The Rag Blog

More to This Spying Business Than Meets the Eye

Posted on June 22, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

NSA’s Domestic Spying Grows
As Agency Sweeps Up Data
By Siobhan Gorman

Mike Hanks called our attention to the following article from the March 10, 2008, Wall Street Journal. Read it! All our attention may be focused on the Congressional vote on FISA and the shameful cave job by the Democrats on that issue, but there’s a lot more going on with the NSA and it’s ever-growing assault on our privacy and our civil liberties.

Thorne Dreyer / The Rag Blog / June 21, 2008

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Five years ago, Congress killed an experimental Pentagon antiterrorism program meant to vacuum up electronic data about people in the U.S. to search for suspicious patterns. Opponents called it too broad an intrusion on Americans’ privacy, even after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

But the data-sifting effort didn’t disappear. The National Security Agency, once confined to foreign surveillance, has been building essentially the same system.

The central role the NSA has come to occupy in domestic intelligence gathering has never been publicly disclosed. But an inquiry reveals that its efforts have evolved to reach more broadly into data about people’s communications, travel and finances in the U.S. than the domestic surveillance programs brought to light since the 2001 terrorist attacks.

Congress now is hotly debating domestic spying powers under the main law governing U.S. surveillance aimed at foreign threats. An expansion of those powers expired last month and awaits renewal, which could be voted on in the House of Representatives this week. The biggest point of contention over the law, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, is whether telecommunications and other companies should be made immune from liability for assisting government surveillance.

Largely missing from the public discussion is the role of the highly secretive NSA in analyzing that data, collected through little-known arrangements that can blur the lines between domestic and foreign intelligence gathering. Supporters say the NSA is serving as a key bulwark against foreign terrorists and that it would be reckless to constrain the agency’s mission. The NSA says it is scrupulously following all applicable laws and that it keeps Congress fully informed of its activities.

According to current and former intelligence officials, the spy agency now monitors huge volumes of records of domestic emails and Internet searches as well as bank transfers, credit-card transactions, travel and telephone records. The NSA receives this so-called “transactional” data from other agencies or private companies, and its sophisticated software programs analyze the various transactions for suspicious patterns. Then they spit out leads to be explored by counterterrorism programs across the U.S. government, such as the NSA’s own Terrorist Surveillance Program, formed to intercept phone calls and emails between the U.S. and overseas without a judge’s approval when a link to al Qaeda is suspected.

The NSA’s enterprise involves a cluster of powerful intelligence-gathering programs, all of which sparked civil-liberties complaints when they came to light. They include a Federal Bureau of Investigation program to track telecommunications data once known as Carnivore, now called the Digital Collection System, and a U.S. arrangement with the world’s main international banking clearinghouse to track money movements.

The effort also ties into data from an ad-hoc collection of so-called “black programs” whose existence is undisclosed, the current and former officials say. Many of the programs in various agencies began years before the 9/11 attacks but have since been given greater reach. Among them, current and former intelligence officials say, is a longstanding Treasury Department program to collect individual financial data including wire transfers and credit-card transactions.

It isn’t clear how many of the different kinds of data are combined and analyzed together in one database by the NSA. An intelligence official said the agency’s work links to about a dozen antiterror programs in all.

A number of NSA employees have expressed concerns that the agency may be overstepping its authority by veering into domestic surveillance. And the constitutional question of whether the government can examine such a large array of information without violating an individual’s reasonable expectation of privacy “has never really been resolved,” said Suzanne Spaulding, a national-security lawyer who has worked for both parties on Capitol Hill.

NSA officials say the agency’s own investigations remain focused only on foreign threats, but it’s increasingly difficult to distinguish between domestic and international communications in a digital era, so they need to sweep up more information.

The Fourth Amendment

In response to the Sept. 11 attacks, then NSA-chief Gen. Michael Hayden has said he used his authority to expand the NSA’s capabilities under a 1981 executive order governing the agency. Another presidential order issued shortly after the attacks, the text of which is classified, opened the door for the NSA to incorporate more domestic data in its searches, one senior intelligence official said.

The NSA “strictly follows laws and regulations designed to preserve every American’s privacy rights under the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution,” agency spokeswoman Judith Emmel said in a statement, referring to the protection against unreasonable searches and seizures. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees the NSA in conjunction with the Pentagon, added in a statement that intelligence agencies operate “within an extensive legal and policy framework” and inform Congress of their activities “as required by the law.” It pointed out that the 9/11 Commission recommended in 2004 that intelligence agencies analyze “all relevant sources of information” and share their databases.

Two former officials familiar with the data-sifting efforts said they work by starting with some sort of lead, like a phone number or Internet address. In partnership with the FBI, the systems then can track all domestic and foreign transactions of people associated with that item — and then the people who associated with them, and so on, casting a gradually wider net. An intelligence official described more of a rapid-response effect: If a person suspected of terrorist connections is believed to be in a U.S. city — for instance, Detroit, a community with a high concentration of Muslim Americans — the government’s spy systems may be directed to collect and analyze all electronic communications into and out of the city.

The haul can include records of phone calls, email headers and destinations, data on financial transactions and records of Internet browsing. The system also would collect information about other people, including those in the U.S., who communicated with people in Detroit.

The information doesn’t generally include the contents of conversations or emails. But it can give such transactional information as a cellphone’s location, whom a person is calling, and what Web sites he or she is visiting. For an email, the data haul can include the identities of the sender and recipient and the subject line, but not the content of the message.

Intelligence agencies have used administrative subpoenas issued by the FBI — which don’t need a judge’s signature — to collect and analyze such data, current and former intelligence officials said. If that data provided “reasonable suspicion” that a person, whether foreign or from the U.S., was linked to al Qaeda, intelligence officers could eavesdrop under the NSA’s Terrorist Surveillance Program.

The White House wants to give companies that assist government surveillance immunity from lawsuits alleging an invasion of privacy, but Democrats in Congress have been blocking it. The Terrorist Surveillance Program has spurred 38 lawsuits against companies. Current and former intelligence officials say telecom companies’ concern comes chiefly because they are giving the government unlimited access to a copy of the flow of communications, through a network of switches at U.S. telecommunications hubs that duplicate all the data running through it. It isn’t clear whether the government or telecom companies control the switches, but companies process some of the data for the NSA, the current and former officials say.

On Friday, the House Energy and Commerce Committee released a letter warning colleagues to look more deeply into how telecommunications data are being accessed, citing an allegation by the head of a New York-based computer security firm that a wireless carrier that hired him was giving unfettered access to data to an entity called “Quantico Circuit.” Quantico is a Marine base that houses the FBI Academy; senior FBI official Anthony DiClemente said the bureau “does not have ‘unfettered access’ to any communication provider’s network.”

The political debate over the telecom information comes as intelligence agencies seek to change traditional definitions of how to balance privacy rights against investigative needs. Donald Kerr, the deputy director of national intelligence, told a conference of intelligence officials in October that the government needs new rules. Since many people routinely post details of their lives on social-networking sites such as MySpace, he said, their identity shouldn’t need the same protection as in the past. Instead, only their “essential privacy,” or “what they would wish to protect about their lives and affairs,” should be veiled, he said, without providing examples.

Social-Network Analysis

The NSA uses its own high-powered version of social-network analysis to search for possible new patterns and links to terrorism. The Pentagon’s experimental Total Information Awareness program, later renamed Terrorism Information Awareness, was an early research effort on the same concept, designed to bring together and analyze as much and as many varied kinds of data as possible. Congress eliminated funding for the program in 2003 before it began operating. But it permitted some of the research to continue and TIA technology to be used for foreign surveillance.

Some of it was shifted to the NSA — which also is funded by the Pentagon — and put in the so-called black budget, where it would receive less scrutiny and bolster other data-sifting efforts, current and former intelligence officials said. “When it got taken apart, it didn’t get thrown away,” says a former top government official familiar with the TIA program.

Two current officials also said the NSA’s current combination of programs now largely mirrors the former TIA project. But the NSA offers less privacy protection. TIA developers researched ways to limit the use of the system for broad searches of individuals’ data, such as requiring intelligence officers to get leads from other sources first. The NSA effort lacks those controls, as well as controls that it developed in the 1990s for an earlier data-sweeping attempt.

Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat and member of the Senate Intelligence Committee who led the charge to kill TIA, says “the administration is trying to bring as much of the philosophy of operation Total Information Awareness as it can into the programs they’re using today.” The issue has been overshadowed by the fight over telecoms’ immunity, he said. “There’s not been as much discussion in the Congress as there ought to be.”

Opportunity for Debate

But Sen. Kit Bond of Missouri, the ranking Republican on the committee, said by email his committee colleagues have had “ample opportunity for debate” behind closed doors and that each intelligence program has specific legal authorization and oversight. He cautioned against seeing a group of intelligence programs as “a mythical ‘big brother’ program,” adding, “that’s not what is happening today.”

READ THE RULING

While the Fourth Amendment guarantees “[t]he right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures,” the legality of data-sweeping relies on the government’s interpretation of a 1979 Supreme Court ruling allowing records of phone calls — but not actual conversations — to be collected without a warrant. Read the ruling.

The legality of data-sweeping relies largely on the government’s interpretation of a 1979 Supreme Court ruling allowing records of phone calls — but not actual conversations — to be collected without a judge issuing a warrant. Multiple laws require a court order for so-called “transactional'” records of electronic communications, but the 2001 Patriot Act lowered the standard for such an order in some cases, and in others made records accessible using FBI administrative subpoenas called “national security letters.”

A debate is brewing among legal and technology scholars over whether there should be privacy protections when a wide variety of transactional data are brought together to paint what is essentially a profile of an individual’s behavior. “You know everything I’m doing, you know what happened, and you haven’t listened to any of the contents” of the communications, said Susan Landau, co-author of a book on electronic privacy and a senior engineer at Sun Microsystems Laboratories. “Transactional information is remarkably revelatory.”

Ms. Spaulding, the national-security lawyer, said it’s “extremely questionable” to assume Americans don’t have a reasonable expectation of privacy for data such as the subject-header of an email or a Web address from an Internet search, because those are more like the content of a communication than a phone number. “These are questions that require discussion and debate,” she said. “This is one of the problems with doing it all in secret.”

Gen. Hayden, the former NSA chief and now Central Intelligence Agency director, in January 2006 publicly defended the activities of the Terrorist Surveillance Program after it was disclosed by the New York Times. He said it was “not a driftnet over Lackawanna or Fremont or Dearborn, grabbing all communications and then sifting them out.” Rather, he said, it was carefully targeted at terrorists. However, some intelligence officials now say the broader NSA effort amounts to a driftnet. A portion of the activity, the NSA’s access to domestic phone records, was disclosed by a USA Today article in 2006.

The NSA, which President Truman created in 1952 through a classified presidential order to be America’s ears abroad, has for decades been the country’s largest and most secretive intelligence agency. The order confined NSA spying to “foreign governments,” and during the Cold War the NSA developed a reputation as the world’s premier code-breaking operation. But in the 1970s, the NSA and other intelligence agencies were found to be using their spy tools to monitor Americans for political purposes. That led to the original FISA legislation in 1978, which included an explicit ban on the NSA eavesdropping in the U.S. without a warrant.

Big advances in telecommunications and database technology led to unprecedented data-collection efforts in the 1990s. One was the FBI’s Carnivore program, which raised fears when it was in disclosed in 2000 that it might collect telecommunications information about law-abiding individuals. But the ground shifted after 9/11. Requests for analysis of any data that might hint at terrorist activity flooded from the White House and other agencies into NSA’s Fort Meade, Md., headquarters outside Washington, D.C., one former NSA official recalls. At the time, “We’re scrambling, trying to find any piece of data we can to find the answers,” the official said.

The 2002 congressional inquiry into the 9/11 attacks criticized the NSA for holding back information, which NSA officials said they were doing to protect the privacy of U.S. citizens. “NSA did not want to be perceived as targeting individuals in the United States” and considered such surveillance the FBI’s job, the inquiry concluded.

FBI-NSA Projects

The NSA quietly redefined its role. Joint FBI-NSA projects “expanded exponentially,” said Jack Cloonan, a longtime FBI veteran who investigated al Qaeda. He pointed to national-security letter requests: They rose from 8,500 in 2000 to 47,000 in 2005, according to a Justice Department inspector general’s report last year. It also said the letters permitted the potentially illegal collection of thousands of records of people in the U.S. from 2003-05. Last Wednesday, FBI Director Robert Mueller said the bureau had found additional instances in 2006.

It isn’t known how many Americans’ data have been swept into the NSA’s systems. The Treasury, for instance, built its database “to look at all the world’s financial transactions” and gave the NSA access to it about 15 years ago, said a former NSA official. The data include domestic and international money flows between bank accounts and credit-card information, according to current and former intelligence officials.

The NSA receives from Treasury weekly batches of this data and adds it to a database at its headquarters. Prior to 9/11, the database was used to pursue specific leads, but afterward, the effort was expanded to hunt for suspicious patterns.

Through the Treasury, the NSA also can access the database of the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, or Swift, the Belgium-based clearinghouse for records of international transactions between financial institutions, current and former officials said. The U.S. acknowledged in 2006 that the CIA and Treasury had access to Swift’s database, but said the NSA’s Terrorism Surveillance Program was separate and that the NSA provided only “technical assistance.” A Treasury spokesman said the agency had no comment.

Through the Department of Homeland Security, airline passenger data also are accessed and analyzed for suspicious patterns, such as five unrelated people who repeatedly fly together, current and former intelligence officials said. Homeland Security shares information with other agencies only “on a limited basis,” spokesman Russ Knocke said.

NSA gets access to the flow of data from telecommunications switches through the FBI, according to current and former officials. It also has a partnership with FBI’s Digital Collection system, providing access to Internet providers and other companies. The existence of a shadow hub to copy information about AT&T Corp. telecommunications in San Francisco is alleged in a lawsuit against AT&T filed by the civil-liberties group Electronic Frontier Foundation, based on documents provided by a former AT&T official. In that lawsuit, a former technology adviser to the Federal Communications Commission says in a sworn declaration that there could be 15 to 20 such operations around the country. Current and former intelligence officials confirmed a domestic network of hubs, but didn’t know the number. “As a matter of policy and law, we can not discuss matters that are classified,” said FBI spokesman John Miller.

The budget for the NSA’s data-sifting effort is classified, but one official estimated it surpasses $1 billion. The FBI is requesting to nearly double the budget for the Digital Collection System in 2009, compared with last year, requesting $42 million. “Not only do demands for information continue to increase, but also the requirement to facilitate information sharing does,” says a budget justification document, noting an “expansion of electronic surveillance activity in frequency, sophistication, and linguistic needs.”

Source. / Wall Street Journal

Thanks to William Michael Hanks / The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged Civil Liberties, Domestic Spying, Internet, National Security Agency, Privacy, Technology, U.S. Government | 1 Comment

Washington Beheading

Posted on June 22, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Thanks to Harry Edwards / The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged Cartoon, Civil Liberties, Congress, Democratic Party, Privacy | Leave a comment

Mesmo’s Reflections on the Sixties

Posted on June 21, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Janis Joplin, folksinger. Austin, Texas, 1965, at The 11th Door on Red River Street. Photo by Bob Simmons / The Rag Blog.

Gerry Storm wrote the following reminiscence on Austin music in the sixties for the Texas Ghetto website in 2000. Austin was a center of the era’s dynamic counterculture and a point of origin for psychedelic rock.

Gerry writes “Mesmo’s Desert Diary” on a reliably irregular basis for The Rag Blog. “A septuagenarian desert rat” who now lives in Southwest New Mexico, Gerry Storm is a former student at the University of Texas in Austin who was a peace activist in the Vietnam era and a noted rock musician during the sixties and seventies. He has added a brief afterthought at the end of this article.

Thorne Dreyer / The Rag Blog / June 21, 2008

The Way We Were
Austin Music : 1965-1969
By Gerry Storm / The Rag Blog

There was no great migration to Austin in 1965. New arrivals were usually headed for the University of Texas, a place in the state bureaucracy, or they were new personnel assigned to Bergstrom Air Force Base. Austin had the reputation of being a beautiful, rather colonial place, with no industry and low pay. U.T. graduates used to lament this situation as they packed their bags and headed for promising, good paying jobs in Dallas and Houston.

Those of us with friends in River City liked to visit because it was always a place to have a good time. It was a city of state drones and school teachers, politicos and lawyers, academics and professional students. It was a place that rich kids preferred to congregate as they waited for their inheritances. It was said to be rather snobbish, a city of tea sippers. But on all social levels, it was a good place to party.

Being the State Capitol and home of the state’s largest and most prestigious university, there was an underground of irreverent scholars, artists, and politicos–some of them with national reputations–that you don’t find in any city. Although they were tolerated in Austin, they hardly dominated the scene. For the most ambitious, Austin was only a stepping stone to the West Coast or the Northeast. That was one of the appealing facets of the town that survives today: It is a good place for a smart kid with ambition and talent but no money to start a reputation.

Night life? No, there wasn’t much of that either. The Club Caravan in the Villa Capri Motel was the only place with a full-time band. The few rock clubs in town changed owners and formats regularly and enforced strict dress codes. There was a big country and western joint near Round Rock, Big G’s, but you wouldn’t have mistaken Austin for Nashville.

You couldn’t buy a drink of hard liquor legally unless you were a member of a private club but you could buy whiskey by the half-pint to gallon, bring it into any beer joint and drink it all.

The veterans of World War II and the Korean Conflict who had flocked to U.T. to cash in on the GI Bill, were gone by the early ’60’s. Their departure had left a definite social vacuum on the night life. The barracks erected for them and other students who couldn’t afford a dorm had been razed, and that area of the south campus had been landscaped to feature the oil rig, Santa Rita Number 1.

The University and public places in Austin had been integrated quickly after Lyndon Johnson a few years earlier decided to run for President, without much fanfare or tumult, prompting black residents to ask, “If it was so easy why didn’t they do it a long time ago?” But it was still a southern town. The only place with any sizeable mixing of the races was Charlie’s Showcase, an East Austin rhythm and blues joint that served as a gathering place for the adventurous.

This was an era when the big happenings were private parties. The times seemed to dictate this social preference, and (as any college-age Texas kid, legislative aide or local dandy could tell you) there were plenty of these. Until a new resident found his or her social group, however, Austin could be a dead town.

Lyndon B. Johnson, longtime resident of the little city and owner of the broadcasting monopoly which controlled the town’s major radio and only TV stations, was now President of the United States; his long time crony, John Connally, was Governor of the State of Texas; Frank Erwin, a member of the Johnson team, was running the University of Texas through the Board of Regents. The Johnson machine was housed in Austin and its power players exerted tremendous influence over not only the city and the state, but the world.

Mother U.T. ruled the cultural life by booking virtually all the name, live, entertainment through the Cultural Entertainment Committee. She was showing off her new art building by lining up one impressive exhibit after another. Gregory Gymnasium served double duty as the Longhorn basketball arena and the campus concert hall. The all-white Longhorn football teams were on a long roll under Coach Darrell Royal, necessitating major expansion of the football stadium. In fact “expansion” was a key a word on campus as the inevitable invasion of the Baby Boomer generation which would eventually double the enrollment was in its early stages. There were no women’s sports teams at the university and coeds could not wear slacks or shorts or jeans to class but they could and did wear mini-skirts, much to the delight of girl watchers.

There was a fair amount of vice in the little city, presided over by a group of bank robbers and hard-core thugs known as The Overton Gang.

The Hill Country west of the city was still unspoiled and largely undiscovered, although the national press covering Lyndon at home had found it and been properly seduced. They regaled over the rides between Austin, Johnson City, and a Highland Lake called “Lake Granite Shoals” (soon to be renamed “The Lyndon B. Johnson Reservoir”). This was the preferred playground of the Johnson clan.

Although the influence of this political machine on the little city was well-known to and weathered by the populace, chances are the Overton Gang was more popular and, perhaps, more ethical.

Some of the best attended musical events were the “Folk Sings” on campus. These were strictly acoustic events featuring students. The repertoire was primarily traditional folk although some of the performers wrote compelling songs of their own.

Bob Dylan was the hero of the day to most folk music fans. His music could be heard in the neighborhoods around the campus, coming from students rooms and over the little local radio station KAZZ. He had managed to crack the pop music Top 10 with his ballad “Like a Rolling Stone”.

The would-be professional rock musicians were playing the “English Sound” and some of them had affected the English look with “Mod” clothing and hair that was a little longer than normal (normal was quite short at the time).

There was a distinct difference between folk fans and rock fans, the former being more altruistic and the latter more animated. It came as quite a shock, therefore, when Dylan appeared at the Newport Folk Festival that summer with a rock group. In succeeding interviews he revealed that he felt like electric music was more suited to the times and that he planned to make all his future appearances with an amplified band as backup.

Folk purists were aghast, they felt betrayed. But young men of his generation got the point, there was a new fear sweeping this group. President Johnson had announced that American forces in Viet Nam would be increased by several hundred thousand, by one million inside a year. The young men understood that they would soon be called upon to put their lives on the line for their country. Many of them did not like the idea of forced inscription to defend a corrupt government thousands of miles away in Asia. None of them liked the idea of dying.

This was the source of the new angst in the music. Folk musicians throughout the country started “going electric”, buying pickups for their acoustic guitars and little amplifiers to go with them. They still differed from the rock musicians in that they were usually rank amateurs when it came to playing in bands. But the music most of the rock musicians played was covers of current and past hits-nothing original. And the folk players wrote almost all their own music, the lyrics to which were now reflecting their discomfort with the growing war and its ramifications. With amplification, one could protest louder. The rock musicians were also feeling the cold wind of the draft in their lives, and they heard the voices of protest.

In September of 1965 Bob Dylan appeared in Austin at the Palmer Auditorium. It was a seminal event in the history of music in “River City”. So great was the response to this music that hundreds of would be protest rock musicians went home and started trying to write songs for this genre. They also started letting their hair grow. Dylan’s attitude and appearance seemed to serve as the signs of the new times and his message was loud and clear: don’t go away like lambs to slaughter, stick together, fight the system.

There was a curious scene on San Jacinto street, a block up from the historic Sholtzgarten. On the corner was The Jade Room, a dress code night club which featured English copy bands, go-go girls, and dancing. In mid block was a nondescript little hole in the wall called variously “The Library” or “Fred”. It featured folk singers, no dancing. Since these were the days before liquor-by-the-drink was legal in Texas, both places were basically beer joints. The Jade Room was very formal, run like a tight ship by its owner/manager, one Marge Funk. The Library/Fred was barely managed at all and had a succession of lessees and would be impresarios, barely keeping afloat.

On some nights there were dozens of performers who wanted to sing but not all of them made it to the mike before closing time. These performers had at least one thing in common, they were no slaves to fashion. Being unkempt was part of the scene at this club, performers and audience alike sharing this mindset. Performers from Fred did not play at The Jade Room nor vice-versa. But there was talent at both places.

The Thirteenth Floor Elevators — Tommy, Bennie, Rocky and Stacy — at the New Orleans Club in Austin, Texas, 1965. Photo by Bob Simmons / The Rag Blog.
Austin’s first nationally famous rock band grew from a combination of these two scenes, the English copy bands and the folkies, the boys at The Jade Room and those at The Library/Fred. The driving force behind the marriage was one Tommy Hall, leader of the first Austin band to find success in the rock business. He was originally from Houston, an English major. In the family who hung out around the Ghetto, he was called “Turn On Tommy”. He was a fast talker, a hustler, a jive artist, a rapper, a believer, a fanatic, a salesman, and sometimes a bore. Originally he had been a Young Republican but had switched allegiances when he became infatuated with music. He was also a good student in his early years at U.T., a quite literate young fellow with English language skills. He could not play a musical instrument so he took up the jug. He could not play the jug very well either, at least not in the traditional sense.

Unknown, unheralded and largely unheard at the folk sings was a skiffle group called “The Lingsmen”. Skiffle was a bastard stepchild of folk and acoustic blues which had a brief fling on the hit parade with an English group led by one Lonny Donegan. Leader of The Lingsmen was Tommy Hall. If you had heard The Lingsmen then and been told they would be the band that would put Austin, Texas on the map as a center of pop music, you could have been forgiven if you had laughed.

In the summer of 1965 when Dylan shocked his followers by going electric, Hall got the message. The Lingsmen played that summer in Corpus Christi. They were no longer a skiffle group. They were covering the rock and roll songs of English bands and surfer music in a decidedly electric format. The group consisted of two boys from Kerrville, Stacey Sutherland and John Ike Walton on guitar and drums, respectively, and Austinite Benny Thurman on bass. None of them was much of a singer. None of them was much of a rock musician either, although Sutherland had some experience. Hall acted as manager of the group but did not play.

Another rising star on the scene in Austin was one Roger Erickson, Jr., the son of an architect/engineer father and frustrated opera singer mother. Rocky, as he was called, had an abiding love for the blues and a good collection of blues records which he learned to imitate quite well. He also had inherited his mother’s voice, a powerful, intense instrument. He had received early musical training and was a competent guitar player. While still a student at Austin High he made a reputation by being expelled for refusing to cut his long, black, wavy hair. Rocky was a good-looking, very likeable fellow. He had plenty of charisma. He was a budding star. His debut on the Austin scene (while still in his teens) came when he put together a band he called “Rocky and The Spades”.

They appeared at The Jade Room and were by most accounts a decent band, and a very loud one. They did not last for long and did not develop a large following. However, in Rocky, Tommy Hall saw the vocalist that he had been searching for to front The Lingsmen. Throw into this mix a lot of spooky mysticism, a little LSD, plenty of pot, other chemicals, sex, an amplifier for Hall’s jug, the literary talents of Clementine Hall, Tommy’s wife at the time and the author of most of the band’s better lyrics, alienation, angst, and a “can do” attitude and you have the recipe that created the Thirteenth Floor Elevators. Hall had become an erstwhile “Acid Guru”, an individual who guided others through LSD trips. In San Francisco, in Boston, and in Austin these individuals were forming groups of followers who believed that their guides (Gurus, masters, etc.) were disciples of God (or The Man himself) sent to lead them into a greater glory. Charles Manson fit this mold. It is said that Tommy Hall had this kind of power over Rocky Erickson and others. For better of worse, it was under this veil of mysticism that Austin’s first successful rock band emerged.

© Gerry Storm 2000

Afterthought.

The real story of the Austin scene was beneath the surface in the pot biz. Well into the ’80’s it was the dealers who financed the shows and various other businesses, bailed out buddies, financed bands, etc. You gotta have some capital to create a scene! The first upscale hippy businesses that morphed into the 6th Street scene were financed by the pot trade. Whole Foods? Dell? There was no grand conspiracy or cartel, just some guys and gals who figured out a way to cross and deliver it to a waiting buyer, and resist bragging about it. Lots of them figured it out and made it work for a time. I’d guess that they are still at it, although growing on this side of the border seems to be more common these days.

Gerry / June 21, 2008

Source. / Texas Ghetto

The Rag Blog

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged Austin, History, Music, Psychedelia, Rock 'n Roll, Sixties, Texas, Texas Ghetto | 1 Comment

Iraq: The Never-Ending (Dismal) Story

Posted on June 21, 2008 by RagBlog

Witnesses Link Chemical to Ill US Soldiers: Highly toxic substance used at Iraq plant
By Farah Stockman / June 21, 2008

WASHINGTON – US soldiers assigned to guard a crucial part of Iraq’s oil infrastructure became ill after exposure to a highly toxic chemical at the plant, witnesses testified at a Democratic Policy Committee hearing yesterday on Capitol Hill.

“These soldiers were bleeding from the nose, spitting blood,” said Danny Langford, an equipment technician from Texas brought to work at the Qarmat Ali Water treatment plant in 2003. “They were sick.”

“Hundreds of American soldiers at this site were contaminated” while guarding the plant, Langford said, including members of the Indiana National Guard.

Langford is one of nine Americans who accuse KBR, the lead contractor on the Qarmat Ali project and one of the largest defense contractors in Iraq, of knowingly exposing them to sodium dichromate, an orange, sandlike chemical that is a potentially lethal carcinogen. Specialists say even short-term exposure to the chemical can cause cancer, depress an individual’s immune system, attack the liver, and cause other ailments.

Yesterday’s hearing – one among several organized to hold contractors accountable for alleged malfeasance in Iraq – was chaired by Senator Byron Dorgan, a North Dakota Democrat. “Hundreds of US troops, who may not even know of their exposure to sodium dichromate that could one day result in a horrible disease, cancers, and death,” he said.

Roughly 250 American soldiers were believed to have come in contact with the chemical, according to Defense Department documents. Sodium dichromate is the same substance that poisoned residents in Hinkley, Calif., an incident made famous by the movie “Erin Brockovich” in 2000.

In Iraq, the chemical was used as an antirust coating for pipes that supply water to the oil fields. After the 2003 US-led invasion, looters raided the Qarmat Ali facility; afterward, the chemical was found strewn around the facility and its grounds.

Langford and his former colleagues have said KBR supervisors initially told them the chemical was a “mild irritant.” The company, however, eventually acknowledged that sodium dichromate was a potentially deadly substance and moved to clean up the site.

KBR has denied any wrongdoing in the matter. The company has insisted the safety of its workers and the troops they work with are its “highest priority.”

After KBR began cleaning up the site, it tested its workers for exposure. The US military also took blood and urine samples from 137 soldiers and civilians who were at the plant. Ten soldiers declined to be tested, and 14 were unavailable, according to the congressional testimony about the exposure provided by officials from the Department of Defense.

The Pentagon has said that the troops’ exposure to sodium dichloride at the Iraqi facility did not appear to pose any long-term threat.

Last year, Ellen Embrey – deputy assistant defense secretary for Force Pealth Protection and Readiness, an office set up specifically to deal with such long-term health issues – told a congressional subcommittee that the test results from the soldiers showed “no specific abnormalities” and that “no long-term health effects are expected” from the exposure.

Dr. Michael Kilpatrick, the Deputy Director for Force Health Protection and Readiness, told the Globe in an interview earlier this year that the samples from the soldiers were brought to the US Army Center for Health Promotion and Preventive Medicine in Aberdeen, Md., and that 98 percent showed the “normal range” of chromium. Yesterday, Kilpatrick said physical exams on the soldiers showed “no definitive signs or symptoms . . . that would indicate chromium exposure.”

In yesterday’s hearing, however, Langford described for the first time how soldiers guarding the facility had the same symptoms as those who had dangerous levels of exposure to the chemical, complaints that are the foundation for the workers’ lawsuit.

“The chromium of Iraq is going to be the same thing as Agent Orange of Vietnam,” Langford said after the hearing. “I want something done for them.”

Edward Blacke, who served as KBR’s health, safety, and environmental coordinator for the Qarmat Ali project, said he saw soldiers with “continuous bloody noses, spitting up of blood, coughing, irritation of the noses, eyes, throat, and lungs, shortness of breath.”

Max Costa, chairman of the Department of Environmental Medicine at New York University, told the committee that ordinary blood and urine tests would not have detected heavy levels of sodium dichromate exposure after a few days. He said that the military would have had to conduct a highly specialized red blood cell test within four months of the exposure to determine the soldiers’ risk of illness.

“Most people don’t get it right,” said Costa, after the hearing. “It is not an established test that medical labs normally do.”

It was not clear yesterday whether the more specialized tests were conducted on the soldiers. The Army lab in Aberdeen is not accredited to conduct those tests, but may have sent the samples elsewhere, according to Defense officials familiar with the procedures there.

Kilpatrick has said his office is keeping records so that any soldier with medical problems that appear to be related to sodium dichromate exposure could make a case for receiving free care from a veterans hospital.

But Dorgan said yesterday that the Pentagon has not done enough to monitor the health of the soldiers and ensure that KBR and other contractors are putting safety first.

“It is almost unbelievable,” the senator said during the hearing. “We know that there has been exposure of workers and soldiers to a deadly chemical, and there has been, in my judgment, lack of accountability by those who caused the exposure and lack of accountability at the Department of Defense, regrettably.”

Dorgan began investigating the workers’ allegations of sodium dichromate exposure after The Boston Globe reported on the case in March.

Source / Boston Globe / Common Dreams

The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged Corporate Corruption, Iraq, U.S. Government | Leave a comment

Jazz : The Colossus

Posted on June 21, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Sonny Rollins, Take One
By Ishmael Reed

Bebop was my generation’s hip-hop. It was more than a pastime; it was an obsession. I used to play trombone with bebop groups. When I turned sixty, I enrolled in Berkeley’s Jazz School, where I studied with jazz pianist Susan Muscarella for nearly five years. I’ve continued with jazz pianist Mary Watkins. When I met Max Roach, I thanked him for keeping me out of reform school; we were too busy listening to bop to get into trouble. We’d spend hours at each others’ homes listening to the latest recordings. We dressed like beboppers. We were clean. We went around looking like Gregory Peck in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. Our idea of a party was where they’d play “Moody’s Mood for Love.” We knew all the words.

Bebop musicians didn’t walk. They came at you, dancing. When Sonny Rollins descended from his studio after our interview, he was wearing this great greenish raincoat that hit him near the ankles. Rollins, who had turned sixty-six when this interview took place, said that when he was a teenager, he was impressed with the way an older trumpet player shined his shoes. Beboppers were sharp, and we were their acolytes.

Theodore Walter “Sonny” Rollins first picked up the sax in 1944 as a sophomore in high school. By the 1950s he had come into his own, playing tenor with a variety of all-time jazz greats, including Art Blakey, Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis. When he left the Max Roach Quintet in 1957, Rollins created his own unique trio (sax, bass and drums) that spotlighted the versatility of his solos and hard bop style. Several years later, in an attempt to regain inspiration in his playing, he stopped recording and began practicing regularly while walking along New York’s Williamsburg Bridge; his triumphant return took place in 1962 with an album titled simply The Bridge.

Rollins’ early recording styles show him developing what would become the Rollins style: a broad repertoire including blues, standards and even spirituals and an intense devotion to melody. No matter how abstract his solos become, one is always mindful of the tune with which he started out—a trait he shares with Thelonious Monk.

Though jazz solos may sound spontaneous, many are rehearsed and memorized. Some musicians are still recycling solos originated by Charlie “Bird” Parker. Rollins, on the other hand, is known for pure improvision. He has a dedicated following but fame in the United States has been slow to come. For some of the white critics, who form the largest segment of the fraternity of jazz critics, Rollins has an attitude. He is recognized as one of the first artists to make reference to the growing militancy of the 1960s with his Freedom Suite.

Both the Yoruba and biblical traditions hold that sometimes your worst adversary is inside your family—in this case, American fans and critics. The prophet is no honored in his own country. Abroad, though, it’s different. Rollins’ Saxophone Colossus is a best-seller in Japan, which he has visited nineteen times and where he has appeared in computer commercials. At seventy-six, he still continues his vigorous touring.

But Rollins doesn’t have to go anywhere, if he doesn’t want to. He’s come a long way since his mother bought him that first Zephyr tenor. He can kick around his Germantown, New York farm and continue to develop his music.

Rollins has accumulated a catalogue of close to fifty albums. More importantly, he’s one of the only surviving icons left from an era in jazz when genius was the norm and musicians like Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk were not only changing music but also affecting black culture and American society. When members of my generation tried to break away from the linear forms of novel writing, we did so because we were trying to keep up with the musicians and painters. How would it look if I did some refried Faulkner and Hemingway, when I lived in a community on the Lower East Side that included Joe Overstreet, Sun Ra and Cecil Taylor? Kenny Dorham and I used to drink together at a dive named the Port of Call, and Albert Ayler and his brother were guests in my home. It’s appropriate that the central image of associated with Rollins is a bridge, because the beboppers, like the hip-hoppers, those who are not pushed into music that degrades by avaricious record producers, have established a bridge that reaches back thousands of years to the sound of the mother drum, the root of all black music. But sometimes it seems that in a white supremacist society, constantly on guard against minorities gaining the upper hand, even the creators of one form of homegrown music are denied credit for their invention. American Experience, on PBS, ran a program about the history of New Orleans. Based on the visuals, one would gain the impression that whites invented jazz. Photos of great black musicians like Jelly Roll Morton, Louis and Lil Armstrong, King Oliver and others roll by without the musicians being identified. All one has to do is notice the names associated with the production to realize the problem.

Reed: There aren’t many survivors from the great bebop revolution. Who is still left?

Rollins: Well, J.J. Johnson [who, since this interview, has died], Milt Jackson [died], Percy Heath [died], and his little brother Jimmy. There’s not many of us left. Art Farmer, who I guess would be about my age. Johnny Griffin. [Since the interview was conducted, bop pioneer Jackie MacLean also died.]

Reed: Do you guys have a survivor’s guild? (Laughter)

Rollins: No, we don’t have one. We should have something like that, ‘cause in the old days in Harlem, they used to have all these clubs and everyone would be together, to help guys. There should really be some kind of federation. But people just see each other now and then, you know.

Reed: You’ve said your mind is like a computer—you have different programs and you snatch from everyplace. Tin Pan Alley, country and western—very eclectic. Do you consider your music to be at all political or satirical, like poking fun at institutions that take themselves too seriously?

Rollins: Yeah, oh sure. Of course. I got a lot of criticism for The Freedom Suite, especially when I went down South on tour and we were playing mainly white colleges. A lot of people had me against the wall, asking, “What did you mean by that?”

Reed: We still get that with gangsta rap, and I remember the horrible things they used to say about bebop. When middle-class black people listened to bebop, they said the music was strange. They didn’t like the culture, they didn’t like the style; just a lot of hate.

Rollins: In a way, because of the guys in that day using drugs and stuff, they might have associated the music with that culture. So maybe I can cut them a little slack.

Reed: Let’s talk about the music here. One critic, Gunther Schuller, said that your method of playing, through melody rather than running harmonic changes, was a radical concept. What did he mean by that?

Rollins: I guess what he’s talking about is thematic improvisation. In other words, if I played “Mary Had a Little Lamb” [sings the melody], I might play for two hours from that same song, variations on that theme. What he meant was that I didn’t just play the melody of “Mary Had a Little Lamb” and go into the chord changes. I kept it as a theme. I think that’s what he meant. But at the time he wrote that, I didn’t know what he meant. I might have understood it, but it was so strange to have someone tell me what I was doing that it sort of tricked me for a minute.

Reed: Describe your apprenticeship with Coleman Hawkins. I know he influenced you a great deal.

Rollins: I would say Monk was more like that. Coleman, he was sort of—I didn’t really work with him. He was just my adult. But I actually used to go to Monk’s house after school and rehearse with his band and stuff, so with him I would say it was more of a real apprenticeship. He was like my guru. Monk would say, “Yeah, man, Sonny is bad. Cats have to work out what they play; Sonny just plays that shit out of the top of his head.”

Reed: In the old days, the players and the gangsters were the real patrons of the art. And if you had talent, they would get you gigs in their clubs. Then a new kind of drug came on the scene. What was the impact of heroin on the jazz scene?

Rollins: Devastating. Devastating.

Reed: When you got in trouble, was that peer group stuff?

Rollins: To an extent, but you know, Bird [Charlie Parker] was doing it, Billie Holiday was doing it, but especially Bird. That’s why Bird was such a distraught figure. Because cats were copying him, and he knew it was wrong but he couldn’t stop. So we figured, Yeah, man, Bird is doing it, let’s go and get high. And I got strung out. I got fucked up. I mean, that’s normal when you don’t know better.

Reed: But you overcame it.

Rollins: That was a rough one. The person that gave me pride to overcome it—besides Bird—was my mother, who stood by me after I had nobody. After I had ripped everybody off. People would see me coming down the street, they’d run. But my mother stayed with me all the way. And Charlie Parker.

Reed: You had a great reputation, but you went to Chicago and worked as a laborer. How did you feel about that?

Rollins: Well, I had messed myself up so bad and burned all these bridges, so when I went to Chicago, I went there to kick my habit.

Reed: And then you went to the government rehab center in Lexington, Kentucky. And afterward made your comeback.

Rollins: I came out and I was thinking about Bird, and what happened when I was in there. I thought, boy, wait till I come out. I’ma show Bird that I’m cool. And then he died while I was still in there. But anyway, I came out and still had to struggle with cats saying, “Hey, man, come on, let’s step out.” But I won that struggle. I wanted to work, and I had to come all the way back out myself. I knew how far down I’d been; I did janitor work and all of this—well, what else was there to really do?

Reed: What about your relationship with club owners?

Rollins: I was blackballed by a lot of these people.

Reed: Why?

Rollins: Because I was what you would call an uppity nigger or whatever. So a lot of these cats were keeping me from playing festivals and shit. This was for acting up and asking for money. Some cats be so glad to play that they don’t say nothing.

Reed: People are so happy to play that they lower the standards?

Rollins: It’s not just in the past, either. I’m going through this shit all the time. They just called me to do a commercial for this car, Infiniti. They wanted us to go to Czechoslovakia to shoot it. There were no speaking parts. It would be this actor and myself sitting down in a jazz club at a table, and there’ll be some Czech jazz musicians up there playing and then a voice-over about Infiniti. Something like that. So naturally I didn’t do it. I mean, for me to just be validating white jazz music. I’m not going to put myself in that position. I’m glad they still think I’m viable, but I’m not gonna do that shit, man.

I did one commercial some time ago, where I was playing on the bridge for Pioneer. They said, “Sonny Rollins really went to practice on the bridge and became excellent, like our product.” Something like that was cool, where I’m identified and the people know it’s me playing. But to sit down and validate someone else’s shit, it’s just not right. It would get me a lot of exposure, it would be cash, of course, but I reached the conclusion a long time ago that I’m not rich. I’m not going to get rich, I just want to make enough to make it. Fuck trying to get into that race. I don’t want it; I don’t even want to speak to those people about it ‘cause I don’t like them.

Reed: Was that like a revelation—some sort of spiritual thing that led you to do that?

Rollins: It happened because I was getting a lot of publicity at the time. I had a band with Elvin Jones and I was playing these places, and I remember the place I played in Baltimore and people really didn’t get it, so I said, “Man, I’m not really doing it. I got to get myself together. First of all, I’ma go back to the woodshed.” That’s why I went on the bridge. Some cat, a writer, was up across the bridge one day and saw me playing, but nobody would have even known it if it hadn’t been for him. That’s how it happened. It didn’t have anything to do with trying to make it public.

Reed: Why are you so hard on yourself?

Rollins: I’m hard on myself because maybe I been around a lot great musicians, and I don’t think I’ll ever be at the level of some of the people I been around. So I’m trying to reach that level. I’m trying to reach a level of performance, and that’s what it’s about.

Reed: They used to hose something called the “Pat Juba” in slavery days: the white slave owners made two black guys beat each other up and one survives, and the masters stand around and watch. I think that still goes on. When it comes to blacks it always seems to be a competition, fighting to see who’s going to be the diva, like they’re having a diva war to see who’s going to be accepted. There can only be one dancer, one writer, one musician. They tried to do that with you and Coltrane, to play you against each other.

Rollins: We didn’t react to it. Coltrane was beautiful, a very spiritual person. He was like a minister. We were thinking about music. It was the writers who influenced the friends who….

Reed: Was it just a few writers who did this?

Rollins: Probably. Remember when Coltrane and I came out. I was popular before Coltrane. We used to be referred to as the angry young tenors—we were against, like, the Stan Getzes, the Birth of the Cool; we were sort of a reaction against that. That was still going on at that time, so we were the angry tenors and nobody was thinking about that shit. But I noticed that withour even realizing that’s what they were doing in slavery days. I noticed that you could never have more than one person up there at a time.

Reed: Let me ask you about gangsta rap.

Rollins: I like the content of rap because it’s the black experience; what they’re saying is the truth. Not everything—I’m talking about the political stuff, of course. We have to accept that ‘cause that’s what’s happening.

Reed: What about the style, all this mixing and sampling and stuff they do?

Rollins: Well, they sampled some of my stuff. This group Digable Planets did some of my stuff. I heard it in a store. I heard somebody playing some of my stuff.

Reed: How do you feel about that?

Rollins: It’s okay, it’s alright. I just don’t want to be ripped off. I need my money. So I like the political thing and I like some of the rhythms them cats are playing. I can use it. I’m not an old fogy. I think jazz has done so much to bring people together, but jazz is only an art form. You can’t change a society with jazz. The society is still backward on racial matters. I like to be democratic; I have a white boy playing in my band right at the moment. But it’s not a personal thing. I find people personally who are great, but the oppressive society just makes it impossible to be real with people. It always fucks everything up.

[This essay is excerpted from Ishmael Reed’s new collection, Mixing It Up: Taking On the Media Bullies and Other Reflections. It is reprinted with permission of the author.

Ishmael Reed is a poet, novelist and essayist who lives in Oakland. His novels include, Mumbo Jumbo, the Freelance Pallbearers and The Last Days of Louisiana Red.]

Source. / CounterPunch / Posted June 15, 2008

Thanks to Carlos Lowry / The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged Arts, Jazz, Music, Musicians | Leave a comment

Journalism : OUT OF PRINT!

Posted on June 21, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Arianna Huffington questions newspapers’“veneer of unassailable trustworthiness.” Drawing courtesy of New Yorker.
The death and life of the American newspaper
By Eric Alterman

The following article on the state of the newspaper in America today first appeared in the March 31, 2008 edition of The New Yorker. For those interested in the future of journalism as we know it, this is a must read.

The American newspaper has been around for approximately three hundred years. Benjamin Harris’s spirited Publick Occurrences, Both Forreign and Domestick managed just one issue, in 1690, before the Massachusetts authorities closed it down. Harris had suggested a politically incorrect hard line on Indian removal and shocked local sensibilities by reporting that the King of France had been taking liberties with the Prince’s wife.

It really was not until 1721, when the printer James Franklin launched the New England Courant, that any of Britain’s North American colonies saw what we might recognize today as a real newspaper. Franklin, Benjamin’s older brother, refused to adhere to customary licensing arrangements and constantly attacked the ruling powers of New England, thereby achieving both editorial independence and commercial success. He filled his paper with crusades (on everything from pirates to the power of Cotton and Increase Mather), literary essays by Addison and Steele, character sketches, and assorted philosophical ruminations.

Three centuries after the appearance of Franklin’s Courant, it no longer requires a dystopic imagination to wonder who will have the dubious distinction of publishing America’s last genuine newspaper. Few believe that newspapers in their current printed form will survive. Newspaper companies are losing advertisers, readers, market value, and, in some cases, their sense of mission at a pace that would have been barely imaginable just four years ago. Bill Keller, the executive editor of the Times, said recently in a speech in London, “At places where editors and publishers gather, the mood these days is funereal. Editors ask one another, ‘How are you?,’ in that sober tone one employs with friends who have just emerged from rehab or a messy divorce.” Keller’s speech appeared on the Web site of its sponsor, the Guardian, under the headline “NOT DEAD YET.”

Perhaps not, but trends in circulation and advertising––the rise of the Internet, which has made the daily newspaper look slow and unresponsive; the advent of Craigslist, which is wiping out classified advertising––have created a palpable sense of doom. Independent, publicly traded American newspapers have lost forty-two per cent of their market value in the past three years, according to the media entrepreneur Alan Mutter. Few corporations have been punished on Wall Street the way those who dare to invest in the newspaper business have. The McClatchy Company, which was the only company to bid on the Knight Ridder chain when, in 2005, it was put on the auction block, has surrendered more than eighty per cent of its stock value since making the $6.5-billion purchase. Lee Enterprises’ stock is down by three-quarters since it bought out the Pulitzer chain, the same year. America’s most prized journalistic possessions are suddenly looking like corporate millstones.

Rather than compete in an era of merciless transformation, the families that owned the Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal sold off the majority of their holdings. The New York Times Company has seen its stock decline by fifty-four per cent since the end of 2004, with much of the loss coming in the past year; in late February, an analyst at Deutsche Bank recommended that clients sell off their Times stock. The Washington Post Company has avoided a similar fate only by rebranding itself an “education and media company”; its testing and prep company, Kaplan, now brings in at least half the company’s revenue.

Until recently, newspapers were accustomed to operating as high-margin monopolies. To own the dominant, or only, newspaper in a mid-sized American city was, for many decades, a kind of license to print money. In the Internet age, however, no one has figured out how to rescue the newspaper in the United States or abroad. Newspapers have created Web sites that benefit from the growth of online advertising, but the sums are not nearly enough to replace the loss in revenue from circulation and print ads.

Most managers in the industry have reacted to the collapse of their business model with a spiral of budget cuts, bureau closings, buyouts, layoffs, and reductions in page size and column inches. Since 1990, a quarter of all American newspaper jobs have disappeared. The columnist Molly Ivins complained, shortly before her death, that the newspaper companies’ solution to their problem was to make “our product smaller and less helpful and less interesting.” That may help explain why the dwindling number of Americans who buy and read a daily paper are spending less time with it; the average is down to less than fifteen hours a month. Only nineteen per cent of Americans between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four claim even to look at a daily newspaper. The average age of the American newspaper reader is fifty-five and rising.

Philip Meyer, in his book “The Vanishing Newspaper” (2004), predicts that the final copy of the final newspaper will appear on somebody’s doorstep one day in 2043. It may be unkind to point out that all these parlous trends coincide with the opening, this spring, of the $450-million Newseum, in Washington, D.C., but, more and more, what Bill Keller calls “that lovable old-fashioned bundle of ink and cellulose” is starting to feel like an artifact ready for display under glass.

Taking its place, of course, is the Internet, which is about to pass newspapers as a source of political news for American readers. For young people, and for the most politically engaged, it has already done so. As early as May, 2004, newspapers had become the least preferred source for news among younger people. According to “Abandoning the News,” published by the Carnegie Corporation, thirty-nine per cent of respondents under the age of thirty-five told researchers that they expected to use the Internet in the future for news purposes; just eight per cent said that they would rely on a newspaper. It is a point of ironic injustice, perhaps, that when a reader surfs the Web in search of political news he frequently ends up at a site that is merely aggregating journalistic work that originated in a newspaper, but that fact is not likely to save any newspaper jobs or increase papers’ stock valuation.

Among the most significant aspects of the transition from “dead tree” newspapers to a world of digital information lies in the nature of “news” itself. The American newspaper (and the nightly newscast) is designed to appeal to a broad audience, with conflicting values and opinions, by virtue of its commitment to the goal of objectivity. Many newspapers, in their eagerness to demonstrate a sense of balance and impartiality, do not allow reporters to voice their opinions publicly, march in demonstrations, volunteer in political campaigns, wear political buttons, or attach bumper stickers to their cars.

In private conversation, reporters and editors concede that objectivity is an ideal, an unreachable horizon, but journalists belong to a remarkably thin-skinned fraternity, and few of them will publicly admit to betraying in print even a trace of bias. They discount the notion that their beliefs could interfere with their ability to report a story with perfect balance. As the venerable “dean” of the Washington press corps, David Broder, of the Post, puts it, “There just isn’t enough ideology in the average reporter to fill a thimble.”

Meanwhile, public trust in newspapers has been slipping at least as quickly as the bottom line. A recent study published by Sacred Heart University found that fewer than twenty per cent of Americans said they could believe “all or most” media reporting, a figure that has fallen from more than twenty-seven per cent just five years ago. “Less than one in five believe what they read in print,” the 2007 “State of the News Media” report, issued by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, concluded. “CNN is not really more trusted than Fox, or ABC than NBC. The local paper is not viewed much differently than the New York Times.” Vastly more Americans believe in flying saucers and 9/11 conspiracy theories than believe in the notion of balanced—much less “objective”—mainstream news media. Nearly nine in ten Americans, according to the Sacred Heart study, say that the media consciously seek to influence public policies, though they disagree about whether the bias is liberal or conservative.

No less challenging is the rapid transformation that has taken place in the public’s understanding of, and demand for, “news” itself. Rupert Murdoch, in a speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, in April, 2005—two years before his five-billion-dollar takeover of Dow Jones & Co. and the Wall Street Journal—warned the industry’s top editors and publishers that the days when “news and information were tightly controlled by a few editors, who deigned to tell us what we could and should know,” were over. No longer would people accept “a godlike figure from above” presenting the news as “gospel.” Today’s consumers “want news on demand, continuously updated. They want a point of view about not just what happened but why it happened. . . . And finally, they want to be able to use the information in a larger community—to talk about, to debate, to question, and even to meet people who think about the world in similar or different ways.”

One month after Murdoch’s speech, a thirty-one-year-old computer whiz, Jonah Peretti, and a former A.O.L. executive, Kenneth Lerer, joined the ubiquitous commentator-candidate-activist Arianna Huffington to launch a new Web site, which they called the Huffington Post. First envisaged as a liberal alternative to the Drudge Report, the Huffington Post started out by aggregating political news and gossip; it also organized a group blog, with writers drawn largely from Huffington’s alarmingly vast array of friends and connections. Huffington had accumulated that network during years as a writer on topics from Greek philosophy to the life of Picasso, as the spouse of a wealthy Republican congressman in California, and now, after a divorce and an ideological conversion, as a Los Angeles-based liberal commentator and failed gubernatorial candidate.

Almost by accident, however, the owners of the Huffington Post had discovered a formula that capitalized on the problems confronting newspapers in the Internet era, and they are convinced that they are ready to reinvent the American newspaper. “Early on, we saw that the key to this enterprise was not aping Drudge,” Lerer recalls. “It was taking advantage of our community. And the key was to think of what we were doing through the community’s eyes.”

On the Huffington Post, Peretti explains, news is not something handed down from above but “a shared enterprise between its producer and its consumer.” Echoing
Murdoch, he says that the Internet offers editors “immediate information” about which stories interest readers, provoke comments, are shared with friends, and generate the greatest number of Web searches. An Internet-based news site, Peretti contends, is therefore “alive in a way that is impossible for paper and ink.”

Though Huffington has a news staff (it is tiny, but the hope is to expand in the future), the vast majority of the stories that it features originate elsewhere, whether in print, on television, or on someone’s video camera or cell phone. The editors link to whatever they believe to be the best story on a given topic. Then they repurpose it with a catchy, often liberal-leaning headline and provide a comment section beneath it, where readers can chime in. Surrounding the news articles are the highly opinionated posts of an apparently endless army of both celebrity (Nora Ephron, Larry David) and non-celebrity bloggers—more than eighteen hundred so far. The bloggers are not paid. The over-all effect may appear chaotic and confusing, but, Lerer argues, “this new way of thinking about, and presenting, the news, is transforming news as much as CNN did thirty years ago.” Arianna Huffington and her partners believe that their model points to where the news business is heading. “People love to talk about the death of newspapers, as if it’s a foregone conclusion. I think that’s ridiculous,” she says. “Traditional media just need to realize that the online world isn’t the enemy. In fact, it’s the thing that will save them, if they fully embrace it.”

It’s an almost comically audacious ambition for an operation with only forty-six full-time employees—many of whom are barely old enough to rent a car. But, with about eleven million dollars at its disposal, the site is poised to break even on advertising revenue of somewhere between six and ten million dollars annually. What most impresses advertisers—and depresses newspaper-company executives—is the site’s growth numbers. In the past thirty days, thanks in large measure to the excitement of the Democratic primaries, the site’s “unique visitors”—that is, individual computers that clicked on one of its pages––jumped to more than eleven million, according to the company. And, according to estimates from Nielsen NetRatings and comScore, the Huffington Post is more popular than all but eight newspaper sites, rising from sixteenth place in December.

Arthur Miller once described a good newspaper as “a nation talking to itself.” If only in this respect, the Huffington Post is a great newspaper. It is not unusual for a short blog post to inspire a thousand posts from readers—posts that go off in their own directions and lead to arguments and conversations unrelated to the topic that inspired them. Occasionally, these comments present original perspectives and arguments, but many resemble the graffiti on a bathroom wall.

The notion that the Huffington Post is somehow going to compete with, much less displace, the best traditional newspapers is arguable on other grounds as well. The site’s original-reporting resources are minuscule. The site has no regular sports or book coverage, and its entertainment section is a trashy grab bag of unverified Internet gossip. And, while the Huffington Post has successfully positioned itself as the place where progressive politicians and Hollywood liberal luminaries post their anti-Bush Administration sentiments, many of the original blog posts that it publishes do not merit the effort of even a mouse click.

Additional oddities abound. Whereas a newspaper tends to stand by its story on the basis of an editorial process in which professional reporters and editors attempt to vet their sources and check their accuracy before publishing, the blogosphere relies on its readership—its community—for quality control. At the Huffington Post, Jonah Peretti explains, the editors “stand behind our front page” and do their best to insure that only trusted bloggers and reliable news sources are posted there. Most posts inside the site, however, go up before an editor sees them. Only if a post is deemed by a reader to be false, defamatory, or offensive does an editor get involved.

The Huffington Post’s editorial processes are based on what Peretti has named the “mullet strategy.” (“Business up front, party in the back” is how his trend-spotting site BuzzFeed glosses it.) “User-generated content is all the rage, but most of it totally sucks,” Peretti says. The mullet strategy invites users to “argue and vent on the secondary pages, but professional editors keep the front page looking sharp. The mullet strategy is here to stay, because the best way for Web companies to increase traffic is to let users have control, but the best way to sell advertising is a slick, pretty front page where corporate sponsors can admire their brands.”

This policy is hardly without its pitfalls. During the Hurricane Katrina crisis, the activist Randall Robinson referred, in a post, to reports from New Orleans that some people there were “eating corpses to survive.” When Arianna Huffington heard about the post, she got in touch with Robinson and found that he could not support his musings; she asked Robinson to post a retraction. The alacrity with which the correction took place was admirable, but it was not fast enough to prevent the false information from being repeated elsewhere.

Read all of it here: Source. / New Yorker

Thanks to Mercedes Lynn de Uriarte / The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged Corporate Media, Internet, Journalism, Newspapers | Leave a comment

Home of the Brave: We Should All Be Ashamed

Posted on June 21, 2008 by RagBlog

Omar Khadr
Prosecuting Children as Terrorists:
Keeping America Safe
By Dave Lindorff

President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and the rest of the warmongers and terror-pimps in the White House would have us believe that Omar Khadr is a monster. Khadr is the 21-year-old Canadian who is facing one of the first show-trials at Guantanamo.

But let’s just step back a minute and consider Mr. Khadr’s case.
The son of an alleged Islamic fundamentalist, Khadr was sent to one of those fundamentalist madrassa schools in Pakistan back when he was 14. From there, he went to Afghanistan, to join with the Taliban in fighting against the remnant warlord backers of the Soviet Union, which had attempted to run Afghanistan as a vassal state.

Then came 9-11 and the October 2001 US invasion of Afghanistan. Young Khadr suddenly found himself fighting against the world’s most powerful military.

In 2002, after the Taliban government had fallen, Khadr was still out in the hills with the forces of resistance. The Taliban government was gone, but the war was not over. In fact it’s still not over, with the Taliban resurgent in much of Afghanistan.

In this situation, with some 20,000 US and European troops battling across Afghanistan, Khadr, by then at the ripe age of 15, found himself with a group of five older fighters in a compound up in the hills. Some US Special Forces came on the location, and, peeking through cracks in the door, saw the group, armed with AK rifles. They called on the men to surrender, but the men allegedly refused.

At that point the brave Americans called in an air strike, and clobbered the building. After that softening up, they went inside to pick up the pieces.

Someone at that point, and US military prosecutors claim it was the wounded Khadr, tossed a grenade while lying injured on the ground. The grenade killed Special Forces Sergeant Christopher Speer. Speer’s comrades opened fire, with three of them hitting Khadr.

When they went to check on him, the critically injured, yet miraculously still living Khadr reportedly pleaded, “Shoot me!” Reportedly, some of Sgt. Speer’s buddies were ready to do just that. Apparently the “clicking” of injured captives by American forces (a war crime) is not uncommon, and even has its own slang word. But a medic with the group interceded and stopped the battlefield execution, and took action to save Khadr’s life.

Khadr was eventually shipped off to Guantanamo, at the age of 15, in violation of a 2002 protocol signed by the US which extended the protection of the Geneva Conventions against imprisoning child soldiers from the prior “under 15” standard to “under 18.” No matter, “bad guy” Khadr would be one of at least 2500 children that the US has admitted to incarcerating in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo and elsewhere as “enemy combatants.”

Today, Khadr is 21. He has spent the second half of his teenage years confined in a prison camp on the naval base at Guantanamo.

This is what Bush and Cheney are really referring to when they assure us that they are holding “the worst of the worst” on the island of Cuba.

They are keeping us safe from 15-year-old boys.

And what, exactly, is Omar Khadr’s “crime”?

As far as I can tell, if he did toss that grenade (and there is testimony from American witnesses that the thrower may have been another man, who was killed in the resulting US barrage of fire), Khadr was simply demonstrating extraordinary bravery of the kind that would earn a silver star, at least, had it been a US soldier or marine doing the same thing under the same circumstances. Consider: he and his comrades-in-arms, battling in defense of their religion and, in some cases, their nation, were bombarded from the air. They were then approached by armed US troops—the very ones who had called in the air strike. This was a battle, and it was not over yet. For all Khadr knew, those US soldiers were going to kill them all. And in any event, Khadr and his fellow fighters had a right to defend themselves to the death to prevent capture. Sure it’s unfortunate that Sgt. Speer was killed, but that’s what happens in wars.

Still, a fighter killing another fighter during warfare is not the act of a “terrorist.” It may be brutal and it may be tragic, but it is the act of a soldier. That soldier, if captured, is not a criminal, but a POW. Moreover, if he is a child, the Geneva Conventions and the subsequent protocol mentioned above, require that he be treated not as a POW but as a victim of war.

Bush and Cheney don’t want to admit that the people fighting US forces in Afghanistan are legitimate soldiers, entitled to protection under the rules of war. They want us to believe that anyone who takes up a gun in defense of their homeland or of the homeland of their allies, and fights against the US military forces that are spread all over the globe like Roman Legions of old, are “terrorists,” deserving of whatever fate we hand them, by whatever rules we want to gin up.

But it’s worth remembering that this particular “terrorist,” at the time of his “crime,” was simply a scared and badly-wounded 15-year-old kid who had the balls to toss a grenade at well-armed soldiers on a search-and-destroy mission.

In an interesting twist that further highlights the absurdity of calling a 15-year-old a hardened terrorist, Speer’s widow, Tabitha, and another soldier who lost an eye in the grenade blast, sued not Khadr, but his father’s estate, claiming that his “failure to control his son” had been the proximate cause of their losses. A federal district judge, in February 2006, awarded the two $102.6 million in damages. In other words, the court concluded Khadr wasn’t responsible for his actions; his father was. And yet the US is prosecuting Omar Khadr for being a hardened terrorist at an age when he was too young to drive!

The Bush/Cheney administration’s incarceration and prosecution of this boy was a war crime. His continued incarceration and the attempt to prosecute him as a terrorist today makes a mockery of America’s motto: Home of the Brave.

We should all be ashamed.

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now available in paperback). His work is available at http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/.

Source / CounterPunch

The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged Criminal Justice, Guantanamo, Terrorism | Leave a comment

Louisiana – Stepping Back into the Middle Ages

Posted on June 21, 2008 by RagBlog

Louisiana’s Latest Assault on Darwin
June 21, 2008

It comes as no surprise that the Louisiana State Legislature has overwhelmingly approved a bill that seeks to undercut the teaching of evolution in the public schools. The state, after all, has a sorry history as a hotbed of creationists’ efforts to inject religious views into science courses. All that stands in the way of this retrograde step is Gov. Bobby Jindal.

In the 1980s, Louisiana passed an infamous “Creationism Act” that prohibited the teaching of evolution unless it was accompanied by instruction in “creation science.” That effort to gain essentially equal time for creationism was slapped down by the United States Supreme Court as an unconstitutional endorsement of religion. State legislators, mimicking scattered efforts elsewhere, responded with a cagier, indirect approach.

The new bill doesn’t mention either creationism or its close cousin, intelligent design. It explicitly disavows any intent to promote a religious doctrine. It doesn’t try to ban Darwin from the classroom or order schools to do anything. It simply requires the state board of education, if asked by local school districts, to help create an environment that promotes “critical thinking” and “objective discussion” about not only evolution and the origins of life but also about global warming and human cloning, two other bêtes noires of the right. Teachers would be required to teach the standard textbook but could use supplementary materials to critique it.

That may seem harmless. But it would have the pernicious effect of implying that evolution is only weakly supported and that there are valid competing scientific theories when there are not. In school districts foolish enough to head down this path, the students will likely emerge with a shakier understanding of science.

As a biology major at Brown University, Mr. Jindal must know that evolution is the unchallenged central organizing principle for modern biology. As a rising star on the conservative right, mentioned as a possible running mate for John McCain, Mr. Jindal may have more than science on his mind. In a television interview, he seemed to say that local school boards should decide what is taught and that it would be wrong to teach only evolution or only intelligent design.

If Mr. Jindal has the interests of students at heart, the sensible thing is to veto this Trojan horse legislation.

Source / The New York Times

Thanks to Betsy Gaines / The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged American Society, Cultural Traditions, Science | Leave a comment

Suppressing the Research That Matters

Posted on June 21, 2008 by RagBlog

Here you can see the effect of the treatment on the two patients with brain cancers. VEGFR-2 activation is shown in green and its expression in red. Cell nuclei are stained in blue. Relative values of activated-VEGFR-2 pixels are displayed in parentheses and total-VEGFR-2 pixels in square brackets are given for the two patients per cell nucleus. (Credit: Cancer Research). Source: Roland Piquepaille’s Technology Trends
U.S. Government Stopped Research After
Finding That Marijuana Slowed Cancer Growth
By Scott Morgan

NORML’s Paul Armentano has a disturbing account of the history of government research regarding the benefits of THC as a potential cancer treatment:

Not familiar with this scientific research? Your government is.

In fact, the first experiment documenting pot’s potent anti-cancer effects took place in 1974 at the Medical College of Virginia at the behest federal bureaucrats. The results of that study, reported in an Aug. 18, 1974, Washington Post newspaper feature, were that marijuana’s primary psychoactive component, THC, “slowed the growth of lung cancers, breast cancers and a virus-induced leukemia in laboratory mice, and prolonged their lives by as much as 36 percent.”

Despite these favorable preliminary findings (eventually published the following year in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute), U.S. government officials refused to authorize any follow-up research until conducting a similar – though secret – clinical trial in the mid-1990s. That study, conducted by the U.S. National Toxicology Program to the tune of $2 million, concluded that mice and rats administered high doses of THC over long periods had greater protection against malignant tumors than untreated controls.

However, rather than publicize their findings, government researchers shelved the results, which only became public after a draft copy of its findings were leaked to the medical journal AIDS Treatment News, which in turn forwarded the story to the national media. [timesheraldonline.com]

They haven’t studied the issue since. And because the U.S. government holds a monopoly on “legal” marijuana that could be used for research purposes, they’ve been able to prevent independent researchers from further investigating marijuana’s promising anti-cancer properties. Armentano notes that research overseas continues to produce very encouraging results.

Unfortunately, our government’s blockade against marijuana/cancer research is so mindless and vindictive that it’s almost impossible to convince anyone that they do things like this. It’s a terrible and frequent conundrum for reformers that if we accurately describe the behavior of our opposition, we end up sounding crazy.

Source / StopTheDrugWar.org / June 16, 2008

Thanks to Mariann Wizard / The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged Drugs, Health Care, Medical Marijuana, Medicine | Leave a comment

It Would Turn the Middle East Into a Fireball

Posted on June 21, 2008 by RagBlog

U.N atom watchdog chief says to quit if Iran attacked
June 29, 2008

DUBAI — The chief of the United Nations nuclear watchdog said in remarks aired on Friday that he would resign if there was a military strike on Iran, warning that any such attack would turn the region into a “fireball”.

“I don’t believe that what I see in Iran today is a current, grave and urgent danger. If a military strike is carried out against Iran at this time … it would make me unable to continue my work,” International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director General Mohamad ElBaradei told Al Arabiya television in an interview.

“A military strike, in my opinion, would be worse than anything possible. It would turn the region into a fireball,” he said, emphasizing that any attack would only make the Islamic Republic more determined to obtain nuclear power.

“If you do a military strike, it will mean that Iran, if it is not already making nuclear weapons, will launch a crash course to build nuclear weapons with the blessing of all Iranians, even those in the West.”

The New York Times reported on Friday that U.S. officials said Israel carried out a large military exercise this month that appeared to be a rehearsal for a potential bombing attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. The newspaper said Israeli officials would not discuss the exercise.

(Reporting by Lin Noueihed and Firouz Sedarat; Editing by Catherine Evans)

Source / Thomson Reuters

The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged Iran, U.S. Aggression | Leave a comment

The "SuperCorridor" – Likely Still Alive and Kickin’

Posted on June 21, 2008 by RagBlog

SuperCorridor Defeat? Don’t Bet On It
by Stephen Lendman / June 20, 2008

The title refers to the I-69/Trans-Texas Corridor (TTC) portion of the North American SuperCorridor Coalition (NASCO) project. The Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) announced that, for now at least, it nixed this part of the $184 billion scheme calling for:

* a 4000 mile toll road network of transportation corridors;
* 10 lanes or 1200 feet wide;

* two or more trans-Texas corridors being considered; one paralleling I-35 from Laredo through San Antonio, Austin, Dallas/Fort Worth to Gainesville; the other an extension following US 59 from Texarkana through Houston to Laredo or the Rio Grande Valley;

* others would parallel I-45 from Dallas/FortWorth to Houston and I-10 from El Paso to Orange;
* they’ll accommodate car and truck traffic;
* rail lines;
* pipelines and utilities; and
* communication systems.

It’s planned across Texas from Mexico to Oklahoma, would have annexed huge private land tracts, and may later on take much of it anyway. Enough to threaten organizations like the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association (TSCRA), Texas Farm Bureau and other rural interests. Their member property rights are at stake, so they fought it, and for now, prevailed — at least partly, but the matter is far from settled.

On June 10, Executive Director Amadeo Saenz announced that TxDOT “narrowed the (TTC I-69) study area (to) existing highway (routes) whenever possible,” and “any area (outside) an existing (one) will not be considered” except for necessary portions. NASCO’s Texas highway remains viable. It’s just a little less “Super” and for now will use mostly existing state highways and connect them to northern links.

The larger project is far more ambitious. It’s to develop an international, integrated, secure superhighway running the length and breath of the continent for profit. It’s to militarize and annex it as part of the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) scheme — aka “Deep Integration” North American Union. If completed, it will extend nearly everywhere — North, South, East and West along four main cross-border regions:

* an Atlantic Corridor, including: the Canada-US East Coast; the Champlain-Hudson Corridor; the Appalachian region; and the Gulf of Mexico;
* a Central Eastern Corridor; an urban one through large cities and industrial areas; another through the Great Plains to the Canadian Prairies;
* a Central Western Corridor, including the largest Mexican maquiladora concentration; and
* a Pacific Corridor linking Fairbanks, Alaska to San Diego into Tijuana, Ciudad Obrego and Mazatlan, Mexico.

From north to south, it will extend from Fairbanks to Winnipeg, Manitoba; Edmonton, Alberta; and Windsor, Ontario, Canada through Kansas City, San Antonio and Laredo, Texas into Neuvo Laredo, Monterrey, Guadalajara, and the ports of Manzanillo, Colima and Lazaro Cardenas, Mexico. Other links will connect Montreal, Ottawa, and Toronto, Canada to New York, Chicago, Indianapolis, Denver, Los Angeles, Salt Lake City, Memphis, Dallas, Houston with still more routes to follow — East to West, North to South across Canada, the US and Mexico.

Read all of it here. / Dissident Voice

The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged Economy, Transportation | Leave a comment

Facts That Are Ignored in the US Mainstream Media

Posted on June 21, 2008 by RagBlog

We’re Number Two!
By Jerome Doolittle

Peter sends wonderful news. The global leader in whom the world has least confidence is Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf. One step above him is our own lovable scamp, George Walker Bush of Greenwich, Connecticut. Way to go, George! We always knew you didn’t have it in you.

Source / Bad Attitudes

The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged George W. Bush, World Opinion | Leave a comment

More to This Spying Business Than Meets the Eye

Washington Beheading

Mesmo’s Reflections on the Sixties

Iraq: The Never-Ending (Dismal) Story

Jazz : The Colossus

Journalism : OUT OF PRINT!

Home of the Brave: We Should All Be Ashamed

Louisiana – Stepping Back into the Middle Ages

Suppressing the Research That Matters

It Would Turn the Middle East Into a Fireball

The "SuperCorridor" – Likely Still Alive and Kickin’

Facts That Are Ignored in the US Mainstream Media

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