What is happening to our country?

I decided to copy Naomi Wolf's whole article here, because I think it is so important. Not only are we making it difficult and nasty for people to get into the country; soon it may be impossible to get out.

Naomi Wolf: A "Paper Coup," and Blackwater Eyes Midtown Manhattan - Politics on The Huffington Post:

I have argued that in the closing stages of a "fascist shift," events cascade. I am hearing about them, even across the globe. Here in Australia I hear from the nation's best-know feminist activist, and former adviser to Paul Keating, Anne Summers, who was also at the time this took place Chair of the Board of Greenpeace International. Summers was detained by armed agents for FIVE HOURS each way in LAX on her way to and from the annual meeting of the board of Greenpeace International in Mexico, and her green card was taken away from her. "I want to call a lawyer," she told TSA agents. "Ma'am, you do not have a right to call an attorney,' they replied. `You have not entered the United States."

Apparently a section of LAX just beyond the security line is asserted to be `not in the United States' -- though it is squarely inside the airport -- so the laws of the US do not apply. (This assertion, by the way, should alarm any US citizen who is aware of how the White House argued that Guantanamo is not `in the United States' - is a legal no-man's land -- so the laws of the US do not apply.) Toward the end of her second five-hour detention she asked, `Why am I being detained?' `Lady, this is not detention,' the TSA agent told her. `Detention is when I take you to the cells out back and lock you up.'

Last week in Boston, while attending Bioneers by the Bay, I heard that one of the speakers for our event, an environmentalist named Gunter Pauli, was going to miss the time of his scheduled speech; he had been physically taken OFF THE PLANE by TSA agents and had to take a much later flight. More chillingly, the camerawoman doing my interview said that another well-known environmental writer found that his girlfriend was effectively `disappeared' for three days as she sought to enter the US from Canada. Lisa Fithian, an anti-globalization activist, was denied entry across the Canadian border in 2001 and was offered the choice of turning back or being arrested.

A friend emails me a story from USA Today about a 24-year-old college graduate who testified before Congress about her family of immigrants and the difficulties they face; shortly afterward, the entire family was arrested by immigration agents. Another online piece reports that Blackwater is setting up operations along the US/Mexico border and an insightful post on Daily Kos describes how the TSA list will revert from the airlines to the management of the Department of Homeland Security shortly and that by February we may well face the need to apply to the State for permission to travel. If this proposed regulation goes through, we will move from 1931 to about 1934--when the borders started to close-- with the stroke of a pen. Jews in America have hardwired into their DNA a sense of the distinction between those who got out before the borders closed and those who waited a moment too long.

Why should Congress impeach and prosecute this instant, not waiting till February? Why should this impeachment and prosecution be solidly bipartisan? After February it is the leaders on both sides of the aisle -- and the people writing these essays -- who are at most risk of being turned back at the border. People who can't leave in a police state are effectively silenced. And history shows that Republicans are at the exact same risk as Democrats of being violently silenced once liberties are lost. I am reading about IBM's close, profitable involvement with Nazi Germany -- much akin to Prescott Bush's well-documented close and profitable involvement with Nazi Germany through German industrialist, Fritz Thyssen. Right up to the top of the solidly Nazi hierarchy of the IBM affiliate, corporate executives were terrified of taking a wrong step in the eyes of the Party: `There are concentration camps', they would whisper to their US backers. The teenage son of one solid Nazi ally was taken hostage when he resisted Party orders. So alignment with the regime in a police state offers no ultimate protection.

Let us think like business consultants analyzing the decisions of a business that claims it is going to close its door in just a year. What kinds of decisions is it making? Here is a quiz, if you still doubt that we need to shift our thinking and recognize what appears to be 'a paper coup.':

- Is building a US Embassy in Baghdad the size of eighty football fields and at a cost of well more than half a BILLION dollars evidence of short- or long-term thinking?

- These walls would crumble if the next legitimate president independently ends the war. How about defending and expanding the basis for FISA violations at this late stage -- after all, these folks will be gone in a year?

- How about the decision to fight so hard for a US attorney who will defend the view that the President is above the law?

- Why would that matter so much in an administration folding its tents?

- Why the rush to establish Guantanamo as a permanent part of the landscape and even seek money at one point to double its size -- if the next President, a truly independent Republican or Democrat, might just close it down?

- Why the push to expand a war that makes no military or popular sense, rush through military tribunals that the next President might just disband, and, by the way, drum up a fresh new World War III?

- Do the neo-cons advising Giuliani look like a fresh page for an independent, transparent election or an ideological continuity of government in themselves?

- Do these look like the short-term tactics of a fading administration -- or the institutional strategic bases for some kind of new long-term beginning?

- Why work so hard to make sure that the man who defended the infamous "enemy combatant" concept will be the new Attorney General?

Increasingly, reputable figures are starting to talk about `a coup.' Jim Hightower notes in an important essay, "Is a Presidential Coup Under Way?," that a coup is defined in the dictionary as a sudden forced change in the form of government. (He also spells out the basis for a rigorously modeled impeachment and criminal prosecution.) Daniel Ellsberg's much-emailed speech on recent events notes that, in his view, a `coup' has already taken place. Ron Rosenbaum speculates in an essay on Slate about the reasons the Bush administration is withholding even from members of Congress its plans for Continuity of Government in an emergency -- noting that those worrying about a coup are no longer so marginal. Frank Rich notes the parallels between ourselves and the Good Germans. And Congress belatedly realizes as if waking from a drugged sleep that it might not be okay for the Attorney General to say the President need not obey the law. Congress may realize why Mukasey CAN'T say that `waterboarding is torture' -- the minute he does so he has laid the grounds for Bush, Cheney and any number of CIA and Blackwater interrogators to be tried and convicted for war crimes. They are so keenly aware that what they have been doing is criminal that laws such as the Military Commissions Act of 2006 have been drafted specifically to protect them and the torturers and murderers they have directed from criminal prosecution. That is why insisting that Mukasey say that waterboarding is torture is, in spite of the alarming apparent defection of Feinstein and Schumer, an important tactic and even the perfect opening for the impeachment bid that Kucinich is bringing on November 6th to be followed by Congressional investigations into possible criminality.

This is the "Blackwater Tactical Weekly." (Yes, Blackwater has its own weekly e-newsletter.) Look at "Islamist protest in N.Y. - 'Mushroom cloud on way'" -- it is reasonable to speculate that Blackwater is focusing on becoming more active domestically in managing domestic protests and rallies. (Regarding this particular rally, note the repetition of the White House `Mushroom Cloud' sound-bite and other signs bearing current White House talking points, that are attributed to alleged Muslim protesters in New York City. The US has a long history of using agents provocateurs -- people dressed as those they are targeting, who pose as conveying a more violent or threatening message than that of the real group itself or who commit acts of violence to stigmatize the group. The Cointelpro program of the 1970's discredited many rallies in this way. An alleged or infiltrated violent, threatening Muslim rally would be the perfect defensible trigger for a Blackwater response.)

See also that Blackwater may be exploring the management of private flights in US airports because of a threat or `threat' to private aircraft. ("Extremists may target private US planes: TSA.") This entry point to the air travel system would seem defensible -- after all Blackwater personnel do in fact guard airports around the world, for example in Bosnia. The danger is that a bleeding of Blackwater into US airport security in general would affect a coup in essence -- quite quickly and serenely -- even as a coup in fact need not be declared. It is a short step from managing private plane and private airport security to aiding the TSA -- which is a branch of Homeland Security -- and Homeland Security and Blackwater have already worked in alliance with one another in New Orleans. A TSA agent blogged about having signed up for Blackwater -- at ten thousand a month, which is a lot more than TSA agents make now and a real incentive -- but I have no evidence of reverse movement. The White House recently announced that the Watch List and No-Fly List together have 775,000 citizens and that they are adding 20,000 A MONTH. This trend on both sides, if not confronted, points to an easy slide to a paramilitarized domestic flight experience in the US and a routine aggressive searching of hundreds of thousands of citizens, the growth being exponential enough so that being aggressively searched could easily soon become a common experience at airports. Nothing at present prevents Blackwater agents from being deployed to help or replace the TSA domestically. Or from being deployed at the next New York City rally such as the one that is being featured on their website. And airports being the lifeline of freedom, if you are scared to fly or can be bullied, interrogated, tasered or worse when flying, you are no longer free. History shows that there is no easy retroactive movement toward a free society once travel is truly restricted.

The Mukasey hesitation on torture is our cue to call a halt to these crimes. (By the way, strapping victims to boards to prepare them for torture was common at Buchenwald.)

Congress must ask:

- What is torture?
- Has it happened?
- Who ordered it?
- How high up the chain of command does this go?
- And what does our system of laws say about such crimes and those who commit them?

If it takes hearings and possible prosecutions to restore the rule of law and maintain a free society, then it is past time for the hearings to begin.

Photo from the Palm Beach Times.

America: We've put the welcome mat away

Got back late last night from Washington. Many thanks to my son Ben for making it possible for me to travel anywhere, anytime.

On the morning before I left, I had a long talk with Bianca from Germany. Why, she wanted to know, did America make it so difficult for foreigners to visit? Before Bush, America was the place to go. Everyone wanted to come here, and everyone felt welcome. Why would Americans want to squander all the good will they had abroad?

Bianca said she was detained at the airport as security went through all her things and asked her various offensive questions. It was insulting and humiliating. Others of her acquaintance had had the same sort of experience.

I could not give her a satisfactory answer, except to say that in our essentially isolationist hearts, we don't care a whole lot about what the world thinks about us. We've never experienced the consequences of not getting along with our neighbors, since we have no neighbors that are even remotely threatening to us. Most Americans don't think much about the rest of the world at all.

The day I came home, I found this news article about the appalling treatment a group of Finnish folksingers received at the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport in Minnesota.

Minnesota's Finnish guests find a rude airport welcome

When three of Finland's most popular musicians, including one described as that country's Bruce Springsteen, arrived for a recent tour in Minnesota, they expected a quick trip through airport customs.

Instead, immigration agents at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport subjected them to more than two hours of interrogation that the musicians considered so harsh and demeaning that they filed a formal complaint with the U.S. Embassy in Helsinki.

"It was almost three hours of screaming, door-slamming and accusations, according to the report I received," said Marianne Wargelin, honorary Finnish consul for the Dakotas and most of Minnesota, which has the second largest Finnish-American population in the nation.

Erkki Maattanen, a filmmaker for Finnish Public Television who accompanied the musicians on the September trip, said his questioners seemed to think the entourage was smuggling drugs or intending to work without a permit. "I kept trying to tell them why we were here, but they'd just yell, 'Shut up!"' he said.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials at the airport declined to comment, referring questions to regional press officer Brett Sturgeon.

Read more....

Bianca had mentioned her admiration for the Finns, evidently not one shared by our security apparatus.

Washington itself, however, is a national treasure, free to all to enjoy, and we must keep it in the hands of the people. Don't let the neothugs who now run our country try to privatize it.

I spent Thursday and part of Friday at the Smithsonian. I can't say I covered much ground. I'm the kind of person, if I'm interested in a subject, I can't just skim over it. The two subjects I was most interested in, American History and Arts and Industry, were both closed for remodeling. But I found that there were two special exhibits at the Museum of Natural History:

"Emissaries of Peace," a history of Cherokee-British relations, which I'll write about separately; and

"African Voices," which "examines the diversity and dynamism of this huge continent. Sound stations provide interviews, folk tales, songs and oral epics ... " There is an aqal, a Somali portable dwelling traditionally built and owned by women, next to a video interview of two Somali-Americans who describe their upbringing in an aqal and the traditions they grew up with.

Elsewhere in the exhibit, videos covered the history of slavery and African programs to eradicate childhood disease. There were displays on cooking, traditional dishes and the staples of various African communities, such as wheat, rice, teft, millet and yams. Another display was of ingenious toys that African children had made using discarded objects such as wood and metal scraps and rubber flip-flops.

You got a sense of a coiled energy, waiting to spring forth.

I spent about 3 hours in these two exhibitions.

Here are a few final photos of Washington.

A peaceful garden, one of many adjacent to the National Mall:

A merry-go-round right on the Mall:

And our national symbol, those ubiquitous golden arches:

A multi-national tour

Yesterday a group of us from the hostel took a walking tour with talented tour guide Larry Amman--the guy in the white cap here. He took us through Lafayette Park, around the outside of the White House, and to several monuments.

Larry is a pro, skillful at weaving in details of interest to the various nationalities in a given group. In this case, we had representatives from Belgium, Germany, India, Hong Kong, Australia, Colombia and South Africa. I think I was the only American in the group.

We passed the Washington Monument, and some got tickets to go into it later. I was due at the Capitol at 2 pm, so I didn't. Maybe tomorrow. In the remaining monuments, I was surprised at the emphasis on peace, liberty and justice in the quotations chosen for each honoree. I was also surprised at the sheer size of the works. Lincoln was much bigger than I expected, for instance. Here's an excerpt from Lincoln's second inaugural address chiseled on the wall of his monument, on the eve of the Civil War's end:

Both[sides] read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes.

. . . .

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

A disappointment for me was the Vietnam Memorial. The wall was thronged with tours and tour guides giving talks, and somehow diminished by the bright sun and balmy weather. At the foot of each panel were handwritten and drawn tributes to the soldiers and the ignominy of war. Very touching, until I realized that these were not personal messages, but middle school class exercises, carefully laminated and destined ultimately for the Vietnam Memorial archives.

Don't get me wrong. I think this is a wonderful thing for middle school kids to do, and some were very touching and illuminating. It's just that they didn't embody that sense of personal connection that seems so much a part of a visit to the wall.

The Vietnam Memorial seems like a place to visit on a rainy day, with few people about and the granite polished by the sky's tears. It's meant to be a place of sadness at a misguided, misbegotten war that claimed way too many lives for way too little reason. At least, that's how I see it.

Next week, on the Memorial's 25th anniversary, Larry, a Vietnam vet, will participate in the public reading of all 58,000 names of the dead.

After the Vietnam Memorial was built, the Korean War vets agitated for their own memorial. The resulting memorial, dedicated in 1995, was a surprise to me. Like the forgotten war it represents, it doesn't get much press. I found it fascinating.

The Memorial depicts soldiers emerging from a wooded area through scrub-covered ground. They are wary and frightened, as though expecting an attack in moments. Made of stainless steel, they are almost white, like ghosts.

Next to the statues is a polished granite wall, with photos of actual Korean War personnel etched into the surface. The etchings and the reflections of the statues interact in a ghostly way on the wall. I don't know if this photo quite captures it, but here it is:


Another surprise was the Roosevelt Memorial. It is a very large one, divided into four main areas representing Roosevelt's four terms. Water is present in all of them, as waterfalls and pools. Roosevelt's words are chiseled in the walls of the waterfalls and next to them. Rockwellesque statues of ordinary people, standing in line for jobs or listening to the newfangled radio, are interspersed. A later addition to the memorial shows Roosevelt in his homemade wheelchair, a kitchen chair with bicycle wheels attached. This section also features a wall with scenes carved in relief and Braille inscriptions for the blind.

As it's getting light and I need to do the laundry, I'm going to stop here.

Priorities and more

A little factoid I overheard:

Cost of SCHIP expansion: $7,000,000,000 a year
Cost of Iraq war: $10,000,000,000 a MONTH

Could we just take a little 3-week vacation from the war and fund children's healthcare?

***

Interesting idea from Kevin Drum: Americans are unhappy with the state of healthcare but worried about any change. So the way to go is extend Medicare to those under 21. As this group grows older, they get to keep their Medicare. Gradually, everyone will be on Medicare and no one will have to make a drastic change in their healthcare program as we evolve to universal healthcare.

I can see the problem here: as 20-somethings gain universal healthcare, the 30-65 age bracket will feel unfairly treated and demand the same. This is actually an advantage, not a problem.