Recent News of Great Interest

TV Uber Alles: Berlusconi wins, democracy loses in Italy

Bob Kerrey, CIA War Crimes, And The Need For A War Crimes Trial

Thu, 19 Apr 2001 Norman Solomon <mediabeat@igc.org> BIAS AND FEAR TILTING COVERAGE OF ISRAEL By Norman Solomon / Creators Syndicate A couple of weeks ago, the New York Times finally printed the name of a 12-year-old organization called Rabbis for Human Rights. But the mention had to be bought -- in a full-page ad expressing support for actions by the group, which is "the only Israeli rabbinic association that includes Orthodox, Reform, Reconstructionist and Conservative rabbis." Days before the advertisement appeared on April 8, the executive director of Rabbis for Human Rights had been arrested while participating in nonviolent civil disobedience against Israeli demolition of houses. "Palestinian homes are being systematically bulldozed all over the West Bank," said a bulletin from Rabbi Arthur Waskow, director of the Shalom Center in Philadelphia. "In this case, there isn't any pretense of 'security interests' or 'military targets.' The houses destroyed yesterday and today belong to ordinary Palestinian citizens whose only crime is the wish to have a roof over their heads." Groups like Rabbis for Human Rights, and Jewish American activists like Rabbi Waskow who vocally oppose Israeli policies, get short shrift in U.S. news outlets. Meanwhile, the reporting on the Israeli- Palestinian cycle of violence is badly skewed by an endless cycle of media bias. Searching the Nexis database of U.S. media coverage during the first 100 days of this year, I found several dozen stories using the phrases "Israeli retaliation" or "Israel retaliated." During the same period, how many stories used the phrases "Palestinian retaliation" or "Palestinians retaliated"? One. Both sides of the conflict, of course, describe their violence as retaliatory. But only one side routinely benefits from having its violent moves depicted that way by major American media. The huge disparity in the media frame is a measure of the overall slant of news coverage. To help maintain pressure for a favorable media tilt, supporters of Israel have a not-so-secret weapon, brandished most effectively as a preemptive threat -- the charge of anti-Semitism. Any Americans who speak out against Israel's extreme disregard for human rights are liable to be in the line of fire. Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor and Nobel Prize winner, is a reminder that victims of tyranny are capable of later aligning themselves with perpetrators of enormous cruelty. Last month, Wiesel delivered a speech to a national conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, one of Washington's most powerful lobbying groups. Wiesel declared that anyone "who uses their Jewishness as a context to attack or condemn Israel -- that's something I'm against." And he denounced criticisms of Israel as "anti-Semitism in Jewish leftist circles." Such salvos are warning shots that Joseph McCarthy would have understood. To quash debate, just smear, smear, smear. Instead of trying to refute critiques of Israeli policies, it's much easier to equate criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism -- a timeworn way of preventing or short-circuiting real debate on the merits of the issues. It is absurd and dangerous to claim that bigotry is at the root of calls for adherence to basic standards of human rights. But the ongoing threat of the "anti-Semitic" label helps to prevent U.S. media coverage from getting out of hand. Last year, I had an interesting experience with one of Florida's daily papers, the Palm Beach Post. A reader's letter, published in early June, charged that a column I'd written "had an anti-Semitic undertone" because it criticized media spin for Israel. Eleven weeks later, on Aug. 25, the newspaper printed a second letter from the same reader, objecting to a column I wrote about Sen. Joseph Lieberman. This time the letter was more emphatic and sweeping, though less specific: "I have noticed in some of his previous columns, he is apt to express anti-Semitic views." The Palm Beach Post printed my weekly syndicated column 30 times during 2000 -- for the last time on Aug. 19, six days before publication of the second letter accusing me of being "anti-Semitic." After that letter came off the press, my column never again appeared in the Palm Beach Post. When I inquired, the newspaper's opinion-page editor told me: "There was no connection." Whatever the case may be, there's no doubt that journalists generally understand critical words about Israel to be hazardous to careers. "Rarely since the Second World War has a people been so vilified as the Palestinians," comments Robert Fisk, a longtime foreign correspondent for the London-based daily Independent. "And rarely has a people been so frequently excused and placated as the Israelis." Fisk is asking his colleagues to search their consciences: "Our gutlessness, our refusal to tell the truth, our fear of being slandered as 'anti-Semites' -- the most loathsome of libels against any journalist -- means that we are aiding and abetting terrible deeds in the Middle East." Anti-Semitism is a reality in the world. Like all forms of religious and racial bigotry, it should be unequivocally opposed. The effectiveness of such opposition is undermined by those who cry wolf, using charges of anti-Semitism as a weapon in a propaganda arsenal to defend Israel's indefensible crimes against Palestinian people. _______________________________________________ Norman Solomon's latest book is "The Habits of Highly Deceptive Media." His weekly syndicated column -- archived at www.fair.org/media-beat/ -- focuses on media and politics. If you are interested in a free subscription to The Konformist Newswire, please visit: http://www.eGroups.com/list/konformist Or, e-mail konformist-subscribe@egroups.com with the subject: "I NEED 2 KONFORM!!!" (Okay, you can use something else, but it's a kool catch phrase.) Visit the Klub Konformist at Yahoo!: http://clubs.yahoo.com/clubs/klubkonformist

New book on NSA sheds light on secrets U.S. terror plan was Cuba invasion pretext

Baltimore Sun Staff April 24, 2001 WASHINGTON - U.S. military leaders proposed in 1962 a secret plan to commit terrorist acts against Americans and blame Cuba to create a pretext for invasion and the ouster of Communist leader Fidel Castro, according to a new book about the National Security Agency. "We could develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington," said one document reportedly prepared by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba," the document says. "Casualty lists in U.S. newspapers would cause a helpful wave of indignation." The plan is laid out in documents signed by the five Joint Chiefs but never carried out, according to writer James Bamford in "Body of Secrets." The new history of the Fort Meade-based eavesdropping agency is being released today by Doubleday. NSA regularly picks up the conversations of suspected terrorist financier Osama bin Laden, says Bamford, and has monitored Chinese and French companies trying to sell missiles to Iran. He provides new details about an Israeli attack on a Navy eavesdropping ship in 1967, suggesting that the sinking was deliberate. And he reveals the loss of an "entire warehouse" full of secret cryptographic gear to the North Vietnamese in 1975, at the end of the Vietnam War. Bamford, a former investigative reporter for ABC News who wrote "The Puzzle Palace" about the NSA in 1982, said his new book is based mostly on documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act or found in government archives. "NSA never handed me any documents," he said. "It was a question of digging." He said he was most surprised by the anti-Cuba terror plan, code-named Operation Northwoods. It "may be the most corrupt plan ever created by the U.S. government," he writes. The Northwoods plan also proposed that if the 1962 launch of John Glenn into orbit were to fail, resulting in the astronaut's death, the U.S. government would publicize fabricated evidence that Cuba had used electronic interference to sabotage the flight, the book says. A previously secret document obtained by Bamford offers further suggestions for mayhem to be blamed on Cuba. "We could sink a boatload of Cubans en route to Florida (real or simulated). ... We could foster attempts on lives of Cubans in the United States, even to the extent of wounding in instances to be widely publicized," the document says. Another idea was to shoot down a CIA plane designed to replicate a passenger flight and announce that Cuban forces shot it down. Citing a White House document, Bamford writes that the idea of creating a pretext for the invasion of Cuba might have started with President Dwight D. Eisenhower in the last weeks of his administration, when the plan for an invasion by Cuban exiles trained in the United States was hatched. Carried out in April 1961, soon after Kennedy became president, the Bay of Pigs invasion proved a fiasco. Castro's forces quickly killed or rounded up the invaders. Army Gen. Lyman L. Lemnitzer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, presented the Operation Northwoods plan to Kennedy early in 1962, but the president rejected it that March because he wanted no overt U.S. military action against Cuba. Lemnitzer then sought unsuccessfully to destroy all evidence of the plan, according to Bamford. Lemnitzer and those who served with him in 1962 as chiefs of the nation's military branches are dead. But two former top Kennedy administration officials said yesterday that they were unaware of Operation Northwoods and questioned whether such a plan was ever drafted. "I've never heard of Operation Northwoods. Never heard of it and don't believe it," said Theodore Sorenson, Kennedy's White House special counsel. "Obviously, it would be totally illegal as well as totally unwise." Robert S. McNamara, Kennedy's defense secretary, said: "I never heard of it. I can't believe the chiefs were talking about or engaged in what I would call CIA-type operations." Bamford writes that besides the Joint Chiefs, then-Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul H. Nitze also favored "provoking a phony war with Cuba." "There may be a piece of paper" on Northwoods, said McNamara. "I just cannot conceive of [Nitze] approving anything like that or doing it without talking to me." The book contains many other revelations in its detailed account of NSA, the biggest U.S. intelligence agency and Maryland's largest employer, with more than 25,000 personnel at Fort Meade, site of its global eavesdropping efforts. Among them: * In recent years, NSA has regularly listened to bin Laden's unencrypted telephone calls. Agency officials have sometimes played tapes of bin Laden talking to his mother to impress members of Congress and select visitors to the agency. * In the late 1990s, NSA tracked efforts by Chinese and French companies to sell missile technology to Iran, particularly the C-802 anti-ship missile. The eavesdropping led to U.S. protests to the Chinese and French governments. * When U.S. troops evacuated Vietnam in 1975, "an entire warehouse overflowing with NSA's most important cryptographic machines and other supersensitive code and cipher materials" was left behind. It was the largest compromise of such equipment in U.S. history, Bamford writes, but the agency still has not acknowledged it. * When Israeli fighter jets attacked the NSA eavesdropping ship USS Liberty in the Mediterranean in 1967, killing 34 Americans and wounding 171, an NSA aircraft was listening in and heard Israeli pilots referring to the American flag on the ship. U.S. officials, including President Lyndon Baines Johnson, decided to forget the matter, Bamford writes, because they did not want to embarrass Israel. To this day, Israeli officials say their forces mistakenly attacked the U.S. ship. Bamford says the reason for the strike was Israel's desperate effort to cover up its attacks on the Egyptian town of El Arish in the Sinai. The Liberty was sitting offshore and the Israelis feared that the ship would detect the operation, which included the shooting of prisoners. Yesterday, an NSA spokesperson questioned a point made in the book about the USS Liberty. "We do not comment on operational matters, alleged or otherwise; however, Mr. Bamford's claim that the NSA leadership was 'virtually unanimous in their belief that the attack was deliberate' is simply not true," the spokesperson said. When he wrote "The Puzzle Palace" in 1982, Bamford was attacked by some NSA officials, who said his revelations gave the Soviet Union and other U.S. adversaries too much information on the secret agency. One former director referred to him as "an unconvicted felon." With the end of the Cold War, the agency has been less guarded. NSA's current director, Air Force Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden, has granted a number of interviews. Hayden "cracked the door open a tiny bit," said Bamford, partly to burnish NSA's public image and correct misconceptions. Sun staff writer Laura Sullivan contributed to this article. Copyright © 2001, The Baltimore Sun

The Drug War: Where Should the Battle Lines Be Drawn? CNN THE POINT WITH GRETA VAN SUSTEREN (There is a stunning admission in this transcript from former CIA Narcotics Officer Kenneth Bucchi regarding the CIA's role in the importing of drugs into the US. I cannot believe this even made it on tv, probably only because it was live. --SW) The Drug War: Where Should the Battle Lines Be Drawn? Aired April 23, 2001 - 20:30 ET THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED. THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED. ANNOUNCER: THE POINT WITH GRETA VAN SUSTEREN. An American woman and her infant are killed. A tragic incident as the war on drugs hits a sour note. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I will wait to see all the facts before I reach any conclusions about blame. (END VIDEO CLIP) ANNOUNCER: Tonight, new questions about how the U.S. is fighting the war. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You really can't control drugs by stopping the flow in. What you have to do, I think, is come up with a plan: a controlled, regulated legalization of drugs. (END VIDEO CLIP) ANNOUNCER: Tonight's POINT: The Drug War: Where Should the Battle Lines Be Drawn? Plus, the benefits of landing in here. THE POINT. Now from Washington, Greta Van Susteren. GRETA VAN SUSTEREN, HOST: What exactly is the war on drugs? We've been talking about it as a nation for years, debating it, spending a lot of money on it. But where does this war begin? Here at home or tens of thousands of miles away? There is new reason to bring this up again, and it's a horrifying one. Tonight's "Flashpoint" -- The Drug War: Where Should the Battle Lines Be Drawn? A tragic case of mistaken identity. Peru shoots down a missionary plane similar to this one in the mistaken belief it carried drugs. Now the White House is questioning Peru's actions. But Peru says its military acted properly. Whoever is to blame, an American woman and her 7-month-old daughter are dead, and Washington is wrestling with renewed doubts about an expensive and long-running battle with no end in sight. The war on drugs has sparked interest far beyond Washington's corridors of power. Hollywood has embraced the subject with two drug- related movies in theaters right now. The latest is "Blow," with Johnny Depp playing a true-life drug dealer making easy money. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, "BLOW") JOHNNY DEPP, ACTOR: 36 hours. PAUL REUBENS, ACTOR: 36 hours -- I don't believe we got rid of it in 36 hours. DEPP: It's fair to say you underestimated the market, Derek. REUBENS: Right on. It's going to take us longer to sell it than it did to sell it. (END VIDEO CLIP) VAN SUSTEREN: The movie "Traffic" takes a grittier approach, and covers the war from Washington to Tijuana. Here's a montage. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, "TRAFFIC") CATHERINE ZETA-JONES, ACTRESS: ... high-impact, pressure-molded. It's odorless, undetectable by the dogs. Undetectable by anyone. (END VIDEO CLIP) (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, "TRAFFIC") ZETA-JONES: I want the principal witness against my husband killed. (END VIDEO CLIP) ANNOUNCER: This winter... (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, "TRAFFIC") MICHAEL DOUGLAS, ACTOR: We're going after their top guys. (END VIDEO CLIP) (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, "TRAFFIC") UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: Your government surrendered this war a long time ago. (END VIDEO CLIP) ANNOUNCER: ... the director of "Erin Brockovich" and "Out of Site"... (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, "TRAFFIC") UNIDENTIFIED ACTRESS: I have a job for you, but I don't have much time. (END VIDEO CLIP) (END VIDEO CLIP) VAN SUSTEREN: Both films, by the way, focus on the war on drugs being waged internationally, south of our border, which again raises the question being argued in this country on a daily basis: Where do we draw the battle lines? We've assembled our POINT panel and we're ready to tackle this divisive topic. Ray Kelly, a former U.S. customs commissioner, joins us from New York. On the West Coast, Democratic Congresswoman Maxine Waters joins us from Los Angeles, along with, Kenneth Bucchi, a former CIA narcotics agent. And from Miami, Edna Buchanan, a Pulitzer Prize- winning writer for "The Miami Herald," and of course, the author of the novel "You Only Die Twice." Welcome to all of you. Let me first start with you Ken. Dead woman, dead child -- Americans, some say, may have seemed to wash their hands and is blaming it on the Peruvian government, the military. What's your reaction to what happened, Ken? KENNETH BUCCHI, FORMER CIA NARCOTICS OFFICER: Well, first of all, I think that long before you ever enter into such an agreement with another country you have to have an absolute signed written agreement as to what the protocol is going to be when you intercept one of these aircraft. There should have been something not unlike a Dash one that a pilot has in his aircraft that says, you know, here's the criteria by which we intercept, here are the -- here are the rules of engagement. And they should have literally been talking to each other, going through that checklist to make sure that this aircraft, you know, fit that description. And the problem I have -- you showed the file footage and you showed this aircraft that's like right off the deck. It's like maybe 150 feet off the deck. I guarantee you this plane here was flying at a normal altitude, it's probably flying a normal pattern. They could have vectored from one airport to the other, and knew that this thing was more than likely a legitimate flight. VAN SUSTEREN: Then, Ken, how do you explain this -- how do you explain this abnormal occurrence, a dead mother and child? BUCHANAN: Well, to be honest with you, I can't explain it. And to be perfectly honest, I don't know that we would be hearing about this if this was a dead, you know, Peruvian woman and child. And I think that really says a lot about the war on drugs, that we care about this because they were American. I think that the reason why we do surveillance on planes in other countries is because they have a much lower threshold for putting down an aircraft than we would have. If America puts down an aircraft, people are going to start paying attention: What did we do that for? So I think that's why we tend to do these, you know, setting these umbrellas up in other countries as opposed to our own. VAN SUSTEREN: Ray, do you agree? Is this because (UNINTELLIGIBLE) because of American victims of this accident? RAY KELLY, FORMER U.S. CUSTOMS COMMISSIONER: No. I think this was a horrendous tragedy and mistake on the part of the Peruvian air force. Clearly, this is not the type of plane that carries drugs. It had pontoons. It's a small aircraft. It had five human beings in a plane, which you can see easily if you pull up next to the aircraft. So this was obviously a violation of the procedures that were put in place to avoid this type of incident. Having said that, the program has been successful. The cultivation of coca in Peru has fallen off significantly, over 60 percent, as I think your setup piece said. We -- the Peruvian government I think is clearly to blame here. We provide intelligence information, as we do to many other countries in the hemisphere. This is a terrible tragedy, but I think the program itself with much better safeguards has got to continue. VAN SUSTEREN: Congressman Waters, do you think this is clearly the mistake of the Peruvian military, or do you assign some blame or responsibility on the United States? REP. MAXINE WATERS (D), CALIFORNIA: Well, clearly, this is not simply a mistake of the Peruvian government. We were involved in this. We have those contractors that the CIA contracts that nobody knows about who's making decisions. And it reminds me of what happened with some of the misguided, wrong-headed policy during the time of the Contra- Sandinista war, where the CIA and others were involved. Clearly, we don't know what we're doing. This mistake cannot just... VAN SUSTEREN: Well, let me stop you right there. WATERS: Yes. VAN SUSTEREN: You're a member of Congress. Why don't we know what they're doing? I mean, somebody has got oversight of the CIA. Someone's got to be looking to see what we're doing -- what the United States is doing overseas. WATERS: Oh, there's not nearly enough oversight of the CIA. They don't let people like me into the intelligence room where they talk about what they're doing. We have an intelligence committee. But I want to tell you, nobody has really taken on the CIA. No matter how much bungling, how many mistakes, how many drug dealers they've involved themselves with, we have not literally taken on the CIA. And we don't even know what their budget really is. I know one thing: We're putting $1.1 billion into this crazy war on drugs in Colombia and in the neighboring communities, and I don't see where we're having any impact at all. We need to be spending money on prevention here at home, on education here at home and reducing the demand. All of these dollars that we're giving out to Colombia and other places where I want to tell you, in Colombia we have the paramilitary that's out there dealing in drugs themselves and we're supporting them. VAN SUSTEREN: All right. We're going to bring in Edna Buchanan. Edna Buchanan, are we, is the United States winning or losing this war on drugs? EDNA BUCHANAN, CRIME WRITER: I don't think we're even holding our own, and I think it's the mediocre people of the world who seem to in control of submarines and airplanes and guns. It's totally unconscionable that this happened to this mother and her little baby named Charity. And I think that -- I hate drugs. I absolutely hate them. As a young reporter, I covered so many cases where there would be a young person lying on a dirty bathroom floor with a needle still in his arm. I covered the cocaine wars in Miami, shootouts in broad daylight. And we're losing and you can't call it off. There's too many people making a living off of it. And you can't legalize it, because it's too dangerous. It's evil. What we need are fresh approaches, the great minds of America to find out how to do this. Incarceration didn't work, education didn't work. Clearly, what we're doing now doesn't work. VAN SUSTEREN: All right. Let me bring in -- you're a bright mind, and you're a successful author and a successful reporter. You won a Pulitzer Prize. What answers do you have, because it seems that so far at least many people think this war is being lost? What do you suggest? BUCHANAN: Well, there are so many things, mediocre things. And the American public is accepting this level of mediocrity where these people lose the plane, get captured, stay in a hotel for a while, and then are treated as heroes when they come home. I mean, what is heroic about that? And also, I think the fact that the movie you just showed a part of, "Blow." Here is this George Jung, who was a Pablo Escobar counterpart in America. And in his book he even admitted if you used cocaine during the '70s or the '80s, he bragged, he had something to do with bringing it here. And here the movie is totally sympathetic to him. Here is this Johnny Depp, this cool guy, and he's lamenting that he's still in jail and that his daughter doesn't come to visit him. Well, probably, he should have -- if I had my way, he'd have the death penalty. If I was his daughter, I wouldn't visit him either. All of the lives that his greediness and his avarice mind caused -- I mean, this man should thank god he's alive and not dead like Pablo Escobar and the rest of them. VAN SUSTEREN: Ray... BUCHANAN: Instead, they portrayed him sympathetically. VAN SUSTEREN: Ray, is the war actually being won? I realize that the focus is on this mother and child who has died, and it's very easy to be emotional. But is -- is there any progress? Is there any headway in this war? KELLY: In 1979, there were 26 million drug users in this country. 1999, the last year we have all statistics on, estimated to be 13 million, so you are talking about a 50 percent decrease. We are, in my opinion, certainly moving in the right direction. This is a long, complex effort. There are no easy answers if you -- if you look at those two numbers, that's a dramatic decrease. Yes, I think we need more resources devoted to prevention and treatment, but it's not an either/or situation. We need interdiction as well, it's a tough dirty business sometimes. But again, I see very positive signs. If you talk -- use the term war, that brings about a lot of emotions on a part of people. I think it's an effort -- it really is ultimately a public health effort, a social effort, and we are moving... VAN SUSTEREN: Let me stop you right, because we have to take a break. When we come back, we will ask Ken Bucchi, who has worked for the CIA (UNINTELLIGIBLE) what he did to fight narcotics. Stay with us. (COMMERCIAL BREAK) VAN SUSTEREN: Welcome back. We're debating the war on drugs in the U.S, and where the boundaries should be drawn. Joining us again are former customs commissioner Ray Kelly, Representative Maxine Waters, former CIA Narcotics Officer Kenneth Bucchi, and crime writer Edna Buchanan. Ken, to you: exactly what did you do as a CIA narcotics officer to fight this war? BUCCHI: It's hard to be exact. I'm sure Congresswoman Waters will not like what I have to say. And I will agree with you, I want to say up front, Congresswoman. But, we basically had a complicit operation, a quid pro quo, if you will, with the drug lords of Colombia and essentially, what we did is we put the lion's share of the market in small cash of drug lords hands, and we sent up corridors with ILS systems for those drugs to flown in and then we took half of them. VAN SUSTEREN: So, actually... WATERS: See? VAN SUSTEREN : ...in bed with the drug dealers in South America. BUCCHI: Yes. Now, understand where I'm coming from. I want to back up. There're a lot of ground has been covered here, and I'm a little concerned about what it is we think we are doing right now in South America. No one in their right behind can believe for a moment that the Colombian government gives a crap about Susie and Tommy doing cocaine in America. They care about whether or not they will maintain power in that country. They maintain that power because we supply them with weapons. We supply them with weapons on the guys we want to fight drugs. But the reality is, we care more about who the drug dealer is, not that the drugs are coming here. Meaning, that drugs beget power. You derive a certain amount of political power from the money that's generated from those drugs and we care about who those people are. VAN SUSTEREN: Ken, who are these contracted employees of the CIA? BUCCHI: I don't that. I'm not the best qualified to talk about that, but I think that's just another example of how, the more you compartmentalize things, the more as a government, you can step back and say, we are not responsible. WATERS: That's right. BUCCHI: We are doing that right now with this downing of this aircraft. To me, this should have been strict guidelines -- long before we have the military of Peru coming in and intercepting this aircraft, we get the tail number, we check it out, so that we are not reporting an aircraft that may be a civilian flight. And the thing is, here's the thing: these contractors I'm sure are paid based upon their success rate and the success rate comes about by way of numbers of aircraft that they intercept. I'm hearing things such as 60 percent of the drugs are being stopped coming out of Peru. Does anybody in America today feel like 60 percent of the drugs came off their streets? (CROSSTALK) WATERS: Ken, I want to thank you for being the clearest voice that I have ever heard coming out of the CIA or any of the related agencies about what is going on in this drug war. Thank you, thank you, thank you! BUCCHI: You are welcome. VAN SUSTEREN: What are going to do now, Congresswoman Waters, having heard what Ken has to say. WATERS: What we have got to do is try and make our politicians, who have no courage, stand up and get a little backbone and really do the right thing. They are afraid to go up against these agencies, afraid they will be considered soft on crime, soft on drugs, and so they don't do anything but sit back and protect them, and allow them to do this terrible work they are doing without questioning what it is they are up to. VAN SUSTEREN: Edna, some people think the war on drugs should be fought at the American border and not beyond the American border. Do you agree on that? WATERS: Well, it's not an either/or. There's room for some interdiction, but I... VAN SUSTEREN : Let me interrupted you, Congresswoman Waters, and let me toss that question to Edna. BUCHANAN: Well, I still question those statistics. All crime is cyclical. Right now, murders and other crimes are down, but how do you know how many drug users are out there? They are not going to check off form at census time. We are seeing a rise here in Florida the use of ecstasy and other drugs, and more people are learning how to use drugs and keep it a secret. Politicians are quick to take credit when the murder rate goes down, but when it goes up, they say, oh, there's nothing you can do to can't stop that kind of crime, and that's the case here. VAN SUSTEREN: Ray, is it ridiculous to think we can never protect our borders? Are our borders like sieves? BUCHANAN: We can't protect them from the hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens that -- we have new illegal aliens arriving every day, and they deport some of them, and they're back two weeks later. So, if we couldn't protect the borders from boatloads of human beings, how will we protect it from this? We have... VAN SUSTEREN : Ray, the borders. Are the sieves? KELLY: Well, I think they're clearly a major challenge for law enforcement. Trade has increased tremendously in the last five, six years every commodity coming in, of course, potentially may have drugs associated with it. And that's one of the reasons I think we want to go to the source countries if we can. There's an expression, we want to go to the beehive instead of trying to catch the bees. And that's what we try to do. We try to go to the source countries to work with those governments, those legitimate governments. The decision to shoot down this aircraft was a determination made by the Peruvian government. WATERS: No! Not just the Peruvian government. The CIA... KELLY: You are wrong. (CROSSTALK) BUCHANAN: No decision; just somebody who wanted a kill on this belt. (CROSSTALK) WATERS: We were in contact with the Peruvian government, the Peruvian pilots, we were in contact with them, we were involved in this operation, don't try to eliminate all responsibility. VAN SUSTEREN: All right. Before we run out of time, let me ask a quick question of Ken. Ken, what do you think would be the most shocking thing you could say about the drug war itself in South America that the American people don't know about that the CIA is doing? BUCCHI: Well, I think the most shocking thing would not be that. I think the most shocking thing to people would be that it would probably be considerably more efficient and cheaper if we just went down to Colombia and bought all the drugs ourselves. But, you know, ultimately, the stuff is marked up 10, 20-fold by the time it gets here, and the Colombians are becoming billionaires, but we're spending $19 billion a year fighting it. And the states are matching those funds. It's ludicrous. For every dollar you spend on treatment, you spend 23 times that in stopping from coming to the country. But what they'd be most surprised about is that there is a complicity. Meaning, you talk about our borders being a sieve. Why is it during the entire Cold War we never had one nuclear bomb put on Cessna and flown in? I mean, it'd be a heck of a lot more likely to penetrate our borders than launching one from Russia. I don't know why... (CROSSTALK) VAN SUSTEREN: That's going to have to be our last word, unfortunately, Ken, and all of you. I'd love to bring you all back to talk about this topic because, obviously, this is a war that's going to go on for some time. WATERS: Please do, Greta. And bring Ken back for certain so that he can help us to understand what really goes on. VAN SUSTEREN: And I'll bring all of you back. Ray Kelly, Congresswoman Maxine Waters, Kenneth Bucchi and Edna Buchanan, thank you all very much. BUCCHI: You're welcome. WATERS: You're welcome. VAN SUSTEREN: Up next: who said there were no fringe benefits to being in the slammer? But don't try this at home. THE POINT is coming right back after a short break and our MONEYLINE update. (COMMERCIAL BREAK) VAN SUSTEREN: You know what happens when you break the law. But what happens when the government does it? Tonight's "Final Point": ka- ching, ka-ching. The federal cash registers are open. Time to grab a few fistfuls of cash. That is, if you are a felon and no one is looking. And guess what? No one is looking. Did you know that millions of dollars are wrongfully paid every year to felons and fugitives, largely because our U.S. government has not taken the time to match the names of medical and social security beneficiaries with law enforcement records? That's right. And here is one example: According to the Associated Press, Medicare paid more than $25,000 for services to an inmate convicted of killing his mother. Federal law prohibits most prisoners from receiving Medicare and Medicaid payments, yet -- so is there -- are there still reason? No one was checking. Who should and who should not receive the funds? So what's the federal government's excuse for this? Bad records, unavailable information, or the argument that expensive new computer programs would have to be devised. My take: I wonder if the federal government would let me slide, too. If I used the same excuses: bad records and unavailable information, and if I didn't send in my income tax papers by April 15. Let me know what you think. Send an e-mail to askgreta@cnn.com. That's one word, askgreta. I'm Greta Van Susteren in Washington. Next on "LARRY KING," actress Dyan Cannon. ANOMALOUS IMAGES AND UFO FILES http://www.anomalous-images.com If you are interested in a free subscription to The Konformist Newswire, please visit: http://www.eGroups.com/list/konformist

Bohemian Grove Fact Sheet http://www.sonomacountyfreepress.org/bohos/bohofact.html What is the Bohemian Grove? The Bohemian Grove is a 2700 acre redwood forest, located in Monte Rio, CA. It contains accommodation for 2000 people to "camp" in luxury. It is owned by the Bohemian Club. What is the Bohemian Club? The Bohemian Club is a private. all male club, which is headquartered in the Bohemian building in San Francisco. It was formed in 1872 by men who sought shelter from the frontier culture (or lack of culture). Who are the present members? The Club has evolved into an association of rich and powerful men, mostly of this country (there are similar organizations in other countries). Some artists are allowed to join (often at reduced rates), because of their social status and entertainment value. The membership list has included every Republican U.S. president (as well as some Democrats) since 1923, many cabinet officials, and director; & CEO's of large corporations, including major financial institutions. What industries are represented among the members? Major military contractors, oil companies, banks (including the Federal Reserve), utilities (including nuclear power), and national media (broadcast and print) have high-ranking officials as club members or guests. Many members are, or have been, on the board of directors of several of these corporations. You should note that most of the above industries depend heavily on a relationship with government for their profitability. The members stay in different camps at the Grove, which have varying status levels. Members & frequent guests of the most prestigious camp (Mandalay) include: Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, S. D. Bechtel, Jr., Thomas Watson Jr. (IBM), Phillip Hawley (B of A), William Casey (CIA). and Ralph Bailey (Dupont). George Bush resides in a less prestigious camp (Hillbillies) with A. W. Clausen (World Bank), Walter Cronkite, and William F. Buckley. What activities take place at the grove? The grove is the site of a two week retreat every July (as well as other smaller get-togethers throughout the year). At these retreats, the members commune with nature in a truly original way. They drink heavily from morning through the night, bask in their freedom to urinate on the redwoods, and perform pagan rituals (including the "Cremation of Care", in which the members wearing red-hooded robes, cremate a coffin effigy of "Dull Care" at the base of a 40 foot owl altar). Some (20%) engage in homosexual activity (but few of them support gay rights or AIDS research). They watch (and participate in) plays and comedy shows in which women are portrayed by male actors. Although women are not allowed in the Grove, members often leave at night to enjoy the company of the many prostitutes who come from around the world for this event. Is any of this hard to believe? Employees of the Grove have said that no verbal description can accurately portray the bizarre behavior of the Grove's inhabitants. Besides this type of merriment. the annual gathering serves as an informational clearing house for the elite. The most powerful men in the country do their "networking" here, despite the Grove's motto "weaving spiders come not here" (don't do business in the Grove). At these gatherings men representing the government, military-industrial, and financial sectors meet and make major policy decisions. The Manhattan project, which produced the first atomic bombs, was conceived at the Grove in 1942. Other decisions made at the Grove include who our presidential candidates will be. There are speeches, known as "Lakeside Talks", wherein high ranking officials disseminate information which is not available to the public-at-large. What are the topics of discussion at the Lakeside Talks? The 1991 talks included: Joseph Califano - HEW Secretary, Carter Administration - "Americas Health Care: Revolution: - Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Pays" Helmut Schmidt - Former German Prime Minister - "The Enormous Problems of the 21st - Century" Elliot Richardson - Nixon & Reagan Administrations - "Defining a New World Order" John Lehman - Secretary of the Navy, Reagan - Administration "Smart Weapons" Richard Cheney - Present Secretary of Defense - "Major Defense Problems of the 21st - Century" What's not right about this? When powerful people work together, they become even more powerful. The Grove membership is wealthy, and becoming more so, while the middle class is steadily becoming poorer. This close-knit group determines whether prices rise or fall (by their control of the banking system, money supply, and markets), and they make money whichever way markets fluctuate. They determine what our rights are and which laws have effect, by appointing judges. They decide who our highest officials shall be by consensus among themselves, and then selling candidates to us via the media which they own. Important issues and facts are omitted from discussion in the press, or slanted to suit their goals, but they are discussed frankly at the Grove. Is there true democracy when so much power is concentrated in so few hands? Is there any real difference between the public and private sectors when cabinet members come from the boardrooms of large corporations? Is the spending of billions on weapons, which are by consensus no longer needed, really the will of the people? Or is it the will of General Electric, General Dynamics, and the other weapons contractors represented at the Grove? What can I do to make a difference? Educate yourself about the Grove and it's inhabitants, and the true nature of the power structure in the world. Then educate your friends. Since most major newspapers and broadcast stations are owned by "insiders", be wary of everything you hear in the press. If you can, participate in protest activities during the July retreat. How do I get more information about the Grove? Send a note to: Bohemian Grove Action Network, P.O. Box 296, Occidental CA 95465. A $5 donation to cover printing and mailing costs is requested. ------------------------------------------------------------ 3. Bohemian Grove Action Network / list of articles [text of frontpage] ------------------------------------------------------------ Bohemian Grove Action Network http://www.sonomacountyfreepress.org/bohos/bohoindx.html The background of this page is a picture of Bohemian Grove members "Burning dull care" - You be the judge Special Event! Bohemian Grove Teach In Organizing, Meeting, Networking, Happening http://www.sonomacountyfreepress.org/bohos/teachin_may_19_2001.html [Articles] - Where are they Hiding Geronimo's Skull? by Tim Giago, Lakota Nation Journal, Winter 2000 Geronimo's Skull - a Bush Connection? by Dennis Roddy, Pittsburgh Post Gazette, September, 2000 BOHEMIAN GROVE -- LAKESIDE TALKS & OTHER MISCHIEF 7/16 TO 8/1/1999 Bohemian Grove Fact Sheet An new website devoted entirely to our Boho buddies - - Check It out Bohemian Grove Lakeside Talks, 1998 by Mary Moore Letter to Bob Weir, 1998 by Mary Moore Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia Speaks at the Grove by Mary Moore7/97 Weaving Spiders, Come Not Here! by Mary Moore 9/92 Newt and Other Atrocities at Bohemian Grove by Mary Moore An Inside Look at a Bohemian Club Member by Phylis Metal (a former mistress) It's Boho Time Again: Bohemian Grove Lakeside Talks, 1996 by Mary Moore ------------------------------------------------------------ 4. Index of Bohemian Grove Reportage ------------------------------------------------------------ Index of Bohemian Grove Reportage [text of]: http://www.sonic.net/~kerry/bohemian/index.html Copyright © 1999 Kerry Richardson (last modified July 16, 1999) Introduction: This internet site contains some reportage about the Bohemian Grove. Some of it dates from the 1980's and may not be current. It is an incomplete picture of the Bohemian Grove and Bohemian Club and it is mostly an outsider's critical view. The Bohemian Grove is located in Sonoma County in California, north of San Francisco. The Bohemian Grove is the country retreat of the Bohemian Club, a private men's club headquartered in San Francisco. Each summer the club holds a gathering at the Grove, usually around the last two weeks in July. The club has over 2000 members, with no racial, religious or political restrictions on membership, but new members must be sponsored and approved, and there is a considerable waiting list. The club has a focus on the arts, music, and theater. The Bohemian Grove has a reputation as being a gathering spot for some of the nation's wealthiest individuals and most powerful politicians. While this is true, it should be noted that the Grove is also attended by many with no claim to fame. The material here focuses more on individuals who are already prominent. A lot of my photographic coverage was made at a local airport used by some of the Bohemian Club members and guests traveling to and from the Grove from other parts of the country. As a result, individuals pictured are likely to live and work elsewhere than the San Francisco Bay area where the club's membership is concentrated. My photo coverage of the Grove spans a period of more than ten years, so it cannot be assumed that anyone pictured was at the Grove at the same time as someone in another photo. Bibliography Several books and magazine articles and a couple of links that pertain to the Bohemian Grove. (all text) Jets Some magnificent flying machines used by the men. (around 71 K. of images) Photos 1 Photos of Ronald Reagan, George Shultz, Colin Powell, and Henry Kissinger. (around 57 K. of images) Photos 2 Photos of George Bush, Richard Cheney, Caspar Weinberger, Malcolm Forbes, Jack Kemp, and Alan Greenspan. (around 67 K. of images) Casey The U.S. Congress looked into William Casey's 1980 Bohemian Grove visit. (around 94 K. of text and graphics) Newt In 1995 House Speaker Newt Gingrich traveled to Bohemian Grove. (around 68K. of images) Life Photographs made on the periphery of Bohemian Grove give some idea of camp life. (around 46 K. of images) Nukes '87 No longer up to date, this article from 1987 examines nuclear weapons industry connections. (around 86 K. of graphics) Work 1 An account of a summer job at the Bohemian Grove. (mostly text) Work 2 In 1987 employees of the Bohemian Club demonstrated during contract negotiations. (text with around 51 K. of images) Links Several photos of interest made inside the Bohemian Grove are at other locations on the web. (link page is text only) Go to Kerry Richardson Home Page. Send e-mail to Kerry Richardson: kerry@sonic.net

Forgotten History - Friday, May 18, 2001 "Little known facts and overlooked history"

Some felt that it would be best that the Indians be absorbed by white culture. Failing that, they would have to be removed and relocated on the other side of the Mississippi River. It was hoped that this could be done peacefully by some, others could care less, as long as they were gone. But it was clear that the United States did not respect the land claims of the natives. John Quincy Adams spoke for the country when he said, "What is the right of a huntsmen to the forest of a thousand miles over which he has accidentally ranged in search of prey." On May 28, 1830, President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian removal act. One of the act's chief targets were what were called the "Five Civilized Tribes." The Choctaw were the first to be removed. Chickasaw followed them. The Cherokee lived on 40,000 acres of land that were the envy of the land grabbers. The Cherokee were a remarkable culture that had a written language, schools for their children, their own newspaper, and a system of government. None of this mattered to those who eyed the land. The Georgian's denied them due process of law and when they resisted the Cherokee were captured, beaten and sometimes killed. It did not make any difference that the Cherokee were peaceful and prosperous. The white man wanted his land. The Cherokee appealed all the way to the Supreme Court and won their case. This still did not matter to President Jackson. "Judge Marshall has made his decision, let him enforce it," said Jackson.

The Cherokee tribe became divided between those who felt it was in their best interest to leave and those who were pre- pared to stay. President Jackson declared that the Cherokee Nation ceased to exist and troops were sent to drive them from their homeland. It was clearly a case of ethnic clean- sing. So 15,000 Cherokee were rounded up and put into stock- ades, or concentration camps, and then driven West. The un- sanitary conditions bred numerous diseases so when the Cher- okee set out for the West, they were sick already. The march itself was awful as rain and then the cold made more of them ill. One private wrote, "I saw them loaded like cattle or sheep into six hundred and forty-six wagons and started towards the West. It was a 1,200-mile journey to what we call Oklahoma and the cold rain of autumn took their toll on the Cherokee. Many became ill and over 4,000 died along the way. The forced march of the Cherokee was an act of cruelty and greed. The Cherokee created a new civilization in Oklahoma but never forgot about the death march.

The Cherokee were no threat to the people of Georgia but the land speculators wanted their wealth. The President of the United States, a man many historians admire, was little more than a war criminal. The "Trail of Tears" ranks with the sad- dest episodes in American History and until the Cherokee are repaid for their suffering and theft, there is no justice.

Questions...Comments...Do you have a topic? Email us at: mail to: denis@shagmail.com

May 14, 2001 | San Francisco Bay Guardian

When John Paul II was shot in St. Peter's Square

Turkish spy scandals shed new light on papal murder attempt

Twenty years ago, on the afternoon of May 13, 1981, Pope John Paul II

struck by three bullets while being driven in a slow-moving

through St. Peter's Square, where 20,000 people had gathered to see

pontiff. Rushed to a hospital, the pope barely survived a six-hour

operation. Two bystanders were also injured in the attack.

The would-be assassin, 23-year-old Turkish terrorist Mehmet Ali Agca,

immediately apprehended at the scene of the crime. The police found

pocket several notes scribbled in Turkish, one of which read: "I am

the pope as a protest against the imperialism of the Soviet Union and

United States and against the genocide that is being carried out in El

Agca's handwritten statement reflected the fanatical "third position"

ideology of the Grey Wolves, a violent, neofascist organization that

denounced both superpowers while engaging in bloody street battles

Agca was a member of the Grey Wolves, but he claimed that he acted

when he tried to kill the pope. In July 1981 he was found guilty of

attempted murder and sentenced to life in prison. The court failed to

reports from several eyewitnesses who said they had seen another dark-

gunman fleeing from St. Peter's Square moments after the shooting.

A year later, while Agca languished in an Italian jail, stories

circulate in the Western press alleging that the plot to assassinate

Paul II was hatched by the Soviet KGB and carried out by the Bulgarian

secret service. The Soviets, according to this theory, viewed the

Polish-born pope as a threat to Communist hegemony in Eastern Europe

Playing off these news accounts, which were based largely on U.S.

intelligence sources, Agca began to weave an elaborate,

that seemingly endorsed the idea of a "Bulgarian connection" to the

shooting. Italian magistrates launched an investigation that

the arrest and trial of three Bulgarians and four Turks. But they

released "for lack of evidence" in 1986 after Agca repeatedly

himself in a Roman courtroom and claimed at one point that he was

The so-called Bulgarian connection was further debunked by the

ex-CIA analyst Melvin A. Goodman, who told the Senate Intelligence

in 1990 that his CIA colleagues, under pressure from agency higher-

skewed their reports to try to lend credence to the notion of a

to murder the pope. "The CIA had no evidence linking the KGB to the

Although it was never substantiated, the much-publicized Bulgarian

connection proved to be one of the more efficacious Reagan-era

disinformation schemes, reinforcing the idea of the Soviet Union as

empire while deflecting attention from potentially embarrassing ties

U.S. intelligence and right-wing extremists in Turkey.

In the late 1970s, armed bands of Grey Wolves launched a wave of bomb

attacks and shootings that killed hundreds of people, including public

officials, journalists, lawyers, human rights activists, students,

unionists. During this period, the Grey Wolves operated with the

encouragement and protection of the Counter-Guerrilla Organization, a

section of the Turkish Army's Special Warfare Department.

the U.S. Military Aid Mission building in Ankara, the Special Warfare

Department received funds and training from U.S. advisors to establish

paramilitary units that were supposed to engage in acts of sabotage

resistance in the event of a Soviet invasion.

But instead of preparing for foreign enemies, these shadowy

specialists set their sights on domestic targets, according to retired

Turkish army commander Talat Turhan, who has authored three books

Turkish secret service and police ties to right-wing extremists and

mafia-style gangs. The Counter-Guerrilla Organization, according to

supplied weapons to the Grey Wolves, who were responsible for much of

political violence that set the stage for the 1980 coup by the Turkish

Agca was part of a network of neofascist gunmen who had close links to

Turkish police commanders, intelligence officers, and far-right

Evidence of this sordid sub-rosa alliance came to the fore in dramatic

fashion in 1996 when one of Agca's closest associates, Grey Wolf

Abdullah Catli (pronounced "chutley"), died in a car crash on a remote

highway near Susurluk, a hundred miles southwest of Istanbul.

A convicted fugitive wanted for murder and heroin trafficking, Catli

accompanied by his gangster girlfriend and a high-ranking police

who also died in the car accident. A Kurdish warlord who teamed up

Turkish security forces was the sole survivor of the crash. Questions

what they were all doing together in the same car led to a

inquiry and a series of stunning revelations about "the deep state"

For twenty years, according to a 1998 parliamentary report, Turkish

agencies backed ultra-right-wing death squads and narco-criminal

were involved in bombings, kidnappings, and other terrorist attacks.

Confirming what human rights activists had long suspected, the report

concluded that members of the Grey Wolves had participated in a

state-sponsored "dirty war" against ethnic Kurds and Turkish

This terror campaign was responsible for many of Turkey's 14,000

murders and disappearances in recent years.

Much of the parliamentary report focused on the ignominious career of

Abdullah Catli, Agca's Grey Wolf mentor. A young thug who looked like

Turkey's answer to Elvis Presley, Catli graduated from street gang

to become a brutal enforcer for the Grey Wolves. By 1978 he had

second-in-command of the group. The following year, Catli helped Ali

escape from a Turkish jail, where he was serving time for the murder

Catli proceeded to safe-house Agca and direct his movements through

European countries in the months leading up to the papal shooting.

provided him with a passport and other fake ID. Most significantly,

Catli who gave Agca the pistol that nearly killed the pontiff. Catli

admitted supplying the gun to Agca when he testified in September

witness at the trial in Rome of three Bulgarians and four Turks who

charged with complicity in the papal death plot. He also testified

oath that the West German BND spy agency had offered him money if he

implicate the Soviet Union and Bulgaria in the attack on the pope.

But Catli said nothing about his role as an undercover agent for the

government. As it turns out, he had been collaborating with the

secret service since the military coup in 1980, despite his status as

fugitive from justice, according to the parliamentary report on the

crash. In other words, Catli was in cahoots with Turkish intelligence

time he supplied Agca with the gun used in the papal shooting.

Imagine if the Bulgarian government had released a report showing

person who gave Ali Agca the papal assassination weapon was then on

payroll of the Bulgarian secret service. The U.S. news media would

have been all over the story, touting it as proof of a sinister

connection. Substitute Turkey, a staunch U.S. ally, for Bulgaria and

In all likelihood, the plot to kill the pope was not backed by a

government. Rather, it appears to have been the work of renegade

extremists who operated under the protective umbrella of Turkey's

service but did not always take their marching orders from Ankara. In

American spy talk, it's called "blowback" - the unintended

covert activity kept secret from the public. Seen from this

shooting of Pope John Paul II is a yet another example of the blowback

Last year, in accordance with the wishes of the pope, Agca was

the Italian government and sent back to his native Turkey. He is

in jail, serving out the remaining nine years of his sentence for

Ipeki, the journalist who had been probing government links to Turkish

Some people had hoped Agca's return would lead to further disclosures

criminal activity in Turkey, but parliamentary investigators complain

the military and other security agencies have blocked their inquiry

prevented them from following many important leads. Meanwhile,

and security officials implicated in death squad killings and drug-

Most of the far-right terrorists who stalked Turkey during the past

two-and-a-half decades have escaped punishment for their crimes. They

ample reason to cheer the electoral success of the Grey Wolves' parent

organization, the National Action Party (known by its Turkish

MHP), which recently joined Turkey's national governing coalition.

Grey Wolves now hold key positions in the party and are serving as MHP

representatives from various Turkish cities. A man privately

U.S. drug enforcement officials as a "well-known heroin chemist" was

elected to parliament in 1999, when the MHP emerged as the second-

Devlet Bahceli, the MHP's current leader and Turkey's deputy prime

says his party has renounced violence. But many of its members

espouse a virulent ethnic nationalist ideology summed up by the

Turkish race above all others." Within these circles, Agca and Catli

revered as great patriots who sought to cleanse Turkey of communist

Martin A. Lee (martin@sfbg.com) is the author of Acid Dreams and The

Reawakens, a book on neofascism. His column, Reality Bites, appears

If you are interested in a free subscription to The

The newsletter of San Francisco Liberation Radio

The CIA's worst-kept secret

Newly declassified files confirm United States collaboration with Nazis

Norwegian law expert accuses Israel of state terrorism

Norwegian expert on international law Terje Lund is

accusing Israel of practicing state-sponsored

terrorism and claims that Palestinian Authority

Chairman Yasser Arafat holds no responsibility for

"I regard much of Israel's aggression against

Palestinians to be pure terrorism" Lund told Norway's

Lund, who has worked in international law for 20 years

and has long experience investigating war crimes for

the UN, said, "Israel is guilty of innumerable war

Israel is guilty of "crimes [including] abuse of

civilians, illegal reprisals, deportations, and a long

list of other war crimes" Lund explained.

Lund added that he was speaking on a judicial, and not

"The Geneva Convention has its own life and is

principally apolitical. After signing them it is

Israel's duty to clean up its act " says Lund.

An international court for Middle East war crimes

should be established if this doesn't happen, he said.

"Another option is to use the existing war-crimes

commission based on the Geneva Convention. This has

never been used, but is put together by 15 of the

world's top experts on international law and should

have been sent to the Middle East a long time ago,

"Israel is against any international investigation of

the situation in the occupied territories," Lund said,

adding that he doesn't see why that should be a

"Israel has ratified the protocol regarding the war

crimes commission and has by that accepted its

jurisdiction" Lund said in defense of his position.

He did, however, note that according to international

laws, Israel has some rights to the use of force.

"Israeli forces are allowed to keep order and calm in

the occupied territories", and are therefore allowed

to use what Lund termed "necessary force."

"But this use of force can only be strictly according

to the principle of proportionality," he added.

"One of Israel's methods is to blow up the homes of

the stone throwing youths, and that is state

"This has nothing to do with the rights of the

occupiers," he said, adding, "Another use of force

Lund also thinks there's a widespread misunderstanding

that international law can regulate what the

According to Lund, the Palestinians are not covered by

"They have therefore also no rights in connection to

international law, but are instead protected by the

UN's human rights conventions," Lund said.

"If the Palestinians wants to lead an armed fight

against the occupation, they should immediately

establish a mini-state and fight based from there,"

"Then a uniformed Palestinian force will have the

right to kill according to international law, and to

be treated as prisoners of war [and] can't anymore be

called criminals by the Israelis," Lund says.

Lund is not denying the fact that extremist groups'

actions against civilian Israeli targets are

terrorism. But he says there is one big difference.

"It is totally unacceptable that Israel as a state is

guilty of these actions. The first to react should be

the Israelis themselves. By not doing so, they're not

Lund also thinks Arafat cannot be accused of the acts

of terror committed by extremist organizations such as

"It is not easy to place the responsibility for these

actions with Arafat. First, he does not have the power

and authority over all the Palestinians - something

Israel and the world around has denied him -

and second he cannot be held responsible as a state

"Does that mean Israel and parts of the world can

blame Arafat for everything the Palestinians are

That has nothing to do with law, but with politics and

The recent revelation concerning former Senator Bob Kerry has made us aware that the ghosts of Vietnam will haunt those of that generation forever. This is not an article meant to attack veterans. While I am not a veteran, I am a member of the Vietnam generation and am sympathetic to the concerns of veterans. In fact, I have made two documentaries that deal with the Vietnam War and veteran issues. So with that said, I was watching a program on PBS when a former veteran described "no fire zones" as genocide. The rest of the panel denied his charges while the program continued. It struck me that the problem with our discussions regarding Vietnam is that we fail to recognize that programs like the Phoenix program, of which Kerry was a part, were genocide. The Webster's Dictionary defines genocide as, "A systematic extermination of a race or cultural group." Let's look at the goals and aims of the "Phoenix Program" and you can decide for yourself if this program fits the definition of genocide.

Kerry himself acknowledges that his Navy Seal unit operated in what was termed as a "free-fire zone." This meant that U.S. soldiers were told that any living thing in that zone was a legitimate military target. Think about it. What the policy makers in Washington did was to make it illegal to be alive in a zone that was controlled by the Viet Cong. So if you were, a women or a child, and your ancestral home happened to be in these areas, you were a target for murder. These were the exact people we were trying to save. The program was the brainchild of the CIA and what the senator's unit did was standardize an operating procedure for their death squads. Kerry's troops, according to Gerhard Klann and corroborated by two Vietnamese survivors, carefully approached the village. When they came upon a woman, an elderly man and three children, they subsequently stabbed them and then cut their throats. Klann, a steelworker, has no particular ax to grind and has made no contact with the Vietnamese. All he seems to want to do is to tell the truth, which can be a very important and powerful tool. So these specialists in counterinsurgency, like Bob Kerry, used methods of torture, assassination and terror. This was an official policy by the United States government under the direction of Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon and LBJ.

These acts were furthered by a U.S. foreign policy that demanded that we show the public we were winning the war. Now, anyone killed in these zones became a VC, whether they were or not, and Westmoreland could tell the public that we were ahead. And we were, if winning meant killing everyone in sight. So the body counts grew and it became like a foot- ball score. Killing equaled winning. The calls by liberal pundits for healing are nothing short of psychobabble. The dead Vietnamese who were brutally exterminated were not thinking about healing. Do you think if any country sent in teams of killers into our country and slit the throats of our citizens, we would be talking about healing the wounds? I seriously doubt it. No, units like Kerry's were murderers. The ordinary soldier was in a tough situation; fighting for his day to day survival in a war that he did not choose. But the Special Forces of the Phoenix Program did exactly what the Nazi's did when they marched in Russia. They performed summery executions and murdered the population for being who they were. Can you tell me what made Kerry any different?

Freedom Lovers & Lovers of Justice; i spoke with Vincent Bugliosi this evening and he has asked for our strong activist support in contacting every known media source asking for their consideration in interviewing Mr. Bugliosi. From the following comments in BUZZFLASH, you will note an air of frustration forthcoming as a result of mainstream media's complicity and lack of response in this obvious criminal conduct of bush et al and the Supreme Criminal 5 - aka the "felonious five" as Mr. Bugliosi has aptly tagged them. This mainstream media complicity and lack of response is what we must overcome. We must get out there and convince every media source that everything that Mr. Bugliosi, and we, have to say is the pure truth and we must be heard. Mr. Bugliosi will be on the Geraldo show Tuesday evening. If you watch television, tune in. i have also enclosed Mr. Bugliosi's article as it appeared in the Nation magazine, "None Dare Call it Treason". It is below the BUZZFLASH interview. i would like to ask those who can, to please also forward this to as many of the anti-bush discussion groups as you can. Please send me an email and let me know who you have forwarded this to so i not follow up to same email addresses. In this case duplication is NOT all bad - but the main thing is to get the word out about the need to contact media as Mr. Bugliosi has asked us to do. i am in direct contact with Mr. Bugliosi, so anyone who has important comments that you feel might help make this a more effective media campaign to get Mr. Bugliosi in the public eye, please reply to me via this email. Please be courteous in all of your correspondence. no peace without justice, john vance, Coordinator A First Amendment Center Voter Rights March West Coast www.freezepeach.cjb.net www.voterwest.org www.votermarch.org (510) 287-9406 "I prosecuted Charles Manson. He was responsible for the savage murders of innocent people. But this is worse. This is worse than John Wayne Gacy. The magnitude of this crime is mind-boggling. These five criminals, let's call them what they are, they belong in prison for the rest of their lives." =============================================================== BUZZFLASH REPORT Saturday June 2, 2001 at 7:07:53 PM AN EXCLUSIVE BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW WITH VINCENT BUGLIOSI <http://www.buzzflash.com/BuzzScripts/Buzz.dll/Content> On Tuesday, May 29, Buzzflash conducted a telephone interview with Vincent Bugliosi, author of "The Betrayal Of America: How The Supreme Court Undermined Our Constitution And Chose Our President". Mr. Bugliosi's book provides the gruesome details of the High Court's theft of the 2000 presidential election. He offers a devastating legal point-by-point rebuttal to the majority opinion that gave the election to George W. Bush, an opinion that is so embarrassingly convoluted that the author refused to sign it. Significantly, in the foreword of the book, trial attorney Gerry Spence cautions that it is "professional death" for a lawyer to challenge the Supreme Court. The danger is apparently not limited to attorneys. Mr. Bugliosi is a best selling author who has been a welcome guest on the mainstream media during all of his previous book tours. You can find his article "None Dare Call It Treason" at: <http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20010205&c=1&s=bugliosi>. "This time has been different," the author told BuzzFlash.com. "I have experienced rejections from shows that have always welcomed me in the past, including The Today Show, Good Morning America, Larry King, Charlie Rose, and Ted Koppel. I have pretty much been relegated to appearing on Court TV and, ironically enough, Fox. I've been interviewed by Greta Van Susterin, Bill O'Reilly, Hannity and Colmes, Judith Regan, and Diane Dimond. But what I call the moderate to liberal media, from National Public Radio to the major network shows, they don't want any part of me this time." WHY? "They all give me the same mantra. 'Number one, the election is over. Number two, Bush won anyway. No one cares anymore', they say. 'Get over it'. It's twisted reasoning and totally illogical, but that's what they say." WHAT IS THE REAL REASON? "There are two reasons. Past experience has taught me that most of the people in media are so conformist that they literally just stop thinking for themselves. And they are extremely stupid. They just repeat what they've heard, and they've heard that Bush won. Secondly, most journalists are spineless to the point that it's amazing that they can even sit up on TV. And they fear the fanatical right. They know that the right wing is far more mean spirited." "The so called 'liberals' in the media are nauseating and disgusting. They just passively absorb all of it and refuse to fight. I'm a fighter." Mr. Bugliosi mentioned that his previous paperback book on the Paula Jones fiasco was reviewed by the New York Times, the Washington Post, and U.S.A. Today. "But not this one. They don't want to touch this. They're hoping that it goes away. But I'm not going away. I will pursue it until those five justices are ashamed to ever show their faces in public again." WHY SO MUCH PASSION ON YOUR PART? WHY NOT "GET OVER IT?" "Because this is the greatest American crime since slavery! The Supreme Court actually ruled that Americans don't have the right to have their votes counted. Listen carefully, because this is easy to distort, but this is a crucial point. I prosecuted Charles Manson. He was responsible for the savage murders of innocent people. But this is worse. This is worse than John Wayne Gacy. The magnitude of this crime is mind-boggling. These five criminals, let's call them what they are, they belong in prison for the rest of their lives. They stole something that many Americans have fought and died for. They corrupted our most precious possession - our democracy!" WHAT CAN BE DONE? "We can get the word out. We can fight this asinine notion that once the crime has been committed, it's over. Even if Bush would have won a legitimate count in Florida, which he wouldn't have, that doesn't excuse the crime that the Supreme Court committed. And, as an experienced trial lawyer, I choose my words carefully. They committed a crime. They used phony arguments to reach a predetermined conclusion. They lied. They knew exactly what they were doing. Letting them off the hook just because some newspaper recounts say that Bush would have won anyway misses the point. If you take a gun and shoot at someone, then you can't claim that you're innocent just because you miss them. And when you stop a vote count solely in order to put your guy in the White House, and in my book I prove beyond any reasonable doubt that's exactly what these five criminals did, then you can't say that it doesn't matter because your crime turned out to be unnecessary." "But these are disreputable people. Just one example Rehnquist. This bum committed perjury during his own confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Senator Kennedy confronted him with a memo that Rehnquist had written as a law clerk for Justice Jackson. It read, 'I think that we should argue in favor of Plessey v. Ferguson'. That's the doctrine of separate but equal. Rehnquist then lied under oath and told the committee that he was transcribing something that Justice Jackson had said. But that was not Jackson's position. And Rehnquist could not produce any other 'transcriptions'. Unfortunately, Jackson was dead. And the Democrats let Rehnquist off the hook." SOUNDS LIKE ASHCROFT AND OLSON... "Exactly. It's really disgusting. Look, the Democrats are not going to do anything on their own, but we can't just put up with this corruption on the Supreme Court. I am going to meet with some people about starting a movement to begin impeachment proceedings in the House Judiciary Committee to bring these five rascals to justice. We have to try. We can't just let them take our democracy away. We have to fight." WHAT CAN WE DO? "Contact the media. Let them know that you care. The producer at Good Morning America, Shelley Roth, told me that she just doesn't believe that anyone cares anymore. It's the same old spiel 'Election's over Bush won No one cares Get over it.' But here's the thing; if the defendants at Nuremberg would have stood up and said, 'The war's over. Let's move on,' that wouldn't have worked. It shouldn't work in America, either." --------- You can contact the morning television programs to ask why they won't interview Vincent Bugliosi by going to this URL: http://www.mediawhoresonline.com/contactinfo.htm#Television

by VINCENT BUGLIOSI* <"http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20010205&s=bugliosi> In the December 12 ruling by the US Supreme Court handing the election to George Bush, the Court committed the unpardonable sin of being a knowing surrogate for the Republican Party instead of being an impartial arbiter of the law. If you doubt this, try to imagine Al Gore's and George Bush's roles being reversed and ask yourself if you can conceive of Justice Antonin Scalia and his four conservative brethren issuing an emergency order on December 9 stopping the counting of ballots (at a time when Gore's lead had shrunk to 154 votes) on the grounds that if it continued, Gore could suffer "irreparable harm," and then subsequently, on December 12, bequeathing the election to Gore on equal protection grounds. If you can, then I suppose you can also imagine seeing a man jumping away from his own shadow, Frenchmen no longer drinking wine. From the beginning, Bush desperately sought, as it were, to prevent the opening of the door, the looking into the box, unmistakable signs that he feared the truth. In a nation that prides itself on openness, instead of the Supreme Court doing everything within its power to find a legal way to open the door and box, they did the precise opposite in grasping, stretching and searching mightily for a way, any way at all, to aid their choice for President, Bush, in the suppression of the truth, finally settling, in their judicial coup d'état, on the untenable argument that there was a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause, the Court asserting that because of the various standards of determining the voter's intent in the Florida counties, voters were treated unequally, since a vote disqualified in one county (the so-called undervotes, which the voting machines did not pick up) may have been counted in another county, and vice versa. Accordingly, the Court reversed the Florida Supreme Court's order that the undervotes be counted, effectively delivering the presidency to Bush. Now, in the equal protection cases I've seen, the aggrieved party, the one who is being harmed and discriminated against, almost invariably brings the action. But no Florida voter I'm aware of brought any action under the equal protection clause claiming he was disfranchised because of the different standards being employed. What happened here is that Bush leaped in and tried to profit from a hypothetical wrong inflicted on someone else. Even assuming Bush had this right, the very core of his petition to the Court was that he himself would be harmed by these different standards. But would he have? If we're to be governed by common sense, the answer is no. The reason is that just as with flipping a coin you end up in rather short order with as many heads as tails, there would be a "wash" here for both sides, i.e., there would be just as many Bush as Gore votes that would be counted in one county yet disqualified in the next. (Even if we were to assume, for the sake of argument, that the wash wouldn't end up exactly, 100 percent even, we'd still be dealing with the rule of de minimis non curat lex, the law does not concern itself with trifling matters.) So what harm to Bush was the Court so passionately trying to prevent by its ruling other than the real one: that he would be harmed by the truth as elicited from a full counting of the undervotes? And if the Court's five-member majority was concerned not about Bush but the voters themselves, as they fervently claimed to be, then under what conceivable theory would they, in effect, tell these voters, "We're so concerned that some of you undervoters may lose your vote under the different Florida county standards that we're going to solve the problem by making sure that none of you undervoters have your votes counted"? Isn't this exactly what the Court did? Gore's lawyer, David Boies, never argued either of the above points to the Court. Also, since Boies already knew (from language in the December 9 emergency order of the Court) that Justice Scalia, the Court's right-wing ideologue; his Pavlovian puppet, Clarence Thomas, who doesn't even try to create the impression that he's thinking; and three other conservatives on the Court (William Rehnquist, Sandra Day O'Connor and Anthony Kennedy) intended to deodorize their foul intent by hanging their hat on the anemic equal protection argument, wouldn't you think that he and his people would have come up with at least three or four strong arguments to expose it for what it was, a legal gimmick that the brazen, shameless majority intended to invoke to perpetrate a judicial hijacking in broad daylight? And made sure that he got into the record of his oral argument all of these points? Yet, remarkably, Boies only managed to make one good equal protection argument, and that one near the very end of his presentation, and then only because Justice Rehnquist (not at Boies's request, I might add) granted him an extra two minutes. If Rehnquist hadn't given him the additional two minutes, Boies would have sat down without getting even one good equal protection argument into the record. This was Boies's belated argument: "Any differences as to how this standard [to determine voter intent] is interpreted have a lot less significance in terms of what votes are counted or not counted than simply the differences in machines that exist throughout the counties of Florida." A more powerful way to make Boies's argument would have been to point out to the Court the reductio ad absurdum of the equal protection argument. If none of the undervotes were counted because of the various standards to count them, then to be completely consistent the Court would have had no choice but to invalidate the entire Florida election, since there is no question that votes lost in some counties because of the method of voting would have been recorded in others utilizing a different method.1 [Footnotes on page 7] How would the conservative majority have gotten around that argument without buckling on the counting of the undervotes? Of course, advice after a mistake is like medicine after death. And as we shall see, no matter what Boies argued, the five conservative Justices had already made up their minds. But it would have been delightful to see how these Justices, forced to stare into the noonday sun, would have attempted to avoid a confrontation with the truth. The Court majority, after knowingly transforming the votes of 50 million Americans into nothing and throwing out all of the Florida undervotes (around 60,000), actually wrote that their ruling was intended to preserve "the fundamental right" to vote. This elevates audacity to symphonic and operatic levels. The Court went on to say, after stealing the election from the American people, "None are more conscious of the vital limits on its judicial authority than are the members of this Court, and none stand more in admiration of the Constitution's design to leave the selection of the President to the people." Can you imagine that? As they say, "It's enough to drive you to drink." What makes the Court's decision even more offensive is that it warmly embraced, of all the bitter ironies, the equal protection clause, a constitutional provision tailor-made for blacks that these five conservative Justices have shown no hospitality to when invoked in lawsuits by black people, the very segment of the population most likely to be hurt by a Bush administration. As University of Southern California law professor Erwin Chemerinsky noted: "The Rehnquist Court almost never uses equal protection jurisprudence except in striking down affirmative action programs [designed to help blacks and minorities]. I can't think of a single instance where Scalia or Thomas has found discrimination against a racial minority, or women, or the aged, or the disabled, to be unconstitutional." Varying methods to cast and count votes have been going on in every state of the union for the past two centuries, and the Supreme Court has been as silent as a church mouse on the matter, never even hinting that there might be a right under the equal protection clause that was being violated. Georgetown University law professor David Cole said, "[The Court] created a new right out of whole cloth and made sure it ultimately protected only one person, George Bush." The simple fact is that the five conservative Justices did not have a judicial leg to stand on in their blatantly partisan decision. In a feeble, desperate effort to support their decision, the Court cited four of its previous cases as legal precedent, but not one of them bears even the slightest resemblance to Bush v. Gore. In one (Gray v. Sanders), the state of Georgia had a system where the vote of each citizen counted for less and less as the population of his or her county increased. In another (Moore v. Ogilvie), the residents of smaller counties in Illinois were able to form a new party to elect candidates, something residents of larger counties could not do. Another (Reynolds v. Sims) was an apportionment case, and the fourth (Harper v. Virginia) involved the payment of a poll tax as a qualification for voting. If a first-year law student ever cited completely inapplicable authority like this, any thoughtful professor would encourage him not to waste two more years trying to become a lawyer. As Yale law professor Akhil Reed Amar noted, the five conservative Justices "failed to cite a single case that, on its facts, comes close to supporting its analysis and result." If the Court majority had been truly concerned about the equal protection of all voters, the real equal protection violation, of course, took place when they cut off the counting of the undervotes. As indicated, that very act denied the 50 million Americans who voted for Gore the right to have their votes count at all. It misses the point to argue that the five Justices stole the election only if it turns out that Gore overcame Bush's lead in the undervote recount. We're talking about the moral and ethical culpability of these Justices, and when you do that, the bell was rung at the moment they engaged in their conduct. What happened thereafter cannot unring the bell and is therefore irrelevant. To judge these Justices by the final result rather than by their intentions at the time of their conduct would be like exonerating one who shoots to kill if the bullet misses the victim. With that type of extravagant reasoning, if the bullet goes on and accidentally strikes down a third party who is about to kill another, perhaps the gunman should ultimately be viewed as a hero. Other than the unprecedented and outrageous nature of what the Court did, nothing surprises me more than how it is being viewed by the legal scholars and pundits who have criticized the opinion. As far as I can determine, most have correctly assailed the Court for issuing a ruling that was clearly political. As the December 25 Time capsulized it, "A sizable number of critics, from law professors to some of the Court's own members, have attacked the ruling as...politically motivated." A sampling from a few law professors: Vanderbilt professor Suzanna Sherry said, "There is really very little way to reconcile this opinion other than that they wanted Bush to win." Yale's Amar lamented that "for Supreme Court watchers this case will be like BC and AD. For many of my colleagues, this was like the day President Kennedy was assassinated. Many of us [had] thought that courts do not act in an openly political fashion." Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy called the decision "outrageous." 2 The only problem I have with these critics is that they have merely lost respect for and confidence in the Court. "I have less respect for the Court than before," Amar wrote. The New York Times said the ruling appeared "openly political" and that it "eroded public confidence in the Court." Indeed, the always accommodating and obsequious (in all matters pertaining to the High Court, in front of which he regularly appears) Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe, who was Gore's chief appellate lawyer, went even further in the weakness of his disenchantment with the Court. "Even if we disagree" with the Court's ruling, he said, Americans should "rally around the decision." Sometimes the body politic is lulled into thinking along unreasoned lines. The "conventional wisdom" emerging immediately after the Court's ruling seemed to be that the Court, by its political ruling, had only lost a lot of credibility and altitude in the minds of many people. But these critics of the ruling, even those who flat-out say the Court "stole" the election, apparently have not stopped to realize the inappropriateness of their tepid position vis-à-vis what the Court did. You mean you can steal a presidential election and your only retribution is that some people don't have as much respect for you, as much confidence in you? That's all? If, indeed, the Court, as the critics say, made a politically motivated ruling (which it unquestionably did), this is tantamount to saying, and can only mean, that the Court did not base its ruling on the law. And if this is so (which again, it unquestionably is), this means that these five Justices deliberately and knowingly decided to nullify the votes of the 50 million Americans who voted for Al Gore and to steal the election for Bush. Of course, nothing could possibly be more serious in its enormous ramifications. The stark reality, and I say this with every fiber of my being, is that the institution Americans trust the most to protect its freedoms and principles committed one of the biggest and most serious crimes this nation has ever seen, pure and simple, the theft of the presidency. And by definition, the perpetrators of this crime have to be denominated criminals. Since the notion of five Supreme Court Justices being criminals is so alien to our sensibilities and previously held beliefs, and since, for the most part, people see and hear, as Thoreau said, what they expect to see and hear, most readers will find my characterization of these Justices to be intellectually incongruous. But make no mistake about it, I think my background in the criminal law is sufficient to inform you that Scalia, Thomas et al. are criminals in the very truest sense of the word. Essentially, there are two types of crimes: malum prohibitum (wrong because they are prohibited) crimes, more popularly called "civil offenses" or "quasi crimes," such as selling liquor after a specified time of day, hunting during the off-season, gambling, etc.; and malum in se (wrong in themselves) crimes. The latter, such as robbery, rape, murder and arson, are the only true crimes. Without exception, they all involve morally reprehensible conduct. Even if there were no law prohibiting such conduct, one would know (as opposed to a malum prohibitum crime) it is wrong, often evil. Although the victim of most true crimes is an individual (for example, a person robbed or raped), such crimes are considered to be "wrongs against society." This is why the plaintiff in all felony criminal prosecutions is either the state (People of the State of California v. _______) or the federal government (United States of America v. _______). No technical true crime was committed here by the five conservative Justices only because no Congress ever dreamed of enacting a statute making it a crime to steal a presidential election. It is so far-out and unbelievable that there was no law, then, for these five Justices to have violated by their theft of the election. But if what these Justices did was not "morally reprehensible" and a "wrong against society," what would be? In terms, then, of natural law and justice, the protoplasm of all eventual laws on the books, these five Justices are criminals in every true sense of the word, and in a fair and just world belong behind prison bars as much as any American white-collar criminal who ever lived. Of course, the right-wing extremists who have saluted the Court for its theft of the election are the same type of people who feel it is perfectly all right to have a mandatory minimum sentence of ten years in a federal penitentiary for some poor black in the ghetto who is in possession of just fifty grams of crack cocaine, even if he was not selling it. [§ 21 U.S.C. § 841 (b)(1)(A)(iii)] Though the five Justices clearly are criminals, no one is treating them this way. As I say, even those who were outraged by the Court's ruling have only lost respect for them. And for the most part the nation's press seems to have already forgotten and/or forgiven. Within days, the Court's ruling was no longer the subject of Op-Ed pieces. Indeed, just five days after its high crime, the caption of an article by Jean Guccione in the Los Angeles Times read, "The Supreme Court Should Weather This Storm." The following day an AP story noted that Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, on vacation in Arizona, had fired a hole-in-one on the golf course. The lack of any valid legal basis for their decision and, most important, the fact that it is inconceivable they would have ruled the way they did for Gore, proves, on its face, that the five conservative Republican Justices were up to no good. Therefore, not one stitch of circumstantial evidence beyond this is really necessary to demonstrate their felonious conduct and state of mind. (The fact that O'Connor, per the Wall Street Journal, said before the election that she wanted to retire but did not want to do so if a Democrat would be selecting her successor, that Thomas's wife is working for the conservative Heritage Foundation to help handle the Bush transition and that Scalia's two sons work for law firms representing Bush is all unneeded trivia. We already know, without this, exactly what happened.) But for those who want more, let me point out that there is no surer way to find out what parties meant than to see what they have done. And like typical criminals, the felonious five left their incriminating fingerprints everywhere, showing an unmistakable consciousness of guilt on their part. 1. Under Florida statutory law, when the Florida Supreme Court finds that a challenge to the certified result of an election is justified, it has the power to "provide any relief appropriate under the circumstances" (§ 102.168(8) of the Florida Election Code). On Friday, December 8, the Florida court, so finding, ordered a manual recount (authorized under § 102.166(4)© of the Florida Election Code) of all disputed ballots (around 60,000) throughout the entire state. As a New York Times editorial reported, "The manual recount was progressing smoothly and swiftly Saturday...with new votes being recorded for both Vice President Al Gore and Governor George W. Bush... serving the core democratic principle that every legal vote should be counted" when, in midafternoon, the US Supreme Court "did a disservice to the nation's tradition of fair elections by calling a halt" to the recount. The stay (requested by Bush), the Times said, appeared "highly political."4 Under Supreme Court rules, a stay is supposed to be granted to an applicant (here, Bush) only if he makes a substantial showing that in the absence of a stay, there is a likelihood of "irreparable harm" to him. With the haste of a criminal, Justice Scalia, in trying to justify the Court's shutting down of the vote counting, wrote, unbelievably, that counting these votes would "threaten irreparable harm to petitioner [Bush]...by casting a cloud upon what he claims to be the legitimacy of his election." [Emphasis added.] In other words, although the election had not yet been decided, the absolutely incredible Scalia was presupposing that Bush had won the election, indeed, had a right to win it, and any recount that showed Gore got more votes in Florida than Bush could "cloud" Bush's presidency. Only a criminal on the run, rushed for time and acting in desperation, could possibly write the embarrassing words Scalia did, language showing that he knew he had no legal basis for what he was doing, but that getting something down in writing, even as intellectually flabby and fatuous as it was, was better than nothing at all. (Rehnquist, Thomas, O'Connor and Kennedy, naturally, joined Scalia in the stay order.) The New York Times observed that the Court gave the appearance by the stay of "racing to beat the clock before an unwelcome truth would come out." Terrance Sandalow, former dean of the University of Michigan Law School and a judicial conservative who opposed Roe v. Wade and supported the nomination to the Court of right-wing icon Robert Bork, said that "the balance of harms so unmistakably were on the side of Gore" that the granting of the stay was "incomprehensible," going on to call the stay "an unmistakably partisan decision without any foundation in law." As Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in opposing the stay, Bush "failed to carry the heavy burden" of showing a likelihood of irreparable harm if the recount continued. In other words, the Court never even had the legal right to grant the stay. "Counting every legally cast vote cannot constitute irreparable harm," Stevens said. "On the other hand, there is a danger that a stay may cause irreparable harm to the respondent [Gore] and, more importantly, the public at large because of the risk that the entry of the stay would be tantamount to a decision on the merits in favor of the applicant. Preventing the recount from being completed will inevitably cast a cloud on the legitimacy of the election." Stevens added what even the felonious five knew but decided to ignore: that it is a "basic principle inherent in our Constitution that every legal vote should be counted." From the wrongful granting of the stay alone, the handwriting was on the wall. Gore was about as safe as a cow in a Chicago stockyard. In yet another piece of incriminating circumstantial evidence, Scalia, in granting Bush's application for the stay, wrote that "the issuance of the stay suggests that a majority of the Court, while not deciding the issues presented, believe that the petitioner [Bush] has a substantial probability of success." But Antonin, why would you believe this when neither side had submitted written briefs yet (they were due the following day, Sunday, by 4 pm), nor had there even been oral arguments (set for 11 am on Monday)? It wouldn't be because you had already made up your mind on what you were determined to do, come hell or high water, would it? Antonin, take it from an experienced prosecutor, you're as guilty as sin. In my prosecutorial days, I've had some worthy opponents. You wouldn't be one of them. Your guilt is so obvious that if I thought more of you I'd feel constrained to blush for you. 2. When prosecutors present their circumstantial case against a defendant, they put one speck of evidence upon another until ultimately there is a strong mosaic of guilt. One such small speck is that in its 5-to-4 decision handing the election to Bush, the Court's ruling was set forth in a thirteen-page "per curiam" (Latin for "by the court") opinion (followed by concurring and dissenting opinions). Students of the Supreme Court know that per curiam opinions are almost always issued for unanimous (9-to-0) opinions in relatively unimportant and uncontroversial cases, or where Justices wish to be very brief. But as USA Today pointed out, "Neither was the case here." Again, on the run and in a guilty state of mind, none of the five Justices, even the brazenly shameless Scalia, wanted to sign their name to a majority opinion of the Court reversing the Florida Supreme Court's order to recount the undervotes. A per curiam opinion, which is always unsigned, was the answer. It is not even known who wrote the per curiam opinion, though it is believed to be O'Connor and/or Kennedy, neither of whose names is mentioned anywhere in the Court's sixty-two-page document. After they did their dirty work by casting their two votes on the case for their favorite, two votes that overruled and rendered worthless the votes of 50 million Americans in fifty states, O'Connor and Kennedy wanted to stay away from their decision the way the devil stays away from holy water. Indeed, by their per curiam opinion, it was almost as if the felonious five felt that since their names would not be on the legally sacrilegious opinion, maybe, just maybe, the guilt they knew they bore would be mitigated, at least somewhat, in posterity. 3. The proof that the Court itself knew its equal protection argument had no merit whatsoever is that when Bush first asked the Court, on November 22, to consider three objections of his to the earlier, more limited Florida recount then taking place, the Court only denied review on his third objection, yeah, you guessed it, that the lack of a uniform standard to determine the voter's intent violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Since the Court, on November 22, felt that this objection was so devoid of merit that it was unworthy of even being considered by it, what did these learned Justices subsequently learn about the equal protection clause they apparently did not know in November that caused them just three weeks later, on December 12, to embrace and endorse it so enthusiastically? The election was finally on the line on December 12 and they knew they had to come up with something, anything, to save the day for their man. The bottom line is that nothing is more important in a democracy than the right to vote. Without it there cannot be a democracy. And implicit in the right to vote, obviously, is that the vote be counted. Yet with the election hanging in the balance, the highest court in the land ordered that the valid votes of thousands of Americans not be counted. That decision gave the election to Bush. When Justice Thomas was asked by a skeptical high school student the day after the Court's ruling whether the Court's decision had anything to do with politics, he answered, "Zero." And when a reporter thereafter asked Rehnquist whether he agreed with Thomas, he said, "Absolutely, absolutely." Well, at least we know they can lie as well as they can steal. 4. The Court anchored its knowingly fraudulent decision on the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. But wait. Since the electors in the fifty states weren't scheduled to meet and vote until December 18, and the Court's ruling was on December 12, if the Court was really serious about its decision that the various standards in the counties to determine the voter's intent violated the equal protection clause, why not, as Justices Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg and Breyer each noted in separate dissents, simply remand the case back to the Florida Supreme Court with instructions to establish a uniform, statewide standard and continue the recount until December 18? The shameless and shameful felonious five had an answer, which, in a sense, went to the heart of their decision even more than the bogus equal protection argument. The unsigned and anonymously written per curiam opinion noted that under Title 3 of the United States Code, Section 5 (3 USC § 5), any controversy or contest to determine the selection of electors should be resolved "six days prior to the meeting of the Electoral College," that is, December 12, and inasmuch as the Court issued its ruling at 10 pm on December 12, with just two hours remaining in the day, the Court said, "That date [December 12] is upon us," and hence there obviously was no time left to set uniform standards and continue the recount. But there are a multiplicity of problems with the Court's oh-so-convenient escape hatch. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, University of Utah law professor Michael McConnell, a legal conservative, pointed out that the December 12 "deadline" is only a deadline "for receiving 'safe harbor' protection for the state's electors" (i.e., if a state certifies its electors by that date, Congress can't question them), not a federal deadline that must be met. New York University law professor Larry Kramer observed that if a state does not make that deadline, "nothing happens. The counting could continue." Justice Stevens observed in his dissent that 3 USC § 5 "merely provides rules ...for Congress to follow when selecting among conflicting slates of electors. They do not prohibit a state from counting ...legal votes until a bonafide winner is determined. Indeed, in 1960, Hawaii appointed two slates of electors and Congress chose to count the one appointed on January 4, 1961, well after the Title 3 deadlines" of December 12 and 18. Thus, Stevens went on to say, even if an equal protection violation is assumed for the sake of argument, "nothing prevents the majority...from ordering relief appropriate to remedy that violation without depriving Florida voters of their right to have their votes counted." But even if December 12 were some kind of actual deadline, nothing was sillier during this whole election debate than the talking heads on television, many of whom were lawyers who should have known better, treating the date as if it were sacrosanct and set in stone (exactly what the Supreme Court majority, on the run and trying to defend their indefensible position, said). In the real world, mandatory dates always have an elliptical clause attached to them, "unless there is just cause for extending the date." I cannot be accused of hyperbole when I say that perhaps no less than thousands of times a day in courthouses throughout the country, mandatory ("shall") dates to do this or that (file a brief, a motion, commence a trial, etc.) are waived by the court on the representation of one party alone that he needs more time. If extending the December 12 (or the December 18 date, for that matter) deadline for a few days for the counting of votes to determine who the rightful winner of a presidential election is does not constitute a sufficient cause for a short extension of time, then what in the world does? No one has said it better than columnist Thomas Friedman: "The five conservative Justices essentially ruled that the sanctity of dates, even meaningless ones, mattered more than the sanctity of votes, even meaningful ones. The Rehnquist Court now has its legacy: In calendars we trust." In other words, to Scalia and his friends, speed was more important than justice. More important than accuracy. Being the strong-armed enforcer of deadlines, even inconsequential ones, was more important to these five Justices than being the nation's protector and guardian of the right to vote. What could be more infuriating than Chief Justice Rehnquist, who knew he was setting up a straw man as counterfeit as the decision he supported, writing that the recount "could not possibly be completed" in the two hours remaining on December 12? The Supreme Court improperly stops the recounting of the votes from Saturday afternoon to Tuesday, December 12, at 10 pm, then has the barefaced audacity to say that Gore ran out of time? This type of maddening sophistry is enough, as the expression goes, to piss off a saint. How dare these five pompous asses do what they did? It should be noted that the recount that commenced on Saturday morning, December 9, was scheduled to conclude by 2 pm that Sunday, and the vote counters were making excellent progress. For example, as reported in the December 10 New York Times, for the 9,000 Miami-Dade County ballots being counted, eight county court judges counting 1,000 ballots an hour, had, by midday Saturday, "gone through more than a third of the ballots [when Scalia stepped in], and expected to finish by nightfall." So the Court's extending the deadline to December 18 would have provided ample time for the Florida Supreme Court to promulgate a uniform standard, finish the vote-counting in a day or so, and even allow for judicial review. As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg observed concerning this last point, "Notably, the Florida Supreme Court has produced two substantial decisions within twenty-nine hours of oral argument." Justice Breyer wrote that the alleged equal protection "deficiency...could easily be remedied." But that's assuming the felonious five wanted a remedy. They did not. All of the above are further indicia of their guilty state of mind. 5. If there are two sacred canons of the right-wing in America and ultraconservative Justices like Scalia, Thomas and Rehnquist, it's their ardent federalism, i.e., promotion of states' rights (Rehnquist, in fact, wrote in his concurring opinion about wanting, wherever possible, to "defer to the decisions of state courts on issues of state law"), and their antipathy for Warren Court activist judges. So if it weren't for their decision to find a way, any way imaginable, to appoint Bush President, their automatic predilection would have been to stay the hell out of Florida's business. The fact that they completely departed from what they would almost reflexively do in ninety-nine out of a hundred other cases is again persuasive circumstantial evidence of their criminal state of mind. 6. Perhaps nothing Scalia et al. did revealed their consciousness of guilt more than the total lack of legal stature they reposed in their decision. Appellate court decisions, particularly those of the highest court in the land, all enunciate and stand for legal principles. Not just litigants but the courts themselves cite prior holdings as support for a legal proposition they are espousing. But the Court knew that its ruling (that differing standards for counting votes violate the equal protection clause) could not possibly be a constitutional principle cited in the future by themselves, other courts or litigants. Since different methods of counting votes exist throughout the fifty states (e.g., Texas counts dimpled chads, California does not), forty-four out of the fifty states do not have uniform voting methods, and voting equipment and mechanisms in all states necessarily vary in design, upkeep and performance, to apply the equal protection ruling of Bush v. Gore would necessarily invalidate virtually all elections throughout the country. This, obviously, was an extremely serious problem for the felonious five to deal with. What to do? Not to worry. Are you ready for this one? By that I mean, are you sitting down, since if you're standing, this is the type of thing that could affect your physical equilibrium. Unbelievably, the Court wrote that its ruling was " limited to the present circumstances, for the problem of equal protection in election processes generally presents many complexities." (That's pure, unadulterated moonshine. The ruling sets forth a very simple, noncomplex proposition, that if there are varying standards to count votes, this violates the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.) In other words, the Court, in effect, was saying its ruling "only applied to those future cases captioned Bush v. Gore. In all other equal protection voting cases, litigants should refer to prior decisions of this court." Of the thousands of potential equal protection voting cases, the Court was only interested in, and eager to grant relief to, one person and one person only, George W. Bush.6 Is there any limit to the effrontery and shamelessness of these five right-wing Justices? Answer: No. This point number six here, all alone and by itself, clearly and unequivocally shows that the Court knew its decision was not based on the merits or the law, and was solely a decision to appoint George Bush President. Conservatives, the very ones who wanted to impeach Earl Warren, have now predictably taken to arguing that one shouldn't attack the Supreme Court as I am because it can only harm the image of the Court, which we have to respect as the national repository for, and protector of, the rule of law, the latter being a sine qua non to a structured, nonanarchistic society. This is just so much drivel. Under what convoluted theory do we honor the rule of law by ignoring the violation of it (here, the sacred, inalienable right to vote of all Americans) by the Supreme Court? With this unquestioning subservience-to-authority theory, I suppose the laws of the Third Reich, such as requiring Jews to wear a yellow Star of David on their clothing, should have been respected and followed by the Jews. Blacks should have respected Jim Crow laws in the first half of the twentieth century. Naturally, these conservative exponents of not harming the Supreme Court, even though the Court stole a federal election disfranchising 50 million American citizens, are the same people who felt no similar hesitancy savaging the President of the United States not just day after day, but week after week, month after month, yes, even year after year for having a private and consensual sexual affair and then lying about it. And this was so even though the vitriolic and never-ending attacks crippled the executive branch of government for months on end, causing incalculable damage to the office of the presidency and to this nation, both internally and in the eyes of the world. Indeed, many of them are delighted to hound and go after the President even after he leaves office. These five Justices, by their conduct, have forfeited the right to be respected, and only by treating them the way they deserve to be treated can we demonstrate our respect for the rule of law they defiled, and insure that their successors will not engage in similarly criminal conduct. Why, one may ask, have I written this article? I'll tell you why. I'd like to think, like most people, that I have a sense of justice. In my mind's eye, these five Justices have gotten away with murder, and I want to do whatever I can to make sure that they pay dearly for their crime. Though they can't be prosecuted, I want them to know that there's at least one American out there (and hopefully many more because of this article) who knows (not thinks, but knows) precisely who they are. I want these five Justices to know that because of this article, which I intend to send to each one of them by registered mail, there's the exponential possibility that when many Americans look at them in the future, they'll be saying, "Why are these people in robes seated above me? They all belong behind bars." I want these five Justices to know that this is America, not a banana republic, and in the United States of America, you simply cannot get away with things like this. At a minimum, I believe that the Court's inexcusable ruling will severely stain its reputation for years to come, perhaps decades. This is very unfortunate. As Justice Stevens wrote in his dissent: "Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year's presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the nation's confidence in [this Court] as an impartial guardian of the rule of law." Considering the criminal intention behind the decision, legal scholars and historians should place this ruling above the Dred Scott case (Scott v. Sandford) and Plessy v. Ferguson in egregious sins of the Court. The right of every American citizen to have his or her vote counted, and for Americans (not five unelected Justices) to choose their President was callously and I say criminally jettisoned by the Court's majority to further its own political ideology. If there is such a thing as a judicial hell, these five Justices won't have to worry about heating bills in their future. Scalia and Thomas in particular are not only a disgrace to the judiciary but to the legal profession, for years being nothing more than transparent shills for the right wing of the Republican Party. If the softest pillow is a clear conscience, these five Justices are in for some hard nights. But if they aren't troubled by what they did, then we're dealing with judicial sociopaths, people even more frightening than they already appear to be. The Republican Party had a good candidate for President, John McCain. Instead, it nominated perhaps the most unqualified person ever to become President, and with the muscular, thuggish help of the Court, forced Bush down the throats of more than half the nation's voters. As Linda Greenhouse wrote in the New York Times, when Rehnquist administers the presidential oath of office to Bush on January 20, for the first time in our nation's history the Chief Justice will not just be a prop in the majestic ceremony but a player. Rehnquist will be swearing in someone he made sure would be President. Obscenity has its place in a free and open society, but it's in the seedy, neon-light part of town, not on the steps of the nation's Capitol being viewed by millions of Americans on television screens throughout the land. That an election for an American President can be stolen by the highest court in the land under the deliberate pretext of an inapplicable constitutional provision has got to be one of the most frightening and dangerous events ever to have occurred in this country. Until this act, which is treasonous, though again not technically, in its sweeping implications, is somehow rectified (and I do not know how this can be done), can we be serene about continuing to place the adjective "great" before the name of this country? FOOTNOTES 1. A total of 3,718,305 votes were cast in the Florida election under the Votomatic punch-card system, and 2,353,811 votes were cast under the optical-scan system. The percentage of votes not picked up using the punch-card system was 3.92 percent, the rate under the more modern optical-scan system being only 1.43 percent. Put in other terms, for every 10,000 votes cast, the punch-card system resulted in 250 more nonvotes than the optical-scan system. Siegel v. LePore, No. 00-15981. See also Ford Fessenden, "No-Vote Rates Higher in Punch-Card Counts," New York Times, December 1. 2. The ruling was so bad that it was very difficult to find even conservative legal scholars who supported it, and when the few who attempted to do so stepped up to the plate, their observations were simply pathetic. University of California, Berkeley, law professor John Yoo, a former law clerk for Thomas, wrote that "we should balance the short-term hit to the court's legitimacy with whether...it was in the best interest of the country to end the electoral crisis." Translation: If an election is close, it's better for the Supreme Court to pick the President, whether or not he won the election, than to have the dispute resolved in the manner prescribed by law. Pepperdine Law School's Douglas Kmiec unbelievably wrote that "the ruling of the US Supreme Court was not along partisan or ideological lines," and that its ruling "protected our cherished democratic tradition with a soundly reasoned, per curiam voice of restraint." I won't dignify this with a translation. 3. Actually, not a recount since the Votomatic machines, for whatever reason, never did detect the votes on these particular ballots. The manual count would be examining these ballots for the first time to see if, as provided for under § 101.5614(5) of the Florida Election Code, there was a "clear indication of the intent of the voter." One example: The stylus punches a clear hole in the paper ballot, but the chad is still attached (hanging) by one or more of its four sides. In that situation the Votomatic machine frequently does not detect the vote, though the intent of the voter could not be any clearer. 4. Earlier in the day, the conservative-leaning US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit in Atlanta voted 8 to 4 to deny Bush's companion attempt to have that court stop the recount. 5. In fact, L. Kinvin Wroth, dean of the Vermont Law School and an expert on the Electoral College, said that "a recount could have gone on right up to the last day of Congress' joint session" on January 6, when the votes of the College were counted in Congress. 6. And this, mind you, in an election in which Bush was leading in Florida by only a few hundred votes while losing the popular vote nationwide to Gore by, at last count, 539,000 votes. *Vincent Bugliosi successfully prosecuted 105 out of 106 felony jury trials as a Los Angeles deputy district attorney, including twenty-one murder convictions without a single loss. His prosecution of Charles Manson was the basis for his true-crime bestseller, Helter Skelter (Bantam). He is also the author of Outrage: The Five Reasons Why O.J. Simpson Got Away With Murder (Island). Copyright © Vincent Bugliosi, January 3, 2001.

Like a zillion other Americans, I went to see Pearl Harbor on the
first day of its release. As I sat there in the jammed bargain
matinee, I kept assuring myself that as author of a radical history
of WWII, I was merely doing research. Now, I could rant on about the
atrocious love story, the film¹s mind-numbing length, and the fact
that no Hawaiians appeared on screen, but this is not a movie review.
This is more like a desperate attempt at context in the face of an
onslaught.

Much has been made of the decision to make Pearl Harbor "politically
correct" by excising any negative references to the Japanese. While I
can appreciate the sentiment, this move does the audience a major
disservice. In the decades leading up to this battle between colonial
powers in the Pacific, negative references played a central role.
Ignoring this in the name of Asian box office receipts places
December 7, 1941 in a vacuum. Pearl Harbor provides no context so,
I¹d like to try.

The build-up to Pearl Harbor began two decades prior to the attack
when, in 1922, the U.S., Britain, and Japan agreed that the Japanese
navy would not be allowed more than 60 percent of the capital ship
tonnage of the other two powers. As resentment grew within Japan over
this decidedly inequitable agreement, that same year, the United
States Supreme Court declared Japanese immigrants ineligible for
American citizenship. This decision was followed a year later by the
Supreme Court upholding a California and Washington ruling denying
Japanese the right to own property. A third judicial strike was dealt
in 1924 with the Exclusion Act which virtually banned all Asian
immigration. Finally, in 1930, when the London Naval Treaty denied
Japan naval hegemony in its own waters, the groundwork for war
(and "surprise attacks") had been laid.

Upon realizing that Japan textiles were out-producing Lancashire
mills, the British Empire (including India, Australia, Burma, etc.)
raised the tariff on Japanese exports by 25 percent. Within a few
years, the Dutch followed suit in Indonesia and the West Indies, with
the U.S. (in Cuba and the Philippines) not far behind. This led to
the Japanese claiming (correctly) encirclement by the "ABCD"
(American, British, Chinese, and Dutch) powers. Such moves, combined
with Japan¹s expanding colonial designs, says Kenneth C. Davis,
made "a clash between Japan and the United States and the other
Western nations over control of the economy and resources of the Far
East and Pacific . . . bound to happen."

WWII, in the Pacific theater, was essentially a war between colonial
powers. It was not the Japanese invasion of China, the rape of
Nanking, or the atrocities in Manchuria that resulted in the United
States declaring war on the Empire of Japan. It was the attack of
three of America¹s territories - the Philippines, Guam, and Hawaii
(Pearl Harbor) - that provoked a military response.

On July 21, 1941, Japan signed a preliminary agreement with the Nazi-
sympathizing Vichy government of Marshal Henri Pétain, leading to
Japanese occupation of airfields and naval bases in Indochina. Almost
immediately, the U.S., Britain, and the Netherlands instituted a
total embargo on oil and scrap metal to Japan - tantamount to a
declaration of war. This was followed soon after by the United States
and Great Britain freezing all Japanese assets in their respective
countries. Radhabinod Pal, one of the judges in the post-war Tokyo
War Crimes Tribunal, later argued that the U.S. had clearly provoked
the war with Japan, calling the embargoes a "clear and potent threat
to Japan¹s very existence."

Which brings me to those negatives references I mentioned earlier.
Self-censorship in the name of profits will mislead movie-goers about
the high level of anti-Japanese racism cultivated by the "greatest
generation." The Japanese soldiers (and, for that matter, all
Japanese) were commonly referred to and depicted as subhuman -
insects, monkeys, apes, rodents, or simply barbarians that must be
wiped out or exterminated. The American Legion Magazine¹s cartoon of
monkeys in a zoo who had posted a sign reading, "Any similarity
between us and the Japs is purely coincidental" was typical. A U.S.
Army poll in 1943 found that roughly half of all GIs believed it
would be necessary to kill every Japanese on earth before peace could
be achieved. As a December 1945 Fortune poll revealed, American
feelings for the Japanese did not soften after the war. Nearly twenty-
three percent of those questioned wished the U.S. could have
dropped "many more [atomic bombs] before the Japanese had a chance to
surrender." Eugene B. Sledge, author of With the Old Breed at Peleliu
and Okinawa, wrote of his comrades "harvesting gold teeth" from the
enemy dead. In Okinawa, Sledge witnessed "the most repulsive thing I
ever saw an American do in the war" when a Marine officer stood over
a Japanese corpse and urinated into its mouth. Perhaps Edgar L.
Jones, a former war correspondent in the Pacific, put it best when he
asked in the February 1946 Atlantic Monthly, "What kind of war do
civilians suppose we fought anyway? We shot prisoners in cold blood,
wiped out hospitals, strafed lifeboats, killed or mistreated enemy
civilians, finished off the enemy wounded, tossed the dying into a
hole with the dead, and in the Pacific boiled flesh off enemy skulls
to make table ornaments for sweethearts, or carved their bones into
letter openers."

And then there was the man who¹d eventually give the order to drop
atomic bombs on Japanese civilians: "We have used [the bomb] against
those who have abandoned all pretense of obeying international laws
of warfare," Harry Truman later explained, thus justifying his
decision to nuke a people that he termed ³savages, ruthless,
merciless, and fanatic."

Rationality in the Pacific was so rare during WW II that, ironically,
it required as a mouthpiece none other than prominent racist Colonel
Charles A. Lindbergh, Jr. Repelled by what he saw and heard of U.S.
treatment of the Japanese in the Pacific theater, the aviator spoke
out. His sentiments are summed up in the following journal entry: "It
was freely admitted that some of our the Japs themselves. Our men
think nothing of shooting a Japanese prisoner or a soldier attempting
to surrender. They treat the Jap with less respect than they would
give to an animal, and these acts are condoned by almost everyone. We
claim to be fighting for civilization, but the more I see of this war
in the Pacific the less right I think we have to claim to be
civilized." When Lindbergh left the Pacific and arrived at customs in
Hawaii, he was asked if he had any Japanese bones in his baggage. It
was, by then, a routine question.

Like most Hollywood spectacles, Pearl Harbor is devoid of context.
There¹s only one line alluding to U.S. economic and legislative
provocation prior to December 7, 1941 and no hint at all of the
internment camps and atomic bombs yet to come. After three hours,
World War II is still "The Good War," America¹s honor remains
untarnished, and the summer movie season is in full swing.

Surprise, surprise.

THIS PIECE FIRST APPEARED ON WWW.ZNET.ORG ON May 28, 2001

Mickey Z. (Michael Zezima) is the author of Saving Private Power: The
Hidden History of 'The Good War' (Soft Skull Press, 2000), on which
this article is based. He can reached at mzx2@earthlink.net.

By now everybody knows that former Senator Bob Kerrey led a seven-

member team of Navy Seals into Thanh Phong village in February 1969,

and murdered in cold blood more than a dozen women and children.

What hardly anyone knows, and what no one in the press is talking

about (although many of them know), is that Kerrey was on a CIA

mission, and its specific purpose was to kill those women and

children. It was illegal, premeditated mass murder and it was a war

And it's time to hold the CIA responsible. It's time for a war crimes

tribunal to examine the CIA's illegal activities during and since the

War crimes were a central was part of a CIA strategy for fighting the

Vietnam War. The strategy was known as Contre Coup, and it was the

manifestation of a belief that the war was essentially political, not

military, in nature. The CIA theorized that it was being fought by

opposing ideological factions, each one amounting to about five

percent of the total population, while the remaining ninety percent

was uncommitted and wanted the war to go away.

According to the CIA's mythology, on one side were communist

insurgents, supported by comrades in Hanoi, Moscow and Peking. The

communists fought for land reform, to rid Vietnam of foreign

intervention, and to unite the north and south. The other faction was

composed of capitalists, often Catholics relocated from North Vietnam

in 1954 by the CIA. This faction was fighting to keep South Vietnam

an independent nation, operating under the direction of quiet

Caught in the crossfire was the silent majority. The object shared by

both factions was to win these undecided voters over to its side.

Contre Coup was the CIA's response to the realization that the

Communists were winning the war for the hearts and minds of the

people. It also was a response to the belief that they were winning

through the use of psychological warfare, specifically, selective

terror the murder and mutilation of specific government officials.

In December 1963, Peer DeSilva arrived in Saigon as the CIA's station

chief. He claims to have been shocked by what he saw. In his

autobiography, SubRosa, DeSilva describes how the VC had "impaled a

young boy, a village chief, and his pregnant wife on sharp poles. To

make sure this horrible sight would remain with the villagers, one of

the terror squad used his machete to disembowel the woman, spilling

"The Vietcong," DeSilva said, "were monstrous in the application of

torture and murder to achieve the political and psychological impact

But the methodology was successful and had tremendous intelligence

potential, so DeSilva authorized the creation of small "counter-

terror teams," designed "to bring danger and death to the Vietcong

functionaries themselves, especially in areas where they felt secure."

Thanh Phong village was one of those areas where Vietcong

functionaries felt secure. It was located in Kien Hoa Province, along

the Mekong Delta. One of Vietnam's most densely populated provinces,

Kien Hoa was precariously close to Saigon, and is criss-crossed with

waterways and rice paddies. It was an important rice production area

for the insurgents as well as the Government of Vietnam, and thus was

one of the eight most heavily infiltrated provinces in Vietnam. The

estimated 4700 VC functionaries in Kien Hoa accounted for more than

five percent of the insurgency's total leadership. Operation Speedy

Express, a Ninth Infantry sweep through Kien Hoa in the first six

months of 1969, killed an estimated 11,000 civilians-supposedly VC

These functionaries formed what the CIA called the Vietcong

Infrastructure (VCI). The VCI consisted of members of the People's

Revolutionary Party, the National Liberation Front, and other

Communist outfits like the Women's and Student's Liberation

Associations. Its members were politicians and administrators

managing committees for business, communications, security,

intelligence, and military affairs. Among their main functions were

the collection of taxes, the recruitment of young men and women into

the insurgency, and the selective assassination of GVN officials.

As the CIA was well aware, Ho Chi Minh boasted that with two cadre in

every hamlet, he could win the war, no matter how many soldiers the

So the CIA adopted the Ho's strategy-but on a grander and bloodier

scale. The object of Contre Coup was to identify and terrorize each

and every individual VCI and his/her family, friends and fellow

villagers. To this end the CIA in 1964 launched a massive

intelligence operation called the Provincial Interrogation Center

Program. The CIA (employing the US company Pacific Architects and

Engineers) built an interrogation center in each of South Vietnam's

44 provinces. Staffed by members of the brutal Special Police, who

ran extensive informant networks, and advised by CIA officers, the

purpose of the PICs was to identify, through the

systematic "interrogation" (read torture) of VCI suspects, the

membership of the VCI at every level of its organization; from its

elusive headquarters somewhere along the Cambodian border, through

the region, city, province, district, village and hamlet committees.

The "indispensable link" in the VCI was the District Party Secretary 

the same individual Bob Kerrey's Seal team was out to assassinate in

Frankenstein's Monster

Initially the CIA had trouble finding people who were willing to

murder and mutilate, so the Agency's original "counter-terror teams"

were composed of ex-convicts, VC defectors, Chinese Nungs,

Cambodians, Montagnards, and mercenaries. In a February 1970 article

written for True Magazine, titled "The CIA's Hired Killers," Georgie-

Anne Geyer compared "our boys" to "their boys" with the qualification

that, "Their boys did it for faith; our boys did it for money."

The other big problem was security. The VC had infiltrated nearly

every facet of the GVN-even the CIA's unilateral counter-terror

program. So in an attempt to bring greater effectiveness to its

secret war, the CIA started employing Navy Seals, US Army Special

Forces, Force Recon Marines, and other highly trained Americans who,

like Bob Kerrey, were "motivationally indoctrinated" by the military

and turned into killing machines with all the social inhibitions and

moral compunctions of a Timmy McVeigh. Except they were secure in the

knowledge that what they were doing was, if not legal or moral,

fraught with Old Testament-style justice, rationalizing that the Viet

Eventually the irrepressible Americans added their own improvements.

In his autobiography Soldier, Anthony Herbert describes arriving in

Saigon in 1965, reporting to the CIA's Special Operations Group, and

being asked to join a top-secret psywar program. What the CIA wanted

Herbert to do, "was to take charge of execution teams that wiped out

By 1967, killing entire families had become an integral facet of the

CIA's counter-terror program. Robert Slater was the chief of the

CIA's Province Interrogation Center Program from June 1967 through

1969. In a March 1970 thesis for the Defense Intelligence School,

titled "The History, Organization and Modus Operandi of the Viet Cong

Infrastructure," Slater wrote, "the District Party Secretary usually

does not sleep in the same house or even hamlet where his family

lived, to preclude any injury to his family during assassination

But, Slater added, "the Allies have frequently found out where the

District Party Secretaries live and raided their homes: in an ensuing

fire fight the secretary's wife and children have been killed and

This is the intellectual context in which the Kerrey atrocity took

place. This CIA strategy of committing war crimes for psychological

reasons to terrorize the enemy's supporters into submission also is

what differentiates Kerrey's atrocity, in legal terms, from other

popular methods of mass murdering civilians, such as bombs from the

sky, or economic boycotts.

Yes, the CIA has a global, illegal strategy of terrorizing people,

although in typical CIA lexicon it's called "anti-terrorism."

When you're waging illegal warfare, language is every bit as

important as weaponry and the will to kill. As George Orwell or Noam

Chomsky might explain, when you're deliberately killing innocent

women and children, half the court-of-public-opinion battle is making

Three Old Vietnam Hands in particular stand out as examples of this

incestuous relationship. Neil Sheehan, CIA-nik and author of the

aptly titled Bright Shining Lie, recently confessed that in 1966 he

saw US soldiers massacre as many as 600 Vietnamese civilians in five

fishing villages. He'd been in Vietnam for three years by then, but

it didn't occur to him that he had discovered a war crime. Now he

realizes that the war crimes issue was always present, but still no

Former New York Times reporter and author of The Best and The

Brightest, David Halberstam, defended Kerrey on behalf of the media

establishment at the New School campus the week after the story

broke. CIA flack Halberstam described the region around Thanh Phong

as "the purest bandit country," adding that "by 1969 everyone who

lived there would have been third-generation Vietcong." Which is CIA

Finally there's New York Times reporter James Lemoyne. Why did he

never write any articles linking the CIA to war crimes in Vietnam?

Because his brother Charles, a Navy officer, was in charge of the

CIA's counter-terror teams in the Delta in 1968.

The CIA launched its Phoenix Program in June 1967, after 13 years of

tinkering with several experimental counter-terror and psywar

programs, and building its network of secret interrogation centers.

The stated policy was to replace the bludgeon of indiscriminate

bombings and military search and destroy operations which had

alienated the people from the Government of Vietnam with the scalpel

of assassinations of selected members of the Viet Cong Infrastructure.

A typical Phoenix operation began in a Province Interrogation Center

where a suspected member of the VCI was brought for questioning.

After a few days or weeks or months undergoing various forms of

torture, the VCI suspect would die or give the name and location of

his VCI comrades and superiors. That information would be sent from

the Interrogation Center to the local Phoenix office, which was

staffed by Special Branch and Vietnamese military officers under the

supervision of CIA officers. Depending on the suspected importance of

the targeted VCI, the Phoenix people would then dispatch one of the

various action arms available to it, including Seal teams like the

In February 1969, the Phoenix Program was still under CIA control.

But because Kien Hoa Province was so important, and because the VCI's

District Party Secretary was supposedly in Thanh Phong, the CIA

decided to handle this particular assassination and mass murder

mission without involving the local Vietnamese. So instead of

dispensing the local counter-terror team, the CIA sent Kerrey's

And that, very simply, is how it happened. Kerrey and crew admittedly

went to Thanh Phong to kill the District Party Secretary, and anyone

else who got in the way, including his family and all their friends.

If you are interested in a free subscription to The

Or, e-mail konformist-subscribe@egroups.com with the

By 1969 the CIA, through Phoenix, was targeting individual VCI and

their families all across Vietnam. Over 20,000 people were

assassinated by the end of the year and hundreds of thousands had

been tortured in Province Interrogation Centers.

On 20 June 1969, the Lower House of the Vietnamese Congress held

hearings about abuses in the Phoenix VCI elimination program. Eighty-

six Deputies signed a petition calling for its immediate termination.

Among the charges: Special Police knowingly arrested innocent people

for the purpose of extortion; people were detained for as long as

eight months before being tried; torture was commonplace. Noting that

it was illegal to do so, several deputies protested instances in

which American troops detained or murdered suspects without

Vietnamese authority. Others complained that village chiefs were not

consulted before raids, such as the one on Thanh Phong.

After an investigation in 1970, four Congresspersons concluded that

the CIA's Phoenix Program violated international law. "The people of

these United States," they jointly stated, "have deliberately imposed

upon the Vietnamese people a system of justice which admittedly

denies due process of law," and that in doing so, "we appear to have

violated the 1949 Geneva Convention for the protection of civilian

During the hearings, U.S. Representative Ogden Reid said, "if the

Union had had a Phoenix program during the Civil War, its targets

would have been civilians like Jefferson Davis or the mayor of Macon,

Georgia."

But the American establishment and media denied it then, and continue

to deny it until today, because Phoenix was a genocidal program --

and the CIA officials, members of the media who were complicit

through their silence, and the red-blooded American boys who carried

it out, are all war criminals. As Michael Ratner a lawyer at the

Center for Constitutional Rights told CounterPunch: "Kerrey should be

tried as a war criminal. His actions on the night of February 24-25,

1969 when the seven man Navy Seal unit which he headed killed

approximately twenty unarmed Vietnamese civilians, eighteen of whom

were women and children was a war crime. Like those who murdered at

My Lai, he too should be brought into the dock and tried for his

Phoenix, alas, also was fiendishly effective and became a template

for future CIA operations. Developed in Vietnam and perfected with

the death squads and media blackout of Afghanistan and El Salvador,

it is now employed by the CIA around the world: in Colombia, in

Kosovo, in Ireland with the British MI6, and in Israel with its other

The paymasters at the Pentagon will keep cranking out billion dollar

missile defense shields and other Bush league boondoggles. But when

it comes to making the world safe for international capitalism, the

political trick is being more of a homicidal maniac, and more cost

Incredibly, Phoenix has become fashionable, it has adhered a kind of

political cachet. Governor Jesse Ventura claims to have been a Navy

Seal and to have "hunted man." Fanatical right-wing US Representative

Bob Barr, one of the Republican impeachment clique, has introduced

legislation to "re-legalize" assassinations. David Hackworth,

representing the military establishment, defended Kerrey by

saying "there were thousands of such atrocities," and that in 1969

his own unit committed "at least a dozen such horrors." Jack Valenti,

representing the business establishment and its financial stake in

the issue, defended Kerrey in the LA Times, saying, "all the

normalities (sic) of a social contract are abandoned," in war.

A famous Phoenix operation, known as the My Lai Massacre, was

proceeding along smoothly, with a grand total of 504 Vietnamese women

and children killed, when a soldier named Hugh Thompson in a

helicopter gunship saw what was happening. Risking his life to

preserve that "social contract," Thomson landed his helicopter

between the mass murderers and their victims, turned his machine guns

on his fellow Americans, and brought the carnage to a halt.

Same with screenwriter and journalist Bill Broyles, Vietnam veteran,

and author Brothers In Arms, an excellent book about the Vietnam War.

Broyles turned in a bunch of his fellow Marines for killing civilians.

If Thompson and Broyles were capable of taking individual

responsibility, everyone is. And many did.

There is no doubt that Bob Kerrey committed a war crime. As he

admits, he went to Vietnam with a knife clenched between his teeth

and did what he was trained to do kidnap, assassinate and mass

murder civilians. But there was no point to his atrocity as he soon

learned, no controlling legal authority. He became a conflicted

individual. He remembers that they killed women and children. But he

thinks they came under fire first, before they panicked and started

shooting back. The fog of war clouds his memory

But there isn't that much to forget. Thanh Phong was Kerrey's first

mission, and on his second mission a grenade blew off his foot,

abruptly ending his military career.

Plus which there are plenty of other people to remind Kerrey of what

happened, if anyone will listen. There's Gerhard Klann, the Seal who

disputes Kerrey's account, and two Vietnamese survivors of the raid,

Pham Tri Lanh and Bui Thi Luam, both of whom corroborate Klann's

account, as does a veteran Viet Cong soldier, Tran Van Rung.

As CBS News was careful to point out, the Vietnamese were former VC

and thus hostile witnesses and because there were slight

inconsistencies in their stories, they could not be believed. Klann

became the target of Kerrey's pr machine, which dismissed as an

Then there is John DeCamp. An army captain in Vietnam, DeCamp worked

for the organization under CIA executive William Colby that

ostensibly managed Phoenix after the CIA let it go in June 1969.

DeCamp was elected to the Nebraska State Senate and served until

1990. A Republican, he claims that Kerrey led an anti-war march on

the Nebraska state capitol in May 1971. DeCamp claims that Kerrey put

a medal, possibly his bronze star, in a mock coffin, and said, "Viet

Cong or North Vietnamese troops are angelic compared with the

Kerrey claims he was in Peru visiting his brother that day. But he

definitely accepted his Medal of Honor from Richard Nixon on 14 May

1970, a mere ten days after the Ohio National guard killed four

student protestors at Kent State. With that badge of honor pinned on

his chest, Kerrey began walking the gilded road to success. Elected

Governor of Nebraska in November 1982, he started dating Deborah

Winger, became a celebrity hero, was elected to the US Senate, became

vice-chair of Senate Committee on Intelligence, and in 1990 staged a

run for president. One of the most highly regarded politicians in

America, he showered self-righteous criticism on draft dodger Bill

Bob Kerrey is a symbol of what it means to be an American, and the

patriots have rallied to his defense. And yet Kerrey accepted a

bronze star under false pretenses, and as John DeCamp suggests, he

may have been fragged by his fellow Seals. For this, he received the

John DeCamp calls Bob Kerrey "emotionally disturbed" as a result of

And Kerrey's behavior has been pathetic. In order to protect himself

and his CIA patrons from being tried as a war criminals, Bob Kerrey

has become a pathological liar too. Kerrey says his actions at Than

Phong were an atrocity, but not a war crime. He says he feels

remorse, but not guilt. In fact, he has continually rehabbed his

position on the war itself-moving from an opponent to more recently

an enthusiast. In a 1999 column in the Washington Post, for example,

Kerrey said he had come to view that Vietnam was a "just war. "Was

the war worth the effort and sacrifice, or was it a mistake?" Kerrey

wrote. "When I came home in 1969 and for many years afterward, I did

not believe it was worth it. Today, with the passage of time and the

experience of seeing both the benefits of freedom won by our

sacrifice and the human destruction done by dictatorships, I believe

the cause was just and the sacrifice not in vain."

Then at the Democratic Party Convention in Los Angeles last summer

Kerrey lectured the delegates that they shouldn't be ashamed of the

war and that they should treat Vietnam veterans as war heroes: "I

believe I speak for Max Baucus and every person who has ever served

when I say I never felt more free than when I wore the uniform of our

country. This country - this party - must remember." Free? Free to

murder women and children. Is this a consciousness of guilt or

CBS News also participated in constructing a curtain of lies. As does

every other official government or media outlet that knows about the

CIA's Phoenix Program, which continues to exist and operate worldwide

Because if the name of one targeted Viet Cong cadre can be obtained,

then all the names can be obtained, and then a war crimes trial

becomes imperative. And that's the last thing the Establishment will

Average Americans, however, consider themselves a nation ruled by

laws and an ethic of fair play, and with the Kerry confession comes

an opportunity for America to redefine itself in more realistic

terms. The discrepancies in his story beg investigation. He says he

was never briefed on the rules of engagement. But a "pocket card"

with the Laws of Land Warfare was given to each member of the US

Does it matter that Kerrey would lie about this? Yes. General Bruce

Palmer, commander of the same Ninth Division that devastated Kien Koa

Province in 1969, objected to the "involuntary assignment" of

American soldiers to Phoenix. He did not believe that "people in

uniform, who are pledged to abide by the Geneva Conventions, should

be put in the position of having to break those laws of warfare."

It was the CIA that forced soldiers like Kerrey into Phoenix

operations, and the hidden hand of the CIA lingers over his war

crime. Kerrey even uses the same rationale offered by CIA officer

DeSilva. According to Kerrey, "the Viet Cong were a thousand per cent

more ruthless than" the Seals or U.S. Army.

But the Geneva Conventions, customary international law and the

Uniform Code of Military Justice all prohibit the killing of

noncombatant civilians. The alleged brutality of others is no

justification. By saying it is, Kerrey implicates the people who

generated that rationale: the CIA. That is why there is a moral

imperative to scrutinize the Phoenix Program and the CIA officers who

created it, the people who participated in it, and the journalists

who covered it up to expose the dark side of our national psyche,

the part that allows us to employ terror to assure our world

To accomplish this there must be a war crimes tribunal. This won't be

easy. The US government has gone to great lengths to shield itself

from such legal scrutiny, at the same it selectively manipulates

international institutions, such as the UN, to go after people like

According to human rights lawyer Michael Ratner the legal avenues for

bringing Kerrey and his cohorts to justice are quite limited. A civil

suit could be lodged against Kerrey by the families of the victims

brought in the United States under the Alien Tort Claims Act. "These

are the kinds of cases I did against Gramajo, Pangaitan (Timor),"

Ratner told us. "The main problem here is that it is doubtful the

Vietnamese would sue a liberal when they are dying to better

relations with the US. I would do this case if could get plaintiffs--

so far no luck." According to Ratner, there is no statute of

limitations problem as it is newly discovered evidence and there is a

stron argument particularly in the criminal context that there is no

But criminal cases in the US present a difficult, if not impossible,

prospect. Now that Kerrey is discharged from the Navy, the military

courts, which went after Lt. Calley for the My Lai massacre, has no

jurisdiction over him. "As to criminal case in the US--my pretty

answer is no," says Ratner. "The US first passed a war crimes statute

(18 USC sec. 2441 War Crimes) in 1996--that statute makes

what Kerrey did a war crime punishable by death of life imprisonment--

but it was passed after the crime and criminal statutes are not

retroactive." In 1988, Congress enacted a statute against genocide,

which was might apply to Kerrey's actions, but it to can't be applied

retroactively. Generally at the time of Kerrey's acts in Vietnam, US

criminal law did not extend to what US citizens did overseas unless

[As a senator, Kerrey, it should be noted, voted for the war crimes

law, thus opening the opportunity for others to be prosecuted for

crimes similar to those he that committed but is shielded from.]

The United Nations is a possibility, but a long shot. They could

establish an ad hoc tribunal such as it did with the Rwanda ICTR and

Yugoslavia ICTY. "This would require action by UN Security council

could do it, but what are the chances?" says Ratner. "There is still

the prospect for a US veto What that really points out is how those

tribunals are bent toward what the US and West want."

Prosecution in Vietnam and or another country and extradition is also

a possibility. It can be argued that war crimes are crimes over which

there is universal jurisdiction--in fact that is obligation of

countries-under Geneva Convention of 1948--to seek out and prosecute

war criminals. "Universal jurisdiction does not require the presence

of the defendant--he can be indicted and tried in some countries in

absentia--or his extradition can be requested", says Ratner. "Some

countries may have statutes permitting this. Kerrey should check his

travel plans and hire a good lawyer before he gets on a plane. He can

Douglas Valentine is the author of The Phoenix Program, the only

comprehensive account of the CIA's torture and assassination

operation in Vietnam, as well as TDY a chilling novel about the CIA

and the drug trade.

If you are interested in a free subscription to The

May 23, 2001 | San Francisco Bay Guardian

Berlusconi wins, democracy loses in Italy

A change of government in Italy is easy to ignore given that it

happens so often. But the May 13 ballot won by billionaire media

magnate Silvio Berlusconi warrants special attention. His election as

prime minister of Italy's 59th government since World War II should

trigger alarm bells in any self-respecting democracy.

A flamboyant demagogue with extremist allies, Berlusconi ran as head

of a far-right-tilting, populist coalition that embraced openly

racist and neo-fascist parties. The Italian media mogul-turned-

politician compares himself to Napoleon, delights in ridiculing AIDS

victims, and is chummy with Rupert Murdoch. The two TV tycoons

recently conferred at Berlusconi's headquarters in Rome, but neither

would divulge what they had talked about during their two-hour

Convicted four times on charges of perjury, falsifying financial

records, tax offenses, and bribery, Berlusconi has a shady track

record with several criminal indictments still pending. He was voted

into high political office despite allegations of mafia connections

and questions about how he acquired his personal fortune.

A walking, talking conflict of interest, Berlusconi has his fingers

in practically every big business pie in Italy. He is one of the

world's wealthiest men, presiding over a 14-billion-dollar financial

behemoth that includes Italy's biggest publishing house, its leading

advertising agency, its wealthiest department store chain, a major

investment firm, extensive real estate holdings, the country's top

soccer club, and, most significantly, Italy's three main private

As prime minister, Berlusconi will also control Italy's three public

TV stations, thereby commanding the attention of 90 percent of

Italy's viewers. Nearly the entire broadcasting system in the world's

sixth-largest industrialized economy will effectively rest in one

man's hands. "It is a situation without precedent in the Western

world," says Giovanni Sartori, professor emeritus of political

science at Columbia University and a longtime observer of Italian

Likened to "Citizen Kane on steroids," Berlusconi enjoys a

concentration of power over information that exists in no other

democratic country. Without his domination of the airwaves, he would

never have emerged as a significant political figure in Italy.

"Sua Emittenza" ("His Transmittance"), as Berlusconi is widely known,

marshaled his opinion-molding TV and print venues to demonize his

adversaries and further his own political ambitions. Blatantly

biased "news" broadcasts on Berlusconi's networks were virtually

indistinguishable from campaign ads and press releases hyping his

During the campaign, Berlusconi was the most visible presence on

Italian TV, while his opponents received perfunctory coverage, at

best, on Berlusconi's channels. Because Italy's state television

doesn't run political commercials, Berlusconi's three national

networks exercised a virtual monopoly on election advertisements. His

rivals found themselves in the unenviable position of having to shell

out money to Berlusconi or forsake TV ads. "This is the only country

in the world where the political parties must pay their political

adversary in order to run an election campaign," says Giuseppe

Giulietti, a parliamentary representative of the Left Democrats, the

main party of what is now Italy's center-left opposition.

Outspending its rivals by more than twenty-to-one and taking

advantage of disproportionate access to national media, Berlusconi's

rightist coalition was able to secure absolute majorities in both

houses of parliament. His own party, Forza Italia, which he launched

seven years ago, is today the biggest vote-getter in the country.

Berlusconi's critics charge that his media-based business empire is

so vast and so influential that he cannot serve as prime minister

without undermining political pluralism in Italy. Declaring

him "unfit to govern," the conservative, pro-business British

Economist went so far as to brand Berlusconi a danger to European

democracy. Several other European newspapers emphasized the ongoing

criminal cases he faces as well as the unhealthy concentration of

power that he wields. Berlsuconi was also roundly chastised for his

willingness to forge opportunistic alliances with right-wing

Berlusconi's principal governing partner is Gianfranco Fini, a suave,

49-year-old politician who had cut his teeth as leader the Italian

Social Movement (MSI), Europe's oldest neofacist party. It is

significant to note that Berlusconi publicly aligned himself with

Fini before the MSI chief gave his organization a face-lift and

renamed it the National Alliance in 1994. (That year, Berlusconi and

Fini partnered for the first time to form a short-lived national

government.) The National Alliance recently grabbed 11 percent of the

vote, ensuring that Fini will be deputy prime minister in the new

One cannot take at face value Fini's claim that he is now a

mainstream conservative as long as the identity of his party remains

inextricably bound up with its fascist heritage. Despite Fini's

attempts to distance himself from the most extreme elements of the

National Alliance, many of its members still harbor nostalgia for

Mussolini's Blackshirts. While Fini cultivates a more moderate image,

the same cannot be said for several of his close associates,

including Francesco Storace, National Alliance president of the Lazio

region. Storace wants to rewrite school textbooks, which he says give

Berlusconi's Forza Italia party also made an electoral pact in Sicily

with Fiammi Tricolore, an unapologetically fascist sect that rejects

Fini's efforts to mainstream the far right movement. Popular among

skinheads and neo-Nazis, Tricolor Flame is led by Pino Rauti, a

veteran of the terrorist underground. Four members of Ordine Nouvo

("New Order"), a neofascist group formed by Rauti, are currently on

trial for a 1969 bomb attack in Milan that killed 16 people and

And then there's Umberto Bossi, head of the xenophobic Northern

League, which holds the balance of power for the ruling coalition in

Italy's lower house of parliament even though it polled only four

percent of the vote. Bossi's crude and incessant immigrant-baiting

has drawn comparisons with Austrian far right leader Jorg Haider, who

was among the first to congratulate Berlusconi for his electoral

Indicative of the rising tide of racist politics in Europe, Bossi has

called for the Italian navy to shoot at ships suspected of carrying

undocumented immigrants into the country. Strident anti-immigration

rhetoric was also a staple of the Berlusconi campaign, while his TV

stations stoked public anxiety by depicting Italy as a nation overrun

by illegal migrants and foreign criminals.

Not surprisingly, the six criminal cases still pending against

Berlusconi have not gotten much coverage on his networks. If his

legal wrangles are discussed at all on privately-owned Italian

television, it is to provide an opportunity for Berlusconi to lash

out at his detractors. He sloughs off compelling evidence of

corruption by claiming that all such charges are communist-inspired

slander. In the world according to Berlusconi, "Communists eat

babies" (his own words) and a conspiracy of left-wing magistrates is

hell-bent on undermining his mandate to save Italy.

Shamelessly pro-American, Berlusconi promises to be Washington's best

friend on the continent. He has already broken ranks with the rest of

Europe by endorsing the Bush administration's controversial plan for

a new missile defense system. Berlusconi also supports Bush's

decision to withdraw from the Kyoto accord on global warming.

Portraying himself as an outsider who took on and defeated the

business establishment, Berlusconi says he'll run the country

as "Italy, Inc," applying the same energy and skills that made him a

successful entrepreneur. Endlessly embellished by his own media

consortium, the myth of the self-made man is central to Berlusconi's

mystique. But there is no such thing as a self-made billionaire,

A former nightclub crooner on Mediterranean cruise ships, Berlusconi

built his business empire not by bucking the establishment but by

paying it off. Although he fashioned an image of himself as a

maverick newcomer untainted by the corrupt old guard of Italian

governance, he owes much of his success to a shadowy network of

In the late 1970s, Berlusconi secretly joined Propaganda Due (P-2),

an elite, fascist-leaning masonic lodge that is often mentioned in

accounts of Italian intrigue. Described by Italian judges as an

illegal "state within a state," the P-2 had high-level connections to

Italian intelligence agencies, the armed forces, leading financiers,

and captains of industry. P-2 members would be implicated in nearly

every major political scandal that has shaken Italy since the mid-

1960s - including neofascist bombings, coup plots, and a major

smuggling operation that specialized in arms and drugs, while

laundering dirty cash through front companies owned by the Vatican

Berlusconi's name was found on a list of P-2 initiates after a 1981

police raid in Tuscany. Of the 963 names on the P-2 roster, most were

prominent Italians. The list also featured several dubious characters

from Argentina, including General Juan Peron, the former president;

Jose Lopez Rega, head of the Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance, a

notorious death squad; and Admiral Emilio Massera, a member of the

military junta responsible for the disappearance of 30,000 people

during the so-called dirty war in the 1970s and early 1980s.

Philip Guarino, a Republican Party operative based in Washington, was

one of the few Americans inducted into the P-2 club. For many years,

Guarino functioned as leader of the Italian section of the GOP's

ethnic outreach division, a project that had recruited several key

figures from fascist Eastern European émigré organizations. Guarino

relinquished his political post in 1988 when his name surfaced in a

flurry of news reports that exposed the role of a dozen or so fascist

collaborators who worked with the GOP's ethnic heritage arm.

The public exposure of the P-2 lodge sent shockwaves rippling through

Italy and cut short the careers of several public officials.

Convicted of making false statements about his P-2 membership,

Berlusconi managed to escape from the scandal unscathed thanks

largely to the help he received from Socialist Party chief Bettino

Craxi, who became Italy's prime minister in the mid-1980s. Craxi was

the best man at Berlusconi's second wedding, and both men were adept

at exploiting the lucrative system of political patronage and illicit

pay-offs that flourished in postwar Italy. Craxi was instrumental in

thwarting early attempts to rein in Berlusconi's media outlets, and

Berlusconi, in turn, actively promoted Craxi on his TV stations.

During this period, Craxi and other right-wing political leaders in

Italy knew they could count on the unflinching support from

Washington, which propped up a political order that was riddled with

corruption in an all-out effort to keep the sizable Italian Communist

Party from gaining power. But when the Cold War ended, so did the

Communist threat, and the entire political edifice in Italy crumbled

Hundreds of public officials were arrested in the early 1990s as the

result of a "clean hands" campaign by Italian magistrates who

uncovered massive corruption and Mafia influence within the

mainstream parties. Craxi fled to Tunisia to avoid a prison sentence.

Prosecutors in Milan subsequently traced six million dollars that had

been funneled from Berlusconi's Finnivest company to foreign bank

accounts controlled by Craxi, who died in Tunisia last year.

Staving off a series of legal challenges, Berlusoni emerged from the

bowels of a thoroughly rotten political system. He surged forward at

a propitious moment to fill the void created by the sudden demise of

the two leading mainstream right-wing forces in Italy, the Christian

Democrats and the Socialists. Bereft of party protection, which had

always been crucial to his commercial success, Berlusconi needed to

enter the political arena directly. So he founded Forza Italia, which

governed briefly in 1994 before giving way to six-and-a-half years of

Why was Berlusconi, a broadcast baron, permitted to compete as a

candidate in the first place? And how could Italy have allowed such a

travesty to occur once again this year? The political bankruptcy of

the center-left coalition is partly to blame for Berlusconi's

comeback. Rather than passing tough antitrust measures to break up

Berlusconi's media assets, the center-left government focused its

attention on imposing stringent economic prescriptions required by

the European Union (EU) so that Italy could participate in the single

Qualifying for the euro was the top priority of the center-left

administration, which implemented major cuts in social welfare

programs in order to comply with rigid EU demands. Meanwhile,

unemployment remained at chronically high levels in Italy. With

dissatisfaction palpable at the grassroots, the "Olive Tree

alliance," as the center-left was called, sought to keep open the

possibility of including Berlusconi's party in a "national unity"

government, should the need arise. Nobel Prize winning dramatist

Dario Fo bemoaned the short-sighted strategy of the Olive Tree

coalition, which miscalculated when it assumed that Berlusconi's

tangled web of companies and his checkered past would render him

politically vulnerable. "In a thoroughly slavish manner," says

Fo, "the left kept Berlusconi in the game, because they believed this

was the best way to improve their prospects. . . This is the only

reason that things have advanced as far as they have."

Outflanked during the recent election campaign by a coordinated media

blitzkrieg, those who underestimated Berlusconi will pay a steep

price. Immediately after the vote was tallied, his "post-fascist"

partner, Gianfranco Fini, promised that heads would roll at the state-

owned RAI television network, which had broadcast programs critical

Martin A. Lee (martin@sfbg.com) is the author of Acid Dreams and The

Beast Reawakens, a book on neo-fascism. His column, Reality Bites,

If you are interested in a free subscription to The