So long, Canada

Strict new border policies are turning Canada into a foreign country. Is this any way to treat our neighbors?

By Edward McClelland

May 1, 2008 | WINDSOR, Ont. -- It was a snowy March night in Windsor, Ont. On the stage of Jason's Executive Lounge, the French Canadian stripper seemed to be asking herself, "Why did I bother to undress?" A royal-blue robe draped over her forearms as she danced to the low-volume disco bip-bip-bipping out of the nightclub's heavy-duty speakers. A muted floodlight cast a pale glow on her bare belly. Three men sat alone at their tables, sipping cranberry-juice cocktails and bottles of Labatt's Blue. The dancer's eyes wandered toward the door. She'd come all the way from Montreal and gotten naked for this?

It wasn't a wild night at Jason's, the club that had founded the "Windsor Ballet," the string of nudie bars whose hormonal scent once lured carloads of American men across the Detroit River to indulge in un-American activities. The drinking age in Ontario is 19. You can buy Cuban cigars at Fidel's Havana Lounge, a once busy tavern-humidor. Even prostitution is legal in the privacy of your own motel room.

"It used to be everybody went back and forth," reminisced Brad McLellan, manager of Jason's Executive Lounge. "It was, 'Where you going? Have a good time.' Then the U.S. side started tightening up after 9/11."

Five years ago, Jason's canceled its lunch specials, long popular with Detroiters off the domestic leash during business hours. Border inspections caused such long backups that customers couldn't get back to the office on time. Now the nightclub has a new headache -- the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative (WHTI), a law that's bringing the phrase "May I see your papers?" to America's frontiers.

In January, the Department of Homeland Security began demanding proof of citizenship -- such as a birth certificate -- of everyone who enters the United States by land. Starting in June 2009, the rules will be even stricter: a passport or similar federally approved document.

Already, Windsor has lost half its American business -- visits dropped from 7.5 million in 1999 to 3.76 million in 2004 -- and McLellan expects to lose even more. "I think the Americans will probably stop coming because it's a hassle to them unless they have a cottage [in Canada]," McLellan said. "A lot of Canadians will stop going over, too. When you get four people who want to go to a Red Wings game, and two of them have a passport, and two don't, they're going to stick together."

McLellan said some of his customers think they need a passport already. Casino Windsor is reaching out to confused Americans with a radio spot that ends, "No passport needed until June 2009."

If the tighter border were just an inconvenience for strip-club patrons, sports fans and gamblers, its effect on international relations might be no big deal. But it's disrupting everyday life in Ameri-Canadian communities, where residents have always thought of themselves as neighbors, not foreigners. The Champlain, N.Y., fire department has a mutual-aid pact with a nearby town in Quebec. Last year, the Canadians were late for a blaze because Homeland Security stopped a truck to inspect the crew's papers.

Automakers that shuttle parts between plants in the United States and Canada now stockpile them in warehouses because truck inspection times have tripled since 2000. The delays cost $11.5 billion a year, according to a report by the Brookings Institution. Indian tribes are outraged about the prospect of having to carry passports to visit relatives and sacred sites across the border that divides their traditional lands. In January, trips from the United States to Canada hit their lowest mark since record-keeping began in 1972.

It's more difficult to measure the impact on American business because our weak dollar makes the border hassle worthwhile for many Canadian shoppers. Canadian visits are up 10 percent since last year, but an official with the Binational Tourism Alliance says that "15 years ago, when the exchange rate was last where it is, the numbers were three times what they are now." Overall, between 1995 and 2005, annual crossings from Canada dropped by half. Perhaps the stay-at-homes include a gentleman I met in Kingston, Ont., who told me he never goes to the states because "I don't want Uncle George looking up my butt."

In her day job as New York's junior senator, Hillary Clinton has pleaded with Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff to cancel the passport regulations, fearing they'll damage upstate New York's already sickly economy. "I've been a leader on the WHTI issue," Clinton told Salon during a campaign stop earlier this year. "I have been opposed to what they've been trying to do. It'll interfere with recreation and tourism. I've spoken to Secretary Chertoff opposing the regulations requiring passports at the northern and southern border."

The new rules aren't just aimed at preventing another 9/11. They're also part of a crackdown on illegal immigration. But Canadians are not swimming across Lake Erie to escape socialized medicine and sane mortgage-lending laws. According to a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson, the "vast majority" of people lying about their citizenship are trying to cross the southern border. And yet, the DHS is applying the same rules to the Canadian border as it is to the Mexican border, despite our vastly different relationships with the two countries.

"The U.S. government has been insulting in the way it's handled the border without consulting the Canadians," says Andrew Rudnick, executive director of the Buffalo Niagara Partnership, a business association of U.S. and Canadian companies. "They've been insensitive to life here."

More and more, the strict new border rules appear to be a huge cultural and economic mistake. As the United States walls itself off against illegal immigration and terrorism, the relationship between Americans and Canadians will be a casualty.

The United States and Canada share the longest undefended frontier in the world -- 5,500 miles. We are closer, in our habits, speech and folkways than any other neighboring nations on earth. Go into a tavern on either side of the border and you're likely to find Molson in the fridge, hockey on TV, and a jukebox well stocked with Kid Rock and Rush. The real cultural dividing line on this continent is not the Canadian border, but the Ohio River. America's Northern states would fit more amicably into a union with Ontario and Nova Scotia than the one with Arizona and Texas.

A study by the Pew Global Attitudes Project found that "the views of Americans who live in the northern border states are much closer to values held by Canadians than are the values of Americans living in the U.S. South." A merchant sailor who shuttles regularly between Michigan and Ontario once observed, "The language is the same. It's the same people. I don't know why there's a border. It's just a nuisance."

I've spent a lot of time in the borderlands over the past few years, and most of the people I've met say the crossing is becoming even more of a nuisance.

Thirty miles southeast of Windsor, along the Lake Erie shore, the farmland is flat, humid and fruitful, producing vines of deeply colored tomatoes and bushels of soft plums. The roadsides are crowded with tin-roofed produce stands flying American and Canadian flags. This is where I first met Carl Mastronardi, a farmer as Americanized as anyone else north of the border. He sold me a carton of blueberries and talked about how his life encompasses both countries.

Mastronardi is Italian, first of all, so he's more verbose than most of his countrymen. "You can't tell by listening to me that I'm Canadian," he bragged. And, he's a Detroiter. As a young man, he crossed the border to see Tigers baseball games and meet girls. His wife is from Michigan, which means he now needs documentation to visit his mother-in-law.

It took 9/11 to remind Mastronardi that he was marooned across the border from the city that provided him with his living, his family and his identity. In the weeks after the attacks, trucks were backed up 20 miles, waiting to cross into the states. When I talked to him again, after WHTI went into effect, he moaned that it was dividing two economies that should be drawing closer.

"It's terrible for trade," he said. "NAFTA was supposed to be so we were all strong -- 450 million of us to compete with those guys in Europe. If you go to Europe, it's wide open. The borders here are not open, but were getting that way. If 9/11 hadn't happened, it would have been laxer. Seventy-five percent of the time, when I took a bus to see the Tigers, we just breezed through. Now, they stop the bus and board it."

Like many other Canadians, Mastronardi finds the restrictions insulting. Proudly multicultural, Canada is scrupulous about minority rights. To American border hawks, that makes it a haven for radical Muslims. In February, Chertoff told the New York Daily News that "more than a dozen" potential terrorists have tried to infiltrate the United States from Canada. According to a DHS report, Canada harbors "known terrorist affiliate and extremist groups, including Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Armed Islamic Group of Algeria."

Mastronardi scoffed at the idea that the Canada was a haven for radical Muslims. "You've got eight million Muslims. We've got, what, 800,000?"

This February, I made a trip around the Golden Horseshoe, a cultural and economic region that encompasses the western bell-end of Lake Ontario, from Toronto to Rochester, N.Y. The two sides of the Niagara River have been getting along splendidly ever since the War of 1812 ended. Ontario has the wineries, the Shaw Festival, and the best view of Niagara Falls. New York has the Walden Galleria. The Buffalo Sabres depend on Canadian hockey fans; the Bills are so popular in Canada that they'll be playing games in Toronto next year. Canadians also cross the border to ski in western New York and fly out of Buffalo-Niagara International Airport.

At Fort Erie Race Track & Slots in Ontario, a popular destination for Americans, Sue, a gambler from Buffalo, was lingering by the slots. "I just carry my birth certificate," she said. "I got asked coming across. It's a lot harder going back. They'll look in your luggage. I saw a group of 80-year-olds, and they had their bags open. It's not like they're al-Qaida."

I have a passport, but I wanted to test American border security, so when I reached the customs booth, after idling in traffic for 15 minutes, I stuck my driver's license out the window. "Is this all you have to cross the border?" the agent demanded. Busted. "I have a passport," I admitted. "Next time, bring your passport," he ordered, assuming I'd left it at home. He handed me a brochure with a list of acceptable I.D.s and let me back into my native land.

For now, as the new policy is being phased in, the border patrol is issuing warnings. Nonetheless, there is "tremendous confusion" over what's needed to cross the border, says Buffalo business leader Rudnick. One reason: DHS originally announced it would ask for passports starting Jan. 1, 2008. The State Department couldn't handle the onslaught of applications, so Congress forced a postponement. In a letter signed by 32 members of the Congressional Northern Border Caucus, New York Rep. Louise Slaughter wrote that "DHS has not met its obligation to inform travelers regarding the new documentation requirements, leading to confusion, adding to delays, and hampering the cross border activity that is so important to our economy."

Down the river from Buffalo is Niagara Falls, Ont. It's the original tourist trap, although with American visits to Canada down 14 percent in the past year, it's not trapping as many as it once did. As early as the 1850s, the falls were a come-on for sleazy midways of tattoo artists and fortune tellers. Today, the tackiness is carried on by Louis Tussaud's Waxworks, whose Arnold Schwarzenegger statue captures every bronzed wrinkle in the California governor's Naugahyde face.

After the wax museum, I checked into the Sheraton, which has a view of the horseshoe falls. "We shouldn't have to carry a passport to go over there," the concierge sputtered. "We have a sisterhood. If I have to carry a passport, I'm not going."

Before leaving the Niagara region, I called Dick Hirsch, a public relations man who's lived in Buffalo all his life, and asked whether the stricter border had changed his habits. "Years ago, when I had clients fly to Buffalo, we would drive over to Canada, go to a Chinese restaurant, have lunch and be back in an hour or so," Hirsch said. "They were impressed with that. I am currently hooked on some cookies sold in Canada. When I exhausted my supply, I would drive over to Fort Erie. Not anymore. I now have a cookie connection, a guy who lives in Canada but works out in the gym I use."

Maybe that's not $11.5 billion in lost trade. But it's one more American who no longer goes to Canada.

Rivers don't divide people. They unite people. Imagine that Washington, D.C., and Arlington, Va., were in separate countries, and you'll have an idea of what life is like in the Twin Soos -- Sault Ste. Marie, Mich., and Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., identically named cities on either side of the St. Marys River.

Canadians cross the river for gasoline, Americans for Italian restaurants and movies. Anyone who went to high school in the 1960s knew a young man who dodged the draft by cab. Lake Superior State University is in Michigan but has so many Canadian students it's won three NCAA hockey titles.

I visited the Soo three years ago. Even then, the border was a serious issue. The DHS would have been a source of derision, with its fleet of Turtle-waxed SUVs and its speedboats churning the river, if it hadn't make a quick run to Canada such a pain in the ass. "They're not fighting terrorism," griped the wife of a Canadian tour boat captain whose business was suffering. "They're fighting tourism."

Canadians think the United States has gone all Rambo since 9/11. I found that out on the International Bridge Walk, which starts at Lake Superior State and ends across the river. One morning, I fell in step with David Orazietti, the local member of the Provincial Parliament. Orazietti's uncle had been captain of the first Lake Superior State hockey team. As a boy, his Pee-Wee hockey squad played in Michigan. So he was worried that a Fortress America would estrange the Soos. The new border-control measures mean that Americans are practically being told to stay home, he said.

At the Canadian end of the bridge, we walked through the border booths, no questions asked. A welcoming committee garlanded us with maple-leaf flags.

This summer, bridge walkers will have to bring birth certificates to celebrate the closeness between the United States and Canada. Next year, passports or the equivalent. It doesn't make sense to Leisa Mansfield, director of the Sault Chamber of Commerce.

"When you think that the 9/11 attackers were here legally, I doubt a passport is going to protect us against terrorist threats," she said.

There's a third nation in the Soo: the Chippewa Indians. They were living on both sides of Lake Superior before the United States and Canada divvied it up, and they're used to crossing freely to visit relatives, attend pow-wows, and worship at sacred sites. "In the eyes of our tribes, as far as ancestors and government, the border isn't there," said Cory Wilson, communications director for the Sault Tribe of Chippewa Indians, in Sault Ste. Marie, Mich.

The Jay Treaty, signed by the United States and Britain in 1794, guarantees Indians free passage across the border, said Heather Dawn Thompson, director of governmental affairs for the National Council of American Indians. But it took a lobbying effort to add tribal I.D. cards to the list of accepted documents. The council is now asking Homeland Security to accept those I.D. cards in lieu of passports next year. Kelly Klundt, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, said the government is working with tribes to develop photo I.D.s that will satisfy the requirements of WHTI.

For the rest of us, Homeland Security will also accept a $45 border-crossing card, or enhanced driver's licenses, with citizenship information encoded on a radio frequency chip that can be read remotely as a traveler approaches a customs booth. Washington, Michigan, Arizona, Texas, Vermont, British Columbia and Ontario are preparing to issue the licenses to drivers who pay an extra fee. Privacy advocates are wary, saying personal information on the licenses can be stolen by anyone with a radio-frequency reader, which is typically used to track packages. Maine and Montana are refusing to produce the licenses, out of opposition to the federal Real I.D. Act, which will require every American to carry electronically readable identification by 2011. Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont (who married a granddaughter of French Canadian immigrants and traces his own roots to Quebec), is also skeptical about the driver's licenses, as well as the passport rule.

"There is no indication that they will be ready with the appropriate technology infrastructure at our borders to handle new documents," he said in March. "There is no reason to believe border upgrades will be ready. There is no signal they will reconsider using problematic RFID technology that poses security and privacy concerns. There is no assurance that they will have enough time to hire and train the border agents who will be needed to implement the passport requirement."

Americans and Canadians will never be as neighborly as we were in the 20th century. Well-to-do Yanks will still hike in Banff and weekend in Vancouver. But the spontaneous college road trips from SUNY Plattsburgh to Montreal, or the Pennsylvania family taking a day trip to Niagara Falls -- those won't happen as often. The less we cross the border, the fewer friendships we'll form, the less we'll marry each other, the less we'll work together. "I feel like the U.S. are our cousins, and we've lived through so much in the maturing of the New World," a woman from St. Catharines, Ont., told me. "I hate to see barriers."

One day this past winter, I was in Detroit, and thought of having dinner in Windsor. I wanted to visit an Italian restaurant where, years ago, I had taken a date, and where Harrison Ford ate while filming "Presumed Innocent." Back then, nobody asked me for I.D., coming or going. Driving into California, with its fruit inspection booths, was tougher than visiting Canada. But there wouldn't be a return trip: I realized I didn't have my passport. And I don't even have a copy of my birth certificate. That day, Canada became a foreign country.

Published on April 30th 2008 on Salon.com

Using "Independent" Experts by Pentagon Probably Illegal

This Article Originally Appeared on PRWatch.org. See Link Below

The Pentagon military analyst program unveiled in last week's exposé by David Barstow in the New York Times was not just unethical but illegal. It violates, for starters, specific restrictions that Congress has been placing in its annual appropriation bills every year since 1951. According to those restrictions, "No part of any appropriation contained in this or any other Act shall be used for publicity or propaganda purposes within the United States not heretofore authorized by the Congress."

As explained in a March 21, 2005 report by the Congressional Research Service, "publicity or propaganda" is defined by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) to mean either (1) self-aggrandizement by public officials, (2) purely partisan activity, or (3) "covert propaganda." By covert propaganda, GAO means information which originates from the government but is unattributed and made to appear as though it came from a third party.

These concerns about "covert propaganda" were also the basis for the GAO's strong standard for determining when government-funded video news releases are illegal:

The failure of an agency to identify itself as the source of a prepackaged news story misleads the viewing public by encouraging the viewing audience to believe that the broadcasting news organization developed the information. The prepackaged news stories are purposefully designed to be indistinguishable from news segments broadcast to the public. When the television viewing public does not know that the stories they watched on television news programs about the government were in fact prepared by the government, the stories are, in this sense, no longer purely factual -- the essential fact of attribution is missing.

In a related analysis, the GAO explained that "The publicity or propaganda restriction helps to mark the boundary between an agency making information available to the public and agencies creating news reports unbeknownst to the receiving audience."

In case anyone disagrees with the GAO on this point, here's what the White House's own Office of Legal Council had to say, in a memorandum written in 2005 following the controversy over the Armstrong Williams scandal (when it was discovered that the Bush administration had actually paid him to publicly endorse its No Child Left Behind Law):

Over the years, GAO has interpreted "publicity or propaganda" restrictions to preclude use of appropriated funds for, among other things, so-called "covert propaganda." ... Consistent with that view, OLC determined in 1988 that a statutory prohibition on using appropriated funds for "publicity or propaganda" precluded undisclosed agency funding of advocacy by third-party groups. We stated that "covert attempts to mold opinion through the undisclosed use of third parties" would run afoul of restrictions on using appropriated funds for "propaganda." (emphasis added)

The key passage here is the phrase, "covert attempts to mold opinion through the undisclosed use of third parties." As the Times report documented in detail, the Pentagon's military analyst program did exactly that.

1. It was covert. As Barstow's piece states, the 75 retired military officers who were recruited by Donald Rumsfeld and given talking points to deliver on Fox, CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS and MSNBC were given extraordinary access to White House and Pentagon officials. However, "The access came with a condition. Participants were instructed not to quote their briefers directly or otherwise describe their contacts with the Pentagon."
2. It was an attempt to mold opinion. According to the Pentagon's own internal documents (which can be downloaded and viewed from the New York Times website), the military analysts were considered "message force multipliers" or "surrogates" who would deliver administration "themes and messages" to millions of Americans "in the form of their own opinions." According to one participating military analyst, it was "psyops on steroids."
3. It was done "through the undisclosed use of third parties." In their television appearances, the military analysts did not disclose their ties to the White House, let alone that they were its surrogates. The military analysts were used as puppets for the Pentagon. In the words of Robert S. Bevelacqua, a retired Green Beret and for Fox News military analyst, "It was them saying, 'We need to stick our hands up your back and move your mouth for you."

Additional evidence of the illegality of the Pentagon pundits operation can be found in the February 1, 1988 memorandum mentioned above by the White House Office of Legal Council. That memorandum, titled "Legal Constraints on Lobbying Efforts in Support of Contra Aid and Ratification of the INF Treaty," was written for the Reagan administration by the well-known conservative lawyer Charles Cooper (then head of the OLC), explaining the limits of what the White House was allowed to do in its campaign to win support for the Contra War in Nicaragua. Cooper (clearly not some liberal naysayer with an anti-war ax to grind), wrote that the Reagan Administration "can make available to private groups, upon request, printed materials that explain and justify the Administration's position on Contra aid. These materials must be items that were created in the normal course of business and not specifically produced for use by these private groups." Cooper continues:

It would be unwise, however, for the Administration to solicit the media to print articles by or interviews with anyone not serving in the government. And, of course, the Administration cannot assist in the preparation of any articles or statements by private sector supporters, other than through the provision of informational materials as described in the preceding paragraph.

In the case of the current Pentagon pundit scandal, however, the Pentagon clearly was assisting in the preparation both of articles and statements by private sector supporters. It did not simply provide "informational materials" that had been "created in the normal course of business." Rather, it sat down with the retired military analysts, worked closely with them on drafting talking points, and in some cases scripted language for them to write in written commentaries, and deployed them as message amplifiers and surrogates without disclosure.

The target is you

A tantalizing window into Donald Rumsfeld's motives for creating the military analysts program can be find in a transcript that the Times obtained of one of his meetings with them. In it, he complains that he has been warned that his "information operations" are "illegal or immoral":

This is the first war that's ever been run in the 21sth Century in a time of 24-hour news and bloggers and internets and emails and digital cameras and Sony cams and God knows all this stuff. ... We're not very skillful at it in terms of the media part of the new realities we're living in. Every time we try to do something someone says it's illegal or immoral, there's nothing the press would rather do than write about the press, we all know that. They fall in love with it. So every time someone tries to do some information operations for some public diplomacy or something, they say oh my goodness, it's multiple audiences and if you're talking to them, they're hearing you here as well and therefore that's propagandizing or something.

This comment shows that Rumsfeld knows about the law against information operations that propagandize U.S. audiences. Although it is illegal to target propaganda at the America people, the law does not forbid propaganda -- even covert propaganda -- aimed at foreign audiences. Rumsfeld has been warned, however, that in today's world with "bloggers and internets and emails," even information operations overseas reach "multiple audiences" including U.S. citizens who are "hearing you here as well and therefore that's propagandizing." The irony, of course, is that Rumsfeld made these comments in a meeting with military analysts whom he had recruited specifically for information operations targeting U.S. audiences. If Rumsfeld knew that there were legal concerns even about operations targeted at foreign audiences, he certainly knew that it was illegal to target the American public. Yet he went ahead and did it anyway, and in another part of the transcript, he explained why. In fighting the war on terror, Rumsfeld said, the "center of gravity's here in Washington and in the United States."

The term "center of gravity" in this context refers to a concept in military theory. According to the U.S. Department of Defense, it means "those characteristics, capabilities, or locations from which a military force derives its freedom of action, physical strength, or will to fight." What Rumsfeld is saying, therefore, is that the most important battle in his war is not the struggle to control Iraq or defeat foreign terrorists. The most important battle, he's saying, is the fight to control the hearts and minds of the American people. And that's why he's willing to break the law to do it.

What is to be done?

Of course, the mere fact that a practice is illegal does not mean that anyone is going to be punished for breaking the law. For that to happen, someone with the power to act needs to enforce the law, which is why Congress needs to hold hearings and create enforcement mechanisms that will ensure compliance in the future. Currently, no such mechanisms exist. As the Congressional Research Service noted in its 2005 report, "No federal entity is required to monitor agency compliance with the publicity and propaganda statutes. At present, the federal government has what has been termed 'fire alarm oversight' of agency expenditures on communications. Scrutiny typically occurs when a Member of Congress is alerted by the media or some other source that an agency’s spending on communications may be cause for concern. A Member then sends a written request to the Government Accountability Office asking for a legal opinion on the activities in question."

Congress should certainly seek such a legal opinion from the GAO and the White House Office of Legal Council regarding the Pentagon's military analyst program, but this time it shouldn't stop at simply seeking an opinion. When the GAO has rendered such legal opinions previously, the government agencies caught violating the law have announced that they would comply in the future. No one was punished, however, and in practice they knew that they could continue doing what they want. That is what happened after the Reagan administration was caught using third-party surrogates to promote the Contra war in Nicaragua in the 1980s (which is how Charles Cooper ended up writing the memo I quoted above). It's what happened after the Armstrong Williams scandal broke in 2004. And without something more than mere publication of a GAO opinion, it's probably all that will happen as a result of this latest Pentagon pundits scandal.

It doesn't have to be this way. If the U.S. Congress had the will to take action, it could create real mechanisms for enforcing the law and ensuring compliance. This is important for reasons that go beyond the issue of whether anyone supports or opposes the current war in Iraq. So long as government agencies are allowed to continue getting away with covert domestic propaganda, the public is left unable to know whether the opinions of "independent" analysts are truly independent. During the Vietnam War, official Pentagon statements became so mistrusted that the term "credibility gap" was coined to describe the distance between official statements and public perceptions. The government's use of "surrogates" posing as independent experts extends the credibility gap not just to public officials but also to seemingly independent, private citizens and the news media. Until accountability exists to prevent abuses like Pentagon analyst program from continuing with impunity, the public will have to assume that anyone who appears on camera espousing views sympathetic to the White House (or, for that matter, to other government agencies) has been secretly trained, recruited and given
financial incentives to do so.

WATCH VIDEO HERE

Diane Farsetta and Sheldon Rampton's blog | login or register to post comments | printer friendly version

Originally Appeared on PRWatch.org

And Now, Some Poetry

Poetry

By Andrea Gibson

Obamah's Pastor

The Rev. Jeremiah White chats with Bill Moyers


The ongoing controversy about the Rev. Jeremiah White has descended into ignorant character assassination. In an hour long interview (with extended clips of his 'controversial' sermons), the Rev. White reveals himself to be an intelligent, compassionate and thoughtful man. His work with his Chicago congregation over the past decades has involved reaching out to encourage his flock to help others and make their lives and those of people around them better. The sermons for which, based on sound bites, he is vilified ring true and show how he works to make the Sunday sermon relevant to his congregation's daily lives. If you'd like to know who the Rev. White is, then watch and listen as he converses with Bill Moyers.


Rev. Jeremiah White Interview pt.1

Rev. Jeremiah White Interview pt.2

Evidence-based Bombing

Scott Ritter, the weapons inspector who challenged the Bush administration over weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, here questions, not the existence of a new reactor in Syria, but rather the concept of Israel's unilaterally attacking a sovereign state who's nuclear program falls with the boundaries of international treaties, legality and UN rules. It's a good point. Israel has refused to sign the Nuclear Non-proliferation treaty--it has nuclear weapons, after all. As Syria's reactor was likely not weapons capable, one must question what US-Israeli international interactions are all about.

By publishing intelligence on a possible Syrian nuclear facility, the US has endorsed after the fact Israel's illegal use of force in attacking it

By Scott Ritter

26/04/08 "The Guardian" -- -It looks as if Israel may, in fact, have had reason to believe that Syria was constructing, with the aid and assistance of North Korea, a facility capable of housing a nuclear reactor. The United States Central Intelligence Agency recently released a series of images, believed to have been made from a videotape obtained from Israeli intelligence, which provide convincing, if not incontrovertible, evidence that the "unused military building" under construction in eastern Syria was, in fact, intended to be used as a nuclear reactor. Syria continues to deny such allegations as false.

On the surface, the revelations seem to bolster justification not only for the Israeli air strike of September 6 2007, which destroyed the facility weeks or months before it is assessed to have been ready for operations, but also the hard-line stance taken by the administration of President George W Bush toward both Syria and North Korea regarding their alleged covert nuclear cooperation. In the aftermath of the Israeli air strike, Syria razed the destroyed facility and built a new one in its stead, ensuring that no follow-up investigation would be able to ascertain precisely what had transpired there.

Largely overlooked in the wake of the US revelations is the fact that, even if the US intelligence is accurate (and there is no reason to doubt, at this stage, that it is not), Syria had committed no crime, and Israel had no legal justification to carry out its attack. Syria is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), and under the provisions of the comprehensive safeguards agreement, is required to provide information on the construction of any facility involved in nuclear activity "as early as possible before nuclear material is introduced to a new facility". There is no evidence that Syria had made any effort to introduce nuclear material to the facility under construction.

While the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the global watchdog responsible for the implementation of nuclear safeguards inspections, has pushed for the universal adherence to a more stringent safeguards standard known as the "additional protocol of inspections", such a measure is purely voluntary, and Syria has refused to sign up to any such expansion of IAEA inspection activity until such time as Israel signs the NPT and subjects its nuclear activities to full safeguards inspections. While vexing, the Syrian position is totally in keeping with its treaty obligations, and so it is Syria, not Israel, that was in full conformity with international law at the time of Israel's September 6 2007 attack.

The United States and Israel contend that the Syrian-North Korean construction project was part of a covert nuclear weapons programme. However, even the United States admits that the facility under construction in Syria lacked any reprocessing capacity, meaning its utility for producing plutonium for a nuclear bomb was nil. Rather than serving as the tip of the iceberg for a nuclear weapons programme, it seems more likely that the Syrian facility was intended for the peaceful use of nuclear energy.

Following the same path as Iran, Syria most probably was positioning itself to present the world with a fait acompli, noting that the current US-Israeli posture concerning the regime in Damascus would not enable Syria to pursue and complete any nuclear programme declared well in advance. By building the reactor in secret, Syria would be positioned to declare the completed facility to the IAEA prior to the introduction of any nuclear material, and then hope to hide behind the shield of the IAEA in order to prevent any Israeli retaliation.

But this is all speculation. By bombing the Syrian facility, Israel not only retarded any Syrian nuclear ambition, peaceful or otherwise, but also precluded a full, definitive investigation into the matter by the international community. Perhaps fearful that Syrian adherence to the NPT would underscore its own duplicity in that regard, the Israeli decision to bomb Syria not only allowed the Syrian effort to be defined as weapons-related (an unproven and unlikely allegation), but by extension reinforced the Israeli (and American) contention that the nuclear activity in Iran was weapons-related as well.

The international debate that has taken place about the Syrian facility shows how successful the Israeli gambit, in fact, was, since there is virtually no discussion about the fact that Israel violated international law in attacking, without provocation, a sovereign state whose status as a member of the United Nations ostensibly affords it protection from such assault. The American embrace of the Israeli action, and the decision to produce intelligence information about the nature of the bombed facility at this late stage in the game, only reinforces the reality that the United States has turned its back on international law in the form of arms control and non-proliferation agreements.

The Bush administration seeks to use the alleged Syrian nuclear facility as a lynchpin in making its arguments against not only the Iranian nuclear programme, but also to scuttle the current discussions with North Korea over its nuclear weapons activities. Having embraced pre-emptive war as a vehicle to pursue its unilateral policy of regime change in Iraq (and having sold that conflict based upon hyped-up weapons of mass destruction charges), it should come as no surprise that the Bush administration would seek to support, and repeat, past patterns of behaviour when pursuing similar policies with Syria, Iran and North Korea.

Truth, and the adherence to international law, have never been an impediment to implementation of American policy objectives under the Bush administration.

Latin America: the attack on democracy

John Pilger argues that an unreported war is being waged by the US to restore power to the privileged classes at the expense of the poor

By John Pilger

24/04/08 "ICH" -- -- Beyond the sound and fury of its conquest of Iraq and campaign against Iran, the world's dominant power is waging a largely unreported war on another continent - Latin America. Using proxies, Washington aims to restore and reinforce the political control of a privileged group calling itself middle-class, to shift the responsibility for massacres and drug trafficking away from the psychotic regime in Colombia and its mafiosi, and to extinguish hopes raised among Latin America's impoverished majority by the reform governments of Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia.

In Colombia, the main battleground, the class nature of the war is distorted by the guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as the Farc, whose own resort to kidnapping and the drugs trade has provided an instrument with which to smear those who have distinguished Latin America's epic history of rebellion by opposing the proto-fascism of George W Bush's regime. "You don't fight terror with terror," said President Hugo Chávez as US warplanes bombed to death thousands of civilians in Afghanistan following the 11 September 2001 attacks. Thereafter, he was a marked man. Yet, as every poll has shown, he spoke for the great majority of human beings who have grasped that the "war on terror" is a crusade of domination. Almost alone among national leaders standing up to Bush, Chávez was declared an enemy and his plans for a functioning social democracy independent of the United States a threat to Washington's grip on Latin America. "Even worse," wrote the Latin America specialist James Petras, "Chávez's nationalist policies represented an alternative in Latin America at a time (2000-2003) when mass insurrections, popular uprisings and the collapse of pro-US client rulers (Argentina, Ecuador and Bolivia) were constant front-page news."

It is impossible to underestimate the threat of this alternative as perceived by the "middle classes" in countries which have an abundance of privilege and poverty. In Venezuela, their "grotesque fantasies of being ruled by a 'brutal communist dictator'", to quote Petras, are reminiscent of the paranoia of the white population that backed South Africa's apartheid regime. Like in South Africa, racism in Venezuela is rampant, with the poor ignored, despised or patronised, and a Caracas shock jock allowed casually to dismiss Chávez, who is of mixed race, as a "monkey". This fatuous venom has come not only from the super-rich behind their walls in suburbs called Country Club, but from the pretenders to their ranks in middle-level management, journalism, public relations, the arts, education and the other professions, who identify vicariously with all things American. Journalists in broadcasting and the press have played a crucial role - acknowledged by one of the generals and bankers who tried unsuccessfully to overthrow Chávez in 2002. "We couldn't have done it without them," he said. "The media were our secret weapon."

Many of these people regard themselves as liberals, and have the ear of foreign journalists who like to describe themselves as being "on the left". This is not surprising. When Chávez was first elected in 1998, Venezuela was not an archetypical Latin American tyranny, but a liberal democracy with certain freedoms, run by and for its elite, which had plundered the oil revenue and let crumbs fall to the invisible millions in the barrios. A pact between the two main parties, known as puntofijismo, resembled the convergence of new Labour and the Tories in Britain and Republicans and Democrats in the US. For them, the idea of popular sovereignty was anathema, and still is.

Take higher education. At the taxpayer-funded elite "public" Venezuelan Central University, more than 90 per cent of the students come from the upper and "middle" classes. These and other elite students have been infiltrated by CIA-linked groups and, in defending their privilege, have been lauded by foreign liberals.

With Colombia as its front line, the war on democracy in Latin America has Chávez as its main target. It is not difficult to understand why. One of Chávez's first acts was to revitalise the oil producers' organisation Opec and force the oil price to record levels. At the same time he reduced the price of oil for the poorest countries in the Caribbean region and central America, and used Venezuela's new wealth to pay off debt, notably Argentina's, and, in effect, expelled the International Monetary Fund from a continent over which it once ruled. He has cut poverty by half - while GDP has risen dramatically. Above all, he gave poor people the confidence to believe that their lives would improve.

The irony is that, unlike Fidel Castro in Cuba, he presented no real threat to the well-off, who have grown richer under his presidency. What he has demonstrated is that a social democracy can prosper and reach out to its poor with genuine welfare, and without the extremes of "neo liberalism" - a decidedly unradical notion once embraced by the British Labour Party. Those ordinary Vene zuelans who abstained during last year's constitutional referendum were protesting that a "moderate" social democracy was not enough while the bureaucrats remained corrupt and the sewers overflowed.

Across the border in Colombia, the US has made Venezuela's neighbour the Israel of Latin America. Under "Plan Colombia", more than $6bn in arms, planes, special forces, mercenaries and logistics have been showered on some of the most murderous people on earth: the inheritors of Pinochet's Chile and the other juntas that terrorised Latin America for a generation, their various gestapos trained at the School of the Americas in Georgia. "We not only taught them how to torture," a former American trainer told me, "we taught them how to kill, murder, eliminate." That remains true of Colombia, where government-inspired mass terror has been documented by Amnesty, Human Rights Watch and many others. In a study of 31,656 extrajudicial killings and forced disappearances between 1996 and 2006, the Colombian Commission of Jurists found that 46 per cent had been murdered by right-wing death squads and 14 per cent by Farc guerrillas. The para militaries were responsible for most of the three million victims of internal displacement. This misery is a product of Plan Colombia's pseudo "war on drugs", whose real purpose has been to eliminate the Farc. To that goal has now been added a war of attrition on the new popular democracies, especially Venezuela.

US special forces "advise" the Colombian military to cross the border into Venezuela and murder and kidnap its citizens and infiltrate paramilitaries, and so test the loyalty of the Venezuelan armed forces. The model is the CIA-run Contra campaign in Honduras in the 1980s that brought down the reformist government in Nicaragua. The defeat of the Farc is now seen as a prelude to an all-out attack on Venezuela if the Vene zuelan elite - reinvigorated by its narrow referendum victory last year - broadens its base in state and local government elections in November.

America's man and Colombia's Pinochet is President Álvaro Uribe. In 1991, a declassified report by the US Defence Intelligence Agency revealed the then Senator Uribe as having "worked for the Medellín Cartel" as a "close personal friend" of the cartel's drugs baron, Pablo Escobar. To date, 62 of his political allies have been investigated for close collaboration with paramilitaries. A feature of his rule has been the fate of journalists who have illuminated his shadows. Last year, four leading journalists received death threats after criticising Uribe. Since 2002, at least 31 journalists have been assassinated in Colombia. Uribe's other habit is smearing trade unions and human rights workers as "collaborators with the Farc". This marks them. Colombia's death squads, wrote Jenny Pearce, author of the acclaimed Under the Eagle: US Intervention in Central America and the Caribbean (1982), "are increasingly active, confident that the president has been so successful in rallying the country against the Farc that little attention will shift to their atrocities".

Uribe was personally championed by Tony Blair, reflecting Britain's long-standing, mostly secret role in Latin America. "Counter-insurgency assistance" to the Colombian military, up to its neck in death-squad alliances, includes training by the SAS of units such as the High Mountain Battalions, condemned repeatedly for atrocities. On 8 March, Colombian officers were invited by the Foreign Office to a "counter-insurgency seminar" at the Wilton Park conference centre in southern England. Rarely has the Foreign Office so brazenly paraded the killers it mentors.

The western media's role follows earlier models, such as the campaigns that cleared the way for the dismemberment of Yugoslavia and the credibility given to lies about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. The softening-up for an attack on Venezuela is well under way, with the repetition of similar lies and smears.


Cocaine trail

On 3 February, the Observer devoted two pages to claims that Chávez was colluding in the Colombian drugs trade. Similarly to the paper's notorious bogus scares linking Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda, the Observer's headline read, "Revealed: Chávez role in cocaine trail to Europe". Allegations were unsubstantiated; hearsay uncorroborated. No source was identified. Indeed, the reporter, clearly trying to cover himself, wrote: "No source I spoke to accused Chávez himself of having a direct role in Colombia's giant drug trafficking business."

In fact, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime has reported that Venezuela is fully participating in international anti-drugs programmes and in 2005 seized the third-highest amount of cocaine in the world. Even the Foreign Office minister Kim Howells has referred to "Venezuela's tre mendous co-operation".

The drugs smear has recently been reinforced with reports that Chávez has an "increasingly public alliance [with] the Farc" (see "Dangerous liaisons", New Statesman, 14 April). Again, there is "no evidence", says the secretary general of the Organisation of American States. At Uribe's request, and backed by the French government, Chávez played a mediating role in seeking the release of hostages held by the Farc. On 1 March, the negotiations were betrayed by Uribe who, with US logistical assistance, fired missiles at a camp in Ecuador, killing Raú Reyes, the Farc's highest-level negotiator. An "email" recovered from Reyes's laptop is said by the Colombian military to show that the Farc has received $300m from Chávez. The allegation is fake. The actual document refers only to Chávez in relation to the hostage exchange. And on 14 April, Chávez angrily criticised the Farc. "If I were a guerrilla," he said, "I wouldn't have the need to hold a woman, a man who aren't soldiers. Free the civilians!"

However, these fantasies have lethal purpose. On 10 March, the Bush administration announced that it had begun the process of placing Venezuela's popular democracy on a list of "terrorist states", along with North Korea, Syria, Cuba, Sudan and Iran, the last of which is currently awaiting attack by the world's leading terrorist state.

This article was first published by the New Statesman

From Information Clearing House

Amy Goodman on Healthcare

The Single-Payer Solution

By Amy Goodman

24/04/08 "Truthdig" -- -As the media coverage of the Democratic presidential race continues to focus on lapel pins and pastors, America is ailing. As I travel around the country, I find people are angry and motivated. Like Dr. Rocky White, a physician from a conservative, evangelical background who practices in rural Alamosa, Colo. A tall, gray-haired Westerner in black jeans, a crisp white shirt and a bolo tie, Dr. White is a leading advocate for single-payer health care. He wasn’t always.

He told me in a recent interview: “Here I am, a Republican, thinking about nationalizing health care. It just went against the grain of everything that I stood for. But you have to remember: I didn’t come to those conclusions with lofty ideals of social justice.”

In the early 1990s, his medical group started falling apart. White, a keen student of economics and the business of medicine, determined that it wasn’t just his practice but the system that was broken.

“You’re seeing an ever-increasing number of people starting to support a national health program. In fact, 59 percent of practicing physicians today believe that we need to have a national health program. I mean, that’s unheard of, even 10 years ago. It’s amazing to see a new generation of physicians coming up who are disgusted with our current health-care system. You know, we’re trained to be advocates of patients, we’re trained to save lives, we’re trained to practice medicine. And instead, what we’re doing is we’re practicing Wall Street economics.”

Single-payer is not to be confused with universal coverage, which Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama both support. In fact, in a recent debate, when Clinton raised the issue of single-payer, the audience interrupted with applause. She immediately countered, “I know a lot of people favor [it], but for many reasons [it] is difficult to achieve.”

Why? One of the most powerful industries in the country opposes it-the insurance industry. Under universal coverage, insurance profits are preserved. Under single-payer, they are not. Dr. Rocky White, who now sits on the board of the nonprofit Health Care for All Colorado, has switched his political affiliation. He also has updated and reissued Dr. Robert LeBow’s book on single-payer called “Health Care Meltdown: Confronting the Myths and Fixing Our Failing System.”

He described possible solutions: “There are a lot of different types of single-payer systems-you could have purely socialized medicine. That’s kind of like what England has. The government owns the hospitals, the government owns the clinics, the government finances all the health care, and all the doctors work for the government. That is truly socialized medicine, as opposed to the Canadian system, where the financing comes through their Medicare program, but all the doctors are in private practice.”

The economics are complex, but this plain-spoken country doctor explains it clearly:

“You know, this industry is a $2-trillion industry, and the profits in the for-profit insurance industry are so huge and it’s so deeply entrenched into Wall Street … but until we move to a single-payer system and get rid of the profit motive in financing of health care, we will not be able to fix the problems that we have.”

What would it take? Dr. White has spent his life dealing with the high winds on the high plains, from Nebraska to Colorado, and describes the challenge the country faces in familiar terms:

“I think that our current presidential candidates understand that ideally single-payer would be the best, but they don’t have the political will to move that forward. Their job is to feel which way the wind is blowing. Our job is to turn that wind.”

Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on 650 stations in North America.

© 2008 Amy Goodman

Amy Goodman is a journalist and activist with a long record of reporting on issues from a progressive perspective. She, along with Juan Gonzales, host Democracy Now, a daily news program which really shouldn't be missed.

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Information Clearing House