The Rag Blog

A US Marine convicted of plotting to murder an Iraqi civilian outside Baghdad last year escaped a jail sentence for his crimes, the military said.

Trent Thomas, who was found guilty of conspiracy to kidnap and murder Hashim Ibrahim Awad in Hamdania on April 26 last year, hugged his family after receiving a reduction in rank and bad conduct discharge.

The 25-year-old former lance corporal, who has been held in detention since the allegations first surfaced last year, could have faced a life prison sentence for his role in Mr Awad’s killing.

On Thursday prosecutors had recommended Thomas be jailed for 15 years in order to send a message to other Marines during a hearing at the Camp Pendleton base outside San Diego.

Mr Awad, a 52-year-old father of 11, was taken from his home in a late-night raid by eight US servicemen and killed before the Marines involved covered up the incident to make it look as if Mr Awad was an insurgent planting a bomb.

The killing is one of a series of incidents that have tarnished the reputation of US forces in Iraq.

In closing arguments, military prosecutor lieutenant colonel John Baker had told the jury that the evidence presented had “proven to you that Corporal Trent D. Thomas is a murderer.”

“Corporal Thomas failed when he contracted to take part in this conspiracy and to cover up and lie,” Lt-Col Baker said.

“This is a plan to kill somebody in cold blood. They (the squad members) were a mob. Vigilante justice is against the law. He (Thomas) might as well have put a signature on a death warrant.”

However, defence lawyers said Thomas’s judgment had so been impaired by post traumatic stress disorder and brain damage following three tours of duty in Iraq that he went along with the plot.

Five other servicemen had already pleaded guilty at earlier hearings to lesser charges in connection with the incident.

One of the five, Robert Pennington, was jailed for eight years in February after pleading guilty to conspiracy to commit murder and kidnapping – the same charges Thomas had denied but was convicted of.

It was a slumber party on Capital Hill. Democrats held an all-nighter on July 17 in an attempt to mollify the great antiwar sentiment that is raging across the land. But their attempt to challenge Bush’s war on Iraq was sanctimonious and superficial at best. Not only were the Democrat’s pleas to set a timetable for withdraw fully pathetic, so too was their moral indignation.

The Democrats certainly don’t contest Bush’s Middle East foreign policy, they embrace it. Just last week the Senate voted 97-0 in favor of moving toward war with Iran. So while the Democrats call for withdraw of our troops from Iraq in the future, they insist we must keep an eye on Iran, for the Iranians are opposing the occupation of Iraq by allegedly arming the Shia resistance.

But the uprisings in Iraq were foreshadowed long ago. The Shia make up 60% of the country’s population, so they were sure to gain power with the outing of Saddam Hussein. Iran, a Shia political stronghold, was certainly going to benefit with the fall of Iraq’s dictator who remained an archenemy of Tehran until his regime was toppled. The Democrats and Republicans most certainly knew this. Regardless, both political parties see the rise of the Shia as an opening for a confrontation with Iran.

Iran isn’t the first scapegoat for the prevailing resistance fighting US armed forces in Iraq. There was a time when we were told the death of Saddam would bring stability to the country. It didn’t happen. Nor did the deaths of his sons Uday and Qusay or the bloody murder of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Iraq remains in turmoil and will continue to be thanks to our illegal invasion.

The Democrats don’t really want to end the war despite their veneer of opposition. If they desired to end the war they would have halted its funding long ago. Likelise, if they really preferred to challenge the Bush falsehoods regarding Iran, they would do so. Instead the Democrats, including their top presidential contenders Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama who voted in favor of holding Iran accountable for the killing of US soldiers, seem to want to handle Iran militarily.

The amendment, H.R.1585, written by Sen. Joe Lieberman, repeats the same round of vacant lies the neocons have been advancing for quite sometime. Iranian influence in Iraq is now becoming the accepted reason among American political elites as to why US forces are failing. The Lieberman amendment also claims that Iran is providing a safe-haven for al Qaeda fighters, even though the group is allegedly blowing up Iraqi Shias daily.

American soldiers aren’t being killed because of Iran; we are losing because there is no such thing as real victory for the US in Iraq. There is only death.

Like Iran’s non-existent nuclear arsenal, there is no evidence that Tehran is funding the Shia resistance. Most Iraqi citizens owned automatic weapons under Saddam and most roadside bombs can be manufactured using household products found in most American garages.

Today’s deeply disturbing revelations in Vanity Fair show the essential role US psychologists played in the torture of detainees in CIA and Department of Defense (DoD) custody, heightening the urgent need for the American Psychological Association (APA) to issue clear ethical guidelines prohibiting psychologists in the military or intelligence services from violating basic human rights as part of interrogation processes, the Coalition for an Ethical APA stated. When read in conjunction with the recently declassified Defense Department investigation which revealed that psychologists re-engineered counter-terrorist training techniques as mechanisms for detainee abuse at Guantánamo, in Afghanistan and in Iraq, this article is an indictment not only of participating psychologists, but of the Association which refuses to condemn these practices.

In early 2005, the APA appointed a Presidential Task Force to form ethics policy that was dominated by psychologists from the military and intelligence establishment, some of whom were involved in the very interrogation chains of command now shown to have facilitated abuse. The ethics policy of the APA and the report of the APA’s Presidential Task Force, taken together, currently allow psychologists to participate in national security interrogations, unlike physicians and psychiatrists, and even permits contravening the ethics code when faced with a conflicting “lawful order” from a governing authority.

“After two years of reports that psychologists were aiding abusive interrogations, we now have clear evidence that psychologists directly participated in torture. During this time the APA, the main voice of the psychological profession, has closed its eyes and ears to all reports of abuse,” said Dr. Stephen Soldz, Director of the Center for Research, Evaluation and Program Development of the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis.

The Vanity Fair article reports the role of psychologists in developing the CIA’s regime of abusive interrogations (“torture”). The article states “that psychologists weren’t merely complicit in America’s aggressive new interrogation regime. Psychologists, working in secrecy, had actually designed the tactics and trained interrogators in them while on contract to the CIA.” Psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen of the military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (SERE) program were brought in by the CIA to use SERE techniques, developed to help our soldiers resist collaboration if captured, to break down detainees.

While Mitchell and Jessen used so-called “enhanced” techniques such as waterboarding (i.e., simulated drowning), most of their techniques became staples of interrogation tactics toward detainees in the war on terror and the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. The article quotes one source as describing the Mitchell and Jessen approach as being to “break down [the detainees] through isolation, [use] white noise, completely take away their ability to predict the future, [and] create dependence on interrogators.” The description of these techniques matches those techniques described by former interrogator Tony Lagouranis in his new book, Fear Up Harsh, as being used by numerous interrogators in Iraq.

The article also makes clear that the sometimes misplaced prestige of psychology as a science and the importance of the supposed “scientific credentials” of the SERE psychologists were crucial to the acceptance of these abusive techniques by general interrogation staff and superiors alike. The article additionally reports that the APA supported the claim that Mitchell and Jessen had specialized scientific knowledge by inviting them to a joint APA-Rand Corporation, CIA-funded conference on the “Science of Deception: Integration of Practice and Theory.” This conference debated “the effectiveness of truth serum and other coercive techniques,” according to Vanity Fair.

The article also reports that these SERE-based techniques developed by Mitchell and Jessen in the CIA’s secret “black sites” proliferated to other venues where detainees were interrogated, including Guantánamo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. The proliferation of SERE techniques was aided by the scientific “patina” afforded by psychology, as stated in the article by Human Rights Watch’s John Sifton. The article further reports that psychologists at Guantanamo participated in interrogations as judges of abuse levels, as “safety officers” deciding just how much abuse a given detainee could tolerate. This very role has been objected to by other health provider organizations, including the American Medical Association.

Since 2005, multiple press reports and government documents have clearly demonstrated that US military and intelligence service psychologists were involved in developing a regime of psychological torture for use on suspected terrorists. In May, the Department of Defense Office of the Inspector General (OIG) declassified a report revealing that psychologists from the military’s SERE program worked with US military psychologists at Guantanamo tasked with “developing the standard operating procedure” for interrogations using tactics that violate the Geneva Conventions. The OIG report also documented that these SERE psychologists played a role in bringing abusive interrogation techniques to Iraq and that the SERE-based techniques also migrated to Afghanistan.

“When the APA leadership chose psychologists to formulate its ethical position on interrogations and torture, they included six from the military and intelligence services, some of whom were in the chain of command that directed the abuse,” said Steven Reisner, of the Coalition for an Ethical APA and Columbia University’s International Trauma Studies Program. “Is it really any surprise that, unlike psychiatrists and physicians who prohibited their members’ participation in interrogation, the APA concluded that psychologists could abandon ‘do no harm’ in favor of ‘break them down?'”

Increasingly, as the number of these reports multiplied, members of the APA have called for the Association to unequivocally condemn the use of psychological knowledge for purposes of coercion, abuse and torture, and to take concrete steps to prevent further participation of psychologists in abusive interrogations. In June, the Coalition for an Ethical APA sent an Open Letter to the President of the APA, Dr. Sharon Brehm, demanding swift and comprehensive changes in APA policy. In six weeks, the number of signatories to the letter has risen to over 650. The APA leadership has yet to respond to this letter. Soon afterwards, 58 psychologists from the National Consortium of Torture Treatment Programs issued an additional letter expressing outrage over the failure of the APA to adequately respond to the growing evidence of psychologist involvement in torture. Numerous individual psychologists have written additional letters of protest, and a group of APA members has organized a campaign to withhold their dues until the APA changes its ethical policy to prohibit such abuses.

“The evidence was strong and is now irrefutable,” states Brad Olson, chair of Divisions for Social Justice (DSJ), a collection of divisions within the APA, and faculty member at Northwestern University, “psychologists not only organized abusive interrogations, they directly participated in torture itself. APA members and psychologists everywhere will not stop our efforts until the APA changes its policy to prevent these disturbing violations of human rights from happening again.”

The APA leadership has stated repeatedly that psychologists’ participation in interrogations help keep interrogations “safe, legal, ethical, and effective.” The public record now suggests that the exact opposite is the case.

In response, the Coalition for an Ethical APA today reasserted its call for basic changes in APA policy regarding participation in interrogations and for fundamental reforms in the Association to prevent the reoccurrence of such catastrophic ethical breaches in the future, the Coalition said. The Coalition believes it is critical that the APA take immediate steps to remedy the damage done to the reputation of the profession and its ethical standards, to the Association, and to human rights, in general.

The group urgently recommends the following:

1. The President of the APA must immediately acknowledge errors and abuses committed by its leadership, and substantively reaffirm its commitment to promoting adherence by all psychologists to international human rights standards.

2. The APA Board of Directors and Ethics Committee must endorse the APA Moratorium on psychologist participation in interrogations of foreign detainees, to be voted upon at the August convention.

3. The APA Board of Directors must encourage, support, and cooperate with ongoing Senate investigations into the role of psychologist’s utilization of SERE techniques in developing the US regime of psychological torture used at Guantanamo, in Iraq and Afghanistan, the CIA Black Sites, and elsewhere.

4. The APA Board of Directors must commence a neutral third-party investigation of its own involvement, and that of APA staff, in APA-military conflicts of interest. Among the issues this investigation must examine are:

a) the numerous procedural irregularities alleged to have occurred during the PENS process;

b) the role of the military and intelligence agencies in the formation and functioning of the PENS Task Force;

c) the reasons the APA and its leadership have systematically ignored the accumulating evidence that psychologists participating in interrogations are contributing to torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment, rather than helping to prevent it;

d) the overall nexus of close ties between the APA staff/leadership and the military and intelligence agencies, ties that may have contributed to a climate that permits undo influence of military and intelligence agencies in the creation of these policies and that encourages turning a blind eye to abuse;

e) the transformation of the APA Ethics Code, from one that protects psychologists’ ethical conduct when such conduct conflicts with law and military regulations to one that protects psychologists who follow unethical law and military regulations.

The Coalition for an Ethical APA calls on all concerned APA members and other psychologists to join them by signing the Open Letter to APA President Sharon Brehm, to participate actively in mini-convention sessions on ethics and interrogation at the APA Convention in San Francisco beginning this August 18th, and to join the demonstrations planned for this Convention [information available at http://ethicalapa.com/].

The Coalition for an Ethical APA unites psychologists deeply concerned about our Association’s failure to act on this major crisis facing our profession.

CONTACTS:

Stephen Soldz
ssoldz@bgsp.edu
Phone: 617-469-3576
Cell: 617-935-4246

Steven Reisner
SReisner@psychoanalysis.net
Office: 212-633-8391
Cell: 646-415-1413

Okay, it’s another lemon, the second you’ve bought from the same used-car lot — and for $1,000 more than the first. The transmission is a mess; the muffler’s clunking; smoke’s seeping out of the dashboard; and you’ve only had it a week. You took it, grudgingly, as a replacement for that beat-up old Camry that only lasted two months, but the salesman assured you it was a winner. No wonder you’re driving onto the lot right now. Before you can even complain, the same salesman’s there. He’s firm. It’s not his fault. You must have done something. Nonetheless, he’s ready to offer you a great deal. For an extra 2,000 bucks, you can have the rusted-out Honda Prelude right behind him, the one that, as a matter of fact, has just burst into flames — and, he assures you, it’s a dandy. It may not look so great today, what with the smoking hood and all, but it’s a vehicle for the ages.

Would you buy a used car from this man? (Hint: He looks remarkably like George Bush.)

Or try it this way:

When you first fell ill — nausea and gnawing stomach pain — you went to that new doctor in town. He diagnosed you with stomach flu, prescribed an acid blocker and vicodin, and told you not to worry a bit. After that, you started vomiting up brown gunk. So you dragged yourself back to the doctor, who added an anti-nausea drug and a cathartic to your regimen. Two days later, you blacked out. You wake up to find yourself in a hospital bed, blood transfusing into your arm. The same doctor is at your bedside, insisting that you be anesthetized and immediately operated on for a bleeding ulcer. He also has a form he says you must sign that relieves him of all responsibility for perforating your stomach or anything else that may occur in the course of the procedure.

Would you take the advice of this man? (Hint: He looks remarkably like Dick Cheney.)

In fact, no set of images from elsewhere in life can do real justice to the Bush administration and the Washington it exists in. In our normal lives, no one could get it so wrong so often and still be given the slightest credence.

And everything in the world of opinion polls points to Americans having reached exactly this conclusion about the President and his team. Call it the American consensus. Recent polls indicate that most of the public has simply stopped listening to George W. Bush and other administration figures who have proven incapable of predicting which policy foot will fall where in the next 60 seconds, no less what might happen, based on their acts, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, or anywhere else.

The polling figures also indicate that there are essentially no Democrats left to be moved from the presidential approval to the disapproval columns; that hardly an “independent” remains on the approval horizon; and that what’s always referred to as the President’s Republican “base” is delaminating by the week. The latest Harris poll, for instance, has the President’s approval ratings at 26% and so in a tie with Richard Nixon’s Watergate-worst Harris low; and the Vice President has hit his own new low at 21%; while, in the cumulative average of polls at Pollster.com, Bush’s approval rating has dropped under 28%. In the last six weeks, if you check out the long-term arc of such ratings, it looks as if George has taken a nosedive off a disapproval cliff.

The latest Gallup poll has, for the first time, breeched 30% on the twisting, downward road away from presidential approval and has also registered a record high in opposition to Bush’s Iraq policy. In addition, only 24% of Gallup’s respondents claim to be “satisfied with the way things are going in the United States at this time” (27% in the latest Newsweek poll, and a mere 19% in the last NBC/Wall Street Journal poll). Other polls show similar results.

In his novel 1984, George Orwell portrayed a future time in which the explanations of recent events and earlier history are continually changed to meet Big Brother’s latest purpose. Previous explanations disappear down “the memory hole.”

Sound familiar? Any American who pays attention can observe the identical phenomenon occurring in the US today.

Think about the Bush Regime’s changing explanations for the failed US occupation of Iraq. Shortly after Bush’s May 2003 announcement of “mission accomplished,” the mission revealed itself to be very much unaccomplished. Americans were told that the cause of the snafu was a small Sunni insurgency of two or three thousand at the most inspired by “die-hard Baath party remnants. Remember the propagandistic deck of cards identifying the most wanted down to the less wanted? Americans were assured that once Saddam Hussein and his relatives and henchmen were rounded up, our troops would be pelted with the promised flowers instead of roadside bombs.

When the roundups, trials, and executions failed to fix the problem, the “die-hard” explanation disappeared. A new explanation, with no continuity to the old, took its place.

The new explanation was that Syria was allowing foreigners to cross its border into Iraq to commit jihad against the American troops. This explanation lasted until it became all too clear, despite the propaganda, that the “foreign fighters” were remarkably well accepted by, and concealed within, the Iraqi communities that were suffering all the collateral damage of the conflict.

When it came time for the US to create an Iraqi government, it was evident that it would be one dominated by Shi’ites. Then, for a limited time, it was permissible to recognize that the insurgency was popularly based in the Sunnis.

As the insurgency evolved into what the Iraq Study Group described as a Sunni-Shi’ite civil war with US troops unclear on which side they stood, the Bush Regime and the captive media began blaming Al Qaeda for the escalating violence. Americans were assured by the Ministry of Truth that there wasn’t a civil war, just outsiders stirring up conflict. This enabled Big Brother to deny that there was a civil war and to revive fear of terrorist attacks in the US and UK, the new Oceania.

The Al Qaeda explanation was soon discarded into the memory hole. The explanation implied that Oceania’s invasion of Iraq had greatly expanded the ranks and strength of Al Qaeda, thus contradicting big Brother’s claim that his war in Iraq was making Oceanians safe by stamping out terrorism. The Al Qaeda explanation had to depart for another reason as well. Cheney, Israel, and the neocons, the rulers of the new Oceania, plan to attack Iran, and so the insurgency in Iraq is now being blamed on Iran.

The Ministry of Truth has accommodated the latest explanation, just as it did all others before, without remarking on the funeral of the previous explanation. All of a sudden, a new explanation appears and is repeated until it, too, goes down the memory hole.

The American and British media work the same way as the Ministry of Truth in Oceania. A day arrives when the “truth” no longer serves the empire or hegemonic power or center of moral purpose in the world, or for short, the regime. When that day arrives, a new explanation appears and is repeated until it, too, is discarded down the memory hole.

In recent weeks Americans have been fed a series of reports from official sources that Iran is arming both Iraqi insurgents and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Experts, both within the government and without, who have been made more attentive by the Bush Regime’s false charges of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, have disputed the news reports.

But the reports keep on coming. As I write, the latest story is that the US military “discovered a field of rocket launchers near a US army base south of Baghdad armed with 34 Iranian-made missiles.” Can you imagine? The insurgents went to the trouble of lugging powerful missiles within striking distance of a US base and just left them there unfired to be discovered by the Americans. To further serve Cheney’s plan to attack Iran, the media report states: “Earlier this month, US commanders stepped up the charges [against Iran], claiming that senior leaders of Iran’s special forces and of the Lebanese Shiite Hezbollah militia have trained Iraqi fighters and provided other support.”

Notice that none of the explanations fed to Americans over the years have ever mentioned, even as a faint possibility, that the US invasion and occupation of Iraq might be the cause of the violence in Iraq.

Allegedly, the US is a free and open country with a free press and a government accountable to the people. Yet, the information fed to the American people is as thoroughly false as that fed to the citizens of Oceania by Big Brother through the Ministry of Truth in Orwell’s famous novel.

In Orwell’s novel, despite the totalitarian power of the government, nothing happens to people as long as they accept the government’s intrusive monitoring of their lives and do not become interested in truth or facts.. In such a world, truth and individuality pass out of human consciousness and become unimportant. Citizens survive by accepting Big Brother’s ever-changing reality.

Boeing has enlisted the aid of Elbit Systems, Israel’s major defense contractor, to construct high-tech surveillance along the border of the U.S. and Mexico. So far, the high-tech fiasco is not working and Arizona residents are organizing a lawsuit to halt government spying on U.S. citizens.

Arivaca resident Margaret Keoppen is among those opposing the 98-foot spy tower in her community, part of Project 28 of the Secure Border Initiative.

With a spy viewing range of 10 miles, the spy tower is pointed at the good folks of Arivaca.

“This system is entirely experimental with unknown results and I don’t wish to be used as a guinea pig with resulting harm to me, my family, my animals, area wildlife,” Keoppen told Project 28.

In Tucson, the search for the biggest joke in town–the environmental assessment of the spy towers — began at the public library.

“That’s odd,” said a research librarian, “there are no copies of it here.” Diligent, the librarian plowed through the web and made a phone call.

A copy of the environmental assessment for the new high-tech border surveillance was finally located at the Arivaca library. In Arivaca, the draft copy of the assessment arrived on a Saturday in April, with no public notice.

A typed cover letter from U.S.Customs and Border Protection said residents had four days to respond, April 14 — 18. The library was closed two of those days. Without phone calls from the librarians, no one would have known it was there. Few people had a chance to even read it.

Driving down from Tucson, the earth is scorched from the 114 to 118 degree temperatures. Contrary to the frenzied hype of television news, a drive along the border, through Three Points, then down the road to Sasabe and finally to Arivaca, reveals three Wackenhut buses–all empty — waiting to be loaded with migrants. There wasn’t a migrant in sight. (Wackenhut, with its history of human rights violations, is now on contract to transport migrants rather than Border Patrol. Wackenhut is now Geo Group, but the buses are labeled Wackenhut.)

A stop at a bird walk near Arivaca proves more desolation. Two men with hunting dogs arrive in separate vehicles. One man takes off quickly for another site, both men wearing plain clothes. In this no-man’s land, strangers are assumed to be undercover border agents or Minutemen.

In Arivaca, residents are fighting mad about the spy tower, which was built without consulting them, less than a mile from town.

“You can not see the border from that spy tower, because of the mountains. The only thing you can see is Arivaca,” says one woman living in this community of 2,500.

Arivaca is 12 miles north of the border and the desert mountains are a fortress that the spy tower camera can not penetrate. In fact, the spy tower isn’t penetrating anything, because like all the nine spy towers on Project 28 of the Secure Border Initiative so far, it isn’t working. But more about that later.

The spy tower has the good folks of Arivaca in clear sight. It is a community of artists and ranchers, popular with birdwatchers and nature lovers. The people here savor their privacy. They have selected Arivaca because it is off the beaten track and ensures a quiet life, far from the prying eyes of anyone.

Now, without any consultation, there is a spy tower on the edge of town, with its camera pointed at them. Worse, the Boeing equipment list for Project 28 calls for radar, infrared, lasers, microwave, iris biometrics and facial biometrics.

“Iris biometrics?” Arivacans ask.

In the environmental assessment, there is no research concerning the health effects of the lasers, microwave, iris biometrics and other technology, on humans.

The environmental assessment concludes Project 28 will have “no significant impact.”

However, the assessment lists the endangered, threatened and sensitive life forms, including the Pima pineapple cactus, masked bobwhite habitat, desert tortoise, burrowing owl and lesser long-nosed bat. There’s also Santa Cruz stripe agave, Huachuca golden aster and Lumholtz nightshade. In Pima County, there’s 20 species, including the Chiricahua leopard frog, cactus ferruginous pygmy-owl and southwestern willow flycatcher.

The conclusion for all: The towers will have “no significant impact.”

Arivaca is the territory of migrating bats, including a large population on the move from the nearby ghost town of Ruby. In the assessment, there’s nothing more than a little mumbo-jumbo about the bats.

Local residents wonder if the spy tower’s radar will effect the bats’ ability to hunt. In the white wash of the environmental assessment, it says, “Tower radar is not expected to impact echolocation of lesser long-nosed bat because recent studies determined that some species of bats avoided the frequencies of radar to which they were exposed,” the assessment says.

So, they’re guessing that the bats won’t be impacted.

Here in the Sonoran desert, bats, hummingbirds, bees and butterflies are the major pollinators. Without pollinators, there will be no saguaro, yucca or desert plants.

In the assessment, there’s only brief mention of the endangered jaguar, Panthera onca. It is the largest cat in the Southwest. There’s also the endangered Sonoran pronghorn and the threatened bald eagle.

The environmental assessment is clearly a joke, no one could have manufactured this document with serious intent. After listing the threatened and endangered species here, including bats and jaguars, the environment assessment concludes that wildlife will not be harmed by the spy towers.

Wildlife, it says, is “expected to stay away.”

This is Saturday Night Live funny. It is easy to image the cartoon, as CorpWatch has also imagined and posted on its website, with horns sounding out alerts in the desert. One horn could be honking: “Wildlife — that includes you birds–you’re expected to stay away!”

On the serious side, the assessment admits that warning lights on towers can disorient migrating birds and cause them to fly in circles, resulting in fatal collisions. Red lights attract more birds than white ones. So, the Boeing solution is: “loud hailer horns.”

The assessment talks much more about grasses and birds than it does of spying on U.S. citizens, which it does not address.

Unwarranted spying on U.S. citizens can have dangerous, even deadly consequences. With the spy towers, Border Patrol agents will be able to sit in their cars and watch local residents on their laptop computers, if and when the spy towers begin functioning.

While the rich are getting richer, they’re slashing social security, medicare and other social programs for the rest of us. What gives?

The commercial media is telling us two perfectly contradictory stories about the American economy. The first is how wonderfully rich we are in the United States. The stock market’s booming — some analysts predict the Dow will break the 15,000 this year — the economy is expanding at a healthy clip, productivity growth is up and unemployment and inflation are relatively low.

But, at the same time, we’re also told that we don’t have the money to pay for a robust social safety net. When it comes to paying for universal health coverage, affording retirement security for our elderly, investing in programs for the poor or educating our children, we need to pinch pennies. According to this storyline, we face a looming “entitlement crisis” — we won’t be able to afford to keep the Baby Boomers in good health and out of poverty, we’re told, unless we slash their benefits and privatize the programs that their elderly parents enjoy today.

This is the line we hear from the Administration when it talks about entitlement “reform”: Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson says that “The biggest economic issue facing our country is the growth in spending on the major entitlement programs: Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.” The solution, according to the Heritage Foundation, is to cut entitlement spending: “Reforming Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid is the only way to get the budget under control.”

How can two narratives that are so clearly at odds with each other be so pervasive? Are we seriously supposed to believe that Paris Hilton has to dig between the cushions of her sofa to buy a can of tuna?

What reconciles these two themes is absent from our mainstream economic discourse: we “can’t afford” all sorts of programs that are clearly in the common good because most of the benefits of our growing economy have gone to a very small group of Americans, who have, in turn, seen their taxes slashed again and again in the past six years. It’s a story that isn’t told as often as it should in the commercial press because it’s a supposedly “liberal” narrative — never mind that über-conservative former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan told Congress that there is a “really serious problem here, as I’ve mentioned many times … in the consequent concentration of income that is rising.”

Saying that the majority of the country’s economic gains in recent years have gone to the top one percent of the income ladder understates the trend. You have to cut the pie into even smaller slices to get the full picture. Because while the bottom half of the top one percent of the income distribution have done far better than the average wage slaves, it is a smaller slice still — the top .01 percent — that has grabbed most of the gains–seeing an impressive 250 percent increase in income between 1973 and 2005 — from an economy that’s grown by 160 percent.

An analysis by economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez gives us the best perspective of what’s going on for everyone else. They found that despite several periods of healthy growth between 1973 and 2005, the average income of all but the top ten percent of the income ladder — nine out of ten American families – fell by 11 percent when adjusted for inflation. For three decades, economic growth in the United States has gone first and foremost to building today’s modern Gilded Age. The recipients of those gains don’t care about a fully funded Social Security system or a healthy Medicare program — they don’t need them.

WASHINGTON, July 17 (UPI) — More than 100 Iraqi oil, economic and legal experts sent a letter to Iraq’s Parliament urging it to consider their critique of the draft oil law.

A senior Iraqi government official was also given a copy and agreed with the technocrats’ assessment.

“With our conviction for the need of a law to organize the upstream sector and its development, and due to its extreme importance, we emphasize the importance of acting steadily,” the letter states, “and not rushing its issuance before enriching it with more discussions and carry out amendments that ensure the interest of all the Iraqi people.”

The letter calls for a strong central government arm in maintaining and developing Iraq’s vast oil and gas sector, though with the “participation of the regions and the governorates in the operations of planning, implementation and management within a comprehensive vision that ensures the maximum benefits for the whole people of Iraq.”

The oil law has been in negotiations since last summer. The Kurds claim the rights to strong regional control over their share of Iraq’s 115 billion barrels of proven while others want a varied amount of central control. Also at issue is how the sector may be opened up to foreign, private investment.

Iraq produces 2 million barrels per day, of which more than 75 percent are sent to the global market.

The letter, signed by 108 experts, calls for the oil law to be put on hold until ongoing constitutional wrangling is completed. “There are ongoing discussions aiming to amend the Iraqi constitution, including the items relating to oil and gas,” it states. “Hence we do not see, from the legal and technical point of view, the necessity to enact the law presented to you now before the constitutional amendments are finalized.”

The senior Iraqi official, speaking on condition of anonymity, called for a thorough examination of the law, especially as the U.S. benchmarks requiring the law’s passage by September loom large.

“I think it’s a legitimate call,” the official said. “This law is going to affect our lives; it’s going to affect the lives of our children.”