Bush bags his trophy terrorist

By Ellen Ratner
This week the Pentagon released the Guantanamo hearing of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM). Two senators went to Guantanamo to witness his hearing via closed circuit television. The senators had real concerns about the possibility of KSM's testimony being coerced and have been vocal about their concerns. Perhaps reading the transcript provides a bit more distance on Mr. Mohammed, but two things seem clear. First, he was tortured while in the CIA secret prison and second, he has decided that he is a ''dead man walking'' and is playing the U.S. government like a violin.



Sens. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) issued the following statement about the possibility of torture, ''In addition, the tribunal was presented with a written statement from KSM alleging mistreatment during his captivity prior to arriving at Guantanamo. This statement was made a part of the classified record of the proceeding. The panel said that the allegations will be submitted to appropriate authorities. Allegations of prisoner mistreatment must be taken seriously and properly investigated. To do otherwise would reflect poorly on our nation.'' Mr. Mohammed alleges that his children were taken into custody and mistreated. So far the CIA and Pentagon have not denied that they currently have, or had, his children and all of the material relating to that has been redacted in the transcript.

The tribunal's testimony had all of the reliability of the Star Chamber of the Inquisition, or more recently, coerced testimony from Soviet days. The methods of the Inquisition are very similar to methods that we have seen in our modern day. As during the Inquisition, the detainee is not afforded a lawyer. Instead, a ''personal representative'' accompanies them.

Our methods to extract confessions are similar to those used by the Spanish Inquisition. These methods include stress positions and a technique that was a forerunner to what is now known as ''water boarding,'' that is, making the subject believe that he or she is going to drown. Professor Anthony D'Amato is the Leighton Professor of Law at Northwestern University. He compared Mohammed's confession to the Stalinist purges in the 1930s where people had been tortured over weeks and months but showed up in court with no external marks of torture. ''With all apparent voluntariness, they admitted subverting the Five-Year Plan that would have provided the Soviet people with necessary food items. ... In short these accused persons, briefly in court on their way to the firing squad, took responsibility for everything that had gone wrong for the past two decades in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.''
It is highly likely that KSM is a terrorist. I don't think anyone is questioning the fact that he was a member of al-Qaida. Aside from this whole proceeding being a carbon copy of some of the greatest breaches of the rule of law in the history of man, the process leaves Americans less secure from terrorists. Most logical Americans with a few critical thinking skills can deduce that this one man could not have been the only one (besides Osama bin Laden and the actual point men) who masterminded and executed more than 29 terrorist acts in the world. Name a terrorist act, or attempted terrorist act in the last 13 years and yes, KSM says he's the man behind it.

The transcript of the testimony is even more revealing. The president of the tribunal states the charges and the basis of those charges with ''evidence.'' KSM disputes the evidence and explains that all this came from a computer that did not belong to him and was not in his house and that did not contain much more than what Americans have on their computers – a picture of Mohammed Atta, for example. KSM also asked to call a witness. The head of the hearing is unimpressed and says ''too bad, no witnesses.'' The charges stand. The strangest thing of all then happens. KSM, after explaining why the case against him is pathetically weak, says that he was tortured and confesses to everything. When asked if he is confessing now under duress, he says no.
So why is the door open for more terrorism? Those who actually did mastermind most of those 29 acts are still at large and by confessing to all of this terrorism, KSM is most likely allowing other terrorists to go free. KSM gave the Bush administration the public relations bump they so desperately need. They can't find Osama Bin Laden so they have his stand-in Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. By not allowing witnesses, reporters and cross examination there is no establishment of the facts. Without facts we are as vulnerable as we were in the days before 9/11.

Mr. Mohammed is clearly bright and strategic. He tells the tribunal in so many words that they have no evidence against him, but then he confesses. He compares himself to George Washington and says that the British would have considered our Founding Father an enemy combatant. In a very clever way he sends out a signal to the terrorists that have not made it to Guantanamo that this is a war, and a war similar to World Wars I and II.

We have been viewed as a just nation due to our system of justice and rule of law, but Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's tribunal has made a mockery of our ''new'' system. Torture, coerced confessions, no representation, no ability to question evidence or witnesses, is a message to the world that we are no longer a nation of laws. The Bush administration is so anxious for a public relations victory that they are willing to upend our founding principles in order to bag their trophy terrorist.

There are no shortcuts in the administration of justice. The administration may have their trophy terrorist – this ''breaking news'' may have taken the four-year anniversary of the war off the front pages, and deflected some heat off the meltdown of the Gonzales Gestapo, but it has not made us safer or more secure. In a letter to the New York Times, former U.S. Army interrogator, Peter Bauer, said, ''The confession of a man being tortured is limited only by the imagination of the torturer.''

To protect America we needs facts not imagined confessions.

Hopelessness causes crime

By Ellen Ratner
Sen. Mary Landrieu spent the greater part of last week fighting for increased funding for victims of Hurricane Katrina. New Orleans has turned into the Wild West. Red tape has stopped real rebuilding and community development in the Gulf Coast. Sen. Landrieu also came up with an initiative to combat crime in the New Orleans region. She had some great ideas to address the crime rate in New Orleans, which has skyrocketed. If it were only in New Orleans it may be a relatively easy fix, but we also heard this week that the murder rate is up across cities in the United States for two years in a row.



On Friday, the Police Executive Research Forum released a study on Violent Crime in the United States. The statistics are alarming. With 56 jurisdictions reporting, "Violent Crime in America: 24 Months of Alarming Trends" covers the percentage change in violent crime from the years 2004 to 2006. Homicide increased 10.21 percent, and robbery increased 12.27 percent. Aggravated assault increased 3.12 percent, and aggravated assault with a firearm increased 9.98 percent.

Why the increase in crime? What we do know is that people commit crimes when they have nothing to lose and when there is no hope, or when there is noticeable disparity between a person and his/her neighbor. We have seen this in Iraq with a Sunni population that now feels disenfranchised by the governing Shiites. We are seeing this in New Orleans and Mississippi when entire families are living in spaces that Mississippi Gov. Barbour says would land him in federal court if he had state prisoners housed in them.

Every parent knows that when Johnny has a big red truck and little Ricky doesn't, it causes jealousy and fights. It is the same with glaring income disparity and the inability to get ahead. The Bush administration financial team's schedule is released weekly to the Washington press corps, and they make speeches and provide dog and pony shows touting the health of the economy. The overall economy may have some healthy signs of growth, but it is clear that the Bush dog and pony shows are not addressing income disparity, which is at the root of increased crime.

The income gap is looking more like an income gulf. Jared Bernstein of the Washington, D.C., Economic Policy Institute says, "If you go back to 1979, prior to the period when the growth in inequality really took off in the United States, the top 5 percent on average had 11 times the average income of the bottom 20 percent. If you fast-forward to the year 2000, the most recent economic peak, you find that that ratio increased to 19 times. So over the course of those two decades, the gap between the wealthiest and the lowest income families grew from 11 times to 19 times."

The trend continues, especially in minority communities. Sen. Chuck Schumer held hearings this week on the African-American employment rates, which dropped from 75 percent in 1990 to 72 percent in 1999, always remaining 3 to 4 percentage points behind white males. (The numbers were 71.5 percent for African-American males and 76.5 for white males in February of 2007, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.) Why? Many African-American males took part in the manufacturing part of our economy. Those jobs simply are not there, having moved across the border. The problem is not just minorities; 16 million Americans now live in deep and severe poverty, and some of this is rural poverty.

Programs to help workers learn to work have been cut. The Job Corps has had an increase in its budget, but other job-training programs suffered decreases, making funding about even. Professor Ronald Miney of Columbia University said that the Welfare-to-Work Program, funded under the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1997, provided funds for states to enroll fathers in employment and training services. Unfortunately, funding for this program was discontinued in 2004. Today, stringent work requirements remain without the training.

Entry-level job openings in retail stores in New York and elsewhere have been known to have lines hundreds and sometimes thousands of people long. If there is no hope, and there is the stress of providing for your family, there is going to be an increase in crime. To use my favorite expression, "This is not rocket science." To reduce crime there needs to be hope. For there to be hope there needs to be jobs and job training, or else we will all be living like third-world countries with extreme poverty in the cities and rural areas, with the wealthy living in gated communities. That is not America, nor should it be.

Romney preaches to the choir

By Ellen Ratner
The Conservative Political Action Conference 2007 (CPAC) had almost 4,000 participants this year. All of the major declared GOP presidential candidates were there, with the exception of Sen. John McCain. Gov. Mitt Romney's people were out in full force making it look like the last days of the New Hampshire primary. Everywhere Sen. Sam Brownback went there were Romney people. Everywhere Governor Romney went there were Brownback people. The halls were littered with bright colored flip-flops with the anti-Romney version of ''I voted for the war before I voted against it.'' No one took credit for the flip-flops but most people concluded the Brownback camp supplied them. A man dressed as ''Flipper'' the dolphin sported an anti-Romney sign. I didn't think the convention could get much worse until I saw a snaked line out the door of 20-something males drooling at the thought of getting to see or touch Ann Coulter. Then Romney spoke.



Romney decided to go full speed ahead with trying to win over the conservative base of the party. His speech was a right-wing focus group reprint. It sounded like his speechwriters ''Googled 'right-wing agenda,' '' and cut and pasted as much as they could possibly fit. His speech was 2,164 words and he mentioned tax or taxes 18 times, spending 4 times and Iraq once. Children got a mere mention three times, mostly within the context of ''family values,'' or immigration. He made no mention of health care or education.

He dissed Massachusetts as a liberal state including its senior Sen. Ted Kennedy. ''Coming from Massachusetts, I saw first hand the liberal future, and it doesn't work,'' he said. Later in the speech he went after the state again. ''Massachusetts became center stage for the liberal social agenda – sort of San Francisco east, Nancy Pelosi style.'' He has a short memory. The ''liberal'' state elected him as its governor and it had elected Republican Governor Weld before him. In fact, until this January, Massachusetts had been governed for sixteen straight years by Republicans. He bragged about their being 600 less state employees on the payroll when he took office, but he somehow left out the fact that he was out of the state 219 days in 2006, making it hard to take credit for such good management style. I wonder if he counted himself as one of the cut employees. I suppose he could justify it since he was out of the state more than he was in it.

He hit every topic that was designed to make the CPAC crowd happy. He fed them the red meat they wanted to hear. He talked about how he supported the petition to get gay marriage on the ballot, cloning human embryos, how he supported the Catholic Church in Massachusetts to make sure those adoptions went to heterosexual families. He was proud of the fact that he enforced the law preventing gays from out-of-state from coming to Massachusetts to get married.

He took a shot at McCain – another ''born again'' social conservative. First he went after McCain- Feingold's election finance reform bill, then he went after the McCain-Kennedy immigration bill; and in one fell swoop, he discharged his venom at two of his enemies. He then kissed up big time to the immigration lets fence them out, or ''fence of spin,'' crowd while knowing full well that this fence is not going to get built in the foreseeable future. It is very safe rhetoric for a conservative crowd.

But what was most amazing in Romney's speech was, the ''devil's gonna getcha'' quality of it. He paraded out every conservative boogieman imaginable. The line that knocked me over, (and some of my Republican friends who were at CPAC with me), was ''Conservatism is a belief in strength. It is because of America's strength that we don't all speak German and that our kids don't all speak Russian. And it is because of America's strength that our grandchildren will not have to speak Farsi or Arabic or Chinese.''

Huh? Is this guy for real? Does Governor Romney think that he can rile up the crowd with such simplistic emotion-laden words and then win a general election of a population who just voted his party out of Congress? Does he really think that even if he can pull off winning the Republican nomination that an eight-years wiser electorate (George W. Bush 2001-2009) is really going to fall for the same tricks and political pabulum again?

I think Gov. Romney's timing is off. Just as many wish Sen. Obama had ten more years of experience, Romneyites wish he was running ten years ago, or even two years ago. It was obvious he had identified most of his advisors before the 2006 mid-term elections. His strategy was in place before the sea of change took place in Congress and when he thought he had only McCain and Brownback to contend with. The electorate woke up and restored some balance in one branch of the government. Rudy Giuliani entering the race is a sign that Americans are not ready to support a conservative social agenda at the expense of more pressing issues. Romney's words come off as just that, words. The crowd clapped at the right times but did not seem to be overwhelmingly impressed. Maybe they were passing the time thinking of the speech with Ann Coulter.

Whether Romney is selling or leasing his soul to CPAC is unknown, but what is known is that if he wins the Republican nomination, we will have a Democrat living in the White House in January of 2009.

The cure for campaign burnout

By Ellen Ratner
Covering past presidential elections was fun, insightful and even inspiring. A candidate had to put themselves in front of real people, not real cameras, in order to gain traction. They took questions from people who are trying to make ends meet or raise a child alone, or worry about their child serving abroad – not from a journalist. The candidates were able to take the actual pulse of the American electorate instead of reading it from the latest poll. I followed Gov. George W. Bush just months before the primary in 2000. He played soccer in a gym in New Hampshire with just a handful of press and maybe two dozen kids and their parents. I was with Howard Dean in the middle of Iowa where a very small contingent of press (six people), followed him to a VFW hall, then to a tiny bookstore and even to a college campus for some real meet and greet. This took place only three months before the Iowa primary. The curtain is just being raised on Campaign 2008 and the campaign events are staged like rock concerts, only the musician is picking up the tab.



The 2008 elections are already a huge series of events that only the large well-financed campaigns can afford to play. Tom Vilsack, the former governor of Iowa, had to drop out of the race last week. The reason? Money. He had raised just about one million dollars. Clinton, McCain, Giuliani or Obama can take in that much in a night. There was a time when scrappers like Vilsack could win. You didn't need to be a best selling author, former first lady, or high profile senator or public official to gain traction. Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton are two names that come to mind. They were relatively obscure governors.

Today, a candidate cannot afford to spend time in one state. The election primary and caucus season this year has changed. America got tired of Iowa and New Hampshire picking our presidents. The rational made sense at the time. Why should two mainly white, small states pick the next president of the United States? Why should they be from the Northeast and the Midwest? What about the South and the West? I can't say that I disagree. Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, South Carolina, California, and Florida will all take place within a few months, or in some cases days of each other. The problem is that this new plan of front loading makes it impossible for a candidate to do anything other than quick trips in the state, so there will be little if any quality time with the electorate.

The voters will have to rely on what is fed to them via large staged events and television advertising to make their decision about the candidates.The candidates, who cannot afford to stage large events or pay for television, will be forced out. It is unlikely that Bill Clinton could have lasted if he were running for president in '08.

I don't think there is any way at this point to bring back the old days of hitting every school and VFW hall in small town America. But I do think it is possible to change the rules so people who don't have a ''senatorial'' campaign war chest of over $20 million dollars to spend, can get in and stay in the game. Britain and Canada have election time limits. They are less than three months. Television time is expensive but since the time is so short during election season even a minority candidate can afford to get in the race.

Shortening what now seems like a perpetual campaign would mean that candidates who are already holding office and being paid with our tax dollars, are actually at work for us instead of themselves. Obama, Clinton, McCain, Dodd, Brownback, Kucinich, Biden all serve in the Senate or House. Gov. Richardson is still a sitting governor. The next 22 months of what they were elected to do is going to be spent with their focus on their own political aspirations versus the interests of their constituencies. And they're even more narcissistic than I thought if they think that somehow their running for president is serving the people who elected them – perhaps,if one of the dozen were to be elected president, but the rest are just free loading on the American taxpayer. Some candidates in the past (Gov. George W. Bush) gave back their salary while they were running and that is admirable, but they were still elected to do a job not seek the next one.

The 2008 election is a mirror image of what is wrong in this country: a few people making the rules, not enough access to government, big money guiding the political process and those at the top doing little more than looking for the next big job. We have to change the election process before it forever changes us as a country and a people. Federal election laws need to limit electioneering so this madness stops and politicians work for us, not themselves.

Non-binding government

By Ellen Ratner
America's ''lawmakers'' might need to change their name to ''statementmakers'' or ''hearingmakers'' if the rest of the year continues in the theme of non-binding/meaningless resolutions. The House and Senate have just been pre-occupied for over a month on debating a ''non-binding'' resolution of disagreement with the president's addition of 21,500 troops to Iraq. This political exercise did nothing more than increases the emissions of hot air in Washington.



Between the announcement of the troop surge, the debate on the surge, the resolution to condemn or not to condemn the surge, the debate on what to condemn, the debate on how to condemn, the debate on the resolution, the debate on the debate of the resolution, I'm beginning to wonder if I'm in a ''Ground Hog Day'' version of ''Dumb and Dumber.''

Our taxes have been bankrolling this public gnashing of teeth and wringing of hands over a ''resolution'' that isn't worth, to use an expression by FDR's veep, ''a warm bucket of spit.'' Meanwhile, the issues of the day beyond the subject of Iraq, i.e. Afghanistan, health care, Medicare, Social Security, education, bankrupt retirement funds, global warming, terrorism, homeland security, immigration . . . remain for someone else to deal with after the 2008 election when it's safe to take a stand on something besides a non-binding resolution.

The Congress reminds me of the crew on a ship that is sailing aimlessly through treacherous waters. Instead of taking control from the insane, inept or disconnected captain, they debate whether or not they should tell the captain that they disagree with the direction of the ship. Part of the crew cannot even get beyond the point of debating whether they should have a debate as to whether or not to tell the captain he is going to sink the ship if he doesn't stake out a new course. Instead, they debate to debate to tell him. In the end, half the crew decides to not even have a discussion as to whether or not they should speak up.

It seems fitting that the debate to debate a non-binding resolution would take place on Presidents Day weekend. After all, it's the president's weekend. It strikes me as odd and disingenuous that members of Congress talk about President Bush as the imperial president, yet they don't ever have the courage to debate to debate whether or not the commitment of 21,500 men and women is a good policy. While non-binding resolutions are a pretty pathetic excuse for a leadership coming from a body that is supposed to be one of only three branches of government, if you are going to waste a month on the subject, at least get an up or down vote that states: We agree or we do not agree with the president's decision to add 21,500 troops in Iraq.

If the congress cannot even get to the point where they will raise a non-binding objection to the president's policy in Iraq, there is no hope that they will pull funding for what Senator Levin calls ''a plunge,'' as in further plunge into being the pickle in the middle of a civil war. The mid-term elections could not have been clearer; the American people overwhelmingly disagree with the president's handling of the war, but Congress can't seem to say it out loud.

President Bush has to go in 2008, and if this Congress doesn't start to cowboy up to the task that the American people set for them in the mid-term elections, it is my hope that they will find their belongings on the moving van as well.