Deputy Attorney General James Comey's testimony: George W. Bush "engage[d] in conduct that the Department of Justice had said had no legal basis"

SCHUMER: And why did you decide to resign?

COMEY: I believed that I couldn’t — I couldn’t stay, if the administration was going to engage in conduct that the Department of Justice had said had no legal basis. I just simply couldn’t stay.

Via Truthdig, this video from YouTube shows former Deputy Attorney General James Comey's testimony to the U.S. Congress this week about this story (summarized on Wikipedia):

In early January 2006, the New York Times, as part of their investigation into alleged domestic surveillance by the National Security Agency, reported that Comey, who was Acting Attorney General during the March 2004 surgical hospitalization of John Ashcroft, refused to "certify" central aspects of the NSA program at that time. The certification was required under existing White House procedures to continue the program. After Comey's refusal, the newspaper reported, Andrew H. Card Jr., White House Chief of Staff, and Alberto R. Gonzales, then White House counsel and now Attorney General, made an emergency visit to the George Washington University Hospital, to attempt to win approval directly from Ashcroft for the program. Comey confirmed these events took place (but declined to confirm the specific program) in testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee on 16 May 2007.

Comey also confirmed that Attorney General Ashcroft forcefully refused to certify the program and that the White House proceeded to go ahead with the program anyway, thus giving rise to what Comey described as "engag[ing] in conduct that the Department of Justice had said had no legal basis". He also testified that he, his chief of staff, Ashcroft, Ashcroft's chief of staff, and FBI director Robert Mueller all threatened to resign over President Bush's defiance of the law.

The transcript of Comey's testimony is at Think Progress.

This article from Slate has the story and its implications for the "unitary executive theory" -- in other words, the dictatorship our country has become in the endless war Bush claims we are engaged in:

Nixon Rides Again
It's only illegal when the president agrees it's illegal.
By Dahlia Lithwick
May 17, 2007

It took a day, but the newspapers finally caught up to the bloggers this morning in recognizing the real shocker in former Deputy Attorney General James Comey's dramatic congressional testimony Tuesday. It's not just the Grim Reaper tale of Alberto Gonzales and Andy Card double-teaming a critically ill John Ashcroft in his hospital bed. The real issue, as Orin Kerr, Glenn Greenwald, Marty Lederman, The Anonymous Liberal, and Paul Kiel started explaining Wednesday, is much bigger: The story isn't who picked on a sick guy or even who did or didn't break laws. The story is who gets to decide what's legal. And the president's now-familiar claim, a la Richard Nixon, is that it's never illegal when he does it.

We now know that in 2004 Gonzales and Andy Card raced to the hospital to try to get a very sick John Ashcroft to certify the legality of the president's secret NSA surveillance program—going over the head of Comey, the acting attorney general while Ashcroft was ill. When Ashcroft refused to override Comey, the White House reauthorized the program without DoJ certification. The question now is whether in so doing, the White House did something illegal, improper, neither, or both.

The Wall Street Journal today dismisses this story as a "full length docudrama." Quoting selectively from Arlen Specter's long colloquy with Comey, in which Comey conceded that "the Justice Department's certification ... was not [required] as far as I know," the Journal concludes that "nothing illegal was done, [Comey] was never threatened by White House officials, and the President told him to do what he felt was right." No laws broken. Nothing to see here, America. Move along.

But those of you who actually read the transcript know that Comey never conceded that DoJ certification of the classified program was legally unnecessary. He seems merely to have said that the administration may not have believed it was legally necessary. Indeed, when Specter asked whether "the certification by the Department of Justice as to legality was indispensable as a matter of law," Comey said he believed that it was. He said, twice, and most carefully, that while he was not a presidential scholar, there were those who argued "that because the head of the executive branch determined that it was appropriate to do, that that meant for purposes of those in the executive branch it was legal." Comey added that he disagreed with that conclusion.

There is a normative legal argument about whether the president should need any permission to do anything in wartime. The bloggers above agree that this bare assertion—that the president's Article II powers allow him to do what needs doing—appears to be the basis for the work of John Yoo, the Office of Legal Counsel lawyer who laid much of the legal groundwork for torture and other forms of unchecked executive power before 2004. That may, in turn, have been the basis for the apparently rigorous re-evaluation of Yoo's legal work by the new head of OLC, Jack Goldsmith. (Disclosure: Goldsmith and I have co-authored here in Slate.)

But regardless of what the Journal claims, Comey was not this week endorsing the assertion that whatever the president says goes. He conceded that the attorney general's certification was not required by statute or by regulation, but it was "the practice in this particular [surveillance] program ... there was a signature line for that." And he added that the AG's certification had never yet been disregarded.

Specter hardly wrung from Comey the concession that the White House decision to reauthorize its NSA program over DoJ objections was "legal." What Comey did grant was the proposition that it could have been legal if you accepted that what the White House does is legal by definition. The administration's decision to push forward with the program anyway meant that Comey (and DoJ) had no role to play at all, and he found that untenable, if not expressly illegal.

It's impossible to draw neat lines around which elements of the mushrooming U.S. attorneys scandal violate the law and which are encompassed in Bush's larger worldview that life happens at the pleasure of the president. But these discussions raise the bigger question: How can the president ever break a law, so long as he insists he is the law? And how can the rest of us know if he's broken a law, if we've absolutely no idea what he's been doing?

The psychodrama in Ashcroft's hospital room boils down to a rift between the people at Justice (Ashcroft, Comey, and Goldsmith) who believed even the president can cross a line into lawless behavior and those who simply don't. Glenn Greenwald contends that "the President consciously and deliberately violated the law and committed multiple felonies by eavesdropping on Americans." The Wall Street Journal insists that no law was broken because the surveillance program put the president above the law. Greenwald believes in an immutable legal architecture that binds even the president. The White House contends the president answers to nobody. There is no midpoint between these two arguments. The president is either above the law or he isn't.

As it turns out, almost everyone who espoused the latter view has fled DoJ. The most underreported moment at Comey's hearing this week was not, as the Journal claims, the Comey-Specter colloquy, but Sen. Chuck Schumer's Freudian effort to swear Comey back into office when he was supposed to be administering an oath. As Ben Wittes puts it today, "the bad guys won."

But that's not quite right. The bad guys were winning for a while because they picked the teams, set the rules, sidelined the referees, and turned off all the lights in the stadium. Congress has some work to do. It needs to drill down on what this mystery eavesdropping program was (and which worse mystery eavesdropping program it replaced) and to get to the bottom of the Yoo memos and what else they've authorized. Let's call the Comey testimony the halftime show. With the refs in and the lights finally on, this might just prove to be an interesting game after all.

Dahlia Lithwick is a Slate senior editor.

Rudolph Giuliani's aggressive, "hostile enforcer" personality type

In my previous post, the article referred to Republican presidential candidate Rudolph Giuliani as "the very archetype of the State Enforcer". I thought this was an interesting term and probably referred to a personality type under some theory of personality, so I looked it up and found this 1999 article analyzing Giuliani's personality.

Can New York mayor Giuliani compromise despite his aggressiveness and moral certitude?
By Joshua Jipson and Will Piatt
St. John’s University
December 12, 1999

What happens when a schoolyard bully, so to speak, moves up to boarding school?

If New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani is successful in his U.S. Senate bid, we’ll find out soon enough.

Regardless of the state in which they are elected, senators are powerful players on a national stage; their political performance, ultimately, affects us all.

At issue, then, is how to predict performance in public office. Our answer: Extrapolate from ingrained personality patterns and past performance.

The dominant feature of Rudy Giuliani’s personality is a controlling, aggressive tendency, which is an attribute instrumental in his past political successes.

During his tenure in the mayor’s office, Giuliani has crusaded vigorously to reduce crime and clean up the streets of New York City. However, in doing so he has berated critics and tormented subordinates not acting fully in accordance with his wishes.

In politics, a combative, crusading political personality can contain the seeds of its own undoing. If past behavior is any indicator of future performance, a Senator Giuliani in short order will embroil himself in controversy.

Conscientiousness, the other prominent element of Giuliani’s personality, provides the underpinnings for honesty, integrity, and strong adherence to moral principle.

But it also can cultivate compulsiveness — and Giuliani seems compelled to attend personally to every detail of a pet project.

A prime example is his micromanagement of New York City’s police department. The U.S. Senate, however, is no place for pouncing on pesky squeegee men and harassing the homeless.

As mayor, Giuliani has been known to veto a budget over minor disagreements, sacrificing broader policy objectives purely to maintain his pride. But functional democracy requires compromising here and forfeiting a contest there, all in the service of progress toward a larger goal. Should Giuliani perpetuate his contentious pattern in the Senate he will merely serve as a personal road block, obstructing the path to his own political success.

Our main concern with Giuliani is his larger personality configuration. When a prominent aggressive tendency combines with moral certitude, the resulting personality prototype is the "hostile enforcer."

These personalities often act as though they have a monopoly on divining right and wrong, believing it is their duty and obligation to punish and control. Giuliani justifies such behavior with the rationale, "The big dog’s gotta eat."

Giuliani may be the biggest dog in New York City, but if elected to the Senate, he’ll have 99 fellow political pooches of like proportions. As surely as the sun rises, some of those senators will cross swords with Giuliani. Simply browbeating or bullying them away, as has been the mayor’s habit, will no longer be an option.

It’s no secret that Giuliani has harbored long-standing presidential ambitions. Reportedly, in college he liked to quip, "Rudolph William Louis Giuliani III, the first Italian Catholic president of the United States."

But as president, his hostility would have global implications. Diplomacy, a vital tool in foreign policy, is not a prevalent trait in personalities such as Giuliani’s.

Case in point: At a 1995 function jointly sponsored by the City of New York and the United Nations, Giuliani stood on-stage at Lincoln Center and ordered Palestinian Authority chairman Yasser Arafat to leave the theater.

Apparently, Giuliani tried to curry favor with the strong Jewish community in the city — a constituency that is key to his political fortunes.

Recently, the New York Observer asked, "Can Rudy Giuliani tame the beast within?" Let’s hope he can, for should he fail, the fire he spouts may scorch not only Washington, but instigate a larger conflagration.

If the firebrand Giuliani is to take another step up the political ladder, he must curtail his aggressive impulses and appreciate that sometimes — even at the pinnacle of power — discretion is the better part of valor.

Joshua Jipson is a sophomore English major from Lakeside, Wis. Will Piatt is a sophomore communication major from Monticello, Ill. Aubrey Immelman, associate professor of psychology, contributed to this article.

Ron Paul on blowback and American imperialism

This article from Information Clearing House talks about how all of our politicians studiously avoid the taboo subject of American imperialism and one of the major consequences of it -- namely, making us lots of enemies. Every time we overthrow a government and install a dictatorship, as in the case of Iran, or bomb and lay siege to a country for 10 years, as in the case of Iraq, or support a racist minority's domination and mistreatment of the majority in a region, as in the case of Israel, we make enemies, and they are not the unthinking, freedom-hating maniacs Bush and company want them to be. In fact, prominent members of Al Qaeda tend to be well-educated and come from wealthy families. Probably a lot of us freedom-loving Americans would turn to terrorism if some powerful country invaded us and bombed our parents' houses and tortured our fathers and brothers. Ron Paul should be commended for refusing to conform to the absurd official denial of these basic things.

Ron Paul on Blowback
By Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
May 17, 2007

Plenty of reasonable people can disagree about foreign policy. What's really strange is when one reasonable position is completely and forcibly excluded from the public debate.

Such was the case after 9-11. Every close observer of the events of those days knows full well that these crimes were acts of revenge for US policy in the Muslim world. The CIA and the 911 Commission said as much, the terrorists themselves proclaimed it, and Osama underscored the point by naming three issues in particular: US troops in Saudi Arabia, US sanctions against Iraq, and US funding of Israeli expansionism.

So far as I know, Ron Paul is the only prominent public figure in the six years since who has given an honest telling of this truth. The explosive exchange occurred during the Republican Presidential debate in South Carolina.

Ron was asked if he really wants the troops to come home, and whether that is really a Republican position.

"Well," he said, "I think the party has lost its way, because the conservative wing of the Republican Party always advocated a noninterventionist foreign policy. Senator Robert Taft didn't even want to be in NATO. George Bush won the election in the year 2000 campaigning on a humble foreign policy –no nation-building, no policing of the world. Republicans were elected to end the Korean War. The Republicans were elected to end the Vietnam War. There's a strong tradition of being anti-war in the Republican party. It is the constitutional position. It is the advice of the Founders to follow a non-interventionist foreign policy, stay out of entangling alliances, be friends with countries, negotiate and talk with them and trade with them."

He was then asked if 9-11 changed anything. He responded that US foreign policy was a "major contributing factor. Have you ever read the reasons they attacked us? They attacked us because we've been over there; we've been bombing Iraq for 10 years. We've been in the Middle East –- I think Reagan was right. We don't understand the irrationality of Middle Eastern politics. So right now we're building an embassy in Iraq that's bigger than the Vatican. We're building 14 permanent bases. What would we say here if China was doing this in our country or in the Gulf of Mexico? We would be objecting. We need to look at what we do from the perspective of what would happen if somebody else did it to us. "

And then out of the blue, he was asked whether we invited the attacks.

"I'm suggesting that we listen to the people who attacked us and the reason they did it, and they are delighted that we're over there because Osama bin Laden has said, 'I am glad you're over on our sand because we can target you so much easier.' They have already now since that time –have killed 3,400 of our men, and I don't think it was necessary."

Then the very archetype of the State Enforcer popped up to shout him down.

"That's really an extraordinary statement," said Rudy Giuliani. "That's an extraordinary statement, as someone who lived through the attack of September 11, that we invited the attack because we were attacking Iraq. I don't think I've heard that before, and I've heard some pretty absurd explanations for September 11th."

Now, this is interesting because it is obvious that Ron never said that we invited the attacks. This was a lie. He said the US foreign policy was a "contributing factor" in why they attacked us, a fact which only a fool or a liar could deny. Guiliani then went on to say that he has never "heard that before" –a statement that testifies to the extent of the blackout on this question.

Ron Paul was invited to respond, and concluded as follows:

"I believe very sincerely that the CIA is correct when they teach and talk about blowback. When we went into Iran in 1953 and installed the shah, yes, there was blowback. A reaction to that was the taking of our hostages and that persists. And if we ignore that, we ignore that at our own risk. If we think that we can do what we want around the world and not incite hatred, then we have a problem. They don't come here to attack us because we're rich and we're free. They come and they attack us because we're over there. I mean, what would we think if we were –- if other foreign countries were doing that to us?"

Wow, he broke the great taboo in American political life! Why this should be a taboo at all is unclear, but there it is. But now that it is finally out in the open, this shocking theory that the terrorists were not merely freedom-hating madmen but perhaps had some actual motive for their crime, let's think a bit more about it.

It is a normal part of human experience that if you occupy, meddle, bully, and coerce, people who are affected by it all are going to get angry. You don't have to be Muslim to get the point. The problem is that most of the American people simply have no idea what has been happening in the last ten years. Most Americans think that America the country is much like their own neighborhood: peaceful, happy, hard working, law abiding. So when you tell people that the US is actually something completely different, they are shocked.

Why would anyone hate us? The problem is that the military wing of the US government is very different from your neighborhood. After the Soviet Union crashed, US elites declared themselves masters of the universe, the only "indispensable nation" and the like. All countries must ask the US for permission to have a nuclear program. If we don't like your government, we can overthrow it. Meanwhile, we sought a global empire unlike any in history: not just a sphere of interest but the entire world. Laurence Vance has the details but here is the bottom line: one-third of a million deployed troops in 134 countries in 1000 locations in foreign countries.

All during the 1990s, the US attempted to starve the population of Iraq, with the result of hundreds of thousands of deaths. Madelyn Albright said on national television that the deaths of 500,000 children (the UN's number) was "worth it" in order to achieve our aims, which were ostensibly the elimination of non-existent, non-US built weapons of mass destruction. Yes, that annoyed a few people. There were constant bombings in Iraq all these years. And let us not forget how all this nonsense began: the first war in 1991 was waged in retaliation for a US-approved Iraqi invasion of its former province, Kuwait. Saddam had good reason to think that the US ambassador was telling the truth about non-interference with Kuwait relations: Saddam was our ally all through the Iran-Iraq war and before.

Ron spoke about complications of the Middle East. One of them is that the enemy we are now fighting, the Islamic extremists, are the very group that we supported and subsidized all through the 1980s in the name of fighting Communism. That's the reason the US knows so much about their bunkers and hiding spots in Afghanistan: US taxdollars created them.

Now, I know this is a lot for the tender ears of Americans to take, who like to think that their government reflects their own values of faith, freedom, and friendliness. But here is the point that libertarians have been trying to hammer home for many years: the US government is the enemy of the American people and their values. It is not peaceful, it is not friendly, it is not motivated by the Christian faith but rather power and imperial lust.

Ron is such a wonderful person that I'm sorry that he had to be the one to tell the truth. One could sense in the debate that he was making an enormous sacrifice here. After Guiliani spoke, the red-state fascists in the audience all started whooping up the bloodlust that the politicians have been encouraging for the last six years –a mindless display of Nazi-like nationalism that would cause the founding fathers to shudder with fear of what we've become. These people are frantic about terrorism and extremism abroad, but they need to take a good hard look in the mirror.
Thank you, Ron, for doing this. We are all in your debt.

Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. is president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, editor of LewRockwell.com, and author of Speaking of Liberty.

Scientists cast doubt on Kennedy bullet analysis; multiple shooters possible

Related to my very first post here, about Lyndon Johnson ordering the assassination of John F. Kennedy, this article from Washington Post reports that new forensic analysis of the bullet fragments found at the scene of the Kennedy assassination could have come from more than one gun, in contradiction of the decades-old official story of a single shooter (Lee Harvey Oswald).

Scientists cast doubt on Kennedy bullet analysis
Multiple shooters possible, study says
By John Solomon
The Washington Post
May 17, 2007

In a collision of 21st-century science and decades-old conspiracy theories, a research team that includes a former top FBI scientist is challenging the bullet analysis used by the government to conclude that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in assassinating President John F. Kennedy in 1963.

The "evidence used to rule out a second assassin is fundamentally flawed," concludes a new article in the Annals of Applied Statistics written by former FBI lab metallurgist William A. Tobin and Texas A&M University researchers Cliff Spiegelman and William D. James.

The researchers' re-analysis involved new statistical calculations and a modern chemical analysis of bullets from the same batch Oswald is purported to have used. They reached no conclusion about whether more than one gunman was involved, but urged that authorities conduct a new and complete forensic re-analysis of the five bullet fragments left from the assassination 44 years ago.

"Given the significance and impact of the JFK assassination, it is scientifically desirable for the evidentiary fragments to be re-analyzed," the researchers said.

Tobin was the FBI lab's chief metallurgy expert for more than two decades. He analyzed metal evidence in major cases that included the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and the 1996 explosion of TWA Flight 800 off Long Island.

After retiring, he attracted national attention by questioning the FBI science used in prosecutions for decades to match bullets to crime suspects through their lead content. The questions he and others raised prompted a National Academy of Sciences review that in 2003 concluded that the FBI's bullet lead analysis was flawed. The FBI agreed and generally ended the use of that type of analysis.

Using new guidelines set forth by the National Academy of Sciences for proper bullet analysis, Tobin and his colleagues at Texas A&M re-analyzed the bullet evidence used by the 1976 House Select Committee on Assassinations, which concluded that only one shooter, Oswald, fired the shots that killed Kennedy in Dallas.

The committee's finding was based in part on the research of now-deceased University of California at Irvine chemist Vincent P. Guinn. He used bullet lead analysis to conclude that the five bullet fragments recovered from the Kennedy assassination scene came from just two bullets, which were traced to the same batch of bullets Oswald owned.

To do their research, Tobin, Spiegelman and James said they bought the same brand and lot of bullets used by Oswald and analyzed their lead using the new standards. The bullets from that batch are still on the market as collectors' items.

They found that the scientific and statistical assumptions Guinn used -- and the government accepted at the time -- to conclude that the fragments came from just two bullets fired from Oswald's gun were wrong.

"This finding means that the bullet fragments from the assassination that match could have come from three or more separate bullets," the researchers said.

"If the assassination fragments are derived from three or more separate bullets, then a second assassin is likely, as the additional bullet would not be attributable to the main suspect, Mr. Oswald."

Al Gore: the assault on reason

Al Gore, in this article from Time, asks “What has happened to our country?” and brings up America's invasion of Iraq and willingness to torture as signals that something has gone dreadfully wrong.

Book Excerpt: The Assault on Reason
by Al Gore
Time Magazine
May 17, 2007

Not long before our nation launched the invasion of Iraq, our longest-serving Senator, Robert Byrd of West Virginia, stood on the Senate floor and said: “This chamber is, for the most part, silent—ominously, dreadfully silent. There is no debate, no discussion, no attempt to lay out for the nation the pros and cons of this particular war. There is nothing. We stand passively mute in the United States Senate.”

Why was the Senate silent?

In describing the empty chamber the way he did, Byrd invited a specific version of the same general question millions of us have been asking: “Why do reason, logic and truth seem to play a sharply diminished role in the way America now makes important decisions?” The persistent and sustained reliance on falsehoods as the basis of policy, even in the face of massive and well-understood evidence to the contrary, seems to many Americans to have reached levels that were previously unimaginable.

A large and growing number of Americans are asking out loud: “What has happened to our country?” People are trying to figure out what has gone wrong in our democracy, and how we can fix it.

To take another example, for the first time in American history, the Executive Branch of our government has not only condoned but actively promoted the treatment of captives in wartime that clearly involves torture, thus overturning a prohibition established by General George Washington during the Revolutionary War.

It is too easy—and too partisan—to simply place the blame on the policies of President George W. Bush. We are all responsible for the decisions our country makes. We have a Congress. We have an independent judiciary. We have checks and balances. We are a nation of laws. We have free speech. We have a free press. Have they all failed us? Why has America’s public discourse become less focused and clear, less reasoned? Faith in the power of reason—the belief that free citizens can govern themselves wisely and fairly by resorting to logical debate on the basis of the best evidence available, instead of raw power—remains the central premise of American democracy. This premise is now under assault.

American democracy is now in danger—not from any one set of ideas, but from unprecedented changes in the environment within which ideas either live and spread, or wither and die. I do not mean the physical environment; I mean what is called the public sphere, or the marketplace of ideas.

It is simply no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse. I know I am not alone in feeling that something has gone fundamentally wrong. In 2001, I had hoped it was an aberration when polls showed that three-quarters of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for attacking us on Sept. 11. More than five years later, however, nearly half of the American public still believes Saddam was connected to the attack.

At first I thought the exhaustive, nonstop coverage of the O.J. Simpson trial was just an unfortunate excess—an unwelcome departure from the normal good sense and judgment of our television news media. Now we know that it was merely an early example of a new pattern of serial obsessions that periodically take over the airwaves for weeks at a time: the Michael Jackson trial and the Robert Blake trial, the Laci Peterson tragedy and the Chandra Levy tragedy, Britney and KFed, Lindsay and Paris and Nicole.

While American television watchers were collectively devoting 100 million hours of their lives each week to these and other similar stories, our nation was in the process of more quietly making what future historians will certainly describe as a series of catastrophically mistaken decisions on issues of war and peace, the global climate and human survival, freedom and barbarity, justice and fairness. For example, hardly anyone now disagrees that the choice to invade Iraq was a grievous mistake. Yet, incredibly, all of the evidence and arguments necessary to have made the right decision were available at the time and in hindsight are glaringly obvious.

Those of us who have served in the U.S. Senate and watched it change over time could volunteer a response to Senator Byrd’s incisive description of the Senate prior to the invasion: The chamber was empty because the Senators were somewhere else. Many of them were at fund-raising events they now feel compelled to attend almost constantly in order to collect money—much of it from special interests—to buy 30-second TV commercials for their next re-election campaign. The Senate was silent because Senators don’t feel that what they say on the floor of the Senate really matters that much anymore—not to the other Senators, who are almost never present when their colleagues speak, and certainly not to the voters, because the news media seldom report on Senate speeches anymore.

Our Founders’ faith in the viability of representative democracy rested on their trust in the wisdom of a well-informed citizenry, their ingenious design for checks and balances, and their belief that the rule of reason is the natural sovereign of a free people. The Founders took great care to protect the openness of the marketplace of ideas so that knowledge could flow freely. Thus they not only protected freedom of assembly, they made a special point—in the First Amendment—of protecting the freedom of the printing press. And yet today, almost 45 years have passed since the majority of Americans received their news and information from the printed word. Newspapers are hemorrhaging readers. Reading itself is in decline. The Republic of Letters has been invaded and occupied by the empire of television.

Radio, the Internet, movies, cell phones, iPods, computers, instant messaging, video games and personal digital assistants all now vie for our attention—but it is television that still dominates the flow of information. According to an authoritative global study, Americans now watch television an average of 4 hours and 35 minutes every day—90 minutes more than the world average. When you assume eight hours of work a day, six to eight hours of sleep and a couple of hours to bathe, dress, eat and commute, that is almost three-quarters of all the discretionary time the average American has.

In the world of television, the massive flows of information are largely in only one direction, which makes it virtually impossible for individuals to take part in what passes for a national conversation. Individuals receive, but they cannot send. They hear, but they do not speak. The “well-informed citizenry” is in danger of becoming the “well-amused audience.” Moreover, the high capital investment required for the ownership and operation of a television station and the centralized nature of broadcast, cable and satellite networks have led to the increasing concentration of ownership by an ever smaller number of larger corporations that now effectively control the majority of television programming in America.

In practice, what television’s dominance has come to mean is that the inherent value of political propositions put forward by candidates is now largely irrelevant compared with the image-based ad campaigns they use to shape the perceptions of voters. The high cost of these commercials has radically increased the role of money in politics—and the influence of those who contribute it. That is why campaign finance reform, however well drafted, often misses the main point: so long as the dominant means of engaging in political dialogue is through purchasing expensive television advertising, money will continue in one way or another to dominate American politics. And as a result, ideas will continue to play a diminished role. That is also why the House and Senate campaign committees in both parties now search for candidates who are multimillionaires and can buy the ads with their own personal resources.

When I first ran for Congress in 1976, I never took a poll during the entire campaign. Eight years later, however, when I ran statewide for the U.S. Senate, I did take polls and like most statewide candidates relied more heavily on electronic advertising to deliver my message. I vividly remember a turning point in that Senate campaign when my opponent, a fine public servant named Victor Ashe who has since become a close friend, was narrowing the lead I had in the polls. After a detailed review of all the polling information and careful testing of potential TV commercials, the anticipated response from my opponent’s campaign and the planned response to the response, my advisers made a recommendation and prediction that surprised me with its specificity: “If you run this ad at this many ‘points’ [a measure of the size of the advertising buy], and if Ashe responds as we anticipate, and then we purchase this many points to air our response to his response, the net result after three weeks will be an increase of 8.5% in your lead in the polls.”

I authorized the plan and was astonished when three weeks later my lead had increased by exactly 8.5%. Though pleased, of course, for my own campaign, I had a sense of foreboding for what this revealed about our democracy. Clearly, at least to some degree, the “consent of the governed” was becoming a commodity to be purchased by the highest bidder. To the extent that money and the clever use of electronic mass media could be used to manipulate the outcome of elections, the role of reason began to diminish.

As a college student, I wrote my senior thesis on the impact of television on the balance of power among the three branches of government. In the study, I pointed out the growing importance of visual rhetoric and body language over logic and reason. There are countless examples of this, but perhaps understandably, the first one that comes to mind is from the 2000 campaign, long before the Supreme Court decision and the hanging chads, when the controversy over my sighs in the first debate with George W. Bush created an impression on television that for many viewers outweighed whatever positive benefits I might have otherwise gained in the verbal combat of ideas and substance. A lot of good that senior thesis did me.

The potential for manipulating mass opinions and feelings initially discovered by commercial advertisers is now being even more aggressively exploited by a new generation of media Machiavellis. The combination of ever more sophisticated public opinion sampling techniques and the increasing use of powerful computers to parse and subdivide the American people according to “psychographic” categories that identify their susceptibility to individually tailored appeals has further magnified the power of propagandistic electronic messaging that has created a harsh new reality for the functioning of our democracy.

As a result, our democracy is in danger of being hollowed out. In order to reclaim our birthright, we Americans must resolve to repair the systemic decay of the public forum. We must create new ways to engage in a genuine and not manipulative conversation about our future. We must stop tolerating the rejection and distortion of science. We must insist on an end to the cynical use of pseudo-studies known to be false for the purpose of intentionally clouding the public’s ability to discern the truth. Americans in both parties should insist on the re-establishment of respect for the rule of reason.

And what if an individual citizen or group of citizens wants to enter the public debate by expressing their views on television? Since they cannot simply join the conversation, some of them have resorted to raising money in order to buy 30 seconds in which to express their opinion. But too often they are not allowed to do even that. MoveOn.org tried to buy an ad for the 2004 Super Bowl broadcast to express opposition to Bush’s economic policy, which was then being debated by Congress. CBS told MoveOn that “issue advocacy” was not permissible. Then, CBS, having refused the MoveOn ad, began running advertisements by the White House in favor of the president’s controversial proposal. So MoveOn complained, and the White House ad was temporarily removed. By temporarily, I mean it was removed until the White House complained, and CBS immediately put the ad back on, yet still refused to present the MoveOn ad.

To understand the final reason why the news marketplace of ideas dominated by television is so different from the one that emerged in the world dominated by the printing press, it is important to distinguish the quality of vividness experienced by television viewers from the “vividness” experienced by readers. Marshall McLuhan’s description of television as a “cool” medium—as opposed to the “hot” medium of print—was hard for me to understand when I read it 40 years ago, because the source of “heat” in his metaphor is the mental work required in the alchemy of reading. But McLuhan was almost alone in recognizing that the passivity associated with watching television is at the expense of activity in parts of the brain associated with abstract thought, logic, and the reasoning process. Any new dominant communications medium leads to a new information ecology in society that inevitably changes the way ideas, feelings, wealth, power and influence are distributed and the way collective decisions are made.

As a young lawyer giving his first significant public speech at the age of 28, Abraham Lincoln warned that a persistent period of dysfunction and unresponsiveness by government could alienate the American people and that “the strongest bulwark of any government, and particularly of those constituted like ours, may effectively be broken down and destroyed—I mean the attachment of the people.” Many Americans now feel that our government is unresponsive and that no one in power listens to or cares what they think. They feel disconnected from democracy. They feel that one vote makes no difference, and that they, as individuals, have no practical means of participating in America’s self-government. Unfortunately, they are not entirely wrong. Voters are often viewed mainly as targets for easy manipulation by those seeking their “consent” to exercise power. By using focus groups and elaborate polling techniques, those who design these messages are able to derive the only information they’re interested in receiving from citizens—feedback useful in fine-tuning their efforts at manipulation. Over time, the lack of authenticity becomes obvious and takes its toll in the form of cynicism and alienation. And the more Americans disconnect from the democratic process, the less legitimate it becomes.

Many young Americans now seem to feel that the jury is out on whether American democracy actually works or not. We have created a wealthy society with tens of millions of talented, resourceful individuals who play virtually no role whatsoever as citizens. Bringing these people in—with their networks of influence, their knowledge, and their resources—is the key to creating the capacity for shared intelligence that we need to solve our problems.

Unfortunately, the legacy of the 20th century’s ideologically driven bloodbaths has included a new cynicism about reason itself—because reason was so easily used by propagandists to disguise their impulse to power by cloaking it in clever and seductive intellectual formulations. When people don’t have an opportunity to interact on equal terms and test the validity of what they’re being “taught” in the light of their own experience and robust, shared dialogue, they naturally begin to resist the assumption that the experts know best.

So the remedy for what ails our democracy is not simply better education (as important as that is) or civic education (as important as that can be), but the re-establishment of a genuine democratic discourse in which individuals can participate in a meaningful way—a conversation of democracy in which meritorious ideas and opinions from individuals do, in fact, evoke a meaningful response.

Fortunately, the Internet has the potential to revitalize the role played by the people in our constitutional framework. It has extremely low entry barriers for individuals. It is the most interactive medium in history and the one with the greatest potential for connecting individuals to one another and to a universe of knowledge. It’s a platform for pursuing the truth, and the decentralized creation and distribution of ideas, in the same way that markets are a decentralized mechanism for the creation and distribution of goods and services. It’s a platform, in other words, for reason. But the Internet must be developed and protected, in the same way we develop and protect markets—through the establishment of fair rules of engagement and the exercise of the rule of law. The same ferocity that our Founders devoted to protect the freedom and independence of the press is now appropriate for our defense of the freedom of the Internet. The stakes are the same: the survival of our Republic. We must ensure that the Internet remains open and accessible to all citizens without any limitation on the ability of individuals to choose the content they wish regardless of the Internet service provider they use to connect to the Web. We cannot take this future for granted. We must be prepared to fight for it, because of the threat of corporate consolidation and control over the Internet marketplace of ideas.

The danger arises because there is, in most markets, a very small number of broadband network operators. These operators have the structural capacity to determine the way in which information is transmitted over the Internet and the speed with which it is delivered. And the present Internet network operators—principally large telephone and cable companies—have an economic incentive to extend their control over the physical infrastructure of the network to leverage control of Internet content. If they went about it in the wrong way, these companies could institute changes that have the effect of limiting the free flow of information over the Internet in a number of troubling ways.

The democratization of knowledge by the print medium brought the Enlightenment. Now, broadband interconnection is supporting decentralized processes that reinvigorate democracy. We can see it happening before our eyes: As a society, we are getting smarter. Networked democracy is taking hold. You can feel it. We the people—as Lincoln put it, “even we here”—are collectively still the key to the survival of America’s democracy.

George Tenet: liar, international criminal

Information Clearing House carries this no-nonsense indictment of George Tenet for cooperating with the “supreme international crime” of the war of aggression on Iraq.

Four-letter Word for Tenet: Liar
By Ray McGovern
Information Clearing House
May 16, 2007

If they question why we died,
Tell them because our fathers lied.
Rudyard Kipling

Mercifully, the flurry of media coverage of former CIA director George Tenet hawking his memoir, “At the Center of the Storm,” has abated. Buffeted by those on both right and left who see through his lame attempt at self-justification, Tenet probably now wishes he had opted to just fade away, as old soldiers used to do.

He listened instead to his old PR buddy and “co-author” Bill Harlow who failed miserably in trying to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. By this point, they may be having second thoughts. But, hey, the $4 million advance is a tidy sum, even when split two ways. Aside from the money, what else could they have been thinking?

Tenet’s book is a self-indictment for the crimes with which Socrates was charged: making the worse cause appear the better, and corrupting the youth.

But George is not the kind to take the hemlock. Rather, with no apparent shame, he accepted what one wag has labeled the “Presidential Medal of Silence” in return for agreeing to postpone his Nixon-style “modified limited hangout” until after the mid-term elections last November. The $4 million advance that Tenet and Harlow took for the book marked a shabby, inauspicious beginning to the effort to stitch together what remains of Tenet’s tattered reputation.

Here in Washington we are pretty much inured to effrontery, but Tenet’s book and tiresome interviews have earned him the degree for chutzpah summa cum laude. We are supposed to feel sorry for this pathetic soul, who could not muster the integrity simply to tell the truth and stave off unspeakable carnage in Iraq. Rather, when his masters lied to justify war, Tenet simply lacked the courage to tell his fellow citizens that America was about to launch what the post WWII Nuremberg Tribunal called the “supreme international crime”—a war of aggression.

Tenet’s pitiable apologia demonstrates once again not only that absolute power corrupts absolutely, but also that the corruption befouls all those nearby.

Cheney’s Chess

For those of prurient bent, the book offers a keyhole-peep into a White House of ill repute, with Vice President Dick Cheney playing at his chess board, moving sniveling pawns like Tenet from one square to another.

Someone should have told the former CIA director that unprovoked war is not some sort of game. Out of respect for the tens of thousands killed and maimed in Iraq, it is time to start calling spades spades. It was a high crime, a premeditated felony to have taken part in this conspiracy.

Not surprisingly, few of Tenet’s talk-show hosts were armed with enough facts to pierce the smoke and the arrogant now-you-listen-to-me approach from Bill Harlow’s PR toolbox. Whether out of ignorance or just habit, celebrity interviewers kept cutting Tenet more and more slack. Understandable, I suppose, for they, like Tenet, were enthusiastic cheerleaders for the attack on Iraq. And so, affable, hot-blooded George was allowed to filibuster, bob, weave, and blow still more smoke. Tenet should not be behind a microphone; he should be behind bars.

With nauseating earnestness, Tenet keeps saying:

“I believed there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.”

This is a lie. And no matter how many times he says it (after the axiom of his master, George W. Bush, who has stressed publicly that repetition is necessary to “catapult the propaganda”), Tenet can no longer conceal the deceit. Indeed, the only other possibility—that he is (as he complains) being made the useful “idiot” on whom Vice President Dick Cheney and others mean to blame the war—can be ruled out.

Tenet was indeed useful to Cheney and Bush, but he is no idiot. Those who do not rely exclusively on the corporate media for their information know Tenet for what he is—a charlatan. A willing co-conspirator, he did for Bush and Cheney what propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels did for Hitler. The key difference is that Goebbels and his Nazi collaborators, rather than writing books and taking sinecures to enrich themselves, were held accountable at Nuremberg.

Phantom Weapons of Mass Destruction

Tenet knew there were no WMD. Secret British documents reveal not only that Tenet told his British counterpart the intelligence was being “fixed” around the policy. They also show that Washington and London developed a scheme to “wrongfoot” Saddam Hussein by insisting on the kind of UN inspections they were sure he would reject, thus providing a convenient casus belli.

Saddam outfoxed them by allowing the most intrusive inspection regime in recent history. At the turn of 2002-03 UN inspectors were crawling all over Saddam’s palaces, interviewing his scientists, and pursuing every tip they could get from Tenet—and finding nothing.

What did satellite imagery show? Nothing, save for the embarrassingly inconclusive photos that then-Secretary of State Colin Powell displayed on Feb. 5, 2003 at the UN. Were there any photos of those biological weapons trailers reported by the shadowy Curveball? None. And so “artist renderings” were conjured up to show what these sinister trailers might look like.

At least the renderings produced by the CIA graphics shop were more professional than the crude forgeries upon which the fable about Iraq seeking uranium in Africa was based. And the Cheney-Rice-Judith Miller story about aluminum tubes for uranium enrichment got bent hopelessly out of shape as soon as genuine scientists (as opposed to Tenet’s stable of malleable engineers) got hold of them.

Exactly four years ago, amid the euphoria of Mission Accomplished and the incipient concern over the trouble encountered in finding WMD, then-deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz told writer Sam Tanenhaus of Vanity Fair that Iraq’s supposed cache of WMD had never been the most important casus belli. It was simply one of several reasons:

“For bureaucratic reasons we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on...Almost unnoticed but huge is another reason: removing Saddam will allow the U.S. to take its troops out of Saudi Arabia...”

Absence of Evidence

Who needs real evidence as opposed to allegations of WMD, when the name of the game is removing Saddam? But how to explain the blather about WMD in the lead-up to the war, when not one piece of imagery or other intelligence could confirm the presence of such weapons? Easy. Apply the Rumsfeld maxim: “The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” And then explain further that the lack of evidence proves nothing but how clever the Iraqis have become at hiding their weapons. Don’t laugh; that’s what Rumsfeld and the neocons said.

That foolishness had run its course by March 2003 when, despite the best “leads” Tenet could provide and the intrusive inspection regime, the UN inspectors could find nothing. It was getting downright embarrassing for those bent on a belli without an ostensible casus, but by then enough troops were in place to conquer Iraq (or so thought Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz). At that point Bush told the UN to withdraw its inspectors promptly and let them watch the fireworks of shock and awe from a safer distance on TV. (The real shocker is President Bush repeated insistence that Saddam threw out the inspectors. But, again, he has so successfully “catapulted” this piece of propaganda that most Americans do not realize it is a lie.)

How did the White House conspirators think they could get away with all this? Well, don’t you remember Cheney saying we would be greeted as liberators...and Ken Neocon Adelman assuring us that it would be a “cakewalk?” We would defeat a fourth-rate army, remove a “ruthless dictator,” eliminate an adversary of Israel, and end up sitting atop all that oil with permanent military bases and no further need to station troops in Saudi Arabia. At that point, smiled the neocons, what spoilsport will be able to make political hay by insisting: Yes, but you did this on the basis of forgery, fakery; and where, by the way, are the weapons of mass destruction?

Granted that over recent weeks George Tenet has shown himself a bit dense beneath the bluster. Nevertheless, there is simply no defense on grounds of density—or gross ineptitude or momentary insanity. He clearly played a sustained role in the chicanery.

Okay; if you insist: let’s assume for a moment that Rumsfeld did actually succeed in convincing Tenet that the reason there was no evidence of WMD was because the Iraqis were so good at hiding them. What then?

Tenet does not get off the hook. There was, in fact, no absence of well sourced evidence that Saddam’s WMD had all been destroyed shortly after the Gulf War in 1991—yes, all of them.

You Go With the Evidence There Is

In 1995, when Saddam Hussein's son-in-law, Hussein Kamel, defected with a treasure trove of documents, he spilled the beans on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. There were none. He knew. He was in charge of the chemical, biological, nuclear, and missile programs and ordered all such weapons destroyed before the UN inspectors could discover them after the war in 1991. He told us much more, and the information that could be checked out was confirmed.

The George-and-Condoleezza-must-have-just-missed-this-report excuse won’t wash, because Newsweek acquired a transcript of Kamel’s debriefing and broke the story on Feb. 24, 2003, several weeks before the war, noting gingerly that Kamel’s information “raises questions about whether the WMD stockpiles attributed to Iraq still exist.”

It was the kind of well-sourced documentary evidence after which intelligence analysts and lawyers positively lust. But the mainstream press dropped it like a hot potato after Bill Harlow (yes, Tenet’s co-author), in his role as CIA spokesperson, angrily protested (a bit too much) that the Newsweek story was “incorrect, bogus, wrong, untrue.” It was, rather, entirely correct; it was documentary—and not forged this time. Curiously, the name of Hussein Kamel shows up on a listing of Iraqis in the front of Tenet’s book, but nowhere in the text. Tenet and Harlow apparently decided to avoid calling attention to the fact that they suppressed information from a super source, preferring instead to help the White House grease the skids for war.

In late summer 2002 CIA operatives had a signal success. They had recruited Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri and had him working in place--for the U.S. Proud of their successful recruitment of a senior Iraqi official, officers of CIA’s clandestine service immediately sought and were given an early meeting with President Bush and his senior advisers.

The information Sabri had already passed to us had checked out well. Naively, the agency officers were expecting sighs of relief as they quoted him saying there were no WMD in Iraq. The information went over like a lead balloon, dispelling all excitement over this high-level penetration of the Iraqi government.

When the CIA officers got back to Headquarters and told colleagues what had just happened at the White House, those who had been tasking Naji Sabri asked whether they should seek additional intelligence from him on the subject. According to Tyler Drumheller, the division chief in charge of such collection, the answer was loud and clear: “Well, this isn’t about intel any more. This is about regime change.”

And then there was Curveball. Tenet and his deputy, John McLaughlin, played a direct role regarding the notorious “Curveball,” a former Iraqi taxi driver and convicted embezzler whom German intelligence deemed a mentally unstable alcoholic, who was "out of control." Unlike the unwelcome reporting from the Iraqi foreign minister, Curveball provided very welcome, if bogus, information on alleged mobile laboratories producing biological weapons in Iraq—grist for the “artist renderings” for Powell’s UN speech.

It was all a crock. And Tenet and McLaughlin both knew it, because Drumheller gave them chapter and verse before Powell's speech, and has now written a book about this sad story.

Moreover, the normally taciturn, but recently outspoken former director of State Department intelligence, Carl Ford, has noted that both Tenet and McLaughlin took a personal hand in writing a follow-up report aimed at salvaging what Curveball had said. Ford spared no words: The report “wasn’t just wrong, they lied...they should have been shot."

Nor can Tenet expunge from the record his witting cooperation in the cynical campaign to exploit the trauma we all felt after 9/11, by intimating a connection with that heinous event and Saddam Hussein. If, as Tenet now concedes, no significant connection could be established between Saddam and al-Qaeda, why did he sit quietly behind Powell at the UN as Powell spun a yarn about a "sinister nexus" between the two? That sorry exhibition destroyed what was left of the morale of honest CIA analysts who, until then, had courageously resisted intense pressure to endorse that evidence-less but explosive canard.

A Cropping Worth a Thousand Words

George Tenet's book includes a photo that is a metaphor for both the primary purpose of his memoir and its unintended result. Most will remember the famous photo of Colin Powell briefing the UN Security Council, with Tenet and then-US ambassador to the UN, John Negroponte sitting staunchly behind him. Well, on a centerfold page large enough to accommodate the familiar shot, the photo has been cropped to exclude Tenet altogether and include only Negroponte’s shoulder and nose (which, mercifully, he was not holding at the time.) This is an incredibly adolescent attempt to distance Tenet from that scandalous performance, even though he was the one most responsible for it. The cropping also suggests that Tenet and Harlow are only too aware that by including spurious “intelligence” in Powell’s speech and then sitting stoically behind him as if to validate it, Tenet visibly squandered CIA's most precious asset--credibility.

“It was a great presentation, but unfortunately the substance didn’t hold up,” blithely write Tenet and Harlow, without any trace of acknowledgment of the enormous consequences of the deception. In a Feb. 5, 2003 Memorandum for the President regarding Powell’s speech that day, we Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) gave him an “A” for presentation, and a “C-” for content. (If we knew then what we know now we would of course have flunked him outright.) In the VIPS memo we warned the president that intelligence analysts were “increasingly distressed at the politicization of intelligence...and finding it hard to be heard above the drumbeat for war.”

That a war of choice was on the horizon was crystal clear—as were the consequences. We urged the president to “widen the discussion beyond violations of Resolution 1441,and beyond the circle of those advisers clearly bent on a war for which we see no compelling reason and from which we believe the unintended consequences are likely to be catastrophic.” We take no comfort in having got that one right. Former UN Chief Inspector and U.S. Marine Major, Scott Ritter, was screaming it from the rooftops (and was blacklisted by the domesticated media). It was a no-brainer.

Tenet Breaks Tenet

Tenet’s tell-some-but-not-all book is unwittingly self-incriminating in another key respect, an illustration of what happens when you have a politician, with PR help, running U.S. intelligence. Much of the Tenet/Harlow self-justifying prose is transparent to any observer who has been paying the slightest attention to issues of intelligence on Iraq over the past few years. What may not be fully clear is that, in his zeal to indict others and exculpate himself, Tenet plays fast and loose with a cardinal tenet of intelligence work. You don’t reveal confidential discussions with policymakers—and you especially don’t quote the president. You simply do not do that. For once you violate confidentiality, not only your effectiveness but also that of those who succeed you will be greatly impaired, if not ended.

In normal circumstances presidents have a right to expect that their conversations with advisers will be kept in strictest confidence, and not revealed later by some buffoon pushing a book. And it is the height of irresponsibility for an intelligence director to quote a president still in office. If the president and senior advisers are unable to count on confidences being kept, it becomes impossible to conduct sensible discussions on policy making.

Why do I say “in normal circumstances?” Because no president has the right to plan a war of aggression with high confidence that accomplices, or others that might become privy to such plans, will stay quiet and not blow the whistle. The oath we take to defend the Constitution of the United States supersedes any promise, explicit or implicit, to enable the president to commit crimes in our name. (And someone ought to tell that to Sen. Dick Durbin, who recently confessed that he knew the intelligence justification for war was a crock, but could not tell the American people because it was secret!)

Am I saying there are circumstances in which conscience may require divulging the confidential remarks of the president of the United States? Of course there are, and these circumstances are a case in point. But that, sadly, was/is far from George Tenet’s intent. That he sees fit now to violate the principle of confidentiality in a quixotic attempt at self-justification (and, yes, his share of the $4 million) betokens not only an adolescent narcissism oblivious to the importance of trust, but also a lack of genuine respect for policymakers, including the president. Those of us who have been privileged to brief the president’s father and other senior national security officials—and there must be a hundred of us by now—never violated that trust the way Tenet has done.

Most people do not know that personal access to the president and his top advisers was a rarity during most of the CIA’s first three decades. Regularized personal access by CIA officers did not begin until former director and then-vice president George H. W. Bush persuaded President Ronald Reagan to authorize the sharing of the President’s Daily Brief (PDB) in one-on-one morning briefings for the vice president, the secretaries of state and defense, and the president’s national security adviser. (With White House approval, we later added the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs as a daily consumer.)

These early morning briefings were conducted by us senior analysts who prepared the PDB (and badgered the drafter/analysts with all manner of questions) the day and night before. We were experienced intelligence professionals steeped in substance and just a secure telephone call away from the analysts we knew could provide additional, trustworthy detail if needed. It was a position of great trust.

Our ethos, our job, was to speak unvarnished truth to power, irrespective of the policy agendas of the officials we briefed. We were trusted to do that as honestly and professionally as possible. The last thing we needed was a CIA director looking over our shoulder—particularly one, like Tenet, not well schooled in the need to protect the credibility of intelligence by avoiding policy advocacy like the plague. During the Reagan presidency, the CIA director rarely joined us for the PDB briefings and did no pre-publication review. The director had quite enough on his plate. His was a dual job involving herding the cats of a scarcely manageable, multi-agency intelligence community, while trying to manage one agency (CIA) itself conceived with a serious birth defect.

A Structural Flaw

A most unfortunate flaw in the National Security Act of 1947 gave the CIA director not only responsibility for preparing unvarnished intelligence, but the additional duty “to perform other such functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security as the National Security Council may from time to time direct”—like running secret wars, as in Nicaragua; overthrowing governments, as in Iran, Guatemala, Chile; and applying President Bush-favored “alternative” methods of interrogation in secret prisons in violation of international and U.S. Army law, as in Afghanistan and Iraq.

This was hardly President Harry Truman’s original intent. Long after he left the White House, Truman addressed this directly in an article for the then independent Washington Post on Dec. 22, 1963:

“I have been disturbed by the way the CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times policy-making arm of the government...I never had any thought of that when I set up the CIA.... I would like to see the CIA restored to its original assignment as the intelligence arm of the president...and its operational duties terminated or properly used elsewhere.


A pity no one listened to Truman. As a result, for the CIA director each of the two scarcely compatible jobs became full-time challenges. During my 27-year career I had a front-row seat watching nine directors, most of whom did their best to act with integrity and honesty, despite that noxious structural fault. And, if that were not enough, this difficult dual task was accompanied by the additional responsibility to manage the entire intelligence community (16 agencies now). This posed a tri-fold management challenge.

Tenet all but admits he was not up to it. I’m “no Jack Welch,” is the way he puts it. Equally unfortunate, he picked inexperienced managers distinguished only by their malleability, their subservience to the perceived wishes of the next level up. Perhaps the best case in point is John McLaughlin, the quintessential affable go-along-to-get-along functionary. McLaughlin very rarely made use of his prerogative as statutory deputy in charge of the intelligence community and did not become much involved in operations. At the top of his sins of commission was staffing substantive analysis with weak-reed supervisors, the easier to bend analytic conclusions to the prevailing winds from the White House and Pentagon.

As for poor misunderstood George, instead of tending to his knitting at CIA headquarters, he decided to hitch a ride downtown with the PDB briefer in the morning, and thus secure regular face time with his pal, the president. From all reports there were many “slam dunks” voiced in those very private discussions. Worse still, Tenet felt free to ignore substantive dissent from other intelligence agencies—a practice that, though occasionally tempting, NEVER makes real sense and was an abnegation of his major responsibility. He knew what the president wanted to hear. And the McLaughlin-protégé analysts knew it too. Not only did they serve it up to recipe, but they actually took steps to conceal from colleagues elsewhere in the intelligence community what their boss was telling the president. On those few occasions when colleagues from other agencies learned via the grapevine what Tenet was telling the president, they were aghast and, understandably, angry. But none of their own bosses, including Colin Powell, dared get crosswise with the Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal.

What Tenet should have told Bush? For starters, that:

--State Department analysts had heaped scorn on the Cheney fiction that Iraq had “reconstituted” its nuclear weapons program. They were, of course, right, but why make it harder for the president to keep a straight face when warning of mushroom clouds? Remember, it is not about Intel; it’s about regime change.

--State had described the cockamamie report about Iraq seeking uranium from Africa as “highly suspect” well before it was learned that this choice morsel was based on a forgery.

--Department of Energy analysts were having a riotous laugh at the thought those famous aluminum tubes could be somehow warped into use for uranium enrichment. The laugh, though, was mostly a mechanism to help suppress their rage over Tenet’s recruitment of pseudo-engineers to spin those aluminum artillery tubes into something more menacing.

--US Air Force intelligence experts thought hilarious the specter of Iraqi planes scarcely larger than the models seen on the Washington Monument grounds somehow flying to our shores to spray chemical or biological agents. But the Air Force, too, caved, acquiescing in their dissent being relegated to a footnote in the infamous National Intelligence Estimate of Oct. 1, 2002 on Iraqi WMD.

But Tenet knew what Bush wanted. And “action officer” Condoleezza could boil down the intelligence estimate into one page and read it to the president, if the opportunity affords itself.

Tenet’s Ave atque Vale in the preface to his book speaks volumes. One need read no further. He looks back unapologetically and with satisfaction on his long career as chief of intelligence, “not always successful, but...“striving to do what is right.”

“Son of immigrants John and Evangelia Tenet, who left their villages in Greece to give me that chance”...and give us George Tenet.

Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.
Beware the Greeks bearing gifts.
Virgil

An earlier version of this article appeared on Consortiumnews.com

Republicans are the party of torture. Audience applauds waterboarding, doubling of Guantanamo

America has officially lost any moral authority it had. Not just politicians and pundits, but audience members as well -- citizens, civilians, everyday Americans -- seem to have gone so insane with fear and revenge that they are willing to give up the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, and just plain basic "everything I need to know I learned in kindergarten" morals. It seems that there is no longer any morality at all to them. And perversely, this comes from the party that declares itself to be the morality police for the rest of us, telling us that homosexual marriage will harm the institution of marriage (and is "morally wrong"). I'll tell you what's morally wrong, and it isn't homosexual marriage -- it's torturing people.

Think Progress has an excerpt from Tuesday's Republican presidential debates (see YouTube video above) in which candidate Rudy Giuliani endorses waterboarding and "every method they can think of":

HUME: Mayor Giuliani, the former Director of Central Intelligence, George Tenet, the current head of the CIA have both said that the most valuable intelligence tool they have had has been the information gained from what are called “enhanced interrogation techniques,” to include, presumably, waterboarding. What is your view whether such techniques should be applied in a scenario like the one I described?

GIULIANI: In the hypothetical that you gave me, which assumes that we know there is going to be another attack and these people know about it, I would tell the people who had to do the interrogation to use every method they can think of. Shouldn’t be torture, but every method they can think of.

HUME: Water boarding?

GIULIANI: I would say every method they could think of, and I would support them in doing that because I have seen — [applause] — I have seen what can happen when you make a mistake about this and I don’t want to see another 3,000 people dead in New York or any place else.

Republican presidential candidate Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-CO) endorsed "Jack Bauer" techniques, saying "we are the last best hope of Western Civilization".

TANCREDO: I just say that it’s almost unbelievable to listen to this in a way. We are talking about it in such a theoretical fashion. You say that nuclear devices have gone off in the United States, more are planned, and we are wondering about whether waterboarding would a bad thing to do? I’m look for Jack Bauer at that time, let me tell you. [applause] There is nothing — if you are talking about — I mean, we are the last best hope of Western Civilization. So all of the theories that go behind our activities, subsequent to these nuclear attacks going off in the United States, they go out the window. When we go under, western civilization goes under. So you better take that into account and you better do every single thing you can as President of the United States to make sure, number one, it doesn’t happen, that’s right. But, number two, you better respond in a way that makes them fearful of you, because, otherwise, you guarantee something like this will happen.

As Think Progress notes,

During the debate last year over loosening the definition of torture, Gen. Colin Powell declared, “The world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism. To redefine Common Article 3 [of the Geneva Conventions]... would put our own troops at risk.” Earlier this year, the U.S. Army dispatched a general to tell producers of the television show 24 that its promotion of torture “was having a damaging effect on young troops.”

I simply don't understand people who endorse torture. How can they not realize that they give up any moral authority whatsoever as soon as they do so? How can they even criticize terrorism? How can they say "we are the last best hope of Western Civilization", when our country practices torture? A kindergartner would know it was wrong.

See this article from USA Today about the television show 24's glorification of torture.

Vague Law and Hard Lobbying Add Up to Billions for Big Oil

In my previous post, I mentioned that oil companies extract oil from publicly-owned land without paying any royalties -- that is, they get the oil for free, and then turn around and charge record prices while making record profits. The following is the original article where I read about this, from the New York Times.

Vague Law and Hard Lobbying Add Up to Billions for Big Oil
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS
March 27, 2006
New York Times

WASHINGTON, March 26 — It was after midnight and every lawmaker in the committee room wanted to go home, but there was still time to sweeten a deal encouraging oil and gas companies to drill in the Gulf of Mexico.

"There is no cost," declared Representative Joe L. Barton, a Texas Republican who was presiding over Congressional negotiations on the sprawling energy bill last July. An obscure provision on new drilling incentives was "so noncontroversial," he added, that senior House and Senate negotiators had not even discussed it.

Mr. Barton's claim had a long history. For more than a decade, lawmakers and administration officials, both Republicans and Democrats, have promised there would be no cost to taxpayers for a program allowing companies to avoid paying the government royalties on oil and gas produced in publicly owned waters in the Gulf.

But last month, the Bush administration confirmed that it expected the government to waive about $7 billion in royalties over the next five years, even though the industry incentive was expressly conceived of for times when energy prices were low. And that number could quadruple to more than $28 billion if a lawsuit filed last week challenging one of the program's remaining restrictions proves successful.

"The big lie about this whole program is that it doesn't cost anything," said Representative Edward J. Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat who tried to block its expansion last July. "Taxpayers are being asked to provide huge subsidies to oil companies to produce oil — it's like subsidizing a fish to swim."

How did a supposedly cost-free incentive become a multibillion-dollar break to an industry making record profits?

The answer is a familiar Washington story of special-interest politics at work: the people who pay the closest attention and make the fewest mistakes are those with the most profit at stake.

It is an account of legislators who passed a law riddled with ambiguities; of crucial errors by midlevel bureaucrats under President Bill Clinton; of $2 billion in inducements from the Bush administration, which was intent on promoting energy production; and of Republican lawmakers who wanted to do even more. At each turn, through shrewd lobbying and litigation, oil and gas companies ended up with bigger incentives than before.

Until last month, hardy anyone noticed — or even knew — the real costs. They were obscured in part by the long gap between the time incentives are offered and when new offshore wells start producing. But lawmakers shrouded the costs with rosy projections. And administration officials consistently declined to tally up the money they were forfeiting.

Most industry executives say that the royalty relief spurred drilling and exploration when prices were relatively low. But the industry is divided about whether it is appropriate to continue the incentives with prices at current levels. Michael Coney, a lawyer for Shell Oil, said, "Under the current environment, we don't need royalty relief."

The program's original architect said he was surprised by what had happened. "The one thing I can tell you is that this is not what we intended," said J. Bennett Johnston, a former Democratic senator from Louisiana who had pushed for the original incentives that Congress passed in 1995.

Mr. Johnston conceded that he was confused by his own law. "I got out the language a few days ago," he said in a recent interview. "I had it out just long enough to know that it's got a lot of very obscure language."

A Subsidy of Disputed Need

Things looked bleak for oil and gas companies in 1995, especially for those along the Gulf Coast.

Energy prices had been so low for so long that investment had dried up. With crude oil selling for about $16 a barrel, scores of wildcatters and small exploration companies had gone out of business. Few companies had any stomach for drilling in water thousands of feet deep, and industry leaders like Exxon and Royal Dutch Shell were increasingly focused on opportunities abroad.

"At the time, the Gulf of Mexico was like the Dead Sea," recalled John Northington, then an Energy Department policy adviser and now an industry lobbyist.

Senator Johnston, convinced that the Gulf's vast reservoirs and Louisiana's oil-based economy were being neglected, had argued for years that Congress should offer incentives for deep-water drilling and exploration.

"Failure to invest in the Gulf of Mexico is a lost opportunity for the U.S.," Mr. Johnston pleaded in a letter to other lawmakers. "Those dollars will not move into other domestic development, they will move to Asia, South America, the Middle East or the former Soviet Union."

Working closely with industry executives, he wrote legislation that would allow a company drilling in deep water to escape the standard 12 percent royalty on up to 87.5 million barrels of oil or its equivalent in natural gas. The coastal waters are mostly owned by the federal government, which leases tens of millions of acres in exchange for upfront fees and a share of sales, or royalties.

Mr. Johnston and other supporters argued that the incentives would actually generate money for the government by increasing production and prompting companies to bid higher prices for new leases.

"The provision will result in a minimum net benefit to the Treasury of $200 million by the year 2000," Mr. Johnston declared in November 1995, denouncing what he called "outrageous allegations" that the plan was a giveaway.

He won support from oil-state Democrats, Republicans and the Clinton administration. Hazel O'Leary, the energy secretary at the time, said the assistance would reduce American dependence on foreign oil and "enhance national security."

Representative Robert Livingston of Louisiana, then a rising Republican leader, declared that the inducements would "create thousands of jobs" and "reduce the deficit."

Many budget experts agree that the rosy estimates were misleading. The reason, they say, is that it often takes seven years before a new offshore field begins producing. As a result, almost all the costs of royalty relief would occur outside of Congress's five-year budget timeframe.

Opponents protested that the cost estimates were wrong, that the incentives amounted to corporate welfare and that companies did not need government incentives to invest.

"They are going to the Gulf of Mexico because that's where the oil is," said Representative George Miller, Democrat of California, during a House debate. "What we do here is not going to change that. We are just going to decide whether or not we are going to give away the taxpayers' dollars to a lot of oil companies that do not need it."

Industry executives and lobbyists fanned out across Capitol Hill to shore up support for the program, visiting 150 lawmakers in October 1995. The effort succeeded. A month later, Congress passed Mr. Johnston's bill.

A Missing Escape Clause

To hear lawmakers today, they never intended to waive royalties when energy prices were high.

The 1995 law, according to Republicans and Democrats alike, was supposed to include an escape clause: in any year when average spot prices for oil or gas climbed above certain threshold levels, companies would pay full royalties instead.

"Royalty relief is an effective tool for two things: keeping investment in America during times of super-low prices, and spurring American energy production when massive capital and technological risks would otherwise preclude it," said Representative Richard W. Pombo, Republican of California and chairman of the House Resources Committee. "Absent those criteria, I do not believe any relief should be granted."

But in what administration officials said appeared to have been a mistake, Clinton administration managers omitted the crucial escape clause in all offshore leases signed in 1998 and 1999.

At the time, with oil prices still below $20 a barrel, the mistake seemed harmless. But energy prices have been above the cutoff points since 2002, and Interior Department officials estimate that about one-sixth of production in the Gulf of Mexico is still exempt from royalties.

Walter Cruickshank, a senior official in both the Clinton and Bush administrations, told lawmakers last month that officials writing the lease contracts thought the price thresholds were spelled out in the new regulations, which were completed in 1998. But officials writing the regulations left those details out, preferring to set the precise rules at each new lease sale.

"It seems to have been a massive screw-up," said Mr. Northington, who was then in the Energy Department. No one noticed the error for two years, and no one informed Congress about it until last month.

Five years later, the costs of that lapse were compounded. A group of oil companies, led by Shell, defeated the Bush administration in court. The decision more than doubled the amount of oil and gas that companies could produce without paying royalties.

The case began as a relatively obscure dispute. Shell paid $3.8 million in 1997 for a Gulf lease and soon drilled a successful well. But the Interior Department denied the company royalty relief, saying that Shell had drilled into an older field already producing oil and gas. The decision hinged on undersea geography and the court's interpretation of language in the 1995 law.

A typical field, or geological reservoir, often encompasses two or three separately leased tracts of ocean floor. Interior Department officials insisted that the maximum amount of royalty-free oil and gas was based on each field. Shell and its partners argued that limit applied only to each lease.

Perhaps shrewdly, the oil companies sued the Bush administration in Louisiana, where federal courts previously had sided with the industry in spats with the government.

The fight was not even close. In January 2003, a federal district judge declared that the Interior Department's rules violated the 1995 law. If the department "disagrees with Congress's policy choices," Judge James T. Trimble Jr. wrote, "then such arguments are best addressed to Congress."

What might have been a $2 billion mistake in the Clinton administration suddenly ballooned into a $5 billion headache under Mr. Bush.

But even as the Bush administration was losing in court, it was offering new incentives for the energy industry.

Mr. Bush placed a top priority on expanding oil and gas production as soon as he took office in 2001. Vice President Dick Cheney's task force on energy, warning of a deepening shortfall in domestic energy production, urged the government to "explore opportunities for royalty reduction" and to open areas like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling.

Gale A. Norton, who stepped down this month as interior secretary, moved quickly to speed up approvals of new drilling permits. Starting in 2001, she offered royalty incentives to shallow-water producers who drilled more than 15,000 feet below the sea bottom.

In January 2004, Ms. Norton made the incentives far more generous by raising the threshold prices. Her decision meant that deep-gas drillers were able to escape royalties in 2005, when prices spiked to record levels, and would probably escape them this year as well.

She also offered to sweeten less-generous contracts the drillers had signed before the regulation was approved.

"These incentives will help ensure we have a reliable supply of natural gas in the future," Ms. Norton proclaimed, predicting that American consumers would save "an estimated $570 million a year" in lower fuel prices.

Ms. Norton's decision was influenced by the industry. The Interior Department had originally proposed a cut-off price for royalty exemptions of $5 per million British thermal units, or B.T.U.'s, of gas. But the Independent Petroleum Association of America, which represents smaller producers, argued that the new incentive would have little value because natural gas prices were already above $5. Ms. Norton set the threshold at $9.34.

Based on administration assumptions about future production and prices, that change could cost the government about $1.9 billion in lost royalties.

"There is no cost rationale," said Shirley J. Neff, an economist at Columbia University and Senator Johnston's top legislative aide in drafting the 1995 royalty law. "It is astounding to me that the administration would so blatantly cave in to the industry's demands."

Incentives Keep Growing

Last April, President Bush himself expressed skepticism about giving new incentives to oil and gas drillers. "With oil at $50 a barrel," Mr. Bush remarked, "I don't think energy companies need taxpayer-funded incentives to explore."

But on Aug. 8, Mr. Bush signed a sweeping energy bill that contained $2.6 billion in new tax breaks for oil and gas drillers and a modest expansion of the 10-year-old "royalty relief" program. For the most part, the law locked in incentives that the Interior Department was already offering for another five years. But it included some embellishments, like an extra break on royalties for companies drilling in the deepest waters.

Lee Fuller, vice president of the Independent Petroleum Association of America, said smaller companies wanted to prevent future administrations from cutting back on incentives. "Having a clear, stable royalty policy was of value to independent producers," he said.

And energy companies, whose executives had long contributed campaign funds to Republican candidates, pushed to block any amendments aimed at diluting the benefits.

The push to lock in the royalty inducements came primarily from House Republicans. The only real opposition came from a handful of House Democrats, in a showdown about 1 a.m. on July 25, according to a transcript of the session.

"It is indefensible to be keeping these companies on the government dole when oil and gas prices are so high," charged Representative Markey of Massachusetts, who proposed to strip the royalty provisions. "We might as well be giving tax breaks to Donald Trump and Warren Buffett."

Mr. Barton, the Texas Republican, brushed aside the objections. He reassured lawmakers that the new provisions would not cost taxpayers anything.

When Mr. Markey proposed a more modest change — having Congress prohibit incentives if crude oil prices rose above $40 a barrel — Republicans quickly voted him down again.

"The only reason they waited until after midnight to bring up these issues is that they couldn't stand up in the light of day," Mr. Markey said in a recent interview. "They all expected me to give up because it was so late and I didn't have the votes. But if nothing else, I wanted to get these things on the record."

A Royalty-Free Future?

It is still not clear how much impact the reduced royalties had in encouraging deep-water drilling. While activity in the Gulf has increased since 1995, prices for oil and gas have more than quadrupled over the same period, providing a powerful motivation, experts say.

"It's hard to make a case for royalty relief, especially at these high prices," said Jack Overstreet, owner of an independent oil exploration company in Texas. "But the oil industry is like the farm lobby and will have its hand out at every opportunity."

The size of the subsidies will soar far higher if oil companies win their newest court battle.

In a lawsuit filed March 17, Kerr-McGee Exploration and Production argued that Congress never authorized the government to set price cut-offs for incentives on leases awarded from 1996 through 2000. If the company wins, the Interior Department recently estimated, about three-quarters of oil and gas produced in the Gulf of Mexico will be royalty-free for the next five years.

Mr. Markey and other Democrats recently introduced legislation that would pressure companies to pay full royalties when energy prices are high, regardless of what their leases allow.

But Republican lawmakers and the Bush administration have signaled their opposition.

"These are binding contracts that the government signed with companies," Ms. Norton recently remarked. "I don't think we can change them just because we don't like them."

Gas prices rise as oil companies take in record profits

Just as after Hurricane Katrina, gas prices rose and oil companies made record profits despite the fact that the Gulf Shore oil infrastructure escaped from the storm rather unscathed, again we have the oil company making record profits while gas prices reach record highs, with no discernable excuse. The World Socialist Web Site has a good article summarizing the "free market" of corporate capitalism at work. Also notable is the fact that a lot of this oil is extracted from federally owned offshore reserves without any royalties paid to the federal government. We give the oil away to Exxon and then allow them to make record profits selling it back to us.

Gas prices rise as oil companies take in record profits
By Mark Rainer
World Socialist Web Site
15 May 2007

The average price for a gallon of gas in the United States has surpassed the $3.00 mark and is currently at $3.07 per gallon. The sharp rise in gas prices has contributed to record high profits of the major oil companies.

Rising fuel prices have put an increased burden on working class families. The average American household is expected to spend $2,600 on gas this year, a significant jump from 2002 when gas expenses averaged $1,600.

According to the Energy Information Administration, the US Department of Energy’s statistical agency, the recent increase in gasoline prices has been due to a “rise in crude oil prices, persistent refinery outages, and seasonal demand growth.”

In fact, crude prices have been fluctuating in recent weeks, but are about at the same level they were one month ago. In the past week, they have actually declined significantly, even as gasoline prices have continued to escalate. Analysts are already predicting that the continued rise in demand will keep gas prices at least at their present levels throughout the summer—the peak driving season.

There have been indications of decreased refining capacity. Refinery outages and a decrease in imports have led to a sharp decline in gasoline inventories and are considered to be largely responsible for most of the recent increase in gasoline prices. Although gasoline inventories rose by 400,000 barrels last week, for the previous 12 weeks inventories were in decline, down a total of 15 percent since February.

Since the mid-1990s, due to a deliberate policy on the part of oil companies, US refineries have been operating near capacity. Outages like those that occurred in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in late 2005 have a large impact on gasoline inventories and have consequently driven up prices. Typically, refineries are shut down in the spring, usually justified on the grounds of regular maintenance and repairs. This spring has seen additional outages with a fire at a major refinery in Texas and other major supposedly unplanned outages.

Among the reasons given for the rise in gas prices, one of the more plausible is the most simple: price gouging. Direct manipulation of the energy market, including through the manufacturing of “unplanned” refinery outages, has precedents. During the 2000-2001 energy crises in California, Enron played a leading role in the rolling blackouts and the $5.7 billion in price hikes that afflicted California energy consumers. Enron’s manipulation of the Californian market included forcing power plants to shut down, price gouging, and over-scheduling the power supply.

In the run-up to the 2006 election, gasoline prices dropped an unprecedented 82 cents over a four-week period. Many Americans felt at the time that the sudden drop was related to the upcoming elections and the attempt to limit pessimism over the economy by temporarily reducing gas prices. This would presumably have had the effect of improving the chances of the Republicans in the elections.

The WSWS noted at the time: “Large energy companies certainly feel they have an interest in maintaining Republican control of the government. Not that they have anything serious to fear from the Democrats, but there are divisions within the ruling elite and no administration has been so closely tied, personally and financially, to the interests of the energy giants as the current one.”

The article concluded with the prediction, “Regardless of the exact forces behind the present decline in gasoline and oil prices, one can bet that by January or February prices will be back to their ‘normal’ exorbitant levels.” (See “US gasoline prices: the ‘free market’ and the November election” http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/sep2006/gaso-s27.shtml)

As a result of a large number of mergers since the 1990s, 10 companies control 81 percent of the nation’s oil refineries. The nation’s top five oil companies—ExxonMobil, British Petroleum (BP), Royal Dutch Shell, Chevron and ConocoPhillips—own more than 40 percent of US refineries. With the absence of additional refining capacity and no government regulation on gasoline prices, there is ample opportunity to control gasoline prices.

The concentration of ownership of gasoline refineries is such that unplanned refinery outages at one or two corporations can have a significant effect. The Texas refinery that caught fire in February supplies the US with 15 percent of its gasoline.

Whatever the cause of the present increase in prices, there is no question that refineries are benefiting greatly as a consequence. On May 4, gross profit margins on gasoline refining rose 57 percent from the start of April to $31.22 a barrel. This is the second widest margin recorded in history, according to the New York Mercantile Exchange, and is double the margins from a year ago. The profits per barrel nearly surpassed the record set on September 1, 2005 in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, with a per barrel gross profit margin of $31.71 per barrel.

The profits of the major oil companies are presently at record levels. Of the five top oil companies all but BP show an increase in first quarter profits from the previous year. First quarter profits for ExxonMobil were $9.3 billion, up 10 percent from last year. Royal Dutch Shell reported $7.3 billion, up 6 percent; Chevron reported $4.7 billion, up 18 percent. ConocoPhillips reported $3.5 billion, up 8 percent from last year. Over the past six years the five top oil companies have taken in a staggering $440 billion in profits.

These profits are coming directly out of the pockets of the American population as a whole. Lacking alternatives in transportation, workers have had to accept the higher gas prices. According to the Labor Bureau of Statistics, transportation costs account for 18 percent of average household expenditures—the third largest component. From 2000 to 2005 average expenditures on gasoline and oil rose by 56 percent to $2,013 in 2005. As a percentage of total household expenditures the amount spent on gasoline and oil rose from 3.4 percent in 2000 to 4.3 percent in 2005.

The rising price of gas has already shown its impact on consumer spending. Forced to pay higher gasoline prices, workers have cut back on food, clothing, cars and other consumer goods. As a result, retail sales declined by 0.2 percent in April, the first decline in seven months.

The sharp rise in gasoline prices and the corresponding profiteering of the large oil corporations has led again to a series of symbolic measures and proposals from congressional Democrats. Everything from investigations into refinery outages, bans on price gouging, and windfall profit taxes has been suggested. This is largely for show, and the Democrats have no intention of seriously carrying through reforms that would alleviate the burden on working people from the rise in gas prices. Similar measures were proposed a year ago—and in the aftermath of Katrina—but were subsequently dropped.

For its part, the Bush administration has signaled that it will take no action on gas prices. In remarks yesterday at the White House, billed as a statement on oil prices and global warming, Bush made no mention of the rising gasoline prices. He proposed reducing gasoline consumption by 20 percent over the next 10 years through the increased use of biofuels and an increase in fuel efficiency. In other words, nothing will be done to help those hardest hit by rising gas prices.