While in charge of the CIA's analytical division in the mid-1980s, Robert M. Gates made wildly erroneous predictions about the dangers posed by leftist-ruled Nicaragua and espoused policy prescriptions considered too extreme even by the Reagan administration, in one case advocating the U.S. bombing of Nicaragua.
Gates -- now President George W. Bush' nominee to replace Donald Rumsfeld as Defense Secretary -- expressed his alarmist views about Nicaragua and the need to bomb the country’s military targets in a secret Dec. 14, 1984, memorandum to then-CIA Director William Casey.
The memo has new relevance today because Gates's private advice to Casey suggests that Gates was either more of an extremist ideologue than many in Washington believe or he was pandering to Casey's personal zealotry.
Either possibility raises questions about Gates's fitness to run the Pentagon at a time when many observers believe it needs strong doses of realism and independence to stand up to both a strong-willed President and influential neoconservative theorists who promoted the invasion of Iraq.
The Iraq War -- now exceeding the length of U.S. participation in World War II -- has been marked by politicized intelligence, over-reliance on force, fear of challenging the insider tough-guy talk, and lack of respect for international law -- all tendencies that Gates has demonstrated in his career.
Cold Warrior
In the 1980s, Gates was a Cold War hardliner prone to exaggerate the Soviet threat, which put him in the good graces of Reagan administration officials. They also rejected the growing evidence of a rapid Soviet decline in order to justify a massive U.S. military build-up and aggressive interventions in Third World conflicts.
Put in charge of the CIA’s analytical division, which supposedly is dedicated to objective analysis, Gates instead pleased his boss Casey by taking an over-the-top view of the danger posed by Nicaragua, an impoverished Third World nation then ruled by leftist Sandinista revolutionaries who had ousted right-wing dictator Anastasio Somoza in 1979.
Though Gates opens his December 1984 memo with the declaration that "it is time to talk absolutely straight about Nicaragua," he then ignores many relevant facts that get in the way of his thesis about the need to launch air strikes against Sandinista military targets and to overthrow the supposedly "Marxist-Leninist" regime.
For instance, Gates makes no mention of the fact that only a month earlier, the Sandinistas had won an election widely praised for its fairness by European and other international observers. But the Reagan administration had pressured pro-U.S. candidate Arturo Cruz into withdrawing when it became clear he would lose -- and then denounced the election as a "sham."
that's from robert parry's 'Why Trust Robert Gates on Iraq' (consortium news). i'm rushing and i believe that gates is supposed to be confirmed the 1st week of december. we really need to think about this and parry's 1 of the few raising questions. he doesn't need to be given a pass. we need to be sure that he's qualified to be a defense secretary. i don't think he is. but if the dems rubber stamp him, that's going to let us know they're not going to fight even with a majority. i'm adding as i can, blogger/blogspot's about to go down.
others should be covering this. please follow parry's coverage. he knows this area very well and he is 1 of the few who will cover it. in real time, that was true as well. most were happy to look the other way on iran-contra and that's part of the reason we're in the mess we're in now.
when those crooks weren't punished, they came back to roost in the bully boy's administration.
okay, i was cursing out robert parry. not in the post, but at the computer. his '-' and his ''' and his '"' have to be changed in a copy & paste by me if copy & paste or they turn into squares when i post. and i was rushing and cursing, 'get a different font, damn it!'
i thought i had 10 or so minutes. i even called poor kat and told her that.
i was rushing and posting every few lines so something would be up if blogger/blogspot went out before i was done. then i say 'damn it, it's 9' and flyboy says, 'yeah, but it [blogger/blogspot] goes out at 10.'
woops. apologies to kat.
and no blame on mike. he told me he thought it was going out at 9 but to check for myself because he wasn't sure he did the time right. (mike and i are on the east coast. the outage note was in pacific time.) so now i can breathe.
my body was nothing but tension. my brow was furrowed, my shoulders were raised and i was just typing like crazy.
let me take a breath.
okay, kat had planned to talk about the pacifia radio archives broadcast on pacifica stations today. she may have, let me go see if she posted.
oh, i hate kat!
she has posted. and she's got the snapshot in it and she wrote 4 paragraphs you can follow. i'm on the phone with her now griping. she said i can grab anything we talked about today because she's not going in to add to it. ('it is what it is.')
that's cool. i'm going to be lazy for a bit so let me note that there are links in the snapshot to pacifica and to pacifica stations.
they're spending today and tomorrow covering their archives. they're opening them and airing some key bits. some, not all.
this is a fundraiser, by the way. so if you hear something you like, think about donating.
if you have $50 bucks or more, you can donate and get a gift.
why a fundraiser? their archives are on tape.
do you know about tapes?
i can't even think of the word but it's the same thing that happens with your skin, the thing that causes cross-linking (which cause wrinkles). c.i. has the softest skin of any 1 i know. to this day.
it's like baby skin.
yeah, i'm just chatting, i'll get back to the archives. but c.i. never had acne. not even a pimple. i mention that because c.i. rarely washes the face. if it doesn't get wet in the shower, it may not get washed and i always think that's why the skin is so soft.
i had to use astringents and everything else. even now, all this time later, i still will get a pimple outbreak (always near the left cheek and people will think it's a mole) when i get my period.
okay so there's a process where oxygen or something causes changes in your skin. with tapes, it changes them as well. (i think it's the same process, if not, oops.)
it causes bits to drop out, bits of sound.
they degrade over time.
you may be aware of that because dvds usually boast that they contain a restored print when they're older movies.
over time film and tape degrade.
so the fundraiser is to preserve the recordings. this costs money. and it's money not just for the technical process but also to pay for people to go through the library.
that's to check stuff and to catalogue it.
when you go into a libarary today, the whole inventory is on computer. they used to have little files with cards (called that a card catalogue, i believe). that's a cost for pacifica as well. they need the money to pay for people to go through and catalogue what they have.
the bette davis thing kat writes about, they didn't even know they had that. it's either from the 60s or the early 70s. i think the 60s. but there are all these things in the archives that they don't know they have.
i enjoyed hearing about that during the broadcast today.
just the idea of discovery.
when we'd do research papers in college, elaine and i always wanted to do them when c.i. was going to the library because c.i. just has a knack for finding the very thing that cements the paper. we'd be at a table with all these books around and i'd usually be bored and trudging through 1 book at a time. c.i. would go through several at the same time and something would spark. i can't remember who it was, but 1 time there was some 1 who committed suicide but it wasn't in the books. it was sort of a tone or something that raised c.i.'s interest. so the ref librarian starts assisting and she was amazed that c.i. had picked up that possibility, they finally found a death notice and it was suicide. the reference librarians loved c.i.
they loved c.i.'s topics, they loved c.i.'s research methods, they just loved c.i.
if i went in with c.i., they'd help me if i needed it. they'd always help elaine. but i would get the dumb blonde attitude (that i was a dumb blonde) if i went in alone.
but it was always a lot of fun. the referance librians loved c.i. so much, i assume it's okay to tell this all these years later, they'd let c.i. go in after hours.
that was so much fun and spooky as hell. the lights would be off unless we were in that area. and it was just so spooky. i remember when i needed something, always on the 2nd floor, i'd be scared to go up there. elaine would take a flashlight but c.i. would just go on through in the dark.
when it was time to find a book on a shelf (c.i. knew the shelving system), it was pull out the lighter and use that to look at the numbers and letters on the book's spine. when c.i. would find my book, i was such a coward. i would grab it, holler 'you're on your own' and go running towards the stairs to get back to the lit area. and i'd make c.i. and elaine both escort me to the ladies' room. elaine played the worst trick on me once. she'd been away from the table for a bit and c.i. had to go off for some rolled microfilm so i was all alone at the table, in this pool of light. i heard this book fall to the floor.
i was scared and looking for elaine and c.i. then another book falls. then another. and they're falling closer and closer to me.
when i screamed, elaine finally started laughing and then i knew it was her. but i was so scared before i knew it was her. some people thought the library was haunted by a woman who used to be a libraian there.
by the end of college, i was comfortable when we'd all be in there after hours. and then it was honestly a lot of fun. (i also was smart enough to carry a flashlight then.)
so i can just imagine how much fun it must be to be in the pacifica archives and discovering something that you didn't know was there. a find.
the rosa parks interview is used at a museum now. i believe the 1 that has the bus she refused to give her seat up on. that interview isn't years and years after it happened. it was when the issue was still being debated and discussed. and that's what they do best, talk to people who are changing history even when the mainstream doesn't grasp that's happening.
who knows what else is in there?
the archives aren't just for 1 pacifica station, they're for all of them, as i understand it. any tape from any of the stations ends up there.
kpfa is the oldest and 1st. it is, in fact, the first public radio station in the country. it started in 1946. kpfk started as a pacifica station in 1959, wbai in 1960, kpft in 1970 (the only radio station in the country to be bombed by the kkk), and wpfw? i have no idea. when we were in d.c. for the march 2005 protests, i was excited about listening to it. as ava and c.i. would say 'and then i listened.'
i like music and c.i. always said if the community didn't want it that way, they'd change it.
so i'll guess d.c. listeners love music. i don't find much of use on that station.
but you've got 5 stations and affiliates.
and you're looking at decades on the air.
think about when bob watada was on his speaking tour. philip maldari interviewed him for kpfa. (c.i. told me kpfk interviewed him as well on a program of their's, i think it was uprising). so they've got that. they've got their march and rallies coverage and who knows what else?
kpfa's book programs interview a lot of authors (cover to cover). dennis and nora interview lots of people on flashpoints. i can think of, for instance, their coverage of the students movement last spring on the immigrant rights issue, and their coverage of the world can't wait rally, and their interview with rita moreno, ivan brobeck, go down the list.
i usually listen to kpfa. that's because it's what c.i. listens to and i usually hear about it on the phone when we're talking. but with the gang moving out there, jim, dona, ty, jess and ava now listen to kpfa as well (instead of wbai) so they're always talking about it as well.
so you can argue i listen to that 1 because it saves the 'explain that again' comments from me.
if i had 1 that broadcast over the airwaves in my area, i'd probably listen to it as well (unless i lived in d.c., i really do not like that station). but i have to listen online and i usually listen to kpfb actually, the a.m. station, because i have less problems with that stream dropping out (it's the a.m. station for kpfa and has the same programming).
of course kat listens to kpfa over the airwaves and she tapes the morning show for betty so they're all talking about it during the editions.
i'm not saying that to say 'it's not that great.' it is a strong radio station and i enjoy listening to it (especially flashpoints) but i could probably enjoy the other 3 as well. i just go with kpfa because that's what every 1 talks about.
elaine listens to wbai online (she'll also listen to kpfa) and she'll give me a heads up about programming that i'll catch from time to time. i'm just trying to be clear so, for instance, no texas community member rags me out for not pushing the houston station.
although i know at least twenty community members in texas listen to kpfa, from gina & krista's polling, but i know there are members in texas who go with kpft and wbai as well. the los angeles station isn't as popular not because people don't enjoy it but due to the fact that there were streaming issues. c.i.'s tried to make a point of noting that they've upgraded their website.
i should probably check it out but i'm probably set with kpfa at this point.
it's like i was writing yesterday about bill and kathleen (i'm not looking up the spelling of their last name) really got a 'face' when i heard bill on radio nation with laura flanders and then when we were all discussing the interview while working on the third estate sunday review right after.
sandra lupien, bonnie faulkner, andrea lewis, philip maldari, larry benksy and of course dennis bernstein and nora barrows-friedman are people who have a 'face.'
we spend more time talking about kpfa shows, while we're working on the editions and while we're on the phone just talking during the week, then we ever do discussing a tv show. that's probably not surprising since we really don't watch a lot of tv. i probably watch the most tv of any 1 because i always have the tv on.
i can be listening to the radio and have it on cnn in the background or whatever. i'll look up every now and then and see if anything's breaking. i'm not sure if that's due to the war or maybe some after effects of 9-11.
it's also true that right after flyboy and i split (before the divorce was final), i couldn't stand walking into a quiet room. i'd have tvs on, radios on, cd players on. i'm not as bad now but i really did need sound back then.
the most serious pacifica listeners are probably kat, c.i., ava and jess. by most 'serious,' i mean they will have it on if they're by a radio. jim'll grab some sports radio from time to time. he'll shudder at that so let me clarify, jim will listen to a game on the radio. he doesn't like most of the sports chat shows.
i do agree with kat's opinion, by the way, that if pacifica was the public radio network across the airwaves in this country and not npr, it would make a huge difference. kat's opinion is that there is so much activity in california due to kpfa, kpfb, kpfk and others makes a huge contribution.
it gets ideas out there and listeners get them further out there because people listening don't just listen and go 'hmm' - they talk about it with friends.
i'm sorry to be so sour on air america radio but i'm really not interested in democratic radio. i think a lot of punches get pulled (the exceptions i noted yesterday apply on this as well). i also think there's a tendancy to jump on 'issues' that aren't issues but are part of a feeding frenzy for mainstream dems.
npr is nothing but cnn with even more lightness.
most of the funds for pacifia come from listeners and that's obvious in the programming. they're not owned by big oil, the way npr is - or by the drug companies, the way npr is.
i do think it's past time that pacifica offers a program that just deals with the war.
other than that, i don't have huge problems with the network and i enjoy kpfa. sunny (elaine's assistant) told me that marjorie cohn (president of the national lawyers guild) is a regular guest on mondays on a wbai program. i might try to listen to that. (i like marjorie cohn. she's a straight shooter.) (in fact call her 'straight talk,' not the hideous john mccain.)
people like marjorie and medea benjamin and michael ratner (and others) don't really turn up on other radio. these are voices that matter and you can hear them on pacifica.
30 years from now, people will want to know, for instance, what michael had to say about donald rumsfeld (rumsfled) due to the court case (that's historic). and you won't have a lot of outlets to go to other than pacifica.
some 1, during the day, said it was people's history (like howard zinn's work) and that's true. so if you haven't caught it, it's going on tonight and it will be going on tomorrow. a wonderful peak at the archives.
bette davis opened her q&a with 'what a dump' - her famous line from beyond the forest. then she took questions about her films. she was kind to crawford but with enough edge (and the request to ask her in private if you want more) that you got the point. she said dark victory was her favorite film. they had ruth gordon discussing writing and thornton wilder.
so maybe you're thinking, 'oh, it's all so political.' there are historical and political things and there's also some wonderful arts coverage.
so make a point to check it out. they're about to air pete seeger shortly (interviewed by tim robbins) or i think that's what i heard. the special programming continues through the night and tomorrow. (links in the snapshot.)
c.i. tried to just say 'pacifica' for the longest time so it wouldn't result in some 1 feeling their favorite station was being overlooked.
but before, i was puffing away on my cigarette and swearing at poor bob parry for his font like crazy.
here's c.i.'s 'iraq snapshot:'
Tuesday, November 28, 2006. Chaos and violence continue in Iraq, Bully Boy plays petulant and ignorant (well . . . maybe he's not playing), freedom of speech takes another blow in Iraq, the US Air Force asks for more money, Tony Blair takes a leak in public, and who gave what orders?
Starting with children's games, the US administration remains in denial about the civil war raging in Iraq. Peter Walker (Guardian of London) reports Bully Boy says Iraq is not in a civil war. It's not, it's not, it's not, and if you don't stop saying it is, he's going to run to Big Babs and you'll be sorry. Bully Boy pins the blame on al Qaeda. He's 'assisted' by the likes of Michael R. Gordon and Dexy-Dexy "Pads a Million" Filkins (New York Times) who take dictation very well in this morning's paper as they single-source the 'news' with an anonymous source who just happens to pin the blame on "the Iranian-backed group Hezbollah." Congratulations to Gordo and Dexy for proving that the male secretary is far from a thing of the past.
While the stenogs provide cover for the Bully Boy, Patrick Cockburn (Independent of London via CounterPunch) reports: "Iraq is rending itself apart. The signs of collapse are everywhere. In Baghdad the police often pick up over 100 tortured and mutiliated bodies in a single day. Government ministries make war on each other. A new and ominoous stage in the disingration of the Iraqi state came earlier this month when police commandos from the Shia-controlled Interior Ministry kidnapped 150 people from the Sunni-run Higher Education Ministry in the hear of Baghdad. Iraq may be getting close to what Americans call 'the Saigon moment, the time when it becomes evident to all that the government is expiring." All but the stenogs.
Sunday's stoning of and jeeering and shouting at the puppet of the occupation in the Sadr City section of Baghdad demonstrates the risks of reality intruding when Nouri al-Maliki leaves the heavily fortified Green Zone. And outside of Baghdad, Dafna Linzer and Thomas E. Ricks (Washington Post) report, things are as bad if not worse. Linzer and Ricks report on a Marine Corps intelligence report, "State of Insurgency in Al-Anbar," which finds that Al-Anbar Province is beyond US control, that it's become "a failed province" and that the Sunnis in the region are fleeing.
On the subject of fleeing, The Arizona Daily Star reports that the lifting of the cufew in Baghdad on Monday resulted in "[h]undreds of Iraqi families . . . [making] a beeline for the airport, where they handed over their savings for one-way tickets to anyplace safe. Others ran for the border, with suitcases strapped to cars bound for Syria and Jordan. Families that stayed stocked up on food, kept their children home from school and waited for another round of sectarian bloodshed." IRIN reports that Human Rights Watch is calling "on Jordan to provide a Temporary Protection Regime (TPR) for the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi refugees living in its territory."
In the face of reality, Bully Boy turns a blind eye. CBS and AP quote him stating, "There's one thing I'm not going to do, I'm not going to pull our troops off the battlefield before the mission is complete." Ask him what the mission is and prepare for vague statements with no concrete markers. As Bully Boy gets pouty, Tony Blair takes a leak on Des Browne and the British public. Yesterday, England's Defense Secretary Des Browne stated, "I can tell you that by the end of next year I expect numbers of British forces in Iraq to be significantly lower -- by a matter of thousands”. Reuters reports today that Blair has declared, "We will remain there (in Iraq) in significant numbers even if there is . . . an adjustment to our role, there will still be a requirement." The promised handover of Basra will apparently change nothing. Meanwhile, AFP reports that South Korea has decided "to extend the mission for another year" in Iraq but will be cutting it's troops from 2,3000 "to around 1,200".
[Added: Andy Sullivan (Reuters) reports Bill Keller has issued a statement stating that the New York Times will call Iraq what it is, a civil war. Keller is quoted: "It's hard to argue that this war does not fit the generally accepted definition of civil war." The article notes LA Times has been doing so since October and that McClatchy Newspapers, The Christian Science Monitor, the Minneapolis Star Tribune and the Sacremento Bee have called it a civil war. Yesterday, NBC became the first network to officially call it what it was.]
Meanwhile, in Australia, Peter Tinley, former Australian soldier who served in Iraq and declared the illegal war "morally bankrupt," tells ABC's Lateline that Australian forces are maxed out: "I'm not talking about the number of troops on the ground . . . I'm talking about the span of command, the span by which the Defence Force can operate and manage the number of operations."
Can Baghdad be 'managed'? Ned Parker and Ali Hamdani (Times of London) report that
"In the war for Baghdad, mosques serve as garrisons. Sunnis use religious sanctuaries as strongholds to fight for mixed neighbourhoods. Shia extremists covert their mosques and prayer rooms, called husseiniyas, into execution chambers. As Iraq falls apart, people like [Hassan] Mahmoud are now terrified by Baghdad's places of worship, which they regard as potential gulags and gallows in the Sunni-Shiar war."
But the problem? The media. Apparently. As Sandra Lupien reported onn yesterday's The KPFA Evening News, "Iraq's parliament speaker implemented new rules banning reporters from the legislative building and imposed a thirty minute delay on broadcast of sessions This in an apparent bid to hide from the public what are increasingly bitter debates between Shi'ite and Sunni lawmakers." "Freedom" still doesn't include a free press in Iraq.
Bombings?
The BBC reports the deaths of at least four in Baghdad with at least seven wounded as a results of car bombs outside Yarmouk hospital. Reuters raises the wounded from those bombings to 40 and notes a home in Tal Afar which had been "booby-trapped with explosives" and left two police officers wounded while another two police officers were wounded in Mosul from a roadside bomb. Peter Walker (Guardian of London) reports that Kirkuk was the site of an assassination attempt on the governor of the province -- "The attacker, wearing a hidden explosives belt, tried to get inside the governor's car, but when he found the door locked he detonated his explosives, killing one civilian and wounding 17 other people, police said." AP notes three dead from a roadside bomb in Baladrooz (four more were reported wounded). And Reuters reports mortars injured 23 people in Baghdad.
Shootings?
AFP notes the shooting deaths of five in Mahmudiyah and seven people shot dead in Baquba.
Corpses?
Reuters reports thirty-six corpses were discovered in Baghdad.
The US military announced today, "One Marine assigned to 1st Brigade, 1st Armored Division died Nov. 27 from wounds sustained due to enemy action while operating in Al Anbar Province." The announcement comes as Aaron Glantz (OneWorld) reports on "a new study by the Caresey Institute" which finds that "[t]he mortality rate for soldiers from rural America is about 60 percent higher than the mortality rate for soliders from metropolitan areas." Glantz notes that the study finds that those "from rural Vermont have the highest death rate in the nation followed by Delaware, South Dakota, and Arizona."
Andrea Shalal-Esa (Reuters) reports that the United States Air Force says it needs "$33.4 billion in extra funding for fiscal 2007 to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and costs related to the 'longer war on terror'."
Current cost of the illegal war, via counter on Tom Hayden's website, $346,000,000,000.
And all the money going to support the illegal war couldn't be used in a better way, right?
New Orleans?
Kyle Snyder: There are over 20 engineering units, there's more than 20 engineering units in the U.S. military. I was part of an engineering unit. And to see places that look worse than Iraq in my own country makes me sick, it makes me disgusted, that they're not doing any rebuilding effort for the poor, for the African-American community. It's like they just left it there. They're not even cleaning it up. It's a disaster area. It's, logistically, it's the most horrible thing I've seen because we have engineering units in Iraq when they should be here. . . . This should be first priority. . . . Start pulling troops from Iraq and rebuilding in New Orleans.
US war resister Kyle Snyder spent Thanksgiving week by joining with Iraq Veterans Against the War, Col. Ann Wright, war resister Darrell Anderson and others to protest the School of Americas in Georgia and then going to New Orleans with Iraq Veterans Against the War to work on the rebuilding. Video clips are available at Soldier Say No! and the one quoted from is also available at Google Video. Snyder self-checked out of the US military in April of 2005, moved to Canada and then returned to the US and turned himself in at Fort Knox on October 31st, only to self-check out again after discovering the military had lied yet again. Snyder is now underground and on the road.
Also traveling is CODEPINK's Medea Benjamin who was recently in South Korea and spoke with Christopher Brown (OhmyNews International): ". . . the job of the peace movement is going to be not [to] put down its guard, to really be forcing the Congress to carry out what is a mandate for radical change, and the radical change is to bring the troops home, to stop allocating money for this war and to have no permanent bases in Iraq. And I think the issue of more money for the war will come up very soon in January when the new Congress reconvenes because they are going to be asked for over a hundred billion dollars more for this war."
Benjamin and others were in South Korea to support the people objecting to US base being expanded and asking that South Korea's troops be brought home from Iraq. Other activists on the trip included Cindy Sheehan who was interviewed about it by Jennifer Veale (Time magazine). In her latest column (BuzzFlash), Sheehan considers the proposal of returning to the draft and is "100% categorically opposed to forced conscription" and outlines her reasons which include that the draft didn't stop earlier wars, the "draft will never be fair and balanced," and that "a draft will only give the war maching more of our children to consume to generate its wealth."
The peace movement includes Cindy Sheehan (who sparked it back to life), Medea Benjamin, Ann Wright, Diane Wilson, Kyle Snyder, Darrell Anderson, Camilo Mejia, Alice Walker, Aidan Delgado, Pablo Parades, Missy Comley-Beattie, Agustin Aguayo, Stephen Funk, Carl Webb, Stan Goff, David Swanson (who examines war resistance here), . . . and many more (hopefully including you).
Writing for the San Francisco Chronicle, Tom Hayden notes that "the anti-war movement has been a major factor in mobilizing a majority of the American public to oppose the occupation and killing in Iraq" and, noting the failure of media to cover the movement: "the only recourse is to prepare widespread demonstrations and ground organizing in the key presidential primary states, to make it impossible for any candidate to become president in 2008 without pledging to end the war and occupation. If there is no peace movement, there will be no peace."
What would there be instead? More abuses, probably done more openly. On Saturday, Reuters reported Janis Karpinski's statement about the letter "signed by Rumsfeld which allowed civilian contractors to use techniques such as sleep deprivation during interrogation." (Karpinski wrote about that in her book, spoke about it with Amy Goodman and Dennis Bernstein.) We can pair that with The Socialist Worker's report on British major Antony Royce's statements in the court-martial for the abuses of Iraqi prisoners where he testified that he was instructed "by Major Mark Robinson, a brigade intelligence adviser, to 'condition' prisoners. Royce said that he then checked with Major Russel Clifton, the brigade's legal adviser, and was again told that 'conditioning' and hooding were acceptable."
[Pru highlighted the article on Royce.]
Lastly, the Pacifica's Archives is presenting a two-day special: Pacifica Radio Archives Presents Voices For Peace And Non-Violence. It is airing on all Pacifica stations (KPFA, KFCF, KPFT, WBAI, KPFK, WPFW), many affiliates and online. The special started today and pulls from the fifty plus years of archives. (Donations made during this two day period go to preserve the archives.) Among the voices heard today were MLK, Coretta Scott King, Rosa Parks, Camilo Mejia, Lena Horne, Fannie Lou Hamer, Gore Vidal, Kurt Vonnegut, Jane Fonda, and many others.
