King Features Syndicate

Obama Traveling in the Company of Killers

If a volcano kills civilians in Indonesia, it's news. When the government does the killing, sadly, it's just business as usual, especially if an American president tacitly endorses the killing, as President Barack Obama just did with his visit to Indonesia.

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What Rotten Eggs Reveal About the State of Our Democracy

What do a half-billion eggs have to do with democracy? The massive recall of salmonella-infected eggs, the largest egg recall in U.S. history, opens a window on the power of large corporations over not only our health, but over our government.

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Troy Davis Deserves a New Trial

Troy Anthony Davis was scheduled to die by lethal injection Tuesday. Two hours before the state of Georgia was to execute him, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a stay until Monday. It had earlier agreed to hear Davis' case on Sept. 29, but Georgia set his execution date six days before the hearing.

Davis was charged with killing Mark MacPhail, an off-duty police officer, in Savannah, Ga., in 1989. Davis had gone to the aid of a homeless man who was being pistol-whipped in a parking lot. Seeing the gun, he said he fled. MacPhail, working security nearby, intervened next, and was killed. Davis, an African-American, claimed his innocence, but was found guilty and sentenced to death. Since his conviction, seven of the nine non-police witnesses have recanted their testimony, alleging police coercion and intimidation in obtaining their testimony. By coming forward and recanting, they face serious repercussions, possibly jail time. Some have identified a different man as the shooter. This man is one of Davis' remaining accusers.

In July 2007, Davis faced his first execution date. Just a day before he was to be executed, the Georgia Pardons Board granted a stay of execution for up to 90 days. Then, Davis' attorneys argued before the Georgia Supreme Court for a retrial or for a hearing to present new evidence. The requests were denied, by a 4-to-3 vote. In the same period, the U.S. Supreme Court was weighing whether death by lethal injection constituted cruel and unusual punishment (the court ultimately allowed its use).

The U.S. Supreme Court will consider Monday whether it will take on Davis' case. If it decides not to, he very likely will be executed.

Among Davis' defenders is former President Jimmy Carter. He said: "This case illustrates the deep flaws in the application of the death penalty in this country. Executing Troy Davis without a real examination of potentially exonerating evidence risks taking the life of an innocent man and would be a grave miscarriage of justice." Georgia Congressman John Lewis also supports Davis. I spoke with Lewis at Invesco Field in Denver, just before Barack Obama's acceptance speech. It was 45 years to the date after the March on Washington and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech.

Lewis recalled that historic day: "We were in Washington, more than 250,000 of us, black and white, Protestant, Catholic, Jews, people of different background, rich and poor. ... In many parts of the South, people could not register to vote, simply because of the color of their skin. And we changed that."

Yet this week, in light of Davis' plight, Lewis told me: "In spite of all of the progress that we've made as a nation and as a people, we still have so far to go. The scars and stains of racism are still deeply embedded in every corner, in every aspect of the American society." He went on to say, when I pointed out that Sen. Obama himself supports the death penalty: "It is troublesome. You know ... someplace along the way, some of us must have the courage to say -- and I'm moving closer and closer to this point -- that in good conscience, I cannot and will not support people who support the death penalty. I think it's barbaric, and it represents the Dark Ages. .... I don't think as human beings, I don't think as a nation, I don't think as a state, we have the right to take the life of another person. That should be left for the Almighty to do."

The death penalty is a noxious and racist practice. According to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, of more than 3,300 people on death row in the U.S., over 41 percent are African-American -- more than three times their representation in the general population. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, since 1973 there have been 130 people exonerated -- people wrongly sentenced to death -- in 26 different states, including five exonerated on death row in Georgia. Evidence even suggests that at least four innocent people have been executed in recent years. There is no physical evidence in the Troy Davis case. After the stay was announced, Davis asked his mother to have people pray for the MacPhail family, and to keep working to dismantle this unjust system. He told her he wouldn't be fighting this hard for his life if he were guilty. This is a case of reasonable doubt. Troy Davis deserves a new trial.

Dissent Is Essential to Democracy

The bulwark against tyranny is dissent. Open opposition, the right to challenge those in power, is a mainstay of any healthy democracy. The Democratic and Republican conventions will test the commitment of the two dominant U.S. political parties to the cherished tradition of dissent. Things are not looking good.

Denver's CBS4 News just reported that the city is planning on jailing arrested Democratic convention protesters at a warehouse with barbed-wire-topped cages and signs warning of the threat of stun gun use. Meanwhile, a federal judge has ruled that a designated protest area is legal, despite claims that protesters will be too far from the Democratic delegates to be heard.

The full spectrum of police and military will also be on hand at the Democratic convention in Denver, many of these units coordinated by a "fusion center." These centers are springing up around the country as an outgrowth of the post-9/11 national-security system. Erin Rosa of the online Colorado Independent recently published a report on the Denver fusion center, which will be sharing information with the U.S. Secret Service, the FBI and the U.S. Northern Command. The center is set up to gather and distribute "intelligence" about "suspicious activities," which, Rosa points out, "can include taking pictures or taking notes. The definition is very broad."

Civil rights advocates fear the fusion center could enable unwarranted spying on protesters exercising their First Amendment rights at the convention. Documents obtained by I-Witness Video, a group that documents police abuses and demonstrations, revealed that the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency were receiving intelligence about the protests at the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York City. The growing problem is that legal, peaceful protesters are ending up on federal databases and watch lists with scant legal oversight.

Former FBI agent Mike German is now a national-security-policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. He said, "It's unclear who is actually in charge and whose rules apply to the information that's being collected and shared and distributed through these fusion centers." Maryland State Police were recently exposed infiltrating groups like the Baltimore Coalition Against the Death Penalty. German explains how police expand "beyond normal law-enforcement functions, and start becoming intelligence collectors against protest groups. The reports that we obtained ... make clear that there was no indication of any sort of criminal activity. And yet, that investigation went on for 14 months, and these reports were uploaded into a federal database. ... When all these agencies are authorized to go out and start collecting this information and putting it in areas where it's accessible by the intelligence community, it's a very dangerous proposition for our democracy."

After Barack Obama became the presumptive Democratic nominee, the protest coalition in Denver splintered, as many were motivated originally by the anticipated nomination of the more hawkish Hillary Clinton. An anarchist group, Unconventional Denver, actually offered to call off its protests if Denver would redirect the $50-million federal grant it is receiving for security to "reinvest their police budget toward real community security: new elementary schools; health care for the uninsured; providing clean, renewable energy." The plea has not been answered. The city, meanwhile, is stocking up on "less-lethal" pepper-ball rifles and has set aside a space for permitted protesting that some are referring to as the "Freedom Cage."

In the Twin Cities on the evening Obama was giving his Democratic acceptance speech in June, the St. Paul Police Department arrested a 50-year-old man peacefully handing out leaflets promoting a Sept. 1 march on the Republican National Convention. After mass arrests at the RNC in Philadelphia in 2000 and roughly 1,800 arrests in New York City in 2004, ACLU Minnesota predicts hundreds will be arrested in St. Paul, and is organizing and training 75 lawyers to defend them.

For now, the eyes of the world are on the Beijing Olympics. Sportswriter Dave Zirin is reporting on the suppression of protests that are occurring there. He has an interesting perspective, as he is a member of the anti-death-penalty group infiltrated in Maryland. He told me, "Our taxpayer dollars went to pay people to infiltrate and take notes on our meetings, and it's absolutely enraging ... a lot of this Homeland Security funding is an absolute sham ... it's being used to actually crush dissent, not to keep us safer in any real way." The lack of freedom of speech in China is getting a little attention in the news. But what about the crackdown on dissent here at home? Dissent is essential to the functioning of a democratic society. There is no more important time than now.

Obama Runs to the Middle

I was on a panel at the Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado this week when Newsweek's Jonathan Alter asked me, "Is Obama a sellout?" The question isn't whether he is a sellout or not -- it's about what demands are made by grass-roots social movements of those who would represent them. The question is, who are these candidates responding to, answering to?

Richard Nixon's campaign strategy was to run in the primaries to the right, then move to the center in the general election. Bill Clinton's strategy was called "triangulation," navigating to a political "Third Way" to please moderates and undecided voters. This past week, Barack Obama has made some signal policy changes that suggest he might be doing something similar. Will it work for him?

Take the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, for example. A Dec. 17, 2007, press release from Obama's Senate office read: "Senator Obama unequivocally opposes giving retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies and has cosponsored Senator Dodd's efforts to remove that provision from the FISA bill. Granting such immunity undermines the constitutional protections Americans trust the Congress to protect. Senator Obama supports a filibuster of this bill, and strongly urges others to do the same." Six months later, he supports immunity for the companies that spied on Americans.

I asked Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., about Obama's position on the FISA bill. He told me: "Wrong vote. Regrettable. Many Democrats will do this. We should be standing up for the Constitution. When Sen. Obama is president, he will, I'm sure, work to fix some of this, but it's going to be a lot easier to prevent it now than to try to fix it later."

Feingold and Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., are planning on filibustering the bill. It will take 60 senators to overcome their filibuster. It looks like Obama will be one of them. Disappointment with Obama's FISA position is not limited to his senatorial colleagues. On Obama's own campaign Web site, bloggers are voicing strident opposition to his FISA position. At the time of this writing, an online group on Obama's site had more than 10,000 members and was growing fast. The group's profile reads: "Senator Obama -- we are a proud group of your supporters who believe in your call for hope and a new kind of politics. Please reject the politics of fear on national security, vote against this bill and lead other Democrats to do the same!"

Then there were the recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions on gun control and the death penalty. Obama supported the court in overturning the 32-year-old ban on handguns in the nation's violence-ridden capital. It's the court's most significant ruling on the Second Amendment in nearly 70 years. And in a blow to death-penalty opponents, Obama disagreed with the high court's prohibiting execution of those who were found guilty of raping children.

In a Jan. 21, 2008, primary debate, Obama called the North American Free Trade Agreement "a mistake" and "an enormous problem." He recently told Fortune magazine, "Sometimes during campaigns the rhetoric gets overheated and amplified ... my core position has never changed ... I've always been a proponent of free trade." This, after the primary-campaign scandal of the alleged meeting between Obama economic adviser Austan Goolsbee and a member of the Canadian consulate. A Canadian memo describing the meeting suggested Obama was generally satisfied with NAFTA. Goolsbee described the accounts as inaccurate. Now people are beginning to question Obama's genuine opposition to NAFTA and "free trade."

Then there is the floating of potential vice presidential candidates. Jonathan Capehart of The Washington Post was on the Aspen panel and noted that he has been receiving e-mails from gay men who angrily oppose former Sen. Sam Nunn as an Obama running mate. They can't forget Nunn's key role in shaping "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," which prohibited gay men and lesbians from serving openly in the military. The e-mails trickled up, prompting the writing of an influential Capehart column, "Don't Ask Nunn."

It may be the strategy of the Obama campaign to run to the middle, to attract the independents, the undecided. But he should look carefully at the lessons of the 2004 Kerry campaign. John Kerry made similar calculations, not wanting to appear weak on the war in Iraq. Uninspired, people stayed home. There are millions who care about the issues from which Obama is distancing himself, from FISA to gun control to gay rights to free trade to the death penalty. Rather than staying home, they should recall the words of Frederick Douglass: "Power concedes nothing without a demand."

The Real Story Behind the Midwest Floods? Climate Change

The floodwaters are rising, swamping cities, breaching levees. Tens of thousands are displaced. Many are dead. No, I am not talking about Hurricane Katrina, but about the Midwest United States. As the floodwaters head south along the Mississippi, devastating communities one after another, the media are overflowing with televised images of the destruction.

While the TV meteorologists document "extreme weather" with their increasingly sophisticated toolbox, from Doppler radar to 3-D animated maps, the two words rarely uttered are its cause: global warming. I asked former Energy Department official Joseph Romm, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, about the disconnect:

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The Road to Better Media

"This way to better media," read the floor sign directing people through a skyway to the Minneapolis Convention Center. Thousands of people gathered there for the fourth National Conference for Media Reform, hosted by freepress.net. They came from all walks of life and all ages to address a central crisis in our society: our broken media system. I was one of the invited speakers.

Despite increasingly complex digital-media offerings and hundreds of channels, we see the diversity of media ownership shrinking, along with the diversity of voices that are broadcast. People are fighting back, organizing, creating alternatives and holding the corporate media giants accountable. The corporations are pushing back. With life and death, war and peace, at stake, hinging on an informed and engaged populace, the stakes have never been higher, the media never more important.

Prominent traditional journalists with decades of experience mingled with the emerging generation of new media producers. Journalist Bill Moyers, who has won more than 30 Emmys, authored four best-sellers and currently hosts the popular PBS weekly news program Bill Moyers Journal, opened Saturday with a plenary address, saying:

"Our dominant media are ultimately accountable only to corporate boards whose mission is not life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for the whole body of our republic, but the aggrandizement of corporate executives and shareholders." Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. is the poster child of media conglomerates. Murdoch's media empire spans the globe, with 35 TV stations in the U.S., the Fox News Channel (so-called) and many other cable channels, The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, HarperCollins, 20th Century Fox movie studios and a slew of interrelated sports and entertainment properties.

Moyers' outspoken critique of the corporate media has provoked Murdoch's chief attack dog, Bill O'Reilly. Last week on his Fox show, O'Reilly said of the media reformers, "These people are crazy ... real nuts!" Josh Silver, Free Press executive director, responded: "He's a mouthpiece for the largest media corporations. And that kind of omnipotent power that these large networks have, taking control of that and taking that power back from them is what this conference is about."

As Moyers finished signing his latest book, O'Reilly Factor producer Porter Berry and his camera crew pounced. Dan Rather was at the conference but eluded the Fox stakeout. Moyers turned the Fox ambush back on Berry:

Moyers: "Rupert Murdoch said the best thing that will come out of the Iraq war will be [oil] at $20 a barrel. Now, today, when I came here, I looked, and it was $130-something. When is Rupert going to explain why the war didn't give us $20-a-barrel oil?"

Making the link between media conglomerates and militarism, Moyers questioned Berry further about Murdoch:

Moyers: "Does Bill O'Reilly work for Rupert Murdoch?"

Berry: "He works for Fox News."

Moyers: "But who owns Fox News?"

Berry: "News Corp. ... "

Moyers: "Rupert Murdoch is the boss."

Indymedia videographers crowded around the two, and the video clips soon found their way onto the Internet. O'Reilly ran a heavily edited clip of the exchange, with none of the above included, but had a "body-language expert" on his show, attempting to smear Moyers. The fact that Murdoch producers were at the conference trying to discredit prominent participants demonstrates the need for honest, strong, countervailing media outlets.

Sen. Byron Dorgan also addressed the conference. On Monday, he and Sens. John Kerry, Robert Menendez and Frank Lautenberg introduced a bill that would end Pentagon use of funds to spread propaganda and charged both the Pentagon inspector general and Congress' Government Accountability Office to investigate allegations that retired generals were used to push for war with Iraq.

Elected officials will not solve our media crisis alone. The grass-roots movement for media reform is growing, and with mass layoffs in newspaper and broadcast newsrooms, critical elections, burgeoning military budgets and multiple wars and occupations, and with emergent and accessible digital-media tools and networks increasingly available to most people, there is no better time to join it.

Obama May Strike a Chord With Disaffected Republicans

David Iglesias is an evangelical, Hispanic Republican -- yes, that one, the former U.S. attorney for New Mexico -- and he has positive things to say about Barack Obama.

I interviewed Iglesias the morning after Obama became the presumptive presidential nominee of the Democratic Party: "Obama represents all the promise of America, that a biracial man from a broken family can rise and have a strong shot of becoming our next president." Asked if he's endorsing Obama, Iglesias replied: "I'm not endorsing anybody. Our country has elected white males from northern European countries going back now 230-or-so years. This finally represents that the top position in American government is really open to everyone, and I think that's sending a powerful message not only to Americans, but throughout the world."

While Iglesias does not dislike John McCain, his own party's nominee, his comments bear directly on strategy for a campaign of Obama versus McCain. As the Puerto Rican primary results suggested, Obama still has to make major inroads into the Latino community. Iglesias' home state, New Mexico, is a "majority minority" state -- that is, people of color outnumber whites in the state (others include California, Texas and Hawaii).

Iglesias represents another population at play in this election: disaffected Republicans.

In his new book In Justice: Inside the Scandal That Rocked the Bush Administration, Iglesias paints a picture of a highly politicized U.S. Department of Justice, allegedly following Republican Party strategy to prosecute people accused of voter fraud in cases where voter registrations could be seen to help Democratic candidates. Iglesias was not prosecuting these alleged voter-fraud cases, which did not sit well with New Mexico Republicans. Al Gore won New Mexico in 2000 by a mere 366 votes, and George Bush edged out John Kerry there in 2004 by about 6,000 votes. New Mexico is definitely a swing state. Congresswoman Heather Wilson barely held on to her congressional office in 2006. Every vote counts in New Mexico, and the Republicans know it: All three House seats are up for grabs in November, along with the Senate seat being vacated by Pete Domenici. Wilson is giving up her House seat to run for his.

While the voter-fraud cases that riled the Republicans were not solid cases, Iglesias explained to me voter-suppression tactics that concern him, those that benefit Republican candidates. Chief among them is "vote caging," which Iglesias says "is when you send voter information to a group of people that you have reason to believe are no longer there, such as military personnel who are overseas, such as students at historically black colleges. When it comes back as undeliverable, the party uses that information to remove that person from the voter rolls, claiming they are no longer there. It is a reprehensible practice. I had never heard of it until after I left office."

Iglesias predicted that the Republican Party will be reined in as a result of the U.S. attorney firing scandal:

"I hope the media keeps shining the spotlight on groups like the American Center for Voting Rights, which has been engaging in this type of voter-suppression action, especially targeting the elderly people and minorities. If you are an American citizen who is not a felon, you have the right to vote. I would just hope that in swing states like Missouri, Wisconsin, New Mexico and a handful of other states, that the Democratic Party and the media really keep a lot of pressure on this."

David Iglesias' father is a Kuna Indian from Panama. David grew up in Panama, Oklahoma and New Mexico. This once rising star of the Republican Party has much to teach all parties in this crucial, volatile political season.

Musician and Activist Utah Phillips Has Left the Stage

"Utah" Phillips died this week at the age of 73. He was a musician, labor organizer, peace activist and co-founder of his local homeless shelter. He also was an archivist, a historian and a traveler, playing guitar and singing almost forgotten songs of the dispossessed and the downtrodden, and keeping alive the memory of labor heroes like Emma Goldman, Joe Hill and the Industrial Workers of the World, "the Wobblies," in a society that too soon forgets.

Born Bruce Duncan Phillips on May 15, 1935, in Cleveland, by his midteens he was riding the rails. He told me of those days in an interview in 2004. By then, he was slowed down by congestive heart failure. His long, white beard flowed over his bow tie, plaid shirt and vest. We sat in a cramped attic of a pirate radio station that was frequently raided by federal authorities. In the early days, he met old-timers, "old, old alcoholics who could only shovel gravel. But they knew songs."

In 1956, he joined the Army and got sent to postwar Korea. What he saw there changed him forever: "Life amid the ruins. Children crying -- that's the memory of Korea. Devastation. I saw an elegant and ancient culture in a small Asian country devastated by the impact of cultural and economic imperialism. Well, that's when I cracked. I said: 'I can't do this anymore. You know, this is all wrong. It all has to change. And the change has to begin with me.'"

After three years in the Army, he went back to the state that earned him his nickname, Utah. There he met Ammon Hennacy, a radical pacifist, who had started the Joe Hill House in Salt Lake City, inspired by the Catholic Worker movement. Hennacy guided Utah Phillips toward pacifism. Utah recalled: "Ammon came to me one day and said, 'You've got to be a pacifist.' And I said, 'How's that?' He said, 'Well, you act out a lot. You use a lot of violent behavior.' And I was. You know, I was very angry. 'You're not just going to lay down guns and fists and knives and hard angry words. You're going to have to lay down the weapons of privilege and go into the world completely disarmed.' If there's one struggle that animates my life, it's probably that one."

Utah's pacifism drove him to run for the U.S. Senate in 1968 on the Peace and Freedom ticket, taking a leave of absence from his civil-service job: "I was a state archivist -- and ran a full campaign, 27 counties. We took 6,000 votes in Utah. But when it was over, my job would vanish, and I couldn't get work anymore in Utah."

Thus began his 40 years in "the trade," a traveling, working musician: "The trade is a fine, elegant, beautiful, very fruitful trade. In that trade, I can make a living and not a killing." He eschewed the commercial music industry, once telling Johnny Cash, who wanted to record a number of Utah's songs: "I don't want to contribute anything to that industry. I can't fault you for what you're doing. I admire what you do. But I can't feed that dragon ... think about dollars as bullets." He eventually partnered with one of the most successful independent musicians in the U.S., Ani DiFranco, who created her own label, Righteous Babe Records. Their collaborative work was nominated for a Grammy Award.

Utah Phillips was a living bridge, keeping the rich history of labor struggles alive. He told me: "The long memory is the most radical idea in America. That long memory has been taken away from us. You haven't gotten it in your schools. You're not getting it on your television. You're being leapfrogged from one crisis to the next. Mass media contributed to that by taking the great movements that we've been through and trivializing important events. No, our people's history is like one long river. It flows down from way over there. And everything that those people did and everything they lived flows down to me, and I can reach down and take out what I need, if I have the courage to go out and ask questions." On his radio show "Loafer's Glory," he once said, work on this planet has been to remember."

A week before he died, Utah Phillips wrote in a public letter to his family and friends: "The future? I don't know. Through all of it, up and down, it's the song. It's always been the song."

Presidential Race Ignores Arms Race

As the U.S. presidential race continues, so does the arms race worldwide. People -- civilians, children -- are being killed and maimed, on a daily basis, by unexploded cluster bombs and land mines. Thousands of nuclear missiles remain at hair-trigger alert. The U.S. government rattles its saber at Iran, alleging a nuclear-weapons program, while at the same time offering uranium to Saudi Arabia. And with the war in Iraq well into its sixth year, one of its architects, Douglas J. Feith, the former undersecretary of defense for policy under Donald Rumsfeld, has predictably penned a revisionist history of the war and the decisions behind it.

Feith said this week: "So while it was a terrible mistake for the administration to rely on the erroneous intelligence about WMD -- and, I mean, it was catastrophic to our credibility -- first of all, it was an honest error and not a lie. But even if you correct it for that error, what we found in Iraq was a serious WMD threat. Even though Saddam Hussein had chosen to not maintain the stockpiles, he had put himself in a position where he could have regenerated those stockpiles in three to five weeks."

In an interview I asked Hans Blix about Feith's comments. He was the United Nations' chief weapons inspector, in charge of the WMD search. Reflecting back five years, he said: "To prove that there is nothing is almost impossible. I think that if we had been in Iraq for a couple of months more, it would have been enough to make it extremely clear to everybody that the chances were real that there were no weapons of mass destruction." Instead of waiting for the inspections, the Pentagon was busy trying to discredit Blix. I asked him about the allegations that the U.S. was bugging his office and home. He said, "I wish to heaven that they had listened a little better to what I had to say, if they did listen."

Blix describes the current state of the world as a "Cold Peace": "It is hard to avoid the impression that -- almost 20 years after the end of the Cold War -- military calculations still dominate the long-term thinking about major global relations. Terrorism is formally made the chief enemy, but precautions are taken against the growing power of China and Russia." President Bush's nuclear-cooperation pact with India, Barack Obama's stated willingness to unilaterally strike nuclear-armed U.S. ally Pakistan, Hillary Clinton's promise to Iran to "totally obliterate" the nation of 70 million (should it attack Israel), and John McCain's hard-line position on Russia, including the deployment of a missile defense in eastern Europe, all point to a reliance on military solutions that Blix sees as a path to conflict and war.

In a remarkable demonstration of hypocrisy, the Bush administration has pledged to deliver enriched uranium to Saudi Arabia. Anti-nuclear activist Harvey Wasserman said: "The idea of giving enriched uranium to the Saudis while threatening war with the Iranians for enriching uranium is astonishing. The idea that the Saudis are going to somehow lower the price of oil on the basis of possibly getting nuclear reactors in the future is just almost staggering to think about."

I asked Blix what is the single most important thing the U.S. could do to support world peace. Sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, he said: "Then I think it's very likely that the Chinese, who have not ratified, will follow. If China does it, maybe India does. If India does, Pakistan does, etc. And the treaty would enter into force. It would be a great thing if we outlawed any nuclear-weapons tests in the future."

Nuclear weapons are not the only weapons of mass destruction. As I spoke to Blix, hundreds of people were meeting in Dublin, Ireland, to craft an anti-cluster-bomb treaty, the cause Princess Diana championed in the last years of her life. The Dublin Diplomatic Conference on Cluster Munitions is dedicated "to negotiate a new instrument of international humanitarian law banning cluster munitions that cause unacceptable harm to civilians."

The conference in Dublin has 128 participating nations. Absent is the leading producer of cluster munitions, the United States. Russia and China are also not there.

From nuclear proliferation to the use of cluster bombs -- coverage of the presidential campaign should focus more on the arms race, less on the horse race.

Justice for Dead Journalists

More than five years have passed since the invasion of Iraq, since President Bush stood under the "Mission Accomplished" banner on that aircraft carrier. While these fifth anniversaries got some notice, another did not: the shelling of the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad by a U.S. Army tank on April 8, 2003. The tank attack killed two unembedded journalists, Reuters cameraman Taras Protsyuk and José Couso, a cameraman for the Spanish television network Telecinco. Couso recorded his own death. He was filming from the balcony and caught on tape the distant tank as it rotated its turret and fired on the hotel. A Spanish court has charged three U.S. servicemen with murder, but the U.S. government refuses to hand over the accused soldiers. The story might have ended there, just another day of violence and death in Iraq, were it not for a young U.S. military intelligence veteran who has just decided to blow the whistle.

Adrienne Kinne is a former Army sergeant who worked in military intelligence for 10 years, from 1994 to 2004. Trained in Arabic, she worked in the Army translating intercepted communications. She told me in an interview this week that she saw a target list that included the Palestine Hotel. She knew that it housed journalists, since she had intercepted calls from the Palestine Hotel between journalists there and their families and friends back home (illegally and unconstitutionally, she thought).

Said Kinne: "[W]e were listening to journalists who were staying in the Palestine Hotel. And I remember that, specifically because during the buildup to 'shock and awe' ... we were given a list of potential targets in Baghdad, and the Palestine Hotel was listed. [P]utting one and one together, I went to my officer in charge, and I told him that there are journalists staying at this hotel who think they're safe, and yet we have this hotel listed as a potential target, and somehow the dots are not being connected here, and shouldn't we make an effort to make sure that the right people know the situation? And unfortunately, my officer in charge ... basically told me that it was not my job to analyze ... someone somewhere higher up the chain knew what they were doing."

She said the officer in charge was Warrant Officer John Berry.

Kinne's account directly contradicts the official line of the U.S. government. On May 2, 2003, Colin Powell, then secretary of state and a former general in the Army, visited Spain. He said of the Palestine Hotel: "We knew about the hotel. We knew that it was a hotel where journalists were located, and others, and it is for that reason it was not attacked during any phase of the aerial campaign."

If Powell was telling the truth, then why was the hotel included on the list of targets that Kinne says she read in a secure e-mail? Or was he just parsing words by saying it wasn't a target during the "aerial campaign"? Kinne also revealed that the military was spying on nongovernmental organizations like Doctors Without Borders and the International Red Cross, listening in on these groups -- also illegal -- and justifying the pretense on the grounds that they might by chance report on a cache of weapons of mass destruction, or their satellite phone might get stolen by terrorists. She also received and translated a fax from the Iraqi National Congress, the CIA-funded group of Iraqi exiles who were funneling false information about WMDs to the U.S. government in order to bolster the case for war. The intel was considered high-value and was sent directly to the White House.

Kinne has shown great courage and taken great risks to bring these revelations to light, to blow the whistle. She follows in the tradition of Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War. Ellsberg has called on government workers to blow the whistle:

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The Worst Food Crisis in 45 Years

Food riots are erupting around the world. Protests have occurred in Egypt, Cameroon, the Philippines, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Mauritania and Senegal. Sarata Guisse, a Senegalese demonstrator, told Reuters: "We are holding this demonstration because we are hungry. We need to eat, we need to work, we are hungry. That's all. We are hungry." United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has convened a task force to confront the problem, which threatens, he said, "the specter of widespread hunger, malnutrition and social unrest on an unprecedented scale." The World Food Program has called the food crisis the worst in 45 years, dubbing it a "silent tsunami" that will plunge 100 million more people into hunger.

Behind the hunger, behind the riots, are so-called free-trade agreements, and the brutal emergency-loan agreements imposed on poor countries by financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund. Food riots in Haiti have killed six, injured hundreds and led to the ousting of Prime Minister Jacques-Edouard Alexis. The Rev. Jesse Jackson just returned from Haiti and writes that "hunger is on the march here. Garbage is carefully sifted for whatever food might be left. Young babies wail in frustration, seeking milk from a mother too anemic to produce it." Jackson is calling for debt relief so that Haiti can direct the $70 million per year it spends on interest to the World Bank and other loans into schools, infrastructure and agriculture.

The rise in food prices is generally attributed to a perfect storm caused by increased food demand from India and China, diminished food supplies caused by drought and other climate-change-related problems, increased fuel costs to grow and transport the food, and the increased demand for biofuels, which has diverted food supplies like corn into ethanol production.

This week, the United Nations' special rapporteur on the right to food, Jean Ziegler, called for the suspension of biofuels production: "Burning food today so as to serve the mobility of the rich countries is a crime against humanity." He's asked the U.N. to impose a five-year ban on food-based biofuels production. The Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, a group of 8,000 scientists globally, is also speaking out against biofuels. The scientists are pushing for a plant called switchgrass to be used as the source for biofuels, reserving corn and other food plants to be used solely as food.

In a news conference this week, President Bush defended food-based ethanol production: "The truth of the matter is it's in our national interests that our farmers grow energy, as opposed to us purchasing energy from parts of the world that are unstable or may not like us." One part of the world that does like Bush and his policies are the multinational food corporations. International nonprofit group GRAIN has just published a report called "Making a killing from hunger." In it, GRAIN points out that major multinational corporations are realizing vast, increasing profits amid the rising misery of world hunger. Profits are up for agribusiness giants Cargill (86 percent) and Bunge (77 percent), and Archer Daniels Midland (which dubs itself "the supermarket to the world") enjoyed a 67 percent increase in profits.

GRAIN writes: "Is this a price blip? No. A food shortage? Not that either. We are in a structural meltdown, the direct result of three decades of neoliberal globalization. ... We have allowed food to be transformed from something that nourishes people and provides them with secure livelihoods into a commodity for speculation and bargaining." The report states: "The amount of speculative money in commodities futures ... was less than $5 billion in 2000. Last year, it ballooned to roughly $175 billion."

There was a global food crisis in 1946. Then, as now, the U.N. convened a working group to deal with it. At its meeting, the head of the U.N. Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, former New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, said, "Ticker tape ain't spaghetti." In other words, the stock market doesn't feed the hungry. His words remain true today. We in the U.S. aren't immune to the crisis. Wal-Mart, Sam's Club and Costco have placed limits on bulk rice purchases. Record numbers of people are on food stamps, and food pantries are seeing an increase in needy people.

Current technology exists to feed the planet in an organic, locally based, sustainable manner. The large corporate food and energy interests, and the U.S. government, need to recognize this and change direction, or the food riots in distant lands will soon be coming to their doors.

Dennis Moynihan contributed research for this column.

Pushing the Single-Payer Solution

As the media coverage of the Democratic presidential race continues to focus on lapel pins and pastors, America is ailing. As I travel around the country, I find people are angry and motivated. Like Dr. Rocky White, a physician from a conservative, evangelical background who practices in rural Alamosa, Colo. A tall, gray-haired Westerner in black jeans, a crisp white shirt and a bolo tie, Dr. White is a leading advocate for single-payer health care. He wasn't always.

He told me in a recent interview: "Here I am, a Republican, thinking about nationalizing health care. It just went against the grain of everything that I stood for. But you have to remember: I didn't come to those conclusions with lofty ideals of social justice."

In the early 1990s, his medical group started falling apart. White, a keen student of economics and the business of medicine, determined that it wasn't just his practice but the system that was broken.

"You're seeing an ever-increasing number of people starting to support a national health program. In fact, 59 percent of practicing physicians today believe that we need to have a national health program. I mean, that's unheard of, even 10 years ago. It's amazing to see a new generation of physicians coming up who are disgusted with our current health-care system. You know, we're trained to be advocates of patients, we're trained to save lives, we're trained to practice medicine. And instead, what we're doing is we're practicing Wall Street economics."

Single-payer is not to be confused with universal coverage, which Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama both support. In fact, in a recent debate, when Clinton raised the issue of single-payer, the audience interrupted with applause. She immediately countered, "I know a lot of people favor [it], but for many reasons [it] is difficult to achieve."

Why? One of the most powerful industries in the country opposes it -- the insurance industry. Under universal coverage, insurance profits are preserved. Under single-payer, they are not. Dr. Rocky White, who now sits on the board of the nonprofit Health Care for All Colorado, has switched his political affiliation. He also has updated and reissued Dr. Robert LeBow's book on single-payer called Health Care Meltdown: Confronting the Myths and Fixing Our Failing System.

He described possible solutions: "There are a lot of different types of single-payer systems -- you could have purely socialized medicine. That's kind of like what England has. The government owns the hospitals, the government owns the clinics, the government finances all the health care, and all the doctors work for the government. That is truly socialized medicine, as opposed to the Canadian system, where the financing comes through their Medicare program, but all the doctors are in private practice."

The economics are complex, but this plain-spoken country doctor explains it clearly:

"You know, this industry is a $2-trillion industry, and the profits in the for-profit insurance industry are so huge and it's so deeply entrenched into Wall Street ... but until we move to a single-payer system and get rid of the profit motive in financing of health care, we will not be able to fix the problems that we have."

What would it take? Dr. White has spent his life dealing with the high winds on the high plains, from Nebraska to Colorado, and describes the challenge the country faces in familiar terms:

"I think that our current presidential candidates understand that ideally single-payer would be the best, but they don't have the political will to move that forward. Their job is to feel which way the wind is blowing. Our job is to turn that wind."

A Torture Debate Among Healers

Imagine, a candidate for president who, a year or so ago, no one would have considered electable. Now the person is the front-runner, with a groundswell of grass-roots support, threatening the sense of inevitability of the Establishment candidates. No, I'm not talking about the U.S. presidential race, but the race for president of the largest association of psychologists in the world, the American Psychological Association (APA). At the heart of the election is a raging debate over torture and interrogations. While the other healing professions, including the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association, bar their members from participating in interrogations, the APA leadership has fought against such a restriction.

Frustrated with the APA, a New York psychoanalyst, Dr. Steven Reisner, has thrown his hat into the ring. Last year, Reisner and other dissident psychologists formed the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology in an attempt to force a moratorium against participation by APA members in harsh interrogations. During the initial phase of this year's selection process, Reisner received the most nominating votes. He is running on a platform opposing the use of psychologists to oversee abusive and coercive interrogations of prisoners at Guantanamo, secret CIA black sites or anywhere else international law or the Geneva Conventions are said not to apply.

The issue came to a head at the 2007 APA annual convention. After days of late-night negotiations, the moratorium came up for a climactic vote. We saw a surreal scene on the convention floor: Uniformed military were out in force. Men and women in desert camo and Navy whites worked the APA Council of Representatives, and officers in crisp dress uniforms stepped to the microphones.

Military psychologists insisted that they help make interrogations safe, ethical and legal, and cited instances where psychologists allegedly intervened to stop abuse. "If we remove psychologists from these facilities, people are going to die!" boomed Col. Larry James of the U.S. Army, chief psychologist at Guantanamo Bay and a member of the APA governing body. Dr. Laurie Wagner, a Dallas psychologist, shot back, "If psychologists have to be there in order to keep detainees from being killed, then those conditions are so horrendous that the only moral and ethical thing to do is to protest by leaving."

The moratorium failed, and instead a watered-down resolution passed, outlining 19 harsh interrogation techniques that were banned, but only if "used in a manner that represents significant pain or suffering or in a manner that a reasonable person would judge to cause lasting harm." In other words, this loophole allowed, you can rough people up, just don't do permanent harm.

Immediately after the vote, Reisner spoke out at a packed town hall meeting: "If we cannot say, 'No, we will not participate in enhanced interrogations at CIA black sites,' I think we have to seriously question what we are as an organization and, for me, what my allegiance is to this organization, or whether we might have to criticize it from outside the organization at this point."

Reisner and others began withholding dues. Prominent APA members resigned, and the best-selling author of Reviving Ophelia Mary Pipher, returned her APA Presidential Citation award. After several months of bad publicity and internal negotiations, an emergency committee redrafted that resolution, removing the loopholes and affirming the outright prohibition of 19 techniques, like mock executions and waterboarding.

When I asked Dr. Reisner, the son of Holocaust survivors, why he would want to head the organization that he has battled for several years, he told me: "If I have this opportunity to make a change, I have a responsibility to do it. I never had the intention of being involved, but the only way to ensure this be changed was by claiming the democratic process in the name of human rights and social-justice issues. I was hoping that mass withholding of dues and mass resignations would shame the APA to come to its senses. It made them take a big step but didn't go far enough."

He expanded: "American people are sick of the reputation of the United States as torturers, as people who abuse prisoners. American people want to see a restoration of values from war to health care. I think what happens in the APA should point to a direction for the whole country."

The APA's annual meeting is this summer, in Boston. Expect interrogation to be the major issue confronting the members gathered there. Final voting for the APA president starts in October. The APA and the United States will determine their next presidents at about the same time. In both elections, a thorough debate on torture should be central.

Winter Soldier Marches Again

Last weekend, in the lead-up to the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, a remarkable gathering occurred just outside Washington, D.C., called Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan, Eyewitness Accounts of the Occupations. Hundreds of veterans of these two wars, along with active-duty soldiers, came together to offer testimony about the horrors of war, including atrocities they witnessed or committed themselves.

The name, Winter Soldier, comes from a similar event in 1971, when hundreds of Vietnam veterans gathered in Detroit, and is derived from the opening line of Thomas Paine's pamphlet, "The Crisis," published in 1776:

"These are the times that try men's souls: The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman."

This Winter Soldier was organized by the group Iraq Veterans Against the War. Kelly Dougherty, an Iraq veteran from the Colorado Army National Guard and IVAW's executive director, opened the proceedings, saying: "The voices of veterans and service members, as well as civilians on the ground, need to be heard by the American people, and by the people of the world, and also by other people in the military and other veterans so they can find their voice to tell their story, because each of our individual stories is crucially important and needs to be heard if people are to understand the reality and the true human cost of war and occupation."

What followed were four days of gripping testimony, ranging from firsthand accounts of the murder of Iraqi civilians, the dehumanization of Iraqis and Afghanis that undergirds the violence of the occupations, to the toll that violence takes on the soldiers themselves and the inadequate care they receive upon returning home.

Jon Michael Turner, who fought with the 3rd Battalion, 8th Marines, tore his medals off his chest. He said: "On April 18, 2006, I had my first confirmed kill. This man was innocent. I don't know his name. I called him 'the fat man.' He was walking back to his house, and I shot him in front of his friend and his father. The first round didn't kill him, after I had hit him up here in his neck area. And afterward he started screaming and looked right into my eyes. So I looked at my friend, who I was on post with, and I said, 'Well, I can't let that happen.' So I took another shot and took him out. He was then carried away by the rest of his family. It took seven people to carry his body away.

"We were all congratulated after we had our first kills, and that happened to have been mine. My company commander personally congratulated me, as he did everyone else in our company. This is the same individual who had stated that whoever gets their first kill by stabbing them to death will get a four-day pass when we return from Iraq."

Hart Viges was with the 82nd Airborne, part of the invasion in March 2003. He described a house raid where they arrested the wrong men: "We never went on a raid where we got the right house, much less the right person. Not once. I looked at my sergeant, and I was like, 'Sergeant, these aren't the men that we're looking for.' And he told me, 'Don't worry. I'm sure they would have done something anyways.' And this mother, all the while, is crying in my face, trying to kiss my feet. And, you know, I can't speak Arabic. I can speak human. She was saying, 'Please, why are you taking my sons? They have done nothing wrong.' And that made me feel very powerless. You know, 82nd Airborne Division, Infantry, with Apache helicopters, Bradley fighting vehicles and armor and my M4 -- I was powerless. I was powerless to help her."

Former Staff Sgt. Camilo Mejia also spoke. After serving in Iraq, he refused to return there. He was court-martialed and spent almost a year in prison. Mejia is now the chairman of IVAW. After he finished the testimony of his experience in Iraq, he laid out the group's demands:

"We have over a million Iraqi dead. We have over 5 million Iraqis displaced. We have close to 4,000 dead [Americans]. We have close to 60,000 injured. That's not even counting the post-traumatic stress disorder and all the other psychological and emotional scars that our generation is bringing home with them. War is dehumanizing a whole new generation of this country and destroying the people in the country of Iraq. In order for us to reclaim our humanity as a military and as a country, we demand the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all troops from Iraq, care and benefits for all veterans, and reparations for the Iraqi people so they can rebuild their country on their terms."

As we enter the sixth year of the war in Iraq, more time than the U.S. was involved in World War II, we should honor the veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, by listening to them.

A Cause Bigger Than Any Scandal

Monday was a strange day in Albany. New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer was scheduled to give a major address to close to 1,000 people, most of whom were women or teens. They were gathered to support and lobby for a reproductive rights bill in the Empire State Plaza's strange, iconic building known as The Egg. It is said to be the most progressive such bill introduced by a governor, guaranteeing a woman's right to an abortion, among other protections.

New York was one of only three states to legalize abortion before Roe v. Wade. JoAnn Smith, CEO and president of Family Planning Advocates of New York State, organized Monday's event. She talked about the pre-Roe days: "Women were dying -- doctors saw it in the hospitals, clergy saw it in the families they were serving, in real people's lives. So it was really the clergy and the doctors who were doing the early organizing. They made New York safe for women as they made their choices on reproductive health care." In fact, the first abortion clinic was run by clergy in New York City, called Clergy Consultation Service. Now, nearly 40 years later, with a U.S. Supreme Court ever closer to overturning Roe v. Wade, Spitzer was working with women's rights activists from around the state to update New York state's law.

The New York state Assembly was also slated to vote Monday on the Healthy Teens Act. Rabbi Dennis Ross, in Albany to push the bill, said: "The Healthy Teens Act ... would provide comprehensive, age-appropriate, medically accurate and 100 percent truthful information about sex to teens. We believe in knowledge. We believe in people knowing about themselves and about their world. And the Healthy Teens Act would give teens that information and capacity that they urgently need." Urgently, indeed: The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention just released a report that one in four girls and young women between the ages of 14 and 19 has a sexually transmitted disease. One in four.

Spitzer turned down $2.6 million of federal abstinence-only education funding, deciding instead to push genuine, empowering information for young people. There was, however, a matching amount of money at the state level that could fund the Healthy Teens Act. The Democratic-controlled Assembly was scheduled to pass the bill that day. The Republican-controlled Senate was holding it up, so the teens who had traveled to Albany planned on rallying, with signs.

People had come in from all over the state. A number of young people, teen peer counselors, had driven in from Buffalo, hours away, where, 10 years ago, Dr. Barnett Slepian, an obstetrician-gynecologist who performed abortions, was assassinated in his home, in front of his wife and kids. The assassin, James Charles Kopp, captured in 2001, was affiliated with the anti-abortion group the Lambs of Christ.

Back at Monday's events, amid red, white and blue balloons above every table, from which people would soon head out to lobby their legislators, it was announced that Spitzer had canceled, with rumors that he was sick. Lt. Gov. David Paterson took the podium. In his typical, casual, folksy style -- he doesn't read from a teleprompter, as he is legally blind -- he lauded the citizen activists, the young people especially, for coming to their state capital to take an active role in their government. After his talk, he held an impromptu press conference. The local Fox TV affiliate was dogging him, asking him how he would respond to critics of the bill who claimed that it would force Catholic hospitals and individual health-care professionals to perform abortions against their will. He didn't flinch, responding immediately: "That's not true. There is a conscience clause."

When asked if he, as a Catholic, had discussed this reproductive rights bill with his cardinal, he said he had, several times. Paterson said he had told the cardinal: "I am pro-choice. I go to bed at night, I wake up in the morning, with a clean conscience." He spoke with the same forcefulness he brings to other issues like gay rights and police brutality. Nine years ago, in March 1999, after African immigrant Amadou Diallo died in a hail of 41 police bullets, then-Sen. Paterson was arrested at New York City Police Headquarters as he protested police brutality.

He wrapped up the news conference just before noon Monday. New York's progressive, blind, Catholic, African-American lieutenant governor, David Paterson, might not have known it then, but he was mere minutes away from receiving the call with the news that Spitzer's alleged use of prostitutes was about to go public.

Soon the storm of the Spitzer Sex Scandal enveloped Albany. The teens did not go out to hold their signs supporting the Healthy Teens Act, and the state Assembly did not pass the act as scheduled. Those 1,000 citizens who came to lobby found their legislators unavailable, the capital overwhelmed with the news. The 6 p.m. cocktail reception hosted by the family planning advocates was well attended, though, but only because it served as a form of group therapy.

The governor has resigned in disgrace, he has let down his wife and his daughters, he is bringing unknown consequences to the prostitutes he hired, and he let down millions in New York state whose causes he championed. But it is not about one leader, or one body, but about the body politic. It is about grass-roots movements, the only sure way to protect the rights of women and girls.

Taxi to the Dark Side

On the Sunday following Sept. 11, 2001, Vice President Dick Cheney told the truth. On NBC's "Meet the Press," he said regarding plans to pursue the perpetrators of that attack: "We have to work the dark side, if you will. We're going to spend time in the shadows." The grim, deadly consequences of his promise have, in the intervening six years, become the shame of our nation and have outraged millions around the world. President George Bush and Cheney, many argue, have overseen a massive global campaign of kidnapping, illegal detentions, harsh interrogations, torture and kangaroo courts where the accused face the death penalty, confronted by secret evidence obtained by torture, without legal representation.

Cheney's shadows saw a moment of sunlight recently, as Alex Gibney won the Academy Award for the Best Documentary Feature for his film Taxi to the Dark Side. The film traces the final days of a young Afghan man, Dilawar (many Afghans use just one name), who was arrested in 2001 by the U.S. military and brought to the hellish prison at Bagram Air Base. Five days later, Dilawar was dead, beaten and tortured to death by the United States military. Gibney obtained remarkable eyewitness accounts of Dilawar's demise from the very low-level soldiers who beat him to death. We see the simple village that was his lifelong home and hear from people there how Dilawar had volunteered to drive the taxi, which was an important source of income for the village.

Dilawar had never spent the night away from home. His first sleepover was spent with arms shackled overhead, subjected to sleep and water deprivation, receiving regular beatings, including harsh knee kicks to the legs that would render his legs "pulpified." He had been fingered as a participant in a rocket attack on the Americans, by some Afghans who were later proved to be the attackers themselves. Gibney uses the tragic story of Dilawar to open up a searing and compelling indictment of U.S. torture policy from Bush and Cheney, through Donald Rumsfeld and the author of the infamous "torture memo," now-University of California Berkeley law professor John Yoo.

The Oscar ceremony was bereft of serious mention of the war, until Gibney rose to accept his award. He said: "Thank you very much, Academy. Here's to all doc filmmakers. And, truth is, I think my dear wife Anne was kind of hoping I'd make a romantic comedy, but honestly, after Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, extraordinary rendition, that simply wasn't possible. This is dedicated to two people who are no longer with us: Dilawar, the young Afghan taxi driver, and my father, a Navy interrogator who urged me to make this film because of his fury about what was being done to the rule of law. Let's hope we can turn this country around, move away from the dark side and back to the light. Thank you very much."

Taxi to the Dark Side can be seen in movie theaters, and the Oscar will surely help open it up to more audiences. Gibney got a surprise, though, from the Discovery Channel, the television network that had bought the TV rights to the film. He told me: "Well, it turns out that the Discovery Channel isn't so interested in discovery. I was told a little bit before my Academy Award nomination that they had no intention of airing the film, that new management had come in and they were about to go through a public offering, so it was probably too controversial for that. They didn't want to cause any waves. It turns out Discovery turns out to be the see-no-evil/hear-no-evil channel."

The Discovery Channel is owned by John Malone, the conservative mogul who owns Liberty Media, one of the largest media corporations on the planet. Malone is famous for his complex business deals that involve spinning off media properties with stock offerings that net him millions. He also has just gotten approval to swap his extensive stock holdings in News Corp., Rupert Murdoch's empire, for control of Murdoch's DirecTV satellite television system. When Discovery told Gibney they would not be airing Taxi to the Dark Side, Malone and Murdoch were awaiting approval for the DirecTV deal from the Bush administration's Federal Communications Commission. (It was approved on Monday, the day after the Oscars.)

HBO managed to buy the television rights to Taxi to the Dark Side so the film will find its way to those households that subscribe to premium TV channels. As Discovery wrote to a critical member of the public, "In its first pay-TV window, HBO will debut the film in September 2008. We are proud that Taxi to the Dark Side will make its basic cable debut in 2009 on Investigation Discovery." So Discovery will show Taxi on one of its smaller side channels, after the election, after its business with the Bush administration is wrapped up.

In the meantime, films like Taxi to the Dark Side and Phil Donahue's excellent Iraq war documentary, Body of War, have to fight for distribution. Let's hope that Gibney's Oscar will help open the theaters and the TV airwaves to these truly consciousness-raising films to turn this country away from the dark side and back to the light.

Lessons of Internment

Nearing 87 years old, Yuri Kochiyama lives in a small room in an Oakland, Calif., senior living facility. Her walls are adorned with photos, posters, postcards and mementos detailing a living history of the revolutionary struggles of the 20th century. She is quiet, humble and small, and has trouble at times retrieving the right word. Yet, with a sparkle in her eyes, she has no trouble recalling the incredible history of the struggle for social justice in the 20th century. She recalls the history not from books, not from documentaries, but from living it, on the front lines.

February marks a coincidence of anniversaries in Kochiyama's incredible life: 66 years ago, on Feb. 19, 1942, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, authorizing the mass internment of Japanese-Americans. Then there is Feb. 21, 1965, the day Malcolm X was assassinated at the Audubon Ballroom in New York City.

Kochiyama was a young woman living with her parents in San Pedro, Calif., when Pearl Harbor was attacked. Within hours, her father was arrested by the FBI. She recalled:

"[The FBI agents] said, 'Is there a Seichi Nakahara living here?' I said, 'He just came home from ulcer surgery.' And they went in and got him -- it was done so quickly, it didn't even take a half of a minute, I don't think. And I didn't dare ask a question. They were going out the door immediately. And then, I just called my mother, who was right down the street to say, 'Come home quick. The FBI just came and took Pop.' "

He was taken to the San Pedro Hospital, where U.S. sailors and Marines who had been injured in the Japanese attacks were also being treated. Kochiyama's father was the only person of Japanese descent in the hospital. They put him in a bed behind a sheet marked "Prisoner of War." Kochiyama recalled what her mother said: "When she saw the reaction of all the American [patients] who were just brought in from Wake Island, she didn't think he was going to last. And so, she asked the head of that hospital, could he be given a room by himself, and then when he was feeling better, could they take him ... to the prison, because that hospital, she said, was probably worse than prison, because here were all these Americans who had been injured."

He was released six weeks later, returned home in a state of extreme illness. Kochiyama recalls: "He came home, it was around dinnertime, 5:30. And they had a nurse come with him. And by the next morning, she woke us up and said, 'He's gone.' " Her father had died.

Yuri and the rest of her family were rounded up and sent to Rohwer Camp in Arkansas as part of the internment of more than 120,000 Japanese-Americans. Nearly 70,000 of them were U.S. citizens. She spent more than two years imprisoned there. She married after her release, and she and her family eventually moved to Harlem, N.Y.

Yuri was a changed woman. Her experience made her aware of the lack of justice suffered not only by Asian-Americans, but by African-Americans and Latinos as well. She met Malcolm X in 1963. They became friends and allies. He sent her postcards from his transformative trip to Africa. She was in the audience at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem when he was shot.

She ran up onto the stage: "Malcolm had fallen straight back, and he was on his back. And so I just went there and picked up his head and just put it on my lap. People ask, 'What did he say?' He didn't say anything. He was just having a difficult time breathing. I said, 'Please, Malcolm, please, Malcolm, stay alive.' But he was hit so many times."

Malcolm X's assassination propelled Kochiyama further into a life committed to the struggle for social justice, human rights, racial equality and prisoner rights. She is a staunch supporter of Mumia Abu-Jamal, who has lived on death row in Pennsylvania for a quarter of a century.

As the Bush administration asserts its authority to detain "enemy combatants" without charge, and zealots in Congress hatch plans to round up 12 million people accused of being "illegal aliens" (100 times the number of Japanese-Americans interned), we all have timely lessons to learn from Yuri Kochiyama.

Felony Disenfranchisement Aids Republicans

As I raced into our TV studio for our Super Tuesday morning-after show, I was excited. Across the country, initial reports indicated there was unprecedented voter participation, at least in the Democratic primaries, several times higher than in previous elections. For years I have covered countries like Haiti, where people risk death to vote, while the U.S. has one of the lowest participation rates in the industrialized world. Could it be this year would be different?

Then I bumped into a friend and asked if he had voted. "I can't vote," he said, "because I did time in prison." I asked him if he would have voted. "Sure I would have. Because then I'm not just talking junk, I'm doing something about it."

Felony disenfranchisement is the practice by state governments of barring people convicted of a felony from voting, even after they have served their time. In Virginia and Kentucky, people convicted of any felony can never vote again (this would include "Scooter" Libby, even though he never went to jail, unless he is pardoned). Eight other states have permanent felony disenfranchisement laws, with some conditions that allow people to rejoin the voter rolls: Alabama, Arizona, Delaware, Florida, Mississippi, Nevada, Tennessee and Wyoming.

Disenfranchisement -- people being denied their right to vote -- takes many forms, and has a major impact on electoral politics. In Ohio in 2004, stories abounded of inoperative voting machines, too few ballots or too few voting machines. Then there was Florida in 2000. Many continue to believe that the election was thrown to George W. Bush by Ralph Nader, who got about 97,000 votes in Florida. Ten times that number of Floridians are prevented from voting at all. Why?

Currently, more than 1.1 million Floridians have been convicted of a felony and thus aren't allowed to vote. We can't know for sure how they would have voted, but as scholar, lawyer and activist Angela Davis said recently in a speech honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Mobile, Ala., "If we had not had the felony disenfranchisement that we have, there would be no way that George Bush would be in the White House."

Since felony disenfranchisement disproportionately affects African-American and Latino men in the U.S., and since these groups overwhelmingly vote Democratic, the laws bolster the position of the Republican Party. The statistics are shocking. Ryan King, policy analyst with The Sentencing Project in Washington, D.C., summarized the latest:

About 5.3 million U.S. citizens are ineligible to vote due to felony disenfranchisement; 2 million of them are African-American. Of these, 1.4 million are African-American men, which translates into an incredible 13 percent of that population, a rate seven times higher than in the overall population. Forty-eight states have some version of felony disenfranchisement on the books. All bar voting from prison, then go on to bar participation while on parole or probation. Two states, Maine and Vermont, allow prisoners to vote from behind the walls, as does Canada and a number of other countries.

The politicians and pundits are all abuzz with the massive turnouts in the primaries and caucuses. There are increasing percentages of women participating, and initial reports point to more young people. The youth vote is particularly important, as young people have less invested in the status quo and can look with fresh eyes at long-standing injustices that disenfranchise so many. In this context, one of The Sentencing Project's predictions bears repeating here: "Given current rates of incarceration, 3 in 10 of the next generation of black men can expect to be disenfranchised at some point in their lifetime. In states that disenfranchise ex-offenders, as many as 40 percent of black men may permanently lose their right to vote."

The Sentencing Project's King said: "We are constantly pushing for legislative change around the country. But public education is absolutely key. There are so many different laws that people simply don't know when their right to vote has been restored. That includes the personnel who work in state governments giving out the wrong information."

I called my friend to tell him he was misinformed. He hadn't been on probation or parole for years. "You can vote," I told him. "You just have to register." I could hear him smile through the phone.

From Oil Wars to Water Wars

The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded this week, in Oslo, Norway. Al Gore shared the prize with the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which represents more than 2,500 scientists from 130 countries. The solemn ceremony took place as the United States is blocking meaningful progress at the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Bali, Indonesia, and the Republicans in the U.S. Senate have derailed the energy bill passed by the House of Representatives, which would have accelerated the adoption of renewable energy sources at the expense of big-oil and coal corporations.

Gore set the stage: "So, today, we dumped another 70 million tons of global-warming pollution into the thin shell of atmosphere surrounding our planet, as if it were an open sewer. And tomorrow, we will dump a slightly larger amount, with the cumulative concentrations now trapping more and more heat from the sun.

"As a result, the Earth has a fever. And the fever is rising. The experts have told us it is not a passing affliction that will heal by itself. We asked for a second opinion. And a third. And a fourth. And the consistent conclusion, restated with increasing alarm, is that something basic is wrong. We are what is wrong, and we must make it right."

He went on: "Last Sept. 21, as the Northern Hemisphere tilted away from the sun, scientists reported with unprecedented distress that the north polar ice cap is 'falling off a cliff.' One study estimated that it could be completely gone during summer in less than 22 years. Another new study, to be presented by U.S. Navy researchers later this week, warns it could happen in as little as seven years. Seven years from now."

How will climate-change skeptics explain that one? (Already, big business is celebrating the break up of the polar ice cap, as a northern sea route from the Atlantic to the Pacific is opening, creating a cheaper route for more needless shipping.) It is hard to imagine the north pole, the storied, frozen expanse of ice and snow, completely gone in just a few years. Lost as well will be the vast store of archeological data trapped in the ice: thousands of years of the Earth's climate history are told in the layers of ice that descend for miles there. Scientists are just now learning how to read and interpret the history. The great meltdown will surely have catastrophic effects on the ecosystem in the north, with species like the polar bear already edging toward extinction.

Rajendra Pachauri, an Indian scientist, accepted for the IPCC. He is a careful scientist with the political finesse to chair the work of the IPCC despite the enduring antagonism of the United States. He pointed to the disproportionate effect of climate change on the world's poor:

"[T]he impacts of climate change on some of the poorest and the most vulnerable communities in the world could prove extremely unsettling ... in terms of: access to clean water, access to sufficient food, stable health conditions, ecosystem resources, security of settlements."

Pachauri predicts water wars and mass migrations. "Migration, usually temporary and often from rural to urban areas, is a common response to calamities such as floods and famines."

Gore invoked the memory of Mohandas Gandhi, saying he "awakened the largest democracy on earth and forged a shared resolve with what he called 'Satyagraha' -- or 'truth force.' In every land, the truth -- once known -- has the power to set us free." Satyagraha, as Gandhi practiced it, is the disciplined application of nonviolent resistance, which is exactly what Ted Glick is doing back in Washington, D.C.

Glick heads up the Climate Emergency Council. On his 99th day of a liquids-only fast, the day after the Nobel ceremony, he joined with 20 people in the office of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell for a sit-in. The Senate Republicans are now blocking a federal energy bill that would create funding for the development of renewable energy sources in the U.S., while stripping away billions of dollars worth of tax breaks for big oil and coal.

Glick told me: "We have to be willing to go to jail. Al Gore, himself, a couple of months ago talked about how young people need to be sitting in in front of the coal plants to prevent coal plants from being built. That's true. Young people need to be doing that. Middle-age people need to be doing that. Older people need to be doing that. And Al Gore needs to be doing that. Let's get serious about this crisis."

While Glick was sitting in, news reports began to circulate about Republican presidential candidate Rudolph Giuliani's law firm's lobbying activities against the energy bill. According to Bloomberg news, Bracewell & Giuliani LLP was hired by energy giant Southern Co. to defeat the bill. At a $1,000-a-plate fundraiser last August, addressing members of the coal industry, Giuliani said, "We have to increase our reliance on coal."

As Giuliani's coffers get fat with money from big oil, gas and coal, Glick has lost more than 40 pounds, and the Earth's temperature continues to rise.

Lou Dobbs Spreads Vile Misinformation about Immigrants

Truth matters. History and context count. "You're entitled to your own opinions. You're not entitled to your own facts," the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously observed.

CNN's Lou Dobbs has migrated to a pre-eminent position in the debate on immigration in the U.S. Since he identifies himself as a journalist, he has a special responsibility to rely on facts and to correct misstatements of fact. CNN, which purports to be a news organization, touting itself as the "Most Trusted Name in News," has an equally strong obligation to its audience to tell the truth.

Dobbs was best known for anchoring CNN's "Moneyline," an early and influential program that helped create the televised financial-news genre. On "Moneyline," Dobbs featured corporate CEOs and generally lauded them.

About five years ago, Dobbs began changing his line, invoking populist rhetoric and championing the cause of the middle class. He thematically titled his coverage "War on the Middle Class" and "Broken Borders." Dobbs' signature issue of undocumented immigrants, or, as he calls them, illegal aliens, has tremendous influence on the debate nationally. So it matters if he is wrong.

On March 28, 2006, Dobbs said on his show, "And it's costing us, no one knows precisely how much, to incarcerate what is about a third of our prison population who are illegal aliens." As it turns out, the number of noncitizens incarcerated in the U.S. federal and state prisons is closer to 6 percent, not 33 percent. Note that the 6 percent includes legal immigrants as well.

On April 14, 2005, Lou Dobbs opened his show by saying: "The invasion of illegal aliens is threatening the health of many Americans. Highly contagious diseases are now crossing our borders decades after those diseases had been eradicated in this country."

CNN correspondent Christine Romans filed a report, then told Dobbs, "There have been 7,000 [cases of leprosy] in the past three years." CBS' "60 Minutes" later challenged the fact, pointing out that there had actually been 7,029 cases reported over 30 years. When Lesley Stahl confronted Dobbs on the statistic, he defended it, saying: "Well, I can tell you this. If we reported it, it's a fact."

Dobbs' reporter, Romans, said her source was "Dr. Madeleine Cosman, a respected medical lawyer and medical historian." Cosman, who died in March 2006, was a medical lawyer and staunch anti-immigrant activist. She was recorded saying publicly of Mexican men: "Recognize that most of these bastards molest girls under age 12, some as young as age 5, others aged 3, although, of course, some specialize in boys, some specialize in nuns, some are exceedingly versatile and rape little girls aged 11 and women up to age 79."

After I played the tape of Cosman for Dobbs, he conceded to me that his reporter's source, Cosman, was a "whack job."

On May 23, 2006, Dobbs aired a report on a state visit by Mexican President Vicente Fox. His correspondent, Casey Wian, called it a "Mexican military incursion" and displayed a map of the U.S. with the seven Southwest states highlighted as "Aztlan," which, Wian reported, "some militant Latino activists ... claim rightfully belongs to Mexico."

The graphic came from the Council of Conservative Citizens, which the Southern Poverty Law Center, a group that tracks hate groups, points out is the current incarnation of the old White Citizen Councils of the 1950s and 1960s, which Thurgood Marshall referred to as "the uptown Klan."

The SPLC has reported that several of Dobbs' guests and sources have had links to the CCC, such as Joe McCutchen of Protect Arkansas Now, part of the Minuteman vigilante movement, and Barbara Coe of the California Coalition for Immigration Reform. Another guest, Glenn Spencer, head of the anti-immigrant group American Patrol, speaks on the white-supremacist circuit. When CNN's Wolf Blitzer had Spencer on, he told his audience that the SPLC had designated American Patrol as a hate group. When Dobbs had him on, he never identified the connection.

In our conversation with Dobbs, "Democracy Now!" co-host Juan Gonzalez raised the issue of history, of how immigrants have been scapegoated: the Irish in the 1860s, the Chinese in the 1880s and, later, Southern Europeans. Dobbs rolled his eyes, saying, "Are you holding me responsible?"

No, and Dobbs knows better. But he must be held responsible for not bringing a historical context to this crucial discussion of immigration reform. The immigration issue will not be solved by vilifying a population. The SPLC has just released a report on the upsurge in anti-immigrant, anti-Latino violence in the U.S.

United Stations Radio Networks has just announced that Dobbs will soon be hosting a three-hour daily talk radio show. The Web site claims, "It's not about what's right and left ... it's about what's right and wrong." Let's hope that Lou Dobbs follows his own advice.

What Would Jesus Buy?

"Black Friday" is the name retailers have given to the day after Thanksgiving in their attempt to make Christmas synonymous with shopping. On Black Friday, Americans are expected to flock to the malls and shopping centers, eager for discounts, armed with plastic. Business analysts fill the airwaves with predictions on how the fickle consumer will perform, how fuel prices and the subprime mortgage crisis will impact holiday shopping. Black Friday is followed by "Cyber Monday," a name coined by the retail industry to hype online shopping. Listening to the business news, one would conclude that the future not only of the U.S. economy but of humanity itself depends on mass, frenzied shopping for the holidays.

Rev. Billy is the street preacher played by Bill Talen, a New York City-based anti-consumerism activist who is the subject of a new feature-length documentary hitting theaters this week, "What Would Jesus Buy?" The film is produced by Morgan Spurlock, who gained fame with his documentary "Super Size Me," in which he showed his physical and emotional decline while eating only McDonald's food for breakfast, lunch and dinner for a month.

In the movie, Talen and his amazing Stop Shopping Gospel Choir cross the country in two biodiesel buses, holding public faux-Gospel revivals denouncing the "Shopocalypse," our crass, corporate, credit-driven consumerist culture and its reliance on sweatshops abroad and low-wage retail jobs at home, while celebrating small-town, Main Street economies, the strength and value of fair-trade shopping, and making do with less.

"We are here today, 28 days before Christmas," Rev. Billy intones at the outset of his tour, to his home congregation in Greenwich Village, "behind so many layers of billboards, with supermodels looking down on us in their Christmas lingerie, billboards covered with fake Dickensian gingerbread lattes -- we're going to go out across this shopping-addicted country." He added later, "We will sit down and defeat the bulbous yellow feet of the most famous corporate logo in the world, and the one that has chosen to steal our children's imaginations for 80 years, the devil, Mickey Mouse."

En route to Disneyland from New York City, the reverend and his flock stop by the Mall of America in Minnesota, Wal-Mart's world headquarters in Bentonville, Ark., and numerous Starbucks shops and big-box stores like Target and Staples -- educating and engaging, confronting and confounding, with creative street theater and direct action. In Traer, Iowa, we meet Michael Reuman, whose clothing store has been open for more than 100 years: "Wal-Mart is killing small-town America. We've got two sons, and I have not encouraged either one of them to come back to the store. There's no future here."

This week, Charles Kernaghan of the National Labor Committee, standing in front of St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York, released a stunning report on the sweatshop conditions in which crucifixes are manufactured in China. St. Patrick's, Trinity Church in New York and the Association for Christian Retail all sell crucifixes traced to the Junxingye factory in Dongguan, China. There, women as young as 15 work seven days a week, 14 hours a day, and earn only 9 cents per hour, after room and board are deducted from their pay. What would Jesus buy, indeed.

Black Friday is also "Buy Nothing Day" -- a global boycott of shopping and consumerism. Started by Kalle Lasn and his colleagues at Vancouver-based Adbusters magazine, Buy Nothing Day seeks to place the ad-fueled and news-media-supported shopping frenzy in a global context. He says, "Driving hybrid cars and limiting industrial emissions is great, but they are Band-Aid solutions if we don't address the core problem: We have to consume less."

The fair-trade movement is growing -- focusing on safe, organic products made locally, by people earning not just the legal minimum wage but a living wage. Networks of sustainable businesses and nonprofit organizations are forming, linking producers with consumers, cutting out the corporations and the middlemen, allowing the people who make the items to get a larger share of the sale price. From clothing to chocolate to food to flowers to fuel, it is becoming increasingly easy to shop ethically. Heifer International features a selection of farm animals that you can sponsor, which the organization will deliver to a poor family in need elsewhere in the world.

This holiday season, spend time with family and friends -- it's worth more than money. Shop locally, or find a fair-trade store or Web site. Before walking into that big-box store, ask yourself, "What would Jesus buy?"

What A Fearless Journalist Looks Like

"I have, after a fashion, been celebrated for having celebrated the lives of the uncelebrated among us; for lending voice to the face in the crowd." That is the opening line of Studs Terkel's long-awaited memoir, Touch and Go. I made a pilgrimage to Chicago to see Terkel, one of the 20th century's greatest journalists, interviewers and storytellers.

After writing a dozen books, winning the Pulitzer Prize, having a play produced on Broadway, winning the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, the George Polk Career Award and the presidential National Humanities Medal, and hosting a daily radio show on WFMT in Chicago for close to half a century, he has, at 95-years-old, written his memoir. "I tape, therefore I am," he writes. "I tape, therefore they are. Who are they, these etceteras of history, hardly worth a footnote? Who are they of whom the bards have seldom sung?"

Though he won his Pulitzer for his oral history "The Good War," about World War II, he says there is a greater generation:

"It was in the '60s, there was the civil rights movement, it flourished, at least for a time, and the rise, resurgence, of feminism; the gays and lesbians coming out as free people. So that's the generation, I think the greatest."

While he is a man of the 20th century, he continues to write about the 21st century. In fact, he has just sued AT&T for collaborating with the government in eavesdropping.

Terkel says this is not new. He was wiretapped in the 1950s, during the McCarthy era. Of the government spies and their telecom allies, then and now, Terkel says:

"They are un-American. Thomas Paine, the most eloquent visionary of the American Revolution, speaks of this country in which a commoner can look at a king and say, 'Bugger off!' I've known this before, because my phone was tapped in the days when the keyword was 'Commie.' "

Terkel was blacklisted for his views, and lost his show, "Stud's Place." Then legendary African-American gospel singer Mahalia Jackson insisted that he be hired as the host of her show. CBS demanded Terkel sign a loyalty oath. When he refused, they threatened to fire him. She told them, "Look, if you fire Studs, find another Mahalia Jackson." CBS backed off. Studs recalled: "Do you know what happened? Nothing. You have to face them down."

Terkel is a fierce critic of the Bush administration, but also of the lack of historical context in American society, which has allowed this government to persist, to attack Iraq, to plan on attacking Iran:

"How could it be, at the end of World War II, we were the most honored, powerful nation in the world? 'Honored' is the key word. Today we are the most despised. How come? The American public itself has no memory of the past. Gore Vidal uses the phrase 'United States of Amnesia.' I say, United States of Alzheimer's. What do we know about it -- why are we there in Iraq? They say, when you attack our policy, you are attacking the boys. On the contrary, they're defending those boys. Welcoming them back home with their families. The war is built upon an obscene lie. We know that now. This lack of history has been denied us."

One of the great listeners of the past century, Studs Terkel is now losing his ability to hear. He told me: "When Robert Browning wrote, 'Come and grow old with me, the best is yet to be,' he was lying through his teeth. But the one thing you can retain is the memory." His almost photographic memory is matched only by his continued intense interest in people's lives and the movements that make those lives better. He jokes: "My epitaph has already been formed: Curiosity did not kill this cat." He's already at work on his next book.

A Vote for Mukasey Is a Vote for Torture

Judge Michael Mukasey admits waterboarding is repugnant, but refuses to say whether it amounts to torture. Yet Democratic Sens. Charles Schumer and Dianne Feinstein voted for his confirmation as U.S. attorney general anyway. Mukasey, Schumer and Feinstein should talk to French journalist Henri Alleg. An editor of a paper in Algeria, he was waterboarded by the French military in 1957, when the French were trying to crush the Algerian independence movement. The 86-year-old journalist spoke to me from his home in Paris:

"I was put on a plank, on a board, fastened to it and taken to a tap [water faucet]. And my face was covered with a rag. Very quickly, the rag was completely full of water. You have the impression of being drowned. And the water ran all over my face. I couldn't breathe. It's a terrible, terrible impression of torture and of death, being near death."

Journalist Stephen Grey, whose documentary "Extraordinary Rendition" airs on PBS stations this week, told me: "I, like many journalists, should issue a correction, an apology really, because we all reported waterboarding as a simulated drowning. It is clear from those who did it, this is actual drowning ... this is something that shocks the conscience and therefore is torture."

In a remarkable demonstration of commitment to his job, former acting Assistant Attorney General Daniel Levin, according to ABC News, underwent waterboarding when tasked by the White House to rework its official position on torture in 2004. Concluding that waterboarding is torture, he was forced out of his job.

On Monday, Nov. 5, anti-torture activists engaged in an actual demonstration of waterboarding outside the Department of Justice. Twenty-six-year-old actor Maboud Ebrahimzadeh volunteered to be the victim. After the session, he was near tears: "It is the most terrifying experience I have ever had. And although this is a controlled environment, when water goes into your lungs and you want to scream and you cannot, as soon as you do you will choke."

Four retired military judge advocates general wrote a letter to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy stating, "Waterboarding is inhumane, it is torture, and it is illegal." Twenty-four former intelligence agents and analysts agreed with the JAGs, adding, "Whether or not the practice is currently in use by U.S. intelligence, it should in fact be easy for him to respond."

Yet Mukasey told the Senate Judiciary Committee, "I don't know what's involved in the technique, if waterboarding is torture."

In the Judiciary hearing when the votes were cast, Leahy said: "No senator should abet this administration's legalistic obfuscations by those such as Alberto Gonzales, John Yoo and David Addington by agreeing that the laws on the books do not already make waterboarding illegal. We have been prosecuting water torture for more than 100 years."

U.S. soldiers have been prosecuted for participating in waterboarding in the Philippines in 1901 and Vietnam in 1968. The U.S. imprisoned a Japanese officer in 1947 for using waterboarding against U.S. troops in World War II.

Sen. Edward Kennedy added: "Make no mistake about it: Waterboarding is already illegal under United States law. It is illegal under the Geneva Conventions, which prohibit 'outrages upon personal dignity,' including cruel, humiliating and degrading treatment. It is illegal under the Torture Act, which prohibits acts 'specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering.' It is illegal under the Detainee Treatment Act, which prohibits 'cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.' And it violates the Constitution."

He went on: "Waterboarding is slow-motion suffocation with enough time to contemplate the inevitability of blackout and expiration--usually the person goes into hysterics on the board. For the uninitiated, it is horrifying to watch, and if it goes wrong, it can lead straight to terminal hypoxia. When done right, it is controlled death."

Republican Sen. Arlen Specter, who voted for Mukasey's confirmation, said Congress should pass a law forbidding waterboarding, having received assurances from Mukasey that he would uphold such a law. What if President Bush vetoed the law, or if he issued one of his signing statements used to sidestep bills he signs into law?

Despite all this, Schumer's and Feinstein's votes for Mukasey mean the Judiciary Committee has voted 11 to 8 to recommend his appointment as attorney general to the full Senate. From war funding to torture, you have to ask, If the Republicans were in the majority, would there be any difference?

Now only the full Senate can block Mukasey's appointment. Maybe at least one senator will step up and filibuster the confirmation, just long enough for Mukasey to research and announce his opinion on whether waterboarding amounts to torture. If a U.S. citizen, soldier or official were waterboarded somewhere overseas, would Americans hesitate for a moment to call it torture? A filibuster might give the Mukasey supporters like Schumer and Feinstein pause to reconsider. For starters, they should talk to Henri Alleg.

Tipping the Scales of Justice in Jena

The tree at Jena High School has been cut down, but the furor around it has only grown.

"What did the tree do wrong?" asked Katrina Wallace, a stepsister of one of the Jena Six, when I interviewed her at the Burger Barn in Jena, La. "I planted it 14 years ago as a tree of knowledge."

It all began at the start of the school year in 2006, at a school assembly, when Justin Purvis asked if he could sit under the schoolyard tree, a privilege unofficially reserved for white students. The next morning, three nooses were hanging from its broad, leafy branches.

African-American students protested, gathering under the tree. Soon after, the district attorney, Reed Walters, came to the school with the police, threatening, "I could end your lives with the stroke of a pen." Racial tensions mounted in this 85 percent white town of 4,000. In December, a schoolyard fight erupted, and the district attorney charged six African-American high school students, the soon to be dubbed Jena Six, with second-degree attempted murder.

I recently visited Billy "Bulldog" Fowler in his office. He's a white member of the LaSalle Parish School Board. He says Jena is being unfairly painted as racist. He feels the hanging nooses were blown out of proportion, that in the high school setting it was more of a prank: "This is the Deep South, and [older] black people know the meaning of a noose. Let me tell you something -- young people don't."

That night, I went to see the Baileys in their mobile home in Ward 10, one of the black neighborhoods in Jena. Two of the Jena Six, Robert Bailey and Theo Shaw, were ironing their clothes. I asked them what they thought when they saw the nooses. Robert immediately said: "The first thing came to mind was the KKK. I don't know why, but that was the first thing that came to my head. I used to always think the KKK chase black people on horses, and they catch you with rope."

Theo said he thought the students who hung the nooses "should have got expelled, cuz it wasn't no prank. It was a threat." School principal Scott Whitcomb thought the same. He recommended expulsion of those who hung the nooses, but the superintendent overruled him, imposing three days of suspension. Whitcomb resigned.

The African-American teens were dealt with differently. They were expelled, but appealed to the school board. The school district had conducted an investigation, but the school board was not allowed to review it. The school board's lawyer was none other than the prosecuting district attorney, Reed Walters.

Board member Fowler recalls the January meeting: "Our legal authority that night was Mr. Walters."

I asked, "And he told you, you couldn't have access to the school proceedings, or the investigation?"

Fowler replied: "That's right. [Walters said] it was a violation of something." The board voted, without information. Fowler recalls: "It was unanimous. No, no it wasn't. There was one board member who voted no, and that was Mr. Worthington." Melvin Worthington, the only African-American on the school board, voted against upholding the expulsion of the black students.

Asked if he felt that Walters had a conflict of interest that night, Fowler replied, "Well, I'm assuming that Mr. Walters knows the law."

Louisiana's 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals doesn't agree. The court just overturned Walters' first conviction in the Jena Six case (by an all-white jury), that of Mychal Bell, ruling that he should have been tried as a juvenile. Walters pledges to challenge that ruling in the Louisiana Supreme Court, while continuing to pursue the other five prosecutions.

Bell remains in jail, where he has been since last December. Although yet to be tried, the others were jailed as well. Theo Shaw just got out earlier this summer. Imprisoned with adults who were maced repeatedly, Theo's asthma was triggered, and he was hospitalized.

National organizations like the NAACP have called for a major march in Jena on Sept. 20, the day Bell was to be sentenced. Although his conviction has been overturned, the march will happen, with thousands expected.

Creating Radio for the People

Rupert Murdoch is looking like the cat that ate the canary with his successful takeover of Dow Jones & Co. and its flagship newspaper, The Wall Street Journal. Media conglomerates like Murdoch's News Corp. are among the most powerful corporations on the planet. His papers beat the drums for war while distracting with gossip and glitz.

Yet people are finding innovative ways to fight back, to demand independent, community-based media. One such effort that you can join is the movement to create new, full-power, noncommercial FM radio stations in the U.S.

This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity. The Federal Communications Commission will open a one-week window, Oct. 12-19, during which nonprofit community groups in the U.S. can file applications.

Think for a moment what a powerful, noncommercial radio station could do in your community. As the late George Gerbner, dean of the Annenberg School for Communication, said, we need a media not run by "corporations that have nothing to tell and everything to sell, that are raising our children today."

Community radio is the antidote to that small circle of pundits featured on all the networks, who know so little about so much, explaining the world to us and getting it so wrong. On community radio, you can hear your neighbors, you can hear people from your community: the silenced majority, silenced by the corporate media.

Pacifica Radio, the network where I got my start, is the oldest public broadcasting network in the United States, founded in 1949 by conscientious objectors like Lew Hill. He created the concept of "listener-sponsored" radio -- the radical concept that quality programming could be put out over the air that would be so different and so valuable to the audience that the listeners would give money to keep it going, and they have, all over the country.

After Pacifica station KPFT went on the air in Houston in 1970, its transmitter was blown up, twice; it is the only U.S. radio station to have suffered such crimes. The transmitter was destroyed by the Ku Klux Klan. Why? Because the station allowed people to speak for themselves, and that challenges stereotypes and caricatures, which fuel hate groups like the KKK.

Pacifica Radio is now part of a national coalition, RadioForPeople.org, that is helping groups file for their own radio licenses. You can check out the availability of a license by entering your ZIP code at the website getradio.org.

Independent community radio provided critical coverage of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. While Cumulus Media was banning the Dixie Chicks for daring to speak out against war, Clear Channel radio stations were sponsoring prowar rallies around the country. Roxanne (Walker) Cordonier, the South Carolina Broadcasters Association's 2002 radio personality of the year, was fired by Clear Channel-owned station WMYI-FM in Greenville, S.C.

"I was fired for being antiwar," she told me. "I was told to shut up. People who retained their employment had the presence of mind to keep quiet." She sued, and Clear Channel settled with her just before trial (for a sum said to be about a year's salary). Four years later, she is back on the air, now buying airtime on a locally owned station. "People forget," she says, "these are the public airwaves, and the public is not getting access to them."

From coast to coast, from Alaska to Hawaii to Florida to Maine, people are organizing to reclaim a small portion of the public airwaves. The October FCC application window for full-power, noncommercial FM licenses is an opportunity to make a meaningful, long-term contribution to your local media landscape -- to help give a voice to the voiceless, to carry on the fine tradition of Pacifica Radio, to create a beacon for truth under which people can discuss the most important issues of the day: war and peace, life and death. Check out getradio.org. Start your own community radio station, and wipe that smile off Rupert Murdoch's face.

The Uncounted Casualties of War

U.S. Marine Lance Cpl. Jeffrey Lucey is not counted among the Iraq War dead. But he did die, when he came home. He committed suicide. His parents are suing the Department of Veterans Affairs and R. James Nicholson, the secretary of Veterans Affairs, for wrongful death, medical malpractice and other damages.

Kevin and Joyce Lucey saw their son's rapid descent after he returned from combat in Iraq in June 2003. Kevin said: "Hallucinations started with the visual, the audio, tactile. He would talk about hearing camel spiders in his room at night, and he actually had a flashlight under his bed, which he could use to search for the camel spiders. His whole life was falling apart."

Jeffrey told his family that he was ordered to execute two Iraqi prisoners of war. After he killed the two men, Jeffrey took their dog tags and wore them until Christmas Eve 2003, when he threw them at his sister, calling himself a murderer. A military investigation concluded the story is without merit, but Kevin Lucey says: "An agency investigating itself, I have a lot of problems with that. We fully believe our son." Joyce Lucey added: "It really, to us, didn't make a difference what caused Jeffrey's PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder]. We know that he came back different, so something happened to him over there."

Jeffrey got worse, secluding himself in his room, watching TV and drinking heavily. Jeffrey was reluctant to seek care, fearing the stigma that he felt accompanied mental-health treatment. Finally, on May 28, 2004, the Luceys had Jeffrey involuntarily committed. The Veterans Affairs hospital released him after three days.

On June 5, 2004, Jeffrey had deteriorated significantly. His sisters and grandfather brought him back to the VA. Joyce said the VA "decided that he wasn't saying what he needed to say to get involuntarily committed. Later we were to find out that they never called a psychiatrist or anybody that could have evaluated him. And they have this all on the record. It said that the grandfather was pleading for his grandson to be admitted."

The Luceys later learned from staff notes that Jeffrey talked about three ways to commit suicide. His father explained: "He told them that he would suffocate himself, he would overdose or he would hang himself. He also shared with the psychiatrist how he had bought a hose. And, of course, on June 5, when we tried to admit him the second time and the VA declined, Joyce and I went through the house, we took everything that he could hurt himself with, but we never thought of a hose."

Turned back by the Veterans Affairs Medical Center, Jeffrey spent his last two weeks alive at home. Kevin Lucey describes the night before his son killed himself: "It was about 11:30 at night, and I was exhausted, Jeff was exhausted. He asked me if he would be able to sit in my lap. And so for 45 minutes we rocked in silence, and the therapist told us after Jeff died that that was no doubt his last place of refuge, his last safe harbor that he felt that he could go to."

The next evening, after returning home from work, Kevin raced inside: "I went to his bedroom, and the one thing I noted was that his dog tags were laying on his bed." He made his way to the cellar, where he found his son Jeffrey dead, with a hose double-looped around his neck.

Three years later, his parents have filed suit. They are not alone. A separate class-action suit was filed by Veterans for Common Sense and Veterans United for Truth on behalf of hundreds of thousands of veterans who have been denied medical benefits.

Jeffrey Lucey's suicide note begins, "Dear Mom and Dad, I cannot express my apologies in words for the pain I have caused you but I beg for your forgiveness. I want you to know that I loved you both and still do but the pain of life was too much for me to deal with."

Supporting the troops means taking care of them when they return home.

Giving Up the Debt Lifestyle

Growing up a tomboy, I hated the pointy-toed sneakers my mom forced me to wear. I ached for Keds high-tops.

Years later, when as a college junior I giddily found myself holding my very first credit card, I knew exactly what my first purchase would be -- and rightly reckoned this was a momentous adult milestone.

But as I signed the credit slip and laced up those high-tops, I had no idea that I'd actually just bought a painful -- and costly -- learning opportunity: I'd entered the debt lifestyle.

At first, it seemed harmless to pay an item's purchase price, plus a bit of interest. But as the years clicked by and I settled down with my spouse, Joyce, I came to feel like a frustrated gerbil -- always running but getting nowhere financially. What had us spinning was the amount of our income being diverted to interest payments -- on credit cards, cars, our mortgage and home equity loans (taken out to pay off credit cards that we ran right back up).

But, now nearly three decades -- and a lot of peanut butter sandwiches -- after my Keds purchase, Joyce and I owe not one cent. And we don't pay interest. Money, rather than being a crowbar, has become a sweet glue that helps bond us to each other and our shared dreams.

Money tears many couples apart. MONEY magazine surveyed 500 married couples last year and found money caused more fights than sex or in-laws. Most -- 84 percent -- said money creates tension in their marriage, and they said the main reason was because they don't agree on financial priorities.

Having been taught by our goof-ups that we were money dummies, Joyce and I sat down eight years ago and designed a roadmap out of debt. We started by creating a very specific picture of our ideal future with the help of Michael Gelb's timeless book, "How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci."

Once we came up with a shared, detailed dream of retiring in Hawaii, we found it easier to make the smart choices required to get us off the awful gerbil wheel.

We set a date -- February 2008 -- to be debt-free and made all money decisions based on that shared goal. Quick examples: Joyce loves to travel, so we took up tent camping -- and found ourselves happily cooking lobsters over an open fire and walking the beach alongside wild Assateague ponies. We swapped golf for tennis, a far cheaper sport.

Most importantly, we prioritized debts, putting every extra nickel toward erasing first one car loan, then the other. Once they were gone, we immediately doubled up on house payments. Each time one loan was wiped out, the pace of our progress picked up. Why? Less was being lost to interest.

Along the way, we received three small inheritances, which we used to pay off the last of our SUV, my piano and, just this summer, the final six months of mortgage payments. Pinch me: We actually own our home.

Financially free at last, we don't need a newer car or a house in a ritzier neighborhood. We've matured faster than our savings bonds.

Shared dreams help build strong couples. And shared financial game plans help make dreams come true. So sit down, and start dreaming -- together.

Bush Trying to Kill Child Health Care

Deamonte Driver had a toothache. He was 12 years old. He had no insurance, and his mother couldn't afford the $80 to have the decayed tooth removed. He might have gotten it taken care of through Medicaid, but his mother couldn't find a dentist who accepted the low reimbursements.

Instead, Deamonte got some minimal attention from an emergency room, his condition worsened and he died. Deamonte was one of 9 million children in the U.S. without health insurance.

Congress is considering bipartisan legislation that will cover poor children in the U.S.

The major obstacle? President Bush is vowing to veto the bill, even though Republican and Democratic senators reached bipartisan agreement on it. The bill adds $35 billion to the State Children's Health Insurance Program over the next five years by increasing federal taxes on cigarettes.

The conservative Heritage Foundation is against the tobacco tax to fund SCHIP, saying that it "disproportionately burdens low-income smokers" as well as "young adults." No mention is made of any adverse impact on Heritage-funder Altria Group, the cigarette giant formerly known as Philip Morris.

According to the American Association for Respiratory Care, with every 10 percent rise in the cigarette tax, youth smoking drops by 7 percent and overall smoking declines by 4 percent.

Marian Wright Edelman, founder of the Children's Defense Fund, says: "It is a public health good in and of itself and will save lives to increase the tobacco tax. Cigarettes kill and cigarettes provoke lung cancer, and every child and every [other] human being we can, by increasing the cigarette tax, stop from smoking or slow down from smoking is going to have a public health benefit, save taxpayers money from the cost of the effects of smoking and tobacco."

Two programs serve as the health safety net for poor and working-class children: Medicaid and SCHIP (pronounced "s-chip"). SCHIP is a federal grant program that allows states to provide health coverage to children who belong to working families earning too much to be eligible for Medicaid but not enough to afford private health insurance when their employers do not provide it. It's the SCHIP funding that is now being debated in Congress.

The Children's Defense Fund has published scores of stories similar to Deamonte's. Children like Devante Johnson of Houston. At 13, Devante was fighting advanced kidney cancer. His mother tried to renew his Medicaid coverage, but bureaucratic red tape tied up the process. By the time Devante got access to the care he needed, his fate was sealed. He died at the age of 14, in Bush's home state, only miles from the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, one of the world's leading cancer treatment and research facilities.

With children's lives at stake, Edelman has no patience for political gamesmanship: "Why is this country, at this time, the richest in the world, arguing about how few or how many children they can serve? We ought to--this is a no-brainer. The American people want all of its children served. All children deserve health coverage, and I don't know why we're having such a hard time getting our president and our political leaders to get it, that children should have health insurance."

Republican Sen. Gordon Smith originally introduced the SCHIP budget resolution in the Senate. Unlike Bush, who is not up for re-election, Smith is defending his vulnerable Senate seat in 2008, in the blue state of Oregon. He, like other Republicans who are breaking with Bush on the war in Iraq, is sensitive to Bush's domestic policies. Georgetown University's Center for Children and Families just released a poll that says 91 percent of Americans support the expansion of SCHIP to cover more kids.

And the American people are willing to go much further. As demonstrated by the popularity of Michael Moore's latest blockbuster, "SiCKO," the public, across the political spectrum, is ready to fix the U.S. healthcare system. How many more children like Deamonte and Devante have to die before the politicians, all with great health insurance themselves, take action?

Time Is Right for New Pentagon Papers

Of the Democratic presidential candidates, Sen. Mike Gravel is probably the least well recognized. His dark-horse candidacy may be the butt of jokes on the late-night comedy shows, but that doesn’t faze former Pentagon analyst Daniel Ellsberg: “Here is a senator who was not afraid to look foolish. That is the fear that keeps people in line all their lives.�

The famed whistle-blower joined Gravel this past weekend on a panel commemorating the 35th anniversary of the publication of the Pentagon Papers by the Beacon Press, a small, nonprofit publisher affiliated with the Unitarian Universalist Association. It was this publisher that Gravel turned to in 1971, after dozens of others had turned him down, to publish the 7,000 pages that Ellsberg had delivered to Gravel to put into the public record.

The story of the leak of the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times is famous, but how they got published as a book, with Gravel’s face on the jacket, reads like a John Grisham novel.

Ellsberg was a military analyst working for the RAND Corp. in the 1960s when he was asked to join an internal Pentagon group tasked with creating a comprehensive, secret history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Ellsberg photocopied thousands of documents and leaked them to The New York Times, which published excerpts in June 1971.

President Richard Nixon immediately got a restraining order, stopping the newspaper from printing more. It was the first time in U.S. history that presses were stopped by federal court order. The Times fought the injunction, and won in the Supreme Court case New York Times Co. v. United States. Following that decision, The Washington Post also began running excerpts. Ellsberg gave the Pentagon Papers to the Post on the condition that one of its editors, Ben Bagdikian, deliver a copy to Gravel.

Gravel recalled the exchange, which he set up at midnight outside the storied Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C.: “I used to work in intelligence; I know how to do these things.� Gravel pulled his car up to Bagdikian’s, the two opened their trunks and Gravel heaved the boxes personally, worried that only he could claim senatorial immunity should they get caught with the leaked documents. His staff aides were posted as lookouts around the block.

Thwarted in his attempt to read the Pentagon Papers into the public record as a filibuster to block the renewal of the draft, Gravel called a late-night meeting of the obscure Subcommittee on Buildings and Grounds, which he chaired, and began reading the papers aloud there. He broke down crying while reading the details of Vietnamese civilian deaths. Because he had begun the reading, he was legally able to enter all 7,000 pages of the Pentagon Papers, once top-secret, into the public record.

Though ridiculed by the press for his emotional display, Gravel was undaunted. He wanted the Pentagon Papers published as a book so Americans could read what had been done in their name. Only Beacon Press accepted the challenge.

Robert West, the president of the Unitarian Universalist Association at the time, approved the publication. With that decision, he said, “We started down a path that led through two and a half years of government intimidation, harassment and threat of criminal punishment.� As Beacon weathered subpoenas, FBI investigations of its bank accounts and other chilling probes, Gravel attempted to extend his senatorial immunity to the publisher. The bid failed in the U.S Supreme Court (the first time that the U.S. Senate appeared before the court), but not without a strongly worded dissent from Justice William O. Douglas: “In light of the command of the First Amendment we have no choice but to rule that here government, not the press, is lawless.�

Which brings us to today. Sitting next to West and Gravel, Ellsberg repeated the plea that he is making in speeches all over the United States: “The equivalent of the Pentagon Papers exist in safes all over Washington, not only in the Pentagon, but in the CIA, the State Department and elsewhere. My message is to them: Take the risk, reveal the truth under the lies of your own bosses and your superiors, obey your oath to the Constitution, which every one of those officials took, not to the commander in chief, but to the Constitution of the United States.�

War and Censorship at Wilton High

Last Sunday night, as millions of Americans tuned in to the two Tonys -- the final episode of “The Sopranos,� to see whether Tony Soprano lived or died, and the Tony Awards, celebrating the best in American theater -- actor Stanley Tucci (who played “Nigel� in “The Devil Wears Prada") was in an off-Broadway theater, the Culture Project, watching high school students perform a play about war.

The production, “Voices in Conflict,� moved the audience to tears, ending with a standing ovation for the teenage actors, still reeling from a controversy that had propelled them onto the New York stage. Their high school principal had banned the play.

Bonnie Dickinson has been teaching theater at Wilton High School in Connecticut for 13 years. She and her students developed the idea of a play about Iraq, initially inspired by the Sept. 3, 2006, death of Wilton High graduate Nicholas Madaras from an IED (improvised explosive device) blast in Baqubah, Iraq. The play uses real testimonials from soldiers, from their letters, blogs and taped interviews, and Yvonne Latty’s book “In Conflict,� with the students acting the roles. The voices of Iraqis are also included.

In mid-March, after students spent months preparing the play, the school administration canceled it. Superintendent Gary Richards wrote: “The student performers directly acting the part of the soldiers ... turns powerful material into a dramatic format that borders on being sensational and inappropriate. We would like to work with the students to complete a script that fully addresses our concerns.� (The students have modified the script; they perform Richards’ letter, its cold, condescending bureaucratese in stark relief with the play’s passionate eyewitness testimonials.)

The story struck a chord with Tucci. He was already producing a video piece about his high school alma mater, John Jay High School in Cross River, N.Y., where high school girls were suspended for performing an excerpt of Eve Ensler’s play “The Vagina Monologues.� Their crime: uttering the word “vagina� after being warned not to.

Following the performance of “Voices in Conflict,� Tucci participated in a public conversation with the student actors, noting that “Cross River and Wilton are only 15 miles apart. There’s obviously something in the water.�

After The New York Times published an article on the Wilton High censorship scandal, Ira Levin, the author of “The Stepford Wives,� wrote the paper a letter: “Wilton, Conn., where I lived in the 1960s, was the inspiration for Stepford, the fictional town I later wrote about in ‘The Stepford Wives.’ I’m not surprised ... that Wilton High School has a Stepford principal. Not all the Wilton High students have been Stepfordized. The ones who created and rehearsed the banished play ‘Voices in Conflict’ are obviously thoughtful young people with minds of their own.�

Wilton High School principal Timothy Canty was quoted in The New York Times article saying that the play might “hurt Wilton families ‘who had lost loved ones or who had individuals serving as we speak,’ and that there was not enough classroom and rehearsal time to ensure it would provide ‘a legitimate instructional experience for our students.’ �

I asked the student actors about their opportunities to discuss the war at school. Jimmy Presson, 16 years old, said his U.S. history class has a weekly assignment to bring in a current-event news item, with one caveat: “We are not allowed to talk about the war while discussing current events.� The students said that they can discuss the war in a Middle Eastern studies class, but, they said, it is not being taught this year. “Theater Arts II was the only class in the school where students were discussing the war,� Dickinson said. Jimmy added, “We also get to speak about it with the military recruiters who are always at school.�

Following Sunday’s production, Allan Buchman, Culture Project’s artistic director, summed up, “What we saw tonight was the reason to have a theater.�

With the evening winding down, the kids were already talking about their next performance, this one at the famed Public Theater, another prominent New York institution, which will be attended by some of the soldiers the student actors play. Jimmy said: “It means a lot that we can share their stories. We got word from India, Japan ... and even Iowa.� The audience laughed. It was getting late. As the students packed up to head home to Connecticut, they wondered if they would ever be allowed to perform the play where it all began, at Wilton High.

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