Author: Ed Weathers

SLOWPOKE PROSECUTORS

Eight years ago, the United States Attorney’s office in Memphis was pushing something called Operation Trigger Lock to combat violent criminals. You might say the feds have been in a different kind of trigger lock lately, unable to pull the trigger on four high-profile cases that have been around for anywhere from six months to almost two years.

The cases include the Albert Means football recruiting scandal, the terroristic attack on Shelby County Medical Examiner Dr. O. C. Smith, the misuse of county credit cards by former county mayoral aide Tom Jones, and the political corruption in former Shelby County Juvenile Court Clerk Shep Wilbun’s office centered around Wilbun aide Darrell Catron.

U.S. Atty. Terry Harris and his staff, along with the FBI and the federal Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms, haven’t said anything about progress in the Smith case since the reclusive medical examiner was bound with barbed wire and had a bomb tied to him 11 months ago. And the slowpoke prosecutors appear to be either befuddled or biding their time on Jones, Catron, and Lang.

As a result of the feds hanging fire, the citizens of Shelby County don’t know if the administration of former Mayor Jim Rout was rife with corruption and greed or just sloppy bookkeeping. The current administration of Mayor A C Wharton is hamstrung by a climate of suspicion and mistrust. A mad bomber with a grudge against the medical examiner apparently is still on the loose. And Logan Young, the University of Alabama football booster who supposedly paid Lang $200,000, remains unindicted but subjected to what amounts to water torture instead.

Taking the four cases in chronological order, here’s the latest:

In August 2001, District Atty. Gen. Bill Gibbons and his former colleague Harris jumped into the Albert Means case. In a joint news conference, they announced the federal indictments of ex-high school football coaches Lynn Lang and Milton Kirk. An indictment of Young, widely reported (although not in the indictment) to be the source of a payment of as much as $200,000 to Lang, seemed imminent.

But in 20 months since then, the prosecutors still haven’t moved the ball past midfield. Kirk, who thrilled readers of The Commercial Appeal all with his tales of “slave trading” by Lang and the University of Alabama, pled guilty to a minor charge. In November, Lang, who previously insisted he didn’t get any money from Young, reversed his field, made a guilty plea, and said he got $150,000. Once again, Young’s number seemed to be up. But the wealthy booster, who has said several times that he did not pay Lang, still has not been indicted.

So last week it was Alabama’s turn to get the football. Attorney Tommy Gallion represents former Alabama assistant football coach Ronnie Cottrell, whose career was derailed by being connected to the recruiting of Means. Cottrell has sued the NCAA, the university, and several individuals for $60 million. Gallion came to Memphis to take depositions from three Memphians he believes are behind the Means story Ñ attorneys Karl Schledwitz and Arthur Kahn, and UT football booster Roy Adams, aka “Tennstud.” Adams didn’t show up, so Gallion grilled Schledwitz and Kahn.

Gallion ran a couple of plays into the line for short gains but hinted that he will start throwing bombs soon. The bad blood between Young and Adams is well known since the publication in 2000 of Bragging Rights, Richard Ernsberger’s book about Southeastern Conference football, and Adams’ frequent Internet postings under his well-known alias, Tennstud. Without the star accuser, Gallion was forced to work around the edges of what he believes is a grand conspiracy against Alabama involving NCAA investigators, former Southeastern Conference Commissioner Roy Kramer, UT football coach Phil Fulmer, The Commercial Appeal, and the Memphis Three.

Schledwitz is a Tennessee graduate and fan who briefly represented Kirk then helped him find another lawyer. Kahn is a former assistant United States attorney who owns Arthur’s Wine and Liquor and set up a fund to benefit the mother of Albert Means before it was revealed that she had, according to Lang, received $10,000 of the payout for Albert’s services. Gallion noted that Kahn is married to Lisa Mallory, who was Logan Young’s former girlfriend at the time they began dating. Gallion asked Kahn if Mallory was “wired up” by federal prosecutors. After some jousting about whether this was a privileged communication by virtue of marriage, Kahn declined to answer, leading Gallion to conclude that she was.

Gallion said Cottrell is a “scapegoat.”

“I believe Logan Young is innocent,” he said, adding that he had not met Young until three weeks ago. “Apparently they’re having a hard time getting anything on him through the grand jury.”

Last week Lang’s sentencing was postponed for four more months.

It was 11 months ago that the bizarre assault on medical examiner O. C. Smith shocked Memphis and brought a swarm of federal investigators to town to look for clues in a real-life version of television’s CSI. With its overtones of terrorism, the case was called the “top priority” of the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms. But real crimes are a lot tougher to solve than fictional ones, even when the victim is a medical examiner with exceptional powers of observation who remained conscious and alert throughout the ordeal.

A spokesman for the Shelby County Health Department said Smith remains shaken by the experience and is not doing interviews. The office declined to provide a picture of him, although Smith participated in a televised news conference the day after he was released. There has been no trace of the religious nut investigators believe sent threatening letters to Smith, planted a bomb in the office that didn’t go off, and then attacked him with razor wire and another homemade bomb, possibly over Smith’s testimony in a murder case.

The feds have been investigating Tom Jones since last fall after disclosures about his county credit card use. There have been no indictments in the case and Jones, a top aide to former Mayor Jim Rout, has not commented publicly about it.

Prosecutors and the FBI have interviewed Jones and his daughter and son-in-law about a honeymoon trip paid for through the Memphis Regional Chamber of Commerce’s Memphis 2005 account. Sources told the Flyer that investigators are looking at other Memphis 2005 expenditures as well.

Memphis 2005 is a chamber-led effort to improve the Memphis business climate. Under the Rout administration, county government and the chamber were partners in a grab bag of loosely defined “economic development” projects with five- and six-figure appropriations. Chamber CEO Marc Jordan has said Jones was often his county contact and that his OK was usually good enough for funds to be released. The only person in county government with more power than Jones was Jim Rout.

The focus of the second front in the county corruption investigation is Darrell Catron. Catron is cooperating with the feds, that much everyone agrees on. He pleaded guilty to information in lieu of indictment. Assistant U.S. Atty Tim Discenza told a federal judge that Catron was singing about unnamed contractors with the clerk’s office. Catron was an aide to former Juvenile Court Clerk Shep Wilbun, a former member of both the City Council and the County Commission.

Last week the government announced that Catron’s sentencing, scheduled for May 2nd, had been postponed until October 24th.

Rx FOR SCHOOLS (PART TWO)

In the April 15 issue of USA Today, respondents to a Gallup Poll were reported to have named property taxes as their least-favorite taxation method–hated even more than income taxes by a 17% margin.

This is not surprising since property taxes across the country have doubled since 1985, mostly in response to widespread budget deficits and current unfunded mandates such as local homeland security measures. These two factors could explain why Shelby County residents are finally starting to question whether they can afford new school construction as an antidote for overflowing classrooms, and furthermore, whether it is the only cure.

This antipathy for property tax increases along with revenue shortfalls in a moribund economy, will force our county government to look for operating efficiencies wherever they may be found.

However, achieving these efficiencies will require asking ourselves if we can continue to indulge in Baby Boomer nostalgia that causes us to shutter our middle and secondary school complexes for two-thirds of every day, just because that’s the way it was done when we were young.

Realizing these savings will require changing the way we handle an assortment of educational issues–graduation credits, extracurricular activities, bus schedules, meal service and personnel placement among them. Unclogging our high school hallways will also demand that taxpayers not allow county government to become an institutional invertebrate when tough decisions are called for.

When the Florida high school I attended from 1970 to 1973 went to double shifts to alleviate crowding, officials reduced graduation requirements to 15 credits for grades 10-12. Physical education classes and many electives did not make the cut. Shelby County schools could do the same and still have time every day for English, math, science, history and a language. What we wouldn’t have time for are courses such as marketing, psychology or art.

Reducing course offerings is never a popular choice, but can we justify spending millions of dollars on optional classes when reducing hours would produce significant savings?

A seven-hour school day is especially curious in that Shelby County Schools currently has a twenty credit graduation minimum for grades 9-12. Twenty credits divided by four years equals five credits per year–exactly the number of hours in a double shift arrangement of 7 AM until noon and noon until 5 PM. But the current six class per day schedule results in a total of twenty-four credits spread over four years–a four credit surplus.

Why are taxpayers footing the bill for courses that are not required for graduation? To provide a cushion for students who struggle perhaps? A compassionate act to be sure, but as far as I know, neither college nor the world of work provides a similar insurance policy against failure. And aren’t those the two institutions for which our school system purports to be preparing our children?

Any discussion of making extracurricular activities such as sports, band and cheerleading the secondary concern of public schools is often met with emotional debates about “well-roundedness” and “tradition.” Both fine aims, I might add. But they should hardly drive school schedules, particularly since this is not an either/or proposition where the choice is to do away with these enrichment activities altogether or schedule them only after school.

Just as we did in my high school thirty years ago, those attending morning classes could participate after school and those on the afternoon schedule, before school. And marketing, psychology and art could be treated as extracurricular offerings. Will this create a problem for those who rely on buses? Yes, but no more than the current schedule which compels those who participate in after-school programs to arrange for private transportation.

Speaking of buses, it would make sense to compress the schedules so that there are fewer routes because there are fewer empty buses rattling around from barn to school. For example, the morning schedules could run as they currently do, but when the driver returned to school, it would be with a load of afternoon students who would disembark moments before the morning students board for the ride home.

In fact, county taxpayers ought to be asking if bus service should even be offered in suburban areas where families who don’t own private transportation are a rarity. Once upon a time, there wasn’t a car in every garage, but we’re providing bus service as if this long ago picture were still part of the American landscape.

By eliminating the traditional seven-hour day, the system could also eliminate food service of the kind that requires onsite preparation of foods and all the equipment, the attendant square footage, food inventory costs, utilities to provide the cooking and a full-time staff including their benefits. Sandwiches, juices, fresh fruits and ice cream could be offered as snacks on the run as they were at my high school. And with a five-hour day, the need for a full meal is less imperative.

The argument that sound nutrition is best served by a hot meal might have some merit if the current school menus were not replete with greasy, fried, calorie-laden food choices that make the phrase “school nutrition” an oxymoron. As one who has “dined” at a number of middle and high school cafeterias in Memphis, I can say with certainty that it would be hard to create meals with less nutrition than the ones I had to consume as a teacher.

And since Tennessee has some of the highest rates of obesity, heart disease and diabetes in the nation and these conditions are related to poor nutrition, our schools could actually stop promoting these diseases and start being part of the solution to these very serious health problems.

Scheduling teachers and support staff is likely to present a real challenge because many adults prefer leaving work at 2:30. But research shows that older teenagers experience REM sleep at 7AM, the same ridiculously early hour at which they are expected to be in class. Younger teenagers appear to suffer no ill effects, suggesting that double shifts which schedule middle schoolers in the morning and high schoolers in the afternoon, could produce added benefits including increases in test scores and grades, and reductions in absenteeism and tardiness. Edina, Minnesota realigned its high schools to accommodate the sleep needs of teenagers and found the aforementioned salutary effects.

And with all due respect to the preferences of teachers and the invaluable contribution they make to society, the school system is ostensibly operated for the benefit of the students and paid for by the citizens. Shouldn’t we be accommodating their needs instead of the other way around?

Although this new schedule would not entirely eliminate staffing increases as some new teachers would have to be hired for two shifts, the additional salaries would be fewer than those required to populate a brand new school.

When additional funding on education is proposed, there is usually rhetoric about preparing our children for this nascent century of three years. Yet when there is talk of reducing spending on education customs that may have outlived their usefulness, tradition is the tried and true shield of defenders of the status quo.

“Once upon a time” should be reserved for mythical tales of the past and medical procedures that involve leeches, not for finding cures to school overcrowding. And brand new schools are a cure that Shelby County can’t afford.

Rx FOR SCHOOLS (PART TWO)

In the April 15 issue of USA Today, respondents to a Gallup Poll were reported to have named property taxes as their least-favorite taxation method–hated even more than income taxes by a 17% margin.

This is not surprising since property taxes across the country have doubled since 1985, mostly in response to widespread budget deficits and current unfunded mandates such as local homeland security measures. These two factors could explain why Shelby County residents are finally starting to question whether they can afford new school construction as an antidote for overflowing classrooms, and furthermore, whether it is the only cure.

This antipathy for property tax increases along with revenue shortfalls in a moribund economy, will force our county government to look for operating efficiencies wherever they may be found.

However, achieving these efficiencies will require asking ourselves if we can continue to indulge in Baby Boomer nostalgia that causes us to shutter our middle and secondary school complexes for two-thirds of every day, just because that’s the way it was done when we were young.

Realizing these savings will require changing the way we handle an assortment of educational issues–graduation credits, extracurricular activities, bus schedules, meal service and personnel placement among them. Unclogging our high school hallways will also demand that taxpayers not allow county government to become an institutional invertebrate when tough decisions are called for.

When the Florida high school I attended from 1970 to 1973 went to double shifts to alleviate crowding, officials reduced graduation requirements to 15 credits for grades 10-12. Physical education classes and many electives did not make the cut. Shelby County schools could do the same and still have time every day for English, math, science, history and a language. What we wouldn’t have time for are courses such as marketing, psychology or art.

Reducing course offerings is never a popular choice, but can we justify spending millions of dollars on optional classes when reducing hours would produce significant savings?

A seven-hour school day is especially curious in that Shelby County Schools currently has a twenty credit graduation minimum for grades 9-12. Twenty credits divided by four years equals five credits per year–exactly the number of hours in a double shift arrangement of 7 AM until noon and noon until 5 PM. But the current six class per day schedule results in a total of twenty-four credits spread over four years–a four credit surplus.

Why are taxpayers footing the bill for courses that are not required for graduation? To provide a cushion for students who struggle perhaps? A compassionate act to be sure, but as far as I know, neither college nor the world of work provides a similar insurance policy against failure. And aren’t those the two institutions for which our school system purports to be preparing our children?

Any discussion of making extracurricular activities such as sports, band and cheerleading the secondary concern of public schools is often met with emotional debates about “well-roundedness” and “tradition.” Both fine aims, I might add. But they should hardly drive school schedules, particularly since this is not an either/or proposition where the choice is to do away with these enrichment activities altogether or schedule them only after school.

Just as we did in my high school thirty years ago, those attending morning classes could participate after school and those on the afternoon schedule, before school. And marketing, psychology and art could be treated as extracurricular offerings. Will this create a problem for those who rely on buses? Yes, but no more than the current schedule which compels those who participate in after-school programs to arrange for private transportation.

Speaking of buses, it would make sense to compress the schedules so that there are fewer routes because there are fewer empty buses rattling around from barn to school. For example, the morning schedules could run as they currently do, but when the driver returned to school, it would be with a load of afternoon students who would disembark moments before the morning students board for the ride home.

In fact, county taxpayers ought to be asking if bus service should even be offered in suburban areas where families who don’t own private transportation are a rarity. Once upon a time, there wasn’t a car in every garage, but we’re providing bus service as if this long ago picture were still part of the American landscape.

By eliminating the traditional seven-hour day, the system could also eliminate food service of the kind that requires onsite preparation of foods and all the equipment, the attendant square footage, food inventory costs, utilities to provide the cooking and a full-time staff including their benefits. Sandwiches, juices, fresh fruits and ice cream could be offered as snacks on the run as they were at my high school. And with a five-hour day, the need for a full meal is less imperative.

The argument that sound nutrition is best served by a hot meal might have some merit if the current school menus were not replete with greasy, fried, calorie-laden food choices that make the phrase “school nutrition” an oxymoron. As one who has “dined” at a number of middle and high school cafeterias in Memphis, I can say with certainty that it would be hard to create meals with less nutrition than the ones I had to consume as a teacher.

And since Tennessee has some of the highest rates of obesity, heart disease and diabetes in the nation and these conditions are related to poor nutrition, our schools could actually stop promoting these diseases and start being part of the solution to these very serious health problems.

Scheduling teachers and support staff is likely to present a real challenge because many adults prefer leaving work at 2:30. But research shows that older teenagers experience REM sleep at 7AM, the same ridiculously early hour at which they are expected to be in class. Younger teenagers appear to suffer no ill effects, suggesting that double shifts which schedule middle schoolers in the morning and high schoolers in the afternoon, could produce added benefits including increases in test scores and grades, and reductions in absenteeism and tardiness. Edina, Minnesota realigned its high schools to accommodate the sleep needs of teenagers and found the aforementioned salutary effects.

And with all due respect to the preferences of teachers and the invaluable contribution they make to society, the school system is ostensibly operated for the benefit of the students and paid for by the citizens. Shouldn’t we be accommodating their needs instead of the other way around?

Although this new schedule would not entirely eliminate staffing increases as some new teachers would have to be hired for two shifts, the additional salaries would be fewer than those required to populate a brand new school.

When additional funding on education is proposed, there is usually rhetoric about preparing our children for this nascent century of three years. Yet when there is talk of reducing spending on education customs that may have outlived their usefulness, tradition is the tried and true shield of defenders of the status quo.

“Once upon a time” should be reserved for mythical tales of the past and medical procedures that involve leeches, not for finding cures to school overcrowding. And brand new schools are a cure that Shelby County can’t afford.

THE EMPTY BOX

(Let me start with my own disclaimer: The following views are mine and mine alone, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Memphis Flyer or anyone else associated with The Memphis Flyer: E.W.)

Religion is the root of much evil.

It has to be said.

Here is what I believe: There is no god, there is no messiah, there are no prophets plugged in to some divine will. There are no saints or holy men. If there is a heaven or a hell or any other kind of afterlife, we can’t know anything about it while we’re in this life, so it’s useless to speculate and foolish to believe. Faith is an empty box. To believe in Christ is to believe in a rabbit’s foot. To believe in the Buddha is to believe that pro wrestling is real. To believe in Mohammed is to believe that the groundhog can predict spring. To believe that the Ten Commandments came from some god on a mountaintop is to believe that television psychics can talk to your dead grandmother. Allah, Jehovah and the Trinity are elves and Tinkerbells. They are no more than desperate hope given a name and anthropomorphic shape by the imaginations of frightened men.

It has to be said.

Religion is superstition. It is mankind crossing its fingers. Its sole functions are 1) to comfort and console those who cannot bear the suffering and death that are ultimately the lot of every human being, and 2) to offer meaning in a world where meaning can never be established. Religion, in other words, is a fortress of lies built to keep out the terrors of existence and nonexistence. For those in power, it is useful in still another way: Since time immemorial, the powerful have used religion to distract the oppressed, to encourage them to focus on the next world so that they will acquiesce to the injustices of this world. If you would have your slaves remain docile, teach them hymns.

This is not saying anything new, but it has to be said again.

On balance, religion has made the world a worse place. It has generated magnificent art and wonderful music and spectacular architecture, and millions of people have, over the centuries, done good and beautiful things in its name, but on balance it has not been good for the world. Those millions of good people would have done just as much good without it. Mother Teresa would have been saintly without the New Testament. Martin Luther King would have been a paragon of eloquent courage without having been baptized. Gandhi would have overturned an empire leaning only on his walking stick. Virtue would exist without Christianity or Judaism or Islam or Hinduism, which, in their vanity and vaporishness, are no different from the Roman’s belief in household gods or the Druid’s belief in tree spirits. A magic act is a magic act, whatever robes we clothe it in. But because of religions like these, the world has experienced centuries and centuries of backwardness and unnecessary suffering. Throats have been slit in their name, hearts exploded, the best minds distracted or destroyed, sweet people tortured, millions of children sent horribly to oblivion.

It has to be said.

Today is a good day to say it. Perhaps the worst of religion’s dangerous superstitions is the notion of the “holy” place. The idea that this patch of earth or that building or that city or nation is somehow sanctified by some god has left us with the bombs and guns and bodies of Kashmir and Belfast, of Baghdad and Jerusalem. “Next year in Jerusalem.” Oh, the lives such words have cost! Why not “Next year in Memphis” or “Next year in Singapore” or “Next year on the banks of the Platte”? What is land but land? What is a building but a building?

Today is a good day to say it because we have a praying president convinced that he is plugged in to the will of God, and his conviction is leading the United States to holy war, first in Iraq and later . . . wherever his prayers might take us. The Muslim world is right: George W. Bush is on a Crusade. He believes that God is on his side, just as Osama bin Laden believes that God is on his side, and the PLO thinks God is on their side, and the Irish Republican Army is certain God is on their side. The list of those who have made war in the name of their god is too long even to start here.

Today is a good day to say it because Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is convinced, as he said last week, that the United States is a country with God’s special blessing, and Attorney General John Ashcroft thinks his views on abortion and the Bill of Rights come straight from the mind of his right-wing Christian god.

Our leaders say they want to make the world safe for secular democracy. I wish they meant it. But I’m afraid that what they really mean is that they want to make a world receptive to their Western god.

There are wars enough when what is “holy” is not part of the picture. Communism and fascism and capitalism would have had their wars even with all gods standing on the sidelines. There are land wars and economic wars and grudge wars and wars for no reason that anyone can understand at all. But religious wars are the most tragic, because they are built so deeply on a deluded sense of righteousness. Have nonbelievers started wars? Of course. They have started wars for land or politics or pure villainy. But I don’t know of a single nonbeliever who has killed simply to make others stop believing. (Stalin, you would say? No, he killed for power.) On the other hand, the world has thousands, millions, who will kill, and have killed, in order to make someone else believe as they believe.

You won’t read this in The New York Times, but it has to be said: Religion does more harm than good. I wish George W. Bush and his handlers would stop talking to, or about, their god. I wish the Near and Middle East would suddenly be flooded by a sea of atheism. I wish Northern Ireland would overnight experience mass religious amnesia. How much more at peace the world would be.

A man truly awake does not need religion. He doesn’t need gods. He doesn’t need miracles. He doesn’t need holy lands here below or celestial heavens up above. For him, life in this universe is itself holy, as is every patch of ground and every path he walks. Life itself is enough of a miracle. To believe in a god who made this life is to believe in a miracle even greater than this miracle. Who needs more than one unfathomable miracle? Existence is a fluke, a freak, a wonder, a dream, a bizarre uncanny thing. Our own consciousness of this existence is so incredible a phenomenon that I don’t understand why anyone feels the need to believe in anything else more “spiritual.” It’s all spiritual. It’s all true magic. Why add imagined magic to explain the magic that is right before us?

Religion is dangerous. It needs to be said, and no one is saying it, except on the nonbelievers’ web sites and in their magazines, where they speak only to each other. Our politicians won’t say it. Our commentators won’t say it. The power of self-censorship in this God-fearing country is too strong, freedom of speech be damned. I can say it here only because this audience is so small, and I have little to risk. (Will fifty of you read this? Will 500? I have no business you can boycott. I have no office you can vote me out of. All I can lose is my job.)

Nearly all my friends are believers. Nearly all of those I love are believers. Most of them are generous and kind, and their religion gives them hope and comfort and pleasant society. Last night, I went to a Passover seder at the home of Jewish friends. They are wonderful people. It was a lovely evening. My own widowed mother has been sustained since my father’s death by the amazing kindness of the women in her church. Yes, I have seen many good works born in synagogues and church pews. But the nonbelievers I know are just as kind, just as loving, just as hopeful, and they have given just as much comfort to those in need.

And I too hope. I hope, for example, that I will see my dead father and my dead friends in some next life, and that we will all be free from worry and pain forever. But it’s just hope, and it’s awake and open-eyed. It’s not faith, which is sleepy and blind. I don’t depend on my hope, and I wouldn’t base my living actions on it. It’s a hope that does not grow out of dogma, and I would never try to impose my hope on someone else. Pure hope never yet has led to war. The same cannot be said of dogma. If I were to found a religion, I would call it “The Church of the Hopeful Few.” Hope would be its only doctrine, and I think it would be a peaceful church.

I know it does little good to tell believers that they should stop believing. I don’t really care if they believe, as long as they remain in their closets when they pray, and leave their gods there when they emerge. Their self-delusion saddens me a bit, but it is usually harmless. When it does harm is when it drives them against the self-delusion of those who believe otherwise. Then is the time of enmity and war.

If our leaders must believe, then, let them believe. But let them remember that the White House is not a cathedral, and that the capitol building is a place of men, not gods.

Editor’s note: The following ran as the lead editorial in the April 20th edition of The Independent, one of several daily newspapers published in London, England.

In case we forget,distracted by the thought of thousands of dead Iraqi civilians, looted museums, and gathering political chaos, the proclaimed purpose of this war, vainly pursued by Britain and the US through the United Nations, was to disarm Saddam Hussein and to destroy weapons of mass destruction deemed a menace to the entire world.

A month has passed since American and British troops entered Iraq, more than a week since the fall of Baghdad. But thus far not even a sniff. Not a drum of VX or mustard gas, not a phial of botulin or anthrax, not a shred of evidence that Iraq was assembling a nuclear weapons program

But that wasn’t what they told us. Remember Colin Powell at the Security Council two months ago (though today it seems another age on another planet): the charts, the

grainy intelligence satellite pictures, the crackly tapes of the intercepted phone conversations among Iraqi officials? How plausible it all sounded, especially when propounded by the most plausible figure in the Bush administration.

And what about those other claims, wheeled out on various occasions by Messrs. Bush, Blair, Cheney, and Rumsfeld? The Iraqi drones that were supposed to be able to attack

the US east coast, the imports of aluminum tubes allegedly intended for centrifuges to enrich uranium, the unaccounted-for lethal nerve and germ agents, in quantities specified

down to the last gallon or pound, as if exact numbers alone constituted proof. All, it seems, egregious products of the imagination of the intelligence services one commodity whose existence need never be doubted

Maybe the Saddam regime was diabolically cunning in the concealment of these weapons, but the shambolic manner of its passing suggests otherwise. Maybe, as those “US

officials” continue to suggest from behind their comfortable screen of anonymity, the weapons have been shipped to Syria for “safekeeping.” But that theory too is dismissed by independent experts.

Indeed, it collapses at the first serious examination. Why should Saddam part with his most effective means of defense, when the survival of his regime and himself was on

the line? Nor will that hoary and disingenuous line advanced by our political masters wash any longer oh yes, we know a lot more, but if we told you, we would be showing our hand to Saddam and endangering precious intelligence sources.

Just believe us, old boy, the Government told us, and you’ll see we were right all along. And the British, being on the whole a reasonable and trusting people, mostly accepted the word of their rulers.

Well, Saddam is now gone. And with him has disappeared any conceivable risk to those intelligence sources (assuming they ever existed). So just what was this information on

the basis of which Washington and its faithful ally launched an unprovoked invasion of a ramshackle third world country? A country with a very nasty regime to be sure, but not a great deal nastier than some other potential candidates for “liberation” in the Middle East and elsewhere.

Having rushed into war to suit its own military and domestic electoral timetable, the Bush administration now has the nerve to claim that a year may be required to establish the whereabouts of the WMD and that it may never do so unless led to them by cooperative Iraqis. But no longer can London and Washington rely simply on the impossibility for the former Iraqi regime to prove a negative, that the weapons do not exist. It is up to the coalition of two to provide proof positive that they do.

This pointless war cannot be unmade. But we urgently need to know that the invasion was not illegal as well. With Britain and the US in full control of Iraq, a month should suffice. If no “smoking gun” has turned up by then, a full parliamentary inquiry is essential into the competence and accountability of the intelligence services, and into how our Government used them to sell a mistaken and reckless policy.

ANATOMY OF A LIE

Plagiarism at the Tri-State Defender was much more extensive and, at times, malicious than we reported last week, according to additional research and interviews with former staff members. And the former managing editor, Virginia Porter, said it was carried out by the African-American newspaper’s current owner, Tom Picou, using the aliases Larry Reeves and Reginold Bundy.

Picou, who lives in Chicago, is the nephew of the late John Sengstacke, founder of the Tri-State Defender and the Chicago Defender and other newspapers that serve the black community. Picou is the CEO of Real Times, which bought the Tri-State Defender and three other newspapers in Detroit, Chicago, and Pittsburgh earlier this year for a reported $11 million.

Picou told the Flyer last week that Larry Reeves was an unpaid freelance writer whom he never met in person although Reeves authored 142 articles in the Tri-State Defender. Picou said he believes Reeves was an elderly white man who has since moved to Arkansas. He declined to speak to the Flyer this week. Asked if he is Reginold Bundy and Larry Reeves, he said, “Absolutely not. I’m finished with this issue and that’s the end of it,” before hanging up the phone.

Like “Larry Reeves,” “Reginold Bundy” was a prolific plagiarist, changing datelines and place-names to relocate stories to Memphis or other cities in the Mid-South. By doing a computer search, the Flyer was able to conclusively establish that several stories were stolen. We offered to show the evidence to Tri-State Defender publisher/editor Marzie Thomas at her office. She declined three times.

á In 1995, Bundy stole parts of a story about crimes of passion in Miami from Miami New Times and transposed it to Memphis, changing real Hispanic people to fictional African Americans and editorializing about violence in the black community.

á In 1995, he stole parts of a story, “Open Hearts,” about an autistic child, from the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel.

á In 2001, he stole parts of “Who’s Sorry Now?,” about the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s mistress, from The Village Voice.

But “Reginold Bundy” was a much more creative and complex persona than “Larry Reeves.” Reeves was a space-filler, “author” of long, front-page stories that were lifted nearly verbatim from other weekly newspapers far enough away that the actual reporters probably would not notice the theft. Bundy had an agenda. In 54 stories found in our computer search, he often editorialized about actual politicians and events in Memphis or West Tennessee and apparently constructed passages of dialogue to embellish his creative efforts.

For example, in 1995 Bundy stole part of a feature story about donating cheap cameras to the homeless in Miami from Miami New Times. But he transposed the story to Memphis, inventing tourists and locals who crassly shot pictures of a homeless man in Court Square “who goes by the name Tattoo George.”

“Tattoo George” speaks to “Reginold Bundy” in a pathetic parody of black dialect, saying, “It’s like dey got nothin’ else to shoot. So day shoot us.”

In a 1996 story, Bundy writes about the

burning of four black churches in rural West Tennessee: “In fact, in many rural counties in Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi, the TSD learned, the state of social conditions haven’t really changed over the past 40 years despite changing laws and national mandates. To target Black churches in the wake of exceeding racial intolerance is no more of a novelty than the alleged continued lynchings in the Mississippi Delta region.”

Sources include “the FBI’s Hate Division,” “documents released in 1968 by the Congress of Racial Equality,” and “an official who preferred not to be identified.”

A 1,415-word 1995 Bundy story attacking state Sen. John Ford includes no sources other than ” close friend” and “one unidentified man in a local restaurant.”

Porter, 62, told the Flyer she was managing editor at the Tri-State Defender from 1995 until 2002, when she was laid off. She now lives in Kankakee, Illinois. She formerly worked as a copy editor for The Sacramento Bee and other newspapers.

She said “I would stake my life on it” that Picou is Reeves and Bundy. She said anyone who questioned procedures at the Tri-State Defender “was abruptly let go.”

“He [Picou] was the big boss,” she said. “Why fight with him over his product?”

She said the make-up work for the Tri-State Defender’s front page, page three, and jump page (where front-page stories are continued) was done in Chicago and sent to Memphis.

“I used to tell him [Picou] all the time, ‘One day you’re going to get the Tri-State Defender sued because I know this stuff is either made up or ridiculous,'” she said.

The Chicago Reader, a weekly newspaper that has written about Picou, describes him as going to work for the Chicago Defender as a teenager and rising from baseball writer to editor to president of Sengstacke Enterprises before leaving the company in 1984 “because he couldn’t put up with the boss.”

Marzie Thomas has been advertising director of the Tri-State Defender since 1991 and was named editor/publisher this year. In a Commercial Appeal profile in February, Thomas, 50, says, “Our mission has always been to tell the truth. We have no other purpose but to make sure the truth gets out.”

In an editorial last week, Thomas wrote that “a free-lance reporter may well have plagiarized stories” and that the Defender “was not the culprit, but rather the victim.”