Author: Jonathan Schwarz

Yesterday, while suggesting some things you might want to do with your time and money, I claimed MoveOn had not focused on preventing war with Iran. Nell of A Lovely Promise points out MoveOn sent out an alert at the same time I posted that saying they indeed ARE organizing against war with Iran. The entire email is on my site, but these are the basics of what they’re planning:

We’re proposing a major campaign to prevent another war. We’ll put retired generals on tour to convince political leaders and editorial boards that this war would be a disaster. We’ll run ads challenging the Administration. And we’ll press Congress to stand up to Bush.

You can donate money for the campaign here.

Also, why not write and call your senators to tell them to sustain Dodd’s possible filibuster against telecom immunity on FISA violations? The ACLU has set up a page here. Then, sign the Open Left letter to Harry Reid.

COMING UP: I tell you what kind of toothpaste to buy. Then, shoelaces. Soon you will need make no decisions of any kind, and we will all move together en masse to Guyana.

Are you looking for things to do with yourself and your money? If so, here are some possible activities from my personal Approved List:

• Donate money to Just Foreign Policy. MoveOn and TrueMajority have not made stopping war with Iran a priority. Just Foreign Policy, a fairly new organization, has. (As you can tell, they focus purely on foreign policy.) Now they’re producing videos on Iran and a national tour with former NY Times reporter Stephen Kinzer, the author of All the Shah’s Men, about the US overthrow of the Iranian government in 1953. These moves are both wise and creative, so we should fork over some money.

Then, sign up to receive their updates.

• Sign the MoveOn petition calling for Congress not to give telecom companies immunity for wiretapping us illegally for the past six (?) years. It’s not impossible to win this one. And certainly doing so would make both the good guys and bad guys take notice. There’s a reason the Republicans (and many Democrats) are so anxious to destroy MoveOn.

Steve Bergstein has the amazing end to the story of Egyptian citizen Abdallah Higazy:

Higazy was staying in a hotel in New York City on September 11 and the hotel emptied out when the planes hit the towers. The hotel later found in the closet of his room a device that allows you to communicate with airline pilots. Investigators thought this guy had something to do with 9/11 so they questioned him. According to Higazi, the investigators coerced him into confessing to a role in 9/11. Higazi first adamantly denied any involvement with 9/11 and could not believe what was happening to him. Then, he says, the investigator said his family would go through hell in Egypt, where they torture people like Saddam Hussein. Higazy then realized he had a choice: he could continue denying the radio was his and his family suffers ungodly torture in Egypt or he confesses and his family is spared. Of course, by confessing, Higazy’s life is worth garbage at that point, but … well, that’s why coerced confessions are outlawed in the United States.

So Higazy “confesses” and he’s processed by the criminal justice system. His future is quite bleak. Meanwhile, an airline pilot later shows up at the hotel and asks for his radio back. This is like something out of the movies. The radio belonged to the pilot, not Higazy, and Higazy was free to go, the victim of horrible timing. Higazi was innocent! He next sued the hotel and the FBI agent for coercing his confession.

But that’s not the end of the story. The end of the story is that all this came out in the decision in Higazy’s case, which was posted online last week. But the court apparently realized they’d made a mistake in allowing Americans to read about the threats the FBI made against Higazy’s family–so the court took down the decision, then replaced it with a version that redacted those parts, and actually called a blog which had published that section and asked them to TAKE IT DOWN. The blog said no.

See Bergstein for all the details. How I love our little websites.

And what’s the best part, beyond the cruelty to Higazy and unknown others? The best part is the FBI has unlimited money, time and trained agents, so there’s no possible way they’d miss a real threat to our lives while dicking around with all their coerced confessions.

(Via Jim Henley, who’s been on the Higazy story since the beginning.)

AND: Remember this was no idle threat. A story about the Egyptian government’s extraordinary brutality–including their willingness to drug and rape thirteen year-olds, videotaping it all the while–is here.

Bob is going to be was at at Firedoglake today Sunday at 5 pm ET to talk about his new book Who Hates Whom.

As it happens, my friend Mike Gerber and I were talking just moments ago about what a great piece of work it is—hilarious, informative and humane. We decided every television sold should come with a copy, so that people can understand what the hell’s going while watching the news. Until that happens, though, you can always buy it separately.

Cheney, Rumsfeld, Libby & co. didn’t start fixing the intelligence around the policy in 2002. That’s been their MO their entire careers. What they did regarding Iraq was completely predictable, and in fact was predicted by people who knew their history.

The best known pre-Iraq example is the “Team B” affair from the mid-seventies, where they made up lots of stories about how the Soviet Union was just about to overwhelm the U.S. with their overwhelming overwhelmingness. Shortly thereafter, the Soviet Union collapsed. Whoops!

There are other episodes almost no one knows about, though. One is the effort by Cheney and others in the eighties to cover up Pakistan’s development of nuclear weapons, as well as the way we and the Saudis were helping. (They couldn’t let the truth get out because Pakistan was helping us with our proxy war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, which of course turned out to be a giant success in its own right.) In order to do this, they had to crush a government nuclear analyst named Richard Barlow who was loudly warning about what Pakistan was up to.

Today the Guardian is running an excellent story about Barlow—what they did to him, what’s happened to him since, and the chance he may receive a small measure of justice. It provides a real glimpse into how the US government truly works, which is why it appears in a foreign publication. I encourage you to read it all.