Wildfires Are Linked to Global Warming -- But Media Obscure the Relationship

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Sam Kornell
July 6, 2009 - Miller-McCune Magazine

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Early last summer, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger announced that California's fire season now lasts all 365 days of the year. At the time, nearly 2,000 separate wildfires were burning across the Golden State; the governor made his declaration during a press conference in Santa Barbara, Calif., where a major conflagration was scorching the hills just north of the city.

Since then, Santa Barbara has endured two more major fires -- one in November and one in May, both well out of what in past years was considered the natural fire season. These fires have attracted national media coverage, possibly in part because they threatened -- and often burned — large homes owned by wealthy, occasionally famous people. The Jesusita fire, which began on May 5, was especially fearsome, reducing 80 homes to rubble and resulting in more than 30,000 evacuations, and it was covered by all of the major national media outlets.

With one notable exception, from the San Francisco Chronicle, none of the coverage explored the possibility that the fire might be linked to climate change, despite ample evidence that such a link exists. A few major outlets, such as Time, did posit such a connection after Australia's Black Saturday fires in February, although that country has a former Australian of the Year focusing attention to the connection.

Perhaps editors didn't see the upside of filtering a visually rich story packed full of human drama through the sieve of a politically divisive issue that appears -- although it can be hard to tell -- yet to gain really serious traction among many Americans. This seems particularly plausible in light of a recent Gallup study finding that 41 percent of respondents believe that the press overstates the evidence of global warming.

But whatever the cause, the apparent reticence of some media organizations to address the link between climate change and wildfire is unfortunate, since wildfires provide an intensely arresting visual example of an often abstract-seeming phenomenon. Studies show that people are more alert to the dangers climate change poses when they believe they can see or experience tangible evidence of it in their daily lives. But the most dramatic impacts of climate change, such as disappearing glaciers, are still mainly occurring at a distance. Making it clear that as climate change intensifies, major wildfires are going to increase in the Western U.S. -- as a recent report by the U.S. Climate Change Science Program concluded -- could help drive home the danger of a phenomenon still most closely associated with the collapse of distant ice-shelves.

"People can relate to what's happening in their immediate environment -- their town, their community, their part of the state," says Eric Pooley, a veteran Washington journalist currently writing a book about the politics and economics of climate change. "To the extent that people still think of climate change as something abstract and going to happen in the future, it's very powerful if reporters can point to things that are already happening" as a consequence of global warming.

The former editor of Fortune magazine and a longtime reporter and editor at Time, Pooley wrote a widely discussed study this winter for the Shorenstein Center for the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard examining shortcomings in media coverage of the economics of climate change. In the extensive research he conducted for the report, he concluded that climate change in general is "still woefully underreported" by the press. In a phone conversation, he argued that reporters and editors are still "wary" about linking climate change to natural disasters, even when such links are scientifically uncontroversial; he believes this needs to change.

Of course, it is true that no single fire can be directly attributed to climate change in much the same way that climate change couldn't be cited as the cause of Hurricane Katrina. The relevant question is not whether a particular natural disaster can be linked directly to the greenhouse effect, but whether it exemplifies future trends. Was Katrina the result of warming ocean water generating more intense hurricanes? There's no definitive answer.

But there is much more certainty if the question is reframed slightly to ask whether, in the future, climate change will generate more frequent and intense hurricanes. The same is true of wildfires. "No individual event can be linked beyond a shadow of a doubt to global warming, but we do know that a warming world makes those events more likely -- it loads the dice in favor of more wildfires, in favor of more hurricanes, in favor of more dramatic flooding and more drought," Pooley said.

California is now in its third year of serious drought, and according to the Forest Service, this summer is going to be marked by extreme fire danger in many highly populated parts of the state. In the likely event that another fire threatens a large city sometime soon, will journalists and editors accord climate change a more prominent role in their coverage?

10 Commandments of the Anti-Christ

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Conspiracy theorists and fringe Christians think the mysterious Georgia stones signal the coming of a "New World Order."

Joseph Laycock
July 6, 2009 - Religion Dispatches

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Back in April, Wired magazine published a story on the history of a strange monument in rural Elberton, Georgia ("granite capital of the world") known as the Georgia Guidestones. The monument consists of four 16-foot-high slabs of granite arranged around a central column and topped with a capstone weighing 25,000 pounds. Carved onto the face of each slab is a list of ten precepts for creating a better society, written in eight modern languages. On the four sides of the capstone are written the words, "Let These Be Guidestones to An Age of Reason" in Sanskrit, Babylonian cuneiform, Classical Greek, and Egyptian hieroglyphs. The central column and capstone are also equipped with holes, astronomically aligned so that the Guidestones can serve as a compass and clock.

The popular consensus is that these stones were meant to survive a global apocalypse and aid survivors in creating a new, enlightened society. Unveiled in 1980, and built by an unknown party, the monument has stood for nearly thirty years outside of town, attracting the curious to Elberton. However, in the last ten years the Guidestones have garnered the attention of conspiracy theorists, who see their message as anti-Christian and a call for a global government. This new reading of the Guidestones ultimately led vandals to deface the monument sometime in December 2008.

The official story of the Guidestones' origin is that Joe Fendley Sr., president of the Elberton Finishing Company, was contacted in 1979 by one "Robert C. Christian" to commission a monument. Christian was a pseudonym used by someone representing "a small group of loyal Americans who believe in God." Fendley has since died, but Randall Sullivan of Wired interviewed Wyatt Martin, the president of Granite City Bank and the only living man who allegedly met Christian. As the project's banker, Martin allegedly learned Christian's true name but will not reveal it. Martin claims he received letters and phone calls from Christian until "around the time of the 9/11 terrorist attacks" and assumes Christian is dead; though some believe Christian never existed. While construction was still underway, Martin and Fendley were accused of perpetuating a hoax, either out of amusement or to promote Fendley's business. Both men took lie detector tests, which they
passed. Sullivan suggests that the hoax rumor may have come from rival granite workers.

According to Jim Miles (author of Weird Georgia), shortly after the Guidestones were unveiled, a local minister stated his suspicion that "Mr. Christian is not a Christian" and that the monument was designed for the worship of the sun as well as the devil. Contemporary Pagans, UFO buffs, and New Agers were naturally attracted by the mystery of the site. New myths were created that the monument was built upon a "power-nexus" or a place sacred to Native Americans. One legend holds that visitors who point both arms at the monument (one palm up, one palm down) will receive a psychic message from the stones. Another Guidestone admirer, Yoko Ono, composed a three-movement score entitled "Georgia Stone."

In 2000, Dr. Reagan R. Davis, a Christian minister, visited the stones and concluded that the Guidestones may well describe the ten commandments of the Antichrist. Particularly upsetting were the precepts to "Maintain humanity under 500 million in perpetual balance with nature," "Guide reproduction wisely encouraging fitness and diversity," and "Let all nations rule internally, resolving external disputes in a world court." Davis interpreted these messages as a call for a world government, a policy of state-sponsored eugenics, and the culling of billions of people. This new interpretation elevated the Guidestones from mere local curiosity to the subject of national notoriety among conspiracy theorists and Christian dispensationalists.

Conspiracy buffs were quick to point out the similarities between the pseudonym "R.C. Christian" and Christian Rosenkreuz, the legendary founder of the esoteric Rosicrucian Order. (Documents attributed to Rosenkreuz were signed "Frater C.R.C."). Christians added that The Age of Reason is also the title of a book by Thomas Paine, which challenges the inerrancy of the Bible. Through numerous Web sites and talk radio programs, a narrative eventually emerged in which the Guidestones (along with ancient esoteric societies like the Masons, eugenics, perceived anti-Christian hostility, and globalization) were all part of a single monolithic entity known as the "New World Order."

The goal of the New World Order is the creation of a single world government and the destruction of national sovereignty and religion. A significant number of Christian dispensationalists subscribe to this view and believe that the New World Order was foretold in the Book of Revelation. In 2005, Mark Dice (using the pseudonym "John Connor" in reference to the Terminator film franchise) organized a Christian group opposed to the New World Order called "The Resistance" and began a campaign to have the monument destroyed. In 2007, radio personality and filmmaker Alex Jones released a documentary entitled Endgame: Blueprint for Global Enslavement, outlining a plan by the Bilderberg group and other global elites to exterminate eighty percent of humanity. The Georgia Guidestones are cited as primary evidence of this plot.

The call of The Resistance was eventually answered with an attack on the stones by vandals who used a can of red spray-paint to write messages such as, "The elite want 80% of us dead," "9-11 inside job," "Obama iz a Muslim," and "Council on Foreign Relations is ran by the Devil." The stones were also splashed with polyurethane, which is especially difficult to remove. The vandalism has been celebrated on numerous Web sites discussing the New World Order's agenda; with only a few dissenting voices pointing out that any assault on free speech, even the free speech of an anonymous cabal, threatens the rights of all. The vandalism of the Guidestones seems to be a classic case of an eccentric and lofty idea under assault by the hoi polloi. In fact, a letter from the monument's benefactors printed by the Elberton Granite Finishing Company predicted just such a scenario. They ask that the people of Elberton County restore the stones should they be
"scattered by people of little understanding."

The short history of the Guidestones has parallels with the history of other mysterious messages and prophesies. It seems plausible that whoever invented the name "R. C. Christian" -- be this an actual cabal or Fendley and Martin -- had some knowledge of Rosicrucianism. (Fendley was active in the local Shrine Club where he could have been exposed to Rosicrucian lore.) There are interesting similarities between the Guidestones and the origin of the Rosicrucian legend.

A European preoccupation with the mysterious Rosicrucian order began in Germany with the appearance of two anonymous documents in the early 17th century: Fama Fraternitatis and Confessio Fraternitatis. Clearly someone wrote these documents although, much like the Guidestones, there is little evidence to determine whether these messages were a legitimate manifesto from a secret brotherhood or an elaborate hoax. But regardless of their origin, the excitement generated in the wake of anonymous messages is very real. Numerous modern esoteric groups claim a connection to the Rosicrucians just as conspiracy theorists regard the Guidestones as vital evidence of a demonic globalist agenda.

Another interesting parallel can be drawn between the Guidestones and the Book of Revelation. Both are texts of little-known origin warning of future peril. These conditions allow for historical-critical as well as dispensationalist readings of both messages. Scholars believe the Book of Revelation was written sometime in the first century and is a warning to early Christians not to conform to the evils of Greco-Roman society. Although the Guidestones were constructed relatively recently, they too have a historical context. The letter from the Guidestones' benefactors describes the problem of global overpopulation and warns that, "Armageddon can be prevented."

Whoever planned the monument in 1979 most likely imagined that Armageddon would take the form of nuclear war with the Soviet Union. "R.C. Christian" could not possibly have predicted the events referenced by the vandals, such as the attacks of September 11 or the election of Barack Obama. But Dice, and others like him, read the Guidestones much as they read the Book of Revelation: not as historical artifacts but as important clues to understanding current events. Stripping the messages of their historical contexts allows them to converge, so that they mutually confirm a dualistic cosmology in which Christians must battle the New World Order. Thus, evidence of the New World Order's unfolding plot can be found both in the Book of Revelation and in the Georgia Guidestones. Likewise, Dice's use of the pseudonym "John Connor" is very telling. Like the character in Terminator, he likely sees himself as one who knows the future and is fighting to prevent it
from happening.

The history of the Guidestones is ultimately an interesting study in the heterogeneous nature of symbols. To build something so extraordinary with so little explanation created a vacuum of meaning. Much like the Guidestones' inspiration, Stonehenge, this caused new meanings to be invented. The Guidestones are essentially a spiritual and political Rorschach test onto which any number of ideas can be imposed. Pagans and New Agers created new myths and rituals, imbuing the stones with sacred reverence. For others, the monument is not the marker of a sacred space but the evidence of a demonic plot. Should the Guidestones survive for centuries as their creators intended, many more meanings could arise, equally unrelated to the designer's original intention.

Plenty of Countries Get Healthcare Right

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Jonathan Cohn
July 5, 2009 - The Boston Globe

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"I don't want America to begin rationing care to their citizens in the way these other countries do."

That was Arizona Senator Jon Kyl, speaking last month about healthcare reform. But it could have been virtually any other Republican, not to mention any number of sympathetic interest groups, because that's the party line for many who oppose healthcare reform. If President Obama and his supporters get their way, this argument goes, healthcare in America will start to look like healthcare overseas. Yes, maybe everybody will have insurance. But people will have to wait in long lines. And when they are done waiting in line, the care won't be very good.

Typically the people making these arguments are basing their analysis on one of two countries, Canada and England, where such descriptions hold at least some truth. Although the people in both countries receive pretty good healthcare - their citizens do better than Americans in many important respects - they are also subjected to longer waits for specialty care and tighter limits on some advanced treatments.

But no serious politician is talking about recreating either the British or the Canadian system here. The British have truly "socialized medicine," in which the government directly employs most doctors. The Canadians have one of the world's most centralized "single-payer" systems, in which the government insures everybody directly and private insurance has virtually no role. A better understanding for how universal healthcare might work in America would come from other countries - countries whose insurance architecture and medical cultures more closely resemble the framework we'd likely create here.

Last year, I had the opportunity to spend time researching two of these countries: France and the Netherlands. Neither country gets the attention that Canada and England do. That might be because English isn't their language. Or it might be because they don't fit the negative stereotypes of life in countries where government is more directly involved in medical care.

Over the course of a month, I spoke to just about everybody I could find who might know something about these healthcare systems: Elected officials, industry leaders, scholars - plus, of course, doctors and patients. And sure enough, I heard some complaints. Dutch doctors, for example, thought they had too much paperwork. French public health experts thought patients with chronic disease weren't getting the kind of sustained, coordinated medical care that they needed.

But in the course of a few dozen lengthy interviews, not once did I encounter an interview subject who wanted to trade places with an American. And it was easy enough to see why. People in these countries were getting precisely what most Americans say they want: Timely, quality care. Physicians felt free to practice medicine the way they wanted; companies got to concentrate on their lines of business, rather than develop expertise in managing health benefits. But, in contrast with the US, everybody had insurance. The papers weren't filled with stories of people going bankrupt or skipping medical care because they couldn't afford to pay their bills. And they did all this while paying substantially less, overall, than we do.

The Dutch and the French organize their healthcare differently. In the Netherlands, people buy health insurance from competing private carriers; in France, people get basic insurance from nonprofit sickness funds that effectively operate as extensions of the state, then have the option to purchase supplemental insurance on their own. (It's as if everybody is enrolled in Medicare.) But in both countries virtually all people have insurance that covers virtually all legitimate medical services. In both countries, the government is heavily involved in regulating prices and setting national budgets. And, in both countries, people pay for health insurance through a combination of private payments and what are, by American standards, substantial taxes.

You could be forgiven for assuming, as Kyl and his allies suggest, that so much government control leads to Soviet-style rationing, with people waiting in long lines and clawing their way through mind-numbing bureaucracies every time they have a sore throat. But, in general, both the Dutch and French appear to have easy access to basic medical care - easier access, in fact, than is the American norm.

In both the Netherlands and France, most people have long-standing relationships with their primary care doctors. And when they need to see these doctors, they do so without delay or hassle. In a 2008 survey of adults with chronic disease conducted by the Commonwealth Fund - a foundation which financed my own research abroad - 60 percent of Dutch patients and 42 percent of French patients could get same-day appointments. The figure in the US was just 26 percent.

The contrast with after-hours care is even more striking. If you live in either Amsterdam or Paris, and get sick after your family physician has gone home, a phone call will typically get you an immediate medical consultation - or even, if necessary, a house call. And if you need the sort of attention available only at a formal medical facility, you can get that, too - without the long waits typical in US emergency rooms.

This is particularly true in the Netherlands, thanks to a nationwide network of urgent care centers the government and medical societies have put in place. Not only do these centers provide easily accessible care for people who use them; they leave hospital emergency rooms free to concentrate on the truly serious cases. Tellingly, a Dutch physician I met complained to me that waiting times in her emergency room had been getting "too long" lately. "Too long," she went on to tell me, meant two or three hours. When I told her about documented cases of people waiting a day, or even days, for treatment in some American emergency rooms, she thought I was joking. (In a 2007 Commonwealth Fund survey, just 9 percent of Dutch patients reported waiting more than two hours for care in an ER, compared to 31 percent of Americans.)

Dutch and French patients do wait longer than Americans for specialty care; around a quarter of respondents to the Commonwealth Fund survey reported waiting more than two months to see a specialist, compared to virtually no Americans. But Dutch and French patients were far less likely to avoid seeing a specialist altogether - or forgoing other sorts of medical care - because they couldn't afford it. And there's precious little evidence that the waits for specialty care led to less effective care.

On the contrary, the data suggests that while American healthcare is particularly good at treating some diseases, it's not as good at treating others. (In some studies, the US did pretty well on cardiovascular care, not so well on diabetes, for example.) Overall, the US actually fares poorly on measures like "potential years of lives lost" - statistics compiled by specialists in an effort to measure how well healthcare systems perform. In a 2003 ranking of 20 advanced countries, the US finished 16th when it came to "mortality amenable to healthcare," another statistic that strives to capture the impact of a health system. The Dutch were 11th and the French were fifth. These statistics are necessarily crude; diet, culture, and many other factors inevitably affect the results. But, taken together, they make it awfully hard to argue that care in these countries is somehow inferior. If anything, the opposite would seem to be true.

Critics of health reform frequently point to cancer as proof that American healthcare really is superior. And, it's true, the US has, overall, the world's highest five-year survival rate for cancer. But that's partly a product of the unparalleled amount of government-funded research in the US - something healthcare reform would not diminish. Besides, it's not as if the gap is as large or meaningful as reform critics frequently suggest. France (like a few other European countries) has survival rates that are generally close and, for some cancers, higher. Much of the remaining difference reflects differences in treatment patterns that have nothing to do with insurance arrangements and everything to do with idiosyncratic medical cultures. This is particularly true of prostate cancer, where a staggeringly high survival rate in the US seems to be largely a product of aggressive US treatment - treatment that physicians in other countries, and increasingly many
specialists here, consider unnecessary and sometimes harmful.

None of this is to say that either the Dutch or French systems are perfect. Far from it. In both countries, healthcare costs are rising faster than either the public - or the country's business interests - would like. And each country has undertaken reforms in an effort to address these problems. The French have started to introduce some of the managed care techniques familiar to Americans, like charging patients extra if they see specialists without a referral, while developing more evidence-based treatment guidelines in the hope that it will reduce the use of unnecessary but expensive treatments. The Dutch overhauled their insurance arrangements a few years ago, to introduce more market competition and reward healthcare providers - that is, doctors and hospitals - who get good results.

But cost is the one area in which France and the Netherlands are a lot like Canada and England: They all devote significantly less of their economy to healthcare than we do. The French spend around 11 percent of their gross domestic product on healthcare, the Dutch around 10. In the US, we spend around 16 percent. And, unlike in the US, the burden for paying this is distributed across society - to both individuals and businesses - in an even, predictable way.

Of course, reforming health insurance in the US isn't going to turn this country into France or the Netherlands overnight, any more than it would turn the US into Britain and Canada. The truth is that the changes now under consideration in Washington are relatively modest, by international standards. But insofar as countries abroad give us an idea of what could happen, eventually, if we change our health insurance arrangements, the experience of people in Amsterdam and Paris surely matters as much as - if not more than - those in Montreal and London. In those countries, government intervention has created a health system in which people seem to have the best of all worlds: convenience, quality, and affordability. There's no reason to think the same thing couldn't happen here.

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Jonathan Cohn is a senior editor of The New Republic, where he writes a blog called "The Treatment." He is also the author of "Sick: The Untold Story of America's Health Care Crisis - and the People Who Pay the Price".

Jobs Report Sign of Deeper Economic Trouble

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Ruth Conniff
July 4, 2009 - The Progressive

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The Federal government's jobs report for June shows the country sliding further into an already historic recession. With 467,000 jobs disappearing, bringing the official unemployment rate to 9.5 percent, wages down, and more workers than ever stuck in part-time jobs that don't adequately cover the bills, Americans are hurting. Credit is tight and spending down, leaving little hope that we can borrow and buy our way out of the current economic slump.

The situation calls for a big new round of government stimulus spending. Economists Dean Baker, Paul Krugman, and others are calling on President Obama to try to force a more ambitious stimulus plan through Congress. "Just to be clear, I'm well aware of how difficult it will be to get such a plan enacted," Krugman writes in the The New York Times, anticipating criticism from the Administration insiders like Rahm Emanuel. (In a New Yorker profile earlier this year, Emanuel was quoted as saying that Krugman and other liberal economists are basically right in their criticisms of the too-timid Obama approach to issues like stimulus and tax cuts, but that it's easy to criticize the President when you don't have to get anything past the Republicans in Congress--"How many bills has he passed?" Emanuel asked of Krugman.)

I interviewed another critic of the Obama Administration's centrist economic team for the forthcoming issue of Progressive, William Greider, author of the definitive book on the Federal Reserve Bank, Secrets of the Temple, and, most recently, Come Home America. Greider also has critical things to say about Krugman: "He can't let go of all the bromides he has absorbed over many years as a professional economist," he says, tarring him with the same brush as Robert Rubin and Alan Blinder.

"I think the Establishment, including people like Robert Rubin and Alan Blinder and others, have come part of the way to reality in which they recognize that globalization as they've sold it is not paying off for people, and that portends a growing popular resistance. Combine that with the present financial crisis and that's going to drive that home even more in popular understanding. But they can't go that next step," says Greider.

The bigger problem with the U.S. economy, Greider points out--beyond the need for stimulus and worker retraining-is the toll taken by globalization and the hollowing out of our manufacturing base.

"I think we will keep going down in those terms until this country gets a political leadership that says, 'You know what, it is nuts to run huge trade deficits year after year and pretend that that's OK. It is nuts to imagine that a large, advanced, industrial economy, can prosper without manufacturing.'" he says. "Nobody else in the world does that. Why do we imagine that the U.S. can? It is nuts to become indebted to our trading partners so we can buy more of their stuff. You lay all those things on the table and it is not unreasonable to say this is going to end. . . . When that happens, if enough people understand that there are ways to come back-not to be number one again, but to just become a viable, prospering economy that more or less includes everybody. That's what the goal ought to be."

Interestingly, Greider has spoken with Rubin and others, and recorded their admission that the religion of global trade has its flaws: that workers here and abroad are not reaping the great benefits the prophets of globalization claimed that they would. But their prescription for reform are far too modest, he says. They can't go the extra step and talk about completely renegotiating trade deals and remaking U.S. manufacturing. Instead we continue to pour bailout money into the Wall Street casino economy, and hope for a turnaround. It's time for the Establishment to acknowledge that their whole approach to economics has to change, he says.

"What you can't get from a lot of those people is a candid acknowledgement of that," he told me. They will say, "'Well, yes, the steelworkers have lost jobs and people have sufferend and that's too bad.' But-this applies to a lot of Democrats in the Congress-they find it very hard to step back and say, 'But this is not about the steelworkers or the autoworkers or others who have been disparaged and wiped out by globalization. It's about the U.S. economy. The fact that this economy is gradually losing strength-partly because of globalization.' That's pretty heavy."

If there is one thing that will start turning things around, it's pressure from Americans who are seeing their jobs dry up.

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Ruth Conniff covers national politics for The Progressive and is a voice of The Progressive on many TV and radio programs. Conniff was a regular on CNN's Sunday Capital Gang and is now a regular on PBS's To the Contrary. She also has appeared frequently on C-SPAN's Washington Journal and on NPR and Pacifica.

Obama's Nuclear-Weapons Adviser Delivers Doomsday Scenario

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Mike Blanchfield
July 4, 2009 - The Vancouver Sun
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It's springtime in Ottawa, and Barack Obama's nuclear weapons adviser invites a luncheon gathering to join him on an imaginary journey that is more Dr. Strangelove than A Moveable Feast.

Picture in your mind's eyes your favourite bistro, or some other cherished spot in the city of Paris,'' Dr. Bruce Blair tells the 75 guests picking at a rubber-chicken lunch recently at a downtown Ottawa hotel.

Now, Blair tells them, picture an atomic bomb exploding in that cafe, just like the one that was dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. In that instant, downtown Paris is gone, along with 150,000 souls. The carnage soon multiplies exponentially.

``History would perish. Culture would perish with those many lives. Your bistro, the family at the table next to you, all of these evaporate,'' says Blair, who, by his own admission, misspent part of his youth with his finger on the trigger of mass destruction as a nuclear-ballistic-missile launch officer in the U.S. Midwest.

Obama arrives in Moscow on Monday to meet his Russian counterpart, Dmitry Medvedev, to hammer out the details of new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty before the old 1991 deal expires in five months. While many see a new START treaty as the road to smoother relations between the White House and the Kremlin, people such as Blair see it as a watershed moment to take bold steps to ultimately rid the world of nuclear weapons.

``We have the wind of Obama and Medvedev at our back,'' says Blair, president of the non-profit World Security Institute, on a recent visit to Canada's capital to push his Global Zero grassroots initiative to rid the world of nuclear weapons.

On a trip to Europe in April, Obama called for a nuclear-free world. But with the nuclear ambitions of Iran and North Korea, coupled with the ever- present threat of terrorists in search of a dirty bomb, the road to that nuclear-free utopia is littered with more potholes than during the Cold War.

Still, Blair and many others say the need for the U.S. and Russia to show leadership is even more pressing, to remove not only the ever-present Cold War possibility of a world-ending nuclear accident, but the 21st-century threat of nukes falling into terrorist hands.

Much has been made of the need to press the ``reset'' button on the strained relations of late between the White House and the Kremlin. Medvedev struck a conciliatory note this past week when he called for a new era in relations with Washington, based on a ``purely pragmatic'' agenda.

Thomas Graham, a retired U.S. diplomat and Clinton-era arms-control ambassador, said Russian and American co-operation on arms control, including a new START treaty, would pay dividends in a much broader sense.

``For too long in this post-Cold War world, the two former Cold War adversaries have remained in a semi-hostile relationship,'' Graham said this past week.

``There could be a serious threat of broader nuclear-weapon proliferation. Many people are concerned about the Iranian nuclear program. . . . This administration, I believe, correctly understands that we cannot effectively deal with either of those issues, and many others, as well, without close co- operation with the Russian Federation.''

Officials from both countries are already hammering out the details of an agreement that would replace the START 1 treaty which expires Dec. 5.

Though the Moscow-Washington relationship is tangled in a web of tension over the U.S. missile-defence-shield plans for Europe, and NATO's eastward expansion, positive signals emerged from the Kremlin on Friday on one front: Medvedev's spokesman said he and Obama would sign a side deal that would allow the U.S. military transit of goods through Russian territory to Afghanistan.

The main goal would be a new START framework that would essentially see both sides slashing their nuclear-warhead stockpiles by one-quarter, down to about 1, 500 warheads each.

Despite the spread of nuclear-weapons arsenals to countries such as China, Pakistan, India and elsewhere, nine out of every 10 nuclear bombs on the planet are under the control of the White House and the Kremlin.

Lilia Shevtsova, of the Moscow office of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, suggests that a renewed version of START will not necessarily make the world a safer place.

``When you start counting nukes, you start talking disarmament and verification procedure. It's a sign, not of mutual trust; it's rather a sign of lack, an absence of mutual trust,'' says Shevtsova.

Charles Ferguson, a senior fellow with the Council on Foreign Relations, says if Russia and the U.S. were to go so far as to cut their arsenals down to 1,000 each, other nuclear countries could begin to compete with them.

``We're uncertain as to where China is headed, in terms of its gradual nuclear development. There's still uncertainties even about India, where it may be headed, or Pakistan,'' says Ferguson.

For Blair, it's well past the time to abandon long-held suspicions and animosities.

After walking his Ottawa luncheon crowd through his Paris doomsday vision, Blair piles on more scenarios.

If there were an accidental launch of weapons that triggered all-out nuclear war between Russia and the U.S., 119 million people in each country would die in the initial exchange. That would include 15 million around the Kremlin in Moscow. A city like Chicago or Ottawa would be gone within the hour.

``We've pushed our luck as far as we can; now we need a policy. So, to put it bluntly, there are two paths that stretch before us: We either bury our weapons or we're buried by them,'' says Blair.

``In a Global Zero world, there will still be terrorists, and still be criminals, but they'll not get their hands on nuclear materials. We'll always have Paris in our future, Ottawa in our future. Right now, we cannot say that.''

Saudi Bombshells, Part 1 - Al-Qaeda excluded from suspect list

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Gareth Porter
July 2, 2009 - Asia Times

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On June 25, 1996, a massive truck bomb exploded at a building in the Khobar Towers complex in Khobar, Saudi Arabia, which housed United States Air Force personnel, killing 19 airmen and wounding 372.

Immediately after the blast, more than 125 agents from the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) were ordered to the site to sift for clues and begin the investigation of who was responsible. But when two US Embassy officers arrived at the scene of the devastation early the next morning, they found a bulldozer beginning to dig up the entire crime scene.

The Saudi bulldozing stopped only after Scott Erskine, the supervisory FBI special agent for international terrorism investigations, threatened that secretary of state Warren Christopher, who happened to be in Saudi Arabia when the bomb exploded, would intervene personally on the matter.

United States intelligence then intercepted communications from the highest levels of the Saudi government, including interior minister Prince Nayef, to the governor and other officials of Eastern Province instructing them to go through the motions of cooperating with US officials on their investigation but to obstruct it at every turn.

That was the beginning of what interviews with more than a dozen sources familiar with the investigation and other information now available reveal was a systematic effort by the Saudis to obstruct any US investigation of the bombing and to deceive the US about who was responsible for it.

The Saudi regime steered the FBI investigation toward Iran and its Saudi Shi'ite allies with the apparent intention of keeping US officials away from a trail of evidence that would have led to Osama bin Laden and a complex set of ties between the regime and the Saudi terrorist organizer.

The key to the success of the Saudi deception was FBI director Louis Freeh, who took personal charge of the FBI investigation, letting it be known within the Bureau that he was the "case officer" for the probe, according to former FBI officials.

Freeh allowed Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar bin Sultan to convince him that Iran was involved in the bombing, and that former president Bill Clinton, for whom he had formed a visceral dislike, "had no interest in confronting the fact that Iran had blown up the towers," as Freeh wrote in his memoirs.

The Khobar Towers investigation soon became Freeh's vendetta against Clinton. "Freeh was pursuing this for his own personal agenda," says former FBI agent Jack Cloonan.

A former high-ranking FBI official recalls that Freeh "was always meeting with Bandar". And many of the meetings were not in Freeh's office but at Bandar's 38-room home in McLean, Virginia.

Meanwhile, the Saudis were refusing the most basic FBI requests for cooperation. When Ray Mislock, who headed the National Security Division of the FBI's Washington Field Office, requested permission to go door to door to interview witnesses in the neighborhood, the Saudis refused.

"It's our responsibility," Mislock recalls being told. "We'll do the interviews."

But the Saudis never conducted such interviews. The same thing happened when Mislock requested access to phone records for the immediate area surrounding Khobar Towers.

Soon after the bombing, officials of the Saudi secret police, the Mabahith, began telling their FBI and CIA contacts that they had begun arresting members of a little known Shi'ite group called "Saudi Hezbollah", which Saudi and US intelligence had long believed was close to Iran. They claimed that they had extensive intelligence information linking the group to the Khobar Towers bombing.

But a now declassified July 1996 report by CIA analysts on the bombing reveals that the Mabahith claims were considered suspect. The report said the Mabahith "have not shown US officials their evidence ... nor provided many details on their investigation".

Nevertheless, Freeh quickly made Iranian and Saudi Shi'ite responsibility for the bombing the official premise of the investigation, excluding from the inquiry the hypothesis that Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda organization had carried out the Khobar Towers bombing.

"There was never, ever a doubt in my mind about who did this," says a former FBI official involved in the investigation who refused to be identified.

FBI and CIA experts on Osama bin Laden tried unsuccessfully to play a role in the Khobar Towers investigation. Jack Cloonan, a member of the FBI's I-49 unit, which was building a legal case against bin Laden over previous terrorist actions, recalls asking the Washington Field Office (WFO), which had direct responsibility for the investigation, to allow such I-49 participation, only to be rebuffed.

"The WFO was hypersensitive and told us to f*ck off," says Cloonan.

The CIA's bin Laden unit, which had only been established in early 1996, was also excluded by CIA leadership from that agency's work on the bombing.

Two or three days after the Khobar bombing, recalls Dan Coleman, an FBI agent assigned to the unit, the agency "locked down" its own investigation, creating an encrypted "passline" that limited access to information related to Khobar investigation to the handful of people at the CIA who were given that code.

The head of the bin Laden unit at the CIA's Counter-Terrorism Center, Michael Scheuer, was not included among that small group.

Nevertheless, Scheuer instructed his staff to put together all the information the station had collected from all sources - human assets, electronic intercepts and open sources - indicating that there would be an al-Qaeda operation in Saudi Arabia after the bombing in Riyadh the previous November.

The result was a four-page memo which ticked off the evidence that bin Laden's al-Qaeda organization had been planning a military operation involving explosives in Saudi in 1996.

"One of the places mentioned in the memo was Khobar," says Scheuer. "They were moving explosives from Port Said through Suez Canal to the Red Sea and to Yemen, then infiltrating them across the border with Saudi Arabia."

A few days after receiving the bin Laden unit's four-page memo, the head of the CIA's Counter-Terrorism Center, Winston Wiley, one of the few CIA officials who was privy to information on the investigation, came to Scheuer's office and closed the door. Wiley opened up a folder which had only one document in it - a translated intercept of an internal Iranian communication in which there was a reference to Khobar Towers. "Are you satisfied?" Wiley asked.

Scheuer replied that it was only one piece of information in a much bigger universe of information that pointed in another direction. "If that's all there is," he told Wiley, "I would say it was very interesting and ought to be followed up, but it isn't definitive."

But the signal from the CIA leadership was clear: Iran had already been identified as responsible for the Khobar bombing plot, and there was no interest in pursuing the bin Laden angle.

In September 1996, bin Laden's former business agent Jamal al-Fadl, who had left al-Qaeda over personal grievances, walked into the US Embassy in Eritrea and immediately began providing the best intelligence the United States had ever gotten on bin Laden and al-Qaeda.

But the CIA and FBI made no effort take advantage of his knowledge to get information on possible al-Qaeda involvement in the Khobar Towers bombing, according to Dan Coleman, one of al-Fadl's FBI handlers.

"We were never given any questions to ask him about Khobar Towers," says Coleman.

Telltale signs of fraud

In the last week of October 1996, the Saudi secret police, the Mabahith, gave David Williams, the FBI's assistant special agent in charge of counter-terrorism issues, what they said were summaries of the confessions obtained from some 40 Shi'ite detainees.

The alleged confessions portrayed the bombing as the work of a cell of Saudi Hezbollah that had had carried out surveillance of US targets under the direction of an Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps officer before hatching a plot to blow up the Khobar Towers facility.

But the documents were curiously short of the kind of details that would have allowed US investigators to verify key elements of the accounts. In fact, Saudi officials refused even to reveal the names of the detainees who were alleged to have made the confessions, identifying the suspects only by numbers one through six or seven, according to a former FBI official involved in the investigation.

Justice Department lawyers argued that the confessions were completely unreliable, and unusable in court, because they had probably been extracted by torture. At Attorney General Janet Reno's insistence, both Reno and FBI Director Louis Freeh said publicly in early 1997 that the Saudis had provided little more than "hearsay" evidence on the bombing.

There were also major anomalies in the alleged confessions of Shi'ite plotters that should have aroused the suspicions of FBI investigators.

The Saudis claimed that on March 28, 1996, Saudi guards at the al-Haditha border crossing with Jordan had discovered 38 kilograms of plastic explosives hidden in a car driven by a Saudi Hezbollah member. That member not only admitted to his Saudi Hezbollah membership, according to the Saudi account, but led the secret police to three more Saudi Hezbollah members, who were allegedly arrested on April 6, 7 and 8.

What was peculiar about that account is that on April 17, 1996, Saudi officials had announced that they had found explosives in a car at the border with Jordan on March 29, and said that "a number of people" had been arrested. And four days later, Saudi Interior Minister Prince Nayef had announced the arrest of four men in the bombing of the Office of the Program Manager of the Saudi National Guard in Riyadh on November 13, 1995. Their confessions were broadcast on Saudi television that same day.

In the announcement of the arrests, reported by the New York Times, Nayef referred to the arms smuggling attempt of March 29, saying it was still not clear if the November blast in Riyadh and the smuggling attempt were related.

That statement had clearly implied that Saudi officials had reason to believe that there was a link between the jihadist network believed to have carried out the Riyadh bombing and those who had been caught after the March 29 explosive smuggling attempt.

After the Khobar bombing, however, the Saudis began to link the interception of explosives in late March to the Shi'ite they were saying had carried out the Khobar Towers bombing.

One day in July, according to a former Clinton administration official, Freeh came into the White House situation room livid with anger, telling officials there he had just learned that the Saudis had arrested a Saudi Hezbollah activist in March with concealed explosives and had discovered the Shi'ite plot to bomb Khobar Towers.

Nayef's statement suggesting a possible tie to the Riyadh bombing of the previous November was a deliberate deception of the United States, which the Saudis never explained to US officials. "We asked why they didn't tell us about this earlier and didn't get an answer," says Williams.

If the Saudis had actually arrested the four Saudi Hezbollah members who had been ordered to carry out the bombing, as they later claimed, it would have been known immediately to the rest of the Saudi Hezbollah organization, which would obviously have called off the bomb plot and fled the country.

Further undermining the Shi'ite explosives smuggling and bomb plot story is the fact that the Saudis had secretly detained and tortured a number of veteran Sunni jihadists with ties to bin Laden after the bombing.

The Sunni detainees over Khobar included Yusuf al-Uyayri, who was later revealed to have been the actual head of al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia. In 2003, al-Uyayri confirmed in al-Qaeda's regular publication that he had been arrested and tortured after the Khobar bombing.

A report published in mid-August 1996 by the London-based Palestinian newspaper Al Qods al-Arabi, based on sources with ties to the jihadi movement in Saudi Arabia, said that six Sunni veterans of the Afghan war had confessed to the Khobar bombing under torture. That was followed two days later by a report in the New York Times that the Saudi officials now believed that Afghan war veterans had carried out the Khobar bombing.

A few weeks later, however, the Saudi regime apparently made a firm decision to blame the bombing on the Saudi Shi'ite.

According to a Norwegian specialist on the Saudi jihadi movement, Thomas Hegghammer, in 2003 - shortly before al-Uyayri was killed in a shoot-out in Riyadh in late May 2003 - an article by the al-Qaeda leader in the al-Qaeda periodical blamed Shi'ites for the Khobar bombing.

In a paper for the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, Hegghammer cites that statement as evidence that al Qaeda wasn't involved in Khobar. But one of al-Uyayri's main objectives at that point would have been to stay out of prison, so his endorsement of the Saudi regime's position is hardly surprising.

Al-Uyayri had been released from prison in mid-1998, by his own account. But he was arrested again in late 2002 or early 2003, by which time the CIA had come to believe that he was a very important figure in al-Qaeda, even though it didn't know he was the leader of al-Qaeda in the peninsula, according to Ron Suskind's book The One Percent Doctrine.

In mid-March 2003, Suskind writes, US officials pressed the Saudis not to let him go. But the Saudis claimed they had nothing on al-Uyayri, and a few weeks later he was released again. The head of al Qaeda in Saudi Arabia and the Saudi secret police were playing a complex game.

The question of how the alleged plotters got their hands on roughly 5,000 pounds of explosives - the estimated amount in the truck bomb - was one of the central questions in the investigation of the bombing. But interviews with six former FBI officials who worked on the Khobar Towers investigation revealed that the investigation had not turned up any evidence of how well over two tons of explosives had entered the country.

Not one of the six could recall any specific evidence about how the alleged plotters got their hands on that much explosives. And one former FBI official who continues to defend the conclusions of the investigation flatly refused to tell this writer whether the investigation had turned up information bearing on that question.

If the Saudi Hezbollah group had actually been plotting to bring the explosives into the country by hiding them in cars, they would have had to get more than 50 explosives-laden cars past Saudi border guards who were already on alert. There is no indication, however, that any additional cars with explosives came across the border in the weeks prior to the bombing.

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Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specializing in US national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam.

Saudi Bombshells, Part 2 - Why US officials blamed Iran

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Gareth Porter
July 3, 2009 - Asia Times

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In March 1997, United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director Louis Freeh got what he calls in his memoirs "the first truly big break in the case": the arrest in Canada of one of the Saudi Hezbollah members the Saudis accused of being the driver of the getaway car at Khobar Towers.

Hani al-Sayegh, then 28 years old, had arrived in Canada in August 1996 after having left Saudi Arabia, by his own account, in August 1995, for Iran and Syria. The Canadian government charged him with being a terrorist, based on claims by the Saudi regime.

In order to be transferred to the United States without facing deportation to Saudi Arabia, where he was believed to face the death penalty, al-Sayegh had to agree to a plea bargain under which he would admit to having proposed an attack on US personnel, for which he would have to serve up to 10 years in prison.

In fact, the only thing al-Sayegh had actually admitted to, according to FBI sources, was having proposed an attack on one AWACS plane that had been turned over to the Saudi Air Force - a proposal he said had been rejected. Both before and after being brought to Washington, moreover, al-Sayegh steadfastly denied any knowledge of the Khobar Towers bombing.

Despite that consistent denial by al-Sayegh, a Washington Post story on April 14, 1997, quoted US and Saudi officials as saying that al-Sayegh had met two years earlier with senior Iranian intelligence officer Brigadier General Ahmad Sherifi and that Iran was the "organizing force" behind the Khobar bombing.

That story, leaked by officials supporting the Saudi version of the Khobar story, cited Canadian intercepts of al-Sayegh's phone conversations in Ottawa before his arrest as allegedly incriminating evidence.

The story leant further credence to the general belief in Washington that Iran had masterminded the bombing, mainly because US intelligence had observed the surveillance of US military and civilian sites in Saudi Arabia by Iranians and their Saudi allies in 1994 and 1995.

What al-Sayegh actually told FBI agents in a series of interviews in Ottawa and Washington, however, contradicted the leaked story, according to sources familiar with those interviews.

Al-Sayegh admitted having carried out the surveillance of one military site other than Khobar for the Iranians, but insisted that it was not to prepare for a possible terrorist bombing but to identify potential targets for Iranian retaliation in the event of a US attack on Iran.

His testimony was consistent with what ambassador Ron Neumann, who was director of the Office for Iran and Iraq in the State Department's Bureau of Near East Affairs from 1991 through 1994, had been saying about the Iranian reconnaissance of US targets.

While most official analysts were ready to believe that Iran was plotting a terrorist attack against the United States, Neumann recalls that he had discerned a pattern in Iranian behavior: every time US-Iran tensions rose, there was an increase in Iranian reconnaissance of US diplomatic and military faculties.

"The pattern could be taken as hostile but it could equally have been defensive," says Neumann, meaning that the Iranians viewed such reconnaissance of possible US targets as part of their deterrent to a US attack.

Al-Sayegh would have been a strange choice for driver of the getaway car at Khobar Towers. A frail man whose frequent asthma attacks repeatedly interrupted his interviews with the FBI, al-Sayegh recounted to investigators he had entered military training with the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, but had been told by his IRGC handler after one particularly disastrous exercise that his asthma made him unfit for military operations.

FBI veteran Jack Cloonan, who was talking with the agents interviewing al-Sayegh that spring and summer, told al-Sayegh's immigration lawyer, Michael Wildes, that he was convinced al-Sayegh had not participated in the operation, according to notes in the diary Wildes kept on the case.

Al-Sayegh continued to deny either that he was involved or the Iranians had anything to do with Khobar, and as a result was deported to Saudi Arabia in 1999 - despite the widespread assumption within the FBI that he would be beheaded on his return.

Freeh had no case against the Iranians and their Saudi allies unless he could get access to the Saudi Shi'ite detainees. In the memoir My FBI, Freeh charged that president Bill Clinton refused to press Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah for access to those prisoners and then asked him for a contribution to the future Clinton presidential library at a meeting at the Hay-Adams Hotel in September 1998.

That account is disputed, however, by numerous Clinton administration officials. Freeh, who was not present, cites only "my sources", strongly suggesting that he got it from the self-interested Prince Bandar.

Freeh claimed that former president George HW Bush had then interceded with Abdullah at Freeh's request, resulting in a meeting between Freeh and Abdullah at Bandar's Virginia estate September 29, 1998. At that meeting, Abdullah offered to allow the FBI to submit questions to the detainees and observe the questions and answers from behind one-way glass.

But what Freeh left out of the story is that Abdullah's new offer came at a time when the Saudis felt a greater need to appease Washington on the Khobar Towers investigation than they had previously.

In May 1998, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had learned that Saudi intelligence had broken up an al-Qaeda plot to smuggle Sagger anti-tank missiles from Yemen into Saudi Arabia about a week before a scheduled visit to Saudi by vice president Al Gore and had not informed US intelligence about the incident.

Then, on August 7, 1998, the US embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania had been bombed 10 minutes apart. The CIA had quickly ascertained that al-Qaeda was responsible for the bombings, with the result that US intelligence began to focus more on bin Laden's operations in Saudi Arabia.

Gore had met with Abdullah on September 24, and had pressed hard for access to an important al-Qaeda finance official, Madani al Tayyib, who had been detained by the Saudi government the previous year, but kept away from US intelligence.

The Saudi regime had long acted to keep the United States away from the bin Laden trail in Saudi Arabia. During the Afghan war, high-ranking Saudi officials, including interior minister Prince Nayef himself, had worked closely with bin Laden. And those ties had apparently continued even after the Saudi government revoked bin Laden's citizenship, froze his assets, and began cracking down on some anti-government Islamic extremists in 1994.

Evidence soon appeared that the regime had allowed Saudi supporters of bin Laden to finance his operations through Saudi charities, while encouraging bin Laden to focus on the US military rather than the regime.

Investigators from the 9/11 Commission later learned that, after bin Laden's move from Sudan to Afghanistan in May 1996, a delegation of Saudi officials had asked top Taliban leaders to tell bin Laden that if he didn't attack the regime, "recognition will follow".

Meanwhile, Nayef was resisting CIA requests for bin Laden's birth certificate, passport and bank records.

The CIA had been sharing its own intelligence on bin Laden with the Mabahith, the Saudi secret police, including copies of National Security Agency interceptions of the cell phone conversations of suspected al-Qaeda officials. Then the militants suddenly stopped using their cell phones, indicating they had been tipped off by the Mabahith.

In early 1997, the CIA's bin Laden station even issued a memorandum for CIA director George Tenet, who was about to travel to Saudi Arabia, identifying Saudi intelligence as a "hostile service".

By late September 1998, the Saudi regime was feeling the heat from the Clinton administration for its failure to cooperate on bin Laden's operations in Saudi Arabia. Abdullah's proposal was a way to demonstrate cooperation on terrorism while helping Freeh promote the Saudi line on the Khobar Towers.

FBI ignored evidence of bin Laden
Bin Laden had made no secret of his intention to attack the US military presence in Saudi Arabia. He had been calling for such attacks to drive it from the country since his first fatwa calling for jihad against Western "occupation" of Islamic lands in early 1992.

On July 11, 1995, he had written an "Open Letter" to King Fahd advocating a campaign of guerilla attacks to drive US military forces out of the kingdom.

Bin Laden's al-Qaeda began carrying out that campaign later that same year. On November 13, 1995, a car bomb destroyed the Office of the Program Manager of the Saudi National Guard (OPM SANG) in Riyadh, killing five US airmen and wounding 34.

The confessions of the four jihadis from the Afghan war to the bombing, which were broadcast on Saudi television, said they had been inspired by bin Laden, and one of them referred to a camp in Afghanistan which was associated with bin Laden.

"It was a backhanded reference to bin Laden," says veteran FBI agent Dan Coleman.

The US Embassy in Riyadh immediately requested that the FBI be allowed to interrogate the suspects as soon as their arrests were announced in April. But the Saudis never responded to the request, and on May 31, the embassy was informed only an hour and half before that the four suspects would be beheaded.

When the bomb exploded at Khobar Towers on June 25, 1996, Scott Erskine, the agent in charge of the Riyadh bombing investigation, was about to return to the United States after another frustrating meeting in which Saudi officials were not forthcoming about whom they were going to prosecute.

When FBI Director Freeh visited Khobar a few days after the bombing, he was told not to expect any more information on the Riyadh bombing.

Instead of insisting that the Clinton administration put more pressure on the Saudis to cooperate on the possibility of links between the two bombings, Freeh quietly decided to drop the investigation of the Riyadh bombing entirely. The case was put on "inactive" status, according to two former FBI officials, meaning that no more actions were to be taken, even though it had not been formally closed.

Bin Laden made it more difficult to ignore his role, however, by publicly claiming responsibility for both the Riyadh and Khobar bombings. In October 1996, after having issued yet another fatwa calling on Muslims to drive US soldiers out of the kingdom, bin Laden was quoted in al-Quds al-Arabi, the Palestinian daily published in London, as saying, "The crusader army was shattered when we bombed Khobar."

And in an interview published in the same newspaper on November 29, 1996, he was asked why there had been no further operations along the lines of the Khobar operation. "The military are aware that preparations for major operations require time, in contrast with small operations," said bin Laden.

He then linked the two bombings in Saudi Arabia explicitly as signals to the United States from his organization: "We had thought that the Riyadh and Khobar blasts were a sufficient signal to sensible US decision-makers to avert a real battle between the Islamic nation and US forces," said bin Laden, "but it seems that they did not understand the signal."

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Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specializing in US national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam.

Saudi Bombshells, Part 3 - FBI chief defended Saudis

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Gareth Porter
July 4, 2009 - Asia Times

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One of the United States government's top investigators on al-Qaeda, veteran agent Dan Coleman, has a theory that Osama bin Laden always took credit for terrorist actions he had planned, but not for those he had not planned.

For example, bin Laden issued no claim about the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and told his former business agent turned Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) informer, Jamal al-Fadl, that he had nothing to do with it, Coleman says.

As noted by the head of the bin Laden unit at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Michael Scheuer, in the 1995 Riyadh and 1996 Khobar Towers bombings in Saudi Arabia a common operational feature was identified: the vehicle carrying the explosives was not parked so as to bring the entire building down.

If the team executing the Khobar bombing had parked parallel to the security fence rather than backing up to it, says Scheuer, it would have destroyed the entire building. The same thing had happened in the bombing of the Office of the Program Manager of the Saudi National Guard in Riyadh which killed five US airmen and wounded 34.

The bin Laden unit of the CIA had collected concrete intelligence on bin Laden's role in planning the Khobar Towers bombing. In mid-January, 1996, according to the intelligence compiled by the unit, bin Laden traveled to Doha, Qatar, where plans were discussed for attacks in eastern Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden arranged for 20 tons of high explosive C-4 to be shipped from Poland to Qatar, two tons of which were to be sent to Saudi Arabia, the report said.

Bin Laden specifically referred to operations targeting US interests in the triangle of cities of Dammam, Dhahran and Khobar in Eastern Province, using clandestine al-Qaeda cells in Saudi Arabia, according to the intelligence reporting.

FBI agents working on the Khobar case simply rejected any evidence of bin Laden's involvement in Khobar, however, because the decision had already been made that the Shi'ites were responsible.

David Williams, then the FBI agent in charge of counter-terrorism, recalls that he had read intelligence reports suggesting bin Laden's involvement in the bombing, but says he had done so "with a suspicious eye".

The FBI investigators dismissed the relevance of the evidence linking bin Laden to the Riyadh bombing. As one former FBI official explained the logic of that position, the Khobar Towers bombing was completely different from the Riyadh bombing seven months earlier: it was in an area of Eastern Province where Shi'ite oppositionists were predominant and where al-Qaeda had no known cell.

The facts, however, told a different story. The city of Khobar itself was predominantly Sunni, not Shi'ite, and the triangular area of the three cities had a large population of veterans of the Afghan war who were followers of bin Laden. As a London-based Palestinian publication reported in August 1996, the six jihadis who confessed to the bombing were all from an area called al-Thoqba near Khobar.

One of the veteran jihadis detained after the bombing, Yusuf al-Ayayri, who was then the actual head of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, was from Dammam and knew the jihadi community in that region very well, according to Norwegian al-Qaeda specialist Thomas Hegghammer.

The FBI and CIA knew nothing about bin Laden's movement in that part of Saudi Arabia, however, because they were completely dependent on Saudi intelligence for such information. A CIA memorandum dated July 1, 1996, said the agency had "little information" about the "location, size, composition or activities" of opposition cells in Saudi Arabia.

Interviews with FBI officials involved in the investigation make it clear that they were not interested in evidence linking bin Laden to the bombing, because they understood their task to be limited to getting whatever information they could from Saudi officials.

Williams says he didn't question the Saudi account of the Khobar plot, because, "You start to believe the people who are your interlocutors."

Asked about the evidence that bin Laden was behind the plot, another FBI official with substantive responsibility for the investigation said, "I didn't get involved in that aspect. That wasn't my job."

In early November 1998, FBI director Louis Freeh sent a team of agents to observe Saudi secret police officials interviewing eight Shi'ite detainees from behind a one-way mirror at the Riyadh detention center. He planned to use the Shi'ite testimony to show that Iran was behind the bombing.

As expected, the stories told by the detainees recapitulated the outlines of the Shi'ite plot that had already been described by the Saudis two years earlier. Now there were even more tantalizing details of direct Iranian involvement.

One of the detainees said Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps General Ahmad Sherifi had personally selected the Khobar barracks as a target. Another said the Saudi Hezbollah members had been not only trained but paid by the Iranians.

"We came away with solid evidence that Iran was behind it," says a former FBI agent.

There was one problem with the evidence the FBI team collected: the Saudi secret police had already had two-and-half years to coach the Saudi Hezbollah detainees on what to say about the case, with the ever-present threat of more torture to provide the incentive.

But Freeh was not about to let the torture issue interfere with his mission. "For Louis, if they would let us in the room, that was the important thing," one former high-ranking FBI official said. "We would have gone over there and gotten the answers even if they had been propped up."

When Freeh took the accounts from the Shi'ite detainees in interrogations witnessed by the FBI team, however, the Justice Department didn't buy them as valid testimony. The department refused to go ahead with an indictment as Freeh had desired, evidently based on the same objection that had been raised two years earlier: the Shi'ites had been subject to torture.

But in January 2001, president George W Bush kept Freeh on as FBI director. Freeh told the new president that Iran had masterminded the Khobar bombing, according to his testimony before the 9/11 Commission, and the Justice Department then began collaborating with Freeh on an indictment of the Saudi Hezbollah which implicated Iran in the Khobar bombing.

The indictment was announced on June 21, 2001 - Freeh's last day as FBI director.

Highly credible evidence soon showed, however, that the Mabahith, the Saudi secret police, did indeed use torture and coercion to get detainees to tell the stories demanded by the Saudi regime - even in front of foreign observers - and that they did so to protect al-Qaeda from investigation by the United States.

Three car bombings in Riyadh in November 2000 that had resulted in the death of a British citizen were generally believed to have been the work of al-Qaeda. But four British citizens, one Canadian and one Belgian, had confessed to the bombings, and their confessions had been broadcast on Saudi television.

After being released in 2003, however, the Canadian citizen, William Sampson, made public his dramatic account of beatings administered by the Mabahith while being hung upside down, including blows which made his testicles swell to the size of oranges. Sampson said the Saudis told him from the beginning what they wanted him to confess to, repeating it over and over while the beatings continued, and refined the story over time, constantly adding new details.

Six weeks into the interrogation, after Sampson began to tell them what they wanted, they started videotaping his confession, using a wall chart to help him remember in detail the movements he was supposed to have made.

The Saudis even coached Sampson on what to say when he was visited by Canadian Embassy personnel, threatening him with further torture if he told the embassy officials the truth. When the embassy personnel came to talk with him, Sampson's two torturers were present for the entire interview, just as they were presumably present at the questioning of the Shi'ite detainees observed by the FBI team.

The other foreigners told similar stories of coerced confessions under torture. Sampson and the five foreigners were released only after a May 2003 suicide bombing by al-Qaeda on a Riyadh compound housing 900 expatriates forced Saudi Interior Minister Prince Nayef to acknowledge al-Qaeda as a terrorist threat in Saudi Arabia.

Meanwhile, once out of office, Freeh became virtually a defense lawyer for the Saudi regime on the Khobar Towers bombing.

Testifying before a joint hearing of the House and Senate Select Intelligence Committees on October 9, 2002, he whitewashed the Saudi policy toward the FBI investigation. Omitting any mention of the Saudi deception over the explosives smuggling incident and refusal to allow the FBI to pursue essential investigatory tasks, Freeh suggested that the Saudis had done everything that could be expected of them.

"Fortunately, the FBI was able to forge an effective working relationship with the Saudi police and Interior Ministry," he said. Any "roadblock or legal obstacle" that "would occur", Freeh asserted, was because of the "marked difference between our legal and procedural systems".

Freeh paid tribute to Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador, as "critical in achieving the FBI's investigative objectives in the Khobar case" and suggested that any such temporary problems "were always solved" by Bandar's "personal intervention".

Freeh misrepresented the arrangement under which the FBI team had observed the interrogation as "making these witnesses directly available".

In an interview for a fawning biography of Prince Bandar, Freeh even went so far as to call the Saudi beheading of four jihadis who confessed to the Office of the Program Manager of the Saudi National Guard bombing after refusing to allow the FBI to question them as "swift justice" on a "Saudi domestic matter".

The final chapter of Freeh's connection with Bandar and the Saudis, however, was still to come. In April 2009, Freeh appeared as Bandar's defense lawyer in a British court case in which Bandar was accused of illegally taking US$2 billion in graft on a Saudi-British arms deal.

In the context of Freeh's straightened financial situation and his very close relationship with Prince Bandar, this sequence of developments in Freeh's relationship with the Saudis, culminating in being put on Bandar's payroll, should have raised eyebrows in Washington.

With a wife and six children to support, Freeh had been far more vulnerable to Saudi blandishments than most senior administration officials. And Bandar had made no secret that he was willing to use the promise of financial benefits to influence US officials while they were still in office.

He once told an associate, according to a February 2002 article by Robert G Kaiser and David Ottaway of the Washington Post, "If the reputation ... builds that the Saudis take care of friends when they leave office, you'd be surprised how much better friends you have who are just coming into office."

Freeh declined to be interviewed for this series.

In light of the history of Freeh's relations with Bandar, his conduct of the investigation of Khobar Towers deserves new scrutiny. Freeh effectively shut down a probe of a terror bombing in which bin Laden was clearly implicated when the Saudis had refused to cooperate; he refused to pursue any investigation of a bin Laden role in the bombing; and he pushed a seriously flawed Saudi account of the bombing, despite the fact that it was tainted by the likelihood of torture.

The result of Freeh's blatant pro-Saudi bias was that bin Laden was allowed more years of unhindered freedom in which to plan terrorist actions against the US. Had Freeh not become an advocate of the interests of the regime whose representative in Washington eventually put him on his payroll, US policy would presumably have been focused like a laser on bin Laden and al-Qaeda two years earlier.

And perhaps the disinterest of the George W Bush administration's national security team toward al-Qaeda before 9/11 would have been impossible.

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Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specializing in US national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam.

Sarah Palin Turns Pro

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Paul Begala
July 3, 2009 - Huffington Post

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I wish Hunter S. Thompson had lived to see this.

As Hunter said, "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro." Sarah Palin makes Mark Foley, the congressman who sent filthy emails to pages look almost normal. She makes David Vitter, the senator who was hanging out with hookers, look almost boring. She makes Larry Craig, caught hitting on a cop in a men's room, look almost stable. She makes John Ensign, the senator who was having an affair with a staffer, look almost humdrum (and compared to the rest of the GOP whack-jobs, he is). And she makes Mark Sanford, the governor with the Latin lover, look positively predictable.

It was an almost impossible mission, but in resigning from office with 17 months to go in her first term, Sarah Palin has made herself the bull goose loony of the GOP.

Let's stipulate that if there is some heretofore unknown personal, medical or family crisis, this was the right move. But Gov. Palin didn't say anything like that. Her statement was incoherent, bizarre and juvenile. The text, as posted on Gov. Palin's official website (here), uses 2,549 words and 18 exclamation points. Lincoln freed the slaves with 719 words and nary an exclamation; Mr. Jefferson declared our independence in 1,322 words and, again, no exclamation points. Nixon resigned the presidency in 1,796 words -- still no exclamation points. Gov. Palin capitalized words at random - whole words, like "TO," "HELP," and "AND," and the first letter of "Troops."

Gov. Palin's official announcement that she is resigning as chief executive of the great state of Alaska had all the depth and gravitas of a 13-year-old's review of the Jonas Brothers' album on Facebook. She even quoted her parents' refrigerator magnet. (Note to self: if one of my kids becomes governor, throw away the refrigerator magnet that says: "Murray's Oyster Bar: We Shuck Em, You Suck Em!") She put her son's name in quotations marks. Why? Who knows. She writes, "I promised efficiencies and effectiveness!?" Was she exclaiming or questioning? I get it: both! And I don't even know what to make of a sentence that reads:

*((Gotta put First Things First))*

Ponder the fact that Rupert Murdoch's Harper Collins publishing house is paying this, umm, writer $11 million for a book. Ponder that and say a prayer for Ms. Palin's editor.

I'm no latter-day Strunk & White, just a guy who was struck by Palin's spectacularly rambling and infantile prose. It bespeaks a rambling and infantile mind. But perhaps not. Perhaps this is all a ruse. Perhaps Gov. Palin wants us to believe she's an intellectual featherweight who is slightly shallower than an actor on High School Musical. Maybe she's trying to throw us off the trail.

Naah. A lot of people thought that about George W. Bush. He couldn't be so block-headed, they said. He couldn't be as childish and churlish as he came off. Oh yes he could. And so, too, might Ms. Palin be as vapid and puerile as her inane statement suggests.

We will know. In the fullness of time (and I predict, not much time) we will know. Again and again in her statement, Gov. Palin returned to the nettlesome ethics inquiries that have been visited upon her since she signed on to be John McCain's running mate. No doubt they are annoying. But does anyone believe that's why she's resigning? No, there's more to this story. And Ms. Palin's resignation only increases the chances that we will all know the rest of the story soon. Or, as she might put it:

We will all KNOW the "rest of the Story" *((SOON!))*

.....

Paul Begala is a political commentator providing insight "from the left" on CNN's programs including Inside Politics. Begala was formerly co-host of Crossfire, CNN's political debate program. Serving in the Clinton administration as counselor to the president, he helped define and defend the administration's agenda and served as the principal public spokesman.

Letter to Obama from a Dying Man

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With an Introduction by Paul Rogat Loeb

Robert Gordon
July 3, 2009 - CommonDreams.org

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My friend Robert Ellis Gordon is dying of lupus, with months left to live. He's spent more than a decade teaching writing to prison inmates, written a terrific book called The Fun House Mirror from those experiences and crafted a rave-reviewed novel, When Bobby Kennedy was a Moving Man, on Kennedy being sent back to earth to determine whether he deserved Heaven or Hell.

I often quote something Robert said to a group of fellow prison teachers, which seems an apt metaphor for any effort at change: "Some of the people we work with will already have redeemed their lives. Others, no matter what we do, will be back in here again. And for some, our efforts will make all the difference. We will never know which group is which, but that should not serve as a deterrent to our efforts."

Robert just wrote this open letter to Obama, challenging him to reach for his deepest levels of courage in being honest about what we face after decades of pillaging our economy. I'll miss his wise voice.

-Paul Rogat Loeb

Dear Mr. President:

I am one, among millions, who recently received an email regarding your health care plan. Mr. Plouffe's email requested personal stories.

As a fifty-five year old man who has lived with a rare and serious illness since 1989, and who was recently referred to hospice, I am, I suppose, no less qualified than others to write about the challenges and unlooked-for blessings that accompany a fatal disease.

Upon reflection, however, I realized my story would be less compelling than others. For I come from a generous family. True, we were raised to make our way in the world and I started to work at age fourteen. Some forty years later, however, when it became evident that I could no longer hold down a job, my family cut back on their expenses so that my basic needs would be met. Hence I will not die, as thousands of my counterparts do, alone and anonymous in a hospital room or in the streets.

So? I deleted Mr. Plouffe's email and returned to the task at hand. But deleted or not I was distracted by the email, so much so that I left the computer and took my dog for a walk. At the park, as I tossed the squeaky ball to Rose, I asked myself a question: if given the opportunity to write a letter to the President -- a letter in which illness and impending death served a larger agenda-- what would I say to him?

The answer was immediate and impassioned: "Please level with the people. Now."

What do I mean by level? And why this sense of urgency?

The urgency stems from the peril I see in an unbalanced presentation of your economic scenario. I do not mean to suggest that you speak only of the most dire predictions. We need a substantive message of hope. It's been a long forty years since we heard one. But authentic hope, as you know better than most, is founded upon truth. You had the courage to speak it throughout your campaign, and the magnitude of your victory revealed a public yearning to hear it.

In order to sustain the trust of the people, it is imperative that you continue to feed this yearning. That you do as you did in your speech on race: speak to us as adults. Speak even more deeply from the heart as well as the head. Above all, speak in the spirit of Judge Learned Hand: "The spirit of liberty is the spirit of not being too sure.

So even as you speak words of hope and quell our fears with your steady presence, let us know that you proceed in the spirit of not being too sure because you cannot be; because no one can be; because a global economic meltdown is unprecedented in scope and nature.

Tell the people, as FDR did, in a style that is true to yourself, that there's no panacea for this catastrophe. A catastrophe that was decades in the making and is not yet fully understood. And that your approach, therefore, must be a flexible one that allows for a sliding scale of eventualities, among which is the possibility-remote or not-- that this economic Katrina may outrace your best efforts to both remedy the cause and mitigate the effects.

What is to be gained by leveling with the people now? And what are the consequences if you do not do so?

Your most precious resource, Mr. President, is neither your brilliance nor the elegance with which you wield the language. Your most precious resource is your credibility.

The consequences of an unbalanced presentation, one that tilts too heavily toward the rosy?

No adverse consequences if that scenario unfolds.

But if worse continues to lead to worse as numerous economists predict, and you deny yourself political cover by not allowing for that eventuality?

Your popularity will prove thin and short-lived. You will lose your credibility. Quickly. And once relinquished, it can't be restored.

Should you lose your credibility the people will, at the least, dismiss you as yet another president in a long line of presidents who opted to not be statesmen. As for your ability to summon our better angels? That remarkable gift will be squandered.

And that's the best case scenario, Mr. President.

The worst?

If , in the absence of a credible President, tens of millions-millions who are ill-prepared for adversity-find themselves living in a state of deprivation and want? And if fear of the unknown starts feeding upon itself?

The people may, as they have in the past, turn to a leader who uses the energy of ignorance and fear to summon our darkest impulses. We don't have to travel back to the Trail of Tears to recognize our capacity for looking the other way while our government pursues a policy of genocide.

We don't have to travel back to the torture and murder of Emmett Till to recognize our capacity for denying the humanity of a child.

Joe McCarthy's sheet of paper?

Ancient history.

A mere nine months ago John McCain chose a running mate who proved masterful at inciting fear and hatred of "the other." And if worse continues to lead to worse in the absence of a credible president, the hatred we saw on the periphery of her crowds could move to the center and burst into flames that consume our better angels as they fan out.

On June 2nd the headline for the New York Times lead story ran beneath this headline: "Obama Is Upbeat For G.M. Future On A Day Of Pain."

Upbeat on a day when the lives of 21,000 autoworkers and their families were shattered.

Upbeat on a day in which the closing of seven plants will translate into tens of thousands of shattered lives in other sectors of the auto industry.

Upbeat on a day when the Times ran an editorial devoted to yet a new wave of home foreclosures.

There's a dissonance here, Mr. President. And even from the standpoint of political calculation- of the coldest Machiavellian calculation-this dissonance does not have to be. Last November the people rejected the politics of fear, rigidity, half-truths and lies, and embraced the politics of unity and truth. This was a tribute to our ability to discern and to the authentic nature of your message. A message of hope to be sure, but one that calls not for ease but sacrifice. And perhaps above all we came to appreciate a creative and compassionate vision that is tempered, at long last, by reality. Your vision represents the best and perhaps last hope for our children and for theirs.

You forged a bond with the people, Mr. President. But the glue hasn't set and the glue will not set if you do not re-calibrate your message.

The last and most important question: what is to be gained by leveling?

Perhaps the best way for me to address the positive, the potential for realizing your vision, is to circle back to Mr. Plouffe's request, and speak to you in personal terms about the lessons of illness and impending death.

You may be familiar with this quote from the poet, Sylvia Plath. "If only you could see me forge my soul, fighting and fighting to forge my soul."

Sylvia Plath succumbed to her despair, committed suicide in 1963. But her words still stand, maybe now more than ever, as tens of millions face the potential, at least, of entering the forging fire. And should that come to pass the people will look to you, just as the British looked to Churchill, for guidance, solace, and above all hope in the midst of their despair.

And where does my twenty-year dance with the fire fit into all of this? Where do you and I intersect? What have I learned that could possibly be of use to the President of the United States? What have I learned that might help this good man forge the soul of a nation?

Maybe something. Maybe nothing. But for what it's worth I offer a glimpse of my journey and a couple of nuggets I've picked up along the way.

The first nugget?

That we forge our souls not for ourselves but in order to be better disciples of compassion.

And how does an obscure writer and former prison teacher make a contribution this late in the day with a timeline, in all likelihood, of months?

Below, an excerpt from a recent note to the doctor who saved my life on numerous occasions over the past two decades.

... Suffering may teach but it is not an end in and of itself. And when the pain abates, during windows of peace, I write.

I have a book to complete before I die. It is different from the others. I want to leave something behind that may serve as a source of solace to a reader here or there; a reader who wrestles with despair during this era of incomprehensible suffering.

All those high-risk infusions? The fatal infection you warn me about? And my choice to continue, to run the risk, in order to buy time to write?

Like any man I fear a painful death. But after receiving Extreme Unction on multiple occasions, I no longer fear death itself. What I fear is a life not well-lived. And the best way for me to do so during the time that remains is to complete that manuscript.

It's just my body (not my soul) that is weary...

So that is my final task: to forge my soul on the page. I may die before I finish. Or I may risk all on the page and find that my skill is wanting; that the story implodes on itself. But if I fail in this task, I will do so in obscurity.

Because you sit where you sit, you don't have that luxury.

What you do have is the opportunity and responsibility to explain how we got here and enumerate the full panoply of outcomes.

If the rosy scenario comes to pass? The people will know, by dint of your honesty, that you are neither above nor below but of them.

And if worse continues to lead to worse? If tens of millions find themselves living at the extremes of deprivation and want? And you've retained your credibility?

The dreams you've resurrected may still be realized. Realized in ways and to a degree that would be unlikely during less uncertain times.

You'll be able to protect us, protect the children, from those who would prey upon fear and unleash violent thought, language and deed.

And as this economic Katrina continues to strengthen? As the people become increasingly aware that economic security is not a birthright? And are overwhelmed by a sense of vulnerability?

As the people walk through the fire together, the differences so artfully exploited by your predecessor will assume their proper perspective. And compassion may well fill the void. Shared adversity has a way of doing that.

And after the worst has passed, Mr. President? And the people, having been tempered by the fire, emerge stronger and more compassionate? Emerge with a visceral understanding of what it means to be dispossessed?

That, Mr. President, is when your vision may be realized. For the people who revealed a desire to serve at the outset of your candidacy, during times of relative prosperity, will still be here when the fire is extinguished. But the people will not be the same. They'll be more able and willing to answer your call. And their progeny will learn through their example.

This is not to say that the fire is pleasant. At times it's excruciating. I know that well. At times I want nothing more than to escape, and it is only faith that sustains me. Faith in God, yes, but also in man. Indeed, as I approach the River's edge, the distinction between divinity without and divinity within seems merely to be one of choice. And a simple choice at that: towards violence or towards compassion.

This is your hour, Mr. President.

I, like you, am both a child of God and a member of the body politic. And as I ready myself to leave this bittersweet world, I want you to know that it affords me much peace to know that you are the President. A President who quietly rescued the Constitution. Who can forge the nation's soul if the need arises. And who re-ignited the flame of hope and compassion months before the general election. A flame that was muted but not extinguished some forty years ago.

And this speaks to the most important lesson I've learned from my twenty-year dance with the fire. Certainly all people wish and deserve to be treated with dignity and compassion. But the human heart is bigger than that. We wish, as well, to experience our magnanimous natures, the divinity within. This is what Gandhi knew and tapped into. This is what my favorite saint knew: "It is in the giving that we receive." And this, Mr. President, is what you know.

So. A dying man's prayer for you and the nation: that the light that burns so brightly in you and your family will extend through generations. And if the children of the children choose to be their brothers and sisters' keepers simply because they listen to their hearts; hearts that tell them they're here to improve the lot of others?

Well, they may never know it was you who reminded their forbears of who they truly are. They may never even know your name.

But what of it?

If the words you spoke on election night come to fruition, they will not bring an end to suffering. But they will bring forth the better angels of which you speak; of which the last great candidate for president spoke.

And when I hear you summon our better angels forth, I hear echoes of the poet Robert Kennedy quoted on the darkest night of his brief campaign. And what greater legacy could he ask of you, and you, in turn, ask of us, than a renewed commitment to the age-old call to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world?

Sincerely,

Robert Ellis Gordon
Seattle, Washington

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Robert Gordon is the author of When Bobby Kennedy Was a Moving Man and The Funhouse Mirror: Reflections on Prison. He's written for Esquire, the Christian Science Monitor, Boston Globe, Ploughshares, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and taught writing in Washington State prisons, juvenile institutions and inner-city high schools. He wrote Funhouse Mirror while undergoing chemotherapy, collaborating with six of his incarcerated students to let their voices be heard. The book won the 2000 Washington State Book Award. As one critic wrote of Bobby Kennedy, "Gordon's vision is at once radical and healing. It teaches us a little about Heaven and a lot about Hell."