According to a Program On International Policy Attitudes poll, an overwhelming majority of U.S. citizens favors the United States joining with other G8 members to limit greenhouse gas emissions. That places George Bush in a small and radically insouciant minority.

The PIPA-Knowledge Networks poll asked whether President Bush should or should not be willing to act to limit greenhouse gases that cause climate change if the leaders of the G8 countries are willing to act to limit the gases. Of all respondents, 86% said that he should; 81% of Republicans supported that as well as 89% of Democrats.

Virtually all respondents — 94% — agreed the United States should limit its greenhouse gases at least as much as the other developed countries do, and 44% think the U.S. should do more than other countries, on average.
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While I view the recent strong-arming of reporters by judges as a clear constitutional violation, it’s clear that there is a difference between Matthew Cooper and Judith Miller. Cooper’s boss made him turn over his notes after his source revoked his confidentiality agreement; Miller is going to jail for not naming her source.

While Time Inc. is being portrayed as a consitutional sellout and Miller as a martyr for journalism, the case is surely more complex. It’s likely that, by turning over Cooper’s notes, Time Inc. could actually give legs to the story and expose the source that outed Valerie Plame (Karl Rove?!). By going to jail, Miller simply protects her source (Karl Rove!?) and seemingly gains in stature as a member of the Fourth Estate sacrificed on the altar of justice.

A New Tork Metro column outs the Pulitzer Prize-winning Miller as a journalist of the whacko — not gonzo — type whose series on weapons of mass destruction for the New York Times was quoted by the Bushites as evidence of WMD existence in Iraq. Of course, her exclusives were based on interviews with former Iraqi golden boy, Ahmad Chalabi.

For the past year, the Times has done much to correct that coverage, publishing a series of stories calling Chalabi’s credibility into question. But never once in the course of its coverage—or in any public comments from its editors—did the Times acknowledge Chalabi’s central role in some of its biggest scoops, scoops that not only garnered attention but that the administration specifically cited to buttress its case for war.

The longer the Times remained silent on Chalabi’s importance to Judith Miller’s reporting, the louder critics howled. In February, in the New York Review of Books, Michael Massing held up Miller as evidence of the press’s “submissiveness” in covering the war. For more than a year, Slate’s Jack Shafer has demanded the paper come clean.

But finally, with Chalabi’s fall from grace so complete—the Pentagon has cut off his funding, troops smashed his portrait in raids of the INC office—the Times’ refusal to concede its own complicity became untenable. Last week, on page A10, the paper published a note on its coverage, drafted by executive editor Bill Keller himself. The paper singled out pieces that relied on “information from a circle of Iraqi informants, defectors, and exiles bent on ‘regime change.’ ” The note named Ahmad Chalabi as a central player in this group.

It seems likely to me that Miller is in jail not because of principle, but because she’s hiding a source even more embarrassing than Ahmad Chalabi.

The Defense Department has issued its homeland defense plan for the next 10 years, and it looks like we can expect another decade of police-state activities where the gubmint will trample on personal freedoms with impunity.

Here’s a sample of the rhetoric of the “Strategy for Homeland Defense and Civil Support”:

Directed by the Strategic Planning Guidance (March 2004), this Strategy for Homeland Defense and Civil Support focuses on achieving the Defense Department’s paramount goal: securing the United States from direct attack. The Strategy is rooted in the following:

• Respect for America’s constitutional principles;
• Adherence to Presidential and Secretary of Defense guidance;
• Recognition of terrorist and state-based threats to the United States; and
• Commitment to continue transformation of US military capabilities.

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The Conundrum of Fighting Terrorism Is, If We Become Them, They Win

I guess I’m dating myself but I remeber when being a medical doctor was considered a higher calling. With the rise of the HMO concept in the medical profession 30 years ago, doctors became just like any other professional – patent attorneys or tax accountant only richer.

Now the medical profession appears to have suffered its worst black eye since the days of Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor who performed horrendous experiments on prisoners in concentration camps, including children.

The charge, which comes from both the Red Cross and former detainees, is that doctors and other medical professionals in the employ of the United States military used their medical training to soften up suspected terrorists during questioning at Guantanamo and in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Now the Pentagon has investigated itself and – big surprise here – found that nothing of the kind ever happened:

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