Washingtonpost.com: Scaife: Funding Father of the Right

Scaife: Funding Father of the Right

Richard Mellon Scaife
Conservative billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife. (AP)
By Robert G. Kaiser and Ira Chinoy
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, May 2, 1999; Page A1

First of two articles

One August day in 1994, while gossiping about politics over lunch on Nantucket, Richard Mellon Scaife, the Pittsburgh billionaire and patron of conservative causes, made a prediction. "We're going to get Clinton," Joan Bingham, a New York publisher present at the lunch, remembers him saying. "And you'll be much happier," he said to Bingham and another Democrat at the table, "because Al Gore will be president."

Bingham was startled at the time, but in the years since – as Clinton has struggled with an onslaught from political enemies – Scaife's assertion came to seem less and less far-fetched.

Scaife did get involved in numerous anti-Clinton activities. He gave $2.3 million to the American Spectator magazine to dig up dirt on Clinton and supported other conservative groups that harassed the president and his administration. The White House and its allies responded by fingering Scaife as the central figure in "a vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president," as Hillary Rodham Clinton described it. James Carville, Clinton's former campaign aide and rabid defender, called Scaife "the archconservative godfather in [a] heavily funded war against the president."

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know thine enemy........

The Stanford Prison Experiment: A Simulation Study of the Psychology of Imprisonment

John Wayne

Remind anyone else of George Bush?

The prisoners even nicknamed the most macho and brutal guard in our study 'John Wayne.' Later, we learned that the most notorious guard in a Nazi prison near Buchenwald was named 'Tom Mix' -- the John Wayne of an earlier generation -- because of his 'Wild West' cowboy macho image in abusing camp inmates.

Where had our 'John Wayne' learned to become such a guard? How could he and others move so readily into that role? How could intelligent, mentally healthy, 'ordinary' men become perpetrators of evil so quickly? These were questions we were forced to ask."

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A fascinating study and slide presentation. I encourage everyone (and everybody you know) to go back to the beginning and take the time to look at and discuss this slide-show presentation.

Gary Williams

New Proof that Coca-Cola Buys Andean Coca Leaves

-------- Original Message -----
January 28, 2005
Please Distribute Widely

Dear Colleague,

Acting Publisher Luis A. Gómez weighs in today on a statement just released by Peru's drug control agency, the National Commission for Development and Life Without Drugs (shortened in Spanish to DEVIDA). The document supports, although timidly, the industrialization of the coca leaf in Peru, a long-sought goal by many in that country as a way to both legitimize this ancient, sacred plant, and to boost the Peruvian economy.

snipped

The DEVIDA statement contains another bombshell: confirmation that the Coca Cola Company, despite repeated denials, does in fact buy coca leaves from both Peru and Bolivia. While small farmers, and even local Peruvian companies trying to incorporate coca leaves into drinks and other products, face constant state harassment and repression, one of the biggest corporations in the world is buying tons of coca, using it in their drinks and lying about it to the world – getting ever-richer off the sacred plant of the Andes, while the people who grow and maintain it suffer for their labor.

Gómez writes, of the DEVIDA document:

"The good part comes in that same point #5. The end of the paragraph reads: 'Coca Cola, the globally recognized soft drink manufacturer, buys 115 tonnes of coca leaf from Peru and 105 tonnes from Bolivia per year, with which it produces, without alkaloids, 500 million bottles of soda per day.' You read correctly, kind readers, Coca Cola buys coca leaves. We have said so ourselves in past reports, and the Peruvian government says the same thing now. And so now we are sure that the 'spark of life' ('La Chispa de la Vida' is Coke's Spanish-language slogan) has coca – in at least 500 million bottles a day. And that process that Nils Ericsson has told us about helped the company earn 13.3 billion dollars in net profit last year, according to their own financial reports.

Read the full report:

http://www.narconews.com

From somewhere in a country called América,

Dan Feder
Managing Editor, Narco News
http://www.narconews.com
webmaster@narconews.com
Narco News is supported by:

The Fund for Authentic Journalism
P.O. Box 71051
Madison Heights, MI 48071 USA
http://www.authenticjournalism.org

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TomPaine.com - Reining In Cheney

Reining In Cheney
Ray McGovern
January 25, 2005

As long as the Bush administration continues to trot out the bogus claims of Iraq's WMD capacity, we will continue to challenge them. This time, Vice President Dick Cheney is basing his claim that Iran is a threat on Iraq's alleged nuclear capacity before we invaded. McGovern—who spent more than 20 years in the CIA—explains how outraged intelligence analysts are reacting to Cheney's most recent embellishment of the known facts.

Ray McGovern served as a CIA analyst from the administration of John F. Kennedy to that of George H. W. Bush, chairing estimates and briefing the President’s Daily Brief. He is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.

Quick! Anyone! Who can put the brakes on Vice President Dick Cheney before we have another war on our hands? Current and former intelligence analysts are reacting with wonderment and apprehension to his remarks last week in an interview with Don Imus. Cheney made questionable claims about Iran's nuclear program and resuscitated his spinning on why attacking Iraq was the prudent thing to do.

Continued.......

Guantánamo: What the World Should Know

The Inquisition Strikes Back

"And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee."

--John Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, Meditation XVII, 1623

Review by Jules Siegel

Original at

1200 words

Guantánamo: What the World Should Know
By Michael Ratner and Ellen Ray
Chelsea Green Publishing Company
184 pages

We have by now all seen much of this material before, but reading it all in one piece, told by human voices in this book-length interview, is not easy to take. "Guantánamo: What the World Should Know" becomes a heart-stopper once you cross the line and realize that you could be any of these victims.

Michael Ratner, President of the Center for Constitutional Rights, is co-counsel in Rasul v. Bush, the historic case of Guantánamo detainees now before the U.S. Supreme Court. His interviewer, Ellen Ray, is President of the Institute for Media Analysis, and a widely published author and editor on U.S. intelligence and international politics.

It's hard to say which is more disgusting, the descriptions of the torture or the bone-chilling analyses of how the president of the United States gave himself the powers of an absolute military dictator. Under Military Order No. 1, which the president issued without congressional authority on November 13, 2001, George W. Bush has ordered people captured or detained from all over the world, flown to Guantánamo and tortured in a lawless zone where, the White House asserts, prisoners have no rights of any kind at all and can be kept forever at his pleasure. Despite the at-best marginal intervention of the American courts so far, there is no civilian judicial review, no due process of any kind.

Continued.......Original at