‘For All Mankind’ : Remembering the Apollo Astronauts’ Epic Derring-Do

Posted on July 20, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

Al Reinert’s stunning ‘For All Mankind’ screens tonight as we observe the 40th Anniversary of man’s greatest adventure

By Thorne Dreyer / The Rag Blog / July 20, 2009

See ‘Tumbling Models: Some of “The Right Stuff,”‘ by Thomas Cleaver, and more about ‘For All Mankind,’ Below.

On July 20, 1969, exactly forty years ago today, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin bounded from Apollo 11’s lunar module onto the face of the moon, capturing the imagination of the world.

On May 25, 1961, JFK had proclaimed to a joint session of Congress that “this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth,” startling those who would be expected to make this, the stuff of sci fi novels, actually happen.

But they came through in, shall we say, flying colors. Twenty four men in spacesuits would circle the moon and twelve would actually walk on its surface in an unprecedented act of cosmic derring-do — while consumating with a weightless flourish what many consider to be man’s greatest technological triumph.

Al Reinert’s 1989 classic film For All Mankind, a splendid documentary about the Apollo flights to the moon in the 60’s and 70’s, is showing tonight (Monday, July 20, 2009) on Turner Classic Movies (TCM) at 7:00 p.m. central time (check your local listings) — as we all observe the 40th anniversary of a singular event in our history: mankind’s first steps on the surface of the moon.

For All Mankind will be followed tonight on TCM by Philip Kauffman’s The Right Stuff, the theatrical movie about the Mercury 7 astronauts based on the Tom Wolfe novel. (See Thomas Cleaver’s remarks below.)

Reinert was (is!) my friend and colleague and I was involved peripherally (and at times not so peripherally) with the years-long development and production of For All Mankind. And the process was as impressive as the final product.

A screenwriter now living in southern California, Reinert is a Texas native who formerly worked as a reporter for the Houston Chronicle and a senior editor at Texas Monthly and as a widely-published freelance magazine writer.

For All Mankind was constructed from actual NASA footage — some of the most amazing documentary photography ever taken — combined with Reinert’s interviews with the Apollo astronauts. The photography, culled from a massive inventory of raw 8mm and 16mm footage — was chronologically reorganized to better tell this epic story.

The sum total was far greater than the parts, transformed by Al Reinert’s artistic vision (and ungodly perseverance and attention to detail), with a great assist from Brian Eno’s unearthly musical score.

Some of this utilization of NASA photography was pioneered by filmmaker William Michael Hanks in his documentary, The Apollo File, with which Reinert was originally involved.

For All Mankind was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary in 1990, losing out to Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt, a film produced during the height of the AIDS epidemic which became a sentimental favorite among Hollywood insiders.

Reinert’s film was recently re-released in hi-def Blu-Ray and premiered before a packed and enthusiastic crowd at the Paramount in Austin during the recent South by Southwest (SXSW) music and film festival. A new Special Edition DVD has been released by Criterion and is available from Amazon.com.

Image from Philip Kaufman’s ‘The Right Stuff.’

Tumbling Models:
Some of ‘The Right Stuff’

By Thomas Cleaver / The Rag Blog / July 20, 2009

TCM’s showing of For All Mankind tonight, Monday, July 20, in widescreen letterbox, is being followed by a presentation of The Right Stuff. Check your local schedule for times.

The Right Stuff is not as good as it could have been (due to the fact that Phil Kaufman — the director — didn’t think the Mercury astronauts had “the right stuff”), but it still has its moments, and I always like that the X-1 and X-1A sequences were done the old-fashioned way, with models hanging on wires in a park in San Francisco, shot against the real sky, with CO2 being sprayed by a production assistant to create the “clouds.”

Also, the “hypersonic tumble” came when the FX supervisor was so frustrated that they couldn’t get it done with motion-capture that he threw the model out the fourth story window of the warehouse where the production offices were. Someone else saw that and said “Brian! It tumbled!” after which they spent three days throwing X-1As off the roof and filming them as they fell. The tumbling F-104 sequence is a series of old Hawk/Testors F104s hanging from balloons, with the film then run in reverse after they were shot rising.

The famous shot of the astronauts walking toward the camera in their space suits came when Phil Kaufman saw all the illegal immigrants who worked in the sweat shop down the hall coming out at the end of shift — so the astronauts are really walking out of a sweatshop in a warehouse in San Francisco.

(Memories from my first experience of working on a “big movie,” where my job was driving Chuck Yeager around and writing press releases for the Unit Publicist).

For All Mankind : ‘Visually Stunning’

There is no narrator spouting scientific facts or high tech jargon. Instead, Reinert blends together comments by thirteen of the original astronauts (others are glimpsed and heard in archival footage but no one is identified), sound effects and an appropriately eerie music score by Brian Eno.

There have been numerous books, films and documentaries on NASA’s Apollo space program from the bestseller Apollo: The Epic Journey to the Moon by David Reynolds, Wally Schirra & Von Hardesty to Ron Howard’s 1995 recreation of the Apollo 13 mission to HBO’s documentary mini-series From the Earth to the Moon (1998), but For All Mankind (1989) is easily the most visually stunning and unconventional approach to documenting the nine Apollo missions that occurred between 1968 and 1972.

Instead of taking a chronological approach, complete with talking head interviews in the style of most documentaries, filmmaker Al Reinert painstakingly reviewed six million feet of archival footage from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s holdings along with 80 hours of original interviews he had conducted and fashioned a hypnotic visual and aural experience as seen through the eyes of the astronauts.

There is no narrator spouting scientific facts or high tech jargon. Instead, Reinert blends together comments by thirteen of the original astronauts (others are glimpsed and heard in archival footage but no one is identified), sound effects and an appropriately eerie music score by Brian Eno.

The result is closer to an experimental film but one that is unmistakably a tribute to America’s foray into the international space race to the moon that was first set in motion by President John F. Kennedy’s September 12th speech in 1962; he vowed that the U.S. would land a spacecraft on the moon and that “it will be done before the end of this decade.” NASA accepted the challenge and it became a reality.

The Apollo space program was enormously costly — an estimation of several billion dollars would not be unlikely — and extensively documented in terms of the cameras that each mission was equipped with for photographing every aspect of the journey. As a result, For All Mankind could be considered the most expensive movie ever made when you consider what it cost to produce all the footage that NASA ultimately acquired.

Reinert recalled, “I began interviewing the Apollo astronauts in 1976. They were mostly retired astronauts by then, changed men, excerpts from the tapes constitute the major part of the soundtrack of For All Mankind. The movie thus speaks with the intimate voice of personal experience.”

He added that “The astronauts went into space carrying movie cameras ’16mm data-acquisition cameras’ \which they reached for reflexively, like tourists, whenever they saw something surprising or spectacular or merely important. They saw such things almost continually. As a result, they brought back thousands of feet of amazing film, perhaps the most extraordinary footage ever shot by human beings.”

— from the Criterion Collection DVD liner notes for For All Mankind.

For All Mankind:

Oscar-nominated documentary is a bold meditation on discovery, courage and perseverance

By Randy Miller III / July 14, 2009

As a bold meditation on discovery, courage and perseverance, Al Reinert’s For All Mankind (1989) truly stands in a class by itself.

This Oscar-nominated documentary chronicles the Apollo space missions of the 1960s and 1970s from a decidedly different perspective: the human one. Replayed reels of grainy stock footage have trained us to assume that the historic 1969 moon landing was distant, desolate and almost difficult to believe — but within this warm atmosphere, it feels as perfectly natural as a home movie.

Though relatively short at only 80 minutes, For All Mankind was assembled from an enormous surplus of 8mm and 16mm footage held in NASA’s archives for nearly two decades. This footage was routinely recorded for posterity, yet the majority of it had yet to be seen by the general public.

For All Mankind‘s subtle flow tricks us into thinking we’re only watching one mission, but its deception shows us the big picture instead: this odyssey was about more than one moment, one journey or one crew; it was about the dedication of all involved, not to mention the overwhelming scope of the space program in general. Such a “discovery,” for lack of a better term, helped to define an entire generation — and like it or not, the accomplishment has yet to be equaled, let alone bettered.

In more ways than one, this broad assortment of material (carefully pieced together by Reinert, with the help of NASA film editors Don Pickard and Chuck Welch) is presented in its most affecting and appropriate form: as a loose but focused narrative, with an abstract beginning and end. Many smaller beginnings and endings were undoubtedly left on the cutting room floor, but it’s all for the best; For All Mankind wouldn’t be half as effective if it were approached in a less artistic manner.

Told in the words of several Apollo astronauts (including James Lovell, Jack Swigert, Ken Mattingly, Michael Collins and others), For All Mankind relies on monologue almost as much as visuals. Much of the audio we hear was recorded right on location — and while it’s potent enough in its own right, the retrospective comments are even more effective.

These astronauts’ enthusiasm is only matched by their humility: they were certainly excited to be part of history, but their respect for the danger involved helped to keep them in check. We can’t blame them, however, for skipping happily across the lunar surface or goofing off in zero gravity; after all, it’s not like we wouldn’t do the same thing. For All Mankind is a sincere and reverent experience, to be sure, but the film’s infectious joy is one of its greatest strengths.

Brian Eno’s score remains another highlight, whether it blends into the background or boldly steps forward. It’s paired perfectly with the film’s abstract flow and editing style, creating a natural but dreamlike atmosphere that works wonderfully. Still, the footage itself is the most effective element: the humbling nature of these visuals, especially with the realization that they’re 100% genuine, really puts things in perspective. Modern documentaries like Planet Earth have given us a greater understanding of the world around us, but the striking simplicity of a desolate lunar landscape is something else entirely.

For All Mankind may be light from a technical perspective, but that’s not the film’s intent: this is more of a spiritual experience than a science lesson. Those looking for a more detailed, analytical rundown of the Apollo missions have plenty of other options to choose from — but for everyone else, For All Mankind remains a definitive document of our first trip to the moon and back.

Originally presented on DVD by Criterion in 2000, For All Mankind wasn’t the company’s most practical release, especially taking its $40 price tag into account: not only were the film’s grainy visuals a tough sell for videophiles, but the short running time and light amount of extras didn’t help matters either. Nine years later, they’ve attempted to create a more attractive package. Boasting a newly-minted transfer, a pair of new featurettes and a lower price tag, this new reissue of For All Mankind is the clear winner from a new buyer’s perspective…

[Read the rest of this review, including technical details and info about features on the new DVD release at DVDTalk.com.

The Rag Blog

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The Health Care Stories for America Blog

Posted on July 19, 2009 by RagBlog

Not only can you read the stories, but write one yourself on this website. It also recognizes your zip-code location when you link up so you get the immediate stories that are in and around your location. When you read some of the stories about each person’s individual medical condition and difficulty with either their insurance carriers or the fact they have no health-care, it truly gives you an idea just how difficult it is for millions.

Diane Stirling-Stevens / The Rag Blog


Nancy, Mercer Island, WA

Dear President Obama,

I am a nurse and work full time. I do not want shareholders on Wall Street determining the care that my patients get. Insurance companies, themselves, are driving up the cost of medicine. I am spending too much time on the phone with them, negotiating for the care the doctors have prescribed. This means that the clinic overhead is increased by paying wages for nursing time on the phone, when we should be with patients.

A worker at Humana Insurance told me recently that they had hired 200 more workers to talk with clinics and hospitals. Insurance companies have legions of gatekeepers who override doctor’s decisions. If this doesn’t drive up cost I don’t know what does.

What I want, as a nurse and a patient, is one set of criteria, one set of rules, one form, one card, one web site to understand, one set of medical records and one insurance card that will allow my care anywhere in America.

  1. It needs to cover EVERYONE, because if a poor uninsured child or mother gets on a bus with the flu…..we all get it! This contributes to pandemics.
  2. It needs to be GUARANTEED so that someone with breast or prostate cancer does not find themselves without insurance because there insurance was rescinded to insure more money for shareholders.
  3. It will cover all, regardless of age, preexisting disease, or income.
  4. Make it COMPREHENSIVE for inpatient and outpatient needs, prevention, medicines, long term care, mental health, dental, vision, hearing, durable medical, ambulances, etc.
  5. The money needs to be directed to health care services, not to middlemen and shareholders. THIS WILL REDUCE COST.
  6. Each citizen should have ONE CARD with each person’s medical records in a chip. This way, you may take it to any doctor or any hospital in America. This helps to reduce mistakes and to coordinate care.
  7. Disallow prescription medication ads. I want my injured worker to get care for his diabetes, rather than only his right leg and low back. “A healthy man has a thousand wishes; a sick man has only one.” [Slovenian proverb]

I have a kidney transplant. If I lost my job tomorrow, I would have no insurance to cover my immuno-suppressant drugs. Without these medicines, I would end up back on dialysis which would be far more costly than my medicines. We need single payer health care.

Thank-you,
Nancy Hewitt Spaeth,BE RN
Mercer Island, Washington

Source / Health Care Stories for America

Many thanks to Diane Stirling-Stevens / The Rag Blog

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Marijuana : It’s High Time to Tax the Pot Crop

Posted on July 19, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

It’s time for the government to cash in on the marijuana crop.

Time to tax marijuana

[With] budget deficits and a worsening recession, it only makes sense to stop spending money to fight marijuana use and start taxing that use to help balance both state and federal budgets.

By Ted McLaughlin / The Rag Blog / July 19, 2009

California recently thought they had fixed their financial problems on the state level, but they were wrong. The state government is still experiencing a huge shortfall in income. There are some in the state who believe it is time to legalize marijuana and tax it to help solve their financial crises.

Using the quantity of marijuana seized by authorities last year as a guide, it is estimated that the marijuana crop in California last year was worth about $17 billion. Personally, I think that’s a very conservative estimate. But even using the government’s $17 billion figure, that dwarfs any other agricultural crop in the state.

The top tax collector in the state says if they tax marijuana just like they tax liquor, the state could collect taxes worth $1.3 billion. That would solve California’s deficit problem. But California is not the only state with a huge marijuana crop or deficit problems. Most states, especially in the West and South, have large illegal crops of marijuana. Marijuana can even be grown as far north as Alaska, as we found out a few years ago when it was legal for a while there.

Frankly, it is time for the federal government to legalize marijuana. While marijuana alone could not pay off the federal deficit, it could be used to keep that deficit from growing larger. Currently, the federal government is searching for ways to pay for health care reform and a public health insurance system. Why not put a substantial tax on marijuana? It could be taxed even more heavily than alcohol, and most users would gladly pay it. A marijuana tax could pay a substantial portion of health care reform.

The only reason marijuana is illegal is because of many years of government propaganda — most of it either wrong or outright lies. The fact that the government still classes marijuana as though it were a dangerous drug like heroin or cocaine or methamphetamine is ridiculous. The truth is that marijuana is far less dangerous than either alcohol or tobacco — both of which are legal (and should remain so). Furthermore, many many deaths can be attributed to alcohol or tobacco each year in America, while not one death can be attributed to marijuana.

There is a myth that marijuana is a “gateway” drug — that users of marijuana will go on to use more dangerous drugs. That is simply a lie. If it has even a small gateway effect, it is because a user quickly learns the government has been lying to him/her about marijuana use. They then wonder what other drugs the government has been lying about. Separating marijuana from the other drugs and legalizing it will kill this small gateway effect caused by government lies.

Millions of honest hard-working tax-paying Americans use marijuana on a fairly regular basis. They do this even though the plant is illegal. They don’t break any other laws. They don’t steal from or hurt any other people. Why do we want to criminalize and punish these people? They just want to make their own choices about their own lives. For some marijuana is a stress-reliever or a sleeping aid, while others just use it recreationally.

Criminalizing and punishing these people actually hurts our country without accomplishing anything positive. We must not only pay for their incarceration, but once they have a record and have difficulty finding work because of that, they are much more likely to actually participate in criminal behavior — behavior that actually would be harmful to persons or property.

Our attempt to enforce this second prohibition has been as big a failure as the first one was. In the twenties and thirties, we found that people would use alcohol whether it was legal or not. Making it illegal simply gave organized crime a big payday — so big they were killing each other to control it. Marijuana (and other drug) prohibition has done the same. People are going to smoke marijuana whether it is legal or not. Isn’t it time to take this money out of the hands of the drug gangs?

We have spent hundreds of billions of dollars on the so-called “war on drugs,” and it’s been like throwing that money away because nothing has been accomplished. The drug war has been an abysmal failure, and anyone thinking clearly can see that. A good start to fixing this problem would be the legalization of marijuana. We might even find fewer people willing to try the illegal drugs if marijuana were legal.

In a time of budget deficits and a worsening recession, it only makes sense to stop spending money to fight marijuana use and start taxing that use to help balance both state and federal budgets.

[Rag Blog contributor Ted McLaughlin also posts at jobsanger, an excellent Texas political blog.]

The Rag Blog

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David Zeiger : This is Where We Take Our Stand

Posted on July 18, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

Episode One : For Those Who Would Judge Me

This is Where We Take Our Stand
A web series about Winter Soldier

By David Zeiger / The Rag Blog / July 18, 2009

I am more than pleased to announce to Rag Blog readers that the web series produced by Bestor Cram and me about last year’s Winter Soldier Iraq and Afghanistan Investigation is finally starting. Throughout the summer we will be posting six episodes of This is Where We Take Our Stand, one every two weeks, at www.thisiswherewetakeourstand.com. Episode one is available now, along with the trailer for the series, and I want to urge all of you to not only watch but post, promote, and help spread the series throughout the internet.

Why this series, and why now? you may ask. Good question. Last year we spent three months following and filming the complicated, intense and emotional process of bringing two hundred and fifty veterans and active duty soldiers to Washington, DC, to expose the realities of America’s occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan from their own experience. With strong support from the antiwar and progressive funding community, we hoped and expected to have a film available in six months. But surprise! Along came Barack Obama and suddenly that support was dust in the wind. I won’t go into details — I think you know the reasons.

In my view, there is no better time than now to present this series. In the name of “not looking backward,” the very policies and strategic goals put in place by the Bush administration in the Gulf region stand fundamentally unchallenged and unchanged by the Obama administration. Am I overstating the case here? Yes, the rhetoric is different, and Obama has even called the invasion of Iraq a mistake. A mistake?! If it’s a “mistake,” that means the goals are valid and righteous, they’re just being pursued with the wrong tactics-as Obama has repeatedly said in the name of “supporting the troops.”

Well, I beg to differ. At the risk of stating the obvious, if these wars were illegal and immoral under Bush, by what logic are they not illegal and immoral under Obama?

Below is the statement about the series written by Bestor and me. I hope that our series will do a little to rattle the sleep out of many people’s eyes, as these occupations continue and, in the case of Afghanistan, expand. Please help us make that happen.

[David Zeiger is an award-winning film producer and director whose highly–acclaimed film Sir! No Sir! documented the little-known GI resistance to the Vietnam War. His production company is Displaced Films.]

This is Where We Take Our Stand:

The series that tells the riveting and timely story of the hundreds of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who testified at last year’s Winter Soldier investigation, has now begun. We hope to reach thousands, even millions worldwide as the six episodes are released throughout the summer:

  • Episode One: For Those Who Would Judge Me available now. See above or click here.
  • Episode Two: Rules of Engagement will launch July 27, 2009.
  • Episode Three: Why We Fight will launch August 10, 2009.
  • Episode Four: Broken Soldier will launch August 24, 2009.
  • Episode Five: This is Not Human Nature will launch September 7, 2009.
  • Episode Six: No Longer a Monster will launch September 20, 2009.

Where’s the debate?

Are we watching passively while Barack Obama carries out the same policies as George W. Bush?

When an American bombing raid this May killed over two hundred civilians in a village in Afghanistan, it was met with a deafening silence. When Obama’s promised “withdrawal” from Iraq leaves 130,000 troops there for at least two more years and 50,000 permanently, it’s hailed as an end to the occupation. And who is demanding to know just what the mission really is when 30,000 more troops are sent to Afghanistan?

Where’s the debate?

In March of 2008, two hundred and fifty veterans and active duty soldiers marked the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq by gathering in Washington, DC, to testify from their own experience about the nature of the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. It was chilling, horrifying, and challenging for all who witnessed it. Against tremendous odds, they brought the voices of the veterans themselves into the debate. That was then.

This is now. Today, we present to you This is Where We Take Our Stand, the inside story of those three days and the courageous men and women who testified. And we present this story today, told in six episodes, because we believe it is as relevant now as it was one year ago. Maybe more.

Here is our challenge to you: Watch the series; spread it far and wide; and ask yourself, Is this about the past, or the present and future? Then add your voice.

If you are a veteran or active duty, present your own testimony. If you are not, but you are still a living, breathing member of the human race, then do whatever you can to join and fan the flames of debate.

– Displaced Films and Northern Light Productions

The Rag Blog

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The Demand Crisis and the Wall Street Pirates. Aaaargh!

Posted on July 17, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer


The Demand Crisis

We could demand that all the pirate trunks of ‘toxic assets’ be loaded onto flatbed trucks and driven back to California where they belong. Overnight, California would need no more IOU’s.

By Greg Moses / The Rag Blog / July 17, 2009

They tell us we’re experiencing a crisis of demand, but they have a backward idea of it.

To turn the picture right side up, we begin with the biggest lesson from the financial sucker punch hitting workers of the world this year — human value comes from having real work to do.

Today’s value crisis hits hardest where profits — and this is why they are called earnings — are failing to produce new tools. This is the demand crisis. Our demand that leaders take better care of the people’s tools has not been heard.

Of course, as the great London philosopher sez in Capital Volume One, tools are contradictory things. The better tools get, the fewer workers needed per unit. Hence the labor-management contradiction. Hence the iron law of social revolution. Dearborn, then and now. Once you start making better tools you can’t help but create — what shall we call it? Change?

And the big problem with change is that people try to go around or over or under or WITHOUT the progressive re-production of tools. No new tools, no real change.

Capitalism is of course the holy system which speaks the language of the Gospel and promises to keep tool making dynamic and efficient so that value flies up from work. And it does have a metaphysical charm owing to our impression that profit and tools derive from some conjoined living form.

The great San Francisco economist Henry George said interest payments are legitimate social demands because the wealth we put back into tools needs to grow like anything else. Of course any living thing can demand disgusting amounts of fodder and grow to obscene proportions on that basis, but it should not use the words of Henry George as an excuse for that.

Now, if we are consistent in our terminology here, we could say that anyone who kills the living conjunction between earnings and tools can be considered anti-capital. But if we were consistent in just this way, we would demand triple damages from Wall Street for a trillion or more anti-capital crimes.

Instead of consistent terminology, however, what we are getting fed these days is nonsense soup. For example, in my home there is an electric soap box where people sit for hours yammering about how outraged they are at outsized cash payments going to workers at institutions who once made a contest of stashing wages and profits into silos that nobody can find.

Well, who was it let go of that money in the first place? Who should demand it back? Predatory lending is piracy. Predatory lending that inflates a mortgage bubble is piracy. To find pirates, you don’t have to go all the way to Tortuga or Mogadishu.

Today there is some question about how to value “toxic assets” that derive from predatory debt. But there’s a simple way to value the cost of such piracy. How much would it cost to give every penny back?

We can solve this demand crisis in at least two ways. First, we could demand that all the pirate trunks of “toxic assets” be loaded onto flatbed trucks and driven back to California where they belong. Overnight, California would need no more IOUs.

Or second — because to be honest about it we secretly admire pirates and sometimes find ourselves dreaming that we could join them — we can demand that all these big-bonus banking houses show us how they are putting their talents to work funding the next generation of tools that we have been needing as a nation since about this time last year.

We demand that they assist California, too.

Meanwhile, we know what the yammering soap boxers want us to believe about the demand crisis. They want us to believe anything really that will keep us from connecting the dots. In that direction there’s a demand crisis, too.

[Greg Moses is editor of the Texas Civil Rights Review. He can be reached at gmosesx@gmail.com.]

The Rag Blog

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Through the Windshield

Posted on July 17, 2009 by RagBlog

Seen at the corner of E. 12th St. and Pleasant Valley Rd., in Austin, Texas,
an unlikely art sale. Perhaps it’s the heat…
Mariann Wizard

The Rag Blog

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John Ross on the Mexican Elections : The Dinosaur is Back

Posted on July 16, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer


Jurassic fallout from the Mexican election:
The dinosaur is back, but for how long?

By John Ross / The Rag Blog / July 16, 2009

Also see ‘No more environmental pretensions: The Green PRI,’ By John Ross, Below.

MEXICO CITY — Nine years ago on a sultry July morning, Mexicans woke up and discovered to their great amazement that the Dinosaur that had hunkered down at the foot of their beds for 71 years was gone. This July 6th, when Mexicans rose in the morning, the Dinosaur was back.

In the famous short poem by Augusto Monterroso, the Dinosaur is the PRI — the Institutional Revolutionary Party — once the longest-ruling political dynasty in the known universe that controlled the destiny of Mexicans from the cradle to the grave for seven interminable decades until it was dislodged from power by the right-wing PAN party in the July 2000 presidential elections.

In its unslakable thirst for power, the PRI committed unspeakable crimes against the Mexican peoples, stealing elections from the most humble city hall to the presidential palace, jailing and torturing and executing those who stood in its way, and emptying out public treasuries in an unmatched kleptocracy that was a legend throughout Latin America, “the perfect dictatorship” Latin American novelist Mario Vargas Llosa once dubbed it (for which the PRI had him tossed out of the country.)

“Have we Mexicans lost our memories and our minds?” asks Sylvia Insulza from behind the counter of her newspaper dispensary in the old quarter of the capital. Tears of frustration crystallize in the corners of her eyes.

The depth and breadth of the PRI victory July 5th is nothing short of stunning. From a distant third place finish in the 2006 presidential fiasco in which the rightist PAN stole the election from Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) and his left-wing PRD party by .57% of the popular vote, the PRI (“proven experience and a new attitude” is its current campaign slogan) took 37% of the total ballots cast, nearly doubling its votes three years back, and taking control of congress for the first time since 1997.

The once-upon-a-time ruling party’s alliance with the so-called Mexican Green Environmental Party (see story below) will give it 259 seats out of 500 in the lower house, an absolute majority. In nine out of 31 states, the PRI won every office up for grabs — federal congressional representatives, local congresses, and municipal officials, a “carro completo” or “full car” in the Institutionals’ curious lexicon.

The Dinosaurs also proved triumphant in five out of six governors’ races, winning two statehouses in which the PAN had resided for 12 years. Only in the northern border state of Sonora where the PRI governor was seen as complicit in the tragic incineration of 48 babies in a Hermosillo day care center a month before the election, was the PAN able to squeeze out a victory in an election in which the PAN and PRI candidates were cousins.

Moreover, the PRI won cities like Naucalpan, an upper middle class Mexico City suburb the right-wingers have controlled since the 1980s, and the nation’s second city, Guadalajara, which the PAN has owned since 1995. In alliance with the Mexican Green Environmental Party, the PRI won its first elected office in Mexico City since 1994. Although the left PRD maintains control of the nation’s capital, the Party of the Aztec Sun does so by a greatly reduced margin. Whereas the PRD registered 51% of the vote in Mexico City in 2006, three years later it weighs in with just 29%.

But Sylvia’s tears of frustration may soon dry. Whether the Dinosaurs are really back or just staying overnight (in Jurassic time) is not yet clear. Mid-term elections are referendums on the sitting president and his administration’s management of the country and July 5th represented a crushing vote of no confidence in Felipe Calderon on whose watch the economy has tumbled into freefall — “growth” in 2009 will measure a negative 8%, the worst slide since the Great Depression of 1929-32.

Calderon, who campaigned as the “President of Employment” has presided over the loss of 2,000,000 jobs. The president’s ill-advised war on the drug cartels has soaked the country in blood — over 12,000 lives have been lost — and fueled corruption and human rights abuses on the part of the military and the police. Calderon’s panic-driven handling of this spring’s Swine Flu “PAN-demic” kicked the bricks out from under the tourist industry, the nation’s third source of dollars, and his arrogant imposition of candidates in the July 5th vote-taking angered and turned many in his own party against him.

Ceding the PRI a 10-point advantage (37% to 27%) in the national vote and the loss of congress to the Institutionals’ absolute majority effectively shuts down Calderon’s legislative agenda. Indeed the PANista may be the weakest president in a century — no Mexican president since the 1910-1919 revolution has ever ruled with the opposition holding an absolute majority in the lower house. Felipe Calderon will be a lame duck for the next three years — in real terms, his presidency ended July 5th.

One of the first casualties of the debacle was PAN party president German Martinez, a creature of Calderon, who tossed in the towel the morning after his party’s most devastating defeat since its founding in 1939. Similar demands for the resignation of PRD president Jesus “Chucho” Ortega, who orchestrated the left party’s worst showing since 1991, are legion.

The Party of the Aztec Sun plummeted from 38% of the national vote in 2006 when Lopez Obrador was at the top of the ticket, to just 12% three years later and its congressional delegation was decimated, retaining only 71 seats out of the 126 it held in the outgoing legislature. Cities in the misery belt girdling the capital such as Nezahualcoyotl, Chalco, and Ecatepec with a total population of 6,00,000 that have been in the PRD’s pocket for years fell to the Dinosaurs.

Despite hanging on to its hegemony in the capital, the PRD lost four out of 16 delegations or boroughs for the first time since it took power here in 1997 although the leftists still have a commanding advantage in the local legislative assembly. In the battles for the delegations, the PAN picked up three of the wealthiest enclaves in the city and the tiny Party of Labor won the megalopolis’s biggest and poorest demarcation — Iztapalapa — by ten points after Ortega and his co-conspirators persuaded the nation’s top electoral court to substitute their candidate at the last minute for one supported by Lopez Obrador.

AMLO responded by mobilizing his considerable base, including the “Adelitas,” hundreds of working women dressed in the outfits of women soldiers during the Mexican revolution, who last year fended off the privatization of the state oil monopoly PEMEX with a campaign of civil disobedience. Adelitas like Berta Robledo, a retired nurse, descended on Iztapalapa walking the precincts day after day to expose the flimflam and support Lopez Obrador’s candidate, a local soccer coach everyone knows as “Juanito.” Now, with Iztapalapa under his belt, AMLO, the once-wildly popular Mexico City mayor who still styles himself as “the legitimate president of Mexico,” has forcibly demonstrated that he is still very much a factor in Mexican electoral politics.

Despite the PRI Dinosaur’s big numbers, it was the Party of No that was the hands- down winner July 5th. Absenteeism hovered between 55 and 60% in the south and center of the country and in northern states like Chihuahua and Baja California where Calderon’s drug war rages, only 25 to 30% of the electorate went to the polls. A national movement to cast protest votes or deface ballots with no-holds-barred slurs against all the political parties, gained resonance throughout the country. The number of “votos nulos” cast doubled from 3% in 2006 to a shade under 6%, and in Mexico City, the votos nulos multiplied by 400% to 10 to 13% of the vote. This reporter observed one disgusted voter in a neighborhood polling place here in the old quarter of the capital angrily ball up his unmarked ballot and cram it through the slot in the “urna.”

Because a recount must be ordered when the number of votos nulos exceeds the margin of victory between the first and second-place finishers, ballot boxes had to be opened and counted out vote by vote in as many as 27,000 out of 140,000 polling places. Indeed, the number of votos nulos — 1.8 million (a half million cast in Mexico City and Mexico state alone) — establishes the Nulos as the fifth electoral force in the country behind the PRI, PAN, PRD, and PVEM but ahead of the PT, Democratic Convergence, New Alliance, and the Social Democrats (who, failing to win 2% of the national vote, lost their registration.)

On the Mexican political calendar, the conclusion of mid-term elections signals the kick-off for the next presidential race three years down the pike in 2012. The big pro-PRI turnout puts the Dinosaurs in the driver’s seat to recover Los Pinos, the Mexican White House, which it held hostage from 1928 through the new millennium.

At this fledgling stage, the PRI frontrunner is Mexico state governor Enrique Pena Nieto, a short, pretty boy politico with deep pockets, a trademark pompadour, and a glamorous soap opera star (Angelica Rivera AKA “The Seagull”) on his arm — Pena Nieto, who Lopez Obrador labels “a male Barbie,” is a darling of Mexico’s two-headed television monopoly, Televisa and TV Azteca.

The governor’s resounding sweep of Mexico state municipal (97 out of 125 city halls) and federal elections in the nation’s most populous and economically active state puts him double digits above his closest rival, Manlio Fabio Beltrones, the leader of the PRI’s senate delegation, and a Mafia-like political boss who is often mocked as “Don Beltrones.” The “Don” is a longtime crony of the much-reviled Carlos Salinas, the former president who fell into public disgrace after his brother was imprisoned for masterminding the gangland execution of a political rival. The return of the Dinosaurs marks a possible revival of Salinas’s fortunes. The bald-pated, big-eared former chief of state was pictured depositing his ballot in a large, front-page El Universal photo July 6th just to remind readers who exactly was back.

Also in the mix for the PRI nomination is the voluminous party president Beatriz Paredes, a Dinosauress whose wardrobe contains a different hand-made Indian huipil (a loose-fitting muumuu-like gown) for every day of the year.

To add to Felipe Calderon’s woes, the PAN has no “bueno” or fair-haired boy in the pipeline to succeed him as president — his young protégé, Juan Camilo Mourino, the recently-appointed Interior Secretary, was killed last November in a mysterious Mexico City air crash after returning from overseeing drug war operations in the north. The PAN’s affairs are managed by a council of aging elders who appear reduced to recycling bland party hacks like Senator Santiago Creel, hardly one of the premium numbers on Calderon’s cell phone dial.

Who the PRD nominee will be depends largely on how long Jesus Ortega’s chokehold on the party is allowed to continue. Bloodied by the July 5th debacle, the chief Chucho seems determined to compound his party’s misery by expelling Lopez Obrador from the PRD on the grounds that he violated the by-laws by backing the PT in Iztapalapa. AMLO remains the most popular — if polemical — politico in Mexico with powers of convocation that far exceed any other party’s front-running candidates. Having insured that the PT and Democratic Convergence retained their registration by endorsing their candidates, Lopez Obrador guaranteed himself a place on the 2012 ballot even if Ortega is successful in expelling him from the PRD.

El Peje as he is affectionately called will no doubt face-off against his successor as Mexico City mayor, Marcelo Ebrard, a strapping, well-spoken but distinctly uncharismatic politician, for the votes of Mexico’s leftists in 2012.

Despite its abysmal showing July 5th, the Mexican Left by whatever initials it shows itself is hardly down for the count. The PRI’s overwhelming win at the polls only represents 16% of 77,000,000 registered Mexican voters when absenteeism and votos nulos are factored into the July 5th results. The Dinosaurs staged a modest congressional comeback in 2003 mid-term elections only to be steamrolled by AMLO and Calderon in 2006. Failure to cope with continuing economic and social turmoil and the predictably polluted performance of PRI elites like the Salinas clan that seem to exult in political mayhem and armed thuggery, are bound to revive left fortunes in the next three years.

According to evolutionists, the dinosaurs went extinct 60,000,000 years ago either because a giant asteroid plunged into the Atlantic Ocean off the Yucatan peninsula lowering world temperatures by ten degrees, or because climate change so thinned out the oxygen count that the dinosaurs’ huge respiratory systems no longer functioned. As climate change once again threatens Planet Earth, the comeback of the PRI dinosaurs will, no doubt, be short-lived.

Photo from AFP.

No more environmental pretensions:
The Green PRI

By John Ross / The Rag Blog / July 16, 2009

The Mexican Green Ecologist Party or PVEM, which will partner with the PRI to form an absolute majority in the lower house of congress (259 out of 500 seats), is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Gonzalez Torres family. Founded by father Jose Gonzalez Torres, a wealthy construction tycoon, with ample investment from brother Victor, the king of the largest chain of generic pharmacies in Mexico, the party is presided over by Jose’s young scion, Jose Emilio Gonzalez, dubbed “El Nino Verde” or “The Green Child.”

Although the PVEM touts its roots in Mexico’s growing environmental movement — the elder Gonzalez Torres was a player in the failed fight to shut down Laguna Verde in Veracruz, Mexico’s only nuclear power plant, and active in protests against Mexico City’s killer smog in the late 1980s — the Gonzalez Torres clan soon discovered that juicy government subsidies to Mexican political parties could pump up family fortunes.

First aligned with the leftist PRD and subsequently with the right-wing PAN, Gonzalez Torres had his sights set on becoming environmental secretary after the election of PANista Vicente Fox in 2000 but when he was passed over for the post, he delivered the PVEM to the PRI with which he has lined up ever since.

Having abandoned its environmental pretensions, the only green the Mexican Green Environmental party has pursued in recent years is the long green of filthy lucre. In 2004, the Nino Verde was secretly filmed soliciting a seven-figure bribe from developers keen on trashing the coastline of Caribbean Cancun. Scant days before the July 5th shakedown, a PVEM senator was nabbed at a Chiapas airport with a million pesos bundled up in his carry-on baggage.

The centerpiece of the Green Party’s July 5th campaign was the restitution of the Death Penalty, which earned it the condemnation of European-based environmental parties and the PVEM has been excommunicated from the Global Greens Network. During the run-up to the recent elections, political cartoonists substituted a vulture for the party’s colorful emblem, a toucan.

As the PRI’s partner in crime in the new legislature, reintroducing the death penalty will be the big enchilada on the PVEM’s plate. The “Greens” are also expected to lobby for rescinding electoral reforms that deprived Televisa and TV Azteca of millions in political advertising revenues in the prologue to the July 5th mid-terms — the reforms were introduced after the broadcasting giants abused the use of television and radio spots in the 2006 presidential election. To this end, Ninfa Salinas Pliego, daughter of the owner of TV Azteca, has been named to head the PVEM bench in the incoming congress.

[John Ross is an American author, poet, freelance journalist, and activist who lives in Mexico City. John Ross will present Iraqigirl, the diary of a teenager growing up under U.S. occupation in northern Iraq, at 7 p.m on July 30th at Modern Times Bookstore, 888 Valencia Street in San Francisco’s Mission District. Ross developed and edited the Haymarket Books volume.]

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Freedom of Choice : No Nanny State

Posted on July 16, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

The Marlboro Man: The picture of Lance Cpl. James Blake Miller, now an Iraq War vet, raised a stink among anti-smoking activists when it appeared in scores of newspapers in 2004. Photo by Luis Sinco.

It does not matter whether it’s the right trying to force religion on me or the left trying to force ‘healthiness’ on me — it is tyranny either way, and I categorically reject it.

By Ted McLaughlin / The Rag Blog / July 16, 2009

Anyone who has read very many of my posts knows that I hate conservatives who want to force everyone into accepting their own particular religious and political beliefs. But some may be surprised to learn that I hate the “nanny state” liberals equally as much.

To me, freedom means having the ability to make my own choices, and allowing everyone else to do the same. As long as my choices don’t hurt someone else, then no one should be able to force me to do something different. It does not matter whether those choices are “good” for me or not.

There are liberals who want to tell us what we can’t eat such as a ban on certain cooking oils or fatty foods. They want to tell me what I can’t drink such as carbonated soft drinks. And of course, they want to keep me from using tobacco products. These people don’t care that I’m an adult, perfectly capable of making my own choices. They have already decided what is best for me and will happily codify it with a law.

This is not freedom. It does not matter whether it’s the right trying to force religion on me or the left trying to force “healthiness” on me — it is tyranny either way, and I categorically reject it. Whatever happened to letting each citizen make his or her own choices?

In a free country, you have the right to try and convince me of anything you want — until I ask you to stop. Write articles, send mail, buy advertisements and try any other non-invasive measures to change my mind if you want. But you have stepped over the line when you try to force my compliance with a law or a ban, because then you are taking my freedom of choice away. And I will not willingly give up ANY freedom!

The latest freedom-grabbing measure is aimed at the very soldiers who are fighting for our country in a war zone. A “study” commissioned by the Pentagon and the Department of Veterans Affairs has decided that their own views of tobacco use should be forced on our military troops — the same troops who are supposedly fighting for our “freedom”.

They want to ban tobacco use on all military bases, and ban the sale of all tobacco products on military bases. They even want to extend this ban to military troops stationed in a war zone. Fortunately Secretary Gates has refused to do this. He cites as his excuse the high stress levels in a war zone. He should just say that soldiers who fight for freedom should have the freedom to make their own choices.

Frankly, this is a stupid thing for a country to do — especially when that country is having trouble filling its military enlistment quotas. They are telling all tobacco users that they don’t respect their freedom to choose, and really don’t want them to join the military.

I am left to wonder exactly what this “freedom” is that is so celebrated and that so many have given their lives to establish. Is it just the freedom to follow the orders of those in power? That’s not freedom — that’s tyranny wrapped in an American flag. And tyranny wrapped in an American flag is no better than any other tyranny.

How about you? Do you want the freedom to make your own choices, or are you happy to left those in power make your choices for you?

[Rag Blog contributor Ted McLaughlin also posts at jobsanger, an excellent Texas political blog.]

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Dick Cheney Isn’t the Only One Who Planned Assassinations

Posted on July 16, 2009 by RagBlog

When a person repeats precisely the same behaviour over and over again, but expects the result to be different, that is Einstein’s definition of insanity.

Americans have been doing the same thing over and over again for 200 years, somehow expecting things to turn out differently. Until we get it through our thick skulls that voting for the establishment will result in the same establishment garbage over and over and over, we will not change America.

Richard Jehn / The Rag Blog


The Democrats’ Selective Amnesia on Assassination: Clinton Did It and Obama Does It Too
By Jeremy Scahill / July 15, 2009

While the focus is on Dick Cheney’s role, the U.S. has long had a bi-partisan assassination program.

Members of Congress have expressed outrage over the “secret” CIA assassination program that former vice president Dick Cheney allegedly ordered concealed from Congress. But this program—and the media descriptions of it—sounds a lot like the assassination policy implemented by President Bill Clinton, particularly during his second term in office.

Partisan politics often require selective amnesia. Over the past decade, we have seen this amnesia take hold when it comes to many of President Bush’s most vile policies. And we are now seeing a pretty severe case overtake several leading Democrats. It makes for good speechifying to act as though all criminality began with Bush and—particularly these days—Cheney, but that is extreme intellectual dishonesty. The fact is that many of Bush’s worst policies (now being highlighted by leading Democrats) were based in some form or another in a Clinton-initiated policy or were supported by the Democrats in Congress with their votes. To name a few: the USA PATRIOT Act, the invasion of Iraq, the attack against Afghanistan, the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program, the widespread use of mercenaries and other private contractors in US war zones and warrant-less wire-tapping.

Regarding the Bush-era assassination program, there is great reason to be skeptical that the program CIA Director Leon Panetta alleges was concealed from Congress is actually the program the public is currently being led to believe it is. Why would the CIA need to conceal a program that never was implemented and, if it never was implemented, why did Panetta need to shut it down? Moreover, who was running this inactive program from the minute Obama was sworn in until June 24 when Panetta supposedly announced its cancellation? This program—as it is currently being described— should hardly be a major scandal to members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, as some are now treating it. As they well know, President Obama has continued the Bush targeted assassination program using weaponized drones and special forces teams hunting “high value targets.” As former CIA Counter-terrorism chief Vincent Cannistraro and others have pointed out, “The CIA runs drones and targets al Qaeda safe houses all the time.” Cannistraro told Talking Points Memo that there is no important difference between those kinds of attacks and “assassinations” with a gun or a knife.

Now, if it turns out that the actual plan Cheney allegedly concealed is something other than what has been publicly described, that will be a different matter. For instance, if the CIA had a secret post-9/11 program planning assassinations on US soil or of US citizens and it was ordered concealed by Cheney. Or, if it was a plan to target in other ways “enemies of the state” within the U.S. as Seymour Hersh has suggested: “The Central Intelligence Agency was very deeply involved in domestic activities against people they thought to be enemies of the state,” Hersh said in March. “Without any legal authority for it. They haven’t been called on it yet. That does happen.”

Let’s look at the program the Democrats claim was kept secret. The Bush administration reportedly authorized the CIA to use small paramilitary teams to hunt down and assassinate “al Qaeda” leaders around the world. It is currently being reported that this plan was never implemented and was born after 9/11. Both of these assertions are very, very doubtful.

The plan, as currently described in the press and by Democrats, is one that continues to exist under the Obama administration right now. In fact, this program has been part of official U.S. policy—under Democratic and Republican administrations—for decades.

By way of background, there is technically a U.S. ban on assassination that dates back to President Ford in 1976. “No employee of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination,” states Executive Order 11905. That was then updated by President Carter who dropped the term “political” simply prohibiting “assassination.” The current Executive Order, 12333, was signed by president Reagan in 1981 and has remained on the books through every administration since. What is brutally ironic about Reagan signing this ban was that he authorized repeated assassinations, notably the 1986 attempt on Col. Moammar Gadhafi, which failed to kill Gadhafi but instead killed his infant daughter. But in that brutal apparent contradiction is the truth: the U.S. does not have a ban on assassinations as long as government lawyers can figure out some legal acrobats for the president to use in sidelining the ban. Every president from Reagan to Obama has reserved the right to assassinate kill “terrorists” by claiming it as a military operation or a preemptive strike.

It is pretty clear that when the Bush administration took over, it picked up the Clinton administration’s policy on assassination and ran with it—albeit with more of a missionary zeal for killing and a removal of some of the layers of lawyering. In short, the Bush team expanded and streamlined the longstanding U.S. government assassination program.

Throughout the 1990s, the question of covert assassinations was a source of major discussion within the Clinton White House and it is clear assassinations were attempted with presidential approval. Newsweek magazine reported on how, in 1995, U.S. Special Forces facilitated the assassination of a Libyan “terrorist” in Bosnia, saying, “American authorities justified the assassination under a little-known 1993 ‘lethal finding’ signed by President Bill Clinton that gave permission to target terrorists.” A former senior Clinton official speaking shortly after 9/11 called on the Bush administration not to escalate the U.S. assassination program, saying “We have a war on drugs, too, but we don’t kill drug lords.” But then, with no apparent sense of contradiction, the official added, “we have proxies who do.”

Clinton-era officials’ attempt to hide behind “proxies” is a stunning trampling of the assassination ban as it currently exists. Not only does it ban U.S. government personnel from engaging in or conspiring to engage in “assassination,” it also bans “Indirect Participation,” stating: “No agency of the Intelligence Community shall participate in or request any person to undertake activities forbidden by this Order.”

The truth is, under Clinton, it wasn’t just proxies authorized to do the assassinations.

The Clinton White House worked for years with the CIA to craft an assassination policy—specifically relating to “al Qaeda” in general and Osama bin-Laden and his top deputies specifically. CIA operatives like Billy Waugh complained in the early and middle years of the Clinton presidencies that they were lawyered to death by Clinton’s attorneys in their attempts to get the green light to kill bin Laden in Sudan. “[I]n the early 1990s we were forced to adhere to the sanctimonious legal counsel and the do-gooders,” recalled Waugh. Among Waugh’s rejected ideas was an alleged plot to kill bin Laden in Khartoum, Sudan and dump his body at the Iranian Eembassy in an effort to pin the blame on Tehran. Eventually, however, Clinton did authorize what amounted to assassination squads to hunt down and kill bin Laden and other “al Qaeda leaders.” That happened officially in 1998 with Clinton’s signing of a Memorandum of Notification authorizing the CIA to carry out covert assassinations. George W Bush was not the president and Dick Cheney was not the vice president. Of course, current CIA Director Leon Panetta was Clinton’s chief of staff from 1994 to 1997 and would have been party to years worth of discussion on this issue when Clinton was president.

Under Clinton, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel issued secret rulings stating that the Ford/Reagan ban on assassinations did not apply to “military targets or “to attacks carried out in preemptive self-defense,” according to Steve Coll, Pulitzer-Prize winning author of Ghost Wars.

Shortly after 9/11, Clinton stated this position publicly, supporting the Bush administration’s “war on terror” targeted assassination policy, saying on NBC News, “The ban that was put in effect under President Ford only applies to heads of state. It doesn’t apply to terrorists.” That is a stunning statement that is a true legal stretch given the explicit language of the ban. Moreover, Clinton did, in fact, try to kill a head of state on April 22, 1999, when he ordered a NATO airstrike on the home of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. Clinton and Gen. Wesley Clark also authorized an assassination attempt on Serbian Information Minister, Aleksander Vucic, bombing Radio Television Serbia when Vucic was scheduled to appear via satellite on CNN’s “Larry King Live.” Vucic was not killed, but 16 media workers were.

Clinton also publicly acknowledged his own administration’s attempt to assassinate bin Laden. “I worked hard to try to kill him,” Clinton said. “I authorized a finding for the CIA to kill him. We contracted with people to kill him. I got closer to killing him than anybody has gotten since.” Clinton’s National Security Advisor Sandy Berger said after Clinton issued his 1998 “lethal finding,” U.S. operatives worked with Afghan rebels for two years in an attempt to kill Bin Laden. “There were a few points when the pulse quickened, when we thought we were close,” Berger later recalled. Among the alleged attempts on bin Laden’s life taken by Clinton was the 1998 bombing of Afghanistan (which was coupled with a massive strike on the Al Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Sudan).

As Coll observed of the Clinton policy: “Clinton had demonstrated his willingness to kill bin Laden, without any pretense of seeking his arrest.”

After 9/11, the CIA, which had been frustrated by some of the hurdles to assassination posed by the Clinton administration’s legal team, now had the conditions and the commander-in-chief it needed to take its assassination program to the next level. The main operations were run out of the CIA’s Counter-Terrorism Center (CTC) headed by J. Cofer Black, who had served as Clinton’s CIA station chief in Sudan when bin Laden was there in the 1990s. After 9/11, Black’s division at the CIA was authorized by President Bush —with the consent of Congress—to hunt down bin Laden and others alleged to be responsible for 9/11. As I describe in my book, Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army:

Before the core CIA team, Jawbreaker, deployed [to Afghanistan] on September 27, 2001, Black gave his men direct and macabre directions. “Gentlemen, I want to give you your marching orders, and I want to make them very clear. I have discussed this with the President, and he is in full agreement,” Black told covert CIA operative Gary Schroen. “I don’t want bin Laden and his thugs captured, I want them dead… . They must be killed. I want to see photos of their heads on pikes. I want bin Laden’s head shipped back in a box filled with dry ice. I want to be able to show bin Laden’s head to the President. I promised him I would do that.” Schroen said it was the first time in his thirty-year career he had been ordered to assassinate an adversary rather than attempting a capture. Black asked if he had made himself clear. “Perfectly clear, Cofer,” Schroen told him. “I don’t know where we’ll find dry ice out there in Afghanistan, but I think we can certainly manufacture pikes in the field.” Black later explained why this would be necessary. “You’d need some DNA,” Black said. “There’s a good way to do it. Take a machete, and whack off his head, and you’ll get a bucketful of DNA, so you can see it and test it. It beats lugging the whole body back!”

The actions of the teams run by Cofer Black were certainly known to Congress. In fact, Black himself testified in front of Congress in 2002 about what he called the new “operational flexibility” being employed in the “war on terror.” “This is a very highly classified area, but I have to say that all you need to know: There was a before 9/11, and there was an after 9/11,” Black said. “After 9/11 the gloves come off.” By 2004, Black claimed that “over 70 percent” of Al Qaeda’s leadership had been arrested, detained, or killed, and “more than 3,400 of their operatives and supporters have also been detained and put out of an action.” The existence of this program is not secret. It has been documented in books by former CIA operatives, is discussed in public speeches by former officials and is a reflected extensively in the Congressional record.

Obviously, the House and Senate Intelligence Committees should investigate the assassination policy under the Bush administration. Cheney’s role is central to that. Prosecutors should also be authorized to do the same. If there is a nefarious program that the public is unaware of and was unlawfully concealed, it should be brought out into the light. But, the truth is that a real investigation—one that actually seeks to get to the broader truths of these matters— would require investigating the current assassination program under Obama and the roots of the program that preceded the day when George W Bush took power. That means looking at the Clinton White House and further back. It means looking at both Democratic and Republican assassination teams. The sad fact is that nobody on Capitol Hill has demonstrated in any way that they have the political courage to do that.

Source / Rebel Reports

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Tom Hayden Comic : The Long War

Posted on July 15, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

The Long War
Text by Tom Hayden.
Illustrated by Sam Marlow and Ellis Rosen. Edited by Paul Buhle.

Published by The Rag Blog.

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[Tom Hayden, a prime mover in the Sixties New Left, was a California State Senator. A respected activist and author, he was a founder of Progressives for Obama and is the author of Ending the War in Iraq (2007), The Voices of the Chicago Eight (2008), and Writings for a Democratic Society, the Tom Hayden Reader (2008).]

[Sam Marlow and Ellis Rosen are graduates of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Together they self-published two comics. Marlowe also worked as a digital colorist for Chicago comic artist, Paul Hornshemeier, on titles such as “The Three Paradoxes”, and Marvel Comics’ “Omega the Unknown.” He recently completed a short science fiction comic about the end of the world. He is currently volunteering at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art. Rosen lives in NewYork where he also works part time at the Barry Friedman Gallery.]

[Paul Buhle is an educator and a historian. He published the New Left journal Radical America during the 1960s and has written or edited many books on radicalism and culture. He now organizes leftwing comic books.]

Go here for earlier Tom Hayden comics published by The Rag Blog.

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Robert Jensen : Getting Radicalized, Slow and Painful

Posted on July 15, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

Portrait of Robert Jensen by Robert Shetterly.

Becoming a radical:
The grief and the joy

Becoming radicalized politically allowed me to see that I was suffering because I didn’t want to fit into a world shaped by unjust systems; the problem wasn’t my values and desires but the pathology of those systems.

By Robert Jensen / The Rag Blog / July 15, 2009

[Rob Shetterly, the artist who created the Americans Who Tell the Truth website, asked some of the people he painted to respond to this query: “Everywhere I go, kids and adults want to know how you got started. What was the defining moment that triggered your dedication to fighting for justice or peace, or the environment?” Below are my thoughts.]

My transition to political radicalism — going to the root of problems, recognizing that dramatic and fundamental change in the way society is organized is necessary if there is to be a decent human future — involved a lot of pain, in two different ways.

The first concerned the process of coming to know about the pain of the world. I had never been a naïve person who thought the world was a happy place, but like many people who have privilege (in my case, being white, male, a U.S. citizen, and economically secure, though never wealthy) I was able to remain ignorant of the depth of the routine suffering in the world.

I was able to ignore how white supremacy, patriarchy, U.S. imperialism, and a predatory capitalist economic system routinely destroy the bodies and spirits of millions of people around the world. When I made a conscious choice to stop ignoring those realities — in my case, when I returned to a university for graduate education with the time to read and study — the process of coming to know about that pain was wrenching. But I found myself wanting to know more.

Why would someone with privilege press to know more about the pain of the world when that knowledge creates tension and emotional turmoil? In my case, coming to understand that the world’s pain is the product of profoundly unjust social systems helped me understand a different kind of personal pain I had been struggling with.

Most of my life I had felt like a bit of a freak, like someone out of step with the culture around him. There’s nothing dramatically wrong with me physically or psychologically, but I always struggled to fit in. I had always had a lingering sense that I didn’t want what others around me seemed to want.

Because of my privilege, the world offered me a lot, and I am grateful for much of what I have — work I have usually enjoyed, an adequate income, relative safety. But I could never figure out how to be normal — how to kick back with the guys; how to get excited about sports, television, or the latest hit music; how to care about what kind of car I drove. In many ways I had it made, on the surface, but that sense of being out of step always dragged me down.

The best way to deal with our individual struggles is to put them in a larger context. That means both understanding the forces that shape our world as well as placing our problems in perspective. Becoming radicalized politically allowed me to see that I was suffering because I didn’t want to fit into a world shaped by unjust systems; the problem wasn’t my values and desires but the pathology of those systems.

That didn’t solve all my personal problems, but it sure helped. Radical politics also helped me understand more clearly how others were suffering much more than I; it shook me out of my self-absorption. Both realizations led me to want to continue the search for more knowledge and understanding about how this all worked, and to commit as much time and energy as I had to movements for social justice.

The paradox is that since I have immersed myself in the pain of the world, I have been able to find new joy. I still understand that the world is not a happy place, and to be truly alive we must face what my friend Jim Koplin calls the “sense of profound grief” that comes with looking honestly at the world. As the writer Wendell Berry has put it, we live on “the human estate of grief and joy” [The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, 3rd ed. (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1996), p. 106].

Grief is inevitable, and it is only through an honest embrace of the grief that real joy is possible. The conventional world tries to sell us many pleasures, but it offers us little joy. That’s because the conventional world is also trying to sell us many ways to numb our pain, which keeps us from that grief. So long as we are out of touch with the grief, we are unable to feel the joy. We are left only with the desperate search for pleasure and a panicked scramble to avoid pain.

This process has, for me, been slow and gradual — there have been no epiphanies. I don’t believe in epiphanies, and I don’t trust people who claim to have epiphanies. I don’t think the deep understanding of the world that we strive for can come in a single moment. It comes from the long and painful struggle, with the world and with ourselves. Insight doesn’t magically descend upon us. We have to work for it, and that always takes time.

As the singer/songwriter Eliza Gilkyson (who also happens to be my partner) has put it, “Those are lost who/try to cross through/the sorrow fields too easily” [“He Waits for Me,” from the CD “Beautiful World,” Red House Records, 2008]. To expand on her metaphor, we cross those fields not in search of a utopia somewhere ahead. Our life is that journey across those fields, facing the grief and celebrating the joy along the way.

[Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center. His latest book is All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice (Soft Skull Press, 2009). Jensen can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu. His posts to The Rag Blog are here, and his articles can also be found here.

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A Stimulus Plan With Jubilee Vouchers. Hallelujah!

Posted on July 15, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer


Keeping the bear at bay:
Jubilee Vouchers and a complete stimulus plan

If we don’t get a serious world-historical plan in place before the real Bear Market hits we’ll soon be thinking of ‘mere unemployment’ as the good old days.

By Greg Moses / The Rag Blog / July 15, 2009

In a world where one class manufactures credit and the other class clings to hope, how bad can a debt economy be? Of course, we could have that long-awaited revolution where the hopeful class clobbers the lending class and puts an end to the disparities that make borrowing necessary. But what would happen the week after that?

On the other hand we could recover the wisdom of the legendary Jubilee by placing the lending class on notice that every seven years we’re going to have a write-down party, beginning with the summer of 2009.

I offer this as a “mustard seed” (with kudos to Larry Kudlow for the Gospel term that he applies to the salvation of capitalism). Jubilee Vouchers could be sown into “green shoots” and harvested as part of the next stimulus plan. If such debt-relief were offered directly to all the people, all at once, you would surely short the future of any politician who tried to get in the way.

The only moral problem with this idea is how to respect and reward all the good people who didn’t get caught up in debt mania. We should acknowledge their moral superiority and sacrifice.

Therefore, the Federal Reserve Bank shall distribute to each taxpayer a book of Jubilee Vouchers totaling $10,000 which shall be accepted by any creditor in return for debt relief. Any unused Jubilee Vouchers held by people of moral superiority and good sense may be presented to the IRS for tax credits that will be good for as many years as the balance may last.

We’ll let the big brains at the Federal Reserve Bank work out the technicalities of what happens next. Maybe they can open up a $2.25 trillion jubilee line of credit to be paid down with interest from the lenders they support. They could call it The People’s Bank.

Or the Fed could refuse to redeem Jubilee Vouchers from lenders who have proven to be predatory, forcing them into immediate bankruptcy. Where the Fed is concerned the world has full faith that when it comes to credit, if there’s a will, there’s a way. (Cap and trade on the national debt anyone?)

Perhaps there is a moral concept of modern economics that will be transgressed by the revival of Jubilee wisdom, but since we’re borrowing our financial language from the Gospel, why not invite those without financial sin to cast the first stones?

For example, there are people who get paid by huge broadcasting conglomerates who sometimes puff themselves up as saints — as if the whole credit scheme never leaks into the advertising budgets that fund their creditable livelihoods. We could invite them to stone us, but they’d stone us anyway.

The point is that credit mania became a thoroughgoing social mood that ate and fed all of us with the same collective spoon. Nobody stopped it why? Because we were all hooked into the accelerated experience of the leveraged life.

Since we haven’t got the appetite to prosecute debt pushers or their officious collaborators, and since it is probably true what Greenspan says — that we will never outlaw greed — at least we might offer some meaningful ritual comforts to all the addicts who get left with nothing but the spasm of withdrawal.

In addition to Jubilee Vouchers, two other fronts need funding — which we can visualize via that odd couple at CNBC, Cramer and Kudlow.

Jim Cramer says we need a real New Deal jobs program. Kudlow says we need business tax cuts. Publisher Mortimer Zuckerman has joined issue with Cramer in calling for a real job-stimulus program. And any number of old supply-siders are lining up along the Kudlow-Laffer axis to fight for Capital first.

But enough of the bickering already. Do we need labor or capital? Cramer or Kudlow? Why not both?

At any rate let’s not do as a nation what the readers of the Wall Street Journal did in their online responses to Zuckerman’s sober proposal. Zuckerman stayed focused on the needs of the people and how the government might do its duty. The readers of the Wall Street Journal diverted precious pixels into a childish blame game of whose fault?

Fact is, there are very few of us behaving like part of the solution these days, and Congress could probably get all this done in early August if we make it a condition of their summer break. Get Zuckerman to print the bill, roll it down the aisle in a wheelbarrow, and nothing of the usual diligence or transparency of American democracy would be sacrificed

But if we don’t get a serious world-historical plan in place before the real Bear Market hits we’ll soon be thinking of “mere unemployment” as the good old days.

[Greg Moses is a frequent contributor to these pages. He can be reached at gmosesx@gmail.com.]

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