Valerie Plame Still Wants to Know
By Jason Leopold
t r u t h o u t | Report
13 Nov.

Former covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson would still like to know the identity of the CIA official who passed her name to the office of Vice President Dick Cheney in the spring of 2003, and “under what circumstances.”

That’s just one of several unanswered questions Plame Wilson has been trying to figure out in the years since several senior officials in the Bush administration leaked her name to syndicated columnist Robert Novak and a handful of other journalists. That leak ended her two-decade CIA career.

“I’d like to know, why did Novak go with my maiden name, Plame, in his original article?” Plame Wilson said during an hour-long, two-part interview with Truthout. “I always thought that was strange. When I married, I took my married name. And then he [Novak] used Valerie Plame [in his column]. It was only the CIA who knew that I worked for them, and my maiden name.”

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A report released today estimates that the cost of the US-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is double what the Bush Administration has directly requested. The Joint Economic Committee’s majority staff report, War at Any Price? The Total Economic Costs of the War Beyond the Federal Budget, includes “hidden” costs such as the drain on economic growth as a result of war-related borrowing, the disruption of oil markets, the future care of injured soldiers and repair costs for the military. The report projects the total costs of the wars to amount to $3.5 trillion between 2003 and 2017, $1 trillion higher than the Congressional Budget Office forecast.

So far, President Bush has asked for $607 billion for the Iraq War, 10 times higher than what the administration estimated before launching its “shock and awe” campaign.

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The Times Vs. Feminism
By Susan J. Douglas
In These Times

Don’t become a feminist. I mean it. Because then you might end up like Katha Pollitt. Wait, isn’t Pollitt an award-winning poet and columnist? Isn’t her “Subject to Debate” column what most of us turn to first when The Nation arrives? As the sharpest feminist commentator in the country, doesn’t Pollitt make feminism seem cool?

Not if you’re the New York Times Book Review, which has rarely met a feminist it liked. The former ballerina Toni Bentley, author of a book on the delights of crotchless panties and the epiphanies of anal sex (I quote: a “direct path … to God”), was assigned to review Pollitt’s latest collection of essays, Learning to Drive and Other Life Stories, and apparently didn’t like it. Fair enough. But Bentley, possibly disappointed by the lack of sodomy, used her review as an opportunity to trash feminists and to trash Pollitt for both being one and not being one who is stereotypical enough.

“Groaning and moaning from clever, sassy women has become a genre unto itself,” writes Bentley of feminist writings, “the righteous revenge of the liberal, pre-, during- or postmenopausal woman,” meaning that even feminists cannot escape from being governed by their hormones and their wombs. Feminists, as we know, are always angry and “shrill”; they are “enraged, educated women” whom Bentley labels “vagina dentate intellectuals.”

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OpenSecrets.org now features updated campaign finance profiles for members of the House and Senate. The site offers a wealth of information about who is greasing whom and for how much.

Find out who’s financing your legislators by clicking here.

Woodstock May Have Saved Sen. McCain’s Life
by Sheldon Richman

John McCain scored a standing ovation at the last Republican presidential debate when he attacked Sen. Hillary Clinton for proposing – unsuccessfully – to spend a million taxpayer dollars on a museum commemorating the 1969 Woodstock festival, saying,

“Now, my friends, I wasn’t there. I’m sure it was a cultural and pharmaceutical event. I was tied up at the time. But the fact is, my friends, no one can be president of the United States that supports projects such as these.”

It would be easy to criticize McCain for politically exploiting his five-and-half years of suffering as a captive of the North Vietnamese during the Vietnam war. But there’s a more important point to be made.

Had McCain simply attacked Clinton’s attempt at pork-barrel spending – the museum is set to open next year in Bethel, New York – that would have been fine (although McCain, too, has some pork-barreling on his record). Taxpayers shouldn’t be forced to support any kind of museum.

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Monday, Nov. 5: National Day to Call the Senate to ban use/export of cluster bombs, which kill and harm civilians. (Over 98% victims are civilians.)

Call your Senators today. Urge them to cosponsor S.594 – the Cluster Munitions Civilian Protection Act.

Take action now! Call: 1-800-352-1897 (a toll free number just for Monday)

Cluster bombs are indiscriminate killers that spew deadly shrapnel over large swathes of land, and leave behind fields of landmines. Over the last 40 years 98% of cluster bomb casualties have been civilians.

More than 80 governments have agreed to negotiate a ban on these killers in the coming year. The U.S. government is not one of them; they say that the military’s need overrides humanitarian concerns. However, these weapons are a liability for the military as well: unexploded bomblets impede troop movement and kill our own troops (dozens of them in Iraq).

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The FBI’s Right to Threaten Torture
by James Bovard

A federal appeals court has concluded that an FBI agent must go to trial on charges he coerced a false confession out of a prime suspect in the 9/11 attacks. But the FBI still insists that its agent did nothing wrong. And the feds swayed the court to suppress that portion of a recent decision detailing how the FBI agent used the threat of torture to break an innocent man.

Abdallah Higazy, a 30-year-old Egyptian student, arrived in New York City to study engineering at the Polytechnic University in Brooklyn on August 27, 2001. A U.S. foreign-aid program reserved and paid for his room at the Millennium Hilton Hotel, next to the World Trade Center. After the first plane crashed into the World Trade Center, Higazy hot-footed it out of the hotel. After the terrorist attack, the hotel was sealed.

Three months later, guests were allowed to retrieve their belongings. When Higazy went to the hotel on December 17, he was arrested and accused of possessing an aviation radio. (A hotel security guard reported finding the radio in a safe in his room.) Higazy denied owning the radio. He was arrested as a material witness and locked up in solitary confinement.

Higazy wanted to clear his name so he agreed to take a polygraph test. FBI agent Michael Templeton wired him up for the test but then proceeded to browbeat him for three hours until he finally admitted to owning the radio. Higazy said the FBI agent warned him, “If you don’t cooperate with us, the FBI will… make sure Egyptian security gives your family hell.” The FBI refused to permit Higazy’s attorney, Robert Dunn, to be in the room while he was given the polygraph. After the interrogation, Higazy was “trembling and sobbing uncontrollably,” according to Dunn.

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Reading Suzanne Levine’s account of her years at Ms., brought back fond memories of my own about the magazine that changed my life. My sister had a subscription in high school, and I became an avid reader of Ms. in 7th grade. It educated and inspired me, and started me on the path of political activism.

In college, I spent a week in New York City in search of a summer internship. My first stop was at Ms. Although the magazine wasn’t hiring, then-editor Pat Carbine spent a couple of hours with me talking about my aspirations and calling editor friends in the city to see about other job options. Looking back, it moves me that such a powerful woman would take time out of her busy day to help a kid with big dreams and no plan.

I ended up spending my summer in New York at McCall’s magazine. But I will never forget the kindness of the good people at Ms. I congratulate them on helping grow the feminist movement not just here but around the world.

Becci Robbins

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Ms. Memories
By Suzanne Braun Levine
The Women’s Media Center

It is always stunning to me to realize that an event that still lives in my contemporary memory actually took place decades ago; so when I was invited to a 35th anniversary celebration for Ms. Magazine (yes, it lives! The current publishers are the Feminist Majority Foundation), it was as though my life was flashing before my eyes. I joined the magazine in the summer of 1972 for the very first monthly issue. When we put Wonder Woman on the cover, we felt empowered and protected by her magic bracelets. But I had no idea what a life-changing and world-changing adventure I had signed up for.

At the time I was an only half-awake feminist. But I did have one bond with the magazine. When the Preview Issue came out the previous winter it featured a list of celebrities who admitted that they had had illegal abortions; amended to the article was a coupon for other women to add their names. I filled out the coupon, glad to step forward on an issue that mattered a lot to me. By the time those coupons were being compiled, I was on the job and actually found and opened my envelope.

The women I worked with came from a range of backgrounds – the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, and those like myself who were magazine types and somewhat less activist. I wore a pink silk blouse and matching cashmere skirt to my first day of work – only to discover that my “desk” was a pile of boxes in a small dusty room I shared with three others. It didn’t take long before I – along with many of the readers of Ms. – was becoming radicalized by the injustices toward women that we were encountering at every turn. I was also a little scandalized by some of the more way-out seeming discussions that I found myself editing. Back then, I found the idea of not shaving your legs, for example, almost unthinkable. And “Liberating Masturbation” … Well, you can imagine.

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