Monday, November 05, 2007

Students Face Expulsion Following Antiwar Sit-In

Chicago IMC
November 2, 2007

Over 30 anti-war protestors at Morton West High School in Berwyn, IL, face expulsion for a demonstration at the school on Thursday.
Over 70 students participated in a sit-in against the Iraq War on All Saint’s Day, Thursday, November 1st. It began third hour when dozens of students gathered quietly in the lunchroom at Morton West High School and refused to leave. The administrators and police became involved immediately and locked down the school for a half hour after class ended. Students report that they were promised that there would be no charges besides cutting classes if they took their protest outside so as not to disturb the school day. The students complied, and were led to a corner outside the cafeteria where they sang songs and held signs while classes resumed.

Despite a police line set up between the protestors and the student body, many other students joined the demonstration. Organizers say they chose November first because it is the Christian holy day called the feast of All Saints and a national day of peace. They wrote a letter and delivered it to Superintendent, Dr. Ben Nowakowski who was present at the time, stating the reason for their protest.

Deans, counselors and even the Superintendent tried to change the minds of a few, mainly those students with higher GPA scores to abandon the protest. The school called the homes of many of the protestors. Those whose parents arrived before the end of school and took their students home, or left before the protest ended at the final bell, received 3-5 days suspension. All others, an estimated 37 received 10 days suspension and expulsion papers. Parents report that Nowakowski stated those who are seventeen will also face police charges.

Parents who are frantically trying to spare their child’s expulsion flooded the school yesterday to file appeals on the matter. So far, Superintendent Nowakowski has held firm on the punishments. They are expected to find out the results of the appeals on Tuesday. Parents and students report and the school’s videotape shown to some of the parents confirms that the students were non-violent in their action.

The protest came on the heels of a recent incident on October 15th, when a student reported hearing that another student had a gun on campus. The story of the eyewitness was deemed unreliable and the school was not locked down. Later that week (October 19), the Berwyn police, acting on a tip arrested one of the youths originally questioned for gun possession and he allegedly confessed to carrying an unloaded semi-automatic handgun that day. All these issues, plus the expected announcement of whether uniforms will be established in the school should make the next Board of Education meeting on Wednesday at 7:00pm at the Morton East campus very well-attended.

See the link below for the Superintendent’s statement on the matter:
www.jsmortonhs.com/news/contentview.asp

For letters or phone calls of support, please see information below:

Dr. Ben Nowakowski, Superintendent
District 201
2423 South Austin, Cicero, IL 60804
bnowakowski (at) jsmorton.org

(708) 222-5702

Mr. Lucas, Principal
Morton West High School
2400 S. Home Ave.
Berwyn, IL 60402
jlucas (at) west.jsmorton.org

708-222-5901

Mr. Jeffry Pesek, President
Board of Education, District 201
3145 South 55th Avenue
Cicero, IL 60804

708-802-1863

For the rest of the Board Members see:
www.jsmortonhs.com/board/default.asp

For parent contact:
Pam Winstead 708-749-3163, pwinstead (at) clearchannel.com

Alma Moran 708-717-4202, qtalmita (at) yahoo.com

Adam Szwarek 847-587-8849, tsq9743 (at) aol.com

Tacoma Anarchist Bookfair Accused Of Being “Homeland Security Threat”

Pitch Pipe Infoshop Collective
Portland Independent Media Center
November 2, 2007

Dear Fellow Human Beings,

At 3 PM, on Friday, November 2nd, the landlord of the building which houses the Pitch Pipe Infoshop received a call from a Tacoma PD lieutenant. He told her that the Infoshop and the Anarchist Bookfair which it is holding this Saturday and Sunday is a homeland security threat and will be monitored by police for the entire weekend. The landlord then approached residents of the building and threatened eviction. As of now, no one is threatened with a sudden eviction.

This is a direct attack on the part of the government against those it disagrees with. The government is attempting to destroy and stop the protests planned for the 9th and 10th of November against the existence of the ICE detention center. It is attempting to shroud the bookfair in a cloud of fear and discourage people from attending. EVERYONE SHOULD STILL ATTEND! We will not allow this attack on our lives from the government.

Tomorrow the Infoshop collective will be keeping a cautious eye out for any infiltrators. There will be a ZERO TOLERANCE policy for infiltrators. In order to better help identify any infiltrators, do not speak about instigations and do not take aggressive actions towards the police. DO NOT DO THESE THINGS NEAR THE HOUSE! We can not have anything happening near the house. Do not venture off somewhere with someone you do not trust. Stay with those you are completely tight with. Any and all infiltrators that are caught will be treated like infiltrators. ALL AFFINITY GROUP MEETINGS ARE CLOSED MEETINGS! PERIOD!

The government just threatened us with the same apparatus that we are fighting against: The Department Of Homeland Security. The same apparatus that is keeping people locked in cages in the Detention Center while we write this. They absolutely can not have protests like the ones planned for the 9th and 10th of November against their fascist infrastructure. Beyond this, the military is bringing a shipment of Strykers back through (supposedly) Olympia on Monday. One thing is clear: they are frightened of us.

The Tacoma PD encouraged the Downtown Merchants Guild to remove all portable items from their storefronts and asked the business owners to be the “eyes and ears” of the police and report any suspicious activity. The police stated that potential actions might be directed at shutting down the Tacoma Link Light Rail or towards destroying property. What reason they have to believe this we do not know but are anxious to find out. As to why they are telling everyone these things the answer is simple: they wish to forcibly stop the protests against ICE by whatever means necessary. Plus, they are terrified of so many anarchists being in the area for the glorious homecoming of their killing machines from overseas.

We can not back down from this. Do not let their petty tactics sway you from coming to the Bookfair or to the protests on the 9th and 10th. This is nothing but them attempting to stifle the energy at our backs. Everyone in the area should come together and not allow another one of these attacks. Because if they feel as if they have succeeded in pushing our efforts back, they will not hesitate to do the same to other groups who push against the grain.

The Pitch Pipe Infoshop Collective

Corporate Media Claims Identity Thieves Contribute To Ron Paul Campaign

KXAN
November 2, 2007

Credit card thieves donating money to a presidential campaign is becoming an increasingly familiar form of identity theft, but there may be nothing law enforcement can do about it.

For Jaye Ruffino it started when she tried to pay a bill with her check card but was unable to, because the bank put a hold on it.

“I told them this doesn’t make any sense, because this isn’t a credit card, it’s a check card, and I’ve got plenty of money in there, so what’s the problem?” Ruffino said.

A customer service representative told her there was a suspicious $5 charge to her account.

“She said, ‘Somebody by the name of Ron Paul has been trying to take $5 out of your account using this number,’” Ruffino said.

As it turns out, credit card thieves used Ruffino’s card to run a test charge, with the money going to the Ron Paul presidential campaign fund.

Here’s how it works: Thieves gather stolen credit card numbers online and run the test charges to see which numbers work. If the charge goes through, they know they have an active card.

Representatives for the Ron Paul campaign said they have discovered more than a dozen mysterious $5 contributions in the past three days. They said they’re working with banks to return the money.

Ruffino said she is thankful her bank noticed something was wrong, even though she has to get a new card.

Banks should have security measures put in place to catch these test charges on accounts, but it is always a good idea for accountholders to check their statements and credit card bills.

A representative for the Texas Attorney General’s Office on Friday said these crimes are rarely prosecuted, because by the time thieves are tracked down, they’re often in other counties, and the Web sites are shut down.

Bush Pathetically Attempts to Make Political Hay by Attacking MoveOn and Code Pink

Think Progress
November 1, 2007

In a politically-charged speech this afternoon at the Heritage Foundation, President Bush brazenly attacked congressional leaders for not immediately granting him all the funding he has requested for the Iraq war.

Lawmakers should stop listening to “Moveon.org bloggers and Code Pink protesters” and start listening to the “warnings of terrorists like Osama bin Laden,” Bush said to a rousing ovation:

When it comes to funding our troops, some in Washington should spend more time responding to the warnings of terrorists like Osama bin Laden and the requests of our commanders on the ground, and less time responding to the demands of MoveOn.org bloggers and Code Pink protesters.


Bush hardly has a leg to stand on when urging others to heed the warnings of bin Laden. More than six years after 9/11, bin Laden roams free and is “stronger than ever.” His administration allowed bin Laden to escape at Tora Bora, shifted resources away from the search for bin Laden in 2002, dismantled the CIA unit charged with locating him, and on top of all that, claimed it didn’t really matter if Osama was captured:

Bush: “So I don’t know where he is. You know, I just don’t spend that much time on him. … And, again, I don’t know where he is. I — I’ll repeat what I said. I truly am not that concerned about him.” [3/13/02]

Additionally, Bush is creating a false urgency around the need for Iraq spending. “The money doesn’t run out until the end of the year,” said Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-CA). Congress is planning to pass $50 billion to $75 billion in interim spending which should carry delay consideration of the full spending request until next year.

With his anemic presidency on the rocks, Bush has resorted to battling with bloggers and war protesters for relevance.

Iraq war source's name revealed

Chemical weapons rockets unilaterally destroyed by Iraq after the first Gulf War
The US cited Mr Alwan's bio-weapon claims in its war argument
bbc
A US TV network has revealed the name of "Curveball" - an Iraqi man whose information was central to the US government's argument to invade Iraq.

The CBS show 60 Minutes identifies him as Iraqi defector Rafid Ahmed Alwan.

The programme says he arrived in a German refugee centre in 1999 where he lied to win asylum and was not the chemical expert he said he was.

His claims of mobile bio-weapons labs in Saddam Hussein's Iraq were backed until well after the 2003 invasion.

'Playing the system'

The CBS 60 Minutes programme airs on Sunday but material released on its web site says Curveball was "not only a liar, but also a thief and a poor student instead of the chemical engineering whiz he claimed to be".

It was a guy trying to get his green card essentially, in Germany, and playing the system for what it was worth
Tyler Drumheller, former CIA official quoted by CBS

It also says it assumes Mr Alwan is now living in Germany under a different name.

The programme says he claimed to be a star chemical engineer at a plant that made mobile biological weapons in Djerf al-Nadaf.

However, its investigation showed he received only low marks in chemical engineering at university and was the subject of an arrest warrant for alleged theft from a TV production company he worked for in Baghdad.

The programme also includes footage of his wedding in 1993 in the Iraqi capital.

It quotes former CIA senior official Tyler Drumheller as saying: "It was a guy trying to get his green card essentially, in Germany, and playing the system for what it was worth."

German intelligence agents warned the US in a letter that there was no way to verify Mr Alwan's claims.

Colin Powell
Colin Powell used the information in a speech to the UN

However, his information was used in a speech by then Secretary of State Colin Powell at the UN to back military action in Iraq.

The 60 Minutes report says the information was passed on by then CIA director George Tenet, who denies ever seeing the German intelligence letter.

The programme says Mr Alwan's story unravelled once CIA agents finally confronted him with evidence contradicting his claims.

Back in November 2005, Col Lawrence Wilkerson, the chief of staff to Mr Powell, told the BBC's Carolyn Quinn he was aware the Germans had said that they had told the CIA of the unreliability.

"And then you begin to speculate, you begin to wonder was this intelligence spun; was it politicised; was it cherry-picked; did in fact the American people get fooled?," Col Wilkerson said.

A presidential intelligence commission into the matter found that Curveball was a liar and an alcoholic.

Bush Senior Warns: More Bush Dynasty “Public Servants”

Think Progress
November 4, 2007

Fox News Sunday launched a new series this week called “American Leaders” that seeks to engage “prominent business, cultural and social figures in candid discussion.” The first “leader” featured by Fox was former President George H.W. Bush, who gave the network an exclusive interview at his Presidential Library.

In his interview this morning, the former president returned the praise, saying that when he watches TV news, he watches Fox News:

I used to pick up that paper, and turn on the Fox and listen to the news, and say “listen to this, look at this so-and-so, why’s he saying that?” I don’t do that anymore.

Bush also said that he would like to see another generation of Bushes in public office. “I’ve got a grandson that would make a wonderfully able public servant if he ran, George P.,” said Bush. “And Pierce, Neil’s son. They have an interest in politics.”





Bush’s love of Fox News echoes that of Vice President Dick Cheney, who requires that all televisions in his hotel room be tuned to Fox News whenever he travels. In 2004, Cheney also told “a conference call” of “tens of thousands of Republicans” that he ends up “spending a lot of time watching Fox News.”

If the next generation of Bushes were to enter public office, it would likely be more of the same politics put forth by the current president:

- George P. Bush, the son of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, has been actively involved in his family’s political fortunes since 1988, when he spoke at the Republican National Convention as a 12 year old. He was also heavily involved in his uncle’s 2000 and 2004 campaigns, working on outreach to the Latino community.

- Pierce Bush, the son of high-priced consultant Neil Bush, worked on his Uncle’s 2004 campaign, telling Larry King that “George W.’s done a great job.” He also shares some of his uncle’s frat boy “folksiness.”

For someone to consider another generation of Bushes in public office a good idea, they’d probably have to be watching nothing but Fox News.

No Email Privacy Rights Under Constitution, U.S. Government Claims

Cryptogon
November 4th, 2007

The most fascinating aspect of this is that lots of people assume that their plain text email communications are private!

Via: Register:

On October 8, 2007, the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in Cincinnati granted the government’s request for a full-panel hearing in United States v. Warshak case centering on the right of privacy for stored electronic communications. At issue is whether the procedure whereby the government can subpoena stored copies of your email - similar to the way they could simply subpoena any physical mail sitting on your desk - is unconstitutionally broad.

This appears to be more than a mere argument in support of the constitutionality of a Congressional email privacy and access scheme. It represents what may be the fundamental governmental position on Constitutional email and electronic privacy - that there isn’t any. What is important in this case is not the ultimate resolution of that narrow issue, but the position that the United States government is taking on the entire issue of electronic privacy. That position, if accepted, may mean that the government can read anybody’s email at any time without a warrant.

Lovelock: “Global Warming Will Kill 6 Billion”

Aftermath News
October 30th, 2007

“In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill…The real enemy, then, is humanity itself….Bring the divided nation together to face an outside enemy, either a real one or else one INVENTED for the purpose…”

- The First Global Revolution: A Report by the Council of Rome

“A total world population of 250-300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal.”

-Ted Turner - CNN founder and UN supporter, in both an interview with Audubon magazine and quoted in the The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor, June ‘96

Gaia theory creator says ‘dark time’ will leave only 500 million, ‘but for those who survive, I suspect it will be rather exciting.’

Business & Media Institute | Oct 22, 2007

Dan Gainor

Six billion dead. That’s the latest magic number from the eco-left that’s designed to scare the world into global warming action. Climate extremist James Lovelock, the founder of the Gaia theory, used it predicting mankind will almost be wiped out by 2100 from global warming.

Lovelock told Rolling Stone that predictions of the earth’s warming will be “nearly double the likeliest predictions of the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.” Rolling Stone summed it up by saying “The human race is doomed,” in a story posted on its site October 17. Only as few as 500 million will survive “with most of the survivors living in the far latitudes – Canada, Iceland, Scandinavia, the Arctic Basin.”

Ironically, the aging scientist didn’t advocate for typical eco-solutions. In fact, he said they won’t work and advocates for nuclear power. “To Lovelock, cutting greenhouse-gas pollution won’t make much difference at this point, and much of what passes for sustainable development is little more than a scam to profit off disaster,” wrote Jeff Goodell. “‘Green,’ he tells me, only half-joking, ‘is the color of mold and corruption.’”

ENDGAME - Blueprint for Global Enslavement

Elite Eugenics Plan to Exterminate 80% of Humanity


The predictions arrive just in time for the media awash in post Nobel Prize climate change coverage. CNN is devoting a huge effort to promote its two-part show “Planet in Peril” that will be shown on the network Oct. 23 and 24 at 9 p.m.

Lovelock isn’t even the first eco-extremist this year to say the earth is over-populated by billions of people. In May, Paul Watson, founder and president of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society warned mankind was “acting like a virus” and 5.5 billion would die.

Now Lovelock trumps that prediction by roughly 500 million lives. “In fact, the coming of the Four Horsemen — war, famine, pestilence and death — seems to perk him up. ‘It will be a dark time,’ Lovelock admits. ‘But for those who survive, I suspect it will be rather exciting,’” wrote Rolling Stone.

Europeans Resisting EU

John F. McManus
JBS
November 1, 2007

On October 27, protest rallies in London and throughout Britain saw politicians and grass-roots anti-EU campaigners demand that Prime Minster Brown schedule a referendum on the matter of Britain’s approval of the new EU Treaty.

European Parliament member Daniel Hannan, a British national, told a large London gathering that Great Britain had already ceased to be an independent nation and was largely run from EU headquarters in Brussels. He insisted that approval of the recently constructed EU treaty formed as a substitute for the rejected EU Constitution, would “make the British people completely subservient to Europe.” He supported the demands for a referendum issued by over 100 elected officials — members of Parliament, members of the European Parliament, and local elected representatives from the country’s cities and towns. Danish political leader and anti-EU activist Jens-Peter Bonde journeyed from his country to participate in the rally.

Speakers claimed that the newly created treaty would make the EU a single legal entity with an EU head of state, an EU foreign minister, an EU police force, an EU judicial system, and an EU army. They also claimed that the new treaty would do away with any remaining ability for Britain to veto EU legislation.

In a related event, a “Counter-Jihad Conference” met in Brussels on October 18. Referring to their homelands as “Eurabia,” participants addressed the continuing strong influx of Muslims into all parts of Europe. Of particular note to Americans, reporter Baron Bodissey, who attended the conference, issued the following warning to the people of the United States:

And for those who think America is exempt from all of this, bear in mind the “North American Union.” The NAU is also considered a paranoid fantasy by most people, but it is being constructed in the same manner, piecemeal, boring document by boring document. Agreements, protocols, joint understandings, etc. — none of them requires the consent of Congress. They are not secret, but they are never noticed by the public at large, and so never generate any popular counter-pressure on elected officials.

Imagine a Rip Van Winkle, who went to sleep in the 1950s during the heady days of the Common Market when removing trade barriers was supposedly the only issue. Waking up fifty years later, he discovers that a totalitarian European regime has been imposed from Brussels, without so much as a by-your-leave from the citizens of the nations of Europe.

O Brave New World, indeed!

It begins with the removal of trade barriers. Then comes the talk about “the free flow of goods and people.” Then, the “harmonization of laws within the community.” With politically correct multicultural indoctrination to grease the skids, no one notices until it’s too late. They wake up and find their God-given rights have evaporated, and decisions are made on their behalf and without their consent by a distant and unaccountable group of bureaucratic mandarins.

Watch Europe closely; its present is America’s future.

What has occurred and continues to occur in Europe does not have to be America’s fate. Resistance here in our nation to the threat posed by those who seek to create an EU-style single legal entity is real and growing. It must become a force that cannot be resisted by any of this nation’s would-be “bureaucratic mandarins.”


9/11 Truth vs Mainstream Media (video)


Gertrude Himmelfarb: Brown’s guru

Paul Vallely
The Independent
November 3, 2007

Tony Blair, you will recall, was the chap with the Big Tent. Nothing so crass as that for Gordon Brown. But consider the speech he gave on liberty and the need for a new Bill of Rights earlier this month. And look at the list of sources he cited: the Magna Carta, Milton, Locke, Voltaire, John Stuart Mill, Macaulay, de Tocqueville, Orwell, Churchill, Green, Hobson and Tawney, Jonathan Sacks, Gertrude Himmelfarb…

Hang on a minute. Gertrude Himmelfarb? Isn’t she the extraordinarily right-wing historian who has been described as “Queen Bee of US conservative intellectuals and cheerleader for the Bush administration”?

Er, yes, that’s the one. And the Labour leader is not just quoting her. He’s written the introduction to the British edition of her new book The Roads to Modernity: the British, French and American Enlightenments. More than that, he invited her to lead a seminar at No 11 Downing Street when he was Chancellor. And if the doyenne of American neocons feels well enough – she’s 85 now – he’s promised her she can have the launch party for the new volume in No 10.

Gordon has long been keen on American intellectuals. A few years back he did the intro to a book called God’s Politics, by a US leftist evangelical, Jim Wallis. But then Wallis is big on fighting poverty, and though he is anti-abortion he’s pro-gay rights.

Himmelfarb, by contrast, is a fully signed-up reactionary who thinks that, since the “liberated” Sixties, the West has descended into “grievous moral disorder”. She has called for a return to Victorian values and a re-establishment of the distinction between the deserving and the undeserving poor.

She did start out a bit of a leftie, like Gordon. But though the Labour leader abandoned his youthful admiration for Gramsci, he has confined his rightward trend to a shift from a social democratic position on the economy to that of a market liberal. And he’s still fiercely concerned about how to bring social justice to the global economy. Gertrude Himmelfarb’s political trajectory, it has to be said, is longer.

She started out far further to the left. Born in 1922 in New York, into what she describes as a respectable but poor Jewish family who had emigrated from Russia just before the First World War, she was by her teenage years a Trotskyite. So was the young man she met at Brooklyn College, Irving Kristol. Their revolutionary Fourth International group, she later said with the talent for mockery which has characterised her vivid writing style, was so small that “it could have been comfortably contained in a telephone booth”.

The year she graduated, 1942, she married Kristol. By the late 1940s the couple were liberal Democrats. By the 1960s, as the counterculture gained sway, they became conservatives. They moved steadily rightwards thereafter.

As an undergraduate, Himmelfarb was outstanding in three disciplines: history, economics and philosophy, a breadth of learning she was to maintain. “What I was really interested in,” she has said, “although I didn’t know it at the time … was what we now call the history of ideas.” She moved to the intellectual hothouse that was the University of Chicago to do a master’s on Rousseau and Robespierre.

Her husband had been drafted into the US infantry in Europe. Himmelfarb moved to the UK to a fellowship at Girton College, Cambridge. She did a doctorate on the Victorian political thinker Lord “power corrupts” Acton. His combination of economic liberalism and pious Catholicism set her on a defining path.

She did it, unorthodoxly, outside institutional academia. For 15 years, while she brought up her children, she was an “independent scholar” producing respected works on Acton, Darwin, Malthus and Mill.

Though the Kristols never made any effort to give their children a political education, her husband recalled, “They learned from the people who visited us, overhearing our conversations.” Their son William is now the editor of Rupert Murdoch’s ultra-right magazine The Weekly Standard and chairman of the neocon think-tank Project for the New American Century. “No family has had a greater impact on today’s conservatism,” The New Yorker said recently, “than the Kristols”.

From biographies of eminent Victorians Himmelfarb widened her reach. The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age (1984) concluded that the Industrial Revolution changed the idea of what poverty was. Previously it had been a “natural, unfortunate, often tragic fact of life, but not necessarily demeaning or degrading”. It became seen as “an urgent social problem” that threatened the fabric of society and must, at all costs, be abolished.

Two years later her Marriage and Morals Among the Victorians was published, disclosing that the proportion of illegitimate births to total births in England fell from 7 per cent in 1845 to less than 4 per cent by the end of the century. Victorian virtues such as hard work, discipline, thrift, self-help, self-discipline, cleanliness, chastity, fidelity and charity, she concluded, were key determinants. The emphasis on personal responsibility, she said, meant there was less need for involvement by the state. Her reach widened further. The New History and the Old (1987) launched a scathing attack of historians who neglected the actions of great men to focus on social and economic structures. She was particularly withering about deconstructionist historians who “liberate the study of history from the tyranny of facts”.

Increasingly she extrapolated from the past to the present, writing opinion articles in The New York Times, lambasting changes to the academic curriculum, affirmative action quotas, and radical feminists.

On Looking Into the Abyss: Untimely Thoughts on Culture and Society (1994) argued that the anti-bourgeois bohemian culture of Bloomsbury became democratised after the Second World War with the huge expansion of higher education and the growth in material affluence. It spread rapidly along the line of least resistance. “Virtues are very hard. Vices are easy to come by. Once young people had the leisure and money to indulge themselves, it was almost inevitable that they do it.” The world had gone from “relativism into nihilism, amorality into immorality, irrationality into insanity, sexual deviancy into polymorphous perversity”.

Thus she continued. The Demoralization of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values (1995) considered crime and illegitimacy statistics in England and in the US. Moral changes had created social problems, she concluded. “For Victorians, virtues were fixed and certain. When conduct fell short of those standards, it was judged in moral terms as bad, wrong or evil.” But today “virtues” had been replaced by “values”. Modern society, fearing to be seen as judgemental, would now only condemn behaviour as “misguided”, “undesirable” or, in the worst corruption of the moral vocabulary, “inappropriate”.

Crime, drug addiction, juvenile delinquency and welfare dependency rose as illegitimacy was legitimised as “an alternative mode of parenting”. Teenage promiscuity was redefined as “sexually active” and encouraged by the offer of condoms. Illegitimacy rose from 5 per cent of births at the start of the 1960s. By 1980 it was 12 per cent by 1980 and by 1992 32 per cent.

Crime statistics told a similar story. The two, she suggested, were related. Modern societies incentivises bad behaviour. People on welfare often receive more in welfare payments than workers on the minimum wage. Unmarried mothers get benefits and services married mothers do not have, thus penalising marriage.

“It is this reluctance to speak the language of morality, and to apply moral ideas to social policies, that separates us from the Victorians,” she said. “In Victorian England every measure of poor relief had to justify itself by showing that it would promote the moral as well as the material well-being of the poor. In recent times we have so completely rejected any kind of moral principle that we have deliberately, systematically divorced poor relief from moral sanctions and incentives. We are now confronting the consequences.”

It is this unashamed moralism that appeals to Gordon Brown. It is something he finds hard to find among the modern Left which sees moral considerations rendered unnecessary by collective politics. Brown knows that, in doing that, the Left implicitly endorses the libertarian individualism of contemporary consumerism. So he is looking elsewhere for an account of what it is in human nature that makes people co-operative, and what it is in social policy that can reinforce that.

This is what Himmelfarb offers. Critics say she has a blinkered or naive view of the world, ignoring issues such as slavery and racism. They point to the paradox that the untrammelled market she endorses produces the hedonist culture promoted by the likes of Rupert Murdoch. They point out that she is better on polemic and prescription than she is on analysis.

Yet for all that she is a woman with a “moral compass”, something Gordon Brown repeatedly lauds. Her latest book, which the Prime Minister is said to regard as “one of the most important in years”, is critical of the Enlightenment in France as absolutist, rabid, anti-clerical and in blind thrall to Reason. In the gentler wisdom of David Hume, Edmund Burke and Adam Smith, the British Enlightenment, she suggests, offers a far healthier alternative – mildly progressive, socially conservative, culturally tolerant, in which faith and reason pull in the same direction. The laissez-faire economics of The Wealth of Nations in balance with the social altruism of his The Theory of Moral Sentiments. It offers the moral sense that is essential for social progress.

All of which is well and good. We must just hope that Gordon doesn’t start to believe the rest what she writes.

A Life in Brief

Born Brooklyn, New York, on 8 August 1922, the daughter of Bertha and Max Himmelfarb, a manufacturer.

Education New Utrecht High School, Brooklyn College, University of Chicago and Girton College, Cambridge.

Family Married Irving Kristol, 1942. One son, one daughter.

Career Independent scholar, 1950-1965. Professor of history at City University of New York, 1978-88. Unsuccessful candidate for the position of librarian of Congress, 1987. Received the National Humanities Medal in 2004.

She says “The beasts of modernism have mutated into the beasts of post-modernism, relativism into nihilism, amorality into immorality, irrationality into insanity, sexual deviancy into polymorphous perversity.”

They Say “One of the greatest historians and public intellectuals of our age.” Eric Cohen, editor of ‘The New Atlantis’

“Naive … intellectually slight… parochial… narrow …. silly.” Alan Ryan, ‘New York Review of Books’

Bill O’Reilly’s Real Target is the 9/11 Truth Movement, Not the Foundation Funded “Loon Left”

Kurt Nimmo
TruthNews
November 4, 2007

Once again demonstrating his political stultification, Fox News “commentator” Bill O’Reilly declares “the far left is totally out of control in this country, and a smart Republican candidate will tie those loons around the necks of Hillary or Barack Obama. Few Americans want to see Rosie O’Donnell and George Soros spending the night in the Lincoln bedroom. Separately, of course.”

In Billzarro world, the “far left” consists of not only Rosie O’Donnell and MoveOn.org, but the truth and patriot movements. As for the inclusion of George Soros in the so-called “loon left,” this is so counterfactual as to be a bad joke. Is Bill unaware of the fact Soros created the European Council on Foreign Relations, a counterpart of the American Council on Foreign Relations with “far left loons” such as Dominique Strauss-Kahn, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, and various former European prime ministers and EU luminaries in attendance? Either Bill has gone off his medication or he is simply a shill casting about with diversionary tactics, a not difficult task as the vast majority of his dwindling audience consists of geriatrics with dead batteries in their hearing aids. I jest, but only slightly.

Moreover, Soros has a stake in the Carlyle Group, along with James Baker and George Bush Senior, hardly loons from the left. Soros has also attended the less than loonish left Bilderberg Conference, a fact documented by the Toronto Sun.

Bill attempted to take Medea Benjamin, founder of Code Pink, to task, declaring “it’s getting dangerous when a person gets that close to secretary Rice with mock blood on her,” a reference to Desiree Anita Ali-Fairooz’s antiwar theatrics during a House Foreign Affairs Committee meeting on October 24. Benjamin was arrested for holding up a peace sign, an act O’Reilly believes to be dangerous “and will lead the violence if not checked,” an absurd insinuation, but one that fits right into the dog and pony show proffered by the corporate media.

In fact, Billzilla knows perfectly well Medea Benjamin and Code Pink are no threat to the established order, a fact that should be obvious when Code Pink’s finances are examined—the group is supported by the Winston Foundation, an organization linked to the National Endowment for Democracy, a documented CIA front, and connected as well to the Rockefeller Family Fund, the Carnegie Corporation, the Heinz Family Foundation, and the Soros Foundations (see the Zmag wiki entry for the Winston Foundation for World Peace).

“Code Pink co-founder Medea Benjamin, a director for Global Exchange, says they are paying a bargain $400 a month for a cubicle office at 15th and H streets in the District. More space for Code Pink is on loan from two organizations down the hall, the National Organization for Women and the Institute for Policy Studies,” Julia Duin wrote for the Washington Times on April 3, 2003. At the time, the Institute for Policy Studies was receiving $2.2 million from the Turner, Ford, MacArthur and Charles Stewart Mott foundations.


No, the threat, as perceived by Bill and his global elite handlers, does not emanate from Code Pink or MoveOn.org, the latter funded by the Iraq Peace Fund, an effort of the Tides Foundation, a “progressive” organization that has received more than $36,000,000 from the Ford Foundation since 1989. It is nothing short of laughable to think Susan Berresford, Ford Foundation president and CFR and Trilateral Commission member, is a leftist “loon” straight out of the closet.

O’Reilly’s designated threat is the 9/11 truth movement, not George Soros, the Quantum Fund pirate ba-zillionaire. In particular, Bill O has it out for Mark Cuban, the billionaire who financed the 9/11 documentary Loose Change.

Last week, from the Factor on-high, O’Reilly threatened Cuban, growling “this is a warning to Mark Cuban, who is distributing that film in a few weeks… this is a warning to you Bud, okay, you pull that movie or I’m gonna be your worst nightmare, because this is gonna lead to death,” although Bill did not specify who might die.

“Billionaire Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks who is set to finance a cinema release of Loose Change narrated by Charlie Sheen, exposed Bill O’Reilly’s rampant hypocrisy concerning his coverage of the 9/11 truth movement on the Fox News host’s radio show,” Paul Joseph Watson wrote last March. “O’Reilly admits right off the bat that he has not even seen Loose Change, following in the trend of his fellow debunkers who have already arrived at a judgment without even checking the evidence.” During the interview, Bill made the “argument that Loose Change should be banned just as some books should be banned.”

Repeating his mafia-like warning of “I’m looking out for him (Sheen) and I’m looking out for you too,” O’Reilly concludes the interview by urging Cuban to rethink the project, stating “there’s a lot of pain involved in this kind of a situation.” With rhetoric like this, O’Reilly wouldn’t have looked out of place had he been born into the Genovese Cosa Nostra family.


In response to Mark Cuban’s financial interest in Loose Change, neocon radio talk show host Michael Reagan said “the left is going to go nuts” over the film and “the jihadists and those in other parts of the world are going to use it and also point to Mark Cuban and say look and see what happened, the Americans did it themselves, we didn’t do anything, blame the Jews, blame America.”

In other words, the film will be used as “jihadist” propaganda and must, according to Bill O’Reilly, be banned like books authored by the likes of Heinrich Heine, Thomas Mann, Karl Marx, Erich Maria Remarque, and others, not only banned in Germany but burned on the Opernplatz in Berlin in 1933 because they did not correspond with Nazi ideology.

Loose Change, of course, does not correspond with the current fascist ideology, that is to say neocon-neolib ideology, and must be banned as dangerous. Neocons, like their Nazi predecessors, will not tolerate dissenting points of view. If the 9/11 truth movement insists on telling the truth, as O’Reilly has ominously warned, “somebody’s gonna get hurt,” and it won’t be Code Pink activists, funded by the Ford Foundation.

Bush invokes 9/11 to justify torture, domestic spying and war

Patrick Martin
Global Research
November 4, 2007

In a speech Thursday, President Bush invoked the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 as an all-purpose justification for his prevailing on a series of issues now in dispute in Congress: the confirmation of Michael Mukasey as attorney general despite his refusal to disavow torture; the passage of legislation to give sweeping new domestic spying powers to the federal government; and the approval of yet another emergency spending bill providing nearly $200 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Bush’s address was less a speech than a semi-hysterical diatribe, combining scare-mongering, crackpot history and bullying of his opponents in Washington. As in all presidential speeches of the past several years, he spoke before a carefully vetted audience at the Heritage Foundation, one of the main right-wing think tanks.

The desperate character of the speech was signaled by his repeated references to the 9/11 attacks, as well as last year’s alleged Al Qaeda plot to blow up airliners flying across the Atlantic from Britain to the US, and—the ultimate bogeyman—a supposed Al Qaeda plot to “build a totalitarian Islamic empire—encompassing all current and former Muslim lands, stretching from Europe to North Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia.”

Bush suggested that any opposition to his policies of torture, spying and war represented a capitulation to this existential terrorist threat. He declared, “I know that when I discuss the war on terror, some here in Washington, DC dismiss it as political rhetoric—an attempt to scare people into votes. Given the nature of the enemy and the words of its leaders, politicians who deny that we are at war are either being disingenuous or naive.”

He denounced the Senate Judiciary Committee for holding up the nomination of Judge Mukasey as attorney general, with demands that he take a position on whether the waterboarding of suspected terrorists constitutes torture. In a lengthy letter to the committee Tuesday, Mukasey expressed personal “repugnance” for waterboarding, but refused to comment on whether it was torture, and hence illegal.

This flies in the face of both the Geneva Conventions and US laws, both of which classify waterboarding as torture and prohibit it completely, under any circumstances.

The Mukasey nomination is a conflict that the Democratic majority in the Senate clearly wanted to avoid. Democratic Senator Charles Schumer of New York originally proposed the judge as a replacement for Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, and praised him in introducing him to the Judiciary Committee two weeks ago.

But when the issue of torture arose on the second day of his confirmation hearing, Mukasey’s refusal to condemn waterboarding as illegal became a political sticking point. Most Senate Democrats and several Republicans—including former Vietnam War POW John McCain—have called for an official ban on waterboarding and even enacted it into law in 2005, although this applied only to the military and not to the CIA.

The White House is adamantly opposed to such a ban, not only because it plans to continue waterboarding prisoners, but because numerous administration officials, from the CIA leadership up to Bush himself, could be held criminally liable for their actions over the past six years. Mukasey stated this concern explicitly in his October 30 letter, saying that any comment on the legality of waterboarding could arouse fears among executive branch officials about “personal legal jeopardy.”

Similarly, both House and Senate Democrats caved in to White House pressure and adopted the so-called Protect America Act last August—legislation that legalized, for a six-month period, more extensive spying on domestic telecommunications and Internet traffic by the CIA, NSA and other US intelligence agencies.

The Bush administration is now pressing for a bill that would make these expanded powers permanent, but the effort has encountered a significant obstacle, with resistance to the White House demand for a provision giving blanket immunity to telecommunications companies for collaborating in illegal surveillance of the private communications of American citizens.

The congressional Democrats have agreed to immunity for future cooperation by the telecommunications firms, but not to immunity that is retroactive, covering the past transfer of vast amounts of telephone and Internet data to the NSA and other federal agencies without any legal authorization, simply on the basis of an executive order from Bush.

There is also a potential logjam over the Iraq-Afghanistan spending, although no leading Democrat in Congress has proposed to block the legislation, and the Democratic-controlled Congress approved the last such measure in May. But there have been suggestions that the latest emergency funding bill will not be taken up until the New Year, when it could well become the focus of public attention during the height of the presidential nominating contest. Bush is pressing for a vote before Christmas.

Bush sought to connect the war funding to the Mukasey nomination and domestic surveillance issues in order to bully his opponents with the threat that they would be accused of neglecting the troops. He concluded with a McCarthy-style smear that managed to link antiwar protesters with terrorism. “When it comes to funding our troops,” he declared, “some in Washington should spend more time responding to the warnings of terrorists like Osama bin Laden and the requests of our commanders on the ground, and less time responding to the demands of MoveOn.org bloggers and Code Pink protesters.”

The Mukasey nomination is the most immediate concern of Bush, Vice President Cheney and their inner circle, as a series of prominent Senate Democrats have come out in opposition to his confirmation, including, by late Thursday, Edward Kennedy, John Kerry, deputy leader Dick Durbin and presidential candidates Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Christopher Dodd and Joseph Biden. Majority Leader Harry Reid indicated that if the Judiciary Committee did not approve the nomination he would not permit a vote by the full Senate.

Cheney touched on the issue in a speech Thursday, traveling to Indianapolis to address a meeting of the American Legion, a reliably pro-war venue from which all critics could be excluded. The vice president went beyond Bush to explicitly defend the torture interrogations conducted by the CIA, claiming that they had produced information that had proven critical for forestalling hundreds of potential terrorist attacks. (This contention did not jibe, however, with another piece of administration propaganda, a CIA leak to the New York Times claiming that the agency had only inflicted waterboarding on three prisoners, and none currently.)

In arguing for the immediate confirmation of Mukasey, Bush claimed that it would be wrong to have any public discussion about what interrogation techniques were forbidden to US agencies because this would help Al Qaeda “train their operatives to resist questioning, and withhold vital information we need to stop attacks and save lives.” By that logic, however, it would be wrong to rule out in advance any method of interrogation, no matter how barbaric, including electrical shocks, the rack, drugs or even dismemberment.

Bush also claimed that Mukasey should not be asked to take a legal position on specific interrogation techniques because he has not yet been “read into the program,” i.e., because, as a retired federal judge, Mukasey does not yet have access to classified information.

The complete absurdity of this argument was demonstrated at the press briefing Thursday by White House press secretary Dana Perino. After reiterating Bush’s claim that it was “very unfair” to ask Mukasey to give an opinion on waterboarding, Perino added that it would be perfectly all right for the Senate to ask such questions after Mukasey had been “read into the program,” that is, after he took office. “If they want to ask him more questions about that,” Perino said, “they should confirm him and then they’d have the opportunity to do so.”

Moreover, Mukasey has not been asked whether specific acts of the CIA constitute torture. He has been asked whether, as a general principle, waterboarding is torture, to which he responded—in a transparent and provocative evasion—that he didn’t know what waterboarding was and therefore could not comment.

Despite this professed ignorance, however, there is no doubt that Judge Mukasey and every other politically literate American knows what waterboarding is and knows that it constitutes torture. Mukasey’s hometown newspaper, the New York Daily News, provided a graphic description of waterboarding in an op-ed column published Wednesday, written by Malcolm Nance, a former adviser on terrorism to the US departments of Homeland Security, Special Operations and Intelligence.

The column, entitled, “I know waterboarding is torture—because I did it myself,” is based on Nance’s experience as a master instructor and chief of training at the US Navy Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape School (SERE) in San Diego, where Navy Seals are trained both to perform and resist waterboarding.

Nance rejects the conventional description of waterboarding in the US media as “simulated drowning.” He writes: “that’s a misnomer. It does not simulate drowning, as the lungs are actually filling with water. There is no way to simulate that. The victim is drowning…. Waterboarding is slow-motion suffocation with enough time to contemplate the inevitability of blackout and expiration. Usually the person goes into hysterics on the board. For the uninitiated, it is horrifying to watch. If it goes wrong, it can lead straight to terminal hypoxia—meaning, the loss of all oxygen to the cells.”

“The lack of physical scarring allows the victim to recover and be threatened with its use again and again,” he continues. “Call it ‘Chinese water torture,’ ‘the barrel,’ or ‘the waterfall.’ It is all the same. One has to overcome basic human decency to endure causing the effects. The brutality would force you into a personal moral dilemma between humanity and hatred. It would leave you questioning the meaning of what it is to be an American.”

The public embrace of this torture technique by the US government is a terrible sign of the decay of democratic rights in America, one which is increasingly recognized throughout the world. On the same day as Bush’s speech, Manfred Nowak, UN Special Rapporteur on torture, declared in a speech in Australia that the US policy was undermining worldwide efforts against torture.

“I am very concerned about the undermining of the absolute prohibition of torture by interrogation methods themselves in Abu Ghraib, in Guantanamo Bay and others, but also by rendition and the whole CIA secret places of detention,” he said. “All that is really undermining the international rule of law in general and human rights but also the prohibition of torture,” said Nowak. “It has a negative effect because the US is a very powerful and important country and many other countries take the US as a model.”

Nowak concluded, “In my opinion, this ill-conceived, security-oriented counterterrorism strategy is having a very, very negative effect, not only on human rights in the USA, but for the first time I would say in a long period of time, the US is really engaging in systematic violation of human rights, but also a very negative effect on many other countries.”