Duncan Moon, the news director for Alaska Public Radio Network, has denied my request to appear on Talk of Alaska. I will be corresponding with the FCC on this. My initial letter to APRN is attached below. Duncan Moon’s e-mail is: dmoon@aprn.org.
Meanwhile, I have been getting a bit of press, at least in Southeast (the Panhandle, to you “outsiders”). The Ketchikan Daily News and the Daily Sentinel of Sitka published front page articles a couple of weeks ago, and Ketchikan and the Juneau Empire ran opinion pieces this week, albeit seriously truncated in the latter case. And the public radio stations in Ketchikan and Juneau (and maybe others) aired a five-minute story, earlier this month.

Dear APRN:

I am a candidate for the U.S. House seat on Nov. 7, 06. I am writing to request that I be given equal time with the incumbent, Don Young, who was on your show, Talk of Alaska, Sep. 26, 06.
I believe I am entitled to equal time because I represent a significant segment of the electorate, who believe that impeachment of President Bush and Vice-President Cheney should, at the very least, be publicly discussed. I know this because over the summer I talked with many thousands of Alaskans, of whom around 4000 signed the petition to put impeachment to a vote. These people deserve to have their voice heard on Talk of Alaska.

To suggest that having the Democratic candidate on the show represents the full spectrum of debate is preposterous. On the same day (Sep. 26) the House approved a record military budget, including $70 billion more for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, by a vote of 394-22. My program calls for not one cent more for these wars. When has this view been expressed by a guest on your airwaves?
One of the primary goals of my campaign is to break the grip of the “two-party” stranglehold on American politics. For obvious reasons, Republicans and Democrats agree that this question is totally out of order. In other words, they express the same viewpoint, which is the opposite of mine.

At the end of Tuesday’s show we were informed that next week’s guest will be gubernatorial candidate Andrew Halcro. Though running as an independent, his politics are not substantially different from the two major parties. If “popularity” is the standard for inclusion in your debate, I point out that Mr. Halcro claimed to have collected 4200 signatures to get on the ballot. I turned in over 4800. I have no problem at all with Mr. Halcro appearing on Talk of Alaska, so long as candidates for Congress – with truly diverse views – be accorded the same privilege.

Sincerely,
Bill Ratigan

I've just received a poster design that I think is smashing!
Until I get a website and/or get more savvy on this blog, you can get it via pfd by e-mailing me at impeachmentalaska@yahoo.com. (if you don't want to log into the comment section).
I'm in the process of finding out if the Alaska Public Radio Network is required to give me equal time with the Republican and Democratic candidates, who have each gotten an hour on the statewide call-in show, “Talk of Alaska”. Not too surprisingly, the network won’t have me on otherwise. Nothing to upset the pleasant relationship management has with the Two Parties. Besides listening to a variety of specious arguments, I was insulted.
But, it’s got me energized.
Below is another letter to Don Young.


Dear Congressman Young:

President Bush proposes to fight “the ideological battle of the 21st Century” using the tools and methods of the Middle Ages, including torture and the Star Chamber.

Nearly all the experienced officers in the CIA, FBI, the military, and experts from around the world, agree that torture yields totally unreliable information. Yet Bush continues to endorse the practice and to brag about its dubious results.

One of his favorite examples is Abu Zubaydah, the first to be interrogated using the “alternative set of procedures”. In his recent (June 06) book, The One Percent Doctrine, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind describes the events around Zubaydah’s capture and “debriefing”. The first thing the FBI and CIA examined was his diary. They quickly realized that he was seriously mentally ill, from a head wound suffered in Afghanistan while fighting for the CIA-backed mujahadeen in the late 1980s. The diary consists of trivial nonsense, from the perspective of three distinct personalities. He had nothing to do with operations; at best he was a “travel agent” or “greeter”. Dan Coleman, the FBI’s top al Qaeda expert (“the man who introduced Osama bin Laden to America” in the mid-1990s) told one of his bosses, “This guy is insane, certifiable, split personality,” an opinion shared by the CIA. Bush reacted by telling his CIA chief, George Tenet, “I said he was important. You’re not going to let me lose face on this, are you?”
“No sir, Mr. President,” Tenet dutifully replied. The torture of the crazy man yielded up plots to attack everything from supermarkets, malls, and banks, to the Statue of Liberty and Brooklyn Bridge. Suskind writes: “Thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each flavor of target….The FBI generally kept its various alerts secret. But word drifted out to the media, time and again, considering the thousands who were involved.”

How much did this worthless “intelligence” cost in wasted energy and money? Who knows? But it wasn’t worthless to one man: it was very valuable to a president whose power rests on successfully bamboozling an ever decreasing minority with an atmosphere of fear and shifting color codes.

In 1904, the many-talented American writer, Edgar Lee Masters (at the time he was a law partner of Clarence Darrow) wrote:

“In the Star Chamber the council [cabinet] could inflict any punishment short of death, and frequently sentenced objects of its wrath to the pillory, to whipping and to the cutting off of ears….With each embarrassment to arbitrary power the Star Chamber became emboldened to undertake further usurpation…. It spread terrorism among those who were called to do constitutional acts….”

As far as I can see, the only difference between Bush’s military tribunals and King Charles’ Star Chamber is that the death penalty is not excluded.

The argument that these people are “evil terrorists” and therefore not entitled to fundamental human and legal rights falls flat on its face, given that thousands of detainees have been released after going through the torture mills at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. The case of Canadian Maher Arar, who was sent by the US to Syria, where he was tortured for a year, is one recent example. He has been completely vindicated by a Canadian court, which roundly condemned the “extraordinary rendition” by US authorities.
Many others continue to languish in the illegal prisons. Some, like the “Algerian Six” are known to be innocent, but their release would constitute an admission of a grave error.

Until now, most of the victims of “extraordinary rendition” and “alternative interrogation” have been dark-skinned persons, whose culture and language are “foreign”. How soon will it be before people with names like Ratigan and Young are subject to torture and Star Chamber justice?

Your party colleagues in the Senate have capitulated, giving the president the sole power to define torture and to appoint its victims. No one expects the Democrats to make so much as a peep.
I strongly urge you to stand up against this extremely serious attack on laws and traditions which go back to our founding revolution, and beyond – to Magna Carta and the roots of our legal system. If you do so, you will also be upholding the tradition of the Republican Party going back to Abraham Lincoln, who banned torture in the midst of the Civil War, when the existence of the Republic was at stake. Then, the danger was from the Southern slave-owners; now the threat comes from the White House itself.

Sincerely,
Bill Ratigan

Below is a copy of a letter (the first of a series) I have sent to Don Young, with copies to the other candidates for Alaska’s U.S. House seat, and the press.

Dear Congressman Young:
As you are no doubt aware, recently there have been reports of hazardous chemical bombs being discovered, and “mysterious” illnesses among workers at Fort Wainwright.
On August 5th, The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner reported that work had been halted on 128 family housing units after two chemical bombs were found at the site. The first question that comes to mind is, “How could the Army carry a $55 million project, intended to house several hundred soldiers and family members, nearly to completion before the discovery was made?” Especially since work was halted in August 2005 after cancer-causing PCB’s were found at the site.
A week later, the News-Miner reported that as many as two dozen workers are still complaining of headaches, fatigue and stomach problems, a month and a half after being exposed to an unidentified toxin while working on a new hangar at the fort. Some of these workers may never fully recover. Why is it taking the Army so long to identify the cause of the illness?
The EPA declared Fort Wainwright a Superfund site in 1990, and it is wrapping up some of its original projects, but it is now obvious that they have not been looking in all the right places. It turns out that the site of the housing project, “Taku Gardens”, was designated “Top Secret” in the early fifties, when the dumping presumably occurred. How many more “top secret” toxic waste dumps are there on the post?
Workers, soldiers, and their families at Fort Wainwright number some 15,000. The fort adjoins residential areas and is within a couple of miles of downtown Fairbanks. The Chena River, so vital to Fairbanks life, flows through the fort. Local residents, who may have been mildly concerned in the past, are becoming increasingly anxious. What actions are you taking in Congress to get a full accounting of the chemicals and bombs which have been dumped at Fort Wainwright, Fort Greeley, and the other military bases in Alaska?
The 172nd Stryker Brigade was recently extended in Iraq, and redeployed to Baghdad to draw fire from a hostile population. As a member of the House Committee on Homeland Security, don’t you think that they and their families, and the American people, would be better served if they were deployed to look for weapons of mass destruction and deadly chemicals in their own backyard?

Finally, I am writing as a constituent, and ask that you respond accordingly, to this and future letters. Because I am a citizen concerned with serious damage to our environment, and many other issues, I am also a candidate for Alaska’s U.S. House seat in the November election. I invite the other candidates to address this issue, and to offer others for discussion, as I will be doing throughout the campaign.

Sincerely,
Bill Ratigan

Things just aren’t going well for G.W. Bush. Last week, several Pentagon analysts reported that Anbar Province, Iraq’s largest and the center of the Sunni insurgency, is effectively “lost”, and the situation in Baghdad and elsewhere is getting worse by the day. In Afghanistan, the puppet Karzai government is threatened with collapse, and the US and NATO forces are stretched to the limit by mounting popular resistance. A plea for more NATO troops fell on deaf ears.
At home, polls show that two out of three Americans disapprove of the war and the president who launched it. So Bush understandably hoped to divert attention from his failed policies by invoking the memory of “9/11”, and by attempting to codify into law his rejection of the Geneva Conventions, along with 800 years of Anglo-Saxon legal tradition. This was probably seen as a “slam-dunk” and a clever way to embarrass the Democratic Party, heading into the November election.
However, this ploy too is about to explode in his face, as Senate Republicans, including those with the most military experience, are expressing serious misgivings. In this they are simply following the advice of the judge advocate generals of the four branches of the military who testified before their committee. Typical of the testimony was that of Marine General James Walker: "I'm not aware of any situation in the world where there is a system of jurisprudence that is recognized by civilized people, where an individual can be tried without – and convicted without – seeing the evidence against him. And I don't think that the United States needs to become the first in that scenario.” In other words, no court in the civilized world would allow the Bush rules!

Poor W. is getting so flustered that he has had to pull the old “If you won’t play by my rules, I’ll take my ball and go home” ruse, warning that failure to toe the line will mean shutting down the “program”. Revealingly, McCain rejects this threat: he and the other critics have no problem with kidnapping, “rendition”, inaccessibility to the Red Cross, etc., all banned under international law.
Likewise, both sides agree that the ancient rights of habeas corpus (the right to know the specific charges against you) and the presumption of innocence (“the golden thread” that runs unbroken through Anglo-Saxon law back to Magna Carta, according to one wise old English barrister, John Mortimer’s “Horace Rumpole”) must be scrapped in the “Global War on Terror”.
McCain, Powell, and others, including most media pundits, also ignore the fundamental question: who determines who is an “enemy combatant”, and thus subject to the special rules? Of course the answer is – who else? – the “Decider-in-Chief”, who is also the final court of appeal (i.e., executioner). Bush established the modern record for legalized state murder while governor of Texas, often expressing sadistic glee, and it is possible that once acquired, the taste for “hands on” killing is never lost. Bush’s proposal would enable him to take complete charge of the process, from the initial arrest order to the death chamber.

The political debacle descending around the president’s head shows his immense vulnerability, particularly to the movement for impeachment. But this won’t happen automatically. The Republican opposition certainly has no interest in pursuing it, and the Democrats, whose fear of Bush and terrorism is exceeded only by their fear of losing election to office, are silent on the tribunals, impeachment, and just about everything else that matters. The simple reason for this is that the two parties of Big Business have no alternative to the Bush policy of military domination of the world.
Bush’s political weakness, which can only get worse, also makes him increasingly desperate – and dangerous. Even in ruling circles, there is increasing fear (hope?) of an “October surprise”.

The way forward begins with removing these criminals from office, as more and more Americans are coming to realize. However, to be effective, this realization requires conscious political expression, as my candidacy attempts to do.

HELP MAKE HISTORY!
STRIKE A BLOW FOR FREEDOM!
IMPEACH NOW!

It's OFFICIAL!
Got the word this afternoon.
Look forward to a stepped-up fight. Now is the time....
Thanks again for all the support.
Bill