Raw Story
Fox News had copies of emails written from Congressman Mark Foley (R-FL) to a Louisiana boy, but chose not to run the story, according to a passage in an Associated Press report.
The relevant excerpt follows:
#
The FBI has begun an inquiry into Foley's computer contact with pages, and Hastert wrote a letter to Florida Gov. Jeb Bush asking for an investigation into whether state laws were broken.
Meanwhile, Florida newspapers — who were leaked copies of the e-mail with the Louisiana boy last year — defended their decision not to run stories. Both The St. Petersburg Times and The Miami Herald were given copies of the e-mail, as were other news organizations, including Fox News.
"Our decision at the time was ... that because the language was not sexually explicit and was subject to interpretation, from innocuous to 'sick,' as the page characterized it, to be cautious," said Tom Fiedler, executive editor of the Herald. "Given the potentially devastating impact that a false suggestion of pedophilia could have on anyone, not to mention a congressman known to be gay, and lacking any corroborating information, we chose not to do a story."
Tuesday, October 03, 2006
State Dept. Confirms Rice-Tenet Meeting
JIDDAH, Saudi Arabia - Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice did receive a CIA briefing about terror threats just about two months before the Sept. 11 attacks, but the information was not new, her chief spokesman said.
In doing so, Sean McCormack confirmed a meeting - on July 10, 2001 - that his boss had said repeatedly she could not specifically recall. She had said earlier that there were virtually daily meetings at the time.
A new book by reporter Bob Woodward of Watergate fame describes the White House meeting as an emergency wakeup call that Rice had brushed off. Rice was President Bush's national security adviser at the time and was promoted to the top diplomatic job last year.
Although spokesmen for the State Department and the National Security Council indicated Sunday that such a meeting had taken place, Rice was still saying Monday that she was not sure about it. She said she would have remembered the sort of forceful warning the book claims was conveyed there.
"We can confirm that a meeting took place on or around July 10, 2001," McCormack said late Monday.
"The information presented in this meeting was not new, rather it was a good summary from the threat reporting from the previous several weeks," he added.
Woodward's book "State of Denial" recounts the meeting among then-CIA Director George Tenet, Rice and the CIA's top counterterror officer. The book said the session stood out in the minds of the CIA officials as the "starkest warning they had given the White House" on al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden and his network.
McCormack said that after the meting, Rice had asked that the same material be given to Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and then-Attorney General John Ashcroft.
Materials from this meeting were made available to the independent Sept. 11 Commission, and Tenet was asked about the session when interviewed by the commission, McCormack said.
The meeting is not part of the commission report, but was referred to obliquely in a report by the commission's predecessor, a joint congressional panel that investigated the 9/11 attacks. That report said that "senior U.S. government officials were advised by the intelligence community on June 28 and July 10, 2001, that the attacks were expected, among other things, to 'have dramatic consequences on governments or cause major casualties' and that 'attack preparations have been made. Attack will occur with little or no warning.'"
Meanwhile, Ashcroft said Monday that he should have been notified of any such report dealing with a pending attack on the United States. "It just occurred to me how disappointing it was that they didn't come to me with this type of information," he said in an interview with The Associated Press.
"The FBI is responsible for domestic terrorism," Ashcroft said. He said both Tenet and Black should have been aware that he had pressed for a more aggressive policy in going after bin Laden and his followers in the United States and should have briefed him as well. Rice knew of this advocacy, he suggested.
According to the Sept. 11 Commission, Ashcroft was briefed on July 5, 2001, "warning that a significant terrorist attack was imminent." The report noted that the briefing addressed only threats outside the United States.
In doing so, Sean McCormack confirmed a meeting - on July 10, 2001 - that his boss had said repeatedly she could not specifically recall. She had said earlier that there were virtually daily meetings at the time.
A new book by reporter Bob Woodward of Watergate fame describes the White House meeting as an emergency wakeup call that Rice had brushed off. Rice was President Bush's national security adviser at the time and was promoted to the top diplomatic job last year.
Although spokesmen for the State Department and the National Security Council indicated Sunday that such a meeting had taken place, Rice was still saying Monday that she was not sure about it. She said she would have remembered the sort of forceful warning the book claims was conveyed there.
"We can confirm that a meeting took place on or around July 10, 2001," McCormack said late Monday.
"The information presented in this meeting was not new, rather it was a good summary from the threat reporting from the previous several weeks," he added.
Woodward's book "State of Denial" recounts the meeting among then-CIA Director George Tenet, Rice and the CIA's top counterterror officer. The book said the session stood out in the minds of the CIA officials as the "starkest warning they had given the White House" on al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden and his network.
McCormack said that after the meting, Rice had asked that the same material be given to Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and then-Attorney General John Ashcroft.
Materials from this meeting were made available to the independent Sept. 11 Commission, and Tenet was asked about the session when interviewed by the commission, McCormack said.
The meeting is not part of the commission report, but was referred to obliquely in a report by the commission's predecessor, a joint congressional panel that investigated the 9/11 attacks. That report said that "senior U.S. government officials were advised by the intelligence community on June 28 and July 10, 2001, that the attacks were expected, among other things, to 'have dramatic consequences on governments or cause major casualties' and that 'attack preparations have been made. Attack will occur with little or no warning.'"
Meanwhile, Ashcroft said Monday that he should have been notified of any such report dealing with a pending attack on the United States. "It just occurred to me how disappointing it was that they didn't come to me with this type of information," he said in an interview with The Associated Press.
"The FBI is responsible for domestic terrorism," Ashcroft said. He said both Tenet and Black should have been aware that he had pressed for a more aggressive policy in going after bin Laden and his followers in the United States and should have briefed him as well. Rice knew of this advocacy, he suggested.
According to the Sept. 11 Commission, Ashcroft was briefed on July 5, 2001, "warning that a significant terrorist attack was imminent." The report noted that the briefing addressed only threats outside the United States.
New Iraqi plan to curb violence
BBC
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has announced a new four-point plan aimed at reducing sectarian violence.
The plan, involving setting up local security committees in each area, came after intensive talks with top Sunni and Shia politicians.
They have been engaged in bitter recriminations as violence has risen, especially in the capital, Baghdad.
Shia politicians had accused senior Sunni figures of providing cover for terrorist attacks.
With the situation on the ground worsening rapidly, the political climate within the national unity government was also becoming increasingly envenomed.
The Sunnis accused Shias in the government apparatus of allowing their own militias to carry out sectarian abductions and murders on a huge scale.
With the death toll from sectarian violence reaching ever-higher levels and new atrocities happening every day, something had to be done. .....
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has announced a new four-point plan aimed at reducing sectarian violence.
The plan, involving setting up local security committees in each area, came after intensive talks with top Sunni and Shia politicians.
They have been engaged in bitter recriminations as violence has risen, especially in the capital, Baghdad.
Shia politicians had accused senior Sunni figures of providing cover for terrorist attacks.
With the situation on the ground worsening rapidly, the political climate within the national unity government was also becoming increasingly envenomed.
The Sunnis accused Shias in the government apparatus of allowing their own militias to carry out sectarian abductions and murders on a huge scale.
With the death toll from sectarian violence reaching ever-higher levels and new atrocities happening every day, something had to be done. .....
Sunday, October 01, 2006
NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF: A New African War Zone
PAOUA, Central African Republic
My aim in bringing Casey Parks, the winner of my contest for university students, to this war-torn land wasn’t to have her held at gunpoint. That was quite an accident — both times.
My purpose was actually to emphasize the urgency of ending the genocide in Darfur before it destabilizes even more of Africa. The malignancy has already spread to Chad, and now it is beginning to destroy the Central African Republic as well.
Sudan has in effect invaded the Central African Republic with a proxy force of Chadians whom it armed and transported to a remote airstrip in Sudanese Antonov aircraft. Now those troops are living in caves in the northeast part of this country and recruiting local people to fight. When the dry season comes in another month or so, that force of 500 troops will presumably join a larger force of Sudanese puppets in trying to overthrow the government of Chad and perhaps of this country as well.
The north of the Central African Republic is now a war zone, with rival armed bands (some from the government) burning villages, kidnapping children, robbing travelers and killing people with impunity.
The country is already unstable for its own reasons, and its own government has much to answer for, but the Sudanese incursion and the small arms rippling out from Darfur have left this region in complete chaos. The violence has driven 100,000 villagers from their homes, and the U.N. calls it “the world’s most neglected crisis.”
Casey and I traveled here in a five-vehicle U.N. convoy, including two pickups full of well-armed soldiers. But the presence of soldiers discourages frank interviews with peasants who have been attacked by soldiers, so we twice left the escorts behind and drove through hard-hit villages.
After we had stopped at the eerily empty village of Bottolna and explored a bit, a man named Dominique Dondjoube crept out of a hiding place and told us that most of the villagers were hiding in the bush — where they were dying from bad water, malaria and malnutrition. “Just yesterday, three children died of malnutrition,” he said. They were a 6-year-old boy, a 5-year-old girl, and a 3-month-old girl whose mother had no milk because of the lack of food.
In a hospital run by Doctors Without Borders, a French doctor was treating Arthur Demongoy, a 2-year-old suffering from severe malnutrition. Children like Arthur are heartbreakingly impassive; they are so starved that they never cry, for every calorie goes to keeping them alive.
“Everything was burned in our village, and all our money was taken, and that’s why we have no food,” explained his mother, Sylvie.
But while a handful of brave aid workers and Catholic missionaries, Europeans and Africans alike, work in this region, they have been shot at and robbed. At some point the danger could force them to pull out.
Indeed, as Casey and I drove on one isolated, rutted road that forced us to drive slowly, we encountered just the kind of menace that has terrorized local people and aid workers: Two men stepped out from the brush on the side of the road, waved rifles and ordered us to stop.
The bandits eventually let us go on, and we continued down the road to interview local people. But since there was only one road into the area, we had to go back the same way — and then were held up again, by the same two men.
That kind of random violence is incredibly infectious, and the legacy of Darfur may be that all of Chad and the Central African Republic will collapse into Somalia-style anarchy. In an interview with Casey and me, President François Bozize of the Central African Republic offered an excellent suggestion: With the deployment of U.N. peacekeepers to Darfur delayed indefinitely because of Sudan’s defiance, post them in the meantime in Chad and the Central African Republic — while still pushing to get them into Darfur itself.
When President Bozize traveled to the U.S. this month for the U.N. General Assembly, the Bush administration made available a mere deputy assistant secretary of state to talk to him. That’s ridiculous, sending a signal that we’re not engaged in Darfur’s regional crisis and don’t care what Sudan does to this country.
If President Bush is serious about genocide, an immediate priority is to stop the cancer of Darfur from spreading further — which means working with France to shore up both Chad and the Central African Republic. (France has troops in both countries.) It also means putting U.N. peacekeepers in both places. Right now.
My aim in bringing Casey Parks, the winner of my contest for university students, to this war-torn land wasn’t to have her held at gunpoint. That was quite an accident — both times.
My purpose was actually to emphasize the urgency of ending the genocide in Darfur before it destabilizes even more of Africa. The malignancy has already spread to Chad, and now it is beginning to destroy the Central African Republic as well.
Sudan has in effect invaded the Central African Republic with a proxy force of Chadians whom it armed and transported to a remote airstrip in Sudanese Antonov aircraft. Now those troops are living in caves in the northeast part of this country and recruiting local people to fight. When the dry season comes in another month or so, that force of 500 troops will presumably join a larger force of Sudanese puppets in trying to overthrow the government of Chad and perhaps of this country as well.
The north of the Central African Republic is now a war zone, with rival armed bands (some from the government) burning villages, kidnapping children, robbing travelers and killing people with impunity.
The country is already unstable for its own reasons, and its own government has much to answer for, but the Sudanese incursion and the small arms rippling out from Darfur have left this region in complete chaos. The violence has driven 100,000 villagers from their homes, and the U.N. calls it “the world’s most neglected crisis.”
Casey and I traveled here in a five-vehicle U.N. convoy, including two pickups full of well-armed soldiers. But the presence of soldiers discourages frank interviews with peasants who have been attacked by soldiers, so we twice left the escorts behind and drove through hard-hit villages.
After we had stopped at the eerily empty village of Bottolna and explored a bit, a man named Dominique Dondjoube crept out of a hiding place and told us that most of the villagers were hiding in the bush — where they were dying from bad water, malaria and malnutrition. “Just yesterday, three children died of malnutrition,” he said. They were a 6-year-old boy, a 5-year-old girl, and a 3-month-old girl whose mother had no milk because of the lack of food.
In a hospital run by Doctors Without Borders, a French doctor was treating Arthur Demongoy, a 2-year-old suffering from severe malnutrition. Children like Arthur are heartbreakingly impassive; they are so starved that they never cry, for every calorie goes to keeping them alive.
“Everything was burned in our village, and all our money was taken, and that’s why we have no food,” explained his mother, Sylvie.
But while a handful of brave aid workers and Catholic missionaries, Europeans and Africans alike, work in this region, they have been shot at and robbed. At some point the danger could force them to pull out.
Indeed, as Casey and I drove on one isolated, rutted road that forced us to drive slowly, we encountered just the kind of menace that has terrorized local people and aid workers: Two men stepped out from the brush on the side of the road, waved rifles and ordered us to stop.
The bandits eventually let us go on, and we continued down the road to interview local people. But since there was only one road into the area, we had to go back the same way — and then were held up again, by the same two men.
That kind of random violence is incredibly infectious, and the legacy of Darfur may be that all of Chad and the Central African Republic will collapse into Somalia-style anarchy. In an interview with Casey and me, President François Bozize of the Central African Republic offered an excellent suggestion: With the deployment of U.N. peacekeepers to Darfur delayed indefinitely because of Sudan’s defiance, post them in the meantime in Chad and the Central African Republic — while still pushing to get them into Darfur itself.
When President Bozize traveled to the U.S. this month for the U.N. General Assembly, the Bush administration made available a mere deputy assistant secretary of state to talk to him. That’s ridiculous, sending a signal that we’re not engaged in Darfur’s regional crisis and don’t care what Sudan does to this country.
If President Bush is serious about genocide, an immediate priority is to stop the cancer of Darfur from spreading further — which means working with France to shore up both Chad and the Central African Republic. (France has troops in both countries.) It also means putting U.N. peacekeepers in both places. Right now.
PAUL KRUGMAN : Things Fall Apart
Right after the 2004 election, it seemed as if Thomas Frank had been completely vindicated. In his book “What’s the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America,” Mr. Frank argued that America’s right wing had developed a permanent winning strategy based on the use of “values” issues to mobilize white working-class voters against a largely mythical cultural elite, while actually pursuing policies designed to benefit a small economic elite.
It was and is a brilliant analysis. But the political strategy Mr. Frank described may have less staying power than he feared. In fact, the right-wing coalition that has spent 40 years climbing to its current position of political dominance may be cracking up.
At its core, the political axis that currently controls Congress and the White House is an alliance between the preachers and the plutocrats — between the religious right, which hates gays, abortion and the theory of evolution, and the economic right, which hates Social Security, Medicare and taxes on rich people. Surrounding this core is a large periphery of politicians and lobbyists who joined the movement not out of conviction, but to share in the spoils.
Together, these groups formed a seemingly invincible political coalition, in which the religious right supplied the passion and the economic right supplied the money.
The coalition has, however, always been more vulnerable than it seemed, because it was an alliance based not on shared goals, but on each group’s belief that it could use the other to get what it wants. Bring that belief into question, and the whole thing falls apart.
Future historians may date the beginning of the right-wing crackup to the days immediately following the 2004 election, when President Bush tried to convert a victory won by portraying John Kerry as weak on defense into a mandate for Social Security privatization. The attempted bait-and-switch failed in the face of overwhelming public opposition. If anything, the Bush plan was even less popular in deep-red states like Montana than in states that voted for Mr. Kerry.
And the religious and cultural right, which boasted of having supplied the Bush campaign with its “shock troops” and expected a right-wing cultural agenda in return — starting with a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage — was dismayed when the administration put its energy into attacking the welfare state instead. James Dobson, the founder and chairman of Focus on the Family, accused Republicans of “just ignoring those that put them in office.”
It will be interesting, by the way, to see how Dr. Dobson, who declared of Bill Clinton that “no man has ever done more to debase the presidency,” responds to the Foley scandal. Does the failure of Republican leaders to do anything about a sexual predator in their midst outrage him as much as a Democratic president’s consensual affair?
In any case, just as the religious right was feeling betrayed by Mr. Bush’s focus on the goals of the economic right, the economic right suddenly seemed to become aware of the nature of its political allies. “Where in the hell did this Terri Schiavo thing come from?” asked Dick Armey, the former House majority leader, in an interview with Ryan Sager, the author of “The Elephant in the Room: Evangelicals, Libertarians and the Battle to Control the Republican Party.” The answer, he said, was “blatant pandering to James Dobson.” He went on, “Dobson and his gang of thugs are real nasty bullies.”
Some Republicans are switching parties. James Webb, who may pull off a macaca-fueled upset against Senator George Allen of Virginia, was secretary of the Navy under Ronald Reagan. Charles Barkley, a former N.B.A. star who used to be mentioned as a possible future Republican candidate, recently declared, “I was a Republican until they lost their minds.”
So the right-wing coalition is showing signs of coming apart. It seems that we’re not in Kansas anymore. In fact, Kansas itself doesn’t seem to be in Kansas anymore. Kathleen Sebelius, the state’s Democratic governor, has achieved a sky-high favorability rating by focusing on good governance rather than culture wars, and her party believes it will win big this year.
And nine former Kansas Republicans, including Mark Parkinson, the former state G.O.P. chairman, are now running for state office as Democrats. Why did Mr. Parkinson change parties? Because he “got tired of the theological debate over whether Charles Darwin was right.”
It was and is a brilliant analysis. But the political strategy Mr. Frank described may have less staying power than he feared. In fact, the right-wing coalition that has spent 40 years climbing to its current position of political dominance may be cracking up.
At its core, the political axis that currently controls Congress and the White House is an alliance between the preachers and the plutocrats — between the religious right, which hates gays, abortion and the theory of evolution, and the economic right, which hates Social Security, Medicare and taxes on rich people. Surrounding this core is a large periphery of politicians and lobbyists who joined the movement not out of conviction, but to share in the spoils.
Together, these groups formed a seemingly invincible political coalition, in which the religious right supplied the passion and the economic right supplied the money.
The coalition has, however, always been more vulnerable than it seemed, because it was an alliance based not on shared goals, but on each group’s belief that it could use the other to get what it wants. Bring that belief into question, and the whole thing falls apart.
Future historians may date the beginning of the right-wing crackup to the days immediately following the 2004 election, when President Bush tried to convert a victory won by portraying John Kerry as weak on defense into a mandate for Social Security privatization. The attempted bait-and-switch failed in the face of overwhelming public opposition. If anything, the Bush plan was even less popular in deep-red states like Montana than in states that voted for Mr. Kerry.
And the religious and cultural right, which boasted of having supplied the Bush campaign with its “shock troops” and expected a right-wing cultural agenda in return — starting with a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage — was dismayed when the administration put its energy into attacking the welfare state instead. James Dobson, the founder and chairman of Focus on the Family, accused Republicans of “just ignoring those that put them in office.”
It will be interesting, by the way, to see how Dr. Dobson, who declared of Bill Clinton that “no man has ever done more to debase the presidency,” responds to the Foley scandal. Does the failure of Republican leaders to do anything about a sexual predator in their midst outrage him as much as a Democratic president’s consensual affair?
In any case, just as the religious right was feeling betrayed by Mr. Bush’s focus on the goals of the economic right, the economic right suddenly seemed to become aware of the nature of its political allies. “Where in the hell did this Terri Schiavo thing come from?” asked Dick Armey, the former House majority leader, in an interview with Ryan Sager, the author of “The Elephant in the Room: Evangelicals, Libertarians and the Battle to Control the Republican Party.” The answer, he said, was “blatant pandering to James Dobson.” He went on, “Dobson and his gang of thugs are real nasty bullies.”
Some Republicans are switching parties. James Webb, who may pull off a macaca-fueled upset against Senator George Allen of Virginia, was secretary of the Navy under Ronald Reagan. Charles Barkley, a former N.B.A. star who used to be mentioned as a possible future Republican candidate, recently declared, “I was a Republican until they lost their minds.”
So the right-wing coalition is showing signs of coming apart. It seems that we’re not in Kansas anymore. In fact, Kansas itself doesn’t seem to be in Kansas anymore. Kathleen Sebelius, the state’s Democratic governor, has achieved a sky-high favorability rating by focusing on good governance rather than culture wars, and her party believes it will win big this year.
And nine former Kansas Republicans, including Mark Parkinson, the former state G.O.P. chairman, are now running for state office as Democrats. Why did Mr. Parkinson change parties? Because he “got tired of the theological debate over whether Charles Darwin was right.”
BOB HERBERT : Poisoned on Eno Road
Dickson, Tenn.
If you stand outside the Holt family home late at night, after everyone has gone to sleep, with the sound of a soft wind drifting through the trees and the damp sweet smell of abundant grass heavy in the humid air, you can easily imagine what this area was like in the days of slavery.
And then the quiet is broken by the sudden eruption of dogs barking and howling on nearby property, and you’re reminded that the tiny population of blacks in Dickson County, even after all these years, is still frequently treated — literally — like garbage.
The property adjacent to the Holt family home is a government-owned landfill. The howling dogs are housed in a pound right next to the landfill. The noise is a nuisance, but it’s the least of the family’s problems.
Toxic chemicals from the landfill have polluted the pristine water that was once drawn from the Holt family well. Unaware that the water was contaminated, the family drank it for years. Now the Holts are convinced that the poisons that seeped for so long from the landfill into the groundwater are responsible for the potentially deadly diseases that have struck several members of the family.
The Holts were not just unaware that their water was contaminated; they had been assured by federal environmental officials way back in 1991 that the water had been tested and was safe to drink.
“They told us,” said Sheila Holt-Orsted, who grew up on the property, “that the water wouldn’t hurt us, and that we shouldn’t worry about it.”
In fact, government records show that dangerous levels of trichloroethylene (TCE), a suspected carcinogen, had been found in the water as early as 1988. The family drank the poisoned water for more than a dozen years after that.
During that time, the government warned white families that the water had been contaminated and provided them with an alternate source of drinking water. The Holts, who are black, were left oblivious to the danger. Welcome to the world of environmental racism, a subject that doesn’t get nearly enough attention.
The Holts’ property is on Eno Road, a quiet rustic area with an interesting history. Hundreds of acres of land along the road were acquired by blacks in the post-slavery period. Only recently freed, they were proud of being landowners. The Holts have lived in the community for many decades.
Blacks make up just 4.5 percent of the Dickson County population, and they have always been clustered in the vicinity of Eno Road. This has been a great convenience for the whites, who have run the local governments. For six decades, the Eno Road community has been designated as the place for whites to dump their garbage.
“The city and county fathers singled out this small, rural and mostly black Eno Road community to locate their garbage dumps, landfills, transfer stations, toxic waste sites — you name it,” said Dr. Robert Bullard, director of the Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark Atlanta University. “These waste sites are all located on Eno Road.”
When I asked the mayor of Dickson County, Robert Stone, why that particular community had been chosen to absorb so much of the county’s garbage, he said he couldn’t respond because the Holts had filed a lawsuit against the county. He referred me to a lawyer, Eric Thornton, who asked why anyone would think it was peculiar to dump the garbage there.
“It has to be at some location,” he said. He denied that race had anything to do with the selection process, noting that there were also whites who lived nearby.
The ingestion of TCE, commonly used as a metal degreaser, has been associated with a variety of cancers, heart disease, impairment of the nervous system, stroke, liver disease, kidney disease, diabetes and other extremely serious disorders.
At various times, the concentration of TCE in the well water of the Holt family was 24 and 29 times as high as the maximum level of five parts per billion set by the federal Environmental Protection Agency.
Sheila Holt-Orsted has undergone six surgeries and chemotherapy for breast cancer. Her father was stricken with prostate cancer. During a conversation in her front yard, less than 50 feet from the landfill, she told me: “My aunt, who lives next door, she had cancer. And then there was another neighbor who had cancer. I said, you know, ‘Something is not right here.’ ”
If you stand outside the Holt family home late at night, after everyone has gone to sleep, with the sound of a soft wind drifting through the trees and the damp sweet smell of abundant grass heavy in the humid air, you can easily imagine what this area was like in the days of slavery.
And then the quiet is broken by the sudden eruption of dogs barking and howling on nearby property, and you’re reminded that the tiny population of blacks in Dickson County, even after all these years, is still frequently treated — literally — like garbage.
The property adjacent to the Holt family home is a government-owned landfill. The howling dogs are housed in a pound right next to the landfill. The noise is a nuisance, but it’s the least of the family’s problems.
Toxic chemicals from the landfill have polluted the pristine water that was once drawn from the Holt family well. Unaware that the water was contaminated, the family drank it for years. Now the Holts are convinced that the poisons that seeped for so long from the landfill into the groundwater are responsible for the potentially deadly diseases that have struck several members of the family.
The Holts were not just unaware that their water was contaminated; they had been assured by federal environmental officials way back in 1991 that the water had been tested and was safe to drink.
“They told us,” said Sheila Holt-Orsted, who grew up on the property, “that the water wouldn’t hurt us, and that we shouldn’t worry about it.”
In fact, government records show that dangerous levels of trichloroethylene (TCE), a suspected carcinogen, had been found in the water as early as 1988. The family drank the poisoned water for more than a dozen years after that.
During that time, the government warned white families that the water had been contaminated and provided them with an alternate source of drinking water. The Holts, who are black, were left oblivious to the danger. Welcome to the world of environmental racism, a subject that doesn’t get nearly enough attention.
The Holts’ property is on Eno Road, a quiet rustic area with an interesting history. Hundreds of acres of land along the road were acquired by blacks in the post-slavery period. Only recently freed, they were proud of being landowners. The Holts have lived in the community for many decades.
Blacks make up just 4.5 percent of the Dickson County population, and they have always been clustered in the vicinity of Eno Road. This has been a great convenience for the whites, who have run the local governments. For six decades, the Eno Road community has been designated as the place for whites to dump their garbage.
“The city and county fathers singled out this small, rural and mostly black Eno Road community to locate their garbage dumps, landfills, transfer stations, toxic waste sites — you name it,” said Dr. Robert Bullard, director of the Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark Atlanta University. “These waste sites are all located on Eno Road.”
When I asked the mayor of Dickson County, Robert Stone, why that particular community had been chosen to absorb so much of the county’s garbage, he said he couldn’t respond because the Holts had filed a lawsuit against the county. He referred me to a lawyer, Eric Thornton, who asked why anyone would think it was peculiar to dump the garbage there.
“It has to be at some location,” he said. He denied that race had anything to do with the selection process, noting that there were also whites who lived nearby.
The ingestion of TCE, commonly used as a metal degreaser, has been associated with a variety of cancers, heart disease, impairment of the nervous system, stroke, liver disease, kidney disease, diabetes and other extremely serious disorders.
At various times, the concentration of TCE in the well water of the Holt family was 24 and 29 times as high as the maximum level of five parts per billion set by the federal Environmental Protection Agency.
Sheila Holt-Orsted has undergone six surgeries and chemotherapy for breast cancer. Her father was stricken with prostate cancer. During a conversation in her front yard, less than 50 feet from the landfill, she told me: “My aunt, who lives next door, she had cancer. And then there was another neighbor who had cancer. I said, you know, ‘Something is not right here.’ ”
TED KOPPEL : An Offer Tehran Can’t Refuse
Guest Columnist
A few days ago, I inadvertently violated United States economic sanctions against Iran. I was paying my hotel bill in Tehran, didn’t have enough cash and asked if I could use a credit card.
“I’ll need to keep your card for at least half an hour,” said the clerk. Since he’d also “needed to keep” my passport for the first couple of days I was in Iran, I thought nothing more of it. Half an hour later, I had my hotel bill and my credit card and left for the airport.
A couple of days later my assistant asked me if I had purchased any clothing in Dubai. “No,” I said. “Why?” Someone, it appeared, had used my corporate credit card to do just that. When I heard the amount involved — precisely the total of my hotel bill — I understood.
There had been no purchase of clothing in Dubai, of course; but some Dubai business debited my credit card there (where such a transaction is legal) for the amount of my hotel bill, simultaneously crediting the company that owns the hotel in Tehran with that sum for the purchase of goods or services in Dubai. Similar, much larger loopholes enable the European subsidiaries of American companies to sell sanction-banned American goods inside Iran in limited but still significant quantities.
Even as the United States withholds its goods and technological know-how from Iran, the Europeans, Russians, Japanese and especially the Chinese are offering theirs as quickly as the contracts can be drafted. The likelihood that more restrictive sanctions against Iran will either make it through the United Nations’ bureaucratic quagmire or dissuade Iran from darting down the path toward nuclear technology is about as dim as that of a popular uprising among the people under 30 who make up 70 percent of Iran’s population.
Many of Iran’s young adults — especially the well-educated, English-speaking ones who cross the path of a visiting American journalist — are frustrated by the puritanical nature of Islamic law. They dismiss their president and ours as deserving each other, denounce the corruption of the mullahs and speak with surprising openness about confiscated satellite dishes, blocked Internet sites, the closing of newspapers and the jailing and mistreatment of dissidents. But the young malcontents appear nowhere close to staging a revolution.
On the highway from Tehran to the Mehrabad airport, I witnessed a mind-bending object lesson in the limits of youthful rebellion: two young women on in-line skates, clutching the door handles of a car being driven by a young man at speeds approaching 60 miles an hour. Both women brazenly violated every traffic law known to man, but with their head scarves in place, the loose ends firmly clenched between their teeth. There are certain lines you don’t cross.
Trivial acts of rebellion, irrelevant to the Islamic revolution, are tolerated. Anything perceived as a significant challenge is not. One of the men who planned and executed the taking of the American Embassy in 1979, for example, spent nine months in solitary confinement for collaborating on a public opinion poll whose findings were deemed unacceptable.
Iran suffers from chronic underemployment and its social safety nets are flimsy at best. The Revolutionary Guards now resemble Mafia families more than ideological shock troops. They still wield enormous influence, but their clout has corrupted them. In Tehran, I’m told, the Revolutionary Guard dominates the construction industry and its leading members have become exceedingly wealthy as a consequence. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad remains popular among the peasants and the poor, who note that he has failed to deliver on most of his campaign promises but are willing to grant him more time. As long as the price of oil remains above $50 a barrel, Iran can buy what it needs.
Mr. Ahmadinejad’s tweaking of the West and his refusal to bow to pressure on the nuclear issue are widely popular in Iran. There was a time, not long ago, when many Iranians genuinely believed that there was a danger of an American military attack, even an invasion. Hardly anyone seems to believe in that possibility any more.
What, then, can the United States do to prevent Iran from developing nuclear technology? Little or nothing. Washington should instead bow to the inevitable.
“You insist on having nuclear weapons,” we should say. “Go ahead. It’s a terrible idea, but we can’t stop you. We would, however, like your leaders to view the enclosed DVD of ‘The Godfather.’ Please pay particular attention to the scene in which Don Corleone makes grudging peace with a man — the head of a rival crime family — who ordered the killing of his oldest son.”
In that scene, Don Corleone says, “I forgo my vengeance for my dead son, for the common good. But I have selfish reasons.” The welfare of his youngest son, Michael, is on his mind.
“I am a superstitious man,” he continues. “And so if some unlucky accident should befall my youngest son, if some police officer should accidentally shoot him, or if he should hang himself in his cell, or if my son is struck by a bolt of lightening, then I will blame some of the people here. That I could never forgive.”
If Iran is bound and determined to have nuclear weapons, let it. The elimination of American opposition on this issue would open the way to genuine normalization between our two nations. It might even convince the Iranians that their country can flourish without nuclear weapons.
But this should also be made clear to Tehran: If a dirty bomb explodes in Milwaukee, or some other nuclear device detonates in Baltimore or Wichita, if Israel or Egypt or Saudi Arabia should fall victim to a nuclear “accident,” Iran should understand that the United States government will not search around for the perpetrator. The return address will be predetermined, and it will be somewhere in Iran.
Maybe we could induce Richard Armitage out of retirement to play the Don Corleone part. Apparently he knows the role, having already played it in Pakistan.
A few days ago, I inadvertently violated United States economic sanctions against Iran. I was paying my hotel bill in Tehran, didn’t have enough cash and asked if I could use a credit card.
“I’ll need to keep your card for at least half an hour,” said the clerk. Since he’d also “needed to keep” my passport for the first couple of days I was in Iran, I thought nothing more of it. Half an hour later, I had my hotel bill and my credit card and left for the airport.
A couple of days later my assistant asked me if I had purchased any clothing in Dubai. “No,” I said. “Why?” Someone, it appeared, had used my corporate credit card to do just that. When I heard the amount involved — precisely the total of my hotel bill — I understood.
There had been no purchase of clothing in Dubai, of course; but some Dubai business debited my credit card there (where such a transaction is legal) for the amount of my hotel bill, simultaneously crediting the company that owns the hotel in Tehran with that sum for the purchase of goods or services in Dubai. Similar, much larger loopholes enable the European subsidiaries of American companies to sell sanction-banned American goods inside Iran in limited but still significant quantities.
Even as the United States withholds its goods and technological know-how from Iran, the Europeans, Russians, Japanese and especially the Chinese are offering theirs as quickly as the contracts can be drafted. The likelihood that more restrictive sanctions against Iran will either make it through the United Nations’ bureaucratic quagmire or dissuade Iran from darting down the path toward nuclear technology is about as dim as that of a popular uprising among the people under 30 who make up 70 percent of Iran’s population.
Many of Iran’s young adults — especially the well-educated, English-speaking ones who cross the path of a visiting American journalist — are frustrated by the puritanical nature of Islamic law. They dismiss their president and ours as deserving each other, denounce the corruption of the mullahs and speak with surprising openness about confiscated satellite dishes, blocked Internet sites, the closing of newspapers and the jailing and mistreatment of dissidents. But the young malcontents appear nowhere close to staging a revolution.
On the highway from Tehran to the Mehrabad airport, I witnessed a mind-bending object lesson in the limits of youthful rebellion: two young women on in-line skates, clutching the door handles of a car being driven by a young man at speeds approaching 60 miles an hour. Both women brazenly violated every traffic law known to man, but with their head scarves in place, the loose ends firmly clenched between their teeth. There are certain lines you don’t cross.
Trivial acts of rebellion, irrelevant to the Islamic revolution, are tolerated. Anything perceived as a significant challenge is not. One of the men who planned and executed the taking of the American Embassy in 1979, for example, spent nine months in solitary confinement for collaborating on a public opinion poll whose findings were deemed unacceptable.
Iran suffers from chronic underemployment and its social safety nets are flimsy at best. The Revolutionary Guards now resemble Mafia families more than ideological shock troops. They still wield enormous influence, but their clout has corrupted them. In Tehran, I’m told, the Revolutionary Guard dominates the construction industry and its leading members have become exceedingly wealthy as a consequence. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad remains popular among the peasants and the poor, who note that he has failed to deliver on most of his campaign promises but are willing to grant him more time. As long as the price of oil remains above $50 a barrel, Iran can buy what it needs.
Mr. Ahmadinejad’s tweaking of the West and his refusal to bow to pressure on the nuclear issue are widely popular in Iran. There was a time, not long ago, when many Iranians genuinely believed that there was a danger of an American military attack, even an invasion. Hardly anyone seems to believe in that possibility any more.
What, then, can the United States do to prevent Iran from developing nuclear technology? Little or nothing. Washington should instead bow to the inevitable.
“You insist on having nuclear weapons,” we should say. “Go ahead. It’s a terrible idea, but we can’t stop you. We would, however, like your leaders to view the enclosed DVD of ‘The Godfather.’ Please pay particular attention to the scene in which Don Corleone makes grudging peace with a man — the head of a rival crime family — who ordered the killing of his oldest son.”
In that scene, Don Corleone says, “I forgo my vengeance for my dead son, for the common good. But I have selfish reasons.” The welfare of his youngest son, Michael, is on his mind.
“I am a superstitious man,” he continues. “And so if some unlucky accident should befall my youngest son, if some police officer should accidentally shoot him, or if he should hang himself in his cell, or if my son is struck by a bolt of lightening, then I will blame some of the people here. That I could never forgive.”
If Iran is bound and determined to have nuclear weapons, let it. The elimination of American opposition on this issue would open the way to genuine normalization between our two nations. It might even convince the Iranians that their country can flourish without nuclear weapons.
But this should also be made clear to Tehran: If a dirty bomb explodes in Milwaukee, or some other nuclear device detonates in Baltimore or Wichita, if Israel or Egypt or Saudi Arabia should fall victim to a nuclear “accident,” Iran should understand that the United States government will not search around for the perpetrator. The return address will be predetermined, and it will be somewhere in Iran.
Maybe we could induce Richard Armitage out of retirement to play the Don Corleone part. Apparently he knows the role, having already played it in Pakistan.
The Top 10 Conservative Idiots, No. 262
October 2, 2006 - Grand Old Perverts Edition
So much for the party of morals and values - Republican congressman Mark Foley (1) resigned last week amid a growing sex scandal which the GOP House Leadership (2) tried to cover up. Meanwhile, The New American Dictatorship (3) is officially installed, George Allen (5) is in more trouble, and Trent Lott (7) steps back into the limelight.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)