Black soldiers receive apology for wrongful convictions

SEATTLE, Washington (AP) -- The Army formally apologized Saturday for the wrongful conviction of 28 black soldiers accused of rioting and lynching an Italian prisoner of war in Seattle, Washington, more than six decades ago.

"We had not done right by these soldiers," Ronald James, assistant secretary of the Army for manpower and reserve affairs, said Saturday. "The Army is genuinely sorry. I am genuinely sorry."

Relatives of the soldiers joined elected officials, military officers and one of the defense lawyers to hear James give the apology before hundreds of people in a meadow near the old Fort Lawton parade grounds and chapel in Discovery Park.

In addition, the soldiers' convictions were set aside, their dishonorable discharges were changed to honorable discharges and they and their survivors were awarded back pay for their time in the brig.


All but two of the soldiers are dead. One, Samuel Snow of Leesburg, Florida, planned to attend the ceremony but wound up in the hospital instead because of a problem with his pacemaker.

The convictions were overturned in October at the prodding of Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Seattle, largely based on the book "On American Soil" published in 2005 by Jack Hamann, a CNN and PBS journalist, and his wife Leslie about the riot on the night of Aug. 14, 1944, and subsequent events at Fort Lawton.

Dozens were injured in the melee that started with a scuffle between an Italian prisoner of war and a black soldier from the segregated barracks near the POW housing. A POW, Guglielmo Olivotto, was found hanged at the bottom of a bluff the next day.

The Army prosecutor was Leon Jaworski, who went on to become special prosecutor in the Watergate scandal of the early 1970s.

Forty-three black soldiers were charged with rioting and three also were charged with murder. Two defense lawyers were assigned to the case and given two weeks to prepare without ever being shown an Army investigation criticizing the way the riot was handled.

Hamann also wrote that at least two soldiers were threatened with lynching by Army detectives. When one witness said a "Booker T." was present at the riot but couldn't give any more detail, the Army charged two men by that name. Another was charged with rioting although white, black and Italian POW witnesses all said he tried to quell the disturbance.

In the ensuing trial, 28 men were convicted.

One of those attending the ceremony Saturday, Arthur Prevost of Houston, said his father Willie, one of the convicted soldiers, never talked about what had happened.

"I think he was embarrassed," Prevost said. "I wished he had told us."

Snow's son, Ray Snow, told the gathering his father felt no animosity for the long-ago injustice.

"He was so honored" by the tribute, Ray Snow said. "We salute you for remembering a travesty that took place."

Clinton consultant 'Ace' Smith feared and admired

Director of her crucial North Carolina campaign, he's equal parts opposition researcher and top-notch strategist.
By Robin Abcarian
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

May 3, 2008

RALEIGH, N.C. — Sitting on the sunny patio of a coffee shop last weekend, Averell "Ace" Smith hardly seemed the kind of guy to strike fear into a politician's heart.

The 49-year-old California political operative -- who helped Hillary Rodham Clinton to victories in the California and Texas Democratic presidential primaries and is now running her North Carolina operation -- was a study in bland: beige polo shirt, beige slacks, bright blue eyes framed by wire-rimmed glasses, a fringe of gray hair around a pink scalp.

Yet people -- many of them fellow Democrats -- frequently use melodramatic imagery to describe him.

"I believe that every life lesson in politics can be extrapolated from 'The Godfather,' " said Chris Lehane, a Democratic strategist and friend of Smith's who has worked for the Clintons.

"Some people are Fredos; at game time they disappear. There are Sonnys, who yell and scream. . . . The most effective ones are the Michael Corleones. Very quiet, they know under which rib to insert the knife. . . . Ace is a Michael Corleone."

The next round of the seemingly interminable quest for the Democratic nomination takes place Tuesday, when Indiana and North Carolina vote. They are the first contests since April 22, when Clinton beat Barack Obama in Pennsylvania.

The race is close in Indiana. In North Carolina, which has a sizable African American electorate, polls have shown Obama ahead, but Clinton has been gaining support over the last week. The fact that the Clinton campaign stationed Smith here signals how crucial the state is to her; she intends to fight for every vote.

"Everyone knew that Pennsylvania was essentially going to be a walk for Clinton and that the whole thing would come down to Indiana and North Carolina," said Joe Trippi, a top advisor to former presidential candidate John Edwards. "Guess where Ace Smith is? I don't think that's an accident."

If Smith can help Clinton seriously narrow Obama's margin of victory -- or even beat him -- in the Tar Heel State, the New York senator's argument that she is the more electable of the two will gain considerable strength.

A victory would also burnish Smith's reputation as a top-notch strategist and perhaps change his image as a fearsome practitioner of a dark political art: opposition research.

Ben Austin, a Democratic political consultant who worked in the Clinton White House and now supports Obama, put it this way: "He is one of the few balding, bespectacled guys who I wouldn't want to run into in a dark alley."

But not all Democrats are fans. "It's admirable if you can lie and get away with it," said Kam Kuwata, a consultant to former Los Angeles Mayor James Hahn, who ran against Smith client Antonio Villaraigosa twice -- successfully in 2001, unsuccessfully in 2005.

And Republicans? Attorney Ken Khachigian, a longtime Republican strategist, is a reluctant admirer. He faced off with Smith in 2006 when a client, former state Sen. Chuck Poochigian, lost to Smith client and former Gov. Jerry Brown for California attorney general. "He does what he has to do," Khachigian said. "He'll be relentless and tough. He fits right in with the Clinton war machine."

Khachigian figured in Smith's biggest political heartbreak. In 1990, Smith was deeply involved in the campaign of his father, longtime San Francisco Dist. Atty. Arlo Smith, who ran against Dan Lungren for state attorney general. Smith won on election day but lost two weeks later when absentee ballots barely put Lungren over the top.

Even now, Ace Smith has a hard time discussing it: "I'll tell you something. I have a tremendous amount of empathy for President Clinton. . . . I mean, if you see someone criticizing, attacking your father, in my case, or his wife, in his case, you just want to slug 'em."

Nevertheless, he said, "you cannot run campaigns if you can't remain calm in the face of adversity and bad polls. The best thing is to be as dispassionate as possible."

Up and down the state of California, political reporters have Ace Smith stories. They speak of heavy boxes landing on their desks, ammunition culled from public records that Smith hopes will shape the campaign narrative.

The topic might be voting records, inflated resume claims, long-ago brushes with the law or questionable business dealings. Not infrequently, stories ensue. Reporters say he is charming, helpful, tenacious and not averse to going over their heads to editors in an attempt to shape a story -- or kill one if he senses it is going to make a client look bad.

When The Times reported in 2006 that Los Angeles City Atty. Rocky Delgadillo -- then running for attorney general -- falsely claimed to have played professional football in Canada, Smith -- representing Democratic primary rival Brown -- made sure reporters had copies of the team roster for the Hamilton Tiger-Cats. In 2005, working for Villaraigosa, he figured, correctly, that a minor billing scandal in the DWP would tar then-Mayor Hahn as a do-nothing who allowed corruption to flourish.

"Ace is very mischievous, in a dark way," said real estate developer Steve Soboroff, whose unsuccessful campaign for Los Angeles mayor in 2001 marked Smith's transition from opposition researcher to campaign manager.

Soboroff recalled that Smith was annoyed at a reporter and invited him to a meeting, promising to give him a scoop and telling him he had to be there at a certain time.

"So when the reporter showed up," Soboroff said, "we were holding the elevator, and as soon as he got close enough to see us, Ace said, 'Oh no, it's too late.' " The elevator doors closed, leaving the reporter behind, scoopless.

Smith -- whose company, SCN Public Relations, has earned about $140,000 from the Clinton campaign since 2007 -- works out of his home in the upscale Marin County town of Kentfield, where he lives with his wife, Laura, a fundraiser, and their children, Abram, 17, and Lili, 14.

He specializes in California races, but Smith has worked all over the country. In the late '80s, he traveled nationwide as political director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. In 1992, before Bill Clinton's first presidential campaign, he produced "vulnerability studies" (the genteel term for "oppo" on your own guy) for the Arkansas governor.

When Smith heard that the Clintons wanted him in North Carolina, he did what he always does before parachuting into a state: grabbed his copy of "Inside U.S.A.," a 1947 guidebook by journalist John Gunther. "I always start there," he said. Then he picks up a AAA guidebook: "I read that start to finish 'cause it has all these odd little facts and pieces about small towns and you get a real flavor for what's going on."

This year in particular, small towns are a major part of his strategy. With Obama faring better in the big cities and among the affluent and well-educated, hitting the smaller population centers has been crucial to Clinton's success. Smith will often send Bill Clinton, who can pop in and out of small towns with ease. (Getting Hillary Clinton there is a cumbersome operation: big jet, lots of aides, the national press.)

Indeed, on Wednesday the former president held rallies in seven North Carolina towns whose populations ranged from less than 3,000 to 23,000. Smith said his internal polling shows that African Americans still have the highest regard for Bill Clinton, even though he has made remarks about Obama that offended many.

"He is enormously talented at looking at voting patterns and demographics and figuring out where you can actually put votes together," Lehane said. "I remember the day before the California primary, there were polls showing it was a dead heat, and some even had Obama surging ahead. The campaign was hectoring him from the East Coast, and he guaranteed them a 10-point win, which is exactly what he delivered."

How could he make such a guarantee? Easy, Smith said. "The way we put it away well before election day was to get millions and millions of Democratic women to cast their ballots . . . before the election. Everything we had was geared to getting all those votes, absentee."

County registrars had lists of those who'd returned absentee ballots, and Smith, with an army of volunteers on cellphones, polled a couple of million of them. "We got to a point," said Smith, "where it was mathematically impossible for Obama to win on election day."

North Carolina is a different story. "In California, Hillary went in with an institutional and demographic advantage," said consultant Austin, referring to her name recognition and popularity among Latinos.

"In North Carolina, Obama goes in with the demographic advantage, and if Ace can pull that out, he will truly have proved his mettle."

robin.abcarian@latimes.com

WHO’S BUSH?

WHO’S BUSH?

How much do we really know about our president’s life, his background and his character? To understand George W. Bush’s administration better, it helps to become better acquainted with the well-smoothed path he has followed to the top. How is it that a lying and denying alcoholic, with arrests for theft and disturbing the peace and a conviction for drunk driving; one born with a silver spoon in his mouth, with no empathy for the plight of ordinary people; an inarticulate spoiled brat who just didn’t get the lessons of a good education; a chronically failed businessman who’s never earned anything on his own; and a high school cheerleader who avoided military service in Viet Nam by joining the National Guard and then going AWOL–gets himself elected as President of the United States? Well, you can be darn sure he didn’t exactly tell us the truth about his background.

To the Manner Born

George W. Bush (Bush Jr.) was born to privilege, high finance, and intrigue. His great-grandfathers, Samuel Bush and George Herbert Walker, were among the founders of the “military-industrial complex,”* making millions profiteering off of World War I, thanks to their close connections with the Rockefellers, Remingtons and the War Industries Board. Bush’s paternal grandfather, Prescott Bush, Sr., was a wealthy banker involved in financing Hitler’s war machine, and a United States Senator instrumental in originally recruiting Richard Nixon into politics. Prescott Bush served in military intelligence during World War I, and later acted as a high-level “confidant, ‘asset,’ or counselor” to the intelligence community. All of these ancestors were graduates of Yale University and members of its secret society, Skull and Bones, whose members have been at the forefront of America’s intelligence services.5 In 1942, George Herbert Walker Bush (Bush Sr.) may have been inducted into the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) as early as age 18, upon his graduation from Phillips Academy-Andover. Without any college and contrary to military regulations, he was commissioned, trained as a Navy pilot, and assigned to the South Pacific. During a patrol, his aircraft was struck by antiaircraft fire and the young pilot bailed out. In his panic, he abandoned his two crewmen to their deaths, even though the aircraft was designed to be crash landed on the ocean.6 Bush Sr. returned from the war and attended Yale, where he was initiated into Skull and Bones. If he was not already a CIA “asset,” it is probable that his athletic coach, Allen “Skip” Waltz, who was the CIA’s full-time headhunter at Yale, recruited him at that time. Upon graduation, Bush Sr. was employed by Dresser Industries, which had long-term connections with the intelligence community. He subsequently moved to Texas and incorporated Zapata Petroleum, which through its many subsidiaries likely served as a conduit for money and supplies to CIA operations in the Caribbean, including Guatemala and the Bay of Pigs invasion.7

*Defined by President Eisenhower in 1961 as a “conjunction of an immense Military Establishment and a large arms industry.” He warned that “we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications.”

With the support of Presidents Nixon and Ford, Bush Sr. became a Congressman, the Chairman of the Republican National Committee, and the Director of the CIA. Although Ronald Reagan personally disliked Bush Sr., Reagan reluctantly picked him as Vice President to unify the Republican Party.8 Following Reagan’s second term, Bush Sr. was elected President of the United States and served one term before being defeated for reelection by Bill Clinton in 1992. As president, Bush Sr. was described as “remorselessly deceitful when it served his purpose.”9

Bush Jr.’s mother, Barbara Pierce, is a descendant of President Franklin Pierce, and her father was president of McCall Publishing Company.10 George and Barbara Bush were raised in wealthy households attended by servants. Their marriage in 1945 brought together two aristocratic lineages, and on July 6, 1946, the young prince, George Jr., was born in New Haven, Connecticut.

In 1948, the Bushes moved to Odessa, Texas, where George Sr. went into the oil business. He was frequently away from home, and his wife, Barbara, primarily raised George Jr. It was she who attended his Little League games and disciplined him. When twelve-year-old George Jr. would get in a fight with Jeb, his five-year-old little brother, “Bar would always get in the middle of those fights and bust them up and slap them around,” according to Uncle Jonathan Bush. Barbara Bush was “the one who instills fear.”11 George Jr. describes her as “a very outspoken person who vents very well–she’ll just let it rip if she’s got something on her mind.”12 Jeb Bush recalls, “Mom was always the one to hand out the goodies and the discipline. In a sense, it was a matriarchal family.”13

The Bush family maid, Otha Taylor, said, “They would squabble a lot. You know how kids and parents that are just alike will get? He was definitely like his mother, they were exactly alike, even their humor was alike.”14 When his mother’s favorite dog died, George Jr. mocked her distress, yelling out, “Doggone it!”15 He also inherited her sharp tongue.16

Once after Barbara Bush allowed Otha Taylor to go home an hour early because she didn’t have any work to do, George Sr. reprimanded Barbara, “Where’s Otha? She’s supposed to stay here until her hour is up, regardless if she has anything to do or not.” Otha remembers, “He’s a really mean man.” According to her, the Bushes believed in “teaching lessons.”17 Bush’s younger brother Neil recalls when he was seven years old and his little brother Marvin six, George Jr., age 16, would give them ten seconds to start running down the hall before he began shooting BB pellets at them.18

Bush’s boyhood friend Terry Throckmorton remembers how he and Bush would capture frogs that would gather in the water at a low spot behind Bush’s house: “We’d put firecrackers in the frogs and throw them and blow them up.”19 Bush Jr. followed his father’s footsteps to Andover and Yale; however, instead of graduating Phi Beta Kappa and being You’re Not Stupid! Get the Truth captain of the baseball team like his daddy, Bush Jr. was a cheerleader with a C average. Sponsored by his father, Bush was initiated into Skull and Bones.

At Yale, Bush was elected president (like his father) of the Delta Kappa Epsilon (DKE) fraternity at a time when new pledges had to undergo physical and psychological abuse. The Yale Daily News said that fraternity hazing at Yale was a “degrading, sadistic and obscene process” and that the DKE hazing ended with the burning of a half-inch-long Delta sign on the pledge’s back.

The New York Times reported on the hazing and quoted Bush Jr. as saying the wound was “only a cigarette burn.” Bush was also quoted in the campus newspaper that there “was no scarring mark, physically or mentally. I can’t understand how the authors ... can assume that Yale has to be so haughty not to allow this type of pledging to go on at Yale.” 20

In addition to a fully paid education at Andover, Yale, and later at Harvard Business School, Bush has gone through life never having to worry about paying the rent, where the next meal was coming from, or if he could afford medical care for his children. Do you think Bush has any clue about our lives and the difficulties we face? Do you think he has the ability to empathize with ordinary working people? You’re not stupid! Get the truth.

“I do not have a perfect record as a youth.”

That much is true. Not only was George W. Bush arrested in 1968 for stealing a Christmas wreath and again for disorderly conduct at a football game while he was in college, but in December 1972, after a Christmas drinking spree with his teenage brother, Marvin, the 26 year-old Bush ran over a neighbor’s trash can as he drove home. When his father sought to reprimand him about his drunken driving, Bush challenged him to fight, “I hear you’re looking for me. You want to go mano a mano right here?”21

At about the same time, Bush was probably arrested for possession of cocaine in Houston, Texas. It appears that as part of a deal with the judge, Bush Sr. arranged for Bush Jr. to serve a few months of community service at Professionals United for Leadership League, a youth organization chaired by Bush Sr.22 Bush attended Harvard Business School between 1973 and 1975 and, according to him, spent his time “drinking and carousing and fumbling around.”23

Then, in the early morning hours of September 4, 1976, a Kennebunkport, Maine police officer saw 30-year-old Bush driving erratically and swerving off the road into a hedge, with his teenage sister, Dorothy, in the car.24 Bush failed a sobriety test, then was handcuffed and taken to the police station. He pled guilty at a court hearing a month later, paid a fine, and his Maine driver’s license was suspended. In 1978, even though he had not completed a required driver rehabilitation course, Bush returned to court to get the suspension lifted, and denied having a drinking problem.

Given an ultimatum by his wife, Bush says he swore off drinking alcohol after a drunken 40th birthday celebration on July 6, 1986.25 However, he wasn’t fully weaned from the bottle, and in April of 1987, he was out drinking in a Mexican restaurant in Dallas when he spotted Al Hunt, the Wall Street Journal’s Washington bureau chief, with his wife and four-year old son. Hunt had contributed to a story that questioned whether Bush Sr. would be elected president, and the drunk and disorderly Bush yelled, “You no good f***ing son of a bitch. I will never f***ing forget what you wrote”26

When Bush ran for governor in 1994, he stated, “What I did as a kid? I don’t think it’s relevant.”27 Only seven years before, the drunken “kid” was stumbling around out of control. Not relevant? One of his first acts as governor was to get a new driver’s license number and to purge his driving record. In 1996, when then Governor Bush was called to jury duty, he left blank the written questionnaire about prior arrests and trials. When he was called to be on the jury in a drunk driving case, his general counsel, Alberto Gonzales, met with the defense attorney and judge in chambers and asked that Bush be excused before the more difficult voir dire (Old French–“to speak the truth”) of jurors began.28 In 1998, a reporter directly asked Bush if he had ever been arrested. Bush lied, “After 1968? No.”29

During the 2000 presidential campaign, Bush’s press spokesperson, Karen Hughes, repeatedly denied that Bush had ever been convicted. In 1999, Bush personally stated during one television interview that there were no “smoking guns” and during another that if there were any damaging information, “you’d have heard about it by now.” However, the truth caught up with Bush just four days before the election when a Fox television reporter was able to confirm Bush’s drunk driving conviction through the Maine Secretary of State.

When confronted, Bush said he had been driving “too slow” and, after being arrested, had simply paid a fine and gone home. He denied ever going to court in the matter.30 He stated that he did not disclose the conviction in order to be a good role model for his twin daughters—who have been cited multiple times by the police for underage alcohol-related criminal offenses.31 Has Bush truly recovered? He denies that he was ever a “clinical” alcoholic, and apparently he has never sought professional help. Whether or not he has really stayed on the wagon, his loud, foul-mouthed and rude behavior has continued, such as his calling a New York Times reporter a “major league asshole” over an open microphone during the 2000 campaign.

More bizarre, during a March 2002 briefing of three U.S. Senators by his National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice, President Bush stuck his head in the room and yelled, “F**k Saddam. We’re taking him out!”

Equally suspicious is the strange “pretzel” incident in which he fell on his face in his White House bedroom while watching a ball game on television. He blamed his passing out on having failed to properly chew a pretzel. Do you believe Bush has successfully overcome his alcohol addiction? You’re not stupid! Get the truth.

Over the Hill

In 1968, 296,406 American boys were drafted into the military service. Most of them were sent to Vietnam, many of them were wounded, maimed, and crippled for life, and 6,332 came home in body bags. George W. Bush was not one of them. Even though Bush lost his draft deferment upon graduation from Yale, even though there was a waiting list of 500 to get into the Texas Air National Guard, and even though he could only answer 25 out of 100 questions on the pilot aptitude test,32 strings were pulled, calls were made, and Bush was allowed to sign up for a six-year hitch in one of the coveted slots.33 In his application, he was asked if he was willing to volunteer for overseas duty (i.e., Vietnam). He checked the box, “do not volunteer.”34

When Bush was asked in 1990 if he had joined the National Guard to avoid service in Vietnam, he said, “I was not prepared to shoot my eardrum out with a shotgun in order to get a deferment. Nor was I willing to go to Canada. So I chose to better myself by learning how to fly airplanes.” When the same question was asked during the governor’s race in 1994, he said, “Hell no. Do you think I’m going to admit that?” By 1999, he had decided that a better answer was, “At the time I wanted to fight.”35

In 1969, 283,586 American boys were drafted into the military service, and 6,249 came home from Vietnam in body bags. George W. Bush was not one of them. He was home learning to fly an old F-102 fighter that was being phased out of military service.36

In 1970, 162,746 American boys were drafted into the military service, and 4,911 came home from Vietnam in body bags. George W. Bush was not one of them. In his ghostwritten autobiography, A Charge to Keep, Bush says that he completed flight training in 1970 and “continued flying with my unit for the next several years.” Well, let’s see if that was true.

In 1971, 94,092 American boys were drafted into the military service, and 2,867 came home from Vietnam in body bags. And, in 1972, 49,514 American boys were drafted into the military service, and 2,609 came home in body bags. George W. Bush was not one of them. On August 1, 1972, he lost his flight status for failing to submit to an annual physical examination, a few months after the Air Force instituted a rigorous random drug testing policy.37 He was grounded, never to fly again. A month later, Major James R. Bath, one of Bush’s “lot of fun” buddies, was also suspended for the same reason.38 (Remember this name.)

Bush received permission in May 1972 to do his training in Alabama, where he was working on the political campaign of a family friend, Winston Blount. He was specifically ordered to report to “Lt. Col. William Turnipseed, DCO, to perform equivalent training.” At this point, it appears that Bush went AWOL for the next year, as Retired General Turnipseed later stated he was certain that Bush never reported for duty.39 Nor does it appear that he did anything of significance in the campaign. A full-time senior staffer reports that Bush was “worthless” and “not dependable.” He was “rarely available” to work on the campaign, but he never requested any time off to attend National Guard meetings. The staffer said “the guard was the last thing on Bush’s mind.”40

After the Alabama election in November, Bush didn’t return to his Houston assignment. He didn’t come back from “over the hill” until after May 1973, when two of his superior officers noted that they could not perform his annual evaluation because he had “not been observed at this unit” during the preceding 12 months. But, what the heck, the war was winding down anyway, and Bush was no longer needed to defend the Homeland. When later asked about being AWOL, Bush said, “I did the duty necessary. ... Any allegations other than that are simply not true.”* 9,087,000 military personnel really did do their “duty” during the Vietnam era, and over 58,000 died.

*On February 14, 2004, faced with a likely race against Democratic Senator John Kerry, a Vietnam War hero, Bush released his military records in which the only evidence that he ever appeared at the Alabama National Guard was a dental examination performed there on

When Bush went off to study at the Harvard Business School, he continued to wear his National Guard flight jacket to classes, creating a perception that he had served in the military. As we will see, perceptions are very important to Bush.41 Do you think Bush did his duty? You’re not stupid! Get the truth.

What an MBA Can Do for You

After the University of Texas turned down Bush’s application to attend its law school, he decided to get a graduate business administration degree from Harvard instead. The legal profession’s loss turned out to be the business profession’s gain, as Bush over and over showed the rest of us how to make lemonade out of lemons. Where anyone else would have crashed and burned, Bush’s golden parachute floated him safely through the financial storms that continued to buffet his business career.

In 1978, again following in his daddy’s footsteps, Bush decided to go into the oil business in Texas. He started up an oil-drilling operation, Arbusto (Spanish–“bush, shrub”) Energy with the help of his uncle, Wall Street banker Jonathan Bush.42 Even though the price of Texas crude quickly went into the toilet, and Bush Jr. may have spent more time in barrooms and on the golf course than in the oil patch, he was able to keep his company afloat with continuing investments by family members and international businessmen seeking to maintain favor with Bush Sr., who was fortuitously elected Vice President in 1980.

In 1979, Bush sold five percent of Arbusto to his old buddy, James Bath (remember) for $50,000. At the time, Bath was operating as the U.S. front man for Salem bin Laden, the brother January 6, 1973. He explained that he did not bother to report for medical examinations after May 15, 1971 because he felt there was no reason to take one because the Alabama National Guard did not fly the type of jet he was trained on. (Bumiller, Elisabeth and Philip Shenon, “Bush Acts Against Critics on Guard Records and 9/11,” The New York Times, February 14, 2004, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/14/politics/14BUSH.html?th.) of Osama bin Laden.* Given the fact that Bath was personally without funds at the time, it is considered highly likely that the money came from bin Laden.43

When Salem bin Laden died in a Texas airplane crash in 1988, a powerful Saudi banker, Khalid bin Mahfouz, took over bin Laden’s financial interests in Houston, Texas. Mahfouz’s sister is married to Osama bin Laden, and Bath continued as Mahfouz’s U.S. front man.44 Bath was later investigated by the FBI for funneling Saudi money through Houston business relationships to influence the foreign policies of Presidents Reagan and Bush Sr.45

In 1982, with his company worth less than its debt of $400,000 and with only $48,000 in the bank, Bush decided that he needed to take his corporation public to raise some money. To improve the balance sheet, an investor friend of James Baker III, later Bush Sr.’s Secretary of State, stepped forward and purchased ten percent of the company for $1,000,000. The investor later called the purchase a “losing wicket.”46 Since his oil patch buddies were calling his company “are busted,” Bush renamed the company Bush Exploration and went public. He wanted to issue $6 million in stock, but only raised $1.14 million. Bush Exploration continued to lose money and two years later was again on the verge of bankruptcy.47

This time the bailout came from two investors from Cincinnati who owned a company known as Spectrum 7. They merged with Bush Exploration, and Bush ended up with 16.3 percent of Spectrum 7 and a salary of $75,000 a year. Since thus far, all Bush had done was to drill dry holes and lose money, the question is what did Bush bring to the table? Spectrum 7's president, Paul Rea, reported that Bush’s name was a “drawing card” for investors.48

By 1986, having lost another $400,000, more than $3,000,000 in debt, and with Spectrum 7’s shares just about worthless, another bailout was in order. This time the savior was Harken Energy Corporation, which was operated by a Republican fund raiser. Harken traded one each of its publicly traded shares for every five of Spectrum 7's, and Bush ended up with stock worth about half a million. He became a member of Harken’s Board, was given $600,000 in stock options and a consulting contract paying him $120,000 a year.

* James Bath was “an asset of the CIA, reportedly recruited by George Bush [Sr.] himself” in 1976. (Phillips, Kevin, American Dynasty, p. 269.)

What did Bush bring to the deal? One of Harken’s major investors stated that “he was supposed to bring in the Gulf connection. But it didn’t come to anything. We were buying political influence. That was it. He was not much of a businessman.”49 Equally candid was one of Harken’s cofounders, Phil Kendrick, who was smart enough to sell his stock three years before Bush Jr. came aboard, and who said, “His
name was George Bush. That was worth the money they paid him.”50

In 1987, Harken sold 17.6 percent of the company to Saudi Sheik Abdullah Taha Bakhsh, whose banker was bin Mahfouz, who, if you recall, also served as the bin Laden’s banker. In 1989, after Bush Sr. was elected President and with an introduction from the new ambassador, Harken was able to obtain exclusive drilling rights for 35 years from Bahrain in the Persian Gulf, and Harken’s stock price began to rise. However, Harken was actually losing money, and to hide 1989 losses of $12.6 million, Harken engaged in a sham sale of a subsidiary to a partnership of Harken insiders, allowing it to claim a profit of $8 million. Harken’s accountant was Arthur Andersen, and this was the same kind of “aggressive accounting” that later sank Enron–and Andersen with it.

Bush chaired a special committee of Harken directors convened to review Harken’s $11 million loan to the insiders that they used to finance the purchase. The next year, after the SEC began to look into the phony sale, Harken had to restate its actual 1989 losses, plus report additional millions in losses for the first quarter of 1990. With this bad news, Harken stock took a nosedive. In the meantime, instead of the usual bailout by his daddy’s friends, Bush had already bailed out.51

Bush had attended a Harken Board of Directors meeting in May 1990 where the crisis was discussed, and he served on the Board’s Fairness Committee concerned with the effect bankruptcy would have on the small shareholders. By late May 1990, a cash crunch was only days away and the repayment of loans was questionable. Bush was an “insider,” and he was a member of the Audit Committee. On June 15, 1990, all members of the Board, including Bush, were advised in writing that under the circumstances, it would be illegal for them to sell any stock.52

Undeterred, Bush sold two-thirds of his Harken stock for $848,560 to an unidentified private purchaser on June 22, 1990, but delayed reporting the sale to the SEC for eight months after the filing deadline. The SEC (headed by a Bush Sr. appointee, and whose General Counsel was Bush Jr.’s former attorney) investigated and, surprise-surprise, failed to find sufficient evidence of insider information. Nevertheless, the SEC letter sent to Bush stated that the investigation “must in no way be construed as indicating that the party has been exonerated or that no action may ultimately result.”53

After the matter became public, Bush first stated in 1994 that he was “absolutely certain” that he had complied with the law in reporting the insider sale. Then his campaign for governor claimed that he had filed the required report and that the SEC had lost it. Bush personally claimed, “I was exonerated.” Later (as President), his press secretary claimed that Harken’s lawyers had mixed up the reporting, even though Harken’s lawyers had informed Bush in writing that reporting was his responsibility. Regarding the phony sale of the Harken subsidiary that allowed him to dump his stock without a loss, Bush himself stated, “All I can tell you is – is in the corporate world, sometimes things aren’t exactly black and white when it comes to accounting procedures.”54

Harken’s small shareholders saw their stocks precipitously drop from $4 a share (ultimately to forty-one cents); however, Bush was able to sneak away with enough money to pay off a half-million-dollar loan he had taken out the year before to purchase a two-percent interest in the Texas Rangers, Dallas’s baseball franchise. Although Bush was named as one of two managing partners, he was restricted from having anything to do with the actual management of the franchise.

After the city of Arlington, Texas raised local taxes and condemned private property to build a new $190 million stadium, the partnership sold the franchise for $250 million.55 Because of financial bonuses in the agreement for the two “managing” partners, Bush ended up with almost $15 million (more than the real managing partner), even though he had done little or nothing to earn it except appear at the games and cheer the players.

Thus it came to be that George W. Bush, who had never held down a real job and whose only marketable asset was his family name and his father’s influence, became convinced he had succeeded on his own and that he was ready for bigger and better things. During the 1994 campaign for governor, he stated that his success was due to “hard work, skillful investments, the ability to read an environment that was ever-changing at times and react quickly.” He insisted that he had never profited from his family connections.

Perhaps Bush’s success really was the result of his Harvard Business School training, but do you believe it? Do you think Bush has any idea how hard ordinary people have to work just to make ends meet? You’re not stupid! Get the truth.

Let Them Eat Cake!

When he ran for president in 1999, Bush held himself out as a “compassionate conservative.” His campaign website reported that he had led the nation in adopting a strong Patients’ Bill of Rights, and he claimed that he had signed legislation to improve health care for children in Texas.56 But was he telling the truth?

In 1995, the Texas legislature passed an HMO reform act to improve patient protections. Bush vetoed the measure. Two years later, the legislature passed a similar measure that included a provision to allow patients to sue their HMO for medical malpractice. Bush again threatened to veto the measure unless the legislature “gutted” its protections. However, when it appeared the legislature would be able to override his veto, Bush allowed the measure to become law without his signature. Not only did he not lead the nation in health care reform, he did everything in his power to defeat health care reform in Texas.57

During the election, Bush promised, “If I’m president… people will be able to take their HMO insurance company to court. That’s what I’ve done in Texas and that’s the kind of leadership style I’ll bring to Washington.” However, when insurance companies later sued Texas to void the Texas law and block state lawsuits against HMO’s for denying rights, the Bush presidential administration joined with the insurance companies and urged the Supreme Court to find that such state claims “are subject to complete” preemption by federal law and must be dismissed. Bush’s lawyers claimed that allowing “patients to sue their HMO will increase the cost of healthcare and add an extra burden on employers.”58

Bush also bragged that “we” had passed legislation creating the Children’s Health Insurance Program. At the time, Texas had the highest number of uninsured children per capita in the United States. The legislature wanted to make the program available to all uninsured children whose families earned up to twice the poverty level, or $33,000. Bush fought to lower the standard to $25,000 a year. Under his plan, almost half, or 220,000, of these 500,000 uninsured children would not have qualified for the coverage.

After a five-year battle, during which 500,000 children went without adequate health care, the legislature finally prevailed, and Bush ungraciously told one of the measure’s proponents, “Congratulations. You crammed it down our throats.”59 The truth is that he was not a part of the we who fought for children’s medical care in Texas.

When television commentator Dan Rather questioned Bush about the abysmal level of medical coverage in Texas, he parried, “I think you can find all kinds of statistics to make all kinds of cases. ... I don’t know the statistics.”60 While Bush didn’t directly deny that the statistics were wrong, and while he did not outright admit that he didn’t know what he was talking about, he certainly did not show any compassion for the health of poor Texas children. Do you believe Bush truly cares about the health and well being of you and your family? You’re not stupid! Get the truth.

5. Phillips, Kevin, American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics
of Deceit in the House of Bush (New York: Viking, 2004), 178-185, 195-
199, Appendix A, pp. 335-341.
6. Sampley, Ted, “George Bush Parachutes Again to Exorcize Demons
of Past Betrayal, March-May 1997, www.usvetdsp.com/story46.htm.
7. Phillips, op. cit., pp. 200-208.
8. Ibid., p. 32.
9. Ibid., p. 148.
10. Minutaglio, Bill, First Son: George W. Bush and the Bush Family
Dynasty (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2001), p. 23.
11. Ibid., p. 49.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid., p. 57.
14. Ibid., p. 48.
15. Ibid., p. 98.
16. Ibid., p. 100.
17. Ibid., pp. 48, 49.
18. Miller, Mark Crispin, The Bush Dyslexicon: Observations on a National
Disorder (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2002), p. 338.
19. Hightower, Jim, Thieves in High Places: They’ve Stolen Our Country–
And It’s Time To Take It Back (New York: Viking Press, 2003), p. 14.
20. Minutaglio, op. cit., pp. 111-113.
21. Ibid., pp. 99, 147-148.
22. Phillips, op. cit., p. 45.
23. Begala, Paul, Is Our Children Learning?: The Case Against George W.
Bush (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), p. 27.
24. Franken, op. cit., p. 46.
25. Minutaglio, op. cit., p. 210.
26. Miller, op. cit., p. 50.
27. Corn, David, The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering The Politics of
Deception (New York: Crown Publishers, 2003), p. 28.
28. Moore, James and Wayne Slater, Bush’s Brain: How Karl Rove Made
George W. Bush Presidential (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2003), p. 278.
29. Corn, op. cit., pp. 29, 30; see also “Busted,” November 3, 2000,
http://dir.salon.com/politics/feature.
You’re Not Stupid! Get the Truth
20
30. “Bush Jr.’s Skeleton Closet,” www.realchange.org/bushjr.html.
31. “Family Ties,” www.thedubyareport.com/family.html.
32. Palast, Greg, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: The Truth About
Corporate Cons, Globalization, and High-Finance Fraudsters (New York:
Plume, Penguin Group, 2002), p. 107.
33. Minutaglio, op. cit., p. 121.
34. Corn, op. cit., p. 25.
35. Ibid., pp. 24, 25.
36. Minutaglio, op. cit., p. 125.
37. Conason, op. cit., p. 65.
38. Moore, James, Bush’s War for Reelection: Iraq, The White House, and
the People. (Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2004),
p. 177; see also Miller, Roger, “Bush & Bin Laden – George W. Bush
Had Ties to Billionaire bin Laden Brood,” October 7, 2001, American
Free Press, www.americanfreepress.net/10_07_01/Bush_Bin_Laden_-
_George_W_B/bush.
39. Conason, op. cit., p. 64.
40. Moore, Bush’s War for Reelection, op. cit., p. 154.
41. Minutaglio, op. cit., p. 156.
42. Ibid., p. 198.
43. Wiles, Rick, “Bush’s Former Oil Company Linked to bin Laden
Family,” October 3, 2001,
http://www.rense.com/general14/bushformer.htm.
44. Palast, op. cit., p. 104; see also Kellner, Douglas, From 9/11 to Terror
War: The Dangers of the Bush Legacy (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman &
Littlefield, 2003), p. 35; see also Ahmed, Nafeez Mosaddeq and John
Leonard The War on Freedom: How and Why America was Attacked,
September 11, 2001 (Joshua Tree, California: Tree of Life Publications.
2002), pp.194-197.
45. Ahmed, op. cit., p. 194.
46. Ivins, Molly and Lou Dubose, Bushwhacked: Life in George W. Bush’s
America (New York: Random House, 2003), p. 7.
47. Ibid.
48. Ibid., p. 8.
49. Corn, op. cit., p. 191.
50. Ivins, op. cit., p. 8.
51. Ivins, op. cit., p. 9.
Who’s Bush?
21
52. Corn, op. cit., pp. 193, 196-197.
53. Ivins, op. cit., pp. 11-14; see also Alterman and Green, op. cit.,
pp 70, 71.
54. Ibid., p. 12; see also Corn, op. cit., pp. 193, 195.
55. Minutaglio, op. cit., p. 322.
56. Corn, op. cit., p. 17.
57. Ibid.
58. Savage, David G., “Patients’ Right to Sue HMOs Before High
Court,” Los Angeles Times, March 24, 2004, p. A12.
59. Corn, op. cit., pp. 17, 18.
60. Ibid., p. 18.

Man, 84, Is Charged With Spying for Israel in 1980s

By Carrie Johnson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, April 23, 2008; A04

For more than two decades after he allegedly furnished an Israeli operative with secrets about U.S. nuclear initiatives and sensitive weapons programs, Ben-Ami Kadish lived unnoticed by law enforcement authorities in suburban New Jersey.

Until yesterday, that is, when Kadish, 84, was arrested at his home, taken to a federal courthouse in Manhattan and charged with four counts of conspiracy allegedly for serving as an foreign agent and allegedly for lying to the FBI about a recent telephone conversation he had with his alleged Israeli handler.

Kadish, a mechanical engineer, worked at the U.S. Army's research arsenal in Dover, N.J., in the early 1980s. He routinely checked classified documents out of a library there and passed them to an unnamed Israeli official who had provided a list of what he wanted, according to a four-count criminal complaint the FBI filed yesterday.

The official photographed pages related to nuclear weaponry, the F-15 fighter jet program and the U.S. Patriot missile defense system, according to an FBI affidavit on which the complaint is based.

Kadish's actions appear to have escaped detection for years even though his handler allegedly also collected classified information from Jonathan Pollard, a former Navy intelligence analyst. Pollard is serving a life sentence in a federal prison in Butner, N.C., after pleading guilty to an espionage-related crime in 1986.

"It's a fascinating case of another agent in place, another sleeper, with the very same handler," said Joseph E. diGenova, the former U.S. attorney in the District who prosecuted Pollard. "We always suspected there were other people. His tradecraft was apparently better than Pollard's."

DiGenova said the espionage, which the charging documents indicate ceased in 1985, doubtless have come to the government's attention because of wiretap evidence obtained by the FBI and federal prosecutors in Manhattan. FBI agents first interviewed Kadish last month about his activities at the Army's Picatinny Arsenal, where he worked between 1963 and 1990, according to the filing.

Kadish, a U.S. citizen who was born in Connecticut, told the agents that he "borrowed" classified documents at the urging of his handler, who encouraged him to help "protect Israel" by sharing papers that had a "direct correlation to Israel's security." He accepted only small gifts and occasional family dinners in exchange for his services, the FBI said.

Kadish told Special Agent Lance Ashworth that between August 1979 and July 1985, he provided the handler with 50 to 100 documents, according to the affidavit.

The handler is identified in the criminal complaint only as "co-conspirator 1," but he has been named in Israeli publications and by a former prosecutor as Yosef Yagur. He lived in the Riverdale section of the Bronx and worked as an adviser on science affairs at the Israeli Consulate in New York.

Yagur left the United States in November 1985, shortly after Pollard was charged with espionage-related offenses, and has never returned.

The handler called Kadish's home at least 22 times between July and November 1985, according to an FBI account of the phone records. The two men have since allegedly maintained contact through periodic e-mail messages and phone calls. They met in Israel four years ago, but their dealings since 1985 have been "purely social," Kadish told investigators.

The handler and Kadish renewed their ties on March 20, according to the FBI affidavit, after federal agents interviewed Kadish for the first time. "Don't say anything," the handler allegedly said. "Let them say whatever they want. . . . What happened 25 years ago? You didn't remember anything."

The next day, FBI agents again questioned Kadish, who allegedly denied the call had taken place. His statements eventually became the basis for two criminal conspiracy charges that accuse him of hindering an investigation and of lying to law enforcement officials. He was also charged with conspiracy to serve as an Israeli agent and conspiracy to disclose documents related to U.S. defense programs.

A federal magistrate judge in New York released Kadish yesterday afternoon on a $300,000 personal recognizance bond secured by his home in Monroe Township, N.J. He was required to surrender his passport, and he will not be allowed to travel beyond New Jersey and New York.

Bruce Goldstein, a defense lawyer for Kadish, did not return calls. David Siegel, a spokesman for the Israeli Embassy, said that "we were formally informed of the indictment by the relevant authorities," but declined to comment further.

Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

Cloak of invisibility: Fact or fiction?

Scientists boldly go where only science fiction has been before

The Associated Press
Updated: 11:46 a.m. ET Oct 19, 2006

WASHINGTON - Harry Potter and Captain Kirk would be proud. A team of American and British researchers has made a Cloak of Invisibility.

Well, OK, it’s not perfect. Yet.

But it’s a start, and it did a pretty good job of hiding a copper cylinder. In this experiment the scientists used microwaves to try and detect the cylinder. Like light and radar waves, microwaves bounce off objects making them visible and creating a shadow, though it has to be detected with instruments.

If you can hide something from microwaves, you can hide it from radar — a possibility that will fascinate the military. Cloaking differs from stealth technology, which doesn’t make an aircraft invisible but reduces the cross-section available to radar, making it hard to track. Cloaking simply passes the radar or other waves around the object as if it weren’t there, like water flowing around a smooth rock in a stream.

The new work points the way for an improved version that could hide people and objects from visible light. Conceptually, the chance of adapting the concept to visible light is good, cloak designer David Schurig said in a telephone interview. But Schurig, a research associate in Duke University’s electrical and computer engineering department, added, “From an engineering point of view it is very challenging.”

Nonetheless, the cloaking of a cylinder from microwaves comes just five months after Schurig and colleagues published their theory that it should be possible. Their first success is reported in a paper in Friday’s issue of the journal Science.

"We did this work very quickly ... and that led to a cloak that is not optimal,” said co-author David R. Smith, also of Duke. “We know how to make a much better one.”

Casting a shadow

The first working cloak was in only two dimensions and did cast a small shadow, Smith acknowledged. The next step is to go for three dimensions and to eliminate any shadow. Viewers can see things because objects scatter the light that strikes them, reflecting some of it back to the eye.

“The cloak reduces both an object’s reflection and its shadow, either of which would enable its detection,” said Smith.

In effect the device, made of meta-materials — engineered mixtures of metal and circuit board materials, which could include ceramic, Teflon or fiber composite materials — channels the microwaves around the object being hidden.

When water flows around a rock, Smith explained, the water recombines after it passes the rock and people looking at the water downstream would never know it had passed a rock. The cloaking has to be designed for specific bandwidths of radiation. In this case it’s microwaves, and someone measuring them wouldn’t be able to tell they had passed around an object. The hope is to do the same for light waves. Looking at a cloaked item, Smith explained: “One would see whatever is behind the cloak. That is, the cloak is, ideally, transparent. Since we do not have a perfect cloak at this point, there is some reflection and some shadow, meaning that the background would still be visible just darkened somewhat.

The ideal cloak would have nearly negligible reflection and virtually no shadowing, Smith said.

“This first experiment has provided a confirmation that the mechanism of cloaking can be realized, we now just need to improve the performance of cloaking structures.”

Other possibilities

In addition to hiding things, redirecting electromagnetic waves could prove useful in protecting sensitive electronics from harmful radiation, Smith commented. In a very speculative application, he added, “one could imagine ’cloaking’ acoustic waves, so as to shield a region from vibration or seismic activity.”

Natalia M. Litchinitser, a researcher at the University of Michigan department of electrical engineering and computer science, said this appears to be the “first, to the best of my knowledge, experimental realization of the fascinating idea of cloaking based on meta-materials at microwave frequencies.”

“Although the invisibility reported in this paper is not perfect, this work provides a proof-of-principle demonstration of the possibility,” said Litchinitser, who was not part of the research team. She added that the next breakthrough is likely to be an experimental demonstration of the cloaking in visible light. “These ideas represent a first step toward the development of functional materials for a wide spectrum of civil and military applications.”

Joining Schurig and Smith in the work were researchers at Imperial College in London and SensorMetrix, a materials and technology company in San Diego, Calif. The research was supported by the Intelligence Community Postdoctoral Research Fellowship Program and the United Kingdom Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.

© 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15329396/

Blackwater: Shadow Army

Blackwater

The Smear This Time

By ANITA HILL
Published: October 2, 2007

ON Oct. 11, 1991, I testified about my experience as an employee of Clarence Thomas’s at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

I stand by my testimony.

Justice Thomas has every right to present himself as he wishes in his new memoir, “My Grandfather’s Son.” He may even be entitled to feel abused by the confirmation process that led to his appointment to the Supreme Court.

But I will not stand by silently and allow him, in his anger, to reinvent me.

In the portion of his book that addresses my role in the Senate hearings into his nomination, Justice Thomas offers a litany of unsubstantiated representations and outright smears that Republican senators made about me when I testified before the Judiciary Committee — that I was a “combative left-winger” who was “touchy” and prone to overreacting to “slights.” A number of independent authors have shown those attacks to be baseless. What’s more, their reports draw on the experiences of others who were familiar with Mr. Thomas’s behavior, and who came forward after the hearings. It’s no longer my word against his.

Justice Thomas’s characterization of me is also hobbled by blatant inconsistencies. He claims, for instance, that I was a mediocre employee who had a job in the federal government only because he had “given it” to me. He ignores the reality: I was fully qualified to work in the government, having graduated from Yale Law School (his alma mater, which he calls one of the finest in the country), and passed the District of Columbia Bar exam, one of the toughest in the nation.

In 1981, when Mr. Thomas approached me about working for him, I was an associate in good standing at a Washington law firm. In 1991, the partner in charge of associate development informed Mr. Thomas’s mentor, Senator John Danforth of Missouri, that any assertions to the contrary were untrue. Yet, Mr. Thomas insists that I was “asked to leave” the firm.

It’s worth noting, too, that Mr. Thomas hired me not once, but twice while he was in the Reagan administration — first at the Department of Education and then at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. After two years of working directly for him, I left Washington and returned home to Oklahoma to begin my teaching career.

In a particularly nasty blow, Justice Thomas attacked my religious conviction, telling “60 Minutes” this weekend, “She was not the demure, religious, conservative person that they portrayed.” Perhaps he conveniently forgot that he wrote a letter of recommendation for me to work at the law school at Oral Roberts University, in Tulsa. I remained at that evangelical Christian university for three years, until the law school was sold to Liberty University, in Lynchburg, Va., another Christian college. Along with other faculty members, I was asked to consider a position there, but I decided to remain near my family in Oklahoma.

Regrettably, since 1991, I have repeatedly seen this kind of character attack on women and men who complain of harassment and discrimination in the workplace. In efforts to assail their accusers’ credibility, detractors routinely diminish people’s professional contributions. Often the accused is a supervisor, in a position to describe the complaining employee’s work as “mediocre” or the employee as incompetent. Those accused of inappropriate behavior also often portray the individuals who complain as bizarre caricatures of themselves — oversensitive, even fanatical, and often immoral — even though they enjoy good and productive working relationships with their colleagues.

Finally, when attacks on the accusers’ credibility fail, those accused of workplace improprieties downgrade the level of harm that may have occurred. When sensing that others will believe their accusers’ versions of events, individuals confronted with their own bad behavior try to reduce legitimate concerns to the level of mere words or “slights” that should be dismissed without discussion.

Fortunately, we have made progress since 1991. Today, when employees complain of abuse in the workplace, investigators and judges are more likely to examine all the evidence and less likely to simply accept as true the word of those in power. But that could change. Our legal system will suffer if a sitting justice’s vitriolic pursuit of personal vindication discourages others from standing up for their rights.

The question of whether Clarence Thomas belongs on the Supreme Court is no longer on the table — it was settled by the Senate back in 1991. But questions remain about how we will resolve the kinds of issues my testimony exposed. My belief is that in the past 16 years we have come closer to making the resolution of these issues an honest search for the truth, which, after all, is at the core of all legal inquiry. My hope is that Justice Thomas’s latest fusillade will not divert us from that path.

Anita Hill, a professor of social policy, law and women’s studies at Brandeis University, is a visiting scholar at the Newhouse Center for the Humanities at Wellesley College.

What If Bill Clinton Had Run for President in 1988?

Al Giordano Sun Sep 30, 9:23 PM ET

Former President Bill Clinton's recent attempt to slow Senator Barack Obama's rise and the words he chose to speak it raise a new question: What if Bill had run for president in 1988?

It's natural that a husband would be protective of his spouse's political ambitions. And when a rival candidate begins to build momentum in Iowa's first-in-the-nation caucus and in national fundraising who can blame Bill Clinton for taking that recent swipe at Barack Obama? In a televised interview with columnist Al Hunt, Bill echoed Hillary Clinton's claim that Obama is too "inexperienced" for the Oval Office. He said:

"I was, in terms of experience, was closer to Senator Obama, I suppose, in 1988 when I came within a day of announcing... I really didn't think I knew enough, and had served enough and done enough to run."

When Clinton did run for president, in 1992, he was the same age as Obama is today. The claim by a white male that at age 42 he had as much experience as a 46-year-old black man probably will bring unintended consequences by firing up a larger Obama vote among African-Americans. The hubris of that statement invokes, all too neatly, the gripes by other white males in affirmative-action friendly workplaces across America; it's a way of speaking in code that most white Americans don't notice, but that black Americans understand painfully well.

And while Obama has smartly ignored the bloodlust of pundits that goad him to "take the gloves off" and hit Hillary Clinton more directly (America may be ready for a black president, but probably not for a younger black man pummeling an elder white woman, even with mere words), Bill Clinton's attempted put-down offered Obama a clean shot at the rival camp through its surrogate: Everybody loves to see the younger athlete score on the aging former champ. And that's exactly what Obama did.

In an act of political jiu-jitsu, Obama turned Clinton's words about experience from 1992 into a Wayback Machine endorsement of his own 2008 quest. In a 1992 debate with George H. W. Bush, Clinton had said: "The same old experience is not relevant... you can have the right kind of experience and the wrong kind of experience."

"He's exactly right," smiled Obama.

Score!

He was followed by the so-far neutral Robert Reich (one of the few cabinet-level veterans of the Clinton White House that is still widely beloved and trusted among Democrats) who jumped up from the sidelines and kicked in an extra point for Obama. Reich said: "While I can understand Bill Clinton's eagerness to undermine his wife's most significant primary opponent, he is not, I believe, completely ingenuous. I happened to talk with him in 1988 before he decided not to run, and also in 1991 before he decided to run the following year. His calculation at both times was decidedly rational and entirely political, based on whether he could win."

Bill Clinton's statement begs a more interesting question: What if he had run for president in 1988, defeated Mike Dukakis for the Democratic nomination, and bested Bush the elder for the White House?

Would a younger President Clinton have been so obsessed as Bush, Sr. was with exorcising "the ghosts of Vietnam" to have invaded Panama in 1989?

Would Clinton have appointed William Bennett as "drug czar" in 1989 and begun the demonization of pot smokers and cancer patients, and wholesale imprisonment of young black males, that the escalation of the war-on-drugs wrought on America?

Would Clinton, in a speech before Congress on September 11, 1990, have said: "Out of these troubled times, our fifth objective -- a New World Order -- can emerge"?

Would a younger Clinton administration have signaled to Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein (then a US ally) that it would look the other way if Iraq invaded Kuwait but then gone to war against Iraq once that happened?

Would hundreds of thousands of US military veterans of that Gulf War be permanently disabled and still suffering the ailments and syndromes of that trauma today if Clinton, and not Bush, had been president then?

Would Islamic fundamentalists and terrorist organizations have gained so much support had the US not led a war that killed hundreds of thousands of Muslims in the Gulf War?

Would Caspar Weinberger, Elliot Abrams, Robert McFarlane and others that conspired to traffic in cocaine and armaments to support right-wing guerrillas in Nicaragua have received pardons from Clinton after their crimes, as occurred under Bush I?

Would Clarence Thomas be on the Supreme Court today?

Come to think of it, Bill Clinton probably should have run for president in 1988 when he was younger and less jaded.

Had Clinton arrived in the White House four years earlier, he probably would never have met Paula Jones back in Arkansas in 1991 or the state troopers there whose testimony later put the Clinton White House on a permanent political defensive, scuttling the progressive agendas promised during his 1992 presidential campaign for most the rest of his tenure.

Maybe if Bill Clinton had been president when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, the peace dividend could have been realized at the end of the Cold War, an authentic peacetime economy could have boomed, and America wouldn't be suffering the blowback of the terrible foreign policy choices made by the first Bush presidency from 1989 to 1993.

But hindsight is 20-20 and we can't turn the clock back, right? Too bad we can't fix the mistakes of 1988 all over again in 2008 and after a two-term Republican president vote for a younger forty-something Democrat that is not yet so jaded by what Washington DC calls "experience."

Oh.

Wait a sec.

We can?