Paranoid Yet?
____________________________________________________________________
2,000 Young American Lives Ended By Lies. Why?
Government Surveillance In The U.K. Why?
Churches in America Probed By I.R.S. Why?
____________________________________________________________________
If you are not paranoid as yet, then perhaps you should be. The threats that are waking us up in America are not specific to America, but rather are occurring, alarmingly, throughout the so-called Free World. Riots in Europe: and if you remember your American history you can recall the times that Americans have rioted: Civil Rights and Integration, anti-Viet Nam War—in other words, events which ordinary citizens have felt strongly enough about to walk down off their stoops and porches to protest en masse. You don’t have to know chapter and verse why people are rioting in Paris and other European cities. What you have to remember is that events have become so intolerable to a significant portion of these citizens that they are compelled by circumstances to join forces in order to effect change.
Our young citizens in America are also taking to the streets to protest the current state of America: it has been many years since our college and high school students were impelled into our streets by the events of our times.
What is most alarming is that the majority of our leading newspapers are not providing the coverage that these protests deserve: Why? Are there conflict of interest issues among the wealthy owners and editors of these news organs?
We are so accustomed to our government working in the background, and accustomed to revelations from the press resulting instantly in positive change that we are failing to realized that the private agenda of criminals masquerading as ‘Neo-cons’ is being furthered no matter what revelations and insights are forthcoming.
We are in trouble and only massive demonstration of public opinion will succeed in turning the run-away forces threatening our world back to the will of the people.
Paranoid is a word fraught with ill connotation and perhaps a better word is watchful: most folks do not have the luxury of deep reading of a variety of press. It falls to those of us who, for whatever reasons, have the time to glean evidence of deceit and malfeasance from the daily news. Information relative to the changes in our world which limit liberty and justice in order to pursue an agenda of greed must be passed to as wide an audience as possible while it is still possible to do so.
Either we must all be rich or we must all be poor: Capitalism v. Communism is no longer a valid argument. That 1% of the world’s population is intent on garnering all the natural resources left to us for their own use is definitely a political idea worth looking at, because that leaves the rest of us in pretty poor shape.
That we might have to resort to encryption in order to say what is on our minds is as real as tomorrow or the next day. Paranoia is the new political party. Join up.
_________________________________________________________________
ROBERT SCHEER
Lying with intelligence
Robert ScheerNovember 8, 2005
WHO IN THE White House knew about DITSUM No. 044-02 and when did they know it?That's the newly declassified smoking-gun document, originally prepared by the Defense Intelligence Agency in February 2002 but ignored by President Bush. Its declassification this weekend blows another huge hole in Bush's claim that he was acting on the best intelligence available when he pitched the invasion of Iraq as a way to prevent an Al Qaeda terror attack using weapons of mass destruction.The report demolished the credibility of the key Al Qaeda informant the administration relied on to make its claim that a working alliance existed between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. It was circulated widely within the U.S. government a full eight months before Bush used the prisoner's lies to argue for an invasion of Iraq because "we've learned that Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and deadly gases."Al Qaeda senior military trainer Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi — a Libyan captured in Pakistan in 2001 — was probably "intentionally misleading the debriefers," the DIA report concluded in one of two paragraphs finally declassified at the request of Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and released by his office over the weekend. The report also said: "Ibn al-Shaykh has been undergoing debriefs for several weeks and may be describing scenarios to the debriefers that he knows will retain their interest." He got that right. Folks in the highest places were very interested in claims along the lines Libi was peddling, even though they went against both logic and the preponderance of intelligence gathered to that point about possible collaboration between two enemies of the U.S. that were fundamentally at odds with each other. Al Qaeda was able to create a base in Iraq only after the U.S. overthrow of Hussein, not before. "Saddam's regime is intensely secular and is wary of Islamic revolutionary movements," accurately noted the DIA. Yet Bush used the informant's already discredited tall tale in his key Oct. 7, 2002, speech just before the Senate voted on whether to authorize the use of force in Iraq and again in two speeches in February, just ahead of the invasion.Leading up to the war, Secretary of State Colin Powell tried to sell it to the United Nations, while Vice President Dick Cheney, national security advisor Condoleezza Rice, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer and Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith repeated it breathlessly for homeland audiences. The con worked, and Americans came to believe the lie that Hussein was associated with the Sept. 11 hijackers.Even CIA Director George Tenet publicly fell into line, ignoring his own agency's dissent that Libi would not have been in a position to know what he said he knew. In fact, Libi, according to the DIA, could not name any Iraqis involved, any chemical or biological material used or where the training allegedly occurred. In January 2004, the prisoner recanted his story, and the next month the CIA withdrew all intelligence reports based on his false information.One by one, the exotic intelligence factoids Bush's researchers culled from raw intelligence data files to publicly bolster their claim of imminent threat — the yellowcake uranium from Niger, the aluminum tubes for processing uranium, the Prague meeting with Mohamed Atta, the discredited Iraqi informants "Curveball" and Ahmad Chalabi — have been exposed as previously known frauds. When it came to selling an invasion of Iraq it had wanted to launch before 9/11, the Bush White House systematically ignored the best available intelligence from U.S. agencies or any other reliable source.It should be remembered that while Bush and his gang were successfully scaring the wits out of us about the alleged Iraq-Al Qaeda alliance, U.N. weapons inspectors were on the ground in Iraq. Weapons inspectors Hans Blix and 2005 Nobel Peace Prize winner Mohamed ElBaradei promised they could finish scouring the country if given a few more months. But instead, they were abruptly chased out by an invasion necessitated by what the president told us was a "unique and urgent threat."Bush exploited the worldwide horror felt over the 9/11 attacks to justify the Iraq invasion. His outrageous claim, repeated over and over before and after he dragged the nation into an unnecessary war, was never supported by a single piece of credible evidence. The Bush defense of what is arguably the biggest lie ever put over on the American people is that everyone had gotten the intelligence wrong. Not so at the highest level of U.S. intelligence, as DITSUM No. 044-02 so clearly shows. How could the president not have known?
Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times
________________________________________________________________
Devil's Advocate: Here comes 1984 Will we be imprisoned for using encryption?
By Martin Brampton
Published: Tuesday 01 November 2005
Are you prepared to accept government surveillance of your every move? Martin Brampton isn't, despite what looks like the coming of a truly Orwellian society.
Maybe I'm paranoid but that doesn't prove they aren't out to get me. These days, it seems as if the government plans to get us all well and truly under its thumb. If the ID cards are not enough, then the anti-terrorist legislation will be.
Authoritarians like to dismiss the 'civil rights industry'. Odd really, since we know exactly what happens in countries like Uzbekistan where people don't have civil rights: arbitrary arrest, torture and imprisonment. Are the victims guilty? No one can ever know but probably not in many cases. Lack of proper legal procedure encourages false reports based on grudges.
Even in this country, while most police officers behave well, there has always been a strand of corruption that has emerged in high-profile miscarriages of justice. The same thing happens on a daily basis in trivial cases where a minority of policemen abuse their powers simply to assert superiority over some hapless individual.
So it is both astonishing and frightening that government is rushing to limit our rights. And it is not as if the complaints are coming from the hoi polloi. No less a person than the UK's Information Commissioner is sounding warnings about the trend towards a surveillance society. He objects to the insistence that we must all record information such as everywhere we have ever lived and then keep updating it until we die.
Moreover, all this is likely to be linked to CCTV face recognition and automatic number plate recognition. George Orwell's novel 1984 was inspired by the fear that a Stalinist communist regime would come to dominate people's lives. It seems as if, with the threat of Kremlin domination long gone, we are going to allow our own government to create 1984 for us.
It is also astonishing and frightening that such an enormous change is being rushed through with little sign of serious thought. Over centuries, we evolved a situation where the individual citizen did not have to account for themselves unless there was evidence of wrongdoing. We do not have to tell anyone where we live or what we are doing. All that seems about to end.
One thought that occurred to me was that I could keep out of at least some of these government computers now that I travel much less. More and more, I am able to work in my office, a hundred yards from home. There are no CCTV cameras in the small town where I live, and quite a few days go by without the use of a car. Inevitably, I depend heavily on communication through the internet.
While at present, most of what I do is in more or less plain text, I started thinking that perhaps more use of encryption would be appropriate - not because I am engaged in law breaking but simply because I would like to assert my right to communicate with who I like and not with anyone else.
But then it occurred to me that the US counted encryption as 'munitions' because it could be used in connection with doubtful activities. It might seem, therefore, that in the government's obsession with terrorism, use of encryption might be seen as tantamount to carrying a bomb in a backpack. Merely exchanging harmless messages with friends and colleagues might be seen as suspicious activity and subject to months of imprisonment without trial.
That leads me to a simple conclusion. I do not want an ID card or to be obliged to constantly feed government computers with details of my life. While I no more wish to be blown to bits than anyone else, I would rather take my chance on it than give up any of my civil rights. Surely life is an adventure in which we have to accept some risks.
Story URL: http://software.silicon.com/security/0,39024655,39153818,00.htm
_________________________________________________________________
THE NATION
Conservatives Also Irked by IRS Probe of Churches
The agency's warning to All Saints is part of a wider look into political activity by nonprofits.
By Jason Felch and Patricia Ward BiedermanTimes Staff WritersNovember 8, 2005
The IRS threat to revoke the tax-exempt status of All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena because of an antiwar sermon there during the 2004 presidential election is part of a larger, controversial federal investigation of political activity at churches and nonprofit groups.Over the last year, the Internal Revenue Service has looked at more than 100 tax-exempt organizations across the country for allegations of promoting — either explicitly or implicitly — candidates on both ends of the political spectrum, according to the IRS. None have lost their nonprofit status, though investigations continue into about 60 of those.The IRS denies any political motivation behind the initiative it started last year. The Treasury Department's inspector general found in February that there was some mismanagement of the investigations but no indication of them being used as a political cudgel to silence critics of the Bush administration.However, the IRS action has triggered an unusual coalition of critics who say they are concerned about the effect on freedom of speech and religion.When Ted Haggard, head of the 30-million-member National Assn. of Evangelicals, heard about the All Saints case Monday, he told his staff to contact the National Council of Churches, a more liberal group.Haggard said he personally supports the war in Iraq and probably would not agree with much in the Rev. George Regas' 2004 sermon at All Saints, which was cited by the IRS as the basis for its investigation. But Haggard said he wants to work with the council of churches "in doing whatever it takes to get the IRS to stop" such actions."It is a violation of the Constitution for the IRS to threaten that church. It may not be a violation of IRS regulations, but IRS regulations have been wrong," said Haggard, who is pastor of the 12,000-member New Life Church in Colorado Springs.Robert Edgar, general secretary of the National Council of Churches, cheered when he heard of Haggard's offer, which Edgar said represented a rare reaching out by the evangelical group to the council.Edgar, a United Methodist minister, former Democratic congressman from Pennsylvania and ex-president of the Claremont School of Theology, said the IRS move against All Saints appeared to be "a political witch hunt on George Regas and progressive ideology. It's got to stop." He stressed that Regas did not endorse a candidate in the sermon.Edgar said he did not favor a bill repeatedly introduced by Rep. Walter Jones (R-N.C.) that would allow pastors to endorse candidates without putting their church's tax-exempt status at risk. Existing law is adequate, as long as enforcement does not vary for churches with different ideologies, Edgar said.The tax code prohibits nonprofits from "participating or intervening in any political campaign on behalf of, or in opposition to, any candidate for public office." The ban includes endorsements, donations, fundraising or any other activity "that may be beneficial or detrimental to any particular candidate."Advocating for ballot initiatives, as many California churches have done in advance of today's special election, is a separate issue, tax experts said. Churches and other tax-exempt organizations are allowed to engage in lobbying as long as "a substantial part of the organization's activities is not intended to influence legislation." Savvy churches make sure they don't draw unwanted attention from the IRS, church officials and others said.When elections near, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles sometimes sends reminders to local parishes of its guidelines on political action. "We don't endorse or oppose candidates, but we can endorse ballot propositions when there is a moral or ethical issue involved," said archdiocese spokesman Tod Tamberg, who knew of no local Catholic churches under IRS scrutiny. This weekend, during Mass at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, Archbishop Roger Mahony endorsed Proposition 73, the state ballot initiative requiring parental notification before an abortion can be performed on a minor.The Rev. William Turner, senior pastor at New Revelations Missionary Baptist Church in Pasadena, said he has never been questioned by the IRS about political activity at his church, despite his reputation as a supporter of President Bush. "We tell our members to vote their conscience," Turner said. "I've been very careful to preach the Gospel, and I can't get into any problems with the IRS for preaching the Gospel."The Rev. John Hunter, pastor of 18,000-member First African Methodist Episcopal Church in South Los Angeles, said his church follows the IRS rules. "Churches have to be very careful," he said.First AME also taps the expertise of member Kerman Maddox, a public relations and political consultant. He tells candidates they can worship at First AME but cannot speak from the pulpit about their candidacy. Instead, he tells them "they can shake hands, pass out literature and campaign to their heart's delight" if they stay off church property. The church doesn't endorse ballot initiatives, he said, and it bans campaign literature at the church.At All Saints, Rector J. Edwin Bacon on Sunday told the congregants that the guest sermon by Regas, a former rector, on Oct. 31, 2004, had prompted the warning from the IRS. In the sermon, Regas did not instruct parishioners whom to support in the presidential election but said that Jesus would have told the president that his Iraq policies had failed.The IRS' letter cited a Times article describing Regas' sermon as having triggered the agency's concerns. The church denies it violated tax rules and has retained a Washington law firm to help argue its position.Using such news reports and tips from the public and interested groups, the IRS identified more than 100 nonprofits that had allegedly intervened politically in the 2004 presidential election. The agency reviewed the cases and selected more than 60 for fuller examination. About of third of those organizations were churches, officials said. The IRS is barred by law from identifying those nonprofits, and the agency would not comment on the specifics of the All Saints case or others.Steven Miller, the IRS commissioner of tax-exempt and governmental entities, said there is nothing political about how cases are chosen. Churches need to be more cautious about what they say during election seasons, and make it clear when they're not speaking for the church, Miller said. "If there's no election, there's no potential for intervention."The courts have said, yes, you have freedom of speech, but not the right to tax-exempt status," he added.The best-known target of the IRS initiative is the NAACP. The IRS has cited a July 2004 speech in which the organization's chairman, Julian Bond, criticized the Bush administration's policies on civil rights as the cause for the audit. The NAACP is fighting the audit.In 1976, Congress passed a law that required audits of churches to be done only if there was a "reasonable basis" to believe a violation had occurred, and made such audits subject to a special approval process from senior IRS officials. Marcus Owens, the former head of tax-exempt organizations at the IRS and now a private attorney representing All Saints, said that the more recent IRS policy changes lowered the threshold for church audits, allowing front-line IRS agents to pursue probes with only cursory approval from above."This is exactly the sort of 1st Amendment briar patch the Congress wanted to keep the IRS out of," said Owens. The IRS disputed Owens' contention, saying audits still face a rigorous approval process by high-level agency officials.On Monday, Regas did a half a dozen interviews with reporters from local and national newspapers, radio and television. And he was inundated with phone calls and e-mail messages, "all positive," he said.When he was asked if he had any regrets about his 2004 sermon, he said: "No regrets. I only wish I had preached it with greater intensity."
Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times
__________________________________________________________________
2,000 Young American Lives Ended By Lies. Why?
Government Surveillance In The U.K. Why?
Churches in America Probed By I.R.S. Why?
____________________________________________________________________
If you are not paranoid as yet, then perhaps you should be. The threats that are waking us up in America are not specific to America, but rather are occurring, alarmingly, throughout the so-called Free World. Riots in Europe: and if you remember your American history you can recall the times that Americans have rioted: Civil Rights and Integration, anti-Viet Nam War—in other words, events which ordinary citizens have felt strongly enough about to walk down off their stoops and porches to protest en masse. You don’t have to know chapter and verse why people are rioting in Paris and other European cities. What you have to remember is that events have become so intolerable to a significant portion of these citizens that they are compelled by circumstances to join forces in order to effect change.
Our young citizens in America are also taking to the streets to protest the current state of America: it has been many years since our college and high school students were impelled into our streets by the events of our times.
What is most alarming is that the majority of our leading newspapers are not providing the coverage that these protests deserve: Why? Are there conflict of interest issues among the wealthy owners and editors of these news organs?
We are so accustomed to our government working in the background, and accustomed to revelations from the press resulting instantly in positive change that we are failing to realized that the private agenda of criminals masquerading as ‘Neo-cons’ is being furthered no matter what revelations and insights are forthcoming.
We are in trouble and only massive demonstration of public opinion will succeed in turning the run-away forces threatening our world back to the will of the people.
Paranoid is a word fraught with ill connotation and perhaps a better word is watchful: most folks do not have the luxury of deep reading of a variety of press. It falls to those of us who, for whatever reasons, have the time to glean evidence of deceit and malfeasance from the daily news. Information relative to the changes in our world which limit liberty and justice in order to pursue an agenda of greed must be passed to as wide an audience as possible while it is still possible to do so.
Either we must all be rich or we must all be poor: Capitalism v. Communism is no longer a valid argument. That 1% of the world’s population is intent on garnering all the natural resources left to us for their own use is definitely a political idea worth looking at, because that leaves the rest of us in pretty poor shape.
That we might have to resort to encryption in order to say what is on our minds is as real as tomorrow or the next day. Paranoia is the new political party. Join up.
_________________________________________________________________
ROBERT SCHEER
Lying with intelligence
Robert ScheerNovember 8, 2005
WHO IN THE White House knew about DITSUM No. 044-02 and when did they know it?That's the newly declassified smoking-gun document, originally prepared by the Defense Intelligence Agency in February 2002 but ignored by President Bush. Its declassification this weekend blows another huge hole in Bush's claim that he was acting on the best intelligence available when he pitched the invasion of Iraq as a way to prevent an Al Qaeda terror attack using weapons of mass destruction.The report demolished the credibility of the key Al Qaeda informant the administration relied on to make its claim that a working alliance existed between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. It was circulated widely within the U.S. government a full eight months before Bush used the prisoner's lies to argue for an invasion of Iraq because "we've learned that Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and deadly gases."Al Qaeda senior military trainer Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi — a Libyan captured in Pakistan in 2001 — was probably "intentionally misleading the debriefers," the DIA report concluded in one of two paragraphs finally declassified at the request of Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and released by his office over the weekend. The report also said: "Ibn al-Shaykh has been undergoing debriefs for several weeks and may be describing scenarios to the debriefers that he knows will retain their interest." He got that right. Folks in the highest places were very interested in claims along the lines Libi was peddling, even though they went against both logic and the preponderance of intelligence gathered to that point about possible collaboration between two enemies of the U.S. that were fundamentally at odds with each other. Al Qaeda was able to create a base in Iraq only after the U.S. overthrow of Hussein, not before. "Saddam's regime is intensely secular and is wary of Islamic revolutionary movements," accurately noted the DIA. Yet Bush used the informant's already discredited tall tale in his key Oct. 7, 2002, speech just before the Senate voted on whether to authorize the use of force in Iraq and again in two speeches in February, just ahead of the invasion.Leading up to the war, Secretary of State Colin Powell tried to sell it to the United Nations, while Vice President Dick Cheney, national security advisor Condoleezza Rice, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer and Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith repeated it breathlessly for homeland audiences. The con worked, and Americans came to believe the lie that Hussein was associated with the Sept. 11 hijackers.Even CIA Director George Tenet publicly fell into line, ignoring his own agency's dissent that Libi would not have been in a position to know what he said he knew. In fact, Libi, according to the DIA, could not name any Iraqis involved, any chemical or biological material used or where the training allegedly occurred. In January 2004, the prisoner recanted his story, and the next month the CIA withdrew all intelligence reports based on his false information.One by one, the exotic intelligence factoids Bush's researchers culled from raw intelligence data files to publicly bolster their claim of imminent threat — the yellowcake uranium from Niger, the aluminum tubes for processing uranium, the Prague meeting with Mohamed Atta, the discredited Iraqi informants "Curveball" and Ahmad Chalabi — have been exposed as previously known frauds. When it came to selling an invasion of Iraq it had wanted to launch before 9/11, the Bush White House systematically ignored the best available intelligence from U.S. agencies or any other reliable source.It should be remembered that while Bush and his gang were successfully scaring the wits out of us about the alleged Iraq-Al Qaeda alliance, U.N. weapons inspectors were on the ground in Iraq. Weapons inspectors Hans Blix and 2005 Nobel Peace Prize winner Mohamed ElBaradei promised they could finish scouring the country if given a few more months. But instead, they were abruptly chased out by an invasion necessitated by what the president told us was a "unique and urgent threat."Bush exploited the worldwide horror felt over the 9/11 attacks to justify the Iraq invasion. His outrageous claim, repeated over and over before and after he dragged the nation into an unnecessary war, was never supported by a single piece of credible evidence. The Bush defense of what is arguably the biggest lie ever put over on the American people is that everyone had gotten the intelligence wrong. Not so at the highest level of U.S. intelligence, as DITSUM No. 044-02 so clearly shows. How could the president not have known?
Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times
________________________________________________________________
Devil's Advocate: Here comes 1984 Will we be imprisoned for using encryption?
By Martin Brampton
Published: Tuesday 01 November 2005
Are you prepared to accept government surveillance of your every move? Martin Brampton isn't, despite what looks like the coming of a truly Orwellian society.
Maybe I'm paranoid but that doesn't prove they aren't out to get me. These days, it seems as if the government plans to get us all well and truly under its thumb. If the ID cards are not enough, then the anti-terrorist legislation will be.
Authoritarians like to dismiss the 'civil rights industry'. Odd really, since we know exactly what happens in countries like Uzbekistan where people don't have civil rights: arbitrary arrest, torture and imprisonment. Are the victims guilty? No one can ever know but probably not in many cases. Lack of proper legal procedure encourages false reports based on grudges.
Even in this country, while most police officers behave well, there has always been a strand of corruption that has emerged in high-profile miscarriages of justice. The same thing happens on a daily basis in trivial cases where a minority of policemen abuse their powers simply to assert superiority over some hapless individual.
So it is both astonishing and frightening that government is rushing to limit our rights. And it is not as if the complaints are coming from the hoi polloi. No less a person than the UK's Information Commissioner is sounding warnings about the trend towards a surveillance society. He objects to the insistence that we must all record information such as everywhere we have ever lived and then keep updating it until we die.
Moreover, all this is likely to be linked to CCTV face recognition and automatic number plate recognition. George Orwell's novel 1984 was inspired by the fear that a Stalinist communist regime would come to dominate people's lives. It seems as if, with the threat of Kremlin domination long gone, we are going to allow our own government to create 1984 for us.
It is also astonishing and frightening that such an enormous change is being rushed through with little sign of serious thought. Over centuries, we evolved a situation where the individual citizen did not have to account for themselves unless there was evidence of wrongdoing. We do not have to tell anyone where we live or what we are doing. All that seems about to end.
One thought that occurred to me was that I could keep out of at least some of these government computers now that I travel much less. More and more, I am able to work in my office, a hundred yards from home. There are no CCTV cameras in the small town where I live, and quite a few days go by without the use of a car. Inevitably, I depend heavily on communication through the internet.
While at present, most of what I do is in more or less plain text, I started thinking that perhaps more use of encryption would be appropriate - not because I am engaged in law breaking but simply because I would like to assert my right to communicate with who I like and not with anyone else.
But then it occurred to me that the US counted encryption as 'munitions' because it could be used in connection with doubtful activities. It might seem, therefore, that in the government's obsession with terrorism, use of encryption might be seen as tantamount to carrying a bomb in a backpack. Merely exchanging harmless messages with friends and colleagues might be seen as suspicious activity and subject to months of imprisonment without trial.
That leads me to a simple conclusion. I do not want an ID card or to be obliged to constantly feed government computers with details of my life. While I no more wish to be blown to bits than anyone else, I would rather take my chance on it than give up any of my civil rights. Surely life is an adventure in which we have to accept some risks.
Story URL: http://software.silicon.com/security/0,39024655,39153818,00.htm
_________________________________________________________________
THE NATION
Conservatives Also Irked by IRS Probe of Churches
The agency's warning to All Saints is part of a wider look into political activity by nonprofits.
By Jason Felch and Patricia Ward BiedermanTimes Staff WritersNovember 8, 2005
The IRS threat to revoke the tax-exempt status of All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena because of an antiwar sermon there during the 2004 presidential election is part of a larger, controversial federal investigation of political activity at churches and nonprofit groups.Over the last year, the Internal Revenue Service has looked at more than 100 tax-exempt organizations across the country for allegations of promoting — either explicitly or implicitly — candidates on both ends of the political spectrum, according to the IRS. None have lost their nonprofit status, though investigations continue into about 60 of those.The IRS denies any political motivation behind the initiative it started last year. The Treasury Department's inspector general found in February that there was some mismanagement of the investigations but no indication of them being used as a political cudgel to silence critics of the Bush administration.However, the IRS action has triggered an unusual coalition of critics who say they are concerned about the effect on freedom of speech and religion.When Ted Haggard, head of the 30-million-member National Assn. of Evangelicals, heard about the All Saints case Monday, he told his staff to contact the National Council of Churches, a more liberal group.Haggard said he personally supports the war in Iraq and probably would not agree with much in the Rev. George Regas' 2004 sermon at All Saints, which was cited by the IRS as the basis for its investigation. But Haggard said he wants to work with the council of churches "in doing whatever it takes to get the IRS to stop" such actions."It is a violation of the Constitution for the IRS to threaten that church. It may not be a violation of IRS regulations, but IRS regulations have been wrong," said Haggard, who is pastor of the 12,000-member New Life Church in Colorado Springs.Robert Edgar, general secretary of the National Council of Churches, cheered when he heard of Haggard's offer, which Edgar said represented a rare reaching out by the evangelical group to the council.Edgar, a United Methodist minister, former Democratic congressman from Pennsylvania and ex-president of the Claremont School of Theology, said the IRS move against All Saints appeared to be "a political witch hunt on George Regas and progressive ideology. It's got to stop." He stressed that Regas did not endorse a candidate in the sermon.Edgar said he did not favor a bill repeatedly introduced by Rep. Walter Jones (R-N.C.) that would allow pastors to endorse candidates without putting their church's tax-exempt status at risk. Existing law is adequate, as long as enforcement does not vary for churches with different ideologies, Edgar said.The tax code prohibits nonprofits from "participating or intervening in any political campaign on behalf of, or in opposition to, any candidate for public office." The ban includes endorsements, donations, fundraising or any other activity "that may be beneficial or detrimental to any particular candidate."Advocating for ballot initiatives, as many California churches have done in advance of today's special election, is a separate issue, tax experts said. Churches and other tax-exempt organizations are allowed to engage in lobbying as long as "a substantial part of the organization's activities is not intended to influence legislation." Savvy churches make sure they don't draw unwanted attention from the IRS, church officials and others said.When elections near, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles sometimes sends reminders to local parishes of its guidelines on political action. "We don't endorse or oppose candidates, but we can endorse ballot propositions when there is a moral or ethical issue involved," said archdiocese spokesman Tod Tamberg, who knew of no local Catholic churches under IRS scrutiny. This weekend, during Mass at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, Archbishop Roger Mahony endorsed Proposition 73, the state ballot initiative requiring parental notification before an abortion can be performed on a minor.The Rev. William Turner, senior pastor at New Revelations Missionary Baptist Church in Pasadena, said he has never been questioned by the IRS about political activity at his church, despite his reputation as a supporter of President Bush. "We tell our members to vote their conscience," Turner said. "I've been very careful to preach the Gospel, and I can't get into any problems with the IRS for preaching the Gospel."The Rev. John Hunter, pastor of 18,000-member First African Methodist Episcopal Church in South Los Angeles, said his church follows the IRS rules. "Churches have to be very careful," he said.First AME also taps the expertise of member Kerman Maddox, a public relations and political consultant. He tells candidates they can worship at First AME but cannot speak from the pulpit about their candidacy. Instead, he tells them "they can shake hands, pass out literature and campaign to their heart's delight" if they stay off church property. The church doesn't endorse ballot initiatives, he said, and it bans campaign literature at the church.At All Saints, Rector J. Edwin Bacon on Sunday told the congregants that the guest sermon by Regas, a former rector, on Oct. 31, 2004, had prompted the warning from the IRS. In the sermon, Regas did not instruct parishioners whom to support in the presidential election but said that Jesus would have told the president that his Iraq policies had failed.The IRS' letter cited a Times article describing Regas' sermon as having triggered the agency's concerns. The church denies it violated tax rules and has retained a Washington law firm to help argue its position.Using such news reports and tips from the public and interested groups, the IRS identified more than 100 nonprofits that had allegedly intervened politically in the 2004 presidential election. The agency reviewed the cases and selected more than 60 for fuller examination. About of third of those organizations were churches, officials said. The IRS is barred by law from identifying those nonprofits, and the agency would not comment on the specifics of the All Saints case or others.Steven Miller, the IRS commissioner of tax-exempt and governmental entities, said there is nothing political about how cases are chosen. Churches need to be more cautious about what they say during election seasons, and make it clear when they're not speaking for the church, Miller said. "If there's no election, there's no potential for intervention."The courts have said, yes, you have freedom of speech, but not the right to tax-exempt status," he added.The best-known target of the IRS initiative is the NAACP. The IRS has cited a July 2004 speech in which the organization's chairman, Julian Bond, criticized the Bush administration's policies on civil rights as the cause for the audit. The NAACP is fighting the audit.In 1976, Congress passed a law that required audits of churches to be done only if there was a "reasonable basis" to believe a violation had occurred, and made such audits subject to a special approval process from senior IRS officials. Marcus Owens, the former head of tax-exempt organizations at the IRS and now a private attorney representing All Saints, said that the more recent IRS policy changes lowered the threshold for church audits, allowing front-line IRS agents to pursue probes with only cursory approval from above."This is exactly the sort of 1st Amendment briar patch the Congress wanted to keep the IRS out of," said Owens. The IRS disputed Owens' contention, saying audits still face a rigorous approval process by high-level agency officials.On Monday, Regas did a half a dozen interviews with reporters from local and national newspapers, radio and television. And he was inundated with phone calls and e-mail messages, "all positive," he said.When he was asked if he had any regrets about his 2004 sermon, he said: "No regrets. I only wish I had preached it with greater intensity."
Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times
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