 Some interesting stories this week, that, for the most part, escaped major media
attention. They're all about complex issues with long-term
implications, so maybe the big media didn't want us worrying our pretty
little heads about them.
Republicans break into private
Democrat databases, use and leak what they find for partisan purposes:
First up, via Atrios, another Bush Republican scandal, this one very
reminiscent of Watergate. What these clowns, including Novak, did, is
completely illegal, and they should all be in prison. Here's the lead
from the Boston Globe, with a link to the full story:
Republican staff members of the
US Senate Judiciary Commitee infiltrated opposition computer files for
a year, monitoring secret strategy memos and periodically passing on
copies to the media, Senate officials told The Globe.
From the spring of 2002 until at least April 2003, members of the GOP
committee staff exploited a computer glitch that allowed them to access
restricted Democratic communications without a password. Trolling
through hundreds of memos, they were able to read talking points and
accounts of private meetings discussing which judicial nominees
Democrats would fight -- and with what tactics.
The office of Senate Sergeant-at-Arms William Pickle has already
launched an investigation into how excerpts from 15 Democratic memos
showed up in the pages of the conservative-leaning newspapers and were
posted to a website last November. [ More]
Canadian sues Ashcroft & Ridge for knowingly & illegally sending him to Syria for torture sessions:
The US Torture Victim Protection Act,
ironically passed by Bush I to extend Americans' ability to sue for
torture overseas, makes illegal the practice of 'extraordinary
rendition' -- the practice of using other countries to extract
information through torture and other methods illegal in the US. Maher
Arar, who was intercepted at an airport stopover on his way home to
Canada from vacation, deported by US authorities without evidence, due
process, or notification of Canadian authorities, and then tortured by
Syrians for over a year before being released without charge, wants to
prevent others from being subject to extraordinary rendition. In his
case, Arar makes it clear his release was a Syrian screw-up -- he was
supposed to 'disappear' in Syria's prison system to keep his case from
coming to light. The second irony is that, although never charged with
anything, he's banned from entering the US for five years so he can't
testify personally in the case. Sixty Minutes has covered the story but the US print media have hardly mentioned it. [Full Story]
Senior CIA advisors tell Bush of high probability of Iraq degenerating into civil war
I've only made two major
predictions on this blog and this was one of them -- that regardless of
what Bush tries to do to 'impose' order, democracy and constitutional
liberalism on Iraq (and Afghanistan), the people of those countries
will determine their own future on their own terms and in their own
time -- and that will inevitably be by way of further bloodshed,
totalitarianism and civil strife. It's encouraging to see that someone
in a position to get Bush's attention is saying the same thing. Not
that he's likely to listen. Here's the lead from Knight-Ridder, picked up by Common Dreams and not many others:
CIA officers in Iraq are warning
that the country may be on a path to civil war, current and former U.S.
officials said Wednesday, starkly contradicting the upbeat assessment
that President Bush gave in his State of the Union address. The CIA
officers' bleak assessment was delivered verbally to Washington this
week, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because
of the classified information involved.
The warning echoed growing fears that Iraq's Shiite majority, which has
until now grudgingly accepted the U.S. occupation, could turn to
violence if its demands for direct elections are spurned. Meanwhile,
Iraq's Kurdish minority is pressing its demand for autonomy and shares
of oil revenue.
"Both the Shiites and the Kurds think that now's their time," said one
intelligence officer. "They think that if they don't get what they want
now, they'll probably never get it. Both of them feel they've been
betrayed by the United States before."
These dire scenarios were discussed at meetings this week by Bush, his
top national security aides and the chief U.S. administrator in Iraq,
L. Paul Bremer, said a senior administration official, who requested
anonymity. Another senior official said the concerns over a possible
civil war weren't confined to the CIA but are "broadly held within the
government," including by regional experts at the State Department and
National Security Council. [ Full Story]
Photo above: Tens of thousands of Shiites demonstrate in Baghdad for an end to foreign occupation
Oh, and my other major prediction? That the crushing Bush debt will
plunge the world into economic collapse. The IMF are my strange
bedfellows on that one. It's going to be a fun year.
Environmental groups grapple internally with the explosive issue of population -- and immigration
Last but not least, a story from
the LA Times about how environmental groups like the Sierra Club are
waking up to the terrifying prospect of One Billion Americans,
with the consequence of coast-to-coast sprawl, eco-catastrophe and zero
green space. The debate pits two core liberal values: environmentalism
and openness to immigration, head-to-head. The result, not
surprisingly, is a headache. The discussion is long overdue and
important. The LA Times did a great job on this story, and since it's
passed into the archives, I'm posting it, courtesy of the Ecological Weblog, in its entirety:
An unusual alliance of
anti-immigration advocates and animal rights activists is attempting to
take over the leadership of the Sierra Club, America's oldest national
environmental group, in what is emerging as a bitter fight over the
future of the 112-year-old organization founded by Scottish immigrant
John Muir. Leaders of a faction that failed to persuade the club to
take a stand against immigration in 1998 are seeking to win majority
control of the group's 15-member governing board in a spring election
-- this time, as part of a broader coalition that includes vegetarians,
who want the club to denounce hunting, fishing and raising animals for
human consumption.
In response, 11 former Sierra Club presidents have written a letter
expressing "extreme concern for the continuing viability of the club,"
protesting what they see as a concerted effort by outside organizations
to hijack the mainstream conservationist group and its $95-million
annual budget. Some of the insurgent candidates vying for the five
available seats on the governing board only recently joined the Sierra
Club. If they win, they will control eight of the 15 seats. Members
will vote in the board elections in March, with the results tallied in
April. People who join the club by the end of January should be able to
vote.
The election has attracted the interest of anti-immigration groups,
which are encouraging their members to join the club to help elect the
insurgent candidates. "What has outraged Sierra Club leaders is that
external organizations would attempt to interfere and manipulate our
election to advance their own agendas," said Robert Cox, a past Sierra
Club president. Moreover, club officials argue that members of the two
insurgent groups share fundamentally anti-human views, in their
opposition to immigration and in their belief that people should take a
backseat to other species.
The Sierra Club's "dominant perspective has been to protect nature for
people," said Executive Director Carl Pope. "But by pulling up the
gangplank on immigration, they are tapping into a strand of misanthropy
that says human beings are a problem." Pope noted that 18% of Sierra
Club members like to fish or hunt, and he worried they could be driven
out by the new agenda from animal-rights advocates. "It's important to
have hunters and fishermen in the Sierra Club," Pope said. "We are a
big-tent organization. We want the Sierra Club to be a comfortable
place for Americans who want clean air, clean water, and to protect
America's open spaces."
The list of insurgent candidates features some high-profile names,
including former Colorado Gov. Richard Lamm, Cornell University
entomology professor David Pimentel, and Frank Morris, former director
of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation. All three have been
outspoken advocates of controlling population growth or restricting
immigration. Lamm is coauthor of "The Immigration Time Bomb: The
Fragmenting of America."
Club officials say the campaign got underway quietly with the recent
election of three activists, including UCLA astronomy professor
Benjamin Zuckerman, a longtime champion of curbs on immigration; and
Paul Watson, head of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, a marine
environmental group perhaps best-known for ramming whaling ships.
During their campaigns, the candidates downplayed the views they are
now advancing.
Club members who support the insurgent candidates accused the
organization's old guard of trying to demonize them as radicals to head
off the increasingly popular efforts to win a new majority. "I really
think we ought to be judged on our merits and what we've done in the
past, and not divide the Sierra Club," Pimentel said.
Political squabbles are hardly new to the 750,000-member Sierra Club,
whose members squared off just last year over whether to take a stand
against the war in Iraq. But the dispute over this spring's elections
is becoming especially rancorous. Some longtime Sierrans worry that a
takeover by the insurgents would brand the organization as bigoted and
xenophobic. "I don't think that Lamm, Pimentel and Morris are racists,"
Pope said. "But they are clearly being supported by racists."
Zuckerman and Watson call those claims ludicrous. They argue that the
club has a responsibility to take strong positions on the issues
affecting the health of the planet. "Everything else the Sierra Club is
doing is doomed to fail if the United States continues on its rapid
population growth," said Zuckerman, 50, who was the leading vote-getter
in the Sierra Club board election two years ago. "There are people who
are being born today who will see a California that has more people
than the entire United States when I was born," he said.
Asked what the Sierra Club could do to curb population growth,
Zuckerman said the group must "talk about the numbers -- how much
immigration we should have and how many babies -- so the mix of
fertility and immigration is debated and we can come to a level where
the population will stabilize."
Watson, who was a co-founder of Greenpeace but who broke ranks with
that organization because he advocated more aggressive tactics, said he
did not expect the Sierra Club to adopt the confrontational methods of
Sea Shepherd. But the club, he said, should promote eating habits that
protect Earth's other inhabitants. "Human beings are literally stealing
resources from all the other species on this planet," said Watson, a
Canadian immigrant.
In an e-mail response to the letter by the 11 former presidents, Watson
wrote, "Is the advocating of low-impact vegetarian diets a cause for
concern? I guess it is if you have a vested interest in grazing or the
beef or poultry industry. I fail to see how vegetarianism in the age of
Mad Cow Disease, E. coli, PCBs in fish, etc., can be considered
anything but practical and realistic."
Sierra Club President Larry Fahn and the other prior presidents have
pointed out that the club's members already voted to remain neutral on
immigration in 1998 after a lengthy public debate, and said that
revisiting the divisive dispute would detract from what board members
have agreed is the most immediate action needed to protect the
environment: unseating President Bush.
The presence of the anti-immigration candidates has led civil rights
leader Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks
what it considers hate groups, to join the Sierra Club and run for its
board. Dees said he decided to throw his hat into the ring to generate
publicity after his staff found that anti- immigration groups were
urging members to join the Sierra Club and help swing the vote. "I'm
not running to win a seat on the board," Dees said. "I'm running to
sound the alarm of an attempt to take over this organization by the
radical element of anti-immigration people. They are interested in
keeping this country white."
Earlier this month, VDare.com, an anti-immigration website founded by
former Forbes senior editor Peter Brimelow, author of the book "Alien
Nation," ran an article discussing the Sierra Club elections. The
article referred to Dees as a "left-wing smear artist" and urged
immigration-control activists to join the Sierra Club and vote for
like-minded candidates in its upcoming elections. The article in turn
was picked up by an anti-Semitic website and topped with a homophobic,
anti-Semitic headline. The author of the article, Brenda Walker, said
she was dismayed at that, but Sierra Club officials cited the recycled
article as evidence of extremist support for the anti-immigration
candidates.
Roderick Nash, a retired UC Santa Barbara historian who has tracked the
environmental movement, noted that since its early days, the Sierra
Club has struggled with tensions over humanity's imprint on the
environment. Gentlemen hikers and climbers -- who wanted to preserve
America's beautiful places so the privileged could visit them -- wrote
diatribes in the early 20th century about Anglo Americans being overrun
by unsavory immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, he said.
Nor is it the first time the Sierra Club has been the target of a
supposed takeover. In the late 1970s, when the club was embroiled in a
battle with Walt Disney Co. over a proposed ski resort in Mineral King
near Sequoia, the ski industry ran a slate of candidates to push for
support of more ski resorts, Pope said. Those candidates lost.
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