Demonstrators passing the Colosseum in Rome. (New York Times)

Please join me in registering for a Virtual March on Washington on February 26th. We are asking Congress to stop the Bush administration's rush to war, and to Let the Inspections Work. Time is running out.

With your help, on February 26th, every Senate office will receive a call EVERY MINUTE from a constituent, as they receive a simulataneous crush of faxes and email. In New York and Los Angeles, "anti-war rooms" will highlight the progress of the day for national media. Local media will visit the "anti-war room" online, to monitor this constituent march throughout the day.

With your help, every Senate office switchboard will be lit up all day with our anti-war messages. This will be a powerful reminder of the bread and depth of opposition to a war in Iraq.

Just go to:

http://www.moveon.org/winwithoutwar/

Please join me and sign up today. This has never been done before. Let's be part of it. (courtesy Laura Elrick)

Splinter groups?

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L15418068

Indy Media DC is now featuring audio / video / reportage of the recent anti-war poetry reading in the nation's capitol. You will find many practical examples of the multiplicity of potential aesthetic responses to U.S. foreign "policy" here:

http://dc.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=50807&group=webcast

Circulars is looking for reports from protests tomorrow and Sunday from where ever you may be. Especially useful are summaries of some of the speeches since many of us are not going to be anywhere near the podium. Photographs are also really cool. Just send to the email address at the right.

Btw, I've changed the design a bit so that it behaves a wee better with Netscape -- it was a real mess before, but even now is very hard to read. The original template of this site was lifted from Movabletype.org, a blog site, and they just don't seem to have cared to make the templates Netscape compatible.

I also wanted to make the header smaller to push the stories up, but I took the liberty of making the rotatating thing to the left slightly bigger and centered over the column, just cause I like the way it looks (click on it and see how it changes.) I took it from the site levitated.net -- I'll put a credit under soon.

Some of you will notice that "Poets for the War" have made some contributions to the comments section. I've been asked to delete them but I think I'm going to keep them on since I don't want anyone to think it's a given that poets are against the war -- in fact, I see this as a reminder that the anti-war argument must always be refreshed.

You'll also notice that there are some different names posting now. I've added numerous people with author privileges though I expect that my own presence will continue to dominate here simply because I'm a web-guy and check in more often. I hope, though, that the community takes more advantage of this site somehow, either through authoring or commenting.

See (some of you) tomorrow... Brian

Antiwar Rallies: How Effective are They at Swaying Opinion?

by Kim Campbell

Antiwar activists like to tell the story about how Richard Nixon used to claim he didn't pay attention to how many people showed up for war protests during the Vietnam War. He was too busy watching football, was the official word.

But later it came out that Mr. Nixon did care how many people took to the streets, and even likely changed war policy thanks to the size of marches in the late 1960s.

As another weekend of coordinated antiwar efforts gets under way, one of the tools of the activist trade - the demonstration - will be on display.

Protests often leave an imprint on the public - and make their way into the history books. But coming up with the next Boston Tea Party is tricky. How effective a big demonstration is depends on the memorability of its message and who is paying attention.

In the current campaign against a war with Iraq, large rallies are a valuable publicity tool for antiwar groups whose attempts to woo undecided Americans are frequently drowned out by a government that argues that it may be necessary to go to war. Given the disparity of antiwar groups and how some have tried to promote agendas that go beyond Iraq, swaying ordinary Americans on the issue isn't always easy.

"You get an opportunity to project an image on the 6 o'clock news that will go into the homes of mainstream Americans, many of whom are uncomfortable with this war. And so you don't want to blow it," says Tom Andrews, national director of Win Without War, a coalition of 29 civic and religious groups.

Over the weekend, protests will be held in New York, San Francisco, and cities across the US and the world. They follow major rallies held in October and January on both US coasts that totaled hundreds of thousands of people.

Unlike during the Vietnam era, or even a decade ago for the Gulf War, activists today can use the Internet to coordinate volunteers and disseminate information to the public about where and when to meet.

That gives access to more everyday Americans who might not otherwise know about such activities. At last month's rally in Washington, many first-time protesters showed up, some even with their children. Over the hubbub of conversation, a few spoke of how they viewed demonstrations as the only outlet for offering their opinion about the war.

Activists want people like that to go back to their communities and share what it was like with others to invigorate participation. They say word of mouth can be a more effective way of getting new recruits than through simply watching images on TV of crowds of strangers and speakers whose tone may not reflect their own.

As Mr. Andrews suggests, organizers have to be careful about how they present themselves when all of America is watching.

Last month in Washington, speakers selected by that rally's organizer, International ANSWER, addressed a wide range of topics, including American Indian rights and the release of imprisoned activist Mumia Abu-Jamal, who killed a police officer in 1981. Critics say that diluted the message and left many observers with the impression that the antiwar movement lacks cohesion (an idea brought home in a recent "Saturday Night Live" sketch.)

Some of the average Americans in attendance were also put off. One high-schooler wrote an essay in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette recently observing that the protest had a wide range of attendees but that its leaders "were so extreme and blatantly anti-American that it might have pushed me to the other camp if I had arrived undecided."

Not all groups organizing protests present their agenda in the same way, but they do say that multiple issues are likely to be raised at rallies because there are so many concerns linked to fighting terrorism and Iraq: impositions on civil liberties, detaining immigrants, preemptive attacks.

"Right now, every major demonstration that will take place around the war will cover a lot of issues, and it's a challenge to keep a focus on Iraq," says Bob Wing, a spokesman for United for Peace & Justice, main sponsor of Saturday's New York rally.

The goal is to generate support from a broad range of Americans, which in turn influences politicians. Many political leaders claim they don't pay attention to the protests and their numbers - much the same way they say they are uninfluenced by polls. But some say they do notice.

"Demonstrations are important," says Sen. Barbara Boxer (D) of California. "It's one way the American people show their strength. In the war in Vietnam, that made a big difference."

What politicians look for, says Andrews, a democrat from Maine who served in the House of Representatives from 1990 to 1994, is to see how broad a range of demonstrators show up and how well organized they are.

They'll have another opportunity to evaluate that this weekend, when antiwar groups try to get the attention of the public. History suggests they will have to stay focused to be successful.

"I was in many marches during the Vietnam War," says Reginald Zelnik, a history professor at the University of California at Berkeley. "Some of them were just great, and some of them suffered from the same problem I think these last ones have. I think the jury is still out as to what direction these [weekend] ones will take."

• Staff writer Gail Russell Chaddock contributed to this story.

Copyright © 2003 The Christian Science Monitor

CIA 'Sabotaged Inspections and Hid Weapons Details'

by Andrew Buncombe in Washington

Senior democrats have accused the CIA of sabotaging weapons inspections in Iraq by refusing to co-operate fully with the UN and withholding crucial information about Saddam Hussein's arsenal.

Led by Senator Carl Levin, the Democrats accused the CIA of making an assessment that the inspections were unlikely to be a success and then ensuring they would not be. They have accused the CIA director of lying about what information on the suspected location of weapons of mass destruction had been passed on.

The row is of heightened significance given the Bush administration's preparations to argue later today before the UN Security Council that the inspections have run their course and it is now time to move to military action.

France, Russia, Germany and other members of the Security Council are likely to back a counter-proposal to increase the number of inspectors, providing them, if necessary, with the support of armed UN soldiers, as a means of avoiding a military strike.

The accusation of US sabotage emerged from a series of Senate hearings on Capitol Hill. On Tuesday, George Tenet, the CIA director, told the armed services committee panel that the agency had provided the UN inspectors with all the information it had on "high" and "moderate" interest locations inside Iraq – those sites where there was a possibility of finding banned weapons. But Mr Tenet later told a different panel that he had been mistaken and that there were in fact "a handful" of locations the UN inspectors may not have known about.

Senator Levin, from Michigan, responded by saying the CIA director had not been telling the truth. Citing a number of classified letters he had obtained from the agency, he said it was clear the CIA had not shared information with the inspectors about a "large number of sites of significant value".

He said the CIA had told him additional information would be passed to the inspectors within the next few days.

Mr Levin pushed Mr Tenet on whether he thought the inspections had any value. The CIA director replied: "Unless [President Saddam] provides the data to build on, provides the access, provides the unfettered access that he's supposed to, provides us with surveillance capability, there is little chance you're going to find weapons of mass destruction under the rubric he's created inside the country ... The inspectors have been put in a very difficult position by his behavior.

Mr Levin said later he believed the CIA had, in effect, taken the decision to undermine the inspections. "When they've taken the position that inspections are useless, they are bound to fail," he told The Washington Post. "We have undermined the inspectors."

Mr Levin has raised his concerns with the White House. In a letter to President Bush, the senator asked that America provide the inspectors with as much information as available.

He wrote: "The American people want the inspections to proceed, want the United States to share the information we have with the UN inspectors and want us to obtain United Nations support before military action is used against Iraq."

© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

A WARM WELCOME TO NEW YORK CITY

February 15th Legal Support

People's Law Collective(PLC) -- Association of Legal Aid Attorneys(ALAA) -- National Lawyers Guild ~NYC~ Mass Defense Committee (NLG)

We have a large number of identified (NLG = green hats, green badges ALAA = green armbands, PLC= red armbands) lawyers and legal observers on hand to try to ensure that the New York City Police Department, Federal Bureau of Investigation, or any law enforcement agency choosing to join us today respects your lawful and peaceful events. Be fear-free in letting your voices be heard against this unjust war.

KNOW YOUR RIGHTS - STREET LAW AND PRACTICE

General Law

- Do not have any item on your person that could be considered a weapon; even a small knife. Obviously ditto for illegal drugs as well.

- The NYPD has banned wooden posts (i.e. for banners). Sticks will be confiscated and you could risk arrest, but cardboard tubes have been allowed.

- The NYPD has in the past has charged protesters possessing Markers and Paint with possession of Graffiti Instruments.

The infamous mask ordinance (i.e. 3 or more in a mask or hood) was ruled unconstitutional in November 2002.

At Risk of Arrest?

- If you are at risk of arrest, you may wish to pass your valuables and irreplaceable items (like date and address book) to one who is not. Things do disappear in "the system."

- If you are at risk of arrest, please inform a legal observer of any medications you will need when in jail. You may be there 1-2 days.

- If you are at risk of arrest, eat a hearty meal. Prison food isn't.

Police Confrontation / Arrest Scenarios

- If you are not being arrested and a Police Officer approaches you and asks for ID or information, you do not have to identify yourself or provide any information unless you're driving at the time.

- If you are being arrested, you may not be read your rights, the

Police only have to tell you that you are under arrest - they only have to read you a "Miranda" warning when questioning you.

- Upon arrest do not say anything to the police other than "I am going to remain silent, I want to speak to a lawyer." Demand your lawyer immediately if you are being questioned or are at all confused about what the cops are saying. SILENCE=SAFE.

- If a Police Officer demands to search your bag or person (and you are not under arrest) say clearly "I do NOT Consent to this Search" (Wording is important). Do not interfere with the search.

- Megaphones are not legally permitted without prior NYPD approval - marchers with megaphones have in the past been arrested- this is especially used as an excuse to arrest folks, especially targeted folks like "Black Bloc members", people of color, etc.

- If you go "limp" when arrested you'll likely be charged with

resisting arrest. This is a misdemeanor.

- If arrested without Identification, or if you refuse to cooperate

after arrest, you may count on being put "through the system" - photo'ed, printed etc. This takes 12-36 hours; count on longer if many are arrested .

- If Arrested - a Legal Aid attorney will do the Arraignment. Later an NLG volunteer attorney may step in if necessary.

- QUESTION? - ASK A LEGAL OBSERVER

If arrested call: 212- 679-6018 (NLG)

or 917 807-0658 (PLC)

If you see people being arrested get their names and call 212-679-6018 (NLG)

or 917-807-0658 (PLC)

Please keep these numbers handy, write them on your arms and pass them on to your legal support people.

DISCLAIMER: The advice given here is meant as a general statement of the law, and should not substitute your spending a pile of money on a real flesh and blood lawyer.

Legal support for the February 15th demonstration against the war is organized by the Association of Legal Aid Attorneys, the People's Law Collective and the National Lawyers Guild NYC Chapter Mass Defense Committee.

http://www.nationalphilistine.com/baghdad/

[New York City]-- On February 13, 2003, teams of artists and activists postered New York City with thousands of copies of snapshots from Baghdad. Quiet and casual, the snapshots show a part of Baghdad we rarely see: the part with people in it.

The snapshots were taken by a friend of ours who just got back from Baghdad working with the Iraq Peace Team (link below). Yes, he saw Iraqis suffering and struggling. But he also saw Iraqis dancing and laughing. This moved him because laughing under the weight of the UN sanctions and the threat of an absurd war is no easy task. We were moved because the people in the pictures remind us of our friends & family.

Thousands of snapshot posters now pepper Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens. We want to show New York the people who will get both liberty and death in one fatal stroke if this war begins. We want you to show them in your city. The entire snapshot collection is online as pdfs. Print them out and poster them anywhere and everywhere.

http://www.nationalphilistine.com/baghdad/

For more info:
New York 2 Baghdad Crew

Baghdad Snapshot Action Spots, in no particular order: Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn, San Fran, Philadelphia, Princeton, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Paris, Warsaw, Omaha, (your city here)

Other links:
http://unitedforpeace.orgJoin the movement

http://iraqpeaceteam.orgHelp them in Baghdad

[This came flying into my inbox this morning -- see Weinberger's earlier commentary in the archives. Not quite sure if this is going to spark a flame war -- the kind of thing I don't want on Circulars -- but nonetheless, it pertains to the way poets are engaging in the anti-war effort and is thus important.]

Why is the "Poems Not Fit for the White House" event at Lincoln Center a benefit (with $100 orchestra seats) for Not In Our Name (NION)?

NION was founded a few months ago by leaders of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP). The RCP is a nut-group that defends Pol Pot, the Shining Path in Peru, the Chinese occupation of Tibet and the massacre in Tiananmen Square. NION is their attempt-- as has been done in the past by various Lyndon LaRouche spinoffs-- to insert themselves into more mainstream opposition politics.

NION has been instrumental in organizing antiwar demonstrations, but otherwise only exists to propagate the NION statement and the "Pledge of Resistance," which is meant to be recited (at considerable length) in unison by large groups.

The NION statement has a few strange sentences, but generally confines itself to opinions held by most with antiwar and anti-Bush sentiments. It was signed by many honorable people, and was notable as the first widespread newspaper petition. Whether this petition should continue to be propagated is another question.

I do not share the opinion held by lefties such as Todd Gitlin, Michael Berube, and David Corn that the presence of NION, ANSWER, and other bizarre groups as organizing forces delegitimizes the antiwar movement (though it certainly provides plenty of ammo for the right). The organizational skills and dedication of their followers are often initially necessary, until they recede into the mosaic of hundreds of other grassroots organizations. They do not delegitimize the movement; what is disturbing is that the movement legitimizes them.

All forms of non-violent antiwar anti-Bush protest from all sectors, and all antiwar poetry events are, without question, worthwhile. Personally, I happen to believe that the hundreds of smaller antiwar poetry readings and the free circulation of poems and statements on the internet are more effective than an expensive and glitzy event at Lincoln Center.

But if this event is to be held, why should it benefit the perpetuation of a dubious fringe group and not Unicef or Oxfam or Doctors Without Borders or a hundred other organizations that are actually out there helping the victims of US policy?

Or if, as Michael Palmer has suggested, newspaper advertisements and humanitarian aid are separate issues or causes, why shouldn't the proceeds from the event go to advertisements of a statement written by the invited poets themselves? Why should they continue to allow Not In Our Name to speak in their name?

A Subversive Celebration

by Derrick Z. Jackson

I DO NOT really blame those poets who could not restrain themselves from telegraphing their intention to turn Laura Bush's poetry symposium at the White House into a rally against war in Iraq. Many poets equate restraint to anthrax. Still, I wish they had played it cool. Bush canceled or, more accurately, censored the event, which would have been held today, when she learned that hundreds of poets were writing antiwar pieces for an open letter to be given to her at her event.

Bush's press secretary said, ''While Mrs. Bush respects and believes in the right of all Americans to express their opinions, she, too, has opinions and believes that it would be inappropriate to turn what is intended to be a literary event into a political forum.''

The end result is that poets will be reading their angry words either before the proverbial choir in cozy coffee shops or in the cold, railing outside the locked walls of power. The funny thing is - although this is impossible for many poets to consider - this was one of those situations where the poets should have taken the attitude, ''Be careful of what you ask for; you just might hear it. ''

The symposium was supposed to celebrate the works of Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Langston Hughes. Nearly a year ago the first lady held an event to salute the writers of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and '30s, which included Hughes. Bush even quoted Hughes's poem, ''Freedom,'' which said, in part, ''Some folks think by burning churches, they burn Freedom.... But Freedom stands up and laughs in their faces and says, `No, not so! No!'''

Had the poets been thinking a little more subversively, they could have burned the figurative roof off the White House with more Hughes. One work of Hughes that the first lady surely is not reading at bedtime to her husband during the buildup in Iraq is ''Message to the President.'' Probably written during World War II, Hughes wrote: ''In your fireside chats on the radio/ I hear you telling the world/ What you want them to know/ And your speeches in general/ Sound mighty fine,/ But there's one thing, Mr. President,/ That worries my mind./ I hear you talking about freedom/ For the Finn,/ The Jew,/ And the Czechoslovak -/ But you never seem to mention/ Us folks who're black! .../ That's why as citizens Mr. President,/ We have a right to demand/ The next time you make a speech,/ Take an all-out stand .../ No more segregation in the USA./ And when you mention the Finns,/ And the Jew,/ And the Czechoslovak,/ Don't forget the fourteen million/ Here who're black./ Such a speech, Mr. President, for me/ Would put a whole lot more meaning/ In Democracy.''

Hughes wrote deftly about the peril of propaganda in ''Mother in Wartime.'' That poem said: ''As if it were some noble thing,/ She spoke of sons at war/ As if freedom's cause/ Were pled anew at some heroic bar,/ As if the weapons used today/ Killed with great elan,/ As if Technicolor banners flew/ To honor modern man -/ Believing everything she read/ In the daily news,/ (no in-between to choose)/ She thought that only/ One side won,/ Not that both / Might lose.''

He also asked Americans to always question their sense of righteousness about war in ''War.'' ''Death is the broom/ I take in my hands/ To sweep the world/ Clean./ I sweep and I sweep/ Then mop and I mop./ I dip my broom in blood,/ My mop in blood -/ And blame you for this,/ Because you are there, / Enemy./ It's hard to blame me,/ Because I am here -/ So I kill you./ And you kill me./ My name,/ Like your name,/ Is war.''

Whoever the poets would have chosen to finish their presentation to the first lady could have ended with ''What I Think.'' In that, Hughes wrote, ''The guys who own/ The biggest guns/ Are the lucky ones/ These days./ being hip/ To your marksmanship/ Is what pays./ on the other hand/ There's some demand/ For a world plan./ Some folks wish/ The human race might/ Try to do right -/Instead of just fight./ But others still feel/ That any old heel/ Has a right/ To laissez faire/ Anywhere,/ And that's Empire's right./As for me,/ I can't agree,/ To my nose, colonies stink./ People ought to be FREE/ And have liberty -/ That's what I think.''

See how much fun - and political - it might have been, even on the first lady's terms?

[This one didn't make the Times; I got it from commondreams.org.]

Reckless Administration May Reap Disastrous Consequences

Senate Floor Speech - Wednesday, February 12, 2003

To contemplate war is to think about the most horrible of human experiences. On this February day, as this nation stands at the brink of battle, every American on some level must be contemplating the horrors of war.

Yet, this Chamber is, for the most part, silent -- ominously, dreadfully silent. There is no debate, no discussion, no attempt to lay out for the nation the pros and cons of this particular war. There is nothing.

We stand passively mute in the United States Senate, paralyzed by our own uncertainty, seemingly stunned by the sheer turmoil of events. Only on the editorial pages of our newspapers is there much substantive discussion of the prudence or imprudence of engaging in this particular war.

And this is no small conflagration we contemplate. This is no simple attempt to defang a villain. No. This coming battle, if it materializes, represents a turning point in U.S. foreign policy and possibly a turning point in the recent history of the world.

This nation is about to embark upon the first test of a revolutionary doctrine applied in an extraordinary way at an unfortunate time. The doctrine of preemption -- the idea that the United States or any other nation can legitimately attack a nation that is not imminently threatening but may be threatening in the future -- is a radical new twist on the traditional idea of self defense. It appears to be in contravention of international law and the UN Charter. And it is being tested at a time of world-wide terrorism, making many countries around the globe wonder if they will soon be on our -- or some other nation's -- hit list. High level Administration figures recently refused to take nuclear weapons off of the table when discussing a possible attack against Iraq. What could be more destabilizing and unwise than this type of uncertainty, particularly in a world where globalism has tied the vital economic and security interests of many nations so closely together? There are huge cracks emerging in our time-honored alliances, and U.S. intentions are suddenly subject to damaging worldwide speculation. Anti-Americanism based on mistrust, misinformation, suspicion, and alarming rhetoric from U.S. leaders is fracturing the once solid alliance against global terrorism which existed after September 11.

Here at home, people are warned of imminent terrorist attacks with little guidance as to when or where such attacks might occur. Family members are being called to active military duty, with no idea of the duration of their stay or what horrors they may face. Communities are being left with less than adequate police and fire protection. Other essential services are also short-staffed. The mood of the nation is grim. The economy is stumbling. Fuel prices are rising and may soon spike higher.

This Administration, now in power for a little over two years, must be judged on its record. I believe that that record is dismal.

In that scant two years, this Administration has squandered a large projected surplus of some $5.6 trillion over the next decade and taken us to projected deficits as far as the eye can see. This Administration's domestic policy has put many of our states in dire financial condition, under funding scores of essential programs for our people. This Administration has fostered policies which have slowed economic growth. This Administration has ignored urgent matters such as the crisis in health care for our elderly. This Administration has been slow to provide adequate funding for homeland security. This Administration has been reluctant to better protect our long and porous borders.

In foreign policy, this Administration has failed to find Osama bin Laden. In fact, just yesterday we heard from him again marshaling his forces and urging them to kill. This Administration has split traditional alliances, possibly crippling, for all time, International order-keeping entities like the United Nations and NATO. This Administration has called into question the traditional worldwide perception of the United States as well-intentioned, peacekeeper. This Administration has turned the patient art of diplomacy into threats, labeling, and name calling of the sort that reflects quite poorly on the intelligence and sensitivity of our leaders, and which will have consequences for years to come.

Calling heads of state pygmies, labeling whole countries as evil, denigrating powerful European allies as irrelevant -- these types of crude insensitivities can do our great nation no good. We may have massive military might, but we cannot fight a global war on terrorism alone. We need the cooperation and friendship of our time-honored allies as well as the newer found friends whom we can attract with our wealth. Our awesome military machine will do us little good if we suffer another devastating attack on our homeland which severely damages our economy. Our military manpower is already stretched thin and we will need the augmenting support of those nations who can supply troop strength, not just sign letters cheering us on.

The war in Afghanistan has cost us $37 billion so far, yet there is evidence that terrorism may already be starting to regain its hold in that region. We have not found bin Laden, and unless we secure the peace in Afghanistan, the dark dens of terrorism may yet again flourish in that remote and devastated land.

Pakistan as well is at risk of destabilizing forces. This Administration has not finished the first war against terrorism and yet it is eager to embark on another conflict with perils much greater than those in Afghanistan. Is our attention span that short? Have we not learned that after winning the war one must always secure the peace?

And yet we hear little about the aftermath of war in Iraq. In the absence of plans, speculation abroad is rife. Will we seize Iraq's oil fields, becoming an occupying power which controls the price and supply of that nation's oil for the foreseeable future? To whom do we propose to hand the reigns of power after Saddam Hussein?

Will our war inflame the Muslim world resulting in devastating attacks on Israel? Will Israel retaliate with its own nuclear arsenal? Will the Jordanian and Saudi Arabian governments be toppled by radicals, bolstered by Iran which has much closer ties to terrorism than Iraq?

Could a disruption of the world's oil supply lead to a world-wide recession? Has our senselessly bellicose language and our callous disregard of the interests and opinions of other nations increased the global race to join the nuclear club and made proliferation an even more lucrative practice for nations which need the income?

In only the space of two short years this reckless and arrogant Administration has initiated policies which may reap disastrous consequences for years.

One can understand the anger and shock of any President after the savage attacks of September 11. One can appreciate the frustration of having only a shadow to chase and an amorphous, fleeting enemy on which it is nearly impossible to exact retribution.

But to turn one's frustration and anger into the kind of extremely destabilizing and dangerous foreign policy debacle that the world is currently witnessing is inexcusable from any Administration charged with the awesome power and responsibility of guiding the destiny of the greatest superpower on the planet. Frankly many of the pronouncements made by this Administration are outrageous. There is no other word.

Yet this chamber is hauntingly silent. On what is possibly the eve of horrific infliction of death and destruction on the population of the nation of Iraq -- a population, I might add, of which over 50% is under age 15 -- this chamber is silent. On what is possibly only days before we send thousands of our own citizens to face unimagined horrors of chemical and biological warfare -- this chamber is silent. On the eve of what could possibly be a vicious terrorist attack in retaliation for our attack on Iraq, it is business as usual in the United States Senate.

We are truly "sleepwalking through history." In my heart of hearts I pray that this great nation and its good and trusting citizens are not in for a rudest of awakenings.

To engage in war is always to pick a wild card. And war must always be a last resort, not a first choice. I truly must question the judgment of any President who can say that a massive unprovoked military attack on a nation which is over 50% children is "in the highest moral traditions of our country". This war is not necessary at this time. Pressure appears to be having a good result in Iraq. Our mistake was to put ourselves in a corner so quickly. Our challenge is to now find a graceful way out of a box of our own making. Perhaps there is still a way if we allow more time.

[I'm sure you've seen this one before, but I came across it again last night and it literally sent chills down my spine.]

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.

for Kerry Sherin

        We may not have chosen to live inside Dick Cheney’s mind, but we do.
        Wyoming, I read somewhere, is the safest place to live in North America.
        No tornados, no tsunamis, no earthquakes, no hurricanes, monsoons, cyclones, or floods. No major airport: no big planes crashing in the sleet. Not even much traffic: not too many car crashes.
        But if living in Wyoming is so safe, living inside Dick Chaney’s mind, though it was formed in Wyoming and stood for Wyoming in the Senate, is not safe at all.
        How do you get from Wyoming to Shock and Awe?
        Getting from Love to Hate, that’s easy: Love, Live, Give, Gave, Gate, Hate.
        Love comes before life, and since newborns don’t survive on their own, life at the beginning involves giving. It can’t not: breast milk, protection, language, diapers made out of whatever, some sort of attention before you crawl or walk. Everyone living got some of that somehow.
        That gets us up to Give. Gave comes next because giving is tiring. You give and give and what thanks do you get? Nothing. Or worse. They think they’re entitled; they’re madder than ever: They sulk in their rooms, they’re sarcastic, they throw rocks.
        So much for giving. I gave at the office and, since they think they’re entitled and are madder than ever, the next logical step is to build a gate, which will keep things quiet at least.
        But as we know, gates creak at night, they leak, they break, in fact, gates concentrate whatever’s on either side, they distill hate.
        Love, Live, Give, Gave, Gate, Hate: Q.E.D.

        But getting from Love to Hate only sheds a little light on getting from Wyoming to Shock and Awe.
        Shock and Awe? “Shock and Awe” is the Pentagon’s current battle plan for Iraq: 300 to 400 cruise missiles the 1st day (more than in all of Desert Storm), 300 to 400 the next, to demolish water, electricity, communications, government buildings, roads, bridges, infrastructure in general; 6000 satellite guidance kits to convert so-called “dumb bombs” into so-called “smart bombs,” etc. “The sheer size of this has never been seen before,” a Pentagon official told CBS. “There will not be a safe place in Baghdad.” Harlan Ullman drew a direct parallel to Hiroshima: the Iraqi people will be “physically, emotionally and psychologically exhausted”; it will be “rather like the nuclear weapons at Hiroshima, not taking days or weeks but minutes.” A 1996 report elaborates: the point is “to impose [an] overwhelming level of Shock and Awe. . . . [to] seize control of the environment and paralyze or so overload an adversary’s perceptions and understanding of events that the enemy would be incapable of resistance.”
        This is Shock and Awe, remember, not Wyoming.
        But by the end it gets a little hard to tell them apart: overwhelming levels seizing control of the environment, paralyzing perceptions and understanding of events.
        That works for Wyoming and just about anywhere in the United States.
        That’s the problem with living inside Dick Cheney’s mind, whether we’ve chosen to or not.

        What’s the point of Shock and Awe?
        To free the Iraqi people.
        Problem:
        “No safe place in Baghdad” contradicts “To free the Iraqi people.”
        Rationale:
        Since the Iraqi people are enslaved inside Saddam Hussein’s mind that mind must be destroyed. That means destroying Saddam Hussein’s body wherever it is in Baghdad, which means brushing aside Baghdad to find him to free the Iraqi people trapped inside
his mind.
        But dead people are only free in the most limited way. Not much bang for the buck there, really.
        Deeper rationale:
        Forget “free,” “love,” “give”: it’s an adult world. Shock and Awe is adult political theater for a world audience. To reach an audience that big you have to project. That’s the point of Shock, the sheer size of which has never, etc. Otherwise the audience won’t be struck with Awe.
        What’s the point of Awe?
        Awe kills two birds with one stone. For good Arabs, it inaugurates democracy, somehow. For no-good Arabs, Awe will . . . what? Awe will awe them into submission. Then things will be quiet outside the gate.
        I can hear Dick Chaney arguing that Awe worked at Hiroshima.
        But Japan was at war with us, and Awe, or at least Instant Submission, didn’t work outside Japan. The Iraqi people are not only not at war with us, we’re rescuing them from Saddam Hussein’s mind. And as for working outside Baghdad? Destroying it will awe Al-Qaeda? That’s a stretch. There are more Al-Qaedans in London or Berlin than in Baghdad. Maybe we should get Berlin first.
        No matter how big you make Shock, you can’t get to Awe.
        Even with a placid audience like the U.S. electorate, you can’t get there.

        Forget it, we’ll never know the exact route from Wyoming to Shock and Awe.
        Some combination of Gate, Hate, Oil, Worship of Force and Getting Reelected mixed together in Dick Cheney’s mind got us halfway there; and Shock and Awe is already halfway here: Here, Baghdad and Here, Wyoming. We’re half “physically, emotionally and psychologically exhausted”; our “perceptions and understanding of events” are half “overloaded.”
        But even half a mind is enough to do the math: we’re half capable of resistance.
        The shocks are huge, disgusting, realer than any hell, but at least they’re not shocking, once we give up our imaginary safety.
        The other half, Awe with its ersatz religious capital letter, we can resist right now, completely.
        The bombs are awful, all the worse because of the thoughtlessness that aims them, but they don’t deserve a shred of awe from us.
        Not a huge victory, but it does mean one weapon is destroyed, the one they always use first.

[The Shock and Awe language comes from various web sites found on Google under “Shock and Awe”: The McLaughlin Group; World Socialist Web Site, etc]

Wired News: A Chilly Response to 'Patriot II'

By Ryan Singel

Unlike its hastily passed predecessor, the Justice Department's wide-ranging follow-up to the Patriot Act of 2001 is already facing intense scrutiny, just days after a civil rights group posted a leaked version of the legislation on its website.

The legislation, nicknamed Patriot II, would broadly expand the government's surveillance and detention powers. Among other measures, it calls for the creation of a terrorist DNA database and allows the attorney general to revoke citizenship of those who provide "material support" to terrorist groups.

Privacy advocates said the bill "gutted the Fourth Amendment," while prominent Democratic senators, including Patrick Leahy, ranking Democratic member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, immediately chastised the administration for its secrecy.

Despite assurances to lawmakers that no bill was in the works, the Justice Department internally circulated a confidential 120-page summary and text of the Domestic Security and Enhancement Act in early January.

The non-partisan Center for Public Integrity published a leaked copy of the bill on Friday.

"As recently as just last week, Justice Department officials have denied to ... the Judiciary Committee that they were drafting another anti-terrorism package," said Leahy in a written statement. "There is bipartisan concern ... about the administration's lack of responsiveness to congressional oversight."

"I have serious concerns ... and hope the Senate will give this bill more scrutiny than the first USA Patriot Act," said Wisconsin Democrat Russ Feingold, the only senator to vote against the Patriot Act. He said he, too, had been misled about the bill's existence.

The Justice Department quickly released a statement that said, "It should not be surprising that the Department of Justice ... discusses additional tools to protect the American people."

The act allows the government to:

* Conduct domestic wiretapping without court order for 15 days following a congressional authorization of use of force or an attack on the United States.

* Secretly detain citizens.

* Deport any alien, including green-card holders, who are convicted of drug possession or an aggravated felony.

* Access a citizen's credit reports without a subpoena.

* Abolish federal court "consent decrees" that limit police surveillance of non-criminal organizations and public events.

* Criminalize the use of encryption software in the commission or planning of a felony.

* Apply strict gag rules to those subpoenaed by a grand jury.

* Collect DNA from suspected terrorists and indeed from any individual whose DNA might assist terror investigations.

* Extend authorization periods for secret wiretaps and Internet surveillance.

* Ease restrictions on the use of secret evidence.

"The administration is pushing everything to less and less judicial and public oversight," said Deirdre Mulligan, director of the Samuelson Law, Technology and Public Policy Clinic. "It's hard to shock me, but this legislation rises to level of shock of consciousness. Alarming as the Patriot Act was, these provisions are right off the edge."

"We haven't been given the most general statistics on the Patriot Act," said Jameel Jaffer of the American Civil Liberties Union, which has sued for information. "It doesn't make sense to expand their powers when we don't know how they are using the ones they got."

The hastily written Patriot Act faced little debate before being passed on Oct. 26, 2001, just weeks after the attacks of Sept. 11.

Since then, the Justice Department has been looking to tweak the Patriot Act, and some of the new proposals simply clean up the original's technically unclear passages.

Not everyone finds the draft outrageous.

"We need to come back and see if the Patriot Act's tools need strengthening," said Mike Scardaville, a policy analyst for the conservative Heritage Foundation. "This is not a program for total government secrecy."

Some news accounts have incorrectly said that the legislation was sent to the vice president and the House speaker. However, the control sheet (PDF) indicates only that the document was sent to 10 internal divisions of the department.

Given the intense attention already focused on this bill, some doubt it will be introduced soon.

"This is a very audacious bill designed to strike while the iron is still hot, but I wonder if it is still hot," said Chris Hoofnagle, deputy counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information Center. "There is already resistance to new government surveillance powers."

"This is something you have on the shelf," said Hoofnagle. "You wait for an opportune moment, like going to war, to introduce it. They call this a draft, but this bill is definitely close to final and gives a good road map of what the Justice Department wants."

ACTION!!!

Day: February 14th 2003
Time: 6:00 am - 10:00 am
Title: BOMBARD THE MEDIA! Anti-War Rally at THE TODAY SHOW NY, NY
Location: at the corner of 49th St. and Rockefeller Plaza btwn 5th and 6th Aves.
Phone Contact: (212) 443-9977
Topic / Issue: Iraq
Sponsor: BOMBARD THE MEDIA!

why...

because they've been ignoring and misrepresenting the anti-war movement for months now, it's time we BOMBARD THE MEDIA!

an anti-war rally will be taking place at a live taping of THE TODAY SHOW. the show is taped from 7-10am but it's best to get there early to get a camera-friendly spot. be sure to bring signs!

this is intended to increase the visibility of the anti-war movement to get the message out to middle america via the mainstream media, who has been trying to ignore us. also it is intended as a booster for the rally on saturday.

this time around we'll be on their turf and too big to ignore.

lots of people are needed to make this action successful. please show up and help out.

There is a peculiar circuit of influence between the USAmerican poets that most interest me, and which I’ve characterized through various readings of Lorine Niedecker’s “You see here,” a poem with an as-yet unattributed quotation.

You see here
the influence
of inference

Moon on rippled
stream

‘Except as
and unless’

Where does this imperative come from – or, from whom?

The ethics of attribution is in the news, of course. Of course, the news is in the ethics of attribution. Meanwhile, it’s far from enough to “take exception” when the inferences peculiar to the “abstract lyric” (so-called) – ‘as / and unless’ – do not do away with epistemology (as Zukofsky hoped Objectivism might). In Buffalo a year or two back, French poet Dominique Fourcade spoke generally about a “poetics of intimacy” and held the Niedecker-Zukofsky correspondence up as evidence. The particular inferences escape memory now, partly due to the difficulty of moving through a world whose ugliest impulses are seemingly instantaneously extended to principles of action. That’s part of my difficulty and perhaps others’ too. Yet I do turn to resources such as Circulars for a kind of intimacy. I read the initial mission statement as coming from a similar awareness of the peculiar value of the circuits of influence that interest me as subjects to history (social, aesthetic, political) as well as epistemology (though the rudiments of such an epistemology have yet to be articulated to my satisfaction, really, so I won’t go there).

To attempt to articulate this value, I have in mind some remarks on 1) Alan Gilbert’s “circular” from the “Poetry Is News” event at St. Mark’s in NYC, “The Present Versus (the) Now,” 2) Leslie Scalapino’s published response to the St. Mark’s “The Blank Generation?” forum in the latest Poetry Project Newsletter, 3) and last, recent rereading of some of Ron Silliman’s work, especially essays in his collection The New Sentence.

The problem I’m working out of is nonetheless similar, I think, to Gilbert’s viz. how one might accept the value of at least the potential influence between aesthetics and political action. At one time, for me, a potential “synaesthetic poetics” seemed promising (hence my little essay in the “Poetry as Activism” issue of Tripwire in 1998). “Now” it is the problem of the “present.” [How these problems are related, historically, is interesting, but I can't get into that right now.]

For Gilbert, “there’s a difference between a now in which one’s range of political and artistic choices are primarily immediate reactions to a current situation, and a present that draws upon a culture and politics of resistance rooted in the past, present, and future." What Gilbert calls a “micro-politics of the everyday” is this distinction, and connotes, for me, the always parenthetical definite article he places before “now” – what is the inference between every day and everyday? Every day the problem of presence (any instant whatever, as certain trends in continental critical theory have it) compels one to take exception, while “(the) now” elicits acceptance of one or another “reaction.” This dialectic seems to quickly short-circuit when, far from the luxury of speculative writing, the integrity of human bodies is being undermined, and the ludicrously “clear and present danger” of the Bush administration – who occupy the White House under criminal pretenses – exemplify for the nations of the world the worst forms of reactionary politics under the auspices of “moral” obligation. This is how I read Gilbert’s definition: “(the) now might be described as a brief lyric moment in these negotiations that’s interrupted by screaming.” While a suspension of disbelief seems like the last thing we need, what feels like an immanently definite “now” remains incredible. Gilbert remarks: “illiteracy is also a discourse” – I may be misunderstanding this remark, but doesn’t this artificially divide (as if a wider divide needed to be introduced to gain perspective here) the fact that “Language Poetry is now taught at Iowa” from the fact that hip hop stands as one of the most visible influences on contemporary poetic praxis? We can anticipate the historical reception of Chuck D. into the canon that already makes room for Ron Silliman. While I believe I share Gilbert’s impatience with “the reactive possibilities of (the) now,” the problem of the present emerges for me as an impossible one, wherein I’m constantly trying to calibrate what seems endemic with what seems insurgent – my “as” against my “unless,” past against future forthwith.

Discussing separate passages in which Silliman and Lyn Hejinian discuss the differences between the political motives of previous generations – namely, their generation – for Silliman a “critical” motivation marked by organization (?), for Hejinian in part the ability to consider utopian visions “tenable” – Scalapino writes, “Unbeknownst to their intention, both Silliman and Hejinian ‘oppose’ Stein and Dogen's theory of action: one's being in time, the outside and the inside, is one being the present alongside past and future at once.” To be present is deviant – “doing what the time is” – or, for Stein as for younger poets, to be continually present. Be vigilant, Silliman seems to say. Isn’t this a rather untenable critical utopia, holding vigil over or cherishing the lesson of the past? While for Gilbert – and I agree – to be present in the world is a critical act which is, in a term Hejinian has used and that might serve to temper Scalapino’s critique, myopic. Going on to perceive in Hejinian an opposition between thinking and being, Scalapino writes, “’Pain’ then (‘being’ rather than thinking) is connecting with one's being living in world war (not merely an individual's limitations, depoliticized as that characterization).” This is not a mourning but a confusion that is painful in the sense that, endemic to characterizations of aesthetics as politics and vice versa, the aesthetic is presumed to do anything other than hurt. Is that the limitation – namely, pleasure – of art?

I just came from a reading this afternoon where Nathaniel Mackey, to an audience nearly 20% sleeping (this was a college gig and we assume these nappers’ attendance was assigned), read:

I don’t much subscribe to the increasing talk, in these dreary times, of “empowerment,” “subversion,” “resistance” and so forth. I once quoted Bachelard’s line, “Thirst proves the existence of water,” to a friend, who answered, “No, water proves the existence of water.” I find myself more and more thinking that way. I find myself – and this goes for everyone else in the band, I think – increasingly unable (albeit not totally unable) to invest in notions of dialectical inevitability, to read the absence of what’s manifestly not there as the sing of its eventual presence. To whatever extent hyperbolic aubade appears to have eclipsed collective “could,” the ballons’ going on about love’s inflated goodbye should alert us to the Reaganomic roots of that eclipse.
I drove down to Santa Ana yesterday. An old friend and I went to the store at one point and on our way we passed a neighborhood park which has more and more become a camp for the homeless. Park Avenue people now call it, irony their one defense. Anyway, as we drove past, my friend, looking out the window, sneered, “Look at them, a bunch of dialects.” He meant derelicts.” So much for malaprop speech as oppositional speech, I couldn’t help thinking, so much of oppositional anything. (ATET A.D., 120-1).

“N.,” the narrator here, is in a temporarily somber mood, but I don’t think it diminishes the import of his approach. Temporary, but I think it’d be amply malaprop to call it provisional. But is it an instance of myopia (myopic speech)?

Since G. W. Bush and company are not legally elected, is it criminal to speak of their designs as policy? [I think so, yes.] How is it I find that I must resist doing so, given the “clear and present danger"?

Silliman: “Poetry in America … is class war – and more – conducted through the normal social mechanisms of verse. The primary ideological message of poetry lies not in its explicit content, political though it may be, but in the attitude toward reception it demands of the reader. It is this ‘attitude toward information,’ which is carried forward by the recipient. It is this attitude which forms the basis for a response to other information, not necessarily literary, in the text. And, beyond the poem, in the world” (“The Political Economy of Poetry,” The New Sentence, 31).

And what attitude is characterized by rapid eye movement (alternately paranoia and sleep). I’ll confess I assigned Mackey’s reading this afternoon to my writing students. I asked them, in the spirit of Hannah Weiner’s notes for a writing workshop she apparently never conducted ("AWARENESS AND COMMUNICATION - archived at UCSC Libraries), to write a response to the reading as a whole – what went through your mind while attending the event? I was cornered by a student on my way out of the auditorium, and he told me he had made an audio recording of the reading just in case. In case of what? In case I fell asleep – you said how we could write about whatever we were thinking – I want to write about how a bunch of people were asleep. He said he saw me sleeping too. I told him I had closed my eyes to listen. etc.

If his observation had been accurate (he wanted me to sleep), it would have been useful to write. In our previous class session, I found (rereading now Silliman’s essay “The New Sentence”) some vague afterlight of the hypothesis that there is an innate learning curve from full thought to imitation of sentence formulation based on complete thoughts – complete sentences. But I’d set up a dialogic situation in which “As I walked” was a complete thought yet to be completed as a sentence, and that the information carried was itself a vague afterlight of a preceding dialogue. So that, every sentence is “new” in that it ends or arrives, teleologically (the final term [.] is defined by the preceding terms). This is the seam through which Silliman is able to weave “K as if with a chamomile” (Tjanting, 132). “Literary criticism,” writes Silliman, summarizing Willard Van Orman Quine, “ought to serve as a corrective. Unlike philosophy, it is a discourse with a clearly understood material object” (“The New Sentence,” 71). This is, of course, untenable. That's Silliman's critique. But it is not so far from Silliman’s signal reference to Stein: “What Stein means about paragraphs being emotional and sentences not is precisely … that linguistic units integrate only up to the level of the sentence, but higher orders of meaning – such as emotion – integrate at higher levels than the sentence and occur only in the presence of either many sentences or … in the presence of certain complex sentences in which dependent clauses integrate with independent ones. The sentence is the horizon …” (87). But my dialogic approach had had nothing to do with the “removal of context” Silliman points to in Bob Grenier’s Sentences. I would argue against characterizing Grenier’s work in that way. My pedagogical approach anticipated that context is presence insofar as “time-sense” relates to sentence structure. Silliman thought, in this time, “poetic form has moved into the interiors of prose” (89). But this severing of context is precisely the work of the implicit dialectic teleology of Quine’s “eternal sentence” proposes as the intentional object of writing, critical writing.

Why I don’t read blogs: they are at best ‘dialects.’

Why I read, and would like to contribute to, Circulars: it is dialogic and, hence, timely.

Join us ...
-------------------------------------------------------
The Baghdad Snapshot Action will be carried out on
Thursday February 13. Teams of artists & activists will
paste thousands of copies of recent photographs from
Baghdad across Manhattan.
-------------------------------------------------------

To join meet us at 9pm:

548 W 21st Street

b/w 10th and 11th (near 11th)

south side of street, ring artists studio bell

what to bring -- warm clothes, wheat pasting supplies [wall paper powder, gallon bucket, water, brush, towel], staple gun, wide clear packing tape, friend(s)/postering partner. if you don't have friends or supplies we will supply you with either or both because we're like that. please let us know what you need.

we'll give you copies of the snapshots and one of the following: a cup of hot cider, a cup of cheap wine, a pepperidge farm goldfish cracker, a hearty welcome.

then we'll have a quick intro/explanation of the project plan and get into a distribution huddle whereby we assign the teams to the various neighborhoods of NYC. If you have specific requests re: neighborhoods you can let us know then. if you have any questions or concerns you can email us. we'll send you a reminder message on Thursday.

We've made 9,000 flyers-bring friends more people more coverage.

See you Thursday night.

emergency contact:
917.572.4909
newyork2baghdad@yahoo.com

The Super-Secret Creative-Subversive Anti-Propagandists

Poets for Peace

Poets will be meeting at 11:00 am this Saturday, Feb. 15:
Outside Conran's food emporium plaza on East 59th Street and 1st Avenue, just under the 59th street bridge.
Look for the Guernica banner and the Poets For Peace banner.

We will begin walking towards the main rally (1st Avenue stretching north from 49th Street) at around 11:30 am.

We will be forming a "feeder march" to the main rally as recommended on the United for Peace website.

Info from the United for Peace website:

For information on feeder marches and the law, see "Know Your Rights: Demonstrating in New York City" by the New York Civil Liberties Union. In general, marching on the sidewalk without a permit is legal so long as you do not obstruct pedestrian traffic. Marching in the street without a permit would be an act of civil disobedience.

(note: This is the official plan. The Bryant park plan is no longer in place.)

View map

[The same mainstream UK paper that put the Amocoming to Kick Your Ass rebus on its cover, which it plagiarized from the internet, shows that plagiarism works both ways in this story on Tony Blair's ghost writer.]

Real Authors of Iraq Dossier Blast Blair

JOURNALIST Sean Boyne and student Ibrahim al-Marashi have attacked Tony Blair for using their reports to call for war against Iraq.

Mr Boyne, who works for military magazine Jane's Intelligence Review, said he was shocked his work had been used in the Government's dossier.

Articles he wrote in 1997 were plagiarized for a 19-page intelligence document entitled Iraq: Its Infrastructure Of Concealment, Deception And Intimidation to add weight to the PM's warmongering.

He said: "I don't like to think that anything I wrote has been used for an argument for war. I am concerned because I am against the war."

The other main source was a thesis by post-graduate student, Ibrahim al-Marashi, the US-born son of Iraqis, who lives in California. His research was partly based on documents seized in the 1991 Gulf War.

He said: "This is wholesale deception. How can the British public trust the Government if it is up to these sort of tricks? People will treat any other information they publish with a lot of skepticism from now on."

After the dossier's origins were revealed, Mr Blair was accused by his own MPs of theft and lies. The fiasco has deeply damaged his attempts to win backing for military action.

It emerged the PA to Mr Blair's spin chief Alastair Campbell was involved in drawing up the dossier which was published last month.

Alison Blackshaw and a Government press officer were both named on the dossier when it was first put on the Government's website. But the names were later removed.

The bulk of the Government's document is directly copied, without acknowledgement, from Ibrahim's 5,000-word thesis - Iraq's Security and Intelligence Network - published last September.

He did not even know the dossier existed until Glen Rangwala, a Cambridge-based Iraq analyst, spotted the plagiarism and called him.

Ibrahim, whose parents fled to the US from Iraq in 1968, said the Government not only blatantly lifted much of his work, including typing and grammatical errors. Mr al-Marashi and Mr Boyne said their figures had been altered in the Government document.

Former Labour Defense Minister MP Peter Kilfoyle said: "It just adds to the general impression that what we have been treated to is a farrago of half-truths.

"I am shocked that on such thin evidence that we should be trying to convince the British people that this is a war worth fighting."

And Labour MP Glenda Jackson said: "It is another example of how the Government is attempting to mislead the country and Parliament.

"And of course to mislead is a Parliamentary euphemism for lying."

The PM's official spokesman rejected Ms Jackson's claims but admitted it had been a mistake not to acknowledge Mr al-Marashi's thesis in the dossier.

He added: "The fact we used some of his work doesn't throw into question the accuracy of the document as a whole. This document is solid."

Asked whether Downing Street was embarrassed about the affair, the spokesman said: "We all have lessons to learn."

The dossier had been praised by US Secretary of State Colin Powell in his speech to the UN Security Council. Mr Boyne added: "Maybe I should invoice Colin Powell."

© mirror.co.uk 2003

[I haven't read anything about this story in US papers; this one comes from a Toronto press, but apparently this documentary has already been playing in Europe and has been shown on German television and to several European parliaments.]

NOW: Out for revenge, Feb 6 - 12, 2003

UK FILMMAKER SAYS GIS COVERED UP TALIBAN MASSACRE BY TED RALL New York City -- In a new documentary to be released in North America within the next few weeks, a Scottish filmmaker offers evidence that American soldiers may have been responsible for war crimes during the invasion of Afghanistan.According to eyewitnesses interviewed in Afghan Massacre: The Convoy Of Death, which few have seen on this side of the Atlantic, U.S. Special Forces supervised -- some say orchestrated -- the systematic murder of more than 3,000 captured Taliban soldiers in November 2001.

"There has been a cover-up by the Pentagon," says director Jamie Doran, a former producer for the BBC. "They're hiding behind a wall of secrecy, hoping this story will go away -- but it won't." Indeed, Afghan Massacre has already been shown on German television and to several European parliaments. The United Nations has promised an investigation. But thanks to a virtual media blackout, few North Americans are aware of the doc.

The allegations stem from the uprising at Qala-i-Jhangi fortress, a dramatic event that marked the last major confrontation between U.S.-backed forces of the Northern Alliance and the Taliban government. Several hundred prisoners, including "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh, revolted against their guards and seized a weapons cache. Responding to Special Forces soldiers working with the Northern Alliance, U.S. jets used bombs to kill most of the rebels.

Eighty-six Talibs, including Lindh, survived the Qala-i-Jhangi revolt. Meanwhile, 8,000 more soldiers surrendered at Kunduz, the last Taliban redoubt in northern Afghanistan. Commanders loyal to General Abdul Rashid Dostum, an Uzbek warlord who later became Hamid Karzai's deputy defence minister, had painstakingly negotiated the surrender of the Taliban from Kunduz and Qala-i-Jhangi.

As I observed while covering the Kunduz front last fall, Northern Alliance commanders promised to quickly release ethnic Afghans among the Taliban once they laid down their arms. Many immediately joined the Northern Alliance. The status of foreign nationals, the so-called Arab Taliban, was somewhat nebulous since they didn't have hometowns in Afghanistan to which they might return after being released. In the end, Dostum guaranteed the lives of all 8,000-plus POWs. "Both British and American military officers were present" at the surrender deal, says Doran.

Newsweek reported that Special Forces commandos from the U.S. Fifth Group hooked up with Dostum in October 2001, offering hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes, advanced weaponry and the use of the air force to strike the targets he indicated. Special Forces soldiers turned Dostum and his top commanders into America's proxy army; the Afghans didn't dare to disobey the source of that largesse.

Although the Americans have been portrayed as tagging along with the Northern Alliance, Afghan forces followed their orders. U.S. troops were in de facto command of joint U.S.-Afghan operations, including Dostum's actions in the north.

Five thousand of the 8,000 prisoners made the trip to Sheberghan prison in the backs of open-air Soviet-era pickup trucks. But Dostum's soldiers were out for vengeance. They stopped and commandeered private container trucks to transport the other 3,000 prisoners. "It was awful," Irfan Azgar Ali, a survivor of the trip, told England's Guardian newspaper. "They crammed us into sealed shipping containers. We had no water for 20 hours. We banged on the side of the container. There was no air, and it was very hot. There were 300 of us in my container. By the time we arrived in Sheberghan, only 10 of us were alive."

One Afghan trucker, forced to drive one such container, says the prisoners began to beg for air. Northern Alliance commanders "told us to stop the trucks, and we came down. After that, they shot into the containers [to make air holes]. Blood came pouring out. They were screaming inside." Another driver in the convoy estimates that an average of 150 to 160 people died in each container.

When the containers were unlocked at Sheberghan, the bodies of the dead tumbled out. A 12-man U.S. Fifth Special Forces Group unit, Operational Detachment Alpha (ODA) 595, guarded the prison's front gates and, according to witnesses, controlled the facility in the hopes of picking key prisoners for interrogation and possible transportation to Guantánamo Bay. (This is how Lindh was singled out.)

"Everything was under the control of the American commanders," a Northern Alliance soldier tells Doran in the film. American troops searched the bodies for al Qaeda identification cards. But, says another driver, "some of [the prisoners] were alive. They were shot" while "maybe 30 or 40" American soldiers watched.

Members of ODA 595, interviewed for the PBS program Frontline on August 2, 2002, confirm their presence at Sheberghan but cagily deny participating in war crimes. "I didn't see any atrocities, but I easily could have. Some prisoners may have died because they were sick or ill, and Dostum's forces just couldn't give them any care because they didn't have it."

But even General Dostum admits 200 such deaths. And the Northern Alliance soldier quoted above says U.S. troops masterminded the cover-up: "The Americans told the Sheberghan people to get rid of them [the bodies] before satellite pictures could be taken."

Ten minutes down the road from Sheberghan is the windswept scrub of Dasht-i-Leili. According to the Boston-based group Physicians for Human Rights, the 3,000 murdered Taliban POWs were brought to Dasht-i-Leili for mass burial. One witness tells the Guardian that a Special Forces vehicle was parked at the scene as bulldozers buried the dead. Despite a sloppy attempt to remove evidence after the fact, Doran's camera sweeps over clothing, bits of skull, matted hair, jaws, femurs and ribs jutting out of the sand. Bullet casings littering the site offer grim testimony that some Talibs were still alive before being dumped in the desert.

"If we're a civilized society, then when men surrender they have to be given basic protection,'' says Doran. "These men were murdered in a grotesque fashion, summarily executed and kicked into large holes in the ground as U.S. soldiers stood by."

In recent months, Doran says, two witnesses who appear in his film have been brought to Sheberghan prison and executed by men loyal to deputy defence minister Dostum. The Pentagon refuses to investigate these charges.

Poets Against the War urgently needs funds to pay for ads in key U.S. newspapers on President's Day, February 17th, expressing our profound opposition to the Bush administration's drive toward war in Iraq. We believe that the world is poised on the knife-edge of a decision between war and peace, and it is conceivably the passionate, miraculous efforts of a growing throng of peace-loving poets that may be able to make part of the difference.

Since January 30, poets in many countries have joined an upsurge of conscience and compassion, submitting poems to the Poets Against the War web site, organizing hundreds of anti-war poetry readings around the world, joining with millions of others in vigils, processions, prayers and intercessions, lobbying and rallying for peace. At no time in history have so many poets spoken in such a large chorus.

Here is the text of the proposed newspaper ad:
 
Poets Against the War

In the face of so much opposition from U.N. members, despite the disapproval of the vast majority of citizens of the world, in defiance of the advice of its own intelligence agencies, and contrary to both common sense and fundamental notions of morality, the Bush administration seems to be headed for war in Iraq.

Over the past two weeks, over 5,000 poets have submitted poems or personal statements to register their opposition to this war. In doing so, they honor a long and rich tradition of thoughtful and moral opposition by poets and other artists to senseless and murderous policies, including those of our own government. At no time in history have so many poets spoken in such a large chorus.

We call upon the Bush administration to halt its headlong rush toward war, to heed the voices of the people of the world, and to seek peaceful means of resolving conflicts in company with the world community.

[First of a series of email newsletters that poet Carol Mirakove has started circulating and which will be appearing regularly on this site. Great links to substantial articles and essays. There is an email address at the end of the article to which you can send subscription requests.]

SHOULD WE BELIEVE THE EVIDENCE AGAINST IRAQ?

Well, we -know- the US government greatly exaggerated the facts and doctored photos in 1991 in order to justify the Gulf War. Here's only one of many citations: "Purchased by ABC from the Soviet commercial satellite agency Soyez-Karta, the photos were expected to reveal the presence of a massive Iraqi troop deployment in Kuwait, but failed to disclose anything near the number of troops claimed by the Bush administration. ABC declined to use them.." "Two satellite experts who had formerly worked for the U.S. government failed to find evidence of the alleged buildup." www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/papers/gulfwar1.htm

The Guardian published on Fri, Feb 7, that the UK war dossier (you know, the one that's supposedly based on secret intelligence about the current state of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction) was plagiarized from documents that are more than a decade old. "Apart from passing this off as the work of its intelligence services," Dr Rangwala said, "it indicates that the UK really does not have any independent sources of information on Iraq's internal policies. It just draws upon publicly available data." www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,890916,00.html

As for Colin Powell's presentation at the UN, none of the information can be substantiated. Who are "their sources"? Other questions that Colin Powell really needs to be answering are here: www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=21&ItemID=2993

Of course, the US government has a long history of this kind of lying. In 1964, President Johnson tricked Congress into okaying the Vietnam War by claiming the North Vietnamese has attacked a US destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin. As he was well aware, the event never happened -- but that didn't stop him from launching a war that claimed the lives of 57,000 American soldiers and millions of Vietnamese civilians. Are we ready for another one of -those-? www.counterpunch.org/tristam1016.html http://www.fair.org/media-beat/940727.html

EVEN IF THE EVIDENCE IS CREDIBLE, IS WAR NECESSARY?

Despite that this large-scale attack casts us into serious peril, our government officials and our major media channels are telling us that it is necessary. Does it make sense to you that Saddam Hussein -- under UN watch -- is a bigger threat to us than the threat of retaliation? From CNN, "Rumsfeld said: "We are sending very clear messages to people around him that they would be well-advised not to use those weapons. In the event, they do, they would wish they hadn't." Rumsfeld was answering a question that referred to President Bush's statement that Saddam has authorized field commanders to use chemical weapons." www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/meast/02/07/sprj.irq.rumsfeld.europe/index.htm l

So question one is, why are our officials answering questions about cremating U.S. soldiers who are killed in chemical warfare (in order to get their bodies home for a memorial) rather than answering questions about how to prevent U.S. soldiers from meeting such a fate? Furthermore, what kind of leverage does Rumsfeld imagine he has over Iraq? The U.S. government is openly planning to flatten the nation at the onset, with hundreds of cruise missiles. What would Iraq have to lose in unleashing chemical warfare, on their own land, or on ours? And then, if the U.S. does go ahead and demolish Iraq, retaliation won't be coming from that country alone (do you think the rest of the middle east [and other oil-rich nations] will sit around and wait to be similarly invaded?). Ok -- per the Belfer Center at Harvard's JFK School of Government, Saddam can be contained: bcsia.ksg.harvard.edu/publication.cfm?program=CORE&ctype=paper&item_i d=361

U.S. SOLDIERS MADE TO BURY IRAQIS ALIVE IN GULF WAR

Do we want more U.S. soldiers to experience this brutality (not to mention their victims!)? Patrick J. Sloyan, Newsday reporter, broke the story on Sept 12, 1991, that U.S. soldiers were made to bulldoze Iraqi soldiers alive. Timothy McVeigh was among those who received this order. Sloyan's summary of Gulf War bulldozing is here: digitaljournalist.org/issue0211/sloyan.html
From the National Catholic Register, a Gulf War Veteran recounts: "I had to give the order, order men who drove the earth-movers to just cover up the trenches. To bury those poor bastards alive." www.ncregister.com/Register_News/120802war.htm

From Charles Sheehan-Miles, Gulf War Veteran: "The first Gulf War wasn't clean, it wasn't pretty, and it wasn't precise. In the chaos and destruction of battle, anything can happen. We killed a lot of people." www.veteransforcommonsense.org/

FBI, CIA SAY THERE IS NO CONNECTION BETWEEN HUSSEIN AND AL-QAEDA

This has been looked at, continuously, by U.S. intelligence since Sept 11, 2001. "Why the CIA thinks Bush is wrong": www.sundayherald.com/print28384. "No one's got proof": www.cnn.com/2002/ALLPOLITICS/08/26/time.iraq/. But media distortion leads to phenomena such as this: 1,200 US citizens were asked, "To the best of your knowledge, how many of the September 11 hijackers were Iraqi citizens?" Of those surveyed, only 17 percent knew the correct answer: that none of the hijackers were Iraqi. 44 percent of USAmericans believe that most or some of the hijackers were Iraqi; another 6 percent believe that one of the hijackers was a citizen of that most notorious node in the axis of evil. That leaves 33 percent who did not know enough to offer an answer. www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2003/02/06/iraq_poll/

IT IS ABOUT OIL

The U.S. has been long-planning to control and re-map the Middle East. From the Institute for National Defense Strategic Studies: "The overriding American concern was preserving access to Gulf oil at reasonable prices and keeping the region secure from threat or invasion." www.ndu.edu/inss/press/Spelreprts/SR_03.htm

Robert Jensen explains, "No one suggests the United States seeks to permanently take direct possession of Iraqi oil. Instead, policymakers are interested in control over the flow of oil and oil profits.." "U.S. control over Iraq through a compliant regime -- beholden for its very existence to the United States -- dramatically increases U.S. control over oil, and therefore over the world economy." www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=15&ItemID=2970

Oh yeah!, and then there's the one about George Bush, Senior, and the Bin Laden family sitting together on the board of the Carlyle group: "Carlyle's investors include the Bin Laden family, which has disowned its terrorist son Osama; Bush Sr.; and former Bush inner guard members Nick Carlucci and James Baker. Judicial Watch says all involved stand to benefit from any increase in U.S. defense spending." www.villagevoice.com/issues/0141/gray.php

IRAQIS WANT THE U.S. TO LEAVE THEM ALONE

The NYC-based artist Paul Chan was in Baghdad from Dec 14-Jan 14 with members of the Iraq Peace Team (www.iraqpeaceteam.org/). They broke sanctions, bringing medicine, toys, and art supplies to the people of Iraq. The people of Iraq -like- us; they hate Bush (Senior and Junior). They want the U.S. to leave them alone. In insisting that the Iraqi people experience the same freedoms that we experience, Paul says the U.S. would be delivering liberty and death in a single blow. Please go to Paul's site and experience wonderful images of people living in Baghdad today: www.nationalphilistine.com/

1.2 MILLION IRAQIS HAVE BEEN KILLED SINCE 1992 We don't want any more blood on our hands: U.S. and UK-led, UN sanctions against Iraq have claimed an estimated 1.2 million Iraqi lives. UNICEF estimates that the total number of casualties includes more than 600,000 Iraqi children under the age of 5, with 4,500 dying each month. www.doctorsworldwide.org/projects/iraq.htm

MESSAGE FROM THE WORLD SOCIAL FORUM: "IF YOU DOUBT THE IMPORTANCE OF THIS, THINK BACK TO SEPTEMBER 11, 2001"

The U.S. is not listening to the UN, it is not listening to the world in protest. If we keep pissing people off & stomping around like a big bully, we are -more- likely to suffer attacks on our landmarks, our homes, our families, our selves. Furthermore, those attacks will be used to justify deeper cuts to our body of civil liberties by our own government. We need to pay attention to, and participate in, our political processes. Robert Jensen recently wrote, "If you doubt the importance of this, think back to September 11, 2001. On that day, we got a glimpse of what it will look like if the empire is dismantled from the outside, if the empire continues to ignore the world. But we have a choice. We, the first citizens of the empire, can commit to dismantling the empire from within, peacefully and non-violently, in solidarity with those around the world struggling for justice." www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=1&ItemID=2950

GOOD NEWS: THE UN MAY BE ABLE TO BLOCK THE ATTACKS

"In 1950, the Security Council set up a procedure for insuring that stalemates between countries would not prevent the United Nations from carrying out its mission to "maintain international peace and security." With the United States playing an important role in its adoption, the Council adopted Resolution 377, the aptly named "Uniting for Peace" in an almost unanimous vote." See the Center for Constitutional Rights website: www.ccr-ny.org

SUBSCRIPTION REQUESTS

Thank you for reading through. I know it's hard and painful and depressing. But, you know, people around the country -- around the world -- are getting together, and that's a good thing.

Send subscription requests to mirakove_relay@yahoo.com.

[Following is a link to an important memorandum on a new initiative to extend the Patriot Act to give the government power to make secret arrests (first time in US history), deport lawful permanent resident aliens without trial, etc. Click "More" to read the entire interview.]

NOW: Politics & Economy - Breaking News | PBS

There's an important story developing tonight at the Justice Department. The non-partisan Center for Public Integrity obtained a closely-guarded document that shows plans for a sweeping expansion of the government's police powers. Until now, few people outside of the department, not even members of key congressional committees have seen this draft legislation. It could lead to increased surveillance and greater secrecy - all in the name of the war on terror. It raises questions about how we balance liberty and security - the rights of individuals versus the rule of law. Bill Moyers talks to Chuck Lewis about the significance of the Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003 and how it would affect civil liberties.

MOYERS: Chuck Lewis, whom you just saw in that piece is with me now. He is the Executive Director of the nonpartisan Center for Public Integrity, the organization responsible for obtaining that document. Chuck Lewis, thank you for joining us.

LEWIS: Thank you.

MOYERS: The Patriot Act was passed six weeks after 9/11. We know now that it greatly changed the balance between liberty and security in this nation's framework. What do you think — what's the significance of this new document, called the Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003?

LEWIS: I think the significance is it just deepens and broadens, further extends the first Patriot Act. That act in 2001, they had six weeks, which was not a lot of time to throw something together. Now there's been 18 months of all kinds of things that have happened and court decisions that have tried to roll back some of the Patriot Act.

And other concerns, law enforcement, people have, and so they've had time to sift and sort what they want. And it's arguably might be a more thorough rendering of all the things law enforcement and intelligence agencies would like to have in a perfect world. It's sort of how I look at it, and I think it's a very tough document when it comes to secrecy and surveillance.

I understand the concerns about fear of terrorism. And it certainly…

MOYERS: We all have those…

LEWIS: We all have those and there are things in the legislation that make sense, and that are reasonable, I think for any American. But there are other things that really take some of the Patriot Act civil liberties issues that folks were concerned about and go even further. And I think it's gonna be very controversial. Some of these sections are gonna be debated for weeks and months.

MOYERS: So many of these powers latent in this draft legislation were powers that were taken away from the intelligence community some years ago because they were abused.

LEWIS: That's right.

MOYERS: Do you see any protection in here against potential abuse?

LEWIS: I don't think there's very much — there's a lot more authority and power for government. There's less oversight and information about what government is doing. That's the headline and that's the theme. And the safeguards seem to be pretty minimal to me.

MOYERS: I just go through here, you know? "Will give the Attorney General the unchecked power to deport any foreigner?"

LEWIS: Right.

MOYERS: Including lawful permanent resident aliens. It would give the government the power to keep certain arrests secret until an indictment is found never in our history have we permitted secret arrests. It would give the government power to bypass courts and grand juries in order to conduct surveillance without a judge's permission. I mean these do really further upend the balance between liberty on the one hand and security on the other.

LEWIS: Well, they do. They reduce judicial oversight with the secret intelligence courts instead of saying the court may do this now it's the court will do this. They can have ex parte conversations where they go into the judge without anyone else around. In terms of information about detainees, not only can they detain anyone they'd like to detain, there is no public information about it.

Journalists cannot find out the names of — we detained over a thousand people after September 11th because we thought they might all be terrorists. Not one of them was really found with any criminal charges to be a terrorist. And we don't know the names of almost all those people, still. And so it does appear that everything that folks might be concerned about with the Patriot Act, this is times five or times ten is what I look at it. I see it very serious.

MOYERS: You and I have had this kind of discussion often, we go back a long way together. The foundation that I serve on has been a big supporter of yours and you've been a big supporter of our journalism. If we were fighting terrorists instead of being journalists, wouldn't we want this kind of power in our hands?

LEWIS: Well, we would, but we operate in a democracy and there's other considerations. I mean I think, you know, there's no question, if you're in law enforcement, this is gonna make it easier for you to do your job. The problem is, we have a history in our country, just in our lifetime, in the last quarter century.

Where we've seen FBI and CIA abuses of ordinary citizens. Where mail has been opened, where homes have been broken into. Where infiltration has occurred in political groups. Informants have been used, misused. People's lives have been ruined. People have committed suicide because of the pressures brought against them by the government, by these kinds of secret intelligence agencies.

This is not a completely crazy idea to worry about the power of the government. And it was curbed and rolled back in the '70s. And there is something obviously occurring here in the public space around the whole issue of liberty and security right now.

And it is clearly changing and it's moving towards security. And the question for us as a people is what is the right balance. And I think my biggest personal concern is that there ought to be a debate about this. So the Patriot Act jammed through Congress in six weeks.

There was a Congressional — there was a Senate hearing that lasted an hour and a half, there were no questions to the Attorney General by the senators. This is too important for our country. Whatever anyone's point of view, this should be a conversation that the country should have.

And if I'm afraid they're waiting for a war or something and then they're gonna pop this baby out and then try to jam it through.

MOYERS: You mean that if it were not rolled out and discussed publicly until the United States has had war in Iraq, people might not pay as much attention to it as they would now.

LEWIS: They wouldn't pay as much attention and you know, our worries and our fears are gonna be different than they are now. And there will be less of — all these things will melt away. These are nice concerns about liberties but we'll be at war. And we'll have presidents and attorneys general and other government officials telling us things. And I just see a — I see that it wouldn't work quite as easily for them if it comes out in the next few weeks as opposed to then.


MOYERS: Congressman Burton, Dan Burton, of Indiana, a very conservative congressman, who is Chairman on the Committee on Government Reform. He said recently, "An iron veil is descending over the executive branch."

Now your forte is moving information around in Washington trying to find out what's going on. Would you agree with what Congressman Burton has said here?

LEWIS: I absolutely agree with what he's saying. I mean there have been 300 roll-backs of the Freedom of Information Act since September 11th. All over America, at the state and local level, as well as the federal government. The Attorney General sent a message to every federal employee, when in doubt, deny any Freedom of Information request.

We have other things like presidential papers being sealed off. We have reporters trying to cover things in Afghanistan being locked in a warehouse and not able to file their stories. Even before September 11th, we had one reporter's home phone records seized by a grand jury without telling him or his news organization.

There's a lot of things happening with information, access to information, and efforts to stop journalism that I have not seen in 20 plus years of watching Washington and journalism and government interact. And it's not just information. It's not information for information's sake. This is about health, safety, lives…

MOYERS: What do you mean?

LEWIS: Well, you have this whole thing in this current draft legislation that there's a worst case scenario type requirement that every company that is making hazardous or toxic materials has to make that information available to the public. So if something terrible does happen they know that it's possible that it could happen and there's some sort of assessment about it. Well now that is not gonna be required. Chemical companies will not have to tell the world about these problems.

And they will — the citizens in that community will not have access to that information in an easy accessible way. And that's new and that affects their life. If some problem occurs, they're unrelated to the terrorism. Something just goes wrong, they will not know anything about that in their community.

So we're rolling back health and safety and environmental and other considerations and sensitivities that have been in our culture now for decades. Are melting away because of — all in the name of fighting terrorism.

MOYERS: What would be the Attorney General's justification for wanting to restrict access to information about toxic chemicals?

LEWIS: Well, the — I haven't heard one. But I think the rationale is that terrorists could get information about a chemical plant and its security, bad security, inadequate security and somehow then bring about a threat.

But the problem is sunlight is the best disinfectant. If these plants have bad security or they're not being well run and they're actually unsafe it's usually exposing it and talking about it and the public being aware of it that ends up improving the plant or the facility or whatever it is.

I actually find that that's how change occurs usually. And so the ostensible rationale is to keep it away from terrorists. But I think it's also a rationale to protect companies frankly in this instance. Well I happen to know that's been the chemical lobbyist's dream for a long time.

A long time before 9/11. They did not want this information made available.

LEWIS: I see a lot of opportunism here around the fear and paranoia in the wake of September 11th. And taking advantage of the insecurity that we all feel today. And that is, to me, incredibly offensive. And that's why a conversation about it, there's 40 sections in this thing. The public needs to have a sense what exactly are we getting here.
There needs to be a chewing over. This should not jam through Congress. This should be out there and being — be talked about.

I mean the realm between public and private, between foreign and domestic, all these things have morphed into the citizen against all of this out there — this morass of regulations and rules and intrusions. And at the same time they can come after you, get your credit card data, your library records, your Internet searching, everything. And they'll decide whether or not you're a suspect or not.

Whether or not they like you. If you're a disfavored political group, or from the wrong ethnic background, then you might become on the radar screen of some folks that you don't know about, you can't find out about, and they can do things. They have — this is incredible power.

MOYERS: One of the provisions in here as I understand it is that the government could actually strip citizenship from someone if — for example, if you were found, according to this, if you were found making what you thought was a legitimate contribution to some non profit organization.

LEWIS: Right.

MOYERS: Foundation. And months from then, that foundation were deemed by the government or that organization were deemed by the government to have been in some way supporting terrorists, you could lose your citizenship because of your contribution, even if you didn't know…

LEWIS: That's right.

MOYERS: That you were contributing to an organization like that.

LEWIS: No, that's absolutely — they have that power. They can also extradite all over world, even if we don't have treaties. I mean, some of the things in here are — strain credulity for legal scholars. They're not sure, they've never seen these kinds of provisions trotted out. I mean, a lot of the question is if it does pass Congress, what would the courts do with it later.

I mean I think there are some legitimate issues there.

MOYERS: What do you make of this? This is the document that went from the Department of Justice with this draft legislation to certain very key people in government. Among them, Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert and Vice President, Richard Cheney, for their comments on this obviously confidential document.

Why the Speaker of the House and the Vice President and not the committee chairman of the Judiciary Committee in the Senate or the appropriate committee in the House?

LEWIS: It's a way to say you've consulted Congress to some extent by sending it to the Speaker and not really consulting Congress.

As far as I can tell, and we have not polled every member or anything like that, but it appears that virtually no one on Capitol Hill, except for the Speaker, has seen this legislation. I'm talking about the people at the judiciary committees in the House and Senate don't have this legislation. And have even been kind of yanked around a little bit for months about whether there will even be legislation.

MOYERS: The House Judiciary Committee actually asked the FBI a few months ago how it has used the new powers that had been given to it under the Patriot Act. And the Justice department said, "We can't tell you that information, it's classified."

And this prompted then-Congressman then Bob Barr, from Georgia, another conservative, by the way, he said the attitude of the Justice Department seems to be that even Congress isn't entitled to know how they are using the authority that Congress gave them.

LEWIS: It's incredible. I mean, if Congress doesn't have oversight over the Justice Department and these programs, who does? That's how it's supposed to work in our constitution and in our set up for government.

MOYERS: That's one of your real concerns, isn't it? That there's no oversight when secrecy is this tight.

LEWIS: Absolutely. The Congress is the people's chance to monitor the executive branch. That is the only… it is the closest branch of government to the people. The House members are up for election every two years. If the House of Representatives and the Congress in general cannot keep a watch on the executive branch and cannot be informed about their activities. There's something very serious here.

MOYERS: Chuck, I hear people out there in the audience thinking, you know, I'm scared. We're — this is a new ballgame, to put it trivially. War on terrorists, they came on 9/11, we keep getting reports they're coming again, who knows where it'll happen. Everybody's scared.

You guys are living in Lotus Land, you journalists talking about this sort of thing. Because we really want the government to protect us from another World Trade Center attack on the Pentagon, which is not far from where your office is in Washington.

LEWIS: Right.

MOYERS: What about that?

LEWIS: Look, I wanna be protected by the government as much as anyone.

But actually, in some ways that's beside the point. There are also freedoms and rights and liberties that, you know, millions of Americas have fought for over 200 years to make sure that this is a special kind of country. And isn't it possible that to be secure and have liberties?

Why give all the power and authority and have no oversight and accountability. What are the safeguards. And that's the question.

MOYERS: When someone inside government, inside the Justice Department, presumably, gives you a confidential document marked, "Not For Distribution," The Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003, knowing that this administration has been cracking down on watchdogs and leaks from inside government, do you consider this person a patriot?

LEWIS: I really do. I think it takes incredible guts to take something that bothers someone, and for whatever reason, they feel they must give it out. And they know they're gonna be polygraphed, they're gonna be questioned. There's gonna be a clampdown found, there's gonna be a witch-hunt after this occurs. They could very likely not only lose their job but-- maybe worse.

MOYERS: Be sued by the government?

LEWIS: Be sued by the government and otherwise ruined professionally. That is the most incredible kind of courage. And I have an incredible respect for anyone who does that.

MOYERS: I should make this clear this is not marked "Top Secret" — this is not a classified document. It is stamped "Confidential" but nobody is betraying the Secrets Act.

LEWIS: Yeah, that's right, I mean, I've — I'm glad to say that that's right.

MOYERS: There was a story this week in Congressional Quarterly, which is a very respected non-partisan journal in Washington. It says "Pentagon's proposed changes strike some as difficult, dangerous and destabilizing." And one of the things Donald Rumsfeld wants is wavers of environmental laws so that troops can conduct more "realistic exercises."

And then this magazine, which is non-partisan, says this is part of the administration's broad campaign to run the federal government more like a private business. And with private businesses you have more control over employees, you have more control over information. Do you see that developing as a syndrome of this administration?

LEWIS: I think it's incredible what's happening. I see a wholesale assault on access to information in this country that has not really been seen, I have to just say it, since Richard Nixon.

When you look at the roll-backs of freedom of information, when you look at things like meeting with energy companies with the Vice President. It's simple things though in government property with government officials getting paid by taxpayer money and it's not available to the public.

When you see some of the things that we have talked about earlier with reporters from detainees to military actions not being able to see things. I see a lot of very aggressive behavior by government officials towards the act of getting information out and information itself. I think that we're in a very unusual situation right now. And it really worries me actually.

MOYERS: Chuck Lewis, Center for Public Integrity, thank you very much.

LEWIS: Thank you.

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

As the rhetoric of war in Iraq grows louder, there is an urgent need for reflective, responsive, and resistant voices in the Canadian public sphere. Published by Three Squares Press, and edited by Mark Higgins, Stephen Pender, and Darren Wershler-Henry, The Common Sky: Canadian Writers against the War will assemble a diversity of Canadian writers expressing their opposition to another (potential) war in the Middle East.

Writers are invited to submit poetry (1-3 pages, max. 3 submissions) and short fiction (max. 1500 words) occasioned by the threat of war in Iraq.

Electronic submissions strongly encouraged.

threesquares@sympatico.ca

OR

Three Squares Press
16 Ashdale Ave.
Toronto, ON
M4L 2Y7

*Please include a self-addressed, stamped envelope if you need your submission returned.

Contributors will receive 2 copies of the anthology.

Proceeds from the sale of the book will be donated to the Canadian Peace Alliance

www.acp-cpa.ca

Submission deadline: Tuesday February 11, 2003
Publication date: March, 2003

**PLEASE DISTRIBUTE WIDELY **