The Rag Blog

Don’t buy the hawks’ hype. The war may be off the front pages, but Iraq is broken beyond repair, and we still own it.

As the fifth anniversary of Operation Iraqi Freedom nears, the fabulists are again trying to weave their own version of the war. The latest myth is that the “surge” is working.

In President Bush’s pithy formulation, the United States is now “kicking ass” in Iraq. The gallant Gen. David Petraeus, having been given the right tools, has performed miracles, redeeming a situation that once appeared hopeless. Sen. John McCain has gone so far as to declare that “we are winning in Iraq.” While few others express themselves quite so categorically, McCain’s remark captures the essence of the emerging story line: Events have (yet again) reached a turning point. There, at the far end of the tunnel, light flickers. Despite the hand-wringing of the defeatists and naysayers, victory beckons.

From the hallowed halls of the American Enterprise Institute waft facile assurances that all will come out well. AEI’s Reuel Marc Gerecht assures us that the moment to acknowledge “democracy’s success in Iraq” has arrived. To his colleague Michael Ledeen, the explanation for the turnaround couldn’t be clearer: “We were the stronger horse, and the Iraqis recognized it.” In an essay entitled “Mission Accomplished” that is being touted by the AEI crowd, Bartle Bull, the foreign editor of the British magazine Prospect, instructs us that “Iraq’s biggest questions have been resolved.” Violence there “has ceased being political.” As a result, whatever mayhem still lingers is “no longer nearly as important as it was.” Meanwhile, Frederick W. Kagan, an AEI resident scholar and the arch-advocate of the surge, announces that the “credibility of the prophets of doom” has reached “a low ebb.”

Presumably Kagan and his comrades would have us believe that recent events vindicate the prophets who in 2002-03 were promoting preventive war as a key instrument of U.S. policy. By shifting the conversation to tactics, they seek to divert attention from flagrant failures of basic strategy. Yet what exactly has the surge wrought? In substantive terms, the answer is: not much.

As the violence in Baghdad and Anbar province abates, the political and economic dysfunction enveloping Iraq has become all the more apparent. The recent agreement to rehabilitate some former Baathists notwithstand ing, signs of lasting Sunni-Shiite reconciliation are scant. The United States has acquired a ramshackle, ungovernable and unresponsive dependency that is incapable of securing its own borders or managing its own affairs. More than three years after then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice handed President Bush a note announcing that “Iraq is sovereign,” that sovereignty remains a fiction.

A nation-building project launched in the confident expectation that the United States would repeat in Iraq the successes it had achieved in Germany and Japan after 1945 instead compares unfavorably with the U.S. response to Hurricane Katrina. Even today, Iraqi electrical generation meets barely half the daily national requirements. Baghdad households now receive power an average of 12 hours each day — six hours fewer than when Saddam Hussein ruled. Oil production still has not returned to pre-invasion levels. Reports of widespread fraud, waste and sheer ineptitude in the administration of U.S. aid have become so commonplace that they barely last a news cycle. (Recall, for example, the 110,000 AK-47s, 80,000 pistols, 135,000 items of body armor and 115,000 helmets intended for Iraqi security forces that, according to the Government Accountability Office, the Pentagon cannot account for.) U.S. officials repeatedly complain, to little avail, about the paralyzing squabbling inside the Iraqi parliament and the rampant corruption within Iraqi ministries. If a primary function of government is to provide services, then the government of Iraq can hardly be said to exist.

Moreover, recent evidence suggests that the United States is tacitly abandoning its efforts to create a truly functional government in Baghdad. By offering arms and bribes to Sunni insurgents — an initiative that has been far more important to the temporary reduction in the level of violence than the influx of additional American troops — U.S. forces have affirmed the fundamental irrelevance of the political apparatus bunkered inside the Green Zone.

Rather than fostering political reconciliation, accommodating Sunni tribal leaders ratifies the ethnic cleansing that resulted from the civil war touched off by the February 2006 bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra, a Shiite shrine. That conflict has shredded the fragile connective tissue linking the various elements of Iraqi society; the deals being cut with insurgent factions serve only to ratify that dismal outcome. First Sgt. Richard Meiers of the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division got it exactly right: “We’re paying them not to blow us up. It looks good right now, but what happens when the money stops?”

In short, the surge has done nothing to overturn former secretary of state Colin Powell’s now-famous “Pottery Barn” rule: Iraq is irretrievably broken, and we own it. To say that any amount of “kicking ass” will make Iraq whole once again is pure fantasy. The U.S. dilemma remains unchanged: continue to pour lives and money into Iraq with no end in sight, or cut our losses and deal with the consequences of failure.

In only one respect has the surge achieved undeniable success: It has ensured that U.S. troops won’t be coming home anytime soon. This was one of the main points of the exercise in the first place. As AEI military analyst Thomas Donnelly has acknowledged with admirable candor, “part of the purpose of the surge was to redefine the Washington narrative,” thereby deflecting calls for a complete withdrawal of U.S. combat forces. Hawks who had pooh-poohed the risks of invasion now portrayed the risks of withdrawal as too awful to contemplate. But a prerequisite to perpetuating the war — and leaving it to the next president — was to get Iraq off the front pages and out of the nightly news. At least in this context, the surge qualifies as a masterstroke. From his new perch as a New York Times columnist, William Kristol has worried that feckless politicians just might “snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory.” Not to worry: The “victory” gained in recent months all but guarantees that the United States will remain caught in the jaws of Iraq for the foreseeable future.

Such success comes at a cost. U.S. casualties in Iraq have recently declined. Yet since Petraeus famously testified before Congress last September, Iraqi insurgents have still managed to kill more than 100 Americans. Meanwhile, to fund the war, the Pentagon is burning through somewhere between $2 billion and $3 billion per week. Given that further changes in U.S. policy are unlikely between now and the time that the next administration can take office and get its bearings, the lavish expenditure of American lives and treasure is almost certain to continue indefinitely.

But how exactly do these sacrifices serve the national interest? What has the loss of nearly 4,000 U.S. troops and the commitment of about $1 trillion — with more to come — actually gained the United States?

Bush had once counted on the U.S. invasion of Iraq to pay massive dividends. Iraq was central to his administration’s game plan for eliminating jihadist terrorism. It would demonstrate how U.S. power and beneficence could transform the Muslim world. Just months after the fall of Baghdad, the president declared, “The establishment of a free Iraq at the heart of the Middle East will be a watershed event in the global democratic revolution.” Democracy’s triumph in Baghdad, he announced, “will send forth the news, from Damascus to Tehran — that freedom can be the future of every nation.” In short, the administration saw Baghdad not as a final destination but as a way station en route to even greater successes.

In reality, the war’s effects are precisely the inverse of those that Bush and his lieutenants expected. Baghdad has become a strategic cul-de-sac. Only the truly blinkered will imagine at this late date that Iraq has shown the United States to be the “stronger horse.” In fact, the war has revealed the very real limits of U.S. power. And for good measure, it has boosted anti-Americanism to record levels, recruited untold numbers of new jihadists, enhanced the standing of adversaries such as Iran and diverted resources and attention from Afghanistan, a theater of war far more directly relevant to the threat posed by al-Qaeda. Instead of draining the jihadist swamp, the Iraq war is continuously replenishing it.

Look beyond the spin, the wishful thinking, the intellectual bullying and the myth-making. The real legacy of the surge is that it will enable Bush to bequeath the Iraq war to his successor — no doubt cause for celebration at AEI, although perhaps less so for the families of U.S. troops. Yet the stubborn insistence that the war must continue also ensures that Bush’s successor will, upon taking office, discover that the post-9/11 United States is strategically adrift. Washington no longer has a coherent approach to dealing with Islamic radicalism. Certainly, the next president will not find in Iraq a useful template to be applied in Iran or Syria or Pakistan.

According to the war’s most fervent proponents, Bush’s critics have become so “invested in defeat” that they cannot see the progress being made on the ground. Yet something similar might be said of those who remain so passionately invested in a futile war’s perpetuation. They are unable to see that, surge or no surge, the Iraq war remains an egregious strategic blunder that persistence will only compound.

Austin — Some 30 Austin activists, dressed all in black, stood in near-freezing drizzle in front of the Texas state capitol building for over an hour beginning at 5 p.m. Friday, Jan. 18, to express their disgust with George Bush’s War in Iraq. The event was part of Iraq Moratorium’s ongoing “Third Friday” demonstrations against the war.

The effort was organized by MDS-Austin, CodePink and Texas Labor Against the War. These three groups have emerged as an effective working coalition that has energized a dormant but wide-spread anti-war sentiment in the capital city of Texas. In December the three groups brought over 50 spirited Christmas carolers together at the same location to greet rush hour drivers with anti-war songs.

At the Jan. 18 event CodePink had planned to line the sidewalk with footwear symbolizing the Iraqi dead. The weather didn’t permit the “In Their Shoes” display, but it didn’t keep away the crowd.

The revitalization of the Austin movement began when MDS printed and began to distribute red and white yard signs saying “Peace. Bring the Troops Home Now.” Close to 3,000 of the signs have been distributed in the Austin area and are also used as placards at demonstrations, providing some visual continuity to the movement here.

MDS leader Alice Embree said, “The Iraq Moratorium has been extremely valuable in providing an on-going vehicle for the anti-war community to grow, to coalesce. And the visibility of MDS’ signs as you drive around the city provides a connection between the activists and the larger community.”

“In the last six years, Washington has stepped up its sales and transfers of high-technology weapons, military training, and other military assistance to governments regardless of their respect for human rights, democratic principles, or nonproliferation,” according to a report in the current(Jan.-Feb.) “Arms Control Today,” published online by the Arms Control Association (ACA). “All that matters is that they have pledged their assistance in the global war on terrorism.”

You read it right. The Bush regime has been using 9/11 as an excuse for the reckless sale of weapons around the globe, working $16.9 billion in new arms deals in 2006, 41.9 percent of the world’s total. This compares to runners-up Russia, $8.7 billion, and Great Britain, $3.1 billion, writes Rachel Stohl, a senior analyst at the Center for Defense Information (CDI), which tracks such data.

Despots once banned from getting U.S. weapons and training are being showered with both. “By providing military assistance with a disregard for human rights(HR) conditions, the U.S. is not only giving up the opportunity to use military assistance as leverage to improve (HR conditions), but is also rewarding abusive governments for their unconscionable actions,” Stohl writes.

Noting that U.S. aid is growing “at the same time as human rights conditions are worsening,” Stohl cites the example of Ethiopia, “which is carrying out a brutal counterinsurgency campaign within its own borders” and Nepal, whose security forces “opened fire on peaceful strikers and anti-government demonstrations.” Bush is also funneling millions into Uzbekistan, where thousands of Muslims have been imprisoned without due process and many tortured to death.

One headline-making scandal, of course, is the $10 billion in taxpayer’s money Bush has funneled to the Pakistan military since 9/11, where General Pervez Musharraf has habitually disappeared his political foes, and recently invoked emergency rule, suspended the constitution and jailed thousands. Bush okayed the multi-billion dollar sale to Musharraf of F-16 jet fighters that can pack nuclear warheads, just as he okayed their sale earlier to India, escalating the capability of these long-time antagonists to inflict dreadful atrocities if they go to war.

Since 2001, CDI has tracked skyrocketing U.S. military aid to the following 25 countries that “have a unique role in the war on terror’ through the strategic services they provide the U.S.”: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, Bahrain, Oman, Yemen, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Algeria, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Djibouti, Ethiopia and Kenya. CDI documented U.S. aid in foreign military, and direct commercial, sales to the 25 soared 400% over the five years prior to 9/11. This despite a 2006 U.S. State Department finding of “serious,” “grave,” or “significant” abuses committed by them against their own citizens.

CDI summarizes, “the U.S. is sending unprecedented levels of military assistance to countries that it simultaneously criticizes for lack of respect for human rights and, in some cases, for questionable democratic processes.”

According to reporter Stohl, what the U.S. is billing as “counterterrorism training” often is nothing more than “counterinsurgency training.” This results, she says, in the U.S. “involving itself in internal conflicts around the world and is in practice encouraging countries to continue their internal struggles that predate September 11, 2001.”

President Bush is just back from the Middle East where he preached the virtues of “democracy.” His arms sales, though, betray his forked tongue.

What’s the current price for a bag of weed? According to the latest figures from the FBI, the human cost is roughly 739,000 a year.

That’s the number of American citizens arrested in 2006 for possessing small amounts of pot. (Another 91,000 were charged with marijuana-related felonies.) The figure is the highest annual total ever recorded, and is nearly double the number of citizens busted for pot fifteen years ago.

Those arrested face a multitude of consequences, primarily determined by where they live. For example, most Californians charged with violating the state’s pot possession laws face little more than a small fine. By contrast, getting busted with a pinch of weed in Ohio will cost you your driver’s license for at least six months. Move to Texas–well, now you’re looking at a criminal record and up to 180 days in jail. Or if you happen to be a first-time offender, possibly a stint in court-mandated ‘drug rehab’ (one recent study reported that nearly 70 percent of all adults referred to Texas drug treatment programs for weed were referred by the courts), probation, and a hefty legal bill. And don’t even think about getting busted in Oklahoma, where a first time conviction for minor pot possession can net you up to one year in jail, or up to ten years if you’re found guilty of a second offense. Thinking of growing your own? That’ll cost you a $20,000 fine, and–oh yeah–anywhere from two years to life in prison.

Yes, you read that right–life in prison.

Of course, not everyone busted for weed receives jail time. But that doesn’t mean that they don’t suffer significant hardships stemming from their arrest–including (but not limited to): probation and mandatory drug testing, loss of employment, loss of child custody, removal from subsidized housing, asset forfeiture, loss of student aid, loss of voting privileges, and the loss of certain federal welfare benefits such as food stamps.

And yes, some offenders do serve prison time. In fact, according to a 2006 Bureau of Justice Statistics report, 12.7 percent of state inmates and 12.4 percent of federal inmates incarcerated for drug violations are incarcerated for marijuana offenses. In human terms, this means that there are now about 33,655 state inmates and 10,785 federal inmates behind bars for violating marijuana laws. (The report failed to include estimates on the percentage of inmates incarcerated in county jails for pot-related offenses.)

In fiscal terms, this means that taxpayers are spending more than $1 billion annually to imprison pot offenders.

Yet this billion dollar price tag only estimates the financial costs on the ‘back end’ of a marijuana arrest. The criminal justice costs to taxpayers–such as the man-hours it takes a police officer to arrest and process the average pot offender–on the ‘front end’ is far greater, with some economists estimating the financial burden to be in upwards of $7 billion a year. Naturally, as the annual number of pot arrests continues to increase (according to the latest FBI data, marijuana arrests now constitute 44 percent of all illicit drug arrests), these costs are only going to grow larger.

There are alternatives, of course–options that won’t leave this sort of human and fiscal carnage in its wake, and that won’t leave entire generations believing that the police are an instrument of their oppression rather than their protection.

‘Decriminalization,’ as first recommended to Congress in 1972 by President Nixon’s National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse, called for the removal of all criminal and civil penalties for the possession, use, and non-profit distribution of cannabis. Such a policy, if adequately implemented, would eliminate the bulk of the human and fiscal costs currently associated with enforcing pot prohibition.

A second option, ‘regulation,’ would also significantly slash many of society’s prohibition-associated fiscal and human costs. Legalizing the commercial sale and use of cannabis in a manner similar to alcohol, with state-mandated age controls and pot sales restricted to state-licensed stores, could also potentially raise billions of added dollars in tax revenue while simultaneously bringing an end to the more egregious and adverse black-market effects of the plant’s criminalization – such as the production of pot by criminal enterprises and its clandestine cultivation on public lands.

Would either option be perfect? No, probably not. (‘Decriminalization,’ for instance, might indirectly encourage pot use; ‘regulation’ might not entirely eliminate the black market sales of pot.) But how can continue with the status quo? Since, 1990, law enforcement have arrested over 10 million Americans–more than the entire population of Los Angeles county–on pot charges. Yet, according to federal figures, both marijuana production and use are rising. Isn’t it time we began looking at ways to address the marijuana issue that move beyond simply arresting and prosecuting an inordinate amount of otherwise law-abiding Americans? Or must we wait until another 10 million citizens are arrested before our state and federal politicians find the courage to begin this discussion?

How humiliating.

The story begins with the shameful case of Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian who was kidnapped by US agents as he changed planes in New York in 2002, and rendered to Syria, where he was tortured for a year on behalf of the Americans before being released.

Mr. Arar — who was awarded millions of dollars in compensation by the Canadian government in January 2007, but has yet to receive even an apology from the US administration — had been wrongly fingered by Canadian intelligence, and his case his one of many chilling examples of the damage caused by failed intelligence in the American’s program of “extraordinary rendition.”

In an attempt to prime diplomats about how to spot the signs of torture when they visit Canadians in foreign jails, the Canadian government’s Foreign Affairs Department instigated a “torture awareness workshop,” which also informed the diplomats of where they could expect to find what CTV in Canada described as “countries and places with greater risks of torture.”

The list, in a training manual issued by the Foreign Affairs Department, included traditional offenders — Afghanistan, China, Egypt, Iran, Mexico, Saudi Arabia and Syria — but also included some torturers that are not generally mentioned in polite Western company: Israel and the United States. Specific mention was made of Guantánamo Bay, where, to drive the point home, the manual noted specific “US interrogation techniques,” including “forced nudity, isolation, and sleep deprivation.”

Oops.

The manual was never supposed to have been publicly released, of course, but the Canadian government inadvertently released it to lawyers for Amnesty International as evidence in a court case relating to the alleged abuse of Afghan detainees, after they were handed over by Canadian soldiers to the local Afghan authorities. After realizing their mistake, government officials desperately tried to get the manual back, stating, as CTV put it bluntly, that they “wanted to black out sensitive parts that may anger allies.”

It’s too late for that, of course. While US ambassador David Wilkins declared, “We find it to be offensive for us to be on the same list with countries like Iran and China,” adding, “Quite frankly it’s absurd,” lawyers and human rights activists have seized upon the documents to insist, for the second time in only a few months, that the Canadian government is guilty of double standards in its refusal to act on behalf of Omar Khadr, the Canadian Guantánamo detainee who was just 15 years old when he was captured in Afghanistan in July 2002.

And they’re right to do so. The first set of double standards was highlighted in September, when, during a visit to Canada to publicize Mr. Khadr’s plight, his US military lawyer, Lt. Cmdr. William Kuebler, contrasted the Canadian government’s “leadership in international efforts to recognize child soldiers as victims in need of special protection and rehabilitation” with its “virtual silence” in the case of his client. Just two weeks ago, David Crane, the former US prosecutor for Sierra Leone’s war crimes trials, who is now a professor at Syracuse University, revived this argument, telling Michelle Shephard of the Toronto Star that he failed to understand how Canada and the United States “could be sympathetic to the plight of Africa’s child soldiers, who are forced to commit atrocious crimes,” but not to Khadr, whose circumstances were the same. “I’m just not sure why the Canadian government, which was tremendously important in my work in West Africa — they were incredibly supportive — is not making a bigger deal of this,” he said.

This latest revelation only adds to the government’s self-inflicted woes. As Amir Attaran, a law professor at the University of Ottawa, explained to CTV, the new developments cast doubt on the government’s assertion that Khadr is being treated fairly in US custody. “Canada has just admitted we believe torture is possible in Guantánamo Bay,” he told the broadcaster’s Canada AM show. “That clashes terribly with what Prime Minister Stephen Harper has said, that Mr. Khadr, who is in Guantánamo Bay and was a child at the time he was put there, is being given a (quote, unquote) appropriate judicial process. Torture is not an appropriate judicial process.” Attaran went on to suggest that the Canadian government’s refusal to demand Khadr’s release from Guantánamo was purely political. “Out of a desire to appear tough on the war on terror, Mr. Harper has put this set of considerations out the window, and that’s not appropriate,” he said, adding, “We have to obey the law.”

Lt. Cmdr. Kuebler also spoke to CTV, reinforcing Amir Attaran’s statement that the documents relating to the “torture awareness workshop” contradict Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s assurances that Khadr is receiving fair treatment. “Omar has been there for five and a half years,” he said, “and at some point in the course of [his] detention the Canadian government developed the suspicion he was being tortured and abused. And yet it has not acted to obtain his release from Guantánamo Bay and protect his rights, unlike every other Western country that has had its nationals detained in Guantánamo Bay.”

Kuebler added that the suspicions that his client has been tortured at Guantánamo undermined any claims that he could receive a fair trial in his Military Commission — the novel system of show trials invented by Dick Cheney and his advisors in November 2001, which are empowered to use evidence obtained through torture, and to prevent this evidence from being revealed to either the defendants or their lawyers.

He explained that he and the rest of his legal team want Khadr to be sent back to Canada to face justice there, and pointed out the absurdity of the Canadian government’s claims that they were waiting for the US judicial process to play itself out. “Omar has certainly been abused, his rights have been violated under international law, and apparently the Canadian government has reason to believe that’s true, and yet, they’ve acted not at all to assist him,” he told CTV.

While the Canadian government attempts to repair its relations with the United States and Israel, the next phase of Omar Khadr’s trial by Military Commission is scheduled to take place early next month, and several motions have already been filed on his behalf. One argues that the Commissions are unconstitutional because they are designed only for non-Americans, and another — relating specifically to Mr. Khadr — argues that they have no jurisdiction over him because trying a detainee who was 15 years old at the time of his capture would violate the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict, a United Nations measure ratified by the United States in 2002, which safeguards juveniles (those under 18 years old) from prosecution. As his lawyers have pointed out, “No international criminal tribunal established under the laws of war, from Nuremberg forward, has ever prosecuted former child soldiers as war criminals,” adding that, if Commission judge Col. Peter Brownback pursues Khadr’s case, he will be “the first in western history” to preside over a trial of alleged war crimes committed by a child.

Adding to the Canadian government’s embarrassment, at almost the same time that the contents of the Canadian government’s training manual were made public, it was revealed that 55 law professors and 22 members of Parliament, including Canada’s former attorney general, Irwin Cotler, had signed the defense lawyers’ motion, stating unequivocally, “It is a principle of customary international law that children are to be accorded special protections in all criminal proceedings, and in any prosecution for participation in warlike acts.”

In the pipeline, undoubtedly, are numerous references to the Canadian government’s latest gaffe, in documents to be filed by Omar Khadr’s lawyers, which would be laughable if the result of the government’s contradictions and cowardice were not so heartless.

You could ask Omar Khadr himself, if you could get anywhere near him.

Looking back now, I think it was around 3 AM on September 26, 1985, while lying on the floor of the Virginia Beach Convention Center, staring at the underside of a folding table, when my husband and I decided to move to higher ground. We had spent the previous day fastening plywood over windows, emptying shelves, closets and cabinets and then stacking our upholstered furniture, rugs, clothing, books and tools atop counters, tables and wooden chairs, trying to protect them from anticipated flood waters.

Hurricane Gloria, described at one point as the “Storm of the Century,” was swirling off the coast, predicted to make a direct hit on Virginia Beach on the morning of the 26th. Our suburban lot, set two blocks back from the Atlantic Ocean, was low-lying. A long-time resident told us that, during the famous Ash Wednesday Storm of 1962, flood waters had reached our front door knob. We had flood insurance but, studying the fine print while hurricane warnings sounded over the radio, we realized that the policy only covered the “depreciated value” of the contents of the house. Depreciated value on a ten year old television, twenty year old books and thirty year old sofa does not equal replacement value. Thus, the eight hour stacking, stashing and boarding up marathon.

And so, we decided to “be safe” and move to higher-much higher-ground in the Shenandoah Valley, two hundred miles inland. Ironically, six weeks after Hurricane Gloria decided to give Virginia Beach a pass and strike Long Island instead, a storm spawned in the aftermath of Hurricane Juan devastated West Virginia and parts of western Virginia, including the Shenandoah Valley. When we arrived there the following spring, we were greeted by the sight of a two story house, still wedged high in an oak tree overhanging the Middle River, where flood waters had left it months earlier.

We found the home of our dreams–a hundred year old “fixer-upper”– perched atop a hill surrounded by rolling countryside, framed to the east by the Blue Ridge Mountains and by the Appalachians to the west. No large bodies of water in sight. Safe at last, we thought.

We were taken aback, therefore, when a tornado struck the nearby town of Augusta Springs. It knocked a century-old wood frame church off its foundation, then skipped over a hill and reduced a trailer to a few scraps of aluminum and shreds of insulation. I commented to an elderly neighbor at what a freakish occurrence a tornado in these parts must be and he nodded, noting, however, that the last one he recalled had torn a path across his pasture before knocking the top off one of the massive oak trees that shaded our own house.

“Oh,” I said, swallowing, “I noticed that the tops of three of the oak trees were broken off. They all must have been damaged in that same storm.”

“Oh, no,” he replied. “The tornado only got one of them. Lightening strikes got the other two.”

One day we got word that my friend Lucy’s house had burned to the ground. My husband and I grabbed some crowbars and headed over to her place, thinking to help her shift the wreckage enough to recover some of her belongings.

“No”, she said, as we arrived to see the flat black ruins. “You don’t get it–there’s nothing left to move.”

Her big, solid house– like our own–had been built of chestnut-a hard wood that had been seasoning for a hundred years. You just can’t get better firewood than that.Twenty one years after our run-in with Hurricane Gloria, we passed through the eye of Typhoon Xangsane in our present home in Da Nang, Vietnam, two blocks from the South China Sea. We survived unscathed, but the City of Da Nang appeared devastated. The typhoon ripped off part, if not all, of everyone’s roof. Great trees that formerly lined the avenues downtown were uprooted; tree limbs and downed electric lines blocked most roads.

Yet, even as the winds were dying down that Sunday evening, Da Nang residents were out salvaging corrugated metal panels and fixing their roofs. Enterprising people quickly began chopping up and hauling away downed trees, leaving only leaves and the smallest twigs for the city trash trucks. Electrical service was restored in a matter of days.

Less than two weeks later, another typhoon lurked off-shore. Da Nang residents bought empty feed sacks and headed resolutely down to the beach. They filled their sacks with sand and then hauled them up atop their houses to ensure that their newly repaired metal roofs stayed in place. The second storm by-passed Da Nang but the sandbags remained in place until the bags degraded and the sand sifted back down to earth many months later.

This year, in lieu of typhoons, central Vietnam was pummeled with a series of extremely heavy rain storms. I’m talking about three days of continuous, horizontal, masonry-wall-penetrating rain! The storm drainage system of downtown Da Nang, for the most part, handled the run-off well-certainly much better than my old neighborhood in Virginia Beach. The Han River rose out of its banks, covering Bach Dang Street for one day. The nearby tourist town of Hoi An flooded, as it does every year. But, as soon as the flood waters receded, shops were mopped out, merchandize restocked and business resumed. Two days after river waters swept through a neighborhood on the outskirts of Da Nang, reaching a height of six feet within some houses, I traveled through to see freshly scrubbed houses, sleeping mats hung out to dry and people sipping coffee in the neighborhood shops.

My young friend Mieng confided that her grandmother’s house had washed away in the recent floods. Her grandmother lives in a bamboo hut by a river in Quang Ngai province.

“Oh, my God!” I said. “What will she do now?”

“The same thing she does every year,” said Mieng. “Stay at the community shelter until the flood waters recede and then rebuild her bamboo house with the help of her neighbors. My Dad wants her to move here, to Da Nang, and live with us, but she wants to stay in Quang Ngai with her friends and neighbors.”

My friend Tam tells me that, when she was a child in Da Nang, before the American War, all the houses in her neighborhood were made of bamboo. One day a fire swept through and burned them all down. I haven’t seen a fire engine in the year and a half that I’ve lived in Da Nang-but I haven’t seen a house on fire either. Da Nang houses now are made of brick and cement-impervious to both fire and flood. The walls are solid masonry; the floor is ceramic tile over concrete. There’s no carpet, no sheet rock, no insulation. If the roof blows off, they stick it back on. If the floor floods, they mop it. If the walls get wet . . . they get mildew.

Will we be able to avert the disastrous effects of global climate change? Maybe we will and maybe we won’t. But, even without that added complication, bad stuff happens. It always has and it always will. There is no safe place. Insurance policies and new technology are not the only possible responses to life in an unpredictable world. There’s a lot to be learned from cultures that have a history of weathering big storms and hard times.

A flexible reed may survive a storm that fells a mighty oak.

Once there was an elephant
Who tried to use the telephant-
No! No! I mean an elephone
Who tried to use the telephone.
-Laura Elizabeth Richards, Eletelphony

It’s only money. And when most of your effort is devoted to making sure that the country is safe from terrorists it’s easy to see how keeping track of money can just be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. And it’s doubly annoying that whenever there’s the slightest hiccoughing in your financial affairs it becomes national news, as if no one else ever has trouble keeping track of money. It would not be surprising if the Justice Department decided to become secretive about its affairs in order to keep trivia about its finances off the front pages.

In January 2005 the revelation was that the FBI had just discovered that it had made a $170 million mistake on something known as the Virtual Case File that had been in development for 5 years. Its purpose was to create a system that would let FBI agents share information. Describing the need for a better system than then existed, Richard Schmitt of the New York Times said: “The overhaul of the decrepit [FBI] computer system was identified as a priority both by the independent commission that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks and by members of Congress, who found that the FBI’s old system prevented agents from sharing information that could have headed off the [9/11] attacks.” When information about this misfortune became public, the FBI hired an expert for $2 million to tell it what went wrong and to tell it whether it was a total loss or whether part of the system could be salvaged.

Although the publicity might have led the casual reader to think the whole thing was an unmitigated disaster, a senior FBI official saw the sunny side. He told reporters that the FBI “had a better understanding of its computer needs and limitations as a result of the project” and described the lessons learned as “invaluable.” The last reference was, of course, a poor choice of words since the value of the lesson learned was exactly $170 million.

The FBI is again in the news, not because it has deterred a savage terrorist attack but because it has misplaced its phone bills and, as a result, some of its phones have been disconnected thus compromising some of its investigations. Here’s how it all happened,

Back in 2006 an employee at the FBI pled guilty to stealing more than $25,000 that was supposed to be used to pay phone bills incurred by the FBI for undercover telecommunication services. As a result, the Office of the Inspector General began an investigation into how the FBI was keeping track of money it used to pay its phone bills. (It doesn’t call them phone bills. It calls them “confidential case funds intended for undercover telecommunication services.”) The investigation produced a report about non-payment of phone bills that is 87 pages long but much of it is confidential so the only thing the average reader gets to see is a 5 page summary and all my readers get to see is a few hundred word description of a small part of the 5 page summary. (Readers who want to read the whole thing can find it online.)

Under the heading “The FBI lacks an Effective Confidential Case Fund Financial Management System” it reported that there are no internal controls to make sure the same phone bill isn’t paid twice-once from FBI headquarters funds and again from certain confidential funds. It found that “the lack of strong system controls-coupled with interpersonal professional relationships that invariably develop over time-increases the risk that field division confidential case funds can be misused.” They got that right, of course, as the convicted employee would attest.

Another heading is entitled “The FBI Pays Telecommunication Surveillance Expenses Inefficiently and Untimely.” The Inspector General reported that it analyzed 990 telecommunication surveillance payments “made by 5 field divisions and. . . over half of these payment were not made on time.” The report then observes that as a result of that, phone lines were disconnected and evidence was lost. In one case the lost evidence pertained to intercept information that was required by a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act order. When the phone line went dead there was no more eavesdropping on that line. Another example offered by the report was $66,000 in unpaid telephone bills sent to one of the field divisions examined by the Inspector General.

The Justice Department was embarrassed by these disclosures. I’m sure we can be confident of one thing, however. The Justice Department has just hired John Ashcroft’s firm to monitor a settlement entered into by a firm that settled criminal proceedings without going to court. Mr. Ashcroft’s firm got the job with no public notice and no bidding. His contract is reportedly worth somewhere between $28 million and $52 million.” John Ashcroft is no telephone company. It is safe to assume he will be paid on time.

BILL MOYERS: From time to time over the next few months we will step outside the election bubble and look at the hard cold facts of power. We’ll have the help of some journalists like Craig Unger, whose reporting raises uncomfortable questions few politicians of either party want to answer. For example: Why do some of the most powerful and privileged people in the country get a free lunch you pay for? You’ll find some of the answers right here in this book by that very name: FREE LUNCH: HOW THE WEALTHIEST AMERICANS ENRICH THEMELVES AT GOVERNMENT EXPENSE (AND STICK YOU WITH THE BILL.) The author is another of America’s top investigative reporters — David Cay Johnston of THE NEW YORK TIMES. He’s won the Pulitzer Prize and the George Polk Award and many other accolades over his forty years as a journalist. Welcome to THE JOURNAL.

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Thank you for having me.

BILL MOYERS: How did you get interested? I mean, behind FREE LUNCH is a 40-year record of chasing the stories and writing about them in one– the Philadelphia Inquirer, the SAN JOSE MERCURY, the NEW YORK TIMES. What propelled you?

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Well, I was always interested when I was young in the exercise of power. My father, who grew up in New Orleans and then left it because he couldn’t stand the racism, would stand my brother and I in front of the little 15-minute news in the ’50s. We would see, you know, hoses being turned on demonstrators or whatever and he would say, you know, “There but for the grace of God – go you, you know? You could be black and living in the South and your life would be horrible.” And that got me to seeing around me– things about how people are treated. And then when I became a reporter, I began to realize that you can have a nice life and just report on what the city council said but that there were really interesting things going on if you paid less attention to what the politicians said and more attention to what the government actually did. And it got me to start thinking about how government finance and taxes and government spending are related to the quality of our lives.

BILL MOYERS: But some of your critics have said you’ve gone beyond investigative reporting in this book to become a crusader against the rich. do you object to people getting rich?

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Oh, no. I– good grief. I have no objection to that whatsoever. But get rich by working hard, working smarter, coming up with a better mousetrap. Don’t get rich by getting the government to pass a law that sticks the government’s hand into my pocket, takes money out of it, and gives it to you. That’s not right. That’s not a fair playing field. And Adam Smith, you know, warned again and again that it is the nature and tendency of business people to want to put their thumb on the scale, and even better, to get the government to put the thumb on the scale for their benefit. And that’s what we’ve seen going on now in our society for some time.

BILL MOYERS: Yeah, the theme of the book as I read it is that not that the rich are getting richer but that they’ve got the government rigging the rules to help them do it.

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: That’s exactly right. And they’re doing it in a way that I think is very crucial for people to understand. They’re doing it by taking from those with less to give to those with more. So the other moral authority I cite in the book is the Bible, both the Old Testament and the new. And all the way through those two books you can read condemnation after condemnation of taking from the poor to benefit the rich. You will come to ruin, it says in the Old Testament, if you give to the rich and yet that’s what we’re doing. We gave $100 million dollars to Warren Buffett’s company last year, a gift from the taxpayers. We make gifts all over the place to rich people. And yet the way the news media write about it, people are often very unaware of this because we use complicated terms and meaningless language to the average reader so they don’t understand what’s happened.

BILL MOYERS: You mentioned Warren Buffet. I was impressed in the book that you do name names. And so let me mention some of the names that you talk about in the book. Warren Buffet. Everyone respects him as the world’s greatest investor. Yet he’s in your book on free lunches.

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: In Several places.

BILL MOYERS: Several places.

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: He got a $665 million interest-free loan for the utility he has in the Midwest. Now–

BILL MOYERS: From? He got the loan from?

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: From the taxpayers. Now, imagine for a moment that the house you live in today, you bought it 24 years ago and you agreed to pay the price then. And now you’ve got to pay back with no interest half the price in the dollars you agreed to in 1924. You could be rich just from that alone?

BILL MOYERS: But those are the rules. Buffet was doing something legal.

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: That’s right. And that’s always the biggest scandal is what is legal. Steve Jobs. Well, Steve Jobs got $70 million of stock options at a meeting of the board of Apple company directors that never took place.

BILL MOYERS: In fact, you say Steve Jobs arranged to have his fraudulently-issued options exchanged for restricted stock worth hundreds of millions. And the government has yet to take any action.

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Well, not against him.

BILL MOYERS: But not against him.

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: They prosecuted two people under him, one of whom said, “I warned Mr. Jobs about this.” Mr. Jobs says, “You know I really didn’t understand the rules.”

BILL MOYERS: Donald Trump.

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Donald Trump benefits from a tax specifically levied by the State of New Jersey for the poor. Part of the casino winnings tax in New Jersey is dedicated to help the poor. But $89 million of it is being diverted to subsidize Donald Trump’s casino’s building retail space.

BILL MOYERS: How does that happen?

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Political connection, the news media not paying enough attention,

BILL MOYERS: The New York Yankees.

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: George Steinbrenner, like almost every owner of a major sports franchise, gets enormous public subsidies. And Steinbrenner is getting more than $600 million for the new Yankee Stadium on-

BILL MOYERS: From the public?

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: From the public But, you know, the major sports franchises which are, first of all, exempted from the laws of economic competition. So-

BILL MOYERS: Yeah, a monopoly.

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: That’s right. Irony is not dead. They derive, I show in Free Lunch, 100 percent of their profits from subsidies. In fact, if it weren’t for these subsidies, the baseball, football, hockey, and basketball enterprises as a whole would be losing hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

BILL MOYERS: And the irony, as you say, is that at least 27 billionaires own major sports teams, all of which benefit from public subsidies.

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: In one way or another. Some much more than others. But they all benefit.

BILL MOYERS: You remember what Art Modell said back in 1996 when he was manipulating Baltimore and Cleveland into a bidding war for his football team? He was asked how he felt about taking money for his out of– for his own pocket at the very same time library funds were being cut. Remember what he said?

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Oh, yes. The pride of having a professional baseball team is worth more than 30 libraries.

BILL MOYERS: George W. Bush.

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Well, this is one– this is a great irony. George Bush owes almost his entire fortune to a tax increase that was funneled into his pocket and into the use of eminent domain laws to essentially legally cheat other people out of their land for less than it was worth to enrich him and his fellow investors.

BILL MOYERS: By building this stadium in Arlington, Texas

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: For the Texas Rangers.

BILL MOYERS: –baseball team– Texas Rangers.

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Right.

BILL MOYERS: That’s right.

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: One of the key sources I quote is a prominent Republican lawyer married to a United States senator who is the expert in Texas on municipal finance. The subsidy, he says, is $202.5 million. And Bush and his partners captured about 168 million of it.

BILL MOYERS: Bush, you say, used eminent domain to claim the land on which the stadium was built, right?

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Right.

BILL MOYERS: And Bush advised his investors, his co-investors this is a sweet deal …

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Oh, yeah. He said that I mean, here’s this money losing team. It’s got this little stadium. It can’t make money. But if we can get a stadium built, it’ll be worth a lot of money. And that’s going on all over the country. All you have to do is get the stadium built and we’ll– you’ll be rich.

BILL MOYERS: One of your most revealing stories in here for me is about the small merchant of a fishing and outdoor gear who’s put out of business by a big competitor who gets $32 million in subsidies from the local government.

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Well, you know, if you walk into many of the big box retailers today, you have to pay sales tax at the cash register on whatever you buy. Well, in many of those stores, the government never gets the money. The owners of the stores get to keep it. And who are the big beneficiaries of that? The Walton family that owns Wal-Mart and the Cabela family who own Cabela’s, which is a fin, feather, and fur outfitting club for fishermen and hunters. And in this little town — in the Poconos, 4,100 people — they came and said, “We want to build the world’s largest outdoor store. $32 million dollars. And the local town fathers went for it because they said all these jobs it’ll create and all this economic benefit. And Jim Weaknecht who runs this little tiny store that makes enough money that his wife can stay home and raise their children.

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: He’s outraged. He goes, “Nobody gave me a subsidy. If I had gone to City Hall and said, ‘Give me a million dollars,’ they would have laughed at me.” And, you know, he charged lower prices than Cabela’s. They still ran him out of business. This little town gave the Cabela family the equivalent of about 11 years of the entire city budget for police and fixing the streets and everything else. And this is going on all across America.

BILL MOYERS: Cabela promised jobs and more money flowing through the economy but that hasn’t happened–

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: No, it hasn’t happened. And, in fact, that’s the argument made everywhere. What you’re really doing is using this government subsidy to draw business away from the existing local merchants who are effectively being taxed to subsidize the newcomer.

BILL MOYERS: You have a chapter in here about an economics professor who embraced the idea of getting government out of the way of business. And yet then he turned around and made cultivating government his business, quote, leaving behind a trail of death and costs that were shifted onto the taxpayers. And he went on to become our government’s Treasury secretary.

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: John Snow was a brilliant young economics professor and lawyer who wrote about how the government system of regulating transportation was inefficient and causing difficult costs. And in the Ford administration– had a prominent role in promoting deregulation of trucking. Then he got a job with the CF– what’s now the CSX Railroad.

BILL MOYERS: And what is CSX?

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: It’s one of the largest railroad companies in America. And that railroad, the– his mentor, Hays Watkins, won an award from INDUSTRY WEEK magazine. And the whole reason for the reward was their success at milking the government for favors. And Snow, throughout his career, spent an enormous amount of time going and meeting not with presidents of the United States but with the congressmen and senators and the staff members and the bureaucrats you’re never going to hear about in the Transportation Department and the Appropriation Department to get all the rules and favors that he wanted.

And one of the worst rules is this. If you’re on an Amtrak train and there is an accident and something happens to you, the damages that occur are always paid by the taxpayer, even if, as in the case I tell about in the book, there was a known unsafe condition that CSX caused in its zeal to cut costs and to increase Mr. Snow’s salary.

Even though Snow was warned and warned this is dangerous, we’re not doing enough for safety. There were official investigations. They stuck to their policy. They saved $2.4 billion dollars. Well, people died because of it. One widow pressed her case, got all the way to the Supreme Court with it. Got $50 million in damages awarded by a jury. Couldn’t today ’cause Governor Jeb Bush in Florida signed a law to prevent this from happening again. But got $50 million in damages. Didn’t cost CSX a penny. They just handed the bill to the taxpayers and said, “You get to pay.”

BILL MOYERS: Because this is a law.

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: That’s the law.

BILL MOYERS: Passed by Congress.

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: That’s right. And this is a moral hazard. It’s another thing that Adam Smith warned us about. You shouldn’t be able to say, “I get the rewards and you the taxpayer are going to take up all the risks.”

BILL MOYERS: Are you agreeing with Ronald Reagan that government is not the solution; government is the problem?

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Well, there are lots of problems with the government. I’ve spent my life exposing all sorts of problems with government. But government is fundamentally essential. Government is what creates for us civilization.We created this country so that we could be free, so that we could pursue our lives the way that we want to pursue them. And wealth is a byproduct of that. But the government is being turned into a vehicle not to ensure our liberties and create a level playing field but instead into a vehicle to take from the many to enrich the few.

BILL MOYERS: There was a stunning section in your book where you say these new rules that have come about in the last few years help Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers, MBNA, that’s the big bank holding company, and Citibank exploit the poor, the unsophisticated, and the foolish because these lenders can now charge rates and impose penalties that were illegal, even criminal, a generation ago.

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: You know, we used to put people to death 500 years ago for loaning money for interest. And for a long time the government regulated the kind of interest that you could charge. And then we had a Supreme Court decision in 1978. And the Supreme Court in that said, you know, ’cause the way the law’s written we’re basically undoing the usury laws in this country. And Congress, pay attention, you need to do something to address this. Well, Congress did. Discovered it was a fabulous way to milk banks and related companies for campaign contributions. And they did for years and years and years and years. Now you turn on your television and there’s Gary Coleman, the former child star-

BILL MOYERS: Right.

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: –promoting a loan where they’ll put the money right into your bank account over the telephone, calling in on the telephone, at 99.25 percent interest. Almost two points a week. When I wrote that I was thinking about a mob guy who was a loan shark and what he would have thought because he spent some time in prison for loan sharking if he were still alive about these ads where now big corporations are doing what he used to do. Except they don’t break your legs, they just take your house.

BILL MOYERS: But we’ve been through 30 years of deregulation now. And as you yourself point out in Free Lunch, America today is more than twice as wealthy as it was in 1980. And the economy is putting out two thirds more per person. I mean, you even remind us that more than half of the wealth created in this country since the United States began has been created in the past quarter century. What’s to complain about that?

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Well, that’s tremendous economic growth. The problem is where it’s going. The increases in income and wealth are all taking place at the very top. In fact 2005 the richest one percent increased their income by far more than the total income of the bottom 20 percent. My contention is that it is government policy that is causing this to happen, that in all sorts of different ways there was a time when government policy was to create and nurture and build a middle class. We have a GI bill. We built an interstate highway system. We invested in education and hospitals. Now we have a government whose policy is to enrich the already rich and make them richer. That’s its focus. And I believe that if we continue down that road you create instability and you don’t create as much wealth.

BILL MOYERS: You point out, by the way, that Bill Clinton as president gave the super rich a larger tax break than George Bush’s tax cuts, right?

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Yeah, I love to trot this one out when somebody goes, “Oh, you’re from the New York Times. You must be, you know, pro-Democrat or liberal or whatever.” I’m the guy who broke the story and reported on the fact that Bill Clinton gave the super rich, the 400 highest income people in America a big tax cut. They were paying 30 cents out of each dollar of their income to the federal government when he came into the office. When he left, it was down to 22. Bush has lowered it to 17. Now, first of all, notice you’re probably paying more than 17 cents. May well be paying more than 22. But Bush gave them an eight cent tax cut– I’m sorry. Clinton gave an eight cent tax cut and Bush only gave them five cents.

BILL MOYERS: Let me read you this quote from one of your critics, Larry Kudlow of NATIONAL REVIEW online and CNBC. He wrote this a couple of years ago after in response to something you had reported in the New York Times about how Bush’s tax cuts on dividends and capital gains had helped people with the highest incomes. Quote: “These entrepreneurs use their God-given talents within the Reagan-esque free market framework that deregulated, slashed tax rates, and provided the first strong dose of economic incentives since the 1920s. A rising economic tide over the last 20 years has lifted living standards, productivity, and employment throughout America. Everyone got richer with a full $39 trillion in new wealth created during this period. Fair?

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: No. Not accurate either. First of all a rising tide lifts all boats unless you’re in the dinghy tied to the dock. And then you get swamped. The poor America, and it’s not like being poor in the third world, but the poor America are worse off. Most Americans have seen their incomes stagnate or decline slightly. People have fewer fringe benefits. They have less in retirement. They have an enormous amount of debt. For every additional dollar since 1980 the people have gotten in equity in their homes, they’ve taken on $2 of debt. That’s not a prescription for getting well off.

Entrepreneurs? Entrepreneurs are people who are going to perform no matter what. And we had our greatest economic growth when we had much higher tax rates. You want entrepreneurs. You need entrepreneurs to have a good society. I don’t have any problem with entrepreneurs. But we need to have a system that also fairly distributes– and government rules affect the distribution of this; it is not in a vacuum– the burdens of society and the benefits of society. And so when we have people who make billion dollar a year incomes and pay 15 percent taxes and janitors who pay the same tax rate and school teachers who pay a 25 percent tax rate, something’s amiss.

BILL MOYERS: But did you notice what happened when the Democrats briefly toyed with the idea of removing that tax break from the hedge fund and private equity managers Congress thought very briefly about removing it. And then the industry held a big party for– Harry Reid, Senate Democratic majority leader down in Las Vegas, and he came back from that big party and said, “I don’t think we’ll be taking that up anytime soon.”

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: The problem of the political donor class’s outsized influence and its grip on Congress is bipartisan. There’s one party in Washington. It’s the party of money. It has different wings and factions. But Washington is the party of money. And the wealthiest people in America, the large corporations in America, are busy milking the government for everything they can get. And you are paying the price of their free lunch.

BILL MOYERS: The book is FREE LUNCH: HOW THE WEALTHIEST AMERICANS ENRICH THEMSELVES AT GOVERNMENT EXPENSE AND STICK YOU WITH THE BILL. David Cay Johnston, thank you for joining me on THE JOURNAL.

BOSTON (Jan. 17) – Nearly a third of antidepressant drug studies are never published in the medical literature and nearly all happen to show that the drug being tested did not work, researchers reported on Wednesday.

In some of the studies that are published, unfavorable results have been recast to make the medicine appear more effective than it really is, said the research team led by Erick Turner of the Oregon Health & Science University.

Even if not deliberate, this can be bad news for patients, they wrote in their report, published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

“Selective publication can lead doctors to make inappropriate prescribing decisions that may not be in the best interest of their patients and, thus, the public health,” they wrote.

The idea that unfavorable test results are quietly tucked away so nobody will see them — sometimes call the “file drawer effect” — has been around for years.

The Turner team used a U.S. Food and Drug Administration registry in which companies are supposed to log details of their drug tests before the experiments are begun.

“It tells you where they placed their bets before they saw the data,” Turner said in a telephone interview.

Of the 74 studies that started for the 12 antidepressants, 38 produced positive results for the drug. All but one of those studies were published.

REWRITTEN STUDIES

However, only three of the 36 studies with negative or questionable results, as assessed by the FDA, were published and another 11 were written as if the drug had worked.

“Not only were positive results more likely to be published, but studies that were not positive, in our opinion, were often published in a way that conveyed a positive outcome,” said the authors.

For example, of the seven negative studies done on GlaxoSmithKline’s Paxil, five were never published. The researchers found three studies for GSK’s Wellbutrin SR, but the two negative ones never reached print.

There were five studies for Pfizer’s Zoloft, but the three showing the drug to be ineffective were not published. A fourth study, ruled questionable by the FDA, was written and published to make it appear that the drug worked.

A Glaxo spokeswoman said the company posts the data from all of its trials, positive or negative, on the Internet.

“GlaxoSmithKline agrees that public disclosure of clinical trial results for marketed medicines is essential and fully supports registration of all trials in progress,” she said.

“Pfizer is committed to the communication of results of all registered clinical studies, regardless of outcome. More specifically, we have committed to disclose clinical trial results within one year after study completion for all of our marketed products,” Pfizer spokesman Jack Cox said in an e-mail.

Turner and his colleagues did not find out who was to blame for not publishing the studies. He said medical journals may have played a role by deciding they would rather publish favorable results.

“There’s an expectation that if you get a positive result, that’s what you’re supposed to do, and if you get a negative result you have failed,” said Turner. “The first impulse is to say, ‘I was wrong. Maybe I should move on to something more interesting”‘ so the results may never get written up.

(Editing by Maggie Fox and David Wiessler)

After pandering to Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert’s right-wing government last week, US president George W. Bush carried the Israeli/neoconservative campaign against Iran to Arab countries. Sounding as authentic as the “Filipino Monkey,” Bush told the Arab countries that “Iran is the world’s leading state sponsor of terror,” and that “Iran’s actions threaten the security of nations everywhere.”

To no effect. Every country in the world, except America, knows by now that the US is the world’s leading state sponsor of terror and that the neoconservative drive for US hegemony over the world threatens the security of nations everywhere. But before we get into this, let’s first see what Bush means by “terrorist” and Iran’s sponsorship of terrorism.

Bush considers Iran to be the leading state sponsor of terror, because Iran is believed to fund Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Palestinian ghetto. Hezbollah and Hamas are two organizations that exist because of Israeli aggression against Palestine and Lebanon. The two organizations are branded “terrorist” because they resist Israel’s theft of Palestine and Israel’s designs on southern Lebanon. Both organizations are resistance organizations. They resist Israel’s territorial expansion and this makes them “terrorist.”

They are terrorists because they don’t receive billions in US military aid and cannot put armies in the field with tanks, fighter jets and helicopter gunships, backed up by US spy satellites and Israel’s nuclear weapons – although Hezbollah, a small militia, has twice defeated the Israeli army. However, Palestine is so thoroughly under the Israeli heel that Hamas can resist only with suicide bombers and obsolete rockets. It is dishonest to damn the terrorist response but not the policies that provoke the response.

The US is at war in Iraq, because the neoconservatives want to rid Israel of the Muslim governments – Iraq, Iran and Syria – that are not American surrogates and, therefore, are willing to fund Palestinian and Lebanese resistance to Israeli aggression. Israel, protected by the US, has disobeyed UN resolutions for four decades and has been methodically squeezing Palestinians out of Palestine.

Americans do not think of themselves or of Israel as terrorist states, but the evidence is complete and overwhelming. Thanks to the power of the Israel Lobby, Americans only know the Israeli side of the story, which is that evil anti-semite Palestinians will not let blameless Israelis live in peace and persist in their unjustified terror attacks on an innocent Israeli state.

The facts differ remarkably from Israel Lobby propaganda. Israel illegally occupies Palestine. Israel sends bulldozers into Palestinian villages and knocks down Palestinian houses, occasionally killing an American protester in the process, and uproots Palestinian olive groves. Israel cuts Palestinian villages off from water, hospitals, farmlands, employment and schools. Israel builds special roads through Palestine on which only Israelis can travel. Israel establishes checkpoints everywhere to hinder Palestinian movement to hospitals, schools and from one enclave or ghetto to another.

Many Palestinians die from the inability to get through checkpoints to medical care. Israel builds illegal settlements on Palestinian lands. Israeli Zionist “settlers” take it upon themselves to evict Palestinians from their villages and towns in order to convert them into Israeli settlements. A huge wall has been built to wall off the stolen Palestinian lands from the remaining isolated ghettoes. Israeli soldiers shoot down Palestinian children in the streets. So do Israeli Zionist “settlers.”

All of this has been documented so many times by so many organizations that it is pathetic that Americans are so ignorant. For example, Israeli peace groups such as Gush Shalom or Jeff Halper’s Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions provide abundant documentation of Israel’s theft of Palestine and persecution of Palestinians.

Every time the UN passes a resolution condemning Israel for its crimes, the US vetoes it. The Palestinian Agricultural Relief Committees’ film, The Iron Wall, reveals the enormity of Israel’s crimes against Palestine.

President Jimmy Carter, Israel’s friend, tried to bring peace to the Middle East but was frustrated by Israel. Carter was demonized by the Israel Lobby for calling, truthfully, the situation that Israel has created “apartheid.”

Historians, including Israel’s finest, such as Ilan Pappe, have documented The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, the title of Pappe’s book published in 2006.

Israelis, such as Uri Avnery, a former member of Israel’s Knesset, are stronger critics of Israel’s policies toward Palestine than can be found in America. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz is more outspoken in its criticism of Israeli policies than any newspaper would dare to be in North America or Europe.

But it is all to no avail in brainwashed America where Israelis wear white hats and Arabs wear black hats.

The ignorance of Americans commits US foreign policy to the service of Israel. As Uri Avnery wrote recently, a visitor from another planet, attending the recent press conference in Jerusalem, would conclude that Olmert is the leader of the superpower and that Bush is his vassal.

Americans don’t know what terror is. To know terror, you have to be a Palestinian, an Iraqi, or an Afghan.

Layla Anwar, an Iraqi Internet blogger, describes what terror is like. Terror is families attending a wedding being blown to pieces by an American missile or bomb and the survivors being blown to pieces at the funeral of the newly -weds.

Terror is troops breaking down your door in the middle of the night, putting guns to your heads, and carrying off brothers, sons, and husbands with bags over their heads and returning to rape the unprotected women.

Terror is being waterboarded in one of America’s torture dungeons. Terror is “when you run from hospital ward to hospital ward, from prison to prison, from militia to militia looking for your loved one only to recognize them from their teeth fillings in some morgue.”

For people targeted by American hegemony, terror is realizing that Americans have no moral conscience. Terror is the lack of medicines from American embargoes that led to the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children.

When asked by Lesley Stahl if the American policy was worth the children’s deaths, Madeleine Albright, President Bill Clinton’s secretary of state, said “we think the price is worth it.”

In the feeble minds of the White House Moron and his immoral supporters, the massive deaths for which America is responsible, including those inflicted by Israel, have nothing to do with Muslim enmity toward America. Instead, Muslims hate us for our “freedom and democracy,” the real threat to which comes from Bush’s police state measures and stolen elections.

There is dispute over the number of Iraqis killed or murdered by Bush’s illegal invasion, a war crime under the Nuremberg standard, but everyone agrees the number is very large. Many deaths result from American bombing of civilian populations as the Israelis did in Lebanon and do in Gaza.

There is nothing new about these bombings. President Clinton bombed civilians in Serbia in order to dictate policy to Serbia. But when Americans and Israelis bomb other peoples, it is not terror. It is only terror when the US or Israel is attacked in retaliation.

The Israeli assault from the air on Beirut apartment houses is not terror. But when a Palestinian puts on a suicide belt and blows himself up in an Israeli cafe, that’s terror. When Clinton bombs a Serbian passenger train, that’s not terror, but when a buried explosive takes out an American tank somewhere in Iraq, that’s terror. Aggressors always have excuses for their aggression. Hitler was an expert at this. So are the US and Israel.

Unfortunately for the world, there’s little chance for change in America or Israel. The presidential candidates (Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich) who would bring change in Washington, without which there will be no change in Israel, are not in the running for their party’s nomination.

As John J. Mearsheimer noted on January 12, the candidates in the running are as much under the thumb of the Israel Lobby as Bush. The candidates are Bush clones as strongly committed as Bush to hegemony, war, Israel and executive power.

The possible exception is Obama. If he is an exception, that makes him a threat to the powers that be, and, as we might have witnessed in the NH primary, the Republican-supplied, Republican-programmed Diebold electronic voting machines can easily be rigged to deny him the Democratic nomination. Hillary will not resist Israel’s wishes, and her husband’s presidency bombed at will his demonized victims.

There is no essential difference between the candidates or between the candidates and George W. Bush. Alabama Governor George Wallace, a surprisingly successful third party candidate for the presidency, said as long ago as 1968, “There’s not a dime’s worth of difference between the Democrat and Republican Parties.” Today, four decades later, there’s not a penny’s worth of difference, not an ounce of difference.

Both parties have revealed themselves to be warmonger police state parties. The US Constitution has few friends in the capital city.

Paul Craig Roberts wrote the Kemp-Roth bill and was assistant secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was associate editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and contributing editor of National Review.

He is author or co-author of eight books, including The Supply-Side Revolution and The Tyranny of Good Intentions. He has held numerous academic appointments, including the William E. Simon chair in political economy, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University, and senior research fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

He has contributed to numerous scholarly journals and testified before Congress on 30 occasions. He has been awarded the U.S. Treasury’s Meritorious Service Award and the French Legion of Honor.

18/01/08 “ICH” — – The White House is now in full-panic mode. In fact, the falling stock market has the administration so worried that Bush will deliver a speech later today that will lay out the details of a “stimulus package” designed to rev-up flagging consumer spending. The desperation is palpable. Fed chairman Bernanke’s appearance on Capital Hill on Thursday turned out to be a total bust. Bernanke was supposed to calm jittery investors with promises of rates cuts and easy credit. Instead, his gloomy predictions put the market into a tailspin sending the Dow Jone’s down 306 points by day’s end. Now it’s up to Bush and Co. to pick up the pieces and try to restore confidence in Wall Street.

Since we first reported on the proposed “stimulus package” (Bush’s Voodoo Stimulus Package” informationclearinghouse.info) the size of the rebates have increased dramatically. The Democratic-led Congress was only calling for $250 per taxpayer or $500 per married couple. Under the White House plan, taxpayers could receive rebates of up to $800 per individual or $1,600 per couple. The rebates will accompanied by additional cuts to the Fed Funds rate (estimated 50 basis points) which will provide more liquidity to the banking system and easier credit for consumers.

The administration’s desperate actions should remove all doubt that the main problem facing the economy is inflation. It is not. The moves are intended to forestall a deflationary spiral that is the logical corollary of 7 years of intensive neoliberal policies. Ironically, now that Bush has achieved his goal of crushing the middle class and destroying the foundation of America’s consumer-based economy; he has decided to change directions and shower those same over-extended, subprime people with a $150 billion gift from the government. It makes no sense at all.

The negotiations on the stimulus package have produced the Democrats first victory over Bush. The president has agreed “not to push for a permanent extension of his 2001 and 2003 tax cuts.” Whoopee. Unfortunately, the Democrats don’t seem to grasp how dire the economic predicament really is or they would have asked for much more. For example, they could have made the rebates contingent on troop withdrawals from Iraq or the closing Guantanamo Bay. But that would mean that the Dems actually knew something about the state of faltering economy, which they don’t. They’d rather spend their time groveling for campaign contributions or applying tooth-whitener than following the collapse in the housing and stock markets.

Earlier today, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson underlined the urgency of the situation on CBS’s “The Early Show” saying:

“What President Bush believes is that we’ve got to do something that is robust. It’s going to be temporary and get money into the economy quickly. It’s going to be focused on consumers, individuals, families — putting money in their pocket. And it’s going to be focused on giving businesses the incentive to hire people, to create jobs.”

Can you sense the panic?

It’s funny in a way. The Bush administration has been warned repeatedly about the disastrous effects of their supply side theories. Of course, they brushed off their critics and carried on with the plundering until they hit a roadblock. Now they’re running around in circles trying to find some way to stop the bleeding. Good luck.

Remember the $2 trillion wars (Iraq and Afghanistan) that could be paid for with “unfunded” tax cuts to the rich?

Remember the cuts to capital gains and corporate taxes that were supposed to “trickle down” to working class Americans creating more jobs and making us all more prosperous?

Remember the low interest rates that were supposed to create Bush’s “ownership society” that, in fact, generated the greatest speculative frenzy in real estate in American history?

Remember Dick Cheney’s brusque assurance that, “deficits don’t matter”?

Remember the myriad corporate giveaways, the lavish “no bid” contracts, and deregulated subprime shenanigans that were supposed to “grow the economy” and strengthen our markets?

The system is failing because it was designed to fail. The impending economic crisis is no accident, but the predictable outcome of deeply flawed policies that are thrusting the country towards a 1930s-type catastrophe.