Millions in the Slammer: We Must Reverse America's Zeal to Incarcerate

By Nomi Prins

The U.S. has the most prisoners and the highest jailing rate of any country -- the insanity must stop.

The movie, Atonement, is a heart-breaking love-story, a historical WWII saga. Without giving away the ending, which must be seen to be adequately felt, it tells the tale of two lovers' lives irrevocably changed by false testimony against one of them -- for a crime he did not commit. Thus, it's also a condemnation of unreliable witnesses, the willingness of people to believe the worst, particularly of those in a lower economic-class, and the havoc that a false accusation and conviction can wreak upon human life. It's a film and message that every judge, jury member, and prosecutor should see and consider before convicting or sentencing anyone accused of a crime.

On December 10th, the United States Supreme Court voted 7-2 to recognize a gross injustice with respect to sentencing guidelines which disproportionately penalize those convicted of crack versus cocaine related crimes. The disparity gives equal punishment to a person caught with 5 grams of crack (a poor person's cocaine) and one caught with 500 grams of coke (a drug dealer's amount). In their validation of a federal district judge's below-guideline sentence for a crack case, the Supreme Court reconfirmed the 2005 Booker ruling that federal judges could have more discretion in levying below-guideline sentences. They did not rule on the validity of the guidelines themselves.

This decision should be viewed as the tip of an iceberg. American prisons teem with non-violent prisoners. Our juries are caught between wanting to rush home for the evening and wanting to appear law-abiding. Members are too quick to bow to the loudest voice amongst them, and not necessarily in The Twelve Angry Men direction. Meanwhile, false convictions, due to witness error, prosecutorial misconduct, inferior defense lawyers or coerced "snitching," continue to destroy multiple generations of lives. They throw the idea of "equal protection under the law" under the same bus as our Declaration of Independence mantra of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

We've simply got to reverse this zeal to incarcerate. The United States has more inmates and a higher incarceration rate than any other nation: more than Russia, South Africa, Mexico, Iran, India, Australia, Brazil and Canada combined. Nearly 1 in every 136 US residents is in jail or prison. That's 2.2 million people, an amount that quadrupled from 1980 to 2005. (There were only 340,000 people incarcerated in 1972.) Adding in figures for those on probation or parole, the number reaches 7.1 million.

Over the next five years, the American prison population is projected to increase three times more quickly than our resident population. The Federal Prison system is growing at 4% per year with 55% of federal prisoners serving time for drug offenses, and only 11% for violent crimes. Women are more likely than men (29% to 19%) to serve drug sentences, dismantling thousands of families. One-third of prisoners are first time, non-violent offenders. Three-quarters are non-violent offenders with no history of violence. More than 200,000 are factually innocent. Whether our citizens are wrongly incarcerated or exaggeratedly so, our prison figures are shameful.

December 19th marked the five-year anniversary of the 2002 exoneration of the five "perpetrators" who were originally caught, indicted, and convicted in the infamous Central Park Jogger case. The five black and Hispanic youths, ages 14 to 16 at the time of their imprisonment, were exonerated only after they had spent between 5 and 13 1/2 years in prison for crimes they did not commit. Their freedom came late, even as it was conclusively confirmed by DNA testing results. At the time of their arrests, they confessed to crimes after prolonged interrogation by police.

The Innocence Project counts 210 people, mostly minorities, who have been exonerated post-conviction by conclusive DNA results (350 people have been exonerated including non-DNA related exonerations). Fifteen of them spent time on death row for crimes they did not commit. The average age at the time of their convictions was 26 years old. The average time served was 12 years. The total number of violent crimes that were committed because the real perpetrators were free while the innocent were imprisoned was 74.

Those total numbers may seem small, as those who favor a harsher penal system would argue, but they only consist of the situations that have been put through years of legal battles to conclude innocence. They don't include cases where there is no money left for the wrongfully convicted to fight for their freedom. They don't include the cases of people who are so beaten down mentally or physically by their imprisonment, they can't fight. They don't include the ones who don't even know what steps to take.

Freedom is a basic human right destroyed by a felony conviction. And in some states, so is the right to vote. Other casualties include the ability to adopt children, find housing or have certain employment. The stigma is permanent. Thus any mistake in a court-room, whether due to a self-serving witness or an ambitious prosecutor, costs someone a part of their life, severing them from the fabric of a justice system designed to protect them. As Martin Luther King said from the Birmingham Jail in 1963, "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly."

Thus, there's more work to do. Providing judges more latitude to reverse jury convictions in which there's no physical evidence, or there exists the potential of fraudulent or self-incriminating testimony coerced under hostile conditions or threats, would be another step in the direction of justice. Reducing guidelines substantially would also help, as would be alternatives to incarceration for non-violent offenders. Without addressing these issues, our prisons will continue to burst beyond the seams of their present 134% overcrowding rate, our prisons systems will continue to get more funding than our schools, and we will be a sadder nation for it.

The Stillborn God

By Zachary Karabell

One of the bedrock assumptions of our society is that we have, after centuries of struggle, finally achieved an enviable balance that allows individuals to have their own religious beliefs but does not permit religion to dictate public life and thereby enflame passions and generate deadly conflict. That balance was hardly easy to create, and only after many years of two steps forward and one step back did we in the West finally -- supposedly -- arrive at the right formula. But arrive we did, says Mark Lilla in "The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics and the Modern West," his provocative, passionate essay on what he calls "the Great Separation."

With the rise of a virulent strain of radical fundamentalism in the Muslim world, that separation is being assailed, and we seem bewildered that anyone could argue against it. Lilla, however, contends that it is not the fundamentalists -- Muslim, Christian and Jewish -- who are seeing the world askew; it is Western culture and its defenders. "We must remind ourselves," he writes, "that we are living in an experiment, that we are the exceptions. We have little reason to expect other civilizations to follow our unusual path, which was opened up by a unique theological-political crisis within Christendom." In short, Lilla believes that we> have gotten one thing utterly wrong: We are not us. We are them. We are not the rule; we are the exception.

The rule for Lilla is a blurring of the political and theological that has defined most societies from time immemorial and Western society for most of recorded history until only recently. Since the dawn of Christianity, there has been a deep confusion in Western society about what constitutes a good society, and Lilla astutely highlights what he sees as the limitations of the New Testament in not "articulating a clear, coherent picture of the good Christian political order." Although full of moral guidance, the New Testament is indeed vague about how society should be structured, perhaps because most of those who penned its text believed that the end of days was near and hence that it would be a waste of time thinking too much about how to construct an ideal political society in this world. The result, however, was endless war and tension between different groups in what became Europe.

Lilla is a historian of ideas, and his book is primarily an intellectual history of the thinkers who confronted the problem of never-ending wars of theology and who sought a solution and an escape. Lilla's hero in this endeavor is Thomas Hobbes, the 17th-century English philosopher who looked at the wreckage caused by theological conflict and offered a radical solution: structure society around man's nature, not on God's. And that nature isn't pretty. For Hobbes, "the reason human beings in war commit acts no animal would commit is, paradoxically, because they believe in God. Animals fight only to eat or reproduce; men fight to get into heaven." Because humans need someone to follow absolutely, Hobbes suggested that they follow not God, whose will is mysterious when applied to politics, but rather an absolute ruler, "an earthly God."

From Hobbes, Lilla then charts the intellectual peregrinations of thinkers as varied as Rousseau, Kant, Hegel and Karl Barth. Some are more familiar than others, but the book as a whole is a sophisticated series of essays on the way these thinkers slowly erected a wall between theology and politics and inexorably built the foundations for a society predicated not on God's will but on human action and human thought.

As with any endeavor of this kind, it is easy to quibble with Lilla's interpretations and his selective readings. But that is less an issue with what Lilla has done and how he has done it than with intellectual history itself. By nature, it imposes a coherence and sense of orderly progression on intellectual thought -- even when acknowledging just how messy the evolution of ideas can be. Because Lilla is looking for the roots of the Great Separation, he naturally finds them, at the expense of clearing away not just weeds but roots of other ideas that are not the subject of his inquiry. Still, that comes with the territory, and while it would have strengthened his case to have acknowledged that his question -- and not some bright, shining self-evident historical progression of ideas -- determined what he does and does not pay attention to, he succeeds in excavating the path that led to what we now blithely call the separation of church and state.

Lilla is by no means a romantic about that separation. He understands how hard it was to achieve, and how unsatisfying it can be and continues to be even to this day. Like democracy, it was never a great solution, only better than the alternatives.

Where Lilla does fall short, however, is in the very presumption that there was a Great Separation, or that it is alien to all but the modern West. It is without a doubt true that Western Europe today is a series of societies defined less and less by Christianity. However, the same cannot be said of the United States. While Americans don't fight wars of religion with one other, it is a stretch to say that there has been a Great Separation in the United States or that God is stillborn in contemporary American life. Fighting to be heard, perhaps, but stillborn? It is also wrong to generalize these issues to humanity. Chinese culture has a powerful stream of Confucian thought which is in essence God-less. China hasn't had a Great Separation because it never had to grapple with an immanent God, a transcendent God, or any God. And India? Let's not get started on India, with its one God, its one Gods, its many Gods, no Gods, pantheon of Gods, and castes, and Vedas and Upanishads and just about anything and everything that has been anywhere and everywhere.

Lilla concludes by saying that "ours is a difficult heritage ...because it demands self-awareness" rather than revelation, because in recognizing the perils of messianic religion, we are left to our devices and those are rarely satisfying. There is something troubling about that sentiment, and self-satisfied. Lilla is saying that our path -- or rather the path he says we took -- is hard, but it is a good hard and a better hard, and, it is strongly implied, a more evolved hard. That would be news to the Chinese, to the Indians, and to billions outside the West who have engaged in equally human struggles in vastly different ways, who don't know from Hobbes and couldn't spell Kant. It would also be news to preachers all across America who everyday lament the separation of church and state and are looking for ways to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

And as for those whom Lilla does not name but whom he nonetheless points a j'accuse-like finger at -- the children of Osama bin Laden -- they do challenge many of our notions as well as those of a billion Muslims who live the great separation more than most in the West recognize. To imply that those children of Bin Laden define the universe of billions of them and that Hobbes and his thought define us is to force far too many square pegs into one very small round hole. Lilla has done a fine job of highlighting and explicating some of the great thinkers of Western civ and exploring how they grappled with some vexing problems. But his reading of who we are is strangely simplistic, and his view of them, of those who have supposedly not made the journey to the other shore, is ultimately confined to a very small them in a wide world that is far more sophisticated and wonderfully more complicated than these essays suggest.

W.Virginia woman charged with battery after allegedly wiping nose on cop

DUNBAR, W.Va. - Sometimes you need a police officer; sometimes you need a tissue.

Confuse the two, and it could cost you. A woman in Charleston, West Virginia, is facing battery charges after allegedly wiping her nose on the back of a police officer's shirt.

Corporal S.E. Elliott says he had arrested the 36-year-old woman last week after seeing her slap a man, bite him on the elbow and spit in his face.

Elliott says the woman wiped her nose on him as he led her into the police station for booking on a charge of domestic battery.

Battery on a police officer is defined as intentionally making physical contact of an insulting or provoking nature with an officer.

<bat·ter·y (bt-r) n. pl. bat·ter·ies

1.

a. The act of beating or pounding.

b. Law The unlawful and unwanted touching or striking of one person by another, with the intention of bringing about a harmful or offensive contact.

bat·ter ¹ (btr)

v. bat·tered, bat·ter·ing, bat·ters

v.tr.

1. To hit heavily and repeatedly with violent blows.

2. To subject to repeated beatings or physical abuse.

It would be nice indeed if the legal definition stayed true to the actual meaning of the word, to beat, pound, to BATTER (to hit heavily and repeatedly with violent blows)>

The Imperial Presidency: The '08 Candidates Weigh In

By Arianna Huffington

Looking back over the last year, it's one of the most important issues America faced. Looking ahead, it could turn out to be the "sleeper issue" of the 2008 presidential race.

I'm talking about executive power, the way it is used -- and has been abused over the last 7 years.

In a very revealing piece in the Boston Globe, Charlie Savage lays out the results of a questionnaire the Globe sent to the presidential candidates on the limits of executive power, asking their views on the Bush administration's expansive view of presidential authority.

It's hard to overstate how vital this issue is, or how far off the media radar screen it remains. Indeed, it's hard to think of another issue in which the importance-to-the-public /attention-paid-by-the-media ratio is as out of whack.

As Savage -- who won a Pulitzer for his coverage of Bush's use of signing statements, and is the author of Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy -- puts it:

"Bush has bypassed laws and treaties that he said infringed on his wartime powers, expanded his right to keep information secret from Congress and the courts, centralized greater control over the government in the White House, imprisoned US citizens without charges, and used signing statements to challenge more laws than all predecessors combined."

True, a lot of the harm Bush has done can be rolled-back or repaired. But the way he wielded executive power greatly increased the ability of the executive branch to do damage. And the problem is, even well intentioned executives don't like to give up power.

It's easy to imagine the next president saying: Sure, Bush used his increased prerogatives to do damage but, trust me, I'll use them to do good.

The Constitution is a monument to skepticism about such trust. Sure, Mr. President, maybe you are a good person, and maybe you do have our best interests at heart, but don't take it personally if we double-check you with a few laws.

That is not, to put it mildly, a reading of the constitution popular in the current White House.

Which is why the next president's approach to executive power is so crucial. "Legal specialists," writes Savage, "say decisions by the next president -- either to keep using the expanded powers Bush and Cheney developed, or to abandon their legal and political precedents - will help determine whether a stronger presidency becomes permanent."

So what will be the view of the next occupant of the Oval Office? The Globe questionnaire was answered by all the major Democratic candidates, but only three Republicans: Romney, McCain, and Paul. Giuliani sent in a general statement, offering no details -- but given his Imperial Mayorship, it's not hard to imagine him bringing the same approach to Pennsylvania Avenue. Mike Hucakbee and Fred Thompson failed to respond -- perhaps the former is waiting for a call back from God, while the latter was probably just too busy being not very busy.

For those who did respond, the results were fairly encouraging (although it's easier to not abuse power you don't yet have). McCain, Paul, Dodd, Biden, and Richardson all roundly decried the use of signing statements, while Clinton, Obama, and Edwards condemned Bush's use of them, without ruling out that they themselves would use them.

These eight also expressed reservations about the broad claims of presidential power made by the Bush administration.

And then there was Mitt "We Oughta Double Guantanamo" Romney, who seemed intent on proving that when it comes to executive power, he'd sit at the feet of those great Constitutionalists Richard Cheney, David Addington, Alberto Gonzales, Harriet Miers, and John Yoo.

His philosophy on executive power can be summed up in his assertion that "our most basic civil liberty is the right to be kept alive" -- which has been the excuse for undermining civil liberties through the centuries. Turns out Mitt's not so hot on that whole "Give me liberty or give me death" thing. Which is odd, considering that his dad marched with Patrick Henry in Richmond.

Then there was his response to a question about whether the President can use an interrogation technique that Congress has "prohibited under all circumstances."

Mitt's answer:

"A President should decline to reveal the method and duration of interrogation techniques to be used against high value terrorists who are likely to have counter-interrogation training. This discretion should extend to declining to provide an opinion as to whether Congress may validly limit his power as to the use of a particular technique." In other words: "Hey, Congress, take your 'prohibition' and shove it!"

Glenn Greenwald called Romney's stance "an astonishing assertion -- that the Terrorists will win if Mitt Romney expresses his views on whether the President must obey the law."

Then there is this:

Q: "Under what circumstances, if any, is the president, when operating overseas as commander-in-chief, free to disregard international human rights treaties that the US Senate has ratified?"

Mitt's answer:

"The President must carry out all of his duties in a manner consistent with the rule of law, whether it is our Constitution or valid international agreements, so long as they do not impinge upon the President's constitutional authority."

And who would decide whether these "rules of law" and "international agreements" impinge on President Romney's authority? Mitt didn't say, but I'm guessing it wouldn't be the Supreme Court.

But take heart, in answer to a question about the president's power to detain U.S. citizens without charges, Romney allowed, "All US citizens are entitled to due process, including at least some type of habeas corpus."

I actually didn't know there were different types. But, hey, Mitt's a successful businessman, so we should probably trust him.

As I said, the survey showed that unease over the Bush/Cheney embrace of unbridled executive power is not a position that fits the media's favored left-vs-right meme. Ron Paul chided his fellow Republicans' refusal to complete the questionnaire: "What are they trying to hide? Why are they embarrassed to answer the questions?" And McCain flatly stated, "I don't think the president has the right to disobey any law."

That's a more unequivocal stance than that taken by some of the Democrats. It's probably no surprise that Clinton, as Savage put it, "embraced a stronger view of a president's power to use executive privilege to keep information secret from Congress than some rivals."

And on signing statements, Clinton answered: "I would only use signing statements in very rare instances to note and clarify confusing or contradictory provisions, including provisions that contradict the Constitution."

Okay, but, again, who will be the one to decide what provisions "contradict the Constitution"? Hillary and Bill?

Edwards and Obama also refused to completely rule out using signing statements -- and on the question of whether he would follow a Congressional law limiting troop deployments, Edwards answered: "I do not envision this scenario arising when I am president."

But I urge you to read the whole thing for yourselves. As Obama stated in his questionnaire: "These are essential questions that all the candidates should answer. Any President takes an oath to 'preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.' The American people need to know where we stand on these issues before they entrust us with this responsibility -- particularly at a time when our laws, our traditions, and our Constitution have been repeatedly challenged by this administration."

Let's make it one of our New Year's resolutions to find out where the candidates really stand on these key constitutional issues -- lest this "sleeper issue" stays slumbering and we awake to another presidential nightmare.

A Summer of MADness?

Motorists Against Detection, the vigilante anti-speed camera group have announced a summer of MADness which will see them target for destruction all speed cameras in the UK. It’s now going to be a period of zero tolerance against all speed cameras, said their campaigns director Capt Gatso.

The group claims speed cameras are just money-making machines and they have given the authorities long enough to prove their worth. The first camera to fall in the summer campaign is in south east London on the A2 at the Sun in the Sands roundabout on-slip heading northbound towards the Blackwall Tunnel.

Capt Gatso, the group's campaigns director, said: "We have completely pulled it out of the ground, it is now lying flat. You can see some of our handiwork posted on www.speedcam.co.uk. He added: In many areas the cameras have not saved one life - the statistics for road deaths haven't gone down. In some areas they have actually gone up - in Essex, for instance, which has a high density of cameras there are more people being killed. We are now planning to target any and all cameras until the Government sees sense and rethinks its road safety policy. Before we had speed cameras we had the safest roads in Europe - since their introduction this is no longer true.

The announcement will surprise many in road safety circles since the group has publicly declared it would not attack cameras outside schools or on high streets. But Capt Gatso said: We need to focus attention on what the cameras are about. We’ve said we wouldn’t attack the ones in built up and urban areas but that’s not where most of the cameras are. There are a lot of frustrated people among our members who have seen the number of cameras increase while road safety levels have fallen. Indeed, the only thing the cameras have done successfully is to reduce the number of traffic officers patrolling our roads and lose a lot of decent people their driving licences and their livelihoods.

MAD is the UK’s only direct action anti-speed camera group and it’s been going since summer 2000. In that time they have taken out just over 1,000 cameras. Their membership who are normally law-abiding people - vary in numbers but there is a hard core of around 200 people throughout the UK who use Internet chat forums, encrypted email and pay as you go phones to keep in touch and plan campaigns.
The group says it has perfected a new and quick way of destroying speed cameras which will enable them to destroy a roadside camera in just a few seconds. Capt Gatso added: The Government and the camera partnerships have failed to spin out via their PR campaigns to convince people that the cameras are there for road safety. Motorists know that they aren’t. All it’s done is further damage the police/public relationship and further alienating communities which they desperately need onside at this time. Many cameras have gone up on busy roads without any history of accidents despite that being the main criteria for installation.And all the time the partnerships and the Treasury rake in millions of extra revenue.

Capt Gatso pointed out that the group is not encouraging dangerous driving or speeding on Britain’s roads. He said: We have said from the beginning that drivers should drive according to the conditions of the road. The police say we need more training and patrols but the Government says we need more fines. But not everyone is paying the fines. Drive a foreign registered car or alter your number plate slightly and you’ll get away with it too. One of the future PR exercises for the shadowy group is for drivers to participate in a day of action called ‘National Cover-Up Your Number Plates Day’ to frustrate parking, bus lane, anpr, congestion and speed cameras. Capt Gatso told us: It will be pandemonium for the authorities. What are the chances of being stopped? We have by default, in the form of number plates on the front and back of our vehicles, a mobile ID card. Now we’ve declared open season on the cameras just keep an eye open for what happens next. This will be civil disobedience on a grand scale covering all areas and people of the country. One thing drivers might consider is that when there’s a police car behind you with its blue lights and sirens on think about family members or friends getting points for going marginally over the limit and don’t let the police past if you don’t think it is safe to do so. Our members don’t. We are always straight out of the way for ambulances and fire engines because we admire the sterling work they do.

Capt Gatso is a family man from north London. He’s in his 40s, a professional he owns a BMW M3 and is a keen motorcyclist. He said: Most of the organising group are just ordinary blokes with families who are sick of us heading towards a police state. He added that the group’s members were all good drivers, most have a professional driving qualification or ride powerful motorbikes on a regular basis and their aims are to encourage the partnerships to clamp down on speeding in built-up areas and near to schools and hospitals. Capt Gatso, the motorists’ friend, said: What we ultimately want to see is all the UK camera partnerships dissolved into a central ticket office which only concentrates on serious and serial offenders. Each case should be treated as a proper crime and properly investigated. We should be stopping the idiots who get behind the wheel of a car who will speed anywhere but won’t get caught if they avoid main roads and motorways. We want to see a higher police presence of trained officers patrolling the roads and put Britain back at the top of the road safety league where it was before the introduction of these infernal cameras.

FBI to put criminals, security issues up in digital billboard lights

The FBI today said it wants to install 150 digital billboards in 20 major U.S. cities in the next few weeks to show fugitive mug shots, missing people and high-priority security messages from the big bureau.

The initiative is made possible through a partnership with Clear Channel Outdoor, the advertising company that’s providing the space as a public service.

The billboards will let the FBI highlight those people it is looking for the most: violent criminals, kidnap victims, missing kids, bank robbers, even terrorists, the FBI said in a release. And the billboards will be able to be updated largely in real-time —right after a crime is committed, a child is taken, or an attack is launched.

The FBI said it tested its first billboard in the Philadelphia area in September, with crystal-clear images of 11 of its most violent fugitives on eight billboards and a 24-hour hotline for the public to call. The billboards paid quick public safety dividends. In October, two fugitives were captured as a direct result of the publicity, the FBI said.

Chicago, Las Vegas, Los Angeles and Miami will be among those cities provided with the new billboards, along with Milwaukee and Philadelphia.The FBI said Atlanta, Cleveland, Indianapolis, Memphis and Minneapolis will also get the billboards, as will Akron, Ohio; Columbus, Ohio; Albuquerque, N.M.; El Paso, Texas; Des Moines, Iowa; Newark, N.J.; Wichita, Kan.; and the Florida cities of Tampa and Orlando.

Using digital billboards to put pressure on criminals is not an entirely new concept. According to a CNN report, in September, Florida authorities arrested a drug suspect two weeks after his photo was displayed on a billboard in Daytona Beach. A tipster who saw the suspect's picture found him sitting in a McDonald's. The billboards have also been useful in disasters. When an interstate bridge collapsed in August in Minneapolis, billboards displayed an emergency message within 15 minutes, the report stated.

The downside is that only a small fraction of U.S. billboards are digital – 500 or so out of estimated 450,000 total signs, according to published reports.

What Darwin Could Tell Us About the "War on Drugs"

By Sanho Tree

Although it may seem counterintuitive, the "law and order" response by our politicians only intensifies the problem.

With every passing year the drug problem seems to get worse. The U.S. government responds by pumping billions more dollars into the war on drugs. Federal spending for this "war without end" is more than twenty times what it was in 1980 and still the drug traffickers appear to be winning. Despite more than six billion dollars spent on "Plan Colombia" alone, cocaine production has actually increased in that country. Now the Bush Administration is asking for $1.4 billion more to aid the Mexican government's drug crackdown through the "Merida Initiative."

Although it may seem counterintuitive, the "law and order" response by our politicians only intensifies the problem. Instead, they might turn to Charles Darwin's theory of evolution to glean insight as to why these "common sense" reactionary solutions often are counterproductive.

As illegal drugs become easier to obtain and more potent, politicians respond in a knee-jerk manner by ramping up law enforcement. After all, drugs are bad so why not escalate the war against drugs? Politicians get to look tough in front of voters, the drug war bureaucracy is delighted with ever expanding budgets, and lots of low-level bad guys get locked up. Everyone wins - including, unfortunately, the major drug traffickers.

As politicians intensified the drug war decade after decade, an unintended consequence began to appear. These "get tough" policies have caused the drug economy to evolve under Darwinian principles (i.e., survival of the fittest). Indeed, the drug war has stimulated this economy to grow and innovate at a frightening pace.

By escalating the drug war, the kinds of people the police typically capture are the ones who are dumb enough to get caught. These criminal networks are occasionally taken down when people within the organization get careless. Thus, law enforcement tends to apprehend the most inept and least efficient traffickers. The common street expression puts it best: "the dealer who uses, loses." Conversely, the kinds of people law enforcement tends to miss are the most cunning, innovative and efficient traffickers.

It's as though we have had a decades-long unintended policy of artificial selection. Just as public health professionals warn against the overuse of antibiotics because it can lead to drug resistant strains of bacteria, our overuse of law enforcement has thinned out the trafficking herd so that the weak and inefficient traffickers get captured or killed and only the most proficient dealers survive and prosper. Indeed, U.S. drug war policies have selectively bred "super-traffickers."

Politicians cannot hope to win a war on drugs when their policies ensure that only the most efficient trafficking networks survive. Not only do they survive, but they thrive because law enforcement has destroyed the competition for them by picking off the unfit traffickers and letting the most evolved ones take over the lucrative trafficking space. The destruction of the Medellin and Cali cartels, for instance, only created a vacuum for hundreds of smaller (and more efficient) operations. Now the police cannot even count the number of smaller cartels that have taken over - much less try to infiltrate and disrupt them.

Moreover, the police have constricted the supply of drugs on the street while the demand remains constant thus driving up prices and profits for the remaining dealers. Increasing drug interdiction creates an unintended price support for drug dealers which, in turn, lures more participants into the drug economy. Of all the laws that Congress can pass or repeal, the law of supply and demand is apparently not one of them.

A public health approach to dealing with illicit drugs should take precedence over "law and order" approaches. Treatment and prevention must take priority over interdiction and eradication because drugs are a demand-driven problem. Politicians, however, continue to devote most drug funding toward cutting the supply. The proposed aid package for the notoriously corrupt Mexican drug war establishment would be better spent on providing treatment for addicts in the United States. Over reliance on politically expedient "get tough" policies will only continue an endless spiral of drug trafficking evolution.

Peace on Earth?

By DAN BARKER

The Freedom From Religion Foundation hears from a lot of people this time of year, especially when we complain about Nativity scenes on government property. The messages from believers range from nasty unprintable hatred to mockingly friendly yet uncivil "Merry Christmas" and "Jesus loves you" wishes (would they call a synagogue and say that?), as if we were challenging those believers rather than the government.

However, we receive many more positive remarks than negative from believers as well as non-believers who support keeping state and church separate.

What most of the detractors don't seem to understand is that we are not threatening their freedom to believe, practice or advertise their religion. We sue governments, not individuals or churches. We are not barging into services pulling worshippers from pews. We don't drag Nativity scenes from front yards or Christmas trees from private businesses. We don't want to break the law: We want to keep the government from breaking the law - law based on the First Amendment protection of personal liberty.

We all have freedom of conscience in this wonderful country, but here is what many believers do not seem to grasp: There is a difference between private speech and government speech. Private speech is protected; government speech is limited. Individuals and private organizations have maximum freedom. Governments possess curtailed freedom in order to allow individual freedom.

In this case, the conservative principle of limited government is an idea with which most liberals agree.

We are not governed by majority rule. We are ruled by a secular Constitution. Specific individual freedoms are hard-wired into our guiding document that no local majority can vote away. No mayor, for example, has the authority to abridge freedom of the press, and no Southern county, regardless of its tradition, may vote to segregate schools - as we saw not so long ago, when federal troops were called in to enforce the will of the Constitution over that of the majority.

The very first liberty in the First Amendment is religious freedom, but notice that before this freedom is spelled out, a restriction is first put in place: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion."

The establishment clause does not apply only to Congress: The 14th Amendment makes it clear that the states and all local governments must act accordingly. The courts have nearly universally affirmed that our government, from the White House to the public school principal's office, must neither advance nor hinder religion. Government must be neutral.

Some say our challenges of religious symbols on government property are trivial and not worth the waste of time and money. But if that were true, no one would miss them if they were removed. Are these people saying the depiction of the holy birth of the Christian savior-god is merely an inconsequential secular trimming?

Of course this is not trivial! Not to them or to us. (Besides, what could be less trivial than working to uphold the First Amendment?)

Others say that we non-believers are simply angry at Christianity and use lawsuits to attack the freedom of belief. But if that were true, we would not be joined by so many believers who agree that we should protect the "wall of separation between church and state," as Thomas Jefferson described the First Amendment.

Yes, some of us do find the anti-humanistic nativity scene offensive since it assumes we are all sinners in need of salvation and slaves who need to humbly bow to a dictator - in a country that is supposedly proudly rebellious, having fought a Revolutionary War to expel the king, sovereign and lord.

When the city, county or state erects a religious symbol on public property as the sole or primary focus of the display, representing (or appearing to represent) the government, that is government speech. It is illegal and un-American.

In America, we are free to disagree about religious teachings; we are not free to ask our government to settle the argument. The government must back off and allow all of us maximum latitude to believe or disbelieve as our consciences direct us.

As the founder of the Freedom from Religion Foundation Anne Nicol Gaylor has always said: "You can't have religious freedom without the freedom to dissent."

Man wants his $400K back from the FBI

Greg Sowinski

Luther Ricks Sr. sits in the living room of his Greenlawn Avenue home where authorities took more than $400,000 from him earlier this year following a fatal self-defense shooting in his house. The FBI now has his money and is refusing to give it back. (Photo by Matthew Hashiguchi)

LIMA — Two robbers who broke into Luther Ricks Sr.’s house this summer may have not gotten his life savings he had in a safe, but after the FBI confiscated it he may not get it back.

Ricks has tried to get an attorney to fight for the $402,767 but he has no money. Lima Police Department officers originally took the money from his house but the FBI stepped in and took it from the Police Department. Ricks has not been charged with a crime and was cleared in a fatal shooting of one of the robbers but still the FBI has refused to return the money, he said.

“They are saying I have to prove I made it,” he said.

The 63-year-old Ricks said he and his wife, Meredith, saved the money during their lifetime in which both worked while living a modest life.

A representative of the FBI could not be reached for comment.

During the fatal shooting incident inside the house June 30, Ricks and his son were being attacked by two men and his son was stabbed. Ricks broke free, grabbed a gun and shot to death 32-year-old Jyhno Rock inside his home at 939 Greenlawn Ave.

Police originally took the money after finding marijuana inside Ricks’ home, which Ricks said he had to help manage pain.

“I smoke marijuana. I have arthritis. I have shingles, a hip replacement,” he said.

Ricks, who is retired from Ohio Steel Foundry, said he always had a safe at home and never had a bank account.

American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio Legal Director Jeff Gamso said Ricks has a tough road ahead, not impossible, but tough to get back his money.

“The law of forfeiture basically says you have to prove you’re innocent. It’s terrible, terrible law,” he said.

The law is tilted in favor of the FBI in that Ricks need not be charged with a crime and the FBI stands a good chance at keeping the money, Gamso said.

“The law will presume it is the result of ill-gotten gains,” he said.

Still Ricks can pursue it and possibly convince a judge he had the money through a lifetime of savings. Asking the FBI usually doesn’t work, he said.

“The FBI, before they would give it up, would want dated receipts,” he said.

If the FBI does keep the money, it would be put toward a law enforcement use, if the city of Lima does not fight for it because the city discovered it, Gamso said.

Lima Law Director Tony Geiger said he has not been asked to stake a legal claim for the money.

Anarchists in the Aisles? Stores Provide a Stage

Karl Marx, the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin and Che Guevara adorn a shirt slipped onto a rack at a Target store in California.

By IAN URBINA

This is the season of frenetic shopping, but for a devious few people it’s also the season of spirited shopdropping.

At a Whole Foods in New York, Ryan Watkins-Hughes stocked a shelf with cans carrying art-infused labels.

Otherwise known as reverse shoplifting, shopdropping involves surreptitiously putting things in stores, rather than illegally taking them out, and the motivations vary.

Anti-consumerist artists slip replica products packaged with political messages onto shelves while religious proselytizers insert pamphlets between the pages of gay-and-lesbian readings at book stores.

Self-published authors sneak their works into the “new releases” section, while personal trainers put their business cards into weight-loss books, and aspiring professional photographers make homemade cards — their Web site address included, of course — and covertly plant them into stationery-store racks.

“Everyone else is pushing their product, so why shouldn’t we?” said Jeff Eyrich, a producer for several independent bands, who puts stacks of his bands’ CDs — marked “free” — on music racks at Starbucks whenever the cashiers look away.

Though not new, shopdropping has grown in popularity in recent years, especially as artists have gathered to swap tactics at Web sites like Shopdropping.net, and groups like the Anti-Advertising Agency, a political art collective, do training workshops open to the public.

Retailers fear the practice may annoy shoppers and raise legal or safety concerns, particularly when it involves children’s toys or trademarked products.

“Our goal at all times is to provide comfortable and distraction-free shopping,” said Bethany Zucco, a spokeswoman for Target. “We think this type of activity would certainly not contribute to that goal.” She said she did not know of any shopdropping at Target stores.

But Packard Jennings does. An artist who lives in Oakland, Calif., he said that for the last seven months he had been working on a new batch of his Anarchist action figure that he began shopdropping this week at Target and Wal-Mart stores in the San Francisco Bay Area.

“When better than Christmas to make a point about hyper-consumerism?” asked Mr. Jennings, 37, whose action figure comes with tiny accessories including a gas mask, bolt cutter, and two Molotov cocktails, and looks convincingly like any other doll on most toy-store shelves. Putting it in stores and filming people as they try to buy it as they interact with store clerks, Mr. Jennings said he hoped to show that even radical ideology gets commercialized. He said for safety reasons he retrieves the figures before customers take them home.

Jason Brody, lead singer for an independent pop-rock band in the East Village, said his group recently altered its shopdropping tactics to cater to the holiday rush.

Normally the band, the Death of Jason Brody, slips promotional CD singles between the pages of The Village Voice newspaper and into the racks at large music stores. But lately, band members have been slipping into department stores and putting stickers with logos for trendy designers like Diesel, John Varvatos and 7 for All Mankind on their CDs, which they then slip into the pockets of designer jeans or place on counters.

“Bloomingdale’s and 7 for All Mankind present the Death of Jason Brody, our pick for New York band to watch in 2008,” read a sticker on one of the CDs placed near a register at Bloomingdales. “As thanks for trying us on, we’re giving you this special holiday gift.” Bloomingdales and 7 for All Mankind declined to comment.

For pet store owners, the holidays usher in a form of shopdropping with a touch of buyer’s remorse. What seemed like a cute gift idea at the time can end up being dumped back at a store, left discretely to roam the aisles.

“After Easter, there’s a wave of bunnies; after Halloween, it’s black cats; after Christmas, it’s puppies,” said Don Cowan, a spokesman for the store chain Petco, which in the month after each of those holidays sees 100 to 150 pets abandoned in its aisles or left after hours in cages in front of stores. Snakes have been left in crates, mice and hamsters surreptitiously dropped in dry aquariums, even a donkey left behind after a store’s annual pet talent show, Mr. Cowan said.

Bookstores are especially popular for self-promotion and religious types of shopdropping.

At BookPeople in Austin, Tex., local authors have been putting bookmarks advertising their own works in books on similar topics. At Mac’s Backs Paperbacks, a used bookstore in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, employees are dealing with the influx of shopdropped works by local poets and playwrights by putting a price tag on them and leaving them on the shelves.

At Powell’s Books in Portland, Ore., religious groups have been hitting the magazines in the science section with fliers featuring Christian cartoons, while their adversaries have been moving Bibles from the religion section to the fantasy/science-fiction section.

This week an arts group in Oakland, the Center for Tactical Magic, began shopdropping neatly folded stacks of homemade T-shirts into Wal-Mart and Target stores in the San Francisco Bay Area. The shirts feature radical images and slogans like one with the faces of Karl Marx, Che Guevara and Mikhail Bakunin, a Russian anarchist. It says, “Peace on Earth. After we overthrow capitalism.”

“Our point is to put a message, not a price tag, on them,” said Aaron Gach, 33, a spokesman for the group.

Mr. Jennings’s anarchist action figure met with a befuddled reaction from a Target store manager on Wednesday in El Cerrito, Calif.

“I don’t think this is a product that we sell,” the manager said as Mr. Jennings pretended to be a customer trying to buy it. “It’s definitely antifamily, which is not what Target is about.”

One of the first reports of shopdropping was in 1989, when a group called the Barbie Liberation Organization sought to make a point about sexism in children’s toys by swapping the voice hardware of Barbie dolls with those in GI Joe figures before putting the dolls back on store shelves.

Scott Wolfson, a spokesman for the federal Consumer Product Safety Commission, said he was not sure if shopdropping was illegal but that some forms of it could raise safety concerns because the items left on store shelves might not abide by labeling requirements and federal safety standards.

Ryan Watkins-Hughes, 28, a photographer from Brooklyn, teamed up with four other artists to shopdrop canned goods with altered labels at Whole Foods stores in New York City this week. “In the holidays, people get into this head-down, plow-through-the-shopping autopilot mode,” Mr. Watkins-Hughes said “‘I got to get a dress for Cindy, get a stereo for Uncle John, go buy canned goods for the charity drive and get back home.’”

“Warhol took the can into the gallery. We bring the art to the can,” he said, adding that the labels consisted of photographs of places he had traveled combined with the can’s original bar code so that people could still buy them.

“What we do is try to inject a brief moment of wonder that helps wake them up from that rushed stupor,” he said, pausing to add, “That’s the true holiday spirit, isn’t it?”

The dangers of religion

<Please bear in mind that the Koran says equally to kill people, and it's that same sentiment of "we're holier than you" that led the christians in this video to do what they did.>

'War on Christmas' Nonsense is a War on Secularists

By Polly Toynbee

Beneath the laughable charge is a poisonous suggestion that 'our way of life' is threatened by foreigners.

My thanks to the kind reader who sent me the program from this year's Christmas carol service at the Old Royal Naval College chapel in Greenwich. It was written by the Rev Jules Gomes, chaplain of the college, and of Trinity College of Music, and also of the University of Greenwich.

Here is the good chaplain's Christmas message: "More Christians have been martyred for their faith in the last century than in any other period of church history. Yesterday's Herod is today's Richard Dawkins and Polly Toynbee, seeking the total extermination of all forms of Christianity. The great irony is that the greatest opposition to Christ comes from so-called broad-minded people who seek to ban Christmas so that people of other faiths are not offended."

<Yes, we atheists are also murderers. We all kill christians on a semi-regular basis. Especially the Dawkins.>

Yes, it is that time of year when secularists, atheists and humanists become the Grinches who stole Christmas. As an honorary associate of the National Secular Society and president of the British Humanist Association, here is my cue to offer you all a rattling good Christmas "Bah, humbug!" Except, of course, it's all utter nonsense. No one is out to ban Christmas or Christianity - not atheists nor other faiths. Yet every year the same urban myths are repeated about the banning of Christmas by some pantomime villain local authority suffering from "political correctness gone mad." King Rat Christmas wreckers are unearthed, and every year these turn out to be garbage stories, but they are stored in the attic for another airing next December.

I had at least five calls from broadcasters this year inviting me to say it would be a jolly good thing if Christmas were rebranded Winterval. That myth began years ago when Birmingham city council tried to spread the festive season across the long winter - though it never replaced Christmas, which came with official celebrations in the middle of it. But the Winterval myth lives on. This year it was joined by this: "God rest ye merry people all, Let nothing go to waste, So let us all this Decemberval, Recycle now with haste." Although written by a vicar for Warrington's Christmas recycling campaign, watch Decemberval enter anti-Christmas demonology.

Christmas opinion polls stir the same pot. Theos, the religious thinktank, found a quarter of adults and over a third of 18- to 24-year-olds couldn't say where Jesus was born. Over half didn't know John the Baptist was Jesus's cousin; over a quarter didn't know who told Mary she was pregnant; and 78% had no idea where Mary and Joseph fled to escape Herod. Even the faithful were ignorant: only 36% of regular churchgoers got all four answers right. I regard this as awful. The loss of classical mythology has made much poetry, art and literature incomprehensible to most people. The loss of Christian mythology would make most European history and painting impenetrable. Secularists do not welcome ignorance as a substitute for declining faith.

Pursuing their annual "atheists are stealing Christmas" riff, a Sunday Telegraph survey of 100 schools found only one in five had a traditional nativity play this year, which is odd considering over a third of primaries are Christian. The sad truth is that some did no play, but others did Scrooge, Arabian Nights, Hansel and Gretel, or the Snow Queen, all also cultural treasures.

British Christians yearn to be martyrs, but frankly atheists are a pretty toothless substitute for lions. In a daft parliamentary debate this month on something called Christianophobia, Mark Pritchard MP accused the politically correct of banning religion from Christmas cards and advent calendars: "Many shoppers find it increasingly difficult to purchase greetings cards that refer to Jesus." Alas, market forces are probably rather stronger than humanist plots: with only 7% of people in church of a Sunday these days, Santa and the Snowman trump the nativity.

Evangelicals started a new myth this year that postage stamps with the Madonna and child are only sold under the counter: you have to ask for them, for fear of offending Muslims and Jews. Stuff and nonsense, retorted the Post Office. But you can bet this one will run and run - along with last year's myth that 70% of offices banned Christmas decorations for multicultural reasons. Another year it was the Red Cross banning cribs.

All this would just be seasonal silliness if it were not cover for a more sinister drumbeat. The right has taken to flying the "Christian" flag in ways that suggest none too subtly that foreigners - Muslims - are stealing our culture and traditions. "They" are stopping "us" celebrating Christmas and teaching Christian stories to our children. When Terry Sanderson, president of the National Secular Society, appeared on GMTV this week, although as usual he denied any atheist plot against Christmas, the theme in about 3,000 emails afterwards was: "We are not Muslims, our culture must not be silenced to avoid offending them."

The BNP has been quick to cash in. In the Christianophobia debate in parliament, the reported case of a BNP Christmas card was raised, "which portrays the holy family on the cover and inside are the words 'Heritage, Tradition and Culture.'" Pritchard warned television firms: "The fear of violence from a particular faith group should not be grounds for hand-selecting or targeting other faith groups who may choose to protest peacefully." Fear of Muslim violence is killing off peaceful Christianity, he implies. But blaming mythical secular political correctness is usually a cover for more sinister suggestions that "our way of life" is under threat from foreigners.

Hastening to defend themselves against the charge, Trevor Phillips, chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, assembled imams, rabbis, Sikh and Hindu leaders to protest that they had no objection to Christmas, asserting that they sent Christmas cards, they liked cribs, and "it's a great holiday for everyone." Leave Christmas alone was the message, addressed again to the hypothetical politically correct secularists.

But we are innocent. It is the Christians who are stirring this dangerous pot, inventing non-stories, yearning for martyrdom - and worse, fermenting an outraged sense among the mainly secular population that they had better call themselves Christian because, as the BNP says, British "Heritage, Tradition and Culture" (read Kultur) are under threat from Muslims. While pretending to attack us, covertly these Christians stir resentment against immigrants.

As more faith trouble brews, it becomes ever more important not to ban religions, but to keep religion out of all functions of the state. It needs to be taught in schools, acted out in nativity plays, too, if they want - but without dangerously segregating children by their faith in sectarian religious institutions. And at last we have at least one political party leader brave enough to admit, like most people, that he doesn't believe in God.

As for secularists and humanists at Christmas, Dawkins himself told a disappointed BBC interviewer that he loves singing carols. And so do I. Not just Away in a Manger or Oh Little Town nostalgic childhood tunes, but all the enjoyably rich and strange theology of "Lo! He abhors not the Virgin's womb … Veiled in flesh the Godhead see, Hail the incarnate Deity," and other such quaint delights.

Is it hypocritical to sing songs with words whose literal truth you do not believe? Any such sad edict would leave most great love songs, hymns and arias unsung. If the royal family can trill, with solemn faces and gladsome minds, "What can I give him, poor as I am?" then anyone can.

Britain Gives Rude Welcome to Innocent Gitmo Prisoners

By Victoria Brittain

To admit that they pose no threat would show how complacent the Brits have been in supporting the U.S.'s black prison network.

The release from Guantanamo Bay of three UK residents after more than four years detention without charge or trial, marks a welcome change of government attitude from the shameful refusal of responsibility for them during the Blair years. Home secretaries and foreign office ministers came and went, but all stoutly maintained, including in successive court cases where the government side was argued by top British lawyers, that these men's fate was not Britain's problem.

However, the last-minute decision to subject two of the three to extradition warrants from Spain on unsubstantiated allegations of terrorism, which meant they had to appear in court immediately to contest deportation, marks yet another low point in the handling of these cases and subjected the distraught families to what felt like torture, as they said today.

Edward Fitzgerald QC and Tim Otty QC, appearing for Jamel el-Banna and Omar Deghayes, had little trouble in politely batting off the government's extremely weak case for opposing bail for el Banna, the first case heard.

The Spanish allegations are so vague and old, it is astonishing that anyone allowed them to be taken seriously. Over several years, the Spanish embassy in Washington has shown no inclination to follow up the fishing line held out by Judge Baltasar Garzon in December 2003, with the names of el-Banna and Deghayes on it as suspected terrorists. Two other men Garzon wanted questioned in Spain were flown there from Guantanamo, but released with no evidence against them. This history makes today's court cases a shocking welcome back to Britain for these two men and their families. (Two UK residents remain in Guantanamo and the UK authorities say they are still pressing their cases. So they should be.)

The newly released men's appalling stories of being kidnapped in Gambia by the US, or of being sold in Pakistan to the US, of extraordinary rendition, of psychological and physical torture in US prisons in Afghanistan and Cuba, are well enough known, thanks to their lawyers' extraordinary tenacity and the testimonies of their former colleagues in prison.

The undistinguished role of the British security services alongside the US every step of the way is also well known. In these cases, as with the previous two sets of releases back to Britain from Guantanamo Bay, much is being made of the security risk the men may pose for the UK. Dame Pauline Neville Jones, for instance, has spoken repeatedly on television about her conviction that people should know just what a risk we run by having these men home.

As with the previous cases, this security scaremongering is window-dressing to cover the complicity of our security services in these men's wrongful arrests, renditon, and serious ill-treatment over five years. To admit the truth - that they pose no threat - would reveal to the British public quite how unacceptable it is that they have been held all these years by our closest ally, in Guantanamo Bay, beyond the reach of the law.

It is not surprising that no one in MI5 has made an apology to any of the men who came back earlier for the service's part in what happened to them. British officials do not go in for apologies. And as far as we know, no one has been fired for incompetence in the intelligence-gathering behind these cases.

But another issue is even more important than British incompetence and hypocrisy. In one strand of multicultural Britain, the detail of these cases are hugely well-known. They are a symbol of why many Muslims feel this society regards them as second-class citizens who do not have the same rights to justice as the white middle class.

FBI aims for world's largest biometrics database

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The FBI is embarking on a $1 billion project to build the world's largest computer database of biometrics to give the government more ways to identify people at home and abroad, the Washington Post reported on Friday.

The FBI has already started compiling digital images of faces, fingerprints and palm patterns in its systems, the paper said.

In January, the agency -- which focuses on violations of federal law, espionage by foreigners and terrorist activities -- expects to award a 10-year contract to expand the amount and kinds of biometric information it receives, it said.

At an employer's request, the FBI will also retain the fingerprints of employees who have undergone criminal background checks, the paper said.

If successful, the system, called Next Generation Identification, will collect the biometric information in one place for identification and forensic purposes, the Post said.

<Nothing could possibly go wrong... right?>

Lakota Tribes: Stop This Country, We Want to Get Off!

Posted by Joshua Holland

Well, well, well. This is certainly interesting …

The Lakota Indians, who gave the world legendary warriors Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, have withdrawn from treaties with the United States.

"We are no longer citizens of the United States of America and all those who live in the five-state area that encompasses our country are free to join us,'' long-time Indian rights activist Russell Means said.

A delegation of Lakota leaders has delivered a message to the State Department, and said they were unilaterally withdrawing from treaties they signed with the federal government of the U.S., some of them more than 150 years old.

The group also visited the Bolivian, Chilean, South African and Venezuelan embassies, and would continue on their diplomatic mission and take it overseas in the coming weeks and months.

Lakota country includes parts of the states of Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana and Wyoming.

[...]

The treaties signed with the U.S. were merely "worthless words on worthless paper," the Lakota freedom activists said.

The only thing that's surprising is that there hasn't been a more aggressive push towards self-determination for indigenous Americans. We're all familiar with the struggles of groups like the Kurds in Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran, or the Basque in Spain and Southern France, among others, but there are independence movements going on all over the world. That our own indigenous nations haven't struggled to secede -- with obvious exceptions like the AIM movement -- is, I suppose, a testament to just how thoroughly Europeans wiped out the natives. The Chechens, Nunavut, Palestinians and Papua New Guineans may have had some fight left in them, but America's indigenous people were well and truly decimated, and the fact that they remain living in squalid poverty in Bantustans called "reservations" -- and that everyone goes about their business like that's not a big deal -- really speaks to that unique American combination of extreme brutality and the exceptionalism that allows us to deny its existence.

The Lakota actually declared independence back in the mid-1970s, but that went nowhere. It's worth noting that a shifting perception of indigenous rights in general is part of the equation:

[The effort gained momentum] in September, when the United Nations adopted a non-binding declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples -- despite opposition from the United States, which said it clashed with its own laws.

"We have 33 treaties with the United States that they have not lived by. They continue to take our land, our water, our children,'' Phyllis Young, who helped organize the first international conference on indigenous rights in Geneva in 1977, told the news conference.

One note about the plan: the Lakota intend to issue their own passports and driver's licenses, and anyone within their territory would be eligible for citizenship. Citizens of the new state would live tax-free, and all a person has to do is renounce their allegiance to the United States.

I can see conservative heads exploding over that Sophie's Choice: On the one hand, you can live in Nebraska without ever paying taxes again, but on the other, you've got to become a dirty, rotten, un-American foreigner and can never mindlessly (but honestly) scream U-S-A! U-S-A! at a sporting event again.

Shock and Tasers in New Orleans

By Naomi Klein

The shameless exploitation of poor New Orleans residents to privatize public infrastructure is being enforced by violence and tasers.

Readers of my book The Shock Doctrine know that one of the most shameless examples of disaster capitalism has been the attempt to exploit the disastrous flooding of New Orleans to close down that city's public housing projects, some of the only affordable units in the city. Most of the buildings sustained minimal flood damage, but they happen to occupy valuable land that make for perfect condo developments and hotels.

The final showdown over New Orleans public housing is playing out in dramatic fashion right now. The conflict is a classic example of the "triple shock" formula at the core of the doctrine.

- First came the shock of the original disaster: the flood and the traumatic evacuation.

- Next came the "economic shock therapy": using the window of opportunity opened up by the first shock to push through a rapid-fire attack on the city's public services and spaces, most notably it's homes, schools and hospitals.

-Now we see that as residents of New Orleans try to resist these attacks, they are being met with a third shock: the shock of the police baton and the Taser gun, used on the bodies of protestors outside New Orleans City Hall yesterday.

Democracy Now! has been covering this fight all week, with amazing reports from filmmakers Jacquie Soohen and Rick Rowley (Rick was arrested in the crackdown). Watch residents react to the bulldozing of their homes here.

And footage from yesterday's police crackdown and Tasering of protestors inside and outside city hall here.

That last segment contains a terrific interview with Kali Akuno, executive director of the People's Hurricane Relief Fund. Akuno puts the demolitions in the big picture, telling Amy Goodman:

This is just one particular piece of this whole program. Public hospitals are also being shut down and set to be demolished and destroyed in New Orleans. And they've systematically dismantled the public education system and beginning demolition on many of the schools in New Orleans--that's on the agenda right now--and trying to totally turn that system over to a charter and a voucher system, to privatize and just really go forward with a major experiment, which was initially laid out by the Heritage Foundation and other neoconservative think tanks shortly after the storm. So this is just really the fulfillment of this program.

Akuno is referring to the Heritage Foundation's infamous post-Katrina meeting with the Republican Study Group in which participants laid out their plans to turn New Orleans into a Petri dish for every policy they can't ram through without a disaster. Read the minutes on my website:.

For more context, here are couple of related excerpts from The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism:

The news racing around the shelter [in Baton Rouge] that day was that Richard Baker, a prominent Republican Congressman from this city, had told a group of lobbyists, "We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it, but God did." Joseph Canizaro, one of New Orleans' wealthiest developers, had just expressed a similar sentiment: "I think we have a clean sheet to start again. And with that clean sheet we have some very big opportunities." All that week the Louisiana State Legislature in Baton Rouge had been crawling with corporate lobbyists helping to lock in those big opportunities: lower taxes, fewer regulations, cheaper workers and a "smaller, safer city"--which in practice meant plans to level the public housing projects and replace them with condos. Hearing all the talk of "fresh starts" and "clean sheets," you could almost forget the toxic stew of rubble, chemical outflows and human remains just a few miles down the highway.

Over at the shelter, Jamar Perry, a young resident of New Orleans, could think of nothing else. "I really don't see it as cleaning up the city. What I see is that a lot of people got killed uptown. People who shouldn't have died."

He was speaking quietly, but an older man in line in front of us in the food line overheard and whipped around. "What is wrong with these people in Baton Rouge? This isn't an opportunity. It's a goddamned tragedy. Are they blind?"

A mother with two kids chimed in. "No, they're not blind, they're evil. They see just fine."

...

At first I thought the Green Zone phenomenon was unique to the war in Iraq. Now, after years spent in other disaster zones, I realize that the Green Zone emerges everywhere that the disaster capitalism complex descends, with the same stark partitions between the included and the excluded, the protected and the damned.

It happened in New Orleans. After the flood, an already divided city turned into a battleground between gated green zones and raging red zones--the result not of water damage but of the "free-market solutions" embraced by the president. The Bush administration refused to allow emergency funds to pay public sector salaries, and the City of New Orleans, which lost its tax base, had to fire three thousand workers in the months after Katrina. Among them were sixteen of the city's planning staff--with shades of "de Baathification," laid off at the precise moment when New Orleans was in desperate need of planners. Instead, millions of public dollars went to outside consultants, many of whom were powerful real estate developers. And of course thousands of teachers were also fired, paving the way for the conversion of dozens of public schools into charter schools, just as Friedman had called for.

Almost two years after the storm, Charity Hospital was still closed. The court system was barely functioning, and the privatized electricity company, Entergy, had failed to get the whole city back online. After threatening to raise rates dramatically, the company managed to extract a controversial $200 million bailout from the federal government. The public transit system was gutted and lost almost half its workers. The vast majority of publicly owned housing projects stood boarded up and empty, with five thousand units slotted for demolition by the federal housing authority. Much as the tourism lobby in Asia had longed to be rid of the beachfront fishing villages, New Orleans' powerful tourism lobby had been eyeing the housing projects, several of them on prime land close to the French Quarter, the city's tourism magnet.

Endesha Juakali helped set up a protest camp outside one of the boarded-up projects, St. Bernard Public Housing, explaining that "they've had an agenda for St. Bernard a long time, but as long as people lived here, they couldn't do it. So they used the disaster as a way of cleansing the neighbourhood when the neighbourhood is weakest. ... This is a great location for bigger houses and condos. The only problem is you got all these poor black people sitting on it!"

Amid the schools, the homes, the hospitals, the transit system and the lack of clean water in many parts of town, New Orleans' public sphere was not being rebuilt, it was being erased, with the storm used as the excuse. At an earlier stage of capitalist "creative destruction," large swaths of the United States lost their manufacturing bases and degenerated into rust belts of shuttered factories and neglected neighborhoods. Post-Katrina New Orleans may be providing the first Western-world image of a new kind of wasted urban landscape: the mould belt, destroyed by the deadly combination of weathered public infrastructure and extreme weather.

Since the publication of The Shock Doctrine, my research team has been putting dozens of original source documents online for readers to explore subjects in greater depth. The resource page on New Orleans has some real gems.

Fear, Loathing & the Crisis of Confidence

By David Sirota

The 'paranoid style' in American politics is grounded in a profound disconnect between ordinary Americans and the political class.

Just a few weeks ago, Scripps Howard News Service and Ohio University released a little-noticed study showing that one-third of Americans now "believe in a broad smorgasbord of conspiracy theories" revolving around government complicity in everything from the 9/11 attacks to the Kennedy assassination. The same survey last year found that "anger against the federal government is at record levels."

It would be easy to chalk up these troubling findings to the unending propaganda of fear. America has been experiencing the searing blast of politicized terror warnings and breaking news graphics for the better part of six years now, and populations living under such constant government and media shock treatment can go a wee bit berserk.

But while many of these conspiracy theories are offensive and factually unsupported, the underlying paranoia and loathing are not surprising, and the feelings are not motivated merely by a fear of the next bogeyman around the corner. The sentiments are symptoms of a deep crisis of confidence in our public institutions -- a crisis that is a predictable reaction to a government that now all but admits it breaks laws, hides information and disregards the public.

We have seen troops sent to war based on manipulated intelligence. We have discovered phones wiretapped without warrants. Just last week, we found out the CIA destroyed tapes of potentially illegal torture sessions. So many scandals now plague the government, it is hard to remember them all. And they have all happened with almost no consequences for the perpetrators.

Nonetheless, every era has its sensational scandals, and so it is probably the mundane that has heated the public's low-grade disgust into a simmering boil. After all, what we see our government and our representatives quietly do every day tells us far more than even the headline-grabbing controversies.

Industries essentially bribe politicians with campaign contributions. Government employees regularly move into six-figure jobs lobbying for the industries they once regulated. Presidential candidates of both parties take time off from their small-town stump speeches about the middle class to hold big corporate fundraisers in New York penthouses and D.C. law firms. All of it is legal and treated as ho-hum by the media.

Then there is the bureaucracy, the faceless monolith whose civil service protections and multiyear appointment terms were supposed to prevent it from becoming what it is today: an increasingly important cog in the corrupt machine.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) provides perhaps the most pristine example of all. In October, the General Accounting Office (GAO) reported that this faceless alphabet-soup agency tasked with regulating the media business now regularly leaks secret information to lobbyists before that information is released to the public. The behavior undoubtedly feeds into the world of "political intelligence" -- a burgeoning cottage industry in Washington whereby well-heeled lobbyists gather inside government information for their corporate clients.

A federal agency that even mildly cared about trying to serve the public or follow the law would react to the GAO's damning report by at least pretending to change. Instead, the FCC dug in.

When lobbyists recently pushed the government to relax ownership regulations and allow for further media consolidation, FCC chairman Kevin Martin provided just one week's notice for a required public hearing on the issue. Officially, the FCC held the hearing to consider public input about the proposed rule change. But Martin later told Congress that before the hearing ever happened he was already putting the finishing touches on his New York Times op-ed formally endorsing the media consolidation plan. And surprise! This week, the FCC officially ratified Martin's deregulation scheme, making it the law of the land.

Like so much of our government's behavior these days, it was kabuki theater at its most obscene -- an obscure yet powerful agency getting caught leaking profit-making secrets to lobbyists, and then telling the public its hearings are all a put-on, taking place well after the corrupt deals have already been cut.

In Scripps Howard's report on its poll findings, some experts expressed astonishment at the anger being expressed by the country. But really, we should be baffled if public opinion were any different. Considering what's going on, is anyone actually stunned that America is enraged? Is anyone really confused about why so many believe the government conspires against the public?

What If America Were Invaded and Occupied?

By Dahr Jamail

"Suppose Iraq invaded America. And an Iraqi soldier was on a tank passing through an American street, waving his gun at the people, threatening them, raiding and trashing houses. Would you accept that? This is why no Iraqi can accept occupation, and don't be surprised by their reactions," says "The Imam," a young man from a mixed Sunni-Shia family, as he explains the genesis of the insurgency in Iraq and its exponential growth.

He is one of the protagonists that Meeting Resistance presents as unmistakable evidence that the root cause of the conflict in Iraq is the occupation itself. The film has resistance fighters themselves tell their story.

Journalists-turned-filmmakers Molly Bingham and Steve Connors were compelled to film this documentary during their early reporting of the U.S. occupation of Iraq. They used the al-Adhamiya neighborhood of Baghdad to explore and depict an insurgency that has been caricatured by the Bush Administration.

Bingham, who has reported previously from Rwanda, the Gaza Strip, and Iran, was the official photographer to the Office of the Vice President of the United States from 1998 to 2001. She believes that it is imperative to understand the people within the resistance if the United States is to find a solution to the Iraq quagmire.

Bingham teamed up with Connors, a photographer who has covered ten conflicts and is a former British soldier who served in Northern Ireland in the early 1980s. Between the two of them they share thirty-three years of experience in covering conflicts around the globe.

In August of 2003, they began working on the film. The project kept them in Baghdad for ten months, as Connors filmed and Bingham wrote the script.

The eighty-five-minute groundbreaking film focuses on ten members of the Iraqi resistance. Interspersed with stunning footage of the aftermath of car bomb attacks, of frightened soldiers aiming their weapons at crowds of Iraqis, and of burning remains of destroyed military vehicles, the meat of the film is the words of the fighters themselves.

"I felt a fire in my heart," one of them recounts. "When they occupied Iraq, they subjugated me, subjugated my sister, subjugated my mother, subjugated my honor, my homeland. Every time I saw them I felt pain. They pissed me off, so I started working [in the resistance]."

The complex nature of their lives speaks to the intricacies of the Iraqi resistance.

"The Teacher," for instance, is married with three children, and always loathed the Ba'ath Party. "The Wife" is a Shiite woman who works as a courier, carrying messages and weapons between groups when she is not watching her two children. Other members, Sunni and Shia alike, work as consultants, weapon producers, and strategists.

In the spring of 2004, a twenty six-year-old photographer in Baghdad told me in an interview that "this is not a rebellion, this is a resistance against the occupation. The media concentrates on the Americans, and does not care about Iraqis." He had been opposed to the regime of Saddam Hussein, and had even welcomed the U.S. invasion, but had quickly grown weary of watching his fellow countrymen humiliated and killed by the occupiers. Like the people in Meeting Resistance, he had subsequently taken up arms.

Connors understands this frustration toward Western media coverage of the occupation. "A major weapon in the arsenal of a modern military is the use of information operations," he says. "These operations, which often take the form of misinformation or disinformation, are directed as much at the enemy population as it is at our own population, without whose support the military cannot continue to execute a war."

He aims to counteract this propaganda.

"To place an opponent like the Iraqi resistance in the human space of ordinary people defending their right to self-determination is to challenge our view of ourselves as liberators," says Connors.

While laying bare the motivations of the resistance, the film also does a forceful job of dispelling other myths.

One of the interviewed, referred to as "The Republican Guard" since he was a career officer in Saddam Hussein's military, is a Sunni married to a Shia woman. "The Sunni and Shia are bound together by blood and family ties," he explains. "I am married to a Shia, my sister is married to a Shia. I can't kill my own children's uncles or kill my wife, the mother of my children."

One scene includes a butcher hacking away at a side of beef. "Iraq is our homeland, it's our Iraq," he says. "If you don't defend your land, you will not defend your honor."

The film recognizes that the resistance has the tacit support of a large percentage of the population, even though the Bush Administration doesn't acknowledge this.

"The Administration chooses to portray people who oppose their will in Iraq as terrorists or extremists who live on the fringes of Iraqi society, isolated from their own countrymen," says Bingham. "Without doubt some individuals involved in attacking U.S. troops are 'extreme' in their beliefs, and they are relentless fighters in the pursuit of their goals, but they are very human and very much part of the social structure of Iraqi society, and move within it. If we removed the context of occupation--in all its forms--from Iraq, most of them would stand down and return to their lives."

Aside from screenings at international film festivals and numerous private and public shows, Connors and Bingham screened the film at West Point, the U.S. Marine Corps staff college at Quantico, and Baghdad.

Bingham feels that the film represented a radically different perspective to the military personnel who viewed it.

"The bulk of the people were taking on new information that was a dramatic paradigm shift for them," she says. "To see their enemy as largely fighting for their homeland because of nationalism and religion, rather than being terrorists, is a big deal."

Calif. Family Blames HMO in Girl's Death

By ALICIA CHANG

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- The family of a 17-year-old leukemia patient blamed Cigna Corp. on Friday for her death, saying the health insurance giant's initial refusal to pay for a liver transplant contributed to her death.

"They took my daughter away from me," said Nataline Sarkisyan's father, Krikor, with tears in his eyes at a news conference at his lawyer's office.

The Philadelphia-based insurer had initially refused to pay for the procedure, saying it was experimental. The company reversed the decision Thursday as about 150 nurses and community members rallied outside of its office in Glendale in suburban Los Angeles. Nataline died just hours later.

The insurer "maliciously killed" Nataline because it did not want to bear the expense of her transplant and aftercare, said family attorney Mark Geragos. He did not say when or in what court he would file the civil lawsuit.

Geragos also said he would ask the district attorney's office to press murder or manslaughter charges against Cigna, an allegation that one legal expert described as difficult to prove and "a little bit of grandstanding."

A district attorney's office spokeswoman declined to comment, saying it would be inappropriate to do so until Geragos submits evidence supporting his request.

The family's "loss is immeasurable, and our thoughts and prayers are with them," Cigna said in a news release Friday. "We deeply hope that the outpouring of concern, care and love that are being expressed for Nataline's family help them at this time."

Nataline was diagnosed with leukemia at 14 and received a bone marrow transplant from her brother the day before Thanksgiving. She later developed a complication that caused her liver to fail. She was in a vegetative state for some time, her mother Hilda said.

Nataline was taken off life support at the University of California, Los Angeles Medical Center on Thursday, her mother said. Nataline died within the hour.

In a Dec. 11 letter to Cigna, four doctors had appealed to the insurer to reconsider. They said patients in similar situations who undergo transplants have a six-month survival rate of about 65 percent.

One of Nataline's doctors, Robert Venick, declined to comment on her case. UCLA Medical Center staff refused to make her other doctors available for comment.

The case raised the question in medical circles of whether a liver transplant is a viable option for a leukemia patient because of the immune-system-suppressing medication such patients must take to prevent organ rejection. Such medication, while preserving the transplanted liver, could make the cancer worse.

Transplantation is not an option for leukemia patients because the immunosuppresant drugs "tend to increase the risk and growth of any tumors," said Dr. Stuart Knechtle, who heads the liver transplant program at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and was not commenting specifically on Nataline's case.

The procedure "would be futile," he said.

Geragos' attempt to get the district attorney to press murder and manslaughter charges against Cigna would be difficult to prove unless the defense can show that the company somehow intentionally caused Nataline's death, said Rebecca Lonergan, a law professor at the University of Southern California.

"My personal opinion is that this is a little bit of grandstanding," said Lonergan, a former Los Angeles County and federal prosecutor.