'Heil Hitler!' in South Carolina

Inside the Secret World of White Supremacy

John F. Sugg, Truthout

When John Howard, owner of the Redneck Shop, saw a black youngster bicycle past his store, he erupted: "There's a nigger there I'd like to hang."

Beyond the hardcore cadre, the backbone strength of Aryan Nations is the estimated 50,000 Americans who share the anti-black, anti-Hispanic and vehemently anti-Semitic beliefs of the Christian Identity movement, plus several times that number who may sympathize with the sect. "Becoming part of this movement means you're Yahweh's elite," Williams boasted in an interview. "You won't find a religion of fewer people, but the numbers don't mean anything because we go to war for Yahweh."

{ ... }

"There are many out there we want to reach with a message that's not watered down," Williams said. "Our heritage is the true Israel. 'Jew' is the name of a mixed-race people. The biggest lie besides the Holocaust is that Jews are the 'chosen people.' Satan is their father."

And, according to the Aryan Nations leader, non-white races were created before Adam, and are the sub-human "beasts of the field" referred to in Genesis 2:19. "It's clear they have lower intelligence," Williams said. "Blacks are soul-less mud people who never had Yahweh's breath of life."

{ ... }

Josh Fowler, nattily robed in green, albeit sans hood, was one of the first in a series of Klan speakers. He swaggered onto the Echo's stage flanked by two bodyguards, one bearing a round shield adorned with the Klan cross. The youthful grand dragon of one of the Klan groups from South Carolina first warmed up the crowd with a little humor, joking that he welcomed speaking inside, at a podium. "Most of the time," Fowler quipped, "I'm on the back of a pickup truck."

The tempo of Fowler's speech quickened and the decibel level soared, until at full screech he brought the audience to its feet in cheers by announcing that what he "really hate[s] is white women with little mongrel babies."

{ ... }

His most vitriolic comments were reserved for Hispanics, the new punching bags of the far right. "They breed like rats, worse than niggers, and send their money back to Mexico," Griffin roared. "Only thing I got for them is a bullet right between the eyes. Ship their dead butts back to Mexico."

Translating Rumsfeld

Rumsfeld: Iraq must take over security

Robert Burns, Associated Press:

The Iraqi government is going to have to take over its country's security "sooner rather than later," Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Friday, as the violence there continued to escalate.

Rumsfeld said U.S. officials, including Gen. George Casey, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, are working with the Iraqi government to develop projections as to when they think they can pass off various pieces of responsibility. He provided no detail.

"The biggest mistake would be to not pass things over to the Iraqis, create a dependency on their part, instead of developing strength and capacity and competence," said Rumsfeld. "It's their country, they're going to have to govern it, they're going to have to provide security for it, and they're going to have to do it sooner rather than later. And that means they've got to take pieces of it as we go along."

Translation: "We're not cutting and running. At the cost of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives, for whom we cared nothing, and only a few thousand lives of Americans for whom we cared nothing, we've now insured that there will be decades of war between Shias, Sunnis, and Kurds, with no faction strong enough to prevent US oil companies from taking control of the oil resources of the region formerly known as Iraq. Mission accomplished."

Deeply obliged?

Foley's angels

Mark Benjamin, Salon:

Oct. 6, 2006 | WASHINGTON -- The Pinto family, which owns and runs a Long Island, N.Y., debt-collection agency, are generous Republican donors, giving more than $156,000 to GOP candidates since 2000. What makes the family's political gift-giving unusual is that almost all of their campaign contributions since 2000 have gone to just two House members -- Mark Foley, whose misconduct triggered the the Capitol Hill page scandal, and Tom Reynolds, whose chief of staff, Kirk Fordham, negotiated with ABC News on Foley's behalf to try to contain the story.

The ties between Foley and Reynolds go beyond having, in turn, employed Fordham in their top staff job. Reynolds is one of four House Republicans who have said that they had received warnings about Foley's suggestive e-mails to pages months before public disclosure. As the chairman of the campaign arm of House Republicans, the National Republican Congressional Committee, Reynolds was aided by financial assistance from Foley, who transferred $100,000 of his own campaign funds to the NRCC in July. Foley was more generous to the NRCC than all but 26 other House Republicans.

{ ... }

Foley, who just resigned from Congress, and Reynolds served together on a House Ways and Means subcommittee that deals with the Internal Revenue Service. This IRS subcommittee connection may have inspired the Pinto family's interest in supporting the political careers of both Republicans.

Congress in 2004 approved a Republican amendment that authorized the IRS to hire private companies to collect back taxes. The Pinto firm with 300 employees, headquartered in Melville, N.Y., made no secret of wanting an IRS debt-collection contract under the new legislation.

With friends like this...

Crooks and Liars has the video of Rep. Ray Lahood, R-Illinois, "defending" House Speaker Dennis Hastert:

When he appointed Duck Cunningham to the intelligence committee, he went to Duke and made sure he wasn't on the intelligence committee after it was disclosed he took 2.3 million dollars. And when Bob Ney was appointed chairman of the House administration committee, he was appointed by Speaker Hastert. Speaker Hastert went to him and told him to step down from that committee after the Abramoff disclosures. Hastert has the ability to take on these big ethical challenges that our party has faced…

Fired for telling truth?

At Reuters, a New Book and a Lost Job

Noam Cohen, New York Times:

On Tuesday, Joe Maguire, one of two editors in charge of markets coverage at Reuters, handed his bosses the galleys of his new book, “Brainless: The Lies and Lunacy of Ann Coulter.” On Wednesday, Mr. Maguire discovered he would have plenty of free time to promote his book, which comes out this week. Neither side in this dispute would say that he was fired.

“There was a difference of opinion about the approval I received to write this book,” Mr. Maguire said. “I thought I had met the conditions, and proceeded accordingly. As a result, I no longer work there.”

Mr. Maguire, who joined Reuters in April, said the book “looks at Ann Coulter’s arguments, and deconstructs them to show how misguided they can be.”

He added: “When the political discourse has dropped to the unfathomable levels it has, someone has to say this is wrong.”

He said he was unable to interview Ms. Coulter for the book, or even get her to return e-mail or phone messages left through her publicist.

Reuters confirmed that Mr. Maguire was granted conditional approval to write his book on Ms. Coulter — a conservative lightning rod, author and TV talking head. When asked what changed once the book was ready, a company statement pointed to Reuters’ principles of “integrity, independence and freedom from bias.” The statement reads: “Our editorial policy and The Reuters Trust Principles are prominently displayed for all to see on www.about.reuters.com. Mr. Maguire’s book will soon be available. Both speak for themselves.”

The book's Web site states:

In BRAINLESS, journalist Joe Maguire takes an incisive look at Coulter, both the private and the public personas, and takes aim at those issues at the helm of her agenda-9/11, Iraq, abortion, Christianity, the Democratic Party, and gender and race issues to name a few-and uncovers her contradictory statements, her questionable research, and her insatiable and socio-pathic need to say just about anything to stay in the spotlight.

Seems like sound journalism, if the book lives up to the blurb.

'More dangerous... than an atomic bomb'

2001 Press Gazette interview with murdered Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya (previous post):

She was marched into the middle of a field for more than an hour. “Then an armoured vehicle arrived filled with armed fighters. They seized me, pushed me with their rifle butts and took me away.”

She won’t go into the full details of what happened over the next few days, other than to say they were “disgusting” and “utterly obscene”.

But she says: “My tormentors couldn’t have imagined they were providing me with the key proof that everything the Chechens had told me about torture and manhandling was true.”

Her captors found the pictures of her children and told her in graphic detail what they would do to them.

A lieutenant colonel switched on “what he imagined was romantic music” and made it clear what she’d have to do to expect a “favourable outcome”. She refused. “Then he looked as his watch and said, ‘Let’s go. I’m going to shoot you’. He took me out of the tent. It was pitch dark. We walked a short distance and he said, ‘Ready or not, here I come’. Suddenly there was a terrible racket, screeching and flames.” A mortar had been fired right next to her.

{ ... }

She was standing in a square in Grozny a few weeks after her article about the camps had been published. An officer came to her said: “I’ve read your work, and I’d like to talk to you.”

But then a general approached: “I would like to shoot you for what you’ve written. You’re more dangerous for us than an atomic bomb.”

Politkovskaya shrugs. “All I do is write. I think this is a big exaggeration of the work of a journalist.”

How Bush let North Korea get nukes

Rolling Blunder: How the Bush administration let North Korea get nukes

Fred Kaplan, Washington Monthly, May 2004:

On Oct. 4, 2002, officials from the U.S. State Department flew to Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea, and confronted Kim Jong-il's foreign ministry with evidence that Kim had acquired centrifuges for processing highly enriched uranium, which could be used for building nuclear weapons. To the Americans' surprise, the North Koreans conceded. It was an unsettling revelation, coming just as the Bush administration was gearing up for a confrontation with Iraq. This new threat wasn't imminent; processing uranium is a tedious task; Kim Jong-il was almost certainly years away from grinding enough of the stuff to make an atomic bomb.

But the North Koreans had another route to nuclear weapons--a stash of radioactive fuel rods, taken a decade earlier from its nuclear power plant in Yongbyon. These rods could be processed into plutonium--and, from that, into A-bombs--not in years but in months. Thanks to an agreement brokered by the Clinton administration, the rods were locked in a storage facility under the monitoring of international weapons-inspectors. Common sense dictated that--whatever it did about the centrifuges--the Bush administration should do everything possible to keep the fuel rods locked up.

Unfortunately, common sense was in short supply. After a few shrill diplomatic exchanges over the uranium, Pyongyang upped the ante. The North Koreans expelled the international inspectors, broke the locks on the fuel rods, loaded them onto a truck, and drove them to a nearby reprocessing facility, to be converted into bomb-grade plutonium. The White House stood by and did nothing. Why did George W. Bush--his foreign policy avowedly devoted to stopping "rogue regimes" from acquiring weapons of mass destruction--allow one of the world's most dangerous regimes to acquire the makings of the deadliest WMDs? Given the current mayhem and bloodshed in Iraq, it's hard to imagine a decision more ill-conceived than invading that country unilaterally without a plan for the "post-war" era. But the Bush administration's inept diplomacy toward North Korea might well have graver consequences. President Bush made the case for war in Iraq on the premise that Saddam Hussein might soon have nuclear weapons--which turned out not to be true. Kim Jong-il may have nuclear weapons now; he certainly has enough plutonium to build some, and the reactors to breed more.

'My house. Mondays. 6:00'

My Real Katrina Anniversary

Crashing Vor at Daily Kos:

While your TV screens were choked with anniversary programming on August 29, for a lot of Orleanians, the date to commemorate, as the Times-Picayune's John Maginns pointed out, is October 1, when those of us outside the "sliver by the river" were permitted to come back to town to begin cleaning up our houses, neighborhoods and our lives. For those of us who live in 70119--the fairest zip code in the land--the date of return was set at October 5.

{... }

Throughout October, we kept a simple, exhausting routine that started at sunup and went through until dark, when it was time to have the genny gassed up and the hatches battened down. In many ways, it was like the schedule humans have kept throughout our history. Then, late in the month, our QOL jumped dramatically in the space of a minute--Entergy turned on the lights. The first thing I did was fire up the big speakers and blast the neighborhood. Hendrix, Steve Earle, Odetta, Bob Marley, Dylan. I hadn't rocked a house like that in years.

The next day, GF and I got in the car and headed out to Metairie, the suburb where all of New Orleans shopped for a while, to pick up a double-burner electric hotplate (gas service took another month). The following Monday, we served red beans and rice for the neighborhood, the first such red bean Monday of what has turned out to be a year of them.

Red beans and rice has the traditional Monday supper in New Orleans for generations, mostly because Monday is the traditional day to do laundry and red beans can be left to simmer while you wash, dry, fold, etc. I have some friends who'd never eaten anything else on Monday night until they left their parents' houses at majority. It's a tradition I like, and have kept loosely when I could.

Since last year, it's one I've kept religiously, missing only two Mondays (a horrible oral surgery and a death in the family).

{... }

I really wasn't snarking in my comment to UU VIEW's diary asking how we'd organize if the Bushistas blacked out the internet ("My house. Mondays. 6:00"). A regular neighborhood meal is a great organizing and informational tool.

Hamdan's lawyer forced from Navy

Guantánamo defense lawyer forced out of Navy

Carol Rosenberg, McClatchy Newspapers:

NEWARK, N.J. — The Navy lawyer who took the Guantánamo case of Osama bin Laden's driver to the U.S. Supreme Court — and won — has been passed over for promotion by the Pentagon and must soon leave the military.

Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift, 44, said last week he received word he had been denied a promotion to full-blown commander this summer, "about two weeks after" the Supreme Court sided against the White House and with his client, a Yemeni captive at the U.S. Navy base in southeast Cuba.

Under the military's "up-or-out" promotion system, Swift will retire in March or April, closing a 20-year career of military service.

A Pentagon appointee, Swift embraced the alleged al-Qaida's sympathizer's defense with a classic defense lawyer's zeal, casting his captive client as an innocent victim in the dungeon of King George, a startling analogy for the attorney whose commander-in-chief is President (George) Bush.

"It was a pleasure to serve," said Swift, who added that he would defend Salim Hamdan again, even if he knew he would have to leave the Navy earlier than he wanted.

"All I ever wanted was to make a difference — and in that sense, I think my career and personal satisfaction has been beyond my dreams," he said.

The woman who shamed Moscow

Death of the woman who shamed Moscow

Mark Franchetti, Sunday Times:

RUSSIA’S most famous investigative reporter, Anna Politkovskaya, was gunned down in the lift of her Moscow apartment block yesterday in an apparent contract killing.

A fearless opponent of Russia’s wars in Chechnya who once described President Vladimir Putin as a “KGB snoop” and compared him to Stalin, she was shot as she returned home from a shopping trip at 4.30pm. A pistol and four bullets were found near her body.

She was the most prominent of dozens of Russian journalists murdered in the past 10 years and her death has dealt a serious blow to the country’s reputation.

Mikhail Gorbachev, the former president, said: “It’s a strike against all the democratic independent press, a terrible crime against the entire country, against all of us.”

A thousand words...

(Thanks Crooks and Liars)

Enjoy your flight, Robert Johnson

Unlikely Terrorists On No-Fly List

CBS:

60 Minutes, in collaboration with the National Security News Service, has obtained the secret list used to screen airline passengers for terrorists and discovered it includes names of people not likely to cause terror, including the president of Bolivia, people who are dead and names so common, they are shared by thousands of innocent fliers.

{ ... }

The "data dump" of names from the files of several government agencies, including the CIA, fed into the computer compiling the list contained many unlikely terrorists. These include Saddam Hussein, who is under arrest, Nabih Berri, Lebanon's parliamentary speaker, and Evo Morales, the president of Bolivia. It also includes the names of 14 of the 19 dead 9/11 hijackers.

But the names of some of the most dangerous living terrorists or suspects are kept off the list.

The 11 British suspects recently charged with plotting to blow up airliners with liquid explosives were not on it, despite the fact they were under surveillance for more than a year.

{ ... }

Even if the list is made more accurate, it won't help thousands of innocent travelers who share a common name on the list and who get detained, sometimes for hours, when they attempt to fly.

Gary Smith, John Williams and Robert Johnson are some of those names. Kroft talked to 12 people with the name Robert Johnson, all of whom are detained almost every time they fly. The detentions can include strip searches and long delays in their travels.

"Well, Robert Johnson will never get off the list," says Donna Bucella, who oversaw the creation of the list and has headed up the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center since 2003. She regrets the trouble they experience, but chalks it up to the price of security in the post-9/11 world. "They're going to be inconvenienced every time … because they do have the name of a person who's a known or suspected terrorist," says Bucella.

CRS: Bush signing statements power grab

Bush signings called effort to expand power

Charlie Savage, Boston Globe:

President Bush's frequent use of signing statements to assert that he has the power to disobey newly enacted laws is ``an integral part" of his ``comprehensive strategy to strengthen and expand executive power" at the expense of the legislative branch, according to a report by the non partisan Congressional Research Service.

In a 27-page report written for lawmakers, the research service said the Bush administration is using signing statements as a means to slowly condition Congress into accepting the White House's broad conception of presidential power, which includes a presidential right to ignore laws he believes are unconstitutional.

The ``broad and persistent nature of the claims of executive authority forwarded by President Bush appear designed to inure Congress, as well as others, to the belief that the president in fact possesses expansive and exclusive powers upon which the other branches may not intrude," the report said.

Under most interpretations of the Constitution, the report said, some of the legal assertions in Bush's signing statements are dubious. For example, it said, the administration has suggested repeatedly that the president has exclusive authority over foreign affairs and has an absolute right to withhold information from Congress. Such assertions are ``generally unsupported by established legal principles," the report said.

CRS September 20 report

Artfully advocating peace

Artfully advocating peace

Jody Sabral, Aljazeera:

Three Danish artists have performed an "art protest" on the streets of the Sri Lankan capital, Colombo, to promote peace in the war-torn country.

Jan Egesborg, one of the street artists involved, told Aljazeera by telephone from Colombo on Monday: "With the present unrest in Sri Lanka we came to advocate for peace."

Egesborg, Pia Bertelsen, and Affex Ventura, who call themselves "Surrend", short for surrender, plastered stickers around the city centre with slogans that read: "Potentially prosperous society - of course you kill each other; Snow all year - of course you kill each other; Terrible beaches here - of course you kill each other; Food is as bad as in Denmark - of course you kill each other."

Egesborg said that the text plays with subtle irony, because Sri Lanka has beautiful beaches, good food, sun all year and is a potentially prosperous society.

{ ... }

Up to 60,000 people have been displaced in the country's northeast, and hundreds have been killed since the recent conflict broke out between the military and the Tamil Tigers (LTTE) three months ago.

GOP Rep uses kids as human shields

NRCC Uses Small Children As Human Shields

Jane Hamsher at Firedoglake:

In the fine tradition of George W. Bush standing under the "Mission Accomplished" sign, or any one of the Katrina backdrops (where no expense was spared to bring power to an area for a photo op, and then just as quickly cut off), we now have the head of the NRCC, Tom Reynolds, using small prop children as set decoration in a press conference devoted to the topic of…yes, predatory online sexual solicitation of minors.

Even the reporters present could not contain themselves:

Reporter: Congressman, do you mind asking the children to leave the room so we can have a frank discussion of this, because it's an adult topic. It just doesn't seem appropriate to me.

Reynolds: I'll take your questions, but I'm not going to ask any of my supporters to leave.

Firedoglake has the video clip, too. (Thanks digby)

A third of land desert by 2100

One third of the planet will be desert by the year 2100, say climate experts

Michael McCarthy, The Independent:

Drought threatening the lives of millions will spread across half the land surface of the Earth in the coming century because of global warming, according to new predictions from Britain's leading climate scientists.

Extreme drought, in which agriculture is in effect impossible, will affect about a third of the planet, according to the study from the Met Office's Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research.

It is one of the most dire forecasts so far of the potential effects of rising temperatures around the world - yet it may be an underestimation, the scientists involved said yesterday.

Gimme an 'F'

I needed to hear this again; maybe you do, too.



Country Joe McDonald at Woodstock, 1969.

Waterboard Armey and DeLay

Congressional pages were warned about former Rep. Mark Foley as long ago as 2001-2. John in DC posted the ABC News video at AmericaBlog, and also relates how Page board boss Rep. John Shimkus let Foley spend time alone with pages even after such warnings were given.

Rep. Dennis Hastert was already Speaker at that time; the GOP leadership in the House then included Majority Leader Dick Armey and Majority Whip Tom DeLay. What did they know? Let's waterboard 'em; it's not like it's torture...

And speaking of Armey: Armey Lashes Out Against Dobson, Values Voters

Pete Winn, associate editor, family.org (Focus on the Family):

Former Texas Congressman Dick Armey, once a stalwart ally in the culture wars, appears to be turning his back on Christian conservatives and their leaders.

The former majority leader of the House of Representatives reportedly told Ryan Sager, author of a new book on the Republican Party, that values voters and their leaders — especially Focus on the Family Action Chairman Dr. James Dobson — are "nasty bullies."

In the interview, Armey responded pointedly when Sager asked why he thought Christian conservatives seemed more powerful now than in the 1990s.

"To a large extent, because Dobson and his gang of thugs are real nasty bullies," Armey said. "I pray devoutly every day, but being a Christian is no excuse for being stupid. There's a high demagoguery coefficient to issues like prayer in schools. Demagoguery doesn't work unless it's dumb . . . These issues are easy for the intellectually lazy and can appeal to a large demographic."

Focus on the Family Action President Jim Daly said it's shocking the former congressman would attack millions of values voters who helped Armey and other social conservatives gain control of Congress.

(Thanks OfftheKuff)

Manufacturing terror

Juan Cole at Informed Comment:

Why is the Bush administration so attached to torturing people that it would pressure a supine Congress into raping the US constitution by explicitly permitting some torture techniques and abolishing habeas corpus for certain categories of prisoners?

Boys and girls, it is because torture is what provides evidence for large important networks of terrorists where there aren't really any, or aren't very many, or aren't enough to justify 800 military bases and a $500 billion military budget.

Cole reports on a September 30 address by Britain's former Ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, at a conference of the Central Eurasian Studies Society:

Murray began receiving photographs and other evidence from victims' families that the Uzbek government was engaging in brutal torture techniques as part of its interrogation of dissidents. One corpse had been beaten around the neck and jaw, and boiled alive. There was a line across his chest, under which it was scalded. Boiled like a lobster.

Yet the UK and the US were giving large amounts of foreign aid to Uzbekistan and winking at the political repression and torture. (Murray may not have known at that time that the US had a detention facility at its Karshi-Khanabad airbase in Uzbekistan, at which it was also torturing suspects.) The US was hoping that its corporations would be given contracts for the development and export of Uzbekistan natural gas. (In late 2004, the Uzbeks made their contract with the Russian Gazprom firm instead, and almost immediately Karimov began planning to ask the US to leave the base.)

Murray as UK ambassador began seeing CIA reports naming known al-Qaeda operatives who were prominent in Uzbekistan. But these turned out to be just run of the mill Uzbek politicians who were on the outs with Karimov. Where did the CIA get this information about high-level terrorists in Uzbekistan? From Karimov's secret police. And where did they get their phony "intelligence"? From torturing dissidents and making them admit to being al-Qaeda and implicating others as al-Qaeda. From torture. From the twilight of conciousness before the boiling killed them. From lobsters.

Now I have to back up and tell you about Uzbekistan. Uzbeks have a Muslim heritage. They have Muslim names. But Uzbekistan is a country full of atheists and secularists. It is more secular than France. Everyone drinks vodka like fish. Almost no one could actually tell you how to pray the five daily prayers. There are a few. They are considered odd by the other Uzbeks. I know a sociologist brought up in the Soviet Union who has studied its "Muslims," who were deracinated over 60 years, and he said, "What you have to understand is that they were normal Soviet citizens." He is right.

{ ... }

In a poll done in 2002 by Pew, 91 percent of Uzbeks agreed with Bush's War on Terror and the way it was being waged! You couldn't have found those numbers anyplace else in the world, maybe even in the US!

Murray pointed out that if you had a referendum in Uzbekistan on whether Islamic canon law should be the law of the land, and explained that it would result in a ban on vodka, less that 1 percent of the population would vote for it. That is certainly true.

So there isn't, frankly, any al-Qaeda to speak of in Uzbekistan. But Karimov used torture and false allegations to manufacture an al-Qaeda, and Murray thought that the Bush administration and elements in the CIA were swallowing it hook, line and sinker.

{ ... }

But the problem is that we now know that serious al-Qaeda is probably only a few hundred men now, and at most a few thousand. Look at who exactly did the London subway bombing. A few guys in a gym in Leeds. That magnitude of threat just would not keep a "War on Terror" in business. The embassy bombings, the Cole, and September 11 itself were done by tiny poorly funded cells that functioned as terror boutiques to accomplish a specific spectacular operation. They don't prove a worldwide, large organization. They prove tiny effective cells. Most of what the Pentagon does and can do is irrelevant to that kind of threat. You'd be better off with some good FBI agents.

So how do you prove to yourself and others a big terror threat that requires a National Security State and turn toward a praetorian society? You torture people into alleging it.

Foley's dirty little open secret

On September 5, long before the first ABC News report, WHInternNow posted The Real Problem With Foley at Daily Kos:

It's not that he's gay. It's that he constantly hits on underage interns on The Hill. You guys talk about an "open secret" well Foley's eye for the young boys in the White House and around the Capitol is what has the Republican bosses scared to death. It's just wrong that this guy can hit on young boys and still be in the leadership.

(Thanks Glenn Greenwald)

Stop Sex Predators posted this September 18 email from repub intern (along with two other emails) on September 21:

My dad who gives a lot of money to republicans got me an internship capitolhill. I thought that I was hot shit, having such a good internship after myfreshman year of college.After a few weeks, I was finally learning my way around DC and I wasenjoying my job.One night, I decided to go out with my new fake ID to my first gay bar.I went to this bar named Coblot.There was old guy who would not leave me alone. He kept following me around.I tried to get him to leave me alone by going to the bathroom.Instead he followed me in and tried to grope me.A few days later my boss had me run something over to another congressmansoffice. It turned out that the guy who groped me was Representative MarkFoley.

Later on September 21, Stop Sex Predators posted an email from No Body:

I am tired of people treating this thing with Congressman Mark Foley like ajoke. It is not funny. He's a danger to any young, slightly attractive youngman on The Hill. I came to Washington because I care about the future ofAmerica. I wanted to be around good and decent men like President GeorgeBush. Instead, I feel like a piece of meat. The worst part of it for me isthere appear to be plenty of my fellow interns who don't mind Foley'sparticular "path to power." Please, if there is anyone who knows what Ishould do tell me. I am genuinely afraid of this man. Anytime he is aroundhe just leers and one guy told me he asked for his email address and got abunch of invitations to go out and "party" whatever that means. Help. Help.Help.

'No longer a democracy... a dictatorship'

Laura Rotolo letter to the Boston Globe:

I GREW UP in Argentina during the rule of a military junta that disappeared more than 30,000 people. I know that when a president has the sole power to detain people he deems to be enemies, when he alone can set the rules for interrogation, when detained people don't have the right to go to court, and when laws are written to immunize officials who have already committed torture, one is no longer living in a democracy but in a dictatorship.

(Thanks Echidne of the Snakes)

9/11 Commission counsel: 'Possible crime'

Bush Officials May Have Covered Up Rice-Tenet Meeting From 9/11 Commission

Peter Rundlet, Counsel to the 9/11 Commission, at Think Progress:

A mixture of shock, anger, and sadness overcame me when I read about revelations in Bob Woodward’s new book about a special surprise visit that George Tenet and his counterterrorism chief Cofer Black made to Condi Rice, also on July 10, 2001:

They went over top-secret intelligence pointing to an impending attack and “sounded the loudest warning” to the White House of a likely attack on the U.S. by Bin Laden.

Woodward writes that Rice was polite, but, “They felt the brushoff.”

If true, it is shocking that the administration failed to heed such an overwhelming alert from the two officials in the best position to know. Many, many questions need to be asked and answered about this revelation — questions that the 9/11 Commission would have asked, had the Commission been told about this significant meeting. Suspiciously, the Commissioners and the staff investigating the administration’s actions prior to 9/11 were never informed of the meeting. As Commissioner Jamie Gorelick pointed out, “We didn’t know about the meeting itself. I can assure you it would have been in our report if we had known to ask about it.”

{ ... }

At a minimum, the withholding of information about this meeting is an outrage. Very possibly, someone committed a crime. And worst of all, they failed to stop the plot.

(Thanks Raw Story)