The vice president has run utterly amok and must be stopped.
By Bruce Fein
(SLATE)
Under Dick Cheney, the office of the vice president has been transformed from a tiny acorn into an unprecedented giant oak. In grasping and exercising presidential powers, Cheney has dulled political accountability and concocted theories for evading the law and Constitution that would have embarrassed King George III. The most recent invention we know of is the vice president's insistence that an executive order governing the handling of classified information in the executive branch does not reach his office because he also serves as president of the Senate. In other words, the vice president is a unique legislative-executive creature standing above and beyond the Constitution. The House judiciary committee should commence an impeachment inquiry. As Alexander Hamilton advised in the Federalist Papers, an impeachable offense is a political crime against the nation. Cheney's multiple crimes against the Constitution clearly qualify.

Take the vice president's preposterous theory that his office is outside the executive branch because it also exercises a legislative function. The same can be said of the president, who also exercises a legislative function in signing or vetoing bills passed by Congress. Under Cheney's bizarre reasoning, President Bush is not part of his own administration: The executive branch becomes acephalous. Today Cheney Chief of Staff David Addington refused to renounce that reasoning, instead laughably trying to diminish the importance of the legal question at issue.

The nation's first vice president, John Adams, bemoaned: "My country has in its wisdom contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived; and as I can do neither good nor evil, I must be borne away by others and meet common fate." Vice President John Nance Garner, serving under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, lamented: "The vice presidency isn't worth a pitcher of warm piss." In modern times, vice presidents have generally been confined to attending state funerals or to distributing blankets after earthquakes.
Then President George W. Bush outsourced the lion's share of his presidency to Vice President Cheney, and Mr. Cheney has made the most of it. Since 9/11, he has proclaimed that all checks and balances and individual liberties are subservient to the president's commander in chief powers in confronting international terrorism. Let's review the record of his abuses and excesses:

The vice president asserted presidential power to create military commissions, which combine the functions of judge, jury, and prosecutor in the trial of war crimes. The Supreme Court rebuked Cheney in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. Mr. Cheney claimed authority to detain American citizens as enemy combatants indefinitely at Guantanamo Bay on the president's say-so alone, a frightening power indistinguishable from King Louis XVI's execrated lettres de cachet that occasioned the storming of the Bastille. The Supreme Court repudiated Cheney in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld.

The vice president initiated kidnappings, secret detentions, and torture in Eastern European prisons of suspected international terrorists. This lawlessness has been answered in Germany and Italy with criminal charges against CIA operatives or agents. The legal precedent set by Cheney would justify a decision by Russian President Vladimir Putin to kidnap American tourists in Paris and to dispatch them to dungeons in Belarus if they were suspected of Chechen sympathies.

The vice president has maintained that the entire world is a battlefield. Accordingly, he contends that military power may be unleashed to kill or capture any American citizen on American soil if suspected of association or affiliation with al-Qaida. Thus, Mr. Cheney could have ordered the military to kill Jose Padilla with rockets, artillery, or otherwise when he landed at O'Hare Airport in Chicago, because of Padilla's then-suspected ties to international terrorism.

Mr. Cheney has championed a presidential power to torture in contravention of federal statutes and treaties.

He has advocated and authored signing statements that declare the president's intent to disregard provisions of bills he has signed into law that he proclaims are unconstitutional, for example, a requirement to obtain a judicial warrant before opening mail or a prohibition on employing military force to fight narco-terrorists in Colombia. The signing statements are tantamount to absolute line-item vetoes that the Supreme Court invalidated in the 1998 case Clinton v. New York.

The vice president engineered the National Security Agency's warrantless domestic surveillance program targeting American citizens on American soil in contravention of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. He concocted the alarming theory that the president may flout any law that inhibits the collection of foreign intelligence, including prohibitions on breaking and entering homes, torture, or assassinations. As a reflection of his power in this arena, today the Senate Judiciary Committee subpoenaed Cheney's office, as well as the White House, for documents that relate to the warrantless eavesdropping.

The vice president has orchestrated the invocation of executive privilege to conceal from Congress secret spying programs to gather foreign intelligence, and their legal justifications. He has summoned the privilege to refuse to disclose his consulting of business executives in conjunction with his Energy Task Force, and to frustrate the testimonies of Karl Rove and Harriet Miers regarding the firings of U.S. attorneys.

Cheney scorns freedom of speech and of the press. He urges application of the Espionage Act to prosecute journalists who expose national security abuses, for example, secret prisons in Eastern Europe or the NSA's warrantless surveillance program. He retaliated against Ambassador Joseph Wilson and his wife, Valerie Plame, through Chief of Staff Scooter Libby, for questioning the administration's evidence of weapons of mass destruction as justification for invading Iraq. Mr. Cheney is defending himself from a pending suit brought by Wilson and Plame on the grounds that he is entitled to the absolute immunity of the president established in 1982 by Nixon v. Fitzgerald. (Although this defense contradicts Cheney's claim that he is not part of the executive branch.)

The Constitution does not expressly forbid the president from abandoning his chief powers to the vice president. But President Bush's tacit delegation to Cheney and Cheney's eager acceptance tortures the Constitution's provision for an acting president. The presidency and vice presidency are discrete constitutional offices. The 12th Amendment provides for their separate elections. The sole constitutionally enumerated function of the vice president is to serve as president of the Senate without a vote except to break ties.

In contrast, Article II enumerates the powers and responsibilities of the president, including the obligation to take care that the laws be faithfully executed. A special presidential oath is prescribed. Section 3 of the 25th Amendment provides a method for the president to yield his office to the vice president, when "he is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office." There is no other constitutional provision for transferring presidential powers to the vice president.

Yet without making a written transmittal to Congress, President Bush has ceded vast domains of his powers to Vice President Cheney by mutual understanding that circumvents the 25th Amendment. This constitutional provision assures that the public and Congress know who is exercising the powers of the presidency and who should be held responsible for successes or failures. The Bush-Cheney dispensation blurs political accountability by continually hiding the real decision-maker under presidential skirts. The Washington Post has thoroughly documented the vice president's dominance in a four-part series running this week. It is quite a read.

In the end, President Bush regularly is unable to explain or defend the policies of his own administration, and that is because the heavy intellectual labor has been performed in the office of the vice president. Cheney is impeachable for his overweening power and his sneering contempt of the Constitution and the rule of law.

The horizon is darkening as a storm brews! Richard Cheney's irrational influence over Persident Bush is becoming dangerously clear. We are in for some very interesting times ahead! As his term begins to wind down, Cheney's want of raw power will heat up, and in due time Congress will realize what is happening, and to Cheney's surprise they will very likely impeach him in a fury!

FROM THE NATION MAGAZINE

Cheney and the Constitution
by AZIZ HUQ
[posted online on June 26, 2007]
If it weren't so frightening, the irony would be delicious: A Vice President who has done more than any other to push the envelope on executive privilege at the expense of the courts and Congress takes the position that his office has both legislative and executive functions so as to avoid accounting for the use of classified materials.
Any veneer of intellectual legitimacy that executive power defenders have caked on their vision of a monarchical executive evaporates in the glare of this naked opportunism. And the scope and nature of today's constitutional crisis comes into clearer focus.
The term "constitutional crisis" is much abused, invoked generally whenever Congress shows some life. Confrontations on war funding and Congressional subpoenas, to cite recent examples, are in fact as old as the Republic. They are but healthy sparks from a constitutional confrontation of "ambition against ambition," precisely as the Framers intended.
But the true crisis is hidden in plain sight--the existence of an office in the Constitution--the Vice President's--with no real remit and no real limits, open to exploitation and abuse.
Consider as symptom number one Cheney's claim to be neither lawmaker nor executive--and thus exempt from any scrutiny of his handling of classified documents. In 2003 President Bush signed an Executive Order 12958 requiring agencies and "any other entity" within the executive branch to report to a division of the National Archives on their classification and declassification activities. But since 2003 Cheney's office has pointed to his position as president of the Senate to justify a refusal to comply. In May 2006 a Cheney spokesperson told Mark Silva of the Chicago Tribune that the legal question had been "thoroughly reviewed." And that was the end of the matter. Only now has Representative Henry Waxman's House Oversight Committee begun to examine the Vice President's failure to comply.
Second, Cheney's argument makes no sense. The Vice President receives documents due to his executive policy-making role, not his position as Senate president. Not even Cheney has the chutzpah to claim he's using these documents in his senatorial capacity: Outing covert CIA agents is apparently an executive function.
Third, if his office performs "legislative" functions, Cheney should be subject to the Senate's strict rules for the handling classified documents. Since I doubt the Vice President would allow a Congressional sergeant-at-arms to enter his office, this in effect creates legal black hole (another one!) where classified documents can disappear without a trace.
Finally, Cheney's argument is plainly a non sequitur. Why should addition of legislative duties trigger the subtraction of executive obligations? In lawyerly terms, the 2003 order applies to "any" entity within the executive branch. Having another label doesn't stop Cheney from being one of those "any" entities.
So much for legal arguments. But then, Cheney and his chief counsel, David Addington, have never been sticklers for fidelity to the letter of the law, especially when that law hinders grander ambitions.
Indeed, Cheney and Addington will go down in history as the most aggressive and successful advocates of executive powers in this nation's history. As Fritz Schwarz and I have charted, Cheney and Addington were in large part responsible for the 1987 Congressional Minority Report out of the Iran-contra affair, which first asserted that the White House could wield "monarchical notions of prerogatives." They grounded their vision of executive power on the prerogatives exercised by the British kings who were overthrown by the American Revolution.
Since 2001 Cheney has been at the tip of the spear in pushing for executive authority to override laws against surveillance and torture, among other things. And he's aggressively used the Office of the Vice President to make unprecedented secrecy claims. In litigation around his energy task force, for example, Cheney invoked Article II of the Constitution--which creates the presidency--to underwrite his defiance of Congressional and private demands for information. The Supreme Court, while it didn't wholly accept Cheney's position, yielded to it with alarming deference in 2004. The suit was later dismissed by a lower court.
To rub salt in the open sore of hypocrisy, Cheney has been among the most assertive Vice Presidents in wielding executive privilege independent of the President. He's also made extravagantly petty claims of secrecy: for example, ordering the Secret Service to destroy logs of visitors to his residence at the Naval Observatory in Washington despite the 1978 Presidential Records Act's contrary demand.
For Cheney to be pushing the envelope on executive power is especially ironic, given the original constitutional status of the vice presidency: That office is a vestigial afterthought tacked on to the Constitution toward the end of the 1787 Constitutional Convention to solve a gaggle of unrelated problems. And it quickly proved more trouble than it was worth.
Discussed only in the convention's closing days, the Office of the Vice President was initially dreamt up to solve a problem with presidential selection. Under the original Electoral College system, each elector had two votes and was constitutionally obliged to cast one of those for an out-of-state candidate. The Framers reckoned this was a way of counteracting the provincial inclination to vote for a home boy, a worry borne out in the 1796 election, which left Thomas Jefferson as Vice President despite a Federalist majority. But the Framers were puzzled as to how to stop electors from simply throwing away that second vote. Enter the Vice President. This secondary office solved the wasted vote problem. And rather neatly, it solved at the same time the presidential succession problem.
Concerned that the vice presidency could be a staging post for a coup, the Framers cast about for some other function for the office. Drawing on the 1777 New York Constitution's design of a Lieutenant Governor's office, they hit on a solution--the Vice President would also serve as a tie-breaking president pro tempore of the Senate. This, they concluded, would justify his salary. Wearing his Senate cap, the Vice President would also conduct the presidential electoral vote count.
All these neat fixes unraveled quickly with the 1800 election. This ended in the sitting Vice President, Thomas Jefferson, presiding over a deadlocked Electoral College with substantial voting irregularities--and then counting himself into the presidency. As Yale law professor Bruce Ackerman and co-author David Fontana tell the tale, Jefferson brazenly took it upon himself to adjudicate a "blatant" irregularity with Georgia's votes. With a potential independent run by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg raising the possibility of all kinds of Electoral College deal-making in 2008, the prospect of Cheney at the lectern tallying ballots should cause some trepidation.
The vice presidency, in short, was never intended as an independent center of constitutional power--let alone home of a shadow EPA (the rather wonderfully named White House Council on Environmental Quality); the secret architect of national energy policy; and the shameful global detention and torture policies--including the wretched military commission system.
Yet the combination of an intellectually insipid occupant of the White House and an ideologue of power as his second in command have combined to transform the constitutional topology. It has created a vice presidency that uses its lack of constitutional function as a license to seize whatever power can be gotten. This power has been largely unwritten by a radical and dangerous theory of executive power--now confirmed as merely a scrim to hide the accumulation of power.
The 1800 election of Thomas Jefferson, therefore, is not the only evidence of a ticking time bomb knitted into the Constitution. That heated election left as its legacy the Twelfth Amendment. Almost a century and a half later, Americans responded to the hazard of executive supremacy with the Twenty-Second Amendment, which imposed a two-term limit on Presidents and limited Vice Presidents to not more than ten total years in presidential service.
There is no call for another amendment. Yet. But perhaps we do need to start thinking about why perhaps the most powerful office in the country is not on the top of a ballot, and why its powers are not defined--or circumscribed--by any law or constitutional provision. Perhaps Congress could take for starters the order on classified evidence that Cheney is disobeying. It's an executive order because Congress passed the buck on crafting a legislative system for handling classified evidence. It's long past time for Congress to take this on. Past legislation has further provided clear channels of responsibility, particularly on military matters. That, indeed, was the primary purpose of the 1947 National Security Act, which implemented important reforms to the Armed Services.
It would be a good debate to have before the 2008 election, when Cheney will start opening the envelopes.

Mail Trail The RNC e-mails represent one more White House demerit.

By Bruce Fein. SLATE MAGAZINE
The Bush administration's signature triptych celebrates lawlessness, secrecy, and scorn for public accountability. The latest confirmation of this fact comes from the June 2007 interim staff report of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. It revealed chronic and flagrant White House violations of the Presidential Records Act of 1978 by employing Republican National Committee e-mail accounts for official business. Then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales stood idly by in a characteristic cerebral stupor.
The act establishes that the records of a president, his inner circle, and certain units of the executive office of the president are owned by the United States. The ownership issue had previously been disputed by President Richard M. Nixon in a battle over papers needed to prosecute Watergate crimes. In order to preserve White House records for access by the public and historians, the act directs the president to "take all such steps as may be necessary to assure that the activities, deliberations, decisions, and policies that reflect the performance of his constitutional, statutory, or other official or ceremonial duties are adequately documented and … maintained as Presidential records pursuant to the requirements of this section … " The act insures that presidents are held accountable to the judgment of history, and that a complete chronicle of White House operations is maintained to teach political wisdom to the nation and its officeholders.
The interim staff report found that at least 88 White House officials enjoyed RNC e-mail accounts, including Karl Rove, the president's senior adviser; Andrew Card, the former White House chief of staff; and Ken Mehlman, the former White House director of political affairs. White House officials wrongly employed RNC e-mail accounts for official purposes, for example, communicating with agencies about federal appointments and policies. The RNC has preserved more than 140,000 e-mails sent or received by Mr. Rove. Over one-half involved communicants using official ".gov" accounts. But the RNC has also destroyed massive numbers of White House e-mails. For instance, of the 88 White House officials with RNC e-mail accounts, no records were preserved for 51 individuals.
At present, the magnitude of the act's violations is unknown. But the motivation of the Bush White House in using these accounts seems clear: to conceal embarrassing communications or evidence of lawlessness. The oversight committee's investigation into convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff's contacts with the White House unearthed the following e-mail exchange between Rove's then-executive assistant Susan Ralston and Abramoff's associate Todd Boulanger: "I now have an RNC BlackBerry, which you can use to e-mail me at any time. No security issues like my WH e-mail." A sister e-mail indicated that Mr. Abramoff had been advised by a White House staff member to avoid sending communications through the official White House e-mail system because "to put this stuff in writing in their e-mail system … might actually limit what they can do to help us." Evidence has also emerged that these RNC e-mail accounts were used by the White House in communicating over the firings of U.S. attorneys and evading Hatch Act limitations on diverting government resources for partisan political activities.
Then-White House Counsel Gonzales apparently knew of the document retention requirements of the act. A memorandum was prepared in his name to White House staff on Feb. 26, 2001, instructing that all e-mail relating to official business be preserved and maintained. But extrapolating from his testimony regarding the U.S. attorney debacle, Gonzales either never read what he signed or didn't remember what he read. That would explain the testimony of Ms. Ralston to the committee. She elaborated that the White House counsel had in his possession as early as 2001 Mr. Rove's RNC e-mails, which concerned official business regarding Enron and special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation of the Valerie Plame leak. Yet Gonzales remained mute and unmoved by the ongoing document retention violations.
The RNC e-mail affair, standing alone, would not justify alarm. Most presidential records were maintained. Abramoff and Scooter Libby were held accountable to the criminal law. Violations of the Hatch Act were identified. But the affair betrays a White House enthusiasm for lawlessness and secret government irreconcilable with bedrock democratic values. And it is this pattern of secrecy for its own sake that is most chilling.
In the aftermath of 9/11, President George W. Bush initiated several secret programs for gathering foreign intelligence, at least one of which was in contravention of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. Neither Congress nor the public was informed. The president cannot be accountable to the law or to the electorate unless his deeds are made known. And Congress cannot legislate to thwart executive abuses unless it knows what mischief is afoot.
In December 2005, the New York Times first revealed the fact of the National Security Agency's warrantless domestic surveillance program that violated FISA. If President Bush had had his way, the secret spying would have remained secret forever. It would never have been subject to congressional or judicial checks. Congressional hearings to learn the spying details (sans sources and methods) have been repeatedly frustrated by claims of executive privilege. Indeed, the Department of Justice has even repeatedly refused to disclose or to discuss advice addressing the legality of the NSA's spying based on the absurd assertion that operational details would be exposed to the enemy by amplifying Supreme Court precedents. During Gen. Michael Hayden's confirmation hearing as director of the Central Intelligence Agency, he refused to answer an inquiry from Sen. Dianne Feinstein as to whether a FISA warrant had ever been sought for a pen register on the theory that an answer would reveal otherwise secret intelligence sources or methods.
President Bush also authorized secret prisons in Eastern Europe to torture or otherwise abuse persons suspected of complicity in terrorism. According to the president, terrorist detainees must be kept in secret dungeons indefinitely because any publicity might clue in al-Qaida that one or more of its cells had been penetrated. In other words, the president is fighting terrorism in part by entirely secret means, a throwback to the Cold War years that witnessed decades of illegal mail openings, illegal telegram interceptions, and years of misuse of the NSA for non-intelligence purposes.
President Bush has asserted executive privilege to prevent Mr. Rove and former White House Counsel Harriet Miers from testifying under oath about the firings of U.S. attorneys. The privilege has further been invoked to conceal relevant Justice Department communications. It has been used to blunt a congressional inquiry into the executive branch's dysfunctional response to Hurricane Katrina.
Vice President Dick Cheney concealed the identities of private business advisers to his Energy Task Force. Visitors for official business are kept secret. Former Attorney General John Ashcroft ordered the closure of removal proceedings for alleged terrorists. The Central Intelligence Agency sought to reclassify declassified information that Chinese intervention in the Korean War had been miscalculated and that the intelligence services of the United States and Great Britain had collaborated during World War II. President Bush has complicated and delayed public access to the papers of former presidents.
The pattern here is clear: The Bush administration treasures secrecy for the sake of secrecy and law evasion. Depend upon it: The RNC e-mail spectacle will not be the last chapter. That should be deeply disturbing.
The history of secret government is a history of oppression and folly. Secrecy invites false allegations or loopy ideas to advance personal vendettas or to gratify racial, religious, ethnic, or other obnoxious biases. President Bush is no exception.

Bruce Fein is a constitutional lawyer and international consultant with Bruce Fein & Associates and the Lichfield Group. He is also chairman of the American Freedom Agenda, a group devoted to restoring checks and balances and protections against government abuses.

Giuliani's loyalty to an accused priest

A grand jury accused Alan Placa of molestation and his diocese has suspended him, but the presidential candidate continues to employ his lifelong best friend as a consultant.
By Alex Koppelman and Joe Strupp
Jun. 22, 2007 Anyone who has followed the career of Republican presidential contender Rudy Giuliani knows the value he places on personal loyalty. Loyalty is what inspired the former mayor of New York to make Bernard Kerik, once his personal driver, the commissioner of the New York Police Department, and then a partner in his consulting firm, and then to suggest him to President Bush as a potential head of the Department of Homeland Security.
After revelations about Kerik's personal history derailed his bid for the federal post, Giuliani demonstrated that there were limits to loyalty. He has distanced himself from Kerik, who resigned from Giuliani's firm and later pleaded guilty to corruption charges. Giuliani has not, however, sought to distance himself from another, much closer friend whose personal baggage is also inconvenient, and would send most would-be presidents running.
Giuliani employs his childhood friend Monsignor Alan Placa as a consultant at Giuliani Partners despite a 2003 Suffolk County, N.Y., grand jury report that accuses Placa of sexually abusing children, as well as helping cover up the sexual abuse of children by other priests. Placa, who was part of a three-person team that handled allegations of abuse by clergy for the Diocese of Rockville Centre, is referred to as Priest F in the grand jury report. The report summarizes the testimony of multiple alleged victims of Priest F, and then notes, "Ironically, Priest F would later become instrumental in the development of Diocesan policy in response to allegations of sexual abuse of children by priests."
Five years after he was suspended from his duties because of the abuse allegations, Placa is currently listed as "priest in residence" at St. Aloysius Church in Great Neck, N.Y., where close friend Brendan Riordan serves as pastor, and officially lives at the rectory there with Riordan. In addition, Placa co-owns a penthouse apartment in Manhattan with Riordan, the latest in a half-dozen properties the two men have owned in common at various times since the late 1980s.
Placa has worked for Giuliani Partners since 2002. As of June 2007, he remains on the payroll. "He is currently employed here," Giuliani spokeswoman Sunny Mindel confirmed to Salon, adding that Giuliani "believes Alan has been unjustly accused." Mindel declined to discuss what role Placa plays with the consulting firm, or how much he is paid. Says Richard Tollner, who testified before the grand jury that Placa had molested him, "[Giuliani] has to speak up for himself and explain himself. If he doesn't, people shouldn't vote for him." Adds Anne Barrett Doyle, co-director of BishopAccountability.org, which tracks suspected priest abuse, "I think Rudy Giuliani has to account for his friendship with a credibly accused child molester."
Placa himself did not return several calls from Salon.
Placa, now 62, has been friends with Giuliani since childhood. The boys attended Bishop Loughlin High School in Brooklyn together, where Giuliani, Placa and Peter Powers, later to become chief aide to Giuliani during his first term as mayor of New York City, were in an opera club together. Placa and Giuliani would sometimes double-date. "After we'd drop off the girls," Placa told the New York Times in 1997, "Rudy and I would spend hours in the car or walking down the sidewalks, debating ideas: religion, the problems of the world, what we wanted to be." Giuliani, Powers and Placa later attended Manhattan College together and were fraternity brothers at Phi Rho Pi.
After college, Placa attended seminary and became a Catholic priest. Ordained in May 1970, he was first assigned to St. Patrick's parish in Glen Cove, N.Y., from 1970 to 1974. He then transferred to St. Pius X Preparatory Seminary high school in Uniondale, N.Y., where he taught till 1978. He served as director of research and development for Catholic Charities from 1978 to 1986. He then went to work for the Diocese of Rockville Centre, which covers 134 parishes in the two suburban Long Island counties of Nassau and Suffolk and is the sixth largest diocese in the country. Placa ran healthcare services for the diocese, rising to the position of vice chancellor in 1988.
Though their career paths had diverged, Placa remained close to Giuliani, and was actively involved in many of the most important events of his friend's life. He was the best man at Giuliani's first marriage in 1968 to his second cousin, Regina Peruggi, then helped Giuliani get an annulment in 1982 -- over Regina's protests -- so he could marry his second wife, Donna Hanover. Placa officiated at the wedding of Hanover and Giuliani in 1984. In September 2002, while suspended by the diocese over the sexual abuse allegations and no longer permitted to perform priestly duties, Placa received special permission to officiate at the funeral of the former mayor's mother, Helen. He also officiated at the funeral of Giuliani's father and baptized both of Giuliani's children.
During Giuliani's political rise from U.S. attorney to mayor, when reporters wanted quotes from old friends they would often turn to Placa. A 1985 New York Times story noted that Placa stayed over at Giuliani's apartment as often as once a week, where the two men would "talk poetry, theology and politics deep into the night." The monsignor also knew Giuliani well enough to describe his relationship with his father, telling the Times, "A major theme with [Giuliani's] father was his hatred for organized crime."
In 2000, when Mayor Giuliani dropped out of the race for the open U.S. Senate seat now held by Hillary Clinton after finding out he had prostate cancer, a Times reporter went to Placa for insight. He told the paper that "it's been a dramatically challenging time."
When Time magazine named Giuliani its Person of the Year for 2001, Placa appeared again in that story, saying he had known Giuliani since he was 13 and that his cancer and Sept. 11 had "made him face his mortality … and his immortality."
But while Giuliani was being celebrated for his performance on Sept. 11, Alan Placa was about to lose his position of power. In addition to being a priest, Placa had received a law degree, and he first came to work for the diocese as its legal consultant. He was legal counsel to Bishop John McGann, and, starting in 1992, also a member of a three-person diocesan team charged with fielding allegations of sexual abuse by priests.
When a molestation scandal erupted in the Catholic Archdiocese of Boston in early 2002, it spilled over into Long Island. The newly installed bishop, William Murphy, had been the No. 2 official in Boston from 1993 to 2001. He had helped arrange early retirement for the most notorious of the abusive priests, Father John Geoghan. After Geoghan was sentenced to prison for molestation in February 2002, the archdiocese revealed that it had settled 100 civil suits on Geoghan's behalf, and also gave law enforcement the names of 90 priests accused of abuse. Responding to public outcry, officials on Long Island subpoenaed the records of the Rockville Centre Diocese, and Bishop Murphy turned over internal files on accused priests to law enforcement in both Nassau and Suffolk counties in March 2002.
In Nassau County, the district attorney concluded that the statute of limitations had expired on all reported incidents and stopped investigating. Suffolk County convened a special grand jury to investigate specific allegations of abuse and how the diocese had dealt with them. The jury heard from 97 witnesses over nine months, and uncovered "deception and intimidation" by those diocesan officials who were supposed to be fielding sexual abuse complaints from parishioners. "The evidence before the grand jury," stated the report, "clearly demonstrates that diocesan officials agreed to engage in conduct that resulted in the prevention, hindrance and delay in the discovery of criminal conduct by priests."
None of the diocesan officials or accused priests are cited in the grand jury's final report by name; the report instead identifies 23 priests by letter, and identifies diocesan officials by the duties they performed. Ultimately, the grand jury determined that "priests working in the Diocese of Rockville Centre committed criminal acts ... These criminal acts included, but were not limited to, Rape, Sodomy, Sexual Abuse, Endangering the Welfare of a Child and Use of a Child in a Sexual Performance." Because the alleged criminal acts had occurred more than five years ago, however, the statute of limitations meant no charges could be filed against any of the accused.
Suffolk County District Attorney Thomas Spota would not confirm to the Long Island newspaper Newsday at the time of the report's release in February 2003 that Priest F was Alan Placa. Spota would say, however, that "this is a person who was directly involved in the so-called policy of the church to protect children, when in fact he was one of the abusers." Multiple media outlets have named Placa as Priest F. Placa implicitly acknowledged as much to the New York Times in a Feb. 20, 2003, story, titled "L.I. Monsignor Scorns Jury, Insisting He Is No 'Monster'," in which he denied the specific allegations in the report. One of the victims whose testimony is cited in the report has also confirmed to Salon that Placa is Priest F.
By the time of the report's release, Placa was no longer an active priest. In April 2002, shortly before the grand jury's impaneling, Placa stepped down as vice chancellor and went on sabbatical. The diocese announced that he would be assigned to a parish as a priest after the sabbatical. By then, several families had spoken to media outlets and described their interaction with Monsignor Placa and complained about how he had handled their allegations of abuse. (Placa would later tell a reporter that while he was a member of the three-person diocesan team he did not report allegations of abuse to law enforcement.) But the sabbatical also came a week after Newsday contacted Placa and informed him that accusers had come forward to say he had molested them.
Several months later, Placa's sabbatical turned into a suspension. On June 3, 2002, Newsday published a story on the alleged victims who had accused Placa of abusing them in the 1970s. One of the accusers was Richard Tollner. On June 13, 2002, the day the Nassau County District Attorney's Office contacted the diocese regarding the accusations against Placa, Bishop Murphy stripped Placa of his right to perform priestly duties like giving communion and officiating at weddings and funerals, and placed him on administrative leave.
The Suffolk County grand jury report, released eight months after Placa's suspension, includes evidence from three alleged victims. It states that in Priest F's first assignment, "he appears to have made feeble attempts at abusing a boy who was an alter [sic] server. ... He pulled up a chair next to the boy and put his right hand on his thigh. Slowly his hand began to creep up towards the boy's genital area. Alarmed, the boy covered his crotch. … The conduct repeated itself within a week.
"After his first assignment," the report continues, "Priest F was transferred within the Diocese to ... a school. Priest F was cautious, but relentless in his pursuit of victims. He fondled boys over their clothes, usually in his office. Always, his actions were hidden by a poster, newspaper or a book. ... Everyone in the school knew to stay away from Priest F."
The report describes two alleged victims complaining to the school's rector about Priest F, and their "suspicions, later confirmed to be correct," that the priest was abusing a fourth boy. Eventually, one of the alleged victims told Priest F, in an encounter witnessed by another boy, "Don't ever fucking touch me again or I'll kill you."
When one of the victims attempted to report the alleged abuse, "the response I had gotten from my family, from my parents specifically was, that's impossible ... Priests just don't do these things. You must be mistaken."
The report also included memos apparently written by Placa in his capacity as sex abuse investigator for the diocese. In a document from June 1993, he asked colleagues, "Please do not identify me as an attorney [to complainants.]" Another spoke of how Rockville Centre's handling of abuse claims had resulted in the "lowest ratio of losses to assets of any diocese. ... Our system is in place and working well." In a letter, Placa spoke of "[giving] some of my time to helping other bishops and religious congregations with delicate legal problems involving the misconduct of priests. ... In the past 10 years, I have been involved in more than two hundred such cases in various parts of the country." While investigating sexual abuse claims against priests for the Diocese of Rockville Centre, he also served as counsel to the House of Affirmation, a mental-health facility for priests in Worcester, Mass. Patients included priests accused of sexual abuse.
In an interview with Salon, former St. Pius X student Richard Tollner, now 48, confirms that he is one of the alleged victims who testified before the grand jury -- the one who allegedly told Priest F "Don't ever fucking touch me again." He also confirms that Placa is Priest F. Tollner claims Placa molested him and at least two others, but when he told school authorities at the time, he says nothing happened. "No one contacted my family or me," Tollner, now 48, recalls. "I told another priest while I was on a retreat and he said he would explore it and he never did." So far none of the alleged victims besides Tollner has come forward publicly. Placa has denied Tollner's allegations and has referred to the former St. Pius X student as "troubled."
More than four years after the release of the report, Placa remains on administrative leave, as confirmed by Sean Dolan, a spokesman for the diocese. Dolan said he believed there was still an investigative process under way but that he didn't know its status. "You probably have to try to contact [Placa]. I'm not in a position to know that." He added that he didn't think there was a limit to administrative leave. "It can go on indefinitely. I believe that's at the discretion of the bishop."
The church has instituted guidelines for handling allegations of sexual abuse since the Boston scandal, directing that a review board made up mostly of laypeople investigate claims. According to Jim Dwyer, former director of media relations for the Archdiocese of Chicago and current director of public information for the Diocese of Phoenix, if a diocese investigates a priest for sexual abuse and determines that there is "reasonable cause to suspect" that the charges are true, the priest would be "permanently removed from ministry." "It's a lower threshold than in criminal cases," stated Dwyer.
The status of priests who are still under investigation, however, is up to the individual diocese. Dwyer said it was possible for administrative leave to go on for a long period -- "weeks, months, more than a year" -- but that he was "unaware" of any administrative leave that had lasted five years. "But I can imagine a situation where it might." Susan Gibbs, spokeswoman for the Archdiocese of Washington, also thought the duration of Placa's leave was out of the ordinary. "If someone's on leave for five years, it's a little unusual. Normally, if someone goes on leave it's for a short period, about six months, which is renewable."
While Placa is on leave, he is employed elsewhere. In August 2002, after his suspension but prior to the release of the grand jury report, he took a job with Giuliani Partners. There is no public record, however, of what that job entails.
Since the first accusations against Placa surfaced, Giuliani has defended his childhood friend. In June 2002, he insisted that "Alan Placa is one of the finest people I know." In addition to the statement from Mindel to Salon reiterating the ex-mayor's support for Placa, Mindel offered two former St. Pius X students to speak in Placa's defense. Kevin McCormack, who attended St. Pius X while Placa was teaching there and graduated in 1978, dismisses talk of abuse. He claims he never heard of any molestation complaints and adds that the student body was so small that word would have gotten around. "I find the allegations very difficult to believe," says McCormack, now a principal at Xaverian High School in Brooklyn, N.Y. "There was never anything like that that was rumored."
Kevin Way, also a 1978 grad, agreed. "I can't imagine it," says Way, now an attorney. "I find it utterly incredible."
Placa still officially lives at the rectory at St. Aloysius Church in Great Neck, where he continues to be listed as priest in residence. The victims' advocacy group Voice of the Faithful of Long Island held protests outside of St. Aloysius in 2005 and distributed leaflets to show its objection to Placa's involvement there. Says Phil Megna, co-chair of Voice of the Faithful, "His claim to fame is that he bragged of his ability to get things pushed under the rug."
Sister Mary Ann Walsh, director of media relations for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, said the issue of whether a priest on administrative leave could live on church property was a diocesan decision. Dwyer of the Diocese of Phoenix said that in his experience it was possible for a priest on administrative leave for sexual abuse allegations to be a "priest in residence" at a church as well, as long as there was no contact with children. In the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, however, spokesman Todd Tamberg said that archdiocesan policy would prevent a priest on administrative leave for allegations of sexual abuse from being a "priest in residence. "If you've been put on administrative leave you not only are restricted from functioning as a priest or dressing as a priest but also from living on church property."
It is unclear, however, how much Placa is "in residence." In late 2005, a few months after the Voice of the Faithful's protests, he purchased a penthouse apartment in the Regatta, a condominium building on South End Avenue in Manhattan. According to documents filed with the City of New York, Placa co-owns the 650-square-foot, $550,000 apartment with Brendan Riordan, the pastor of St. Aloysius. They are cited as "joint tenants with right of survivorship" in a condominium unit assignment agreement signed on Dec. 5, 2005. Giuliani spokeswoman Mindel confirmed that Riordan and Placa co-own the apartment and said that Placa stays there "on occasion," but that it is an investment property and he lives primarily at the rectory. She said that Riordan "never stays there."
Placa and Riordan -- who also attended Helen Giuliani's funeral -- have known each other for more than 30 years. Both taught at St. Pius X in the late 1970s, and both worked within the Diocese of Rockville Centre for most of their careers. Together they wrote a book called "Desert Silence: A Way of Prayer for an Unquiet Age" in 1977.
Since the late 1980s, the two men have owned six different properties in New York and Florida in common. From 1991 to 1998, while Riordan was pastor of Saints Cyril and Methodius in Deer Park, N.Y., and Placa was vice chancellor of the diocese, Placa was also priest in residence at Saints Cyril and Methodius. Both men are listed as living at the church rectory in public documents. According to the Official Catholic Directory, Riordan had moved to St. Aloysius in Great Neck as pastor by Jan. 1, 1999; Placa has been listed as priest in residence at St. Aloysius since 1999.
-- By Alex Koppelman and Joe Strupp

`Citizen Kane' Tops American Film Institute List of Best Movies
By Courtney Dentch
June 21 (Bloomberg) -- ``Citizen Kane'' topped the list of the American Film Institute's top 100 movies, holding on to the lead spot 10 years after the list was first compiled.
The 1941 movie, written, directed and produced by Orson Welles when he was 25 years old, tells the story of newspaper tycoon Charles Foster Kane and his final word, ``Rosebud.'' Welles also starred in the title role.
The American Film Institute, based in Los Angeles, reissued its ``100 Years...100 Movies'' list 10 years after the original rankings were drawn up. A jury of 1,500 film artists, critics and historians evaluated the movies based on their critical recognition, awards, lasting popularity, and historical and cultural significance, the institute said.
``The Godfather,'' ``Casablanca,'' ``Raging Bull,'' and ``Singin' in the Rain'' rounded out the top five films. AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies -- 10th Anniversary Edition:
1 Citizen Kane (1941)
2 The Godfather (1972)
3 Casablanca (1942)
4 Raging Bull (1980)
5 Singin' in the Rain (1952)
6 Gone With the Wind (1939)
7 Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
8 Schindler's List (1993)
9 Vertigo (1958)
10 The Wizard of Oz (1939)
11 City Lights (1931)
12 The Searchers (1956)
13 Star Wars (1977)
14 Psycho (1960)
15 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
16 Sunset Blvd. (1950)
17 The Graduate (1967)
18 The General (1927)
19 On the Waterfront (1954)
20 It's a Wonderful Life (1946)
21 Chinatown (1974)
22 Some Like It Hot (1959)
23 The Grapes of Wrath (1940)
24 E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982)
25 To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)
26 Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)
27 High Noon (1952)
28 All About Eve (1950)
29 Double Indemnity (1944)
30 Apocalypse Now (1979)
31 The Maltese Falcon (1941)
32 The Godfather Part II (1974)
33 One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975)
34 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)
35 Annie Hall (1977)
36 The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)
37 The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
38 The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)
39 Dr. Strangelove (1964)
40 The Sound of Music (1965)
41 King Kong (1933)
42 Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
43 Midnight Cowboy (1969)
44 The Philadelphia Story (1940)
45 Shane (1953)
46 It Happened One Night (1934)
47 A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)
48 Rear Window (1954)
49 Intolerance (1916)
50 The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)
51 West Side Story (1961)
52 Taxi Driver (1976)
53 The Deer Hunter (1978)
54 M*A*S*H (1970)
55 North by Northwest (1959)
56 Jaws (1975)
57 Rocky (1976)
58 The Gold Rush(1925)
59 Nashville (1975)
60 Duck Soup (1933)
61 Sullivan's Travels (1941)
62 American Graffiti (1973)
63 Cabaret (1972)
64 Network (1976)
65 The African Queen (1951)
66 The Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
67 Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966)
68 Unforgiven (1992)
69 Tootsie (1982)
70 A Clockwork Orange (1971)
71 Saving Private Ryan (1998)
72 The Shawshank Redemption (1994)
73 Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)
74 The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
75 In the Heat of the Night (1967)
76 Forrest Gump (1994)
77 All the President's Men (1976)
78 Modern Times (1936)
79 The Wild Bunch (1969)
80 The Apartment (1960)
81 Spartacus (1970)
82 Sunrise (1927)
83 Titanic (1997)
84 Easy Rider (1969)
85 A Night at the Opera (1935)
86 Platoon (1986)
87 12 Angry Men (1957)
88 Bringing Up Baby (1938)
89 The Sixth Sense (1999)
90 Swing Time (1936)
91 Sophie's Choice (1982)
92 Goodfellas (1990)
93 The French Connection (1971)
94 Pulp Fiction (1994)
95 The Last Picture Show (1971)
96 Do the Right Thing (1989)
97 Blade Runner (1982)
98 Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942)
99 Toy Story (1995)
100 Ben-Hur (1959)
To contact the reporter on this story: Courtney Dentch in New York at cdentch1@bloomberg.net . Last Updated: June 21, 2007 07:50 EDT

The Sunday Times
Lesson one from Gaza – get out of Iraq fast
Andrew Sullivan
From the perspective of Washington, what is now unfolding in Gaza may well be viewed as a vindication of neoconservatism.
Neoconservatives, after all, have long argued that the root cause of terrorism and autocracy in the Middle East is not American meddling or Israeli error, or even oil. It’s fundamentally about a deep-seated Arab political culture that has never had an experience of democracy or produced a polity not dominated by tribalism, monarchism, autocracy or Islamism.
It’s about an Arab political culture that is the most hostile to western concepts of individual citizenship, liberty or the rule of law of almost any culture on the planet.
Arabs, in the judgment of neoconservatives, are tragically not very interested in self-government as the West understands it, and never have been. They are interested in family, tribe, religion and, when all else fails (and often when it doesn’t), brutal violence. If you haven’t watched Lawrence of Arabia recently it’s ravishingly persuasive on this point.
Whatever one’s view of this analysis, it seems obvious that even the most virulent of Israel’s critics cannot blame the current barbarism in Gaza on the Jews. After all, the Israelis withdrew, didn’t they? The main Arab states and Europe backed the moderate Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas, didn’t they? A power-sharing deal was brokered between Fatah and Hamas by the Arab states.
And yet civil war still rages. What you see in Gaza, moreover, is what you see anywhere in the Arab world where order is not imposed by overwhelming force or a police state or a monarchy. You see total anarchy and barbarism. You see Iraq.
The complementary neoconservative view is no rosier. It is that Hamas’s rise in Gaza must be seen in the broader regional context of Iran’s Shi’ite revival and regional and global aspirations.
Here is how Charles Krauthammer, the neoconservative columnist, put it on Fox News last week: “Hamas is supplied and financed by Iran. Iran has now a constellation of allies and clients in that region, the way the Sovi-ets had around the world. It’s got Hamas now in Gaza, it’s got Hezbollah in Lebanon, it’s got Sadr in Iraq. And it has a country, Syria, as its only Arab ally in that region.
“It’s an Iranian client crescent, and it is the beginning of a general Iranian, Islamist revolutionary infiltration of the Arabs. It’s the beginning of a great struggle between Persian, nonArab, Shi’ite and radical Iran with all of these Arabs.”
Cheery, isn’t he. But sadly persuasive. The evidence of rising Islamic fundamentalism among the Palestinians is impossible to ignore. This is not Yasser Arafat’s secular Palestine. It is something even more troubling.
“The era of justice and Islamic rule have arrived,” announced Islam Shahawan, a spokesman for Hamas’s militia, as Islamist thugs walked their opponents out on the street and shot them in the head. Religious violence is much harder to contain or to moderate than violence vested in a desire for mere territory or revenge or worldly power. If God sanctions violence without end, then violence will continue without end.
It’s also clear how many Washington neocons will interpret the Gaza meltdown. They will either use it as grist for the case for launching a military strike on Hamas’s protector and funder Iran. Or they will argue that the dangers of Hamas in Gaza are a harbinger of what would happen if the US were to withdraw from Iraq.
As Ralph Peters, a former military intelligence officer, explained in the New York Post last Thursday: “We’re stuck in Iraq, and it sucks. But were we to leave in haste, far more blood than oil would flow in the Persian Gulf. The disaster in Gaza’s just a rehearsal for the Arab-suicide drama awaiting its opening night in Iraq.”
But here, it seems to me, neoconservatism begins to devour itself. For the sake of argument, assume the premise about the violent dysfunctionality of Arab political culture. (I’d say it’s more complicated than that, and Israel’s and America’s mistakes have compounded the Arab suicide. Nonetheless, suicide is ultimately something you really have to do to yourself, and the Palestinians have long since perfected the art.) Now ask yourself: if that’s correct, how on earth did neoconservatives ever argue that we could produce a functioning democracy by force of arms in Iraq?
This is surely the self-contradiction at the heart of neoconservatism. Even at the maximum surge strength, America is helpless in the face of an Iraqi civil war that has only just begun, can be fuelled indefinitely by corrupt oil money, and is driven by centuries-old sectarian hatred between Shi’ite and Sunni Muslims and decades of totalitarian trauma. And yet the neocons insist we should plough on, adding more troops, planning on permanent bases for indefinite occupation.
Well, you can’t have it both ways. Either Arab culture without autocracy really is what we see in Gaza and Iraq or it isn’t. If it is, then trying to build western-style democracy during a brutal civil war in Iraq is a mug’s game.
We have, I think, two options. We can withdraw from Iraq and play the grand regional Shi’ite-Sunni war in the Middle East by proxy. Or we can enmesh ourselves much more deeply and irrevocably in a metastasising conflict. Such a conflict may well breed even more antiwestern terror and run the risk of inserting Americans into an ancient sectarian blood feud.
There are grave dangers in both options and no one should underestimate the risks of withdrawal from a power vacuum we created. But surely the lesson of Gaza and Iraq is that occupation will not transform Arab culture for the better either. It may in fact make things worse.
What I guess I’m saying is that if you take neoconservatism seriously as an analysis of Arab culture and the regional conflict in the Middle East, and you are primarily interested in the defence of the West, the case for cutting our losses in Iraq is a very strong one.
But somehow the neocons are afraid to follow their argument to its logical and inexorable conclusion. We need to leave. Soon. Or reap a gathering whirlwind.

John Tracy, 82; deaf son of actor Spencer Tracy,

By Valerie J. Nelson; L.A. Times

John Tracy, the deaf son of actor Spencer Tracy who inspired his parents to establish the pioneering John Tracy Clinic in Los Angeles to help young hearing-impaired children and their families, has died. He was 82. Tracy died Friday night at his son's ranch in Acton, where he had lived for the past five years, said his sister, Susie Tracy. The cause of death was not specified. He was 17 when his mother, Louise Treadwell Tracy, first spoke publicly about rearing a deaf child. The speech at USC led her to found the clinic in a campus bungalow in 1942, and she helped build the nonprofit into a leading institution for deaf education. For the first few years, Spencer Tracy was the clinic's sole support."As a child, John Tracy couldn't have known that he would be the inspiration of a whole movement to give new hope to parents of children with hearing loss," Barbara F. Hecht, president of the clinic, told The Times.The clinic was among the first to start a hearing-impaired child's training in infancy and make parental education a critical component. It has helped an estimated 245,000 parents and children.It tries to educate "deaf children through their mothers and fathers, who otherwise would not know what to do with them…. I hoped it would help a great deal," John Tracy wrote in 1946 in the Volta Review, the journal of the Alexander Graham Bell Assn. for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing. The story, written when he was 22, was headlined "My Complicated Life."John Ten Broeck Tracy was born June 26, 1924, in Milwaukee to two actors who married between a matinee and evening performance.When Tracy was 10 months old, his mother became alarmed when a door that accidentally slammed shut failed to wake him. "I stopped suddenly…. I stood motionless beside his crib. I called his name again — and then I shouted it. He slept on. And so I discovered our baby was deaf," she said years later. Afraid to tell anyone, even her husband, she consulted several doctors who told her that her son had "nerve damage, cause unknown." They also said he would never talk. The Tracys refused to accept doctors' advice to "wait — in a few years he'll be old enough for a state school," a reference to deaf education that would start when he was 6."We went right on talking to Johnny, singing to him, telling him nursery rhymes, and as it turned out, that was just the right thing to do," Louise once said, according to a 1983 Times story.He once told of a time when he was 3 or 4 and his mother took a break from chattering to him. He remembered "leaning my face forward closer to hers and saying, 'Talk!' That was my first word," Tracy told the Daily News of Los Angeles in 2003. Through his mother's perseverance and as many as 3,000 repetitions of one word, Tracy learned to speak and read lips, Ladies' Home Journal reported in 1972.Despite a bout with polio at 6 that left him with a weakened leg, Tracy began riding horses at 9 and competed in Riviera Country Club riding contests, he wrote in Volta. He also became a dedicated polo and tennis player. With his father's acting career taking off, the family put down roots in 1936 on an eight-acre ranch in Encino, where they lived for 19 years. At 14, Tracy began writing stories and drawing cartoons for a newsletter delivered to family and friends that he published for years on a printing press in his bedroom.A film buff, he often got an assist from his father, who would give him a script "so John could read it and get more out of the movie," said Susie, his younger sister.Although Tracy had been mainly home-schooled by tutors, he went to Pasadena City College, and his father spoke at his graduation.After attending what is now the California Institute of the Arts, Tracy worked for several years in the art props department at Walt Disney Studios; Disney was a close family friend. Tracy stopped working when his eyesight started to fail in the late 1950s.Well into adulthood, he learned that his deafness was due to Usher syndrome, a genetic disease that was also to blame for his fading vision. By the early 1990s, he was legally blind from retinitis pigmentosa.In 1953, he married Nadine Carr, a neighbor with whom he used to ride horses. They had a son, Joseph Spencer Tracy, before divorcing in 1957.By then, his family had moved to Holmby Hills and added a room next to Tracy's bedroom to house his collections, which included art books, comics and scrapbooks that documented world events.A year before his mother died in 1983, Tracy moved to a Santa Monica retirement home, then later to Acton. His father died in 1967.When asked whether he had a message for the hearing-impaired children who attend the clinic that bears his name, Tracy told the Daily News in 2003 that "I want to let the kids know they can live a full life. Sports, schools, hobbies, interests, dating, marriage, have a family, drive a car — all of it."In addition to his sister, Susie, and his son, Joseph, who is an artist, Tracy is survived by three grandchildren.Services are pending. Memorial donations may be made to the John Tracy Clinic, 806 W. Adams Blvd., Los Angeles, CA, 90007.

Sopranos Goodfellas Say Good Ending

by Josh Grossberg
They may have abruptly been silenced when the screen cut out, but the cast of The Sopranos is finally breaking the omertà about the controversial series finale.
James Gandolfini and the rest of his onscreen families are praising show mastermind David Chase for leaving the audience guessing at the end of Sunday's swan song by having the screen cut to black for 10 painful seconds.
"You have to ask David Chase about that. Smarter minds than mine know the answer to that. I thought it was a great ending," the erstwhile Tony Soprano told the New York Daily News of the truncated last scene, in which Tony waits for his family to convene at a diner to the strains of "Don't Stop Believin'." The suspense builds as all sorts of sketchy-looking people come through door and Meadow struggles to parallel-park outside. Just as she's about to run in, the picture cuts out. The ambiguous ending ticked off many fans who hoped for a more traditional resolution.
But Gandolfini, who turned up with several castmates Thursday night for costar Tony "Paulie Walnuts" Sirico's benefit for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, disagreed. "The ending was exactly what it should have been."
The Emmy winner said he was also in the dark about any Sopranos movie, an idea that Chase has publicly whacked for now.
"Don't look at me. I don't have an answer. All I know is that it's over," Gandolfini said, adding that he had no idea how the show was going to end.
His onscreen spouse Edie Falco says she was equally in the dark about the last scene.
"I think the ending was just great. I mean that. I have never second-guessed David Chase, and I'm not about to start now," she told the newspaper. "Yes, I was at that table, but I have no idea what happened after the screen went blank."
Steven Van Zandt, whose consigliere Silvio Dante was last seen comatose in a hospital, was even more blunt.
"A conventional ending would have been a fraud," he said. "Life doesn't have tidy little endings. Even some great songs just fade out like the last episode of The Sopranos."
Van Zandt, who also hosts a Sirius Satellite radio show, also claimed that "the opinions [are] shifting across the country."
"It started out 50-50, and by last night, it was 80-20 in favor of the ending," he said.
Sirico was also on board with his cohorts. "I thought the ending was outstanding. We got Phil Leotardo. We went back to our lives. What do people want? More blood? A whole family whacked? I like that David Chase let the viewers decide."
Aida Turturro, who played Tony's sister, Janice, said she was pleased with the finale, but suggested that the abrupt ending meant Tony did get whacked—a theory popularized on many fanboards.
"Tony and [brother-in-law] Bobby [Baccalieri] talked a few episodes back about how when you finally get hit, you never see it coming and the world just goes black," she told the Daily News. (Bobby's actual quote was: "You probably don't even hear it when it happens.")
According to Reuters, the Tony-gets-hit hypothesis appears to be gaining traction, with an assist by an HBO rep, who said there were several "legitimate" clues supporting the scenario.
"While [Chase] won't say to me 100 percent what it all means, he says some people who've guessed have come closer than others," HBO spokesman Quentin Shaffer told the wire service. "There are definitely things there that he intended for people to pick up on."
Aside from the flashback conversation between Tony and Bobby, subscribers to the theory point out that Chase titled the first episode of this final season "Members Only." In the episode, Tony is nearly killed after getting shot in the gut by his demented Uncle Junior. Among the people who enter the diner in the final scene is a guy wearing a Members Only jacket. He's seen entering the restroom moments before the blackout, and many viewers have noted the resmblance to a similar scene in The Godfather in which mobsters retrieve their weapons from a restroom before an execution.
Shaffer intimated to Reuters that "Members Only" could also be a subtle reference to membership in La Cosa Nostra.
But any such subtlety was lost on those Sopranos–watching meatheads who apparently took out their frustrations on Chase—or rather, his Wikipedia entry.
Following Sunday's broadcast, someone defaced Chase's biography, listing him as a "homosexual American television writer, director and producer" even though Chase is a happily married man. The Wikipedia powers have since barred further editing on the page.
While the farewell episode may have caused some grief for Chase, it's done wonders for Journey.
The band announced Friday that its album sales are up nearly 100 percent at major retailers and "Don't Stop Believin' " has seen its downloads increase an whopping 482 percent at the iTunes Store after serving as the soundtrack to The Sopranos' sign-off.
Copyright 2007 E! Entertainment Television, Inc. All rights reserved.

How Harry Potter Really EndsThe final scene, revealed!

By Dan KoisPosted Thursday, June 14, 2007,
Harry walked into the Three Broomsticks and took a seat in a booth near the back. Who were all the people in here tonight? They looked familiar, but Harry didn't know any of them. Was that Dolores Umbridge? No, just some woman in a hideous cardigan.
None of these diners knew yet that Voldemort was dead—not by Harry's hand, but killed instead by Dean Thomas and Seamus Finnegan, who'd happened upon He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named outside of London. They'd cursed him from behind and watched as the Knight Bus ran over his head with a horrible crunching sound.
Harry flipped through the channels on the wizarding wireless until he found a song that reminded him of the old days, "Do the Hippogriff" by the Weird Sisters. He remembered the crowds dancing to this song at the Yule Ball, years before; so many of those friends were long gone now, dead or in Azkaban. As the song began, Harry heard the tinkle of the bell above the front door as Ginny came in. She hurried to his booth and sat down.
"It's Percy," he told her, taking a swig of butterbeer. "He's testifying."
Each time the bell rang and another wizard walked into the pub, Harry looked up warily. Voldemort may have been dead, but there were still plenty of people who'd be thrilled if Harry was the victim of a Bat-Bogey Hex, or worse. Was that man in the corner booth, stirring sugar into his tea, from the Ministry of Magic? Or a Death Eater, burning for revenge? Or was he just some bystander who couldn't help noticing the famous scar on Harry's forehead?
Ron, his red hair cut short and a thin beard running along his jaw, came through the door and sat down. Harry took his hand for a second, a little overwhelmed. After the depression, and the suicide attempt in the fifth-floor prefects' bathroom, it was good to see Ron happy again; his new office job with the Chudley Cannons quidditch club—and the German-made sports broom Harry had bought him—seemed to be improving his spirits.
Someone approached the table. Harry looked up, hoping it might be Hermione, but instead it was a pale, sneering young man who for a moment reminded Harry of Draco Malfoy. The man walked past Harry's booth and entered the bathroom. Across the pub, a man with dark eyes laughed with a woman who reminded Harry of Bellatrix Lestrange.
Outside, a frustrated Hermione tried to tether Buckbeak the hippogriff to a street lamp, but Buckbeak was having none of it. He shook his eagle head angrily and pawed at the ground. Hermione sighed; she'd have to start with the bowing all over again.
An order of Pumpkin Pasties arrived at the table, and Harry popped one in his mouth. Where was Hermione? She'd told him earlier in the week that she was giving up her plans to be a Healer in favor of a career as an advocate, defending wizards in Ministry hearings. He'd flushed with pride. Maybe having the whole gang here would ease the sense of dread he couldn't shake.
He remembered what Hagrid had told him. "Aye, Harry," poor Hagrid had said. "You probably don't even hear it when it happens." Was that true? Had Hagrid heard the words, or seen the flash of green, when those two Death Eater thugs killed him in the Magical Menagerie in Diagon Alley?
Outside, Hermione finally managed to settle Buckbeak in one place along the curb. She ran across the lane, heading for the entrance to the Three Broomsticks.
Harry heard the jingle of the door. He looked up. He felt his scar
.Dan Kois has worked as a film executive and a literary agent. He writes and edits New York magazine's arts and culture blog, Vulture.

And, we must have the truth, how can we tolerate not knowing? Even though the truth is right before our eyes all along? Ah, the fun rolls on! David Chase is a genius!

FROM Steve Gorman

LA Times Features

(Did)The controversial blackout which abruptly ended the TV mob drama meant that Tony Soprano was rubbed out.
And today HBO said they may be on to something.
One clue in particular, a flashback in the penultimate episode to a conversation between Tony and his brother-in-law about death, gained credence as an HBO spokesman called it a "legitimate" hint and confirmed that series creator David Chase had a definite ending in mind.
"While he won't say to me 100 per cent what it all means, he says some people who've guessed have come closer than others," HBO spokesman Quentin Schaffer said after speaking to Chase.
"There are definitely things there that he intended for people to pick up on," Mt Schaffer said.
Chase suggested as much in an interview on Tuesday with The Star-Ledger newspaper of New Jersey when he said of his end to the HBO series, "Anyone who wants to watch it, it's all there".
In the final moments of the concluding episode, Tony, the conflicted mob boss who has just survived a round of gangland warfare, sits in a diner with his family munching on onion rings as the 1980s song by rock band Journey, Don't Stop Believing, blares from a juke box.
Tension builds as a suspicious man wearing a "Members Only" jacket eyes Tony from a nearby counter before slipping into a restroom.
Then, as Tony looks toward the restaurant's entrance, the screen abruptly goes blank in mid-scene - with no picture or sound for 10 seconds - until the credits roll silently.
Stunned viewers, many initially believing something had gone wrong with their cable TV reception, were left wondering whether Tony ended up "whacked" or whether his sordid life went on as usual.
The jarring, fill-in-the-blank finale, concluding a show widely hailed as America's greatest television drama, sparked a furious debate about whether Chase had conceived of an actual ending and whether he left the audience any clues.
The biggest hint, according to a consensus taking shape on the web, is a scene from an earlier episode in which Tony and his brother-in-law, Bobby Bacala, muse about what it feels like to die.
"At the end, you probably don't hear anything, everything just goes black," Bobby says while they sit fishing in a small boat on a lake.
"I think that is one of the most legitimate things to look at," Mr Schaffer said when asked about theories that the flashback was meant to foreshadow Tony's death.

A Different Take!
Sopranos, Etc

by Larry Gross
There are different ways to be original and so, necessarily, different ways to be inspired to be original. These are things to remember and consider when contemplating the aesthetic success or failure of The Soprano's last episode's windup.
A lot of the huffing and puffing about David Chase's choices with regard to the episodes closing moments has to do with the complicated and always conflicted way in which the show addressed its audience. The whole importance of the show has always originated in Chase's determination not to hide his conflictedness about liking and not liking Tony Soprano, to evade to the furthest degree the either-he's-good-or-he's-bad approach and go for the he's both approach. Tony's a lot of different things at different times.
Chase himself was always trying to express a lot of different aspirations in this enterprise, even when they slammed up against each other in not entirely satisfactory ways. Let's start by recalling some of the balls Chase has sought to keep in the air.
In addition to being the tale of a Jersey crime boss on his last legs seeking help in therapy as the myth of the Mafia-macho-omnipotence wanes, a soap about a family perpetually in crisis, and the delineation of multiple turf wars of a more generic crime story kind, The Sopranos managed to be about other things as well
*It was a love-hate letter to our therapeutic culture of self absorbed self realization and all the ways that psychoanalytic thought has become debased yet inescapable cultural marker. (This was ground, incidentally, that Alan Ball was traversing from the California perspective for many of the same years on Six Feet Under.)
*It was a meditation on the fact that everyone in our world is connected to and obsessed with showbiz/old movie/nostalgia/media/the technology of visual culture, even those mafia goons who would seem least likely to be involved with and most remote from concerns for such things .
It's important to note in this regard, that in addition to Kristopher's indirectly fatal brush with Hollywood, AJ is tossed into the maw of movies near the end. This is rather explicit proof - if any were needed - that psychological authenticity will always evade him as it has his father and grandfather before him. (Not unrelated to this is one of the show's most famous episodes, obsessed reliance upon a defective cell phone, a device which today has become itself part of visual culture.)
What clearly must have begun to obsess Chase (and who knows how many of his creative collaborators) as the show evolved, was how the phenomenon of the show's very success itself, mirrored back the contradictions in these thematic arcs. Vast widespread love and popularity for Tony Soprano must have often felt, for an already-conflicted sensibility like Chase's, an almost insupportably agonizing irony. And this of course includes its being a good self-esteem boosting thing too, to which he owed a certain basic responsibility. A debt to his audience needed settling and a debt to his own vision.
But the contradictions in the situation for Chase and us still don't end there: One paradox: Though Chase was marvelously fierce about not playing by the more inane banally fear-driven rules of tv dramaturgy, he was far more a stylistic traditionalist than he was any kind of stylistic or aesthetically oriented innovator. Rich characterizations and satisfyingly deep emotional expression were the week-by-week stuff that the show did best. If you want hard-to-follow ingenious path-breaking visual metaphor and truly rule-shattering tv dramaturgy you go to Potter's Singing Detective or McGoohan's The Prisoner. There is more of that type of taste-for-formal-experiment-as-a-virtue and central inspiration in its own right in the work of Gary Shandling and Alan Ball's Six Feet Under or the first year of Twin Peaks, than in The Sopranos. This isn't a knock it's simply a classification. If he were a novelist, Chase wouldn't be Joyce or Kafka, he'd be Balzac or Tolstoy. This is to say that when the show went for more explicit visual “strangeness,” i.e. episodes where Tony's asleep and dreaming or in a bullet induced coma for most of its duration, were not Chase at his strongest. One absolutely admired his will to flex those muscles, but you were a far from the supple rigorous craziness of the Charlie Kaufmans or the David Lynchs at their intermittent best, when you saw those episodes.
This is to say that the grand contradiction inside Chase's creation was its own ambivalent participation in cultural history. It dealt with an outmoded 20th century world-view (specifically the nostalgically remembered decades of the sixties and seventies) colliding with 21st century ambiguity and the artist, whether he fully knew it or not, caught right in the middle of the same thing in his own aesthetic process. (It's hard to imagine someone as smart as Chase doing anything unwittingly, but then the older you get, the more you know, the more you discover you missed…)
Which gets us to Sunday night's episode with its controversial final sequence in the diner with its eight seconds of blackness at last.
I don't want to say why it was great. Or even that it was great, because I think there are a lot of strong arguments on both sides of that issue. Value judgments are like opinions and assholes, everybody's got them…
I am interested in giving an account of where it came from.
Let's dispose of two extreme points of view, one harshly negative, one harshly cynical. The negative one says he ended it that way because he was chickenshit, stalled or both. He didn't “know” how to end his show.
I won't list all the reasons why that's bullshit. But it is. And the proof that it is, simply, that the last three episodes were so abundant in conventionally “big” dramatic moments that Chase made it very explicit he could give us one if he wanted to.
A more hardcore cynical interpretation is that Tony lives on in thematic and narrative indeterminacy for reasons entirely irrelevant to the shows structure and themes itself, that Chase simply wants the option to do movies and sequels about Tony.
Let me say this about that.
I think Chase is probably himself cynical enough or respectful enough of the cynical take on Life, to allow himself to be interpreted that way. But on another level he's getting the last laugh on those who think about it like that, or let's say, those who think about it in so simple a way On a more empirically specific level, against that argument, is Gandolfini's widely reiterated determination to leave the show behind, which would seem to rule out further versions.
My suspicion is that if Chase returns at all to these characters for whatever reasons after some hiatus, it will be in a structure and tone so different from what The Sopranos has been up till now, that it won't be what it has hitherto been. A series or a movie about Meadow's middle class marriage woes as a lawyer with a lawyer husband or the saga of the Tony-Carmela marriage's final freeze may come, but I don't think it will be a continuation, in any meaningful way, of The Sopranos.
So if those are not the reasons, what's he about?
Everything about the episode up till the end moments is the meat-and-potatoes, darkly comic psychological moral realism that the show offered us at regular intervals for the previous six years. But the theme of disappointment and frustration is also obsessively being tracked-and dramatized. Bobby's funeral is held not with insupportable anguish, but a shrug. Info is gotten on Phil Leotardo from a Fed who's himself more morally compromised than ever. Parting glances at Silvio. Tony's sis. Paulie's sweetly insufficient visionary moment with the Virgin. And above all, Tony's devastating failure to talk with Uncle Junior are all little emblems of failed, disrupted communication. Even the much admired killing of Phil is abrupt and purposely the result of numerous narrative ellipses. The way that Meadow and AJ are pulled back into the family's normative straightjacket is quiet and grim, a Chekhovian demonstrations that almost all gestures in life toward psychological autonomy and transcendence habitually end in failure.
What the cut to black in the last seconds says it says not in a similarly well dramatized manner - not in the manner of a cathartic statement - but at the level of structure. It's Chase saying, “Up till now I've been satisfied to be good at the dramatic. I am good at the realistic. But I am at the end of the day aware that that is not enough; that to be true to my vision I have to show that there is an ambiguous unknowable set of moral and social forces working here that cannot be fully resolved in the terms I have set forth.”
It's no wonder this disgusts a sizable part of Chase's audience.
He has gotten their deepest loyalty in many, many cases by his casual seeming mastery of the most conventional dramatic instruments. Now at the very ultimate moment he alludes to their insufficiency and symbolically denies his own skill at statement.
But not only is Tony's fate thematically unknowable or undecidable, there's another governing issue. That long disruptive fragmenting cut to black at the close is a conclusive gesture toward, and even for, the audience, and anything but a display of contempt for them. Anger and ambivalence maybe, but not contempt. The filmmaker confesses that the power of making the Sopranos' story meaningful lies not with him, but with us.
The choice to make abrupt empty blackness the “ending” was entirely about the show's relation to its audience.
What people wanted was David Chase's conclusive statement about Tony Soprano, but the final ending scene does not come from the nature of Tony Soprano's character, it comes from the problem of David Chase's relationship with his audience.
To clarify by way of analogy, there is a famous choice in movie narrative that nominally offers resolution but in fact destroys the possibility of conclusiveness even more monstrously than this Soprano's finale. That is the murder of Janet Leigh in Psycho. And particularly there is a strong similarity in Hitchcock's decision to cast a major star who “could not” be killed a half hour into the film, but whose death and disappearance structured that impossibility as the governing aspect of the film's structure.
Whatever else is true about that admirably complex choice on Hitchcock's part, you can say that it did not emanate as an inspiration, from the psychological necessities of the character of Marion Crane in that movie, nor was it in any meaningful way a “resolution” of her story. It was in fact the most aggressive insult to meaning perhaps in the history of cinema. Marion Crane's death is precisely as black and arbitrary as the black screen that ended The Soprano's as a series.
What Chase was doing involved not the characters or the story as such, but a meditation on the show's relation to its audience, not just the audience's literal narrative expectations so much as the whole issue of that audience's feelings about the show.
If it was (as with the Hitchcock example) an instance of violence to the governing assumptions of the audience, it was of a surpassingly honest kind. It said, “this is what I have been about all along…I have implicated you in the destiny of Tony and his family-but I have always told you are there is a problem and therefore a cost for simplistic, transparent, identification, and now, finally, at last, the bill has come due.”
It's not the explicit thematic punishment of killing them, which as many Chase supporters have already pointed out would be too tidy and morally coherent by half. It's the confession that straightforward representational narrative information can't get to the bottom of this diversely jumbled contradictory life Chase has been putting on display.
(What's partly so moving and odd about the whole sequence in the diner is how paradoxically rich with ongoing lived life it is… from the exhilarating rhythms of the Journey tune to images a couple smooching in another booth, another family gathering down the end of the aisle, two black guys stopping at a street stand outside, the quintessential Sopranos comedy of Meadow's inept parking job, all the hints of dread in a guy eying Tony, down to the tiny affirmation of AJ talking about “remembering the good times.”)
So as Paulie got it so evocatively wrong at Bobbie's funeral, “in the midst of death we are in life.” But Chase is not tantalizing us with specific narrative issues. There's no one in the story left to kill Tony and the danger of a cop bust has already been covered in the scene with his lawyer. Tony's anxious fearful looks to the door are not narratively specific. They are signatures of his soul's perpetual divided state, as Michael Corleone's blank impassive stare was the signature of his damnation.
The disappointment-causing “attack” on or denial of grayification to the audience is also perhaps the most explicit statement of the sovereignty of the audience, because it was by taking us into consideration that Chase generated this idea in the first place (in the same way that audience certainty that Hitchcock wouldn't/couldn't - not moral or narrative necessity - inspired him to kill Marion Crane). The audience is always ultimately compelled by the best art to take responsibility, to discover responsibility for its own interpretive moves or failure to make them.
To go back to my first assertion, originality partly means letting yourself be influenced by new and different kinds of reality as the way to make art. In 19th century fiction, that meant making “ordinary” non-aristocratic human beings the heroes of fiction. In the great era of modernist narrative, that meant exploring the structure of consciousness as the motive for metaphor. In the case of Hitchcock, and now in the case of David Chase, two masters of popular visual film narrative, the very sociology of tv and film's popularity itself, our attachment to issues like the star system, and our expectation of easy narrative closure, become problematic zones that inspire a confrontation and questioning of form.
In the end though with Chase, it does come back to character.
The Sopranos was emphatically not tragedy on the model of The Godfather nor was it exclusively a realist denunciation of the mob's moral bankruptcy like Goodfellas, though the overwhelming influence of both conceptions on Chase was visible everywhere and generously acknowledge by him many times. (The rushed anti-dramatic “sit” discussing Phil's fate in this show was one of many effective smaller-than-life Godfather parody/commentaries in this final episode. Scorsese and Coppola are, of course, Chase's own oedipal issue.)
Tony Soprano has always lived a unique, perpetually undecidable tragic-comic death-in-life that spills outside the very norms of dramatic genre writing Chase deploys so skillfully. Tony has lived between a rock and a hard place, but then so has David Chase. I believe it was inevitable and profound of Chase to find ways at the end, to share his most intimate dilemmas and questions with us.
This is NOT the artist abdicating responsibility. This is the artist, a most solicitous and engaging type usually, insisting that we assume ours.
- Larry Gross June 12, 2007

US News"Sopranos" creator defends uncertain ending

By REUTERS
NEW YORK - Many 'Sopranos' fans were furious at Sunday's unresolved ending, but show creator David Chase said he didn't mean to annoy anybody, and for those left wanting more he didn't rule out a movie based on the series.
After building tension for six seasons over 8-1/2 years, 'The Sopranos,' one of America's most critically acclaimed television shows, ended with a black screen. But for the nearly 12 million viewers tuning in, there was no clear answer to the big question -- would mob boss Tony Soprano survive or get whacked?
'I have no interest in explaining, defending, reinterpreting, or adding to what is there,' Chase told New Jersey newspaper The Star-Ledger in an interview from France where he was on vacation while avoiding the media frenzy.
'No one was trying to be audacious, honest to God,' the paper quoted him as saying. 'We did what we thought we had to do. No one was trying to blow people's minds or thinking, 'Wow, this'll (tick) them off.''
'People get the impression that you're trying to (mess) with them, and it's not true. You're trying to entertain them.''
The Star-Ledger, the real-life local paper in northern New Jersey where the show is set, said Chase agreed to the interview before the season began and before he decided to go to France to avoid day-after debates over the final episode.
In the final moments of the show, Tony Soprano, played by James Gandolfini, was munching onion rings in a New Jersey diner surrounded by a smiling family.
A guy looking like a hit man had entered the restroom behind Tony and might be expected to come back out and kill the entire family, but then the screen went black for several seconds, leaving viewers to guess what happened next.
The blackout left many viewers dismayed or convinced they had lost reception. HBO, the Time Warner Inc.-owned pay-cable channel that launched 'The Sopranos' in 1999, was immediately flooded with e-mails.
Asked whether the ambiguous ending was a way of setting up a movie, Chase said: 'I don't think about (a movie) much.'
'I never say never. An idea could pop into my head where I would go, 'Wow, that would make a great movie,' but I doubt it,' The Star-Ledger quoted him as saying.
'I'm not being coy,' he added. 'If something appeared that really made a good 'Sopranos' movie, and you could invest in it and everybody else wanted to do it, I would do it. But I think we've kind of said it and done it.'
Sunday's show drew 11.9 million viewers, making it the fourth most-watched episode ever behind the 2002 fourth season debut (13.4 million), the finale of that season (12.5 million), and the debut of season five in 2004 (12.1 million), HBO said.
'The Sopranos,' which averaged 7.8 million viewers in its Sunday airings this season, also topped the night's most watched program on broadcast television -- CBS news magazine '60 Minutes,' which drew 9.5 million viewers.
(c) Reuters 2007.

FROM SALON: A Different Take;
Paris isn't free -- and neither are we

Paris Hilton's strange celebrity hits a new nadir after Friday's chaotic perp walk. Will we ever be free from her now?
By Heather Havrilesky and Rebecca Traister
Jun. 09, 2007 Resistance is futile. You can avert your eyes, cover your ears, change the channel and close your browser, but you can't escape the truth: Paris Hilton has become an omnipresent cultural icon, a symbol of the depravity of our times, and thanks to Friday's sobbing, O.J.-level arrest spectacle, she's destined to remain at the forefront of that rushing flow of global news until we're all old and gray.
Earlier this week, though, there was a glimmer of hope: As Hilton began her 23-day stint in a Los Angeles jail (a sentence that had already been reduced by half), a nation joined hands and solemnly prayed that prison might be the one thing that could convince Hilton to put away the party dresses, close the cellphone, retire the baby-doll voice, put down the apple martini and go home. Together, we dared to dream that the dark realities of life in the big house would teach Hilton, once and for all, not only that drinking while driving isn't just bad publicity, it's a crime that endangers innocent people, but that we're tired of her face, and we want her to finally have the good taste to do what so many criminals and porn stars and flashers have done before, once they've had their comeuppance: disappear. Surely, Paris Hilton had the money and the resources and the good sense, at long sweet last, to finally make herself scarce!
So when the news came out on Thursday that Hilton was released from jail and sent home with a house-arrest ankle bracelet, after just three days, due to an unspecified "medical condition" that many have speculated is her deteriorating emotional and mental state, a great cry of protest rose up from the land. Why?! When our prisons are filled with men and women serving time for their crimes, why should one pretty young heiress walk free?
A member of the prison's medical team told the New York Post that Paris was let go because she was on the verge of losing it: "She was crying a lot ... She's in lockdown for 23 hours. She was depressed." Ah, yes. As opposed to the rest of those in our nation's prisons.
From that point on, even the least interested among us, who had averted our eyes and begged the universe to spare us the latest details of Paris' incarceration, couldn't help perusing the gory details: OK! magazine reported that Paris, upon release yesterday, began planning a major house party for last night. A friend of Hilton's (who told OK! about the party) allegedly said, "Paris has had an awful five days in prison ... She wants to see her friends and have fun. She's been punished enough already."
A fellow inmate reported that Paris cried continuously in prison, and was repeatedly pressing her "medical alert" button, summoning guards. The inmate also claimed that Paris was eating officer-level food, not regular mess. Paris' parents reportedly planned to visit her in the slammer this weekend, but her aunt Francesca Hilton told Us Weekly that "now, we will have to have a party" instead.
But television-viewing, tabloid-consuming proles weren't the only ones recoiling at these latest developments. Judge Michael T. Sauer, who originally sentenced Hilton to prison and specifically noted that she should not be allowed work furlough, work release, house arrest or other fame-based dispensations, was apparently angered by the news of her return home. By Thursday night, he'd called for a hearing Friday morning. And when he heard that Hilton had arranged to attend the hearing via teleconference, the judge ordered the sheriff's department to pick her up.
Which brings us to another media spectacle, perhaps the finest hour of Hilton's "poor little rich girl" performance yet: Friday afternoon helicopter footage shot Hilton being led, in handcuffs, to a police car, while paparazzi snapped photos of her in the back seat, sobbing. "This has got to be one of the worst, if not the worst day, of Paris Hilton's life," the anchor of Headline News intoned, while trial attorney B.J. Bernstein reminded us, over and over, that Hilton was just the unfair victim of a power struggle between a judge and a sheriff.
And once Hilton's hearing was over and she was returned to jail, the news was even more grim. "Paris Hilton left the courtroom in tears, screaming for her mother," a Headline News anchor told us, solemnly. "It was not a pretty sight."
Even after years of watching Hilton direct the media like her own obedient little phalanx of winged monkeys, it would take a coldhearted cynic to doubt that Hilton was experiencing real pain and anguish upon returning to prison. At the very least, we were witnessing a coddled child having a severe allergic reaction to the real world. Hilton could certainly be losing her doughnuts in a medically authentic way, since by all appearances, she's never been punished, never been forced to eat anything she doesn't like, never had to sleep anywhere uncomfortable or wear anything unflattering. While the rest of us are more than passingly familiar with deprivations and things not going our way, Hilton could actually blow a fuse from what would look, to an outsider, like a mildly unpleasant experience. That pea under a stack of mattresses might not bruise you. but you don't sleep on 5 million thread-count sheets, now, do you?
And when you consider the fact that she's protected by relatives who talk openly to the press about throwing a party to celebrate their insipid child being released from prison early after having driven drunk? It makes simple sense to assume that not only is she unapologetic for her crime, she's absolutely indignant about her punishment. The Associated Press reported that, "As Ms. Hilton was led away to await her trip back to jail, she turned to her parents and said, 'It's not right!'" You almost have to feel empathy for the girl, dragged off to endure flavorless food and sleepless nights on scratchy sheets, all the while fancying herself a pretty blond Mumia Abu-Jamal.
Let's just pray that those bad prison sheets scratch her tender white ass enough to get her out of our faces for good. Because we certainly didn't ask for this, either. No matter how the talking heads and pundits have tried to convince us that Paris is a reflection of our shallowness and stupidity as a culture, most of us have never wanted her to be a symbol of anything. Is the crotch flash an act of subversion, in which Hilton channels the paparazzi to put her image on every cover, from tabloids to respected newspapers alike? Is Hilton, like her understudies Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears, just a frightened child, overwhelmed and intoxicated by all of the attention the media gives her?
We don't care anymore. And now she's become a symbol of something that bestrides her like a colossus, the inherent inequality and corruptibility of the criminal justice system -- which only means that the insanity will never, ever end. Paris Hilton's image will appear everywhere, across the globe, her every word will be broadcast to millions, this person who never did anything, who never had a marketable skill or talent to show for any of it, and who's never, in her short life, had a single interesting thing to say.
Even pointing that out has become hopelessly clichéd, infinitely repeated, until no one remembers what's real and what isn't. The most outraged protest will only melt into a hopeless morass of punditry and reactionary pronouncements, floating into the digital abyss with the rest of the pop cultural detritus: a TMZ headline, a mug shot from the Smoking Gun, a pilfered phone list, a nasty exchange transcribed for Gawker.
We are powerless. All we can do is pray that one day, Paris Hilton will show mercy on us all, and go away.
-- By Heather Havrilesky and Rebecca Traister

Remarks of former U.S. President Bill Clinton
Harvard College Class Day 2007, Harvard Yard
Thank you very much, Samantha, Stephanie, Chris, all the marshals, all the student speakers. Thanks for the gags and the jokes, and you know, when I got invited to do this, it was humbling in some ways. They asked Bill Gates to be the Commencement speaker. He's got more money than I do [LAUGHTER] and he went to Harvard. And I brought my friend Glenn Hutchins here with me, who's at his 30th reunion and he had something to do with overseeing the endowment and he explained that Gates was really, really, really rich and I was just rich [LAUGHTER]. And then I thought, well, the students asked me and that's good and besides, I don't have to wear a robe.
But I couldn’t figure out why on what is supposed to be a festive and informal day, you would pick a gray-haired 60-year-old to speak.
Following the great tradition of Al Franken, Will Ferrell [LAUGHTER], Borat or Ali G or whoever he was that day [LAUGHTER]. Conan O'Brien, that Family Guy person. What a tradition. So I did like Talladega Nights, however. Then I was reading all I could find out about the class and I thought well, they don't have any fun today. They already had fun. They had this class-wide Risk tournament around exam time [LAUGHTER]. And I understood when I heard the followership speech, I understood why you had that. Now you can all run for president. You played Risk. It's an eight-year Risk tournament. Then I thought well, maybe it's because you're about to name Drew Faust your next president, and I think women should run everything now [LAUGHTER]. And then I figure maybe it's just because Robin Williams and Billy Crystal turned you down [LAUGHTER]. But for whatever reason, we're here and I have had a really good time [LAUGHTER].
You've already heard most of what you need to hear today, I think. But I want to focus for a minute on the fact that these graduating classes since 1968 have invited a few non-comedians. First was Martin Luther King [APPLAUSE], who was killed in April before. I remember that very well because it was my senior year at Georgetown. He was killed in April, before he could come and give the speech. And Coretta came and gave the speech for him here. And you’ve had Mother Teresa and you've had Bono. What do they all have in common? They are symbols of our common humanity and a rebuke even to humorists' cynicism. Martin Luther King basically said he lived the way he did because we were all caught in what he called an inescapable web of mutuality. Nelson Mandela, the world's greatest living example of that, I believe, comes from a tribe in South Africa, the Xhosa, who call it ubuntu. In English, I am because you are. That led Mother Teresa from Albania to spend her life with the poorest people on earth in Calcutta. It led Bono from his rock stage to worry about innocent babies dying of AIDS, and poor people with good minds who never got a chance to follow their dreams. This is a really fascinating time to be a college senior. I was looking at all of you, wishing I could start over again and thinking I'd let you be president if you let me be 21 [LAUGHTER].
I'd take a chance on making it all over again if I could do it again. But I think, just think what an exciting time it is. All this explosion of knowledge. Just in the last couple of weeks before I came here, I read that thanks to the sequencing of the human genome, the ongoing research has identified two markers which seem to be high predictors of diabetes, which, as you heard, is a very important thing to me because it's now predicted that one in three children born in the United States in this decade will develop diabetes. We run the risk that we could be raising a first generation of kids to live shorter lives than their parents. Not because we're hungry, but because we don't eat the right things and we don't exercise. But this is a big deal. Then right after that, I saw that through our powerful telescopes we have identified a planet orbiting one of the hundred stars closest to our solar system, that appears to have the atmospheric conditions so similar to ours that life could actually be possible there. Alas, even though it's close to us in terms of the great universe, it's still 20 million light-years away. Unreachable in the lifetime of any young person. So unless there's a budding astrophysicist in the class that wants to get married in a hurry and then commit three generations and take another couple with him, we'll have to wait for them to come to us. It's an exciting time.
It's also exciting because of all the diversity. If you look around this audience, I was thinking, I wonder how different this crowd would have looked if someone like me had been giving this speech 30 years ago. And how much more interesting it is for all of us.
It’s a frustrating time, because for all the opportunity, there’s a lot of inequality. There’s a lot of insecurity and there’s a lot of instability and unsustainability. Half the world’s people still live on less than two bucks a day. A billion on less than a dollar a day. A billion people go to bed hungry tonight. A billion people won’t get a clean glass of water today or any day in their lives. One in four of all the people who die this year will die from AIDS, TB, malaria and infections related to dirty water. Nobody in America dies of any of that except people whose AIDS medicine doesn’t work anymore, or people who decline to follow the prescribed regime.
In the United States in the last decade, we have had six years of economic growth, an all-time high in the stock market, a 40-year high in corporate profits. Workers are doing better every year with productivity, but median wages are stagnant. And there’s actually been in all this so-called recovery a 4 percent increase in the percentage of people working full-time falling below the poverty line, and a 4 percent increase in the percentage of people working, who with their families, have lost their health insurance. It’s an unequal time. It’s an uncertain, insecure time because we’re all vulnerable to terror, to weapons of mass destruction, to global pandemics like avian influenza. We all make fun of the modern media and culture all the time, but I thought it was interesting in my little house in Chappaqua, where I stay home alone rooting for the candidate [LAUGHTER], I watch the evening news in the last few months, and it’s interesting. Somehow, clawing its way through the stories of the latest crime endeavor in our neighborhood and whether Britney Spears’ hair has grown out or not, I have learned that there were chickens in Romania, India and Indonesia identified with avian influenza and that every chicken within three square miles, those unfortunate ones, was eradicated. On the evening news, competing with Britney Spears and crime. Why? That’s a good thing because of the shared insecurity we feel. You all saw it this week in all of the stories about the terrorist attack being thwarted in Kennedy airport.
Now remember a few months ago, everybody I knew was shaking their head when we found out that there was a plot in London to put explosive chemicals in a baby bottle to make it look like formula to evade the airport inspection. And every time I ask somebody, I said did you feel a chill go up and down your spine, they said yeah, they did. Because they can imagine being on the airplane, or in my case, I could imagine my daughter, who has to travel a lot on her job, being on the airplane. But here’s what I want to tell you about that. The inequality is fixable and the insecurity is manageable. We’re going to really have to go some in the 21st century to see political violence claim as many innocent lives as it did in the 20th century. Keep in mind you had what, 12 million people killed in World War I, somewhere between 15 and 20 million in World War II, six million in the Holocaust, six million Jews, three million others. Twenty million in the political purges in the former Soviet Union between the two world wars and one afterward. Two million in Cambodia alone. Millions in tribal wars in Africa. An untold but large number in the Chinese Cultural Revolution. I mean, we’re going to have to really get after it, if you expect your generation to claim as many innocents from political violence as was claimed in the 20th century. The difference is you think it could be you this time. Because of the interdependence of the world. So yes, it’s insecure but it’s manageable.
It’s also an unsustainable world because of climate change, resource depletion, and the fact that between now and 2050, the world’s supposed to grow from six and a half to nine billion people, with most of the growth in the countries least able to handle it, under today’s conditions, never mind those. That’s all fixable, too. So is climate change a problem? Is resource depletion a problem? Is poverty and the fact that 130 million kids never go to school and all this disease that I work on a problem? You bet it is. But I believe the most important problem is the way people think about it and each other, and themselves. The world is awash today in political, religious, almost psychological conflicts, which require us to divide up and demonize people who aren’t us. And every one of them in one way or the other is premised on a very simple idea. That our differences are more important than our common humanity. I would argue that Mother Teresa was asked here, Bono was asked here, and Martin Luther King was asked here because this class believed that they were people who thought our common humanity was more important than our differences [APPLAUSE].
So with this Harvard degree and your incredible minds and your spirits that I’ve gotten a little sense of today, this gives you virtually limitless possibilities. But you have to decide how to think about all this and what to do with your own life in terms of what you really think. I hope that you will share Martin Luther King’s dream, embrace Mandela’s spirit of reconciliation, support Bono’s concern for the poor and follow Mother Teresa’s life into some active service. Ordinary people have more power to do public good than ever before because of the rise of non-governmental organizations, because of the global media culture, because of the Internet, which gives people of modest means the power, if they all agree, to change the world. When former President Bush and I were asked to work on the tsunami, before we did the Katrina work, Americans, many of whom could not find the Maldives or Sri Lanka on a map, gave $1.2 billion to tsunami aid. Thirty percent of our households gave. Half of them gave over the Internet, which means you don’t even have to be rich to change the world if enough people agree with you. But we have to do this. Citizen service is a tradition in our country about as old as Harvard, and certainly older than the government.
Benjamin Franklin organized the first volunteer fire department in Philadelphia 40 years before the Constitution was ratified. When de Tocqueville came here in 1835, he talked among other things about how he was amazed that Americans just were always willing to step up and do something, not wait for someone else to do it. Now we have in America a 1,010,000 non-governmental groups. Not counting 355,000 religious groups, most of whom are involved in some sort of work to help other people. India has a million registered, over a half a million active. China has 280,000 registered and twice that many not registered because they don’t want to be confined. Russia has 400,000, so many that President Putin is trying to restrict them. I wish he wouldn’t do that, but it’s a high-class problem. There were no NGOs in Russia or China when I became president in 1993. All over the world we have people who know that they can do things to change, but again, I will say to all of you, there is no challenge we face, no barrier to having your grandchildren here on this beautiful site 50 years from now, more profound than the ideological and emotional divide which continues to demean our common life and undermine our ability to solve our common problems. The simple idea that our differences are more important than our common humanity.
When the human genome was sequenced, and the most interesting thing to me as a non-scientist – we finished it in my last year I was president, I really rode herd on this thing and kept throwing more money at it – the most interesting thing to me was the discovery that human beings with their three billion genomes are 99.9 percent identical genetically. So if you look around this vast crowd today, at the military caps and the baseball caps and the cowboy hats and the turbans, if you look at all the different colors of skin, all the heights, all the widths, all the everything, it’s all rooted in one-tenth of one percent of our genetic make-up. Don’t you think it’s interesting that not just people you find appalling, but all the rest of us, spend 90 percent of our lives thinking about that one-tenth of one percent? I mean, don’t we all? How much of the laugh lines in the speeches were about that? At least I didn’t go to Yale, right? [LAUGHTER] That Brown gag was hilarious. [LAUGHTER]
But it’s all the same deal, isn’t it? I mean, the intellectual premise is that the only thing that really matters about our lives are the distinctions we can draw. Indeed, one of the crassest elements of modern culture, all these sort of talk shows, and even a lot of political journalism that's sort of focused on this shallow judgmentalism. They try to define everybody down by the worst moment in their lives, and it all is about well, no matter whatever’s wrong with me, I’m not that. And yet, you ask Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa and Bono to come here. Nelson Mandela’s the most admired person in the world. I got tickled the other night. I wound up in a restaurant in New York with a bunch of friends of mine. And I looked over and two tables away, and there was Rush Limbaugh [LAUGHTER], who’s said a few mad things about me. So I went up and shook hands with him and said hello and met his dinner guest. And I came just that close to telling him we were 99.9 percent the same. [LAUGHTER] But I didn’t want to ruin the poor man’s dessert, so I let it go. [LAUGHTER]
Now we’re laughing about this but next month, I’m making my annual trek to Africa to see the work of my AIDS and development project, and to celebrate with Nelson Mandela his birthday. He’s 89. Don’t know how many more he’ll have. And when I think that I might be 99.9 percent the same as him, I can’t even fathom it. So I say that to you, do we have all these other problems? Is Darfur a tragedy? Do I wish America would adopt sensible climate change regulation? Do I hate the fact that ideologues in the government doctored scientific reports? Do I disagree with a thousand things that are going on? Absolutely. But it all flows from the idea that we can violate elemental standards of learning and knowledge and reason and even the humanity of our fellow human beings because our differences matter more. That’s what makes you worship power over purpose. Our differences matter more. One of the greatest things that’s happened in the last few years is doing all this work with former President Bush. You know, I ought to be doing this. I’m healthy and not totally antiquated. He’s 82 years old, still jumping out of airplanes and still doing stuff like this. And I love the guy. I’m sorry for all the diehard Democrats in the audience. I just do. [LAUGHTER] And life is all about seeing things new every day. And I’ll just close with two stories, one from Asia, one from Africa. And I’m telling you all the details don’t matter as much as this.
After George Bush and I did the tsunami, we got so into this disaster work that Kofi Annan asked him to oversee the UN’s efforts in Pakistan after the earthquake, which you acknowledged today, and asked me to stay on as the tsunami coordinator for two years. So on my next to last trip to Aceh in Indonesia, the by far the hardest hit place, a quarter of a million people killed. I went to one of these refugee camps where in the sweltering heat, several thousand people were still living in tents. Highly uncomfortable. And my job was to go there and basically listen to them complain and figure out what to do about it, and how to get them out of there more quickly. So every one of these camps elected a camp leader and when I appeared, I was introduced to my young interpreter, a young Indonesian woman, and to the guy who was the camp leader, and his wife and his son. And they smiled, said hello, and then I looked down at this little boy, and I literally could not breathe. I think he’s the most beautiful child I ever saw. And I said to my young interpreter, I said, I believe that’s the most beautiful boy I ever saw in my life. She said, yes, he’s very beautiful and before the tsunami he had nine brothers and sisters. And now they’re all gone.
So the wife and the son excused themselves. And the father who had lost his nine children proceeded to take me on a two-hour tour of this camp. He had a smile on his face. He never talked about anything but what the people in that camp needed. He gave no hint of what had happened to him and the grief that he bore. We get to the end of the tour. It’s the health clinic in the camp. I look up and there is his wife, a mother who had lost nine of her 10 children, holding a little bitty baby less than a week old, the newest born baby in the camp. And she told me, I’m going to get in trouble for telling this. She told me that in Indonesian culture, when a woman has a baby, she gets to go to bed for 40 days and everyone waits on her hand and foot. [LAUGHTER] She doesn’t get up, nothing happens. And then on the 40th day, the mother gets up out of bed, goes back to work doing her life and they name the baby. So this child was less than a week old. So this mother who had lost her nine children is here holding this baby. And she says to me, this is our newest born baby. And we want you to name him. Little boy. So I looked at her and I said through my interpreter, I said, do you have a name for new beginning? And she explained and the woman said something back and the interpreter said yes, luckily for you, in Indonesian the word for dawn is a boy’s name. And the mother just said to me, we will call this child Dawn and he will symbolize our new beginning. You shouldn’t have to meet people that lose nine of their 10 children, cherish the one they got left, and name a newborn baby Dawn to realize that what we have in common is more important than what divides us. [APPLAUSE]
And I leave you with this thought. When Martin Luther King was invited here in 1968, the country was still awash in racism. The next decade it was awash in sexism, and after that in homophobia. And occasionally those things rear their ugly head along the way, but by and large, nobody in this class is going to carry those chains around through life. But nobody gets out for free, and everyone has temptations. The great temptation for all of you is to believe that the one-tenth of one percent of you which is different and which brought you here and which can bring you great riches or whatever else you want, is really the sum of who you are and that you deserve your good fate, and others deserve their bad one. That is the trap into which you must not fall. Warren Buffett's just about to give away 99 percent of his money because he said most of it he made because of where he was born and when he was born. It was a lucky accident. And his work was rewarded in this time and place more richly than the work of teachers and police officers and nurses and doctors and people who cared for those who deserve to be cared for. So he’s just going to give it away. And still with less than one percent left, have more than he could ever spend. Because he realizes that it wasn’t all due to the one-tenth of one percent, and that his common humanity requires him to give money to those for whom it will mean much more.
In the central highlands in Africa where I work, when people meet each other walking, nearly nobody rides, and people meet each other walking on the trails, and one person says hello, how are you, good morning, the answer is not I’m fine, how are you. The answer translated into English is this: I see you. Think of that. I see you. How many people do all of us pass every day that we never see? You know, we all haul out of here, somebody’s going to come in here and fold up 20-something thousand chairs. And clean off whatever mess we leave here. And get ready for tomorrow and then after tomorrow, someone will have to fix that. Many of those people feel that no one ever sees them. I would never have seen the people in Aceh in Indonesia if a terrible misfortune had not struck. And so, I leave you with that thought. Be true to the tradition of the great people who have come here. Spend as much of your time and your heart and your spirit as you possibly can thinking about the 99.9 percent. See everyone and realize that everyone needs new beginnings. Enjoy your good fortune. Enjoy your differences, but realize that our common humanity matters much, much more. God bless you and good luck.

Turkey, Kurds and Paris Hilton

By Tony Blankley

THE WASHINGTON TIMESPublished June 6, 2007
Yesterday I googled "Turkey and the Kurds" and got 1,310,000 hits. Then I googled "Paris Hilton"andgot 45,800,000 hits. That seems about right. Who wouldn't prefer to reflect on the soft-porn potential of the spoiled, slinky, sexually incontinent, blonde heiress facing down the various titillating menaces of the prison shadows, rather than thinking about the prospect of yet another war in the Middle East. Although, if Paris had been sentenced to a Turkish prison we could have merged the two stories in a sort of updated "Thousand and One Nights" adventure with Paris in the part of Scheherezade, telling fascinating tales to stop her husband King Shahryar from killing her. In the updated version Paris would obviously sell her fascinating tales afterward for publicity and profits, rather than for her life -- as in the original. But, alas, the two stories have not merged, and it is a sad reflection on my misspent mental life that right now I'm one of the guys who actually does care more about the Turks and the Kurds than I do about Paris and her prisoners of love. But a bloody mess is on the cusp of getting bloodier in Iraq, and while events are not entirely within our control, we may be able to influence them. To summarize the situation: The terrorist Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK), has been harassing Turkey for decades allegedly on behalf of the approximately 15 million Kurds living in Turkey (about 20 percent of the Turkish population -- and with the highest birthrate of any ethnic group in Turkey). Currently, the Turks suspect (perhaps with justification) that some of the approximately 5 million Kurds living in northern Iraq are giving cover and help to the PKK terrorists. The Turks very plausibly fear that the Kurds (living more or less contiguously in Southern Turkey, northern Iraq, northeast Syria and northwestern Iran, as well as in Armenia and environs) want to form an independent state -- which state would strip Turkey of a fifth of its land and population. Thus, Turkey has strongly opposed a division or federalization of Iraq into a Kurd north, Sunni middle and Shi'ite south -- preferring a unitary Iraqi state. But the Kurds have been theUnitedStates' strongest ally in Iraq. Their Pershmerga military has kept their part of Iraq relatively peaceful. It is also the most prosperous. They are claiming their rights to the oil-rich city of Kirkuk (from where they had been forcibly removed by Saddam Hussein). The Turks fear that a richer, separatist or independent Iraqi Kurdish population helping the PKK commit terror against Turkish government and civilian targets is a strategic threat to Turkey. As a result, as Turkey has been reinforcing its troops along the border with Iraq and the powerful Turkish Army general staff stresses its readiness for a cross-border operation to crush the PKK, the Turkish foreign minister told a European Union meeting a few days ago that Turkey has every right to take measures against Kurdish guerrillas in northern Iraq. Thus the crisis approaches. Both Turkey and the Kurds have been our historic allies. Since the Iraqi war started we have constantly asked Turkey to be patient with the Kurds and not to intervene in Iraqi Kurdish territory over the PKK (even though they are killing Turks in their terrorist attacks). So far they have complied. Meanwhile, we have asked the Iraqi Kurds not to assert any independence claims. So far they have complied. But events are unfolding dangerously. The Turkish Army -- as the ultimate defender of a secular Turkish culture and state -- is in an increasingly strategic public struggle with revanchist Islamist forces in Turkey. It is a real possibility that there may be a showdown or coup d'etat against the Islamist government by the Turkish Army this fall. Fighting the secular PKK is very popular in Turkey -- especially amongst religious Turkish people living outside the big cities. The PKK has recently drawn blood again. The army believes it could strengthen its domestic political position by crossing over the border and (they believe) "crush" the PKK. Thus the Turkish army has both a legitimate national-security concern and a political calculation for taking military action imminently. If they take such action, it might be a quick and successful suppression of the terrorist PKK. But there is a big risk that it will either fail in that regard, or will induce a broader Kurdish military response (or will fail because it will induce a broader Kurdish response). In that event the Turkish army will discover the "pleasures" of a Kurdish insurgency similar to our experience with the Sunni insurgency in Baghdad and environs. Moreover, if fighting and instability breaks out in the Kurdish north, it will have major negative economic effects on all of Iraq. So, the United States and the Europeans are again calling for Turkey to restrain itself. This time, that may not be enough. Just about the last thing we want to see is a Turkish/Kurd war to break out. We can no longer just ask Turkey to restrain itself. It is time to flop down on the side of American action to really pressure our Kurdish friends and allies to take such actions as will convince Turkey that military invasion is not necessary to stop the PKK terrorists from using Iraq as a base of operation. Whether U.S. troop movements up to the Iraqi-Turkish border are wise or foolish should be decided promptly by our smartest military and diplomatic people on the ground there -- and acted on promptly. We could easily get overtaken by dangerous events very suddenly.

Punishment time will come for the Republicans, Christians are starting to realize their faith has been used as a flim-flam by a bunch of "Old South" vulgarians..."

Word for Word They’ll Say Anything
Soviet-Style ‘Torture’ Becomes ‘Interrogation’
By SCOTT SHANE
HOW did the United States, in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, come to adopt interrogation techniques copied from the Soviet Union and other cold war adversaries?
Investigators for the Senate Armed Services Committee are examining how the methods, long used to train Americans for what they may face as prisoners of war, became the basis for American interrogations.
In 2002, the C.I.A. and the Pentagon became concerned that standard questioning was inadequate for suspected terrorists and turned to a military training program called Survival, Evasion, Reconnaissance and Escape, or SERE. For decades, SERE trainers had exposed aviators and others at high risk for capture to Soviet-style tactics, including disrupted sleep, exposure to extreme heat and cold, and hours in uncomfortable stress positions. Sometimes the ordeal included waterboarding, in which a prisoner’s face is covered with cloth and water is poured from above to create a feeling of suffocation.
Some of those techniques have been used on prisoners at Guantánamo Bay and in Afghanistan and Iraq, and at the C.I.A.’s secret overseas jails for high-level operatives of Al Qaeda.
Many SERE veterans were appalled at the “reverse engineering” of their methods, said Charles A. Morgan III, a Yale psychiatrist who has worked closely with SERE trainers for a decade.
“How did something used as an example of what an unethical government would do become something we do?” he asked.
His question is only underscored by a 1956 article, “Communist Interrogation,” in The Annals of Neurology and Psychiatry, recently turned up by the Intelligence Science Board, which advises the spy agencies. Written by doctors working as Defense Department consultants, Lawrence E. Hinkle Jr. and Harold G. Wolff, the article shows that methods embraced after 2001 were once considered torture that would produce false information. SCOTT SHANE
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The article describes basic Soviet N.K.V.D. (later K.G.B.) methods: isolation in a small cell; constant light; sleep deprivation; cold or heat; reduced food rations. Soviets denied such treatment was torture, just as American officials have in recent years:
The effects of isolation, anxiety, fatigue, lack of sleep, uncomfortable temperatures, and chronic hunger produce disturbances of mood, attitudes and behavior in nearly all prisoners. The living organism cannot entirely withstand such assaults. The Communists do not look upon these assaults as “torture.” But all of them produce great discomfort, and lead to serious disturbances of many bodily processes; there is no reason to differentiate them from any other form of torture.
Interrogators looked for ways to increase the pressure, including “stress positions”:
Another [technique] widely used is that of requiring the prisoner to stand throughout the interrogation session or to maintain some other physical position which becomes painful. This, like other features of the KGB procedure, is a form of physical torture, in spite of the fact that the prisoners and KGB officers alike do not ordinarily perceive it as such. Any fixed position which is maintained over a long period of time ultimately produces excruciating pain.
Overt brutality was discouraged, as it was at American facilities:
The KGB hardly ever uses manacles or chains, and rarely resorts to physical beatings. The actual physical beating is, of course, repugnant to overt Communist principles and is contrary to K.G.B. regulations.
Closed trials and military tribunals were standard, as at Guantánamo:
Prisoners are tried before “military tribunals,” which are not public courts. Those present are only the interrogator, the state prosecutor, the prisoner, the judges, a few stenographers, and perhaps a few officers of the court.
The Bush administration concluded that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to Qaeda detainees. Similarly, the Soviets argued that international rules did not apply to foreign detainees:
In typical Communist legalistic fashion, the N.K.V.D. rationalized its use of torture and pressure in the interrogation of prisoners of war. When it desired to use such methods against a prisoner or to obtain from him a propaganda statement or “confession,” it simply declared the prisoner a “war-crimes suspect” and informed him that, therefore, he was not subject to international rules governing the treatment of prisoners of war.
Communist-style interrogation routinely produced false confessions:
The cumulative effects of the entire experience may be almost intolerable. [The prisoner] becomes mentally dull and loses his capacity for discrimination. He becomes malleable and suggestible, and in some instances he may confabulate. By suggesting that the prisoner accept half-truths and plausible distortions of the truth, [the interrogator] makes it possible for the prisoner to rationalize and thus accept the interrogator’s viewpoint as the only way out of an intolerable situation.

TIME 5/31/07

Report and protest of US Torture

Many of the controversial interrogation tactics used against terror suspects in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo were modeled on techniques the U.S. feared that the Communists themselves might use against captured American troops during the Cold War, according to a little-noticed, highly classified Pentagon report released several days ago. Originally developed as training for elite special forces at Fort Bragg under the "Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape" program, otherwise known as SERE, tactics such as sleep deprivation, isolation, sexual humiliation, nudity, exposure to extremes of cold and stress positions were part of a carefully monitored survival training program for personnel at risk of capture by Soviet or Chinese forces, all carried out under the supervision of military psychologists.
This troubling disclosure was made in the blandly titled report, "Review of DoD-Directed Investigations of Detainee Abuse", which for the first time sets forth the origins as well as new details of many of the abusive interrogation techniques that led to scandals at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and elsewhere — techniques that some critics contend the Pentagon still has not gone far enough in explicitly banning. Sen. Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, called the findings "deeply troubling," and signaled his intention to hold hearings later this year on the interrogation methods it describes.
The report, completed last August but only declassified and made public on May 18, suggests that the abusive techniques stemmed from a much more formal process than the Defense Department has previously acknowledged. By 2002 the Pentagon was looking for an interrogation paradigm to use on what it had designated as "unlawful combatants" captured in the "war on terror." These individuals, many taken prisoner in Afghanistan, were initially brought to the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo, although others were subsequently hidden away in CIA secret prisons or turned over to U.S.-allied governments known to practice torture. That same year, the commander of the detention facility at Guantanamo began using the abusive "counter resistance" techniques adopted from SERE on prisoners at the base, and according to the Pentagon report SERE military psychologists were on hand to help.
In response to fallout over the well-documented cases of prisoner abuse — which included prolonged isolation, sensory deprivation (visual and auditory), forced removal of clothing, exploiting prisoners phobias (notably fear of dogs), and threats against family members — the Pentagon began scaling back the use of SERE tactics in 2002 and eventually banned them altogether. The Army Field Manual, which serves as a primary guide for U.S. military interrogation, now specifically rules out the use of a variety of SERE-founded techniques including water-boarding, a form of simulated drowning, as well as the use of dogs.
But critics remain concerned that the Pentagon's clean-up has not gone far enough. In the letter to Secretary Gates, dated May 31, 2007, the non-profit Physicians for Human Rights cites an appendix of the current Army Field Manual that "explicitly permits what amounts to isolation, along with sleep and sensory deprivation." The letter, signed by retired Army General Stephen Xenakis, a psychiatrist and former senior medical commander, and Leonard Rubenstein, the organization's executive director, also points out that the current Field Manual remains "silent on a number of other SERE-based methods (including sensory overload and deprivation) creating ambiguity and doubt over their place in interrogation doctrine."
In 2006, the Pentagon issued revised guidelines reducing the role of psychiatrists as members of U.S. military interrogation teams, partly in response to critics who contend that doctors, who take an oath as caregivers, should not be involved in non-therapeutic or abusive treatment. But the Physicians for Human Rights letter says that even the Pentagon's new and revised guidelines continue to call on military psychologists to play a central part in interrogations, which the group calls "dangerous" and inappropriate. The Pentagon says it has fully investigated all abuses and taken appropriate measures to prevent any kind of recurrence.
Even assuming that Pentagon reforms have succeeded in cleaning up the worst excesses of U.S. interrogations, a number of experts have grave doubts that current policies are either workable or effective. Members of the Intelligence Science Board, many of whom serve as consultants to the Pentagon, have recently argued that U.S. interrogation policy involves a grab-bag of outmoded techniques, many dating from the 1950s, that ignore lessons learned from law enforcement and lack cultural sensitivity to Arab and other foreign prisoners. The kind of insensitivity, critics might now add, that we once assumed only our worst enemies would show their foreign prisoners