NOVEMBER 22, 2004
1:40PM / CONTACT: Americans United for the Separation of Church and State
Telephone (202) 466-3234; Facsimile (202) 466-2587
E-mail:
Taxpayer-Funded Americorps Program Should Not Promote Religion, Watchdog Group Says
Americans United Urges Appellate Panel To Bar Religious Instruction By Program Participants
WASHINGTON -- November 22 -- Teachers taking part in the taxpayer-funded AmeriCorps program should not be permitted to engage in religious instruction at sectarian schools, Americans United for Separation of Church and State has advised a federal appeals court.
The AmeriCorps program, run by the Corporation for National and Community Service, provides stipends called “national service education awards” to individuals for work at certain locations around the country.
Some of these positions are at religious schools, and some of the award recipients teach religion and lead religious activities as part of their work at these schools. A U.S. District Court ruled July 2 that the arrangement is unconstitutional. The federal government has appealed.
“This program provides teachers to parochial schools at taxpayer expense,” said the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United. “It is patently unconstitutional.”
In a friend-of-the-court brief filed today, Americans United asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to rule against religion subsidies in the program.
“Here, religious institutions actually use AmeriCorps participants and grant funds for religious instruction and activities,” reads the brief. “The government has failed to create an effective system for monitoring how the aid is used. The aid consists of religious instructors who have received religious training from faith-based institutions. And the instructors perform core teaching functions at parochial schools.”
Joining Americans United in the brief are the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League, and People For the American Way Foundation. The case is Corporation for National and Community Service v. American Jewish Congress.
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Political Opportunism?
(in this case, Mutual)
GOP House Majority Leader Tom DeLay charged yesterday that his Democratic counterpart, Nancy Pelosi, engaged in her own crooked fund-raising practices that actually broke the law.
Reports the San Francisco Chronicle:
"DeLay was referring to a Federal Election Commission decision in 2003 in which one of Pelosi's fundraising committees was fined $21,000 for making illegal political contributions during the 2002 congressional elections.
"The FEC ruled that two Pelosi political action committees created to help Democrats in the 2002 elections were related instead of being independent and therefore violated a rule against giving more than the maximum $5,000 annual contribution."
Pelosi and other Democrats have urged the top Republican to step down from his leadership post after the House Ethics Committee admonished him last week for allegedly giving donors special access by hosting a June 2002 fund-raising golf outing for energy lobbyists.
The committee also rebuked DeLay for using the Federal Aviation Administration to try to track a plane that Democratic state legislators in Texas flew out of state to stall a vote during last year's redistricting battle.
.A.R.E.'s "Principle 3" says, "We identify those with an obligation toward poor and marginalized people, and support and encourage their efforts to fulfil their responsibilities," naming corporate investors terrorists may want to keep away. Australia's C.A.R.E. partners bring to Iraq ideologies the violent elements appear to be resisting:
Data Solutions- technological access to the outside world; on line and off site gambling- Tattersalls; Qantas- carrier for outside tourism; Australia Post, Rupert Murdoch's News Limited- images from the outside world including Page Three Girls; Goldman Sach JB Ware, Ernst and Young - taking money outside the country, bringing outside money and foreign interest into Iraq. Potential council members are advised former economies receiving Australian C.A.R.E. aid have become consumers of Australian exports, "Australian businesses rely on each year for employment, import and export opportunities, income and profits" "gaining access to prominent business leaders and the elite corporate community."
C.A.R.E. is one of 160 members of WashingtonDC based American Council For Voluntary International Action, receiving advocacy and other direction. interaction.org self-formed in 1984, self-described as "the nation's leading advocate for international relief, refugee and development programs talks to Congress, the Administration and the public to build understanding and support for programs that save lives and help poor people help themselves." InterAction posts it unifies members who, collectively, receive annual contributions from private donors, of more than $3 billion. Members pay annual dues based on a small percentage (.15%) of their internationally related expenses. Funds from dues ranging from $1,000 and to $30,000 are used to "influence policy and debate on issues" affecting millions worldwide.
InterAction requires its members to ascribe to a - Private Voluntary Organization Standard "asking accountability in the critical areas of financial management, fundraising, governance, and program performance" because it does not "bear lightly the responsibility of the trust the America people place in us." InterAction posts on its website members must "have tax-exempt status under section 501 (a) of the U.S. Internal Revenue Code and have received such status at least two years prior to submitting their membership application." C.A.R.E. is a 501(c )(3) ( requiring individual CARE Members register as a non-profit charitable organization regulated by laws and statutes of its own country.
InterAction's Iraqi working group, co-chaired by Sandra Mitchell and Rick Augsburger, was set up in September 2002, engaging as "issues emerge, in relevant advocacy and policy interventions." Months before Ms. Hassan's abduction, interAction posted a "plain language handbook on Counter-Terrorism Measures: what US non profits and grantmakers need to know" discussing the Patriot Act, IRS rules and Treasury Department voluntary guidelines to their site along with postings from the International Rescue Committee's "Lack of Preparedness for Humanitarian Crisis in Iraq Will Risk Innocent Lives." The handbook focused on money management in these days and times of fearing funding terrorist organizations.
InterAction offers, as does C.A.R.E., to help "open doors and provides access to top-level government officials and policymakers." InterAction says it is not a political organization but "we do sometimes take positions on things like the US international affairs budget, protecting refugees and other issues that affect our members and their efforts," working "to coordinate the efforts of member organizations to influence policy and budget priorities in order to maximize effectiveness of advocacy and outreach to the Congress and the administration on humanitarian and development issues" and "work to educate elected officials and others about how little of the federal budget goes to international assistance programs and why Americans should support such
efforts."
Monday Pay-to-play politics
On Tuesday, the San Jose City Council will be asked to reform laws that govern how elected officials and candidates raise and spend money. One key recommendation will deal with the money elected officials raise for general expenses such as attending community events, advertising in neighborhood newsletters and taking constituents out for a meal. The proposal would forbid officials from forming political action committees to get around city rules for fundraising.
Michael Scheuer, author of Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror, is leaving the agency - forced out by an administration that confuses fealty to the imperial presidency with loyalty to the country - signals the systematic dismantling of the country’s last and best defense against a burgeoning threat to our national security. Last Tuesday, Scheuer, a 22-year veteran of the CIA - and, up until 1999 in charge of the task force assigned to track Osama bin Laden
The views expressed in Imperial Hubris - that we aren’t hated for our vaunted "freedom" to show Viagra ads on television, but because of a foreign policy that is idiotic, Israeli-centric, and irredeemably evil to many millions of Muslims throughout the world - are shared by a significant number of intelligence professionals at the CIA. Scheuer and his co-thinkers are fierce critics of the Iraq war and occupation, and in the run-up to the invasion they "leaked" a considerable body of material that debunked the lies of the War Party - and accurately predicted the ensuing disaster. Now they are being blamed, excoriated, and purged by the likes of John "Boots on the ground" McCain, who smears them as a "rogue agency" and is among the loudest calling for "reform." He is joined by the liberals’ favorite neocon, David Brooks, whose softly wonkish demeanor masks a characteristic tendency to go for the jugular:
"Now that he’s been returned to office, President Bush is going to have to differentiate between his opponents and his enemies. His opponents are found in the Democratic Party. His enemies are in certain offices of the Central Intelligence Agency."
EVER SINCE THE Guardian of London revealed almost two weeks ago that "Anonymous," the author of the soon-to-be-published Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror (Brassey’s, Inc.), is a CIA figure "centrally involved in the hunt for Bin Laden," the American press has been playing catch-up — yet in a strangely coy sort of way.
Public interest in the book itself isn’t at all hard to understand: it’s not every day that an active US intelligence officer publishes a work that disputes the Bush administration’s assertions, holding that, among other things, bin Laden is not on the run; the invasion of Iraq has not made the United States safer; and that Islamists are in a campaign of insurgency, not terrorism, against the US because of US policies, not out of hatred for American values. But what’s a bit harder to grasp is exactly why the media seem so reflexively deferential to the idea that "Anonymous" must be anonymous — especially when critical details revealed in a June 23 New York Times story indicated that his real identity is well-known to at least a few denizens of the Washington press corps.
Indeed, the Times piece revealed that Washington Post managing editor Steve Coll knows more about Anonymous than most — enough to give him a first name and details of his career in Coll’s recently published and highly acclaimed book, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001. While the Times identified "Mike" via Coll’s book as a 22-year CIA veteran who ran the Counterterrorist Center’s bin Laden station (code-named "Alec") from 1996 to 1999, the paper also reported that in spite of that revealing detail — and despite the fact that "Mike" is an overt CIA employee whose name is not a state secret — a "senior intelligence official" held that "Mike’s" full identity had to remain unknown because revelation of his full name "could make him a target of Al Qaeda."
FOR THE MOMENT, all the general public knows about the book comes from excerpts posted on a handful of Web sites, and a slew of brief television and radio interviews, where Anonymous has appeared in silhouette. He also published another anonymous book two years ago, Through Our Enemies’ Eyes: Osama bin Laden, Radical Islam, and the Future of America, which analyzed the structure and motives of Al Qaeda. Anonymous is not squishy: both Hubris and Eyes seem sufficiently apocalyptic to warm the heart of someone as anti-Islamic and bloodthirsty as, say, Ann Coulter. So if liberals seem ecstatic that yet another career national-security official is blasting the Bush administration for unnecessarily invading Iraq and bungling the so-called war on terror, they’re also horrified by Anonymous’s apparent advocacy (largely rhetorical, actually) of a military campaign that includes "killing in large numbers" and "a Sherman-like razing of infrastructure" as part of "relentless, brutal and blood-soaked defensive military action until we have annihilated the Islamists who threaten us."
But at issue here is not just the book’s content, but why Anonymous is anonymous. After all, as the Times and others have reported, his situation is nothing like that of Valerie Plame, a covert operative whose ability to work active overseas cases was undermined when someone in the White House blew her cover to journalist Robert Novak in an apparent payback for an inconvenient weapons-of-mass-destruction intelligence report by her husband, Joseph Wilson. Anonymous, on the other hand, is, by the CIA’s own admission, a Langley-bound analyst whose identity has never required secrecy.
A Phoenix investigation has discovered that Anonymous does not, in fact, want to be anonymous at all — and that his anonymity is neither enforced nor voluntarily assumed out of fear for his safety, but rather compelled by an arcane set of classified regulations that are arguably being abused in an attempt to spare the CIA possible political inconvenience. In the Phoenix’s view, continued deference by the press to a bogus and unwanted standard of secrecy essentially amounts to colluding with the CIA in muzzling a civil servant — a standard made more ridiculous by the ubiquity of Anonymous’s name in both intelligence and journalistic circles.
When asked to confirm or deny his identity in an interview with the Phoenix last week, Anonymous declined to do either, and said, "I’ve given my word I’m not going to tell anyone who I am, as the organization that employs me has bound me by my word." His publisher, Brassey’s, likewise declined to comment. Nearly a dozen intelligence-community sources, however, say Anonymous is Michael Scheuer — and that his forced anonymity is both unprecedented and telling in the context of CIA history and modern politics.
"The requirement that someone publish anonymously is rare, almost unheard-of, particularly if the person is not in a covert position," says Jonathan Turley, a national-security-law expert at GeorgeWashingtonUniversityLawSchool. "It seems pretty obvious that the requirement he remain anonymous is motivated solely by political concerns, and ones that have more to do with the CIA. While I’m sure some would argue that there’s some benefit to book sales in being anonymous because it’s mysterious and fuels speculation, the fact is that if his full name and history were known and on the book, it would get a lot more attention. It’s difficult for the media to cover an anonymous subject who has to abide by limits on what he can say about himself or anything that might reveal who he is."
Upon reviewing Scheuer’s manuscripts, the CIA could have done what national-security agencies have done in the past with employees’ works that were based on open (i.e., unclassified or publicly available) sources, but whose wide distribution might be problematic: stamp a "secret" or "top secret" classification on it so it never sees the light of day. Yet according to intelligence-community sources, this really wasn’t an option with Scheuer’s work, given the unusual origins of Through Our Enemies’ Eyes.
"That book actually started as an unclassified manual in 1999 for new counterterrorist officers working bin Laden and Sunni extremism," says one veteran CIA terrorism specialist. "Scheuer had written it at the request of his successor as Alec station chief, who specifically wanted it to be something that was drawn from open sources in the Arab and Islamic worlds for two reasons: one, so people could take it out of the building and digest it at their leisure, and two, because he wanted new officers to appreciate how much is actually out there that’s useful that isn’t classified, particularly if you have a context for it."
Given his in-house manual’s open-source-based, unclassified status, Scheuer figured it wouldn’t be much of a problem to cull more public material to recast the approximately 100 pages as a marketable academic manuscript — which he did over the course of late 1999 and early 2000, submitting the book to the CIA’s Publications Review Board (PRB) in the spring of 2000. According to Scheuer, the manuscript was at first denied release because the board took issue with the book’s brief favorable discussion of Samuel Huntington’s "clash of civilizations" theory, which posits that antagonism between Western and Islamic cultures (among others) will drive world conflict in the coming years.
"They wrote back saying our Arab friends would be upset, and ‘his views of Huntington’s paradigm bring into question his ability to perform official duties,’" Scheuer says. "That came back, and I thought it was beyond the pale, so I appealed directly to the seventh floor [higher-ups]. And it took the better part of a year to get permission to submit it for publication. I believe it was because of 9/11 that they suddenly became less concerned with what they first considered ‘areas of sensitivity.’ But the condition was that I remain anonymous and that there be no mention of my employer on the cover or anywhere else."