My Letter to Earthjustice

I wrote a very angry letter to Earthjustice today.  Normally I support environmental advocacy groups, but every once in a while I come across something that makes me shake my head in despair.  In this case, the issue is the regulation of coal ash from power plants.  Coal ash is currently a topic of much dispute, given the potential hazards it can create (e.g. the Kingston, Tennessee ash lagoon disaster in 2008).  Suffice it to say I know a lot about coal ash.

Earthjustice published this online press release regarding the handling and disposal of coal ash in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The press release unfortunately contained some glaring errors, and I wrote the letter below in order to assist Earthjustice in correcting the errors.  I regret using some of the angrier words that I employed, but I was feeling a bit insulted by what they had published, and was angry when I wrote this.

Unfortunately, sometimes you owe your friends the duty of shouting at them when they screw up badly enough.  (Apologies in advance to any friends of mine who read this!)


This experience has been a big disappointment for me, since I want groups like Earthjustice to succeed and flourish.  I've donated time and money to helping a number of them (though lately they seem only to want my money). 

The role of environmental advocacy groups, such as Earthjustice, MassPIRG, the Sierra Club, etc. is to inform the public on environmental hazards and other issues.  It's therefore essential that the advocacy groups provide the correct information-- complete, properly researched and sourced, technically astute, and cognizant of the relevant state and federal regulations and statute.  That's not easy.  It's a sad fact that advocacy groups like these don't have very many technical people on their staffs.  This is why people like EPA whistleblower William Sanjour (a personal hero of mine) are so valuable, because they possess both the personal inclination and the professional expertise to make a solid case for an environmental cause.  Enthusiasm and public outreach are excellent and indispensable things, but they cannot replace expertise in the subject matter. 

Wrong or incomplete information ultimately does more harm than good; when exposed as incorrect after an advocacy organization used it to beat the drum of public opinion, the public responds with cynicism and apathy, the advocates are exposed to ridicule, and the cause itself loses credibility, leading to a situation best described with a quote from an angry Bodie Broadus on The Wire-- "...and now we look like bitches."  We expect hyperbole and glibness with facts from Fox News-- a news organization that blames its excesses on being entertainment, and which once claimed as a legal defense to have no legal obligation to broadcast the truth-- and we damn them for it.  These groups should at least aspire to be better than Fox News.  I haven't read everything Earthjustice has written, and I hope that this document was an isolated incident.

Earthjustice has promised a reply, which I will post when it arrives.



Ego servire huic veritatem.....

June 12, 2012

Ms. [Name Redacted], Legislative Associate

Earthjustice

Suite 702

1625 Massachusetts Avenue

Washington, DC 20036

Dear Ms.[Name Redacted]

I recently reviewed Earthjustice’s press release, Massachusetts Coal Ash Disposal and Reuse, and noted several serious errors in it.

As an environmental professional working in Massachusetts and specializing in hazardous and solid waste management (including coal ash, things that go boom, and worse), and as a self-identified tree hugger who helps to run the Green Drinks meet-up in Springfield, MA, this is a disappointing smack in the face from an environmental advocacy organization that I ordinarily respect. 

Accordingly, writing on my own behalf, I offer the following comments as assistance to Earthjustice in correcting the errors.

Your document’s most significant error is an egregious misinterpretation of a statutory exemption in the Massachusetts Public Health Law, Chapter 111 Section 150A, which your document presents as exempting coal ash from state waste management requirements. Your document then incorrectly informs the reader that Massachusetts somehow uniquely does not regulate coal ash (which is not actually possible, given the federal requirements of Subtitle D of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act of 1976, as amended). 

The relevant passage from your document states, as quoted verbatim:

State Law Deficiencies

·         The Massachusetts Solid Waste Act, Chapter 111, s. 150A, specifically exempts coal ash from solid waste regulations. The use of coal ash as fill or for any commercial or industrial purpose (or when stored for such use) does not need approval from the local board of health and is not regulated by the Department of Environmental Protection.

·         Chapter 111, s. 150A also currently exempts the disposal of coal ash in a monofill (single waste landfill) from solid waste regulations, including the requirement to obtain approval from local boards of health.

None of these statements are correct.  To the contrary, Massachusetts does regulate coal ash, but not necessarily or automatically as a waste material.  The Massachusetts Solid Waste Regulations and Hazardous Waste Regulations, and their authorizing statutes, each place great emphasis on recycling.  Materials that are recycled are not considered to be a waste, since they have value, can be productively used, and are not being discarded.  This paradigm is consistent with federal statute and regulation. 

In particular, the relevant text from Section 150 reads:

Ash produced from the combustion of coal, including but not limited to fly ash and bottom ash, shall not be construed as refuse, rubbish, garbage, or waste material under this section when used as a raw material for concrete block manufacture, aggregate, fill, base for road construction, or other commercial or industrial purpose, or stored for such use. (Emphasis mine) 

This is a targeted exemption included in the statute specifically to encourage the recycling of coal ash into usable products, such as concrete, in preference to land disposal.  It is emphatically not a blanket exemption from regulation since ash not being reused or stored for reuse is a waste and remains subject to solid waste management laws.  The original intent of the exemption was to avoid requiring commercial facilities such as concrete block manufacturers or areas of highway where coal ash was used as a structural fill to seek approval as registered landfills or solid waste facilities (in MA, this is dubbed “Site Assignment”) on top of their existing requirements.  They are still required to handle the materials appropriately and are subject to civil and criminal enforcement actions for failure to do so. The same part of Section 150A later specifically notes,

[The MassDEP] shall have jurisdiction to determine, after notice and hearing, that the establishment or operation of such a [recycling] location has created a nuisance condition by reason of odor, dust, fires, smoke […]

The reuse of coal ash as a base for road construction, landfill cover, or fill material also is not taken for granted, but requires the proponent file a site-specific Beneficial Use Determination with the MassDEP, in which analytical data collected from the actual ash or other material is used to conduct a pre-construction risk assessment for human health or ecological risks, based on the same 1x10E6 (one chance in one million chances) risk factors used for MassDEP’s pollution remediation standards.  All such determinations are subject to MassDEP approval.

Coal ash that fails TCLP analysis or otherwise qualifies as a hazardous waste may not be beneficially reused unless the method of reuse (as proven to MassDEP’s satisfaction) prevents human health or ecological damage.  In the interim, the material must be managed as a hazardous waste rather than as a solid waste. 

Ergo, even recycling operations are subject to regulatory oversight and must conform to established standards for the protection of human health and the environment.

If the ash is not going to be reused, it is a waste and is subject to the standard solid waste (and sometimes hazardous waste) requirements (e.g. disposal only at a DEP- approved facility).  Any inappropriate use or disposal of ash is subject to civil or criminal penalties.

The same part of Section 150A states that:

No final disposal of ash produced by the combustion of coal may be accomplished by burial of such ash in the ground, other than as base for road construction or fill, unless the place where such disposal takes place has been assigned for such disposal by the board of health and plans for such disposal have been approved by the department pursuant to this section.  [In other words, coal ash may only be landfilled at permitted solid waste landfills]

These provisions have been part of Chapter 111 statute in their current form, unchanged, since 1976.  QED, coal ash is not exempt from statutory or regulatory requirements, as your document claims, and hasn’t been for over three decades.  I note that your document is not dated, but two of the footnotes reference documents from 2007, so I presume it was written later than 2007.  This sort of gross error is inexcusable and embarrassing, and damages the credibility of environmental advocacy organizations.

                       

In addition, since your document claims that boards of health are barred from taking action against coal ash facilities, please note that under Chapter 111 statute and under the implementing regulations, solid waste management and enforcement is directed jointly by MassDEP and the municipal boards of health, and since Massachusetts is a home rule state, municipalities retain the authority to regulate coal ash either under Chapter 111 or by means of local bylaws, e.g. as the City of Haverhill has done with a bylaw specifically prohibiting its storage or use within the city.  Boards of Health also possess considerable enforcement authority, and may take enforcement action independent of MassDEP.

In addition, the statement that “The advanced age of these [coal ash] ponds makes it unlikely that they have critical safeguards like liners and leachate collection systems” is questionable to say the least.   State and federal construction standards for lagoons went into effect in the 1980s, which antedates the construction of at least some of the ponds you list.  In any case, the construction and inspection plans for the lagoons are readily available in MassDEP files, and the presence or absence of liners and leachate collection systems could easily be verified with a few telephone calls, without even the need for a Freedom of Information Act request.

I’m not sure where the claim that coal ash is “exempt from monitoring” comes from, but it’s flatly not true.  All landfills in the Commonwealth, including coal ash monofills, are subject to groundwater monitoring requirements while in operation and for varying periods of time after the landfill is closed and capped.  Incidentally, the Mount Tom ash landfill, which you describe as still in operation, actually closed in the late 1990s and has been capped. 

The only other exemption I’m aware of for coal ash is an exemption under the Massachusetts Contingency Plan—the state’s remediation regulations—that exempts coal ash (together with wood ash and unburnt coal) from some but not all requirements of the cleanup regulations, under which it is exempt from release notification requirements only; if the ash poses a hazard, it must still be dealt with.  The rationale for this is that drilling a hole anywhere in a mill town or other urban area in the Commonwealth is almost certain to encounter coal ash or contaminants stemming from coal ash (typically metals or PAHs) because prior to the 1960s, coal bottom ash was widely used as fill material in urban properties.  Even undisturbed land accumulated coal residues from a century and a half of atmospheric deposition of the particulates that we now trap and manage as fly ash.  It is wholly impracticable to regulate such small and ubiquitous amounts of coal ash residues.

As a corollary to the above, Massachusetts has required all landfills opened in the Commonwealth since the early 1980s to be (at minimum) constructed according the RCRA Subtitle D requirements, including a liner, leachate collection system, etc.  Older pre-Subtitle D unlined landfills undergoing final closure and capping must receive leachate collection systems if leachate is a problem at the facility.  Unlined landfills in Massachusetts could not receive solid waste after 1992 (c.f. Chapter 153 of the Acts of 1992), but were required to dispose all further waste in lined landfill cells that meet or exceed Subtitle D requirements. 

On a final note-- the West Springfield power plant was originally built to be dual-fueled with coal and oil, but has not burned coal since at least 1999 (it currently burns fuel oil and natural gas), and the coal-firing equipment has been removed.  It is inaccurate at this point, thirteen years later, still to consider it a coal-fired plant. 

Professionals like myself work very hard to protect the environment.  I do not wish to be rude, but gross misinformation of this sort, written by people who self-evidently have not done due diligence in their research and consequently have no idea what they’re talking about, only makes our job harder by forcing us to re-fight battles in the legislature and in the court of public opinion over non-existent problems.

Accordingly, I politely suggest that Earthjustice remove the document from the Internet and correct it.

If you intend to continue publishing documents to raise public awareness of environmental issues—and I sincerely hope you continue—please make sure your facts are correct, or you will do a great disservice to everyone, including yourselves and those for whom you advocate.

I am at your disposal (no pun intended) if you have any further questions on the matter.

Yours,

[me], CHMM

The Battle of the Uterus

The hits just keep on coming. I am gobsmacked at how quickly and virulently the war over women’s health has blown up over the last two months. Although the issue of abortion, contraception, and other medical care was always present to a lesser extent, it didn’t erupt into a major political issue until the Obama administration attempted to mandate that all employers include birth control in their health care plans.

The Catholic Church, forgetting that it is no longer a respected paragon of moral leadership, led the counterattack by screaming that the requirement was an attack on religious liberty, and incidentally making common cause with the very evangelicals churches who until recently blasted Rome as the whore of Babylon. They also lied, and I’m pretty sure lying is still a sin. The Catholic Church crossed the River Jordan into the political world years ago. Any church that wants to play politics on the national level has given up any pretense of being the neutral, benevolent and charitable influence on society that deserved a tax exemption, and should pay taxes just like any other corporation.

The disgraced senator and now presidential candidate Rick Santorum, a paleo-Catholic who was humiliated in a 2008 reelection contest after being caught waist-deep in lobbying and corruption scandals, fanned the flames in order to score political points against his opponents in the Republican primary contests.

The backlash against the Susan G. Komen foundation’s defunding of Planned Parenthood—an ill-considered move instigated by a fanatical Republican on the Komen board—didn’t help things either, since the fuss only highlighted how much Planned Parenthood does in addition to providing abortions, such as pregnancy care, cancer screenings, and the like. Two-thirds of Americans support Planned Parenthood.

In recent months, the legislatures of the state and federal governments have also been the scene of laws that might have been taken from Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale (except, as many have recently noted, the book was intended as a cautionary tale rather than an instruction manual).

For example, an Arizona law now encourages doctors to lie to their patients in the expectation that the doctors would try to talk the patient out of an abortion.

Congress is considering legislation that would ban the use of federal funds to aid women needing emergency medical care if that medical care could include an abortion or the death of the fetus. Let’s just call it the Let Women Die On The Floor Act of 2012.

Texas just sacrificed an entire women’s health care program, funded by $34 million from the federal government’s Medicaid program, after the legislature and Governor Perry decided to ignore fifty-year-old laws against discriminating against health care providers and to ban Planned Parenthood from receiving state funding. It probably won’t reduce the number of abortions in Texas, but it will keep over several hundred thousand women from receiving services like breast cancer screenings, and ultimately result in some of them dying of cancer. I hope it was worth it, Rick, but you’re not running for president anymore, and don’t have to keep burnishing those Christian Coalition credentials quite so bright.

Georgia, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and several other states have enacted or are considering laws that would give a fetus more rights than the woman in whose womb it lies, and obliging the government to defend every fetus at the expense of the mother. To miscarry for any reason would become a crime in some states. Women pregnant as a result of rape would have to bear the rapist’s child—nine months of legally-mandated hell. A stillborn baby would have to be carried to term—nine months, and delivered ‘naturally,’ even if it had died in the first trimester and disintegrated into a rotting mass of slime. How exactly is that a natural delivery? Women in Arizona could soon be fired at-will for using contraception, if that offends the company management’s moral position. Unfertilized eggs may receive ‘personhood’ status in some states, thus making any contraception that could prevent their fertilization an abortion. The “Plan B” emergency contraception pill, which can prevent conception but not terminate conceived zygote, is under siege.

This legislation comes overwhelmingly from the hard right wing of the Republican party, and would do nothing more or less than strip women of their human rights.

The insanity of these Handmaid’s Tale laws is borne out by several laws proposed as parodies. For example, a law proposed in Georgia by Representative Yasmin Neal, a Democrat, called for a ban on vasectomies. A similar law, proposed in Oklahoma, would have banned the deposition of semen anywhere but a woman’s vagina, thereby criminalizing several major male pastimes.

And yet, the Republican chair of a Congressional hearing on women’s health would not allow a Georgetown law student named Sandra Fluke to speak, preferring instead to listen only to men. Ms. Fluke was subsequently vilified as a slut by an obese abuser of prescription painkillers and impotence medication who just happened to have a widely-broadcast radio program. To the credit of the business community, many of the program’s advertising sponsors promptly terminated their advertising contracts with the show.

I wouldn’t be surprised if people in other countries look at the US and see some sort of Strangelove scenario, with our government overrun with General Rippers afoam at the mouth about a vast conspiracy seeking to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.

This just shows you how schizophrenic and intellectually bankrupt conservatism is these days. The religiously-motivated social conservatives and the small-government fiscal conservatives are tripping over each other like the Three Stooges, panicked by a primary contest that has deteriorated into bad reality TV, an economy that seems to be on the road to recovery despite their best efforts, and a Democratic (And black! How dare he!) president who seems invincible.

The result is that we have presidential candidates, senators, governors, and state legislators thumping copies of Atlas Shrugged or Adam Smith and demanding that the government stay out of the finances of people (and ‘people’ includes multibillion-dollar corporations now) because more than token taxation of the wealthy is unconscionable, socialist, and totalitarian.

Many of the exact same people, maybe only sentences later, can be found thumping the a copy of the Bible and demanding legislation that drastically prunes away women’s civil rights and reproductive rights be passed under the sort of hell-for-leather deadlines that usually involve other countries bombing our naval bases.

So it’s blackest tyranny for the government to tax citizens to pay for services that the citizens enjoy, but sound, essential, and godly policy for government to regulate the microscopic workings of women’s internal organs, never mind the bedroom? What sort of small and limited government is that? Even Ron Paul, who looms largest of the Republican presidential candidates when it comes to small government, has tied himself in a knot on the issue.

Why is the uterus fair game when capital gains tax is off limits?

William F. Buckley would weep.

I don’t expect any of these laws to stand for very long, even if they become law. The legal arguments and precedents supporting them are tenuous in the extreme, and they attempt essentially to write discrimination and inequality into state or federal law. The affront to the civil rights of half of this country’s population will not withstand even the lightest judicial review. Most of the legislators who vote for these laws, cynically, likely expect them to be overturned in short order, but they can use the fuss thus created to win the support of those evangelical Christians who expect the government to throw out the Constitution in favor of the Bible, a population probably including the 52% of Mississippi Republicans who believe President Obama is a Muslim.

That’s one reason that abortion will never actually be made illegal. It’s one of the ultimate laws of Republican hypocrisy. If they ever actually followed through with it, and they probably could have during the first George W. Bush administration, they wouldn’t have that flag to rally the troops around during the next election.

We have wars going on, economic turmoil, the head of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac refuses to take his boot off the neck of the housing mortgage market because it would make it harder for him to balance the books, and a Senate Minority Leader whose sole goal for the last four years has been to keep President Obama from being reelected.

We have more important concerns.

This artificial battle over women’s health is a stupid waste of time.

Women’s health care does not need to be open to this sort of debate and bogus legislation. It should be as simple and easy to obtain as it is for men. No more, no less. The fact that women require different services, some of which involve pregnancy and childbirth, should matter not one bit.

More to the point, the state and federal government should just give up any pretense that it knows more about what is good for a woman than the woman herself. If she wants to have an abortion, it should be safe, legal, and entirely up to her. Any financial, ethical, or spiritual consequences should also be borne by her. It’s her body, it should be her choice. If we respect the freedom of the individual, ok, let’s carry it all the way through, educate her without indoctrinating her, and let her make an educated choice based on her own physical, mental, spiritual, and medical situation.

This will never happen, of course, because as long as there are politicians willing to make an issue of it, abortion will be used as a club to beat the other side. That’s no reason to stretch the issue to include breast cancer screenings which could save you’re mother’s, daughter’s, sister’s, or wife’s life.

A response to Meghan McCain

Hi Meg, I’m Tom.

We’ve never met, but I’m a regular reader of your posts on the Daily Beast. I saw your August 10 piece on the ‘Obamaclypse,’ and the return of ‘politics as usual’ to Washington. You complain that “we’ve traded hope and unity not only for politics as usual in Washington, but for something far worse. We’ve entered a new chapter in government selfishness, new levels of disillusionment and public distrust of elected officials, something that the Twitter world has dubbed the “Obamaclypse” or “Barackalypse.”

Since I actually have a regular job and a part-time job, and am not a talking head and incipient professional celebrity—really, Meg, why are you hanging out with the Perez Hilton set?—who can blow off work to party in Vegas, it took me a couple days to find the time to write you a response.

I was a bit puzzled by the time frame you used. Apparently the problem is that you feel anxious because two and a half years after being elected, President Obama hasn’t fixed everything. You’re worried that the people who supported him in 2008 are going to feel angry and disappointed.

Now, I’m no fortunate one, no senator’s daughter (hat tip to John Fogerty), so things have looked pretty grim to me for a long time. It’s true, we’re totally bummed out that the economy is still creaking along, but our generation—yours and mine, since I’m only a few years older than you—is a pretty tough-skinned bunch sometimes. We kinda have to be. We’ve had a lot of disappointments over the last ten years, and the American Dream is pretty much a hallucination now. This country already has the most unequal distribution of wealth in the developed world, and the middle class is sinking fast.

Yes, our generation saw Columbine and 9/11, as you mentioned—and a nice bit of sentimental appeal that was, too. Remember, though, that we also saw President Bush deliberately lie for six months and then lead the nation into a pointless war that has seen tens of thousands of Americans killed and wounded. We saw oil industry lobbyists practically write the administration’s energy legislation. We saw the results of the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act that Republicans rammed through Congress in the waning days of the Clinton Administration, as one bank after another crashed and burned in a cloud of debt. I saw a large number of the people I graduated from college with lose their jobs when the economy tanked during one of the several downturns we had between 2001 and 2008.

I’ll be honest. I voted for President Obama in 2008 because his vision was as close as we could get to the opposite the Bush Administration’s goals and track record. We had just had eight solid years of government by a political machine that fostered crony capitalism, deficit spending on a scale never seen before or since, and one Congressional scandal after the next; John Boehner handed out checks from lobbyists on the House floor! Jack Abramoff, anyone? CEOs from Enron to AIG were partying like the worst of the Roman emperors while laying off hundreds of workers, and running their companies into the ground. Wages didn’t budge after 2001, but inflation kept on going, so your salary bought you less every year. The baby boomers “dropped the ball on their burden of responsibility”—you’re absolutely right there. By the time the primary season ended in 2008, millions people were willing to believe in change precisely because the country obviously needed it.

So it’s no wonder that we’re a little burned-out and cynical. Nothing new there. I list the above not for the sake of blaming the Bush Administration, the Republican Party, or conservatives in general—though they bear responsibility for much of what’s currently wrong with this country—but to show you why the current mess isn’t a deal-breaker for me as far as President Obama. I’m used to stuff like this. Most people my age don’t look to leaders like President Obama for inspiration. We look to them for substance, and the ability to get things done. Some people are going to be disappointed or heartbroken, yes, but the rest of us are just going to have to keep calm and carry on, because we’re stuck in this situation.

I distinctly remember another inspirational figure. In fact, I campaigned for your dad, Senator McCain, in New Hampshire in 1999 and 2000, back when he was the maverick he’s now just pretending to be, the McCain of McCain-Feingold. Your dad and President Obama had a lot in common—they wanted to reach young people, they called for a wholesale change in the way Washington functions, and they wanted a new era of government transparency and accountability. Unfortunately the Republican leadership kicked your dad to the curb in favor of George W. Bush after the South Carolina primary, the first of several new low points for political smear campaigns.

Senator Obama was an inspirational in 2008 and he’s still an inspirational figure now. One of the most appealing things about him (and your dad too, for that matter) was that he wasn’t just ladling out pie-in-the sky solutions (Ron Paul), the tired crap that every Republican has recycled since 1980 (your dad) or bogus homespun wisdom (Sarah Palin). At the same time, though, give the man credit for being substance as well as style. Starting in the fall of 2008, President Obama has over the last three years consistently given probably the most candid assessment of the nation’s economy that any president has offered; even before he was inaugurated he was warning that recovery would take time.

He seems a bit different now, yes, but really, what president hasn’t had to trim his sails a bit after two and a half years in office? Still, he’s accomplished far more than he’s given credit for.

Let’s look briefly at some of the Obama Administration’s accomplishments (not in order of importance):

• The rescue of the automotive industry. Whether you like the idea of bailouts or not, it saved a lot of peoples’ jobs and most of the money has been paid back to the government.
• The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (stimulus program) worked. According to the White House Council of Economic Advisers, the February 2009 stimulus bill had put over 800,000 people back to work by the third quarter of that year.
• In the process, the stimulus managed to accomplish a lot of too-long-deferred necessary work on the nation’s roads and bridges.
• Terminated the Bush Administration’s practice of overruling scientific findings for political concerns.
• TARP—the $700 billion Troubled Assets Relief Program inherited from the Bush Administration—worked. Once again, billions spent, but billions repaid. Ironically, the reason Wall Street is still around to crash in 2011 is because the federal government rescued it in 2009.
• A significant CUT in spending, which Fox News never talks about because it doesn’t fit in to the right wing’s mental universe.
• Berzerk protests at town hall meetings aside, ‘Obamacare’ actually works, and fixed many of the problems created by the Bush Administration’s health-care legislation, including allowing governments to negotiate drug prices and eliminating the ‘donut hole.’
• Fumigated the White House and Capitol Hill of the lobbyists that had infested them during the Bush Administration, imposing stringent new requirements on lobbyists and bans on gifts to politicians. Boehner’s Santa Claus routine is now illegal.
• Scrapped the Bush Administration’s financial chicanery by actually counting the costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars in the federal budget, rather than continuing to hide it in off-budget spending.
• Shut down the Bush Administration’s programs of waterboarding and extraordinary rendition of suspected terrorists in favor of handling them with actual laws.
• Started getting us out of Iraq.
• Killed Osama Bin Laden.

That’s quite a track record for two and a half years, especially given the scale of the mess President Obama inherited from President Bush. I’m sorry you’re still not happy, Meg.

I have to call you out on some other stuff too.

We’re disappointed, yes, but we’re not blind. Anyone who’s kept up on current events knows that the cynicism hasn’t returned to Washington—it never left. President Obama is a breath of fresh air, yes, but that only goes so far when the rest of the room smells like a sewer. Really, the root cause that some of President Obama’s campaign promises (climate change, some banking reform regulation) have failed to live up to expectations is because the Republicans in Congress have done everything possible to gut them. In fact, the reason the President’s promise to being a new civility to Washington failed is because the Republicans took their ball and went home. I can’t really blame the president for this; all through 2009 and 2010, every time the administration offered compromise, the Republican leadership refused to play nice. John Boehner sure talks a line about spending cuts, but not when they effect the General Electric plants in his district. I keep mentioning Speaker Boehner, by the way, because he makes such a good example of what’s wrong with Washington.

When you said “The last election was all about hope and change and ushering in a new beginning and phase in America. Not only have we not been given hope and change, but generation Y is feeling disillusionment and asking ourselves what exactly we have to look forward to,” I think you forgot that there was an election in 2010, too, which for a variety of reasons put the Republicans in charge of Congress again, and gave the hard-line Tea Party group a disproportionate say in what happens in Congress. Your dad’s old colleague, Russ Feingold, one of the most respectable senators of the last twenty years, lost his seat to a wealthy Republican hack with no political experience and a cloud of ethics problems. That’s the problem of 2010 in a microcosm.

So now it’s 2011, and what’s bugging me just now? It’s not the president. It’s not even cynicism, which is at least predictable. It’s Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, and his comment that “We weren’t kidding around, either. We would have taken it down.” The ‘it’ he’s referring to is the national economy, which Chaffetz and his allies in Congress would happily have crashed during the debt ceiling dispute. Now really, that’s a crisis of leadership right there— elected officials willing to wreck the country’s already fragile economy over a point of political ideology? These are the people who howl that President Obama is a radical? What is this, Opposite Year? This isn’t cynicism; it’s stupidity. The worst of the trouble over the debt ceiling came from the Tea Party scuttling every idea the Republican leadership came up with; it’s a bit embarrassing when your party can’t even keep itself together enough to even put something up for a vote, while the President sits there waiting for you.

So it’s no wonder that while the President is still pretty popular, Congress’ approval ratings could hardly get lower. John Boehner, the would-be kingmaker with skin the color of an Oompa-Loompa, is now less popular than the widely-vilified Nancy Pelosi. The Tea Party is turning into the Albatross Party, especially among mainstream Republicans because of how they repeatedly cut Boehner’s legs out from under him during the debt ceiling negotiations.

I’m not really certain how to end this response. Urging you to think positive would be a bit trite and pointless. “Buckle in for a bumpy ride” would be just as bad. Since you generally write interesting and thoughtful stuff, though, I think I’ll just suggest you keep up the good work, and not turn into someone like Sean Hannity, who essentially gets paid not to like President Obama, without regard for whether what he’s saying can be supported by facts.

Have fun,

Tom

Thinking about the election.....

I am thoroughly sick of the election coverage right now. This has been going on since November 2008. Sarah Palin is suffering from overexposure (and not just the Alaskan weather kind) and I can't keep track anymore of which vitriolic right-wing candidate's followers have arrested or beaten up people who disagree with the candidate. Joe Miller, Rand Paul, they all run together after a while. Personally, I think private retinues of political thugs is a rather ominous phenomenon. Alas, I'm not talking about Roderick Spode again.

The Tea Party is a formidable opponent, far more ferocious than the old-line institutional Republicans like Mitch McConnell and John Boehner. They have a broad appeal to the people who feel they've been given short shrift by the system. Most of them are, however, probably mad at the government for what was actually done to them by their health insurance companies, employers, or banks, or the general and continuous slide in real wages since the 1970s, rather than the government.... but it is hard to get that point across. In any case, they're mad as hell and are lashing out at the most visible and vulnerable target. After all, you can't vote out the head of your HMO after your benefits have been slashed.

In that respect, they're not that different in motivation than the progressives who voted the Democrats into control of Congress in 2008, and into the White House in 2008. Some of them are probably even the same people.

Still, when the Tea Party puts the Republicans back in charge of the House, it won't be the hellraisers who get the prominent seats and the most power. We'll be back to guys like McConnell, Boehner, Cantor, et al., most of whom have been in DC for ages. Even if Christine O'Donnell, Rand Paul, Carly Fiorina, or any of the other current crop of Tea Party heart-throbs get elected, they'll be reduced to cogs in a machine controlled by older men with very different priorities, including an affinity for corporate economics and an ill-concealed disdain for the people and populism, even as manifested in the Tea Party. There is seldom any gratitude in politics.

Thus the irony.

It also says a great deal about the respective priorities of the Obama White House and the Republican machine that while the White House has imposed strict new disclosure and access requirements for lobbyists and has fought for campaign finance reform, the Republican candidates in this year's election benefit from the Citizens United windfall, which opened the gates to a flood of unregulated cash from anonymous donors. The Republicans are outspending Democrats seven to one on media advertisements, and it hasn't escaped public notice that multimillionaires in New York are meddling in congressional elections in Oregon by essentially laundering money through a 527.

For all that President Obama and his supporters have accomplished in the last year and a half-- and the list is really impressive, to those who bother to read it-- it was unlikely the Democrats would retain even their nominal control of Congress after the midterms.

That the Democrats managed to accomplish what they did in the face of such entrenched, well-coordinated, and well-funded opposition is extremely impressive.

I call it a nominal control because of two things. The Republicans managed to get a great deal of mileage out of simply saying 'no' and filibustering at every opportunity, and because the Democratic majority was a paper tiger that depended too heavily on Blue Dogs, many of whom are 'conservatives in the wrong party,' so to speak-- leftovers from before Goldwater and Nixon turned the Republican party into what it is now. Once you stop counting the Blue Dogs as Democrats (which Reid and Pelosi might well have done, since they couldn't count on Blue Dog support without heaps of pork), the Democrats didn't have any kind of a majority at all.

Most importantly, the expectation that the Democrats will take losses in the 2010 election isn't sour grapes or pessimism, it's based in historical reality.

Incumbent parties almost always take a brutal walloping in the midterm after a new president is elected. The most recent such midterm, in 2002, was an anomaly, largely because of the September 11 terrorist attacks. Even in midterms in general, every midterm election for the last 70 years has resulted in the President's party losing seats in Congress, with exactly three exceptions-- 1934, 1998, and 2002.

I must admit, though, that the Democrats are actually doing better than I expected.

What I find exasperating, however, is how many Democratic candidates like Chet Edwards, Jason Altmire, and Joe Manchin have essentially given in to the right wing's demonization of the President, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, and (perhaps most of all) Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Most of these guys are essentially Blue Dogs anyways, and fighting for their lives against Republicans, but it is infuriating nonetheless.

The Republicans, for their part, generally wasted no time in running away from George W. Bush after 2006. I'm sure the world still wonders why.

I think part of the problem is that the public is just grossly misinformed about the issues.

TARP didn't start under Obama, it started under Bush.

So did the auto industry bailout.

The deregulation that allowed the crash of 2008 also happened under Bush, but Obama did something about that.

Most of 'Obamacare' consisted of strictures binding on health insurers, not the consumer, and were certainly more to the benefit of the consumer than the Republican bill of 2005, which forbade Medicare from negotiating pharmaceutical prices and gave Big Pharma the right to charge whatever it wanted.

The Obama administration actually CUT taxes for most people, which begs the question of exactly what reality most of the Tea Party howlers live in.

I'd particularly like to know how many people in the US actually understand what socialism is and how it works, as opposed to just parroting right-wing talking points.

In general, the election coverage as a whole increasingly begs the question of whether a non-conservative administration, candidate, or party can expect a fair shake from an increasingly partisan news media. Jon Stewart really IS the hardest-hitting journalist in the media, and I'm appalled by that fact too.

By partisan, of course, I certainly do not mean the mythical "liberal media." I point as an example, rather, to the network whose owner has donated millions of dollars to Republican party organs, and whose primary media outlet once used as a defense in court the argument that the media has no obligation to tell the truth.

The result ultimately remains to be seen......

God Gave Us The Papacy.....

By now you may have read of or heard of this incident.

On September 12, 1960, a man surnamed Kennedy stood before the Ministerial Association of Greater Houston and assured his audience that he believed "in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute -- where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be Catholic) how to act and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote -- where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference -- and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the President who might appoint him or the people who might elect him. I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish -- where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches, or any other ecclesiastical source -- where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials -- and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all."

That man, of course, was John Fitzgerald Kennedy, our nation’s first Catholic president, who overcame over a century and a half of political and social stigma associated with Catholicism, by dispelling the lingering fear that a Catholic president would be politically subservient to the Papacy.

Forty-nine years later his nephew Patrick Kennedy, a Congressman representing Rhode Island, founded as a colony that embraced religious freedom, has been effectively excommunicated by a Catholic bishop upset that Representative Kennedy, a democratically-elected public servant of a diverse constituency, refuses to take his political marching orders out of the pages of Catholic dogma.

I must congratulate Bishop Tobin for so manfully attempting to undo what JFK did in the way of opening socioeconomic doors for Catholics in the United States.

Sarah Palin

Sarah Palin. I’m pretty amazed at the amount of sheer vitriol that’s come out about this woman in the last week.

Seriously, John McCain announced her as his running mate barely a week ago, and already the scandals and skeletons in the closet have been piling up like there’s no tomorrow. A surprising number of these scandals have emerged from Alaskan sources, among Palin’s own constituents and particularly the residents of the town of Wasilla, of which she was mayor for six years. Despite her 80% approval rating among Alaskans, there appear to be some there who are definitely in a torch-and-pitchfork mood.

It’s not just angry people on the internet, either—Time Magazine, ABC, the Washington Post, and the New York Times have all written her off as a disaster.

Let’s call it as it is— she’s the governor of a state with fewer people than most large cities (670,000 people, about as many as the city of Baltimore, Maryland). She was mayor of Wasilla, a town with a population (2000 census) of fewer than 5,500 people from 1996 until 2002. [By contrast, my hometown had 14,000 in the same census year, and is still considered a Podunk by Massachusetts standards.] These really do not add up to the sort of qualifications I look for in a presidential or vice-presidential candidate. She has no foreign policy experience and no legislative experience.

On top of that, we have the following:

Her claim to be a small government reformer and corruption fighter is blatant hogwash. She publicly and vocally supported (in her official capacity as governor) the infamous ‘Bridge to Nowhere,’ a $329 million dollar lump of particularly shameless pork (a bridge between two islands, paid for my the federal government) snared by Senator Ted Stevens, who is currently indicted for corruption. Palin has since contradicted herself by claiming to have opposed the bridge project all along. When public outcry killed the bridge project, Palin diverted the money to other pet projects, and then claimed the credit for stopping the boondoggle she had helped push.

The Republican culture of corruption extends even here, no surprise; Senator Ted Stevens is one of the world champs in bringing home the pig products; for all the image of the hardy frontier, Alaska receives far more in federal subsidies than any other state in the country. The entire Republican apparatus is reeling under the brunt of investigations, indictments, and revelations of gross corruption. Given the size of the Alaskan political community and Palin’s involvement in it, it is virtually impossible that she wasn’t involved in this personally, and indeed she accepted $4,500 in campaign contributions in the same VECO fundraising affair that led to Stevens’ indictments.

She’s a glutton for pork; Wasilla collected over $27 million in federal subsidies and public works funding during her second term as mayor, and had its own lobbying firm on retainer.

While mayor of Wasilla, she blew $15,000,000 in public funds (more than twice the town’s entire annual operating budget) on a multi-use sports arena and convention center that still hasn’t broken even, and receives hundreds of thousands of dollars in state subsidies. She raised the sales tax on groceries 2% to pay for it all. Why in the world does a town of a few thousand people need something like this?

While mayor, she investigated the possibility of removing books she deemed to be offensive from the public library, going so far as to attempt to fire the librarian when the librarian objected.

She was nearly recalled as mayor after sacking most of the town government and replacing them with cronies. After a public outcry over abuse of power, the mayor’s office was subsequently stripped of most of it’s power, which was turned over to a town manager (yet another Palin crony). Sound familiar?

She’s the nexus of ‘Troopergate,’ in which she sacked the public safety commissioner who refused to fire her sister’s ex-husband, in a glaring example of her abuse of power.

She’s already under investigation by the Alaska state legislature over Troopergate, among other things, including her involvement in a business that was shut down by state order for failure to obey the law.

She sacked the entire state Board of Agriculture and Conservation in a feud with the state Creamery Board over a failing state-run business that she wanted to keep open, then replaced them with cronies.

Her husband works in the oil and gas industry—an employee of British Petroleum, specifically-- which accounts for nearly half of the Alaskan state economy. Pretty much anything she did as governor or would do in the White House as far as energy policy would fail any reasonable conflict-of-interest test.

She’s a fan (and longtime supporter) of Pat Buchanan, whose statements such as 1990’s “Capitol Hill is Israeli-occupied territory” earned him his own page on the Anti-Defamation League’s website, as well as a supporter of Jews for Jesus, a controversial group that attempts to convert Jews to evangelical Christianity.

She has repeatedly made public statements about how US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan are 'are on a mission from God.’ Fine words from Jake Blues, but not for this.

She turned the town’s healthy budget surplus into a crippling deficit in just a few years (sound familiar?).

She campaigned for both mayor and governor as an outspoken Christian, a fiscal conservative, and an advocate of small government; public records are silent on the former, but government size and spending bloated enormously (Wasilla’s expenditures jumped 49%) whenever and wherever she was in charge (sound familiar?).

A governor, she eviscerated social services, including programs that supported single mothers and pregnant teenagers.

She has over the past twelve years earned a reputation for fighting dirty, vindictiveness (see Troopergate and the dairy board matter) and cronyism. After eight years of George Bush and Dick Cheney, we need a break.

She has hired an attorney on a $95,000 retainer (payable out of government funds, as he represents her both as a private individual and as governor) to defend her against accusations of abuse of power.

She has requested that her church fellows pray in favor of a $30 billion natural gas pipeline project (yet more federal money) that she has been trying to push through as governor. (Really, this is just crass to the point of being laughable).

I’ll skip all the stuff about how she has a Down’s Syndrome baby (having hid the pregnancy from the public and most of her family for seven months), is supposedly a rabid hunter, her atrocious people skills, and her lack of anything like public dignity (e.g. she giggled when a right-wing talk radio host on whose show she was appearing referred to an opponent of hers as a cancer, knowing that said opponent actually had cancer). That’s beside the point. George Bush has already lowered the dignity bar quite a ways.


The 500-pound troll in the room, however, is this. The vice-president of the United States is literally a heartbeat away from being president. Serious business. They can also wield significant power and influence on their own, depending on the climate and personalities in the administration; case in point, Dick Cheney.

McCain apparently picked her after meeting her just once, for fifteen minutes, the day before she was announced as the pick, and with little or no preliminary vetting. McCain’s staff even wrote her acceptance speech for her.

The fact that McCain would pick someone who is not only grossly underqualified to be president, but who has so many skeletons in their personal and official closets that they can humiliate the Republican party’s ticket this badly in the space of just a week, raises serious questions about McCain’s own judgment on the matter.

It’s also rather laughable that McCain shot himself in the foot in this fashion—he juxtaposes age and experience, but picked someone who has neither, and who by his own alleged standards wouldn’t be suited to take over in the event that McCain’s age catches up with him.




On a more personal level, there are also a few more strikes against her.

She is a creationist, and advocated the teaching of creationism in Alaskan public schools. For me, this is a big disqualifier. You can be a devout Christian without being a creationist, but you can’t be a creationist (particularly a biblical literalist) without essentially writing off most of the scientific knowledge gathered over the last century and a half, at least. In my opinion, people who embrace these ideas are not sufficiently grounded in empiricism and reality to be good leaders.

She is an evangelical Pentecostal who can’t seem to keep her public duties and private beliefs separate. With all respect, I think we have had quite enough right-wing holy rollers in the White House lately, and that we do not need any more.

She cannot correctly pronounce ‘nuclear.’ This is just a failing grade right from the start.

Her 17-year-old daughter is pregnant. Palin cut funding for sex education (like Bush, she advocates teaching abstinence only) and social services for teenage and unwed mothers. This is nothing short of elemental irony.

Tautology

To be honest, I'm no longer sure whether this is tautology, circular argument, or just plain stupidity, because my brain is somewhat addled by it....

Chris Matthews interviewed two talk radio hosts regarding the statements Bush made in Israel yesterday, in which he claimed that anyone who opposed him was the same as those who tried to appease Hitler in the years before 1939. The right-winger, the odious bigmouth Kevin James, spent five minutes trying to BS his way out of having to answer a question regarding Neville Chamberlain to which he quite obviously didn't know the answer-- he didn't know what Chamberlain did, even though he was the one who brought up the issue of Chamberlain and appeasement as a talking point. I mean, seriously, this was embarassing-- brainless repetition and just randomly yelling over everyone else without making any sort of actual sense.

Matthews finally gave up and said "your problem, Kevin, is that you don't know anything." SHortly afterwards, Matthews added "I've gotta go to someone who knows SOME history.... this is PATHETIC." Oh... and later "He's as bad as the White House press secretary who doesn't know what the Cuban Missile Crisis was!" And "You're wrong. You don't understand what appeasement is, don't use the word."

I'm no great fan of Matthews-- he threw Bush et al way too many softballs before November of 2006 for me to trust him entirely-- but he won a merit badge in this inteview.

James also told the other guest to watch The Path to 9/11..... I wonder if he is aware that that movie is a lump of propaganda that bears precious little resemblance to documented reality?

Olbermann Goes Medieval on Bush

Ok, really, I've been good. I have been a political junkie for years but I have managed to go months without a political post. Until now.

MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, who has done so much to drag from the murky depths the lies and sad truths of the Bush administration, seems to have really had it with Bush now... over golf.

You see, Bush claims that he gave golf up in some sort of show of solidarity with the people he sent off to Iraq and their families. That's trite enough to begin with. The problem is, however, that Bush also lied about it, as well as lying about the other usual things like Iraqi WMDs and so on, in a recent interview with Politico that seems to have lit Keith's fuse.

Here's the link, watch for yourself.

Link to Crooksandliars.com


Incidentally, mucho props to Crooksandliars for what they do-- they preserve in video all the stuff Bush, Cheney, Delay, and everyone else has said in recent years, so you can reference it-- it really helps keep things from falling down the corporate media's memory hole.

Are you there, God? It's me, Lurker...

I just wanted to know.... why did you put so many nimrods and twits on this planet?

Exhibit A-- Doug Feith, former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy and head of the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, one of the chief architects of the Iraq debacle.

Here he is, getting thoroughly dismantled and spindled by Jon Stewart while trying to sputter excuses and ass-covering explanations for the Bush Administration.....

Link with video.

I look at this sort of stuff with a historian's eye-- personally, I think that thirty or forty or fifty years down the road, people will be writing books about Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert in much the same way they write books about Voltaire or Mark Twain now. Humor makes things stick-- and you know what? The right wing might have the Heritage Foundation and all those other think tanks slaving away to write their own version of history, but we progressives have all the comedians. ;)

Incidentally-- John McCain's campaigning in western Washington State today, and one of the events on the slate is a fundraising dinner for which people will pay $33,100 per plate to attend. That says a lot about where the financial base for his election is coming from-- how many people can drop a figure comparable to MY ANNUAL SALARY on ONE MEAL??? That's the Republican Party for ya-- the only thing they want from anyone but the rich is their votes. Compare that to the millions of people who donated less than $200 each to Obama, and you get a picture of what people actually want in a candidate this year.

Incidentally-- I got a sunburn today. I'm burned as red as Stalin's undershorts (tightie reddies?).

Anyone want to go see a battleship?

Required Reading

Everyone should read the following article..... which hasn't been reproduced in the US media, probably for obvious reasons....you can't make stuff like this up, but it's true. Ms. Edmonds has, incidentally, been trying to go public with her story in the US for over a year and a half now, but government pressure has resulted in no public Congressional hearings and no major media exposure..... so she had to go overseas, to the Sunday Times of London, to get her story out.

(maximum sarcasm) I love having such a fanatically liberal left-wing media, don't you? (/maximum sarcasm) Now playing: NIN: Happiness is Slavery, and Pink Floyd: Mother (AKA the "Mother should I trust the government" song)

US Nuclear Secrets Coverup


Excerpt:

From The Sunday Times

January 6, 2008

For sale: West's deadly nuclear secrets

Insight: Chris Gourlay, Jonathan Calvert, Joe Lauria

A WHISTLEBLOWER has made a series of extraordinary claims about how corrupt government officials allowed Pakistan and other states to steal nuclear weapons secrets.

Sibel Edmonds, a 37-year-old former Turkish language translator for the FBI, listened into hundreds of sensitive intercepted conversations while based at the agency's Washington field office.

She approached The Sunday Times last month after reading about an Al-Qaeda terrorist who had revealed his role in training some of the 9/11 hijackers while he was in Turkey.

Edmonds described how foreign intelligence agents had enlisted the support of US officials to acquire a network of moles in sensitive military and nuclear institutions.

Among the hours of covert tape recordings, she says she heard evidence that one well-known senior official in the US State Department was being paid by Turkish agents in Washington who were selling the information on to black market buyers, including Pakistan.

The name of the official – who has held a series of top government posts – is known to The Sunday Times. He strongly denies the claims.

However, Edmonds said: "He was aiding foreign operatives against US interests by passing them highly classified information, not only from the State Department but also from the Pentagon, in exchange for money, position and political objectives."

She claims that the FBI was also gathering evidence against senior Pentagon officials – including household names – who were aiding foreign agents.

"If you made public all the information that the FBI have on this case, you will see very high-level people going through criminal trials," she said.

Her story shows just how much the West was infiltrated by foreign states seeking nuclear secrets. It illustrates how western government officials turned a blind eye to, or were even helping, countries such as Pakistan acquire bomb technology.

The wider nuclear network has been monitored for many years by a joint Anglo-American intelligence effort. But rather than shut it down, investigations by law enforcement bodies such as the FBI and Britain's Revenue & Customs have been aborted to preserve diplomatic relations.

How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Strange

Y'all might know that I'm no big fan of government secrecy and the intelligence community, especially during the Cold War. I like sunshine; I thoroughly dislike crypto-fascism on the part of the government or any parts of the government, especially the creepier OGAs—'Other Government Agencies' whose names and existence are classified. Here's some of the reasons why.... article first, rant second.

CIA to Air Decades of Its Dirty Laundry

Assassination Attempts Among Abuses Detailed

By Karen DeYoung and Walter Pincus

Washington Post Staff Writers

Friday, June 22, 2007; A01

The CIA will declassify hundreds of pages of long-secret records detailing some of the intelligence agency's worst illegal abuses -- the so-called "family jewels" documenting a quarter-century of overseas assassination attempts, domestic spying, kidnapping and infiltration of leftist groups from the 1950s to the 1970s, CIA Director Michael V. Hayden said yesterday.

The documents, to be publicly released next week, also include accounts of break-ins and theft, the agency's opening of private mail to and from China and the Soviet Union, wiretaps and surveillance of journalists, and a series of "unwitting" tests on U.S. civilians, including the use of drugs.

"Most of it is unflattering, but it is CIA's history," Hayden said in a speech to a conference of foreign policy historians. The documents have been sought for decades by historians, journalists and conspiracy theorists and have been the subject of many fruitless Freedom of Information Act requests.

In anticipation of the CIA's release, the National Security Archive at George Washington University yesterday published a separate set of documents from January 1975 detailing internal government discussions of the abuses. Those documents portray a rising sense of panic within the administration of President Gerald R. Ford that what then-CIA Director William E. Colby called "skeletons" in the CIA's closet had begun to be revealed in news accounts.

A New York Times article by reporter Seymour Hersh about the CIA's infiltration of antiwar groups, published in December 1974, was "just the tip of the iceberg," then-Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger warned Ford, according to a Jan. 3 memorandum of their conversation.

Kissinger warned that if other operations were divulged, "blood will flow," saying, "For example, Robert Kennedy personally managed the operation on the assassination of [Cuban President Fidel] Castro." Kennedy was the attorney general from 1961 to 1964.

Worried that the disclosures could lead to criminal prosecutions, Kissinger added that "when the FBI has a hunting license into the CIA, this could end up worse for the country than Watergate," the scandal that led to the fall of the Nixon administration the previous year.

In a meeting at which Colby detailed the worst abuses -- after telling the president "we have a 25-year old institution which has done some things it shouldn't have" -- Ford said he would appoint a presidential commission to look into the matter. "We don't want to destroy but to preserve the CIA. But we want to make sure that illegal operations and those outside the [CIA] charter don't happen," Ford said.

Most of the major incidents and operations in the reports to be released next week were revealed in varying detail during congressional investigations that led to widespread intelligence reforms and increased oversight. But the treasure-trove of CIA documents, generated as the Vietnam War wound down and agency involvement in Nixon's "dirty tricks" political campaign began to be revealed, is expected to provide far more comprehensive accounts, written by the agency itself.

The reports, known collectively by historians and CIA officials as the "family jewels," were initially produced in response to a 1973 request by then-CIA Director James R. Schlesinger. Alarmed by press accounts of CIA involvement in Watergate under his predecessor, Schlesinger asked the agency's employees to inform him of all operations that were "outside" the agency's legal charter.

This process was unprecedented at the agency, where only a few officials had previously been privy to the scope of its illegal activities. Schlesinger collected the reports, some of which dated to the 1950s, in a folder that was inherited by his successor, Colby, in September of that year.

But it was not until Hersh's article that Colby took the file to the White House. The National Security Archive release included a six-page summary of a conversation on Jan. 3, 1975, in which Colby briefed the Justice Department for the first time on the extent of the "skeletons."

Operations listed in the report began in 1953, when the CIA's counterintelligence staff started a 20-year program to screen and in some cases open mail between the United States and the Soviet Union passing through a New York airport. A similar program in San Francisco intercepted mail to and from China from 1969 to 1972. Under its charter, the CIA is prohibited from domestic operations.

Colby told Ford that the program had collected four letters to actress and antiwar activist Jane Fonda and said the entire effort was "illegal, and we stopped it in 1973."

Among several new details, the summary document reveals a 1969 program about CIA efforts against "the international activities of radicals and black militants." Undercover CIA agents were placed inside U.S. peace groups and sent abroad as credentialed members to identify any foreign contacts. This came at a time when the Soviet Union was suspected of financing and influencing U.S. domestic organizations.

The program included "information on the domestic activities" of the organizations and led to the accumulation of 10,000 American names, which Colby told Silberman were retained "as a result of the tendency of bureaucrats to retain paper whether they needed it or acted on it or not," according to the summary memo.

CIA surveillance of Michael Getler, then The Washington Post's national security reporter, was conducted between October 1971 and April 1972 under direct authorization by then-Director Richard Helms, the memo said. Getler had written a story published on Oct. 18, 1971, sparked by what Colby called "an obvious intelligence leak," headlined "Soviet Subs Are Reported Cuba-Bound."

Getler, who is now the ombudsman for the Public Broadcasting Service, said yesterday that he learned of the surveillance in 1975, when The Post published an article based on a secret report by congressional investigators. The story said that the CIA used physical surveillance against "five Americans" and listed Getler, the late columnist Jack Anderson and Victor Marchetti, a former CIA employee who had just written a book critical of the agency.

"I never knew about it at the time, although it was a full 24 hours a day with teams of people following me, looking for my sources," Getler said. He said he went to see Colby afterward, with Washington lawyer Joseph Califano. Getler recalled, "Colby said it happened under Helms and apologized and said it wouldn't happen again."

Personal surveillance was conducted on Anderson and three of his staff members, including Brit Hume, now with Fox News, for two months in 1972 after Anderson wrote of the administration's "tilt toward Pakistan." The 1972 surveillance of Marchetti was carried out "to determine contacts with CIA employees," the summary said.

CIA monitoring and infiltration of antiwar dissident groups took place between 1967 and 1971 at a time when the public was turning against the Vietnam War. Agency officials "covertly monitored" groups in the Washington area "who were considered to pose a threat to CIA installations." Some of the information "might have been distributed to the FBI," the summary said. [Lurker's Note-- c.f. the FBI's COINTELPRO program] Other "skeletons" listed in the summary included:

• The confinement by the CIA of a Russian defector, suspected by the CIA as a possible "fake," in Maryland and Virginia safe houses for two years, beginning in 1964. Colby speculated that this might be "a violation of the kidnapping laws."
  

• The "very productive" 1963 wiretapping of two columnists -- Robert Allen and Paul Scott -- whose conversations included talks with 12 senators and six congressmen.
  

• Break-ins by the CIA's office of security at the homes of one current and one former CIA official suspected of retaining classified documents.

• CIA-funded testing of American citizens, "including reactions to certain drugs."
  

The CIA documents scheduled for release next week, Hayden said yesterday, "provide a glimpse of a very different time and a very different agency."

Barred by secrecy restrictions from correcting "misinformation," he said, the CIA is at the mercy of the press. "Unfortunately, there seems to be an instinct among some in the media today to take a few pieces of information, which may or may not be accurate, and run with them to the darkest corner of the room," Hayden said.

Hayden's speech and some questions that followed evoked more recent criticism of the intelligence community, which has been accused of illegal wiretapping, infiltration of antiwar groups, and kidnapping and torturing of terrorism suspects.

"It's surely part of [Hayden's] program now to draw a bright line with the past," said National Security Archive Director Thomas S. Blanton. "But it's uncanny how the government keeps dipping into the black bag." Newly revealed details of ancient CIA operations, Blanton said, "are pretty resonant today."

Now don't get me wrong-- I'm not going to take after Hoover's Secretary of State Henry Stimson and demand we shut down intel because 'gentlemen do not read each others' mail,' like Stimson did when he shut down the Black Chamber in the 20s. We can't do that-- it'd be nice to be able to do it because nobody's threatening us, but the world just doesn't work that way.

The idea that some operations run by the CIA were so secret and compartmentalized that the President, the Congress, and the Director of the CIA didn't know about them is a pretty scary thought indeed. None of this stuff was known except to a select few in the intelligence community until Seymour Hersh published an article about it in the New York Times, as mentioned above. Hersh's article may well have been the first time the President himself heard of what the CIA was doing on the public dime. This doesn't even really address the bigger, less-secret operations like the overthrow of Mossadegh, the School of the Americas, support for Latin American dictators like Pinochet, etc, and the initially secret incursions into Laos and Cambodia during the Vietnam War. Hooray for national security and reasons of state, might makes right and laws do not bind us. It's no wonder most of the world doesn't like us very much. Blowback happens.

The crushing irony is…. All the time we were tying ourselves in knots and pissing on the Constitution and Bill of Rights with all this black-bag stuff, the KGB was running rings around us without breaking a sweat.

After word of some of the CIA's shenanigans got out in the 70s and created an enormous scandal, thanks to Hersh and others, a Congressional panel known as the Church Committee was established (the name comes from the panel's chair, Sen. Frank Church). There was also another investigation run in parallel by the House, the Pike Committee, but the Church Committee is better-known. President Ford's advisors, including Donald Rumsfeld and Henry Kissinger, immediately tried to stonewall the Committee's investigation by claiming executive privilege and state secrecy. The result was a real watershed in public knowledge about what was going on, and what had been going on in secret for the previous thirty years, and some new constraints on what the intelligence community could do, based on the Committees' conclusion that the CIA and OGAs had been allowed entirely too much latitude and freedom from accountability; Senator Church himself complained that the country's spies had been acting like 'rogue elephants.' If you're interested in reading the Commission's reports in the original, they're linked at the bottom of this page. They're also here.

The gist of it is this:

The legislative branch has been remiss in exercising its control over the intelligence agencies. For twenty-five years Congress has appropriated funds for intelligence activities. The closeted and fragmentary accounting which the intelligence community has given to a designated small group of legislators was accepted by the Congress as adequate and in the best interest of national security. There were occasions when the executive intentionally withheld information relating to intelligence programs from the Congress, but there were also occasions when the principal role of the Congress was to call for more intelligence activity, including activity which infringed the rights of citizens. In general, as with the executive, it is clear that Congress did not carry out effective oversight.

(Church Committee Report, Book I, Chapter I, Section E.)

Anyone remember Ollie North and the Reagan-era Continuity of Government plans, or REX84? COG plans in and of themselves are normal—every administration has them. The basic one is, if the president dies, the VP takes, over, etc. That's in the constitution, but as time went on, and especially during the Cold War, when the primary objective was for the government to remain operational after the Soviets nuked us, they tended to get very elaborate. COG plans are one thing, but COG plans that propose the dissolution of Congress, the imposition of martial law over the whole country, and creation of a shadow government composed of a handpicked group of men from the Executive Office of the President, an alphabet soup of OGAs, and the military, which would then run the country indefinitely? Small wonder Bush is trying to bury the Reagan-era records indefinitely.

Continuity of Government (starring Rumsfeld and Cheney)

July 5, 1987 Miami Herald article by Alfonse Chardy, reproduced here (scroll down—see especially the bits about how they stole classified info from the Carter campaign when Dear Old Ronnie was running for election for a bit of black comedy. This was the first publication regarding the COG plan)

The existence of REX84 (Readiness Exercise, 1984) first came up during the Iran-Contra hearings—the basic idea was that in the event of a crisis (for which the defining criteria are vague), the federal government, acting through the military and FEMA, would impose martial law and arrest anyone on a long list of suspected dissidents, and throw them in newly-built, FEMA-run prison camps without due process. (n.b. – the nuclei of FEMA were established as parts of the Housing and Urban Development and Defense Department, initially charged with maintaining civil defense systems, and was only given the natural disaster responsibility in 1978; it kept a very low profile until the Reagan years, and didn't receive much publicity until their botched response to Hurricane Andrew).

This is not tin-foil-hat stuff. This was your tax dollars at work.

Between the pre-Church Commission stuff, Watergate, and Iran Contra, I'm very glad that we have laws like FISA; I just wish Congress and the Supreme Court would force the White House to obey the laws these days..

I'm not in the least bit surprised that we're having pretty much the same situation today, with a runamok intelligence community running secret prisons in other countries, private armies of on-the-books-but-off-the-record mercenaries like Blackwater, indefinite imprisonment of suspected enemy agents, and abducting people in ALLIED foreign countries. Hell, look at the bunch of CIA goons now on trial in Italy. "The US has said the Americans accused of the kidnapping would not be sent to Italy even if the government made an extradition request." I must admire the chutzpah; this is a perfect to treat one of the few countries to actually like us, George. Small wonder the current administration wants to circumvent FISA and junk the security clearances of most of Congress—they want to be able to work in the dark again, in a return to the bad old days.

Remember that bit I quoted from the Church report, that mentioned the executive intentionally withholding information from the Congress and violating the rights of citizens? Does that sound familiar? It should, or have you not been watching the news?

We're even sliding back into the dark ages with the CIA and OGAs running around inside the US—look at all the allegations that government agencies have been infiltrating, spying on, harassing, and sabotaging antiwar groups (on top of the usual Republican dirty tricks like hiring robo-call companies to jam Democratic organizations' phone lines during elections). It really makes me wonder if the old claim by some black leaders (c.f the San Jose Mercury News article reproduced here) that the CIA had intentionally created the crack epidemic to weaken the black population wasn't actually valid after all.

I mean, we know (and have the documents and an official apology for) government testing of radioactive or toxic materials on civilians without their knowledge or consent back in the 50s and 60s, plus nightmares like the Tuskegee syphilis experiments. Word of these experiments started to leak out in the early 1980s, as individuals or groups began talking publicly about experiments to which they were subjected. Most of this was basically weapons testing, or attempts to study the effects of radiation on people; the Department of Defense, Atomic Energy Commission, and CIA were easily the worst offenders when it came to experimenting on humans. Do the names Castle Bravo, Project Green Run, MK-Ultra, Project Chariot, Project 48A, or Operation Buster/Jangle ring any bells? Just check out this list…. Green Run involved opening the vents at the Hanford plant in Washington and burping out large quantities of radioactive iodine in order to track fallout patterns and the range at which radioactivity could be detected. The wind blew the stuff right over a city. ="">Buster/Jangle? Yeah, American troops sitting around watching a bomb go off six miles away so the Pentagon and Atomic Energy Commission can use them as lab rats. Men flying aircraft through mushroom clouds. Great ideas. We know bullets kill people; do we need to shoot 3,000 conscripts in the head to see if 5.56mm rifle ammunition is lethal? No. Then why do we need to have a couple of battalions standing around when a nuke goes pop? Giving hundreds of men cancer—which we knew radiation caused, among other side effects—just to see whether an atomic bomb works well enough seems very stupid to me. Same with spraying biological weapons around in the NYC subway or on the coast of California just to see what would happen, or dosing people with LSD. At least 23,000 citizens were subjected to 1,400 similar experiments, including soldiers, prison inmates, retarded or orphaned children, or anyone who happened to check into a hospital while the experiment was running, most without their knowledge or consent. Children at the Fernald School in Massachusetts were fed radioactive material in their oatmeal, in a study partly sponsored by Quaker Oats and MIT. The number of people affected by downrange nuclear fallout or other side effects will probably never be known, but in one incident after the Simon A-bomb test in the '50s, a fallout hotspot was discovered in Troy NY, thanks to prevailing winds.

Things like this infuriate me. These are human beings here; they are not lab rats, and should not be treated as disposable things to be used in tests. Allow me some hyperbole. My fellow Americans, you are cannon fodder in the war for defense of capitalism; truth, justice, and the American way need not apply. The generals are the guys in the white coats, thousand-dollar suits, or gold-braided jackets, who do the thinking for us peons; we're not here to reason why, we're just here to do and die.

Oh, and incidentally, military personnel who were experimented on were banned from suing the government, on the grounds that their injuries were 'incidental to service.' (Feres v. United States, 1950, United States v. Stanley, 1987) even though the circumstances in the latter case involved a soldier who, as part of a government experiment, was given LSD without being informed or asked for consent. Apparently soldiers can be expected to double as lab rats. Thank you very much, Mr. Justice Brennan.

Peter Libassi, Chairman of the Interagency Task Force on the Health Effects of Ionizing Radiation, summed it up in 1979 by noting "[There was] a general atmosphere and attitude that the American people could not be trusted with the uncertainties, and therefore the information was withheld from them. I think there was concern that the American people, given the facts, would not make the right risk-benefit judgments." Even after the experiments tapered off in the late '60s and early '70s, six consecutive administrations fought tooth and nail to keep things as thoroughly under wraps as they could.

Oh, and we're still getting taken to war under false pretenses—Gulf of Tonkin incident, Iraqi WMDs and ties to 9/11….what's the difference? We've still got a nasty old clique of people in the federal government who have decided that they know what's best for the country, and that the rest of us aren't worth listening to. The kicker is…. It's the same bunch of people, then as now, some in government and some floating around the fringes: Cheney. Rumsfeld. Baker. Perle. Wolfowitz. Feith. Kissinger. Gates. Clinton was an interruption, and an unpleasant surprise—no wonder the Republican establishment hated him so much.

You know, when I was a little kid reading comic books, the plot devices that always used to bug me was stuff about top-secret government super soldier experiments (Captain America, Weapon X, etc.; behold my childhood memories as they slowly rust away), alien technology, or experiments with bombs and stuff (i.e. gamma bombs and the resulting Incredible Hulk), and I still get a kick out of reading about huge underground bunkers or secret facilities like the Notch in South Hadley. I can only imagine what Groom Lake or the Nevada Test Site are like. It always perplexed and concerned me out that a republic like this would go to such lengths to hide what it's doing from the public for whom the government ostensibly works... as I got older and started devouring history, even the extremely sanitized stuff, it started putting things in perspective, and I realized that a lot of this comic book stuff was, in hindsight, a pretty scathing commentary on actual government behavior. Some of the stuff I had ignored as conspiracy theories or fiction was real, and while there might not be a Weapon X or some Men In Black or even the Impossible Missions Force running around, we did have those über-secret little OGAs which always seemed to have the cool James Bond toys and who were so classified that they could do whatever they wanted. Small wonder the Roswell crash and the Philadelphia Experiment seem so plausible to many people, and no wonder at all how the X-files became so popular. We've become so used to the government hiding stuff from us that we've come to expect it.

The world wars created the modern framework of an intelligence structure, as run by professionals and with a heavy capital investment in monitoring communications and technology, emphasis on cryptography, as well as a severe case of institutional paranoia, especially given the post-1945 stakes of nuclear war. Prior to 1914, intelligence was a smaller-scale, less institutionalized field that tended to attract a lot of amateurs and dilettantes, who ran operations out of the back rooms of embassies in their spare time, or through espionage rings composed of individuals in the right places, and the concept of secrecy hadn't yet developed into its current form as an all-consuming virtue, something which at times seems to exist strictly for its own sake. There was no Bletchley Park until World War Two. The experiences of the war changed things a great deal. In the Cold War era, to be blunt, the federal government, and particularly the intelligence and military communities, simply didn't trust the American public, either because they worried that the public wouldn't accept the means necessary to reach the ends, or because they feared for a loss of any advantages over the Soviet bloc. IBM also made an unbelievable amount of money out of developing and running cryptographic equipment; during the Second World War entire divisions of IBM were co-opted directly into the military for the duration of the war, and became the major technical infrastructure for the intelligence community. Alan Turing, the mathematics genius and computer innovator, spent most of his wartime years working for Bletchley Park.

Janus' doorway stayed open for a long time after 1939; Korea followed on the coattails of World War Two and involvement in Vietnam came hard on the heels of Korea, creating the looming prospect of one war after another, and over everything loomed the prospect of a third world war. The priorities of government, the intelligence community, and the military-industrial complex changed—you might say it became as much an effort to save us from ourselves as to save us from the Russians. Everything revolved around the Cold War, to the point where the hippies, Black Panthers, Cesar Chavez, social reformers, civil rights movements, antiwar movements during Vietnam, were all monitored and vetted to see if they were potential avenues for Communist infiltration into American life and our precious bodily fluids, or simply because the government wanted to evaluate whether or not they were termites in the timbers, potential liabilities to a country that might need to fight a very large war in the near future. This was particularly the case when opposition to military institutions like the draft or nuclear weapons became part of the opposition's agendas.

Personally, I always thought the whole point of the Cold War was to defend our way of life from the threat of a militarized dictatorship—at least, that's how it was taught in schools. Snort… yeah, whatever, spare me the fire-breathing better-dead-than-red patriotism. So what's the point of it all if, in order to win the war, we have to be willing to throw away the way of life we're defending and resort to setting up another authoritarian regime just to hold off the first one? I know it sounds a bit Howard Zinn—two elites bashing away at each other, with the rest of humanity as cannon fodder and grunt labor, but wouldn't we be just trading one bunch of rich and well-connected nabobs for another-- rich industrialists/bankers vs. the Communist Party clique? Who can tell me the difference? Why not just save a lot of effort, skip the war, and surrender to Brezhnev or Andropov, if the end result either way is authoritarianism? I guess this is the sort of logic one's mind willingly follows if you're the sort of man who can start out small with the idea of burning a village in order to save the village, and then just apply the same metaphor for ends justifying means to your own country on a national, institutionalized scale. I don't mind fighting to defend my country if it's a republic I believe in, but I have some real objections to laying down my life for the benefit of General Electric, Chrysler, and DuPont.