Jeff Gerth - the New York Times (former) face of "SHODDY JOURNALISM"

This HUGE article by Eric Boehlert of MediaMatters.org compiles many of the chronic lies and "SHODDY JOURNALISM" of then New York Times reproter JEFF GERTH - which is we post it here.

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Jeff Gerth, meet Judith Miller
by Eric Boehlert, Media Matters for America
Wed, May 30, 2007
http://mediamatters.org/columns/200705300001

Isn't former New York Times reporter Jeff Gerth writing the definitive book about Hillary Clinton sort of like Judith Miller deciding to write the definitive book about Iraq's WMDs? It just doesn't add up.
After all, both Gerth and Miller, former star reporters, are well known for the facts they got wrong, more so than the stories they got right. While Miller limited most of her damage to a single topic, Iraq, Gerth, by contrast, became a Zelig-like figure at the newspaper during the 1990s, appearing at every crossroads where The New York Times lost its newsroom composure, and uncorked dark, convoluted tales featuring the conniving Clintons at the heart of a would-be criminal enterprise.

Indeed, Gerth was at the center of a rather unfortunate period in the Times' history. It was pre-public editor, pre-bloggers, and pre-Media Matters for America. And it was a time when the paper's leadership seemed more concerned with protecting high-profile scandal stories -- propping them up, really -- than with being accurate and honest with its readers.

But that shoddy approach to journalism caught up with the Times in recent years, and the paper has suffered a series of credibility setbacks, particularly with its prewar reporting. If you don't think Gerth's corner-cutting contributed to the paper's troubles -- if you think ambitious insiders at the Times didn't take notice of Gerth's star run when he was lauded and rewarded for writing accusatory stories that couldn't withstand close scrutiny and often didn't even make sense -- then I don't think you understand how the Beltway media's star system works.

Meaning Judith Miller simply picked up where Jeff Gerth left off.

I have no real nostalgic desire, in 2007, to rehash the Gerth blunders regarding Whitewater, rocket technology transfers to China, Monica Lewinsky, and Wen Ho Lee, among others. But with Her Way, Gerth is presenting himself as an expert on Hillary Clinton -- and the book is lauded as presumptively credible because, the media remind us, it is co-authored by respected investigative reporters -- despite the fact that, among mainstream reporters, perhaps nobody during the 1990s got more things wrong about Hillary and Bill Clinton than Jeff Gerth.

Gerth's misfires became as predictable as his reporting style. The drill went like this: Gerth would write accusatory, albeit muddled accounts of alleged Clinton wrongdoings and lean heavily on the cover-up angle. The allegations were often fueled by questionable partisan sources, and Gerth often refused to seriously consider alternative (i.e. benign) explanations for the questions raised. Republicans, seizing on Gerth's high-profile work, would then create an investigatory body (such as the Cox committee), or urge for an independent counsel (like Kenneth Starr). That meant Gerth would receive leak after leak from grateful Clinton investigators and then play up their over-the-top accusations without a hint of skepticism, only to have the investigators' final reports and conclusions be widely dismissed as ineffectual and untrustworthy. But by that point, Gerth has moved onto a new target, and the same closed loop began anew.

It's interesting that once President Bush came into office, Gerth seemed to lose his investigative zeal. He took some swings at corruption surrounding Halliburton and Enron. But Gerth was careful never to suggest White House cover-ups were under way, and his stories did not create much buzz or shift the D.C. landscape; the thrill seemed to be gone. Perhaps that was because Gerth's GOP cheering section -- his base -- was no longer interested in journalists aggressively trying to connect widely scattered dots about the president or his aides. And without their prodding and their leaks, Gerth's pipeline dried up. (From 1995 through 2000, Gerth had more than 180* bylines at the Times; from 2001 through 2005, he produced less than half that number.)

Gerth is also a famously bad writer. Even journalist James Stewart, a fellow Whitewater cheerleader who wrote lovingly of Gerth's journalistic skills in Blood Sport (Simon & Schuster, 1997), reported: "Some Gerth submissions left [Times] editors stunned, not even knowing where to begin." That brand of bad writing, as Little Rock columnist Gene Lyons and Slate's Bruce Gottlieb have detailed, allowed Gerth to camouflage all sorts of holes in his reporting. Gerth seemed to take bad writing, and camouflaging, to new heights during his discredited Whitewater adventures.

Gerth's career was quickly elevated by the Times' convoluted Whitewater narrative about the Clintons and their 1970s real-estate investment with James McDougal -- who later opened an Arkansas savings and loan that eventually failed -- as well as the kaleidoscope of conflicts that modest deal supposedly triggered. Prior to entering the Clinton chase, Gerth was perhaps best known for formally apologizing for a story he'd co-written for Penthouse prior to joining the Times. In that article, Gerth tried to link a California resort with organized crime. The resort co-owners sued, and in order to avoid being targeted in the $522 million libel suit, Gerth wrote a letter of apology to the owners for any harm the article caused.

It appears to have been the last time Gerth apologized for his reporting.

Even the headline on Gerth's infamous first Whitewater story from March 8, 1992, was inaccurate. As Lyons noted in Fools for Scandal: How the Media Invented Whitewater, (Franklin Square Press, 1996), the Times headline read "Clintons Joined S.& L. Operator In an Ozark Real Estate Venture." The operator, of course, was James McDougal. Except that when the Clintons joined the venture in 1978, McDougal was not a savings and loan operator.

The actual contents of the article did not fare much better. Gerth wrote: "The Clintons appear to have invested little money, so stood to lose little if the venture failed, but might have cashed in on their 50 percent interest if it had done well." Not true; the Clintons put $220,000 in borrowed money at risk. (They lost approximately $42,000.)

Another example: Gerth wrote about Beverly Bassett Schaffer, an Arkansas bank regulator appointed by then-Gov. Clinton and who was portrayed in the Times as a political crony who went easy on McDougal's savings and loan, Madison Guaranty. Bassett Schaffer served as a linchpin in the early Whitewater conspiracy. In the first Whitewater article, Gerth informed readers that Schaffer "did not remember the federal examination of Madison." In truth, after reviewing her Madison file, Schaffer faxed Gerth 20 pages of notes before he wrote his accusatory story. (Among the facts lost down Gerth's memory hole: It was Bassett Schaffer who first recommended that Madison be shut down, a full 18 months before it happened.)

Incredibly, Gerth not only left out any mention of the notes Bassett Schaffer had faxed to him regarding the examination, but he claimed Bassett Schaffer "did not remember" the examination.

A stunned Bassett Schaffer complained to Gerth in writing: "This information was ignored and, instead, you based your story on the word of a mentally ill man [McDougal] I have never met and documents which you admitted to me ... were incomplete." (It's no exaggeration to suggest Gerth's conduct regarding Bassett Schaffer would have been a firing offense in many newsrooms.)

Printing Starr's leaks

Despite years of conspiratorial reporting and commentary from the Times (readers could practically hear William Safire's heart beating faster when the columnist typed up his predictions about pending Clinton indictments), Whitewater proved to be a dry hole. "Through it all, the evidence against the Clintons bordered on the nonexistent," wrote Jeffery Toobin in his 1999 book A Vast Conspiracy (Random House).

Nonetheless, Gerth's unusually close relationship with Whitewater sleuth Kenneth Starr paid off when the Monica Lewinsky story broke in early 1998. At the time, Gerth served as the newspaper's point person -- a clearinghouse of sorts -- between the paper and Starr's talkative lieutenants, who were anxious to use the press to shape the unfolding investigation and pressure the White House by planting doomsday stories in the media. Gerth helped.

Two weeks after the Lewinsky charge went public, Gerth co-wrote a Page One exclusive that suggested Clinton had summoned his personal secretary, Betty Currie, to the Oval Office the day after he gave a deposition in the sexual misconduct lawsuit filed by Paula Jones, leading Currie "through an account of his relationship" with Monica Lewinsky that differed in part "from her own recollections." The Times' source: "lawyers familiar with her account." The article, which came amid the Monica media frenzy and was deemed to be a very Big Deal, set in motion the media narrative that Clinton had tried to coach Currie into lying. The article also came complete with Gerth's patented worse-case-scenario-for-Clinton spin. "It just comes screaming at you out of the Times story," NPR's Nina Totenberg said at the time. "This has all the earmarks of a Starr leak."

Indeed it did. Months later, Starr admitted to journalist Steven Brill that he and his deputy spoke with Gerth at length the day before his Currie story ran. Starr insisted they simply confirmed the information Gerth and his team already had, which, of course, revolved around secret grand jury testimony that only prosecutors and Currie knew about at the time. (Obviously, Currie and her attorney had no reason to leak it.)

In the end, the Currie story proved to be a total washout. As testimony from Currie's five grand jury appearances later showed, there was no discernable difference in how she and Clinton recalled the meeting in question. The Washington Post later noted, "Rather than Currie being the crack in the Clinton armada that the independent counsel's office had hoped for, her testimony shows she was intent on remaining a faithful personal secretary unwilling to undermine her CEO." [Emphasis added.]

From Monica, Gerth soon moved on to more high-minded Clinton pursuits, such as the allegation of illegal technology transfers to China. The guts of the story were that after a civilian Chinese rocket carrying a Loral Space and Communications satellite exploded and crashed shortly after takeoff on February 14, 1996, Loral engineers diagnosed the problem and gave Chinese officials a report on the mishap. But in the process, Loral may have given the Chinese too much sensitive information. The Justice Department opened an inquiry into those charges.

That's the story Gerth began to report in April 1998. But, as usual, Gerth went much further. His stories clearly implied that a crucial White House waiver needed by Loral to launch satellites in China was granted because Loral chairman Bernard Schwartz was a longtime contributor to the Democratic Party. Once granted that waiver, Gerth asserted, Loral leaked ballistic missile secrets to the People's Republic of China. The allegation, and the fact that it was made on the front page of The New York Times, set off a Beltway firestorm, with administration critics declaring that Clinton had sold out America's national security in exchange for some campaign cash. In essence, Clinton was being charged with treason.

As was his custom, though, during his missile reporting, Gerth had downplayed or left out key information, omissions that strengthened the angle he was pushing. For instance, the allegation that Loral's actions had damaged national security; Gerth's articles omitted any reference to the fact that a CIA report concluded that the Loral incident had not harmed national security. (News consumers had to rely on The Washington Post to find out that information.)

In his original damning exposé, Gerth reported that Clinton had "quietly" approved a Loral waiver to launch another Chinese satellite despite the company's security breach. "Quietly" certainly carried with it the connotation that Clinton was acting on the hush-hush.

How's this for "quietly"?

1. Clinton immediately notified Congress of his February decision to approve the launch.

2. The State Department and all of Clinton's top national security aides approved of the decision.

3. Even the Pentagon, which first raised concerns about Loral, recommended the China approval.

Fast-forward to May 23, 2000, when the Los Angeles Times reported that just months after looking into the matter in 1998, Justice Department investigators became convinced the Loral chairman had done nothing wrong. A task force led by prosecutor Charles La Bella had been unable to turn up "a scintilla of evidence -- or information -- that the president was corruptly influenced by Bernard Schwartz." One federal investigator told the paper, "Poor Bernie Schwartz got a bad deal. There never was a whiff of a scent of a case against him."

It took 17 days for The New York Times, on Page 24, to inform readers that Schwartz had been cleared. And no, Gerth did not write that story.

By then, Gerth had already won a Pulitzer Prize for his missile technology reporting. The Loral stories resulted in something besides a Pulitzer -- it resulted in the creation of the Cox committee, named after then-Rep. Christopher Cox (R-CA). Cox was to investigate Chinese espionage and the theft of U.S. missile technology in hopes of embarrassing the Clinton administration. Fueled by the unfolding Lewinsky scandal, Republicans embraced Gerth's reporting as yet another entry into the world of perpetual Clinton investigation.

After the overheated Cox Report was published in January 1999, it was ridiculed by experts in the field for being little more than a scare document riddled with factual errors, its language "inflammatory" and its key conclusions "unwarranted." That was the conclusion reached by a research team connected to Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation, which reported that "there is no credible evidence presented or instances described of actual theft of U.S. missile technology."

Neither Gerth nor anybody else at the paper ever reported on the research team's findings. That may have been in part because the newspaper was still institutionally committed to the Cox Report, which the paper had hyped relentlessly. How else to explain the paper's embarrassing, unsigned editorial at the time of the report's release, labeling the Cox committee's work "an invaluable public service" and celebrating its "unsparing investigation." That's a flattering description that perhaps only Cox committee staffers still cling to today.

The Times' Wen Ho Lee fiasco

Like Whitewater, the Cox committee report may have been a bust, but it produced more scandal fodder for the Times. That's because the Cox committee's star witness was an obsessive Energy Department sleuth with no formal technical training named Notra Trulock. Trulock claimed that he had cracked the case of how the Chinese government had obtained information about U.S. warheads, including the most sophisticated in the arsenal, the W-88 Trident D-5. According to Trulock, the information came from an American employee at Los Alamos National Laboratories, a soft-spoken 60-year-old scientist named Wen Ho Lee, who was spying for Chinese government. Worse, Clinton administration officials were dragging their feet in uncovering the dastardly plot. Trulock had been spinning his fantastic tale about Lee for years. (That China had obtained the W-88 information was a confirmed fact.) But most government officials, including those at the CIA, wouldn't bite. Trulock, though, eventually found an eager audience with the Cox committee and with the Times.

On March 6, 1999, the Times uncorked a breathless, 4,000-word exclusive ("Breach at Los Alamos: A Special Report: China Stole Nuclear Secrets For Bombs, U.S. Aides Say") that essentially presented Trulock's doomsday allegations as fact, and contained a loaded quote from a government investigator who compared the alleged spy case to Americans Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were convicted of giving atomic secrets to the Soviet Union and executed in 1953. The article was co-authored by Gerth. Predictably, Republicans went bonkers, framing the controversy in the most hysterical terms.

Although it did not name Lee (that came three days later), the article made clear that Lee was the prime suspect in what the paper called a historic bout of communist espionage. Relentlessly prosecutorial in tone, the March 6 story often, in unqualified terms, referred to "the espionage," "the leak," "the theft," and "the crime," leaving readers no room for doubt.

Interrogating Lee the next day at Los Alamos -- without his attorney present -- FBI agents waved the Times article around. "You know, Wen Ho, this, it's bad," said one agent. "I mean, look at this newspaper article! I mean, 'China Stole Secrets for Bombs.' It all but says your name in here."

Yet by the summer of 1999, a crew of respected reporters -- the New York Daily News' Lars-Erik Nelson, the Los Angeles Times' Bob Drogin, and The Washington Post's Walter Pincus and Vernon Loeb -- were firing missiles into the Times' leaky Wen Ho Lee ship, reporting that the paper's initial, breathless spy caper just didn't withstand scrutiny and that it was "built on thin air," as Robert S. Vrooman, Los Alamos' former counterintelligence chief described the case against Lee.

It quickly became obvious that the Times, much as with Gerth's work on Whitewater and Lewinsky, had been duped by partisan sources with axes to grind against the Clinton administration. Indeed, the Times' competitors revealed that Trulock, the paper's star source, had posted a message of thanks and support on the right-wing Clinton-hating website FreeRepublic.com and that Trulock once spit on the Energy Department's acting counterintelligence chief, who was black, and who, in a subsequent affidavit, accused Trulock of "having racist views towards minority groups." Additionally, after leaving the Energy Department, Trulock became a spokesman for the conservative Free Congress Foundation and then an associate editor at the right-wing media watchdog group Accuracy in Media. That's who the Times built its Wen Ho Lee story around, adopting his spin as fact.

Wen Ho Lee was charged in December 1999 with 59 counts of mishandling nuclear secrets and denied bail. He spent 278 days in solitary confinement. The story, though, completely unraveled in the summer of 2000, when government witnesses had to tell their tall tales in court as part of Lee's bail hearing. The most damaging revelation came from the FBI's lead agent, Robert Messemer, who was forced to recant crucial testimony he'd given in December, when he charged that Lee had lied to investigators and colleagues. On September 13, 2000, after a U.S. District Court judge lit into top government officials who had "embarrassed our entire nation" with their handling of the case, Lee was free. Incredibly, as the Lee case fell apart, indignant Times editorials demanded the government appoint an "independent examiner" to determine whether Lee had been unfairly targeted. Why didn't the daily just ask Gerth?

Today, the Times' original breathless Wen Ho Lee exposé, much like Gerth's first Whitewater exposé, reads like a journalistic train wreck, with unproven allegations strewn across the landscape. As Lucinda Fleeson concluded in the magazine American Journalism Review:

After 19 months of sensational reporting and demagogic politicking, none of the major points made in Gerth and [James] Risen's original March 6, 1999, story hold up:

* There is no evidence that there was espionage at Los Alamos as opposed to any of hundreds of other locations.

Wen Ho Lee did not fail two lie detector tests. He passed lie detector tests in 1984 and December 1998. In February 1999 the FBI gave him two tests, one of which was pronounced inconclusive and the other interpreted as deceptive.

* Whether the Chinese made a great leap forward in their nuclear development continues to be a matter of sharp dispute -- clearly the Chinese obtained information that enabled them to learn how to miniaturize warheads, but the Chinese haven't deployed anything like the W88.

* This wasn't the most serious spy case since the Rosenbergs.

* While Republicans complain they have been stonewalled by the Clinton administration in their efforts to obtain some documents, there is no evidence of a Clinton cover-up. In fact, it now appears that [then-Attorney General Janet] Reno acted properly when she initially resisted pressure to investigate Lee.

According to a Columbia Journalism Review interview in 2001, Gerth was "unwilling to articulate any lessons learned from the Wen Ho Lee story beyond saying that intelligence stories, by their nature, are fraught with danger." That's not surprising. Gerth has been unwilling to articulate any mistakes made.

For instance, Gerth appears to be almost delusional about his flawed Whitewater reporting. "The New York Times has never run a correction of the [March 8, 1992] story because there's nothing to correct," Gerth proudly told CJR.

You gotta love that outdated Times view of the world: If all-knowing and unerring Times editors refuse to run a correction, that means everything's accurate.

Gerth produced for CJR a 1999 letter written by Joseph Lelyveld, then the executive editor of the Times, to an Arkansas newspaper editor who had criticized the Times' Whitewater coverage. In the letter, Lelyveld condescendingly announced that Gerth's work was above reproach. According to CJR, Gerth was practically beaming with pride when he shared the correspondence -- his "trump card," as the magazine described it.

Honestly, does Gerth really think that a cover-your-ass letter written by his boss means that Gerth and the Times did nothing wrong during Whitewater? That type of elitist, protect-your-own approach might have worked during the 1990s. But it's not going to fly in the new digital era, where fact-checking reigns (just ask Judith Miller) and where Gerth won't be able to hind behind genuflecting Times editors.

I agree that Her Way should be judged on its own merits. And Gerth, along with co-writer Don Van Natta Jr., are free as journalists to portray Hillary Clinton however they wish. But readers are also free during the upcoming book release and book tour to press Gerth to explain how getting stories wrong about the Clintons for a decade now qualifies him as an expert on the topic.

* This sentence originally stated that Gerth had more than 160 bylines from 1995 through 2000.

Gene Lyons: Media WHORES aided the Ken Starr INQUISITION in Arkansas...

Well, at least some people in America know what the illegal, Washington, DC directed invasion of Iraq is like: for 5 long years, Ken Starr's partisan Republican "INDEPENDENT" investigation of the "Whitewater" Arkansas real-estate flop TERRIFIED dozens of Arkansas citizens caught up in the maniacal Washington funded Ken Starr jihad against any- and all things Clinton.

Is is fair to say that Washington, DC, today is as imperial and arrogant as Berlin was in the late 1930s? It certainly would be fair to make that comparison if you were one of the over 600,000 Iraqis killed since the US capitol city approved, financed, and directed the illegal invasion of that country. And, to poorly paraphrase President Harry S. Truman (talking about war-profiteers ability to ROB TAXPAYERS during critical war years), Hitler and his killers had to wake up early, and work long and hard, to kill a few million victims... something that today's nuclear-armed US military could, literally, equal in a few dozen minutes.

IS THERE _ANY_ force to compell justice and honesty among the American (whore) corporate media and now the fully corrupted US criminal justice system and their "federalist society" neo-segregation judiciary?

Well, with the Democratic leadership gorging on swill from the same corporate trough, an honest and independent media is becoming a vanashing possibility as quickly as the prospects of an honest and independent criminal justice system are.

As Lyons reports, US prosecutors have the power of KGB commissars/Gestapo inspectors - and the trend has only gotten WORSE since Ken Lay and his minions descended on Arkansas a decade ago.


Actions no surprise
Gene Lyons
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
http://www.nwanews.com/adg/Editorial/190957/


The editors of America’s most prestigious newspapers pronounce
themselves flabbergasted by the Bush administration’s corrupt and
nakedly partisan machinations at the Department of Justice. As well they
should. Hiring and firing U.S. attorneys according to their willingness
to use the criminal justice system to follow a party line shocks the
conscience of anybody committed to the Constitution and the rule of law.
Some of us wonder why it’s taken them so long to grasp the obvious.
Because last time around, The New York Times and Washington Post were
urging them on. Prosecuting federal crimes from political corruption and
bank fraud to terrorism, U.S. attorneys wield enormous discretionary
power. As the Times explains in a stinging editorial, “they can wiretap
people’s homes, seize property and put people in jail for life. They can
destroy businesses, and affect the outcomes of elections. It has always
been understood that although they are appointed by a president, usually
from his own party, once in office they must operate in a nonpartisan
way, and be insulated from outside pressures.”

Indeed, the revelation that an inexperienced ideologue like Monica
Goodling, the GOP apparatchik who testifies before Congress this week,
was given authority by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to draw up hit
lists of U.S. attorneys unwilling to pursue meritless voting fraud
charges against Democrats strikes at the essence of democracy. The
Times’ editors won’t be satisfied until the incompetent toady Gonzales
is forced from office.

Funny, because when Kenneth Starr and his Merry Men subjected the state
of Arkansas to a six-year inquisition, Beltway thinkers treated him as
an untouchable. Those of us who objected were scorned as “Clinton
apologists,” and worse. Begging for leaks out of Starr’s office like
dogs at the dinner table, the national press became prosecutorial press
touts.

Ancient history? Maybe so. The Arkansas experience constitutes a vivid
illustration of all that can go wrong when law enforcement becomes a
partisan cudgel. Not everybody, see, could afford top-dollar legal
representation, nor enjoyed the protections of White House celebrity.

Starr’s prosecutors, several of whom Bush has appointed to federal
judgeships and other posts, knew they couldn’t bring anything but an
airtight case against the president and first lady. That wasn’t true of
anybody else in Arkansas, even then-Gov. Jim Guy Tucker. Hundreds of
ordinary citizens—bankers, loan officers, real estate appraisers,
surveyors, tax lawyers, accountants, college professors, secretaries—got
swept into the ever-expanding “Whitewater” investigation. For them, it
wasn’t quite like living in America.

Virtually the entire case depended upon one David Hale, a con man
indicted by Little Rock’s Democratic U.S. attorney for embezzling over
$2 million from the Small Business Administration. Caught red-handed,
Hale began spinning wild fables about every prominent person in Arkansas
he’d ever done business with and some, like the Clintons, he hadn’t.
Many were Republicans, none of whom Starr’s prosecutors ever touched.

A jury convicted Tucker of bank fraud, based upon a loan document Hale
prepared that there was no evidence Tucker ever saw. After pleading
guilty to a second charge for health reasons (liver transplant), Tucker
finally got a look at the formal charges: as he’d suspected, Starr’s
prosecutors had indicted him using an expired tax law. Too late, Jim
Guy. His appeals went nowhere in the partisan 8th Circuit Court.

Remember Susan McDougal in chains? She swore Starr put her in a perjury
trap: demanding she confirm Hale and her ex-husband Jim McDougal’s
cockamamie tales. Kept in solitary for most of two years, she was
acquitted of obstructing justice after a jury heard McDougal and several
other witnesses testify that prosecutors pressured them for false
testimony.

A Little Rock municipal judge named Bill Watt got tagged an “unindicted
coconspirator” for refusing to confirm Hale’s tall tales about Bill
Clinton. Although he’d provided prosecutors with documentary evidence
he’d severed his relationship with Hale and alerted the SBA to his
crimes, the allegation cost Watt his job, his reputation and pension. A
scrapper, Watt later presented his case to the Arkansas Judicial
Discipline and Disability Commission and was fully reinstated to the
bar—the only formal reversal in that agency’s history. I could cite a
dozen similar examples. Starr’s team investigated not crimes, but
people. They ransacked ordinary citizens ’ lives investigating tall
tales no competent U.S. attorney would waste resources on. Meanwhile,
any skeptical observer who read the transcripts and studied the
documents could confidently predict Whitewater would come to nothing. So
naturally GOP hardliners thought they could turn the Department of
Justice into a partisan tool. The last time they did so, Beltway pundits
cheered.

Monica Goodling: Bush/Gonzales' HATCHET WOMAN vs QUALIFIED Dem. and "liberal" Department of Justice candidates. WHERE's THE SCANDAL HEADLINES??

NOTHING illustrates the craven, treacherous DUPLICITY of the Washington whore Post and other "major media outlets" than the difference in handling of the two MONICA scandals. In the Monica Lewinsky 'scandal,' the Washington WHORE Post TRUMPETTED EVERY new leak and allegation about then President Clinton's affair ON THE FRONT PAGES, IN BOLD, SCREAMING HEADLINES.

Now that we Americans are learning that under the Bush White House, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was effectively trying to PURGE _all non-partisan, non-Republican officials from the Department of Justice - CRICKETS! The WHORE Post and LYING NY Times do their typical misdirection reporting, BURYING the true story under confusing if not misleading headlines.

In this case, merely "purging non-Republicans from the Department of Justice" doesn't EVEN BEGIN to describe the CRIMINALITY of this Rove-orchestrated DOJ purge: the conscious effort to DERAIL PROSECUTIONS of Republican officials, and CREATE BOGUS PROSECUTIONS of Democratic vote-registration activists.

THAT IS, CRIMINAL, PERJUROUS, adn GESTAPO-esque PROSECUTIONS of INNOCENT American voter activists, in order to SWING CLOSE ELECTIONS for Republican candidates, the rights and lives of those targetted activists (and the voters they try to register) BE DAMNED.

The WASHINGTON WHORE POST and LYINC NEW YORK TIMES - the modern American 'journalistic' equivalent of Joseph Goebble's Brown-Shirt thug "hang enemies of the Reich from the nearest lamp-post!" propaganda.

=====================================================

(Dana Milbank gets this story "right." It is just that the Washington Post REFUSES to give the conclusions of this report the gravity they are due: that the ATTORNEY GENERAL of the United States LIED, UNDER OATH, to the US Congress, about a serial and systematic effort commissioned BY HIM to PURGE the Department of Justice of ALL non-Republican loyalist officers and officials. This is a FAR bigger scandal than the Monica Lewinsky scandal, but the corrupt editors and publishers of the Post PRETEND IT IS BUSINESS AS USUAL - FIRING Americans from their jobs, and THROWING AMERICANS INTO JAIL, based on PARTISAN LIES and double-standards.)


Monica's Own Monica Problem

By Dana Milbank
Thursday, May 24, 2007; A02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/23/AR2007052301446.html


In Alberto Gonzales's Justice Department, Democrats and liberals who were denied civil service jobs were said to have a "Monica Problem."

After yesterday's House Judiciary Committee hearing, the Justice Department has a Monica Problem of its own.

The source of the metastasizing Monica Problem (not to be confused with the previous president's Monica Problem) is Monica Goodling, a graduate of Pat Robertson's law school who was the Justice Department's enforcer of partisan purity until she resigned and investigations began. In a full day of testimony, she accused the No. 2 Justice official of giving false testimony to Congress, implied that Gonzales himself had improperly tried to influence her testimony, and generally described Gonzales's Justice Department as a wholly owned subsidiary of the Republican National Committee.

"I may have gone too far in asking political questions of applicants for career positions," the trembling young witness told the committee after securing immunity from prosecution for her testimony. "I may have taken inappropriate political considerations into account on some occasions."

"Was that legal?" demanded Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Va.). Under the witness table, Goodling wrung her hands and rubbed her bracelet. She drew a deep breath. "I know I crossed the line," she admitted.

So, apparently, did Paul McNulty, who has already announced his resignation as deputy attorney general. Goodling said he was "not fully candid" in his testimony to Congress about the White House's role in the replacement of U.S. attorneys.

And speaking of line crossers, there was that "uncomfortable" meeting when Gonzales seemed to be trying to coach Goodling's testimony. Days before she resigned, the attorney general presented his version of the firings ("Let me tell you what I remember") and asked for her reaction. "I didn't know that it was maybe appropriate," Goodling said.

Republicans must have known they had a problem on their hands, for they moved with dispatch to create diversions. Rep. Chris Cannon (Utah) opted to read into the record a lengthy editorial comparing Rep. Jack Murtha (D-Pa.) to Tony Soprano. Rep. Dan Lundgren (Calif.) delivered a 250-word speech praising his own glorious service as his state's attorney general.

The only break Republicans got all day came from a neophyte Democrat on the committee, Steve Cohen (Tenn.), who decided to poke fun at the educational pedigree of Goodling, Regent University law school Class of '99 ("top 10.5 percent of class," reported her résumé).

"The mission of the law school you attended, Regent, is to bring to bear upon legal education and the legal profession the will of almighty God," he said. "What is the will of almighty God, our creator, on the legal profession?"

"I'm not sure that I could define that question for you," Goodling answered.

Cohen continued: "Are you aware of the fact that in your graduating class, 50 to 60 percent of the students failed the bar the first time?"

"I know it wasn't good," she conceded.

Republicans erupted in groans and cries of "bigotry." "Regent University students won the American Bar Association's Negotiation Competition February 11," protested Randy Forbes (R-Va.).

Goodling had been the subject of considerable speculation as her testimony was delayed for weeks by her immunity negotiations. Would she be a modern-day Fawn Hall, defending her bosses the way Ollie North's secretary once fought for him? Or would she be the woman with powerful tear ducts described by her colleague David Margolis as having sobbed in his office for "30 to 45 minutes" when the scandal broke.

But Goodling was neither. Her trembling fingers gave away her nerves, but she made clear from the start that she hadn't come to take the fall: At the top of her written testimony, bold and underlined, was the sentence "The Deputy Attorney General's Allegations are False."

With the assistance of committee Democrats, Goodling quickly established that she had little preparation for the senior job she held at the Justice Department. Asked about her previous experience making personnel decisions, Goodling began her answer by noting that she was student body president in college.

But Democrats quickly realized that Goodling, who worked for the RNC before joining the Justice Department, was of more use to them as a savvy operative than as an ingenue. Their questions encouraged her to paint political considerations at Justice as so pervasive that she couldn't quantify them.

How many job applicants did she block because of political leanings? "I wouldn't be able to give you a number." Did she ask aspiring civil servants whom they voted for? "I may have." Did she screen applicants for career prosecutor jobs so that Republicans landed in those positions? "I think that I probably did." How many times? "I don't think that I could have done it more than 50 times, but I don't know." She further admitted that she "occasionally" researched career applicants' political affiliations and checked their political donations.

Legally, this could all add up to a major Monica Problem for Goodling, who brought three high-priced lawyers with her to the hearing. "I intend to establish a legal defense fund at some point," she told the committee.

Here's guessing that Gonzales and McNulty won't be contributing.

CORRUPTED justice: Judge gives ex-secretary Coca-Cola corp. 8 years for selling trade secrets; to date NO PENALTY for MASSIVE VOTER DISENFRANCHISEMENT

This article demonstrates the BIAS of both the American government ("justice" system) and the American whore media: PROPERTY RIGHTS, and especially corporate rights, are FAR MORE IMPORTANT to "the establishment" than the rights of voters DISENFRANCHISED by 6+ years of Republican-Christianist jihad against minority and Democratic voter registration.

America's judges i black robes, like America's senators and representatives, operate IN THE BELLY OF THE BEAST - at the core of the United States Government. What they call "STABILITY" - maintaining the status quo, which is to say maintaining the wealth and power of the ruling class - is far more important "in the belly of the beast" than enforcing voter rights or protecting public citizens from unlimited, dictatorial presidential powers.

==========================================

Ex-Coke Secretary Gets 8 Years in Prison
Harry R. Weber AP
May 23, 2007
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20070523/coca-cola-trade-secrets


ATLANTA — A federal judge ignored a former Coca-Cola secretary's plea for mercy Wednesday and sentenced her to eight years in prison for conspiring to steal trade secrets from the world's largest beverage maker.

U.S. District Judge J. Owen Forrester told Joya Williams, 42, that he was giving her a longer sentence than recommended by federal prosecutors and sentencing guidelines because, "This is the kind of offense that cannot be tolerated in our society."

Williams had faced up to 10 years in prison on the single conspiracy charge in a failed scheme to sell Coke's trade secrets to rival PepsiCo Inc. for at least $1.5 million.

But sentencing guidelines, which federal judges are not bound by, called for a sentence of 63 months to 78 months. Williams was convicted Feb. 2 following a jury trial in U.S. District Court in Atlanta, where The Coca-Cola Co. is based.

"I can't think of another case in 25 years that there's been so much obstruction of justice," the judge said.

As for the sentencing guidelines, Forrester said, "The guidelines as they are written don't begin to approach the seriousness of this case."

A co-defendant, Ibrahim Dimson, was sentenced to five years in prison. Both also were ordered to pay $40,000 restitution, and they will be on supervised release for three years after being released from prison.

Forrester ignored a tearful apology by Williams, which marked the first time she acknowledged what she did. Williams had testified during the trial that she did not commit a crime.

"Your honor, I have expanded my consciousness through this devastating experience," Williams said before she was sentenced. "This has been a very defining moment in my life. I have become infamous when I never wanted to become famous."

She added, "I am sorry to Coke and I'm sorry to my boss and to you and to my family as well."

The government said Williams stole confidential documents and samples of products that hadn't been launched by Coca-Cola and gave them to Dimson and a third defendant, Edmund Duhaney, as part of a conspiracy to sell the items to Pepsi. Duhaney, like Dimson, pleaded guilty to conspiracy. Before the Coke case, Duhaney and Dimson had been incarcerated at the same federal prison in Alabama at the same time.

Duhaney, who had been friends with Williams for years, will be sentenced for the Coke conspiracy later. A date was not immediately set because Duhaney's lawyer, Don Samuel, is in the midst of another trial. Samuel filed a request Wednesday to allow Duhaney to be released from custody Thursday for several days so he can be at the hospital with his 15-year-old daughter, who is having surgery. Forrester granted the request.

The conspiracy was foiled after Pepsi warned Coca-Cola that it had received a letter in May 2006 offering Coca-Cola trade secrets to the "highest bidder." The FBI launched an undercover investigation and identified the letter writer as Dimson.

Williams was fired as a secretary to Coca-Cola's global brand director after the allegations came to light.

Williams' apology Wednesday lasted for several minutes and she asked the judge to show mercy, though Forrester had told her before she spoke that he planned to depart from sentencing guidelines.

"Punishment is the memories and the moments that I'm going to miss," she said. "Punishment is never having a family of my own."

Assistant U.S. Attorney Byung J. Pak told the judge that Williams didn't deserve leniency.

"Choices have consequences and she made those choices," Pak said. "She chose to go to trial and she lied on the stand."

At the hearing, prosecutors disclosed that Williams has two prior convictions, one involving making false statements related to unemployment insurance.

Williams' lawyers had repeatedly asserted in court and out of court that Williams had no criminal past, and the government until Wednesday did not challenge that assertion.

DC media whores selling - "WAR vs IRAN" - based on - UNNAMED SOURCES and DRUDGE Report....

Oh, those inside-the-beltway media whores - God's own personal plague on America and the free world. In this case, journalist Will Bunch at "Attytood.com" catches one of the world's best English newspapers, the UK Guardian, spouting unsourced Bush administration "BOMB IRAN YESTERDAY" talking-points as fact - WITHOUT BOTHERING to run an accuracy analysis.
But more importantly, this "IRAN ALLIES WITH Al QAIDA!" meme is being embraced wholeheartedly BY THE DC WHORE PUNDITOCRACY, which means that the United States of America MUST, IMMEDIATLY, START A THIRD WAR in the MidEast, Hallelujah, and buy, build, sell (to the US military) and drop - MORE BOMBS! - PRAISE JESUS, Isaac, and Abraham!

=====================================

"Buying the War," Part II -- now it's Iran
http://www.attytood.com/2007/05/buying_the_war_part_ii_now_its.html


You would think that after after all the official and unofficial lies that came out of the Washington spin machine during the 2002-03 run-up to the war in Iraq, newspapers would be a little more skeptical about similarly unsupported, high-level but anonymous and bellicose allegations about Iran (or anyone else).

And you would doubly think that about a newspaper that, day in and day out, is one of the best in the world: Britain's Guardian.

You'd think...but you would be wrong:

Iran is secretly forging ties with al-Qaida elements and Sunni Arab militias in Iraq in preparation for a summer showdown with coalition forces intended to tip a wavering US Congress into voting for full military withdrawal, US officials say.
"Iran is fighting a proxy war in Iraq and it's a very dangerous course for them to be following. They are already committing daily acts of war against US and British forces," a senior US official in Baghdad warned. "They [Iran] are behind a lot of high-profile attacks meant to undermine US will and British will, such as the rocket attacks on Basra palace and the Green Zone [in Baghdad]. The attacks are directed by the Revolutionary Guard who are connected right to the top [of the Iranian government]."


The story does have another source -- another anonymous U.S. official, but in Washington:

"Tehran is behaving like a racecourse gambler. They're betting on all the horses in the race, even on people they fundamentally don't trust," a senior administration official in Washington said. "They don't know what the outcome will be in Iraq. So they're hedging their bets."
Boo! Scared yet?

Look, I think that reporting of the Iraq crisis should be as aggressive as possible, and that obviously includes talking to American officials in Washington and in Baghdad. And, the situation in the region has become quite volatile since our decision to invade it, and no doubt Iran is a player, but...

I can also tell you as a journalist with 26 years of experience behind me that this story is the biggest load of crap -- and that's not a phrase I would use loosely -- I've ever seen in my life. Two unnamed government officials as sources, and a perfunctary denial from an Iranian officials in the last paragraph -- and that's it?

This is a stunning allegation -- so stunning because it really makes no sense. Iran's government does have close ties with some of Iraq's Shiite leaders that we also seem to be propping up these days, but it is the bitter enemy of the Sunni forces that these unnamed Bush spinmeisters now claim they are also supporting. If such a bizarre reversal had taken place, and I were to write a story about it, I would be sure to talk to outside experts on the region and to non-U.S. government sources -- and quite them by name -- to prove such an unlikely premise was in fact true.

That did not happen. And in fact, the story is so "out there" that it would be best ignored -- except that you can't ignore it. For one thing, it's highlighted on the Drudge Report, and since Matt Drudge rules the world of Beltway media, it's going to become part of the public discourse. Also, in spite of its lack of even truthiness, let alone truth, it does prove -- just like the top-selling "Christian book" calling for an American jihad against Tehran -- the lengths that some of our leaders are still willing to go in formenting Armageddon.

But the fact that one of the world's better newspapers was willing to play along -- or that my own colleagues in the mainstream media seem to never learn -- is the saddest development of all. Didn't anyone watch "Buying the War"?

New York Whore Times pushes LYING "Most Katrina Flooding Victims Were Black" meme...

Harry Shearer deconstructs ANOTHER persistent NEW YORK TIMES LIE - "that it is only poor Black who were victimized by post-Katrina floods, and only because they were too stupid to get out of the way."

In fact, the flooding occured UNDER BLUE SKIES, LONG AFTER KATRINA HAD DEPARTED - and only when the FEDERAL LEVEES (dikes) FAILED, as predicted that they would, and possibly or in part due to SUBSTANDARD federal inspections and maintenance.

ARTHUR SULZERGER and the NEW YORK WHORE TIMES - Courting the neo-con imperialists, and Joining the Big Oil conglomerates in SELLING America's security DOWN THE RIVER for power & profit....
==========================================

The Template Dies Hard
by Harry Shearer, Huffington Post "eat the press"
May 21, 2007
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/harry-shearer/the-template-dies-hard_b_48895.html


Today, twenty months after the Katrina story began, one of the durable myths of the story's template resurfaced on NBC's Nightly News. Martin Savidge, nominally of the network's New Orleans bureau, flatly stated in the opening to a piece on continuing racial divisions in the city (unlike, say, which other American cities?), that most people affected by the disaster were African-American. This continues to be the impression of most Americans, due primarily to the fact that it was easier for media crews to get to the Superdome and Convention Center during K week (still, despite everything, freeway-close) than to get to St. Bernard Parish, a white-flight county to the east where nearly 100% of the housing was destroyed by Katrina-related flooding. At least, that's the charitable interpretation. The less benign view is that the New York-based media adopted a template of the story that cast it in racial terms and is loath to give up that template.

This is not to deny the obvious fact that, overall, white folks have tended to have more resources to fuel their return than African-Americans, who remain the bulk of the exiles. But the idea that the flooding chose favorites, on the basis of either race or class, is a persistent canard, and somebody in the "New Orleans bureau" should have had the time and opportunity to know better.

TREASON- Oil Companies CONTROL battery market - TO INCREASE AMERICAN DEPENDENCE ON foreign OIL...

<< The way they operate is by patent infringement suits through the courts and then they settle by limiting the size of the batteries they will allow to be manufactured; and by having "friendly courts" issue a non disclosure order to the losing battery manufacturer so there are no public record of the settlement. This is the reason you haven't seen a Plug-in Toyota in the market place. Toyota is simply not allowed to buy larger batteries. >>


http://www.greencarcongress.com/2007/01/cobasys_and_a12.html

Cobasys is a joint venture between ChevronTexaco Technology Ventures—a subsidiary of ChevronTexaco—and Energy Conversion Devices (Ovonics). These are the oil people, who now call themselves energy companies and are currently controlling the NiMH battery market. And, now they are going for control of the Li-Ion battery market. Notice there are few independent oil companies now and notice how the major companies are merging for more control of the energy business. Bp-Arco being the latest.

The way they operate is by patent infringement suits through the courts and then they settle by limiting the size of the batteries they will allow to be manufactured; and by having "friendly courts" issue a non disclosure order to the losing battery manufacturer so there are no public record of the settlement. This is the reason you haven't seen a Plug-in Toyota in the market place. Toyota is simply not allowed to buy larger batteries.

These energy companies are very busy working with other energy device and fuels manufacturers to make sure they protect their oil market and energy investments by controlling all forms of energy in the U.S. The oil companies are in the solar cell business and the alternative energies business as well and in the battery business.

All this big business control serves to slow down the development and time to market of other forms of energy. Good for their profits; bad for the consumers and worse for Global Warming.

I think it's time for a investigative reporter to gather this information and make it public so that our Congress has to address the issue. Where is Thomas Friedman when you need him?

Bravo! Robert Naiman takes down Dana Milbank's typical Washington Post SMEAR of non neo-con candidate...

Tsk Tsk Tsk! The Washington WHORE Post caught in the act - again - making sneering little derogatory comments that, over time, create an artifical meme around candidates (most often Democrats) that amounts to millions of dollars worth of free campaign ads for the opposing (mostly Republican) candidates.

(Note: the Post has FIFTEEN PAGES of comments on Milbank's snarky, sneering 7 paragraph column, the comments running at over 5:2 in favor of Kucinich's impeachment stand.)

Just as the WHORE Post and the LYING New York Times created the "AL GORE IS A LIAR!" meme all through the summer of presidential campaign 2000, even though (to be extremely charitable) GEORGE W. BUSH was LESS THAN FORTHCOMING about his DUI arrest and conviction, and his AWOL non-appearance at an Alabama Air National Guard post he had BEEN ORDERED TO, after then Lt. Bush had REFUSED to take a Texas Air National Guard flight physical, as ordered, despite receiving thousands of dollars of Texas ANG jet-pilot training.

<< Writing in the Washington Post, Dana Milbank is predictably snarky, although the level of venom is breathtaking. We couldn't have published Mr. Milbank's piece in my high school newspaper. Unlike the Washington Post editors, apparently, our faculty advisor had standards for what you could print.From Mr. Milbank's aggressive journalism, we learn that Kucinich is "perhaps 5 feet 6 inches tall in shoes" and that "he approached the microphones, which nearly reached his eye level." We also learn that Kucinich was undeterred by "wind that ruffled his text and the few strands of his hair that were insufficiently weighted by Brylcreem."

Feminists take note. It is not only women politicians who can expect to face IRRELEVANT and INAPPROPRIATE media commentary about their appearance. Apparently, as a male politician, if you oppose THE IMPERIAL AMBITIONS of the Washington [whore] PUNDIT CLASS too vigorously, you can be an honorary woman. >>

----------------------------------
The WASHINGTON WHORE POST is nothing less than THE MOST CORRUPTED ORGANIZATION in ALL of Washington DC - and that includes Mr. Bush's attempt to "DOMINIONIZE" the Department of Justice, by installing officials there who will committ PERJURY, by enacting FALSE PROSECUTIONS of voter-registration activists (to deter minority voters) in systematic & coordinated efforts to DISENFRANCHISE minority voters (and thereby assert one-party rule).

================================================

Dana Milbank Blows a Gasket
Kucinich Announces Cheney Impeachment, Citing Threats Against Iran
by Robert Naiman
04.25.2007
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-naiman/kucinich-announces-cheney_b_46797.html


On Tuesday, Representative Dennis Kucinich introduced articles of impeachment against Vice-President Cheney. There are three articles: manipulation of intelligence to deceive Congress and the American people, fabricating a threat from Iraqi weapons of mass destruction prior to the invasion of Iraq; manipulation of intelligence to deceive Congress and the American people about an alleged relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda prior to the invasion of Iraq; and threatening aggression against Iran, in violation of the U.N. Charter and the U.S. Constitution.

(Kucinich seems to be one of the few Members of Congress aware that threatening to attack other countries is a violation of the U.N. Charter, a treaty to which the U.S. is signatory.)

You can find the text of the impeachment articles and supporting documents here.

Writing in the Washington Post, Dana Milbank is predictably snarky, although the level of venom is breathtaking. We couldn't have published Mr. Milbank's piece in my high school newspaper. Unlike the Washington Post editors, apparently, our faculty advisor had standards for what you could print.

From Mr. Milbank's aggressive journalism, we learn that Kucinich is "perhaps 5 feet 6 inches tall in shoes" and that "he approached the microphones, which nearly reached his eye level." We also learn that Kucinich was undeterred by "wind that ruffled his text and the few strands of his hair that were insufficiently weighted by Brylcreem."

Feminists take note. It is not only women politicians who can expect to face irrelevant and inappropriate media commentary about their appearance. Apparently, as a male politician, if you oppose the imperial ambitions of the Washington pundit class too vigorously, you can be an honorary woman.

Despite pundit dismissals, Kucinich's introduction of impeachment articles against Cheney could have immense practical significance for efforts to oppose war with Iran and end the war in Iraq, even if the House never votes to impeach Cheney. News reports make clear that the Vice-President's office is the Dark Tower of planning and advocacy for aggressive war and human rights abuses in the Administration, a place where officials conspire to sabotage efforts of other Bush Administration officials to pursue serious diplomacy. A serious effort to impeach Cheney, even if ultimately unsuccessful, could discredit, delegitimize, isolate and preoccupy the Vice-President's office, limiting its potential for harm for the next year and a half, and strengthening the more adult forces in the Administration.

A recent and important example: on April 13 the Washington Post reported that the State Department wanted to release 5 Iranian officials captured in Iraq in January:

The Bush administration has decided to hold onto five Iranian Revolutionary Guard intelligence agents captured in Iraq, overruling a recommendation from the State Department to release them because they are no longer useful, according to U.S. officials.
The case is at the center of mounting tensions, the Post noted, and threatened efforts towards cooperation about Iraq:

The five, seized in a Jan. 11 raid by U.S. forces in the Kurdish city of Irbil in northern Iraq, are at the center of increasing tensions between Washington and Tehran. Iran has been indirectly ratcheting up pressure on the United States, its allies and even its own friends in the Iraqi government to win freedom for the group now known as the Irbil five.
Iran is threatening not to attend a pivotal meeting in Egypt next month of Iraq's neighbors - plus the United States and international groups involved in Iraq - that Washington hopes will increase regional cooperation to stabilize the country. Without Iran, which exerts great influence in Iraq, the meeting could end up having marginal impact, according to Iraqi officials and Middle East experts.

When the Iraqi government did not help obtain the release of the five detainees, Iran refused to allow a plane carrying Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to fly over Iranian territory en route to Japan last week. Some U.S. officials now say they believe the seizure of 15 British sailors and marines last month by Revolutionary Guard naval forces may have been at least in part an effort to heighten pressure on the United States through Britain, its close ally and the second-largest contributor of troops to coalition forces in Iraq.

Guess what happened to the State Department's recommendation?

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice went into the Tuesday meeting with a recommendation to free the men, but after a full review of the options she went along with the consensus, U.S. officials said. Vice President Cheney's office made the firmest case for continuing to hold the men.
...
Get involved:

www.justforeignpolicy.org

Right-Wing triest to DEMAGOGUE "secular," and "humanist" - WITH COMPLICITY of "major media." Just as they once turned "LIBERAL DEMOCRAT" into a SNEER

How Right Wing Ideology Threatens Western Civilization
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
http://existentialistcowboy.blogspot.com/2007/04/how-right-wing-ideology-threatens.html


When did “humanism” become a dirty word? When did the recently coined phrase “secular humanism” become a code word with which fundamentalists would attack the separation of church and state, democracy, and the rule of law?

Have you heard that "secular humanists are molesting your children"? According to one pamphlet they are. Have you been told secular humanism is a conspiracy by the filthy rich to pervert American life? That's what some religious leaders claim. They portray secular humanism as an insidious cancer eating away at everything good and decent. Think this "secular humanism" sounds too bad to be true? You're right.
-Matt Cherry & Molleen Matsumura, Myths About Secular Humanism

My education was hardly elitist. Nevertheless, I grew up respecting the "separation of church and state" and considered the issue settled. To borrow a phrase from Churchill, "I got it into my bones" that religious ideology was a matter of personal conviction. I was taught to consider “learning” to be a good thing and often revered positions and convictions with which I differed. I learned to identify “humanism” with the “rebirth of learning” often referred to as the Renaissance.

Given a choice between religion and science, I would have chosen science while respecting the rights of those who chose religion. But with the ascension of Ronald Reagan, a sea change in public attitudes was a fait accompli. My position toward those who would not extend to me the same right or respect hardened considerably. What was behind this seismic shift in public morality? But during the Reagan administration, the religious right deliberately hijacked the term "secular humanism" and made of it a right wing code word.

Strictly speaking, "humanism" is a term most often associated with the Italian Renaissance, specifically, the Plato Academy supported and encouraged by Lorenzo di Medici. It was a revival of the Platonic tradition concurrent with the discovery of new antiquities in Rome, notably the Laocoön, a lasting influence on a young Michelangelo.

I might have been willing to concede certain ambiguities associated with the term "humanism". Humanism was not, after all, a specific dogma like dialectical materialism. Rather, humanism properly denotes a spirit of renewed learning. Amid Medieval Scholasticism, it was a breath of fresh air, a willingness to let free enquiry take us where it will. The opposite of inflexible dogma, it still appeals to the sense of adventure, the sheer delight in the act of learning itself.

Humanism was the dynamic clash of giant egos, intellects, and other larger than life personalities: Leonardo da Vinci, Cosimo di Medici, Michelangelo, Marsilio Ficino, Lorenzo di Medici, Machievelli, Pope Julius, Cristoforo Landino, and Ficino's own student, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. So varied are those outlooks, so contradictory, that attempts by the American right wing to pigeon-hole Humanism ring hollow, pathetic and uninformed.

The members of this revived Plato Academy were Michelangelo’s tutors and mentors. Had it not been for these liberal scholars, modern Christianity might be devoid of its many “Platonic” aspects, specifically that there exist abstract and wholly non-spatial, non-temporal objects. God? Or is God simply a specific manisfestation of a pre-existing, "Platonic" ideal.

In a related development, a cache of books have been found in Lancashire. The books date to the time of the Florentine Academy of Lorenzo di Medici. Authors to be found include Ovid and Marsilio Ficino, among others. In a book of verses by Ovid are margin notes believed by some scholars to have been made by a young William Shakespeare. The notes are said to be in a "...Shakespearean hand". If that is true, they date to a time after Shakespeare left Stratford but before registering his first play in London. The margin notes, then, might have been made during Shakespeare "lost ten years".


Platonism had not gone away during the dark and middle ages. Rather, the scholars of the academy in Florence were inspired by the Plato Academy and took its name. It is fair to conclude that the scholars who gathered around Lorenzo di Medici became central to a renewed interest in learning, literally, a Renaissance. Until the heirs of the inquisition recently raised the specter of theocracy in America, one might have hoped that a combination of science and tolerance might usher in a new golden age.


The Renaissance scholars did not call themselves humanists. The term "humanism" is a relatively new invention, coined in 1808 by a German educator, F. J. Niethammer. Because it denoted programs of study not involving science or engineering, it lead inexorably to those studies that are now called “the humanities” -music, art, literature, journalism, philosophy.


More to the point, “humanism" had never opposed religion especially in its Renaissance birthplace, Italy! Characterized by openess and enquiry, it was never insidious or covert. Unlike cults -religious and otherwise -humanism is so broad, so open, so encompassing as to be very nearly meaningless. Among humanists throughout history are to be found both churchmen, scientists, atheists, and monks. Why, then, has this term, coined but recently, become such a cause celebre among the right wing? What’s the beef?


In the fifteenth century, the term "umanista," or "humanist," was current and described a professional group of teachers whose subject matter consisted of those areas that were called studia humanitatis. The studia humanitatis originated in the mddle ages and were all those educational disciplines outside of theology and natural science. Humanism was not opposed to logic, as is commonly held, but opposed to the particular brand of logic known as Scholasticism. In point of fact, the humanists actively revised the science of logic.

Humanism, then, really begins during the middle ages in Europe; while the humanist scholars of the Renaissance made great strides and discoveries in this field, humanistic studies were really a product of middle ages. Not only that, the "rediscovery" of the classical world which was the hallmark of Renaissance humanism in reality began much earlier in the middle ages; as Europeans began to see themselves as a single ethnic group with a common origin in the middle ages, the recovery of classical literature, both Latin and Greek, became a concern for all the medieval centers of learning.
--Humanism, Early Modern, Italian Renaissance


A prominent member of Lorenzo's Plato Academy was Pico della Mirandola who claimed to have read every book in Italy. Mirandola, himself, wrote some 900 theses in which he tried to cover “all knowledge”; he offered to debate anyone on those points. Admittedly, the church in Rome considered some of the theses heretical and Pico was imprisoned for his beliefs.


It must be remembered, however, that his work in general has not been considered politically controversial since that time. Moreover, those criticizing “secular humanism” today are primarily the progenitors of “Protestantism” -not the church from which the Protestant movement eventually separated. At last, modern Protestants opposed to “secular humanism” have apparently failed to raise specific objections to specific points, only to the vague idea of “secular humanism” itself. It is, therefore, an extremely vague position unfairly demonizng the very act of investigation and knowledge seeking.


Modern reactionaries often try to equate “secular humanism” with atheism. The charge has the smell of strawman about it. Of course, it is untrue. Wikipedia entries describing an atheistic "secular humanist" movement are suspicious. I doubt such a movement exists. Who are the leaders? Where are the headquarters? Where is the membership, the meeting hall? The very notion of a top down, cult-like "movement" seems at odds with the very spirit of humanism i.e., free enquiry, open mindedness, enlightenment. Humanists are unlikely to go underground, or to wear white sheets and light bon fires. They are unlikely to scurry through alley ways to attend surreptitious meetings. They are not Illuminati. They do not wear robes and pointy hats. They do not chant.


How does one make of freedom a cult? More precisely, how does one make of freedom a cult unless with fascist means and aims? And what of charges that "humanism" is of necessity and definition atheistic? The founders of Lorenzo's Plato Academy most certainly were not if anyone in Florence at the time had been!


At its inception, “humanists” were not merely scholars, they were good Catholics. A perfect example is Michelangelo himself, a devout Catholic to the very end of his life and, likewise, a “humanist”. In fact, the very icon of humanism is his statue of David now in the Academia in Florence.

Gonzales tried to extort signature from sedated Attorney General Ashcroft- while Ashcroft was in intensive care, with complications from surgery

More from the "USA completely Through the Looking Glass" department: Then (Bush) White House Counsel Gonzales, and CHIEF OF STAFF Andrew Card, tried to EXTORT a wiretapping reauthorization signature from then Attorney General John Ashcroft - at 9 PM at night, in an intensive care hospital room, while Ashcroft was under a morphine-drip sedative, recovering from not only surgery, but life-threatening complications!

Such is the "MORAL VALUES" and "HONOR AND DIGNITY" of the George W. Bush White House - his Chief of Staff, and White House Counsel, sneaking around in the dead of night, trying to extort a signature from a sick man, alone (they hoped) in a hospital bed, under the influence of narcotics, and suffering life-threatening complications to surgery.


==========================================

Gonzales Hospital Episode Detailed
Ailing Ashcroft Pressured on Spy Program, Former Deputy Says

By Dan Eggen and Paul Kane
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, May 16, 2007; A01



On the night of March 10, 2004, as Attorney General John D. Ashcroft lay ill in an intensive-care unit, his deputy, James B. Comey, received an urgent call.

White House Counsel Alberto R. Gonzales and President Bush's chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr., were on their way to the hospital to persuade Ashcroft to reauthorize Bush's domestic surveillance program, which the Justice Department had just determined was illegal.

In vivid testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday, Comey said he alerted FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III and raced, sirens blaring, to join Ashcroft in his hospital room, arriving minutes before Gonzales and Card. Ashcroft, summoning the strength to lift his head and speak, refused to sign the papers they had brought. Gonzales and Card, who had never acknowledged Comey's presence in the room, turned and left.

The sickbed visit was the start of a dramatic showdown between the White House and the Justice Department in early 2004 that, according to Comey, was resolved only when Bush overruled Gonzales and Card. But that was not before Ashcroft, Comey, Mueller and their aides prepared a mass resignation, Comey said. The domestic spying by the National Security Agency continued for several weeks without Justice approval, he said.

"I was angry," Comey testified. "I thought I just witnessed an effort to take advantage of a very sick man, who did not have the powers of the attorney general because they had been transferred to me."

The broad outlines of the hospital-room conflict have been reported previously, but without Comey's gripping detail of efforts by Card, who has left the White House, and Gonzales, now the attorney general. His account appears to present yet another challenge to the embattled Gonzales, who has strongly defended the surveillance program's legality and is embroiled in a battle with Congress over the dismissals of nine U.S. attorneys last year.

It also marks the first public acknowledgment that the Justice Department found the original surveillance program illegal, more than two years after it began.

Gonzales, who has rejected lawmakers' call for his resignation, continued yesterday to play down his own role in the dismissals. He identified his deputy, Paul J. McNulty, who announced his resignation Monday, as the aide most responsible for the firings.

"You have to remember, at the end of the day, the recommendations reflected the views of the deputy attorney general," Gonzales said at the National Press Club. "The deputy attorney general would know best about the qualifications and the experiences of the United States attorneys community, and he signed off on the names," he added.

Those comments appear to differ, at least in emphasis, from earlier remarks by Gonzales, who has previously laid much of the responsibility for the dismissals on his ex-chief of staff, D. Kyle Sampson. They stand in contrast to testimony and statements from McNulty, who has acknowledged signing off on the firings but has told Congress he was surprised when he heard about the effort.

The Justice Department and White House declined to comment in detail on Comey's testimony, citing internal discussions of classified activities.

The warrantless eavesdropping program was approved by Bush after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. It allowed the NSA to monitor e-mails and telephone calls between the United States and overseas if one party was believed linked to terrorist groups. The program was revealed in late 2005; Gonzales announced in January that it had been replaced with an effort that would be supervised by a secret intelligence court.

The crisis in March 2004 stemmed from a review of the program by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, which raised "concerns as to our ability to certify its legality," according to Comey's testimony. Ashcroft was briefed on the findings on March 4 and agreed that changes needed to be made, Comey said.

That afternoon, Ashcroft was rushed to George Washington University Hospital with a severe case of gallstone pancreatitis; on March 9, his gallbladder was removed. The standoff between Justice and White House officials came the next night, after Comey had refused to certify the surveillance program on the eve of its 45-day reauthorization deadline, he testified.

About 8 p.m. on March 10, Comey said that his security detail was driving him home when he received an urgent call from Ashcroft's chief of staff, David Ayres, who had just received an anxious call from Ashcroft's wife, Janet. The White House -- possibly the president -- had called, and Card and Gonzales were on their way.

Furious, Comey said he ordered his security detail to turn the car toward the hospital, careening down Constitution Avenue. Comey said he raced up the stairs of the hospital with his staff, beating Card and Gonzales to Ashcroft's room.

"I was concerned that, given how ill I knew the attorney general was, that there might be an effort to ask him to overrule me when he was in no condition to do that," Comey said, saying that Ashcroft "seemed pretty bad off."

Mueller, who also was rushing to the hospital, spoke by phone to the security detail protecting Ashcroft, ordering them not to allow Card or Gonzales to eject Comey from the hospital room.

Card and Gonzales arrived a few minutes later, with Gonzales holding an envelope that contained the executive order for the program. Comey said that, after listening to their entreaties, Ashcroft rebuffed the White House aides.

"He lifted his head off the pillow and in very strong terms expressed his view of the matter, rich in both substance and fact, which stunned me," Comey said. Then, he said, Ashcroft added: "But that doesn't matter, because I'm not the attorney general. There is the attorney general," and pointed at Comey, who was appointed acting attorney general when Ashcroft fell ill.

Later, Card ordered an 11 p.m. meeting at the White House. But Comey said he told Card that he would not go on his own, pulling then-Solicitor General Theodore Olson from a dinner party to serve as witness to anything Card or Gonzales told him. "After the conduct I had just witnessed, I would not meet with him without a witness present," Comey testified. "He replied, 'What conduct? We were just there to wish him well.' "

The next day, as terrorist bombs killed more than 200 commuters on rail lines in Madrid, the White House approved the executive order without any signature from the Justice Department certifying its legality. Comey responded by drafting his letter of resignation, effective the next day, March 12.

"I couldn't stay if the administration was going to engage in conduct that the Department of Justice had said had no legal basis," he said. "I just simply couldn't stay." Comey testified he was going to be joined in a mass resignation by some of the nation's top law enforcement officers: Ashcroft, Mueller, Ayres and Comey's own chief of staff.

Ayres persuaded Comey to delay his resignation, Comey testified. "Mr. Ashcroft's chief of staff asked me something that meant a great deal to him, and that is that I not resign until Mr. Ashcroft was well enough to resign with me," he said.

The threat became moot after an Oval Office meeting March 12 with Bush, Comey said. After meeting separately with Comey and Mueller, Bush gave his support to making changes in the program, Comey testified. The administration has never disclosed what those changes were.

Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

Washington Post FINALLY "discovers" - the Bush White House exhibits "SHOCKING LAWLESSNESS." THEIR words, not ours!

<< James B. Comey, the straight-as-an-arrow former No. 2 official at the Justice Department, yesterday offered the Senate Judiciary Committee an account of Bush ADMINSTRATION LAWLESSNESS SO SHOCKING it would have been unbelievable coming from a less reputable source. >>

IF "SHOCKING LAWLESSNESS" by the Attorney General does not warrant IMPEACHMENT, then we are no longer a nation of laws.

Having, finally, NOTICED this "shocking LAWLESSNESS" on the part of the Bush administration, the lying Washington Post also has an OBLIGATION - to report, TRUTHFULLY and HONESTLY - of ALL THE OTHER CASES of LAWLESSNESS by the Bush-Rove-Cheney presidency.

And the Democrats, too, have a duty and an obligation to RESTORE AMERICA to the RULE OF LAW.

======================================



Mr. Comey's Tale
A standoff at a hospital bedside speaks volumes about Attorney General Gonzales.
Wednesday, May 16, 2007; Page A14
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/15/AR2007051501945.html
JAMES B. COMEY, the straight-as-an-arrow former No. 2 official at the Justice Department, yesterday offered the Senate Judiciary Committee an account of Bush administration lawlessness so shocking it would have been unbelievable coming from a less reputable source. The episode involved a 2004 nighttime visit to the hospital room of then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft by Alberto Gonzales, then the White House counsel, and Andrew H. Card Jr., then the White House chief of staff. Only the broadest outlines of this visit were previously known: that Mr. Comey, who was acting as attorney general during Mr. Ashcroft's illness, had refused to recertify the legality of the administration's warrantless wiretapping program; that Mr. Gonzales and Mr. Card had tried to do an end-run around Mr. Comey; that Mr. Ashcroft had rebuffed them.

Mr. Comey's vivid depiction, worthy of a Hollywood script, showed the lengths to which the administration and the man who is now attorney general were willing to go to pursue the surveillance program. First, they tried to coerce a man in intensive care -- a man so sick he had transferred the reins of power to Mr. Comey -- to grant them legal approval. Having failed, they were willing to defy the conclusions of the nation's chief law enforcement officer and pursue the surveillance without Justice's authorization. Only in the face of the prospect of mass resignations -- Mr. Comey, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III and most likely Mr. Ashcroft himself -- did the president back down.

As Mr. Comey testified, "I couldn't stay, if the administration was going to engage in conduct that the Department of Justice had said had no legal basis." The crisis was averted only when, the morning after the program was reauthorized without Justice's approval, President Bush agreed to fix whatever problem Justice had with it (the details remain classified). "We had the president's direction to do . . . what the Justice Department believed was necessary to put this matter on a footing where we could certify to its legality," Mr. Comey said.

The dramatic details should not obscure the bottom line: the administration's alarming willingness, championed by, among others, Vice President Cheney and his counsel, David Addington, to ignore its own lawyers. Remember, this was a Justice Department that had embraced an expansive view of the president's inherent constitutional powers, allowing the administration to dispense with following the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Justice's conclusions are supposed to be the final word in the executive branch about what is lawful or not, and the administration has emphasized since the warrantless wiretapping story broke that it was being done under the department's supervision.

Now, it emerges, they were willing to override Justice if need be. That Mr. Gonzales is now in charge of the department he tried to steamroll may be most disturbing of all.

The WHORE New York Times AT IT AGAIN: LYING in their reporting, SMEARING those who oppose "Free Trade" sellout big-business deal...

"Declarative yet dishonest statements" are the stock-in-trade of the NY and DC whore punditocracy:

The WHORE TIMES are SO BRAZENLY CORRUPT, that they (the editors and publisher, Mr. Arthur Sulzberger) FEEL THAT THEY CAN LIE to their readers - on a daily basis! - and never be called for it.

In this case, as David Sirota points out, NO ONE has read all the fine-print details of the new NAFTA trade pact (bottom paragraph, this post), that big-business Republicans, the Bush administration, and DLC (big-business) Democrats are trying to rush through Congress, unread and little reported, even though the pact essentially GUTS US LABOR LAW, by making the "trade treaty" provisions of the pact TRUMP US law, thereby allowing UNION-BUSTING, environmental gutting "standards" of the pact to OVERRIDE US LAWS.

Mr. Sulzberger and his senior editors are a good argument for bringing back CORPORAL PUNISHMENTS - they are trying to earn millions of dollars in profits by LYING TO and DECEIVING the American public, and should spend a night or two in the stocks, in the public square, just for being so treacherous and deceitful as they worship their own furious money-grubbing and lies.

Sirota reports: << The New York Times story [on the Lobbyist-written Free Trade Pact'] is now on the Business Page of the Times' site. The story includes NO COMMENTS FROM representatives of LABOR, HUMAN RIGHTS, ENVIRONMENTAL, or CONSUMER PROTECTION groups, and NO FULL DETAILS ABOUT the "deal." >>

Here is the LYING money quote from Steven R. Weisman's NY Times article:
<< Democrats said the accord would be a major victory in their campaign to ensure that trade deals provided for the rights of workers to organize and that trading partner countries banned child labor and slave labor. >>
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/05/10/business/trade.php

As Sirota points out - THE PACT DOES NOTHING OF THE KIND!

Sirota continues his deconstruction of NY Times' lies and opposition-bashing "reporting": << But perhaps the most egregious example came from the Gray Lady (which, true to form, has an editorial today endorsing this week's SECRET trade deal, even though its editors, like the rest of the public, HAVE NOT SEEN THE ACTUAL LEGISLATIVE LANGUAGE). In a scathing editorial on the eve of the NAFTA vote, the New York Times ATTACKED environmental groups for raising concerns about the pact's utter lack of enforceable environmental protections. The editorial declared as fact that NAFTA "includes numerous environmental protections"; that "Mexico is more likely to become a cleaner nation with NAFTA"; and that NAFTA was specifically designed not to allow corporations to extract profits from the desperately low-wage, environmentally hazardous conditions in the country to our south, but instead "to protect the environment against the economic explosion" of natural cross border commerce. The editorial further claimed that environmental advocates were factually wrong for asserting that NAFTA would allow foreign corporations to use international courts to sue American local, state and federal governments in an effort to overturn those government's environmental protection laws. >>

Arthur Sulzberger and his lying minions at the NEW YORK WHORE TIMES: BOLDLY LYING, beyond a shadow of a doubt, right to the American people and Times' readers.


<< Of course, none of the reporters covering the deal on Thursday has actually seen the language of the agreement they are now praising because the specific legislative language is still being kept secret (MyDD's Matt Stoller just got his hands on a copy of a more detailed summary and thankfully posted it here - but it is only a summary and not the actual legislative language that will be included in the Peru, Panama, Colombia and South Korea trade deals, and as we know, legislative language is where the rubber hits the road in trade deals. >>
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-sirota/journalism-becomes-stenog_b_48333.html

Media WHORES spin nation's chief law enforcement officer - Attorney General Gonzales- LYING under oath as "Confidently Deflecting Democrats Criticism"

There is only one reason that President Bush still occupies the White House: the nation's corporate "major media" editors, publishers, and producers ARE SLAVISHLY DEVOTED to the notion that the naked emperor is clothed in the most regal finery ever produced.

In this case, AP writer Lara Jakes Jordan reports that the nation's CHIEF LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICER - Attorney General Alberto Gonzales LYING UNDER OATH to a Congressional committee - is a case of "confidently deflect[ing] Democrat's demands."

In fact, the Attorney General LIED bold-faced to the Congress and American people, telling the committee that he supervised and authorized a PURGE list of US Attorneys - US prosecutors to be FIRED at the urging of _____? - WITHOUT Mr. Gonzales KNOWING WHO IT WAS that so seriously and ardently wanted those prosecutors fired!

Mr. Gonzales "CONFIDENTLY DEFLECTED" Congressional committee demands - ONLY BECAUSE HE KNEW THAT THE WHORE American press-media would LIE, DISTORT, DIVERT, DIMINISH, and wet-blanket (bury under misleading headlines and muddy context) the story.

Of which Ms. Jordans Yahoo/AP article is a textbook example.

----------------------------------------------------

Read it for yourself: The nation's Attorney General smuggly STONEWALLING an honest answer, stating (paraphrased) "I DON'T KNOW WHO PUT THE PROSECUTORS ON THIS PURGE (to be fired) LIST, but I APPROVED OF IT and FIRED those US Attorneys."
http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/2007/05/10/gonzales/print.html

ABC "news" runs the AP story in a similar narrative: the nation's Attorney General EVADING HONEST, FORTHRIGHT ANSWERS as "confidently parries questions."
http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=politics&id=5292418


======================================

Gonzales 'deflects' Democrat's Criticism
[the honest headline would be "Gonzales EVADES Direct Answers"]
http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=politics&id=5292418
By Lara Jakes Jordan, AP
Thu May 10, 2007
http://fe18.news.re3.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070510/ap_on_go_co/gonzales_prosecutors


WASHINGTON - Attorney General Alberto Gonzales confidently deflected House Democrats' demands Thursday for details in the firings of U.S. attorneys, appearing ever more likely to survive accusations that the dismissals were politically motivated.

Republican lawmakers rushed to Gonzales' defense as the attorney general denied anew that the firings last year were improper.

The mostly muted five-hour hearing in front of the House Judiciary Committee was a sharp contrast to Gonzales' sometimes testy appearance three weeks ago when Senate Republicans questioned his competence to run the Justice Department. One senator at that session joined a small GOP chorus saying he should step down.

"I will work as hard as I can, working with this committee and working with DOJ employees, to reassure the American people that this department is focused on doing its job," Gonzales said Thursday.

That did not satisfy exasperated Democrats, who accused Gonzales of being evasive.

"Your reputation is on the line, Mr. Attorney General. What do you have to say for yourself?" asked Rep. Maxine Waters (news, bio, voting record), D-Calif., adding that the "buck stops at the top."

"I accept responsibility," Gonzales answered.

President Bush steadfastly has stood by Gonzales, his longtime counselor and friend. Even career Justice Department staffers angered by the attorney general's response to the firings acknowledge Gonzales appears to have beaten back calls to leave.

The latest lawmaker to urge Gonzales to quit was Rep. Adam Schiff (news, bio, voting record), D-Calif. "I hope you will resign because the department is broken and I don't think you're the one to fix it," Schiff told him.

Republicans sought to portray the controversy as losing steam. They pushed Democrats to wrap up the congressional probe that has dogged the department since the beginning of the year.

"The list of accusations has mushroomed, but the evidence of wrongdoing has not," said Rep. Lamar Smith (news, bio, voting record) of Texas, top Republican on the committee. "If there are no fish in this lake, we should reel in our lines of questions, dock our empty boat and turn to more pressing issues."

Gonzales acknowledged low morale at the department. Career prosecutors have said it is stunting hiring. Private defense lawyers say it has led to government hesitation and indecisiveness in some courtrooms. Gonzales contended the department's independence is intact.

"Contrary to being gun shy, this process is somewhat liberating in terms of going forward," he said.

Gonzales repeatedly said he was unaware of many of the factors leading up to the dismissals because he relied on his former chief of staff, Kyle Sampson, to carry them out. He also said he could not clarify parts of the firing process that remain murky in his own mind while investigations of the dismissals continue.

He said he has "no basis to believe" that Todd Graves, the former prosecutor in Kansas City, Mo., left in early 2006 because Graves refused to endorse department allegations about voter fraud in Missouri.

Gonzales praised the work of Debra Yang, formerly the U.S. attorney in Los Angeles, who resigned in October to take a higher paying job at a private firm.

Graves and Yang were not among the eight prosecutors whose dismissals are being investigated. But questions about their resignations have recently surfaced.

Gonzales denied that Bush's political adviser, Karl Rove, demanded last fall's ouster of then-New Mexico prosecutor David Iglesias. But the attorney general acknowledged that Rove had complained about stagnant voter fraud cases in three districts, including New Mexico, and noted those concerns were echoed by Sen. Pete Domenici (news, bio, voting record), R-N.M.

Those complaints spurred suspicions that Iglesias was improperly fired because he refused to target Democrats.

On the other side, GOP Rep. James Sensenbrenner leaned on Gonzales on Thursday to speed the department's corruption investigation of Democratic Rep. William Jefferson (news, bio, voting record) of Louisiana.

"Congressman, you know I cannot talk about that," Gonzales told Sensenbrenner, R-Wis.

"Well, everybody's talking about it except you," Sensenbrenner answered. "The people's confidence in your department has been further eroded, separate and apart from the U.S. attorney controversy, because of the delay in dealing with this matter."

The House committee also released a portion of closed-door testimony from Sampson suggesting that the Justice Department spared U.S. Attorney Steven M. Biskupic in Milwaukee to avoid angering Sensenbrenner.

Thursday's hearing served up more political bickering but few new facts about the firings.

At one point, as many as nine Capitol Police officers escorted a half-dozen protesters from the room out of concern they would disrupt the hearing.

Despite Committee Chairman John Conyers (news, bio, voting record)' plea that the hearing focus on the fired prosecutors, Republicans asked Gonzales about a range of topics, including terrorism and intellectual property theft. Gonzales mostly stuck to a script of accepting responsibility and pushing beyond the controversy — to Democrats' obvious skepticism.

"You have a situation where most people believe that you didn't tell the truth about the U.S. attorneys," said Rep. Jerrold Nadler (news, bio, voting record), D-N.Y. "If most people believe that the United States attorney general has not told the truth about why these U.S. attorneys were fired, how can they have confidence in your job?"

"I don't believe that's an accurate statement," Gonzales responded. "And what I'm trying to do in appearances like this is to set the record straight."

D.C. media whores "THRIVING... in the mess" that Tenet facilitated" (i.e. Bush-Cheney war in Iraq) Thus there is NO REASON to report honestly...

There is one simple reason that the nation's media whores - especially the elite of the DC and national media (the executives, editors, publishers, owners, and lobbyists of the Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, Washington Times, Fox 'news,' etc.) - are SELLING AMERICA DOWN THE RIVER - they are ensconced comfortably in their COCOON of DC power and privilege, and the MORE that Bush-Cheney et al make a MESS of the Iraq occupation, THE MORE MONEY, INFLUENCE, and POWER flows through Washington DC.

Look at the state of Kansas - HALF of their National Guard equipment is deployed in Iraq - being used and abused until depreciated to zero (written off) - and they will NEVER BE REIMBURSED for those expenditures and costly equipment.

YET the Washington press whores GIVE President Bush a FREE PASS for his "TAX CUTS" mantra - even though shipping states' National Guard equipment to Iraq is effectively a BACK DOOR TAX.
------------------------------------------------

<< [few] ...foreign policy professionals... do the honorable thing and resign when the alternative is to carry out a disastrous policy.

Disastrous for whom? After 2001, budget discipline evaporated, vivid photo ops multiplied, and American citizens checked their constitutional freedoms at the door. Apart from a few awkward moments at Presidential press conferences, EVERYONE IN WASHINGTON IS THRIVING in the MESS that Tenet facilitated.
There was thus no reason to make Tenet suffer. He accepted his Medal of Freedom, signed his book deal, and was wafted into Georgetown University to teach a new generation of College Republicans to feed at the public trough. Should they recoil at his public criticism of Vice President Cheney, Tenet can fall back on the applause of the American Hellenic Educational Progressive Association. Few Greek-Americans care to write off one of their own as a failure. >>

===============================================

Tenet's Forgettable Twin
John Brady Kiesling
05.11.2007
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-brady-kiesling/tenets-forgettable-twin_b_48217.html


I'm grateful to Arianna Huffington's excellent memory. On April 29, 2007 she argued that CIA Director George Tenet should have resigned to protest the way his agency was being misused in the run-up to the Iraq War. She came up with my name as a reminder that foreign policy professionals occasionally do the honorable thing and resign when the alternative is to carry out a disastrous policy.

Disastrous for whom? After 2001, budget discipline evaporated, vivid photo ops multiplied, and American citizens checked their constitutional freedoms at the door. Apart from a few awkward moments at Presidential press conferences, everyone in Washington is thriving in the mess Tenet facilitated.

There was thus no reason to make Tenet suffer. He accepted his Medal of Freedom, signed his book deal, and was wafted into Georgetown University to teach a new generation of College Republicans to feed at the public trough. Should they recoil at his public criticism of Vice President Cheney, Tenet can fall back on the applause of the American Hellenic Educational Progressive Association. Few Greek-Americans care to write off one of their own as a failure.

Intellectually, my decision to resign from the U.S. Foreign Service in February 2003 was a fine one. The American people are less secure because of President Bush's policies, and soon they will be less prosperous. But the brain circuitry that rewards humans for good decisions is the same circuitry our chimpanzee cousins use. Happiness in social animals does not derive from being right. It comes from the social reinforcement we get from our troop.

The U.S. government offers heroin-like rewards to those who play by its rules. I did not have Tenet's bedside secure telephone or morning meetings with the President. Still, as head of the Political Section of U.S. Embassy Athens I basked in the glory of a superpower. I chaired meetings of my acolytes, lectured journalists, chatted with cabinet ministers, rode in motorcades with flying flags. Withdrawal meant long, gray days and restless nights.

It would be silly to envy the painlessness of Tenet's transition. The applause I got from the "reality-based community" was as warm and respectful as I could have hoped. My letter of resignation to Secretary of State Powell, which I cc'd to the New York Times, still gets quoted by scholars and bloggers. It was, the writer Michel Faber said, "a masterpiece of dignity, eloquent reasoning, acute analysis and, most of all, humanity." And with such psychic support I had better be content.

Diplomacy is one of the rare professions open to a mild-mannered person with a BA in ancient Greek and MA in ancient history. I resigned with just under twenty years in the U.S. Foreign Service, at age 45. Hanging on another five years for my pension was the prudent course, but I was angry and the war was going to start in three weeks.

My daughter's college tuition was paid up. The proceeds from selling my house in DC would keep me fed for five years or so. Returning from Greece, I was horrified at the nonsense filling the media. On foreign policy, the Washington Post was as pompous and parochial as the Washington Times. In 2003 there seemed a desperate need for a "Diplomacy for Dummies" book to explain what kind of world Americans are part of. Also, I was squeamish about looking for a real job.

Americans are no more disposed to employ our Cassandras than the ancient Trojans were. Accurate prophecy regarding Iraq does not require brilliance or deep expertise. An open-minded person who watched the interplay of nationalism and religion in the Middle East, anyone who listened sympathetically to ordinary Muslims, could have predicted the response to our amateurish attempts at preemptive democracy. And now that foreign policy pragmatism is socially acceptable again, the spies, diplomats, politicians, journalists and academics are pulling out their private correspondence to remind us that indeed they knew better. They would have given an honest opinion on Iraq back when it mattered, but their Commander in Chief failed to ask them for it.

This being so, with perceptive and deferential analysts a dime a dozen, any organization would be rash to hire someone of proven disloyalty and tactlessness. U.S. government contracts keep afloat almost every significant foreign-affairs employer in the country. Adding my tainted name to the masthead would do them no favors.

No one gets rich writing books. Tenet earned his $4 million advance for emerging from the shadows, sharing a few secrets that had reached their sell-by date, and making the politically timely point that what happened was someone else's fault. I was offered one tenth of one percent of that amount for writing a book that explained, drawing on my own awkward apprenticeship, what diplomacy does and how and why.

The publishers are right, of course. The public sees diplomacy not as the glamorous front lines of America's national defense but rather as a remote province of languid and impenetrable cookie-pushers. Americans are infatuated instead with the idea that the world revolves on secrets and conspiracies. This is an extremely profitable delusion. Spies can expect an invitation to The Daily Show or at least 60 Minutes. Diplomats do their sixty minutes on C-Span2 and hit the university lecture circuit with a box of books in the trunk of a borrowed car.

My book reviews were kinder than Tenet's. The ex-ambassadors and academics who reviewed Diplomacy Lessons praised it handsomely: "... a new George Kennan..." "...Kiesling's broad scope and incisive wit are reminiscent of some of Sir Harold Nicolson's best essays on diplomacy." Few Americans recognize those names. Still, enough non-specialists devoured the book to convince me to keep writing.

I live simply these days in central Athens. By bicycle (the silver SUV had palled, even if I could still afford it) it takes half an hour to Korydallos prison. There I study "Revolutionary Organization 17 November," a Greek terrorist group that humiliated the CIA for 27 years. This next book would be more salable if I soft-pedaled U.S. blunders, but then key lessons for America's "war on terrorism" would be lost.

Yes, by a strict reading of his oath of service, Tenet should have resigned. His job was to protect the people and Constitution of the United States. He worked for a President who would pay no attention to any lesser gesture. He deserves the criticism Ms. Huffington meted out for his self-serving performance.

I took the less-traveled road, and am content. Greek-style "filotimo" ("love of honor") is certainly worth having. Government employees nurturing grand suburban aspirations, however, would be ill-advised to cling to it. Tenet has been richly rewarded by the American system for hiding his doubts and pandering to the Old Testament instincts of his boss. Until human sensibilities evolve in the wake of some global catastrophe, it will always feel more comfortable, to fawn on the powerful and hope for the best.

-- John Brady Kiesling