Pete Seeger Spellbinds, E.J. Donne: The Sherrod case

http://www.commondreams.org/video/2010/07/30-2

Pete Seeger Performs New Song About BP Oil Spill

On July 23th 2010 Pete Seeger performed live at a Gulf Coast Oil Spill
fundraiser at The City Winery in New York City. There, he unveiled to the
public his new protest song about the BP oil spill entitled "God's Counting
on Me, God's Counting on You." Backing up Pete's singing and banjo picking
is the singer/songwriter James Maddock on acoustic guitar. All proceeds of
this concert went to the Gulf Restoration Project. The show was produced and
hosted by Richard Barone. The video was edited and mixed by Matthew Billy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hM8QK4oM3Jk
July 29,2010

- - -

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/17386/120244

Pete Seeger Spellbinds with Intimate New York Set

By Patrick Doyle
RollingStone.com : Jun 22, 2010 6:19 PM EDT

At 91, Pete Seeger doesn't like to travel anymore, preferring performing in
front of school children in his hometown of Beacon, New York, to big
journeys into the city. But last night, the folk legend played a short but
spellbinding set for 400 fans at New York's Gotham House, an old converted
bank, and received WhyHunger's Chapin award in recognition of his work on
hunger and poverty issues.

After a dinner in the sprawling banquet hall, Tom Chapin outlined Seeger's
70-year career and still-active life upstate, joking, "He poisons the minds
of children with his subversive attitudes about poverty and human rights."
Seeger didn't give much of an acceptance speech, choosing instead to strap
on his rustic banjo for a politically charged set that began with his 1970
track "We'll All Be A-Doubling." He still picks masterfully, and his voice
sounds gloriously ragged. When Rolling Stone told him the performance
recalled his legendary 1963 Carnegie Hall recording, Seeger laughed, "I
can't remember that far back - it was 50 years ago!"

During the opening number, Seeger told the crowd he recently asked a local
politician to help slow down his hometown's growing population. The reply? "
'Pete if you don't grow, you die,' " Seeger recalled. "I didn't know what to
say. Then at one o'clock in the morning I woke up. I said, 'It's true, if
you don't grow, you die, but doesn't it follow that the quicker you grow the
sooner you die?' "

Seeger switched to a 12-string guitar and began a hymn-like finger-picked
version of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow." He told the story behind the
classic Wizard of Oz track, recounting how lyricist Yip Harburg and composer
Harold Arlen held a successful two-man protest to get the studio to include
the song in the film. Seeger looked up at the ceiling and apologized to the
deceased Harburg for having to change the lyric "Why can't I" to "Why can't
you and I?" and explained his logic: "If I'd been there when little Dorothy
said, 'Why can't I?' I'd tell her, 'Dorothy, it's because you only asked for
yourself. You've got to ask for everybody, because either we're all going to
make it over that rainbow or nobody is going to make it.' "

After his set, Seeger locked away his banjo in its case and told RS he still
likes to perform, even though "my voice is gone. I just shout or whisper."
He still looks back fondly on the frigid inaugural concert for Barack Obama,
where he led a joyous version of "This Land Is Your Land" alongside Bruce
Springsteen. Saying he remains supportive of the president, Seeger mused on
the nature of American electoral politics. "If you do what in the long run
is the best thing, you may not get elected," he said. "But you could get
elected four years from now because people like George W. Bush get in and do
so bad, that the whole country will realize what shortsighted people they
are. I always say God only knows what the future's going to bring. But he
gave us brains. And fundamentalists do as bad things here as they do in the
Muslim countries. Some miracles are going to happen."

Turning to talk about his upcoming disc Tomorrow's Children (due July 27th),
which features 19 songs recorded with local schoolchildren, Seeger's mood
lightened. "I find a 10-year old likes to sing alto because they can shout
it," he said, adding that the project is a major highlight in a
half-century-plus career: "It's the most inspiring thing I've ever done."

***

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/25/AR2010072502756.html

Enough right-wing propaganda

By E.J. Dionne Jr.
The Washington Post, July 26, 2010

The smearing of Shirley Sherrod ought to be a turning point in American
politics. This is not, as the now-trivialized phrase has it, a "teachable
moment." It is a time for action.

The mainstream media and the Obama administration must stop cowering before
a right wing that has persistently forced its propaganda to be accepted as
news by convincing traditional journalists that "fairness" requires treating
extremist rants as "one side of the story." And there can be no more
shilly-shallying about the fact that racial backlash politics is becoming an
important component of the campaign against President Obama and against
progressives in this year's election.

The administration's response to the doctored video pushed by right-wing hit
man Andrew Breitbart was shameful. The obsession with "protecting" the
president turned out to be the least protective approach of all.

The Obama team did not question, let alone challenge, the video. Instead, it
assumed that whatever narrative Fox News might create mattered more than
anything else, including the possible innocence of a human being outside the
president's inner circle.

Obama complained on ABC's "Good Morning America" that Agriculture Secretary
Tom Vilsack "jumped the gun, partly because we now live in this media
culture where something goes up on YouTube or a blog and everybody
scrambles." But it's his own apparatus that turned "this media culture" into
a false god.

Yet the Obama team was reacting to a reality: the bludgeoning of mainstream
journalism into looking timorously over its right shoulder and believing
that "balance" demands taking seriously whatever sludge the far right is
pumping into the political waters.

This goes way back. Al Gore never actually said he "invented the Internet,"
but you could be forgiven for not knowing this because the mainstream media
kept reporting he had.

There were no "death panels" in the Democratic health-care bills. But this
false charge got so much coverage that an NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll
last August found that 45 percent of Americans thought the reform proposals
would likely allow "the government to make decisions about when to stop
providing medical care to the elderly." That was the summer when support for
reform was dropping precipitously. A straight-out lie influenced the course
of one of our most important debates.

The traditional media are so petrified of being called "liberal" that they
are prepared to allow the Breitbarts of the world to become their assignment
editors. Mainstream journalists regularly criticize themselves for not
jumping fast enough or high enough when the Fox crowd demands coverage of
one of their attack lines.

Thus did Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander ask this month why the paper had
been slow to report on "the Justice Department's decision to scale down a
voter-intimidation case against members of the New Black Panther Party."
Never mind that this is a story about a tiny group of crackpots who stopped
no one from voting. It was aimed at doing what the doctored video Breitbart
posted set out to do: convince Americans that the Obama administration
favors blacks over whites.

And never mind that, to her great credit, Abigail Thernstrom, a conservative
George W. Bush appointee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, dismissed
the case and those pushing it. "This doesn't have to do with the Black
Panthers," she told Politico's Ben Smith. "This has to do with their
fantasies about how they could use this issue to topple the [Obama]
administration." Instead, the media are supposed to take seriously the
charges of J. Christian Adams, who served in the Bush Justice Department.
He's a Republican activist going back to the Bill Clinton era. His party
services included time as a Bush poll watcher in Florida in 2004, when on
one occasion he was involved in a controversy over whether a black couple
could cast a regular ballot.

Now, Adams is accusing the Obama Justice Department of being "motivated by a
lawless hostility toward equal enforcement of the law." This is racially
inflammatory, politically motivated nonsense -- and it's nonsense even if
Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh talk about it a thousand times a day. When an
outlandish charge for which there is no evidence is treated as an
on-the-one-hand-and-on-the-other-hand issue, the liars win.

The Sherrod case should be the end of the line. If Obama hates the current
media climate, he should stop overreacting to it. And the mainstream media
should stop being afraid of insisting on the difference between news and
propaganda.

Boyarsky: The Biggest Secret

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_biggest_secret_from_the_secret_archive_20100727/

The Biggest Secret From the 'Secret Archive'

"But this isn't old news. It's the inside story, and we are getting it for
the first time."

By Bill Boyarsky
Truthdig: July 27, 2010

The release of 92,000 pages of secret military documents by the website
WikiLeaks points to the futility of the war in Afghanistan and the double-
dealing of our so-called ally Pakistan.

The material, mostly intelligence reports from the ground, gives a
pessimistic picture of U.S. and British troops confronted with a hostile-or
at best indifferent-Afghan nation as they pursue a war designed to defeat
the Taliban and kill Osama bin Laden. The documents shred the optimistic
description of the war offered by President Barack Obama, Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and others in the
administration. They will, as former New York Times columnist Leslie Gelb
wrote in The Daily Beast, make it "much more difficult to deny or dodge the
truths that we've all been well aware of."

From a historical perspective, the release of the documents recalls the
publication of the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War after they were
obtained by Daniel Ellsberg. The papers, a secret history of the war,
revealed how successive administrations had lied about their reasons for
fighting in Vietnam. Their publication, first in The New York Times, was a
major factor in turning public opinion against the war. The lengthy legal
fight over the papers, with the Nixon administration trying to stop
publication, became as big a story as the papers themselves.

Julian Assange, who runs WikLleaks (he was profiled in The New Yorker), also
released the leaked reports to The New York Times, as well as The Guardian
and Der Spiegel. But unlike the Pentagon Papers, the Afghanistan "Secret
Archive," as the Times called it, flashed around the world with lightning
speed. There's no time for a long legal fight in the Internet era.

Assange's impact may be as great as Ellsberg's. The Pentagon Papers, a
history written at the direction of then-Defense Secretary Robert McNamara,
were a product of the highest levels of the Defense Department and were a
confirmation of what the anti-war movement had been saying. The material
obtained by WikiLeaks came from the ground up, from servicemen and - women
in the field. Their reports, incident by incident in real-time
communications, confirm what Afghanistan war critics have been saying.

They counter the basic assumption behind the Obama strategy-that we and our
allies can build an Afghanistan strong and willing to stop the Taliban in
order to end terrorist attacks around the world.

There are many incidents in the documents that show the hopelessness of
making war comrades out of hostile or suspicious Afghans. Some of the
incidents had previously been reported while others had not. One report,
from the British, told how Afghan border police "were high on opium and
having a party. An argument between an interpreter and a number of policemen
ensued; this developed into a fight between the interpreter and the
[police] . a number of shots were fired."

These reports are assembled in an interactive map of Afghanistan on The
Guardian's website. Individually, they are reports of big and small
incidents, without context. But if you have the time and patience to go
through all of them, you will see the impossibility of allying with the
Afghan citizenry and armed forces.

The documents also describe the relations between Pakistan's intelligence
agency, Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI,) and the Afghanistan insurgency.
New York Times reporters filled out the information in the documents with
reporting of their own.

The documents describe how Lt. Gen. Hamid Gul, former head of ISI,
encouraged Taliban leaders to focus their suicide bombing missions inside of
Afghanistan "in exchange for the government of Pakistan's security forces
turning a blind eye" to Afghan insurgent fighters operating in Pakistan.
Another message says Gul pays monthly visits to a madrassa that trains
suicide bombers.

Gul told the Times the allegations were "absolute nonsense" and that
"American intelligence is pulling cotton wool over your eyes." But, the
Times said, American soldiers are inundated with reports of such
collaboration between the insurgents and Pakistani intelligence, which has
long sought allies against India.

The documents also tell of secret American commando units that kill
insurgent commanders but also inflame Afghans by killing civilians. And the
Taliban, gaining strength in arms, is using heat-seeking missiles against
U.S. and allied aircraft, the documents revealed.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said the release of the documents
was "a breach of federal law" and that an investigation into the source of
the leak was initiated last week. But he told reporters that the information
has "in many ways been publicly discussed-whether by you or by
representatives of the U.S. government-for quite some time." In other words,
old news.

But this isn't old news. It's the inside story, and we are getting it for
the first time. The "Secret Archive" shows how the Obama team has misled us.
We and other nations with troops in the war are hostages in a hostile land
while terrorists operate from Connecticut, New Jersey and other places far
from Afghanistan.

Bacon: "This law is very unjust!" - The inside story

From: David Bacon

http://newamericamedia.org/2010/07/one-womans-story-this-law-is-very-unjust.php

"THIS LAW IS VERY UNJUST!"

By Teresa Mina, as told to David Bacon
New America Media, 7/24/10

Teresa Mina was a San Francisco janitor, member of Service Employees
Union Local 87, when she was fired because the company said she
didn't have legal immigration documents. Immigration and Customs
Enforcement told her employer to fire 463 workers because they lack
legal immigration status. She told her story to David Bacon the day
before she returned to Mexico.

I come from Tierra Blanca, a very poor town in Veracruz. After my
children's father abandoned us, I decided to come to the U.S.
There's just no money to survive. We couldn't continue to live that
way.

We all felt horrible when I decided to leave. My three kids, my mom,
and two sisters are still living at home in Veracruz. The only one
supporting them now is me.

My kids' suffering isn't so much about money. I've been able to send
enough to pay the bills. What they lack is love. They don't have a
father; they just have me. My mother cares for them, but it's not
the same. They always ask me to come back. They say maybe we'll be
poor, but we'll be together.

I haven't been able to go back to see them for six years, because I
don't have any papers to come back to the U.S. afterwards. To cross
now is very hard and expensive.

My first two years in San Francisco I cleaned houses. The work was
hard, and I was lonely. It's different here. Because I'm Latina and
I don't know English, if I go into a store, they watch me from head
to foot, like I'm a robber.

After two years, I got a job as a janitor, making $17.85 per hour.
Cleaning houses only paid $10. But then I was molested sexually.
Another worker exposed himself to me and my friend. When we went to
the company and filed a complaint, they took me off the job and kept
me out of work a month. They didn't pay me all that time.

That's when my problems started, because I called the union and asked
them to help me. After that, the company called me a problematic
person, because I wouldn't be quiet and I fought for my rights.
Sometimes they wouldn't give me any work.

When you work as a janitor you're mostly alone. You pick up trash,
clean up the kitchen and vacuum. These are simple things, and they
tire you out, but basically it's a good job. Lots of times we don't
take any breaks, though. To finish everything, sometimes we don't
even stop for lunch.

No one ever said anything to me about immigration for four years.
But then the company gave a letter to my coworkers, saying they
wouldn't be able to continue working because they had no papers.
About 40 people got them at first. Eventually I got a letter too.

The person from human relations said immigration had demanded the
papers for all the people working at the company. She said 300
people didn't have good papers. People whose papers were bad had a
month to give the company other documents. If the immigration
authorities said these were no good too, we'd be fired. She said the
immigration might come looking for us where we lived.

We had a meeting at the union about the letters. Some people in that
meeting had papers, and came to support those of us who didn't.
They said when they first came here they had to cross the border like
we did, in order to find work.

They complained that so many of us were being fired that the workload
increased for people who were left. The union got weaker too. We're
all paying $49 a month in union dues, and that adds up to alot.
We're paying that money so that the union will defend us if we get
fired like this. In that meeting we said we wanted equal rights. No
one should be fired unless the immigration arrests us. We don't want
the comapny to enforce immigration law. The comapny isn't the law.

The company gave me no work in December and January. I was
desperate. I had no money. I had to move in with someone else,
because I couldn't pay rent. I couldn't send money home to my
children.

I was so stressed I fell and broke my arm, and was out on disability.
Then I went back to work, and when I went to get my check, the woman
in the office wouldn't pay me until I showed them new immigration
papers. She gave me three days to bring then, and said if I didn't
I'd be fired. I asked her, "so you're the immigration?"

I felt really bad. I spent so many years killing myself in that job,
and I needed to keep it so I could send money home. But I couldn't
keep fighting. I didn't want my problems to get even bigger - I
could tell things would only get worse.

I went back after three days, and told the company I didn't have any
good papers. I asked for my pay for the hours I'd worked, and my
vacation. I told them I had a flight back to Mexico and needed my
check. They only paid me 60 hours, though they owed me 82. They
knew I was leaving and couldn't fight them over it. The union did
get me something. If I come back with papers within two years, I'll
get my job back.

This law is very unjust. We're doing jobs that are heavy and dirty.
We work day and night to help our children have a better life, or
just to eat. My work is the only support for my family. Now my
children won't have what they need.

Many people are frightened now. They don't want to complain or fight
about anything because they're afraid they might get fired. They
think if we keep fighting, the immigration will pick us up. They
have families here. What will happen to their children? Nobody
knows. They worry that what's happened to me might happen to them.

I can't afford to live here for months without working. I came to
this country to work for my children. But if this is what happens
because I've been fighting and struggling, I'd rather leave, and go
home and live with my children. In the end, they need me more.

So I guess I'll go back to Tierra Blanca. I'll work in the fields or
try selling food there. My family says the economic situation at
home is very hard. I'm not bringing much money home. But I like to
work, and I know I'll find a way.

For more articles and images, see http://dbacon.igc.org

See also Illegal People -- How Globalization Creates Migration and
Criminalizes Immigrants (Beacon Press, 2008)
Recipient: C.L.R. James Award, best book of 2007-2008
http://www.beacon.org/productdetails.cfm?PC=2002

See also the photodocumentary on indigenous migration to the US
Communities Without Borders (Cornell University/ILR Press, 2006)
http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/cup_detail.taf?ti_id=4575

See also The Children of NAFTA, Labor Wars on the U.S./Mexico Border
(University of California, 2004)
http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/9989.html
--
__________________________________

David Bacon, Photographs and Stories
http://dbacon.igc.org

__________________________________
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Afghanistan: The Pentagon's Lost War

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/afghanistan_the_pentagons_lost_war_20100727/

Afghanistan: The Pentagon's Lost War

By William Pfaff
Truthdig: July 27, 2010

While it is unquestionable that Barack Obama made the war in Afghanistan
"his" war, it also is true that it was served to him on a platter and with a
gun pressed against his back.

It was in fact the Pentagon's chosen war. Had he refused to fight it,
Pentagon insider stories, the opposition press and the Republican Party
would have attacked him and his new administration for demonstrating
incompetence in dealing with world affairs, naive and pacifist inclinations,
and a willingness to "surrender" to terrorism.

Mr. Obama, a presidential candidate wholly without military experience,
decided to forestall the inevitable attacks upon him as someone incapable of
dealing with security issues, by accompanying his promise to end George W.
Bush's Iraq war and making peace in Iraq (yet to be accomplished-as was
foreseeable at the time) by relaunching and winning "the right war," the war
in Afghanistan against al-Qaida and the Taliban.

This was a half-baked notion since al-Qaida's survival as a serious
terrorist organization, rather than an internationally notorious franchise
for homegrown terrorism, was at the time doubted, and the Taliban was
clearly a domestic Afghan political and social phenomenon possessing no
international dimension other than in neighboring Pakistan. It had neither
the design nor the capability to attack the United States or Europe-nor any
interest in doing so.

The Taliban had done nothing directly to harm the United States, but those
in the United States who, for various reasons, wanted the war in Afghanistan
prosecuted by Washington, held that unless the U.S. defeated the Taliban and
controlled Afghanistan, that country would be forever a "safe haven" for
terrorism. Much the same thing could be said of most of the world's
unoccupied spaces (including Utah and Idaho).

The ascendant force in the Pentagon when Obama took office was a group of
younger officers associated with Gen. David Petraeus, author of a
restatement of classical political as well as military anti-insurgent
tactics in a forthcoming U.S. Army Field Manual. He had been named
commandant of Central Command (covering the Middle East and Central Asia) by
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, and in turn placed a protege, Gen.
Stanley McChrystal, in command in Afghanistan. Petraeus was credited with
what actually was not (and still is not) "victory" in Iraq because he had
recommended and commanded the "surge" of reinforcements sent into Iraq in
2007-08, and was associated with the program that had recruited and paid
Sunni tribal forces to restore order in their own tribal areas by driving
out al-Qaida's supporters (tacitly in support of the dominant Shiite
political forces in Baghdad, expected to win the forthcoming 2010
parliamentary elections and form an independent coalition government-which
has yet to happen).

The new President Obama sent Gen. McChrystal to Kabul to assess the
situation and recommend a program of action. To no one's surprise, he
recommended a "surge" of troops to Afghanistan, as in Iraq, to a total that
today already is at nearly 100,000 American soldiers and contractors, plus a
huge program of civilian "nation builders" in which Americans would go into
villages to teach and promote democracy, school-building, women's education
and modern administration. This would follow an initial phase in which
American forces would "clear" an area of Taliban and would then install
newly trained Afghan soldiers and police to secure or "hold" the newly
liberated area while NATO combat forces would move ahead to clear still more
of Afghanistan.

Afghanistan is a country of some 250,000 square miles (646,000 square
kilometers). It is larger than France, most of it rugged and very difficult
to access. Its population is estimated by the U.N. to be some 30 million, 80
percent of it rural and tribal, a society profoundly disrupted by virtually
continuous war since 1979, and mostly illiterate.

President Obama asked Gens. McChrystal and Petraeus how long their program
would take. They assured him that American troops could begin shipping home
in a year, and so the president assured the American people.

It is difficult to imagine how Gens. McChrystal and Petraeus could in good
faith have presented him with so fantastical a plan, or how Barack Obama,
who is surely not a fool, could have accepted it. But the press, the
Congress and the American people nodded collectively that this was a scheme
of benevolent nation-building that could transform and pacify Afghanistan.
Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had written a few months before
in Foreign Affairs magazine that the United States could and should "change
the world, and in [America's] image." To do so, she wrote, was "a uniquely
American realism."

Such fantasy is bipartisan. It can by no means simply be blamed on Obama and
the Democrats. It is as American as apple pie, and Gens. McChrystal and
Petraeus's strategy for pacifying Afghanistan came straight, freshly baked,
out of the Pentagon.

Today the fantasy has collapsed. The accounts of journalists and of soldiers
themselves, the small-unit combat histories newly disclosed in the WikiLeaks
classified documents, have made plain what every informed grown-up American
should have known from the beginning, that U.S. forces are being defeated in
this preposterous effort, just as Soviet and British imperial forces were
defeated before them.

Barack Obama might today call in Gen. Petraeus, and his predecessor Gen.
McChrystal, together with the latter's "Team America" of high school jocks,
and tell them that as they are responsible for this fiasco of destruction
and useless slaughter, they will now make a public apology to the American
people, and take charge of executing a mass American retreat from
Afghanistan, with as little loss as possible to American forces and the
Afghan people.

There is nothing to be gained by staying.

But that is impossible. Failure is merely a steppingstone to success in the
American military and political systems. No one accepts responsibility. The
war will go on until it is extended to Pakistan, and possibly beyond.
Casualties will steadily mount. No one can predict when the inevitable
moment will come, but it will come, when the last Americans are lifted by
helicopter off an embassy rooftop, and the Afghans, Pakistanis, Indians,
Tajiks and others at last are left to reconstruct their own world.

Visit William Pfaff's website for more on his latest book, "The Irony of
Manifest Destiny: The Tragedy of America's Foreign Policy" (Walker & Co.,
$25), at www.williampfaff.com.
© 2010 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

Scheer: Thank God for the Whistle-Blowers, 40% of House Democrats vote NO

From: Marcy Winograd
To: pdla@svpal.org
Sent: Tuesday, July 27, 2010 5:57 PM
Subject: [PDLA] Congress Votes to Escalate Afghanistan War -
Waxman Votes NO; Harman Votes for War

Dear Friends, though Congress voted once again to send more troops to
Afghanistan, the good news is that 114 (40% of House Democrats) voted
against the 33-billion dollar supplemental. Among those in the CA
delegation casting a courageous NO vote were Waxman, Becerra, the Sanchez
sisters, Chu, Garamendi, Matsui, Waters, Lee, Eshoo, Filner, Farr, Miller,
Lofgren, & Woosley. Those voting for the escalation included Harman,
Schiff, Sherman, McNerney, Capps (!), Roybal Allard, Berman, Baca. Please
read David Swanson's excellent report below and click on the link to read
how the entire Congress voted. I will make sure their voting records are
distributed widely, so the people know where everyone stands. As Daniel
Ellsberg so eloquently asked at the PDA conference in Ohio last weekend:
Are we doing everything in our power to stop the US occupations? Thank you
to those of you who contacted Congress. Keep the heat on. Peace, Marcy

***

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/thank_god_for_the_whistle-blowers_20100728/

Thank God for the Whistle-Blowers

"We should be grateful to the whistle-blowers who gave us the
Afghanistan war documents for once again letting us in on the sick joke that
passes for U.S foreign policy."

By Robert Scheer
Truthdig: July 28, 2010

What WikiLeaks did was brilliant journalism, and the bleating critics from
the president on down are revealing just how low a regard they have for the
truth. As with Richard Nixon's rage against the publication of the Pentagon
Papers, our leaders are troubled not by the prospect of these revelations
endangering troops but rather endangering their own political careers. It is
our president who unnecessarily sacrifices the lives of our soldiers and not
those in the press who let the public in on the folly of the mission itself.

What the documents exposed is the depth of chicanery that surrounds the
Afghanistan occupation at every turn because we have stumbled into a
regional quagmire of such dark and immense proportions that any attempt to
connect this failed misadventure with a recognizable U.S. national security
interest is doomed. What is revealed on page after page is that none of the
local actors, be they labeled friend or foe, give a whit about our
president's
agenda. They are focused on prizes, passions and causes that are obsessively
homegrown.

Our fixation on al-Qaida has nothing to do with them. President Barack
Obama's
top national security adviser admitted as much when he said last December
that there were fewer than 100 of those foreign fighters left in
Afghanistan. Those who do remain in the region are hunkered down in
Pakistan, and as the leaked documents reveal, that nation is just toying
with us by pretending to cooperate while its intelligence service continues
to support our proclaimed enemies. As Gen. Stanley McChrystal made clear in
his famous report, the battles in Afghanistan are tribal in nature and the
agendas are local-be they about drugs, religion or the economic power of
military blackmail. The documents contain a steady drumbeat of local hustles
that are certainly deadly but rise to the level of a national security
threat against the U.S. only when we insist on making their history our own.

It has ever been so with the Afghans, and our continued attempt to bend
their passions to our purposes will always lead to horrid results. That is,
in fact, just how their nation came to be the launching pad for the 9/11
attacks, which is the ostensible purpose of our occupation. We meddled in
their history in a grand Cold War adventure to humble the Soviets by
attacking the secular government in Kabul with which Moscow sided.

When presidential press secretary Robert Gibbs intones, "We are in this
region of the world because of what happened on 9/11," he is mouthing a
dangerous half-truth. The opposite is the case: 9/11 happened because the
U.S. was in the region, and not the other way around. Entanglement with
Afghanistan has been based on a tissue of lies since day one, when Jimmy
Carter first decided to throw in with the religious fanatics there, as
current Secretary of Defense Robert Gates revealed in his 1996 memoir. Gates
had served on Carter's National Security Council and in his book exposed
what the publisher touted as "Carter's never-before revealed covert support
to Afghan mujahedeen-six months before the Soviets invaded."

Our government recruited terrorists from the Arab world to go to Afghanistan
and fight in that holy war against godless communism with even greater
enthusiasm during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, who proclaimed the Muslim
fanatics "freedom fighters." As the 9/11 Commission report stated, those
freedom fighters included Osama bin Laden and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the
alleged architect of the 9/11 attacks.

Three years before that attack, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter's national
security adviser, was asked in an interview with Le Nouvel Observateur if he
regretted "having given arms and advice to future terrorists," and he
answered: "What is most important to the history of the world? Some
stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the
Cold War?"

One of Carter's advisers back then was Richard Holbrooke, now Obama's top
civilian adviser on Afghanistan. Clearly he knows quite a bit about stirring
up Muslims, and someone should ask him about the brilliant decision to give
heat-seeking Stinger rockets to those same fanatics who then turned them
against our side, according to the recently disclosed documents. They never
learn. It was Holbrooke who helped design the Vietnam-era assassination
programs exposed in the Pentagon Papers and now replicated in the
Afghanistan documents.

Thanks to Daniel Ellsberg, who risked much to make the record of the Vietnam
War public, we learned about the madness that Holbrooke and others were
creating. We should be grateful to the whistle-blowers who gave us the
Afghanistan war documents for once again letting us in on the sick joke that
passes for U.S foreign policy.

UK's PM: 'Gaza cannot remain a prison camp', Women to Set Sail past Israel

From: Abie Dawjee
The RAIN Newsletter

http://www.jpost.com/International/Article.aspx?id=182759

'Gaza cannot remain a prison camp'

By ASSOCIATED PRESS
The Jerusalem Post: Tuesday, July 27, 2010

In Turkey, UK's Cameron makes harsh comments against Israel.

ANKARA, Turkey - Israel's May 31 interception of a Gaza-bound aid flotilla
was "completely unacceptable," British Prime Minister David Cameron said
Tuesday during an address to Turkish businessmen.

In a reference to Israel's blockade of the Strip, he said: "Gaza cannot and
must not be allowed to remain a prison camp."

He also commented that the world needs Turkey's help in pushing Iran to
address international concerns about its suspected nuclear weapons program.

Cameron went on to declare that Britain was a staunch backer of Turkey's
troubled bid to join the European Union. His visit early in his term was a
measure of Britain's acknowledgment of Turkey as a critical ally in a
conflict-prone region, much as US President Barack Obama traveled to Turkey,
NATO's only Muslim member, in 2009 to boost a partnership despite
differences on key issues.

Cameron's strong reference to the flotilla was likely to please his Turkish
hosts, though he said an Israeli inquiry into the May 31 incident should be
swift and transparent. That comment differed from Turkey's public stance
that any inquiry should be international.

New EU and Canadian sanctions, targeting Iran's foreign trade, banking and
energy sectors, were taken Monday in an attempt to thwart Iran's nuclear
program. The EU's measures also blacklist Iran's shipping and air cargo
companies.

"New sanctions the EU announced yesterday are designed to persuade Iran to
give the international community confidence that its nuclear program really
is peaceful as Iran claimed," Cameron said.

***

From: Romi Elnagar

http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=52237

Women Prepare to Set Sail Past Israel

By Mona Alami and Samar Hajj

BEIRUT, Jul 22, 2010 (IPS) - The 'Maryam', an all-female Lebanese aid ship,
currently docked in the northern Lebanese port of Tripoli, is getting ready
to set sail for Gaza in the next few days. The ship, which aims to break
Israel's siege on the Palestinian territory, will carry about 50 aid
workers, including some U.S. nuns keen to deliver aid to the long-suffering
women and children of Gaza.

"We were all drawn to the project...united by a feeling of stark injustice,"
says Samar Hajj, one of the organisers of the Maryam, which is named
after the mother of Christ.

Israel's siege began in 2006 after Hamas militants won Palestinian
legislative elections, then led a cross-border raid and kidnapped an Israeli
soldier, Gilad Shalit. Its watertight blockade has been maintained with
Egypt's help, since Hamas sought control of the territory in 2007. It has
resulted in crippling shortages, making daily life difficult in Gaza.

On May 31, Israeli forces attacked Mavi Marmaris, a Turkish humanitarian aid
vessel bringing aid to Gaza, killing nine Turkish activists aboard. After
the
attack, which sparked a wave of global condemnation of Israel, Hajj gathered
to protest against Israel in downtown Beirut with 11 other friends. "We were
appalled at the violent images we saw on TV and wanted to take action."

The women later got in touch with Yasser Kashlak, a 36-year-old Syrian of
Palestinian origin, who heads the Free Palestine Movement. Kashlak had
contributed to the financing of other vessels that tried breaking the siege,
including the Gaza Freedom Flotilla and the Naji al Ali.

"After the Mavi Marmaris incident, one of the women hailed Mary during our
weekly meeting. Her exclamation came like a revelation, so we decided to
call our ship Maryam (Mary in Arabic). The name was perfect for a vessel
that comprised only women. Who could disparage the Virgin Mary, a
recognised saint in most religions?" says Hajj.

The ship is slated to make a stopover in a friendly port before heading to
Israel because of the palpable hostility between Lebanon and Israel. Last
month, the Cypriot government banned any vessel headed to Gaza from its
docks. But activists can still sail from a port in Turkish Cyprus.

"We have the option to sail from a number of friendly ports and are
completely aware of our obligation to transit through a foreign port to
avoid our trip being labeled an act of war," says Hajj.

Hajj estimates she has received about 500 applications for the trip, but t
he Maryam will transport only about 50 women, half of who are Lebanese
nationals, the rest being Arabs, Europeans and from the U.S. The organiser
explains that carrying Palestinians on the ship is not an option because of
the risk of arrests by Israelis.

"The ship will transport cancer medicine and other necessary items for
women and children. We will not carry any weapons or terrorists,
irrespective of what the Israeli army might say," says Hajj.

While they wait to set sail, the headquarters of the Maryam remains agog
with activity as women from different backgrounds, political affiliations,
nationalities and religious beliefs converse, argue and joke.

"All women travelling on the ship have taken on the name Maryam and are
distinguishable by a number, like Maryam 1, Maryam 2, etc. We prefer to keep
identities secret to avoid pressure from respective embassies," adds Hajj.

Maryam 1 is a middle aged Indian lawyer and the wife of an admiral. "I am a
follower of the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi who fought against every form
of oppression peacefully in the course of his life. He was also opposed to
the occupation of Palestine," she says.

The lawyer explains that before deciding to join the Maryam, she studied the
legal implications of the attack on the Free Gaza Flotilla, which she says
was illegitimate.

"What the Mavi Marmaris attack highlighted was that two sets of rules were
applied to humanity, depending on a people's colour, race and religion. But
what people fail to realise is that suffering is by nature indivisible."

Sitting across from her was Maryam 2, a former biologist of Lebanese-
Armenian descent. "I have been closely following the Palestinian issue and
have been moved by the blatant injustice that is practiced against
Palestinians by the Israelis," she says.

At the daily meetings, Maryam 2 bonded with other women from diverse
backgrounds, particularly a Turkish journalist. Turkey and Armenia have been
at odds since the Turkish massacre of Armenians in the early 19th century.

"The journalist, who barely speaks English told me I was a godsend when she
discovered I could speak some Turkish. Here at the Maryam headquarters,
nationality and religion dissolve behind the common resolve of breaking the
siege of Gaza," she says.

The sail date for both aid ships from Beirut has yet to be announced.
Lebanese Transport Minister Ghazi Aridi said the Naji Al-Ali is now docked
at the Lebanese port of Tripoli and can set sail once it is cleared by
port authorities. However, the pan-Arab daily Al-Hayat reported recently
that the sail of the two ships has been postponed until further notice,
particularly after Iran cancelled sending two aid ships to the area. The
report was denied by Saer Ghandour, the organiser of the Naji Al-Ali
sailing, who added that the ship's formalities were still in process.

Meanwhile, most Maryam passengers are impatient to set sail. "We will not
fight Israelis with weapons, stones or knives, but with our free will," says
Maryam 3, a single woman working in the Lebanese government. "And we will
not surrender."

In Israel, the army chief, Gabi Ashkenazi, told the Knesset's Foreign
Affairs and Defence Committee on Jul. 6 that every effort should be made
to ensure that no more flotillas set sail for Gaza.

"Now a Lebanese flotilla with women and parliament members is getting
organised. Israel is trying to prevent its departure in open and covert
ways."
(END)

Time to Celebrate, Time to Mourn, Scientists Confirm Giant Plumes Are From Spill

Julian Assange, founder of Wickileaks is today's sole interviewee of
Amy Goodman on Democracy Now. It's a fascinating, heartfelt and
penetrating discussion of the what and why of the documents release
and a powerful rejoinder to the self-serving critiques of the right and
the administration. Including the charge that it doesn't include Obama
and the pentagon's latest strategy. This is one not to be missed. -Ed

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/07/27

Wikileaks: Time to Celebrate, Time to Mourn

by Jeff Cohen
CommonDreams.org: July 27, 2010

It's time to celebrate.

It's a big win for Internet-based indy media that WikiLeaks.org posted its
"Afghan War Diary" based on 90,000 leaked U.S. military records detailing a
failing war in which U.S. and allied forces have repeatedly killed innocent
civilians. This on-the-ground material is vaster than the Daniel
Ellsberg-leaked Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War, and was much faster
in reaching the public.

Thanks to the Internet and new technologies, it's easier than ever for a
whistleblower to anonymously leak documents exposing official abuses and
deception, easier to copy and disseminate vast quantities of material, and
easier for journalists and citizens to cull through all the data.

I spent hours with Dan Ellsberg this weekend at the Progressive Democrats
meeting in Cleveland, where he spoke after a screening of the brilliant
documentary, "The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the
Pentagon Papers".

In 1971, it was Henry Kissinger who called Ellsberg "the most dangerous man
in America." The movie shows how Ellsberg (aided at times by his own kids
and pal Tony Russo) laboriously copied 7,000 pages of classified high-level
documents - which exposed that every president from Truman to Johnson had
publicly lied about Vietnam. It took many months before a newspaper
published the documents and much longer before they all were gathered in a
book.

Today, the "most dangerous man in the world" may be Julian Assange of
WikiLeaks. At least that's how he's seen by the various governments that
have threatened to prosecute him for revealing their secrets. But as a
stateless and office-less news organization operating in cyberspace,
WikiLeaks is almost untouchable.

Throughout this decade of war, Ellsberg has been an evangelist beseeching
government employees to engage in leaking and "unauthorized truth telling".
His prayers have now been partially answered - with Assange boasting that
the 2004-2009 Afghan war logs constitute "the most comprehensive description
of a war to have ever been published during the course of a war."

The Internet has changed the game since the Pentagon Papers, says Assange:
"More material can be pushed to bigger audiences, and much sooner."

If Ellsberg is the most important whistle-blower in U.S. history, Internet
activist Assange is probably the most important aider-and-abetter of
whistle-blowers - using technology that Ellsberg couldn't have imagined as
he labored over his now ancient Xerox machine.

Launched less than four years ago with a focus on helping Chinese
dissidents, the donation-supported WikiLeaks has continuously posted
material embarrassing to business and governments. In April, WikiLeaks
posted horrific video of a 2007 U.S. Apache gunship attack in Baghdad that
killed a dozen civilians, including two Reuters journalists.

The video leak led to the jailing of 22-year-old Army intelligence analyst
Bradley Manning - suspected now in the Afghan leak. To its credit, WikiLeaks
is raising money for Manning's defense.

This is also a time to mourn.

Because some things don't seem to change - like endless war, based on
deceit.

Nearly forty years after the Pentagon Papers were leaked by Democratic
military analyst Ellsberg, a Democratic White House seems bent on public
deception and cheerleading on behalf of an immoral war that can't be won.

Team Obama decided to escalate the Afghanistan folly, knowing all that the
public now has access to thanks to WikiLeaks - such as NATO killing of so
many civilians ("blue on white" events); Task Force 373, a "black" special
forces unit that sometimes kills kids or Afghan allies as it hunts down
insurgents; widespread Afghan animosity toward U.S. forces; allied troops
firing on each other ("blue on blue" incidents); a steady increase in
Taliban attacks.

All the color-coded military jargon can't obscure the reality that
dishonesty often infects the original incident reports or intervenes soon
after, before any public statements are issued. Remember the lies about Pat
Tillman's death.

From Vietnam through Afghanistan, deceiving the public has been the
government's knee-jerk response. The Ellsberg documentary shows U.S. Defense
Secretary Robert McNamara going before TV cameras and boldly lying about all
the military progress in Vietnam - just minutes after McNamara had told
Ellsberg privately that he agreed there'd been no progress.

When Ellsberg leaked the papers, the Nixon White House prosecuted him for
espionage and burglarized his psychiatrist's office searching for dirt -
after failing in court to prevent newspapers from publishing the papers.

The Obama White House didn't try to stop the New York Times from publishing
the Afghan logs (hopeless since WikiLeaks had also provided them to foreign
publications - Germany's Der Spiegel and the British Guardian, whose initial
coverage focused much more on civilian casualties than did the Times.)

But the Obama administration denounced WikiLeaks as "irresponsible" and
non-objective - and argued that the president had announced "a new strategy"
for Afghanistan last December "precisely because of the grave situation that
had developed over several years." The "new strategy" claim is hardly more
credible than Nixon's claim in 1968 that he had a plan to end the Vietnam
War.

Asked by Der Speigel whether he, following in Ellsberg's footsteps, was
"today's most dangerous man," Assange responded: "The most dangerous men are
those who are in charge of war. And they need to be stopped."

Obama recently asked Congress for $33 billion more to pay for his 30,000
increase in U.S. troops to Afghanistan. That vote could happen any day.

Will they be stopped?

Jeff Cohen is an associate professor of journalism and the director of the
Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College, founder of the media
watch group FAIR, and former board member of Progressive Democrats of
America. In 2002, he was a producer and pundit at MSNBC (overseen by NBC
News). His latest book is Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in
Corporate Media.

***

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/24/science/earth/24plume.html?ref=us

Scientists Confirm Underwater Plumes Are From Spill

By John Collins Rudolf
NY Times: July 23, 2010

Florida researchers said Friday that they had for the first time
conclusively linked vast plumes of microscopic oil droplets drifting in the
Gulf of Mexico to the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

The scientists, from the University of South Florida, matched samples taken
from the plumes with oil from the leaking well provided by BP. The findings
were the first direct confirmation that the plumes were linked to the spill,
although federal scientists had said there was overwhelming circumstantial
evidence tying them to BP's well.

The discovery of the plumes several weeks into the oil leak alarmed
scientists, who feared that clouds of oil particles could wreak havoc on
marine life far below the surface. Plumes have been detected as far as 50
miles from the wellhead, although oil concentrations at those distances are
extremely low, about 750 parts per billion.

This is well below the level considered acutely toxic for fish and marine
organisms, but could still affect eggs and larvae, the scientists fear.

"There are a lot of things that are potentially at risk," said David
Hollander, an oceanographer with the University of South Florida who is
studying the plumes. "There's not a lot known of the toxic effects of oil on
organisms living in deeper waters."

The announcement by the Florida researchers came as federal scientists
released their own report on the oil formations. The multiagency report
describes the presence of large plumes of microscopic oil droplets within
several miles of the wellhead at a depth of 3,280 to 4,265 feet. Oil
concentrations there are as high as 10 parts per million, or the equivalent
of one tablespoon of oil in 130 gallons of water.

The plumes closest to the well may be concentrated enough to pose a threat
to nearby deepwater coral reefs, which host a diversity of ocean life, said
Steve Murawski, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's chief
scientist for the spill response. "We know that even low concentrations can
be harmful to the eggs and larvae of the deep coral," he said.

The federal report also described a drop in dissolved oxygen levels in deep
water near the well, which it said probably resulted from the rapid
reproduction of oil-eating microbes. Yet the reduction did not signal
conditions that could cause a die-off in sea life, the report concluded.

The ultimate impact of the oil plumes on sea life in the gulf remains open
to debate. A plume has been found near DeSoto Canyon, an underwater valley
south of the Florida Panhandle where ocean currents push nutrient-rich water
up onto the continental shelf. Some scientists fear that oil, even in the
low concentrations found in the plumes, could be driven into the shelf's
life-rich shallow waters and cause harm.

"It's almost an express route up there," Dr. Hollander said. "That's what
raises the concerns of the biologists."

Yet federal scientists say they believe that the oil concentrations in the
deepwater plumes are too low to have much of an effect on the gulf's
commercially valuable fisheries.

Methane readings 100x normal near oil disaster site, BP, Scientists, and Gag Agreements

From: "Richard Menec" <menecraj@shaw.ca>

http://www.tampabay.com/news/environment/water/scientists-from-st-petersburg-find-high-methane-readings-near-oil-disaster/1110095

Scientists from St. Petersburg find high methane readings near oil disaster
site

By Craig Pittman, staff writer
Tampa Bay Times: July 21, 2010

ST. PETERSBURG - Two years before the Deepwater Horizon explosion,
scientists from SRI International took readings on the levels of methane in
the Gulf of Mexico less than 10 miles from the rig. Last year, they went
back and did it again.

Now, after the rig blew up and gushed oil for more than 80 days, SRI's
scientists from St. Petersburg have returned to the same area just northwest
of the disaster and taken fresh readings.

They found levels of methane - a particularly potent greenhouse gas - are
now 100 times higher than normal, SRI scientists said. They can't say for
sure it's from BP, said SRI director Larry Langebrake, but "it is a sign
that says there are things going on here that need to be researched."

Higher levels of methane can cause problems both in the gulf and around the
globe.

Seeps in the ocean floor put small amounts of methane into the water, where
it's consumed by naturally occurring microbes. Higher concentrations of
methane can cause the microbe population to boom, gobbling up oxygen needed
by other marine life and producing dead zones in the gulf.

The other problem, said Langebrake: "Methane is a stronger greenhouse gas
than carbon dioxide."

In fact, it's 20 times worse than carbon dioxide, trapping lots more heat
close to the earth, contributing to climate change. And it can hang around
in the atmosphere for up to 15 years.

In addition to the increased amount of methane, the SRI tests "did show
indications that the methane was further up in the water column than we had
seen it before," said Carol Lutken of the University of Mississippi, which
is part of a consortium with SRI that has been doing the tests.

The findings from SRI are not the first to suggest that Deepwater Horizon is
gushing methane as well as oil. Scientists from Texas A&M who tested the
water within 5 miles of Deepwater Horizon reported finding methane
concentrations that were 100,000 times higher than normal.

However they do suggest that the methane may be spreading throughout the
gulf just like the underwater plumes of oil found by oceanographers from the
University of South Florida and other academic institutions.

SRI is still analyzing the results. "We're still trying to understand what
those things are telling us," Langebrake said.

SRI, based in Menlo Park, Calif., is the nonprofit scientific research
institute that began as the research arm of Stanford University. In 2006 St.
Petersburg persuaded the company to open a marine technology operation here
to take advantage of research being produced at nearby state and federal
facilities. Its offices opened last year near Albert Whitted Airport.

SRI is part of a consortium of institutions that has been studying natural
seeps in the ocean floor for what until recently was known as the U.S.
Minerals Management Service. The seeps come from deposits of methane gas
that, because they are so deep beneath the ocean, have frozen into icy
crystals.

Disturbing those deposits - say, by drilling an oil well through them - can
turn that solid methane into a liquid, leaving the ocean floor unstable,
explained Lutken.

Worse, the freed gas may explode. One theory on the cause of the Deepwater
Horizon disaster blames a methane gas bubble for causing the explosion and
fire that sank the rig. There have been rumors that a similar methane
explosion could cause a tsunami, a concern that government officials say is
unfounded.

Generally the oil industry tries to avoid methane areas during drilling for
safety reasons. But the U.S. Energy Department wants to find a way to
harvest fuel from those methane deposits, Lutken said.

For its research, the consortium persuaded the government to let it take
over an area of the gulf floor that turned out to be in the same deepwater
canyon as BP's well, Lutken said. But they're to the northwest and on a
slope, just over half a mile deep, while Deepwater Horizon's well is a mile
below the surface.

That means that the methane in higher levels that SRI discovered during the
most recent tests on June 25 and 26 has apparently been flowing upslope,
Lutken said.

What may turn out to be as important as those higher methane readings,
though, are the earlier test results from research cruises before the oil
rig explosion, she said, because they offer a snapshot of what "normal"
should look like.

"We have what it was like in the neighborhood before Deepwater Horizon
occurred," she said.
_______________________________________________
Rad-Green mailing list
Rad-Green@lists.econ.utah.edu

***

http://scienceblogs.com/mikethemadbiologist/2010/07/bp_scientists_and_gag_orders.php

Mike the Mad Biologist

Mad rantings about politics, evolution, and microbiology

BP, Scientists, and Gag Agreements

Category: Bidness . Ethics . Funding . Oil
Posted on: July 19, 2010 10:10 AM, by Mike

Last week, I wrote about a column by biologist Marc Lipsitch, who described
a conflict of interest for scientists that has not been discussed: gag
agreements for scientists who accept industry funding. In other words, if
the corporate funder doesn't like the results, nobody will hear about them.
These agreements also present other problems, such as reviewing grant
proposals or receiving federal funding, as the scientist will have access to
information that is unknown and undiscussed*.

Well (pun intended), BP appears to have tried this strategy too (italics
mine):

BP has been trying to hire marine scientists from universities around the
Gulf Coast in an apparent move to bolster the company's legal defense
against anticipated lawsuits related to the Gulf oil spill, according to a
report from The Press-Register in Mobile, Ala.
Scientists from Louisiana State University, Mississippi State University
and Texas A&M have reportedly accepted BP's offer, according to the
paper....

Robert Wiygul, an Ocean Springs lawyer who specializes in environmental
law, said BP is in effect denying the government access to valuable
information by hiring the scientists and adding them to its legal team. "It
also buys silence," Wiygul told the Press-Register, "thanks to
confidentiality clauses in the contracts."

Scientists who sign the contract to work for BP will be subject to a
strict confidentiality agreement. They will be barred from publishing,
sharing or even speaking about data they collected for at least three years.

George Crozier, director of the Dauphin Island Sea Lab, who was approached
by BP, told the paper: "It makes me feel like they were more interested in
making sure we couldn't testify against them than in having us testify for
them."

BP even tried to hire the entire marine sciences department at the
University of South Alabama, according to the report. Bob Shipp, the head of
the department, said he declined the offer because of the confidentiality
clause.

Since these researchers from Louisiana State University, Mississippi State
University and Texas A&M will not be able to discuss their data, all the
work they do and anything they publicly state simply can't be given
credence. To the extent these universities are about scholarship, this is a
serious violation of that mission. And the article highlights the need for
all universities to address gag agreements:

But according to the Press-Register, Shipp can't prevent his colleagues
from signing on with BP because staff members are allowed to do outside
consultation for up to eight hours a week.
"More than one scientist interviewed by the Press-Register described being
offered $250 an hour through BP lawyers," the article said. "At eight hours
a week, that amounts to $104,000 a year."

Ultimately this stems from:

the lack of recognition that you can't have it all. Sometimes you have to
make choices, and those choices confer benefits and costs. If you want a job
where your ideas and contributions are taken seriously because you don't
have a hidden agenda (good work if you can get it), then there are certain
things you can't do.

Shame on these scientists. And the NRDC is right: the research funds should
be administered by the National Academy of Sciences. But then we would have
to be rude and uncivil to BP, and the Obama Administration just didn't have
the guts to do that.

*Thinking about this issue some more, it seems that an unscrupulous person
could write a proposal for work that they have already done, and receive
funding. This wastes money and takes funding away from other projects.

How Your White House Defends Its War, Topsy Secret America

If you read this on the URL itself, there are nine click-ons in Glen
Greenwald's response in the text itself, such as "there are numerous
official documents - THAT HAVE RECENTLY EMERGED - You access
them by clicking on 'that have recently emerged.' They are there to
substantiate indications the situation hasn't improved or gotten
worse, contrary to the administration's desperate attempt to stem the
tidal wave roused by this report, get the money now being debated
in the House and keep this disaster going.

Nine of them.

http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/2010/07/26/this-is-how-your-white-house-defends-its-war/

This Is How Your White House Defends Its War

Posted by Byard Duncan on @ 7:36 am
Article printed from speakeasy: <http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy
URL to article:
http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/2010/07/26/this-is-how-your-white-house-defends-its-war/
Here's the White House's full response to the latest WikiLeaks saga:

The United States strongly condemns the disclosure of classified
information by individuals and organizations which could put the lives of
Americans and our partners at risk, and threaten our national security.
Wikileaks made no effort to contact us about these documents - the United
States government learned from news organizations that these documents would
be posted. These irresponsible leaks will not impact our ongoing commitment
to deepen our partnerships with Afghanistan and Pakistan; to defeat our
common enemies; and to support the aspirations of the Afghan and Pakistani
people.

The documents posted by Wikileaks reportedly cover a period of time from
January 2004 to December 2009. On December 1, 2009, President Obama
announced a new strategy with a substantial increase in resources for
Afghanistan, and increased focus on al Qaeda and Taliban safe-havens in
Pakistan, precisely because of the grave situation that had developed over
several years. This shift in strategy addressed challenges in Afghanistan
that were the subject of an exhaustive policy review last fall. We know that
serious challenges lie ahead, but if Afghanistan is permitted to slide
backwards, we will again face a threat from violent extremist groups like al
Qaeda who will have more space to plot and train. That is why we are now
focused on breaking the Taliban's momentum and building Afghan capacity so
that the Afghan government can begin to assume responsibility for its
future. The United States remains committed to a strong, stable, and
prosperous Afghanistan.

Since 2009, the United States and Pakistan have deepened our important
bilateral partnership. Counter-terrorism cooperation has led to significant
blows against al Qaeda's leadership. The Pakistani military has gone on the
offensive in Swat and South Waziristan, at great cost to the Pakistani
military and people. The United States and Pakistan have also commenced a
Strategic Dialogue, which has expanded cooperation on issues ranging from
security to economic development. Pakistan and Afghanistan have also
improved their bilateral ties, most recently through the completion of a
Transit-Trade Agreement. Yet the Pakistani government - and Pakistan's
military and intelligence services - must continue their strategic shift
against insurgent groups. The balance must shift decisively against al Qaeda
and its extremist allies. U.S. support for Pakistan will continue to be
focused on building Pakistani capacity to root out violent extremist groups,
while supporting the aspirations of the Pakistani people.

And Glenn Greenwald's take, via Salon.

It's hardly a shock that the war in Afghanistan is going far worse than
political officials have been publicly claiming. Aside from the fact that
lying about war is what war leaders do almost intrinsically - that's part of
what makes war so degrading to democratic values - there have been numerous
official documents that have recently emerged or leaked out that explicitly
state that the war is going worse than ever and is all but unwinnable. A
French General was formally punished earlier this month for revealing that
the NATO war situation "has never been worse," while French officials now
openly plot how to set new "intermediate" benchmarks to ensure - in their
words - that "public opinion doesn't get the impression of a useless
effort." Anyone paying even mild attention knows that our war effort there
has entailed countless incidents of civilian slaughter followed by official
lies about it, "hit lists" compiled with no due process, and feel-good
pronouncements from the Government that have little relationship to the
realities in that country (other leak highlights are here). This leak is
not unlike the Washington Post series from the last week: the broad strokes
were already well-known, but the sheer magnitude of the disclosures may
force more public attention on these matters than had occurred previously.

Byard Duncan is a contributing writer and editor for AlterNet. His work has
appeared on AlterNet, Truthout, Common Dreams and the China Daily.

***

http://www.thenation.com/blog/37675/huge-fly-swatter-no-flies-top-secret-americas-vast-counterterrorism-machine

Huge Fly Swatter, No Flies: Top Secret America's Vast Counterterrorism
Machine

By Robert Dreyfus
The Nation: July 10, 2010

Not surprisingly, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence is
complaining about the Washington Post's blockbuster series, "Top Secret
America," whose first installment appeared today. (You can read the whole
series, as it appears, at the Post's special site, TopSecretAmerica.com.)
Laughably, the ODNI says:

The reporting does not reflect the Intelligence Community we know.. We
have reformed the [intelligence community] in ways that have improved the
quality, quantity, regularity, and speed of our support to policymakers,
warfighters, and homeland defenders, and we will continue our reform
efforts. We provide oversight, while also encouraging initiative. We work
constantly to reduce inefficiencies and redundancies, while preserving a
degree of intentional overlap among agencies to strengthen analysis,
challenge conventional thinking, and eliminate single points of failure.

But as the Post makes clear, the world of Top Secret America has grown like
Topsy Secret America. Dana Priest and William M. Arkin, who wrote the
series, report that the post-9/11 apparatus has exploded to include at least
1,271 government organizations and nearly 2,000 private contractors in
10,000 locations, with 854,000 people holding top-secret security
clearances. The intelligence budget for the United States has risen from $30
billion a year in 2001 to $75 billion today, and that only scratches the
surface. And they report:

Twenty-four organizations were created by the end of 2001, including the
Office of Homeland Security and the Foreign Terrorist Asset Tracking Force.
In 2002, 37 more were created to track weapons of mass destruction, collect
threat tips and coordinate the new focus on counterterrorism. That was
followed the next year by 36 new organizations, and 26 after that; and 31
more, and 32 more, and 20 or more each in 2007, 2008, and 2009.

What's missing from the story, however, is any assessment of the threat
against which this vast and growing machinery is arrayed. The Post notes
that twenty-five separate agencies have been set up to track terrorist
financing, which admirably shows the overlapping and redundant nature of the
post-9/11 ballooning of agencies and organizations targeting terrorism. But
the article barely mentions that there are hardly any terrorists to track.

The Post points out that among the recent, nuisance-level attacks by Muslim
extremists-the Fort Hood shooter, the underwear bomber, the Times Square
incident-the intelligence machine failed to detect or stop them. True.
That's an indictment of the counterterrorism machinery that has become a
staple for critics of the outsize budgets and wasteful bureaucracy that has
been created since 9/11.

The core problem, which the Post doesn't address, is that Al Qaeda and its
affiliates, its sympathizers, and even self-starting terrorist actors who
aren't part of Al Qaeda itself, are a tiny and manageable problem. Yet the
apparatus that has been created is designed to meet nothing less than an
existential threat. Even at the height of the cold war, when the Soviet
Union and its allies were engaged in a brutal, country-by-country battle
across Asia, Africa and Latin America to combat the United States, NATO, and
American hegemonism, there was nothing like the post-9/11 behemoth in
existence. A thousand smart intelligence analysts, a thousand smart FBI and
law enforcement officers, and a few hundred Special Operations military folk
are all that's needed to deal with the terrorism threat. It's been hugely
overblown. Yet in the Post story, sage-like gray beards of the
counterterrorism machine stroke their chins and pontificate about how
difficult it is to coordinate all these agencies, absorb all the data, read
all the reports and absorb the 1.7 billion e-mails and phone calls that are
picked up every day by the National Security Agency. It's an "Emperor's New
Clothes" problem. The emperor isn't naked, but no one, really, is
threatening him.

Robert Dreyfuss

Krugman Quote, Rich: There's a Battle Outside and It Is Still Ragin'

Hi. I sent this email out this morning, but two sections of my email list
seem to have vaporized. As there are a number of list serves on this
section I'm pretty sure you didn't get this. Let me know if this is a dupe,
and thanks in general for being interested enough. -Ed

Today's Democracy Now program is on the leaks around the Af/Pak
wars. It's a remarkable panel with critical analyses. Tune in. -Ed

Quote of the Day
July 24, 2010

'Finally, on the war: For most Americans, the whole
debate about the war is old if painful news - but not
for those obsessed with refurbishing the Bush image.
Karl Rove now claims that his biggest mistake was
letting Democrats get away with the "shameful" claim
that the Bush administration hyped the case for
invading Iraq. Let the whitewashing begin!

'Again, Republicans aren't trying to rescue George W.
Bush's reputation for sentimental reasons; they're
trying to clear the way for a return to Bush policies.
And this carries a message for anyone hoping that the
next time Republicans are in power, they'll behave
differently. If you believe that they've learned
something - say, about fiscal prudence or the
importance of effective regulation - you're kidding
yourself. You might as well face it: they're addicted
to Bush.'

Columnist Paul Krugman
New York Times
July 23, 2010
http://tinyurl.com/2blof72

***

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/opinion/25rich.html?th&emc=th

There's a Battle Outside and It Is Still Ragin'

"none of us, then or now, can see around the corner and know
what history will bring."

By Frank Rich
NY Times Op-Ed: July 25, 2010

THE glittering young blonde in a low-cut gown is sipping champagne in a
swank Manhattan restaurant back in the day when things were still swank. She
is on a first date with an advertising man as dashing as his name, Don
Draper. So you don't really expect her to break the ice by talking about bad
news. "The world is so dark right now," she says. "One of the boys killed in
Mississippi, Andrew Goodman - he's from here. A girlfriend of mine knew him
from summer camp." Her date is too busy studying her décolletage, so she
fills in the dead air. "Is that what it takes to change things?" she asks.
He ventures no answer.

This is just one arresting moment - no others will be mentioned here - in
the first episode of the new "Mad Men" season premiering tonight. Like much
in this landmark television series, the scene haunts you in part because of
what people don't say and can't say. "Mad Men" is about placid postwar
America before it went smash. We know from the young woman's reference to
Goodman - one of the three civil rights activists murdered in Philadelphia,
Miss., in June 1964 - that the crackup is on its way. But the characters
can't
imagine the full brunt of what's to come, and so a viewer in 2010 is left to
contemplate how none of us, then or now, can see around the corner and know
what history will bring.

This country was rightly elated when it elected its first African-American
president more than 20 months ago. That high was destined to abate, but we
reached a new low last week. What does it say about America now, and where
it is heading, that a racial provocateur, wielding a deceptively edited
video, could not only smear an innocent woman but make every national
institution that touched the story look bad? The White House, the N.A.A.C.P.
and the news media were all soiled by this episode. Meanwhile, the majority
of Americans, who believe in fundamental fairness for all, grapple with the
poisonous residue left behind by the many powerful people of all stripes who
served as accessories to a high-tech lynching.

Even though the egregiously misleading excerpt from Shirley Sherrod's
43-minute speech came from Andrew Breitbart, the dirty trickster notorious
for hustling skewed partisan videos on Fox News, few questioned its
validity. That the speech had been given at an N.A.A.C.P. event, with
N.A.A.C.P. officials as witnesses, did not prevent even the N.A.A.C.P. from
immediately condemning Sherrod for "shameful" actions. As the world knows
now, her talk (flogged by Fox as "what racism looks like") was an uplifting
parable about how she had risen above her own trials in the Jim Crow South
to aid poor people of every race during her long career in rural
development.

The smear might well have stuck if the white octogenarian farmer saved by
Sherrod 24 years ago was no longer alive and if he didn't look like a Norman
Rockwell archetype. Only his and his wife's testimony to her good deeds on
CNN could halt the lynching party. Tom Vilsack, the secretary of agriculture
who fired Sherrod without questioning the video's patently spurious
provenance, was far slower to reverse himself than the N.A.A.C.P. Good for
him that he seemed genuinely chagrined once he did apologize. But an
executive so easily bullied by Fox News has no more business running a
government department than Ken Salazar, the secretary of interior who let
oil companies run wild on deepwater drilling until disaster struck. That the
White House sat back while Vilsack capitulated to a mob is a disgraceful
commentary on both its guts and competence. This wasn't a failure of due
diligence - there was no diligence.

Even now, I wonder if many of those who have since backtracked from the
Sherrod smear - including some in the news business who reported on the
video without vetting it - have watched her entire speech. What's important
is not the exculpatory evidence that clears her of a trumped-up crime. What
matters is Sherrod's own story.

She was making the speech in Georgia, her home state, on March 27, the 45th
anniversary of her father's funeral. He had been murdered when she was 17,
leaving behind five children and a wife who was pregnant with a sixth.
Sherrod had grown up in Baker County, a jurisdiction ruled by a notorious
racist sheriff, L. Warren Johnson, who was nicknamed "Gator" for a reason.
Black men were routinely murdered there but the guilty were never brought to
justice. As Sherrod recounted, not even three witnesses to her father's
murder could persuade the grand jury to indict the white suspect.

Sherrod had long thought she'd flee the South, but had an epiphany on the
night of her father's death. "I couldn't just let his death go without doing
something in answer to what happened," she said. So she made the commitment
to stay and devote her life to "working for change." She later married
Charles Sherrod, a minister and co-founder of the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee, whose heroic efforts to advance desegregation,
including his imprisonment, can be found in any standard history of the
civil rights movement.

None of this legacy, much of it accessible to anyone who wanted to look (or
ask), prevented the tarring of Shirley Sherrod last week. And it all
unfolded while the country was ostentatiously marking the 50th anniversary
of "To Kill a Mockingbird."

If we are to learn anything from this travesty, it might help to retrace the
racial soap opera that immediately preceded and provoked it. That story
began on July 13, when the N.A.A.C.P. passed a resolution calling on the Tea
Party to expel "racist elements" in its ranks. No sooner had Tea Party
adherents and defenders angrily denied that such elements amounted to
anything more than a few fringe nuts than Mark Williams, the spokesman and
past chairman of the Tea Party Express, piped up. He slapped a "parody" on
the Web - a letter from "colored people" to Abraham Lincoln berating him as
"the greatest racist ever" and complaining about "that whole emancipation
thing" because "freedom means having to work for real."

Williams had hurled similar slurs for months, but now that the N.A.A.C.P.
had cast a spotlight on the Tea Party's racist elements, he was belatedly
excommunicated by the leader of another Tea Party organization. In truth,
it's
not clear that any group in this scattered movement has authority over any
other. But one thing was certain: the N.A.A.C.P. was wrong to demand that
the Tea Party disown its racist fringe. It should have made that demand of
the G.O.P. instead.

The Tea Party Express fronted by Williams is an indisputable Republican
subsidiary. It was created by prominent G.O.P. political consultants in
California and raises money for G.O.P. candidates, including Sharron Angle,
Harry Reid's Senate opponent in Nevada. But Republican leaders, presiding
over a Congressional delegation with no blacks and a party that nearly
mirrors it, remain in hiding whenever racial controversies break out under
their tent. "I am not interested in getting into that debate," said Mitch
McConnell last week.

Once Williams was disowned by other Tea Partiers, Breitbart posted the bogus
Sherrod video as revenge under the headline "Video Proof: The NAACP Awards
Racism." To portray whites as the victims of racist blacks has been a weapon
of the right from the moment desegregation started to empower previously
subjugated minorities in the 1960s. But its deployment has accelerated with
the ascent of a black president. The pace is set by right-wing stars like
Glenn Beck, who on Fox branded Barack Obama a racist with "a deep-seated
hatred for white people," and the ever-opportunistic Newt Gingrich, who on
Twitter maligned Sonia Sotomayor as a "Latina woman racist."

Even the civil rights hero John Lewis has been slimed by these vigilantes.
Lewis was nearly beaten to death by state troopers bearing nightsticks and
whips in Selma, Ala., just three weeks before Sherrod's father was murdered
200 miles away in 1965. This year, as a member of Congress, he was pelted
with racial epithets while walking past protesters on the Capitol grounds
during the final weekend of the health care debate. Breitbart charged Lewis
with lying - never mind that the melee had hundreds of eyewitnesses - and
tried to prove it with a video so manifestly bogus that even Fox didn't push
it. But he wasn't deterred then, and he and others like him won't be
deterred by the Sherrod saga's "happy ending" as long as the McConnells of
the conservative establishment look the other way and Fox pumps racial rage
into the media bloodstream 24/7.

"You think we have come a long way in terms of race relations in this
country, but we keep going backwards," Sherrod told Joe Strupp of Media
Matters last week. She speaks with hard-won authority. While America's
progress on race has been epic since the days when Sherrod's father could be
murdered with impunity, we have been going backward since Election Day 2008.

We don't know what history will bring next. But we might at least address
the chilling question prompted in "Mad Men" by the horrific events of 46
summers ago - "Is that what it takes to change things?" - before our own
summer comes to a boil again.

Krugman Quote, Rich: There's a Battle Outside and It Is Still Ragin'

Today's Democracy Now program is on the leaks around the Af/Pak
wars. It's a remarkable panel with critical analyses. Tune in. -Ed

Quote of the Day
July 24, 2010

'Finally, on the war: For most Americans, the whole
debate about the war is old if painful news - but not
for those obsessed with refurbishing the Bush image.
Karl Rove now claims that his biggest mistake was
letting Democrats get away with the "shameful" claim
that the Bush administration hyped the case for
invading Iraq. Let the whitewashing begin!

'Again, Republicans aren't trying to rescue George W.
Bush's reputation for sentimental reasons; they're
trying to clear the way for a return to Bush policies.
And this carries a message for anyone hoping that the
next time Republicans are in power, they'll behave
differently. If you believe that they've learned
something - say, about fiscal prudence or the
importance of effective regulation - you're kidding
yourself. You might as well face it: they're addicted
to Bush.'

Columnist Paul Krugman
New York Times
July 23, 2010
http://tinyurl.com/2blof72

***

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/opinion/25rich.html?th&emc=th

There's a Battle Outside and It Is Still Ragin'

"none of us, then or now, can see around the corner and know
what history will bring."

By Frank Rich
NY Times Op-Ed: July 25, 2010

THE glittering young blonde in a low-cut gown is sipping champagne in a
swank Manhattan restaurant back in the day when things were still swank. She
is on a first date with an advertising man as dashing as his name, Don
Draper. So you don't really expect her to break the ice by talking about bad
news. "The world is so dark right now," she says. "One of the boys killed in
Mississippi, Andrew Goodman - he's from here. A girlfriend of mine knew him
from summer camp." Her date is too busy studying her décolletage, so she
fills in the dead air. "Is that what it takes to change things?" she asks.
He ventures no answer.

This is just one arresting moment - no others will be mentioned here - in
the first episode of the new "Mad Men" season premiering tonight. Like much
in this landmark television series, the scene haunts you in part because of
what people don't say and can't say. "Mad Men" is about placid postwar
America before it went smash. We know from the young woman's reference to
Goodman - one of the three civil rights activists murdered in Philadelphia,
Miss., in June 1964 - that the crackup is on its way. But the characters
can't
imagine the full brunt of what's to come, and so a viewer in 2010 is left to
contemplate how none of us, then or now, can see around the corner and know
what history will bring.

This country was rightly elated when it elected its first African-American
president more than 20 months ago. That high was destined to abate, but we
reached a new low last week. What does it say about America now, and where
it is heading, that a racial provocateur, wielding a deceptively edited
video, could not only smear an innocent woman but make every national
institution that touched the story look bad? The White House, the N.A.A.C.P.
and the news media were all soiled by this episode. Meanwhile, the majority
of Americans, who believe in fundamental fairness for all, grapple with the
poisonous residue left behind by the many powerful people of all stripes who
served as accessories to a high-tech lynching.

Even though the egregiously misleading excerpt from Shirley Sherrod's
43-minute speech came from Andrew Breitbart, the dirty trickster notorious
for hustling skewed partisan videos on Fox News, few questioned its
validity. That the speech had been given at an N.A.A.C.P. event, with
N.A.A.C.P. officials as witnesses, did not prevent even the N.A.A.C.P. from
immediately condemning Sherrod for "shameful" actions. As the world knows
now, her talk (flogged by Fox as "what racism looks like") was an uplifting
parable about how she had risen above her own trials in the Jim Crow South
to aid poor people of every race during her long career in rural
development.

The smear might well have stuck if the white octogenarian farmer saved by
Sherrod 24 years ago was no longer alive and if he didn't look like a Norman
Rockwell archetype. Only his and his wife's testimony to her good deeds on
CNN could halt the lynching party. Tom Vilsack, the secretary of agriculture
who fired Sherrod without questioning the video's patently spurious
provenance, was far slower to reverse himself than the N.A.A.C.P. Good for
him that he seemed genuinely chagrined once he did apologize. But an
executive so easily bullied by Fox News has no more business running a
government department than Ken Salazar, the secretary of interior who let
oil companies run wild on deepwater drilling until disaster struck. That the
White House sat back while Vilsack capitulated to a mob is a disgraceful
commentary on both its guts and competence. This wasn't a failure of due
diligence - there was no diligence.

Even now, I wonder if many of those who have since backtracked from the
Sherrod smear - including some in the news business who reported on the
video without vetting it - have watched her entire speech. What's important
is not the exculpatory evidence that clears her of a trumped-up crime. What
matters is Sherrod's own story.

She was making the speech in Georgia, her home state, on March 27, the 45th
anniversary of her father's funeral. He had been murdered when she was 17,
leaving behind five children and a wife who was pregnant with a sixth.
Sherrod had grown up in Baker County, a jurisdiction ruled by a notorious
racist sheriff, L. Warren Johnson, who was nicknamed "Gator" for a reason.
Black men were routinely murdered there but the guilty were never brought to
justice. As Sherrod recounted, not even three witnesses to her father's
murder could persuade the grand jury to indict the white suspect.

Sherrod had long thought she'd flee the South, but had an epiphany on the
night of her father's death. "I couldn't just let his death go without doing
something in answer to what happened," she said. So she made the commitment
to stay and devote her life to "working for change." She later married
Charles Sherrod, a minister and co-founder of the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee, whose heroic efforts to advance desegregation,
including his imprisonment, can be found in any standard history of the
civil rights movement.

None of this legacy, much of it accessible to anyone who wanted to look (or
ask), prevented the tarring of Shirley Sherrod last week. And it all
unfolded while the country was ostentatiously marking the 50th anniversary
of "To Kill a Mockingbird."

If we are to learn anything from this travesty, it might help to retrace the
racial soap opera that immediately preceded and provoked it. That story
began on July 13, when the N.A.A.C.P. passed a resolution calling on the Tea
Party to expel "racist elements" in its ranks. No sooner had Tea Party
adherents and defenders angrily denied that such elements amounted to
anything more than a few fringe nuts than Mark Williams, the spokesman and
past chairman of the Tea Party Express, piped up. He slapped a "parody" on
the Web - a letter from "colored people" to Abraham Lincoln berating him as
"the greatest racist ever" and complaining about "that whole emancipation
thing" because "freedom means having to work for real."

Williams had hurled similar slurs for months, but now that the N.A.A.C.P.
had cast a spotlight on the Tea Party's racist elements, he was belatedly
excommunicated by the leader of another Tea Party organization. In truth,
it's
not clear that any group in this scattered movement has authority over any
other. But one thing was certain: the N.A.A.C.P. was wrong to demand that
the Tea Party disown its racist fringe. It should have made that demand of
the G.O.P. instead.

The Tea Party Express fronted by Williams is an indisputable Republican
subsidiary. It was created by prominent G.O.P. political consultants in
California and raises money for G.O.P. candidates, including Sharron Angle,
Harry Reid's Senate opponent in Nevada. But Republican leaders, presiding
over a Congressional delegation with no blacks and a party that nearly
mirrors it, remain in hiding whenever racial controversies break out under
their tent. "I am not interested in getting into that debate," said Mitch
McConnell last week.

Once Williams was disowned by other Tea Partiers, Breitbart posted the bogus
Sherrod video as revenge under the headline "Video Proof: The NAACP Awards
Racism." To portray whites as the victims of racist blacks has been a weapon
of the right from the moment desegregation started to empower previously
subjugated minorities in the 1960s. But its deployment has accelerated with
the ascent of a black president. The pace is set by right-wing stars like
Glenn Beck, who on Fox branded Barack Obama a racist with "a deep-seated
hatred for white people," and the ever-opportunistic Newt Gingrich, who on
Twitter maligned Sonia Sotomayor as a "Latina woman racist."

Even the civil rights hero John Lewis has been slimed by these vigilantes.
Lewis was nearly beaten to death by state troopers bearing nightsticks and
whips in Selma, Ala., just three weeks before Sherrod's father was murdered
200 miles away in 1965. This year, as a member of Congress, he was pelted
with racial epithets while walking past protesters on the Capitol grounds
during the final weekend of the health care debate. Breitbart charged Lewis
with lying - never mind that the melee had hundreds of eyewitnesses - and
tried to prove it with a video so manifestly bogus that even Fox didn't push
it. But he wasn't deterred then, and he and others like him won't be
deterred by the Sherrod saga's "happy ending" as long as the McConnells of
the conservative establishment look the other way and Fox pumps racial rage
into the media bloodstream 24/7.

"You think we have come a long way in terms of race relations in this
country, but we keep going backwards," Sherrod told Joe Strupp of Media
Matters last week. She speaks with hard-won authority. While America's
progress on race has been epic since the days when Sherrod's father could be
murdered with impunity, we have been going backward since Election Day 2008.

We don't know what history will bring next. But we might at least address
the chilling question prompted in "Mad Men" by the horrific events of 46
summers ago - "Is that what it takes to change things?" - before our own
summer comes to a boil again.