TURNING and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

 The Second Coming  W.B. Yeats

 The Voice of the White House

                 Washington, D.C. May 21, 2008: “There has been much speculation, fueled by obviously concocted “leaks” from Israeli official sources, that Bush is planning to attack Iran before the end of his term in January of 2009.

 As I have said before, a unit attached to the DoD has been monitoring all the secret Israeli governmental communications between Tel Aviv and their Embassy in Washington since 2003. 

 Why are they doing this? Is Bush aware of this?

 They are doing this because in a number of elevated military circles, Israel is viewed as treacherous and eager to involve the United States in a war against Iran solely to protect themselves from a possible attack by that country. And Bush is most certainly not aware of the military surveillance of Israel or he would order it stopped immediately and the perps punished.

 While Bush is very, very sensitive, and highly responsive to, Israeli needs, he knows that an American attack on Iran would have to be via the Air Force and tactical nuclear in nature. A forewarned U.S. military leadership would certainly block this insanity and Bush knows it.

 He does not want to end his disgraced presidency with a public rebuff from the JCS so his (and especially Cheney’s) wishes to show up Iran will have to find other outlets. Bush has a pathological detestation to being defied and anyone who gets in his way is fired at once.

 On the other hand, a rebellion of sorts at the highest military levels would be a personal, and very humiliating, disaster that Bush wants desperately to avoid.

  If not Bush, then the  leadership of the Republicans know that there is sharply rising anti-Semitism in America, based entirely on the activities of the Neocons and some elements of the American media. They hope, frantically, that they will not suffer a crushing defeat at the hands of the American public at the November elections and are distancing themselves both from Bush and the rabidly pro-Israel factions of their own party.

 Power means, among other things, money, and if there is a sweeping Democrat victory at the polls and the pliant carbon copy of Bush, Senator McCain, loses his last-chance for the presidency, all of them will be looking for jobs where they will have to work for a living, not working the public for its bounty. 

 Fully aware of this, Israel is frantically trying to shove the United States into a war against its enemies. Israel, according to military intercepts, does not want to be seen as the actual aggressor and does not want to spend any money on a war they might lose.

 Besides, the logistical problems inherent in an Israeli attack are such as to preclude Tel Aviv from doing anything other than pushing and shoving their many allies in Washington to help them.

 I have maintained that these intercepts ought to be published in full so that the American voters might know exactly what they have in store for them if McCain get into the White House. Given their incendiary nature, I doubt if any branch of the American media, with the possible exception of Keith Olberman, would dare to make any of them public.

 If they did get out, I, and others here, can easily see pogroms in America  that would rival those of Imperial Russia or Nazi Germany.”

Israel proposes American naval blockade of Iran

May 21, 2008

RIA Novosti

            TEL AVIV, The Israeli prime minister has proposed that a U.S. naval blockade be imposed on Iran to stop the Islamic Republic from moving ahead with its uranium enrichment program, an Israeli newspaper said on Wednesday.

                According to the Haaretz daily, at a meeting in Jerusalem with the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, Ehud Olmert said, "The present economic sanctions against Iran have run out of steam," and proposed "a naval blockade of Iran," using the U.S. navy to limit movement in and out of the Islamic Republic by Iranian merchant ships.

                As an alternative, he proposed placing restrictions on Iranian aircraft, businessmen and senior Iranian officials at airports throughout the world.

                "Iranian businesspeople, unable to land anywhere in the world, would pressure the regime," Haaretz quoted Olmert as saying.

                Iran has defied three rounds of relatively mild United Nations Security Council sanctions over its refusal to halt uranium enrichment, which many Western countries say is being used by Tehran as a cover for nuclear weapons development. Iran says the program is of an entirely peaceful nature and is necessary for energy production.

                Russia and China, which have strong trade links with Iran, have so far prevented stronger sanctions against the Islamic Republic, using their vetoes on the Security Council.

                Olmert reiterated that drastic measures to stop Iran's efforts to obtain nuclear weapons did not necessarily mean violence.

                The newspaper did not provide a U.S. response to the Israeli proposals for a naval blockade. However, the White House yesterday categorically denied a report in the Jerusalem Post that U.S. President George W. Bush intended to attack Iran before the end of his final term of office in January 2009.

                White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said the article was "not worth the paper it's written on."

                The country's nuclear program has contributed to tensions between Washington, with Bush refusing late last year to rule out military action against Teheran despite a report by the country's intelligence community which suggested that the Islamic Republic had halted attempts to create a nuclear bomb in 2003.

                Olmert is planning to visit Washington in June to discuss the Iranian nuclear program and prospects of U.S.-brokered peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.

SECRECY NEWS
from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy
Volume 2008, Issue No. 48
May 21, 2008
 
 INTEL AGENCY ACTION URGED AGAINST SPACE, CYBER THREATS
 
                U.S. defense intelligence agencies should aim to "eliminate" the capabilities of opponents to operate effectively against the United States from outer space or cyber space, according to a new Pentagon
strategy for defense intelligence.
 
                Defense intelligence shall "eliminate any advantage held by our adversaries to operate from and within the space and cyber domains," says the new strategy document, "Defense Intelligence 2008" (strategic objective IV).
 
                "As stated in the U.S. National Space Policy, the focus of defense intelligence in space will be to ensure full situational awareness for military and civilian decision-makers, support military planning initiatives, and satisfy operational requirements. As addressed within the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative, cyberspace has become a vital national interest economically, militarily and culturally, and the current patchwork of passive defense is likely to fail in the face of greater vulnerabilities and more sophisticated threats."
 
                "Defense intelligence must do its part to defeat this critical threat."
 
                See "Defense Intelligence 2008" (flagged by BeSpacific.com):
 
                 http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/dod/2008strategy.pdf
 
 NORTH KOREA-SYRIA CONTACTS VIEWED BY OPEN SOURCE CENTER
 
                Intergovernmental contacts between North Korean and Syrian officials during the last two years were scrutinized by the DNI Open Source Center (OSC), but even in retrospect the available record presents no indication of joint work on a secret nuclear facility destroyed by Israel last September.
 
                "A review of available North Korean and Syrian print and online media in the period 2005-2007 has yielded the names of dozens of DPRK and Syrian officials involved in military, scientific, trade, and other aspects of bilateral relations," the OSC analysis said.
 
                However, "no obvious indications of covert military cooperation surfaced in the highly-censored media of North Korea or Syria in this period."
 
                In other words, assuming the allegations of clandestine nuclear cooperation are true, open source intelligence provided no clues concerning the activity.
 
                Like most other OSC products, the new analysis has not been approved for public release. But a copy was obtained independently by Secrecy News.
 
                See "DPRK-Syria Bilateral Contacts, 2005-2007," Open Source Center, May 2, 2008:
 
                 http://www.fas.org/irp/dni/osc/dprk-syria.pdf

The Forgotten Dead

May 23, 2008

by Brian Harring

May 23, 2008, Lt. Jeffrey A. Ammon, 37, of Orem, Utah, died May 20, as a result of injuries suffered from an improvised explosive device in the Aband District, Afghanistan. The sailor was attached to Commander Navy Region Northwest, Bangor, Wash., and serving in Afghanistan as a member of Provincial Reconstruction Team Ghazni.

May 21, 2008, Lt. Col. Joseph A. Moore, 54, of Boise, Idaho, died of natural causes May 20 in Djibouti. He was assigned to the 124th Wing, Idaho Air National Guard, Gowen Field, Idaho.  1st Lt. Jeffrey F. Deprimo, 35, of Pittston, Pa., died May 20 in Ghazni, Afghanistan, of wounds suffered when his vehicle encountered an improvised explosive device.  He was assigned to the 3rd Battalion, 103rd Armor Regiment, Pennsylvania Army National Guard, Williamsport, Pa.

May 20, 2008, Cpl. William J. L. Cooper, 22, of Eupora, Miss., died May 19 while supporting combat operations in Helmand Province, Afghanistan. He was assigned to 1^st Battalion, 6^th Marine Regiment, 2d Marine Division, II Marine Expeditionary Force, Camp Lejeune, N.C. Pvt. Branden P. Haunert, 21, of Cincinnati, Ohio, died May 18 in Tikrit, Iraq, of wounds suffered when his vehicle encountered an improvised explosive device. He was assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 327th Infantry Regiment, 1st Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault), Fort Campbell, Ky. Master Sgt. Davy N. Weaver, 39, of Barnesville, Ga., died May 18 in Qalat, Afghanistan, of wounds suffered when his vehicle encountered an improvised explosive device. He was assigned to the 48th Infantry Brigade Combat Team, Georgia Army National Guard, Macon, Ga.

May 16, 2008 Soldier Sgt. John K. Daggett, 21, of Phoenix, Ariz., died May 15 in Halifax, Canada, of wounds suffered May 1 in Baghdad, Iraq, when a rocket-propelled grenade struck his vehicle. 

May 14, 2008 Soldier Sgt. Victor M. Cota, 33, of Tucson, Ariz., died May 14 in Baghdad, Iraq, of wounds suffered when his vehicle encountered an improvised explosive device in Kadamiyah, Iraq, May 13.

May 12, 2008 Soldier Cpl. Jessica A. Ellis, 24, of Bend, Ore., died May 11 in Baghdad, Iraq, of wounds suffered when her vehicle encountered an improvised explosive device.  Soldier Pvt. Matthew W. Brown, 20, of Zelienople, Pa., died May 11 in Asadabad, Afghanistan, from injuries suffered in a non-combat related incident. Soldier Spc. Joseph A. Ford, 23, of Knox, Ind., died May 10 in Al Asad, Iraq, of injuries suffered in a vehicle accident. 

May 11, 2008 Soldier Pfc. Ara T. Deysie, 18, of Parker, Ariz., died May 9 in Paktia Province, Afghanistan, of wounds suffered when his unit came under rocket-propelled grenade fire.

May 10, 2008 Soldier Spc. Mary J. Jaenichen, 20, of Temecula, Calif., died May 9 in Iskandariyah, Iraq, of a non-combat related injury. Soldier Sgt. Isaac Palomarez, 26, of Loveland, Colo., died May 9 in Kapisa Province, Afghanistan, of wounds suffered when his patrol encountered an improvised explosive device and came under small arms and rocket-propelled grenade fire.

May 9, 2008 Soldier Pfc. Aaron J. Ward, 19, of San Jacinto, Calif., died May 6 in Al Anbar, Iraq, of wounds suffered when his unit came under small arms fire while conducting cordon and search operations. Soldier Spc. Alex D. Gonzalez, 21, of Mission, Texas, died May 6 in Mosul, Iraq, of wounds suffered when his vehicle encountered small arms fire and a rocket-propelled grenade attack. 

May 8, 2008 Two soldiers died May 7 in the Sabari District, Afghanistan, of wounds suffered when their vehicle encountered an improvised explosive device: Spc. Jeremy R. Gullett, 22, of Greenup, Ky., who was assigned to the 4th Battalion, 320th Field Artillery Regiment, 4th Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault), Fort Campbell, Ky. Staff Sgt. Kevin C. Roberts, 25, of Farmington, N. M., who was assigned to 2nd Battalion, 506th Infantry Regiment, 4th Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault), Fort Campbell, Ky.  Four Marines died May 2 in Al Anbar province, Iraq, supporting combat operations: Lance Cpl. Casey L. Casanova, 22, of McComb, Miss. Cpl. Miguel A. Guzman, 21, of Norwalk, Calif. Lance Cpl. James F. Kimple, 21, of Carroll, Ohio Sgt. Glen E. Martinez, 31, of Boulder, Colo.

May 5, 2008 Soldier Pvt. Corey L. Hicks, 22, of Glendale, Ariz., died May 2 in Baghdad, Iraq, of wounds suffered when his vehicle encountered an improvised explosive device.

May 4, 2008 Soldier Spc. Jeffrey F. Nichols, 21, of Granite Shoals, Texas, died May 1 in Baghdad from wounds suffered when his vehicle encountered an improvised explosive device.

May 3, 2008  Soldier Sgt. 1st Class Lawrence D. Ezell, 30, of Portland, Texas, died April 30 in Baghdad of wounds suffered when an improvised explosive device detonated near his unit during combat operations. Soldier Sgt. Jerry L. DeLoach, 45, of Jackson, Ga., died July 7, 2007, at Fort Knox, Ky. He had been medically evacuated from theater, and died of a non-combat related injury.  Soldier Staff Sgt. Chad A. Caldwell, 24, of Spokane, Wash., died April 30 in Mosul, Iraq, of injuries sustained while conducting dismounted combat operations.

May 2, 2008  Two soldiers April 30 in Baghdad, Iraq, from wounds suffered when their vehicle encountered an improvised explosive device: Cpt. Andrew. R. Pearson, 32, of Billings, Mont. Spc. Ronald J. Tucker, 21, of Fountain, Colo.

May 1, 2008   Soldier Staff Sgt. Bryan E. Bolander, 26, of Bakersfield, Calif., died April 29 in Baghdad from wounds suffered when his vehicle struck an improvised explosive device.  Marine Sgt. Merlin German, 22 of Manhattan, N.Y., died April 11 at Brooke Army Medical Center, San Antonio, Texas, from wounds he suffered while conducting combat operations in Al Anbar province, Iraq, on Feb. 22, 2005. He was medically retired Sept. 28, 2007, as a result of his injuries. Soldier Staff Sgt. Clay A. Craig, 22, of Mesquite, Texas, died April 29 in Baghdad, Iraq, from wounds suffered when he received small arms fire during combat operations. 

. Source: http://www.defenselink.mil/Releases/

Chertoff’s Cheka

Some Detainees Are Drugged For Deportation

Immigrants Sedated Without Medical Reason

May 14, 2008

by Amy Goldstein and Dana Priest

Washington Post

                The U.S. government has injected hundreds of foreigners it has deported with dangerous psychotropic drugs against their will to keep them sedated during the trip back to their home country, according to medical records, internal documents and interviews with people who have been drugged.

The government's forced use of antipsychotic drugs, in people who have no history of mental illness, includes dozens of cases in which the "pre-flight cocktail," as a document calls it, had such a potent effect that federal guards needed a wheelchair to move the slumped deportee onto an airplane.

"Unsteady gait. Fell onto tarmac," says a medical note on the deportation of a 38-year-old woman to Costa Rica in late spring 2005. Another detainee was "dragged down the aisle in handcuffs, semi-comatose," according to an airline crew member's written account. Repeatedly, documents describe immigration guards "taking down" a reluctant deportee to be tranquilized before heading to an airport.

In a Chicago holding cell early one evening in February 2006, five guards piled on top of a 49-year-old man who was angry he was going back to Ecuador, according to a nurse's account in his deportation file. As they pinned him down so the nurse could punch a needle through his coveralls into his right buttock, one officer stood over him menacingly and taunted, "Nighty-night."

Such episodes are among more than 250 cases The Washington Post has identified in which the government has, without medical reason, given drugs meant to treat serious psychiatric disorders to people it has shipped out of the United States since 2003 -- the year the Bush administration handed the job of deportation to the Department of Homeland Security's new Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, known as ICE.

Involuntary chemical restraint of detainees, unless there is a medical justification, is a violation of some international human rights codes. The practice is banned by several countries where, confidential documents make clear, U.S. escorts have been unable to inject deportees with extra doses of drugs during layovers en route to faraway places.

Federal officials have seldom acknowledged publicly that they sedate people for deportation. The few times officials have spoken of the practice, they have understated it, portraying sedation as rare and "an act of last resort." Neither is true, records and interviews indicate.

Records show that the government has routinely ignored its own rules, which allow deportees to be sedated only if they have a mental illness requiring the drugs, or if they are so aggressive that they imperil themselves or people around them.

Stung by lawsuits over two sedation cases, the agency changed its policy in June to require a court order before drugging any deportee for behavioral rather than psychiatric reasons. In at least one instance identified by The Post, the agency appears not to have followed those rules.

In the five years since its creation, ICE has stepped up arrests and removals of foreigners who are in the country illegally, have been turned down for asylum or have been convicted of a crime in the past.

If the government wants a detainee to be sedated, a deportation officer asks for permission for a medical escort from the aviation medicine branch of the Division of Immigration Health Services (DIHS), the agency responsible for medical care for people in immigration custody. A mental health official in aviation medicine is supposed to assess the detainee's medical records, although some deportees' records contain no evidence of that happening. If the sedatives are approved, a U.S. public health nurse is assigned as the medical escort and given prescriptions for the drugs.

After injecting the sedatives, the nurse travels with the deportee and immigration guards to their destination, usually giving more doses along the way. To recruit medical escorts, the government has sought to glamorize this work. "Do you ever dream of escaping to exotic, exciting locations?" said an item in an agency newsletter. "Want to get away from the office but are strapped for cash? Make your dreams come true by signing up as a Medical Escort for DIHS!"

The nurses are required to fill out step-by-step medical logs for each trip. Hundreds of logs for the past five years, obtained by The Post, chronicle in vivid detail deviations from the government's sedation rules.

An analysis by The Post of the known sedations during fiscal 2007, ending last October, found that 67 people who got medical escorts had no documented psychiatric reason. Of the 67, psychiatric drugs were given to 53, 48 of whom had no documented history of violence, though some had managed to thwart an earlier attempt to deport them. These figures do not include two detainees who immigration officials said were given sedatives for behavioral rather than psychiatric reasons before being deported on group charter flights, which are often used to return people to Mexico and Central America.

Even some people who had been violent in the past proved peaceful the day they were sent home. "Dt calm at this time," says the first entry, using shorthand for "detainee," in the log for the January 2007 deportation of Yousif Nageib to his native Sudan. In requesting drugs for his deportation, an immigration officer had noted that Nageib, 40, had once fled to Canada to avoid an assault charge and had helped instigate a detainee uprising while in custody. But on the morning of his departure, the log says, he "is handcuffed and states he will do what we say." Still, he was injected in his right buttock with a three-drug cocktail.

In one printout of Nageib's medical log, next to the entry saying he was calm, is a handwritten asterisk. It was put there by Timothy T. Shack, then medical director of the immigration health division, as he reviewed last year's sedation cases. Next to the asterisk, in his neat, looping handwriting, Shack placed a single word: "Problem."

When he landed in Lagos, Nigeria, Afolabi Ade was unable to talk.

"Every time I tried to force myself to speak, I couldn't, because my tongue was . . . twisted. . . . I thought I was going to swallow it," Ade, 33, recalled in an interview. "I was nauseous. I was dizzy."

As he was being flown back to Africa, his American wife alerted his parents there that he was on his way. His father was waiting at the Lagos airport. It was the first time in three years that they had seen one another. Shocked by how woozy the young man was, his father decided not to take him home and frighten the rest of the family. Instead, he checked his son into a hotel.

Ade was in the hotel for four days before the effects of the drugs began to abate.

Part of a prominent Nigerian family, Ade asked The Post to identify him by only a portion of his name to protect their reputation. He had come to the United States as a college student in the mid-1990s. Five years later, he was in a car belonging to cousins when police found fraudulent checks in the trunk. He pleaded guilty.

After finishing his sentence, Ade was living in Atlanta, and was two semesters away from a telecommunications degree at DeVry University, when immigration officers came looking for him one day in January 2003. They wanted to deport him for the old crime. He called his probation officer to ask whether he could wait to surrender until he took his upcoming final exams. But when he went to the probation office, immigration officers were there to arrest him.

His records offer little explanation of why he was sedated. The one-page medical record in his file mentions one condition: chronic nasal allergy. The log of his trip does not mention mental illness; in the space to list current medical problems, a nurse wrote merely that Ade was anxious.

His drugging, however, fits a pattern that emerges from the cases analyzed by The Post: The largest group of people who were sedated had resisted attempts to deport them at least once before.

One summer day in 2003, deportation officers arrived at the rural Alabama jail where Ade was being held. Pack your bags, they told him. When they reached an immigration office in Atlanta, Ade recalled, half a dozen "big guys came to meet me and said I was there to be deported."

"I can't be deported," he replied. "I have a wife I love very much." Besides, he told them, he was still appealing his immigration case. He shouldn't have to leave, he protested, until the judge had ruled. That day, he was returned to Alabama. But he said that immigration officers warned him, "We'll find a way to get you on a plane."

A few weeks later, the officers came back and again took him to a holding cell in Atlanta. He was, the medical log says, becoming "increasingly anxious and non-cooperative per flt. to Nigeria." At 1:30 p.m., the log says, "Dt taken down by four" guards.

Ade was being held down, he recalled, when he noticed a nurse "with a needle and a bottle with some kind of substance in it." He said he told the guards: "Okay, fine, fine. If it's going to be like this, don't inject me. I will go on my own free will."

The nurse went ahead, the log shows, injecting him in the left shoulder with two milligrams of a powerful drug, Haldol, used to treat psychosis, and one milligram of an anti-anxiety drug, Ativan. He was injected with two more rounds, as well as a third drug, in progressively larger doses, during the trip.

The effects of those injections are what alarmed Ade's father after the plane landed in Lagos. Yet the medical log says Ade arrived "alert and oriented."

His family's doctor, who visited him on each of the four days his father hid him in the hotel, had a different view. "He was groggy -- somebody under the influence of drugs or drunkenness," recalled Olakunle Adigun, a general practitioner. He couldn't figure out what sedatives his patient had been given, so he tried to detoxify him with saline infusions.

Ade's pulse was dangerously low, and when he tried to walk around the hotel room, "he leaned on the wall," Adigun said. "He was talking, but a slurred kind of speech."

* * *

Internal government records show that most sedated deportees, such as Ade, received a cocktail of three drugs that included Haldol, also known as haloperidol, a medication normally used to treat schizophrenia and other acute psychotic states. Of the 53 deportees without a mental illness who were drugged in 2007, The Post's analysis found, 50 were injected with Haldol, sometimes in large amounts.

They were also given Ativan, used to control anxiety, and all but three were given Cogentin, a medication that is supposed to lessen Haldol's side effects of muscle spasms and rigidity. Two of the 53 deportees received Ativan alone. One person's medications were not specified.

Haldol gained notoriety in the Soviet Union, where it was often given to political dissidents imprisoned in psychiatric hospitals. "In the history of oppression, using haloperidol is kind of like detaining people in Abu Ghraib," the infamous prison in Iraq, said Nigel Rodley, who teaches international human rights law at the University of Essex in Britain and is a former United Nations special investigator on torture.

For people who are not psychotic, said Philip Seeman, a University of Toronto specialist in psychiatry and pharmacology, "prescribing Haldol . . . is medically and ethically wrong." Seeman studied the drug in the 1960s and later discovered the brain receptors on which several antipsychotic drugs work.

The only circumstances in which small amounts of Haldol are appropriate for non-psychotic people, Seeman said, are when a person comes into a hospital emergency room violent and agitated from an overdose of a drug such as PCP, or when someone with severe dementia is delusional or combative. "You or I wouldn't get it if we were emotionally upset," he said.

In addition, Seeman said, typical doses to help psychotic patients accustomed to the drug are perhaps five to 15 milligrams a day. Several deportees were given a total of 30 milligrams, which Seeman characterized as "really high," especially for people who have never taken the drug before.

Even when used for its intended patients, people with psychosis, Haldol has drawn warnings from the U.S. government. In September, the Food and Drug Administration issued an alert citing "a number of case reports of sudden death" and other reports of dangerous changes in heart rhythm. It is, important, the FDA warned, to inject Haldol only into muscles, not veins, and to avoid doses that are too high.

"Pharma non grata" is the way Emergency Medicine News magazine described the drug after the FDA alert.

Beyond the specific drugs used, Rodley said, is a deeper question: "What is the least intrusive means of restraint consistent with the human dignity of the person? . . . I'd be very surprised if the injection of disabling chemicals against somebody's will that affect one's psychological well-being . . . is likely to be the least intrusive means."

Asked to explain the reason for using Haldol and other psychotropic drugs with people who are not mentally ill, ICE responded, "The medications used by Aviation Medicine are widely used in psychiatry." Agency officials said that medical escorts administer "the lowest dose possible." Combining Haldol and Ativan "allows you [to] use less of each," they said, and produces a quicker and longer sedative effect.

In the years before Ade was drugged, there had been an internal debate within the U.S. government over whether sedating deportees against their will is legal, according to confidential legal memos obtained by The Post. There was agreement that mentally ill people could be forced to take psychotropic medicine on their way out of the country. At dispute were cases in which the detainees were not mentally ill but combative -- known as "behavioral cases."

Near the end of the Clinton administration, Health and Human Services lawyers  sent around a memo that warned, "[U]sing chemical restraints in cases in which medication is not clinically indicated . . . may put the government at risk of potential liability."

Another memo went further, concluding that it could be done only if a federal judge gave permission in advance. "[R]egarding detainees who are not mentally ill," the November 2000 document said, "involuntary medication of such persons for the sole purpose of subduing them during deportation, without a court order, is not supported by any legal authority and raises ethical issues, as well.

"After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and after the Bush administration assumed a tough new stance on immigration in its campaign against terrorism, the Justice Department still sounded wary about drugging deportees. In March 2002,  a Justice lawyer laid out two options. One choice, he wrote, was to "seek a court order . . . in every case where the alien's medication is not therapeutically justified." The other choice was to create a regulation to grant immigration officials explicit permission to sedate deportees, perhaps including safeguards that would give people a warning that they might be medicated -- and a chance to object.

Top immigration officials chose neither. Instead, in May 2003, just after ICE was created,  they internally circulated a new policy: "[A]n ICE detainee with or without a diagnosed psychiatric condition who displays overt or threatening aggressive behavior . . . may be considered a combative detainee and can be sedated if appropriate under the circumstances

Under that policy, scores of people have been sedated every year since then, usually with heavy psychotropic drugs.

Some countries forbid the practice. The medical files for several deportees recount disputes between U.S. officials, who wanted to inject a subject, and foreign officials, who would not allow it.

Immigration guards and a public health nurse ran into trouble in May 2004, during a stopover on a trip from Colorado to Guinea. The deportee had been given the three-drug cocktail at the airport gate before leaving Denver, the nurse wrote in the log. Three "booster doses" followed.

The last booster was given shortly before the plane landed in Belgium. "[N]o problem initially with Belgium security," the log says. "[T]hen approached and informed illegal to medicate detainee against their will in Belgium. Informed them pt wasn't medicated in Belgium airspace for which they replied that he is medicated in Belgium." In the end, the security officers let the deportation go ahead.

Immigration guards and a nurse had more trouble during another deportation to Guinea in April 2006, as they escorted a 34-year-old man from Atlanta, with a stop in France.

He had been given 15 milligrams of Haldol, as well as the two other drugs, by the time the flight reached Paris at 9:45 a.m. According to  a nurse's report on the incident, the guards, nurse and deportee were met at the plane by French national police, who accompanied them to an airport police station to await the connecting flight to Africa later in the day.

Once at the station, one of the guards asked a French officer "where we could inject the detainee when needed." First, they were shown into a private area. But five minutes later, the nurse's report says, "a superior French police officer approached and informed me that any type of involuntary injection was strictly forbidden in France, and that we would have to wait until we were in the aircraft if we were to inject our detainee."

Six hours later, the entourage returned to the boarding area for the flight to Guinea. "When we arrived at the plane, the detainee became very argumentative, refusing to enter plane until [the guards] produced paperwork showing a final deportation order," the nurse wrote. The immigration officers tried to coax him onto the plane. He refused.

"I asked the French police if the ramp on the gate would be an appropriate place to medicate," the nurse wrote. "The French police's reply was that it was strictly forbidden." The plane's captain came over to say that he would not allow the deportee onto the flight. The guards and the nurse flew him back to Atlanta.

Five weeks later they tried again, and this time, they reached Guinea. By the time they arrived, a nurse had given the deportee nine injections of Haldol totaling 55 milligrams -- nearly four times as much as before.

* * *

One deportee who was sedated last year had convictions for armed robbery and assault. Another kept telling immigration officers, "I am God." But many of those injected with psychotropic drugs, records show, are neither violent nor mentally ill. They simply do not want to go home.

"[M]ild anxiety and agitation" is how a deportation log describes Remmy Semakula's state on the afternoon he was taken from his cell in the Middlesex County jail in New Jersey to be deported to Uganda in early April 2007. According to a memo from his deportation officer, he had said earlier that he would "fight with the officers and obstruct the operation of the airline" if guards tried to force him to go home. Semakula, 42, said that he had not tried to thwart his deportation and had not known it was imminent because his immigration case still was before a federal judge. "I never fought violently or physically," he said. "They just grabbed me and injected me with a sleeping drug."

The first time immigration agents tried to deport Michel Shango, he slammed his head, hard, against the outside of the van that had come to pick him up at Atlanta's city jail. Instead of being driven to the airport, then flown to the Democratic Republic of Congo, he was brought back to the jail so his wound could be tended to.

"I asked him why he feared being returned back to his country," an immigration officer wrote of the incident. Shango, now 42, replied that he had been a journalist and had written articles critical of the Congolese government. "Detainee stated . . . that he might as well die trying to avoid deportation," a second officer wrote, "because they will kill him as soon as he gets to the D.R. of the Congo."

Until early 1996, Shango worked in Congo, ghostwriting articles and supplying information to foreign correspondents about the repressive administration of President Mobutu Sese Seko, he said in telephone interviews from locations in Congo, Gabon and Equatorial Guinea, where friends are now helping him hide. Eventually Shango was arrested, he and two of his lawyers said, but he escaped to Canada, then settled in North Carolina, where he started a limousine business with a cousin in Charlotte. He married an American, who at first offered to help him become a citizen. The marriage dissolved. He applied for political asylum. He was turned down.

He was remarried to a Congolese woman by the time immigration officers came to his house at 4:30 one morning in May 2006. As his wife and their three American-born children cried at the frightening scene, the officers led him away at gunpoint.

On Feb. 28, 2007, three months after the first deportation attempt was aborted because of the head-banging incident, seven guards arrived at the Atlanta jail to make a second attempt. Shango glanced at his watch and noted that it was 1:45 p.m. "They pushed me against the wall," he recalled. "They pulled my pants down." His medical log shows that he was given seven shots in his right buttock and right shoulder before he boarded the airplane.

The log says his only psychological problem was "anxiety disorder."

By the time Shango reached Congo,  records show, he had been injected with 32.5 milligrams of Haldol and 7.5 milligrams of Ativan. As he was thrown into a prison after he got off the plane, and even as friends helped him escape, he was so disoriented, he said, that he did not fully know where he was. For two weeks, Shango said, "It was like I was dreaming. . . . I started crying, crying, crying all day long. . . . I was like crazy, because [of] the drugs, knocking me down."

* * *

Of all the detainees who have been forcibly drugged, only two have drawn much public attention. Neither, in the end, was deported. And compared with other deportees, neither got large doses of sedatives. But publicity about their cases sent shock waves through the immigration bureaucracy. Raymond Soeoth, a Christian minister from Indonesia, had tried and failed to win asylum in the United States. While in custody at an immigration compound near Los Angeles, his medical log notes, Soeoth, now 39, he said he would kill himself if deported -- a statement his lawyers say he never made.

On Dec. 7, 2004, he was injected in the left buttock with five milligrams of Haldol and four milligrams of Cogentin before being taken to the airport. As it turned out, his deportation was canceled before takeoff because immigration officials had not alerted airline security in Singapore, a stopover point.

Amadou Diouf came to the United States from Senegal as a student in 1996 and got a degree in information systems from California State University at Northridge. He married a U.S. citizen and was trying to change his immigration status when, in March 2005, he was arrested and brought to the same compound as Soeoth.

Eleven months later, as he was still appealing his case and, according to his lawyers, had a court order blocking his deportation, immigration officers came for him and took him to the airport for the trip back to Senegal.

At first, records show, Diouf, now 32, was calm. He was already sitting in a window seat, 4A, when he demanded to speak to the plane's captain. He "became more agitated, anxious and loud in his dialogue," according to the medical log. A nurse said he would be given "some calming medicine," but when Diouf saw the needle, he lunged. Guards "proceeded to take down the detainee to the ground" in the plane's galley, and the nurse injected him with five milligrams of Haldol, two milligrams of Ativan and two milligrams of Cogentin.

At that point, the guards and nurse called off the trip. Diouf was returned to his cell. In early May 2007, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California was drafting a lawsuit on behalf of Soeoth and Diouf and told a local newspaper, the Los Angeles Daily Journal, about their sedations. Across the continent, inside the immigration health division's headquarters in downtown Washington, the publicity's effect was electric.

The next day, the chief of psychiatry for the division's aviation medicine branch dispatched a memo. "I have stopped all planned non-psychiatric behavioral escorts, of which 10 are currently planned," he wrote, until government lawyers "have formalized policy in regards to this type of escort activity."

A month and a half later, the medical escort rules were changed. Except in psychiatric cases,  according to a confidential June 21 memo from ICE, the health division "must have a court order to assist. . . . [ICE in] removal of problematic detainees." In January,  the language was made even stronger: "DIHS may only involuntarily sedate an alien to facilitate removal where the government has obtained a court order. There are no exceptions to this policy."

The newest rules were issued less than three weeks before the government tentatively settled the lawsuit with Soeoth and Diouf, who are now out of custody. The government is no longer trying to deport Soeoth; Diouf is still fighting to remain in the country.

How well the government is following its new rules is unclear. Asked how many court orders the government has sought, immigration officials said that none "have been issued to involuntarily sedate an alien for removal purposes," but they declined to discuss whether any requests are pending.

In one known case in which  government lawyers sought a court order, they withdrew the request after a congressman intervened. On Oct. 1, a federal judge in Texas was asked for permission to sedate Rrustem Neza. Immigration officers had canceled their first attempt to deport him to Albania because he created a scene at the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport, screaming, "I am not a terrorist."

One week after the government filed its motion, Rep.  Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.), a former judge,  wrote to the court, saying he had "grave concerns" about the government's desire to medicate his constituent to deport him. "Mr. Neza fled Albania after telling a crowd in Tropoje the names of the men who were seen killing Azem Hajdari, who organized a student movement against the Communist Party. Mr. Neza's cousins were fatally shot while fleeing with him," the congressman wrote. "[S]edating Mr. Neza amounts to a death sentence for an innocent man."

Last March, after Gohmert had spoken about Neza's case with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and after he had introduced legislation to block Neza's deportation, the issue was dropped.

* * *

In at least one instance since the rules were changed, the government apparently drugged a deportee without permission from a judge. Maher Ayoub, now 44, was sent back to Egypt last August. A month later, immigration officials told Congress that they had not yet asked for a court order in any case.

Ayoub had thwarted the first attempt to deport him, a few months earlier, by sitting in a van and demanding all the paperwork in his immigration file. He said he spent the next three months in segregation in an Elizabeth, N.J., detention center. The next time they tried to send him home, immigration officers were determined to make sure he would go quietly.

His record offers contradictory evidence about whether there was psychiatric justification for the drugs he got, though it seems to suggest that there was not. A one-page "patient summary" for Ayoub says "Med/Psych Alert Documents: None." His medical escort log labels him a mental health case and says he had a "depressed mood" and an "anxiety state."

A handwritten note in his escort file, from a psychiatrist who saw him at the Elizabeth center, first says Ayoub was not likely to endanger himself or anyone else -- then, lower on the same page, says he might. On the next page of the file is another note, this one written two days before his flight, from the psychiatrist in charge of aviation medicine. It says that Ayoub's case is a "behavioral escort," not a psychiatric one, and that the nurse "is only to give medications to the patient if he agrees to take them. He will only use involuntary treatment if the patient is at imminent risk of hurting himself or others."

That is not what happened.

"Detainee tearful and wringing hands," his medical log begins. An hour later, it says: "Detainee increasingly agitated and resisting clothing change. Detainee is now crying and screaming" at two guards. A nurse at the Elizabeth detention center slid two milligrams of the anti-anxiety drug, Ativan, into his left shoulder.

Immigration officials said his deportation was "consistent" with the June policy that allows medication only when a detainee "may be a risk to himself or others."

"I was feeling my head was leaving my body," Ayoub remembers. "I was losing control over my body." He was groggy but awake when he arrived with guards and the nurse at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport and boarded the nonstop flight to Egypt.

Before the plane took off, he remembers, he called over a flight attendant and "asked them to tell the pilot I didn't want to leave." The nurse stuck a needle into his right arm this time. That injection put him to sleep.

Staff researcher Julie Tate and database editor Sarah Cohen contributed to this report.

Immigration agency plans new family detention centers

The federal ICE, which already runs two such facilities, is taking bids for as many as three more. Critics say detaining families is punitive and unnecessary.

May 18, 2008

by Anna Gorman
Los Angeles Times

The federal government is accepting bids for up to three new family detention centers that would house as many as 600 men, women and children fighting deportation cases.

                Immigration and Customs Enforcement issued a call for proposals last month and set June 16 as the deadline. New facilities are being considered on both coasts and on the Southwestern border. The agency calls for minimum-security residential facilities that would provide a "least restrictive, nonsecure setting" and provide schooling for children, recreational activities and access to religious services.

 Family detention has been condemned by human rights groups and immigrant rights organizations as punitive and unnecessary. But immigration authorities said it ensures that immigrants show up for their court hearings and leave the country when ordered deported.

                "Family detention has had the desired impact," ICE spokeswoman Kelly Nantel said. "We don't see as many families coming across the border. That automatic pass is no longer there."

                There are currently two family facilities -- a former nursing home in Pennsylvania and a former prison in Texas. The T. Don Hutto detention center in Taylor, Texas, opened in 2006 and faced protests and lawsuits within the year charging that the children were living in substandard conditions. A settlement resulted in changes in how the children are treated.

                New facilities would allow the government more flexibility and enable the agency to keep families together, Nantel said. In Los Angeles this week, three illegal immigrant mothers and their toddlers, including one American child, were among about 60 people discovered at a drop house used by smugglers. Because there is no family facility nearby, the women and children are being housed in a private shelter.

                The American Civil Liberties Union criticized the proposed plan to open new family detention centers.

                "After the horrible conditions that were revealed at the Hutto facility, it is very disappointing that the government appears to want to produce more immigration prisons for families and children," said Ahilan Arulanantham, a staff attorney at the Southern California office.

                Arulanantham said most families do not pose a safety or flight risk and should not be detained. Instead, he said, they should post bonds, wear electronic monitors or be part of an intensive supervision program.

                "There are other ways to deter illegal immigration without imprisoning children," he said. "This shows that we have become addicted to incarceration as a method to solving our problems, which it is obviously not."

                In extreme cases, Arulanantham said, he could see families being housed in some sort of halfway house, but not a former prison run by a private prison company.

                Immigration and Customs Enforcement plans to review the proposals and make a decision within several months, Nantel said. The bids could come from county governments or private companies. The facilities would house up to 200 people each, about 150 juveniles and 50 adults. Authorities estimate detainees would be kept at the center for between 20 and 30 days.

                The proposal calls for minimal security facilities and refers to the centers as residential family shelters, but says the contractor should structure programs "designed to prevent escapes" and should provide a plan that "monitors resident movement and physically counts residents." Nobody with a criminal record would be admitted.

                Corrections Corp. of America senior vice president Damon Hininger said he was aware of the request for proposals and that the company was "taking a look at it." The company already runs several immigration detention centers, including Hutto.

                Hutto has 450 beds, and as of last week there were about 150 people being held in family detention there. If new facilities are built, Nantel said the agency would consider transferring the families out of Hutto and using it as an adult immigration detention center.

                "Running a residential facility in what was a former prison, that was a challenge," she said. "There have been lessons learned out of Hutto."

                When the center opened, children were given hospital scrubs to wear, forbidden to have toys and allowed only one hour of recreation per day, attorneys said. As a result of the settlement, children are allowed to wear pajamas, move freely around the center and bring toys into their rooms. There also have been changes made to the facility, including adding individual bathrooms, adding murals and replacing metal doors.

                Given the national security goals of the Department of Homeland Security, advocates said they are skeptical about future family centers.

                "They really do have this penal system model in their heads," said Andrea Black, coordinator of Detention Watch Network, a coalition advocating reform of immigration detention and deportation. "I think it's going to be challenging for them to actually be able to run a family facility that is nonpunitive given their current philosophy and practices."

                The need to imprison families stems from the presence of so many illegal families sneaking across the border or hiding in the United States, said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a nonprofit group that advocates a reduction in the number of immigrants.

                "This is really recognizing the realities of the illegal alien population," he said. "They used to let everybody out and trust them to come back. That hasn't worked out, to say the least. This is simply the pendulum moving back the other way."

                anna.gorman@latimes.com

Editorial

Teeing Up the Next Mortgage Bust

May 19, 2008

New York Times

                In responding to the subprime mortgage crisis, most Congressional Republicans and many Bush administration officials apparently believe they have time on their side. They are wrong.

                The housing bust is feeding on itself: price declines provoke foreclosures, which provoke more price declines. And the problem is not limited to subprime mortgages. There is an entirely different category of risky loans whose impact has yet to be felt — loans made to creditworthy borrowers but with tricky terms and interest rates that will start climbing next year.

                Yet the Senate Banking Committee goes on talking. It has failed as yet to produce a bill to aid borrowers at risk of foreclosure, with the panel’s ranking Republican, Richard Shelby of Alabama, raising objections. In the House, a foreclosure aid measure passed recently, but with the support of only 39 Republicans. The White House has yet to articulate a coherent way forward, sowing confusion and delay.

                The fits and starts are harmful. The housing bust is in the downward spiral of price declines and foreclosures. Single-family-home prices dropped 7.6 percent from the first quarter of 2007 through the first quarter of 2008, the largest year-over-year decline since the National Association of Realtors began reporting prices in 1982. Conservatively estimated, 2.2 million homes will enter foreclosure this year. An additional nine million homeowners — those with zero or negative equity — are considered at high risk of default because they have no cushion if recession or inflation, or both, make it impossible for them to keep current on their mortgages.

                Theoretically, when prices fall, consumer demand should rise, sending prices back up again. Unquestioning belief in that self-correcting mechanism is the reason many Republicans don’t want to do anything to prevent foreclosures.

                But in many cities today, house-price declines are so severe that potential buyers are staying on the sidelines, fearful of further collapse. The result is declines that are deeper than need be to restore affordability. That’s everyone’s problem, because as long as house prices continue to fall, the financial system will remain unsettled and the economy will not revive.

                And if house prices fall more than expected — a peak-to-trough decline of 20 percent to 25 percent is the rough consensus, with the low point in mid-2009 — financial losses and economic pain could extend well into 2011.

                That is because a category of risky adjustable-rate loans — dubbed Alt-A, for alternative to grade-A prime loans — is scheduled to reset to higher payments starting in 2009, with losses mounting into 2010 and 2011. Distinct from subprime loans, Alt-A loans were made to generally creditworthy borrowers, but often without verification of income or assets and on tricky terms, including the option to pay only the interest due each month. Some loans allow borrowers to pay even less than the interest due monthly, and add the unpaid portion to the loan balance. Every payment increases the amount owed.

                In coming years, if price declines are in line with expectations, Alt-A losses are projected to total about $150 billion, an amount the financial system could probably absorb. But until investors are sure that price declines will hew to the consensus, the financial system will not regain a sure footing. And if declines are worse than expected, losses will also be worse and the turmoil in the financial system will resume.

                There’s a way to avert that calamity. It’s called foreclosure prevention. There is no excuse for delay.

Sears majesty to hedge-fund dust
May 18, 2008

by Julian Delasantellis
Asia Times
 

            Sometimes attributed to British psychologist Oliver James, a variety of psychological and physical maladies found only in prosperous societies has been given a quasi-clinical appellation, "affluenza".

                One of the manifestations of affluenza is called "restless leg syndrome", a painful nighttime disorder of the lower extremities, generally suffered by those who do not do much physical activity or exertion during the day - such as the typical office worker who drives to work, parks in his assigned parking space near the building door, does eight hours of sedentary physical inactivity behind a desk, then goes home the same way.

                The American pharmacological industry, always quick to develop and market remedies for previously unknown health disorders to people who have generous prescription drug coverage, has come up with a medication for restless leg syndrome. This drug is advertised aggressively on TV shows and networks programmed for women, since the industry knows that the fairer sex is more likely than those strong and silent "suck up your gut" American men, with any medical condition seemingly less serious than multiple bullet wounds, to seek medical help from doctors.

                As this is a medication only available by a doctor's prescription in the US, government regulations mandate that any advertisements for it also notify the prospective user of any possible side effects. For this medication, these are "an unusual urge to gamble or increased sexual urges and/or behaviors".

                A medication that has increased urges to gamble as a side effect? So that's who has been buying the stock of Sears these past few years.

                As the United States spread west to the Pacific coast on its manifest destiny after the Civil War, it may have been the Colt six-shooter pistol and Winchester rifle that conquered the frontier, but it was the general store that civilized it. It was there where one could purchase some of the artifacts of the civilized East Coast, such as perhaps fancy linens and housewares, that Mrs Frontiersman could use to soften the edges of their rugged pioneer lifestyle, that would make their rough and ready log cabins their homes.

                Even the smallest of Western towns eventually got their own general store. However, with so many small Western towns popping into existence in the late 19th century, prospective general store entrepreneurs knew they didn't have to open a store in a town that already had one, where they would be forced to compete with already established businesses. All they had to do is travel down the trail or rail line a ways to find a new town without an already existent general store. Thus, after a while, until the small frontier outposts grew into larger towns, the general stores were able to act as local monopolies, charging monopoly prices, surely, a deformation of the intended proper workings of free markets.

                In 1888, Richard W Sears, who up to that time had been in the business of using railway station agents as wholesale distributors for his pocket watches and timepieces, came upon the idea of selling his wares directly to the public through printed mailers; this concept proved so successful that he followed it up with a catalog of general merchandise. By 1894, this Sears Catalog had grown to 322 pages. Sears used the new technology of the railroads to circumvent the established distribution networks of the general stores, in much the same way that, 100 years later, e-retailers such as Amazon.com and others used the Internet to bypass the dominant retail distribution networks of the past few years.

                Sears, along with his partner Alvah Roebuck, soon developed a reputation for quality merchandise at reasonable prices, so, as the frontier closed early in the 20th century and previously small isolated outposts grew into real population centers, it was natural for Sears, Roebuck to shift its focus from mail order to actual retail stores. In 1925, Sears opened its first retail outlet, on the first floor of its Chicago mail order distribution center. The concept was an instant success; by the end of the Roaring Twenties the company was opening a new retail outlet in an American city every two days, a pace that barely slowed with the onset of the Great Depression in the 1930s.

                It would be after World War II that the Golden Age of Sears would be seen. Looking ahead and projecting the tremendous outpouring of American population from the cities to the still nascent suburbs, the company started an ambitious expansion plan that placed hundreds of new Sears stores right alongside the new Interstate highways that would become the transit conduit of urban America to its new frontiers out on the golden suburban periphery. It also branched out beyond America's borders, bringing its vision of American prosperity and the good life to Canada, Mexico, Central and South America, and even opened a few stores in Western Europe.

                These were the halcyon days of homogenized American suburban middle-class conformity, when most of the country lived in the same type of Levittown housing development, watched the same TV programs, ate the same TV dinners, drove the same cars, wore the same drip dry grey flannel clothes, and did much of its shopping at Sears. For decades, Sears was the number one retailer in the United States, and in 1974, when the Sears Tower in Chicago was completed and began its 22-year reign as the world's tallest building (a status that in 1996 fell to Kuala Lumpur's Petronas Towers), it reflected the power of the company's hubris as bestriding the immense American retail market like a colossus.

                But, as the children of the baby boom grew and moved out of their, in Malvina Reynolds' phrase, "ticky tacky little boxes" (all with Sears' Kenmore line of appliances) into homes with families of their own, Sears seemed to lose its step. The single great homogenized middle class of the first decades of the postwar era was atomizing into smaller subsets that demanded more personalized consumer choices.

                The "me" generation of the 1970s, a population group that once expressed its individuality through Eastern religions and recreational drug use, had conformed its conduct to traditional American social norms to such an extent that it would now do so mainly through its consumer products choices.

                Instead of a nation that clothed itself in the manner that Sears' buyers thought appropriate, the middle-class component that shopped according to price put their money first at Kmart, later at Wal-Mart; those that were willing to pay up for more trendy fashions did so at more upscale clothiers Macy's and Nordstrom's. Similar market segmentations occurred with the company's once-lucrative appliance businesses, with price-conscious shoppers flocking to the new "category killers" of Home Depot and Best Buy, while those willing to pay up for a more upscale cachet than what Sears was offering with its Kenmore line found their own outlets.

                By 1991 Wal-Mart replaced Sears as America's leading retailer and has never looked back since. Sears, its stores consistently seen as stodgy and old fashioned, its "all for one and one for all" marketing philosophy seen as out of step with the times, lacking in that now all-important amorphous marketing quality known as "pop", settled into a graceful, steady decline.

                That was the condition of the company in 2004, when it had the misfortune to catch the attention of modern turbo-finance capitalism.

                Some people, when they see some poor unfortunate lying on the ground, help the person to their feet. Not modern turbo-finance; it saw Sears lying in the gutter, decided like a vampire that there was no reason why the very lifeblood should not be drained from it.

                That year, 2004, was when one Edward S "Eddie" Lampert, a 42-year-old former Goldman Sachs bond trader, showed stodgy old Sears the way the world now really works. Through his ESL hedge fund, Lampert had established a 53% majority controlling interest in Kmart, which, in the futile attempt of trying to compete with the larger and more efficient Wal-Mart to offer the lowest prices in town, had bankrupted itself. Lampert closed stores and slashed jobs, restoring the company to operating profitability.

                By 2004, Kmart's regular stream of income, generated by people making their regular purchases of cat food and deodorant, had accumulated itself into a $3 billion war chest. Lampert had no intention of plowing this sum back into the company, to modernize its dowdy stores, or, more importantly, its creaky supply and distribution system, in order for it to compete more effectively with Wal-Mart. He had far bigger and grander ideas. He was going to use Kmart's cash stream to finance his rise to become the capitalist world's next super billionaire, a younger, and richer version of Warren Buffett.

                By early 2005, Lampert was ready for his next big step towards the stars. An $11 billion buyout deal for Sears by Lampert's Kmart was how the media interpreted a complex deal that was announced on November 17 of the previous year. What was really going on here was that Lampert's ESL hedge fund was folding both Sears and Kmart into a single corporate entity, to be called Sears Holdings.

                Overnight, Lampert became one of the titans of American retailing, ironic, for then and since, he has demonstrated little or no interest in the successful retail operations of his enterprise.
 
                 Unlike many of the other mammoths of American merchandising, you never would find him down on the sales floor, making sure the restrooms were clean or that the salesclerks on the return desks were courteous. No, in running perhaps the most fabled, trusted name in American commerce, Lampert gave every indication that he cared very little about the enterprise that others before him had labored over a century to build.

                Although both Sears and Kmart both maintained their separate store identities, (which did not stop Nike, not wanting to be tainted from any downmarket reek possibly wafting over from declasse K-Mart, from pulling its wares from Sears) in reality, a strange form of symbiosis between Sears, Kmart and ESL developed that essentially blurred the demarcation lines between all three.

                In essence, during his now more than three-year term as the chief executive of Sears Holdings, Lampert has conclusively proven that he has very little interest in the actual retail operation of Sears. Same-store, year-over-year sales, the key metric for retail success, have spiraled down month after month, quarter after quarter, even though the first years of Lampert's reign were a time of significant US economic growth-with attendant free spending by US consumers.

                Retail advertising budgets have been slashed. Funding for maintenance, upkeep and renovation for the stores have been cut way back; at many shopping centers, the Sears store is becoming more the mall eyesore than its anchor. As for investing the capital to maintain healthy levels of inventory in both stores, so that customers don't find empty shelves when coming in to look for a product and then turn around and never come back, well, that's not all that important anymore, either.

                You might think that any retailer acting in such cavalier contravention to time-honored retail principles might have received the highest possible measure of approbation and sanction from Wall Street.

                Not true. During the first two years of the Lampert reign, the stock market adored Sears Holdings. The stock was up 15% in 2005, 47% in 2006, as opposed to much more modest rises of 2.5% and 7% for those years in the general RTH retail stock index.

                What could be the cause of this seeming contradiction? Had the stock market, or at least the specialist station where Sears Holdings was traded, entered a bizarre sort of Fantastic Four reversed dimension, where bad corporate practices were now good, and incompetent management now adored?

                If only the explanation were this innocent. In reality, what has been happening with both Kmart and Sears during the Lampert era was that the operating expenses for both entities have been cut to the bone, in order to free up the billions that Lampert would use for hedge fund speculation at ESL. The point was no longer to manage these respected entities in such a manner that they would flourish and thrive for the benefit of the stockholders, the employees and the communities in which they and the customers lived; now, it was to generate large returns for the shareholders alone (of which Lampert was, of course, the largest one) and keep Sears and Kmart alive long enough to bleed them dry.

                Looked at in this light, the stock's superior returns in 2005 and 2006 are easy to understand. Those two years were very good vintages for the hedge fund industry. As I explained in Hedge Funds: Playing dice with the universe (Asia Times Online, July 6, 2006), those were the days when the funds had discovered a very simple way to make absolute scads of money. If everybody took massive similar positions in the same investment, these positions, simply through the weight of the amount of money being directed at them, could not help but appreciate. Reading the financial media from that time, I half expected to see a picture of Lampert water-skiing on Long Island Sound, with an accompanying caption announcing that "Eddie Lampert Now Walks on Water".

                But as all readers of this site well know, things sure changed in 2007. Many of the hedge fund strategies that paid off like slot machine jackpots in the previous two years, such as huge heavily leveraged bets on subprime mortgage paper, came up lemons last year. Sears Holdings' profits fell 99% from the third quarter of 2006 to the same period of 2007. The stock is down 50% from its high in April of 2007, as opposed to a less than 5% decline by the RTH retail index.

                Also,the news that Lampert's ESL bought an $800 million stake last year in Citigroup, just before the subprime storm made landfall, when the stock was trading at $51 (as opposed to its current price of under $24) has not helped him further his burning desire to be known as the Dauphin to King Buffett of Omaha, either.

                Herb Greenberg of the Moneywatch web site named Lampert as the worst chief executive officer of 2007; considering last year's competition, quite the distinction.

                Sears stockholders, who two years ago toasted young prince Eddie as their risen savior, are now an ornery, ill-tempered, mean-spirited crew. Last February, Lampert tried to convince them to stand firm and true; he actually compared himself to Eli Manning, the American football quarterback who led his underdog New York Giants to an improbable win over the heavily favored New England Patriots in last February's Super Bowl. In response, I'm sure that many of his stockholders would have reacted favorably to the sight of Lampert being briskly "sacked" by a whole side of 150 kilogram American football linebackers.

                To this observer, the sorry saga of Sears illustrates just how far distorted American ethics and values have become from exposure to the great credit and money carnival of the past few years. "All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned," Karl Marx wrote in 1848. In this case, nobody thought twice, nobody blinked an eye, when Wall Street took a truly unique American institution, Sears, and turned it from a fine, respected American society matron into a common streetwalker reduced to pimping through the night for Eddie Lampert.

                Last year, the New York Times' Gretchen Morgenson noted that more American national income was produced by financial engineers, people like Lampert who manipulate the amorphous abstraction called money, than by the mechanical engineers who manipulate actual physical realities such as steel, concrete, mortar and oil. In his new book Bad Money (reviewed May 10 by Joe Costello), Kevin Phillips notes that "By 2004-6, financial services represented 20 to 21 percent of gross domestic product, manufacturing just 12 to 13 percent."

                Somewhere along the line, America got the idea that the buck generated from financial services, from manipulating money, from passing it from hand to hand, was equivalent, or even superior to (after all, you come home with a lot better smelling clothes after a day on the trading floor compared to a day at the steel mill) the same buck made actually making and sustaining something - such as the great brand Sears once was.

                Here is the actual core of the current crisis of American overconsumption. The music has stopped, the dance is over, the great credit and money creation machine of the past few years has shut down. As the dust settles, we see that, for all the money, and supposed wealth, created over the past few years, very little of actual value, of real worth remains. As does now Lampert's, as does now America's, and its dream of endless wealth created through little or no actual work, phantasms still dance into and out of our world with the pages of a calendar, and only the very foolish mistake their ever-vertiginous presence with reality.

                Somewhere in all the packing boxes my wife and I are yet to unpack almost two years after our house move are the pictures she had taken every year of our son, in the 1970s and 1980s, at the Sears Portrait Studio. Millions of other 20- to 50-year-old Americans have similar pictures, from the same source.

                Very few observers think that Sears can survive much longer, still under withering competitive pressure from Wal-Mart and being bled to death by the likes of Lampert. In a few years, our granddaughter will see the pictures of her daddy at her age, wonder what the "Sears" means on the back of the picture.

                If my son asks me what to tell her (and, come on, how likely is that?), this is what I will say. "Honey, sometimes grownups act very silly."

                Julian Delasantellis is a management consultant, private investor and educator in international business in the US state of Washington. He can be reached at juliandelasantellis@yahoo.com.