by Nina Totenberg at the endangered National Public Radio (where you can listen to the story and see a picture of the wrongly convicted man, who served 18 years for a crime someone else committed):

When prosecutors violate the law to deprive a person of a fair trial, is vindication enough, or should the prosecutors be held liable for damages?

This week, a bitterly divided U.S. Supreme Court all but closed the door to such lawsuits. The 5-4 ruling came in the case of a New Orleans man who served 18 years in prison for a crime he did not commit.

In December of 1984, Raymond Liuzza Jr., the son of a prominent New Orleans business executive, was shot to death in front of his home. Police, acting on a tip, picked up two men, Kevin Freeman and John Thompson.

Thompson denied knowing anything about the shooting, but Freeman, in exchange for a one-year prison sentence, agreed to testify that he saw Thompson commit the crime.

Prosecutors wanted to seek the death penalty, but Thompson had no record of violent felonies. Then, a citizen saw his photo in the newspaper and implicated him in an attempted carjacking — and prosecutors saw a way to solve their problem. John Hollway, who wrote a book about the case, said the solution was to try the carjacking case first.

A conviction in the carjacking case would yield additional benefits in the subsequent murder trial, Hollway observes. It would discredit Thompson if he took the stand in his own defense at the murder trial, so he didn’t. And the carjacking would be used against him during the punishment phase of the murder trial.

It all worked like a charm. Thompson was convicted of both crimes and sentenced to death for murder.

An ‘Oh my God’ moment

Several years later, four young lawyers at the silk-stocking firm of Morgan Lewis in Philadelphia took on Thompson’s case pro bono. But after 10 years and thousands of hours of work, they lost all their appeals, including one at the U.S. Supreme Court. Two of the lawyers, Michael Banks and Gordon Cooney, flew to Louisiana.

“We were literally on our way from telling John that we had failed him as his lawyers and that he was going to die,” Banks says. “And we were on our way to tell his mother and his 17-year-old son that they should start planning for the execution.”

Banks was driving while his co-counsel checked their office voice mail and learned some astonishing news: Their investigator had unearthed, in microfiche files, a lab report to prosecutors in the carjacking. A swatch of fabric stained with the carjacker’s blood had been tested and never produced to the defense.

“It is an ‘oh my God’ moment,” Banks says.

He says that single discovery would unravel both cases.

“We still did not have evidence of Thompson’s innocence, but now we knew the DAs had played very, very dirty pool, and we were determined to see if there was other evidence that we could get,” he says.

There was plenty.

Further testing would show that the carjacker’s blood was Type B; Thompson’s was Type O. And, it turned out, one of the prosecutors had years earlier made a deathbed confession to a colleague that he had hidden the blood report from the defense. That confession, too, was kept secret.

To the Supreme Court

All of this would eventually lead to reversal for both convictions, and a new trial on the murder charge. At that trial, yet more evidence would be uncovered and presented to the jury.

Previously undisclosed police reports showed witnesses at the crime scene had described the shooter as 6 feet tall with close-cropped hair. Thompson was 5-feet, 8-inches tall with a huge Afro. The description, in fact, fit not Thompson, but Freeman, the man who had made the deal to testify against Thompson.

In all, there would be 10 pieces of exculpatory evidence that prosecutors failed to turn over to the defense at the first murder trial. At the second trial, a jury acquitted Thompson after just 35 minutes of deliberation.

Thompson then sued New Orleans District Attorney Harry Connick and his office for failure to train prosecutors about their obligation to turn over such evidence to the defense. Connick’s office had previously been chastised by the Supreme Court for similar failures. A jury awarded Thompson $14 million in damages. But this week, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned that award.

Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for the five-justice majority, said there was no proof of a pattern of indifference in the DA’s office and that prosecutors, unlike police, do not need special training in such matters because they learn the rules in law school.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg took the unusual step of reading her dissent from the bench to underscore her view that the “deliberately indifferent attitude” in the DA’s office had created a “tinderbox,” where miscarriages of justice were inevitable. Many saw her dissent as a call to Congress to change the law.

“That is what’s scary”

Thompson insists he’s not bitter, saying he can’t miss money he never had, but he says he is worried about accountability for prosecutors.

“I’m disappointed that from the Supreme Court ruling … I didn’t make things better. I might have made things worser,” he says. “It made them really think they got permission to kill now without being held accountable. That is what’s scary.”

Connick, the district attorney, feels vindicated by the high court ruling.

“I think that he committed … a murder, and I think that obviously we thought we had enough evidence to gain a conviction,” he says. “So I was delighted that the Supreme Court ruled in our favor.”

[Hmmmm. Mr. Connick just ignores all the evidence. What does the truth matter? Don’t you wonder about that lying Mr. Kevin Freeman, who apparently got away with murder (and could be free to do it again)? Again: When an innocent person is wrongly punished, an actual perpetrator is still on the loose. Just makes you proud to have such a fine judicial system, doesn’t it?]

by Yaniv Reich on APRIL 2, 2011, in Mondoweiss:

Israel is “vindicated”, claims Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman about Richard Goldstone’s latest op-ed in the Washington Post, adding that “we knew the truth and we had no doubt it would eventually come out.” Netanyahu has gone so far as to demand the Goldstone report be retracted from the UN. Among all the celebrations and self-congratulatory pats on the back, it is worth pausing for a moment to ask: what exactly does Goldstone’s latest essay vindicate?

The answer seems much less clear than Israel’s unconditional supporters want to argue. The most charitable portions of his piece (to Israel) suggest that

if I [Goldstone] had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document.

This statement is so patently obvious as to be meaningless, particularly given Israel’s steadfast non-cooperation at the time of the investigation, but let’s assume Goldstone means this in a substantive way. He did publish this piece under a headline of “reconsidering the Goldstone report” after all.

What else is there in this op-ed that suggests a change from the original Goldstone report? The op-ed focuses on a very select group of three themes. The first point relates to the ongoing investigations into allegations of war crimes. Goldstone refers to the UN committee of independent experts’ report to support this argument, and he quotes that report to the effect that “Israel has dedicated significant resources to investigate over 400 allegations of operational misconduct in Gaza” while “the de facto authorities (i.e., Hamas) have not conducted any investigations into the launching of rocket and mortar attacks against Israel.” The second key claim in Goldstone’s op-ed is confusing, but suggests that the ongoing investigations have proven that Israel did not attack civilians as a matter of intentional policy. How these conclusions have been reached before the investigations, which the Goldstone report called for as its primary recommendation, have been concluded is unclear. The third theme is that Hamas has not done any of the good things Israel has done: Hamas did deliberately target civilians, Hamas didn’t investigate anything, Hamas continues to be guilty of war crimes by firing rockets into civilian areas, and Goldstone admits he was maybe “unrealistic” and “mistaken” to believe Hamas would investigate itself.

I want to first highlight several general observations about what this op-ed does and doesn’t say. Then I will address these three themes in detail.

What the Goldstone op-ed doesn’t say

Limited to one of seven categories of possible war crimes
The Goldstone commission’s findings on deliberate attacks on civilians is one of at least seven broad findings (which comprise hundreds of specific incidents) that raise issues about Israel’s conduct. These other key findings include:

1. Israel’s illegal siege on Gaza, which constitutes a form of collective punishment and so violates the Fourth Geneva Conventions;
2. The political institutions and buildings of Gaza cannot be lawfully considered part of the “Hamas terrorist infrastructure” and so Israel’s attacks on them are unlawful;
3. Israel taking insufficient measures to protect the Palestinian civilian population;
4. “Indiscriminate” attacks (as distinct from “deliberate” attacks) killed many civilians without any credible military rationale for those actions;
5. Israeli use of weapons, such as white phosphorous and flechette missiles, which, although not banned under current international law, were used in ways that do violate the laws of war; and
6. Israel’s deliberate destruction of civilian infrastructure, including industrial plants, food production facilities, sewage treatment plants, and water installations; this destruction has no military justification (for example, Israel’s “wanton destruction” of Mr. Sameh Sawafeary’s chicken coops, killing all 31,000 chickens inside despite there being no military activity in the area) and could constitute a crime against humanity.

Goldstone’s op-ed pointedly excludes discussion of all of these very serious charges of possible war crimes and possible crimes against humanity, so it’s odd that FM Lieberman and his hasbara “excreta” (his word, not mine) think Israel is somehow absolved of all responsibility. One cannot avoid the impression that Israel’s unconditional supporters stillhaven’t actually read the report.

Overlooks key impacts of the report
One of the strangest omissions in the op-ed was the recognition that, assuming Israel is conducting investigations in good faith (again, more on that terrible assumption below), it was the Goldstone report that caused Israel to conduct these investigations. The best evidence this is the case was Israel’s absolute refusal to investigate anything except the credit card theft case, until, that is, it got worried that Israeli leaders might end up in the International Criminal Court. More evidence to support this argument can be found in Israel’s response to a conflict without a Goldstone kick in the rear: the 2006 Lebanon war. In that case, Israel constituted the whitewashing Winograd Commission, which didn’t even pretend to investigate the “the government policies and military strategies that failed to discriminate between the Lebanese civilian population and Hizbullah combatants and between civilian property and infrastructure and military targets”, as Amnesty International and other human rights organizations observed. Thus, without the Goldstone report, there is absolutely no reason to believe Israel would be conducting the investigations for which Goldstone is largely praising now.

Another important impact, which was a direct result of the report’s recommendations, was the policy changes, such as “new Israel Defense Forces procedures for protecting civilians in cases of urban warfare and limiting the use of white phosphorus in civilian areas.” I have argued elsewhere that these policy changes acknowledge implicitly that Israel had not been minimizing civilian casualties, as it argues so vociferously, or else there wouldn’t be any possible policy changes that could further minimize civilian harm. Either civilian casualties were being minimized before, in which case the policy changes are meaningless, or are minimized now (hypothetically, of course), in which case Israel wasn’t doing its utmost to protect civilians from harm before. It certainly can’t be both. Either way, these policy changes are directly related to the report, a point Goldstone’s op-ed also makes.

Validity of specific claims made in Goldstone’s op-ed

The credibility of Israel’s investigations
Goldstone’s op-ed gives the strong impression that, despite the length of Israel’s military investigations being “frustrating”, Israel has “appropriate processes” in place. It is difficult to understand where this belief comes from, because it certainly does not appear in this form in McGowan Davis report he cites (McGowan Davis chairs the UN committee of independent experts monitoring implementation of the Goldstone report recommendations). That report paints are far less appealing picture of Israeli’s military investigations, noting, for example, that:

1. That Israel’s military justice system provides for mechanisms to ensure its independence”, but “the Committee further noted that notwithstanding the built-in structural guarantees to ensure the MAG’s [Military Advocate General’s] independence, his dual responsibilities as legal advisor to the Chief of Staff and other military authorities, and his role as supervisor of criminal investigations within the military, raise concerns in the present context given allegations in the FFM report that those who designed, planned, ordered, and oversaw the operation in Gaza were complicit in international humanitarian law and international human rights law violations.
2. The Committee does not have sufficient information to establish the current status of the on-going criminal investigations into the killings of Ateya and Ahmad Samouni, the attack on the Wa’el al-Samouni house and the shooting of Iyad Samouni.. . . As of 24 October 2010, according to media reports, no decision had been made as to whether or not the officer would stand trial.” This case is of course cited directly by Goldstone, yet his arguments are incompatible with the actual McGowan Davis report.
3. The Committee has discovered no information relating to four incidents referred to in the FFM [Goldstone] report: incident AD/02, incident AD/06, the attack on the Al-Quds hospital, and the attack on the Al-Wafa hospital. Nor has the Committee uncovered updated information concerning the status of the criminal investigations into the death of Mohammed Hajji and the shooting of Shahd Hajji and Ola Masood Arafat, and the shooting of Ibrahim Juha. Accordingly, the Committee remains unable to determine whether any investigation has been carried out in relation to those incidents.
4. It is notable that the MAG himself, in his testimony to the Turkel Commission, pointed out that the military investigations system he heads is not a viable mechanism to investigate and assess high-level policy decisions. When questioned by commission members about his “dual hat” and whether his position at the apex of legal advisory and prosecutorial power can present a conflict of interest under certain circumstances, he stated that “the mechanism is calibrated for the inspection of individual incidents, complaints of war crimes in individual incidents (…). This is not a mechanism for policy. True, it is not suitable for this.
5. The Committee expressed strong reservations as to whether Israel’s investigations into allegations of misconduct were sufficiently prompt. In particular, the Committee expressed concern about the fact that unnecessary delays in carrying out such investigations may have resulted in evidence being lost or compromised, or have led to the type of conflicting testimony that characterizes the investigations into the killings of Majda and Raayya Hajaj, and the inconclusive findings reported with respect to the tragic deaths of Souad and Amal Abd Rabbo and the grave wounding of Samar Abd Rabbo and their grandmother Souad.
6. The promptness of an investigation is closely linked to the notion of effectiveness. An effective investigation is one in which all the relevant evidence is identified and collected, is analyzed, and leads to conclusions establishing the cause of the alleged violation and identifying those responsible. In that respect, the Committee is concerned about the fact that the duration of the ongoing investigations into the allegations contained in the FFM report – over two years since the end of the Gaza operation – may seriously impair their effectiveness and, therefore, the prospects of achieving accountability and justice.

These conclusions of the McGowan Davis report give a very different impression of mechanisms for accountability in Israel’s military justice system than one would understand from a casual reading of Goldstone’s latest op-ed. For additional, excellent analysis of these points, Adam Horowitz’s piece at Mondoweiss is a must-read.

Was it a deliberate policy of targeting Palestinian civilians?
If this op-ed “vindicates” anything, it seems to be about Israel deliberately targeting civilians as a matter of policy. The Goldstone report investigated 11 specific cases, which were concerning because civilians were killed “under circumstances in which the Israeli forces were in control of the area and had previously entered into contact with or at least observed the persons they subsequently attacked, so that they must have been aware of their civilian status.” After reviewing the details of these cases, which included not only the attack on the Samouni family (discussed in the op-ed) but also attacks on a mosque at prayer time and the shootings of civilians waving white flags, the report concludes:

From the facts ascertained in the above cases, the Mission finds that the conduct of the Israeli armed forces constitute grave breaches of the Fourth Geneva Convention in respect of willful killings and willfully causing great suffering to protected persons and as such give rise to individual criminal responsibility. [Goldstone report, pp. 16]

This finding, of course, is precisely why the report recommends that Israel launch credible investigations into possible wrongdoing, which Goldstone claims Israel is now doing (more on this later). In that sense, Israel’s investigations confirm many of the key findings of the Goldstone report, a point I’ve raised previously.

The conclusion above, which is easily the strongest charge in the entire Goldstone report, has very little to do with Goldstone’s latest statement that “civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy.” The Goldstone commission and other human rights investigations have never said the IDF maintains a policy of deliberately targeting civilians. This is a red-herring; nobody seriously believes there is a high-level policy to murder civilians. The actual issue is that “these incidents indicate that the instructions given to the Israeli forces moving into Gaza provided for a low threshold for the use of lethal fire against the civilian population” (Goldstone report, pp. 16). This low threshold was an intentional policy, as has been confirmed by dozens of soldiers’ and officers’ statements. For example, many people have commented before about how the IDF “rewrote the rules of war for Gaza,” in particular by getting rid of “the longstanding principle of military conduct known as ‘means and intentions’—whereby a targeted suspect must have a weapon and show signs of intending to use it before being fired upon—as being applicable before calling in fire from drones and helicopters in Gaza last winter.” The intentional, deliberate policy was one of “literally zero risk to the soldiers”, an order that is inescapably related to the high civilian casualties among the Palestinians. For these reasons the main argument in Goldstone’s latest op-ed, which FM Lieberman erroneously believes “vindicates” Israel, is entirely besides the point.

Condemning Hamas
Hamas certainly, and unlawfully, does deliberately target civilians. This is not only grotesque but illegal, and Hamas military leaders should be referred to the International Criminal Court for this since Hamas’ political leadership has refused to investigate the matter themselves and hold those responsible for war crimes to account. But, of course, this was already well known by anybody who read the Goldstone report, which wrote:

The Mission has further determined that these [8000 rocket] attacks [since 2001] constitute indiscriminate attacks upon the civilian population of southern Israel and that where there is no intended military target and the rockets and mortars are launched into a civilian population, they constitute a deliberate attack against a civilian population. These acts would constitute war crimes and may amount to crimes against humanity.

One could have also reached the same level of awareness by reading any of Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, or other human rights organizations‘ press releases and reports. In this sense, there is absolutely nothing new about Hamas in Goldstone’s latest op-ed, yet some Israelis and Jewish groups seem surprised (see, e.g., AIPAC’s one of many tweets on the matter).

A sad, integrity-damaging turn

The first time I saw Judge Goldstone speak in person he was striking in his equanimity and unshakeable commitment to international law. Even in the face of hate-filled attacks by Jews in the audience, who compared his report to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, he handled himself with a level of firm principle that I imagined to be unmovable. The second time I saw him speak in public a year later, he seemed tired and worn down by the relentless attacks against him by those who chose to attack the messenger instead of deal with the message. It was nothing concrete that he said, but there was a withered tone in his voice and a sort of quiet resignation that his best intentions had been so vehemently manipulated—and misunderstood.

Goldstone’s latest op-ed is something else altogether. It does not challenge a single concrete finding in the entire report, and he has not conceded absolutely anything to his critics in that way. In fact, his findings under severe constraints have held up remarkably well with time. But the tone and timing of this current piece suggest that somehow the report should be “reconsidered”, that it was somehow wrong. Moreover, his comments seem to intentionally mislead about the content of the UN independent committee’s findings on due process in Israel. This is nothing more than a bone to Israel’s apologists, which is deeply misleading for all the reasons discussed here. I am afraid this is a sad, integrity-damaging turn for a man who had singlehandedly done so much to protect people from war crimes in Israel, Palestine, and elsewhere.

And he should have known better, that is, he should have known that this craven gesture to Israel would not allow his enemies to forgive him and welcome him back to the broader Jewish community. Already the enemies, sensing weakness, attack for the final kill attempt. Jeffrey Goldberg, with the tone of the intellectual gatekeeper he fashions for himself, makes it clear this doesn’t change the “blood libel.” The editor-in-chief of the Jerusalem Post, David Horovitz, tells Goldstone “an apology is not good enough.” We can expect much, much more of such attacks.

Goldstone has done neither international law and accountability for war crimes—nor himself—any favors with this latest, depressing op-ed.

This post originally appeard on Yaniv Reich’s blog Hybrid States.

++++++++

See also:

• Goldstone’s shameful U-turn
• Reconsidering the Goldstone report on Israel and war crimes As Eldad comments: “What he says is that had he known when he wrote his report what he knows today, the report would have been very different from the one that now exists. How different? Mainly, apparently, it would have not accused Israel of war crimes, or at least with regard to fewer instances. I cannot say that I find Goldstone’s turn-about entirely convincing. To mention a few points: he takes much too much for granted that Israel is performing (has performed) a transparent and thorough investigation. Hamas’s crimes, he says, were intentional—Israel’s not, at least not in all cases, for example the one in which 21 members of a single family were killed. Goldstone claims that Israel has the right to defend itself, but not a word about Gaza having that same right. He goes so far as to say that the fact that Hamas managed to kill only comparatively few Israelis does not relieve it of accountability, but says nothing about Israel having killed so many—intentionally or not—being accountable for their deaths. Really! Just to claim that Israel did not kill intentionally does not relieve it of responsibility! Goldstone should have read testimonies of soldiers who participated in the killing fields of Gaza that are gathered in Breaking the Silence (the link to it follows Goldstone’s retraction). And also it might have been useful for him to have seen a video showing how technologically advanced Israel is in the field of drones used to kill, but which nevertheless hit civilians—in one case a family in their yard having tea, in another 2 young women walking down the street (the link also follows the report). And I hardly need remind you of the doctor’s 3 daughters and niece who were suddenly killed by tank shells while sitting in their room. Do we say that a driver who killed a pedestrian is not responsible because he/she did not do it intentionally? Goldstone’s report (the original one) was fair-handed. His comments now sound as though he feels that his report conflicted with his support for Israel. Read and see what you think.”
• Judge Goldstone retracts part of his report, leaves the rest intact. Goldstone’s op-ed retraction of a portion of the report has gotten far more coverage than the original conclusions of his report when it first came out. The op-ed is “being characterized as a retraction…. [But] Judge Goldstone actually only comments on one small part of the report, which [implies] that the rest of the report stays intact and that he is still in support of that…. [T]he Dahiya Doctrine is the war doctrine that Israel first used in the 2006 attack on Lebanon, which basically said that any area that they were receiving fire from, they would consider the entire area to be a military target. (Dahiya is a neighborhood in Beirut that was absolutely flattened.) Leading up to Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, the Israeli military and political command was very clear that they were going to recreate Dahiya in Gaza. And many people, including Judge Goldstone and the [unrefuted majority of the] Goldstone Report, say that’s exactly what happened. And that’s one of the most damning charges of the Goldstone Report, which Goldstone does not address in this op-ed, that there was an intentional policy of collective punishment, of attacking the civilian infrastructure, the electricity, the food, the people of Gaza, to punish them for having elected Hamas. And that’s a charge that still stands.”

by Ross Stephens, from Leawood, Kansas, as a letter to the editor in The Progressive Populist:

In his State of the Union message, President Obama referred to the fact that the tax-rate for corporations in the United States is one of the highest, which is true. What he did not say is, taxes collected from corporations are way below average for developed nations — of 30 countries, only Turkey and Mexico have lower taxes on business. American corporations have an abundance of loopholes and tax abatements; multi-national and foreign corporations hide their profits in the jurisdiction of governments or countries with lower taxes or in no-tax tax colonies. Lobbying and campaign contributions are an incentive for inserting special exemptions in legislation passed by Congress and much cheaper than paying the corporate income tax.

In 1952 the corporate income tax brought in 32.1% of all federal revenue collected; by 2001 it had dropped to 7.6%; and for 2009 was 6.6%. On the other hand, Social Security/Medicare taxes increased from 5.6% in 1952 (before Medicare) to 42.3% of revenue by 2009.

Social Security/Medicare has paid for itself, but in supplanting the corporate tax as the second most important source of federal revenue, trust fund surpluses have been in effect spent for war and national security as the deficit mounts and large corporations pay very little in taxes.

We have turned massive portions of federal services over to corporations. Three-fifths of the monetary outlays of the Defense Department are now outsourced to private corporations; as is the case for seventy percent of intelligence operations, 56% for the Department of Homeland Security, and similar portions of the national security activities for a half-dozen other federal agencies. Two-thirds of all fulltime federal civilian and military employees are in some aspect national security. Total expenditures for war/national security, including servicing war-incurred debt, amounted to nearly half of all federal expenditures just prior to the economic meltdown of 2008. It’s not Social Security and Medicare that are driving up the national debt — it’s war and the massive outsourcing of public services to private corporations that largely avoid paying the corporate income tax. Government waste, inefficiency, corruption, and war combine to increase corporate profits.

Last year the US Supreme Court gave corporations the right to vote with their money in our elections, without limits or disclosure (Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission). A recent study of this “hidden money” gave these funds to the Republicans versus Democrats by a ratio of 21 to one —resulting in a large increase of Republicans in Congress and the States. Because of redistricting and this Court decision, the results of the 2010 election will distort politics for the next decade. I want to know where in the US Constitution and legislation passed by Congress corporations are made legal persons and where legal persons are given the right to vote? Does this case mean American, multi-national, and foreign corporations all have effectively the right to vote in our elections? We should change the Pledge of Allegiance to, “I pledge allegiance to the Corporation and the CEO for which it stands …”

Ross Stephens
Leawood, Kansas

by Margot Roosevelt in the Los Angeles Times:

An effort by a handful of UC Berkeley scientists to reexamine temperature data underlying global warming research has landed in the center of a national political debate over government regulation.

The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature study is led by physicist Richard Muller, a longtime critic of the scientific consensus on climate change, who plans to testify on the effort Thursday before the House Science Committee in the latest of several congressional inquiries on climate science since the GOP majority was seated.

The Berkeley project’s biggest private backer, with $150,000, is the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation. Oil billionaires Charles and David Koch are the nation’s most prominent funders of efforts to prevent curbs on fossil-fuel burning, the biggest contributor to planet-warming greenhouse gases….

The Berkeley effort is hardly new. Over the last two decades, three independent scientific groups have analyzed international data from thousands of weather stations. Using different combinations of stations and varying statistical methods, all have come to nearly identical conclusions: The planet’s surface, on average, has warmed about 0.75 degrees centigrade (1.4 degrees Fahrenheit) since the beginning of the 20th century.

Scientists involved in those studies said they would welcome new peer-reviewed research, but they contend that Muller is violating scientific protocol by publicizing his project, underway for months, before it produces any vetted scientific papers.

“I am highly skeptical of the hype and claims,” said Kevin Trenberth, who heads the Climate Analysis Section of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, a university consortium. “The team has some good people but not the expertise required in certain areas, and purely statistical approaches are naive. I suspect they have an agenda.”

The Koch donation, to many, confirms those suspicions. “Why would a scientist accept funding from an organization with no interest in advancing the science?” asked Benjamin Santer, an atmospheric scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory….

Peter Thorne, a leading expert on temperature data at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C., said … he was unsurprised by the Berkeley project’s focus on temperature data. “For those who wish to discredit the science, this record is the holy grail,” he said. “They figure if they can discredit this, then society would have significant doubts about all of climate science.”

But temperature is only one indicator of global warming, Thorne said. “Even if the thermometer had never been invented, the evidence is there from deep ocean changes, from receding glaciers, from rising sea levels and receding sea ice and spring snow cover. All the physical indicators are consistent with a warming world.

“There is no doubt the trend of temperature is upwards since the early 20th century. And that trend is accelerating.”

Please see this short debate on Democracy Now!. A plague on both your houses!
Just put the emphasis, the scientific research, the funding toward solar and wind and other sustainable!

Your tax dollars at work
Trillions for Iraq and Afghanistan
Domestic spending freeze
How is the war economy working for you?

by Chris Hedges in truthdig:

Power does not rest with the electorate. It does not reside with either of the two major political parties. It is not represented by the press. It is not arbitrated by a judiciary that protects us from predators. Power rests with corporations. And corporations gain very lucrative profits from war, even wars we have no chance of winning. All polite appeals to the formal systems of power will not end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We must physically obstruct the war machine or accept a role as its accomplice.

The moratorium on anti-war protests in 2004 was designed to help elect the Democratic presidential candidate, Sen. John Kerry. It was a foolish and humiliating concession. Kerry snapped to salute like a windup doll when he was nominated. He talked endlessly about victory in Iraq. He assured the country that he would not have withdrawn from Fallujah. And by the time George W. Bush was elected for another term the anti-war movement had lost its momentum. The effort to return Congress to Democratic control in 2006 and end the war in Iraq became another sad lesson in incredulity. The Democratic Party, once in the majority, funded and expanded the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And Barack Obama in 2008 proved to be yet another advertising gimmick for the corporate and military elite. All our efforts to work within the political process to stop these wars have been abject and miserable failures. And while we wasted our time, tens of thousands of Iraqi, Afghan and Pakistani civilians, as well as U.S. soldiers and Marines, were traumatized, maimed and killed.

Either you are against war or you are not. Either you use your bodies to defy the war makers and weapons manufacturers until the wars end or you do not. Either you have the dignity and strength of character to denounce those who ridicule or ignore your core moral beliefs-including Obama-or you do not. Either you stand for something or you do not. And because so many in the anti-war movement proved to be weak and naive in 2004, 2006 and 2008 we will have to start over. This time we must build an anti-war movement that will hold fast. We must defy the entire system. We must acknowledge that it is not our job to help Democrats win elections. The Democratic Party has amply proved, by its failure to stand up for working men and women, its slavishness to Wall Street and its refusal to end these wars, that it cannot be trusted. We must trust only ourselves. And we must disrupt the system. The next chance, in case you missed the last one, to protest these wars will come Saturday, March 19, the eighth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. Street demonstrations are scheduled in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. You can find details on here.

We are spending, much of it through the accumulation of debt, nearly a trillion dollars a year to pay for these wars. We drive up the deficits to wage war while we have more than 30 million people unemployed, some 40 million people living in poverty and tens of millions more in a category euphemistically called “near poverty.” The profits of weapons manufacturers and private contractors have quadrupled since the invasion of Afghanistan. But the cost for corporate greed has been chronic and long-term unemployment and underemployment and the slashing of federal and state services. The corporations, no matter how badly the wars are going, make huge profits from the conflicts. They have no interest in turning off their money-making machine. Let Iraqis die. Let Afghans die. Let Pakistanis die. Let our own die. And the mandarins in Congress and the White House, along with their court jesters on the television news shows, cynically “feel our pain” and sell us out for bundles of corporate cash.

Michael Prysner, a veteran of the Iraq War and one of the co-founders of March Forward!, gets it. His group is one of those organizing the March 19 protests. Prysner joined the Army out of high school in June 2001. He was part of the Iraq invasion force. He worked during the war in Iraq tracking targets and calling in airstrikes and artillery barrages. He took part in nighttime raids on Iraqi homes. He worked as an interrogator. He did ground surveillance missions and protected convoys. He left the Army in 2005, disgusted by the war and the lies told to sustain it. He has been involved since leaving the military in anti-recruiting drives at high schools and street protests. He was arrested with 130 others in front of the White House during the Dec. 16 anti-war protest organized by Veterans for Peace.

“I believed going into the war that we were there to help the Iraqi people and find weapons of mass destruction,” he said when we spoke a few days ago. “But it quickly became clear that these two reasons for the war were absolutely false. If you mentioned weapons of mass destruction to intelligence officers they would laugh at you. It was not even part of the mission to look for these things. If it was part of the mission I would have known because I was part of the only intelligence company in the north of the country. I thought that maybe we were there to help the Iraqi people, but all I saw when I was there was Iraqis brutalized and their living conditions deteriorate drastically. Iraqis would tell me we were worse than Saddam. I soon realized there was a different purpose for the war, that we were putting in place a permanent military occupation. It was my firsthand experience during my deployment that showed me the reality of the Iraq War and led me to begin to question U.S. foreign policy. I began to wonder what U.S. foreign policy as a whole was about. I saw that Iraq was a microcosm. The U.S. military is used to conquer countries for the rich, to seize markets, land, resources and labor for Wall Street. This is what drives U.S. foreign policy.”

“When Obama was elected in 2008 the majority of the country had turned against the Iraq War,” he said. “You could not be a Democrat running for office without giving lip service to being against the Iraq War. The reason people were against the war is because there was a constant, senseless death of U.S. troops and Iraqi civilians. It was a squandering of our resources. This has not changed, despite the rebranding of the occupation. U.S. soldiers are still being killed, wounded and psychologically traumatized, especially those on their third, fourth and fifth deployment who were traumatized in previous deployments and are being re-traumatized. There were two U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq a few days ago. The reasons that led people to oppose the war in 2003 are still in effect. All that has changed is that the U.S. has been able to recruit enough Iraqis to put in the forefront and take the brunt of the combat operations with U.S. soldiers a few steps behind. U.S. soldiers are still involved in combat. One of our members [of March Forward!], who joined our group about a month ago, is in Iraq now. He told me yesterday that he was hit harder than he has ever been hit on his nine months of deployment. Combat is still a reality. People are still being killed and maimed.”

“The war is still going on,” he lamented. “It is still bad for U.S. soldiers, and Iraq is completely destroyed. It is a catastrophe for the Iraqi people. To call this current operation ‘New Dawn,’ like this is a new day for the Iraqi people, ignores the fact that Iraqis have no electricity, live with constant violence, have no functioning government, have occupying forces still in their country and suffer rampant birth defects from the depleted uranium and other things. Iraq’s ‘New Dawn’ is a horror. It will remain that way until Iraq is given justice, which is a complete and immediate withdrawal of all occupying forces and heavy reparations paid to that country.”

Iraq, despite the brutality of Saddam Hussein, was a prosperous country with a highly educated middle class before the war. Its infrastructure was modern and efficient. Iraqis enjoyed a high standard of living. The country did not lack modern conveniences. Things worked. And being in Iraq, as I often was when I covered the Middle East for The New York Times, while unnerving because of state repression, was never a hardship. Since our occupation the country has tumbled into dysfunction. Factories, hospitals, power plants, phone service, sewage systems and electrical grids do not work. Iraqis, if they are lucky, get three hours of electricity a day. Try this in 110-degree heat. Poverty is endemic. More than a million Iraqi civilians have been killed. Nearly 5 million have been displaced from their homes or are refugees. The Mercer Quality of Living survey last year ranked Baghdad last among cities-the least livable on the planet. Iraq, which once controlled its own oil, has been forced to turn its oil concessions over to foreign corporations. That is what we have bequeathed to Iraq-violence, misery and theft.

It is not as if the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have popular support. The latest CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll shows that 63 percent of the American public opposes U.S. involvement in Afghanistan. And the level of discontent over the war in Iraq is even higher. Yet we continue to accept the duplicity of bankrupt liberal institutions and a corrupt political process that year after year betrays us. Public opinion is on our side. We should mobilize it to fight back. When I and the other protesters were arrested outside the White House on Dec. 16, several of the police officers who had been deployed as military members to Afghanistan or Iraq muttered to veterans as they handcuffed them that they were right about the wars. The anti-war sentiment is widespread, and we must find the courage to make it heard.

“All these people join the military because there is an abysmal job market and tuition rates are skyrocketing,” Prysner said. “Many young people are cut off from a college education. People are funneled into the military so they can make a living, have a home, health care, take care of their children and have an education. If a fraction of the money spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was used to meet human needs, kids would be able to go to college at affordable rates. We would be able to create jobs for young people when they get out of high school. Vast amounts of wealth, which we create, are poured into these wars and the military while people here are facing increasing hardship. We have to demand and fight for change, not ask for it.”

“We supposedly elected the most progressive president we have seen in a long time and the Democrats took control of the House and the Senate, but the wars have only expanded and intensified,” Prysner said. “The wars are now going into other countries, especially Pakistan and Yemen. The Democrats had a filibuster-proof majority in Congress. We had a seemingly progressive president. But all we got was more war, more military spending, more bombing of innocent people abroad and more U.S. troops coming home in coffins. This should eradicate and shatter the idea that convincing the Democrats to be on our side will accomplish anything. Left to its own devices Washington will continue its war drive. It will continue to dominate these countries and use them for staging grounds to invade other countries. There has been no real change in our foreign policy. If we are hurting the Democrats at this point, then fine. We need to build an independent political movement that is outside of the Establishment. This is the only way we have ever won real victories in our history.”

© 2011 TruthDig.com