The Rag Blog

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. — Article III, Section 3, United States Constitution (emphasis added)

The mainstream Democrats – represented, say, by Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards, Joe Biden, and Christopher Dodd – have not levied war against the United States. Their treason lies instead in committing the second offense: they adhere to enemies of the country, giving them aid and comfort.

The enemies are President George W. Bush and Vice President Richard Cheney. Like no other president and vice president in history, these men attacked their country.

It was not our geography George Bush and Richard Cheney invaded. Instead they abandoned and subverted the bedrock institution of our Constitutional democracy: the rule of law. By word and deed, Mr. Bush repeatedly and arrogantly sets himself above the law, claiming obedience to be a matter of Presidential choice. Mr. Cheney orchestrates, coaches, applauds and iterates.

This cannot stand if the country we know and cherish is to survive. George Bush and Richard Cheney are literally enemies of the state; long before now and by any measure of Constitutional justice they should have been impeached and removed from office.

Abjectly, continuously, and stubbornly refusing to hold them accountable, however, the mainstream Democrats adhere to this criminal president and vice president: nothing they have asked for has been denied, no barriers placed in their way. That is giving them aid and comfort, and that is treason.

George Bush and Richard Cheney took the country to war illegally, with a deliberate, carefully designed and executed package of fear-mongering propaganda: lies, distortions, and deceptions. No informed citizen entertains the slightest doubt about this.

Lying to the people and the Congress was the most despicable violation of the rule of law by Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, but many more followed: torturing prisoners, denying habeas corpus, spying on U.S. citizens, nullifying new laws with “signing statements,” and so on and on. The litany of impeachable offenses is long and painful, but the so-called “War on Terror,” these men insist, makes all of it acceptable, even necessary.

Nearly six years have elapsed since the Bush Administration first defeated the rule of law. For most of these years a Republican Congress saw fit not to intervene, or even to question this behavior, so effective was the Administration’s propaganda campaign, and so firm were the bonds of partisanship. But now the mainstream Democrats control the Congress.

Also during these six years the truth emerged, and now we can see the “War on Terror” truly for what it is-an overarching mega-lie: an untruth of such unimaginable scope and magnitude it recalibrates for an entire nation the perception of reality. (Aryan supremacy was the mega-lie of Nazi Germany.)

No one should be surprised that the threat of terrorism has increased, not diminished, since 9/11: the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were not even remotely intended to combat it.

We know the Bush Administration, when it took office, was indifferent to terrorism, brushing aside explicit warnings about al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden; we know the President was planning instead, at least six months before 9/11, to invade both Afghanistan and Iraq; we know of a National Security Council memorandum dated February 3, 2001 speaking about the “capture of new and existing oil and gas fields” in Iraq; we have acquired with a lawsuit the maps of Iraqi oil fields Vice President Cheney’s “Energy Task Force” was studying a month later; we have learned how the privatized structure of Iraq’s postwar oil industry was designed by the Bush Administration a year before the war began; we know the Administration was negotiating pipeline rights-of-way with the Taliban, unsuccessfully, until five weeks before 9/11; we know the final threat to them was a “carpet of bombs”; we are aware of President Bush twice refusing offers from the Taliban to surrender Osama bin Laden, before and after the carpet of bombs was unleashed; we’ve read of the five “mega-bases” in Iraq, to house 100,000 troops for as long as 50 years; we’ve learned the U.S. Embassy compound under construction in Baghdad will be ten times larger than any other in the world; and we know Exxon/Mobil, Chevron/Texaco, Royal Dutch/Shell, and British Petroleum/Amoco are poised to claim immense profits from 81% of Iraq’s undeveloped oil fields.

Are these the activities and outcomes of a “War on Terror?”

We also know President Bush, a month before 9/11 in August of 2001, notified the governments of Pakistan and India he would launch a military mission into Afghanistan “before the end of October.”

Between the dates of the President’s announcement and his order to attack, the Trade Towers and the Pentagon were struck by the hijacked airliners. Seizing in a heartbeat this spectacular opportunity to disguise and launch the preplanned invasions, the Bush Administration concocted the mega-lie, and the “War on Terror” was born.

The “War on Terror” is a conscious and ingenious masquerade for the geostrategic pursuit and control of Middle Eastern oil and gas resources. The facts place this beyond dispute. Mr. Bush’s claim of “taking the fight directly to the terroristsand the states that harbor them” was yet one more intentional deception, as subsequent events fully demonstrated. In Afghanistan the state was overthrown instead of apprehending the terrorists-Osama bin Laden remains at large-and in Iraq, when we invaded, there were no terrorists at all. But today both “states” are fitted with puppet governments and dotted with permanent U.S. military bases in close proximity to their hydrocarbon assets.

Only the Bush Administration continues to natter about a bogus “War on Terror.” Others are more candid:

o Republican Senator Senator Charles Hagel: “People say we’re not fighting for oil. Of course we are. They talk about America’s national interest. What the hell do you think they’re talking about? We’re not there for figs.” (Speaking at Catholic University, 9/24/07)

o Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, in his book The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World: “I’m saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.”

o Democratic Senator Jon Tester: “We’re still fighting a war in Iraq and people who are honest about it will admit we’re there over oil.” (Associated Press, 9/24/07)

o General John Abizaid, retired CENTCOM commander: “Of course it’s about oil, we can’t really deny that.” (Speaking at Stanford University, 10/13/07)

The criminal fraudulence of the “War on Terror” is fully documented , but the contemporary press has been derelict in failing to expose the mega-lie and publicize it. The mainstream Democrats are equally derelict in ignoring it.

Failing to hold President Bush accountable for his crimes constitutes the most profound obstruction of justice. And failing to contradict his hideous mega-lie clearly reinforces the President’s hand: the mainstream Democrats are now accomplices.

The damage done by the Democrats’ treason is equally great in prospect. Without exposing the lie of the war in Iraq and acting upon the exposure, there is no credible and reliable way to stop the Administration’s insane intention of attacking Iran. The proffered rationales-and the fraudulence-are identical, as the Democrats stride toward complicity in yet another illegal and immoral war.

Why can’t the mainstream Democrats speak sublime truth to demonic power? Doing so, they claim, would be too “divisive” and jeopardize the party’s success in next year’s election.

This strategy is politically suicidal. A Democratic sweep in 2008 grows dimmer every day.

The rank-and-file Republicans who continue to believe Mr. Bush’s lies about the “war on terror” will not vote for a Democrat. The rank-and-file Democrats who see through the lies are increasingly enraged by the insipid waffling of their mainstream candidates. And roughly half the American people don’t bother to vote at all, repelled by the tawdry attack ads and negativity of bitterly partisan, superficial, sophomoric, and issue-avoidance politicking.

If the mainstream Democrats do nothing to change this, they will wind up where they’re headed-disappointed and defeated in 2008-and they will deserve it. Only by exposing and acting on the truth about the war can they change any Republican minds, regain the support of disenchanted Democrats, and attract the politically inert, indifferent Americans. A new style of politics needs badly to be engaged, one that is dedicated not merely to winning elections, but to a genuine concern for truth, for justice, for the rule of law, and for integrity in public service.

The most direct and honorable way of invoking such a style is by impeaching George Bush and Richard Cheney. Never in our history have the high crimes and misdemeanors been so flagrant, and the people of our country know it.

Yes, Congressman Kucinich sought with a “member’s privilege” motion to initiate an impeachment proceeding on the floor of the House of Representatives. But Democratic Majority Leader Steny Hoyer moved immediately to kill the initiative, only to be thwarted by a Republican trick. Finally Nancy Pelosi, desperate to avoid a floor debate, managed to have the matter referred to the Judiciary Committee-where Chairman John Conyers has been sitting on the original bill since last April. The giving of aid and comfort to the enemies will, seemingly, continue.

But the mainstream Democrats now face a carpe diem moment of truly historic measure: if they choose, they can foreswear their treason. It was a majority, bipartisan vote that sent the impeachment bill to Judiciary, and that is all the political cover the Democrats need to take the next courageous and necessary step.

For the sake of the rule of law, for the sake of the integrity of the Congress, for the sake of the country’s future, and incidentally for the sake of a potential Democratic victory in 2008, the politics of truth and justice must be showcased. The Judiciary Committee must hold hearings immediately, to see if impeachment is in fact warranted – and polls say the greater part of the country thinks it is.

If the mainstream Democrats will not do this, if their treason continues, then decent and thinking citizens everywhere – concerned patriots all – can only weep for their country.

Richard W. Behan lives and writes on Lopez Island, off the northwest coast of Washington state. He is the author of Plundered Promise: Capitalism, Politics, and the Fate of the Federal Lands (Island Press, 2001) and he is working on his next book, To Provide Against Invasions: Corporate Dominion and America’s Derelict Democracy. He can be reached at rwbehan@rockisland.com.

11/09/07 “ICH” — — You cannot honestly say you are supporting American soldiers if you support the use of torture techniques like waterboarding. By any objective definition, waterboarding is torture. The technique is a type of simulated drowning of a prisoner who has their limbs bound.

The use of simulated drowning is not new. The Nazis used it in World War II. The Iranian secret police used it under the Shah. It was used in the Vietnam War. Dictators in South America have used this kind of torture. It causes severe psychological damage in most cases and has caused deaths. The Bush Administration claims that it is not torture but the claim is false.

The Bush Republicans defending the use of waterboarding are being dishonest with the American people. Torture usually produces very poor quality information. People will say anything to stop torture. Prisoners will confess to crimes they did not commit. They will implicate innocent people. They will invent fictional plots, fictional conspiracies and fictional dangers. In military and national security terms, torture is not effective. Morally, it is simply wrong.

Torture between international combatants has been outlawed by international law and treaties. Use of torture makes the user a war criminal. The United States has long supported this position to prevent American soldiers from being tortured. American government policies, under Bush, concerning the use of torture put American soldiers at grave risk. We will have great difficulty prosecuting enemies who torture our soldiers if we engage in torture ourselves.

For those Republicans (or Democrats) who defend waterboarding as something less than torture, I have a proposal. Whenever a Bush Administration official is called before the House or Senate to testify, they should be waterboarded the entire time they are testifying. The technique, according to the Bush Republicans, elicits honest answers and does not amount to torture. According to these Bush Republicans, waterboarding does not cause any lasting damage.

Personally, I do not believe the Bush Republicans are correct in their position about waterboarding. However, if the Bush Republicans are sincere in their stated beliefs, we should give them an opportunity to prove it. Cabinets officers, White House staffers, Republican Senators, Bush, Cheney, Rove, Bush appointees like Mukasey and other Bush Administration personnel should all be given personal opportunities to prove that waterboarding is not torture and is effective in providing honest answers to questions.

I think it is a much better idea to waterboard Bush Republican leaders (who support waterboarding) in order to prove that waterboarding is not torture than it is to put our soldiers at risk of being tortured. I think all of them would quickly conclude that waterboarding is torture, illegal, dangerous and ineffective.

In the Dark Ages, they had a version of waterboarding. It was called “dunking.” It was a sadistic kind of torture. Naturally, this type of sadistic, ineffective torture still has a strong appeal to certain types of barbaric Republicans!

WASHINGTON (Nov. 11) – As Congress debates new rules for government eavesdropping, a top intelligence official says it is time that people in the United States changed their definition of privacy.

Privacy no longer can mean anonymity, says Donald Kerr, the principal deputy director of national intelligence. Instead, it should mean that government and businesses properly safeguard people’s private communications and financial information. Kerr’s comments come as Congress is taking a second look at the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Lawmakers hastily changed the 1978 law last summer to allow the government to eavesdrop inside the United States without court permission, so long as one end of the conversation was reasonably believed to be located outside the U.S.

The original law required a court order for any surveillance conducted on U.S. soil, to protect Americans’ privacy. The White House argued that the law was obstructing intelligence gathering because, as technology has changed, a growing amount of foreign communications passes through U.S.-based channels.

The most contentious issue in the new legislation is whether to shield telecommunications companies from civil lawsuits for allegedly giving the government access to people’s private e-mails and phone calls without a FISA court order between 2001 and 2007.

Some lawmakers, including members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, appear reluctant to grant immunity. Suits might be the only way to determine how far the government has burrowed into people’s privacy without court permission.

The committee is expected to decide this week whether its version of the bill will protect telecommunications companies. About 40 wiretapping suits are pending.

The central witness in a California lawsuit against AT&T says the government is vacuuming up billions of e-mails and phone calls as they pass through an AT&T switching station in San Francisco.

Mark Klein, a retired AT&T technician, helped connect a device in 2003 that he says diverted and copied onto a government supercomputer every call, e-mail, and Internet site access on AT&T lines.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which filed the class-action suit, claims there are as many as 20 such sites in the U.S.

The White House has promised to veto any bill that does not grant immunity from suits such as this one.

Congressional leaders hope to finish the bill by Thanksgiving. It would replace the FISA update enacted in August that privacy groups and civil libertarians say allows the government to read Americans’ e-mails and listen to their phone calls without court oversight.

Kerr said at an October intelligence conference in San Antonio that he finds concerns that the government may be listening in odd when people are “perfectly willing for a green-card holder at an (Internet service provider) who may or may have not have been an illegal entrant to the United States to handle their data.”

He noted that government employees face up to five years in prison and $100,000 in fines if convicted of misusing private information.

Millions of people in this country — particularly young people — already have surrendered anonymity to social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook, and to Internet commerce. These sites reveal to the public, government and corporations what was once closely guarded information, like personal statistics and credit card numbers.

“Those two generations younger than we are have a very different idea of what is essential privacy, what they would wish to protect about their lives and affairs. And so, it’s not for us to inflict one size fits all,” said Kerr, 68. “Protecting anonymity isn’t a fight that can be won. Anyone that’s typed in their name on Google understands that.”

“Our job now is to engage in a productive debate, which focuses on privacy as a component of appropriate levels of security and public safety,” Kerr said. “I think all of us have to really take stock of what we already are willing to give up, in terms of anonymity, but (also) what safeguards we want in place to be sure that giving that doesn’t empty our bank account or do something equally bad elsewhere.”

Kurt Opsahl, a senior staff lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an advocacy group that defends online free speech, privacy and intellectual property rights, said Kerr’s argument ignores both privacy laws and American history.

“Anonymity has been important since the Federalist Papers were written under pseudonyms,” Opsahl said. “The government has tremendous power: the police power, the ability to arrest, to detain, to take away rights. Tying together that someone has spoken out on an issue with their identity is a far more dangerous thing if it is the government that is trying to tie it together.”

Opsahl also said Kerr ignores the distinction between sacrificing protection from an intrusive government and voluntarily disclosing information in exchange for a service.

“There is something fundamentally different from the government having information about you than private parties,” he said. “We shouldn’t have to give people the choice between taking advantage of modern communication tools and sacrificing their privacy.”

GRANJENO, Texas (Nov. 8) – Founded 240 years ago, this sleepy Texas town along the Rio Grande has outlasted the Spanish, then the Mexicans and then the short-lived independent Republic of Texas. But it may not survive the U.S. government’s effort to secure the Mexican border with a steel fence.

A map obtained by The Associated Press shows that the double- or triple-layer fence may be built as much as two miles from the river on the U.S. side of the Rio Grande, leaving parts of Granjeno and other nearby communities in a potential no-man’s-land between the barrier and the water’s edge.

Based on the map and what the residents have been told, the fence could run straight through houses and backyards. Some fear it could also cut farmers off from prime farmland close to the water.

“I don’t sleep right because I’m worried,” said Daniel Garza, a 74-year-old retiree born and raised in Granjeno. Garza said federal agents told him that the gray brick house he built just five years ago and shares with his 72-year-old wife is squarely in the fence’s path.

“No matter what they offer, I don’t want to move, I don’t want to leave,” Garza said, his eyes watering.

Congress has authorized $1.2 billion for 700 miles of fence at the Mexican border to keep out illegal immigrants and drug smugglers. The plans call for about 330 miles of virtual fences – cameras, underground sensors, radar and other technology – and 370 miles of real fences. About 70 miles of real fence are set to be built in the Rio Grande Valley, at the southeastern tip of Texas, by the end of 2008.

The Rio Grande has been the international boundary since the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo in 1848 ended the Mexican-American War. But officials say that putting the fence right up against the river could interfere with its flow during a flood and change its course, illegally altering the border.

The map obtained by the AP shows seven stretches of proposed fence in the Rio Grande Valley, including one section that could cut through the property of about 35 of Granjeno’s nearly 100 houses. City leaders and residents say federal officials have shown them the same map.

Exactly how many Rio Grande Valley residents could lose some or all of their property is unclear. The map does not have a lot of detail, and depicts only one portion of the valley, which has about 2 million people overall.

Local residents, many of whom have put “No Border Wall” signs on their cars and in their yards, say they have been assured they will be compensated at fair market value for any property taken by the U.S. government. But that has not given them much comfort.

“We want to be safe, but it’s just that this is not a good plan,” said Cecilia Benavides, whose riverfront land in Roma, about 50 miles upriver from Granjeno, was granted to the family by the Spanish in 1767. “It gives Mexico the river and everything that’s behind that wall. It doesn’t make any sense to me.”

Michael Friel, a Customs and Border Protection spokesman in Washington, said the maps are preliminary and no final decisions on the route of the fence have been made. But he said the maps reflect the government’s judgment of how best to secure the border against intruders.

“Our agency, Customs and Border Protection, has an obligation to secure our nation’s border and we take that obligation, or that responsibility, very seriously,” Friel said.

The fence would be at least 15 feet high and capable of withstanding a crash of a 10,000-pound vehicle going 40 mph, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

Exactly what it would look like has not been decided, but it could consist of concrete-filled steel posts a few inches apart, or perhaps sheet metal with small openings. It would not be continuous, but would instead be broken up in several sections of various length.

What will happen to the land between the fence and the river is the biggest question for landowners in border towns like Granjeno, a town of three streets and about 400 people situated in a mostly corn-growing region of the Rio Grande Valley.

J.D. Salinas, the top elected official in Hidalgo County, said he can’t get an answer no matter how many times he asks.

“Are we going to lose prime farmland because they are going to build a structure that’s not going to work?” Salinas asked. “You’re moving the border, basically two miles. You’re giving it up to Mexico, and the U.S.-Mexico treaties say you are not supposed to do that.”

Local officials also fear the fence could cut off access to drinking water that is pumped from the river and piped in to 35,000 homes in the Rio Grande Valley. They fear that town officials will not be allowed to set foot inside the no-man’s-land to repair any pumps that might fail.

Homeland Security documents on a department Web site say that “in some cases, secure gates will be constructed to allow land owners access to their private property near the Rio Grande.” But the documents offer few details.

“They said there’s going to be gates, and I said, ‘That’s wonderful. What kind of gates?'” said Noel Benavides, Cecilia Benavides’ husband. The only specific type described, he said, was an electronic gate.

“That requires power. What happens when it floods?” Benavides said he asked federal officials. He never got an answer.

Granjeno Mayor Alberto Magallan said his small town wants to fight. But with only one business – an agricultural trucking company and bar – and a per capita income of $9,000, it is unlikely they can afford to do anything but sell.

Manuel Olivarez Jr., a 63-year-old lumber salesman, said that his daughter’s and brother’s homes would be spared, but that the fence would run through their backyards. And Olivarez worries the Border Patrol is likely to pass very close to his daughter’s house every day.

“Probably if she sticks out her hand from the back door, a Border Patrol Jeep will be hit her,” Olivarez said with a nervous laugh.

Gloria Garza, Daniel Garza’s niece, said she worries the border fence will eventually destroy the town where she has lived all her life.

HOLIDAY: Most in attendance support panel’s decision to bar anti-war groups.

LONG BEACH – The 11th annual Long Beach Veterans Day Parade was a smooth and peaceful event on Saturday, despite controversy this week over three anti-war groups that were prohibited from marching.

Veterans for Peace, Iraq Veterans Against the War and Military Families Speak Out said their First Amendment rights were violated when the parade committee, a nonprofit organization, rejected their application.

Organizers have said the groups were trying to push a political agenda at an event that’s supposed to be free from politics.

With signs saying, “End The War Now,” more than 25 members from all three groups stood quietly on an island in the middle of the parade route on Atlantic Avenue in North Long Beach.

The groups on Saturday morning approached 9th District City Councilman Val Lerch, chairman of the parade committee, in a final effort to participate. Lerch, however, said the parade line-up was set for this year.

“They stood peacefully and honored our veterans,” said Lerch, whose 9th District includes the parade route. “And I thank them very much for that.”

The parade kicked off at 10 a.m. and headed south on Atlantic before it looped back around and spilled into Houghton Park.

The line-up featured more than 100 entries, including marching bands, vintage fire trucks and military jeeps, city officials on convertibles, horseback riders and drill teams.

The event concluded with a vendor fair and special ceremony in the park, which honored the parade’s three Grand Marshals: Military Marshal Col. Lisa Costanza, honorary Grand Marshal Long Beach Fire Department Battalion Chief Dave Kean and Celebrity Grand Marshal Cal Worthington.

A sea of nearly 3,000 parade-goers lined the street, holding up signs and banners and waving tiny U.S. flags.

Allyssa Finch, 8, held up a handmade sign saying, “Your Bravery Makes You A Hero!”

“We want our troops to know we love and support them,” said her mother Diane Finch, who attends the parade every year.

Long Beach resident Joan Noble was dressed head to toe in red, white and blue, complete with a U.S. flag umbrella and blanket.

“I was born on the Fourth of July, so I’m extra patriotic,” she said.

Although they weren’t allowed to march this year, Jason Lemieux, a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War, said members came anyway to support the veterans.

“We came out today in the spirit of Veterans Day,” said Lemieux, a Marine who served three tours in Iraq.

Member Joe Wheeler, who served in Iraq in 2003, came down from San Francisco with his 4-year-old daughter Ivy.

“Just because we don’t agree with the war doesn’t mean we served our country any less,” Wheeler said. “We have a right to be in this parade.”

“It’s almost symbolic of saying we are not really veterans,” said Eric Estenzo, who also served in Iraq in 2003.

Col. Ann Wright, a member of Veterans for Peace, worked as a deputy embassador for the U.S. embassy in Mongolia, and served in the U.S. Army for 29 years before resigning in 2003 after the U.S. invaded Iraq.

“It’s pretty sad when you have a private group excluding some veterans based on their political beliefs,” she said. “We have our differences, but we have all served our country. Veterans Day is for all veterans.”

Pat Alviso, a member of Military Families Speak Out, said the groups plan to meet with the parade committee in January and will try to march next year.

“Today is a sad day for Long Beach,” Alviso said. “It’s sad that some veterans have to stand off to the side when they could be in the parade.”

Most veterans who came to see the parade on Saturday supported the committee’s decision.

Fred Dunn, an 84-year-old World War II vet who was born and raised in Long Beach, said the anti-war groups should march in their own parade.

“This is to honor the veterans who have served,” he said. “It’s not a political deal.”

“Don’t rain on our parade,” said Shirley Oglesby, whose husband Jack served in Vietnam. “We don’t want war either. But here is not the time nor place.”

The Oglesbys have attended the parade for the last 11 years.

“I wonder what the men who died would think if they allowed protestors to march,” Jack Oglesby said.

“I’m against the war in Iraq too,” said Sasha Kilauren, who served in the U.S. Navy during the Cold War. “But these groups shouldn’t be allowed to march in this type of parade. It’s inappropriate.”

Vet George Kerr, 65, said seeing the anti-war groups on Saturday was reminiscent of the atmosphere in 1967 when he returned home from Vietnam.

Wes Davey, drafted during the Vietnam War, thought America learned a lesson in Vietnam. He never thought he’d spend his 54th birthday in Baghdad, or that a son would serve there, too.

Brandon Day carries the names of 11 dead comrades tattooed on his right arm. But you don’t need to see the tattoos to see his pain. It’s in his eyes.

And Raymond Camper is one of the Minnesota National Guard members who served a longer stretch in Iraq than any other U.S. troops deployed there.

Camper, Davey and Day share more than their time in uniform. They share the anger and disenchantment of many veterans who have returned from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They also share a determination to speak out.

The three are among the founding members of the Minnesota chapter of Iraq Veterans Against the War, a group established here in September.

(For more information, visit the website at www.ivaw.org.)

Today is Veterans Day (government offices will be closed Monday), and Iraq Veterans Against the War will join Veterans For Peace near the State Capitol this morning for a reading of the names of Minnesotans who have died in Iraq. Afterward, the antiwar vets hope new members will join them to help get word to other veterans that there is strength in numbers, and in telling the truth.

Drafted as a teenager during the Vietnam era, Davey was a National Guard and Army Reserve soldier who retired with the rank of master sergeant after serving in Iraq at the start of the war.

Now, at 58, he is president of the Minnesota chapter of Iraq Veterans Against the War.

Speaking last week at Augsburg College, Davey said the war was based on lies from the Bush administration and that, while servicemen and women and their families have borne the war’s sacrifice, the affluent in the political and corporate worlds are sacrificing nothing and are profiting from the war.

Davey said veterans returning from Iraq — many suffering from undiagnosed or untreated physical and mental problems — are angered by the attitude they encounter when they get back: “You volunteered. Shut up and die.”

Nearly 4,500 Americans have died in Iraq and Afghanistan (this year has been the bloodiest to date, in both countries). Meanwhile, the wounded and maimed return to a country where 70 percent of the public opposes the war but few do anything about it, including the “opposition” in Congress. No wonder there is rising anger among veterans.

Day, 29, enlisted after 9/11 and served two tours in Iraq, the second ending in September 2006. After 9/11, he had an eagle and a flag tattooed on his right shoulder, a sign of his desire to defend America. Now, on that same arm, tattooed dog tags bear the names of 10 soldiers in his company who died in Iraq, as well as the name of a friend who committed suicide after coming home.

The darkness doesn’t go away

“Being in Iraq fills you with a darkness that doesn’t go away,” Day told a gathering at the Cathedral of St. Paul in September, recounting how he pulled another friend’s body from the wreckage of a Humvee. Now studying engineering at the University of Minnesota, Day finds that his outrage at the waste of lives in Iraq fuels his passion to speak against the war.

After four soldiers in his unit were killed in an explosion, he says, an Army psychiatrist counseled the grieving troops. But after two hours, the shrink looked at his watch and said, “Well, I guess we should get out of here.”

After that, Day says, the soldiers decided they couldn’t talk about their feelings. Instead, their attitude became, “The Army broke me, and they can’t fix me.”

Today’s reading of the names of the dead will follow a 10:30 bell-ringing ceremony at the First Shot Memorial on the west side of the Veterans Services Building near the Capitol. Afterward, at noon, the group will meet at Macalester Plymouth United Church, 1658 Lincoln Av., St. Paul. All Iraq-era veterans are welcome. They may also e-mail Minnesota@ivaw.org.

“For the second time in my life, a president has plunged our country into a quagmire where there is no way to win a victory which can be defined,” Davey says.

“… the literature on counter-insurgency is so enormous that, had it been put aboard the Titanic, it would have sunk that ship without any help from the iceberg. However, the outstanding fact is that almost all of it has been written by the losers.” – Martin van Creveld, in The Changing Face Of War, 2006

11/09/07 “Asia Times” — — Amid the George W Bush administration’s relentless campaign to “change the subject” from Iraq to Iran, how to “win” the war against the Iraqi resistance, Sunni or Shi’ite, now means – according to counter-insurgency messiah General David Petraeus – calling an air strike.

On a parallel level, the Pentagon has practically finished a base in southern Iraq less than 10 kilometers from the border with Iran called Combat Outpost Shocker. The Pentagon maintains this is for the US to prevent Iranian weapons from being smuggled into Iraq. Rather, it’s to control a rash of US covert, sabotage operations across the border targeting Iran’s Khuzestan province.

With the looming Turkish threat of invading Iraqi Kurdistan and President General President Musharraf’s new “let’s jail all the lawyers” coup within a coup in Pakistan, the bloody war in the plains of Mesopotamia is lower down in the news cycle – not to mention the interminable 2008 US presidential soap opera. Rosy spinning, though, still rules unchecked.

The Pentagon – via Major General Joseph Fil, commander of US forces in Baghdad – is relentlessly spinning there’s now less violence in the capital, a “sustainable” trend. This is rubbish.

Fil cannot even admit to the basic fact that Baghdad has been reduced to a collection of blast-walled, isolated ghettos in search of a city. Baghdad, from being 65% Sunni, is now at least 75% Shi’ite, and counting. Sunni and Shi’ite residents alike confirm sectarian violence has died down because there are virtually no more neighborhoods to be ethnically cleansed.

When Fil says the Iraqi forces are “much, much more effective”, what he means is they are much more ferocious. Terrified middle class, secular Shi’ite residents have told Asia Times Online these guards – Shi’ites themselves – roaming Baghdad with their machine guns pointing to the sidewalks are “worse than the Americans”.

Violence has also (relatively) decreased because the bulk of Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army is still lying low, following his strict orders, even though they are being targeted by constant US air strikes on Sadr City.

The falling numbers of US deaths have also been subjected to merciless spinning. Yet already more US troops have been killed in Iraq in 2007 than in all of 2006. This temporary fall is not caused by a burst of Sunni Iraqi resistance good will – even though an array of groups has taken some time out to concentrate forces in these past few months on unifying their struggle (See It’s the resistance, stupid Asia Times Online, October 17, 2007.)

Once again, Baghdad residents, who daily have to negotiate life in hell, reveal what’s going on. Lately, as a Shi’ite businessman says, “We have not seen the Americans. They used to come to my neighborhood almost every day at night, with Humvees and Bradleys. They stopped at the end of September.” This means less US-conducted dangerous “missions” in the Baghdad wasteland – with less exposure to snipers and improvised explosive devices (IEDs) – and more time spent in ultra-fortified bases.

The Pentagon even had to admit that sniper attacks, conducted by real pros, have quadrupled during the past year and could “potentially inflict even more casualties than IEDs”. The US Department of Defense’s Defense Advance Research Projects Agency had to rush a program using lasers to identify snipers before they shoot.

Anyway, whenever there is a mission in Baghdad now it inevitably means an air strike. Mega-slum Sadr City residents confirm the US keeps attacking alleged Mahdi Army “terrorist” haunts – but mostly from the air.

With the US corporate media operating virtually like a Pentagon information agency, the only news fit to print is that as of early this week there were 3,855 American dead in Iraq. But most of all – and never mentioned – there were 28,451 wounded in combat. And as of October 1, there were no less than 30,294 military victims of accidents and diseases so serious they had to be medically sent out of Iraq.

When in doubt, ‘liberate’ from the air Brigadier General Qasim Atta, spokesman for the Baghdad security plan, revealed this week Iraq’s security forces have set up 250 spy cameras across Baghdad – presumably to track the Sunni resistance, the Mahdi Army and remaining al-Qaeda in the Land of the Two Rivers operatives. Atta has argued “the terrorists are now forced to resort to kidnappings and planting roadside bombs because our security plan is working”. That’s more rubbish.

Kidnapping is an established industry in Baghdad; with the exodus of the middle classes to Jordan, Syria and beyond, now there’s virtually no one flush enough to be kidnapped. IEDs continue to follow wherever American convoys roam. And since they are not roaming – they stick to base – fewer IEDs are exploding. As for al-Qaeda, it has relocated from Baghdad neighborhoods such as Dora – but it will be back.

With fewer missions on the ground, the Pentagon could not but launch four times more air strikes on Iraqis in 2007 – the year of Bush’s “surge” – than in the whole of 2006. Up to the end of September, there had been 1,140 air strikes. Last month, there were more air strikes than during the siege that devastated Fallujah in November 2004.

Even discounting the criminal absurdity of an occupation routinely dropping the bomb on packed neighborhoods of a city it already occupies, civilians are the inevitable “collateral damage” of these attacks – families, women, children, assorted “non-combatants”. The US Air Force does not even take responsibility – claiming the air strikes are ordered by scared-to-death convoys of Humvees patrolling, say, the mean streets of Sadr City.

The Pentagon talk of “precision strikes” and “reducing collateral damage” means nothing in this context. This appalling human-rights disaster has to be attributed to counter-insurgency messiah Petraeus, the “loser”, according to Martin van Creveld, who wrote the latest book on the matter, The Changing Face Of War.

But for public relations purposes inside the US, Petraeus’ “by his book” approach works wonders. The Pentagon can spin to oblivion to a cowered media that US deaths are falling. Who cares what the Nuri al-Maliki “sovereign” Iraqi government says? Maliki is nothing but the mayor of the Green Zone anyway. Who cares what the “fish” – who support the “sea” of the resistance, Sunni or Shi’ite – feel? 80% of them are unemployed anyway – and they merely struggle to survive as second-class citizens in their own land.

There’s hardly any electricity, fuel or food in Baghdad – everything is rationed – for anyone who’s not aligned with a militia-protected faction. The only other option is to flee. With at least a staggering 4.4 million, according to the United Nations, either refugees or internally displaced, options are dwindling fast. There may be as many as 2 million Iraqi refugees in Syria alone. Damascus, in despair, has tightened its visa rules: only academics and businessmen are now entitled. No less than 14% of the entire Iraqi population has been displaced – courtesy of the Bush administration.

Oh, but the Bush administration is “winning” the war, of course. Counter-insurgency doctrine rules that the enemy must be controlled with social, political, ideological and psychological weapons, and risks have to be taken so civilians can be protected.

The surging Petraeus turned that upside down. Or maybe not – he’s just providing his own scholarly follow-up to the indiscriminate bombings of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia in the 1960s and 1970s. Petraeus, His master’s voice, might as well call an air strike over the whole of Mesopotamia and then call it “victory”.

11/09/07 “TPMmuckraker” — — After Pervez Musharraf declared martial law this weekend, Condoleezza Rice vowed to review U.S. assistance to Pakistan, one of the largest foreign recipients of American aid. Musharraf, of course, has been a crucial American ally since the start of the Afghanistan war in 2001, and the U.S. has rewarded him ever since with over $10 billion in civilian and (mostly) military largesse. But, perhaps unsure whether Musharraf’s days might in fact be numbered, Rice contended that the explosion of money to Islamabad over the past seven years was “not to Musharraf, but to a Pakistan you could argue was making significant strides on a number of fronts.”

In fact, however, a considerable amount of the money the U.S. gives to Pakistan is administered not through U.S. agencies or joint U.S.-Pakistani programs. Instead, the U.S. gives Musharraf’s government about $200 million annually and his military $100 million monthly in the form of direct cash transfers. Once that money leaves the U.S. Treasury, Musharraf can do with it whatever he wants. He needs only promise in a secret annual meeting that he’ll use it to invest in the Pakistani people. And whatever happens as the result of Rice’s review, few Pakistan watchers expect the cash transfers to end.

About $10.58 billion has gone to Pakistan since 9/11. That puts Pakistan in an elite category of U.S. foreign-aid recipients: only Israel, Egypt and Jordan get more or comparable U.S. funding. (That’s only in the unclassified budget: the covert-operations budget surely includes millions more, according to knowledgeable observers.) While Israel and Egypt get more money, Pakistan and Jordan are the only countries that get U.S. cash from four major funding streams: development assistance, security assistance, “budget support” and Coalition Support Funds. Pakistan, however, gets most of its U.S. assistance from Coalition Support Funds and from budget support. And it’s those two funding streams that have minimal accountability at best.

The “budget support” package is the lion’s share of U.S. economic assistance to Pakistan — and it’s not spent in conjunction with any U.S. agency. “It’s a cash transfer,” says Lisa Curtis, a South Asia analyst at the Heritage Foundation who used to work on the South Asia desk at the State Department and for Sen. Richard Lugar (R-ID). “That goes directly to the Pakistani treasury.” It totalled around $200 million each year until earlier this year, when Rep. John Tierney (D-MA) plucked $75 million of out of it and put it in an education fund for USAID to administer. In theory, budget support is supposed to free up the treasuries of the four countries that receive it for investing in their national infrastructure. But in practice, recipients can do with it whatever they like. “The notion is it gives them greater flexibility on how to use the money,” explains Craig Cohen, vice president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “The trade-off is accountability.”

In Pakistan’s case, the only oversight is an annual agreement, known as the Shared Objectives statement, whereby top State Department and Treasury Department officials receive from Musharraf deputies — usually Prime Minister Shawkat Aziz — an explanation of how Musharraf intends to spend the money. The agreement is reached entirely in secret. “A good question is what are the objectives we’re basing this budget support on,” Cohen says.

Accountability also suffers in the Coalition Support Funds. According to Rick Barton of CSIS, who spearheaded perhaps the most comprehensive report on the murky world of U.S.-Pakistan ties, Pakistan has gotten over $6 billion in Coalition Support Funds since 9/11, with disbursements rising to total about $100 million a month. This, too, is a direct cash transfer. “The Coalition Support funding is basically a sort of a handshake deal between militaries,” Barton says. “We don’t have good sense where it goes. … we don’t ask a lot of questions, and we don’t have a lot of record-keeping. “

Only about ten percent of the $10.58 billion since 9/11 has gone toward development aid and humanitarian assistance, according to the CSIS report — even after Pakistan suffered a devastating earthquake in October 2005. “Close to 90 percent goes to the military-led government,” Barton says. “Some of it is directly into the military, and the other pieces go into the Musharraf government.”

In Pakistan, the military runs not just the government, but major sections of the economy as well. Joshua Hammer recently reported for The Atlantic that the Pakistani military owns large stakes in the country’s “banks, cable-TV companies, insurance agencies, sugar refineries, private security firms, schools, airlines, cargo services, and textile factories.” Mainlining largely untraceable money into the Pakistani treasury helps this system perpetuate itself — even as widespread public discontent, from both moderates and radicals, boils over. It also sends the signal that the U.S. prefers to have relations with Pervez Musharraf rather than the Pakistani people.

With an endless, futile and costly Iraq war, a stinking economy and most Americans seeing the country on the wrong track, the greatest national group delusion is that electing Democrats in 2008 is what the country needs.

Keith Olbermann was praised when he called the Bush presidency a criminal conspiracy. That missed the larger truth. The whole two-party political system is a criminal conspiracy hiding behind illusion induced delusion.

Virtually everything that Bush correctly gets condemnation for could have been prevented or negated by Democrats, if they had had courage, conviction and commitment to maintaining the rule of law and obedience to the Constitution. Bush grabbed power from the feeble and corrupt hands of Democrats. Democrats have failed the vast majority of Americans. So why would sensible people think that giving Democrats more power is a good idea? They certainly have done little to merit respect for their recent congressional actions, or inaction when it comes to impeachment of Bush and Cheney.

One of the core reasons the two-party stranglehold on our political system persists is that whenever one party uses its power to an extreme degree it sets the conditions for the other party–its partner in the conspiracy–to take over. Then the other takes its turn in wielding excessive power. Most Americans–at least those that vote–seem incapable of understanding that the Democrats and Republicans are two teams in the same league, serving the same cabal running the corporatist plutocracy. By keeping people focused on rooting for one team or the other, the behind-the-scenes rulers ensure their invisibility and power.

The genius of the plutocrats is to create the illusion of important differences between the two parties, and the illusion of political choice in elections. In truth, the partner parties compete superficially and dishonestly to entertain the electorate, to maintain the aura of a democracy. Illusion creates the delusion of Americans that voting in elections will deliver political reforms, despite a long history of politicians lying in campaigns about reforms, new directions and bold new policies. The rulers need power shifting between the teams to maintain popular trust in the political system. Voting manifests that trust–as if changing people will fix the system. It doesn’t.

So voters become co-conspirators in the grand political criminal conspiracy. Those who vote for Democrats or Republicans perpetuate the corrupt, dishonest and elitist plutocracy that preferentially serves the interests of the Upper Class and a multitude of special interests–some aligned with the Republicans and some with the Democrats. Voting only encourages worthless politicians and those that fund and corrupt them.

Public discontent leads to settling for less through lesser evil voting rather than bold thinking about how to reform the system to get genuine political competition and better candidates and government.

I understand why sane people would not want to vote for Republicans, based on the Bush presidency. But I cannot understand why politically engaged people think that putting Democrats in power will restore American democracy and put the welfare of non-wealthy Americans above the interests of the wealthy and the business sector. Bill Clinton’s administration strongly advanced globalization and the loss of good jobs to foreign countries. Economic inequality kept rising. Trade agreements sold us out.

And in this primary season talk about reforming our health care system among Democrats never gets serious about providing universal health care independent of the insurance industry. And why should citizens be supportive of a party that favors illegal immigration–law breaking–that primarily serves business interests by keeping labor costs low?

Nor have Democrats stood up to challenge the official 9/11 story that no longer has any credibility to anyone that takes the time to seriously examine all its inconsistencies with what really happened and the laws of physics.

Whoever wins the Democratic presidential nomination will not be free of corruption and lies. He or she will owe paybacks to all the fat-cat campaign donors. Voters will be choosing the lesser-evil Democratic presidential candidate. Is that really the only choice? Is there no other action that can advance the national good?

There seem to be just two other choices. Vote for some third party presidential candidate, but the downside of that is twofold. No such candidate can win in the current rigged system. Worse, voting gives a stamp of credibility to the political system, as if it was fair, when it is not. Voting says that you still believe that the political system merits your support and involvement.

The second option is to boycott voting to show total rejection of the current political system and the plutocratic cabal using the two-party duopoly to carry out its wishes. When a democracy no longer is legitimate, no longer is honest, and no longer serves the interests of ordinary citizens, then what other than violent revolution can change it? When the electoral system no longer can provide honest, corruption free candidates with any chance of winning, what can citizens do? Either stay home or just vote in local and state races and for ballot measures.

I say remove the credibility and legitimacy of the federal government by reducing voter turnout to extremely low levels. Show the world that the vast majority of Americans have seen the light and no longer are deluding themselves about their two-party democracy. A boycott on voting for candidates for federal office is a form of civil disobedience that has enormous power to force true political reforms from the political system. This is the only way to make it crystal clear that the presidency and Congress no longer represent any significant fraction of the people. This is the only way to show that America’s representative democracy is no longer representative and, therefore, is no longer a credible democracy. Just imagine a federal government trying to function in the usual ways when only 20 percent of the eligible voters actually voted.

It takes more courage to boycott voting than to vote for lesser evil Democrats and in the end this is the only way for people to feel proudly patriotic. This is the only way to not contribute to the ongoing bipartisan criminal conspiracy running the federal government.

We have broken government because the spirit of Americans that gave us our revolution and nation’s birth has been broken, in large measure by distractive and self-indulgent consumerism. It is better to recognize that those who vote suffer from delusion than to criticize those who do not vote as apathetic. Non-delusional nonvoters recognize the futility of voting.

Democrats will not restore our democracy. That is the painful truth that most people will not readily accept. Such is the power of group delusion. Voting produces never-ending cycles of voter dissatisfaction with those elected, both Democrats and Republicans. It is time to break this cycle of voter despair. Voters that bitch and moan about Congress and the White House have nobody to blame but themselves, no matter which party they voted for.

If it looks like a recession and feels like a recession …

“Quite frankly,” said Senator Charles Schumer, peering over his glasses at the Fed chairman, Ben Bernanke, “I think we are at a moment of economic crisis, stemming from four key areas: falling housing prices, lack of confidence in creditworthiness, the weak dollar and high oil prices.”

He asked Mr. Bernanke, at a Congressional hearing Thursday, if we were headed toward a recession.

An aide handed the chairman his dancing shoes, and Mr. Bernanke executed a flawless version of the Washington waffle. He said: “Our forecast is for moderate, but positive, growth going forward.” He said: “Economists are extremely bad at predicting turning points, and we don’t pretend to be any better.” He said: “We have not calculated the probability of recession, and I wouldn’t want to offer that today.”

With all due respect to the chairman, he would see the recession that so many others are feeling if he would only open his eyes. While Mr. Bernanke and others are waiting for the official diagnosis (a decline in the gross domestic product for two successive quarters), the disease is spreading and has been spreading for some time.

The evidence is all around us. Representative Elijah Cummings of Maryland told Mr. Bernanke that many members of Congress are holding forums in their districts “to help people who are coming to our doors, literally with tears in their eyes, and trying to figure out how they’re going to manage a foreclosure that’s right around the corner.”

The housing meltdown is getting the attention, but there’s so much more. Bankruptcies and homelessness are on the rise. The job market has been weak for years. The auto industry is in trouble. The cost of food, gasoline and home heating oil are soaring at a time when millions of Americans are managing to make it from one month to another solely by the grace of their credit cards.

The country has been in denial for years about the economic reality facing American families. That grim reality has been masked by the flimflammery of official statistics (job growth good, inflation low) and the muscular magic of the American way of debt: mortgages on top of mortgages, pyramiding student loans and an opiatelike addiction to credit cards at rates that used to get people locked up for loan-sharking.

The big story out of Mr. Bernanke’s appearance before the Joint Economic Committee was his prediction that the economy was likely to worsen. Only the people still trapped in denial could have believed otherwise.

This is what Representative Maurice Hinchey of upstate New York told the chairman:

“This economy is not doing well. And the example of the mortgage closures on 2 million people — and maybe a lot more than that as time goes on — is really not the cause of the economic problem we’re facing, but it’s just a factor of it. It’s a factor of the weakness of this economy.”

In an interview after the hearing, Representative Hinchey discussed the disconnect between official government reports and the reality facing working families. He noted that the unemployment rate does not include workers who have become so discouraged that they’ve given up looking for a job.

And the most popular measure of inflation, the Consumer Price Index, does not include the cost of energy or food, “the two most significant aspects of the increased cost of living for the American people.”

The elite honchos in Washington and their courtiers in the news media are all but completely out of touch with the daily struggle of working families. Thirty-seven million Americans live in poverty and close to 60 million others are just a notch above the official poverty line.

An illness, an auto accident, the loss of a job — almost anything can knock them off their rickety economic perch.

We hear over and over that consumer spending accounts for 70 percent of the gross domestic product, but we seldom hear about the frightening number of Americans who are trying desperately to maintain a working-class or middle-class style of life while descending into a sinkhole of debt.

“We have an economy that is based on increased debt,” said Mr. Hinchey. “The national debt is now slightly above $9 trillion, and ordinary working people are finding that they have to borrow more and more to maintain their standard of living.”

“The average now is that people are spending close to 10 percent more than they earn every month. Obviously, that can’t be sustained.”

Which psychological torture would you rather not have to endure (bearing in mind that you don’t know how or when it will end):

1. Being made to wear panties and chained to a heap of fellow prisoners while rude foreigners insult you. Or,

2. What Ronald Bradley Naulls endured after his house and his Corona, California cannabis dispensary were raided by the DEA July 17?

Naulls’s torment was amplified because his wife Anisha was put through it, too, and their children were the very instrument by which it was applied. On the day of the raids Aaliyah, Amaiyah, and Aryanna Naulls -ages 5, 3, and 1, respectively- were taken from their home and placed in foster care at a location undisclosed to their parents. In the name of “family values” these healthy, well-cared-for little girls – impressionable, frightened little girls- were taken from their mother and father because the raiders had found edible marijuana stored in a refrigerator in the Naullses’s garage.

The rip-off of the Naulls kids was described to your correspondent on July 26 by an outraged attorney named James Anthony -a former assistant city attorney in Oakland who had helped Naulls fight a move by Corona politicians to close his dispensary. According to Anthony, Naulls had gotten a retail-business license and opened “Healing Nations” in April 2006, just before the city imposed a moratorium on cannabis dispensaries. He joined the Chamber of Commerce, donated to charities, got on well with his neighbors in a nondescript Corona strip mall. Anthony thinks the city’s attempt to close Healing Nations signaled the DEA that a raid would be welcome by the local power structure.

Anthony regrets having advised Naulls to pay taxes to the state Board of Equalization. When Healing Nations was raided a DEA agent told the media that it had grossed $1.2 million in nine months; the tax statement was the apparent source of the info. All the Naullses’s assets were seized, including accounts from a computer consulting company and a property management firm that Ronnie had started in years past. Financial ruin and prison was the worst-case scenario Anthony had foreseen for Naulls -not losing the kids.

Naulls is 27. Anthony described him as “a Republican, a church-goer, a computer nerd, a small business person. He looks like Will Smith. Anisha’s a beauty queen. The kids are cute as buttons. There was no trauma in their lives until the cops showed up and kicked the door in at six o’clock in the morning. They rousted everybody out of bed, waved shotguns around, handcuffed mommy and daddy and put them in separate police cars with helicopters overhead. Now the kids are in the clutches of Riverside County Health and Human Services and their mother is being held to answer on felony child endangerment charges.

“Grandma wants to take the kids,” said Anthony. “She’s a real estate broker, Japanese-American. But they won’t let her until they’ve completed a background check because grandpa has a 19-year-old DUI… The California Supreme Court has said that marijuana should be treated like any prescription drug. If CPS has some other evidence that somebody is abusing the kids, fine, step in and see that they’re protected. But the presence of medicine is utterly irrelevant. Is the county going to take children out of every home where there’s a prescription drug? Why not put a padlock on the school at 3 o’clock and keep them all?”

Don’t give them any ideas, James.

After the raids, Ronnie Naulls’s mother had put up her house to secure his release. The process took six days and he didn’t emerge from a federal detention center in Los Angeles until July 23. In addition to consoling his wife and agonizing over his daughters (with whom they would have brief supervised visits in a Riverside County office building on Wednesday mornings), Naulls had to focus on his looming federal prosecution and Anisha’s felony child endangerment case –how to find lawyers, how to raise funds to pay them, what approaches to take. He also had to make ends meet, i.e. get a job.

Anisha recounts: “They took my SUV. I’d had it for a year before Ronnie started [the dispensary]. We were told that the DEA had given it back to the bank. I called the bank and asked to get my car back. The bank said ‘Sure,’ but then they called the DEA and the DEA said ‘If you give them the car back, we’ll take it right back from them again.’ So the bank got scared and wouldn’t give it back. So it’s like ‘Wow, can you leave us alone, we’re trying to move on!'”

Ronnie and Anisha Naulls went to Riverside County Superior Court July 27 seeking custody of their children. They were represented by Geoff Gerber, a local family law specialist. According to James Anthony, who debriefed Gerber, “The judge got it that both parents are out of custody now and seem to be okay parents, so why not give the kids back to them? He looked to the social worker for guidance. ‘Oh, right the parents are pot smokers!'” The judge authorized CPS to return the children when the parents showed declining THC levels. This condition may not be legal, says Anthony, who wished he had the resources to argue to an appellate court that the parents’s THC levels were irrelevant.

Anthony described an episode that had ratcheted up the Naullses’s terror level. While Ronnie was still in jail, DEA agents had come to their house unannounced to return the computers confiscated during the raid. Anisha told them to leave everything on the porch. The agents tried to assure her that their intentions were benign but she would let them in the house. The next day, Anthony said, “a social worker called to say that the DEA had informed them that Anisha was being resistant and uncooperative. The social worker said ‘You have to cooperate with any government official who comes by your house, otherwise it looks like you have something to hide and you’re not a fit home for these children.’ The county is being used by the DEA to increase their leverage. ‘We have your children so you have to throw your doors open to the DEA without a warrant.’ Anisha’s position was correct.”

Ronnie had been ordered to undergo drug testing by two separate tentacles of The System: federal pretrial services and county social services. “Ronnie had to do drug testing for pretrial services up in Orange County and we had to do drug testing for social services in Corona,” Anisha expalined. “We had to call a number every day and if it said our color, we had to go in. It’s overwhelming.” Ronnie Naulls naively figured that going to a job interview took priority over going to a drug test. He had been asked back for a follow-up after an initial interview with a local company in the computer field –“a good-paying job and they really liked him,” according to Anisha. “Ronnie thought they were going to hire him.” Instead, he was picked up and returned to federal detention on August 23 for having missed two pee tests (the second miss being on a day he went to court in an attempt to get the girls back) and failing to keep his ankle bracelet charged. Middle-class people who have had little contact with The Syste, often think they can explain to an understanding supervisor, that common sense will prevail, that exceptions will be granted; poor people tend to be conversant with The System and to know better.

Naulls had made another foolish move after the July 27 hearing when he went to greet well-wishers who were holding a rally in front of the Healing Nations dispensary. He was observed by government agents. “The DEA got on the phone with Ronnie’s mom,” according to Anisha, “and told her, ‘You’re about to lose your house and your son doesn’t care, he’s out there protesting.’ Ronnie’s mom called and she’s crying. They put Ronnie through hell. Even the judge noticed, he said ‘These things they brought you back on are very minor … it’s kind of silly but I have to go along with it.'”

Ronnie Naulls’s folks came from Kansas. They are not related to the great UCLA basketball player Willie Naulls (a question he gets asked all the time). Ronnie discovered the analgesic effects of marijuana after fracturing his neck and shoulder in an auto accident; large doses of Ibuprofen and Naproxen had caused bleeding in his stomach. He decided to open a dispensary when his father was diagnosed with prostate cancer. “It seemed absurd that you would pay for a card and there’s nowhere to get your medicine in the county,” Naulls said. He did research on the internet and hired attorney Robert Raich to help him create a non-profit. The pent-up demand turned out to be enormous. At the time of the raid, Healing Nations had almost 3,000 members and Naulls was attempting to repeat his success in an underserved area north of San Diego.

“I thought that in America if you don’t infringe on anyone’s life, liberty or property, the government would stay out of your business,” Naulls said when we spoke on Friday, Aug. 10. He was dreading the prospect of federal prosecution but hopeful about getting the girls back soon from the county –maybe that very afternoon. During their once-a-week supervised visits the children seemed “bewildered,” Naulls said. They didn’t know why they had been taken from their home and he and Anisha were not allowed to explain it to them. How could you, honestly? “The plant that mommy and daddy smoke that makes them feel better, some people think it’s very, very bad … “

RN: Our five-year-old thinks she’s she’s being punished. She promises to be good. She doesn’t understand why she can’t come home.

CP: What do you tell her?

RN: The social worker won’t allow us to tell her anything. All I can tell her is that Jesus teaches us to be patient and to pray and daddy promises that you will come home. But I can’t say you’re going to be home soon or anything with regard to the time frame.

CP: That must be torture.

RN: It’s absolute torture.

CP: Do you know anything about whose house they’re in?

RN: No. All we know is that they’re with a foster parent. We don’t know where they are or who they’re with. Nothing.

CP: Is it just your three girls living there or is there a bigger group?

RN: From what I gather they have other kids there. Aaliyah says that the kids are being mean to her. They don’t allow her to use the night light -she had a night light at home. My one-year-old has a diaper rash, which she never had before. Amaiyah had a scratch on her arm.

CP: What’s the criterion for the decision to let them come home? James Anthony said they were going to drug test you and if your THC level was going down, that would be a factor.

RN: My levels have been going down. But the social worker said that the criminal investigation could curtail them from coming home.

CP: Any sense that the social worker is sympathetic?

RN: No. They’re treating it like another drug case. I can tell by his demeanor, we’re just “drug people.” I gave him a copy of my doctor’s recommendation, but… Our lawyer is trying to be tactful and not offend the social workers. We’re afraid if we make any demands they’ll say ‘you’re not cooperating’ and they’ll keep them longer.

On Aug. 13 Naulls told CP that the girls were still in foster care.

RN: We still haven’t gotten our kids back. The social worker came by on Friday afternoon to inspect the house and make sure it was safe for the girls, so we got our hopes up. He went through the house, said he would make his decision today. He told us to call him at 3. We were still trying to reach him after 4. The fact that we couldn’t get ahold of him told me the news wasn’t going to be positive. Then he finally called back and said that their decision was not to give us the kids back because of the pending criminal investigation. He told Anisha, “You have an open case and Ronnie has an open case and what if you go to jail?” She said, “It’s not up to you to decide whether we go to jail.” So we go for another hearing to ask a judge to overrule Child Protective Services.

CP: How often does that happen?

RN: We’re told it’s 50-50. They look at the situation and also if we’ve been following Child Protective Services’ requests, like I am not using medicine and my THC levels are declining and my wife doesn’t have any THC in her system at all. We’ve been testing every other day.

On Aug. 16 the Naullses went to court and prevailed –they got their kids back after 30 days of separation, fear, and uncertainty– but there is no happy ending. Ronnie is facing federal charges for selling a controlled substance and may have to rely on a public defender. Federal law doesn’t acknowledge that cannabis is a medicinal herb or that California voted to legalize it. In the land of Common Sense there would be a “this-family-has-suffered-enough” defense; but we live in the land of Mandatory Minimums.

In the land of Common Sense the Naullses would have been given a warning of some kind instead of having their kids ripped off. The Naulls girls seem to be overcoming their ordeal. Some forms of torture leave no visible marks but cause nightmares down the line. We can only hope that their foster home was one of the good ones and that, having had each other throughout the five-week separation from their parents, they pulled through in tact. This is Anisha’s take on things after the girls had been home about five weeks:

“They told the girls that they were at the babysitters. And that we were working. So, that’s what they think. And they’re just kind of like: ‘Why did it take so long?’ And we say, ‘Well, we were trying to get things together for work.’

“They’re adjusting to being back home. It’s a process. They have a little bit of separation anxiety right now. My oldest will wake me up, ‘I had a nightmare the police took you.’ When Aaliyah started back to school -she had to miss a week of school- one of her classmates came up to her and was like ‘My mommy said that your mommy’s in jail.’ So Aaliyah comes home and says,’Mommy, my friend says that you were in jail. Is that what you were doing when I was at the babysitters?’ And I’m like ‘Wow, no. Mommy wouldn’t go to jail. Why would mommy go to jail? Your friend doesn’t know what she’s talking about.’ We’ve had a few conversations like that.

“My three-year-old will say, out of the blue, if I’m leaving, ‘Please don’t leave me on the freeway.’ And I’m like ‘Wow, mommy’s not going to leave you on the freeway.’ So … But they’re okay, they’re getting back to normal.”

Anisha had just learned that Riverside County is charging her with three counts of felony child endangerment -one for each of the girls, including Aryanna who could barely walk back in July, let alone get into the refrigerator in the garage. “These people are not nice,” says Anisha.

The False Premise of Endangerment

The premise on which government snatched the Naulls girls is as fraudulent as the premise on which the government invaded Iraq. In the extremely unlikely event that the girls went into the garage and the parents didn’t hear the alarm and the girls opened the refrigerator and found the marijuana edibles and unwrapped them and proceeded to gorge themselves, they would experience a cannabis overdose, which involves a very unpleasant torpor that can last for eight hours (some of which is typically spent asleep). There is no subsequent adverse effect. The most likely longterm reaction to an overdose of edible cannabis is an aversion to cannabis in any form. Just as there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, there is no poison in cannabis. The government promulgates whatever lies and policies are needed to advance corporate interests. War in Iraq: good for the oil companies. War on pot: good for the drug companies. War by any lies necessary.

The vote by more than 5 million Californians for Prop 215 was above all a testament to its safety, not its efficacy. Most people who smoked pot in social settings in the ’60s and ’70s and ’80s were unaware of its medical effects, let alone that it had been widely used in tinctures produced by Eli Lilly, etc.. But they did know that they and their friends never experienced reefer madness or any other health problems. Even most people who never smoked pot have known people who did and observed that its impact is negligible compared to alcohol and tobacco. The Prop 215 vote was a message from the people to the government that marijuana is relatively benign.

The government’s response has been, “Our mind is made up, don’t confuse us with the facts.” It is not just the feds who treat cannabis as if it causes grave harm; Riverside County’s Department of Social Services is operating on the same false assumption. After Prop 215 passed, Tod Mikuriya, MD, warned that implementation would hinge on state, county, and city agencies revising their protocols. Tod implored Ethan Nadelmann of the Lindesmith Center (now the Drug Policy Alliance) to conduct or underwrite what he called an “audit” that would involve contacting, advising, and pressuring every agency that had to adjust to marijuana becoming legal for medical use. Nadelmann said no, his group would be devoting its resources to funding medical marijuana initiatives in other states.

You don’t have to study Clausewitz or Sun Tzu on the art of war to know that sometimes a victory has to be consolidated before you try to gain more ground. The danger with advancing too soon is that your forces get overextended and you’re unable to defend what you’ve won.

Contributions to the Naulls Defense Fund can be made on a tax-deductible basis through Green-Aid.