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The state Theft of Children - So called British Justice - Even a murderer is treated better

Monday, August 27th, 2007

The Dark Heart Of England

English authorities take newborn babies for adoption - this compares how their legal system treats a pregnant woman and a man arrested for murder.

The bulk of English adoptions result from forcible takings:

Children fall into three groups according to the reason for their adoption: relinquished infants (14%), those whose parents had requested adoption in complex circumstances (24%), and those children required to be adopted by social services and the courts (62%).

So now let’s compare our murderer and the woman whose baby is taken (English authorities often take several kids at once, but to keep it simple we’ll look at single takings).

Investigating Authority

The murderer gets investigated by the cops who are required by law to identify themselves by name, and sometimes number.

The pregnant woman gets investigated by social services officials whose identities are kept secret throughout legal proceeding and all all times subsequently.

Lawyer Presence

The alleged murderer is entitled to have his lawyer present at all interviews with cops.

The pregnant woman has no rights to have her lawyer present during her meetings with social services, and (as the YouTube debacle showed), they prevent the woman recording.

Miranda Rights

Cops must read the alleged murderer the Brit equivalent of Miranda rights before taking any statement from him, and must release him if they are not able to charge him within a tightly-limited period. They must tape the entire interview and hold it for subsequent audit, and the suspect must sign any confession.

Social services officials do not read Miranda rights; they can interview the woman as many times as they like for as long as they like. They can call on (or require the attendance of) the woman at any time. They do not tape meetings in auditable form. They are not required to have the woman sign any statements they note.

Charges

The murder is charged with a specific act, which the court must verify.

The woman can be charged with the potential for inflicting harm, for example:

In March Mr Justice McFarlane publicly castigated social workers who had removed a nine-year-old girl from her parents for 14 months on the absolutely false pretext that her mother might be suffering from Munchausen’s syndrome by proxy (attention-seeking).

The judge found that every one of the 13 assertions made by the social services team leader was “misleading or incomplete or wrong”.

Munchausen’s syndrome by proxy was invented by the fraudster Meadow and is now discredited - many women have lost their babies to this monster.

Representation

Social services targets the babies of the young, ill, and poor, who must rely on court-provided lawyers. Some (at least) of these are believed by their customers to be in cahoots with social services and/or the dregs of their profession.

The murderer has the same problem, however he has daylight on his side - if his lawyer messes up, it’s visible to the world.

Secret Courts

Unlike the murderer, the woman has to fight for her child under a complete blanket of secrecy:

The courts…rule on bids by councils to put removed children up for adoption, which is irreversible. Yet, while criminal cases must be proved beyond reasonable doubt, family courts take decisions on the balance of probabilities and unlike criminal courts, cases are heard in strict secrecy.

Under the current law, reporters and members of the public cannot attend family court hearings, see documents, review evidence or obtain copies of judgments.

Since in forced adoption cases the baby is being taken into a new family, its “old” identity is irrelevant. The real motive is to protect the individuals doing the taking - here’s a family lawyer:

“Social services are the only department other than MI5 who undertake their work in complete secrecy. It’s not the welfare of the child that is being protected, it is the welfare of social workers. This cannot be justified.

It gets worse - adoption agencies aren’t covered by this secrecy - here’s a rare campaigner (scroll quarter way down):

I can generally only write when judges go public.

Yet I have discovered that even as I was writing about this case last year, painstakingly omitting much of the detail to ensure that no one could identify the child, her picture, real name and age were being published in a national newspaper. Not by a journalist, who would have been in contempt of court. But by an adoption agency, advertising for adopters.

Agencies have to find good homes for needy children. Many do a great job. But for parents who are routinely told that they will be in contempt if they dare to reveal the legal proceedings to anyone outside the court, or even to talk about the child by name, because his or her privacy is paramount, it is staggering to see their children being advertised like pets.

Contempt

Women fighting to keep their kids may not treat these awful courts and social services employees with the respect they feel they deserve. In consequence, each week in England, these courts jail 4 people for contempt. That gives them a criminal record and guarantees they won’t get their kids back.

This 200 a year is oddly hard to track down. It’s a quote by government minister in a debate on June 13, 2006, and a search confirms it. But the full quote is not accessible on Parliament’s website - I do hope that’s a glitch.

Appeal

The murderer has the full record of his trail published, and has a right to appeal.

The mother has no such record, so cannot appeal:

Family courts are refusing to tell mothers why their babies are being taken away and put up for forced adoption.

Two mothers have told The Sunday Telegraph that their pain at losing their children was made worse by not knowing the grounds on which judges took the decisions.

Both women had their requests for copies of the judgments turned down repeatedly. As a result, they were prevented from launching legal battles to win their babies back, because appeals cannot be lodged without -written judgments.

Without written judgments, parents can’t even ask the European Court of Justice to intervene.

And even if the woman does appeal successfully, once the baby has been adopted, the English authorities won’t return it (see comment 3:18):

After taking their daughter to hospital, they were accused of abusing her. Their second child, born a few weeks later, was taken away almost from the moment she was born. They have subsequently been cleared of any charges, yet their children have not been returned to them.

They are being told by SS that, despite seeing their mother up until January this year (when the older daughter was told to say goodbye to her mother because she’d never see her again), they are settled with their prospective adoptive family and they will not be moved and that it is SS’s decision to overturn an adoption decision.

So English women are unprotected from a state that inflicts the terrible and life-long damage of losing their kids, while murderers have a raft of protections against a short prison sentence:

The mandatory life sentence does not underpin public abhorrence of murder because everyone knows that life does not mean life but on average something less than 10 years.

That’s England - land of stolen kids, abused women, and happy murderers.

Fortunately, the rest of the world is different - here’s Baroness Hale:

The United Kingdom is unusual amongst members of the Council of Europe in permitting the total severance of family ties without parental consent. (Professor Triseliotis thought that only Portugal and perhaps one other European country allowed this.) It is, of course, the most draconian interference with family life possible.

In future posts we’ll look at the perpetrators of these outrages, at the people fighting them, and the implications for English society.

 If anyone has had a similar experience we want to hear from you, Email  blackerja@hotmail.co.uk.

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Cancer in Iraq vets raises possibility of toxic exposure

Monday, August 27th, 2007

By Carla McClain

After serving in Vietnam nearly 40 years ago — and receiving the Bronze Star for it — the Tucson soldier was called back to active duty in Iraq.

While there, he awoke one morning with a sore throat. Eighteen months later, Army Sgt. James Lauderdale was dead, of a bizarrely aggressive cancer rarely seen by the doctors who tried to treat it.

As a result, his stunned and heartbroken family has joined growing ranks of sickened and dying Iraq war vets and their families who believe exposures to toxic poisons in the war zone are behind their illnesses — mostly cancers, striking the young, taking them down with alarming speed.

The number of these cancers remains undisclosed, with military officials citing patient privacy issues, as well as lack of evidence the cases are linked to conditions in the war zone. The U.S. Congress has ordered a probe of suspect toxins and may soon begin widespread testing of our armed forces.

“He got so sick, so fast”

Jim Lauderdale was 58 when his National Guard unit was deployed to the Iraq-Kuwait border, where he helped transport arriving soldiers and Marines into combat areas.

He was a strong man, say relatives, who can’t remember him ever missing a day of work for illness. And he developed a cancer of the mouth, which overwhelmingly strikes smokers, drinkers and tobacco chewers. He was none of those.

“Jim’s doctors didn’t know why he would get this kind of cancer — they had no answers for us,” said his wife, Dixie.

“He got so sick, so fast. We really think it had to be something he was exposed to over there. So many of the soldiers we met with cancer at Walter Reed (Army Medical Center) complained about the polluted air they lived in, the brown water they had to use, the dust they breathed from exploded munitions. It was very toxic.”

As a mining engineer, Lauderdale knew exactly what it meant when he saw the thick black smoke pouring nonstop out of the smokestacks that line the Iraq/Kuwait border area where he was stationed for three months in 2005.

“He wrote to me that everyone was complaining about their stinging eyes and sore throats and headaches,” Dixie said. “For Jim to say something like that, to complain, was very unusual.

“One of the mothers on the cancer ward had pictures of her son bathing in the brown water,” she said. “He died of kidney cancer.”

Stationed in roughly the same area as Lauderdale, yet another soldier — now fighting terminal colon cancer — described the scene there, of oil refineries, a cement factory, a chlorine factory and a sulfuric acid factory, all spewing unfiltered and uncontrolled substances into the air.

“One day, we were walking toward the port and they had sulfuric acid exploding out of the stacks. We were covered with it, everything was burning on us, and we had to turn around and get to the medics,” said Army Staff Sgt. Frank Valentin, 35.

Not long after, he developed intense rectal pain, which doctors told him for months was hemorrhoids. Finally diagnosed with aggressive colorectal cancer — requiring extensive surgery, resulting in a colostomy bag — he was given fewer than two years to live by his Walter Reed physicians.

He is now a couple of months past that death sentence, but his chemo drugs are starting to fail, and the cancer is eating into his liver and lungs. He spends his days with his wife and three children at their Florida home.

“I don’t know how much time I have,” he said.

Suspect: depleted uranium

None of these soldiers know for sure what’s killing them. But they suspect it’s a cascade of multiple toxic exposures, coupled with the intense stress of daily life in a war zone weakening their immune systems.

“There’s so much pollution from so many sources, your body can’t fight what’s coming at it,” Valentin said. “And you don’t eat well or sleep well, ever. That weakens you, too. There’s no chance to gather your strength. These are kids 19, 20 and 21 getting all kinds of cancers. The Walter Reed cancer ward is packed full with them.”

The prime suspect in all this, in the minds of many victims — and some scientists — is what’s known as depleted uranium — the radioactive chemical prized by the military for its ability to penetrate armored vehicles. When munitions explode, the substance hits the air as fine dust, easily inhaled.

Last month, the Iraqi environment minister blamed the tons of the chemical dropped during the war’s “shock and awe” campaign for a surge of cancer cases across the country.

However, the Pentagon and U.S. State Department strongly deny this, citing four studies, including one by the World Health Organization, that found levels in war zones not harmful to civilians or soldiers. A U.N. Environmental Program study concurs, but only if spent munitions are cleared away.

Returning solders have said that isn’t happening.

“When tanks exploded, I would handle those tanks, and there was DU everywhere,” said Valentin. “This is a big issue.”

The fierce Iraq winds carry desert sand and dust for miles, said Dixie Lauderdale, who suspects her husband was exposed to at least some depleted uranium. Many vets from the Gulf War blame the chemical used in that conflict for their Gulf War syndrome illnesses.

Congress orders study

As the controversy rages, Congress has ordered a comprehensive independent study, due in October, of the health effects of depleted uranium exposure on U.S. soldiers and their children. And a “DU bill” — ordering all members of the U.S. military exposed to it be identified and tested — is working its way through Congress.

“Basically, we want to get ahead of this curve, and not go through the years of painful denial we went through with Agent Orange that was the legacy of Vietnam,” said Rep. Raúl Grijalva, D-Ariz., a co-sponsor of the bill.

“We want an independent agency to do independent testing of our soldiers, and find out what’s really going on. These incidents of cancer and illness that all of us are hearing about back in our districts are not just anecdotal — there is a pattern here. And yes, I do suspect DU may be at the bottom of it.”

What’s happening today — growing numbers of sickened soldiers who say they were exposed to it amid firm denials of harm from military brass — almost mirrors the early stages of the Agent Orange aftermath. It took the U.S. military almost two decades to admit the powerful chemical defoliant killed and disabled U.S. troops in the jungles of Vietnam, and to begin compensating them for it.

Doctors flabbergasted

Whatever it was that struck Jim Lauderdale did a terrifying job of it.

Sent to Walter Reed with oral cancer in April 2005, he underwent his first extensive and disfiguring surgery, removing half his tongue to get to tumors in the mouth and throat. A second surgery followed a month later to clear out more of those areas.

Five months later, another surgery removed a new neck tumor. Then came heavy chemotherapy and radiation.

Shortly after, he had a massive heart attack, undergoing another surgery to place stents in his arteries. Two weeks later, the cancer was back and growing rapidly, forcing a fourth surgery in January 2006.

By this time, much of his neck and shoulder tissue was gone, and doctors tried to reconstruct a tongue, using tissue from his wrist. He couldn’t swallow, so was fed through a tube into his stomach.

Just weeks later, four external tumors appeared on his neck — “literally overnight,” his wife said.

Suffering severe complications from the chemo drugs, Lauderdale endured 39 radiation treatments, waking up one night bleeding profusely through his burned skin. The day after his radiation ended, new external tumors erupted at the edge of the radiation field, flabbergasting his doctors.

“As this aggressive disease grew though chemoradiation, it was determined at this point there was no chance for cure,” his oncologist wrote then.

By then, the cancer had spread to his lungs and spine and, most frightening of all, “hundreds and thousands” of tumors were erupting all over his upper body, his wife said.

“The doctors said they’d never seen anything like it — that this happens in only 1 percent of cases,” she said.

Efforts to contact his doctors at Walter Reed were unsuccessful, but a leading head-and-neck cancer specialist at the Arizona Cancer Center reviewed the course of Lauderdale’s disease.

“This a a very wrenching case,” said Dr. Harinder Garewal. “This is unusually aggressive behavior for an oral cancer. I would agree it happens in only 1 percent of cases.”

When oral cancer occurs in nonsmokers and non-drinkers, it tends to be more aggressive, he said.

“My feeling is the immune system for some reason can’t handle the cancer,” he said.

Jim Lauderdale died on July 14, 2006, and was buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

Dixie and their two grown children still feel the raw grief of loss, but not anger, she said.

“But I am convinced something very wrong is happening over there. Is anyone paying attention to this? Is the cancer ward still full?” she asked. “I would hate to see another whole generation affected like this, but I’m very afraid it will be.”

● Contact reporter Carla McClain at 806-7754 or at cmcclain@azstarnet.com.

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Clash with Cheney over Iran prompted Rove departure

Monday, August 27th, 2007

By Ray McGovern
It is as though I’m back as an analyst at the CIA, trying to estimate the chances of an attack on Iran. The putative attacker, though, happens to be our own president.

It is precisely the work we analysts used to do. And, while it is still a bit jarring to be turning our analytical tools on the U.S. leadership, it is by no means entirely new. For, of necessity, we Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) have been doing that for almost six years now — ever since 9/11, when “everything changed.”

Of necessity? Yes, because, with very few exceptions, American journalists lose their jobs if they expose things like fraudulent wars.

The craft of CIA analysis was designed to be an all-source operation, meaning that we analysts were responsible — and held accountable — for assimilating information from all sources and coming to judgments on what it all meant. We used information of all kinds, from the most sophisticated technical collection platforms to spies to open media.

Here I have to reveal a trade secret, which punctures the mystique of intelligence analysis. Generally speaking, 80 percent of the information one needs to form judgments on key intelligence targets or issues is available in open media.

It helps to have training from past masters of media analysis, which began in a structured way in targeting Japanese and German media in the 1940s. But, truth be told, everyone with a high school education can do it. It is not rocket science.

This is not to denigrate the contribution of CIA operations officers, case officers running sensitive agents, for though small in percentage of the whole nine yards available to be analyzed, information from such sources can often make a crucial contribution.

Consider, for example, the daring recruitment in mid-2002 of Saddam Hussein’s foreign minister, Naji Sabri, who was “turned” into working for the CIA and quickly established his credibility. Sabri told us there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

My former colleagues, perhaps a bit naively, were quite sure this would come as a vast relief to President George W. Bush and his advisers. Instead, they were told that the White House had no further interest in reporting from Sabri; rather, that the issue was not really WMD, it was “regime change.”

So our former colleague, operations officer par excellence, Robert Baer, reports (in this week’s “Time”) that, according to his sources, the Bush/Cheney administration is winding up for a strike on Iran, that Bush’s plan to put Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps on the terrorism list points in the direction of such a strike, and that delusional “neo-conservative” thinking that still guides White House policy concludes that such an attack would lead to the fall of the clerics and rise of a more friendly Iran.

Hold on, it gets even worse: Baer’s sources tell him that administration officials are thinking that “as long as we have bombers and missiles in the air, we will hit Iran’s nuclear facilities.”

VIPS member Phil Geraldi, writing in “The American Conservative,” earlier noted that Karl Rove has served as a counterweight to Vice President Dick Cheney, determined as Cheney seems to be expanding the Middle East quagmire to Iran.

And former Pentagon analyst, retired Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, who worked shoulder-to-shoulder with the most rabid Pentagon neo-cons just before the attack on Iraq, has put into words (on LewRockwell.com) speculation several of us have been indulging in with respect to Rove’s departure.

In short, it seems a good bet that Rove, who is no one’s dummy and would not want to have to “spin” an unnecessary war on Iran, lost the battle with Cheney over the merits of a military strike on Iran, and only then decided to spend more time with his family.

Whatever else Rove has been, he has served as a counterweight to Dick Cheney’s clear desire to expand the Middle East quagmire into Iran.

With the propaganda buildup we have seen so far, what seems most likely, at least initially, is an attack on Revolutionary Guard training facilities inside Iran, and that can be done with cruise missiles.

With some 20 targets already identified by anti-Iranian groups, there are enough assets already in place to do that job. But the while-we’re-at-it neo-con logic referred to above may well be applied after, or even during, that kind of attack from the air.

Yes, it is happening again.

The lead editorial in today’s “Washington Post” regurgitates the unproven allegations that Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps is “supplying the weapons that are killing a growing number of American soldiers in Iraq”; that it is “waging war against the United States and trying to kill as many American soldiers as possible.”

Designating Iran a “specially designated global terrorist” organization, says the Post, “seems to be the least the United States should be doing, given the soaring number of Iranian-sponsored bomb attacks in Iraq.”

It’s as though Dick Cheney is again writing the Post editorials. And not only that, arch neo-con James Woolsey has just told Lou Dobbs that the U.S. may have no choice but to bomb Iran in order to halt its nuclear weapons program.

As Woolsey puts it, “I’m afraid within, well, at worst, a few months; at best, a few years; they could have the bomb.”

Woolsey, self-described “anchor of the Presbyterian wing of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs,” has long been way out in front plumbing for wars, like Iraq, that he and other neo-cons myopically see as being in Israel’s, as well as America’s, interest.

Within days of 9/11, Woolsey was arguing for war with Iraq even while conceding, at the time, that there was no evidence tying Iraq to 9/11.

The latest is also rubbish. And Woolsey knows it. And so do the reporters for the “Washington Post,” who are aware of, but have been forbidden to tell, a highly interesting story.

The National Intelligence Estimate on if and when Iran is likely to have the bomb has been ready since February. It has been sent back four times — no doubt because its conclusions do not support what folks like Cheney and Woolsey are telling the president.

The conclusions of the most recent NIE on the issue (early 2005) was that Iran could probably not have a nuclear weapon until “early to mid-next decade,” a formula memorized and restated by Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell at his confirmation hearing in February.

One can safely assume that McConnell had been fully briefed on the first “final draft” of the new estimate, which has now been in limbo for half a year.It is a safe bet that the conclusions of the new draft resemble those of the 2005 estimate all too closely to suit Cheney.

It is a scandal that the congressional oversight committees have not been able to get hold of the new estimate, even in draft.For it is a safe bet it would give the lie to the claims of Cheney, Woolsey and other cheerleaders for war with Iran and provide powerful ammunition to those arguing for a more sensible approach to Iran.

Despite the administration’s war-like record, many Americans may still cling to the belief that attacking Iran won’t happen because it would be crazy; that Bush is a lame-duck president who wouldn’t dare undertake a new reckless adventure when the last one went so badly.

But, with this administration, rationality has not exactly been a strong suit. Bush has placed himself in a neoconservative bubble that operates with its own false sense of reality. As psychiatrist Justin Frank noted in a July 27 memorandum updating his book, “Bush on the Couch”:

“We are left with a president who cannot actually govern, because he is incapable of reasoned thought in coping with events outside his control, like those in the Middle East.

“This makes it a monumental challenge — as urgent as it is difficult — not only to get him to stop the carnage in the Middle East, but also to prevent him from undertaking a new, perhaps even more disastrous adventure — like going to war with Iran, in order to embellish the image he so proudly created for himself after 9/11 as the commander in chief of “the first war of the 21st century.’”

Ray McGovern is a 27-year veteran analyst of the CIA and co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

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The CIA’s open secrets

Monday, August 27th, 2007

By Joseph Weisberg

When a federal judge dismissed Valerie Plame’s lawsuit against the Central Intelligence Agency earlier this month, she ruled that the agency was entitled to stop Plame from publishing the dates of her agency service, even though these dates had been supplied to Congress in an unclassified letter from the CIA and had been published in The Congressional Record. Plame is just one in a long line of ex-CIA employees to lose similar suits, in which the agency successfully defended the position that information in the public domain was classified.

How can information that’s a five-minute Google search away be classified? It’s simple. Classified information is not the same thing as secret information.

When I worked in the CIA’s directorate of operations (now called the national clandestine service) in the early ’90s, we were told that information was classified when it involved sources or methods. It seemed logical that sources were classified. These were actual agents who would be put in jeopardy if their identities were revealed.

But practically everything the CIA does could be considered a “method,” so the CIA can decide that almost anything relating to its work is classified. You’d probably want this latitude if you were running an intelligence agency. But one of its unfortunate byproducts is that no one, inside or outside the intelligence community, really knows what classified information is.

Because so many things at the CIA are classified, only a small percentage of them are actually secrets. Take agency cover arrangements. I cannot write about them in this article in any detail.

If I point out that agency officers are often under cover as XXXXXXXXXX, the CIA will make me take it out before publishing this article. (Before I submitted this article to the CIA’s publications review board, I blacked it out myself to save the reviewers the trouble.)

But are cover arrangements secret? Most of the time, no. Anyone with even a passing interest in espionage knows about the CIA’s use of the specific cover that I redacted above. If you think you know what’s under that black bar, you’re probably right. Certainly every foreign intelligence agency in the world knows about it. It can’t possibly be considered secret. But it is definitely classified.

What about the CIA’s covert action in Afghanistan in the 1980s? Everyone knew about this at the time - in no way, shape or form was it a secret - but it was a covert action, and it was classified.

I’m assuming it has since been declassified because I’ve read all about it in books by ex-agency officers that were vetted by the agency. If I’m wrong, there will be some more redactions in this paragraph.

There are actually legitimate reasons to classify so much information that isn’t secret. Even if every foreign government in the world knows about our cover arrangements, countless diplomatic and legal problems would be created if we officially admitted that we use them.

Official acknowledgment of covert actions would be even riskier. It was problematic enough to be arming rebels in Afghanistan who were killing Soviet soldiers.

How would the Soviets have responded if we had openly admitted it? How would we respond today if Iran openly admitted training and arming insurgents in Iraq? We may know their denials are false, but they help Iran avoid international sanction, and they help us avoid being forced to respond militarily.

If the government openly admitted various CIA activities, even those that are already well-known, it could also precipitate a great deal of negative news coverage in the foreign press. (It would create yet another public perception problem to admit we classify information because of public perception, which is one of the reasons the fiction is maintained that information is classified because it is secret.)

In the end, then, the classification system serves a perfectly valid purpose. It draws a distinction between the information that the government does, and does not, want to discuss publicly.

What ends up classified may seem a bit perverse at times, such as when information in the public domain is ruled off limits for publication. But that’s troubling only if you make the mistake of thinking that classified information is supposed to be secret.

For former CIA employees turned writers, like Plame, the vagaries of the system have tremendous advantages.

Plame just wrote a book that the CIA could reasonably maintain was entirely classified. After all, you’re not supposed to quit an intelligence agency and then tell everybody about what you did when you were there (certainly a lot of methods would be involved).

But since nobody is really sure what is and isn’t classified, the agency permits publication of a lot of material that could go either way. It seems petulant to sue over a few dates the CIA wanted to take out of a book that it was otherwise allowing to go forward. Plame was right that the dates weren’t secret. But the agency didn’t want to officially admit them, so they were, in fact, classified.

Joseph Weisberg is the author of the forthcoming novel “An Ordinary Spy.”

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US intelligence report points to Iraqi government’s removal

Monday, August 27th, 2007

By Peter Symonds

The National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq released last week reflects a growing consensus not just among the US spy agencies, but in the White House and American ruling elite, that the main obstacle to the US agenda in Iraq is the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

Not surprisingly, the four-page unclassified portion of the NIE drawn up by 16 US intelligence agencies backs the Bush administration’s “surge” strategy. The report highlighted “measurable but uneven improvements in Iraq’s security situation since the last estimate in January 2007” and predicted further “modest” gains as long as US troops remained and aggressive military operations continued.

Nevertheless, despite its muted, conservative language, the NIE painted a grim picture of the US occupation. “[T]he level of overall violence, including attacks on and casualties among civilians, remains high; Iraq’s sectarian groups remain unreconciled; AQI [Al Qaeda in Iraq] retains the ability to conduct high-profile attacks; and, to date, Iraqi political leaders remain unable to govern effectively,” it stated.

The final comment about the Maliki government reflects the frustration in US ruling circles over the failure of the 2003 invasion to transform the country into a stable client state and to open up its vast oil reserves for exploitation by American corporations. Just weeks before Washington’s top general and its senior diplomat in Baghdad are due to report to the US Congress, none of the Bush administration’s so-called benchmarks, including the passage of oil laws, has been met.

Without openly calling for Maliki’s removal, the logic of the NIE’s “judgments” certainly leads to that conclusion. The report notes the US military’s gains in enlisting the support of Sunni tribes and some insurgents in fighting so-called Al Qaeda groups, but highlights the failure of the Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad to reach any accommodation with these new Sunni allies. “[W]e judge these initiatives will only translate into widespread political accommodation and enduring stability if the Iraqi government accepts and supports them,” it warned.

The NIE also “assessed” that the position of Maliki would become “more precarious” over the next six to 12 months because of criticism by Shiite parties, as well as Sunni and Kurdish parties. The Iraqi government would “continue to struggle to achieve national-level political reconciliation and improved governance” over the same period. The NIE highlighted the need for “a fundamental shift in the factors driving Iraqi political and security developments” for long-term progress to be made—the most obvious “shift” being Maliki’s removal.

The NIE document followed a barrage of comments in Washington last week expressing dissatisfaction with the Maliki government. After a two-day visit to Iraq, Carl Levin, the Democratic Party chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, openly called for the Iraqi parliament to replace Maliki with “a less sectarian and a more unifying prime minister”. Leading presidential contender, Hillary Clinton, publicly endorsed Levin’s remarks a day later.

President Bush stopped short of openly calling for Maliki to go. Yet, while nominally continuing to support the Iraqi prime minister, he declared last Tuesday: “The fundamental question is: Will the government respond to the demands of the people? If the government doesn’t respond to the demands of the people, they will replace the government.” The US ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, added his own damning assessment of the Baghdad government last week as “extremely disappointing”.

The appeal to the “demands of the Iraqi people” is simply absurd—the vast majority of Iraqis are opposed to continued US occupation of their country. The moves against Maliki are determined by the shifting requirements of US strategy not only in Iraq but more broadly throughout the Middle East. The Bush administration backed the Shiite and Kurdish parties that form the Maliki government as a means for ousting Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime, which rested on Iraq’s Sunni Arab elite. However, having provoked an anti-US insurgency and a sectarian civil war between Sunni and Shiite militias, the White House is now demanding that Baghdad accommodates sections of the ousted Baathist regime in order to divide the Sunni insurgency.

More fundamentally, as the Bush administration escalates its confrontation with neighbouring Iran, the Maliki government, with its ties to Tehran, has become untenable as far as Washington is concerned. In recent weeks, the White House and the Pentagon have stepped up the propaganda blitz against Iran over its alleged nuclear weapons programs and unsubstantiated claims that it is assisting attacks by Shiite militia on US troops. Maliki is also an obstacle to US attempts to forge an anti-Iranian alliance of so-called Sunni states in the Middle East such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt that are bitterly opposed to the Shiite regime in Baghdad.

Maintaining the thrust of US propaganda, the NIE repeated the allegation of Iranian “interference” in Iraq. “Assistance to armed groups, especially from Iran, exacerbates the violence inside Iraq, and the reluctance of the Sunni states that are generally supportive of US regional goals to offer support to the Iraqi government probably bolsters Iraqi Sunni Arabs’ rejection of the government’s legitimacy,” it stated.

Maliki reacted sharply to the public calls for his removal, describing the comments of Clinton and Levin as “discourteous”. In an obvious reference to the Bush administration’s “benchmarks”, he declared: “No one has the right to place timetables on the Iraq government.” Speaking during a visit to Syria, Maliki said he would “find friends elsewhere” if he were abandoned by the US. Far from warding off a move against his government, this last remark, hinting at a turn to Tehran and Damascus, will only strengthen Washington’s resolve to refashion the Baghdad regime.

The Bush administration’s dissatisfaction with the Iraqi government has been evident for months, encouraging Maliki’s rivals to move against him. Since the beginning of the year, there have been walkouts from the cabinet by the Basra-based Shiite Islamic Virtue Party (Fadhila), the Shiite bloc loyal to cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and the major Sunni Arab factions. On Saturday, the Iraqi National List of former interim prime minister Iyad Allawi formally announced its withdrawal after previously boycotting cabinet meetings.

In preparation for parliament’s resumption early next month, all the Iraqi factions are engaged in intense backroom manoeuvring. Maliki is attempting to shore up the current ruling Shiite-Kurdish bloc, while his rivals are preparing for a vote of no confidence. None of this has anything to do with the “will of the Iraqi people”. All the Iraqi parties are well aware that the final decision on the fate of Maliki’s government will be taken in Washington, not Baghdad.

Significantly, one of the main contenders for the prime minister’s post, Iyad Allawi, has hired high-profile lobbying firm Barbour Griffith & Rogers for six months at the cost of $300,000 to “provide strategic counsel and representation” before “the US government, Congress, media and others”. Central to Allawi’s campaign in Washington is President Bush’s former envoy to Iraq, Ambassador Robert Blackwill, who is the firm’s president, as well as other top Bush administration aides, including Philip Zelikow, a former adviser to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Blackwill, who also served as Bush’s ambassador to India, is a senior figure in the US foreign affairs establishment. He was Rice’s mentor before she took office. As Bush’s adviser on Iraq in 2004, Blackwill played a crucial role in installing Allawi as head of the interim government. While the Bush administration now insists that Blackwill is operating as a private citizen, there is little doubt that the White House has given the green light for his campaign against Maliki.

Allawi, who received virtually no support in the 2005 Iraqi elections, was a loyal political thug for Saddam Hussein’s regime before breaking away and becoming a longtime CIA asset. He has close relations with sections of the Baathist party, particularly in the military and intelligence. In a policy statement published in the Washington Post on August 18, Allawi laid out a six-point “Plan for Iraq”, in which he declared he would impose a state of emergency on Baghdad and all conflict areas and carry out a far-reaching restructuring of the Iraqi security forces.

Allawi is not the only possibility being contemplated in Washington. But he certainly fits the bill as a political strongman who would not hesitate to carry out US orders and use every available means to crush opposition to his rule. That he is even under consideration is an indication of the type of regime that the Bush administration is seeking—with or without the approval of the Iraqi parliament. In its cautious criticisms of the present regime, the NIE document is another sign that, one way or another, Maliki’s days are numbered.

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US attorney general Gonzales resigns

Monday, August 27th, 2007

Mark Tran
Monday August 27, 2007
Guardian Unlimited

Alberto Gonzales had worked with George Bush since the 1990s. Photograph: Ron Edmonds/AP
 

The embattled US attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, today announced his resignation, joining an exodus of top-level officials from the White House.”It has been one of my greatest privileges to lead the department of justice,” Mr Gonzales said in a perfunctory statement, without taking questions from reporters. He will step down on September17.

“I have lived the American dream,” the son of migrant workers said. “Even my worst days as attorney general have been better than my father’s best days.”

The 51-year-old Bush loyalist served more than two years as America’s first Hispanic attorney general. In recent months he came under intense pressure to quit in a political row over the sacking of eight federal prosecutors that congressional Democrats have said was politically motivated. Mr Gonzales did not help his case with unconvincing appearances on Capitol Hill.

Mr Gonzales worked for Mr Bush when he was governor of Texas in the 1990s and served as a White House lawyer in Mr Bush’s first term before becoming the attorney general in February 2005.

Mr Bush said he had reluctantly accepted the resignation of a trusted adviser and good friend and rebuked detractors of Mr Gonzales, saying: “His good name has been dragged through the mud for political reasons”.

Mr Gonzales outraged civil liberties groups by stating in January 2002 that parts of the half-century-old Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war were “obsolete” and some provisions were “quaint.”

He also came under fire for Mr Bush’s decision to forego the use of warrants in America’s domestic spying programme adopted after the September 11 2001 attacks. In January, Mr Gonzales backtracked and said the programme would be subject to court approval.

Mr Gonzales is the latest in a string of top officials who have left the administration, from the former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld to Karl Rove, the president’s closest confidant and the man credited with Mr Bush’s two presidential victories.

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Labour given £300,000 by unregistered ‘friends’

Monday, August 27th, 2007

By Ben Russell

A group which has donated more than £300,000 to Labour was not properly registered, the party has admitted.

Labour Party officials asked Muslim Friends of Labour to register as a members’ association with party funding watchdogs after they were informed of the problem by the Electoral Commission.

The commission asked the party to clarify the status of the organisation last week after releasing figures showing that it has donated £312,000 to Labour so far this year. Muslim Friends of Labour was listed as an “unincorporated association” which does not have to declare the source of its funds.

By contrast, “members’ associations”, made up of party members, must give details of the individuals who fund any political donations.

The organisation is chaired by Mohammed Sarwar, a controversial Labour MP who was briefly suspended in the late 1990s before being cleared ina vote rigging scandal. Most of Westminster’s Muslim MPs and peers are believed to be members.

Labour has previously attacked the Conservatives for receiving donations from the Midlands Industrial Council, a group of businessmen.

A Labour Party spokesperson said: “Muslims for Labour is an association made up of Labour members and supporters which does important work for the Labour Party both in fund-raising and in communicating our message to the Muslim community.”

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Alarm as police offenders keep jobs in force

Monday, August 27th, 2007

By Kate O’Hara

More than 30 police officers serving in forces throughout Yorkshire were convicted of criminal offences last year, it has emerged.

Revelations that so many law enforcers, most of whom are still in post, have turned law-breakers were dubbed “deeply worrying” by a road safety campaigner.

The disclosures – made under the Freedom of Information Act – showed that of the four forces in Yorkshire, West Yorkshire had the highest number of serving officers convicted between January 2006 and April 2007.

Fourteen of the convictions were for motoring offences.

The force would not disclose what the other convictions were for, but last year an exclusive Yorkshire Post report prompted outrage when it was revealed 10 of its serving officers had been convicted of assault.

In South Yorkshire seven police officers were convicted of criminal offences – four for traffic offences, one for affray, one for common assault and another for obstructing the police.

Only one resigned prior to disciplinary proceedings. The others have all been allowed to stay in the force despite breaking the law.

Neither force would disclose how many of their officers had received run-of-the-mill speeding fines or penalty points.

In Humberside three officers were convicted of speeding offences and are still in post; another, who was convicted of perverting the course of justice, has since been dismissed.

Across the force area there were a staggering 1,912 occasions where police vehicles activated a speed camera while engaged on duty. Of those, 1,900 were not pro-cessed as it was established that the vehicles were res-ponding to emergency calls. The remaining 12 were cancelled after further inquiries.

The year before there were only eight occasions when Humberside Police officers were caught by speed cameras while on duty. The force said the figure had spiralled so dramatically because of the “increased use of roadside cameras to detect speeding and other offences”.

Across the region only North Yorkshire Police officers emerged with a clean slate, although the force did concede that five had been caught speeding and fined.

Last night a spokeswoman for Huddersfield-based road safety charity Brake called the figures “deeply worrying”.

“These numbers are terribly high and it is of grave concern that serving police officers who are supposed to be enforcing the law are so blatantly breaking it.

“I think these figures could lead to a lot of mistrust from members of the public. If they can’t trust the officers not to be breaking the law then that is a deeply worrying state of affairs.”

Last year the

Yorkshire Post revealed that more than 40 officers serving in Yorkshire had criminal records or had been cautioned for offences ranging from drink-driving to assault, shoplifting and dangerous driving.

This prompted calls for a more accountable and open system for disciplining those who break the law, but the figures released this year were even less clear in some cases.

West Yorkshire Police did not give any details of the offences committed by its 20 law-breaking officers, apart from the fact that 14 of them were motoring offences.

A spokesman said: “We expect the highest standards of our officers.

“All cases where officers receive criminal convictions or cautions are subject to close scrutiny on an individual basis to establish whether the convictions or cautions will affect their job and whether there are any disciplinary issues arising that need to be addressed.”

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A new intelligence report paints a bleak picture of Iraq

Monday, August 27th, 2007

By Warren P. Strobel and Leila Fadel

A new assessment of Iraq by U.S. intelligence agencies provides little evidence that the American troop “surge” has accomplished its goals and predicts that the U.S.-backed government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki will become “more precarious” in the months ahead.

A declassified summary of the report released Thursday said that violence remains high, warns that U.S. alliances with former Sunni Muslim insurgents could undercut the central government and says that political compromises are “unlikely to emerge” in the next 12 months.

Perhaps most strikingly, U.S. intelligence analysts concluded that factions and political players in and outside Iraq already are maneuvering in expectation of a drawdown of U.S. troops — moves that could later heighten sectarian bloodshed.

“The national intelligence assessment confirms what we feared the most: The U.S. has become deeply embroiled in Iraq’s civil war,” said Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., the chairman of the Senate intelligence committee.

A White House spokesman, Gordon Johndroe, said the report, known as a National Intelligence Estimate, showed that President Bush’s decision to send an additional 28,000 troops to Iraq is beginning to have an effect.

While it said that the surge has brought “measurable, but uneven improvements in security,” the report didn’t repeat recent military assertions that civilian deaths have decreased by 50 percent. Instead, it said, “the level of overall violence, including attacks on and casualties among civilians, remains high.”

It also suggested that while violence is no longer increasing, any progress might be temporary. “The steep escalation of violence has been checked for now,” the report said, noting, “Overall attack levels across Iraq have fallen during seven of the last nine weeks.” It provided no specific statistics.

The report also said that al-Qaida in Iraq “retains the ability to conduct high-profile attacks,” and it warned that the current U.S. tactic of recruiting former Sunni Muslim insurgents to defeat al-Qaida in Iraq — one of the pillars of efforts by Army Gen. David Petraeus, the U.S. commander in Iraq — could backfire.

Nor has the surge brought about Sunni reconciliation with al-Maliki’s government, the report said. Worse, it said, such “bottom-up” security initiatives could pose risks to the al-Maliki government by undermining central authority and reinvigorating armed opposition to the government in Baghdad.

U.S. military spokesmen in Baghdad weren’t available for comment.

The report’s main conclusions, known as “key judgments,” were declassified 2 { weeks before Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker are to testify to Congress on Iraq’s performance on 18 political, economic and security benchmarks.

The report didn’t address each of those points directly, but it concluded that the “broadly accepted political compromises required for sustained security, long-term political progress and economic development are unlikely to emerge unless there is a fundamental shift in the factors driving Iraqi political and security developments.”

“To date, Iraqi political leaders remain unable to govern effectively,” it said.

In recent days, several U.S. lawmakers have suggested that al-Maliki should step down, and Bush on Tuesday gave the Iraqi leader a less-than-ringing endorsement.

The intelligence estimate says that al-Maliki, while increasingly hemmed in by his opponents, is likely to remain in power — if only because other Shiite Muslim leaders realize that trying to replace him could paralyze the government.

“It’s difficult to see an obvious replacement that would garner the majority support you would need,” said a senior U.S. intelligence official, one of three who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity in order to discuss the estimate frankly.

An Iraqi official close to al-Maliki said the embattled Shiite prime minister has become more isolated from his Shiite and Kurdish allies. Al-Maliki, who’s from the Dawa party, the smallest and least powerful in the Shiite alliance, depended on those allies to win his position.

Bruce Riedel, a former CIA analyst now with the Brookings Institution, a center-left Washington policy organization, said that with summer ending and little real progress in Iraq, Bush has to blame someone.

“The president promised that people will see political progress by the end of the summer, it’s here, and the only progress is the Sunnis turning on al-Qaida. Maliki’s government is not likely to embrace these Sunnis because the Sunnis are not interested in embracing a Shiite government,” Riedel said.

Briefing reporters on the report, a second senior U.S. intelligence official said that when U.S. troops leave Iraq, some Sunni groups “could turn on one another to encourage a greater degree of intra-sectarian conflict.”

A similar dynamic is now being seen among Shiite militias in southern Iraq as British troops reduce their presence there.

On other topics, the declassified judgments found that:

_Iraqi Security Forces, while more competent than before, haven’t improved enough to conduct major operations independent of U.S. and allied troops.

_Iran “will continue to provide funding, weaponry and training to Iraqi Shia militants” despite U.S. protests.

_Syria has cracked down on Sunni extremist groups trying to infiltrate fighters into Iraq because they threaten Syria’s stability, but is providing support to other groups inside Iraq to try to increase its influence there.

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Iraq corruption whistleblowers face penalties

Monday, August 27th, 2007

Cases show fraud exposers have been vilified, fired, or detained for weeks

AP

One after another, the men and women who have stepped forward to report corruption in the massive effort to rebuild Iraq have been vilified, fired and demoted.

Or worse.

For daring to report illegal arms sales, Navy veteran Donald Vance says he was imprisoned by the American military in a security compound outside Baghdad and subjected to harsh interrogation methods.

There were times, huddled on the floor in solitary confinement with that head-banging music blaring dawn to dusk and interrogators yelling the same questions over and over, that Vance began to wish he had just kept his mouth shut.

He had thought he was doing a good and noble thing when he started telling the FBI about the guns and the land mines and the rocket-launchers — all of them being sold for cash, no receipts necessary, he said. He told a federal agent the buyers were Iraqi insurgents, American soldiers, State Department workers, and Iraqi embassy and ministry employees.

The seller, he claimed, was the Iraqi-owned company he worked for, Shield Group Security Co.

“It was a Wal-Mart for guns,” he says. “It was all illegal and everyone knew it.”

So Vance says he blew the whistle, supplying photos and documents and other intelligence to an FBI agent in his hometown of Chicago because he didn’t know whom to trust in Iraq.

For his trouble, he says, he got 97 days in Camp Cropper, an American military prison outside Baghdad that once held Saddam Hussein, and he was classified a security detainee.

Also held was colleague Nathan Ertel, who helped Vance gather evidence documenting the sales, according to a federal lawsuit both have filed in Chicago, alleging they were illegally imprisoned and subjected to physical and mental interrogation tactics “reserved for terrorists and so-called enemy combatants.”

No noble outcomes
Corruption has long plagued Iraq reconstruction. Hundreds of projects may never be finished, including repairs to the country’s oil pipelines and electricity system. Congress gave more than $30 billion to rebuild Iraq, and at least $8.8 billion of it has disappeared, according to a government reconstruction audit.

Despite this staggering mess, there are no noble outcomes for those who have blown the whistle, according to a review of such cases by The Associated Press.

“If you do it, you will be destroyed,” said William Weaver, professor of political science at the University of Texas-El Paso and senior advisor to the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition.

“Reconstruction is so rife with corruption. Sometimes people ask me, ‘Should I do this?’ And my answer is no. If they’re married, they’ll lose their family. They will lose their jobs. They will lose everything,” Weaver said.

They have been fired or demoted, shunned by colleagues, and denied government support in whistleblower lawsuits filed against contracting firms.

The only way we can find out what is going on is for someone to come forward and let us know,” said Beth Daley of the Project on Government Oversight, an independent, nonprofit group that investigates corruption. “But when they do, the weight of the government comes down on them. The message is, ’Don’t blow the whistle or we’ll make your life hell.’

“It’s heartbreaking,” Daley said. “There is an even greater need for whistleblowers now. But they are made into public martyrs. It’s a disgrace. Their lives get ruined.”

Cont… http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20430153/page/2/ 

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The War On Working Americans - Part I

Monday, August 27th, 2007

By Stephen Lendman
RINF Alternative News

As Labor Day approaches, what better time to assess the state of working America. It’s under assault and weakened by decades of eroding rights in the richest country in the world once regarded as a model democratic state. It’s pure nonsense in a nation always dedicated to wealth and power, but don’t try finding that discussed in the mainstream. Today, it’s truer than ever making the struggle for equity and justice all the harder. That’s what ordinary working people now face making beating those odds formidable at the least.

In a globalized world, the law of supply and demand is in play with lots more workers around everywhere than enough jobs for them. It keeps corporate costs low and profits high and growing with Business Week (BW) magazine reporting in its April 9 issue “the share of (US) national income going to corporate profits (compared to labor) is hovering around a 50 year high.” BW then quoted Harvard economist Richard Freeman’s research paper saying only “a global pandemic that kills millions of people” could cause a labor shortage and elevate worker bargaining power.

There’s little in sight, and the result is a huge reserve army of unemployed or underemployed working people creating an inevitable race to the bottom in a corporatized marketplace. It harms workers everywhere, including in developed nations. They’re outsourcing good jobs abroad to lower wage countries and pressuring workers to do more for less because they’ve got little bargaining power to fight back. More on this below.

Organized Labor in the US - Its Rise and Decline

Organized labor’s rise began modestly and was fragile in the earliest days of the republic. It gained strength in good economic times, then lost it in downturns like the depression in 1873. By the 1880s, things were better as the nation underwent rapid industrialization. With it came rising prosperity and workers wanting a share of the benefits. They turned to unions for help with skilled artisans leading the way helping the unskilled as well in their efforts to organize.

New labor organizations arose, older ones expanded, and as they did, they grew more active and militant. It led to the “great uprising of labor” in 1886, including the landmark Chicago May 4 Haymarket Riot protesting police violence against strikers the previous day. Its impact was hugely negative at first. It forced organized labor to regroup and settle in for a long period of recovery.

This was at a time the incipient labor movement was over two million and rising beginning with its organizing efforts launching it in the 1870s. By the 1880s, it had enough strength to stage huge strikes for better pay and working conditions like the struggle for an eight hour day that had 80,000 strikers parading peacefully down Chicago’s main Michigan Avenue on May 1, 1886 in what’s now regarded as the first ever May Day Parade.

Workers were helped from community-based emerging independent political parties sensitive to their rights. That’s unheard of today in an age where no effective political party stands for working people despite Democrats and Republicans saying they do. Workers are now on their own. They’re left to struggle in a global marketplace with pathetically little help weak unions can provide.

Earlier in the 19th century, the first national union arose as workers began asserting their rights. It was called the National Labor Union (NLU), emerged after the Civil War, but was short-lived. Next came the Knights of Labor in 1869 with a mandate to protect all workers including women and blacks after 1883. They were represented by industry groups rather than trade and skill level that was common until then. Its goals were high but achievements few at a time of widespread worker repression in the 1880s. It led to its decline as a more resilient union emerged the result of disaffection with the Knights.

It was called the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and was founded by Samuel Gompers in 1886 to replace its predecessor, the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions. The ill-fated American Railway Union (ARU) followed in 1893, the largest industrial union of its day for a time, and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) that at its peak in the 1920s had 100,000 members.

The Wobblies are still around 102 years after Big Bill Haywood, Eugene Debs and others founded the union in 1905 as a commitment to working people in their struggle with corporate employers. It’s motto was “an injury to one is an injury to all,” its goal was revolutionary, and it’s still true to its root ideology today as stated in the current IWW Constitution:

“The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people…..Between (workers and employers) a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the (unfair) wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth….It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism….By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.”

That philosophy under dedicated men like Haywood, Debs and others set the Wobblies on a collision course with government and big business that tried to crush it. During WW I in 1917, it was vicious under Woodrow Wilson’s Justice Department (DOJ). It used the repressive Espionage and Sedition Acts to raid and disrupt union meeting halls across the country. It’s the same tactic used today against Latino immigrants and Muslims in the concocted “war on terrorism” and the one against undocumented workers.

In 1917 and later, Wilson’s DOJ acted much the same way arresting 165 Wobbly leaders on the grounds they hindered the war effort by using their First Amendment right to speak out against it. They were tried near war’s end in 1918, all convicted, and given long prison terms under a Democrat President thought of reverentially today. Bill Haywood was luckier. After conviction, he was released on bail and fled to the Soviet Union where he remained until his death, but the IWW was never again the same.

They were hammered again from 1918 - 21 during the infamous Palmer Raids under Wilson Attorney General Mitchell Palmer. He targeted radical left wing groups like the Wobblies at the time of the first “Red Scare” after the 1917 Russian Revolution. It launched J. Edgar Hoover’s career in the DOJ Bureau of Investigation’s new General Intelligence Division that later became the FBI in 1935. The IWW is still around, still dedicated to its founding principles, but it’s worldwide membership is only around 2000, mostly in the US.

The AFL fared much better. It became the largest union in the first half of the 20th century even after the founding of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in 1935 with which it merged in 1955. Today, it’s still the country’s largest federation of unions. Its web site claims a membership of around 10 million workers, even after the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), Teamsters, UNITE-HERE and United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) broke away from the federation in 2005. The United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America (UBC) did as well in 2001, and the Laborers International Union of North America (LIUNA) left in 2006. They formed a new Change to Win federation in September, 2005 representing about 5.5 million workers. It likely left AFL-CIO with fewer members than it claims with its true size closer to 8 million or less.

AFL-CIO’s state is a metaphor for the times. Organized labor today is weak in the face of declining membership and corporate dominance with workers losing out in a globalized world. It’s fall has been long-term and painful with worker rights hammered since the 1980s. It’s a long way today from when the landmark Wagner Act passed in 1935 under Franklin Roosevelt. It established the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) guaranteeing labor the right to bargain collectively on equal terms with management for the first time ever, but it wasn’t an act of kindness.

It came at the height of The Great Depression when those in power feared the worst. FDR and Congress acted to save capitalism at a time they feared mass worker hostility might boil over like it did in 1917 Soviet Russia. Like all other worker victories, this one came through struggle. It was from organizing, pressing their demands, taking to the streets, going on strike, holding boycotts, battling police and National Guard forces supporting management against working people, paying with their blood and lives and finally achieving results. They got an eight-hour day, a living wage, and on-the-job benefits because strong unions went head-to-head with management and won. It’s worlds different now with corporate giants in bed with friendly governments, and Democrats and Republicans vying to see which party can be more accommodative.

From the 19th century forward, it was never easy for labor from the height of the movement’s strength to the present. Unions were always disadvantaged even at a time of reasonable labor-management harmony. The passage of the harsh 1947 Taft-Hartley Labor-Management Relations Act showed how tenuous their position always was. Harry Truman vetoed the bill but was overridden. He called it a “slave labor bill” and then hypocritically used it 10 times, the most ever by any President to this day. The law throttles organized labor by giving the President power to stop strikes by court-ordered injunction for 80 days. He can claim the national interest, some other one, or none at all that’s always the same one - to help corporate management deny workers their rights.

Taft-Hartley is still the law and was last invoked by GW Bush in the summer of 2002 against 10,500 west coast dock workers “locked out” (not striking) by the Pacific Maritime Association representing shipping companies and terminal operators.

Earlier in 2001 and new in office, Bush showed his anti-labor stripes straightaway. He invoked the Railway Labor Act blocking a threatened strike by 10,000 mechanics, cleaners and custodians at Northwest Airlines set for March 12. He acted again against United Airlines’ 15,000 mechanics in December. He also took management’s side in August, 2006 against Northwest’s 8700 flight attendants’ planned job action against the bankrupt airline’s unfair demands for huge wage cuts and increases in hours worked. Bill Clinton was just as unfriendly invoking the Railway Labor Act against American Airline’s pilots and to prevent railroad strikes 13 times.

Laws like these, and Presidents’ willingness to use them, crushed the spirit and letter of the Wagner Act. They greatly weakened or revoked hard won provisions, and as a consequence, diminished union clout. Taft-Hartley allows stiff penalties for union violations but minimal ones for companies. It enacted a list of “unfair (union) labor practices” prohibiting jurisdictional strikes (relating to worker job assignments), secondary boycotts (against firms doing business with others being struck), wildcat strikes, sit-downs, slow-downs, mass-picketing against scabs brought it, closed shops (in which employees must join unions), union contributions to federal political campaigns, and more while legalizing employer interventions aimed at preventing unionizing drives.

It began a process of gradual erosion of union power to bargain collectively. That’s their weapon now weakened because of devious employer tactics. They can illegally fire union sympathizers (thousands each year) and get away with only minor wrist slap fines after years of expensive litigation to prove wrongdoing. Further, employers can fire workers for any lawful reason like incompetence or no stated reason at all. Even the right to strike is neutralized with employers able to hire replacements or threaten to ship jobs offshore. With government on their side, they’re empowered to fire union workers and legally replace them with lower-paid scabs or Latino immigrants.

The Reagan administration marked the beginning of the current trend in its first year. He was contemptuous of organized labor while hypocritically saying “I support unions and the rights of workers to organize and bargain collectively.” He showed it in August, 1981 by firing 11,000 striking PATCO air traffic controllers, jailing its leaders, fining the union millions of dollars, and effectively busting it in service to the monied interests backing him. It was a shot across organized labor’s bow and a clear message to business and industry of what to expect from a friendly Republican President. Nothing changed since under Democrat or Republican administrations with workers unable to match the power and influence of capital. The toll ever since has been devastating.

Union membership has been in steady decline from its post-war high of 34.7% in the 1950s. It held fairly constant through most of the 1970s at around 24% where it stood in 1979. At the end of the Reagan era, it was down to 16.8% and is currently around 12% overall with about 36% of government workers unionized but only 7.4% of them in the private sector. It’s the lowest it’s been since the beginning of the mass unionization struggles of the 1930s and in the private sector in over 100 years. It’s because of Democrat and Republican antipathy to organized labor and corporate threats to close plants and outsource jobs. It’s forced workers to take pay cuts and fewer benefits that are dropping to where they’ll be none, and they’ll be on their own to live or die by market-based rules rigged against them.

George Bush supports corporate interests aiming to crush unions so they have free reign to treat workers any way they wish or go find other work. In the wake of 9/11, he took on public sector unions straightaway. He denied 170,000 new Department of Homeland Security (DHS) employees their civil service protection and right to bargain collectively. Those affected included Transportation Security Administration (TSA) newly federalized airport screeners. They lost their right to unionize in the name of national security that could as easily been for any reason or none at all. But this was just for starters. Bush also wants federal positions contracted out to private companies. That jeopardizes 850,000 federal employees likely to get lower pay, fewer benefits, loss of other unionized rights, and many of them ending up out of work.

Overall, organized workers always get higher wages and greater benefits, which explains why strong unions are vital. The evidence comes from David Sirota in his his 2006 book, “Hostile Takeover.” He showed:

– 89% of union members have employer-paid health care coverage compared to 67% for nonunion members; as fewer companies now provide it, those numbers are lower; in addition, companies continue making employees pay a greater share of the cost of coverage;

– employers pay a larger share of union member health care premiums than nonunion members get (but the percentage is falling);

– over two-thirds of union members have short-term disability insurance compared to about one-third for nonunion workers;

– union members get about 26% more vacation time and 14% more total paid leave than nonunion workers; and

– Economic Policy Institute (EPI) data show union influence gets high school graduating members about 8.8% more pay than nonunion workers.

Greater worker clout under unions is why management wants to destroy them. It’s to deny working people their right to organize, earn more and get greater benefits corporations don’t want to provide. It’s happening in the gilded age of George Bush, and a recent example came in a ruling late last year when his administration’s NLRB ruled 3-2 against registered nurses’ right to union membership if they perform certain minimal supervisory duties.

It was in a case where United Auto Workers (UAW) were trying to organize nurses at a Taylor, Michigan-based hospital. US labor law doesn’t guarantee supervisors the right to organize making the NLRB ruling hugely important for up to eight million workers in other trades. It may potentially deny their right henceforth to qualify for union representation if employers want to use this ruling to add enough supervisory responsibilities to employees’ job descriptions to throw them into a union-exempt category.

Bush further ended the Clinton administration’s regulation requiring federal agencies vet companies’ compliance with the law when awarding federal contracts. He also issued harsh anti-union, anti-worker executive orders (EOs) as well as a tsunami of other repressive ones. He barred automatic union-recognition agreements on federally funded construction projects, abolished labor-management cooperation partnerships aimed at improving productivity and working conditions, and mandated contractors henceforth must inform employees they no longer had to join a union without having to tell them it’s their legal right.

Just the way Ronald Reagan busted PATCO, George Bush tipped his hand straightaway in office. He’s a company man and union-hater, so henceforth it’s been open season on workers and their rights under his administration. His policies range from:

– a one-sided support for management;

– stripping workers of their right to unionize;

– cutting pay raises for 1.8 million federal workers on the pretext of a “national emergency;”

– denying millions overtime pay;

– appointing anti-union officials;

– scheming to weaken (and then end) retirement security by replacing Social Security with risky private accounts managed by Wall Street sharks that so far has gotten nowhere because of public opposition to it;

– weakening environmental regulations and protections; and more in an endless war on workers in service to corporate interests that elected and own him.

The failed “immigration reform” legislation was, in fact, a Trojan Horse. It’s down but not dead and remains a thinly veiled scheme targeting all workers. It’s a dagger aimed straight at organized labor in a plan to create a workplace of unempowered serfs, a “bracero America,” including US citizens having few or no benefits and no security. If this legislation ever becomes law, workers will be at the mercy of business to hire and fire them at will.

Another anti-labor tool is the repressive Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and its Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arm. It conducts paramilitary border and workplace assaults on undocumented Latino workers as part of a larger agenda to disenfranchise all working Americans and deny them the right to bargain collectively with management through unions. By targeting undocumented workers first, the eventual aim is to create a large exploitable disposable reserve army worker pool; strip all workers of their rights; empower employers to offer low wage, low or no benefit jobs; and pretty much be able to operate as they please.

The Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) - Some Hope for Worker Rights Now Denied

EFCA was introduced to “amend the (landmark pro-labor) National Labor Relations Act (passed in 1935)” that’s been systematically dismembered piece by piece ever since. Its aim was to “establish an efficient system to enable employees to form, join, or assist labor organizations, to provide for mandatory injunctions for unfair labor practices during organizing efforts, and for other purposes.” On June 26, Senate Republicans blocked labor’s top legislative priority by preventing the bill’s supporters from getting the 60 votes needed to end debate and bring it to a vote.

For now the bill is dead, but if it ever passes, it will change federal law on worker rights. They’ll henceforth be able to organize by signing cards authorizing union representation, penalize employers violating worker rights to do it, and establish new mediation and arbitration processes for first-contract disputes. It might also end or slow down the firing, demoting, laying off, or suspending without pay of over 20,000 US workers annually because of their union activities.

The bill was introduced in the 108th and 109th Republican-controlled Congresses but failed to pass. It was introduced again in the 110th Congress on February 5, 2007, got 233 co-sponsors by month’s end, and passed in the House March 1, 2007 for the first time. On March 2, it was placed on the Senate calendar where leading Democrats expected it to pass despite Republican opposition. They were wrong.

That’s bad news for a bill that would have won back some worker rights after decades of losing them. It’s backed by over five dozen organizations including the NAACP, United for a Fair Economy, Jobs with Justice and numerous other civil, human and labor rights groups. The US Chamber of Commerce and other organizations joined with big business against the bill. They oppose all worker rights, and their lobbying paid off. They claimed the bill allowed them the right to organize before employers can explain why doing it is not in their best interest. Ignored is that union workers always have more rights that include higher pay, greater benefits and added job security. That’s bad for business and why corporate giants fought to kill the bill.

They have a powerful ally in the White House making their job a lot easier. In a mid-February speech before a business lobby group, Dick Cheney announced George Bush would veto EFCA legislation if it passed on his watch. He assured those attending this administration will keep its anti-labor record unblemished on something polls show 77% of working Americans want but won’t get as long as George Bush is in office.

Global Unionization - Another Potential Ray of Hope

In April editions of The American Prospect, the Washington Post and ZNet, Harold Meyerson wrote about “a radical new direction for the globalized economy” in his article titled “Unions Gone Global.” He noted the United Steel Workers (USW) here are negotiating a merger with two of Britain’s largest unions to create “the first genuinely multinational trade union” that with about three million members will be the world’s largest. Meyerson reported the goal, as USW’s Gerald Fernandez put it, is “to fight financial globalization (by) fight(ing) it globally….by building a global union (in this case a) federation of metal, mining, and general workers.”

The partners in this one stated a commitment to “fund human rights and union rights in parts of Africa and Colombia” where more unionists are killed annually than anywhere else, and the country gets billions in US aid each year to help out. They also plan a global effort “to protect employees’ retirement benefits” from corporate predators wanting to end them. For now, there’s no way to know if the idea behind the merger will spread, whether workers here and abroad will benefit from it, or even if the USW and their British partners will follow through effectively on their committed aims to help win back what unionized workers have been losing for years.

Have Your Say: The War On Working Americans - Part I
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Evidence Suggests CIA Purposefully Spiked Investigations

Monday, August 27th, 2007

CIA Inspector General’s Report
911Blogger

A grave miscarriage of justice is afoot. After years being withheld the Administration finally is forced to release the CIA’s IG Report on 9/11. While earlier news accounts said the report would be released in early September it was released in the middle of a Congressional recess, in the middle of a Summer break, thus insuring it will not receive the attention it deserves. Worse still is the conclusion in most press reports since its release that bolsters the official narrative ie. that all the myriad failures were simply due to ’systemic failure’ and/or incompetence.

The circumstantial evidence running contrary to this conclusion is compelling and convincing.

It appears that Al-Hazmi and Al-Mihdhar were being protected by higher ups in the CIA. Respected author Joe Trento has reported that they were working for Saudi Intelligence. Others reported the two were removed from the watchlist two days before 9/11. I don’t know if either was the case. It is clear however that there was a concerted effort to protect them similar in some respects to the way authorities in FBI HQ refused to allow Rowley and company in Minnesota to go into Mousaoui’s laptop computer or how higher ups prevented Robert Wright in Chicago from going after the money trail of Yassin Al-Kadi (Qadi) who financed the software company Ptech and the terrorist group Hamas and who was later named a /Specially Designated Global Terrorist/ by President Bush in October of 2001.

There is a pattern here that cannot be adequately explained by charges of ’systemic failure’ or incompetence. As Kristen Breitweiser http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kristen-breitweiser/enabling-danger- par t-one_b_5951.html has suggested, something else is going on, and the repeated missed opportunities (She has documented 7) and blocked communications suggests something “purposeful” on the part of authorities. The IG Report says 60 agents reviewed the Intel about the two.

Please review the statement below made by 9/11 widow Kristen Breitweiser and by Investigative Journalist Michael Isikoff of Newsweek. These are merely jumping off points to following a trail few have had the courage to examine closely and relentlessly until answers to the questions raised by Kristen and others are answered. In the wake of 9/11, billions of dollars, the lives of soldiers and the Constitution are being sacrificed. Let not truth be sacrificed as well, not when it comes to what happened on September 11th, 2001.

Thank you.

Kyle F. Hence Co-Producer, 9/11: Press for Truth http://www.911pressfortruth.com

*Statement of Kristen Breitweiser, Co-Chairperson, September 11 Advocates Concerning the Joint 9/11 Inquiry Senate Select Committee on Intelligence House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence September 18, 2002 * [snip] Perhaps even more disturbing is the information regarding Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, two of the hijackers. in late August, the CIA asked the INS to put these two men on a watchlist because of their ties to the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole. On August 23, 2001, the INS informed the CIA that both men had already slipped into the country. Immediately thereafter, the CIA asked the FBI to find al-Midhar and Alhazmi. Not a seemingly hard task in light of the fact that one of them was listed in the San Diego phone book, the other took out a bank account in his own name, and finally, an FBI informant happened to be their roommate. [snip]*

Later after three more years of connecting dots, Kristen Breitweiser wrote in Huffington Post, August 20, 2005 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kristen-breitweiser/enabling-danger- part -one_b_5951.html *

[snip] Additionally, when one carefully reads the 9/11 chronology and information provided in the public record, it becomes increasingly clear that the CIA´s repeated failure to share information with the FBI about two of the 9/11 hijackers-al Mihdhar and al Hazmi– was purposeful. There exists at least seven instances between January 2000 and September 11th, 2001, that the CIA withheld vital information from the FBI about these two hijackers who were inside this country training for the attacks. Once, twice, maybe even three times could be considered merely careless oversights. But at least seven documented times? To me, that suggests something else. (To read about these instances, I suggest you read 9/11 materials relating to the “watchlisting issue” involving al Mihdhar and al Hazmi which is a story so detailed, that it deserves its own lengthy blog.) [snip]

*From an interview with Newsweek Investigative Reporter Michael Isikoff for the documentary, 9/11: Press for Truth http://www.911pressfortruth.com :*

MICHAEL ISIKOFF: The CIA learned about this meeting. It arranged for it to be under surveillance by the Malaysian special branch… The CIA subsequently learned within days that… Almihdhar and Alhazmi were headed for the United States. …An FBI detailee who knew about this at the Counter Terrorism Center of the CIA drafted a cable to alert the FBI, and that cable was quashed by superiors at the CIA.

Have Your Say: Evidence Suggests CIA Purposefully Spiked Investigations
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