Meet the Straight-Talker

According to the latest Washington Post poll, there's been a dramatic shift towards John McCain following his victory in the Florida GOP primary, and he now leads Mitt Romney by 24 points nationwide. With a number of winner-take all primaries on the Republican side, he has a very good shot at wrapping up the nomination on February 5. It looks like conservatives -- with a few raving-mad, mouth-breathing exceptions -- have gone through denial, anger, bargaining and depression and come finally to accept their insubordinate nominee. Modern conservatives are the philosophical heirs of the monarchists of a previous era; despite months of grumbling, most will, ultimately, rally around the king come November.
McCain is also the candidate most Democrats and progressives have feared facing in the general election. According to RealClearPolitics' rolling average of head-to-head polls, McCain would beat Clinton today by a slim margin of just under 2 percent and would edge out Obama by a razor-thin half-point. Eight months out -- and months before the first debate between the nominees -- these data mean little, but they are causing some concern on the left.

McCain is, however, an extremely weak candidate. The senator's been showing his age throughout the primaries, and there is still a long and exhausting slog ahead. His wooden delivery of stump speeches -- sometimes offered while staring at his notes -- and some incidents in which he's appeared "confused" -- he referred to Vladimir Putin as the president of Germany -- are vulnerabilities for a 71 year-old candidate. Most people still haven't had a chance to see and hear from these candidates at length this cycle, and while we all decry the fact that people often make political decisions based on the candidates' mannerisms or appearances rather than on the issues, in a race against a cranky, old-looking and somewhat out-of-it McCain, the War of Appearances is likely to be won handily by either of the potential Dem nominees.

The affable and avuncular image McCain's worked so hard to cultivate may also be difficult to maintain as voters focus more attention on the candidate. As Sidney Blumenthal wrote for Salon:

McCain's political colleagues … know another side of the action hero -- a volatile man with a hair-trigger temper, who shouted at Sen. Ted Kennedy on the Senate floor to "shut up," called his fellow Republican senators "shithead," "fucking jerk," "asshole," and joked in 1998 at a Republican fundraiser about the teenage daughter of President Clinton, "Do you know why Chelsea Clinton is so ugly? Because Janet Reno is her father." [In 2006], McCain suddenly rushed up to a friend of mine, a prominent Washington attorney, at a social event, and threatened to beat him up because he represented a client McCain happened to dislike, and then, just as suddenly, profusely and tearfully apologized.

And McCain's problems run far deeper than his irascibility and some gaffes on the stump. His real challenge is that his popularity -- his viability -- rests almost entirely on two narratives that have absolutely no connection with reality: his reputation as a straight-talking "maverick" and a moderate, and his "brave" support for Bush's troop escalation, a policy that's led to the widely-embraced but wholly false idea that "the surge is working."

These narratives have only gone unchallenged thanks to a compliant press; the commercial media are McCain's most dedicated constituents, and he's spent a career fostering that country-before-party image, even while walking in lock-step with Republicans on all but a few over-reported issues.

This means that Democrats are not so much running against McCain, the candidate, as McCain, the myth. The Republican Party will be a serious obstacle for the Democratic nominee, but ultimately election 2008 will be as much a battle to overturn the conventional wisdom as it will be a fight with the senator from Arizona. It should be a source of some encouragement then that the progressive movement, with its blogs, social-networking space and alternative media outlets, is far better prepared to fight and win that kind of battle than it has been at any other time in recent memory.

The Twists and Turns of the "Straight-Talk Express"

McCain's strongest selling point was summed up well by Matt Welch in the L.A. Times last week. "It's no mystery why independents gravitate toward McCain," he wrote. "He's a country-first, party-second kind of guy who speaks bluntly and delights in poking fellow Republicans in the eye on issues such as campaign finance reform and global warming."

The reality is that John McCain is the antithesis of the principled straight-talker. When he was asked in a recent debate whether, as president, he would sign into law the comprehensive immigration reform bill that he's championed for the past three years, he responded: "No, I would not, because we know what the situation is today." Yes, the situation today is that he's running for the Republican nomination.

As journalist and blogger Steve Benen noted, that's only one of a number of measures that McCain has worked hard to pass and is now saying he'd oppose:

• McCain used to champion the Law of the Sea convention, even volunteering to testify on the treaty's behalf before a Senate committee. Now, if the treaty comes to the Senate floor, he's vowed to vote against it.

• McCain was a co-sponsor of the DREAM Act, which would grant legal status to illegal immigrants' kids who graduate from high school. In 2007, to make the far-right base happy, he voted against the bill he had taken the lead on.

• In 2006, McCain sponsored legislation to require grassroots lobbying coalitions to reveal their financial donors. In 2007, after receiving "feedback" on the proposal, McCain told far-right activist groups that he now opposes the measure he'd backed.

• McCain used to support major campaign-finance reform measures that bore his name. In June 2006, McCain announced his opposition to a major McCain-Feingold provision.

As Benen points out, it's one thing to change one's mind about a piece of legislation, "but these aren't just random bills that McCain voted on -- these are bills that he personally championed -- recently."

That's long been the trend with McCain, who claims that he's spent decades "fighting for the unborn" when stumping in socially conservative states, but has at least tacitly defended Roe V. Wade in the past. He voted against the temporary Bush tax cuts -- saying at the time that the nation has never cut taxes "in a time of war" -- but is now pledging to make them permanent as a central promise of his campaign.

But, ironically, of all the issues that McCain has embraced over the years, it's been his take on the occupation of Iraq that has possibly been the least consistent -- he's "flip-flopped" on various aspects of Bush's Iraq policy dozens of times. The only consistency in his record is that each and every prediction of what would come to pass in Iraq has been proven consistently and terribly wrong.

The Realities of Occupation

McCain has said "that U.S. troops could be in Iraq for 'a thousand years' or 'a million years,' as far as he was concerned," and based much of his pitch for the White House on the fact that he backed the troop "surge" despite the fact that it was highly unpopular at the time.

The problem for McCain is that he's betting his career that the situation in Iraq is as likely to remain as it is or improve as it is to decline. That assumption's problematic, and if the decline in violence proves temporary between now and November, it will only expose the failure of the symbolic troop escalation on which McCain's hung so much of his campaign.

The "surge is working" narrative's not reality-based, and when it comes to Iraq, we've seen the spin give way to the ugly facts time and time again.

That the troop escalation has been anything but a success is not an ideological claim, as supporters of the occupation charge, but numerical and chronological. The surge began last February, and there was something approaching a consensus at the time that the addition of about 20,000 combat troops -- the rest were support personnel -- would be a drop in the bucket in a country of 25 million people. Retired four-star General Barry McCaffrey said at the time: "I personally think the surge of five U.S. Army brigades and a few Marine battalions dribbled out over five months is a fool's errand." But the troop build-up continued in March, April and May.

The period that followed was a bloodbath -- last June and July were the most violent summer months of any year of the occupation. August was one of the bloodiest months, period. Then, that month, the powerful Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr ordered his Mehdi Army to stand down. The number of Iraqi civilian deaths fell by about 50 percent the next month and decreased again in October and November. The militia is estimated to be 100,000 strong and is arguably the most powerful ground force in Iraq after the U.S. military. While the change can't be wholly ascribed to any single factor -- the violence has also decreased as a result of communities that have been fully "cleansed" of one or another ethnic or sectarian group -- it's clear that al-Sadr's order, not Bush's "surge," was responsible for most of whatever "success" there may have been.

Finally, there is the masterpiece of propaganda known as the "Sunni Awakening." Spun as a sign of success, the reality is that the U.S. military turned over some of the areas where they'd encountered the most violent resistance to local Sunni authorities -- many of whom they had condemned as "terrorists" previously -- and started paying their fighters to stop shooting at U.S. troops. In other words, the U.S. was defeated and surrendered territory to the "enemy," effectively paying reparations to local populations and suffering fewer casualties as a result. There are many ways to define success, but defeat and surrender are not among them. Yet, in perfectly Orwellian fashion, after four years of saying that Iraq was mostly stable aside from a few local areas and the Sunni "Triangle of Death," the administration simply stopped using the phrase and replaced it with talk of a "Sunni Awakening." We've always been at war with Eurasia.

The stated goal of the escalation was to "provide space" for political progress that might lead to a lasting and sustainable peace. But there's been no move towards political consensus on any of the Iraqi political class's most divisive issues, not has there been any reconciliation of ethnic and sectarian tensions in the streets.

Dissatisfaction with the Iraqi leadership will continue to increase. Tensions in the South between Shia nationalists and separatists have been on a straight upward line since the Brits pulled back. A growing rift has developed between the national army and U.S.-backed Sunni militias. Mosul has become the latest city to catch fire. The referendum for the future of Kirkuk has been delayed because the question of the oil-rich city's future is too explosive.

Every day, the stress on Moqtada al-Sadr's ceasefire, which is scheduled to expire this month, continues; it's unlikely that it will hold through November. There have already been a number of instances in which Mehdi Army units have gone freelance; if the ceasefire holds, that number will no doubt increase.

Baghdad and the Kurdish regional government are at odds over oil contracts. The country's infrastructure is still in tatters, and there are 4 million displaced Iraqis. If the 2 million or so who are refugees in other countries return, nobody knows what to do with them and inadequate food supplies will be further strained. If they try to return to neighborhoods that have been successfully "cleansed," a new wave of violence will likely ensue. A terrible drought is decimating Iraqi agriculture. Public health officials say that while the cholera epidemic that swept the country last year is under control now, they expect it to return with a vengeance as the temperature rises this summer. I could go on -- Iraq is a disaster of epic proportions, and no amount of spin can conceal that reality indefinitely.

Remember that the troop escalation is scheduled to end in July, three months before Americans go to the polls. At that point, even a docile media is going to have to either report that violence -- and the all-important U.S. casualty rate -- is on the rise again, or they'll be forced to examine the escalation's success or failure in terms of political progress as well as the level of violence. Either storyline shifts the debate significantly (as would a cancellation of the long-planned summer draw-down).

The Politics of Occupation

Unfortunately, even in the midst of a heated election campaign, the Democratic candidates have so far deprived voters of a fair and open debate about one of the most important issues of our time. Both Clinton and Obama have been coy -- dishonest, really -- about their plans for Iraq, claiming, for example, that they will remove "combat troops" but retain some "non-combat" troops for training, counter-terrorism missions and to protect, in Clinton's words "the more than 100,000 Americans civilians who are there, working for the embassy, working for businesses, working for charities."

It's a tragic reflection of our political culture that they can get away with these vagaries on an issue of such great concern to their constituents. The dirty truth is that "non-combat troops" are troops with orders to stay in their bases when the shit hits the fan unless said shit involves our contractors and infrastructure. It's profoundly immoral given the propaganda laid out for staying in-country; it effectively continues the occupation but abandons even the pretense of protecting vulnerable Iraqi civilians.

Both candidates have refused to put a hard number on the amount of "non-combat" troops that would be required for their missions, forcing us to essentially read the tealeaves to glean what they would actually do if elected. Both have proposed missions similar to that laid out in the Center for American Progress' "Strategic Redeployment 2.0" plan (PDF), which calls for about 50,000 troops to fulfill. According to an analysis by historian Stephen Zunes, "most estimates of the numbers of troops needed to carry out [the mission Clinton has described] range between 40,000 and 75,000." NPR reported that senior advisors to Obama have privately said that he would likely retain 50,000 troops in-country. These are exactly the same number of troops that George Bush has tried to lock in by signing a "cooperation agreement" with the Iraqi government his military installed.

This is a grim reality for the "anti-this-war" movement, but it's important to understand that it is the perception that matters, and with an abundance of low-information voters, a candidate who says he or she wants to end the "war" will have a distinct advantage over John "1 Million Years Is Fine By Me" McCain, regardless of his or her sincerity. According to the Jan. 18-22 L.A. Times-Bloomberg Poll (PDF), 66 percent of independents agree with close to 90 percent of Democrats that the U.S. should withdrawal from Iraq within a year.

Match-ups

According to the Washington Post poll cited above, a slim plurality of Democratic primary voters believe Clinton has a better shot at defeating McCain than does Obama, although her lead on that poll question has eroded in recent weeks. A good argument can be made that Clinton, whose team has more experience pushing back against the GOP smear machine than any other, is tougher than Obama, and therefore has a better chance. Clinton's backers also have the highest intensity of support among any of the top three candidates.

Obama's strengths, however, play perfectly against McCain's narratives. His "post-partisan" rhetoric is appealing to a whole generation of new voters -- young people have come out for him in droves in the early primaries -- and he has done extremely well with self-identified independents, the same group that's delivering the nomination to McCain (so far, he's tended to split the partisan GOP vote with Romney and won with the indies).

On Iraq, Obama has the advantage of having opposed the invasion from the beginning, which means that he'd have significantly less difficulty drawing a contrast on the issue with McCain than Clinton, who will have to explain why she voted for the war before she "opposed" it.

Finally, Clinton has the highest "negatives" -- disapproval rating -- of any candidate in the race. Modern American elections are won in large part by turning out "your guys" and keeping your opponents' supporters at home. McCain, despite the grudging acceptance of many Republicans in recent weeks, still has the softest support of any of the three candidates -- fewer than one in four of those voters who back him tell pollsters that they "support him strongly." So, while there would be a lot of people who would want to take part in history and elect the first woman to the Oval Office, there are also going to be voters who don't support McCain, and might stay on their couches against an Obama (whose negatives are very low), but who would be motivated to get to the polls to vote against Clinton. So while most on the right will hold their noses and vote for McCain, it's likely that others -- some anti-immigrant hardliners, some Christianists -- will simply stay home against Obama whereas they may be motivated to beat "Hitlery." That doesn't need to be a very large number in those swing states to make the difference.

Beating McCain

Whoever becomes the eventual Democratic nominee will enjoy a structural advantage over McCain. The Democratic candidates are "crushing" their GOP rivals in terms of fund-raising, there have been record turn-outs in primary after primary on the Democratic side, and there's clearly a burning desire among partisan Dems and many progressives to take out the Republican trash after 8 long years of war and Bushenomics.

All that will mean little, however, if the race is against McCain, the man, as opposed to the media myths he's created. Ultimately, this will be a test of the communication infrastructure progressives have labored to build over the past ten years; we have 8 months to chip away at the twin towers of McCain's candidacy -- his ostensible independent streak and the success of the Bush "surge" that he championed.

That means it's time for some message discipline. McCain is not a "straight-shooter," he's a "Bush Republican" who will say anything to get elected. He has a different message for every crowd. He's a flip-flopper on all the issues that he supposedly bucked his party over in the past.

Branding the troop escalation the "McCain doctrine" -- as John Edwards has done -- ties him to a policy that has a very good chance of going south, visibly and undeniably, before the end of summer.

Moreover, the 'surge is working' narrative itself has to be challenged, forcefully, before Election Day. As blogger Chris Bowers argued recently:

The simple truth is that, starting with the explosion of blogosphere traffic during the invasion of Iraq and with the rise of Howard Dean's presidential campaign in 2003, over the past five years, the rising and declining fortunes of the contemporary manifestation of the progressive movement have been inextricably tied to winning and losing the Iraq debate nationwide. Right now, because we are losing that debate, we are losing pretty much every other fight, too.

As Joe Brewer and Scott Parkinson of the Rockridge Institute suggest, the key to that is reframing the debate from the question of whether the escalation of troops has had an effect, to a simple story of betrayal. America was betrayed by leaders -- like John McCain --who led it into a destructive imperial war and who continue to spin a web of lies and half-truths to maintain the occupation.

The popular "straight-talking" McCain? Bring him on. We have eight months to chip away at a leviathan of spin.

Link.

Who Do We Trust?

Who do you think? Not that it matters so much....

See Big Brother's Eyes

Look here.

Brave New World: Text to Go to the Bathroom

What will the old, technologically inept, and the desperately poor do?? For the former, maybe there'll be a Boy Scout around....

Finland's Road Administration has started locking its isolated roadside toilets - and unlocking them via SMS. In response to incidents of arson and thefts, the transport authority came up with the novel solution which increased security, without reducing access for the public.

The new system was introduced in last month in the rest areas along Highway 1 in Paimio and Salo near Turku.

The toilets have been secured, and a sign outside explains that the user just sends the word "open" (in Finish) to a short code and the door will be unlocked remotely. The company managing the service will keep a short term record of all users phone numbers, simply so that if the toilet is then damaged by criminals, they can be traced by the police.

There is no premium charge for the SMS.Link.

No Comment -- Yet

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Bill Gates does not Believe in What he's Preaching

Yeah, yeah, what else is new. M$ is built on lies. Why should he stop now?

The Redmond company makes products here but records software sales to PC makers and high-volume customers through an operation in Nevada, where there is no corporate tax. So Washington is missing out on revenue it could use for badly needed infrastructure needs — like replacement of the 520 bridge.

By Jeff Reifman

When I heard that Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates had invoked the phrase "creative capitalism" at last month's World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, it reminded me how Microsoft avoids paying taxes on Washington-made software by selling it through Nevada. Since 1997, I estimate, the company has avoided paying more than $528 million in state taxes while racking up $92 billion in profit and distributing more than $42 billion in dividends to shareholders. Microsoft's creative capitalism has deprived Washington state a lot of tax revenue it needs to pay for critical infrastructure such as replacing the aging 520 bridge that many of its employees use to get to and from corporate headquarters in Redmond.

In 2004, I wrote about Microsoft's tax practices in Seattle Weekly. Since then, the process has continued unabated as Microsoft's revenues have continued to grow.

Here's how the practice works: Microsoft's product teams, based mostly in Redmond and Issaquah, build software products such as Windows Vista, Windows Server, SQL Server, and Office. But sales of these products to PC manufacturers and corporate customers are conducted from a License and Operations office in Reno, Nev., where there is no corporate income tax. Microsoft records the revenue for these sales (traditionally about 31 percent of overall revenue) in Nevada and does not pay the Washington business and occupation tax required on software reproduction.

I estimate that for the past 11 years, Microsoft has used this practice to save $48 million annually, cumulatively more than half a billion dollars. If the Washington Legislature had not reduced the software tax rate from 1.5 percent to 0.484 percent in 1998, Microsoft's tax savings would be more than triple that. As the company's revenues have grown, so have the savings. Last year, I estimate, it avoided $76.7 million in taxes.

In 2004, Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith told me, "The reality is that in the scheme of things, the impact is not very significant — either for the company or for the state government or the state economy. ... The law is actually structured in such a way so as to permit a company to do precisely what we are doing."

Maybe, but maybe not. As the lost tax revenue adds up, it's up to Attorney General Rob McKenna and the Washington Legislature to decide whether Microsoft should be required to pay taxes for selling software from Nevada that was created by 35,510 employees on its 11.2 million square feet of real estate here in metro Puget Sound.

Software license codes are unique in that they can generate hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue by unlocking hundreds of thousands of copies of software for a PC manufacturer like Dell or a large company like General Electric. While shipping a DVD with a replication code might not attract the same kind of scrutiny that trucking timber products or delivering an airplane does, Microsoft accomplishes an astonishing sleight of hand by recording the licensing revenue in Nevada from products made here in Washington.

There will be a lack of equity and fairness as long as state leaders allow Microsoft to operate with a different set of rules than other businesses that pay the taxes on all of their Washington-made products. More importantly, the state will be left without vital revenue from its most successful company. How large does our infrastructure deficit have to become before our elected leaders find the political will to challenge this practice?

Link.

Why Big Media Journalism Sucks; They Have No Problem Being Chilled by Our Leaders

Good journalism is a de facto crime, that simple. Freedom of the press is limited to the freedom to kiss Our Leaders asses and pass on their lies.

Greenwald:

Ever since the President's illegal warrantless eavesdropping program was revealed by the New York Times' Jim Risen and Eric Lichtblau back in December, 2005, there has been a faction of neoconservatives and other extremists on the Right calling for the NYT reporters and editors to be criminally prosecuted -- led by the likes of Bill Kristol (now of the NYT), Bill Bennett (of CNN), Commentary Magazine and many others. In May, 2006, Alberto Gonzales went on ABC News and revealed that the DOJ had commenced a criminal investigation into the leak, and then "raised the possibility [] that New York Times journalists could be prosecuted for publishing classified information."
That was one of the more revealing steps ever taken by Bush's DOJ under Gonzales: the administration violated multiple federal laws for years in spying on Americans, blocked all efforts to investigate what they did or subject it to the rule of law, but then decided that the only real criminals were those who alerted the nation to their lawbreaking -- whistleblowers and journalists alike. Even Gonzales' public musing about criminal prosecutions could have had a devastating effect -- if you're a whistleblower or journalist who uncovers secret government lawbreaking, you're obviously going to think twice (at least) before bringing it to light, given the public threats by the Attorney General to criminally prosecute those who do.
Eighteen months have passed since Gonzales' threats, and while there have been some signs that the investigation continues -- former DOJ official Jack Goldsmith, for instance, described how he was accosted and handed a Subpoena by FBI agents in the middle of Harvard Square, demanding to know what he knew about the NSA leak -- there had no further public evidence that the DOJ intended to pursue Risen and Lichtblau. Until now.
Yesterday, the NYT reported that Jim Risen was served with a grand jury Subpoena, compelling him to disclose the identity of the confidential source(s) for disclosures in his 2006 book, State of War. The Subpoena seeks disclosure of Risen's sources not for the NSA program (for which he and Lichtblau won a Pulitzer Prize), but rather, for Risen's reporting on CIA efforts to infiltrate Iran's nuclear program. Nonetheless, Risen's work on State of War is what led to his discovery that the Bush administration was illegally spying on Americans without the warrants required by law.
The issuance of a grand jury Subpoena to a reporter seeking the disclosure of confidential sources is one of the most serious steps the DOJ can take. If the reporter refuses to disclose his source(s) -- as reporters feel duty-bound to do, and, independently, as their future ability to uncover government secrets requires -- the reporter can be held in contempt and consigned to prison (Risen has indicated he will not comply). Judy Miller's refusal to disclose her sources in the Libby case, in response to a grand jury Subpoena, is what led to her imprisonment for 85 days, until she finally relented and revealed her sources. Had she not done so, she could have (and likely would have) remained imprisoned indefinitely.
Risen's book, State of War, was published in early January, 2006 -- more than two years ago. Why is it now, suddenly, that he is being subpoenaed to reveal his sources?
Issuing a Subpoena to a journalist poses such serious First Amendment threats that the DOJ has promulgated guidelines for what must occur in order for that to happen. Pursuant to Section III(A)(2)(l) of those guidelines -- "Subpoenas to the Media":

If the investigation involves media news gathering functions, the staff should first attempt to obtain the necessary information from non-media sources before considering subpoenaing members of the news media. If these attempts are unsuccessful and news media sources are the only reasonable sources of the relevant information, the staff should attempt to negotiate with the news media member or organization to obtain the information voluntarily. If such negotiations fail, the staff must seek the express approval of the Attorney General before issuing a subpoena.

Although one can't say for certain, it seems rather likely that what has led to the issuance of this grand jury Subpoena to Risen is that Michael Mukasey has apparently decided to make criminal investigations of such leaks one of his top priorities, and is prepared for a massive First Amendment fight with Risen and his publisher, Simon & Schuster, which likely will include a willingness to imprison Risen if he fails to comply -- just as the Neoconservative Right, still seething over Risen's role in exposing the President's NSA lawbreaking, has been demanding for some time.
One of the leading theorists of the "Imprison-the-NYT" movement has been Gabriel Schoenfeld of Norm Podhoretz's Commentary Magazine. He wrote a widely-cited article back in March, 2006 arguing that Risen, Lichtblau and even NYT Editor Bill Keller should all be criminally prosecuted under the Espionage Act and other statutes for publishing the NSA story:

The real question that an intrepid prosecutor in the Justice Department should be asking is whether, in the aftermath of September 11, we as a nation can afford to permit the reporters and editors of a great newspaper to become the unelected authority that determines for all of us what is a legitimate secret and what is not. Like the Constitution itself, the First Amendment's protections of freedom of the press are not a suicide pact. The laws governing what the Times has done are perfectly clear; will they be enforced?

On his Commentary blog yesterday, Schoenfeld gloated about the Subpoena to Risen and suggested a possible connection to not only Risen's work on the NSA story, but also Schoenfeld's own agitating for the imprisonment of these journalists. Schoenfeld wrote (referring to himself in the third person by the name of his blog, "Connecting the Dots"):

Finally, action. A federal prosecutor has issued a subpoena to James Risen of the New York Times, one of two reporters at the paper who compromised the National Security Agency's (NSA) Terrorist Surveillance Program in December 1995 (sic). . . .
Why is this investigation proceeding now? Connecting the Dots has no inside information. But Connecting the Dots was seated at the same table as Michael Mukasey and his wife at two dinners in the last three years, back when the future Attorney General was still a mere federal judge. The leaks in the New York Times did not come up for discussion, but Mukasey made plain he was a close reader of COMMENTARY.
Did he read a certain article in COMMENTARY entitled Has the New York Times Violated the Espionage Act? That's a question James Risen -- and Bill Keller, too -- should be thinking about.

It's entirely unsurprising that Michael Mukasey sat socially with our nation's most extremist neoconservatives and declared himself a "close reader of COMMENTARY." After all, before his nomination was formally announced, the White House chose Bill Kristol to announce his selection and, in a lengthy article, to vouch to conservatives for what a fine AG Mukasey would make.
Mukasey was a long-time supporter of the neocons' favorite candidate, Rudy Giuliani and, prior to becoming Attorney General, was part of the Giuliani campaign. And it was Dianne Feinstein and Chuck Schumer -- both with neoconservative leanings (war supporters both, among other things) -- who jointly enabled Mukasey's confirmation by becoming the only Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee to vote in his favor.
Although there are still facts missing -- such as whether this Subpoena was actually approved by Mukasey rather than Gonzales -- it's hard to avoid the conclusion that the Grand Jury Subpoena was done at least with Mukasey's assent. It seems rather clearly to signify the intent of his Justice Department to more aggressively pursue reporters who disclose information embarrassing to the President.
It's hard to overstate how threatening this behavior is. The Bush administration has erected an unprecedented wall of secrecy around everything it does. Beyond illegal spying, if one looks at the instances where we learned of lawbreaking and other forms of lawless radicalism -- CIA black sites, rendition programs, torture, Abu Ghraib, pre-war distortion of intelligence, destruction of CIA torture videos -- it is, in every case, the by-product of two forces: government whistleblowers and reporters willing to expose it.
Grand Jury Subpoenas such as the one issued to Risen have as their principal purpose shutting off that avenue of learning about government wrongdoing -- the sole remaining avenue for a country plagued by a supine, slothful, vapid press and an indescribably submissive Congress. Mukasey has quickly demonstrated that he has no interest in investigating and pursuing lawbreaking by high government officials, but now, he (or at least the DOJ he leads) seems to be demonstrating something even worse: a burgeoning interest in investigating and pursuing those who expose such governmental lawbreaking and turning those whistleblowers and investigative journalists into criminals.

UPDATE: An emailer sums up the situation nicely:

So, let me see if I get this straight. The Congress issues subpoenas to former [and current] Bush officials to testify about administration conduct. Said officials ignore the subpoenas. Nothing happens.
Administration, via grand jury, issues subpoena, Risen is threatened with jail.
What's wrong with this picture?

That's rather accurate.
One other notable aspect of this is that every time the administration attacks press freedoms, the newspapers' Editorial Pages are virtually mute. The only commentary I could find concerning the Risen Subpoena is this appropriately concise reaction from Spencer Ackerman, writing at the new online newspaper, Washington Independent. Neither the Post nor the Times' Editorial Pages has bothered to weigh in.

Clip (Clips) of the Day

This is like the scariest thing I've seen since... a long time....

Quote of the Day, Something to Live by

All the passions make us commit faults; love makes us commit the most ridiculous ones. -- La Rochefoucauld

Music Video Of The Day

This is so not an endorsement; I am already so disenamored, at the least, of all of the remaining candidates. I don't think any of them capable and/or inclined of doing anything good for the country.

But good music, we endorse that.

Word of the Day

Rightard. Use it well and often....

Collected Lies of Our Leaders: False Terrorist Threats

Link to a compendium (or "load of shit").

And are Our Leaders' G-Men creating fake threats for the rightists to exploit?

TILF

Link.

Collect Them All!!

Link.

Against the War, for the Troops

Another victim of madmen's pointless, unnecessary war.

Marine Lance Cpl. James Jenkins is buried in the same New Jersey cemetery that he used to run through on his way to high school, stopping at the Eat Good Bakery to get two glazed doughnuts and an orange juice before heading off to class. When his mother, Cynthia Fleming, visits his grave, she looks over the low cemetery wall at not only the bakery but the used-car lot where James used to sell Christmas trees during the winter and the nursing home where he worked every summer and says, "Lord, son, you're on your own turf." James, who died at 23, is buried in Greenwood Cemetery; the owners told Cynthia they're proud to have him there.

During his short career as a marine, Corporal Jenkins received many commendations recognizing his "intense desire to excel," "unbridled enthusiasm" and "unswerving devotion to duty." It was for heroic actions performed during a fifty-five-hour battle with the Mahdi militia in Najaf that Jenkins was awarded a Bronze Star for valor. The fighting, which began on the city streets in August 2004 and moved into the Wadi al Salam Cemetery, was ferociously personal. Marines and militiamen were often only yards apart, killing one another at close range. When the battle was over, eight Americans and hundreds of militiamen were dead.

After that tour, his second in Iraq, Jenkins could barely sleep. When he did, the nightmares were horrible. He was plagued by remorse and depression, unable to be intimate with his fiancée, run ragged by an adrenaline surge he couldn't turn off.

Back at San Diego's Camp Pendleton the following January, Jenkins took to gambling, or gambling took to him; he became addicted to blackjack and pai gow, a fast-moving card game where you can lose your shirt in a minute. The knife-edge excitement felt comfortingly familiar. Jenkins went into debt, borrowing thousands of dollars from payday loan companies. Busted for writing bad checks, he was locked up in the Camp Pendleton brig that spring pending court-martial. In the months that followed, he was released, locked up and released again. He spoke often of suicide. The Marines never diagnosed his post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). When his mother called his command seeking help, Jenkins's first sergeant, who had not served in Iraq, told Fleming he thought James was using his suicidal feelings to his advantage. "I have 130 marines to worry about other than your son," she recalls the sergeant saying. When his command decided to lock him up a third time, James Jenkins ran.

On September 28, 2005, eight months after returning from Iraq, Jenkins found himself cornered in the Oceanside apartment he shared with his fiancée. A deputy sheriff pounded on the front door, while a US Marshal covered the back. The young man with the "intense desire to excel" decided he could not go back to the brig or get an other-than-honorable discharge. He would not shame his family or have his hard-won achievements and his pride stripped away. And he was in pain. "He said, 'I can't even shut my eyes,'" his mother says, recalling one of his calls home that month. "He said, 'I killed 213 people, Mom.' He said, 'I can't live like this.' He said, 'Everything I worked for is down the drain,' and he was crying like a baby." While the officers waited for his fiancée to open the door, Jenkins shot himself in the right temple.

In the wake of Jenkins's suicide, the Marine Corps attempted to deny death benefits to his mother by claiming he'd died a deserter; but in a report based on that eligibility investigation, Thomas Ferguson, a special agent from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, described the young man as a "salvageable marine" whose untreated PTSD had led to his suicide.

"LCpl Jenkins was a bona fide war hero," Ferguson wrote. "Unfortunately, it is clear that when he most needed help from the military, the military failed him."

James Jenkins is a casualty of the war in Iraq as much as his fellow marines who died in that cemetery in Najaf, abandoned by an organization that has little tolerance for broken marines and is itself under tremendous stress from sustaining multiple deployments. "They didn't do anything," his mother says. "They just kept locking him up."

According to civilian and military defense lawyers, mental health professionals and veterans' advocates, the trajectory of James Jenkins's postdeployment life, with untreated PTSD leading to misconduct and then punishment, is all too common in the Marine Corps. A marine endures one, two, even three tours in Iraq, serves honorably and well, but returns suffering from combat trauma and starts to drink or abuse drugs or becomes violent at home, and suddenly finds himself ostracized, punished and drummed out of the Corps with an other-than-honorable or bad-conduct discharge. A history of service is tarnished, and the marine is denied benefits--even the treatment necessary to recover from combat trauma--and left with only a bitter sense of betrayal. A Corps review in 2007 of 1,019 other-than-honorable discharges issued to combat veterans during the first four years of the Iraq War found that fully a third of the discharged marines had evidence of PTSD or another combat-related mental illness. Lt. Col. Colby Vokey, the Marine Corps's legal defense counsel for the western United States, estimates that of all the Iraq combat veterans his office defends, one-third have PTSD or another combat-stress mental health issue. Many of these clients have served at least two tours in Iraq.

The factors leading to the abandonment of combat-broken marines are both cultural and operational. The Marine Corps is the youngest, most male, most junior and least married of all the services. Sixty-six percent of the troops are 25 or younger; 13 percent are teens; and 39 percent hold the rank of private, private first class or lance corporal. Fewer than 7 percent are female. The Corps's deeply macho culture, which values stoicism in the face of pain and disdains "weakness," makes it hard for marines to seek help. Judith Broder, a civilian psychiatrist who treats Iraq and Afghanistan vets, says, "They all know of stories where buddies have asked for help and have been ridiculed by the chain of command or given some kind of treatment that is not really adequate and told they have to go back."

This harsh culture is exacerbated by the relentless tempo of training and deployment, which pressures commanders to quickly replace broken marines with deployable ones. "You read the Marine Corps values and you'll find that anybody that gets hurt isn't courageous or doesn't have honor," Judith Litzenberger, a civilian defense lawyer and twenty-one-year Navy veteran, explains. "That's how the marines interpret it: 'I went to Iraq and I didn't whine and I didn't claim that I had a mental disorder, and damn well marines don't do that--we suck it up.' And it has to be that way because they have a mission that's bigger than the number of people they have. They can't spend all their time taking care of people who have mental disorders. They've got to wash them out quickly and move on."

The Corps also places more emphasis on discipline than any other branch of the military. According to USA Today, the Corps prosecutes close to the same number of troops for misconduct as the Army does, though it is one-third the size. "I don't think the legal system is being used improperly according to regulations," Lieutenant Colonel Vokey says. "The problem is I don't think the system accounts for these folks with PTSD. There's got to be another way to handle this without lumping them in with every other marine who commits misconduct. They were fine when they went to Iraq, we broke them, this is what combat did to them, and I think we should feel some responsibility for what happens to them."

Add to these factors the political and financial pressures surrounding the Iraq War, which have resulted in a mental health system so underfunded that last year a Pentagon Mental Health Task Force termed its staffing "woefully inadequate." The Navy, which provides psychological healthcare to the Marines, has filled only 72 percent of its psychologist billets and 62 percent of its psychiatrist billets.

"The funding has just been awful, the worst I've ever seen in my twenty years in the military," says Dr. Katherine Scheirman, a retired Air Force colonel who served as chief of medical operations in the Air Force's Europe headquarters from July 2004 to September 2006. Scheirman says the current political environment has made it "impossible" to give wounded soldiers proper care. "It's all about money," she says. "Every kid that gets kicked out with PTSD is gonna be a lifetime of disability payments for the government. Every kid who gives up and kills himself, nothing." Scheirman's unit was in charge of evacuating the wounded from Iraq and Afghanistan and transporting them to the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany and on to the United States. She says politics infused every aspect of care. When she tried to beef up the hospital staff at Landstuhl, she was told, "No, we can't put more doctors or nurses in there because it will look like we expect more casualties." She was not allowed to send the visibly wounded home on commercial planes. "The rule," she says, "was they couldn't fly commercial if they had injuries that showed because it would upset the American people." The military planes were so cold the Air Force ended up running clothing drives for hats, scarves and mittens--a situation that continues today. In one e-mail requesting donations, a lieutenant colonel wrote, "Mittens are preferred because they often fit better over wounded hands/fingers."

"What kind of Army doesn't provide mittens for its wounded soldiers?" Scheirman asks. "What's sad is this isn't the way it's ever been before. I came into the military under Reagan, and George Bush's dad--they treated people well. The Clintons treated people really, really well. It's only this Administration that acts like the lives of these soldiers are expendable."

When the fourth Army Mental Health Advisory Team (MHAT IV) traveled to Iraq in 2006 to assess the mental health of soldiers and marines in theater, they noted the intensely "personal" nature of duty there--that is, the high percentage of soldiers and marines who knew someone seriously wounded or killed and could describe an event that had caused them "intense fear, helplessness or horror": seeing a friend liquefied in a tank, being attacked by IEDs, being caught in the open under sniper fire, "seeing, smelling, touching...dead people." Last June the Pentagon's Mental Health Task Force reported that 31 percent of the marines who served in Iraq or Afghanistan are suffering from traumatic stress, and Marine Corps suicide rates have been above average since the United States invaded Afghanistan. In 2004 the Corps reported thirty-two active-duty suicides, six of them from Camp Pendleton.

Marines have not only been heavily deployed during Operation Iraqi Freedom; they've been sent into some of Iraq's most volatile areas, and they suffer 25 percent of the casualties, though they make up only 16 percent of ground forces there. "It has long been recognized that mental health breakdown occurs after prolonged combat exposure, a considerable number of Soldiers and Marines are conducting combat operations everyday of the week, 10-12 hours per day...for months on end," the MHAT IV report explains. "At no time in our military history have Soldiers or Marines been required to serve on the front line in any war for a period of 6-7 months, let alone [a] year, without a significant break in order to recover from the physical, psychological, and emotional demands that ensue from combat."

Their deployments generally run seven months, though last year 4,000 marines had their tours extended. Once home, they are given up to thirty days of leave to reconnect with their families, though many cannot even adjust to sleeping in a bed. Then they are back in training for their next deployment. The average break between tours is only six months. According to a mental health counselor at the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center in Twentynine Palms, California, who requested anonymity, marines suffering from combat trauma often decide not to seek counseling because they simply don't have time. Moreover, they tell the counselor, since they'll just be sent back into combat, what's the point? "In some way it is miraculous if someone doesn't have PTSD with these repeated tours," says Judith Broder, the psychiatrist. She founded The Soldiers Project, which provides free psychological services to Iraq and Afghanistan vets and their families, including, currently, several active-duty marines. "There's this heartbreaking sense these guys express of, 'I don't know who I am or what I did over there, and I have to hold myself together because I'm going to have to do it again, so don't try to pull me back into something soft and sweet. This is not going to do me good.'"

"Maybe we have to recognize that after a deployment or two, you're not able to deploy anymore because the stresses on the mind are just too great," says Maj. Haytham Faraj, the lead defense counsel at Camp Pendleton. The case that made Faraj "the angriest I've ever been at the Marine Corps" involved a 19-year-old who was severely wounded by a rocket attack during his first tour in Iraq.

The marine's wounds left him unable to control his bowels, and he lost sexual function. After being treated at several military hospitals, he was sent home to his parents on convalescent leave. His military counsel, former Marine Capt. Melissa Epstein Mills, now in private practice, says that during those months, the teen was "falling into the depths of depression dealing with these truly traumatic injuries and the death of his best friend, who died shortly after he was hit. [Then] his wife served him with divorce papers while he was in the hospital. His parents described it as a downward spiral."

When they found themselves unable to help their son, his parents asked his command at Pendleton to come get him. The 19-year-old confessed to his company commander that he had been smoking pot while convalescing.

"He had been on some pretty heavy painkillers and was being transitioned off," Epstein Mills explains, "but it was [also] a coping mechanism." The young man's regimental commander recommended him for an other-than-honorable discharge for drug use, which, Epstein Mills says, would likely have meant denial of his veterans' benefits--including mental healthcare--for the rest of his life.

"What a lot of people miss is that, in general, it's totally up to the commander what happens to their troop," says Scheirman. "They can send him to the hospital and say, 'Hey, this guy isn't able to do his work. Would you look at him for PTSD?' Or they can just kick the guy out." A medical discharge, which is generally under honorable conditions, can take many months, sometimes longer, and all the while the commander is stuck with an undeployable marine. An administrative separation usually takes a few weeks, at most. "If you kick the guy out, you'll get somebody to replace him," she says. "So that's the incentive for the commanders."

Epstein Mills and the 19-year-old's Marine Corps lawyer won him a general discharge under honorable conditions. Unlike an honorable discharge, it will not qualify him for educational benefits from the GI Bill, but he'll probably get some medical benefits.

Before Lt. Col. Andrew Horne left Iraq in 2005, where he was the civil military operations officer for western Anbar province, he and every marine under him above the rank of staff sergeant attended a briefing on PTSD given by the division psychiatrist, a Navy officer. "They said it's been determined that it comes from a feeling of helplessness, and elite units like Marines don't get it," Horne says. "And the ones who do get it have usually been discipline problems before or have a pre-existing problem. So it was really designed to, one, make you not report it yourself and, two, be suspicious of anyone who was reporting it."

More than two years later, despite a growing acknowledgment within the Corps of the mental costs of war, PTSD remains underdiagnosed and undertreated. At Twentynine Palms, some of the civilian counselors on base avoid sending marines to division psychology because at least a dozen marines they referred there for treatment were given "personality disorder" diagnoses and kicked out of the service [for more on the personality disorder scandal, see Joshua Kors, April 9 and October 15, 2007]. Mary Jo Thornton, a licensed family therapist and former base counselor, remembers one Marine sergeant coming back from his appointment with the naval psychologist, saying, "Thanks, you ruined my career. Now they're ad-sepping [administratively separating] me out of the military. The little guy talked to me for a half-hour and told me I had a personality disorder." Many active-duty marines go off base to veterans' centers for counseling, because only there do they feel safe from punishment.

When Cpl. Michael Cataldi, who served with the Third Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion based at Twentynine Palms, returned from his first deployment, he was angry and depressed. "Helicopters scared me because I picked up a helicopter crash," he says. "Thirty marines and one Navy corpsman all died, and we were the first four people there. I did a body count when I was 20 years old." The pilot was on fire, and Cataldi had to put him out with a shovel. "I smell burning flesh when people grill chicken. I can't be in crowds," he says. "This all happened before I went over the second time."

It took months between deployments for him to get an appointment with the regimental psychologist, and when he did he sensed the doctor was trying to talk him out of his symptoms. "He kind of told me, as I was telling him what I was feeling, that I wasn't really feeling that," he recalls. Cataldi was diagnosed with anxiety and depression, not PTSD, given anti-anxiety meds and antidepressants, and sent back to Iraq. There he was put in charge of the guard at Camp Apache.

After four months the medical officer left Iraq, and suddenly Cataldi had no more meds. "I had a breakdown," he says. "I even defecated all over myself, and I don't remember doing it." Cataldi was evacuated to the combat stress center at Camp Al-Assad, where he was diagnosed with PTSD and given three weeks of treatment. When he returned to base, he began to get disciplinary write-ups: one for an unauthorized absence, the other for allegedly threatening his executive officer. "They were trying to take my rank and call me a horrible marine," he says. Cataldi ended up facing a nonjudicial punishment proceeding and losing half a month's pay. "They thought I was trying to go home," he says.

When Cataldi returned to the States at the end of his second deployment, with only a few months left on his service contract, he stayed low to the ground, afraid his commanders would take his rank or kick him out. In his last evaluation before leaving the Corps, Cataldi had a fifteen-minute appointment with the naval psychiatrist on base, who told him he had "anxiety disorder."

Unlike the Army and the Air Force, almost every Marine and Navy base has a brig on board, and that makes it easy to use the brig as storage for a troubled marine. "We think pretrial detention is overly prescribed," Faraj says. "More often than not it's used as a tool, because the command doesn't want to deal with someone." Consequently, marines with mental health problems are not only locked up in a brig without adequate mental healthcare but are asked to make serious legal decisions while actively suffering from mental disorders. "I think doing a court-martial at that time is a setup," Judith Litzenberger, the civilian defense lawyer, says. "It's totally devoid of due process. You don't have a client there that you can talk to. We need some long-term psych hospitals that can treat these guys." The hospital at Pendleton lost its psych treatment certification a few years ago and never worked to get it back, so the camp no longer has an inpatient psychiatric facility. Marines who attempt suicide in the brig are sent to the Naval Medical Center in San Diego, but the naval hospital offers only acute care to marines, so once the suicidal marine is stabilized, he is sent back to jail. Though commanders do not purposely use pretrial detention to break a marine, that is often the effect on a marine suffering from PTSD--as it was in the case of Sgt. Patrick Uloth.

Uloth's command thought "he walked on water," Faraj says. After two tours in Iraq, they even recommended him for an officer-training program. "I thought the Marine Corps did no wrong," Uloth recalls. "I could watch you do something and if the Marine Corps told me you didn't do it, I believed it. I loved the Marine Corps that damn much." But untreated PTSD, pretrial detention and official callousness destroyed his career in the Corps.

It began during his second deployment to Iraq, when Uloth and members of his unit manning a vehicle checkpoint fired on a car speeding toward them. "When they went to see what they'd gotten, in the car were a father and three young kids," Faraj says. "That troubled him so much that he began to have nightmares, and that's when the PTSD set in." Two weeks before his tour ended, an explosive-filled truck detonated at another checkpoint, where Uloth saw two of his marines die. Under heavy fire, he retrieved the decapitated head and body of his best friend. Then he held the hand of a dying 19-year-old marine and told him he was going to be OK.

Once Uloth's unit returned to Pendleton, he began to suffer from PTSD, depression and "conversion disorder," characterized by flashback-related seizures. Each time he tried to see the unit psychiatrist, he was given an appointment weeks away--a typical wait, according to Faraj. Uloth decided to go home to New Orleans, where he checked himself into the psychiatric ward at a nearby Air Force hospital. After forty-five days, the Marines sent chasers to pick him up. Back at Pendleton, he was charged with unauthorized absence (UA) and thrown into the brig.

There, Uloth was put in isolation, stripped to his underwear for up to twenty-four hours a day and was so heavily medicated he felt like a "zombie." Once a month he was taken in handcuffs and leg shackles to see a psychiatrist. Faraj wanted to go to trial, sure that they could beat the charges. But after two months in the brig, Uloth told him, "I can't take it anymore. You got to get me out." Faraj's plea agreement included a reduction in rank to corporal and a general discharge under honorable conditions.

While Uloth waited for his discharge to come through, he was transferred to a new unit. When a marine faces misconduct proceedings, he is often transferred from his parent company to a headquarters unit. The people he served with in Iraq were busy training for redeployment or were back overseas, and the rear command knew him only as a marine charged with substance abuse or UA, another one of "the broke, lame and lazy." In the new unit, Uloth, an experienced sergeant, was subject to daily ridicule and assigned to pick up trash.

Uloth told Faraj he couldn't take it. Faraj told him to hang in there, but a few days later, Faraj got a call from the unit's first sergeant, asking if he knew where Uloth was. Six months after that, Uloth was picked up again in New Orleans, this time on a DUI, and thrown back into the Pendleton brig.

The previous terms of his discharge were voided, but Uloth told Faraj, "Any way you can get me out, I just want out." Uloth was separated with an other-than-honorable discharge, with all direct medical benefits denied him, his history of faithful service erased.

Now Uloth cannot afford medication to control his seizures, so he just "wings it" and has ended up in various emergency rooms. He uses alcohol to put himself to sleep. Recently, several of the marines who served with him in Iraq tracked him down. "We all served in combat together and all of them have the same problems," Uloth says. "They've all been diagnosed with PTSD, their lives are upside down, a lot of them have tried committing suicide, a lot of them are alcoholics, they can't keep a marriage or a relationship, everybody's lives are shitholes."

The Marine Corps has always taken pride in caring for its own, but its efforts to take care of mentally wounded marines have overwhelmingly failed, plagued by denial, machismo, an unrealistic war tempo and a severe shortage of resources. In the spring of 2007 the Corps set up the Wounded Warrior Regiment, where marines suffering from physical and mental injuries could be tracked and supported. "I spoke with the guy at Quantico who was going to be running this warrior regiment," says Steve Robinson, a Gulf War veteran and veterans' advocate. "And one of the first things he said that made me sit up in my chair was, 'Look, we don't want to diagnose marines with PTSD. We need them to get back into the fight. Call it something else, whatever you want to call it, and then we try to retrain them.'"

Robinson told him, "Well, that's great, but the DSM-IV [Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders] clearly states that if they have these signs and symptoms, they should be diagnosed."

When members of President Bush's Commission on Care for America's Returning Wounded Warriors visited Pendleton last spring, they spoke with a group of marines housed in the wounded warrior barracks who said they felt they were being punished for being wounded. The marines pointed to the sterile living environment, rigid rules banning rest in their rooms during the day and menial tasks assigned to those well enough to work. In his report to the President's commission, Lt. Col. Leslie Chip Pierce said visitors from the commission "were taken to a location in the barracks known to these wounded warriors as the petting zoo." At the camp's Behavioral Health Clinic, the staff expressed "frustration" too, saying, according to the report, that "line commanders are not always committed to PTSD identification and treatment once they have returned to home base."

After the Marine Corps conducted its review of less-than-honorable discharges, Navy Capt. William Nash, who coordinates the Marines' combat stress program, recommended, according to USA Today, that "any marine or sailor who commits particularly uncharacteristic misconduct following deployment...be aggressively screened for stress disorders and treated." Almost a year later, the Navy and Marine Corps have yet to implement these screenings. They simply don't have the manpower.

More than two years have passed since James Jenkins's death, which Lieutenant Colonel Vokey describes as a "terrible tragedy" that should never have occurred. It was three months after returning from Iraq, in April 2005, that Jenkins first complained of depression and was referred to Division Psychology. There he was diagnosed with "adjustment disorder," which meant he would not receive treatment for PTSD. He was then given Ambien to help him sleep and an antianxiety drug, Ativan--and declared fit for duty.

The Ambien didn't help, and he took himself off Ativan. On May 5 he asked for help with his depression again. He was told to continue taking Ambien.

At the end of that month, Jenkins was confined to the brig to await his court-martial. While there, he filled out a Chronological Record of Medical Care, checking the "yes" box after the question "Have you had any thoughts of injuring yourself or others?" Beside that box, Jenkins wrote, "Combat, Kill the enemy." Still he received no mental healthcare. The medical officer merely noted, "PT [patient] has hx [history] of Adjustment D/O [disorder] with depression and anxiety."

Cynthia Fleming kept calling the first sergeant, trying to get her son help. "I told him my son was going to kill himself. They told me the brig was a form of suicide watch. I said, 'That's a jail.'"

Inside the brig, the situation took a bizarre turn. Another jailed marine, a gunny sergeant, tried to hire Jenkins to kill five people and kidnap another sergeant's daughter. Jenkins informed his lawyer and was released in order to work as an informer. But when he began to gamble again and cash worthless checks, he was rearrested. Because his life would have been at risk inside Pendleton, Jenkins was locked up in the Miramar brig instead. A judge quickly released him, but his command decided to send him back to the brig at Pendleton. "Of course, he's petrified of the guy who he's reporting on and being back in the brig with him," Vokey says. "That's when he took off."

Jenkins stole a gun from an Oceanside pistol range, a gun with one bullet, he told his mother on the phone. She called his unit; the defense lawyers called, too. "We had talked to the unit, trying to get them to go find this kid because he was going to kill himself, and didn't get a lot of compassion," Vokey says. "They were just fed up with him."

Fleming told her son she could fly out to California the next day. "Tomorrow will be too late," he said. "Tell everybody I'm sorry. Tell my sisters, tell my brother, tell my nieces, I'm so sorry. All I wanted to do is make you proud."

When Fleming arrived at Scripps Memorial Hospital, James was brain-dead. Two noncommissioned officers were in the room with her, one of them James's first sergeant. Fleming told the nurses, "See that sergeant right there? He said my son was using this to his advantage. But look at my baby now."

His command gave up on him, but Jenkins never gave up on the marines--not when it counted. The citation accompanying his Bronze Star reads, in part, "With the squad pinned down under intense enemy fire in the Najaf cemetery, he moved along the lines to reestablish communication with Company B. When he reached their position, four enemy militiamen located to his direct front attacked. Without regard for his own well being, Lance Corporal Jenkins climbed on top of a tomb and fired directly down at the enemy.... After eliminating the four militiamen, he returned to the squad's position and directed an attack that destroyed four additional enemy combatants. He continued to risk his own safety as he covered the withdrawal of his fellow Marines to friendly lines."

These days, Cynthia Fleming rarely goes into the storage room where she keeps James's belongings; the scent of him lingering on his clothes is too painful. "But one day I went out there and I picked up his boots that were in a box, and when I picked up his boots, the Iraqi sand fell out, and I lost it," she says. "His boots was so worn you could tell that boy did some fighting and running over there in Iraq."

Link.

Our Wonderful World

Finally, the truth is seeping out. Contrary to how President George W. Bush has tried to justify the Iraq war in the past, he has now clumsily-if inadvertently-admitted that the invasion and occupation of Iraq was aimed primarily at seizing predominant influence over its oil by establishing permanent (the administration favors "enduring") military bases.

He made this transparently clear by adding a signing statement to the defense appropriation bill, indicating that he would not be bound by the law's prohibition against expending funds:

"(1) To establish any military installation or base for the purpose of providing for the permanent stationing of United States Armed Forces in Iraq," or

"(2) To exercise United States control of the oil resources of Iraq."

But, if you have been asleep for the past five years, you may ask, what about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and its ties to al-Qaeda? A recent study by the Center for Public Integrity found that Bush made 260 false claims about these in the two years following 9/11. He was followed closely by then-Secretary of State Colin Powell with 254. Nor can they any longer pretend they were deceived by faulty intelligence, since hard evidence that continues to accumulate shows they knew exactly what they were doing.

Moreover, it has become abundantly clear that the "surge" of 30,000 troops into Iraq was aimed-pure and simple-at staving off definitive defeat until Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney are safely out of office. Some, but not all, of those 30,000 troops are slated for withdrawal, but those who still expect more sizable withdrawals have not been reading the tea leaves. It is altogether likely there will still be 150,000 U.S. troops, and even more than that number of contractors, in Iraq a year from now.

In the administration's view, the oil-and-bases prize is well worth the indignity of refereeing a civil war and additional troop casualties. That view was reflected recently in the words of a well-heeled suburbanite, who suggested to me, "You must concede that a few GIs killed every week is a small price to pay for the oil we need. Many more died in Vietnam, and there wasn't even any oil there."

That person was unusually blunt, but I believe his thinking may be widely shared, at least subconsciously, by those Americans who are not directly affected by the war-which is to say he vast majority. It is easier to assimilate and parrot the administration's dishonesty than to confront the reality that these are consequential lies. They bring untold death and destruction-and not only in Iraq, where several hundred thousand civilians are dead and one out of six families have been displaced-but to thousands of our fellow citizens as well.

The Human Cost

Not only have almost 4,000 American troops been killed, but another 30,000 have been wounded in action. Veterans Administration documents obtained by Veterans for Common Sense show that nearly 264,000 Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans already have been treated at VA hospitals, including more than 100,000 for mental health conditions.

According to a Harvard University report, the VA is projected to spend up to $700 billion over the next 40 years for medical care and disability payments for veterans of the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. Add the billions sunk every week into the quagmire of Iraq-it is madness.

We are approaching a trillion-dollar war, while our Treasury is bankrupt, our economy is in shambles, and our infrastructure crumbles. The only things on an upward swing are the profits of oil companies...and suicides in the military.

For a fraction of the money wasted on an un-winnable occupation-cum-armed-referee-duty in Iraq, premium health care could be provided to every American, including veterans, whom we owe big time, and the almost 50 million of our brothers and sisters who lack health insurance.

The iniquities of war have widened the inequities in our society, stretching the gap between the haves and the have-nots. It is not right for me, one of the haves, to have so disproportionate a share of the nation's wealth and opportunity. Nowhere is this more obvious than the access to excellent health care to which privilege has "entitled" me. A recently discovered challenge to my health brought this home to me like a ton of bricks.

Why Me?

The doctors said they needed more tissue from what they called the "mass" in my lower abdomen, so they could determine what kind of cancer had set up shop there. There was some sense of urgency, so just days later a surgeon made room for me at the end of a very busy New Year's Eve.

The cutting was over; the stitches were in; the pain was slight; and there I was, wide awake in a comfortable hospital room, welcoming 2008 with painful questions.

For the hundredth time I found myself asking, Why me?

But wait-it may not be what you're thinking.

The troubling question was why was I privileged to have prompt access to the best in medical care, when such is not available to most of our veterans and some 50 million other Americans. We are called to be concerned about our brothers and sisters. It did not seem fair.

Why was it that I could expect excellent doctors to plan a therapy regime that would probably shrink the grapefruit-sized cancerous "mass" and add still more years to my 68? What about the others? Without access to good doctors and advanced medical technology, is it likely that they would not become of their "mass" until it was the size of a melon-and perhaps too late?

Waking Up

The anesthesia had worn off, and the only real discomfort came from the dangling questions. December had brought surprise and new awareness. I needed some quiet time to process it all, and the turn of the year seemed appropriate. So I turned off the TV and scribbled what follows.

To hear I had been invaded by cancer was a bummer. But from the very start that unwelcome surprise was softened by awareness that I was one of the lucky ones. No, not "lucky"-privileged.

A health insurance card lay in the white knapsack full of privilege that I carry around with me, usually without much awareness on my part. The voice of conscience was whispering that it is not right to be unaware. One out of six Americans have no insurance card in their knapsack or in the plastic bag that serves as their chest of drawers. Is that the America of which we were once so proud?

It started with my swollen right leg. No big deal, I thought; I had simply sprained that ankle too many times playing basketball. And besides, varicose veins run in my family. Small wonder my blood was having trouble circulating down that way.

But at my annual physical my doctor saw it differently. We needed to find out what was causing the swelling. Sclerotherapy, a sophisticated, expensive procedure seemed indicated, but would my insurance cover it? It would, so we went ahead.

But the swelling got worse, suggesting some kind of blockage higher up. Enter the world of multimillion-dollar technology-CT-scan, PET-scan, and pinpointing of the mass, followed quickly by a needle biopsy. All covered by insurance.

It looked like lymphoma. But the oncologist wanted to be sure of exactly what variety of lymphoma it was before he decided what the optimum treatment regime might be. Hence, the New Year's Eve surgery and extraction of tissue immediately dispatched to the Mayo Clinic for a thorough pathology report. See what I mean about privileged?

Stress Tests ...

My thoughts went back to the thallium stress test before the surgery. The nurses injected some dye and measured my heart on an accelerating treadmill to induce stress. They encouraged me, and stood ready to catch me if I fell off. I found myself thinking of less benign ways to induce stress-stress positions, sensory deprivation, and what President Bush calls "an alternative set of procedures." And my thoughts went to Guantanamo and the hundreds of prisoners flown there in shackles with no assurance they would survive the kind of deliberately induced stress they would encounter there.

And then they strapped me onto a narrow gurney where I had to remain still for twenty minutes while another million-dollar machine hovered low over my chest and took pictures. There were two technicians and nurses there to ensure my comfort and allay my concerns. And I thought of the gurneys of Guantanamo and the strapped-in prisoners surrounded by other kinds of folks, including physicians and psychologists who, in a mockery of the Hippocratic oath, do their best to inflict, not alleviate pain.

... and Suicide

I also thought of the two dozen Guantanamo detainees who tried to starve themselves to death two and a half years ago. They, too, were strapped onto gurneys, while thick plastic tubes were forced through their noses to force-feed enough nourishment to keep them alive, lest the Bush administration be embarrassed. On June 10, 2006 three detainees did succeed in hanging themselves, the first successful suicides after 41attempts by some 25 individual detainees.

Those detainees' hope was for the release that comes with death; I could hope for healing.

The three who killed themselves incurred the wrath of Guantanamo commander, Rear Adm. Harry B. Harris, Jr., who announced that the suicides were "not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare against us." In similar spirit, Colleen Graffy, deputy assistant secretary of state for public diplomacy, told the BBC that the suicides "certainly (are) a good PR move to draw attention."

I wonder how Graffy would describe the actions of those U.S. veterans experiencing such suffering that they, too, commit suicide. A CBS study showed that in 2005 alone, 6,256 veterans of Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan took their own lives, many of them after experiencing very long waiting lines for medical treatment. That is an average of 17 suicides a day. Shame on us!

As for those on active duty, "Soldier Suicide at Record Level," a report by the Washington Post's Dana Priest on Jan. 31, shows that in 2007 suicides among active duty soldiers reached their highest level since the Army began keeping such records in 1980.

Army 1st Lt. Elizabeth Whiteside, 25, made the most recent known suicide attempt. On Monday evening, as the president gave his State-of-the-Union address, Whiteside swallowed dozens of antidepressants and other pills, after leaving a note expressing the hope that "this will help other soldiers." Thanks to a Good Samaritan neighbor, who quickly called Walter Reed Army Medical Center authorities, Whiteside's survived. She has now been transferred from the intensive care unit to the psychiatric ward.

Lt. Whiteside is a high achieving graduate of the University of Virginia and had been given high ratings by her Army superiors. She decided to talk to Dana Priest late last year, after a soldier Whiteside had befriended at the psychiatric ward of Walter Reed Army Medical Center hanged herself after being discharged without benefits.

Blame

Many U.S. servicemen and women can blame their cancer on contamination from the depleted uranium used in artillery and other shells and toxic chemicals that have saturated regions of Iraq, including populated areas, leading to a spurt of cancer illnesses.

Against this background, I reflected on how fortunate I was that the cause of the cancer that had invaded me would probably remain a mystery. I wondered how it would feel to be able to trace a fatal disease to the instruments of war; how it would feel to be an Iraqi parent watching a child die of cancer, or living in fear that a new child might be born with serious birth defects.

No, I cannot blame my illness on someone's negligence, or cavalier disregard of the consequences of highly toxic weaponry. But thousands of Iraqis can. And so, too, can those U.S. troops who have served in Afghanistan and Iraq-including in the virtually "casualty-less" Gulf War in 1991. How many Americans are aware that, of the almost 700,000 deployed to theater during the 1991 Gulf War, roughly one in three has sought medical care from the VA?

You didn't know that? Please ask yourself why.

Higher Powers and Favorite Philosophers

President Bush has recently taken to talking again about his "higher power" and redemption.

The higher power with whom I try to stay in touch is concerned first and foremost with justice and then (only then) peace. In the biblical sense, peace is no more nor less than the experience of justice.

I would guess the Bush's higher power was appalled at the Coliseum-type spectacle Monday evening, as the President of the United States played cheerleader for Team America killing still more people-to standing ovations from his supporters in Congress.

Nor would the person President Bush has called his "favorite political philosopher," Jesus of Nazareth, be likely to endorse the spectacle, much less join in. He had a pretty clear take on all this.

As we reflect on the growing inequality in this country, manifested so clearly in whether or not one has access to quality health care, we might remind the president of what his favorite philosopher had to say about goats-not as in "My Pet Goat," but goats portrayed as lining up for a serious, long-term "alternative set of procedures."

And the goats will turn and ask: 'Lord, when did we see you ... ill ... and not attend to your needs?'

And he will answer: 'As often as you neglected to do it for the least of these, you neglected to do it for me.' (Matthew 25)

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Warning of the Day

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Straight Talk About the Straight Talker Who Will be Our Next Leader

Every time I hear the media say Sen. John McCain "of Arizona" it makes me crazy. McCain has done as little for Arizona as possible and it shows. The state is Mississippi in the Southwest, an Appalachia with golf courses, the epicenter of a brewing socio-environmental calamity. It is a place frighteningly behind in the competitive world of the 21st century, however much it provides a haven for a certain kind of rich person and, until recently, for real-estate players. Arizona was never anything but a national political platform for McCain.

If McCain had been governor, his apathy would be an especially tempting target. Even so, as a senator he has done as little as possible in education, research, transportation, health care, the environment...the list goes on and on. Most days one wondered if Arizona even had senators representing it, rather than trying to be national political figures.

McCain a "maverick"? A maverick would have been pushing to rebuild American's passenger-train system as an essential step in easing oil dependency and combating global warming (not to mention traffic congestion). Instead, McCain has waged a vendetta against Amtrak, not to reform but to kill it. Real straight talk would have told Arizonans they can't keep building subdivisions in the forests and avoid the consequences of fires. It would have rallied the state to protect its environment rather than to turn it into a vast grotesque strip mall. Not Sen. McCain.

At this point, so-called conservatives are saying, "Yeah! That's just what we want! Property rights! Tax cuts! Yahyahyah!!..."

So why do I keep hearing that so many so-called conservatives hate McCain, or mistrust McCain? I guess it's a sign of what conservatism has become: a doctrine as rigid and "faith based" as communism in its day, and far from the body of ideas that animated Barry Goldwater -- a man truly "of Arizona."

McCain differed from the rigid party line on immigration. Big deal. Here the fire breathers want a pony: a cheap Arizona economy without the brown people who make it possible. Taxes? After rightly saying it was unprecedented for the nation to cut taxes in wartime, McCain retreated and now is another tiresome tax cutter who will "cut the budget."

Unlike the chicken-hawks, McCain is a genuine military hero and understands the seriousness of sending Americans to war. Yet here, too, he seems to promise more of the same in the Middle East. We need a serious discussion about withdrawal from Iraq and its consequences, but no candidate, right or left, is offering it. McCain apparently believes we can sustain this self-inflicted wound for 100 years.

Indeed, the more he panders to so-called conservatives, the less he has even the ashes of independence left in his campaign kitbag. So the right will embrace him, because the right loves power more than even rigid doctrine, and especially the overwhelming power that has accrued to corporate interests over 25 years.

The big question is whether the media will truthfully report on McCain's record and policy proposals. So far, they're still in love. I can't even imagine another four years of the catastrophic policies the senator proposes to continue if he makes it to the White House.

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Nightmare Image of the Day

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So Why is the Newspaper Business Screwed Up?

I would just add that it just ain't newspapers -- it's all journalistic media.

Mary McCarthy said famously of Lillian Hellman: “Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’.”

It’s tempting to say the same about the many diagnoses of what ails the newspaper world. We hear endlessly that the troubles are a result of the Internet, new technology, “people don’t read anymore,” and, my favorite, “people don’t have as much time as they used to.” As if there was once a 36-hour day, or people who once worked 12-hour shifts while raising large families had this abundance of time.

These forces are real. And yes, a big swath of the public is distracted by celebrity gossip and gets its “news” from blogs, television and talk radio. What’s less noted is how newspapers themselves contributed to the dumbing down of America. What’s most frustrating is that the discussion fails to focus on the more significant reasons behind the decline in newspaper journalism. They are:

-The creation of monopoly markets and, through consolidation, cartels of newspaper ownership. Economic history shows us that monopolies and cartels always commit suicide. Divorced from the imperatives of real competition, monopolies easily slip into a self-centered world of bureaucratic conformity and a desire to protect the status quo. They became slow and rigid, in other words, road kill for competitors.

-Consolidation of newspapers into large, publicly held companies. This removed newspapers from their communities and killed a sense of holding a public trust. And it left them at the mercy of Wall Street. Newspaper executives promised returns that are nearly impossible for any (legal) entity to sustain year after year. Everything came to depend on delivering these short-term “growth” numbers to the Street. Among the biggest losers was the ability to invest in future technologies and the ability to shift to meet changing consumer habits. Those wouldn’t deliver instant double-digit margins. Thus, newspaper companies failed to start, or failing that, buy, a Yahoo or Craig’s List.

-A largely defensive strategy took hold, even though history shows that no company under siege ever merely cut its way to recovery. Significantly, investment in the unique intellectual capital of newspapers – journalism – was constantly reduced. Newsrooms lost much of their top talent. Marketing, more important than ever in business, was never a newspaper strength, and was cut to the bone. Research and development received little more than lip service, or was another tool to hand down demands for shorter, dumber, fluffier stories. There was little interest on the advertising side in the kind of “skunk works” that might have leapfrogged from print to online before the crisis became acute. No longer did the smartest business-school grads want to work on the business side of newspapers. A thousand cuts hurt readership. One example: eliminating stock tables antagonized the most loyal readers, older folks who weren’t online. Many went away. Multiply that around every newspaper each time a key reader destination was eliminated. The cutback of international coverage comes just as America's future is more and more determined by world events (yes, even the soccer mom's ability to fill up her SUV).

-Groupthink was a natural outgrowth of monopolies and the demands of Wall Street. This was hastened by the ascendancy of Gannett and its (for a while) superior returns. A startlingly conformist agenda emerged all over: design over content; short, uninteresting (but non-irritating to advertisers) stories, etc. The universe of different tactics, strategies and innovations that a competitive industry would have evolved never happened. The industry became strikingly inwardly focused, insulated from a changing world. When change was noted, it somehow always produced moves that degraded the news product. Years were spent developing “new editorial products” to attract non-readers. This was a questionable use of resources, as surveys and focus groups showed most of these people wouldn’t read anyway, and certainly not subscribe seven days a week to a print edition. But the resources to do them were diverted away from coverage that served existing readers. Industry leaders were singularly cavalier about their loyal customers, while chasing ones they had little chance to attracting.

-Leadership collapsed under the weight of these forces. A generation of managers that would go along with these dictates rose, while those with other ideas were pushed out or aside. These surviving managers – of course with honorable exceptions – were singularly incapable of dealing with the historic turning points facing newspapers. Every day they came in hoping to not make a mistake, to merely preserve the business they had, or to push through artificial, top-down, one-side-fits-all formulas, usually backed by questionable research. At some chains, the jobs of editors became little more than gathering stuff for graphic do-dads and implementing the content rules cooked up at headquarters. These were once the front-line leaders who made the biggest difference in the quality of a product based, inexorably, on the written word, well told. The simple creed of "get a great story and put it in the newspaper (or online)" went away. For example, experienced police reporters went away -- even though it's clear that well-done cop stories draw readers. In their place was a 21-year-old taking dictation from a police public-affairs announcement.

-The biggest problem, of course, had nothing to do with the newsrooms. It was the collapse of an unsustainable business model. Simply put, the model involved sending miniskirted saleswomen out to sell ads at confiscatory rates to lecherous old car dealers and appliance-store owners. Protecting these profits, whether from national, local or classified ads, became the central focus of newspaper bosses. These areas were the most vulnerable to new competitors. But the condition of the industry by the 1990s – risk averse, promising unrealistic margins, losing its best talent, ignoring ideas outside its preconceived notions – left it unable to meet these threats.

The newspaper was always a tricky balance, where advertising paid for an independent news operation. The best newspapers carried it off. But news alone could never “pay for itself.” It would be have been difficult for any mature industry to face the sea changes that swamped newspapers. But a more decentralized, competitive industry might have found its way. Imagine if one company would have turned a “dying” PM newspaper into an online newspaper? It would have been very lean, but a wonderful competitive weapon. Imagine if another would have bought Yahoo in its infancy and both fed off its innovation and used it as a news and advertising platform?

Now the tailspin continues, and the damage to our democracy is hard to overstate. It's no coincidence that the United States stumbled into Iraq and is paralyzed before serious challenges at home and abroad at precisely the moment when real journalism is besieged. It almost might make the conspiracy minded think there was a grand plan to keep us dumb.

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A Step Closer to Fascism

For years, as many as 200 members of Immanuel Bible Church and their friends have gathered in the church's fellowship hall to watch the Super Bowl on its six-foot screen. The party featured hard hitting on the TV, plenty of food -- and prayer.

But this year, Immanuel's Super Bowl party is no more. After a crackdown by the National Football League on big-screen Super Bowl gatherings by churches, the Springfield church has sacked its event. Instead, church members will host parties in their homes.

Immanuel is among a number of churches in the Washington area and elsewhere that have been forced to use a new playbook to satisfy the NFL, which said that airing games at churches on large-screen TV sets violates the NFL copyright.

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New Cinema from the WGA