Executive Privilege: Legitimate or 'Cover up'?

The ghosts of Richard Nixon --'executive privilege' and a 'Saturday Night Massacre' --haunt the House Judiciary Committee probing charges that Bush played politics when he fired some nine US attorneys back in 2006. The firings reminded one of Nixon's infamous 'Saturday Night Massacre' as do Bush's claims that 'executives' are 'privileged'.

Of course, Bush played politics as did Nixon before him. That's what idiots in office do! The question is: will Bush be allowed to get away with it? However carefully the courts have crafted the language of 'executive privilege', it is still nothing more nor less than an unprecedented exception to the rule of law. 'Executive privilege' is another way of saying that while everyone else must obey the spirit and the letter of the law, 'Presidents' are above it all and may not be held to account or even investigated. Not even English monarchs were so 'privileged'. And to make the point, the English chopped off Charles I's head!

Richard Nixon's resignation left several issues unresolved only to be summoned up by a 'President' even less mature, less intellectually equipped to fulfill the duties of the office than was Nixon himself. Though it should have been consigned to the intellectual graveyard with Nixon's resignation, the specter of 'executive privilege' still holds out for Bush the hope that he may yet get away with it all. The only problem for Bush is this: 'executive privilege' is pure bullshit.

There is no mention of 'executive privilege' in the Constitution. There is no mention of 'executive privilege' in the Bill of Rights. There is no mention of 'executive privilege' among those responsibilities and duties assigned to the office of President' by the Constitution. [See: US Constitution, Article 11] 'Executive Privilege' was apparently invented by Washington in 1796 when he cited it to justify his refusal to comply with a House request for documents relating to the negotiations leading to the Jay treaty with England.

The Senate alone plays a role in the ratification of treaties, Washington reasoned, and therefore the House had no legitimate claim to the material. Accordingly, Washington provided the documents to the Senate but not the House.

Eleven years later, the issue of executive privilege arose in court. Counsel for Aaron Burr, on trial for treason, asked the court to issue a subpoena duces tecum--an order requiring the production of documents and other tangible items--against President Thomas Jefferson, who, it was thought, had in his possession a letter exonerating Burr.

After hearing several days of argument on the issue, Chief Justice John Marshall issued the order commanding Jefferson to produce the letter. Marshall observed that the Sixth Amendment right of an accused to compulsory process contains no exception for the President, nor could such an exception be found in the law of evidence. In response to the government's suggestion that disclosure of the letter would endanger public safety, Marshall concluded that, if true, this claim could furnish a reason for withholding it, but that the court, rather than the Executive Branch alone, was entitled to make the public safety determination after examining the letter.

Jefferson complied with Marshall's order. However, Jefferson continued to deny the authority of the court to issue it, insisting that his compliance was voluntary. And that pattern persists to the present. Thus, President Clinton negotiated the terms under which he appeared before Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr's grand jury, rather than simply answering a subpoena directing him to appear.

--MICHAEL C. DORF, A Brief History of Executive Privilege, Findlaw

But it would appear that the shoe is on the other foot. Starr had insisted that 'no one was above the law'. But now, as was the case in the early '70s, it is the GOP that would seek to find in 'executive privilege' a 'no man's land' where GOP office holders might break the law with impunity. It was, after all, the height of the Watergate Scandal in the early 1970s, when then President Nixon cited 'executive privilege' to justify his refusal to release the so-called 'White House tapes', his secret recordings of every conversation held in the Oval Office.

The Supreme Court considered this argument in the 1974 case of United States v. Nixon. A grand jury convened by Watergate special prosecutor Leon Jaworski issued a subpoena to President Nixon requiring that he produce Oval Office tapes and various written records relevant to the criminal case against members of Nixon's Administration. Nixon resisted on grounds of executive privilege.

The Court recognized "the valid need for protection of communications between high Government officials and those who advise and assist them in the performance of their manifold duties." It noted that "[h]uman experience teaches that those who expect public dissemination of their remarks may well temper candor with a concern for appearances and for their own interests to the detriment of the decision making process."

Nonetheless, the Justices concluded that the executive privilege is not absolute. Where the President asserts only a generalized need for confidentiality, the privilege must yield to the interests of the government and defendants in a criminal prosecution. Accordingly, the Court ordered President Nixon to divulge the tapes and records. Two weeks after the Court's decision, Nixon complied with the order. Four days after that, he resigned.

--MICHAEL C. DORF, A Brief History of Executive Privilege, Findlaw

As Dizzy Dean might have put it: "It's deja vu all over again!" The House Judiciary Committee has subpoenaed Karl Rove in connection with the Siegelman case. Committee chairman, Representative John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, says the committee wants to find out if Rove knows anything about a decision to prosecute former Gov. Donald E. Siegelman of Alabama, a Democrat, who was, in fact, never convicted of bribery and is free pending an appeal.

The claim of executive privilege is always suspect. SCOTUS' concession that there exists a privilege about matters not concerning 'national security' is overly broad, an invitation to folk like Bush or Nixon to plot and scheme against the people. There is no justification for this kind of cover and its defense is a neat circular argument that places 'public servants' above the law, raising them above any method by which they may be held to account. In secrecy, the cover of 'national security' is predictably abused by Presidents of any party. What are and what are not matters of 'national security' are subjective, ideologically based 'opinions' deliberately cited to cover the substance of what are, in fact, meetings of a criminal conspiracy.

It's time to call 'executive privilege' what it is: bullshit! American presidents have proven themselves undeserving of any privilege. American presidents should be assumed to be crooked. Americans presidents have a 'burden of proof' , a responsibility to the American people. Like Medieval Knights, they should be required to prove or demonstrate their worthiness. Of late, all of them have failed miserably.

Additional resources

• What Secrets Are Protected Under a Claim of Executive Privilege?
• Why Bush Refuses to Allow Karl Rove and Harriet Miers to Testify Before Congres
• The Executive Privilege Showdown
• Break Through Bush Administration’s Executive Privilege Roadblock

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GOP, Bush, Evil, Tyranny

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Exposed: A World Wide Epidemic of Idiots and Ideologues

The American 'right wing', 'conservative' mentality has gone global and wherever it is found it is ugly, mean, and evil. A 'New World Order' of corporate robber barons, privileged elites and US militarists is international in scope, respecting no borders, no peoples, no local authorities. Not only progressives in America must resist, but good people all over the world.

Recently, the 'Roma', otherwise known as 'Gypsies', have become as pressing an issue in Rome as were the 'homeless' made that way by the policies of Ronald Reagan in the US. The ability of rapacious wealth to blame its victims knows no national boundaries. It is tragically universal.

Romanipe - first act

The current Roman response is a typical 'conservative', authoritarian knee jerk which exacerbates the problem. It doesn't address causes; it simply shifts responsibility and, ultimately, location. A people denied jobs based on prejudice can hardly be blamed for being poor.

During Ronald Reagan's depression of some 2 years (the worst since the Great Depression) jobless people found themselves living in squalid tents under freeway overpasses in Houston, TX! Like the Roman establishment now, GOP poohbahs and Ronald Reagan himself blamed the victims of his fiscal incompetence. Reagan called them 'mentally ill'. Right wings everywhere will always blame immigrants though it is most often 'establishment' governments themselves to blame --NOT the victims. In this case, how many 'tent cities' would simply disappear overnight if residents had jobs? Denying them jobs and shelter is stupid, non-productive, and makes matters worse.

The 'immigrant' issue in the mouths of Reagan, Bush and other icons of the rapacious right wing should be enough to incite riots and revolution. The real 'immigrants' in America are, in fact, the so-called European settlers from whom Bush et al descended. Bush is not merely a 'new' (and phony) Texan, his crime family is, historically speaking, newly arrived on the North American continent. Predating these 'immigrants' was a diverse Native American population of some 900,000 speaking 300 languages, exhibiting almost as many cultures. These people are my people of whom I am descended!

They are my ancestors! They crossed a great land bridge from Asia to get here and we were here for thousands of years before a 'white man' ever set eyes upon the continent.

I've often think how lucky I am to be here at all. My ancestors were very nearly wiped out by subsequent, 'white' immigration, broken treaties, the relatively recent 'Trail of Tears'.

In 1830 the Congress of the United States passed the "Indian Removal Act." Although many Americans were against the act, most notably Tennessee Congresssman Davy Crockett, it passed anyway. President Jackson quickly signed the bill into law. The Cherokees attempted to fight removal legally by challenging the removal laws in the Supreme Court and by establishing an independent Cherokee Nation. At first the court seemed to rule against the Indians. In Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, the Court refused to hear a case extending Georgia's laws on the Cherokee because, it was alleged, the Cherokee did not represent a sovereign nation. In 1832, the US Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Cherokee on the same issue in Worcester v. Georgia. In this case Chief Justice John Marshall ruled that the Cherokee Nation was sovereign, making the removal laws invalid. The Cherokee would have to agree to removal in a treaty. The treaty then would have to be ratified by the Senate.

--Trail of Tears

But Andrew (0l' Hickory) Jackson set a dangerous precedent which must continue to inspire the likes of George W. Bush. Jackson ignored the decision of the high court and ordered the forcible removal of the Cherokee from their homes and a forced march to Oklahoma. Many died along the way. A handful --my ancestors --escaped! My ancestors defied a lawless 'President' and survived!

This tragedy is not adequately taught in the public schools. It was not until Howard Zinn [See: A People's History of the United States] confronted this history forthrightly that the plight of the Arawaks --a tribe that was wiped out entirely by Cristoforo Colomb (Columbus) --became widely known.

For more than one hundred years, the US approached each tribe as an independent nation. But, in 1786, the US government established its first Native American reservation. It was President James Monroe, in his second inaugural address of 1821, who spoke of US policy as 'flattering their pride'. It was because the rightful owners of the land had been 'flattered', then, that the US government proceeded upon a policy of genocide and ethnic cleansing for which it has yet to pay! Perhaps it is the source of US arrogance and false pride that it has gotten away with a crime that not even Hitler's Third Reich got away with: genocide!

A society that denies an entire class jobs and then blames that class for not having jobs or money is a crooked, sick society! It doesn't get any more stupid than that. I grew up among fundies who told me that Israel was "God's chosen" country and in the next breath denounced the Jews who killed "Christ". I am still amazed at the human capacity for compartmentalization, as if some parts of the brain never communicate with other parts. In fact, acts of genocide are genocide whether they are perpetrated by Hitler against the Jews or by Jews against the Palestinian or by the American government against the Native American, the Negro, or those of Hispanic descent.

I have a solution to the Palestinian 'problem'. Give them back THEIR land!

Palestine Pre-1947

On behalf of the Cherokee, I say to Bush: give us back our land as you have brought upon it utter disgrace, ignominy, and ultimate ruin!

I also have a solution for George W. Bush: lock him up forever for the seemingly innumerable counts of mass murder that he has committed. Dissolve, perhaps destroy, a government that is no longer legitimate, no longer accountable to the people, a government that was described by Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence.

Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government ...

--Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence

Che Guevara had just this situation in mind, justifying revolution when it was government itself that broke the peace with the people [See: Guerilla Warfare, Che Guevara]. The US government is, in fact, owned outright by a handful of huge corporations who would have you believe the utterly absurd notion that they are, in fact, 'people'! Corporations are 'people' only by legal abstraction, linguistic legerdemain, and the brute economic force that manages to get such bullshit made law by the ass kissers in Congress!

Throughout Anglo/American history, high treason consists of a government 'waging war upon its own people', precisely the condition achieved by George W. Bush now. It is a state of war in which his 'base', a tiny elite of rich military/industrialists gained control of the Washington apparatus and now wages war upon the people, their rights, their properties, and their persons.

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon is moving forward with plans to build a new, 40-acre detention complex on the main American military base in Afghanistan, officials said, in a stark acknowledgment that the United States is likely to continue to hold prisoners overseas for years to come.

The proposed detention center would replace the cavernous, makeshift American prison on the Bagram military base north of Kabul, which is now typically packed with about 630 prisoners, compared with the 270 held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Until now, the Bush administration had signaled that it intended to scale back American involvement in detention operations in Afghanistan. It had planned to transfer a large majority of the prisoners to Afghan custody, in an American-financed, high-security prison outside Kabul to be guarded by Afghan soldiers.

--US Planning Big New Prison in Afghanistan, New York Times

I propose an iron clad addendum to the Geneva accords: a prohibition of the practice of outsourcing warfare. It should be banned outright! Signatory nations should be encouraged to codify penalties to include death for violations thereof. Blackwater, a worst offender, is nothing more than Murder, Inc. By contracting to murderers, the 'state' sanctions murder and presumes to make it legal. It is not sufficient in a world ruled by Bush that 'state' sanctioned murder is merely denounced. It must be made unlawful and punishable by death. 'States' --in the face of world wide revulsion and/or revolution --must be compelled to abide by the principle of 'Due Process of Law', that powers exercised by 'states' derive ONLY from the people who are sovereign.

These 'immigrants' to the new world waged war upon and, in some cases, imprisoned a Native American population. Having assumed only recently control of a continent, the Bush administration proposes to build an ugly, fascist wall along the Rio Grande, the border between Mexico and Texas. But this is not the end of American problems. GOP policies create poverty by enriching only the upper one percent of the population while impoverishing everyone else. It's not a local problem; it's world wide. Eventually, idiots and ideologues will have killed the goose that lays golden eggs. Bush, meanwhile, can be depended upon to round up and imprison in FEMA camps all those in the bottom quintile who fall off the ladder. The camps have been built. The trains are ready. The sub-contractors represent America's last viable industry: the construction and maintence of concentration camps.

The following is an 'extra', a nod to a man whose entire life seemed dedicated to thinking 'outside the box', shaking up conservative orthodoxy, waging war on war, stupidity and ideology ---Bertrand Russell.

Russell's social activism stretches back at least as far as1910, when he published his Anti-Suffragist Anxieties,and to 1916, when he was convicted and fined in connection with anti-war protests during World War I. Following his conviction, he was also dismissed from his post at Trinity College, Cambridge. Two years later, he was convicted a second time. The result was six months in prison. Russell also ran unsuccessfully for Parliament (in 1907, 1922, and 1923) and, together with his second wife, founded and operated an experimental school during the late 1920s and early 1930s.

Although he became the third Earl Russell upon the death of his brother in 1931, Russell's radicalism continued to make him a controversial figure well through middle-age. While teaching in the United States in the late 1930s, he was offered a teaching appointment at City College, New York. The appointment was revoked following a large number of public protests and a 1940 judicial decision which found him morally unfit to teach at the College.

In 1954 he delivered his famous "Man's Peril" broadcast on the BBC, condemning the Bikini H-bomb tests. A year later, together with Albert Einstein, he released the Russell-Einstein Manifesto calling for the curtailment of nuclear weapons. In 1957 he was a prime organizer of the first Pugwash Conference, which brought together a large number of scientists concerned about the nuclear issue. He became the founding president of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in 1958 and was once again imprisoned, this time in connection with anti-nuclear protests in 1961. The media coverage surrounding his conviction only served to enhance Russell's reputation and to further inspire the many idealistic youths who were sympathetic to his anti-war and anti-nuclear protests.

During these controversial years Russell also wrote many of the books that brought him to the attention of popular audiences. These include his Principles of Social Reconstruction (1916), A Free Man's Worship (1923), On Education (1926), Why I Am Not a Christian (1927), Marriage and Morals (1929), The Conquest of Happiness (1930), The Scientific Outlook (1931), and Power: A New Social Analysis (1938).

Upon being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950, Russell used his acceptance speech to emphasize, once again, themes related to his social activism.

Russell's Writings

• A Selection of Russell's Articles
• A Selection of Russell's Books
• Major Anthologies of Russell's Writings
• The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell

Additional resources

• Bush: Law in the Land of Mannon
• Jonathan Gurwitz: Republicans are in trouble and they don't know why
• Kant and Hume on Morality

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Bush's Conspiracy to Create an American Police State Part VIII: Atrocities are justified with lies, myths or propaganda

Bush is a rotten, transparent bald-faced liar and anyone still believing him is either stupid or complicit. Bush said: "We do not torture!" And all the while, his administration was working to 'legalize' the capital crimes that Bush himself had clearly ordered. What followed was an organized campaign of lies to justify torture even as the practice of it was made official policy and often called by its Orwellian euphemism: 'enhanced interrogation'.

The practice of torture was carried out at Abu Ghraib, GITMO, and various US gulags and hell-holes throughout Eastern Europe. By any Orwellian name given it by Bush or his minions, it is torture.

Recent ACLU-compelled disclosures of previously concealed DOJ documents reveal many of the details of what has been long known: that the highest levels of the Bush administration secretly implemented an illegal torture regime. But while those torture programs began in secret, we have gradually learned more and more about them. The more time that goes by and the more we learn — particularly if we do nothing meaningful to stop it — the more the responsibility for these policies shifts from the administration to all of us collectively.

--Glenn Greenwald: Growing Responsibility for the Bush Torture Regime

Torture is a crime which if it results in death, the penalty is death. That law applies to the architects and defenders of the policy of torture. It applies to Bush --its chief architect, defender and practitioner.

The disclosure that the Justice Department advised the White House in 2002 that the torture of al Qaeda terrorist suspects might be legally defensible has focused new attention on the role President Bush played in setting the rules for interrogations in the war on terrorism.

...

An Aug. 1, 2002, memo from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, addressed to Gonzales, said that torturing suspected al Qaeda members abroad "may be justified" and that international laws against torture "may be unconstitutional if applied to interrogation" conducted against suspected terrorists.

The document provided legal guidance for the CIA, which crafted new, more aggressive techniques for its operatives in the field. McClellan called the memo a historic or scholarly review of laws and conventions concerning torture. "The memo was not prepared to provide advice on specific methods or techniques," he said. "It was analytical."

Attorney General John D. Ashcroft yesterday refused senators' requests to make public the memo, which is not classified, and would not discuss any possible involvement of the president.

In the view expressed by the Justice Department memo, which differs from the view of the Army, physical torture "must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death." For a cruel or inhuman psychological technique to rise to the level of mental torture, the Justice Department argued, the psychological harm must last "months or even years."

A former senior administration official involved in discussions about CIA interrogation techniques said Bush's aides knew he wanted them to take an aggressive approach.

--Memo on Torture Draws Focus to Bush

Bush himself took center stage to defend practices which he had denied took place.

Bush 'justifies' torture

The Bush administration defended torture as they denied they were doing it!

Although the president adamantly denied that the U.S. government uses torture, the United States has used practices such as waterboarding that can only be called torture.

--Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, Bush Justifies CIA Detainee Abuse; Proposed Military Commissions Deeply Flawed

Like Hitler's minions at Wannsee, Bush partisans Alberto Gonzales and John Yoo were tasked with putting lipstick on the pig, making 'legal' Bush's various capital crimes, crimes for which Nazis hanged following the famous trials at Nuremberg.

• The war against Iraq was begun upon a pack of lies and is, itself, a violation of the Nuremberg Principles, the Geneva Conventions, and numerous treaties; moreover, there is no language in UN Resolution 1441 authorizing the use of force by the United States against Iraq.
• Nothing said by Bush about the reasons for the war on Iraq have been in any way true. See any one of numerous Downing Street Memos which prove that intelligence was cherry picked to support the war —though Bush knew that there was more credible evidence to the contrary. Colin Powell's presentation to the UN, for example, consisted of a plagiarized student paper and ten year old black and white satellite photos. It was fraud from start to finish and Powell has since recognized that and apologized.

• Bush and Blair conspired to begin the war of aggression against Iraq though both men knew —before hand —that Saddam did not have WMD. Later, Bush would puke up a similar lie about Katrina in New Orleans.

Bush never denied 'torture'. He never claimed that because it was against international law that the US would not engage in it. Rather, Bush tasked John Yoo with making it all legal after the fact. Under the cover of 'national security' and 'protecting the American people', Bush asserts powers than not even Richard Nixon would have assumed though Nixon famously said: "If the President does it, it is not illegal!"

As an alleged victim of torture, GOP Presidential hopeful, John McCain is often presumed to be opposed to the practice. But, according to Glenn Greenwald that is just not the case.

He holds himself out as a principled torture opponent but is, in fact, the single greatest enabler of legalizing torture in this country, from his 2005 bill which exempted the CIA from torture prohibitions to his 2006 leadership in enacting the Military Commissions Act to his opposition this year to the waterboard ban."

US 'torturers' have invented creative rationalizations to justify their crimes after the fact or to make legal the crimes already committed! But, in the end, their every 'rationalization' is either a lie, a fallacy, or a delusion. McCain for example, distinguishes between the US 'torture' of, say, a French citizen vs that of the US 'torture' of an Iraqi.

I’ve made it very clear, I’ve made it very clear in my statements and in my support of the Detainee Treatment Act, the Geneva Conventions, etc., that there may be some additional techniques to be used, but none of those would violate the Geneva Conventions, the Detainee Treatment Act… And we cannot ever, in my view, torture any American, that includes waterboarding.

John McCain, quoted by Associated Press

McCain denies that waterboarding is torture --but it is. McCain opposes it when it is used against Americans, but supports its use by Americans upon anyone of any other nationality. The US, we are to suppose, is, like our 'President', above the laws --even those treaties and other obligations that we signed and affirmed. Despite what McCain and other GOP partisans may say, those obligations are just that: obligations. By law, they have become in the 'law of the land'. I had this argument with an aid to my Congressman. He lost!

McCain differs insubstantially from Bush who believes that the US torture of anyone --US or foreign -- is legal 'if the President does it!' I work assiduously to give Bush an opportunity to use that line of defense at a war crimes trial considering the capital charges against him. Let him bet his very life upon his stupid, fallacious and flawed argument.

Even if the war against Iraq, and likewise the phony 'war on terrorism', were not frauds, the practice of torture still violates the various treaties to which the US is obliged. Hence, Bush's Hitlerian efforts to make legal --after the fact --the various and numerous capital crimes that he had already committed in the name of our once great nation. Considering the failed 'wars on terrorism' waged by Ronald Reagan as well as Bush, one should not be surprised to learn that GOP policies are counter-productive. [See: Terrorism is Always Worse Under GOP Regimes].

Administration lawyers argued that since al-Qaeda and its Taliban allies were not a state party to the Geneva Conventions they were not covered by its ban on torture and other maltreatment. True, America had ratified (in 1988) the Convention against Torture, but that applied only to acts carried out on American soil, they said. And though America's own 1994 federal statute against torture did cover acts by Americans abroad, this applied only to full-blown torture, not lesser abuses.

In the notorious “torture memos” drawn up by the Department of Justice and the Pentagon in 2002 and 2003, the same lawyers sought to restrict the normal definition of torture—“severe pain or suffering”—to extreme acts equivalent to “serious physical injury, organ failure, or even death”. Furthermore, as a wartime commander in chief whose main duty was to protect the American people, the president had the power to override both domestic and international law, they argued. After being leaked in 2004 most of these memos were “withdrawn”, though not the one on the president's wartime powers.

Mr Bush and his colleagues have always said that America neither authorises nor condones torture. “We don't do torture,” the president famously said. But Mr Bush has been vaguer about the grey area between torture and more moderate pressure. Soon after suspected terrorists were first sent to Guantánamo in January 2002 he said that America's armed forces would treat the detainees “humanely” in a manner “consistent with the Geneva Conventions”—but only “to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity”.

Not until the Supreme Court's ruling in Hamdan in 2006 did the administration accept that all detainees, wherever held, were protected by Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which bans all forms of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment as well as torture. The 2005 Detainee Treatment Act, incorporating an amendment by Senator John McCain, already prohibited such treatment by American soldiers anywhere in the world. But it did not apply to the CIA.

--Is torture ever justified?, The Economist

So, why do Republicans adhere to a policy that even a cursory reading of real world stats thoroughly discredits? Reaganites themselves provide a clue: "...Reagan made us feel good about ourselves"! Michael Shermer, who has lately proven himself incapable of practicing what he preaches, posits that false beliefs are based on and drive from prejudice. But that just puts a label on it. It does not explain prejudice itself just as Bush's wild, outlandish, conspiracy theories fail to explain or even address a series of incredible events conveniently labeled: 911!

Lies are not believed randomly. Lies are purposefully disseminated and are likewise believed. Lies thus play a dual role --one for the liar and another for the gullible believer. Hitler, for example, openly boasted of his 'war against the Jew".

"Against the Jews I fought open-eyed and in view of the whole world...I made it plain that they, this parasitic vermin in Europe, will be finally exterminated."

Hitler's lies derived from his flawed psychology for whom 'Jews' became a convenient scapegoat! An individual in Hitler's adoring audience would find in Hitler's lies his/her own 'reason to believe'. Clearly --millions were victimized by punitive reparations following World War I. Economic chaos, wild inflation, the ensuing hardships made fertile soil upon which to sow the seeds of hate and prejudice.

The US was likewise deceived by Ronald Reagan whose campaign made of Jimmy Carter a scapegoat. Carter was conveniently blamed for the siege of the US Embassy in Iran and an 'oil' crisis that inconvenienced Americans and raised the price of gasoline at the pump. It no longer mattered that Carter was among the top two or three Presidents in job creation, productivity, and overall economic performance. He was tagged with a 'label' that stuck!

Hitler made it clear that he intended to wipe out the Jewish "race". Goring acted upon his Fuhrer's wishes. Goring's order was, in turn, followed by Heydrich who organized the apparatus of the Final Solution as one would organize a corporate division, a department, a cabinet post. Such is the Banality of Evil.

Millions felt better about themselves, conveniently blaming Jews for their miserable, desperate lives in pre-war Germany. Hitler made them feel good about being bigots just as Reagan later made people feel good about being bigots, self-absorbed materialists, greedy yuppies, and latter day militarists with Nazi leanings and connections.

Bush is a proven liar —caught red handed beyond any reasonable doubt. One is hard pressed to name a single time he's ever told the truth about anything! Does it make sense to acquiesce to his claims of absolute, dictatorial powers?

Even as Bush assumes dictatorial powers, a majority of Americans say that they cannot believe Bush. Certainly, that incredulity must reasonably extend to Bush's rationalizations for a dictatorship.

Most of those polled say that they find Bush dishonest and untrustworthy —certainly not qualities you want in a dictator. Can a liar be trusted with absolute powers? Who but a liar and a blackguard would want to be a dictator?

Bush has summoned up a team of toadies to rationalize, to 'make legal' his various crimes. We know Bush is a liar and his various machinations intended to make legal his crimes are widely known. His entire life is a lie, a facade designed to defraud the world. Beneath the grandoise stage paint and props, is an evil, frightened dwarf. Bush is right to be afraid! He can't handle the truth about himself.

“A lie would make no sense, unless the truth were felt to be dangerous.”

--Carl G. Jung

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Bush's Capital Crimes

I have yet to see a complete list of Bush's crimes. Here are just a few main categories in which Bush has outdone Nero.

Election Theft


• Bush's campaign financed the felonious physical assault of vote re-counters in Florida, even as the State Supreme Court has ruled in favor of Al Gore who had sought the recount, a recount upheld by the Florida Supreme Court. Though, this state issue was resolved legally by the Florida Supreme Court, SCOTUS would later hand down a bogus decision for which there is no precedent or basis in law.
  

• Scalia's rationalization is pure political bunkum and has nothing do with law. Certainly, there was no compelling reason for the US Supreme Court to even hear the case! Scalia said that 'continuing' the recount would be harmful to Bush. Duh! In a Democracy the one getting the fewer number of votes is SUPPOSED to lose! Scalia is not only a criminal, he's an idiot and an arrogant asshole! All his statements concerning Bush v Gore are those of an idiot pretending to be a great intellect.

Bush Goes Rogue

• In office, Bush imperiously repudiated America's treaty obligations and international commitments, most notably the Kyoto accords on global warming. An aide to my GOP Congressman told me that the US is not obliged by the treaties it signs!
  

• Bush covered up the crime of 911, destroying evidence as he interfered with and obstruction investigations. He opposed the creation of the 911 Commission and interfered with it after its creations. The result: an incomplete, disingenuous, and irrelevant 'tome' disowned by the co-chairs of the committee that wasted tax payer dollars coughing it up! Pure propaganda designed to deflect suspicion of the Bush administration complicity and cover up of 911!

Bush Exploits 911

• Bush presided over and orchestrated an gestalt of lies --much of based on decades old photographs --in order to justify what is, in fact, a war of naked aggression against Iraq for the purpose of 'liberating' that nation's oil resources! His lies about Iraq make the US attack, invasion and continued occupation an on-going war crime in violation of US Codes, Title 18, Section 2441. Bush tried to make these crimes, specifically, legal only after he had already committed them! That's understandable: the penalty for violating them is death!
  

• Bush admits to authorizing a campaign of ongoing tortures at Abu Ghraib and a gulag of Nazi-like hell-holes throughout Eastern Europe. There is evidence that US Troops, under orders from the Bush administration, not only committed various tortures but murder and other atrocities that had been heretofore associated with the likes of the Nazi under Hitler, Pol Pot and August Pinochet.
  

• The theft of Iraqi oil resources is an international crime.
• The theft of Iraqi art treasures is a crime!
• Bush personally bears the legal responsibility for the deaths of US Soldiers in a war of naked aggression --a war crime! I urge family members of slain US soldiers bring a class action against George W. Bush personally. He is personally responsible for every military death in wars that are illegal under both US and International Conventions to which the US is signatory!

Bobby Darin - Simple Song of Freedom

Enough is enough!

Additional resources

• Bush Should Stand Trial For Capital Crimes
• Bugliosi: George Bush Should be Tried for Mass Murder
• Bush's Crimes
• A list of Bush's crimes! Running out of room!
• BUSH CARTEL CRIMES
• Another Smoking Gun on Terror War Torture

Rules for Radicals: How to Begin Taking Back Our Government

I am disgusted and fed up with campaign coverage. I don't give a crap about Hilary 'tearing up' or Obama wearing or not wearing a flag pin of any sort! I am not impressed with idiots who find patriotism in a flag pin like Bush finds courage at the bottom of a bottle! I care even less about how McCain --an idiot --is doing!

The debates might as well be about how many angels can dance on the head of a flag pin. Everything is eyewash until the treasonous criminals who seized the White House are brought to justice before a hangin' judge! Until someone addresses that issue, everything else is just meaningless polemics, a sop, bread and circuses to let the 'people' believe that they actually count. Since 911, you don't count!

I am not a 'Kumbayah Liberal'. I am a roll up your sleeves and carry a tire iron radical! I am not gentile when someone like Bush --a prissy, prancy, snot-nosed, gay boy cheerleader --tries to bullshit me while scrapping the Constitution and threatening the rest of the world with nukes! Bush's co-conspirators, the GOP, the MIC and certain well-heeled individuals have much to answer for. With any luck at all, they will! In a dock! Charged with a panoply of crimes for which there is abundant probable cause now to try their sorry asses! Don't waste time calling me a 'conspiracy theorist'; I'm not talking theories --I'm talking indictments!

The American left used to be tough. Throughout the American left were found tough minded organizers and radicals like Saul Alinsky who did not mince words.

"Liberals in their meetings utter bold works; they strut, grimace belligerently, and then issue a weasel-worded statement 'which has tremendous implications, if read between the lines.' They sit calmly, dispassionately, studying the issue; judging both sides; they sit and still sit.

The Radical does not sit frozen by cold objectivity. He sees injustice and strikes at it with hot passion. He is a man of decision and action. There is a saying that the Liberal is one who walks out of the room when the argument turns into a fight.

Society has good reason to fear the Radical. Every shaking advance of mankind toward equality and justice has come from the Radical. He hits, he hurts, he is dangerous. Conservative interests know that while Liberals are most adept at breaking their own necks with their tongues, Radicals are most adept at breaking the necks of Conservatives.

Radicals precipitate the social crisis by action - by using power. Liberals may then timidly follow along or else, as in most cases, be swept forward along the course set by Radicals, but all because of forces unloosed by Radical action. They are forced to positive action only in spite of their desires ...

--Saul Alinsky: The American Radical

The American left was, in fact, so tough that a shocked and awed GOP decided that if they could not come up with their own strategies they would revert to form and steal those of the 'organizers' that represented America's left wing throughout the 20s, 30s and 40s. Though they will not admit it, the GOP was as impressed as it was frightened with Saul Alinsky. He had, after all, organized the tough Chicago neighborhoods made famous by Upton Sinclair in his novel: The Jungle.

There's another reason for working inside the system. Dostoevsky said that taking a new step is what people fear most. Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people. They must feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and change the future.

This acceptance is the reformation essential to any revolution. To bring on this reformation requires that the organizer work inside the system, among not only the middle class but the 40 per cent of American families - more than seventy million people - whose income range from $5,000 to $10,000 a year [in 1971]. They cannot be dismissed by labeling them blue collar or hard hat. They will not continue to be relatively passive and slightly challenging. If we fail to communicate with them, if we don't encourage them to form alliances with us, they will move to the right. Maybe they will anyway, but let's not let it happen by default.."[2]

--Saul Alinsky, Organizer

So impressed was the GOP that throughout the '80s --the decade that saw the rise of Tom DeLay --GOP consultants would include Alinsky's 'Rules for Radicals' as the cornerstone of the various GOP 'Campaign Manuals' that they put together. It was a GOP manual, in fact, that was my introduction to Alinsky. I think it's time the 'left' reclaimed Alinsky. He is, after all, one of our own. It's time the 'left' dust off his 'Rules for Radicals', reclaim them, and put them to work in service to a higher call than that of Bush self-aggrandizement, bullying, and outright theft of the world's resources.

RULE 1: "Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have."

Power is derived from 2 main sources - money and people. "Have-Nots" must build power from flesh and blood. (These are two things of which there is a plentiful supply. Government and corporations always have a difficult time appealing to people, and usually do so almost exclusively with economic arguments.)

RULE 2: "Never go outside the expertise of your people."

It results in confusion, fear and retreat.

Feeling secure adds to the backbone of anyone. (Organizations under attack wonder why radicals don't address the "real" issues. This is why. They avoid things with which they have no knowledge.)

RULE 3: "Whenever possible, go outside the expertise of the enemy."

Look for ways to increase insecurity, anxiety and uncertainty. (This happens all the time. Watch how many organizations under attack are blind-sided by seemingly irrelevant arguments that they are then forced to address.)

RULE 4: "Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules."

If the rule is that every letter gets a reply, send 30,000 letters. You can kill them with this because no one can possibly obey all of their own rules. (This is a serious rule. The besieged entity's very credibility and reputation is at stake, because if activists catch it lying or not living up to its commitments, they can continue to chip away at the damage.)

RULE 5: "Ridicule is man's most potent weapon."

There is no defense. It's irrational. It's infuriating. It also works as a key pressure point to force the enemy into concessions. (Pretty crude, rude and mean, huh? They want to create anger and fear.)

RULE 6: "A good tactic is one your people enjoy."

They'll keep doing it without urging and come back to do more. They're doing their thing, and will even suggest better ones. (Radical activists, in this sense, are no different that any other human being. We all avoid "un-fun" activities, and but we revel at and enjoy the ones that work and bring results.)

RULE 7: "A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag."

Don't become old news. (Even radical activists get bored. So to keep them excited and involved, organizers are constantly coming up with new tactics.)

RULE 8: "Keep the pressure on. Never let up."

Keep trying new things to keep the opposition off balance. As the opposition masters one approach, hit them from the flank with something new. (Attack, attack, attack from all sides, never giving the reeling organization a chance to rest, regroup, recover and re-strategize.)

RULE 9: "The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself."

Imagination and ego can dream up many more consequences than any activist. (Perception is reality. Large organizations always prepare a worst-case scenario, something that may be furthest from the activists' minds. The upshot is that the organization will expend enormous time and energy, creating in its own collective mind the direst of conclusions. The possibilities can easily poison the mind and result in demoralization.)

RULE 10: "If you push a negative hard enough, it will push through and become a positive."

Violence from the other side can win the public to your side because the public sympathizes with the underdog. (Unions used this tactic. Peaceful [albeit loud] demonstrations during the heyday of unions in the early to mid-20th Century incurred management's wrath, often in the form of violence that eventually brought public sympathy to their side.)

RULE 11: "The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative."

Never let the enemy score points because you're caught without a solution to the problem. (Old saw: If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem. Activist organizations have an agenda, and their strategy is to hold a place at the table, to be given a forum to wield their power. So, they have to have a compromise solution.)

RULE 12: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it."

Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions. (This is cruel, but very effective. Direct, personalized criticism and ridicule works.)

--Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals

Even now, Alinsky is quoted more often by the 'right' than the 'left' who should be studying him. I found the following comment on the 'Free Republic':

"Hillary!" Rodham (Pre-Clinton), while at Wellesley, studied Saul Alinsky, whose ideas provided the organizing thesis for her (mysteriously unavailable) Senior Honors Paper.(!)

This is the absolute truth!

Heads up!

My response to the 'wing nut' who posted this is: so what! I advocate taking Alinsky back. He's the genie in the lamp. He served the left well until, somewhere, sometime, he was hijacked. The right wing rubbed the lamp and his 'Rules for Radicals' became the object of right wing study, application and practice.

The right wing, however, misunderstood and misapplied Alinsky. The right wing organizes from the top down; Alinsky from people to people, block by block! The right wing is ideologically constipated. Alinsky believed in what works for the people.

I say: reclaim Alinksy, the Genie! Let him out of the lamp and put him back to work for greater and better causes than the enrichment of some one percent of the population who didn't work for it and doesn't deserve it. Class warfare? You bet your sweet ass, it is! Bring it on! Put Alinsky to work for peace and people --not guns and phony aristocrats!

Put Alinsky to work organizing 'committees' that will track down war criminals (we know who they are) when they are out of office and on the lamb. Put Alinsky to work organizing research teams that will support numerous capital crimes cases. Put Alinsky's principles to work getting the goods on the 'real killers' of 911! And we know who they are as well! Some good starts have been made. But a revolution is won, like chess, in the end game with checkmate. In this case, we start with Rule 12: "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it."

Saul Alinsky's Legacy

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Bush: An "accessory before the fact" of Mass Murder

by Len Hart 

It's bad enough that those courageous enough to oppose Bush's rise to dictatorship are attacked and impugned by the right wing! That is to be expected. But the propagation of fallacies and nonsense by those who should know better is intolerable.

A recent 'editorial' by Buzzflash, which is ordinarily to be commended for keeping a watchful eye on Bush's nefarious machinations, seems to have completely missed the point with regard to the so-called '911 Truth Movement'.

This article may be considered an 'open letter' to Buzzflash where I respond to their comments in italics.

We have often taken issue with the 9/11 Truth Movement because it takes the fact that there are many unanswered questions about 9/11 and tries to answer them with often bizarre speculation.

---Conspiratorially Speaking: United Flight 93 and 9/11

  It is fallacious to refer to a movement of many with the word 'it'! There are many positions by many free thinking individuals throughout what is conveniently called the '911 Truth Movement'. To apply a single position to every person demanding a complete and unbiased investigation of a crime that was in fact never properly investigated is absurd, unfair and fallacious.

In the many papers that I have read by David Ray Griffin et al, the focus is primarily on the demonstrable 'holes', lies and fallacies that are found in various conspiracy theories put forward by Bush, Powell, Rumsfeld, et al as well as the 'official account' put forward by the 911 Commission.

Certainly, some members of the '911 TruthMovement' have concluded that because only the Bush administration actively sought to cover up, prevent and in many instances quash investigations of 911, then it is reasonable to conclude that 911 was an inside job. Else --why cover it up? But to attribute that position to every Bush critic is unfair and fallacious.

It may be true to state that the so-called 'Truth Movement' began with Griffen's still un-refuted paper entitled:

The Destruction of the World Trade Center: Why the Official Account Cannot Be True

Popular Mechanics and MSM propagandists tried to marginalize this paper because they could not refute it! Last time I checked, steel still will not melt or weaken at temperatures less than 2795ºF. The science upon which Griffin based his paper is simply beyond the meager intellectual capacity of idiots like Bill 0'Reilly to comprehend, let alone refute. Simply, if steel will not melt at kerosene fire temperatures, then the official theory of 911 is a monumental fraud! Photos of people walking around, waving distress flags, in the hole in the North Tower where some 10,000 gallons of jet fuel was said to have been burning is absolute and irrefutable proof that the fires were never hot enough nor did they last long enough to have brought down the towers.

Bushies might wish we would forget WTC7 about which Larry Silverstein himself said 'it was pulled'. Certainly, no airliner hit it. The dinky fires were unimpressive, less inflammatory than the rhetoric describing them. Even if the kerosene had damaged and caused the twin tower fires, that was not the case at WTC7. So --why did WTC7 collapse if not from dinky, unimpressive, fires here and there? Occam's Razor demands the common sense conclusion: it was 'pulled' and therefore prepared weeks, possibly months, in advance! Just as Silverstein said it was.

This bears repeating: if WTC7 was pulled, then the official conspiracy theory is nonsense.
The 'movement', therefore, deals with the gaping holes, fallacies, lies, and inconsistencies with the 'official conspiracy theory'. The 'movement' demands a complete, fair and competent investigation of the crime of 911 --an investigation that was, in fact, never begun.

911 was a crime still actively covered up by Bush. To conclude that because one demands a complete and thorough investigation of 911, he/she must, therefore, believe 911 to be an inside job is unfair and fallacious. In my case, I have concluded that 911 was, indeed, an inside job and for good reasons which I have outlined elsewhere. But it does not follow that because I so believe then everyone connected with a 'movement' is likewise convinced.

Buzzflash stated flatly that '911 was not an inside job', an obvious attempt to shift the burden of proof. The dictum in both logic and debate is: those who assert must prove! It is Bush who asserts the theory --the so-called 'official conspiracy theory'. The burden of proof is on Bush to prove it. It is Bush's job to prove the OFFICIAL conspiracy theory involving some 19 Arabs who were most certainly not capable of piloting any aircraft of any size, seizing control of four large airliners armed only with box cutters. Reams can be written in refutation of this absurd theory, but it is enough, here, to point out its absurdity on its face.

Whenever a 100 ton airliner crashes anywhere at anytime for any reason, there is left behind some 100 tons of debris. The debris found at the Pentagon could have been carted off in several hand-toted wheelbarrows. Airliners of any size do not vaporize nor do they pop into parallel universes, worm holes or rabbit holes. It's time to get fuckin' real, folks! Bushies think you are too stupid to get wise to them.

The Space Shuttle Columbia crashed into the Stratosphere at some 24,000 MPH, yet left identifiable debris and body parts over three states. Unlike Flight 93, that wreckage was recovered and identified. It did not get sucked into another dimension nor did it shape-shift into a tiny hole.

...but it was something that probably could have been prevented in August of 2001 if Bush and Rice had listened to a CIA warning about Al-Qaeda preparing hijackings in the U.S. But Bush and Rice did nothing -- absolutely nothing -- to put airports on a heightened security alert. Then Bush --at the very least --is an accessory to mass murder. Some case law:

The State concedes there was not sufficient evidence to convict the defendant of first-degree murder based on premeditation and deliberation, and it was error to so charge. There was evidence, however, that the defendant was an accessory before the fact to first-degree burglary, as we shall demonstrate later in this opinion. The killing was done during this burglary, which killing would be felony murder. State v. Simmons , 286 N.C. 681, 213 S.E.2d 280 (1975), death sentence vacated , 428 U.S. 903, 49 L. Ed. 2d 1208 (1976).

--IN THE SUPREME COURT OF NORTH CAROLINA, 9 February 1996, STATE OF NORTH CAROLINA v. DANIEL C. MARR, No. 164PA94 - Polk

If Bush participated in the destruction of evidence after 911, then he is an accessory after the fact.

Section 3. Accessory after the fact

Whoever, knowing that an offense against the United States has been committed, receives, relieves, comforts or assists the offender in order to hinder or prevent his apprehension, trial or punishment, is an accessory after the fact.

Except as otherwise expressly provided by any Act of Congress, an accessory after the fact shall be imprisoned not more than one-half the maximum term of imprisonment or (notwithstanding section 3571) fined not more than one-half the maximum fine prescribed for the punishment of the principal, or both; or if the principal is punishable by life imprisonment or death, the accessory shall be imprisoned not more than 15 years.

But 911 is not a run-o-the-mill act of violence to which Bush is prima facie an accessory after the fact. 911, enabled by Bush inaction 'before the fact' is, therefore, an act of high treason. That changes everything:

The Supreme Court sustained a conviction of treason, for the first time in its history, in 1947 in Haupt v. United States. 1299 Here it was held that although the overt acts relied upon to support the charge of treason--defendant's harboring and sheltering in his home his son who was an enemy spy and saboteur, assisting him in purchasing an automobile, and in obtaining employment in a defense plant--were all acts which a father would naturally perform for a son, this fact did not necessarily relieve them of the treasonable purpose of giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

--See: HAUPT v. U.S., 330 U.S. 631 (1947)

The reality is that the Bush White House covered up much about 9/11, including its own incompetence. 

Indeed! Bush ordered the destruction, sale or removal of most of the evidence prior to investigation. Last time I checked, 911 was a crime. This willful cover up of a crime IS a crime. In this case --'obstruction of justice' at the very least! Certainly, 'accessory after the fact'.

Brush up your history of Watergate. Whether or not Nixon was complicit in the plot depended upon what he knew and when he knew it, an issue central to the special prosecutor's investigation. Similarly, much of Bush's complicity in 911 depends upon what he knew and when he knew it. If Bush had any knowledge whatsoever of any plot by anyone at any time and failed to act upon it, he should be prosecuted to the letter of the law!

How much we don't know. But we do know that -- if you recall -- Bush would only be interviewed by the 9/11 Commission (which was stacked with white-washers) with Cheney at his side, and with no notes or minutes taken, and with their not being sworn in under oath, and with the "interview" occurring in the Oval Office. That sort of scenario does not inspire a great deal of credibility.

Indeed, it does not! We might have known what we now 'don't know' had there been various investigations that Bush either overtly and deliberately quashed or failed to support. One is culpable who is aware of an imminent murder and despite being in a position to prevent it does nothing! If I were a juror considering a capital crimes indictment against GWB, I might be swayed not only by Bush's failure to act but his overt actions to quash! I might be inclined to return: guilty as charged!

Late July 2001 (B): David Schippers, noted conservative Chicago lawyer and the House Judiciary Committee's chief investigator in the Clinton impeachment trial, later claims that FBI agents in Chicago and Minnesota contact him around this time and tell him that a terrorist attack is going to occur in lower Manhattan. According to Schippers, the agents had been developing extensive information on the planned attack for many months. However, the FBI soon pulls them off the terrorist investigation and threatens them with prosecution under the National Security Act if they go public with the information.

--Verifiable Research on 9/11

Now --if you don't believe 'Verifiable Research', call up David Schippers and ask him directly. That's called journalism. If Bush had foreknowledge of this type and failed to act, then he is at least guilty of being an accessory before the fact. An additional charge of high treason might be prosecuted due to the fact that '911' was, in fact, an act of war against the people of the US.

But on a scale of 1 to 10, BuzzFlash would put it at an 8 likelihood that Flight 93 was indeed downed by an American missile.

Perhaps Buzzflash missed it when Donald Rumsfeld referred on video tape to the 'missile' that hit the Pentagon and the 'missile' that shot down Flight 93.

In the meantime, Buzzflash would do well to represent fairly the positions of the 911 truth movement as a whole. Buzzflash would do well to consider the implications of the Bush administration's order to sell off WTC steel to China, for example, an act that makes Bush --prima facie --an accessory to mass murder after the fact! The destruction of that evidence alone should have been enough to land Bush in the dock in a Federal Courtroom. Now --my position is that innocent folk rarely cover up capital crimes nor have an interest in doing so. The cover up of capital crimes is something that is invariably done by those who commit them!

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'Untimely deaths' that benefited R. M. Scaife, the CIA, and the Bush Crime Family

In a twisted, right wing brain like that of Richard Mellon Scaife, murder may be justified by endless ideological rationalizations. Not only lives are lost but truth itself. It is a sick mentality that sacrifices the voice of reason for lies and bullshit. Short-term, short-sighted victories are pyrrhic and the very fabric of society is corrupted.

The whole fabric of society will go to wrack if we really lay hands of reform on our rotten institutions. From top to bottom the whole system is a fraud, all of us know it, laborers and capitalists alike, and all of us are consenting parties to it.

--Henry Adams

Surely someone has done a study that proves that the murder of liberals is suspiciously and statistically high in America and would be higher still if you include those who are 'suicided' under 'suspicious circumstances'. No theory --just cold hard statistics! Numbers don't lie but liars often take up a gun, a private airplane, or a lonely bathroom stall when they have no other argument to back them up.

That has been the case with the morally bankrupt and depraved American right wing for too long now. Even Rome fell --but America will have done in a few decades what took centuries for Rome. The bad news is --the process of America's fall was begun in the middle seventies. The time now is about one minute to midnite.

There have been many milestones along the US path to fascism and dictatorship. For excellent reasons, I have often singled out Ronald Reagan's infamous tax cut of 1982 which I said re-started a pernicious trend: the rich getting obscenely rich and everyone else getting obscenely poor.

See: Conscience of a Liberal by Paul Krugman.

We had not yet 'survived' the worst effects of that cut when Bush, the Lesser made of three short words --'tax', 'cut' and 'elite' --his entire economic philosophy and program. Gore Vidal, in his Decline and Fall of the American Empire, denounced the emergence of an American empire which began a long decline in the middle 80's when the US became a net debtor nation.

The late Steve Kangas, however, dates the onset of decline to the middle seventies. It was between 1975 and 1994, claimed Kangas, that income inequality grew most dramatically. WWII, coming as it did toward the end of the Great Depression, had ushered in what has been called the 'Great Compression', the most egalitarian period in American History.

Income inequality in postwar America can be divided into two distinct periods. Between 1947 and 1974, income inequality was reduced from .376 to .355 on the Gini scale (which goes from 0 to 1, with 1 being the most unequal). But between 1975 and 1994, income inequality dramatically grew, from .357 to .426, a level not seen since the Great Depression. Although the decades immediately following World War II were socially conservative, they were impeccably liberal from an economic standpoint. In the 1950s, the top individual tax rate was 91 percent. By the 60s, President Johnson would cut poverty nearly in half with his Great Society programs. And this was an era of unprecedented prosperity; white middle class families never had it so good, either before or since. Black families made enormous strides towards equality, with their poverty rate falling from 55 to 31 percent.

This liberal economic era came to an end in 1975, when a quiet revolution took over Washington DC The stage was set in 1974, when the House of Representatives decentralized its power, allowing 22 committees to delegate much of their authority to 172 subcommittees. This not only created a mass of competing special interests, but enabled corporations to lobby their particular subcommittees much more directly, secretly and effectively. But the real shift in power came with the 1975 SUN-PAC decision, which basically legalized corporate political action committees. In 1974, there were only 89 quasi-corporate PACs; a decade later, this had exploded to 1,682. By 1992, corporations formed 67 percent of all PACs, and they donated 79 percent of all contributions to political parties.

The rise of the corporate special interest system in 1975 resulted in a tremendous shift in power, away from workers and the poor, and towards corporations and the rich. Corporate lobbyists wasted no time scaling back the programs of the New Deal and the Great Society. Under Jimmy Carter's presidency alone, corporate lobbyists bribed Congress to do all of the following:

• Pass the first tax cut for the rich in 15 years: a reduction in the capital gains tax from 39 to 28 percent.
• Raise social security taxes, a heavily regressive tax that hits the poor the hardest.
• Impose a tax on unemployment benefits. (!)
• Reduce cash welfare benefits.
• Kill Ralph Nader's pet project: the creation of a Consumer Protection Agency.
• Deregulate airlines, trucking, railroads, oil, telecommunications and interest rates, and create the deregulation machinery that Reagan would later use.
• Increase defense spending.

And all this happened before Ronald Reagan!

Under the corporate special interest system, the top tax rates were reduced from 70 percent to as low as 28 percent, while regressive payroll, state and local taxes were raised on the poor. Executive pay exploded, while the average hourly wage fell from $8.55 to $7.40 in constant 82 dollars. The value of individual welfare benefits were cut over 40 percent. Poverty has actually risen, from 11 to 15 percent. And this is the first generation of middle class Americans who believe that they will not see their parents' standard of living -- while the richest 1 percent owns nearly 40 percent of America's wealth.

This, in a nutshell, is the core problem facing liberals. Those who wish to become activists need to direct their energies to dismantling the corporate special interest system and restoring greater equality of income. The gap between the rich and poor cannot be completely eliminated, nor should we want it to, but the gap should certainly be reduced from its current insane size, and policies should be enacted that allow rich and poor incomes to grow at the same pace, not apart.

--Steve Kangas, Activism in Three Easy Steps

Thus, the right wing sought to shut up yet another dissenter and may have done it the old fashioned way, as it had done with John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, and, most probably, Paul Wellstone and JFK Jr. The right wing has a stake in your not believing 'conspiracy theories' or in the truth. Killing folk is how the right wing 'wins' a 'debate'. Shutting your mouth is a permanent solution to dissent.

It was “Origins of the Overclass” in which Kangas mentioned Richard Mellon Scaife by name.

The origins of this machine, interestingly enough, can be traced back to the CIA. This is not to say the machine is a formal CIA operation, complete with code name and signed documents. (Although such evidence may yet surface — and previously unthinkable domestic operations such as MK-ULTRA, CHAOS and MOCKINGBIRD show this to be a distinct possibility.) But what we do know already indicts the CIA strongly enough. Its principle creators were Irving Kristol, Paul Weyrich, William Simon, Richard Mellon Scaife, Frank Shakespeare, William F. Buckley, Jr., the Rockefeller family, and more. Almost all the machine's creators had CIA backgrounds.

During the 1970s, these men would take the propaganda and operational techniques they had learned in the Cold War and apply them to the Class War. Therefore it is no surprise that the American version of the machine bears an uncanny resemblance to the foreign versions designed to fight communism. The CIA's expert and comprehensive organization of the business class would succeed beyond their wildest dreams. In 1975, the richest 1 percent owned 22 percent of America’s wealth. By 1992, they would nearly double that, to 42 percent — the highest level of inequality in the 20th century.

--Kangas, Origins of the Overclass

That was in 1999.

Body no. 2: Steve Kangas, a prolific writer who got on the wrong side of George W Bush and his cronies, was found dead on 8 February 1999. He was discovered in a semi-conscious state by electrician, Don Adams. Adams reported blood on the floor around the spot and left to call for help.

When he returned they found Steve sitting on the toilet slumped over and covered in blood. His website, Liberalism Resurgent, ruffled many high-profile feathers, but it disturbed billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife most of all, even though he was only fleetingly mentioned on Kangas's website. Scaife, a publishing magnate and Bush crony who the most generous donor to conservative causes in American history, hired a private detective to look into Kangas' past.

The award-winning political website, with over 300 html pages, was a 'one-stop-shop' of liberal arguments and facts to be used in debates against popular neo-conservative myths. Scaife tried to discredit Kangas by viciously attacking him with a long-running smear campaign in his many newspapers. While Scaife was on the war path, Kangas was quietly working with a publisher to finish his book. Kangas' body was found in a 39th-floor bathroom outside of Scaife's offices in Pittsburgh, the victim of an apparent suicide.

But the story is full of holes: Kangas was a prolific writer, yet he left no note. Why did he go on a long trip from Las Vegas to Pittsburgh with a fully-packed suitcase of clothes? He also bought a burglar alarm shortly before he left for Pittsburgh. Why did he need a burglar alarm if he was planning to kill himself? A gun-control campaigner, he nevertheless bought a gun. What was he afraid of? And why on earth did he go to Pittsburgh just outside of Scaife's doorway?

After his death, everything in his flat was trashed, but his computer was sold for $150 and its hard drive wiped clean. Although the most bizarre detail of his suicide is that he was shot twice in the head? The police never conducted an investigation beyond the autopsy and the very next morning, 18 hours after his death, they ruled it a suicide, without even carrying out toxicology tests. Equally odd, there are over 1,000 internet posts on this topic, dated from eleven days after his death, yet it was not reported in mainstream media until nearly a month later.

--The extraordinary frequency of untimely deaths that benefit the Bush family, Britt Collins

Kangas described specifically the cozy partnership between the CIA and the US media, pointing out that “Journalism is a perfect cover.”

“People talk freely to journalists”, Kangas wrote; "few think suspiciously of a journalist aggressively searching for information. Journalists also have power, influence and clout. Not surprisingly, the CIA began a mission in the late 1940s to recruit American journalists on a wide scale, a mission it dubbed Operation MOCKINGBIRD. The agency wanted these journalists not only to relay any sensitive information they discovered, but also to write anti-communist, pro-capitalist propaganda when needed.”

Every four years the naive half who vote are encouraged to believe that if we can elect a really nice man or woman President everything will be all right. But it won't be. Any individual who is able to raise $25 million to be considered presidential is not going to be much use to the people at large. He will represent oil, or aerospace, or banking, or whatever moneyed entities are paying for him. Certainly he will never represent the people of the country, and they know it. Hence, the sense of despair throughout the land as incomes fall, businesses fail and there is no redress."

--Gore Vidal

'Liberal' comes from the Latin liberalis, literally, pertaining to a free man. In politics, therefore, to be liberal means extending democracy to all citizens through change and reform, or, if need be, revolution. It was the latter course favored by both Thomas Jefferson, in the Declaration of Independence, and Che Guevara, in his Principles of Guerilla Warfare. As Gore Vidal points out, one understands why the word 'liberal' simply 'had to be erased from our political lexicon'.

The erasure of 'liberal' from 'politically correct' discourse in America has taken many forms, primarily, the seizure of the US media by irresponsible liars, like Rupert Murdoch, or mendacious money grubbers like Clear Channel. More ominously, dissenters are simply murdered, 'suicided', or disappeared. I am hard pressed to name a single 'right wing' activist to have ever 'disappeared' but the list of 'lefties, pinkoes, liberals, 'niggers', and 'tree huggers' to have died under 'mysterious circumstances' is legion. I am not inclined to believe an absurd and obvious cover story that Steve Kangas knocked out his own teeth before he shot himself in the head. Twice!

Radical right wing nut jobs who think it possible to shoot one's self in the head TWICE, should try it themselves!

When I first heard that Steve Kangas may have died in Pittsburgh, I searched for an obituary and could find none. I wanted to know about the circumstances. I knew Steve Kangas had written an investigative essay on Richard Mellon Scaife and wondered whether there might be a connection, though I really didn't expect to find one. Finally, someone with Lexus Nexus access verified that Steve Kangas had actually died, and sent me the short obituary from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette of Feb. 12:

"The body of a 37-year-old man found in a 39th floor bathroom of One Oxford Centre late Monday night has been identified as Steven Kangas of Las Vegas. He died of a gunshot wound to the head. The Allegheny County coroner's office ruled the death a suicide."

I plugged in One Oxford Centre and Scaife -what popped up made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

Scaife Foundations
One Oxford Centre
301 Grant Street, Suite 3900
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15219-6401

Since then, the questions surrounding the death of Steve Kangas have snowballed. There were two parallel tracks being taken. One track was seeking more information about Steve's death and wanting a further investigation. The other track was bent on smearing Steve's reputation and turning him into everything from an embezzler to a neo nazi to a down and out womanizing drunk to an assassin out to murder Richard Mellon Scaife. For instance Tucker Carlson, in an article "Stalking Scaife" characterized Steve Kangas as, "Kangas, a 37-year-old Internet pornographer from Las Vegas" and Tony Snow, in an article "Steve Kangas Left-Wing Vince Foster" characterized Steve Kangas as, "Squeeky Frohme with intellectual pretensions."

For any who are unfamiliar with Steve Kangas and wish to make up their own mind, I suggest you visit his web page and read through his essays ("The Origins of the Overclass" is the essay that mentions Scaife).

[...]

He posted his last essay to his Web site on February 3, just five days before his untimely death. In my opinion, it is not the writings of a man in throes of alcoholism, though people like Richard Scaife have suggested as much and he may well view Steve's work as pornography. See:

[...]

There are more questions than answers. Richard Scaife hiring a detective to try and dig up dirt on Steve Kangas raises a red flag. He used the same detective, Rex Armistead, that was used to try and dig up dirt on President Clinton for the Arkansas Project. [See: A Break in the Case , Rex P. Armistead's "odoriferous background",Rex Armistead spied on CNN's correspondent John Camp, Assaulted suspect] The Pittsburgh police should have been so thorough. I doubt the police even questioned Richard Scaife, though one report did say they were thinking about it. The systematic attempted trashing of Steve Kangas' raises questions. Discrepancies between the coroner's report, in which Steve was injured when first found, and the police report, with no mention of injuries when he was first found raises questions. The quick cremation and the erasure of Steve Kangas' hard drive raises questions.

If magically I could have three questions about the circumstances around this case answered, I suppose they would be -- (1) Is the checking of the circuit breakers in One Oxford Centre rest rooms sop, and is there a log to prove this? (2) Was the gun that killed Steve empty when found? The news articles infer this, stating 47 rounds were found in his backpack and in one pocket. This is important because if Steve Kangas were in custody of Scaife security, they may have initially taken his gun away and emptied the clip. There may even be prints on the bullets or the clip, if the gun is still in evidence. (3) One intriguing puzzle piece that doesn't fit with the theory of suicide -- the bullet found around the time that Steve Kangas was found. There was a bullet hole found in the window of a street level clothing store. The slug was found inside the store. The bullet got there somehow. The location of One Oxford Centre doesn't appear to be a part of Pittsburgh where random bullet holes would be found. I suspect this may be the first time ever that a bullet hole was found in a window of one of the shops. Maybe some time after all the stores had closed, Steve Kangas had attempted to leave, was stopped by Scaife security, shots or a shot were fired, with Steve Kangas was forced to go back up to the 39th floor. If that bullet is connected, suicide becomes implausible.

I don't know what happened to Steve Kangas on the evening of February 8. I can write several scripts from the facts, as reported in the various newspaper articles. Many of the facts of the case seem suspicious and do not fit well with the theory of suicide. When I started digging on my own, that is what I expected to find. But from the burglar alarm system, to the $300 gun, to the intensive work he'd been doing on his political web site, that does not seem to be where Steve Kangas was at.

And then there is that bullet hole in the window of the Kountz and Rider clothing store.

For Steve's sake, this case deserves to be investigated further by someone with the means and abilities far greater than I. Hopefully someone, or some agency, will investigate the death of Steve Kangas in the manner it deserves.

Rest in peace, Steve Kangas.

--John Van Matre

--A letter from John Van Matre

Are we 'liberals' to cower in alley ways? Not a chance! We organize and inspire a revolution that will sweep away the inequities compounded since Ronald Reagan. We undo Bush's treasonous assault upon the Constitution. We prosecute and sentence those guilty of mass murder, war crimes and high treason!

We bravely shout: 'J'Accuse!' or, as is often said today, we speak truth to power!

We get in their faces!

We shall never shut up!

Piecemeal, 'they' can simply 'off' one of us here, another there. Anyone daring to connect a fall from a hospital window with a tragic plunge from an airplane is simply marginalized as a 'conspiracy theorist'. But what if millions rise up in defiance amid massive civil disobedience? What if when Bush whines class warfare, we answer in a chorus: 'well, DUH, you stupid fuck!!!'

And what if you track down these men and kill them? What if you murdered all of us? From every corner of Europe hundreds of men -- thousands -- would rise up to take our places. Even Nazis can't kill that fast....

Lazlo to Major Strasser, Casablanca

And not even the Bush crime family or the GOP can kill or 'suicide' that fast.

Selected Links from Kangas' Liberal Resurgent

• Timeline of CIA Atrocities
• The Origins of the Overclass
• Peter Montegue: Economic Inequality and Health
• Help Fight the Right
• The Reagan Years: A Statistical Overview
  

Other resources

• MIT Press The Quarterly Journal of Economics
• The extraordinary frequency of untimely deaths that benefit the Bush family
• New info unearthed about the strange death of Steve Kangas
• Suspicious 'Suicides'
• An Evil Synthesis
  
• Monopoly Media Manipulation
• When Fascism takes over U.S.: FEMA readies prison trains & concentration camps in martial law

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