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BAGHDAD — When Iraqi deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz described the box that Washington has meticulously constructed for Iraq, he put it this way: “Doomed if you do, doomed if you don’t.”

It would be difficult to argue the point with Aziz, and I didn’t try. Instead, during a Sept. 14 meeting here in Baghdad, I joined with others in a small American delegation who argued that the ominous dynamics of recent weeks might be reversable if — as a first step — Iraq agreed to allow unrestricted inspections.

Despite Iraq\’s breakthrough decision that came two days later to do just that, I\’ll be leaving Baghdad tonight with a scarcely mitigated sense of gloom. While the news from the Iraqi capital has been positive in recent days, the profuse signs of renewed acquiescence to war among top Democrats on Capitol Hill are all the more repulsive.

Boxed in, the Iraqi government opted to accept arms inspectors as its least bad choice. Gauging the odds of averting war, Iraq chose a long shot — appreciably better than no chance at all, but bringing its own risks. Several years ago, Washington used UNSCOM inspectors for espionage totally unrelated to the U.N. team’s authorized mission. This fall, new squads of inspectors poking around the country could furnish valuable data to the United States, heightening the effectiveness of a subsequent military attack.

Aziz, a very analytical man, hardly seemed eager to grasp at weapons inspections as a way to stave off attack. Instead, he told our delegation — which included Rep. Nick Rahall (D-W.Va.) and former Sen. James Abourezk — that a comprehensive “formula\” would be needed for a long-term solution.

Presumably the formula would include a U.S. pledge of non-aggression and a lifting of sanctions. No such formula is in sight. Instead, the White House remains determined to inflict a horrendous war. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party\’s \”leadership\” in the Senate, pursuing some sort of craven political calculus, is lining up to put vast quantities of blood on its hands.

I would like to take Tom Daschle to visit a 7-year-old girl, suffering from leukemia, who I saw in a Baghdad hospital a few days ago. He might spare a few senatorial moments to look at the I.V. connected to her wrist, the uncontrolled bleeding from her lips, the anguish in the dark eyes of her mother, seated on a bare mattress. Years of sanctions, championed by moralizers in Washington, have left Iraq without adequate chemotherapy drugs.

Now we\’re hearing about a resolution that — unless people across the United States mobilize in opposition — will sail through the House and Senate to authorize a massive U.S. military attack on Iraq.

I can hear the raspy and prophetic voice of Sen. Wayne Morse, who voted against the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, roaring 38 years ago: \”I don\’t know why we think, just because we\’re mighty, that we have the right to try to substitute might for right.\”

After leaving Tariq Aziz\’s office, our delegation met with Sa\’doun Hammadi, speaker of Iraq’s National Assembly. “We are now a country facing the threat of war,” he said. “We have to prepare for that.”

Hammadi is an elderly man. While he\’s now in frail physical health, his mind and articulation remain acute. If the U.S. invaders come, Hammadi said, “the Iraqi people will fight.” As those words settled in the air, the gaunt old man paused and then added: “I will fight.” And for a moment I thought that I could see the dimming of light in his eyes, like embers in a dying fire.

During the current heavy dance of death, the U.S. government leads with every major step. And the sky over Baghdad seems to foreshadow new horrors; unfathomable and avoidable.

With an all-out war on Iraq shadowing the near horizon, what are Americans to do if they want to prevent such carnage from happening in their names with their tax dollars? For one thing, they — we — can speak up. Now. The fact that the odds are dire should spur us into creative action, not anesthetize us into further passivity. “And henceforth,” Albert Camus wrote, “the only honorable course will be to stake everything on a formidable gamble: that words are more powerful than munitions.”

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Norman Solomon is executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy (www.accuracy.org), which sponsored the U.S. delegation to Baghdad in mid-September.

As we weigh an attack on Iraq, we need someone like the Vietnam era\’s Wayne Morse.

As prominent senators consider the wisdom of making war on Iraq, truly independent thinking seems to stop at the water\’s edge. But I keep recalling a very different scene: On Feb. 27, 1968, I sat in a small room on Capitol Hill. Around a long table, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was in session, taking testimony from an administration official. I remember a man with a push-broom mustache and a voice like sandpaper, raspy and urgent.

Wayne Morse, the senior senator from Oregon, did not resort to euphemism. He spoke of the \”tyranny that American boys are being killed in South Vietnam to maintain in power.\” Moments before the hearing adjourned, Morse said he did not \”intend to put the blood of this war on my hands.\”

It\’s hard to imagine the late senator going along with claims today that the U.S. government has a right to attack Iraq because of the doctrine of \”anticipatory self-defense.\”

A fierce advocate of international law, Morse had no patience for double standards. In 1964 he told a national TV audience: \”I don\’t know why we think, just because we\’re mighty, that we have the right to try to substitute might for right. And that\’s the American policy in Southeast Asia–just as unsound when we do it as when Russia does it.\”

Nor was Morse at all tolerant of pronouncements about the necessity of saving face. He bristled at the kind of logic advanced the other day by a top Pentagon advisor, James R. Schlesinger, who asserted that \”given all we have said as a leading world power about the necessity of regime change in Iraq … our credibility would be badly damaged if that regime change did not take place.\”

Members of Congress are apt to focus on the efficacy of taking military action, the hazards of getting bogged down, the need for a clear exit strategy. But such discussions did not preoccupy Morse. He directly challenged the morality–not just the \”winnability\”–of the war in Vietnam. And from the outset he insisted that democracy requires substantial public knowledge and real congressional oversight rather than acquiescence to presidential manipulation.

Appearing on the CBS program \”Face the Nation,\” Morse objected when journalist Peter Lisagor said, \”Senator, the Constitution gives to the president of the United States the sole responsibility for the conduct of foreign policy.\” The senator responded sharply: \”Couldn\’t be more wrong. You couldn\’t make a more unsound legal statement than the one you have just made. This is the promulgation of an old fallacy that foreign policy belongs to the president of the United States. That\’s nonsense.\”

When Lisagor prodded him (\”To whom does it belong then, senator?\”), Morse did not miss a beat: \”It belongs to the American people…. And I am pleading that the American people be given the facts about foreign policy.\”

When his questioner persisted–\”You know, senator, that the American people cannot formulate and execute foreign policy\”–Morse became indignant. \”Why do you say that?\” he demanded. \”I have complete faith in the ability of the American people to follow the facts if you\’ll give them. And my charge against my government is, we\’re not giving the American people the facts.\”

Today there are ample reasons for similar concerns.

During the early years of the Vietnam War, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee functioned as a crucial venue for dissenting perspectives, but in its current incarnation the panel is notably less independent. The witness list for this week\’s hearings about Iraq prompted Scott Ritter, an ex-Marine and former U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq, to charge that Chairman Joseph Biden (D-Del.) and most of the congressional leadership \”have preordained a conclusion that seeks to remove Saddam Hussein from power regardless of the facts and are using these hearings to provide political cover for a massive military attack on Iraq.\”

Transfixed with tactical issues, none of the senators on television in recent days would dream of acknowledging the current relevance of a statement made by Morse a third of a century ago: \”We\’re going to become guilty, in my judgment, of being the greatest threat to the peace of the world. It\’s an ugly reality, and we Americans don\’t like to face up to it.\”

With war and peace hanging in the balance, I miss Wayne Morse. He insisted on asking tough questions. He fully utilized a keen intellect. And he spoke fearlessly from the heart without worrying about the political consequences.

The nation\’s Fourth Estate is functioning largely as a fourth branch of government.

In the wake of September 11, the White House has repeatedly sent news executives and working journalists an unsubtle message: Exercise too much independence and you\’ll risk accusations of giving aid and comfort to the terrorist enemy. While a few American journalists made feisty noises during the first tumultuous weeks of autumn, for the most part they eagerly went along to get along with the war-makers.

Breaking new ground in news management, the Bush administration has indicated that it foresees a war without end. So we should understand that what\’s underway amounts to far more than temporary incursions on the First Amendment.

This fall, the news media of the United States have been sliding down a long-term slippery slope. Television networks in particular are running scared — accelerating their already appreciable zeal to serve the propaganda agendas of top officials in Washington.

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The day before George W. Bush became president, a CNN anchor interviewed the incoming White House chief of staff and then bade him farewell. \”All right, Andy Card,\” said Judy Woodruff, \”we look forward to working with you, to covering your administration.\”

If major news outlets were committed to independent journalism, Woodruff\’s statement on national television January 19 would have caused quite a media stir. But it was just another sign of media coziness with power brokers in Washington. Leading journalists and spinners in high places are accustomed to mutual reliance. That\’s good for the professional advancement of all concerned. But the public\’s right to know is another matter.

\”The first fact of American journalism is its overwhelming dependence on sources, mostly official, usually powerful,\” Walter Karp pointed out in Harper\’s Magazine a dozen years ago. Since then, the problem has grown even more acute. A multitude of journalists advance their careers by (in Woodruff\’s words) \”working with\” movers and shakers in government.

Behind the scenes, the tacit deals amount to quid pro quos. Officials dispense leaks to reporters with track records of proven willingness to stay within bounds. \”It is a bitter irony of source journalism,\” Karp observed, \”that the most esteemed journalists are precisely the most servile. For it is by making themselves useful to the powerful that they gain access to the \’best\’ sources.\” While some fine journalism, assertive and carefully researched, gets into print and onto airwaves every day, the islands of such reporting are drowned in oceans of glorified leaks and institutional handouts.

On the surface, concerns about scant separation of press and state might seem to be misplaced. After all, don\’t we see network correspondents firing tough questions at politicians? Isn\’t the press filled with criticism of policymakers? Yet we\’re encouraged to confuse partisan wrangles and tactical disputes with wide-ranging debate and free flow of information. To a great extent, mainstream media outlets provide big megaphones for those who already have plenty of clout. That suits wealthy owners, large advertisers and government officials. But what about democracy?

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In early May of 1991, two months after the Gulf War ended, the Washington editors for 15 major American news organizations sent a letter of complaint to then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney. They charged that the Pentagon had exerted \”virtually total control\” over coverage of the war. The letter represented completion of a ritual for American media coverage of U.S. military actions: News outlets routinely engage in self-censorship and sometimes grouse — especially after the fact — that the government has imposed too many restrictions on the press.

This fall, scant objections came from big media institutions or high-profile journalists when the Defense Department made clear its intentions to place severe limits on war-related information. \”The press policies in the war on terrorism are looking a lot like the Gulf War policies established by Bush\’s father, Dick Cheney and Colin Powell,\” said University of Iowa journalism professor Jeffrey A. Smith, a scholar on wartime news coverage. \”There is denial of access. The press pools have not been activated. The press briefings have been few and inadequate.\”

Rather than balk at such signals of news management, many in network news operations seemed to welcome them. Dan Rather drew a lot of media comment for breaking into sobs during his September 17 appearance on David Letterman\’s show, but the CBS news anchor didn\’t get much flak for his pledge of loyalty. \”George Bush is the president,\” Rather said, \”he makes the decisions.\” Speaking as \”one American,\” the newsman added: \”Wherever he wants me to line up, just tell me where. And he\’ll make the call.\”

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With the overwhelming bulk of news organizations already serving as amplification systems for Washington\’s warriors in times of crisis, the White House found itself in a strong position to retool and oil the machinery of domestic propaganda after September 11. When confronted with claims about \”coded messages\” that Osama bin Laden and his henchmen might be sending via taped statements — as though other means like the Internet did not exist — TV network executives fell right into line.

Tapes of Al Qaeda leaders provided a useful wedge for the administration to hammer away at the wisdom of (government-assisted) self-censorship. Network execs from ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox and CNN were deferential in an October 10 conference call with Condoleezza Rice. The conversation was \”very collegial,\” Ari Fleischer told the White House press corps. The result was an agreement, the New York Times reported, to \”abridge any future videotaped statements from Osama bin Laden or his followers to remove language the government considers inflammatory.\” It was, the Times added, \”the first time in memory that the networks had agreed to a joint arrangement to limit their prospective news coverage.\”

News Corp. magnate Rupert Murdoch, speaking for Fox, promised: \”We\’ll do whatever is our patriotic duty.\” CNN, owned by the world\’s largest media conglomerate AOL Time Warner, was eager to present itself as a team player: \”In deciding what to air, CNN will consider guidance from appropriate authorities.\”

\”Guidance\” from the \”appropriate authorities\” is exactly what the president\’s strategists had in mind — brandishing a club without quite needing to swing it. As longtime White House reporter Helen Thomas noted in a column, \”To most people, a \’request\’ to the television networks from the White House in wartime carries with it the weight of a government command. The major networks obviously saw it that way…\” The country\’s TV news behemoths snapped to attention and saluted the commander in chief. \”I think they gave away a precedent, in effect,\” said James Naughton, president of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies. \”And now it\’s going to be hard for them not to do whatever else the government asks.\”

Ostensibly concerned about coded messages, administration spinmeisters were after much more sweeping leverage over all types of mainstream media. The compliant network executives explained that the coded-messages matter \”was only a secondary consideration,\” the New York Times recounted. \”They said Ms. Rice mainly argued that the tapes enabled Mr. bin Laden to vent propaganda intended to incite hatred and potentially kill more Americans.\” (There was, of course, no need to curtail the broadcasting of propaganda intended to incite hatred and potentially kill more Afghans.) Four days after the bombing of Afghanistan started, Fleischer urged newspapers not to print full texts of statements by bin Laden and his cohorts. \”The request is to report the news to the American people,\” he said. \”But if you report it in its entirety, that could raise concerns that he\’s getting his prepackaged, pretaped message out … putting it into the hands of people who can read it and see something in it.\” Newspapers were a bit less inclined than the networks to comply with such \”requests,\” but a chill was in the air. The First Amendment shivered.

\”The government\’s attempts to pressure the media regarding the airing of bin Laden\’s statements are totally illegitimate,\” said Jane Kirtley, a professor of media ethics and law at the University of Minnesota. \”Government directives like this, especially to a regulated industry like broadcast and cable, carry the force of coercion, if not the force of law.\” TV and radio executives are acutely aware that the Federal Communications Commission — more corporate-friendly and authoritarian than ever — would frown on independent behavior in the industry. The FCC chair, Michael Powell, is significantly to the right of his father, the secretary of state. And with the few dominant media conglomerates seeking even more deregulation to assist with mergers and boost market share, there are powerful incentives to go along with any \”request\” from the Bush administration about limiting news coverage of the latest war.

Meanwhile, at print outlets with outsized journalistic reputations, some similar precedents are in place. \”There have been instances,\” the late Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham acknowledged, \”in which secrets have been leaked to us which we thought were so dangerous that we went to them [U.S. officials] and told them that they had been leaked to us and did not print them.\” In November 1988, speaking to senior CIA officials at the agency headquarters in Langley, Virginia, she said: \”There are some things the general public does not need to know and shouldn\’t. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows.\”

Just before the bombing of Afghanistan got underway on October 7, the Post reported that U.S. intelligence officials had informed members of Congress that the Al Qaeda network was very likely to strike again soon in the United States. It was hardly startling news — Attorney General John Ashcroft had already said as much on television — but alarm bells went off at the White House, and CIA director George Tenet swung into action to wave the Post away from further unauthorized reporting. Tenet \”had been forced to persuade the newspaper not to publish even more sensitive material,\” according to the New York Times. The next day, the Times quoted the Post\’s executive editor, Leonard Downie Jr., who said that — \”a handful of times\” during the month since September 11 — administration officials called the Post and \”raised concerns that a specific story or more often that certain facts in a certain story, would compromise national security.\” Those calls were fruitful, Downie said: \”In some instances we have kept out of stories certain facts that we agreed could be detrimental to national security and not instrumental to our readers, such as methods of intelligence collection.\”

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But it is the content of collected intelligence and other secrets that top U.S. officials often seem most anxious to keep under wraps. A frequent excuse is that details of Uncle Sam\’s troop movements must be tightly controlled. But the government is eager to keep crucial information from the American public — information that might undermine Washington\’s pro-war line.

Concerned about reports of civilian casualties that gradually increased during the first days of bombing Afghanistan, the U.S. government took action — not by curtailing the slaughter but by foreclosing public access to detailed photos that otherwise would have been available from space. \”The Pentagon has spent millions of dollars to prevent western media from seeing highly accurate civilian satellite pictures of the effects of bombing in Afghanistan,\” the London-based Guardian reported on October 17. At issue were photos from the Ikonos satellite, which takes pictures at such high resolution that \”it would be possible to see bodies lying on the ground after last week\’s bombing attacks.\”

When the Defense Department moved to prevent media access to such pictures, it did not invoke provisions of American law allowing \”shutter control\” over U.S.-launched civilian satellites in wartime. Instead, the Guardian reported, \”the Pentagon bought exclusive rights to all Ikonos satellite pictures of Afghanistan off Space Imaging, the company which runs the satellite. The agreement was made retrospectively to the start of the bombing raids.\”

Buying up all of the satellite\’s pictures was a much more effective way to thwart media access than seeking a legal ban would have been. Because photos of carnage in Afghanistan from the air war \”would not have shown the position of U.S. forces or compromised U.S. military security, the ban could have been challenged by news media as being a breach of the First Amendment,\” the Guardian explained. According to the newspaper, \”the only alternative source of accurate satellite images would be the Russian Cosmos system. But Russia has not yet decided to step into the information void created by the Pentagon deal with Space Imaging.\”

Eleven years ago, during the lead-up to the Gulf War, photos from a Soviet satellite indicated that the Bush-Quayle administration was lying when it claimed that at least 250,000 Iraqi troops and 1,500 tanks were in Kuwait by the second week of September 1990. Much of the initial public rationale for a U.S. military buildup in the Persian Gulf that fall was based on the claim that those troops represented an imminent threat to invade Saudi Arabia (at a time when more than 100,000 U.S. soldiers were already stationed in that country).

After purchasing photos of the region from a Soviet commercial satellite agency, the St. Petersburg Times published a front-page article on January 6, 1991 — more than a week before the Gulf War began — reporting that \”Soviet satellite photos of Kuwait taken five weeks after the Iraqi invasion suggest the Bush administration might have exaggerated the scope of Iraq\’s military threat to Saudi Arabia at the time.\” Analysis of the photos indicated that the actual Iraqi troop strength in Kuwait was perhaps 25 percent of the figure that the White House had trumpeted while building its war agenda.

The St. Petersburg Times reporting on the satellite photos got little play in the national media. (Similar information had gotten only a few drops of media ink in autumn 1990 without gaining any prominent media attention.) But the story was irksome to war planners in Washington. This time around, the Bush administration is striving to do an even better job of bottling up information that might undercut enthusiasm for the current war. Meanwhile, the press corps has mostly contented itself with the official news flow. A week and a half into the air war, Pentagon correspondents got an affirmative response to requests for formal spoonfeeding at day-in day-out news conferences. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld was understandably upbeat. \”Let\’s hear it for the essential daily briefing, however hollow and empty it might be,\” he said. \”We\’ll do it.\”

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The media war overseas has been more awkward. Some U.S. officials fret about losing ground in a global propaganda war. In early October, Colin Powell urged the emir of Qatar to lean on the Qatar-based Al Jazeera satellite TV network, which broadcasts news to 35 million Arabic-speaking viewers worldwide. The effort, coming from a government that is fond of preaching about free speech, was rich with irony and hypocrisy. Al Jazeera has raised the ire of numerous repressive Arab regimes because of its independent reporting. Since the network went into operation in 1996, an Australian journalist noted, \”it has infuriated every government from Libya to Kuwait — each of whom have at various times threatened to withdraw their ambassadors from Qatar in protest.\”

Reporting from Cairo, a correspondent for the San Francisco Chronicle remarked on \”the sight of the United States, the defender of freedom and occasional critic of Arab state repression, lobbying one of the most moderate Arab leaders to rein in one of the region\’s few sources of independent news.\” After failing at its efforts to stigmatize and isolate Al Jazeera, the Bush administration abruptly shifted tactics. In mid-October, Condoleezza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld went out of their way to appear on the network in sit-down interviews.

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\”The Taliban have kept reporters out,\” foreign correspondent Robert Fisk wrote in the London Independent shortly after the bombing of Afghanistan began. \”But does that mean we have to balance this distorted picture with our own half-truths?\” He asked another key question: \”Why are we journalists falling back on the same sheep-like conformity that we adopted in the 1991 Gulf War and the 1999 Kosovo war? … Is there some kind of rhetorical fog that envelopes us every time we bomb someone?\”

On the home front, a fierce media war is underway. \”The president has stated repeatedly that this will be a long war — which means the long-term threat to our First Amendment guarantee of free speech and freedom of the press will be enormous,\” writes Charles Levendosky, editorial page editor of the Casper Star-Tribune in Wyoming. \”Whether the First Amendment ever recovers its broad protection of speech and the people\’s right to know depends upon the public and advocates who fight for our liberties.\”

In these ominous times, our only hope for reviving the First Amendment is to make full use of it.

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Norman Solomon is executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy.

This article appeared in the December 2001 issue of Z Magazine (www.zmag.org).

MORE THAN 13 decades after Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox, the U.S. Senate is getting ready to confirm as attorney general someone who has voiced fervent admiration for the Confederacy. It\’s an almost unbelievable situation. Yet many news outlets – and the vast majority of senators – are perpetuating a state of denial.

John Ashcroft, defeated for re-election to the Senate in November, is the incoming president\’s most controversial Cabinet pick. Arguments are raging about Ashcroft\’s hard-line positions against civil rights, affirmative action, school desegregation, women\’s rights, abortion, gay rights and protection of civil liberties. Media attention has focused on the extraordinary actions that he took in 1999 to block the appointment of African-American Judge Ronnie White to the federal bench by smearing him as \”pro-criminal.\”

If he becomes attorney general, Ashcroft will be the nation\’s chief law enforcement officer. He\’ll have enormous power while running the Justice Department and making weighty recommendations to the president on judicial appointments. For good measure, Ashcroft will oversee such agencies as the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Immigration and Naturalization Service and federal prisons.

Less than two years ago, in an extensive interview with Southern Partisan magazine, Ashcroft was emphatic about his admiration for Jefferson Davis and other Confederate leaders. At the time, the senator was considering a run for the 2000 Republican presidential nomination, a quest that would have involved cultivating support among white voters in GOP primaries in the South.

During the interview, Ashcroft praised Southern Partisan as a magazine that \”helps set the record straight,\” adding \”You\’ve got a heritage of doing that, of defending Southern patriots like Lee, [Stonewall] Jackson and Davis. Traditionalists must do more. I\’ve got to do more. We\’ve all got to stand up and speak in this respect, or else we\’ll be taught that these people were giving their lives, subscribing their sacred fortunes and their honor to some perverted agenda.\”

Should the attorney general of the United States be someone who doubts that the preservation of slavery was a \”perverted agenda\”?

That\’s not the only question arising from the interview. And to fully understand the impact of Ashcroft\’s words, you must understand who reads Southern Partisan, which has been described as \”a leading journal of the neo-Confederacy movement.\”

In 1996, the magazine asserted that slave owners \”encouraged strong slave families to further the slaves\’ peace and happiness.\” And in 1990, Southern Partisan touted former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke as \”a Populist spokesperson for a recapturing of the American ideal.\”

Some Ashcroft backers have strained to pooh-pooh the fallout from the interview. For example, a Dec. 31 editorial in the Detroit News scoffed at any suggestion that Ashcroft\’s comments \”call into question his commitment to civil rights and may be grounds for a challenge to his appointment.\”

The newspaper declared: \”That\’s a nonsensical smoke screen. The views Sen. Ashcroft shared several years ago with Southern Partisan magazine reflect a curious American reality – the ability to reconcile admiration for the courage, nobility and commitment of the rebels with an objection to their cause.\”

In fact, Ashcroft derided the idea that pro-slavery leaders had a blameworthy agenda, and he did not express any \”objection to their cause.\” The Detroit News editorial was misleading in another important respect: Like so much other media coverage, it did not scrutinize – or even mention – Ashcroft\’s sweeping endorsement of Southern Partisan as a magazine that \”helps set the record straight.\”

Avoidance of Ashcroft\’s overall record has been typical of editorials by newspapers supporting him for attorney general, including the Boston Herald, the Atlanta Journal and the Chicago Tribune.

But at least as many daily papers – notably the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Star Tribune in Minneapolis – have editorialized against the Ashcroft nomination. And quite a few other dailies (such as The Sun, the Atlanta Constitution, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times and St. Petersburg Times)have expressed editorial misgivings.

Perhaps most telling has been the response from the most prominent newspaper in the prospective attorney general\’s home state of Missouri, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch – which swiftly urged the Senate to \”investigate Mr. Ashcroft\’s opposition to civil rights, women\’s rights, abortion rights and to judicial nominees with whom he disagrees.\”

The Post-Dispatch recalled that \”Mr. Ashcroft has built a career out of opposing school desegregation in St. Louis and opposing African-Americans for public office.\”

It\’s no surprise that Bob Jones University, notorious for bigotry, gave Ashcroft an honorary degree in 1999. Accepting the award in person, he was proud to deliver the commencement address.

While the country\’s editorial writers and columnists are deeply divided over whether Ashcroft should become attorney general, there is much less division in evidence on Capitol Hill. Republicans, of course, are marching to Bush\’s drum. Meanwhile, the Senate\’s 50 Democrats have been mealy-mouthed at best.

Democratic politicians are fond of preening themselves as champions of civil rights. But now, at a pivotal moment in history – while some complain that Ashcroft\’s ideology makes them uncomfortable and promise that the nominee will face tough questions – the bottom line is that the Democrats in the Senate seem very willing to cave.

Sen. Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont lost no time signaling pacific intent toward Ashcroft, a six-year-member of the club: \”I do not intend to lead a fight against him.\”

Another purported liberal on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, was quick to say: \”Unless there\’s something I\’m unaware of, I\’d be inclined to vote for him.\”

The Ashcroft nomination could turn out to be the defining issue of the presidential transition. Right now, the cowardice of Senate Democrats is sending an obscene message of contempt toward all Americans who have struggled against racism since the Civil War.

Norman Solomon is executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, a nationwide consortium of policy researchers with offices in San Francisco and Washington.

Under our office door came a note advising us that African-American and Latino groups would have a press conference the next day to release a report showing that minority populations will suffer most if the United Nations Global Warming Treaty–the Kyoto agreement–passes the U.S. Senate.

The press conference was being pulled together by Advantage Communications Consultants, a public relations firm in Houston, and coordinated by a group called the Center for Energy and Economic Development (CEED). A simple check told us that CEED is a coal industry front group. If ratified, the Kyoto agreement would require reductions in carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels.

But nothing in the press materials told us that this was a coal industry event. So we decided to go to the press conference and play along.

Perhaps because it was a slow news day, there were many reporters attending the press briefing, including reporters from the Associated Press and L.A. Times. C-SPAN\’s camera was there to beam the press conference out live.

The moderator, Linda Brown from the Houston public relations firm, opened by saying blacks and Latinos are left out of the national policy debate on global warming. We were told that six black and Latino groups, including the AFL-CIO\’s A. Phillip Randolph Institute, the National Black Chamber of Commerce and the United States Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, were releasing a report, which found that \”millions of blacks, Hispanics and other minorities could be pushed into poverty by tough new restrictions on energy use.\”

After a video, the leaders of the groups laid out the chief findings of the study: The Kyoto treaty would trigger a recession that would put more than 1 million black and Latino workers’ jobs at risk, and higher unemployment, reduced earning power and higher prices for energy would impoverish millions of people of color.

Almost an hour into the press conference, not one mention had been made of the coal industry\’s involvement with the study. Sitting next to us in the press area was Stephen Miller, the president of CEED. Yes, the coal industry had paid $40,000 for the report, he admitted.

In addition, Harry Alford of the National Black Chamber of Commerce, said that his organization had received checks from Texaco, General Motors and others, but that \”money has nothing to do with what we are doing here today.\”

\”I take offense at your thinking that our groups are here because someone gave us a check to say something,\” Alford said. \”So I\’m a little insulted. And I do think the question is racial.\”

Lionel Hurst appeared insulted, too–by Alford. Hurst is the ambassador to the United States from Antigua and Barbuda. Hurst confronted Alford at the press conference, pointing out that communities of color around the world are already suffering unduly from the impacts of global warming. \”Failure to act internationally on global warming will pose the greatest costs to the most vulnerable nations of the world due to sea level rise and the spread of infectious diseases in a warmer world,\” Hurst said.

Also offended were the African-American activists who for years have been working on the question of polluting industries dumping on minority communities. These activists, including Dr. Joseph Lowery of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Connie Tucker of the Southern Organizing Committee, sent a letter to all members of Congress, pointing out that the risks to minority communities from global warming \”are much greater than the dangers from the Kyoto Protocol that appear in the biased predictions of the coal lobby.\”

They pointed out that asthma death rates are two times higher for blacks than for whites, and that a recent national assessment of the regional impacts of global warming on the United States found that higher temperatures, coupled with air pollution in minority neighborhoods, would further aggravate asthma problems. In addition, the coal industry study ignored the substantial long-term economic benefits of mitigating global warming.

These arguments didn\’t faze Oscar Sanchez, executive director of the Labor Council for Latin American Advancement, which represents 1.5 million Hispanic members of the AFL-CIO. He defended his group\’s participation in the coal industry-funded event and laid down a slippery slope philosophy familiar to public interest groups co-opted by big business money. \”We had a story to tell and we found a way of doing it,\” Sanchez told reporters during the press conference. \”We found a sponsor. It\’s not uncommon. It\’s not like it\’s something that never happened before.\”

Russell Mokhiber is editor of Corporate Crime Reporter, and Robert Weissman is editor of Multinational Monitor. They are co-authors of Corporate Predators: The Hunt for MegaProfits and the Attack on Democracy (Common Courage).

Think Tank Monitor is a joint project of FAIR and the Institute for Public Accuracy.

A 1992 front-page story in the Boston Globe (9/22/92), \”Red Square Turns to Crimson,\” announced proudly that Harvard experts were advising Russia in its conversion to capitalism. \”Privatization stands as the centerpiece of Russia\’s economic-reform program,\” wrote the Globe. It was an equation the \”best and brightest\” from Harvard would drum home again and again to the media: privatization equals reform. The piece quoted the head of the Harvard Russia project, Andrei Shleifer: \”Once you work with Russians for two weeks, you become a free-market enthusiast.\”

As more becomes known about the laundering of Russian money in Western banks, many in the United States will likely try to hide behind stories of faraway organized crime. But U.S. policy toward Russia has contributed to that country\’s sorry conditions–with the Harvard Institute for International Development\’s Russia project (HIID) playing a major role.

Among those under investigation for criminal activity in both the west and Russia is longtime Yeltsin aide Anatoly B. Chubais, the chief architect of Russia\’s economic \”reforms.\” In the mid-\’90s, Chubais and his clique of political and financial power brokers, known as the \”Chubais Clan,\” were the darlings of the U.S. Treasury and international financial institutions–and of the U.S. establishment press.

HIID, together with the Chubais \”dream team,\” as the Treasury Department\’s Lawrence H. Summers called it, presided over Russia\’s economic \”reforms,\” many of them U.S.-funded, including privatization. But the so-called reforms were more about wealth confiscation than wealth creation. Privatization, which had substantial input from U.S.-paid Harvard advisors, fostered the concentration of property in a few Russian hands and opened the door to widespread corruption and funneling of monies to Western banks.

Chubais was briefly on the HIID payroll, and he is currently head of Russia\’s electricity monopoly. In 1995, the Economist magazine (4/8/95) projected that Chubais would be president of Russia by 2010. But by 1998, the New York Times (3/24/98) conceded that he \”may be the most despised man in Russia\” since \”his early efforts at privatization were widely viewed as vast federal gifts to inside operators at the expense of millions of workers who got nothing but promises they cannot redeem.\”

HIID was in the unique position of recommending U.S. aid polices in support of market reforms while being a chief recipient of the aid–as well as overseeing other aid contractors, some of whom were HIID\’s competitors. HIID, Chubais and their associates played a major role in promoting themselves and the \”reforms\” in the Western media; for example in a 1993 Washington Post piece (5/7/93), Shleifer complained that the Clinton administration was allowing privatization efforts to \”fall through the cracks.\”

A New York Times \”Economic Scene\” column (4/20/95) led thus:

Is Russia poised for economic takeoff? After three years of on-again, off-again reforms and with the Pyrrhic military victory in Chechnya still fresh in the news, skepticism comes easily. But little by little, wary analysts are abandoning their caution. \”Russia is a real market economy now,\” says Andrei Shleifer, an economist at Harvard who has advised the Russian government on privatization.
Some of those associated with HIID allegedly profited directly from it. HIID helped established Russia\’s Federal Commission on Securities, roughly the equivalent of the SEC in the U.S. It was officially established by Yeltsin proclamation, and funded by the U.S. government through institutions run by those around the Harvard-Chubais coterie. The first mutual fund licensed by the Commission was headed by Elizabeth Hebert, who was the girlfriend of Jonathan Hay, Harvard\’s manager and point man in Moscow.

Harvard appears to have benefited from HIID\’s Russia connection. Harvard Management Company, the university\’s endowment fund, was allowed to participate in choice auctions of Russian government property, despite the fact that foreign investors were supposed to be excluded under auction rules.

In 1996, the GAO found that U.S. oversight over Harvard was \”lax,\” and, following allegations in 1997 that Shleifer and the other Harvard principals used their positions and inside knowledge as advisers to profit from investments in Russia, the U.S. government cancelled the last $14 million earmarked for Harvard. Shleifer, now under investigation by the Justice Department, was dismissed by HIID. (Still, Shleifer, who is a protégé of Treasury Secretary Summers, received the Clark Award from the American Economic Association this year, an award that Summers, who has been the architect of economic policy toward Russia, received in 1993. The association\’s president-elect, Dale Jorgenson, said Shleifer\’s scandal \”was not even mentioned\” in their considerations–New York Times, 4/26/99.)

In Privatizing Russia, co-authored by Shleifer with Chubais associate Maxim Boycko, they acknowledge that \”aid can change the political equilibrium–by explicitly helping free-market reformers to defeat their opponents.\” Richard Morningstar, U.S. aid coordinator for the former Soviet Union, concurred (Collision and Collusion, Wedel): \”If we hadn\’t been there to provide funding to Chubais, could we have won the battle to carry out privatization? Probably not. When you\’re talking about a few hundred million dollars, you\’re not going to change the country, but you can provide targeted assistance to help Chubais.\”

Leonid Krutakov, Russian investigative reporter for the publication Moskovsky Komsolets noted that throughout the Yeltsin years, \”both the foreign and domestic press created a central deception–a false set of \’alternatives.\’ The idea was pushed on both sides of that Atlantic that if you didn\’t support Chubais, you were supporting the communists.\” Krutakov, who has broken many of the scandal stories, noted (eXile, 10/23/99):

Obviously it\’s difficult to come into a country blind and just evaluate the situation instantly. You draw your conclusions from people you meet. Western reporters came in and talked to Chubais, and Chubais tossed words around like \”market,\” \”profit,\” \”openness\”–all the right words. And this was the only view point of view they heard that made sense, as far as they knew.

Janine R. Wedel is associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh and is the author of Collision and Collusion: The Strange Case of Western Aid to Eastern Europe. Think Tank Monitor is a project of FAIR and the Institute for Public Accuracy (www.accuracy.org).

A decade after writing The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS, Michael Fumento of the Hudson Institute continues to minimize and skew the AIDS crisis.

Fumento is a virtual poster child for what right-wing institutions can foster: Prior to joining Hudson, he’s had stints at the American Enterprise Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute. He was legal writer at the Unification Church=owned Washington Times and science writer at Reason magazine. Prior to that, he was a staffer with the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights under Reagan.

In an op-ed in the Washington Times (6/8/99), Fumento was happy to proclaim that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had found fewer new AIDS cases–for a rather perverse reason: It proves to him that he was right all along. He now claims that because there has been a 20 percent decline in new U.S. AIDS cases over the last year, \”the bottom is truly falling out of the epidemic,\” and since heterosexual AIDS cases continue at 14 percent of the total, there was never a threat of a wider epidemic.

Fumento was able to put a cheerful spin on the numbers by focusing only on the number of people with full-blown AIDS–ignoring that the number of people newly infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, is holding steady at 40,000 per year. Unmentioned by Fumento: one major reason for the decline in new AIDS cases in the U.S. is the success of protease inhibitors, which slow the progression of the disease. Actually, his piece was somewhat ill-timed, since shortly thereafter reports surfaced that \”the past few years\’ decrease is slowing down at an alarming rate,\” since drug treatments have \”lost their effectiveness as the virus becomes resistant to new drugs.\”(Time, 9/13/99)

Fumento mocks \”the second biggest obsession, teen-agers\”–noting that they are only 0.6 percent of new cases. Of course there are relatively few teens with AIDS, since it generally takes about 10 years for the disease to develop. (They constitute 2 percent of reported HIV infections, or about three times as great a proportion.)

Fumento notes that of the 297 U.S. teens reported with AIDS, 68 were in the heterosexual contact category. But if you bother doing the math, that’s 23 percent–higher than the 14 percent for all age groups, suggesting that down the line AIDS contracted via heterosexual contact will continue to constitute a greater portion of the total. \”Though the number of AIDS deaths has in the last few years decreased abruptly due to the new drug treatments, the percentage of AIDS deaths attributable to heterosexual contact has continued to rise slowly but steadily,\” notes Peter Lurie, a doctor at Public Citizen\’s Health Research Group.

Fumento takes great delight in chastising \”homosexual activists [who] are now admitting they literally conspired to exaggerate the threat to the general population.\” No example of such an admission from \”homosexuals,\” as he insists on calling them, is given; while there certainly may have been instances in which lesbian and gay advocates fell into an undifferentiated \”everyone is at risk\” argument, the highest profile activist group, ACT UP, generally stressed that it was stigmatized groups–gay men, poor people of color and IV drug-users–who had the highest risk of both contracting and dying from HIV/AIDS in the U.S.

More troubling, \”general population\” seems to be Fumento’s code for well-to-do straight white people. When he notes the ethnic disparities (they’re tough to miss; the cover of the CDC report he cites features a graph showing that there are now as many blacks with AIDS as whites), he does so in such a way as to tell European-American readers that they need not worry–or care. It’s someone else’s problem, so it’s not really a problem.

This approach explains why Fumento can limit his critique almost totally to the United States. According to the head of the U.N. program on HIV and AIDS (NPR, 9/17/99), \”every day, Africa buries now five and a half thousand of its sons and daughters who have died from AIDS.\” The vast majority of this toll stems from heterosexual transmission, and both HIV and actual AIDS cases are increasing in Africa. These deaths–which total in the millions–do not result in any apology from Fumento for talking about \”the myth of heterosexual AIDS.\”

Think Tank Monitor is a joint project of FAIR and the Institute for Public Accuracy (www.accuracy.org). Research assistance and special thanks to Bob Lederer.

For many years, Social Security was supposed to be the third rail of American politics–not to be touched by officials who valued their political lives. This unique power resulted from an irresistible combination of affection and clout: Social Security was appreciated as the most successful anti-poverty program in America, and its clout came from the millions of voters from all walks of life who received checks every month, without fail.

But by late 1998 it was beginning to look like the 63-year-old program was facing forced retirement, and would be rejected for a younger, sexier model. Two conservative think tanks, with funding from investment firms with plenty to gain from a privatized system, have worked hard, and effectively, to undermine the loyalty of the U.S. public, and politicians.

If Social Security as we know it is cast off like a rejected first wife by this Congress, it will be because of the slow but steady deterioration of public support over more than a decade. Dorcas Hardy, Reagan\’s Social Security commissioner, wanted to privatize Social Security, but the idea seemed so weird that it received little serious attention–especially from the public.

It became obvious that privatization would not receive substantial public support until the public\’s faith in the Social Security system had dramatically eroded–but to do that the public needed to be convinced that there was a crisis, not in some far future time, but now. And so, the \”fact\” that Social Security was going broke, or was already bankrupt, became a recurring theme trumpeted by the pro-privatization pundits of the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute.

The bankruptcy myth

Over the years, the statement has been made so many times and repeated by so many people that many Americans now believe that Social Security is bankrupt, or will be any day now. My personal experience is that most reporters assume that it is so. And yet nothing is further from the truth.

Last year, Social Security paid out $383 billion in checks, and received $436 billion in taxes and an additional $49 billion in interest. Instead of red ink, Social Security made almost $102 billion in profit, to add to the more than $652 billion it had in profits from previous years.

I suppose there are some folks who aren\’t impressed by a program with an annual surplus of more than $100 billion and \”end of the year assets\” of more than $756 billion, but even they can\’t call it bankrupt, a term that means \”lacking funds\” or \”unable to pay one\’s debts.\” A more accurate description of the Social Security program is to say that it is rolling in money, that it has an enormous surplus that is growing every year, and will be for years to come.

The Trustees of the Social Security System use very conservative (that is to say, pessimistic) assumptions in forecasting their program’s financial future. (See \”TV on Social Security: It\’s Broke, Fix It\”) But even using their figures, it is not until sometime after 2020 that the program will collect less in taxes and interest than it pays in benefit checks, and even then, it will have more than $1 trillion in the Social Security Trust Fund, left from previous years. Their most recent estimate is that, for the next 34 years, the taxes that are collected, when added to interest and money from the Trust Fund, will be sufficient to pay all the benefits currently planned.

It is not until 2034 that the Trustees project that there will be no money left in the Trust Fund, and not enough taxes to pay all the benefits that are expected. But even when the Trust Fund is empty, and for the foreseeable decades thereafter, the Trustees expect there will be enough taxes to pay 75 percent of the planned benefits.

And yet experts from the Heritage Foundation and Cato Institute have repeatedly and falsely claimed that Social Security is bankrupt–and the media have let them get away with it. For example, in an executive summary of a June 1998 report entitled \”Social Security\’s $20 Trillion Shortfall,\” the Heritage Foundation author, Daniel J. Mitchell, flatly claimed \”the Social Security system is bankrupt.\” When Mitchell repeated that lie on Good Morning America the following month (7/26/98), the ABC reporter interrupted him–not to correct him, but to indirectly support his views by pointing out that 84 percent of participants in a survey on ABC\’s website favored some sort of privatization.

Of course, ABC is not the only network that fails to challenge the misinformation of these think tanks. In January 1998 on CNN\’s Newsday and again in December 1998 on CNN\’s Your Money, the anchors claimed that \”Social Security starts having cash-flow problems just 14 years from now.\” According to actuaries at Social Security, at the end of 2015, which is 17 years after that broadcast, Social Security will have assets of almost $2 trillion. I\’d like to have cash flow problems like that!

Are these pro-privatization pundits unable to read those tiny numbers on the charts that Social Security makes public every year, or is there something else going on? The statements about bankruptcy are clearly just wrong, but the claims of cash flow problems seem to reflect their view that since the Trust Fund is filled with government bonds instead of stacks of paper money, these assets are not real.

These funds were borrowed from the trust fund by the U.S. Treasury, under the condition that they would be paid back with interest. But Cato, Heritage and others apparently view these funds as gone forever. For example, in a column in the L.A. Times (12/7/98), Cato’s Michael Tanner refers to the Trust Fund as \”little more than an accounting fiction.\” Washington Post columnist James Glassman, who is also an American Enterprise Institute fellow, refers to these hundreds of billions of dollars as if they were irrelevant (11/24/98). Glassman tells us that the Trust Fund consists of what little was \”left over–and there hasn\’t been much\” after the checks are sent to beneficiaries. In fact, these \”left-overs\” currently amount to $730 billion.

Privatization, not preservation

Now that half of America is persuaded that Social Security is a riskier bet than a Superbowl game (Oppenheimer Funds Newswire, 1/21/99), the next step is to try to convince everyone that privatization, rather than preservation, is the answer. Since the goal is to bring wavering Democrats on board, the next strategy was to issue reports claiming that minorities and women would particularly benefit from Social Security privatization. Once again, facts did not get in the way of ideology.

As a dramatic first step, last year the Heritage Foundation published a report claiming that Social Security is a bad deal for African-Americans and Latinos. The report received considerable coverage and was widely quoted by major media–for example, Rep. Mark Sanford (R.=N.C.) claimed in a Washington Post op-ed (6/7/98) that \”a single male born in 1975 and living in Charlie Rangel\’s [mostly minority] New York district is guaranteed a negative 6.4 percent rate of return.\”

CNN (1/13/98) reported that \”an African-American male born in 1970, single with a high income, would see a nearly 4 percent negative rate of return because of shorter life expectancy.\” This example should have raised immediate skepticism, since men with high income, regardless of race, tend to live longer lives, not shorter.

In fact, the Heritage Foundation\’s estimates were fatally flawed and totally inaccurate, based on \”a glaring error,\” according to a former chief actuary of the Social Security Administration (The Actuary, 9/98). Current Social Security Administration officials have also corrected the Heritage report, and concluded that non-whites actually do at least as well if not better than whites. Many of the TV networks and news magazines were strangely silent, but Business Week (12/14/98) ran a outspoken critique entitled \”Red-Faced Over Social Security: A Conservative Think Tank\’s Boo-Boo.\” In contrast, CNN repeated the exact same example of a short-changed African-American that they had used in January 1998 for a story that they used one year later (Your Money, 1/18/99).

Cato took the lead on the women\’s issue, writing a well-publicized report (CNN, 7/20/98) claiming that women would greatly benefit from privatization. The claim was immediately questioned by women\’s advocates–if women earn less than men, and are the main beneficiaries of Social Security\’s benefits for widows and non-working spouses, how could they benefit from a program where benefits are more closely tied to earnings?

In this case, Cato\’s claim was possible because they conveniently ignored the enormous transition costs of privatization. By pretending that all the money that is now paid as Social Security taxes could instead be invested in stocks and bonds for each individual\’s private account, Cato researchers were able to conclude that women would benefit. In order to make their point, Cato researchers ignored the cuts in benefits that had been included in every serious privatization plan, all of which disproportionately harmed women (Congressional Quarterly, 4/28/98).

The Heritage and Cato estimates also ignore another major factor: Social Security taxes don\’t only pay for our retirement, they also help to support children whose working parents have died, as well as widows and severely disabled individuals who are unable to work to support themselves. These are the people who most desperately need Social Security, but the pro-privatizers hope that nobody will notice that their economic security isn’t even mentioned in the reform plans–and on this point, the privatizers have usually been right.

Diana Zuckerman is director of the Social Security Project of the National Association of Commissions for Women.

Anyone remotely familiar with conservative think tanks’ diatribes regarding such hot-button race issues as affirmative action (they’re against it), bilingual education (they’re against it), multiculturalism (they’re against it), welfare \”reform\” (they support it) or tougher criminal sentencing (they support it) would not be surprised by the American Enterprise Institute’s analyses of race issues in the United States.

Still, even for the initiated, the ferocity of AEI’s work on race is quite breathtaking. Although the mainstream media are now deploring the overt racism of hate groups such as the Council of Conservative Citizens (see this issue of Extra!), the fact is that there is an overlap between the analyses of \”respectable\” conservatives, like those at AEI, and the overt racial hatred of white supremacist organizations like CCC.

The differences between the hate-mongering of the CCC and mainstream conservative thought should not obscure the fact that both are at base fundamentally concerned with the question of how to manage the \”hordes of color\” who have long outnumbered Europeans globally, and soon will be the majority in this country.

CCC expresses this concern explicitly: \”We’re only 9 percent of the world’s population, white Europeans, and our country’s going to majority nonwhite soon,\” Gordon Lee Baum, the council’s CEO, complained in a Washington Post interview (1/17/99). \”Why can’t European Americans be concerned with this genocide? Is that racial to say that?\” CCC’s strategy for dealing with this is re-segregation, an attack on interracial marriages, closing U.S. borders to immigrants of color and tacit support of the Ku Klux Klan.

The same concern about global and national reality of European populations being outnumbered by non-European populations is implicit, occasionally even explicit, in the work of AEI fellows. In a New York Times Magazine (11/23/97) story on declining population growth rates, for example, AEI’s Ben Wattenberg fretted:

The West has been the driving force of modern civilization, inexorably pushing towards democratic values. Will that continue when its share of the total [global] population is only 11 percent? Perhaps as less developed countries modernize, they will assimilate Western views. Perhaps the 21st will be another \”American century.\” Perhaps not.

AEI’s origins

AEI’s origins are in the heart of the business-oriented conservative community. Hoping to match the influence Robert S. Brookings had achieved via the Brookings Institution, Johns-Manville chief Lewis Brown founded AEI in 1943 as an intellectual counterweight to New Deal philosophy. Initially known less as a center of research and thinking than as an uncritical defender of big business, AEI underwent a major change in reputation between 1977 and 1986 under the leadership of William Baroody Jr.

Baroody used the publicity skills he had honed in the White House Public Liaison Office of the Nixon and Ford administrations to change AEI’s image from \”that of a pro-corporation lunatic fringe\” (Soley, The News Shapers) to that of a mainstream conservative think tank. Baroody started AEI’s massive publicity campaigns, which included press releases about its seminars, forums and policy proposals, sending opinion pieces to newspapers and distributing free radio commentaries to broadcast stations.

While the publicity campaign helped improve AEI’s image with the media, Baroody’s hiring of former Ford administration officials after the Republicans’ 1976 electoral defeat was also instrumental. Baroody hired such big names as Herbert Stein, chair of Nixon’s Council of Economic Advisers; David Gergen, a Nixon/Ford speechwriter and communications expert; Philip Habib, Kissinger’s shuttle diplomat; and former President Gerald Ford himself.

AEI’s PR efforts increased the groups fundraising ability as well as its visibility; Ford hosted an annual \”World Forum\” in Vail, Colorado, where the Baroody bunch hobnobbed with the wealthy. Baroody’s strategy was extremely successful, turning AEI into a $9 million, 154-person Republican government-in-waiting. AEI employees who eventually became high-level Reagan officials included James C. Miller, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Murray Weidenbaum and Antonin Scalia.

Despite (or because of) its close ties to Reagan administration appointees and policies, the AEI became a leading source of guests for PBS’s NewsHour during the 1980s. Between January 1982 and October 1990, AEI spokespersons appeared on the NewsHour 142 times, an average of 1.4 appearances per month–almost twice as often as representatives from the Carnegie Endowment or Brookings Institution (Soley, The News Shapers).

Money on the right

While AEI appeared very conservative in the late 1970s when compared to the Carter administration, during the early years of the Reagan administration the political center shifted. Think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation were further to the right, and attracted the attention and money of conservative donors. Donations to AEI declined, causing both a financial and ideological crisis at the organization. AEI’s then-chair William C. Butcher, chief executive officer of Chase Manhattan Bank, fired Baroody, and in December 1986 appointed Christopher DeMuth, a former staff assistant to President Nixon and a publicist in Reagan’s Office of Management and Budget.

Under DeMuth, AEI has made a dramatic rightward shift. In addition to such well-known conservatives as Irving Kristol, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Lynne Cheney and Richard Perle, AEI currently houses what amounts to a \”race desk\” made up of Judge Robert H. Bork, the John M. Olin Scholar in Legal Studies; Dinesh D’Souza, a John M. Olin Research Fellow; and Charles Murray, a Bradley Fellow.

Note the involvement here of well-known conservative foundations like Olin and Bradley. In their book, No Mercy: How Conservative Think Tanks and Foundations Changed America’s Social Agenda, Jean Stefancic and Richard Delgado report that in 1991 Bork received $150,880 from such sources; D’Souza got $98,400 plus an additional $20,000 to promote his controversial book, Illiberal Education.

AEI has at times received criticism for the overtly anti-black views of its most visible racial analysts. But certainly the publicity surrounding D’Souza and Murray has not hurt AEI’s fundraising. AEI’s 1997 Annual Report shows revenues totaled $18.6 million, with roughly equal amounts coming from foundations, corporations and individuals, and the remaining 18 percent from conferences, sales and other revenues. Expenses totaled only $14.3 million, with AEI investing the surplus in building its endowment, and prefunding future research.

Deborah Toler is a member of the Institute for Public Accuracy\’s editorial board. Research assistance was provided by Nihar Bhatt.

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Sidebar:

Slouching Towards Bigotry: AEI’s Racial Fellows

Robert Bork’s Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline is an extended screed warning about the demise of \”bourgeois culture\” and the rise of a \”degenerate society.\” The signs of degeneracy that he detects often have a racial tinge:

We hear one day of the latest rap song calling for killing policemen or the sexual mutilation of women; the next of coercive left-wing political indoctrination at a prestigious university, then of the latest homicide figures for New York, Los Angeles, or the District of Columbia; of the collapse of the criminal justice system, which displays an inability to punish adequately and, often enough, an inability to convict the clearly guilty; of the rising rate of illegitimate births, the uninhibited display of sexuality and the popularization of violence in our entertainment; worsening racial tensions, the angry activists of feminism, homosexuality, environmentalism, animal rights–the list could be extended almost indefinitely.

Rap music, for Bork as for other AEI writers, is a symbol of what is most \”sick\” about African-American culture. He wrote in his book that it is \”little more than noise with a beat,\” that the lyrics often range from \”the perverse to the mercifully unintelligible,\” and that \”it is difficult to convey just how debased it is.\”

The New York Times (9/24/96) concluded that Slouching Towards Gomorrah is in the end \”an ugly and intemperate book,\” but not before the reviewer noted Bork was on target in his criticisms of \”self-esteem\” (i.e. multicultural) programs in schools, and in his insistence that it is equality of opportunity, not outcomes, that Americans should seek.

Legalizing discrimination

Dinesh D’Souza is clearly one of AEI’s \”superstars\”–ranking his own page on AEI’s website of fellows’ biographies. D’Souza has impeccable conservative credentials. Arriving in the United States at age 16 in 1978 on a Rotary Scholarship, D’Souza became editor-in-chief for the Dartmouth Review, the notorious right-wing college paper (also heavily supported by the Olin Foundation). He later became managing editor of the Heritage Foundation’s Policy Review, and served as a policy adviser in the Reagan administration.

D’Souza’s Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus– a compendium of anecdotes purportedly documenting the horrors of political correctness and affirmative action on college campuses–propelled him into the media spotlight. D’Souza’s recent The End of Racism was so patently offensive that staunch black conservatives Robert Woodson and Glenn Loury both denounced the book and severed their ties with AEI in protest.

The book is specifically about African-Americans, who, according to D’Souza, should stop using institutional racism as an \”excuse\” for their \”failure\” to achieve what whites and Asians have achieved. Instead, they should accept that they are held back by a \”culture of poverty\” consisting of high crime and illegitimacy rates, and dependency on welfare and other government programs.

In a stance not so different from that of the CCC, D’Souza advocates legalizing racial discrimination. \”What we need is a long-term strategy that holds the government to a rigorous standard of race neutrality,\” he wrote in The End of Racism, \”while allowing private actors to be free to discriminate as they wish.\” In D’Souza’s vision, \”individuals and companies would be allowed to discriminate in private transactions such as renting an apartment or hiring for a job.\” Lest there be any doubt as to his intent, D’Souza states: \”Am I calling for the repeal of the Civil Rights Act of 1964? Actually, yes.\”

Welcoming The Bell Curve

D’Souza does, however, dissent from his colleague Charles Murray’s genetic explanations for poverty in communities of color. As a fellow at the Manhattan Institute during the 1980s, Murray wrote Losing Ground, a book that provided the blueprint for the Reagan administration’s attacks on welfare. This book was extremely influential in shaping the welfare \”reform\” legislation that ultimately passed under President Clinton (Extra!, 3-4/98).

But when Murray began to write The Bell Curve, with Richard Herrnstein (now deceased) as co-author, his thesis was too extreme even for the Manhattan Institute. He soon found a welcome mat for his racialist views at AEI.

The Bell Curve makes the turn-of-the century argument that blacks’ intractable IQ deficiencies, and not racism, are responsible for their disproportionate poverty and incarceration rates. The book and the controversy it caused made the covers of The New Republic (10/31/94), Newsweek (10/24/94) and the New York Times Magazine (10/9/94). The book also got a glowing review in the New York Times Book Review (10/16/94; see Extra!, 1-2/95).

Other important AEI contributors to the race debate include theologian Michael Novak and Ben Wattenberg. Novak, a welfare specialist, makes religious arguments that capitalism offers the best hope for the poor. He maintains that welfare breeds dishonesty, as recipients try to circumvent the rules and taxpayers engage in tax-cheating to avoid paying the cost for these programs.

Wattenberg worries about the death of Western civilization under current cultural patterns in the U.S., and like his colleagues opposes \”proportionalism\” (i.e., affirmative action). Wattenberg’s television show, Think Tank, is funded by Olin, along with the William H. Donner and JM foundations.

–D.T.

Think Tank Monitor is a joint project of FAIR and the Institute for Public Accuracy. Research assistance: Nihar Bhatt, Jenifer Dixon and Omar Nashashibi.

President Clinton, in his address to the nation just after ordering the bombing of Iraq last month on the eve of his scheduled impeachment vote, claimed that while \”other countries possess weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles, with Saddam there\’s one big difference. He has used them, not once but repeatedly.\” Clinton failed to mention that our government was rather chummy with Hussein when he was using such weapons.

The president then played psychic, insisting that unless we bomb, \”Saddam Hussein will use these terrible weapons again\” — ignoring the fact that he did not use them during the Gulf War.

\”Without the sanctions\” against Iraq, Clinton continued, there would be \”less food for [Iraq\'s] people.\” Can anybody believe that? UNICEF studies show that 5,000 Iraqi children are dying every month as a result of the sanctions. The sanctions are the opposite of \”smart bombs\” (inflated as that concept is): Sanctions actually target the weakest people in society — children, the elderly, the sick.

Clinton is being disingenuous when he says that \”so long as Iraq remains out of compliance, we will work with the international community to maintain and enforce the economic sanctions.\” In fact, the administration has undermined the international consensus by insisting that the economic sanctions continue even if Iraq complies with the weapons inspectors.

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in March 1997 declared: \”We do not agree with the nations who argue that if Iraq complies with its obligations concerning weapons of mass destruction, sanctions should be lifted.\” This twisted U.S. policy is totally contrary to U.N. Resolution 687, which states that when Iraq complies with the weapons inspectors, the sanctions \”shall have no further force or effect.\”

\”I am a Baptist,\” Clinton stated as he was about to take office. \”I believe in death-bed conversions. If he [Saddam Hussein] wants a different relationship with the United States and the United Nations, all he has to do is change his behavior.\” Immediately, as commentators attacked the incoming president for such politically incorrect notions, Clinton backtracked the next day, saying: \”There is no difference between my policy and the policy of the present [Bush] administration\” — that is, the sanctions would stay in place so long as Saddam Hussein does. This has ensured another six years of hell for 20 million Iraqis.

This policy of keeping the economic sanctions in place regardless of compliance with UNSCOM has apparently succeeded in destroying UNSCOM. The practice of maintaining the sanctions whatever Iraq\’s actions was applied to the recent bombing, as Clinton attacked Iraq without stating what Iraq could do to put a stop to the bombing. UNSCOM ceased to be an instrument of weapons inspections and became rather an excuse for bombing.

Now, in a cynical gesture, the administration makes a show of offering to lift the cap on the \”oil-for-food\” program — although Iraq\’s devastated infrastructure cannot produce the amount of oil currently allowed by the United Nations.

This administration claims its bombings and enforcement of the \”no-fly\” zones are U.N.-mandated, while actually these administration policies are undermining international law. In fact, last month the retiring Rep. David Skaggs (D-Colo.) pointedly raised a legal issue, noting that \”President Clinton acted in violation of the Constitution in ordering these attacks without authority of Congress.\” Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights notes perhaps the supreme irony — \”legally, Clinton\’s unauthorized bombing is more impeachable than his lies about Lewinsky.\”

Last month\’s bombing was not instigated, like previous standoffs, by Iraq\’s expelling inspectors but by a report by UNSCOM head Richard Butler. Citing sources, The Post reported that \”Clinton administration officials played a direct role in shaping Butler\’s text during multiple conversations with him [two days before the bombing] at secure facilities in the U.S. mission to the U.N.\”

When Iraq was reducing compliance this summer, claiming that UNSCOM inspectors were spies, Clinton officials said they would take action at a \”time and place of our choosing.\” Both the Iraqis and the administration were far more prescient than anyone could have imagined.

Still, the real issue is the policy, not its timing. Sanctions and bombing; killing slowly and killing quickly. Killing Iraqis is not a strategy.

The writer is communications director of the Institute for Public Accuracy.
This article originally appeared in the Washington Post (1/26/99).