Tuesday, January 10, 2006

Adam Green: Truthiness: Colbert Was Robbed!. Monday night, The Colbert Report entered 2006 with one hell of a debut show - and that's the truth. After well-leveled slaps at O'Reilly, Justice Sunday III, and anti-judge sentiment ("We've already got the president to interpret the law, we don't need judges"), Colbert used the last five minutes of the show to masterfully open America's eyes to a true journalistic tragedy at the Associated Press -- one that may remain disguised as a mere act of comedy to the untrained eye.  (At the bottom of this post, I will ask you to give your respectful feedback to AP reporter Heather Clark. hclark@ap.org ) Harkening back to October 17, 2005, the night the Colbert Report debuted on Comedy Central, Colbert replayed his first Word of the Day: Truthiness. At the time he had joked, "Now I'm sure some of the Word Police, the wordanistas over at Webster's, are gonna say, 'Hey, that's not a word.'" But on Monday, Colbert swollowed his pride - he admitted he was wrong.  Because it turns out, this week the American Dialect Society voted "truthiness" the 2005 word of the year.  Colbert commented: I have never been so honored and insulted at the same time. You see the Associated Press article announcing this prestigious award - written by one Heather Clark - had a glaring omission: Me.  I'm not mentioned, despite the fact that truthiness is a word I pulled right out of my keyster. Instead of coming to me, here's where Ms. Clark got the definition.  "Michael Adams, a professor at North Carolina State university who specializes in lexicology, said 'truthiness' means 'truthy, not facty.'" First of all, I looked him up. He's not a professor, he's a vising associate professor.  And second, it means a lot more than that, Michael. I don't know what you're getting taught over there in English 201 and 324 over at Tompkins Hall, Wolfpack. But it isn't truthiness. You know what, bring out the board. He then proceeded to put Michael Adams on his already-saturated "On Notice" board (removing the E Street Band from that list, and keeping James Brady at the top of it).  Colbert then went a step further. But the real culprit here is so-called reporter, Heather Clark.  This is her sleaziest piece of yellow journalism since, "New Mexico Poll Watchers See Smooth Election Day." Now, I already tore her a new one for that. Heather Clark, you...are dead to me. She then earned a fresh entry on Colbert's "Dead To Me" board, joining Men with Beards, California's 5th District, and Bowtie Pasta. Great comedy. One could easily call it a night.  But guess what? There's more.  Colbert was right.  He was totally and journalistically robbed. Heather Clark's AP story mentions that the honor was bestowed by the American Dialect Society, and laboriously goes through a list of less-funny words that earned awards like "podcast." But if one actually checks the American Dialect Society's website it becomes stunningly obvious that Clark neglected to mention a key fact drilled home at the very top of the society's webpage: In its 16th annual words of the year vote, the American Dialect Society voted truthiness as the word of the year. First heard on the Colbert Report, a satirical mock news show on the Comedy Channel, truthiness refers to the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true. As Stephen Colbert put it, "I don't trust books. They're all fact, no heart." This is an open-and-shut journalistic case.  By the prominent acknowledgement of the award givers, Stephen Colbert deserves full public credit for giving voice to a concept that embodies the centerpiece of the Bush Administration -- preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true. Heather Clark's exclusion of Colbert from this story is like excluding Santa from a story about Christmas -- oddly convenient.  If Clark is dead to Colbert, it is up to us to ask her to correct the record.  Like Colbert, she must swallow her pride and admit she was wrong.  Ms. Clark can be contacted respectfully at hclark@ap.org.  And if you're on the fence about whether to contact her, don't just do it for Colbert. Do it in the name...of truthiness. (Views expressed in this posting are the author's and not necessarily any affiliated organizations.) [The Huffington Post | Full Blog Feed] 2:57:12 PM    comment []

Rep. John Conyers: Larry Tribe on Spying: A Grave Abuse. Hearing on January 20 Amid the scandal about the President's secret spying on law-abiding Americans, I asked Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe, the most respected legal scholar when it comes to constitutional questions, for his opinion. You can read his entire letter to me in plain text below or in pdf, but - as first reported by the Wall Street Journal - his analysis confirms my suspicions that this is an utterly lawless and unconstitutional act. My reading of his letter: from the perspective of legal scholarship, the Administration's justifications don't pass the laugh test. To cast a little more light on this issue, I announced today that I am calling Democratic hearings (though all are welcome) on this issue, on January 20 at 10am. Professor Tribe begins by dissecting the Administration's attempts to minimize the secret spying. As he indicates, there are types of communications which contain so little content that the collection of it has been held to not be a "search or seizure," such as routing information on electronic communications. The President tried to cloud the issue by making it seem like these were the type of intercepts the NSA was gathering when he said "the program is one that listens to a few numbers" because "we want to know who they're calling..." Tribe charitably calls this "less than forthright," especially in light of the Attorney General's concession that the intercepts were much more than that. Tribe also rejects the Administration's attempts to diminish this activity by claiming that it solely encompassed U.S. citizens' communications with "members of Al Qaeda." In fact, the Attorney General let slip that the program is far broader, so broad that, in Professor Tribe's view, the "definition casts so wide a net that no-one can feel certain of escaping its grasp." He concludes that there is a "strong case" that the program likely violates the Fourth Amendment, especially in light of the lack of Congressional authorization for it. In terms of the legal precedents, Tribe concludes that when the secret spying is so far outside the category of allowable unilateral Presidential actions, that it "misses it by a mile". He then turns to the argument that the resolution authorizing the use of force against Al Qaeda also authorized this secret spying and, in my favorite turn of phrase, states "[t]he technical legal term of that, I believe, is poppycock." He concludes that the program is "as grave an abuse of executive authority as I can recall ever having studied." The entire letter is well worth a read. The Honorable John Conyers, Jr. United States House of Representatives 2426 Rayburn House Office Bldg. Washington, DC 20515-2214 Dear Congressman Conyers: I appreciate your interest in my views as a constitutional scholar regarding the legality of the classified program of electronic surveillance by the National Security Agency ("NSA") that the President authorized within months of the September 11, 2001, attacks by Al Qaeda, a program whose existence the President confirmed on December 17, 2005, following its disclosure by The New York Times several days earlier. Some have defended the NSA program as though it involved nothing beyond computer-enhanced data mining used to trace the electronic paths followed by phone calls and e-mails either originating from or terminating at points overseas associated with terrorists or their affiliates or supporters. But that type of intelligence gathering, whose history long antedates September 11, 2001, typically entails little or no interception of communicative content that would make it a Search or "seizure" as those terms are understood for Fourth Amendment purposes (see Smith v. Maryland, 442 U.S. 735 (1979) (the "pen register" case)), or "electronic surveillance" as that term is used in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)(see 50 U.S.C. § 1801 (f)(1)-(2)). Unfortunately, as Attorney General Gonzales candidly conceded in a press briefing on December 19, 2005, the program under discussion here authorized precisely such interception of "contents of communications." See http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/12/print/20051219- 1.html. Although there may be room for debate about the boundary between content interception and mere traffic analysis in other contexts, the Attorney General eliminated speculation on the point when he said in that press briefing that the "surveillance that . . . the President announced on [December 17]" is the "kind" that "requires a court order before engaging in" it "unless otherwise authorized by statute or by Congress," and it is undisputed that a court order is precisely what the Executive Branch chose to proceed without. The President was therefore being less than forthright when, two weeks after admitting that he had authorized what the FISA defines as "electronic surveillance" that would normally require a judicial warrant, he told reporters in Texas that the "NSA program is one that listens to a few numbers" because "the enemy is calling somebody and we want to know who they're calling . . . ." See http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Bush.html?ei=5094&en=8b73b4903455b75... (1/3/2006). To be sure, the President did say "we want to know who they're calling and why," to "find out what the enemy's thinking," hopefully alerting the attentive listener to the possibility that the contents of individual messages are being intercepted. But by centering the discussion on what sounds more like number-crunching than content-trawling, the President encouraged the program's other apologists to depict it as relatively innocuous by shifting attention away from precisely what makes this program of secret surveillance so legally controversial. Equally diversionary is the frequently repeated suggestion that, whatever the program intercepts, the only messages it reaches are "communications, back and forth, from within the United States to overseas with members of Al Qaeda," to quote the Attorney General's December 19 press briefing. Again, however, the attentive listener might have caught the more precise account the Attorney General let slip at another point in that same briefing, when he noted that the surveillance that had been going on under presidential auspices for roughly four years in fact reaches all instances in which "we . . . have a reasonable basis to conclude that one party to the communication is a member of Al Qaeda, affiliated with Al Qaeda, or a member of an organization affiliated with Al Qaeda or working in support of Al Qaeda." Given the breadth and elasticity of the notions of "affiliation" and "support," coupled with the loosely-knit network of groups that Al Qaeda is thought to have become, that definition casts so wide a net that no-one can feel certain of escaping its grasp. A strong case can be made that, even under the circumstances confronting the United States in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks launched by Al Qaeda on September 11, 2001, and even with assurance that conversations are being intercepted solely to aid in preventing future terrorist attacks rather than for use as evidence to prosecute past misdeeds, so indiscriminate and sweeping a scheme of domestic intrusion into the private communications of American citizens, predicated entirely on the unchecked judgment of the Executive Branch, violates the Fourth Amendment "right of the people to be secure . . . against unreasonable searches and seizures" even if it otherwise represents an exercise of constitutional power entrusted to the President by Article II or delegated to the President by Congress in exercising its powers under Article I. The precise question of such a scheme's consistency with the Fourth Amendment has never been judicially resolved -- nor is it likely to be resolved in this situation. For the scheme in question, far from being authorized by Congress, flies in the face of an explicit congressional prohibition and is therefore unconstitutional without regard to the Fourth Amendment unless it belongs to that truly rare species of executive acts so central to and inherent in the power vested in the President by Article II that, like the power to propose or veto legislation or to issue pardons, its exercise cannot constitutionally be fettered in any way by the Legislative Branch. Any such characterization would be hard to take seriously with respect to unchecked warrantless wiretapping. As the Supreme Court famously held in Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, 343 U.S. 579 (1952), an emergency presidential takeover for a limited time of certain critical publicly held corporations like Bethlehem Steele Co. and the United States Steele Co., in order to avert the threat that would be posed to our national security by a stoppage of the steel production needed for weapons and other materials essential to the ongoing Korean War, falls outside that tiny category of congressionally illimitable executive acts and is indeed unconstitutional unless affirmatively authorized by Congress. If that is so, then certainly an unchecked presidential program of secretly recording the conversations of perhaps thousands of innocent private citizens in the United States in hopes of gathering intelligence potentially useful for the ongoing war on a global terrorist network not only falls outside that category but misses it by a mile. The only escape from that conclusion would be to hold that inherent and illimitable presidential power to abridge individual liberty and erode personal privacy categorically exceeds presidential power to displace temporarily the corporate managers of entirely impersonal business property, without confiscating, transferring, or otherwise touching the property's ultimate ownership by the holders of its shares. But our Constitution embodies no such perverse system of priorities. The presidential power at issue in this case is therefore subject to the control of Congress. And that Congress has indeed forbidden this exercise of power is clear. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 unambiguously limits warrantless domestic electronic surveillance, even in a congressionally declared war, to the first 15 days of that war; criminalizes any such electronic surveillance not authorized by statute; and expressly establishes FISA and two chapters of the federal criminal code, governing wiretaps for intelligence purposes and for criminal investigation, respectively, as the "exclusive means by which electronic surveillance . . . and the interception of domestic wire, oral, and electronic communications may be conducted." 50 U.S.C. §§ 1811, 1809, 18 U.S.C. § 2511(2)(f). The House version of the bill would have authorized the President to engage in warrantless electronic surveillance for the first year of a war, but the Conference Committee rejected so long a period of judicially unchecked eavesdropping as unnecessary inasmuch as the 15-day period would "allow time for consideration of any amendment to this act that may be appropriate during a wartime emergency." H.R. Conf. Rep. No. 95-1720, at 34 (1978). If a year was deemed too long, one can just imagine what the Conferees would have said of four years. Rather than reaching for the heaviest (and, in this context, least plausible and hence most ineffectual) artillery by claiming an inherent presidential power to spy on innocent American citizens within the United States even in the teeth of a clear and explicit congressional prohibition of that technique of intelligence-gathering beyond the first 15 days of a declared war, the administration points to the FISA's own caveat that its prohibitions are inapplicable to electronic surveillance that is "otherwise authorized" by a congressional statute, which of course encompasses a joint resolution presented to and signed by the President. The Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) against Al Qaeda, Pub.L. No. 107-40, 115 Stat. 224 §2 (a) (2001), is just such a resolution, the administration claims, for it authorizes the President to use "all necessary and appropriate force" against "nations, organizations, or persons" associated with the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, in order to protect the nation from the recurrence of such aggression. Although that resolution of course says nothing about electronic surveillance as such, neither does it say anything specifically about the detention of enemy combatants fighting for Al Qaeda in Afghanistan as part of the Taliban, the organization from within which the Al Qaeda terrorist network launched those infamous attacks. Yet, in the face of congressional legislation (the Non-Detention Act) expressly forbidding the executive detention of any United States citizen except "pursuant to an Act of Congress," 18 U.S.C. § 4001(a), the Supreme Court in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, 124 S.Ct. 2633 (2004), held that such detention in the United States of individuals who are U.S. citizens captured while fighting against American forces in Afghanistan "for the duration of the particular conflict in which they were captured," in order to prevent them "from returning to the field of battle and taking up arms once again," escapes the prohibition of that anti-detention statute by virtue of its implied authorization by the AUMF as an exercise of the "necessary and appropriate force" Congress authorized the President to use, a conclusion supported by the fact that such detention for this limited purpose is a "fundamental and accepted . . . incident to war." 124 S.Ct. at 2640. If Hamdi treated the AUMF as an "explicit congressional authorization," 124 S.Ct. at 2640-41, for imprisoning an enemy combatant despite AUMF's failure to mention "detention" or "imprisonment" in so many words, the argument goes, the AUMF must be read to impliedly authorize the far less severe intrusion of merely eavesdropping on our terrorist enemies, and on members of organizations that indirectly support them. After all, the collection of "signals intelligence" about our enemies abroad is no less an accepted incident of war than detaining the captured enemy -- just as signals intelligence of foreign agents (including some going to and from the United States) has been accepted as an inherent power of the President even in the absence of war. Surely, then, now that Al Qaeda has launched a war against us, and now that Congress has responded with the functional equivalent of a declaration of war in the AUMF, even the entirely innocent American citizen in Chicago or Cleveland whose phone conversation with a member of an Al Qaeda-supportive organization happens to be ensnared by the eavesdropping being undertaken by the NSA cannot be heard to complain that no statute specifically authorized the Executive to capture her telephone communications and e-mails as such. Invasion of that citizen's privacy was, alas, but one of war's sad side effects -- a species of collateral damage. The technical legal term for that, I believe, is poppycock. Hamdi obviously rested on the modest point that statutory authority to kill or gravely injure an enemy on the field of battle impliedly authorizes one to take the far less extreme step of detaining that enemy, solely for the duration of the battle, to prevent his return to fight against our troops. Power to engage in domestic electronic surveillance on a wide scale within the territorial United States -- intercepting, recording and transcribing conversations of 4unsuspecting citizens who have committed no wrong, are not foreign agents traveling to and from the United States, and in fact pose no threat themselves but merely happen to have accepted a phone call or received an e-mail from, or sent an e-mail to, a member of an organization that is said to be supportive of the Al Qaeda network -- is by no stretch of the legal imagination a "lesser included power" contained within the power to repel future terrorist attacks by Al Qaeda on the United States. Thus the argument that the AUMF does not impliedly authorize this wide-ranging and indefinitely enduring program to extract potentially useful intelligence from ordinary citizens easily survives challenge based on Hamdi. More than that, Hamdi in fact yields added support for the conclusion that the AUMF cannot provide the requisite authorization. For the Hamdi plurality agreed "that indefinite detention for the purpose of interrogation," even of conceded enemy combatants, "is not authorized" by the AUMF. 124 S.Ct. at 2641 (emphasis added). It follows a fortiori that indefinite subjection of American citizens who are not even alleged to be enemies, much less enemy combatants, to ongoing invasions of their privacy in the United States for purposes of obtaining valuable information is not authorized either. Moreover, it makes a difference that the FISA's specific regulation of all electronic surveillance in the United States deals with the subject at issue here in a far more comprehensive and elaborate way than the Anti-Detention Statute involved in Hamdi dealt with the military detentions at issue there -- military detentions that the Court treated as falling within the Anti-Detention Statute merely for the sake of argument when it held only that, if that statute otherwise applied, then it was trumped by the more specifically relevant AUMF. Here, in contrast, there can be no serious doubt that it is the FISA, and not the AUMF, that deals more specifically with the activity in question. Construing the AUMF, taken in conjunction with the President's power as Commander in Chief under Article II, as implicitly conferring broad authority to engage in whatever warrantless surveillance the President might deem necessary in a war of indefinite duration against Al Qaeda-related terrorism even in the face of FISA's prohibitions would entail interpreting the AUMF far more broadly than anyone could, in truth, have anticipated. If that AUMF authorization were indeed this broad, the President must simply have overlooked its continued existence when he recently chided Congress for failing to reenact the PATRIOT Act's provisions. To be sure, the AUMF, even on the Justice Department's extravagant reading, enacted no criminal proscriptions of the sort that parts of the PATRIOT Act included. Nor did it purport to authorize the President to enact such criminal laws, morphing into some sort of one-man legislature. But, on the government's broad reading, the AUMF certainly had armed the President, as of September 18, 2001, with the authority to take most of the steps the PATRIOT Act expressly authorized -- including all of the purely investigative and preventive actions it empowered the President to take -- until the recent sunsetting of some of its provisions. And it had empowered him as well, again on the government's reading, to override any statutory prohibitions that might otherwise have stood in his way. On the government's proposed reading of the AUMF, in other words, the PATRIOT Act, insofar as it confers the powers of investigation and prevention most fiercely sought by the President, becomes a needless and mostly redundant bauble. A statutory construction with such bizarre and altogether unanticipated consequences -- and one that rests on so shaky a foundation -- would be inadmissible even if accepting it would not leave us with serious questions under the Fourth Amendment, which it of course would. Finally, it is telling that Attorney General Gonzales, when asked in his December 19 press briefing why the administration hadn't simply proposed to Congress, in closed session if necessary, that it amend FISA to grant legislative permission for the kind of domestic surveillance program the President deemed essential to the nation's security, replied that the administration had concluded such a request would probably have been futile because Congress would most likely have denied the authority sought! To argue that one couldn't have gotten congressional authorization (in late 2001, when the NSA program was secretly launched) after arguing that, by the way, one did get congressional authorization (in late 2001, when the AUMF was enacted) takes some nerve. Apart from the obvious lapse in logic, it is axiomatic that legislative reluctance to relax or eliminate a prohibition is no defense to a charge of its violation. The inescapable conclusion is that the AUMF did not implicitly authorize what the FISA expressly prohibited. It follows that the presidential program of surveillance at issue here is a violation of the separation of powers -- as grave an abuse of executive authority as I can recall ever having studied. Yours truly, Laurence H. Tribe [The Huffington Post | Full Blog Feed] 2:54:41 PM    comment []

January 10, 2006 I.R.S. Limited Tax Refunds of Poor, Congress Is Told By DAVID CAY JOHNSTON Tax refunds sought by hundreds of thousands of poor Americans have been frozen and their returns labeled fraudulent, blocking refunds for years to come, the Internal Revenue Service's taxpayer advocate told Congress today. The taxpayers, whose average income was $13,000, were not told that they were suspected of fraud, the advocate said in her annual report to Congress. The advocate, Nina Olson, said her staff sampled suspected returns and found that, at most, one in five was questionable. A computer program selected the returns as part of the questionable refund program run by the criminal investigation division of the Internal Revenue Service. In some cases, the criminal division ordered that taxpayers be given no hint that they were suspected of fraud, the report said. Most of the poor people whose returns the computer flagged as fraudulent were seeking the earned income tax credit, a benefit for the working poor. The credit can return all of the income taxes and Social Security taxes withheld from the paychecks of poor people. Without the credit, many poor people coming off welfare and going to work would receive less money because of taxes taken out of their paychecks and the loss of health benefits, I.R.S. data and other government documents show. The average refund sought was $3,500, which under the rules for obtaining the credit means that the vast majority of those suspected of fraud were single parents or married couples with children. The maximum benefit for singles is less than $400. Ms. Olson said the I.R.S. devoted vastly more resources to pursing questionable refunds by the poor, which she said cannot involve more than $9 billion, than to a $100 billion problem with unreported incomes from small businesses that deal only in cash, many of which do not even file tax returns. Ms. Olson, whose job Congress created eight years ago to argue for the interests of taxpayers, also said the top priority for the tax system must be simplification. She said the tax system is so complex that millions of people have difficulty complying and can get in trouble for subtle mistakes, while those with aggressive advisers can manipulate the system to escape paying taxes they owe. Once a return is flagged, requests in future tax returns are also frozen for a number of years that the advocate said she is not allowed to disclose because it goes to law enforcement techniques. Ms. Olson said that 66 percent of those taxpayers who pressed for their refunds were found to be due all the money they sought or even more than they asked for. Leslie M. Book of Villanova University, who runs a tax clinic for the poor and has studied how well the poor comply with the tax laws, said the computer program was a blunt and unfair way to look for fraud. "Surely there are taxpayers who are ineligible claiming the credit," Professor Book said. "But freezing refunds without giving taxpayers process is an extremely dangerous way to administer the earned income tax credit," he said. "These taxpayers often need more rather than less protection because they are not sophisticated, are afraid of government involvement." Another 16 percent were issued partial refunds, Ms. Olson reported. When the I.R.S. criminal investigation division was shown Ms. Olson's report, it said the finding that 80 percent of refunds were a result whole or in part was misleading because it applied only to people who pressed for their refunds. Ms. Olson said criminal investigators had broken the questionable refunds into three groups, the most serious of which were labeled "conclusively fraudulent." In 46 percent of those returns, however, the criminal investigators later acknowledged to the taxpayer advocate that there was no evidence of fraud, according to the report. Ms. Olson said it was unfair, and a waste of resources, to withhold refunds from poor people when at most one in five of them appeared not to be due refunds. She also said that the I.R.S. told her that its program had protected $2.1 billion of revenue. But she said this number was misleading. Just two refunds, from a scheme run by prisoners, accounted to $1.8 billion of the total, she said, citing testimony to Congress by Nancy Jardini, chief of the I.R.S. criminal division. Ms. Olson told Congress that these two refunds almost certainly would have been detected without the questionable refund computer sweeps. The staff of Congress's Joint Committee on Taxation must review all refunds of $2 million or more before they can be issued. Thus, the two refund requests totaling $1.8 billion would have been referred to the Congressional tax staff. 2:29:25 PM    comment []

Copyright 2006 Newspaper Publishing PLC Independent on Sunday (London) January 8, 2006, Sunday SECTION: First Edition; NEWS; Pg. 8 LENGTH: 681 words HEADLINE: GM; NEW STUDY SHOWS UNBORN BABIES COULD BE HARMED; MORTALITY RATE FOR NEW-BORN RATS SIX TIMES HIGHER WHEN MOTHER WAS FED BYLINE: BY GEOFFREY LEAN ENVIRONMENT EDITOR BODY: Women who eat GM foods while pregnant risk endangering their unborn babies, startling new research suggests. The study " carried out by a leading scientist at the Russian Academy of Sciences " found that more than half of the offspring of rats fed on modified soya died in the first three weeks of life, six times as many as those born to mothers with normal diets. Six times as many were also severely underweight. The research " which is being prepared for publication " is just one of a clutch of recent studies that are reviving fears that GM food damages human health. Italian research has found that modified soya affected the liver and pancreas of mice. Australia had to abandon a decade-long attempt to develop modified peas when an official study found they caused lung damage. And last May this newspaper revealed a secret report by the biotech giant Monsanto, which showed that rats fed a diet rich in GM corn had smaller kidneys and higher blood cell counts, suggesting possible damage to their immune systems, than those that ate a similar conventional one. The United Nation's Food and Agriculture Organisation held a workshop on the safety of genetically modified foods at its Rome headquarters late last year. The workshop was addressed by scientists whose research had raised concerns about health dangers. But the World Trade Organisation is expected next month to support a bid by the Bush administration to force European countries to accept GM foods. The Russian research threatens to have an explosive effect on already hostile public opinion. Carried out by Dr Irina Ermakova at the Institute of Higher Nervous Activity and Neurophysiology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, it is believed to be the first to look at the effects of GM food on the unborn. The scientist added flour from a GM soya bean " produced by Monsanto to be resistant to its pesticide, Roundup " to the food of female rats, starting two weeks before they conceived, continuing through pregnancy, birth and nursing. Others were given non-GM soya and a third group was given no soya at all. She found that 36 per cent of the young of the rats fed the modified soya were severely underweight, compared to 6 per cent of the offspring of the other groups. More alarmingly, a staggering 55.6 per cent of those born to mothers on the GM diet perished within three weeks of birth, compared to 9 per cent of the offspring of those fed normal soya, and 6.8 per cent of the young of those given no soya at all. 'The morphology and biochemical structures of rats are very similar to those of humans, and this makes the results very disturbing' said Dr Ermakova. 'They point to a risk for mothers and their babies.' Environmentalists say that " while the results are preliminary " they are potentially so serious that they must be followed up. The American Academy of Environmental Medicine has asked the US National Institute of Health to sponsor an immediate, independent follow-up. The Monsanto soya is widely eaten by Americans. There is little of it, or any GM crop, in British foods though it is imported to feed animals farmed for meat. Tony Coombes, director of corporate affairs for Monsanto UK, said: 'The overwhelming weight of evidence from published, peer-reviewed, independently conducted scientific studies demonstrates that Roundup Ready soy can be safely consumed by rats, as well as all other animal species studied.' What the experiment found Russian scientists added flour made from a GM soya to the diet of female rats two weeks before mating them, and continued feeding it to them during pregnancy, birth and nursing. Others were give non-GM soya or none at all. Six times as many of the offspring of those fed the modified soya were severely underweight (like the baby rat on the left) as those (such as the one on the right) born to the rats given normal diets. Within three weeks, 55.6 per cent of the young of the mothers given the modified soya died, compared to 9 per cent of the offspring of those fed the conventional soy. LOAD-DATE: January 8, 2006 2:26:39 PM    comment []

Ariel Sharon...  Israel's Prime Minister was a ruthless military commander responsible for one of the most shocking war crimes of the 20th century, argues Robert Fisk. President George Bush acclaims Ariel Sharon as 'a man of peace', yet the blood that was shed at Sabra and Chatila remains a stain on the conscience of the Zionist nation. As Sharon lies stricken in his hospital bed, his political career over, how will history judge him? By Robert Fisk - 06 January 2006 http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article336785.ece http://www.globalecho.org/view_article.php?aid=6289 I shook hands with him once, a brisk, no-nonsense soldier's grip from Sharon as he finished a review of the vicious Phalangist militiamen who stood in the barracks square at Karantina in Beirut. Who would have thought, I asked myself then, that this same bunch of murderers - the men who butchered their way through the Palestinian Sabra and Chatila refugee camps only a few weeks earlier - had their origins in the Nazi Olympics of 1936. That's when old Pierre Gemayel - still alive and standing stiffly to attention for Sharon - watched the "order" of Nazi Germany and proposed to bring some of this "order" to Lebanon. That's what Gemayel told me himself. Did Sharon not understand this. Of course, he must have done. Back on 18 September that same year, Loren Jenkins of The Washington Post and Karsten Tveit of Norwegian television and I had clambered over the piled corpses of Chatila - of raped and eviscerated women and their husbands and children and brothers - and Jenkins, knowing that the Isrealis had sat around the camps for two nights watching this filth, shrieked "Sharon!" in anger and rage. He was right. Sharon it was who sent the Phalange into the camps on the night of 16 September - to hunt for "terrorists", so he claimed at the time. The subsequent Israeli Kahan commission of enquiry into this atrocity provided absolute proof that Israeli soldiers saw the massacre taking place. The evidence of a Lieutenant Avi Grabovsky was crucial. He was an Israeli deputy tank commander and reported what he saw to his higher command. "Don't interfere," the senior officer said. Ever afterwards, Israeli embassies around the world would claim that the commission held Sharon only indirectly responsible for the massacre. It was untrue. The last page of the official Israeli report held Sharon "personally responsible". It was years later that the Israeli-trained Phalangist commander, Elie Hobeika, now working for the Syrians, agreed to turn state's evidence against Sharon - now the Israeli Prime Minister - at a Brussels court. The day after the Israeli attorney general declared Sharon's defence a "state" matter, Hobeika was killed by a massive car bomb in east Beirut. Israel denied responsibility. US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld traveled to Brussels and quietly threatened to withdraw Nato headquarters from Belgium if the country maintained its laws to punish war criminals from foreign nations. Within months, George W Bush had declared Sharon "a man of peace". It was all over. In the end, Sharon got away with it, even when it was proved that he had, the night before the Phalangists attacked the civilians of the camp, publicly blamed the Palestinians for the murder of their leader, President-elect Bashir Gemayel. Sharon told these ruthless men that the Palestinians had killed their beloved "chief". Then he sent them in among the civilian sheep - and claimed later he could never have imagined what they would do in Chatila. Only years later was it proved that hundreds of Palestinians who survived the original massacre were interrogated by the Israelis and then handed back to the murderers to be slaughtered over the coming weeks. So it is as a war criminal that Sharon will be known forever in the Arab world, through much of the Western world, in fact - save, of course, for the craven men in the White House and the State Department and the Blair Cabinet - as well as many leftist Israelis. Sabra and Chatila was a crime against humanity. Its dead counted more than half the fatalities of the World Trade Centre attacks of 2001. But the man who was responsible was a "man of peace". It was he who claimed that the preposterous Yasser Arafat was a Palestinian bin Laden. He it was who as Israeli foreign minister opposed Nato's war in Kosovo, inveighing against "Islamic terror" in Kosovo. "The moment that Israel expresses support...it's likely to be the next victim. Imagine that one day Arabs in Galilee demand that the region in which they live be recognised as an autonomous area, connected to the Palestinian Authority..." Ah yes, Sharon as an ally of another war criminal, Slobodan Milosevic. There must be no Albanian state in Kosovo. Ever since he was elected in 2001 - and especially since his withdrawal of settlements from the rubbish tip of Gaza last year, a step which would, according to his spokesman, turn any plans for a Palestinian state in the West Bank into "formaldehyde" - his supporters have tried to turn Sharon into a pragmatist, another Charles de Gaulle. His new party was supposed to be proof of this. But in reality, Sharon had more in common with the putchist generals of Algeria. He voted against the peace treaty with Egypt in 1979. He voted against a withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 1985. He opposed Israel's participation in the Madrid peace conference in 1991. He opposed the Knesset plenum vote on the Oslo agreement in 1993. He abstained on a vote for peace with Jordan in 1994. He voted against the Hebron agreement in 1997. He condemned the manner of Israel's retreat from Lebanon in 2000. By 2002, he had built 34 new Jewish colonies on Palestinian land. And he was a man of peace. There was a story told to me by one of the men investigating Sharon's responsibility for the Sabra and Chatila massacre, and the story is that the then Israeli defence minister, before he sent his Phalangist allies into the camps, announced that it was Palestinian "terrorists" who had murdered their newly assassinated leader, President-elect Gemayel. Sharon was to say later that he never dreamed the Phalange would massacre the Palestinians. But how could he say that if he claimed earlier that the Palestinians killed the leader of the Phalange? In reality, no Palestinians were involved in Gemayel's death. It might seem odd in this new war to be dwelling about that earlier atrocity. I am fascinated by the language. Murderers, terrorists. That's what Sharon said then, and it's what he says now. Did he really make that statement in 1982? I begin to work the phone from Jerusalem, calling up Associated Press bureaus that might still have their files from 19 years ago. He would have made that speech - if indeed he used those words - some time on 15 September 1982. One Sunday afternoon, my phone rings in Jerusalem. It's from an Israeli I met in Jaffa Street after the Sbarro bombing. An American Jewish woman had been screaming abuse at me - foreign journalists are being insulted by both sides with ever more violent language - and this man suddenly intervenes to protect me. He's smiling and cheerful and we exchange phone numbers. Now on the phone, he says he's taking the El-Al night flight to New York with his wife. Would I like to drop by for tea? He turns out to have a luxurious apartment next to the King David Hotel and I notice, when I read his name on the outside security buzzer, that he's a rabbi. He's angry because a neighbour has just let down a friend's car tyres in the underground parking lot and he's saying how he felt like smashing the windows of the neighbour's car. His wife, bringing me tea and feeding me cookies, says that her husband - again, he should remain anonymous - gets angry very quickly. There's a kind of gentleness about them both - how easy it is to spot couples who are still in love - that is appealing. But when the rabbi starts to talk about the Palestinians, his voice begins to echo through the apartment. He says several times that Sharon is a good friend of his, a fine man, who's been to visit him in his New York office. What we should do is go into those vermin pits and take out the terrorists and murderers. Vermin pits, yes I said, vermin, animals. I tell you what we should do. If one stone is lobbed from a refugee camp, we should bring the bulldozers and tear down the first 20 houses close to the road. If there's another stone, another 20 ones. They'd soon learn not to throw stones. Look, I tell you this. Stones are lethal. If you throw a stone at me, I'll shoot you. I have the right to shoot you. Now the rabbi is a generous man. He's been in Israel to donate a vastly important and, I have no doubt, vastly expensive medical centre to the country. He is well-read. And I liked the fact that - unlike too many Israelis and Palestinians who put on a "we-only-want-peace" routine to hide more savage thoughts - he at least spoke his mind. But this is getting out of hand. Why should I throw a stone at the rabbi? He shouts again. "If you throw a stone at me, I will shoot you." But if you throw a stone at me, I say, I won't shoot you. Because I have the right not to shoot you. He frowns. "Then I'd say you're out of your mind." I am driving home when it suddenly hits me. The Old and New Testaments have just collided. The rabbi's dad taught him about an eye for an eye - or 20 homes for a stone - whereas Bill Fisk taught me about turning the other cheek. Judaism is bumping against Christianity. So is it any surprise that Judaism and Islam are crashing into each other? For despite all the talk of Christians and Jews being "people of the Book", Muslims are beginning to express ever harsher views of Jews. The sickening Hamas references to Jews as "the sons of pigs and monkeys" are echoed by Israelis who talk of Palestinians as cockroaches or "vermin", who tell you - as the rabbi told me - that Islam is a warrior religion, a religion that does not value human life. And I recall several times a Jewish settler who told me back in 1993 - in Gaza, just before the Oslo accords were signed - that "we do not recognise their Koran as a valid document." I call up Eva Stern in New York. Her talent for going through archives convinces me she can find out what Sharon said before the Sabra and Chatila massacre. I give her the date that is going through my head: 15 September 1982. She comes back on the line the same night. "Turn your fax on," Eva says. "You're going to want to read this." The paper starts to crinkle out of the machine. An AP report of 15 September 1982. "Defence Minister Ariel Sharon, in a statement, tied the killing [of the Phalangist leader Gemayel] to the PLO, saying: "It symbolises the terrorist murderousness of the PLO terrorist organisations and their supporters." Then, a few hours later, Sharon sent the Phalange gunmen into the Palestinian camps. Reading that fax again and again, I feel a chill coming over me. There are Israelis today with as much rage towards the Palestinians as the Phalange 19 years ago. And these are the same words I am hearing today, from the same man, about the same people. In September 2000, Ariel Sharon marched to the Muslim holy places - above the site of the Jewish Temple Mount - accompanied by about a thousand Israeli policemen. Within 24 hours, Israeli snipers opened fire with rifles on Palestinian protesters battling with police in the grounds of the seventh-century Dome of the Rock. At least four were killed and the head of the Israeli police, Yehuda Wilk, later confirmed that snipers had fired into the crowd when Palestinians "were felt to be endangering the lives of officers". Sixty-six Palestinians were wounded, most of them by rubber-coated steel bullets. The killings came almost exactly 10 years after armed Israeli police killed 19 Palestinian demonstrators and wounded another 140 in an incident at exactly the same spot, a slaughter that almost lost the United States its Arab support in the prelude to the 1991 Gulf War. Sharon showed no remorse. "The state of Israel," he told CNN, "cannot afford that an Israeli citizen will not be able to visit part of his country, not to speak for the holiest for the Jewish people all around the world." He did not, however, explain why he should have chosen this moment - immediately after the collapse of the "peace process" - to undertake such a provocative act. Stone-throwing and shooting spread to the West Bank. Near Qalqiliya, a Palestinian policeman shot dead an Israeli soldier and wounded another - they were apparently part of a joint Israeli-Palestinian patrol originally set up under the terms of the Oslo agreement. "Everything was pre-planned," Sharon would claim five weeks later. "They took advantage of my visit to the Temple Mount. This was not the first time I've been there..." Jerusalem is a city of illusions. Here Ariel Sharon promises his people "security" and brings them war. On the main road to Ma'ale Adumim, inside Israel's illegal "municipal boundaries", Israelis drive at over 100 mph. In the old city, Israeli troops and Palestinian civilians curse each other before the few astonished Christian tourists. Loving Jesus doesn't help to make sense of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Gideon Samet got it right in Ha'aretz. "Jerusalem looks like a Bosnia about to be born. Main thoroughfares inside the Green Line... have become mortally perilous... The capital's suburbs are exposed as Ramat Rachel was during the war of independence..." Samet is pushing it a bit. Life is more dangerous for Palestinians than for Israelis. Terrorism, terrorism, terrorism. "I suggest that we repeat to ourselves every day and throughout the day," Sharon tells us, "that there will be no negotiations with the Palestinians until there is a total cessation of terrorism, violence and incitement." Gaza now is a miniature Beirut. Under Israeli siege, struck by F-16s and tank fire and gunboats, starved and often powerless - there are now six-hour electricity cuts every day in Gaza - it's as if Arafat and Sharon are replaying their bloody days in Lebanon. Sharon used to call Arafat a mass murderer back then. It's important not to become obsessed during wars. But Sharon's words were like an old, miserable film had seen before. Every morning in Jerusalem, I would pick up the Jerusalem Post. And there on the front page, as usual, will be another Sharon diatribe. PLO murderers. Palestinian Authority terror. Murderous terrorists. Within hours of the 11 September 2001 attacks on the United States, Ariel Sharon turned Israel into America's ally in the "war on terror", immediately realigning Yasser Arafat as the Palestinian version of bin Laden and the Palestinian suicide bombers as blood brothers of the 19 Arabs - none of them Palestinian - who hijacked the four American airliners. In the new and vengeful spirit that President Bush encouraged among Americans, Israel's supporters in the United States now felt free to promote punishments for Israel's opponents that came close to the advocacy of war crimes. Nathan Lewin, a prominent Washington attorney and Jewish communal leader - and an often-mentioned candidate for a federal judgeship - called for the execution of family members of suicide bombers. "If executing some suicide bombers' families saves the lives of even an equal number of potential civilian victims, the exchange is, I believe, ethically permissible," he wrote in the journal Sh'ma. When Sharon began his operation "Defensive Shield", the UN Security Council, with the active participation and support of the United States, demanded an immediate end to Israel's reoccupation of the West Bank. President George W Bush insisted that Sharon should follow the advice of "Israel's American friends" and - for Tony Blair was with Bush at the time - "Israel's British friends", and withdraw. "When I say withdraw, I mean it," Bush snapped three days later. But he meant nothing of the kind. Instead, he sent secretary of state Colin Powell off on an "urgent" mission of peace, a journey to Israel and the West Bank that would take an incredible eight days - just enough time, Bush presumably thought, to allow his "friend" Sharon to finish his latest bloody adventure in the West Bank. Supposedly unaware that Israel's chief of staff, Shoal Mofaz, had told Sharon that he needed at least eight weeks to "finish the job" of crushing the Palestinians, Powell wandered off around the Mediterranean, dawdling in Morocco, Spain, Egypt and Jordan before finally fetching up in Israel. If Washington firefighters took that long to reach a blaze, the American capital would long ago have turned to ashes. But of course, the purpose of Powell's idleness was to allow enough time for Jenin to be turned to ashes. Mission, I suppose, accomplished. Sharon's ability to scorn the Americans was always humiliating for Washington. Before the massacres of 1982, Philip Habib was President Reagan's special representative, his envoy to Beirut increasingly horrified by the ferocity of Sharon's assault on the city. Not long before he died, I asked Habib why he didn't stop the bloodshed. "I could see it," he said. "I told the Israelis they were destroying the city, that they were firing non-stop. They just said they weren't. They said they werent doing that. I called Sharon on the phone. He said it wasnt true. That damned man said to me on the phone that what I saw happening wasn't happening. So I held the telephone out of the window so he could hear the explosions. Then he said to me: 'What kind of conversation is this where you hold a telephone out of a window?'" Sharon's involvement in the 1982 Sabra and Chatila massacres continues to fester around the man who, according to Israel's 1993 Kahan commission report, bore "personal responsibility" for the Phalangist slaughter. So fearful were the Israeli authorities that their leaders would be charged with war crimes that they drew up a list of countries where they might have to stand trial - and which they should henceforth avoid - now that European nations were expanding their laws to include foreign nationals who had committed crimes abroad. Belgian judges were already considering a complaint by survivors of Sabra and Chatila - one of them a female rape victim - while a campaign had been mounted abroad against other Israeli figures associated with the atrocities. Eva Stern was one of those who tried to prevent Brigadier General Amos Yaron being appointed Israeli defence attaché in Washington because he had allowed the Lebanese Phalange militia to enter the camps on 16 September 1982, and knew - according to the Kahan commission report - that women and children were being murdered. He only ended the killings two days later. Canada declined to accept Yaron as defence attaché. Stern, who compiled a legal file on Yaron, later vainly campaigned with human rights groups to annul his appointment - by Prime Minister Ehud Barak - as director general of the Israeli defence ministry. The Belgian government changed their law - and dropped potential charges against Sharon - after a visit to Brussels by US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the man who famously referred on 6 August 2002 to Israelis' control over "the so-called occupied territory" which was "the result of a war, which they won". Rumsfeld had threatened that NATO headquarters might be withdrawn from Belgian soil if the Belgians didn't drop the charges against Sharon. Yet all the while, we were supposed to believe that it was the corrupt, Parkinson's-haunted Yasser Arafat who was to blame for the new war. He was chastised by George Bush while the Palestinian people continued to be bestialised by the Israeli leadership. Rafael Eytan, the former Israeli chief of staff, had referred to Palestinians as "cockroaches in a glass jar". Menachem Begin called them "two-legged beasts". The Shas party leader who suggested that God should send the Palestinian "ants" to hell, also called them "serpents". In August 2000, Barak called them crocodiles. Israeli chief of staff Moshe Yalon described the Palestinians as a "cancerous manifestation" and equated the military action in the occupied territories with "chemotherapy". In March 2001, the Israeli tourism minister, Rehavem Zeevi, called Arafat a "scorpion". Sharon repeatedly called Arafat a "murderer" and compared him to bin Laden. He contributed to the image of Palestinian inhumanity in an interview in 1995, when he stated that Fatah sometimes punished Palestinians by "chopping off limbs of seven- and eight-year-old children in front of their parents as a form of punishment". However brutal Fatah may be, there is no record of any such atrocity being committed by them. But if enough people can be persuaded to believe this nonsense, then the use of Israeli death squads against such Palestinians becomes natural rather than illegal. Sharon was forever, like his Prime Minister Menachem Begin, evoking the Second World War in spurious parallels with the Arab-Israeli conflict. When in the late winter of 1988 the US State Department opened talks with the PLO in Tunis after Arafat renounced "terrorism", Sharon stated in an interview with the Wall Street Journal that this was worse than the British and French appeasement before the Second World War when "the world, to prevent war, sacrificed one of the democracies". Arafat was "like Hitler who wanted so much to negotiate with the Allies in the second half of the second world war...and the Allies said 'No'. They said there are enemies with whom you don't talk. They pushed him to the bunker in Berlin where he found his death, and Arafat is the same kind of enemy, that with whom you don't talk. He's got too much blood on his hands." Thus within his lifetime Sharon was able to bestialise Yasser Arafat as both Hitler and bin Laden. The thrust of Sharon's argument in those days was that the creation of a Palestinian state would mean a war in which "the terrorists will be acting from behind a cordon of UN forces and observers". By the time he was on his apparent death bed yesterday that Palestinian "state", far from being protected by the UN, was non-existent, its territory still being carved up in the West Bank by growing Jewish settlements, road blocks and a concrete wall. Largely forgotten amid Sharon's hatred for "terrorism" was his outspoken criticism of Nato's war against Serbia in 1999, when he was Israeli foreign minister. Eleven years earlier he had sympathised with the political objective of Slobodan Milosevic: to prevent the establishment of an Albanian state in Kosovo. This, he said, would lead to "Greater Albania" and provide a haven for - readers must here hold their breath - "Islamic terror". In a Belgrade newspaper interview, Sharon said that "we stand together with you against the Islamic terror". Once Nato's bombing of Serbia was under way, however, Sharon's real reason for supporting the Serbs became apparent. "It's wrong for Israel to provide legitimacy to this forceful sort of intervention which the Nato countries are deploying... in an attempt to impose a solution on regional disputes," he said. "The moment Israel expresses support for the sort of model of action we're seeing in Kosovo, it's likely to be the next victim. Imagine that one day Arabs in Galilee demand that the region in which they live be recognised as an autonomous area, connected to the Palestinian Authority..." NATO's bombing, Sharon said, was "brutal interventionism". The Israeli journalist Uri Avnery, who seized on this extraordinary piece of duplicity, said that "Islamic terror" in Kosovo could only exist in "Sharon's racist imagination". Avnery was far bolder in translating what lay behind Sharon's antipathy towards Nato action than Sharon himself. "If the Americans and the Europeans interfere today in the matter of Kosovo, what is to prevent them from doing the same tomorrow in the matter of Palestine? "Sharon has made it crystal-clear to the world that there is a similarity and perhaps even identity between Milosevic's attitude towards Kosovo and the attitude of Netanyahu and Sharon towards the Palestinians." Besides, for a man whose own "brutal interventionism" in Lebanon in 1982 led to a Middle East bloodbath of unprecedented proportions, Sharon's remarks were, to say the least, hypocritical. As Sharon sent an armoured column to reinvade Nablus, still ignoring Bush's demand to withdraw his troops from the West Bank, Colin Powell turned on Arafat, warning him that it was his "last chance" to show his leadership. There was no mention of the illegal Jewish settlements. There was to be no "last chance" threat for Sharon. The Americans even allowed him to refuse a UN fact-finding team in the occupied territories. Sharon was meeting with President George W Bush in Washington when a suicide bomber killed at least 15 Israeli civilians in a Tel Aviv nightclub; he broke off his visit and returned at once to Israel. Prominent American Jewish leaders, including Elie Wiesel and Alan Dershowitz, immediately called upon the White House not to put pressure on Sharon to join new Middle East peace talks. "This is a tough time," Wiesel announced. "This is not a time to pressure Israel. Any prime minister would do what Sharon is doing. He is doing his best. They should trust him." Wiesel need hardly have worried. Only a month earlier, the Americans rolled out their first S-70A-55 troopcarrying Black Hawk helicopter to be sold to the Israelis. Israel had purchased 24 of the new machines, costing $211m - most of which would be paid for by the United States - even though it had 24 earlier-model Black Hawks. The log book of the first of the new helicopters was ceremonially handed over to the director general of the Israeli defence ministry, the notorious Amos Yaron, by none other than Alexander Haig - the man who gave Begin the green light to invade Lebanon in 1982. Perhaps the only man who now had the time to work out the logic of this appalling conflict was the Palestinian leader sitting now in his surrounded, broken, ill-lit and unhealthy office block in Ramallah. The one characteristic Arafat shared with Sharon - apart from old age and decrepitude - was his refusal to plan ahead. What he said, what he did, what he proposed, was decided only at the moment he was forced to act. This was partly his old guerrilla training, a characteristic shared by Saddam. If you don't know what you are going to do tomorrow, you can be sure that your enemies don't know either. Sharon took the same view. The most terrible incident - praised by Sharon at the time as a "great success" - was the attack by Israel on Salah Shehada, a Hamas leader, which slaughtered nine children along with eight adults. Their names gave a frightful reality to this child carnage: 18-month-old Ayman Matar, three-year-old Mohamed Matar, five-year-old Diana Matar, four-year-old Sobhi Hweiti, six-year-old Mohamed Hweiti, 10-year-old Ala Matar, 15-year-old Iman Shehada, 17-year-old Maryam Matar. And Dina Matar. She was two months old. An Israeli air force pilot dropped a one-ton bomb on their homes from an American-made F-16 aircraft on 22 July 2002. What war did Sharon think he was fighting? And what was he fighting for? Sharon regarded the attack as a victory against "terror". Al-Wazzir, now an economic analyst in Gaza, believed that people who did not believe themselves to be targets were now finding themselves under attack. "There's a network of Israeli army and air force intelligence and Mossad and Shin Bet that works together, feeding each other information. They can cross the lines between Area C and Area B in the occupied territories. Usually they carry out operations when IDF morale is low. When they killed my father, the IDF was in very low spirits because of the first intifada. So they go for a 'spectacular' to show what great 'warriors' they are. Now the IDF morale is low again because of the second intifada." Palestinian security officers in Gaza were intrigued by the logic behind the Israeli killings. "Our guys meet their guys and we know their officers and operatives," one of the Palestinian officials tells me. "I tell you this frankly - they are as corrupt and indisciplined as we are. And as ruthless. After they targeted Mohamed Dahlan's convoy when he was coming back from security talks, Dahlan talked to foreign minister Peres. "Look what you guys are doing to us," Dahlan told Peres. "Don't you realise it was me who took Sharon's son to meet Arafat?" Al-Wazzir understands some of the death squad logic. "It has some effect because we are a paternalistic society. We believe in the idea of a father figure. But when they assassinated my dad, the intifada didn't stop. It was affected, but all the political objectives failed. Rather than demoralising the Palestinians, it fuelled the intifada. They say there's now a hundred Palestinians on the murder list. No, I don't think the Palestinians will adopt the same type of killings against Israeli intelligence. "An army is an institution, a system; murdering an officer just results in him the great war for civilisation 573 being replaced..." The murder of political or military opponents was a practice the Israelis honed in Lebanon where Lebanese guerrilla leaders were regularly blown up by hidden bombs or shot in the back by Shin Bet execution squads, often - as in the case of an Amal leader in the village of Bidias - after interrogation. And all in the name of "security". Throughout the latest bloodletting, the one distinctive feature of the conflict - the illegal and continuing colonisation of occupied Arab land - was yet again a taboo subject, to be ignored, or mentioned in passing only when Jewish settlers were killed. That this was the world's last colonial conflict, in which the colonisers were supported by the United States, was undiscussable, a prohibited subject, something quite outside the brutality between Palestinians and Israelis which was, so we had to remember, now part of America's "war on terror". This is what Sharon had dishonestly claimed since 11 September 2001. The truth, however, became clear in a revealing interview Sharon gave to a French magazine in December of that year, in which he recalled a telephone conversation with Jacques Chirac. Sharon said he told the French president that: "I was at that time reading a terrible book about the Algerian war. It's a book whose title reads in Hebrew: The Savage War of Peace. I know that President Chirac fought as an officer during this conflict and that he had himself been decorated for his courage. So, in a very friendly way, I told him: 'Mr. President, you have to understand us, here, it's as if we are in Algeria. We have no place to go. And besides, we have no intention of leaving.'" Sana Sersawi speaks carefully, loudly but slowly, as she recalls the chaotic, dangerous, desperately tragic events that overwhelmed her almost exactly 19 years ago, on 18 September 1982. As one of the survivors prepared to testify against the Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon - who was then Israel's defence minister - she stops to search her memory when she confronts the most terrible moments of her life. "The Lebanese Forces militia had taken us from our homes and marched us up to the entrance to the camp where a large hole had been dug in the earth. The men were told to get into it. Then the militiamen shot a Palestinian. The women and children had climbed over bodies to reach this spot, but we were truly shocked by seeing this man killed in front of us and there was a roar of shouting and screams from the women. That's when we heard the Israelis on loudspeakers shouting, "Give us the men, give us the men." We thought: "Thank God, they will save us." It was to prove a cruelly false hope. Mrs Sersawi, three months pregnant, saw her 30-year-old husband Hassan, and her Egyptian brother-in-law Faraj el-Sayed Ahmed standing in the crowd of men. "We were all told to walk up the road towards the Kuwaiti embassy, the women and children in front, the men behind. We had been separated. There were Phalangist militiamen and Israeli soldiers walking alongside us. I could still see Hassan and Faraj. It was like a parade. There were several hundred of us. When we got to the Cité Sportive, the Israelis put us women in a big concrete room and the men were taken to another side of the stadium. There were a lot of men from the camp and I could no longer see my husband. The Israelis went round saying "Sit, sit." It was 11 o'clock. An hour later, we were told to leave. But we stood around outside amid the Israeli soldiers, waiting for our men." Sana Sersawi waited in the bright, sweltering sun for Hassan and Faraj to emerge. "Some men came out, none of them younger than 40, and they told us to be patient, that hundreds of men were still inside. Then about four in the afternoon, an Israeli officer came out. He was wearing dark glasses and said in Arabic: "What are you all waiting for?" He said there was nobody left, that everyone had gone. There were Israeli trucks moving out with tarpaulin over them. We couldn't see inside. And there were Jeeps and tanks and a bulldozer making a lot of noise. We stayed there as it got dark and the Israelis appeared to be leaving and we were very nervous. "But then when the Israelis had moved away, we went inside. And there was no one there. Nobody. I had been only three years married. I never saw my husband again." The smashed Camille Chamoun Sports Stadium was a natural "holding centre" for prisoners. Only two miles from Beirut airport, it had been an ammunition dump for Yasser Arafat's PLO and repeatedly bombed by Israeli jets during the 1982 siege of Beirut so that its giant, smashed exterior looked like a nightmare denture. The Palestinians had earlier mined its cavernous interior, but its vast, underground storage space and athletics changing-rooms remained intact. It was a familiar landmark to all of us who lived in Beirut. At mid-morning on 18 September 1982 - around the time Sana Sersawi says she was brought to the stadium - I saw hundreds of Palestinian and Lebanese prisoners, perhaps well over 1,000 in all, sitting in its gloomy, cavernous interior, squatting in the dust, watched over by Israeli soldiers and plainclothes Shin Beth agents and a group of men who I suspected, correctly, were Lebanese collaborators. The men sat in silence, obviously in fear. From time to time, I noted, a few were taken away. They were put into Israeli army trucks or jeeps or Phalangist vehicles - for further "interrogation". Nor did I doubt this. A few hundred metres away, up to 600 massacre victims of the Sabra and Chatila Palestinian refugee camps rotted in the sun, the stench of decomposition drifting over the prisoners and their captors alike. It was suffocatingly hot. Loren Jenkins of The Washington Post, Paul Eedle of Reuters and I had only got into the cells because the Israelis assumed - given our Western appearance - that we must have been members of Shin Beth. Many of the prisoners had their heads bowed. Arab prisoners usually adopted this pose of humiliation. But Israel's militiamen had been withdrawn from the camps, their slaughter over, and at least the Israeli army was now in charge. So what did these men have to fear? Looking back - and listening to Sana Sersawi today - I shudder now at our innocence. My notes of the time contain some ominous clues. We found a Lebanese employee of Reuters, Abdullah Mattar, among the prisoners and obtained his release, Paul leading him away with his arm around the man's shoulders. "They take us away, one by one, for interrogation," one of the prisoners muttered to me. "They are Haddad militiamen. Usually they bring the people back after interrogation, but not always. Sometimes the people do not return." Then an Israeli officer ordered me to leave. Why couldn't the prisoners talk to me? I asked. "They can talk if they want," he replied. "But they have nothing to say." All the Israelis knew what had happened inside the camps. The smell of the corpses was now overpowering. Outside, a Phalangist Jeep with the words "Military Police" painted on it - if so exotic an institution could be associated with this gang of murderers - drove by. A few television crews had turned up. One filmed the Lebanese Christian militiamen outside the Cité Sportive. He also filmed a woman pleading to an Israeli army colonel called "Yahya" for the release of her husband. The colonel has now been positively identified by The Independent. Today, he is a general in the Israeli army. Along the main road opposite the stadium there was a line of Israeli Merkava tanks, their crews sitting on the turrets, smoking, watching the men being led from the stadium in ones or twos, some being set free, others being led away by Shin Beth men or by Lebanese men in drab khaki overalls. All these soldiers knew what had happened inside the camps. One, Lt Avi Grabovsky - he was later to testify to the Israeli Kahan commission - had even witnessed the murder of several civilians the previous day and had been told not to "interfere". And in the days that followed, strange reports reached us. A girl had been dragged from a car in Damour by Phalangist militiamen and taken away, despite her appeals to a nearby Israeli soldier. Then the cleaning lady of a Lebanese woman who worked for a US television chain complained bitterly that Israelis had arrested her husband. He was never seen again. There were other vague rumours of "disappeared" people. I wrote in my notes at the time that "even after Chatila, Israel's 'terrorist' enemies were being liquidated in West Beirut." But I had not directly associated this dark conviction with the Cité Sportive. I had not even reflected on the fearful precedents of a sports stadium in time of war. Hadn't there been a sports stadium in Santiago a few years before, packed with prisoners after Pinochet's coup d'état, a stadium from which many prisoners never returned? Among the testimonies gathered by lawyers seeking to indict Ariel Sharon for war crimes is that of Wadha al-Sabeq. On Friday 17 September 1982, she said, while the massacre was still - unknown to her - under way inside Sabra and Chatila, she was in her home with her family in Bir Hassan, just opposite the camps. "Neighbours came and said the Israelis wanted to stamp our ID cards, so we went downstairs and we saw both Israelis and Lebanese forces on the road. The men were separated from the women." This separation - with its awful shadow of similar separations at Srebrenica during the Bosnian war - was a common feature of these mass arrests. "We were told to go to the Cité Sportive. The men stayed put." Among the men were Wadha's two sons, 19-year-old Mohamed and 16-year-old Ali and her brother Mohamed. "We went to the Cité Sportive, as the Israelis told us," she says. "I never saw my sons or brother again." The survivors tell distressingly similar stories. Bahija Zrein says she was ordered by an Israeli patrol to go to the Cité Sportive and the men with her, including her 22-year-old brother, were taken away. Some militiamen - watched by the Israelis - loaded him into a car, blindfolded, she says. "That's how he disappeared," she says in her official testimony, "and I have never seen him again since." It was only a few days afterwards that we journalists began to notice a discrepancy in the figures of dead. While up to 600 bodies had been found inside Sabra and Chatila, 1,800 civilians had been reported as "missing". We assumed - how easy assumptions are in war --that they had been killed in the three days between 16 September 1982 and the withdrawal of the Phalangist killers on 18 September, and that their corpses had been secretly buried outside the camp. Beneath the golf course, we suspected. The idea that many of these young people had been murdered outside the camps or after 18 September, that the killings were still going on while we walked through the camps, never occurred to us. Why did we journalists at the time not think of this? The following year, the Israeli Kahan commission published its report, condemning Sharon but ending its own inquiry of the atrocity on 18 September, with just a one-line hint - unexplained - that several hundred people may have "disappeared around the same time". The commission interviewed no Palestinian survivors but it was allowed to become the narrative of history. The idea that the Israelis went on handing over prisoners to their bloodthirsty militia allies never occurred to us. The Palestinians of Sabra and Chatila are now giving evidence that this is exactly what happened. One man, Abdel Nasser Alameh, believes his brother Ali was handed to the Phalange on the morning of 18 September. A Palestinian Christian woman called Milaneh Boutros has recorded how, in a truck-load of women and children, she was taken from the camps to the Christian town of Bikfaya, the home of the newly assassinated Christian President-elect Bashir Gemayel, where a grief-stricken Christian woman ordered the execution of a 13-year-old boy in the truck. He was shot. The truck must have passed at least four Israeli checkpoints on its way to Bikfaya. And heaven spare me, I had even met the woman who ordered the boy's execution. Even before the slaughter inside the camps had ended, Shahira Abu Rudeina says she was taken to the Cité Sportive where, in one of the underground "holding centres", she saw a retarded man, watched by Israeli soldiers, burying bodies in a pit. Her evidence might be rejected were it not for the fact that she also expressed her gratitude for an Israeli soldier - inside the Chatila camp, against all the evidence given by the Israelis - who prevented the murder of her daughters by the Phalange. Long after the war, the ruins of the Cité Sportive were torn down and a brand new marble stadium was built in its place, partly by the British. Pavarotti has sung there. But the testimony of what may lie beneath its foundations - and its frightful implications - will give Ariel Sharon further reason to fear an indictment. I had been in the Sabra and Chatila camps when these crimes took place. I had returned to the camps, year after year, to try to discover what happened to the missing thousand men. Karsten Tveit of Norwegian television had been with me in 1982 and he had returned to Beirut many times with the same purpose. Lawyers weren't the only people investigating these crimes against humanity. In 2001, Tveit arrived in Lebanon with the original 1982 tapes of those women pleading for their menfolk at the gates of the Cité Sportive. He visited the poky little video shops in the present-day camp and showed and reshowed the tapes until local Palestinians identified them; then Tveit set off to find the women - 19 years older now - who were on the tape, who had asked for their sons and brothers and fathers and husbands outside the Cité Sportive. He traced them all. None had ever seen their loved ones again. Extracted from The Great War For Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East, by Robert Fisk. Published by Fourth Estate on 3 October 2005 www.independent.co.uk go to top http://www.robert-fisk.com 10:47:21 AM    comment []

Death of an American Hero By Robert Parry January 10, 2006 "Hero" is one of the most abused words in the English language, often applied to people who simply face some danger or who do well in sports or business. But the word really should be reserved for someone who - in the face of danger - does the right thing. Hugh Thompson, who died on Jan. 6 at the age of 62 from cancer, was such a hero. In one of the darkest moments of modern American history - on March 16, 1968, in the Vietnamese village of My Lai - Thompson landed his helicopter between rampaging U.S. soldiers and a group of terrified Vietnamese villagers to save their lives. Circling over the village, Thompson was at first uncertain what he was witnessing. A bloodied unit of the Americal Division, furious over its own casualties, had stormed into a hamlet known as My Lai 4. Revenge-seeking American soldiers rousted Vietnamese civilians - mostly old men, women and children - from their thatched huts and herded them into the village's irrigation ditches. As the round-up continued, some Americans raped the girls. Then, under orders from junior officers on the ground, soldiers began emptying their M-16s into the terrified peasants. Some parents used their bodies futilely to shield their children from the bullets. Soldiers stepped among the corpses to finish off the wounded. American Heroes But there also were American heroes that day in My Lai, including helicopter pilot Hugh Clowers Thompson Jr. from Stone Mountain, Georgia. After concluding that he was witnessing a massacre, he landed his helicopter between one group of fleeing civilians and American soldiers in pursuit. Thompson ordered his helicopter door gunner, Lawrence Colburn, to shoot the Americans if they tried to harm the Vietnamese. After a tense confrontation, the soldiers backed off. Later, two of Thompson's men climbed into one ditch filled with corpses and pulled out a three-year-old boy who was still alive. Thompson, then a warrant officer, called in other U.S. helicopters to assist the Vietnamese. All told, they airlifted at least nine Vietnamese civilians to safety. When he returned to headquarters, a furious Thompson reported what he had witnessed, leading to orders that the My Lai killings be stopped. By then, however, the slaughter had raged for four hours, claiming the lives of 347 Vietnamese, including babies. "They said I was screaming quite loud," Thompson told U.S. News & World Report in 2004. "I threatened never to fly again. I didn't want to be a part of that. It wasn't war." For siding with Vietnamese civilians over his American comrades, Thompson was treated like a pariah. He was shunned by fellow soldiers, received death threats for reporting the war crime, and later was denounced by one congressman as the only American who should be punished for My Lai. Thompson responded by saying that he had done what he thought was right, even if that meant aiming guns at Americans to save Vietnamese. "There was no way I could turn my back on them," he later explained. False Hero But the appellation "hero"often lands on the wrong shoulders, giving credit not to people like Thompson who risk everything to do what is right, but rather elevating people who win acclaim by doing what is popular or expedient. That flip side of the Thompson lesson was learned by another American soldier serving in the same region in Vietnam, whose life in a sense intersected with Thompson[base ']s as they traveled in opposite directions, Thompson toward obscurity and the other toward fame. Several months after the My Lai massacre - but before the slaughter became a public scanda - Army Major Colin Powell was assigned to Americal headquarters in Chu Lai. As a senior staff officer, Powell was given the task of investigating allegations of America's abuse of Vietnamese civilians. A letter had been written by a young specialist fourth class named Tom Glen, who had served in an Americal mortar platoon and was nearing the end of his Army tour. In the letter to Gen. Creighton Abrams, the commander of all U.S. forces in Vietnam, Glen accused the Americal Division of routine brutality against civilians. "The average GI[base ']s attitude toward and treatment of the Vietnamese people all too often is a complete denial of all our country is attempting to accomplish in the realm of human relations," Glen wrote. "Far beyond merely dismissing the Vietnamese as 'slopes' or 'gooks,' in both deed and thought, too many American soldiers seem to discount their very humanity; and with this attitude inflict upon the Vietnamese citizenry humiliations, both psychological and physical, that can have only a debilitating effect upon efforts to unify the people in loyalty to the Saigon government, particularly when such acts are carried out at unit levels and thereby acquire the aspect of sanctioned policy." Glen[base ']s letter contended that many Vietnamese were fleeing from Americans who "for mere pleasure, fire indiscriminately into Vietnamese homes and without provocation or justification shoot at the people themselves." Gratuitous cruelty was also being inflicted on Viet Cong suspects, Glen reported. "Fired with an emotionalism that belies unconscionable hatred, and armed with a vocabulary consisting of [OE]You VC,[base '] soldiers commonly [OE]interrogate[base '] by means of torture that has been presented as the particular habit of the enemy. Severe beatings and torture at knife point are usual means of questioning captives or of convincing a suspect that he is, indeed, a Viet Cong. ... [base "]What has been outlined here I have seen not only in my own unit, but also in others we have worked with, and I fear it is universal.[per thou] A Cursory Probe The letter[base ']s troubling allegations were not well received at Americal headquarters, where Glen[base ']s report ended up on Major Powell[base ']s desk. It was Powell[base ']s politically sensitive job to investigate the charges of the division[base ']s mistreatment of Vietnamese. Powell undertook the assignment, but did so without questioning Glen or assigning anyone else to talk with him. Powell simply accepted a claim from Glen[base ']s superior officer that Glen was not close enough to the front lines to know what he was writing about, an assertion that Glen has since denied. After a cursory review, Powell drafted a response on Dec. 13, 1968. He admitted to no pattern of wrongdoing by the Americal Division toward Vietnamese civilians. Powell claimed that U.S. soldiers were taught to treat Vietnamese courteously and respectfully. The Americal troops also had gone through an hour-long course on how to treat prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions, Powell noted. [base "]There may be isolated cases of mistreatment of civilians and POWs,[per thou] Powell wrote. But [base "]this by no means reflects the general attitude throughout the Division. [sigma] [base "]In direct refutation of this [Glen[base ']s] portrayal,[per thou] Powell concluded, [base "]is the fact that relations between Americal soldiers and the Vietnamese people are excellent.[per thou] Meteoric Rise Powell[base ']s findings, of course, were largely false, though they were exactly what his superiors wanted to hear. Powell[base ']s see-no-evil approach to controversies soon opened his way to a meteoric career as the most acclaimed political soldier of his era. After finishing his Vietnam tour, Powell earned plum assignments, such as a stint at the White House where he gained powerful mentors, such as future Defense secretaries Caspar Weinberger and Frank Carlucci. In the 1980s, Powell played a pivotal role in arranging the Iranian arms sales at the heart of the Iran-Contra Affair. He later employed his considerable personal charms to convince official Washington that the scandal was overblown and damaging to U.S. national security. Later, under President George H.W. Bush, Powell became the nation[base ']s first African-American chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and oversaw the military operations against Panama in 1989 and Iraq in the first Persian Gulf War in 1990-91. Awash in public acclaim after those lopsided military victories, Powell entered the pantheon of modern American heroes. Indeed, it seemed that no profile of Powell was complete without a reference to him as a [base "]genuine American hero.[per thou] In Campaign 2000, Powell[base ']s status played an important role in securing the White House for George W. Bush because many journalists and many voters assumed that Powell would restore a sense of maturity and wisdom to the federal government and to U.S. foreign policy. Instead Powell helped Bush lead the nation into the disastrous war in Iraq. In February 2003, Powell exploited his glittering reputation to go before the United Nations and sell the administration[base ']s false assertions that Iraq[base ']s Saddam Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction. Later, millions of Americans were shocked to learn that Powell had let himself be used to peddle dubious WMD claims, which have since led to the deaths of more than 2,200 American soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqis. After resigning as Secretary of State -- but not before Bush gained a second term -- Powell conceded that his U.N. testimony was a [base "]blot[per thou] on his reputation. But Americans might have been less surprised if they had understood Powell[base ']s real history. [See, for instance, Consortiumnews.com[base ']s series [base "]Behind Colin Powell[base ']s Legend.[per thou]] In modern America, it seems false hero-worship has become the equivalent of worshipping false idols in ancient times, though arguably believing in false heroes has proved more dangerous. Much of the mistake in trusting Colin Powell could be traced back to his blithe repudiation of Tom Glen[base ']s heartfelt warnings. Indeed, if Powell had done any serious examination of Glen[base ']s charges, Powell might well have learned about Thompson[base ']s first-hand account of the My Lai massacre just months earlier. My Lai Scandal It would take another hero from the Americal Division, an infantryman named Ron Ridenhour, to piece together the truth about My Lai. After returning to the United States, Ridenhour interviewed Americal comrades who had participated in the massacre. On his own, Ridenhour compiled this shocking information into a report and forwarded it to the Army inspector general. The IG[base ']s office conducted an aggressive official investigation, in marked contrast to Powell[base ']s slipshod review. Confirming Ridenhour's report, the Army finally faced the horrible truth. Courts martial were held against officers and enlisted men who were implicated in the murder of the My Lai civilians. Lt. William Calley, the platoon commander at My Lai, was sentenced to life in prison, but President Richard Nixon later commuted the sentence to three years[base '] house arrest. Thompson[base ']s brave defense of those Vietnamese civilians, however, was lost in the mist of history, until he was interviewed for a documentary in the 1980s. That prompted a public campaign to honor Thompson and his crew as examples of true American heroes. Eventually, Thompson and two of his comrades, Colburn and Glenn Andreotta (who was killed in Vietnam three weeks after the My Lai massacre), were awarded the Soldier[base ']s Medal, the highest U.S. military honor for bravery when not facing an enemy. An emotional Thompson, who worked as a veterans counselor in Louisiana after leaving the military, accepted the award in 1998 [base "]for all the men who served their country with honor on the battlefields of Southeast Asia.[per thou] On March 16, 1998, Thompson and Colburn returned to Vietnam to attend a service at My Lai marking the 30th anniversary of the massacre. [base "]I cannot explain why it happened,[per thou] Thompson said, according to CNN. [base "]I just wish our crew that day could have helped more people than we did.[per thou] Referring to the ostracism he faced and the long delay in getting recognition for what he did at My Lai in 1968, Thompson told the Associated Press in 2004: [base "]Don't do the right thing looking for a reward, because it might not come.[per thou] According to the AP, Colburn was at Thompson[base ']s side when the American hero of My Lai died in Alexandria, Louisiana, after a long battle with cancer. Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth.' 10:25:55 AM    comment []

Patt Morrison: Abramoff Pleads Guilty -- But Please Don't Convict the Hat. I know the question that's on everyone's lips about Jack Abramoff -- What is with those hats? Will he wind up as perhaps the only federal felon to grace the pages of GQ? As the First Mlle. of Millinery in these parts, I was prevailed upon by my fellow blogger Marty Kaplan to undertake an answer. First Abramoff shows up to plead guilty in D.C., wearing a trenchcoat -- was that a bulletproof vest under there, or was he just displeased to see anyone? -- and of course that topper, the black hat. The next day, in court in Miami, he's wearing a dark suit -- and a tan baseball cap bearing the word "Cascata." The word is Italian for "waterfall," and it's American for "really expensive Vegas golf resort with typically wasteful water features in a desert." While I admire Abramoff's insouciance, I can't imagine that such a cap helps the case of a man who baited his lobbyist hook with trips to the world's ritziest golf courses. As for the black hat, a New York Times columnist hazarded that it was a "pseudo-Hasidic homburg," and a National Review Online writer characterized it as "the black hat of a very Orthodox Jew." While Abramoff certainly made his faith a prominent part of his persona, this particular headgear looked too small, and the crown too low, and the whole effect just too fashion-conscious, to match those descriptions. My informed judgment is that it's ... a fedora. The fedora's first incarnation was as a woman's hat. Does that make Abramoff a cross-dresser? Not unless you put Bogart and King Edward VIII in that category. Okay, scratch the king -- we're not altogether sure about him. But "fedora" was the milliners' rage after Sarah Bernhardt wore it onstage, playing a Russian princess of that name in Victorien Sardou's drama "Fedora." Not long after, the fictional heroine who fell under Svengali's spell in a novel also wore a nifty little hat, which also became known by her name -- "Trilby." Both styles started out in ladies' hatboxes but ended up on gentlemen's heads and hat racks. [I found a man's black felt fedora being sold by that name, in the Los Angeles Times in July 1888, for $1.95.] Thereafter it was a manly, even macho piece of headgear. In the 1950s, the Los Angeles Police Department fielded a team of sartorially distinguished detectives known as "the Hat Squad." After men stopped routinely wearing hats -- thanks in part to John F. Kennedy, who had a great head of hair to show off -- the snap-brim style still remained a kind of signature, the tough guy's visual trope. On the small screen or large, no film-noir shamus, no G-man, no Puzo Mafioso could saunter forth without one. [On the website for the venerable Forward newspaper, Abramoff's chapeau is described as a Borsalino model -- Borsalino is the great Italian hat-maker -- that it costs $200 retail, and that he bought it at a Brooklyn haberdasher catering largely to Orthodox Jews. But a salesman was quoted as saying just what I thought: Jack's topper is too low in the crown and too narrow in the brim to be truly religious.] Having begun life as a woman's hat, the fedora never entirely abandoned female heads. In the final airport scene in "Casablanca," Bergman wears some version or fedora, tilted fetchingly over one tear-filled eye. A fedora showed up on Joan Crawford's head in "Mildred Pierce," I believe, and on Joan Fontaine's in "Suspicion." Or was it "Rebecca"? As for the baseball cap -- well, if it's a religious statement, it must mean that God is a golfer and, gentlemen, She deserves better tee-times. At least Abramoff's not wearing a tinfoil hat -- yet. Maybe he'll save that for copping an insanity plea. [The Huffington Post | Full Blog Feed] 10:24:19 AM    comment []

In Abramoff Case, Most See Evidence of Wider Problem . Most Americans believe that corruption in Congress is widespread, and even larger majorities support far-reaching reforms that would effectively end lobbying as it is currently practiced on Capitol Hill, according to the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll. By Richard Morin and Claudia Deane. [washingtonpost.com - washingtonpost.com - elections, campaigns, government and politics news and headlines.] 9:58:31 AM    comment []

© Copyright 2006 Patricia Thurston.