People Before Profit blog

U.S. helps terrorists thrive in Miami

Fri, 27 Jan 2006 10:44:00 +0000

Commentary

Gerardo Hernández, one of the imprisoned anti-terrorist Cuban Five, sends a cartoon that he drew depicting a wall around the United States. Not everybody can get in. A sign says, “Anti-Cuba terrorists only.”

Anti-Cuba terrorist Luis Posada Carriles will probably find a home in Miami soon. Six months ago, immigration Judge William L. Abbott ordered Posada’s deportation. He subsequently gave the U.S. government 90 days to find any country (with the exception of Cuba and Venezuela, which seeks Posada’s extradition) to take him in. The time is up on Jan. 24.

According to Jose Pertierra, Venezuela’s U.S.-based attorney, the law says that if Posada has no place to go, he gains parole. Pertierra commented, “If Posada Carriles hits the streets, mendacity will have triumphed as it did when the world was told that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.”

Demonstrations protesting against U.S. sanctuary for Posada are scheduled to take place in Miami soon, according to Cuba solidarity activist Andres Gomez.

Posada and Orlando Bosch, a parolee living in Miami for 17 years, are admitted terrorists. They stand accused of bombing a Cuban airliner in 1976, killing 73 people. For the Bush administration, however, Posada is merely an undocumented immigrant, not a murderer. Conveniently, the immigration court handling his case lacks authority to grant extradition requests.

Backed up by three treaties with the U.S., Venezuela has twice requested Posada’s extradition. After months of stonewalling by Washington, on Jan. 18 Venezuelan Ambassador Bernardo Alvarez called upon “the American people to demand that the U.S. government abide by its international obligations.”

The U.S. government’s coddling of anti-Cuba terrorists is nothing new. Now that Hugo Chávez is president of Venezuela, however, it would appear that anti-Venezuela terrorists are welcome in the U.S., too. Perhaps the wording on Gerardo Hernández’s sign needs some modification.

On Dec. 2, a Venezuelan judge in Caracas convicted three men for the 2004 murder of state prosecutor Danilo Anderson, who had been leading the investigation of the attempted coup against Chávez in 2002. Court documents implicated five others in Anderson’s murder. Of these, two were killed in a gunfight with Venezuelan police. But two others — Johan Pena and Pedro Lander, former Miami police officers — fled home to Florida.

Witnesses placed Pena near the crime scene, and Lander allegedly made the bomb used in the attack. The U.S. has refused to turn them over the Venezuelan authorities.

Pena, incidentally, aired his anti-Chávez views over Miami’s Channel 41 five months ago.

There is yet another Miami angle. The chief witness in the Anderson case, Giovanni José Vásquez, claims that former Miami FBI head Héctor Pesquera attended a September 2003 meeting in Panama at which the killing of the Venezuelan official was planned. Also on hand were a “CIA agent with the surname Morrison,” he said, and Luis García of Miami’s Comandos F-4, an anti-Cuba paramilitary group.

This is the same Pesquera who, in 1998, led the pretrial FBI investigation of Gerardo Hernández and his four compañeros, now known as the Cuban Five.

It all adds up to a tangled web of right-wing, anticommunist intrigue. When will these schemers be brought to trial?

No pension? No health care? No retirement?

Fri, 27 Jan 2006 10:29:00 +0000

For everybody who isn’t asleep, it’s obvious that American employers intend to destroy all hope of “golden years” retirement. They intend to work us until we die. The latest nail being driven into our collective coffin is the announcements by IBM and Verizon that they will “freeze” employee pension plans and substitute 401(k) programs. Current employees are to accrue no more benefits, future employees will get none, and everybody who already has a pension is likely having trouble sleeping at night.

Retirement packages that were considered rock-solid secure are now decimated by bankruptcy courts and vicious employers. Even protection from the mighty Auto Workers union, which pioneered fixed-benefit pensions just after World War II, can no longer be counted on. The UAW just agreed, for the first time in its history, to concessions for current retirees along with future retirees.

“Guaranteed” health care “rights” for pensioners are even more unstable. At least the pension plans are partially underwritten by the federal Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC). Health care “rights” are not underwritten at all. Companies unburdened by union contracts can terminate health care for their retirees just about whenever they want to. Those with union contracts are implementing the same scare tactics that General Motors used on the UAW to pressure for concessions.

It seems crazy because it is.

American workers were producing plenty of wealth in the 1940s to finance pension plans and health care for retirees. Any glance at productivity figures will show that they are producing much more now. Productivity has run far ahead of the increase in the workforce. There’s more than enough wealth to go around.

In fact, anybody who stops and thinks for a minute will realize that it has been possible for some time to lighten our workload by shortening the working week. European workers have shorter hours and longer vacations, while working hours continue to grow in the U.S. The wealth is being produced, and yet, employers tell us that there isn’t enough.

How did we get into this mess?

There is a big black hole in American history. We never look at the period 1946-1956. If we look at it at all, it’s through rose-colored glasses that lie and say that American workers made great gains.

In truth, we American workers lost our butts in that period. We began 1946 with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) kicking employers’ butts in every workplace. The CIO stood against racism and anticommunism and for unity. It stood for international cooperation. It also stood for national health care and continuing improvements in Social Security. It’s those last two that I’m focusing on right now.

Beginning in 1947, with the Cold War assault on the unions and passage of the Taft-Hartley Act, many CIO leaders joined the cold warriors by driving out every progressive member they could reach. They ran away from international solidarity. They expelled a large number of unions, then formed dual unions and took over their contracts. Eleven of America’s most progressive CIO unions were destroyed. By the time the CIO rejoined the reactionary old AF of L, in 1956, it was hard to tell the difference between the two.

In the late 1940s, when the Auto Workers negotiated employer pension plans and employer health care for their members, they turned their backs on the rest of the working class. They tied themselves, instead, to the fortunes of “their” employers. Other unions, after they had kicked out every progressive member, did the same.

By 1983, the situation had become completely ridiculous. Unions were forming “joint” committees in every workplace, and union membership, for many, began to mean support for the bosses. Even now, when employers are shafting their employees openly every day, some unions continue to join their bosses in television ad campaigns!

It’s important to note that, between 1947 and 1956, American unions had given up national health care and enhanced Social Security in favor of employer-provided benefits exclusively for union members. Nonunion workers were left to the mercy of the bosses. Declining union membership, after a peak in 1957, guaranteed that union workers would eventually be almost as helpless. Workers cannot win when we are divided.

That’s what happened.

Jim Lane (flittle7@yahoo.com) is a labor activist in North Texas.

In remembrance: Women who died from illegal and unsafe abortions

Fri, 27 Jan 2006 10:27:00 +0000

Jan. 23 was the 33rd anniversary of the Supreme Court Roe v. Wade decision, which “recognized and guaranteed women’s constitutional right to control their own bodies,” as Kim Gandy, president of the National Organization for Women, put it. We invite our readers to reflect on what’s at stake in the current battle to preserve that right.

The seven women below are just a small representation of the countless women who have died because they did not have access to safe and legal abortions. Most of these women died before Roe v. Wade offered them a safe alternative. However, women continue to die and suffer injury due to current restrictions that particularly affect young women and poor women. Our government is now controlled by conservative leaders who are extremely hostile to women’s reproductive rights. If more restrictions on abortion are enacted, and especially if Roe v. Wade is overturned, this list of lives cut short could grow to include our daughters, sisters, mothers, best friends, wives, partners, granddaughters and other special women and girls.

Clara Bell Duvall Dec. 23, 1896 – March 27, 1929 Clara Duvall, her husband and five children (ages 6 months to 12 years) were living in Pittsburgh, Pa., with her parents due to limited financial resources when she learned she was pregnant again. Clara attempted a self-abortion with a knitting needle. Her doctor, knowing she was seriously ill and in severe pain, delayed sending her to a hospital for several weeks. The Catholic hospital where she died chose to list the cause of death as “pneumonia.”

Ruth Irene Friedl Aug. 24, 1901 – Aug. 21, 1929 Denied a legal abortion though her pregnancy was diagnosed as life-threatening, Ruth Friedl attempted to self-abort by drinking a plant poison, ergot apiol. That night at the dinner table of their home in Denver, Colo., with her husband and two small children present, she collapsed and died.

Pauline Roberson Shirley June 22, 1910 – Aug. 22, 1940 Pauline Shirley and her six children were living with her mother in Arizona while her husband sought work in California. After an illegal abortion, she began to hemorrhage and was hospitalized. She needed massive transfusions. While Pauline’s mother searched the community for donors, Pauline bled to death.

Vivian Campbell Dec. 12, 1925 – May 6, 1950 Vivian Campbell was the mother of two children ages 5 and 3. She was newly separated from her husband when she realized she was pregnant. Sending her children to stay with her parents, she sought and obtained an illegal abortion. She sent for her husband, but by the time he arrived at the hospital it was too late. She died in agony of peritonitis.

Geraldine Santoro Aug. 16, 1935 - June 8, 1964 The photo of Geraldine Santoro dead on a hotel room floor has become a symbol for the horror of illegal abortion. Gerri, as she was known, lived on her family farm in Coventry, Conn., with her two daughters. At the age of 28, separated from her abusive husband, she became pregnant by another man, Clyde Dixon. Afraid that her husband would kill her if he found out, she and Dixon looked for ways to terminate her pregnancy. With no other options, they attempted to perform the procedure themselves. When the operation went awry, Dixon fled, leaving Santoro behind where she bled to death. A chambermaid found her body the next morning.

Rosie Jimenez 1950 – Oct. 3, 1977 A single mother with a 5-year-old daughter, Rosie Jimenez of McAllen, Texas, was a scholarship student six months away from her teaching credential. She was the first known victim of the Hyde Amendment, which cut off Medicaid funding for abortion to women on public assistance — women who by the government’s own definition cannot afford health care. Too poor to pay for the procedure at a private clinic, she died in agony from a botched illegal abortion.

Becky Bell Aug. 24, 1971 – Sept. 16, 1988 At 17, Becky became a victim of an Indiana state law requiring parental consent for a minor to obtain an abortion. Unable to bring herself to disappoint her parents by telling them she was pregnant — or go before a judge to bypass the law — Becky sought an illegal abortion. When she became seriously ill, her parents rushed her to the hospital. In severe pain from a massive infection, Becky still could not tell them, and despite the efforts of the doctors, she died.

This remembrance is reprinted from the National Organization for Women web site, www.now.org.

To take back Congress, take a page from Karl Rove

Fri, 27 Jan 2006 10:24:00 +0000

It’s all too coincidental. The former vice president of the United States of America draws considerable media coverage when he charges the current president is a threat to the republic and calls for a special, independent investigator to probe spying and other possible crimes against the American people.

Four days later headlines blare that Osama bin Laden has surfaced again. After a year and a half of absence from the public eye, what is purported to be his voice mentions falling public opinion polls for Bush, cites Rep. Murtha’s call to end the occupation as a reason the president is weakened, and throws in mention of a “truce.” Simultaneously, a new terrorist attack strikes Israel — quickly blamed on Syria and Iran, two of the Bush administration’s current foes. The fear coursing through the U.S. public’s mind quickens.

The next day, Karl Rove, that king of political slime and current object of a criminal investigation, comes out with the GOP “road map” to victory for the 2006 congressional elections.

In a speech before the Republican National Committee, Rove projects the same strategy that brought them victory in 2004: attack the Democrats on terrorism and national security. The return of the fear factor.

“The United States faces a ruthless enemy, and we need a commander in chief and a Congress who understand the nature of the threat and the gravity of the moment America finds itself in,” Rove said. “President Bush and the Republican Party do. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for many Democrats.”

Well, for all who have an interest in booting out the Bushites from their control of Congress, it’s time to take a page from Rove’s playbook: the best defense is a good offense.

• The terrorism fear factor is their strong suit. So let’s take it on. Republican policies have created an endless cycle of violence. No one is safe from it. Terrorist attacks have increased around the world since Bush declared his “war on terror” and invaded Iraq without cause.

To end terrorism as we know it requires international cooperation to isolate those forces. But how secure can the U.S. be when an endless cycle of violence threatens to engulf the world, especially with the renewed war threats against Iran?

Despite billions of taxpayer dollars, there is no homeland security. Major cities have no evacuation plans for emergencies, as Hurricane Katrina plainly showed. Thousands of U.S. soldiers are dead and wounded for a lie, along with many more thousands Iraqis. Withdrawing the troops is not “cut and run.” It’s ending the cycle of violence.

• Stand up for the freedom to earn, learn and live. The Republican Congress has spent trillions propping up corporate, banking and private interests, increasing the Pentagon budget and ballooning the deficit. Poverty and joblessness have grown — and no wonder, with budget cuts to helpful government programs like Medicaid, student aid and Head Start in order to pay for trillions in tax breaks to the super-wealthy. Ordinary people suffer. More than 45 million go without health care, jobless rates soar in the African American community, public schools are under attack, and extremist religious interests assault science education. Immigrants, who come to the U.S. out of necessity, are scapegoated and targeted by racist groups. Pensions are stolen, worker health and safety slide back to 19th-century conditions and privatization of public resources, from Social Security to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, for private exploitation are all on the GOP agenda.

To stop this wholesale theft of centuries of progress and democratic rights, Congress has to stand up for the freedom to earn, learn and live. Put people to work rebuilding the Gulf Coast and the nation’s crumbling infrastructure, and reversing dangerous environmental degradation — not with the corruption of private interests, but with public works jobs. Massive job creation with livable wages will boost sagging economies across the country. The freedom to learn, earn and live means passing the Employee Free Choice Act, raising the minimum wage and addressing racism and inequality with real remedies. It also means keeping government out of people’s private lives — from who you love to when you chose to have children.

• Congress has to bring back law and order to the nation’s capital. Ultra-right Republican rule has created a culture of crime, corruption and incompetence. The Abramoff-connected corporate lobbyists on K Street are the current high profile case. But the criminal feeding frenzy dates back to the reign of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, whose “Contract on America” opened the Capitol Hill floodgates for corporations to come in and start writing laws and regulations.

• With the White House, Congress and possibly the Supreme Court under ultra-right Republican control, checks and balances have gone out the window and the president thinks he is above the law. Democrats have to take back Congress from Republican control to restore the checks and balances that our forefathers (and mothers) saw as the foundation of our government.

Probably some will cringe at the thought of using terms like “law and order.” Personally, given the organized crime bosses that wield government control today, I want a law and order Congress to prosecute the Republicans’ culture of crime, guarantee no one puts himself above the law, and restore the system of checks and balances. We need a Congress that fights for the rights of the people and the freedom to earn, learn and live.

Terrie Albano (talbano@pww.org) is editor of the People’s Weekly World.

Defeat anti-immigrant HR 4437

Fri, 27 Jan 2006 10:13:00 +0000

Last December, the House of Representatives passed anti-immigrant HR 4437, introduced by GOP Rep. James Sensenbrenner (Wis.).

• It would make all undocumented workers felons, as well as those who help or work with them including teachers, clergy, union leaders, social workers and family members.

• Employers would have to check the Social Security numbers of all their employees.

• An environmentally destructive wall would be built along the Mexican border.

• Local and state police would be deputized to arrest anyone they think may be without documents. This would vastly increase racial profiling and scare immigrants away from reporting crimes.

This is no solution! It is another way of diminishing the democratic rights of the people in our country.

HR 4437 must be defeated in the Senate. Just and workable immigration reform should be passed instead.

What are the reasons for immigration?

Increased immigration is the result of the declining living standards and job displacement caused by NAFTA and other pro-big-business policies pushed by our government. To provide a better future for their families, immigrants are pushed and pulled to come here, at great cost and risk, to live without papers and suffer great indignities. This puts immigrant workers in a vulnerable position and forces them into substandard wages and working conditions. Employers and others use the immigrants’ vulnerability as a lever to lower living standards and quality of life for all.

Don’t buy the big lie.

Immigrants are accused of causing every social problem, and especially of taking jobs and services they are not entitled to. This is not true.

Working people as a whole, including immigrants, pay a larger share of the tax burden than the rich and receive fewer benefits. The profits made from the work of immigrants and all workers are being taxed less and less and sometimes not at all.

Immigrants don’t fire or hire people. They do not outsource jobs, downsize workplaces, raise prices or premiums. They are victims of big business too. For more jobs and services, we need to tax exploitative profits!

We need positive immigration reform.

History shows that as long as extremes of inequality exist between countries, labor migration will continue. The pro-corporate policies of our government that impoverish other nations must be changed. Immigration law should protect the interests of both immigrant and non-immigrant workers.

Organized labor and community and religious groups urge the following constructive program for immigration reform:

• Legalization with a clear path to citizenship must be allowed for existing undocumented immigrants, and future immigrants, with a priority on family reunification.

• Immigrants must be able to participate in labor, religious, civic and cultural activities without fear of deportation.

• “Guest worker” programs have historically been prone to exploitation. Separate has never been equal. Instead, implement improved labor protections and stronger enforcement for immigrants and citizen workers.

Repressive policies like those proposed in HR 4437 must be rejected. They are unjust and counterproductive, and make immigrant workers more vulnerable to exploitation and other injustices.

Immigration policy is scheduled for debate in the Senate in February. Contact and urge your senators today to reject HR 4437 and all repressive anti-immigrant measures, and to vote for legalization of immigrants with a clear path to citizenship and full labor and civil rights for all people. Call the congressional switchboard: (202) 224-3121.

The Immigrant Rights Committee of the Communist Party USA can be reached at cpusa@cpusa.org.

The looting of Iraq

Fri, 27 Jan 2006 10:07:00 +0000

A just released audit reveals vast new allegations of fraud and incompetence in the channeling of millions of dollars intended for reconstruction of Iraq in 2003 and 2004.

As reported by The New York Times Jan. 25, the U.S. office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction has revealed “irregularities” in an area covering half the country, including “bricks” of shrink-wrapped $100 bills stashed casually in bathroom safes, filing cabinets and unlocked foot lockers and siphoned off for unknown purposes.

Some of the malfeasance proved deadly, as when an elevator crashed at a paid-for but unfinished rehabilitation project at a hospital in Hilla, killing three Iraqis.

Bad enough that some of the funds are our taxpayers’ money. But it is particularly shocking that most of the misused millions came from Iraqi oil proceeds and funds seized from the Saddam Hussein government — in other words, money belonging to the Iraqi people. Iraqis continue to suffer daily because, under the U.S. occupation, their infrastructure, including electricity, health care facilities, schools and transportation, remains in a shambles.

A Defense Department official, speaking anonymously, called contracting procedures “a disaster.”

Added to previous accounts of fraud, mismanagement and price gouging by U.S.-based transnational contracting firms supposedly engaged in reconstructing Iraq, like Halliburton and Bechtel, both with crony ties to the Bush administration, the new revelations paint a picture of wholesale looting of funds belonging to the Iraqi and American people.

Many of the findings are expected to raise big new questions about the actions of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq.

It will not be enough to identify and prosecute low-level perpetrators. Such scandals reveal how rotten the U.S. occupation of Iraq has been from the very beginning. No time should be lost in withdrawing all U.S. forces from Iraq, paying reparations to the Iraqi people — in the first place out of the profits of Halliburton and Bechtel — and bringing the highest echelons of the Bush administration to book for their crimes against humanity.

Take 10 to stop Alito

Fri, 27 Jan 2006 10:05:00 +0000

Block out 10 minutes. Call your senator. Tell her/him to reject Judge Samuel Alito. Then call your family, friends and co-workers and ask they do the same. It is a patriotic duty. It is urgent. It is effective.

There was ample evidence in the Senate hearings that Alito does not uphold the Constitution’s separation of powers, a core democratic concept designed to blunt dictatorship. Nevertheless, in a party line vote, the GOP-controlled Judiciary Committee voted to send the nomination to the full Senate for confirmation.

The hearings revealed Alito places the president above the law, creating a dictator. Key testimony demonstrated that Alito supports spying on Americans, sanction of torture, and detention of U.S. citizens without trial, charges or access to a lawyer. It is chilling.

If the Senate confirms Alito’s lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court, women face the real threat of a return to “barefoot and pregnant” and back-alley abortions. Women’s reproductive rights, rights to a job, rights on the job and rights in society at large are in peril.

More than a century of struggle to expand constitutional and democratic protections, marching toward ending racial discrimination and racist acts, will be set back.

With Alito’s pro-corporate thumb tipping the scales of justice, workplace safety can become a relic of a bygone era when corporations enjoyed unbridled power.

Efforts to restore clean water and clean air, maybe the most democratic of inalienable rights endowed by the creator, would be curtailed, hamstrung or halted.

The good news is, for the first time in 90 years, not one minority party committee member bowed to the administration. The Democrats on the committee were united in rejecting this extremist nomination.

Pressure on senators from the folks at home can still turn the tide. Media spin doesn’t vote. Voters do. This is an early vote in the 2006 elections, a vote to restore the rule of law in our country.

And if Alito is confirmed, it powerfully underscores the importance of ending Republican control of Congress on Election Day, Nov. 7.

DeLay proposes sending Abramoff to Pluto

Fri, 27 Jan 2006 09:42:00 +0000

As NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft waited on a launch pad at Cape Canaveral to embark on a nine-and-a-half year mission to Pluto, Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Texas) took to the floor of the House of Representative to propose sending former lobbyist Jack Abramoff on the first manned mission to that mysterious planet.

DeLay’s dramatic proposal surprised many in Congress, since the Texas lawmaker had never seemed so impassioned about the nation’s space program in the past.

But in a 45-minute speech to the House, DeLay made an emotional plea for $42.7 billion in funding that would make Abramoff the first disgraced lobbyist in space.

“If I could choose any American to put in a rocket ship and send into space for nine and a half years, that American would be Jack Abramoff,” DeLay told his colleagues.

The Texas congressman’s surprising proposal immediately drew widespread support in Congress, particularly among congressmen implicated in the ongoing lobbying corruption probe.

Rep. Bob Ney (R-Ohio), who stepped down as chairman of the House Administration Committee last week, said that he was seriously considering rescinding that decision, telling reporters, “If we wind up sending Abramoff to Pluto, that changes everything.”

But House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) took to the floor to oppose the plan, saying, “Taxpayers should not foot the bill to give Jack Abramaoff a roundtrip ticket to Pluto.”

DeLay, however, offered this response: “Who said it was a roundtrip ticket?”

Elsewhere, President George W. Bush said that he meant to invade Iran all along, blaming the error on SpellCheck.

Andy Borowitz writes a daily humor column at borowitzreport.com.

Bush official: Mine safety not my priority

Fri, 27 Jan 2006 07:57:00 +0000

news analysis

President Bush’s Mine Safety and Health chief David Dye shocked senators from both parties when he got up and left in the middle of a Jan. 23 Senate hearing on the West Virginia mining disaster. The message his action sent was clear: mine safety is not his priority. C-SPAN caught the scene for all Americans to see.

Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), who chaired the hearing, said of the Dye walkout, “I can’t recall it ever happening before. We’ll find a way to take appropriate note of it.”

In the first three weeks of this year, 15 coal miners in West Virginia and Kentucky died on the job. A Jan. 2 explosion killed 12 miners at the Sago Mine, owned by International Coal Group (ICG). The one surviving miner remains in a coma. A roof collapse Jan. 10 took the life of a Kentucky miner. On Jan. 19, a fire swept through Massey Energy’s Aracoma Alma No. 1 mine in Melville, W.Va. Two days later, rescue crews found the bodies of Ellery Hatfield, 47, and Don Bragg, 33. None of these mines is union.

Alma No. 1 used a ventilation and conveyor belt system that may have contributed to the spread of the fire. This system only became legal in 2004 when the Bush administration loosened up safety rules. Coal companies had been seeking that change for 15 years.

“We had major concerns about it,” said Davitt McAteer, who is heading West Virginia’s investigation of the Sago explosion. McAteer was an assistant secretary for mine safety and health in the Clinton administration. “If a fire could occur on a belt, that fire and the deadly gases the fire produces will be carried directly to the working face where the miners are.”

McAteer directly challenged Dye’s assertion that the technology to track miners underground is unproven. He cited success of pager-size tracking devices worn in mines in Australia. The cost of such equipment to track underground miners for Sago’s 145 miners would have been $100,000, he estimated. Miners at Sago produced $15.7 million in profit for ICG in the first three quarters of 2005, or over $100,000 each.

At the Jan. 23 meeting of the Senate Appropriations subcommittee on mine safety, Specter demanded to know if any of the 208 violations of federal safety regulations at the Sago mine was a “causative factor” in the disaster.

“We’re still investigating,” said Ray McKinney, MSHA’s administrator of coal mine safety and health, looking bored.

Did the budget cuts that eliminated 183 mine inspectors impact enforcement of the law, asked Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) “No, I don’t think so,” Dye replied before hitting the door.

Dye said he had to leave to investigate a mine fire in Colorado. But a search by this reporter revealed the last reported mine fire in that state occurred in October 2005.

Meanwhile, the both houses of the West Virginia Legislature acted unanimously to require coal operators to stockpile oxygen inside mines and to supply tracking devices. They voted to fine coal operators $100,000 if they do not contact emergency officials within 15 minutes of an incident.

Lidella Hrutkay, a delegate to the Legislature from Logan County, the site of the fire, said she sat with the Alma No. 1 families during their vigil at the Bright Star Free Will Baptist Church. Miners who escaped the fire told her that if they spoke to the media, Massey Energy would fire them. “I heard the same thing from many different people,” Hrutkay said.

The International Coal Group is working around the clock to keep miners and their families quiet, and to keep the United Mine Workers of America out. ICG circulated a petition to remove the UMWA as the families’ representative in the state and federal investigations. Under the 1969 federal Mine Health and Safety Act, nonunion miners can retain the UMWA to represent them during the investigation of a disaster and the union can provide rescue teams.

“It is astonishing that ICG would go to such lengths to impede the investigation into what happened at Sago,” said UMWA President Cecil Roberts, jaw set. “What are they afraid of?” The union, he continued is focused on finding the cause of the explosion at Sago “so that such an event never happens again — at Sago or at any other mine. That’s what the UMWA wants, and that’s what the American people want. We will not abandon the families of the miners who died there.”

In Chicago, cuts in AIDS funding increase misery

Sun, 22 Jan 2006 09:47:00 +0000

The cuts in AIDS funding are already being felt by local agencies. The Ryan White CARE Act was flat funded in the last budget. The word on the street is that they will be focusing on medically necessary programs like primary care and drugs but funding for other programs will be cut. They essentially have more people with AIDS and HIV to cover and they are living longer, so they will have to do more with less. Programs like housing, transportation, case management, nutrition, mental health, drug rehab, and alternative therapy like massage, acupuncture and chiropractic will be cut.

The program I work for, massaging low income clients with AIDS and HIV, used to be in a special category when it came to funding by HRSA which oversees the allocation of funds by the Ryan White CARE Act. We were recently told that our program is to be moved into an “other” category, which means we will be slated to be cut. We are currently raising the bar and asking foundations to come through with the money we need to operate. Our program provides massage, acupuncture, and chiropractic care to clients with AIDS and HIV at a number of sites. These therapies are needed to deal with the side effects of the drug cocktail our clients take to survive. Massage not only helps deal with stress but also with eliminating the toxins that accumulate in the muscles from all the drugs. Acupuncture deals with everything from arthritic conditions to digestive problems from the drugs. Chiropractic basically helps clients deal with pain without adding another painkiller to their regiment of drugs and keeps clients mobile. These three therapies often work in tandem to raise the quality of life for a client.

Another program that has been put in the “other” category by HRSA is mental health services. This is a particularly cruel category to cut because these mental health workers specialize in mental health issues from just the trauma of having AIDS to dealing with the mental side effects of taking the drugs, which can vary from hallucinations to depression. Now they expect clients with AIDS to wait even longer to get scarce mental health services that are available for the poor.

Housing subsides that were earmarked for people with AIDS will be cut and those people will be competing for the scarce resources of section 8 programs that are in place. Transportation has already been cut. The AIDS Foundation of Chicago used to provide fare cards to people to get around in the Chicago area. Now regular fare cards have been cut and only those with senior or disability cards, which are reduced fare cards, will be given passes. Case management is also being cut so those case managers who deal with signing up poor clients with AIDS will be cut. Small agencies like the one where I volunteer, Better Existence with HIV (BEHIV), which deals mostly with non medical services for people with AIDS and HIV, will be left to fend for themselves.

Where do we go from here as far as advocacy on the issue? The bottom line is that the very survival of people with AIDS and HIV in this country depends on Republicans losing seats in congress in 2006. On the local picture we need to pressure state and local governments to fund these programs. The issue of AIDS should gain center stage in the arguments for universal healthcare as well. The NY based group called ACT UP has on their web site how the drug company Abbott is overcharging for its AIDS drugs. It also has information about how here are 20,000 more people with AIDS and HIV that qualify for low-income assistance and many are not getting it. Low-income people with AIDS have a double burden and will be finding themselves destitute under the current administration.

A popular look at physics today

Fri, 20 Jan 2006 11:00:00 +0000

A Briefer History of Time By Stephen Hawking with Leonard Mlodinow Bantam, 2005 Hardcover, 176 pp., $25

If you aren’t a scientist but seek to understand the latest theories of physics, then this book is for you. In “A Briefer History of Time” Hawking clarifies, in a popular way, the theories of the Big Bang origin of the Universe, the special and general theories of relativity, quantum theory, black holes, and what physics has to say about time travel and string theory.

While in general the book is a very good read, in Chapter 3, Hawking goes somewhat astray. He tries to explain the nature of a scientific theory. Along with many other physicists unschooled in the class struggle, he cites Karl Popper and the “falsification” doctrine as the source of the proper definition of a scientific theory. This has present-day relevance in light of the “intelligent design” struggles. Hawking has good intentions in this area, but as they say, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. For example, at one point he cites Darwinian evolution favorably, but somehow winds up in the social-Darwinist camp.

Hawking discusses how classical relativity theory is only consistent with either an expanding or contracting universe. In the case of an expanding universe, time began, he says, with the “big bang.” In the other case, that of a contracting universe, time will end, he says, at the moment of the “big crunch,” at that moment the universe collapse into nothingness. For the Marxists, both possibilities must be ruled out: time is infinite and the universe cannot originate from nothing nor collapse into nothing.

In the last chapter, Hawking reviews the questions that humans have always asked about the nature of the universe and our place in it. He discusses how the discovery of the laws that govern the structure and behavior of this universe has led mankind to adopt the scientific view. Later, he reviews the quantum-mechanical evidence that led us to discount Laplacian determinism, which is viewed as an example of the philosophical trend known as “mechanistic materialism” in Marxist literature.

But Hawking holds out an interesting possibility. He envisages a unified theory in which gravity is combined with the uncertainty principle, and which “space and time together might form a finite, four-dimensional space without singularities or boundaries, like the surface of the earth only with more dimensions.” He takes off from this scenario to raise questions like, “How much freedom did God (sic) have in constructing the universe?”

It seems to this reviewer that Hawking is a closet atheist. He never comes openly out to say that God does not exist; instead, he raises questions that can have only one answer — and that is the answer of scientific materialism.

There have been dozens of efforts to popularize science in general, and physics in particular. Recently, a number of leading string theorists have written books on the subject. While more work needs to be done, Hawking’s book is a step in the right direction.

Nuts and bolts of exploitation

Fri, 20 Jan 2006 10:30:00 +0000

Inequality Matters: The Growing Economic Divide in America and Its Poisonous Consequences By James Lardner and David A. Smith, editors Published by Demos/The New Press, 2006 Hardcover, 328 pp., $25.95

A handful of American intellectuals actually understand the ins and outs of the great ripoffs of American economics and cultural values in the past 26 years. They have the numbers that expose the great shifts in income, taxation and accumulated wealth, as well as the ruling-class propaganda machine that abets the heist with camouflage. The editors of “Inequality Matters” gathered some of these best and brightest intellectuals to create essays on intertwining topics such as racism, income distribution, student aid, class mobility and declining democracy. The pieces fit to a large description of a nation of people being sucked dry by corporate vampires under cover of paid liars.

Among the essayists are well-known critics of America’s bloodthirsty right wing such as TV commentator Bill Moyers and popular author Barbara Ehrenreich, who exposes the lies of low-income life in her recent book, “Nickel and Dimed.”

The downside of this very informative collection is its lack of class analysis and its failure to provide meaningful direction to overcome the ills so dramatically exposed. Throughout the book, authors talk about the American “middle class” when they mean “middle income.” Although they understand the evils of rapacious corporations, they don’t seem to see any ruling class capitalists behind them. Even though they realize that the workers are being exploited, they blur all the lines that make our class capable of uniting and fighting back.

They recommend two web sites that are, indeed, very informative: www.inequality.org and www.demos.org. The Demos page says, “As part of its mission to build a fairer, more democratic America, Demos works to address long range challenges to the well-being of our society. This work illuminates the intersection of different issues and often cuts across departments in the organization.” In the “events” section of both sites, they recommend a series of forums and symposiums.

While there is no denying the values of information and education, Americans are going to have to do a little more if any actual change is going to come about. “Inequality Matters” is no handbook for much-needed action, but it is a valuable source of information.

Waging war on Haitis poor

Fri, 20 Jan 2006 10:18:00 +0000

Canada in Haiti: Waging War on the Poor Majority By Yves Engler and Anthony Fenton Fernwood Publishing, 2005 Softcover, 256 pp., $12.95

While Canadian involvement in Afghanistan makes headlines, less well known is its role in Haiti. Last year, the Liberal government of Prime Minister Paul Martin announced that it will be playing a major role in rebuilding Haiti. In “Canada in Haiti: Waging War on the Poor Majority,” Yves Engler and Anthony Fenton expose Canadian government involvement in the overthrow of an elected government and supporting a repressive dictatorship in Haiti.

Like the U.S., the Canadian government disliked former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who worked to improve the lives of the country’s poor. He built new schools and health clinics and doubled the minimum wage. Aristide dismantled Haiti’s caste system, which marginalized the poor, as well as dismantling the hated military. He also refused to privatize state-owned industries, which the U.S. demanded of him.

After the U.S.-backed opposition failed to defeat Aristide’s Fanmi Lavalas party in the 2000 elections, the U.S. pressured the World Bank to sever promised loans to the impoverished Caribbean island. The only help that Haiti could depend on were from foreign-funded nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).

However, some of these NGOs, funded by the U.S. government’s National Endowment for Democracy, were busy organizing opposition to the Aristide government. In fact, the authors point out, “Many, if not most members of the interim government worked at one time for one of the alphabet soup groups receiving U.S. government funding.” The Canadian Liberal government joined the struggle to oust Aristide, giving grants to NGOs that were hostile to the Aristide government.

Beginning in 2003, Canada went so far as convening a series of meeting in Ottawa with French and U.S. officials to discuss Aristide’s removal and an international trusteeship over Haiti. Denis Paradis, Canada’s secretary of state for Latin America and La Francophonie, leaked the first such meeting to journalist Michel Vastel. Engler and Fenton state that Ottawa used testimony from Canadian funded NGOs to justify the U.S. overthrow of Aristide.

When former members of Haiti’s disbanded army invaded Haiti from the Dominican Republic, the United Nations and Canada ignored requests from Aristide for military assistance to protect his government. After U.S. troops seized Aristide on Feb 29, 2004, and flew him into exile, Canada sent troops to Haiti to help secure the country and bolster the U.S.-installed interim government.

Engler and Fenton argue that far from supporting economic and social development and strengthening democracy in Haiti, Canada has contributed to the country’s descent into violence and chaos. Citing various human rights reports, the authors write that the human rights situation has become catastrophic on the island: the justice system has collapsed, prisons are full of political prisoners and the Haitian National Police (HNP) commit regular massacres in poor neighborhoods.

The Canadian government is supporting this state of affairs, playing a key role in the Haitian Ministry of Justice.

Furthermore, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police are leading the UN police mission in charge of training and overseeing the murderous HNP. Engler and Fenton are also critical of Canadian media coverage of Haiti, mentioning several examples of police massacres and human rights reports that were mentioned by the international press but ignored or downplayed by the Canadian media.

“Canada in Haiti: Waging War on the Poor Majority” is a well-written and well-researched primer on Canadian as well as U.S. involvement in Haiti.

Health Care is a Right strong and simple

Fri, 20 Jan 2006 09:48:00 +0000

On Election Day 2005, Seattle’s voters resoundingly approved an advisory measure for an American right to health care, Ballot Measure 1. The vote was 69 percent yes to 31 percent no. It capped a two-year effort by volunteer activists from two small community organizations in Seattle: the Puget Sound Alliance for Retired Americans (PSARA) and Health Care For All-Washington (HCFA-WA).

We were delighted with the outcome. Some on our side were afraid we might lose. When we got a super-majority, everybody just said, “Awesome!”

Two years earlier, PSARA’s president Will Parry and I were talking one day about what the group’s health care committee, which I chair, might be able to accomplish.

I said I would like to mount a petition campaign asking our City Council to place an item on the city ballot that would give voters the chance to say that “health care is a right.” I told Will that I believed the main element lacking in the health care reform movement was the participation of everyday people. He agreed. We both thought there were lots of great experts advocating for a single-payer insurance system, and good bills being offered in Congress, but little involvement of ordinary people to support these high-level efforts.

A petition for “health care is a right” could bring in lots of people based on something they could easily understand and support. I wanted to avoid asking people to agree with complicated health insurance systems. Once a majority of people in America agree that “health care is a right,” and express it firmly to Congress, the experts’ job will be much easier. Then, we can come up with a thoughtful way of making health care a human right that corresponds to our political reality and our traditions here in the U.S.

A week later, Will phoned and said, “Brian, I think you’re onto something. Let’s run with it and see where it takes us.”

Will Parry is the respected 85-year-old president of PSARA. He is about as experienced a community leader as one is apt to find anywhere. He enjoys extensive ties to labor, religious and community organizations in Seattle. He is not the kind of fellow you want to embrace with empty talk about organizing mass movements.

“Okay, Will,” I said with as much confidence as I could muster, “I’ll be down to the office tomorrow and we can write the language for the petition.”

We knew that the wording we would be asking people to sign on to would determine everything for us. Illinois Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr. has called for a new Bill of Rights for Americans, including a right to equal high-quality health care. Starting with his language, we wrote the petition wording: “Every person in the United States should have the right to health care of equal high quality. The Congress should immediately enact legislation to implement this right.”

We took the petition to a great variety of public places, including food stores, farmer’s markets, street festivals, Seattle’s Gay Pride parade, political demonstrations and events. The two main supporting organizations sent out copies through their newsletters. We received many completed petitions from folks we mailed to, after they had passed them among family members and in their neighborhoods. Over the two years, we collected 11,500 signatures.

When someone was approached and asked to sign our petition, usually she would take the board and begin to read the wording. Almost invariably, when she came to the word “right,” she would nod her head, take the pen and sign. People responded to the words “right to health care” like it was something they knew in their hearts was good. Often, their eyes would actually light up. “I agree with that,” they would often say. People smiled while they signed, and thanked us for our good work. It was fun.

This is counter to what is portrayed in the media and by many of our national leaders: everybody is supposed to be crazy for free enterprise in America today. But if congressional action is needed to make sure that everybody has a right to quality health care, what does that say about the insurance industry? Maybe it’s not working to the benefit of the great majority of Americans. Maybe we need to use the federal government to fix this problem regardless of what the big insurance companies say. I think that is what 69 percent of Seattle’s voters meant when they voted to send a message to the other Washington for a right to health care.

After this huge ballot victory, it is apparent to us that Americans want to help change the way health care is distributed in the U.S. People want everybody to be covered. We are glad we avoided presenting people with a complex system to support. A “right to health care” is both simple and strong. It gets the message across. We would like to see more cities take up Seattle’s call. Imagine what it would be like in Congress if 30 cities followed our example. Now, that’s something I’d love to see!

Brian King (bpjking@comcast.net) is a retired United Food and Commercial Workers steward in Seattle.

Bush counterterrorism initiative in Africa?

Fri, 20 Jan 2006 09:45:00 +0000

Across the front pages of several of this nation’s newspapers came the recent announcement that the Bush administration had embarked on another adventure in its “war against terrorism.” Referred to as the “Trans-Sahara Counter-Terrorism Initiative,” this effort involves an annual budget of $100 million as well as the deployment of troops and advisers to help prosecute the fight against terrorism in Africa.

There is only one problem: the sort of terrorism described by the Bush administration is not a major problem in Africa. In fact, to push the envelope a bit further, one could say that it is not even a minor problem. When compared on a scale with the major problems affecting the continent, it simply does not rate. Consider:

• Since 1997, approximately 4 million people have died as a result of the civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. This amounts to more people killed in any war since World War II.

• In the Sudan, the long-running north/south civil war that just ended through a peace agreement resulted in the deaths of 2 million people. The current Darfur crisis in the western Sudan has resulted in the deaths of approximately 400,000 people.

• The HIV/AIDS pandemic has hit Africa like no other continent. In 2005 alone, 2.4 million people have died as a result of the illness. Only 10 percent of those infected with HIV in Africa are able to get regular access to anti-retrovirals.

• Poverty has been increasing over the years rather than decreasing. Africa has made insufficient advances in economic development and the building or rebuilding of infrastructure, and most of its nations are burdened by debt imposed by the international financial institutions and/or the nations of the global North.

In this environment it is nothing short of odd for the Bush administration to foist on the continent a program for the elimination of a problem that is not a major problem for the continent. Al Qaeda-like terrorism does not hold a candle to these tragedies.

More than anything else, the Trans-Sahara Counter-Terrorism Initiative reflects both the desire to secure major African oil reserves as well as the mindset of an administration that has determined that its particular notion of the terrorism danger must be the greatest catastrophe to affect planet Earth since a meteor struck this planet 65 million years ago and wiped out the dinosaurs.

Rather than recognizing the principal problems affecting the majority of the world’s peoples generally, and African peoples in particular, such as poverty, civil wars, wealth polarization, corporate rape, out-of-control epidemics while governments are forced to divert resources to paying off debt, etc., the Bush administration has decided that counterterrorism must be, in all situations, the modus operandi for all nations.

Thus, at a moment when Africa needs desperately to demilitarize, the Bush administration promotes policies of militarization. At a moment when Africa desperately needs further democratization, the Bush administration promotes policies that encourage despotic governments to cry “terrorism” every time that they wish to suppress opposition (whether that opposition is armed or unarmed).

Lacking any real historical analysis, and certainly lacking any sense of the destructive roles that the United States and Western Europe have played in Africa for hundreds of years, the Bush administration adds kerosene to an already inflamed situation. What is so desperately needed is a U.S. contribution of assistance to peace-making and peace-keeping operations in Africa as well as constructive economic assistance to African nations as they position themselves to be successful actors in the 21st century.

Perhaps this is too much of a New Year’s wish.

Bill Fletcher Jr. is president of TransAfrica Forum. This article originally appeared in the Chicago Defender and other publications and is reprinted by permission of the author.

Editorial: Scrooges budget

Fri, 20 Jan 2006 09:30:00 +0000

Just before Christmas, Vice President Dick Cheney, his face fixed in its perpetual Scrooge-like scowl, flew home from the Middle East to cast a tie-breaking Senate vote for a budget reconciliation bill that cuts human needs programs by $40 billion while showering the rich with another $70 billion in tax cuts.

Cheney’s vote was needed because of a courageous fight by labor, community and other organizations. United in the Human Needs Coalition, they had pushed five Republican moderates to join Democrats in opposing the Bush-backed budget bill. This opposition forced the reactionary Senate leadership to moderate the cutbacks somewhat. Because of these changes, the House must now vote again on the final package, a roll call that is expected Feb. 3.

The National Organization for Women, already locked in the battle to convince the Senate to reject Bush’s Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito, is also urging its members to “make another effort in January” to convince House members to “change their vote to no” on the budget reconciliation.

NOW points out that the measure approved by the House Dec. 19 imposes a 50 percent work participation rate for recipients of Temporary Assistance to Needy Families benefits but provides woefully inadequate childcare funding. It mandates higher co-pays and premiums for Medicaid recipients. It cuts funding for child support enforcement by $1.5 billion.

Senate Republicans rammed through tax cuts for the rich despite warnings that it would add tens of billions to the federal budget deficit. And the Bush administration made clear that it is seeking another $200 billion for the occupation of Iraq on top of the nearly half trillion Defense Department budget.

The Republican leadership displays total indifference to the suffering of the poor, homeless and hungry including over a half million displaced by Hurricane Katrina, while opening the sluices for lobbyists like Jack Abramoff and their greedy corporate clients.

This election year all 435 House seats and one-third of the Senate are up for grabs. Demand that these lawmakers reject Bush-Cheney budget and tax priorities. If they don’t stand up, work to unseat them from office. “We will remember in November!”

Editorial: All U.S. forces must leave Iraq

Fri, 20 Jan 2006 09:27:00 +0000

Faced with growing popular demand to end the Iraq war and bring American soldiers home quickly, and pressed by November elections that will decide the composition of Congress through 2008, the Bush administration has begun to talk about withdrawing some U.S. troops. “As Iraqis stand up, we will stand down, President Bush said last November. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said present U.S. troop levels would not be needed “for very much longer” because Iraqi forces were becoming more effective.

At the same time, more has begun to emerge about the extent of the U.S. air war in Iraq. Citing U.S. military figures, the Washington Post reported last month that U.S. air strikes had escalated from about 25 per month earlier in the year to 120 in November. The Sunday Times of London said U.S. air strikes are expected to rise to at least 150 per month.

More has been revealed about future air war prospects by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh. “A key element of the drawdown plans, not mentioned in the President’s public statements, is that the departing American troops will be replaced by American airpower,” Hersh wrote in The New Yorker last month. Hersh also pointed out that “neither Congress nor the public has engaged in a significant discussion or debate about the air war.”

The U.S. military has made much of “smart” weaponry’s potential to reduce civilian casualties. But at TomDispatch.com Jan. 12, Michael Schwartz detailed repeated instances of U.S. “precision” air strikes causing extensive civilian deaths and injuries. Schwartz predicted that airpower alone “could kill well over 20,000 Iraqi civilians in 2006,” and that the rate of 1,000 civilian deaths per week since the Iraq war started, recorded by Johns Hopkins researchers in the famous study published early last year, “could be dwarfed in the coming year.”

It’s the job of the American peace majority to make sure that all U.S. forces leave Iraq. Nothing less will lay the basis for Iraqis to reconstruct their country in a unified and democratic manner.

Strange case of Padilla gets stranger

Thu, 19 Jan 2006 14:33:00 +0000

Commentary

The case of accused enemy combatant Jose Padilla gets more bizarre with every passing month. Rather than being a case that would establish the government’s right to arrest even U.S. citizens on U.S. soil and imprison them forever without trial or access to an attorney, it is beginning to look like another public relations disaster for the Bush administration.

Padilla, it might be recalled, was born and raised in Chicago, acquired a police rap sheet allegedly through gang membership, eventually converted to Islam and was arrested at O’Hare International Airport in May of 2002. The government accused (but did not charge) him with being an Al Qaeda jihadist fighter, of having trained at Al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan of having planned to detonate a radioactive “dirty bomb” in a U.S. urban center.

Later, when some doubt was cast on the possibility that someone with Padilla’s background and education could actually set off a nuclear explosion, the government changed the accusation: Now they said his plan had been to open the gas vents in apartment buildings and then trigger an explosion, killing a large number of people. Even if Padilla did not have the background for atomic sabotage, any fool can blow out a pilot light, turn the gas on “high” and then activate some sort of spark.

Padilla became a legal and constitutional cause célèbre because of the government’s assertion that even though he was a U.S. citizen, he was arrested on U.S. soil, and the courts are open for business to try felony cases all over this country (so we assume Padilla could easily have been indicted if there was evidence against him), they could simply imprison him forever and not even let him have access to attorneys under the special powers that the president claims in his capacity of “commander in chief” of the war against terrorism.

Another dimension was the possibility that he would be tried by the special tribunals for “enemy combatants” that the Bush administration invented without any basis in constitutional law.

So Padilla sat in the Navy brig at Charleston, S.C., without access to lawyers or the courts, or any idea of what was going to happen to him.

But from the outside, civil liberties organizations saw the importance of the case, and began to work to get Padilla under the protections of the Constitution, i.e. into a regular courtroom where full due process protections would apply.

The implications of the government’s assertion about its rights to hold Padilla, made in May 2002, have become more and more frightening as more has been revealed about CIA torture, secret prison camps, “rendition” of suspects to countries where they can be tortured, government spying without even an attempt to get a warrant, and now the government’s assertion that the president can simply “waive” the McCain anti-torture bill if he feels like it, which means claiming the executive branch’s right to nullify statutes passed by the legislative branch and signed by the president.

People are waking up to the links between these actions, and realizing that we are coming closer to dictatorship than ever before in the history of this country. So the fight of civil libertarians on behalf of Padilla has been of utmost importance.

Things have not gone entirely the government’s way. In 2004, the Supreme Court agreed in another case, that of Yasir Hamdi, a U.S. citizen captured abroad, that the government had overreached. It did not rule on the merits of the Padilla case at that time, because of a jurisdictional technicality.

However, at that point the federal government voluntarily allowed Padilla to consult with an attorney, evidently to avoid a definitive court ruling that he had the right to one. But as the Padilla case wound its way back through the federal courts, the 4th District Court ruled in Padilla’s favor on the issue of whether the government could keep him imprisoned without trial.

Unfortunately, the Court of Appeals for the 4th District reversed this ruling. (The judge who wrote the ruling was Michael Luttig, one of Bush’s possible Supreme Court nominees.) So the thing was on the verge of being brought once more to the Supreme Court, with the danger for the government that the Supremes might rule that the Bush administration had acted unconstitutionally in holding Jose Padilla in custody for three years without even the promise of a trial by a jury of his peers. This would have not only forced the government to charge Padilla or release him, it might have served as a precedent to keep the government from doing such things to others.

So in November 2005, the government suddenly indicted Padilla in Florida and moved to take him out of the Navy brig and put him into a regular federal jail pending trial. The two most frightening accusations the government had made against Padilla, namely the dirty bomb and the gas explosions, have disappeared into thin air. He is still accused of training with Al Qaeda (and the government claims that they have an application form he filled out for this training in 2000) and of planning to give material aid to terrorism and kill Americans.

One theory is that the information on which the scarier accusations were based had in fact been extracted by torture from Al Qaeda figures held in U.S. or allied custody, and therefore could not under any circumstances be presented in court, where they would not only not hold up, but would add to the torture scandal. The Appeals Court at first tried to prevent the move from the Navy brig, perhaps suspecting that this was nothing but a maneuver to prevent the Supreme Court from ruling on the constitutional issue and thus setting a precedent. However, the Supreme Court has now allowed the move to go ahead, and Padilla (plus three other people) have been indicted. Padilla has entered a plea of “not guilty,” but the judge denied bail. Never a dull moment in the bizarre world of George W. Bush’s “justice.”