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Behind Colin Powell's Legend: Part One
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Imagine, if you can, Hillary Klinton running for president. (It isn't hard to do.) Imagine that she loses the popular vote, but wins an electoral college "mandate" due to a victory of less than 1,000 votes in New York. At the time, both the Governor of New York and its Secretary of State are Democrats, who are tied very closely to Hillary, and quickly attempt to declare Hillary the winner. Imagine also that her victory is aided by over 10,000 double-punched ballots in a conservative Christian county, where the ballot had a faulty design, and the double votes are for both the GOP candidate and Ralph Nader. Question: would anyone of a conservative bent be declaring this was a legitimate election? Would they be urging the GOP candidate to give up for the "good of the country?" Would they be arguing that all this talk of election fraud was hurting the stock market and the ordeal needed to be finished so the nation can heal? And perhaps most important, would anyone be writing to The Konformist, calling it "partisan" for not defending Hillary's "election"?
Keep in mind before you answer these questions one thing: the gods have a very wicked sense of humor.
For those who wonder why The Konformist has been so "one-sided" on this issue, it is because we actually try to adhere to consistency. This is not, after all, about Bush vs. Gore. It is about Bush vs. the right to representation, a right that has been effectively trampled on in the past month. The choice is a simple, slam-dunk decision.
The truth is, we could care less for Al Gore: he is a fraud who didn't deserve a single vote he received in winning this election. We also do find it ironic that a political team trying to fight organized larceny of the Oval Office has a man named "Daley" as its spokesman. But you don't need to defend Gore and Daley to find disgust at the behavior of the Bush Campaign this year. They have put both Watergate and the October Surprise to shame.
It really is quite amazing. At least Tricky Dick was honest enough to call his campaign team "CREEP". On the other hand, let's give Shrub some credit: unlike his father (who, after all, was a wimp) he has been brash enough to try to steal the presidency from people in plain view.
It didn't have to be this way: faced with the evidence of a dubious result in Florida, G.W. could've demanded a revote, giving some speech about how he wouldn't want to be president if his election was in doubt. (And, contrary to one of the many lies which has been in print, this wouldn't break any law. In fact, due to faulty voting machines, there was a revote in one Maryland county for the 1972 election, eight days after election day. The revote was included in the state's final totals and certified by Congress, a pretty compelling precedent.) Hell, he could've earned some sorely missing respect for such a brave act, even if he did lose a legitimate revote. But that would be too honorable a deed to expect from G.W., or, for that manner, any member of the Bush family.
We could go on and on about the scandals in Florida: the double-punched ballots, the claims of pre-punched ballots in African-American voters, the harassment and suppression of African-American voters by Florida Highway Patrol pigs. We could, but it's just not worth it: anyone who missed it the first time clearly won't pay attention now. The key to understand Votescam 2000 is that it isn't a conspiracy. It is out in the open.
That means that the real blame for this mess lies on the shoulders of the American people. As Bill Klinton tried to cheerfully put it recently, "Some countries, people would be in the streets over this. I'm thankful I live in a country with enough faith in its democracy." Translation: what a pathetic gang of lazy suckers you all are.
That said, here are the other Beastly characters behind the worst election scandal in the history of our once supposedly great nation, all who get a share of this scandalous prize:
* George W. Bush: The sorry excuse for a man at the center of the controversy. Son of one of the most creepy characters of the 20th century.
* Richard "Donkey Dick" Cheney: Shrub's VP candidate. The man who led the Pentagon during the Persian Gulf massacre and then rewarded with sleazy Texas oil-executive job.
* Donald Evans: Bush's Campaign Chairman, and thus the chief organizer of the theft.
* Karen Hughes: Bush Communications Director. Leading blowhard for team Bush, perhaps the only person who could exceed Bush in the smarmy department.
* Karl Rove: Bush Chief Strategist. Head Machiavelli in the defense and promotion of the grand larceny.
* Ari Fleischer: Bush Spokesman. Tried to argue that Palm Beach County was a Buchanan stronghold.
* Theodore Olson: Bush Lead Counsel. Longtime reactionary lawyer for hire.
* James Baker: Daddy's Hired Gun. Came in and repeatedly pronounced slurs of any public official who dared to get in the way of the gross violations of democratic rights.
* John Ellis "Jeb" Bush: Brother of George W. and Governor of Florida. The crooked rigging which has occurred in Gatorland has his fingerprints all over the place.
* Katherine Harris: Florida Secretary of State. A blatant partisan for both Bush brothers (and perhaps not merely because of politics), she has abused her office in a repulsive manner while hiding behind her caked makeup.
* John Ellis: Fox Executive and Bush first cousin. The man who first pushed for the declaration of Shrub's "victory," a declaration soon followed like a parrot by the rest of the media.
* Xavier Suarez: Miami Ex-Mayor. Though he lost his election as Miami thanks to vote fraud and record falsification, he "helped fill out absentee ballot forms and enlist Republican absentee voters in Miami-Dade County" during the last election. (His own words.)
* John Sweeney: New York Congressman. Ordered a Miami-Dade County mob to "shut it down" when a recount threatened to overturn the Bush swindle.
* Dick Armey and Tom DeLay: House Majority Leader and House Majority Whip, both from Texas. In an unprecedented move, both vowed to block any move aimed at electing Gore in Congress when it meets in joint session to accept the results of the electoral college.
Contrary to the sales job from "conservative" circles of a "liberal media", the right-wing had quite a few blowhards to defend the undefendable this election:
* Paul Gigot: Wall Street Journal Reporter who celebrated the "bourgeois riot" which shut down the vote counting and gloated over Representative Sweeney's potentially criminal involvement in a shutdown of voting.
* Paul Craig Roberts: In a fabulous David Duke impersonation, ranted in an article titled "Stop, Thief" that America was being stolen by Hispanics and Blacks from the Third World. Roberts is also a regular WSJ columnist.
* George Will: Twerpish intellectual dweeb who feigns enjoyment of baseball to cover for his effete manner. Incredibly whined of a "ferocity gap" in the election which he insisted the Democratic Party was leading, and alleged a "slow-motion larceny" was in effect.
* Charles Krauthammer, Michael Kelly, Robert Novak: Trio of hacks in the snobbish Will mold, all hammering in on and promoting the same lies.
* Ann Coulter: Shilling for the GOP is a equal opportunity program for women. Insulted Palm Beach voters by declaring them "stupid," "feeble-minded" "jackasses," while the Florida Supreme Court represented "a kangaroo court."
* Richard Cohen: Washington Post Columnist. Though supposedly a "liberal", declared the following: "Given the present bitterness, given the angry irresponsible charges being hurled by both camps, the nation will be in dire need of a conciliator, a likable guy who will make things better and not worse. That man is not Al Gore. That man is George W. Bush." As the World Socialist Web Site would note, his article "combines political idiocy and cowardice."
* George Bush: Batting cleanup. Needs no introduction.
The Votescam 2000 merely is the icing on the cake for the senior Bush, and it is fitting that in the month before the 20th Century officially expires, lurking in the shadows, as usual, is Bush, now along with the rest of his family of unrepentant creeps. No question that, over the last fifty years, Bush has been the King of all Beastliness, and the Beasthood shall continue thanks to his demon-seed for a long time to go, no matter how the election ends.
And just how will this all end? Here's a clue: Al Gore's worst enemies weren't in the GOP but in his own party, who believe it would be politically wiser for the Democrats to cave in and shoot for the 2002 and 2004 elections, taking over Congress first, then the presidency. Little surprise: a party without principals can't be expected to defend people's right to vote. That certainly isn't an encouraging sign. Nor is the fact that Al Gore has gone out of his way to silence the protests of African-Americans outraged over the scandal. It appears Gore would prefer people not know that his legitimate victory has more to do with the disgust that Shrub and his party have rightfully earned from minorities than any admiration for a man that should have cake-walked into the Oval Office in the first place.
Win or lose, George W. Bush and co. have already taken Beasthood to a new recent low. And that says a lot, which is why we recognize them all.
In any case, we salute George W. Bush (and his slimy cohorts) as Beast of the Month. Congratulations, and keep up the great work, dudes!!!
Sources:
http://www.alternewswire.com/fix.htm
The Finest Collection of Votescam Links Going
Update: Finalizing the coup, on December 18, The Electoral College voted 271-266 George W. Bush as "president".
By Robert Parry
Let it be remembered that Texas Gov. George W. Bush, the loser across the United States by a third of a million votes, “won” the presidency through two key acts of raw power.
Bush's campaign sponsored a violent demonstration by Republican activists as ballots were about to be counted on Nov. 22. He then enlisted partisan Republicans on the U.S. Supreme Court to prevent a statewide recount in Florida before a Dec. 12 deadline.
On Nov. 22, about 150 rioters – led by Republican congressional staffers dispatched from Washington – charged the offices of the Miami-Dade County canvassing board as it was about to commence a partial recount of votes. With the mob roughing up Democrats and pounding on the walls, the canvassing board abruptly reversed itself and decided not to count those votes after all.
Rather than criticize this bizarre attack on what was then a court-ordered process, Bush reveled in its success.
His campaign sponsored a celebration for the demonstrators the next night at a swanky hotel in Fort Lauderdale. The “president-elect” even called to joke with the rioters about their Miami operation, according to the Wall Street Journal [Nov. 27, 2000]. At the party, singer Wayne Newton crooned Danke Schoen.
Then, after two more weeks of delays, the Florida Supreme Court ordered a partial statewide recount to examine ballots that had been kicked out by machines for supposedly having no choice for president.
On Saturday, Dec. 9, facing a deadline of Dec. 12 for certification of Florida’s electors, vote counters across the state began examining these so-called “under-votes.”
In the first few hours, the counters found scores of ballots with clear votes for president that had been missed by the machines. Other ballots were set aside for a judicial determination about whether a vote was registered or not.
With Bush’s lead at less than 200 votes and slipping, the Texas governor played his trump card. He turned to his five arch-conservative allies on the U.S. Supreme Court.
By a 5-4 majority, the court – for the first time in U.S. history – stopped the counting of votes cast by American citizens for president. The majority consisted of Justices William Rehnquist, Anthony Kennedy, Sandra Day O'Connor, Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia.
In a written explanation, Scalia made clear that the purpose of the extraordinary injunction against counting votes was to prevent Bush from losing his lead and having "a cloud" cast over the "legitimacy" of his presidency if the court decided to throw out the new votes.
Three days later, on Tuesday night only two hours before the Dec. 12 deadline was to expire, the same five justices issued a complex ruling that reversed the Florida Supreme Court’s recount order. The U.S. Supreme Court cited a hodgepodge of “constitutional” issues, including complaints about the lack of consistent standards in the Florida recount.
After having delayed any remedy up to the deadline, Bush’s five allies then demanded that any revised plan and recount be completed within two hours, a patently impossible task.
Twisting 'Equal Protection'
The five conservatives may have taken pleasure, too, in applying “equal protection” arguments to prevent the recount. Historically, Supreme Court liberals have used “equal protection” principles to strike down discrimination against African-Americans and other persecuted minorities.
Now, the five conservative justices were hoisting the liberals on their own petard. The “equal protection” argument asserted that the votes of other Florida citizens would be diluted if the ballots that had been kicked out by voting machines were counted using standards that varied from county to county.
The irony of the argument, however, couldn’t be missed. In wealthier voting precincts, new optical scanners were used to count votes and did the counting so efficiently that few of the votes cast for president were missed.
In poorer precincts, where African-Americans and retired Jewish voters were concentrated, older punch-card systems were used which failed to record thousands of votes for president. Just as poor neighborhoods ended up with older textbooks in their schools, they got stuck with antiquated voting machines.
To correct this imbalance and to count those votes, the Florida Supreme Court had ordered hand examination of those ballots statewide. In a few hours on Saturday, that recount discovered scores of missed votes.
But the U.S. Supreme Court – long the protector of the downtrodden in American society – was revealing itself in its new right-wing form. In stopping the recount, the court’s pro-Bush majority granted greater weight to the votes cast in wealthier precincts.
The traditional use of the “equal protection” principle of the U.S. Constitution had been turned on its head. The Constitution was now being cited to protect the privileged to the detriment of the poor.
Besides this ironic interpretation of “equal protection,” the U.S. Supreme Court relied on “reasoning” that – if applied fairly – would have judged the entire Florida election unconstitutional.
While excluding the hand recounts ordered by the Florida Supreme Court, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the inclusion of earlier hand recounting done in Republican areas that had boosted Bush’s total by hundreds of votes.
Also left in were scores of overseas absentee ballots, heavily favoring Bush, that were counted after some Republican counties waived legal requirements almost entirely.
Supposedly to avoid disenfranchising U.S. military personnel, ballots were accepted even though they lacked signatures, witnesses and dates. In a couple of cases, overseas ballots were faxed in and counted, clearly in violation of state law.
In two better known cases in Seminole and Martin counties, Republicans were allowed to fix errors on absentee ballot applications also in violation of state law. The state courts ruled, however, that these ballots should be counted, despite the irregularities, because the sanctity of the vote was more important than technical voting rules.
Those situations all favored Gov. Bush.
Judicial Politics
Given the lack of consistent standards throughout Florida and the waiving of technical legal requirements in other cases, a logical extension of the U.S. Supreme Court’s logic would be that the entire presidential election in the Florida should be thrown out as unconstitutional.
Or – if logic were again followed honestly rather than politically – the imperfect remedy of examining and possibly counting thousands of “under-votes” should have been allowed to go forward.
But at those two crucial moments when American democracy hung in the balance, Gov. Bush and his advisers turned first to violent demonstrators to attack the offices of vote counters and then to political allies on the U.S. Supreme Court to complete the coup d'etat.
In the memorable words of Justice Scalia, the leading Bush partisan, the majority’s concern was that a count of Florida’s vote that showed Bush to be the loser – when the court might later make him the winner – would not square with the need for “democratic stability.”
In a dissenting opinion on Dec. 12, Justice John Paul Stevens, an appointee of President Gerald Ford, said the majority's action in blocking the Florida recount "can only lend credence to the most cynical appraisal of the work of judges throughout the land."
Justices Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, appointees of President Bill Clinton, said in another 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 the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law."
Yet, beyond those stern words about the U.S. Supreme Court's mockery of democracy, worse could lie ahead.
The nation now must be aware that the U.S. Supreme Court – long trusted as the protector of the nation’s democratic principles – has been transformed into a vehicle for upholding whatever partisan legal strategies George W. Bush and his incoming Justice Department choose to direct against those who stand in the way.
The "rule of law" could fast become a code word for tyranny.
With its Dec. 12 ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court has marked itself as the ultimate weapon for its favored politicians to wield against their enemies. That is the final cautionary tale of Election 2000, as the nation enters a dangerous new era.
In the end, history must record that the U.S. Supreme Court made George W. Bush the “winner” of the presidency, though he was the loser of the popular vote, both nationally and apparently in the crucial state of Florida.
Supreme Court overrides US voters: a ruling that will live in infamy
By the Editorial Board
14 December 2000
The ruling issued Tuesday by the US Supreme Court marks a turning point in US history. It constitutes a fundamental and irrevocable break with democracy and the traditional forms of bourgeois legality.
There is no precedent for the action taken by the Court. After an election in which 100 million people voted, the result has been determined by five unelected judges in a five-to-four split decision. The majority on the Court halted the counting of votes in Florida for the transparent purpose of preventing Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore, who won the popular vote nationally, from getting credit for ballots cast in his favor and thereby winning the state's pivotal electoral votes. The judges stole the election and threw it to their Republican ally George W. Bush.
They did so in broad view of the American people, overturning a decision of the Florida Supreme Court and dismissing the warnings of their fellow justices, who protested in vain that the ruling would undermine the legitimacy of the judiciary and discredit the United States' claims to represent democratic principles.
One section of the decision handed down by Chief Justice William Rehnquist and associate justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Sandra Day O'Connor and Anthony Kennedy bears quoting. In its bald denial of the right of suffrage, it reveals the essence of their action:
“The individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote for electors for the President of the United States unless and until the state legislature chooses a statewide election as the means to implement its power to appoint members of the Electoral College.”
The majority decision goes on to say that any state legislature can, at any time, revoke the popular vote for president and “if it so chooses, select the electors itself.”
The very methods employed by the Bush campaign and its allies on the Supreme Court, and the overtly anti-democratic basis of their actions, reveal the nature of the policies the new administration intends to carry out. Bush speaks for the most ruthless and avaricious sections of the ruling class—those who demand the removal of all legal, political and moral limitations on the exploitation of the working class, the realization of profit and the accumulation of personal wealth.
The 2000 election brought to a head a bitter conflict over policy and strategy that has been raging within the US ruling elite for the past decade. A substantial section within the corporate and political establishment never accepted the legitimacy of the Democratic Clinton-Gore administration. Despite Clinton's efforts to conciliate the Republican right and adapt to its social agenda, powerful forces within financial and corporate circles saw his administration as a retreat from the aggressive anti-labor and pro-business policies of Reagan and the elder George Bush. They bitterly resented Clinton's token gestures toward social reform.
These forces sought to remove Clinton from office, backing the series of scandals and provocations that culminated in the impeachment and Senate trial of the Democratic president. The Supreme Court figured prominently in that attempted coup, beginning with its unanimous ruling in May of 1997 denying Clinton's request for a postponement of the Paula Jones sexual harassment suit until after his term of office. Chief Justice Rehnquist played a key role in the conspiracy, appointing the ultra-right judge who fired the first Whitewater independent counsel and replaced him with Kenneth Starr.
Having failed to bring down Clinton, these same forces have acted to hijack the 2000 election and return a Republican administration that will pursue a course of class confrontation and employ authoritarian methods.
No premise of Marxism is more hotly denounced by defenders of the capitalist system, liberal and conservative alike, than the theoretical conception that the state is an instrument of class rule, and that bourgeois democracy is, in the final analysis, a form of the dictatorship of capital. Yet the working out of the electoral crisis has provided a powerful confirmation of this basic Marxist precept. Five high court judges, the most elite representatives of the American bourgeoisie, have intervened to decide the election and override the votes of 50 million Gore supporters.
That the Court's action is an attack on democratic rights is acknowledged in the dissenting opinion of Associate Justice John Paul Stevens, who writes: “In the interest of finality, however, the majority effectively orders the disenfranchisement of an unknown number of voters whose ballots reveal their intent—and are therefore legal votes under state law—but were for some reason rejected by the ballot-counting machines.”
In concluding his bitter dissent, Stevens states: “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 the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.”
Here Stevens points to a significant aspect of the process that has unfolded over the past five weeks: the recklessness exhibited by the dominant factions within the US ruling elite that back the Republican Party. Their willingness to sacrifice the legitimacy of the Supreme Court in the eyes of broad sections of the public underscores the authoritarian trajectory of their policies. Public confidence in the Court is less critical to those who are breaking with democratic norms and moving in the direction of dictatorial rule.
It is, however, a fact that with the discrediting of the high court, every institution of the bourgeois state has fallen into disrepute. Congress has already been disgraced in the eyes of broad masses for its role in the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal and impeachment conspiracy. The odor of fraud hangs over the presidency even before George W. Bush takes up residency in the White House.
The deep-rooted social polarization within American society has now found a stark expression in the breakdown of traditional bourgeois democratic institutions. The fierce and protracted conflicts within the ruling elite have spilled over to society at large, and the masses can no longer be kept on the sidelines.
The social and political attacks that will be launched by the Bush administration will meet with ever greater resistance from working people and all those prepared to fight for democratic rights and social justice. The flabby opposition of Gore and the Democrats is one thing. The opposition of the working class is something altogether different.
The crisis of the 2000 election marks a new point of departure in American life, and, indeed, in world affairs. Social relations and political conditions will never return to what they were before November 7. The first task of the American working class is to work through this immense political experience, and draw the appropriate political lessons. The Socialist Equality Party and its political organ, the World Socialist Web Site, are prepared to play a leading role in this process of political education and preparation for the great class battles ahead.
See Also:
Democrats
prostrate before Supreme Court assault on democratic rights
[12 December 2000]
US Supreme
Court embraces a century-old legacy of racism and reaction
[12 December 2000]
Lessons from
history: the 2000 elections and the new "irrepressible conflict"
[11 December 2000]
Supreme Court
halts Florida vote count: A black day for American democracy
[10 December 2000]
Copyright
1998-2000
World Socialist Web Site
All rights reserved
Robert Sterling
Editor, The Konformist
http://www.konformist.com
http://www.thenation.com/special/20010101rehnquist.mhtml
NOMINATION OF JUSTICE WILLIAM HUBBS
REHNQUIST
HEARINGS before the COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY UNITED
STATES SENATE
SECOND SESSION on the NOMINATION OF JUSTICE WILLIAM HUBBS REHNQUIST
TO BE CHIEF JUSTICE OF THE UNITED STATES
July 29, 30, 31, and August 1, 1986
Statement of James J. Brosnahan to the United States
Senate Judiciary
Committee
August 1, 1986
My name is James J. Brosnahan. I was born and raised
in
Massachusetts, graduating from Boston College in 1956. After my wife
and I graduated from the Harvard Law School in 1959, we moved to
Phoenix, Arizona. Between April 10, 1961, and February of 1963, I
served as an assistant United States attorney, prosecuting federal
criminal cases in Phoenix. In 1963 I left Arizona and moved to San
Francisco, California, where I also served as an assistant United
States attorney prosecuting criminal cases. I am now in private
practice in San Francisco.
I am appearing today at the request of the Committee. I have never
volunteered any information about the events of 1962. My position is
that those who are interested in those events are entitled to
accurate answers from me as to what I know and specifically the
members of this Committee are entitled to the testimony of any
witness if they request it.
On Election Day in November 1962, in Phoenix, Arizona, several
assistant U.S. attorneys were assigned the task of receiving
complaints alleging illegal interference with the voting process. As
complaints came in, an assistant U.S. attorney accompanied by an FBI
agent would be dispatched to the precinct involved. On that day the
United States Attorney's Office in Phoenix received numerous
complaints from persons attempting to vote in precincts in South
Phoenix. At that time the population of south Phoenix was
predominantly black and Hispanic and voted overwhelmingly Democratic.
The Office of United States Senator Hayden also received complaints
on that day. The complaints we received alleged in various forms that
the Republican challengers were aggressively challenging many voters
without having a basis for that challenge. One of the complaints
frequently voiced on that day was that Republican challengers would
point out a black or Hispanic person in the voting line and question
whether he or she could read. (At this time it was my understanding
that Arizona law required that a voter be able to vote in English.)
According to the complaints received at the U.S. Attorney's Office,
these challenges were confrontational and made without a factual
basis to believe the person challenged had any problem reading. The
U.S. Attorney's Office was advised that because the challenges were
so numerous, the line of voters in several precincts grew long and
some black and Hispanic voters were discouraged from joining or
staying in the voters' line. It was also reported that at one of the
precincts there was a fist fight as a result of a confrontation
between a Republican challenger and another person.
Based on interviews with voters, polling officials, and my fellow
assistant U.S. attorneys, it was my opinion in 1962 that the
challenging effort was designed to reduce the number of black and
Hispanic voters by confrontation and intimidation.
I received a complaint on Election Day and went with an agent of the
Federal Bureau of Investigation to a polling place in south Phoenix.
The polling place had a long line of voters, several tables at which
sat challengers from both parties, and an official whose job was to
preside over allowing people to vote. There may have been one or two
other officials or clerks. When we arrived, the situation was tense.
At that precinct I saw William Rehnquist, who was serving as the only
Republican challenger. The FBI agent and I both showed our
identifications to those concerned, including Mr. Rehnquist. We both
talked to persons involved and the FBI agent interviewed anyone
having information about what had occurred at the polling place. In
fairness to Justice Rehnquist, I cannot tell the Committee in detail
what specific complaints there were or how Mr. Rehnquist responded to
them. The complaints did involve Mr. Rehnquist's conduct. Our arrival
and the showing of our identifications had a quieting effect on the
situation and after interviewing several witnesses, we left. Criminal
prosecution was declined as to all participants in the incidents at
various precincts that day. Prosecution was declined as a matter of
prosecutorial discretion. Our investigation was pursuant to the
following criminal statutes:
18 U.S.C. § 594, which made it a misdemeanor to intimidate, threaten,
coerce...or attempt to intimidate, threaten, or coerce...any other
person for the purpose of interfering with the right of such other
person to vote.
18 U.S.C. § 241, which made it a felony for two or more persons to
conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any citizen for
exercising his civil rights.
I have read the testimony and letter supplied by Justice Designate
William Rehnquist to this Committee in 1971. On pages 71 and 72 of
his testimony, he describes his role in the early 1960's as trying to
arbitrate disputes at polling places. That is not what Mr. Rehnquist
was doing when I saw him on Election Day in 1962. At page 491 of the
1971 Record in his letter, William Rehnquist stated: "In none of
these years did I personally engage in challenging the qualifications
of any voters." This does not comport with my recollection of the
events I witnessed in 1962 when Mr. Rehnquist did serve as a
challenger.
William Rehnquist was well-known to me in 1962. The Phoenix legal
community was a lot smaller than than it is now. Mr. Rehnquist had
clerked on the United States Supreme Court, which was a distinction
that few Phoenix lawyers had at that time. There is no question that
the person to whom I spoke at the polling place was William
Rehnquist.
In 1971 when Mr. Rehnquist was nominated to be a Justice of the
Supreme Court, I recalled the 1962 incident. No one contacted me
about it. I did not know until recently that this Committee had
actually inquired into the voting problems of those years.
December 11, 2000 |
| Supreme Court Intrigue |
By Mollie Dickenson
Insider information in Washington suggests that the
prospects of the U.S. Supreme Court letting the Florida vote count proceed are
even dimmer than some commentators speculate.
One of the court's supposed "swing vote," Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, is firmly on board for George W. Bush's victory.
According to a
knowledgeable source, O'Connor was visibly upset - indeed furious - when the
networks called Florida for Vice President Al Gore on Election Night. "This
is terrible," she said, giving the impression that she desperately wanted
Bush to win.
Some have heard that one
reason why O'Connor was so upset was that the O'Connors want to retire home to
Arizona, but will not do so if Gore wins. In that case, O'Connor will remain on
the court to deny Gore the opportunity to replace her.
Other friends say
that there is a different reason - that if Bush wins, Chief Justice William
Rehnquist will retire, and then O'Connor will take his place as the first female
chief justice. The president appoints Supreme Court
justices and the chief justice.
For Gore to rely on the
bipartisanship of the other "swing vote" on the Supreme Court, Justice
Anthony M. Kennedy, to save the day may also prove
Court watchers in
Washington say that it is doubtful that Kennedy would have signed the majority
opinion to stay the vote count on Saturday if he had any thought of changing his
mind after the hearing Monday.
For what it may be
worth, however, Kennedy has personal ties to Gore's
At holiday parties in Washington, meanwhile, Democrats are in deep depression about the Supreme Court's unprecedented move to shut down the counting of ballots in Florida.
One former U.S.
senator's wife said, "I can't bear to even discuss it. It's so outrageous
that it makes me physically ill." Her husband admitted to the same
symptoms.
A former high Clinton
appointee to the Justice Department said, "The
The paternalism toward
the American people displayed in Justice
Americans already know
that slightly different standards have been used to hand count Florida
"under votes." Broward County used freer standards than did Palm
Beach, but Broward's standards are legal and are incorporated in the statutes of
George W. Bush's Texas.
Most Americans who have
followed post-election events closely also know
Even if the U.S. Supreme
Court lets the vote counting proceed, the stay has delayed matters so the
Republican-dominated Florida state legislature can
Another Bush back-stop -
should the people's votes go to Gore - would be
Ultimately, the final decision about Florida's electoral votes could be made by the chief executive of Florida, Gov. Jeb Bush, the candidate's brother.
George W. Bush is nothing, if he's not well connected.
December 17, 2000 |
| Behind Colin Powell's Legend: Part One |
On Dec. 12, a 5-4 vote by the conservative majority of the U.S. Supreme Court awarded George W. Bush the presidency. To do so, the conservatives applied "equal-protection" safeguards that historically had protected blacks and other minorities from discrimination.
In this case, however, "equal protection" was used to stop the counting of votes -- many from African-American precincts -- that likely would have given Al Gore the victory in Florida and thus the presidency.
As Bush's strategy was underway, retired Gen. Colin Powell -- one of the nation's most prominent African-Americans -- met with Bush at his ranch in Texas. Based on the available record, Powell did nothing to dissuade Bush from his course of action, which effectively disenfranchised the 90 percent of the African-American voters who cast their ballots for Gore.
On Dec. 16, four days after the U.S. Supreme Court ruling, Bush appointed Powell to be secretary of state, the first African-American who would hold that post. As he has at other times in his military-political life, Colin Powell advanced his career by staying silent in the face of what many other African-Americans considered a gross injustice.
In view of these new developments and the questions they raise about Colin Powell's character, we are presenting an updated version of a series – "Behind Colin Powell's Legend" – that originally appeared at this Web site several years ago.
Behind Colin Powell's Legend – Part One
By Robert Parry & Norman Solomon
On a sunny autumn afternoon, Sept. 25, 1995, hundreds lined up on a sidewalk in San Francisco to grab a glimpse of a national icon.
Indoors, dozens of reporters and photographers packed into a room baking under the hot lights of television cameras.
An electricity filled the air, as if the crowd were waiting for a TV actor or a rock star, some super-hot celebrity. In a sense, they were. That day, on a mega-successful book tour, retired General Colin L. Powell was scheduled to answer a few questions and sign a few hundred books.
Preparations for the news conference were going smoothly, too, until two minutes before Powell was to appear.
Then, the bookstore managers fell into in a small panic over an intruder who was holding forth at the back of the room.
"How did he get here?" one manager asked the other.
"I don't know," the other answered. "I don't know how he got in here."
"He slipped in," said the first.
Their fretting focused on a middle-aged man in a wheelchair who was speaking to a cluster of reporters. He was hunched inside his silvery metal contraption. His jeans-clad legs dangled as if inert. His clothes were tidy but informal. His thinning hair was slightly unkempt.
The man spoke quietly, at a deliberate pace. He paused occasionally to search for and capture an elusive word. The reporters, most younger than he was, leaned over him with microphones and note pads. They seemed intrigued, but uncertain of his news value.
The bookstore managers did not have a quick solution to the intrusion, so they drifted back to their anticipation of Powell's arrival. "I have so much respect for this man," bubbled the store's director of sales.
The Hero Arrives
Moments later, San Francisco's mayor swept into the room. A wave of excitement followed as Colin Powell arrived and strode to the rostrum. He was the picture of confident authority, in his wire-rim executive-style glasses, a well-tailored pinstripe black business suit, a crisp pastel-blue shirt, a tasteful burgundy tie.
The mayor pumped Powell's hand and proclaimed a formal welcome for the first African-American to serve as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Reporters competed to toss some softball questions that the general smoothly swatted over the fence. Powell offered only a well-rehearsed glimpse into his private side.
"Writing the book," the retired general explained about My American Journey, "you learn a lot about yourself, you learn a lot about your family, you learn a lot about people who helped you along the way that you have forgotten about. So, it was very introspective for me, and I came away with a deeper appreciation of my own family roots, but an even greater appreciation of the nation we live in, the society we are a part of, and a faith in this society that I hope, as a result of this book and whatever I might do in the future, faith that I hope we can continue to pass on to new generations."
The second query was a self-help question about race: "What do you say to all the kids from all the Bronxes around this country who say, 'race is a stumbling block, poverty is a stumbling block?'"
"Race is a problem," Powell responded firmly. "Let it be someone else's problem. What you have to do is do your very best, study, work hard, believe in yourself, believe in your country."
As the news conference rolled on, Powell showed off the qualities that had set so many political hearts aflutter in fall 1995. But Powell encountered some friction when he started explaining why Americans were dazzled by the military again, a quarter century after the disastrous Vietnam War.
"Why that comes about," Powell said, "because of the superb performance of the armed forces of the United States in recent conflicts, beginning with the, I think, Panama invasion, and then through Desert Shield and Storm. And Americans saw that these young men and women were competent, proud, clean, patriotic, and they kind of fell in love with them again. And so it's not so much I think what--"
The voice from the back of the room suddenly broke in, an accusatory voice belonging to the man in the wheelchair. "You didn't tell the truth about the war in the Gulf, general," the man shouted.
Powell first tried to ignore the interruption, but the man persisted, hectoring Powell about the tens of thousands of civilian dead in the wars in Panama and Iraq, conflicts that brought Powell his national fame. Finally, Powell responded with a patronizing tone, but he called the dissenter by name.
"Hi, Ron, how are you? Excuse me, let me answer one question if I may."
"But why don't you tell them, why don't you tell them why--"
"The fact of the matter is--"
"My Lai--"
"I think the American people are reflecting on me the glory that really belongs to those troops," Powell continued, brushing aside the interruption.
Then, Ron Kovic's voice could be heard only in snippets beneath Powell's amplified voice. "General, let me speak--"
"I think what you're seeing is a reflection on me of what those young men and women have done in Panama, in Desert Storm, in a number of other places--"
"A hundred-and-fifty-thousand people, the bombing--"
"So it's very, it's very rewarding to see this change in attitude toward the military. It's not just Colin Powell, rock star. It's all of those wonderful men and women who do such a great job."
Born on the Fourth
Ron Kovic, a veteran of the Vietnam War, a soldier paralyzed in combat, was one of the few dissident voices at the bookstore that day. Kovic, author of the autobiography, Born on the Fourth of July, which was later made into a movie, tried to warn reporters not to swallow Powell-mania.
As Powell moved off to sign copies of his own book and the reporters began to depart, too, Kovic pleaded, "Colin Powell is not the answer. He sets a very dangerous precedent for this country."
From his wheelchair, Kovic had struggled to make that case. "I want the American people to know what the general hid from the American public during the Gulf War," Kovic said. "They hid the casualties. They hid the horror. They hid the violence. We don't need any more violence in our country. We need leaders who represent cooperation. We need leadership that represents peace. We need leaders that understand the tragedy of using violence in solving our problems. We have enough violence in this country."
To Kovic, Powell lacked a truly critical eye toward war.
"Did Colin Powell really learn the lessons of the Vietnam War? Did he learn that the war was immoral? I think that he learned another lesson. He learned to be more violent, to be more ruthless. And I've come as a counterbalance to that today. I've come as an alternative voice. And I think I speak for many, many people in this country when I say that General Colin Powell is a detriment to democracy; he's a danger to our Constitution; he's a danger to our democracy."
Kovic tried to persuade the journalists that the United States should confront its Cold War past, the way other nations, both right-wing and left-wing, have begun to do.
"America has got to go through its own perestroika, its own glasnost," Kovic continued. "I came down today because I just can't allow this to continue -- this honeymoon, this love affair with someone who was part of a policy which hurt so many human beings."
But few Americans listened to the advice of Ron Kovic that day or since. Hundreds of thousands bought Powell's 1995 memoirs, My American Journey, and the national press corps accorded the retired general near-unanimous acclaim. Besides being a hero for his accomplishments as the first black American to lead the nation into war, Powell became the most celebrated U.S. military officer since Dwight Eisenhower.
In the early days of the 1996 presidential campaign, journalists pined openly for Powell's candidacy. Liberals and centrists saw Powell as a role model for young blacks. Many conservatives admired Powell's success despite his humble origins. What slight criticism there was came mostly from the far right because of Powell's avowal that he was a "Rockefeller Republican" who supported abortion rights and affirmative action.
Questions
Still, what about Kovic's questions? What is Colin Powell's unvarnished record?
What did Powell do in Vietnam? What was his role in the Iran-contra scandal? How did he rise so smoothly as a black man in a white-dominated Republican national security establishment? Were Powell's victories in Panama and Iraq excessively violent and insufficiently concerned with civilian dead?
These are questions perhaps even more relevant today as Colin Powell stands as President-elect George W. Bush's first Cabinet choice, the man who would be the nation's first African-American secretary of state. Given Bush's inexperience in foreign affairs, the former general likely will wield broad power over U.S. foreign policy.
Many Americans see Colin Powell as a reassuring figure on the national stage. Yet, the accolades have prevented any balanced analysis of his positives and his negatives. Indeed, Powell's legend has created its own mystery.
Drawing from the available public record, including Powell's own memoirs, this series will address that mystery. Who is Colin Powell?
Vietnam Lessons
On Jan. 17, 1963, in South Vietnam's monsoon season, U.S. Army Capt. Colin Powell jumped from a military helicopter into a densely forested combat zone of the A Shau Valley, not far from the Laotian border.
Carrying an M-2 carbine, Capt. Powell was starting his first -- and only -- combat assignment. He was the new adviser to a 400-man unit of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN). Across jungle terrain, these South Vietnamese government troops were arrayed against a combined force of North Vietnamese regulars and local anti-government guerrillas known as the Viet Cong.
The 25-year-old Powell was arriving at a pivotal moment in the Vietnam War. To forestall a communist victory, President John F. Kennedy had dispatched teams of Green Beret advisers to assist the ARVN, a force suffering from poor discipline, ineffective tactics and bad morale.
Already, many U.S. advisers, most notably the legendary Col. John Paul Vann, were voicing concerns about the ARVN's brutality toward civilians. Vann feared that the dominant counterinsurgency strategy of destroying rural villages and forcibly relocating inhabitants while hunting down enemy forces was driving the people into the arms of the Viet Cong.
But as Colin Powell arrived, he was untainted by these worries. He was a gung-ho young Army officer with visions of glory. He brimmed with trust in the wisdom of his superiors. Capt. Powell also felt the deepest sympathy for the ARVN troops under his command, but only a cold contempt for the enemy.
Soon after his arrival, Powell and his ARVN unit left for a protracted patrol that fought leeches as well as Viet Cong ambushes. From the soggy jungle brush, the Viet Cong would strike suddenly against the advancing government soldiers. Often invisible to Powell and his men, the VC would inflict a few casualties and slip back into the jungles.
In My American Journey, Powell recounted his reaction when he spotted his first dead Viet Cong. "He lay on his back, gazing up at us with sightless eyes," Powell wrote. "I felt nothing, certainly not sympathy. I had seen too much death and suffering on our side to care anything about what happened on theirs."
While success against the armed enemy was rare, Powell's ARVN unit punished the civilian population systematically. As the soldiers marched through mountainous jungle, they destroyed the food and the homes of the region's Montagnards, who were suspected of sympathizing with the Viet Cong. Old women would cry hysterically as their ancestral homes and worldly possessions were consumed by fire.
"We burned down the thatched huts, starting the blaze with Ronson and Zippo lighters," Powell recalled. "Why were we torching houses and destroying crops? Ho Chi Minh had said the people were like the sea in which his guerrillas swam. ... We tried to solve the problem by making the whole sea uninhabitable. In the hard logic of war, what difference did it make if you shot your enemy or starved him to death?"
For nearly six months, Powell and his ARVN unit slogged through the jungles, searching for Viet Cong and destroying villages.
Then while on one patrol, Powell fell victim to a Viet Cong booby trap. He stepped on a punji stake, a dung-poisoned bamboo spear that had been buried in the ground. The stake pierced Powell's boot and quickly infected the young soldier's right foot. The foot swelled, turned purple and forced his evacuation by helicopter to Hue for treatment.
Although Powell's recovery from the foot infection was swift, his combat days were over. He stayed in Hue, reassigned to the operations staff of ARVN division headquarters. As part of his work, he handled intelligence data and oversaw a local airfield. By late autumn 1963, Powell's first Vietnam tour ended.
On his return to the United States, Powell did not join Vann and other early American advisers in warning the nation about the self-defeating counterinsurgency strategies. In 1963, Vann carried his prescient concerns back to a Pentagon that was not ready to listen to doubters. Then, when his objections fell on deaf ears, Vann resigned his commission and sacrificed a promising military career.
In contrast, Powell recognized that his early service in Vietnam put him on a fast track for military success. He signed up for a nine-month Infantry Officer Advanced Course that trained company commanders. In May 1965, Powell finished third in a class of 200 and was the top-ranked infantryman. A year later, he became an instructor.
In 1966, as the numbers of U.S. servicemen in Vietnam swelled, Powell received a promotion to major, making him a field-grade officer before his 30th birthday. In 1968, Powell continued to impress his superiors by graduating second in his class at Fort Leavenworth's Command and General Staff College, a prestigious school regarded as an essential way station for future Army generals.
Recognizing Powell as an emerging "water-walker" who needed more seasoning in the field, the Army dispatched Powell to a command position back in Vietnam. But on his second tour, Powell would not be slogging through remote jungles. On July 27, 1968, he arrived at an outpost at Duc Pho to serve as an executive officer.
Then, to the north, at the Americal headquarters in Chu Lai, division commander Maj. Gen. Charles Gettys saw a favorable mention of Powell in the Army Times. Gettys plucked Powell from Duc Pho and installed him on the general's own staff at Chu Lai.
Gettys jumped the young major ahead of more senior officers and made him the G-3 officer in charge of operations and planning. The appointment made "me the only major filling that role in Vietnam," Powell wrote in his memoirs.
But history again was awaiting Colin Powell. The Americal Division was already deep into some of the cruelest fighting of the Vietnam War. The "drain-the-sea" strategy that Powell had witnessed near the Laotian border continued to lead American forces into harsh treatment of Vietnamese civilians.
Though it was still a secret when Powell arrived at Chu Lai, Americal troops had committed an act that would stain forever the reputation of the U.S. Army. As Major Powell settled into his new assignment, a scandal was waiting to unfold.
My Lai
On May 16, 1968, a bloodied unit of the Americal division stormed into a hamlet known as My Lai 4. With military helicopters circling overhead, revenge-seeking American soldiers rousted Vietnamese civilians -- mostly old men, women and children -- from their thatched huts and herded them into the village's irrigation ditches.
As the round-up continued, some Americans raped the girls. Then, under orders from junior officers on the ground, soldiers began emptying their M-16s into the terrified peasants. Some parents used their bodies futilely to shield their children from the bullets. Soldiers stepped among the corpses to finish off the wounded.
The slaughter raged for four hours. A total of 347 Vietnamese, including babies, died in the carnage. But there also were American heroes that day in My Lai. Some soldiers refused to obey the direct orders to kill and some risked their lives to save civilians from the murderous fire.
A pilot named Hugh Clowers Thompson Jr. from Stone Mountain, Ga., was furious at the killings he saw happening on the ground. He landed his helicopter between one group of fleeing civilians and American soldiers in pursuit.
Thompson ordered his helicopter door gunner to shoot the Americans if they tried to harm the Vietnamese. After a tense confrontation, the soldiers backed off. Later, two of Thompson's men climbed into one ditch filled with corpses and pulled out a three-year-old boy whom they flew to safety.
Several months later, the Americal's brutality would become a moral test for Major Powell, too.
A letter had been written by a young specialist fourth class named Tom Glen, who had served in an Americal mortar platoon and was nearing the end of his Army tour. In the letter to Gen. Creighton Abrams, the commander of all U.S. forces in Vietnam, Glen accused the Americal division of routine brutality against civilians.
Glen's letter was forwarded to the Americal headquarters at Chu Lai where it landed on Major Powell's desk.
"The average GI's attitude toward and treatment of the Vietnamese people all too often is a complete denial of all our country is attempting to accomplish in the realm of human relations," Glen wrote.
"Far beyond merely dismissing the Vietnamese as 'slopes' or 'gooks,' in both deed and thought, too many American soldiers seem to discount their very humanity; and with this attitude inflict upon the Vietnamese citizenry humiliations, both psychological and physical, that can have only a debilitating effect upon efforts to unify the people in loyalty to the Saigon government, particularly when such acts are carried out at unit levels and thereby acquire the aspect of sanctioned policy."
Glen's letter contended that many Vietnamese were fleeing from Americans who “for mere pleasure, fire indiscriminately into Vietnamese homes and without provocation or justification shoot at the people themselves.” Gratuitous cruelty was also being inflicted on Viet Cong suspects, Glen reported.
“Fired with an emotionalism that belies unconscionable hatred, and armed with a vocabulary consisting of 'You VC,' soldiers commonly 'interrogate' by means of torture that has been presented as the particular habit of the enemy. Severe beatings and torture at knife point are usual means of questioning captives or of convincing a suspect that he is, indeed, a Viet Cong. ...
“It would indeed be terrible to find it necessary to believe that an American soldier that harbors such racial intolerance and disregard for justice and human feeling is a prototype of all American national character; yet the frequency of such soldiers lends credulity to such beliefs. ...
“What has been outlined here I have seen not only in my own unit, but also in others we have worked with, and I fear it is universal. If this is indeed the case, it is a problem which cannot be overlooked, but can through a more firm implementation of the codes of MACV (Military Assistance Command Vietnam) and the Geneva Conventions, perhaps be eradicated."
In 1995, when we questioned Glen about his letter, he said he had heard second-hand about the My Lai massacre, though he did not mention it specifically. The massacre was just one part of the abusive pattern that had become routine in the division, he said.
Powell's Response
The letter's troubling allegations were not well received at Americal headquarters.
Major Powell undertook the assignment to review Glen's letter, but did so without questioning Glen or assigning anyone else to talk with him. Powell simply accepted a claim from Glen's superior officer that Glen was not close enough to the front lines to know what he was writing about, an assertion Glen denies.
After that cursory investigation, Powell drafted a response on Dec. 13, 1968. He admitted to no pattern of wrongdoing. Powell claimed that U.S. soldiers in Vietnam were taught to treat Vietnamese courteously and respectfully. The Americal troops also had gone through an hour-long course on how to treat prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions, Powell noted.
"There may be isolated cases of mistreatment of civilians and POWs," Powell wrote in 1968. But "this by no means reflects the general attitude throughout the Division." Indeed, Powell's memo faulted Glen for not complaining earlier and for failing to be more specific in his letter.
"In direct refutation of this [Glen's] portrayal," Powell concluded, "is the fact that relations between Americal soldiers and the Vietnamese people are excellent."
Powell's findings, of course, were false, though they were exactly what his superiors wanted to hear.
It would take another Americal hero, an infantryman named Ron Ridenhour, to piece together the truth about the atrocity at My Lai. After returning to the United States, Ridenhour interviewed Americal comrades who had participated in the massacre.
On his own, Ridenhour compiled this shocking information into a report and forwarded it to the Army inspector general. The IG's office conducted an aggressive official investigation, in marked contrast to Powell's review.
Confirming Ridenhour's report, the Army finally faced the horrible truth. Courts martial were held against officers and enlisted men who were implicated in the murder of the My Lai civilians.
But Powell's peripheral role in the My Lai cover-up did not slow his climb up the Army's ladder. After the scandal broke, Powell pleaded ignorance about the actual My Lai massacre.
Luckily for Powell, Glen's letter also disappeared into the National Archives -- to be unearthed only years later by British journalists Michael Bilton and Kevin Sims for their book, Four Hours in My Lai.
Powell's Admissions
In his best-selling memoirs, Powell did not mention his brush-off of Tom Glen's complaint.
Powell did include, however, another troubling recollection that belied his 1968 official denial of Glen's allegation that American soldiers "without provocation or justification shoot at the people themselves."
After a brief mention of the My Lai massacre in My American Journey, Powell penned a partial justification of the Americal's brutality. In a chilling passage, Powell explained the routine practice of murdering unarmed male Vietnamese.
"I recall a phrase we used in the field, MAM, for military-age male," Powell wrote. "If a helo spotted a peasant in black pajamas who looked remotely suspicious, a possible MAM, the pilot would circle and fire in front of him. If he moved, his movement was judged evidence of hostile intent, and the next burst was not in front, but at him.
"Brutal? Maybe so. But an able battalion commander with whom I had served at Gelnhausen [West Germany], Lt. Col. Walter Pritchard, was killed by enemy sniper fire while observing MAMs from a helicopter. And Pritchard was only one of many. The kill-or-be-killed nature of combat tends to dull fine perceptions of right and wrong."
While it's certainly true that combat is brutal and judgments can be clouded by fear, the mowing down of unarmed civilians in cold blood does not constitute combat. It is murder and, indeed, a war crime.
Neither can the combat death of a fellow soldier be cited as an excuse to murder civilians. Disturbingly, that was precisely the rationalization that the My Lai killers cited in their own defense.
But returning home from Vietnam a second time in 1969, Powell already had begun to prove himself the consummate team player. Those skills were tested again when Powell was drawn into another Vietnam controversy involving the killing of civilians.
In a court martial proceeding, Powell sided with an Americal Division general who was accused by the Army of murdering unarmed civilians while flying over Quang Ngai province. Helicopter pilots who flew Brig. Gen. John W. Donaldson had alleged that the general gunned down civilian Vietnamese almost for sport.
In an interview, a senior investigator from the Donaldson case told us that two of the Vietnamese victims were an old man and an old woman who were shot to death while bathing. Though long retired -- and quite elderly himself -- the Army investigator still spoke with a raw disgust about the events of a quarter century earlier. He requested anonymity before talking about the behavior of senior Americal officers.
"They used to bet in the morning how many people they could kill -- old people, civilians, it didn't matter," the investigator said. "Some of the stuff would curl your hair."
For eight months in Chu Lai during 1968-69, Powell had worked with Donaldson and apparently developed a great respect for this superior officer.
When the Army charged Donaldson with murder on June 2, 1971, Powell rose in the general's defense. Powell submitted an affidavit dated Aug. 10, 1971, which lauded Donaldson as "an aggressive and courageous brigade commander."
Powell did not specifically refer to the murder allegations, but added that helicopter forays in Vietnam had been an "effective means of separating hostiles from the general population."
Mysterious Interview
Powell apparently was questioned by Army authorities about his knowledge of Donaldson's alleged atrocities. But his answers may be lost to history. In his memoirs, Powell provides a brief -- and incorrect -- description of the 1971 interview in the context of the My Lai massacre.
"I was serving in the Washington area, and was called to appear before a board of inquiry conducted by Lt. Gen. William Ray Peers at Fort Belvoir, Virginia," Powell wrote. "The board wanted me to give a picture of fighting conditions in the Batangan Peninsula in 1968 [where the My Lai massacre had occurred]. I knew it had been a hellhole, a rough piece of territory inhabited by VC sympathizers."
Powell's account of the interview is itself a bit of a mystery. While it's true that in 1971, a commission headed by Gen. Peers was investigating the My Lai cover-up, all the Peers interviews were conducted at the Pentagon, not at Fort Belvoir.
Also, by 1971, the Army knew a great deal about the "fighting conditions in the Batangan Peninsula" and would not need the opinion of an officer who arrived months after the My Lai massacre. Further, when we examined the Peers Commission records at the National Archives branch at Suitland, Md., we found no indication that Colin Powell ever had been interviewed by the board.
There was, however, an investigation at Fort Belvoir conducted in the same time frame by the Army's criminal investigation unit. It was examining the murder allegations against Powell's friend, Gen. Donaldson.
The retired Army investigator told us that Powell was questioned in that case. But the investigator said Powell volunteered little knowledge about the atrocities. The investigator doubted that any record was made of the interview.
Nevertheless, the investigator claimed that "we had him [Donaldson] dead to rights," with the testimony of two helicopter pilots who had flown Donaldson on his shooting expeditions. Still, the investigation collapsed after the two pilot-witnesses were transferred to another Army base and apparently came under pressure from military superiors.
The two pilots withdrew their testimony, and the Army dropped all charges against Donaldson. "John Donaldson was a cover-up specialist," the old investigator growled.
While thousands of other Vietnam veterans joined the anti-war movement and denounced the brutality of the war, Powell held his tongue. To this day, Powell has avoided criticizing the Vietnam War other than to complain that the politicians should not have restrained the military high command.
With the My Lai cloud dissipated, Major Powell's career advanced smartly. Powell often says he learned many lessons from Vietnam. One lesson he doesn't mention is that a military bureaucrat succeeds best by sidestepping controversy and keeping quiet when superiors screw up.
As the years unfolded, that proved to be a very valuable lesson indeed.
| December 19, 2000 |
| Behind Colin Powell's Legend: Part Two |
By Robert Parry & Norman Solomon
Powell's Second Scandal
The middle years of Colin Powell's military career – bordered roughly by the twin debacles of My Lai and Iran-contra – were a time for networking and advancement.
The Army footed the bill for Powell's masters degree in business at George Washington University. He won a promotion to lieutenant colonel and a prized White House fellowship that put him inside Richard Nixon's White House.
Powell's work with Nixon's Office of Management and Budget brought Powell to the attention of senior Nixon aides, Frank Carlucci and Caspar Weinberger, who soon became Powell's mentors. The high-powered contacts would prove invaluable to Powell through the 1970s and 1980s as the personable young officer rose swiftly through the ranks.
When Ronald Reagan swept to victory in 1980, Powell's allies -- Weinberger and Carlucci -- took over the Defense Department as secretary of defense and deputy secretary of defense, respectively. When they arrived at the Pentagon, Powell, then a full colonel, was there to greet them.
But before Powell could move to the top echelons of the U.S. military, he needed to earn his first general's star. That required a few command assignments in the field. So, under Carlucci's sponsorship, Powell received brief assignments at Army bases in Kansas and Colorado.
By the time Powell returned to the Pentagon in 1983, at the age of 46, he had a general's star on his shoulder. In the parlance of the Pentagon, he was a water-walker.
Ground Zero
On June 29, 1983, Colin Powell's spit-polished shoes clicked through the Outer Ring power corridors of the Pentagon. Powell was again in the terrain he knew best, his professional home: official Washington, what he often called "Ground Zero."
He also was back to his future, once more on the fast track to success.
But Powell had returned to an administration courting danger. Caught up in an anti-communist crusade around the world, President Reagan's men were engaged in brush-fire wars against what they considered the Soviet Union's surrogates. Reagan's operatives also were battling Democrats in Congress whom the White House sometimes viewed as little more than Moscow's fellow-travelers.
At the Central Intelligence Agency, the aging director William J. Casey was pressuring the Soviet Union on all fronts, through wars that often pitted desperately poor peasants and rival tribes against one another. Whether in Angola or Mozambique, in Nicaragua or Guatemala, in Lebanon or Afghanistan, Casey was spoiling for fights: to finish off the Cold War in his lifetime.
While Casey plotted at CIA, the often inattentive Ronald Reagan snapped to when battlefield maps were put before him, with pins representing Nicaraguan contras outmaneuvering other pins for forces loyal to Nicaragua's leftist Sandinista government. Reagan, the onetime war-movie actor, and Casey, the onetime World War II spymaster, loved the game of international conflict and intrigue.
But many of their fiercest battles were fought in Washington. Liberal Democrats, led by old political war-horse, House Speaker Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill, thought that Reagan and Casey were overly zealous, maybe even a bit crazy. Democrats, as well as some Republicans, suspected, too, that Casey, the mumbling dissembler, was treating Congress like a fifth column, like agents of influence slipped behind his lines to disrupt his operations.
Still, the hub of any American military activity -- whether overt or covert -- remained the Pentagon. It was from the Defense Department that the special operations units were dispatched, that the military supplies were apportioned, that the most sensitive electronic intelligence was collected. All these military responsibilities were vital to Casey and Reagan, but came under the jurisdiction of Defense Secretary Weinberger.
To Casey's and Reagan's dismay, the Pentagon brass favored greater caution when it came to offending Congress. After all, Congress held the strings to the Pentagon's bulging purse. Maybe Casey could blow off a senator or offend a congressman, but the Pentagon could not detonate too many bridges to its rear.
The 'Filter'
Onto that political battlefield stepped newly minted Brig. Gen. Colin Powell, who had been named military assistant to Secretary Weinberger. It was a position that made Powell the gatekeeper for the defense secretary, one of Reagan's closest advisers.
Top Pentagon players quickly learned that Powell was more than Weinberger's coat holder or calendar keeper. Powell was the "filter," the guy who saw everything when it passed into the Secretary for action and who oversaw everything that needed follow-up when it came out.
Powell's access to Weinberger's most sensitive information would be a mixed blessing, however. Some of the aggressive covert operations ordered by Reagan and managed by Casey were spinning out of control. Like a mysterious gravitational force, the operations were pulling in the Pentagon, whatever the reservations of the senior generals.
Already, the Democrats were up in arms over military construction in Honduras, which Reagan insisted was "temporary," but which looked rather permanent. In El Salvador, U.S. military advisers were training a brutal army which was slaughtering political opponents and unarmed villagers in a bloody counterinsurgency war. In Costa Rica, the U.S. embassy's "mil-group" was a bustle of activity as Washington tried to push neutralist Costa Rica into the Nicaraguan conflict.
Around all these initiatives were U.S. military officers and non-commissioned trainers who were responsible to Pentagon authority. The officers reported to the Southern Command in Panama and "Southcom" reported to the Pentagon, where at the end of the information flow chart sat the Secretary of Defense and his "filter," Colin Powell.
Yellow Fruit
This expanding super nova of covert operations began to swallow the Pentagon a few months after Powell's return. On Sept. 1, 1983, an Army civilian, William T. Golden, stumbled onto billing irregularities at a U.S. intelligence front company in suburban Annandale, Va., which was handling secret supplies for Central America.
The supply operation fell under the code name "Yellow Fruit," an ironic reference to the region's banana republics. The billing irregularities seemed modest at first, the doctoring of records to conceal vacation flights to Europe. But Golden began to suspect that the corruption went deeper.
By October 1983, Yellow Fruit had turned thoroughly rotten, and the Army began a criminal inquiry. "The more we dig into that," Gen. Maxwell R. Thurman, vice chief of the U.S. Army, later told congressional Iran-contra investigators, "the more we find out that it goes into agencies using money, procuring all sorts of materiel."
Reacting to the scandal, Thurman implemented new secret accounting procedures for supporting CIA activities. "We have tried to do our best to tighten up our procedures," Thurman said.
But the muck of the Central American operations was oozing out elsewhere, too, as Casey recruited unsavory characters from the region to carry out his bidding. One of the worst of these allies was Panama's Gen. Manuel Noriega, whom Casey found useful funneling money and supplies to the Nicaraguan contras fighting to overthrow Nicaragua's leftist Sandinista government.
In September 1983, Powell traveled with Weinberger on an inspection tour of Central America. On that trip, they were accompanied by an eager Marine major from the National Security Council staff. His name was Oliver North. "From the moment we were airborne, he started worming his way into Weinberger's presence," Powell wrote in My American Journey.
Powell was even more contemptuous of Noriega, "an unappealing man, with his pockmarked face, beady, darting eyes, and arrogant swagger," according to Powell. Meeting Noriega, Powell claimed to have "the crawling sense that I was in the presence of evil."
There was also intelligence that Noriega was working with Colombian drug traffickers. Still, Powell has made no claim that he sought Noriega's ouster from the U.S. payroll. "Cold War politics sometimes made for creepy bedfellows," Powell rationalized.
Powell's retrospective disdain for Noriega also does not square with the enthusiasm some of Powell's Pentagon friends expressed for the Panamanian at the time. Powell's pal, Richard Armitage, the assistant defense secretary for inter-American affairs, hosted a Washington lunch in November 1983, honoring Noriega. "Pentagon officials greeted Noriega's rise to power with great satisfaction," noted author John Dinges.
Noriega's visit coincided with another growing political problem for the Reagan administration, the refusal of an angry Congress to continue funding the contra war in Nicaragua. The rebel force was gaining a reputation for brutality, as stories of rapes, summary executions and massacres flowed back to Washington. Led by Speaker O'Neill, the Democratic-controlled House capped the CIA's contra funding at $24 million in 1983 and then moved to ban contra aid altogether.
Lebanon Strife
Meanwhile, in the Middle East, Reagan's policies were encountering more trouble. Reagan had deployed Marines as peacekeepers in Beirut, but he also authorized the USS New Jersey to shell Islamic villages in the Bekaa Valley, an action that killed civilians and angered the Shiite Moslems.
On Oct. 23, 1983, Islamic militants struck back, sending a suicide truck bomber through U.S. security positions and demolishing a high-rise Marine barracks. A total of 241 Marines died. "When the shells started falling on the Shiites, they assumed the American 'referee' had taken sides," Powell wrote later, though it was not clear that he ever actively opposed the ill-fated intervention in Lebanon.
After the bombing, U.S. Marines were withdrawn to the USS Guam off Lebanon's coast. But Casey ordered secret counter-terrorism operations against Islamic radicals. As retaliation, the Shiites targeted more Americans. Another bomb destroyed the U.S. Embassy and killed most of the CIA station.
Casey dispatched veteran CIA officer William Buckley to fill the void. But on March 14, 1984, Buckley was spirited off the streets of Beirut to face torture and eventually death. The grisly scenes -- in the Middle East and in Central America -- were set for the Iran-contra scandal.
Powell's Iran-Contra Role
Back at the Pentagon, Colin Powell might have felt at ease in the familiar environs. But Washington was indeed about to become "Ground Zero."
In 1984-85, as the Iran-contra storm clouds built, one-star Gen. Colin Powell was the “filter” for information flowing to Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger.
After the scandal broke in 1986, Powell managed to escape its consequences, in part, by claiming that much of what Weinberger knew about the secret deals had not gone through that “filter.”
Powell said he knew next to nothing about unlawful 1985 shipments of U.S. weapons from Israel to Iran -- or about illegal third-country financing of the Nicaraguan contra rebels.
But was the general lying?
The documentary record makes clear that his boss, Weinberger, knew a great deal -- and the evidence suggests that so did Powell.
Weinberger was one of the first officials outside the White House to learn that Reagan had put the arm on Saudi Arabia to give the contras $1 million a month in 1984, as Congress was cutting off the CIA's covert assistance through what was known as the Boland Amendment.
Handling the contra-funding arrangements was Saudi ambassador Prince Bandar, a close friend of both Weinberger and Powell. Bandar and Powell had met in the 1970s and were frequent tennis partners in the 1980s.
So it was plausible -- perhaps even likely -- that Bandar would have discussed the contra funding with Powell, Weinberger or both. But exactly when Weinberger learned of the Saudi contributions and what Powell knew remain unclear to this day.
The Iran-contra trial of Weinberger for alleged obstruction of justice -- which was set for early 1993 and was expected to include testimony by Powell -- was derailed by President George H.W. Bush on Christmas Eve 1992 when he pardoned Weinberger and five other Iran-contra defendants.
What is known from the public record, however, is that on June 20, 1984, Weinberger attended a State Department meeting about the contra operation. His scribbled notes cited the need to "plan for other sources for $." But secrecy would be vital, the defense secretary understood. "Keep US fingerprints off," he wrote.
In summer 1984, Gen. John Vessey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, learned from a foreign visitor about the Saudi money for the contras. Vessey told Weinberger, who gave Vessey the impression of surprise. "I reported it to Secretary Weinberger," Vessey said in a deposition. "His reaction was about the same as mine, sort of surprise first that [Saudi Arabia] would do it."
In 1985, when the Saudis doubled their annual contra gift from $12 million to $25 million, Vessey quickly passed on word to Weinberger again. This time, the record is clear that the Defense Secretary understood that the contribution to buy weapons was part of the larger contra-aid strategy.
"Jack Vessey in office alone," Weinberger wrote on March 13, 1985. "Bandar is giving $25 million to Contras -- so all we need is non-lethal aid."
The Iran Initiative
Meanwhile, the White House was maneuvering into dangerous geopolitical territory, too, in its policy toward Iran. The Israelis were interested in trading U.S. weapons to Iran's radical Islamic government to expand Israel's influence in that important Middle Eastern country. It was also believed that Iran might help free American hostages held by Islamic extremists in Lebanon.
Carrying the water for this strategy within the Reagan administration was national security adviser Robert McFarlane. He circulated a draft presidential order in June 1985, proposing an overture to supposed Iranian moderates.
The paper passed through Weinberger's "filter," Colin Powell. In his memoirs, Powell called the proposal "a stunner" and a grab by McFarlane for "Kissingerian immortality." After reading the draft, Weinberger scribbled in the margins, "this is almost too absurd to comment on."
On June 30, 1985, as the paper was circulating inside the administration, Reagan declared that the United States would give no quarter to terrorism. "Let me further make it plain to the assassins in Beirut and their accomplices, wherever they may be, that America will never make concessions to terrorists," the president said.
But in July 1985, Weinberger, Powell and McFarlane met to discuss details for doing just that. Iran wanted 100 anti-tank TOW missiles that would be delivered through Israel, according to Weinberger's notes. Reagan gave his approval, but the White House wanted to keep the operation a closely held secret. The shipments were to be handled with "maximum compartmentalization," the notes said.
On Aug. 20, 1985, the Israelis delivered the first 96 missiles to Iran. It was a pivotal moment for the Reagan administration. With that missile shipment, the Reagan administration stepped over an important legal line. The transfer violated laws requiring congressional notification for trans-shipment of U.S. weapons and prohibiting arms to Iran or any other nation designated a terrorist state. Violation of either statute could be a felony.
A Mysterious Meeting
The available evidence from that period suggests that Weinberger and Powell were very much in the loop, even though they may have opposed the arms-to-Iran policy. On Aug. 22, two days after the first delivery, Israel notified McFarlane of the completed shipment. From aboard Air Force One, McFarlane called Weinberger.
When Air Force One landed at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington, McFarlane rushed to the Pentagon to meet Weinberger and Powell. The 40-minute meeting started at 7:30 p.m.
That much is known from the Iran-contra public record. But the substance of the conversation remains in dispute. McFarlane said that at the meeting with Weinberger and Powell, he discussed Reagan's approval of the missile transfer and the need to replenish Israeli stockpiles.
If that is true, Weinberger and Powell were in the middle of a criminal conspiracy. But Weinberger denied McFarlane's account, and Powell insisted that he had only a fuzzy memory of the meeting without a clear recollection of any completed arms shipment.
"My recollection is that Mr. McFarlane described to the Secretary the so-called Iran Initiative and he gave to the Secretary a sort of a history of how we got where we were that particular day and some of the thinking that gave rise to the possibility of going forward ... and what the purposes of such an initiative would be," Powell said in an Iran-contra deposition two years later.
Congressional attorney Joseph Saba asked Powell if McFarlane had mentioned that Israel already had supplied weapons to Iran. "I don't recall specifically," Powell answered. "I just don't recall." When Saba asked about any notes, Powell responded, "there were none on our side."
In a later interview with the FBI, Powell said he learned at that meeting that there "was to be a transfer of some limited amount of materiel" to Iran. But he did not budge on his claim of ignorance about the crucial fact that the first shipment had already gone and that the Reagan administration had promised the Israelis replenishment for the shipped missiles. To have admitted that would have been to admit being part of a criminal conspiracy.
This claim of only prospective knowledge would be key to Powell's Iran-contra defense. But it made little sense for McFarlane to learn of the missile delivery and the need for replenishment, then hurry to the Pentagon, only to debate a future policy that, in reality, was already being implemented.
Guilty Knowledge
The behavior of Powell and Weinberger in the following days also suggested that they knew an arms-for-hostage swap was under way.
According to Weinberger's diary, he and Powell eagerly awaited a release of an American hostage in Lebanon, the payoff for the clandestine weapons shipment to Iran. In early September 1985, Weinberger dispatched a Pentagon emissary to meet with Iranians in Europe, another step that would seem to make little sense if Weinberger and Powell were indeed in the dark about the details of the arms-for-hostage operation.
At the same time, McFarlane told Israel that the United States was prepared to replace 500 Israeli missiles, an assurance that would have required Weinberger's clearance since the missiles would be coming from Defense Department stockpiles.
On Sept. 14, 1985, Israel delivered the second shipment, 408 more missiles to Iran. The next day, one hostage, the Rev. Benjamin Weir, was released in Beirut. Back at the Pentagon, Weinberger penned in his diary a cryptic reference to "a delivery I have for our prisoners."
But when the Iran-contra scandal broke more than a year later, Weinberger and Powell would plead faulty memories about the Weir case, too. Saba asked Powell if he knew of a linkage between an arms delivery and Weir's release. "No, I have no recollection of that," Powell answered.
After Weir's freedom, the job of replenishing the Israel missiles fell to White House aide Oliver North who turned to Powell for logistical assistance.
"My original point of contact was General Colin Powell, who was going directly to his immediate superior, Secretary Weinberger," North testified in 1987. But in their later sworn testimony, Powell and Weinberger continued to insist that they had no idea that 508 missiles had already been shipped via Israel to Iran and that Israel was expecting replenishment of its stockpiles.
Secret Intercept
Powell stuck to that story even as evidence emerged that he and Weinberger read top-secret intelligence intercepts in September and October 1985 in which Iranians described the U.S. arms delivery.
One of those reports, dated Oct. 2, 1985, and marked with the high-level classification, "SECRET SPOKE ORCON," was signed by Lt. Gen. William Odom, the director of the National Security Agency.
According to Odom's report, a sensitive electronic intercept had picked up a phone conversation a day earlier between two Iranian officials, identified as "Mr. Asghari" who was in Europe and "Mohsen Kangarlu" who was in Teheran.
"A large part of the conversation had to do with details on the delivery of several more shipments of weapons into Iran," wrote Odom. "Asghari then pressed Kangarlu to provide a list of what he wanted the 'other four planes' to bring. ... Kangarlu said that he already had provided a list. Asghari said that those items were for the first two planes. Asghari reminded Kangarlu that there were Phoenix missiles on the second plane which were not on the first. ... [Asghari] said that a flight would be made this week."
In 1987, when congressional Iran-contra investigators asked about the intercepts and other evidence of Pentagon knowledge, Powell again pleaded a weak memory. He repeatedly used phrases such as "I cannot specifically recall." At one point, Powell said, "To my recollection, I don't have a recollection."
When asked if Weinberger kept a diary that might shed more light on the issue, Powell responded, "The Secretary, to my knowledge, did not keep a diary. Whatever notes he kept, I don't know how he uses them or what he does with them. He does not have a diary of this ilk, no." As for his own notebooks, Powell announced that he had destroyed them.
Greasing the Skids
In the next phase of the evolving Iran operation -- the direct delivery of U.S. missiles -- Powell would play an even bigger role.
Indeed, the disastrous policy might never have happened, or might have stopped much sooner, except for the work of Colin Powell.
In early 1986, Powell short-circuited the Pentagon covert procurement system that was put in place after the Yellow Fruit scandal. Defense procurement officials said that without Powell's interference, the system would have alerted the military brass that thousands of TOW anti-tank missiles and other sophisticated weaponry were headed to Iran, a terrorist state.
But Powell used his bureaucratic skills to slip the missiles and the other hardware out of U.S. Army inventories.
The story of Powell's maneuvers can be found in a close reading of thousands of pages from depositions of Pentagon officials, who pointed to Weinberger's assistant as the key Iran-contra action officer within the Defense Department.
Powell insisted that he and Weinberger minimized the Pentagon's role. Powell said they delivered the missiles to the CIA under the Economy Act, which regulates transfers between government agencies. "We treated the TOW transfer like garbage to be gotten out of the house quickly," Powell wrote in My American Journey.
But the Economy Act argument was disingenuous, because the Pentagon always uses the Economy Act when it moves weapons to the CIA. Powell's account also obscured his unusual actions in arranging the shipments without giving senior officers the information that Pentagon procedures required, even on sensitive covert activities.
Weinberger officially handed Powell the job of shipping the missiles to Iran on Jan. 17, 1986. That was the day Reagan signed an intelligence "finding," a formal authorization to pull arms from U.S. stockpiles and ship them to Iran.
In testimony, Powell dated his first knowledge of the missile transfers to this moment, an important distinction because if he had been aware of the earlier shipments – as much evidence suggests – he potentially would have been implicated in a felony.
'Executive' Orders
A day after Reagan's "finding," Jan. 18, 1986, Powell instructed Gen. Max Thurman, then acting Army chief of staff, to prepare for a transfer of 4,000 TOW anti-tank missiles but Powell made no mention of Iran. "I gave him absolutely no indication of the destination of the missiles," Powell testified.
Though kept in the dark, Thurman began the process of transferring the TOWs to the CIA, the first step of the journey. Powell's orders "bypassed the formal [covert procedures] on the ingress line," Thurman acknowledged in later Iran-contra testimony. "The first shipment is made without a complete wring-out through all of the procedural steps."
As Powell's strange orders rippled through the top echelon of the Pentagon, Lt. Gen. Vincent M. Russo, the assistant deputy chief of staff for logistics, called Powell to ask about the operation. Powell immediately circumvented Russo's inquiry. In effect, Powell pulled rank by arranging for "executive instructions" commanding Russo to deliver the first 1,000 TOWs, no questions asked.
"It was a little unusual," commented then Army chief of staff, Gen. John A. Wickham Jr. "All personal visit or secure phone call, nothing in writing -- because normally through the [covert logistics office] a procedure is established so that records are kept in a much more formal process. ... I felt very uneasy about this process. And I also felt uneasy about the notification dimension to the Congress."
On Jan. 29, 1986, thanks to Powell's orders, 1,000 U.S. TOWs were loaded onto pallets at Redstone Arsenal and transferred to the airfield at Anniston, Ala. As the shipment progressed, senior Pentagon officers grew edgier about Powell withholding the destination and other details. The logistics personnel also wanted proof that somebody was paying for the missiles.
Major Christopher Simpson, who was making the flight arrangements, later told Iran-contra investigators that Gen. Russo "was very uncomfortable with no paperwork to support the mission request. He wasn't going to 'do nothin', as he said, without seeing some money. ...'no tickey, no laundry.'"
The money for the first shipment was finally deposited into a CIA account in Geneva on Feb. 11, 1986. Three days later, Russo released the 1,000 TOWs to the CIA. The first direct U.S. arms shipment to Iran was under way, although the Israelis were still acting as middlemen.
Legal Worries
Inside the Pentagon, concerns grew about Powell's unorthodox arrangements and the identity of the missile recipients. Major Simpson told congressional investigators that he would have rung alarm bells if he had known the TOWs were headed to Iran.
"In the three years that I had worked there, I had been instructed ... by the leadership ... never to do anything illegal, and I would have felt that we were doing something illegal," Simpson said.
Even without knowing that the missiles were going to Iran, Simpson expressed concern about whether the requirement to notify Congress had been met. He got advice from a Pentagon lawyer that the 1986 intelligence authorization act, which mandated a "timely" notice to Congress on foreign arms transfers, had an "impact on this particular mission."
Major Simpson asked Gen. Russo, who got another legal opinion from the Army general counsel who concurred that Congress must be notified. The issue was bumped up to Secretary of the Army John Marsh. Though still blind about the shipment's destination, the Army high command was inclined to stop the peculiar operation in its tracks.
At this key moment, Colin Powell intervened again. Simpson said, "General Powell was asking General Russo to reassure the secretary of the Army that notification was being handled, ... that it had been addressed and it was taken care of." Despite Powell's assurance, however, Congress had not been notified.
Army Secretary Marsh shared the skepticism about Powell's operation. On Feb. 25, Marsh called a meeting of senior Army officers and ordered Russo to "tell General Powell of my concern with regard to adequate notification being given to Congress," Russo later testified. Marsh also instructed Russo to keep a careful chronology of events.
Army chief of staff Wickham went further. He demanded that a memo on congressional notification be sent to Powell. "The chief wanted it in writing," stated Army Lt. Gen. Arthur E. Brown, who delivered the memo to Powell on March 7, 1986.
'Handle It'
Five days later, Powell handed the memo to President Reagan's national security adviser John Poindexter with the advice: "Handle it ... however you plan to do it," Powell later testified.
Poindexter's plan for "timely notification" was to tell Congress on the last day of the Reagan presidency, Jan. 20, 1989. Poindexter stuck the Pentagon memo into a White House safe, along with the secret "finding" on the Iran missile shipments.
While debate over notification bubbled, others in the Pentagon fretted over the possibly illegal destination of the missiles. Col. John William McDonald, who oversaw covert supply, objected when he learned that key Army officials had no idea where the weapons were headed.
"One [concern] was inadvertent provision of supplies to the [Nicaraguan] contras in violation of the Boland Amendment," which prohibited military shipments to the contras, McDonald testified. "The second issue was inadvertent supply to countries that were on the terrorist list. ... There is a responsibility to judge the legality of the request."
When McDonald was asked by congressional investigators how he would have reacted if told the weapons were going to Iran, he responded, "I would have told General Thurman ... that I would believe that the action was illegal and that Iran was clearly identified as one of the nations on the terrorist list for whom we could not transfer weapons."
But when McDonald joined other Pentagon officers in appealing to Powell about the missile shipment's destination, they again were told not to worry. Powell "reiterated [that it was] the responsibility of the recipient" agency, the CIA, to notify Congress, "and that the Army did not have the responsibility to do that."
HAWK Shipment
Then, in March 1986, Powell conveyed a second order, this time for 284 HAWK antiaircraft missile parts and 500 HAWK missiles. This time, Powell’s order set off alarms not only over legal questions, but whether the safety of U.S forces might be jeopardized.
The HAWK order would force a drawdown of U.S. supplies to a dangerous level. Henry Gaffney, a senior supply official, warned Powell that "you're going to have to start tearing it out of the Army's hide."
But the Pentagon again followed Powell's orders. It stripped its shelves of 15 spare parts for HAWK missiles that were protecting U.S. forces in Europe and elsewhere in the world.
"I can only trust that somebody who is a patriot ... and interested in the survival of this nation ... made the decision that the national policy objectives were worth the risk of a temporary drawdown of readiness," said Lt. Gen. Peter G. Barbules.
If there had been an air attack on U.S. forces in Europe during the drawdown, the HAWK missile defense batteries might not have had the necessary spare parts to counter an enemy attack.
Implemented by Colin Powell, the Iran initiative had taken priority over both legal safeguards inside the Pentagon and over the safety of U.S. soldiers around the world.
Next: Part Three -- Falling Upward. Coming soon...
How an Illogical, Inconsistent Supreme Court Opinion of Five Justices Anointed Bush as President of the United States
Q: I'm not a lawyer and I don't understand the recent Supreme Court decision in Bush v. Gore. Can you explain it to me? A: Sure. I'm a lawyer. I read it. It says Bush wins, even if Gore got the most votes. Q: But wait a second. The US Supreme Court has to give a reason, right? A: Right. Q: So Bush wins because hand-counts are illegal? A: Oh no. Six of the justices (two-thirds majority) believed the hand-counts were legal and should be done. Q: Oh. So the justices did not believe that the hand-counts would find any legal ballots? A. Nope. The five conservative justices clearly held (and all nine justices agreed) "that punch card balloting machines can produce an unfortunate number of ballots which are not punched in a clean, complete way by the voter." So there are legal votes that should be counted but can't be. Q: Oh. Does this have something to do with states' rights? Don't conservatives love that? A: Yes. These five justices have held that the federal government has no business telling a sovereign state university it can't steal trade secrets just because such stealing is prohibited by law. Nor does the federal government have any business telling a state that it should bar guns in schools. Nor can the federal government use the equal protection clause to force states to take measures to stop violence against women. Q: Is there an exception in this case? A: Yes, the "Gore exception." States have no rights to control their own state elections when it can result in Gore being elected President. This decision is limited to only this situation. Q: C'mon. The Supremes didn't really say that. You're exaggerating. A: Nope. They held "Our consideration is limited to the present circumstances, as the problem of equal protection in election processes generally presents many complexities." Q: What complexities? A: They didn't say. Q: I'll bet I know the reason. I heard Jim Baker say this. The votes can't be counted because the Florida Supreme Court "changed the rules of the election after it was held." Right? A. Wrong. The US Supreme Court made clear that the Florida Supreme Court did not change the rules of the election. But the US Supreme Court found the failure of the Florida Court to change the rules was wrong. Q: Huh? A: The Legislature declared that the only legal standard for counting vote is "clear intent of the voter." The Florida Court was condemned for not adopting a clearer standard. Q: I thought the Florida Court was not allowed to change the Legislature's law after the election. A: Right. Q: So what's the problem? A: They should have. The US Supreme Court said the Florida Supreme Court should have "adopt[ed] adequate statewide standards for determining what is a legal vote" Q: I thought only the Legislature could "adopt" new law. A: Right. Q: So if the Court had adopted new standards, I thought it would have been overturned. A: Right. You're catching on. Q: If the Court had adopted new standards, it would have been overturned for changing the rules. And if it didn't, it's overturned for not changing the rules. That means that no matter what the Florida Supreme Court did, legal votes could never be counted if they would end up with a possible Gore victory. A: Right. Next question. Q: Wait, wait. I thought the problem was "equal protection," that some counties counted votes differently from others. Isn't that a problem? A: It sure is. Across the nation, we vote in a hodgepodge of systems. Some, like the optical-scanners in largely Republican-leaning counties record 99.7% of the votes. Some, like the punchcard systems in largely Democratic-leaning counties record only 97% of the votes. So approximately 3% of Democratic votes are thrown in the trash can. Q: Aha! That's a severe equal-protection problem!!! A: No it's not. The Supreme Court wasn't worried about the 3% of Democratic ballots thrown in the trashcan in Florida. That "complexity" was not a problem. Q: Was it the butterfly ballots that violated Florida law and tricked more than 20,000 Democrats to vote for Buchanan or Gore and Buchanan? A: Nope. The Supreme Court has no problem believing that Buchanan got his highest, best support in a precinct consisting of a Jewish old age home with Holocaust survivors, who apparently have changed their mind about Hitler. Q: Yikes. So what was the serious equal protection problem? A: The problem was neither the butterfly ballot nor the 3% of Democrats (largely African-American) disenfranchised. The problem is that somewhat less than .005% of the ballots (100 to 300 votes) may have been determined under slightly different standards because judges sworn to uphold the law and doing their best to accomplish the legislative mandate of "clear intent of the voter" may have a slightly opinion about the voter's intent, even though a single judge was overseeing the entire process to resolve any disputes. Q: A single judge? I thought the standards were different. I thought that was the whole point of the Supreme Court opinion. A: Judge Terry Lewis, who received the case upon remand from the Florida Supreme Court, had already ordered each of the counties to fax him their standards so he could be sure they were uniform when the US Supreme Court stopped him from counting the uncounted votes (favoring Gore). Republican activists did their best to send junk faxes to Lewis in order to prevent him from standardizing the process in a way that could justify the vote counting. They succeeded. Q: Hmmm. Well, even if those .005% of difficult-to-tell votes are thrown out, you can still count the votes where everyone agrees the voter's intent is clear, right? A: Nope. Q: Why not? A: No time. Q: I thought the Supreme Court said that the Constitution was more important than speed. A: It did. It said, "The press of time does not diminish the constitutional concern. A desire for speed is not a general excuse for ignoring equal protection guarantees." Q: Well that makes sense. So there's time to count the votes when the intent is clear and everyone is treated equally then. Right? A: No. The Supreme Court won't allow it. Q: But they just said that the constitution is more important than time! A: You forget. There is the "Gore exception." Q: No time to count legal votes where everyone, even Republicans, agree the intent is clear? Why not? A: Because December 12 was yesterday. Q: Is December 12 a deadline for counting votes? A: No. January 6, 2001 is the deadline. In the Election of 1960, Hawaii's votes weren't counted until January 4, 1961 Q: So why is December 12 important? A: December 12 is a deadline by which Congress can't challenge the results. Q: What does the Congressional role have to do with the Supreme Court? A: Nothing. Q: But I thought --- A: The Florida Supreme Court had earlier held it would like to complete its work by December 12 to make things easier for Congress. The United States Supreme Court is trying to "help" the Florida Supreme Court out by forcing the Florida court to abide by a deadline that everyone agrees is not binding. Q: But I thought the Florida Court was going to just barely have the votes counted by December 12. A: They would have made it, but the five conservative justices stopped the recount last Saturday. Q: Why? A: Justice Scalia said some of the counts may not be legal. Q: So why not separate the votes into piles -- indentations for Gore, hanging chads for Bush, votes that everyone agrees went to one candidate or the other -- so that we know exactly how Florida voted before determining who won? Then, if some ballots (say, indentations) have to be thrown out, the American people will know right away who won Florida? A. Great idea! An intelligent, rational solution to a difficult problem! The US Supreme Court rejected it. (Gore exception) They held that such counts would likely to produce election results showing Gore won and Gore's winning would cause "public acceptance" and that would "cast[] a cloud" over Bush's "legitimacy" that would harm "democratic stability." Q: In other words, if America knows the truth that Gore won, they won't accept the US Supreme Court overturning Gore's victory? A: Yes. Q: Is that a legal reason to stop recounts? or a political one? A: Let's just say in all of American history and all of American law, this reason has no basis in law. But that didn't stop the five conservatives from creating new law out of thin air. Q: Aren't these conservative justices against judicial activism? A: Yes, when liberal judges are perceived to have done it. Q: Well, if the December 12 deadline is not binding, why not count the votes afterward? A: The US Supreme Court, after admitting the December 12 deadline is not binding, set December 12 as a binding deadline at 10 p.m. on December 12. Q: Didn't the US Supreme Court condemn the Florida Supreme Court for arbitrarily setting a deadline? A: Yes. Q: But, but -- A: Not to worry. The US Supreme Court does not have to follow laws it sets for other courts. Q: So who caused Florida to miss the December 12 deadline? A: The Bush lawyers who first went to court to stop the recount, the rent-a-mob in Miami that got paid Florida vacations for intimidating officials, and the US Supreme Court for stopping the recount. Q: So who is punished for this behavior? A: Gore, of course. Q: Tell me this, are Florida's election laws unconstitutional? A: Yes, according to the Supreme Court. Q: And the laws of 50 states that allow votes to be cast or counted differently are unconstitutional? A: Yes, according to the logic of the Supreme Court opinion. And 33 states have the same "clear intent of the voter" standard that the US Supreme Court found was illegal in Florida Q: Then why aren't the results of 33 states thrown out? A: Um. Because um.. the Supreme Court doesn't say Q: But if Florida's certification includes counts expressly declared by the US Supreme Court to be unconstitutional, we don't know who really won the election there, right? A: Right. But a careful analysis by the Miami Herald shows Gore won Florida by about 20,000 votes (excluding the butterfly ballot errors). Q: So, what do we do, have a re-vote? Throw out the entire state? Count under a single uniform standard? A: No. We just don't count the votes that favor Gore. Q: That's completely bizarre! That sounds like rank political favoritism! Did the justices have any financial interest in the case? A: Scalia's two sons are both lawyers working for Bush. Thomas's wife is collecting applications for people who want to work in the Bush administration. Q: Why didn't they recuse themselves? A: If either had recused himself, the vote would be 4-4, and the Florida Supreme Court decision allowing recounts would have been affirmed. Q: I can't believe the justices acted in such a blatantly political way. A: Read the opinions for yourself: http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/supremecourt/00-949 dec12.fdf (December 9 stay stopping the recount) http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/00pdf/00-949.pdf (December 12 opinion) Q: So what are the consequences of this? A: The guy who got the most votes in the US and in Florida and under our Constitution (Al Gore) will lose to America's second choice (Bush) who won the all important 5-4 Supreme Court vote, which trumps America's choice Q: I thought in a democracy, the guy with the most votes wins. A: True, in a democracy. But America in 2000 is no longer a democracy. In America in 2000, the guy with the most US Supreme Court votes wins. Q: So what will happen to the Supreme Court when Bush becomes President? A: He will appoint more justices in the mode of Thomas and Scalia to ensure that the will of the people is less and less respected. Soon lawless justices may constitute 6-3 or even 7-2 on the court. Q: Is there any way to stop this? A: YES. No federal judge can be confirmed without a vote in the Senate. It takes 60 votes to break a filibuster. If only 41 of the 50 Democratic Senators stand up to Bush and his Supremes and say that they will not approve a single judge appointed by him until a President can be democratically elected in 2004, the judicial reign of terror can end.and one day we can hope to return to the rule of law and the will of the people. Q: What do I do now? A: Email this to everyone you know, and write or call your Senator, reminding him or her that Gore beat Bush by several hundred thousand votes (three times Kennedy's margin over Nixon) and that you believe that VOTERS rather than JUDGES should determine who wins an election by counting every vote. And to protect our judiciary from overturning the will of the people, you want them to confirm NO NEW JUDGES APPOINTED BY A NON-DEMOCRATICALLY ELECTED PRESIDENT until 2004 when a president is finally chosen by the American people, instead of Antonin Scalia. Attorney at Law P.S. Q: Isn't anyone on the US Supreme Court a rational follower of the rule of law? A: Yes. Read the four dissents. Excerpts below: Justice John Paul Stevens (Republican appointed by Ford): "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 the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law." Justice David Souter (Republican appointed by Bush): "Before this Court stayed the effort to [manually recount the ballots] the courts of Florida were ready to do their best to get that job done. There is no justification for denying the State the opportunity to try to count all the disputed ballots now. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (Democrat appointed by Clinton): Chief Justice Rehnquist would "disrupt" Florida's "republican regime." [In other words, democracy in Florida is imperiled.] The court should not let its "untested prophecy" that counting votes is "impractical" "decide the presidency of the United States." Justice Steven Breyer (Democrat appointed by Clinton): "There is no justification for the majority's remedy . . . " We "risk a self-inflicted wound -- a wound that may harm not just the court, but the nation." |
Bush Inauguration Is Marked By Large Demonstrations
Opposition groups protest illegitimate rule by right wing govt.
By Abayomi Azikiwe, Pan-African News Wire, Editor
WASHINGTON, DC, 20 Jan. (PANW)--Tens of thousands of anti-Bush protestors
descended on the nation's capital on Saturday to express their opposition to
what many characterized as an appointed regime by the US Supreme Court.
People who opposed Bush dominated the area around Freedom Plaza located in
the vicinity of Pennsylvania avenue and 14th Street NW, in downtown
Washington. Activists who represented a myriad of political movements
including the campaign to free Mumia Abu-Jamal, the independence of Puerto
Rico, women's rights groups, anarchists youth collectives, socialists, gay
and lesbian right organizations, environmentalists and civil rights
advocates and many other political tendencies, began to pour into the
Freedom Plaza area before ten o'clock saturday morning.
Although permits had been granted to the demonstration's organizers, the US
Secret Service had thousands of agents in the streets surrounding the Plaza
preventing the protestors from entering the grounds facing Pennsylvania
avenue, the route where George W. Bush was scheduled to drive
pass later on that afternoon.
At 10:30am, Brian Becker of the International Action Center, which had made
the request for the permit to hold the demonstrations months ago, took the
microphone and said that "ninety minutes ago we were supposed to have
gotten
into the Plaza." The IAC and its supporters waged a legal fight to
open up
large sections of the parade route to demonstrators who were opposed to the
handling of the national elections in November and the Supreme Court refusal
to allow all of the votes in Florida to be counted and tabulated.
A standoff developed between the Secret Service and thousands of
demonstrators who began to gather at the Freedom Plaza entrance located on
the corner of Pennsylvania and 14th Street NW.
Almost simultaneously a group of several hundred anarchist youth
representing the Revolutionary Anti-Capitalist Black Blocs were seen
marching down Pennsylvania avenue towards 14th. They were shouting
"no
justice, no peace, free mumia, [expletive] the police."
Confrontations arose later in another section of downtown as police arrested
and beat several youthful protestors, while others took to the streets and
burned American flags. It was reported that at least nine
people were arrested in these clashes between demonstrators and the police.
"This is precisely why we were in US District Court yesterday" said
an IAC
organizer, who spoke through a loudspeaker to the crowd that was growing
rapidly. "We said the checkpoints were not neutral," he
continued. "They
are not about security for the president, they are basically a way to get
rid of the free speech rights of demonstrators and we will never surrender,
we will never surrender these rights," he declared to the cheers of the
crowd.
"Whose streets, our streets," the crowd began to chant as the Secret
Service
officials continued to delay the entry of the activists into the Freedom
Plaza area.
Soon the Secret Service agents began to a allow a trickle of people into the
area after they examined the contents of any bags held by those entering the
Plaza. During this time someone picked up the microphone and began to speak
out against the refusal of the Secret Service to allow people into the Plaza
area immediately without a search.
"The clock is ticking but we are not going to leave said Larry Holmes, an
IAC organizer." Holmes continued by stating that "we can't stress
enough how
important, how absolutely crucial to our objective here today, which is to
demonstrate that the people are against the illegitimate, racist,
reactionary ruler for the rich being inaugurated for anything.
Anti-Bush forces began to overshadow event
By 11:00 am on Saturday, there was a feeling that most of the people in
route to Pennsylvania avenue were anti-Bush. As soon as the crowds
gathered
outside the entrance to Freedom Plaza had begun to move more swiftly through
the Secret Service checkpoints, signs and banners were hoisted which
represented a broad cross-section of political groups in the United States.
Banners and signs flew above the crowd which said: "Bush=Racism; "Hail
to
the Thief"; "Free Mumia Abu-Jamal"; Justice for Jamil Al-Amin (H.
Rap
Brown); "End Police Brutality"; "John Ashcroft is a sexist-racist
pig";
"Free Florida's Black Voters"; etc. This demonstration was described
as the
largest anti-inaugural protests since the beginning of the second term of
Richard Nixon in 1973.
Once the initial group of over 5,000 protestors entered the Freedom Plaza
area, speakers began to address a host of political concerns in several
places throughout the area. Some spoke about the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal and
the plight of political prisoners in the US, others addressed the need for
the total abolition of the what they called "the racist death penalty"
in
the country, while some made statements about the eroding rights of free
speech and the corporate domination of the media.
Despite the massive show of force by over 7,000 police, secret service
agents, national guardsmen and other military personnel, the crowds grew
larger and more vocal in their opposition to the Bush administration.
Soon another march of 12,000 people began to descend into the area of
Freedom Plaza from 14th Street NW from Dupont Circle. This delegation of
demonstrators were organized by the Justice Action Movement (JAM) and it
consisted of a majority of anti-establishment youth ranging from socialists
to women's rights activists, advocates of greater voting rights for national
minorities and the poor, those calling for a national moratorium on the
death penalty and dozens of other groups.
It was then announced by the organizers of the Freedom Plaza rally that
outgoing President Bill Clinton had formally denied American Indian Movement
(AIM) leader Leonard Peltier executive clemency. The crowds began to shout
out in anger demanding the immediate release of Peltier who has been in
federal prison for over two decades after being sentenced for the alleged
murder of two Federal Bureau of Investigation agents, who he claims he did
not kill. Later a representative of the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee
would address the crowd on the latest developments in the case of the Native
American leader.
Official parade is denounced by anti-Bush protestors
When the official parade of Republican dignitaries and supporters, including
columns of military units and police convoys, began to pass the Plaza on
Pennsylvania avenue, people who occupied the majority of
the space inside the area, began to boo and scream at the participants.
Some of the protestors chanted: "free Mumia, jail Bush, free Peltier, jail
Bush." Others yelled: "Go back to Texas you racists."
"All up and down Pennsylvania avenue, guess who is here?" said Larry
Holmes
of the IAC. "Us" the crowd responded. "They did not want us
to be here on
Pennsylvania avenue," Holmes later said, in reference to the protracted
political and legal battle waged by the rally organizers who utilized the
legal resources of the Partnership for Civil Justice.
Attorneys for this agency, Carl Messineo and Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, were
present as legal observers for the anti-Bush inaugural demonstrations on
Saturday. They eventually addressed the crowd on the significance of the
legal victory won by the organizers which allowed them to enter the
Pennsylvania avenue area around Freedom Plaza, where the government sought
through the Presidential Inauguration Committee (PIC) and the Secret Service
to bar all protests from this venue.
During the early afternoon columns of buses with darkened windows drove by
Pennsylvania avenue to the boos and denunciations of the anti-Bush
protestors who by this time had grown to tens of thousands of people. These
people were Republican dignitaries who were enroute to the White House where
a reception would be held later for Bush.
The protestors denounced all sections of the parade: the military columns,
the police, the Texas Rangers, the marching bands from the marines and the
educational institutions in Bush's home state were met with boos and
catcalls.
"Go back to Texas." The protestors shouted in unison as a column of
Texans
walked pass in the parade wearing cowboy hats and boots, with shirts
emblazoned with the lone star--a historical signature for the white settlers
in the formerly Mexican controlled territory now known as a US state.
In other sections of Pennsylvania avenue, Bush's vehicle was hit with ice
and eggs. When his limousine went past Freedom Plaza, the crowd of tens of
thousands of protestors screamed "racist murderer" and " George
Dubya we
know you, your father was a killer too."
Columns of police units and Secret Service agents lined the streets and ran
alongside the presidential limousine when it passed the Plaza. Bush did not
exit the vehicle until he reached a cordoned off area near the White House
where only Republican guests were supposed to be allowed. However, anti-Bush
protestors were able to hit his vehicle with an egg after he had exited.
The role of the corporate media
Media outlets in the US attempted to downplay the size and character of the
protest demonstrations against the Bush inauguration. However, because of
the overwhelming presence of the opposition forces, the major networks were
forced to address the protest actions.
They attempted to blame the damp and drizzling weather on the low turnout of
Republican party supporters in Freedom Plaza and along the Pennsylvania
avenue parade route. While the news commentators refused to give any real
estimates of the number of demonstrators against Bush, they did tacitly
acknowledge that they were far greater than pro-Bush Republicans.
Later Saturday evening on the C-Span television network, a caller who
supported the Republican party stated that "this was a sad day for the
nation" and asked "where were the Republicans today in Washington, DC
?"
In another protest action at the Supreme Court, over 10,000 activists
gathered to host what they called a counter-inauguration where the national
elections results in Florida were denounced as fraudulent. The
crowd surrounded the Court building and later took a pledge to continue the
fight for universal voting rights in the United States. These actions were
organized by the NAACP, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the National
Lawyers Guild and other organizations.
IAC organizers of the rally at Freedom Plaza stated that they were satisfied
with the turnout and the legal right won in the courts to be present in the
area along Pennsylvania avenue.
Brian Becker pointed out that "this was a victory because tens of thousands
of people came out to protest this illegitimate government that was installed
through the disenfranchisement of black voters in Florida."
Organizers pledged to continue their efforts to oppose Bush's policies in
the coming months and stated that they would be back to the nation's capital
soon.
Please send as far and wide
as possible.
Thanks,
Robert Sterling
Editor, The Konformist
http://www.konformist.com
Saturday, January 20, 2001
ARTISTpres
Bush Inaugural Special: 100 Links to
Bush info
The following are links to information about the Bush family,
the Bush cabinet appointees and the corporations, think tanks
and foundations that are behind the GW Bush administration.
My including these links to materials other than the articles I
wrote is not to be considered an endorsement of any statement
they contain. These links connect to sites run by the left, the
religious right, conservative think tanks, political independents
and the mainstream media. Some are pro-Bush and are
included for cross reference value. All links were good as of
this writing so if you get a message to the contrary keep
trying-they are busy sites. When you cut and paste the web
adresses or type them in there must be no added spaces or
characters or else you will not be able to access the sites.
Within each of these sites you can do a word search on Bush or
any other word or name that interests you. These materials,
which are only a tiny fraction of what's out there, will help you
to see through the blitzkrieg of false information we are all
being subject to about GW Bush and his cabinet. Please
forward these links to your friends, the media, elected officials
and anyone else with an interest in knowing the real story
behind the 43rd President of the United States.
This list was compiled by
Robert Lederman, President of A.R.T.I.S.T.
(Artists' Response To Illegal State Tactics)
ARTISTpres@aol.com (718) 743-3722
Lederman articles on the Bush connection to Nazis, eugenics
and drug companies. Also articles on West Nile Virus,
Giuliani, the Manhattan Institute - more than 50 articles filled
with references.
http://Baltech.org/lederman/spray/
An exceptional article on the relationship between American
conservatives, GW Bush, so-called compassionate
conservatism, eugenics and the Nazis: Nazis In America by
Myrna Estep Ph. D
http://www.feminista.com/v3n10/estep.html
Bush financial misconduct
http://www.campaignwatch.org
Bush family background
http://www.geocities.com/alanjpakula/triplecrown.html
http://www.shorejournal.com/elkhorn/
http://www.prorev.com/bush.htm
http://www.copvcia.com/witness_list.htm
http://members.tripod.com/~Evademic/naznwo/naznwo10.txt
http://www.motherjones.com/news_wire/bushboys.html
http://www.realchange.org/bushjr.htm
http://www.tylwythteg.com/enemies/Bush/bush17.html
http://www.gwbush.com/
http://www.onlinejournal.com/Commentary/commentary.html
http://www.bushfiles.com/bushfiles/midland.html
http://afrocubaweb.com/bushes.htm
http://www.davidicke.com/icke/articles/bush.html
http://www.infomanage.com/secrets/bios/bushes.html
http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/3750/bush.htm
http://www.kmf.org/williams/bushbook.html
http://www.hli.org/issues/pp/bcreview/index.html
http://www.joinhugs.org/mainpage/bushrecord.html
http://www.monitor.net/monitor/morgue.html
CIA, Nazis & the Republican Party
http://www.bartcop.com/nazigop.htm
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Fascism/OldNazis_NewRig
ht.html
http://www.srpska-mreza.com/library/facts/ratline.html
http://www.newsmakingnews.com/mblinks.htm
http://www.watch.pair.com/jbs-cnp.html
Philadelphia Enquirer 9/10/98 David Lee Preston, "Fired Bush
backer one of several with possible Nazi links," September 10,
1988.
Project Paperclip: the CIA Nazi recruitment program - many of
the tink tanks and organizations behind Bush got their ideas
directly from these former Nazi officials.
http://www.dc.peachnet.edu/~shale/humanities/composition/ass
ignments/experiment/paperclip.html
Head of Florida holocaust Museum links Bush family to Nazis
"The Bush family fortune came from the Third Reich."
-John Loftus, former US Justice Dept. Nazi War Crimes
investigator and President of the Florida Holocaust Museum
quoted in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune 11/11/2000
http://www.newscoast.com/headlinesstory2.cfm?ID=35115
4/14/1990 New York Times quotes George Bush as stating,
"Lets forgive the Nazi war criminals."
US releases Nazi documents (AP)
http://www.apbnews.com/media/gfiles/1999/11/03/nazis1103_
01.html
Josef Goebbels on propaganda - Understand how the Big Lie
techniques used by the Bush campaign work
http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/goebmain.htm
Eugenics sites (the Bush family are among the world's top
advocates for eugenics)
http://www.notdeadyet.org/eughis.html
http://www.techreview.com/articles/as96/allen.html
http://www.hli.org/issues/pp/bcreview/index.html
http://users.erols.com/straymond/EUGENICS2.htm
http://home.att.net/~eugenics/
http://www.sightings.com/general3/eugene.htm
http://www.biol.tsukuba.ac.jp/~macer/SG.html
Fluoride info
(Alcoa, which plays a major role in the Bush administration, is
the world's leading producer of fluoride and was a leading ally
of Nazi Germany)
http://204.181.21.150/trufax/fluoride/flchrono.html
Gulf War Syndrome and how the George Bush administration
supplied Iraq with chemical and biological warfare materials,
allowed US servicemen and women to be exposed to them and
then covered up the entire scandal by Air Force Captain Joyce
Riley
http://www.all-natural.com/riley.html
http://www.biblebelievers.org.au/gulf.htm
A very interesting chronology of world events related to the
Bush family and the new administration's goals
http://www.trufax.org/chrono/cre.html
Cheney links
http://www.infoplease.com/spot/cheney1.html
http://www.weeklywire.com/ww/08-28-00/austin_pols_feature
2.html
http://www.campaignwatch.org
http://www.weeklywire.com/ww/08-28-00/austin_pols_feature
2.html
http://www.l0pht.com/pub/blackcrwl/patriot/north_and_constit
ution.txt
http://www.findarticles.com/m1295/9_64/65014757/p1/article.j
html
http://www.monitor.net/monitor/0008a/cheneydislike.html
http://www.motherjones.com/news_wire/cheney.html
http://www.foreignpolicy-infocus.org/papers/micr/introduction.
html#Figure 1
http://www.l0pht.com/pub/blackcrwl/patriot/north_and_constit
ution.txt
http://www.foreignpolicy-infocus.org/papers/micr/mission.htm
l
"A clique of U.S. industrialists is hell-bent to bring a fascist
state to supplant our democratic government and is working
closely with the fascist regime in Germany and Italy. I have
had plenty of opportunity in my post in Berlin to witness how
close some of our American ruling families are to the Nazi
regime. . . Certain American industrialists had a great deal to
do with bringing fascist regimes into being in both Germany
and Italy. They extended aid to help Fascism occupy the seat of
power, and they are helping to keep it there."-William E. Dodd,
U.S. Ambassador to Germany, 1937.
See: Shadow of the Swastika
http://www.capnasty.org/taf/issue7/elkhorn1.htm
AND
http://users.actweb.net/~eye/arms_industry_world_war_2.htm
Powell took hefty fee from Lebanese just before election
http://www.smh.com.au/news/0101/08/world/world3.html
Ashcroft and white supremacists
NY Observer January 11, 2001
http://www.nyobserver.com/pages/conason.asp
The Heritage Foundation
http://www.corporations.org/coors/
http://alant.purespace.de/anti.html
http://www.watch.pair.com/heritage.html
The Bell Curve and the Pioneer Fund
(The Bell Curve is the socialogical text that is the source
behind many of the Bush's cabinet appointees ideas on African
Americans, welfare reform, affirmative action, school
vouchers, voting rights etc. It's author, Charles Murray, is
directly connected to more than half of Bush's cabinet
appointees and advisors)
http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45/049.html
http://www.fair.org/extra/9501/bell.html
http://www.marmoset.com/60minute/Webnav/eugen.html
THE NEW YORK TIMES - 12/11/97
Pioneer Fund Backs Controversial Study of "Racial
Betterment"
http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45/022.html
Bush Monsanto connection
http://www.notmilk.com/
Bush has controversial bio removed from stores
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/politics/DailyNews/bushbook9
91022.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/campaigns/wh
2000/stories/stmartins102799.htm
Masons and US Presidency connection [scroll down to Bush
section]
(GW Bush will be sworn in on a masonic bible)
http://www.fortunecity.com/roswell/daniken/443/uspresidentas
masonspt3.htm
Quotes by Bush, Kissinger etc. on the New World Order
http://www.wearenow.com/eighthground/free/quotes.shtml
http://www.vaix.net/~api/172115.htm
Bush, Hitler, Skull and Bones connection
http://www.cuttingedge.org/news/n1314.cfm
To access thousands of web sites with detailed information on
the Bush/Nazi connection go to a good search engine such as
http://www.google.com/ and type in
Bush AND Nazi.
Likewise if you type in Alcoa AND Nazi or Ford AND Nazi
etc. you'll get thousands of pages of information on these
connections.
Other excellent search engines to search for Bush links
http://www.excite.com/
http://www.google.com/
http://www.raging.com/
http://www.dejanews.com/[ST_cam=search.yahoo.none.slot]/
http://www.webcrawler.com/
http://www.mamma.com/
http://www.yahoo.com/
http://partners.nytimes.com/library/tech/reference/cynavi.html?
Partner=AOL&RefId=l3eEFnnnn.n-
http://www.scrubtheweb.com/
Robert Lederman, President of A.R.T.I.S.T.
(Artists' Response To Illegal State Tactics)
ARTISTpres@aol.com (718) 743-3722
Lederman articles on the Bush connection to Nazis, eugenics
and drug companies; West Nile Virus expose, Giuliani,
Manhattan Institute, Eugenics info - more than 50 articles
http://Baltech.org/lederman/spray/
PLEASE FORWARD AND POST WIDELY
God Bless America and Impeach GW Bush!
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
February 2001
By Ralph Nader
<http://www.brillscontent.com/2001feb/features/nader.shtml>
What if we threw a presidential campaign and nobody came? The Green Party's
candidate explains how he tried to engage the press, and why it didn't work.
Please send as far and wide as possible.
Thanks,
Robert Sterling
Editor, The Konformist
http://www.konformist.com
Florida
'recounts' make Gore winner
Special report: the US elections
Martin Kettle in Washington
Monday January 29, 2001
Al Gore, not George Bush, should be sitting in the White House today as the
newly elected president of the United States, two new independent probes of
the disputed Florida election contest have confirmed.
The first survey, conducted on behalf of the Washington Post, shows that Mr
Gore had a nearly three-to-one majority among 56,000 Florida voters whose
November 7 ballot papers were discounted because they contained more than one
punched hole.
The second and separate survey, conducted on behalf of the Palm Beach Post,
shows that Mr Gore had a majority of 682 votes among the discounted
"dimpled"
ballots in Palm Beach county.
In each case, if the newly examined votes had been allowed to count in the
November election, Mr Gore would have won Florida's 21 electoral college
votes by a narrow majority and he, not Mr Bush, would be the president.
Instead, Mr Bush officially carried Florida by 537 votes after recounts were
stopped.
In spite of the findings, no legal challenge to the Florida result is
possible in the light of the US supreme court's 5-4 ruling in December to
hand the state to Mr Bush. But the revelations will continue to cast a cloud,
to put it mildly, over the democratic legitimacy of Mr Bush's election.
Some 56,000 so-called "overvotes" were examined in the Washington
Post
survey. All of these ballot papers were ruled to be invalid votes on November
7 because they contained two or more punched holes in the presidential
section of the ballot. Twelve Florida counties used voting machines where
voting was by punch cards in this way, and eight of them participated in the
survey: Broward, Highlands, Hillsborough, Marion, Miami-Dade, Palm Beach,
Pasco and Pinellas. None of the ballot papers in the survey formed part of
any official count or recount.
The research shows that 45,608 of the 56,000 ballot papers (87% of the total)
contained votes for Mr Gore, compared with 17,098 containing votes for Mr
Bush (33%). In 1,367 cases, voters punched every hole except that for Mr
Bush.
In cases where the voters cast invalid "overvotes" in the
presidential
election, but then cast valid votes in the US senate contest lower down on
the same ballot, 70% voted Democrat, Mr Gore's party, and only 24% voted
Republican.
The disproportion was especially dramatic in Palm Beach, whose butterfly
ballot paper interleaved two lists of candidates in such a way as to show Mr
Gore's name second on the ballot paper, but to require the voter to punch the
third hole to record a vote for him.
Though no absolute conclusions can be drawn from the overvotes, the
implication that many thousands more invalidated Floridians intended to vote
for Mr Gore than for Mr Bush seems hard to resist. The survey also clearly
implies that some of Florida's voting machines were inadequate and that many
voters were confused by the procedure.
In the second survey, the Palm Beach Post examined 4,513 dimpled "undervotes"
- so named because no hole was punched in the ballot paper - and which were
excluded from the November and December manual recount process. In each case,
the Palm Beach county canvassing board ruled that no vote had been cast on
these ballots but Democratic or Republican observers disputed the ruling. The
ballots in the survey had been set aside for a possible court-ordered review
that never took place.
Of the disputed ballots, some 2,500 had dimples for Mr Gore, while 1,818 had
similar marks for Mr Bush. If they had been counted, Mr Gore would have had a
net gain of 682 votes. This would have been in addition to a separate net
gain of 174 votes from Palm Beach which was disallowed by Florida's secretary
of state.
If you are interested in a free subscription to The
Konformist Newswire, please visit:
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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!:
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Bandits in Black Robes
Why you should still be angry about Bush v. Gore
By Jamin Raskin
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2001/0103.raskin.html
Quite demonstrably the worst Supreme Court decision in history, Bush v.
Gore changes everything in American law and politics. The Rehnquist
Court has destroyed any moral prestige still lingering from the Warren
Court's brief but passionate commitment to civil rights in the middle of
the last century. Now the court has returned to its historic
conservative role, rushing to aid the political party of property and
race privilege in a debased partisan way, torturing out of the Equal
Protection Clause new rules to assure the power of one political
faction. Bush v. Gore was no momentary lapse of judgment by five
conservative justices, but the logical culmination of their long drive
to define an extra-constitutional natural law enshrining the rights of
white electoral majorities, like the one that brought George W. Bush the
White House.
People do not want to believe that Bush v. Gore is actually the worst
Supreme Court decision in our history because we want that title to
belong for all time to the infamous Dred Scott decision (1857), which
found that African-Americans could not be "citizens"within the meaning
of the diversity jurisdiction clause of the Constitution. But Dred Scott
was, by comparison, a brilliantly reasoned and logically coherent
decision. It was a masterpiece of originalism, legal analysis based on
the Framers' intent. It demonstrated to the satisfaction of anyone then
or today that the original Constitution was indeed a white man's compact
and that it was never contemplated by the Framers that slaves or the
descendants thereof could avail themselves of the federal courts. (It
would take the Civil War and Reconstruction to destroy the white
supremacist Constitution.) Of course, original intent is not the only
theory of constitutional interpretation, much less the controlling one,
but at least the Dred Scott decision had a coherent theory rooted in the
history and text of the Constitution.
By contrast, Bush v. Gore's Emancipation Proclamation for pregnant chads
mocks legal reasoning and represents an affront to the rule of law. It
has no grounding in originalism or textualism, the watchwords of the
conservatives. It constitutes an assault on federalism and the
separation of powers, both of which conservatives pretend to love. And
it makes a mockery of the phrase "judicial restraint."In a slapdash
job
of constitutional interpretation, the conservatives upended and ravaged
four foundational relationships in our constitutional system. It usurped
the role of the Florida Supreme Court in interpreting state law. It
usurped the role of the American people by halting the counting of
ballots in a presidential election and effectively choosing the
president for them. It usurped Congress' powers to accept or reject the
states' electoral college votes. And it reversed the proper distribution
of powers in federal government by having Supreme Court justices appoint
the president rather than vice versa.
To accomplish these feats, the court had to trample its own restrictive
rules about who can even be heard in federal court. In equal protection
cases, certainly those involving racial minorities, the Rehnquist Court
has been adamant that plaintiffs seeking a hearing may not assert the
rights of others or abstract principles of fairness but must establish
standing by showing their own concrete personal injury at the hands of
the government. Thus, in Allen v. Wright (1984), the court denied
standing to African-American parents who wanted to compel the IRS to
enforce the law by withdrawing tax exemptions from private schools that
discriminate on the basis of race. Justice O'Connor stated that citizens
have no general right to make government comply with the law and found
that the African-American plaintiffs were not personally injured by the
white flight allegedly facilitated by the IRS.
But in Bush v. Gore, the Rehnquist majority did not even ask, much less
explain, how Bush was personally injured by the hypothetical possibility
that anonymous third-party citizens might have their ballots counted
differently in Florida's presidential election. Nor, for that matter,
did the justices ask how stopping the vote counting would redress those
third-party injuries.
Like a rampaging elephant in a polling booth, the court overrode not
only the glaring standing problem but also the obstacles of federalism
and the "political question doctrine."Article II leaves it to
"Each
State"to appoint its electors, and the 12th Amendment provides that the
"President of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and House
of Representatives, open all the certificates and the votes shall then
be counted."The court should simply have deferred to the states and
Congress. That is almost certainly what it would have done if Al Gore
had been leading in Florida and had asked the court to stop an order of
the Florida Supreme Court for a statewide manual recount of undercounted
ballots upon a petition by George W. Bush.
Even if we charitably assume that the court would have considered the
merits of an equal protection claim in a hypothetical Gore v. Bush case,
there can be no doubt that the conservative majority would have
dismissed the argument, a theory so weak that the court itself refused
to certify it for consideration when Bush raised it on Nov. 22, 2000.
Only later when it realized this was the only available hook to hang its
hat on did the majority find new life in this approach.
Even if one suspends disbelief and imagines that the Rehnquist Court, in
the hypothetical Gore v. Bush case, would have determined that there was
an equal protection violation, it is impossible to see how the court
ever would have arrived at the remedy of halting the recount. If voters
are threatened with constitutional injury by potentially not having
their votes count when similarly situated votes in other counties are
being counted, that injury becomes certain and undeniable if the court
orders that they not be counted. How are the rights of pregnant- chad
voters vindicated by judicial relief mandating their categorical
disappearance in the election?
This paradox reflects the fact that there were no injured plaintiffs as
parties in Bush v. Gore available to complain about being
disenfranchised by the court. Rather, the plaintiff was a candidate
desperately looking for ways to prevent the counting of votes. The
tragedy here is that the majority not only ordered actual
disenfranchisement as the remedy for potential disenfranchisement but
actually used voting rights rhetoric to nullify the right to vote. If
there was an equal protection violation in Bush v. Gore, it is found not
in anything Florida did, but in the very relief that the court ordered.
Still, the decision was not out of character for the Rehnquist Court.
Far from it. For at least a decade, the court has been promoting a
deeply conservative and racialized ideology of electoral politics that
finally collapsed into bare-knuckled Republican partisanship in Bush v.
Gore.
The Rehnquist Court made clear in 1993 that it intended to read equal
protection in politics through an ideological lens. Writing for the
majority in Shaw v. Reno, Justice O'Connor launched the court on its
path of striking down so-called "bizarrely drawn"majority-African
American and majority-Hispanic congressional districts created by states
under the Voting Rights Act. Like Bush v. Gore, the court's decision in
Shaw relied on a stunning abandonment of all prior equal protection
jurisprudence to define a very strange new right for a powerful social
group---white people---facing nothing we might recognize as
discrimination. In Shaw and its progeny, the court essentially
articulated a presumptive new right under equal protection for white
citizens to be part of racial majorities in federal, state, and local
legislative districts.
This double standard, which masquerades as "color blindness,"requires
tremendous judicial interference with the political processes of the
states to prevent the creation of aesthetically displeasing
majority-minority districts. Like Bush v. Gore, the Shaw doctrine also
betrays original understanding jurisprudence because it has been an
article of faith with conservatives for decades that the intent of the
14th Amendment had nothing to do with districting practices, since the
whole purpose of giving Congress enforcement powers under the 14th
Amendment was to empower it to take remedial action against white
supremacy.
In Shaw, the court discarded conventional modes of constitutional
analysis in favor of a racially charged conservative political
correctness. The white law professors at Duke, who brought the Shaw
litigation after redistricting turned them into a racial minority in
their House district, actually suffered no injury from the alleged wrong
of "racial gerrymandering."They retained a perfect right to vote, to
run
for office, to campaign, and to raise money. They enjoyed all the same
rights (and burdens) that African-Americans have as minorities in
majority-white legislative districts.
Yet in Shaw, the court found that the plaintiffs stated an actionable
claim by objecting to "redistricting legislation that is so extremely
irregular on its face that it rationally can be viewed only as an effort
to segregate the races for purposes of voting, without regard for
traditional districting principles and without sufficiently compelling
justification."A majority African-American district with an odd-looking
perimeter "bears an uncomfortable resemblance to political
apartheid,"Justice O'Connor observed. In Holder v. Hall, Justice Thomas
upped the ante and described the creation of majority African-American
districts as "an enterprise of segregating the races into political
homelands that amounts, in truth, to nothing short of Œpolitical
apartheid.'"
What is so amazing about this rhetoric is that "segregation"and
"apartheid"in the hands of Rehnquist, Thomas, and the gang have
nothing
in common with society's understanding of these concepts. Indeed, the
political "segregation"allegedly caused by majority-African American
districts is the precise opposite of the forms of segregation condemned
in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. The separate-but-equal schools
deemed unlawful in Brown were 100 percent white and 100 percent
African-American. The districts targeted for destruction in Shaw were
the most integrated districts in the history of North Carolina: The
First District was 53.4 percent African-American, 45.5 percent white,
and the Twelfth was 53.3 percent African-American and 45.2 percent
white.
Moreover, since racial integration is the conservatives' overriding
goal, it should have moved them that the existence of these districts
meant that, for the first time since Reconstruction, there would be
African Americans in the state's delegation to the U.S. House. The new
majority-minority districts created in the wake of the 1990 census meant
that the number of minorities in Congress increased by 18. Meanwhile, a
majority---57 percent---of North Carolina's African-Americans continued
to live in majority-white districts. And even after the creation of the
two majority-African American districts to remedy a history of racial
gerrymandering in the state, white majorities and white congressmen
continued to hold 10 out of 12, or 83 percent, of the state's U.S. House
seats even though whites only constituted 79 percent of the state's
population.
Shaw has transplanted a most astounding racial double standard to the
very heart of equal protection. Under the Shaw rule, whites have a
presumptive right not to be part of majority African-American or
Hispanic districts that have an odd shape, although African American and
Hispanics have no such right against belonging to oddly shaped
majority-white districts. The Constitution requires no standards of
compactness, contiguity, geometric form, or aesthetically pleasing
appearance in legislative districts. (Who has ever seen a square or
triangular congressional district?) In general now, whenever
legislatures deliberately create majority-minority districts to remedy
past racial vote dilution, they violate the Constitution, but if they
deliberately create majority-white districts to entrench white
incumbents, they have done nothing wrong.
Unlike minority plaintiffs challenging the snob zoning of housing,
suspicious road closings, racially uneven use of the death penalty, or
police recruitment testing that disproportionately fails minorities,
white plaintiffs in these cases of abstract symbolic harm do not have to
show personal injury and do not have to show that there was any
governmental purpose to discriminate against them.
Meantime, the court has cavalierly sent packing actually disenfranchised
populations seeking its help. Everyone knows that the conservatives in
Bush v. Gore stated there is no constitutional right for the people to
vote for president beyond what the states are willing to bestow upon
them. Less well-known is that, just two months prior to the court's
decision in Bush v. Gore, the court dismissed an appeal in Alexander v.
Daley, a voting-rights case brought by the District of Columbia
Corporation Counsel and Covington and Burling on behalf of more than a
half-million American citizens who live in the capital city and have no
voting representation in the U.S. House or Senate.
The plaintiffs lost below in a 2-1 panel decision in the U.S. District
Court, but won a splendid dissent by the senior judge on the panel,
Louis Oberdorfer, who found that the denial of representation in
Congress violated equal protection. While the Bush majority granted
certiorari on George W. Bush's petition over the weekend and heard oral
arguments 48 hours later, the same justices categorically refused to
hear the arguments of Washingtonians, who have been waiting for a
hearing on their disenfranchisement for 200 years.
Supreme Court Nominations
After Bush v. Gore, there is no use in anyone pretending the selection
of judges is not a political event, indeed a partisan one, or that it
has ever been anything else. Supreme Court justices have been political
actors from the beginning. The first chief justice, John Jay, actually
ran for governor twice in New York while he was on the bench, winning
the second time and resigning from the court. No one should have been
shocked at news reports at the time Bush v. Gore was argued that Justice
Scalia's son was working as a lawyer for the Republicans' law firm, or
that Justice Clarence Thomas' wife was collecting résumés for the
prospective Bush administration.
Consequently, Democrats must assert the co-equal role of the Senate to
advise and consent. The democratic genius of a system of separated
powers is that when one branch is clogged and hostile to the claims of
significant parts of the population, access and redress are ordinarily
available in another branch. For this reason, the Senate must give no
presumptive weight to the Bush administration's judicial selections.
Senators as a group represent a fuller picture of national political
opinion than a president, certainly this one. Whereas a president
constructs an electoral college majority out of victories in certain
states, senators represent majorities (or pluralities) of voters in
every single state. Moreover, because of their staggered elections,
senators provide a kind of temporally extended representation of the
people's will rather than the president's expression of part of the
nation's mood on a single day once every four years.
All of which is to say, when President George W. Bush begins to fill the
63 vacancies in the federal judiciary in 2001 and floats names for
Supreme Court justices, he should remember the political context of his
victory. Although he eked out a dubious four-vote majority in the
electoral college after eking out a dubious one-vote majority on the
Supreme Court, he lost the national election by more than a half-million
votes. Historically, presidents who achieved office without being truly
elected---Bush almost certainly falls into this category---have seen
more than 50 percent of their Supreme Court nominees rejected.
If President Bush has no mandate to pack the courts with more zealots,
Senate Democrats do have a strong mandate to stop the court's slide from
untenable conservative ideology to blatant Republican partisanship. The
Democrats must not conduct business as usual, the kind they gave us with
the unanimous 1986 confirmation of Antonin Scalia. If Democrats take the
path of least resistance and confirm right-wing corporate lawyers and
platitude-spouting bureaucrats like Clarence Thomas promoting the
Federalist Society agenda, there will be hell to pay for the Bill of
Rights and public welfare generally. Indeed, it has been the Democrats'
wimpiness in challenging Republican judicial nominees that helped to
create the five justice Bush majority.
But, most importantly, the project of constitutional politics cannot be
reserved for Supreme Court nominations. Every district court judge has
tremendous power over people's lives and the Democrats should take
federal appeals court nominations as seriously as they do Supreme Court
nominations. The specific assault on political liberty and electoral
democracy follows logically from a society-wide crackdown on civil
rights and liberties. From Zero Tolerance in the high schools to the War
on Drugs to shrinking privacy to racial profiling, we need a movement to
restore the meaning of our Bill of Rights in the institutions of
society. It is time for the people to take the Constitution back from
the court.
Jamin B. Raskin is a professor of constitutional law at American
University's Washington College of Law and author of the forthcoming
book on constitutional democracy.
***
From:
Bay_Area_Activist list info:
Dear Ted,
My name is Victoria Collier, I'm the editor of VoteScam
<http://www.votescam.com>http://www.votescam.<http://www.votescam.com>com
I read with much appreciation your article about the need to examine
non-violence and its role in the rising People's movement -- anti-corporate
fascism, anti-globalism, pro-freedom, pro-democracy. There is no name for
this movement, but it is growing quickly and spreading like a wild fire.
The words that we use to fan the flames will very much affect the direction
in which this fire burns, and what it burns! I agree with your views
completely and hope that your words of peace and responsibility make the
necessary rounds and are absorbed by activists who are currently refilling
their molotov cocktails.
Being effective is everything. Perhaps the People's movement initially drew
international attention because of the violence in Seattle where the police
were seen by many as the bad guys. But I think the cause has already
suffered considerably due to the continuing and now uninteresting media
coverage of the ubiquitous black-clad stone throwers. To the majority of
people who only watch the major Networks for their news, the protests are
now as predictably violent and uncannily similar in appearance to the
endless skirmishes on the Gaza strip. The danger of this is obvious. The
only hope to change the flow of this tendency toward violence lies with
people like yourself and your ability to articulate respectfully the need
for awareness of greater consequences, and a grasp of the big picture.
I'd like to respond to a specific and extremely important, largely
overlooked aspect of this movement that you mentioned in your article.
You wrote:
>Personally, I don't see "non-violence," non-violence alone, as a
>potentially winning strategy. There is much more that we have to be
>about, including the formation of an alternative to the Democrats and
>Republicans, one which runs independent candidates and is grounded in
>and accountable to grassroots, broadly-based social movements.
Please take a moment to check out the website I listed above. There is
information that you, as an effective spokesperson for many, should know as
you continue on with the battle, and I am assuming at this point that you
are unaware of it, as so many are.
I believe, due to many years as a political activist and organizer involved
with our elections system, that at the moment what you have stated above is
an IMPOSSIBILITY. Running independent candidates grounded in accountable
grass roots, broadly based social movements is an exercise in futility.
Why? Because over the past thirty years, our elections system, from
beginning to end, has been slowly taken over by private corporate
interests, and they now control every aspect of the process, including the
actual machinery used to count the votes. There is a wide body of
information about this, and a rising movement opposing the corporate
take-over of the elections, specifically the computerized vote count, but
it is rising parallel to the anti-globalization movement. They have not yet
branched out to reach each other. That will have to happen, inevitably, if
we are really going to create the changes we need.
At the moment I am one of the main spokespeople for this movement because
my father and uncle wrote the most important book on this topic, "Votescam:
The Stealing of America." Votescam was published 1992 and immediately
banned by the major book chains, which you will no doubt recognize as a
sign of its importance! Nevertheless it has been widely circulated by word
of mouth and has sold tens of thousands of copies, and demand for the book
is growing, I am excited to report. It documents the corporate take-over of
our voting system and the rise of unverifiable, riggable computerized
voting and how it is easily used to control elections for the benefit of
those already in power. It also documents the rise of Voter News Service,
the highly secretive and protected major media consortium that is
drastically more powerful than most people understand. The media and the
computer are now the two greatest threats to democracy and I state again
that the time is coming when this understanding will have to be grasped and
then voiced by the millions who are opposed to global corporate hegemony.
You are absolutely correct, we cannot fight them with violence. We are
out-gunned, and besides, that's not what we're here for. We're here to
create a sane and livable and beautiful world. And it is my opinion that we
must deal with reality, and not with fantasy. Though a utopian anarchist
society with no government and no boundaries just might be the best thing
for all life on earth, I cannot see it happening no matter how far I
stretch my imagination. There are 6 billion people in the world and unless
those numbers are drastically reduced by means I would not like to
contemplate, this planet is going to be dealing with governments and
boundaries for along time to come. What I can see is taking back our
currently existing democratic system from the criminals who have
infiltrated and harnessed it. And there is only one way to do this-- get
them out of office. And there is only one way to do that-- through elections.
As you might've noticed, we have not been able to do that for a long time.
No matter how angry and outraged the citizen become, no matter how
blatantly the politicians lie and cheat and steal, no matter how flagrantly
they sell our national sovereignty to global financiers and undermine the
foundations of the country and our economic and social infrastructure--
they just keep getting back into office to do it again! And we are told
it's OUR fault! Someone keeps voting for them, right? Well, not
necessarily. It is not, in fact, the citizens who are controlling the vote
count. It is private, unaccountable corporations who program the voting
software. Not even the elections supervisors can read the code. It has been
this way for a long time, getting progressively worse over 30 years.
Citizens have lost their Constitutional right to a fair and verifiable vote
count and they have largely not even noticed. Most people assume there is
some kind of accountability in the voting process. But the signs are
clear--voter turn-out has fallen in direct proportion to the rise of
computerized voting. And the feeling that new people with new thoughts can
make any headway in Washington is functionally dead. That fact is, American
government is dead. There is a foul, rotting smell about it. And yet we
continue to pump billions of our taxes into the hulking corpse to keep the
illusion alive. Why? Because most of us are not ready for a revolution. We
can't afford one, and besides, we are not all anarchists. Many people in
this country still think the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are
documents that one should not dismiss so lightly. Many people fought and
died to sustain this country. They do not want to fight and die to tear it
down.
We have but one hope, and that is to take back our vote. Until we control
the mechanism of democracy, until we are in the drivers seat, we will
never be able to steer this country away from the cliff it is speeding toward.
I too have been to the protests, and I have spent years fighting for
environmental issues and human rights causes. I am completely aware of what
we stand to lose if we don't win. I have also spent years in the battle for
citizen control over the democratic process and I know that we are just a
few chess moves away from losing that battle already. There are over 400
bills moving through the states right now to push standardization of the
computerized vote count down the throats of millions of Americans who
simply don't know what they are about to lose.
I write this in hope that you will take the time to learn more about it.
The information in Votescam is vital to any well informed social movement.
I am happy to talk with you about it at any time.
Thank you again for your great article!
Sincerely,
Victoria Collier
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WHEN SPIDERS UNITE, THEY CAN TIE DOWN A LION --
Ethiopian Proverb
Click Book to Read on Line
Who owns the US Government?
Below are "Contributions From Selected
Industries to Federal Candidates
and Parties, 1990-2000" in the U.S.
$117,711,747 - Oil and Gas
$ 58,426,889 - Automotive
$ 51,070,027 - Electric Utilities
$ 35,242,032 - Chemical and Related Manufacturing
$ 24,756,971 - Forestry and Forestry Products
$ 17,945,784 - Mining
$ 6,950,843 - Total Environmental Contributions
Source: Center for Responsive Politics
as printed in Sierra Club Magazine, March/April 2001 issue, page 19.
Please visit this great web site with it's wonderful article "Brainwashing America"
