|  Just Say Know
A review by Gerry Donaghy Back in March of this year, President Barack Obama's team hit on a novel way to interact with the vox populi by holding a virtual town hall meeting over the Internet. Most of the questions dealt with issues he had addressed while on the campaign trail: health care, the mortgage crisis, education, and chronic unemployment. One question that made it past the vetting process asked if marijuana legalization couldn't be a tool for creating both jobs and tax revenue for the government. The President quickly laughed the issue off, saying that he "didn't think the strategy was good." It was a frustrating response for legalization advocates, and perfectly illustrated the disconnect between their ideals and political reality. If Obama had given even a hint of entertaining the idea, the outcry from Republicans would have been deafening and distracting. In Obama's political calculus, it's easier to deal with a bunch of disgruntled potheads then it is to deal with the minority party. Huffington Post correspondent Ryan Grim's book, This Is Your Country on Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America, explores the myriad of disconnects that inhabit our conventional wisdom when it comes to drug use and drug policy. Why is it, for example that in order to receive the mandatory minimum jail sentence for powder cocaine you must possess 500 grams, whereas for crack cocaine the amount is only 5 grams? How can a plan for addict treatment, which was effective in reducing use at the expense of only $34 million, be thrown out in favor of a plan featuring military tactics (raids and interdictions) and mandatory minimum jail sentences, with less demonstrated efficacy and a price tag of $783 million? Why is it that Drug Abuse Resistance through Education (aka D.A.R.E., founded by notorious L.A. police chief Daryl Gates) seems to elevate kids' interest in drugs instead of discouraging it? Grim, who has waded through a staggering amount of research, ranging from government statistics on drug use in America to the impact of the North America Free Trade Act on the drug trade between the U.S. and Mexico, presents his results in a way that is informative, yet neither strident nor didactic. He is equally quick to point out that in California, while some medical marijuana dispensaries can be overly generous with whom they distribute to, one shop alone contributed approximately $875,000 to the state's tax coffers. His reporter's instinct keeps the book from becoming mired in either partisan or policy arguments. Instead, he sticks to facts that show how our country's relationship with drugs is frequently adversarial, and frequently motivated by passion rather than evidence, and that it is always, in his words, a "never ending game of Whac-A-Mole." There are two aspects of Grim's research that I wish would receive more attention in the mainstream media. One is the role that large pharmaceutical companies play in shaping our drug policy. It is considerably hypocritical of government and Big Pharma to tell us that, on one hand, methamphetamine should be illegal, while another stimulant, Ritalin, should not only be legal but in fact the drug of choice for issues such as ADD. One troubling facet of this relationship is how the manufacturers and distributors of legal drugs (such as R.J. Reynolds Tobacco, Anheuser-Busch, GlaxoSmithKline, and Pfizer) help fund The Partnership for a Drug-Free America, which endlessly reminds us what our brains look like on drugs — at least the illegal ones, anyway. While the Partnership has distanced itself from its alcohol and tobacco sponsors, Grim makes it clear that we won't be seeing any "This is your brain on Prozac" ads anytime soon.
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by John Rogers But the title he may favor is one he found buried in his FBI file. "To classify Krassner as a social rebel is far too cute," a letter in the file said in response to a favorable magazine interview with the co-founder of the Yippie Party, the group that notoriously disrupted the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. "He's a nut, a raving, unconfined nut." So Krassner titled his autobiography "Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut." "I figured I might as well make use of it," says the author, smiling broadly as he sits in the living room of his modest tract home in this sandy, sagebrush-dotted corner of the Mojave Desert on a scorchingly hot morning. On a nearby table is a copy of "A People's History of the United States of America" by historian and social activist Howard Zinn. For someone who has lived figuratively on the edge of society for most of his life, Krassner appears to have made the move literally as well, having left Los Angeles' epicenter of counterculture, Venice Beach, several years ago to take up residence in a place where the temperature sometimes hits 120 degrees, accompanied by blast-furnace winds of 70 mph or more. But the co-founder of the group that once ran a pig for president and tried to disrupt the seat of capitalism by throwing dollar bills onto the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange, says he has come to love his quiet little piece of Americana with its backyard views of the snowcapped mountains towering over Palm Springs in the distance. Krassner, who made his debut at Carnegie Hall as a violinist at age 7 (and then almost immediately gave up music because he couldn't get along with his teacher) is 77 now. That's a number he confirms with both a sheepish grin and a faux apology: "I'm sorry, I don't know how that happened." But if the years are gaining on him, the exuberant, still-youthful-looking rebel never lets on. Still an unabashed political radical, as well as a prolific writer, Krassner is the author of more than a dozen books. The most recent, "Who's to Say What's Obscene: Politics, Culture and Comedy in America Today," comes out in July. It takes a skewering look at American politics and morals, speaking generally in favor of such subjects as pornography and recreational drug use and dismissing the torture of prisoners of war as something that is truly obscene. But it goes about it in such a lighthearted fashion as to rarely seem preachy. "The word that comes to mind when I think of him is integrity," says Robert Scheer, former syndicated columnist and founding editor of the online magazine Truthdig.com. "The guy anguishes over what is right and wrong more than the editors of the most respectable publications. ... He doesn't get it right all the time, but he always thinks it out." It was Krassner, Scheer says, who gave him his big break as an investigative reporter, providing the money to travel to Vietnam in 1963 to report on covert U.S. involvement in that country's civil war before the United States had become inextricably involved in it. Scheer's story, first published in Krassner's small, groundbreaking satirical magazine, The Realist, was picked up by the mainstream media and gained national attention. The publisher had raised the money for Scheer's Vietnam trip by selling red, white and blue posters with the word Communism, preceded by another, much more impolite word. The posters quickly became a hit on college dorm room walls. "It really confused all these conservative types," Scheer recalled with a laugh. "They hated communism" but they also hated seeing it described with a barnyard epithet for sexual intercourse. That is just one of a seemingly endless chain of stories of practical jokes and other stunts attached to Krassner's name, some of them true, others apocryphal. One of the latter, says Krassner, is that he came up with the acronym for the Youth International Party by throwing his head back in a moment of psychedelic-inspired bliss and shouting "Yippie!" "As a journalist, I knew that we had to have a who for the who, what, where, when and why that would symbolize the radicalization of hippies for the media," he says with a mischievous smirk. "So I started going through the alphabet: Bippie, Dippie, Ippie, Sippie. I was about to give up when I came to Yippie." http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090622/ap_en_ot/us_books_paul_krassner
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The theocratic repression in Iran is a reminder that there can be no freedom without secular government By Michael Lind
 In the summer of 1968, as Soviet tanks rolled into communist Czechoslovakia to end the brief period of liberalization known as the "Prague Spring," W.H. Auden composed a poem titled "August 1968": The Ogre does what ogres can,
Deeds quite impossible for Man,
But one prize is beyond his reach,
The Ogre cannot master Speech:
About a subjugated plain,
Among its desperate and slain,
The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,
While drivel gushes from his lips. Watching the scenes of bravery and brutality that are being played out in Iran brings Auden's poem to mind. Another line comes to mind as well: the observation by W.E.B. DuBois in 1903 that "the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color-line." Racism has not been extinguished, but it has been corralled, by the now-universal principle of the separation of race and state. The demise of political racism leaves political religion standing as the most widespread form of tyranny in the world. The problem of the 21st century is the problem of the creedal line. If the problem is solved, it will be solved by universalizing the principle of the separation of religion and state. Secular government is the basis of both liberty and democracy. It is important to emphasize this, because of the tendency to portray the struggle in Iran in terms of a global conflict between democracy and dictatorship. Set aside, for a moment, the fact that former Prime Minister Mir Hossein Mousavi was one of four candidates, including President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who were approved to run as presidential candidates last May by the clerics of Iran's Guardian Council. It does not take away from the heroism of Mousavi or his followers to point out that if Ahmadinejad stole the election he stole an election that was already rigged. The larger issue is the question of what comes first: separation of church and state, or democracy. America's Founders had no doubts on that score. Democracy requires citizens who are free from "superstition" and "priestcraft," to use 18th-century language. Americans have usually believed that religion can play a constructive role in a democratic republic by encouraging moral behavior. But in the traditional American view, theocratic democracy is nothing more than majoritarian tyranny, whether the clerics have a formal role in the state or merely tell the voters how to vote. And even secular democracy is not a goal in itself. It is merely a means to an end: the protection of natural rights. The idea of universal, basic natural human rights is incompatible with theocracy in any form. While Christians and adherents of other religions can believe in natural rights, the theory of natural rights itself, influenced by ancient Greek sophists and Epicureans, is inherently secular. Natural rights by definition are those that ordinary people, using only their reason, can agree upon -- things like life and liberty and property or happiness, meaning access to subsistence. The list of natural rights varies from thinker to thinker, but they all have one thing in common -- they are not revealed by a divine intelligence to a prophet or priests. http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2009/06/23/religion_iran/index.html
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 He may yet turn out to be the avatar of Iranian democracy, but three decades ago Mir-Hossein Mousavi was waging a terrorist war on the United States that included bloody attacks on the U.S. embassy and Marine Corps barracks in Beirut.
Mousavi, prime minister for most of the 1980s, personally selected his point man for the Beirut terror campaign, Ali Akbar Mohtashemi-pur, and dispatched him to Damascus as Iran's ambassador, according to former CIA and military officials.
The ambassador in turn hosted several meetings of the cell that would carry out the Beirut attacks, which were overheard by the National Security Agency.
"We had a tap on the Iranian ambassador to Lebanon," retired Navy Admiral James "Ace" Lyons related by telephone Monday. In 1983 Lyons was deputy chief of Naval Operations, and deeply involved in the events in Lebanon.
"The Iranian ambassador received instructions from the foreign minister to have various groups target U.S. personnel in Lebanon, but in particular to carry out a 'spectacular action' against the Marines," said Lyons.
"He was prime minister," Lyons said of Mousavi, "so he didn't get down to the details at the lowest levels. "But he was in a principal position and had to be aware of what was going on."
Lyons, sometimes called "the father" of the Navy SEALs' Red Cell counter-terror unit, also fingered Mousavi for the 1988 truck bombing of the U.S. Navy's Fleet Center in Naples, Italy, that killed five persons, including the first Navy woman to die in a terrorist attack.
Bob Baer agrees that Mousawi, who has been celebrated in the West for sparking street demonstrations against the Teheran regime since he lost the elections, was directing the overall 1980s terror campaign.
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A US federal judge has ordered a Guantanamo detainee who was reportedly tortured, imprisoned and abandoned by al Qaeda and the Taliban released. The US government had argued that even though Abd Al Rahim Abdul Rassak was tortured by al Qaeda as a suspected Western spy, held by the Taliban for a year and a half and then abandoned, he was still allied with his tormentors. US District Court Judge Richard Leon, however, rejected the prosecutor's claims in his ruling, which even included punctuation marks as an extra guarantee. "I disagree… [US officials are] taking a position that defies common sense," wrote the judge in a 13-page written decision. The judge said the government initially appeared to mistake Rassak as a suicide bomber based on videos captured at an al Qaeda safe house. Later on, however, it was clear that the suspect had been tortured by al Qaeda. In his verdict, the judge harshly attacked the notion that Rassak could be part of the same organization that had abused him. "There is no evidence -- from either side -- as to why he suddenly was suspected by al Qaeda leaders of spying and was tortured for months into giving a false confession," Judge Leon wrote. "It is highly unlikely that by that point in time al-Qaida (or the Taliban) had any trust or confidence in him. Surely extreme treatment of that nature evinces a total evisceration of whatever relationship might have existed!" The Syrian detainee told US interrogators that he had stayed at a guesthouse used by Taliban and al Qaeda fighters for several days in 2000, where he had helped clean weapons. He also said that he had briefly attended a terror training camp. "[Rassak] was conscripted by the Taliban who then turned on him after three weeks and subjected him to barbaric torture. He was imprisoned by the United States when he tried to provide information to us about his torturers," one of his lawyers, Steven Wax said. "[The ruling] is yet another reminder that there are innocent men in Guantanamo," he added.
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 By David Goldstein WASHINGTON — He probably won't show it, but Sen. Pat Roberts might be feeling a bit smug lately. He's resisted the urge to weigh in with his trademark, dry-as-a-prairie-in-a-drought sense of humor, though the situation is certainly ripe for it. Even something as simple as, "So there!" Because it wasn't too long ago that the Kansas Republican took a pretty sharp elbow from a nonprofit government-watchdog group over a scholarship program he set up to train future intelligence officers. It turns out, though, that he might have been something of a visionary. Here's what happened: Citizens Against Government Waste gave Roberts the Narcissist Award in its latest edition of the "Pig Book," a compendium of allegedly wasteful government spending. The $2 million earmark that he'd requested for the Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program was included. Roberts set up the pilot program four years ago when he was the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Its purpose was to train workers in the intelligence community in specialized areas where it was deficient, such as language skills, regional studies and new technology. "When we created the program, intelligence agencies were losing highly qualified recruits to the private sector," Roberts said. "We needed a tool to attract some of the best and brightest to government service." The Pig Book authors labeled his earmark one of the "oinkers" and recognized his "dogged perseverance in the mad pursuit of pork." The intelligence community, meanwhile, loved the program. "It was a tremendous idea," said Ron Sanders, an associate director of national intelligence for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Further, the Obama administration — whose intelligence policies Roberts often finds troubling, including plans to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center — likes his scholarship so much that it wants to expand it, make the program permanent and provide regular funding. No more earmarks. A representative of Citizens Against Government Waste couldn't be reached for comment. http://www.mcclatchydc.com/homepage/story/70542.html
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George W. Bush crawled out of the puckerbrush last week to deliver a speech in Erie, Pennsylvania, in which he took a poke at President Obama. "I told you I'm not going to criticize my successor," he said, before doing exactly that. "I'll just tell you that there are people at Gitmo that will kill American people at a drop of a hat and I don't believe that persuasion isn't going to work. Therapy isn't going to cause terrorists to change their mind."
Ron Paul, the popular Republican Congressman from Texas, is ripping into the president and Congress for what he sees as their "goal" with round after round of stimulus: complete economic collapse. 
DESERT HOT SPRINGS, Calif. – He was once a child music prodigy and in the decades since, 
