All Women are NOT Created Equal

In the race for Santa Clara County, D.A., the right woman is on the left.

For the first time in the history of this country, there is growing interest in putting a woman in the White House. And here in California, more and more women are running for local office. But before we heed the feminist call to make our President the First Lady as well, we should probably consider the possibility that being woman, alone, is not enough.

With the 2006 mid-term elections looming and the 2008 presidential race not far behind, Karyn Sinunu and her female rival, Dolores Carr, represent the national dilemma in microcosm and are changing the way we think about law enforcement, politics and the qualities we look for in a leader.

Though Sinunu and Carr are both women, they could not be more different. Sinunu is a Liberal; Carr is a Conservative. Sinunu is a nuancing genius; Carr stays the course.

Perhaps it is unfair to compare them. After all, Sinunu is, as her closest friend and colleague, Deputy D.A. Ed Fernandez says proudly "a star." She began her career at the Santa Clara County D.A.'s office in 1986, after raising two children. She whizzed through her trial assignments in five years, winning the coveted Trial Attorney of the Year award. By '91 she was managing teams and by '94 she was an assistant D. A. Two years ago, Sinunu was promoted to Chief Assistant D. A. for Homicide. Her boss, District Attorney George Kennedy, endorses her candidacy. With experience managing over 180 attorneys and a budget exceeding $60 million, Karyn Sinunu's qualifications are stellar.

Sinunu has authored a victim's rights manual which is now being distributed to all California prosecutors and has developed a procedure for use in child abuse investigations. She is strongly committed to victim's rights, has proposed legislation that would make it a felony to frame someone for a crime and is not afraid to throw out a case if evidence suggests that police (or over-zealous prosecutors) have fingered the wrong man. Now let's take a look at Dolores Carr.

Carr has worked in the D.A.'s office since 1985. A look at her web site turns up a number of endorsements. She is hailed for her "comprehensive knowledge of the law" and for "supervising the grading of the California General Bar Examination." But nothing on her site or in her campaign materials seems to get to the heart of how Dolores Carr thinks. For that, we need to review the case that put Dolores Carr and Karyn Sinunu on opposing sides for the first time.

Back in 1991, Carr was prosecuting a rape case. The alleged perpetrator was a black man who had frequented the 42nd Street Bar & Grill in Palo Alto. Three women accused him of following and harassing them. One said she was raped. While two of the victims were unable to identify their assailant, one picked out a man named Lucas from a photo line-up.

Dr. Lucas, who was in residency at Stanford University, was picked up and charged with stalking, sexual harassment, and rape. Yet, though all three victims claimed the perpetrator had been driving a red car and wore a leather jacket, no red car and no leather jacket ever turned up. What's more, DNA samples taken from the rape victim did not match DNA taken from Lucas. One would think it would have ended there, but it did not.

Dolores Carr, now a California Supreme Court judge, was insistent that Lucas was guilty, and chose to hold him on the lesser charges of stalking and harassment. Not until Karyn Sinunu got involved, months later, was the actual perpetrator found and Dr. Lucas released. Interestingly, the case is in the news again, because the convicted rapist has been released, and has re-offended.

Sinunu and Carr are also facing off again, this time in the race for the D. A.'s office. Carr, who became a judge in 2000, is portraying herself as an "outsider" who will "reform" the D. A.'s office. Here's a quote from her campaign materials: " . . . it is the ethical obligation of the district attorney to seek truth, not simply convictions. Anything less inflicts unnecessary pain and expense upon litigants." Yet when Carr was recently asked about the Lucas case, she said she wouldn't do anything differently.

Despite Carr's campaign rhetoric, the Lucas case demonstrates that Carr lacks Sinunu's wisdom. Had Sinunu not stepped in, one can only guess at the number of months Dr. Lucas would have remained behind bars. What's more, with Lucas in jail, the person ultimately found to be the rapist might never have been charged.

I set up a meeting with Karyn Sinunu to understand what she saw in the Lucas case that Carr missed by "staying the course" despite evidence of innocence.

Sinunu lives in a modest brick house in an upper-middle-class San Jose neighborhood. The yard is impeccably manicured, with short lush grass and well-maintained hedges. She opens the door and leads me into a living room with large, overstuffed furniture in subdued tones. The hardwood floors spread a honey-colored glow throughout the house. The décor is Metropolitan Home. Not fancy, but very nice, and homey. The artwork and the bookcases throughout reflect an appreciation of culture and a lifelong pursuit of education.

Sinunu herself is a mixture of femininity and strength. Dressed in a dark blazer, matching knee-length skirt and leather high-heeled pumps, she is the visual representation of the balance between business and pleasure, style and substance. When she speaks, she conveys a mixture of passion, intelligence, compassion, and a laser-like ability to perceive the essence of things.

Despite the fifteen years that have passed since the Lucas case, she was surprisingly clear on the specifics. Yet what impressed me most was her description of the Lucas interrogation and how she sensed, immediately, that Lucas was an innocent man.

Sinunu: [The police] picked him up. They questioned him at length. And one of the questions was, "Have you ever followed women?" And he said, "yes." I don't know why, but he talked about one time, when he was in his car. He saw a beautiful woman crossing the crosswalk and he circled around the block and looked at her. Now Dr. Lucas, it was clear from watching the video, was a man who was socially naïve and very much a book worm and it was an odd thing for a man to say in that kind of an interview, but he was that forthright. He was very thoughtful in his answers and he was clearly just beaten down by this, I mean shocked, that he had been arrested. So the case came to the District Attorney's office, and based on the statement that he had followed a woman one time, and quite frankly I don't know any man who hasn't probably done the same, but just looking from afar—he wasn't stalking her or anything—he just watched a pretty woman. Based on that statement, he was charged.

Dr. Lucas couldn't make bail. A recent medical school graduate, he had no money, just student loans. He sat in jail for six weeks. Finally, the DNA evidence taken from the rape victim came back. It did not match the DNA taken from Dr. Lucas.

Sinunu: An attorney called me in Palo Alto and said "I'm representing Dr. Lucas, what's going on with your office?" Well, I had just taken over the Sexual Assault unit, so I took the case. I looked at everything. I didn't know how we could possibly prove this. And I had the case dismissed. We were changing our whole theory, I mean, we believed that one person did this . . . that had a certain piece of clothing and a certain car, and we couldn't find anyone who said that Lucas had a leather jacket. We couldn't find any one who said he had a red car, or borrowed a red car. I learned after that, that there was a janitor there at the hospital, at Stanford Hospital, who was little bit obsessed by the case. He kept asking everyone about it. And he was an African American man who drove a red car.

Sinunu discovered that this janitor had a record. He'd been arrested for driving under the influence. When the police arrested him they took his blood to determine his blood alcohol level. Sinunu asked them to run his DNA. She then asked them to compare it to the DNA evidence found on the rape victim. It was a match.

What was it that allowed Karyn Sinunu to grasp what others missed? Many watched the videotape of Dr. Lucas’ interrogation, including Dolores Carr. Others were privy to the same evidence Sinunu had at her disposal. What led Sinunu to question the curious janitor whom nobody else seemed to notice? I contend her finely honed "women's" intuition tipped the balance.

Intuition, to be clear, is not instinct. Instinct tells us to run from danger and to hold our breath when underwater. Intuition is different; it is instinct tempered with wisdom. It requires assessment of the facts surrounding a situation and an awareness of the interests of the players. It necessitates constant assimilation of new information. Intuition requires the ability to "nuance."

A person with highly developed intuition will “smell” something amiss, just as Karyn Sinunu did when she watched the tape of the Lucas interrogation.

It's time to focus our energies on finding and electing leaders who possess the kind of thoughtfulness and intuitive leadership that a woman like Karyn Sinunu can bring. Not content to simply uphold the law, Sinunu is proactively crafting both legislation and guidance to assist her fellow attorneys in finding, prosecuting, and removing from society those criminal elements most dangerous to our communities.

Simultaneously, she is passionately committed to victim's rights, defendant's rights, and the all-important task of protecting our children from exposure to violence.
With a strong background in philosophy and psychology, Sinunu is literally writing the book on how to both prosecute and prevent, the violence that predisposes children to lives as adult offenders. Karyn Sinunu is a visionary.

In the end, whether we are selecting a District Attorney or the next President of the United States, what matters most isn't getting any woman into office, but getting the right woman. And in the race for Santa Clara County D.A., the right woman is on the left.

Immigration Insanity

Why are Republicans so worried that illegal aliens might benefit from amnesty? Why is no one asking how corporate interests responsible for the hiring of illegal aliens are going to be held accountable? "We can't reward illegal behavior." That's what I keep hearing. But aren't the corporations that encouraged/enabled illegal immigrants to come to this country just as responsible for the immigration problem as the immigrants themselves? After all, it's a two-way street: immigrants show up, somebody hires them. Without the second half of that equation, none of this would be happening.

What's more, it is just as illegal to hire illegals as it is illegal for illegals to be here. So why is nobody interested in pursuing legal action against the companies who broke the law for the past 20 years? If we can track down the people who crossed our borders illegally, surely we can find out where they worked.

Yet, I've heard no talk of fining the people and/or businesses that profited from frightened workers, who have historically been over-worked and under-paid. Instead, high-level Republicans (whose own business interests likely benefited from the 12 or so million illegal aliens now working in the United States) are so fearful that the very people they profited from might actually benefit themselves, they are inundating the talk show circuits. And, as usual, they're playing a broken record: "they broke the law" is the favorite tune of the hour--never once do any of them acknowledge the fact that the law was also broken by everybody who profited from hiring illegal aliens. That never seems to come up.

If we want to be fair (though clearly fairness is not the goal) we would charge every individual or company who hired an illegal alien--knowingly or not--a fee. We could base that fee on what it costs to educate a foreigner to be conversant in our complicated language and to understand our complex system of government.

Of course, to be really fair we would have to make the companies that hired illegal immigrants pay back wages as well. They should be forced to cough up the difference between what they paid their workers and what they would have paid if forced to pay minimum wage. That would be an interesting exercise, wouldn't it? At the same time, of course, we would need to crack down, viciously, on any future violations of immigration laws--punishing those hiring even as we seek to punish those sneaking across our borders.

As for those already here, when they have completed and/or tested out of their training, they should be allowed to apply for citizenship through the usual process, while working here and paying taxes. As long as we eliminate any future practice of hiring illegal workers, there will be no incentives for additional illegal immigrants to show up here. The key, however, is enforcement.

As long as we force businesses to pay for their criminal behavior, and the fines are in excess of what they save paying slave wages, there will be no incentive for them to continue to lure illegal immigrants across our borders. When you remove the cause of a problem you don't need to deal with symptoms. Besides, as one comic put it, try building a 700-mile fence without Mexicans. The fence isn't the answer. Enforcing the law is.

We need to admit that we allowed this problem to fester and take responsibility for that fact. What's more, we need to stop acting like it's a new crises--this is not new. The only reason it's coming up now is that Bush can't find a single other area to talk about that gives him even a semblance of credibility with anybody. This is it--his last hurrah. If he can win the hearts of Hispanics everywhere, he won't go out in utter disgrace. He needs something to work on that will make him look better than he does right now. He picked immigration. It's one of the few areas he hasn't already picked up, screwed up and had to run from. Now he figures he can boost the ratings with his peeps by getting Hispanics across the country to side with him. He's a desperate man. This is a desperate move.

It's also a repeat. Remember Reagan? He did the same thing. Only he called it "amnesty." And what happened? We let folks stay but nobody kept up the other end of the deal, the end that said we should start enforcing laws against hiring illegal immigrants, and stop encouraging them to come here covertly. That never happened. So here we are again.

What is the definition of insanity? Oh yeah, doing the same thing and expecting different results.

It's Not About Terrorism, It Never Was

"We are information rich and question poor." --Baroness Susan Greenfield


Everybody's pitching fits about the NSA's phone monitoring project, the one that AT&T/SBC and Verizon signed up for, no questions asked. The one that will provide the government with literally billions of records of phone calls (from cell and land lines), email transactions, videos downloaded and web sites visited. Only Qwest media had the sense to question the legality of the request. Only Quest said, hey, don't you need to give us some paperwork before we hand over records of every call or email, everybody we service, ever made?

The NSA declined to provide the requested/required documentation, so Quest kept their records private, as well they should have. Somebody give them a medal, please.

USA Today's big story, which broke Friday, focuses on the fact that the other two communication giants (AT&T and SBC recently merged) just stepped on up and handed over their stuff. Naturally, people are upset. But nobody's upset for the same reason I am, at least nobody I know of, except Greg Palast. He's the author of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and one of the few journalists in this country who isn't afraid to put two and two together.

Palast has done a lot of research into this and he believes, as do I, that our government is merely using the terrorist threat to intimidate people into complying with requests that would otherwise be seen as both illegal and reprehensible--and, of course, it's working. I can imagine no other circumstance under which the heads of either AT&T or Verizon would so unthinkingly hand over their customers' records. But if you say it's to fight terrorism, what choice do they have, really?

Yet, if this program were a remotely effective tool for fighting terrorism, the NSA could easily have received approval from FISA. In fact, when asked why they didn't go through FISA, at least one official actually said it was because they didn't think FISA would give them approval. Why? Because access to billions of private citizens' records is not a terrorism-fighting tool; it's an information gathering tool that helps the Bush administration understand/control the public mindset.

They aren't using the information to track down Al Qaeda; they're trying to figure out where their biggest political threats are and to eliminate them through some seemingly innocuous legislation that we won't see for what it is and therefore won't know enough to be afraid of. It's not about them spying on us, it's about them preventing us from spying on them. We're not the ones doing stuff we shouldn't--they are. It's another brilliant plan executed by the men who stole two elections, manipulated intelligence and sent us to war so they would have a constant reason to infringe on our personal freedoms and take our money.

The only area of competence, literally, the ONLY area of competence this administration has demonstrated is in the area of public manipulation of information. They have failed, miserably, at every other task put to them. They have focused all their energy and expertise on controlling what we believe and none of their efforts have gone into addressing actual problems and/or providing effective programs to help the American people be safe and prosperous.

The NSA is not cataloguing and monitoring call patterns in order to protect us from terrorism; they're doing it to see which 527s are having the strongest impact via email campaigns. Remember when Republicans tried to make 527s illegal? Well, that didn't work so now they're doing what they think will work, they're going to find a way to compare the political situation in the country with the patterns they see in internet traffic. This will tell them exactly which organizations to target/discredit so they can eliminate or at least minimize political damage done when information they don't like (like how they actually operate and who wins/loses) finds its way into the public domain.

They need to monitor our communications so they can know how the internet hurts/helps them politically. They are looking for patterns. In fact, as one official put it, the data are used for "social network analysis." This is not about fighting Al-Qaeda, this is data mining.

This is at the heart of what should be the national debate and it's time we started facing facts: if they get away with the NSA program and we let them slide on the failure to enforce net neutrality, we will lose our democracy. The only thing that keeps us from being a dictatorship now is our immediate, uncensored, access to critical information. It's that simple.

As for their idiotic claim that, by removing names from phone numbers in the database, people's identities are protected, that's just another technicality. The fact that they aren't getting the phone numbers from the same search they get the phone tracking from is irrelevant in practical terms. However, it's an important distinction because it allows them to claim that they are not performing an illegal search, since they aren't accessing names. Of course, "the phone numbers the NSA collects can easily be cross-checked with other databases to obtain that information." In other words, they'll put the names right back into those records the second they choose to, but it won't be illegal because it wasn't done up front. That's how these people work. Remember Bush promising to fire anybody involved in the leak of Valerie Plame's name?

They tried the same twisted argument then. They claimed that by saying "Joe Wilson's wife" instead of "Valerie Plame" administration officials didn't 'out' her. Of course, Joe Wilson only has one wife. It doesn't matter if they said the name, she was 'outed' just the same. But to them, a group of extremely limited thinkers who don't appear to understand that despite their own twisted thought processes, content is more important than packaging, this is a perfectly legitimate argument.

But that's not the main point either. The real issue here, under all the hoopla over terrorism and invasion of privacy is something infinitely more sinister: the current administration is trying to stop you and me from having the true power of a Democracy at our disposal--they are working furiously to find a way to curtail your ability to access uncensored information.

Do you think the Chinese government is the only client Google can create custom web browser tools for? Think again. I don’t know exactly how the Chinese internet works, but don't think our government can't implement something like that here. They took us to war against our will. They put a puppet president in place and rigged two consecutive elections. Let's not forget that.

When the 2006 mid-term elections create the usual political in-fighting, let's hope somebody is smart enough to disable the argument about our privacy rights being a rational sacrifice to the fight on terror and start calling it like it is. This is a clear violation of our Constitutional rights for the purpose of understanding and manipulating OUR information gathering processes, such that we lose our access to free and unfettered information about our own government. That's what's at stake here.

And while we're at it, it's time to make a distinction between conspiracy theorists (who make stuff up) and people who merely have the ability to recognize a conspiracy when they see one.

The Second Coming

Things fall apart . . the centre cannot hold . . .The best lack all convictions, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. -- W. B. Yeats, The Second Coming

I am not an evangelical, but our president is. People seem loathe to talk about. In his own small circles he's a proud believer; yet in the public eye he's "slouching toward Bethlehem." Fearful of being exposed for the religious fanatic he is, he avoids the discussion. But those who know him, know exactly what's going on.

Perhaps you believe his believing isn't relevant. But it is. It's at the core of his decision-making. And as he is the "decider," it's critical. Just the other night when a friend of his was asked if Bush thinks we should curtail our energy consumption, his friend said, no, absolutely not. George W. Bush believes we are a "blessed" nation. Our lifestyle is fed by the fruits of the land God gave us. We are meant to use it--not save it.

There is, of course, no discussion of how our nation's consumption of much more than what comes from our own large continent fits into God's plan. There is simply an unspoken assumption that if we can get our fat hands on it, it is, apparently, "God's will."

It will be very interesting to see how George W. submits to God's will when Bolivia kicks us out of their country. On May 1, the Washington Post reported that Bolivian President Evo Morales made good on his threat to nationalize the oil and gas fields that "private companies have plundered for years." (Those private interests to which Morales refers, are largely U.S. corporate interests.) While the announcement was not unexpected, it apparently did surprise a few when it was accompanied by a deployment of soldiers to the fields.

Bolivia is not alone in the desire to curtail huge profits, by U.S. interests, while the citizens on whose land they operate benefit little. In Venezuela, over 30 oil contracts were recently voided because the government is now demanding a larger stake in the profits. A similar situation appears to be brewing in Ecuador, where limits on foreign crude profits are becoming law.

But Bolivia is going a step further: in March of this year they opened criminal cases against three former presidents and eight lesser officials for alleged mishandling of foreign oil contracts. It's exactly what the public wants: accountability. Funny how it's happening in Bolivia, but has yet to happen here, in this hotbed of Democracy, this "blessed" nation of ours.

It will be interesting to see if the Bolivian investigations into oil and gas industry corruption will lead to a revisiting of the 1999 water contract Bolivia signed with one of Bechtel's subsidiaries. That deal, a 40-year contract allowing Aguas del Tunari to take over the water supply to Bolivia's third largest city and charge exorbitant rates of the poorest while raking in huge profits, was actually terminated --but only after massive protests. And Bechtel still made out. They sued Bolivia for $25 million based on the loss of profits they could have made if the original contract had played itself out.

Meanwhile, the Bechtel bunch is cleaning up in Iraq. For those who worry that the war was all about oil, that's not entirely true. Sure, we want the oil, but equally important is Iraq's potential for supplying the likes of Bechtel and Halliburton with a seemingly unlimited number of opportunities to overcharge and under deliver on a myriad of contractual services. Iraq is the land of opportunity for large Western corporate interests and the inexhaustible needs our invasion has created were arguably one of the biggest motivations for our invasion of that country in the first place. From the perspective of our evangelical leader, it's all worked out quite nicely.

But there is an enemy lurking--one Bush hasn't the sense to be concerned with--not yet at least. It isn't Al Qaeda and it isn't the Democrats either. It's a black woman named Bunnatine (Bunny) Greenhouse. A former top-ranking official in the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers, Greenhouse took exception to the exclusive, no-bid contracts, the government kept giving to KBR (formerly Kellogg, Brown and Root--a Halliburton subsidiary). This was back in 2004. After two years of questioning the questionable practices of paying over $10M to KBR without offering competitive bidding, Greenhouse was hauled into a general's office and demoted for poor performance. She was also given the option to retire. Greenhouse decided to fight back.

Since then she has managed to continue to work while building her case. It's like holding two jobs, really, but her determination is evident. Her contention is that she was chosen by God to "be a fisher among men." According to a detailed article in April's Vanity Fair, Greenhouse talks about her message from God and says that at the time she didn't know exactly what it meant, but now she does.

It all started in 1997, when General Joe Ballard, the Army Corps's first black chief engineer, gave Greenhouse her personal mission: he wanted her to "shatter the cronyism that had led to bad contracts." She started by enforcing a law already on the books that required small and minority-owned companies to have a fair chance when bidding on government contracts. Since she had to sign off on anything over a certain amount, she would see any really large, lucrative deals, so she had some control. But after a while, she says the cronies tried to beat the system by dividing the work up into smaller projects; hence, the ability to get them signed off by Greenhouse's subordinates, whom were presumably tied to the companies getting the contracts. But even that pales in comparison to what happened when the war began.

Greenhouse describes a high-level government meeting that included members of KBR, the very company responsible for preparing the plan for restoring Iraqi oil. She also says that "it's strict protocol in the procurement business that the contractor who drew up the contingency plan for a job should not be allowed to bid on the job itself: he'd know the exact budget and other details that would give him an unfair advantage." Yet, KBR got the contract.

Since then other troubles with KBR have hit the press. When KBR chose Altanmia Commercial Marketing Company to supply gas to Iraq at $2.65/gallon, twice what others would have charged, people were up in arms. But instead of getting to the bottom of the scandal, the Army Corps of Engineers signed a waiver behind Greenhouse's back that essentially said they didn't want to see KBR's records and nobody else was going to see them either. As the contractor who hired KBR, the Corps had the legal right to do that--the question is, who within the Corps would give that order? No one seems to know.

But the story isn't over. Whatever is going on with Iraqi oil and KBR will come out in the end because of people like Bunny Greenhouse. Just as President Bush feels a sense of righteousness to his cause, Greenhouse too senses a greater destiny, pulling her toward a cause that is in exact opposition to that of our President.

While Bush manipulates the truth so he can continue to take from others by force, shoving his misguided ideology onto a frightened and ignorant group of followers who fail to see beyond the surface, Bunnatine Greenhouse is fighting to reveal the truth and free the oppressed.

Can you believe it? Our president turned out to be the anti-Christ and Jesus is a black chick. What will they think of next?