CBC News
WASHINGTON (AP) – A lawyer is making an unusual appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of an unlikely client: Saddam Hussein.

Curtis Doebbler, the lone American on Saddam’s legal team, wants the high court to declare the detention of the ousted Iraqi president unconstitutional.

The long-shot legal manoeuvre comes as Saddam’s lawyers await the chance to meet with their client and find out what charges he will face in a war crimes trial by Iraq’s new government. He could face the death penalty.

“Even the people we dislike the most have a right to a fair trial,” said Doebbler, who volunteered his services on the 20-member team with lawyers from Belgium, Britain, France, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya and Tunisia.

Doebbler said his clients over the past decade have received little media attention: Ethiopian refugees, displaced persons in Sudan’s Khartoum State, and political activists in Sudan.

His work for his latest client has earned him threats but has not deterred him, he told reporters Thursday. “Whether it’s a former president or whether it’s a refuge, individuals have the same basic human rights,” he said. full article

Soros and Georgia/Pravda
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by R. Jeffrey Smith Washington Post
Money Was Directed to Texas GOP to Help State Redistricting Effort

In May 2001, Enron’s top lobbyists in Washington advised the company chairman that then-House Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) was pressing for a $100,000 contribution to his political action committee, in addition to the $250,000 the company had already pledged to the Republican Party that year.

DeLay requested that the new donation come from “a combination of corporate and personal money from Enron’s executives,” with the understanding that it would be partly spent on “the redistricting effort in Texas,” said the e-mail to Kenneth L. Lay from lobbyists Rick Shapiro and Linda Robertson.

The e-mail, which surfaced in a subsequent federal probe of Houston-based Enron, is one of at least a dozen documents obtained by The Washington Post that show DeLay and his associates directed money from corporations and Washington lobbyists to Republican campaign coffers in Texas in 2001 and 2002 as part of a plan to redraw the state’s congressional districts.

DeLay’s fundraising efforts helped produce a stunning political success. Republicans took control of the Texas House for the first time in 130 years, Texas congressional districts were redrawn to send more Republican lawmakers to Washington, and DeLay — now the House majority leader — is more likely to retain his powerful post after the November election, according to political experts. full article

cnn.com

WASHINGTON (CNN) — U.S. officials have discussed the idea of postponing Election Day in the event of a terrorist attack on or about that day, a Homeland Security Department spokesman said Sunday.

The department has referred questions about the matter to the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel, said spokesman Brian Roehrkasse, confirming a report in this week’s editions of Newsweek magazine.

Newsweek said the discussions about whether the November 2 election could be postponed started with a recent letter to Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge from DeForest Soaries Jr., chairman of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.

The commission was set up after the disputed 2000 presidential vote to help states deal with logistical problems in their elections.

Soaries, who was appointed by President Bush, is a former New Jersey secretary of state and senior pastor of the 7,000-member First Baptist Church of Lincoln Gardens in Somerset.

Newsweek reported that Soaries expressed concern that no federal agency had the authority to postpone an election and asked Ridge to ask Congress to give his commission such power.

Ridge warned Thursday that al Qaeda terrorists were planning a large-scale attack on the United States “in an effort to disrupt the democratic process.” (Full story)

Ridge said he had no specific or credible information about threats to the political conventions. The four-day Democratic convention kicks off July 26 in Boston, Massachusetts, and the Republican National Convention begins August 30 in New York City.

Ridge also said the nation’s color-coded terrorist threat level would remain at yellow, or elevated.

…the Republican chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, Rep. Christopher Cox of California, said on “Late Edition” that he sees Ridge’s request as part of a prudent effort to plan for “doomsday scenarios.”

“We don’t have any intelligence to suggest that it is going to happen, but we’re preparing for all of these contingencies now,” Cox said.

Noting that New York election officials were able to postpone their September 11, 2001, primary election after terrorists slammed hijacked planes into the World Trade Center, Cox said “there isn’t any body that has that authority to do that for federal elections.”

“So what Secretary Ridge has asked the Justice Department to do is, ‘Give me a legal memo, tell me what will be necessary. Do we need to go to Congress and get legislation?’ ” full article

by Richard Lichtman counterpunch.org
After September 11 much was made of America’s “loss of innocence.” What was meant by this phrase was that our sense of inviolable security had been forever breached and that we could no longer feel safe in our impregnable fortress, this chosen land protected by two oceans and God’s divine munificence that had so defined us as blessed and so granted us suzerainty as “the first new nation” and “the city on the hill.”

Of course, such a realization of utter vulnerability as 9/11 provided would assuredly produce a violent trauma in our national consciousness. But the wound went deeper still. For it has always been a fundamental assumption of the American political- religious psyche that we alone were inviolable, and that our geographical distance from the remainder of the world conferred upon us a special status among nations, one that freed us from concern for immediate political consequence and thereby provided us with an impartiality of judgment marked by a special purity. In the middle ages the distribution of land was understood as the embodiment of God’s transcendent purpose, and similarly, in the consciousness of the first Puritan settlers our secure distance from Europe was construed as an ideological premise in an argument that provided us with unique moral possibility. Our geographical separation and our moral mission were merged into a single claim of unique theological purpose.

From its Puritan origins America was steeped in a transcendent claim to moral purpose and mission. The “American jeremiad,” as Sacvan Berkovitch has reminded us, produced as one of its cultural manifestations such ceremonial confirmations as the litany of Fourth of July oratory, hailing in Charleston in 1788, “the Revolution as the beginning of a new age in human history;” and in New York, proclaiming, in the words of Thomas Yarrow, “From their birth,” the American states were “designed to be the redeemers of mankind.” From Pennsylvania to Rhode Island, the country was averred “the Great Temple of Liberty.” “Long streams of light emanate from its portals…its turrets will stream into the heaven…and the pillar of divine glory, descending from God, will rest forever on its summit.” In Maine, Virginia and South Carolina, orators asserted the correspondence between local developments and the “vast design of providence…for the universal redemption of the human race.” This was not the vision of human corruption born of original sin that the Puritans had brought with them from the despair of Europe. Nor was it merely a proclamation of American superiority, though this claim was certainly included. It was, rather, the embrace of a mandate to lead the “redemption of the human race” in total transfiguration. Winthrop’s very notion of “a city upon a hill” connoted separation from the turmoil of European corruption for the sake of a new social order. The water passage was a metaphorical ablution, a symbolic rite of purification from those sins of our original nature.

Berkovitch has stated the matter with brilliant concision:

“Only in the United States has nationalism carried with it the Christian meaning of the sacred. Only America, of all national designations, has assumed the combined force of eschatology and chauvinism. Many other societies have defended the status quo by reference to religious values; many forms of nationalism have laid claim to a world-redeeming promise; many Christian sects have sought, in secret or open heresy, to find the sacred in the profane, and many European defenders of middle class democracy have tried to link order and progress. But only the American Way, of all modern ideologies, has managed to circumvent the paradoxes inherent in these approaches. Of all the symbols of identity, only America has united nationality and universality, civic and spiritual selfhood, secular and redemptive history, the country’s past and paradise to be, in a single synthetic voice.”

And Melville, in his novel White-Jacket:

“And we Americans are the peculiar, chosen people — the Israel of our time; we bear the arc of the liberties of the world…God has predestined, mankind expects, great things from our race; and great things we feel in our souls…Long enough have we been skeptics with regard to ourselves, and doubted whether, indeed, the political Messiah had come. But he has come in us.”counterpunch.org

An interesting article
by David Greenberg The New Yorker
George W. Bush and his forebears.

…But a dynastic sense of “unfinished business,” though it may have partly motivated the Iraq war, doesn’t explain why George W. has waged it with an abandon wholly uncharacteristic of his father. Indeed, the differences between the Bush Administrations now loom larger than the continuities. Brashness, for example, isn’t a quality associated with the elder Bush, who always displayed the ingrained modesty of the old establishment. Politically, he was self-effacing to a fault. When the Berlin Wall fell and his press secretary, Marlin Fitzwater, urged him to make a speech, Bush seemed puzzled. “The last thing I want to do is brag about winning the Cold War,” he said. The trait could bleed into opportunism, too: he swallowed his pro-choice record and his scorn for “voodoo economics” (a phrase he coined) when Reagan tendered him the Vice-Presidential slot,in 1980.

George W. showed little of his father’s caution as he barrelled ahead with his controversial appointments and extravagant tax cuts, convinced that he was doing the right thing. The signature act of his Presidency, targeting Saddam, defied his father’s judgment that deposing the tyrant would alienate the Arab allies whose support had been essential to the first Gulf War. And, where the elder Bush struggled to articulate a well-defined world view, few doubt the younger Bush’s ideological consistency.

The difference between the Bushes is starkest in the area of religion. The father had the traditional Yankee unease about introducing religion into political life. During the 1988 campaign, when he recalled floating on the life raft in the Pacific after his wartime crash, he said, “I thought about Mother and Dad and the strength I got from them, and God and faith”—and then became so worried about the implications of his words that he added, “and the separation of church and state.” Even in avowing his faith he sounded strained. “If by ‘born again’ one is asking, ‘Do you accept Jesus Christ as your savior?’” he said, “then I would answer a clear-cut yes. No hesitancy. No awkwardness.”

George W.’s devotion to evangelical Protestantism, by contrast, is well known. Although Christianity didn’t play a strong role in his early life, he found God when he turned forty. At the time, he was drinking heavily and his marriage was collapsing. Laura told him that if he didn’t stop drinking she would leave him and take their daughters with her. For a year, Bush had been consulting with the Reverend Billy Graham—pastor to Presidents since Eisenhower—and he began exploring the evangelical message. He joined a Bible-study group—an especially significant commitment, in the Schweizers’ view, because it met at the same time as “Monday Night Football.” “With W. no longer drinking,” the Schweizers write, he and Laura “became intimate once again.”

The news media have been prone to underestimate the importance of George W.’s evangelicalism. Perhaps it’s because the religious right has perfected the art of what used to be called Mau-Mauing, rendering the press corps fearful of broaching the subject. Maybe reporters genuinely believe that George W. plays it up for political purposes; they often describe him as behaving cynically when he takes actions that please the Christian right. But this reading stems from an assumption of continuity between the son and the father, who did pander to evangelical conservatives. “I always laugh when people say that George W. Bush is saying this or that to appease the religious right,” his first cousin John Ellis told the Schweizers. “He is the religious right.”

George W. has been active in evangelical politics since his father’s 1988 campaign, when he served as the campaign’s liaison to the religious right. Working with Doug Wead, an Assemblies of God pastor and a longtime Bush associate, he forged personal alliances with influential ministers, broadcasters, and activists. In the Iowa caucuses, the televangelist Pat Robertson outpolled the elder Bush (who explained, comically, that his supporters were off that night golfing or at air shows and débutante balls). But the son’s aggressive networking paid off in the Southern primaries weeks later, when his father, once distrusted by born-again Christians, trounced even Robertson within that constituency. In the younger Bush’s own Presidential bid, in 2000, he got a minority of the over-all vote but eighty-four per cent of highly observant, white evangelicals. “For the first time,” Phillips notes, “a Republican presidential victory rested on a religious, conservative, southern-centered coalition.” For the first time, the President of the United States was also “the de facto head of the Religious Right.”

Phillips attributes Bush’s success to demographics, in particular the surge of evangelical Christian denominations as a proportion of the faithful. Between 1960 and 2000, the number of Americans who attended weekly services fell from thirty-eight per cent to twenty-five per cent. At the same time, membership in the Southern Baptist Convention grew from ten million to seventeen million, and membership in the Pentecostal churches from less than two million to nearly twelve million. “Liberal religion was being routed,” Phillips concludes. Bush shared the values of this growing bloc and enjoyed its overwhelming support.

Bush has not been shy about displaying his faith. Shortly after September 11, 2001, the President came across Proverbs 21:15: “When justice is done, it brings joy to the righteous but terror to evildoers.” Soon, “evildoers” became his favorite term for Al Qaeda. Bush’s speechwriter, Michael Gerson, himself an evangelical, laces the President’s addresses with seemingly innocuous terms that the devout recognize as laden with meaning: “whirlwind,” “work of mercy,” “safely home,” “wonder-working power.” Phillips refers to a study by the religion scholar Bruce Lincoln, who identified, in Bush’s speech to Congress announcing the invasion of Afghanistan, allusions to Revelation, Isaiah, Job, Matthew, and Jeremiah. In private, Bush has been even more explicit. “George sees this as a religious war,” a family member told the Schweizers. “He doesn’t have a p.c. view of this war. His view of this is that they are trying to kill the Christians. And we the Christians will strike back with more force and more ferocity than they will ever know.” Phillips says that Bush has spoken of himself as an instrument of divine will.
full article

by Erin Kelly Burlington (VT) FreePress
WASHINGTON — Independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader accused Howard Dean in a debate Friday of going from an “insurgent” Democrat to “the detergent of the dirty laundry of the Democratic Party.”

“The old Howard Dean has turned into Howard Dean II,” Nader said during the hourlong debate. Nader repeatedly chastised Dean — former Vermont governor and one-time Democratic presidential front-runner — for turning from rival to ally of presumptive Democratic nominee John Kerry.

Dean chuckled at Nader’s “detergent comment,” but warned that Nader’s candidacy could hurt some of the poorest Americans by taking away votes from Kerry and helping President Bush be re-elected.

“This year we’re faced with an extraordinary emergency,” Dean said, accusing the Bush administration of waging an ill-advised war in Iraq, favoring the rich with its tax policies and dismantling environmental protection laws.

“I am desperate to send George Bush back to Crawford, Texas,” Dean said.

The politicians squared off in a debate at the National Press Club sponsored by the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. It was aired on National Public Radio and televised on C-SPAN.

For Dean, who dropped out of the race in the spring after a string of losses in the primaries, the debate was a chance to help the Kerry campaign by trying to convince progressive voters that a vote for Nader is really a vote for Bush. Dean has formed a group called Democracy for America to raise money for Kerry and Democratic congressional candidates.

Nader tried to turn the debate back on Dean, frequently reading anti-Kerry quotes from speeches that the former governor gave while he was still a presidential hopeful; among them: attacks on Kerry as a “Washington insider” and “a special interest clone.”

“We don’t want to settle for the lesser of two evils in this country,” Nader said, again quoting Dean.

Dean said he has differences with Kerry, but said those differences are nothing compared to those he and most Democrats have with Bush.

“I believe that in the end the people I care about will be better served by a John Kerry presidency than a George Bush presidency,” Dean said.

Dean angered Nader by charging that many of the people who are signing Nader’s petitions to get on state ballots are Republicans or, in the case of one Oregon group, anti-gay activists whose main goal is to defeat Kerry. Nader accused Dean of trying to “smear him.”

At one point, NPR host Margot Adler asked Dean what advice he would give Nader. Dean replied: “Lighten up.”

Nader laughed: “That’s better than what I thought he would say.”

What this story does not report, or any others I have found, was Nader’s response to Dean’s criticism that right-wingers are contributers to the Nader campaign. His response was that Kerry accepts contributions from corporations that are under Federal indictment. Dean was flustered and said he would talk to Kerry about it. Ha.

This is the season of despair, and there are terrible years ahead.

Nader Calls Kerry a “Puppet” For Israel, Charges Dems With “Mini-Watergate”:Democracy Now interview

by Robert Scheer The Nation
Has anyone noticed that the charges leveled last week against Saddam Hussein bore no relation to the reasons offered by President Bush for his pre-emptive invasion of Iraq? Not a word about Hussein being linked to terrorist attacks on the United States or having weapons of mass destruction that posed an imminent threat to our nation’s security.

That is because after seven months of interrogation, the United States appears to have learned nothing from Hussein or any other source in the world that supports the Pazresident’s decision to go to war. Washington turned Hussein over to the Iraqis without charging its infamous prisoner of war with any of these crimes. And even the Iraqis did not charge him with being behind the insurgency that almost daily claims American lives.

It’s a travesty, if you think about it. The fact is that the United States, which holds itself up as the exemplar of democracy for the entire Middle East, held Hussein in captivity for seven months, virtually incommunicado, without access to lawyers of his choosing and without charging him with a crime or releasing him at the end of the occupation, as required by the Geneva Convention. If the United States believes, as most of the world does, that Hussein committed crimes against humanity, then he is entitled to the same international standards of due process that the United States and its allies applied to top Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg. It is well established in such cases that justice will not be served by turning Hussein over to be tried by his former political rivals or his victims. full article

The Black Commentator
Haiti is a prison ruled by psychopaths, an angry wound in the body of the African Diaspora inflicted by pirates at war with civilization, itself.  It is the festering evidence of the Bush men’s true intentions for the region and hemisphere, a nightmare and a warning from the North to the South: don’t even pretend that you are free.

Since February 29, when the United States and France forced President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and his wife into an odyssey of exile, Haiti has endured the dictatorship of an elite so tiny and morally depraved that its survival is dependent on indigenous criminals and foreign soldiers. The U.S.-installed government of Gerard Latortue – a rabble fronting for butchers and thieves – now seeks legitimacy in the ranks of the Caribbean Community, Caricom, the 15-nation regional body from which Latortue recklessly withdrew in the aftermath of the coup.

At a summit meeting this week in Grenada, Caricom’s leaders withheld recognition of the Haitian Gangster State, opting instead to send a delegation to explore restoration of relations in the future. According to reports earlier in the week, Belize, Antigua and Barbuda, Trinidad and Tobago, Grenada and the Bahamas pressed for immediate recognition of Latortue’s regime, while a smaller bloc, led by St. Vincent and the Grenadines Prime Minister Ralf Gonsalves, sought to ostracize the U.S. puppet.

“The Heads or no group of Heads can go and meet Latortue, and, if they go, they would not be representing me,” said Gonsalves. “Latortue was installed by the Americans, you do not have democracy in Haiti today and there is no level playing field, therefore whoever wants to recognize Haiti can, but the Government of St. Vincent and the Grenadines will not recognize the Latortue administration.”

The final compromise calls for Haitian readmission to Caricom based on certain “conditionalities,” including an early return to a constitutional government in Haiti, establishment of a bi-partisan electoral council for competitive local, national and presidential elections, and the disarming of armed bands.

Every Caribbean leader knows that the Latortue regime cannot possibly adhere to such conditions, since it is in a state of war with the majority of Haiti’s people – the mass constituency that chose Aristide as their President under the Lavalas party umbrella. Caricom’s face-saving formula seeks to preserve the dignity of the organization while allowing member states to attempt to make their peace with the United States – the overwhelming presence at the Grenada meeting. Jamaican Prime Minister P. J. Patterson was ready to compromise, having borne the full fury of U.S. wrath at his decision to temporarily harbor Aristide after his release from the Central African Republic. full article

by Justin Podurzmag.org
Talk prepared for Life After Capitalism Conference at World Social Forum, Porto Alegre, January 2003

The Weight of History

The Americas were built by murdering the indigenous inhabitants of the land and bringing slaves from Africa to work that land. That history is 510 years old. The reason we have racism in the Americas, and what we call ‘white supremacy’ in North America, is because the weight of that history has never been lifted from those who have been forced to bear it.

Today the indigenous in North America are some of the poorest people, under constant attack and pressure by states and corporations who crave what little land and resources they have left, and by racism itself that says that any redress of the history of genocide against them is ‘special treatment’.

Today African Americans in the United States are more than 50% of the prison population when they are 13% of the population. They are also disproportionately represented among the poor, the unemployed, those without health insurance, those killed by police.

Afro-Colombians are 70% of that country’s 2 million internally displaced, when they are only 25% of the population. Mexicans, Guatemalans, Nicaraguans, Brazilians—all know the travails and murderous campaigns against their indigenous populations.

This is a 510-year long history, and it is not just a history of the Americas. We could start our history in 1492, but we have to note that 1492 isn’t just the year that Columbus reached the Americas. It’s also the year that Europe conquered the kingdom of Granada, the last outpost of Muslim Spain. In Muslim Spain Christians, Muslims, and Jews had coexisted. The conquest of Spain by Christian Europe changed that. Jews and Muslims were forced to convert or be expelled. Then the Inquisition was created to root out false converts, burn them at the stake, take their lands.

Slavery and the massive theft of land and resources from the Americas was the foundation on which modern capitalism was built. In order to build that capitalism, it was necessary to destroy whole peoples in the most gruesome ways. In order to destroy peoples in this way, it was necessary to create a myth that these people Europe was doing these things to were not quite human—that the indigenous were not quite human; the blacks were not quite human. When it developed these myths Europe was not working from a vacuum: dehumanization was practiced first on the Jews and Muslims (Moors) in Europe itself or in the Middle East. And I think the roots of modern racist mythology can be found in these medieval notions of blood and purity, of infidels and outsiders, while the roots of modern institutional racism can be found in the construction of capitalism itself, in the genocide, slavery, and colonialism that were a necessary part of capitalism’s construction.

Capitalism and racism are still about theft, and plunder. They are still about dehumanization, war, massacre of helpless people who are treated as less than human. Today’s War on Terror was almost called a ‘Crusade against Evil’. Several times now, thousands of Muslims have been rounded up and arrested in the US. The historical parallels are there.

So if we want to go out on a limb and ask ourselves what it would mean for there to be a life after racism, we’d have to take it together with life after capitalism. Life after racism implies life after capitalism since so much of racism works through the unequal sharing of resources, the starving of many millions for the benefit of the few, and all the mythology and historical baggage designed to justify that distribution.

But there is more to racism than just economics, and more to anti-racism than anti-capitalism. I would say that the necessary components for a life after racism are four: polyculturalism, autonomy, solidarity, restitution. My idea for life after racism could be summed up as ‘integration without assimilation, and autonomy without separation’. I’ll go into detail on these points, but first a note about nationalism
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