Dag Hammarskjold

Rants in the Void

Our incurable instinct to acquire - to assimilate in the crudest sense of the word - provides the medium for much of our aesthetic experience….We pick the flower. We press body against body - bringing to naught that human beauty which is only physical in that the surfaces of the body are animated by a spirit inaccessible to physical touch.” - Dag Hammarskjold

Palin's Enemies List: Lashes Out At The Media, Bloggers, And SNL Writers

During the months that she served as the Republican Party's vice presidential candidate, Sarah Palin had what could best be described as an acrimonious relationship with the press. Thrust into the national spotlight from relative political obscurity, the former Alaska Governor saw her professional record and personal story come under a powerful microscope. And as controversy was exposed and questions were raised, the animosity that Palin felt for the fourth estate became nearly all-consuming.

In her upcoming book, "Going Rogue," the former governor spends ample time airing her grievances with the way she was and continues to be treated by the media. The cast of characters she disparages range from the famous to the obscure, the national to the local - all of whom are accused of either peddling scandal or playing out political vendettas.

At one point in the book, Palin recalls ridiculing Hillary Clinton for complaining about her treatment in the press. "I wasn't really accusing her of whining," Palin writes. "Still, before criticizing her on this point, I should have walked a mile in her shoes. I can see now that she had every right to call the media on biased treatment that ended up affecting her candidacy. In fact, I should have applauded her because she was right..."

The animosity wasn't always there, as Palin writes. As governor of Alaska she had what she described as a "fine relationship" with the media - even offering up her personal cell phone number to local reporters. But a move from the statehouse to the campaign trail brought with it more critical coverage and a much larger pool or reporters. From the onset, things were rocky.

Palin writes with disgust that the "tone some reporters (and many bloggers) seemed to want to set was one of 'hypocrisy.'" Calling those who questioned the circumstances of her daughter's pregnancy "Trig truthers," she scoffs at the bloggers who, if they "weren't busy pushing fairy tales, would post threatening stories about any number of looming scandals that would drive me out of office."

Mostly, she recoils at the fourth estate's supposed sanctimoniousness. "I was amazed at how many liberal pundits seemed floored by a pregnant teenager," she writes, "as if overnight they'd all snuck out and had traditional-values transplants."

From there, Palin accuses various outlets, including the Huffington Post, of mischaracterizing her appearance at the Wasilla Assembly of God church, in which she called the war in Iraq "a task from God."

She even bemoans the writers at Saturday Night Live for having bad taste.

"I looked at the script," she writes of the preparation for her appearance on the show. "It wasn't all that funny. SNL writers had taken the campaign's 'Drill, baby, drill' mantra and turned it into a risqué double entendre about Todd and me. I thought, Nah. C'mon, New York talent, we can do better than that."

The toughest words, in the end, are saved for Katie Couric, the CBS anchor whose interviews with Palin became a major embarrassment for the McCain campaign. As Palin writes:

"Though Katie edited out substantive answers, she dutifully kept in the moments where I wore my annoyance on my sleeve.... There was much Katie appeared not to know, or care to hear about."

[snip]

"But Katie wasn't interested in discussing these issues. And when I did, she didn't air them. Instead, when I tried to describe frequent Russian incursions by figuratively referring to Vladimir Putin entering our airspace, CBS researched the Russian leader's actual flight over the United States and called my statement inaccurate. And when I referenced Alaska's narrow maritime border to describe our close proximity to other nations, CBS reported that the Coast Guard monitored the border and not the governor."

[snip]

"But Katie's purpose - shared by most media types - seemed to be to frame a 'gotcha' moment. And it worked. Instead of my scoring points for John McCain, I knew that I had let the team down."

[snip]

"I don't think she really wanted to hear my answer because she interrupted me five times as I tried to give it. The badgering had begun. This is really annoying me, I thought. Then she asked me about abortion and the morning-after pill twelve times. Twelve different times."

[snip]

"I answered as graciously and as patiently as I could. Each time, I reiterated my pro-life, pro-woman, pro-adoption position. But no matter how many ways I tried to say it, Katie responded by asking her question again in a slightly different way. I began to feel like I was in the movie Groundhog Day."

Palin's anger towards Couric became so consuming that even when recounting a wholly different campaign controversy -- the $150,000 in clothes purchased for her by the RNC -- she felt compelled to go back and take a swipe at the CBS anchor.

Katie Couric even weighed in on the trumped-up 'controversy,' writing: 'There aren't a lot of Joe Six-packs out there who can drop six figures on a new wardrobe, so Gov. Sarah Palin's $150,000 shopping spree seems excessive to some people."


This is especially ironic coming from Katie, whose own stylists, the B Team was told, was part of the team the campaign hired to do the convention shopping before I even arrived.

The end of the campaign did not bring with it an end to the frosty relationship between Palin and the press. There was, for example, the interview she did with the local television station KTUU for a routine Thanksgiving Day story

The station, Palin writes in her book, "set up an odd camera angle to capture turkeys being decapitated behind me... The photographer couldn't post it to the Web fast enough. The video became an instant YouTube hit."

"Now, I'd be the first person to tell you where your Thanksgiving meal comes from," Palin adds. But this was a deliberate move to make some noise."

Then there was the coverage of the various ethics complaints filed against her. Palin writes of reporters from the "lower 48" essentially stalking her daughter Piper on her walk home from Harborview Elementary School. She claims journalists were camping out "at the end of our driveway in Wasilla and on the ice in front of our home," and "incessantly call[ing] and stop[ping] by my parents' and siblings' and in-laws' homes and businesses."

The relationship, of course, is a two-way street. And to this day, the former Alaska Governor has not given a public news conference since being tapped as the vice presidential candidate. Palin, in "Going Rogue," proclaims that it was McCain campaign operatives who restricted her availability. "It got so bad," she writes, "that a couple of times I had a friend in Anchorage track down phone numbers for me, and then I snuck in calls to folks like Rush Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity and someone I thought was Larry Kudlow but turned out to be Neil Cavuto's producer."

But, even then, the disdain she felt for the media -- whose coverage she described as "pathetic and chilling" -- was entirely obsessive.

"Perhaps the national press outlets just don't have the resources anymore to devote to balanced coverage," she writes at one point. "Perhaps they've all just given up on themselves, so we've given up on them, too, except to treat their shoddy reporting like a car crash -- sometimes you just have to look."


Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/

Emilie Autumn

dancing leaves

the deep forest green
leaves dancing with the raindrops
a soft grey misty light
dripping through my thoughts

the trees and I, in the rain
getting wet together
we are each a child of god
no one of us the better

a gentle breeze sighs through the trees
my mind is rested, clear and bright
I open up before my lord
small and humble in her sight

here within this hazy dew
boundaries tend to blur
the eye and I not seeing straight
but the murmur of the birds

we shall fly where chaos reigns
in harmony and light
where the universe is not and is
and all is simply right

beyond reason's mere feeble grasp
where insane and gifted play
where past and future, memory and dream
lie pregnant within the day

the stars look down bemused
in cold, eternal death
whilst we dance in shadows cast
by the light of our eternal quest

Is the House Health Care Bill Better than Nothing?

Marcia Angell, M.D.: Is the House Health Care Bill Better than Nothing?

Is the House Health Care Bill Better than Nothing?

Well, the House health reform bill -- known to Republicans as the Government Takeover -- finally passed after one of Congress's longer, less enlightening debates. Two stalwarts of the single-payer movement split their votes; John Conyers voted for it; Dennis Kucinich against. Kucinich was right.

Conservative rhetoric notwithstanding, the House bill is not a "government takeover." I wish it were. Instead, it enshrines and subsidizes the "takeover" by the investor-owned insurance industry that occurred after the failure of the Clinton reform effort in 1994. To be sure, the bill has a few good provisions (expansion of Medicaid, for example), but they are marginal. It also provides for some regulation of the industry (no denial of coverage because of pre-existing conditions, for example), but since it doesn't regulate premiums, the industry can respond to any regulation that threatens its profits by simply raising its rates. The bill also does very little to curb the perverse incentives that lead doctors to over-treat the well-insured. And quite apart from its content, the bill is so complicated and convoluted that it would take a staggering apparatus to administer it and try to enforce its regulations.

What does the insurance industry get out of it? Tens of millions of new customers, courtesy of the mandate and taxpayer subsidies. And not just any kind of customer, but the youngest, healthiest customers -- those least likely to use their insurance. The bill permits insurers to charge twice as much for older people as for younger ones. So older under-65's will be more likely to go without insurance, even if they have to pay fines. That's OK with the industry, since these would be among their sickest customers. (Shouldn't age be considered a pre-existing condition?)

Insurers also won't have to cover those younger people most likely to get sick, because they will tend to use the public option (which is not an "option" at all, but a program projected to cover only 6 million uninsured Americans). So instead of the public option providing competition for the insurance industry, as originally envisioned, it's been turned into a dumping ground for a small number of people whom private insurers would rather not have to cover anyway.

If a similar bill emerges from the Senate and the reconciliation process, and is ultimately passed, what will happen?

First, health costs will continue to skyrocket, even faster than they are now, as taxpayer dollars are pumped into the private sector. The response of payers -- government and employers -- will be to shrink benefits and increase deductibles and co-payments. Yes, more people will have insurance, but it will cover less and less, and be more expensive to use.

But, you say, the Congressional Budget Office has said the House bill will be a little better than budget-neutral over ten years. That may be, although the assumptions are arguable. Note, though, that the CBO is not concerned with total health costs, only with costs to the government. And it is particularly concerned with Medicare, the biggest contributor to federal deficits. The House bill would take money out of Medicare, and divert it to the private sector and, to some extent, to Medicaid. The remaining costs of the legislation would be paid for by taxes on the wealthy. But although the bill might pay for itself, it does nothing to solve the problem of runaway inflation in the system as a whole. It's a shell game in which money is moved from one part of our fragmented system to another.

Here is my program for real reform:

Recommendation #1: Drop the Medicare eligibility age from 65 to 55. This should be an expansion of traditional Medicare, not a new program. Gradually, over several years, drop the age decade by decade, until everyone is covered by Medicare. Costs: Obviously, this would increase Medicare costs, but it would help decrease costs to the health system as a whole, because Medicare is so much more efficient (overhead of about 3% vs. 20% for private insurance). And it's a better program, because it ensures that everyone has access to a uniform package of benefits.

Recommendation #2: Increase Medicare fees for primary care doctors and reduce them for procedure-oriented specialists. Specialists such as cardiologists and gastroenterologists are now excessively rewarded for doing tests and procedures, many of which, in the opinion of experts, are not medically indicated. Not surprisingly, we have too many specialists, and they perform too many tests and procedures. Costs: This would greatly reduce costs to Medicare, and the reform would almost certainly be adopted throughout the wider health system.

Recommendation #3: Medicare should monitor doctors' practice patterns for evidence of excess, and gradually reduce fees of doctors who habitually order significantly more tests and procedures than the average for the specialty. Costs: Again, this would greatly reduce costs, and probably be widely adopted.

Recommendation #4: Provide generous subsidies to medical students entering primary care, with higher subsidies for those who practice in underserved areas of the country for at least two years. Costs: This initial, rather modest investment in ending our shortage of primary care doctors would have long-term benefits, in terms of both costs and quality of care.

Recommendation #5: Repeal the provision of the Medicare drug benefit that prohibits Medicare from negotiating with drug companies for lower prices. (The House bill calls for this.) That prohibition has been a bonanza for the pharmaceutical industry. For negotiations to be meaningful, there must be a list (formulary) of drugs deemed cost-effective. This is how the Veterans Affairs System obtains some of the lowest drug prices of any insurer in the country. Costs: If Medicare paid the same prices as the Veterans Affairs System, its expenditures on brand-name drugs would be a small fraction of what they are now.

Is the House bill better than nothing? I don't think so. It simply throws more money into a dysfunctional and unsustainable system, with only a few improvements at the edges, and it augments the central role of the investor-owned insurance industry. The danger is that as costs continue to rise and coverage becomes less comprehensive, people will conclude that we've tried health reform and it didn't work. But the real problem will be that we didn't really try it. I would rather see us do nothing now, and have a better chance of trying again later and then doing it right.

Seven Swans Cover by Sufjan Stevens (Kelsey)

You say "trans-panic," I say "hate"

Salon.com Life | You say "trans-panic," I say "hate"

You say "trans-panic," I say "hate"
Was the murder of a transgender woman sparked by bias, deception or both?

Tracy Clark-Flory

Apr. 18, 2009 |

In what is believed to be a historic first, a hate-crime statute is being used to prosecute the murder of a transgender person. Last summer in Greeley, Colo., 18-year-old Angie Zapata was allegedly beaten to death with a fire extinguisher after Allen R. Andrade discovered that she was transgender. The two had met online and hung out at Zapata's apartment for two days, during which she gave her 32-year-old companion a blow job. At one point, she left him alone in the apartment and he discovered photographs that raised his suspicions about her sex. When she returned, Andrade allegedly confronted her, grabbed her crotch and, discovering she had a penis, brutally murdered her.

During opening statements on Thursday, Andrade's attorney argued that his client simply "snapped" and "flew into an uncontrollable rage" after finding out that the beauty he had courted online was actually born male. Yes, it's that familiar trans-panic defense, a close relative to the gay-panic defense. In a lawyerly twist of logic, though, the defense team is rejecting the hate-crime charge, which would lengthen Andrade's sentence, and arguing that Zapata's sexual identity did not spark the defendant's murderous rage. Public defender Bradley Martin argued: "It's about a deception and the reaction to that deception." Which is kind of like saying: "It wasn't a reaction to finding out she was transgender, it was a reaction to finding out she was transgender." Well, in that case.

The prosecution, of course, sees things differently. In fact, they argue Andrade plotted to kill Zapata 36 hours after his discovery of the deception. Deputy District Attorney Brandi Nieto says statements he has made will support the fact that the murder was a hate crime. Indeed, the statements already made public paint a vivid picture of a hateful homophobe: He was recorded in a phone conversation saying "gay things need to die" and told police that he was pretty sure he had "killed it" after hitting Zapata in the head until she stopped breathing. Andrade was also recorded telling his girlfriend: "It is not like I went up to a schoolteacher and shot her in the head or killed a straight law-abiding citizen." (A law-abiding citizen! Says the man who admitted to bashing in someone's skull.)

It's been a while since trans-panic and gay-panic pleas have shown up on my radar, but this case -- as have many cases before -- serves as an enraging reminder that those defenses are so often only euphemisms and apologies for hate.

Revenge of the RINOs

Revenge of the RINOs - The Daily Beast

Revenge of the RINOs
by Meghan McCain
April 18, 2009 | 8:14pm

Republican in Name Only? Try the future of the GOP. The following is Meghan McCain's address to the Log Cabin Republicans Convention—a group that promotes gay issues within the GOP—on April 18, 2009.

Thank you all for having me here tonight. I am thrilled to be able to speak to you this evening to share some of my experiences from the campaign and observations on where our party is today. And I’m proud to tell you there is a special role for the Log Cabin Republicans to play in our future.

The last two years of my life have been an amazing series of moments. Some sad, some thrilling and others mesmerizing. I want to tell you about some of those moments as well as the ones that are yet to come.

I have been humbled by the outpouring of support that I received during the campaign. The tumultuous ride of my father’s quest for the Presidency has been well chronicled. In October, 2007 I launched the site McCainBogette.com. I chose to do my part in telling the campaign’s story from my perspective for a variety of reasons.

First and foremost, I realized my Dad would always have to deal with people perceiving him as “too old” to be President. I know what you’re all thinking: Why would anyone think that? As with many things, reality is sometimes so different from what people perceive.

I know my father better than anyone. And if he could have a 23 year old wiseass like me as a daughter, then that certainly doesn’t make him too old. Someone had to tell the nation that, and I was up to the challenge.

Second, I have been a child of politics since the day I was born.

As you can imagine and have seen, politics can be a nasty sport. And between you and me, many of the people in this business tend to take themselves entirely too seriously. I wanted to break out of that. I wanted people to see the normal aspects of political life. From the messy motel rooms to the steady diet of doughnuts and Red Bull. From the moments of endless energy to the quiet times you share with family and friends.

And from the times of incredible pride to the ones where the world around you seems like it’s unraveling in a storm of insanity. I wanted to give people a first hand look into an experience few ever have seen.

And finally, I wanted to be me. That perhaps was the most challenging reason of all. I have been fortunate to have been blessed with two amazing parents who have led lives motivated by helping others. But I am also my parents’ daughter. I have my mother’s grace under fire.

And I have my Dad’s “heartburn-inducing” ability to say what he thinks almost whenever he wants. The person who stands before you is not confined within the mold of what a daughter of a Republican Presidential candidate “should” be for some. And that’s OK. Our world is not confined by molds and neither should our nation.

That’s what I saw for fourteen months on the campaign trail. Of course it wasn’t all that you might expect. My hair stylist, Josh Rupley who is here tonight and a proud new member of the Log Cabin Republicans, joined us on the trail for the last few months of the campaign. I was not prepared for the uptick in date requests I received via email during that time. And I mean date requests for Josh, not me. His presence really seemed to cause quite a stir on the site and we still get a huge kick out of it.

That brings us to today. I honestly did not expect my personal journey in politics would become more interesting since election day. But that's exactly what has happened. It took months for the campaign highs and lows to subside. When 2009 began, I had a fresh outlook on life and decided to pursue writing. I still wanted to focused on that delicate blending of Republican politics and who I am and what I think. I was thrilled to be asked to write for Tina Brown’s website The Daily Beast. My most notorious article to date was entitled, “My Beef with Ann Coulter.” Ok, so much for being delicate.

I am concerned about the environment. I have a tattoo. I believe government should always be efficient and accountable. I have lots of gay friends. And yes, I am a Republican.

What’s happened since has been unexpected, humbling and motivating. I did not expect my frustration with what I perceive to be overly partisan and divisive Republicans to cause a national incident. And no, I’m not that engaged with myself to think it was even that much of an incident.

People in our country have much more important issues to deal with on a daily basis. But the experience did reinforce what I learned on the campaign trail in some major ways.

I’ll summarize them in three points:

1. Most of our nation wants our nation to succeed.
2. Most people are ready to move on to the future, not live in the past.
3. Most of the old school Republicans are scared shitless of that future.

You know the old problem: Political discussion just breaks down into bickering and fighting instead of solving. And Republicans have a tendency to get way too hung up on words. I’m not just talking about the occasional profanity. When someone says they “hope the President succeeds” they say it with the hope that the country gets better, the economy improves and people can feel safe, confident and free to live their lives as they choose. And may I add in full equality with each other.

I believe most people get that, and more people are getting it everyday.

I believe most of our nation wants our nation to succeed.

I feel too many Republicans want to cling to past successes. There are those who think we can win the White House and Congress back by being “more” conservative. Worse, there are those who think we can win by changing nothing at all about what our party has become. They just want to wait for the other side to be perceived as worse than us. I think we’re seeing a war brewing in the Republican party, but it is not between us and Democrats. It is not between us and liberals. It is between the future and the past. I believe most people are ready to move on to that future.

We know a party that was thriving at one point on a few singular issues cannot see long term success. Even worse, we’ve seen how it has contributed to some serious problems in our nation and world.

Let me blunt, you can’t assume you’re electing the right leaders to handle all the problems facing our nation when you make your choice based on one issue. More and more people are finally getting that.

Simply embracing technology isn’t going to fix our problem either. Republicans using Twitter and Facebook isn’t going to miraculously make people think we’re cool again. Breaking free from obsolete positions and providing real solutions that don’t divide our nation further will. That’s why some in our party are scared. They sense the world around them is changing and they are unable to take the risk to jump free of what’s keeping our party down.

What I am talking about tonight is what it means to be a new, progressive Republican. Now some will say I can’t do that. If you aren’t this and that, then you’re clearly a “Republican in Name Only,” also affectionately known as a RINO.

Suggesting the notion that one can be faithful to the original core values of the GOP while open to the realities of our changing world has really hit a chord with people. And it seems to be the next, natural stage of the journey I’ve been traveling.

It would be easy to say my generation views politics very differently from others. Maybe we’re more progressive, socially liberal or just hate arguing in lieu of actually solving the problems at hand. But what I’ve learned though my experiences is that these feelings are not contained to one age group. They’re the growing beliefs and desires of people of all ages, races, genders, faiths, persuasions and political parties.

So tonight, I am proud to join you in challenging the mold and the notions of what being a Republican means.

I am concerned about the environment. I love to wear black. I think government is best when it stays out of people’s lives and business as much as possible. I love punk rock. I believe in a strong national defense. I have a tattoo. I believe government should always be efficient and accountable. I have lots of gay friends. And yes, I am a Republican.

If there is one thing that gives me hope about the future of our party and the role you and the Log Cabin Republicans can play in it is this: there’s never been a better time to speak out. People are listening. And, they’re more open minded than ever before. Maybe it’s because they’re worried about the future. Maybe it’s because they’re so disenchanted with the past. It’s probably a little of both.

But know this: The moment to make a difference is now and I am proud to share it with you. America’s best days are ahead of us. And we will show our nation that we will get there together.

Thank you again for having me speak tonight. And thank you for all you are doing to help make a new Republican party a reality.

N.S.A.’s Intercepts Exceed Limits Set by Congress

N.S.A.’s Intercepts Exceed Limits Set by Congress - NYTimes.com

N.S.A.’s Intercepts Exceed Limits Set by Congress
By ERIC LICHTBLAU and JAMES RISEN

WASHINGTON — The National Security Agency intercepted private e-mail messages and phone calls of Americans in recent months on a scale that went beyond the broad legal limits established by Congress last year, government officials said in recent interviews.

Several intelligence officials, as well as lawyers briefed about the matter, said the N.S.A. had been engaged in “overcollection” of domestic communications of Americans. They described the practice as significant and systemic, although one official said it was believed to have been unintentional.

The legal and operational problems surrounding the N.S.A.’s surveillance activities have come under scrutiny from the Obama administration, Congressional intelligence committees and a secret national security court, said the intelligence officials, who spoke only on the condition of anonymity because N.S.A. activities are classified. Classified government briefings have been held in recent weeks in response to a brewing controversy that some officials worry could damage the credibility of legitimate intelligence-gathering efforts.

The Justice Department, in response to inquiries from The New York Times, acknowledged Wednesday night that there had been problems with the N.S.A. surveillance operation, but said they had been resolved.

As part of a periodic review of the agency’s activities, the department “detected issues that raised concerns,” it said. Justice Department officials then “took comprehensive steps to correct the situation and bring the program into compliance” with the law and court orders, the statement said. It added that Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. went to the national security court to seek a renewal of the surveillance program only after new safeguards were put in place.

In a statement on Wednesday night, the N.S.A. said that its “intelligence operations, including programs for collection and analysis, are in strict accordance with U.S. laws and regulations.” The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees the intelligence community, did not address specific aspects of the surveillance problems but said in a statement that “when inadvertent mistakes are made, we take it very seriously and work immediately to correct them.”

The questions may not be settled yet. Intelligence officials say they are still examining the scope of the N.S.A. practices, and Congressional investigators say they hope to determine if any violations of Americans’ privacy occurred. It is not clear to what extent the agency may have actively listened in on conversations or read e-mail messages of Americans without proper court authority, rather than simply obtained access to them.

The intelligence officials said the problems had grown out of changes enacted by Congress last July in the law that regulates the government’s wiretapping powers, and the challenges posed by enacting a new framework for collecting intelligence on terrorism and spying suspects.

While the N.S.A.’s operations in recent months have come under examination, new details are also emerging about earlier domestic-surveillance activities, including the agency’s attempt to wiretap a member of Congress, without court approval, on an overseas trip, current and former intelligence officials said.

After a contentious three-year debate that was set off by the disclosure in 2005 of the program of wiretapping without warrants that President George W. Bush approved after the Sept. 11 attacks, Congress gave the N.S.A. broad new authority to collect, without court-approved warrants, vast streams of international phone and e-mail traffic as it passed through American telecommunications gateways. The targets of the eavesdropping had to be “reasonably believed” to be outside the United States. Under the new legislation, however, the N.S.A. still needed court approval to monitor the purely domestic communications of Americans who came under suspicion.

In recent weeks, the eavesdropping agency notified members of the Congressional intelligence committees that it had encountered operational and legal problems in complying with the new wiretapping law, Congressional officials said.

Officials would not discuss details of the overcollection problem because it involves classified intelligence-gathering techniques. But the issue appears focused in part on technical problems in the N.S.A.’s ability at times to distinguish between communications inside the United States and those overseas as it uses its access to American telecommunications companies’ fiber-optic lines and its own spy satellites to intercept millions of calls and e-mail messages.

One official said that led the agency to inadvertently “target” groups of Americans and collect their domestic communications without proper court authority. Officials are still trying to determine how many violations may have occurred.

The overcollection problems appear to have been uncovered as part of a twice-annual certification that the Justice Department and the director of national intelligence are required to give to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on the protocols that the N.S.A. is using in wiretapping. That review, officials said, began in the waning days of the Bush administration and was continued by the Obama administration. It led intelligence officials to realize that the N.S.A. was improperly capturing information involving significant amounts of American traffic.

Notified of the problems by the N.S.A., officials with both the House and Senate intelligence committees said they had concerns that the agency had ignored civil liberties safeguards built into last year’s wiretapping law. “We have received notice of a serious issue involving the N.S.A., and we’ve begun inquiries into it,” a Congressional staff member said.

Separate from the new inquiries, the Justice Department has for more than two years been investigating aspects of the N.S.A.’s wiretapping program.

As part of that investigation, a senior F.B.I. agent recently came forward with what the inspector general’s office described as accusations of “significant misconduct” in the surveillance program, people with knowledge of the investigation said. Those accusations are said to involve whether the N.S.A. made Americans targets in eavesdropping operations based on insufficient evidence tying them to terrorism.

And in one previously undisclosed episode, the N.S.A. tried to wiretap a member of Congress without a warrant, an intelligence official with direct knowledge of the matter said.

The agency believed that the congressman, whose identity could not be determined, was in contact — as part of a Congressional delegation to the Middle East in 2005 or 2006 — with an extremist who had possible terrorist ties and was already under surveillance, the official said. The agency then sought to eavesdrop on the congressman’s conversations, the official said.

The official said the plan was ultimately blocked because of concerns from some intelligence officials about using the N.S.A., without court oversight, to spy on a member of Congress.

Leon Panetta Digs Deeper

Leon Panetta Digs Deeper - The Daily Beast

Leon Panetta Digs Deeper
by John Sifton
April 9, 2009 | 10:02pm


A day after the release of a blockbuster Red Cross report on torture—and an article in The Daily Beast—the CIA director reiterated his stance that many agency employees who might have participated in torture shouldn’t be investigated or prosecuted.

The pressure seems to be getting to CIA Director Leon Panetta. On Monday night, a confidential report by the International Committee of the Red Cross detailing CIA torture and detention practices during the Bush administration was published by the New York Review of Books. In an article for the Daily Beast on April 8, I wrote that Panetta’s position against the investigation and prosecution of those potentially guilty of criminal activity is compromised because a number of his top aides are implicated in the torture program. The following day, April 9, possibly in response to the growing furor, Panetta sent a letter to CIA employees, referring to the “continuing media and congressional interest in reviewing past rendition, detention, and interrogation activities that took place dating back to 2002,” including issues involving the involvement of private contractors in CIA activities.

In his letter, Panetta outlines the Agency’s “current policy regarding interrogation of captured terrorists,” stating: “Under the Executive Order, the CIA does not employ any of the enhanced interrogation techniques that were authorized by the Department of Justice from 2002 to 2009.” He also declares: “CIA officers do not tolerate, and will continue to promptly report, any inappropriate behavior or allegations of abuse.” He seems defensive.

Panetta also makes the following interesting statement: “CIA no longer operates detention facilities or black sites and has proposed a plan to decommission the remaining sites. I have directed our Agency personnel to take charge of the decommissioning process and have further directed that the contracts for site security be promptly terminated. It is estimated that our taking over site security will result in savings of up to $4 million.”

This is a strange set of claims and it is difficult to know how to parse them. Panetta seems to be saying that “there are no sites,” that “we’ve submitted a plan to close the sites,” and that “we’re closing the sites” all at the same time. But then he also makes it sound as though the CIA is “taking charge” of the sites from contractors, and that “taking over” the sites will save $4 million, suggesting they’re being kept open for the time being. (From where comes the $4 million in savings? If the sites are being closed, isn’t the money saved anyway?) Each of his statements seems to contradict the last. At a later point in the note, Panetta writes, “CIA retains the authority to detain individuals on a short-term transitory basis.” But where is the agency going to hold them, if the sites are closed? Panetta does not explain.

In short, Panetta’s note simply doesn’t make sense. In the end, his point seems to be that the sites exist, but are not being used currently, and may be closed in the future—except that they won’t, because the CIA retains the power to detain. Is Panetta really aware of what is actually going on?

Perhaps he’s discombobulated. Panetta has increasingly been in the hot seat because of his remarks indicating that he believes no CIA personnel should be investigated for abuse if their actions relied on legal assurances from the Department of Justice—a reference to memos written during the Bush administration by the Office of Legal Counsel, which, through deeply flawed and now repudiated legal analysis, attempted to offer legal justifications for the CIA’s various torture techniques from 2002-2006. (These methods include sleep deprivation, forced standing, and prolonged isolation—methods used by the Soviets and North Koreans—to outright physical assaults, binding or confining prisoners into painful positions, and waterboarding.)

Panetta reiterated the claim on Wednesday in his letter to CIA employees, writing, “Officers who act on guidance from the Department of Justice—or acted on such guidance previously—should not be investigated, let alone punished. This is what fairness and wisdom require.”

But as I discussed in my Daily Beast article, Panetta’s arguments about “legal reliance” are misplaced and inaccurate as a matter of criminal law. And as a general matter, it increasingly appears as though he’s more interested in protecting various CIA officials beneath him—holdovers from the Bush era—than in cleaning up the CIA.

It is important to note, however, that “cleaning up the CIA” doesn’t mean a purge. The agency has thousands of officers and directors, and only a few are implicated in the past crimes. In any case, many of the most tainted directors have already left.

Moreover, investigations of existing staff shouldn’t focus on lower level officers. Accountability, if it ever occurs, should focus primarily on executive level directors, like the current CIA Deputy Director, Stephen Kappes, and the Director of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service, Michael Sulick—both high-level officials in the CIA’s operations directorate when the worst detainee abuses were committed.

Investigations should focus also on high-level executive officers in the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center (CTC) who are still at the agency, for example, G— —, a former deputy to Jose Rodriquez, the chief of CTC back in 2002-2004 and who now enjoys a prestigious CIA chief of station posting in Europe. (I can’t reveal her name or posting here; it remains covert. It should also be noted that the former CTC chief of operations also remains at the agency.)

Yet it is inappropriate to place this whole mess on Panetta’s shoulders. Attorney General Eric Holder is also a central actor in these matters. It is the Department of Justice’s responsibility to investigate and if possible prosecute alleged cases of torture and other violations of criminal law. Members of Congress, too—especially senior leaders on the Senate and House intelligence committees—have an obligation to insist on accountability from the administration.

Ultimately, of course, the failure of the Obama administration to address the Bush administration’s crimes lies with President Obama himself. So far he is sending the wrong message to both CIA and the Department of Justice. And yet the furor continues to grow. President Obama will only lose more credibility if he tries to ignore it.

The CIA Torture Coverup

The CIA Torture Coverup - The Daily Beast

The CIA Torture Coverup
by John Sifton
April 7, 2009 | 9:34pm


Why doesn’t Leon Panetta want the agency investigated or prosecuted for torture allegations? Maybe because some of the men implicated, John Sifton reports, are the ones advising him.

On Monday night, the confidential report of the International Committee of the Red Cross on the CIA’s secret detention and interrogation program was published on the Web site of the New York Review of Books. The report confirms previous allegations about CIA abuses against detainees. Unlike earlier reporting, however, the document is based on irrefutable first-hand information: interviews with detainees and U.S. officials. The document describes in stark detail the CIA’s use of forced standing, sleep deprivation, prolonged isolation, assaults, and waterboarding. It also discloses the participation of CIA medical personnel in torture.

Because the basic facts about their involvement in the CIA interrogation program are now known, Panetta’s actions are increasingly looking like a coverup.

Some revelations in the ICRC report have already become known through the reporting of journalists Mark Danner and Jane Mayer. As a result, press accounts have focused on the fresh news of medical personnel supervising and overseeing abuse. But other important facts about the report have been overlooked that make the question of torture not simply a matter of the past.

The New York Times reported that Leon Panetta, the current CIA director, has taken the position that “no one who took actions based on legal guidance from the Department of Justice at the time should be investigated, let alone punished.” Yet a number of CIA officials implicated in the torture program not only remain at the highest levels of the agency, but are also advising Panetta. Panetta’s attempt to suppress the issue is making Bush’s policy into the Obama administration’s dirty laundry.

Take Stephen Kappes. At the time of the worst torture sessions outlined in the ICRC report, Kappes served as a senior official in the Directorate of Operations—the operational part of the CIA that oversees paramilitary operations as well as the high-value detention program. (The directorate of operations is now known as the National Clandestine Service.) Panetta has kept Kappes as deputy director of the CIA—the No. 2 official in the agency. One of Kappes’ deputies from 2002-2004, Michael Sulick, is now director of the National Clandestine Service—the de facto No. 3 in the agency. Panetta’s refusal to investigate may be intended to protect his deputies. Because the basic facts about their involvement in the CIA interrogation program are now known, Panetta’s actions are increasingly looking like a coverup.

Another overlooked fact is this: The ICRC report is an important legal document that contains well-sustained allegations of criminal conduct with legal significance. Unlike earlier claims in books, magazines, and newspapers, the ICRC’s allegations are official notices from a legally recognized entity. The ICRC, after all, is not Human Rights Watch, the Washington Post, or the New Yorker, all of which have reported on the CIA’s secret prison program. The ICRC is an official entity recognized under the Geneva Conventions and various other earlier international treaties relating to armed conflict and prisoners of war. The ICRC is specifically tasked under the Geneva Conventions to visit prisoners and communicate with detaining powers to uphold the conventions’ spirit and purpose. Its interpretations and statements on matters of international law are held as legally authoritative. As such, the ICRC’s allegations have legal significance beyond previous disclosures. In effect, the document itself is evidence in a criminal case.

Note in particular the report’s date, February 14, 2007—Valentine’s Day. On that date, the U.S. government was put on notice about the allegations of CIA torture. (The ICRC also wrote to the U.S. governments about the issue of disappearances at several points in 2003-2006.)

Under international law—the Geneva Conventions, the Convention Against Torture, and basic precepts of customary international law—the United States has a positive obligation to investigate and prosecute persons alleged to have committed torture and other violations of the laws of war. As of Valentine’s Day 2007, and possibly earlier, the U.S. government was obligated to investigate and prosecute the abuses detailed in the report. The United States’ failure to do so is a recurring breach of international law. If the Spanish case against six high-level Bush administration officials accused of authorizing torture proceeds, the Red Cross report—among other documents—may be entered as evidence. Further international prosecutions that the U.S. is obligated to respect may go down the chain of command to Panetta’s deputies.

The ICRC report does not contain information about the identities of CIA personnel involved in the program, although there are descriptions of some individual interrogators; nor does it discuss the involvement of senior government officials in the program.

Nonetheless, footnote 9 reveals that the ICRC was informed by the then-director of the CIA, Michael Hayden, that interrogation plans for detainees were submitted to the “CIA headquarters” for approval and as of 2007 were approved by “the director or deputy director of the CIA.” It is likely that this approval process existed at earlier points in 2002-2006.

This is more than an interesting detail. In fact, it could implicate several high-level CIA officials in torture, including previous CIA directors George Tenet (resigned 2004) and Porter Goss (resigned 2006), as well as deputy directors John McLaughlin (resigned 2004) and Albert Calland (resigned 2006). These CIA officials are no longer serving. Kappes, Sulick, and others are still there.

Panetta’s refusal to endorse investigations and prosecution is based in part on opinions issued in memos in 2002 to 2003 from the Bush administration’s Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel to the effect that the CIA’s interrogation tactics were legal.

The OLC memoranda, however, were highly controversial even within the Bush administration, and today there are almost no lawyers or academics in the United States who defend their reasoning. Parts of the memoranda were withdrawn in 2005 and the Obama administration has repudiated their contents. But the memos were on the books for a time and conventional wisdom among academics as well as some Obama officials is that it would be difficult to prosecute a CIA officer who relied on legal assurances contained in them. In criminal law, there are legal defenses to prosecution when a government agent, in good faith, relies on an official legal interpretation as to what is or is not legal and then commits otherwise illegal activity. (To take an example: It would not be appropriate to prosecute an undercover DEA agent if he smoked marijuana with drug dealers as part of efforts to gain their trust, especially if the agent were told by a Department of Justice lawyer that it was legal to do so.)

But Panetta’s “reliance on counsel” argument is off base. First, some of the worst torture that occurred as part of the CIA program occurred in the case of Abu Zubaydah—and most of that abuse occurred before the relevant OLC memoranda were even written.

Second, the reliance defense is not an absolute shield to prosecutions: it is a defense available to individual defendants on a case-by-case basis. A court must decide, from case to case, whether the defense applies.

And, ultimately, the reliance in question must be in good faith. Prosecutors may be able to show in higher-level cases that officers like Tenet, Goss, and others believed that the memoranda were flawed and therefore were not acting in good faith. Moreover, if prosecutors can show that a reasonable attorney would or should have known the memoranda were incorrect as a matter of law, they might be able to prosecute attorneys within the White House and CIA—such as former OLC attorney John Yoo and CIA Acting General Counsel John Rizzo—on grounds that by writing or promulgating the memoranda they participated in a criminal enterprise aimed at allowing the president and his staff, and the CIA, to evade federal criminal law.

Of course, such investigations are politically tricky. In order to avoid being tainted, President Obama might appoint a special prosecutor, fire implicated CIA officials (there are plenty of CIA rank and file who would be glad to see them go), and wash his hands of political fallout. In any case, he has to do something. Even if Panetta wishes it, the torture scandal is not going away.

John Sifton is a private investigator and attorney based in New York City. His firm, One World Research, carries out research for law firms and human-rights groups, including in South Asia, the Middle East and North Africa. He has conducted extensive investigations into the CIA interrogation and detention program.

Newsweek's unintentionally revealed, central truth

Newsweek's unintentionally revealed, central truth - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com

Newsweek's unintentionally revealed, central truth


In his just-released cover story on Paul Krugman's status as Obama critic, Newsweek's Evan Thomas includes these observations:

By definition, establishments believe in propping up the existing order. Members of the ruling class have a vested interest in keeping things pretty much the way they are. Safeguarding the status quo, protecting traditional institutions, can be healthy and useful, stabilizing and reassuring.

Thomas then acknowledges what is glaringly obvious not only about himself but also most of his media-star colleagues: "If you are of the establishment persuasion (and I am) . . ."

One day in the near future, Thomas should have a luncheon or perhaps a nice Sunday brunch at his home, invite over all of his journalist friends who work in the media divisions of our largest corporations, and they should spend 15 minutes or so assembling these sentences together, and then examine what these facts mean for the actual role played by establishment journalists, the functions they fulfill, whose interests they serve, and the vast, vast disparities between (a) those answers and (b) the pretenses about their profession and themselves which they continue, ludicrously, to maintain. To make the discussion less strenuous on the guests' brains, Thomas, as a good host, could provide visual illustrations such as this and this.

Also, in the name of consumer protection, television news shows and the largest newspapers ought to place that above-excerpted paragraph by Thomas as a warning at the top of every product they produce.

bridges...

Someone asked me this question:
What is life?

Spontaneously I answered:
A collection of moments...

these moments could be a few minutes,
or a few days,
or a few months at a stretch...
in other words, these moments could be a phase...

these moments are when we feel light and happy,
more alive and happy to be alive...
when we become free of the chain of moment-to-moment memories,
when two or three or ten hours pass by without us feeling it,
when a week or two pass by and it all feels like just yesterday...

it is in these times when we feel free of our thoughts, plans, worries, or inhibitions.
it is when we live intense,
it is when we live the moment.

the ecstasy of the moment lived fully!
how brief, how fast...
like an orgasm!

and then, the moment fades,
somehow forgotten,
swallowed by the waves of daily surprises and anxieties.


assume that these moments are like train stations,
from which our train of thoughts departs onto bridges,
these bridges cross through the landscapes of our lives,
and these landscapes are our own ideas,
terrains in the mind,
virtual terrains...

these bridges are the days we don't count,
days we have not lived fully,
days we can easily tear away from the calendar of our years,
days erased, days skipped, days left blank...

these are the days which we consider as insignificant,
as days leading us to better times (the stations, the moments)
and so, these insignificant days become our bridges.

these bridges,
they cross through deserts when we feel dry and empty,
over oceans when we feel lost and thirsty,
over mountains when we conquer, explore and achieve,
over valleys and rivers when we feel relaxed and at peace...
over volcanoes when our minds become like battlefields, war zones and minefields,
over black murky wastelands when we feel remorse, regret and fear...

these bridges,
they take us far and near,
in every direction they please,
up and down and sideways too,
inside out, upside down and in reverse,
like a magic mountain, they twist and turn,
they go in circles and loop around...

days passed on bridges,
days wasted,
days like roads and bridges, taking us places,
days spent in waiting for better days to come,
bridges to stations...

(Hady B)

Israel promises troops legal backing over Gaza war

Print Story: Israel promises troops legal backing over Gaza war - Yahoo! News

** Fucking cowards!!


Israel promises troops legal backing over Gaza war
By Jeffrey Heller Jeffrey Heller

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – International calls to investigate Israel over alleged war crimes in the Gaza Strip prompted Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on Sunday to promise military personnel state protection from foreign prosecution.

"The commanders and soldiers sent to Gaza should know they are safe from various tribunals and Israel will assist them on this front and defend them, just as they protected us with their bodies during the Gaza operation," Olmert said.

Last week, the military censor ordered local and foreign media in Israel to blur the faces of army commanders in photos and video footage of the Gaza war for fear they could be identified and arrested while traveling abroad.

Israeli media reports said the military had been advising its top brass to think twice about visiting Europe.

Speaking at the weekly cabinet meeting, Olmert said Israel's justice minister would consult with the country's top legal experts and find "answers to possible questions relating to the Israeli military's activities" during the 22-day war.

Some 1,300 Palestinians, including at least 700 civilians, were killed, medical officials said, in the offensive Israel launched in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip with the declared aim of ending cross-border rocket attacks.

The civilian deaths sparked public outcry abroad and prompted senior U.N. officials to demand independent investigations into whether Israel committed war crimes.

Ten Israeli soldiers and three civilians, hit by rocket salvoes, were killed in the conflict.

Israel said hundreds of militants were among the Palestinian dead and that it tried its best to avoid civilian casualties in densely populated areas where gunmen operated.

WHITE PHOSPHOROUS

Rights group Amnesty International has said that Israel's use of white phosphorus munitions -- which can cause extreme burns -- in built-up areas of the Gaza Strip was indiscriminate and therefore constituted a war crime.

Israel has said it used all weapons in Gaza within the limits of international law. Its military, however, has opened an investigation into white phosphorous use during the conflict.

Palestinians have long demanded international prosecution of Israel's military crackdowns. Yet legal frameworks are problematic.

The International Criminal Court in The Hague has no jurisdiction to investigate in the Gaza Strip, as it is not a state. Though the Palestinian Authority has been functioning as an interim sovereign polity since 1993, it was forced out of Gaza last year by Hamas after the Islamists won an election.

And while Israel has not signed the Rome Statute that enshrined the ICC, it can still be investigated, but that would require a U.N. Security Council mandate. Any such proposal would probably be vetoed by Israel's ally, the United States.

Some European nations allow for war crimes lawsuits to be filed privately against members of Israel's security services.

In 2005, reserve Major-General Doron Almog, the former head of Israeli forces in the Gaza Strip, was warned by Israeli diplomats not to leave an El Al aircraft that landed in London after a tip-off British police were about to arrest him on war crimes charges.

A British Muslim group had won an arrest warrant alleging he breached the Fourth Geneva Convention in the demolition of Palestinian homes in 2002 in the southern Gaza Strip. Israel said the dwellings provided gave cover to gunmen.

Almog stayed on the plane and flew back to Israel.

Supreme Court Steps Closer to Repeal of Evidence Ruling

Supreme Court Steps Closer to Repeal of Evidence Ruling - NYTimes.com

Supreme Court Steps Closer to Repeal of Evidence Ruling
By ADAM LIPTAK

WASHINGTON — In 1983, a young lawyer in the Reagan White House was hard at work on what he called in a memorandum “the campaign to amend or abolish the exclusionary rule” — the principle that evidence obtained by police misconduct cannot be used against a defendant.

The Reagan administration’s attacks on the exclusionary rule — a barrage of speeches, opinion articles, litigation and proposed legislation — never gained much traction. But now that young lawyer, John G. Roberts Jr., is chief justice of the United States.

This month, Chief Justice Roberts, writing for the majority in Herring v. United States, a 5-to-4 decision, took a big step toward the goal he had discussed a quarter-century before. Taking aim at one of the towering legacies of the Warren Court, its landmark 1961 decision applying the exclusionary rule to the states, the chief justice’s majority opinion established for the first time that unlawful police conduct should not require the suppression of evidence if all that was involved was isolated carelessness. That was a significant step in itself. More important yet, it suggested that the exclusionary rule itself might be at risk.

The Herring decision “jumped a firewall,” said Kent Scheidegger, the general counsel of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, a victims’ rights group. “I think Herring may be setting the stage for the Holy Grail,” he wrote on the group’s blog, referring to the overruling of Mapp v. Ohio, the 1961 Warren Court decision.

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. joined the Herring decision and has been a reliable vote for narrowing the protections afforded criminal defendants since he joined the court in 2006. In applying for a job in the Reagan Justice Department in 1985, he wrote that his interest in the law had been “motivated in large part by disagreement with Warren Court decisions, particularly in the areas of criminal procedure,” religious freedom and voting rights.

Justice Alito replaced Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who was considered a moderate in criminal procedure cases.

“With Alito’s replacement of O’Connor,” said Craig M. Bradley, a law professor at Indiana University, “suddenly now they have four votes for sure and possibly five for the elimination of the exclusionary rule.”

The four certain votes, in the opinion of Professor Bradley and other legal scholars, are Chief Justice Roberts, Justice Alito, Justice Antonin Scalia and Justice Clarence Thomas, who is also an alumnus of the Reagan administration.

The fate of the rule seems to turn on the views of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who has sent mixed signals on the question. As in so many areas of the law, there are indications that the court’s liberal and conservative wings are eagerly courting him. They are also no doubt looking for the case that, with Justice Kennedy’s vote, will settle the issue once and for all.

The United States takes a distinctive approach to the exclusionary rule, requiring automatic suppression of physical evidence in some kinds of cases. That means, in theory at least, that relatively minor police misconduct can result in the suppression of conclusive evidence of terrible crimes.

Other nations balance the two interests case by case or rely on other ways to deter police wrongdoing directly, including professional discipline, civil lawsuits and criminal prosecution.

In Herring, Chief Justice Roberts seemed to be advocating those kinds of approaches. “To trigger the exclusionary rule,” he wrote, “police conduct must be sufficiently deliberate that exclusion can meaningfully deter it, and sufficiently culpable that such deterrence is worth the price paid by the justice system.”

That price, the chief justice wrote, “is, of course, letting guilty and possibly dangerous defendants go free.”

The Herring decision can be read broadly or narrowly, and its fate in the lower courts is unclear. The conduct at issue in the case — in which an Alabama man, Bennie D. Herring, was arrested on officers’ mistaken belief that he was subject to an outstanding arrest warrant — was sloppy recordkeeping in a police database rather than a mistake by an officer on the scene. Since the misconduct at issue in Herring was, in the legal jargon, “attenuated from the arrest,” the decision may apply only to a limited number of cases.

But the balance of the opinion is studded with sweeping suggestions that all sorts of police carelessness should not require, in Chief Justice Roberts’s words, that juries be barred from “considering all the evidence.”

A broad reading of the decision by the lower courts, Professor Bradley said, means “the death of the exclusionary rule as a practical matter.”

In one of the first trial court decisions to interpret Herring, a federal judge in New Jersey took the broader view, refusing to suppress evidence obtained from computer hard drives under a search warrant based on false information supplied by a Secret Service agent. The agent had told the judge that DVDs found during an earlier search contained child pornography.

This was false: other law enforcement officials had reviewed the DVDs and had found no child pornography. The agent, who was leading the investigation, testified that he did not know of that review when he made his statement.

“This conduct,” Judge Stanley R. Chesler wrote a week after Herring was decided, “while hardly qualifying as a model of efficient, careful and cooperative law enforcement, does not rise to the level of culpability that the Supreme Court held in Herring must be apparent for the exclusionary rule to serve its deterrent purpose and outweigh the cost of suppressing evidence.”

Constitutional adjudication is not a science experiment, and it is often hard to say for sure what difference a change in personnel makes. In the case of the exclusionary rule, though, you can get pretty close.

On Jan. 9, 2006, just months after Chief Justice Roberts joined the court, the justices heard arguments in Hudson v. Michigan. The police in Detroit had violated the constitutional requirement that they knock and announce themselves before storming the home of Booker T. Hudson, and the question in the case was whether the drugs they found should be suppressed under the exclusionary rule

Justice O’Connor, in her last weeks on the court while the Senate considered Justice Alito’s nomination, was almost certainly the swing vote, and she showed her cards.

“Is there no policy protecting the homeowner a little bit and the sanctity of the home from this immediate entry?” she asked a government lawyer, her tone sharp and flinty.

David A. Moran, who argued the case for Mr. Hudson, was feeling good after the argument. “I was pretty confident that I’d won,” he said in a recent interview. “O’Connor had pretty clearly spoken on my side.”

Three months later, the court called for reargument, signaling a 4-to-4 deadlock after Justice O’Connor’s departure. Justice Alito was on the court now, and the tenor of the second argument was entirely different.

Now Justice Stephen G. Breyer, who seemed to have been at work on a majority opinion in favor of Mr. Hudson, saw a looming catastrophe. The court, Justice Breyer said, was about to “let a kind of computer virus loose in the Fourth Amendment.”

Justice Breyer had reason to be wary. When the 5-to-4 decision was announced in June, the court not only ruled that violations of the knock-and-announce rule do not require the suppression of evidence but also called into question the exclusionary rule itself.

In a law review article later that year, Mr. Moran went even further. “My 5-4 loss in Hudson v. Michigan,” he wrote, “signals the end of the Fourth Amendment as we know it.”

Justice Scalia, writing for the majority, said that much had changed since the Mapp decision in 1961. People whose rights were violated may now sue police officers, and police departments are more professional. In light of these factors, he wrote, “resort to the massive remedy of suppressing evidence of guilt is unjustified.”

Justice Scalia cited the work of a criminologist, Samuel Walker, to support his point about increased police professionalism. Professor Walker responded with an opinion article in The Los Angeles Times saying that Justice Scalia had misrepresented his work. Better police work, Professor Walker said, was a consequence of the exclusionary rule rather than a reason to do away with it.

Justice Kennedy signed the majority decision, adopting Justice Scalia’s sweeping language. Oddly, though, he also wrote separately to say that “the continued operation of the exclusionary rule, as settled and defined by our precedents, is not in doubt.”

Another important Warren Court decision on criminal procedure, Miranda v. Arizona, appears to remain secure. Miranda, as anyone with a television set knows, protected a suspect’s right to remain silent and the right to a lawyer by requiring a warning not found in the Constitution. The decision, like Mapp, was the subject of much criticism in the Reagan years.

But in a pragmatic 7-to-2 decision in 2000, the Rehnquist Court refused to revisit the issue. Miranda warnings, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist wrote for the majority, had “become embedded in routine police practice” and had “become part of the national culture.” Justices Scalia and Thomas dissented.

Defenders of the exclusionary rule breathed a sigh of relief in November

“From the point of view of a liberal concerned about criminal procedure,” said Yale Kamisar, a law professor at the University of San Diego, “we were saved by Barack Obama in the nick of time. If ever there was a court that was establishing the foundations for overthrowing the exclusionary rule, it was this one.”

For now, said Pamela Karlan, a law professor at Stanford, “they don’t have five votes to disavow the exclusionary rule by name.”

At the same time, Professor Karlan said, “you are not going to see any dimension along which there is going to be an expansion of defendants’ rights in this court.”

Video shows proof of phosphorus bombs in Gaza

Video shows proof of phosphorus bombs in Gaza | World news | guardian.co.uk

Gaza doctors detail burns to entire victims' bodies from chemical that is forbidden to be used as a weapon

Video showing injuries consistent with the use of white phosphorus shells has been filmed inside hospitals treating Palestinian wounded in Gaza City.

Contact with the shell remnants causes severe burns, sometimes burning the skin to the bone, consistent with descriptions by Ahmed Almi, an Egyptian doctor at the al-Nasser hospital in Khan Younis.

Almi said the entire body of one victim was burned within an hour. It was the first time he had seen the effects of what he called a "chemical weapon".

The Israeli military has denied using white phosphorus during the assault on Gaza, but aid agencies say they have no doubt it has been used.

"It is an absolute certainty," said Marc Garlasco, a senior military analyst at Human Rights Watch. He had seen Israeli artillery fire white phosphorus shells at Gaza City, Garlasco said.

The shells burst in the air, billowing white smoke before dropping the phosphorus shell.

Garlasco said each shell contains more than 100 incendiary rounds, which ignite and pump out smoke for about 10 minutes.

Severe respiratory problems can result in anyone exposed to the smoke and burning chemical particles that rain down over an area the size of a football pitch.

According to the International Solidarity Movement, many patients at the hospital near Khan Younis were suffering from serious breathing difficulties after inhaling smoke.

Human Rights Watch compares the use of white phosphorus shells over Gaza to the impact of cluster munitions, which scatter "bomblets" over a wide area. Children may kick and play with a lump of phosphorus, stirring up the embers and producing more fire and smoke.

The use of white phosphorus as a weapon – as opposed to its use as an obscurant and infrared blocking smoke screen – is banned by the UN's third convention on conventional weapons, which covers the use of incendiary devices. Though Israel is not a signatory to the convention, its military manuals reflect the convention's restrictions on using white phosphorus.

Israel initially claimed that it was not using white phosphorus. It later explained that shells being loaded for a howitzer, identified from photographs as phosphorus rounds, were empty "quiet" shells used for target marking. However, images of exploding shells and showering burning fragments are now acknowledged by independent observers as having been phosphorus.

At the centre of the controversy is the way white phosphorus air burst shells have been used in heavily built-up urban areas, with an overwhelmingly civilian population.

The M825A1 rounds, which are the kind identified as being fired by Israeli forces, are made primarily for use as a smokescreen in a way that limits their effect as an incendiary weapon, experts say.

Neil Gibson, a technical adviser to Jane's Missiles and Rockets magazine, said the shells did not produce high-velocity burning fragments like conventional white phosphorus weapons once did.

Instead, he said, they produced a "series of large slower burning wedges which fall from the sky". The wedges would then ignite spontaneously in the air and fall to the ground, burning for five or 10 minutes, he said.

Israel may face UN court ruling on legality of Gaza conflict

Israel may face UN court ruling on legality of Gaza conflict | World news | The Guardian

Israel faces the prospect of intervention by international courts amid growing calls that its actions in Gaza are a violation of world humanitarian and criminal law.

The UN general assembly, which is meeting this week to discuss the issue, will consider requesting an advisory opinion from the international court of justice, the Guardian has learned.

"There is a well-grounded view that both the initial attacks on Gaza and the tactics being used by Israel are serious violations of the UN charter, the Geneva conventions, international law and international humanitarian law," said Richard Falk, the UN's special rapporteur on the Palestinian territories and professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University.

"There is a consensus among independent legal experts that Israel is an occupying power and is therefore bound by the duties set out in the fourth Geneva convention," Falk added. "The arguments that Israel's blockade is a form of prohibited collective punishment, and that it is in breach of its duty to ensure the population has sufficient food and healthcare as the occupying power, are very strong."

A Foreign Office source confirmed the UK would consider backing calls for a reference to the ICJ. "It's definitely on the table," the source said. "We have already called for an investigation and are looking at all evidence and allegations."

An open letter to the prime minister signed by prominent international lawyers and published in today's Guardian states: "The United Kingdom government ... has a duty under international law to exert its influence to stop violations of international humanitarian law in the current conflict between Israel and Hamas."

The letter argues that Israel has violated principles of humanitarian law, including launching attacks directly aimed at civilians and failing to discriminate between civilians and combatants.

The letter follows condemnation earlier this week from leading QCs of Israel's action as a violation of international law, and a vote by the UN's human rights council on Monday on a resolution condemning the ongoing Israeli military operation in the Gaza Strip.

"The blockade of humanitarian relief, the destruction of civilian infrastructure, and preventing access to basic necessities such as food and fuel are prima facie war crimes," a group of leading QCs and academics, including Michael Mansfield QC and Sir Geoffrey Bindman, wrote in a letter to the Sunday Times.

Israel has already been found to have violated its obligations in international law by a previous advisory opinion of the ICJ, and is likely to vigorously contest arguments that it is an occupying power. It previously stated that occupation ceased after disengagement from Gaza in 2005.

Its stance raises questions as to the utility of an advisory opinion by the ICJ after Israel rejected its finding in a previous case, which found the wall being constructed in the Palestinian territories to be a violation of Israel's obligations under international humanitarian law.

Questions are also being raised as to whether the international criminal court, which deals with war crimes and crimes against humanity, would have any jurisdiction to hear cases against perpetrators of the alleged crimes on both sides of the conflict. Neither Israel nor the Palestinian territories are signatories to the Rome statute, which brings states within the jurisdiction of the ICC.

More likely, experts say, is the establishment of ad-hoc tribunals of the kind created to deal with the war in the former Yugoslavia and the genocide in Rwanda.

"If there were the political will there could be an ad-hoc tribunal established to hear allegations of war crimes," Falk said. "This could be done by the general assembly acting under article 22 of the UN charter which gives them the authority to establish subsidiary bodies."

Israel's last surge before a Gaza cease-fire?

Print Story: Israel's last surge before a Gaza cease-fire? - Yahoo! News

Israel's last surge before a Gaza cease-fire?

By Ilene R. Prusher and Joshua Mitnick

JERUSALEM and Tel Aviv – The Israeli military on Thursday shelled the main United Nations aid compound in Gaza, struck a building that houses foreign news organizations, and caused a fire at a hospital. The attacks sparked global condemnation even as efforts to reach a cease-fire continued.

Later in the day, Hamas struck the Israeli city of Beersheba with a salvo of Qassam rockets, injuring five people, two of them seriously.

The Israeli strikes on what political officials said were unintended targets in the Gaza campaign underscore what some analysts see as a furious drive by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) to achieve as many last-minute blows to Hamas as possible before a cease-fire is reached. And at this stage of the war, fissures are emerging within the Israeli civilian and military leadership.

"It's the final push to make Hamas understand, either they make a decision for a cease-fire, or it will be difficult to survive," says Shmuel Rosner, a leading opinion maker and journalist. "They need to show seriousness so Hamas doesn't interpret Israel's waiting of the last few days as reluctance to continue the operation."

While Ehud Barak, Israel's defense minister, apologized to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon for Israel's strike on their Gaza headquarters, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert took a different approach. He said the building had been used by Palestinian militants to strike Israeli forces.

Mr. Olmert, quoting a senior IDF officer, said Israel's troops opened fire on militants inside the compound shot antitank weapons and machine guns. "It is absolutely true that we were attacked from that place," he said.

Those two points provide a window into the differences that have developed at the top of the Israel political structure, run by an unlikely troika of Olmert, Mr. Barak and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni – none of whom are allied.

With an election set for Feb. 10, the political rivals have become even more assertive in claiming their share of the credit for the war.

Ms. Livni, who is running to succeed Olmert, reportedly favors a unilateral pullback even without a cease-fire, according to media reports. A swift pullback would minimize risks to Israeli soldiers as well as the chances of a giving Hamas an opportunity to score any parting blows. A quick withdrawal would also improve Israel's position with its Western allies, which is progressively eroding as damage and death tolls mount.

"She is afraid of a mess up," says Gideon Doron, a political science professor at Tel Aviv University. "The longer you stay there, the higher the likelihood of a soldier getting hurt. That's bad for the ruling party."

Barak, who has got a boost from the polls for leading the war effort, reportedly supports a swift "humanitarian" cease-fire and the Egyptian efforts to reach a truce with Hamas. He would also like to wrap up the fighting and show a willingness to pursue peace to bolster his position among in his pro-peace Labor Party.

Olmert, who reportedly supports continuing the operation, is a lame duck prime minister and is free of his colleagues' political calculations. Mr. Doron says he's concerned about his legacy and would like to be remembered as the leader who squashed Hamas.

But meanwhile in Gaza, the war moved into one of its most deadly days amid some of the heaviest Israeli shelling on Thursday. Israel's military chief of staff told a parliamentary committee Tuesday that although Hamas has been dealt a serious blow, "we still have work to do."

In the crosshairs are senior Hamas figures who have gone underground, including Mahmoud az-Zahar – whose home was hit by the Israeli air force late Wednesday night. Hamas Interior Minister Saeed Seyyam was also killed Thursday. Mr. Seyyam controlled Hamas police and security forces of about 13,000 men, many of whom were directly involved with fighting.

Many observers say that IDF strategists have a short-list of targets they want to strike before a cease-fire. The Israel defense establishment, they say, is loath to slow down and give the impression that it's tired or is lacking in the will to continuing fighting Hamas.

But Israel missile strikes drew even sharper international condemnation on Thursday, in particular from the UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki Moon, who is in Israel trying to bring about a cease-fire that would end Israel's attacks on Gaza and the continued launch of rockets at Israel by Hamas militants.

Into the afternoon Thursday, the UN headquarters in Gaza, where some 700 Palestinian civilian had sought shelter, was still burning out of control, several hours after it was hit, forcing the suspension of major aid operations in the coastal territory. The chief of operations there said there wasn't enough water to douse the flames, a result of Gaza's battered infrastructure in the 20-day war with Israel.

"The warehouses are burning down, the fire is spreading, and we're very concerned," says John Ging, the director of operations in Gaza for UN Relief Works Agency (UNRWA), the UN's main arm for aid to Palestinians.

"There's a shortage of water and that's why it's spreading. All the food, medicine, and humanitarian aid we have to distribute in Gaza are stored here," Ging adds.

The solution is to "stop the shooting, respect the UN, and then we can start to rebuild. Our compound is falling apart before my eyes! There are a million-and-half people depending on aid from us, and an attack on our compound is another challenge that we can do without."

Mr. Ban, a diplomat who usually speaks in carefully crafted statements, issued his strongest statement to date on the conflict, which mushroomed on Dec. 27 after a six-month cease-fire expired and Hamas resumed rocket fire at Israel.

"I conveyed my strong protest and outrage to the defense minister and the foreign minister and demanded a full explanation," said Ban, who had met Ms. Livni earlier Thursday as part of a multi-national effort to bring the devastating 20-day-old war to an end.

Ban said in a press conference that he spoken to Barak. "The defense minister said to me it was a grave mistake and he took it very seriously," Ban said. "He assured me that extra attention will be paid to UN facilities and staff and this will not be repeated."

In Gaza, flames from the bombings Thursday also engulfed the al-Quds Hospital in Gaza City, though it was unclear whether this was from a direct hit or from a fire resulting from a nearby attack.

A UN spokesman said that the headquarters was hit by what was believed to be three white phosphorous shells, which burn at higher-than-usual temperatures, and that UN workers were unable to douse the flames with standard fire extinguishers.

Thursday marked the second time since the war began that a UN facility took a direct hit from Israel.

Last week, Israeli forces bombed a UN-run school in Jabalya, in northern Gaza, killing 39 Palestinians sheltering there. The Israeli army says it hit the school because it was the source of mortar fire, but the UN says that no militants were found at the site.

At press time, emergency services in Beersheba, Israel, were dealing with the aftermath rocket attack there.

One of the Qassams launched by Hamas made a direct hit on a car. In all, Gaza militants fired at least 24 rockets at Israel Thursday, hitting cities such as Gedera, Ofakim, and Sderot. The wail of sirens, sending people in and out of bomb shelters, was heard throughout the day.

Bill Moyers interviews Simon Schama

Bill Moyers Journal . Transcripts | PBS

BILL MOYERS: We're hearing the word "historic" over and over again as we near the inauguration of our first African American president. But there is something else historic as well about this moment, and that's the convergence of issues our country faces. Our economy is in freefall. Our government is in shambles. We're at war in two other countries. And our foreign policy has produced one fiasco after another.

Some people even say Obama should actually consider himself fortunate to be taking over at a time like this, because there's nowhere to go but up. Maybe, but as we used to say in East Texas, no situation is so bad, it can't get worse. The truth is there's nothing new about freshly inaugurated presidents inheriting a mess.

When George Washington took the oath of office at Federal Hall here in New York he was taking over a newly independent collection of squabbling states so penniless that Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton had to negotiate a bailout just to cover the salaries of the president and Congress.

And Lincoln. When Abraham Lincoln was sworn in on March 4, 1861, his hand on the same Bible Barack Obama will be using, the Union was dissolving into Civil War. Jefferson Davis had already been inaugurated as President of the Confederacy two weeks earlier.

Lincoln's bumbling predecessor, James Buchanan, told him, "If you are as happy on entering the White House as I am on leaving, you are a very happy man indeed."

CHIEF JUSTICE CHARLES EVANS HUGHES: You, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, do solemnly swear...

BILL MOYERS: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, of course, became president as the country was shivering and starving through the fourth winter of the Great Depression. Twenty-five percent of us were unemployed, stocks had plunged seventy-five percent after the Crash of '29 and new investment and industrial production were non-existent.

So it has been throughout America's stormy past: two steps back for every three forward, periods of boundless optimism countered by times of fear and desperation.

That's the background that prompted me to want to talk to our guest on this broadcast.

Historian Simon Schama has spent eight months traveling across America to take stock of our nation's character. Exploring our experience with war, religion, prosperity, and race.

MAN: I don't think any white person can really understand what it is to be a Negro in America.

BILL MOYERS: This legacy now awaits Obama on the doorstep of the White House.

The result of his travels is a television series premiering on BBC America next week, during the inauguration, and this upcoming book, THE AMERICAN FUTURE: A HISTORY.

Simon Schama is an art and literary critic who since 1990 has written and presented more than 30 documentaries as well as such best-sellers as THE POWER OF ART and the three-volume A HISTORY OF BRITAIN. He teaches history and Art History at Columbia University here in New York, and he still looks at America with the eye of the curious and intrigued visitor - the traveler who helps us see ourselves as others see us - and as, perhaps, we really are.

Welcome to you.

SIMON SCHAMA: Thank you for having me.

BILL MOYERS: Some time ago when we talked, oh, I think it was '05 or '06, you said to a group of us you thought the election in 2008, in that election we would finally confront our demons. Did we?

SIMON SCHAMA: Oh, I think we did actually. I think, or maybe even if we were demurring about taking stock of the magnitude of the many disasters besetting the United States, history in the shape of massive economic trouble happening at the time of a difficult and indeterminate war, made sure that we would. It's not just a question, Bill, I think of a number of policies that went wrong or even a question of a government that really, put it mildly, hadn't lived up to its billing.

It's been this extraordinary sense of a sinkhole at the center of our authority. That somehow all the nostrums and wisdoms and optimistic clichés, if you like, that have sustained us really since Ronald Reagan's Morning in America could not cope with trouble in manufacturing, could not cope with a sense of loss of grip about why our sons and daughters were dying abroad. Because America, you know, it's the reason I did this, both the series and the book. America is not impervious to these great moments of philosophical self-examination. We think of it all as sort of TV slogans and spin, the creatures of opinion management. But there have been moments over and over again, Watergate and the aftermath of Kennedy, when we've said we are a great democratic experiment. What has become of us? And I did think this would be another of those moments.

BILL MOYERS: Obama himself said last week in a speech on the economy that, you know, it's very late in the game. He didn't sound as certain as he might have about what can be done.

SIMON SCHAMA: No. He better sound a bit more certain in the weeks and months that are coming. What was actually a little disappointing about the end stages of his campaign is having promised us, really, a debate about a return to mutual purpose. He was really playing, as one must, I suppose, pragmatic politics and didn't exactly make the speech for me that I was hungering for, saying times are tough, but we're in this together. There were little whispers of that because of the nervousness really about rocking the boat too much before the election itself came along.

Now he has a really different task. He does indeed have the kind of Franklin Rooseveltian task of making Americans face up to the magnitudes of disaster. Maybe they don't need to be educated about this without utterly demoralizing us collectively, sapping our energy. It's a tough thing. So the catch-up is to say, for Timothy Geitner and all the rest of them, how much state power ought we be using without actually killing the animal we're supposed to be bringing back from sickness; namely, American capitalism? It's a tricky one. You can only feel your way day by day, week by week, I suspect.

BILL MOYERS: My sense is that the movement that was out there, that the longing for a new American story after the last eight years found Obama in one very strong sense. If you-

SIMON SCHAMA: Yes, but it takes a guy with really shrewd nostrils to smell the way the wind is going.

BILL MOYERS: And you were writing in September of last fall, two months before the election, that the next president would be the most compelling storyteller.

SIMON SCHAMA: Yes, I did.

BILL MOYERS: Why?

SIMON SCHAMA: Well, I'd read "Dreams from My Father." That is a book about his own life, but it is also a book about the possibilities of American life, be it from the Great Plains, from Kansas, or his father's rather hapless, tragic story of the Kenyan who comes to Hawaii and then leaves his family to go to Harvard. It was almost like reading Steinbeck actually. The moment in that first book of his where I thought, this is an American story, is when his mother, in Indonesia, wakes the little boy, Barry, up at four o'clock in the morning to get extra lessons which he barely understands because she's worried about him getting not enough education in Jakarta or wherever it was. And we were threatened with losing a sense really, especially, you know, in the minority community he became aware of in South Chicago-

BILL MOYERS: Right.

SIMON SCHAMA: -that education above all is empowerment. That's such an American story. That's why I came to America, Bill.

BILL MOYERS: That's why you make the case that his story, the story he tells about himself, is implanted in the American DNA.

SIMON SCHAMA: I think he's so good because he's actually very honest. When he gets to Chicago after a very moody, alienated, odd period, after he graduated from Columbia as an undergraduate, he wandered around, did some work as a consultant for a business corporation. Led a lonely life way over in East Harlem. And then just was hungry for some sort of connection. This is someone whose mother had left him with his grandparents in Hawaii, whose father had disappeared, someone whose whole life has been about reconnecting with some larger group.

And actually what was very odd, was when he was accused by Sarah Palin in particular of never running anything, that he didn't say it was no picnic going to Altgeld Gardens and Roseland in South Chicago, we're talking about asbestos removal. We're talking about fundamental, you know, making sure sewage doesn't back up, making sure electricity isn't cut off. He had early contact with a very hard education, all those empty damp church halls where he tried to get four or five people to come, twenty-five people to come, fifty people. That's what community organizing means. It doesn't mean some kind of lofty piece of editorializing. It means getting rid of the asbestos.

BILL MOYERS: So you think he appreciates or at least understands what you write about in the book, this dark underside of the American DNA, the American Dream, where for every Barack Obama, there are legions of young black men still experiencing racism, violence, and alienation, as you describe this?

SIMON SCHAMA: Yes. He is-

BILL MOYERS: You think he really appreciates-

SIMON SCHAMA: His strengths and his weakness is that he does. Precisely because he is the skinny intellectual with a kind of, oh, so-so jump shot, jumped into the rough life of South Chicago. As I say, he's very wry about his unpreparedness for that. But there's no question. There's another passage he's written that he was headed for drugs. He liked to kind of cultivate this sort of cool attitude. His great strength is that he does know all these worlds. The question, really, was whether he knows too much. Whether he has too much experience of all these worlds to be able to say enough of input really. Time for a decision. We have no idea if he's any good at that. We're about to find out.

BILL MOYERS: Do you have an intuition about that, looking at both his story and America's story?

SIMON SCHAMA: I think-

BILL MOYERS: -for the moment?

SIMON SCHAMA: I think he's going to start by kissing up to too many people. And then I think there'll be a moment maybe about two months down the line and the kissing's going to stop. I rather hope so.

BILL MOYERS: So here Obama with this story is coming to take the Oath of Office next week. If he reads your book - which I most certainly hope he does, quite frankly - if he reads your book, he will find that he's standing at the convergence of four powerful forces in American life that you have identified and organized your work around. War, religion - what you call American fervor, I love that term, fervor - immigration, and abundance, or plenty. Tell me briefly why those four themes commanded your attention.

SIMON SCHAMA: The views that America's had historically about those seem to me to gather together into the exceptional American character. For example, it was really only in America that an intense debate was played out, about what the place of the military was going to be in American life.

BILL MOYERS: We have an excerpt from your series, let's take a look at it.

SIMON SCHAMA: And like the soldiers of Gettysburg, the veterans of World War II have become an emblem of the good American war. Like thousands of young men, Epifanio Salazar signed up after Pearl Harbor. At seventeen, he was too young, but he lied about his age. Salazar trained as a paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne Division. Two days after D-day, he made his first jump, behind German lines in Normandy. No one doubts that if ordinary Americans like Salazar had not made that jump into the fire, the world might now be a very different place.

EPIFANIO SALAZAR: We landed in some fields, they were waiting for us. They had machine guns and everything. I got shot by a German in the knee, and here, in the shoulder. It was awful.

SIMON SCHAMA: You had one hell of a tough war.

EPIFANIO SALAZAR: Oh, it's to hell and back.

SIMON SCHAMA: What do you think, do you think about the wars that America is in now, and compare?

EPIFANIO SALAZAR: I think the war in Iraq is not so good. It's a political war, is what I think. Because in World War II it took us five years to win, completely win. And now it's five years, we haven't done anything.

SIMON SCHAMA: Salazar had invited me to join him at a gala to honor him and his fellow veterans. I guess I'd assumed that the atmosphere of shared ordeals, remembered wounds and deaths would preclude any hint of debate. But I was wrong. General Ricardo Sanchez, who had served as commander of American forces in Iraq, gave a speech. I was expecting him to deliver a call to arms. Instead, we got something more authentically American - a call to vote.

GENERAL RICARDO SANCHEZ: We are now into year six of Iraq, and if we disagree with the policies, then there are mechanisms for us to express that. When you're in a time of leadership crises, what better time for you to mobilize yourselves and make a statement than during a presidential election year? Whether you support a Republican or Democratic candidate is irrelevant. The point that I'd like to leave with you, is that the entire American community must mobilize itself, get involved in this tremendously critical year and make a statement. We have to send a message to Washington, because the future of our country is at stake.

BILL MOYERS: What were you thinking, sitting there?

SIMON SCHAMA: How wonderfully American a moment that was. I was completely dewy-eyed. I was thinking of all those men with medals organizing the destruction of democracy in some South American republic or the military junta in Burma or places where the authority of the uniform has given you permission to kill democracy because it's such an inconvenience. Pervez Musharraf, for example.

I was thinking there is Sanchez who had every reason to represent himself as the wronged general, wronged by civilian command of the war. And, in fact, he bared his heart to me about, actually, what a disaster he thought the immediate post-invasion administration had been. But the message he wanted in public about that supremely military occasion, when military sentiment was the kind of communal bond, was the first thing we are is a democracy. That's only in America, you find.

BILL MOYERS: You open one chapter with a quotation from Vice President Dick Cheney. "America has never been a warrior culture." When you heard that, what went through your mind?

SIMON SCHAMA: Well, the next sentence is, "Just because Dick Cheney said it doesn't necessarily make it untrue." I thought this is rich coming fro- but then my second thought was, you're right. That's absolutely true. Of course you and I agree that the temptation to bullying - Theodore Roosevelt was high on the sound of a bugle, as we all know - has always been there, and it's often been succumbed to. We've gotten into all sorts of wars in American history, not to mention genocide of Native Americans, the Mexican War, certainly a war of choice. Nonetheless, there is some sense that the founding fathers would have been proud of Ricardo Sanchez in saying that there was an exceptionally strong element inside American life which is about the only decent war, the war worth spilling the blood of our sons and daughters is the war of last resort.

BILL MOYERS: I wonder if Obama understands the extent to which that early movement that we have talked about was inspired by the desire to end war, the war in Iraq and whether he knows today that he could betray the kind of trust and inspiration that we're invested in him because people were opposed to the war?

SIMON SCHAMA: Well, it'd be a shocking thing if he didn't. He went out on a limb when nobody else, you know, was actually prepared to deny the government's view about weapons of mass destruction, called it the dumb war, and so on. The danger is, of course, actually there was an incoming president, especially at 47 - or was it 48-year-old President - however smart, will succumb to those who say, "You're very bright but you must understand the art of state power. Enough with the soft, sentimental, sappy stuff. It's a hard world out there." Whether he goes, you might say, grimly Hamiltonian. And that will indeed be a betrayal.

If you ask me a prediction, Bill, I think he won't. I think actually he brings us to, you know, fervor. I think he is very invested on America's right to flourish being conditional on its survival of the moral community. I think that's a very important part of what America means to him.

BILL MOYERS: The Founding Fathers, as you point out, struggled with the moral underpinnings of military force. Do you think those moral underpinnings are still in place today after Iraq?

SIMON SCHAMA: Well, I think actually the difficulties in Iraq and our terrible overextension and years of chaos and violence and the worry about whether after we leave it'll descend into sectarian violence again, make the case that if you actually don't fight a war, as in the Second World War in which you're completely morally invested, it does you no good in terms of your own national security. The rest of the world whom ultimately you need to help you in this campaign, especially against global terrorism, will desert you, will treat you as someone who's caught the infection of military enthusiasm to a shocking degree. And they will not be there, especially when economic times are hard. So it's sort of in your interests to actually fulfill America's original mandate to fight wars in which you're morally un-occluded about.

BILL MOYERS: You were also in Texas to explore the second great theme in your book that you say converges at the time of Obama's inauguration and that is immigration. Let look at this excerpt from your visit to Houston, Texas.

SIMON SCHAMA: Texas, where a third of the city is Hispanic, and where some white Texans get hot and bothered about being swamped by a Latino tide.

VOLUNTEER BORDER PATROLMEN: Pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

SIMON SCHAMA: These volunteers gather every week to protect the kind of America they want to live in. The group is run by Curtis Collier, a pest exterminator.

CURTIS COLLIER: There's an estimated thirty to forty million people in our country illegally. And when you start multiplying that by just a few dollars, if forty million people only cost you just one dollar, it'd be costing you forty million. But it is estimated that a single illegal alien costs taxpayers somewhere in the neighborhood of four thousand dollars a year. As far as America needing the laborers to do the work that people here won't do, what happens is, these people coming to this country actually keep wages down.

SIMON SCHAMA: Their targets are the Mexican migrant workers who stand at the roadside waiting to be offered a day's work.

WORKER: I don't mind "One Nation, One Flag, One Language," that's right, I think that's right. But over there, they got cardboard with the words, "Nail 'Em and Jail 'Em." But these guys, all of us, we are just feeding our families.

PATROLMAN: You're all very illegal.

WORKER: No, everybody legal.

PATROLMAN: Show us papers and we'll help you get work

WORKER: You have no authority to-

PATROLMAN: We got authority, we're citizens.

WORKER: Why? I'm citizen too.

WORKER: A lot of guys, we have family here, born here, many of us are citizens.

PATROLMAN: What about the ones that aren't citizens? What about the ones standing here that are invaders? What do you want to do with them?

WORKER: I - I - I guess that's right.

PATROLMAN: "I - I - I" - you need to get the invaders to go home.

WORKER: But jail 'em? I don't think that's fair. We're humans.

PATROLMAN: Illegal invasion is illegal.

WORKER: Right, but we're humans.

PATROLMAN: I don't give a care what you are, if you're not an American citizen you ain't got the right to be in America, get the hell out.

PATROL WOMAN: They're not in our country legally, they're not paying taxes. They're bringing in numerous diseases, they're raping and killing people. If they don't find a job, they go out and steal and rob. They even say that Texas belongs to them. They said that we stole it from them. And I know, I had relatives that came down from Tennessee and fought for the Republic of Texas and won it, fairly and squarely. And now they're saying, this is our country, y'all stole it from us, which is not true.

BILL MOYERS: You quote a woman in your book from 1854, "She regarded the Mexicans 'not as heretics or heathens to be converted...but rather as vermin to be exterminated.'" And I thought what an old story you're telling here. What explains this paradox that we, as you say, call ourselves a nation of immigrants but we resist all the newcomers when they arrive here? And that's an old strain. What is it that accounts for that, Simon? Is it that those of us who are here fear losing our identity in the bubbling melting pot?

SIMON SCHAMA: Yes. How does one put it without sounding too highfaluting? But I'd say an anthropological neurosis, oddly enough. Franklin, who I quote in the book actually-

BILL MOYERS: Benjamin Franklin-

SIMON SCHAMA: Benjamin Franklin, 1750, is terrified about the Germans in Pennsylvania. For Franklin, this was going to be an empire of the free but only if you're maybe Scots, maybe Irish or English. He wrote, of course actually, he was aware of German journalism and so on. But he fought bitterly against the possibility that the Germans would overrun Pennsylvania. The notion is: there's always the next wave. They're not going to be ready or right or, in some peculiar biological way, compatible with democracy. The Irish weren't going to be compatible. The Italians weren't going to, but time takes its own. We were talking earlier about the amazing power of education. And, you know, that has the capacity somehow magically over the generations to make all these people just fine as Americans.

The jump which we're seeing now, however, is what Chuck Alaman in Dearborn, Michigan, says at the end of that film, talks about with great pride, says, "I'm not an Arab American. I'm an American who happens to be a Muslim. I'm as American as apple pie." And we are seeing, if Obama's elected, the coloring of America. And you gave me an article to read in the "Atlantic Monthly" which was sort of about how white America is ending. And I thought, yes. But am I missing something here? But what exactly is the problem?

BILL MOYERS: Well, the problem is this historical memory that you write. I mean, if Benjamin Franklin, as you say, you call him the founding father of American paranoia.

SIMON SCHAMA: Right.

BILL MOYERS: And he anticipated the day that-

SIMON SCHAMA: Andrew Jackson, whose praises we are singing far too much in my view actually.

BILL MOYERS: Because? Because?

SIMON SCHAMA: Because Andrew Jackson was responsible for the first great exercise in ethnic cleansing, actually, who removed the Cherokee over the Mississippi in an act of absolutely horrifying cruelty and brutality.

BILL MOYERS: You call what Andrew Jackson did in removing the Cherokee the most morally repugnant moment in American history.

SIMON SCHAMA: Jefferson actually had been the first to make this deal. He said, look, Cherokee, if you can become American - in other words, if you learn English, you open schools, maybe you'll become Christian, if you accept our laws, if you turn the Cherokee Nation into a little New Hampshire or something, of course you could stay. You'll be thrifty farmers.

They do that. Their chief is called John Ross, you know, it's part Scottish but mostly Cherokee. They do that. And it's when they've actually accepted the American deal that Jackson says, "Uh-oh, they've actually fulfilled their side of the bargain only too well. But we need Georgia because gold has been discovered in Georgia. Get rid of them. We want them to vanish."

But what I wanted to say, Bill, was that this election is an astonishing moment in that respect because Americans were asked to vote on who they thought would be the more authentically, patriotically competent commander-in-chief between a decent, decorated, genuine American white hero and someone who looked and sounded like Barack Obama. You can't make the case that an African American somehow is incapable of embodying American values when every word that falls out of that man's mouth sounds as though he'd written the Constitution. I'm being a little too nice to Obama now.

BILL MOYERS: There's something else, too. Immigration, which has been a fierce strain in American nativism and opposition to the newcomer, fierce strain, did not cut as deeply, was not as hot an issue last November as most people expected it would be. Have we, in effect, with Obama's election, settled the issue?

SIMON SCHAMA: I suspect not. The credit belongs both to actually the president, to George Bush, and to John McCain. Their view, which puts them firmly on the left of the Republican Party, was that there ought to be a way for illegal immigrants to become citizens actually. And so John McCain started to make tremendous noises about the security fence and so on. But it's true, it sort of fizzled and disappeared. Simply there seems to be more urgent things on people's scanner I believe.

BILL MOYERS: Does Obama's election mean we can finally put race behind us?

SIMON SCHAMA: The race problem will not go away, not least because when times are tough actually those who are, in any case, economically disadvantaged, who have less schooling, are likely to be those who are most, alas, disposable in terms of the possibility of unemployment. So we're going to expect I think trouble in the cities. Not I think trouble like 1960s.

But you asked, of course, the historical question. That is profound. America begins with an act - and you know, I'm deeply sentimental in my enthusiasm about the beginning of the American experiment. But it begins with an act of profound bad faith. Jefferson writes the Declaration of Independence in which liberty and equality are offered as the defining principles that make you American, while he is himself a slave owner. And then the Constitution is made at the moment in which African Americans are defined as three-fifths of a human in order to give the South enough clout to perpetuate slavery.

And, you know, Lincoln's conversion coming up to the Civil War and then during the Civil War, from someone who found it morally loathsome but pragmatically had to be kept that way, to someone who, for whatever reasons, to win the war or not, was responsible for the Emancipation Proclamation, was an enormous change.

Lincoln, simply in the end, found it unbearable to hold up his head as an American and keep that act of bad faith going. But then we had a hundred years of Jim Crow and we had the civil rights movement. So this moment, it does seem to me to finally wipe clean that original sin, that profoundly repellent act of bad faith at the very beginning.

BILL MOYERS: You give valuable time in this series and in the book to religion. How come?

SIMON SCHAMA: I thought particularly religion is especially outside America misunderstood as a kind of captive of the conservative right. So that it's become almost a synonym for wanting to kind of rant and rave about what is right and what is wrong about the abortion debates and when life begins and so on. And there seems to be a much older and grander and nobler tradition.

I was particularly taken with Roger Williams, who's extremely undisciplined, sort of unorthodox Protestant for whom the regime in Massachusetts was a form of theocratic tyranny. Well, we're back in the 1600s now and he founds Providence Plantation that becomes Rhode Island in order that anybody of any kind of faith could practice without being persecuted by the other. The American bet was taken that belief would flourish exactly to the degree in which you could never be prosecuted. You could never be turned into a criminal for believing or praying to the wrong god. And that was a bet that's paid off. So in some sense, the religiosity of America has been tied up with tolerance and freedom always.

I mean, Jefferson, that old deist. Can you imagine? Jefferson did not believe that Jesus was son of God. Do we imagine someone actually running for higher office is prepared to say, "Fine school teacher. But, you know, virgin birth, give me a break." Really, I mean, that's unlikely to happen. But Jefferson, that sort of skeptical deist who believed in the creator, he did believe in a creator but thought the New Testament was essentially a kind of a nice fairy tale about a good, moral teacher. Jefferson gave America a great gift in saying that we cease to be Americans once we start to institute religious injunction in our laws.

BILL MOYERS: Your travels took you to the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia. Let me show the audience what happened there.

SIMON SCHAMA: It's Easter Sunday in Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where Martin Luther King preached his gospel of liberation.

REVEREND RAPHAEL WARNOCK: People dare to ask, why we ain't. Two hundred and forty-four years of slavery, and you dare to ask me, why in the world are black people so angry?

SIMON SCHAMA: Like most black congregations in the country, Ebenezer has a new hero, Barack Obama. They consider him one of them, a man whose political convictions owe an enormous debt to his faith.

Obama's background in the black church, the church of slave rebellions, comes with political risks. The sermons of his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, dominated the talk that Easter weekend. He made some incendiary remarks that were instantly picked up by the American media. But here, the media attacks on Wright were seen as an attack on all of them.

REVEREND RAPHAEL WARNOCK: For two weeks now, the talking heads have been engaged in a yellow journalistic prosecution of the black church. Jeremiah Wright may be the subject, and Barack Obama may have been called to testify, but in a real sense, the black church is on trial.

SIMON SCHAMA: Reverend Warnock was not shy about taking his fervor right into the political fray.

REVEREND RAPHAEL WARNOCK: The truth may get you killed, the truth will get you crucified. Sometimes on a cross, sometimes on CNN.

SIMON SCHAMA: So much for Jefferson's hope that politics and religion might be kept apart.

REVEREND RAPHAEL WARNOCK: For me it's a question of social justice. And justice is not simply a political issue, it's a theological issue. The prophets of the Old Testament spoke about the God of justice. They said, "Woe unto you who crush the poor." So when I speak to public policy issues, I am being faithful to the Gospel.

Martin Luther King, Jr. said the judgment of God is upon America.

I would argue that the black church was born fighting for freedom. The freedom struggle is the black church's very raison d'etre, its reason for being. It is the one thing that really makes the witness of the black church distinctive in America, and it has been part of the black church's gift to America.

BILL MOYERS: What did you think, the son of Jewish refugees, sitting there in Ebenezer Baptist Church?

SIMON SCHAMA: I thought it was just grand, really. There's no doubt that as an historical statement, the Reverend Warnock was saying exactly how it is. That's to say the moment really when slaves were able to form a community out of sight and out of control of the overseer and the plantation owners were in the so-called steal-away churches or the hush harbors. The slave owners had a decision to make. Is life going to be more difficult for us in keeping our population of slaves docile with or without Christianity? So they decided that was the answer.

But that involved teaching slaves often to read or write so they could read the Bible, bringing their own white preachers in. Once they got the bard of the gospels, they decided to do something about it themselves. And the film and the chapter in the book really traces this one extraordinary place of freedom before the Civil War, especially among your lot, among the Baptists where blacks could really have their own government. By the 1870s and '80s, deep into Jim Crow years, W.E.B. DuBois, who himself is not a particularly religious person, is awed by this extraordinary establishment of what he calls the temple of African American life. So it's so important. And it was something that did not come naturally to Obama, of course.

BILL MOYERS: You were reporting and writing this at the time of the controversy-

SIMON SCHAMA: Right.

BILL MOYERS: -over Jeremiah Wright-

SIMON SCHAMA: Yes.

BILL MOYERS: -of which Pastor Warnock talked.

SIMON SCHAMA: When Obama decided on March the 18th, I'm sure it was actually, to give that great speech, the greatest speech he gave in the entire campaign, in Philadelphia. And he said, "I want to explain to you the relationship between religion and being an African American in America. "I want to explain to you, however much you like or dislike it, the nature of black anger. And then you'll understand why Jeremiah spoke as extremely as he did."

BARACK OBAMA: For the men and women of Reverend Wright's generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or the beauty shop or around the kitchen table.

And occasionally it finds voice in the church on Sunday morning,

SIMON SCHAMA: I thought, he has gone down in flames. I thought that day when I read it, I thought this is a noble speech which has destroyed his candidacy. He's decided to grasp two violently struggling snakes with his hands. And he's had it, really. But he will know when he loses the nomination, I thought, my power of clairvoyance deserting me, that he went down for a good cause. But, of course, it was that moment where actually engaging an issue of morality in American life only did him good. It only did him good.

BILL MOYERS: You describe America as a place of everlasting optimism. And yet one of the most haunting scenes in your work is of you walking into an abandoned house in the Great Plains and find yourself standing "inside the dead and broken body of the dream." What are you experiencing there?

SIMON SCHAMA: Oh, it was the death, as I said, of the little house on the prairie. That was a house that had been abandoned during the Dust Bowl and somehow miraculously had actually sort of stayed that way. And it America, was the sort of spirit of can-do America, is balanced by tragic illuminations like that.

There was a wonderful man we talk about in the film called Hugh Bennett, who became Roosevelt's sort of conservation person. And it's an extraordinary scene really where he stands talking about what's the desire for immediate greed by churning up the short grass prairie which gave you two generations maximum of high-yield crops, what we did was destroy the entire ecosystem of the grass that bound together the soil surface. So when the winds blew and there was a drought for many years, lo and behold, the dust storms. And he's standing there on the floor of the Senate. And the dust storm, the one dust storm that was horrifying, I believe it's 1935, that actually darkened the skies over Washington, that had blown east. And Bennett says, "This is what I mean. There goes Oklahoma." And he was listened to. He was listened to by the government and he was listened to by Congress. So America is this for me it will always be this most moving poetic place - does that surprise you, Bill? - in the world to be. Because it is actually about innocent ebullience followed by tragic illumination. And it's a change of course. I do still believe we'll change course. But we'll change course and still be America.

BILL MOYERS: You have said that no one is ever elected president in this country by talking about limits.

SIMON SCHAMA: Right.

BILL MOYERS: And yet we're entering a period in which Obama has to cope with limits, right?

SIMON SCHAMA: He does. But he's been smart and I think true about this. I don't want to give him a pass on everything. But actually talking about renewable sources of power, by talking about new technology, wind power, solar power, and so on, it does sound a bit like a kind of green sermon. But he's right. Investment in those enables him to deploy the one thing that we're not running out of in my view and that's American technological ingenuity. That little piece of Benjamin Franklin's legacy and alive and well. We see it every day on the web. If you could somehow actually translate that deep well of ingenuity then you feel, indeed, that what you're talking about when you talk about limits is different. You can't have Hummers the size of Rhode Island anymore barreling on the freeway. But you can have a new way, cars will go on. They'll just be different kinds of cars.

BILL MOYERS: But one reviewer says, "I was left feeling rather chilled by Schama's take on the U.S. and its prospects. This may be the end of an empire as we knew it. And one can only wonder what it will mean for someone like Obama to preside," and here's where your historical convergence arrives on the scene, "to preside over its dismantling or its transformation."

SIMON SCHAMA: That's the challenge. That's typically dark European view. But it's the challenge. You can either be - it's an extraordinary thing, this convergence of catastrophe and euphoria. Euphoria at the president we have and the heap of trouble we're in. Either the heap of trouble will do him in and there'll be a terrible dark backlash of disappointed expectations, or he'll flip it. It won't be easy. The flipping won't happen overnight. But he can actually turn it to an extraordinary vindication of the American experiment. I rather hope he will.

BILL MOYERS: Have you learned something about the American character that surprised you, that enables you to project where we are going as a people, the soul of America?

SIMON SCHAMA: There are moments in our history, some of the ordeals of the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, that Americans were called on to sacrifice, during the New Deal and during the Second World War. We are indeed going to go through a kind of test of that order. But in each occasion really America has emerged with an essential characteristics altered, but intact.

BILL MOYERS: And that is?

SIMON SCHAMA: I think freedom, ingenuity, and justice.

BILL MOYERS: Those you think are the bedrock of American character?

SIMON SCHAMA: I do. I do. And as I say, I think actually equality and justice were a dark joke so long as racism remained embedded in the institutional fabric of the United States. That's changed.

BILL MOYERS: So we're a country of great paradox.

SIMON SCHAMA: Yes.

BILL MOYERS: But you find us also a resilient people.

SIMON SCHAMA: Yes, absolutely.

BILL MOYERS: Simon Schama, thank you very much.

SIMON SCHAMA: You're welcome.

BILL MOYERS: There's more information about THE AMERICAN FUTURE, the series, the book and DVD, on our web site on pbs.org.