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November 1, 2005

Bush Taps “Scalia-Lite” to Replace O’Connor

On the day we honored Rosa Parks, Mother of the Civil Rights Movement, George W. Bush appointed a white male to replace Sandra Day O’Connor on the Supreme Court. Evidently unable to find a woman or Latino sufficiently “qualified” to sit on the high court, Bush reached deep into the trough of right-wing federal judges and pulled out Samuel Alito.

On Friday, at 12:40 p.m., the same hour that Patrick Fitzgerald announced the indictment of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Bush called Alito. Desperate to stop the hemorrhaging from the withdrawal of Harriet Miers, the grim revelation that the 2000th American soldier had died in his unnecessary war in Iraq, and the pending indictment of a principal White House neocon, Bush tapped a judge adored by the right wing.

The conservatives’ giddy reaction to the nomination of “Scalito” or “Scalia-Lite,” as Alito is frequently called because of his affinity with Antonin Scalia, stands in stark contrast to that of the more moderate Miers. His record tracks the right-wing agenda.

Alito would gut abortion rights if given the chance. As a judge on the Third US Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia, he voted in Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 1991 to uphold a Pennsylvania law that included a provision requiring women seeking abortion to notify their spouses. When the case reached the Supreme Court, the justices used it to reaffirm Roe v. Wade. Justice O’Connor wrote the decision, which struck down the state’s spousal notification requirement. In his dissent in Casey, Chief Justice William Rehnquist quoted Alito’s dissent from the lower court opinion.

But Alito’s right-wing bona fides don’t stop there. Alito engages in “judicial restraint” – the right wing’s stated litmus test – only when the conservative ends justify the means. He showed little restraint when he voted to scuttle Congress’s intent by making it much harder for civil rights plaintiffs to prove sex and race discrimination. In one case, Alito’s colleagues on the Third Circuit observed that the federal law prohibiting employment discrimination “would be eviscerated if our analysis were to halt where [Judge Alito] suggests.”

Alito voted to invalidate part of the Family and Medical Leave Act, which guarantees most workers up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave to care for a loved one. The 2003 Supreme Court decision in Nevada v. Hibbs upheld the FMLA, essentially reversing a 2000 opinion by Alito which found that Congress had exceeded its power in passing the law.

In Erienet v. Velocity Net, Alito dissented from an opinion that makes it easier for consumers to get relief in state courts for violation of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act.

Samuel Alito has also shown hostility to privacy rights by supporting the unauthorized strip searches of women and children who are not named in a search warrant. He voted to uphold the strip search of a mother and her 10-year-old daughter in Doe v. Groody in 2004. That vote drew harsh criticism from Bush’s current Homeland Security Director Michael Chertoff, who was on the Third Circuit at the time. Chertoff accused Alito of rubber-stamping police misconduct. Alito’s excessive deference to executive power in Groody could signal his willingness to defer to the power of the executive in Bush’s wars on Iraq, terror and civil liberties. This is cause for great concern.

In 2001, Alito authored a decision that struck down a public school district’s policy that prohibited harassment against students based on their sexual orientation. The policy focused on harassment that might interfere with a student’s educational performance or create an intimidating, hostile or offensive environment. But Alito ruled this policy was unconstitutional because it could cover “simple acts of teasing and name-calling.”

Alito pandered to the gun lobby when he voted to strike down a federal law prohibiting the possession of machine guns. His position led Alito’s colleagues to accuse him of disrespecting the considered decision of Congress by requiring it to “play ‘Show and Tell’ with the federal courts.”

Several progressive organizations, including the National Lawyers Guild (NLG), the AFL-CIO, NARAL-Pro Choice America, the Alliance for Justice, MoveOn.org and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights are opposing the Alito nomination. NLG President Michael Avery stated, “Judge Alito’s record on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals is replete with examples of how his extremely conservative views have led to decisions that ignore the legitimate interests of women, families, people of color, consumers and working people. These decisions run contrary to established Supreme Court precedent and the will of the Congress.”

Alliance for Justice President Nan Aron said, “If confirmed to the pivotal O’Connor seat, Judge Alito would fundamentally change the balance of the Supreme Court, tipping it in a direction that could jeopardize our most cherished rights and freedoms.” Karen Pearl, interim president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, agreed. Alito’s confirmation “would radically transform the Supreme Court and create a direct threat to the health and safety of American women,” she said.

Key Democrats immediately stepped up to the plate and challenged the Alito nomination. Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid said, “Conservative activists forced Miers to withdraw from consideration for this same Supreme Court seat because she was not radical enough for them. Now the Senate needs to find out if the man replacing Miers is too radical for the American people.” Reid also criticized Bush’s selection of another white male: “This appointment ignores the value of diverse backgrounds and perspectives on the Supreme Court. The President has chosen a man to replace Sandra Day O’Connor, one of only two women on the Court. For the third time, he has declined to make history by nominating the first Hispanic to the Court … President Bush would leave the Supreme Court looking less like America and more like an old boys club.”

Senator Patrick Leahy said, “Judge Alito’s record on the bench demonstrates that he would go to great lengths to restrict the authority of Congress to enact legislation to protect civil rights and the rights of workers, consumers and women. Judge Alito has also set unreasonably high standards that ordinary Americans who are the victims of discrimination must meet before being allowed to proceed with their cases.”

Other Democrats have reacted similarly. Senator Ted Kennedy said, “If confirmed, Alito could very well fundamentally alter the balance of the court and push it dangerously to the right, placing at risk decades of American progress in safeguarding our fundamental rights and freedoms.” Senator Charles Schumer observed, “It’s sad that [Bush] felt he had to pick a nominee likely to divide America.” Senator John Kerry asked, “Has the right wing now forced a weakened President to nominate a divisive justice in the mold of Antonin Scalia?” And Senator Barack Obama said, “President Bush has … made a selection to appease the far right wing of the Republican Party.”

The precariously balanced Supreme Court will tip to the right if Alito is confirmed. Larry Lusberg, a former federal prosecutor who has known Alito for 22 years, affirms: “Make no mistake: he will move the court to the right, and this confirmation process is really going to be a question about whether Congress and the country want to move this court to the right.”

With his nomination of Samuel Alito, Bush has thrown down the gauntlet. Although many Democrats are vociferous in their displeasure, it is not clear that 41 of them will agree to a filibuster. Several must stand for election next year in red states, and Alito’s intellect and credentials – notwithstanding his radical ideology – may sway them in his direction. If the Democrats do filibuster, it will force the Republicans to use the “nuclear option” to override the time-honored filibuster for the first time.

As the Libby indictment continues to put on trial the lies on which the Iraq war was based, Bush’s agenda – including the Alito nomination – may be hobbled.

October 27, 2005

Harriet Miers: Bush’s Pit Bull

Bush has nominated his Texas crony as a stealth appointment to the Supreme Court. Although the Senate will be hard-pressed to discover Harriet Miers’s positions on the critical issues, she does have a long record of loyalty to Bush, whom she calls “the most brilliant man I ever met.” Bush undoubtedly knows where she stands – and it doesn’t appear to be on the side of civil liberties.

Miers represented a string of large corporations, including Walt Disney Co., Microsoft, Ford, Chrysler, Honda, Citibank and the Bank of America. Like John Roberts, Harriet Miers has no history of protecting the rights of women, minorities, the poor, the disabled or the environment.

Some far-right Christian organizations appear disappointed that Bush didn’t tap an ideological judge like Priscilla Owen, Janice Rogers Brown, J. Michael Luttig, or Michael W. McConnell. Public Advocate President Eugene Delgaudio calls Miers’s nomination “a betrayal of the conservative, pro-family voters whose support put Bush in the White House in both the 2000 and 2004 elections and who were promised Supreme Court appointments in the mold of Thomas and Scalia.”

Miers has never been a judge, so there is no concrete evidence of her judicial philosophy. But when Rush Limbaugh sought reassurance from Dick Cheney that Miers’s judicial philosophy parallels that of Scalia or Thomas, Cheney responded, “I’m confident that she has a conservative judicial philosophy that you’d be comfortable with … And the President has great confidence in her judicial philosophy.”

James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, and one of the most radical evangelical conservatives, sanctioned the Miers nomination after a well-placed call from Karl Rove. “Some of what I know I am not at liberty to talk about,” Dobson said.

Justice Nathan Hecht of the Texas Supreme Court testified to Miers’s bona fides as an evangelical Christian. He guarantees that Miers personally opposed abortion and attended “pro-life” events with him.

Bush is asking his right-wing religious backers to take it on faith that Miers will fulfill their agenda of further Christianizing America. There are clues that would confirm that faith. When Bush named Miers as White House Counsel to replace newly minted Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, Bush used the fundamentalist buzz word “grace” to describe Miers. She works with Exodus Ministries, which is dedicated to fulfilling released prisoners’ “need for intimate knowledge of the saving grace of Jesus Christ.” Its website proclaims that “Exodus is a place where ex-offenders learn how faith in Christ is the first step from captivity to freedom.”

After the American Bar Association voted to take a pro-choice position, Miers led the charge to have that vote reconsidered by the ABA membership. While we can expect her to tell the Senate Judiciary Committee that she was only concerned with the proper role for the ABA, Miers’s enthusiasm for undoing the ABA’s pro-choice stance belies such an excuse.

Harriet Miers was the first woman to serve as president of the Texas Bar Association. Yet she opposed a plan that would guarantee the election of a racial or ethnic minority bar president every sixth year.

Senate Majority leader Bill Frist of Tennessee is delighted with the Miers nomination. He called her “another outstanding nominee,” describing her selection as “a nomination we are excited about, we are pleased with.” Frist says “she is a woman who understands judicial restraint.”

Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada is equally ebullient. Evidently relieved that Bush didn’t nominate the dreaded Priscilla Owen or Janice Rogers Brown, Reid declared, “I’m very happy we have someone like her.”

Harriet Miers is likely to be as circumspect about her views as was John Roberts about his. Indeed, it was Miers who refused to share Roberts’ memos from his tenure in the Solicitor General’s office with the Senate. Miers will not share her records from her service in the Bush administration either.

Like Roberts, Miers has been a Republican party loyalist. She is being rewarded for her 12-year service to Bush, who plucked her from his inner circle of confidantes. In 1996, Bush called the loyal Miers, who helped Bush hide his National Guard record, “a pit bull in size 6 shoes.” Hardly a fitting replacement for the open-minded Sandra Day O’Connor.

When Bush nominated Miers, he proclaimed, “She has devoted her life to the rule of law and the causes of justice.” On the contrary, it appears that Miers has devoted her life to the interests of big corporations and George W. Bush.

The senators and the American people will be left to guess at how Miers feels about the issues that affect our lives.

Harriet Miers is not an intellectual giant like John Roberts. The enigmatic Miers must persuade the senators that she is committed to equality under the law. Harriet Miers has a high burden to carry to convince the Senate that she is qualified to sit on the highest court in the land.

October 18, 2005

Continuing in His Defiance of the Law

Republicans and Democrats have finally found something they can agree on. They have bipartisan support to stop Bush’s inhuman and degrading treatment of prisoners in United States custody: It’s bad for our image in the Arab and Muslim world. It breeds more resentment against the US, making us more vulnerable to terrorism. And it’s just plain un-American.

Last month, an Army captain and two sergeants from the 82nd Airborne Division contacted Senator John McCain (R-Ariz) and Human Rights Watch with allegations that members of the unit routinely beat, tortured and abused detainees in 2003 and early 2004. Capt. Ian Fishback, a Westpoint graduate, said he was frustrated that his reports to superiors went unheeded.

They reported seeing soldiers break prisoners’ legs, and strike blows to the heads, chests, and stomachs of prisoners – on a daily basis. They described witnessing soldiers pour chemical substances on prisoners’ skin and into their eyes. They said the mistreatment at a base near Fallujah was “just like” what happened at Abu Ghraib.

Capt. Fishback told Human Rights Watch that he believes the abuses he witnessed in Iraq and Afghanistan were caused in part by Bush’s 2002 decision not to apply the Geneva Conventions protections to detainees captured in Afghanistan. Fishback said:

[In Afghanistan,] I thought that the chain of command all the way up to the National Command Authority [President Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld] had made it a policy that we were going to interrogate these guys harshly … We knew where the Geneva Conventions drew the line, but then you get that confusion when the Sec Def [Secretary of Defense] and the President make that statement [that Geneva did not apply to detainees].
Two weeks ago, 90 percent of the Senate voted to ban “cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment” of prisoners held in US military custody. Although the vote merely reflects prohibitions already existing in several treaties the United States has ratified – making them binding domestic law under the Constitution – the Bush administration has refused to follow the law.

The measure introduced by McCain and other Republican senators was an amendment to a $440 billion Defense Appropriations bill. It was adopted by the votes of 46 Republicans, 43 Democrats and one Independent. The amendment also prohibits the use of any interrogation treatment or technique not authorized by and listed in the US Army Field Manual on Intelligence Information.

Notwithstanding the universal prohibition on cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment in the laws that bind the United States, the Bush administration has taken the position that they apply only within US territory, and only within limits recognized in the US War Crimes Act with respect to US nationals abroad.

For that reason, the McCain amendment specifies there will be no “geographical limitation on the applicability of the prohibition against cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment.”

McCain, a POW in Vietnam for nearly six years, said, “Many of my comrades were subjected to very cruel, very inhumane and degrading treatment, a few of them even unto death. But every one of us – every single one of us – knew and took great strength from the belief that we were different from our enemies.”

More than two dozen retired senior military officers, including Colin Powell and John Shalikashvili, both former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, support the McCain amendment.

Bush sent Dick Cheney to pressure McCain to withdraw his amendment, without success. Now that the amendment has been adopted by the Senate, Bush threatens to veto the appropriations bill if the McCain amendment is appended to it. The White House says the measure would “restrict the president’s authority to protect Americans effectively from terrorist attack and bringing terrorists to justice.”

A presidential veto can be overturned by a two-thirds majority in both houses. But some House Republicans plan to push for the McCain amendment to be dropped from the spending bill in a joint House-Senate conference committee.
An editorial in the Washington Post said: “Let’s be clear: Mr. Bush is proposing to use the first veto of his presidency on a defense bill needed to fund military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan so that he can preserve the prerogative to subject detainees to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. In effect, he threatens to declare to the world his administration’s moral bankruptcy.”

It’s a pity that Congress continues to finance the failed US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. If the Democrats recapture the House and Senate in the mid-term elections, and if, as Bob Herbert wrote in yesterday’s New York Times, the Democrats “get over their timidity, look deep into their own souls, discover what they truly believe and then tell it like it is,” they could push Congress to stop funding those wars and we could withdraw our troops. That is how US involvement in Vietnam ended. But don’t hold your breath.

The Bush administration persists in blocking any independent investigation of the torture, murder and inhuman treatment of prisoners in US custody, and Congress has thus far failed to demand one.

Bush is probably taking solace from a statement by Professor John Yoo, one of the principal authors of the Bush administration’s torture memos, who wrote in the Washington Post: Harriet Miers “may be one of the key supporters in the Bush administration of staying the course on legal issues arising from the war on terrorism.” When legal challenges to Bush’s policies come before the Supreme Court, Miers may well salute and march to the orders of her former boss.

October 11, 2005

Nobel Prize Slaps Bush Nuke Policy

Last week, the International Atomic Energy Agency and its chief, Mohamed ElBaradei, won the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons. The award was a slap at George W. Bush, who had pressed for ElBaradei’s removal just months before. It was also a blow to Bush’s policies of dealing with nuclear issues unilaterally, and the US focus on non-proliferation to the exclusion of disarmament – both of which are required by the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

The Bush administration tried to engineer the ouster of ElBaradei after the IAEA chief refused to endorse Bush’s claims that Saddam Hussein had restarted Iraq’s nuclear weapons program. The US also perceived ElBaradei as too soft on Iran, a charter member of Bush’s axis-of-evil.

A month before George W. Bush invaded Iraq, ElBaradei told the United Nations, “We have to date found no evidence of ongoing prohibited nuclear or nuclear-related activities in Iraq.” John Bolton, then Undersecretary of State for Disarmament, now United States ambassador to the UN, responded that ElBaradei’s statement was “impossible to believe.” Dick Cheney said, “I think Mr. ElBaradei frankly is wrong.”

But it turned out that ElBaradei was right about the absence of nukes in Iraq, and his refutation of Bush’s allegation that Iraq had bought tons of enriched uranium from Niger has also been corroborated.

A few days before Bush launched “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” ElBaradei revealed that the US had relied on fabricated documents to support its Niger claim. This revelation raised the ire of Bush, who had included the false Niger assertion in his state of the union address in order to whip up support for his impending illegal invasion of Iraq.

In the run-up to the war, ElBaradei said, “No, we are not finding any evidence of weapons of mass destruction.” He added courageously, “No, we are not going to give the US the kind of report they wanted that would have served as a legal justification for war against Iraq.”

ElBaradei is the first UN official to call for Israel to eliminate its secret nuclear weapons program. He advocated a nuclear-free Middle East, consistent with Security Council Resolution 687 that ended the Gulf War in 1991. In Article 14, the resolution spells out the need to create a zone free of all weapons of mass destruction across the Middle East. Ironically, this US-crafted resolution created enhanced powers for the IAEA and arms inspection verification.

“We must abandon the unworkable notion that it is morally reprehensible for some countries to pursue weapons of mass destruction,” ElBaradei said, “yet morally acceptable for others to rely on them for security – and indeed continue to refine their capacities and postulate plans for their use.”

ElBaradei was likely referring to the hypocrisy of the United States, which continues to expand its nuclear arsenal and promulgate policies that would allow it to pre-emptively use its nukes, all the while setting its sights on countries like Iran and North Korea for their nuclear programs.

The Pentagon’s March 15th “Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations” provides for the US to use nuclear weapons to counter potentially overwhelming conventional adversaries, to secure a rapid end of a war on US terms, or simply “to ensure success of US and multinational operations.”

By standing up to the mighty United States, ElBaradei showed uncommon courage, leading the Nobel Committee to describe him as “an unfraid advocate of new measures to strengthen” the nuclear non-proliferation regime.

The US and ElBaradei are squaring off again, this time over Iran. ElBaradei says there is no evidence that Iran has a nuclear weapons program. In an attempt to discredit him, the US eavesdropped on dozens of phone calls between ElBaradei and Iranian diplomats, according to the Washington Post.

But the United States’ efforts to collect ammunition against ElBaradei were unsuccessful. When his re-election was put up for a vote, 34 of the IAEA countries voted for ElBaradei to continue as head of that organization. Only the US voted no.

Although the IAEA recently passed a resolution that discusses the possibility of sending the issue of Iran’s nuclear capacity to the Security Council, the Nobel Prize may embolden the IAEA to stand up to US pressure to refer Iran to the Council, according to Phyllis Bennis from the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC.

“The fact that the United States government doesn’t like the government of Iran doesn’t give them the right to impose their own version of what the NPT [Non-Proliferation Treaty] requires and doesn’t require,” Bennis said on Democracy Now!

The latest National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, whose highly classified findings were disclosed by the Washington Post, reported the intelligence community’s consensus judgment that Iran remains 6 to 10 years away from the threshold of nuclear weapons capability.

Dr. Vojin Joksimovich, a nuclear engineer in San Diego, told me that Iran is not violating the NPT by its civilian use of nuclear power. Although there is no right to enrich uranium to 90 percent or more, which would be weapons grade material, Iran is enriching to 3 to 5 percent for fuel for nuclear power plants, according to Joksimovich. Brazil, he said, is also enriching uranium using the centrifuge technique that Iran wants to use. But the US doesn’t challenge Brazil; Bush seeks to build a case for war with Iran.

In a dejá vu from the run-up to “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” Bush began rattling the sabers against Iran in August. He declared on Israeli television that “all options are on the table” if Tehran does not comply with international demands.

Bush might think that attacking Iran would bolster the Republican Party’s showing in the 2006 mid-term elections, by distracting attention from his failed Iraq war. Ironically, the Bush administration is supporting Iraq’s Shiite government, which has close ties to Iran.

ElBaradei said in August that the only way to resolve the situation with Iran “is through negotiation.” German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder responded to Bush’s threatening comments by saying, “Let’s take the military option off the table. We have seen it doesn’t work.”

Russia agrees that diplomacy is the answer. A statement on the ministry’s web site said, “We favor further dialogue and consider the use of force in Iran counter-productive and dangerous, something which can have grave and hardly predictable consequences … We consider that problems concerning Iraq’s nuclear activities should be solved through political and diplomatic means, on the basis of international law and Tehran’s close cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency.”

Bennis hopes the peace prize will encourage ElBaradei to call directly on the five nuclear powers (who also happen to be the veto-bearing members of the Security Council), and particularly the United States, to give up their nuclear arsenals, as required by the NPT.

Under the Non-Proliferation Treaty, countries that don’t have nuclear weapons agree not to acquire them, in exchange for the promise from nuclear states to progressively disarm. Disarmament and non-proliferation are two sides of the same coin or two contractual promises exchanged. Thus, when the Bush administration unilaterally decides not to disarm, but instead to develop and even contemplate using new nukes, it is in flagrant violation of the NPT. The US cannot “choose” non-proliferation over disarmament.

Tragically, nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation were omitted from the Outcome Document at last month’s UN Summit that marked the 60th anniversary of the founding of the United Nations. It was the Bush administration that insisted on the omission.

September 29, 2005

US Pulls the Strings in Haiti

Laden with heavy security, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice paid a quick visit to Haiti on Tuesday. Her mission: to reassure Haiti’s interim government that the United States wants the elections to go forward in November, and to see to it that President Jean-Bertrand Aristide does not return to Haiti.

Once again, the US is manipulating Haiti.

On February 29, 2004, the United States had forcibly removed President Aristide from Haiti, then maintained that he voluntarily resigned. President Aristide had been elected with 80 percent of the vote. True to form, the Bush administration, which claims to love democracy, engineered a coup d’etat and removed a democratically-elected leader of another country.

The Aristides are now in South Africa, which granted them asylum. On August 31, President Aristide issued a statement, cautioning that free and fair elections could not take place in Haiti until the thousands of Lavalas [the pro-Aristide party comprised mostly of Haiti’s poor] who are in jail and in exile are free to return home, the repression that has already killed over 10,000 people ends immediately, and national dialogue begins.

President Aristide asked, “In 1994, who could have expected free, fair and democratic elections in South Africa with Nelson Mandela, Govan Mbeki, Oliver Tambo and other leaders and members of the African National Congress in jail, exile or in hiding?”

Two prominent Lavalas leaders are in jail. Rev. Fr. Gérard Jean Juste, who has been in custody for two months, was declared a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International. More than 400 interfaith religious leaders have signed a letter asking for Fr. Jean Juste’s release. Former Prime Minister Yvon Neptune has been jailed for 16 months, with no charges against him. Both men are in frail health.

The United Nations maintains a peacekeeping force of 8,000 in Haiti. I asked Mildred Aristide, the President’s wife, what role the UN has played in Haiti’s problems. She told me: “Before the coup in February 2004 – up until that very day – the constitutional government requested assistance from the UN to help defend Haitians from the murderous band of former soldiers, drug dealers, and thugs who were set on destabilizing the country and killing innocent people.”

How did the UN respond? It “stood by and allowed a democratically elected President, along with nearly 7,000 elected officials, to be removed from office,” Mrs. Aristide said. Only then, she added, did the UN vote to send an intervention force to Haiti.

“Credible reports of UN complicity in human rights abuses have surfaced,” Mrs. Aristide noted. “The UN has been forced to investigate allegations. The Haitian Police distribute machetes to hooded attachés, gun down innocent demonstrators, systematically raid poor slums, disappear prisoners turned over to them by the UN – all under the official sanction of the UN which voted to exercise control over the police.”

Referring to the police and the UN, Mrs. Aristide said, “The people of Haiti who are under siege are hard pressed to see any distinction among their repressors.” Both Haiti’s police and the UN force are enabled by United States political and economic clout.

When Rice was in Haiti Tuesday, she made clear the US does not want President Aristide to return to Haiti. “The Haitian people are moving on,” Rice said.

But things in Haiti are not going according to “script,” says Mrs. Aristide. Roger Noriega, assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs in the State Department, resigned. In August, Haiti’s interim government released the imprisoned Louis-Jodel Chamblain, a leader of the vicious Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti (FRAPH), a paramilitary group blamed for thousands of killings during the military dictatorship that ruled Haiti after forcing President Aristide from power in 1991. James B. Foley, the US Ambassador to Haiti, left his post in August for unknown reasons. Foley called Chamblain’s release a “sham,” especially in light of Neptune’s continued incarceration with no evidence against him. Foley characterized Neptune’s detention as “a violation of human rights, an injustice and an abuse of power.”

“Kidnappings, murder and other crimes have become widespread in Haiti since the interim government came to power a year-and-a-half ago,” Rep. Maxine Waters (CA) said in an August statement.

On August 20, police accompanied by machete-wielding civilians attacked a soccer crowd of thousands, shooting or hacking to death at least six and as many as 30 spectators. “Our tax dollars were at both ends of the killing,” Brian Concannon, Director of the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, told the Congressional Black Caucus last week. “The soccer game was sponsored by a USAID program, to promote peace in the neighborhood. The US also sponsors the killers, the Haitian National Police, by providing guns and weapons despite a consistent history of police killing over the last 18 months.”

“Roads and infrastructure have fallen into disrepair, and public services have virtually disappeared. The interim government has done nothing to stem the growing violence in the country, and it has done nothing to make millions of dollars in promised aid from international donors available to the Haitian people,” said Rep. Waters. “Just about the only thing the interim government has done is jail hundreds of political prisoners.”

Since President Aristide’s ouster, thousands of people have demonstrated to protest the horrific conditions, and the interim government has responded with violence against the people. Spurred by the US to take a more “proactive role” in going after armed pro-Aristide gangs, UN troops have engaged in “a wave of Fallujah-like collective punishment inflicted on neighborhoods known for supporting Aristide,” according to Naomi Klein.

The International Crisis Group (ICG) has documented that 18 months after President Aristide was forced out of the country, Haiti remains insecure and volatile. Much of the population displays “disenchantment, apathy and ignorance about the electoral process,” the ICG found.

The IGC reported that “a week before the scheduled close of registration, only 870,000 [of 4 million] potential voters had registered, and none had yet received the new national identity card required to vote.”

Although Rice tried to put a positive gloss on Haiti’s prospects for fair and free elections, “Haiti is in the midst of a comprehensive program of electoral cleansing,” said Concannon. “Its ballots are being cleansed of political dissidents, its voting rolls cleansed of the urban and rural poor. The streets are being cleansed of anti-government political activity,” he said.

Lavalas supporters have said they will not participate in the elections unless political prisoners are released, political persecutions are ended, and President Aristide is returned to Haiti. Senior officials at Canada’s Foreign Affairs Department admit that Lavalas remains Haiti’s most popular party. Thus, an election without Lavalas would be sham.

On June 28, the House of Representatives passed Rep. Barbara Lee’s resolution to block arms transfers to Haiti. The State Department responded by announcing on August 9 that it would send $1.9 million worth of guns and other equipment to the police before the elections and presumably before the Senate could vote on the resolution, according to Concannon.

Rep. Waters’ proposed amendment to H.R. 2601 provides good standards for evaluating conditions in Haiti as the elections approach, in Concannon’s opinion. It requests adequate security, disarmament of paramilitary groups, and trials or release for the political prisoners. Concannon stresses the importance of the opportunity to vote, to organize, and to campaign.

Haitians are still demonstrating in spite of the repression. Haitian democracy supporters are planning a demonstration in Port-au-Prince tomorrow to commemorate the anniversary of the 1991 coup against President Aristide, which they have done every September 30 since 1996. The interim government has outlawed all demonstrations until October 2. That decree “is as unconstitutional in Haiti as it would be in the US and most other countries,” said Concannon.

Demonstrations and other Haiti solidarity events will be held in 38 cities in 14 countries on or around September 30.

September 27, 2005

Bush’s Twin Masters

George W. Bush’s two masters – the neoconservatives and the right-wing Christians – were the guiding force behind his decision to invade Iraq, change its regime, and control it permanently.

The neocons’ blueprint for Bush’s war can be found in a 1992 draft of the Pentagon Defense Planning Guidance on Post-Cold War Strategy, prepared by Paul Wolfowitz. It said, “Our overall objective is to remain the predominant outside power in [the Middle East and Southwest Asia to] preserve U.S. and Western access to the region’s oil.”

The US had played a pivotal role in the Middle East for 50 years. One year before the Shah was toppled, I visited Iran as an international observer on behalf of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers. Tehran sported a US corporation on nearly every corner, but the people were mired in poverty. In 1953, the CIA had overthrown the democratically-elected secular prime minister, Mohammed Mossadeq, whose government had nationalized the British oil company. The US installed the Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlevi, ushering in a 25-year reign of terror.

Iran became the largest customer for United States arms. US-based oil companies replaced the British. When Iranians began to rise up against the Shah, the US told the Shah it supported him “without reservation” and encouraged him to use force to maintain his power, even trying to engineer a military coup to save him. In 1979, a broad-based united front consisting of nationalists as well as militant Muslims coalesced around the Ayatollah Khomeini, overthrew the Shah, and inaugurated a theocracy of religious fascism.{mosgoogle right}

Because of Washington’s longstanding support for the Shah, Khomeini’s government became a model for fundamentalist anti-US Islamic regimes. The United States was eager to counter the now anti-American Iranian government and prevent it from controlling the Persian Gulf, the largest oil source in the world.

To keep both Iran and Iraq from controlling the Gulf, the US quietly encouraged Iraq to invade Iran in 1980, with the promise of financing from Saudi Arabia. The US removed Iraq from its list of terrorist nations, and allowed the transfer of arms to Iraq, while simultaneously permitting Israel to arm Iran.

The United States supplied Saddam Hussein with chemical and biological weapons. Even after Iraq used its chemical weapons in the early 1980s, the US restored diplomatic relations with Iraq. Still playing both ends against the middle, the US itself supplied arms covertly to Iran in 1985.

Thinking the United States was still his ally, Saddam let April Glaspie, the career Foreign Service officer who headed the US mission in Iraq, know that he was about to invade Kuwait in 1991. Glaspie responded with a green light, and Saddam invaded. But the US, not wanting Iraq to dominate the western shore of the Persian Gulf, reacted by re-invading Kuwait. The United States didn’t really wish to destroy Iraq; it still wanted Iraq as a counterweight to Iran. But the US underestimated Saddam’s ability to maintain his position of control over the Kurds and the Shiites – both politically and through the use of terror. The survival of Saddam represented a severe limitation on American political power.

Employing the same strategy it later used in Operation Iraqi Freedom, the United States attacked the infrastructure of Iraq in 1991 during Operation Desert Storm, which led to hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths from disease caused by unclean water. During Operation Desert Fox in 1998, the US bombed Iraq after Saddam refused to let UN inspectors into Iraq, on the grounds they were spying for the CIA. It turns out they were indeed CIA spies, according to the Washington Post.

By mid-2000, the United States had dropped 88,000 tons of bombs over Iraq, killing many civilians. Between 4,000 and 5,000 children per month died in Iraq as a result of prior US bombing and sanctions.

After the September 11 attacks, the Bush administration mounted a concerted campaign to prepare the American people for war on Iraq. Although unable to find any weapons of mass destruction or evidence linking Iraq to 9/11, Bush never wavered in his march toward war.

Bush’s Iraq war is consistent with his new military strategy of “pre-emptive” war set forth in The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, September 2002, and the Project for the New American Century’s September 2000 document.

But there was no danger to pre-empt in Iraq, which had not invaded any country for 12 years. Iraq’s military, severely weakened by the Gulf War, years of sanctions and intrusive inspections, never posed a threat to the US or other countries in the region.

A quarter of a million US and UK troops launched numerous 2,000-pound bombs on Baghdad in rapid succession. More than 100,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed and tens of thousands have been wounded. Nearly 2,000 American soldiers have died and thousands more have been wounded.

No weapons of mass destruction have been found and the Iraq/al-Qaeda link has been discredited. Indeed, Wolfowitz admitted in Vanity Fair that the weapons of mass destruction rationale was a “bureaucratic” excuse for war, upon which “everyone” could agree. In light of the failure to find any WMDs, Wolfowitz revealed a new rationale for Operation Iraqi Freedom: using Iraq to redraw the Middle East in order to reduce the terrorist threat to the United States.

Two years before Operation Iraqi Freedom, the Bush administration’s plan to take military control of the Gulf region regardless of whether Saddam was in power was detailed in the Report of The Project for the New American Century. It says: “While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.”

Indeed, former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill has confirmed that toppling Saddam was on George W. Bush’s agenda long before 9/11.

According to O’Neill, in January 2001, Rumsfeld articulated the desire to “dissuade” other countries from “asymmetrical challenges” to United States power, a characterization strikingly similar to that in Wolfowitz’s 1992 Pentagon paper. Rumsfeld’s advocacy of a pre-emptive attack “matched with plans for how the world’s second largest oil reserve might be divided among the world’s contractors made for an irresistible combination,” O’Neill later said.

Five months later, Vice President Dick Cheney’s secret energy task force, in a May 2001 report, called on the White House to make “energy security a priority of US trade and foreign policy” and to encourage Persian Gulf countries to welcome foreign investment in their energy sectors.

When US-UK forces took control of Iraq, their first order of business was to secure the oil fields instead of the hospitals. Meanwhile, Halliburton’s Kellogg Brown & Root was awarded a controversial $7 billion no-bid contract to rebuild Iraq’s oil fields.

In July 2003, the public interest group Judicial Watch finally secured some of the documents from Cheney’s energy task force meetings. They contain the smoking gun: “a map of Iraqi oilfields, pipelines, refineries and terminals, as well as 2 charts detailing Iraqi oil and gas projects” and “Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts.” The documents are dated March 2001, two years before Bush invaded Iraq.

Bush’s twin masters are the neocons and the right-wing Christians.

The United States’ uncritical support for Israel, and the installation of a US- and Israel-friendly regime in Iraq, is not motivated by love for the Jewish people. Rather, this support is critical to the right-wing Christian agenda. In order to fulfill the Scripture’s promise, the right-wing Christians want to transfer the temple mount in Jerusalem from Muslim to Jewish hands, to facilitate the rebuilding of the temple so Jesus can return.

US assistance to Israel maintains that country as an America-friendly presence in the midst of countries that are exploited by and resent the policies of both the United States and Israel. Instead of fighting terror – as Bush likes to proclaim – his war on Iraq has drawn foreign terrorists into Iraq to fight against the Western infidels.

Its success in removing Saddam’s regime made way for the United States to construct 14 US military bases in Iraq. All of these bases are instrumental to Washington’s strategy to maintain hegemony in the Middle East. Kellogg Brown & Root, which built the infamous tiger cages in Vietnam and Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo, got the no-bid contract for reconstruction in Iraq, and in New Orleans as well.

Our government’s atrocious neglect of the poor and marginalized people of the Gulf Coast before and after Hurricane Katrina has come into full focus. And Bush’s opposition to the Kyoto Protocol – which would require US corporations to sacrifice some of their profits to combat global warming – has come home to roost in Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas. Nearly half the National Guard and many high-water vehicles were in Iraq when they should’ve been in New Orleans.

The Bush administration has spent more than $200 billion on an illegal and unjustified war of conquest in Iraq and continues to send $3 billion of aid per year to Israel to fund its brutal military occupation of the Palestinian people. It is time for the US to get out of the business of funding killing and occupation, and into the business of funding healthcare, jobs, education and housing.

September 19, 2005

No on Roberts

The Senate Judiciary Committee hearings have ended and the jig is up. Although Roberts characterized his judicial role as merely an “umpire,” he consistently played hide the ball about his views during the questioning. Nevertheless, Roberts’ disingenuousness came through in spite of his evasions. And the senators have enough information about Roberts’ record to know he would move the Court dramatically to the right, eviscerating the hard-earned gains of the civil rights movement.

In a well-orchestrated performance, Roberts refused to divulge his real opinions about abortion, end of life decisions, the constitutionality of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1968 Fair Housing Act, and the power of Congress to pass statutes that protect people or legislation to stop a war.

Roberts painted his refusals to answer as necessary to maintain judicial ethics, repeatedly responding that these issues might come before the high court.

Roberts’ ethical veneer cracked, however, when Russ Feingold (D-Wis) challenged him about a very recent conflict of interest Roberts displayed with his decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. At the same time Bush & Co. was interviewing Roberts for the Supreme Court, he voted to give Bush unfettered power to use military commissions that violate due process to try suspected terrorists, and to deny them access to US courts to challenge violations of the Geneva Conventions.

Roberts demonstrated an encyclopedic – indeed, photographic – memory for the details of every case the Supreme Court had decided and every memo he had ever written. But when Feingold asked Roberts about the dates of his interviews for the Court, and whether they overlapped with the dates of his decision in Hamdan, suddenly Roberts stuttered, stammered and couldn’t remember.

Roberts also misled the senators in his statements about how he would measure laws that discriminate on the basis of gender. The Supreme Court has held that the Equal Protection Clause requires that racial classifications must be judged with strict scrutiny, gender classifications should be examined with intermediate scrutiny, and classifications based on factors other than race or gender will be upheld if there is a reasonable basis to support them. Some heightened level of scrutiny is necessary only if the classifications discriminate based on race or gender.

Roberts told the committee that he had always supported a heightened level of scrutiny for gender classifications. But in a draft article he wrote in the early 1980s when working for Attorney General William French Smith, Roberts decried any heightened scrutiny for classifications that discriminate on the basis of gender. Roberts lied about his record on sex discrimination.

When challenged about his prior statement that there is a “so-called ‘right to privacy'” in the Constitution, Roberts declared that privacy is indeed protected by the Constitution. He cited the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of religion and prohibition on establishment of a religion, and the Third Amendment’s prohibition on quartering soldiers in private homes. Roberts also said that liberty is protected in the Constitution, and he agreed with Griswold v. Connecticut, which struck down a state statute that prohibited the sale of contraception. But Roberts stopped short of admitting that liberty encompasses a woman’s right to abortion. We are left with the statement in Roberts’ brief that Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided and should be overruled.

The Democratic senators on the committee were concerned about whether Roberts would overturn Congressional statutes that protect minorities, women, gays, the poor, the disabled, and the environment. Roberts deflected Illinois Senator Richard Durbin’s question about whether Justice Roberts would protect the little guy by saying: “If the Constitution says that the little guy should win, the little guy’s going to win in court before me. But if the Constitution says that the big guy should win, well, then, the big guy is going to win, because my obligation is to the Constitution.”

What Roberts continually hid from the senators, however, was an explanation of how he interprets the Constitution, which does not contain the words “the little guy” or “the big guy.” While denying he is an “ideologue,” Roberts used his extraordinary intellect to dodge every question that would have uncovered his true ideological agenda.

But that agenda comes into focus when one examines his record as a lawyer in the Reagan and Bush I administrations, and as a corporate lawyer. Roberts argued repeatedly against the rights of the little guy.

On the final day of the hearings, Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga) testified against the Roberts confirmation. Lewis, one of the giants of the civil rights movement, was beaten, arrested and jailed more than 40 times for peaceful, nonviolent demonstrations against legalized segregation in the South.

Lewis said, “I fear that if Judge Roberts is confirmed to be Chief Justice of the United States, the Supreme Court would no longer hear the people’s cries for justice. I feel that the leadership of the court would promote politics over the protection of individual rights and liberties. If the federal courts had abandoned us in the civil rights movement, in the name of judicial restraint, we might still be struggling with the burden of legal segregation in America today.”

Governor Howard Dean has taken a strong stand against the confirmation of Roberts. “The consistent mark of Roberts’ career is a lack of commitment to making the Constitution’s promise of equal protection a reality for all Americans, particularly the most vulnerable in our society,” Dean wrote in an op-ed last week.

The Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee should follow Dean’s lead. They must vote against the confirmation of John Roberts for Chief Justice of the United States.

September 13, 2005

John Roberts: Umpire or Ideologue?

Judges are like umpires. Umpires don’t make the rules; they apply them …
I come before the committee with no agenda. I have no platform.
— John Roberts’ opening statement, Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing, September 12, 2005

The opening statements of the 18 senators who will first vote on John Roberts’ nomination for Chief Justice of the United States set the stage for the confirmation battle. The 10 Republicans and 8 Democrats previewed their expectations of the interrogation of Roberts, which begins today.

Whereas the Democrats favor widespread questioning to get to know the man who could shape the law of the land for the next generation, Republicans seek to limit the examination to only that necessary to achieve confirmation. Democrats are concerned about whether Roberts would strike down acts of Congress that protect civil rights and liberties, and whether he would give blind deference to executive power; Republicans are gunning for reversal of Roe v. Wade, and for destruction of the wall that separates church from state.

Roberts ended his opening statement by saying, “I look forward to your questions.” The way Roberts decides to answer – or not answer – questions probing his judicial philosophy will determine whether he would come to the Court as an impartial umpire, or a right-wing ideologue.

Republican senators on the committee repeatedly invoked “the Ginsburg precedent,” saying that during her confirmation hearing, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg refrained from answering questions about her judicial philosophy. But when asked a specific question about a constitutional right to privacy, Ginsburg answered:

There is a constitutional right to privacy composed of at least two distinguishable parts. One is the privacy expressed most vividly in the Fourth Amendment: The Government shall not break into my home or my office without a warrant, based on probable cause; the Government shall leave me alone. The other is the notion of personal autonomy. The Government shall not make my decisions for me. I shall make, as an individual, uncontrolled by my Government, basic decisions that affect my life’s course. Yes, I think that what has been placed under the label “privacy” is a constitutional right that has those two elements: the right to be let alone and the right to make basic decisions about one’s life’s course.

Ginsburg could not have more clearly stated that she believes the Constitution contains a right to privacy. But during his confirmation hearing for the Court of Appeals, John Roberts refused to say whether he thinks there is a constitutional right to privacy. If he refuses once again to answer this hot-button question, it is safe to assume he subscribes to his earlier characterization of the “so-called ‘right to privacy'” and the statement in the brief he co-authored in Rust v. Sullivan: “The Court’s conclusion in Roe that there is a fundamental right to an abortion … finds no support in the text, structure, or history of the Constitution.”

There are two striking differences between the Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Ginsburg and Roberts. First, when Bill Clinton tapped her for the high court, Ginsburg had a much more extensive record of public writings than Roberts. Second, hers was a consensus nomination. Clinton had cleared it with Senate Republican leaders in advance. Bush did not consult Democrats before nominating Roberts.

Most of Roberts’ public writings date back to his tenure in the Reagan administration. The White House refuses to supply the committee with memos he wrote while serving as principal deputy solicitor general in the Bush I administration. The memos would provide the senators with more current information about his views. Decrying the Bush administration’s refusal to grant access to Roberts’ full record, Edward Kennedy (D-Mass) said, “We can only wonder what they don’t want us to know.” Russ Feingold (D-Wis) added, “I also must say candidly, the refusal gives rise to a reasonable inference that the administration has something to hide here.”

Extremist right-wing organizations such as Operation Rescue and the Family Research Council, which have anti-abortion and anti-gay agendas, celebrate Roberts’ nomination. Yet conservative Republican senators such as John Kyl (R-Ariz) say that ideology should not play a role in Roberts’ confirmation: “It would be a tragic development if ideology became an increasingly important consideration in the future. To make ideology an issue in the confirmation process is to suggest that the legal process is and should be a political one.”

Other Republicans are more forthcoming. For Lindsey Graham (R-SC), “the central issue before the Senate is whether or not the Senate will allow President Bush to fulfill his campaign promise to appoint a well-qualified, strict constructionist to the Supreme Court and, in this case, to appoint a chief justice to the Supreme Court in the mold of Justice Rehnquist.”

“This is a confirmation proceeding, however, not a coronation,” observed Feingold. Speaking of memos Roberts wrote during the Reagan administration, Feingold said, “In memo after memo, his writings were highly ideological and sometimes dismissive of the views of others.” This does not bode well for a chief justice who must consider the opinions of his colleagues and attempt to achieve consensus on the Court.

Several Democratic senators were concerned about Roberts’ evident willingness to strike down Congressional statutes. “When we discuss the Constitution’s commerce clause or spending power,” said Patrick Leahy (D-Vt), “we’re asking about congressional authority to pass laws to ensure clean air and water and children’s and seniors’ health, and safe, good drugs, safe workplaces, even wetland protection, levees that should protect our communities from natural disasters.”

Republicans frequently decry what they call “activist judges.” Richard Durbin (D-Ill) spoke about Frank Johnson, a federal district judge from Alabama and a life-long Republican. “Fifty years ago,” said Durbin, “following the arrest of Rosa Parks, Judge Johnson ruled that African-Americans of Montgomery, Alabama, were acting within their constitutional rights when they organized a boycott of the buses and that Martin Luther King Jr. and others could march from Selma to Montgomery.”

The Ku Klux Klan branded Johnson the most hated man in America; wooden crosses were burned on his lawn. “Judge Frank Johnson,” Durbin noted, “was denounced as a judicial activist and threatened with impeachment. He had the courage to expand freedom in America. Judge Roberts, I hope that you agree America must never return to those days of discrimination and limitations on our freedom.”

Durbin also warned of the dangers of government sponsorship of religion. He quoted Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s opinion in the recent Ten Commandments case: “At a time when we see around the world the violent consequences of the assumptions of religious authority by government, Americans may count themselves fortunate. Our regard for constitutional boundaries has protected us from similar travails while allowing private religious exercise to flourish. Those who would renegotiate the boundaries between church and state must answer a difficult question: Why would we trade a system that has served us so well for one that has served others so poorly?”

Diane Feinstein (D-Cal), the only woman on the committee, told Roberts, “It would be very difficult … for me to vote to confirm someone whom I knew would overturn Roe v. Wade, because I remember … what it was like when abortion was illegal in America … As a college student at Stanford, I watched the passing of the plate to collect money so a young woman could go to Tijuana for a back-alley abortion. I knew a woman who killed herself because she was pregnant.”

Several senators referred to Roberts’ stellar academic and professional qualifications. Yet, in the words of Russ Feingold: “We must evaluate not only his qualifications, but also his ability to keep an open mind, his sensitivity to the concerns of all Americans and their right to equal protection under the laws; not only his intellectual capacity, but his judgment and wisdom; not only his achievements, but his fairness and his courage to stand up to the other branches of government when they infringe on the rights and liberties of our citizens.”

Charles Schumer (D-NY) declared that the American people “need to know above all that, if you take the stewardship of the high court, you will not steer it so far out of the mainstream that it founders in the shallow waters of extremist ideology.”

Explaining why it is critical that Roberts fully answer questions about his judicial philosophy and legal ideology, Schumer said, “As far as your own views go, however, we only have scratched the surface. In a sense, we have seen maybe 10 percent of you – just the visible tip of the iceberg, not the 90 percent that is still submerged. And we all know that it is the ice beneath the surface that can sink the ship.”

Will John Roberts be forthcoming about his views on the issues of concern to Americans, such as civil rights, women’s rights, privacy, religious liberty, executive power, and environmental rights? Or will he play hide the ball and deprive us of critical information with which to judge the man who will judge the issues that affect us all?

Quoting Senator Paul Simon at the Ginsburg confirmation hearing, Durbin cautioned Roberts: “You face a much harsher judge than this committee. That’s the judgment of history. And that judgment is likely to revolve around one question: Did you restrict freedom or did you expand it?”

September 6, 2005

John Roberts: Uncompassionate Conservative

George W. Bush has nominated John Roberts to be Chief Justice of the United States. Bush lauded Roberts for his “goodwill and decency toward others.” Yet Roberts’ record reveals a callous disregard for the rights of people very much like the tens of thousands who have died and been rendered homeless by Katrina.

The outpouring of compassion by people all over this country – and indeed, the world – in the wake of Hurricane Katrina stands in stark contrast to Bush’s actions both before and after the tragedy. In spite of warnings about the weak levees in New Orleans, Bush cut the Army Corps of Engineers’ budget for levee construction by 44 percent. By sending the National Guard to fight in his trumped-up war on Iraq, Bush deprived the people of New Orleans of critical assistance immediately after the hurricane struck. The day after what may be the worst disaster ever to hit the United States, Bush refused to interrupt his golf game to exercise badly needed leadership.

Most of the tragic images flashing across our television screens are of African Americans. They are suffering indescribable hardship as a result of an administration that failed to protect them from the predicted hurricane, and then failed to timely render aid that would have saved thousands of lives.

John Roberts’ career has established his credentials as an uncompassionate conservative. He has worked consistently to deny access to the courts to individuals who have suffered harm like those in New Orleans. He has long been an enemy of civil rights – for the poor, for minorities, for women, for the disabled, for workers, and for a clean and safe environment.

Roberts tried to cut back the federal law that allows people to sue the government when they have been deprived of their federal rights. When he worked at the Solicitor General’s office in the George Bush I administration, Roberts wrote an amicus brief in which he argued that the state of Virginia should not reimburse hospitals for Medicaid claims at reasonable rates. Roberts said the Medicaid Act did not create any enforceable rights. Roberts would likely deny relief to people in New Orleans who seek to recover medical costs from a government that failed to protect them.

Roberts viewed legislation to fortify the Fair Housing Act as “government intrusion.”

Roberts condemned a Supreme Court decision striking down a Texas law that allowed schools to deny admission to the children of undocumented workers.

Roberts fought for a narrow interpretation of the Voting Rights Act that would have made it much harder for minorities to get elected to public office. He mischaracterized the Act as requiring “a quota system for electoral politics.” Robert’s characterization of the Voting Rights Act borders on racism.

Roberts contended that Congress could pass a law to prevent all federal courts from ordering busing to achieve school desegregation, a position much more extreme than that adopted by the Reagan administration. Roberts would likely have agreed with his boss William Rehnquist, who argued to his boss Justice Robert Jackson that the racist Plessy v. Ferguson’s separate but equal doctrine should be maintained.

Roberts took the position that affirmative action programs are bound to fail because they require recruiting “inadequately prepared candidates,” another unfounded and racist stance.

Roberts has referred to the “so-called ‘right to privacy'” in the Constitution; he argued that Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided and should be overruled. Roberts’ position would consign poor women who could not afford to travel to a state that does allow abortion to coat hangers in back alleys. Roberts would likely vote to uphold state laws that made the sale of contraceptives illegal, which the Court struck down in Griswold v. Connecticut.

Roberts worked to keep women who have suffered gender discrimination out of court. He argued for a narrow interpretation of Title IX that would effectively eviscerate its protections altogether. Roberts wrote an amicus brief in which he argued that a student who was sexually molested by her high school teacher was not entitled to compensatory damages under Title IX. Fortunately, the Supreme Court held otherwise, saying that the girl would have “no remedy at all” if it had adopted Roberts’ position.

Roberts ridiculed the gender pay equity theory of equal pay for comparable work as a “radical redistributive concept.” He mocked female Republican members of Congress who supported comparable worth, writing, “Their slogan might as well be ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to her gender.'”

Roberts supported a dramatic weakening of the Education for All Handicapped Children Act. He maintained that a deaf student who got by in school by lip-reading and using a hearing aid was not entitled under the Act to receive the services of a sign-language interpreter in the classroom.

Roberts defended Toyota for firing a woman with carpal tunnel syndrome.

Roberts argued on behalf of the National Mining Association that West Virginia citizens could not prevent mining companies from extracting coal by blasting the tops off of mountains and depositing the debris in nearby valleys and streams.

Throughout his career, John Roberts has acted without “goodwill and decency toward others.” His positions have demonstrated a mean spirit that flies in the face of what we like to think America stands for. The 50-year-old Roberts would have the opportunity to shape the nation’s highest court for the next two or three decades. A Roberts Court would threaten the rights of all but the rich and powerful. It is time for the Democrats to utter the “f” word: Filibuster.

September 3, 2005

The Two Americas

Last September, a Category 5 hurricane battered the small island of Cuba with 160-mile-per-hour winds. More than 1.5 million Cubans were evacuated to higher ground ahead of the storm. Although the hurricane destroyed 20,000 houses, no one died.

What is Cuban President Fidel Castro’s secret? According to Dr. Nelson Valdes, a sociology professor at the University of New Mexico, and specialist in Latin America, “the whole civil defense is embedded in the community to begin with. People know ahead of time where they are to go.”

“Cuba’s leaders go on TV and take charge,” said Valdes. Contrast this with George W. Bush’s reaction to Hurricane Katrina. The day after Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, Bush was playing golf. He waited three days to make a TV appearance and five days before visiting the disaster site. In a scathing editorial on Thursday, the New York Times said, “nothing about the president’s demeanor yesterday – which seemed casual to the point of carelessness – suggested that he understood the depth of the current crisis.”

“Merely sticking people in a stadium is unthinkable” in Cuba, Valdes said. “Shelters all have medical personnel, from the neighborhood. They have family doctors in Cuba, who evacuate together with the neighborhood, and already know, for example, who needs insulin.”

They also evacuate animals and veterinarians, TV sets and refrigerators, “so that people aren’t reluctant to leave because people might steal their stuff,” Valdes observed.

After Hurricane Ivan, the United Nations International Secretariat for Disaster Reduction cited Cuba as a model for hurricane preparation. ISDR director Salvano Briceno said, “The Cuban way could easily be applied to other countries with similar economic conditions and even in countries with greater resources that do not manage to protect their population as well as Cuba does.”

Our federal and local governments had more than ample warning that hurricanes, which are growing in intensity thanks to global warming, could destroy New Orleans. Yet, instead of heeding those warnings, Bush set about to prevent states from controlling global warming, weaken FEMA, and cut the Army Corps of Engineers’ budget for levee construction in New Orleans by $71.2 million, a 44 percent reduction.

Bush sent nearly half our National Guard troops and high-water Humvees to fight in an unnecessary war in Iraq. Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Paris in New Orleans, noted a year ago, “It appears that the money has been moved in the president’s budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq.”

An Editor and Publisher article Wednesday said the Army Corps of Engineers “never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security – coming at the same time as federal tax cuts – was the reason for the strain,” which caused a slowdown of work on flood control and sinking levees.

“This storm was much greater than protection we were authorized to provide,” said Alfred C. Naomi, a senior project manager in the New Orleans district of the corps.

Unlike in Cuba, where homeland security means keeping the country secure from deadly natural disasters as well as foreign invasions, Bush has failed to keep our people safe. “On a fundamental level,” Paul Krugman wrote in yesterday’s New York Times, “our current leaders just aren’t serious about some of the essential functions of government. They like waging war, but they don’t like providing security, rescuing those in need or spending on prevention measures. And they never, ever ask for shared sacrifice.”

During the 2004 election campaign, vice presidential candidate John Edwards spoke of “the two Americas.” It seems unfathomable how people can shoot at rescue workers. Yet, after the beating of Rodney King aired on televisions across the country, poor, desperate, hungry people in Watts took over their neighborhoods, burning and looting. Their anger, which had seethed below the surface for so long, erupted. That’s what’s happening now in New Orleans. And we, mostly white, people of privilege, rarely catch a glimpse of this other America.

“I think a lot of it has to do with race and class,” said Rev. Calvin O. Butts III, pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem. “The people affected were largely poor people. Poor, black people.”

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin reached a breaking point Thursday night. “You mean to tell me that a place where you probably have thousands of people that have died and thousands more that are dying every day, that we can’t figure out a way to authorize the resources we need? Come on, man!”

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff had boasted earlier in the day that FEMA and other federal agencies have done a “magnificent job” under the circumstances.

But, said, Nagin, “They’re feeding the people a line of bull, and they are spinning and people are dying. Get off your asses and let’s do something!”

When asked about the looting, the mayor said that except for a few “knuckleheads,” it is the result of desperate people trying to find food and water to survive.

Nagin blamed the outbreak of violence and crime on drug addicts who have been cut off from their drug supplies, wandering the city, “looking to take the edge off their jones.”

When Hurricane Ivan hit Cuba, no curfew was imposed; yet, no looting or violence took place. Everyone was in the same boat.

Fidel Castro, who has compared his government’s preparations for Hurricane Ivan to the island’s long-standing preparations for an invasion by the United States, said, “We’ve been preparing for this for 45 years.”

On Thursday, Cuba’s National Assembly sent a message of solidarity to the victims of Hurricane Katrina. It says the Cuban people have followed closely the news of the hurricane damage in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, and the news has caused pain and sadness. The message notes that the hardest hit are African-Americans, Latino workers, and the poor, who still wait to be rescued and taken to secure places, and who have suffered the most fatalities and homelessness. The message concludes by saying that the entire world must feel this tragedy as its own.