National

The John McCain Land Rush
By Michael Winship
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Tuesday 13 May 2008

Hell hath no fury like a convert. Or so it seemed back in the early nineties, when the political career of Arizona Sen. John McCain almost went down in flames during the savings and loan scandal.

Senator McCain, you'll recall, was one of the notorious Keating Five, a group of US senators accused of using their clout to help bail out Charles Keating, chairman of the failed Lincoln Savings and Loan. All had received campaign contributions and other perks from Keating.

The collapse of Lincoln Savings cost the American taxpayer $3.4 billion. Charles Keating went to prison. Mr. McCain got off with a mild rebuke for "questionable conduct" from the Senate Ethics Committee, but so embarrassed was he, the senator vowed from then on he would be above reproach, the Caesar's wife of Capitol Hill. A changed man, he would fight for truth, justice and the American way, battling special interests, crusading for ethics and leading the way for campaign finance reform with the evangelistic zeal of the born again.

Here's what he wrote in his 2002 book, "Worth the Fighting For":
"I would very much like to think that I have never been a man whose favor could be bought ..."

And this:
"I have carefully avoided situations that might even tangentially be construed as a less than proper use of my office."

And this:
"Money does buy access in Washington, and access increases influence that often results in benefiting the few at the expense of the many."

In truth, Senator McCain has fought hard against pork barrel and earmarks. And the mere mention of the famous campaign finance reform bill he created with Democratic Sen. Russ Feingold is enough to send many of his fellow Republicans into sputters of apoplexy. But, as with so many politicians and candidates, the burdensome financial demands of campaigning for office - the endless fundraising, the expectations of high-rolling donors - have too often forced John McCain into that most human of hypocrisies, the one that goes, "Do as I say, not as I do."

Appropriately, for a senator from the vast expanses of the American southwest, it's land deals that appear to be John McCain's weakness, land deals possibly tied to campaign donations, lobbyists and other inside connections. A week ago, The Washington Post reported McCain pushed for legislation allowing a rancher named Fred Ruskin to trade more than 55,000 acres of his land for an equal amount of federal land, prime for development.

According to The Post, the senator was initially reluctant, but, "The Arizona Republican became a key figure in pushing the deal through Congress after the rancher and his partners hired lobbyists that included McCain's 1992 Senate campaign manager, two of his former Senate staff members (one of whom has returned as his chief of staff), and an Arizona insider who was a major McCain donor and is now bundling campaign checks."

And wait, as they say on those late night, huckster television ads, there's more! Rancher Ruskin and his partners plan to have 12,000 homes built on the land by a company called SunCor Development. SunCor is a subsidiary of Pinnacle West, Arizona's largest power utility. It's run by Steven Betts, a McCain supporter who has raised more than $100,000 for the senator's presidential bid.

Betts told The Post there is "absolutely no" link between his fundraising and the land swap. But it's not the first time McCain has helped contributors navigate the corridors of Congress to help hammer down a good real estate deal.

Just last month, for example, The New York Times reported on McCain's long friendship with Donald R. Diamond, another rich real estate man from Arizona. With the senator's help, Diamond has profited in similar swaps for federal land, including a lucrative deal that sold him California coastline property, formerly part of the Fort Ord military base. Diamond, who has been called "the other Donald" - Arizona's answer to Donald Trump - has raised more than a quarter of a million dollars for the McCain presidential campaign. So far.

Asked about the leg up Senator McCain has given him in the real estate game, Diamond told The Times, "I think this is what Congress people are supposed to do for constituents. When you have a big, significant businessman like myself, why wouldn't you want to help move things along? What else would they do? They waste so much time with legislation."

In other words, all constituents are created equal - but the ones with the deepest pockets are more equal than the rest of us.

Nor is it the first time McCain has fallen under the sway of the DC lobbyists, whose ways he vowed to reform, lobbyists who also happen to be former or current employees of his. McCain's presidential campaign manager Rick Davis, senior advisers Steve Schmidt and Mark McKinnon and chief political adviser Charles Black, Jr. - their usual clients have names like Verizon, General Motors and JP Morgan.

This potential for conflicts of interest snapped at the campaign's posterior just this week when Newsweek revealed McCain's recent choice to coordinate the Republican National Convention in September is chief executive of a public relations and lobbying firm, which used to be on the payroll of the military junta ruling Myanmar. That regime, under fire for resisting relief efforts in the wake of last week's deadly cyclone, has in the past been charged with gruesome human rights abuses by none other than John McCain.

Certainly, Senators Clinton and Obama are advised by people who make their livings lobbying for corporate America and other countries, too. After all, they know the ins and outs of government and politics better than anyone. But as McCain himself wrote in "Worth the Fighting For," "Questions of honor are raised as much by appearances as by reality in politics, and because they incite public distrust they need to be addressed no less directly than we would address evidence of expressly illegal corruption."

When Barack Obama questioned Senator McCain's "bearings" last week, he was talking about McCain's portrayal of him as sympathetic to the militant Palestinian group Hamas. The McCain campaign chose to interpret "bearings" as a reference to McCain's age. Lost bearings equal lost marbles. But think of it instead as the lost bearings of a moral compass, thrown off true north by the dollars, demands and compromises of a life in contemporary American politics.

Michael Winship, president of the Writers Guild of America, East, and former writer with Bill Moyers, writes this weekly column for the Messenger Post Newspapers in upstate New York. This article was previously published in the Messenger Post Newspapers.

I am thinking of the millions of dollars that go to research on how to grow potatoes better. Those type of things. Cut those programs for a bit until things get more balanced.

Yes. cutting programs on food production is such a good idea. Especially now with the ongoing food riots and starvation.

With global warming, we are going to need a hell of a lot more research as to how to grow crops in hot weather with little water.

I think we could get rid of all the military bands first and then think about cutting of research into food production.

And when you think about it, isn't that just about the most conservative idea you have ever heard? Cutting research on food production.

As another conservative once said, "Let them eat cake."

The Tortured Law on Torture
Posted on May 13, 2008

By Robert Scheer

Ah yes, those torture confessions have proved so useful. That, at least, was the claim of our president in justifying one of the most egregious assaults ever on this nation’s commitment to the rule of law. But now comes news that charges have been dropped against the so-called Sept. 11 attacks’ 20th hijacker, one of dozens so identified, because the “evidence” he supplied under torture and later recanted is not credible enough to go to trial.

That fact, of course, will not compel President Bush to cut the tortured prisoner loose. After all, Saudi citizen Mohammed al-Qahtani has only been held in confinement for more than six years without being charged with a crime, and without being allowed to confront his accusers in a court of law.

The fact that the information produced is worthless—as evidenced by Qahtani, once driven insane, naming everyone around him in the camp as a major al-Qaida operative—will not deter those who condone torture. But others expert in these matters, including presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain, will recoil from such tactics.

It was the treatment of Qahtani and other prisoners, as witnessed by horrified U.S. Navy Department investigators at Guantanamo, that got the attention of the Navy’s then-General Counsel Alberto J. Mora. In one of those all too rare examples of true heroism that makes one proud to be an American, Mora challenged the Bush administration to practice the human rights standards that America proclaims to the world. But Bush would stay true to his own values: “Any activity we conduct is within the law,” Bush stated in November 2005, adding, “We do not torture.”

What was it then? As the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer reported in 2006, citing the Army’s own interrogation logs, Qahtani, in addition to being subjected to documented beatings and other physical abuse, was put through an S&M routine calculated to drive him mad, which it accomplished:

“Qahtani had been subjected to 160 days of isolation in a pen perpetually flooded with artificial light. He was interrogated on 48 of 54 days, for 18 to 20 hours at a stretch. He had been stripped naked; straddled by taunting female guards, in an exercise called ‘invasion of space by a female;’ forced to wear women’s underwear on his head, and to put on a bra; threatened by dogs; placed on a leash and told that his mother was a whore.’”

Quite an advertisement for the American way of life. Should we expect the rest of the world to boycott the Olympics when we next get to host the Games? Others might question why the Third 1949 Geneva Convention’s prohibition against “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment,” doesn’t apply to the United States.

The failure to elicit any usable incriminating information from Qahtani once again supports the view of most experts that torture is not only morally repugnant, it is in fact counterproductive to getting at the truth.

But this didn’t trouble John Yoo, then the Justice Department lawyer who wrote the infamous Bybee memo on torture, named after Yoo’s boss, Jay S. Bybee, who was rewarded for his leadership with a judgeship on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in Los Angeles. Yoo, the best recent example of what the great anti-Nazi writer Hannah Arendt once referred to as the “banality of evil,” teaches law at UC Berkeley when not touring the country to argue that if an action does not produce death through organ failure it can’t be torture. Audiences tend to clap politely and observe that while they don’t agree with him, he is, as I was told by a UCLA professor after such an appearance, “a very bright fellow.”

On Feb. 6, 2003, as Qahtani was being led around on a leash, Yoo visited Mora in his Pentagon office. Mora later told the New Yorker writer Mayer that he asked Yoo, “Are you saying the president has the authority to order torture?” Yoo answered with a clear “yes.” Following that stellar legal advice, then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, with Yoo’s encouragement, officially approved “hooding,” “exploitation of phobias,” “stress positions,” “deprivations of light and auditory stimuli” and the other horrors that the scandals of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo would burn into the legacy of the United States.

Robert Scheer’s new book, ”The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America,” will be published June 9 by Twelve.
[Guantanamo detainees]

McCain outlines vision of Iraq victory

In Ohio, McCain outlines vision that achieves Iraq victory, curbed spending and bipartisanship

John McCain, looking through a crystal ball to 2013 and the end of a prospective first term, sees "spasmodic" but reduced violence in Iraq and Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden dead or captured and government spending curbed by his ready veto pen.

The Republican presidential contender also envisions April's annual angst replaced with the option a simpler flat tax, illegal immigrants living humanely under a temporary worker program, and political partisanship stemmed by weekly news conferences and British-style question periods with joint meetings of Congress.

In a speech Thursday, McCain conceded he cannot make the changes alone, but he wanted to outline a specific governing style to show the accomplishments it can achieve. He backed up his remarks with a Web ad featuring similar content.

"I'm not interested in partisanship that serves no other purpose than to gain a temporary advantage over our opponents. This mindless, paralyzing rancor must come to an end. We belong to different parties, not different countries," McCain told several hundred in the capital city of Ohio, a general election battleground. "There is a time to campaign, and a time to govern. If I'm elected president, the era of the permanent campaign will end; the era of problem-solving will begin."

To the disdain of some fellow Republicans, the presumed GOP nominee has worked with Democrats on legislation aimed at overhauling campaign finance regulations, redrafting immigration rules and regulations and implementing government spending controls.

While that has cultivated a maverick image for McCain, the Arizona senator has also been accused of exhibiting a nasty temper — swearing even at fellow lawmakers from his own party — and unabashed partisanship.

In particular, McCain has clashed with the leading Democratic presidential contender, Barack Obama. After tangling with the Illinois senator on lobbying reforms, McCain questioned Obama's integrity in a publicly released 2006 letter.

McCain wrote he had thought Obama's interest in ethics legislation "was genuine and admirable," before adding: "Thank you for disabusing me of such notions." He accused Obama of "partisan posturing."

While calling for Congress to drop mindless partisanship, McCain also chided the media — with whom he has enjoyed a generally positive relationship — for fueling contention with its campaign coverage.

"Campaigns and the media collaborated as architects of the modern presidential campaign, and we deserve equal blame for the regret we feel from time to time over its less-than-inspirational features," he said.

Anticipating a key achievement of his administration, McCain said: "The Iraq war has been won. Iraq is a functioning democracy, although still suffering from the lingering effects of decades of tyranny and centuries of sectarian tension. Violence still occurs, but it is spasmodic and much reduced."

Speaking to reporters afterward, McCain denied that by saying the war would be won by 2013 he was setting a timetable for U.S. withdrawal from Iraq — something he has criticized former rival Mitt Romney for doing.

"It's not a timetable, it's victory, it's victory I've always predicted," McCain said. "I'm not putting a date on it. It could be next month, it could be next year, it could be three years from now."

In outlining other potential achievements of a first term in his speech, the 71-year-old McCain implicitly was suggesting he would seek a second term, an attempt to mute suggestions he would serve only four years after being the oldest president ever to take office for a first term.

In particular, he sees a world in which:

— The Taliban threat in Afghanistan has been greatly reduced.

— "The increase in actionable intelligence that the counterinsurgency produced led to the capture or death of Osama bin Laden, and his chief lieutenants," McCain said. "There still has not been a major terrorist attack in the United States since Sept. 11, 2001."

— A "League of Democracies" has supplanted a failed United Nations to apply sanctions to the Sudanese government and halt genocide in Darfur.

— The United States has had "several years of robust growth," appropriations bills free of lawmakers' pet projects known as "earmarks," public education improved by charter schools, health care improved by expansion of the private market and an energy crisis stemmed through the start of construction on 20 new nuclear reactors.

— Democrats are asked to serve in his administration, he holds weekly news conferences and, like the British prime minister, answers questions publicly from lawmakers.

McCain also pledges to halt a Bush administration practice of enacting laws with accompanying signing statements that exempt the president from having to enforce parts he finds objectionable.

"I will respect the responsibilities the Constitution and the American people have granted Congress," the senator said, "and will, as I often have in the past, work with anyone of either party to get things done for our country."

Newsweek 5/15/2008

What a nice dream! Or should I say fantasy? But one thing did strike me, when John McCain said....

McCain also pledges to halt a Bush administration practice of enacting laws with accompanying signing statements that exempt the president from having to enforce parts he finds objectionable.

"I will respect the responsibilities the Constitution and the American people have granted Congress," the senator said, "and will, as I often have in the past, work with anyone of either party to get things done for our country."

So even top Republicans are saying that Bush's signing statements do not respect the Constitution.

Les, Why when McCain says something it is a fantsy, but when O'Bama says something it is true? I tend to think they are both sincere men, time will tell. I thought you democrats were open minded, or is that when you talk to eachother?

TRRon, it depends on the statements. THIS is fantasy.

"It's not a timetable, it's victory, it's victory I've always predicted," McCain said. "I'm not putting a date on it. It could be next month, it could be next year, it could be three years from now."

Les, It depends on McCain's defination of victory. Remember Bill's defination of sex.

yes. I've been waiting for a definition of "victory" or staying until "the job is done."

It depends on McCain's defination of victory. Remember Bill's defination of sex.

So it comes out as "I DID (or did NOT) have victory with Iraq". Only problem, there is still a stain on the Iraqi landscape from years of fighting.