I have a friend who’s a pretty famous writer and he called me yesterday; he’d been to a dinner party with some other pretty famous writers and, “You know,” he said, “No one was talking about the war.”

What were they talking about? I asked him.

“They were talking about…” He couldn’t really remember. Their books. Other people’s books. None of which were about the war.

“They want it to be known they’re anti-Bush,” he said, “but it’s almost a matter of social identification, like they read the right books and eat at the right restaurants. The cool ones.”

What’s cool about not speaking out against the war? I wondered.

I thought about a review of a biography of Leni Riefenstahl that appeared in yesterday’s (Sunday’s) New York Times. Leni was always very interested in meeting the right people—“I must meet that man!” she was known for exclaiming—including Hitler. Her interest in (literally) giving blowjobs to power served her well; she had a brilliant career.

Concentration camps? She never heard of ‘em, she said.

This morning, President Bush could be heard on the radio denying a new report saying that as many as 650,000 Iraqis have been killed since the U.S. invasion. “Not credible,” the president tells us.

“I guess they think,” said my friend the writer, of his friends the other writers, “that if they step out against the war they’re going to look foolish, like some throwback to the ‘60s.”

Or maybe they’re cowards? Careerists? I don’t know any of these people he was talking about, so I really can’t say. I do know that Shelley said that “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

It’s these same people that my friend met at the dinner party who are always moaning about how “there is no activism in this country.”

Read the article from yesterday’s New York Times, excerpted in Rosebud #81, below, about all the brave people who protested the Republican National Convention in New York in 2004. They were spied on by the NYPD; close to two thousand were arrested, innocent people exercising their First Amendment rights. Dissidents. Meanwhile, where were these writers?

The anti-war movement in this country could use their voice. I mean the fiction writers, the poets, Shelley’s unacknowledged legislators. Right now, by their silence, they’re legislating the continuation of the war and our turn toward this sort of Mister Softee fascism we're experiencing, as they enjoy their dinner parties and talk about all the “good books” one should read.

See below from today's New York Times, a story on spying on protestors at the Republican National Convention in 2004. Then read my Rosebud posts #80 and #76, below. There's a connection between all of this and 9/11 as a justification for domestic fascism and war, which I'll get to in another post... Have a beautiful Sunday.


City Police Spied Broadly Before G.O.P. Convention

By JIM DWYER
Published: March 25, 2007

For at least a year before the 2004 Republican National Convention, teams of undercover New York City police officers traveled to cities across the country, Canada and Europe to conduct covert observations of people who planned to protest at the convention, according to police records and interviews.

From Albuquerque to Montreal, San Francisco to Miami, undercover New York police officers attended meetings of political groups, posing as sympathizers or fellow activists, the records show.

They made friends, shared meals, swapped e-mail messages and then filed daily reports with the department’s Intelligence Division. Other investigators mined Internet sites and chat rooms.

From these operations, run by the department’s “R.N.C. Intelligence Squad,” the police identified a handful of groups and individuals who expressed interest in creating havoc during the convention, as well as some who used Web sites to urge or predict violence.

But potential troublemakers were hardly the only ones to end up in the files. In hundreds of reports stamped “N.Y.P.D. Secret,” the Intelligence Division chronicled the views and plans of people who had no apparent intention of breaking the law, the records show.

These included members of street theater companies, church groups and antiwar organizations, as well as environmentalists and people opposed to the death penalty, globalization and other government policies. Three New York City elected officials were cited in the reports.

In at least some cases, intelligence on what appeared to be lawful activity was shared with police departments in other cities. A police report on an organization of artists called Bands Against Bush noted that the group was planning concerts on Oct. 11, 2003, in New York, Washington, Seattle, San Francisco and Boston. Between musical sets, the report said, there would be political speeches and videos.

“Activists are showing a well-organized network made up of anti-Bush sentiment; the mixing of music and political rhetoric indicates sophisticated organizing skills with a specific agenda,” said the report, dated Oct. 9, 2003. “Police departments in above listed areas have been contacted regarding this event.”

Police records indicate that in addition to sharing information with other police departments, New York undercover officers were active themselves in at least 15 places outside New York — including California, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, Montreal, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas and Washington, D.C. — and in Europe.

The operation was mounted in 2003 after the Police Department, invoking the fresh horrors of the World Trade Center attack and the prospect of future terrorism, won greater authority from a federal judge to investigate political organizations for criminal activity.

To date, as the boundaries of the department’s expanded powers continue to be debated, police officials have provided only glimpses of its intelligence-gathering.

Now, the broad outlines of the pre-convention operations are emerging from records in federal lawsuits that were brought over mass arrests made during the convention, and in greater detail from still-secret reports reviewed by The New York Times. These include a sample of raw intelligence documents and of summary digests of observations from both the field and the department’s cyberintelligence unit.

Paul J. Browne, the chief spokesman for the Police Department, confirmed that the operation had been wide-ranging, and said it had been an essential part of the preparations for the huge crowds that came to the city during the convention.

“Detectives collected information both in-state and out-of-state to learn in advance what was coming our way,” Mr. Browne said. When the detectives went out of town, he said, the department usually alerted the local authorities by telephone or in person.

Under a United States Supreme Court ruling, undercover surveillance of political groups is generally legal, but the police in New York — like those in many other big cities — have operated under special limits as a result of class-action lawsuits filed over police monitoring of civil rights and antiwar groups during the 1960s. The limits in New York are known as the Handschu guidelines, after the lead plaintiff, Barbara Handschu.

“All our activities were legal and were subject in advance to Handschu review,” Mr. Browne said.

Before monitoring political activity, the police must have “some indication of unlawful activity on the part of the individual or organization to be investigated,” United States District Court Judge Charles S. Haight Jr. said in a ruling last month.
Christopher Dunn, the associate legal director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, which represents seven of the 1,806 people arrested during the convention, said the Police Department stepped beyond the law in its covert surveillance program.

“The police have no authority to spy on lawful political activity, and this wide-ranging N.Y.P.D. program was wrong and illegal,” Mr. Dunn said. “In the coming weeks, the city will be required to disclose to us many more details about its preconvention surveillance of groups and activists, and many will be shocked by the breadth of the Police Department’s political surveillance operation.”

The Police Department said those complaints were overblown.

On Wednesday, lawyers for the plaintiffs in the convention lawsuits are scheduled to begin depositions of David Cohen, the deputy police commissioner for intelligence. Mr. Cohen, a former senior official at the Central Intelligence Agency, was “central to the N.Y.P.D.’s efforts to collect intelligence information prior to the R.N.C.,” Gerald C. Smith, an assistant corporation counsel with the city Law Department, said in a federal court filing.

Balancing Safety and Surveillance

For nearly four decades, the city, civil liberties lawyers and the Police Department have fought in federal court over how to balance public safety, free speech and the penetrating but potentially disruptive force of police surveillance.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, Raymond W. Kelly, who became police commissioner in January 2002, “took the position that the N.Y.P.D. could no longer rely on the federal government alone, and that the department had to build an intelligence capacity worthy of the name,” Mr. Browne said.

Mr. Cohen contended that surveillance of domestic political activities was essential to fighting terrorism. “Given the range of activities that may be engaged in by the members of a sleeper cell in the long period of preparation for an act of terror, the entire resources of the N.Y.P.D. must be available to conduct investigations into political activity and intelligence-related issues,” Mr. Cohen wrote in an affidavit dated Sept. 12, 2002.

In February 2003, the Police Department, with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s support, was given broad new authority by Judge Haight to conduct such monitoring. However, a senior police official must still determine that there is some indication of illegal activity before an inquiry is begun.

An investigation by the Intelligence Division led to the arrest — coincidentally, three days before the convention — of a man who spoke about bombing the Herald Square subway station. In another initiative, detectives were stationed in Europe and the Middle East to quickly funnel information back to New York.

When the city was designated in February 2003 as the site of the 2004 Republican National Convention, the department had security worries — in particular about the possibility of a truck bomb attack near Madison Square Garden, where events would be held — and logistical concerns about managing huge crowds, Mr. Browne said.

“We also prepared to contend with a relatively small group of self-described anarchists who vowed to prevent delegates from participating in the convention or otherwise disrupt the convention by various means, including vandalism,” Mr. Browne said.
“Our goal was to safeguard delegates, demonstrators and the general public alike.”

In its preparations, the department applied the intelligence resources that had just been strengthened for fighting terrorism to an entirely different task: collecting information on people participating in political protests.

In the records reviewed by The Times, some of the police intelligence concerned people and groups bent on causing trouble, but the bulk of the reports covered the plans and views of people with no obvious intention of breaking the law.

By searching the Internet, investigators identified groups that were making plans for demonstrations. Files were created on their political causes, the criminal records, if any, of the people involved and any plans for civil disobedience or disruptive tactics.

From the field, undercover officers filed daily accounts of their observations on forms known as DD5s that called for descriptions of the gatherings, the leaders and participants, and the groups’ plans.

Inside the police Intelligence Division, daily reports from both the field and the Web were summarized in bullet format. These digests — marked “Secret” — were circulated weekly under the heading “Key Findings.”

On Jan. 6, 2004, the intelligence digest noted that an antigentrification group in Montreal claimed responsibility for hoax bombs that had been planted at construction sites of luxury condominiums, stating that the purpose was to draw attention to the homeless. The group was linked to a band of anarchist-communists whose leader had visited New York, according to the report.

Other digests noted a planned campaign of “electronic civil disobedience” to jam fax machines and hack into Web sites. Participants at a conference were said to have discussed getting inside delegates’ hotels by making hair salon appointments or dinner reservations. At the same conference, people were reported to have discussed disabling charter buses and trying to confuse delegates by switching subway directional signs, or by sealing off stations with crime-scene tape.

A Syracuse peace group intended to block intersections, a report stated. Other reports mentioned past demonstrations where various groups used nails and ball bearings as weapons and threw balloons filled with urine or other foul liquids.
The police also kept track of Richard Picariello, a man who had been convicted in 1978 of politically motivated bombings in Massachusetts, Mr. Browne said.

At the other end of the threat spectrum was Joshua Kinberg, a graduate student at Parsons School of Design and the subject of four pages of intelligence reports, including two pictures. For his master’s thesis project, Mr. Kinberg devised a “wireless bicycle” equipped with cellphone, laptop and spray tubes that could squirt messages received over the Internet onto the sidewalk or street.

The messages were printed in water-soluble chalk, a tactic meant to avoid a criminal mischief charge for using paint, an intelligence report noted. Mr. Kinberg’s bicycle was “capable of transferring activist-based messages on streets and sidewalks,” according to a report on July 22, 2004.

“This bicycle, having been built for the sole purpose of protesting during the R.N.C., is capable of spraying anti-R.N.C.-type messages on surrounding streets and sidewalks, also supplying the rider with a quick vehicle of escape,” the report said. Mr. Kinberg, then 25, was arrested during a television interview with Ron Reagan for MSNBC’s “Hardball” program during the convention. He was released a day later, but his equipment was held for more than a year.

Mr. Kinberg said Friday that after his arrest, detectives with the terrorism task force asked if he knew of any plans for violence. “I’m an artist,” he said. “I know other artists, who make T-shirts and signs.”

He added: “There’s no reason I should have been placed on any kind of surveillance status. It affected me, my ability to exercise free speech, and the ability of thousands of people who were sending in messages for the bike, to exercise their free speech.”

New Faces in Their Midst

A vast majority of several hundred reports reviewed by The Times, including field reports and the digests, described groups that gave no obvious sign of wrongdoing. The intelligence noted that one group, the “Man- and Woman-in-Black Bloc,” planned to protest outside a party at Sotheby’s for Tennessee’s Republican delegates with Johnny Cash’s career as its theme.

The satirical performance troupe Billionaires for Bush, which specializes in lampooning the Bush administration by dressing in tuxedos and flapper gowns, was described in an intelligence digest on Jan. 23, 2004.
“Billionaires for Bush is an activist group forged as a mockery of the current president and political policies,” the report said.

“Preliminary intelligence indicates that this group is raising funds for expansion and support of anti-R.N.C. activist organizations.”

Marco Ceglie, who performs as Monet Oliver dePlace in Billionaires for Bush, said he had suspected that the group was under surveillance by federal agents — not necessarily police officers — during weekly meetings in a downtown loft and at events around the country in the summer of 2004.

“It was a running joke that some of the new faces were 25- to 32-year-old males asking, ‘First name, last name?’ ” Mr. Ceglie said. “Some people didn’t care; it bothered me and a couple of other leaders, but we didn’t want to make a big stink because we didn’t want to look paranoid. We applied to the F.B.I. under the Freedom of Information Act to see if there’s a file, but the answer came back that ‘we cannot confirm or deny.’ ”

The Billionaires try to avoid provoking arrests, Mr. Ceglie said.

Others — who openly planned civil disobedience, with the expectation of being arrested — said they assumed they were under surveillance, but had nothing to hide. “Some of the groups were very concerned about infiltration,” said Ed Hedemann of the War Resisters League, a pacifist organization founded in 1923. “We weren’t. We had open meetings.”

The war resisters publicly announced plans for a “die-in” at Madison Square Garden. They were arrested two minutes after they began a silent march from the World Trade Center site. The charges were dismissed.

The sponsors of an event planned for Jan. 15, 2004, in honor of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday were listed in one of the reports, which noted that it was a protest against “the R.N.C., the war in Iraq and the Bush administration.” It mentioned that three members of the City Council at the time, Charles Barron, Bill Perkins and Larry B. Seabrook, “have endorsed this event.”

Others supporting it, the report said, were the New York City AIDS Housing Network, the Arab Muslim American Foundation, Activists for the Liberation of Palestine, Queers for Peace and Justice and the 1199 Bread and Roses Cultural Project.

Many of the 1,806 people arrested during the convention were held for up to two days on minor offenses normally handled with a summons; the city Law Department said the preconvention intelligence justified detaining them all for fingerprinting.

Mr. Browne said that 18 months of preparation by the police had allowed hundreds of thousands of people to demonstrate while also ensuring that the Republican delegates were able to hold their convention with relatively few disruptions.

“We attributed the successful policing of the convention to a host of N.Y.P.D. activities leading up to the R.N.C., including 18 months of intensive planning,” he said. “It was a great success, and despite provocations, such as demonstrators throwing faux feces in the faces of police officers, the N.Y.P.D. showed professionalism and restraint.”

Garden Plot:
The Pruning Of Subversive Youth
And the Beginning of the Next ‘60s ,
Which Won’t Be Anything Like the ‘60s….

The most ridiculous person in the news today (Saturday) is Timothy H. Canty, the principal of the Wilton, Connecticut high school who wouldn't let students put on a play criticizing the war in Iraq.

Canty is amusing in the way all Nazis can be amusing, as Chaplin first discovered in The Great Dictator—thinking that they, mere puny men with swelled egos, can censor the effervescence of the human spirit, tamp down its willful goodness.

Wilton is an affluent town, and Wilton High School’s state-of-the-art auditorium cost $10 million. Apparently not only are the poor to be silenced in Bush’s America, but the over-privileged as well (if the poor are “underprivileged," aren’t the rich overly so?). Well of course—look at what happened in the 60s. You let some educated, overprivileged kids start expressing their political ideas, and pretty soon you have a peace movement on your hands.

We already have a peace movement in this country—a widespread, broad-based coalition which has been protesting the Iraq war since before it even started, which has camped out in the halls of the Congress to build fires under the behinds of senators and has attracted hundreds of thousands to marches across the country, media coverage or no. But what we don’t have yet is a fired-up youth contingent with a unified cultural voice; and that is, perhaps, what the powers-that-be fear the most.

Principal Canty reportedly told Wilton High’s would-be activists that “only someone who had actually served in the war could understand the experience." Their play, “Voices of Iraq,” was to be a compilation of “reflections of soldiers and others involved, including a heartbreaking letter from a 2005 Wilton High graduate killed in Iraq last September at age 19," according to the New York Times. (Despite the students' repeated attempts to revise the play to meet Canty's demands for more "balance," he continued to nix it.)

“In Wilton,” said Devon Fontaine, 16, an actor in the play, “most kids only care about Britney Spears shaving her head or Tyra Banks gaining weight. What we wanted was to show kids what was going on overseas.”

But that might be dangerous, Devon. If you think this is just about your high school play and your meanie of a principal, think again; it's actually indicative of a deeper strain of American style fascism. Suppressing subversive elements among America’s youth has been government policy since the 60s. It’s called "Garden Plot."

The official name is “Civil Disturbance Plan 55-2: Garden Plot.” You can’t get it online anymore—the Department of Defense web site has pulled it—which has led some people to dismiss it as a conspiracy theory. But it’s not. When I was doing a story on protestors at the Republican National Convention in 2004, a researcher in military history gave me a copy of it. It’s about 200 pages long, extremely weird and scary.

Believed to have been a D.O.D. response to the Kerner Commission, "Operation Garden Plot" is a Department of Defense plan for the suppression of dissent through military force and counterintelligence. It advocates domestic spying, the suspension of the Posse Comitatus Act and the easy imposition of martial law—all maneuvers the Bush administration has been very keen on. It places particular emphasis on infiltrating and suppressing the political activities of civil rights advocates and students.

Garden Plot is no dinosaur from the pre-Church Committee era, however, but still active, according to one military official I spoke to in 2004, who asked not to be named. (The plan itself warns military personnel not to discuss it.) It was last activated on September 11, 2001, ostensibly to respond to so-called "civil disturbances" following the terrorists attacks. But the militaristic response to street protest in the last several years since Seattle (which I wrote about in Rosebud #76, below), seems in keeping with the plan's call for the use of force against dissidents.

Garden Plot can still be seen peeking out of several military and law enforcement documents available online, including the Center For Law and Military Operations Domestic Operational Law (DOPLAW) Handbook, published in April of 2001, available at www.jagcnet.army.mil/CLAMO. The DOPLAW handbook discusses the plan at length, stating, for example, that “The Department of Defense Civil Disturbance Plan, named ‘GARDEN PLOT,’ provides guidance and direction for planning, coordinating and executing military operations during domestic civil disturbances"—meaning riots and/or protests.

Garden Plot also lays the groundwork for the surveillance of “counterintelligence targets,” which it says include "disruptive elements, extremists or dissidents perpetrating civil disorder.” Which is pretty broad language, spookily. It could even mean a bunch of high school students putting on a play about the war in Iraq.

Which is all the more reason why this play should go on somewhere. Somebody with some money to spend on something worthy, maybe somebody connected with the theater, should reach out to the “Voices of Iraq” kids at Wilton High and make them America's Idols.

When kids stop talking and thinking about Britney and Shmitney et al and turn their minds en masse toward the state of the world, there’s no limit to the lush garden they can grow. They’re turning. They are. The media gives them no credit for it, often ridicules them when they make some noise, but they're getting louder and more coherent every day. They're waking up. Their friends and schoolmates are dying in America's wars, and they can't sleep.

This is only the beginning. But this time won’t be anything like the last. Not with the technology they now possess, not with the mistakes of their parents and grandparents to learn from. As the 60s bard himself said once, at a similarly pivotal time, The times they are a-changin'. There's no telling what it will look like, except that it will be different. Better.

And make no mistake, the plot is in place for when it happens.
But fear not. We can take 'em.

Bush's Brain Tumor

Big ups to Donald Trump for going on national television yesterday (Friday) and telling it like it is. The Donald was in great form, on Wolf Blitzer on CNN, talking straight with that spoiled little boy pout of his in a way that I was suddenly finding rather adorable. He called the war in Iraq a “catastrophe,” a “disaster"; said everything coming out of the Bush administration was “a lie"; described Condoleeza Rice as "a nice woman who flies around the world taking meetings and getting photographed sitting at 45 degree angles” but ultimately “never makes a deal. People all over the world want to make deals!”

“People who never had a problem with us before, they hate us," Trump said. "Even in England they hate us!” And can you blame them? Because of this president—for in the end who else is to blame?—Iraq will go up in flames, no matter what we do, no matter how long we stay. But how to get out? asked Blitzer, singing the media's lament. I’ll tell you how, said Trump, New Yorker, “Declare victory and leave.”

It was refreshing to see someone of The Donald's brand status saying what’s on everyone’s minds, uncensored by whatever reason there is for anyone to censor him or herself now, when the stakes are so high. Straight talk is quintessentially American, and hearing it spoken always has the same effect as seeing the sun rise.

When someone like Trump, a raging capitalist out of Sinclair Lewis (who I've always found to be a very nice guy), is calling this president and this war a sham, then the jig really is up; it's time to run the crooks out of town. Congress should take note. There’s no “wiggle-room” here: they are in fact a disaster, and a lot of them should be fired ("You’re fired!” as the Donald would say), if not indicted.

Take Rove. The last week in the news was taken up with a couple more Rovian dirty tricks gone awry: the Valerie Plame scandal and now the Alberto Gonzalez scandal involving the firing of U.S. attorneys. At the heart of both affairs is Karl Rove, a man who would make Machiavelli giggle with admiration.

Testifying on Capitol Hill, Valerie Plame reminded a panel of Democrats and Republicans that Rove "clearly was involved" in an orchestrated effort to leak her covert identity as a CIA agent. "Karl Rove clearly was involved in the leaking of my name and he still carries a security clearance to this day, despite the president's words to the contrary that he would immediately dismiss anyone who had anything to do with it," she said.

Meanwhile, emails surfaced linking Rove to the politically motivated firing of eight U.S. Attorneys. “The latest e-mails between White House and Justice Department officials show that Rove inquired in early January 2005 about firing U.S. attorneys” who “wouldn’t play ball,” said the A.P.

The Republicans seem to regard Rove as a wizard, a kind of right-wing Rasputin; if so, then how come they lost the Congress, are losing the war, and most people (including even Donald Trump) think the entire administration is a disaster? How long are they going to put up with this guy?

Did you ever see that picture of Rove when he was in high school? Ouch. I spent a lot of time around high school students at one point in my career, and the ones that looked like Rove did usually didn’t have it so good. The pressures of extreme geekdom had the unfortunate effect of turning some into the worst kind of mean-spirited a-holes, forever bent on exacting the revenge of the nerds.

Rove's high school experience must have been painful, poor guy, because he seems hell-bent on exacting this revenge not only on the American voter, but the entire world, if you factor in his engineering of the build-up to the Iraq war. He lives on spin. Nothing, including the truth, ever better get in his way. Scruples, ethics, the law—bah!, Rove seems to say. In this sense, he's the perfect symbol of our times, sadly. He and Britney Spears could replace the bald eagle on American money...

He'll be in full spin mode now that the spotlight is on his latest indiscretions and some in Congress are calling for his head, demanding he be hauled in to testify before Congress. Let's see how he'll try and wiggle out of that one. Getting Rove in the hot seat will be about as easy as getting a bull to drink a cup of tea.

For background on how he fights political blood sport, check out “Bush’s Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential,” by James Moore and Wayne Slater, bureau chief of the Dallas Morning News.( There’s a documentary of the same name available on Netflix and in video stores. See also www.bushbrain.com.) Check out Rove's career as a fixer of elections back in Texas, all before he met his man-crush, George W. Bush.

"They were complimentary figures, Bush and Rove, each offering elements the other lacked," says the book. "This man could be president, Rove concluded early on... 'Bush is the kind of candidate and officeholder political hacks like me wait a lifetime to be associated with,' he told a reporter."

Beauty and the Geek; it's been a terribly sad tale, especially for us.

The Secret of Good Parenting

The earth is in trouble. And so we who are parents, as we go about our day, looking after our kids, seeing to their needs, have yet another responsibility on our agenda: saving the planet. We can’t be good parents anymore unless we make this a priority. To be a even a somewhat decent parent today is to become involved in the struggle to end global warming.

We can buy all the Baby Einstein videos we want, all the right strollers and baby carriers; we can make sure our kids get into the best schools, have piano lessons and learn chess and Chinese. We can do all that, and yet what does it ultimately mean if, in 20 years, our kids don't have access to clean drinking water? If the earth is beset by famine, devastating storms and the inevitable wars for basic resources? (It's already happening...)

This is no longer a partisan issue, no longer something politicians can dismiss as mumbo-jumbo science. We all know the earth is in danger. And that means our kids are. And their kids. The threat is extinction, scientists say. Bye-bye, babies. Bye-bye humans.

A new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, written and reviewed by more than 1,000 scientists from dozens of countries, makes some dire predictions about what our children face in as little as 20 years: Tens of millions will be flooded out of their homes each year as the Earth reels from rising temperatures and seas. Pests will proliferate. Tropical diseases like malaria will spread. Food and water will become scarce. But by 2080, hundreds of millions of people could face starvation.

“Things are happening and happening faster than we expected,” says Patricia Romero Lankao of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., one of the many co-authors of the new report. North America, it says, “has already experienced substantial ecosystem, social and cultural disruption from recent climate extremes," such as hurricanes and wildfires. Katrina was no aberration, but a nightmarish preview.

Unless we get moving. Now. The report says that scientists are “confident that many current problems—change in species’ habits and habitats, more acidified oceans, loss of wetlands, bleaching of coral reefs, and increases in allergy-inducing pollen—can be blamed on global warming"; but also that “many—not all—of those effects can be prevented…if within a generation the world slows down its emissions of carbon dioxide and if the level of greenhouse gases sticking around in the atmosphere stabilizes.”

A generation. That means us. The parents. This is our job, as much as it's our job to give our kids breakfast and love.

What we have to do first of all is think. Imagine, as John Lennon said. Believe. There’s a book right now, The Secret, which everybody’s talking about (even Oprah, natch); it’s a popularization of some very esoteric ideas, ideas which have power. The Secret markets itself through applying those ideas to getting rich and getting thin, attracting a relationship.

How about living in a clean, safe, beautiful world?

The Secret says: “Decide what you want. Believe you can have it. Believe you deserve it and believe it’s possible for you. And then close your eyes every day for several minutes, and visualize having what you already want, feeling the feelings of already having it. Come out of that and focus on what you’re grateful for already, and really enjoy it. Then go into your day and release it to the Universe and trust that the Universe will figure out how to manifest it.”

If I have any problem with The Secret, it’s that last part: “trust that the Universe will manifest it.” I doubt that George Bush and Co., the Pentagon and the Joint Chiefs, Exxon and Halliburton et al are going to stop their warring and war on the environment just because I ask the Universe to make them stop. But maybe. Who knows. It’s a start.

So let’s Imagine:

“I want a clean world for myself and my kid(s). I believe it’s possible. In fact, the world's scientists say it is. They say that if in a generation we stop global warming then we have a chance for planetary health and rejuvenation. I see myself as part of that change. I’m imagining living on a planet with clean air, land and water. I'm imagining the polar bears frolicking on ice floats. I'm seeing happy whales and dolphins. I'm seeing thriving bees and frogs. I’m seeing people all over the world electing governments which are committed to the stewardship of nature. I’m seeing myself acting responsibly in all my decisions for what to buy, wear, eat, and how to travel. I’m seeing myself taking responsibility, and this makes me joyful. I’m seeing my daughter growing up on a healthy, green planet, and this makes me joyful. I’m grateful for the abundance that exists, and I’m seeing it continuing into the future. I’m seeing it spread to all people, all over the world. I'm seeing the end of our dependence on oil, the end to this war and all wars for oil in the Middle East. I'm seeing sane, responsible people seeking out clean energy sources...”

Try it. Like the Jewish mother says in the joke about the dead man and chicken soup, It couldn’t hoit.

Libby Found Guilty

I agree with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid: "It's about time someone in the Bush Administration has been held accountable for the campaign to manipulate intelligence and discredit war critics," he said. Although Libby was the one convicted, Reid said, "his trial revealed deeper truths about Vice President Cheney's role in this sordid affair. Now President Bush must pledge not to pardon Libby for his criminal conduct."

And now it’s time for Congress to follow up on the "deeper truths" and hold hearings on Vice President Cheney's possible criminal conduct.

Is It Fascism Yet?

Sunday in Iran, 33 women were arrested for protesting outside a courthouse where five women were on trial for leading a campaign to gain more legal rights for women. The women were charged with “endangering national security, agitating against the government and taking part in illegal gatherings.” The arrests were part of a crackdown against protesting against the government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Sound familiar? It should.

Protesting has an become an increasingly criminalized activity here in this country during the Bush administration. In February the New York Times reported on the “extra scrutiny of detainees” during the 2004 protests at the Republican National Convention. Over 1,000 people were arrested during the RNC protests, many of them wrongly and illegally, lawsuits say. New York police had a “special set of rules in place for the R.N.C., and they didn’t necessarily comport with the law,” according to Donna Lieberman of the New York Civil Liberties Union.

A New York judge recently declared illegal the videotaping of protestors—which had become a common practice in recent years. When I was working on a story on the 2004 Republican National Convention, I remember being struck by all the cops with video cameras, wearing “TARU” jackets (for Technical Assistance Response Unit), standing on the edges of the protests, filming. It was creepy, not something you’re supposed to see here in America. I remember asking a cop why they were videotaping the protestors.

“We’re not,” he said, training his camera on the protestors.

“They’re just recording,” another cop told me breezily. “It has nothing to do with the protestors. It’s protocol. It’s not used for surveillance.”

The New York judge on the case didn’t buy that, either. From now on cops are only allowed to videotape protests when they have reason to believe a crime will be broken; which unfortunately still gives them a broad leeway. While I was reporting this story I talked to someone who used to work in national intelligence who said that he believed it was possible these videotapes were being used to create files on protestors. “Face recognition" technology would make it possible to take individual faces out of crowds and identify them.

If it all sounds scarily Iron Curtain-ish, it is. And how about spying on protest groups? In early 2004, the City Council of the District of Columbia, in its “Metropolitan Police Department’s Policy and Practice in Handling Demonstrations in the District of Columbia," found that D.C. police had used “undercover officers to infiltrate political organizations in the absence of criminal activity” and that there had been “repeated instances of what appear to be preemptive actions taken against demonstrators including preemptive arrests"—including at President Bush's 2001 inauguration.

But videotaping and infiltrating is actually the least of it. Police departments throughout this country have for some time now been using so-called “nonlethal weapons” against protestors—in other words, police are attacking innocent Americans as if they weren’t just criminals, but enemies in a war zone.

You may have heard of nonlethal weapons—or as the manufacturers prefer to call them, “less than lethal weapons,” because they do, in fact, kill people—from news reports about the Iraq war. They’re the weapons our military often uses for “crowd control” in Iraq and other places, they’re how we subdue supposed “insurgents.” They’re also commonly used against U.S. citizens exercising their First Amendment rights, some would even say their moral or patriotic duty to dissent.

The nonlethal weapons industry is vast, and it is scary. It includes the manufacture of rubber bullets, gasses, tasers, billy clubs, and much more that is very high-tech and very cruel. Do a search on “nonlethal weapons” and start poking around on some of the manufacturers’ web sites; these militarists seem to be very psyched about war, and the profits to be made from war, and also the prospect of a military conflict with Iran. They are very convinced that nonlethal weapons are an appropriate response to street protest. When I saw Obama and Hillary marching tight-smiled in Selma, all I could think of was: what would the police be doing to these marchers today, if these high-profile politicians weren’t there, locking arms with them?

So plain has the relationship between nonlethal weapons and protest become that many nonlethal weapons manufacturers now actually market their products as tools for quelling what they chillingly term “civil disturbances”—that's Orwellian for protests. The web site for Defense Technologies, a leading nonlethal weapons manufacturer and supplier to the NYPD, features a promotional video in which images of rabid-looking protestors waving signs are set against apocalyptic-sounding music and a deep voice intoning, “Seattle, 1999, riots at the WTO conference, and we are there! Washington, D.C., 1999, disturbances outside the World Bank meeting, and we are there!” A “hostile subject” is then seen being wrestled to the ground, his face doused with pepper spray.

It isn’t just advertising, unfortunately. At the 2003 FTAA protests in Miami, protestors were not only pepper sprayed but beaten, shot with rubber bullets, and tasered. In 2004, the Miami Activist Defense and National Lawyers Guild filed a federal lawsuit challenging “the mass false arrests”—over 800 of them—“of, and unreasonable force against, lawful demonstrators,” and charging local law enforcement with coordinating “an all-out assault on the First Amendment, engaging in widespread political profiling,” sweeping the streets “of anyone viewed as being an anti-FTAA activist, effectively suspending the Fourth Amendment in the city for 10 days."

Meanwhile protests in this country have been overwhelmingly non-violent—especially considering the size of many of them (500,000 at the RNC and not one violent act on the part of protestors). The police response to protest has been the opposite. A willing media has run to the story of the “violent anarchists,” etc.—a bunch of hogwash. A few months after the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle, the New York Times was forced to retract a report that demonstrators had “hurled Molotov cocktails, rocks and excrement at delegates and police officers" after Seattle authorities admitted that protestors had thrown no objects at human beings. It was propaganda.

You'd be hard-pressed to find anything in the extensive writing on Seattle showing evidence of protestors causing any harm to others; but there's a great deal of evidence that police did. Protestors shut down the WTO through marches and organized acts of civil disobedience, the blocking of key sites and traffic. An unprecedented coalition of labor, students, religious groups, environmental groups, NGOs and random others had committed themselves to non-violence before the protest even started. The opposition to the WTO was free-ranging, representing the basic tenets of the Global Justice movement: that extra-governmental organizations with no accountability to voters should not be permitted to make global decisions on matters of trade and environmental policy, typically favoring multinational corporations over the interests of the environment, the poor and the working man and woman, exporting American jobs in the process.

And for believing in all this—which sounds to me like the themes of a Frank Capra movie—and for willing to put their bodies on the streets for their beliefs, protestors were met with billy clubs and pepper spray. It was Bill Clinton who authorized that.

If it hasn't sunk in that this is going on—and why should it when it never appears on national television—check out footage of the 2003 FTAA protests in Miami available on Indymedia. Watch a law-abiding lawyer named Elizabeth Ritter get shot in the head. Ritter, an unintentional icon of the Global Justice movement, said she had had no problem with the FTAA itself when she came out for the protest. She was protesting the immense police presence there.

In what has become an increasingly common response to protest, post-911, the Miami police spent tens of millions of dollars and engaged the muscle of multiple federal law enforcement agencies in dealing with what turned out to be a gathering of only a few thousand people. For the FTAA meetings, Miami became the host to over 40 local, state and federal agencies under a “Law Enforcement Joint Operations Command” financed with $8.5 million from the then $87 billion budget for the War on Terror.

(Someone should do a thorough auditing of these enormous anti-protest budgets and see just where and to whom all this money is going. In 2004, Savannah spent $25 million for the G-8 protests, to which only around 400 people showed up. Republican governor Sonny Perdue took the unusual step of declaring six Georgia counties under a state of emergency due to the threat of “unlawful assemblages, threats of violence, or otherwise”—an order which gave police great freedom in making arrests and breaking up any “gatherings of people.” 20,000 state, local and federal cops were there to handle what turned out to be a ragtag group of protestors including people in wheelchairs. Who made bank on all that $25 million?)

On November 22, 2003, in Miami, 2500 police in riot gear massed across Biscayne Boulevard and drove about a thousand peaceful protestors away with rubber bullets, tear gas, “paint balls” full of pepper spray, “bean bags” full of lead shot and other nonlethal weapons. Elizabeth Ritter was among them. A tall, no-nonsense-looking woman in a red linen blazer, she carried a sign which said, “FEAR TOTALITARIANISM.” “What are you doing?” she demanded of a line of advancing riot police shooting rubber bullets into the crowd. “You are attacking these young people. They have a right to be here. Come on.” The police continued advancing. As Ritter turned around, they shot her in the back five times with rubber bullets.

“Did you shoot me?” Ritter demanded, turning back around. “A lady in a suit who has been walking peaceably in front of you for half an hour?” She showed the back of her wounded leg to a cameraman from Indymedia. Minutes later, as the police marched forward, Ritter crouched beneath her sign, and again police shot her, through the sign, in the head.

“You all saw it!” Ritter screamed at the cadre of reporters and cameramen.

But few people in the America have ever seen such footage. It didn’t turn up on the national or even local TV news; the lead story that night was Michael Jackson’s surrender from Neverland. Nor did New Yorkers see footage of what really happened at the anti-Iraq war protests in the city in February of 2003. The NYPD repeatedly sprayed pepper spray into crowds of peaceful demonstrators, in addition to breaking up crowds with horses and batons. Footage from Indymedia shows officers holding large cans (called “aerosoles”) and spraying pepper spray in the faces of people who are doing nothing but standing on the street or sidewalk.

“Even at locations far from the main action, the police deployed pepper spray,” says a New York Civil Liberties Union report on the protest.

While it may sound like something Granny carries in her handbag, pepper spray—or Oleoresin Capsicum (OC)—is actually an inflammatory agent more powerful than tear gas. It causes the eyes to slam shut and temporary blindness set in due to dilation of the optical capillaries. Inflammation of the lungs restricts all but life support breathing. Pepper spray has been linked to over 100 fatalities in the United States; and yet every officer in the NYPD now carries it as part of his or her usual gear.

“Pepper spray is absolutely illegal”—at least in war, that is, but not for use against American protestors, Edward Hammond of the Sunshine Project, a non-lethal weapons N.G.O., told me in 2004. “Certain chemicals which meet the definition of a ‘riot control agent’ can be used by law enforcement. Governments were unwilling to give up tear gas in the Chemical Weapons Convention. They wanted to be able to gas their own citizens,” he said.

How could it be, that something soldiers aren't even allowed to use against the enemy is allowed to be used against U.S. citizens? Banned by international agreements such as the Biological Weapons Convention and the Geneva Convention, nonlethal weapons exist in a largely unregulated realm, ignored by Congress. Their proliferation in American law enforcement goes back to 1993 and the Battle of Mogadishu. After the infamous “Black Hawk Down” incident, where an Army helicopter was shot down and 18 American servicemen were killed by rioting civilians, there was a push by the Department of Defense to develop weapons for conflicts that are not technically war, conflicts where the United States has a role “peacekeeping.”

In its “Policy for Non-lethal Weapons,” published in 1996, the D.O.D. said that nonlethal weapons—“explicitly designed and primarily employed so as to incapacitate personnel or materiel” by "means other than gross physical destruction”—would allow for “military action in situations where use of lethal force is not the preferred option.” Meaning, we’re not technically in a war, but we want to act like we are, so we better not kill too many people, just “incapacitate” them.

Then in 1997, Congress established the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate under Marine Corps command. The JNLWD, based in Quantico, Virginia, makes recommendations and proposals to the Department of Defense on the nonlethal weapons being developed by wings of the military and the burgeoning nonlethal weapons industry. Most nonlethal weapons companies are advised by former military commanders; all companies sell freely to both the military and police departments.

This transfer of weaponry from the military to law enforcement was actually set up by the Clinton administration. In a “Memorandum of Understanding Between the Department of Defense and Department of Justice On Operations Other than War and Law Enforcement,” signed by a post-WACO Attorney General Janet Reno in 1994, an agreement was set forth “to conduct a program to enhance D.O.D. Operations Other Than War (OOTW) and D.O.J. and other Law Enforcement (LE) operations through a sharing and joint development, to the extent permitted by law, of technology and systems applicable to both.” The memorandum cited “a growing convergence between the technology required for military operations and the technology required for law enforcement. Moreover, recent technological advances suggest a current ability to enhance the effectiveness of both OOTW and LE missions.” That's a gobbledygook way of saying we're declaring war on the American people.

In a striking linkage between protest and Operations Other Than War, the Army’s Center for Lessons Learned issued a paper in 2000 saying that, "Over the last nine years, peace operations in Haiti, Somalia, and Bosnia placed demanding challenges on our soldiers and leaders… Having the right tools to execute missions in volatile and dangerous situations enhances the capability to succeed. Non-lethal weapons provide that enhanced capability… Recent history shows that the most likely threats are from civil disturbances… Examples include: (1) Peace operations in Bosnia-Herzegovina …(2) According to news reports, groups organized and instigated civil disturbances in Seattle, WA, to protest U.S. support of the World Trade Organization.” In other words, we make no distinction between a war zone and a U.S. city in the midst of a (legal, peaceful) protest.

The nightsticks and hoses that were the order of the day in Selma are quickly receding before the forces of technology. More exotic non-lethal weapons are coming to Operations Other than War abroad and at home. The Air Force Research Laboratory has spent $40 million on a Humvee-mounted “directed-energy weapon” which microwaves the skin, causing an unbearable burning sensation. HSV Technologies in San Diego is developing a super-taser that can paralyze “subjects” from as far away as a mile. And the JNLWD has been studying the use of “calmatives”—central nervous system depressants, or knock-out drugs.

Calmatives were used by Moscow police in the hostage crisis of 2002, causing the death of 118 people, roughly one in seven of the 763 Moscow hostages taken. But to some in the U.S. military, this was still seen as a victory. “This situation may very well cause Chechens to rethink their support of these terrorist groups,” said the Center for Contemporary Conflict, a think-tank for the Navy. There’s military logic for you.

The rationale from police departments continues to be that nonlethal weapons are more “humane” because theoretically they do not kill people. “If you’re given a choice between tear gas and police officers with sticks over their heads wielding them into a crowd then obviously the gas is much more preferable,” Miami Police Chief John Timoney told me in 2004. “Non-lethal weapons are much more humane than nightsticks, absolutely.” But the Miami Police used nightsticks as well as pepper spray against protestors at the 2003 FTAA protest, and many people suffered injuries due to the use of nonlethals in that shameful debacle, including one man who got a “paint ball” embedded in his face.

At the RNC, the NYPD rolled out a high-tech sound device which was first deployed in Iraq in 2003—a megaphone the size of a satellite dish which is being used to deliver warnings and, on command, emit a piercing tone so excruciating to humans that it causes crowds to disperse. It’s not yet known whether it will also cause deafness.

What's next? American citizens being burned with microwave weapons, just because they don't agree with this government, this war—perhaps the coming war with Iran? The police presence at protests has, tellingly, been toned down somewhat since the opposition to the Bush administration and the war in Iraq has grown. But what happens if or when there's another terrorist attack and protestors again become a handy target for the propaganda of fear? What happens when the Bush administration starts telling us we have to deliver the Iranian people from their oppressive government? We can ask them then who will deliver us. We can get out on the streets and deliver our own loud message. We’re Americans, and that means something holy: we fight back.