they appear
identical to other cancer cells, but these cancer stem
cells hold the power to produce cancerous tumors in
much the same way that normal stem cells can
regenerate the body's healthy tissues. They also seem
to resist traditional cancer drugs, explaining why
patients can be seemingly cured of some cancers only
to see the disease return.
In the past two years, cancer stem cells have gone
from a theory on the fringes of biology to an idea
that is attracting money and talent in cancer
research. Last year a scientist at the University of
Michigan announced the discovery of stem cells in
breast tumors. In the past few months, a form of
leukemia and two types of brain cancer were both
linked to cancer stem cells, and scientists familiar
with unpublished studies said more cancers are likely
to follow. The first test in patients of a therapy
targeting these stem cells is now getting underway. 

Restore the Republic in 2005!

Theft of the 2004 Election & Complicity of the 
Corporatist News Media

http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2004/1046

Ohio GOP election officials ducking subpoenas as Kerry
enters stolen vote fray
by Bob Fitrakis, Steve Rosenfeld and Harvey Wasserman
December 28, 2004

COLUMBUS -- Ohio Republican election officials thumbed
their noses at a subpoena Monday, December 27, as
Republican Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell
refused to appear at a deposition in an election
challenge lawsuit filed at the Ohio Supreme Court.
Meanwhile John Kerry is reported to have filed a
federal legal action aimed at preserving crucial
recount evidence, which has been under GOP assault
throughout the state. 

Richard Congianese, Ohio Assistant Attorney General,
is seeking a court order to protect Blackwell from
testifying under oath about how the election was run.
Blackwell, who administered Ohio's November 2
balloting, served as co-chair of the Bush-Cheney
campaign. 

James R. Dicks, Miami County Assistant Prosecuting
Attorney, also filed a motion to block subpoenas in
ten key Ohio counties. Other local election officials
slated to be deposed, such as in Claremont County,
have also refused to answer attorney questions. 

President George Bush, Vice-President Richard Cheney
and White House Political Advisor Karl Rove received
notice that they will be deposed Tuesday and
Wednesday, December 28 and 29. The trio’s Ohio
attorney, Kurt Tunnell, so far claims his clients have
not been properly served. Under Ohio law, the
Republican-dominated Ohio Supreme Court is responsible
for serving the three with subpoenas. 

Meanwhile, the Election Protection legal team has
collected new statements under oath describing more
voting and vote-counting problems on November 2. 

Voters in Trumbull County have testified that on
Election Day they received punch-card ballots where
holes were already punched for Bush. Meanwhile, a
notarized affidavit signed by Angela Greene, who voted
at Whitehall Yearling High School in central Ohio's
Franklin County, stated that one of the malfunctioning
electronic voting machines at her polling place was
delivered without a cartridge – meaning votes cast
might have gone uncounted. 

In Miami County, Blackwell certified a 98.5% turnout
in the Concord Southwest precinct, comprised of 520
votes for Bush and 157 for Kerry. This statistically
improbable turnout has all but 10 of the 689
registered voters casting their ballots on Election
Day. A preliminary canvas by The Free Press of less
than half the precinct found 25 registered voters
admitting they had not voted, meaning the official
tally was almost certainly fraudulent. 

The nearby Concord South precinct certified a 94.27%
voter turnout, with 468 alleged votes for Bush versus
182 for Kerry. Miami County is included in the
election challenge since it somehow reported nearly
19,000 additional votes after 100% of the precincts
had reported on Election Day. 

In Madison County, where public records requests were
filed to obtain voting records, the voting results
provided by the Madison County Board of Elections came
directly from a private company, Triad Governmental
Systems, Inc. An email dated November 29, 2004 from
Brandon Sandlin of Triad reads as follows: “Hello to
all in Madison County! Attached you will find the
cumulative report (oh49unov.pdf) with over and under
votes reported as well as the official abstract
(oh49abs.pdf). These reports may be printed for your
records and then mailed to the state along with your
other certification reports.” Coming from a private
corporation, Triad's letter underscores the barriers
to making a reliable independent public assessment and
recount of Ohio's presidential tally. 

In Mahoning County, the Washington Post reported new
affidavits documenting electronic "vote hopping" from
Kerry to Bush. This means voting machines highlighted
the choice for Bush before the voter recorded a choice
of his or her own. The legal team has been told by a
computer expert that this may mean the machines were
pre-set on a Bush vote as a default. The Free Press
has obtained dozens such sworn statements of vote
hopping. 

The legal team is also exploring new evidence that in
Coshocton, Ohio, write-in votes wrongly defaulted to
Bush when run through the voting machine. 

On December 23, U.S. Representative John Conyers, Jr.
of the House Judiciary Committee, wrote a letter to
Triad President Brett A. Rapp inquiring whether or not
Triad possessed remote access capabilities for any of
the 41 counties where its election tabulation software
or computers are in use. 

Attorneys for the election challenge team are also
exploring ties between Triad and the Tennessee-based
company Datamaxx. Ohio public safety and police
agencies use the Datamaxx DMPP2020 software for its
LEADS computer systems. Datamaxx makes numerous remote
access products that law enforcement can access with
mobile and handheld computers. 

The Free Press has also obtained a list of all voting
machines assigned in Franklin County, including serial
numbers. The list contains at least 42 machines
originally assigned to predominantly African-American
and inner city wards that voted 80% for Kerry, and
where voters waited in line for three hours and more
on Election Day. These 42 machines were blacked out on
the list, raising the question of whether these were
among the 68 machines the Franklin County Board of
Elections has admitted holding back in the warehouse
despite obvious shortages at certain polling places.
Affidavits from poll workers confirm that numerous
requests for more machines were made through election
day, but that few if any were delivered. 

Franklin County Board of Elections Chair Bill Anthony
claims that low-level poll workers refused to accept
the machines assigned by high-ranking election
officials. But he has yet to provide specific details.
Anthony has repeatedly claimed that he was a watchdog
for Democratic interests in the election, but he was a
political appointee of the Republican Secretary of
State. 

Under Ohio election law, the members, directors and
deputy directors of all boards of elections are
assigned by the Secretary of State. They hold these
paying jobs at his discretion regardless of whether
they are Democrat or Republican. A major argument of
those who claim Ohio’s 2004 presidential election was
fraud-free centers on the myth that local precincts
are run as bipartisan operations, deflecting charges
of partisan interference while failing to account for
the fact that the principles all owe their jobs to the
Secretary of State, who in this case served as
co-chair of the state's Bush-Cheney campaign. 

These problems add to the established pattern of
problems that favored Bush at Kerry’s expense. 

Despite the legal stonewalling, lawyers directing the
election challenge case are still pursuing
evidence-gathering efforts. Three expert witnesses are
scheduled to be deposed on Thursday and Friday,
including specialists in statistics and vote counting
irregularities. 

The challengers are seeking a January 4th hearing
before the Ohio Supreme Court. Members of Congress
meet in Washington on January 6 to evaluate the
Electoral College vote. Led by Rep. John Conyers
(D-MI), it is virtually certain numerous members of
the Congressional Black Caucus will challenge that
vote. But the assent of a Senator is required for the
challenge to go forward, and thus far none has
definitively confirmed. 

Despite ducking depositions, Blackwell is escalating
his public appearances in hopes of becoming Ohio’s
next governor. On January 12, 2005, Blackwell is
scheduled to speak at the exclusive Scioto Country
Club on the topic of “Ethics in Leadership.” Blackwell
became nationally known after disenfranchising voters
who had not registered on 80-pound bond paper stock
under an archaic Ohio law. He reversed longstanding
Ohio tradition that allowed voters to cast provisional
votes by county by ruling that none of these votes
would be counted unless the voter was in the right
precinct. He also was recently censured for running a
“get out the vote” campaign for Issue One, a
Constitutional amendment banning gay marriage and
spousal benefits. 

Meanwhile, Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) was reported to be
filing a brief in federal court in relation to the
activities of Triad and events in Hocking County,
where serious questions have arisen as to the
integrity of the recount. Kerry previously circulated
a letter to all 88 counties requesting information on
how the vote was conducted. The Kerry campaign raised
millions of dollars from grassroots supporters with
the promise that "all votes would be counted." But the
Democrats are not known to have helped fund the legal
work of the Green and Libertarian Parties and their
grassroots Election Protection supporters, who have
raised the money for the shoestring campaign that has
kept the legal challenges alive thus far. 

An Election Protection rally in downtown Columbus has
been set by Rev. Jesse Jackson for 2pm Monday, January
3. It will be followed by a national gathering in
Washington January 6, to take place as Congress
evaluates the Electoral College and the Ohio votes,
which have allegedly given George W. Bush another term
in the White House. 

--
Bob Fitrakis, Steve Rosenfeld and Harvey Wasserman are
co-authors of the upcoming OHIO'S STOLEN ELECTION:
VOICES OF THE DISENFRANCHISED, 2004, a book and film
project from http://freepress.org. Support is welcome
via http://freepress.org/store.php#don_pub or by
sending a check to The “Columbus Institute for
Contemporary Journalism”, 1240 Bryden Rd., Columbus,
Ohio 43205. 



http://blog.democrats.com/node/2172
Stolen Election 2004: Monday Update
by Bob Fertik on 12/26/2004 8:08pm. - revised
12/27/2004 10:33am
January 6 is fast approaching, and we need to convince
one Senator to support Maxine Waters and other House
Democrats in their challenge to Ohio's electors. Call
your Democratic Senators today! Cite the Moss v. Bush
lawsuit as the basis for the challenge.
Activists will be coming to DC from across the nation.
ReDefeatBush.com is helping local activists arrange
transportation. ReDefeatBush has also compiled a
target list of 77 Members of the U.S. House of
Representatives who should be core supporters.
To set the stage for the January 6 protest, Rev. Jesse
Jackson will lead a "Pro Democracy Count Every Vote
Rally" in Columbus Ohio on January 3, which is
co-sponsored by Ohio Congresswoman Stephanie
Tubbs-Jones, MoveOn.org, Progressive Democrats of
America, the anti-war coalition United for Peace and
Justice, Ohio State Senator Joyce Beatty, CASE Ohio
and others. According to Rev. Jackson, this rally will
mark the beginning of a mass movement:
“The vote recount in Ohio is underway. The election
challenge lawsuit has been filed. Subpoenas are being
prepared. Depositions are being planned. Hearings
spearheaded by Cong. John Conyers are bringing forth
new evidence of voter machine manipulation. And now
Sen. John Kerry has joined in the recount fight. We
must have a thorough investigation of voter
irregularities and the voter machines before Congress
certifies the Electoral College vote on January 6,”
Rev. Jackson said. “January 3rd will be the beginning
of a new Pro-Democracy Movement in America. Forty
years ago, the Voting Rights Act was passed as a
result of an independent, mass civil rights movement.
We will carry forward that tradition in 2005, and
continue the fight to count every vote and make sure
every vote counts.”
The power of a popular mass movement was proved in
Ukarine, where street protests forced the corrupt
government to conduct a nationwide re-vote that
appears to have elected Yushchenko. Amazingly,
Sunday's network headlines about Ukraine trumpeted the
exit polls showing challenger Yushchenko beating
Yanukovych. Yet those same networks refuse to release
the raw exit poll data showing challenger Kerry
beating Bush. If Bush really won, you can bet the exit
poll data would have been released immediately. 
Of course, Yuschenko led massive protests against the
Stolen Election in Ukraine. Here in the U.S., John
Kerry has been invisible since he conceded on November
3. But his lawyers have been increasingly active in
challenging Ohio's election fraud. Fintan Dunne says
Kerry will intervene in the Triad recount fraud case
on Monday, and this case could have decisive
consequences.
If the recount was fraudulent, does that have
implications for the validity of the first count in
Ohio? The Kerry campaign knows full well that it does.
That's why their latest statement questions the
"integrity" of the "entire" electoral process. And the
election of Bush/Cheney.
For Kerry, a fraudulent recount in Ohio could be an
open door into to the Oval Office.
To get from here to there, Democrats would have to
challenge Ohio's fraudulent Electors - and that
requires Just One Senator. To help convince your
Senators, Ray Beckerman compiled an excellent set of
Ohio links on (a) fraud, (b) disenfranchisment, (c)
voter suppression, (d) recount obstruction, and (e)
vote machine tampering.
Don't believe Beckerman, whose is meticulously
documenting every credible news item? Then how about
the non-partisan National Research Commission on
Elections and Voting (courtesy of the Nashua
Advocate), which issued an interim report on Dec 22
and declared itself unable to make a "conclusive
statement regarding the accuracy or fairness of
specific [2004 election] results at this time." Why
not? They offer about 2 dozen important reasons.
Meanwhile, new evidence of fraud keeps accumulating.
Last Thursday, David Cobb asked a Federal Court to
preserve a wide range of evidence, including voting
machines and election records, to ensure the integrity
of the Ohio presidential recount. 
"It is time for the federal judiciary to step in and
ensure the integrity of the recount in Ohio, something
which Ohio's blatantly partisan Secretary of State is
either unwilling or thoroughly incapable of doing,"
said Cobb. Papers filed with the court state that
"voting machines in multiple counties may have been
tampered with during the recount by an employee of
Triad Governmental Systems, Inc.-the company whose
computer program tallied the punch-card votes cast in
41" of Ohio's 88 counties. The most widely reported of
these instances took place on December 10, in Hocking
County, Ohio, when a Triad representative reprogrammed
a computer used for tabulating votes and instructed
the county's Deputy Director of Elections to create a
"cheat sheet" so "the count would come out perfect and
we wouldn't have to do a full hand recount of the
county."
Last Tuesday, voters in the Mahoning Valley (including
Youngstown) testified for 3 hours at a hearing
organized by Rev. Rick Judy of Mahoning County; Rev.
Werner Lange of Trumbull County; Ray Nakley, an
officer of the Arab-American Community Center in
Youngstown; and Russ Buckbee, Green Party coordinator
for NE Ohio. They testified about
Pre-punched ballots; touch-screen vote switching; 
more absentee votes than absentee voters; unfair
provisional voter deletions;   change of voting sites
on Election Day. voter suppression;  voter
intimidation; double voting; malfunctioning machines;
recalibrated machines; evidently rigged machines; and
even 25 million negative votes registered in some
races in Mahoning County!...
“One pattern that has been documented based on the
experience of voters in Florida, New Mexico, Ohio, and
elsewhere (especially in swing states) is the machines
appear to have been set with a default to Bush.  Then
if the voter successfully punched the ballot for
another candidate, Bush was replaced by that
candidate.”
The exact number of votes officially given to Bush and
stolen from Kerry by such means is unknown.  No
explanation has, to date, been given and no serious
investigation into this outrage against democracy has
been launched.
Nor has there been any defensible explanation provided
for the documented absentee vote inflation in Trumbull
County.  A careful review by Werner Lange and Maggie
Hagan of nearly 200 precincts in Trumbull County
revealed a considerable discrepancy between the number
of certified absentee votes and the number of
registered absentee voters identified in the poll
books.  The poll books are to contain not only the
name of every registered voter, but also clearly
identify who voted (either by regular, absentee or
provisional means) and who did not.  The Trumbull
County investigation showed some 650 more absentee
votes than there were absentee voters identified in
the poll books examined.  If the absentee vote
inflation rate there were consistent statewide, then
over 63,000 votes were up for grabs in Ohio.
After 7 weeks of protests, hearings, investigations,
recounts, and lawsuits, the NY Times finally sent 3
reporters (James Dao, Ford Fessenden and Tom Zeller
Jr.) to Ohio to cover the second theft of the
Presidency. Their first report is a completely
superficial review of the most obvious problems -
155,000 provisional ballots, of which 23% were
rejected; 93,000 overvotes and undervotes, all of
which were rejected; and long lines. But the reporters
didn't do any investigations - or even talk to any
investigators! - they just accepted denials from Ken
Blackwell. E-mail public at nytimes.com and demand a real
investigation of Ohio election fraud!

http://www.solarbus.org/stealyourelection/articles/1222-media.html
TV Networks Officially Refuse to Release Exit Poll Raw
Data
Mainstream media finally displays true colors

by Gary Beckwith
the Solar Bus http://election.solarbus.org
December 22, 2004
For those watching the growing body of evidence
concerning election fraud in our past presidential
election, one question has remained: Why don't we hear
about this on the evening news?
As of yet it's been hard to explain why the
controversies in Ukraine make the headlines, but when
similar problems are discovered at home, you have to
scour the Internet to find the information.
It certainly isn't for lack of events on which to
report. Members of The House Judiciary Committee have
been meeting regularly reviewing evidence of
systematic voter suppression and voting machine
tampering. A coalition of lawyers have filed a lawsuit
against the Bush campaign citing deliberate
manipulation of votes. Sworn testimony and signed
affidavits have implicated companies, individuals, and
a Florida congressman.
This developing story could eventually turn out to be
more explosive than Watergate. But it's rarely
mentioned on the major networks, and when it is,
there's almost always a chiding remark about the
"conspiracy nuts" and obscure "internet bloggers" who
are behind it all.
The truth is, it's not just conspiracy nuts, or
bloggers, or even just Democratic supporters of Kerry.
It's a growing number of people who want to know what
really happened on Novermber 2nd. It's teachers,
doctors, lawyers, all kinds of people who care about
their Democracy just as much as the people in Ukraine
do. And a recent survey showed that even without the
media coverage, 20% of Americans believe the election
was stolen.
For these people it's been a difficult task to spread
the word, and to tell the uninformed about the
election problems. That's because for many, if it's
not on the evening news, it isn't happening. And as
soon as you start telling someone about it, their
first question is always, "Why aren't I hearing about
this on the news?".
That's a question we'd all like to see answered.
Until now, we've only been able to speculate. Perhaps
the media is just tired of a long drawn out election
season. Perhaps reporters don't want to "stick their
neck out" until more evidence is uncovered. Perhaps
the reporters just haven't seen the evidence that
already exists. And one possibility of many is that
the mainstream media has been purposely withholding
this story from the American people. Emails have
floated around, purportedly written by reporters,
saying that they've been instructed not to write about
the problems with the election or they'll lose their
job.
It's hard to believe that the media would cover up
something like this, considering that many reporters
probably voted for Kerry and would want the people to
know if the election was stolen. But there's already
enough of a story that it should be getting attention
- the Congressional hearings, lawsuits filed, and
sworn testimony are newsworthy of themselves,
regardless of their outcomes. The lack of coverage of
already existing events forces us to wonder why.
Attempts to get an explanation from the media have
been met with cold and evasive responses. Local media
outlets say it's not their duty to report the national
news. National media people say there's not enough
evidence yet, and they're waiting to see how it pans
out before they give it the spotlight. This begs the
question: Do we wait until the Superbowl is over to
report on it? Did they wait until the OJ trial was
over to report on it?
But as the story develops, no one has been able to
explain why the media is avoiding it like the plague.
Until today.
Yesterday Representative John Conyers called their
bluff. He's the one leading the investigation in the
House of Representatives Judiciary Committee. After
weeks of investigation he's become more and more
interested in seeing the raw data of the exit polls.
Exit polls were a red flag in Ukraine, and many
statistical experts have used the exit polls from our
election to demonstrate a high likelihood that there
was some funny business on November 2nd.
Like most people trying to get to the bottom of the
matter, Mr. Conyers first came to the realization that
the exit poll data has mysteriously not been released
yet. We only have the preliminary exit poll data,
which showed Kerry winning Ohio by several points. But
about half way through election day, the networks
started "mixing in" the "real" numbers with the exit
poll data, and from that point on, the raw exit poll
data has been locked up.
So, Conyers wrote to Warren Mitofsky, who owns the
exit poll data, asking for the complete raw data,
without the "real" numbers mixed in. Mitofsky balked,
saying that the TV Networks actually own it and he was
not able to release it without their permission.
Conyers then took his inquiry to the leaders of ABC,
CBS, NBC, CNN, and Fox.
And they promptly laid an egg. Through a spokesperson
who spoke on behalf of all the media companies
together, they said they are still analyzing the data
and don't want to release it until they're done.
The egg they laid is frustrating for those who want to
know the truth and want to see the raw exit poll
numbers. But it does answer one question for us once
and for all. It finally shows us that the media is not
avoiding the election controversy because they're
tired of the election, or they want more evidence.
They are purposefully preventing the information from
getting out and they are hiding the information they
have.
Any objective investigator, or any concerned citizen
for that matter, simply cannot accept their answer to
Conyers. The media has had over 6 weeks to "analyze"
the exit polls and releasing the numbers would not
prevent them from continuing their analysis in any
way. 
The data is just that - raw data. By itself it is not
obscured by "analysis." The networks can evaluate and
analyze it all they want, but they should also give
others a chance to look at the same numbers and draw
their own conclusions. There is absolutely no
precedent or moral ground for withholding this
information from the American public. The bottom line
is that raw data does not need to be analyzed. Conyers
and the American people are not asking for the
analysis. We're asking for the data.
We're not talking about proprietary trade secrets, or
a "secret source" that they're trying to protect.
We're talking about information about us, the American
people who voted on Election Day. It's like having
your doctor refuse to let you see your own medical
records.
The media is supposed to report the facts, whatever
they are, not withhold them. When the media stops
reporting and starts withholding, it ceases to be the
media.
While it's frustrating that we still can't see the
exit polls, let's thank the media for at least
resolving one thing for us today. Now we know why we
don't see stories about the election on the evening
news. Their refusal to release the exit polls shows us
categorically that there is a concerted effort on
behalf of the major media outlets to consciously
prevent the information from getting out. It's not
simple oversight, and it's not because they don't
think it's newsworthy. Now we know. They are
withholding information from us.
Now that that's been resolved, we can move on to the
next question: What are they hiding, and why?
For more information on election fraud, see
election.solarbus.org



http://www.bradblog.com/archives/00001076.htm

Blogged by Brad on 12/24/2004 @ 6:24pm PT...

FEENEY ATTORNEY THREATENS HOMETOWN PAPER WITH LEGAL
ACTION!
Intimidating Letter Faxed to Seminole Chronicle
Charges Story on Feeney was 'False and Defamatory'
Feeney Attorney Uses Unrelated and Questionable
'Ethics Investigation' as Sole Basis for Claims


Congressman Tom Feeney's (R-FL) attorneys have sent a
letter threatening the editors of Florida's Seminole
Chronicle intimating possible legal action in light of
the news report filed by Editor Alex Babcock last week
concerning allegations made in a sworn affidavit [PDF]
and in sworn public testimony before members of the
U.S. House Judiciary committee by software programmer
Clint Curtis.

The story of Curtis' allegations and affidavit was
originally reported by The BRAD BLOG several weeks
ago. Curtis has alleged, among other things, that
Feeney conspired, in an October 2000 meeting, to have
a "vote-rigging software prototype" built by Yang
Enterprises, Inc. -- a company for which Feeney at the
time served as corporate counsel and registered
lobbyist even while he concurrently served as
Legislator, and eventually Speaker of the Florida
House. Feeney was the running mate to Jeb Bush during
his first failed bid for Governor of Florida, and is
now a U.S. Congressman from Florida's newly created
24th Congressional District. He also now sits on the
U.S. House's Judiciary Committee.

The letter from John P. Horan of "Foley and Lardner,
attorneys at law", was faxed to Babcock at the
Seminole Chronicle office earlier this week. It
alleges the newspaper's report "constitute[d] a
serious departure from accepted journalism standards
and a breach of the Chronicle’s fair reporting
privilege."

Horan goes on to accuse Babcock of reporting "in a
sensational, reckless and unfair manner," and claims
that "This conduct exceeds all known bounds of bias
and constitutes a reckless disregard for the truth."

According to the letter, Horan's charges on behalf of
Feeney, stem from his claim that "These assertions
were fully investigated by the State of Florida
Commission on Ethics which found that 'there was no
probable cause' to believe the assertions and
dismissed each complaint."

However, BRAD BLOG research into those ethics charges
filed against Feeney, and their supposed
"investigation", has revealed that the commission
referred to, and the investigation itself, appear to
have had serious flaws and conflicts of interest
involved. Many of which were reported at the time of
the commission's findings by a number of Florida
newspapers.

For a start, six of the eight members of the
"Commission on Ethics" which Horan's letter refers to,
were appointed to the commission by and/or have direct
ties to either Tom Feeney or his old running-mate and
then Governor, Jeb Bush!

On October 17, 2002, the Daytona Beach News-Journal
reported on the "Commission on Ethics" findings that
Horan uses as the only basis for criticism of the
Seminole Chronicle's article.

The News-Journal reported on those findings by
revealing that neither the investigator looking into
the ethics complaint nor the two key witnesses in the
case were ever even interviewed by the commission!
Despite a state law that requires them to do so!

As well, public documents in the case -- including
Email which directly contradicted statements made by
Feeney to the commission during the "investigation" --
were similarly never investigated, also in apparent
violation of state law, according to the paper.

>From just one of several articles on this from the
Daytona Beach News-Journal...



Feeney ethics probe ignored key elements

An investigator looking into an ethics complaint
against House Speaker Tom Feeney failed to examine
public documents or interview key witnesses as
required by state law.

Records show the investigation by the Florida
Commission on Ethics into whether Feeney improperly
used his position to benefit one of his legal clients
consisted only of denials of wrongdoing by the Oviedo
Republican and other state officials. State law
requires the investigation to include all evidence,
including documents and inter- views with people
related to the complaint.

The public records the investigator failed to collect
include e-mails that conflict with state- ments Feeney
has made about the role he played in gaining special
favors for his client, Yang Enterprises, an Oviedo
computer firm, including arranging meetings with state
officials who have the most say over state technology
contracts.

Feeney told the ethics investigator he never spoke to
anyone at the State Technology Office about Yang.
Records show Feeney arranged a meeting in his
legislative office in Oviedo for Yang with State
Technology Of fice head Roy Cales in July 2000.

The commission investigator also did not interview two
former state employees who claimed Yang submitted
false invoices in its $8 million contract with the
Florida Department of Transportation and that Feeney
pressured DOT in the matter. The employees were
subsequently fired by DOT.


(The full article is available for purchase only, via
the News-Journal's Print Archives.)

Of the "two former state employees" referred to in the
News-Journal's article, one was Clint Curtis who has
confirmed with The BRAD BLOG that he was never
interviewed by the commission during their
"investigation", despite having been one of the two
individuals who made the initial complaint!

The other state employee, who has requested that we do
not publish their name at this time, has also
confirmed in interviews with The BRAD BLOG that they
were similarly never interviewed by the commission.

Furthermore, the allegations made by Curtis that
Feeney conspired to commit vote-fraud, and which
Babcock reported on in his article, were not even the
charges that the "Commission on Ethics" was supposedly
looking into via their questionable investigation!

In all of this, the power of Tom Feeney in Florida
should not be overlooked or underestimated. Despite a
comment to the contrary made by Feeney to MSNBC
producer. As reported by Keith Olbermann earlier this
week, Feeney said in regard to these charges “I’m very
amused by it. I wish I had some of the power that he
suggests.”

As it turns out, Feeney does have that power.

In a Time Magazine article from November 26, 2000,
Feeney is described as perhaps being "the only man
more influential in Florida than football king Bobby
Bowden."

And on November 20, 2001, The Orlando Sentinel
described Feeney, who had by then become Florida House
Speaker for at least a full year, as "one of Florida's
most powerful elected officials".

In regards to the letter from Feeney's attorney, The
BRAD BLOG recognizes such an obvious, thuggish and
ham-fisted attempt to intimidate a responsible member
of the press at Feeney's small hometown paper for
exactly what it is: An attempt to suppress the growing
scandal that has emerged during our continuing
investigation, and that of other reporters like
Babcock, into these very troubling matters.

The intent of such a letter is little more than an
effort to send a chilling message to all such
reporters who would dare look into these charges.

We commend Babcock's courage in standing up to such a
reprehensible tactic and for his apparent vows to
continue his paper's investigation and reporting on a
story of great national and local importance and
newsworthiness.

In an unbylined opinion piece from yesterday's
Chronicle (which Babcock confirms that he wrote for
the paper after having received the letter from
Feeney's attorney), Babcock remained both defiant and,
fortunately, clear-headed about his journalistic
responsibilities to the people: [emphasis added]


In reporting on the charges made by Clint Curtis
against Feeney, our goal was to inform you, our
readers, of serious charges made in a public forum
before members of Congress investigating voting
irregularities.

It is this role that all news organizations should
play, to keep a watchful eye over the government that
serves us. It's your business as voters to know what
your elected representatives are doing, and what they
have been accused of doing.
...
We attempted and failed to contact Feeney prior to
publication, but went ahead with the article because
the forum in which the claims were presented was so
high-profile, and the charges so incendiary, that to
ignore them would have been irresponsible. Continued
attempts by the Chronicle to interview Feeney on the
record have been denied by his office.

Michigan Congressman John Conyers, who presided over
the forum that heard Curtis' allegations, found Curtis
credible enough to allow him to address a group of
Feeney's peers. Because Conyers felt the testimony was
valid, we thought you should know about it, too.


In an interview today with The BRAD BLOG, Babcock
confirmed that attempts to contact Feeney prior to
publication were unsuccessful.

While all such attempts to contact Feeney prior to
publication of the original article went unanswered,
it seems that once the article was published things
changed very quickly. Babcock received both phone
calls and email from a representative of Feeney's
office the very next day.

He told us that he spoke for a while with a member of
Feeney's staff, and during that call it was "made
clear that their policy is to stay off record."

Babcock added, "We would be happy to speak with Tom
Feeney if he would like to tell his side of the
story."

Babcock's statements are consistent with the
even-handedness of his article, as well as previous
discussions we've had with him over the past week
concerning this matter.

While others in the media have shown some reluctance
to report these troubling charges concerning our
elected public officials, Babcock is to be
congratulated for refusing to turn away from difficult
issues merely on the grounds that they contain
explosive allegations and several very powerful
elected officials.

He is doing the job of journalist and, so far, he has
been doing it with fairness, honesty and transparency.

The Clint Curtis allegations about Tom Feeney were
indeed made in public, under penalty of perjury, and
specified detailed charges of wrong-doing and
potential felonies. These were not allegations made in
the dark, by unnamed persons or shadowy figures, but
rather out in the open, by a man who has invited
scrutiny, skepticism and has been willing to answer
the questions of just about anyone who would like to
talk to him about these matters.

The public has the right to know about such issues and
the press has the responsibility to inform the public.
Both sides deserved to be aired and investigated, and
Babcock seems to have made every attempt to do
precisely that in a responsible fashion.

The BRAD BLOG has reviewed the entire faxed letter
from Horan, and we will be happy to publish it in it's
entirety if permission is granted by Babcock or the
Seminole Chronicle publishers (Knight Newspapers) to
do so. Babcock has said his publishers are currently
reviewing the letter from Feeney's attorney and are
considering their reply.

...CONTACTS...

Tom Feeney
Website: Congressman Tom Feeney (R-FL)
Email: unknown
DC Phone: 202-225-2706
DC Fax: 202-226-6299 

Tom Feeney, Campaign Headquarters, FL
1420 Alafaya Trail, Suite 103
Oviedo, Florida 32765
(407) 366-2212
Email: Todd Sykes, Campaign Coordinator
NOTE: The above address is in the Yang Enterprises,
Inc. (YEI) building.
Feeney ran unopposed in 2004.

Seminole Chronicle
Email: Alex Babcock, Editor (Include Name, Address and
Phone if you wish letter to be considered for
publication.)
Website: www.SeminoleChronicle.com 

http://www.columbiatribune.com/2004/Dec/20041224News016.asp

Kerry bowed out too soon, Jackson says 


Chicago Tribune 
Published Friday, December 24, 2004
Claiming Ohio’s 2004 election results were more
troubling than Florida’s four years ago, the Rev.
Jesse Jackson yesterday said Democratic presidential
candidate Sen. John Kerry called it quits too soon.

"Kerry conceded much too quickly, before the facts
were in," Jackson said in a conference call with
reporters to discuss an ongoing challenge to Ohio’s
election results.

"When he pulled the plug, the national media left as
well," Jackson said of Kerry’s concession on Nov. 3,
the day after the election.

Since then, a Jackson-led group claims to have
uncovered a wide range of voting irregularities in the
Buckeye State, including tabulations that contradicted
early exit polls pointing to a Kerry victory, voting
machine errors, absentee ballot counting errors and
inaccurate directions given to voters trying to get to
polling places.

The concerns are detailed in a 41-page petition
contesting the election before the Ohio Supreme Court.

Jackson’s Rainbow/PUSH Coalition plans a "Pro
Democracy - Count Every Vote Rally" on Jan. 3 in
Columbus, Ohio.

Presidential candidates of the Green and Libertarian
parties funded a statewide recount of the Ohio vote.
The recount gave an additional 346 votes to Bush and
494 more votes to Kerry. Earlier this month, Ohio
Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell certified Bush as
the winner of the state, with 2.86 million votes,
compared with Kerry’s 2.74 million votes. 

 
  Copyright © 2004 The Columbia Daily Tribune. All
Rights Reserved. 

Bush Abomination’s #1 Failure: National Security

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1224-01.htm

Published on Friday, December 24, 2004 by the
Associated Press  
Ex-Hostage: Rebels Wanted Bush Re-Elected  
 
  
PARIS - French journalists held hostage for four
months in Iraq said their militant captors told them
they wanted President Bush to win re-election.


REBELS WANTED BUSH RE-ELECTED
French journalists and former hostages in Iraq Georges
Malbrunot (R) and Christian Chesnot talk to newsmen
moments after landing at Villacoublay military
airbase, near Paris, December 22, 2004.
REUTERS/Charles Platiau
 
In a four-page account of their ordeal, one of the
reporters, Georges Malbrunot, also wrote that they saw
several other hostages who were later decapitated. The
journalists said their captors viewed foreign
businessmen working in Iraq as their enemies. 

One of the captors from the group calling itself the
Islamic Army in Iraq said Bush's re-election would
boost their cause, Malbrunot wrote in Friday's edition
of Le Figaro, the French daily he works for. 

"We want Bush because with him the American troops
will stay in Iraq and that way we will be able to
develop," Malbrunot cited the captor as saying. 

Bush beat Democrat John Kerry to win the presidency
last month. 

Another captor, who described himself as the group's
head of internal intelligence, told the men that the
Islamic Army has four enemies: American and coalition
troops, "their collaborators, that is to say Italian
businessmen, or even French," as well Iraqi police and
spies. 

Malbrunot wrote that the Islamic Army has 15,000 to
17,000 members and that its hostage-takings are
carefully organized. 

"There are those who stop people on the roads, those
that carry out interrogations, those that keep guard
and those that judge," he wrote. 

He and fellow French reporter Christian Chesnot feared
at times that they would be killed, he said. 

Others hostages they saw who were later decapitated
included two Macedonians, an Iraqi power station
executive and a bodyguard for Ahmad Chalabi, a
candidate in next month's Iraqi elections and a
one-time Pentagon favorite, he recounted. 

Malbrunot, 41, and Chesnot, 38, were released Tuesday.


In a separate interview on RTL radio, Malbrunot said
it would take time to recover from their ordeal.
"Sleeping, for example, is hard," he said. 

"But the life of a free man is far easier than that of
a hostage," he added. 

© Copyright 2004 Associated Press

###
http://feeds.bignewsnetwork.com/redir.php?jid=cdaf1f0fdb423957
 



Bin Laden inquiry to widen
Reuters
December 27, 2004 
PARIS: A French judge has widened a probe into the
financial network surrounding the family of Osama bin
Laden after questioning his half-brother and learning
of a E241 million ($425.7million) transfer to
Pakistan.

Investigating magistrate Renaud Van Ruymbeke received
court authorisation to extend his investigation after
Yeslam bin Laden was questioned over allegations of
links with the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks
in the US. 
As a result, Mr Van Ruymbeke was adding "other
instances of money laundering" to the probe already
under way, Le Monde newspaper reported on the weekend.

On December 5, 2001, French authorities opened an
investigation into financial transfers carried out
through Paris between firms grouped within the Saudi
Investment Company (SICO) run by Yeslam bin Laden. 
Yeslam was questioned by the French judge in 2002, and
has handed over a copy of documents detailing the
distribution of the bin Laden family wealth to 54
brothers and sisters after the death of their father
in 1967, the paper said. 
	 

		    

	

Although he denied having had any contact with his
half-brother for the past 20 years, the paper said,
documents held by Swiss banking authorities suggest
that Yeslam and Osama bin Laden held a joint account
in Switzerland between 1990 and 1997, according to
Jean-Charles Brisard – a private investigator hired by
families of the victims of the September 11 attacks. 
Yeslam told French investigators on September 27 this
year that he had omitted to mention the existence of
that account, while still insisting he had not mixed
with his half-brother, Le Monde said. 
Contacted by Le Monde, Yeslam's Swiss-based lawyer,
Pierre de Preux, said his client simply acted as a
relay for the rest of the family wishing to deposit
their inheritance in Switzerland, since Yeslam was
resident in Geneva. 
Reuters 


Bin Laden inquiry to widen
Reuters
December 27, 2004 
PARIS: A French judge has widened a probe into the
financial network surrounding the family of Osama bin
Laden after questioning his half-brother and learning
of a E241 million ($425.7million) transfer to
Pakistan.

Investigating magistrate Renaud Van Ruymbeke received
court authorisation to extend his investigation after
Yeslam bin Laden was questioned over allegations of
links with the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks
in the US. 
As a result, Mr Van Ruymbeke was adding "other
instances of money laundering" to the probe already
under way, Le Monde newspaper reported on the weekend.

On December 5, 2001, French authorities opened an
investigation into financial transfers carried out
through Paris between firms grouped within the Saudi
Investment Company (SICO) run by Yeslam bin Laden. 
Yeslam was questioned by the French judge in 2002, and
has handed over a copy of documents detailing the
distribution of the bin Laden family wealth to 54
brothers and sisters after the death of their father
in 1967, the paper said. 
	 

		    

	

Although he denied having had any contact with his
half-brother for the past 20 years, the paper said,
documents held by Swiss banking authorities suggest
that Yeslam and Osama bin Laden held a joint account
in Switzerland between 1990 and 1997, according to
Jean-Charles Brisard – a private investigator hired by
families of the victims of the September 11 attacks. 
Yeslam told French investigators on September 27 this
year that he had omitted to mention the existence of
that account, while still insisting he had not mixed
with his half-brother, Le Monde said. 
Contacted by Le Monde, Yeslam's Swiss-based lawyer,
Pierre de Preux, said his client simply acted as a
relay for the rest of the family wishing to deposit
their inheritance in Switzerland, since Yeslam was
resident in Geneva. 
Reuters 



 Bush Abomination’s #2 Failure: Economic Security

http://www.sptimes.com/2004/12/26/Perspective/Save_Social_Security_.shtml

Save Social Security from White House
By BOB GRAHAM
Published December 26, 2004

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

During my lifetime, five events have most affected
Florida and its prosperity: mosquito control; air
conditioning; jet air travel; Fidel Castro; and the
creation of Social Security and other retirement
income programs. 

The first three are deeply entrenched in our society,
and I look forward to Castro passing from the scene.
Social Security, however, is at a crossroads.
President Bush and his Republican allies in Congress
seem determined to unravel the most important social
safety net in this nation's - and Florida's - history.

The strength of the current Social Security program is
that it gives workers a guaranteed,
inflation-protected retirement income for as long as
they live. No one gets rich from Social Security - the
average monthly benefit per Floridian is $900. But for
many Americans, it serves as their principal
protection from poverty. This is particularly true for
the nearly 7-million Americans who receive benefits
much earlier than retirement as a result of becoming
disabled.

The president wants to change the current program by
allowing some workers to direct a portion of their
payroll taxes into an individual account. The
president has not presented the details of his
proposal. Based on the work of the president's Social
Security commission and comments from the White House,
it appears that the president is likely to propose no
change in the benefits for current retirees or workers
who are 55 or older. For the under-55 worker, there
will be gradual changes in the benefit structure until
the benefits are actuarially supportable by the
current Social Security tax. Using 2004 policies and
value of the dollar, when fully implemented this
benefit change is estimated to reduce the current
average of $900 a month to about $700 in guaranteed
benefits. The under-55-year-old worker would also be
able to further reduce the guarantee to about $525 in
exchange for the establishment of an individual
retirement account. The hope would be that the
earnings on the individual account return the total
monthly Social Security benefit to at least $900.

Floridians should pay close attention to this effort.
Florida has a higher proportion of seniors than any
other state, with nearly one in five residents age 65
or older. One dollar out of every $14 in benefits paid
by the Social Security Administration goes to a
resident of Florida. Perhaps more than any other
state, Florida's economy has benefited from seniors
having a stable and adequate income in retirement. The
nearly $3-billion in monthly Social Security benefits
paid to Floridians in 2002 represented 6.5 percent of
total personal income received in Florida in that year
and contributed more to Florida's economy than did all
of the state's manufacturing activity.

The president's proposal raises three concerns. First,
it increases the uncertainty that workers face as they
plan for their retirement. Most Americans now retire
to a chair that has three legs: an employer-provided
pension, personal savings and Social Security. The
potential for higher retirement income that proponents
of privatization herald comes with significantly
greater risk. This is in addition to the increased
risk that workers bear when employers shift from
traditional pension plans to defined contribution
plans such as 401(k)s. Under defined contribution
plans, employers commit only to contribute a set
amount into a worker's retirement account. Typically,
a substantial amount of the worker's personal savings
are committed to matching or supplementing the
employer's contribution. Whether these funds
accumulate to an amount that will provide an adequate
income in retirement is up to the worker's investment
acumen. Now the president believes that workers should
shoulder this risk as part of Social Security as well.

Those who elect for individual accounts will have all
three of the legs dependent on their skill and luck
and the market's swings. This violates a fundamental
rule of investment: diversify, diversify, diversify.

The second concern is that the president is using
"fuzzy math" to sell his plan. He is exaggerating the
problems facing the current program by suggesting that
it is underfunded by $10-trillion. To be sure, Social
Security faces a funding challenge, and each year of
delay makes fixing the program more difficult. But
according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget
Office, the Social Security Trust Fund will remain
solvent through 2052, with the ability to pay 80
percent of benefits after that. But exaggerating the
challenges facing the program is not necessary.

>From its beginning in the 1930s, Social Security has
been funded by current workers paying the cost of
current retirees. The estimated cost of breaking this
intergenerational social contract is $1-trillion over
10 years. There is no hard or fuzzy math as to how to
pay for this transitional cost. There is one
preposterous idea not to pay for it at all, just add
it to the already burgeoning national debt. Let our
grandchildren pay. This is immoral.

The final concern with the president's plan is that he
refuses to consider other viable options for shoring
up the program. According to the Congressional Budget
Office, Social Security's revenue shortfall is less
than one-half of 1 percent of the nation's economy.
The entire Social Security shortfall over the next 75
years is about one-fourth the cost of the Bush tax
cuts if made permanent. The revenue loss from the
president's proposal to repeal the estate tax would
cover nearly two-thirds of the shortfall.

In his 1998 State of the Union address, President
Clinton proposed saving Social Security first. There
was wisdom in that statement. This led to budget
surpluses, a booming economy and the opportunity to
pay off America's public debt. President Bush rejected
that opportunity - he opted for tax cuts for the rich
first. We now need to defeat ideas that would kill
Social Security as we have known it, especially when
it is sold under the banner of salvation.

Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., is retiring after 18 years in
the Senate.



http://quote.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000103&sid=a__JizFrCnn0&refer=news_index

Kmart, Sears Slash Prices to Salvage Sluggish Sales
(Correct) 
Kmart, Sears Slash Prices to Salvage Sluggish Sales
(Correct) 

(Adds dropped letter in 13th paragraph.) 

By Rachel Katz 

Dec. 24 (Bloomberg) -- Kmart Holding Corp. and Sears,
Roebuck & Co. are among the U.S. retailers offering
discounts of as much as 75 percent to lure last-minute
shoppers and salvage what's been a sluggish holiday
season. 

Sales gains in the first three weeks of December
averaged 3.1 percent, compared with 5.2 percent in the
same period last year, according to the International
Council of Shopping Centers- UBS weekly index. The
markdowns may not be enough to spur consumers to spend
more on holiday gifts, said investors including David
Keuler at Mason Street Advisors. 

``I don't know if it's going to be enough for what
appears to have been a very slow 2 1/2 weeks,'' said
Keuler, who helps manage about $60 billion at the
Milwaukee-based firm, including shares of Wal-Mart
Stores Inc. ``We needed less weakness during the
middle of the month.'' 

The November-December period can account for almost 25
percent of retailers' annual sales. A slowdown in
consumer spending, which accounts for about two-thirds
of U.S. economic activity, may signal a decline in
economic growth. 

The last time Christmas Eve fell on a Friday was in
1999, when Dec. 24 was the sixth biggest day of the
season in terms of sales, according to the
International Council of Shopping Centers, a New
York-based trade association. 

Kmart, which is open from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m., cut prices
on fragrance gift sets by 25 percent and is selling
1/3-carat diamond earrings for $59.99, down from $263.
Sears is offering discounts of as much as 50 percent
on some sweaters and coats and 60 percent on jewelry.
A J.C. Penney Co. coupon gives customers $10 off any
purchase of $50 or more. 

The discounts are similar to offers last week, when
sales rose 3.5 percent, the largest gain in a month,
according to ICSC. Retailers who slashed prices last
week may not have been willing to further drop prices
to draw shoppers, said ICSC economist Michael Niemira.


`Mostly Men' 

Traffic at the Mall of America is ``very hectic,''
said Maureen Bausch, vice president of business
development for the Bloomington, Minnesota, shopping
center, the largest in the U.S with more than 520
stores, including Nordstrom Inc. and Williams- Sonoma
Inc. 

``It's mostly men, which is very typical this time of
year,'' Bausch said in an interview. ``It's not a time
to browse. It's a time to buy.'' 

The day before Christmas may be more important this
year than usual because many employers are giving
workers the day off. That helps shoppers who have
procrastinated, said Todd Jones, an analyst at PNC
Advisors in Philadelphia, whose $48 billion in assets
include Federated Department Stores Inc., owner of
Macy's and Bloomingdale's. 

Yet To Shop 

``Most people have a full day to shop in the stores,''
said Jones, who is based in Philadelphia. ``I'm not
saying it's going to be a panacea. Maybe that can help
us get to a more respectable increase of 3 percent to
4 percent.'' 

Shares of Wal-Mart fell 42 cents to $52.55 yesterday
in New York Stock Exchange composite trading.
Dallas-based Neiman Marcus declined 27 cents to
$72.55, while Plano, Texas-based J.C. Penney fell 90
cents to $40. 

About 70 percent of shoppers hadn't completed their
holiday shopping as of Dec. 19, according to ICSC.
Sales in the November- December holiday period are
expected to increase 2.5 percent to 3 percent this
year after November sales rose a less-than-expected
1.8 percent. 

``It's good, but nothing you're going to celebrate
over,'' said David Abella, an analyst at New
York-based Rochdale Investment Management, whose $1.2
billion in assets include Wal- Mart shares. 

Luxury Chains 

Sales gains at luxury retailers such as Neiman Marcus
Group Inc. have outpaced those at department stores
such as Federated, Deutsche Bank analyst Bill Dreher
wrote in a report. Poor results at Federated and May
Department Stores Co. may hurt fourth- quarter profit
as the chains boost discounts, he wrote. 

Wal-Mart's December sales are rising within its
forecast for a gain of 1 percent to 3 percent, less
than the 4.3 percent increase a year ago, as
low-income shoppers pare budgets amid higher food and
energy prices. 

The average price for a gallon of regular gasoline was
$1.82 in the week ended Dec. 20, about 22 percent
higher than a year earlier, according to the U.S.
Energy Department. Natural gas for January delivery on
the New York Mercantile Exchange is 8.5 percent
higher. 

Wal-Mart, based in Bentonville, Arkansas, said Dec. 18
that sales of winter merchandise such as coats,
sweaters and shovels last week picked up after
sluggish results earlier in the month. 

Department stores are discounting coats as much as 50
percent as racks remained ``heavily stocked,'' UBS
analyst Linda Kristiansen wrote in a report. Better
inventory control has helped the chains limit the need
for discounts on other merchandise, she wrote. 

Clothing Glut 

Some clothing sales may have been damped by increasing
demand for electronics such as digital cameras and
music players including Apple Computer Inc.'s iPod,
PNC's Jones said. 

``There's only so many places you can spend it,''
Jones said in an interview. 

Unsold goods will probably be discounted heavily next
week, hurting margins, said Jennifer Hanson, an
analyst at Cortina Asset Management. 

``They will want to be clean so they can start
bringing in the new merchandise,'' Hanson said. The
Milwaukee-based firm's more than $200 million in
assets include Men's Wearhouse Inc. and AnnTaylor
Stores Corp. shares. ``The longer they wait to sell
inventory, the deeper the discount they have to put
out.'' 

Stores may see a boost starting Sunday when customers
seek out post-holiday discounts and redeem gift cards.
Purchases of gift cards, which aren't counted by
retailers until recipients redeem them, may increase
by $100 million to $17.3 billion this year, according
to the National Retail Federation. 

Shoppers also are buying more over the Internet. Sales
at U.S. Internet retailers surged 57 percent to $2.45
billion in the week ended Dec. 19 from a year earlier,
according to Reston, Virginia-based Web-research
company ComScore Networks Inc. 

Bush Abomination’s #3 Failure: Environmental Security

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1226-01.htm

Published on Sunday, December 26, 2004 by the
lndependent/UK 

Bush Left in the Cold by Climate Allies 
by Geoffrey Lean
 
George Bush's two closest allies in his attempt to
sabotage international action to combat global warning
last week dramatically distanced themselves from him.
Saudi Arabia announced that it had approved the Kyoto
Protocol, the treaty on climate change which President
Bush has been trying to kill. And Australia, while
still rejecting it, parted company from the United
States by saying that it was prepared to negotiate its
successor.
The moves follow a tense international negotiating
session in Buenos Aires where, as The Independent on
Sunday reported last week, the US brought the talks to
the brink of collapse by obstructing even anodyne
proposals. This breached an assurance given by
President Bush in 2001, when he pulled out of the
protocol, that America would not try to stop other
countries reaching agreement.
New negotiations are due to begin next year on a
successor to Kyoto, which will come into force in
February, following Russia's decision to ratify it
last autumn. Tony Blair regards progress on climate
change as one of the top priorities of Britain's
presidency of the G8 group of the world's most
powerful nations.
US opposition endangers both initiatives, but Mr Bush
suffered a blow on Tuesday when the Saudi cabinet
approved the treaty. A royal decree is being prepared
to endorse it officially. The decision is significant,
since the Saudis worked closely with the US in Buenos
Aires, but the Australian initiative is more
important, as it has so far marched in step with the
US to try to kill negotiations.
Ian Campbell, Australia's environment minister, said
it would be prepared to enter an agreement to combat
global warming. He warned that unless it was reached,
the world would be "in jeopardy", adding: "The
difference between the US and Australia is that we are
prepared to engage in a new agreement, so long as it
is comprehensive."
Meanwhile, the official European Environment Agency
has announced that the EU nations were on track to
exceed the pollution cuts they have promised under
Kyoto, so long as they implement all their policies
and measures. 
© Copyright 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd
###


http://www.earthinstitute.columbia.edu/news/2004/story12-13-04b.html


Earth Institute News

posted 12/17/04

Contact: Mary Tobin
845-365-8607 or mtobin at ldeo.columbia.edu

Michael Crichton’s State of Confusion
by Gavin Schmidt, Earth Institute climate scientist
and RealClimate.org contributor

In a departure from normal practice on the
RealClimate.org site, this post is a commentary on a
piece of out-and-out fiction (unlike most of the other
posts which deal with a more subtle kind). Michael
Crichton’s new novel “State of Fear” is about a
self-important NGO hyping the science of the global
warming to further the ends of evil eco-terrorists.
The inevitable conclusion of the book is that global
warming is a non-problem. A lesson for our times
maybe? Unfortunately, I think not. 

Like the recent movie “The Day After Tomorrow", the
novel addresses real scientific issues and
controversies, but is similarly selective (and
occasionally mistaken) about the basic science. I will
discuss a selection of the global warming-related
issues that are raised in between the car chases,
shoot-outs, cannibalistic rites and assorted
derring-do. The champion of Crichton’s scientific view
is a MIT academic-turned-undercover operative who
clearly runs intellectual rings around other
characters. The issues are raised as conversations and
Q and A sessions between him (and other ‘good guys’)
and two characters; an actor (not a very clever chap)
and a lawyer (a previously duped innocent), neither of
whom know much about the science. 

So for actors and lawyers everywhere, I will try and
help out. 

The issues Crichton raises are familiar to those of us
in the field, and come up often in discussions. Some
are real and well appreciated while some are red
herrings and are used to confuse rather than
enlighten.

The first set of comments relate to the attribution of
the recent warming trend to increasing CO2. One
character suggests that “if CO2 didn’t cause the
global cooling between 1940 and 1970, how can you be
sure it is responsible for the recent warming?”
(paraphrased from p86) . Northern Hemisphere mean
temperatures do appear to have cooled over that
period, and that contrasts with a continuing increase
in CO2, which if all else had been equal, should have
led to warming. But were all things equal? Actually
no. In the real world, there is both internal
variability and other factors that affect climate
(i.e. other than CO2). Some of those other forcings
(sulphate and nitrate aerosols, land use changes,
solar irradiance, volcanic aerosols, for instance) can
cause cooling. Matching up the real world with what we
might expect to have happened depends on including ALL
of the forcings (as best as we can). Even then any
discrepancy might be due to internal variability
(related principally to the ocean on multi-decadal
time scales). Our current ‘best guess’ is that the
global mean changes in temperature (including the
1940-1970 cooling) are actually quite closely related
to the forcings. Regional patterns of change appear to
be linked more closely to internal variability
(particularly the 1930’s warming in the North
Atlantic). However, in no case has anyone managed to
show that the recent warming can be matched without
the increases in CO2 (and other GHGs like CH4). 

Secondly, through the copious use of station weather
data, a number of single station records with long
term cooling trends are shown. In particular, the
characters visit Punta Arenas (at the tip of South
America), where (very pleasingly to my host
institution) they have the GISTEMP station record
posted on the wall which shows a long-term cooling
trend (although slight warming since the 1970’s).
“There’s your global warming” one of the good guys
declares. I have to disagree. Global warming is
defined by the global mean surface temperature. It
does not imply that the whole globe is warming
uniformly (which of course it isn’t). (But that
doesn’t stop one character later on (p381) declaring
that “..it’s effect is presumably the same everywhere
in the world. That’s why it’s called global warming").
Had the characters visited the nearby station of Santa
Barbara Aeropuerto, the poster on the wall would have
shown a positive trend. Would that have been proof of
global warming? No. Only by amalgamating all of the
records we have (after correcting for known problems,
such as discussed below) can we have an idea what the
regional, hemispheric or global means are doing. That
is what is meant by global warming.

Crichton next raises the apparently unrecognised (by
the lawyer character at least) fact that the interior
of Antarctica is cooling (p196), an issue discussed in
another post (Antarctica cooling, global warming?).
This is more or less correct (given the obvious
uncertainties in long term data from the continental
interior), but analogously to the example above, local
cooling does not contradict global warming.

 Next, and slightly more troubling, we have some
rather misleading and selective recollection regarding
Jim Hansen’s testimony to congress in 1988. “Dr.
Hansen overestimated [global warming] by 300 percent”
(p247). Hansen’s testimony did indeed lead to a big
increase in awareness of global warming as a issue,
but not because he exaggerated the problem by 300%. In
a paper published soon after that testimony, Hansen et
al, 1988 presented three model simulations for
different scenarios for the growth in trace gases and
other forcings (see figure). Scenario A had
exponentially increasing CO2, Scenario B had a more
modest Business-as-usual assumption, and Scenario C
had no further increases in CO2 after the year 2000.
Both scenarios B and C assumed a large volcanic
eruption in 1995. Rightly, the authors did not assume
that they knew what path the carbon dioxide emissions
would take, and so presented a spectrum of results.
The scenario that ended up being closest to the real
path of forcings growth was scenario B, with the
difference that Mt. Pinatubo erupted in 1991, not
1995. The temperature change for the decade under this
scenario was very close to the actual 0.11 C/decade
observed (as can be seen in the figure). So given a
good estimate of the forcings, the model did a
reasonable job. In fact in his testimony, Hansen ONLY
showed results from scenario B, and stated clearly
that it was the most probable scenario. The ‘300
percent’ error claim comes from noted climate skeptic
Patrick Michaels who in testimony in congress in 1998
deleted the bottom two curves in order to give the
impression that the models were unreliable.

Dr Hansen is further quoted (a little out-of-context)
saying: “The forcings that drive long term climate
change are not known with an accuracy sufficient to
define future climate change". Given the discussion
above it is clear that without good estimates of the
actual forcings, the differences in the model
projections can be large. It is widely accepted that
exact prediction of what will happen to climate in 50
or 100 years is impossible. Much of the future is of
course unknowable. A new energy source could replace
fossil fuels, governments could control emissions, or
maybe a series of huge volcanoes will erupt. Therefore
it is much more sensible to ask, what would climate be
like if you doubled CO2? or if this or that scenario
occured. There are much better defined questions.
Hansen’s quote is often taken to imply that models are
so unreliable they are useless in helping assess the
issue. In fact it is the opposite - Hansen is actually
claiming that the uncertainty in models (for instance,
in the climate sensitivity) is now less than the
uncertainty in the emissions scenarios (i.e. it is the
uncertainty in the forcings, that drives the
uncertainty in the projections). 

Continuing to p315, it is claimed that “in the 1970’s
all the climate scientists believed an ice age was
coming” (and, as described on p563, the MIT academic
apparently still thinks so). However, this is not an
accurate statement and William Connolley’s pages on
the subject are an illuminating read for those wanting
more details.

Another issue that often comes up in discussion about
the surface temperature record is the impact of the
Urban Heat Island Effect (UHIE), and here it appears
on p370. It is undisputed that the centres of cities
such as New York are significantly warmer than the
surrounding countryside. This issue has been
extensively studied and is corrected for in all
analyses of the global temperature trends. To see
whether there might still be a residual effect in the
corrected data, a recent paper (Parker, Nature, 2004)
looked at the differences in the trends if you looked
separately at windy and not-so-windy conditions. Wind
is known to diminish the impact of urban heating, and
so the trends on windy days should be less than trends
on still days if this was important. The trends
actually end up almost exactly the same. Other
validating data for the corrected surface temperature
record comes from the oceans, which have also been
warming in recent decades. Even Richard Lindzen ,
normally an arch-skeptic on these issues, stated that
“ocean temperature increases present some support for
the surface temperature record” Lindzen (2002).
Another demonstration that the corrections are
sufficient is that over the continental US, where many
cities have a clear urban heating signal, the mean of
the corrected data is actually rather flat (p88) -
i.e. none of the strong urban biases in the US has
made it into the regional or indeed global mean.

A central issue in the book concerns sea-level rise.
Vanuatu is singled out for special attention since the
islanders there are understandably concerned about
their low-lying islands eventually being swamped. Sea
level however is a surprisingly difficult thing to
measure. Tide gauges are very noisy, and are usually
located on the continental coast. Global trends in sea
level from these gauges are between 1.7 to 2.4 mm/yr.
Sea level though is not rising everywhere. In
Scandinavia the continents are still rebounding from
the ice age and local sea level is receding. Satellite
data (TOPEX/POSIEDEN and JASON) can give a global
picture, and indicate that although the global mean
rise over recent years (2.8 mm/yr) is significantly
larger than the longer term trend estimated from tide
gauges, sea level change is actually very dynamic.
There are many patterns of behaviour particularly in
the Pacific, associated with El Nino variability -
possibly related to Vanuatu’s lack of actual sea level
rise over the last 40 years. Curiously, Crichton cites
the higher satellite derived number to claim that the
rate of sea level rise has not increased recently
("[Sea level is] rising faster, Satellites prove
it","Actually they don’t"), p424. There are clearly
some problems in comparing tide gauge and satellite
data, and of course, satellites can have their
problems (cf. MSU data), but the quoted numbers don’t
support the actual statement at all - though it would
be fairer to say that the satellites are consistent
with a recent rise in the rate, rather than a proof
that it is occuring. 

There are only a few out-and-out errors, but to be
generous, they probably just slipped through the
editing process. For instance, on p187 “higher
temperature means more water vapor in the air and
therefore fewer clouds” - Presumably, he meant that if
the temperature is higher, the relatively humidity
could be lower (and so there might be less clouds). On
p368. “Croplands are warmer than forested lands". This
is probably a confusion with the urban heating issue,
but the actual impact is the opposite - croplands have
a higher albedo than forests, reflect more solar
radiation, and are thus cooler. In fact, while this is
not yet fully quantified, it appears to have been a
significant cooling term in the global budget over the
last 150 years. On p461 “…Greenland shows that, in the
last hundred thousand years, there have been four
abrupt climate change events” More like 40. And that
is probably an undercount given that Greenland may not
record events in the tropics.

At the end of the book, Crichton gives us an author’s
message. In it, he re-iterates the main points of his
thesis, that there are some who go too far to drum up
support (and I have some sympathy with this), and that
because we don’t know everything, we actually know
nothing (here, I beg to differ). He also gives us his
estimate, ~0.8 C for the global warming that will
occur over the next century and claims that, since
models differ by 400% in their estimates, his guess is
as good as theirs. This is not true. The current batch
of models have a mean climate sensitivity of about 3 C
to doubled CO2 (and range between 2.5 and 4.0 degrees)
(Paris meeting of IPCC, July 2004) , i.e an
uncertainty of about 30%. As discussed above, the
biggest uncertainties about the future are the
economics, technology and rate of development going
forward. The main cause of the spread in the widely
quoted 1.5 to 5.8 C range of temperature projections
for 2100 in IPCC is actually the different scenarios
used. For lack of better information, if we
(incorrectly) assume all the scenarios are equally
probable, the error around the mean of 3.6 degrees is
about 60%, not 400%. Crichton also suggests that most
of his 0.8 C warming will be due to land use changes.
That is actually extremely unlikely since land use
change globally is a cooling effect (as discussed
above). Physically-based simulations are actually
better than just guessing.

Finally, in an appendix, Crichton uses a rather
curious train of logic to compare global warming to
the 19th Century eugenics movement. He argues, that
since eugenics was studied in prestigious universities
and supported by charitable foundations, and now, so
is global warming, they must somehow be related.
Presumably, the author doesn’t actually believe that
foundation-supported academic research ipso facto is
evil and mis-guided, but that is an impression that is
left.

In summary, I am a little disappointed, not least
because while researching this book, Crichton actually
visited our lab and discussed some of these issues
with me and a few of my colleagues. I guess we didn’t
do a very good job. Judging from his reading list, the
rather dry prose of the IPCC reports did not match up
to the some of the racier contrarian texts. Had
RealClimate been up and running a few years back,
maybe it would’ve all worked out differently…

This commentary is reprinted with Gavin Schmid's
permission from a blog entry on RealClimate.org.
RealClimate is a commentary site on climate science by
working climate scientists for the interested public
and journalists. We aim to provide a quick response to
developing stories and provide the context sometimes
missing in mainstream commentary. The discussion here
is restricted to scientific topics and will not get
involved in any political or economic implications of
the science.

The Earth Institute at Columbia University is among
the world’s leading academic centers for the
integrated study of Earth, its environment, and
society. The Earth Institute builds upon excellence in
the core disciplines—earth sciences, biological
sciences, engineering sciences, social sciences and
health sciences—and stresses cross-disciplinary
approaches to complex problems. Through its research,
training and global partnerships, it mobilizes science
and technology to advance sustainable development,
while placing special emphasis on the needs of the
world’s poor. 

 
More on the Complicity of the Corporatist Media

http://www.mediachannel.org/views/dissector/affalert302.shtml

Press Still Falling Down on Iraq 
By Danny Schechter
Mediachannel.org 
NEW YORK, December 22, 2004 -- Since when did the
American Civil Liberties Union become a media
organization? Or put another way: why have so much of
our press fallen down on the job of pushing the Bush
Administration to disclose information about its
war-related practices, ranging from how it provides
for our troops to detailing military abuse of
prisoners and detainees? 
Documents pried from the government by the ACLU under
the Freedom of Information Act , and disclosed this
week, suggest that the abuse of detainees was more
systematic than we knew and ordered from on high. One
email even indicates that President Bush signed off on
the policy. While the administration disputes the
document, that famous question raised during the
Watergate investigation comes around again in a
different form: What did the President know and when
did he forget he knew it? 
The ACLU's success at breaking news also raises the
question of how aggressive our press has been in
challenging military rationales and White House
message points. 
Even as the frame and focus of coverage changed from
liberation to occupation, from invasion to insurgency,
the essential news dynamic remains the same. It's
still AAU: "All About U.S." 
Compare the number of stories devoted to the impact
the war has had on the people of Iraq with the number
on body armor and troop deployments. The destruction
of Fallujah has slipped not only off the front pages,
but every page. Not only is there no continuing
reporting on civilian casualties (estimates range from
20,000 to 100,000 or more) but also few on why so many
average Iraqis oppose the occupation. 
Ironically the best mainstream account of on the
ground realities remains the one by Farnaz Fassihi,
the Wall Street Journal reporter whose gripping
account was sent out in a private email, not a
published story. 
One of our best war reporters, Chris Hedges of The New
York Times, seems to find it easier to get his
perspective out in books and magazines than in his own
newspaper. In his most recent piece he observes: "War
is presented primarily through the distorted prism of
the occupiers. The embedded reporters, dependent on
the military for food and transportation as well as
security, have a natural and understandable tendency,
one I have myself felt, to protect those who are
protecting them. And the reporting, even among those
who struggle to keep some distance, usually descends
into a shameful cheerleading." 
Stories of abuse of detainees only became well known
after photographs appeared on TV and in The New
Yorker. But even then, when CBS did its story on Abu
Ghraib in April 2004, the major media was late to the
story. 
We now have personal "trophy" photos of horrific abuse
from service families dating back to May 2003. Amnesty
International began campaigning on the story with
videos in July 2003. And yet it only became a big deal
in the late spring of 2004. 
Then the major media filed it away again, until that
famous news organization, the ACLU, gave them more
fodder this week. 
And even then, to this day, the focus has been on
individuals who committed abuses, rather than those up
the chain of command who ordered it, or knew about it
and said nothing. To this day sanitized terms like
"abuse" are frequently used to substitute for the more
legally correct words like "torture" and "war crimes."

I recently made a documentary called "WMD: Weapons of
Mass Deception," and one complaint by a critic really
got my blood boiling: The public knows all this
already. Yet fully 50% of the Bush voters told
pollsters before the election they still believed
there are WMD's in Iraq, even after the president
himself said he no longer believes it. 
If public opinion on the war is shifting--with 56% now
saying the invasion was a bad idea--it can't be
because of the media. 
-- Danny Schechter is an Emmy Award-winning former ABC
News and CNN producer. Besides making films, he is the
"blogger-in-chief" at Mediachannel.org. This
commentary appeared first at Editor & Publisher. 


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http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/24/1731220

Friday, December 24th, 2004
Bill Moyers: "Our Democracy is in Danger of Being
Paralyzed"

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--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bill Moyers has retired from his weekly public affairs
show "Now" on PBS. Over the past three decades, he
became an icon of American journalism. He recently
gave the keynote address before 2,000 people at the
first ever National Conference on Media Reform where
he warned, "What we're talking about is nothing less
than rescuing a democracy that is so polarized it is
in danger of being paralyzed and pulverized. Alarming
words, I know. But the realities we face should
trigger alarms. Free and responsible government by
popular consent just can't exist without an informed
public." [includes transcript] 
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Moyers was press secretary for President Lyndon
Johnson, was publisher of Newsday for several years
and worked for CBS News. He began his career at PBS as
host of "This Week" and "Bill Moyers” Journal" in
1971. 
Moyers' final episode of "Now," which he has hosted
since 2000, aired last Friday. The show included a
piece about the right-wing media, which he recently
called a "partisan propaganda arm of the Republican
National Committee." 

"Now" will continue with co-host, David Brancaccio,
but the show itself is being cut down from 60 minutes
to just half an hour making room for two more shows
hosted by two of the most right-wing media
personalities, Tucker Carlson of CNN and Paul Gigot
with the Wall Street Journal Editorial board. In fact,
the subject of Bill Moyers' last show was what has
happened to the media in this country. 

Today we spend the hour hearing an address by Bill
Moyers on the state of the media. In November 2003,
Moyers delivered the keynote address before 2,000
people at the first ever National Conference on Media
Reform in Madison, Wisconsin. This is journalist Bill
Moyers. 


Bill Moyers, retiring host of "Now with Bill Moyers"

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
RUSH TRANSCRIPT 
This transcript is available free of charge, however
donations help us provide closed captioning for the
deaf and hard of hearing on our TV broadcast. Thank
you for your generous contribution. 
Donate - $25, $50, $100, more...

BILL MOYERS: Thank you for inviting me tonight. I’m
flattered to be speaking to a gathering as
high-powered as this one that’s come together with an
objective as compelling as “media reform.” I must
confess, however, to a certain discomfort, shared with
other journalists, about the very term “media.” Ted
Gup, who teaches journalism at Case Western Reserve,
articulated my concerns better than I could when he
wrote in The Chronicle of Higher Education (November
23, 2001) that the very concept of media is insulting
to some of us within the press who find ourselves
lumped in with so many disparate elements, as if
everyone with a pen, a microphone, a camera, or just a
loud voice were all one and the same. …David Broder is
not Matt Drudge. “Meet the Press” is not “Temptation
Island.” And I am not Jerry Springer. I do not speak
for him. He does not speak for me. Yet ‘the media”
speaks for us all. 

That’s how I felt when I saw Oliver North reporting on
Fox from Iraq, pressing our embattled troops to
respond to his repetitive and belittling question,
“Does Fox Rock? Does Fox Rock?” Oliver North and I may
be in the same “media” but we are not part of the same
message. Nonetheless, I accept that I work and all of
us live in “medialand,” and God knows we need some
“media reform.” I’m sure you know those two words are
really an incomplete description of the job ahead.
Taken alone, they suggest that you’ve assembled a
convention of efficiency experts, tightening the bolts
and boosting the output of the machinery of public
enlightenment, or else a conclave of high-minded
do-gooders applauding each other’s sermons. But we
need to be – and we will be – much more than that.
Because what we’re talking about is nothing less than
rescuing a democracy that is so polarized it is in
danger of being paralyzed and pulverized. 

Alarming words, I know. But the realities we face
should trigger alarms. Free and responsible government
by popular consent just can’t exist without an
informed public. That’s a cliché, I know, but I agree
with the presidential candidate who once said that
truisms are true and clichés mean what they say (an
observation that no doubt helped to lose him the
election.) It’s a reality: democracy can’t exist
without an informed public. Here’s an example: Only
13% of eligible young people cast ballots in the last
presidential election. A recent National Youth Survey
revealed that only half of the fifteen hundred young
people polled believe that voting is important, and
only 46% think they can make a difference in solving
community problems. We’re talking here about one
quarter of the electorate. The Carnegie Corporation
conducted a youth challenge quiz of l5-24 year-olds
and asked them, “Why don’t more young people vote or
get involved?” Of the nearly two thousand respondents,
the main answer was that they did not have enough
information about issues and candidates. Let me rewind
and say it again: democracy can’t exist without an
informed public. So I say without qualification that
it’s not simply the cause of journalism that’s at
stake today, but the cause of American liberty itself.
As Tom Paine put it, “The sun never shined on a cause
of greater worth.” He was talking about the cause of a
revolutionary America in 1776. But that revolution ran
in good part on the energies of a rambunctious, though
tiny press. Freedom and freedom of communications were
birth-twins in the future United States. They grew up
together, and neither has fared very well in the
other’s absence. Boom times for the one have been boom
times for the other. 

Yet today, despite plenty of lip service on every
ritual occasion to freedom of the press radio and TV,
three powerful forces are undermining that very
freedom, damming the streams of significant public
interest news that irrigate and nourish the flowering
of self-determination. The first of these is the
centuries-old reluctance of governments – even elected
governments – to operate in the sunshine of disclosure
and criticism. The second is more subtle and more
recent. It’s the tendency of media giants, operating
on big-business principles, to exalt commercial values
at the expense of democratic value. That is, to run
what Edward R. Murrow forty-five years ago called
broadcasting’s “money-making machine” at full
throttle. In so doing they are squeezing out the
journalism that tries to get as close as possible to
the verifiable truth; they are isolating serious
coverage of public affairs into ever-dwindling “news
holes” or far from prime- time; and they are gobbling
up small and independent publications competing for
the attention of the American people. 

It’s hardly a new or surprising story. But there are
fresh and disturbing chapters. 

In earlier times our governing bodies tried to squelch
journalistic freedom with the blunt instruments of the
law – padlocks for the presses and jail cells for
outspoken editors and writers. Over time, with
spectacular wartime exceptions, the courts and the
Constitution struck those weapons out of their hands.
But they’ve found new ones now, in the name of
“national security.” The classifier’s Top Secret
stamp, used indiscriminately, is as potent a silencer
as a writ of arrest. And beyond what is officially
labeled “secret” there hovers a culture of sealed
official lips, opened only to favored media insiders:
of government by leak and innuendo and spin, of
misnamed “public information” offices that churn out
blizzards of releases filled with self-justifying
exaggerations and, occasionally, just plain damned
lies. Censorship without officially appointed censors.


Add to that the censorship-by-omission of consolidated
media empires digesting the bones of swallowed
independents, and you’ve got a major shrinkage of the
crucial information that thinking citizens can act
upon. People saw that coming as long as a century ago
when the rise of chain newspaper ownerships, and then
of concentration in the young radio industry, became
apparent. And so in the zesty progressivism of early
New Deal days, the Federal Communications Act of 1934
was passed (more on this later.) The aim of that
cornerstone of broadcast policy, mentioned over 100
times in its pages, was to promote the “public
interest, convenience and necessity.” The clear intent
was to prevent a monopoly of commercial values from
overwhelming democratic values – to assure that the
official view of reality – corporate or government –
was not the only view of reality that reached the
people. Regulators and regulated, media and government
were to keep a wary eye on each other, preserving
those checks and balances that is the bulwark of our
Constitutional order. 

What would happen, however, if the contending giants
of big government and big publishing and broadcasting
ever joined hands? Ever saw eye to eye in putting the
public’s need for news second to free-market
economics? That’s exactly what’s happening now under
the ideological banner of “deregulation.” Giant
megamedia conglomerates that our founders could not
possibly have envisioned are finding common cause with
an imperial state in a betrothal certain to produce
not the sons and daughters of liberty but the very
kind of bastards that issued from the old arranged
marriage of church and state. 

Consider where we are today. 

Never has there been an administration so disciplined
in secrecy, so precisely in lockstep in keeping
information from the people at large and – in defiance
of the Constitution – from their representatives in
Congress. Never has the so powerful a media oligopoly
– the word is Barry Diller’s, not mine – been so
unabashed in reaching like Caesar for still more
wealth and power. Never have hand and glove fitted
together so comfortably to manipulate free political
debate, sow contempt for the idea of government
itself, and trivialize the people’s need to know. When
the journalist-historian Richard Reeves was once asked
by a college student to define “real news”, he
answered: “The news you and I need to keep our
freedoms.” When journalism throws in with power that’s
the first news marched by censors to the guillotine.
The greatest moments in the history of the press came
not when journalists made common cause with the state
but when they stood fearlessly independent of it. 

Which brings me to the third powerful force – beyond
governmental secrecy and megamedia conglomerates –
that is shaping what Americans see, read, and hear. I
am talking now about that quasi-official partisan
press ideologically linked to an authoritarian
administration that in turn is the ally and agent of
the most powerful interests in the world. This
convergence dominates the marketplace of political
ideas today in a phenomenon unique in our history. You
need not harbor the notion of a vast, right wing
conspiracy to think this more collusion more than pure
coincidence. Conspiracy is unnecessary when ideology
hungers for power and its many adherents swarm of
their own accord to the same pot of honey. Stretching
from the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal to
the faux news of Rupert Murdoch’s empire to the
nattering nabobs of no-nothing radio to a legion of
think tanks paid for and bought by conglomerates – the
religious, partisan and corporate right have raised a
mighty megaphone for sectarian, economic, and
political forces that aim to transform the egalitarian
and democratic ideals embodied in our founding
documents. Authoritarianism. With no strong opposition
party to challenge such triumphalist hegemony, it is
left to journalism to be democracy’s best friend. That
is why so many journalists joined with you in
questioning Michael Powell’s bid – blessed by the
White House – to permit further concentration of media
ownership. If free and independent journalism
committed to telling the truth without fear or favor
is suffocated, the oxygen goes out of democracy. And
there is a surer way to intimidate and then silence
mainstream journalism than to be the boss. 

If you doubt me, read Jane Kramer’s chilling account
in the current New Yorker of Silvio Berlusconi. The
Prime Minister of Italy is its richest citizen. He is
also its first media mogul. The list of media that he
or his relatives or his proxies own, or directly or
indirectly control, includes the state television
networks and radio stations, three of Italy’s four
commercial television networks, two big publishing
houses, two national newspapers, fifty magazines, the
country’s largest movie production-and-distribution
company, and a chunk of its Internet services. Even
now he is pressing upon parliament a law that would
enable him to purchase more media properties,
including the most influential paper in the country.
Kramer quotes one critic who says that half the
reporters in Italy work for Berlusconi, and the other
half think they might have to. Small wonder he has
managed to put the Italian State to work to guarantee
his fortune – or that his name is commonly attached to
such unpleasant things as contempt for the law,
conflict of interest, bribery, and money laundering.
Nonetheless, “his power over what other Italians see,
read, buy, and, above all, think, is overwhelming.”
The editor of The Economist, Bill Emmott, was asked
recently why a British magazine was devoting so much
space to an Italian Prime Minister. He replied that
Berlusconi had betrayed the two things the magazine
stood for: capitalism and democracy. Can it happen
here? It can happen here. By the way, Berlusconi’s
close friend is Rupert Murdoch. On July 3lst this
year, writes Jane Kramer, programming on nearly all
the satellite hookups in Italy was switched
automatically to Murdoch’s Sky Italia 

So the issues bringing us here tonight are bigger and
far more critical than simply “media reform.” That’s
why, before I go on, I want to ask you to look around
you. I’m serious: Look to your left and now to your
right. You are looking at your allies in one of the
great ongoing struggles of the American experience –
the struggle for the soul of democracy, for government
“of, by, and for the people.” 

It’s a battle we can win only if we work together.
We’ve seen that this year. Just a few months ago the
FCC, heavily influenced by lobbyists for the
newspaper, broadcasting and cable interests, prepared
a relaxation of the rules governing ownership of media
outlets that would allow still more diversity-killing
mergers among media giants. The proceedings were
conducted in virtual secrecy, and generally ignored by
all the major media, who were of course interested
parties. In June Chairman Powell and his two
Republican colleagues on the FCC announced the revised
regulations as a done deal. 

But they didn’t count on the voice of independent
journalists and citizens like you. Because of coverage
in independent outlets – including PBS, which was the
only broadcasting system that encouraged its
journalists to report what was really happening – and
because citizens like you took quick action, this
largely invisible issue burst out as a major political
cause and ignited a crackling public debate. You
exposed Powell’s failure to conduct an open discussion
of the rule changes save for a single hearing in
Richmond, Virginia. Your efforts led to a real
participatory discussion, with open meetings in
Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, New York and Atlanta.
Then the organizing that followed generated millions
of letters and “filings”at the FCC opposing the
change. Finally, the outcry mobilized unexpected
support for bi-partisan legislation to reverse the new
rules that cleared the Senate – although House
Majority Leader Tom De Lay still holds it prisoner in
the House. But who would have thought six months ago
that the cause would win support from such allies as
Senator Trent Lott or Kay Bailey Hutchinson, from my
own Texas. You have moved “media reform” to
center-stage, where it may even now become a catalyst
for a new era of democratic renewal. 

We working journalists have something special to bring
to this work. This weekend at your conference there
will be plenty of good talk about the mechanics of
reform. What laws are needed? What advocacy programs
and strategies? How can we protect and extend the
reach of those tools that give us some countervailing
power against media monopoly – instruments like the
Internet, cable TV, community-based radio and public
broadcasting systems, alternative journals of news and
opinion. 

But without passion, without a message that has a
beating heart, these won’t be enough. There’s where
journalism comes in. It isn’t the only agent of
freedom, obviously; in fact, journalism is a deeply
human and therefore deeply flawed craft – yours truly
being a conspicuous example. But at times it has risen
to great occasions, and at times it has made other
freedoms possible. That’s what the draftsmen of the
First Amendment knew and it’s what we can’t afford to
forget. So to remind us of what our free press has
been at its best and can be again, I will call on the
help of unseen presences, men and women of
journalism’s often checkered but sometimes courageous
past. 

Think with me for a moment on the reasons behind the
establishment of press freedom. It wasn’t ordained to
protect hucksters, and it didn’t drop like the gentle
rain from heaven. It was fought and sacrificed for by
unpretentious but feisty craftsmen who got their hands
inky at their own hand presses and called themselves
simply “printers.” The very first American newspaper
was a little three-page affair put out in Boston in
September of 1690. Its name was Publick Occurrences
Both Foreign and Domestick and its editor was Benjamin
Harris, who said he simply wanted “to give an account
of such considerable things as have come to my
attention.” The government shut it down after one
issue – just one issue! – for the official reason that
printer Ben Harris hadn’t applied for the required
government license to publish. But I wonder if some
Massachusetts pooh-bah didn’t take personally one of
Harris’s proclaimed motives for starting the paper –
“to cure the spirit of Lying much among us”? 

No one seems to have objected when Harris and his
paper disappeared – that was the way things were. But
some forty-odd years later when printer John Peter
Zenger was jailed in New York for criticizing its
royal governor, things were different. The colony
brought Zenger to trial on a charge of “seditious
libel,” and since it didn’t matter whether the libel
was true or not, the case seemed open and shut. But
the jury ignored the judge’s charge and freed Zenger,
not only because the governor was widely disliked, but
because of the closing appeal of Zenger’s lawyer,
Andrew Hamilton. Just hear him! His client’s case was:


Not the cause of the poor Printer, nor of New York
alone, [but] the cause of Liberty, and. . . every Man
who prefers Freedom to a Life of Slavery will bless
and honour You, as Men who. . .by an impartial and
uncorrupt Verdict, [will] have laid a Noble Foundation
for securing to ourselves, our Posterity and our
Neighbors, That, to which Nature and the Laws of our
Country have given us a Right, -- the Liberty – both
of exposing and opposing arbitrary Power…by speaking
and writing – Truth. 

Still a pretty good mission statement! 

During the War for Independence itself most of the
three dozen little weekly newspapers in the colonies
took the Patriot side and mobilized resistance by
giving space to anti-British letters, news of
Parliament’s latest outrages, and calls to action. But
the clarion journalistic voice of the Revolution was
the onetime editor of the Pennsylvania Magazine, Tom
Paine, a penniless recent immigrant from England where
he left a trail of failure as a businessman and
husband. In 1776 – just before enlisting in
Washington’s army – he published Common Sense, a
hard-hitting pamphlet that slashed through legalisms
and doubts to make an uncompromising case for an
independent and republican America. It’s been called
the first best seller, with as many as 100,000 copies
bought by a small literate population. Paine followed
it up with another convincing collection of essays
written in the field and given another punchy title,
The Crisis. Passed from hand to hand and reprinted in
other papers, they spread the gospel of freedom to
thousands of doubters. And why I bring Paine up here
is because he had something we need to restore – an
unwavering concentration to reach ordinary people with
the message that they mattered and could stand up for
themselves. He couched his gospel of human rights and
equality in a popular style that any working writer
can envy. “As it is my design,” he said, “to make
those that can scarcely read understand, I shall
therefore avoid every literary ornament and put it in
language as plain as the alphabet.” 

That plain language spun off memorable one-liners that
we’re still quoting. “These are the times that try
men’s souls.” “Tyranny, like hell, is not easily
conquered.” “What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too
lightly.” “Virtue is not hereditary.” And this: “Of
more worth is one honest man to society and in the
sight of God than all the crowned ruffians that ever
lived.” I don’t know what Paine would have thought of
political debate by bumper sticker and sound bite but
he could have held his own in any modern campaign. 

There were also editors who felt responsible to
audiences that would dive deep. In 1787 and ‘88 the
little New-York Independent Advertiser ran all
eighty-five numbers of The Federalist , those serious
essays in favor of ratifying the Constitution. They
still shine as clear arguments, but they are, and they
were, unforgiving in their demand for concentrated
attention. Nonetheless, The Advertiser felt that it
owed the best to its readers, and the readers knew
that the issues of self-government deserved their best
attention. I pray your goal of “media reform” includes
a press as conscientious as the New-York Advertiser,
as pungent as Common Sense, and as public-spirited as
both. Because it takes those qualities to fight
against the relentless pressure of authority and
avarice. Remember, back in l79l, when the First
Amendment was ratified, the idea of a free press
seemed safely sheltered in law. It wasn’t. Only seven
years later, in the midst of a war scare with France,
Congress passed and John Adams signed the infamous
Sedition Act. The act made it a crime – just listen to
how broad a brush the government could swing – to
circulate opinions “tending to induce a belief” that
lawmakers might have unconstitutional or repressive
motives, or “directly or indirectly tending” to
justify France or to “criminate,” whatever that meant,
the President or other Federal officials. No wonder
that opponents called it a scheme to “excite a fervor
against foreign aggression only to establish tyranny
at home.” John Ashcroft would have loved it. 

But here’s what happened. At least a dozen editors
refused to be frightened and went defiantly to prison,
some under state prosecutions. One of them, Matthew
Lyon, who also held a seat in the House of
Representatives, languished for four months in an
unheated cell during a Vermont winter. But such was
the spirit of liberty abroad in the land that admirers
chipped in to pay his thousand-dollar fine, and when
he emerged his district re-elected him by a landslide.
Luckily, the Sedition Act had a built-in expiration
date of 1801, at which time President Jefferson – who
hated it from the first – pardoned those remaining
under indictment. So the story has an upbeat ending,
and so can ours, but it will take the kind of courage
that those early printers and their readers showed. 

Courage is a timeless quality and surfaces when the
government is tempted to hit the bottle of censorship
again during national emergencies, real or
manufactured. As so many of you will recall, in 1971,
during the Vietnam War, the Nixon administration
resurrected the doctrine of “prior restraint” from the
crypt and tried to ban the publication of the Pentagon
Papers by the New York Times and the Washington Post –
even though the documents themselves were a classified
history of events during four earlier Presidencies.
Arthur Sulzberger, the publisher of the Times, and
Katherine Graham of the Post were both warned by their
lawyers that they and their top managers could face
criminal prosecution under espionage laws if they
printed the material that Daniel Ellsberg had leaked –
and, by the way, offered without success to the three
major television networks. Or at the least, punitive
lawsuits or whatever political reprisals a furious
Nixon team could devise. But after internal debates –
and the threats of some of their best-known editors to
resign rather than fold under pressure – both owners
gave the green light – and were vindicated by the
Supreme Court. Score a round for democracy. 

Bi-partisan fairness requires me to note that the
Carter administration, in 1979, tried to prevent the
Progressive magazine, published right here in Madison,
from running an article called “How to Make an
H-Bomb.” The grounds were a supposed threat to
“national security.” But Howard Morland had compiled
the piece entirely from sources open to the public,
mainly to show that much of the classification system
was Wizard of Oz smoke and mirrors. The courts again
rejected the government’s claim, but it’s noteworthy
that the journalism of defiance by that time had
retreated to a small left-wing publication like the
Progressive. 

In all three of those cases, confronted with a clear
and present danger of punishment, none of the owners
flinched. Can we think of a single executive of
today’s big media conglomerates showing the kind of
resistance that Sulzberger, Graham, and Erwin Knoll
did? Certainly not Michael Eisner. He said he didn’t
even want ABC News reporting on its parent company,
Disney. Certainly not General Electric/NBC’s Robert
Wright. He took Phil Donahue off MNBC because the
network didn’t want to offend conservatives with a
liberal sensibility during the invasion of Iraq.
Instead, NBC brought to its cable channel one Michael
Savage whose diatribes on radio had described
non-white countries as “turd-world nations” and who
characterized gay men and women as part of “the grand
plan to cut down on the white race.” I am not sure
what it says that the GE/NBC executives calculated
that while Donahue was offensive to conservatives,
Savage was not. 

And then there’s Leslie Moonves, the chairman of CBS.
In the very week that the once-Tiffany Network was
celebrating its 75th anniversary – and taking kudos
for its glory days when it was unafraid to broadcast
“The Harvest of Shame” and “The Selling of the
Pentagon” – the network’s famous eye blinked.
Pressured by a vociferous and relentless right wing
campaign and bullied by the Republican National
Committee – and at a time when its parent company has
billions resting on whether the White House, Congress,
and the FCC will allow it to own even more stations
than currently permissible – CBS caved in and pulled
the miniseries about Ronald Reagan that conservatives
thought insufficiently worshipful. The chief honcho at
CBS, Les Moonves, says taste, not politics, dictated
his decision. But earlier this year, explaining why
CBS intended to air a series about Adolf Hitler,
Moonves sang a different tune: “If you want to play it
safe and put on milquetoast then you get
criticized…There are times when as a broadcaster when
you take chances.” This obviously wasn’t one of those
times. Granted, made-for-television movies about
living figures are about as vital as the wax figures
at Madame Tussaud’s – and even less authentic –
granted that the canonizers of Ronald Reagan hadn’t
even seen the film before they set to howling;
granted, on the surface it’s a silly tempest in a
teapot; still, when a once-great network falls
obsequiously to the ground at the feet of a partisan
mob over a cheesy mini-series that practically no one
would have taken seriously as history, you have to
wonder if the slight tremor that just ran through the
First Amendment could be the harbinger of greater
earthquakes to come, when the stakes are really high.
And you have to wonder what concessions the media
tycoons-cum-supplicants are making when no one is
looking. 

So what must we devise to make the media safe for
individuals stubborn about protecting freedom and
serving the truth? And what do we all – educators,
administrators, legislators and agitators – need to do
to restore the disappearing diversity of media
opinions? America had plenty of that in the early days
when the republic and the press were growing up
together. It took no great amount of capital and
credit – just a few hundred dollars – to start a
paper, especially with a little political sponsorship
and help. There were well over a thousand of them by
1840, mostly small-town weeklies. And they weren’t
objective by any stretch. Here’s William Cobbett,
another Anglo-American hell-raiser like Paine,
shouting his creed in the opening number of his 1790s
paper, Porcupine’s Gazette. “Peter Porcupine,”
Cobbett’s self-bestowed nickname, declared: 

Professions of impartiality I shall make none. They
are always useless, and are besides perfect nonsense,
when used by a newsmonger; for, he that does not
relate news as he finds it, is something worse than
partial; and . . . he that does not exercise his own
judgment, either in admitting or rejecting what is
sent him, is a poor passive tool, and not an editor. 

In Cobbett’s day you could flaunt your partisan
banners as you cut and thrust, and not inflict serious
damage on open public discussion because there were
plenty of competitors. It didn’t matter if the local
gazette presented the day’s events entirely through a
Democratic lens. There was always an alternate Whig or
Republican choice handy – there were, in other words,
choices. As Alexis de Tocqueville noted, these many
blooming journals kept even rural Americans amazingly
well informed. They also made it possible for
Americans to exercise one of their most democratic
habits – that of forming associations to carry out
civic enterprises. And they operated against the
dreaded tyranny of the majority by letting lonely
thinkers know that they had allies elsewhere. Here’s
how de Tocqueville put it in his own words: 

It often happens in democratic countries that many men
who have the desire or directed toward that light, and
those wandering spirits who had long sought each other
the need to associate cannot do it, because all being
very small and lost in the crowd, they do not see each
other and do not know where to find each other. Up
comes a newspaper that exposes to their view the
sentiment or the idea that had been presented to each
of them simultaneously but separately. All are
immediately in the shadows finally meet each other and
unite. 

No wandering spirit could fail to find a voice in
print. And so in that pre-Civil War explosion of
humanitarian reform movements, it was a diverse press
that put the yeast in freedom’s ferment. Of course
there were plenty of papers that spoke for
Indian-haters, immigrant-bashers, bigots, jingoes and
land-grabbers proclaiming America’s Manifest Destiny
to dominate North America. But one way or another,
journalism mattered, and had purpose and direction. 

Past and present are never as separate as we think.
Horace Greeley, the reform-loving editor of the New
York Tribune, not only kept his pages “ever open to
the plaints of the wronged and suffering,” but said
that whoever sat in an editor’s chair and didn’t work
to promote human progress hadn’t tasted “the luxury”
of journalism. I liken that to the words of a kindred
spirit closer to our own time, I.F. Stone. In his
four-page little I.F. Stone’s Weekly, “Izzy” loved to
catch the government’s lies and contradictions in the
government’s own official documents. And amid the
thunder of battle with the reactionaries, he said: “I
have so much fun I ought to be arrested.” Think about
that. Two newsmen, a century apart, believing that
being in a position to fight the good fight isn’t a
burden but a lucky break. How can our work here bring
that attitude back into the newsrooms? 

That era of a wide-open and crowded newspaper playing
field began to fade as the old hand-presses gave way
to giant machines with press runs and readerships in
the hundreds of thousands and costs in the millions.
But that didn’t necessarily or immediately kill public
spirited journalism. Not so long as the new owners
were still strong-minded individuals with big
professional egos to match their thick pocketbooks.
When Joseph Pulitzer, a one-time immigrant reporter
for a German-language paper in St. Louis, took over
the New York World in 1883 he was already a
millionaire in the making. But here’s his recommended
short platform for politicians: 

1.Tax luxuries 

2. Tax Inheritances 

3. Tax Large Incomes 

4. Tax monopolies 

5. Tax the Privileged Corporation 

6. A Tariff for Revenue 

7. Reform the Civil Service 

8. Punish Corrupt Officers 

9. Punish Vote Buying. 

10. Punish Employers who Coerce their Employees in
Elections 

Also not a bad mission statement. Can you imagine one
of today’s huge newspaper chains taking that on as an
agenda? 

Don’t get me wrong. The World certainly offered people
plenty of the spice that they wanted – entertainment,
sensation, earthy advice on living – but not at the
expense of news that let them know who was on their
side against the boodlers and bosses. 

Nor did big-time, big-town, big bucks journalism
extinguish the possibility of a reform-minded
investigative journalism that took the name of
muckraking during the Progressive Era. Those days of
early last century saw a second great awakening of the
democratic impulse. What brought it into being was a
reaction against the Social Darwinism and unrestrained
capitalistic exploitation that is back in full force
today. Certain popular magazines made space for – and
profited by – the work of such journalists – to name
only a few – as Lincoln Steffens, Ida Tarbell, Upton
Sinclair, Samuel Hopkins Adams and David Graham
Phillips. They ripped the veils from – among other
things – the shame of the cities, the crimes of the
trusts, the treason of the Senate and the villainies
of those who sold tainted meat and poisonous
medicines. And why were they given those
opportunities? Because, in the words of Samuel S.
McClure, owner of McClure’s Magazine, when special
interests defied the law and flouted the general
welfare, there was a social debt incurred. And, as he
put it: “We have to pay in the end, every one of us.
And in the end, the sum total of the debt will be our
liberty.” 

Muckraking lingers on today, but alas, a good deal of
it consists of raking personal and sexual scandal in
high and celebrated places. Surely, if democracy is to
be served, we have to get back to putting the rake
where the important dirt lies, in the fleecing of the
public and the abuse of its faith in good government. 

When that landmark Communications Act of 1934 was
under consideration a vigorous public movement of
educators, labor officials, and religious and
institutional leaders emerged to argue for a broadcast
system that would serve the interests of citizens and
communities. A movement like that is coming to life
again and we now have to build on this momentum. 

It won’t be easy, because the tide’s been flowing the
other way for a long time. The deregulation pressure
began during the Reagan era, when then-FCC chairman
Mark Fowler, who said that TV didn’t need much
regulation because it was just a “toaster with
pictures,” eliminated many public-interest rules. That
opened the door for networks to cut their news staffs,
scuttle their documentary units (goodbye to “The
Harvest of Shame” and “The Selling of the Pentagon”),
and exile investigative producers and reporters to the
under-funded hinterlands of independent production. It
was like turning out searchlights on dark and
dangerous corners. A crowning achievement of that
drive was the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the
largest corporate welfare program ever for the most
powerful media and entertainment conglomerates in the
world – passed, I must add, with support from both
parties. 

And the beat of “convergence” between once-distinct
forms of media goes on at increased tempo, with the
communications conglomerates and the advertisers
calling the tune. As safeguards to competition fall,
an octopus like GE-NBC-Vivendi-Universal will be able
to secure cable channels that can deliver interactive
multimedia content – text, sound and images – to
digital TVs, home computers, personal video recorders
and portable wireless devices like cell phones. The
goal? To corner the market on new ways of selling more
things to more people for more hours in the day. And
in the long run, to fill the airwaves with customized
pitches to you and your children. That will melt down
the surviving boundaries between editorial and
marketing divisions and create a hybrid known to the
new-media hucksters as “branded entertainment.” 

Let’s consider what’s happening to newspapers. A study
by Mark Cooper of the Consumer Federation of America
reports that two-thirds of today’s newspaper markets
are monopolies. And now most of the country’s powerful
newspaper chains are lobbying for co-ownership of
newspaper and broadcast outlets in the same market,
increasing their grip on community after community.
And are they up-front about it? Hear this: Last
December 3 such media giants as The New York Times,
Gannett, Cox, and Tribune, along with the trade group
representing almost all the country’s broadcasting
stations, filed a petition to the FCC making the case
for that cross ownership the owners so desperately
seek. They actually told the FCC that lifting the
regulation on cross ownership would strengthen local
journalism. But did those same news organizations tell
their readers what they were doing? Not all. None of
them on that day believed they had an obligation to
report in their own news pages what their parent
companies were asking of the FCC. As these huge media
conglomerates increase their control over what we see,
read, and hear, they rarely report on how they are
themselves are using their power to further their own
interests and power as big business, including their
influence over the political process. 

Take a look at a new book called Leaving Readers
Behind: The Age of Corporate Newspapering published as
part of the Project on the State of the American
Newspaper under the auspices of the Pew Charitable
Trusts. The people who produced the book all love
newspapers – Gene Roberts, former managing editor of
The New York Times; Thomas Kunkel, dean of the Philip
Merrill College of Journalism; Charles Layton, a
veteran wire service reporter and news and feature
editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer, as well as
contributors such as Ken Auletta, Geneva Overholser,
and Roy Reed. Their conclusion: the newspaper industry
is in the middle of the most momentous change in its
three hundred year history – a change that is
diminishing the amount of real news available to the
consumer. A generation of relentless corporatization
is now culminating in a furious, unprecedented blitz
of buying, selling and consolidating of newspapers,
from the mightiest dailies to the humblest weeklies.
It is a world where “small hometown dailies in
particular are being bought and sold like hog futures.
Where chains, once content to grow one property at a
time, now devour other chains whole. Where they are
effectively ceding whole regions of the country to one
another, further minimizing competition. Where money
is pouring into the business from interests with
little knowledge and even less concern about the
special obligations newspapers have to democracy.”
They go on to describe the toll that the never-ending
drive for profits is taking on the news. In
Cumberland, Maryland, for example, the police reporter
had so many duties piled upon him he no longer had
time to go to the police station for the daily
reports. But newspaper management had a cost-saving
solution: put a fax machine in the police station and
let the cops send over the news they thought the paper
should have. In New Jersey, the Gannett chain bought
the Asbury Park Press, then sent in a publisher who
slashed fifty five people from the staff and cut the
space for news, and was rewarded by being named
Gannett’s Manager of the Year. In New Jersey, by the
way, the Newhouse and Gannett chains between them now
own thirteen of the state’s nineteen dailies, or
seventy three percent of all the circulation of New
Jersey-based papers. Then there is The Northwestern in
Oshkosh, Wisconsin, with a circulation of 23,500.
Here, the authors report, is a paper that prided
itself on being in hometown hands since the Johnson
administration – the Andrew Johnson administration.
But in 1998 it was sold not once but twice, within the
space of two months. Two years later it was sold
again: four owners in less than three years. 

You’d better get used to it, concluded Leaving Readers
Behind, because the real momentum of consolidation is
just beginning – it won’t be long now before America
is reduced to half a dozen major print conglomerates. 

You can see the results even now in the waning of
robust journalism. In the dearth of in-depth reporting
as news organizations try to do more with fewer
resources. In the failure of the major news
organizations to cover their own corporate deals and
lobbying as well as other forms of “crime in the
suites” such as Enron story. And in helping people
understand what their government is up to. The report
by the Roberts team includes a survey in l999 that
showed a wholesale retreat in coverage of nineteen key
departments and agencies in Washington. Regular
reporting of the Supreme Court and State Department
dropped off considerably through the decade. At the
Social Security Administration, whose activities
literally affect every American, only the New York
Times was maintaining a full-time reporter and,
incredibly, at the Interior Department, which controls
five to six hundred million acres of public land and
looks after everything from the National Park Service
to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, there were no
full-time reporters around. 

That’s in Washington, our nation’s capital. Out across
the country there is simultaneously a near blackout of
local politics by broadcasters. The public interest
group Alliance for Better Campaigns studied forty-five
stations in six cities in one week in October. Out of
7,560 hours of programming analyzed, only 13 were
devoted to local public affairs – less than one-half
of 1% of local programming nationwide. Mayors, town
councils, school boards, civic leaders get no time
from broadcasters who have filled their coffers by
looting the public airwaves over which they were
placed as stewards. Last year, when a movement sprang
up in the House of Representatives to require these
broadcasters to obey the law that says they must sell
campaign advertising to candidates for office at the
lowest commercial rate, the powerful broadcast lobby
brought the Congress to heel. So much for the “public
interest, convenience, and necessity.” 

So what do we do? What is our strategy for taking on
what seems a hopeless fight for a media system that
serves as effectively as it sells – one that holds all
the institutions of society, itself included,
accountable? 

There’s plenty we can do. Here’s one journalist’s list
of some of the overlapping and connected goals that a
vital media reform movement might pursue. 

First, we have to take Tom Paine’s example – and Danny
Schecter’s advice – and reach out to regular citizens.
We have to raise an even bigger tent than you have
here. Those of us in this place speak a common
language about the “media.” We must reach the audience
that’s not here – carry the fight to radio talk shows,
local television, and the letters columns of our
newspapers. As Danny says, we must engage the
mainstream, not retreat from it. We have to get our
fellow citizens to understand that what they see,
hear, and read is not only the taste of programmers
and producers but also a set of policy decisions made
by the people we vote for. 

We have to fight to keep the gates to the Internet
open to all. The web has enabled many new voices in
our democracy – and globally – to be heard: advocacy
groups, artists, individuals, non-profit
organizations. Just about anyone can speak online, and
often with an impact greater than in the days when
orators had to climb on soap box in a park. The media
industry lobbyists point to the Internet and say it’s
why concerns about media concentration are ill founded
in an environment where anyone can speak and where
there are literally hundreds of competing channels.
What those lobbyists for big media don’t tell you is
that the traffic patterns of the online world are
beginning to resemble those of television and radio.
In one study, for example, AOL Time Warner (as it was
then known) accounted for nearly a third of all user
time spent online. And two others companies – Yahoo
and Microsoft – bring that figure to fully 50%. As for
the growing number of channels available on today’s
cable systems, most are owned by a small handful of
companies. Of the ninety-one major networks that
appear on most cable systems, 79 are part of such
multiple network groups such as Time Warner, Viacom,
Liberty Media, NBC, and Disney. In order to program a
channel on cable today, you must either be owned by or
affiliated with one of the giants. If we’re not
vigilant the wide-open spaces of the Internet could be
transformed into a system in which a handful of
companies use their control over high-speed access to
ensure they remain at the top of the digital heap in
the broadband era at the expense of the democratic
potential of this amazing technology. So we must fight
to make sure the Internet remains open to all as the
present-day analogue of that many-tongued world of
small newspapers so admired by de Tocqueville. 

We must fight for a regulatory, market and public
opinion environment that lets local and
community-based content be heard rather than drowned
out by nationwide commercial programming. 

We must fight to limit conglomerate swallowing of
media outlets by sensible limits on multiple and
cross-ownership of TV and radio stations, newspapers,
magazines, publishing companies and other information
sources. Let the message go forth: No Berlusconis in
America! 

We must fight to expand a noncommercial media system –
something made possible in part by new digital
spectrum awarded to PBS stations – and fight off
attempts to privatize what’s left of public
broadcasting. Commercial speech must not be the only
free speech in America! 

We must fight to create new opportunities, through
public policies and private agreements, to let
historically marginalized media players into more
ownership of channels and control of content. 

Let us encourage traditional mainstream journalism to
get tougher about keeping a critical eye on those in
public and private power and keeping us all informed
of what’s important – not necessarily simple or
entertaining or good for the bottom line. Not all news
is “Entertainment Tonight.” And news departments are
trustees of the public, not the corporate media’s
stockholders 

In that last job, schools of journalism and
professional news associations have their work cut
out. We need journalism graduates who are not only
better informed in a whole spectrum of special fields
– and the schools do a competent job there – but who
take from their training a strong sense of public
service. And also graduates who are perhaps a little
more hard-boiled and street-smart than the present
crop, though that’s hard to teach. Thanks to the high
cost of education, we get very few recruits from the
ranks of those who do the world’s unglamorous and
low-paid work. But as a onetime “cub” in a very
different kind of setting, I cherish H.L. Mencken’s
description of what being a young Baltimore reporter a
hundred years ago meant to him. “I was at large,” he
wrote, 

in a wicked seaport of half a million people with a
front seat at every public . . [B]y all orthodox
cultural standards I probably reached my all-time low,
for the heavy reading of my teens had been abandoned
in favor of life itself. . .But it would be an
exaggeration to say I was ignorant, for if I neglected
the humanities I was meanwhile laying in all the
worldly wisdom of a police lieutenant, a bartender, a
shyster lawyer or a midwife. 

We need some of that worldly wisdom in our newsrooms.
Let’s figure out how to attract youngsters who have
acquired it. 

And as for those professional associations of editors
they might remember that in union there is strength.
One journalist alone can’t extract from an employer a
commitment to let editors and not accountants choose
the appropriate subject matter for coverage. But what
if news councils blew the whistle on shoddy or
cowardly managements? What if foundations gave
magazines such as the Columbia Journalism Review
sufficient resources to spread their stories of
journalistic bias, failure or incompetence? What if
entire editorial departments simply refused any longer
to quote anonymous sources – or give Kobe Bryant’s
trial more than the minimal space it rates by any
reasonable standard – or to run stories planted by the
Defense Department and impossible, for alleged
security reasons, to verify? What if a professional
association backed them to the hilt? Or required the
same stance from all its members? It would take
courage to confront powerful ownerships that way. But
not as much courage as is asked of those brave
journalists in some countries who face the dungeon,
the executioner or the secret assassin for speaking
out. 

All this may be in the domain of fantasy. And then
again, maybe not. What I know to be real is that we
are in for the fight of our lives. I am not a romantic
about democracy or journalism; the writer Andre Gide
may have been right when he said that all things
human, given time, go badly. But I know journalism and
democracy are deeply linked in whatever chance we
human beings have to redress our grievances, renew our
politics, and reclaim our revolutionary ideals. Those
are difficult tasks at any time, and they are even
more difficult in a cynical age as this, when a deep
and pervasive corruption has settled upon the
republic. But too much is at stake for our spirits to
flag. Earlier this week the Library of Congress gave
the first Kluge Lifetime Award in the Humanities to
the Polish philosopher Leslie Kolakowski. In an
interview Kolakowski said: “There is one freedom on
which all other liberties depend – and that is freedom
of expression, freedom of speech, of print. If this is
taken away, no other freedom can exist, or at least it
would be soon suppressed.” 

That’s the flame of truth your movement must carry
forward. I am older than almost all of you and am not
likely to be around for the duration; I have said for
several years now that I will retire from active
journalism when I turn 70 next year. But I take heart
from the presence in this room, unseen, of Peter
Zenger, Thomas Paine, the muckrakers, I.F. Stone and
all those heroes and heroines, celebrated or
forgotten, who faced odds no less than ours and did
not flinch. I take heart in your presence here. It’s
your fight now. Look around. You are not alone. 

To purchase an audio or video copy of this entire
program, click here for our new online ordering or
call 1 (800) 881-2359.

Illegitimate, Incompetent & Corrupt

http://www.notthistimegeorge.org/framer.cfm?liid=847

washingtonpost.com
 
War Crimes
Thursday, December 23, 2004; Page A22 


THANKS TO a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties
Union and other human rights groups, thousands of
pages of government documents released this month have
confirmed some of the painful truths about the abuse
of foreign detainees by the U.S. military and the CIA
-- truths the Bush administration implacably has
refused to acknowledge. Since the publication of
photographs of abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison in
the spring the administration's whitewashers -- led by
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld -- have contended
that the crimes were carried out by a few low-ranking
reservists, that they were limited to the night shift
during a few chaotic months at Abu Ghraib in 2003,
that they were unrelated to the interrogation of
prisoners and that no torture occurred at the
Guantanamo Bay prison where hundreds of terrorism
suspects are held. The new documents establish beyond
any doubt that every part of this cover story is
false. 

Though they represent only part of the record that
lies in government files, the documents show that the
abuse of prisoners was already occurring at Guantanamo
in 2002 and continued in Iraq even after the outcry
over the Abu Ghraib photographs. FBI agents reported
in internal e-mails and memos about systematic abuses
by military interrogators at the base in Cuba,
including beatings, chokings, prolonged sleep
deprivation and humiliations such as being wrapped in
an Israeli flag. "On a couple of occasions I entered
interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and
foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair,
food or water," an unidentified FBI agent wrote on
Aug. 2, 2004. "Most times they had urinated or
defecated on themselves, and had been left there for
18 to 24 hours or more." Two defense intelligence
officials reported seeing prisoners severely beaten in
Baghdad by members of a special operations unit, Task
Force 6-26, in June. When they protested they were
threatened and pictures they took were confiscated. 
 
Other documents detail abuses by Marines in Iraq,
including mock executions and the torture of detainees
by burning and electric shock. Several dozen detainees
have died in U.S. custody. In many cases, Army
investigations of these crimes were shockingly shoddy:
Officials lost records, failed to conduct autopsies
after suspicious deaths and allowed evidence to be
contaminated. Soldiers found to have committed war
crimes were excused with noncriminal punishments. The
summary of one suspicious death of a detainee at the
Abu Ghraib prison reads: "No crime scene exam was
conducted, no autopsy conducted, no copy of medical
file obtained for investigation because copy machine
broken in medical office." 

Some of the abuses can be attributed to lack of
discipline in some military units -- though the broad
extent of the problem suggests, at best, that senior
commanders made little effort to prevent or control
wrongdoing. But the documents also confirm that
interrogators at Guantanamo believed they were
following orders from Mr. Rumsfeld. One FBI agent
reported on May 10 about a conversation he had with
Guantanamo's commander, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller,
who defended the use of interrogation techniques the
FBI regarded as illegal on the grounds that the
military "has their marching orders from the Sec Def."
Gen. Miller has testified under oath that dogs were
never used to intimidate prisoners at Guantanamo, as
authorized by Mr. Rumsfeld in December 2002; the FBI
papers show otherwise. 

The Bush administration refused to release these
records to the human rights groups under the Freedom
of Information Act until it was ordered to do so by a
judge. Now it has responded to their publication with
bland promises by spokesmen that any wrongdoing will
be investigated. The record of the past few months
suggests that the administration will neither hold any
senior official accountable nor change the policies
that have produced this shameful record. Congress,
too, has abdicated its responsibility under its
Republican leadership: It has been nearly four months
since the last hearing on prisoner abuse. Perhaps
intervention by the courts will eventually stem the
violations of human rights that appear to be ongoing
in Guantanamo, Iraq and Afghanistan. For now the
appalling truth is that there has been no remedy for
the documented torture and killing of foreign
prisoners by this American government. 


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© 2004 The Washington Post Company


John P. O’Neill Wall of Heroes

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000741680

Al Neuharth, in Christmas Column, Calls for Bringing
Troops Home from Iraq 

By E&P Staff 

Published: December 23, 2004 11:00 AM ET 

NEW YORK In a column noting the high number of U.S.
military personnel in Iraq who will be far from home
on Christmas, USA Today founder Al Neuharth declared
today that if he were eligible to serve in Iraq, "I
would do all I could to avoid it." He also wrote in
his weekly column for the paper that America's New
Year's resolution should be to bring the troops home
"sooner rather than later."

Neuharth, 80, a World War II vet, said he would
happily volunteer for that kind of "highly moral duty
again." But he would avoid serving in Iraq, likening
it to the Vietnam war, which "many of the polticially
connected" managed to escape. 

He concluded that "support our troops" is a wonderful
slogan but "the best way to support our troops thrust
by unwise commanders- in-chief into ill-advised
adventures like Vietnam and Iraq is to bring them
home. Sooner rather than later. That should be our New
Year's resolution."

Neuharth served in the infantry in World War II in
France, Germany and the Philippines. He noted that he
and his colleagues in that war were "properly armed
and equipped."



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
E&P Staff (letters at editorandpublisher.com) 


http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1223-01.htm


Published on Thursday, December 23, 2004 by Reuters 

Bush Monkey Picture Shown on Giant Billboard 

 
 
An electronic billboard at the entrance to New York
City's Holland Tunnel to New Jersey, December 22, 2004
with an image of a painted portrait of U.S. President
George W. Bush with a 'Censored in NY' banner over it
is projected. Painted by artist Christopher Savido,
the work 'Bush Monkeys,' painted using monkeys to form
the image, was banished from an art show in New York
last week amid charges of censorship and is now being
projected on the billboard and auctioned on Ebay with
part of the proceeds donated to the artist' 'Art for
Armor' cause to help parents of U.S. soldiers wishing
to supply their sons and daughters with body armor in
Iraq. REUTERS/Mike Segar
NEW YORK - A portrait of President Bush using monkeys
to form his image that was banished from a New York
art show last week amid charges of censorship was
projected on a giant billboard in Manhattan on
Tuesday. 
"Bush Monkeys," a small acrylic on canvas by Chris
Savido, created the stir last week at the Chelsea
Market public space, leading the market's managers to
close down the 60-piece show. 
Animal Magazine, a quarterly arts publication that had
organized the month-long show, said anonymous donors
had paid for the picture to be posted on a giant
digital billboard over the entrance to the Holland
Tunnel, used by thousands of commuters traveling
between Manhattan and New Jersey. 
The original picture will be auctioned on eBay, with
part of the proceeds donated to parents of U.S.
soldiers wishing to supply their sons and daughters
with body armor in Iraq. 
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld came under fire
from soldiers in Kuwait earlier this month who
complained that they had to use scrap metal to armor
their vehicles. 
"Many of my friends are over in Iraq," Savido said in
a statement. 
The painting offers a likeness of Bush but the image
is made up of monkeys swimming in a marsh. It was
originally priced at $3,500 in the show's catalog. 
Organizers expect more than 400,000 drivers to see the
billboard each day for the next month. 
© Copyright 2004 Reuters Ltd
###
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/122704K.shtml

Kulchur War
   Evolution Shares a Desk With 'Intelligent Design' 
    By Michael Powell 
    The Washington Post 
    Sunday 26 December 2004 
    Dover, Pa. - "God or Darwin?" 
    Lark Myers, a blond, 45-year-old gift shop owner,
frames the question and answers it. "I definitely
would prefer to believe that God created me than that
I'm 50th cousin to a silverback ape," she said.
"What's wrong with wanting our children to hear about
all the holes in the theory of evolution?" 
    Charles Darwin, squeeze over. The school board in
this small town in central Pennsylvania has voted to
make the theory of evolution share a seat with another
theory: God probably designed us. 
    If it survives a legal test, this school district
of about 2,800 students could become the first in the
nation to require that high school science teachers at
least mention the "intelligent design" theory. This
theory holds that human biology and evolution is so
complex as to require the creative hand of an
intelligent force. 
    "The school board has taken the measured step of
making students aware that there are other viewpoints
on the evolution of species," said Richard Thompson,
of the Thomas More Law Center, which represents the
board and describes its overall mission as defending
"the religious freedom of Christians." 
    Board members have been less guarded, and their
comments go well beyond intelligent design theory.
William Buckingham, the board's curriculum chairman,
explained at a meeting last June that Jesus died on
the cross and "someone has to take a stand" for him.
Other board members say they believe that God created
Earth and mankind sometime in the past ten thousand
years or so. 
    "If the Bible is right, God created us," said John
Rowand, an Assemblies of God pastor and a newly
appointed school board member. "If God did it, it's
history and it's also science." 
    This strikes some parents and teachers, not to
mention most evolutionary biologists, as loopy
science. Eleven parents have joined the American Civil
Liberties Union and filed suit in federal court in
Harrisburg seeking to block mention of intelligent
design in high school biology, arguing it is religious
belief dressed in the cloth of science. 
    "It's not science; it's a theocratic idea," Bryan
Rehm, a former science teacher in Dover and a father
of four. "We don't have enough time for science in the
classroom as it is - this is just inappropriate." 
    This is a battle fought in many corners of the
nation. In Charles County, school board members
recently suggested discarding biology textbooks
"biased towards evolution." In Cobb County, in
suburban Atlanta, the local school board ordered that
stickers be placed inside the front cover of science
textbooks stating: "Evolution is a theory, not a
fact." State education boards in Ohio and Kansas have
wrestled with this issue, as well. 
    In 1987, the U.S. Supreme Court seemed to settle
this question, ruling that Louisiana could not make
creationism a part of the science curriculum. The
state, Justice William J. Brennan wrote, cannot
"restructure the science curriculum to conform with a
particular religious viewpoint." (Justice Antonin
Scalia dissented, arguing that creationism could be
"valuable scientific data that has been censored from
the classrooms by an embarrassed scientific
establishment.") 
    Of late, conservative school boards have launched
a counteroffensive, often marching under the banner of
intelligent design. This theory has lingered on the
margins of mainstream scientific discourse with just
enough intellectual heft to force its way into some
discussions of evolutionary theory. 
    Essentially intelligent design posits that the
human cell, among other organisms, is too finely tuned
to have developed by chance. "The human cell is
irreducibly complex - what we find in the cell is
stuff that looks strongly like it was designed by an
intelligence," said Michael J. Behe, a biology
professor at Lehigh University and leading advocate of
intelligent design. 
    Behe acknowledges this theory might lead one to
postulate the existence of a supernatural force, such
as God. But he said this is unknown and rejects those
who would portray him as a creationist. "Our starting
point is from science, not from Scripture," Behe said.

    Few biologists buy that. There is, they say, a
central evolutionary theory embraced by mainstream
scientists worldwide: That life on Earth has evolved
over billions of years and in fits and starts from
one-celled organisms to modern humans. That this
theory is pockmarked with unexplained gaps, and
subject to debate, is how science is crafted. 
    "People have an impatience about science," said
Kenneth R. Miller, a Brown University biologist and
author of the biology textbook used in Dover. "They
think it's this practical process that explains how
everything works, but that's the least interesting
part. 
    "We understand a lot of the mechanisms of
evolution but it's what we don't understand that makes
it exciting." 
    Even today many residents are not sure how Dover,
a former farm hamlet become a bedroom community for
York and Harrisburg, came to occupy the ramparts in a
century-long war over Darwin's theories. 
    In the 18th century, an erudite French shopkeeper
settled in this valley and gave the name Voltaire to
his village. German and English settlers, a local
history notes, soon discovered that Voltaire was "a
French atheist" and "a disbeliever in revealed
theology" and changed the town's name. 
    Dover's modern politics are resolutely Republican
- President Bush polled 65 percent of the vote here -
and its cultural values are Christian, with an
evangelical tinge. To drive its rolling back roads is
to count dozens of churches, from Lutheran to United
Church of Christ, Baptist, Pentecostal and Assemblies
of God. 
    Many here speak of a personal relationship with
Christ and of their antipathy to evolutionary theory
(A Gallup poll found that 35 percent of Americans do
not believe in evolution). Steve Farrell, a friendly
man and owner of a landscaping business, talked of
Darwin and God in the Giant shopping center parking
lot. 
    "We are teaching our children a theory that most
of us don't believe in." He shook his head. "I don't
think God creates everything on a day-to-day basis,
like the color of the sky. But I do believe that he
created Adam and Eve - instantly." 
    Back in the town center, Norma Botterbusch talks
in her jewelry store, which has been a fixture here
for 40 years. "We are a very lenient town," she said.
"But why should a minority get to file a lawsuit and
dictate school policy? Most of our kids already know
who created them." 
    The evolution revolution in Dover began as a
dispute about property taxes. The previous school
board spent too much money and a conservative group
defeated them. Last June, board member Buckingham
criticized a new biology textbook as "laced with
Darwinism." He added, according to the ACLU's lawsuit,
that "our country was founded on Christianity and our
students should be taught as such." 
    Neither Buckingham nor the board president nor the
school superintendent responded to requests for
interviews. 
    In October, the Dover school board passed this
motion: "Students will be made aware of gaps/problems
in Darwin's theory and of other theories of evolution
including, but not limited to, intelligent design.
Note: Origins of Life is not taught." 
    Several board members resigned in protest. When
the remaining board members choose replacements, they
subjected certain candidates to withering questions.
"I was asked if I was a liberal or conservative, and
if I was a child abuser," recalled Rehm, who was known
as an outspoken opponent of intelligent design. 
    In the end, the York Daily Record reported that
the board picked a fundamentalist preacher, a
home-schooler who does not send his kids to public
school for religious reasons, and two more who in
effect pledged to support the board. 
    Dover's evolution policy has left many teachers
deeply uncomfortable. One science teacher noted that
he avoids talking about the origins of life. "We don't
do the monkeys-to-man controversy," he said. "It's
just not worth the trouble." 
    The Discovery Institute in Seattle, which is
regarded as a leader in intelligent design theory,
also opposes the Dover school board's policy in part
because it seems to take three steps into
old-fashioned creationism. "This theory needs to be
debated in the scientific sphere," said Paul West, a
senior fellow. "It's much too soon to require anyone
to teach it in high school." 
    Miller, the Brown University biologist and
textbook author, hopes the day that it is taught in
high school never arrives. "It's very clear that
intelligent design has become a stalking-horse,"
Miller said. "If these school boards had their
druthers, they would teach Noah's flood and the
6,000-year-old design of Earth. 
    "My fear is that they are making real headway in
the popular imagination." 
http://www.boston.com/yourlife/health/diseases/articles/2004/12/26/stem_cells_seen_driving_tumors/
Stem cells seen driving tumors
Scientists ID foe in war on cancer
By Gareth Cook, Globe Staff  |  December 26, 2004
Stem cells have become famous for their ability to
heal, spurring hopes that they might one day cure
Parkinson's disease, spinal cord injuries, and a wide
variety of ailments. But now a growing number of
researchers are concluding that stem cells are also
the hidden force behind one of nature's most feared
killers: cancer.
Within each tumor, they believe, lurks a small
population of elusive, highly potent cells that drive
the tumor's growth. Under a microscope they appear
identical to other cancer cells, but these cancer stem
cells hold the power to produce cancerous tumors in
much the same way that normal stem cells can
regenerate the body's healthy tissues. They also seem
to resist traditional cancer drugs, explaining why
patients can be seemingly cured of some cancers only
to see the disease return.
In the past two years, cancer stem cells have gone
from a theory on the fringes of biology to an idea
that is attracting money and talent in cancer
research. Last year a scientist at the University of
Michigan announced the discovery of stem cells in
breast tumors. In the past few months, a form of
leukemia and two types of brain cancer were both
linked to cancer stem cells, and scientists familiar
with unpublished studies said more cancers are likely
to follow. The first test in patients of a therapy
targeting these stem cells is now getting underway.
The discovery of cancer stem cells provides a
promising new target for the war on cancer, and it
could also force a profound change in cancer research,
say the theory's growing number of advocates.
Most treatments today are judged by their ability to
shrink tumors, but the new results suggest the size of
the tumor is all but irrelevant: If doctors can kill
the stem cells, the tumor is doomed, but if the stem
cells survive it will be back.
''It is mind-blowing," said Robert A. Weinberg, an MIT
scientist who is one of the world's leading cancer
biologists. ''The entire mindset of people must now be
refocused onto these stem cells."
Scientists caution that the path ahead will be
challenging. Simply finding cancer stem cells is
difficult, requiring laborious trial-and-error
experiments in which biologists analyze
similar-looking cancer cells for the chemical
signatures of a stem cell. They then attempt to sift
out those cells and see if they cause new cancers to
grow. But there are lingering obstacles: Even for many
healthy tissues, for instance, there is not yet a
definitive test to distinguish stem cells.
The research community is amassing its forces to
attack the problem. Harvard University, Harvard
Medical School, and the Harvard-affiliated hospitals
are organizing a cancer stem-cell program as a part of
the recently formed Harvard Stem Cell Institute. This
year, the National Cancer Institute has identified
cancer stem cells as one of the most important new
ideas in cancer research; next year it plans to
announce a stem-cell initiative, according to R. Allan
Mufson, who is chief of the Cancer
Immunology/Hematology Branch at the institute.
In part, the excitement surrounding the idea has come
from the growing realization that there are deep
connections between the biology of cancer -- perhaps
the top target of biomedical research over the last
three decades -- and the rapidly expanding science of
stem cells. Researchers say progress in understanding
the origins of cancer may also give them tools to
unleash the potential of stem cells for healing.
The idea also exerts a powerful emotional pull on
doctors who specialize in cancer treatment because it
relates directly to one of the cruelest aspects of the
disease. Patients can endure surgery, radiation, and
near-lethal drugs to fight their tumors, only to watch
helplessly as the cancer comes raging back.
''We have agents that will treat almost every cancer,"
said Dr. Gary Gilliland, who directs the leukemia
program at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and is
leading Harvard's new cancer stem cell effort. ''But
with a few notable exceptions, we don't cure these
cancers."
Scientists have suspected a link between stem cells
and cancer cells for decades. Stem cells, which appear
in many tissues in the adult body -- from the skin to
the blood to the brain -- are unique because they have
the ability to create large numbers of other cells.
Scientists also sometimes refer to stem cells as
''immortal" for their unique ability to renew their
own ranks, seemingly indefinitely. Cancer cells seem
to share some of these qualities, only they are
riddled with genetic defects that make them grow into
dangerous, uncontrolled masses.
A stem cell ''has all the things that we ascribe to a
very aggressive cancer," said John E. Dick, a
professor at the University of Toronto.
In 1994, Dick became the first scientist to prove the
existence of a cancer stem cell, which combines the
profound genetic damage of a cancer cell with the
self-renewing capacity of a normal stem cell. In
studying a common form of blood cancer called acute
myelogenous leukemia, he found that only a small
proportion of the leukemia cells were capable of
actually causing the cancer. And these cells, he
showed, had the same chemical markers as the stem
cells found in healthy blood.
But that idea remained an isolated finding until last
year, when Dr. Michael Clarke, a professor at the
University of Michigan, announced he had found a stem
cell in human breast tumors -- suddenly suggesting
that stem cells could be driving solid tumors as well.
In August, a paper in the New England Journal of
Medicine linked another form of leukemia to cancer
stem cells, and last month, a paper in the prestigious
journal Nature showed that two common forms of brain
tumors are driven by stem cells.
The brain research, led by Dr. Peter B. Dirks of the
University of Toronto and the Hospital for Sick
Children in Toronto, looked at cells taken from human
brain tumors and identified possible cancer stem cells
among them. Dirks showed that as few as 100 of these
cells could create an aggressive brain cancer in a
mouse. But without these stem cells, even a massive
dose of up to 100,000 cancer cells didn't spark a
cancer, according to the paper.
Clarke said last week that in unpublished work he has
identified stem cells for another cancer, and believes
he has found stem cells for two more types of cancer.
With other cancer scientists now starting to direct
their research toward stem cells and new findings
bolstering the idea, Clarke said he now receives
almost daily invitations to give presentations around
the country.
''When I first published this, nobody believed me,"
Clarke said. ''At this point, I think I am going to
die if I take one more plane trip."
Although the field has only begun to yield useful
findings, scientists are already looking for ways to
use this knowledge to treat cancer. They believe the
key is to home in on the ways in which stem cells
differ from normal cells. Radiation and traditional
chemotherapy drugs tend to target cells that are
dividing quickly and creating large numbers of new
cells. Because this rapid division is the trademark of
an active cancer, these treatments are generally
effective at shrinking the size of tumors -- the
traditional measure of effectiveness.
Stem cells, by contrast, are usually slow to divide.
When a stem cell does divide, it can create long-lived
copies of itself -- thus ensuring its ''immortality."
But a stem cell can also create cells known as
progenitor cells that have the power to create a group
of new cells that quickly expand in number. Cancer
therapies that kill only these quickly dividing cells
may appear successful in the short term, but leave the
more important stem cells unharmed.
The search for drugs that would specifically target
cancer stem cells is underway. Craig T. Jordan, a
scientist at the University of Rochester School of
Medicine and Dentistry, has been working for years
with the cancer stem cells identified in 1994, looking
for ways to kill them without hurting normal cells.
Two years ago, while still a researcher at the
University of Kentucky, he identified a pair of drugs
that targeted leukemia stem cells. Recruiting began
last month for a trial in Kentucky for people who have
relapsed, which is very common, and for other patients
who can't handle the toxicity of the traditional
treatment.
Jordan said that in unpublished work he has identified
another promising drug treatment, based on a natural
plant compound called parthenolide, though he
cautioned that any clinical trial of this drug would
be at least a year away.
Clarke, Dirks, and other scientists involved in the
research said that they are especially interested in
developing treatments that can disrupt the ability of
the cancer stem cells to replicate themselves. If
scientists can find a drug that interferes with this
power, then without the ''immortal" stem cells, the
tumor would simply die.
Dr. Harley I. Kornblum, a leading figure in brain
cancer stem cells research, is working on a project to
screen large numbers of potential drugs to stop cancer
stem cells from replicating indefinitely. Kornblum is
director of the neural stem cell research center at
the University of California, Los Angeles, and a
researcher at the Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center
there.
Drugs that target cancer stem cells, scientists said,
could be used in combination with traditional
chemotherapies to heighten their effect. They might
also be used in combination with drugs designed to
disrupt the ability of tumors to attract the new blood
vessels they need to survive, a process called
angiogenesis.
Researchers are also actively looking for drugs that
might disrupt the ability of cancer cells to leave the
primary tumor and start growing elsewhere in the body,
a process called metastasis.
Although many aspects of cancer stem cells are still
poorly understood -- and only a few types have been
identified -- it may not be necessary to understand
them well to tame them, said Dr. Todd R. Golub,
director of the cancer program at the Broad Institute
and an oncologist at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.
For example, he said, if a therapy can efficiently
destroy all of the direct offspring of the stem cells,
then the cancer can be held in check, making it a
manageable chronic disease rather than an
unpredictable killer.
Newer approaches to cancer drug development may yield
drugs that kill cancer stem cells even if scientists
have not been able to identify the stem cells.
These drugs, such as Gleevec, are designed to attack
very specific aspects of a cancer cell, though some
patients treated with Gleevec have begun to suffer
relapses.
Cancer has proven an ingenious and frustrating
opponent, but even with all the difficult work that
now lies ahead, one longtime researcher said that the
discovery of cancer stem cells has been like pulling
back a great veil.
''Finally," said Weinberg, ''we have come to see the
true face of the enemy."
Gareth Cook can be reached at cook at globe.com.For more
stem cell coverage, see www.boston.com/news/science/