"The proposition General Motors has presented to the United Auto Workers and American taxpayers in its latest restructuring plan is simple: You must pay for your own execution.

"GM, which already took $15.4 billion in bailout money, wants another $11.6 billion and is offering in return this deal: It will close 16 of its American manufacturing plants, terminate 21,000 of its factory workers and double the cars it builds in low-wage Mexico, China and South Korea and ships back to the U.S. to sell.

"There it is: GM is demanding that Americans pay to send their own jobs overseas.

"In the world where corporate executives live, the one in which boards of directors grant CEOs multi-million dollar bonuses even after companies tank, maybe that’s not a perverse proposition.

"But in the world where real Americans live, we’ve had enough of this crap. Decades of foolish tax and other federal policies that encouraged American manufacturing firms to throw Americans out of work and expatriate were bad enough. To expect American taxpayers to bankroll GM’s plans to layoff American workers and move their jobs overseas goes too far.

"As much as for the UAW, this is a life and death struggle for the USW, American manufacturing, and for millions of Americans in good-paying jobs. Without manufacturing, America is in danger of attempting to subsist on an economy based on nothing more than amorphous derivatives, credit default swaps and Ponzi schemes. The Steelworkers represent hundreds of thousands of workers whose jobs depend on the auto industry, from steelworkers who make the steel, to the rubber workers who make the tires, to the glass workers who make the windshields, to the paper workers who make the glossy pamphlets.

"Altogether, more than 7 million paychecks depend on the U.S. auto industry, including healthcare, education, service, retail and other jobs. This bus tour is about preserving those jobs, all of those jobs.

"It’s not as if it’s impossible for a U.S. auto company to manufacture here. Ford Motor Co., which is not taking any bailout money, is investing $500 million in retooling its Michigan Truck plant outside Detroit so that it can make small cars that it will sell worldwide, including its next-generation, battery-electric Focus. And Chrysler, which is getting bailout money, has made a deal with Fiat under which the Italian car company will manufacture a small car in one of Chrysler’s U.S. assembly facilities, which, along with other long-term commitments, will eventually create 4,000 U.S. jobs." 

Jeremy Bigwood writes at In These Times about the Obama administration planning a new round of the historically disastrous "public safety" programs in Latin America.

"At an April 7 press conference, President Barack Obama’s special advisor for the Summit of Americas Jeffrey Davidow announced the administration’s new plan to provide U.S.-funded “public safety” programs to other governments throughout the Western Hemisphere. U.S. public safety programs are necessary now, Davidow said, because “Latin America [and] the Caribbean are witnessing an increase in criminality and are having difficulty confronting this because of judicial and police systems that need assistance, need more training, need more equipment.”

"The United States has pursued similar policies in the past—with disastrous results. The first such projects were organized in the wake of the Spanish-American War, when the United States was keen on policing its newly won satrapies in the Caribbean and Pacific.

"Initially, these “security” initiatives were enforced through direct U.S. military occupation. It wasn’t until 1954 that a separate “civilian” agency specializing in police aid was established: the Civil Police Administration (CPA), which began operating in Guatemala after the 1954 CIA-backed coup that removed the democratically-elected government of Jacobo Arbenz.

"In 1961, President Kennedy formed the U.S. Agency for International Development ( USAID ) and rolled the CPA into the new agency, renaming it the Office of Public Safety (OPS). Official literature describes OPS’s goal as the creation of a “carefully balanced program of technical advice, training and equipment.”

"In reality, the United States used OPS to control the behavior of foreign police for its own political ends. The goal of U.S. public safety programs was to unify a country’s police and military under a central command—overseen by OPS advisors. Assassination, disappearance and torture were the tools of the OPS trade.

"This is beginning to look like a replay of the failed 1993 health-care reform efforts led by then-first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton. Back then, the business interests took a hard line and waged a PR campaign, headlined by a fictitious middle-class couple, Harry and Louise, who feared a government-run health-care bureaucracy.

"Still absent from the debate are advocates for single-payer, often referred to as the “Canadian-style” health care. Single-payer health care is not “socialized medicine.” According to Physicians for a National Health Program, single-payer means “the government pays for care that is delivered in the private (mostly not-for-profit) sector.”

"Single-payer advocates have been protesting in Senate Finance Committee hearings, chaired by Democratic Montana Sen. Max Baucus. Last week, at a committee hearing with 15 industry speakers, not one represented the single-payer perspective. A group of single-payer advocates, including doctors and lawyers, filled the hearing room and, one by one, interrupted the proceedings.

"Protester Adam Schneider yelled: 'We need to have single-payer at the table. I have friends who have died, who don’t have health care, whose health care did not withstand their personal health emergencies. ... Single-payer now!'

"Baucus gaveled for order, guffawing, 'We need more police.' The single-payer movement has taken his words as a rallying cry. At a hearing Tuesday, five more were arrested. They call themselves the “Baucus 13.”

"One of the Baucus 13, Kevin Zeese, recently summarized Baucus’ career campaign contributions:

    “From the insurance industry: $1,170,313;
  health professionals: $1,016,276;
  pharmaceuticals/health-products industry: $734,605;
  hospitals/nursing homes: $541,891;
  health services/HMOs: $439,700.”

"That’s almost $4 million from the very industries that have the most to gain or lose from health-care reform.

"Wisconsin Sen. Russ Feingold, a single-payer advocate, said his position will not likely prevail in Washington: 'I don’t think there’s any possibility that that will come out of this Congress.' That’s if things remain business as usual.

"Mario Savio led the Free Speech Movement on the UC Berkeley campus. In 1964, he said: 'There comes a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part, you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.'

“ 'Unless you’re free,' the Baucus 13 might add, 'to speak.' The current official debate has locked single-payer options out of the discussion, but also escalated the movement—from Healthcare-NOW! to Single Payer Action—to shut down the orderly functioning of the debate, until single-payer gets a seat at the table."

"He was eager to talk about his just-published memoir, Eyes on the Horizon (and I was able to scan through a copy during the cocktail hour). Myers’s presentation, like his book, was thin gruel.

"After his brief talk, he seemed intent on filibustering during a meandering Q & A session. He finally called on me since no other hands were up. Some were yawning, but it was too early to simply leave.

"I introduced myself as a former Army intelligence officer and CIA analyst with combined service of almost 30 years.

"I thanked him for his stated opposition to interrogation techniques that go beyond “our interrogation manual”; and his conviction that “the Geneva Conventions were a fundamental part of our military culture”—both viewpoints emphasized in his book.

"I then noted that the recently published Senate Armed Services Committee report, “Inquiry Into the Treatment of Detainees in U.S. Custody,” sowed some doubt regarding the strength of his convictions.

"Why, I asked, did Gen. Myers go along when then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld authorized harsh interrogation techniques and, earlier, when President George W. Bush himself issued an executive order arbitrarily denying Geneva protections to al-Qaeda and Taliban detainees?

"I referred Gen. Myers to the Senate committee’s finding that he had nipped in the bud an in-depth legal review of interrogation techniques, when all interested parties were eager for an authoritative ruling on their lawfulness. (The following account borrows heavily from the Senate committee report.)

"I asked Gen. Myers why he stopped the in-depth legal review. He bobbed and weaved, contending first that some of the Senate report was wrong.

“ 'But you did stop the review, that is a matter of record.  Why?' I asked again.

“ 'I stopped the broad review,' Myers replied, 'but I asked [Myers’s Legal Counsel, Captain (now Rear Admiral) Jane] Dalton to do her personal review and keep me advised.'

"(Myers had a memory lapse when Senate committee members asked him about stopping the review.)

"I asked again why he stopped the review, but was shouted down by an audience not used to having plain folks ask direct questions of very senior officials, past or present.

"Judge Kessler ruled last Monday that the government had failed to establish, “by a preponderance of the evidence,” that Alla Ali Bin Ali Ahmed was “part of, or substantially supported, Taliban or al-Qaeda forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners,” and stated that the government “should take all necessary diplomatic steps to facilitate“ his release.

"This was not the first time that a judge had ordered a prisoner freed from Guantánamo because of the weakness of the government’s evidence. Since the Supreme Court reinstated the prisoners’ habeas corpus rights last June, judges have ordered the release of 25 prisoners in the 29 cases that have so far been heard.

"In its case against him, the government drew on allegations made by four prisoners in Guantánamo, and also attempted to rely on a “mosaic theory” of intelligence. As Judge Kessler described it, drawing on documents submitted by the government, "[the] theory is that each of these allegations -- and even the individual pieces of evidence supporting these allegations -- should not be examined in isolation. Rather, “[t]he probity of any single piece of evidence should  be evaluated based on the evidence as a whole,” to determine whether, when considered “as a whole,” the evidence supporting these allegations comes together to create a “mosaic” that shows the Petitioner to be justifiably detained.

"Judge Kessler then noted that, although it “may well be true” that “use of the mosaic approach is a common and well-established mode of analysis in the intelligence community … at this point in this long, drawn-out litigation the Court’s obligation is to make findings of fact and conclusions of law” to consider the government’s case. After pointing out that the mosaic theory “is only as persuasive as the tiles which compose it and the glue which binds them together,” she then proceeded to highlight a catalog of deficiencies in the tiles and the glue. 

"Ali Soufan, the former FBI agent who helped interrogate detained al-Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah, told lawmakers Wednesday that he wasn’t the only interrogator who opposed torturing Abu Zubaydah at a CIA-operated facility in the spring of 2002. According to Soufan, all the members of the CIA’s interrogation team stood against a single CIA “contractor” who advocated such techniques as placing the detainee in a “confinement box.”

"Testifying before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee, Soufan — whose face was dramatically concealed behind a wooden partition in order to protect his identity — gave an account of the fateful interrogation that went further than what he wrote in a New York Times op-ed on April 22. In that op-ed, Soufan wrote that he opposed using harsh interrogation techniques on Abu Zubaydah, especially after non-physical techniques resulted in valuable intelligence, such as a positive identification of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. He wrote that unnamed CIA colleagues also “balked at the techniques” but were “instructed to continue” with using them. Soufan added that “it was contractors, not CIA officers, who requested the use of these techniques.”