Nancy Pelosi: Caught By The CIA

CIA Says Pelosi Was Briefed on Use of 'Enhanced Interrogations'

By Paul Kane

Intelligence officials released documents this evening saying that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was briefed in September 2002 about the use of harsh interrogation tactics against al-Qaeda prisoners, seemingly contradicting her repeated statements over the past 18 months that she was never told that these techniques were actually being used.

In a 10-page memo outlining an almost seven-year history of classified briefings, intelligence officials said that Pelosi and then-Rep. Porter Goss (R-Fla.) were the first two members of Congress ever briefed on the interrogation tactics. Then the ranking member and chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, respectively, Pelosi and Goss were briefed Sept. 4, 2002, one week before the first anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

The memo, issued by the Director of National Intelligence and the Central Intelligence Agency to Capitol Hill, notes the Pelosi-Goss briefing covered "EITs including the use of EITs on Abu Zubaydah." EIT is an acronym for enhanced interrogation technique. Zubaydah was one of the earliest valuable al-Qaeda members captured and the first to have the controversial tactic known as water boarding used against him.

The issue of what Pelosi knew and when she knew it has become a matter of heated debate on Capitol Hill. Republicans have accused her of knowing for many years precisely the techniques CIA agents were using in interrogations, and only protesting the tactics when they became public and liberal antiwar activists protested.

In a carefully worded statement, Pelosi's office said today that she had never been briefed about the use of waterboarding, only that it had been approved by Bush administration lawyers as a legal technique to use in interrogations.

"As this document shows, the Speaker was briefed only once, in September 2002. The briefers described these techniques, said they were legal, but said that waterboarding had not yet been used," said Brendan Daly, Pelosi's spokesman.

Pelosi's statement did not address whether she was informed that other harsh techniques were already in use during the Zubaydah interrogations.

In December 2007 the Washington Post reported that leaders of the House and Senate intelligence committees had been briefed in the fall of 2002 about waterboarding -- which simulates drowning -- and other techniques, and that no congressional leaders protested its use. At the time Pelosi said she was not told that waterboarding was being used, a position she stood by repeatedly last month when the Bush-era Justice Department legal documents justifying the interrogation tactics were released by Attorney General Eric Holder.

The new memo shows that intelligence officials were willing to share the information about waterboarding with only a sharply closed group of people. Three years after the initial Pelosi-Goss briefing, Bush officials still limited interrogation technique briefings to just the chairman and ranking member of the House and Senate intelligence committees, the so-called Gang of Four in the intelligence world.

In October 2005, CIA officials began briefing other congressional leaders with oversight of the intelligence community, including top appropriators who provided the agency its annual funding. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a prisoner-of-war in Vietnam and an opponent of torture techniques, was also read into the program at that time even though he did not hold a special committee position overseeing the intelligence community.

A bipartisan collection of lawmakers have criticized the practice of limiting information to just the "Gang of Four", who were expressly forbidden from talking about the information from other colleagues, including fellow members of the intelligence committees. Pelosi and others are considering reforms that would assure a more open process for all committee members. (source)

Fools for Communism

In Denial: Historians, Communism and Espionage, by John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, San Francisco: Encounter Books, 300 pages, $25.95

In 1983 the Indiana University historian Robert F. Byrnes collected essays from 35 experts on the Soviet Union -- the cream of American academia -- in a book titled After Brezhnev. Their conclusion: Any U.S. thought of winning the Cold War was a pipe dream. "The Soviet Union is going to remain a stable state, with a very stable, conservative, immobile government," Byrnes said in an interview, summing up the book. "We don't see any collapse or weakening of the Soviet system."

Barely six years later, the Soviet empire began falling apart. By 1991 it had vanished from the face of the earth. Did Professor Byrnes call a press conference to offer an apology for the collective stupidity of his colleagues, or for his part in recording it? Did he edit a new work titled Gosh, We Didn't Know Our Ass From Our Elbow? Hardly. Being part of the American chattering class means never having to say you're sorry.

Journalism, academia, policy wonkery: They all maintain well-oiled Orwellian memory holes, into which errors vanish without a trace. Stern pronouncements are hurled down like thunderbolts from Zeus, and, like Zeus, their authors are totally unaccountable to mere human beings. Time's Strobe Talbott decreed in 1982 that it was "wishful thinking to predict that international Communism some day will either self-destruct or so exhaust itself in internecine conflict that other nations will no longer be threatened." A Wall Street analyst who misjudged a stock so badly would find himself living under a bridge, if not sharing a cell with Martha Stewart. But Talbott instead became Bill Clinton's deputy secretary of state, where he could apply his perspicacious geopolitical perceptual powers to Osama bin Laden.

One of the most striking revelations in the exposure of the Jayson Blair disaster at The New York Times was his fabrication of an entire visit to the West Virginia farm of POW Jessica Lynch's family, including detailed descriptions of rivers and cattle herds that did not exist. Lynch's parents read the story, laughed at the ludicrous falsehoods, but made no attempt to correct them. It never occurred to them that there was any point. Anybody who reads papers or watches television news knows how rare corrections are.

That's especially true when the mistake is not a discrete, concrete fact like a misspelled name but a broader error of perspective or analysis. It took decades for the Times to admit that the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting of its Stalin-era Moscow bureau chief, Walter Duranty, was delusionary drivel. Even so, his Pulitzer stands. And the Times has yet to bite the bullet on its correspondent Herbert J. Matthews, the clueless Castro groupie who wrote that the comandante was winning his guerrilla war in Cuba at a time when he actually commanded fewer than 20 men.

Sometimes the refusal to confront errors is simple hubris. But often it masks a queasy reluctance to start down a path of self-examination, for fear of where it will lead. During the final days of the 1990 election in Nicaragua, ABC News released the results of a poll showing the ruling Sandinista Party ahead by 16 percentage points. "For the Bush Administration and the Reagan Administration before it, the poll hints at a simple truth: After years of trying to get rid of the Sandinistas, there is not much to show for their efforts," Peter Jennings gravely informed his viewers. But a few days later, the Sandinistas lost -- by 14 percentage points. The "simple truth" was really that the poll, like so much of what ABC and other American news media outlets had been reporting from Nicaragua for the previous decade, was utterly, dumbfoundingly, whoppingly wrong. But if you think that triggered a frenzy of soul searching at ABC -- about how the poll could have been so mistaken, about how none of the network's reporters sensed anything askew -- then guess again. Instead, Jennings dismissed the subject the next day with a single smirking reference to the inscrutability of Nicaraguans.

What went unreported was a research project conducted during the election by the University of Michigan, which by deploying various groups of student pollsters discovered that Nicaraguans mistrusted foreigners, presumed them active allies of the Sandinistas, and persistently lied to them. That fact had calamitous implications not only for what reporters had been writing about Nicaragua in the previous decade but for the reporters themselves. What had they done to make Nicaraguans view them as a foreign auxiliary of the Sandinista Party? Could it be that journalists covering Nicaragua had a (gasp!) ideological bias in favor of the Sandinistas? And could it be a coincidence that you're probably reading about this study for the first time?

The end of the Cold War has produced many such numbing silences. The speed with which the Soviet empire imploded and the economic ruin and popular revulsion that were revealed have made it clear that baby boomer intellectuals and journalists, viewing the world through the distorted lens of Vietnam, overwhelmingly got it wrong. Peasants ate less and were slaughtered more on the other side of the Iron Curtain; the jails were fuller; the KGB's list was a lot longer and a lot deadlier than Joe McCarthy's. A team of French historians calculated the worldwide death toll of communism during the 20th century at more than 93 million. When Hoover Institution historian Robert Conquest used newly available data from the Soviet Union to update The Great Terror, his account of Stalin's murderous purges of the 1930s, his publishers asked for a new title. "How about I Told You So, You Fucking Fools?" Conquest suggested.

The Conquest anecdote comes from In Denial: Historians, Communism and Espionage, an improbably riveting dispatch from the battlefields of historiography by scholars John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr.

Chilling and often perversely funny, it details the intellectual sleight of hand to which many American historians of communism and the Soviet Union have resorted as newly revealed archives in Moscow and Washington suggest they were, well, fucking fools.

Their efforts haven't been very successful. As Haynes and Klehr note, the world's final redoubt of communism is not Havana or Pyongyang but American college campuses: "The nostalgic afterlife of communism in the United States has outlived most of the real Communist regimes around the world....A sizable cadre of American intellectuals now openly applaud and apologize for one of the bloodiest ideologies of human history, and instead of being treated as pariahs, they hold distinguished positions in American higher education and cultural life."

Bold words, especially in academia, where suggesting somebody has communist sympathies -- even if he's carrying a bloody hammer and sickle in one hand and Trotsky's severed head in the other -- instantly draws gleeful cries of "McCarthyism!" I say, if this be blacklisting, make the most of it:

� Miami University's Robert W. Thurston, in his 1996 book Life and Terror in Stalin's Russia, rejects the overwhelming evidence that Stalin's purges took the lives of millions. He concedes only 681,692 executions in the years 1937 and 1938, and a mere 2.5 million arrests. Even using those low-ball figures, that means that nearly one of every 20 adult Soviet males went to prison and that more than 900 of them were executed per day. Nonetheless, Thurston says Stalin has gotten a bad rap: There was no "mass terror...extensive fear did not exist...[and] Stalin was not guilty of mass first-degree murder."

� Theodore Von Laue, a professor emeritus of history at Clark University, goes further in a 1999 essay in The Historian. He says it's the damnable Russian peasantry that ought to be begging poor Stalin for forgiveness: "He supervised the near-chaotic transformation of peasant Eurasia into an urban, industrialized superpower under unprecedented adversities. Though his achievements were at the cost of exorbitant sacrifice of human beings and natural resources, they were on a scale commensurate with the cruelty of two world wars. With the heroic help of his uncomprehending people, Stalin provided his country, still highly vulnerable, with a territorial security absent in all history." And Stalin was no mere poet, Von Laue adds, but a damn fine technocrat too: "The sophisticated design of Soviet totalitarianism has perhaps not been sufficiently appre-ciated."

� Columbia's Eric Foner, a past president of both the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians, staking his bid as founder of what might be called the Smiley-Face School of History, denounces "the obsessive need to fill in the blank pages in the history of the Soviet era." He wasn't talking about pesky American historians using the Freedom of Information Act to ferret out new horror stories about J. Edgar Hoover but about a Moscow exhibition on the Soviet gulag. What possible good could come of learning the details of that?

Foner, Von Laue, and Thurston are not lone nuts, the academic equivalents of Mark Lane and Ramsey Clark, but important revisionist historians. The revisionists, mostly baby boomer survivors of the New Left, have been conducting their own Cold War with traditionalist historians for nearly four decades. Unlike in the rest of the world, in academia their side was victorious. Since the 1970s, it's been an article of faith in historical journals and university presses that the United States rather than the Soviet Union posed the greatest threat to world peace and political freedom.

The revisionists' dominion over the domestic side of Cold War history has been even more total. That's been written as melodrama, with the U.S. Communist Party, or CPUSA -- a collection of amiable folk singers, brave anti-segregationists, and Steinbeckian labor organizers -- trying to rescue the maiden of American democracy from the railroad tracks where McCarthy, J. Edgar Hoover, and the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) had tied her down. The revisionists reluctantly gave some ground on the nature of the Soviet Union as Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost allowed some ugly facts to bubble to the surface, but they were adamant on the U.S. side: The Communist Party was just a lefty variant of the Republicans and Democrats, and people like Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs were innocent martyrs, the victims of a demented witch hunt.

That myth was reduced to rubble by a series of crushing blows in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union. First, in 1992, the post-Soviet government of Boris Yeltsin threw open the Communist Party's records, including the enormous collection of documents held by the Communist International, or Comintern, which directed the affairs of foreign Communist parties during the first half of the century. Two years later, the Russian SVR, the cash-strapped successor to the KGB, allowed brief and limited access to some of its old files to a handful of Western historians in return for a substantial gratuity. And finally, in 1995, the U.S. government released thousands of KGB cables intercepted and decoded in the 1940s in a top-secret operation known as Venona. In all, some 2 million pages of new documents became available, a historical payload of unfathomable proportions and inestimable impact.

The new picture of American Communists that emerged looked nothing like the one painted by the revisionists. The CPUSA was founded in Moscow, funded from Moscow (as late as 1988 Gus Hall was signing receipts for $3 million a year), and directed by Moscow; the Comintern reviewed everything from the party's printing bills to its public explanations of the nuances of the Hitler-Stalin pact, and the slightest misstep could bring scorching rebukes.

Worse yet, it really was a nest of spies: Hundreds of CPUSA members had infiltrated the American government and were passing information to the KGB. They honeycombed the State Department and the Office of Strategic Services. Virtually all of the revisionists' martyrs really were spilling secrets to the Kremlin, including Alger Hiss, the Rosenbergs, and a pair of Roosevelt aides, Harry Dexter White and Laurence Duggan, who died (White of a heart attack, Duggan of a jump or fall from a window) after being questioned by HUAC. The CPUSA would do literally anything for Moscow, even kill: Party members were intimately involved in assassination plots against the heretic Bolshevik Leon Trotsky, and later they would assist in unsuccessful KGB plots to break his murderer out of jail. More than 350 spies, nearly all CPUSA members, are identified in the Venona cable traffic alone. One KGB cable gave Earl Browder, the party chief from 1930 to 1945, credit for personal recruitment of 18 spies. Another wondered how the KGB would ever operate in the United States without the help of the CPUSA.

If a similar treasure trove of documentary evidence about the Civil War had been uncovered -- say, establishing that Lincoln's government had been riddled with Confederate spies and that several of his cabinet members were secret slaveholders -- half the university presses in America would have burned out from overuse. But the revelations of CPUSA peonage to Moscow have produced only a handful of books from U.S. historians. Among the most notable have been three by Klehr and Haynes: The Secret World of American Communism, The Soviet World of American Communism (both co-authored with Russian documentarians), and Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America.

Klehr, who teaches at Emory University, and Haynes, a historian with the Library of Congress, were among the first American scholars to examine the Communist Party archives thrown open in Moscow. Though traditionalist historians with a leery view of American Communists, they were hardly McCarthyite mad dogs. As recently as 1992, in The American Communist Movement: Storming Heaven Itself, they scoffed at the idea that the CPUSA was a colony of would-be Borises and Natashas. "Espionage was not a regular activity of the American C.P.," they wrote. "The party promoted communism and the interests of the Soviet Union through political means; espionage was the business of the Soviet Union's intelligence services. To see the American Communist Party chiefly as an instrument of espionage or a sort of Fifth Column misjudges its main purpose."

What they found in the Moscow archives convinced them otherwise. However many fluffhead folk singers and guilt-tripping Hollywood glitterati it may have contained, the CPUSA, they wrote three years later in The Secret World of American Communism, was also "a conspiracy financed by a hostile foreign power that recruited members for clandestine work, developed an elaborate underground apparatus, and used that apparatus to collaborate with espionage services of that power."

For conceding their mistake, Klehr and Haynes have undergone the intellectual equivalent of a Stalinist show trial by their fellow historians. A constant stream of articles in academic journals and lefty magazines -- even an entire conference sponsored by New York University's International Center for Advanced Studies -- has pilloried them for everything from "triumphalism" (that is, they're glad Stalin didn't win the Cold War; can you imagine a historian of World War II being drummed out of the profession for expressing gratitude that Hitler didn't win?) to accepting funding from conservative foundations (which, unlike the tens of millions of dollars the CPUSA took from the Kremlin, might come with secret strings attached) to starting the Vietnam War, destroying affirmative action, and dismantling the welfare state.

That bit about Vietnam came from a piece co-authored by Ellen Schrecker of Yeshiva University, who in a movement rich with unintentional self-parody nonetheless towers above the rest. We might even call her the Lucille Ball of anti-anti-communism, though, to be sure, she would never be so gauche as to associate with a pre-revolutionary Cuban like Ricky Ricardo. A prodigious apologist, Schrecker in one article conceded that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg delivered atomic secrets to the Soviets, then plaintively demanded: "Were these activities so awful?" She also coined the immortal phrase "non-traditional patriots" for the Rosenbergs, a felicitous way of saying that they lived in the United States but were loyal unto death to the Soviet Union.

Her accusation that Haynes and Klehr were a fascist Leviathan with their tentacles writhing in every right-wing plot of the past four decades appeared in The Nation, which, because it has 70 years of Stalinist apologias to justify, unsurprisingly offers some of the most die-hard resistance to the new Cold War scholarship. It also has contributed some hilarity to the debate, including then-editor Victor Navasky's argument that the word espionage was "out of context" when applied to American Communists during the Cold War. It would be more appropriate, he wrote, to say that "there were a lot of exchanges of information among people of good will."

There's no arguing with at least one part of that sentence: "a lot." One of those people of good will, KGB officer Itzhak Akhmerov, reported back to his bosses that CPUSA spies in America had provided him with enough U.S. government documents between 1942 and 1945 to fill 2,766 reels of microfilm. It apparently was a pretty one-sided exchange, since Akhmerov does not list any Soviet documents that he offered in return.

Ultimately, though, Navasky and The Nation turn from amusing to tendentious to dishonest as they twist and turn to avoid painful truths -- none, apparently, as distressing as the guilt of Alger Hiss, the New Deal aristocrat who pumped State Department secrets to the Soviets for more than a decade. The case against Hiss, the left's protests notwithstanding, has always been overwhelming. Whittaker Chambers, a courier for a spy ring of Washington Communists that reported to Soviet military intelligence, identified Hiss as his contact. A former KGB agent confirmed it.

Numerous witnesses, including maids of both families, reported seeing the men together regularly, and auto registration records supported Chambers' claim that Hiss gave him a car to aid in his transport of documents filched by the spy ring. Chambers produced dozens of summaries and copies of State Department documents, all either in Hiss' handwriting or typed on his typewriter. Though the statutes of limitations made it difficult to try Hiss for espionage, he was convicted in 1950 of lying about his relationship to Chambers.

The fall of the Soviet Union has driven even more nails into Hiss' coffin. A KGB cable in the Venona files identifies a spy code-named "Ales" at the State Department whose biographical details match only Hiss. Meanwhile, an interview with another State Department spy -- Noel Field, who fled behind the Iron Curtain when he fell under suspicion in 1949 -- was discovered in the archives of the Hungarian security police. Field related how his friend Hiss, unaware that Field was already spying for the KGB, had tried to recruit him as a source for Soviet military intelligence. The same story of the encounter between Field and Hiss (which dismayed the Soviets as a security lapse) turned up in KGB files in Moscow.

Writing in The Nation, Navasky dismisses all the new documents as contrivances, misunderstandings, and KGB braggadocio. What's really important, he says, is that in 1992 Hiss asked Dmitri Volkogonov, a disillusioned former Soviet general who was Boris Yeltsin's adviser on military affairs, to search intelligence archives for material on Hiss. Volkogonov replied that he had "carefully studied many documents from the archives of the intelligence services of the USSR as well as various information provided by the archives staff....I can inform you that Alger Hiss was never an agent of the intelligence services of the Soviet Union." Case closed, Navasky declares, though allowing casually that "Volkogonov later agreed with a persistent reporter that perhaps he should have qualified his declaration of Hiss' innocence because it's impossible to prove a negative."

Here's what Volkogonov actually said. He spent only two days on the "search" for documents and mostly relied on the word of KGB archivists. He didn't make any inquiries at all of Soviet military intelligence, the agency for which Hiss worked. And he had no idea the case was so controversial in the United States; he was just trying to do a favor to an old man near death. "What I saw gives no basis to claim a full clarification," Volkogonov admitted. "There's no guarantee that it was not destroyed, that it was not in other channels...Honestly, I was a bit taken aback. [Hiss' attorney] pushed me hard to say things of which I was not fully convinced."

If it seems that Navasky has turned Volkogonov's words upside down, that's not surprising, because Navasky has always lived in an upside-down universe where the moral flaw is not allegiance to a mass murderer like Stalin but turning away from him (to "crawl through the mud," in Navaskyspeak). The Nation has no harsh words for Paul Robeson, who refused to intervene for Russian friends who were about to be purged -- only for those, such as Elia Kazan, who denounced Stalin and his American quislings. When some Afghan peasant finally points out Osama bin Laden's cave, count on Navasky and The Nation to call him a dirty squealer and to explain that a few airplanes crashing into skyscrapers now and again are a small price to pay for the preservation of personal politesse.

The whole "squealer" ethos is not only stupid -- what kind of moron would not have wanted Mafia turncoats to testify against John Gotti? -- but fraudulent. At a press conference last summer, I listened to the playwright Chris Trumbo argue that Elia Kazan should have been denied an Oscar for naming Hollywood Communists to HUAC. During World War II, when the Soviet Union and the United States were allied against Hitler, Trumbo's Communist father, Dalton, also named names, secretly pointing the FBI to Hollywood figures he believed were suspiciously anti-war. But there was no suggestion during the press conference that his screenwriting Oscar be revoked. Likewise, Trumbo's intellectual fellow travelers in academe and journalism have built entire careers on denouncing spying by the FBI and CIA but are blithely unconcerned about KGB espionage. The standard excuse, as Ellen Schrecker has written several thousand times, is that "McCarthyism did more damage to the Constitution than the American Communist Party ever did."

If that's true, it's not for want of trying by the CPUSA. If Franklin Roosevelt had died just nine or 10 months earlier, his third-term vice president, Communist sympathizer Henry Wallace, would have become president. Wallace once said that if he were president he would appoint Harry Dexter White treasury secretary and Laurence Duggan secretary of state. Both of them, we now know unambiguously from Venona cables, were Soviet spies.

More broadly, people like Schrecker can't or won't understand that their culture of denial is what created McCarthyism. It was the palpable indifference of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations toward Communist penetration of the American government that finally triggered the backlash led by HUAC and McCarthy. McCarthy's accusation that Roosevelt ushered in "20 years of treason" is an absurd exaggeration. But if Roosevelt didn't deserve to be executed as a spy, he most certainly ought to have been horsewhipped for his cavalier dismissal of Whittaker Chambers' accusations. As early as 1939, Chambers warned Roosevelt about Alger Hiss and named at least 12 other U.S. officials who would later be proved Soviet spies. Roosevelt airily told his aides that Chambers could "go fuck himself." The spies kept passing secrets to Moscow for another nine years, until HUAC began making noises about the case. Chambers' warning was only one of several by regretful spies during that period that first Roosevelt and then Truman ignored. Truman was so lackadaisical that the military code breakers working on the Venona Project kept it secret from him for fear word would leak back to the Soviets.

Fifty years later, the pattern is repeating itself. The character assassinations and lies of the die-hard defenders of American communism have given rise to a movement to rehabilitate McCarthy and other bully-boy anti-communists of the 1940s and '50s. Some efforts of this movement, such as George Washington University historian Arthur Herman's Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America's Most Hated Senator, are relatively judicious attempts to correct some of the exaggerations about McCarthy -- for instance, the widely repeated but totally erroneous claim that he never correctly identified a single Communist. Others, such as conservative attack-blonde Ann Coulter's Treason, attempt a radical makeover. McCarthy (who accused everybody from Harry Truman to George Marshall of secret Soviet sympathies) was actually too charitable, Coulter argues; he was too tenderhearted to say, as she does, that all liberals -- everybody from Lyndon Johnson to Tom Daschle -- are traitors at heart. "Whenever the nation is under attack, from within or without, liberals side with the enemy," Coulter writes. "This is their essence."

That's idiotic, to be sure, but no more so than American University historian Anna Kasten Nelson's argument that Venona isn't important because there are all kinds of good reasons a perfectly innocent person might be secretly passing microfilm to a KGB agent. (No, she doesn't list any of them.) "It is time to move on," she wrote recently, instead of "rehashing old debates" (because, you know, historians get bored with old stuff). Then there's the psychobabble contention of Bard College's Joel Kovel that J. Edgar Hoover hunted spies not because foreign espionage is against the law but because he had some previously undiscovered Freudian condition in which anti-communism "might be interchangeably a womb or anus." Writing stuff like that amounts to handing the Coulters of the world a loaded gun and daring them to pull the trigger. As somebody once said: Have you no sense of decency, Sir?


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Foner and Trumbo reply to Garvin

Eric Foner and Christopher Trumbo have responded to Glenn Garvin's article:

I hope the rest of reason is more accurate than Glenn Garvin's review "Fools for Communism" (April), which references me. Garvin says "Foner 'denounces 'the obsessive need to fill in the blank pages of the Soviet era.'"

He is referring to an article I wrote after teaching in Russia in 1990. I did not "denounce" the focus on the Soviet past among the people I met in Moscow at all—I reported it, as part of a discussion of a museum exhibition on one of Stalin's prison camps and, more generally, of how Gorbachev's policy of "openness" had unleashed a wide-ranging discussion of history. As a historian I applaud all efforts to uncover forgotten or suppressed aspects of the past. How this qualifies me as one of the historians supposedly "in denial" about Soviet history is difficult to understand.

It is unclear if this misrepresentation stems from the book under review or is the invention of the reviewer. Either way, it does not reflect well on your generally interesting magazine.

Eric Foner
DeWitt Clinton Professor of History
Columbia University
New York, NY



Glenn Garvin writes, "During World War II, when the Soviet Union and the United States were allied against Hitler, [Christopher] Trumbo's Communist father, Dalton, also named names, secretly pointing the FBI to Hollywood figures he believed were suspiciously anti-war. But there was no suggestion during the [2003] press conference [about Hollywood and the blacklist] that his screenwriting Oscar be revoked."

The assertion that Trumbo pointed "the FBI to Hollywood figures he believed were suspiciously anti-war" is a product of Garvin's fecund imagination. There is no evidence to support it. The only reference to Trumbo's speaking to the FBI that I know of can be found in his published letters, Additional Dialogue: Letters of Dalton Trumbo, 1942-61 (M. Evans & Co.). Anybody sufficiently interested in Garvin's garbled thesis can find enlightenment on page 26 of that volume.

Finally, at the press conference Garvin attended, there was no suggestion that anybody's Oscar "be revoked." Revoking Oscars originates with Garvin. And by the way, Dalton Trumbo was given two of them�for motion pictures he wrote using a pseudonym during the time he was blacklisted and unable to find work using his own name.

Christopher Trumbo
Beverly Hills, CA



Glenn Garvin replies: If anything, both the book In Denial and my review soft-pedal the�tone of Foner's essay, which appeared in the December 1990 issue of Harper's. The air of bitter disappointment was palpable as Foner described young Russians who admire Abraham Lincoln but "paint the history of the Soviet era in the blackest hues, reclassifying every top leader between Lenin and Gorbachev as either criminal or incompetent." Worse yet, he wrote, the Russians were turning away from distinctions between bourgeois and socialist ideologies in favor of something he referred to, contempt practically dripping from the quotation marks, as "universal human values." Foner sounded like nothing so much as a jilted paramour as he complained of "this love affair with America."

As for Christopher Trumbo, I am astonished to find myself in agreement with him: Everybody, including his father's leftist admirers, should read Dalton Trumbo's 1944 letter to the FBI reprinted in Additional Dialogue. In it, he boasts of having provided the FBI with letters from writers who are "1) anti-war, 2) anti-Semitic, 3) in the process of organizing politically, 4) distributing pamphlets to further their cause and corresponding with persons detained by the Federal government, and 5) of the opinion that the Commander in Chief of American forces is 'the greatest criminal incendiary in history.'" He adds, "I share with the men of your organization a sincere desire to see an end to all such seditious propaganda as criminal slander of the Commander in Chief, defeatism, pacifism, anti-Semitism and all similar deceits and stratagems designed to assist the German cause." He closes by noting that he's including more letters and begging the FBI not to tip off the writers about what he has done, presumably so he can keep ratting on them.

I will concede Christopher Trumbo one technical point. Although he continues to object to the decision to give Elia Kazan a lifetime achievement Oscar, he did not use the word revoke. The importance of the distinction eludes me, but I am inclined to be charitable to a man whose father was not only one of Stalin's loudest apologists but also one of J. Edgar Hoover's pet rats. Talk about a childhood of mixed signals. (source)

Homeland Insecurity, American Style

By: John Perazzo
FrontPageMagazine.com | Wednesday, May 06, 2009



During her first few weeks on the job, the Secretary of America’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS), former Arizona governor Janet Napolitano, has shown herself to be unqualified for her new post in a number of significant ways. She has proudly banished the word “terrorism” from the federal lexicon; she is ignorant of the most elementary facts regarding 9/11; she is eager to blame the United States for drug cartels violence in Mexico, without a shred of evidence; despite that violence, she is demonstrably averse to halting illegal immigration across the U.S.-Mexico border; and she is inclined to smear American conservatives as potential “terrorists.”

Because of her already dismal performance, some have begun to call for Napolitano’s resignation. Republican Congressman John Carter of Texas, for one, says that Napolitano “has no business serving in the position she’s in now” and “should be fired by the administration.” The conservative group Move America Forward is calling for Napolitano’s dismissal on grounds that she is “so ignorant” of a host of key facts that bear heavily on her ability to fulfill the duties of her office.

Although much commentary has focused on the recent report that brands conservatives as terrorists, the former Arizona governor still enjoys an undeserved reputation as a tough border governor. Consider Napolitano’s record vis à vis illegal immigration. As Arizona governor, she vetoed a bill that sought to eliminate voter fraud by requiring voters to present a valid driver’s license or two alternate forms of identification when casting their ballots. According to Napolitano, such a requirement would have disenfranchised “poor voters” who might not possess the requisite documents. She also supported a proposal to grant driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants; she supported a Senate bill that would have granted amnesty to millions of illegals; she vetoed a state bill that would have required police to enforce federal immigration laws; she vetoed measures to cut illegal-alien welfare benefits and college-tuition discounts; she vetoed a proposal that would have allowed local police and federal immigration officials to work collaboratively on immigration cases; and she opposed legislation that would have officially barred the use of the easily forged Mexican Matricula Consular card as a valid form of identification.

During her stint at DHS, Napolitano already has called off a series of scheduled immigration raids at U.S. workplaces. When Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents busted dozens of illegal aliens at a Bellingham, Washington engine plant, a furious Napolitano chastised ICE supervisors and ordered an immediate investigation into the raid because it violated President Obama’s campaign pledge (to Hispanic lobby groups) that illegal aliens would not be arrested at their workplaces. Moreover, she supports a pathway to citizenship whereby illegals could, within a relatively short time, become naturalized.

It is difficult to see how Americans are made safer by Napolitano’s stance on immigration.

In an April interview with CNN’s John King, Napolitano casually dismissed Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio’s assertion that illegal aliens should be prosecuted and jailed. Said the DHS Secretary:

“Sheriff Joe … knows that there aren’t enough law-enforcement officers, courtrooms or jail cells in the world to do what he is saying. What we have to do is target the real evil-doers in this business, the employers who consistently hire illegal labor, the human traffickers who are exploiting human misery. And yes, when we find illegal workers, yes, appropriate action, some of which is criminal, most of that is civil, because crossing the border is not a crime per se. It is civil.”

Contrary to Napolitano’s absurd claim, however, illegal immigration is indeed a criminal offense under United States law. Section 8, Title 1325 of the U.S. Code clearly states:

Any alien who (1) enters or attempts to enter the United States at any time or place other than as designated by immigration officers, or (2) eludes examination or inspection by immigration officers, or (3) attempts to enter or obtains entry to the United States by a willfully false or misleading representation or the willfull concealment of a material fact shall, for the first commission of any such offense, be fined under title 18 or imprisoned for not more than six months, or both, and, for a subsequent commission of any such offense, be fined under title 18, or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.

Why doesn’t the head of DHS know that illegal immigration is a crime?


In a March 2009 speech to the Brookings Institution, Napolitano characterized U.S. efforts to protect its southern border as insensitive displays of jingoistic arrogance. “One of the things that we need to be sensitive to,” she said, “is the very real feelings among southern border states and in Mexico that if things are being done on the Mexican border, they should also be done on the Canadian border.” Absent from Napolitano’s logic was any recognition of the rapidly growing epidemic of violence, abductions, and murders near the Mexican border—a state of affairs that bears no resemblance whatsoever to the situation along the U.S.-Canada border. To make matters worse, in an April 20th interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Napolitano claimed, incorrectly, that some of the 9/11 hijackers had entered the U.S. through Canada.

Napolitano is exceedingly prone to prevarication. For instance, she claimed recently that “70 percent of the weapons in the hands of the [Mexican] drug cartels are coming from the U.S.” But in fact, more than two-thirds of the guns recovered at Mexican crime scenes are never even sent to the U.S. for tracing, because their markings make it obvious that they originated from somewhere else. Moreover, a large number of the recovered weapons lack serial numbers entirely and thus cannot be traced to any location. In the final analysis, a mere 17 percent of all the guns in question can actually be traced to America.

That is a far cry from Napolitano’s 70-percent fairytale.

One of Napolitano’s most controversial moves as DHS Secretary has been to break with the Department’s tradition of warning the American public about potential terrorist threats by Islamic extremists. Instead, she refers to such acts of terrorism as “man-caused disasters.” In an interview with Germany’s Spiegel Online, she was asked whether her avoidance of the term “terrorism” meant that “Islamist terrorism suddenly no longer pos[es] a threat to your country.” She replied:

Of course it does [pose a threat]. I presume there is always a threat from terrorism. In my speech, although I did not use the word “terrorism,” I referred to “man-caused” disasters. That is perhaps only a nuance, but it demonstrates that we want to move away from the politics of fear toward a policy of being prepared for all risks that can occur.

It seems, however, that Napolitano’s aversion to the so-called “politics of fear” comes into play only with regard to Islamic terrorists. By contrast, unfounded smears implying that American conservatives represent a “terrorist” threat fall well within the bounds of legitimate political discourse, according to Napolitano.

You may recall that in April, Napolitano’s DHS released a report warning that “right-wing extremists” who were “hate-oriented” might be “gaining new recruits by playing on their fears about several emergent issues” such as “the economic downturn,” “the election of the first African American president,” and “the possible passage of new restrictions on firearms.” Particularly susceptible to recruitment, added the report, were: “anti-government” groups; people “dedicated to…opposition to abortion or immigration”; and military veterans (returning from Iraq and Afghanistan) who face “significant challenges reintegrating into their communities.”

Remarkably, the text of this DHS report was liberally peppered with explicit references to the otherwise forbidden word—“terrorism”—as the supposedly exclusive domain of “right-wingers.” The report said, for example, that its warnings would be “provided to…counterterrorism and law enforcement officials so they may effectively deter…terrorist attacks against the United States”; that DHS “has no specific information that domestic right-wing terrorists are currently planning acts of violence, but rightwing extremists may be gaining new recruits”; that during the 1990s, “an economic recession, criticism about the outsourcing of jobs, and the perceived threat to U.S. power and sovereignty by other foreign powers…contributed to the growth in the number of domestic right-wing terrorist and extremist groups”; that “[t]he possible passage of new restrictions on firearms and the return of military veterans facing significant challenges reintegrating into their communities could lead to the potential emergence of terrorist groups”; that “the threat posed by lone wolves and small terrorist cells is more pronounced than in past years”; that “white supremacists’ longstanding exploitation of social issues such as abortion, inter-racial crimes, and same-sex marriage…[have] contributed to the growth in the number of domestic rightwing terrorist and extremist groups”; and that DHS “assesses that lone wolves and small terrorist cells embracing violent rightwing extremist ideology are the most dangerous domestic terrorism threat in the United States.”

So much for avoiding the word “terrorism.”

For actions such as this, the aforementioned Rep. John Carter says, “We shouldn’t even give [Napolitano] the respect of letting her resign. She should be fired by the administration for accusing honest, American citizens—because of their political beliefs—of being domestic terrorists.” The Texas Republican says he will “keep pounding” the issue “until we get rid of this woman.”

Congresswoman Mary Fallin, R-OK, declares that Napolitano is “out of touch with mainstream America” if she believes that returning war veterans and people who support the Second Amendment are predisposed to engage in “terrorism.” In addition, says Fallin, the DHS Secretary “insulted our friends in Canada by falsely claiming the 9/11 terrorists came from there.”

According to Move Forward America (MFA), Napolitano has demonstrated that she is “ignoran[t] about Islamic terrorism” and “has no clue about the details of what happened to America on September 11, 2001.” “Her outlook and priorities are exactly backward and plainly dangerous,” says MFA. “Napolitano is unfit to serve as secretary of Homeland Security and President Obama must fire her before she causes more damage to our country.”

Examining her belief system, damage is the most likely prognosis...(source)

Kanye's New Protege'?

The Gratitude Of The Iraqi's Is Expressed Thusly Under An Obama Administration

BAGHDAD, May 1 -- U.S. military officials said Friday that the Iraqi government has not allowed them to interrogate a detainee the Iraqis contend is the leader of the Sunni insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq.

Iraqi officials have identified the suspect, who was taken into custody April 23, as Abu Omar al-Baghdadi. Some U.S. intelligence officials view Baghdadi as a fictional figure created by non-Iraqi Arab leaders of the insurgent group to give it an Iraqi identity.

"We have not had any access to him," Maj. Gen. David G. Perkins, the top U.S. military spokesman in Iraq, said Friday. "We are in discussions with the Iraqis to determine how we can confirm or deny who he is."

Iraqis have hailed the arrest, which they say was carried out with no assistance from U.S. troops, as a testament to their readiness to take control of security as the U.S. military starts withdrawing from urban areas. Civilian and U.S. military deaths have spiked as U.S. troops have begun closing inner-city outposts to meet a June 30 deadline Iraqi officials set as part of a bilateral agreement.

Two Marines and a sailor were killed Thursday in Anbar province, in western Iraq, the U.S. military announced Friday, making April the deadliest month for U.S. troops in Iraq since September. Eighteen troops were killed in April, a twofold increase compared with March. But the number remained low compared with most months of the six-year war.

However, a wave of suicide and car bombings over the past few weeks has sharply increased civilian deaths. At least 371 Iraqis and 80 Iranian pilgrims were killed violently in April, according to a tally by the Associated Press. The civilian death toll has increased every month this year.

Five people were killed in a suicide bombing Friday at a coffeehouse near the northern city of Mosul, an Iraqi police official said.

Perkins said the recent bombings, most of which have targeted Shiites, were an effort by al-Qaeda in Iraq to foment sectarian violence.

"The purpose is to generate ethno-sectarian violence, because ethno-sectarian violence is what generally escalates into an out-of-control situation," Perkins said. "The more chaos they generate here in Iraq, the better it is for them because they sort of thrive in a chaotic environment."

Speaking to Western journalists at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, Perkins said U.S. military officials are concerned about the recent bloodshed, but he pointed out that it has so far not triggered a response from Shiite militias. A pattern of sectarian retaliatory responses drove Iraq to the brink of civil war in 2006 and 2007.

Although the recent violence has called into question the readiness of Iraq's security forces, Iraqi and U.S. officials have said they see no need to alter the withdrawal timeline.

Also Friday, U.S. soldiers shot and killed two men during a raid near the northern city of Tikrit. Soldiers opened fire after two suspects failed to heed orders to drop their weapons, the military said in a statement, adding that the men were suspected of planting roadside bombs.

Police officials in Tikrit said U.S. and Iraqi soldiers were targeting Arkan al-Shujairy, 26, a government employee. They said American soldiers opened fire on the man's cousin, Imad al-Shujairy, 27, a policeman, when he walked out of a house as troops were approaching. The soldiers later shot Arkan al-Shujairy inside the house, police said.

Fatin Abdel-Qader, a provincial council member, said local leaders consider the raid a violation of the security agreement.

"All military operations in the province should be implemented in coordination with the police and provincial government," she said. "If the Americans do not respond to this, we will end our relationships and dealings with them."

Maj. Bassim al-Hadithi, an official at the provincial security coordination center, said U.S. officials told him the raid was based on faulty intelligence. "They are apologizing for that," he said. (source)

Andrew McCarthy Delivers A Defeaning Blow To The Obama Administration

May 1, 2009

By email (to the Counterterrorism Division) and by regular mail:

The Honorable Eric H. Holder, Jr.
Attorney General of the United States
United States Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, D.C. 20530-0001

Dear Attorney General Holder:

This letter is respectfully submitted to inform you that I must decline the invitation to participate in the May 4 roundtable meeting the President’s Task Force on Detention Policy is convening with current and former prosecutors involved in international terrorism cases. An invitation was extended to me by trial lawyers from the Counterterrorism Section, who are members of the Task Force, which you are leading.

The invitation email (of April 14) indicates that the meeting is part of an ongoing effort to identify lawful policies on the detention and disposition of alien enemy combatants—or what the Department now calls “individuals captured or apprehended in connection with armed conflicts and counterterrorism operations.” I admire the lawyers of the Counterterrorism Division, and I do not question their good faith. Nevertheless, it is quite clear—most recently, from your provocative remarks on Wednesday in Germany—that the Obama administration has already settled on a policy of releasing trained jihadists (including releasing some of them into the United States). Whatever the good intentions of the organizers, the meeting will obviously be used by the administration to claim that its policy was arrived at in consultation with current and former government officials experienced in terrorism cases and national security issues. I deeply disagree with this policy, which I believe is a violation of federal law and a betrayal of the president’s first obligation to protect the American people. Under the circumstances, I think the better course is to register my dissent, rather than be used as a prop.

Moreover, in light of public statements by both you and the President, it is dismayingly clear that, under your leadership, the Justice Department takes the position that a lawyer who in good faith offers legal advice to government policy makers—like the government lawyers who offered good faith advice on interrogation policy—may be subject to investigation and prosecution for the content of that advice, in addition to empty but professionally damaging accusations of ethical misconduct. Given that stance, any prudent lawyer would have to hesitate before offering advice to the government.

Beyond that, as elucidated in my writing (including my proposal for a new national security court, which I understand the Task Force has perused), I believe alien enemy combatants should be detained at Guantanamo Bay (or a facility like it) until the conclusion of hostilities. This national defense measure is deeply rooted in the venerable laws of war and was reaffirmed by the Supreme Court in the 2004 Hamdi case. Yet, as recently as Wednesday, you asserted that, in your considered judgment, such notions violate America’s “commitment to the rule of law.” Indeed, you elaborated, “Nothing symbolizes our [adminstration’s] new course more than our decision to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay…. President Obama believes, and I strongly agree, that Guantanamo has come to represent a time and an approach that we want to put behind us: a disregard for our centuries-long respect for the rule of law[.]” (Emphasis added.)

Given your policy of conducting ruinous criminal and ethics investigations of lawyers over the advice they offer the government, and your specific position that the wartime detention I would endorse is tantamount to a violation of law, it makes little sense for me to attend the Task Force meeting. After all, my choice would be to remain silent or risk jeopardizing myself.
For what it may be worth, I will say this much. For eight years, we have had a robust debate in the United States about how to handle alien terrorists captured during a defensive war authorized by Congress after nearly 3000 of our fellow Americans were annihilated. Essentially, there have been two camps. One calls for prosecution in the civilian criminal justice system, the strategy used throughout the 1990s. The other calls for a military justice approach of combatant detention and war-crimes prosecutions by military commission. Because each theory has its downsides, many commentators, myself included, have proposed a third way: a hybrid system, designed for the realities of modern international terrorism—a new system that would address the needs to protect our classified defense secrets and to assure Americans, as well as our allies, that we are detaining the right people.

There are differences in these various proposals. But their proponents, and adherents to both the military and civilian justice approaches, have all agreed on at least one thing: Foreign terrorists trained to execute mass-murder attacks cannot simply be released while the war ensues and Americans are still being targeted. We have already released too many jihadists who, as night follows day, have resumed plotting to kill Americans. Indeed, according to recent reports, a released Guantanamo detainee is now leading Taliban combat operations in Afghanistan, where President Obama has just sent additional American forces.
The Obama campaign smeared Guantanamo Bay as a human rights blight. Consistent with that hyperbolic rhetoric, the President began his administration by promising to close the detention camp within a year. The President did this even though he and you (a) agree Gitmo is a top-flight prison facility, (b) acknowledge that our nation is still at war, and (c) concede that many Gitmo detainees are extremely dangerous terrorists who cannot be tried under civilian court rules. Patently, the commitment to close Guantanamo Bay within a year was made without a plan for what to do with these detainees who cannot be tried. Consequently, the Detention Policy Task Force is not an effort to arrive at the best policy. It is an effort to justify a bad policy that has already been adopted: to wit, the Obama administration policy to release trained terrorists outright if that’s what it takes to close Gitmo by January.

Obviously, I am powerless to stop the administration from releasing top al Qaeda operatives who planned mass-murder attacks against American cities—like Binyam Mohammed (the accomplice of “Dirty Bomber” Jose Padilla) whom the administration recently transferred to Britain, where he is now at liberty and living on public assistance. I am similarly powerless to stop the administration from admitting into the United States such alien jihadists as the 17 remaining Uighur detainees. According to National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair, the Uighurs will apparently live freely, on American taxpayer assistance, despite the facts that they are affiliated with a terrorist organization and have received terrorist paramilitary training. Under federal immigration law (the 2005 REAL ID Act), those facts render them excludable from the United States. The Uighurs’ impending release is thus a remarkable development given the Obama administration’s propensity to deride its predecessor’s purported insensitivity to the rule of law.

I am, in addition, powerless to stop the President, as he takes these reckless steps, from touting his Detention Policy Task Force as a demonstration of his national security seriousness. But I can decline to participate in the charade.

Finally, let me repeat that I respect and admire the dedication of Justice Department lawyers, whom I have tirelessly defended since I retired in 2003 as a chief assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York. It was a unique honor to serve for nearly twenty years as a federal prosecutor, under administrations of both parties. It was as proud a day as I have ever had when the trial team I led was awarded the Attorney General’s Exceptional Service Award in 1996, after we secured the convictions of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman and his underlings for waging a terrorist war against the United States. I particularly appreciated receiving the award from Attorney General Reno—as I recounted in Willful Blindness, my book about the case, without her steadfastness against opposition from short-sighted government officials who wanted to release him, the “blind sheikh” would never have been indicted, much less convicted and so deservedly sentenced to life-imprisonment. In any event, I’ve always believed defending our nation is a duty of citizenship, not ideology. Thus, my conservative political views aside, I’ve made myself available to liberal and conservative groups, to Democrats and Republicans, who’ve thought tapping my experience would be beneficial. It pains me to decline your invitation, but the attendant circumstances leave no other option.

Very truly yours,

/S/

Andrew C. McCarthy

cc: Sylvia T. Kaser and John DePue
National Security Division, Counterterrorism Section (source)

Barry In Charge: Never Let The Facts Stand In Your Way (the British torture claim)

Why in the world do we claim that Barry is of high intelligence? It's as if we are finding out, day after day, that this man is an affirmative action hire on this new job for him known as, "The Presidency".

Last night he further condemned the Bush administration, which kept the US safe for 7 long years after 911, by claiming that waterboarding is torture, then using the British as cover for directing his treasonous actions of revealing our interrogation secrets to the world.

But there's only one problem: Barry doesn't know history, much less that of his savage Kenyan roots. His grandfather was part of the "kill Whitey" movement in Kenya, then made to pay for it at the British intelligence's directions of his black captors.

First the claim from last night (fast forward to 16:15):



And now the facts:

Barack Obama’s grandfather was imprisoned and brutally tortured by the British during the violent struggle for Kenyan independence, according to the Kenyan family of the US President-elect.

Hussein Onyango Obama, Mr Obama’s paternal grandfather, became involved in the Kenyan independence movement while working as a cook for a British army officer after the war. He was arrested in 1949 and jailed for two years in a high-security prison where, according to his family, he was subjected to horrific violence to extract information about the growing insurgency.

“The African warders were instructed by the white soldiers to whip him every morning and evening till he confessed,” said Sarah Onyango, Hussein Onyango’s third wife, the woman Mr Obama refers to as “Granny Sarah”.

Mrs Onyango, 87, described how “white soldiers” visited the prison every two or three days to carry out “disciplinary action” on the inmates suspected of subversive activities.

“He said they would sometimes squeeze his testicles with parallel metallic rods. They also pierced his nails and buttocks with a sharp pin, with his hands and legs tied together with his head facing down,” she said The alleged torture was said to have left Mr Onyango permanently scarred, and bitterly antiBritish. “That was the time we realised that the British were actually not friends but, instead, enemies,” Mrs Onyango said. “My husband had worked so diligently for them, only to be arrested and detained.”

Mr Obama refers briefly to his grandfather’s imprisonment in his best-selling memoir, Dreams from My Father, but states that his grandfather was “found innocent” and held only for “more than six months”.

Mr Onyango served with the British Army in Burma during the Second World War and, like many army veterans, he returned to Africa hoping to win greater freedoms from colonial rule. Although a member of the Luo tribe from western Kenya, he sympathised with the Kikuyu Central Association, the organisation leading an independence movement that would evolve into the bloody uprising known as the Mau Mau rebellion.

“He did not like the way British soldiers and colonialists were treating Africans, especially members of the Kikuyu Central Association, who at the time were believed to be secretly taking oaths which included promises to kill the white settlers and colonialists,” Mrs Onyango said.

In his book, Mr Obama implies that his grandfather was not directly involved in the anticolonial agitation, but his grandmother said that her husband had supplied information to the insurgents. “His job as cook to a British army officer made him a useful informer for the secret oathing movement which would later form the Mau Mau rebellion,” she said. The Mau Mau used oaths as part of their initiation ceremony.

Mr Onyango was probably tried in a magistrates’ court on charges of political sedition or membership of a banned organisation, but the records do not survive because all such documentation was routinely destroyed in British colonies after six years.

“To arrest a Luo ex-soldier, who must have been a senior figure in the community, is pretty serious. They must have had some damn good evidence,” said Professor David Anderson, director of the African Studies Centre at the University of Oxford and an authority on the Mau Mau rebellion.

The British responded to the Mau Mau uprising with draconian violence: at least 12,000 rebels were killed, most of them Kikuyu, but some historians believe that the overall death toll may have been more than 50,000. In total, just 32 European settlers were killed.

According to his widow, Mr Onyango was denounced to the authorities by his white employer, who sacked him on suspicion of consorting with “troublemakers”. He may also have been the victim of a feud with an African neighbour who worked in the district commissioner’s office. Mr Onyango, notoriously outspoken, appears to have accused this official of corruption.

According to Mrs Onyango, her husband was arrested by two soldiers, and taken to Kamiti prison, the national maximum-security prison outside Nairobi.

“This was like a death camp because some detainees died while being tortured,” Mrs Onyango said. “We were not allowed to see him, not even taking him food.” She said her husband was told that he would be killed or maimed if he refused to reveal what he knew of the insurgency, and was beaten repeatedly until he promised “never to rejoin any groupings opposed to the white man’s rule”. Even after he had confessed, and renounced the insurgency, the physical abuse allegedly continued.

Some of Mr Onyango’s fellow inmates were beaten to death with clubs, according to Mrs Onyango. “In fact, my late husband was lucky to have left the prison alive without any serious bodily harm, save for the permanent scars from beatings and torture, which remained on his body till he died.”

Like all family histories, retold many years after the events, some elements of Mrs Onyango’s account are hazy. For example, the white men she described as “soldiers” are far more likely to have been Special Branch officers, who wore a uniform that was indistinguishable from military uniform to most Africans.

Mrs Onyango also described an incident of her husband’s “torture”, which was nothing of the sort. “The white soldiers would spray his body with an itching chemical. This, he said, could make him scratch his body till it bled.” Almost certainly, Mr Onyango was being treated for body lice but apparently he was so used to brutality that he assumed the routine chemical delousing treatment was another form of abuse.

During Mr Obama’s first visit to Kenya in 1988, his grandmother recalled the growing resentment against white colonial rule in Kenya, with rallies and mounting violence that would explode into full-scale rebellion in 1952. “Most of this activity centred on Kikuyuland,” she told him. “But the Luo, too, were oppressed, a main source of forced labour. Men in our area began to join the Kikuyu in demonstrations . . . many men were detained, some never to be seen again.”

The British colonial authorities began a sustained campaign to quell the Mau Mau uprising, establishing numerous detention camps that some historians describe as “Kenya’s Gulag”, where inmates were frequently abused. “There was torture in Kenya during the Mau Mau emergency, institutional and systematic, and also casual and haphazard,” Professor Anderson writes in Histories of the Hanged: Britain’s Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire (2005). “Violence . . . was intrinsic to the system, and the use of force to compel obedience was sanctioned at the highest level.”

At the height of the rebellion, an estimated 71,000 Kenyans were held in prison camps. The vast majority were never convicted. Letters smuggled out of the camps complained of systematic brutality by warders and guards. According to the Harvard historian Caroline Elkins, who won a Pulitzer Prize for her exposé of British atrocities during the Mau Mau uprising, there were reports of sexual violence and mutilation using “castration pliers”. “This was an instrument devised to crush the men’s testicles,” she writes in Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya (2005). “Other detainees also described castration pliers, along with other methods of beating and mutilating men’s testicles.”

Several hundred letters from camp inmates survive in the Kenyan National Archives, “chronicling camp conditions, forced labour, torture, starvation and murder”, according to Ms Elkins. One white policeman, Duncan McPherson, told Barbara Castle, the former MP, that conditions in some detention camps were “worse, far worse, than anything I experienced in my 4½ years as a prisoner of the Japanese”.

Mr Onyango was 56 when he was arrested, and he emerged from imprisonment prematurely aged and deeply embittered. In his memoir, Mr Obama described his grandfather’s shocking physical state: “When he returned to Alego he was very thin and dirty. He had difficulty walking, and his head was full of lice.” For some time, he was too traumatised to speak about his experiences. Mrs Onyango told her grandson: “From that day on, I saw that he was now an old man.”

Understandably, Mr Onyango held a lifelong grudge against the British for the way he had been treated, yet he was doubtful that the independence movement would succeed. “How can the African defeat the white man,” he told his son, “when he cannot even make his own bicycle?”

Barack Obama Sr, Mr Onyango’s son and the President-elect’s father, seems to have inherited his father’s attitudes towards the colonial power. He was also arrested, for attending a meeting in Nairobi of the Kenya African National Union (Kanu), the organisation spearheading the independence movement. Mrs Onyango told Mr Obama that his father, unlike her husband, had been held only for a short time in the white man’s prison: “Because he was not a leader in Kanu, Barack was released after a few days.”

Mr Onyango was a victim of the fight for Kenyan independence, but his son became a direct beneficiary of that movement. In 1960, Barack Obama Sr travelled on a scholarship to the University of Hawaii, as part of a programme (sponsored by John F. Kennedy) to train young Kenyans to rule their own country.

Mrs Onyango said that the combative spirit shown by her husband during Kenya’s bloody independence struggle has passed down through the generations to the future president. “This family lineage has all along been made up of fighters,” she said. “Senator Barack Obama is fighting using his brain, like his father, while his grandfather fought physically with the white man.”

Bloody birth of a nation

— In 1895, the British Government establishes the East Africa Protectorate and opens up the fertile highlands of Kenya to whites

— Kenya becomes a British colony in 1920. A year later, members of the Kikuyu tribe, angered by exclusion from political representation, form Kenya’s first African political protest movement

— In 1952, the Mau Mau rebellion against colonial rule erupts and for the next seven years Kenya is under a state of emergency

— Uprising is put down by military action and the detention of thousands of Mau Mau suspects in prison camps. Only 32 European civilians are killed in the violence, but more than 50,000 Africans are believed to have died

— Kenya becomes independent on December 12, 1963, with Jomo Kenyatta elected its first President (source)

Barry In Charge: Why A Boy Can't Be Given Leadership ("That wasn't me")

Poor little Barry.

100 days into office, and he still hasn't grown a pair. This petulant child is still running around claiming that anything bad that happens isn't my fault, and everything good that happens is because of me.

But that's not how a man leads. Real leaders take responsibility for what has happened while in congress, while president, and in everyday situations around the house. This man-boy hasn't learned that lesson, and it is painfully obvious to those of us who have already learned that lesson.

Watch here as Barry acts like he wasn't a sitting Senator when President Bush was given a TARP package to pass by congress last fall:



I guess we need to call in Barry's "Truth Squad" to sort it all out: was Barry in congress for two years before becoming president or not?:


Later in the day after this first clip, Barry delivers his own report card after 100 days in office to a Washington press corps. And if you watch here [fast forward to 8:30], you'll see Barry remember that he was indeed part of the senate when there is something good for which to take credit:



It's all pretty sophomoric, isn't it? How did we end up with this child as the leader of the free world?

Well, I'm not the only one who sees it. Millions of Americans are raising their voices through so far peaceful means, and now, finally, we see the press begin to notice, as well:

WASHINGTON – "That wasn't me," President Barack Obama said on his 100th day in office, disclaiming responsibility for the huge budget deficit waiting for him on Day One. It actually was him — and the other Democrats controlling Congress the previous two years — who shaped a budget so out of balance.

And as a presidential candidate and president-elect, he backed the twilight Bush-era stimulus plan that made the deficit deeper, all before he took over and promoted spending plans that have made it much deeper still.

Obama met citizens at an Arnold, Mo., high school Wednesday in advance of his prime-time news conference. Both forums were a platform to review his progress at the 100-day mark and look ahead.

At various times, he brought an air of certainty to ambitions that are far from cast in stone.

His assertion that his proposed budget "will cut the deficit in half by the end of my first term" is an eyeball-roller among many economists, given the uncharted terrain of trillion-dollar deficits and economic calamity that the government is negotiating.

He promised vast savings from increased spending on preventive health care in the face of doubts that such an effort, however laudable it might be for public welfare, can pay for itself, let alone yield huge savings.

A look at some of his claims Wednesday:

OBAMA: "Number one, we inherited a $1.3 trillion deficit.... That wasn't me. Number two, there is almost uniform consensus among economists that in the middle of the biggest crisis, financial crisis, since the Great Depression, we had to take extraordinary steps. So you've got a lot of Republican economists who agree that we had to do a stimulus package and we had to do something about the banks. Those are one-time charges, and they're big, and they'll make our deficits go up over the next two years." — in Missouri.

THE FACTS:

Congress controls the purse strings, not the president, and it was under Democratic control for Obama's last two years as Illinois senator. Obama supported the emergency bailout package in President George W. Bush's final months — a package Democratic leaders wanted to make bigger.

To be sure, Obama opposed the Iraq war, a drain on federal coffers for six years before he became president. But with one major exception, he voted in support of Iraq war spending.

The economy has worsened under Obama, though from forces surely in play before he became president, and he can credibly claim to have inherited a grim situation.

Still, his response to the crisis goes well beyond "one-time charges."

He's persuaded Congress to expand children's health insurance, education spending, health information technology and more. He's moving ahead on a variety of big-ticket items on health care, the environment, energy and transportation that, if achieved, will be more enduring than bank bailouts and aid for homeowners.

The nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimated his policy proposals would add a net $428 billion to the deficit over four years, even accounting for his spending reduction goals. Now, the deficit is nearly quadrupling to $1.75 trillion.

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OBAMA: "I think one basic principle that we know is that the more we do on the (disease) prevention side, the more we can obtain serious savings down the road. ... If we're making those investments, we will save huge amounts of money in the long term." — in Missouri.

THE FACTS: It sounds believable that preventing illness should be cheaper than treating it, and indeed that's the case with steps like preventing smoking and improving diets and exercise. But during the 2008 campaign, when Obama and other presidential candidates were touting a focus on preventive care, the New England Journal of Medicine cautioned that "sweeping statements about the cost-saving potential of prevention, however, are overreaching." It said that "although some preventive measures do save money, the vast majority reviewed in the health economics literature do not."

And a study released in December by the Congressional Budget Office found that increasing preventive care "could improve people's health but would probably generate either modest reductions in the overall costs of health care or increases in such spending within a 10-year budgetary time frame."

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OBAMA: "You could cut (Social Security) benefits. You could raise the tax on everybody so everybody's payroll tax goes up a little bit. Or you can do what I think is probably the best solution, which is you can raise the cap on the payroll tax." — in Missouri.

THE FACTS: Obama's proposal would reduce the Social Security trust fund's deficit by less than half, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center.

That means he would still have to cut benefits, raise the payroll tax rate, raise the retirement age or some combination to deal with the program's long-term imbalance.

Workers currently pay 6.2 percent and their employers pay an equal rate — for a total of 12.4 percent — on annual wages of up to $106,800, after which no more payroll tax is collected.

Obama wants workers making more than $250,000 to pay payroll tax on their income over that amount. That would still protect workers making under $250,000 from an additional burden. But it would raise much less money than removing the cap completely.

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OBAMA: "My hope is that working in a bipartisan fashion we are going to be able to get a health care reform bill on my desk before the end of the year that we'll start seeing in the kinds of investments that will make everybody healthier."

THE FACTS: Obama has indeed expressed hope for a health care plan that has support from Democrats and Republicans. But his Democratic allies in Congress have just made that harder. The budget plan written by the Democrats gives them the option of denying Republicans the normal right to block health care with a Senate filibuster. The filibuster tactic requires 60 votes to overcome, making it the GOP's main weapon to ensure a bipartisan outcome. The rules set by the budget mean that majority Democrats could potentially pass health care legislation without any Republican votes, sacrificing bipartisanship to achieve their goals. (source)

Barry In Charge: His Definition of Being A "Unifier" (mocking the Tea Partier's)

There are real people around the world who work to harm America: Ahmadinejad, Chavez, Medvedev/Putin, etc...but do you ever hear Barry speak of them in the same way he does half of his country? Listen to the way he speaks of us Tea Partier's who, in one day, asssembled peacefully to nearly 1 million in size across America to protest runaway spending and the growth of the federal government:



To those of you who have cared enough about your country to actually read the news over the years, I know that I don't need to tell you this...but to the truly ignorant out there who think that Barry is making a good argument in this clip, I offer this bit of education: he's LYING in order to shut out my half of this great country, and usher in SOCIALISM.

We aren't in this situation because of tax cuts for the rich. We are in this situation because the federal government regulated banks to give out BAD LOANS over ten years ago, then grew Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac [both government-owned/run institutions] to enormous sizes in order to purchase all of these toxic loans.

Barry lies in order to foist his socialist "answer" to a problem that he and the rest of his Democrat leftists dreamed up during the Clinton administration. President Bush tried to curtail the growing crisis, but not only is there precious little a president can do in the way of single-handedly correcting this problem, but too many of you idiots who love CNN, MSNBC, and the rest of the MSM followed down the path of demonizing Bush even though his management of the economy at least kept us at 3% GDP growth for 8 years, despite a dot.com bust and 9/11 attack on our economy that he inherited.

I know that for many of you, your hate is too blinding to believe my words. So try reading one of your own swishy leftists lay it all out for you here, in the Village Voice.

A Little Levity