Merrill's Stan O'Neal wasn't ready for subprime time, but he was a record-setting fundraiser for Bush

Merrill Lynch's ouster of CEO E. Stanley O'Neal is good timing for the financial behemoth, but it comes a few years too late for America and for thousands of Merrill employees.

He's being driven out for his reckless bundling of subprime mortgages into shaky securities that Merrill aggressively peddled and that are now shaking Wall Street's foundations. Yes, these big financial institutions play funny money with your monthly payments, making millions while you don't see a dime from their monopoly tactics.

Not that this is anything new. The explosion in subprime mortgages is caused in large part by predatory lending practices, which are particularly aimed at black people (O'Neal used to be one of those) and other minorities.

More on O'Neal in a minute, but as I wrote in April 2001 about this financiopathic scheme — "From the Subprime to the Ridiculous" — when the War of Terror was still being waged almost entirely on the domestic front by banks and companies like Merrill:

In those days, Stan O'Neal, while firing thousands of Merrill employees, was recklessly expanding Merrill's subprime bidness.

In 2003, as I previously noted, O'Neal, the highest-ranking black man on Wall Street, was a reckless bundler in another way: He set a fundraising record for George W. Bush's campaign by sending out a letter that generated $279,750 from other rich people in less than three weeks' time, the most in such a such a short period.

O'Neal, one of the nine Bush "Rangers" on Wall Street, was a prime bundler before the term hit its current vogue.

As this moneychanger is being driven from the temple, he'll be dragging along a big bag of cash. Details of that aren't immediately known, but, like most CEOs, he had one helluva deal. For instance, as the New York Times's Eric Dash noted this past April, O'Neal had a particularly sweet clause in his Merrill deal just in case the big company wobbled so much that it fell under the control of another big company:

Hell, that was incentive for him to be reckless enough take Merrill into the toilet. If he had stayed around long enough to really ruin the company to the extent that some other behemoth would take control, he would have gotten a quarter of a billion.

Now O'Neal joins the ranks of former Merrill employees. He probably won't be asked to join them for commiseration drinks. He fired more than 25,000 of them during his tenure.

The convergence of America's pastimes — religious crackpotism, fast food, and immigration — on America's former pastime

Just wait until the World Series, which opens tonight in Boston, shifts to Denver on Saturday. That's when Jesus and Muhammad — and Sayyid Qutb, the spiritual godfather of Al Qaeda — will join the millions of other viewers.

Colorado's a great setting for what used to be America's pastime. Our country's real manias about fast food, religion, and immigration have strong roots there.

South of Denver lies Colorado Springs, headquarters of Focus on the Family's James Dobson, the godfather of America's religious right-wingers. (See my 1997 story "King James's Version.")

North of Denver is Greeley, the slaughterhouse capital for the fast-food industry. Colorado Rockies owner Charlie Monfort owes his good fortune to his daddy's massive abattoirs in Greeley. The family's cattle feedlots are also the stamping grounds for immigrants brought in to deal with the muck and death. (For inhumane treatment of animals, see this. For inhumane treatment of immigrants who perform this inhumane treatment of animals, see this.)

And in a weird confluence of human and animal slaughter philosophies, Greeley is the town where Sayyid Qutb lived in 1949, where he learned to hate Americans' "immoral" behavior before he returned to the Middle East and became the most influential 20th century thinker for radical schnooks like Osama bin Laden. (See Mike Peters's 2002 Greeley Tribune story "Roots of Terrorism Reach to 1949 Greeley" and Daniel Brogan's 2003 story "Al Qaeda’s Greeley Roots" in the Denver magazine 5280.)

Not that all the strange confluences in Colorado are bad. Northern Colorado is also the home of the amazing Temple Grandin, an ingenious autistic person made famous by Oliver Sacks. Grandin, more attuned to animals than people, revolutionized cattle feedlots by at least making the treatment of cattle more humane before they're slaughtered. Her life story is fascinating — especially the "Squeeze Machine" she invented for herself.

You can't make this shit up — except for Charlie Monfort and his family's cattle feedlots. As Eric Schlosser wrote in Fast Food Nation:

The money from Greeley's feedlots wafted down to Denver, enabling Charlie Monfort and his family to buy the Rockies and feed campaign contributions to right-wing religious wackos like Rick Santorum and Tom Tancredo.

As for the Rockies' players themselves, Denver Westword's Michael Roberts pleads, "Please, Don't Play the Jesus Card, Rockies."

Today's timid New York Times article reminds the nation that the Rockies are a Christian team by intelligent design: Monfort is born-again, and General Manager Dan O'Dowd is not only a dedicated Christian but purposely recruits other Christians to be his players.

Bob Nightengale (a former colleague of mine years ago at the Arizona Republic) broke that story nationally in a piece last summer for USA Today. The Times's Ben Shpigel begins his story today with a denial by a Jewish Rockie that the team's Christianity is forced down his throat. Shpigel, in a typical Times skin-back, then notes:

Yeah, right.

In any case, I hope the Rockies slaughter the Red Sox — religious nuts like Qutb and Dobson notwithstanding.

Today's scheduled embrace of the Dalai Lama by George W. Bush represents a major change in foreigner policy by the White House.

Bush's new plan: If you meet the Buddha on the road, get a photo-op with him.

That's a shift from the Blackwater philosophy: If you meet an Iraqi on the road, shoot him.

In any case, plagued by a war that his own regime started, the president has chosen to burnish his image by meeting with a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. No, not Al Gore, who looks as if he's won several pizza prizes since Bush's operatives stole the presidency from him in 2000.

This Nobel winner is Tenzin Gyatso, who was proclaimed the Dalai Lama when he was only two years old and ruled Tibet until China ousted him years ago. Gyatso won the 1989 Nobel prize "for his consistent resistance to the use of violence."

Meanwhile, China is pissed, as the L.A. Times notes this morning:

Too bad that Hunter S. Thompson, the Dalai Lama's deceased twin, isn't around to write about this absurd face-to-face between two spiritual leaders whose approaches to violence are so different.

Will the peace-loving Buddhist leader have any impact on Bush? It's too late for that. The best we can hope for is that, instead of gonzo pol Karl Rove whispering into Bush's ear, "Stick to principle, stick to principle," this Gyatso pol will whisper, "Stay in the moment, stay in the moment."

It would be nice if he also told Bush, "Don't stay in Iraq, don't stay in Iraq."

Bad news on the global terror front: Unstable Pakistan will become even more shaky when its former leader (and Musharraf's enemy) returns home this week.

As Benazir Bhutto prepares to return to Pakistan later this week from her Dubai exile and becomes a target of strongman prick Pervez Musharraf's assassins, we can only recall how tragic it was for the U.S. to pull back from that volatile region more than five years ago.

Back in 2002, the Bush-Cheney regime abandoned the full-fledged hunt for Osama bin Laden and duped Congress and the country into invading Iraq.

Pakistan was where it was at. Bin Laden was hiding there and in neighboring Afghanistan. As the Soviets found out, you can't fight rebels in Afghanistan without somehow, some way also fighting them as they scurry across the border into Pakistan, where they have even government support.

Officials of Pakistan's spy agency, the ISI — widely credited with co-opting the Taliban and, along with the Saudis and Reagan administration, arming them — were sympathetic to bin Laden as long as he didn't destabilize their own country.

Recall that Porter Goss and Bob Graham, chairs of the House and Senate Intelligence committees, were having breakfast on the morning of 9/11 with Mahmood Ahmed, the Pakistani ISI official who later turned out to be hijacker Mohammed Atta's bagman. It was also Ahmed who had sent $100,000 to Atta on orders from the guy who later kidnapped Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. You can't make this shit up.

Yes, we left Pakistan in 2002. Big mistake.

We invaded Iraq. Bigger mistake.

We inflamed the Shia-Sunni schism in Iraq, widening everywhere else that ancient rift between Islam's main sects. Take Pakistan. Unlike in Iraq, the Sunnis are the majority. Please remember that most of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudis, and despotic monarchy Saudi Arabia is ruled by Sunni fanatics.

There has long been sectarian violence in Pakistan — see this October 2004 BBC backgrounder. Add to that the return to the country of Benazir Bhutto, whose daddy, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was Pakistan's prime minister in the '70s before he was executed by the country's military. Later, Benazir Bhutto — nearly a dead ringer for Andrea Martin/Edith Prickley's version of another South Asia strongwoman, Indira Ghandi — became prime minister, and then she was driven from Pakistan amid corruption charges.

Pakistan was a bigger threat to world stability after 9-11 than Iraq was. Yes, Iraq was a bigger threat to Israel and always a danger to Kuwait, but Pakistan's instability was a much more dangerous threat to the U.S., no matter what the Bush regime's propagandists have drummed into our heads.

Now's the perfect time to recall that the hunt by Musharraf and the ISI for bin Laden was half-hearted at best. Our reaction has been to step up arm sales to Musharraf, as I noted in April 2005.

Don't be surprised if that well-armed Pakistan government sends more Lockheed fighter jets swooping down on Bhutto than it sent to look for bin Laden.

Lettuce have your huddled masses: Work force becomes truly globalized.

Beset by an immigration war on one front and just plain war on another front, government officials in the U.S. are frantically seeking more illegals for necessary farm work here and longer stays in Baghdad for shanghaied foreigners to build the unnecessary supermax American embassy.

As Nicole Gaouette of the Los Angeles Times reported yesterday,

Meanwhile in Baghdad, workers from the Philippines and other countries who were shanghaied by U.S.-hired contractors to build the supermax U.S. embassy will probably be roped into staying longer as that project falls behind and its cost soars toward $1 billion. Check out the testimony at intrepid California congressman Henry Waxman's July hearing for details on the shanghai gestures.

Without addressing the issue of the original trickery that landed many of those foreign workers in Baghdad against their will, Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post reported yesterday:

As I wrote on August 8:

That story was broken by others, including David Phinney of Inter Press Service in June, who noted that contractor First Kuwaiti has reaped $2 billion from U.S. taxpayers for construction of military camps and the embassy. Phinney wrote:

Wait a sec. As Phinney also notes, Filipino laborers at the new embassy are making much more than that:

Pay is marginally better in our fields. Gaouette's Times story mentions almost by the way that "almost three-quarters of farmworkers are thought to be illegal immigrants."

The percentage of people who mow our lawns is probably even higher, but anyway, Gaouette notes that the White House is extremely concerned about this aspect of the free-market economy:

These are truly salad days for government officials in the U.S. as they quietly chew on these labor-force problems. Gaouette noted:

Pursued not for the sake of the workers but of the corporate farms that depend on cheap labor.

Slave work in Baghdad or California — take your pick. Farmworkers don't get health benefits, and the embassy is going to have a full-time psychiatrist for counseling and drugs, so Iraq seems the better bet: At least your boss in Iraq will be medicated.

Sotheby's to sell a raggedy-ass copy next month in New York City. Habeas corpus not included.

With the Lieberman-Kyl Amendment's momentous move toward a pre-emptive strike on Iran, now's as good a time as any to sell off the Magna Carta. As everyone can see, George W. Bush has poked enough holes in it to reduce its value.

In our era of take no prisoners, but if you do, hold them unlawfully at Abu Ghraib, Gitmo and various torture chambers around the world — new AG Michael Mukasey is bound to agree and, more importantly, he'll be much more effective at running that game on us than Alberto Gonzales was. So it makes sense to peddle this piece of civil-liberties paper to the highest bidder.

In December, Sotheby's plans to do just that in New York City. The privately owned copy, dated 1297, is expected to fetch $20 million to $30 million — undercoating included. But after the past seven years of the Bush-Cheney regime's erosion of the ancient document's key provision on habeas corpus, the question is whether it's worth the vellum it's scrawled on.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's appearance in New York City coincides perfectly with the attempt by war hawks Joe Lieberman and Jon Kyl to push us into a pre-emptive strike on Iran. Rapping the Iranian ruler's knuckles was so easy that it was bound to stir up the populace and take their minds off the tragedy in Iraq.

The New Yorker's Seymour Hersh wrote years ago about the current administration's thirst for Persian blood, and various Israeli officials have beat those drums too.

That's all we need: another war to produce more prisoners whose rights of habeas corpus we can deny.

Too late to ask Bill Kunstler about that.

The most thorough news story so far about putative Attorney General Michael Mukasey comes, not from the mainstream press, but from the Jewish Week. And James D. Besser's extremely well-balanced account cuts right through to the topics of church-state separation, the Patriot Act, and civil liberties.

Faith is an issue when it comes to Mukasey, and that has nothing to do with the Jew-hating websites that are foaming at the mouth about him.

It figures that the Bush administration would replace a dumb but avid opponent of civil liberties — Alberto Gonzales — with a smart but avid opponent of civil liberties, as I pointed out in "War of Terror's New Front: Mukasey." But with the Arab world blowing up all around us, do we have to have an attorney general who's not only an ardent supporter of the Patriot Act but also an avid Zionist?

We already know, as I pointed out earlier, that Mukasey regards the Bill of Rights as less important than the rest of the Constitution because it was tacked-on and that he wants the citizenry to have faith in their government.

The New York Times managed to write an entire story this morning about Mukasey's handling of "war on terror" suspects without mentioning his handling of terror suspects in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing case. Philip Shenon's story even says this:

"Widely admired"? That's not backed up in the story. "Material witnesses"? That's the Times's euphemism for the thousands of Muslims unjustifiably scooped off our streets by the hysterical AG John Ashcroft (see my August 2004 review of the film Persons of Interest).

The Wall Street Journal is the only mainstream outlet that even mentioned that William Kunstler tried to have Mukasey removed from the 1993 bombing case because of the judge's Orthodox Judaism. But the September 18 Journal piece was misleading, saying that Kunstler wanted him removed because he's Jewish. No, it's because Mukasey is both Orthodox and Zionist. There's a difference between that and simply being Jewish.

The Jewish Week story by Besser you haven't read? Check it out, particularly a telling analysis of Mukasey and civil liberties from, of all people, Marc Stern of the ardently pro-Israel American Jewish Congress:

Now that is interesting: a judge who is a "very deep skeptic" about the legal process concerning terror suspects. Stern accurately notes that the only question is whether Mukasey goes too far. And Besser accurately portrayed the Kunstler v. Mukasey episode:

But Besser stopped there. In fact, Mukasey cleverly had Kunstler removed as the sheik's lawyer. Without context, Shenon's story this morning mentioned a very similar move by Mukasey in an October 2001 case of Osama Awadallah, a college student with no criminal record who was one of thousands of Muslims rounded up on U.S. streets after 9/11:

Talking about bending the law for political purposes. I thought Bush didn't like "activist judges."

Anyway, Besser did a good job in his story by talking to Muslim groups, among others:

Besser's story points out that Mukasey's views on the separation of church and state are not really known. But his story itself helps provide the troubling answer.

First off, Ibrahim Hooper was simply being shrewdly politic about Mukasey. The future AG's status as an Orthodox Jew is highly relevant.

Just as right-wing Christians use their faith as a political bludgeon, so do Mukasey's fellow Orthodox Jews. He's a graduate of the Ramaz School, an Upper East Side school affiliated with Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun (which calls itself "KJ"), and his wife was a teacher there.

Here's the congregation's mission statement. See if it differs much from the kind of politicized religion practiced by the likes of the late, unlamented Jerry Falwell and the alive, unlamented Pat Robertson, among many others:

Church-state separation? No. Political action by a religious organization? Yes. I'm not saying this is remarkable or even right-wing. This is the way most American Jewish congregations look at Israel.

But why do you think that American Muslims protest when their own ties to overseas Muslims are unfairly questioned and even prosecuted?

More to the point of church-state separation: When it comes to most sects of Orthodox Judaism, there ain't no separation. So that's bound to raise some worries about Mukasey from those who defend such a separation.

I guess that, with the hawks like Cheney beating the drums for some kind of war with the mullahs of Iran, we might as well have a Zionist as attorney general.

This oily business of dealing with evil foreign leaders.

New York's tabloids and assorted pols came unglued yesterday about the very idea of Iran's crackpot hardliner Mahmoud Ahmedinejad wanting to visit Ground Zero.

Where were they when Uzbek dictator Islam Karimov, whose regime boils people to death, was courted by George W. Bush and Mayor Mike Bloomberg?

Don't let your own blood boil at the thought of a bad guy visiting our sacralized 9/11 site. Condemn it, if you want, but Ahmedinejad was just trying to score political points, as our own pols do all the time at Ground Zero. He got what he wanted: The angry U.S. reaction will play well back home in Tehran, especially with the radical mullahs who really run Iran and like to stir up hatred for the "Great Satan."

Do we even have to say that in international politics, enemies today are pals tomorrow, and vice versa, and that the reasons almost always have to do with greed for money and natural resources?

On the other hand, it would be nice if our press at least reported these events. The Uzbek despot Karimov laid a wreath at Ground Zero in 2002, and there was literally not one word in the U.S. press about it at the time — I'm not talking about criticism or praise but any words at all. Nothing.

So Karimov is not a bad enough guy to get you worked up? Saddam Hussein was brown-nosed by Don Rumsfeld in December 1983. There's no reason to condemn Rumsfeld for that; it was just oil politics — just like the oil politics that Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney played when they seized upon the 9/11 attacks to justify invading Iraq.

After all, when Texas oil execs questioned Cheney in 1998, when he was still at Halliburton, about the physical dangers of pursuing oil in turbulent parts of Asia, the future vice president and de facto commander in chief told them:

Saddam is gone, but we still don't really have Iraq's oil. We do, however, have such evil people as the Taliban to deal with, right? Well, the Taliban were hailed as Afghan freedom fighters by Ronald Reagan during their triumphant visit to the White House on March 21, 1983. Reagan said at the time:

That's ancient history, huh? In fact, they were still our pals 14 years later. In late 1997, the Taliban were wined and dined at the homes of Bush's pals, the Houston oil execs, during Dubya's reign as the hangingest governor in U.S. history.

The oil schnooks were buttering up the Taliban for pipelines and other bidness, of course. See Wayne Madsen's "Afghanistan, the Taliban, and the Bush Oil Team" for details.

At least that courting of the Taliban less than 10 years ago was reported at the time. Of the many words in the mainstream press, my favorites are from a December 14, 1997, story by Caroline Lees in the Telegraph (U.K.), in which she describes the Taliban officials' visit to Unocal vice president Martin Miller's palatial Houston home:

The world has started foreclosure proceedings on the U.S. It's finally happening, much to the detriment of your children and their children.

Bad news out of Saudi Arabia: The archaic but wealthy kingdom is so scared of our imminent recession that it's abandoning our shaky dollar. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard of the Telegraph (U.K.) explains this morning:

This stuff is really complicated, and I'm oversimplifying, and many rich schnooks are the ones making the decisions. (Read this good overview of Wall Street's subprime greed by David Ignatius in Beirut's Daily Star.)

The fact is that, no matter how much money the hedge funds and private-equity people are raking in, a recession looms in the U.S. The rest of the planet is a coalition of the unwilling to be dragged down with us.

This attack by the Saudis on our economy may prove to be more damaging to the U.S. in the long run than the mostly Saudi hijackers' attack on the World Trade Center, which, though horrible and deadly, was an attack on only the symbol of our economy. There was no justification for the 9/11 attack. But this economic attack is justified, because of the greedy schmucks and costly war that have helped send our economy spinning out of control.

Here's the rub: Our rich are getting richer, but foreign investors and governments own most of our debt. As the dollar collapses, they are pulling their money out — can't a brother get a dime?! World investors are looking elsewhere; many have a yen for Japan's strong economy.

We're Number Something-Other-Than-1!

Just one example of how relatively poor we are and how this crisis has been building for a long time: In April, Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal demanded that Citigroup make "Draconian" cuts in its budget, and 17,000 people lost their jobs. Who cares what some Saudi prince says? Well, he's the huge bank's biggest individual shareholder.

Here's more from the Telegraph on the recent move by Saudi royals:

Our money woes are killing us:

Are the Democrats really sure they want to take over the White House? They will inherit an economy heading south and an unwinnable, tragic war.

We can't afford to keep fighting in Iraq, but we can't afford not to as long as we can't get some sort of international alliance to help calm things down over there.

Mercenaries like Blackwater may have to do all the fighting for us, but we won't be able to pay for them. As for our own soldiers: When we finally bring them home, there may be a full-blown recession and no jobs for them.

This is all tied to our mortgage-market crisis, which is caused by our money men playing dangerous games with the dough you homeowners send to the bank every month.

Here's even more from the Telegraph that warns of an even deeper crisis with the mortgage mess:

That's easy for him to say. He's got a new book to peddle.

$15 billion of your money up in smoke for under-fire mercenary company, other defense contractors.

While Blackwater's mercenaries beg for mercy for killing a baby and 19 other people in Baghdad on Sunday, they're already working on another lucrative government contract on yet another foreign adventure: the "war on drugs."

In a major new outsourcing deal reported by only a few outlets, including the Army Times, Blackwater will divvy up a $15 billion pot of government gold, along with four huge defense contractors: Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and Arinc.

Blackwater claims to be building remote-control spy airships. Purty darn good for an army based in a little North Carolina town — no, it's Currituck, not Mayberry.

Arinc, a Maryland-based major supplier of airplane surveillance and passenger-counting equipment, is particularly stoked about the deal, which it announced on the sixth anniversary of 9/11:

Hang on, Arinc, you're getting ahead of yourselves. Here's how GovExec.com's Katherine McIntire Peters describes this other privatized war, which apparently is necessary because, even with the privatized war in Iraq, we still don't have enough troops to conduct all these wars:

Blackwater clearly knows how to deal with foreigners. But how does a little ol' company get to share our wealth with such huge defense contractors? No doubt it's got low friends in high places.

It probably didn't hurt the mercenary army that, according to federal campaign records, its top execs gave $1,000 to Tom DeLay's campaign on December 14, 2004. Or that they contributed mostly to other openly God-fearing lawmakers, like Bono pal Rick Santorum, Kansas's Todd Tiahrt, and Indiana's Mike Pence — whose campaign-finance tool is the Principles Exalt a Nation PAC.

Praise the Lord and pass the ammo. Better make that a blunt.

How about "large armies of foreign mercenaries"?

Regarding the army of mercenaries I wrote about in "Dreadlock in Baghdad" (September 18), Harry Byrne writes from Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania:

Thanks for reading, Harry, but look, this sounds like some typically liberal claptrap. Anyone can lift a quote from Jefferson. What's the context?

Oh, wait, it's from the Declaration of Independence.

U.S. officials already banned from travel in Baghdad.

Despite Sunday's gun battle in Baghdad in which 20 civilians were killed by Blackwater mercenaries, there are new reports that the Iraqi government may not cancel Blackwater's contract after all.

No surprise there, because Iraq's foundering government seems to have been canceled.

Radio Free Iraq reports that the Iraqi Parliament called off its September 18 session because a majority of its members didn't show up for work. The parent Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty news service says in today's roundup:

U.S. officials have already been forbidden to travel outside the Green Zone. Iraqi officials, targeted by insurgents, don't want to travel either.

Bring in more mercenaries! That seems to be the message. Tel Aviv-based Dominic Moran of Zurich's International Relations and Security Network (ISN) reports today:

Providing a good roundup of U.S. mercenary work, Moran also notes:

Here's a question, raised in 1979 by the mellifluous Mighty Diamonds:

Thirty years later, the answer's clear: The Pentagon, that's who. At best we'll get the "rogue security contractor" excuse from the Bush regime for Sunday's cacophonous killing of 11 Iraqis in Baghdad by the North Carolina mercenary army Blackwater.

That excuse has worked before. As I wrote in July 2004, it was used by the Pentagon after the Abu Ghraib tortures came to light. SecDef Don Rumsfeld blamed "rogue" soldiers.

Our memories are short when it comes to the mercenaries employed by the Bush regime. As I pointed out in August 2004, private "interrogators" from CACI were employed by the Pentagon at Abu Ghraib, where all that "fear up" went down.

After this latest incident of privatized violence, we have Blackwater saying its boys were ambushed. Blackwater has 1,000 "troops" in Iraq and guards Ambassador Ryan Crocker. Yes, they guard Crocker, and the administration guards them. Monday's Washington Post concisely captured the two versions of the latest Blackwater escapade. Here's the first:

Followed by the second version:

They wanted to shoot them some Ay-rabs, pal. The way I see it, the Mighty Diamonds sang about the possibility of dreadlocked Rastafarians someday making bodyguards pay the price:

But don't worry, Blackwater bodyguards, the Bush regime will shelter you. Iraq's citizens are the ones who can't hide. As of this morning, IBC's "documented civilian deaths from violence" totals somewhere between 72,596 and 79,187.

Yes, the Blackwater "incident" was notable. But as the IBC "recent events" list notes, on that same Sunday, many other Iraqis died, and not at the hands of American mercenaries, whom our press continues to euphemistically label "contractors" or "bodyguards."

One of the victims was a 12-year-old boy who was killed in Diwaniya during a raid by U.S. and Iraqi troops, according to news reports assembled by IBC. Wonder what happened there?

In any case, this particular bloody Sunday was predestined. IBC's list of 38 people who were killed just the day before includes this entry:

And this one:

Picking Mukasey as AG should help the GOP and Rudy and should scare civil libertarians.

The selection of terror-case judge Michael Mukasey, a pal of Rudy Giuliani's, as the next AG broadly hints at the GOP's strategy for next year's elections: Terror 24-7.

Mukasey's close ties to Rudy make him a simply fabulous choice as attorney general. He's practically a running mate for Giuliani during the next year of campaigning.

What about Mukasey and the rest of us? For the next year as lame-duck AG, Mukasey, who presided over the trial of the World Trade Center's 1993 bombers, will be a constant and sympathetic/heroic reminder of the "war on terror." Maybe that will stoke enough fear in us that we'll forget the war of terror we've created in Iraq.

This is a smart move by the GOP. It smacks of Karl Rove, but he supposedly left the building.

Here's the bad news: Mukasey is potentially far more hazardous to our civil liberties than Alberto Gonzales ever was. Gonzales was a dumb-ass, and Mukasey is very sharp. Mukasey thinks so highly of the Patriot Act that he felt compelled to defend it in a 2004 Wall Street Journal op-ed, writing:

Dispensing with the name, Mukasey proceeds to write a scary analysis, particularly his sneering at librarians' concerns and his strong implication that the Bill of Rights, because it was tacked onto the Constitution, has less heft.

His argument is that we ought to give the government the benefit of the doubt in its dealings with we the people. That's the same kind of reasoning that Chief Justice John Roberts uses to give corporations the benefit of the doubt over people, as I wrote in July 2005..

Here are Mukasey's concluding paragraphs from the WSJ op-ed:

Of course, it's the government that determines what measures are required to "keep us alive." This is one scary lawyer, or as Ben Franklin said:

But concerning the really important stuff — the '08 presidential campaign — Giuliani now has a security blanket. Mukasey is, in effect, his running mate. He'll get bipartisan support from the Senate — Chuck Schumer and other Democrats love him, and Mukasey's role as a judge intimately involved with World Trade Center and other terrorism cases while he was a federal judge in New York City will guarantee him a free pass during confirmation hearings.

You'll hear the word "terror" about a million times during those brief hearings, and the horror of the attacks will be brought up again and again.

As to Mukasey's connections with Giuliani? Forget this morning's papers if you want all the details. As Ron Mills pointed out yesterday in his cleverly named blog, Ron Mills — News And Commentary, Mukasey is a really close pal of Rudy's — he administered the oath of office to newly elected Mayor Giuliani twice in 1994 — once in Mukasey's apartment.

Mukasey was already a member of the Giuliani campaign's "Justice Advisory Committee", and Mukasey's son Marc is a partner in Rudy's law firm.

The apartment oath and the fact that Marc Mukasey is a law partner of Rudy's somehow didn't make it into this morning's New York Times story.

But if Rudy wins the '08 election, you can be sure of one detail: Mukasey will stay on as AG.

If you have some time on your hands, go to John Young's insane and great cryptome.org for the complete transcript of the trial stemming from the '93 bombing.

And what a trial that was. The prosecutor won the case, and you'd think that the GOP would love to give him a top job in the Bush administration — except for the fact that the prosecutor was Patrick Fitzgerald.

Why Uzbekistan is something to think about on this day.

By this time on the sixth anniversary of the 9/11 horror, you will have seen plenty of images of pols trying to launch themselves from the sacralized Ground Zero — though Rudy Giuliani got scorched on his latest takeoff when some victims' families accused him of exploiting the tragedy now that he's a presidential candidate.

Giuliani, who would never have been a presidential candidate if not for 9/11, was the first pol to exploit Ground Zero, but he's not the last, of course, and he's probably not even the most worrisome. In 2002, Uzbek dictator Islam Karimov used the sacralized 9/11 site as a photo-op — with the blessing of Giuliani's successor, Mike Bloomberg.

Why bring up Karimov's Ground Zero visit five years after the fact? Who cares if a foreign pol desecrated what has become sacred ground? The reason is that Uzbekistan is nothing but an Iran in the making, Karimov is its shah, and we're the dupes who have helped prop him up. All that in a world that's more dangerous than it was six years ago.

Iraq has become a training ground for terrorists since our 2003 invasion. Uzbekistan, which is about as geopolitically strategic (see map below), is liable to become such a training ground for terrorists even without a U.S. invasion.

Our fairly warm relationship with Karimov grew warmer after 9/11, when we enlisted in our "war on terror" this dictator who conducts a war of terror on his own people. Dangerous move by the Bush regime, because the radical Muslims who will probably take over undemocratic Uzbekistan when the aging despot dies or is deposed will also have long memories. They're sure to remember that, under the once-secret "rendition" scheme, we shipped Muslim prisoners to his jails for interrogation. They'll also remember how our government stood by and did nothing during Karimov's notorious Andijan massacre of dissidents in the spring of 2005 and then tried to suppress an independent investigation of the slaughter.

Expect to see those images of Karimov at Ground Zero and cuddling with Bush used eventually as devices to stir up hatred of the U.S.

The Central Asian "republic" is destined to be the next "-stan" to push its way into headlines, and the news will be bad. Am I crazy? Yes. Am I wrong about Uzbekistan? I don't think so. Here's how the mainstream International Crisis Group summed things up late last month:

If understanding our history with Karimov and Uzbekistan is important, then recalling how we "handled" the shah and Iran is instructive.

Yes, Karimov is following right in the footsteps of Shah Reza Pahlavi. What's worse is that our government is traipsing down the same garden path with Uzbek's dictator as we did with the shah. And our relationship with Karimov and his NSS is similar to our relationship with the shah and his dreaded secret service, SAVAK, which was shaped by the CIA. Alfred McCoy, in A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror, wrote:

Karimov rules the same way the shah did. We haven't been as close to Karimov as we were to the shah, but our allowing Karimov to use 9/11 as a symbol back in 2002 was cynical: The Bush regime buttered him up as an ally, and Bloomberg was careful not to offend him because of New York's large number of Bukharan Jewish emigres, many of whom supported him.

Karimov himself is pretty cynical: In his own nation, he generally tolerates Jews and even protects them, because the Bukharan Jews have lived there for a thousand years and pose no threat to his power. But he harshly represses Christians — and even the Muslims who make up nearly 90 percent of the California-sized country of 27 million people.

As I pointed out a couple of years ago, New York's Jewish Week described the strange embrace of Karimov by the city's Bukharan Jews:

George W. Bush's relationship with Karimov isn't quite as old as Karimov's relationship with Uzbek Jews. Bush's dealings with Karimov date back to 1997, when Dubya was still the hangingest governor in U.S. history: Enron's Ken Lay, Bush's biggest campaign contributor, wanted to make a deal with Uzbekistan so Lay instructed Dubya to meet with one of Karimov's minions to grease the skids.

By 2002, the Bush regime wanted to curry favor with Karimov because Uzbekistan borders on Afghanistan. When Karimov visited the States, he got the royal treatment. At Ground Zero, the dictator looked like the religious type, right? I mean, he laid a wreath and even signed his name on a memorial wall.

Bloomberg gave Karimov freer rein in New York City than he gave the 500,000 Americans protesting at the Republican National Convention in 2004. And in December 2005, Bloomberg blasted a New York transit strike as "morally reprehensible." But it was OK for the mayor to roll out the red carpet three years earlier for a morally reprehensible dictator.

Anyway, by the time of the 2002 visit, Karimov was already known as a harsh despot, and Bloomberg tried to keep the news pretty quiet that he was schlepping a dictator around town. You couldn't find on the mayor's website the photos of him and Karimov in the mayor's office or of Karimov at Ground Zero. But the pix were trumpeted on the Uzbekistan government site.

Five years after his visit to Ground Zero, Karimov is surely nearing the end of his 20-year reign — one sign is that there's more and more repression in Uzbekistan. Forum 18, an Oslo-based religious-freedom group that snoops on repressive regimes around the world, noted just the other day that Karimov and his secret police, the National Security Service, have stepped up their spying on religious communities. Forum 18's Felix Corley wrote on September 5:

It's one thing for a predominantly Muslim country to spy on Christians or for a predominantly Christian nation to spy on Muslims — that happens in many places. But Karimov is playing with fire, just as the shah did in Iran, because he's hassling Muslims in a Muslim country. Forum 18's Corley noted:

Karimov's day of reckoning with his country's Muslim radicals is approaching. And it won't help Americans worried about the spread of terrorists that our government is supporting him till the bitter end.

Obscuring the view of Iraq.

Great timing by the White House for the so-called Petraeus report, which Bush regime staffers are busily writing as we speak: Remembrance of the horrific day six years ago is clouding our view of the Iraq debacle, where mo