Document of the Day
November 1st
posted: November 1, 2007 3:42 EST
By Michael Clancy, Village Voice
It wasn't much of shock this morning when prosecutors dropped the case against Lindley DeVecchio, the former FBI agent accused of collaborating with mobsters on four murders.
The case was teetering on collapse Tuesday afternoon after the Voice published Tom Robbins' "Tall Tales of a Mafia Mistress", sending both the defense and prosecutors scrambling. The story revealed that the prosecution's star witness, Linda Schiro, contradicted her sworn testimony at the trial in interviews she had in 1997 with Robbins and another reporter, Jerry Capeci. On the stand, she said DeVecchio had a hand in four rubouts. In those interviews, she said DeVecchio only helped ice Patrick Porco.
The Daily News noted that Robbins, whose stories put ex-Giuliani administration official Russell Harding in the clink, has the distinction of writing stories that got one man locked up and helped another guy get out.
• • •
Listen to "The Schiro Tapes."
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October 22nd
posted: October 22, 2007 6:11 EST
9/11 hysteria, even surrounding 60-year-old documents about American spies
By Graham Rayman, Village Voice
On October 9, Charlotte Dennett, a prim Vermont woman uneasily holding her handbag, stood up in federal court in Manhattan to try yet again to pry the 60-year-old secrets about her father’s death from the U.S. government.
Daniel Dennett was an American spy working in the Middle East during and after World War II, at a time when the world powers were jockeying for control of oil in the region. He died in a mystery-shrouded 1947 plane crash in Ethiopia, when Charlotte was just six weeks old.
Now a 60-year-old journalist, Charlotte Dennett traveled to the stately federal appellate courtroom at 500 Pearl Street from tiny Cambridge, Vermont, this month to try to convince a three-judge panel to let her continue her lawsuit against the CIA for records surrounding her father’s work.
Even though the records pre-date the Eisenhower administration and most of the people named in them are dead, the CIA has blocked, resisted, and delayed her Freedom of Information Act requests for over eight long years. CIA spokesman George Little declined to comment on the pending litigation. In court papers, the agency argues that the release of the records could compromise national security and expose intelligence “sources and methods.”
To Dennett, also a self-taught lawyer, the case speaks volumes about the government’s post-9/11 obsession with secrecy.
“It’s hard enough to get documents from the CIA, but post-9/11, it’s 10 times more difficult,” she says. “I am concerned that there is an effort to secretize our history. This lawsuit has been a struggle to prevent that.”
John Taylor, a legendary archivist specializing in intelligence at the National Archives who assisted Dennett in her research, says he’s puzzled by the agency’s stubbornness. “The CIA is very reluctant to release anything on the Middle East regardless of date,” the 87-year-old Taylor says. “It’s not clear to me why, especially since these records are from the 1940s.”
Charlotte Dennett’s odyssey began 15 years ago, when she decided to learn everything she could about her father and write a book about that era. In 1943, she learned, the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of today’s CIA, sent her father, then 37, to the Middle East. Based in Lebanon, Daniel Dennett specialized in counterintelligence, or keeping an eye on other spies. His code name was “Carat,” and his working cover was as a cultural attaché in the U.S. Embassy in Beirut.
read on . . .
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September 24th
posted: September 24, 2007 3:53 EST
By Rick Anderson, Seattle Weekly
On average over the past five years, Seattle's federal immigration judges denied asylum to immigrants and illegals more frequently than the U.S. average, and, locally, Seattle Judge Kendall Warren denied it most often. With an 85 percent rejection rate of asylum appeals, Warren's denial rate ranked 34th among 238 judges included in a study released today by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse of Syracuse University. The study was headed up by former New York Times reporter David Burnham and former Bellevue resident Susan B. Long, a college professor who also has fought memorable battles with the Internal Revenue Service.
Ranked 66th in the Syracuse study was Seattle Judge Anna Ho, with a 78 percent denial rate, followed by Victoria Young (72nd, 76 percent), Edward Kandler (106th, 67 percent) and Kenneth Josephson (118th, 66 percent). The Seattle court, which deals with a large percentage of cases involving Chinese asylum seekers, rejected about ten percent more requests than the U.S. court average.
The study found wide disparities from court to court - and within some courts. In New York, for example, two of 36 such judges denied asylum requests less than ten percent of the time while another denied requests more than 90 percent of the time. The result, the study concludes, "points strongly to a dysfunctional system where the law is not the law" and has traditionally been applied inequitably throughout the system.
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September 12th
posted: September 12, 2007 9:41 EST
By Ward Harkavy, Village Voice
Osama wants Americans to convert, but many of us are already religious fanatics.
Sounding like a presidential candidate, Osama bin Laden sympathized with our "insane taxes and real estate mortgages," according to Al Qaeda's tape, brilliantly dissected by Anne Applebaum in Slate.
Bin Laden's solution for beleaguered Americans? Convert to his brand of hardline Islam.
That wouldn't be much of a leap for many Americans, because 12.6 percent of us are "traditional evangelical" Christians, according to a 2004 survey by the political science prof John Green at the University of Akron's Bliss Institute of Applied Politics.
And what do traditional evangelical Christians believe in? Evangelizing, by definition, which is what bin Laden was doing on that tape.
And here's a reminder: Most evangelical Christians believe in the Rapture, as beliefnet.org's Deborah Caldwell noted in an excellent 2002 article. For you who are unaware, this is how religioustolerance.org explains the Rapture:
Most Evangelical Christians believe that the Rapture … will happen precisely as described [in the Bible], sometime in the near future. All previously saved Christians, totaling perhaps 5 to 10 percent of the world's population, will suddenly have their bodies converted into a different form that they will wear for all eternity in Heaven. They will rise vertically into the air. Many believe that they will pass right through ceilings, roofs of cars, etc. to meet Jesus Christ in the sky. Although the vast majority of humans will be left behind, there will be much devastation as planes, trains and automobiles as their pilots, engineers and drivers suddenly disappear and the vehicles crash.
And Americans make fun of Islamic fanatics' beliefs about meeting virgins in Heaven?
Bin Laden's a violent creep, but his brand of religious fanaticism would be a pretty good fit for evangelical George W. Bush.
Reporters for Frontline's The Jesus Factor (2004) talked with top Southern Baptist official Richard Land — whose denomination is the biggest in the U.S. — about Bush's inauguration for his second term as Texas governor:
"The day he was inaugurated there were several of us who met with him at the governor's mansion," says Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission. "And among the things he said to us was, 'I believe that God wants me to be president.' "
OK, I'm convinced: God is vengeful.
(Land, by the way, wears presidential-seal cuff links; see my September 2004 item "The Christocrats.")
I guess that those of you who voted for Bush — Twice! For Christ's sake! — are off the hook, in both senses of the phrase.
Judging by the results of the 2004 religious survey, the turban of conservative Muslim bin Laden would wear well on quite a few other Americans, as much as they rightly detest him.
Hardliners of one religion have more in common with hardliners of another religion than with the rest of us. They all believe in conservative, patriarchal "family values" and they give us the same fiery message: Convert, or burn in hell — and we'll light the match.
You still think there's no comparison between bin Laden's homicidal brand of Islam and the beliefs of America's Rock-of-Ages-rigid traditional Christian evangelicals? Here's the grim FAQ about the future of us unbelievers, according to the killer logic of raptureready.com:
What do most countries do with those who commit treason? The governments either incarcerate the traitors for the rest of their lives or they execute them.
Rejection of God is surely treason because mankind originates from Him: the DNA to form our bodies, the gravity to keep it intact, air to keep us breathing, food and water resources to sustain our bodies, materials for shelter, materials for clothing, and all the other good things about life that we take for granted everyday.
What, then, does a human being deserve when he dismisses God, disregards His law (that is written on our hearts), then even goes so far as to say He does not exist and that evolution is our creator?
Let this be a warning.
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August 28th
posted: August 28, 2007 12:21 EST
Hackneyed headline fits: Ex-Iraq czar Bremer peddles armor technology to military while armor contracts go unfilled.
By Ward Harkavy, Village Voice
This morning's New York Times story on the widening weapons scandal in Iraq is shocking — the biggest shock is that the Pentagon's special investigator has been saying this for a long time and we're just now sending teams of investigators from numerous agencies to check it out.
Still awaiting investigation is war profiteering related to weapons and armor. One of the people planning to profit from the continuing Iraq war is ex-czar and Medal of Freedom winner
Jerry Bremer, and not just from
his book tours.
Meanwhile, we never have found out what happened to the $9 billion in Iraqi oil revenue that Bremer's regime oversaw but which can't be exactly accounted for. Just one of many oil-for-slush scandals in Iraq, that story was broken by the British NGO Christian Aid in June 2004
Back to the present: The latest quarterly report by Stuart Bowen, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, revealed that numerous contracts for weapons and armor have gone unfulfilled.
An audit last October by Bowen's office revealed that we weren't even keeping track of — or prepared to maintain — the thousands of weapons we were handing out to Iraqi and U.S. soldiers.
Just about the same time, Bremer, the Bush regime's former head man in Iraq when the country started descending into civil war, joined the board of directors of BlastGard, which sells a reinforced wrap to protect Humvees from mines and homemade bombs. He's also a lobbyist for BlastGard. An enthusiastic article by Philip Siekman in April's Fortune Small Business accented Bremer's value to the company in one paragraph:
In November, BlastGard announced that it had signed a $186,000 deal to provide its products to the U.S. Marine Corps for use in Iraq and Afghanistan. The company also named L. Paul Bremer, former administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, to its board.
The article explains just what the company does and how its prospects are truly "explosive":
Military forces around the world are a major target of opportunity for BlastGard. A pad of BlastWrap on the bottom of a Humvee, for example, would complement the vehicle's armor plate. Conventional armor is pretty good at blocking the shock wave and shrapnel from a mine or from the homemade explosives that litter roads in Iraq. But armor plate also compounds the jolt that tosses the vehicle, often causing serious injury to its occupants. BlastWrap would reduce that bone-breaking whump. …
Amid the good news lurks the risk that this small company could choke on the sheer variety of its opportunity. BlastGard's SEC filings and marketing materials catalog a multitude of possible Blast-Wrap applications, few of which have yet attracted customers. For the first nine months of 2006, BlastGard posted an operating loss of $1.2 million on just $197,000 in sales.
Numerous competitors are developing alternative blast mitigators, including metal alloy mesh and foamed metals. And the company's easily fabricated material is certain to attract knockoff artists. [BlastGard execs James Gordon and John Waddell] have filed a patent application to protect their multimillion-dollar investment in BlastWrap. But if the duo can overcome the near-term challenges, their company's potential, in this era of terrorism and war, would be explosive.
Meanwhile, inspector Bowen's report last October showed that of a $531,000 contract for reinforced armor for the Iraqi Army, $424,800 hadn't even been spent. The Pentagon has, however, completed a $76,955.50 contract to put decals on the Iraqi Army's Hummers.
Back when he took over in Iraq in the spring of 2003, Bremer obviously never foresaw that he would be joining a company like BlastGard that has such exciting and explosive prospects. As Deputy SecDef Paul Wolfowitz told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on May 22, 2003:
We are making progress. In my most recent conversation with Presidential Envoy Bremer, he reports that, while the security situation is serious — and still imposes severe restrictions on our ability to move freely — Baghdad is not a "city in anarchy," shops are open, and the city is bustling with traffic.
Now Bremer is working to make a profit off the chaos of Baghdad. BlastGard itself proudly points to a November 15, 2006, Wall Street Journal article saying that Bremer will be a "director and lobbyist with an eye on opportunities within the government and Defense Department."
You can't say exactly the same thing about Bremer's predecessor in Iraq, Lieutenant General Jay Garner.
Garner has also joined BlastGard, but only as a "military advisor," not a director.
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August 22nd
posted: August 22, 2007 10:15 EST
Shock and awful: Turn to page 17 of your haven't-got-a-prayer book (otherwise known as
"Tab K") for this exciting and formerly secret map of Iraq from the U.S. military's August 2002 invasion plans.
By Ward Harkavy, Village Voice
We already knew that the government of Iraq's prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, was grinding to a halt when cabinet members stopped showing up. Now U.S. pols want to kick out Maliki himself, papers reported yesterday.
The only question is whether this stooge will flee before he's kicked out.
That's because we're in the strange situation of having stooges over there in chaotic Iraq but not being able to control anything — even them. It wasn't supposed to happen this way. Hey, in August 2002, our top leaders were being told what they wanted to hear: that we were supposed to have only 5,000 troops in Iraq by December 2006. Instead, we have more than 25 times that number in August 2007.
In any case, Maliki had better have his affairs in order. From yesterday's Times (U.K.) story by Tim Reid:
The Iraqi Prime Minister is facing public calls for his ousting from US military officers and senior senators on Capitol Hill, amid fears that he is incapable of forging political reconciliation among Iraq’s warring factions.
US regional commanders in Iraq and senior Democrats and Republicans in Washington believe that the military gains achieved by President Bush’s surge strategy in recent weeks will prove worthless unless Nouri al-Maliki is replaced.
Carl Levin, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, returned from Iraq yesterday and declared the Maliki Government "non-functional". He added: "I hope the Parliament will vote the Maliki Government out of office and will have the wisdom to replace it with a less-sectarian and more-unifying prime minister and government."
Although a long-time opponent of Mr Bush and the war, Mr Levin’s comments were given considerable bipartisan weight as they came after a joint report on Iraq that he released with John Warner, his widely respected counterpart on the Armed Services Committee and a key Republican voice on the war.
Interesting, but there are big questions (here and here) about whether the "surge" is working.
And if we pressure al-Maliki to leave, who'll be our next stooge in Baghdead? As Reid's story notes:
General
David Petraeus, the US ground commander in charge of the surge, is expected to voice his support for Mr al-Maliki in his
progress report to Congress, which will probably be delivered on September 11, the sixth anniversary of the 2001 terror attacks on the United States.
The dilemma in Washington is that, should Mr al-Maliki fall, there is no clear replacement. Moreover, any perception in Iraq that Mr al-Maliki was ousted because of pressure from Washington would be the "kiss of death" for any successor, said
Dick Durbin, another senior Senate Democrat recently returned from Iraq.
"Imagine if we have to step in with a brand new leader and a new government," Mr Durbin said. "How many more months would we have to wait?"
You mean we're still waiting? According to the August 2002 plans presented to Don Rumsfeld's Pentagon and Dick Cheney's White House by the Cardassian-sounding U.S. Central Command, we were supposed to have only 5,000 U.S. troops in Iraq by December 2006.
It took until February 2007 to pry that "Top Secret Polo Plan" from the government, and that was thanks only to Joyce Battle and Tom Blanton, among others, at the plucky National Security Archive.
Check out the plan's "Tab K" (which includes the above slide) for a look at the 2002 map of Iraq overlaid with U.S. generals' testosterone. It's all full of "shock and awe" and "exploit" and "gain control" and "seize oil." Brother.
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August 20th
posted: August 20, 2007 12:21 EST
Americans breathe sigh of relief.
By Ward Harkavy, Village Voice
If one picture is worth a thousand words, then a 1994 video of Dick Cheney that's zooming around the Internet is priceless.
Actually, Cheney makes the point in less than 300 words that an invasion of Iraq wouldn't be worth it. Remember, this is back in 1994, and Cheney is being questioned about the first Gulf War.
Here's the video on YouTube. And here's the transcript, thanks to the people at Associated Content:
Q: Do you think the U.S., or U.N. forces, should have moved into Baghdad?
Cheney: No.
Q: Why not?
Cheney: Because if we'd gone to Baghdad we would have been all alone. There wouldn't have been anybody else with us. There would have been a U.S. occupation of Iraq. None of the Arab forces that were willing to fight with us in Kuwait were willing to invade Iraq.
Once you got to Iraq and took it over, took down Saddam Hussein's government, then what are you going to put in its place? That's a very volatile part of the world, and if you take down the central government of Iraq, you could very easily end up seeing pieces of Iraq fly off: part of it, the Syrians would like to have to the west, part of it — eastern Iraq — the Iranians would like to claim, they fought over it for eight years. In the north you've got the Kurds, and if the Kurds spin loose and join with the Kurds in Turkey, then you threaten the territorial integrity of Turkey.
It's a quagmire if you go that far and try to take over Iraq.
The other thing was casualties. Everyone was impressed with the fact we were able to do our job with as few casualties as we had. But for the 146 Americans killed in action, and for their families — it wasn't a cheap war. And the question for the president, in terms of whether or not we went on to Baghdad, took additional casualties in an effort to get Saddam Hussein, was how many additional dead Americans is Saddam worth? Our judgment was, not very many, and I think we got it right.
This video is definitely worth 300 words, and though it's deadly funny, it's not worth 3,000 dead Americans.
Toppling Saddam was one thing. But Associated Content also has an intriguing 2006 piece about Cheney topping his wife.
Under the unimaginative headline "Did Dick Cheney Have Sex with His Wife One Night in October of 1965 Simply to Get Out of Vietnam?" Timothy Sexton notes this:
On October 26, 1965, the Selective Service changed its mind about married men being drafted. It would now accept married men without children, though married men with children would remain exempt.
At the time, Cheney was classified 1-A, eligible to be drafted. If he had children, he'd be reclassified 3-A.
Sexton counts backward from the birth of Cheney's daughter Liz on July 28, 1966. Whadda you know: There's almost exactly nine months' difference. Sexton, in his mean-spirited piece, figures that Dick impregnated wife Lynne in late October 1965, right when he learned that married men without children were going to be drafted.
And Sexton points out that Cheney was re-classified from 1-A to 3-A in January 1966. That would be shortly after it was confirmed that Lynne was pregnant.
That spared Dick Cheney from Vietnam. I was a psychiatric 4-F during that war, and I'm still nuts, but that doesn't mean I was crazy enough to have sex with Lynne Cheney in 1965 or invade Iraq in 2003.
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August 9th
posted: August 9, 2007 3:10 EST
Another bankrupt government policy aimed at college students.
By Ward Harkavy, Village Voice
Attention, students: Here's some material the federal government does not want you to study and learn: the latest Congressional Research Service report on the sorry history of why your student-loan debt is such an unreasonable burden.
Good luck reading the entire report. Congress further screws the public by not making its CRS reports (including this one) readily available.
Anyway, two crucial bills currently before Congress would help ease the ridiculous current situation in which student-loan borrowers can't get out from under their debt even when they formally declare bankruptcy. The better of the two bills, S.511, was introduced by presidential contender Hillary Clinton this past February 7 in the Senate. The July 26 CRS report, Student Loans in Bankruptcy, says in its summary:
If enacted, S. 511 would make both public and private loans dischargeable in bankruptcy when seven years have passed from the beginning of the repayment period. Another bill, S. 1561, would eliminate privately financed student loans from those that are nondischargeable in bankruptcy. The purpose of the bill would be to restore the law to its status before the passage of the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act (BAPCPA) in 2005.
"Consumer Protection." Yeah, right. Corporations regularly use bankruptcy to discharge debt — they even matter-of-factly talk about it in their government filings as just another helpful tool to increase profits — but you students can't use it. You used to be able to, but as the report says, "over the years, the scope of student loan dischargeability has been steadily narrowed."
As Congress considers these bills, the CRS prepared the report in language that even the dumbest Congress member can understand. All the sorry history of how Congress has steadily screwed students over recent years — especially the onerous tightening imposed by the Bush regime and GOP-ruled Congress in 2005 of the rules under which you human beings can declare bankruptcy — is in this report. All you can see is the report's brief summary. Why not the rest? Here's how the admirable OpenCRS project explains it:
American taxpayers spend nearly $100 million a year to fund the
Congressional Research Service, a "think tank" that provides reports to members of Congress on a variety of topics relevant to current political events. Yet, these reports are not made available to the public in a way that they can be easily obtained. A project of the Center for Democracy & Technology, Open CRS provides citizens access to CRS Reports that are already in the public domain and encourages Congress to provide public access to all CRS Reports.
CRS Reports do not become public until a member of Congress releases the report.
And most of them don't release them. When they do, the reports are not made available in any orderly way, and you often have to pay for them.
Oh, you'll pay in other ways. The bankrupt and onerous bankruptcy laws are just one part of the sad story of unreasonable student-loan burdens. A very good recent take on student loans — particularly regarding politicians' hype about how they're "fixing" the problems — is "No Justice for Student Borrowers," in Port Folio Weekly, out of Hampton Roads, Virginia. Reporter Jennifer C. O'Donnell (talking about other bills, not Clinton's) notes in the July 31 piece:
The bills are Washington’s way of dealing with a slew of media coverage in recent months regarding a generation of student borrowers paralyzed by overwhelming student loan debt. For months, newspapers, national magazines and television magazines harped on the financial distress new graduates experienced at the hands of loan lenders. At the heart of many of those stories was the almost mobster-like business tactics lenders imposed on their borrowers, specifically outrageous penalty fees and fines on late or defaulted loans.
O'Donnell's savvy, smoothly done story goes on:
While politicians high-five each other for coming to the aid of a generation of graduates-to-be, there’s a very vocal group of consumers who aren't impressed.
"This is all really just window dressing," said Alan Collinge, founder and executive director of Student Loan Justice, a grassroots organization of student borrowers working to reform the federal student loan system.
Collinge says the bills completely avoid what is the main concern regarding the issue of student loan borrowing—the lack of consumer protections. In order for student borrowers to enjoy the same rights home, car and other borrowers have, the student loan industry would have to experience a major overhaul, and that’s something Congress has failed to move on, he added.
As I said, O'Donnell's story doesn't talk about Clinton's bill or the other Senate bill. Here's the summary of the July CRS report:
Currently, student loans cannot be discharged when the debtor declares bankruptcy, which means that, unlike most other unsecured debt, student loans will stay with the debtor post-bankruptcy.
There are two bills pending before the 110th Congress that would amend the U.S. Bankruptcy Code to restore limited dischargeability for student loans, consistent with the law at various points in its prior history. If enacted, S. 511 would make both public and private loans dischargeable in bankruptcy when seven years have passed from the beginning of the repayment period. Another bill, S. 1561, would eliminate privately financed student loans from those that are nondischargeable in bankruptcy. The purpose of the bill would be to restore the law to its status before the passage of the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act (BAPCPA) in 2005.
This report examines the history of student loan nondischargeability in bankruptcy law and the bills introduced to amend treatment of loans in bankruptcy.
Apparently that's all the government wants you to know.
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August 4th
posted: August 4, 2007 12:36 EST
Breaking out of the pack of Iraq war docs, No End in Sight devastates.
No End in Sight
By Rob Nelson, City Pages (Minneapolis/St. Paul)
Masterfully edited and cumulatively walloping, Charles Ferguson's No End in Sight turns the well-known details of our monstrously bungled Iraq war into an enraging, apocalyptic litany of fuckups. One may have already heard some or all of the absurd, shameful, appalling details that Ferguson collects — the well-connected American kid plucked straight out of Georgetown to oversee the Baghdad traffic plan, Dick Cheney's five draft deferments during the Vietnam War, the $2 trillion price tag, the estimated 700,000 Iraqi civilian casualties — and still be driven to hysterics by the sheer volume of atrocity gathered here. Ferguson's early title card — "It is a story in which many people tried to save a nation" — may be overly generous toward the doc's talking-head roster of former U.S. military officials and other administrative casualties of war, but No End in Sight is certainly a film about failure, perhaps the ultimate film about failure. Or maybe we should call it a film about the ultimate failure?
As the movie's more begrudging admirers will likely acknowledge, Ferguson is no Michael Moore. His background is as a scholar and a Brookings wonk, and No End in Sight — his first film, amazingly — is less a work of investigation (or activism) than history. There's no psychology in the movie (e.g., Dubya has daddy issues), and neither are there conspiracy theories (e.g., the war is about redrawing the Middle East map and further fueling Halliburton's tank). On some level, it even endeavors to be a film without politics — and might be that if such a thing were possible.
Bracketed by a pair of press-conference quotes from Donald Rumsfeld — the first smugly declaring his pride in the "first war of the 21st century," the second defensively claiming, "I don't do quagmires" — the doc scarcely acknowledges the fraudulent justification and fundamental immorality of the Iraq invasion, though A Pretext for War author James Bamford does show up to say, "I don't know what these [Bush administration officials] were smoking, but it must have been very good." Focusing on the war itself, from shock-and-awe and Mission Accomplished to Rummy's honorable discharge and beyond, Ferguson is chiefly interested in compiling a filmed dossier of incompetence — not so much to argue that the war could've been won and won early, but to suggest that the magnitude of arrogant irresponsibility will carry aftershocks as far into the future as the mind can imagine. No end, indeed. The title seems to refer not to the interminable war, but to the irreversible stain on America's reputation. Ferguson's ultimate image of urban Iraq in flames, swarming with well-armed insurgents, is a picture of hell, and not one that's only burning Over There.
read on . . .
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August 3rd
posted: August 3, 2007 9:03 EST
By Ward Harkavy, Village Voice
If I were in charge of amending Karl Rove's personal financial disclosure report to the Federal Election Commission to bring it up to date . . .
Read on . . .
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