News From A Parallel World

The early returns have an eerie familiarity. U.S. troops pushing a major offensive into “enemy” strongholds in the countryside, Pentagon flacks with charts and pointers, the mass media uncritically trumpeting “success”, the President promising that nobody’s gonna push us around.

This time it’s Pakistan and Afghanistan. Forty-some years ago, it was Viet Nam. Each time, a Democratic President with a working majority, popular support, and an ambitious domestic program. Same bleeding war.

A few days ago, the government of Pakistan reported that more than 700 innocents have been killed since the first of the year, most by remote-controlled missiles, drones. At this time there are already about half a million refugees streaming north, ahead of the American war. In Pakistan, as in Cambodia in the late ‘sixties, it cannot possibly end well.

We are waging a war in Pakistan for the same reason Lyndon Johnson began a secret war into Laos and Cambodia: the main event had begun spilling across borders. The Vietnamese insurgents were able to duck across the lines, move supplies, find sanctuaries. So, too, the Afghan rebels. Wars of imperial purpose can never be confined to targets; they spread. As in Viet Nam, so it is in Afghanistan.

Lyndon Johnson assured the American people that he wanted peace. In the meantime, he wanted conquest. The U.S., often through a Texas company named Brown & Root –– the precursor to Halliburton –– built enormous permanent bases in the occupied land. In a sense, the politics of the matter was secondary. The point was control over economies and resources.

Barack Obama was carried to unlikely victory on a great wave of anti-war sentiment. He promised to end the war in Iraq and bring American troops home. LBJ won by a landslide against Barry Goldwater, the Republican nominee whose bellicosity worried the electorate. When Johnson took the oath of office in January, 1965, the U.S. had fewer than 16,000 military personnel in Viet Nam, none of them combat troops.

Robert McNamara died recently. Known principally as a major architect of Johnson’s war against Viet Nam, he had come to recognize both the horror and the futility of the enterprise, but not before more than fifty thousand Americans –– and a million or more Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians –– had been killed.

Just as was the case with Viet Nam, at the beginning, Obama’s widening of the theater is popular with the general public and taken by the media as a sign of toughness and resolve. Everyone talks about supporting the troops, as they are fed into a hopeless conflict and maimed in growing number. As always, a corrupt and generally ignorant Congress appropriates the money and is afraid to criticize lest its members be seen as unpatriotic.

In one sense, Obama’s war is closer to the one waged by Richard Nixon. Johnson’s assault on Viet Nam had become a liability, in the same way that Bush’s invasion of Iraq had backfired. Nixon pledged to end the war; instead, he invaded Laos and Cambodia. Obama’s war is already spreading across the subcontinent and, like the ones pursued by Johnson, Nixon, and Bush, it is creating new enemies every minute. We have bombed wedding parties, local gatherings, schools, and hospitals. As in Southeast Asia, the ‘enemy’ is ubiquitous and defined by body counts and not any recognizable ideology, culture or behavior. If you are hit by missiles, you deserve it.

In press accounts, so pathetically biased, ignorant, and xenophobic, the term being used now is “militant.” We are killing “militants.”

I’ve seen all of this shit before. In the ‘sixties, the Pentagon released figures on “enemy casualties” that later turned out to have been inflated by a factor of 10, and to have included water buffalo. Also, it included children. America tried everything: carpet bombing, ‘strategic hamlets’, special forces murders, napalm, deals with drug warlords. In the end, we had so lost all sense of moral compass that Nixon and Henry Kissinger unleashed the infamous “Christmas bombings” –– in the North two months AFTER a deal had been struck to end the war. Why? Because Kissinger argued that we needed it to convince our “allies” in the South of our continuing ‘resolve’. It was mass murder as public relations stunt.

Today, the lies are more sophisticated, they’ve had to be, but there is little difference in the death and misery. Most Americans accept as an article of faith that our militaristic adventurism is ‘necessary’ for reasons of national defense, a ludicrous proposition on its face. And while the U.S. builds enormous, permanent military facilities inside other nations, its government pretends that its presence is temporary.

Geopolitics is about money and the control over global resources. It is America’s conceit that our foreign policy is grounded in fairness and in assisting other nations. That has never been true. It has also never been less true than it is now.

As President Obama journeys to Russia and elsewhere in search of arms reduction agreements, America’s military-intelligence operations are ongoing in hundreds of places around the world. The U.S. has had special ops forces in Iran for quite a while, just as it did in Iraq and Pakistan before the recent unpleasantness. By now, you could probably recite the names as well as I of the countries whose democratic and/or popular governments have been overthrown by America’s CIA in concert with local thugs. Millions of people have been murdered by the fascist governments we have installed in Iran, Indonesia, Cambodia, Chile, Salvador, Greece, well, as I said...

Millions of human beings. Human beings who loved and were loved, who had families, friends, joys, and the array of life’s events to which they brought meaning, care, and passion.

It was Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State, Madeline Albright, responding to a reporter’s question about civilian deaths in Kosovo, who remarked, “We think it was worth it.”

The fact is, as Scott Fitzgerald said about the very wealthy, the political elite are “not like you and me,” and they are aware of it. It is the basis for policies which can entertain terms such as ‘kill ratio’ and ‘enhanced interrogation’ and ‘extraordinary rendition.’ The people being kidnapped, tortured, and killed are not named Allbright, Clinton, Bush, Rumsfeld, Kissinger. To the latter, war’s victims are mere figures in calculation, part of the profit-and-loss statement.

Obama still talks about closing Guantanamo, but worse conditions, worse tortures, are inflicted on thousands now being held without charge in worse prisons in Afghanistan. He does not speak of these. Nor does he speak of closing the School of the Americas, now under a new name, which trains South American death squads.

The Bush policies on kidnapping remain in force; so do those pertaining to domestic wiretapping, and breaking-and-entering without a warrant.

Having read Obama’s first book, I remain convinced that he is a rare President, someone who, like President Kennedy, might actually hear the weeping of the world. If so, he is also aware of the realities of power. He is constrained. He knows what happened in Dallas in 1963.

Jack Kennedy, in the words of his lover, Mary Pinchot Meyer, “was moving too fast.” He tried to bring the country’s secret police and the CIA under control. He wanted to end the arms race. Historical ‘revisionists’ have buried it, but that’s who he was.

At a back-channel meeting during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, Robert Kennedy told Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, his brother was “under tremendous pressure to use force against Cuba. If the situation continues much longer, the President is afraid that the generals may seize power...”

Meanwhile, America’s wars are part of an enormous military-intelligence deployment whose actual budget remains secret, even from the President.

This is the situation in which Obama finds himself. And Afghanistan is his war. Whatever his actual calculations, whatever the pressures, he obviously feels that it is necessary to expand it and to fight it. But Obama’s war cannot be won. It is Viet Nam all over again, and it will bleed us as it ruins that nation, creating hundreds of thousands of refugees, murdering children, bringing home veterans whose rates of depression, domestic violence, and suicide exceed those of Viet Nam.

“We think it was worth it,” Allbright said. Obviously, someone thinks so now.

Companion stories today on Truthout and Alternet, different authors, the same question: was the Iranian election rigged? Then came the response of the Obama administration: we don’t buy Ahmadinejad’s claim of a “landslide” victory.

Well, that’s pretty fucking rich.

Personally, I have no opinion on the Iranian deal because I haven’t examined whatever evidence there is, but I do have an opinion about crooked elections in the United States. That’s a subject I know something about.

America’s electoral history is, of course, chock-full of great stories. There’s Landslide Lyndon Johnson’s 87-vote Senate seat election and Box 13, and there’s Richard J. Daley’s notorious ballot stuffing in Chicago which arguably swung Illinois in 1960 and thereby elected Jack Kennedy.

There’s the 2000 election, where Bush won a first term only because hundreds of thousands of blacks were disenfranchised, Florida was flat-out lifted, and a compromised Supreme Court ordered the recount stopped.

But in 2004, all previous thefts were reduced to insignificance in the most collossal invalidation of a free election in history. And nobody in government or the mainstream media seemed very interested.

I’ve mentioned this before but it’s worth repeating. Many political people knew by midnight on election day that the 2004 vote was rigged. The reason they knew this is that political people know how exit polls are conducted and what they mean.

I remember that night very well. I’d already learned during the day of massive lines and extraordinary turnouts in Democratic strongholds throughout the nation. Coupled with the pre-election polling trends, this indicated a probable landslide for John Kerry. Early returns validated it. Then came the exit polls.

What pols know about exit polls is that they are better than 99% accurate. Always. A one percent difference between an exit poll and the actual reported vote would be considered an anomaly.

On election night, 2004, exit polls showed a Kerry landslide in both popular and electoral votes. It was over. George Bush, looking at the same numbers, was despondent. But then something odd happened.

In one state after another, notably in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, Colorado, and three other “battleground states”, the announced votes were between 6 and 8 percent different from the exit poll results, and in each case the reported numbers showed the switch from Kerry to Bush. In six of these states, the switch was enough to give the electoral votes to the President, completely altering the national outcome.

Having once been deeply involved in politics, I was familiar with exit polls. I was familiar with the methodology. Watching the returns at a dinner party at a friend’s home in Mill Valley, I knew that something was terribly wrong. Later that night, on the internet, I accessed the exit polls as first reported on CNN and compared them with the returns. The pattern was unmistakable. In 43 states, the returns mirrored the exit poll percentages exactly. In 7, they were wildly divergent, all in Bush’s favor. The first statisticians who looked at this were stunned. A Pennsylvania professor wrote that the odds against this happening were, roughly, 100,000,000-to-1.

It turned out that many people noticed the same thing and were alarmed at the implications. But the mass media ignored both the evidence and the clamor. What little controversy there was seemed to center on the more traditional methods of vote theft, with voting machines unavailable in urban or college town precincts, voting lines that ran for more than a mile in some places in Ohio, hundreds of thousands of uncounted ‘provisional’ ballots (nearly all of these cast by non-whites) in Ohio, and wholesale disenfranchisement in states such as Florida, where private companies were hired by Republican Secretaries of State to “purge” voter rollsof likely Democratic voters.

There were the occasional stories of weird returns, such as counties in Virginia where voting machines began to count backwards, and Ohio, where more votes were said to have been cast for George Bush in one town than its total population. But when it came to the larger question, the mass media just danced around.

I wrote an op-ed piece for the local newspaper; the editor, an old friend, told me that they wouldn’t run it. It was crazy, he said. And he pointed to an article in the New York Times which cursorily noted the charges some were making and then dismissed them as the ravings of the lunatic fringe.

Okay, I can work with that. I’d been relegated to the fringe so often in 40-plus years of adult life that I was comfortable out there.

But then the scary shit began to surface. First came the “undervotes”. An undervote is what it’s called when a voter marks his or her ballot for some candidates but not others. For obvious reasons, the highest number of cast votes is at the top of the ballot, with undervotes showing up in small increments further down, e.g. a voter who selects a candidate for President and another for Governor may skip the choice for state treasurer.

Typically, undervotes are a very, very small percentage. But in 2004, in key precincts in Florida and Ohio, especially, the undervotes reported for President were as high as SEVENTY percent. This means that in those places, seventy percent of those who actually voted in other races, supposedly skipped the Bush-Kerry race.

Nationwide, the undervote numbers in several districts in “battleground states” ran to the hundreds of thousands. That is a conservative estimate. Some investigators believe the true number is in the millions.

Then there were the numerous reported instances of ‘vote-flipping’, where voters saw their electronic, touch-screen votes for Kerry register as votes for George Bush.

To ignore the widespread and incontrovertible evidence of electronic fraud, the mass media and the politicians committed a criminal conspiracy. There is no doubt that it occasioned fierce arguments behind closed doors. One such argument is reported to have taken place between Kerry and his running mate, John Edwards. Edwards was furious and demanded that Kerry go public, that they challenge the legitimacy of the election. Kerry demurred. It would cause a constitutional crisis, Kerry said, to which Edwards is said to have replied, “So what!?”

In my lifetime I’ve witnessed several conspiracies deprive the nation of its elected leaders. Each time, the official story, while ludicrous under sober examination, was accorded august authority, sanctified on the networks, written into “history” books and taught to the next generation. This is how empires control the public mind.

Few people have the time or inclination to get into it. Those who do are subject to dismissal as crackpots. No one wants to be thought a crackpot; much easier to ‘prove’ your sanity by going along with what you’ve been told.

Over the years, one claim I’ve heard is this one: if these things had been conspiracies, someone would’ve talked. What’s so utterly sad about this argument is that the person offering it is unaware of the fact, the plain, unvarnished fact that people have talked; you just don’t get to learn of it. And even when it reaches the popular press, it’s mostly dismissed. Perhaps you recall the deathbed confession of E. Howard Hunt. This was actually covered in Rolling Stone, but it was ignored everywhere else. Hunt was dying. He told his son about Dallas and what he knew of the assassination of John Kennedy.

Old news, apparently. Yawn.

Not so old news: people have now come forward to talk about how they were recruited to build a fool-proof computer program for electronically rigging the 2004 presidential election.

There is a documentary called “Uncounted” which you must see. In it, that election is examined in detail, everything from systematic disenfranchisement to the hundreds of thousands –– perhaps millions –– of uncounted and/or thrown away “provisional” ballots. And then comes the testimony of men who were hired to rig the touch-screen voting machines. In Florida, one was asked by Congressman Tom Feeney to create a ‘back door’ program which would alter votes and make itself untraceable.

Watching these people talk about it is gut-wrenching. These were Republicans, conservatives, people who supported George Bush and Dick Cheney and believed in them. But in a couple of cases these were also people who believed in America, people who were self-described conservatives. They are obviously in shock. They still can’t believe that it happened, yet it happened to them.

If you watch this film, you will know these men are not lying. But let’s assume that they might be. Doesn’t it seem logical that, on an issue which strikes at the very heart of a free society, we’d want to know? Wouldn’t it seem obvious that exploring their veracity, at the very least, was worth the trouble?

The history we are taught is a false history when it comes to matters of empire. Perhaps in a hundred years it will be thought not to matter. Everyone involved will be long dead. Even the JFK murder, where evidence was destroyed wholesale and plenty more was locked up for fifty years by government order, is considered to have taken place so long ago that it no longer bears on our own lives.

It’s easy to let the matter slide these days. After all, with the ongoing destruction of the middle class, the transformation of the United States into Banana Republic Empire, and the theft of everything else that isn’t nailed down –– and they’re prying the nails out of what is –– there are other matters to worry about. Plus, Obama won, right? So what difference does it make now? 2004 is history.

But, however convenient such an excuse might be, and however much false comfort we might derive from it, that’s a dangerous conclusion. Because in our world, in our country, right now, criminal conspiracies are being hatched, not only by some local thugs who ‘plan’ to stick up a bank but by corporate thugs who plan to stick up the nation.

They do it because they can get away with it. They get away with it because the rest of us choose ignorance and selective amnesia.

So forgive me for being amused at the U.S. government’s and news media’s outrage at what is happening in Iran. And forgive me for wondering why some people, in some nations, unlike in America, care enough about their rights, their freedoms, and their countries to demand an accounting.

Went to a meeting tonight, got in the car and motored out somewhere. My excuse for this break from my reclusive existence, and if you can say that sentence fragment three times without blowing it you’re too functional and something is wrong with you, is that the meeting centered on a matter which not only interests me but concerned, directly, an old friend and cultural hero.

The specific point of the gathering was a call to “Save the Coastal Post”, a monthly newspaper of general, mostly local, circulation which has been tweaking the ears of idiots and the powerful, which I concede is occasionally redundant, for around thirty-five years. The man who created and still runs the paper is the old friend.

The reason the paper is struggling right now is that the Coastal Post, which is actually named The Great Western Pacific Coastal Post, finally pissed-off the pro-Israeli lobby enough to incite some ugly shit. Among the items: large quantities of the paper stolen from its distribution sources like public markets and newsstands. Also: a lot of phone calls were made to advertisers to convince them to pull their ads or face boycotts.

So the issues are things like freedom of speech, which is no small consideration, plus the survival of a very important community asset. But how is it going to be accomplished?

There were some pretty smart cookies in the room and ideas got tossed around, but what distinguished them for me was that they were all over the place. Various proposals designed to raise the paper’s profile locally, entice subscribers ($24.00 for a year’s worth, which ain’t bad –– the letters section alone is worth it), take on the would-be censors, have value, and they’ll help for a while. But the larger question, the one nobody is yet able to answer, is this: in the age of corporate media ownership and mass media consolidation, where will the independent voices come from and how will they be heard?

After all, freedom of the press was based on the absolute necessity of dissent in any society which expects to be free politically.

Meanwhile, somebody has to pay the cost of producing and disseminating material. In the world of mass media, the costs are enormous and are borne by advertisers who are interested in much more than selling you a physical product. They are interested in controlling editorial content. Let’s face it, Boeing is not trying to sell me a bomber; they are trying to sell me on the idea that my government should buy it. They are trying to sell me on the idea that my country needs it, that I am at risk without it. They are selling war.

But the Great Western Pacific Coastal Post is of no interest to Boeing. That is its secret weapon. Because in this new internet world, at least at this moment, all bets are off. Nobody knows how to control the internet and nobody knows how to best use it to advance ideas or political power.

Instead of focusing inward, perhaps the Coastal Post can run the other way. The editor mentioned that the website has at times generated hundreds of thousands of views. That’s because search engines have connected information-seekers with information. Well, why not? It’s wide open.

Marshall McLuhan observed nearly fifty years ago that, historically, the old media invariably became the content of the new media. As in many other respects, he is being proven right. But no one is yet sure how this will evolve. Newspapers like the San Francisco Chronicle are getting thinner and lighter by the day, with odder and odder front-page stories and large photos. Whatever they think they’re up to, it’s not working.

That means there’s room. Freedom of the press is going to be tough to stop on the internet. It may be possible to find a way to secure it, to guarantee it, in fact to cause it to blossom into a real nightmare for Boeing and the rest of them, so long as we can figure it out first.

Check out www.coastalpost.com.

In the sixties, it was Brown and Root, the Houston-based contractor whose founders were buddies of Landslide Lyndon Johnson. Brown and Root got a lot of government deals, exclusive and non-bid, including the huge Cam Ranh Bay military base in (South) Viet Nam.

Herman Brown and Johnson went back to the fifties, where they combined for LBJ’s ascendency to the Senate thanks to box 13 and the rigged Texas election of 1952. The relationship remained cozy right to the end. Johnson’s war helped make Brown and Root wealthy beyond measure.

Brown and Root became an outfit named Halliburton and was later itself turned into a subsidiary, Kellogg, Brown and Root, spun-off two years ago. Such is high finance.

Something else about high finance: it trumps high politics.

Maybe you thought that with the election of a young, smart, progressive President, the country was through with the more excessive corruption of the Bush years. If so, you would have been wrong.

While Dick Cheney dodges criminal indictments around the rest of the world, makes speeches defending torture, and rakes in ‘deferred compensation’ from Halliburton, KBR, despite a record which entitles its executives to some long-deferred time in a federal penitentiary, continues to collect huge new government contracts and even “tens of millions of dollars in bonuses”, according to an article in Reuters.

As many as five U.S. soldiers have been electrocuted so far due to half-assed KBR work in Iraq. A Senate committee charged with looking into the scandal asked that the army, which continues to issue multi-million-dollar contracts to KBR, send a witness to testify about this. The army declined to do so.

A little history:

In February of 2007, the Defense Department’s Contract Management Agency issued a report on Halliburton/KBR’s work in Iraq which noted, in part: “Primary safety threat, theater wide, is fire due to the inferior 220 electrical fixtures found throughout Iraq. Improper installation (and) substandard equipment purchases...”

Nothing was done. In September, 2008, the CMA’s agency commander, Captain David Graff, wrote a letter expressing his outrage at the situation. “We cannot overemphasize the significance of the lack of sustained electrical support services being provided by KBR in Iraq to maintain the minimum life, health and safety standards in support of our (troops)”, Graff said.

The contracts have continued to this day. KBR was recently awarded a new $35 million deal for work in Iraq, including electrical work.

Last week, an electrical inspector hired by the army to review its U.S.-run facilities in Iraq, testified that 90% of KBR’s wiring in newly-constructed buildings was not done properly, meaning an estimated 70,000 buildings where troops live and work are not safe. “We found improper electrical work in every building we inspected,” Jim Childs told investigators.

So we’ve got what amounts to a criminal corporation which bought its way into a chunk of federal money at least as far back as the 1950s, operating pretty much like it owns the government. It identifies ‘needs’ –– created in the public mind and backed by the mainstream media –– which the government must fill, e.g. an invasion of a foreign country; then it monopolizes the field, buys a few members of congress, and snares a stream of lucrative contracts.

It does not have to actually fulfill these contracts. As the Government Accountability Office has reported, there are billions of dollars in war-related funds actually missing, unaccounted for, and there are more billions in waste because hundreds of major projects –– contracted for with Halliburton/KBR, Bechtel, and others –– have been abandoned unfinished. The profits must be sensational.

Corporations such as KBR answer to no one. Spokeswoman Heather Browne said, “KBR remains proud of the work it performs in Iraq. We remain committed to engaging in a transparent, and more importantly a fact-based, dialogue on this issue while pledging continued full cooperation and support to the military.”

Hey, those electrocuted soldiers? Shit happens. How’s that for “fact-based”?

William P. Utt, KBR’s chairman, said that the company was not expected to meet the U.S. electrical code. The codes used in buildings it maintains “throughout the war zone” (translation: the ones without the top brass) “were known and thought to be acceptable.”

More than a year ago, Halliburton/KBR got a government contract on some work right here at home, hundreds of millions to build “detention centers” where large numbers of people might be held against their will, i.e. imprisoned. Presumably, these are being built. The contract was let, according to the Bush administration, because it was believed that such facilities might be necessary to hold illegal immigrants or for “civil unrest.”

We are so bloody naive in America. The fact is that we are an empire, easily the most powerful and wealthiest in human history. We know this about Empires: they are intrinsically nests of murder and corruption. They couldn’t possibly be otherwise. Why would we think that?

Every empire eventually collapses internally because its powerful are too greedy and crazy to avoid sucking the life out of it. That’s what’s been happening in this country for at least sixty years but the predation has increased exponentially since the 1980s. Once it was discovered that the Savings and Loan industry could be looted without much penalty, it was wide open.

In California, executives of the public power company, PG&E, made a deal with Enron, shipped its profits to a “parent” corporation (also called PG&E), and in a single day voted its executives multi-million-dollar bonuses and then, in the afternoon, met with lawyers to plan a bankruptcy filing. Nobody went to jail.

Now the bankers are doing it. Not only are the big boys not being penalized, a couple of their guys, Geithner and Summers, are now running the economic policy of the Obama administration. Man, that is some serious hardball.

Talked with a fellow the other day who works with banks all over the country and has friends at the fed. He had this to say: over the next twelve months, the government is going to close a thousand banks. This will mean that a thousand small institutions, community banks, will be taken over. But don’t worry: your deposit’s safe because these banks will then be sold to Wells Fargo and Bank of America and Morgan Chase.

Think about the implication of this. Think about what it means and what the point is.

Here’s what it looks like to me: the banking system was looted by people who knew that what they were doing –– pimping every stupid loan possible in an escalating and wildly-inflated real estate market –– would eventually crash the system. But that was okay because they could get away with it and, AND, they could use the ensuing crisis to eat all of the little banks.

After all, Citigroup, those twisted thugs who spent four hundred million bucks of OUR money on “naming rights” to the Mets’ ballpark, is “too big to fail.” But you know a bank or two in your town which isn’t. You see, there are those ‘neighborhood banks’ which will be found to be “under-capitalized.” Why? Because they made construction loans on commercial properties which now, thanks to the crash, have nobody to occupy them.

Citigroup and the other criminals are, of course, the ones who are “under-capitalized”, and through their own intention. But they are “too big to fail”. They can do anything, take anything, fake anything, run everything. You and I are not too big to fail. It is perfectly acceptable if we are unemployed, so long as there aren’t so many unemployed it becomes necessary to use those Halliburton/KBR detention “facilities”.

One more small thing:

Corporations now employ their own armies. The Blackwater scandals in Iraq, where private thugs operated as death squads run by corporations, caused it to change its name but not its circumstances. The American government has done little to challenge this dangerous situation. In effect, we now have death squads killing people with, essentially, impunity; individual killers may occasionally be sacrificed if the public gets to noticing and objecting, but the deals are going on regardless.

Once any group is licensed to kill abroad it takes no time at all for these things to come back home. Ask John Kennedy. That was the last time a real threat arose to the way things were being run. Look at old footage of Kennedy going after the steel executives, the oil executives, the war-profiteers. It’ll make your hair stand on end.

In post-WWII Eastern Europe, enemies or people of serious inconvenience to the Soviet state often committed ‘suicide’ by leaping out of windows or from rooftops. Now, in the New World Order, it is America’s enemies who make themselves dead.

The latest, evidently, is Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi.

A few weeks ago, al-Libi, who had been tortured in several CIA “black hole” prisons, was located in a Libyan jail by Human Rights Watch investigators. He related that he had finally agreed to tell his captors whatever they wanted to hear as a way of stopping the torture. What they’d been after was a ‘link’ between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. Shortly after his interview with human rights investigators, al-Libi is said by Libyan authorities to have “killed himself.”

The importance of the al-Libi story is in part its place in time. The torture began in 2002, as President Bush and Dick Cheney were preparing the Congress –– and the public by way of the usual media whoring –– for the unprovoked invasion of Iraq. And the torture was regarded as necessary, not for the purpose of learning information but in manufacturing it. al-Libi’s faked ‘confession’ and those of other torture victims were designed to create a false reality in which the war could be marketed.

Leaked memoranda show that torture was routine by April, 2002, at least three months before the government recruited John Yoo and a couple of other men of easy virtue –– one of whom Bush then appointed to the federal bench –– to provide legal ‘cover’ for it. Yoo quite openly asserted that the President had to authority to torture anyone he wanted to; he could, if he wished, Yoo actually said, “order that a child’s testicles be crushed in front of his mother” as a means of extracting information.

While this was going on, a Boeing subsidiary was hired to operate “black flights” in which detainees were kidnapped and flown to torture chambers, “black hole” prisons around the world. A term was invented for the practice: thus kidnapping became “extraordinary rendition” much as torture became “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

It is becoming alarmingly evident that a system of torture was used by the federal government not only for the purpose of ‘supporting’ the fictitious grounds for war but for supplying fictitious answers to questions about the event which triggered national hysteria and gave the Bush regime the reactionary political basis for abrogating the Bill of Rights: the attacks of September 11, 2001.

Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, says that torture was not aimed at preventing further attacks but in linking Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. And because no such link existed, it was clear to everyone involved that one would have to be tortured into existence. And Major Paul Burney, a psychiatrist at Guantanamo, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that torture was used on prisoners on the orders of Vice President Dick Cheney even after the subject was reported to be “compliant.” This strongly suggests that the government was not interested in discovering intelligence but in manufacturing it.

And there is more. In April of 2003, after the war had begun, the U.S. captured Muhammed Khudayr al-Dulaymi, once chief of the M-14 section of Iraq’s Mukhabarat, secret police under Saddam Hussein. According to Charles Duelfer, head of The Iraq Survey Group and the person in charge of interrogations of Iraqi officials, he was told by people “at very senior levels” in Washington –– “not the CIA” –– that al-Dulaymi was to be waterboarded despite the conviction of the interrogators that “it was ludicrous” that al-Dulaymi would know of links between al Qaeda and Hussein. Duelfer says he considered the instruction to be “reprehensible.”

In this context, consider the attacks on the World Trade Center and what we have been told about them.

The ‘9-11 Commission’ was appointed by President Bush to pre-empt a congressional investigation. Its Final Report and source footnotes reveal that much of its conclusions as to the planning and execution of the attacks was based on interrogations which used torture. As journalists –– and an independent NBC analysis –– discovered, there was a second round of interrogations in early 2004, specifically to produce answers to questions from the ‘9-11 Commission’ after its lawyers had been unsatisfied by the CIA’s sanitized reports.

The Commission requested direct access to the prisoners and was told, in the words of one intelligence official, to “go pound sand.” Instead, it was allowed to submit written questions; the CIA then employed waterboarding and other torture in producing the ‘answers’ the government wanted the Commission to have.

As many investigators have already argued, there are deeply troubling problems with the government’s official story concerning the events of September 11, 2001. A credible case can be made that the collapse of the towers (and of ‘building 7’) could not have been caused solely by the planes flown into them. Several of the persons named by the government as having participated in the attack have shown up alive.

The commission’s questions about the September 11th attacks, in the chronology now emerging, prompted a new round of waterboarding. One victim was waterboarded more than 180 times in a single month. The prisoners were be tortured until they provided the ‘correct’ answers.

But the second round of questioning is strikingly odd in another sense. It took place as the Commission’s Report was being written. The ‘findings’ had already been made. Thus, it is quite likely that the questions posed of the prisoners held by the government were due to the unresolved nature of the investigation itself. They were writing the Report but they were feverishly looking for proof, enough so that they knowingly countenanced torture as a means to that end.

Philip Zelkow, who was to become counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, was the Commission’s executive director. He has since said, “We were not aware, but we guessed that things like that were going on.” A former senior CIA official, still off the record, said that the Commission “never” expressed “any concerns about techniques and even pushed for the second round...” The second round involved at least thirty “enhanced” interrogations.

At least four of the detainees whose ‘information’ was featured in the official Report have testified in hearings at Guantanamo –– hearings which are secret and to which the American people have no access –– that they told their questioners whatever they wanted as a means of stopping the torture. No serious intelligence operative would use torture to extract information because torture induces unreliable stories.

It was never about producing intelligence. It was always about producing fake ‘documents’ –– remember the “yellowcake” claims and the ridiculous forgery? –– to induce domestic compliance with whatever the government had in mind. And it worked.

There are several very dark aspects to all of this, and they go beyond the treatment of prisoners.

Cliff Arnebeck is a lawyer. On the day before the November election, he and other attorneys deposed a critical witness in the lawsuit involving election tampering in Ohio in 2004. The witness, Mike Connell, was the chief IT consultant to Karl Rove and created websites for the Bush and McCain electoral campaigns. In 2004, he also set up the website reporting the 2004 presidential election returns.

On December 19th, Connell, an experienced pilot flying in clear weather, died when his plane crashed and exploded in a residential neighborhood near Akron. He was expected to testify in open court the following week.

Connell had told friends that he feared for his life, that George Bush and Dick Cheney would “throw (him) under the bus,” and he had told then-Attorney General Mukasey that he had been warned that he had to “take the fall.”

Connell had told Arnebeck of threats to him and his wife, and Arnebeck contacted Mukasey and Ohio Attorney General Nancy Rogers, and he wrote a letter to the court outlining the threats. No one responded.

Stephen Spoonamore, the original whistleblower who first named Connell to investigators, told Arnebeck that Rove was making threats and that “the White House is very worried about this case.”

They had reason to be. Spoonamore, a conservative Republican and a prominent expert in security and computer fraud, had turned out to be a real conservative –– someone who believed in the Constitution. He’d worked with Connell and personally knew many of the cyber-security people in the Bush operation.

Mark Crispin Miller, a New York University professor who has written extensively about electronic tampering in several recent elections, including the presidential election of 2004, told Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! that he had seen Spoonamore’s notes of a conversation with Connell in which the latter asked how to go about destroying White House e-mails.

Karl Rove’s e-mails, which are now “missing,” were on a server in Chattanooga, Tennessee, hosted by something called SMARTech. Also on these servers: the Ohio state presidential election vote tallies, which were sent on election night to Tennessee, where they were “delayed” before being sent back. In one sense, it’s just a more sophisticated and reliable example of the method once employed by Richard Daley, the elder, mayor of Chicago fifty years ago. Daley would ‘sit on’ the Cook County boxes until downstate had reported; then he’d know how many votes he needed to steal.

But in another sense, we are witnessing something entirely new and hostile to the country’s survival. Daley finessing Illinois for Kennedy in 1960, “Landslide Lyndon” Johnson, posing with several cronies around ‘box 13’, the ballot box “discovered” after LBJ had lost the Senate primary by a hundred or so votes to Coke Stevenson, and what a surprise that the ballots came out about 240-3. These were criminal acts, not only unpunished but rewarded. We’ve got a long history of it.

But this is different. The federal government wouldn’t offer protection to the most important RICO witness in a court proceeding and declares that the witness’s plane went down because of bad weather or insufficient fuel, and ignores the fact that Connell’s plane produced a fireball which charred and pocked some of the house fronts in the neighborhood. Miller says that people can go online and see the footage that the news crews got.

Two months ago, famed investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, in answering a question at a ‘Great Conversations’ event at the University of Minnesota, referred to on ongoing, covert military operation he termed “an executive assassination ring” which reported directly to Dick Cheney’s office. Hersh is working on a book and said later that his comments were “an honest response” to a question but “not something I want to dwell about in public.”

Maybe not, but here’s what Hersh said:

“After 9-11, I haven’t written about this yet, but the Central Intelligence Agency was very deeply involved in domestic activities against people they thought to be enemies of the state. Without any legal authority for it. They haven’t been called on it yet.

“Right now, today, there was a story in the New York Times that if you read it carefully mentioned something known as the Joint Special Operations Command –– JSOC it’s called. It’s a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently. They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days they reported directly to the Cheney office. They did not report to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff or to Mr. Gates, the secretary of defense...

“Congress has no oversight of it. It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on. Just today in the Times there was a story that its leaders, a three-star admiral named (William H.) McRaven, ordered a stop to it because there were so many collateral deaths.

“Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us...”

Right now, it doesn’t seem likely that there will be a criminal investigation, let alone appointment of a special prosecutor, although the crimes more than apparently committed by high government officials strike at the very heart of the nation.

Don’t kid yourself. Obama certainly knows what’s been going on. There is a non-governmental power, in place, which has the ability to carry out death squad activities anywhere they’re sent. Once the civilian authority has been circumvented, democracy itself is dead.

The new President is under enormous pressure. His recent reversal on disclosing torture documents, and his refusal in federal court to change the Bush position on secrecy and national security –– nobody who could write “Dreams From My Father” could possibly believe in what he’s been doing on these matters.

America has some pretty dreadful secrets, and it is very possible that one constraint on the President is his own uncertainty whether a serious investigation, once begun, could be limited before disclosures rocked the country. How much truth can America handle about itself?

And even should he wish to open these channels and bring the light of day to our worst crimes, Obama would face institutional obstruction and congressional cowardice, not to mention the bullets of the twenty-first century’s first “lone assassin.”

Today, the United States Senate, that highest of august bodies, the place where the Democratic Party holds a solid majority and where its members clap one another on the back for empty achievements and deliver oratorical promises they never intend to keep, voted 90-6 to remove funding from the supplemental military funding bill the money to be spent for closing Guantanamo and for conducting a Justice Department investigation into the tortures that went on there.

The six Senators who wanted to fund these things were: Patrick Leahy of Vermont, Dick Durbin of Illinois, Tom Harkin of Iowa, Carl Levin of Michigan, and both members from Rhode Island, Sheldon Whitehouse and Jack Reed. That’s it.

I disagree strongly with several major policies of this President. I hate the giveaway of what remains of the Treasury to the thieves in the banks and on Wall Street. We continue to wage an idiot and terrible war in Afghanistan and, now, Pakistan. The Obama education secretary is completely wrong about nearly everything.

But I am supporting this President because I believe that on a fundamental level he is on our side, the side of the people, and it’s been forty-six years since the last President who was decent enough to care and tough enough to nearly pull it off. He is on a long road. I hope we can walk that road with him.

As of this morning, we’ve got cases of swine flu reported in six states. In related news, Senator Arlen Specter (R-Pa) announced that he would run for re-election as a Democrat.

Specter is a favorite of mine. In a business famous for self-serving duplicity, mammoth fakery, and bloated egos, he is a giant. Beginning with his stunning debut as a young lawyer on the staff of the Warren Commission, where he invented the infamous ‘single-bullet’ theory to explain the inexplicable, Specter has made it plain that no crime is beneath him. Indeed, his chairmanship of the Senate Ethics Committee, whose main task has been to cover-up the misdeeds of those in power, has been marked by the sort of convenient blindness which paves the road to success in American politics.

He’s a piece of work, Specter is.

His conversion to the party of Barack Obama, contrary to whatever horseshit masquerading as principle he will no doubt dump on an incurious media, is the rankest evil we’ve witnessed since Joltin’ Joe Lieberman began dancing back to the Democrats in the wake of John McCain’s ugly pasting last November. It is duplicity which would make even Spiro Agnew blush.

Needless to say, Arlen Specter is no Democrat. His timely leap from the sinking G.O.P. ship originated from a single ineluctable fact, which is that as the Republican nominee he would be beaten like a gong in 2010. This has been an emerging reality in statewide polls for more than a year now. Pennsylvania Democrats from Ed Rendell on down (or up, depending on your view of Rendell) have been soiling themselves in glorious anticipation.

Much of what passes for political commentary these days, at least what the corporate sponsors are willing to pay for, has been about the G.O.P., its increasing irrelevancy, its dearth of leadership, and the jokesters named Palin and Limbaugh hanging from its newly-imaciated frame.

The Specter switcheroo is being played that way, the ‘moderate’ who has no home left in his own party due to how crazy the rest of them are. But the bigger story is what it portends for the Democrats. While President Obama welcomes Specter, is “thrilled”, according to early accounts, and offers to campaign for him, the news is not necessarily good for the country.

For one thing, as David Sirota and one or two other sentient bloggers are writing on the Huffington Post, his conversion did not reflect any change in Specter’s politics. He’s finessed himself a nomination and a re-election each of which until now had been up for grabs. He’ll nominally vote with the Democrats in organizing the Senate. But in terms of philosophy or ideology, and presumably in ethics, he’s the same old useless bastard.

Forty-five years ago, as a young lawyer on the staff of the Warren Commission pretending to investigate the murder of John F. Kennedy, it fell to Specter to craft an explanation for the impossible forensic material. The Commission knew from the film of the killing and its own tests on the weapon said to have fired all the shots, not to mention the physical problems inherent in firing any weapon at the motorcade through a large, leafy tree which blocked the view from the “sniper’s nest” in the Depository, that there was more than one shooter and that none had been named Lee Oswald. There was quite literally no doubt about it.

But the Commission’s job was not to investigate but to allay fears and suspicions, to put to rest the rumors swirling around the country. The staff understood this quite well, as statements over the years by other staffers have made clear. And Specter was the fellow who came up with the solution.

Briefly, this was his problem: the shooting in Dealey Plaza had caused nine wounds in three people. One shot had missed, striking a spectator named James Tague as he stood near the overpass. One shot killed Kennedy, striking him in the right temple. Because it was physically impossible to deliver more than three shots from the bolt-action rifle in the 5.6 seconds eastablished by the film as being the largest possible window of time available, it meant that the remaining wounds had to be accounted for by a single bullet.

It had to have caused these wounds:

1. a wound of entry in Kennedy’s back, several inches below the collar and slightly to the right; 2. a wound in Kennedy’s throat, identified by every doctor at Parkland Hospital who saw it before it was enlarged for a breathing tube as a wound of entry; 3. a wound in the back of Governor John Connally, who had been seated directly in front of Kennedy; 4. a wound of exit in Connally’s chest; 5. a wound in the radius of Connally’s right wrist; 6. a wound of exit at the radius; 7. a superficial wound in Connally’s left thigh.

It was also a bullet with magical properties, since it emerged from this journey, having traversed Kennedy’s back and neck, and broken Connally’s ribs and the radius in his wrist, in pristine condition. Commission Exhibit 399 had lost less in grains of lead than were recovered from Connally’s wrist alone. When compared with bullets which had been fired into gelatin blocks –– and which had been thereby blunted –– or those fired into animal cadavers –– and which had been thereby flattened –– Exhibit 399 had quite obviously never wounded anybody.

But young Arlen Specter was stuck with Exhibit 399 because it was the only link he had between the President’s murder and the rifle said to have belonged to Oswald. This bullet had at one time been fired from that weapon. And it had been ‘found’ on a bloody stretcher at Parkland Hospital said to have been used to transport the wounded Governor.

As it later turned out, the stretcher on which the magic bullet was ‘found’ had been used not for Connally but for a kid named Ronnie Fuller, admitted at the same time for a badly cut chin. Admittedly, Specter didn’t know about Ronnie Fuller. And he did not have access to the mountain of materials since excavated around the assassination.

But Specter cannot claim ignorance as a defense, even if he’d like to, because he had to know at the time that, whatever the truth, he was inventing a lie. He knew this for many reasons, but the most compelling was the existence of the Zapruder film of the murder because it provided investigators with a clock. Running at 18.3 frames per second, Zapruder’s Bell & Howell established not only a time limit for all of the shots but an accurate sequencing. Within the window of the film, you can see Kennedy reacting to being hit, his hands rising to his throat. In the seat in front of him, Connally is turned to his right and begins to turn back the other way; he later said that he’d heard the shot and was trying to see what it was. Clearly visible is his right hand, which is gripping his Stetson. It should not be necessary to point this out, but if your radius has been shattered by a bullet you cannot grip anything. Then comes the frame where Connally reacts to being struck. This happens more than 1.6 seconds after Kennedy is hit but less than 2.3 second. And 2.3 seconds is the fastest time possible to operate the bolt on the Manlicher Carcano, using Olympic sharpshooters, which the Commission did.

In other words: it not only didn’t happen that way, it couldn’t have happened that way, and Specter had to know it.

He must’ve been under great pressure, I concede that. As one key New Orleans witness said to Jim Garrison, “Kennedy’s in a pine box; the government’s still breathing. You’re lining up with a dead man.”

Today, as reporters crowded around, Specter quipped that he had a larger entourage than Lee Harvey Oswald. Now, isn’t that a very curious thing to say.

Tree-huggers running wild, that’s what it is. Hey, don’t get me wrong, I love ‘em, every blinking one of ‘em, and a few I really admire, such as Julia Butterfly and Frank Egger, but it’s like anything else: along with the wizards you get the ideologues, and wherever you get ideologues you get trouble.

I am a golfer. I have other problems, too, clearly, but that’s one of them. I am dedicated to the pursuit, which offers along other things occasional revelations concerning planet earth and what in the world we are doing here; and regardless of what any of you left-wingers out there think, you can run across a lot of really cool people on the links, even the ones with money.

I am a golfer but I stick pretty close to home, which is San Geronimo Golf Course just over White’s Hill and five minutes away if the traffic’s wide open, which it often is. I do not travel well, another of my problems. But you are not reading this because you find my problems fascinating –– you have plenty of your own, especially these days of economic calamity and criminal euphemism.

There’s this golf course, Sharp Park, in San Francisco. Never played there. Couldn’t find it even with a google map, see aforementioned note on travel, and probably never will.

There is pressure being applied to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors right now by a tree-hugging outfit which wants the city to close the course, which it owns, so that the land may revert to its ‘natural’ condition. This idea is enthusiastically backed by Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi, who evidently does not understand shit about golf but isn’t going to let that detail derail his larger purpose.

The tree-hugger faction is fronted by The Center for Biological Diversity, which has threatened to sue the city unless the course is closed, in order to “protect two threatened species,” according to the blurb in the Mercury News. These are the garter snake and the red-legged frog.

I am a big fan of the garter snake, although I appreciate it even better when it’s not underfoot. I go back to childhood with the garter snake. I believe I also have an affinity for the red-legged frogs. Frogs and I go back a long way, too, and in jaw-dropping ways I’m not going into here.

But Sharp Park is not hurting the garter snakes, and it is not hurting the frogs. Golfers have been slogging around this links-style track for seventy years. The snakes and frogs are still there. In fact, the course already closes portions of the 14th fairway due to flooding, rather than pump the water, because that would disturb the frogs laying their eggs in the springtime.

These are people who know something about caring for their surroundings and the creatures which inhabit them.

On its wed site devoted to Sharp Park, the Center speaks of turning the “exclusive, underused and budget-breaking golf course” into a series of wetlands with trails, a visitor center and camping and picnic zones. They don’t mention what that might cost, and the ‘budget-breaking’ line is horseshit, but the point is clear. One Jeff Miller, described as an “advocate with the center” thinks such a project would attract a lot of federal money.

“Exclusive” meaning what, exactly? “Underused” in what manner? The CBD folks, who are worried about the species they cite, want to bring in more people? Increase “utilization”? Camping zones? Picnic zones? How’s that helping out the garter snake? Does the red-legged frog want visitors?

Let’s face it, the CBD people want to build a theme park for themselves and their friends; they want to attract federal money and build things; they want, in fact, to turn this golf course into an open-air zoo.

As I said, I’ve never played Sharp Park. There are other courses around, and even if this place, at $12.00 for seniors and $20.00 for S.F. residents, is a great place for people who love the game but don’t have the money for fancy equipment, or new Priuses, why should I care?

It happens that Sharp Park, whatever its faults, was originally designed by one Alister MacKenzie, who is in the course architects hall of fame, if there is such a thing and even if there isn’t. He was a genius, a mad creator, a visionary. Not every course he designed was as likely as Augusta National, where the Masters is played, but they are his creations.

One does not consign a Picasso sketch to the slag heap, even if it’s not one of his best.

Mirkarimi’s legislation asks city staff to look into “transferring the land to the National Park Service or jointly managing the property with the agency, which raises the possibility of shrinking the golf course” –– shrinking the golf course? like, we could make it a 12-holer? –– “or transforming it into a 400-acre park with managed wetlands.”

By all means, let’s turn 400 acres over the National Park Service, those progenitors of concession stands at National landmarks, that’s what the red-legged frogs need: federal management.

Hey, I realize that Mirkarimi’s just another ambitious pol, albeit on the left, and he’s a whiz at the equations: save the snake, talk about wetlands, plenty of votes; save the golf course for those who can’t afford to play without it? Not so many votes.

No, I blame the brainless culture which has sprung up alongside the environmental movement, for it gives birth to things like the CBD. I blame the culture of left-wing self-righteousness which at its worst lends credence to the sneering ‘political correctness’ jibes of the moronic right-wing.

I have over the years been an active participant in a number of political crusades, and on reflection I think they were each worthy (if occasionally self-destructive), but crusades attract not only the morally-engaged but the morally-compromised as well. Fanaticism is always dangerous because it rides on certainty, and if there’s anything certain on the planet it’s that human beings, you and me included, don’t know much and are astoundingly slow at this learning business.

If anyone out there knows any San Francisco politicos, I invite you to please tell them to leave the garter snake, the red-legged frog, and the low-income golfer alone.

I saw another photo of the man in the Chron yesterday, accompanying Matthew Stannard’s story of a Justice Department memorandum written by John Yoo, the Boalt Hall law professor who once claimed that it would be morally justifiable to “crush a child’s testicles” in front of his mother to extract “information” from her.

In the photo, Yoo is wearing a striped tie, wire-rimmed glasses, and a thin smile. It would not be necessary for anyone to obtain legal authority for the crushing of the child’s testicles, nothing beyond the opinion of the President who could legally order or authorize it as “necessary” in the “war on terror.”

I kept staring at the photo, trying to convince myself that I was seeing a human being, a man who had cares and concerns and interests, who probably selected his tie with the thought that it made him look pretty good.

John Yoo’s job at the Justice Department was to craft legal memoranda which would provide cover for George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld in the use of torture and brutality.

Hitler had lawyers like John Yoo. He had a cowardly, complaisant legislature which enacted ‘Patriot Acts’, thus legalizing everything he wanted to do.

Right now in America the surveillance and secrecy policies of the Bush regime are being defended by President Obama’s Justice Department. In federal court, Obama’s lawyers have told a judge that he has no power to enforce his own orders to disclose a secret wiretap document, and they have threatened to destroy it rather than produce it. Meanwhile, prisoners held for years without charges or open trial are condemned in secret by military courts.

On April 27, 1961, another American President forcefully argued a different point of view. Speaking to the American Association of Newspaper Publishers, John Kennedy said this:

“The very word ‘secrecy’ is repugnant in a free and open society. And we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths, and to secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment far outweigh the dangers which are cited to justify it. There is little value in ensuring the survival of our nation if our traditions do not survive with it –– and there is very great danger that an announced need for greater security will be seized upon by those anxious to expand its meaning to the very limits of official censorship and concealment...”

Sound familiar?

(Associated Press dispatch, Washington, D.C., April 18, 2009):

AP Newswire. The Obama administration announced today that it is “turning the page” on drug dealers, armed robbers, and those found to have perpetrated drive-by shootings.

“We need to be looking forward, not backward,” the President told an afternoon press gathering on the South Lawn at the White House. He added that many of these people “thought that what they were doing was lawful at the time.”

In related news, President Obama also promised that he would ignore any crimes committed by domestic kidnappers and torturers if they committed crimes while working for the government.

In California, the killer who raped her eight-year-old victim is reportedly considering asking the court to “turn the page” and let her go, since “God told me to do it.”

All of this warms my heart. It vindicates the hours and cash I personally spent to advance the candidacy of our new President. It’s change you can believe in.

In the new national order, forgiveness is the watchword. The principles of Nuremberg, to borrow an expression from former Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, are “quaint” in the modern world. Forget the tired old nonsense about accountability. You can’t run a modern state without a strong domestic spy apparatus, and who would want to work for the secret police if they were always worried about future prosecution?

Amnesty for everyone! Except, of course, for Roman Polanski, Rod Blagojevich, and the hundreds of thousands encarcerated for smoking marijuana.

Amnesty for cops who shoot unarmed citizens. Amnesty for the CEOs who steal the life savings of millions. Hey, anybody can make an honest mistake.

I like the new Obama Nation, a place where nearly anything goes.

I’ve been avoiding writing this little column for better than a month. But now, with the news clippings piling-up on my work desk and Thursday night’s wind outside, in Dylan’s fractured simile, howling like a hammer, it’s a good time. Healthy, too; constipation is never a good idea, and mental constipation can blank-out an entire personality. I know people who’ve been jammed-up for fifty years and it’s not pretty.

I’m calling this a column now, even though the term itself is a relic of the dying industrial age. Newspapers are falling dead all over the place and the Bay Area’s remaining metropolitan rag, The Chronicle, is wondering why on its own front page. No great mystery. You can find anything on the internet, including in most cases better and leafier prose.

Personally, I shall miss The Chron, which I like to read with my breakfast cereal every morning, mostly Jon Carroll and a couple of cartoons, and the Sudoku puzzle. But the news, you can get it anywhere now. I don’t need to read The Chronicle to know which way the wind blows like a hammer.

Headlines:

“Obama Justice Dept. keeps Bush stance on rendition lawsuits.”

“Obama, Bush detention policies are very similar.”

“Obama’s Justice Dept. in court over challenge to Bush wiretap policy.”

“Feds try to block lawyers from seeing classified document.”

“Bush detainee policy supported by Obama.”

“Obama administration request denied in wiretapping case.”

You know, if I was a cynical sort of fellow, I might begin wondering just what I got when I voted for change I could believe in.

Look, I like the guy personally. He’s charming as all hell, and literate, which alone is such a relief after the Reign of George the Idiot King, that I want to ignore the signs, unmistakable though they certainly are, that America’s flirtation with fascism has not ended with Barack Obama’s security policies.

If Nixon was doing what Obama’s doing on matters of governmental and police power, not to mention sending another wave of troops to Afghanistan (can Pakistan be far behind?), we’d all be in the streets, and you know it.

Documents on America’s widespread kidnapping of people and flying them to secret prisons around the world, where ‘friendly’ governments assist us in torturing our captives, remain hidden behind a fierce Justice Department fight to suppress them.

A bipartisan Senate Armed Services committee report said that Donald Rumsfeld and his friends instituted policies or torture at Guantanamo and elsewhere, but the Justice Department says it will not pursue prosecution against those who committed these terrible crimes. Meanwhile, the U.S. has decided to release a Guantanamo prisoner on condition that he agree not to sue us.

The mis-nomered ‘Patriot Act’ remains backed in its entirety by the Executive Branch (as well as the Democratic congressional leadership), including the law which authorizes the President to round up anybody he deems a ‘threat’ to ‘national security’. No one is talking about –– or rescinding –– the contract with Halliburton to build enormous detention camps.

Widespread wiretapping of citizens continues.

Yeah, Obama’s charming as hell. But as several beautiful women I know personally can attest, charm only goes so far. I like Michelle, too, and the kids. I like it that the First Family wants to get a Portuguese water dog because it reminds me of my friend Bolo, who has gone to where the water dogs can romp around all day.

It must be said that the domestic (and foreign) police policies of the new guy are not better in any material respect than the crazy, dangerous policies of the nutcase we just sent back to the ranch. We’d better be honest about it. Otherwise, we’re likely to awaken one day to the realization that we’d replaced “compassionate conservatism” with ‘fascism with a human face.’