Action Items Submitted by Iowa's Peace & Justice Caucus for the 2007 Iowa Delegate Assembly

New Business Items

Iowa Peace & Justice Caucus New Business Item 1: The ISEA calls for the NEA to petition the U.S. government to remove all American troops from Iraq as soon as possible.

RATIONALE:

Our Iraq war has been flawed since its inception, both in its underlying premises and as well as in its execution. Our treatment of some prisoners has been shameful, and our continued presence there further exacerbates an already untenable situation. We cannot continue putting our honorable soldiers at unnecessary risk, creating the conditions which increase, not quell threats of future terrorism, and harming our nation’s ability to serve as a respected leader in the world.

Iowa Peace & Justice Caucus New Item #2: The ISEA calls for the NEA to petition Congress for the repeal of the Military Commissions Act of 2006.

RATIONALE:

This new law eliminates Habeas Corpus for those our government wishes to have “disappear.” They can be arrested, held indefinitely without trial, and treated in any manner the President or his designee determines, even if it violates generally accepted treatment of prisoners.


Iowa Peace & Justice Caucus New Business Item # 3: The ISEA calls for the NEA to lobby Congress to seek an end to American torture of prisoners presently under our government’s control.

RATIONALE:

As one of the signers of the Geneva Convention, the U.S. Government continues to violate prisoner guidelines it once agreed to, and, by its actions, it continues to shame Americans, harms our relations with other nations and puts our nation and military at increased risk for retaliation.

Iowa Peace & Justice Caucus New Business Item # 4: The ISEA calls for the NEA to lobby Congress to completely overhaul the current, fundamentally flawed “No Child Left Behind” version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

RATIONALE:

The basic premises behind NCLB are fallacious. We must have an ESEA that moves beyond a top-down, simplistic accountability framework to a framework based on shared responsibility, trust, equity, and quality teaching and learning, with federal support not control, that empowers youth to thrive in a democratic society and diverse, changing world. We must have an ESEA that tries to help public schools, not hurt them.

LEGISLATIVE PROPOSAL

First Tier, Part I, Adequate Financial Support for Public Education #6.

e. The ISEA supports developing a funding mechanism with a greater reliance on income taxes rather than property taxes and other forms of taxation.

RATIONALE:

The present system of school funding relies heavily on property taxes as a source for funding and gives a tremendous advantage to those school districts already rich in property taxes. The 1971 funding formula was meant to correct that but has not been allowed to operate properly; thus we have a significant disparity in funding from district to district. There must be equity.

Death Watch in the Persian Gulf and Washington

Death Watch in the Persian Gulf and Washington
January 24, 2007

by Dave Lindorff

Watching the slow-motion march to war against Iran is a bit like watching a terminal cancer patient in a hospice. We know how it's going to end. We know it's going to be tragic and ugly. But we are powerless to stop it.

There is a difference of course.

For the cancer patient, there really is no alternative.

For us, there is an alternative to the catastrophe which President Bush and his regent, Dick Cheney, are preparing for us all.

We could rise up as a nation and demand that our elected representatives pass a Boland-type amendment banning any use of the military in Iraq. We could demand that a resolution be passed revoking the 2002 Authorization for Use of Military Force against Iraq. We could demand the revocation of the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force which the president has improperly cited as giving him extra-Constitutional powers. And we could demand that Congress tell the president and vice president that if they attack Iran without explicit congressional authorization they will both be immediately impeached.

The votes could be there for such an action, as even some Republicans are clearly opposed to this insanity, but the courage to call the president's hand and lay down the cards is not.

And so the horrible march to disaster continues.

The cynicism of this administration is beyond belief. We have the supposedly "straight talking" defense secretary Robert Gates telling Congress that there is no plan "at the moment" to attack Iran--even as he sends two aircraft carrier battle groups into the Persian Gulf and stockpiles Patriot anti-missile batteries in the region (of what use are carriers and anti-missile rockets in a counter-insurgency in Iraq?). We have the president authorizing a blatantly illegal and clearly provocative attack on an Iranian consulate in Irbil, Iraq, and violating international law by arresting six people in that raid.

Let's be clear. An attack on Iran, which poses no immediate or imminent threat to the United States, would be the most heinous of international war crimes--a "crime against peace" violating the UN Charter and the Nuremburg Charter. It would also be a strategic disaster that would dwarf even the president's collassal strategic blunder in invading Iraq.

There are no more troops left to fight in Iran, so all the U.S. could hope to do would be to bomb that country. But bombing that country would do nothing to stop Iran from retaliating in myriad ways that could bring the U.S. to its knees.

Take sappers. Iran, which has a sophisticated and well-equipped espionage apparatus, could set out on a campaign of sabatoge, blowing up U.S. chemical plants, petrochemical refining and storage facilities, and power plants. Since these are all known to be on the target list of U.S. bombers in Iran, Iran would be well within its rights retaliating in kind inside U.S. borders. If the U.S. were to follow its usual criminal practice of also attacking Iranian hospitals and other civilian targets, Iranians could and likely would follow suit. I wouldn't be surprised, given how long the administration has been talking about attacking Iran, if its military strategists hadn't already smuggled bombs into place in shipping containers, ready to blow if we attack.

Feeling safer?

Iran has other options too, to hurt us. The Shia militias in Iraq, which have largely ignored U.S. forces unless harassed, are tight with the Iranians, having received shelter and support from Iran during Hussein's brutal rule, and sharing, as they do, a common religion. If Iran comes under attack, it is hard to believe that the Iraqi militias will not turn their substantial firepower on outnumbered US forces in Iraq.

When you think of it, attacking Iran would be a wonderful way of doing what the U.S. claims it has been wanting to do for several years now: uniting the Sunni and Shia forces in Iraq and ending their fratricidal conflict. The only problem is that they will be joining hands the better to attack U.S. troops! How clever this administration is!

And then there's the economic costs of an Iran War. Here Iran really has to do nothing, though it could make things all the worse by using one of its high-tech anti-ship missiles to sink an American naval vessel or even just a civilian tanker in the gulf. Even without such an action, an invasion of Iran would lead to a shutdown of oil coming from the Persian Gulf. That's one quarter of all the oil supplies in the world. Even if Iran never fires a missile, the insurance industry will make it financially impossible for any ship-owner to sail into the gulf.
So forget $80/barrel oil. Crude oil would quickly soar past $100 a barrel, past $160 a barrel, probably. Some analysts have even talked of $200 a barrel. No matter - after $100 a barrel, the world economy would grind to a halt. And the American trade deficit would go through the roof. We're not talking slowdown here - we're talking global depression.

All this is clear.

But it is also clear that the Congress doesn't have the guts and principle to halt this march to madness.

And so we just continue to watch the patient die.

Was the War a 'Bluder" or Was It Treason?

Published on Saturday, January 20, 2007 by CommonDreams.org
Was Iraq War a `Blunder' or Was It Treason?
by Dave Lindorff

New Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco), is calling President Bush's invasion of Iraq a "stark blunder" and says that his new scheme to send 21,500 more troops into the mess he created is just digging the hole deeper.

I wonder though.

It seems ever more likely to me that this whole mess was no blunder at all.

People are wont to attribute the whole thing to lack of intelligence on the president's part, and to hubris on the part of his key advisers. I won't argue that the president is a lightweight in the intellect department, nor will I dispute that Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and that whole neocon gang have demonstrably lacked the virtues of reflection and humility. But that said, I suspect that the real story of the Iraq War is that Bush and his gang never really cared whether they actually would "win" in Iraq. In fact, arguably, they didn't really want to win.

What they wanted was a war.

If the war they started had ended quickly with the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, that would have served their purposes, at least for the short term. Bush would have emerged from a short invasion and conquest a national hero, would have handily won re-election in 2004, and would have gone on to a second term as a landslide victor. But if it went badly, as it has, they figured he would still come out ahead. He would be a wartime president, and he'd make full use of that role, expansively misdefining his "commander in chief" title to imply authority over the Congress and the courts, to grab power heretofore unheard of for a president.

This, I suspect, was the grand strategy underlying the attack on Iraq.

If I'm right, there may have been method to the madness of not building up enough troops for the invasion to insure that U.S. forces could occupy a destroyed Iraq and help it rebuild, method to the madness of allowing looters free sway to destroy the country's remaining post-invasion infrastructure, method to the madness, even, of allowing remnant forces of Hussein's to gather up stockpiles of weapons and even of high-density explosives, so they could mount an effective resistance and drag out the conflict.

So many apparently stupid decisions were made by people who should clearly have been too smart to make them, from leaving hundreds of tons of high explosives unguarded to cashiering all of Iraq's army and most of the country's civil service managers, that it boggles the mind to think that these could have been just dumb ideas or incompetence. (L. Paul Bremer, for instance, who made the "dumb" decision about dismantelling the Iraqi army, prior to becoming Iraq's occupation viceroy, had headed the nation's leading risk assessment consultancy, and surely knew what all the risks were of his various decisions.)

I mean, we expect a measure of idiocy from or elected leaders and their appointees, but not wholesale idiocy!

This disaster has been so colossal, it almost had to have been orchestrated.

If that's the case, Congress should be taking a hard look at not just the latest installment of escalation, but at the whole war project, beginning with the 2002 campaign to get it going. Certainly throwing 21,500 new troops into the fire makes no sense whatever. If 140,000 of the best-equipped troops in the world can't pacify Iraq, 160,000 aren't going to be able to do it either. You don't need to be a general to figure that out. Even a senator or representative ought to be able to do it. So clearly Congress should kill this plan.

Since it's not about "winning" the war, it has to be about something else. My guess would be it's about either dragging things out until the end of 2008, so Bush can leave office without having to say he's sorry. But of course, it could also be about something even more serious: invading Iran.

We know Bush is trying mightily to provoke Iran. He has illegally attacked an Iranian consulate in Iraq (an act of war), taking six protected consular officials there captive. He is sending a second aircraft carrier battle group into the Persian Gulf, and is setting up Patriot anti-missile missile bases along Iran's western border. This buildup has all the earmarks of a pre-invasion. All that's needed now is a pretext--a real or faked attack on an American ship, perhaps, ala the Gulf of Tonkin "incident" that launched America into the Vietnam War.

The way I see it, either way the president is committing treason, because he is sending American troops off to be killed for no good reason other than for aggrandizing power he shouldn¹t have, and/or simply covering his own political ass.

Treason is the number one impeachable crime under the Constitution, and we're at a point where Congress is going to have to act or go down in history as having acquiesced in the worst presidential crime in the history of the nation.

Dave Lindorff is co-author, with Barbara Olshansky, of The Case for Impeachment: The Legal Argument for Removing President George W. Bush from Office (St. Martin's Press, June 2006). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net and Counterpunch.org

A Letter to the Full Congress

Letter to the Full Congress
Reg Weaver, NEA President Reg Weaver

January 8, 2007

Dear Senator/Representative:

The more than 8,000 delegates to the National Education Association's (NEA) annual Representative Assembly have asked NEA to weigh in with the United States Congress on the war in Iraq. NEA, representing 3.2 million educators across the nation, believes Congress and the President should work toward an appropriate exit strategy to bring U.S. troops home from Iraq. In addition, we believe that Congress and the President should ensure that veterans returning from the war have adequate support systems, including employment and educational opportunities and health care.

Educators are deeply concerned about the impact of the war on our nation, particularly on students whose parents have been deployed. In addition, they are concerned that expending billions of dollars on a war for which no specific exit strategy has been designed is draining resources from other priorities, including public education.

Our members' concerns are well-founded. According to the Iraq Study Group report released last month, the situation in Iraq is "grave and deteriorating." The report recommended a radically different approach from current policy, including the withdrawal of most U.S. combat troops by early 2008. We are hopeful that the upcoming Congressional hearings result in a bipartisan strategy that moves us closer to an appropriate exit plan.
We thank you for your consideration of our views on these important issues.

Sincerely,

Reg Weaver,
PresidentNational Education Association

Growing Resistance to "No Child Left Behind"

Growing Resistance to "No Child Left Behind"
by Dr. Monty Neill,
FairTest

The upcoming reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), now named "No Child Left Behind" (NCLB), offers the new Congress an opportunity to repair the worst aspects of the federal law and turn it into a tool for supporting school improvement rather than punishing schools serving our most disadvantaged students. Though NCLB’s serious deficiencies didn’t rise to the top of the list of voters’ concerns in the recent elections (there was a lot of competition!), there has been no shortage of voices in the growing national chorus calling for NCLB reform.

For example, Communities for Quality Education has catalogued efforts in all 50 states to take action to fix NCLB since 2003. Many of these proposals focus on NCLB’s inadequate funding, but others seek substantive revisions or call for a state to opt out of NCLB entirely.

Parents, students and community leaders have spoken about the problems they see at forums around the country, including some sponsored by the Public Education Network. Surveys, such as the annual Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup poll, show that the more people know about NCLB, the more they disapprove of the law. NCLB's prescriptions are rejected by large majorities. In poll after poll, educators overwhelming oppose key NCLB requirements, finding the consequences more harmful than beneficial.

Nearly 100 national education, civil rights and religious groups have endorsed the “Joint Organizational Statement on No Child Left Behind Act” calling for major changes to the law. Many of the signers have also offered detailed proposals to amend the law. Congress should listen carefully to these many critiques and act on their recommendations when it comes time ESEA reauthorization.

Signers of the Joint Statement agree that NCLB's goal of narrowing achievement gaps and improving achievement for all students is a worthy one. But they have seen mounting evidence that its mechanisms for forcing improvement are harming those who most need help. Indeed, FairTest's review of the evidence shows that NCLB is actually undermining efforts to improve schools (documented and analyzed in Failing Our Children).

Key problems with the law include over-emphasizing standardized testing, narrowing curriculum and instruction to focus on test preparation; over-identifying schools in need of improvement; using sanctions that do not help improve schools; inappropriately excluding or retaining in grade low-scoring children to boost test results; and inadequate funding. The law not only punishes schools, it damages educational quality, particularly for those the law purports to help – low income children, children of color, those with learning disabilities, and those who are just learning English.

What is a better roles for the federal government to play in improving education, particularly for low-income and minority-group children? The Joint Statement concludes, "Overall, the law’s emphasis needs to shift from applying sanctions for failing to raise test scores to holding states and localities accountable for making the systemic changes that improve student achievement."

In future posts I will present concrete proposals for overhauling the federal law, based on the Joint Statement. For now, I will close with five guiding principles from a recent FairTest article in Rethinking Schools:

First, the goal should be high-quality teaching and learning to benefit the whole child, not drill-and-kill to artificially inflate scores on mostly multiple-choice tests in a few subjects.

Second, a new law should focus on the capacity of schools to improve, including adequate resources, professional development, and stronger parental involvement.

Third, any accountability structure must use multiple forms of evidence, not just scores on standardized tests, as the basis for making decisions.

Fourth, sanctions must be a last resort and tailored to meet specific problems, not arbitrary actions using one-size-fits-all formulas. They should also be designed to build capacity for improvement, not punish schools and districts.

Fifth, the new law should effectively empower educators, parents, and communities to work together collaboratively, rather than move responsibility ever further from local decision-making. It should also include equity and civil rights protections to ensure that local empowerment does not allow majorities the power to ignore low-income, racial minority, English-language learning, or disabled children.


Deja-vu All Over Again: National Test Plan Resurfaces
Thursday, January 25, 2007 5:38 PM


Many have observed that the farther you travel from the classroom, the stronger the support for No Child Left Behind becomes. Still, it is disheartening to see new policy proposals from on high that are more likely to worsen than solve NCLB’s many flaws. The latest example is a resurrected campaign for a national exam. Proponents cite discrepancies between state test results and the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) as evidence that such a test is now needed more than ever. Similar proposals have previously been soundly defeated, and some pundits think the idea will gain little traction beyond a limited set of policy elites. Proponents, however, brim with confidence, calling such policies “inevitable.”




As with NCLB, the lack of evidence that a national exam based on national standards will help improve schools does not dampen political enthusiasm for these quick fixes. Like NCLB, a national test would be costly and irrelevant to many real educational needs and distract attention from developing real solutions -- such as high-quality professional development to help teachers create and use high-quality classroom assessments. And like NCLB, they perpetuate the illusion that education can be improved if only there is a "good test" to define educational outcomes and control curriculum and instruction.

Leading the charge, former U.S. Education Secretaries Rod Paige and William J. Bennett co-wrote a Washington Post commentary in the fall titled “Why We Need a National School Test.” They argued that NCLB is not working because “most states have deployed mediocre standards, and there's increasing evidence that some are playing games with their tests and accountability systems.”

While plugging pet theories such as school choice and the notion that more money does not improve education (at least for public schools), they argue that the only way to make NCLB work is for federal officials to impose a consistent standard via a national exam, publicize all results down to the school level, then “butt out.”

These arguments may sound familiar. In fact, they rehash previous efforts to implement a national test. President George H.W. Bush proposed such an exam, which was defeated in Congress primarily by Democrats. (FairTest played a key role in marshaling education and civil rights groups to block that scheme.) President Bill Clinton's administration began to use general Education Department appropriations to develop a national exam, until Congress barred anything more than item development. That prohibition was initiated by a coalition of conservative Republicans and African American and Latino Democrats.

The right-wing Fordham Foundation, headed by former Education Department officials Chester "Checker” Finn and Michael Petrilli, has been a major supporter of NCLB (despite some recent reservations) and is on board the latest bandwagon. Fordham released a report in August entitled To Dream the Impossible Dream: Four Approaches to National Standards and Tests for America's Schools. The four possibilities:

1. Mandatory federal standards and assessments to replace the state-by-state system.

2. A voluntary version with federal incentives to states (e.g., more money, fewer regulations) to opt into such a system.

3. Federal incentives for groups of states to collaborate on developing common standards and tests.

4. More “transparent” state standards and tests, made easier to compare to one another and to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).

But conservatives are not alone in the new push. In January, liberal Senator and NCLB loyalist Ted Kennedy (D-MA), who chairs the Senate's education committee, introduced a bill encouraging states to peg their proficiency levels to those on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). He proposes that NAEP would be updated to set "a national benchmark that is internationally competitive."

Meanwhile, Sen. Chris Dodd (R-CT), the second-ranking Democrat on the education committee and now a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, joined with Rep. Vernon J. Ehlers, (R-MI), in proposing legislation to reward states that adopt voluntary "American education content standards." The National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees NAEP, would supervise development of the standards. To obtain the awards, a state's test would have to be aligned with the standards. A common test probably would follow.

Treating the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) as the gold standard, would be a terrible mistake. First, like state tests, NAEP exams are only limited measures of what students ought to be learning. Second, researchers from the National Academy of Sciences and the Government Accountability Office, among many others, have found the NAEP levels ("proficient," etc.) to be flawed and inappropriately difficult. Third, only a minority of students in the highest-scoring nations would reach "proficient" on NAEP. Would everyone else – and their schools – fail? What then?

Rather than set things right, making NAEP the national standard would likely exacerbate NCLB’s negative consequences, bringing even more teaching to the test and less hope of offering all students, whether advantaged or not, a education that addresses the needs of the whole child.
- For more information, see FairTest’s fact sheet on national testing at www.fairtest.org/facts/ntfact.htm

- At press time, Kennedy's legislation, S. 164, was not available through Congress; his press statement about the bill is at kennedy.senate.gov/newsroom/press_release.cfm?id=62ced8ab-9b4a-4c04-9f6db46b8a3026d1

- Similarly, Dodd's presentation about his bill S.224 is at http://dodd.senate.gov/index.php?q=node/3699

- When printed, the bills will be posted at thomas.loc.gov/home/thomas.html.

- Monty Neill is Executive Director of FairTest http://www.fairtest.org/. A earlier version of this article appeared in the January 2007 FairTest Examiner (available via email for free, from the website).

NEA Joins Major Labor and Civil Rights Groups to Support Local School Districts

Supreme Court Hears Arguments
in School Desegregation Cases

NEA joins major labor and civil rights
groups to support local school districts

WASHINGTON—The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments today on whether school districts should be able to use tailored policies to ensure equitable, diverse enrollment and desegregate local schools. The National Education Association and leading labor and civil rights organizations have supported the policies of the two school districts in question, saying the modest measures are one part of fulfilling the promise of Brown v. Board of Education .

“These districts saw schools re-segregating and knew that separation in education can never be equal,” said Reg Weaver, NEA president. “They made the decision to use modest, narrowly tailored policies to protect the right of every child to a quality public education. They’ve had the support of their local communities, and their plans have been successful. These school districts are models for how to achieve more equitable and diverse schools.”

The cases involve constitutional challenges to voluntary, race-conscious student assignment plans adopted by the Seattle School District and the Jefferson County Board of Education in Kentucky. They will likely be decided by June of 2007 in what will be the most significant Supreme Court decision in years on the role of race in education.

A host of other organizations, including the AFL-CIO, People for the American Way, American Federation of Teachers and 43 NEA state affiliates, signed on to NEA’s amicus brief in support of the schools.

The Seattle policy allows students to attend the schools of their choice and uses race as one of several tiebreakers for popular schools if it helps bring the schools closer to the district’s average racial composition. A similar program at issue in the Kentucky case aims to keep the Black student population between 15 and 50 percent of the total population at most schools. About 35 percent of the 97,000 students in the district are Black. In 2004, the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University called Kentucky schools among the most integrated in the nation.

In its brief, NEA urges the court to uphold the value of diversity in education, which a substantial body of research has shown actually improves the quality of education for all students. “Interactions among students of different races—with different vantage points, skills, and values—are of great consequence not only to the students’ development as citizens in a multiracial, democratic society, but also to their intellectual development,” the brief says. “The impact of encountering and dealing with racial diversity as part of their education is positively linked to growth in cognitive and academic skills of both racial minority and white students. These educational benefits are realized not only while children are in school, but in their subsequent lives as well.”

In the Supreme Court’s 2003 decisions in Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger , two cases involving challenges to the University of Michigan’s student admission plans, Justice O’Connor made similar points. She said diversity better prepares students to be successful and the benefits of diversity are “not theoretical, but real.”

“There’s no quick fix legal or legislative measure to ensure diversity, close the achievement gaps between students and wipe out a long history of discrimination in education,” Weaver said. “These policies are one part of a solution that must also include adequate and equitable funding, qualified teachers and professional respect to get the job done.”


A copy of NEA's complete amicus brief is available online (PDF, 209KB, 45 pages ).


The National Education Association is the nation's largest professional employee organization, representing 3.2 million elementary and secondary teachers, higher education faculty, education support professionals, school administrators, retired educators and students preparing to become teachers.

When Votes Disappear

by PAUL KRUGMAN

November 24, 2006

You know what really had me terrified on Nov. 7? The all-too-real possibility of a highly suspect result. What would we have done if the Republicans had held on to the House by a narrow margin, but circumstantial evidence strongly suggested that a combination of vote suppression and defective - or rigged - electronic voting machines made the difference?

Skip to next paragraph...

Fortunately, it wasn't a close election. But the fact that our electoral system worked well enough to register an overwhelming Democratic landslide doesn't mean that things are O.K. There were many problems with voting in this election - and in at least one Congressional race, the evidence strongly suggests that paperless voting machines failed to count thousands of votes, and that the disappearance of these votes delivered the race to the wrong candidate.

Here's the background: Florida's 13th Congressional District is currently represented by Katherine Harris, who as Florida's secretary of state during the 2000 recount famously acted as a partisan Republican rather than a fair referee. This year Ms. Harris didn't run for re-election, making an unsuccessful bid for the Senate instead. But according to the official vote count, the Republicans held on to her seat, with Vern Buchanan, the G.O.P.candidate, narrowly defeating Christine Jennings, the Democrat.

The problem is that the official vote count isn't credible. In much of the13th District, the voting pattern looks normal. But in Sarasota County,which used touch-screen voting machines made by Election Systems and Software, almost 18,000 voters - nearly 15 percent of those who cast ballots using the machines - supposedly failed to vote for either candidate in the hotly contested Congressional race. That compares with under vote rates ranging from 2.2 to 5.3 percent in neighboring counties.

Reporting by The Herald-Tribune of Sarasota, which interviewed hundreds of voters who called the paper to report problems at the polls, strongly suggests that the huge apparent under vote was caused by bugs in the ES&S software.

About a third of those interviewed by the paper reported that they couldn't even find the Congressional race on the screen. This could conceivably have been the result of bad ballot design, but many of them insisted that they looked hard for the race. Moreover, more than 60 percent of those interviewed by The Herald-Tribune reported that they did cast a vote in the Congressional race - but that this vote didn't show up on the ballot summary page they were shown at the end of the voting process. If there were bugs in the software, the odds are that they threw the election to the wrong candidate. An Orlando Sentinel examination of other votes cast by those who supposedly failed to cast a vote in the Congressional race shows that they strongly favored Democrats, and Mr.Buchanan won the official count by only 369 votes. The fact that Mr.Buchanan won a recount - that is, a recount of the votes the machines happened to record - means nothing.

Although state officials have certified Mr. Buchanan as the victor, they've promised an audit of the voting machines. But don't get your hopes up: as in2000, state election officials aren't even trying to look impartial.

To oversee the audit, the state has chosen as its "independent" expert Prof. Alec Yasinsac of Florida State University - a Republican partisan who made an appearance on the steps of the Florida Supreme Court during the 2000 recount battle wearing a "Bush Won" sign.

Ms. Jennings has now filed suit with the same court, demanding a new election. She deserves one. But for the nation as a whole, the important thing isn't who gets seated to represent Florida's 13th District. It's whether the voting disaster there leads to legislation requiring voter verification and a paper trail.

And I have to say that the omens aren't good. I've been shocked at how little national attention the mess in Sarasota has received. Here we have as clear a demonstration as we're ever likely to see that warnings from computer scientists about the dangers of paperless electronic voting are valid - and most Americans probably haven't even heard about it.

As far as I can tell, the reason Florida-13 hasn't become a major national story is that neither control of Congress nor control of the White House is on the line. But do we have to wait for a constitutional crisis to realize that we're in danger of becoming a digital-age banana republic?

After Pat's Birthday: A Soldier Speaks Out from Iraq

After Pat’s Birthday
Posted on Oct 19, 2006
By Kevin Tillman

Editor’s note: Kevin Tillman joined the Army with his brother Pat in 2002, and they served together in Iraq and Afghanistan. Pat was killed in Afghanistan on April 22, 2004. Kevin, who was discharged in 2005, has written a powerful, must-read document.

It is Pat’s birthday on November 6, and elections are the day after. It gets me thinking about a conversation I had with Pat before we joined the military. He spoke about the risks with signing the papers. How once we committed, we were at the mercy of the American leadership and the American people. How we could be thrown in a direction not of our volition. How fighting as a soldier would leave us without a voice… until we got out.

Much has happened since we handed over our voice:
Somehow we were sent to invade a nation because it was a direct threat to the American people, or to the world, or harbored terrorists, or was involved in the September 11 attacks, or received weapons-grade uranium from Niger, or had mobile weapons labs, or WMD, or had a need to be liberated, or we needed to establish a democracy, or stop an insurgency, or stop a civil war we created that can’t be called a civil war even though it is. Something like that.

Somehow America has become a country that projects everything that it is not and condemns everything that it is.

Somehow our elected leaders were subverting international law and humanity by setting up secret prisons around the world, secretly kidnapping people, secretly holding them indefinitely, secretly not charging them with anything, secretly torturing them. Somehow that overt policy of torture became the fault of a few “bad apples” in the military.

Somehow back at home, support for the soldiers meant having a five-year-old kindergartner scribble a picture with crayons and send it overseas, or slapping stickers on cars, or lobbying Congress for an extra pad in a helmet. It’s interesting that a soldier on his third or fourth tour should care about a drawing from a five-year-old; or a faded sticker on a car as his friends die around him; or an extra pad in a helmet, as if it will protect him when an IED throws his vehicle 50 feet into the air as his body comes apart and his skin melts to the seat.

Somehow the more soldiers that die, the more legitimate the illegal invasion becomes.

Somehow American leadership, whose only credit is lying to its people and illegally invading a nation, has been allowed to steal the courage, virtue and honor of its soldiers on the ground.

Somehow those afraid to fight an illegal invasion decades ago are allowed to send soldiers to die for an illegal invasion they started.

Somehow faking character, virtue and strength is tolerated.

Somehow profiting from tragedy and horror is tolerated.

Somehow the death of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people is tolerated.

Somehow subversion of the Bill of Rights and The Constitution is tolerated.

Somehow suspension of Habeas Corpus is supposed to keep this country safe.

Somehow torture is tolerated.

Somehow lying is tolerated.

Somehow reason is being discarded for faith, dogma, and nonsense.

Somehow American leadership managed to create a more dangerous world.

Somehow a narrative is more important than reality.

Somehow America has become a country that projects everything that it is not and condemns everything that it is.

Somehow the most reasonable, trusted and respected country in the world has become one of the most irrational, belligerent, feared, and distrusted countries in the world.

Somehow being politically informed, diligent, and skeptical has been replaced by apathy through active ignorance.

Somehow the same incompetent, narcissistic, virtue less, vacuous, malicious criminals are still in charge of this country.

Somehow this is tolerated.

Somehow nobody is accountable for this.

In a democracy, the policy of the leaders is the policy of the people. So don’t be shocked when our grand kids bury much of this generation as traitors to the nation, to the world and to humanity. Most likely, they will come to know that “somehow” was nurtured by fear, insecurity and indifference, leaving the country vulnerable to unchecked, unchallenged parasites.

Luckily this country is still a democracy. People still have a voice. People still can take action. It can start after Pat’s birthday.

Brother and Friend of Pat Tillman,

Kevin Tillman

Pentagon Surveillance of Peace Activists

Documents Shed New Light on Pentagon Surveillance of Peace Activists (10/12/2006)

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: media@aclu.org

Defense Department Tracked Quakers, Student Groups

NEW YORK -- Documents released today by the American Civil Liberties Union reveal new details of Pentagon surveillance of Americans opposed to the Iraq war, including Quakers and student groups. The documents show that the Pentagon was keeping tabs on non-violent protesters by collecting information and storing it in a military anti-terrorism database.

"There is simply no reason why the United States military should be monitoring the peaceful activities of American citizens who oppose U.S. war policies," said ACLU attorney Ben Wizner. "When information about non-violent protest activity is included in a military anti-terrorism database, all Americans should be concerned about the unchecked authority this administration has seized in the name of fighting terrorism."

The documents come in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the ACLU earlier this year after evidence surfaced that the Pentagon was secretly conducting surveillance of protest activities, anti-war organizations and groups opposed to military recruitment policies. The Pentagon shared the information with other government agencies through the Threat and Local Observation Notice (TALON) database.

The TALON database was intended to track groups or individuals with links to terrorism, but the documents released today show that the Pentagon gathered information on anti-war protesters using sources from the Department of Homeland Security, local police departments and FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces.

Among the documents are reports on protest activities across the country organized or supported by the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), a Quaker peace group. The source for the information is identified as "a special agent of the federal protective service, U.S. Department of Homeland Security," who is apparently on the AFSC e-mail list.

One document, which is labeled "potential terrorist activity," lists events such as a "Stop the War NOW!" rally in Akron, Ohio on March 19, 2005. The source noted that the rally "will have a March and Reading of Names of War Dead" and that marchers would pass a military recruitment station and the local FBI office along the way.

Also included in the documents is information on a series of protests mistakenly identified as taking place in Springfield, Illinois (the protests actually occurred in Springfield, Massachusetts). According to the document, "Source received an e-mail from the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), e-mail address: [REDACTED] that stated that on March 18-20, a series of protest actions were planned in the Springfield, IL area… to focus on actions at military recruitment offices with the goals to include: raising awareness, education, visibility in community, visibility to recruiters as part of a national day of action."

"Spying on citizens for merely executing their constitutional rights of free speech and peaceful assembly is chilling and marks a troubling trend," said Joyce Miller, AFSC Assistant General Secretary for Justice and Human Rights. "Our country is built upon a system of checks and balances. The Pentagon’s actions violate the rule of law and strike a severe blow against our Constitution."

Another document provides further details of surveillance of a protest planned by the Broward Anti-War Coalition during the Fort Lauderdale Air & Sea Show, which was previously revealed in an NBC news report. The document released today reveals that the Miami-Dade Police Department provided the Defense Department with information on the protest, and that the U.S. Army Recruiting Command and the Joint Terrorism Task Force in Miami were also briefed on the planned protest, which was intended to "counter military recruitment and the ‘pro-war’ message with ‘guerrilla theater and other forms of subversive propaganda.’"

The ACLU said it is concerned that the Defense Department cites acts of civil disobedience and vandalism as cause to label anti-war protests as "radical" and potential terrorist threats in some of the TALON reports. In a document listing upcoming Atlanta area protests by the Georgia Peace and Justice Coalition, the Pentagon - citing the Department of Homeland Security as its source - states that the Students for Peace and Justice network poses a threat to DOD personnel.

To support that claim, the TALON report cites previous acts of civil disobedience in California and Texas, including sit-ins, disruptions at recruitment offices and street theater. Describing one protest in Austin, Texas, the document notes: "The protesters blocked the entrance to the recruitment office with two coffins, one draped with an American flag and the other covered with an Iraqi flag, taped posters on the window of the office and chanted, ‘No more war and occupation. You don’t have to die for an education.’"

"The Pentagon has gone too far in collecting information on Americans who pose no real threat to national security," said Wizner. "It is an abuse of power and an abuse of trust for the military to play any role in monitoring critics of administration policies."

The documents released today are online at:
www.aclu.org/safefree/spying/27047lgl20060828.html (Florida protests)
www.aclu.org/safefree/spying/27046lgl20060912.html (Georgia, California and Texas protests)
www.aclu.org/safefree/spying/27045lgl20060912.html (AFSC protests in Massachusetts and Ohio)

More information on government surveillance of Americans is online at: www.aclu.org/spyfiles.

Paul W. Mann

Paul W. Mann, Obituary
September 29, 2006

Take a moment to view this short piece that we've
dedicated to our dear friend Paul.

Paul W Mann died suddenly Friday, September 29, 2006 at Iowa Methodist Medical Center. He graduated from East Monona High School in 1965. Paul earned his BS in Education at Central Missouri State University in 1969 and a Masters of Public Administration from Drake in 1981.

Paul taught in the Des Moines Public Schools from 1969 until present. He had been a social science and English teacher, a School Within a School Work Advisor, In-School Suspension Advisor, and currently was a world civilization and government teacher at Central Academy. He had served as President of the Des Moines Education Association (8 years), National Co-Chair of the NEA Peace and Justice Caucus, NCUEA Midwest Regional Director, NEA and ISEA Resolutions Committees, NEA Congressional Contact Team, and ISEA PAC Vice President. He also served as a member of the DSM Teacher Retirement System Advisory Board. Paul was a delegate for the NEA Representative Assembly for the past 30 years. He currently served on the DMEA and ISEA Executive Boards. Paul was a national delegate to the National Democratic Conventions (1976 - 1984). He was also a member of the Iowa Democratic Party Central Committee and was active in the Democratic Party.

"...Did you ever know that you're OUR hero..."

In 1977, Paul accepted President Carter's invitation to attend his White House Reception following his 1977 Inaugural Address (and Paul played Peter Gunn on the piano in the White House)! In 1980, Paul attended a White House Briefing on Strategic Arms Limitation Talks by US Secretary of Defense, Zbigniew Bryzezinski. In 1981, Paul was one of 2 people nominated by Drake University to be a US Presidential Management Intern. In 1989, he received the DMEA Ruth Foster Award.

Paul worked tirelessly to improve conditions for students and educators alike. Paul dedicated his knowledge and leadership to Des Moines Public Schools for 37 years. He was an effective, creative, caring, fun loving, and enthusiastic teacher.

Whatever Paul pursued, he did with passion and joy which is evident by his love of spending time with his family and numerous friends, helping others, creating simulations for his classes, traveling, astronomy, archeology, geology, history, politics, canoeing, multiple personal collections, biking, bocce ball, soccer, RAGBRAI, woodworking, puzzles, animals, singing and music.

We will miss you at the microphone sir... I think that our assembly will be quiet in your absence. That is why we will celebrate you...and why we will miss you.

Memorials may be made to the Paul W. Mann Peace and Justice Fund or the Paul W. Mann Memorial Fund.