Let's make A LOT of phone calls today!

 

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 6, IS NATIONAL CALL-IN DAY TO END THE WAR

Tuesday is the day! Congress Members get back to DC today, and we want to welcome them. We're asking you to call, Email, and fax your Congress Members and ask for an end to the war in Iraq. This National Call-In Day - organized by Democrats.com, Progressive Democrats of America, and After Downing Street, together with United for Peace and Justice and many other peace organizations - aims to flood Congress Members' offices with our message for bringing this war to a close.

Our message is simple: "I am calling to let Rep. ______ know that I think the Iraq war is wrong and all our troops should be brought home immediately!"

Take Action Below, or call the Capitol toll free 888-818-6641.
http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/congress

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IRAQ INTELLIGENCE
What I knew before the invasion

BY BOB GRAHAM

In the past week President Bush has twice attacked Democrats for being hypocrites on the Iraq war. ''More than 100 Democrats in the House and Senate, who had access to the same intelligence, voted to support removing Saddam Hussein from power,'' he said.

The president's attacks are outrageous. Yes, more than 100 Democrats voted to authorize him to take the nation to war. Most of them, though, like their Republican colleagues, did so in the legitimate belief that the president and his administration were truthful in their statements that Hussein was a gathering menace -- that if Hussein was not disarmed, the smoking gun would become a mushroom cloud.

The president has undermined trust. No longer will the members of Congress be entitled to accept his veracity. Caveat emptor has become the word. Every member of Congress is on his or her own to determine the truth.

As chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence during the tragedy of Sept. 11, 2001, and the run-up to the Iraq war, I probably had as much access to the intelligence on which the war was predicated as any other member of Congress.

I, too, presumed the president was being truthful -- until a series of events undercut that confidence.

In February 2002, after a briefing on the status of the war in Afghanistan, the commanding officer, Gen. Tommy Franks, told me the war was being compromised as specialized personnel and equipment were being shifted from Afghanistan to prepare for the war in Iraq -- a war more than a year away. Even at this early date, the White House was signaling that the threat posed by Hussein was of such urgency that it had priority over the crushing of al Qaeda.

In the early fall of 2002, a joint House-Senate intelligence inquiry committee, which I co-chaired, was in the final stages of its investigation of what happened before Sept. 11. As the unclassified final report of the inquiry documented, several failures of intelligence contributed to the tragedy. But as of October 2002, 13 months later, the administration was resisting initiating any substantial action to understand, much less fix, those problems.

At a meeting of the Senate intelligence committee on Sept. 5, 2002, CIA Director George Tenet was asked what the National Intelligence Estimate provided as the rationale for a preemptive war in Iraq. An NIE is the product of the entire intelligence community, and its most comprehensive assessment. I was stunned when Tenet said that no NIE had been requested

by the White House and none had been prepared. Invoking our rarely used senatorial authority, I directed the completion of an NIE.

Tenet objected, saying that his people were too committed to other assignments to analyze Hussein's capabilities and will to use chemical, biological and possibly nuclear weapons. We insisted, and three weeks later the community produced a classified NIE.

There were troubling aspects to this 90-page document. While slanted toward the conclusion that Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction stored or produced at 550 sites, it contained vigorous dissents on key parts of the information, especially by the departments of State and Energy. Particular skepticism was raised about aluminum tubes that were offered as evidence Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program. As to Hussein's will to use whatever weapons he might have, the estimate indicated he would not do so unless he was first attacked.

Under questioning, Tenet added that the information in the NIE had not been independently verified by an operative responsible to the United States. In fact, no such person was inside Iraq. Most of the alleged intelligence came from Iraqi exiles or third countries, all of which wanted the United States to remove Hussein, by force if necessary.

The American people needed to know these reservations, and I requested that an unclassified, public version of the NIE be prepared. On Oct. 4, Tenet presented a 25-page document titled ''Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction Programs.'' It represented an unqualified case that Hussein possessed them, avoided a discussion of whether he had the will to use them and omitted the dissenting opinions contained in the classified version. Its conclusions -- such as, ''If Baghdad acquired sufficient weapons-grade fissile material from abroad, it could make a nuclear weapon within a year'' -- underscored the White House's claim that exactly such material was being provided from Africa to Iraq.

From my advantaged position, I had earlier concluded that a war with Iraq would be a distraction from the successful and expeditious completion of our aims in Afghanistan. I had come to question whether the White House was telling the truth -- or even had an interest in knowing the truth.

On Oct. 11, I voted No on the resolution to give the president authority to go to war against Iraq. I was able to apply caveat emptor. Most of my colleagues could not.

Bob Graham, a former Democratic senator from Florida, is a fellow at Harvard University's Institute of Politics.

Katrina Update - Our Government doesn't care about us!

For a Former Panther, Solidarity After the Storm

By Michelle Garcia / Washington Post

NEW ORLEANS -- Malik Rahim, a granddaddy with a broad face and long gray dreadlocks, leans across his wooden kitchen table and with a low Nawlins growl lets you know what he thinks local pols did for racial harmony.

"I'm far from being a Republican, but I got to call it the way it is," he says. "They had a shoot-to-kill order on African Americans in this city with an African American mayor."

He catches himself.

"Let me rephrase that: A so-called African American mayor and a so-called African American police chief. They sat here and allowed this governor to declare martial law on African Americans ."

In the days after Katrina drowned the city, Rahim, 58, sat on his front porch in Algiers, a working-class district of bungalows, churches and smokestacks that lies across the Mississippi River from downtown New Orleans, and watched mostly white militias patrol the streets with rifles and pistols. Then came the National Guard, carrying their M-16s, and Gov. Kathleen Blanco's order to "shoot and kill" the "hoodlums."

This is New Orleans, he says, where the fabric of history is woven with the likes of Jim Crow and the Dixiecrats. "Here's that plantation mentality," he roars. "New Orleans was a city that was ran by old money, old plantation money, so they never gave a damn about blacks."

But, a visitor across the table asks, what about the plans for rebuilding? The promises from New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and Blanco to help folks, poor folks, reclaim their lives?

"You can't [urinate] down my back and tell me it's rain," he says, a chuckle ripping through his thick chest. "That's what they're doing and they think that people won't understand what they're doing. No, you ain't [urinating] on me."

Some people might dismiss Rahim as another angry black man in New Orleans. Or conclude he's just another aging former Black Panther with an abundance of Southern gumption. You might even acknowledge some truth in the reasoning offered up by Blanco's spokesman, Denise Bottcher, who notes that althougha lot of the reports of violence turned out to be overblown, "there was lawlessness," and "at the time and place you have to respond to protect people's lives." Race, she says, played no part in the governor's actions.

The stone-cold reality for Rahim is that his spare bedrooms and the parlor are now stuffed with about a dozen portable generators and trailer-size tents cover his back yard to house a slew of idealistic, mostly white, young people.

Rahim, a Green Party candidate for City Council in 2002, is the nucleus of Common Ground Collective, a grass-roots recovery effort of volunteers parachuting into the city from points across the nation. Rahim's late mother's home, which survived the storms intact, has become the epicenter of the effort to deliver water, food, ice and medical care to the city's poorest.

Common Ground volunteers in search of a bare-knuckles approach and a movement to inspire them meet up with those who have lost patience waiting for officialdom to help them. More than 300 volunteers have cycled through the house. Before Thanksgiving, caravans with even more volunteers set out for the South to participate in a massive holiday rebuilding effort.

Doctors from New York, San Francisco and Indonesia canvass the neighborhoods, some on bicycles, offering front-porch medicine for those who can't make it to the 24-hour clinic the group runs at a mosque. Labor crews hammer blue tarps onto the roofs, the post-Katrina emblem of survival. Volunteers live and work at food distribution centers in some of the poorest sections of New Orleans.

Jonathan Arend, 32, a medical resident at Montifiore Hospital in the Bronx, rushed back to his hometown two days before Hurricane Rita doled out even more punishment. Arend recalled that locals such as Swampwater Jack, who lives across the street from the clinic, stayed away from the medical centers with National Guardsmen stationed out front and instead preferred to have his asthma checked at home, where he could show off photos of the gators he had shot down in the bayou.

"There was so many bizarre sets of circumstances and unnatural and outlandish things that were going on," says Arend. "The fact that you see a white guy riding a bicycle in a white coat and stethoscope was just part of the mix."

Sam Zellman doesn't mention race as he pours lighter fluid into his Zippo and flips it shut inches away from his blond Mohawk. A burly man, Zellman ditched his job at arestaurant in Paw Paw, Mich., to haul refrigerators and trash from damaged houses.

"Sitting at work making food for yuppies and listening to it on NPR -- after a couple of days of this I'm like, I gotta come down," says Zellman, who spent a month at the collective after he gave up on being deployed by the Red Cross. "Some of us want a better world, and this is kinda pushing on the rock together. If it's us, or anarchists or the church folks, we have common goals, common short-term goals."

Inside the kitchen, Rahim traces this mobilization to an era of resistance and rebellion.

"I was trained for this," says Rahim, his eyes intent. "I'm not doing nothing but what we were doing in the party," he says. "The mold abatement I had done with the pest control program. Our feeding program. It was part of our breakfast program."

When Rahim was in his early twenties and still went by the name Donald Guyton, he returned from Vietnam and joined the Black Panthers, a national militant liberation movement dedicated to battling racism and not averse to using violence. The FBI deemed the Panthers a threat to domestic security and put the group under surveillance.

In New Orleans in 1970, the Panthers set up operations in a house next to the bleak, sprawling public housing complex named Desire. Throughout the Lower Ninth Ward, pocked with poverty, neglect and thugs, the young men and women in their berets earned the admiration of many by chasing away the drug dealers. They offered social services -- free breakfasts and tutoring programs.

"They really started doing what the establishment was not," says Bob Tucker, then a young aide to Mayor Moon Landrieu who now owns an engineering firm. "When you look at what the Ninth Ward was, you have urban renewal, which was really urban removal, and Hurricane Betsy," a Category 4 storm that had ravaged the area five years before.

But there were tensions and suspicions. Local police eyed the militants warily.

On Sept. 14, 1970, the Panthers unmasked two undercover cops. The police claimed they were beaten. The next day, when police descended on the Panthers' headquarters, a 30-minute gun battle broke out. One bystander, shot by police, died.

Police arrested Rahim, then the chapter's defense minister, and 13 other Panthers. Most were charged with attempted murder.

As Rahim and other Panthers sat in jail on $1.5 million bond, their comrades squared off with police in what became known as the Showdown in Desire. A bloody denouement loomed -- until hundreds of public housing residents filed out of their homes and stood between the police and the Panthers, forming a human shield. A court later acquitted Rahim and the Panthers.

With the Panther Party dissolving in New Orleans, he bolted to San Francisco, served five years in prison for armed robbery and devoted three decades to prisoner and poverty rights causes, converting to Islam in 1989. Just a few years ago, he returned to the South to care for his mother before she passed away.

Within some circles Rahim is revered as a voice of consciousness, if not some good old rabble-rousing, says Tucker, who became chairman of the city's transit system. Beneath the provocative rhetoric, Rahim is a man driven by "a heart the size of New Orleans," says Tucker, who organized an anti-violence effort with him a few years ago.

"He talks about race because race is alive and well in the city and the country; he doesn't talk about it from the standpoint of a victim," Tucker says.

After New Orleans rumbled with unrest in the chaotic days after Katrina, Rahim unleashed his outrage in an essay in the San Francisco Bay View, an African American online weekly. "This is criminal," he began, and concluded with "You don't want to see black people live." The editors circulated his fiery words among community radio programs and activist groups. Within days volunteers began appearing at Rahim's door.

And this time, says Rahim, the solidarity that defused rising racial tensions was white. "If it wasn't for the work the courageous young men and women are doing here in New Orleans, we would be in it," he says, scanning the volunteers lounging in his back yard. "Because that's what stopped it, when they start seeing young whites sitting on my porch protecting me."

Rahim strolls across the front porch on a sultry evening looking for a meeting of his lieutenants, laughing and joking. Instead he runs into a newlywed couple from the neighborhood who dropped by to say goodbye before a young soldier ships off to Iraq. There are bear hugs for everyone. A long-haired young man follows Rahim while blowing a Pan-like wooden pipe.

Rahim has decided to run for mayor. There are too many poor people, too many African Americans too easily forgotten, he says; his long-shot campaign is about them.

Rahim then considers his battalion of mostly white volunteers and his racial critique. Might this be a paradox? To which, he cues up another rap.

"Right now America is drunk on prosperity. What we're showing is these conditions do exist. The demonization of young African Americans is unjust and we can make a change," he says, then pauses, considers his words and adds: "Not one that is based upon overthrowing anything."

The Man Who Sold the War - Rolling Stones Article

The Man Who Sold the War Meet John Rendon, Bush's general in the propaganda war The road to war in Iraq led through many unlikely places. One of them was a chic hotel nestled among the strip bars and brothels that cater to foreigners in the town of Pattaya, on the Gulf of Thailand.

On December 17th, 2001, in a small room within the sound of the crashing tide, a CIA officer attached metal electrodes to the ring and index fingers of a man sitting pensively in a padded chair. The officer then stretched a black rubber tube, pleated like an accordion, around the man's chest and another across his abdomen. Finally, he slipped a thick cuff over the man's brachial artery, on the inside of his upper arm.

Strapped to the polygraph machine was Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, a forty-three-year-old Iraqi who had fled his homeland in Kurdistan and was now determined to bring down Saddam Hussein. For hours, as thin mechanical styluses traced black lines on rolling graph paper, al-Haideri laid out an explosive tale. Answering yes and no to a series of questions, he insisted repeatedly that he was a civil engineer who had helped Saddam's men to secretly bury tons of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons. The illegal arms, according to al-Haideri, were buried in subterranean wells, hidden in private villas, even stashed beneath the Saddam Hussein Hospital, the largest medical facility in Baghdad.

It was damning stuff -- just the kind of evidence the Bush administration was looking for. If the charges were true, they would offer the White House a compelling reason to invade Iraq and depose Saddam. That's why the Pentagon had flown a CIA polygraph expert to Pattaya: to question al-Haideri and confirm, once and for all, that Saddam was secretly stockpiling weapons of mass destruction.

There was only one problem: It was all a lie. After a review of the sharp peaks and deep valleys on the polygraph chart, the intelligence officer concluded that al-Haideri had made up the entire story, apparently in the hopes of securing a visa.

The fabrication might have ended there, the tale of another political refugee trying to scheme his way to a better life. But just because the story wasn't true didn't mean it couldn't be put to good use. Al-Haideri, in fact, was the product of a clandestine operation -- part espionage, part PR campaign -- that had been set up and funded by the CIA and the Pentagon for the express purpose of selling the world a war. And the man who had long been in charge of the marketing was a secretive and mysterious creature of the Washington establishment named John Rendon.

Rendon is a man who fills a need that few people even know exists. Two months before al-Haideri took the lie-detector test, the Pentagon had secretly awarded him a $16 million contract to target Iraq and other adversaries with propaganda. One of the most powerful people in Washington, Rendon is a leader in the strategic field known as "perception management," manipulating information -- and, by extension, the news media -- to achieve the desired result. His firm, the Rendon Group, has made millions off government contracts since 1991, when it was hired by the CIA to help "create the conditions for the removal of Hussein from power." Working under this extraordinary transfer of secret authority, Rendon assembled a group of anti-Saddam militants, personally gave them their name -- the Iraqi National Congress -- and served as their media guru and "senior adviser" as they set out to engineer an uprising against Saddam. It was as if President John F. Kennedy had outsourced the Bay of Pigs operation to the advertising and public-relations firm of J. Walter Thompson.

"They're very closemouthed about what they do," says Kevin McCauley, an editor of the industry trade publication O'Dwyer's PR Daily. "It's all cloak-and-dagger stuff."

Although Rendon denies any direct involvement with al-Haideri, the defector was the latest salvo in a secret media war set in motion by Rendon. In an operation directed by Ahmad Chalabi -- the man Rendon helped install as leader of the INC -- the defector had been brought to Thailand, where he huddled in a hotel room for days with the group's spokesman, Zaab Sethna. The INC routinely coached defectors on their stories, prepping them for polygraph exams, and Sethna was certainly up to the task -- he got his training in the art of propaganda on the payroll of the Rendon Group. According to Francis Brooke, the INC's man in Washington and himself a former Rendon employee, the goal of the al-Haideri operation was simple: pressure the United States to attack Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein.

As the CIA official flew back to Washington with failed lie-detector charts in his briefcase, Chalabi and Sethna didn't hesitate. They picked up the phone, called two journalists who had a long history of helping the INC promote its cause and offered them an exclusive on Saddam's terrifying cache of WMDs.

For the worldwide broadcast rights, Sethna contacted Paul Moran, an Australian freelancer who frequently worked for the Australian Broadcasting Corp. "I think I've got something that you would be interested in," he told Moran, who was living in Bahrain. Sethna knew he could count on the trim, thirty-eight-year-old journalist: A former INC employee in the Middle East, Moran had also been on Rendon's payroll for years in "information operations," working with Sethna at the company's London office on Catherine Place, near Buckingham Palace.

"We were trying to help the Kurds and the Iraqis opposed to Saddam set up a television station," Sethna recalled in a rare interview broadcast on Australian television. "The Rendon Group came to us and said, 'We have a contract to kind of do anti-Saddam propaganda on behalf of the Iraqi opposition.' What we didn't know -- what the Rendon Group didn't tell us -- was in fact it was the CIA that had hired them to do this work."

The INC's choice for the worldwide print exclusive was equally easy: Chalabi contacted Judith Miller of The New York Times. Miller, who was close to I. Lewis Libby and other neoconservatives in the Bush administration, had been a trusted outlet for the INC's anti-Saddam propaganda for years. Not long after the CIA polygraph expert slipped the straps and electrodes off al-Haideri and declared him a liar, Miller flew to Bangkok to interview him under the watchful supervision of his INC handlers. Miller later made perfunctory calls to the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency, but despite her vaunted intelligence sources, she claimed not to know about the results of al-Haideri's lie-detector test. Instead, she reported that unnamed "government experts" called his information "reliable and significant" -- thus adding a veneer of truth to the lies.

Her front-page story, which hit the stands on December 20th, 2001, was exactly the kind of exposure Rendon had been hired to provide. AN IRAQI DEFECTOR TELLS OF WORK ON AT LEAST 20 HIDDEN WEAPONS SITES, declared the headline. "An Iraqi defector who described himself as a civil engineer," Miller wrote, "said he personally worked on renovations of secret facilities for biological, chemical and nuclear weapons in underground wells, private villas and under the Saddam Hussein Hospital in Baghdad as recently as a year ago." If verified, she noted, "his allegations would provide ammunition to officials within the Bush administration who have been arguing that Mr. Hussein should be driven from power partly because of his unwillingness to stop making weapons of mass destruction, despite his pledges to do so."

For months, hawks inside and outside the administration had been pressing for a pre-emptive attack on Iraq. Now, thanks to Miller's story, they could point to "proof" of Saddam's "nuclear threat." The story, reinforced by Moran's on-camera interview with al-Haideri on the giant Australian Broadcasting Corp., was soon being trumpeted by the White House and repeated by newspapers and television networks around the world. It was the first in a long line of hyped and fraudulent stories that would eventually propel the U.S. into a war with Iraq -- the first war based almost entirely on a covert propaganda campaign targeting the media.

By law, the Bush administration is expressly prohibited from disseminating government propaganda at home. But in an age of global communications, there is nothing to stop it from planting a phony pro-war story overseas -- knowing with certainty that it will reach American citizens almost instantly. A recent congressional report suggests that the Pentagon may be relying on "covert psychological operations affecting audiences within friendly nations." In a "secret amendment" to Pentagon policy, the report warns, "psyops funds might be used to publish stories favorable to American policies, or hire outside contractors without obvious ties to the Pentagon to organize rallies in support of administration policies." The report also concludes that military planners are shifting away from the Cold War view that power comes from superior weapons systems. Instead, the Pentagon now believes that "combat power can be enhanced by communications networks and technologies that control access to, and directly manipulate, information. As a result, information itself is now both a tool and a target of warfare."

It is a belief John Rendon encapsulated in a speech to cadets at the U.S. Air Force Academy in 1996. "I am not a national-security strategist or a military tactician," he declared. "I am a politician, a person who uses communication to meet public-policy or corporate-policy objectives. In fact, I am an information warrior and a perception manager." To explain his philosophy, Rendon paraphrased a journalist he knew from his days as a staffer on the presidential campaigns of George McGovern and Jimmy Carter: "This is probably best described in the words of Hunter S. Thompson, when he wrote, 'When things turn weird, the weird turn pro.'"

John Walter Rendon Jr. rises at 3 a.m. each morning after six hours of sleep, turns on his Apple computer and begins ingesting information -- overnight news reports, e-mail messages, foreign and domestic newspapers, and an assortment of government documents. According to Pentagon documents obtained by Rolling Stone, the Rendon Group is authorized "to research and analyze information classified up to Top Secret/SCI/SI/TK/G/HCS" -- an extraordinarily high level of clearance granted to only a handful of defense contractors. "SCI" stands for Sensitive Compartmented Information, data classified higher than Top Secret. "SI" is Special Intelligence, very secret communications intercepted by the National Security Agency. "TK" refers to Talent/Keyhole, code names for imagery from reconnaissance aircraft and spy satellites. "G" stands for Gamma (communications intercepts from extremely sensitive sources) and "HCS" means Humint Control System (information from a very sensitive human source). Taken together, the acronyms indicate that Rendon enjoys access to the most secret information from all three forms of intelligence collection: eavesdropping, imaging satellites and human spies.

Rendon lives in a multimillion-dollar home in Washington's exclusive Kalorama neighborhood. A few doors down from Rendon is the home of former Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara; just around the corner lives current Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. At fifty-six, Rendon wears owlish glasses and combs his thick mane of silver-gray hair to the side, Kennedy-style. He heads to work each morning clad in a custom-made shirt with his monogram on the right cuff and a sharply tailored blue blazer that hangs loose around his bulky frame. By the time he pulls up to the Rendon Group's headquarters near Dupont Circle, he has already racked up a handsome fee for the morning's work: According to federal records, Rendon charges the CIA and the Pentagon $311.26 an hour for his services.

Rendon is one of the most influential of the private contractors in Washington who are increasingly taking over jobs long reserved for highly trained CIA employees. In recent years, spies-for-hire have begun to replace regional desk officers, who control clandestine operations around the world; watch officers at the agency's twenty-four-hour crisis center; analysts, who sift through reams of intelligence data; and even counterintelligence officers in the field, who oversee meetings between agents and their recruited spies. According to one senior administration official involved in intelligence-budget decisions, half of the CIA's work is now performed by private contractors -- people completely unaccountable to Congress. Another senior budget official acknowledges privately that lawmakers have no idea how many rent-a-spies the CIA currently employs -- or how much unchecked power they enjoy.

Unlike many newcomers to the field, however, Rendon is a battle-tested veteran who has been secretly involved in nearly every American shooting conflict in the past two decades. In the first interview he has granted in decades, Rendon offered a peek through the keyhole of this seldom-seen world of corporate spooks -- a rarefied but growing profession. Over a dinner of lamb chops and a bottle of Chateauneuf du Pape at a private Washington club, Rendon was guarded about the details of his clandestine work -- but he boasted openly of the sweep and importance of his firm's efforts as a for-profit spy. "We've worked in ninety-one countries," he said. "Going all the way back to Panama, we've been involved in every war, with the exception of Somalia."

It is an unusual career twist for someone who entered politics as an opponent of the Vietnam War. The son of a stockbroker, Rendon grew up in New Jersey and stumped for McGovern before graduating from Northeastern University. "I was the youngest state coordinator," he recalls. "I had Maine. They told me that I understood politics -- which was a stretch, being so young." Rendon, who went on to serve as executive director of the Democratic National Committee, quickly mastered the combination of political skulduggery and media manipulation that would become his hallmark. In 1980, as the manager of Jimmy Carter's troops at the national convention in New York, he was sitting alone in the bleachers at Madison Square Garden when a reporter for ABC News approached him. "They actually did a little piece about the man behind the curtain," Rendon says. "A Wizard of Oz thing." It was a role he would end up playing for the rest of his life.

After Carter lost the election and the hard-right Reagan revolutionaries came to power in 1981, Rendon went into business with his younger brother Rick. "Everybody started consulting," he recalls. "We started consulting." They helped elect John Kerry to the Senate in 1984 and worked for the AFL-CIO to mobilize the union vote for Walter Mondale's presidential campaign. Among the items Rendon produced was a training manual for union organizers to operate as political activists on behalf of Mondale. To keep the operation quiet, Rendon stamped CONFIDENTIAL on the cover of each of the blue plastic notebooks. It was a penchant for secrecy that would soon pervade all of his consulting deals.

To a large degree, the Rendon Group is a family affair. Rendon's wife, Sandra Libby, handles the books as chief financial officer and "senior communications strategist." Rendon's brother Rick serves as senior partner and runs the company's Boston office, producing public-service announcements for the Whale Conservation Institute and coordinating Empower Peace, a campaign that brings young people in the Middle East in contact with American kids through video-conferencing technology. But the bulk of the company's business is decidedly less liberal and peace oriented. Rendon's first experience in the intelligence world, in fact, came courtesy of the Republicans. "Panama," he says, "brought us into the national-security environment."

In 1989, shortly after his election, President George H.W. Bush signed a highly secret "finding" authorizing the CIA to funnel $10 million to opposition forces in Panama to overthrow Gen. Manuel Noriega. Reluctant to involve agency personnel directly, the CIA turned to the Rendon Group. Rendon's job was to work behind the scenes, using a variety of campaign and psychological techniques to put the CIA's choice, Guillermo Endara, into the presidential palace. Cash from the agency, laundered through various bank accounts and front organizations, would end up in Endara's hands, who would then pay Rendon.

A heavyset, fifty-three-year-old corporate attorney with little political experience, Endara was running against Noriega's handpicked choice, Carlos Duque. With Rendon's help, Endara beat Duque decisively at the polls -- but Noriega simply named himself "Maximum Leader" and declared the election null and void. The Bush administration then decided to remove Noriega by force -- and Rendon's job shifted from generating local support for a national election to building international support for regime change. Within days he had found the ultimate propaganda tool.

At the end of a rally in support of Endara, a band of Noriega's Dignity Battalion -- nicknamed "Dig Bats" and called "Doberman thugs" by Bush -- attacked the crowd with wooden planks, metal pipes and guns. Gang members grabbed the bodyguard of Guillermo Ford, one of Endara's vice-presidential candidates, pushed him against a car, shoved a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. With cameras snapping, the Dig Bats turned on Ford, batting his head with a spike-tipped metal rod and pounding him with heavy clubs, turning his white guayabera bright red with blood -- his own, and that of his dead bodyguard.

Within hours, Rendon made sure the photos reached every newsroom in the world. The next week an image of the violence made the cover of Time magazine with the caption POLITICS PANAMA STYLE: NORIEGA BLUDGEONS HIS OPPOSITION, AND THE U.S. TURNS UP THE HEAT. To further boost international support for Endara, Rendon escorted Ford on a tour of Europe to meet British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, the Italian prime minister and even the pope. In December 1989, when Bush decided to invade Panama, Rendon and several of his employees were on one of the first military jets headed to Panama City.

"I arrived fifteen minutes before it started," Rendon recalls. "My first impression is having the pilot in the plane turn around and say, 'Excuse me, sir, but if you look off to the left you'll see the attack aircraft circling before they land.' Then I remember this major saying, 'Excuse me, sir, but do you know what the air-defense capability of Panama is at the moment?' I leaned into the cockpit and said, 'Look, major, I hope by now that's no longer an issue.'"

Moments later, Rendon's plane landed at Howard Air Force Base in Panama. "I needed to get to Fort Clayton, which was where the president was," he says. "I was choppered over -- and we took some rounds on the way." There, on a U.S. military base surrounded by 24,000 U.S. troops, heavy tanks and Combat Talon AC-130 gunships, Rendon's client, Endara, was at last sworn in as president of Panama.

Rendon's involvement in the campaign to oust Saddam Hussein began seven months later, in July 1990. Rendon had taken time out for a vacation -- a long train ride across Scotland -- when he received an urgent call. "Soldiers are massing at the border outside of Kuwait," he was told. At the airport, he watched the beginning of the Iraqi invasion on television. Winging toward Washington in the first-class cabin of a Pan Am 747, Rendon spent the entire flight scratching an outline of his ideasin longhand on a yellow legal pad.

"I wrote a memo about what the Kuwaitis were going to face, and I based it on our experience in Panama and the experience of the Free French operation in World War II," Rendon says. "This was something that they needed to see and hear, and that was my whole intent. Go over, tell the Kuwaitis, 'Here's what you've got -- here's some observations, here's some recommendations, live long and prosper.'"

Back in Washington, Rendon immediately called Hamilton Jordan, the former chief of staff to President Carter and an old friend from his Democratic Party days. "He put me in touch with the Saudis, the Saudis put me in touch with the Kuwaitis and then I went over and had a meeting with the Kuwaitis," Rendon recalls. "And by the time I landed back in the United States, I got a phone call saying, 'Can you come back? We want you to do what's in the memo.'"

What the Kuwaitis wanted was help in selling a war of liberation to the American government -- and the American public. Rendon proposed a massive "perception management" campaign designed to convince the world of the need to join forces to rescue Kuwait. The Kuwaiti government in exile agreed to pay Rendon $100,000 a month for his assistance.

To coordinate the operation, Rendon opened an office in London. Once the Gulf War began, he remained extremely busy trying to prevent the American press from reporting on the dark side of the Kuwaiti government, an autocratic oil-tocracy ruled by a family of wealthy sheiks. When newspapers began reporting that many Kuwaitis were actually living it up in nightclubs in Cairo as Americans were dying in the Kuwaiti sand, the Rendon Group quickly counterattacked. Almost instantly, a wave of articles began appearing telling the story of grateful Kuwaitis mailing 20,000 personally signed valentines to American troops on the front lines, all arranged by Rendon.

Rendon also set up an elaborate television and radio network, and developed programming that was beamed into Kuwait from Taif, Saudi Arabia. "It was important that the Kuwaitis in occupied Kuwait understood that the rest of the world was doing something," he says. Each night, Rendon's troops in London produced a script and sent it via microwave to Taif, ensuring that the "news" beamed into Kuwait reflected a sufficiently pro-American line.

When it comes to staging a war, few things are left to chance. After Iraq withdrew from Kuwait, it was Rendon's responsibility to make the victory march look like the flag-waving liberation of France after World War II. "Did you ever stop to wonder," he later remarked, "how the people of Kuwait City, after being held hostage for seven long and painful months, were able to get hand-held American -- and, for that matter, the flags of other coalition countries?" After a pause, he added, "Well, you now know the answer. That was one of my jobs then."

Although his work is highly secret, Rendon insists he deals only in "timely, truthful and accurate information." His job, he says, is to counter false perceptions that the news media perpetuate because they consider it "more important to be first than to be right." In modern warfare, he believes, the outcome depends largely on the public's perception of the war -- whether it is winnable, whether it is worth the cost. "We are being haunted and stalked by the difference between perception and reality," he says. "Because the lines are divergent, this difference between perception and reality is one of the greatest strategic communications challenges of war."

Read More: Rolling Stone : The Man Who Sold the War

Do you know how many died today?

December 2, 2005 Roadside Bomb Kills 10 U.S. Marines in Falluja

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- A roadside bomb killed 10 Marines and wounded 11 while they were on a foot patrol near Fallujah, the Marine Corps said Friday, in the deadliest attack on American troops in nearly four months.

Thursday's bomb, which was made from several large artillery shells, struck members of Regimental Combat Team 8 of the 2nd Marine Division near the city about 30 miles west of Baghdad, the Marine Corps said.

In another statement, the Marines reported a U.S. Army soldier also assigned to the 2nd Marine Division died Thursday in a rocket attack near Ramadi. The U.S. command had earlier said four American service members were killed Wednesday, three of them from hostile action and the fourth in a traffic accident.

At least 2,121 members of the U.S. military have died since the beginning of the war in 2003, according to an Associated Press count.

On Aug. 3, 14 Marine Reserve troops from Ohio were killed when their amphibious assault vehicle was blown up by a roadside bomb near Haditha in western Iraq.

Of the 11 who were wounded, seven have returned to duty, the Marine Corps said. It added that Marines from the same unit continue to conduct counterinsurgency operations throughout Fallujah and surrounding areas.

Regimental Combat Team 8 is a part of the II Marine Expeditionary Force based at Camp Lejeune, N.C. The unit has been among the hardest hit in the war. In the nearly three years since the war began, 147 Marines from II MEF have died in combat, according to 2nd Marine Division spokesman Lt. Barry Edwards.

Regimental Combat Team 8 has been in Iraq since the beginning of February.

Fallujah had been a stronghold of the insurgents until U.S. forces, led by Marines, assaulted the city in November 2004. Since then, the U.S. military and the Iraqi government have been working to rebuild it and limit the return of insurgents.

The attack came after U.S. commanders reported a drop in suicide and car bombings as a result of increased U.S.-Iraqi operations.

However, Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, a coalition operations officer, warned that al-Qaida in Iraq, led by Jordanian terror mastermind Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, will likely step up attacks in the next two weeks to try to disrupt parliamentary elections Dec. 15.

Lynch said suicide bombings declined to 23 in November as U.S. and Iraqi forces were overrunning insurgent strongholds in the Euphrates River valley west of the capital.

Communities along the river are believed used by foreign fighters, who slip into the country from Syria and travel down the waterway to Baghdad and other cities.

''In the month of November: only 23 suicide attacks -- the lowest we've seen in the last seven months, the direct result of the effectiveness of our operations,'' Lynch said.

Car bombings -- parked along streets and highways and detonated remotely -- have declined from 130 in February to 68 in November, Lynch said.

However, suicide attacks have not consistently decreased in the past year. After more than 70 such attacks in May, the number fell in August by nearly half and then climbed to more than 50 two months later.

And despite the decline in the past month, there has been no letup in the relentless toll of American deaths at a time of growing discontent in the United States over the war.

The fatality toll for November was at least 85, which was down from the 96 American deaths suffered in October -- the fourth deadliest month since the war began. But it was well above the 49 deaths in September. U.S. monthly death tolls have hit 80 or above during 10 of the 33 months of the war.

There also has been no decline in the past six months in the Iraqi death toll from suicide attacks, according to an AP tally. In November, at least 290 Iraqis were killed in such attacks, more than double the figure from the previous month. The count shows the Iraqi toll ranging from at least 69 deaths in August to at least 356 in September.

In Ramadi, 70 miles west of Baghdad, the U.S. military launched a counterinsurgency operation code-named Operation Shank, a statement said.

''The purpose of the operation is to disrupt a terrorist group that utilizes an area of Ramadi as its base for attacks on local Ramadi citizens, Iraqi and U.S. military,'' the statement said. It is the fifth such operation in the area in recent weeks designed to calm the area before the elections.

On Thursday, insurgents allowed a local AP Television News cameraman to film gunmen as they toted automatic rifles and rocket launchers through the streets in central Ramadi. The insurgents appeared to be relaxed and not engaged in fighting. A gunman who did not given his name claimed the insurgents were ''controlling the city.''

Lynch denied reports that insurgents had staged major attacks on U.S. forces in Ramadi or had taken control of the town. He said there had been only one rocket-propelled grenade had been fired and there were no injuries.

As part of security measures for the elections, Iraq's Interior Ministry has banned all non-Iraqi Arabs from entering the country until further notice, officials said.

The decision was taken by Interior Minister Bayn Jabr, said two senior Interior Ministry officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to the media.

''This step is part of the security measures taken for the elections,'' said one of the senior Interior Ministry officials. ''It covers all border points whether airports, land border crossings and ports.''

In Baghdad, some Shiites joined hundreds of Sunni Muslims to denounce widespread arrests of suspected insurgents. They prayed together before a joint demonstration in a show of unity ahead of the potentially divisive elections.

Men waved Iraqi flags and women dressed in black robes carried posters of their missing sons. Some held portraits of Sunni clerics who have been killed since the U.S. invasion.

The joint prayer ceremony at Iraq's most famous Sunni shrine was called by Sunni politician Adnan al-Dulaimi, who has been trying to ease tensions between the rival Muslim communities.

Several prominent Shiite clerics who were invited did not show up, and Shiites made up only a small percentage of the several hundred people who turned out. Still, the ceremony was a significant sign that some mainstream religious leaders want to prevent tensions between the communities from erupting into a full-scale civil war.

Shiites make up the majority in Iraq, but were oppressed by former ruler Saddam Hussein, who is a Sunni. Since Saddam's overthrow, Shiites have controlled most of the political power in Iraq, while the anti-U.S. insurgency has been dominated by Sunnis.

Sunni suicide bombers have targeted Shiite mosques and gatherings.

Sunni leaders have complained of attacks by Shiite death squads tied to the government. Last month, U.S. troops discovered an Interior Ministry jail filled with 173 detainees, some showing signs of torture. Jabr suggested some making the torture allegations were supporting the insurgency or had a personal score to settle.

The Toll of War

  http://www2.townonline.com/roslindale/localRegional/view.bg?articleid=378127&format=text  

 

The toll of war

By David L. Harris/ Staff Writer
Thursday, December 1, 2005

Carlos Arredondo looked with despair at a photo of his two sons.
     There they were: Alexander and Brian posing in front of an American flag not too long ago.
     "That’s my American dream," said Arredondo, a 45-year-old native of Costa Rica who now lives in Roslindale. "My boys."
     But just over a year ago - on Aug. 25, 2004 - he found out Alexander, barely 20 years old, had been killed while fighting in Iraq. Arredondo’s dream had been changed. The young man who once attended the Charles Sumner Elementary School in Roslindale and went on to Blue Hills Regional Technical School in Canton was gone, the 968th American casualty in Iraq.
     The photo, mounted on a 10-foot board with other snapshots, Alexander’s resume and one of his letters home, was displayed recently for pedestrians walking through Boston Common as part of an antiwar exhibit.
     With more than 2,000 deaths recorded thus far in the war in Iraq, Arredondo has taken his anger, frustration and sadness and channeled it into being one of this war’s most visible critics, a New England version of Cindy Sheehan, the Texas mother who has become the national symbol of the antiwar movement.
     "Now he’s working to stop these tragedies," said Jamaica Plain resident Charley Richardson, co-founder of the anti-war group Military Families Speak Out. "He’s saying ’I’m giving meaning to this.’"
     Grief displayed
     Just over a year ago, Arredondo’s grief was displayed for the world to see.
     Arredondo, who was living in Hollywood, Fla., at the time, was holding his cell phone, waiting for his son to call home to wish him a happy 44th birthday.
     He remembers the uniformed officers coming out of their van.
     "I was fixing a fence in my house when I saw them coming over," said Arredondo, in an interview at his home, where the Marine Corps and U.S. flags fly in his backyard on Seymour Street in Roslindale. "It was my birthday ... I thought he was back home, like a surprise. But instead, it was my worst nightmare."
     Three Marines approached him.
     "I’m sorry to tell you that Lance Cpl. Alexander Arredondo was killed in combat," said one of the Marines.
     Arredondo couldn’t breathe.
     "I was in shock," he said. "It wasn’t supposed to be happening. I ran to the back of my house to find my mother.
     "I asked God to tell me what’s going on," he recalled. Carlos asked the Marines to leave his home, but they did not.
     For the second time, Carlos asked the Marines to leave. They said they couldn’t.
     Arredondo grabbed a hammer out of his garage, intending to smash the Marines’ van windows.
     He pounded the hammer hard into the ground, went back into the house and again prayed to God, asking to wake up from this nightmare. And for the third and last time, Arredondo asked the Marines to leave. But they didn’t.
     Arredondo went back to his garage, grabbed five gallons of gasoline and a propane gas torch he had stocked for a job that morning. He took his hammer out with him and began to hit the windows of the van so hard it flew inside the vehicle.
     His mother, Luz Marina Redondo Piedra, tried to get the gasoline away. But Carlos went to the driver’s side door, placed the gas can on the driver’s seat and sat inside.
     "I was calling for my son, screaming for my son," he said. He picked up the hammer and again smashed the equipment inside the van. The dashboard, the computer, the rear windows. He cut his wrist, a mark he still bears.
     Then he poured the gas all over the van.
     "I grabbed the torch and the fumes were already so much ... I couldn’t breathe," he said. "My mother grabbed my hand."
     And then a spark ignited and sent flames pouring all over.
     "I landed in the middle of the street," he said.
     Carlos was in flames and the Marines rushed to put out the fire. About 26 percent of his body had been burned.
     "My feet are burning, my feet are burning," he recalled saying.
     Another nightmare
     Two days later, Carlos woke up in the hospital.
     "I thought I was in another nightmare," he said.
     One year later, his burns are almost all healed, except for the lower parts of his legs, which are reddish in color from the flames. He applies a special ointment every day to help heal. He now attributes the incident to post traumatic stress disorder and goes twice a week for psychological counseling.
     "We still don’t believe it," said Melida Arredondo, Alexander’s stepmother. "We still expect him to come home."
     About three years earlier, Alexander had signed up with the Marines, who promised him a sign-on bonus. He quit his job at D’Angelo and had his sights set on seeing new places and meeting new people. Carlos and Melida found out later Alexander was offered a $10,000 bonus to sign up with the Marines. He was 17.
     Alexander was nicknamed "Dondo" by his Marine buddies and was known for his humor.
     "He really liked complaining about a lot of things," said Lance Cpl. Peter P. Brogdon in an article published in a Marines newsletter after Alexander’s death. "But if he didn’t complain, he used sarcasm. It had to be a joke."
     But Alexander was serious about his experience overseas.
     "I’ve never seen water this blue before," Alexander wrote his parents on Jan. 19, 2003, as he was shipped to Kuwait. "I’ve never looked 360 degrees around me and seen nothing but water, clouds, the sun and a fleet of battleships surrounding me."
     Later on in the letter, Alexander wrote, "I am not afraid of dying. I am more afraid of what will happen to all the ones that I love if something happens to me."
     As part of his work with the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit, Alexander was dispatched on his second tour of duty to Najaf, a restive city at the time that was filled with rebel Shi’ite cleric Moqtada Al-Sadr’s followers, men who wore black and were urged to fight Americans at any cost.
     On Aug. 25, Alexander was clearing out a four-story hotel and was fatally shot in his left temple, most likely by a sniper, according to an e-mail sent 10 months later to Carlos by the Marines. He fell into the arms of a fellow Marine, whose identity is still unknown to the Arredondos.
     "My son made the ultimate sacrifice," Carlos Arredondo said. "He did a wonderful job by helping the Iraqi people. But it’s time to let them walk on their own two feet."
     Carlos Arredondo visits his son’s grave in Walpole no less than twice per week.
     "Sometimes we bring lunch there for about an hour," he said. "We cut the grass and change the flowers."
     Activism
     Arredondo, a handyman by trade, is struggling to get back to work and he is consumed by sharing his story to whomever will listen.
     By his own estimates, he has spread out 7,000 copies of the letter his son wrote to his parents on Jan. 19, 2003. He has already ordered 2,000 more. In his home, he has 20 binders filled with news clippings, letters and other materials related to Alexander.
     The sudden public appearances - he’s quoted in almost every article about anti-war protests - have taken their toll.
     "It’s affecting me economically because I’m not working full time," Arredondo said. "We barely make it with the bills. We have a purpose which we think is important ... whatever it takes. If they look at my son’s pictures, it makes it worth it."
     He’s already met with Gov. Mitt Romney and has even been kicked out of a rally for Sen. John Kerry when he displayed that photo of Alexander and Brian in front of the crowd. And he’s become close to Sheehan, the anti-war activist who also lost a son in battle, often marching with her in protests around the country.
     Any way he can, Arredondo continues to share his story. At one event earlier last month, he talked to about 30 people at the Paulist Center near the State House as part of the American Friends Service Committee’s "Eyes Wide Open" exhibit.
     "What you are doing is fantastic," said one anti-war activist, Ivonna Lee of Arlington.
     Currently, Arredondo plans to form a group called People United for Peace, a nonprofit that he hopes will educate high school students about military recruiting techniques and giving students alternatives to the military.
     "We don’t want our 17-year-old sons signing up," he said. "We want them [recruiters] to be out from the high schools."
     But he will never forget his son, his pride and joy.
     On the day the number of war dead in Iraq surpassed 2,000, Arredondo woke up early and constructed a small casket and draped an American flag on it. He attached a photo of Alex on the back and walked from the Common down Newbury Street to Roslindale.
     "It’s a catharsis. It’s just part of the healing," he said. "I’m not going to stay inside the closet."
      David Harris can be reached at dharris@cnc.com.
     Send donations to:
     People United for Peace
     c/o Boston Mobilization
     30 Bow St.
     Cambridge, Ma 02138

Do you know how many died today?

 

4 US Troops Killed in Push against Iraqi Rebels
    By Kirk Semple
    The New York Times

    Thursday 01 December 2005

    Baghdad - The American military said today that four American troops died, including two marines who were killed in combat operations in the rebellious province of Anbar, where military commanders have pressed a series of intensive sweeps to disrupt insurgent networks in advance of national elections on Dec. 15.

    The two marines, both with Regimental Combat Team 8, Second Marine Division, were killed Wednesday by small-arms fire in separate incidents in Fallujah, 30 miles west of Baghdad, the American military said.

    An Army soldier died from a gunshot wound on Wednesday north of Baghdad, the military said, offering no further details and not specifying whether the wound was the result of a hostile attack, friendly fire or a suicide attempt. Also on Wednesday, a Marine assigned to the Second Marine Aircraft Wing of the Second Marine Expeditionary Force died in a non-combat vehicle accident near al Taqaddum, the military announced.

    Today, about 2,000 American troops and 500 Iraqi Army soldiers continued their push to root out rebels in the rural region east of Hit, 100 miles west of Baghdad, officials said. American commanders say that area is a manufacturing center for car bombs and the kind of homemade explosives that have bedeviled troops and caused thousands of casualties since the invasion. The operation started on Wednesday.

    Beginning last spring, American and Iraqi commanders in Anbar have conducted numerous large-scale assaults on towns along the Euphrates River in an effort to destroy the insurgency's system of smuggling routes, supply lines and safe houses for fighters, both foreign and Iraqi.

    Today, Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, a senior military spokesman in Baghdad, credited the sweeps with sharply cutting the number of insurgent attacks around the country, including suicide bombings and incidents involving homemade bombs.

    There were 50 suicide bombings in Iraq in October and 19 in November, he said. Over the same period, the number of concealed bombs that either exploded or were discovered and cleared fell to 1,329 from 1,869, he said.

    The drop in the number of attacks is "a direct result of the effectiveness of our operations against the Zarqawi network," General Lynch said at a news conference here, referring to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian-born militant whom American commanders have declared their No. 1 enemy here.

    But rebels also launched some of their deadliest suicide attacks of the year in November, including a suicide car bomb that exploded outside the main hospital in the town of Mahmudiya, killing at least 30, and suicide bomb attacks on two Shiite mosques in the Kurdish town of Khanaqin, which together killed at least 70.

    Several months ago, American officials pointed to another drop in suicide attacks - to 40 in August from 70 in May - to indicate the success of their western strategy. But just as soon, the number of suicide bombings began to climb - to 46 in September and 50 in October.

    Similarly, while the number of incidents involving hidden bombs has dropped in the past two months, there has been an overall increase since June, when 1,170 were found.

    In Ramadi, the provincial capital of Anbar, between 20 to 30 insurgents who had gathered in a marketplace in the north part of the city this morning fired mortar rounds at the provincial government building then melted away, according to Ahmed Faisal, a traffic police officer in Ramadi, who said he had seen the attackers. At the time of the incident, tribal sheiks were scheduled to gather for a meeting at the building. There were no reported casualties.

    Police Lt. Mohammed al-Obaidi told The Associated Press that at least four mortar rounds fell near the American base on the eastern edge of the city, causing no casualties.

    But American government officials and an official from Iraq's Interior Ministry emphatically denied that there had been a coordinated guerrilla attack and said there had only been one rocket propelled grenade fired at a joint American-Iraqi observation post today. "There were no signs of any significant insurgent activity anywhere in the city," an American military press release said. "That is all. No other attacks."

************************************************************

A host of recent developments have made it clear that the Bush White House is doing battle against the journalistic standards and practices that underpin of our democracy. With its unprecedented campaign to undermine and stifle independent journalism, Bush & Co. have demonstrated brazen contempt for the Constitution and considerable fear of an informed public.

Free Press has launched a campaign to chronicle and combat Bush’s war on the press. Today, we published a new report showing the scope and intensity of the administration’s assault on press freedoms. The growing list of attacks on the press is truly astonishing:

Infiltrating Public Broadcasting
White House loyalists inside the Corporation for Public Broadcasting have launched a crusade to remake PBS, NPR and other public media into official mouthpieces. Kenneth Tomlinson’s tenure at the CPB was characterized by targeting journalists like Bill Moyers who dared to air dissenting voices or prepare investigative reports on the administration.

Tomlinson's goal was clearly to fire a shot across the bow of all public stations so managers would shy away from the sort of investigative journalism that might expose Bush administration malfeasance. Tomlinson resigned in disgrace but left behind a cast of cronies to carry out his partisan crusade. And we still don’t know the extent to which Karl Rove and others at the White House orchestrated his efforts.

Manufacturing Fake News
Under Bush administration directives, at least 20 federal agencies have produced and distributed scores of "video news releases" out of a $254 million slush fund set up to manufacture taxpayer-funded propaganda. These bogus and deceptive stories have been broadcast on TV stations nationwide without any acknowledgment that they were prepared by the government rather than local journalists.

The segments — which trumpeted administration “successes,” promoted its controversial line on issues like overhauling Medicare, and featured Americans "thanking" Bush — have been repeatedly labeled "covert propaganda" by investigators at the Government Accountability Office.

Bribing Journalists
The administration has paid pundits to sing its praises. Earlier this year, TV commentator Armstrong Williams pocketed $240,000 in taxpayer money to laud Bush’s education policies. Three other journalists have since been discovered on the government dole; and Williams admits that he has "no doubt" that other paid Bush shills are still on the loose.

The administration has even exported these tactics. According to the Los Angeles Times, the U.S. military is now secretly paying Iraqi newspapers to publish stories written by American troops.

Lying about the Iraq War
The White House saw the battle for domestic popular opinion as one of the main fronts in the war in Iraq. With the help of a compliant media, truth became the first casualty in their campaign to whip up support. But rather than admit to their lies and misinformation, the administration continues to attack those reporting the truth.

As Frank Rich recently wrote in the New York Times, the administration’s "web of half-truths and falsehoods used to sell the war did not happen by accident; it was woven by design and then foisted on the public by a P.R. operation built expressly for that purpose in the White House."

Eliminating Dissent in the Mainstream Media
Bush has all but avoided traditional press conferences, closing down a prime venue for holding the executive accountable. On those rare occasions when he deigned to meet reporters, presidential aides turned the press conferences into parodies by seating a friendly right-wing “journalist,” former male escort Jeff Gannon, amid the reporters and then steering questions to him when tough issues arose.

They have effectively silenced serious questioners, like veteran journalist Helen Thomas, by refusing to have the president or his aides call on reporters who challenge them. And they have established a hierarchy for journalists seeking interviews with administration officials, which favors networks that give the White House favorable coverage.

Gutting the Freedom of Information Act
The administration has scrapped enforcement of the Freedom of Information Act and has made it harder for reporters to do their jobs by refusing to cooperate with even the most basic requests for comment and data from government agencies. This is part of a broader clampdown on access to information that has made it virtually impossible for journalists to cover vast areas of government activity.

Consolidating Media Control
The administration continues to make common cause with the most powerful broadcast corporations in an effort to rewrite ownership laws in a manner that favors monopoly control of information. The Federal Communications Commission will announce plans to rewrite the ownership rules soon – it could happen as early as February – with aims of unleashing a new wave of media consolidation. The administration’s desired rules changes would strike a mortal blow to local reporting and further squeeze journalists.

 

In a famous 1945 opinion, Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black said that "the First Amendment rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public, that a free press is a condition of a free society." In other words, a free press is the sine qua non of the entire American Constitution and republican experiment.

We started Free Press because our democracy demands a diverse and independent media. The Bush administration’s attack on the foundations of self-government requires a response of similar caliber. I hope you’ll join me in the year ahead as Free Press works to hold the administration accountable for all its attacks on journalism and see that such abuses will not be repeated in the future.

Please take a moment to visit our online campaign to defend democracy from the White House assault on the media.

Onward,

Robert W. McChesney
President
Free Press
www.freepress.net

It only takes one person - Thank you Rosa Parks

December 1, 2005

Friends,

I just thought we should all pause for a moment today to remember the simple act of courage, defiance and dignity committed by Rosa Parks when she refused to move to the back of the bus because the law said she had the wrong skin color. The greatest moments in history, the ones that have truly mattered and have taken us to a better place, are made up of scores of these singular acts by ordinary, everyday people who could no longer tolerate the crap and the nonsense of those in charge.

Today, whether it is a student who holds a sit-in to get the army recruiters off his campus, or the mother of a dead soldier who refuses to leave the front gate of the president's ranch, we continue to be saved by brave people who risk ridicule and rejection but end up turning huge tides of public opinion in the direction of righteousness. We owe them enormous debts of gratitude. It is not easy to stand up for what is right, especially when everyone else is afraid to leave the comfortable path of conformity.

Rosa Parks may have been alone on that bus at the moment of her arrest but she wasn't alone for long. The old order was shaken, the world was upended and, as a people, we were given a chance for a bit of redemption.

Perhaps the best way to celebrate this most important day in American history is to ask yourself what it is that you can do today to make a difference. What risk can you take to move the ball forward? What is that one thing you've been wanting to say to your co-workers or classmates that you've been afraid to say -- but in your heart of hearts you know needs to be said? Why wait another day to say it or do it?

There is probably no better way to honor Rosa Parks -- and yourself -- than for you to put a stop to an injustice you see, not allowing it to continue for one more second. Do something. Then send me an email (contributions@michaelmoore.com) and tell all of us what you did (I'll post as many as I can).

Fifty years later, the bus we're on could use a few more people simply saying, "No. I'm sorry. I've had enough. I'm not going to take it anymore."

Yours,

Michael Moore
www.michaelmoore.com

I was called to action:

Dear Mr. Moore, 

Thank you from the bottom of my heart for your Rosa Parks letter you sent to everyone today. I know it isn't often you write to all of us, this was a letter that was needed. 

One person can make a difference. One persons courage can bring out what is inside all of us. When the one person sparks the sleeping people to wake up we all are rewarded with a better society, a better life for us all. 

Today you sparked me into making a t-shirt to wear while I go through my day. It is something I try to do as often. I make shirts for people to read that makes them want to come talk to me. Today my shirt says "One person can make a difference   Remember her always     Rosa Parks    50 years ago she refused to move".  I have already been several places. Most everyone who has seen me has read my shirt and a few have talked to me about it.  I hope it sparks something in them to speak to another person.  

This is a lesson for all of us. Speak out what you believe and you would be surprised how many believe the same as you. Don't be aggressive with your actions. Let people approach you. You must be visual and not be afraid to be who you are. A lesson we learn from our Peaceful Warriors like Rosa Parks and now Cindy Sheehan. There is hope in knowing when bad things have happened in our country like making people sit at the back of the bus because of their skin, we become stronger as a nation. What is heart breaking to me, before we become a stronger nation, always in our history many have to suffer before we are moved to action. 

 

We all are human, we all live here together. Let your love shine and we'll be here forever.....

Peace be inside all of us,

Cindy

Hollywood, FL