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Biting the Hand

Remember the good old days when you bought people and they stayed bought?

The whole thing was set up so President Bush could come to the airport in October for a ceremony to congratulate the new Iraqi government. When you work backwards from that, you understand the dates the Americans were insisting on. Ahmad Chalabi, NY Times, November 26, 2003

posted by Jerry Bowles 8:23 PM

Reasons to Hate George W. Bush:
The Great Texas Death Trip (Part 2)

If Governor Bush was immune to legal arguments for clemency, he was equally unmoved by personal repentance. If ever there were a case that should have appealed to the conscience of a “compassionate Christian,” it is that of Karla Faye Tucker, who was executed on February 3, 1998, the first woman to be executed in the U.S. since 1984 and first woman to be executed in Texas since the 1860s.

In 1984, Tucker was convicted of the brutal murders of her ex-lover, Jerry Lynn Dean, and his companion, Deborah Thornton and sentenced to the death penalty. During her trial, Tucker admitted that on June 13, 1983, she and her boyfriend at the time, Daniel Ryan Garrett, took a pickax and hacked Dean and Thornton to death while they were sleeping. (Garrett was also convicted of murder and sentenced to death but, he died of liver disease while in prison in 1994.)

Over the next 14 years on death row, Tucker became a model prisoner, a converted Christian and minister. She married the prison chaplain. At no time did she ever deny her guilt in the 1984 murders. Among the thousands of people who supported her appeal for clemency were the Conservative minister Pat Robertson and the detective who had urged the death penalty at her original trial.

Not only was Bush unmoved by Tucker’s obviously sincere rehabilitation, he was apparently angered by a perceived personal rebuke in an interview she did with Larry King. In a now famous interview in the August 1999 issue of Talk magazine, Conservative writer and TV commentator Tucker Carlson wrote the following telling vignette about the man who would become President:

In the week before [Karla Faye Tucker's] execution, Bush says, Bianca Jagger and a number of other protesters came to Austin to demand clemency for Tucker. "Did you meet with any of them?" I ask.

Bush whips around and stares at me. "No, I didn't meet with any of them," he snaps, as though I've just asked the dumbest, most offensive question ever posed. "I didn't meet with Larry King either when he came down for it. I watched his interview with [Tucker], though. He asked her real difficult questions, like 'What would you say to Governor Bush?' "

"What was her answer?" I wonder.

"Please," Bush whimpers, his lips pursed in mock desperation, "don't kill me."

Karla Faye Tucker never said those words or anything like those words. What she did say is that in pressing forward with her execution, Bush was succumbing to election-year politics.

What the sociopath on the other end heard was a challenge to his authority. Karla Faye Tucker spoke the truth and it cost her her life.

posted by Jerry Bowles 3:15 PM

This just in from New Hampshire… grass-roots with Wes Clark

An old Marine aviation buddy of mine who flew some of those “secret missions” over Cambodia and Laos that Henry Kissinger doesn’t like to talk about was invited to a Wes Clark shindig in Manchester this morning. Here it is from a fly on the wall…

“Because of the press he’s been given, I had expected to meet a fairly self-centered, or somewhat narcissistic guy. Instead, I found a man who seems very balanced, bright and focused. In his opening remarks, he spoke of how upset he was at the very low level of esteem in which the US is now held by the world, particularly our closest allies. He mentioned that over one hundred thousand Germans demonstrated in front of Brandenburg Gate immediately after 9/11 and contrasted that with the public reaction to Bush’s visit to the UK last week.”

“He said that running for president wasn’t his idea, but he had become convinced that this ‘government of, by, and for special interests’ (huge applause here) was a tragedy for the nation.”

“He called the war profiteering and cronyism of the Vice President and Halliburton ‘shameful’. He spoke in great detail about the health care system he proposes in detail including dollar figures. He also said he wants the US health care system to shift more focus onto wellness. He said he would encourage legislation which would negotiate drug prices for all Americans, just as the VA now does for veterans. I found him to be a well researched, thoughtful, engaging speaker.”

“Three of us drove over from the seacoast area and we were standing in a group at the back of the room after the Q&A ended.” It seemed like every reporter and news camera in the state were there, but after about ten minutes he made his way over to us and talked to us for about twenty minutes. The result this far is that I have offered my home for a house party, and have just come from the Exeter town offices, where I am going to book the Town Hall for a Clark rally in early January.”

“I think this guy is one candidate (there may be two) who can affect regime change. Given the political polarization around the nation, Dems who voted for Bush over either Gore or Clinton, and Republicans who can’t stomach who Bush has turned out to be, may make the difference.

posted by Groom 2:57 PM

Profiles in Slime

Matt Drudge is bannering his "exclusive" that certain unnamed military people are angry because of the military honors being accorded the remains of Howard Dean's brother, Charles, who went missing in Laos in 1974 while hiking with an Australian friend. What actually happened is that the Laotians turned over to American authorities the remains of four bodies--Dean, the friend, and two bodies thought to be U.S. soldiers killed during the Viet Nam war--a fact not mentioned by Drudge. An honor guard divvied up the remains into four caskets, draped three of them with American flags and one with an Australian flag, saluted as they were loaded onto a cargo plane, where the remains were flown to Hawaii for positive identification.

The honor guard was there presumably because of the two bodies thought to be soldiers--not because Howard Dean's brother was involved. In any event, given the time and place of his disappearance, it seems not unreasonable to suspect that Charles Dean may have been doing a little U.S. government business of his own although nobody is likely to say so.

Congratulations, Matt. You have hit a new low.

posted by Jerry Bowles 1:15 PM

Reasons to Hate George W. Bush:
The Great Texas Death Trip (Part I)

"Please," Bush whimpers, his lips pursed in mock desperation, "don't kill me," George W. Bush, mocking convicted killer and fellow converted Christian Karla Faye Tucker’s appeal for clemency. Talk, August 1999, Tucker Carlson

Beginning with Clifton Russell, Jr. on March 31, 1995 and ending with Claude Jones on December 07, 2000, 152 human beings—150 men and two women--were executed during George W. Bush’s tenure as governor of Texas. That is almost double the number of executions in any other state over two decades and a standing record for any American governor. Four of those who were killed by the state were juveniles. Several were mentally incompetent. If Texas were a nation, it would rank fifth in the world in executions.

Junior Bush is hardly alone among callow politicians who have used the death penalty as a kind of racist (in effect, if not intent) tool to curry votes and favor with conservative white people. But, he is almost certainly the most prominent to do so with so much indifference or so little doubt about either its fairness or the possibility of executing an innocent person.

The evidence is clear that Bush performed only a minimal review of pleas for clemency. (Bush's appointment calendar for the morning of one particularly contentious execution shows a half-hour slot marked "Al G—Execution.") On execution day, Governor Bush’s legal counsel Alberto Gonzales, Al G, now the White House counsel, provided Bush with a three-page summary of each case. That summary was literally the only thing that stood between the condemned person and lethal injection.

Gonzales’ summaries were not only brief but they frequently failed to mention key information that formed the basis of the appeal. We know this only because a freelance journalist named Alan Berlow obtained 57 of these summaries under Texas public information law and published an article about them called The Texas Clemency Memos in the July/August 2003 issue of The Atlantic Monthly. “…in these documents Gonzales repeatedly failed to apprise the governor of crucial issues in the cases at hand: ineffective counsel, conflict of interest, mitigating evidence, even actual evidence of innocence,” Berlow wrote.

Berlow cites as an example of the flimsiness of the Bush-Gonzales “system” the 1997 case of Terry Washington, a mentally retarded man who was executed for the murder of a 29-year-old restaurant manager. Gonzales spent a third of the memo describing the gruesomeness of the murder and almost entirely omitted any information that suggested a miscarriage of justice might have been done. Washington's final 30-page petition for clemency was centered on the issues of ineffective counsel and retardation. On execution day, all that Gonzales presented Bush was a three-page memo in which the only mention of the petition was that it had been rejected by the state Board of Pardons and Paroles.

…the summary refers only fleetingly to the central issue in Washington's clemency appeal—his limited mental capacity, which was never disputed by the State of Texas—and presents it as part of a discussion of "conflicting information" about the condemned man's childhood. (The page containing this discussion is missing from the copy of the summary signed by Bush, raising the possibility that he never actually saw it before authorizing Washington's execution.) Most important, Gonzales failed to mention that Washington's mental limitations, and the fact that he and his ten siblings were regularly beaten with whips, water hoses, extension cords, wire hangers, and fan belts, were never made known to the jury, although both the district attorney and Washington's trial lawyer knew of this potentially mitigating evidence.

Berlow says he was unable to find any evidence that Gonzales ever sent Bush a clemency petition—or any document—“that summarized in a concise and coherent fashion a condemned defendant's best argument against execution in a case involving serious questions of innocence or due process.” Instead, he says, Bush relied on Gonzales's summaries, which never made such arguments.

Evil really is banal, isn't it?

(This is the beginning of a series of "Reasons to Hate George W. Bush." All suggestions for future topics will be greatly appreciated. I'll post part two of this one later on today.)

posted by Jerry Bowles 11:36 AM

Your vote could get lost in the ether…

If Howard Dean and Wes Clark want to get out the vote, it’s time they address this issue. The following editorial in the November 25th edition of the Pulitzer-owned Arizona Daily Star offers some food for thought...

The nation learned in the 2000 presidential election that the American system of voting is fragile. But some attempts to fix the problem are no better than Florida’s hanging chads. Specifically, computer scientists have been warning for many months that newer forms of electronic voting are susceptible to mistakes and fraud. For that reason, it was a significant move Friday when the California secretary of state decreed that all electronic voting machines must provide paper receipts.

After Florida, many people thought computerized voting systems offered the solution to punch cards whose little chads sometimes tenaciously hung on, causing ballots to be miscounted.

But one common form of computerized voting- the touch screen- increasingly has been challenged after scientists analyzed the software driving the machines. The source code for the software was leaked and published on the Internet, and then researchers analyzing it determined it failed to provide adequate security against fraud and mistakes.

That problem is compounded by the fact that the machines do not provide any sort of a permanent record of the vote. The voter does not receive a receipt confirming that his or her vote was properly recorded. And there’s no paper record that accompanies the machine. That means there’s no way to recount the votes by hand in case of a malfunction.

In announcing his decision, Kevin Shelley, the California secretary of state, said he took the action to ensure that voters feel more confident that their votes are being counted. He denied that electronic voting systems are “inherently insecure.”

But many experts and voting rights advocates contend otherwise. One, Stanford University professor David Dill, even has created a website (www.verifiedvoting.org) to call attention to the problems. In addition to point out the machine’s susceptibility to fraud and errors, the Web site contends that even thorough testing cannot “reveal malicious programs that could subvert an election.”

Given these problems, a paper receipt and the trail it leave is essential, as California belatedly has noted.

Because California is such a large market for voting machines, Shelley’s requirement of a paper receipt most likely will influence voting requirements in other states and cities. It should.

Florida taught America a lesson it cannot ignore: The right to vote means little if the vote is not accurately counted.

No license, no matter... when you buy from Halliburton

Canandian "anti-terrorism trainer" David Hudak, the one-time sidekick of Saddam's "supergun" designer, Gerald Bull, has been acquitted of posessing 2500 shoulder fired missiles and conspiring to violate the Arms Export Control Act by training foreign troops without a license from the Department of State. Hudak purchased the missiles from a subsidiary of Halliburton. US Federal District Judge John Conway, after ruling that former Halliburton honcho Dick Cheney could not be linked to the case, recused himself. Another Federal District Judge, Christina Armijo (a Republican recently appointed by Sen. Pete Domenici) took over the case. Hudak, who took the witness stand, was acquitted by a jury of his "peers."

posted by Groom 6:19 AM