The Rag Blog

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.

The U.S. now has an Attorney General, Mr. Michael Mukasey, who does not know if waterboarding is torture. One wonders what else escapes the knowledge of the Mr. Mukasey.

Is he aware that U.S. law forbids the practice of waterboarding, as do numerous international treaties? He has stated that he must withhold judgment on it until he receives more information. Will he continue to ‘withhold judgment’ on this practice, that he himself calls ‘repugnant,’ until some nation starts waterboarding U.S. soldiers? One may well ask why other countries, especially those with whom the U.S. is at war, should hesitate to waterboard their prisoners if the U.S. will not refrain from doing so. The answer is common decency, but with the world’s most powerful nation not demonstrating that trait, one cannot long expect other nations victimized by the United States to exhibit it.

Since this so-called ‘interrogation technique’ has been banned by domestic law, why, one could reasonably wonder, is there any debate about it? The answer is because for some bizarre reason, domestic law does not apply to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and President Bush has refused to say whether or not he has allowed that agency to practice it. At least he is not denying its use, as he originally and vehemently denied the existence of CIA-run prisons in foreign lands that don’t even bother to discuss the morality of torture. Perhaps Mr. Bush can hold his head high with the knowledge that in the U.S., that beacon of peace, freedom and morality, the ethics of whether to torture or not to torture prisoners is discussed publicly in the hallowed halls of Congress. That the debate comes down to a quasi-conclusion of ‘well, it’s probably not all that bad as long as we call it something else’ does not seem to diminish Mr. Bush’s pride in the moral leadership of the United States.

If Mr. Bush, Mr. Mukasey and certainly Vice President Dick Cheney are, if not warm proponents of waterboarding, at least willing to consider its use, it might be helpful to know what the brouhaha is all about.

This particular ‘interrogation method’ is not new. It was very popular during the Italian Inquisition five-hundred years ago and has appeared now and then since. The Japanese used it at least sporadically during World War II, as did U.S. soldiers in Vietnam. More recently the Khmer Rouge used it on prisoners in Cambodia. And following the high moral standards set by Italian, Japanese and Cambodian torturers, the CIA listed waterboarding on its list of approved ‘enhanced interrogation techniques.’ My, my, what a pretty term!

This ‘enhancement’ involves strapping an individual down face up so he or she is completely immobile, on an inclined board with the person’s feet raised above the head. The victim’s face is covered, sometimes wrapped with cellophane. Sometimes the victim is gagged. The torturer then pours water repeatedly onto the person’s face. This gives the impression of being submerged under waves and the victim believes he or she is drowning. The gag reflex activates as the person involuntarily tries to save him or herself from drowning. The experience, as related by those who have so been tortured, is terrifying.

This tame, academic description does not convey anything close to the enormity of the experience. Some information from the CIA which, for a time, waterboarded some of its employees as part of their training, may be beneficial. Those trainees lasted an average of fourteen seconds before begging to be released. And these were people who knew for a fact that they were not being drowned.

While the CIA will not classify waterboarding as torture, many CIA officials think it is useless because the victim will tell the ‘interrogator’ anything he or she wants to hear in order to stop the torture. In fact, this is one reason why torture is seen as unacceptable; information obtained in this way is generally useless.

As the term ‘waterboarding’ slowly found its way into the American consciousness, some interesting facts about its history were exposed. In 1947 the U.S. charged a Japanese army officer, Yukio Asano, with war crimes for using the technique on an American citizen. He was convicted and sentenced to fifteen years of hard labor. It appears that the U.S. view on waterboarding has changed considerably since that day. Will the U.S. now acquit Mr. Asano posthumously?

So this cruel practice is now, if not acceptable, at least not unacceptable, in the land of the free and the home of the brave. One wonders how long this archaic, savage and barbaric ‘interrogation method’ has been practiced by the United States. One further wonders what other such methods are and have been used since the U.S.’s immoral, illegal and obscene invasion of Iraq. Is it possible that U.S. soldiers have attached electrodes to the genitals of Iraqi prisoners? Have they stripped them and led them around with collars and leashes like dogs? Did they force naked prisoners to form human pyramids, and then photograph themselves standing in front of them, grinning happily? No, such cruel and inhumane behaviors are never tolerated by the United States; military training and shared accountability is such that these and/or similar practices would never occur. Oh wait, one forgets that all those things were perpetrated by U.S. soldiers on Iraqi prisoners in Baghdad. Well, slap a few low-level U.S. military wrists and we’ll forget the whole thing.

Which seems to be just what the Democratic-controlled U.S. Congress has done. As they blathered on about Mr. Mukasey’s refusal to term waterboarding torture; as they stood in righteous indignation that the highest law enforcement officer in the country would not endorse U.S. and international law; as they spluttered and dithered and then sought reasons to justify voting for him they apparently forgot not only their mandate, but their duty as well.

Mr. Bush had threatened to appoint an ‘acting’ Attorney General if Mr. Mukasey were not confirmed. Such an appointment would not require Congressional approval. Is Congress so deficient in clout, or perhaps it is spine that it lacks, that this action by the president would stand? Are the members of that governing body so willing to submit to presidential blackmail that they will confirm as the highest law enforcement officer in the country a man who will not support U.S. law that forbids waterboarding?

Mr. Bush, of course, has always bought into the jingoism that he personifies: any measure to protect the corporate interests of the exalted U.S. is justified. After all, this is the U.S., which can operate by different rules than the rest of the world. That seems to be sufficient reason to allow the torture of prisoners; the wiretapping of U.S. citizens; the dismissal of due process; restrictions on the rights to free speech and assembly, and a host of other measures Mr. Bush has taken in the name of freedom. One must give him credit: he has somehow caused Congress to interpret ‘supporting the troops’ as continuing the war for them, and equally as bizarre he has convinced them and many U.S. citizens that the best way for them to keep the rights of which they are so proud is to surrender them.

One naively looks to the next presidential election for some significant change. This will only mirror the disappointment of the last Congressional election that swept the war-mongering Republicans from office and replaced them with the war-tolerating Democrats. It took many years for the U.S. to learn important lessons from the mistakes of Vietnam, and not so many for them to forget them all. The confirmation of an Attorney General who condones torture is the latest in the U.S.’s long history of disgraceful injustice.

Editor’s Note: My two correspondents in Venezuela provided me with the following report based upon their meetings with government officials earlier today. -LMB

14 DEPUTIES IN NATIONAL ASSEMBLY COME OUT AGAINST THE GOVERNMENT

14 deputies are expected to go to the opposition side in the National Assembly between now and the December 2nd National Referendum to approve the constitutional reforms.

3 LEADERS, FORMERLY LOYAL TO CHAVEZ COME OUT AGAINST HIM

After ex-General and former Defemse Minister, Raul Baduel came out against the constitutional reforms earlier this week, the Attorney General, Isaias Rodriguez and Comptroller General of the Republic, Cloudosbaldo Russian are expected to publicly pronounce their opposition to the Constitutional Reform proposals. Such traitorous actions will weaken the cohesive authority of the State and hence Central Government.

VENEZUELAN MILITARY PENETRATED

Raul Isaias Baduel, former Four Star General and Minister of Defense shocked the population when he came out against constitutional reforms last Monday, November 5, and is now working hand-in-glove with Podemos (political party now firmly in the opposition camp). Baduel has now joined forces with Ismael Garcia (General Secretary of Podemos) who consistently opposed the constitutional reforms alleging that they would constitute a single political line of thought in Venezuela. His position clashes with the pluralistic, democratic Articles 1 and 2 of the 1999 Constitution, so prized by the people. Plans have already been laid to launch candidates for mayors and governors in the 2008 local elections. This would be the new opposition to Chavez were it to succeed.

The 4th Armed Division in Maracay, formerly under of the command of Baduel is said to be loyal to him. Moreover, the current minister of Defense, Gustavo Briceno Rangel has been a close personal friend of Baduel for 30 years just as Baduel has been a close personal friend of President Chavez for the same number of years. In a seminar with oil workers in 2003, Baduel stated that he had been offered $1 billion to instrument the overthrow of Chavez and he stated that he turned it down out of loyalty to the Bolivarian project. Is this now about money or power? Earlier this week, in a public broadcast on VTV, Chavez stated, “Baduel is a traidor not only to Chavez – but to the people of Venezuela”. In massive marches supporting Chavez this week, signs appeared everywhere declaring “Baduel – Traidor a la Revolucion!”

Baduel took an oath with President Chavez on December 17, 1982 in Maracay to create a Bolivarian Republic and overthrow the corrupt oligarch system which kept 80 % of Venezuelans in poverty for 40 years. Baduel also stood by Chavez and saved the day during the 2002 coup attempt. This is the first hard evidence that the US-backed opposition may have penetrated the existing standing Army after the 2003 non-violent purge of the Venezuelan Armed Forces by former Defense Minister, Humberto Prieto. How did they do it? We suggest money and the desire for power now that petroleum has almost reached $100-barrel.

Millions of dollars of US taxpayer money is being used through the auspices of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED-Washington) to buy the loyalty and consciences of all these men. In addition, a pronouncement by at least one high-ranking active military officer against the constitutional reform and against Chavez personally is expected in coming days.

SPAWNED IN JOINT MEETINGS BETWEEN THE U.S. STATE DEPARTMENT AND VENEZUELAN OPPOSITION IN PRAGUE, the CZECH REPUBLIC.

This is all U.S.-planned and supported following the meeting in Prague when Paul Wolfowitz, Madeleine Albright and Venezuelan opposition leader, Humberto Celli from the discredited Democratic Action Party (AD) met earlier this month.

MONEY DOESN’T SPEAK – IT SWEARS – BOB DYLAN

In addition to these dramatic findings, Carabobo State Governor Luis Felipe Acosta Carlez, one of the heroes in helping to break the opposition-inspired food shortages of economic sabotage of 2002-2003, has been bought off by NED funds in Washington and is expected to resign as governor after making a deal with rancid oligarchy in Valencia.

The Washington-spawned plan is also bent on blocking major routes to cut off distribution of food supplies in order to bring the population to its knees and with the hope they will demand Chavez’ resignation.

URIBE’S PARAMILTARY SPAWN PLANTED IN VENEZUELA?

The plan also includes the use of Colombian paramilitary cells in Venezuela to arbitrarily kill innocent civilians and create chaos which they have been doing for the past month vis-à-vis the bourgeois student protests.

This plan involves another economic sabotage – the closing of factories to lock out workers – just as they did in the national managers’ strike in 2002-2003.

THE GROUNDWORK IS BEING LAID

The private media (mainly Globovision) is up to its neck in this conspiracy against the legally and constitutionally-elected government. Reruns of Baduel’s speech and Ismael Garcia’s interventions in the National Assembly plus raising the profile of Israel Rodriguez are currently being shown over and over again. We are certain that this is a matter of laying the groundwork for an attempt to overthrow the government. This groundwork is being laid to give media credibility to these men. The opposition believes that the people in the barrios will abandon Chavez for a new government under the leadership of traidores like Baduel, Garcia and Rodriguez. Also, they hope that the people will be intimidated to believe “there is no other way”. This is directly out of the CIA handbook.

On a regional level, some who have claimed to be die-hard Chavez supporters have also been bought off to facilitate chaos on a local level and to disarticulate the influence of Central Government in cities and towns in all 24 Venezuelan States.

SOURCES

This information came from Arturo Rosales and Ramon Santiago directly from Venezuelan military intelligence. This information has been known for at least 3 weeks by the government. Proof: The same sources knew that Former Minister of Defense Raul Baduel would come out against the reforms before he made is speech on Monday, November 5. Therefore, while we are not making any hard predictions, our best intelligence indicates that some or all of the destabilizing actions described above will take place within the next few days or weeks.

Once again the opposition plans do not take into account the political awareness of the people (“el pueblo”). This was the major error of the opposition in the April, 2002 coup attempt and the economic oil sabotage of 2002-2003.

This week, Chavez held 3 pro-reform rallies trans-Venezuela before going to Chile, in Carabobo, Maracay and Charallave and hundreds of thousands of people poured into the street to see and support their beloved president. Chavez obviously knows about the opposition/Washington plan and these mega marches were designed to serve as a warning to the Venezuelan, undemocratic bourgeoisie.

There is a very real possibility that a “flash-point” will occur, in the midst of these actions or to launch this plan such as hasn’t been seen since the April 11, 2002 coup attempt, when President Chavez was kidnapped by the US-backed coupsters. In world history, there has been no humanistic Head of State comparable to him. Period!

The fact that Chavez is fully aware that this mega-conspiracy is not an objection to the constitutional reforms, but in reality, is another attempt to eliminate a democratically-elected Head of State. His awareness tells us that element of surprise has already been defused and his administration has plans in place to neutralize the actions of the US fascist opposition.

THE RISKS FOR THE OPPOSITION

The former Chavez supporters, bought off with millions of dollars by NED do not realize the risks they are incurring. If these plans go forward, “el pueblo” may not respond as peacefully as they did in the 2002 coup-attempt when Chavez told them to go back to their homes and be calm. Caveat Emptor! (Let the buyer beware!).

Editor’s Note: In this breaking news article references are made to other articles in the featured section of www.axisoflogic.com

Editor’s Comment: In recent weeks we have been watching Venezuelan students gathering in Caracas for noisy protests against the Constitutional Reform slated for a vote on December 2nd. Two days ago they marched to the National Assembly where they presented a paper documenting their rejection of the reforms. While they performed loudly, the demonstration was carried out without violence. The police and national guard quietly provided security on the perimeter of the crowd without any intrusion into the crowd and without any form of suppression. All of this stands in stark contrast to the many anti-war demonstrations in the U.S. where police brutality and oppression of free speech are commonplace. The participants in these protests are primarily drawn from upper middle class and upper class students who otherwise benefit enormously from the Chávez administration. In an Axis of Logic interview yesterday, Venezuelan journalist Arturo Rosales stated, “These are the people who would have been leaders in government had it not been for the defeat of the U.S.-backed oligarchy in the nonviolent, democratic Bolivarian Revolution.

These Constitutional Reforms have been debated and considered in many open, public meetings throughout Venezuela for months with full participation by the people, members of all political parties and the Deputies from the National Assembly, consistent with Venezuela’s existing democratic constitution. The student protests are broadcast and magnified on a daily basis on Globo-Vision and other anti-government television stations and print media. Meanwhile, authorities have informed us that the people will respond with a massive pro-government demonstration that will dwarf the few hundred students this Sunday in Caracas. Over a million people are expected in this pro-government march and demonstration but we can rest assured that the anti-government media here and in the U.S. will provide little to no coverage of events.

The student protests and media coverage are funded by the National Endowment for Democracy in Washington within the framework of CIA strategies being advanced to interfere in the domestic affairs of Venezuela. This U.S. funding and support for the student demonstrations reveals the continuing attempts by Washington to discredit and bring down the government that has been democratically elected by an overwhelming majority of the people. Most recently, this interference by the U.S. government can be traced directly to the meeting held in Prague by Condaleeza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz and others working for the U.S. State Department.

We thank investigative journalist, Jesús Moreno (author) and Iris Buehler (Tlaxcala translator) for this report.

– Les Blough, Editor

November 9, 2007 – When the capitalist economy turns downward and the government, run by the rich, seeks to scrounge up more money, where does it turn? To the workers, who are already reeling from layoffs, slashed wages, and the loss of health benefits and pensions.

This time around it’s the city of New York that says it is short of cash. On Oct. 30 Mayor Michael Bloomberg imposed a hiring freeze on all government agencies as a solution to declining revenues. No discussion, no way for city employees or residents to debate what to do. The mayor did it by decree. He also told city commissioners to find ways to cut spending by 2.5 percent this fiscal year, which ends June 30, 2008, and by 5 percent next year.

What’s the reason for the city’s financial problems? News reports cite the crisis in credit and housing, a lack of large real estate transactions and a decline in Wall Street profits as factors for the city’s declining revenues. But city officials are trying to scapegoat the unions.

The officials recently submitted a revised spending plan to the Financial Control Board, which oversees the city’s finances, stating that labor costs will be responsible for 65 percent of the revenue deficit by 2011, while a decline in tax revenue will be responsible for 34 percent. (New York Times, Nov. 3)

Bloomberg “has agreed to more generous pay raises for union after union, leading to expenses that stand to outpace revenue, especially toward the end of the city’s four-year spending plan,” the article stated.

For the mayor to complain that workers are making too much money is particularly outrageous, given Bloomberg’s status as one of 946 billionaires in this country. This year he moved to No. 25 in Forbes magazine’s list of the 400 richest people in the U.S., with a net worth of $11.5 billion.

Bonuses to Wall Street executives last year hit a record $23.9 billion—more than 15 times what the city expects to save over the next two years through the budget cuts. (Bloomberg, Oct. 31) (Yes, THAT Bloomberg. The mayor owns this huge financial news network.)

Wall Street and the financial corporations located in the city are the mechanism for the transfer of hundreds of billions of dollars in profit, squeezed every year out of workers all over the world, to the idle rich.

Such problems as a budget deficit in a major city don’t exist in a socialist society, where the wealth is publicly owned. But in the meantime, workers can demand that, instead of eliminating jobs and slashing services, the city officials go after the corporations that make huge profits off the labor of workers while avoiding paying taxes.

Two years ago, Citizens for Tax Justice did a study of state corporate income taxes paid by 252 of the largest and most profitable corporations in the country. A portion of these taxes go to the cities. It found that 71 of these companies had not paid any state income taxes for at least one year from 2001 through 2003. And some companies, including giants AT&T, Boeing, Eli Lilly and Merrill Lynch, paid no net state income tax over the full three-year period.

Companies that did pay state income tax on average paid taxes on only 2.3 percent of their U.S. profits.

Articles copyright 1995-2007 Workers World. Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.

If and when private security contractor Blackwater USA and its heavily-armed operatives are forced to pull out of Iraq as the result of the September 16th rampage in downtown Baghdad when its employees massacred up to 28 Iraqis, Mexico could be a profitable option for the North Carolina-based company.

Actually, Blackwater is almost in Mexico already. For months, the North Carolina-based corporation has been pressuring local San Diego officials to grant it an operating license for an 824-acre training site to be known as Blackwater West in Potrero California 45 miles east of that bustling port city but only six miles from the Tecate Mexico border crossing. The site, some of which snakes through the Cleveland National Forest, is a favored transit route for undocumented Mexican workers heading north and has been recently scorched by out-of-control wildfires.

Blackwater USA’s plans have drawn the ire of locals who are not happy about having 15 firing ranges in earshot and a coalition of homeowners, local farmers, environmentalists, and peaceniks has been pieced together to oppose the project. Nonetheless, Blackwater has kept up a full court press on county officials, even sailing the company yacht flying a humongous Blackwater flag, into a local marina last spring and inviting members of the planning commission aboard for cocktails.

Blackwater USA is attracted to the San Diego area because of the heavy concentration of military bases such as Camp Pendleton in the environs that could produce a windfall of security and training contracts from its pals in the Pentagon. Blackwater USA was founded by ex-Navy Seal Eric Prince who cultivates close ties with the military.

One of Blackwater’s most rah-rah backers in the Potrero venture is local congressman Duncan Hunter, ranking republican on the House Armed Services Committee and a dark horse candidate for his party’s presidential nomination. Hunter is considered one of the most virulent anti-Mexican immigration voices in congress and is a political architect of the separation wall that now lines California’s border with Mexico.

The dispute over Blackwater’s proposed Potrero training camp is not just a NIMBY-type confrontation. Siting the facility a stone’s throw from the Mexican border internationalizes the proposition. By any stretch of the imagination, Mexican president Felipe Calderon ought to be nervous about the encampment of the world’s largest private army on his conflictive northern border, particularly one that is not accountable to either the Geneva Convention or U.S. and Mexican military and civil law. Yet Calderon has not publically protested the proposal.

Situated in rugged high desert terrain, Potrero is an idyllic hideaway to train a new generation of Rambos – one can imagine guest motivational appearances by Sylvester Stallone and California’s action figure governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. The camp which, in addition to multiple shooting ranges, will house an armory and feature both a 33,000 square feet urban counter-insurgency set and a course where armed vehicles seek to evade a paint ball barrage, is expected to train military and law enforcement personnel as well as private paramilitary security forces.

Blackwater USA has trained dozens of police forces at its Moyock North Carolina complex in the heart of that state’s Great Dismal Swamp, including big city (New York, Washington DC, Los Angeles and Chicago) officers as well as rural forces like the Maricopa County Arizona sheriff’s department. Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, is a first stop for undocumented Mexican migrants and the local police have been deputized to assist the Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) to corral the “indocumentados.”

Blackwater USA’s strategic position overlooking the Mexican border in Potrero presents inviting economic opportunities. Testifying before congress in 2005, then-Blackwater president Gary Jackson said that the North Carolina enterprise was prepared to provide assistance on border security and long-time connections inside DHS could generate lucrative contracts training increasingly heavily-armed ICE agents. San Diego congressperson Bob Filner, a Democrat told Salon Magazine’s Elaine Zimmerman last month that he believes Blackwater is positioning itself to move into the border security business.

As the National Guard troops brought back from Iraq by George Bush to patrol the border and appease fellow-republicans like Hunter are drawn down (3000 have already been pulled back), Blackwater USA is poised to fill in the gap. Blackwater would also be useful in strengthening security at troubled immigration detention centers along the border, more than half of which have already been privatized.

In an October 15th Wall Street Journal interview Prince indicated that Iraq-type operations were no longer at the top of Blackwater USA’s business agenda and that he saw his company as going more “full spectrum.” Now, as they move into their new facility on the Mexican border, Eric Prince & Company appear to be set to expand into both border enforcement and the Bush White House drug war with an operational role in Plan Mexico, the $1.5 billion U.S.-Mexico drug war scheme to fuse drug-fighting agencies on both sides of the border under Washington’s control.

Despite repeated advisories from the White House that Plan Mexico is a done deal, Bush and Calderon have yet to formalize the pact, pending approval by the U.S. Congress.

The request for three half billion dollar Plan Mexico pay-outs through 2009 was sent on to congress folded into a near $50 billion supplemental spending bill to finance Bush’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan but given Democratic aversion to funding these failed military escapades in an election year, passage is not assured. Plan Mexico has spread widespread suspicion south of the border with many Mexicans condemning the project as a grievous violation of national sovereignty.

Modeled on Washington’s flawed Plan Colombia, which has pumped billions into that South American nation to bolster the right-wing regime of Alvaro Uribe, one of Bush’s few allies in the hemisphere, Plan Mexico will supply this not-so-distant neighbor nation with upgraded military hardware and cutting edge technological savvy – the New York-based Verint Technology is already installing a voice-activated “communication interruption” system that will audit all phone and e-mail traffic in Mexico and to the U.S. The surveillance technology, which is being bankrolled by a U.S. State Department grant, appears to be as much in violation of the Mexican constitution as Bush’s massive, secret surveillance dragnet of his own citizens violates the U.S. magna carta.

Unlike Plan Colombia, Plan Mexico does not contemplate the stationing of U.S. troops on Mexican soil. Such an adventure would be universally unpopular here – the U.S. has invaded Mexico eight times since this country won its independence in 1821. To insure that U.S. military personnel stays on their side of the line, Mexican drug fighters are trained out of country, mainly at the Center for Special Forces in Fort Bragg North Carolina (100 miles as the crow flies from Blackwater’s Moyock complex.)

Nonetheless, as the military pares itself down and outsources its services, training Mexican troops is a role that a new “full-spectrum” Blackwater USA seems perfectly positioned to assume at the Potrero site. Because it is not formally a part of the U.S. military, Blackwater could also infiltrate personnel across the border for on-site engagement inside Mexico.

Coincidentally, according to a recent report in the Army Times (Sept. 14th), Blackwater USA has just been handed a sizeable chunk of a $15 billion USD drug war grant by the Department of Defense (Raytheon is another big winner.) Part of the Blackwater boodle is slated for the design of an unmanned aerostat surveillance platform that has been subcontracted with the Maryland-based Arinc Corporation. The “blimp” project (if that what is being proposed) marks a radical departure for Eric Prince’s conglom, which has never before been a supplier of technology to the military.

According to the Army Times report, the DOD grant mandates Blackwater USA “to deploy surveillance techniques, train foreign security forces, and provide logistical and operational support” for drug war initiatives.

Founded in 1996 by Prince and a handful of ex-Navy Seal buddies, Blackwater USA’s business boomed in the wake of 9/11 and it is heavily invested in Bush’s War on Terror. Drug war operations represent a field in which Blackwater has little experience but which, logistically at least, is not much different from the security firm’s terror war duties. In recent years, the White House has done its damndest to conflate the War on Drugs with the War on Terror.

Blackwater USA’s enlistment in the drug war is a direct challenge to its stiffest competitor, DynCorp – up until now, the Dallas-based corporation has locked up 94% of all private drug war security contracts.

Blackwater USA’s move into combating narco-terrorism will give the North Carolina outfit a foot up in Latin America where the private security industry is flourishing. Blackwater now employs 1200 Chileans, ex-members of dictator Augusto Pinochet’s military, in its international operations – in addition to its contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan, Blackwater provides security for high officials in Azerbaijan, Jordan, and Bokano Faso among other governments.

But Blackwater USA’s Colombian subsidiary, ID Systems, ran into a storm of criticism when it recruited 20 ex-military officers for the company’s Iraq operation – the recruits now claim that they were paid less than half of what their contracts called for and were kept by Blackwater USA in Iraq against their wills.

Under the U.S.’s post 9/11 security redesign, military protection of the homeland has become the province of the newly created North Command, now housed in a Colorado bunker. Within the North Command’s schema, Mexico forms a major portion of the U.S.’s southern security perimeter but with the U.S. military severely restricted in its abilities to put Special Forces on Mexican soil to combat the terrorists, narco or otherwise, Blackwater USA, perched as it is on the border at its Potrero California training camp and equipped with multi-million dollar DOD grants, stands ready to provide logistical and operational support to further Washington’s designs on Mexico and the South.

While most people are lamenting the violence in Pakistan, Burma, Afghanistan and Iraq, apparently it’s not enough bloodshed for Vice President Dick Cheney.

Last month in a caravan of 15 sport utility vehicles and an ambulance–no jokes, please–Cheney made his way to Clove Valley Rod & Gun Club about 70 miles north of New York City, near Poughkeepsie, for a day of controlled bloodletting.

Cheney landed at Stewart Air Force Base and took off the following day for the upscale gun club at a cost of $32,000 for local law enforcement officials who guarded his hotel, protected his motorcade and diverted school buses.

Unlike Cheney’s 2003 trip to Rolling Rock Club in Ligonier Township, PA in which he killed 70 pheasants and an undisclosed number of ducks (his hunting party killed 417 pheasants), staff at the Clove Valley Rod & Gun Club remained tight lipped about the take. An employee who answered the phone would not disclose which species was being shot–ads say pheasants, ducks and Hungarian partridges–and kept repeating “I don’t know anything about it,” before hanging up. Like Cheney’s last visit to Clove Valley in 2001, the 4,000 acre club which costs $150,000 a year to join was a fortress with Blackwater style snipers “protecting” the Vice President’s right to shoot tame birds.

But a New York Daily News photographer did snap a picture of a small Confederate flag hanging inside a garage on the hunt club property which prompted civil rights leader Rev. Al Sharpton to demand that Cheney “leave immediately, denounce the club and apologize for going to a club that represents lynching, hate and murder to black people.”

Cheney spokeswoman Megan Mitchell said neither Cheney nor anyone on his staff saw such a flag at the hunt club. (Maybe the flag was on the women’s side of Clove Valley; only men are allowed in the clubhouse.)

Of course the nation is still amused about Cheney’s 2006 hunting mishap in which he shot 78-year-old attorney Harry Whittington in the face in Texas instead of a quail–and everyone from Letterman to the President Bush jokes about it.

But canned hunting isn’t funny.

Birds raised for canned hunts at gun clubs and in state “recreational” areas are grown in packed pens–think factory farmed chickens–and fitted with goggles so they won’t peck each other to death from the crowding.

When released for put and take hunters like Cheney, pen raised birds can barely walk or fly–or see thanks to the goggles. They don’t know how to forage or hide in the wild and sometimes have to be kicked to “fly” enough to be shot.

Some hunters say shooting the pellet-ready tame animals who offer no resistance is like having sex with a blow up doll.

But others say hunting itself is like sex with a blow up doll and that the ten percent decline in hunters seen in the US since the late nineties–from 14 million to about 12.5 million–coincides exactly with the debut of impotence drugs like Viagra.

Still for the Veep to pursue his addiction to the “programmed massacre of scores of tame pen-raised birds” despite all the “negative publicity it has generated for him” suggests a deep psychological disorder writes Gerald Schiller in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Especially since criminologists have long recognized that premeditated, sadistic treatment of animals is a strong predictor of criminal and homicidal violence.

Sociopaths Jeffrey Dahmer and Richard Speck were both big on animal cruelty. And they weren’t running foreign policy.

11/09/07 “ICH” — – -You wouldn’t know it if you just watch TV news or read the corporate press, but this past Tuesday, something remarkable happened. Despite the pig-headed opposition of the Democratic Party’s top congressional leadership, a majority of the House, including three Republicans, voted to send Dennis Kucinich’s long sidelined Cheney impeachment bill (H Res 333) to the Judiciary Committee for hearings.

The vote was 218 to 194.

Now the behind-the-scenes partisan maneuvering that preceded that vote was arcane indeed, with Kucinich first exercising a member’s privilege motion to present his stymied impeachment bill to the full House, only to have Speaker Nancy Pelosi arrange for a colleague (Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-MD) offer a motion to table it. The Republicans, anxious to embarrass the Speaker, threw a wrench into that plan, though, by voting as a bloc to oppose tabling. Since Kucinich already has 22 co-sponsors for his bill, it was clear that the tabling gambit would fail. As soon as that became apparent, rank-and-file Democrats, unwilling to be seen by their constituents as defending Cheney, rushed to change their votes to opposing the tabling motion. In the end, tabling failed by 242 to 170 with 77 Democrats supporting a pleasantly surprised Kucinich.

In order to avoid a floor debate on the merits of impeaching the eminently impeachable Vice President Cheney, Pelosi and her allies then moved to send Kucinich’s bill directly to the Judiciary Committee. They were joined by three Republicans, including maverick Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul (R-TX).

Now the hope of the Democratic leadership is that this means Kucinich’s impeachment bill will continue to be safely bottled up in a subcommittee of the Judiciary Committee. But it may not work out that way for them.

Whatever the explanation, this impeachment bill has been endorsed by a floor vote of the full House, with bipartisan support.

For the Judiciary Committee to sit on it now and not schedule a hearing would be a gross travesty of parliamentary procedure and custom.

Indeed, some House members not associated with Kucinich’s resolution are now openly calling for immediate hearings into Cheney’s impeachable actions—specifically lying the country into a war in Iraq, and threatening war with Iran.

One indication of the change in the political climate in the House is the announcement by Rep. Robert Wexler (D-FL), a six-term congressman and a member of the House Judiciary Committee, that he will call for the Judiciary Committee to take up Kucinich’s impeachment bill. This is significant because Wexler, no left-wing hothead, is not a co-signer of the Kucinich bill.

In an email message to constituents, Wexler said:

“I share your belief that Vice President Cheney must answer for his deceptive actions in office, particularly with regard to the preparations for the Iraq war and the revelation of the identity of covert agent Valerie Plame Wilson as part of political retribution against her husband.”

“…Cheney and the bush Administration have demonstrated a consistent pattern of abusing the law and misleading Congress and the American people. We see the consequences of these actions abroad in Iraq and at home through the violations of our civil liberties. The American people are served well with a legitimate and thorough impeachment inquiry. I will urge the Judiciary Committee to schedule impeachment hearings immediately and not let this issue languish as it has over the last six months. Only through hearings can we begin to correct the abuses of Dick Cheney and the bush administration; and if it is determined in these hearings that Vice President Cheney has committed High Crimes and Misdemeanors, he should be impeached and removed from office. It is time for Congress to expose the multitude of misdeeds of the Administration and I am hopeful that the Judiciary Committee will expeditiously begin an investigation of this matter.”

Also calling for prompt action by the Judiciary Committee in the wake of the Tuesday House vote was Carol Shea-Porter, a first-term Democrat from New Hampshire, who also is not a sponsor of the Kucinich measure. In explaining her vote to send the Kucinich bill to the Judiciary Committee, she said:

“It is the duty of the Vice President to faithfully execute the laws of the United States of America and to defend the Constitution. There is growing evidence that the Executive Branch has ignored some of our laws and has attempted to bend the Constitution to its will. Members of both parties decided that this issue is too important to ignore. I voted with my Republican and Democratic colleagues to investigate the Vice President’s actions in office.”

She characterized the resolution sending the bill to the Judiciary Committee as a “strongly bi-partisan vote.”

With these kinds of endorsements and calls for action, it is clear both that Speaker Pelosi is looking increasingly pathetic and out of touch with her “impeachment is off the table” mantra, and also that Judiciary Chair John Conyers (D-MI), who seems to have been intimidated by the Speaker for the past year, but who earlier had been a leader in exposing the crimes of the Bush/Cheney administration, is getting strong support for taking a bolder stand.

Stephen Cohen (D-TN), a member of the Judiciary Committee who is a co-sponsor of the Kucinich resolution, says he thinks that there will be an impeachment hearing in the committee.

The 22 House members who have already signed on as co-sponsors of Kucinich’s Cheney impeachment resolution are: Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), Maxine Waters D-CA), Hank Johnson (D-GA), Keith Ellison (D-MN), Lynn Woolsey D-CA), Barbara Lee (D-CA), Albert Wynn (D-MD), William Lacy Clay (D-MO, Yvette Clarke (D-NY), Jim McDermott (D-WA), Jim Moran (D-VA), Bob Filner (D-CA), Sam Farr (D-CA), Robert Brady (D-PA), Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), Donald Payne (D-NJ), Steve Cohen (D-TN), Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX), Carolyn Kilpatrick (D-MI), Ed Towns (D-NY, Diane Watson (D-CA, and Danny Davis (D-IL).

The change in attitude toward impeachment among the rank and file, and the evident increasing willingness to buck the Speaker, reflects growing awareness of the groundswell of popular anger with the Bush administration and the Democratic Congress over continued funding of the Iraq War, and over continued erosion of Constitutional government and civil liberties by an administration that wants unfettered executive power and by a Congress that is afraid to act.

The latest polls show three in four Democrats in favor of impeaching the vice president and president, while a majority of all Americans favor impeaching the vice president and roughly half of all Americans favor impeaching the president.

This is before hearings and presentation of evidence have even begun!

The Democratic strategy for the 2008 election has been to do nothing overly confrontational, to pass no significant legislation, to collect lots of money from corporate interests, and to hope that the Republican Party, saddled with an unpopular administration and an unpopular war, will implode.

The strategy, however, is proving to be a disaster, as public support for the Democratic do-nothing Congress has fallen even below the president’s record low numbers. Just running against Republicans, Bush/Cheney, and the continuing war risks seeing Democrats go down to defeat in ’08.

It is awareness of this looming electoral disaster that underlies the growing restiveness among rank-and-file Democrats in the House, all of whom have to face the voters in less than a year’s time.

As recently as a month ago, it didn’t look like impeachment was in the cards,

Now it’s starting to look like we Cheney’s going to be put in the dock.

It may not be long before we start to see bills of impeachment filed against President Bush too.

WASHINGTON, Nov 8 (IPS) – A National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran has been held up for more than a year in an effort to force the intelligence community to remove dissenting judgments on the Iranian nuclear programme, and thus make the document more supportive of U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney’s militarily aggressive policy toward Iran, according to accounts of the process provided by participants to two former Central Intelligence Agency officers.

But this pressure on intelligence analysts, obviously instigated by Cheney himself, has not produced a draft estimate without those dissenting views, these sources say. The White House has now apparently decided to release the unsatisfactory draft NIE, but without making its key findings public.

A former CIA intelligence officer who has asked not to be identified told IPS that an official involved in the NIE process says the Iran estimate was ready to be published a year ago but has been delayed because the director of national intelligence wanted a draft reflecting a consensus on key conclusions — particularly on Iran’s nuclear programme.

The NIE coordinates the judgments of 16 intelligence agencies on a specific country or issue.

There is a split in the intelligence community on how much of a threat the Iranian nuclear programme poses, according to the intelligence official’s account. Some analysts who are less independent are willing to give the benefit of the doubt to the alarmist view coming from Cheney’s office, but others have rejected that view.

The draft NIE first completed a year ago, which had included the dissenting views, was not acceptable to the White House, according to the former intelligence officer. “They refused to come out with a version that had dissenting views in it,” he says.

As recently as early October, the official involved in the process was said to be unclear about whether an NIE would be circulated and, if so, what it would say.

Former CIA officer Philip Giraldi provided a similar account, based on his own sources in the intelligence community. He told IPS that intelligence analysts have had to review and rewrite their findings three times, because of pressure from the White House.

“The White House wants a document that it can use as evidence for its Iran policy,” says Giraldi. Despite pressures on them to change their dissenting conclusions, however, Giraldi says some analysts have refused to go along with conclusions that they believe are not supported by the evidence.

In October 2006, Giraldi wrote in The American Conservative that the NIE on Iran had already been completed, but that Cheney’s office had objected to its findings on both the Iranian nuclear programme and Iran’s role in Iraq. The draft NIE did not conclude that there was confirming evidence that Iran was arming the Shiite insurgents in Iraq, according to Giraldi.

Giraldi said the White House had decided to postpone any decision on the internal release of the NIE until after the November 2006 elections.

Cheney’s desire for a “clean” NIE that could be used to support his aggressive policy toward Iran was apparently a major factor in the replacement of John Negroponte as director of national intelligence in early 2007.

Negroponte had angered the neoconservatives in the administration by telling the press in April 2006 that the intelligence community believed that it would still be “a number of years off” before Iran would be “likely to have enough fissile material to assemble into or to put into a nuclear weapon, perhaps into the next decade.”

Neoconservatives immediately attacked Negroponte for the statement, which merely reflected the existing NIE on Iran issued in spring 2005. Robert G. Joseph, the undersecretary of state for arms control and an ally of Cheney, contradicted Negroponte the following day. He suggested that Iran’s nuclear programme was nearing the “point of no return” — an Israeli concept referring to the mastery of industrial-scale uranium enrichment.

Frank J. Gaffney, a protégé of neoconservative heavyweight Richard Perle, complained that Negroponte was “absurdly declaring the Iranian regime to be years away from having nuclear weapons”.

On Jan. 5, 2007, Pres. George W. Bush announced the nomination of retired Vice Admiral John Michael “Mike” McConnell to be director of national intelligence. McConnell was approached by Cheney himself about accepting the position, according to Newsweek.

McConnell was far more amenable to White House influence than his predecessor. On Feb. 27, one week after his confirmation, he told the Senate Armed Services Committee he was “comfortable saying it’s probable” that the alleged export of explosively formed penetrators to Shiite insurgents in Iraq was linked to the highest leadership in Iran.

Cheney had been making that charge, but Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defence Robert M. Gates, as well as Negroponte, had opposed it.

A public event last spring indicated that White House had ordered a reconsideration of the draft NIE’s conclusion on how many years it would take Iran to produce a nuclear weapon. The previous Iran estimate completed in spring 2005 had estimated it as 2010 to 2015.

Two weeks after Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced in mid-April that Iran would begin producing nuclear fuel on an industrial scale, the chairman of the National Intelligence Council, Thomas Fingar, said in an interview with National Public Radio that the completion of the NIE on Iran had been delayed while the intelligence community determined whether its judgment on the time frame within which Iran might produce a nuclear weapon needed to be amended.

Fingar said the estimate “might change”, citing “new reporting” from the International Atomic Energy Agency as well as “some other new information we have”. And then he added, “We are serious about reexamining old evidence.”

That extraordinary revelation about the NIE process, which was obviously ordered by McConnell, was an unsubtle signal to the intelligence community that the White House was determined to obtain a more alarmist conclusion on the Iranian nuclear programme.

A decision announced in late October indicated, however, that Cheney did not get the consensus findings on the nuclear programme and Iran’s role in Iraq that he had wanted. On Oct. 27, David Shedd, a deputy to McConnell, told a congressional briefing that McConnell had issued a directive making it more difficult to declassify the key judgments of national intelligence estimates.

That reversed a Bush administration practice of releasing summaries of “key judgments” in NIEs that began when the White House made public the key judgments from the controversial 2002 NIE on Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction programme in July 2003.

The decision to withhold key judgments on Iran from the public was apparently part of a White House strategy for reducing the potential damage of publishing the estimate with the inclusion of dissenting views.

As of early October, officials involved in the NIE were “throwing their hands up in frustration” over the refusal of the administration to allow the estimate to be released, according to the former intelligence officer. But the Iran NIE is now expected to be circulated within the administration in late November, says Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst and founder of the anti-war group Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.

The release of the Iran NIE would certainly intensify the bureaucratic political struggle over Iran policy. If the NIE includes both dissenting views on key issues, a campaign of selective leaking to news media of language from the NIE that supports Cheney’s line on Iran will soon follow, as well as leaks of the dissenting views by his opponents.

11/09/07 “AlterNet” — – The United Nations Security Council, with support from the British and American delegations, is poised to cut the Iraqi parliament out of one of the most significant decisions the young government will make: when foreign troops will depart. It’s an ugly and unconstitutional move, designed solely to avoid asking an Iraqi legislature for a blank check for an endless military occupation that it’s in no mood to give, and it will make a mockery of Iraq’s nascent democracy (which needs all the legitimacy it can get).

While the Bush administration frequently invokes sunny visions of spreading democracy and “freedom” around the world, the fact remains that democracy is incompatible with its goals in Iraq. The fact remains that the biggest headache supporters of the occupation of Iraq have to deal with is the fact of the occupation itself. As far back as the middle of 2004, more than nine out of 10 Iraqis said the U.S.-led forces were “occupiers,” and only 2 percent called them “liberators.” Things have only gone downhill since then, and any government that represents the will of the Iraqi people would have no choice but to demand a timetable for the withdrawal of foreign troops. This fact poses an enormous problem, as the great triumph of the Bush administration and its supporters has been in their ability to convince a much of the Americans population that Iraqi interests and Washington’s interests are in harmony, even when they’re diametrically opposed.

Crucial to this fiction is a U.N. mandate that confers legal cover on the so-called “multinational” forces in Iraq. The mandate is now coming up for renewal, and a majority of Iraqi legislators oppose its renewal unless conditions are placed on it, conditions that may include a demand for a timetable for the departure of American troops.

The process of renewing the mandate is highlighting the political rift that’s divided the country and fueled most of the violence that’s plagued the new state. That’s the rift between nationalists — those Iraqis who, like most of their countrymen, oppose the presence of foreign troops on the ground, the wholesale privatization of Iraq’s natural resources and the division of their country into ethnic and sectarian fiefdoms, and Iraqi separatists who at least tolerate the occupation — if not support it — and favor a loose sectarian/ethnic-based federation of semiautonomous states held together by a minimal central government in Baghdad.

In the United States, the commercial media has largely ignored this story, focusing almost exclusively on sectarian violence and doing a poor job giving their readers and viewers a sense of what’s driving Iraq’s political crisis. An understanding of the tensions between nationalists and separatists is necessary to appreciate the import of the parliament being cut out of the legislative process and the degree to which doing so hurts the prospect of real political reconciliation among Iraq’s many political factions. (We’ve discussed this dynamic in greater detail in an earlier article.)

The key ingredient to understand is this: The Iraqi executive branch — the cabinet and the presidency — are completely controlled by separatists (including Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds and secular politicians). But the parliament is controlled by nationalists — nationalists from every major ethnic and sectarian group in the country — who enjoy a small but crucially important majority in the only elected body in the Iraqi government.

In 2006, Maliki’s office requested the renewal of the U.N. mandate without consulting the legislature, a process that many lawmakers maintained was a violation of Iraqi law. The problem was that Maliki didn’t have the authority to make the request under the Iraqi constitution. Article 58, Section 4 says that the Council of Representatives (the parliament) has to ratify “international treaties and agreements” negotiated by the Council of Ministers (the cabinet). Specifically, it reads: “A law shall regulate the ratification of international treaties and agreements by a two-thirds majority of the members of the Council of Representatives.”

Prime Minister Maliki had claimed that the constitution didn’t refer to the U.N. mandate. A senior Iraqi lawmaker, speaking on condition of anonymity, said of the assertion: “If we are asked to approve a trade agreement concerning olive oil, should we not have the right to pass on an agreement concerning the stationing of foreign military forces in our national soil?”

In June, we reported that the parliament had passed a binding resolution that would force Maliki to go to the parliament and give Iraqi lawmakers an opportunity to block the extension of the mandate. It was signed by the majority of the 275-seat legislature, then sent to the president. According to the Iraqi constitution, the president has 15 days to veto it by sending it back to the parliament; otherwise it automatically becomes a ratified law. The 15 days passed without a veto, so, according to the terms of the constitution, the Iraqi parliament’s resolution became a law in mid-June 2007.

Something happened, however, between the passage of that law and the latest report by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon. According to Moon’s latest report to the Security Council (PDF), dated Oct. 15, the law that had been passed by the duly elected legislature of Iraq became nothing more than a “nonbinding resolution”:

The Council of Representatives passed a nonbinding resolution on 5 June obligating the cabinet to request parliament’s approval on future extensions of the mandate governing the multinational force in Iraq and to include a timetable for the departure of the force from Iraq.

One might have believed that the disconnect was a simple mistake, if not for the fact that members of the Iraqi parliament, still fuming over being cut out of the process the year before, sent a letter to the U.N.’s special envoy for Iraq back in April clarifying the situation in very clear terms. According to an English translation provide by the Global Policy Forum, it says: “The Iraqi Cabinet has unilaterally requested a renewal of the U.N. mandate keeping the occupation troops (MNF) in Iraq” despite the fact that “such a request issued by the Iraqi cabinet without the Iraqi parliament’s approval is unconstitutional.” It continues: “The Iraqi parliament, as the elected representatives of the Iraqi people, has the exclusive right to approve and ratify international treaties and agreements, including those signed with the United Nations Security Council.”

According to sources within the Iraqi delegation to the United Nations, the letter, signed by 144 MPs –more than half of Iraq’s legislators — was received in good order by the special envoy, Ashraf Qazi, but never distributed to the Security Council members, as is required under the U.N. resolution that governs the mandate. The parliament, and indeed the majority of the Iraqi population, had been cleanly excised from the legislative process.

The important thing to understand is that the run-around goes beyond the issue of the mandate itself. Iraq is not in the midst of an incomprehensible religious war over some obscure theological differences between Sunni and Shiite Muslims but is deeply and profoundly divided over fundamental questions about the future of the country. In cutting the nationalist majority in the parliament out of the process of governing, the Maliki administration, Bush administration and, apparently, the U.N. secretary-general are making political reconciliation much more difficult. History has offered the lesson time and time again: Deny people the right to participate in deciding their own destiny in a peaceful political process, and they’ll try to do so with guns and bombs. The United Nations, like the administration and its supporters, and like Sen. Joe Biden and those who favor his plan for partitioning the country, is taking sides in a political battle that should be exclusively for Iraqis to decide.

If there were some similarities between the current Iraqi-Iraqi conflict and the U.S. civil war it is in having one side that wants to keep the country united, and another side planning to secede. All of the foreign forces that are intervening in Iraq’s affairs — whether led by the United States, Iran or Al-Qaeda — are on the side of a minority of Iraqis who want to secede against the majority’s will.

This U.N. mandate issue is not occurring in a vacuum. When it comes to the nascent Iraqi government, supporters of the occupation have long had their cake and eaten it too. On the one hand, they deny that the U.S.-led military force is an occupying army at all, maintaining that all those foreign troops are there at the “request” of the Iraqi government. That’s an important legal nicety — occupying forces have a host of responsibilities under international law and acknowledging the reality of the occupation would result in more legal responsibilities for the administration to ignore. At the same time, when the only people who all those purple-fingered Iraqi voters actually elected to office try to attach some conditions to the U.N. mandate, demand a timetable for withdrawal or come out against privatizing Iraq’s natural resources, and then somehow magically disappear, their hopes and aspirations are discarded as if they never existed.

It’s time to force the issue: The Iraqi parliament, the only body elected by the Iraqi people, wants some say over the continuing presence of foreign troops on its soil, and a majority of its lawmakers, like a majority of both Americans and Iraqis, wants a timetable for ending the occupation.