The Obama Movement: Historical Turning Point?

The Obama Movement: Historical Turning Point?

http://towardfreedom.com/home/content/view/1242/1/

Written by Paul Buhle
Tuesday, 26 February 2008

Whatever is written about the Democratic presidential nomination
before the concession of one candidate or another is likely to be
premature at best. Still, for those historically-minded, a great deal
of significance has already happened.

When Hillary Clinton, a few days ago, accused Barack Obama of leading
"a movement" and not "a campaign," she inadvertently identified the
most important phenomenon in mainstream American politics, and not
only liberal politics, in a generation. She could be accused of
partial inaccuracy because the movement, arguably, has pushed Obama
from campaign to something more, notwithstanding the capabilities of
his electoral machine.

We can rightly go back to 1936 for one precedent, because the
organizations of the Left, fresh from participation in city general
strikes, hardly to mention housing struggles and unemployed marches,
made a ninety degree turn. Not only Communists, of course, but
prominent socialist labor leaders and others who grasped that FDR was
reaching out and offering organizing space as well as a global tilt
against fascism (initially welcomed by the New York Times and
others). The influences were felt within the rising industrial union
movement and elsewhere. But the real effects would be within the next
few years, when the Left, as individuals and organized groups large
or small, played an enormous role in culture, labor and politics. The
US that entered the Second World War was a different place than the US in 1935.

We can rightly go back to the middle 1960s for another precedent. The
leadership of society emphatically including the organized labor
movement based in the warfare-welfare economy successfully resisted,
in the end, anything like a decisive shift in power. And yet: the
hopes and expectations of the Kennedy years, alongside the rising
civil rights movement and the emerging student movements, propelled
the sense of "movement" beyond anything that the professionals of the
Democratic party anticipated or wanted. Coming out of the 1960s, the
progressive and multiracial coalitions successfully taking local
elections during the 1970s, senate and congressional progressives,
few as these may have been, etc., all owe to the Movement model.

We drop further into the negative with the successful centralization
of power by the DLC, with its sources in Democrats for Nixon, the
Moynihan defeat of Bella Abzug, the rise of the Clintons and above
all the counterattacks against the Jesse Jackson campaign of 1988.
Here we find the story of the Superdelegates and their capacity for
mischief. And, in the months to come, those hawkish Democrats far
more eager to keep a potential peacenik out of power than to defeat
Republicans. Count on it.

Better that we rest our case, for the moment, on the positives. When
thousands of aging and aged African Americans in Chicago gather their
energies for Obama, when they are mirrored by thousands of mostly
white undergraduates at the University of Wisconsin, when prestigious
endorsements (useful though they are) seem pale compared to crowds
roaring for social change, then we have the basis of a Movement, the
phenomenon that, as Tom Hayden has said, individuals do not create
but history can create.

What can we do, as progressives of varying age and political
backgrounds, to bring a wider, more sustained social movement right
for our time into existence? I can't think of a more important question.
---

Paul Buhle, a Senior Lecturer at Brown University, was editor of the
SDS magazine RADICAL AMERICA, and is author or editor of many books
on the Left and popular culture.

.

Symposium: The Death of a Traitor [Philip Agee]

Symposium: The Death of a Traitor

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=6A8CDEC4-F7A9-4149-8057-A537115C3656

By Jamie Glazov
FrontPageMagazine.com | Friday, February 29, 2008

Philip Agee, a renegade ex-CIA agent, recently died in obscurity in a
run-down Havana neighbourhood. He betrayed his country and several
agency operatives were murdered after being exposed by him. Agee's
treacherous behavior in this regard prompted a U.S. law against
exposing government spies.

A distinguished panel joins us today to discuss Agee, the damage he
did to this country and the lessons and significance we can draw from
the life and career of this traitor. Our guests are:

Jim Woolsey, a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency (1993-1995).

Chris Simmons, a Counterintelligence Officer since 1987. From
1996-2004, he was deeply involved with the majority of US
Counterintelligence successes against Cuba. He was a central figure
in the identification, investigation, and debriefing of convicted
Cuban spy, Ana Belen Montes. She remains the highest-ranking Cuban
spy ever sent to prison in the US. Simmons was the lead military
official in the May 2003 expulsion of 14 Cuban spies serving under
diplomatic cover. This was the third largest expulsion of diplomats
in US history, and the only one not targeted against Russia/USSR. He
has lectured on Cuban Intelligence throughout the US Intelligence
Community, to Congress, the Heritage Foundation, and in several
academic forums. In addition, his views on Cuba are increasingly
covered by the media, resulting in stories by EFE, TV and Radio
Marti, Notimex, the Washington Times, the Miami Herald, and America
TeVe in Miami. He writes a column on Cuban Intelligence for the Miami
Herald and is founder of the Cuban Intelligence Research Center.

Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest official ever to have defected
from the Soviet bloc. In 1989, Ceausescu and his wife were executed
at the end of a trial where most of the accusations had come
word-for-word out of Pacepa's book Red Horizons, republished in 27
countries. Pacepa's new book, Programmed to Kill: Lee Harvey Oswald,
the Soviet KGB, and the Kennedy Assassination, has just been published.

and

Andy McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor and a senior fellow at the
Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. He prosecuted the Blind
Sheik and his organization for seditious conspiracy in 1995. A failed
American, Philip Burnett Franklin Agee, 72, "Pont" to the KGB for
nearly four decades, is dead in Cuba, his spiritual home. He was a
traitor, paid by the Cubans and Russians.

FP: Jim Woolsey, Christopher Simmons, Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa and
Andy McCarthy, welcome to Frontpage Symposium.

Any McCarthy, let's begin with you.

What were your thoughts on the occasion of Agee's death?

McCarthy: Thanks, Jamie. It's a pleasure to join you and the rest of the group.

My interest in Agee is not that of a CIA insider but, instead, a
fascinated outsider whose national-security work on the
law-enforcement side of government was importantly affected by the
intelligence community. From that perspective, Agee seems to me to
have been the perfect storm of much that was excessive, or at least
eccentric, about the Agency and the 1970s. It's an aspect of the
critical but often overlooked difference between the skills of
intelligence gathering/analysis/operations and criminal investigation
that the CIA has always been more hospitable to those of a Leftist
bent of mind than, say, the FBI. The Agency, after all, really came
into being in the course of a great cause in which we and the British
(whose intelligence services were obviously very influential for us)
were aligned with the Soviet Union. It was, moreover, more concerned
than law-enforcement with knowledge of the world and expertise in
various disciplines; thus the top universities were much more of a
recruiting base for the CIA than the FBI. That doesn't necessarily
signal a leftward bent -- Bill Buckley, after all, joined the Agency,
not the Bureau. Still, I don't think we can ignore that the decades
immediately after the CIA's creation were those when the academy
trended decidedly and identifiably to the political left.

From the pool of Agency personnel, I think you thus end up with a
swath of people who are inclined -- or at least receptive -- to an
anti-American worldview and who are less rigid than their law
enforcement counterparts tend to be about bright-line rules, and
rigid, hierarchical divisions of responsibility. Consequently, the
hard line we try to draw between gathering information and exercising
charging discretion is better respected in the law-enforcement system
than the line between gathering intelligence and making policy is
honored in the intelligence system. This is not to say that you don't
have people in law-enforcement who heavy-handedly lobby to affect
charges and policy. But I think you have a greater percentage of
people in the intelligence community who think they know best and
should be the ones steering national policy, and who, concurrently,
are less apt to defer to protocols and conventions against taking
matters into their own hands.

This type of person, I think, was catalyzed -- and not in a helpful
way -- by the Zeitgeist of the Seventies which, in overreaction to
Watergate, some intelligence abuses, and elite criticism of the war,
evolved into what Jean Kirkpatrick memorably referred to as the
"Blame America First" culture. They came to see the U.S. as immoral
and imperialistic, and to see the intelligence business as
particularly noxious -- what with its practices of deceit to cull
information, its need to deal with unsavory characters (since nice,
upstanding people rarely are found rubbing elbows with those who pose
dire threats to the United States), and its secrecy and unilateral
control by the (discredited) executive branch. Of course personal
factors play a big part in why someone becomes a traitor. But just
looking at the framework from the outside, I don't think it's a great
mystery why you get an Agee, an Aldridge Ames, or even a lot of the
current and former intelligence officials today who are so deeply and
actively critical of U.S. policy.

FP: Thank you Andy McCarthy.

Mr. Woolsey?

Woolsey: Well, Andy's right that on the liberal-conservative spectrum
there have historically been more liberals in the CIA and more
conservatives in the FBI. But it's of course a long way between being
even on the very left end of the American political spectrum, and
even being willing to spin intelligence to affect policy, and being a
homicidal traitor like Agee.

I have been struck by the degree to which, during most of the Cold
War, ideology explained relatively little about American traitors.
That wasn't true at first. Certainly in the 30's and 40's the Soviets
snared a number of people who were on the left politically and who
were attracted by the very far left ("I have seen the future and it
works.") For some this was because their doubts about capitalism were
heavily magnified by the Depression, for others because our wartime
alliance with the USSR created a sense of common purpose. Here in the
US (Alger Hiss) and in the UK (the Cambridge spy ring of which Kim
Philby was a part) some true sons of the establishment spied for the
Soviets not because they were failures in life, needed money, or were
blackmailed but because they became true, believing communists.

By the time we were into the fifties, however, and the world had
digested Khrushchev's disclosure of Stalin's crimes, the Soviets got
very few American assets who were true believers. The traitors of the
late cold war era tended to be of two types. One was flakey young
guys such as the Falcon and the Snowman (F: "Hey Dude, stop Bogarting
that joint and look what I've found here in the SCIF - a manual for
the new reconaissance bird!" S: "Phat! Let's drop it off at the
Soviet Embassy, get a few bucks, and score some more grass!").
Another common type was the mid-career loser, often with a weird
psychological twist: Ames, Hanssen, Agee.

Now in the current era we have to be particularly aware of avoiding
stereotypes. For example, the vast majority of Cold War era spies
were white guys, but Cuba's penetration of DIA was with a
Cuban-American woman. And a very senior FBI official a few years ago
(happily now retired) was so convinced that there was another Ames,
in his view, in the leftist CIA that he ruined more than one career
at Langley while systematically overlooking for a long time the
ostensibly deeply religious and quite conservative Robert Hansen
spying for the Russians from his office just down the hall in the FBI building.

Our enemies are creative in finding spies that break stereotypes. We
must get inside their heads and be creative ourselves.

FP: Thank you James Woolsey.

Mr. Pacepa, your thoughts on Mr. McCarthy's and Woolsey's comments?

And kindly also touch on Agee the man: the man who betrayed his
former colleagues, the CIA and his own country. What damage did he do?

Pacepa: I am delighted to join such distinguished participants in
discussing a crucial side of the intelligence war. Let me start by
showing Agee as he was seen at the top of the Soviet bloc
intelligence community, to which I belonged when he became a traitor.
It is, I believe, a novel look.

According to Sergio del Valle, the head of the Cuban domestic and
foreign intelligence services with whom I had a relatively close
working relationship in the 1960s and 1970s, Agee was a venal
womanizer who had been recruited in Mexico City by the Cuban
espionage service, the DGI (Dirección General de Inteligencia), with
the help of a Cuban lover.

At that time the Soviet espionage service, the PGU, was engaged in
publishing bogus books by such supposed authors, such as White
Russian commander General Vlasov and Soviet foreign commissar Maksim
Litvinov, and even a collection of invented written correspondence
between Tito and Stalin. [1] Agee was like manna from heaven for the PGU.

The PGU took over Agee from the Cubans and persuaded him to put his
name on a "devastating book" against the CIA that would make him a
"rich man." During the Cold War the CIA was the West's first line of
defense against communist expansion, and the PGU believed that Agee
could help it erode the CIA's ability to recruit highly positioned
people able to see what spy satellites could not­what communist
despots were planning to do against the rest of the world.

The PGU resettled Agee in England, and tasked to write a book about
his experience with the CIA. From General Aleksandr Sakharovsky, a
former chief intelligence adviser in Romania who rose to head the PGU
for an unprecedented 14 years, I learned that Agee's book was in fact
conceived and documented by a DGI/PGU team of disinformation experts
in Moscow. The chapter drafts and the appended documentary materials
were sent to Agee through a PGU officer assigned under cover as the
London correspondent of the Novosti news agency, which was a PGU
front. (I later identified the correspondent as Edgar Cheporov.)

In January 1975, this joint DGI/PGU disinformation effort took shape
in the form of a book entitled Inside the Company: CIA Diary,
attributed to Phillip Agee. The book claimed that "millions of people
all over the world had been killed or had their lives destroyed by
the CIA," [2] and it identified some 250 "criminal" CIA officers
involved in Latin American operations, whose names had been provided
to Agee by the DGI/PGU team in Moscow.

Inside the Company became an instant bestseller and was translated
into 27 foreign languages. Why? In my other life, as a communist
intelligence tsar, I oversaw the Romanian equivalents of both the FBI
and the CIA, and I came to realize that the populace has very
different yardsticks for each. The domestic security agency carried
out its duties more or less in the open, and its officers were seen
as human beings with human failings. But foreign intelligence, which
was buried in utter secrecy, was light years away from people's
everyday lives. It was considered to be a mysterious and magical
organization, consisting of anonymous officers without name or face
who could bring off anything asked of them.

The PGU capitalized on this perception.

In 1978 I learned about a new PGU operation, aimed at using Agee to
make the CIA "toothless in Europe." Soon after that I broke with
communism, and of course I lost contact with those PGU plots. Twenty
years later I learned a few details of this new effort from original
PGU documents smuggled out of Moscow by PGU officer Vasily Mitrokhin,
helped by the British MI6.

Documents in the Mitrokhin Archive­described by the FBI as "the most
complete and extensive intelligence ever received from any
source"­show that in 1978 the PGU created a task force staffed with
officers from Service A (disinformation) and Directorate K
(counterintelligence), headed by V.N Kosterin, assistant to the chief
of Service A, and charged it to provide Agee with materials designed
to create another book. This became Dirty Work: The CIA in Western
Europe, which contained names and biographical details of some 700
CIA officers who were, or had been, stationed in Europe.

In 1979, according to other documents in the Mitrokhin Archive, the
PGU tasked Agee to lend his name to a sequel book, Dirty Work: The
CIA in Africa. Agee was met in Cuba by two PGU officers, Oleg
Nechiporenko of Directorate K and A.N. Itskov of Service A, who gave
him a list of CIA officers working on the African continent.

Dirty Work was published in September 1979, bringing the total number
of CIA officers exposed by the PGU with Agee's help to about 2,000. [3] [i]

Trust is the most valuable asset of any espionage service, whatever
its nationality or political flavor, and the CIA was indeed harmed
for a time­any high-ranking foreigner would think twice before
putting his life in the hands of an espionage organization unable to
protect the identity of its officers and sources. Nevertheless, the
CIA continued to epitomize the notion of freedom for most of the
people kept prisoner in the Soviet bloc, and it eventually become
instrumental in winning the Cold War.

By the 1990s, Agee had become a forgotten relic. Now he has died of
septicemia in an infected Cuban hospital, and he was immediately
cremated to avoid future embarrassments. His books are turning to
ashes as well.

I am always interested in the perceptive comments of Jim Woolsey, and
I hope he can expand a little on how Agee has been regarded within
our intelligence community. Is he now forgotten there as well?

Simmons: To build upon Mr. Pacepa's observations, additional
confirmation regarding the fact that Agee began collaborating with
the KGB and DGI in the late 1960s comes from KGB General Oleg Kalugin
and Cuban defector Pedro Anibal Riera Escalante. Riera served in the
DGI (later simply the "DI") from 1969 until 1993. During his tour in
Mexico (1986-1991/1992) he participated in Operation "Moncada," which
targeted the secretary of the CIA's deputy station chief. Agee was
used to approach the secretary, but he was quickly recognized and his
effort just as quickly rebuffed.

I would also like expand upon Mr. Woolsey's comments on Agee's
motivations. Agee has often been characterized as a traitor motivated
by ideology. However, I believe revenge and greed also played
significant roles in his betrayal of the United States. The CIA
forced Agee to resign in 1968 due to his unprofessional and reckless
behavior. Specific examples included irresponsible drinking, repeated
and vulgar propositioning of colleagues' wives, and an inability to
control his finances. These character flaws should have raised flags
with US Counterintelligence. Instead, these failings fuelled Agee's
bitterness and thirst for revenge.

Regarding the greed aspect, in 1992, two senior CIA officers and the
highly respected DGI defector, Florentino Aspillaga, publicly charged
Agee with repeatedly receiving money from Cuban Intelligence. In
fact, Aspillaga said Agee's payments might have totaled more than a
million dollars. Agee denied the charges, but a second Cuban defector
both confirmed Havana's payments to Agee and charged Agee with
teaching Sandinistas how to identify US intelligence personnel and
their operations. It's important to remember that the Castro regime
was, and is, disinclined to pay its agents. As such, for Havana to
have paid Agee hundreds of thousands of dollars simply emphasizes the
importance the DGI/DI placed on him.

McCarthy: I feel here like a student lucky enough to get into the
faculty lounge on a day when the A-Team profs all happen to be there.

The Cuban and Soviet usage of Agee is fascinating stuff, and just as
the last time General Pacepa and I were together in an FPM symposium,
when the general spoke about the KBG role in marketing the Protocols
on the Elders of Zion, I'm struck by how coldly calculating the
Soviets were in exploiting prejudices and misconceptions in popular culture.

Of course, Jim and Chris can address this from the intelligence side
of the house far better than I, but in working national security
matters as a prosecutor and in studying them as a commentator, I've
been struck by how politically correct we are. Showy politesse is, I
suppose, necessary to some degree in diplomatic circles­I mean, who
wants to ruin a perfectly lovely dinner party. But it seems
positively stupid in the intelligence world.

To take one recent example, there is the case of Nada Nadim Prouty
(maiden name Nada Nadim El-Aouar), who infiltrated both the FBI and
the CIA despite being a former illegal alien and the sister-in-law of
a top Hizballah operative, Talal Chahine. Prouty pled guilty last
November to using her access to government intelligence files to
review intelligence on Hizballah­and there seems to be a determined
effort in government circles to understate the significance of what happened.

Prouty had fraudulently obtained U.S. citizenship with the help of
her roommate, a U.S. marine captain named Samar Spinelli (maiden name
Khalil Nabbouh) who pled guilty to that fraud. The third roommate in
the group was a woman named Elfat El-Aouar: aka Mrs. Talal Chahine.
He is now a fugitive­a Detroit restauranteur and apparent Hizballah
big-wig who was laundering and routing millions to the terror
organization in Lebanon (where it is now believed he has
fled­El-Aouar pled guilty to tax fraud).

Now, I hear what Jim is saying about how, at a certain point, Soviet
moles did not typically fit a "true-believer" profile. But one would
think, if we took today's threat environment into account, that
someone like Prouty was straight out of central casting. How the hell
does that happen? I fear we are so intimidated as a government by
accusations of Islamophobia that we are overlooking what one might
have thought was the undeniable connection between Islamic ideology
and Islamic terror. It's like you don't even need to infiltrate us;
we will actively recruit you and not screen for, or blithely dismiss,
the pluperfectly obvious potential threat.

I've seen some of this syndrome myself in the astounding mishandling
of al Qaeda operative Ali Mohamed by the CIA, the FBI and the U.S.
army. (Shameless plug­I write about Mohamed in my soon-to-be
published book, Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad). And why,
to take a slightly different example, would the army drum out a
highly respected scholar like Stephen Coughlin … because he declined
to modulate his (entirely correct) views on jihadism to fit the
military's rose-tinted vision of Islam?

Woolsey: I very much agree with the statements of this fascinating panel.

The Pacepa perspective is invaluable and I certainly agree with the
Simmons point on Agee's having been motivated by revenge and greed.

The McCarthy points about the recent cases set the tone for what we
must focus on in the future -- we're not in Kansas any more dealing
with cynical Soviets with a dead ideology. Our current problem is
much harder because the operatives who serve our major adversary --
several varieties of radical Islamic extremism -- are far from being
cynics and their ideology is far from dead. Indeed they very much
believe that they are commanded by God to destroy our civilization
and way of life and to use any means -- nuclear weapons, suicide
bombing, and total duplicity in order to achieve that end. Hence the
cases pointed out in the McCarthy comment. All is fair game to them:
lying about their citizenship, lying about a knowledgeable student of
Islam who understands their ideology, financing terrorists and then
denying it, and so on.

We must first of all cease the practice of the US Government's
honoring the radical Islamic extremists -- however cleverly they
speak and whatever their oil wealth and however large their corps of
lobbyists. If Harry Truman had decided to reach out to the American
legal community at the beginning of the cold war, he would not have
elevated the communist-front Lawyer's Guild to being his chief
adviser. And the US Government needs to stop its current parallel
practice of honoring the advice and company of Wahhabi-funded, Muslim
Brotherhood organizations and ignoring truly moderate Muslims such as
many Sufi, traditional Shia, Indonesians, and the like. Otherwise we
will see many more espionage cases of the sort that are set out in
the McCarthy comment -- and worse.

Pacepa: In order to protect our country and our allies against
terrorist and nuclear despots, we need highly positioned intelligence
sources. Only they can tell us what those despots have in mind, and
what their most secret war plans against us are. How can we get such
sources? The most important thing is to earn the trust of potential
agents and defectors, in spite of the vitriolic anti-American climate
they may be living under.

This takes me back to the subject of our Symposium. Agee died of
septicemia, but he left an infected legacy that it is still causing
considerable damage to the trustworthiness of the CIA, our first line
of defense against terrorism and nuclear proliferation. For one
thing, Moscow is still using Agee's name to discredit the CIA as an
organization incapable of preserving the secrecy of its officers,
foreign agents and foreign operations. For another thing, Agee's
revelations have encouraged some American political figures to
promote themselves by revealing CIA secrets.

From own experience I know how difficult it is for high-ranking
enemy officials to be persuaded to place their lives in the hands of
an espionage organization distrusted by the general public and by its
own government. In 1975 I decided to defect to the CIA. I trusted it,
I admired the efficiency of its secret war against the Soviet empire,
and I wanted to help. But, just before taking that irreversible step,
I was slapped in the face by the Rockefeller Commission report
describing the CIA as a rogue organization. The following year, the
Senate's Church Commission published 14 more reports portraying the
CIA as a criminal organization. A cable sent to Bucharest from KGB
chief Yury Andropov triumphantly prophesied: "The CIA's tyranny is
over." Ceausescu popped a bottle of champagne. A couple of months
later I had dinner with Janos Kadar, the ruler of Hungary and the
first chief of its communist espionage service; he raised his glass
of vodka with a toast: "To the CIA's funeral!"

The reports of the Rockefeller and Church Commissions froze me in
place for three more years. If the U.S. government did not trust its
own CIA, why should I? After I finally defected in 1978, I was sure
that other heads of Soviet bloc espionage services would follow in my
footsteps. It did not happen. Further investigations hit the press,
this time publicly revealing the CIA's failures in handling
intelligence defectors and agents. Those new reports would have
scared the guts out of me, had I still been in Romania.

Right now the CIA is being publicly raked over the coals in numerous
investigations­all "politically correct." I understand the openness
of American society. But espionage is, by definition, a secret and
merciless war that is especially perilous when waged against brutal
tyrants­even the slightest indiscretion could endanger the lives of
CIA officers and their sources. This sensitive national security tool
should not be used to improve the domestic stature of ambitious politicians.

To the best of my knowledge, none of our main allies has voluntarily
washed the dirty linen of its intelligence business in public. Their
espionage services also occasionally make mistakes, but they are
usually corrected in house.

It is not fair to compare the CIA with my former foreign intelligence
service, the Romanian DIE, but there is a lesson there. After I broke
with communism, the DIE became the subject of a public political
investigation. Romania's dictator needed to explain to the Politburo
why he had been "betrayed" by his own spy chief, and he made the DIE
his scapegoat. Soon after that the whole DIE collapsed­and I was
credited with "single-handedly demolishing an entire Soviet bloc
espionage service."

Over the past 25 years I have worked with a number of CIA officers.
All have been good professionals and devoted patriots, ready to go to
any lengths to protect our national security. They do not need more
Agee-style revelations. They need to be quietly helped to regain the
trust of their potential sources abroad. Trust is the most valuable
asset of any espionage service, no matter its nationality or political flavor.

Simmons: I agree with the insightful comments from the other panelists.

However, I would like to expand upon two points raised by Mr.
McCarthy. First, the shrewd ability of our enemies to exploit
prejudices and misconceptions in our popular culture and secondly,
how political correctness undermines our counterintelligence services.

A long-term influence operation conducted by the Castro regime has
been it masterful ability to justify its intelligence operations as
defensive measures taken against US terrorists. One need not look
further than the worldwide campaign known as "Free the 5" to witness
Havana's ability to exploit prejudices and mistaken beliefs. This
effort aggressively and methodically lies to global audiences by
portraying the espionage operations of the now defunct Florida-based
Wasp Network as Havana's innocent response to a violence-prone
Miami-exile community. In reality, several members of the Wasp
Network played key roles in the deaths of four members of Brothers to
the Rescue. Cuba conducted similar, albeit much smaller influence
operations following the arrest of INS official Mariano Faget, as
well as Florida International University staff members Carlos and Elsa Alvarez.

For decades, Havana also successfully exploited the biases held by
CIA Case Officers regarding the capabilities of Cuban Intelligence.
This arrogance came to light in June 1987 when Florentino Azpillaga
Lombard defected and revealed that 85 of the CIA's Cuban assets were
Cuban agents or provocations. Many of these double agents "worked"
for the CIA for decades, effectively denying the US leadership with
"ground truth" regarding what was actually occurring in Cuba.

Moving onto the issue of political correctness, this behavior has a
crippling effect on US Counterintelligence. We must remember that
Havana is predisposed towards racial/ethnic/gender profiling. Cuban
case officers favor the targeting of US minorities, specifically
women, African Americans, and Hispanics. This practice is based on
Havana's premise that minorities in the United States have been
repressed for so long that a need for revenge can be nurtured and
fueled within many members of these communities. Whether we believe
it or not is irrelevant; Havana has been quite successful with this
tactic. While Agee clearly didn't fit the racial/ethnic/gender
profile, his need for revenge is well within Havana's spotting and
assessing protocols. We need to view Cuba's preference towards
profiling for what it is; an operational signature that leaves their
agents very vulnerable. The US inflicted devastating losses on Cuban
Intelligence from 1998-2003. We can better repeat those successes
when we stop worrying about being "PC."

FP: Jim Woolsey, Christopher Simmons, Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa and
Andy McCarthy, thank you for joining Frontpage Symposium. And a
special thanks to Peter Collier, who planted the seeds from which
this symposium grew.
--

Notes:

[1] Andrew and Gordievsky, pp. 463-464. The authors describe several
bogus memoirs produced by the Agayants department, noting that the
fraudulent Litvinov book was "sophisticated enough to deceive even
such a celebrated Soviet scholar as E.H. Carr, who in 1955
contributed a forward" to it.

[2] Phillip Agee, Inside the Company: CIA Diary (London, Penguin,
1975), p. VIII.

[3] "Allegations Concerning Philip Agee and the Covert Action
Information Bulletin," source: The Sword and the Schield:: the
Mitrokhin Archives and the History of the KGB, Christopher Andrew and
Vasili Mitrokhin,, October 5, 1999, p. 2, as published on

http://jya.com/agee-kgb.htm.
---

Jamie Glazov is Frontpage Magazine's managing editor. He holds a
Ph.D. in History with a specialty in U.S. and Canadian foreign
policy. He edited and wrote the introduction to David Horowitz's Left
Illusions. He is also the co-editor (with David Horowitz) of The Hate
America Left and the author of Canadian Policy Toward Khrushchev's
Soviet Union (McGill-Queens University Press, 2002) and 15 Tips on
How to be a Good Leftist. To see his previous symposiums, interviews
and articles Click Here. Email him at jglazov@rogers.com.

.

Background for Chicago 10

[See URL for embedded links.]

Background for Chicago 10

http://pressblog.uchicago.edu/2008/02/29/background_for_chicago_10.html

Chicago 10, the innovative documentary that revisits the tumult of
the 1968 Democratic National Convention and the Chicago 8/7
conspiracy trial of key antiwar activists a year later, opens Friday
in select theaters. The film is directed by Brett Morgen and combines
archival footage of the chaos of August 1968 with animated
reenactments of scenes from the trial. Plus a soundtrack ranging from
Black Sabbath and Steppenwolf to the Beastie Boys and Eminem.

Morgen has been quoted as saying that he "wanted to do the myth of
Chicago rather than the history," and "if you want to know the
history of what happened in Chicago so long ago, then read a book."
Well, we think understanding history is pretty darn important and are
happy to oblige.

Twenty years ago we published the most complete account of the events
surrounding the 1968 DNC, David Farber's Chicago '68. That book is
innovative itself, creating multiple perspectives reflecting both
police and demonstrators. Farber shows the developing plans of the
antiwar movement for protesting the war in Vietnam during the
convention, as the shocks of 1968 shift the ground­the Tet offensive,
President Lyndon Johnson's withdrawal from the re-election race, the
assassination of Martin Luther King and subsequent riots in cities
across the country, and the assassination of Robert Kennedy.

Next month we will release a paperback edition of Battleground
Chicago: The Police and the 1968 Democratic National Convention by
Frank Kusch. Battleground Chicago is essential for understanding what
is completely absent in Chicago 10­any insight into the motivations,
thoughts, and feelings of the individual policemen who were enforcing
order on the streets of Chicago. (Or, as Mayor Richard J. Daley
famously misstated it: "the policeman is there to preserve
disorder.") Kusch interviewed eighty former Chicago police officers
who were on the scene and uncovered the other side of the story of '68.

If you want to get a taste of 1968, go see Chicago 10. But if you
want to understand 1968, read a book.

.

Their War, Our War: Signs of Life from America’s Youth

Their War, Our War: Signs of Life from America's Youth

http://www.cityonahillpress.com/article.php?id=1068

By Nick Winnie
[February 2008]

On a temperate, late-autumn day a few months ago, my father and I
climbed the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to look at the most
patriotic of American landscapes. The reflecting pool, the National
WWII Memorial, the Washington Monument and the United States Capitol
lined up like a row of standing soldiers.

"It's been almost 40 years since I've been here," my father
reminisced. "The last time I was here, you couldn't even see all of
this beautiful grass ­ there were so many thousands of us, standing
shoulder to shoulder, pissed at Nixon, sick of that war."

He didn't ask, but beneath his words lay an obvious question.

Why, after nearly five years of a war that was originally justified
on what we now know were false premises, that has killed 3,972
American soldiers and up to 1 million Iraqi civilians, violently
uprooted 4.8 million Iraqis from their homes and cost American
taxpayers nearly $500 billion dollars, why is your generation not
doing what we did?

Since the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003, these
questions have been as difficult to answer as they are necessary to
ask. And in a city like Santa Cruz, so proud of its progressive
activism and so given to 1960s countercultural nostalgia, these
questions are nearly inescapable.

And yet our generation continues the critiques: Where our parents'
generation was engaged and idealistic, we are passive and cynical.
Where they were cooperative and violently anti-establishment, we are
self-absorbed and materialistic. The list of self-evident
generational opposites goes on and on.

Beyond these simple black-and-white assertions are common
explanations with a bit more historical perspective. Our parents'
antiwar activism drew inspiration and practical lessons from the
civil rights movement. In MLK, JFK and RFK, '60s activists had
charismatic figures to rally around. They watched the grisly scenes
of the Vietnam War unfold on their TV screens every night. Perhaps
most importantly, they had draft notices and the death letters of
friends who weren't coming back. We've lacked all of these things and
have remained relatively quiet about our war.

Questions about the apathy of our generation have plagued me for
years. Now, on the eve of the American invasion's fifth anniversary,
they ring in my ears, louder than ever. But this is because I'm
beginning to reformulate my own answers to such questions.

I'm beginning to see signs that we are slowly waking from our civic slumber.

First of all, we're voting now in numbers that actually carry some
weight in national elections, a fact that became abundantly clear
with the Iowa caucus. In this significant first primary campaign
stop, young voters (ages 18 through 29) flooded the polls, increasing
their turnout from 2004 by 135 percent.

A recent Time magazine feature tracked the spike in youth voting,
which has extended from Iowa and the early primary states through
Super Tuesday, and has continued to lift Barack Obama to an
uninterrupted 11 primary state victories since then. In "The Year of
the Youth Vote," columnist David Von Drehle wrote of Obama, "His
campaign has become the first in decades ­ maybe in history ­ to be
carried so far on the backs of the young."

The article displayed a poll that compared general youth interest in
the 2008 presidential elections to 2000 and 2004. According to the
poll, 74 percent of 18- through 29-year-olds said they were paying
close attention to the campaign, as opposed to 42 percent in 2004 and
a paltry 13 percent in 2000.

In our generation's own slightly detached, digital-age way, we have
also turned the Internet into a powerful grassroots weapon that has
the potential to revolutionize American politics.

The emergence of rapidly growing online organizations, such as
MoveOn.org, has created a new avenue for mass protest and organizing
that was simply not available to youth a decade ago. MoveOn has a
network of over 3 million members and can make a strong, mass
political statement immediately. The organization is currently
demanding that super-delegates allow voters to decide the Democratic
candidate and it has rapidly gathered over 400,000 petition
signatures to apply significant political pressure.

Outside of cyberspace, our generation has also exhibited its nascent
idealism and willingness to sacrifice in its little-known, but
significant, volunteer efforts. A poll recently used by Mother Jones
magazine indicated that today's youth are volunteering at a higher
rate than any point in the last 40 years.

So, perhaps our generation isn't so apathetic after all.

There is certainly an encouraging trend of increased political
activism and involvement. What remains entirely unclear is how this
general shift will affect the way we relate to our war, whose
blood-encrusted legacy will define these years of our political maturity.

On April 7, when the American occupation of Iraq officially becomes
five years old, we might not stage mass antiwar protests that rival
those of the Vietnam era, but we must find a way ­ our own way ­ to
exercise the passion and idealism we've always had for our country.

.

Bachelor of Science in Pot Studies?

See: http://www.oaksterdamuniversity.com/
--

Bachelor of Science in Pot Studies?

http://www.campusprogress.org/page/community/post/Annika/CLl4

By Annika - Feb 26th, 2008

A new trade school in Oakland, CA is preparing its students for a
highly competitive career in a burgeoning field: medical marijuana.
For $200, Oaksterdam University (clever, huh?) teaches students how
to cultivate and cook with pot, and equips them to navigate the legal
restrictions on the use of medical marijuana.

"My basic idea is to try to professionalize the industry and have it
taken seriously as a real industry, just like beer and distilling
hard alcohol," said Richard Lee, the activist and medical marijuana
distributor who founded the school.

While Lee's students seem excited about learning to "grow pot at home
for fun, health, public service ­ or profit," not everyone is
thrilled. Though Lee's school is totally legal, Michael Chapman, an
assistant agent in charge with the Drug Enforcement Agency's San
Francisco office, thinks it's more of a detriment than a public
service. "I think they are sending the wrong message out to the
community and it's something that could only facilitate criminal
behavior," he said.

Fun fact: According to Lee, entry-level workers at medical marijuana
dispensaries earn over $50,000 a year on average, and managers and
owners often make over $100,000.

.

71 cop-killing case may cost S.F. millions

'71 cop-killing case may cost S.F. millions

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/02/28/BALLV9NKR.DTL

Wyatt Buchanan, Chronicle Staff Writer
Thursday, February 28, 2008

A murder trial for several men charged with killing a San Francisco
police officer 37 years ago and with plotting to kill police officers
across the country could cost the city millions of dollars in
attorney fees for the accused.

The "San Francisco Seven" are accused of killing Sgt. John Young
inside the Ingleside Police Station in 1971, and three of those men
are also charged with conspiracy to kill officers from New York to
Los Angeles to Louisiana from 1968-73.

Prosecutors have described the accused as members of the Black
Liberation Army, an offshoot of the Black Panthers.

The case, which some attorneys involved are calling the most complex
and expensive in city history, already has drained the fund of money
set aside for attorneys of criminal defendants who cannot afford a lawyer.

"This is a very extraordinary case," said Neal Taniguchi, chief
fiscal officer for San Francisco Superior Court, where it is being
tried. "It's a case that is 35 years old and has half a million
documents of evidence. It's very time consuming to go through all the
evidence, and that's why it costs so much."

On Thursday, the Budget and Finance Committee of the Board of
Supervisors considered a measure to allow the county court system to
spend an additional $2.26 million this year for indigent defendants
who are not represented by the public defender.

Most all of that money would be spent on this case, and it would be
in addition to the $7.26 million San Francisco already had budgeted
for these kinds of expenses. By law, the public defender can only
represent one defendant in a trial where multiple people are being prosecuted.

The case also is unusual because it is state Attorney General Jerry
Brown, not county District Attorney Kamala Harris, who brought
charges against the men.

City leaders say they plan to ask the state to reimburse San
Francisco for the cost, but that will take an act of the state
Legislature and the city cannot do so until the trial is complete.

Attorneys defending the men said the government's case is weak and
questioned the reasoning for pursuing an expensive and time-consuming trial.

Public Defender Jeff Adachi, whose office is representing one
defendant, said he thinks prosecutors will have a difficult time
proving the charges, as the accused have maintained their innocence
for decades and the case involves allegations of illegal police interrogation.

"I've been around 20 years and I've never seen a case like this," Adachi said.

Stuart Hanlon, a defense attorney representing another of the
accused, said there is no new evidence in the case and much of the
evidence - including the gun purportedly used in the shooting - has vanished.

"It's going to be very tough to prove this case, and the real
question is, given the lack of evidence, why we're doing this," said
Hanlon, who said he is working for about a quarter of his regular
rate and said the other attorneys on the case are collaborating to
keep the fees low.

The Superior Court assigned two defense attorneys for each defendant
because of the voluminous amount of evidence, Taniguchi said.

The attorney general last month dropped conspiracy charges against
five of the men originally charged, which led to the release of one
of them. The three others still are charged with murder and
conspiracy, and prosecutors are confident they can win the case.

"We have very strong evidence supporting our prosecution for these
individuals murdering a police officer," said Gareth Lacey, spokesman
for Attorney General Brown. "We have credible and strong new evidence
that we'll present at the preliminary hearing in April."

Taniguchi said the money the court requested, which still needs
approval from the full Board of Supervisors, also would pay for the
increasing number of defense attorneys needed from outside the public
defender's office.

In 2005-06, 14 such attorneys were needed. Last fiscal year, that
number increased to 24, he said.
---

E-mail Wyatt Buchanan at wbuchanan@sfchronicle.com.

.

Sixties Folk Icon Makes Rare Appearance [Jim Kweskin]

Sixties Folk Icon Makes Rare Appearance

http://www.eastbayexpress.com/music/sixties_folk_icon_makes_rare_appearance/Content?oid=651782

Jim Kweskin's Jug Band was positioned for stardom. Then he pulled the plug.

By Hal Gelb
February 27, 2008

There are waiters and waitresses, receptionists and Realtors, but for
an artist, Jim Kweskin has an unusual day job. He manages and is part
owner of Fort Hill Construction, a multi-million dollar outfit that
does, the singer-guitarist says by phone one workday morning from an
LA job site, "high-end building and renovation."

The construction gig is so much at the center of his life that the
one-time leader of the Jim Kweskin Jug Band, the funky, infectious
'60s aggregation that Fresh Air rock historian Ed Ward places in
importance alongside the Beatles, Byrds, and Rolling Stones, rarely
performs or records. "I'm not trying to make a living at music," he
says, and adds, "It's a good feeling."

So when Kweskin takes the stage at the Freight & Salvage Friday
night, it will be something of a rare occasion. "I keep my finger in
the pie," he admits, "but not a tremendous amount."

The Jug Band, which first brought Maria Muldaur to national
attention, played Kweskin's typical repertoire, an eclectic mix of
almost entirely pre-'50s Americana: good-timey tunes, folk, blues,
pop, and early jazz. A pillar of the Harvard Square folkie scene that
spawned Joan Baez and then a national attraction ­ Janis Joplin
opened for them when they played the Fillmore ­ the Jug Band was
being positioned for pop stardom by Dylan's manager, Albert Grossman,
when Kweskin pulled the plug.

"Once I realized I had to play music for a living ­ which meant all
the time ­ it stopped being fun," he recalls. "There was too much
time away from home, too much repetition." He grew unhappy "playing
music with kazoos" and moved on to a few non-Jug Band albums,
including the deeply moving Jim Kweskin's America, before stopping
recording entirely in 1980.

Following Mel Lyman, the Jug Band's charismatic Santa Rosa-raised
banjo and harmonica player, into the commune Lyman was putting
together on Fort Hill in Boston's Roxbury ghetto pulled him further
away from a musical career. When asked to describe the community's
ethos, Kweskin simply says, "It's just a family, a bunch of people
who live together and share." That was the original attraction.
"Being together with a large family, with people who were inspiring
to me and who I grew to care about."

He even refers to Fort Hill Construction as his family's business.
"There was a bunch of rundown houses," he recalls, "and we moved in,
because at that time we were quite poor." Over the course of a couple
of years, the community bought the houses and learned how to fix them
up. "And after a while people said, 'Hey, you guys do pretty good
work. Why don't you work on my house?'"

Kweskin tends to use the word "community," not "commune" for Fort
Hill. "The next word after 'commune' could be 'cult,'" he notes.
That's a term Fort Hill has heard a lot. In the 1970s, a Rolling
Stone cover story pictured Fort Hill as an acid-fascist cult with a
megalomaniac Lyman as its Charlie Manson. Kweskin calls the article
"a chop job, full of falsehoods. They really tried to destroy us."

"Why would they do that?"

"To sell papers."

"Did the community change as a result?"

Yeah, he laughs. "We stopped giving interviews to newspapers."

More recent press accounts are cautious but laudatory, pointing to
Fort Hill as one of the few communal experiments to survive the '60s.
How'd they manage that? "Strong people. Committed. The personal
relationships. A lot of it had to do with who Mel Lyman was, helping
us getting this family going."

Articles point especially to the children raised in the commune.
They're described as responsible, studious, courteous adults. And to
Kweskin's delight, a number of them are into music. "I've taught
music to almost all the kids and some of them have grown up to be
quite good musicians. That's a very good feeling."

One of the "kids" is the remarkable singer Samoa Wilson, with whom he
recorded two recent albums, Now and Again and Live the Life on Blix
Street Records. Kweskin also has two forthcoming CDs, one featuring
his fingerpicking and another that captures a jug band extravaganza
at the Great American Music Hall where he jammed with John Sebastian,
David Grisman, and Geoff Muldaur. He's been gigging again with
Muldaur, the Jug Band's singer/guitarist, ever since they reunited at
a memorial for Fritz Richmond, the band's bassist and jug player
extraordinaire, in 2005.

All in all, Kweskin may play a dozen or two dates a year now. He
plays "when I feel inspired, when I have some music in me or
something that I want to play for people. Then I feel very alive onstage."

.

Who Passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964?

Who Passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964?

http://www.alternet.org/rights/77507/

By Nicolaus Mills, Dissent Magazine
February 22, 2008.

The Clinton/Obama debate over who deserves credit for the Civil
Rights Act has died down. But a history lesson is in order.
--

Like so many of my generation who did voter registration work in the
South during the 1960s, I have been saddened by the debate that
Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama sparked over whether Martin Luther
King or President Lyndon Johnson was responsible for the landmark
1964 Civil Rights Act that outlawed discrimination in hiring and
public accommodations. Instead of providing voters with a thoughtful
view of the recent past, Clinton and Obama combined to offer a crude,
"great man" theory of history in which King's vision and Johnson's
pragmatism were portrayed as antithetical forces.

The debate has quieted down. But it should not be allowed to fade
from the headlines without a reminder of the lesson this controversy
threatened to obscure -- blacks and whites across America relied on
one another to make the Civil Rights Act of 1964 a reality.

The act had its legislative origins in a June 11, 1963 speech that
President John Kennedy delivered on national television after Justice
Department officials, aided by federal marshals, forced Alabama
Governor George Wallace to stand aside while two black students were
admitted to the previously segregated University of Alabama. "If an
American, because his skin is dark … cannot enjoy the full and free
life which all of us want, then who among us would be content to have
the color of his skin changed and stand in his place?" Kennedy asked
the country.

But Kennedy's speech, which was followed hours later by the murder of
Mississippi civil rights leader Medgar Evers in Jackson, did not
guarantee a speedy passage of civil rights legislation. A coalition
of southern Democrats and conservative Republicans stood in the way
and the best that Kennedy could do before his November 22
assassination was to get his civil rights bill voted out of committee.

It fell to President Lyndon Johnson to get Kennedy's civil rights
legislation enacted. Soon after taking office, Johnson made his
intentions clear. "We have talked long enough in this country about
equal rights," he told a joint session of Congress on November 27.
"It is time now to write the next chapter and to write it in books of
law." At this same time, Martin Luther King was playing a crucial
role in shaping public opinion. His April 16 "Letter from Birmingham
Jail" and his August 28 speech "I Have a Dream" galvanized millions
of Americans who in the past had remained passive when support for
civil rights was needed.

Still, it was not until 1964 that Kennedy's civil rights bill got
through Congress. On February 10, the House passed the bill by a vote
of 290 to 130 and on June 19, in the wake of a record-breaking 75-day
filibuster, which took up 534 hours, the Senate passed its version of
the civil rights bill by a 73 to 27 margin. Now Lyndon Johnson began
pressuring Congress to reach agreement on a bill that he could sign by July 4.

At this moment, Johnson benefited not only from the civil rights
coalition led by Martin Luther King but from the grassroots work of
Bob Moses, then a young organizer for the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee (SNCC) who had been active in Mississippi
since 1961. At a November 1963 SNCC meeting, Moses had proposed a
1964 "Summer Project" in Mississippi that would make extensive use of
college students, getting them to teach in freedom schools and carry
out voter registration drives. A black-white coalition, Moses
believed, would engage the whole country. But no sooner had the
Summer Project begun when three of its participants -- Michael
Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman -- disappeared on June 21
near Philadelphia, Mississippi.

Their disappearance (their bodies would later be found buried in an
earthen dam) could not be ignored by America. Television cameras and
the print media descended on Mississippi while state officials acted
as if nothing of importance had happened. "They could be in Cuba,"
joked Mississippi Governor Paul Johnson.

It was the worst response that the diehard segregationists of the
Deep South could have made. The influence of Martin Luther King,
Lyndon Johnson, and John Kennedy, along with years of demonstrations
and sit-ins, had created a political tide that reached its peak with
the disappearance of the three men. On July 2, two days ahead of
schedule, Congress, under heavy public pressure, agreed to the civil
rights bill that Johnson wanted. Five hours later in a White House
signing ceremony timed to coincide with the evening news, the
president addressed the nation.

"One hundred and eighty-eight years ago this week a small band of
valiant men began a long struggle for freedom," Johnson told the
nation. "Now our generation of Americans has been called on to
continue the unending search for justice within our own borders." The
analogy was unmistakable. The president was comparing the work of the
Founding Fathers with that of the civil rights movement.

Martin Luther King, who was present at the White House signing
ceremony, also had no doubts about the significance of the day or
about Lyndon Johnson's role in making the civil rights bill law. "It
was a great moment," King declared, "something like the signing of
the Emancipation Proclamation by Abraham Lincoln."

Today, we cannot know exactly what Johnson and King, two coalition
builders, would say about the efforts to portray them as civil rights
rivals. But it is hard to imagine that both would not have seen
comparisons that pit them against each other as inimical to the civil
rights movement they believed in. As King observed of the struggle
for racial justice in his "Letter from Birmingham Jail": "We are
caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single
garment of destiny."
---

Nicolaus Mills is a professor of American Studies at Sarah Lawrence
College and author of Like a Holy Crusade: Mississippi 1964­The
Turning of the Civil Rights Movement in America and most recently,
Winning the Peace: The Marshall Plan and America s Coming of Age as a
Superpower.

.

Anti-War Movement Wrestles with 1968

Anti-War Movement Wrestles with 1968

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/02/27/7315/

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0208/8710.html

by Ryan Grimm
Published on Wednesday, February 27, 2008 by Politico.com

A coalition of anti-war groups is vowing to protest this summer's
Democratic National Convention in Denver under the rubric "Re-create
'68," prompting criticism from some on the left who are loath to
revisit what they see as a disastrous time for both the anti-war
movement and the Democratic Party.

Capping a year that saw the assassinations of both the Rev. Martin
Luther King Jr. and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, the 1968 Democratic
National Convention erupted in violence as thousands of Chicago
police officers, supported by U.S. Army troops and National
Guardsmen, battled in the streets with activists protesting the
Vietnam War. Inside the convention hall, the Democrats chose as their
presidential nominee Hubert Humphrey, who went on to lose the general
election to Richard Nixon.

Re-create '68?

"What's the political calculation that speaks to them of the wisdom
of civil disobedience - which means a massive media spectacle - on
the brink of a Democratic campaign that could plausibly put a
Democrat in the White House who's committed to withdrawal from Iraq?"
asked Todd Gitlin, an anti-Vietnam War activist who was at the
Democratic National Convention in 1968. "If the objective is to put a
belligerent Republican in the White House, they should keep up the good work."

The "belligerent Republican" of whom Gitlin speaks will almost
certainly be Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who spent the summer of 1968
as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.

Organizers acknowledge that their "Re-create '68 moniker has been met
with skepticism as they've toured the country to gin up support among
fellow activists. "A lot of people of course associate it with the
DNC of '68 and react negatively," said organizer Mark Cohen. But the
point, Cohen said, isn't to reproduce the violence associated with
the 1968 convention, just the strong sense of countercultural protest
that coalesced against the Vietnam War. "We don't call ourselves
'Re-create Chicago '68,'" Cohen offered.

Leslie Cagan, head of United for Peace and Justice, an anti-war group
that has organized large marches in the past, said her group has
endorsed the planned demonstrations in Denver.

Cynthia McKinney, a former Democratic congresswoman now running as a
Green Party candidate for president, will be expressing herself at
the demonstration, said organizers. They also plan to reach out to
Ralph Nader, who is running as an independent, third-party candidate.
The coalition is seeking the support of ANSWER, an anti-war
organization with a more radical approach to street protest than UFPJ's.

A major march against the war on the Sunday before the convention
will be followed by a week of action, some of which will include
nonviolent civil disobedience.

Organizer Barbara Cohen speculated that some of the reticence about
the name comes from a misunderstanding of the Chicago ruckus. "First
of all, it was a police riot, and people should remember that," said
Cohen, explaining that the group has no plans to become violent.
"It's the feeling and the ambience from '68 that we want to re-create now."

Medea Benjamin, co-founder of the anti-war group Code Pink, said her
organization will participate in the demonstrations in order to focus
attention on Democrats it believes haven't done enough to stop the
war in Iraq. "We'll use it as a time to pressure leaders like Nancy
Pelosi, who we feel talks a lot about opposing the war but maneuvers
Congress to make sure it gets funded," she said.

Michael Heaney, a Florida University political scientist who studies
the anti-war movement, said he expects between 10,000 and 30,000
people to participate in the Denver protest, depending on which
candidate seems headed for the Democratic nomination. Organizers said
that, from a turnout standpoint, a victory by Hillary Rodham Clinton
would be good for numbers - echoing sentiment on the right that
Clinton is a boon to corralling outrage. "If Hillary gets the
nomination, we're going to have very large numbers - a solid 50,000
people at every event," said organizer Glenn Spagnuolo, 37, who
wasn't yet born in 1968.

What about the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis-St.
Paul, where the GOP will nominate as its presidential candidate the
Senate's chief advocate of the "surge" in Iraq?

Organizers say that they'll protest at the Republican convention,
too, but that their focus will be on the Democrats in Denver. "I
think it's even more important to be in Denver at the DNC," Cohen
said. "Republicans aren't going to listen, no matter what we say, but
the Democrats might actually listen."

Cohen was an activist with the radical Students for a Democratic
Society in 1968, but she wasn't at the Chicago convention. "Partly,
my ride fell through, and something else came up that summer," she said.

Rep. Diana DeGette, a Democrat who represents Denver, was only 11 in
1968, but she said that she's flummoxed by the notion that anyone
would want to re-create the dark days of that year. "I can't figure
out why, for the life of me, that somebody would want to re-create
'68," she said. "Is it the riots or tear gas - or perhaps the
assassinations? Or maybe the election of a Republican president? I'm
not sure the name was completely thought out."

DeGette added, however, that her husband is a top official at the
American Civil Liberties Union and that she is pushing for the
demonstrators to have a "robust right" to speak their minds.

Gitlin, a former president of Students for a Democratic Society,
fears that the protests in Denver will be too much about people
speaking their minds and not enough about obtaining the results that they want.

"In the '60s," he said, "there were competing strains: the desire for
results and the desire for self-expression. This seems to belong
squarely in the self-expression camp."

Gitlin said that trying to re-create the feeling of another era
"makes about as much sense as throwing a costume party. It's absurd
to think you can re-create the culture of a moment. History is a
succession of irreproducible moments

.

The Left Won the Debates of the 1960s

Clintonites Need to Realize the Left Won the Debates of the 1960s

http://hnn.us/articles/47398.html

By James Livingston
2-18-08

Mr. Livingston teaches history at Rutgers. He's finishing a book
called The World Turned Inside Out: American Thought and Culture at
the End of the 20th Century. He blogs at politicsandletters.com.
---

Last time out on this limb, I ended by saying that the Obama campaign
performs a political sensibility­an attitude toward history­that
adjourns the culture wars by assuming the Left won the struggles
conducted in, or inherited from, the 1960s. This campaign assumes, in
other words, that the New Left has become the mainstream of American
politics. It assumes accordingly that the New Right has always been a
marginal, insurgent movement destined to fail with an electorate that
has increasingly insisted on­or rather just acted out­equality across
lines of race, gender, sexual preference, and national origin.

As the culture at large moved rapidly left after 1965, the New Right
chose political means to slow or stop the process. And once in a
while, for example in 1994, it succeeded, although its intellectual
purchase on the culture kept slipping, and its political toehold was
always insecure at best­as witness the elections of 1998 and 2000,
when Democrats won decisively.

Yes, George W. Bush was named the president by a radical junta
convened at the Supreme Court. But his domestic agenda was "No Child
Left Behind," which, regardless of its bureaucratic intricacies, was,
and is, a measure fully consistent with the welfare state­his
Senatorial comrade in arms, remember, was Teddy Kennedy.

It was only in late 2001, after 9/11, that the zealots of the New
Right were able to seize the time, in a kind of coup d'etat that
featured all the hysterical symptoms of 20th-century fascist
movements (and I use the adjective advisedly, based on my reading of
Robert Paxton's The Anatomy of Fascism). Their instant magnification
of executive power was designed to destroy any balance between the
branches of government, and to refit the White House as a bunker from
which to launch two wars in two years, each in the name of "an end to
evil." As late as the summer of 2007, they were planning to bomb Iran
and happily acknowledged their insane intentions. War was, in
principle, the health of the state they imagined.

But they failed. The "war on terror" has become a joke, except when
journalists or politicians equate Al Qaeda in Iraq with the real
thing. The zealots of the New Right­Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld,
Feith, Addington, Perle, Frum, et al.­and their idiot enablers in the
executive branch­Bush, Yoo, Gonzalez, Libby, Rice, Powell, et al.­are
now in jail or in exile or in disgrace or in denial. The American
people would not legitimate their attempted coup.

The people have made it plain, by this refusal, that they want a
return to the rule of law, not of men. They've also made it plain
that they favor Democrats on issues, from health care to the economy
to the Iraq war, but also on values, including a woman's right to
choose and gay rights. Don't take my word for it, consult the
National Opinion Research Center or USA Today or the Pew Center
polls. Everywhere you look, the results are the same: the New Right
can no longer use political means to contain the consequences of the 1960s.

In short, the American people, young and old, have made it plain that
they're increasingly liberal. That liberal trend stopped the New
Right in its tracks, just when it thought it finally had a grip on
power in Washington.

Now these people typically don't call themselves liberals. They don't
call themselves feminists or socialists, either. Nonetheless,
liberalism, feminism, and socialism are constituent elements of our
culture, our politics, and our society. That is why, when polled,
most so-called conservatives say they want more government spending
on health and education. That is why, when asked, men and women who
refuse the label of "feminist" always insist they favor equal
opportunity for males and females, and, when pressed, usually
acknowledge that gender differences are mostly matters of
historically determined cultural conventions.

And that is why, when prompted, even the hapless Bush administration
is pushing a fiscal stimulus package to address the subprime mortgage
mess, as meanwhile the Federal Reserve frantically drives real
interest rates toward zero: everyone, from Left to Right, assumes
that market forces are economic means to social and political
ends­they are supposed to be manipulated in the name of the general
welfare­not anonymous externalities beyond the intellectual grasp and
social control of human beings.

Look at it another way. The transformation of liberalism in the
late-20th century made it an approximation of what we used to call
social democracy. And that interesting transformation makes sense of
the New Right's fear of liberalism­that is, its ferocious, yet mostly
inarticulate conflation of liberalism and socialism.

Irving Kristol, the founding father, by all accounts, of
neo-conservatism, explained this political process in 1978: "To begin
with, the institutions which conservatives wish to preserve are, and
for two centuries were called, liberal institutions, i.e.,
institutions which maximize personal liberty vis a vis a state, a
church, or an official ideology. On the other hand, the severest
critics of these institutions­those who wish to enlarge the scope of
government authority indefinitely, so as to achieve ever greater
equality at the expense of liberty­are today commonly called
'liberals.' It would certainly help to clarify matters if they were
called, with greater propriety and accuracy, 'socialists' or 'neo-socialists."

This was, once upon a time, a complaint. What if we read it as a
prophecy? What if Henry Kaufman, the Wall Street guru of the 1970s,
was right in 1980 when he announced that the majority of the American
people was committed to "an unaffordable egalitarian sharing of
production," that is, to some kind of unspoken socialism?

One way to answer the question is to notice the dizzying range of
regulatory agencies, federal statutes, and executive orders, which,
then as now, limit the reach of market forces in the name of purposes
that have no prices. A laundry list of such agencies, statutes, and
orders would merely begin with . . . FRS, FDA, FTC, SEC, FDIC, FCC,
FAA, OSHA, EPA, EEOC, NWS, FEMA, NIH, CDC, NSF, NEA, NEH. . . And so
on, unto acronymical infinity.

To this incomplete laundry list we should add the post-Vietnam armed
services­the "all-volunteer army" that now serves as a job-training
program and a portal to higher education for working-class kids of
every color. These armed services are a social program that still
lives up to the egalitarian ideals of the 1960s, in part because it
addresses the problem of race and the promise of diversity with the
attitudes of affirmative action.

Another, more prosaic way to answer the question about an unspoken
socialism passing for politics as usual is to measure the growth of
transfer payments in the late-20th century, when the liberal/welfare
state was supposedly collapsing.

Transfer payments represent income received by households and
individuals for which no contribution to current output of goods and
services has been required. By supply-side standards, they are
immoral at best and criminal at worst because they represent reward
without effort, income without work. But they were the fastest
growing component of income in the late-20th century, amounting, by
1999, to 20% of all labor income.

From 1959 to 1999, transfer payments grew by 10% annually, more than
any other source of labor income, including wages and salaries. By
the end of the 20th century, one of every eight dollars earned by
those who were contributing to the production of goods and service
was transferred to others who were not making any such contribution.

The detachment of income from work­the essence of socialism­abides,
then, just as unobtrusively, but just as steadfastly, as The Dude,
who unwittingly foiled the venal designs of that outspoken
neo-conservative, the Big Lebowski.

Why, then, does the academic left keep crying wolf? Why do lefties
keep portraying themselves as losers in the culture wars and in the
larger political battles we're fighting today? Why do they keep
bemoaning "the collapse of the liberal state" or keep defending a
welfare state that shows no sign of impending expiration? Why can't
they see that we won?

Why, in sum, does the Left agree with right-wing blockheads like Ross
Douthat? He's the guy who concludes his Sunday New York Times
(2/10/08) op-ed as follows: "Precisely because the right has won so
many battles­on taxes, welfare, crime and the cold war­in the decades
since it squared off against Gerald Ford and Jacob Javits, the
greatest danger facing the contemporary Republican party is
ideological sclerosis, rather than insufficient orthodoxy."

Hello? The supply-siders themselves have admitted, over and over,
that the Reagan Revolution was a bust­because he couldn't cut federal
spending, and indeed increased it significantly in the 1980s. He also
raised taxes, fled Lebanon after a terrorist attack on US Marines,
sold illegal arms to Iran, and negotiated with the leader of the
"evil empire" then resident in the Soviet Union.

An avowed liberal ended welfare as we knew it, and in doing so he
permitted greater labor force participation by women. Violent crime
rates have plummeted because the proportion of young single males in
the general population has fallen­not because we've jailed more drug
users and dealers. And the Cold War was fought (and "won," if that is
the right word) by a cross-class, bipartisan coalition that included
many avowed Marxists, socialists, and liberals.

But the consensus across the Left/Right intellectual divide says that
Douthat is correct­that the conservatives have been winning all
along, or at least since the sainted Ronald Reagan beat Jimmy Carter.
Both sides believe that the electorate bought into supply-side
economics, the Contract for America, the values of the religious
right, and the "war on terror." Both sides are wrong.

The Left is more wrong, however, because its pose as a marginalized
movement with no real voice in the political debates of our time
reenacts and reinforces a passivity that is at the very least a
mistake. This pose enables abstention, not action. It makes us mere
spectators on the history of our time; it depicts us as beautiful
souls who can't bear the corrupting burdens of the world as it is
rather than as we would like it to be. It promotes purity.

As a case in point that will draw us back to Obamarama, I offer in
evidence the incendiary essay by the esteemed feminist Robin Morgan,
who, like Paulie ("the Hitman") Krugman, sees nothing but
"celebrity," "hero worship," and a "cult of personality" in the
unreasonable and quite possibly misogynistic attitudes of Barack's
deluded supporters (see Krugman's column of 2/11/08 in the NYT).

Morgan is nothing if not reasonable, so she is a true believer in the
false consciousness of those who disagree with her. Unqualified and
uneducated voters here worship at the shrine of "celebrity-culture
mania" erected by Obama supporters. Among them are "young women eager
to win male approval by showing they're not feminists"­presumably by
favoring Obama. She quotes Harriet Tubman to equate such women with
slaves who did not even know they were enslaved: "When asked how she
managed to save hundreds of enslaved African-Americans during [sic]
the Civil War, she replied bitterly, 'I could have saved thousands
–if only I'd been able to convince them they were slaves.'"

I get it. If only we were able to convince Obama's female supporters
that they're, uh, slaves to male supremacy, we could save them from
their false consciousness and deliver them unto Hillary. Because of
course "She's better qualified" than Obama. It is self-evident. You
can tell because this dubious statement about the candidates'
qualifications is followed by Homeric diction: "(D'uh.)"

But the pivot of the piece is the rhetorical series of questions
through which Morgan announces the return of the repressed 1960s:
"How dare anyone unilaterally decide to turn the page on history
[that would be the 1960s], papering over real inequities and
suffering constituencies [these would be the insignia of our
benighted present], in the promise of a feel-good campaign? How dare
anyone claim to unify while dividing, or think that to rouse U.S.
youth from torpor it's useful to triage the single largest
demographic in this country's history: the boomer generation­the
majority of which is female?"

So Morgan wants us to believe that us Obama supporters are
practically misogynists because we assume that the boomers of the
Left won the battles begun in the 1960s and don't want to fight them
all over again. Like the New Republic's Leon Wieseltier, who also
raises the rhetorical stakes by asking "How dare he?", Morgan wants
us to believe that in making this crucial assumption­by acting as if
the culture wars are over­we blind themselves to the inequities and
suffering that, now as then, and always already, disfigure our
country. Like Voltaire's Pangloss, we have begun to believe that we
live in the best of all possible worlds. In our happy ignorance, we
forget the atrocities of the past and begin to believe, stupidly, in
a better future.

To which there can be only one response: we need a usable past if we
are to shape a better future. We need to know that this is our
country. If our ethical principles do not reside in and flow from the
historical circumstances we study­if our most cherished values do not
somehow intersect with the dreary facts of our everyday lives and the
disheartening facts of our country's past­we have no choice except to
retreat from the world as it is, rather than as we would like it to
be, and then curse it as the obvious cause of our righteous anger.

Here is how John Dewey explained the dilemma of those who would act
as if their principles can never be derived from, or embodied in,
historical circumstances, including the political movements and
institutions of the present: "An 'ought' which does not root in and
flower from the 'is,' which is not the fuller realization of the
actual state of social relationships, is a mere pious wish that
things should be better."

Yes, it is a mere pious wish, a waking dream that will keep you pure,
and only pure­undefiled by compromise and engagement with the world
as it exists, a world full of illiberal Democrats and surly
Republicans, plus many other unruly political species at home and
abroad. That wish, that dream, will let you believe that false
consciousness is the affliction of all those others who have
misinterpreted their own interests­you already know what is right for
them, and you mean to do it, no matter what they might say. Or you
know that they'll never get it, so you congratulate yourself as you
say "Goodbye."

To shed our piety, to wake from our dream of purity, we must "turn
the page" on the "boomer generation" of the 1960s without forgetting
or repudiating it, just as Obama asks us to. That means we take its
achievements for granted. We assume we won, and get on with the
changes we can still believe in.

.

The 'Year That Rocked' [1968]

The 'Year That Rocked'

http://www.dailybreeze.com/lifeandculture/ci_8322137

By Jim Farber, Staff Writer
Article Launched: 02/22/2008

1968. It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. It was, as
Bob Dylan would later write, a time when, "There was music in the
cafes at night and revolution in the air."

Everyone knows the headlines: "Martin Luther King Gunned Down in
Memphis"; "Robert Kennedy Assassinated in Los Angeles"; "Police Beat
Back Protesters at Chicago Democratic Convention"; "Medalists Raise
Black Power Salute at Mexico Olympics."

"The problem," says John Powers, principal writer and artistic
director of "Works in Progress," "is people who were born after these
events took place don't know much more than the headlines."

Exploring the lifelines and plotlines behind the headlines, says
Powers, is the theme of a new four-part theater series, "1968: Year
that Rocked!" which begins Wednesday at the George Nakano Theatre of
the Torrance Cultural Arts Center.

Performed by a cast of professional actors, each segment will feature
the actual words spoken by the people involved, drawn from speeches
and recorded conversations, threaded together by Powers and
accompanied by projections of historic material.

The way Powers sees it, there's a lot of resonance between where we
were as a nation in 1968 and where we are today in 2008.

Forty years ago we were mired in Vietnam. Now we're bogged down in
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that we don't know how to get out of,
Powers says. We're in the midst of a political campaign that's all
about change. And the Olympics are about to be held in a country,
China, that wants to show itself off to the world, but has real
issues regarding human rights, just as Mexico did.

As Mark Twain was fond of saying, "History doesn't repeat itself, but
it rhymes."

"1968: Year that Rocked!" begins with "Memphis."

"Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis," Powers says. "But
why was he there? What was the sanitary workers strike all about? Why
did he go to Memphis when his advisers warned him against it? And
what was the role of J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI?"

Those are the questions the production will try to answer.

In Wednesday's performance, Carl Gillard will take on the role of
Martin Luther King Jr., with Ian Tanza as FBI director J. Edgar
Hoover, Renard Ricks as the Rev.James Lawson of the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference, and Bill Wolski as Memphis mayor Henry Loeb.

Part 2, "Los Angeles," to be presented March26, will focus on the
death of Bobby Kennedy.

"RFK is assassinated in Los Angeles (at the Ambassador Hotel) after
winning the Democratic primary," says Powers. "Why was he running for
president? Why was he in contention with Lyndon Johnson, the man that
had been his brother's running mate?

"It was over Johnson's handling of the Vietnam War," Powers explains.
"But most people don't know that. Bobby was trying to reverse the
policy set in motion by his brother and extended by LBJ."

"Chicago," scheduled for April 30, takes place during the turbulent
summer of '68, says Powers, when violent confrontations took place
inside and outside the Democratic National Convention.

The performance, Powers says, will focus on the roles played by four
men: presidential peace candidate Eugene McCarthy; Jerry Rubin,
leader of the Yippies; David Dellinger, organizer of the National
Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam; and Chicago's
all-powerful mayor, Richard M. Daley.

The final chapter, "Mexico," will be staged May 28. It will trace the
violence and the politics leading up to and during the XIX Olympiad
in Mexico City.

It will recall the street war waged against student protesters by
government soldiers, and trace the steps leading to that famous
silent protest by two black American athletes, Tommy Smith and John
Carlos, as they took their place on the victory stand.

"We've come to see what they did as a Black Power salute," says
Powers. "But it was meant as a more complex protest. Their heads were
bowed in sorrow and they were not wearing shoes in sympathy with the
impoverished people of the world. There were many other specific
symbols they were trying to evoke. But the media focused on the Black
Power element and branded it as that."

While "1968: Year That Rocked!" is designed to provide an insightful
look back at history, the real goal of the series, says Powers, is to
provoke people to continually ask what's going on behind the scenes.

"If we do that," says Powers, "our grandchildren won't have to ask,
`Why didn't we know?"'
---

Jim Farber (310) 540-5511, Ext. 416 jim.farber@dailybreeze.com

.

Defense wants evidence from American Indian Movement slaying

Defense wants evidence from American Indian Movement slaying

http://www.jacksonholestartrib.com/articles/2008/02/19/news/regional/6e8ef1c0e0199426872573f1007a7403.txt

By CARSON WALKER
Associated Press writer
2/19/08

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. -- A man charged with killing American Indian
Movement activist Anna Mae Pictou Aquash 32 years ago wants federal
prosecutors to turn over evidence from the body for DNA testing.

A Denver man is already serving a life sentence in the case.

John Graham was extradited from British Columbia in December, four
years after he was charged with killing Aquash, a fellow AIM member
from Nova Scotia, around Dec. 12, 1975, on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.

Graham pleaded not guilty in federal court in Rapid City to
first-degree murder. His trial is scheduled to start June 17 in Rapid City.

Graham's lawyer, John Murphy, asked a federal judge this past week to
make the government reveal the location of and make available to a
defense expert for testing Aquash's underwear and a sanitary napkin
taken at the first autopsy.

A rancher found the unidentified body Feb. 24, 1976, north of
Wanblee. The local coroner, Dr. W.O. Brown, ruled she died of
exposure to the cold.

Brown found evidence of acid phosphate in her vagina, from which he
concluded she had sex shortly before her death, Murphy wrote in his
memorandum filed with the request.

Brown turned over the evidence to the FBI after the autopsy, Murphy wrote.

The FBI then used an identification procedure common at the time that
involved cutting off the hands, which was done and weeks later
identified the body as Aquash.

The remains were exhumed from an Oglala grave and a second autopsy by
Minneapolis pathologist Garry Peterson revealed she had been shot in
the back of the head with a .38-caliber handgun. He ruled the death a homicide.

Brown, now deceased, then wrote that he "inadvertently overlooked"
the bullet, although Peterson said a nurse at the first autopsy
remembered seeing blood flowing from the head wound.

The peculiar circumstances compounded allegations that federal agents
were involved in the slaying, which they have denied. They have said
AIM leaders order the killing.

Murphy wrote in the court document that Graham notified prosecutors
Feb. 7 he wanted the underpants and sanitary napkin tested and asked
whether the items had ever been checked for DNA.

Prosecutors have not responded, he wrote.

"Mr. Graham needs to have these items preserved and tested in order
to fully investigate the facts of his case. DNA testing on these
items may lead to the production of material evidence that assists
Mr. Graham in his defense by implicating others in the crime alleged,
corroborating other witnesses' version of events that implicate
uncharged third parties in this crime, and by attacking the
credibility and consistency of the government's theory of
prosecution," Murphy wrote.

Murphy was unavailable for comment. U.S. Attorney Marty Jackley is
not allowed to discuss pending court cases.

Another man charged with killing Aquash, Fritz Arlo Looking Cloud,
was convicted in 2004 and given a mandatory life prison sentence. He
is from Pine Ridge but had been living homeless in Denver.

In an earlier court filing, Murphy asked the judge to require
prosecutors to turn over all of Looking Cloud's statements so Graham
can spot inconsistencies, some of which were made under the influence
of drugs and alcohol.

"The government's only alleged witness to the crime, Mr. Looking
Cloud, is an accomplice who has been sentenced to life and who has a
motive to fabricate," he wrote.

At Looking Cloud's trial, witnesses said he, Graham and another AIM
member, Theda Clark, drove Aquash from Denver and that Graham shot
Aquash in the Badlands as she begged for her life.

Clark has not been charged. She lives in a nursing home in western
Nebraska and has refused to talk about the case.

Graham, a Yukon native also known as John Boy Patton, denies killing
Aquash, though he acknowledged being in the car with her from Denver.

.

Diverse group treads The Longest Walk for the environment

Diverse group treads The Longest Walk for the environment

http://www.indiancountry.com/content.cfm?id=1096416690

Americans look to shed light on ecological challenges facing the nation

By Dhyana Levey -- Mreced Sun-Star, Calif.
February 22, 2008

MERCED, Calif. (MCT) - The sounds of passing trains and honking cars
blended with cheers and a pounding drum Feb. 18 as about 100 brightly
clad walkers brought their journey through Merced.

They paused in the morning for a break where Highway 59 meets Olive
Avenue. A cloud of sweet-smelling sage wafted from the center of
their circle as Los Banos resident Henry Dominguez, Chiricahua, led a
prayer in thanks to the past four miles they had walked.

The beginning point was Alcatraz Island, but participants had spent
the weekend at Merced resident and Shawnee Indian Mike Hermann's
ranch. There, they gathered spiritual and physical replenishment
through food, rest and a sweat lodge before hitting the road once again.

There were many purposes to this walk - the Longest Walk II - which
will span five months as it heads to Washington, D.C. For one, it
gives a 30-year nod of remembrance to the original 1978 Longest Walk
across the country. Many walkers, such as Hermann and Dominguez,
participated in the 1978 trip.

The purpose for that journey was to draw attention to proposed
legislation in Congress that threatened American Indian rights.
Shortly afterward, the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978
was passed.

This year, walkers want to raise environmental concerns. ''I have 10
sons and eight daughters ... and I want to make sure they have air
they can breathe and water they can drink,'' Dominguez said. ''We
need to put the message out there.''

As walkers reach each community, they plan to gather information from
the locals about each environmental challenge they are facing. These
details will be included in a paper to be delivered to Congress July
11, said organizer Pashina Banks Moore - daughter of Dennis Banks who
co-founded the American Indian Movement, led the 1978 walk and has
taking charge of this year's trip.

While the event is to raise awareness across the nation, it also
works as a springboard to address local issues, said David Alvarez, a
Merced resident and ''Yoeme'' or Yaqui Indian. He runs the Merced
Talking Circle, which provides updates on issues affecting American Indians.

His specific environmental concerns for Merced include the area's
congestion from so many vehicles, and the development of major
outlets. ''It hurts the quality of the air,'' he said. ''To top it
off, there isn't adequate health care.''

Some walkers, like Kaelan Holmes of Seattle, were in the walk for the
long haul. ''I haven't had a driver's license for years, so I'm used
to walking,'' he said. ''I love Seattle, but you can't just sit there
stagnant. ... A lot of people here are going through a spiritual pilgrimage.''

Other walkers, like Atwater pencil portrait artist Johnny Clay,
simply joined in for the Merced part of the walk as it headed down
Olive Avenue on the way to Le Grand and into Chowchilla.

Clay, a descendant of the Yokayo Band of Pomo Indians, was also one
of many local residents who donated food or other supplies.

At least 50 people from this area so far have donated food or money,
Hermann said. The Merced County Food Bank even passed some nutrients along.

And the event itself drew participants from all ages and backgrounds.

Buddhist monks joined the journey with American Indians and other
cultures. Shunsho Yamada traveled all the way from Tokyo to make the
cross-country trip. ''I came here to learn about what this movement
is so I can go back to Japan to talk about it,'' he said.

This year's walk drew more people than the original, Hermann said. It
split into two groups to cover two routes. The northern route
commemorates the original walk and will wind through Nevada, Utah and
Colorado. The southern route - which came through Merced - visits
significant Native tribal land.

But the biggest difference between the Longest Walk II and its 1978
predecessor is technology, Hermann said: ''We can document everything
as we go along. People up ahead can get a vision of the walk [from
the Web site]. In 1978, there wasn't the technology to have forward vision.''

.