How long does it take for people to figure out that they've been had? Apparently, a long time.

Another former intelligence officer has come forth to tell what happened to the intelligence services in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. Col. W. Patrick Lang, former defense intelligence officer at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) bears personal witness to the corruption of intelligence by the civilians brought into the Defense Department by Dick Cheney, who shaped the intelligence product to conform to their own plans for the Middle East. The neocons' assault upon our intelligence resources has severely damaged the ability of those services to deliver accurate information to our leaders and policy-makers. It appears, unfortunately, that leaders and policy-makers in this administration have no desire for accurate information if it contradicts their neo-conservative beliefs.

Lang's words are harsh and straight to the point:

What does drinking the Kool-Aid mean today? It signifies that the person in question has given up personal integrity and has succumbed to the prevailing group-think that typifies policymaking today. This person has become "part of the problem, not part of the solution."
 
What was the "problem"? The sincerely held beliefs of a small group of people who think they are the "bearers" of a uniquely correct view of the world, sought to dominate the foreign policy of the United States in the Bush 43 administration, and succeeded in doing so through a practice of excluding all who disagreed with them. Those they could not drive from government they bullied and undermined until they, too, had drunk from the vat.
 
What was the result? The war in Iraq. It is not anything like over yet, and the body count is still mounting. As of March 2004, there were 554 American soldiers dead, several thousand wounded, and more than 15,000 Iraqis dead (the Pentagon is not publicizing the number). The recent PBS special on Frontline concerning Iraq mentioned that senior military officers had said of General Franks, "He had drunk the Kool-Aid." Many intelligence officers have told the author that they too drank the Kool-Aid and as a result consider themselves to be among the "walking dead," waiting only for retirement and praying for an early release that will allow them to go away and try to forget their dishonor and the damage they have done to the intelligence services and therefore to the republic.

With the appointment of Porter Goss as director of the C.I.A., there is now a purge going on that will cripple the agency for many years to come, as some of the best and most experienced managers and directors leave because they are dedicated to delivering accurate and truthful intelligence rather than fictions supporting the aims of Cheney and Bush. We are already paying the price for deliberately blinding ourselves.

Lang's article, Drinking the Kool-Aid, published in the Journal of the Middle East Policy Council, comes by way of the Maha Blog. It can be downloaded as a pdf file from the website.

I received an email from the President of the Association of Trial Lawyers in America which I reproduce in part:

"Yesterday, the House of Representatives passed H.R. 5, the so-called HEALTH Act, which would allow drug companies, HMOs, nursing homes, doctors and hospitals to avoid full accountability when they cause injury or death.

"Although the bill passed, backers of the bill failed to pass the bill by the sizable margin they hoped might jump start the bill in the Senate.

"In fact, despite a year of relentless lobbying by doctors and insurers, as well as drug companies, nursing homes and HMOs, there was virtually no increased support for this legislation.

"A year ago, when the House passed this same bill, 229 Members voted in favor of it. Today, 230 Members voted in favor. This marks the fourth time since September 2002 that the House has passed this legislation."
___________________________________

This is the object of the "tort reform" exponents: make it impossible for badly injured people to receive fair compensation for pain and suffering caused by them, and when their really egregious or deliberate negligence injures the patient, exempt them from punitive damages

Punitive damages disrupt business plans. Injuries and compensatory damage awards that arise from them can be predicted statistically, enabling insurance actuaries to set premiums at a profitable rate to protect their clients. Punitive damages awards, on the other hand, are not predictable and are intended to make an example. When Ford was sued about 20 years ago for making the Pinto with an exposed gas tank prone to rupture and burn when the car was rear-ended, a company memo obtained by the plaintiff's lawyers during discovery revealed that the company was well aware of the danger and made the cold-blooded decision to go ahead and make it with the dangerous design, because the potential savings in cost were considerably more than it could expect to pay out in lawsuits and legal expenses. Of course Ford didn't plan for that memo to see the light of day and when it was put before twelve citizens in a court of law, they awarded the plaintiffs $90 million in punitive damages, their estimate of Ford's cost savings. The verdict, although later reduced on appeal, was a fair one, considering Ford's deliberately manufacturing a dangerous automobile.

It is now coming to light that the giant Pharmaceutical Corporations, part of the most profitable industry in the world, routinely suppress data from unfavorable trials of new medicines in order to get FDA approval. Baycol, Phen-Fen and Vioxx are three recent products that the manufacturers had good reason to believe were dangerous yet deliberately failed to warn. Should they be exempted from punitive damages, even it they knowingly marketed a dangerous product, which brought them fabulous profits?

Let's make it closer to home: The driver of an 18-wheeler, high on methamphetamine, barrels through your neighborhood at 80 mph, ignoring stop signs and speed limits. He runs up on the curb and hits your 5-year old daughter who dies instantly and is apprehended 50 miles down the road by law enforcement officers. His employer knows of his addiction but keeps him on the payroll because he delivers his load so quickly. Your daughter dies instantly, so she experiences little pain and suffering. She has no job or earning power and it is almost impossible to estimate the net present value of her future earnings. Her body, flattened by the 18-wheeler, is unrecognizable. A few days later, the insurance adjustor brings you a check for $200,000, which is the cap on non-economic damages. Your daughter, in the eyes of the insurance company, has no economic value. You must accept the $200,000 because the tort reformists have protected the driver, the trucking company and their insurers. The trucking company and driver get off scott free and you, dear bereaved father or mother, stand there holding a check for $200,000. The driver, his employer and the insurance company are laughing their way to the bank.

That is what the tort reformists are trying to bring about.

Predictably, representatives Wicker and Pickering voted for the health care industry and against the people of Mississippi. Taylor, somewhat unaccountably for a Democrat, also voted against the people. Bennie Thompson is the only representative from this state that consistently votes on behalf of the rest of us.

Think about it.

Click here to confirm how your Representative voted:
http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2005/roll449.xml

As readers of this blog probably know, the Central America Free Trade Area (CAFTA) passed the House of Representatives last night by one vote after much arm twisting by the Republican leadership. CAFTA will lower trade barriers between the signatory members.
Representatives Gene Taylor (D) and Bennie Thompson (D) voted against the bill and Roger Wicker (R) and Chip Pickering (R) voted in favor. When there's a trade bill that will hurt Mississippians, our two Republican congressmen can be expected to bite the bullet and put party above they people they are supposed to represent. It's tough job messing over one's state, but somebody has to do it.

They did not disappoint.

Like NAFTA, enacted in the mid-90s, CAFTA will further hasten the flight of textile mills and other manufacturing concerns from Mississippi and the rest of the U. S. Southeast to lower wage countries, but it will also harm farming in those countries by allowing U.S. agricultural goods, mostly wheat and corn, subsidized by the government, into the countries at a far lower price than the local farmers can grow it. This has been the pattern in many undeveloped countries. Farmers, lacking credit on reasonable terms and unable to sell their produce at a high enough price to survive, abandon their land and move into the urban areas, where they look for work and live in barrios. Many of them make their way to the U.S., where they work as illegal immigrants and send money back to their families. Our actions really do come back to haunt us.

Here is an article on the impact of CAFTA on farmers in Nicaragua, The War of Hunger: CAFTA Threatens to Eliminate Nicaragua's Small Farms by Sean Donahue in the Narcosphere blog. It's an excellent description of what happens in these underdeveloped countries when the trade gates are opened wide.

Paul Krugmans's column in the NY Times this morning says it all. Toyota decided to put a large factory in Ontario, Canada instead of a southern U.S. low-wage and low-tax state for two reasons: poor quality of worker here and the national health system in Canada. It's not hard to figure out why this is true and why our idiotic policies in Mississippi (and nationally) are compounding the problem.

Rep. Henry Waxman D-CA, released a fact sheet the other day outlining the evidence for eleven different leaks of Valerie Plame Wilson's identity as an undercover agent for the CIA. It's now becoming obvious that this was no "slip of the tongue," but a concerted effort to strike back at Joe Wilson (through his wife) for calling the administration a liar on the Saddam Hussein/yellowcake uranium/Niger connection.

That persons at the top of the administration would deliberately reveal the identity of a CIA agent with no official cover, putting her life and the lives of her overseas networks of contacts in extreme danger as well as killing off an information-gathering operation on weapons of mass destruction, simply beggars the imagination.

And then we are treated to the spectacle of a New York Times reporter jailed for refusing to testify in front of a grand jury as a witness to a crime. Considering Miller's sorry record as a shill for Cheney and Chalabi during the buildup for the invasion of Iraq, we believe that Miller is refusing to testify not because of any misguided notion of journalistic privilege but because she doesn't want to be faced with the choice of taking the Fifth Amendment or going to jail for conspiracy. We also think that she's probably terrified at what the thugs in power could and would do to her if she talked.

As the saying goes, when you lie down with dogs you rise up with fleas.

Those of us raised on the values of contemporary western civilization are having a lot of trouble understanding how a well-educated woman in her twenties can strap a high-explosive charge to her body and blow herself up in order to kill innocent people, including children, as well as occupying solders. To us, it just doesn't compute; staying alive is the most important thing. For many of us, it is the only thing.

Human history, however, contains numerous tales of warriors who give up their lives for the good of their tribe or nation, and they are praised and considered heroes for making the ultimate sacrifice for a greater cause.

In Roman literature, the name Horatio stands out as an example of courage and the willingness to give up one's life for one's city. Horatio, you will recall, stood on the last remaining bridge over the Tiber river, holding off the Etruscans while the Romans hacked away on the bridge from their side. The bridge eventually fell and carried Horatio into the waters beneath

The most profound example of the suicide bomber in my estimation is Samson, the biblical hero, reputed to be the strongest man that ever lived. His deeds fighting the Philistines who ruled Canaan reminds one of the Celtic hero Cuculian, who could also slay hundreds of men in a single fight.

As the story goes, Samson took Delilah, a Philistine woman, to be his mistress, and after a great deal of cajoling and nagging, she talked Samson into revealing the secret of his strength, which was his long hair. While Samson slept, Delilah had his hair cut off, after which the Philistines were able to capture and blind him. Some time later, the Philistines were offering a sacrifice to their god Dagon, a ceremony we are told was accompanied with much merrymaking, and demanded that Samson be brought to the party for entertainment. He was placed between two pillars of the temple where he was mocked by all the lords and ladies of the Philistines. With the help of an attendant, he put his arms on the pillars supporting the temple and prayed to God to give him strength just one more time. His prayer was answered and Samson pulled down the entire structure, killing thousands of people along with himself.

He was buried by the Hebrews as a great hero.

A modern illustration: the 1996 movie Independence Day, in which the alcoholic pilot Russell Casse flies his jet into the heart of the invaders' space ship, thus saving the United States and the world by sacrificing his own life to kill the enemy.

We regard these suicide bombers as heroic and their grisly deeds commendable because they were on our side. We can imagine how much they must have loved their nation and its people. We sing their courage in the face of certain death, and it does require immense courage to choose death as the price of striking the enemy.

Cruel and barbaric as it may seem to us, the compatriots of the suicide bombers regard them the same way as we regard our heroes. Having no tanks, bombers or missiles with which to fight back, they have done all they can to inflict death and suffering on an enemy that they blame for their oppression.

We shouldn't expect them to stop anytime soon.

"It is common mistake in going to war to begin at the wrong end, to act first, and wait for disaster to discuss the matter" -- from History of the Peloponnesian War

Some things just don't change.

It was surprising that Justice O'Conner resigned before Justice Rehnquist, who is suffering from cancer and was expected to resign first. This is Bush's chance to change the direction of the Court for a couple of generations.

Expect a nasty battle. If Bush manages to have someone like Scalia or Thomas confirmed, it is conceivable that the Court could eliminate all business regulation and even find Social Security unconstitutional. I don't want to sound alarmist, but the Supreme Court prior to the middle 1930s declared constitutional nearly every attempt to regulate what was at that time a vicious economic oligopoly.

Suppose, for instance, that Bush nominates Robert Bork, a former nominee rejected by the Senate. Bork, the intellectual father of modern anti-trust jurisprudence, preaches a social philosophy that is almost indistinguishable from the 19th social Darwinist Herbert Spencer, author of the phrase "survival of the fittest." Bork, in short, has never seen a monopoly he didn't like.

It should be an interesting summer.