Sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words. There are no words to describe the pain Bryon Halsey has endured in his life time. Mr. Halsey was falsely accused and convicted in 1988, of the brutal rape and murders of his female companion’s two children. Halsey escaped the death penalty but was sentenced to two life terms plus twenty years. After spending nineteen years in prison, DNA evidence cleared Halsey of the crime and he was exonerated and released on bail last week. The picture published in The New York Times shows Byron Halsey sitting beside his attorney looking stunned with a single tear rolling down his cheek, his hands cuffed and folded thoughtfully beneath his chin. It’s almost as if the reality of the news of his new-found freedom hasn’t really hit him yet. No one can imagine the nightmare of being wrongfully accused, then convicted and sentenced to life in prison. The only thing that could possibly be worse then this scenario is being sentenced to die for a crime you did not commit and that is exactly what’s happened to fourteen of the two hundred people found not-guilty by the Innocence Project, a legal clinic at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in Manhattan.

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We should all be so motivated

In June 2001, a lawyer for Rudy Giuliani stood on the steps outside divorce court and said that the New York mayor had all of $7,000 to his name. But that was before 9/11, of course, and before Giuliani cashed in big time on the fame that followed him afterward.

Giuliani’s net worth stands at $30 million today, much of it coming from the book he wrote and the speeches he has given after the attack on his city transformed him into a national celebrity. As financial disclosure forms released this week show, Giuliani made more than $11 million from speeches in 2006 and the first couple of months of 2007, and $1.8 million of that take — a sum that exceeds the average payout to families from the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund — came from something called “Life Win, Inc. (Get Motivated Seminars).”

Life Win and Get Motivated Seminars are Florida corporations controlled by Peter Lowe, who billed himself as “America’s Success Strategist” until the company with which he was involved — some say he ran it — crashed and burned in 2001.

As St. Petersburg Times reporter Alicia Caldwell reported back in 2003, the Get Motivated series of seminars is part of Lowe’s “comeback attempt.” As Caldwell described it, a Get Motivated seminar is a “daylong program infused with Christianity, patriotism and pumping music suitable for aerobics.” The seminars, pitched at the golf shirt and Dockers crowd, feature “mega-watt superstars” like Zig Ziglar and Suze Orman, plus Lowe and his wife, Tamara — she’s described on her Web site as a “former drug addict and dropout” who delivers a “dynamic, inspiring and motivational” message — and former military men Colin Powell and Tommy Franks.

When Giuliani participates — it looks like he did so about two dozen times over the course of the past year or so — he takes the stage to “New York, New York” with red, white and blue confetti swirling around him. He then uses the attack and the aftermath of 9/11 to illustrate his six principles of leadership, which seem to boil down to having convictions; being optimistic, courageous and well prepared; working as a team; and communicating well. The last of those is just the culmination of the others, Giuliani tells the folks who turn out for the seminars. “You do all five of those things, and communication is just speaking to people,” Caldwell quoted him as saying at one in 2003. “It’s not magic.”

No, maybe not. But collecting nearly $2 million for business platitudes and 9/11 memories, not to mention the $10,000 the Lowes gave to Giuliani’s PAC last year? That’s a pretty good trick.

— Tim Grieve-The War Room www.salon.com

After watching George Tenet flog his book on Meet the Press last Sunday, I worked up a fantasy scenario in my head that sort of put things right for me. For this scenario to work you have to believe or at least picture heaven and hell. I imagined all of the Iraqi war dead including all the American soldiers lined up outside hell. The war dead would be sent down from heaven at the moment of Tenet’s death to greet him as he approaches the gates of hell. Tenet would be compelled to look each of the war victims in the eyes, (that is if they have eyes left in their heads) before he is allowed to pass them by. After he looks each of the victims in the face, he will then be allowed to burn for all eternity in the fiery pits of hell for his role in starting a pre-emptive war that never needed to be fought against an impotent regime that posed no imminent threat to the United States. In none of the interviews that I have watched has George Tenet ever mentioned the victims of the Iraq war, the blood that has been spilled as a result of his ineptitude and that is unforgivable. The fact that he will make money and thereby profit on the bodies and blood of this useless, endless, horrible, tragic war is sinful and immoral and I can not for the life of me understand how he can sleep at night or look at himself in the mirror. He must be a sociopath like OJ Simpson or Ted Bundy, able to compartmentalize his crimes and therefore justify his sins.

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