From the Washington Post today:

Put another way, Mr. Bush has managed to rack up more new debt during his five years in office than the entire debt amassed by the United States through 1988. And there is more to come: The president's budget envisions the debt rising to $11.5 trillion by 2011. This means that an increasing share of an increasingly tight budget must be devoted simply to paying interest -- an estimated $220 billion this fiscal year alone. Remember: This is the president who entered office promising to pay off $2 trillion in debt held by the public over the next decade. Far from being paid down, the debt held by the public has grown, from $3.3 trillion in 2001 to $5 trillion this year.

In the end, of course, Congress will vote to raise the debt ceiling, as it must. Indeed, the House has already done so, quietly, under a rule designed to let members take that step without having any politically damaging attention called to it. The Senate is to take up the issue this week, most likely just before it leaves on its latest recess; there, too, the hope of the majority is to get this unpleasant business over with as quickly as possible. But Democrats have secured an agreement to vote on several amendments, including tying the debt increase to restoring pay-as-you-go requirements on new entitlement spending or tax cuts. This is mostly for purposes of political point-scoring -- the amendment's not likely to be approved -- but that doesn't take away from the importance of doing something to get the budget under control.

Because, as the debt ceiling approaches $9 trillion, it's time to pause and consider the unabashed recklessness of the Bush administration's fiscal policies and its unwillingness to alter its tax-cutting course to accommodate new budgetary realities. "Future generations shouldn't be forced to pay back money that we have borrowed," Mr. Bush said in March 2001. "We owe this kind of responsibility to our children and grandchildren." Where is that responsibility now?

Sometimes one death revirberate around the world and has a great impact. The death of Tom Fox is and should be one of those circumstances. A good man... doing good, thoughtfully and stongly....

"Be patterns, be examples in every country,place,or nation that you visit," George Fox wrote, "so that your bearing and life might communicate with all people. Then you'll happily walk across the earth to evoke that of God in everybody. So that you will be seen as a blessing in their eyes and you will receive a blessing from that of God within them."

Thank you for a light that shone brightly ... bless you all who strive for PEACE.

Why don't they tell us the good news?

By Cervantes

The population of Iraq is about 24 million, just a tad more than the population of Texas. Imagine that in Texas, several acres in the center of the capital city, including the capitol building and government offices, are surrounded by a 12 foot high blast wall, and that citizens are forbidden to enter the zone to meet with their representatives or officials of state agencies, or to observe legislative or court proceedings. The state is occupied by 140,000 Russian soldiers, who travel in armored convoys and shoot 50 caliber automatic rifles at any vehicle that gets close to them. Hardly any of them speaks a word of English.

The government is controlled by evangelical protestants, whose police work closely with the Russian soldiers. The evangelicals live in separate neighborhoods from people of other faiths. Routinely, Russian soldiers surround non-evangelical neighborhoods, while the evangelical police break down the doors of every house, force the inhabitants to kneel in the front yard, and ransack the homes. On each occasion, they haul away a dozen or so young men to secret prisons, where they join thousands of others who are held without charges, who have no access to lawyers or the legal system, and who no-one is allowed to visit. On a typical Friday:

1. A car bomb kills 9 people at a Catholic church in Lubbock.
2. A Texas Ranger is killed and 3 are injured by a roadside bomb in Dallas.
3. A car bomb in Waco kills three civilians.
4. Gunmen kill a government official in Galveston and kidnap another.
5. A roadside bomb kills a police lieutenant and injures a police captain in Crawford.
6. A Russian helicopter fire two rockets into a Jewish neighborhood in Houston, killing six members of a family. The government claims the dead were all insurgents.
7. A gunfight between unknown militants and Russian and Texan forces near Texas Stadium results in four injuries.
8. Gunmen killed a policeman in Huntsville.
9. The kidnappers of a Russian journalist threaten to kill her unless the Russians release all the Texan women they hold in prison.
10. Gunmen kill a traffic policeman in College Station.
11. Gunmen killed a police sergeant on patrol in Nacogdoches.
12. A roadside bomb kills a civilian in Fort Worth.



On this day, as on most others, a couple of dozen people are kidnapped for ransom. It is unsafe to travel on the highways, and bodies turn up with their hands bound and signs of torture in vacant lots every day. Most of the state has electricity for only 4 hours a day, and most Texans have contaminated drinking water. The unemployment rate is 60%, and 10% of children are malnourished. Most people depend largely on government rations for food.

Vladimir Putin complains constantly that the news media aren't covering all the good news from Texas.

"Torturers"....How we got there.... from NY Times

November 14, 2005
Op-Ed Contributors
Doing Unto Others as They Did Unto Us
By M. GREGG BLOCHE and JONATHAN H. MARKS

Washington — How did American interrogation tactics after 9/11 come to include abuse rising to the level of torture? Much has been said about the illegality of these tactics, but the strategic error that led to their adoption has been overlooked.

The Pentagon effectively signed off on a strategy that mimics Red Army methods. But those tactics were not only inhumane, they were ineffective. For Communist interrogators, truth was beside the point: their aim was to force compliance to the point of false confession.

Fearful of future terrorist attacks and frustrated by the slow progress of intelligence-gathering from prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Pentagon officials turned to the closest thing on their organizational charts to a school for torture. That was a classified program at Fort Bragg, N.C., known as SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape. Based on studies of North Korean and Vietnamese efforts to break American prisoners, SERE was intended to train American soldiers to resist the abuse they might face in enemy custody.

The Pentagon appears to have flipped SERE's teachings on their head, mining the program not for resistance techniques but for interrogation methods. At a June 2004 briefing, the chief of the United States Southern Command, Gen. James T. Hill, said a team from Guantánamo went "up to our SERE school and developed a list of techniques" for "high-profile, high-value" detainees. General Hill had sent this list - which included prolonged isolation and sleep deprivation, stress positions, physical assault and the exploitation of detainees' phobias - to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who approved most of the tactics in December 2002.

Some within the Pentagon warned that these tactics constituted torture, but a top adviser to Secretary Rumsfeld justified them by pointing to their use in SERE training, a senior Pentagon official told us last month.

When internal F.B.I. e-mail messages critical of these methods were made public earlier this year, references to SERE were redacted. But we've obtained a less-redacted version of an e-mail exchange among F.B.I. officials, who refer to the methods as "SERE techniques." We also learned from a Pentagon official that the SERE program's chief psychologist, Col. Morgan Banks, issued guidance in early 2003 for the "behavioral science consultants" who helped to devise Guantánamo's interrogation strategy (we've been unable to learn the content of that guidance).

SERE methods are classified, but the program's principles are known. It sought to recreate the brutal conditions American prisoners of war experienced in Korea and Vietnam, where Communist interrogators forced false confessions from some detainees, and broke the spirits of many more, through Pavlovian and other conditioning. Prolonged isolation, sleep deprivation, painful body positions and punitive control over life's most intimate functions produced overwhelming stress in these prisoners. Stress led in turn to despair, uncontrollable anxiety and a collapse of self-esteem. Sometimes hallucinations and delusions ensued. Prisoners who had been through this treatment became pliable and craved companionship, easing the way for captors to obtain the "confessions" they sought.

SERE, as originally envisioned, inoculates American soldiers against these techniques. Its psychologists create mock prison regimens to study the effects of various tactics and identify the coping styles most likely to withstand them. At Guantánamo, SERE-trained mental health professionals applied this knowledge to detainees, working with guards and medical personnel to uncover resistant prisoners' vulnerabilities. "We know if you've been despondent; we know if you've been homesick," General Hill said. "That is given to interrogators and that helps the interrogators" make their plans.

Within the SERE program, abuse is carefully controlled, with the goal of teaching trainees to cope. But under combat conditions, brutal tactics can't be dispassionately "dosed." Fear, fury and loyalty to fellow soldiers facing mortal danger make limits almost impossible to sustain.

By bringing SERE tactics and the Guantánamo model onto the battlefield, the Pentagon opened a Pandora's box of potential abuse. On Nov. 26, 2003, for example, an Iraqi major general, Abed Hamed Mowhoush, was forced into a sleeping bag, then asphyxiated by his American interrogators. We've obtained a memorandum from one of these interrogators - a former SERE trainer - who cites command authorization of "stress positions" as justification for using what he called "the sleeping bag technique."

"A cord," he explained, "was used to limit movement within the bag and help bring on claustrophobic conditions." In SERE, he said, this was called close confinement and could be "very effective." Those who squirmed or screamed in the sleeping bag, he said, were "allowed out as soon as they start to provide information."

Three soldiers have been ordered to stand trial on murder charges in General Mowhoush's death. Yet the Pentagon cannot point to any intelligence gains resulting from the techniques that have so tarnished America's image. That's because the techniques designed by communist interrogators were created to control a prisoner's will rather than to extract useful intelligence.

A full account of how our leaders reacted to terrorism by re-engineering Red Army methods must await an independent inquiry. But the SERE model's embrace by the Pentagon's civilian leaders is further evidence that abuse tantamount to torture was national policy, not merely the product of rogue freelancers. After the shock of 9/11 - when Americans desperately wanted mastery over a world that suddenly seemed terrifying - this policy had visceral appeal. But it's the task of command authority to connect means and ends rationally. The Bush administration has too frequently failed to do this. And so it is urgent that Congress step in to tie our detainee policy to our national interest.

M. Gregg Bloche is a law professor at Georgetown University and a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution. Jonathan H. Marks, a barrister in London, is a bioethics fellow at Georgetown and Johns Hopkins.

I'm on a new quest...in search of 'unreasonable' women

so here's the start..

Molly Ivins - thank you for your recommendation of "An Unreasonable Woman - a true story of Shrimpers, Politicos, Poluters and the fight for Seadrift, Texas" about and by Dian Wilson ... truly An Unreasonable Woman

Request your "An Unreasonable Woman" ... free button

Join/support CODE PINK for Peace


Thanks to Tom Dispatch for the introduction:

"A Felon for Peace" - A Tomdispatch Interview with Ann Wright