AlterNet Special

AlterNet:
Another 9/11 Coverup in the Making?

By Rory O'Connor, AlterNet
Posted on August 23, 2006

Despite the best efforts of the Pentagon to keep the lid on, the story of Able Danger - the controversial secret military intelligence program that purportedly identified five active al-Qaeda cells and four of the 9/11 hijackers more than a year before the worst terror attacks ever on American soil - continues to make news.

The latest wrinkle is a nasty public spat between the National Geographic Channel, which plans to broadcast "Triple Cross: Bin Laden's Spy in America" on Aug. 28, and author Peter Lance, whose new book forms the basis of the documentary.

Lance is an Emmy-winning former reporter-producer for ABC News. His book, "Triple Cross," which will be released in September, accuses law enforcement officials of negligence in tracking down Ali Mohamed, an alleged al-Qaeda agent in the United States for years before Sept. 11. The book says Mohamed was hired by the CIA and worked for the FBI, all the while providing information to the terrorists. The book also contains, according to Lance, "a major new insight" into why the Pentagon killed the Able Danger operation in April 2000.

It involves the discovery by Able Danger operatives that Ali Mohamed was a member of Osama bin Laden's inner circle. Mohamed turned up in FBI surveillance photos as early as 1989, training radical Muslims who would go on to assassinate Jewish militant Meir Kahane and detonate a truck bomb at the World Trade Center. He not only avoided arrest, but managed to become an FBI informant while smuggling bin Laden in and out of Afghanistan, writing most of the al-Qaeda terrorist manual and helping plan attacks on American troops in Somalia and U.S. embassies in Africa. Finally arrested in 1998, Mohamed cut a deal with the Justice Department, and his whereabouts remain shrouded, unknown.

''The FBI allowed the chief spy for al-Qaeda to operate right under their noses,'' Lance said. ''They let him plan the bombings of the embassies in Africa right under their noses. Two hundred twenty-four people were killed and more than 4,000 wounded because of their negligence."

Lance contends that when Pentagon officials realized how embarrassing it would be if it were revealed that bin Laden's spy had stolen top-secret intelligence (including the positions of all Green Beret and SEAL units worldwide), they decided to bury the entire Able Danger program. Lance further states that his book also contains evidence that Patrick Fitzgerald (of later Scooter Libby/Valerie Plame fame) covered up key al-Qaeda intelligence in 1996, when he was then an assistant U.S. attorney in New York. To Lance, Fitzgerald was "one of the principal players in the government's negligence, who engaged in an affirmative coverup of key al-Qaeda-related intelligence in 1996."

Lance believes "Fitzgerald was hopelessly outgunned by Mohamed, a hardened al-Qaeda spy, who was bin Laden's personal security advisor." Despite two face-to-face meetings with Mohamed, whom Fitzgerald called "the most dangerous man I've ever met," he left him on the street, which allowed Mohamed - who actually planned the surveillance for the African Embassy bombings - to help pull off that simultaneous act of terror in Kenya and Tanzania on August 7, 1998, in which 224 died and more than 4,000 were injured.

There is also a chilling tie-in in the book to the airliner-bombing plot revealed last week by the British intelligence. Much of the key intelligence that Fitzgerald helped to bury in 1996 was directly related to the Bojinka plot, a scheme by original WTC bomber and 9/11 architect Ramzi Yousef to smuggle small improvised explosive devices aboard up to a dozen U.S. bound jumbo jets exiting Asia.

Fitzgerald went on become both U.S. attorney for the northern district of Illinois and special prosecutor in the CIA leak probe. After allowing Ali Mohamed to operate with virtual impunity for years, Fitzgerald finally arrested him post-bombing in 1998. But then he cut a deal with him that allowed Mohamed to enter witness protection and avoid the death penalty.

Lance contends that this was to spare the government from embarrassment, since Ali Mohamed had been an FBI informant since 1992. Yet despite three years in federal custody, Fitzgerald and his elite FBI squad members were unable to extract the 9/11 plot from Mohamed, who was so close to bin Laden that he lived in the Saudi billionaire's house after moving him and his family from Afghanistan to Khartoum in 1992.

The revelations, says Lance, proved "too hot to handle" for the National Geographic Channel, which is two-thirds owned by Rupert Murdoch's NewsCorp (which also owns Lance's publisher, HarperCollins). "The Feds have gotten to them, there is no doubt," Lance told me in an interview. "National Geographic has abandoned the truth and acquiesced to pressure from the government."

Television critic Glenn Garvin first reported the flap in a Miami Herald piece that characterized Lance's reaction to the program as a "watered-down whitewash" that was "like doing 'Schindler's List' from Hitler's perspective.''

Able Danger insiders had figured the documentary to be controversial, but no one expected open warfare to break out between Lance and his broadcasters prior to its airing. Lance, who was originally slated to narrate the film, is so angry at what he sees as the program's shift in direction and emphasis that he now refuses to back it at all.

At least one source interviewed for the documentary - House Armed Services Committee vice chairman Curt Weldon, who has spearheaded congressional efforts to get to the bottom of the Able Danger affair - has asked to be removed from the program. "We didn't think National Geographic was doing a 100 percent job," says Weldon's chief of staff, Russ Caso. "We felt we weren't looking at an unbiased piece.'' And National Geographic's producers now won't even let Lance see the final cut unless he signs what they call a "nondisparagement agreement.''

The public pissing match between Lance and his putative broadcaster is virtually without precedent. ''It's probably happened before,'' John Ford, executive vice president of programming at National Geographic Channel, told the Herald. "But I can't tell you when. I certainly don't know of a case." Ford strongly denies the documentary is a whitewash and says the network still stands behind it despite Lance's attack. But Lance is having none of it: "They hijacked my work," he says, "The documentary is now skewed so much in favor of the feds that it actually distorts the facts of the story." National Geographic's executive vice president of programming, John Ford, said the film's producers never intended to base the documentary solely on the book - something Lance hotly disputes.

"Let me set the record straight on the allegations made by John Ford," he says. "First, in the Miami Herald piece, Ford lied to Glenn Garvin when he said that 'Peter wanted us to include accusations and conclusions ... that we could not independently verify, and we weren't willing to do that.'"

"The film is also based on our own independent research," says Ford. He also told United Press International that Lance "wants this show to reflect his own personal conclusions," and that he is "using this controversy to promote his book."

"The second lie is that the documentary 'was never supposed to be based solely' on my book," says Lance. "The truth is that from the beginning Nat Geo hired me to do a documentary exclusively based on my work. This was my show from start to finish. But now we're at a point where a major cable network, reporting on an issue of national importance, is backtracking on proof of how the FBI folded on the road to 9/11. What's worse, in a few days this documentary will air with my name on it!" Lance concludes, "This is a ridiculous lie, since they've cut me out of the process and rolled over in favor of the feds."

Despite Lance's vehement protestations, National Geographic executives like Ford are undeterred and say that the show must and will go on - especially given the upcoming fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. ''It exposes how different parts of the U.S. national security apparatus failed to connect the dots on Ali Mohamed over a decade and a half,'' Ford said. "It's like a Tom Clancy thriller, but true.''

What's also true is that many questions still remain unanswered about the actual Able Danger program, what it found, and what reaction higher-ups everywhere from Pentagon brass to FBI officials to the 9/11 Commission had when Able Danger operatives attempted to inform them of its findings.

Why, for example, were three planned meetings with the FBI canceled at the last minute, thus preventing the bureau from hearing evidence that may have helped them "connect the dots" before the terror attacks? Why was the guided missile destroyer USS Cole sent to refuel at the port of Aden, Yemen, in October 2000, despite the fact that Able Danger had identified Aden as the location of an active al-Qaeda cell? Why did Special Operation Command chief Peter Schoomaker (now Army chief of staff) apparently do nothing after Able Danger analysts personally briefed him about the danger in Yemen just two days before a suicide bomb attack blew a 40-by-40-foot hole in the side of the Cole, killing 17 crew members and injuring 39 others?

Further, why was veteran intelligence analyst-operative Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer's career derailed and reputation besmirched after he tried to alert an unwilling 9/11 Commission to Able Danger's findings? What has happened to the Department of Defense's own inspector general's investigation into the scapegoating of Shaffer - originally slated to be completed and made public in May? Whatever happened to Arlen Specter's Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on Able Danger, originally scheduled for last September and then "postponed for the Jewish holidays?" And why were the entire 2.5 terabytes of Able Danger data destroyed, along with a pre-9/11 link chart that identified four eventual hijackers and even had a photograph of Mohammed Atta?

And what about reports that the Able Danger program was reconstituted after the data purge by a classified Raytheon "skunk works" program in Garland, Texas? Or that the entire data-mining effort was then taken "black," hidden deep inside the intelligence bureaucracy and expanded into what later morphed into Total Information Awareness, NSA warrantless surveillance, and in fact the government's ongoing illegal and unconstitutional spying on huge quantities of domestic telephone calls and emails? Conspiracy ... or something more? The plot ever thickens …

Filmmaker and journalist Rory O'Connor writes the Media Is A Plural blog.

© 2006 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at:
http://www.alternet.org/story/40693/

---

AlterNet:
Where Bush's Arrogance Has Taken Us

By Jim Hightower, Hightower Lowdown
Posted August 23, 2006.

An illegal war, a long list of eroded rights, and a country run by and for the benefit of corporate campaign donors - all courtesy of the imperial presidency.

[Editor's Note: The August issue of The Hightower Lowdown contains a poster-sized chart detailing the many grievances, lies and miscues of the Bush Administration. Below is the story in text form, you can also download the full poster from The Hightower Lowdown.]

During his gubernatorial days in Texas, George W let slip a one-sentence thought that unintentionally gave us a peek into his political soul. In hindsight, it should've been loudly broadcast all across our land so people could've absorbed it, contemplated its portent?and roundly rejected the guy's bid for the presidency. On May 21, 1999, reacting to some satirical criticism of him, Bush snapped: "There ought to be limits to freedom."

Gosh, so many freedoms to limit, so little time! But in five short years, the BushCheneyRummy regime has made remarkable strides toward dismembering the genius of the Founders, going at our Constitution and Bill of Rights like famished alligators chasing a couple of poodles.

Forget about such niceties as separation of powers, checks and balances (crucial to the practice of democracy), the First Amendment, the Fourth Amendment, and open government-these guys are on an autocratic tear. Whenever they've been challenged (all too rarely), they simply shout "war on terror," "commander-in-chief," "support our troops," "executive privilege," "I'm the decider," or some other slam-the-door political phrase designed to silence any opposition. Indeed, opponents are branded "enemies" who must be demonized, personally attacked, and, if possible, destroyed. Bush's find-the-loopholes lawyers assert that a president has the right to lie (even about going to war), to imprison people indefinitely (without charges, lawyers, hearings, courts, or hope), to torture people, to spy on Americans without court or congressional review, to prosecute reporters who dare to report, to rewrite laws on executive whim?and on and on.

Here, we are pleased to give you a sense of the enormity of what Bush & Company are doing under the cloak of war and executive privilege in a handy-dandy poster format.

The War President

"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we."
-George W., August 2004

* Number of Americans killed in Bush's Iraq war as of August 2006: 2577

* What Bush press flack Tony Snow said the day the total number of American dead reached 2,500: "It's a number"

* Number of Americans killed since Bush declared "Mission Accomplished" on May 1, 2003: 2,438

* Number of Americans wounded (a vague term that includes such horrors as brain damage, limb blasted off, eyes blown out, psyche shattered, etc.) in Bush's war:

o Official count: 18,777
o Independent count: up to 48,000

* Estimated number of Iraqi civilians (men, women, and children) killed in Bush's war since Saddam Hussein was ousted: 38,960

* For Iraqis, the bloodiest month of the war so far: June 2006

more than 100 civilians killed per day

* Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmit's advice to Iraqis who see TV reports of innocent civilians being killed by occupying troops: "Change the channel."

* Percent of Iraqis who want American troops to leave: 82

* Stockpiles of Weapons of Mass Destruction found in Iraq since Bush committed Americans to war in 2003 on the basis that Saddam had and was about to use WMDs: 0

* Number of nations in the world: 192

* Number that joined Bush's "Coalition of the Willing" (COW) to invade Iraq: 48
(The list includes such military powers as Angola, El Salvador, Eritrea, Estonia, Latvia, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Palau, Romania, Solomon Islands, and Uganda.)

* Number of COW nations that actually sent any troops to Iraq: 39
(Of these, 32 sent fewer than 1,000 troops. Many sent no fighting units, deploying only engineers, trainers, humanitarian units, and other noncombat personnel.)

* Number of the 39 COW nations contributing troops that have since withdrawn them: 17
(An additional 7 have announced plans to withdraw all or part of their contingents this year.)

* Number of COW troops in Iraq: 150,000

* Number of these that are U.S. troops: 139,000

* Number of White House officials and cabinet members who have any of their immediate family in Bush's war: 0

Follow the Money

We're dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon."
-"Howling Paul" Wolfowitz, Deputy Defense Secretary, in testimony to Congress, March 2003

* The official White House claim before the invasion of what the war and occupation would cost U.S. taxpayers: $50 billion

* As of July 2006, the total amount appropriated by Congress for Bush's ongoing war and occupation: $295,634,921,248

* Current Pentagon spending per month in Iraq: $8 billion (or $185,185.19 per minute)

* Assuming all troops return home by 2010, the projected "real costs" for the war: More than $1 trillion
(includes veterans' pay and medical costs, interest on the billions Bush has borrowed to pay for his war, etc.)

Bonus Stat!

* Annual salary of Stuart Baker, hired by the Bushites to be the White House "Director for Lessons Learned": $106,641
* Number of lessons that Bush appears to have learned: 0

The Imperial Presidency

"I'm the commander - see, I don't need to explain - I do not need to explain why I say things. That's the interesting thing about being the president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don't feel like I owe anybody an explanation."
George W., August, 2002.

Matt Wuerker

Signing Statements

When signing a particular congressional act into law, a few presidents have occasionally issued a "signing statement" to clarify their understanding of what Congress intended. These have not had the force of law and have been used discreetly in the past.

Very quietly, however, Bush has radically increased both the number and reach of these statements, essentially asserting that the president can arbitrarily decide which laws he will obey.

* Number of signing statements issued by Bush as of July 2006: more than 800
(This is more than the combined total of all 42 previous presidents.)

A few examples of congressionally passed laws he has effectively annulled through these extralegal signing statements:

o a ban against torture of prisoners by the U.S. military

o a requirement that the FBI periodically report to Congress on how it is using the Patriot Act to search our homes and secretly seize people's private papers

o a ban against storage in military databases of intelligence about Americans that was obtained illegally

o a directive for the executive branch to transmit scientific information to Congress "uncensored and without delay" when requested

* Provision of the Constitution clearly stating that Congress alone has the power "to make all laws": Article 1, Section 8
* Provision of the Constitution clearly stating that the president "shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed": Article 2, Section 3
* Name of the young lawyer in the Reagan administration who wrote a 1986 strategy memo on how to pervert the use of signing statements in order to concentrate more power in the executive branch, as Bush is now doing: Samuel Alito, named to the U.S. Supreme Court by Bush this year

National Security Letters

These are secret executive writs that the infamous 2001 Patriot Act authorizes the FBI to issue to public libraries, internet firms, banks, and others. Upon receiving an NSL, the institution or firm is required to turn over any private records it holds on you, me, or whomever the agents have chosen to search.

Who authorizes the FBI to issue these secret writs? The FBI itself.

* Surely the agents have to get a search warrant, a grand jury subpoena, or a court's approval? No

* But to issue an NSL, an agent must show probable cause that the person being searched has committed some crime, right? No

* Well, don't officials have to inform citizens that their records are being seized so they can defend themselves or protest? No

* Number of NSLs issued by various FBI offices last year alone: 9,254

NSA Eavesdropping

In 2001, Bush issued a secret order for the National Security Agency to begin vacuuming up massive numbers of telephone and internet exchanges by U.S. citizens, illegally seizing this material without any judicial approval or informing Congress, as required by law.

* Number of Americans who have had their phone and internet communications taken by NSA: Just about everyone!
(NSA is tapping into the entire database of long-distance calls and internet messages run through AT&T and probably other companies as well.)

* In May of this year, the Justice Department abruptly halted an internal investigation that was trying to uncover the name of the top officials who had authorized NSA's warrantless, unconstitutional program. Who killed this probe, which was requested by Congress? George W himself! (He directed NSA simply to refuse security clearances for the department's legal investigators.)

* What happened to NSA Director Michael Hayden, who was the key architect of Bush's illegal eavesdropping program and the one who would've formally denied clearances to Justice Department investigators? In May, Bush promoted him to head the CIA.

* This past May, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales warned that journalists who report on NSA's spy program could be prosecuted under the antiquated Espionage Act of 1917.

* Times in U.S. history this act has been used to go after the press: 0

* Margin by which the U.S. House in 1917 voted down an amendment to make the Espionage Act apply to journalists: 184-144

Interesting Fact:

The New York Times reported this June that Bush was running another spy program. This one was snooping through international banking records, including millions of bank transactions done by innocent Americans. George reacted angrily to the exposure, branding the Times report "disgraceful" and declaring that revelation of his spy program "does great harm to the United States." The White House and its right-wing acolytes promptly launched a "Hate-the-Times" political campaign.

Name the guy who was the first to reveal that such a bank-spying program was in the works: George W. Bush! At a September 2001 press conference, he announced that he'd just signed an executive order to monitor all international bank transactions.

Watch Lists

From the Bushites' ill-fated Total Information Awareness program (meant to monitor all of our computerized transactions) to the robust efforts by Rumsfeld's Pentagon to barge into the domestic surveillance game, America under Bush has fast become "The Watched Society."

* Number of data-mining programs being run secretly on us by the federal government: Nearly 200 separate programs at 52 agencies

* Number of "local activity reports" submitted to the Pentagon in 2004 under the "Threat and Local Observation Notice" program (TALON), which directed military officers throughout our country to keep an eye on suspicious activities by civilians: More than 5,000
(They included such "threats" as peace demonstrators and 10 activists protesting outside Halliburton's headquarters.)

* Number of official "watch lists" maintained by the feds: More than a dozen run by 9 different agencies

* Number of Americans on the Transportation Security Administration's "No- Fly" list: That's a secret.
(TSA concedes that it's in the tens of thousands. In 2005 alone, some 30,000 people called TSA to complain that their names were mistakenly on the list.)

* Most famous citizen who is on the No-Fly list and has been repeatedly pulled aside by TSA for additional screenings at airports: Sen. Ted Kennedy

* How can you get your name removed from TSA list? That's a secret.

Name That Guy!

In 1966, a young Republican congressman stood against his party's elders to cosponsor the original Freedom of Information Act, valiantly declaring that public records "are public property." He said that FOIA "will make it considerably more difficult for secrecy-minded bureaucrats to decide arbitrarily that the people should be denied access to information on the conduct of government."

Who was that virtuous lawmaker? Donald Rumsfeld!

Only eight years later, Gerald Ford's chief of staff strongly urged him to veto the continuation of FOIA. Who was that dastardly staffer? Donald Rumsfeld!

Who is now one of the chief "secrecy-minded bureaucrats" who routinely violates OIA's principles? Right, him again!

Regime of Secrecy

"Democracies die behind closed doors."
- Appeals court judge Damon Keith, ruling in a 2002 case that the Bushites cannot hold deportation hearings in secret

* Increase in the number of government documents marked "secret" between 2001 and 2004: 81 percent

* Number of government documents stamped "secret" in 2001: 8.6 million

* Number of government documents stamped "secret" in 2004: 15.6 million (a new record)

* Cost to taxpayers of classifying and securing documents in 2004: $7.2 billion ($460 per document)

* Number of previously declassified documents that the CIA tried to reclassify as "secret" under a 2001 secret agreement with the National Archives, even though many had already been published and some date back to the Korean War: 25,315

* Number of different "official designations" the government now has to classify nonsecret information so it still is kept out of the public's reach: Between 50 and 60
(They include such stamps as CBU: Controlled But Unclassified, SBU: Sensitive But Unclassified, and LOU: Limited Official Use Only.)

* The only vice-president in history who has claimed that he, like the president, has the inherent authority to mark "secret" on any document he chooses: "Buckshot" Cheney

* Number of documents Cheney has classified: That's a secret.
(He claims he does not have to report this to anyone - not even the president.)

* Of the 7,045 advisory committee meetings held by the Bushites in 2004, percentage that were completely closed to the public, contrary to the clear intent of the Federal Advisory Committee Act: 64 percent (a new record)

* Number of times from 1953 to1975 (the peak of the Cold War) that presidents invoked the "state secrets" privilege, which grants them unilateral power in extraordinary instances literally to shut down court cases on the grounds they could reveal secrets that the president doesn't want disclosed: 4

* Number of times the same privilege was invoked between 2001 and 2006: At least 24

* Under Clinton, Attorney General Janet Reno issued an official memo instructing agencies to release as much information as possible to the public. In October 2001, AG John Ashcroft issued a memo canceling Reno's approach, expressly instructing agencies to look for reasons to deny the public access to information and pledging to support the denials if the agencies were sued.

* 2005 FOIA requests still awaiting a response at year's end: 31 percent
(a one-third increase over the 2004 backlog)

* Median waiting time to get an answer on FOIA request from Bush's justice department: 863 days

Halliburton

"Halliburton is a unique kind of company."
- Dick Cheney, September 2003

* Total value of contracts given to Halliburton for work in the Bush-Cheney "War on Terror" since 2001: More than $15 billion

* Amount that Halliburton pays to the Third World laborers it imports into Iraq to do the work in its dining facilities, laundries, etc.: $6 per 12-hour day (50 cents an hour)

* Amount that Halliburton bills us taxpayers for each of these workers: $50 a day

* Amount that Halliburton bills U.S. taxpayers for:

o A case of sodas: $45

o Washing a bag of laundry: $100

* Halliburton's campaign contributions in Bush-Cheney election years:

o In 2000: $285,252 (96 percent to Republicans)

o In 2004: $145,500 (89 percent to Republicans)
Plus $365,065 from members of its board of directors (99 percent to Republicans)

* Increase in Halliburton's profits since Bush-Cheney took office in 2000: 379 percent

* Halliburton's 2005 profit: $1.1 billion
(highest in the corporation's 86-year history

"Since leaving Halliburton to become George Bush's vice-president, I've severed all of my ties with the company, gotten rid of all my financial interest. I have no financial interest in Halliburton of any kind."
Former CEO Dick Cheney, Meet the Press, September 2003

* Annual payments that Cheney has received from Halliburton since he's been vice-president:

o 2001: $205,298
o 2002: $162,392
o 2003: $178,437
o 2004: $194,852
o 2005: $211,465

* Cash bonus paid to Cheney by Halliburton just before he took office: $1.4 million

* Retirement package he was given in 2000 after only 5 years as CEO: $20 million

* Number of times in the past two years that Republicans have killed Sen. Byron Dorgan's amendment to set up a Truman-style committee on war profiteering to investigate Halliburton: 3

* Naughty word Cheney used during a Senate photo session in 2004 to assail Sen. Patrick Leahy, who had criticized Cheney's ongoing ties to Halliburton: "Go #@! percent yourself.

Jim Hightower is the author of "Let's Stop Beating Around the Bush" (Viking Press). He publishes the monthly Hightower Lowdown.

© 2006 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at:
http://www.alternet.org/story/40678/

---

AlterNet:
Big Ag, Oil and Tobacco Will Kill You For a Profit

By Jane Smiley, HuffingtonPost.com
Posted on August 23, 2006

In the late eighties, I wrote a novel called A Thousand Acres. Everyone thought it was about incest and "King Lear".

To me, those were plot elements that I was using in service to the theme, which concerned the transformation of the midwestern American landscape from a unique, diverse, and rather fragile natural ecosystem that supported methods of European animal and grain farming imported by German, English, and Scandinavian farmers during the nineteenth century to a denuded and lifeless "food" factory in which a few crops (corn, soybeans, hogs, and beef) and the money that could be made from them pushed every other consideration of human endeavor and biodiversity to the margins, or snuffed them out entirely. My book was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and made into a movie. American agriculture got worse.

In the early nineties, I wrote another novel about farming called Moo, a comic novel that took place on the campus of a land grant university. While researching Moo, I discovered BSE, which was only just then (1992) emerging in the UK as a relative of scrapie, a form of brain-wasting disease that occurs in sheep. As far as I know, the references to BSE in Moo were the first to appear in the US.

The characters in Moo discuss the practice of feeding cows, normally vegetarians, the animal byproducts of sheep farming. They are appalled. And it still seems like a no-brainer. If cows eat offal and then people eat cows, a certain proportion of people will become ill with sheep and cow diseases, and, voila, scrapie crossed two species barriers - to cows and to humans - because the agriculture corporations either didn't know what they were doing or didn't care. Nevertheless, American agriculture got worse.

After I left Iowa and started writing about other things, the ag companies (according to Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma and the film "The Future of Food"), continued to perpetrate vicious idiocies, and to do so in a more and more aggressive manner, challenging the rights, and the abilities, of people in all parts of the world to have any say in the nature and composition of the food we put into our bodies. They have done so, as far as I can tell, solely for profit. They have exhibited greed that crosses over from mere selfish immoral criminality into actual insanity.

Here's an example. By the time I was writing A Thousand Acres, it had been apparent for some twenty-five or thirty years that insecticides and herbicides were contaminating the landscape and the water supply, killing off wildlife, destroying fertility in males and females of all species, and causing disease in the farmers themselves and their families. The common sense solution to this increasing problem would have been to acknowledge the destructive power of these unnatural chemicals, and to have shifted American agriculture away from their use.

The ag companies, however, preferred to remake the ecosystem so that farmers would use more chemicals rather than fewer; they genetically modified seed to make it resistant to an herbicide, Roundup, that when applied would destroy every living plant around it except the proprietary seed plants also owned by the corporation that formulated Roundup.

This is exactly analogous to an act of war against the natural ecosystem. It produced acts of war against the farmers, too, because Monsanto aggressively pursued royalty payments from anyone and everyone who had those genetically modified plants in their fields, no matter how they got there, and even if the farmer didn't want them there. Let's say vandals invade your house, eat all your food, drink all your liquor, and make a terrible mess. After they burn the house down, they send you a bill, and sue you if you don't pay it. And the judge backs them up. That is what Monsanto has done to the farmer, and what it is doing to the ecosystem.

Still, it's a no-brainer. If chemicals are killing us and our world, we stop manufacturing the chemicals, unless we are insanely greedy and demonically possessed by the idea that every single element of life, every seed and bit of DNA can and must be owned by someone. Here's what the big ag companies want to do - they want to own and contaminate the entire gene pool of all the world's food resources for their own profit and without the knowledge or input of anyone who will actually be eating the food or living in the world they create. So far, the French and the Japanese and some other nations are standing firm, but the US government, our government, your government, is trying to enforce the will of the big ag companies.

With regard to ag policy, Clinton and Gore were bad, but Bush and Cheney are infinitely worse. Let's call a spade a spade here. By means of corrupting the Congress and the Executive and the Judiciary branches of our government, the ag companies have changed the rules, and deregulated themselves. They have given their crimes against humanity technical legality, but they are still crimes against humanity (and, in fact, against the entire natural world).

The model, of course, is big tobacco. As was reaffirmed again this past week, big tobacco knew fifty years ago that there was nothing beneficial about their product. Tobacco is a bad plant, a bad industry, and a bad product. Faced with the truth, big tobacco changed their advertising , stonewalled, and lied in order to maintain profits. What big ag did not learn from the experiences of big tobacco was to first, do no harm. Rather, big ag learned to hide the harm it is doing and befuddle the lines of liability, as well as to force deregulation, to buy off the politicians and the researchers, and to present the world with a genetic fait accompli, a crime and a sin that cannot be undone. Sort of like the Iraq war.

Everyone knows at this point that Halliburton (that is, big war) and big oil were the prime movers in instigating the war in Iraq through their man Cheney and their poodle, Bush. And, of course, Halliburton and the other war industries and Exxon and the other oil companies have been the only ones to profit from the Iraq war. They have not sent members of their own families to fight; they have suffered no bombings of their own plants or their own homes. They thought they had a fool-proof plan for profits, and indeed, they did. We, the taxpayers, have paid for their adventure with money and lives. They have not gotten the Iraqi oil (let's say plan A), but they have driven up prices and profits (plan B). The president of Exxon is the happiest old man in the world, I am sure.

Big ag, big tobacco, big war, big oil, and their enablers on Wall Street always congratulate themselves on "wealth creation". This is what the "free market" does - it takes something that was supposedly worthless, like mountaintops in West Virginia or corn varieties in Mexico or oil deposits in Alaska, and gives them "value".

But this is a fiction. The model here is big water. The earth abounds in rivers and lakes. Wealthy water companies (the water rights in my river are owned by a company in England that is now in trouble for mismanaging their own Thames) go to other countries and buy or take the water rights of those people and then sell them back to those very people at a price they can hardly afford.

This is "wealth creation" - creating wealth for stockholders, even though they already have more wealth than they know what to do with, by stealing the resources of the poor and the powerless. The "free market" always talks about buying low and selling high, but it specializes in theft. And, as an alternative, if the "wealth creators" cannot use what you own, say a hardy seed that works well for your ecosystem, they will render it useless so that you will have to buy their seed just to live.

Given what these big corporations routinely do, we have to ask, are they filled and peopled from top to bottom by ruthless monsters who care nothing about others, and also nothing about the world that we live in? Are these CEOs and CFOs and COOs and managers and researchers and stockholders so beyond human that, let's say, the deaths in Iraq and the destitution of the farmers and the tumors and allergies and obesities of children, and the melting of the Greenland ice cap and the shifting of the Gulf Stream are, to them, just the cost of doing business? Or are they just beyond stupid and blind, so that they, alone among humans, have no understanding of the interconnectedness of all natural systems?

One thing you have to ask yourself, faced with American corporate culture, is, what is it about Americans, in particular, that makes them so indifferent to consequences, especially the consequence of doing harm to others, over and over and over? Why did those big tobacco folks persist, for fifty years, in poisoning their customers and attempting to get more customers? Was that what Jesus told them to do?

I bring up Jesus because many, if not most of these companies are headquartered in red states, states proud of their Christian heritage. Big tobacco is (or used to be) located in the south, big oil in Texas, big ag in St. Louis, Minnesota, and Iowa. If Christianity abounds in these states, and people working in these corporations, and running them, are professing Christians, and these people give themselves a license to steal and destroy every day of the year, what does that say about Christianity? Let me tell you. It says that Christianity, especially American Christianity, is the religion of death. Or it says that corporate culture is one thing and religious belief is another, and the religious side is powerless to confront any of the deadly sins perpetrated by the corporate side. But either way, American corporations are set up, not to "create wealth", but to plunder the wealth of everyone not powerful enough to stop them. And the rest of the world understands this. Why do they hate us, again? Oh, yeah. Our values.

When George Bush was elected, the big industries breathed a happy sigh. Finally, they had a "CEO president". The implication of that phrase was that Bush would know how to run the company, to reduce labor costs and outsource various services. The fact was that neither Bush nor Cheney had ever actually succeeded in business, but that was a detail. Failures though they were, they were steeped in corporate ways of thinking, and they owed a lot to big oil, big war, and big ag. They showed immediately that they knew how to do business in the corporate way by cheating in the 2000 election (let's call this "deregulating themselves and their governing behaviors"). This was the true mark of a "CEO President" - do what you can get away with, dare the others to stop you, act always as a predator rather than as a custodian of the common good, because according to theorists of the "free market", there is no common good. Thank you, Milton Friedman. And it doesn't matter how well or poorly they run the government. As they drive it into the ground, they are still acting as good CEOs in the American tradition, preparing their own golden parachutes, sticking it to the suckers (customers, suppliers, stockholders, citizens, soldiers), and treating the property of the corporation (for example the US Army) as their own private stock.

Deregulation has made this debacle.

This is what I remember about the 1980 election. When I got up the morning after and found out the result, I stood in front of my television and wept. I was right to do so. Ronald Reagan busied himself deregulating everything he could - the airlines, the savings and loans, the protections of consumers and workers, health care and the health of the nation itself, the industries that people relied upon for jobs. Babies, children, old folks, farm animals, you name it, he made their lives worse. Possessed of a nice ranch of his own, he assigned James Watt to wreck the environment for everyone else. And he just kept smiling. Americans loved it. He died a couple of years ago with the reputation of a saint. Why would that be? Well, he made Americans proud of themselves again, but for what? Profligate waste? Ignoring every sign that the era of big oil would someday come to an end? Accelerated destruction of natural resources for the sake of Conspicuous consumption? An increase in the number of homeless people in big American cities? Worthless fiddling in the concerns of other nations, like Nicaragua? Is it the US that gives corporations a bad name, or corporations that give the US a bad name? In 1980, the Republicans invited the corporate elite to have it their way. The world we have now, violent and selfish and brutal, contaminated and in danger of environmental collapse, is the world they made, both by actually dismantling the regulatory environment and by letting powerful people get in the habit of thinking that doing whatever they felt like, no matter how grossly harmful, was their right and their privilege.

American corporations always defend their activities by pointing to how innovative they are. This is especially galling when the food companies and the ag companies do it, because they have no good innovations to offer and never have. Olestra? Margarine? Dr. Pepper? GM foods? Roundup? Roundup Ready seed? Salty, fatty fast foods that have ruined the health of millions of Americans? High fructose corn syrup? Chickens raised in cruel and inhuman conditions, contaminated with E. coli and other bacteria? Rice carrying carotene supposedly invented to help starving children, except that children below a certain percentage of body fat can't metabolize the carotene? Whoops! A nice bowl of regular old brown rice and some tofu would work better, but no ag company can figure out how to own all of it. Or a piece of pumpernickel bread and some aged cheddar. Since humans know how to feed themselves, the only thing that the ag companies can do is introduce deceptively marketed products and take for themselves money that might have gone to feeding someone. Oh, yeah, and they can irrevocably change the world so that all biodiversity is reduced and destroyed. Once again, you've got to ask, are they inhumanly evil or inhumanly short-sighted? Oh, well. They are always wrapping themselves in the flag, so it must be the American way.

And it is. American corporations are uniquely free to do business in an irresponsible manner because of what you might call a typo in the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which uses the word "person" without defining it as a human being. Since then, corporations have repeatedly interpreted their personhood in their own favor - they get to have the rights that humans have, such as free political speech (bribing candidates with contributions), but none of the consequences (mortality, moral reciprocity, full liability for bad actions). The result is all around us and threatens to destroy us.

A hundred years ago, the rapaciousness of the business elite spawned a century of war and social conflict. The power of Socialism and Marxism was in the rage people feel when their means are stolen from them, when they are duped and fooled and used as cannon fodder by people like George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, when the world they live in grows more and more inhuman and self-evidently stupid. That rage is growing now. Anarchists have been replaced by suicide bombers. Marxists have been replaced by Islamicists and lefty bloggers. But, of course Bush and Cheney and the capitalists have empowered their own opposition because the human pattern is the same. The war machine, as in Lebanon (epitomized by aerial destruction) is just as clumsy as it ever was. You cannot torment and injure and murder and disfigure people into liking or agreeing with you, only into going underground while they prepare their revenge. You cannot treat people, even people who don't speak your language or dress like you, as suckers and babies (as in, taking candy from a baby). The average person knows this, but CEOs and CEO Presidents apparently do not.

The fact is, the day Ronald Reagan was elected and the corporations decided to roll back the regulations that limited their power, greed, and egomania was the day they doomed themselves and all of us, because it was the day they began living the lie that there are no consequences to corporate activities. By deregulating themselves, they made sure only that the consequences of their misguided policies would be bigger - global climate change rather than higher gas prices, contaminated gene pools rather than lower profits from pesticides, global famine rather than localized corn blight, tens of thousands dead in Iraq rather than higher R and D costs, the death of the Ford motor company rather than a shift to less profitable, more fuel efficient cars.

The list is endless. And their defense of what they do gets harsher and more shrill. We are given to understand that if they don't have their way at this point, conflagration in the middle east - war with Iran, possibly nuclear - will result. What kind of person plans such a thing? Inhumanly callous or inhumanly stupid? We have our answer - a CEO President, someone who epitomises both qualities.

Regulation was good because it rationalized not only business activity and human governance, but also because it rationalized the way the business elite saw themselves. It did not simply confront power with power, as Marxism did; it took details into consideration and broke up the huge gamble that is capitalism into a plethora of smaller gambles with perhaps fewer profits but also fewer consequences.

You may have bought a piece of swampland in Florida, thinking you could develop it, and subsequent understanding of the ecosystem may have lowered the value of your particular piece of property. Too bad you had to eat that investment and come up with some other use for your acquisition, but your business failure is not a reason to destroy the Everglades. Too bad you put your R and D into SUVs, but that is not a reason to destroy Iraq, endanger Israel, and bomb Iran.

Of course there are less predatory corporations than big ag, big oil, big war, and big tobacco - Costco comes to mind, and, lately, even Walmart. As a retail corporation, Walmart is sensitive, at least on the surface, to appearances and to the opinions of customers. Monsanto, whose customers are a captive base of farmers, so far thinks it can suppress or ignore the truth about what it does.

As always, it is those who most dislike regulation who need it. Traditional wisdom and common sense are correct - people who are primarily interested in power and money are the very ones who can least be trusted. We can assume that Genghis Khan, for example, would have hated regulation. But George W. Bush is not Genghis Khan, at least not so far. We should start by regulating him and go on from there to regulating everyone else who shows indifference to the welfare of the world that we all share.

Jane Smiley is the author of numerous books, including Horse Heaven and The Greenlanders.

© 2006 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
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