“Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man”: Mixed but Moving

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

You’ve probably heard Leonard Cohen’s music without knowing it. His songs have appeared in movies from McCabe and Mrs. Miller to the German film The Edukators and even (albeit in censored form) Shrek. They’ve been featured on TV shows ranging from The West Wing to The L Word — and Cohen actually did a guest appearance on Miami Vice, playing the head of Interpol. A native of Montreal, Cohen was born in 1934 and was a published poet before he graduated from college. He wrote the best-selling novel Beautiful Losers in 1966 and set out for New York to become a singer-songwriter because he figured singing his words would pay better than just printing them. While he never had much of a voice — something he’s refreshingly honest about; when he accepted a music award in Canada in 1992 he said, “Only in Canada could somebody with a voice like mine win ‘Vocalist of the Year’” — and other people’s records of his songs generally were bigger hits than his, he nonetheless built up a cult following with the release of his first album, Songs by Leonard Cohen, in 1967.

Discovered by the legendary producer John Hammond — who’d also helped launch the careers of Benny Goodman, Count Basie, Billie Holiday, Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan, George Benson and Bruce Springsteen — and signed by him to Columbia Records, Cohen emerged as a kind of anti-Dylan. While even the most intimate of Dylan’s songs drew on phantasmagorical imagery and seemingly immense casts of characters, Cohen’s focused laser-like on the emotions of individuals or couples. Cohen also avoided writing openly political songs and, unlike Dylan, kept his original Jewish name. Though Cohen’s popularity dwindled in the 1970’s — especially after his ill-advised decision to do an album with baroque “Wall of Sound” producer Phil Spector, Death of a Ladies’ Man, at the height of the disco and punk movements — interest in his music began to perk up in the 1990’s after the late Kurt Cobain mentioned him in a song on his band Nirvana’s last album in 1993. Within two years there were at least two tribute albums to Cohen on the market and his songs once again began to attract the attention of record buyers — especially in Europe, where he’s always been more popular than in the U.S.

Alas, Cohen himself wasn’t around to share in the new-found acclaim, or the money it was bringing in; he’d deserted the music business to become a Buddhist monk and was living in a monastery on top of Mt. Baldy, taking care of his guru, a 90-something monk named Roshi. He gave his then-manager, Kelley Lynch, power of attorney over his business affairs, intending that she should run his publishing company and hold his royalties for him. Instead, he later alleged in a lawsuit, she sold the rights to his songs and pocketed the money herself, leaving him with $150,000 after a career that had earned millions. When he emerged from seclusion he made two new albums, Ten New Songs (2001) and Dear Heather (2004), produced and co-wrote the Blue Alert album for his current girlfriend, Anjani Thomas, and hired a new manager who, with producer Hal Willner, organized tribute concerts called Came So Far for Beauty in New York, Britain and Australia.

The new film Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man tells at least part of this story, though it tells it surprisingly obliquely. It’s basically documentary footage and interviews with Cohen himself intercut with other musicians — including Bono and The Edge from U2 — talking about how great he is and how much he influenced them, and footage from the Came So Far for Beauty concert in Sydney, Australia in 2005. Cohen, his speaking and singing voices both reduced to a monotone croak, gives anecdotes about his life but dresses them up in the same philosophical and imagistic language with which he writes his lyrics. The concert participants are an incestuous lot of currently popular “folk” singers — including brother and sister Rufus and Martha Wainwright and their mother and aunt, Kate and Anna McGarrigle — along with Teddy and Linda Thompson and a group called “The Handsome Family” and such unrelated people as rocker-turned-folkie Nick Cave, Antony (an androgynous singer from Britain who leads a band called Antony and the Johnsons), Beth Orton, Jarvis Cocker, Julie Christensen, Perla Batella and Joan Wasser.

Though the grace and power of Leonard Cohen’s work and personality ultimately shine through, Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man is a film with enough flaws you could probably nit-pick it to death. The talking-heads footage and the concert scenes blend oddly together. The interview segments show a pockmarked Cohen in close-up, his face looking every bit as old as his birth certificate tells us he is — though, oddly, they seem to be the product of more than one interview: when Cohen discusses his monastery life, he’s wearing a thin beard he doesn’t have in the rest of the film.

The performances range from profoundly moving — Antony’s weird countertenor voice and feminine appearance (he looks like a drag queen doing Janis Joplin, appropriately enough since Cohen had a brief affair with the real Joplin) vividly project the song “If It Be Your Will” — to awful. Nick Cave and two female singers who don’t even begin to blend with him ruin Cohen’s most famous song, “Suzanne,” and Beth Orton simply sounds incompetent on “Sisters of Mercy.” Rufus Wainwright’s contributions are strong but a bit prissy — given his well-known homosexuality, the description of the blow job Cohen got from Joplin in “Chelsea Hotel No. 2” seems Gay when Wainwright sings it — though the less well-known Teddy Thompson does well by “Tonight Will Be Fine.”

It’s no surprise that the best version of a Cohen song in the film comes from Cohen himself. After Bono tells us that his all-time favorite Cohen piece is “Tower of Song,” there Cohen is singing it, in a sequence shot in a New York nightclub without an audience, with U2 as his backup band. Bono plays an electronic keyboard and sings harmonies, taking over the lead vocal for a few lines. The feeling is uncannily close to that of “The Wanderer,” the piece Johnny Cash recorded with U2 in 1993; like Cash, Cohen comes off as an aging bard who’s just returned from a long journey to tell his young acolytes the lessons he’s learned on his trek through the world.

In essence, that’s the overall message of Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man. Cohen emerges as a sort of wise man — the horrible naïveté that cost him his life savings is discreetly unmentioned — and his lyrics, dense and rich in poetic and philosophical musings on his own and other people’s emotions and behavior, are certain to affect you. Whatever might be wrong with this or that interpretation of a Cohen song in the film, the basic strength of his material comes through — and so does the love the musicians and performers in the film have for it, even though some of them love Cohen’s songs not wisely but too well. Leaving the theatre, you’re likely to be moved and feel exalted by an hour and 38 minutes spent with a fascinating man who’s created compelling art in three media — music, poetry and drawing — and you’re also likely to be tempted to empty your wallet to stock up on Leonard Cohen CD’s.

Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man is now playing at the Landmark Cinemas, 3965 Fifth Avenue in Hillcrest. Please call (619) 299-2100 for showtimes and other information.

Former Ugandan Parliament Member Speaks in Mission Valley

Speaker Aggressively Discusses Women, AIDS and So-Called “Genocide” in North

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2006 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

“There has been a betrayal of women’s rights in Uganda,” said Miria Matembe, former ethics minister and member of parliament in the Ugandan government, in a speech at the Mission Valley public library July 2. Matembe, a heavy-set woman with a short, almost masculine haircut, spoke for well over two hours, fielding some surprisingly hostile questioning from the audience as she explained why she broke with Uganda’s president, Yoweri Museveni, in 2003 after Museveni had Uganda’s constitution amended so he could run for a third term as president.

After noting that her friend, university professor Dr. Dee Aker, had last been in Uganda in 2001 and had observed the local elections that year — “they were very bad in my constituency of Barrera, and Dee said this was a hopeless case” — Matembe said she had defended the elections and the Museveni government. After 2003, Matembe changed her mind. “I had no choice but to part company with President Museveni and join those who think he’s taking us in the wrong direction,” Matembe said. “In 2003 I told him not to amend the constitution to eliminate the term limits. … Some African brothers, when they get into power, they cannot get out.”

Matembe joked that “one day we might have to come observe your elections to make sure they are free and fair,” but said that at least the United States has a tradition of checks and balances, including limits on the power of the president, that doesn’t exist in most African countries. She claimed that only two post-independence leaders in sub-Saharan Africa — Julius Nyerere of Tanzania and Nelson Mandela of South Africa — have ever voluntarily stepped down from the presidencies of their countries. (A few audience members offered the names of one or two more.) “The others,” said Matembe, “hold ‘elections’ as personal property, view government as patronage and just stay around.”

Yoweri Museveni became the leader of Uganda in 1989, after a decade-long guerrilla war between his New Resistance Movement (NRM) and the Ugandan government. Prior to then, Uganda had been under the leadership of two bloodthirsty dictators, Milton Obote and Idi Amin. Amin had overthrown Obote; Obote in turn overthrew Amin in the 1970’s and ruled until the NRM won its guerrilla war and Museveni assumed power. At first Museveni promised a democracy and recruited political activists, including Matembe, to draft a new constitution.

“In the Ugandan constitution, we said, ‘No traditional chiefs,’ because they rule forever,” Matembe recalled. “So we put down a limit of two five-year terms for the president.” After questioning why the U.S. continues to support Museveni and hail him as a democrat even as his rule becomes increasingly dictatorial and corrupt, Matembe said, “I believed in that man until I saw him stand up in 2003 and say, ‘I would advise you to give up the term limit.’” Matembe explained that she had other issues with Museveni besides his scrapping the constitutional term limit to keep himself in office — notably her frustration at being unable to get him or the Ugandan parliament to live up to the constitutional guarantees of gender equality — but the term-limit issue was the last straw.

“We are just there … ”

“I wanted to use politics to espouse my cause for women’s equality,” Matembe said. “When the NRM came to power, it seemed to be a period of cleaning up. I wanted a legal framework to promote gender equality and empowerment for women’s. I linked with women in non-governmental organizations (NGO’s) to encourage change.” Among her greatest victories was a constitutionally mandated quota of at least 28.8 percent women in the national parliament and at least 30 percent women in the local and regional governments — but Matembe has become discouraged about that, too, feeling that the quota system has become an impediment to real progress for women in Uganda.

“We are just there; we got access and presence, but no influence,” Matembe explained. “We participated in vain, because at the end of the day our rights are not there. Women supposedly play an important role in Ugandan politics, but many decisions that affect women’s lives are still made without their participation. This is not only unfair and unjust, it renders the political process a sham.” What’s more, she said, the quota-guaranteed seats in the parliament have attracted women who are more interested in the income and perks of legislative service —especially desirable in a country whose economy is still underdeveloped and few middle-class jobs exist — than in activism. “They perceive [the quota system] as an act of privilege and generosity on the part of the government, so they are not willing to rock the boat,” Matembe explained.

According to Matembe, the biggest specifically feminist issues facing Ugandan women are property rights, divorce and domestic violence, including sexual abuse. While the Ugandan constitution says at least some of the right things on paper — “it does away with traditional practices [like arranged marriages and female genital mutilation], sets the marriage age at 18 and grants women the right to own property independently of their husbands” — the government “has been very reluctant to make laws in conformance with the constitution on women’s rights,” she explained.

Rape Laws from 1908

What that means in practice is that rights American and other Western women won in the 1970’s after decades of feminist struggle (and which, as Matembe grimly noted, many young American women take so totally for granted that they refuse to organize to protect them) still don’t exist for women in Uganda. The laws governing rape and domestic abuse date back as far as 1908, when Uganda was still a British colony, and allow men accused of rape to use the victim’s previous sexual history in court against her. What’s more, they specifically define rape as a woman being forced to have sex against her will by a man other than her husband. Like most U.S. rape laws before the so-called “second wave” of feminist activism in the 1970’s, Uganda’s laws say that a husband has the automatic right to have sex with his wife any time he wants, whether she wants to or not.

The only change in Uganda’s rape laws since Museveni came to power has been to increase the penalties, as a response to the AIDS crisis — but even that is meaningless if women are too traumatized or scared by the court system to testify against their rapists, and according to Matembe that’s usually the case in Uganda today. What’s more, she added, even when rapists are convicted “the judges don’t put out big sentences. The [rape] laws are not user-friendly. They put the woman on trial and put her through a second rape in court.”

Matembe boasted that she had once suggested castration as an appropriate punishment for rapists — leaving it somewhat ambiguous whether she was serious or simply taking an extreme position to dramatize the importance of reforming Uganda’s antediluvian rape laws. (At least one woman in the front row at the Mission Valley library seemed to like the idea.) Matembe said “there is no political will” to change these ancient rape laws and that the entire promise Museveni made to be interested in women’s participation in government was a sham.

“He was using us to promote his causes,” she said. “The government is mainly interested in harnessing us to stay in power. Beyond that, the government is not interested in empowering women, as shown by its refusal to enforce the laws on equal property rights and enact new laws on divorce and sexual abuse.” About the only hope for Ugandan victims of rape or domestic violence, Matembe conceded, lies with non-governmental organizations like Hope After Rape and Action for Development, who reach out to the survivors of rape and domestic violence, respectively.

AIDS, Abstinence and Health Care

Asked about Uganda’s AIDS situation and alleged U.S. pressure on the Museveni government to abandon condoms and safer-sex education in favor of abstinence-only programs, Matembe said she’d been involved personally in Uganda’s AIDS response and took pride in the claim that Uganda’s rate of HIV seropositivity had fallen from 15 percent of the population in the early 1990’s to 6 percent today. “Our AIDS rate is low because of our own efforts, not the United States,” she said. “The U.S. government came to ‘help’ us with AIDS just to be seen. For America to put Uganda up as African’s model AIDS program was Bush’s idea, not ours.” She said that Uganda applauded the United Nations effort to set up a Global Fund against AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria (from which the U.S. has largely abstained in favor of setting up an anti-AIDS fund of its own) but said “we don’t need to borrow strategies from anywhere.”

Matembe said she personally took the HIV antibody test when she visited the U.S. in 1991 “because I wanted to be at the forefront in fighting the evil, and therefore I wanted to know my status. (This was in sharp contrast to South African president Thabo Mbeki, who refused to take the test in 2000 because, he said, it would be a gesture of support for the orthodox model that HIV is the sole cause of AIDS and he didn’t want to commit to that while he was inviting scientists with other points of view to advise him on the syndrome.) Matembe said the initial strategy of Uganda was to “take AIDS on at every function, including a funeral or a wedding … It was a tough journey, and we were abused for it. I talked at a wedding, and when the boy went to kiss the girl, the girl said, ‘Don’t! You’ll give me AIDS!’”

Instead of pushing abstinence-based anti-AIDS programs on Uganda, Matembe said the developed world would be better advised to work on improving Uganda’s overall health-care infrastructure. “If we had good health facilities, we would not be dealing with AIDS,” she said. “Caring for the sick without gloves, you get AIDS.” She also said that the abstinence-only proponents ignore both human nature and the lack of rights for women in Uganda — particularly the laws that prevent married women from refusing to have sex with their husbands or insisting on condom use when they do. “I am a very good Christian, but I am against the churches saying abstinence,” Matembe declared. “Even Jesus said that the spirit was willing but the body was weak. What about the bodies of ordinary human beings?”

Uganda’s North: Terror and Camps

Though much of Matembe’s presentation was fervent — she frequently raised her voice and gestured flamboyantly to make her points — on no other issue was she as emotional as on the situation in northern Uganda. A good many of the people in the audience, including some Ugandan émigrés, had been encouraged to come to the meeting by a local group called the Campaign to End Genocide in Uganda Now (C.E.G.U.N.). Their argument is that Museveni’s government is carrying on a campaign to wipe out the Acholi people of northern Uganda by placing them in concentration camps, and using the threat of a terrorist organization called the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) to justify keeping them in the camps.

Matembe couldn’t have disagreed more. Whatever her differences with Museveni on other issues, she remains a staunch supporter of his policies in the north, convinced that relocating the people out of their villages and into camps in the 1990’s was the only way to stop the LRA. She said the north had been “pacified” to the point where there is only one district — in the Chittagong/Gulu area — where the camps are still necessary. “Problems remain in Acholiland,” Matembe conceded. “Women have been raped. Young children have been abducted and raped and have had children by fathers they don’t know. The struggle has been going on for 20 years. It is very sad that that happened.”

But Matembe vehemently defended Museveni against the C.E.G.U.N. members’ charges of genocide. She blamed the LRA and its leader, Joseph Kony, for the brutalities in the north and the need to keep the Acholis in camps. “We debated it in parliament and tried our best, but we couldn’t sort out the situation or have talks with the terrorists,” Matembe said. “Kony has no agenda. The other groups who were fighting the government all had agendas, and we were able to negotiate with them and bring them into the government.” Matembe also blamed the government of Sudan, which until recently provided weapons and financial support to the LRA and still gives LRA fighters sanctuary in their country. (Ironically, Sudan’s Arab Muslim-dominated government has been accused of genocide against the Christian and animist people of southern Sudan as well as the people of Darfur in the west, who are Muslims but are Black instead of Arab.)

During the question-and-answer period, Matembe had to deal with hostile statements from the C.E.G.U.N. members and supporters in the audience, and at times it seemed as if the Black people in the room were applauding the C.E.G.U.N. speakers while the whites were coming to Matembe’s defense. A number of the C.E.G.U.N. members pointed to a recent interview Joseph Kony gave to the BBC after years of media silence, during which he identified the LRA as a movement for Acholi liberation and denied that his fighters ever cut off the limbs, noses or lips of fellow Acholis — as Matembe and the Ugandan government have charged.

Matembe responded furiously. “The people fighting Kony have told us what was going on, and one problem was that Sudan was arming them,” she said. “Kony is an animal. How come he turns his guns on the Acholi people and cuts them down instead of fighting against the [Ugandan] army?” Asked why the struggle in the north has been going on for over two decades, Matembe said, “Guerrilla wars take a long time to win. Even the U.S. hasn’t got Osama bin Laden and hasn’t stopped the situation in Iraq. Uganda is poor and is trying to fight with Kony.” Matembe did acknowledge that “the army in Uganda is corrupt,” and that one reason the war is lasting so long is that much of the money set aside to fight it is being diverted into the pockets of military leaders — some of whom received high-powered, high-paid appointments in Museveni’s government even after parliament censured them for corruption.

According to Matembe, it’s the overall poverty in Uganda, as well as the threat from the LRA, that’s keeping the Acholis in the camps this long. “People are in the camps because the government doesn’t have enough money,” she said. “We put a motion before the Ugandan parliament to have the north declared a disaster area so we could get foreign help, but Museveni was against it because he thought it was a sign of defeat.” One issue on which she and the C.E.G.U.N. people did agree was that after a decade in the camps — in which time a whole generation has been born and grown to adulthood without any formal education whatsoever — the Acholis would need a lot of physical, psychological and spiritual help to leave and resume any sort of normal life, and Matembe said she hoped the Americans would help provide that.

“It is not true that the government is deliberately exterminating the Acholis,” Matembe said. “Acholis do not live in Acholiland alone. We emigrate, we mix, we intermarry. I regret the situation in Acholiland today. It is my view that the war is no longer at that magnitude. It is now mostly in southern Sudan. I understand that the government has decided that these people should go out of the camps, but to do that these people must have a lot of rehabilitation, including psychological help and searches to find out if their original homes still exist. But I want to believe that something is being done for these people.” Denying the claims of C.E.G.U.N. and other groups that one million Acholis have been killed by the relocation, Matembe said, “I’m not there. I talk from my heart and I want to appeal to the people from Acholiland to be honest and not to tell Americans that one race in Uganda is trying to eliminate another.”

Low Turnout, Negative Campaign Sank Busby, Queer Democrats Told

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2006 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Ever since Republican Brian Bilbray, former Congressmember and Washington lobbyist, defeated Democrat Francine Busby by five percentage points in the June 6 special election to fill the seat of former Congressmember Randy “Duke” Cunningham, most pundits analyzing the race have suggested that it means the Republicans will likely keep control of Congress after this fall’s election. The argument goes that tightly gerrymandered districts, carefully drawn to favor incumbents, Republican party loyalty and the popularity of most local Congressmembers — whatever voters may think of the nationwide party to which they belong — will ensure enough Republican wins to preserve their House of Representatives majority. That’s the perception Jess Durfee, former San Diego Democratic Club president and currently chair of the San Diego County Democratic Central Committee, and Ira Lechner, Virginia-born political activist and Democratic campaigner, came to the San Diego Democratic Club June 22 to challenge.

According to Durfee and Lechner, what did Busby in was a low voter turnout, a last-minute gaffe, a misplaced strategy aimed at getting Republicans to cross over instead of seeking support among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents who rarely vote, and an intensely negative campaign on both sides that left voters disgusted and kept them home. Because the club’s advertised speaker, San Diego city attorney Mike Aguirre, didn’t show, Durfee and Lechner got more time than expected to discuss the results of the June 6 election — but what was billed as a post-mortem of the entire result focused almost exclusively on the Bilbray-Busby race.

Lechner compared the turnout in June 2006 to that of the Presidential election in November 2004, in which Busby ran against Cunningham and predictably lost big in a heavily Republican district — before Cunningham pled guilty to charges of corruption, left Congress and received an eight-year prison sentence. In that election, 275,000 people voted in the 50th Congressional district, where Cunningham and Busby were running; Cunningham got 169,000 votes and Busby got 105,000, Lechner said. By contrast, on June 6 only 157,000 people voted in the district and only 71,000 voted for Busby. The key to winning the election, Lechner argued, would have been reaching out to the 34,000 “true-blue Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents” who had voted for Busby in 2004 and didn’t vote at all this year.

Instead, Lechner said, “Busby became a focus for the Democratic battle for control of Congress in the whole country, with media attention and a whole lot of money. We spent somewhere in the neighborhood of $4-5 million. In addition, a lot of phone banking was done by MoveOn.org and EMILY’s List sent out mail pieces that were far better done than the miserable pieces I got from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC). They were unreadable and stupid. You remember the commercials, with the bouncing kangaroo? The DCCC’s commercials were disruptive. The Republicans spent at least $10 million and had $24 million available.”

According to both Lechner and Durfee, the involvement of both the Republican and Democratic national congressional campaigns turned the race into a mud-fest, with both sides airing disgustingly negative commercials and the Republicans, since as usual they had more money, airing more of them. “Do you remember the first commercial they put up about Busby allegedly applauding child molesters?” Lechner said. “That ran on every single local channel for three weeks. It didn’t change Busby’s negative rating hardly at all. One could argue that the $10 million spent by the Republicans and the $5 million by the Democrats had virtually no effect on the election except to turn people off from voting at all.”

And that, Durfee argued, is precisely why the Republicans in particular have become known for running such nasty campaigns: because turning people off from voting at all is exactly what the Republicans want. Durfee called it “voter suppression” and said the Republicans can get away with it because they have a far more loyal hard-core base that will turn out and vote for their party’s candidates no matter what. The Republicans’ trick, he said, is to magnify the importance of their base by turning off everyone else in the electorate — and one proven way for the Republicans to do that is to run such a negative campaign that the Democrats feel forced to respond in kind. “When you fight a negative campaign with a negative campaign, we’re likely to lose because Republicans will come out come hell or high water, whereas Democrats are a lot more fickle,” Durfee explained.

When club member and Busby campaign volunteer Bill Stanhope said that all anyone he talked to during door-to-door precinct walks could recall about her were the attack ads, Lechner responded with a slashing critique of the mind-set of Washington-based political consultants. “The power of these consultants from D.C. is just overwhelming — and bad,” Lechner said. “They have one formula, and on June 7 they’re gone. In this case they left at 11:15 in the morning on June 6. The consultants are so powerful that all the candidates listen to them. What they don’t realize is that the American voter is yearning for a reason to vote for somebody — and instead all they get is these negative campaigns on both sides.”

“The candidate pays the consultant and the direct-mail house pays the consultant,” Durfee added. “So the candidate is going to be persuaded to do more mail whether it will do them any good or not. The consultants are getting kickbacks from the mail houses.” Durfee said the only way to defang the power of the consultants is to build more neighborhood-based grass-roots campaigns; he urged people to go door-to-door in their neighborhoods and give positive messages on why people should vote for a particular candidate instead of fear-mongering with attacks on the opponent.

Durfee outlined another Republican strategy to win elections: getting hot-button initiatives on the ballot that will attract socially conservative voters to the polls and thereby swell the totals for Republican candidates as well. In 1994 Republican governor Pete Wilson tied his political fortunes to the anti-immigrant Proposition 187, erased a double-digit deficit in the polls and won re-election — though he hurt the long-term status of the Republican party in California by encouraging eligible Latinos to become U.S. citizens and vote Democrat. (In the mid-1990’s the San Diego Democratic Club’s voter registration volunteers reported that when they worked in Latino communities and asked people what party they wanted to register with, they’d often reply, “Which party is Pete Wilson in? I want to be in the other one.”) More recently, Republicans have used initiatives banning same-sex marriage and restricting women’s rights to reproductive choice to draw out socially conservative voters.

Though governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Republican leadership lost all four of the initiatives they put on the ballot in the November 2005 special election, Durfee warned that they are pulling the same strategy this November by putting back on the ballot the initiative that came closest to victory last year: one requiring that the parents be notified if a minor girl seeks an abortion. “The initiative on parental notification will be on the ballot this November,” Durfee warned. “These initiatives are on the ballot to drive the far Right to the ballot box. Overall, we have a good slate of Democrats statewide and locally, but we have our work cut out for us.”

BILL FREYER:

“Mr. Handball” Brings “Pleasures and Treasures” to North Park

interview by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2006 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Beginning in May, a small, quiet, unassuming bungalow at 2228 University Avenue started undergoing a transformation. It got a new coat of paint on the outside and a broad new stoop of stairs at its entrance. Inside, its walls were painted and a series of shelves and racks were put up containing all sorts of goodies, including T-shirts and other clothing, sex toys and S/M equipment, adult videos and also original artworks and other items one doesn’t expect to see in a store catering to an adult market. On June 15, the two men who had created this business opened its doors to the public and turned on the neon sign that announces its name, “Pleasures and Treasures,” and its slogan: “A new experience every time!”

The main man behind Pleasures and Treasures, Bill Freyer, is a lot like his store: quiet and unassuming on the outside, energetic, passionate and deeply committed on the inside. He’s of medium height, rail-thin, with short hair and in such good physical shape it’s hard to believe he’s old enough to have done all the things he says he’s done. Before he got into the adult retail business, he was known mostly as the founder of Red Hankies San Diego, a club for fellow devotees of the sex practice variously known as “fisting” or “handballing.” He started this club two decades ago and has seen it grow into a worldwide organization that hosts an annual “FistFest” convention in Palm Springs every June.

Zenger’s visited Bill Freyer on June 18 — Bill’s birthday. (He didn’t say which birthday.) We talked about the store, Bill’s history with Red Hankies and in the Leather community, the dos and don’ts for wanna-be fisters and fistees, and how their intent for the store is not only to sell merchandise but, with their own experiences in Leather and kink, to teach people how to use these items to improve their sex lives and increase their erotic repertoires. Though Pleasures and Treasures actually opened on June 15, their official “grand opening celebration” was July 1, from noon to 3 p.m., and featured special guests Bill Gardner and John Singleton of the Palm Springs-based Hot Desert Knights company, pioneers in producing “bareback” (condom-free) adult Gay videos.

Zenger’s: Bill, why don’t we start with a little of your background, how long you’ve been involved in the community and what got you into this?

Bill Freyer: I’ve been in San Diego for about 22 years now. I have been actively involved in Club X and Leatherfest, and also I’m the head of Red Hankies of San Diego. I’ve had friends also that have other shops, like Perry and Brian over at Ringold, and I worked for a short stint at RAW Limited. When I quit there, I missed being around the customers, and my partner and I sat down and discussed opening our own shop. When this shop became available here, especially right next door to the 2200 Club, it was meant to be.

Zenger’s: There seem to be so many of these kinds of stores around North Park: the Crypt, MacLeo, until recently Ringold, and RAW. How many stores like this do you think this area can support; and what’s going to make yours different, so that people will want to come to this one?

Freyer: I think there’s still a huge gap in the community for stores of our type. The biggest difference between our store and the others is some of them have people working at them who really don’t know the scene. They’re just working there. Or some of them look totally slutty, so that a lot of people would not want to walk through the front door just from the outside of the building, or from the merchandise displayed through the window.

We’ve created a very intimate atmosphere here, from the outside look of planted flowers and the wide staircase coming into the store. None of the lighting inside is harsh or brightly fluorescent. We’ve tried to put lamp lighting around as much as possible to provide a nice, intimate setting. We’re not putting anything into our actual entry showroom that would be offensive or overly sexual. And we welcome everybody with a smile.

I know the Leather scene well enough that if somebody comes in who’s a total novice and has questions, we’re able to answer them. We’re very much a one-on-one, service-oriented business. If somebody comes in, whether they’re into bondage or Leather or fisting or whatever little fetish they may want to get into, this is going to be a great place for me to be able to talk to them one-on-one, expose them to some of the stuff that we have here in the store, and answer people’s questions without them feeling embarrassment, or not knowing who to ask, or how to ask a question if they’re curious. There aren’t enough places here in town that have experienced people working there to answer questions when somebody does want to know something.

Zenger’s: Have you had any difficulties with the city in terms of what sort of merchandise you can and can’t have here?

Freyer: Not really. I talked to the city and we were able to get our business license under just a regular retail business, clothing-type store. As long as we stay under 15 percent of our stock being adult product, we don’t even have to classify ourselves as an adult business. We actually do want to be known more for our clothing, our gifts, and the artwork, with the adult side of it being a sideline. You can still come and get your adult paraphernalia and novelties, but you’ll be able to get all the other things you want, from great T-shirts to artwork. One of the other aspects that we have here is an art gallery. We’ll have rotating artists that will be coming through, displaying their art for 30 days at a time, and we’re giving the local artists a place to display their artwork and at the same time bring in a diverse crowd into our store.

Zenger’s: When I interviewed David Snider at RAW, he talked about his frustration about being able to sell adult videos directly. How have you been able to work around that problem?

Freyer: David had the problem of a location directly across the street from him that sold videos before he had his store license. There’s a Municipal Code ordinance saying that if you’re within 1,500 feet of another business selling adult product, you cannot sell the same product. I don’t have anybody else within 1,500 feet of me selling videos, so I can get away with that.

Zenger’s: You said you think being right next to the 2200 Club is going to help your business. How?

Freyer: It’s a built-in clientele. The back of our building actually faces their parking lot, and we have signage saying, “Enter at the front,” so people can’t miss us as they’re leaving their parking lot. Also, the owner and manager of the 2200 Club have been extremely supportive, and they’ve even offered our customers 20 minutes of free parking behind their establishment. So if there’s no parking out front, feel free to use their parking lot back there.

Zenger’s: I’ve long wanted to do an interview with you about Red Hankies and that whole side of your life. did you get interested in fisting in the first place?

Freyer: I was just having a good time with someone. We were playing, and one thing kind of led to another. Before I knew it he was introducing me to fisting, and I became hooked on it. One thing led to another, and when I moved here to San Diego, I thought it would be cool to see if there were others like me who were into the handball scene. I advertised in the local rags at the time that I wanted to start a new club here in San Diego for those into handball, or “FF” as I initialized it in the ad, because a lot of people are offended by the word “fisting.” One thing led to another, people started joining, and we formed an official club. That was 17 years ago, and now we’re a worldwide organization. At last count we’re about 400 members strong from all points of the earth.

Zenger’s: I know I had a hard time believing that fisting even existed. I thought, “Gee, that must be some weird urban legend in the Gay community.” I’d seen a couple of photos, but thought, “They could fake that.” It was hard for me to believe that anybody did that, let alone that they actually enjoyed it.

Freyer: I understand that. There’s a fine line between wanting just regular sex and wanting to experiment. A lot of people will only want what I call “vanilla” sex, in general oral and anal. But once you become bored with that and you want to explore other avenues, there’s so much out there to experiment with and enjoy. Some people get into bondage, some people get into being flogged. Other things like electricity. Some people are even into being a slave or a pup.

When you are talking about the sexual arena itself, sometimes you want something just a little larger than the average penis. So you start playing with toys, graduating sizes of dildos or whatever. Some people even use cucumbers, just to have something to expand themselves with. If you’re lucky and you get with somebody who’s experienced in the handball scene, then they can guide you through and let you experience it in a gentle and loving way.

It’s not something you usually do overnight. You have to build up to something the size of a hand, either by toys or even buy a couple of fingers at a time. But eventually, if you’re patient or hungry enough, then what started off as two or three fingers will become four, and then five, and then the hand will actually slide inside.

There’s a totally different feeling for both the top and the bottom. The bottom will experience the expanding and fullness, and the massaging of the prostate, and the top will experience the closeness, warmth and intimacy of having that much of themselves inside of another person. If you’re actually in a loving relationship and you’re doing this, then it’s a higher element of intimacy than any other kind of an experience. If you’re doing this strictly on the pure sex aspect, it’s overwhelming as well.

Zenger’s: One thing I’ve noticed hearing you talk, also seeing some of the literature on fisting, is that the preparations involved, especially if you’re the bottom, seem really elaborate, almost a sort of monastic discipline. You have to adjust your diet and clean yourself out to prepare.

Freyer: Some people are very lucky. They can adjust their diet and do a clean-out process in 20 minutes. Other people really have to regiment themselves on their diet two or three days in advance. You can do anything from an Epsom salts-type drink that you swallow down that actually causes you to evacuate everything within your system, to just a dish hose-type clean-out in the shower. But the main thing is just being clean and fresh, shall we say, for the play.

Another way of stopping things once you are clean is to take Imodium, which will actually prevent anything else coming further down in the system, to prevent any kind of unpleasantness. But the bottom needs to be clean, and the top also needs to have his nails done, cut short and buffed, so they’re nice and smooth and there are no raw edges.

Gloves are always encouraged for safe play. Some people are allergic to latex, and so there are also nitrile gloves. Of course there have always been people who don’t like gloves, and they’ll always use a bare hand. In that case you just make sure that you don’t have any cuts or sores on your hands. A good way of knowing whether you do have any or not is just put some vinegar on your hands, and if you have a cut or anything like that you will know it.

Zenger’s: Don’t you also have to be somewhat choosy about what lubes you use for this?

Freyer: Well, there are more comfortable lubes. Probably the biggest one that people equate with fisting is Crisco. It’s cheap, but at the same time it’s also very messy. It is a grease. If you get it into your bedding or your carpet or anything like that, it’s almost impossible to get totally out. It also has a specific odor that will permeate your house if you don’t clean it up properly, because it actually becomes rancid over time, and you have that rancid smell. If you use something like Elbow Grease or J-Lube, those kinds of products, they wash right out of your clothing, and the clean-up is easy.

The main thing is if you are using gloves, you want to make sure you are using a lubricant that’s not going to break down the glove also. So anything with a grease product that’s not latex-compatible will break down the latex pretty fast. You need to use something that is actually latex-compatible when you’re doing that.

Zenger’s: That’s pretty much the same thing we all had to learn when condoms started being common.

Freyer: Right. You’ve got to use the right lubricant whether you’re using condoms or gloves, either one.

Zenger’s: What exactly does the Red Hankies club do?

Freyer: We actually have a newsletter so people can meet through the newsletter ads. We also do social events, such as barbecues, pool parties, potlucks. We do bar nights where we have a beverage bust. Here locally it’s at the Eagle, on the third Thursday of every month. We also do things up in Los Angeles and Palm Springs, San Francisco, everything from barbecues and potlucks to play parties. And the play parties are usually either held at the private residence of a member or at a bathhouse, or even a hotel. We can reserve an entire hotel and have play parties.

Zenger’s: Didn’t your group start the annual “FistFests”?

Freyer: Yes. Our biggest event is FistFest, and it’s held in Palm Springs every June. We have people come in from all over the world to attend that. It’s almost like a convention of sorts, a nice, naked convention,. Playing underneath the stars, hot balmy nights. Lots of fun.

Zenger’s: Do you ever get newbies at your events, people who seek you out just because they’re curious about fisting and haven’t taken the plunge yet, and want to talk to you guys before they do?

Freyer: Oh, lots. We have a small ad in the local rags, and people will call or they’ll show up at the bar nights, and they’ll say, “Look, I’ve heard about fisting, or I may have seen it in a movie somewhere. I have no idea how to proceed, or if I would even fit into your club, or would you even welcome somebody that’s not experienced?” I’m one of the very first ones to say, “First of all, you have to know the right person to get experienced. And through our club you meet the right people. You meet the experienced people who know what they’re doing.” We’re very good at training and answering questions

Zenger’s: Would you talk about the dangers involved in fisting? Some people have really exaggerated ideas about how dangerous this is, but there are also some risks. Can you talk a little about both the myths surrounding fisting and the actual risks?

Freyer: Probably the biggest myth is if you get into fisting, you’re going to lose control of your bowel movements totally, your butt’s never going to go back to its shape, and you’re going to be on a bag by the time you’re 10 years into it. That’s not true. The anus is like any other muscle. It can stretch. It can have its own memory. And as long as you work that muscle like any other muscle, and exercise it — some people may know what Kegels are, where you actually squeeze your buttocks when you’re sitting, and you squeeze your butthole at the same time — it actually keeps your butthole in good shape and doesn’t let it totally stretch out and elasticize.

The other fallacy is people think that if you put your hand inside, you’re going to rip everything inside. The only time that that would happen is if somebody is playing unsafe, meaning having long fingernails, or if they’re totally drugged up or drunk from alcohol and they don’t know what’s going on, or have the feelings or sensations that they should be feeling if they’re not high. Then they don’t realize if something doesn’t feel right until it’s too late. In my entire career in the fisting world, I’ve only ever heard of three people that got hurt, and they readily admit that they were high on something and they didn’t feel anything until it was too late.

Zenger’s: So one of your warnings would be: “This is a clean and sober activity.”

Freyer: Very much so. I can’t stress enough that people really need to be in full containment of their faculties, so they feel every nuance that’s going on with them during the act. If you’re out of it, if you’re drunk, if you’re drugged up, whatever, then your senses are deadened by that and you don’t know what’s going on. And you don’t feel the natural high that you can get from a really good handball session.

Zenger’s: How do you feel about having the reputation of being the founder of Red Hankies and therefore in a sense being “Mr. Fisting San Diego”?

Freyer: [Laughs.] I’m very proud of what I’ve accomplished. Being around for 17 or, 18 years, we are one of the longest living clubs still here in San Diego. I’m very proud that, people know my name, and especially equate it with respect. Too many reputations get tarnished or talked about or messed up so easily, and I’ve been able to retain my respect in the community. When I decided to open the shop, I knew that my name and my reputation would actually bring customers in. I guess there’s something to be said for recognition.

How to Reach Bill

Pleasures and Treasures is located at 2228 University Avenue in North Park (near Mississippi Street), next door to the 2200 Club. Its hours are noon to 11 p.m. Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, noon to 2 a.m. Fridays and Saturdays, noon to 6 p.m. Sundays (closed Tuesdays). Bill and Tom can be reached there by phone at (619) 822-4280 or by e-mail at pleasuresandtreasures@cox.net

Red Hankies of San Diego can be reached by phone at (619) 516-2888, by e-mail at RHSDFF@aol.com, or via the Web at www.rhsd.org

Red Hankies International can be reached by phone at (619) 688-8668, by e-mail at RHI_inc@cox.net, or via the Web at www.redhankiesinternational.com

AIDS (Hype) at 25

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2006 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • Used by permission

Even though I have been writing, reporting, talking and being an activist around AIDS for over two decades, I was still taken aback by the hype surrounding the 25th anniversary of Los Angeles-based Dr. Michael Gottlieb’s report in the June 5, 1981 issue of the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report — the charmingly named newsletter of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) — announcing the first five cases of what has since come to be called AIDS. The Los Angeles Times ran an elaborate series of articles called “AIDS at 25,” ranging from pieces on the fate of the AIDS quilt and the disappearance of red ribbons at awards shows and celebrity galas to alleged new epidemics in places like China. Newsweek did a cover story, also called “AIDS at 25.” PBS ran a two-part, four-hour presentation of the AIDS epic on its Frontline series.

All of these presentations, of course, followed what TV journalist John Hockenberry once called “the gospel of the AIDS establishment.” If you read these articles or watched these programs, you were told that the so-called Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) is the sole and exclusive cause of AIDS; that HIV exposure invariably leads to infection, AIDS and an early death; that the standard so-called “HIV tests” (really tests for antibodies to all or some of the nine proteins believed to make up HIV) can tell you with 99-plus percent certainty whether this dire fate will befall you; that since 1996 “lifesaving” medications have been available that will delay the “progression” from HIV to AIDS and death, and that though they may have a number of unpleasant “side” effects these are certainly preferable to letting untreated HIV ravage your body, smash your immune system to smithereens and leave you vulnerable to all sorts of horrible “opportunistic infections,” many of them lethal.

Regular readers of Zenger’s know that I don’t believe any of that for a moment, and I’ve frequently interviewed and covered credentialed scientists like Peter Duesberg, David Rasnick, Kary Mullis, Stefan Lanka, Charles Thomas, Roberto Giraldo and others who have a very different view of what AIDS is, what causes it, how it should be treated and what should be done to stop its spread. Though those scientists don’t always agree with each other, they have one thing in common: the AIDS establishment — the junta of failed cancer researchers who were put in charge of AIDS research almost as soon as the syndrome was first identified; the authorities in the U.S. government and the United Nations who quickly proclaimed HIV the “truth” about AIDS and suppressed scientific inquiry into any other possible causes; the giant pharmaceutical companies who are making tons of money off those supposedly “lifesaving” drugs; and the activists, non-governmental organization officials and other do-gooders who think they’re doing the world a favor by raising money to pay the big drug companies to provide these medications to the Third World — has moved heaven and earth to try to shut them up.

Though the scientific critique of the HIV/AIDS model is almost as old as the alleged HIV/AIDS connection itself — HIV was first politically proclaimed as the cause of AIDS in April 1984 and the first scientific article challenging the model, Peter Duesberg’s “Retroviruses as Carcinogens and Pathogens: Expectations and Reality” (http://www.virusmyth.net/aids/data/pdcancer.htm), was published in October 1987 — it’s almost never acknowledged in the mainstream media. At times the suppression becomes ridiculous, as it did when a few years after the so-called “cocktail therapies,” including protease inhibitors, were introduced in 1996, large numbers of patients started experiencing their frequently horrific side effects — ranging from sunken faces and swollen bellies to chronic diarrhea, toxic liver failure and death. “Nobody thought these drugs would have these effects!” the establishment scientists whined — and journalists, acting as their mouthpieces as usual, repeated the claim. Actually, somebody — the dissident scientists in general and David Rasnick, a Ph.D. chemist whose entire professional career had been as a protease researcher, in particular — had warned about these effects, both in professional journals and when I interviewed him in these pages. But nobody outside a handful of people who’d stumbled across the dissident critique of AIDS noticed.

What’s happening in AIDS today is a peculiar duality, as an establishment bloated with success and profits selling a dubious theory and ruthlessly suppressing alternatives is being confronted with an increasingly disinterested public. In a real sense, AIDS is over. The epidemic is history. Since 1993, AIDS in the developed world has been endemic: though there’ve been a few year-to-year fluctuations and the occasional uptick, the numbers of new diagnoses have trended steadily downward. The trendy celebrities who used to wear those red ribbons to the Academy Awards have moved on to trendier causes: breast cancer, the “war on terror” (pro or anti), global warming.

Even in the Queer community, where AIDS was first identified and where it was the public-policy and activist issue through most of the 1980’s and 1990’s, AIDS awareness has been dwindling. In the 1990’s the right of Queers to serve openly in the U.S. military took over from AIDS as the hot issue among Queer activists, and in this decade the military issue has in turn been superseded by marriage equality and outreach to Queer youth. I had an interesting experience recently running into two friends of mine who were meeting at a coffeehouse to plan an upcoming Queer event and debating to what organization they should donate the door charge. It was a toss-up between two organizations working with Queer youth; not once did they consider donating to an AIDS organization.

AIDS awareness in the Queer community is dwindling in another respect as well. The cloud of shame and fear AIDS – specifically the myth that AIDS is caused by a sexually transmitted virus — dropped over Gay male sexuality has finally started to lift. Fewer and fewer Gay and Bisexual men are living their lives under the gun of virological terrorism; they’ve stopped using condoms when they have sex, they’ve stopped going to take the HIV antibody test every six months, and they’re generally living their sex lives as if AIDS didn’t exist. This isn’t entirely a good thing, mainly because it’s making them somewhat more vulnerable to syphilis and other diseases that really are sexually transmitted, but there’s a difference between maintaining a reasoned awareness of the risks of STD’s and being traumatized by a deliberately hysterical fear campaign into regarding sex as a harbinger of death, which is what the AIDS establishment’s “HIV prevention” campaign tried to do to a generation of Gay men. One sign of this is the increasing popularity of “bareback” Gay porn videos that depict condom-free sex; a marginal (and highly controversial) part of the market when they were reintroduced in the late 1990’s, today they dominate the porn catalogs.

Like the Communist Party of the Soviet Union during its own long, slow decline from omnipotence into irrelevance, the AIDS establishment is trying to regain its power by scaring people all over again. HIV “prevention educators” are trying to warn people of the side effects of the anti-HIV drugs — ironically sounding at times like AIDS dissidents as they use some of the same arguments we do: that the benefits of the drugs have been oversold and their risks swept under the proverbial carpet. Acknowledging that the “HIV epidemic” has stalled in the developed world, they’ve seized on various parts of the global South — first sub-Saharan Africa, then southeast Asia, India and now China — alleging, on the basis of highly dubious estimates and wild extrapolations from little hard data, that millions of people in these areas are already “HIV-positive” and only incredibly expensive, highly toxic drugs can save them (sort of, since one other tenet of the AIDS establishment is that HIV exposure is always fatal).

I don’t know how many people who called their pledges into Live 8 while the concerts were being telecast realized that they were essentially donating their money to Big Pharma, but that’s exactly what they were doing. Not content with being the most profitable corporations in the world (at least until the recent spikes in crude oil and gasoline prices put the big oil companies ahead of them), the giant pharmaceutical companies have persuaded millions of people worldwide to give them money, albeit through the fig leaf of non-governmental organizations (NGO’s) shilled for by rock stars like Bono, to buy AIDS drugs for countries whose real health problems could be solved at a fraction of the cost. What the countries being ballyhooed as the sites of the next big AIDS epidemics actually need are clean water, sanitation, cheap generic antibiotics for the diseases that really threaten them — especially tuberculosis and malaria — and a health infrastructure to offer their people basic care.

On one level, the AIDS industry at 25 looks like an unstoppable juggernaut, still maintaining its appearance of omnipotence and its ability largely to silence its scientific and activist critics. It’s still making enormous amounts of money for its constituencies — the scientists being paid to research HIV, the organizations receiving government grants to “educate” people to get tested and take the drugs, and above all the drug companies who’ve made a killing (figuratively and literally) on selling the meds. On another level, though, AIDS is dying of sheer disinterest. None of the hysterical predictions that AIDS would be a pandemic of such proportions that it could threaten the very existence of the human race have come anywhere close to coming true — indeed, that part of the AIDS hype has quietly been transferred to avian flu and other newer, scarier pandemic hypes. The AIDS scare is ending the way T. S. Eliot said the world would — not with a bang, but a whimper — and it’s highly unlikely that those of you who are still around in 2031 will see anywhere near the recent hype when “AIDS at 50” rolls around.

Greg Palast Defies Publishers, Speaks in San Diego

New Book “Armed Madhouse” Offers Dark View of Present-Day America

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2006 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Independent journalist, economist and activist Greg Palast opened his talk at the First Unitarian-Universalist Church in Hillcrest June 10 by announcing that the publishers of his new book, Dutton, had told him not to bother stopping in San Diego on his book tour. “I said, ‘I’m not going to visit all of San Diego, just Activist San Diego,’” Palast told his publisher — making a pun on the name of one of the organizations that sponsored his local appearance. He announced that he was donating all his author’s royalties on copies of the book sold that day to Activist San Diego, which promoted his appearance in partnership with the church’s Peace and Democracy Action Group, and thanked two of Activist’s principal organizers, Martin Eder and Tanja Winter, by name not only in his speech but in the book itself.

Palast’s speech was a mixture of familiar themes from his last book, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, explored again and updated in his new one — to which he’s given the breath-challenging title Armed Madhouse: Who’s Afraid of Osama Wolf?, China Floats, Bush Sinks, The Scheme to Steal ’08, No Child’s Behind Left, and Other Dispatches from the Frontline of the Class War. Among them were the frauds used by the Republicans to win both the 2000 and 2004 Presidential elections by disqualifying massive numbers of voters in poor precincts; the business connections between the oil industry and the Bush administration that, he argued, led not only to the U.S. decision to invade and conquer Iraq but the way the postwar occupation was handled; and the real reasons the U.S. wants to get rid of Venezuelan President Hugh Chávez.

But, though Palast’s speech ended with a typical exhortation to get out and vote — “They’re going to take away five million votes this time, so we’re going to take six million new people to the polls,” he said — his book Armed Madhouse is considerably more cynical than he was in person. While much of the book merely expands on the themes in his stump speech, it also acknowledges that even if America’s progressive get those six million people registered and voting, there aren’t that many genuine alternatives for them to vote for. Though Palast is surprisingly sympathetic towards H. Ross Perot, whose independent campaign for President in 1992 got 19 percent of the vote nationwide, he’s well aware that the two-party structure built into the fabric of America’s political and electoral structure means that the only serious competitor to the Republican Party is the Democratic Party — and throughout the book Palast portrays the Democrats as either missing in action on the great battles of the day or, worse, actively complicit with the Republicans.

Democratic Villains

Palast’s list of Democratic villains is long and inglorious. The most prominent is Al Gore, who according to Palast almost singlehandedly drove the economically populist, socially conservative Perot voters solidly into the Republican camp. It happened, he said in Armed Madhouse, on one night — November 9, 1993 — when he and Perot appeared on Larry King Live to debate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). “Seven years before the ‘Battle in Seattle’ at the World Trade Organization confab, Perot went after ‘free trade,’ the cornerstone of the new economic Darwinism,” Palast wrote. “Perot alerted the nation that the wealthy had joined forces to cut your jobs and wages, to pit Detroit against [the maquiladoras in Ciudad] Juárez, in a competition to the bottom. His message woke up working-class Republicans by the millions: those guys in the mailroom and behind the lunch counter who voted Republican because of the corporate party’s platform of no abortion, no flag burning, no homosexuals and lots of country music. Perot told them to ‘think jobs’ instead.”

In his book, Palast recalled just how Gore responded to Perot’s challenge to the “free trade” orthodoxy of both major parties. “Perot and his 19.7 million workers who feared for their pensions and union cards were called ignorant fools, suckers for labor union fear-mongering, confused, economic dummies, and cowards before history,” Palast wrote. “Gore, the rich prep-school kid, looked so pleased with himself, taunting the funny little man who’d made his way up from the working class. And 19.7 million Americans knew Gore was making fun of them, too, telling textile workers losing their health insurance they were unsophisticated little schmucks who knew nothing about economics. … Gore followed his put-down of labor unions, which unanimously opposed NAFTA, with praise for Rush Limbaugh as a ‘distinguished American’ (really) and accolades for NAFTA-backer Lee Iacocca, chairman of Chrysler Motors. Gore didn’t mention that Iacocca had moved Chrysler engine assembly work to Mexico in anticipation of NAFTA. But the unemployed Chrysler workers knew that.”

Also on Palast’s list of Democratic villains are New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson — a former member of President Clinton’s Cabinet and a partner in Henry Kissinger’s firm, Kissinger Associates — and Secretary of State Rebecca Vigil-Giron, who he claims allowed local Republican elections officials systematically to disenfranchise Native American voters and others likely to vote Democrat for President in this closely contested “battleground state.” The reason Richardson and Vigil-Giron let the Republicans get away with it, according to Palast, was to win an internal battle for control of the New Mexico Democratic Party. Since delegates to state and county Democratic conventions in New Mexico are allocated according to the percentage of the vote for the Democratic Presidential candidate in each precinct, Palast argued, Richardson’s machinations around the election — which included signing a bill requiring anyone who wants a recount of a state election to post a bond of over $1 million — were aimed mostly at getting his principal political rival, State Senator Linda Lopez, out of her position as Democratic state chair. “The ballot they shot at Lopez hit [Democratic presidential nominee John] Kerry between the eyes,” Palast wrote.

Ohio’s Third-Sex Voters

Palast’s main topics at the First Unitarian-Universalist Church were election fraud and the real motives for the war in Iraq — both treated in depth in his book as well. He cited Donna Frye’s loss in the 2004 mayoral election in San Diego — she actually got more votes than either of the other candidates, Dick Murphy or Ron Roberts, despite the handicap of running as a write-in, but was denied the victory because some of her voters had written her name but hadn’t filled in the bubble hole beside the write-in blank — as an example of the “spoiled ballot” phenomenon, by which a ballot where the voter’s intent is clear is nonetheless disqualified for a stray mark where one shouldn’t be, no mark where one should be, or some other insignificant violation of elections rules. “The one investigation that keeps coming back is how American democracy works, or doesn’t,” Palast said.

He cited CNN exit polls on the day of the 2004 election which indicated that Kerry was leading Bush 51 to 49 percent among men and 53 to 47 percent among women. “So here’s your question, class: what third sex put George Bush over the top in Ohio and gave him the White House? Answer: the uncounted,” Palast wrote in Armed Madhouse. “The nasty little secret of American democracy is that, in every national election, ballots cast are simply thrown in the garbage — millions of them. Most of them are called ‘spoiled,’ supposedly unreadable, damaged, invalid. They just don’t get counted. In Ohio, there were 133,237 ballots simply thrown away, more than the Bush ‘victory’ margin. In New Mexico the uncounted vote was five times the Bush alleged victory margin of 5,988. In Iowa, Bush’s triumph of 13,498 was overwhelmed by 36,811 votes rejected. In all, over three million votes were cast but never counted in the 2004 Presidential election.” [Emphasis Palast’s.]

This wouldn’t be much of a problem if the voters whose ballots were rejected— the ones who cast “spoiled” ballots, the ones who were challenged at the polls but allowed to cast “provisional” ballots which were discarded uncounted, the over half a million absentee voters whose ballots were simply shredded, and the continuing disqualification of voters for being convicted felons (even if their only “crime” was allegedly committed years in the future, as happened to some of the supposed “felons” barred from voting in Florida in 2000) — broke the same way politically as those whose ballots were counted. But Palast said that’s hardly likely.

“I used to be a professor of statistics,” Palast said, “and I and a team of statisticians went through the precincts with ‘spoiled’ ballots to see where they came from. The probability of your vote not getting counted is 900 percent higher for African-Americans, 500 percent higher for Latinos and over 2,000 percent higher for Native Americans than for whites. Eighty-eight percent of the 3.6 million uncounted votes were cast by minority voters.” One place Palast went to investigate the phenomenon of disappearing voters of color was Precinct 13 in Taos, New Mexico, better known as the Taos Pueblo, where “every single voter is either a Native American or married to one,” he wrote in Armed Madhouse.

According to the official results of the 2004 elections — the ones a Democratic governor and secretary of state chose not to challenge — “tens of thousands of Native Americans showed up to vote, waited in line for hours, didn’t cast a vote for President, and walked out,” Palast explained. “So I dropped in on Taos, Precinct 13, and asked Ruben Romero, who holds the grand title of Governor and War Chief of the pueblo, ‘Why can’t you people do something as simple as pick a president?’” Palast wrote in Armed Madhouse. “The War Chief ignored my deliberate provocation. Unflappable, in his slow, rhythmic English, he explained, ‘We thought they knew about these sophisticated things, so we trusted them.’ By them he meant the local, politically hostile white officials from the country who wheeled in new machines before the vote. He was resigned to it.”

Palast also talked to Taos Pueblo “Head of Tourism” Richard Archuleta, who mentioned that virtually all the young men from the Taos Pueblo join the U.S. military — and that virtually all the registered voters from the Pueblo are Democrats. “On the Pueblo’s mud-brick walls there were several hand-painted signs announcing Democratic Party pow-wows, none for Republicans,” Palast said. “Richard showed me where the Ketchup Queen herself, First Lady wannabe Teresa Heinz Kerry, had stopped and had lunch before the election. Laura Bush wouldn’t do that. Indecisive? Indians are Democrats. Case closed, white boy.” [Emphasis Palast’s.]

Homeless Republican Donors

At his First Unitarian-Universalist Church lecture, Palast also explained how the Congressional Black Caucus got suckered into supporting the so-called Help America Vote Act (HAVA), passed in 2002, which allowed voters whose credentials were challenged at the polls to cast so-called “provisional” ballots. “The Congressional Black Caucus thought no more than 100,000 people would get provisional ballots,” he said. “In fact, three million voters got provisional ballots and almost two million of those were thrown out.” Much of Bush’s “victory” margin in Ohio came from voters who showed up at the “wrong” precinct to vote, Palast explained. Until HAVA, the voters at the “wrong” precincts — sometimes meaning the wrong card table in a large school gymnasium where many precincts’ voters were casting ballots — could still cast ordinary, countable ballots as long as they were legally registered. That changed in 2004. “Under HAVA, all voters in the wrong precincts had to be given provisional ballots,” two-thirds of which weren’t counted, Palast said.

One reason there were three million provisional ballots in the 2004 election was because the Republican Party pursued an aggressive strategy of challenging voters of color and others considered likely to vote Democrat. “I wasn’t sure that happened until I got this in my e-mail inbox at georgewbush.org,” Palast explained. Two friends of his had registered that domain in hopes that they might get e-mails meant for the official Bush campaign at georgewbush.com — and they hit paydirt when they got an e-mail from Tim Griffith, research director and deputy communications director for the Bush campaign. It was sent to all Republican state party chairs throughout the country, and it contained attachments with long lists of names, addresses and phone numbers of voters — 98 percent of them from majority African-American precincts in Florida.

Asked by his bosses at the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) to go to the Republicans for confirmation that the documents were authentic, Palast got the door slammed in his face at national Republican headquarters in Washington, D.C. but he got an explanation from Florida Republican public relations director Joseph Agostini. According to Agostini, the lists were potential donors to the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign — which didn’t ring true because not only were the addresses in poor, largely African-American neighborhoods, some of them were from a homeless shelter in Tallahassee.

Agostini’s boss, Mindy Tucker Fletcher, had a different explanation. “These are newly registered voters we mailed to, where the letter came back — bad addresses,” she told Palast. After Palast’s team stumbled on these so-called “caging” lists in Tallahassee, “more confidential Republican National Committee caging lists poured in: hit lists of African-American voters, including students of Edward Waters College, an African-American school, and the Jacksonville State Street Rescue Mission (more Bush campaign donors, Mr. Agostini?),” Palast wrote in Armed Madhouse.

In his book, Palast explained how the “caging” system worked: “Voters in Black precincts made the list if a first-class letter sent to them was returned — they could then be challenged based on an address change. We checked one list that included 50 Black soldiers. We called one, Randall Preusa. His wife indicated that his address had changed because he was shipped overseas. Go to Baghdad, lose your vote. A Black soldier’s vote gone. Nice. Mission accomplished.” Despite the fact that “caging” was illegal under the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the Republicans did it anyway, Palast said — not only in Florida, but in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. Nor did they have to worry about being prosecuted — not with the American justice system safely in the hands of then-attorney general John Ashcroft, Mindy Tucker Fletcher’s former boss.

Iraq: The War for No Oil

One of the most contrarian parts of Armed Madhouse has to do with the war in Iraq and its real motivations. According to Palast, the war was indeed fought for Iraq’s oil — but not in the way most progressives believe. Besides chronicling the dispute within the American ruling elite over how to get rid of Saddam Hussein and what sort of government to put in his place — whether to foment a quick military coup or launch a full-scale invasion and a lengthy occupation — he argued that the real purpose of the Iraq war was not to gain access to Iraq’s oil, but quite the opposite: to keep Iraqi oil out of the world market altogether so oil prices would skyrocket and the world’s oil giants would make record-breaking profits.

Palast’s key clue, he explained, was a 323-page document, “Options for a Sustainable Iraqi Oil Industry,” which he traced back to all-purpose Republican fixer James Baker III, who in addition to having been secretary of state and White House chief of staff under Reagan and Bush, Sr. is also the attorney for Exxon/Mobil and the Carlyle Group, and a legal representative of the government of Saudi Arabia who has an office inside the White House. “In a 320-page document, the oil companies said they wanted to ‘enhance the Iraqi government’s relationship with OPEC,’” Palast explained. OPEC, for those who weren’t alive in the 1970’s or slept their way through them, is the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, the international cartel that controls the price of crude oil — and Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest exporter of petroleum, runs the cartel and brooks no rivalry from its other members.

“Saudi Arabia establishes a quota for every other OPEC nation: you produce this much and no more,” Palast explained. “It keeps down the supply of oil, and therefore keeps up the price. Iraq has almost as much oil as Saudi Arabia, but its quota is four million barrels a day. It could produce six million. Before the war, the U.S. kept Saddam Hussein to two million barrels a day.” According to Palast, the strategy to go to war against Iraq to bolster the OPEC cartel was hatched in James Baker’s offices in Houston, and one participant was Ken Lay, then founder and chief executive officer of Enron and now a convicted felon. Palast said that Baker, Lay and their fellow conspirators decided to get rid of Saddam Hussein because he was “jerking” the oil supply, raising and lowering his production to try to break OPEC and get more oil revenue for his country.

According to Palast, keeping Iraq’s oil production well below its potential has been part of the Western world’s plan for that country “ever since Winston Churchill invented Iraq in 1920 by drawing a circle around the oil fields in Kirkuk and Basra and the oil-bearing tar sands near Baghdad.” Aside from launching a poison-gas attack against the Kurds who resisted incorporation into Iraq and wanted independence (“I am strongly in favor of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes to spread a lively terror … against recalcitrant Arabs as an experiment,” Churchill wrote at the time in a memo Palast quotes in Armed Madhouse), Churchill installed a Hashemite Jordanian, Prince Faisal (the character Anthony Quinn played in the film Lawrence of Arabia) as king of Iraq, and in 1925 Faisal gave exclusive rights to all Iraq’s oil to a sham company headed by Calouste Gulbenkian.

According to Palast, Gulbenkian became known as “Mr. Five Percent” because he immediately “flipped” 95 percent of Iraq’s oil business to a consortium of the West’s biggest oil companies — Anglo-Persian (now British Petroleum), Standard Oil (now Exxon/Mobil), Royal Dutch Shell and the French company CFP. “The oil majors had a better use for Iraq’s oil than drilling it — not drilling it,” Palast wrote in Armed Madhouse. “The oil bugs had bought Iraq’s concession to seal it up and keep it off the market.” Palast describes a bizarre series of maneuvers to keep Iraq’s oil sealed up and off the market from that day to this, including drilling sham wells that were virtually certain not to produce.

In 1961, Iraq’s nationalist Ba’athist government nationalized its oil fields and threatened a takeover of neighboring Kuwait. (A TV documentary on the first President Bush, shown in 1992, revealed that he was in the Persian Gulf during this dry run for the 1991 Gulf war — on board a British Petroleum tanker.) President Kennedy talked the British out of invading Iraq, but, according to Palast, “the freedom Kennedy offered the Iraqis to drill their own oil to the maximum was quickly taken away from them by their Arab brethren. The OPEC cartel, controlled by Saudi Arabia, capped Iraq’s production at a sum equal to Iran’s, though the Iranian reserves are far smaller … To keep Iraq’s Ba’athists from complaining about the limits, Saudi Arabia simply bought off the leaders by funding Saddam’s war against Ian and giving the dictator $7 billion for his ‘Islamic bomb’ program.”

Palast argued that Iraq’s next move — the 1990 seizure of Kuwait — was provoked not only by internal politics within OPEC but also by Kuwait’s siphoning off Iraq’s oil reserves through slant-drilling into Iraqi territory on the border. The result was a disaster for Iraq, which from 1990 to 2003 was subjected to the most restrictive regime of economic sanctions ever imposed on a single country by the rest of the world. The burden of sanctions was lifted somewhat in 1996 by the so-called “Oil for Food” program, which served the interests of the major oil companies by restricting Iraq’s production still further — from four million barrels a day before the war to two million. Since the U.S. invasion, Palast said, Iraq’s oil production has fallen even lower than that. “Whether by design or happenstance, this decline in output has resulted in tripling the profits of the five U.S. oil majors to $89 billion for a single year, 2005, compared to pre-invasion 2002,” Palast wrote in Armed Madhouse — and if you’re wondering who’s funding those profits, just look at the price board on any gas station.

Palast Debunks “Hubbert’s Peak”

Though he didn’t go into this in his First Unitarian-Universalist Church appearance, in Armed Madhouse Palast took on what’s become an article of faith among many progressives, particularly environmentalists: the idea that the world is running out of oil. Virtually all the “end of oil” theories can, he argued, be traced back to a single paper, presented in 1956 by Shell Oil geologist M. King Hubbert. Hubbert’s paper estimated the world’s total oil reserves at 1.25 trillion barrels and predicted they would run out in 2006. It included a graph with a somewhat lopsided bell-shaped curve that’s become known as “Hubbert’s Peak” because it purported to show how oil use would rise as discoveries of new fields declined, leading to a “peak” in 2000 and eventual exhaustion of the world’s oil supplies.

According to Palast, Hubbert’s paper — prepared by him as a Shell company man and first presented to a meeting of the American Petroleum Institute — had two uses as propaganda. First, at a time when the price of oil was $2.77 a barrel and falling, it justified higher oil prices by presenting petroleum as a scarce resource. Second, it promoted the unlimited development of nuclear energy as an alternative — not coincidentally, just after Shell had just launched Urenco, a consortium to enrich uranium for nuclear power plants — and argued that nuclear could meet the world’s energy needs for the next 5,000 years.

Palast’s analysis claims that Hubbert’s end-of-oil theory not only served the interests of his employers but has proven to be flat-out wrong. “Worldwide oil reserves continue to rise even faster than American and China can burn it,” he wrote in Armed Madhouse. “Since 1980, reserves, despite our binge-guzzling, have risen from 648 billion to 1.2 trillion barrels. Yet, weirdly, despite the rising flood of discovered crude, its price quadrupled between 2001 and 2005.” Why? Palast named five factors: the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the resulting “insurgency” and civil war; Russia’s takeover of Yukos Oil, which cut its output; “U.S.-promoted sabotage of oil piping, loading and refining systems in Venezuela”; a cutback of production by Saudi Arabia to maintain their power as the prime mover in OPEC; and the U.S. abandonment of conservation as an energy policy since Bush took office in 2001.

Indeed, Palast’s critique of Hubbert runs so far against the grain of progressive thought that he felt compelled to include an appendix to his book partially rehabilitating Shell’s geologist. Hubbert’s 1956 paper acknowledged that his “end of oil” prediction applied only to the world’s primo petroleum: the so-called “light, sweet crude” that comes out of Saudi Arabia and is the benchmark against which all the rest of the world’s oil is priced. Once the price of oil rises, it becomes economically feasible to exploit the heavy tar-like crude found in abundance in three places in the world: Iraq (especially the central third of the country around Baghdad, the part that doesn’t contain any light, sweet crude), Brazil and Venezuela.

According to Palast, if you count heavy oil tar, Venezuela, not Saudi Arabia, has the world’s largest reserves of crude. “There are questions about how much crude Saudi Arabia has left, but Venezuela has more oil than all the Arabian Peninsula put together,” he told his First Unitarian-Universalist audience. “If you had more oil, you would bring down the price — but you would also bring down the House of Saud and the little house of Bush. That’s why we have to kill [Venezuelan president] Hugo Chávez.” Palast noted in his book that Chávez has not only been offering cut-rate oil to his South American neighbors and using the proceeds from the rising cost of petroleum to benefit Venezuela’s poor — “in the 1970’s the Venezuelan oil money went to Miami and the Venezuelans got cardboard houses; today they’re brick houses,” Palast explained — he’s also threatening the International Monetary Fund’s control of the developing world’s economies and even offering foreign assistance to communities of color in the U.S.

“It was the Wall Street Journal that dubbed Chávez ‘a tropical version of the International Monetary Fund, offering cut-rate oil supply deals and buying hundreds of millions of dollars of bonds from financially strapped countries such as Argentina and Ecuador,’” Palast wrote in Armed Madhouse. “The un-tropical International Monetary Fund was not amused, nor were money center banks of New York and London. Petro-dollars are supposed to move from Venezuela to New York and only then return to Latin America as loans carrying interest rates up to 16 percent. … And to underscore the point, Chávez traveled to more Third World nations with gifts of low-cost oil: the Bronx, New York and Chicago’s West Side. In September 2005, Chávez offered these poor racial Bantustans … discounted heating oil through CITGO, the U.S. retail outlet of Venezuela’s oil company. A public relations gimmick? Undoubtedly. But Chávez is making a point. The public, American public included, does not have to remain hostage to the Saudi-Houston cartel.”

According to Palast, Chávez also stepped in — or tried to — to help New Orleans recover from Hurricane Katrina. “He swiftly ordered the federal government to dispatch to New Orleans 18 water purification units, 50 tons of food, two mobile hospitals, expert search teams, and 20 lighting units with generators,” Palast wrote in Armed Madhouse. However, … [this] equipment was refused entry to the disaster zone by the U.S. State Department. President Bush also flew in generators and lights. They were used for a photo op in the French Quarter, then removed when the President concluded his television pitch.”

Where’s the New Kingfish?

Along with H. Ross Perot and Hugo Chávez, one unlikely member of Palast’s pantheon of heroes is the late Huey Long, nicknamed the “Kingfish,” who rode nature’s last near-annihilation of New Orleans — the Mississippi River floods of 1927 — to election as Louisiana governor and nationwide fame for his demands for a sweeping redistribution of wealth and income in the U.S. Though he met the fate televangelist Pat Robertson called to be meted out to Chávez — Long was assassinated in 1935 just as he was planning an independent run for President on a “Share-the-Wealth” ticket — many of Long’s ideas, including unemployment insurance and Social Security, became part of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and helped make the Democrats the majority party in the U.S. from 1932 to 1968.

Despite his skewering of pro-corporate and pro-war Democrats in his book, Palast clearly thinks that progressive programs will emerge from the Democratic Party if the people rise up and demand them. That was the message behind the peroration with which he concluded his First Unitarian-Universalist Church speech. “What are you going to do about this, about the attack on our kids in the classroom [an issue Palast only briefly referenced in his speech but discussed in far greater detail in his book’s critique of what he calls the “No Child’s Behind Left” act], about the fact that they are stealing elections and you can see where they’re heading in 2008?”

Palast recalled a meeting he had with African-American leaders, including Martin Luther King III — eldest son of the late civil-rights hero — in which King said, “I’m going to take your book and put it on my father’s grave.” “I was very moved, “ Palast recalled, “but I said, ‘You’re just going to get the book dirty.’ Jesse Jackson said, ‘When we march, we win. If we don’t march, we do lose.’ So I said, ‘Let’s march down Pennsylvania Avenue.’ He said, ‘Register people and vote.’ It sounds simple, but right now it’s revolutionary.”

Independent Journalists Visit, Report on Iraq
Jamail, Manning Show Film of Aftermath of U.S. Attack on Falloujah

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2006 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Mark Manning, a commercial deep-sea diver and underwater filmmaker for 22 years, does not at first seem like the most likely person to be the only videographer to capture images of the Iraqi city of Falloujah after the November 2004 U.S. attack. But he was, and he and fellow independent journalist Dahr Jamail came to the Thomas Jefferson School of Law June 2 to talk about it and show Manning’s film, Caught in the Crossfire, detailing the intensity of the attack on Falloujah and what it did to the people who lived there. The event, which also included long talks by Manning and Jamail, was sponsored by the San Diego chapter of the National Lawyers’ Guild, the San Diego Coalition for Peace and Justice, Global Voices for Justice and Aware.

“I was actually making another film when Dahr met me in Jordan,” Manning recalled to the audience of about 100 people. “A number of families of U.S. and Iraqi servicemembers, who’d lost their sons in the war, wanted to get together for dialogue. They couldn’t get into Iraq so they had to shoot in Jordan. A number of Iraqis came over and started to talk about what had happened in Falloujah, and it was hard to believe they were experiencing annihilation of their families, towns and cities. They asked me to come back with them to Iraq and grow a beard, dress like an Iraqi, and see Iraq first-hand.”

Like John Howard Griffin, the 1960’s white writer who darkened his skin and shaved his head to experience life as an African-American in the South, Manning was aware from the moment he crossed the border and encountered his first U.S. checkpoint that he was going to be regarded as a second-class person as long as he maintained his disguise. “There’s a division between the Westerners in one place and the Iraqis in another,” he explained. “I blended in quite well and got to experience what it’s like to experience Iraq as an Iraqi.”

The first lesson he learned, Manning said, was “the Americans are not there to help us. Once you set up internal checkpoints, there is no more propaganda. The veil is lifted. If you walk or drive or just look the wrong way, you will be killed. The images are not, ‘We’re going to liberate you.’” That’s why, Manning added, his Iraqi acquaintances told him fellow American journalists would call him “brave” for living his life in Iraq as an Iraqi — even though he only did it for “three weeks to one month.”

Like Mark Manning, Dahr Jamail stumbled almost by accident into his career as a gadfly journalist and blogger in Iraq. “I was a mountain guide in Alaska,” he recalled. What got him interested in going to Iraq and covering the story himself was “the great disparity between what the U.S. mainstream media reported and what was in the European press or on Al-Jazeera.” Jamail said he held the U.S. media largely responsible for the war because in the run-up to it in 2002 and 2003 most mainstream media outlets uncritically reported the Bush administration’s propaganda about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction, posing an immediate threat to the U.S. and having been involved in the 9/11 attacks — all of which, of course, turned out to be false.

“You cannot wage a war without rumors, without media, without propaganda,” Jamail said. “Media complicity is a situation I feel strongly about. In the Nuremberg tribunals, it was established that Hitler was able to do what he did largely because of his propaganda campaign, and at Nuremberg they said the primary function of the media during the war is not to incite people to violence. Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, [New York Times columnist] Thomas Friedman and [New York Times reporter] Judith Miller, and media outlets like CNN and Fox, are without a doubt guilty of inciting the public to violence. Would this war have even happened if these people had not done what they did?”

Manning specifically compared what actually happened in Falloujah during the two U.S. sieges against the city — the aborted one in April 2004 and the armed takeover and destruction of the town seven months later — with what Americans were told was going on by their media. “At first we were told that 250,000 civilians had been evacuated [before the November attack] and they’re O.K.,” Manning said. “Then there were no reports about civilians at all. Our crew went to a one-room farmhouse with 60 people and children everywhere. The civilians forced out of their homes were living in cars, chicken coops or holes in the ground.”

According to Manning, President Bush promised the citizens of Falloujah that “the rebuilding teams would be in right after the Marines,” but in fact there was no rebuilding effort at all, nor was there any effort to take care of the displaced civilian population. (One audience member rather grimly compared the situation Manning described in Falloujah to that in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.) “I never saw one aid station,” he said. “There was no aid coming into Falloujah. There was no attempt to do anything for the civilians. I was there in January 2005, two months after the attack, and the thing that shocked me the most was that my own country had done this.”

Manning said that when the first refugees returned to Falloujah following the attack, it was hard for them to adjust “because the whole place was destroyed. You’d see people wandering around just looking for their relatives. Mothers would show up; a lot of people left family members behind, and once it started they couldn’t leave. It was flat-out chaos and a disturbing, heartbreaking realization because it’s coming from your own government. … I had people coming up to me and saying, ‘Why did you do this? Why?’ I had to wrestle with this.”

According to Jamail, what happened to the Falloujans has been happening to virtually all Iraqis since the U.S. occupation, only slower. “The infrastructure in Iraq is worse than it was under Saddam Hussein, even under the sanctions,” he said. “Anyone with a pulse gets that security is basically nonexistent.” He cited the estimate of a team writing for the British medical journal Lancet that 100,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed since the war started — three times the begrudgingly produced estimate from the U.S. government — and said that since that figure was published in October 2004 it doesn’t include the death toll from the second Falloujah attack or anything that’s happened since. Jamail cited Les Roberts, one of the authors of the Lancet survey, as saying that it’s entirely possible that by now over 300,000 Iraqi civilians have died as a result of the U.S. war.

Jamail said the U.S. isn’t treating its own military personnel much better than it’s treating the Iraqis. “We’re nearing 2,500 U.S. soldiers killed and 25,000 wounded, and a lot of them would have died except for modern medical technology,” he said adding that one thing that’s helping keep the U.S. wounded alive is the ability to fly them out of the country quickly for treatment at U.S. military hospitals in Europe. That may not be a good thing, he argued, because soldiers who would have died in a previous war are returning with “severe brain injuries, almost brain-dead” — and though there are already “almost 500,000 Iraq war veterans,” Jamail added, “Bush is cutting Veterans’ Administration funding by $10 billion.”

As for the situation faced by Iraqis themselves, Jamail said they’re suffering from the almost complete breakdown in law, order and public services brought about by the U.S. occupation. “Most people in Iraq don’t leave their homes unless they absolutely have to,” he said. “Thirty people per day are being kidnapped. … Militias are basically running much of Baghdad and almost all of southern Iraq. Iraqi homes have only three hours of electricity per day, which makes it impossible either to preserve perishable food or run air conditioning during the summer heat. Potable water is in short supply. … Unemployment is still above 50 percent, significantly higher than it was under the sanctions.”

One result Jamail cited has been a continuing nosedive in Iraqis’ health. “Even in the capital city there are major outbreaks of cholera,” he explained. “In the 1980’s Iraq had the best health care system in the Middle East; now, if a patient goes into a hospital, there’s an 80 percent chance they will leave with an infectious disease they didn’t have when they went in. Doctors and other professionals are leaving en masse because of the fear of kidnapping and assassination.”

Much of Jamail’s presentation was a detailed argument that the U.S. policies towards Iraq constitute war crimes — material one would ordinarily have expected to hear from the event’s M.C., Thomas Jefferson international law professor Marjorie Cohn, who played a major role in setting up the event. Speaking while the big news from Iraq was the accusation that Marines in the town of Haditha had massacred innocent civilians in retaliation for the killing of one of their company’s members — nearly a week before the killing of suspected al-Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab Zarqawi — Jamail accused the U.S. military of deliberately targeting not only individual civilians but also whole towns like Falloujah for “collective punishment,” in violation of the Geneva conventions.

One U.S. tactic that particularly angered Jamail was the deliberate targeting of hospitals and clinics. “The impeding of medical care has been repeated in many areas,” he said. “In Falloujah on November 7, 2004, the day the siege was begun, U.S. and Iraqi forces occupied Falloujah General Hospital. Two days later the U.S. bombed Falloujah’s clinic. The U.S. military refused to allow medical aid during or immediately after the siege.”

According to Jamail, the official explanation from the U.S. military for targeting hospitals and clinics was that they had been “circulating propaganda” during the previous failed siege of Falloujah in April 2004 — that is, doctors had been giving press conferences in the hospitals showing the kinds of injuries their clients were coming in with, thereby embarrassing the military and contradicting the claim that no civilians were being hurt in the siege. “Under the Fourth Geneva Convention, even an attack on a military hospital is a war crime,” Jamail said. “Military forces may not starve out civilians.”

Manning added that not only did U.S. forces target the Falloujah hospital and clinics before and during the attack, but after the city was secured the remaining clinics “were either bombed or purposely destroyed from the inside. There was a specific targeting of the clinics, and we don’t know why. That’s why Iraqis say, ‘To be sick is to die. To be wounded is to die.’” Manning thinks that most of the children he talked to for his film are dead by now because the U.S. so meticulously destroyed Falloujah’s health-care system.

Jamail claimed that the U.S. military and its Iraqi allies had targeted Falloujah’s civilians in other ways too. “The first thing the U.S. forces did in Falloujah was cut off the city’s water supply,” he said. “U.S. forces left Falloujah’s citizens to face this without help, and that’s a war crime.” And Manning, in his presentation, pointed out that each family in Falloujah had an average of eight to 10 children — so the attack was bound to kill eight to 10 times as many children as adults.

According to Jamail, the U.S. campaign in Falloujah also included an attack on non-embedded media people who tried to get the truth about the attack to the world. “Independent journalists trying to cover Falloujah have been shot at,” he said. “A U.S.-signed order gives the Iraqi government severe powers against the media — and now we’re seeing that at home too.” And, he added, contrary to the widespread belief that the now-notorious tortures at Abu Ghraib were aberrations, “at Abu Ghraib torture was going on almost from the beginning of the war, and is still going on to this day. The Bush administration still argues for the right to do these sorts of things to human beings.”

Asked why the U.S. military and the Bush administration pursued such an intense attack against Falloujah in apparent contradiction of their stated goal of winning the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people, Jamail explained that the November 2004 attack on Falloujah was “a direct result of the April siege,” which itself was ordered to avenge the deaths of four Americans employed by the Blackwater private contractor in an ambush by Iraqi resistance fighters early in the year. Jamail said that the April attack failed because “enough journalists got in and brought back enough information from doctors that the siege was forced to stop because the truth was getting out.”

Indeed, Jamail said that the April siege went ahead against the recommendation of the Marine commander on the ground in Falloujah, who had already begun assigning his men to work with the Falloujans on helping rebuild their infrastructure. “The order from the April siege came directly from the White House, and that led to the November siege.”

Manning, responding to the same question, said that he couldn’t “put myself into the minds of the planners” of the attack, but “the Iraqis told me they thought [the Americans] were trying to make Falloujah an example to the rest of the Iraqi people” of what would happen to them if they actively, or even tacitly, supported the resistance. He also noted that the attack started just three days after Bush won the 2004 Presidential election. “That’s how Bush spent his ‘political capital,’” Manning acidly remarked. “I’m angry about our leaders and their insincere explanations.”

But if Manning is angry at the leaders of the U.S., he’s even angrier at the American people for having failed to rise up and demand an end to the war. He traces it back to the attacks on September 11, 2001 and what he calls America’s “hateful, racist response” to them. “We’ve attacked two countries without caring about the civilian damage,” he said. “We’ve paid more attention to basketball games than to the war. We’ve allowed it to happen.”

Manning made it clear that he doesn’t blame American servicemembers for the attacks on civilians in Falloujah and Haditha. “They saved my life twice and let our team go in with medicines when their commanding officers said no,” he explained. “The Marines are very efficient, and they’re trained to kill. If you tell them to set up hospitals, they will do that. If you tell them to screw the civilians and shoot everything that moves, they will do that. Bush is directly responsible for Falloujah and Haditha — and ultimately the American people are responsible for keeping him in office.”

Web sites for Dahr Jamail and Mark Manning:
Dahr Jamail: http://www.dahrjamailiraq.com
Mark Manning: http://www.conceptionmedia.net