Get the Facts Newsletter, January 2006
Volume 2, Issue 1
I just couldn't let this newsletter go out without acknowledging our boys in pewter (or whatever their new uniform color is). At long last, the Seattle Seahawks are going to the Super Bowl!
Simply wishing the team well doesn't quite seem sufficient, however. They couldn't have gotten where they are without their fans. Congratulations to us, too! In particular, my hat goes off to two Seahawks fans who must surely be the embodiment of the 12th Man and the 12th Woman. Meet: Lorin "Big Lo" Sandretzky (He even has his own action figure ) and Becky.
Enjoy the game!
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As most of you know, for the past eight years, I've been dragged back and forth through the court system by the Radical Right because of a tape I gave to the press. The tape revealed Newt Gingrich and several of his cronies conspiring to sidestep a ruling by the House Ethics Committee, which I chaired at the time. The case, which is still going on, is never far from my mind, but I felt some solace recently after reading a New York Times editorial about the ethics of leaking. It makes the same central argument I've always made: When the government does something illegal, the American have a right to know about it.
Written collectively by the New York Times editorial staff, the article argues, "A democratic society cannot long survive if whistle-blowers are criminally punished for revealing what those in power don't want the public to know—especially if it's unethical, illegal, or unconstitutional behavior by top officials. …
"When the government does not want the public to know what it is doing, it often cites national security as the reason for secrecy. The nation's safety is obviously a most serious issue, but that very fact has caused this administration and many others to use it as a catchall for any matter it wants to keep secret, even if the underlying reason for the secrecy is to prevent embarrassment to the White House."
• Read the full article
MY INTERVIEW WITH TAVIS SMILEY
On January 9, 2006, radio host Tavis Smiley interviewed me on his daily two-hour radio show, the Tavis Smiley Show. The topic of discussion was the nasty court battle for your First Amendment rights being waged against me by Rep. John Boehner (R–OH).
• Listen to the interview (Requires Windows Media Player)
• Learn more about Boehner vs. McDermott
• Find out more about Tavis Smiley
COSTLY WITHDRAWAL IS THE PRICE TO BE PAID FOR A FOOLISH WARI thought you might find this recent editorial, written by Hebrew University military history professor Martin van Creveld, to be an eye-opening opinion on how the U.S. should conduct its withdrawal from Iraq.
He explains, "As the [American] troops withdrew [from Vietnam], they left most of their equipment to the Army of the Republic of South Vietnam—which just two years later, after the fall of Saigon, lost all of it to the communists. …
"[But] simply abandoning equipment or handing it over to the Iraqis, as was done in Vietnam, is simply not an option. And even if it were, the new Iraqi army is by all accounts much weaker, less skilled, less cohesive, and less loyal to its government than even the South Vietnamese army was. For all intents and purposes, Washington might just as well hand over its weapons directly to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Clearly, then, the thing to do is to forget about face-saving and conduct a classic withdrawal."
• Read the full article
Uzbekistan, formerly part of the Soviet Union, has a nasty track record of human rights abuses. That includes attacks on Uzbekistani human rights defenders who attempt to reveal those abuses. But, as former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray recently revealed, that doesn't stop the U.K. or the U.S. from using intelligence obtained by torture in that country. According to report in the Boston Globe, Murray says that the U.S. regularly sent terrorist suspects to Uzbekistan for interrogation and that "the CIA and the British intelligence agency MI6 routinely cited information in their regular intelligence briefings that has been passed on by Uzbek authorities and was almost certainly obtained under torture."
An editorial published in the Guardian laid out, in graphic detail, the stakes of such revelations, both for Murray and the Uzbekistanis he met with: "Six hours after Jamal Mirsaidov met with [Murray], the limp and mutilated corpse of his grandson was dumped on his doorstep. The body was battered and one arm appeared to have been immersed in boiling fluid until the skin had begun to peel off. … His mistake had been to write a letter to Tony Blair and George Bush alerting them to the daily torture meted out to dissidents in Uzbekistan, their new ally in the war on terror."
Murray himself was, according to the Guardian, "subjected to a humiliating disciplinary investigation, had his personal life publicly shredded and suffered a string of health problems. He became the rogue ambassador."
While President Bush claims that the United States does not condone the use torture, he seems to be leaving out a crucial part of that claim: The U.S. does not condone the use torture by the U.S. If other countries do it, that's their problem. For a president who prides himself on his morality and promotion of "a culture of life," this kind of duplicity is not only hypocritical; it's unconscionable.
• Read the Boston Globe article
• Read the Guardian article
• Visit Craig Murray's blog
• Read about attacks on human-rights defenders
• Find news updates on Uzbekistan
Like most politicians in the Democratic Party, I strongly support laborers' right to unionize and believe that unions are one of our country's strongest defenses against the exploitation of workers. However, there's one area where I think Democrats and unions are falling down on the job, and that's health insurance.
I recently read a compelling argument about the auto industry that argues in favor of one of my top legislative priorities: universal, single-payer health care. New York Times editorial columnist Robert Finch writes, "If the government paid everyone's health insurance bills, as those in Canada and most of Europe do, Detroit's Big Three could save at least $1,300 per vehicle. … [P]erhaps the most important factor keeping an overhaul off the national agenda is one that few Democrats acknowledge: most of [United Auto Workers President Ron] Gettelfinger's fellow labor leaders don't support a single-payer system either. …
"The reason comes down to simple self-interest. The United Auto Workers is one of the few private-sector unions that doesn't run its own health plan. Rather, most have created huge companies to administer their workers' plans, giving them a large and often corrupt stake in the current system."
• Read the full "Big Labor's Big Secret" article
• Get details on my views about labor and health care
Here are just a couple of the Web sites I rely on to get the facts:
• Nancy Pelosi's House Democratic Leader: http://democraticleader.house.gov/
• Poets Against the War: http://www.poetsagainstthewar.org
Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams
By Alfred Lubrano (Wiley; 2003)
This author must have been a fly on the wall in my house when I was growing up. He writes about the internal conflict among those of us who were raised in blue-collar homes but are now living white-collar lives. He explores how these kinds of folks often hover between those two worlds, not quite feeling accepted in either.
• Get more details
• Join the American Values Team
• Make a donation
Note: Jim McDermott is not responsible for content on Web sites listed in this newsletter except for http://www.mcdermottforcongress.com.
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Revision date: January 27, 2006
