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2012-11-06T19:29:00.000-08:00

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Caution: Ingenious animals at work

2011-06-25T12:14:00.000-07:00

from the April 19, 2005 edition - http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0419/p18s02-hfks.html

Caution: Ingenious animals at work

We used to think that humans were the only tool-users. But now chimps, crows - even dolphins - have been spotted using them.

By Sharon J. Huntington

How often do you use tools? Every day? If you're thinking of a hammer or saw, you might say you don't use tools very often. But a tool can be any object you use to get something done. A fork is a tool. So is a pencil. We use tools all the time. People used to think this was one way we humans were different from animals, because animals don't use tools. Then scientists began to discover animals using tools, sometimes in very clever ways.

Because animals in captivity were easier to watch than those in the wild, people first observed tool use by zoo animals. They noticed that chimpanzees would pick up a stick and wave or throw it at another chimp to frighten or startle it. Sometimes they used sticks to play games such as tug of war. Scientists decided to study chimps' ability to use tools.

In the 1920s, German-American psychologist Wolfgang Kohler worked with four chimps named Chica, Grande, Konsul, and Sultan. He would place a bunch of bananas out of reach and leave items that could be used for tools, such as sticks and wooden boxes. Soon the chimps figured out how to use the sticks to pull the bananas into their cage, or stack up boxes to reach the bananas. As Dr. Kohler and other scientists observed animals learning to use tools, they wondered if this was something only done in captivity.

Jane Goodall, considered the world's expert on chimpanzees, discovered that the animals also use tools in the wild. She watched chimps at Lake Tanganyika in Tanzania, Africa. Dr. Goodall saw them pick blades of grass and carefully trim them, then stick them into a termite mound for a moment. Then they pulled out the blades covered with termites, one of their popular dinners. They were using the blades as tools to "fish" for their food.

Using tools when no one's around

Later observers learned that chimpanzees also clean themselves with wads of leaves, or use them like a sponge to soak up water for drinking. Recently scientists in the Republic of Congo placed cameras in an area frequented by chimpanzees, to observe them when no humans were around.

The cameras recorded the chimps using a tool kit, a combination of tools, to get their termite dinners out of underground nests. The chimps use their feet to poke a large stick into the earth, as you might push a shovel into the ground to dig a hole. Then they use a different stick as a fishing probe to bring out the termites. Sometimes they even use their teeth to fray the end of the probe, like a brush, to collect more insects.

The chimps seem to know that different types of sticks work best for different purposes. They use a specific plant for each tool. They gather the sticks from one area and carry them to places where termites are found.

Chimps aren't the only animals to use tools. Orangutans have been seen braiding vines together to make stronger rope. Capuchin monkeys use rocks to smash open palm nuts.

Even birds have uses for tools. Woodpecker finches and green jays also use a probe (a cactus spine or twig) to pull grubs and insects from holes in trees.

Another bird, the Egyptian vulture, likes to dine on ostrich eggs. The eggs are too hard to break open by pecking them with their beaks. Goodall also observed these birds in Tanzania. She found that the vultures throw rocks at the eggs to break them open.

Green herons have been seen to use bait when they go fishing. The heron drops a small object onto the surface of the water. Sometimes this brings fish to the surface. The fish think the object is food. Then the heron snatches the fish for its dinner.

Not all green herons do this. Scientists are still trying to understand how the birds learn this and why only some birds do it.

Sea creatures aren't known to use tools very often, but that may be because we haven't observed them as much. Or they may not need to use tools to find food or meet their needs. In Shark Bay, Australia, however, dolphins have been seen carrying sponges on their beaks. It is thought that they use sponges to protect their beaks while looking for food on the ocean floor.

Some scientists study how animals use tools to try to understand how animals think and how their thinking processes differ from those of humans. How well can animals reason out a problem and decide to use a tool to solve it?

Watch mom to see how it's done

Some tool use seems to be socially transmitted. Younger animals learn to use tools by watching adults. Young chimpanzees in the Republic of Congo, for example, were observed watching their mothers fish termites out of mounds using sticks. Then the youngsters would try it themselves.

Sea otters eat while floating on their backs. They often dive underwater to find a shellfish, then come up to the surface to eat it. They place a rock on their stomach and crack the shellfish against the rock to open it. Young otters watch their mothers doing this and learn to imitate them.

At other times animals have been known to discover how to use a tool all by themselves. A crow once lived in the laboratory of psychologist Benjamin Beck, who studies animal behavior. The crow's food needed to be moistened before he could eat it. When someone forgot to provide water to moisten the food, the crow took matters into his own hands (or beak). He had a cup that he'd been given as a toy. He used the cup to carry water from a trough on the other side of the room for his food.

Researchers study examples like this to try to better understand how animals figure out how to use tools. Do they use trial and error? In other words, do they just move things around until they stumble onto something that works? Or do they reason about what might solve the problem? It's hard to know what's going on in an animal's mind. Scientists still aren't certain how well animals can think through problems and find or fashion tools to solve them. It will take more observation and research before we understand animals that use tools.

• For pictures and descriptions of varioud animals using tools go to www.nationalgeographic.com/ngkids/0307/. Video clips of chimps using toolkits are at: news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/10/1006_041006_chimps.html.

The Harry Houdini of the primate world

Orangutans are known to be clever tool-users. One in particular became especially well-known for it. An orangutan named Fu Manchu lived at the Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha, Neb. In 1968, he found a way to escape. "It was a game to him," said zoo director Lee Simmons. Workers would come to the zoo in the morning and find Fu and his family in the trees outside their compound. The keepers would have to round them up and coax them back into their enclosure.

At first, head keeper Jerry Stones thought someone must have left the door to the compound unlocked. But no one admitted they might have done it.

When it happened again, Mr. Stones figured he was going to have to fire some careless worker. But after the third escape, he started to watch the orangutans carefully. Finally, he caught Fu Manchu in the act. The primate was slipping down to a door that connected the compound with the furnace room. Then, incredibly, he was using a piece of wire to slip under the latch and open the door.

To keep Fu from masterminding any more escapes, zookeepers were careful to remove from the cage any wire or other objects that might be used to unlatch the door.

But Fu wasn't about to give up. One day, Stones noticed that Fu had something in his mouth. Suspicious, Stones checked. Sure enough, Fu had bent a piece of wire so that he could hide it around his gums. He had been storing his latest lock pick in his mouth.

Full HTML version of this story which may include photos, graphics, and related links

The Siege vs. Real Life Readings

2010-12-03T21:30:00.000-08:00

Patriot Raid

By Jason Halperin, AlterNet
Posted on April 29, 2003, Printed on December 3, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/15770/

A month ago I experienced a very small taste of what hundreds of South Asian immigrants and U.S. citizens of South Asian descent have gone through since 9/11, and what thousands of others have come to fear. I was held, against my will and without warrant or cause, under the USA PATRIOT Act. While I understand the need for some measure of security and precaution in times such as these, the manner in which this detention and interrogation took place raises serious questions about police tactics and the safeguarding of civil liberties in times of war.

That night, March 20th, my roommate Asher and I were on our way to see the Broadway show "Rent." We had an hour to spare before curtain time so we stopped into an Indian restaurant just off of Times Square in the heart of midtown. I have omitted the name of the restaurant so as not to subject the owners to any further harassment or humiliation.

We helped ourselves to the buffet and then sat down to begin eating our dinner. I was just about to tell Asher how I'd eaten there before and how delicious the vegetable curry was, but I never got a chance. All of a sudden, there was a terrible commotion and five NYPD in bulletproof vests stormed down the stairs. They had their guns drawn and were pointing them indiscriminately at the restaurant staff and at us.

"Go to the back, go to the back of the restaurant," they yelled.

I hesitated, lost in my own panic.

"Did you not hear me, go to the back and sit down," they demanded.

I complied and looked around at the other patrons. There were eight men including the waiter, all of South Asian descent and ranging in age from late-teens to senior citizen. One of the policemen pointed his gun point-blank in the face of the waiter and shouted: "Is there anyone else in the restaurant?" The waiter, terrified, gestured to the kitchen.

The police placed their fingers on the triggers of their guns and kicked open the kitchen doors. Shouts emanated from the kitchen and a few seconds later five Hispanic men were made to crawl out on their hands and knees, guns pointed at them.

After patting us all down, the five officers seated us at two tables. As they continued to kick open doors to closets and bathrooms with their fingers glued to their triggers, no less than ten officers in suits emerged from the stairwell. Most of them sat in the back of the restaurant typing on their laptop computers. Two of them walked over to our table and identified themselves as officers of the INS and Homeland Security Department.

I explained that we were just eating dinner and asked why we were being held. We were told by the INS agent that we would be released once they had confirmation that we had no outstanding warrants and our immigration status was OK'd.

In pre-9/11 America, the legality of this would have been questionable. After all, the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution states: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated; and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized."

"You have no right to hold us," Asher insisted.

"Yes, we have every right," responded one of the agents. "You are being held under the Patriot Act following suspicion under an internal Homeland Security investigation."

The USA PATRIOT Act was passed into law on October 26, 2001 in order to facilitate the post 9/11 crackdown on terrorism (the name is actually an acronym: "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act.") Like most Americans, I did not recognize the extent to which this bill foregoes our civil liberties. Among the unprecedented rights it grants to the federal government are the right to wiretap without warrant, and the right to detain without warrant. As I quickly discovered, the right to an attorney has been seemingly fudged as well.

When I asked to speak to a lawyer, the INS official informed me that I do have the right to a lawyer but I would have to be brought down to the station and await security clearance before being granted one. When I asked how long that would take, he replied with a coy smile: "Maybe a day, maybe a week, maybe a month."

We insisted that we had every right to leave and were going to do so. One of the policemen walked over with his hand on his gun and taunted: "Go ahead and leave, just go ahead."

We remained seated. Our IDs were taken, and brought to the officers with laptops. I was questioned over the fact that my license was out of state, and asked if I had "something to hide." The police continued to hassle the kitchen workers, demanding licenses and dates of birth. One of the kitchen workers was shaking hysterically and kept providing the day's date, March 20, 2003, over and over.

As I continued to press for legal counsel, a female officer who had been busy typing on her laptop in the front of the restaurant, walked over and put her finger in my face. "We are at war, we are at war and this is for your safety," she exclaimed. As she walked away from the table, she continued to repeat it to herself: "We are at war, we are at war. How can they not understand this?"

I most certainly understand that we are at war. I also understand that the freedoms afforded to all of us in the Constitution were meant specifically for times like these. Our freedoms were carved out during times of strife by people who were facing brutal injustices, and were intended specifically so that this nation would behave differently in such times. If our freedoms crumble exactly when they are needed most, then they were really never freedoms at all.

After an hour and a half the INS agent walked back over and handed Asher and me our licenses. A policeman took us by the arm and escorted us out of the building. Before stepping out to the street, the INS agent apologized. He explained, in a low voice, that they did not think the two of us were in the restaurant. Several of the other patrons, though of South Asian descent, were in fact U.S. citizens. There were four taxi drivers, two students, one newspaper salesman -- unwitting customers, just like Asher and me. I doubt, though, they received any apologies from the INS or the Department of Homeland Security.

Nor have the over 600 people of South Asian descent currently being held without charge by the Federal government. Apparently, this type of treatment is acceptable. One of the taxi drivers, a U.S. citizen, spoke to me during the interrogation. "Please stop talking to them," he urged. "I have been through this before. Please do whatever they say. Please for our sake."

Three days later I phoned the restaurant to discover what happened. The owner was nervous and embarrassed and obviously did not want to talk about it. But I managed to ascertain that the whole thing had been one giant mistake. A mistake. Loaded guns pointed in faces, people made to crawl on their hands and knees, police officers clearly exacerbating a tense situation by kicking in doors, taunting, keeping their fingers on the trigger even after the situation was under control. A mistake. And, according to the ACLU a perfectly legal one, thanks to the PATRIOT Act.

The PATRIOT Act is just the first phase of the erosion of the Fourth Amendment. From the Justice Department has emerged a draft of the Domestic Securities Enhancement Act, also known as PATRIOT II. Among other things, this act would allow the Justice Department to detain anyone, anytime, secretly and indefinitely. It would also make it a crime to reveal the identity or even existence of such a detainee.

Every American citizen, whether they support the current war or not, should be alarmed by the speed and facility with which these changes to our fundamental rights are taking place. And all of those who thought that these laws would never affect them, who thought that the PATRIOT Act only applied to the guilty, should heed this story as a wake-up call. Please learn from my experience. We are all vulnerable so speak out and organize, our Fourth Amendment rights depend upon it.

Jason Halperin lives in New York City and works at Doctors Without Borders/Medicins San Frontieres. If you are moved by this account, he asks that you consider donating to your local ACLU chapter.

____________________________________

Published on Friday, June 27, 2003 by the Inter Press Service

Post-9/11 Immigrant Roundup Backfired - Report

by Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON - Measures take by the U.S. administration against Arab and Muslim immigrants after the Sep. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks against New York and the Pentagon have not only failed to protect U.S. security, but may have made it more vulnerable, according to a major report released here Thursday.

The round-up and detention of more than 1,200 immigrants after the attacks were particularly abusive, says the report by the Washington-based Migration Policy Institute (MPI) an influential think tank.

It said that the government's efforts to depict some of those who were detained as terrorists were simply wrong." The only charges brought against them were actually for routine immigration violations or ordinary crimes,'' concludes the 165-page report, ''America's Challenge: Domestic Security, Civil Liberties and National Unity After September 11''.

''Many of the policies that have been adopted in the wake of Sep. 11 are an attempt to use immigration as a proxy for anti-terrorism,'' said Vincent Cannistraro, a former senior counter-terrorism official in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), who is on MPI's board of advisers and helped prepare the report.

''We haven't learned anything about pre-empting terrorism in America, but we have intimidated, antagonized and alienated many (minority) communities (which is) counter-productive to what the FBI and other agencies are trying to do," he added at the report's release.

What breakthroughs have been made in identifying and apprehending terrorists have been the result of traditional police and intelligence work and co-operation and information-sharing with foreign intelligence agencies, not from any of the immigration initiatives taken by the administration, says the report, which also includes the most comprehensive compilation of the individuals detained after 9/11 and their experiences.

''Arresting a large number of non-citizens ... only gives the nation a false sense of security,'' the document added.

The report is likely to be taken seriously. The MPI's advisory board members include the last two commissioners of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS): James Ziglar, who just served in the current administration; and Doris Meissner, INS head under former President Bill Clinton. Meissner co-authored the report.

In addition to Cannistraro, it also includes Mary Jo White, who, as a former U.S. attorney in the southern federal district of New York, gained a reputation as a tough and relentless prosecutor in high-profile terrorism cases.

The report also coincided with news that the Justice Department's inspector general (IG) is investigating possible abuses by federal prison guards in Brooklyn against immigrants detained there.

In a widely noted report released earlier this month, the IG found ''significant problems'' in the way federal officials dealt with the post-Sep. 11 roundups. Dozens of detainees were subject to verbal and physical abuse by guards at the facility, where they were left to languish in ''unduly harsh'' conditions for months, some without access to family members or attorneys, it said.

The MPI report, whose scope is broader than the plight of the detainees, nonetheless ''puts flesh on the bones of the IG's report'', according to David Cole, a Georgetown University law professor who also contributed to the document.

It found, for example, that, unlike the Sep. 11 hijackers, the majority of those detained had significant ties to the United States and roots in their communities here. Of the detainees on which relevant information was available, almost half had lived in this country for at least six years and had close family relationships here.

The report examines the government's post-9/11 immigration measures from three distinct perspectives -- their effectiveness in actually fighting terrorism; their impact on civil liberties; and their effect on America's sense of community as a nation of immigrants. In each case, it concludes that the administration's policies were largely counter-productive.

The key to fighting terrorism, according to the report, is focusing on improved intelligence, information and information sharing; better and more targeted border protection; vigorous intelligence-based law enforcement; and engagement with Arab- and Muslim-American communities.

''We believe it is possible to use immigration measures more effectively to defend against terrorism, while also protecting the fundamental liberties at the core of American identity,'' Meissner said.

The latest raids follow an established pattern in U.S. history, according to the report. During the McCarthy era in the 1950s, Congress enacted strong anti-immigration measures while, during the ''Red Scare'' that followed World War I, the attorney general at the time, A. Mitchell Palmer, ordered thousands of immigrants rounded up and detained without due process.

During national security crises, Washington has often followed ''the course of least resistance'', according to Cole, who noted that immigrants are particularly vulnerable to abuses at such times.

But the greatest harm to U.S. anti-terrorist efforts in this case has been the impact of the administration's harsh measures on Arab- and Muslim-American communities says the report. Programs such as requiring special registration by males from certain countries carried out last year has discouraged co-operation with law-enforcement agencies, in part because they became a vehicle for sweeping up those with minor immigration violations.

At the same time, the alienation and persecution felt by the same communities immediately after Sep. 11 have also had the unintended effect over time of reaffirming their identity as Muslims and Arabs in the United States, according to Muzaffar Chishti, an MPI senior fellow and co-author.

''The experience of Muslim and Arab communities post-Sep. 11 is, in many ways, an impressive story of a community that first felt intimidated, but has since started to assert its place in the American body politic,'' he said.

But Cannistraro stressed that the administration's ham-handed attack on immigrant communities had also taken a heavy toll on its image in the immigrants' homelands overseas.

''If anything, we have painted an image of us as a narrow, biased society that really believes in the Clash of Civilizations,'' he said, singling out Attorney General John Ashcroft as especially responsible. ''It serves us poorly abroad, and it has provided ammunition to some of the fiery imams who encourage young people (to sacrifice) themselves.''

____________________________________

MI6 and CIA 'sent student to Morocco to be tortured'

David Rose

The Observer, Sunday 11 December 2005

An Ethiopian student who lived in London claims that he was brutally tortured with the involvement of British and US intelligence agencies.

Binyam Mohammed, 27, says he spent nearly three years in the CIA's network of 'black sites'. In Morocco he claims he underwent the strappado torture of being hung for hours from his wrists, and scalpel cuts to his chest and penis and that a CIA officer was a regular interrogator.

After his capture in Pakistan, Mohammed says British officials warned him that he would be sent to a country where torture was used. Moroccans also asked him detailed questions about his seven years in London, which his lawyers believe came from British sources.

Western agencies believed that he was part of a plot to buy uranium in Asia, bring it to the US and build a 'dirty bomb' in league with Jose Padilla, a US citizen. Mohammed signed a confession but told his lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, he had never met Padilla, or anyone in al-Qaeda. Padilla spent almost four years in American custody, accused of the plot. Last month, after allegations of the torture used against Mohammed emerged, the claims against Padilla were dropped. He now faces a civil charge of supporting al-Qaeda financially.

A senior US intelligence official told The Observer that the CIA is now in 'deep crisis' following last week's international political storm over the agency's practice of 'extraordinary rendition' - transporting suspects to countries where they face torture. 'The smarter people in the Directorate of Operations [the CIA's clandestine operational arm] know that one day, if they do this stuff, they are going to face indictment,' he said. 'They are simply refusing to participate in these operations, and if they don't have big mortgage or tuition fees to pay they're thinking about trying to resign altogether.'

Already 22 CIA officers have been charged in absentia in Italy for alleged roles in the rendition of a radical cleric, Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, seized - without the knowledge of the Italian government - on a Milan street in February 2003.

The intense pressure on US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice last week, coupled with Friday's condemnation of the use of evidence extracted under torture by the House of Lords, has intensified concerns within the CIA. The official said: 'Renditions and torture aren't just wrong, they also expose CIA personnel and diplomats abroad to enormous future risk.'

Mohammed arrived in Britain in 1994. He lived in Wornington Road, North Kensington, and studied at Paddington Green College. For most of this time, said his brother, he rarely went to a mosque. However, in early 2001 he became more religious.

The Observer has obtained fresh details of his case which was first publicised last summer. He went to Pakistan in June 2001 because, he says, he had a drug problem and wanted to kick the habit. He was arrested on 10 April at the airport on his way back to England because of an alleged passport irregularity. Initially interrogated by Pakistani and British officials, he told Stafford Smith: 'The British checked out my story and said they knew I was a nobody. They said they would tell the Americans.'

He was questioned by the FBI and began to hear accusations of terror involvement. He says he also met two MI6 officers. One told him he would be tortured in an Arab country.

The interrogations intensified and he says he was taken to Islamabad; then, in July 2002, on a CIA flight to Morocco. His description of the process matches independent reports. Masked officers wore black. They stripped him, subjected him to a full body search and shackled him to his seat wearing a nappy.

In Morocco he was told he had plotted with Padilla and had dinner in Pakistan with Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the planner of 9/11, and other al-Qaeda chiefs. 'I've never met anyone like these people,' Mohammed told Stafford Smith. 'How could I? I speak no Arabic... I never heard Padilla's name until they told me.'

During almost 18 months of regular beatings in Morocco, Mohammed says he frequently met a blonde woman in her thirties who told him she was Canadian. The US intelligence officer told The Observer this was an 'amateurish' CIA cover. 'The only Americans who historically pretended to be Canadian were backpackers travelling in Europe during the Vietnam war. Apart from the moral issues, what disturbs me is that, as an attempt to create plausible deniability, this is so damn transparent.'

According to Mohammed, he was threatened with electrocution and rape. On one occasion, he was handcuffed when three men entered his cell wearing black masks. 'That day I ceased really knowing I was alive. One stood on each of my shoulders and a third punched me in the stomach. It seemed to go on for hours. I was meant to stand, but I was in so much pain I'd fall to my knees. They'd pull me back up and hit me again. They'd kick me in the thighs as I got up. I could see the hands that were hitting me... like the hands of someone who'd worked as a mechanic or chopped with an axe.'

Later he was confronted with details of his London life - such as the name of his kickboxing teacher - and met a Moroccan calling himself Marwan, who ordered him to be hung by his wrists. 'They hit me in the chest, the stomach, and they knocked my feet from under me. I have a shoulder pain to this day from the wrenching as my arms were almost pulled out of their sockets.'

Another time, he told Stafford Smith: 'They took a scalpel to my right chest. It was only a small cut. Then they cut my left chest. One of them took my penis in his hand and began to make cuts. He did it once, and they stood still for maybe a minute watching. I was in agony, crying, trying desperately to suppress myself, but I was screaming... They must have done this 20 to 30 times in maybe two hours. There was blood all over.'

In September he was taken to Guantanamo Bay where he has been charged with involvement in al-Qaeda plots and faces trial there by military commission. Stafford Smith said: 'I am unaware of any evidence against him other than that extracted under torture.'

The Foreign Office, the Moroccan Embassy and the CIA refused to comment yesterday.

____________________________________

Sources: Hijackers' ex-landlord was FBI informant

From Dana Bash, Kelli Arena and David Ensor
CNN

WASHINGTON (CNN) --A former landlord of two of the September 11 hijackers was an FBI informant at the time, knowledgeable sources confirm to CNN.

The two hijackers, Khalid Almidhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, lived in San Diego in the fall of 2000 and were taken in by a Muslim man after he met them at a local Islamic center. The landlord had been an informant for the FBI, supplying information about the Islamic terrorist groups Hamas and Hezbollah.

The revelation, first reported by Newsweek, focuses renewed attention on possible mistakes made by U.S. law enforcement and intelligence prior to September 11. Newsweek reported that the FBI informant lived in close quarters with the two future hijackers.

"The FBI concedes that a San Diego case agent appears to have been at least aware that Saudi visitors were renting rooms in the informant's house," Newsweek reported.

Some members of the congressional committee investigating the intelligence failures and the September 11 attacks knew about the relationship between the landlord and the FBI, and the point will probably come up when the panel holds public hearings, expected later this month.

U.S. intelligence officials said that in January of 2000, when Almidhar and Alhazmi attended a meeting of known terrorists in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, that fact was communicated by the CIA to the FBI. Yet it was not until August 23, 2001, that the CIA warned the FBI and other law enforcement agencies to watch for the two men, and that they might try to enter the United States.

By that time, Almidhar and Alhazmi had been in the U.S. for more than 11 months.

The FBI contends the agency was never told about the two men before August 23 and says it can find no record of any such communication between CIA and FBI to show the information might have been overlooked. The FBI has maintained that position in its dealings with congressional investigators and has asked the CIA to document, if possible, having sent word earlier.

The San Diego landlord, reached by CNN on Monday, has refused comment.

This landlord's history gets even weirder

____________________________________

Plot Warning Is Reviewed By the F.B.I.

BLUMENTHAL, RALPH. New York Times. Oct 29, 1993.

(Italics and bold-face added)

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is reviewing the allegations of an informer who said after the World Trade Center explosion that he had warned law-enforcement agents of a plot to build a bomb, and that if they had worked with him, they would have prevented the blast, officials said.

But some officials disputed important parts of the informant's account yesterday, saying that conversations with him took place half a year before the attack on the trade center, and months before the bomb was actually built.

The comments of the informer, Emad A. Salem, are in transcripts of telephone conversations with the police and F.B.I. agents that Mr. Salem secretly recorded. In the transcripts, Mr. Salem is quoted as saying that the bombing could have been foiled but for an F.B.I. supervisor's rejection of a plan to have him work with the plotters building the bomb, then substitute harmless powder for the explosives.

The review of Mr. Salem's allegations that has been undertaken by the F.B.I. is not a formal investigation. The Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility, which looks into suspected ethical lapses, has not been called in, officials said. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity. Reno Declines to Comment

Asked repeatedly about the allegations at her regular news briefing in Washington yesterday, Attorney General Janet Reno declined comment, citing the trial in Manhattan Federal Court of four men charged with the Feb. 26 blast that killed six. In court at that trial yesterday, defense lawyers sought copies of the informer's transcripts. [ Article, page B4. ]

Spokesmen for the new F.B.I. director, Louis J. Freeh, also said they were barred from making any response about the informer's allegations. But other bureau officials acknowledged that an internal inquiry into the handling of Mr. Salem and his information was under way. They said it did not suggest any wrongdoing.

Representative Charles E. Schumer of Brooklyn, chairman of the subcommittee on crime and criminal justice, wrote Ms. Reno yesterday that the panel would call her and Mr. Freeh to testify at a hearing on the F.B.I.'s handling of the trade center bombing and other counterterrorism issues. Mr. Schumer said he would wait until after the trial to convene that hearing.

Senator Alfonse M. D'Amato, who was himself a target of a terrorist assassination plot, according to Government charges in the related bombing case, said yesterday that he was confident that Mr. Freeh would conduct an inquiry into the matter. "No one has to ask him," he said.

The Salem tapes emerged as a volatile issue this week when the Government, under the Federal court's rules of evidence, turned over 903 pages of transcripts from 45 tape cassettes to defense lawyers representing 15 defendants charged with plotting to blow up city landmarks in the second bombing case. Transcripts of another 25 tapes have been withheld for "security and other issues," prosecutors said.

The transcripts, which Federal Judge Michael B. Mukasey barred the lawyers from disseminating but which were reviewed by The New York Times and other newspapers, quote Mr. Salem complaining to F.B.I. agents that "I told you the World Trade Center," among other planned targets, "but nobody listened." Foiled His Chance

One unnamed F.B.I. supervisor in particular, Mr. Salem says, forced him into the role of witness and thus foiled his chance to remain under cover and be "building the bomb with a phony powder and grabbing the people who was involved in it."

But the officials who spoke on condition of anonymity disputed Mr. Salem's account yesterday. For one thing, they said, although he had begun working for the F.B.I. in late 1991, he and the bureau had angrily parted ways in the middle of 1992 and did not resume contact until after the bombing the following February.

Contrary to Mr. Salem's repeated tape-recorded protestations after the bombing, they said, he had not warned them that the trade center was to be attacked; nor, they said, could he have done that by the time his relationship to the bureau was interrupted, half a year before the attack. Link to Suspects

It took the tracing of a vehicle part found in the wreckage six days after the explosion to link the bombing to the suspects whom Mr. Salem had earlier cultivated, the officials said.

The sequence of events was confirmed yesterday by Mr. Salem's former wife, Barbara Rodgers, who said he had not been in touch with the F.B.I. for many months before the bombing.

Ms. Rodgers also said that to gain favor with the F.B.I. early on, Mr. Salem gave agents videotapes from Egypt showing supporters of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and other Muslim extremists. The sheik is at the heart of the second bombing trial.

One law-enforcement official said yesterday that there was dismay in the F.B.I. over how Mr. Salem caught agents' ready affirmations on tape to his complaints that the bureau had mishandled the trade center bombing. "We all wish they wouldn't have said, 'yeah, yeah,' said the official ruefully. Officials have said the agents may have been trying simply to mollify their often combative and flighty informant.

Officials declined to identify the supervisor Mr. Salem complains about as being responsible for not following through on a plan that would have thwarted the blast, and said no one was facing discipline as a result of the allegations. Basis for Dispute

They said that dispute with the informer was based on the supervisor's proper insistence that Mr. Salem, whose information had not always proved reliable, wear a hidden body recorder to gather evidence so he could take the witness stand in a trial.

Although out of touch with the F.B.I. for half a year before the bombing, Mr. Salem continued to circulate in Muslim militant circles and thus may have picked up information about the pending attack, officials said. But, they said, he did not turn it over until after the bombing, when he re-established his relationship with the F.B.I.

____________________________________

U.S. supported al-Qaeda cells during Balkan Wars

Isabel Vincent. National Post. Mar 15, 2002.

Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda terrorist network has been active in the Balkans for years, most recently helping Kosovo rebels battle for independence from Serbia with the financial and military backing of the United States and NATO.

The claim that al-Qaeda played a role in the Balkan wars of the 1990s came from an alleged FBI document former Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic presented in his defence before the Hague tribunal last week. Mr. Milosevic faces 66 counts of war crimes and genocide.

Although Hague prosecutors have challenged the veracity of the document, which Mr. Milosevic identified as a Congressional statement from the FBI dated last December, Balkan experts say the presence of al-Qaeda militants in Kosovo and Bosnia is well documented.

Today, al-Qaeda members are helping the National Liberation Army, a rebel group in Macedonia, fight the Skopje government in a bid for independence, military analysts say. Last week, Michael Steiner, the United Nations administrator in Kosovo, warned of "importing the Afghan danger to Europe" because several cells trained and financed by al-Qaeda remain in the region.

"Many members of the Kosovo Liberation Army were sent for training in terrorist camps in Afghanistan," said James Bissett, former Canadian ambassador to Yugoslavia and an expert on the Balkans. "Milosevic is right. There is no question of their participation in conflicts in the Balkans. It is very well documented."

The arrival in the Balkans of the so-called Afghan Arabs, who are from various Middle Eastern states and linked to al-Qaeda, began in 1992 soon after the war in Bosnia. According to Lenard Cohen, professor of political science at Simon Fraser University, mujahedeen fighters who travelled to Afghanistan to resist the Soviet occupation in the 1980s later "migrated to Bosnia hoping to assist their Islamic brethren in a struggle against Serbian [and for a time] Croatian forces."

The Bosnian Muslims welcomed their assistance. After the Bosnian war, "hundreds of Bosnian passports were provided to the mujahedeen by the Muslim-controlled government in Sarajevo," said Prof. Cohen in a recent article titled Bin Laden and the war in the Balkans. Many al-Qaeda members decided to stay in the region after marrying local Muslim women, he said.

They also set up secret terrorist training camps in Bosnia -- activities financed by the sale of opium produced in Afghanistan and secretly shipped through Turkey and Kosovo into central Europe.

In the years immediately before the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, the al-Qaeda militants moved into Kosovo, the southern province of Serbia, to help ethnic Albanian extremists of the KLA mount their terrorist campaign against Serb targets in the region.

The mujahedeen "were financed by Saudi and United Arab Emirates money," said one Western military official, asking anonymity. "They were mercenaries who were not running the show in Kosovo, but were used by the KLA to do their dirty work."

The United States, which had originally trained the Afghan Arabs during the war in Afghanistan, supported them in Bosnia and then in Kosovo. When NATO forces launched their military campaign against Yugoslavia three years ago to unseat Mr. Milosevic, they entered the Kosovo conflict on the side of the KLA, which had already received "substantial" military and financial support from bin Laden's network, analysts say.

In the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist strikes on the United States, NATO began to worry about the presence in the Balkans of the Islamist terrorist cells it had supported throughout the 1990s.

____________________________________

CIA Wanted Visas for bin Laden's Crew

Transcript of CBC (Canada) Interview with Michael Springman, Former State Department Official In The US Visa Bureau, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia

Interview Date 3 July 2002

Springman: Well it began in Jeddah when I was repeatedly told to issue visas to unqualified applicants. This went on for quite some time, during most of my tour there.

CBC: When you say unqualified applicants, what kind of qualifications didn't they have?

Springman: Under the American immigration laws, you need to demonstrate that you are going to the United States for a specific purpose, and typically in such a situation you are going to sign a business deal, or you're going to go as a tourist to see the Grand Canyon, or you're going as a student to study a particular course of study. And these were people that had no job; in one instance he was a Sudanese, who was unemployed in Saudi Arabia, and a refugee from the Sudan. But he got a visa for National Security purposes, after it was taken out of my hands by the chief of the consular section. The King's barber's secretary apparently got a visa. There were other people in similar situations that really demonstrated no clear idea of what they were going to do.

CBC: All right, King's barber's aside, to be the Devil's advocate your superior from time to time overruled your findings. Why is that unusual?

Springman: Well it's unusual because in State department practice, you are supposed to have new concrete and substantive information that was not available to the fellow who adjudicated the visa at the beginning. And this was never done.

CBC: So what do you think you were dealing with here; it all sounds a bit like a case of visa fraud perhaps, but why to you think there was anything more than that?

Springman: Well initially I thought that is what it was. There was visa fraud. I had been told by one contact that the price for a visa at the American consulate was the equivalent of $2500 US. But once I got back to the United States, and was out of the foreign service, I ran across a couple of people with ties to the American government, that told me another story; that the CIA was recruiting fighters for the Afghan war against the then Soviets, and that their asset, Osama bin Laden was working with them. They had a recruiting office in Jeddah, they had a recruiting office in Riyadh, and third one somewhere in the Eastern province. And they would send these people to Jeddah, the fifth largest visa issuing post in the Middle East, for visas. They would apparently run these people straight over from their recruiting office over to my visa window. Well obviously, when they were not good solid businessmen, or good upstanding upper class people I would refuse them.

CBC: How many would you estimate that got into the United States that shouldn't have through this back door?

Springman: Well, in my case I would say as many as 100.

CBC: And when you questioned them, what would they say were their reasons for expecting to get a visa with such slight credentials?

Springman: There was one instance of two Pakistanis who came to me, and they wanted to got to an American auto parts trade show. They couldn't name the show, and they couldn't name the city in which it was going to be held. And then the case officer came over and called me on the phone, and said, "Give them a visa". I said "No, it doesn't wash". "Well, we need it, I'm sorry." Then he went to the head of the consular section and got me overruled, and they got their visas. But when I complained to the powers in the consulate, and the people in Riyadh, I was told to keep quiet, that there was reasons for doing this, that it wasn't a case of my poor judgment, it was this and it was that. This simply fueled my suspicions that something untoward was going on.

CBC: Was there ever any pattern to these applicants that you could see? To their situations, their skills, their nationalities?

Springman: They seemed to basically people with no real skills. Their nationalities for the most part were Pakistani, Palestinian, Syrian, Lebanese. They were young, in their 20s and their 30s say, and they seemed to have no ties to any place in particular.

CBC: Where did Afghanistan seem to fit into this whole pattern? Because it seems they were going to the US to collect or be rewarded for some past deed, or to be trained for another. Where did Afghanistan fit in?

Springman: Afghanistan was the end user of their facilities. My sources told me that they were coming to the United States for training as terrorists, and they would be sent back to Afghanistan. But then the countries that had originally had supplied them certainly didn't want them back. These were people that had been given skills in overthrowing governments, destroying armored columns and things like this, and the various governments in the region frankly didn't want them back, because they thought they might apply these skills at home.

CBC: So if your theory is true, you can demonstrate a relationship between the CIA and Osama bin Laden dating back as far as 1987.

Springman: That's right. And as you recall, they believe that this fellow Sheikh Abdel Rahman over in New York that was tied to the first Trade Center bombing, had gotten his visa from a CIA case officer in the Sudan. And that 15 or so of the people who came from Saudi Arabia to participate in the attacks on the WTC and the Pentagon had gotten their visas through the American consular general at Jeddah.

CBC: Well what does that suggest? That this pipeline was never rolled up, that it is still operating?

Springman: Exactly. I had thought it had been, because I had raised sufficient hell that I thought they had done it. I had complained to the embassy in Riyadh, I had complained to the diplomatic security in Washington, I had complained to the General Accounting Office, I had complained to the State Department Inspector General's office, and I had complained to the Bureau of Consular Affairs at the State Department. Apparently the reverberations from this where heard all over the State Department.

CBC: And if what you say may be true, many of the terrorists who allegedly flew those planes into those targets got their US visas through the CIA and your US consulate in Jeddah. That suggests an relationship ongoing as recently as September [2001]. What was the CIA presumably recruiting these people for, as recently as September 11th?

Springman: That I don't know. That's one of the things that I tried to find out through a series of Freedom of Information Act requests starting 10 years ago. And at the time, the State Department and the CIA stonewalled my requests; they are still doing so.

CBC: If the CIA had a relationship with the people responsible for September 11, are you suggesting that they are in some way complicit?

Springman: Even through omission or failure to act.

CBC: Do you have any evidence, any paperwork from all of these years that might go towards supporting all of this?

Springman: Regrettably not. I had something at some point. My predecessor in Jeddah had begun a file of people with peculiar attributes who got had got visas. I kept it up, I added to it. I learned later on after I had left, that this file had been mysteriously been shredded.

CBC: But you complained, and you complained and you complained, but what eventually happened to you?

Springman: My appointment in the State Department was terminated, and I was never given a coherent statement why.

CBC: You will above all will appreciate that conspiracy theories are a dime a dozen these days with regard to September 11th, what makes yours different or any more credible than the others?

Springman: I have floated around the international affairs community for the past 20 years. I was in the middle of this in Jeddah; I knew people in the foreign service, I knew people out of it, I knew people in the CIA. I had at one time great respect for the CIA, but this operation in Jeddah was so peculiar, so strange, and it went against anything I had ever seen or heard in my 20 years in government, that I thought that what these people were telling me about CIA involvement with Osama, and with Afghanistan had to be true because nothing else would fit. By the attempts to cover me up and shut me down, this convinced me more and more that this was not a pipe-dream, this was not a machination, this was not a conspiracy theory.

CBC: But when you take the events of 1987, when visas were being issued to people unqualified for them, and suggest that happened again to the same people responsible for the attacks in New York and Washington: that's a quantum leap. How do you justify that?

Springman: For all I know, and for all we know, this might not have been the intended consequence. It could have been a mistake, it could have been a misjudgment. Or for all that we know, it could have been an effort to get the US directly involved in some fashion. I mean it's only a few thousand dead, and what's this against the greater gain in the Middle East.

CBC: But you're quite sure that Mohammed Atta and others had their visas issued in Jeddah?

Springman: This is what I was told by reading an article in the Los Angeles Times.

CBC: Well, an intriguing tale and we thank you for telling us.

Springman: You're quite welcome.

Audio file of interview can be downloaded at
http://radio.cbc.ca/programs/dispatches/audio/020116_springman.rm

Additional interview with Springman on BBC Newsnight 6 November 2001
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/events/newsnight/1645527.stm

US & al-Qaeda used to be buddies

2010-11-12T18:30:00.000-08:00

U.S. supported al-Qaeda cells during Balkan Wars

Isabel Vincent. National Post. Don Mills, Ont.: Mar 15, 2002. pg. A.18

ivencent@nationalpost.com

They also set up secret terrorist training camps in Bosnia -- activities financed by the sale of opium produced in Afghanistan and secretly shipped through Turkey and Kosovo into central Europe.

In the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist strikes on the United States, NATO began to worry about the presence in the Balkans of the Islamist terrorist cells it had supported throughout the 1990s.

FBI imformant inside first WTC bombing terrorist cell

2010-11-12T18:28:00.000-08:00

Plot Warning Is Reviewed By the F.B.I.

BLUMENTHAL, RALPH. New York Times. Oct 29, 1993. pg. B.1

(Italics and bold-face added)

It took the tracing of a vehicle part found in the wreckage six days after the explosion to link the bombing to the suspects whom Mr. Salem had earlier cultivated, the officials said.

The sequence of events was confirmed yesterday by Mr. Salem's former wife, Barbara Rodgers, who said he had not been in touch with the F.B.I. for many months before the bombing.

All WAG THE DOG readings

2010-11-12T18:14:00.000-08:00

Daily Mail

CLINTON'S REVENGE: But was his real target the Arab terrorists or Lewinsky's testimony?

Ian Cobain Aug 21, 1998

PRESIDENT Clinton unleashed up to 100 cruise missiles against Sudan and Afghanistan yesterday to avert what he claimed was 'an immediate threat' of terrorist attack.

He said he had 'compelling evidence' that fanatical Islamic terrorist leaders were holding a summit to plan further atrocities against the U.S. in the wake of the embassy bombings two weeks ago.

'Our target was terror. Our mission was clear,' he told the American people in a televised address last night.

But there was massive cynicism about the timing, at the end of the toughest week of his career, and announced just as Monica Lewinsky emerged from giving more evidence about their affair to the Grand Jury.

His Defence Secretary William Cohen even faced accusations that the attacks were inspired by the recent Hollywood comedy Wag The Dog, in which an embattled President launches a 'pretend war' to distract attention from a sex scandal. The scenario echoed events in the New Year, just as the Lewinsky story was first breaking, when Clinton ordered a massive build-up of forces in the Gulf against Saddam Hussein.

It was unclear last night whether the strikes, launched from warships in the Gulf and and the Red Sea, would save him from political ruin or simply add to his troubles. While many key political figures, including some of his severest critics, backed his action, others questioned his 'diversionary tactics'.

But the main target, terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden, was reported to have survived unscathed.

The hugely wealthy Saudi Arabian is widely suspected of bankrolling the embassy attacks two weeks ago in Tanzania and Kenya in which 300 died, including 12 Americans, and thousands were injured.

Clinton accused bin Laden of having previously plotted to kill the Pope, assassinate Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak, and blow up American airliners.

His followers, an estimated 5,000 throughout the Middle East, are strongly suspected to have been responsible for two recent bomb attacks on U.S. military bases in Saudi Arabia in which more than 20 servicemen died.

Bin Laden is believed to have a huge arsenal of weapons in Afghanistan, including antiaircraft missiles and tanks.

'We had compelling evidence the bin Laden group was planning other attacks against Americans and other freedom-loving people,' said Clinton.

At 6.30pm British time, the first strike was launched against the Saudi exile's HQ in a remote mountainous region in the south of Afghanistan.

Targets included his main supply depot, a nearby training camp, and three other sites which the Tal-iban militia which controls most of the country had allowed him to establish. But Israeli technicians who have been monitoring the Afghan airwaves for more than a week heard his voice - shocked, fearful, but apparently still promising vengeance against his enemies - hours after the bombers had gone home.

The raids were timed to coincide with another in Sudan on a suspected chemical weapons plant on the Khartoum outskirts, which Mr Cohen said was run by 'bin Laden's terrorist organisations'.

But interior minister Abdul Rahim said the plant was a privately- owned pharmaceuticals factory and insisted: 'There are no chemical weapons plants in my country - none. This is a disgraceful attack.' British teacher Paul Bartlett, who drove by after the attack, said: 'We saw big flames which were out of control. ' Seven people were reported injured. Shortly afterwards television reports showed angry crowds thronging the site with riot police holding them back.

Pentagon officials refused to disclose details of the strikes but said that between 75 and 100 missiles were involved.

Clinton broke off his holiday in Martha's Vineyard to announce the action, saying: 'Today we have struck back.

'These groups have executed terrorist attacks against Americans in the past. We have convincing evidence these groups played the key role in the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. Terrorists must have no doubt that in the face of their threat, America will protect its citizens,' he said before flying to Washington to address the nation.' U.S. politicians traditionally rally behind their president in such a crisis, but in an extraordinary break with Congressional tradition, some urged him to quit.

Dan Coats, a Republican senator from Indiana, said: 'I think the timing is extraordinary. The reaction of the President is so uncharacteristic of anything he has done in the six years of his presidency that it raises legitimate questions.

'He has broken the bond of trust that is necessary for any president to be effective as leader of the free world, and I think that places the United States in a dangerous situation.

'Was there a diversionary motive here? The President has obvious problems and I want know why this was done now. This is a question that will be asked around the world.' But House speaker Newt Gingrich backed the air raids, and said he had been expecting the action for several days.

Defence Secretary William Cohen insisted: 'The only motivation behind this was our absolute obligation to protect the American people from terrorist activities.

'We are engaged in a very difficult confrontation with the forces of international terrorism. The strike was designed to attack bin Laden's infrastructure and that's precisely what we have done.

'We have taken these actions to reduce the ability of these terrorist organisations to train and equip their misguided followers.

'Those who attack our people will find no safe place, no refuge from the long arm of justice.' Nevertheless, it seemed like an incredible coincidence that the strikes should take place on the very day that Miss Lewinsky was called back to testify again before the Grand Jury, just days after Clinton's humiliating admission that he had lied about their affair.

She was just leaving the court when the TV networks suddenly interrupted programmes to broadcast Clinton's dramatic announcement.

But officials were saying that planning for the attacks began seven days ago.

It took a week to get the warships in place and once there it was considered imperative to act immediately before word leaked out to the terrorists.

Remarkably, this is the second time Clinton has been able to push his sex scandal off the front pages with a foreign policy action.

In January and February of this year he ordered a massive buildup of forces in the Gulf in response to a refusal by Saddam Hussein to let U.N. weapons inspectors investigate suspected nuclear and chemical weapons sites.

'She Was Fighting to the Death'; Details Emerging of W. Va. Soldier's Capture and Rescue:[FINAL Edition]

Susan Schmidt and Vernon Loeb. The Washington Post. Washington, D.C.: Apr 3, 2003. pg. A.01

Pfc. Jessica Lynch, rescued Tuesday from an Iraqi hospital, fought fiercely and shot several enemy soldiers after Iraqi forces ambushed the Army's 507th Ordnance Maintenance Company, firing her weapon until she ran out of ammunition, U.S. officials said yesterday.

Lynch, a 19-year-old supply clerk, continued firing at the Iraqis even after she sustained multiple gunshot wounds and watched several other soldiers in her unit die around her in fighting March 23, one official said. The ambush took place after a 507th convoy, supporting the advancing 3rd Infantry Division, took a wrong turn near the southern city of Nasiriyah.

"She was fighting to the death," the official said. "She did not want to be taken alive."

Lynch was also stabbed when Iraqi forces closed in on her position, the official said, noting that initial intelligence reports indicated that she had been stabbed to death. No official gave any indication yesterday, however, that Lynch's wounds had been life-threatening.

Several officials cautioned that the precise sequence of events is still being determined, and that further information will emerge as Lynch is debriefed. Reports thus far are based on battlefield intelligence, they said, which comes from monitored communications and from Iraqi sources in Nasiriyah whose reliability has yet to be assessed. Pentagon officials said they had heard "rumors" of Lynch's heroics but had no confirmation.

http://proquest.umi.com

Saving Private Lynch story 'flawed'

By John Kampfner

Private Jessica Lynch became an icon of the war, and the story of her capture by the Iraqis and her rescue by US special forces became one of the great patriotic moments of the conflict.

But her story is one of the most stunning pieces of news management ever conceived.

Private Lynch, a 19-year-old army clerk from Palestine, West Virginia, was captured when her company took a wrong turning just outside Nasiriya and was ambushed.

Nine of her comrades were killed and Private Lynch was taken to the local hospital, which at the time was swarming with Fedayeen. Eight days later US special forces stormed the hospital, capturing the "dramatic" events on a night vision camera.

They were said to have come under fire from inside and outside the building, but they made it to Lynch and whisked her away by helicopter.

There was no [sign of] shooting, no bullet inside her body, no stab wound

Dr Harith a-Houssona Reports claimed that she had stab and bullet wounds and that she had been slapped about on her hospital bed and interrogated.

But Iraqi doctors in Nasiriya say they provided the best treatment they could for the soldier in the midst of war. She was assigned the only specialist bed in the hospital and one of only two nurses on the floor.

"I examined her, I saw she had a broken arm, a broken thigh and a dislocated ankle," said Dr Harith a-Houssona, who looked after her.

Jessica amnesia

"There was no [sign of] shooting, no bullet inside her body, no stab wound - only road traffic accident. They want to distort the picture. I don't know why they think there is some benefit in saying she has a bullet injury."

Witnesses told us that the special forces knew that the Iraqi military had fled a day before they swooped on the hospital.

"We were surprised. Why do this? There was no military, there were no soldiers in the hospital," said Dr Anmar Uday, who worked at the hospital.

"It was like a Hollywood film. They cried 'go, go, go', with guns and blanks without bullets, blanks and the sound of explosions. They made a show for the American attack on the hospital - action movies like Sylvester Stallone or Jackie Chan."

There was one more twist. Two days before the snatch squad arrived, Harith had arranged to deliver Jessica to the Americans in an ambulance.

But as the ambulance, with Private Lynch inside, approached a checkpoint American troops opened fire, forcing it to flee back to the hospital. The Americans had almost killed their prize catch.

When footage of the rescue was released, General Vincent Brooks, US spokesman in Doha, said: "Some brave souls put their lives on the line to make this happen, loyal to a creed that they know that they'll never leave a fallen comrade."

The American strategy was to ensure the right television footage by using embedded reporters and images from their own cameras, editing the film themselves.

The Pentagon had been influenced by Hollywood producers of reality TV and action movies, notably the man behind Black Hawk Down, Jerry Bruckheimer.

Bruckheimer advised the Pentagon on the primetime television series "Profiles from the Front Line", that followed US forces in Afghanistan in 2001. That approached was taken on and developed on the field of battle in Iraq.

As for Private Lynch, her status as cult hero is stronger than ever. Internet auction sites list Jessica Lynch items, from an oil painting with an opening bid of $200 to a $5 "America Loves Jessica Lynch" fridge magnet.

But doctors now say she has no recollection of the whole episode and probably never will.

Story from BBC NEWS:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/programmes/correspondent/3028585.stm

Published: 2003/05/15 08:50:39 GMT

ABC News Primetime Thursday, November 6, 2003

Jessica Lynch Interview: I'm No Hero

In the interview, Lynch also clears up conflicting stories about her actions during the March 23 ambush in which Lynch was taken prisoner. Initial reports portrayed the Army supply clerk, then 19, as a hero who was wounded by Iraqi gunfire but kept firing until her ammunition ran out, shooting several Iraqis.

But Lynch confirms that was not the case. She tells Sawyer she was just a soldier in the wrong place at the wrong time, whose gun jammed during the chaos. "I'm not about to take credit for something I didn't do," she tells Sawyer in the interview, airing Tuesday, Nov. 11.

"I did not shoot, not a round, nothing," she tells Sawyer. "When we were told to lock and load, that's when my weapon jammed É I did not shoot a single round É I went down praying to my knees. And that's the last I remember."

Lynch, now 20, says she feels hurt to have received praise she says her colleagues deserved. "It hurt in a way that people would make up stories that they had no truth about. They did not know whether I did that or not. Only I would have been able to know that, because the other four people on my vehicle aren't here to tell that story. So I would have been the only one able to say, 'Yeah, I went down shooting.' But I didn't. I did not."

Lynch described the moments of the ambush as terror and confusion. "Once it started, it was just chaos," she said, adding, "You could hear them [bullets] bouncing off our vehicle. You could hear people screaming. It was scary, so scary."

She said her convoy was surrounded by Iraqi attackers: "They were coming from everywhere. We had vehicles getting stuck, vehicles running out of gas É our weapons were jamming."

Her unit was ambushed after missing a turn and becoming separated from the convoy they were traveling in. "We weren't thinking quickly. We were so tired, we were hungry É it was just a mistake," Lynch said.

http://abcnews.go.com/sections/Primetime/US/Jessica_Lynch_031106-1.html

Tillman Killed by 'Friendly Fire'; Probe Cites Error Platoon Mates:[FINAL Edition]

Josh White. The Washington Post. Washington, D.C.: May 30, 2004. pg. A.01

Pat Tillman, the former pro football player, was killed by other American troops in a "friendly fire" episode in Afghanistan last month and not by enemy bullets, according to a U.S. investigation of the incident.

New details released yesterday about Tillman's death indicate that he was gunned down by members of his elite Army Ranger platoon who mistakenly shot in his direction when the unit was ambushed. According to a summary of the Army investigation, a Ranger squad leader mistook an allied Afghan Militia Force soldier standing near Tillman as the enemy, and he and other U.S. soldiers opened fire, killing both men.

That Tillman, 27, wasn't killed by enemy fire in a heroic rescue attempt was a major revelation by the U.S. military more than a month after the April 22 incident, which the Pentagon and members of Congress had hailed as an example of combat bravery. Tillman's sacrifice of millions of dollars when he left the National Football League's Arizona Cardinals to become a soldier has been held up as a stark contrast to the prison scandal in Iraq.

Shortly after his death, Army officials awarded Tillman a Silver Star for combat valor and a Purple Heart. He also was promoted from specialist to corporal. They said Tillman was killed while charging at the enemy up a hill, allowing the rest of his platoon to escape alive.

REALITY:

First, a vehicle with Tillman's unit broke down and the platoon mechanic could not fix it. Then, without air resources to lift the vehicle out of the area, the soldiers decided to tow the vehicle as they moved to their next assignment. On April 22, the soldiers split the platoon, sending a working vehicle ahead while Tillman's unit towed the disabled one, slowing it down, according to a spokesman for the U.S. Central Command in Florida.

"Approximately 30 minutes after the platoon split off in their separate directions, the section with the non-mission capable vehicle was ambushed by anti-coalition forces," the summary said. "Hearing the engagement, the other section of the platoon maneuvered to the location of the ambush and engaged in the fight."

It was then that the Afghan soldier was mistaken for the enemy and was killed when the other half of the platoon returned. Tillman, who was by his side, also was shot, the report said.

Military officials could not explain the discrepancy between earlier reports and the releases yesterday, saying that a month- long investigation into the attack helped clarify the events. The investigation reports that Tillman was killed after he got out of his vehicle and fought about a dozen insurgents in restricted terrain and in poor light conditions.

http://proquest.umi.com

CounterPunch

December 28, 2002

How Bush Sr. Sold the Bombing of Iraq

by MITCHEL COHEN

"The U.S. has a new credibility. What we say goes."

President George Bush, NBC Nightly News, Feb. 2, 1991

In October, 1990, a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl, identified only as Nayirah, appeared in Washington before the House of Representatives' Human Rights Caucus. She testified that Iraqi soldiers who had invaded Kuwait on August 2nd tore hundreds of babies from hospital incubators and killed them.

Television flashed her testimony around the world. It electrified opposition to Iraq's president, Saddam Hussein, who was now portrayed by U.S. president George Bush not only as "the Butcher of Baghdad" but -- so much for old friends -- "a tyrant worse than Hitler."

Bush quoted Nayirah at every opportunity. Six times in one month he referred to "312 premature babies at Kuwait City's maternity hospital who died after Iraqi soldiers stole their incubators and left the infants on the floor,"(1) and of "babies pulled from incubators and scattered like firewood across the floor." Bush used Nayirah's testimony to lambaste Senate Democrats still supporting "only" sanctions against Iraq -- the blockade of trade which alone would cause hundreds of thousands of Iraqis to die of hunger and disease -- but who waffled on endorsing the policy Bush wanted to implement: outright bombardment. Republicans and pro-war Democrats used Nayirah's tale to hammer their fellow politicians into line behind Bush's war in the Persian Gulf.(2)

Nayirah, though, was no impartial eyewitness, a fact carefully concealed by her handlers. She was the daughter of one Saud Nasir Al-Sabah, Kuwait's ambassador to the United States. A few key Congressional leaders and reporters knew who Nayirah was, but none of them thought of sharing that minor detail with Congress, let alone the American people.

Everything Nayirah said, as it turned out, was a lie. There were, in actuality, only a handful of incubators in all of Kuwait, certainly not the "hundreds" she claimed. According to Dr. Mohammed Matar, director of Kuwait's primary care system, and his wife, Dr. Fayeza Youssef, who ran the obstetrics unit at the maternity hospital, there were few if any babies in the incubators at the time of the Iraqi invasion. Nayirah's charges, they said, were totally false. "I think it was just something for propaganda," Dr. Matar said. In an ABC-TV News account after the war, John Martin reported that although "patients, including premature babies, did die," this occurred "when many of Kuwait's nurses and doctors stopped working or fled the country" -- a far cry from Bush's original assertion that hundreds of babies were murdered by Iraqi troops.(3) Subsequent investigations, including one by Amnesty International, found no evidence for the incubator claims.

It is likely that Nayirah was not even in Kuwait, let alone at the hospital, at that time; the Kuwaiti aristocracy and their families had fled the country weeks before the anticipated invasion. Some defended their country at the gaming tables in Monte Carlo, where at least one member of the ruling family was reported to have gambled away more than $10 million as his fellow rulers called for economic and military assistance from abroad.

As invasions go, Iraq's invasion of Kuwait was relatively -- I stress the word "relatively" -- bloodless. Despite the heart-rending testimonies TV viewers in the U.S. were subjected to night after night, fewer than 200 Kuwaitis were killed. Compare that to such "peaceful" ventures as the U.S. invasion of Panama the year before, which killed an estimated 7,500 Panamanians; or, a year after the Gulf war, the 10,000 Somalis killed by . troops in what was portrayed as a "peace mission" to bring food aid to the allegedly starving region.(4)

How did Nayirah first come to the attention of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, which put her before the world's cameras? It was arranged by Hill & Knowlton, a public relations firm hired to rally the U.S. populace behind Bush's policy of going to war. And it worked!

Hill & Knowlton's yellow ribbon campaign to whip up support for "our" troops, which followed their orchestration of Nayirah's phony "incubator" testimony, was a public relations masterpiece. The claim that satellite photos revealed that Iraq had troops poised to strike Saudi Arabia was also fabricated by the PR firm. Hill & Knowlton was paid between $12 million (as reported two years later on "60 Minutes") and $20 million (as reported on "20/20") for "services rendered." The group fronting the money? Citizens for a Free Kuwait, a phony "human rights agency" set up and funded entirely by Kuwait's emirocracy to promote its interests in the U.S.

"When Hill & Knowlton masterminded the Kuwaiti campaign to sell the Gulf War to the American public, the owners of this highly effective propaganda machine were residing in another country" -- the United Kingdom -- writes Sharon Beder and Richard Gosden in PR Watch. "Should this give pause for thought? Does it demonstrate a certain potential for the future exercise of global political power -- the power to manipulate democratic political processes through managing public opinion," which Hill and Knowlton demonstrated 10 years ago?(5)

All of this is concealed in a new HBO "behind-the-scenes true story" of the Gulf War, which is being released at this crucial political moment. As Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting writes, "HBO's version of history never makes clear that the incubator story was fraudulent, and in fact had been managed by an American PR firm, not Iraq. Curiously, however, the truth seems to have been clear to Robert Wiener, the former CNN producer who co-wrote 'Live from Baghdad.'As he explained to CNN's Wolf Blitzer (11/21/02), 'that story turned out to be false because those accusations were made by the daughter of the Kuwaiti minister of information and were never proven.' Unfortunately, HBO viewers won't know that when they see the film."(6)

In 1998, Hill and Knowlton found a new client -- President Clinton -- who hired them to advise him and to polish his image. The last time they were involved, by the time their lies were exposed TV newscasters were waxing ecstatic over the rockets' red glare, computerized "smart-bombs" bursting in air, and 250,000 people were dead.

Mitchel Cohen is the co-editor of Green Politix, the national newspaper of the Greens/Green Party USA. He can be reached at: mitchelcohen@mindspring.com

NOTES

1. Doug Ireland, Village Voice, March 26, 1991.

2. The use of the Big Lie to manipulate public opinion and neutralize opposition to a particular war was not invented by Bush. See, for instance, James Laxer, "Iraq: US has match, seeks kindle: American leaders have often falsified reasons to attack other countries," (ActionGreens, Mar. 31, 2001). Laxer is a Political Science Professor at York University, Toronto.

3. ABC World News Tonight, 3/15/91.

4. In actuality, people in only certain areas of Somalia were starving -- those that had been subjected to IMF structural adjustment programs. See, Mitchel Cohen, "Somalia & the Cynical Manipulation of Hunger," Red Balloon Collective, 1994.

5. Sharon Beder and Richard Gosden, "PR Watch," Volume 8, No. 2, 2nd Quarter 2001. The PR firm has since been working at the behest of the pharmaceutical industry to ban over-the-counter vitamin and nutritional supplement sales in Europe.

6. Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, "HBO Recycling Gulf War Hoax?" December 4, 2002.

http://www.counterpunch.org/cohen1228.html

<>
Reagan on Grenada Excerpt

President Reagan spoke to the nation on live television on October 27th, 1983 regarding the bombing in Lebanon and the liberation of Grenada.

The Grenada portion of the speech below came after the part on barracks bombing in Lebanon that killed over 200 Marines, the greatest one day loss of US troops since World War II. The excerpt below is the end of the speech.

May I share something with you I think you'd like to know? It's something that happened to the Commandant of our Marine Corps, General Paul Kelley, while he was visiting our critically injured marines in an Air Force hospital. It says more than any of us could ever hope to say about the gallantry and heroism of these young men, young men who serve so willingly so that others might have a chance at peace and freedom in their own lives and in the life of their country.

I'll let General Kelley's words describe the incident. He spoke of a "young marine with more tubes going in and out of his body than I have ever seen in one body."

"He couldn't see very well. He reached up and grabbed my four stars, just to make sure I was who I said I was. He held my hand with a firm grip. He was making signals, and we realized he wanted to tell me something. We put a pad of paper in his hand—and he wrote Semper Fi."

Well, if you've been a marine or if, like myself, you're an admirer of the marines, you know those words are a battle cry, a greeting, and a legend in the Marine Corps. They're marine shorthand for the motto of the Corps—Semper Fidelis—"always faithful."

General Kelley has a reputation for being a very sophisticated general and a very tough marine. But he cried when he saw those words, and who can blame him? That marine and all those others like him living and dead, have been faithful to their ideals. They've given willingly of them selves so that a nearly defenseless people in a region of great strategic importance to the free world will have a chance someday to live lives free of murder and mayhem and terrorism. I think that young marine and all of his comrades have given every one of us something to live up to.

They were not afraid to stand up for their country or, no matter how difficult and slow the journey might be, to give to others that last, best hope of a better future. We cannot and will not dishonor them now and the sacrifices they've made by failing to remain as faithful to the cause of freedom and the pursuit of peace as they have been.

I will not ask you to pray for the dead, because they're safe in God's loving arms and beyond need of our prayers. I would like to ask you all—wherever you may be in this blessed land—to pray for these wounded young men and to pray for the bereaved families of those who gave their lives for our freedom.

God bless you, and God bless America.

English 21B

2010-11-12T18:11:00.000-08:00

English 21B
eCompanion access
American Heritage Dictionary

The Matrix, Wag the Dog, & The Siege Readings

The Matrix

Can we grow people in a tank like Neo?

Vision of the Future

Looking through Cats' Eyes

First Electronic Eye for Blind

Putting Images in the Brain
Brain control headset for gamers

Seeing the Brain Lie

Recognizing the Scene of the Crime

Computer that reads your intentions

The Computer That Makes You Smarter

Memory Chip

Remote Control Rat

Wag the Dog

Wag the Dog cast & plot

Funeral Dog

***All Wag the Dog Readings***

The Siege

Raid on an Indian restaurant

Post-9/11 Immigrant Roundup Backfired

Tortured American Jose Padilla

Tortured Genitals

FBI Informant Lived with Hijackers

FBI Informant Gave '93
WTC Bombers Explosives

Al Qaeda Worked with US
in Afghanistan & Balkans

Martial Law & Posse Comitatus

Warrants to Listen?

Torture

Joining the Military
Pro & Con

SMC Datatbases

Wikipedia

Christian Science Monitor

Boston Globe

Democracy Now!
90.7 FM

Counter-Recruiting

Propaganda
Readings & Video

Propaganda Methods

Barry on Beer

Propaganda Article in Wikipedia

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

Ads

Winston

Winston Jingle

Beverly Hillbillies Winston

Flintstones' Winston

LBJ

Pres. Johnson Ads

Obama Ads

Superbowl

Mother

Same
McCain Ads

Global

Never Surrender

Obama Celebrity

Other Candidates

Bush Sr. Ads

Bill Clinton Ads

Ross Perot Ads

Coca-Cola

Mean Joe Green

I'd Like To Teach The World To Sing

Coca -Cola Christmas: Arctic Beach Party

Coke & a Smile Train

Pepsi

You've Got a Lot to Give

Simply Irresistable

Britney Spears

Litter PSAs

Crying Indian

Woodsy Owl: Who Will?

Unsecured Loads: Litter and It Will Hurt

Print Ads

Pick an era & 3 ads for same product

NEWS

The Guardian (publicly funded paper in UK)

BBC
(a source the rest of the world trusts)

Al Jazeera
(like the BBC, but closer to the action)

Democracy Now!
90.7 FM
6-7 am, 9-10 am, M-F
The best hour of news
everyday it's on

Frontline
(documentary series on
PBS, lots of foreign policy,
corporate issues, etc.)

History News Network
should more accurately be
called history AND news.
Historians and experts
post articles on both.

Pick a President

Project Vote Smart
(a good starting point for
comparing candidates records)

COVER LETTER

JOBS
INTERNSHIPS

SCHOLARSHIPS

E-Mail: myk15@verizon.net

SMC English 1 & VC English 1A

2010-11-07T20:08:00.000-08:00

SMC English 1 &
VC English 1A

VC Online Databases

Banished Words (Cliches)


Definition Links
Rape & Torture Essay Example Paragraphs handout Citing in Rape & Torture handout *all Rape & Torture Case Readings* Torture The Torture Memos UN Convention Against Torture Part 1 Articles 1-3 CIA Torture Research Brits & US use sex torture Abu Ghraib story More Hersh on Abu Ghraib Hersh on rape at Abu Ghraib VIDEO: Third Party Torture on 24 genitals cut with a scalpel more on the cut guy The Dark Art of Interrogation a broader overview of methods VIDEO: Torture Memo Author Asked if President Can Bury Someone Alive Date Rape military definition Antioch College definition Kobe Bryant in a nutshell Perception of Cues in Conflictual Dating Situations Magnitude Scaling of Intensity of Sexual Refusal Behaviors in a Date Rape Academic Freedom CULPA student reviews of Prof. Massad Sexual Harassment CNN: Sexual Harassment: Serious, Subtle, Stubborn Santa Monica College Case Weisberger Colby College Case College of the Canyons 1 College of the Canyons 2

Fallacy links

Wikipedia Propaganda Methods

***Sourcewatch***
second best

the Propaganda Game
(a fairly exhaustive list
with good examples)

Nizkor

Mission Critical
(scroll down to fallacies
section. This one has some
interactive exercises)


Propaganda Links
How vulnerable are you to propaganda? Take this test and find out. There are but two powers in the world, the sword and the mind. In the long run the sword is always beaten by the mind. Napoleon Bonaparte "Through clever and constant application of propaganda people can be made to see paradise as hell, and also the other way around, to consider the most wretched sort of life as paradise." Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, part I chapter X In view of the primitive simplicity of their minds they more easily fall a victim to a big lie than to a little one, since they themselves lie in little things, but would be ashamed of lies that were too big. Such a falsehood will never enter their heads and they will not be able to believe in the possibility of such monstrous effrontery and infamous misrepresentation in others; yes, even when enlightened on the subject, they will long doubt and waver, and continue to accept at least one of these causes as true. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, part I chapter X I shall give a propagandist cause for starting the war never mind whether it be plausible or not. The victor shall not be asked later on whether we told the truth or not. Adolf Hitler, speech to inner circle, Aug. 22, 1939 Hitler's "War Propaganda" Herman Goering on selling war Hitler's speech on victory in Poland FDR's Pearl Harbor speech


Science Links
The BBC (a good site to search with credible info and easily digestible articles) Evolution Institute for Creation Research Dr. Duane T. Gish pre-eminent creationist Creationist Response to DNA Creationism's geologic time scale Recent Peer Reviewed Article by Grant's on Galapagos Finches Local Evolution in Progress Uncle Bacteria? The Genetic Archaeology of Race NAS on Evolution vs. Creationism Scientific American Response to Creationist Arguments Origin of Species by Charles Darwin UFO/Alien Abduction An Astronomer's Personal Statement on UFOs Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Mars or Europa: Where Does Life Exist? New York Times: SETI article Abduction by Aliens or Sleep Paralysis? Nova:Kidnapped by UFOs? Alien Autopsy--Faked or Fiction? (I have no memory of this picture being taken) Alien Abduction Experience & Research Abduction test PEER \| Program for Extraordinary Experience Research \| (Dr. John Mack's website) Harvard Reaction to Mack UFO City (UFO news) Animal Intelligence The Truth About Cats and Frogs; We Do Animals No Favor When We Think They Are Like Us Time: Can Animals Think? BBC: Overview of Animal Experiments Debate Baby and Chimp Raised Together Koko's Dead Kitten Chat with Koko the Gorilla Online Koko Signing Koko's Webpage *Researchers Journal of talking to Koko* Studying Wild Gorillas *Washoe's webpage* *Orangutan Language Project* **Great Apes Trust S P A C E C H I M P S The Jane Goodall Institute My best friend is a chimp "Speaking Bonobo" Smithsonian Magazine Animal Intelligence: How Brainy Are They? PBS: Inside the Animal Mind The Foundation for Biomedical Research Americans for Medical Progress PETA** PETA primate Experiment videos American Anti-Vivisection Society Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Response to Animal Rights Arguments in Medical Journal Scientific American:Trends in Animal Research Scientific American: Animal Research Is Wasteful and Misleading Scientific American: Animal research is vital to medicine Full text no longer available, but you can check dates and get print version in the library. Looking Through Cat's Eyes PBS Frontline: Organ farm


Language and Literature Links
Internet Movie Database: Top Movies Rotten Tomatoes: Top Movies Roger Ebert (movie reviews to refresh your memory)


Statistics Links
*Bureau of Justice Statistics* Statistical Resources on the Web List of Poll Links PollingReport.com (pretty exhaustive comparison of polls on many issues)

Government Links

***Bureau of Justice Statistics*** Death Penalty Information Center
Pro-Death Penalty.com
CQ Researcher Index
PBS: Frontline: "The Case for Innocence"
Innocence Project
PBS: Frontline: "Drug Wars"
What Is the Matter With Mary Jane?
Yahoo! Death Penalty
Yahoo! Drug Policy
Frontline index
Newsweek
DRUG POLICY IN THE NETHERLANDS
The Canadian Foundation for Drug Policy


Research
Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan We can have an honest disagreement, but when we can't even agree on the facts, someone is lying. Michael J. Dixon Facts are stubborn things and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence. John Adams, Arguments in Defense of the Soldiers in the Boston Massacre Trials, December 1770 Research Starting Points Ventura College CQ Researcher & Proquest CQ how to Wikipedia *Congressional Research Service * better than average news The Guardian (respected British paper) BBC (a source the rest of the world trusts) Al Jazeera (like the BBC, but closer to the action) Democracy Now! 90.7 FM 6-7 am, 9-10 am, M-F The best hour of news everyday it's on Frontline (documentary series on PBS, lots of foreign policy, corporate issues, etc.) History News Network should more accurately be called history AND news. Historians and experts post articles on both. Pick a President Project Vote Smart (a good starting point for comparing candidates records) Thomas Legislative Info (government source of links) New York Times Congressional Guide Michael Moore Fahrenheit 9/11 Notes + Sources Michael Moore Homepage (has press and critics) Spinsanity analysis Election 2000 2004 vote suppression in Florida BBC Florida 2004 BBC TV News story on purge of black voters Diebold Memos Disclose Florida 2000 E-Voting Fraud (see link to CBS News internal review of election coverage) US Commission on Civil Rights Reports on 2000 Election (discusses black voter purge, as seen in the video in class) Examples of Black Voters Turned away from Polls Flaws in 2004 felon list Civil Rights Commission Urges Criminal Investigation in Florida Electronic Voting GAO study on electronic voting Brief summary of GAO findings Newsweek on Electronic Voting Black Box Voting.org (the starting point. Bev Harris is the investigator who first broke this and has done the best research) University of Iowa Computer Science Department analysis of Diebold flaws Diebold head says he will do anything to get Bush re-elected Vietnam Vet ahead in polls loses by 13% on Diebold This is long, so here's a crucial excerpt: In Georgia, Republican Saxby Chambliss repeatedly questioned the patriotism of Democratic incumbent and triple amputee war hero Max Cleland during his campaign. Chambliss made the absurd claim that he was more patriotic than Cleland even though he had avoided service in the Vietnam war with a "medical deferment". A Poll taken by the Atlanta Journal Constitution published on November 1st, just five days before the election, showed support for Georgia Democratic Senator Max Cleland at 49%, clearly 5% ahead of Republican Saxby Chambliss at 44%. Many People in Georgia, particularly veterans, had been angered by the crude remarks made by Chambliss and they turned out in record numbers to vote for Cleland. When the 'Diebold' Electronic Voting tally was made public it stunned and confused the Georgia voters. Saxby Chambliss had won with 53% of the vote compared to Max Cleland's 46%. It represented a 13% pro-Republican swing that seemed to materialize out of cyberspace. The victories of Chambliss and Hagel, along with the tragic October 25, 2002 plane crash that killed Democratic Senator Paul Wellstone, virtually guaranteed Republican control of the Senate. More example of odd results using touch screens (with links) how the vote count can be manipulated Media Censorship/Consolidation/Bias Project Censored Press freedom index Censored SNL Toon on Media Consolidation Disinfopedia an encyclopedia of propaganda, PR, and political BS "viral marketing" is worth a paper by itself Urban Legends Reference Pages PR firms have figured out how urban legends spread and use the same mechanism, so there's a lot of overlap PR Watch watching those who fake the news PR Watch on Kuwaiti Incubator story a good example of how PR fakes the news Council of Public Relations Firms (these are the guys who actually do it) Fox News Producer on Bias Lie or Cut Story Critical of Advertiser Columbia Journalism Review checks bias and accuracy MediaMatters.org fact checks and analyzes primarily right wing sources FAIR Fairness and Accurary in Reporting A great overall resource for media issues. Takes on left and right. Spinsanity.org fact checks and analysis FactCheck.org emphasis on political ads at the moment Media Channel covers all the issues Free Press Media Reform activist website, but covers all the issues The Center for Public Integrity primarily on government corruption, but a lot of stuff on media (you have to buy the politicians to consolidate) Institute for Public Accuracy in depth research on stories in the news Outfoxed devastating analysis of the fair and balanced network *Outfoxed trailer* funny and offensive especially why there aren't more black cops Primary Documents on Foreign Policy *good for all topics except maybe energy* Frontline Iraqi Threat "Allow the president to invade a neighboring nation whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion ... and you allow him to make war at pleasure. If today he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to him, 'I see no probability of the British invading us,' but he will say to you, 'Be silent: I see it if you don't.'" Congressman Abraham Lincoln, 1848 Frontline: 10/03 Iraq story links Retired Pentagon Analyst Returned to Work After 9/11 Now Critical of use of Iraq intel British Cabinet Member Says Threat Faked Blair Knew Iraq not a Threat says his Foreign Minister Diplomats & Military Commanders for Change non-partisan career diplomats and Pentagon officials critical of Bush foreign policy and intelligence abuses in an unprecedented public letter Wilson on fake uranium letter CIA director's letter to Senate before Iraq War Pentagon Intel said no WMD Fall before war Intelligence Insiders Speak out on Iraq Interview with Producer of UNCOVERED a documentary comparing Bush claims about Iraq with what Intelligence told him Cooperative Research Iraq Bibliograghy (some links, but an excellent outline of issues and sources you can find yourself on proquest) Rumsfeld, Saddam and WMD Rumsfeld's handshake with Saddam and primary documents on why he was there Pew Polls of Iraq and world Gallup poll of Iraqis Spring 2004 Coalition Provisional Authority Poll of Iraqis What do we have for comparison? US Nukes Nuke Delivery systems 9/11: what did we know? TV show on WTC attack BEFORE 9/11 Retroactively classified testimony Four 9/11 Moms Battle Bush 9/11 Families Questions 9/11 Commission *9/11 Commission Report* Saudi Money to Al Qaeda Pakistani Money & Intelligence Contact with 9/11 Hijackers The Man Who Knew (An FBI agent who hunted alQaeda, was blocked by superiors, quit in frustration, and went to work at the WTC, where he was killed on 9/11) Congressional 9/11 Report Congressional 9/11 Report (html format, easier to access, but not directly from the government) Cooperative Research 9/11 Bibliograghy (some links, but an excellent outline of issues and sources you can find yourself on proquest) Causes of Terrorism BBC 911 Causes overview BBC 911 Details Frontline: Interview with Osama bin Laden Library of Congress Country Studies Hunting for Bin Laden Islam: Empire of Faith (PBS) Yes, This Is About Islam Al Jazeera (like CNN in the Arab world) Arab News 9/11 (their analysis, POV) Business & Intervention "There is only one thing in this world, and that is to keep acquiring money and more money, power and more power. All the rest is meaningless." Napoleon Bonaparte MARKETS; Oil Economics Lubricates Push for War Dollar vs. Euro showdown in Middle East Intervention & democracy/nation building, etc. “There is such a thirst for gain [among military suppliers]…that it is enough to make one curse their own Species, for possessing so little virtue and patriotism.” President George Washington, 1778 “I don’t want to see a single war millionaire created in the United States as a result of this world disaster.” President Franklin D. Roosevelt, during World War II War Is a Racket by Major General Smedley Butler two time Medal of Honor winner He tells the real cause of every military campaign he fought in President Eisenhower's Farewell Address: In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together. (see section IV) Confessions of an Economic Hitman One of the players explains why Third World countries have crushing debt and who benefits *US Military Interventions* Great list that gives causes, propaganda, and inciting incident for wars. Somewhat biased, but mostly accurate Speeches and Eyewitnesses to Intervention *Mark Twain on Philippines is great, and Lodge on need for expansion is very relevant Recent Actions re. Turkey New York Times Special Report: The CIA in Iran Pentagon Papers (on Vietnam) Corpwatch corporate watchdog Corpwatch Links Great direct links to corporate webpages coverage of research subtopics like globalization, WTO, war profiteers Israel Frontline: Battle for the Holy Land How Will Israel Survive?** Major article in Newsweek, looks at background and future additional links Illegal Immigration Congressional Budget Office on true cost

Remove spaces and add @ to email me:

E-Mail: migueljdixon (at) gmail.com

All Single Parent Readings

2010-11-07T15:35:00.000-08:00

Feeling a Bit Scared In a Brave New Father-Free World

Donna Britt. The Washington Post. Sep 4, 1998.

Everywhere you look, there they aren't.

They aren't in the lives of Jodie Foster, Sandra Bernhard, Madonna, Erykah Badu or a host of other celebrity single moms. Not one was around recently when two Spice Girls, "Posh" and "Scary," announced their pregnancies. The complex picture that emerged after two blue-eyed Virginia toddlers were revealed to have been switched at birth -- a portrait complete with grandparents, a teary mother and assorted lawyers -- lacked even one.

I'm talking about fathers -- specifically dads who are married to the mothers of the infants they helped create. At least both pregnant Spice Girls are engaged. But in our brave new world of marriage-free child-raising, little was made of the fact that neither mom in the baby-switching case had wed her daughter's father. And that wherever the toddlers end up, they won't have a daddy.

But hey -- it was just another no-daddy news story.

We see them all the time. In recent weeks, two prominent East Coast journalists announced their marriage-free pregnancies. This week, I thought nothing could be sadder than the story of the Virginia woman who discovered the body of her missing son at the scene of the car accident where he had died -- and where police and medics had inadvertently overlooked him. Then I read that her fresh-faced, unmarried son, 19, had twin sons living in Alabama.

Statistics tell me that nationally, unwed births are declining. My gut tells me that the drop may be too little, too late.

There have always been fatherless children through divorce, death and contraceptive error; single parents who adopt are my heroes. But I'm alarmed by the casualness with which some people now approach unwed parenthood, the hardest job I, after my divorce, ever faced.

I don't know which makes me crazier: the girls and women who thoughtlessly have babies without the benefit of emotionally and legally committed husbands, or the guys who plant their seed with no intention of experiencing the magical -- and needy -- creature that blossoms as a result.

Or is it the culture that ignores unwed parenthood until it's too late?

Well, we'd better start caring. In a new, 14-year study of 6,000 males, ages 14 to 22, Cynthia Harper, of the University of Pennsylvania, and Sara S. McLanahan, of Princeton University, found that boys with absentee fathers are twice as likely to be incarcerated as those from traditional two-parent families -- regardless of their race, income and parents' education.

Clearly, fathers who live with their sons -- and presumably, their daughters -- often add something undefinable, nurturing and necessary to their children's development.

And as a society, we are ignoring that.

I asked my son, 16 -- who adores both his birth father and the very involved stepdad who is raising him -- why fathers matter.

"Fathers are so important," he said. "Kids need somebody other than their moms to talk to, to give them guidance about what men should do, how men think. You need a man around to know how a man feels."

Yes, you do. But how does that happen in a world in which uncommitted sex is not only common but celebrated by pop culture? In which -- for good and ill -- the stigma against single motherhood has greatly decreased? In which our relaxed sexual mores inevitably result in more single women getting pregnant?

As someone who always deeply longed for children, I understand how a woman who never found a loving mate could still want, and have, a child. Additionally, "many young women find no evidence within their families or neighborhoods that a marriage will be secure or that their child's father will stick around," writes Melissa Ludtke in her book "On Our Own: Unmarried Motherhood in America." Young single moms, she says, ask, "Why get involved with someone who will just tell me what to do?"

For financially secure older women -- who are aware of soaring divorce rates and of the many "committed" husbands who barely participate in child-rearing -- the choice may be based on a decision, said Ludtke: Life without a husband is tolerable; life without a child is not.

I understand. But where does that leave us?

Stumped, sad and confused, for my part. I'm sick of hearing unwed parents routinely say, "I wasn't ready to get married" -- as if they were ready to bring a costly and demanding new life into the world.

In a nation in which morality is increasingly negotiable, in which there are few rules and fewer consequences for breaking them, in which everyone feels the right -- no, the obligation -- to fulfill himself or herself regardless of the impact, I see no way out of our father-free fix.

Which leaves me feeling terrible. And dreading the next no-daddy news story.

Few Now Quail at TV's Unwed Moms

Unlike Murphy Brown, such characters are not targets of conservatives

DANA CALVO. Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles, Calif.: Oct 26, 2001.

Each week, more than 29 million people tune in to NBC's "Friends," making it the most watched show on television, but the program's newest story line--Rachel's decision to have and raise a child alone--has evaded scrutiny from conservatives, a group who spent considerable political capital on the same issue less than a decade ago.

When Rachel's pal Joey asks her to marry him so that she will not face this "scary" world as a single mother, Rachel squeezes his bicep, thanks him and replies warmly, "I'm not looking for a husband."

Rachel is not alone. On prime-time television this season, there are single mothers by choice on ABC, NBC, the WB and HBO. These are not divorcees or widows. These are women making a conscious decision to go it alone, and their convictions have drawn nary a peep from the likes of former Vice President Dan Quayle, who skewered the fictional newswoman Murphy Brown nine years ago when she decided to do the same. At the time, Quayle said Brown's story line glamorized out-of-wedlock births, and when Candice Bergen won an Emmy for her portrayal of Brown she made a point of mentioning the veep in her acceptance speech. (Quayle was out of the country for most of this month and unavailable for comment.)

"The professional, single mother is no longer the pariah," said Sheri Annis, a media and political consultant in L.A. who thinks the dialogue about single-mother households has changed radically since Quayle used Murphy Brown as an antithesis of his family-values platform. Partly, Annis said, it is due to the sheer numbers of single mothers compared with 10 or 20 years ago. But it is also because many of the women on TV choosing to raise kids are well- educated, wealthy and eager to assume the responsibilities of parenthood.

Those story lines reflect a cultural shift among a portion of the television audience that advertisers want to reach. This past decade's booming economy produced unprecedented numbers of well- educated women with disposable income. Suddenly, placing commercials on programs targeting that "modern woman" seemed savvy, not risky.

"These same women are reaching their late 30s now and thinking [about their] biological clock. TV's answer has been single parenting, [which is] non-disruptive to story lines and programs," said Tina Pieraccini, professor of communication studies at the State University of New York at Oswego. "Remember when Rhoda got married--it didn't work!"

As with Rachel, marriage for most TV single moms is not even a consideration. Last season, Ellenor on ABC's "The Practice" went to a sperm bank and eventually won full custody of her child, whose sperm-donor father sought equal parenting rights. Miranda on HBO's "Sex and the City" conceived during "pity sex" with her bartender ex- boyfriend, who felt sexually inadequate. Determined to abort the fetus, Miranda sits in the waiting room of a clinic, but then decides that her "lazy ovaries" might be offering her her one chance to have a child.

Less than 10 years ago Miranda would have been criticized for her casual approach to starting a family, to say nothing of her abortion stand. But now, according to Parents Television Council director L. Brent Bozell, there are more urgent causes to press.

"The top three issues are the graphic and gratuitous violence on television; the sheer promiscuity of sex; the raunchy language," he said

Annis offers another theory. "People aren't looking down on single motherhood, because it's everywhere," she said. "They're concerned about the children who don't have the access to education and health care."

Those quality-of-life questions were part of Quayle's argument-- that far too many real-life single mothers didn't have the advantages of Murphy Brown.

Typical of the way the single-mom story lines play out over time is Roz, the articulate, savvy assistant to Dr. Frasier Crane on NBC's well-watched show "Frasier." Roz conceived her baby during a tryst with a teenager several seasons ago and decided to raise the baby alone. She never mentions the child's father and does not appear to have any relationship with him. Parenting in Roz's world comes with few problems.

But situations such as Roz's are ridiculous, according to Don DeVine, vice chairman of the American Conservative Union, the country's oldest and largest grass-roots conservative organization. DeVine attributes his colleagues' silence to disgust rather than acceptance. Rather, DeVine believes there is no need to lash out at the producers of these images on television because America has realized the fictional scenarios have no relevance to their own lives or values.

"Most people have figured Hollywood is irretrievable and have tried to go about living their lives around it, or without it," DeVine said. "No matter how much brainwashing Hollywood does, those conservative values stay there. It's hard to find a liberal these days that doesn't see a single mom as a problem.... Conservatives still don't like what's going on in Hollywood and New York."

And most observers agree he's got a point about "what's going on in Hollywood." Television seems to be imitating real life for stars, not real life for ordinary people. Here, wealthy, white actresses such as Diane Keaton, Calista Flockhart and Jodie Foster have made single motherhood look manageable and hip.

"As you count it up, [the Hollywood single-mom phenomenon] certainly is an over-representation of the general population," said Pieraccini. "It looks like a more common, widespread choice on television with the well-to-do mother. But in real life, the more common thing is the divorced single mother."

As a group, single mothers in the United States grew by 27% from 1990 to 2000, producing an estimated 7.6 million single mothers today, census figures show. (That represents a significant drop from the previous decade, when single-mother homes increased 46%.) There is no data that breaks out whether the women within that group choose to have or adopt a child without a partner or whether they are single mothers as a result of widowhood or divorce. But individuals familiar with the culture of single mothers by choice say television's inclusion of single moms is probably showing a disproportionate number of these women.

Jane Mattes, head of Single Mothers by Choice, a 20-year-old worldwide membership organization that helps single mothers find information, agreed. "It's always going to be a small percentage of people who choose to have a child alone," she said. "All of the prophesizing--that marriage would go out the window, that women wouldn't 'need' men--that didn't happen. Most women would still prefer to have a child with a man they love and respect. But it doesn't always work out that way."

Still, some find it impolitic for groups to fault female TV characters who are clearly intent on creating a nurturing atmosphere for the children they've consciously chosen to raise. That extends to such story lines as the WB's "Gilmore Girls," which does not fall neatly within the confines of "better late than never."

"Gilmore Girls" centers on a mother and a daughter who are only 16 years apart. The mother, a member of a wealthy family in Connecticut, has never been married, although the father has a warm relationship with both of the women. The show's creator, Amy Sherman- Palladino, said "Gilmore Girls" writers are continually discussing the standards of a "proper" upbringing.

"Our main character was raised by the most moral, upright, wealthy people, and [yet] their daughter still ended up getting pregnant at 16," she said. The show has not merely avoided criticism- -it has been lauded for its wholesome content, with endorsements from the Family Friendly Forum and Viewers for Quality Television. That reception seems like a dramatic departure from the climate less than a decade ago, but to Sherman-Palladino, it makes perfect sense. She said the growing number of single mothers on television indicates that an expanded definition of family values has gained integrity.

"Family values means you love and take care of the ones around you," she said. "It got turned into a judgmental thing where a group of people tell you if you're moral. After a while, frankly, I think the country got creeped out by that."

Looking Beyond Sex

Donna Britt. The Washington Post. Nov 20, 1998.

Sitting across from ShawnNee at the coffee shop, I watch as she dabs a crumpled napkin at her wet, beautiful eyes. "I will tell anyone," she is saying, "that being a single mother is the hardest job they will ever have. You are responsible for putting a roof over a child's head, quality day care, class trips, everything."

Another dab. Every few weeks, I stop in to chat with this pretty and eloquent Silver Spring resident whom I met when she was in high school. Today, she's saying that she broke up with her 4-month-old son's father, whom she hoped to marry, because he kept hitting her.

Like millions of young women, ShawnNee, 25, didn't quite believe that the sex she was having -- because she was lonely, and needy, and it looked like love -- would result in a human being.

"Recently," she continues, "I offered to pay for {a friend's} abortion. I said, `You have no idea what's ahead of you.' "

Yet ShawnNee adores her baby. Watching her dab and sniff, it occurs to me: The sexual revolution is over.

Sex won.

We sure didn't. If the generation that rebelled against its parents' traditional notions of sex and commitment won, why do we look like such losers?

In some communities, "my baby's father" has replaced "my husband" and even "my boyfriend" as the only acknowledged link between women and their children's daddies. In metropolitan Washington, a third of the households are headed by women -- and only one in five of the region's single mothers has a household income above $50,000, says a new report by the Greater Washington Research Center. On average, women still make less money than men and are more likely to be on welfare; they tend to be the financial losers in divorce.

"A lot of young girls want someone to love," ShawnNee is saying. "They don't believe in their worth. So they keep kissing frogs -- guys who aren't serious."

Older girls, too. A week ago, I learned a dear friend -- who's smart, thoughtful and pushing 30 -- is pregnant. I'd break out the champagne, except:

My friend is single; she's already caring for the two young children of an incapacitated pal; her baby-to-be's father is married, though separated. Having survived one guilt-swamped abortion, my friend -- who was on the pill when she conceived with this man with whom she wasn't serious! -- is determined to have her child.

Women without mates have been raising children -- some quite well, thank you -- for centuries. As long as there is divorce and death, as long as people fall out of love, there will be single moms. I am certain that my friend's intelligence and resourcefulness and the generosity that moved her to take in two needy youngsters will make her a wonderful parent.

As a former single mom, I am just as certain that she is embarking on the toughest, loneliest journey she has ever undertaken.

That's despite the supportive parents and pals my friend has nearby. "Nearby" may as well be "Beirut" when it's 4 a.m., you have to be at work at 8, and your newborn is wailing for the third time since midnight. When all that exists in the world is your exhaustion and the wailing.

It's unfair, just blaming sex. But hey -- babies start with the act that movies, music and TV shows suggest is fun and consequence-free. In fact, the consequences of sex are often tiny human beings with great big needs.

Human beings who just keep getting bigger.

Theresa Sykes, a science teacher at Montgomery County's ethnically and economically diverse White Oak Middle School, recently watched sympathetically as several parents burst into tears in the middle of parent-teacher conferences. All, she says, were single mothers.

The women's children, Sykes says, included "one very bright child whose grades were slipping because he was clearly grieving over his absent father, and another who'd always been really responsible who was suddenly rebelling -- his mom has to work two jobs, he's by himself . . .

"It's hard enough raising kids with two parents," Sykes says. "Some single mothers don't have any idea of what's down the road, when their cute little baby becomes an impressionable adolescent."

ShawnNee has looked down that road and is terrified. So has my friend, whose two adopted children will be joined by a newborn. As a perpetually overwhelmed married mother, I tremble for them both.

But how do we get a hip, overconfident culture to accept the old-timey notion that contraceptive mistakes happen? That women -- who, unfairly yet unavoidably, bear the principal financial, physical and emotional burden of kids without dads -- should avoid sex with men with whom they are unprepared to consider having a child?

I ask ShawnNee.

"It is much easier to get pregnant than people realize," she says. "But I realized that I had to change. To believe in myself . . . that you don't need a baby, or a man, to love yourself."

She stops dabbing and almost smiles.

"That you don't have to keep kissing these frogs."

Understanding BABY MAMAS

Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas. Orlando Sentinel. Aug 14, 2005.

Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas are both Philadelphia-based sociologists and the Authors of "Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage" (2002, University of California Press). Edin teaches at the University of Pennsylvania and Kefalas at St. Joseph's University.

Americans are up in arms over the latest instance of pop culture marketing the "wrong message" to the nation's youth. Fantasia Barrino's hit song "Baby Mama" celebrates what some view as the single greatest threat to the American family: young women who bear and raise a child on their own.

Today one in three American children is born to unmarried parents, but one rarely sees a "baby mama" pushing a stroller on an affluent suburban sidewalk or an Ivy League university campus. That's because having children while young and unmarried is far more than a fad. We live in an America that is profoundly unequal, with a yawning gap between rich and poor. As genuine opportunities for upward mobility plummet and living-wage jobs disappear, many neighborhoods in America's neglected inner city have become worlds without hope, populated by young women and men whose future prospects are already so dim there is simply nothing to lose by having a baby while young or unmarried. Here, hopes for college and rewarding careers are little more than pipe dreams. Here, becoming a "baby mama" rises to the top of the list of potential meaning- making activities through mere lack of competition.

Between 1995 and 2000, we entered into the lives of 162 poor black, white and Puerto Rican single mothers living in poor inner- city neighborhoods across the Philadelphia area. While suburban girls "hook up," conscientiously use contraception and have an abortion if they find themselves pregnant before they wed, poor young women practice contraception lackadaisically and move from courtship to conception at lightning speed. While suburban girls usually view having a baby before finishing school and establishing a career as an unmitigated disaster, their poor inner-city counterparts see childbearing as a natural part of late adolescence and early adulthood. Most suburban high-school seniors won't have a child for a decade or more. Meanwhile, Linda, a poor black mother of two from inner-city Philadelphia, exclaims, "Wait till you're 30 or 40 [to have children]? I don't think so!"

In poor urban neighborhoods, the norms suburban youth hold seem to work in reverse. The right thing to do, according to the women we came to know, is to greet a less-than-perfectly-planned pregnancy with a resolve to rise to the challenge. Conversely, they view those who terminate a pregnancy merely to advance their education or career as selfish at best, immoral at worst. Why? Coming of age in a poor urban neighborhood creates a powerful need for something positive to "look to." Before pregnancy, these young women's lives were often spinning out of control, dogged by school failure, struggles with parents and peers, the lure of drugs and alcohol and the omnipresent dangers on their neighborhood streets. Into this void comes a baby, bringing a profound sense of meaning and identity. The minute-by-minute demands of caring for a child bring order out of the chaos, generate a powerful sense of purpose and offer a profound source of relational intimacy -- a self-made community of care. Deena, a white mother of three, eagerly exclaims, "I wanted my son; I did. I wanted a baby. It wasn't like because everybody else had a baby. I really wanted to have a family. I wanted somebody to take care of."

Contrary to popular opinion, most "baby mamas" don't become single mothers because they no longer believe in marriage. Surprisingly, most aspire to marriage and place a sacred significance on the institution. But they think too much of marriage to wed in circumstances that will almost certainly lead to divorce. That's why they hold off on marriage until they are economically stable and emotionally mature. Melissa, a white mother of one, says people should marry "when they're 40. This way you've got everything situated [financially] and you know what you're getting into by then." She then pauses, and reflects, "I guess the kids come first. I don't know; I guess that's just the way it goes."

Unlike their 1950s counterparts, the mothers we met are not looking to wed so they can depend on a man to bring home the bacon while they stay home and fry it up in a pan. These mothers have suffered a host of ills at the hands of their children's fathers: domestic abuse and chronic infidelity, drinking and drug use, criminal behavior and the jail and prison terms that so often follow. Given these problems, it is astonishing that they have any hope for marriage at all. While some succeed in their search for a diamond in the rough, an exception to the neighborhood rule, mistrust of men runs deep. So while most hope to marry and marry "for life," they are careful to hedge their bets, insisting on being "set" economically in their own right before entering into the risky enterprise of marriage. Stella, an African-American mother of one, plans to marry her child's father but adds, "I want to be able to support my daughter independently. If things do not work out the way we want them to, I want to be able to do what I need to do for her without being stuck waiting for his help."

Meanwhile, precious few single mothers while away their hours sporting their babies around the neighborhood, competing with their friends about which baby has the cutest outfit. Who has time for that, when birth often brings a surge of determination to "get myself together for the baby"? As Fantasia's song extols, being a "baby mama" is all about, "payin' ya bills working ya job goin' to school," not waiting for a welfare check. This song vividly reveals the paucity of welfare as a means of survival: "You get that support check in the mail, ya open it and you're like `What the hell?' You say `This ain't even half of daycare.' "

Economists have shown that a poor girl's prospects aren't any better when they wait until their mid-20s to have their children, and most single mothers know this full well -- the $7-an-hour job they can land at 18 is the same $7-an-hour job they'll be holding down at 28. Most work to support themselves and their children and very few now rely on welfare for very long. So why should we concern ourselves with the growing number of women who put motherhood before marriage? While the young mother's future prospects may not be hurt, having a child outside of a stable two-parent union does put the child at risk for a host of social ills, including behavioral problems, school failure, mental-health problems, teen pregnancy and difficulty finding stable employment in adulthood. Many single mothers do an extraordinary job as parents, and not all of the men who father their children turn out to be good bets for a lifetime partnership. Some of these men are downright dangerous to the well- being of children. But on average, children do pay a heavy price for growing up fatherless, a price that few single mothers fully comprehend. To the extent that we care about children, we should work to improve single parents' ability to achieve what they themselves often say they deeply desire: a stable and lasting relationship with their children's father.

Ultimately, young women in inner-city neighborhoods aren't aspiring to become a "baby mama" to trap a man into supporting them, or simply to get that meager welfare check; they aren't getting pregnant because they can't get birth control or lack knowledge of the facts of life. They have children because they see little reason to wait. From their point of view, there is precious little to lose and so much to gain through motherhood. When other avenues for creating esteem -- a sound education, promising career, or comfortable lifestyle -- are blocked, having a baby is a way to bring order, purpose, and relational intimacy into lives that have already veered badly off track. Most of these young women know full well that raising a child alone is going to be an uphill battle. Yet they, like Fantasia, believe that "What don't kill you can only make you stronger."

How Kids Fare in New Welfare Era

Study finds single mothers struggle to work as well as care for their children

Marilyn Gardner Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor. Christian Science Monitor. Apr 16, 2002.

Document URL: http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb

Ask Mary Patino about the advantages of work over welfare and she offers an upbeat answer.

"My life is much different," says Ms. Patino, a food-service worker at a wholesale club in San Jose, Calif. "When I was on aid, it was stress - worrying about having enough money to pay the rent and give my daughters what they need. Now I have a steady income."

But ask if her children are better off, and she hedges. "On the financial part, yes," she says. "But as a mom, I know they need a lot more attention and time."

As welfare reform has propelled millions of single mothers like Patino into the workforce since 1996, questions about its effects on families have loomed large. Now a report released today offers the first national look at how toddlers and preschoolers have fared under the new system.

The good news is that the demand that welfare recipients find jobs has boosted family income. But the stubborn counterpoint is that the modest economic gains have not discernably improved families' living conditions or the daily lives of young children.

It's a sign that, while the welfare-to-work law has enjoyed bipartisan support and helped cut welfare rolls in half since 1996, lingering questions remain about its effect on children.

In the study, mothers' earnings averaged less than $13,000 a year, keeping most families below the poverty line.

Since government assistance diminishes as their job income rises, some mothers still do not have enough money to pay the rent. One- fifth of all mothers in the study had to cut the size of meals they serve their children because they lack cash to buy more food. Two in every 5 women also reported significant levels of emotional depression.

Researchers followed more than 700 single mothers for up to four years after they entered welfare-to-work programs in California, Florida, and Connecticut. Where other welfare studies have focused on elementary school children and high school students, this is the first comprehensive look at the impact on young children, who are most affected by their mothers' work.

The report, a collaboration by scholars at several universities, comes as the welfare system awaits reauthorization by Congress. President Bush has proposed expanding the hours that welfare recipients must spend in "work activities," which can include job training, to 40 hours per week. Currently, the requirement is 30 hours - or 20 for those with children under five.

The proposal is controversial, touching on a central debate about welfare reform: whether children will be shortchanged by having parents out of the home more often.

Among the report's encouraging findings, the children who attended child-care centers - one-third of those studied - show better literacy skills than those who are cared for in other arrangements. Those enrolled in higher-quality centers made even greater progress.

"We do find a positive effect from child-care centers," says Susanna Loeb of Stanford University, a director of the project. "That's the most exciting part of the study."

Yet she is disappointed that children did not make greater gains in cognitive development.

Researchers see few improvements in parenting practices, such as parents reading to children. Most mothers say they spend less time with their young children because they work.

Although the home environment did not deteriorate when mothers went to work, neither did it improve, researchers found.

Professor Loeb emphasizes the need to establish child-care centers responsive to the kinds of work these mothers do. Many women in the survey work irregular hours, evenings, and weekends. Finding child-care centers that are flexible enough to accommodate their work schedules is difficult.

Patino, who took part in the study, faced child-care problems for her youngest daughter. Even now, her rotating work schedule makes it hard to arrange daycare.

Similarly, another participant, Deserie Varela of San Francisco, worried that her youngest child was spending 10 hours a day in child- care while she worked as a home-care aide. Her three children, she says, "really didn't like the fact that I was gone all day. In the beginning, they were trying to mess up a little bit in school. I had to straighten that out."

Because of health problems and the need to find better housing, Ms. Varela had to quit her job after two years and return to welfare. "It felt good to work, and I liked what I was doing," she explains. "But at that time it was just too hard." Her 45-minute commute each way on public transportation was difficult. She also needs to find a new apartment by April 27. After that, she hopes to return to work.

Bruce Fuller, a study director from the University of California, Berkeley, calls the report a "sobering warning that simply requiring single mothers to work more in very low-wage jobs is not likely to boost the well-being of young children. We can't put all our eggs into forcing women to work more hours in low-wage jobs, if the policy goal is to improve young kids' environments."

President Bush's answer to that challenge is to fund new efforts to promote higher marriage rates - since poverty rates are highest for single-parent families.

Aside from the political controversy over that proposal, such a result may be difficult to achieve. As Connecticut women in the study began working more, their newfound financial self-reliance apparently had a wider impact: They married less often than those who faced less pressure to work, researchers noted.

Fuller also challenges Bush's proposal to double the work requirements for mothers with very young children. "He doesn't want to spend any more money on child care. Our findings suggest that an investment in quality child-care centers would help accomplish the goal of improving child well-being."

Douglas Besharov, a scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute in Washington, is encouraged by the report's general absence of alarming findings. "You have a group of people [conducting this study] who are no friends of welfare reform, and they're really hard put to find any substantial increase in hardship. Theirs is not the only study that comes to that conclusion."

As for Bush's plan for 40 hours of work per week, Mr. Besharov says flatly, "It's not going to happen. Either Congress won't pass it, or, if it does, the states won't implement it. That's because there are so many loopholes. The federal government has no ability to impose these kinds of work requirements."

Whatever lawmakers decide, Varela has a wish list: "To have a really good-paying job, and a nice home, so that my kids would not have to be raised around here [in San Francisco public housing]."

Patino's wish is short: "A raise," she says simply. Then, in comments that would warm the hearts of policymakers, she adds, "Now that we're off aid and out of that system, we're leading a much happier life. The path where we're going is a much brighter one. Children deserve a lot more than what being on aid gives them."

A Young Father's Rare Choice

As Single Parent, D.C. Teen Juggles School, Adult Responsibility; [FINAL Edition]

Manny Fernandez. The Washington Post. Mar 7, 2005.

Document URL: http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb

Nothing disturbs the quiet of the Southeast Washington apartment in the darkness before dawn except the running water in the bathroom sink.

He lifts his baby gently from bed. Through the night, he slept without moving so they could lay side-by-side on a mattress on the bedroom floor, the first of the day's small sacrifices.

He guides her through the logistics of a toddler's morning, washing her face with a damp cloth, changing her diaper, telling her to say cheese so he can brush her teeth. He dresses her in a pink jumper with matching socks.

James Hall carries his bundled daughter through the morning chill on South Capitol Street, narrating their journey past rumbling buses and siren-wailing ambulances as if they were on an adventure in an exotic land. Finally, they step from the cold into the warmth of an Oxon Hill apartment. It is after 8 a.m. when Hall puts on his backpack and stands by the door.

The child cries, for the first time this morning. She grabs her tiny purple coat and heads for the door, too. He wipes her tears with his jacket sleeve. "You can't go," he tells her. "I got to go to school."

Hall is a teenage single father. He is the rare male among the 700,000 U.S. teenagers who become parents each year: He has chosen to tackle parenthood alone.

"There are grown men, adult men, who have the responsibility and don't do it. For him to make the attempt . . . is phenomenal," said Richard Gross, an assistant principal at Ballou Senior High School in the District. All five Ballou students who bring their children to the school's day-care center are female, and in most cases when teenagers become parents, the burden of child care falls principally -- often solely -- on the mother.

Hall spends his days leading a double life -- one as an 18-year- old senior at Ballou and the other as a young father raising a daughter one month shy of her second birthday. He is growing up and growing old, all at once.

He carries her yellow jumper in the same blue backpack in which he keeps his English homework. He skips lunch at Ballou to play basketball in the gym with friends, but wakes up hours before school starts to brush and braid her hair. He could drop out of school and work full time, but he wants to graduate. He could put her up for adoption, but he fought to gain custody and can't imagine life without her.

"It's hard," he said. "It ain't easy. . . . But I'm doing it. I know I have no choice."

Hall embraces fatherhood, making it up as he goes. His mother gives him advice, but early in the morning and late at night, it is up to him alone to clip the barrettes onto her hair, wash her clothes, give her a bath. They learn from one another. She learned how to walk by holding on to his legs; he learned how to tuck the diaper in so the tape doesn't stick to her skin after he noticed a scab on her side.

On this recent morning, Hall leaves her with his mother in Oxon Hill and heads to school with one of his three brothers, Darryl, a Ballou sophomore. He sits at a window seat on the A6 bus. Sometimes, his mind wanders and he thinks about his rambunctious daughter. He wonders whether the people next to him think he's crazy, because he sits there, smiling.

Hall arrives at Ballou on time. He has already been up for three hours with his daughter, but his school day has just begun.

Wearing blue jeans, an oversize black T-shirt and a black skullcap pulled tight over his cornrows, he blends in with the hundreds of other young men heading to class, a thin but muscular teenager with the beginnings of a beard on his lower chin. In some ways, he behaves just like them, calling his girlfriend at all hours of the day, almost storming out of class when a substitute teacher gets on his nerves.

But he is more of an adult now than a school-age teenager. Hall missed about four months of school this year because he couldn't find a babysitter. His mother, Brenda, was working two jobs then -- at a grocery store during the day and as a security guard late at night -- and couldn't watch the baby. She quit working at the store to look after her granddaughter.

That has freed Hall to attend school day and night, taking six classes -- some of them make-up courses -- between 8:45 a.m. and 7:30 p.m. A quiet, serious student, he spent a recent Saturday finishing a book report.

Throughout most of his morning classes, he ignores the clatter of students in the halls outside and concentrates on his work. In the afternoon, during his law class, three students put their heads down and sleep, but Hall sits up, reading a court case for an upcoming mock trial.

He studies to graduate, and he studies for the toddler. "I don't want to be one of those parents where she goes, 'Daddy, why is this and why is that?' And I go, 'That's why you got a teacher.' If I don't know it and she don't know it, we're going to the library," he said.

Hall was in the delivery room at the Baltimore hospital that day in April 2003 when his then-girlfriend gave birth. He cut the umbilical cord and committed to memory the baby's essentials: 6 pounds, 9 ounces, 19 inches. He named her Ja'Mya, turning his first name into a girl's name, and gave her the middle name Princess. "I didn't do no basic name," Hall said. "I did a name I never heard before."

He and the mother later split up. He got a call soon after from social workers in Baltimore. "They said: 'We have your daughter. We want to know if you want to come and get her,' " he recalled. "They said they couldn't find the mother."

The baby had been unplanned, but Hall was different from many other guys his age -- he knew he wanted a family. He was ready to take on the responsibility.

"How can you leave a baby? I can't see it," he said recently, shaking his head. "I can't see it."

He has been raising Ja'Mya since he was 17, when she was little more than 6 months old, getting help along the way from his mother. Other people, including staff members at Ballou and a Washington- based nonprofit group, United Planning Organization, have offered him assistance from time to time. He said neither he nor Ja'Mya has had contact with her mother in more than a year.

Hall wants to raise Ja'Mya on his own, as much as he's able, so they share an apartment with his cousin in a tan-brick building on South Capitol Street SE. He receives roughly $200 in public assistance each month and food stamps, and struggles financially. He has been looking for a part-time job, for a car, for a dresser for the apartment. "Every dime he gets . . . he puts on that child," Brenda Hall said.

It's a few minutes after 7:30 p.m. and dark outside when Hall emerges from his final night class.

On the A8, he sits near the window, resting the back of his head on his book bag as if it were a pillow. This is a typical evening for him, from bus to bus and class to class, with little time for socializing. But he doesn't dwell on it. "I don't think about that stuff," Hall says as the bus lurches forward. "I probably miss playing sports. I don't really pay attention to it."

He steps off the bus. He has several more blocks to go before he sees Ja'Mya. He yawns but keeps on walking.

Hall sits in the Oxon Hill apartment, typing on a laptop his book report on "Black Diamond: The Story of the Negro Baseball Leagues." Ja'Mya sleeps in a bedroom while he works at a coffee table in the living room.

A few minutes past 9:30 p.m., after finishing the book report and moving on to a poetry assignment for English class, he takes a break and eats a hot dog, his first real meal of the day. He sits on the carpet and leans against the doorway at the edge of the kitchen.

Ja'Mya wakes up and walks over to him. She is usually a firecracker with four limbs, constantly running, jumping and bouncing. But now she rests in her father's arms, staring up at him with her big, dark eyes and big, curly eyelashes. He puts his chin on her head.

Hall asks her to touch her nose, and she does. He asks her to touch her head, and she does. He talks to her as he would an adult. Sometimes, he tells her to turn on the TV, and he waits for her to find the power button. He tells her to put away a penny in the water jug with the rest of the spare change. He doesn't help her so that she learns to figure it out herself.

It's 11:30 p.m. when he starts the long walk to his apartment. He has decided to let Ja'Mya sleep with his mother, as he often does when he stays late because he worries about the cold, "stupid people trying to rob people, crazy people driving drunk."

By the time he steps into the apartment, it's midnight, and he heads straight for bed. He sleeps alone on the mattress. He can stretch out. But it's not the same. He said it doesn't feel right without her breathing softly beside him.

Rise in single mothers driven by older women

Dahleen Glanton and Bonnie Miller Rubin, Tribune staff reporters. Chicago Tribune. Chicago, Ill.: Dec 17, 2006.

http://proquest.umi.com

Kimberly Dearth's biological clock was beginning to tick pretty loudly. So when she discovered she was pregnant, she had no problem putting diapers before a diamond ring.

"It was unplanned but not unwelcome," said Dearth, 37, who is raising her 15-month-old daughter, Samantha, as a single mother. "Two different doctors told me that I would need fertility treatments. So when I found out that I was pregnant, I was shocked, I was frightened, but I was also very happy."

Dearth, a medical assistant from Cedar Lake, Ind., is among a growing number of women over the age of 35--when fertility rates begin to steeply decline--to become single mothers.

The number of out-of-wedlock births has reached a record high in the U.S., with nearly 4 in 10 babies born last year to unmarried women, according to a recent report by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The increase was seen in all racial groups.

Unlike two decades ago, teenagers--who are now having fewer babies--are not driving the trend. It is fueled, in part, by women in their 30s and 40s, many of whom had put off marriage and family to pursue a career. In recent years single mothers have fought to remove the stigma of raising children out of wedlock.

Married women also are having babies later, researchers said. More than a quarter of the 4.1 million babies born in 2005 were to women ages 30 to 54.

"This is continuing a trend that has been going on for quite a number of years," said Stephanie Ventura, a statistician with the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics, speaking of unwed and married older mothers. "We've only seen greater rates in the 1950s when people tended to have larger families. Now we are seeing women making up for previously postponed childbearing."

Fourteen years after actress Candice Bergen drew the ire of Vice President Dan Quayle and other conservatives when her TV character, Murphy Brown, got pregnant and decided to raise the baby alone, single women are helping redefine the typical American family.

Despite efforts by social conservatives to promote traditional marriages, the Ozzie and Harriet stereotypes of the 1950s--a mother who stays home with the children while the father works--have long vanished from most American households. With nearly half of all marriages ending in divorce and more couples involved in non- traditional relationships such as co-habitation, married couples have become a minority, accounting for 49.7 percent of households, according to the U.S. Census.

With marriage no longer considered by many a prerequisite for having children, single mothers are integrating into the mainstream and getting attention in the media, including celebrities such as Angelina Jolie, Jodie Foster and photographer Annie Leibovitz.

Though some pregnancies are unexpected, many older women have gone to great lengths to give birth, such as turning to in-vitro fertilization using sperm banks or donor eggs, health officials said.

"Society's attitude has changed a little in that people understand that this is an option for single women who have not found the right man, or were divorced in their 30s, and really do want to be a mother," said Jane Mattes, 62, who founded the networking group Single Mothers by Choice.

According to Mattes, the Internet-driven group has grown from eight members in 1981 to 2,000 today. Most of them are college- educated women age 35 to 45 with an established career, debunking the negative stereotype of struggling young mothers on welfare.

"When you hear the term 'single mother,' most people think of teenagers or a divorced woman who was left with children, but most of these women aren't either," said Mattes. "They are choosing to become single mothers, which is very different. This is about making a personal choice."

As the number of births to unwed mothers rose 4 percent last year to 1.5 million, the number of births to teenagers--who two decades ago were considered synonymous with unwed mothers--continued a downward spiral that began in 1991, according to health officials. Girls ages 15 to 19 accounted for 40.4 births per 1,000 females-- the lowest ever recorded.

Black teenagers ages 15 to 19, who historically have held the record for out-of-wedlock births, have charted the biggest decline. Last year the percentage of births to black teens in that age group dropped by 3 percent, tying them with the decline among white teens. The biggest drop, 6 percent, occurred among black teenagers ages 15 to 17, marking a 59 percent decrease since 1991 and the steepest reduction by any race or age group. Hispanic teens saw a 1 percent decline last year.

Part of the reason is that young people are having less sex and using more contraception, said Bill Albert, spokesman for the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancya non-profit, non- partisan organization. Experts said programs targeting teenagers also have contributed to the decline.

"There's a real concern about [sexually transmitted diseases] in general and AIDS. That has had a sobering effect on teen sexual behavior, and it's a way to focus young boys' attention that just wasn't there 20 years ago. It's no longer just a 'girls' problem,'" Albert said.

Albert said a relatively healthy economy in the last 10 to 15 years has also affected black girls. "Those who see a successful future are less apt to derail it with teen pregnancy and parenthood," he said.

The CDC's Ventura said the research tends to indicate teenagers are waiting until their 20s to have a child. More than half the births to women ages 20 to 24 were to unmarried women.

When Jenni Young became pregnant, she decided to have the baby, regardless of whether she had a future with the child's father. Now 1-year-old Fiona is the light of her life, she says, and she has no regrets.

"I was at a point in my life where I knew I could support her," said Young, 31, an attorney who works in the Loop. "It didn't matter if I had a man, because I knew I could do it alone."

Child care is the biggest hurdle, but Young said she has her mother, who lives with her, and a nanny to help her juggle work and family.

Karen Brown had heard the statistics about how hard it is for professional black women to find a husband. So she decided that if she did not conceive by age 40, she would adopt. She transferred from her job in Chicago to be near her sister in Greensboro, N.C., bought a house and started decorating a nursery. The only problem was there was no man in her life.

"A year later, I became involved in a relationship," she said. "We never specifically talked about the future, but he knew I wasn't taking birth control and he was like, 'if it happens, it just happens.'"

Brown, a sales analyst for a computer services firm, said she always intended to raise her child alone, without financial assistance from the man, with whom she no longer has a relationship. Today, she said, her top priority is providing a nurturing environment for her 9-year-old daughter, Mariah Addison.

"She does cry sometimes about not having her dad around, but we talk about it," said Brown. "These feelings are uniquely hers because I always had a dad at home. I do feel guilt sometimes, but we don't let it overwhelm us. We don't push it under the rug. We deal with it as it comes."

While mothers such as Brown are financially secure enough to care for their children, statistics show that is not the norm, according to Kay Hymowitz, a senior fellow at Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank.

"This is a very disturbing trend because children who grow up with single mothers are susceptible to a host of problems. They have a greater risk of poverty, emotional problems, school failure and of becoming single parents themselves when compared to children with two parents."

According to Hymowitz, author of "Marriage and Caste in America: Separate and Unequal Families in a Post-Marital Age," a traditional family structure gives children a better foundation.

"People assume the reason married couples' children seem to turn out better is because there are two parents, two incomes and two brains, but that's not true," she said. "Co-habitating parents don't show quite the same strength; nneither do stepparents. Marriage carries with it a whole set of messages about how to live, which are consistent with middle-class life in this country."

But for Quinn Ward, 29, of Atlanta, it is just as important to have role models for the child.

Though she became pregnant during her sophomore year in college, she never allowed it to deter her goals. She graduated and earned her master's degree while shuffling her son, Quint, around the University of Georgia campus. When he was 5, she took him with her on an exchange program to Ghana.

"To be successful and get to the place where I am, sometimes you have to take your child with you," said Ward, who works in marketing for a large insurance firm. "The key is to have a good support system of family and friends, and we have that."

dglanton@tribune.com brubin@tribune.com

Welfare is Not the Daddy!

Darryl James. Jul 1-Jul 7, 2010

If we were truly concerned about the future of our children, then we would focus on the benefits, not the costs of amending the Welfare system, because as study after study has shown, our children are doing worse with fewer fathers in the home.

An early study from the Journal of Genetic Psychology found that the differences in development between children were connected more to the amount of interaction with the father as opposed to the socio-economic status of either parent or even the number of adults in the household.

Current studies prove that children without fathers in the home are more prone to an assortment of difficulties.

Yet, society focuses on jailing fathers who do not pay, which has not proven to make them pay or make them show up.

The problem is not that fathers just want to have children and walk away, as we have been told. The problem is that Welfare, in many ways, supplants the father, and in other ways, the courts simply ignore or impede fathers who desire to be present.

Nearly 40 percent of unwed mothers are living with a man and are already mothers to one or more additional children, but the "income-tested" Welfare System creates blockages to marriage.

Governmental assistance programs often root out males who may be dating single mothers prior to deciding to marry and attempt to assign financial responsibility to them, often resulting in a breakup.

For example, if a mother who is living with her boyfriend applies for benefits as a single head of household, she will have support from the system, while her mate ostensibly will have his own income, even if it's minimum wage.

But if the two do decide to marry, the system will immediately count the man's income against the woman's Welfare eligibility, reducing or ending her benefits.

What this means, as dramatized in the 'Seventies movie Claudine, is that benefits are maximized when a single mother remains single, and slashed if she marries. The two incomes represented by the man's income and Welfare benefits, are reduced to solely the man's income-a huge burden delivered with no preparation.

In this manner, the Welfare System forces impoverished couples to choose to remain unmarried over combining incomes in a marriage. While the popular concept of single Black mothers is of Welfare Queens, that concept is neither based on truth or intelligence. Welfare benefits are scarcely enough for a family to survive on and most of the Welfare fraud is actually committed by white women.

Welfare case workers will even deduct gifts from a man from the amount of monthly assistance provided to the single mother.

What must be stated and underscored is that these solutions arc designed to create financial responsibility, not to place fathers in the lives of children.

And, in reality, there is no huge single parent Welfare drain on the economy. Total Welfare program costs in the United States are just over $400 billion per year, which is only FIVE PER CENT of the Gross Domestic Product. And only half of this goes to households with children.

But, even as America's president seeks more billions for a failing war effort overseas, many Americans fly into a rage over the possibility of Welfare's five percent of the GDP growing to a whopping six percent.

The total arrearages in child support is just under $100 billion dollars, while the cost of the Iraq War will be over $1 trillion by the time things are all said and done.

If we acknowledge the fact that 70 percent of men in arrears earn less than $10,000 annually, then forcing a single woman off of Welfare benefits if she marries, tacitly creates fewer marriages and more single parent households. It also makes for fewer fathers in the lives of children, when the man is pursued for repayment of Welfare benefits.

Can the Welfare and Child Support System be revamped to make more fathers present in the lives of more children?

The easy answer is yes.

First, since the focus on making him pay has failed (arrears have actually risen despite arrests), more efforts to make him present should be pursued, which will benefit everyone.

Instead of continuing to penalize parents, society would fare better to actually reward couples who many and combine incomes while improving their standing.

For example, instead of slashing Welfare benefits when a man is in the home, the system would be pragmatic to provide assistance for education or the acquisition of trades, in addition to time-limited extension of daycare support and transportation costs for both parents.

The net result will be fewer amities languishing in poverty and on Welfare.

Additionally, a single father who is present in the home and taking full advantage of those incentives should also have his debt to the Welfare system reduced substantially. Largely, impoverished men are being jailed and their licenses are being revoked for being unable to reimburse the Welfare system, not for refusing to pay into a single mother headed household.

A great many fathers hit the road when facing a loss of license and/or jail.

If we wish to have more fathers in the lives of children, then we must stop viewing them as responsible for repaying the government If a single mother's benefits were to be unaffected by marriage, particularly to an already impoverished father, no one would have to make choices between marriage and Welfare benefits.

The net benefit here would be mostly for single Welfare mothers and the low-wage earning, fathers with low or no skills, who are the overwhelming majority of so-called "Deadbeat Dads." Both groups are also among those for whom marriage is most elusive.

Funny, but with all the current hoopla over same sex marriages, there are no huge outreach programs by either church or state to urge single parents to set marriage as a goal to better the lives of their children.

Political and social leaders would do their communities justice by providing the positive message that marriage will improve the lives of all involved, as opposed to the negative message that fathers desire to be absent which has generally been proven to be a lie.

And, both church and state must stop delivering confusing messages about sex, while allowing the media and entertainment to deliver sex and sexuality. The battle is against sex education in the schools, with little other education suggested. We know that people will learn from somewhere, so the decision is whether they will learn in the schools or in the streets. Some adults have yet to learn.

Finally, the Welfare System must stop competing with fathers as the breadwinner in the lives of single mothers and children.

The bottom line to all of this is that single fathers, especially single Black fathers, have gotten a bad rap. Most of the negative views are based on mythology and personal biases, not fact.

The sad reality is that even though I have presented research and statistics in this book, many ignorant people have still responded with their same old, tired stereotypes, ignoring everything except their silly misconceptions, which they have allowed to pose as truth.

If we truly desire to improve the lot of those at the bottom, then those above had better be about the business of creating pragmatic solutions

We can continue to chase after men who have little money, and we can continue to crow about how fathers "just need to pay," but at the end of the day, that campaign has failed.

Perhaps it's time for something new.

VC English 1B & SMC English 2

2010-02-12T17:43:00.000-08:00

Poetry Links

HANDOUTS

Smedley Butler's War Is a Racket

Murder Ballads

War Protest Songs

Poetry Terms

OTHER LINKS

Crime Library Murder links

Not in Our Name
anti-war songs by
established artists

Download Free Anti-War
music, spoken word,
slideshows, video

Tortilla Curtain Links

T.C. Boyle's Homepage
Boyle's Message Board
Reader's Guide to Tortilla Curtain
Topanga Geographic Photos

Uncle Tom's Cabin Links

Yahoo class page

SLAVE NARRATIVES

Yahoo! Slave Narratives

Sound Files of a Former Slave

First person narratives of the American South by author

First person narratives of the American South by subject
(religion related but still extensive)

OTHER SOURCES

Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin

Uncle Tom's Cabin & American Culture

PBS: Africans in America
(check links from this page)

League of the South
(modern defenders of Old South)

A Pro-Slavery Argument (1862)

Marx Links

Friedman's "The Social Responsibility of Business"

Marx letter to Abraham Lincoln

Pygmalion Links

Overview of Victorian England Newman's Definition of a Gentleman
Women's Work and Class Stereotypes of the Poor KRUGMAN: the Death of Horatio Alger NY Times upward mobility charts (print all four)

There are but two powers in the world, the sword and the mind. In the long run the sword is always beaten by the mind.

Napoleon Bonaparte

In view of the primitive simplicity of their minds they more easily fall a victim to a big lie than to a little one, since they themselves lie in little things, but would be ashamed of lies that were too big.

Such a falsehood will never enter their heads and they will not be able tobelieve in the possibility of such monstrous effrontery and infamous misrepresentation in others; yes, even when enlightened on the subject, they will long doubt and waver, and continue to accept at least one of these causes as true.

Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, part I chapter X

I shall give a propagandist cause for starting the war never mind whether it be plausible or not. The victor shall not be asked later on whether we told the truth or not.

Adolf Hitler, speech to inner circle, Aug. 22, 1939

Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts.

Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan

We can have an honest disagreement, but when we can't even agree on the facts, someone is lying.

Michael J. Dixon

Michael Moore

Fahrenheit 9/11 Notes + Sources

Michael Moore Homepage
(has press and critics)

Spinsanity analysis

better than average news

The Guardian
(publicly funded paper in UK)

BBC
(a source the rest of the world trusts)

Al Jazeera
(like the BBC, but closer to the action)

Democracy Now!
90.7 FM
6-7 am, 9-10 am, M-F
The best hour of news
everyday it's on

Frontline
(documentary series on
PBS, lots of foreign policy,
corporate issues, etc.)

History News Network
should more accurately be
called history AND news.
Historians and experts
post articles on both.

Election 2000

BBC TV News story
on purge of black voters
Diebold Memos Disclose
Florida 2000 E-Voting Fraud
(see link to CBS News internal
review of election coverage)
US Commission on Civil Rights
Reports on 2000 Election
(discusses black voter purge,
as seen in the video in class)
Examples of Black Voters
Turned away from Polls

Flaws in 2004 felon list

Civil Rights Commission Urges
Criminal Investigation in Florida

Electronic Voting

Newsweek on Electronic Voting *****Black Box Voting******
(this should be the starting point of
your research. It's the eye of the storm)
Black Box Voting. org
(similar to the site above.
If you can't get one, try the other.
Frequent hacks and legal actions on both)
University of Iowa Computer Science Department analysis of Diebold flaws
Diebold head says he will do anything to get Bush re-elected
Vietnam Vet ahead in polls loses by 13% on Diebold

This long, so here's a crucial excerpt:

In Georgia, Republican Saxby Chambliss repeatedly questioned the patriotism of Democratic incumbent and triple amputee war hero Max Cleland during his campaign. Chambliss made the absurd claim that he was more patriotic than Cleland even though he had avoided service in the Vietnam war with a "medical deferment". A Poll taken by the Atlanta Journal Constitution published on November 1st, just five days before the election, showed support for Georgia Democratic Senator Max Cleland at 49%, clearly 5% ahead of Republican Saxby Chambliss at 44%. Many People in Georgia, particularly veterans, had been angered by the crude remarks made by Chambliss and they turned out in record numbers to vote for Cleland. When the 'Diebold' Electronic Voting tally was made public it stunned and confused the Georgia voters. Saxby Chambliss had won with 53% of the vote compared to Max Cleland's 46%. It represented a 13% pro-Republican swing that seemed to materialize out of cyberspace. The victories of Chambliss and Hagel, along with the tragic October 25, 2002 plane crash that killed Democratic Senator Paul Wellstone, virtually guaranteed Republican control of the Senate.

More example of odd results using touch screens
(with links) how the vote count can be manipulated

Media Censorship/Consolidation/Bias

Disinfopedia
an encyclopedia of propaganda,
PR, and political BS
"viral marketing" is
worth a paper by itself

Urban Legends Reference Pages
PR firms have figured out how urban legends spread
and use the same mechanism, so there's a lot of overlap

PR Watch
watching those who fake the news

PR Watch on Kuwaiti Incubator story
a good example of how PR fakes the news

Council of Public Relations Firms
(these are the guys who actually do it)

Fox News Producer on Bias
Lie or Cut Story Critical of Advertiser

Columbia Journalism Review
checks bias and accuracy

MediaMatters.org
fact checks and analyzes
primarily right wing sources

FAIR.org
Fairness and Accurary in Reporting
A great overall resource for
media issues. Takes on left and right.

Spinsanity.org
fact checks and analysis

FactCheck.org
emphasis on political ads
at the moment

Media Channel
covers all the issues
Free Press Media Reform
activist website, but
covers all the issues
The Center for Public Integrity
primarily on government corruption,
but a lot of stuff on media (you have
to buy the politicians to consolidate)
also good for business and intervention

Institute for Public Accuracy
in depth research on stories in the news

Primary Documents on Foreign Policy
***good for all topics except maybe energy***

Iraqi Threat

Frontline: 10/03 Iraq story links

Retired Pentagon Analyst Returned to Work After 9/11
Now Critical of use of Iraq intel
British Cabinet Member Says Threat Faked
Blair Knew Iraq not a Threat says his Foreign Minister

Diplomats & Military Commanders for Change
non-partisan career diplomats and Pentagon
officials critical of Bush foreign policy and
intelligence abuses in an unprecedented public letter

Wilson on fake uranium letter

CIA director's letter to Senate before Iraq War

Pentagon Intel said no WMD Fall before war

Intelligence Insiders Speak out on Iraq
Interview with Producer of UNCOVERED
a documentary comparing Bush claims about
Iraq with what Intelligence told him

Cooperative Research Iraq Bibliograghy
(some links, but an excellent outline of issues
and sources you can find yourself on proquest)

Rumsfeld, Saddam and WMD

Rumsfeld's handshake with Saddam and
primary documents on why he was there

Pew Polls of Iraq and world

Gallup poll of Iraqis Spring 2004

9/11: what did we know?

Retroactively classified testimony

Four 9/11 Moms Battle Bush

9/11 Families Questions

9/11 Commission

***Complete 9/11 Commission Report***

Saudi Money to Al Qaeda

Pakistani Money & Intelligence
Contact with 9/11 Hijackers
The Man Who Knew
(An FBI agent who hunted alQaeda,
was blocked by superiors, quit in
frustration, and went to work at the
WTC, where he was killed on 9/11)
Congressional 9/11 Report
Congressional 9/11 Report
(html format, easier to access, but
not directly from the government)
Cooperative Research 9/11 Bibliograghy
(some links, but an excellent outline of issues
and sources you can find yourself on proquest)

Causes of Terrorism

BBC 911 Causes overview
BBC 911 Details
Frontline: Interview with Osama bin Laden
Library of Congress Country Studies
Hunting for Bin Laden
Islam: Empire of Faith (PBS)
Yes, This Is About Islam
Al Jazeera
(like CNN in the Arab world)
Arab News 9/11
(their analysis, POV)

Business & Intervention

War Is a Racket
by
Major General Smedley Butler
two time Medal of Honor winner
He tells the real cause of every
military campaign he fought in

President Eisenhower's
Farewell Address:

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

(see section IV)

***US Military Interventions***
Great list that gives causes, propaganda, and inciting
incident for wars. Somewhat biased, but mostly accurate
Speeches and Eyewitnesses to Intervention
***Mark Twain on Philippines is great, and
Lodge on need for expansion is very relevant

MARKETS; Oil Economics Lubricates Push for War
Dollar vs. Euro showdown in Middle East

Democracy Now!
90.7 FM
6-7 am, 9-10 am, M-F
covers this topic extensively
on a regular basis

Corpwatch.org

Primary Documents on Foreign Policy
look at Latin American section
(especially Chile) and Middle East

the CIA in Iran link below is also relevant

Intervention & democracy/nation building, etc.

Recent Actions re. Turkey
New York Times Special Report: The CIA in Iran
Pentagon Papers (on Vietnam)

SUPPORTING OUR TROOPS
(before, during, and after)

Army Times
(some of the headlines alone tell the whole
story--check out Gaurd and Reserve tab)

David Hackworth
decorated WWII, Korean War, and
Vietnam vet writes on military issues

Israel

***Frontline: Battle for the Holy Land***
***How Will Israel Survive?***
Major article in Newsweek,
looks at background and future

additional links

to email me, copy the address below and remove the spaces:

migueljdixon @ gmail.com

2 & 21A

2009-11-07T14:25:00.000-08:00

VC English 2 &

SMC English 21A

American Heritage Dictionary

Ventura English 2: SI Soraya Zarook's Help Page

Ape & SUV readings

Print out the readings with asterisks (***) next to them, bring to class, and follow other directions given in class.

APE IQ

***Orangutan Mimes***

***He Talks to Animals***

***S P A C E C H I M P S***

***Baby and Chimp Raised Together ***
More on Baby & Chimp
with photos & video clips

Talking' Chimp Baffles Scientists

***Two Talking Apes ***

***Koko's Dead Kitten***

***Animals with Tools***

***Chimp Prank Phone Calls***

***Counting Chimp***

Chat with Koko the Gorilla Online

Researchers Journal of talking to Koko

Washoe's webpage

Orangutan Language Project

Great Apes Trust

Studying Wild Gorillas

The Jane Goodall Institute

Chimp Experiment with AIDS & more

Ape Makes Fire & Draws symbols
(click to see video)

Kanzi with Lexigrams

SUV

Why Oil Sheiks Love A Good Hummer
(handed out in class)

***US made cars that get better MPG
but NOT sold here***
***Sugar in your tank***

***Make your own diesel at McDonald's***

***Run Your Car on Pond Scum***

***Plug-in Hybrid***

***Chevy Volt Plug-in***

***Hybrid vs. Regular SUV***

Toyota's 1,000 Range Mile Battery?

Better than Batteries for Electric Car?

***Compressed Air Car***

***"Free" power for electric car?***

A Better SUV

PBS: Cars of the Future
on the Road NOW

PBS: Car of the Future:
transcript

SUV LINKS

Cause & Effect
Essay Readings

Single Moms

***all REQUIRED single parent readings***

Forget Juno

Happy Iraqis Readings

***all REQUIRED Iraqi readings***
print this ENTIRE link, mark up assigned
reading, and bring the whole thing to our
next class.

Spring 2004 Gallup Poll

Iraqis Rate CPA

Government Iraqis Want

View of Invasion

View of Occupation

Coalition Provisional Authority Poll

Iraqi Interpreter's Anguished Life

Iraqi Oil

Our Plan for Iraqi Property

Arab view of United States

***Pew Poll of Arab & World Opinion of US***

***Zogby on Arab Opinion of US***

Who Dies, Who Pays, Who Profits

Iraq Body Count

Nukes

Effects of nuclear explosions in Wikipedia

Nuclear fallout in Wikipedia

Nuclear weapons effects calculator

Effects of Hiroshima Bomb

An A bomb survivor's story

Nuclear bunker buster video

Foreign Terrorism

***Osama Tape 10/2004***

What We Did in Iran

US in Lebanon in the 80s transcript

BBC brief overview of US in Lebanon

Frontline: Interview with Osama bin Laden

Timeline of US intervention in Middle East

General Zinni

Our Plan for Iraqi Property

Domestic Terrorism

Interview with Tim McVeigh
Oklahoma City bomber

Cynanide Bomb Plot in Texas

Interview with Weather Underground
left wing terrorists

Research Links

****Wikipedia****

Wikipedia Report Form blank

***News IQ Test***

Statistics

***Bureau of Justice Statistics***
Statistical Resources on the Web

List of Poll Links

PollingReport.com
(pretty exhaustive comparison of polls on many issues)

Grammar practice

Do these exercises online, print out
with feedback, and bring to class.

Subjects and Verbs

Fragments

Brain Link/Ads Readings

Propaganda Methods

Barry on Beer

Brain Link

Vision of the Future

Ads

seen in class:

Robot Chicken Star Trek Ad

Winston Beverly Hillbillies

Winston Flintstones

LBJ Daisy Girl

Obama Crowd

Obama Mother

Obama McCain Same as Bush

McCain Obama Celebrity Ad

McCain Never Surrender

McCain War Ad

Pepsi Generation Slow

Pepsi Simply Irresistible

Pepsi Britney Spears

Coke I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing

Coke Mean Joe Green

Coke Polar Bears & Penguins

Littering: Crying Indian

Littering: Woodsy Owl Who Will?

Littering: Tie down Your Load

MORE:

Apple's 1984

Apple iMac Jeff Goldblum

Apple Think Different

Apple: I'm a Mac and I'm a PC

Pres. Johnson ads

Bush TV ads

Kerry TV ads

anti-drug ads

more anti-drug ads

Coke current ads

All Siege vs. Reality Readings

Cause & Effect
Essay Readings

Single Moms

***all single mom readings***

Daddy Free World

TV's Unwed Moms

Welfare, Kids, and Single Moms

Happy Iraqis Readings

***all Iraqis readings***

Spring 2004 Gallup Poll

Iraqis Rate CPA

Government Iraqis Want

View of Invasion

View of Occupation

Coalition Provisional Authority Poll

Iraqi Interpreter's Anguished Life

Iraqi Oil

Our Plan for Iraqi Property

Arab view of United States

***Pew Poll of Arab & World Opinion of US***

***Zogby on Arab Opinion of US***

Who Dies, Who Pays, Who Profits

Iraq Body Count

Nukes

Effects of nuclear explosions in Wikipedia

Frontline: Interview with Osama bin Laden

Midterm Readings

Instructions:

Download all midterm readings.

Pick one.

Do margin notes.

Write a one paragraph summary.

Bring summary, ALL MIDTERM readings, textbook, and dictionary to class Monday.

How vulnerable are
you to propaganda?
Take this test
and find out.

NEWS

The Guardian
(publicly funded paper in UK)

BBC
(a source the rest of the world trusts)

Al Jazeera
(like the BBC, but closer to the action)

Democracy Now!
90.7 FM
6-7 am, 9-10 am, M-F
The best hour of news
everyday it's on

Frontline
(documentary series on
PBS, lots of foreign policy,
corporate issues, etc.)

History News Network
should more accurately be
called history AND news.
Historians and experts
post articles on both.

Pick a President

Project Vote Smart
(a good starting point for
comparing candidates records)

Mike Dixon's English

home

Caution: Ingenious animals at work

Caution: Ingenious animals at work

The Siege vs. Real Life Readings

Patriot Raid

By Jason Halperin, AlterNetPosted on April 29, 2003, Printed on December 3, 2010http://www.alternet.org/story/15770/

MI6 and CIA 'sent student to Morocco to be tortured'

David Rose

Sources: Hijackers' ex-landlord was FBI informant

US & al-Qaeda used to be buddies

FBI imformant inside first WTC bombing terrorist cell

All WAG THE DOG readings

ABC News Primetime Thursday, November 6, 2003

How Bush Sr. Sold the Bombing of Iraq

English 21B

SMC English 1 & VC English 1A

***all Rape & Torture Case Readings***

Torture

Date Rape

Academic Freedom

Sexual Harassment

***All Single Parent Readings***

How Kids Fare in New Welfare Era

VC English 1B & SMC English 2

2 & 21A

***Talking' Chimp Baffles Scientists***

Effects of nuclear explosions in Wikipedia

Effects of nuclear explosions in Wikipedia

By Jason Halperin, AlterNet
Posted on April 29, 2003, Printed on December 3, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/15770/

all Rape & Torture Case Readings

All Single Parent Readings

Talking' Chimp Baffles Scientists