2006 - The issues and the signs

Amen.

Praying is not allowed on my threads.

More reasons why Bush sealed access to presidential papers
George W. Bush was able to protect public view of campaign contributions from Enron's Ken Lay be transferring all evidence documents to his father's library in Texas in the last days of his governorship. Among the first things Bush did after becoming president was to seal all presidential papers from public view. I wonder what's in those Enron documents that he feared so much? Those library documents would also expose his's father's activity in the illegal Iran-Contra activity.---BBB

The Freedom of Information Center
Freedom of Information Under Attack
By Charles Lewis
The Center for Public Integrity
June 26/2002

Asking the tough questions required of "watchdog journalism" is especially difficult in a national crisis atmosphere of fear, paranoia and patriotism. In the months since the September 11 terrorist attacks, we have been painfully reminded of Senator Hiram Johnson's famous 1917 observation that "The first casualty when war comes is truth." Trauma from the worst civilian loss of life on American soil and the resultant "war on terrorism" without borders have all contributed to an historic assault on openness and the public's access to information by government officials at all levels.

We are talking about a tectonic shift from past decades in how our Freedom of Information laws and commonly held principles of openness and government accountability are administered and adhered to by those in power. And the long-time, much-abused preclusion to the public's right to know, national security, now has been broadened with a new political euphemism, "homeland security." Emblematic of this shift is the situation in which the Bush White House, after creating the Office of Homeland Security and appointing former Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge as its first director, for months forbade him to testify before Congress or talk extensively with the news media. More broadly, within six months of the September 11 attacks, in no fewer than 300 separate instances, federal, state and local officials have restricted access to government records by executive order or proposed new laws to sharply curtail their availability, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Unfortunately, in the context of actual information and candor from the U.S. government about its armed conflicts, for decades now we have come to expect very little. After the military and public relations debacle in Vietnam, the Pentagon and various Presidents have "tried to hide the true face of war by controlling the images of the conflict," as Jacqueline Sharkey found in the 1992 Center for Public Integrity report, Under Fire: US Military Restrictions on the Media from Grenada to the Persian Gulf. The major architect of the infamous Persian Gulf media restrictions, then-Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney, is now the vanishing vice president who frequently works from an undisclosed location.

Against this backdrop, then, severely limiting reporters' access to the field of action in Afghanistan was hardly surprising. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press noted in its March white paper, Homefront Confidential, that "In effect, most American broadcasters and newspaper reporters scratched out [Afghanistan war] coverage from Pentagon briefings, a rare interview on a U.S. aircraft carrier or a humanitarian aid airlift, or from carefully selected military videos or from leaks . . . The truth is, the American media's vantage point for the war has never been at the front lines with American troops."

Along the way there has been no shortage of substantively misleading statements by White House and Pentagon officials. Indeed, when they announced the creation, and days later the public demise, of a new Department of Defense Office of Strategic Influence which would occasionally release disinformation for battlefield advantage, to most journalists the hilarious irony was the sheer redundancy of it all. Why did they need a new office for that?

Skewed and distorted war coverage regrettably but undeniably has become an accepted, cynical tradition. More remarkable are the new restrictions to basic constitutional freedoms and rights. For example, since September 11, government officials have detained hundreds of people for months without releasing the most basic information about them. And, in language that George Orwell would have grudgingly admired, we were told that the extraordinary news blackout was actually an act of compassion done to protect the civil liberties of the unaccused incarcerated. Attorney General John Ashcroft said, "It would be a violation of the privacy rights of individuals for me to create some kind of list."

U.S. immigration proceedings, usually open to the public, have been closed. President George W. Bush signed a military order authorizing that suspected terrorists can be tried in military tribunals instead of regular courts, and it is unclear what limitations might be placed on the news media in covering them. The USA Patriot Act, passed just six weeks after the terrorist attacks, gives federal authorities more power to access e-mail and telephone communications. And, as the Reporters Committee has observed, the new federal eavesdropping could potentially pick up conversations not only of terrorists, but also journalists.

In a March Washington Post report, eerily reminiscent of the 1962 thriller Seven Days in May, it was first disclosed that President Bush secretly had dispatched roughly 100 senior civilian officials from every Cabinet department and some independent agencies in a "shadow government" to live and work at two secret, fortified locations outside Washington. Bush reportedly implemented and maintained this classified "Continuity of Operations Plan" for half a year without notifying Congress or the American people. Initiated in the first chaotic hours of September 11, the shadow government and its rotating "bunker duty" had become an undisclosed, "indefinite precaution."

Bush acknowledged setting up the secret operation, which he said he had "an obligation as the President" to do . . . This is serious business. I still take the threats that we receive from Al Qaeda killers and terrorists very seriously." Not informing Congress at all about something so significant for an extended period of time was very reminiscent of the secret and illegal Iran-Contra fiasco in the 1980's, which happened on George Herbert Walker Bush's watch as vice president. And, later, in his last days as President, he effectively shut down the criminal prosecution process by pardoning some of the Reagan administration officials allegedly involved.

It is in this almost surreal atmosphere that Attorney General Ashcroft issued a chilling memorandum about America's penultimate sunshine law, the Freedom of Information Act. In it, he revoked earlier openness directives by former Attorney General Janet Reno and advised federal officials that "when you carefully consider FOIA requests and decide to withhold records, in whole or in part, you can be assured that the Department of Justice will defend your decisions unless they lack a sound legal basis or present an unwarranted risk of adverse impact on the ability of other agencies to protect other important records."

Just three weeks later, with no fanfare or announcement, President Bush signed Executive Order 13233, sharply restricting public access to the papers of former presidents. The Bush order overrides the post-Watergate, 1978 Presidential Records Act, guaranteeing that a president's papers must be made available to the public 12 years after he leaves office. Now George W. Bush can personally decide when the White House documents of Ronald Reagan and his father will be made public. The Executive Order has provoked not only widespread, bipartisan outrage, but also remedial legislation and broadly supported litigation to block its implementation. As Steven L. Hensen, the president of the Society of American Archivists, wrote in a Washington Post editorial, "the order effectively blocks access to information that enables Americans to hold our presidents accountable for their actions . . . for such access to be curtailed or nullified by an executive process not subject to public or legislative review or scrutiny violates the principles upon which our nation was founded."

The generally unspoken reality is that the war on terrorism has given the Bush administration phenomenal cover to do what all political appointees attempt to do -- withhold inconvenient information from the public. Indeed, we saw signs of a robust appetite in all the president's men and women for such cold-blooded political expedience long before September 11. In his last hours as governor of Texas, George W. Bush had his official records packed up and shipped off to his father's presidential library at Texas A&M University, thereby removing them from the usual custody of the Texas State Library and Archives and the strong Texas public information law. The Texas attorney general recently ruled that these gubernatorial papers can remain at his father's library but they would be open to the public, as state documents.

The intransigent refusal of Vice President Cheney to release basic information about the meetings he and other administration officials held on government time and property to formulate federal energy policies has resulted in an unprecedented lawsuit against the Bush administration brought by the normally polite and patient General Accounting Office, headed by the U.S. comptroller general, David Walker. Walker v. Cheney is the most significant, high-level showdown between Congress and a White House since Watergate. Two-thirds of the American people believe the President has not been truthful on the subject of Enron and the full extent of his relationship with major energy and other campaign contributors.

With all of the aggressive obfuscation and preemptive, self-serving policy decisions when it comes to the public's right to know, I have a gnawing, unavoidable sense that the current occupants of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue are obsessed with secrecy in an almost Nixonian way. They are certainly more hostile than usual to the concept of openness, accountability and the work journalists attempt to do every day. How else do you describe the Justice Department secretly subpoenaing Associated Press reporter John Solomon's telephone records to attempt to learn the identity of a confidential source, many weeks before September 11? The Reporters Committee found that "the Justice Department did not negotiate with Solomon or his employer, did not say why the reporter's phone records were essential to a criminal investigation, and did not explain why the information could not be obtained any other way." What else other than directed hostility would explain Marines locking reporters and photographers in a warehouse to prevent them from covering American troops killed or injured north of Kandahar, Afghanistan on December 6?

There are simply a growing number of unacceptable incursions into the commonly held, always contentious but respectful space between Government and the Fourth Estate in the world's oldest democracy. The American people deserve much better, of course. Yet little will change for journalists unless Americans understand what rights they are losing and demand that these restrictions be lifted so they can be fully informed.
-------------------------------------------------

Charles Lewis is founder and executive director of the Center for Public Integrity. Katy Lewis of the Center contributed research. A version of this commentary first appeared in the Summer 2002 issue of Nieman Reports. To write a letter to the editor for publication, e-mail [email protected]. Please include a daytime phone number.

How about a chorus of Sha na na na...hey-hey?

BBB

A hell of a nice find. Thankyou.

Last night on a Fox show, Charles Krauthammer made a joke about this adminstration's covert nature, saying "This administration isn't into sharing". Broad laugher among the assembled rightwing pundits.

The thing is of course, that transparency isn't a partisan issue any more than the principle of balance of powers or following the law. These are fundamental protections to democracy.

One of the 'hopeful signs' I've mentioned up front relates to the Abramoff scandal/investigation. There's now a thread specifically on that...

http://www.able2know.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=1754480#1754480

No problem. I simply ask, as a matter of aesthetics, you engage someone who doesn't own two tin ears.

One the intersection of the legal issue and the imperial presidency issue, the Padilla case is getting interesting...


full article

NY Times coverage

Iraq, of course, presents problems for everyone. If things there go badly, it will hurt the administration and Republican electoral results in November. If it goes swimmingly, it will surely produce an opposite result.

That puts Dems in a tough political position, a position which the Republican PR brains are taking advantage of. But that's how the game is played and it is all now quite inevitable. God knows what is going to happen between now and November, and then in the next two years. But some of the signs aren't promising for Republican hopes...

link


link


http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/13495281.htm

Bush Team Rethinks Its Plan for Recovery
Bush Team Rethinks Its Plan for Recovery
New Approach Could Save Second Term
By Peter Baker and Jim VandeHei
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, December 29, 2005; A01

President Bush shifted his rhetoric on Iraq in recent weeks after an intense debate among advisers about how to pull out of his political free fall, with senior adviser Karl Rove urging a campaign-style attack on critics while younger aides pushed for more candor about setbacks in the war, according to Republican strategists.

The result was a hybrid of the two approaches as Bush lashed out at war opponents in Congress, then turned to a humbler assessment of events on the ground in Iraq that included admissions about how some of his expectations had been frustrated. The formula helped Bush regain his political footing as record-low poll numbers began to rebound. Now his team is rethinking its approach to his second term in hopes of salvaging it.

The Iraq push culminated the rockiest political year of this presidency, which included the demise of signature domestic priorities, the indictment of the vice president's top aide, the collapse of a Supreme Court nomination, a fumbled response to a natural disaster and a rising death toll in an increasingly unpopular war. It was not until Bush opened a fresh campaign to reassure the public on Iraq that he regained some traction.

The lessons drawn by a variety of Bush advisers inside and outside the White House as they map a road to recovery in 2006 include these: Overarching initiatives such as restructuring Social Security are unworkable in a time of war. The public wants a balanced appraisal of what is happening on the battlefield as well as pledges of victory. And Iraq trumps all.

"I don't think they realized that Iraq is the totality of their legacy until fairly recently," said former congressman Vin Weber (R-Minn.), an outside adviser to the White House. "There is not much of a market for other issues."

It took many months, and much political pain, for that realization to sink in. In the heady days after reelection, Bush and Rove sketched out an ambitious agenda to avoid the traditional pitfalls of second-term presidents. They settled on four domestic priorities for 2005: remaking Social Security, revising the tax code, cracking down on court-clogging litigation and easing immigration rules. As the year ends, only some litigation limits have passed, and Social Security, tax and immigration plans are dead or comatose.

As Bush focused on Social Security the first half of the year, the cascading suicide bombings in Iraq played out on American television screens. It was summer by the time Bush decided to shift public attention to Iraq. A speech at Fort Bragg, N.C., failed to move the political needle. Bush then escaped to Texas for August -- a vacation shadowed for weeks by a dead soldier's mother named Cindy Sheehan, then brought to an abrupt halt by Hurricane Katrina.

Plans to rebuild public confidence on Iraq were shelved as the president was consumed by the hurricane and the fiasco over Harriet Miers's Supreme Court nomination. Then after I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, was charged with perjury in the CIA leak case, Democrats forced an extraordinary closed-door Senate session to demand further investigation of the roots of the Iraq war.

That proved a galvanizing moment at the White House, according to a wide range of GOP strategists in and out of the administration. Rove, Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman and White House strategic planning director Peter H. Wehner urged the president to dust off the 2004 election strategy and fight back, according to officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share internal deliberations. White House counselor Dan Bartlett and communications director Nicolle Wallace, however, counseled a more textured approach. The same-old Bush was not enough, they said; he needed to be more detailed about his strategy in Iraq and, most of all, more open in admitting mistakes -- something that does not come easily to Bush.

Although Rove raised concerns about giving critics too much ground, the younger-generation aides prevailed. Bush agreed to try the approach so long as he did not come off sounding too negative. Peter D. Feaver, a Duke University specialist on wartime public opinion who now works at the White House, helped draft a 35-page public plan for victory in Iraq, a paper principally designed to prove that Bush had one.

Bush went into campaign mode, accusing Democrats of hypocrisy for voting to authorize the war and then turning against it. When Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.) proposed pulling troops out of Iraq, the White House issued an unusually harsh and personal response comparing him to liberal filmmaker Michael Moore. The original draft, officials said, had been even tougher.

Within a few days, though, the president shifted tone. Writing off 30 percent or more of the public as adamantly against the war, his advisers focused on winning back a similar-size group that had soured on Iraq but, they believed, wanted to be convinced victory was possible.

The White House employed every bully pulpit the president has -- speeches to military, diplomatic and political audiences; interviews with key television anchors; Cheney's surprise trip to Iraq; private briefings for congressional centrists; a prime-time Oval Office address on Dec. 18 that reached 37 million people; and an East Room news conference.

The humility theme was woven into speeches, often in the first two minutes to keep viewers from turning away. Aides had noticed that anger at Bush after Hurricane Katrina subsided somewhat after he took responsibility for the response. The idea, one senior official said, was like fighting with a spouse: "You need to give voice to their concern. That doesn't necessarily solve the division and the difference, but it drains the disagreement of some of its animosity if you feel you've been heard."

Better yet, from the White House perspective, Democrats helped frame the choice when House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) endorsed Murtha's withdrawal plan and party Chairman Howard Dean declared it impossible to win in Iraq. "For most of the year we were debating events," the senior official said. "Now we're debating Democrats."

The president received the results he wanted. His approval ratings rose eight percentage points in the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll, to 47 percent.

Bush, who had plenty to be morose about through the fall, responded with vigor as well. Instead of heading immediately to bed after the Oval Office address, as he usually does, he stuck around to chew through themes for his upcoming State of the Union address, another high-ranking administration official said.

No one in the White House expects the speech to include anything of the magnitude of Social Security. As one aide put it, instead of home runs, Bush will focus on hitting singles and doubles. "The lesson from this year," said Grover G. Norquist, a GOP activist close to Rove, "is you cannot do anything dramatic unless you have 60 votes" in the Senate, where Republicans are five shy of the count needed to break a filibuster.

With the federal deficit projected to top $340 billion and both Iraq and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina demanding substantial new money, officials are discussing bigger spending reductions than Bush has advocated in the past and changes to how government puts together its budget. On the other side of the equation, administration officials pushing for health care, education and other initiatives are squeezed.

Despite the gain in polls, some advisers see trouble ahead. Bush's top aides are telling friends they are burned out. Andrew H. Card Jr., already the longest-serving White House chief of staff in a half-century, is among those thought to be looking to leave. Rove's fate is uncertain, as he appears likely to remain under investigation in the CIA leak case, people close to the inquiry said.

Some are concerned that although Bush has changed his approach, he has not changed himself. He has been reluctant to look outside his inner circle for advice, and even some closest to Bush call that a mistake because aides have given up trying to get him to do things they know he would reject.

As they end a difficult year, advisers said they know they cannot take the recent political progress for granted. "We view this as not mission accomplished," one top aide said. "It's going to need to be sustained."

New NPR Poll: Two Takes
washingtonpost.com's Politics Blog
Posted at 09:20 AM ET, 12/29/2005
New NPR Poll: Two Takes

The two pollsters -- one Democrat and one Republican -- who conducted the latest National Public Radio poll on the state of the American electorate have each released a memo analyzing the results.

A look at the two memos reveals that polling is equal parts science and art. While Glen Bolger, a partner in the GOP firm Public Opinion Strategies, and Stan Greenberg, a partner with the Democratic Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, agree on most points (the danger to Republicans of the right direction/wrong track numbers, President Bush's increased approval ratings), they draw different conclusions on the survey as a whole, with Greenberg sounding decidedly optimistic and Bolger adopting a more measured and cautious tone.

The memos show several areas of general agreement.

In Bolger's analysis, he points out that "perceptions of the economy are improving -- albeit slowly" since the last NPR survey in July. Those rating the state of the economy as "excellent/good" rose five percent, with those rating it "not so good/poor" fell by four percent.

Greenberg, too, cites the improved perceptions of the economy in his memo, arguing that it is the sole factor for the recent rise in Bush's job approval numbers. "Bush's improvement comes from an improvement in the economy," Greenberg writes.

Both pollsters also highlight the right direction/wrong track number, which stood at 35/60 in the NPR survey. Greenberg concludes that despite Bush's "real" gains in his job approval, the wrong track number still argues that the "structure for a change election seems largely intact." Bolger writes that the country remains "decidedly pessimistic," and adds: "With one party control in Washington, it is quite possible for unhappy voters to punish the people running the show."

The widest divergence of opinion between the two men comes on the question of how Democrats' "culture of corruption" argument is playing with voters. In the poll, 63 percent said that ethics and corruption issues were the "same as usual" and 65 percent said the problems fell "about equally with both parties."

Greenberg says how corruption will play in 2006 remains an open question since the various scandals in Washington "have hardly penetrated the public consciousness." He adds that Democrats should see the numbers as a "warning flag" to candidates who must position themselves as "reformers -- differentiated from the special interest cesspool in Washington and prepared to advocate real change."

Looking at those same numbers, Bolger concludes that "Democrat attempts to drive the message that there is a Republican 'culture of corruption' have failed miserably thus far." As evidence, he points out that President Bush has a 43 percent to 41 percent edge over Democrats on who would do a better job of "improving ethics in Washington, D.C."

The summaries provided by the two men differ only slightly in content but diverge widely in tone. Greenberg insists that the data in the poll shows "the desire for a new direction, the greater intensity and unity of Bush opponents, the swing of independent voters and the Iraq war all continue to move voters toward a change vote in 2006."

Bolger is more measured in his final assessment. "Republicans looking for a 'glass half full' set of data will find it here," he writes, noting the improved image of the economy and the failure of the "culture of corruption" message. But, Bolger adds: "It is always more prudent as a pollster to be paranoid -- and there are numerous challenges facing the Republican party in these data."

Re: Blatham


I found someone else agrees with me. This from a law professor posted on The Daily Kos.---BBB

ScAlito: A Courtier in King George's Court?
Thu Dec 29, 2005 at 08:17:22 AM PDT
Law Professor Sandy Levinson writes at Prof. Jack Balkin's Blog:

Samuel Alito may turn out, perhaps fortunately for the rest of us, to be a victim of cruel fate, being the wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time. Here he is, a noted-and more than competent, in any conventional sense-ultra-conservative who has the misfortune of having to face the Senate on January 7 in effect to defend his nomination to the Supreme Court by President George W. Bush.

. . . Alito was clearly not nominated simply because he has doubts about Roe v. Wade. One could reel off at least a dozen of plausible nominees who share that hostility. . . . So what does explain Alito's nomination, given that by any plausible account McConnell would have been a more distinguished nominee with easier prospects of confirmation? The answer, I suggest, is the belief by insiders in the Bush Administration that he would be better on the one issue they REALLY care about, which is the aggrandizement of Executive power. The events of the past two weeks, following the disclosures about literally unwarranted wiretapping and data-mining by the National Security Agency, bring into sharp focus the intent by the Administration, led by Dick Cheney, to assert almost unlimited executive powers linked to the "Commander-in-Chief" Clause of Article II of the Constitution.

. . . This makes it essential, obviously, that every member of the Senate Judiciary Committee grill Judge Alito on his views of Article II, the Commander-in-Chief Clause, and, for that matter, the Oath of Office, given that University of Minnesota Law Professor Michael Stokes Paulsen reads the Oath to license the President basically to do whatever he wishes so long as there is a good faith belief that it is "defense" of the Constitution. Quoting Lincoln, Paulsen argues that just as one can amputate a limb in order to save the life of a person, so can a President in effect ignore any given part of the Constitution, including, of course, any of the protections of the Bill of Rights, in order to save the Nation. To put it mildly, this theory of the "amputated Constitution" should give us all pause.

Had Alito been nominated two years ago, many of these questions might have sounded "academic." In the aftermath of the disclosure of memos written within the Department of Justice justifying the President's "inherent" right to torture and then, more recently, of Bush's own public claims to almost limitless executive authority following the NSA disclosures, there is nothing at all academic about them. They go to the heart of whether we can maintain ourselves as a constitutional republic.

I am shocked! You agree with something from the Daily KOS??

Before I respond may I ask you a clarifying question?

Is your concern over a single party system or a single party system where that single party is the GOP?

It's a fair question and not that easy to answer honestly and concisely.

As I've come to understand my own political notions and values, they apear to rise up from an observation and a moral premise.

The observation is that we are commonly not a very kind or just species. The institutions of society I prize are those which ammeliorate the worst tendencies in us. One of those tendencies is to accrete power and priviledge in the hands of a small minority and then to set up systems wherebye that power/priviledge is kept to that small group while those outside are very purposively held down. It makes sense to me to consider that some of us wish to dominate and the others wish not to be dominated (though, clearly, some of us prefer to be dominated).

The moral premise is that we, and any "government" worthy of our support, have a moral duty to minimize suffering. That suffering may fall out from simple chance (an earthquake) or from the injust and unkind consequences of how we organize ourselves socially (the subject here is what I spoke of in the paragraph immediately above).

Consequently, I am deeply suspicious of concentrations of power as I think that will lead almost always to tyranny. The role of governement ought to be, from my view, most fundamentally concerned with avoiding tyranny (which isn't an on/off thing, it has gradations) and with ensuring that priviledge is spread as widely as prudently possible. It's as much a Christian idea as it is a Greek idea. It's also Rawlsian for those familiar with that fellow.

All of that leads me to favor social democrat variations of government and policy. It also leads me to strongly disfavor the modern Republican party in the US. But I hold no allegiance to any party because it is the principles and policies I care about. Transparency, for example. The more a government operates in secrecy, the more dangerous I consider it to be. The more power a government suggests that it has the right to wield, the greater my anxiety.

Any party who wished exclusive power would be dangerous. But that danger increases where that party manifests other characteristics complimentary to holding/maintaining power, as in insistence on deference to it, or association with key centers of power and wealth outside of government, etc.

Blotham says:
"We are not commonly not a very kind or just species"


I wonder if Blotham learned that after watching HIS country's government pasted with a no-confidence motion to topple PM Martin's government. Some say that the liberal party in Canada under Martin no longer has the moral authority to lead the nation because of a corruption scandal.

Is that what he means when he says we are not a "just" species?

With his Solomonic Wisdom, Blotham ought to hurry to help Martin rise up from his cesspool of corruption.
But Martin, like most of the Canadians I have know, is a mealy mouthed hypocrite who deserves to be tossed out on his head!

RAWLSIAN LIBERALISM
RAWLSIAN LIBERALISM

I. THE INTUITIVE ARGUMENT.

According to Rawls, social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are to everyone's advantage and attached to positions open to all. He argues for this by arguing against the prevailing ideology of equal opportunity. That ideology can be summarized in the following argument:

1. Inequalities are just only when conditions of equal opportunity obtain.

2. Conditions of equal opportunity obtain only when a person's fate is not determined by morally irrelevant factors.

3. One's fate is not determined by morally irrelevant factors only when it is determined by one's choices and efforts.

4. One's fate is determined by one's choices and efforts only if it is not determined by social circumstances.

5. Therefore, inequalities are just only when not determined by social circumstances.

Rawls argues that the prevailing ideology is unstable, since it only rules out inequalities determined by social circumstances. But one's talents and abilities are no more deserved that one's social circumstance. Therefore, inequalities determined by one's talents and abilities must be ruled out as well:

6. One's fate is determined by one's choices and efforts alone only if it is not determined by one's talents and abilities.

7. Therefore, inequalities are just only when not determined by a person's talents and abilities.

Complete thesis:
http://web.missouri.edu/~philrnj/rawls.html

Blatham
Blatham, Michael Harrington's Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC) was the only political organization I ever found worthy of my membership. I got to know Michael quite well when we were organizing in the San Francisco Bay Area.

BBB

Michael Harrington 1928-1989) born on Feb 24
US writer. "He was a noted leftist author who awakened the U.S. to American poverty in "The Other America," 1962; "Taking Sides," 1965."

Quotes by Michael Harrington:

"Clothes make the poor invisible. . . . America has the best-dressed poverty the world has ever known."

"People who are much too sensitive to demand of cripples that they run races ask of the poor that they get up and act just like everybody else in society."

"If there is a technological advance without a social advance, there is, almost automatically, an increase in human misery."

"One cannot raise the bottom of society without benefitting everyone above."

"Our affluent society contains those of talent and insight who are driven to prefer poverty, to choose it, rather than to submit to the desolation of an empty abundance. It is a strange part of the other America that one finds in the intellectual slums."

Books by Michael Harrington:

The Other America

Taking Sides

Toward a Democratic Left

The Politics at God's Funeral

Covert CIA Program Withstands New Furor
Covert CIA Program Withstands New Furor
Anti-Terror Effort Continues to Grow
By Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 30, 2005; A01

The effort President Bush authorized shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, to fight al Qaeda has grown into the largest CIA covert action program since the height of the Cold War, expanding in size and ambition despite a growing outcry at home and abroad over its clandestine tactics, according to former and current intelligence officials and congressional and administration sources.

The broad-based effort, known within the agency by the initials GST, is compartmentalized into dozens of highly classified individual programs, details of which are known mainly to those directly involved.

GST includes programs allowing the CIA to capture al Qaeda suspects with help from foreign intelligence services, to maintain secret prisons abroad, to use interrogation techniques that some lawyers say violate international treaties, and to maintain a fleet of aircraft to move detainees around the globe. Other compartments within GST give the CIA enhanced ability to mine international financial records and eavesdrop on suspects anywhere in the world.

Over the past two years, as aspects of this umbrella effort have burst into public view, the revelations have prompted protests and official investigations in countries that work with the United States, as well as condemnation by international human rights activists and criticism by members of Congress.

Still, virtually all the programs continue to operate largely as they were set up, according to current and former officials. These sources say Bush's personal commitment to maintaining the GST program and his belief in its legality have been key to resisting any pressure to change course.

"In the past, presidents set up buffers to distance themselves from covert action," said A. John Radsan, assistant general counsel at the CIA from 2002 to 2004. "But this president, who is breaking down the boundaries between covert action and conventional war, seems to relish the secret findings and the dirty details of operations."

The administration's decisions to rely on a small circle of lawyers for legal interpretations that justify the CIA's covert programs and not to consult widely with Congress on them have also helped insulate the efforts from the growing furor, said several sources who have been involved.

Bush has never publicly confirmed the existence of a covert program, but he was recently forced to defend the approach in general terms, citing his wartime responsibilities to protect the nation. In November, responding to questions about the CIA's clandestine prisons, he said the nation must defend against an enemy that "lurks and plots and plans and wants to hurt America again."

This month he went into more detail, defending the National Security Agency's warrantless eavesdropping within the United States. That program is separate from the GST program, but three lawyers involved said the legal rationale for the NSA program is essentially the same one used to support GST, which is an abbreviation of a classified code name for the umbrella covert action program.

The administration contends it is still acting in self-defense after the Sept. 11 attacks, that the battlefield is worldwide, and that everything it has approved is consistent with the demands made by Congress on Sept. 14, 2001, when it passed a resolution authorizing "all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons [the president] determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks."

"Everything is done in the name of self-defense, so they can do anything because nothing is forbidden in the war powers act," said one official who was briefed on the CIA's original cover program and who is skeptical of its legal underpinnings. "It's an amazing legal justification that allows them to do anything," said the official, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issues.

The interpretation undergirds the administration's determination not to waver under public protests or the threat of legislative action. For example, after The Washington Post disclosed the existence of secret prisons in several Eastern European democracies, the CIA closed them down because of an uproar in Europe. But the detainees were moved elsewhere to similar CIA prisons, referred to as "black sites" in classified documents.

The CIA has stuck with its overall approaches, defending and in some cases refining them. The agency is working to establish procedures in the event a prisoner dies in custody. One proposal circulating among mid-level officers calls for rushing in a CIA pathologist to perform an autopsy and then quickly burning the body, according to two sources.

In June, the CIA temporarily suspended its interrogation program after a controversy over the disclosure of an Aug. 1, 2002, memorandum from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel that defined torture in an unconventional way. The White House withdrew and replaced the memo. But the hold on the CIA's interrogation activities was eventually removed, several intelligence officials said.

The authorized techniques include "waterboarding" and "water dousing," both meant to make prisoners think they are drowning; hard slapping; isolation; sleep deprivation; liquid diets; and stress positions -- often used, intelligence officials say, in combination to enhance the effect.

Behind the scenes, CIA Director Porter J. Goss -- until last year the Republican chairman of the House intelligence committee -- has gathered ammunition to defend the program.

After a CIA inspector general's report in the spring of 2004 stated that some authorized interrogation techniques violated international law, Goss asked two national security experts to study the program's effectiveness.

Gardner Peckham, an adviser to then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), concluded that the interrogation techniques had been effective, said an intelligence official familiar with the result. John J. Hamre, deputy defense secretary under President Bill Clinton, offered a more ambiguous conclusion. Both declined to comment.

The only apparent roadblock that could yet prompt significant change in the CIA's approach is a law passed this month prohibiting torture and cruel and inhumane treatment of prisoners in U.S. custody, including in CIA hands.

It is still unclear how the law, sponsored by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), will be implemented. But two intelligence experts said the CIA will be required to draw up clear guidelines and to get all special interrogation techniques approved by a wider range of government lawyers who hold a more conventional interpretation of international treaty obligations.

"The executive branch will not pull back unless it has to," said a former Justice Department lawyer involved in the initial discussions on executive power. "Because if it pulls back unilaterally and another attack occurs, it will get blamed."

The Origins

The top-secret presidential finding Bush signed six days after the Sept. 11 attacks empowered the intelligence agencies in a way not seen since World War II, and it ordered them to create what would become the GST program.

Written findings are required by the National Security Act of 1947 before the CIA can undertake a covert action. A covert action may not violate the Constitution or any U.S. law. But such actions can, and often do, violate laws of the foreign countries in which they take place, said intelligence experts.

The CIA faced the day after the 2001 attacks with few al Qaeda informants, a tiny paramilitary division and no interrogators, much less a system for transporting terrorism suspects and keeping them hidden for interrogation.

Besides fighting the war in Afghanistan, the agency set about to put in place an intelligence-gathering network that relies heavily on foreign security services and their deeper knowledge of local terrorist groups. With billions of dollars appropriated each year by Congress, the CIA has established joint counterterrorism intelligence centers in more than two dozen countries, and it has enlisted at least eight countries, including several in Eastern Europe, to allow secret prisons on their soil.

Working behind the scenes, the CIA has gained approval from foreign governments to whisk terrorism suspects off the streets or out of police custody into a clandestine prison system that includes the CIA's black sites and facilities run by intelligence agencies in other countries.

The presidential finding also permitted the CIA to create paramilitary teams to hunt and kill designated individuals anywhere in the world, according to a dozen current and former intelligence officials and congressional and executive branch sources.

In four years, the GST has become larger than the CIA's covert action programs in Afghanistan and Central America in the 1980s, according to current and former intelligence officials. Indeed, the CIA, working with foreign counterparts, has been responsible for virtually all of the success the United States has had in capturing or killing al Qaeda leaders since Sept. 11, 2001.

Bush delegated much of the day-to-day decision-making and the creation of individual components to then-CIA Director George J. Tenet, according to congressional and intelligence officials who were briefed on the finding at the time.

"George could decide, even on killings," one of these officials said, referring to Tenet. "That was pushed down to him. George had the authority on who was going to get it."

The Lawyers

Tenet, according to half a dozen former intelligence officials, delegated most of the decision making on lethal action to the CIA's Counterterrorist Center. Killing an al Qaeda leader with a Hellfire missile fired from a remote-controlled drone might have been considered assassination in a prior era and therefore banned by law.

But after Sept. 11, four former government lawyers said, it was classified as an act of self-defense and therefore was not an assassination. "If it was an al Qaeda person, it wouldn't be an assassination," said one lawyer involved.

This month, Pakistani intelligence sources said, Hamza Rabia, a top operational planner for al Qaeda, was killed along with four others by a missile fired by U.S. operatives using an unmanned Predator drone, although there were conflicting reports on whether a missile was used. In May, another al Qaeda member, Haitham Yemeni, was reported killed by a Predator drone missile in northwest Pakistan.

Refining what constitutes an assassination was just one of many legal interpretations made by Bush administration lawyers. Time and again, the administration asked government lawyers to draw up new rules and reinterpret old ones to approve activities once banned or discouraged under the congressional reforms beginning in the 1970s, according to these officials and seven lawyers who once worked on these matters.

Gen. Michael V. Hayden, deputy director of national intelligence, has described the administration's philosophy in public and private meetings, including a session with human rights groups.

"We're going to live on the edge," Hayden told the groups, according to notes taken by Human Rights Watch and confirmed by Hayden's office. "My spikes will have chalk on them. . . . We're pretty aggressive within the law. As a professional, I'm troubled if I'm not using the full authority allowed by law."

Not stopping another attack not only will be a professional failure, he argued, but also "will move the line" again on acceptable legal limits to counterterrorism.

When the CIA wanted new rules for interrogating important terrorism suspects the White House gave the task to a small group of lawyers within the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel who believed in an aggressive interpretation of presidential power.

The White House tightened the circle of participants involved in these most sensitive new areas. It initially cut out the State Department's general counsel, most of the judge advocates general of the military services and the Justice Department's criminal division, which traditionally dealt with international terrorism.

"The Bush administration did not seek a broad debate on whether commander-in-chief powers can trump international conventions and domestic statutes in our struggle against terrorism," said Radsan, the former CIA lawyer, who is a professor at William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul, Minn. "They could have separated the big question from classified details to operations and had an open debate. Instead, an inner circle of lawyers and advisers worked around the dissenters in the administration and one-upped each other with extreme arguments."

At the CIA, the White House allowed the general counsel's job, traditionally filled from outside the CIA by someone who functioned in a sort of oversight role, to be held by John Rizzo, a career CIA lawyer with a fondness for flashy suits and ties who worked for years in the Directorate of Operations, or D.O.

"John Rizzo is a classic D.O. lawyer. He understands the culture, the intelligence business," Radsan said. "He admires the case officers. And they trust him to work out tough issues in the gray with them. He is like a corporate lawyer who knows how to make the deal happen."

These lawyers have written legal justifications for holding suspects picked up outside Afghanistan without a court order, without granting traditional legal rights and without giving them access to the International Committee of the Red Cross.

CIA and Office of Legal Counsel lawyers also determined that it was legal for suspects to be secretly detained in one country and transferred to another for the purposes of interrogation and detention -- a process known as "rendition."

Lawyers involved in the decision making acknowledge the uncharted nature of their work. "I did what I thought the best reading of the law was," one lawyer said. "These lines are not obvious. It was a judgment."

Credit and Blame

One way the White House limited debate over its program was to virtually shut out Congress during the early years. Congress, for its part, raised only weak and sporadic protests. The administration sometimes refused to give the committees charged with overseeing intelligence agencies the details they requested. It also cut the number of members of Congress routinely briefed on these matters, usually to four members -- the chairmen and ranking Democratic members of the House and Senate intelligence panels.

John D. Rockefeller IV (W.Va.), ranking Democrat on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, complained in a 2003 letter to Vice President Cheney that his briefing on the NSA eavesdropping was unsatisfactory. "Given the security restrictions associated with this information, and my inability to consult staff or counsel on my own, I feel unable to fully evaluate, much less endorse, these activities," he wrote.

Rockefeller made similar complaints about the CIA's refusal to allow the full committee to see the backup material supporting a skeptical report by the CIA inspector general in 2004 on detentions and interrogations that questioned the legal basis for renditions.

Some former CIA officers now worry that the agency alone will be held responsible for actions authorized by Bush and approved by the White House's lawyers.

Attacking the CIA is common when covert programs are exposed and controversial, said Gerald Haines, a former CIA historian who is a scholar in residence at the University of Virginia. "It seems to me the agency is taking the brunt of all the recent criticism."

Duane R. "Dewey" Clarridge, who directed the CIA's covert efforts to support the Nicaraguan contras in the 1980s, said the nature of CIA work overseas is, and should be, risky and sometimes ugly. "You have a spy agency because the spy agency is going to break laws overseas. If you don't want it to do those dastardly things, don't have it. You can have the State Department."

But a former CIA officer said the agency "lost its way" after Sept. 11, rarely refusing or questioning an administration request. The unorthodox measures "have got to be flushed out of the system," the former officer said. "That's how it works in this country."
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Researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.