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| Right-Wingers PISS ON CHRIST ... IN A FLASH-FORWARD: Drunkard Bush=Pontius Pilate |
| 01.31.04 (5:08 pm) [edit] |
Pontius Pilate laughed and ridiculed Jesus Christ who spoke of redemption and forgiveness before Pilate had him killed ... The hypocritical Christian right-wingers PISS ON CHRIST as they attack those who have helped the poor while they trample on the necks of the poor themselves ... IN A FLASH-FORWARD from Pontius Pilate's hate-filled rhetoric that Christ condemned:--
Bush has his hate-filled propagandist network out-in-arms to scream "[i]Chappaquiddick[/i]" at the top of their lungs every time Senator Ted Kennedy criticizes his corrupt administration. Where is the moral high-ground that these Christian right-wing hypocrites falsely claim to hold?
Christ spoke of redemption and forgiveness through prayer and good works. Senator Ted Kennedy has one of the best legislative records in Congress for helping those in need: the vulnerable, the helpless, the poor, working people, and those struggling to survive. Kennedy's good works follow, a hell of alot more, the teachings and sermons that Christ taught us, than Drunkard Dubya's [i]Pontius Pilate-like [/i]crimes and atrocities against innocent human beings.
Contrast that with ne'er-do-well Dubya, the Deserter, Liar, Thief, Traitor and War Criminal, who has never helped anyone in his failed life because he is a failed drunkard and congenital idiot who would be slopping toilets in jail, if his Poppy wasn't the Head of the RICH BUSH CRIME FAMILY. Bush vomits hypocritical screed about Christ while he PISSES ON CHRIST with his murder of innocent people in wars to enrich his putrid family and corporate paymasters.
[i]Chappaquiddick[/i]? A terrible tragedy that Senator Kennedy has to live with. However, in the aftermath of this horrible event, Kennedy has worked hard and achieved a long track-record of good works. Kennedy's admonishment of Bush's lousy foreign and domestic agenda makes sense and that is what draws Dubya's virulent and hate-filled attack.
[i]Deserter in a druken stupor banging sluts in hotel rooms while comrades-in-arms fight & die in Vietnam[/i]? Bush is too brain-dead to remember where he was and who he was fucking at the time. [i]ANY[/i] good works? Zip, Zero, NADA! ... [i]Instead, Slut Bush's crimes[/i]? 520+ U.S. Soldiers & Thousands of Innocent Iraqi Civilians massacred to enrich his Corporate Pimps: Halliburton, Bechtel, Carlyle Group, Unocal, etc. ...
[b]George W. Bush - Deserter - AWOL[/b], http://whistleass.typepad.com...
REMEMBER Jesus Christ said, "[b]whatever you do for the least of these my brothers, you did it unto me[/b]." http://www.thechristian-cente...
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| September 11 Inquiry Could Become Election Embarrassment for Bush |
| 01.31.04 (6:23 am) [edit] |
[b]September 11 Inquiry Could Become Election Embarrassment for Bush[/b], http://www.commondreams.org/h...
WASHINGTON - The White House is resisting pressure to push the deadline of the main inquiry into the September 11 attacks closer to the November presidential election in a move which could embarrass President George W. Bush.
The US Congress originally gave the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon The United States 18 months to finish its investigation into the 2001 hijacked plane strikes. That would take it to May 27.
But the commission this week asked for at least two months more to complete its work.
"We are telling the Congress and the president what we need to do the best possible job," said commission chairman Thomas Kean. "Much work remains."
Investigators looking into the attacks on the World Trade Center towers in New York and the Defense Department headquarters in Washington -- which left about 3,000 dead -- have reported several bureaucratic obstacles.
Kean, a former governor of New Jersey state, has highlighted how the Bush administration has refused to give access to some secret documents and for some top officials to give evidence.
The commission has said it still wants national security advisor Condoleezza Rice to testify.
Evidence given this week by former officials of the Federal Aviation Administration about security failures reinforced Kean's calls for a deadline extension.
The White House, which opposed the creation of the commission -- made up of five Democrats and five Republicans -- is clearly embarrassed, experts said.
"It's just the closer that it gets to the election the more sensitive the issue becomes, especially for a president who's strong point is national security," said Stephen Hess, a politics specialist at the Brookings Institution in Washington.
Bush, who will seek a second four year term in the November 2 election, is already under pressure over the Iraq war he ordered last year because of the failure to find weapons of mass destruction.
And Hess said that the president cannot afford to be seen as hindering the September 11 inquiry, which forced a complete rethink of US policies and unleashed the global war on terror. Such an impression would fuel suspicions that the administration is trying to hide something, he added.
Statements from the White House highlight the dilemma.
"This White House is committed to making sure that the commission has all the information they need to do their job," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said this week. "We believe it's important that they move forward as quickly as they can to complete their work."
In Congress, some influential Republicans, such as House of Representatives leader Dennis Hastert are already insisting that the commission should meet its May 27 deadline.
Democratic senators, Joseph Lieberman and John Edwards, both candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination, are saying the inquiry should be given more time.
The Washington Post on Friday joined calls for the extension.
"The administration and congressional Republicans are keen to avoid an extension, apparently because they want whatever damaging facts the commission's report contains to be old news by election day," said an editorial.
"There is simply no good reason to prevent such work from continuing to completion."
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| Donations For Terrorists? |
| 01.31.04 (6:21 am) [edit] |
[b]Donations For Terrorists?[/b], http://www.thenation.com/outr...
Imagine if some bugaboo of the right -- Hilary Clinton, say -- gave the keynote address at a charity event linked to terrorists.
Imagine if three whole days [b]before[/b] Senator Clinton lent her name and her time to the event, [i]The Hill[/i], a quality newspaper that covers Congress, had come out with a devastating report linking the charity event to a terrorist organization -- one that has killed Americans, seized a US Embassy, and worked hand-in-glove with Saddam. Imagine if [i]The Hill [/i]report, under the headline "Terrorists Plan DC Fundraiser," also revealed that the Red Cross -- the purported beneficiary of the event -- was having nothing to do with it.
Imagine if two whole days beforehand, one Republican Congressman had demanded that Attorney General John Ashcroft investigate the charity, and another who'd been invited to speak announced he wouldn't.
Imagine if, after all that, Senator Clinton (or Ted Kennedy, or Howard Dean, or Al Franken, or any other boogeyman of the right) nevertheless showed up to give a rousing speech -- for a rousing fee. And imagine if, when confronted afterwards, she insisted she was simply helping the Red Cross; and then, when informed that the Red Cross days ago had publicly renounced the event, mumbled, "I was unaware of that."
How long would it be before it was monster news? Before TV anchors were asking Senator Clinton if she didn't want to distance herself from the Saddam Hussein-backed terrorists she was associating so chummily with? Before thousands of e-mail jokes -- all playing one way or another off the lameness of "I was unaware of that" -- were clogging up cyberspace?
Meanwhile, back in the real world, this bumbling character was not Hilary Clinton but Richard Perle -- adviser to the Pentagon, key cheerleader for regime change. Perle spoke last weekend at an event http://www.iran-solidarity.or... for Iranian earthquake victims -- despite a compelling report http://www.thehill.com/news/0... in [i]The Hill [/i]that the event was favoring not the Red Cross, but the Mujahedin-e Khalq, a group the State Department considers http://usinfo.state.gov/regio... a terrorist organization; and despite public complaints http://www.ajc.com/news/conte... by two Republican Congressmen.
Then again, the reason for that terrorist classification is that the MEK favors regime change -- violently if necessary -- in Iran. So one could see why Perle would find them more fun to hang around with than, say, those losers over at the UN. http://www.guardian.co.uk/Ira...,2763,918812,00.html And in any case, Perle's not been very choosy in past about who signs his checks http://www.thenation.com/outr... , to say nothing of whose checks he signs http://www.thenation.com/outr... .
The [i]Washington Post [/i]reports http://www.washingtonpost.com... that the charity event, attended by more than 3,000 people at the Washington Convention Center, "generated enough concerns within the [Bush] Administration" that some officials talked of blocking it entirely, FBI agents attended it, and the Treasury Department this week froze the assets of its prime organizer.
Asked about the controversy, Perle told [i]The Post [/i]he was getting paid to help the Red Cross; told the Red Cross had days earlier publicly renounced the event, he said, "I was unaware of that." Guess he's not quite the Middle Eastern expert he has claimed to be. Though most of us had already figured that out.
- [i]Matt Bivens, The Nation[/i]
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| REPUBLICANS AGAINST BUSH |
| 01.30.04 (3:25 pm) [edit] |
[b]More Republicans Are Coming Out Against Bush![/b]
[b]Visit the [i]Conservatives Against Bush [/i]web-site [/b]on http://www.conservativesagain...
[b]Conservatives Against Bush [/b]was founded to propound the conservative principles that this administration has forsaken. This President has expanded the welfare state, saddled future generations with debt, eroded some of our basic freedoms, and waged a spurious war in Iraq that in the end did not make the U.S. any safer. We seek to reenergize conservatives, so they will press for change in this administration.
[b]Visit also the[i] Republicans Against Bush [/i]web-site [/b]on http://world.std.com/~3Diff/rab.html
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| Dubya IS A LIAR And AN ABORTIONIST! |
| 01.30.04 (10:51 am) [edit] |
[b]Definition of a LIAR[/b]: [i]One who lies or utters falsehoods[/i]. A Lie: [i]An untrue statement made with the intent of deceiving[/i].
[b]Definition of an ABORTIONIST[/b]: [i]One who causes abortion[/i]. An Abortion: [i]Partial or complete arrest of development in anything[/i].
Dubya[i] lied [/i]about non-existent WMDs in Iraq that supposedly posed an imminent threat to our national security.
Dubya is responsible for the massacres and slaughters (i.e. [i]the abortion[/i]) of 519 US Soldiers and thousands of innocent Iraqis, in an illegal and immoral war based upon lies.
[b]Go back to the beginning [/b]...
[b]The First Lie[/b], http://www.tompaine.com/featu...
While all of the Democratic presidential candidates (except Sen. Joseph Lieberman) criticize President George W. Bush for his unilateral recklessness in starting a war against Iraq, they are missing a larger point: The invasion was not just reckless. It was unconstitutional.
It is time to set the record straight. The United States Congress never voted for the Iraq war. Rather, Congress voted for a resolution in October 2002 which unlawfully transferred to the president the decision-making power of whether to launch a first-strike invasion of Iraq. The United States Constitution vests the awesome power of deciding whether to send the nation into war solely in the United States Congress.
Those members of Congress—including certain Democratic presidential candidates—who voted for that October resolution cannot now claim that they were deceived, as some of them do. By unlawfully ceding the war-declaring power to the president, they allowed the president to start a war against Iraq based on whatever evidence or whatever lies he chose. The members of Congress who voted for that October resolution are as complicit in this illegal war as is the president himself.
Imagine this: The United States Congress passes a resolution which states: "The President is authorized to levy an income tax on the people of the United States as he determines to be necessary and appropriate in order to pay for subsidies to U.S. oil companies." No amount of legal wrangling could make such a resolution constitutional. Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution grants the power to levy taxes exclusively to the United States Congress.
Now let us turn to reality. In October 2002, Congress passed a resolution which stated: "The President is authorized to use the Armed Forces of the United States as he determines to be necessary and appropriate in order to 1) defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq; and 2) enforce all relevant United States Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq." As he determines to be necessary and appropriate.
Congress cannot transfer to the president its exclusive power to declare war any more than it can transfer its exclusive power to levy taxes. Such a transfer is illegal. These are non-delegable powers held only by the United States Congress.
In drafting the War Powers Clause of Article I, Section 8, the framers of the Constitution set out to create a nation that would be nothing like the model established by European monarchies. They knew the dangers of empowering a single individual to decide whether to send the nation into war. They had sought to make a clean break from the kings and queens of Europe, those rulers who could, of their own accord, send their subjects into battle. That is why the framers wisely decided that only the people, through their elected representatives in Congress, should be entrusted with the power to start a war.
The wars of kings and queens of Europe had brought not only havoc and destruction to the lives of those forced into battle and those left to suffer their loss. They had also brought poverty. They were stark symbols that the subjects living under such monarchies lacked any voice or any control over their destiny.
The War Powers Clause of the Constitution emerged from that collective memory: "Congress shall have power...To declare war... " No other language in the Constitution is as simple and clear.
Thomas Jefferson called it "an effectual check to the Dog of war." George Mason said that he was "for clogging rather than facilitating war." James Wilson stated: "This system will not hurry us into war; it is calculated to guard against it. It will not be in the power of a single man, or a single body of men, to involve us in such distress; for the important power of declaring war is vested in the legislature at large."
Several years after the adoption of the Constitution, James Madison would write: "In no part of the constitution is more wisdom to be found, than in the clause which confides the question of war and peace to the legislature, and not to the executive department."
Some might ask how George W. Bush's war against Iraq is different from other U.S wars. Congress has not declared war since World War II. While some of the U.S. military actions since that time have received the equivalent of a congressional declaration, others have not. There have been other violations of the War Powers Clause of the Constitution.
But today we face an extraordinary moment in United States history. The president of the United States launched a premeditated, first-strike invasion of another country, the likes of which this nation has never before seen. This massive military operation sought to conquer and occupy Iraq for an indefinite period of time. This was not a random act of raw power. It was the first salvo of a new and dangerous U.S. doctrine, a doctrine which advocates the unprovoked invasion and occupation of sovereign nations. This new doctrine threatens to destabilize the world, creating a new world order of chaos and lawlessness.
Now more than ever, the Constitution and the rule of law must apply. And, now more than ever, the truth must be told. The first lie about the Iraq war was not that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or ties to Al Qaeda. The first lie told to the American people is that Congress voted for this war.
In the midst of the rushed congressional debate in October 2002, U.S. Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-W. Va.) warned that the resolution under consideration was unconstitutional. "We are handing this over to the President of the United States," Byrd said. "When we do that, we can put up a sign on the top of this Capitol, and we can say: 'Gone home. Gone fishing. Out of business.'" Byrd added: "I never thought I would see the day in these forty-four years I have been in this body... when we would cede this kind of power to any president."
The Iraq war is in direct violation of the United States Constitution. The president and the members of Congress who voted for that October resolution should be held accountable for sending this nation into an illegal war.
It is time to hold up the Constitution to the faces of those who dare to defy it. It is time to demand our country back.
[i]John C. Bonifaz is an attorney in Boston and the author of Warrior-King: The Case for Impeaching George W. Bush. (NationBooks-NY, January 2004)[/i]
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| Cheney's Halliburton Shuffle ... Spelled: R-I-P- O-F-F!!! |
| 01.30.04 (7:25 am) [edit] |
[b]The Halliburton Shuffle[/b], http://nytimes.com/2004/01/30...
Can you spell Halliburton? R-i-p- o-f-f.
War-torn Iraq has been a gold mine for Halliburton, yet another treasure trove of U.S. taxpayer dollars for a company that has no peer in the fine art of extracting riches from the government.
But if you go through some of Halliburton's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission over the past several years, as I have, you'll see a company that goes to great lengths — literally to the ends of the earth — to escape paying its fair share of taxes to the government that has been so good to it.
Annual reports filed with the S.E.C. since the mid-90's — when Dick Cheney took over as chief executive and wrote the game plan for garnering government goodies — showed Halliburton subsidiaries incorporated in such places as the Cayman Islands, Bermuda, Trinidad and Tobago, Panama, Liechtenstein, and Vanuatu.
Vanuatu? Who knew?
Vanuatu is a mountainous group of islands in the South Pacific. Its people support themselves mostly by fishing and subsistence farming. "Additional revenues," according to the Columbia Encyclopedia, "derive from a growing tourist industry and the development of Vila [the capital] as a corporate tax shelter."
Halliburton, in an S.E.C. filing in 2000, duly noted that it had a subsidiary incorporated in Vanuatu called Kinhill Kramer (Vanuatu) Ltd.
The company adamantly denies that its offshore subsidiaries are used to shift income out of the U.S. But it's indisputable that somebody is doing a dandy job of limiting Halliburton's tax liability. When I asked how much Halliburton paid in federal income taxes last year, a company spokeswoman, Wendy Hall, said, "After foreign tax credit utilization, we paid just over $15 million to the I.R.S. for our 2002 tax liability."
That is effectively no money at all to an empire like Halliburton. Less than pocket change. Dick Cheney must be having a good laugh over the way his old company, following his road map, is taking the U.S. for such a ride.
In the early 90's, when Mr. Cheney was defense secretary under the first President Bush, he hired the Halliburton subsidiary Brown & Root to determine what military functions could be outsourced to private profit-making companies. Brown & Root came up with myriad ideas in a classified study and was handed a lucrative contract to implement its own plan.
Mr. Cheney took over as chief executive of Halliburton in 1995, and the defense contracts just kept on coming. When he returned to government as vice president in 2001, no firm was better positioned than Halliburton to cash in on the billions of dollars in contracts that resulted from the war on terror and the conflict in Iraq.
Halliburton is bound so intimately to the defense establishment it might as well be an adjunct to the military. (Mr. Cheney still receives deferred compensation from Halliburton but insists he has no role in the awarding of contracts.)
Halliburton is an organization that has the reach of a multinational and the eyes of a Willie Sutton. Through its subsidiaries, it has done work with countries the U.S. has accused of supporting terror. It was accused of overcharging the U.S. government for work done in the 1990's, and in 2002 it agreed to pay a $2 million settlement in response to accusations that it had defrauded the government.
The Pentagon is currently examining allegations that the Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root overcharged the government by $61 million for gasoline imported into Iraq from Kuwait. Last week the company acknowledged that at least one employee had participated in a $6.3 million kickback deal with a Kuwaiti company. That money has reportedly been repaid to the government.
What we have here is a private profit-making multinational company with no particular allegiance (other than contractual) to the U.S. government. Nevertheless, through its powerful allies in the government, Halliburton enjoys extraordinary influence over national defense policies and has its own key to the national treasury.
If it's at all grateful, it hasn't shown it. The U.S. is at war. The government is running record deficits. Money is tight everywhere. But Halliburton won't even kick in its fair share. It continues to benefit from the nation's largesse, while scouring the world for places to shelter as much of its American riches as possible.
[i]By BOB HERBERT, N.Y. Times, 01/30/04[/i]
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| Apparently the Law & Accountability Don't Apply to the Mad King George! |
| 01.30.04 (7:21 am) [edit] |
[b]Where's the Apology?[/b], http://www.nytimes.com/2004/0...
George Bush promised to bring honor and integrity back to the White House. Instead, he got rid of accountability.
Surely even supporters of the Iraq war must be dismayed by the administration's reaction to David Kay's recent statements. Iraq, he now admits, didn't have W.M.D., or even active programs to produce such weapons. Those much-ridiculed U.N. inspectors were right. (But Hans Blix appears to have gone down the memory hole. On Tuesday Mr. Bush declared that the war was justified — under U.N. Resolution 1441, no less — because Saddam "did not let us in.")
So where are the apologies? Where are the resignations? Where is the investigation of this intelligence debacle? All we have is bluster from Dick Cheney, evasive W.M.D.-related-program-activity language from Mr. Bush — and a determined effort to prevent an independent inquiry.
True, Mr. Kay still claims that this was a pure intelligence failure. I don't buy it: the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has issued a damning report on how the threat from Iraq was hyped, and former officials warned of politicized intelligence during the war buildup. (Yes, the Hutton report gave Tony Blair a clean bill of health, but many people — including a majority of the British public, according to polls — regard that report as a whitewash.)
In any case, the point is that a grave mistake was made, and America's credibility has been badly damaged — and nobody is being held accountable. But that's standard operating procedure. As far as I can tell, nobody in the Bush administration has ever paid a price for being wrong. Instead, people are severely punished for telling inconvenient truths. And administration officials have consistently sought to freeze out, undermine or intimidate anyone who might try to check up on their performance.
Let's look at three examples. First is the Valerie Plame affair. When someone in the administration revealed that Ms. Plame was an undercover C.I.A. operative, one probable purpose was to intimidate intelligence professionals. And whatever becomes of the Justice Department investigation, the White House has been notably uninterested in finding the culprit. ("We have let the earthmovers roll in over this one," a senior White House official told The Financial Times.)
Then there's the stonewalling about 9/11. First the administration tried, in defiance of all historical precedents, to prevent any independent inquiry. Then it tried to appoint Henry Kissinger, of all people, to head the investigative panel. Then it obstructed the commission, denying it access to crucial documents and testimony. Now, thanks to all the delays and impediments, the panel's head says it can't deliver its report by the original May 11 deadline — and the administration is trying to prevent a time extension.
Finally, an important story that has largely evaded public attention: the effort to prevent oversight of Iraq spending. Government agencies normally have independent, strictly nonpartisan inspectors general, with broad powers to investigate questionable spending. But the new inspector general's office in Iraq operates under unique rules that greatly limit both its powers and its independence.
And the independence of the Pentagon's own inspector general's office is also in question. Last September, in a move that should have caused shock waves, the administration appointed L. Jean Lewis as the office's chief of staff. Ms. Lewis played a central role in the Whitewater witch hunt (seven years, $70 million, no evidence of Clinton wrongdoing); nobody could call her nonpartisan. So when Mr. Bush's defenders demand hard proof of profiteering in Iraq — as opposed to extensive circumstantial evidence — bear in mind that the administration has systematically undermined the power and independence of institutions that might have provided that proof.
And there are many more examples. These people politicize everything, from military planning to scientific assessments. If you're with them, you pay no penalty for being wrong. If you don't tell them what they want to hear, you're an enemy, and being right is no excuse.
Still, the big story isn't about Mr. Bush; it's about what's happening to America. Other presidents would have liked to bully the C.I.A., stonewall investigations and give huge contracts to their friends without oversight. They knew, however, that they couldn't. What has gone wrong with our country that allows this president to get away with such things?
[i]By PAUL KRUGMAN, N.Y. Times, 01/30/04[/i]
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| MORE BUSH LIES: GOP Doesn't Want An Inquiry Because ... |
| 01.30.04 (7:19 am) [edit] |
[b]MORE BUSH LIES ... But the GOP doesn't want an independent inquiry because they would watch Bush, Cheney and the gang be hauled off to prison![/b]
[b]White House Cites Iraq's History of Seeking Arms as a Reason for War[/b], http://www.nytimes.com/2004/0...
The Bush administration, justifying its decision to go to war against Iraq despite its failure since then to find any banned weapons there, said Thursday that even if Saddam Hussein had not amassed stockpiles of nuclear, biological or chemical weapons, the United States could not have afforded to leave him in power because he had a history of trying to acquire them.
On the defensive since its former chief weapons inspector said he now believed that Iraq did not have any substantial stockpiles of banned weapons at the start of the war, the White House sent Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, to appear on the three network morning news programs to carry the message that the war was justified even if Mr. Hussein's weapons stockpiles are ultimately found to have been nonexistent.
"With Saddam Hussein, we were dealing with somebody who had used weapons of mass destruction, who had attacked his neighbors twice, who was allowing terrorists to run in his country and was funding terrorists outside of his country," Ms. Rice said on the "Early Show" on CBS.
"Given that, and his history of refusing to account for his weapons of mass destruction and his efforts to conceal his programs, this was a very dangerous man in a very dangerous part of the world," she added. "And the president of the United States had no choice but to deal with that gathering threat to American interests and to the interests of our friends abroad."
Ms. Rice continued to rebuff calls from many Democrats and from the former chief weapons inspector, David A. Kay, for an independent election-year inquiry into how the Central Intelligence Agency and other American intelligence organizations apparently misjudged the extent and the sophistication of Mr. Hussein's weapons programs before the war.
But she signaled that President Bush would support a more narrowly focused review of American intelligence capabilities in the war on terrorism if the inquiry could be done at a time and in a manner under the White House's control.
Before the administration undertakes any review, she said, it wants to have the final report of the organization Dr. Kay headed until last week, the Iraq Survey Group. The group's new leader, Charles A. Duelfer, has said he does not know how long it will take to finish scouring Iraq for arms and evidence of weapons programs.
There is no doubt "that we're going to need to go back and compare what we thought we would find with what we found," she said on "Good Morning America" on ABC. "And at that time, I think there are important questions about how we deal with the proliferation problem with highly secretive regimes that are using dual-use technologies to acquire weapons of mass destruction."
The closest she came to acknowledging a problem with the intelligence used by Mr. Bush in making a case for the war came when she told CBS that "what we have is evidence that there are differences between what we knew going in and what we found on the ground."
She alluded to a feeling at the White House that the intelligence services had played a vital role in stopping or slowing arms programs in North Korea, Iran and Libya, among other nations. But she suggested that any fundamental problems with intelligence capabilities centered on underestimating the threat from nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs in those countries rather than on what Democrats have characterized as a deliberate effort by the administration to overstate the threat from Iraq.
"The fact is, it's usually been underestimation of programs of weapons of mass destruction, not overestimation, that has been the problem for the world," she told ABC. On CBS, she cited "a problem of dealing with very closed societies that are doing everything they can to hide the extent and nature of their programs."
In Congress, Republicans closed ranks with the White House to head off any new inquiry.
"The Senate Intelligence Committee, of which I am a member, is well along in a thorough review of the estimates provided to Congress and the executive branch concerning Iraq," said Senator John W. Warner, Republican of Virginia, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee. "Congress has this responsibility and should complete its work before decisions are made about the need for further analysis."
A Republican aide in Congress said there was almost no chance of an outside inquiry getting under way this year, and little political risk from the issue for the White House or Congressional Republicans.
"The Republicans are not going to push for an investigation and the Democrats don't have enough votes to get one," the aide said.
[i]By RICHARD W. STEVENSON, N.Y. Times, 01/30/04[/i]
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| Why Dubya Is LYING About Iraq Elections? ... The Real Truth Behind This FIASCO ... |
| 01.29.04 (8:31 pm) [edit] |
[b]The U.S. Begs for UN Backing in Iraq[/b], http://www.zmag.org/content/s...
The U.S. is eager for the UN to return to Iraq to provide political cover for its occupation. The quagmire on the ground in Iraq plus recognition that the rest of the world, and most Iraqis themselves, reject Washington's claim of legitimacy is the basis for the Bush administration reversing its earlier anti-UN positions to beg the international organization for help.
Kofi Annan's decision to send a technical investigative team to Iraq is partly in response to mounting pressure from the U.S., but also a response to shifting sentiments among Iraqis, particularly the call from Ayatollah al-Sistani for a UN assessment of political conditions. While Annan's announcement indicated he was responding to the request of the U.S. occupation authorities and its hand-picked "governing council" to determine whether elections could be held by Washington's June 30th deadline, he left open the possibility of a broader definition of "what alternative arrangement would be acceptable" if not.
WHY IS THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION SO SET ON A JUNE 30TH "HANDOVER OF POWER TO IRAQIS"?
1) The deadline is driven far more by U.S. desperation -- electoral and economic/corporate -- than by any concern about "returning sovereignty" to Iraq. The Bush administration is lying about the deadline, claiming that it will lead to a "transfer of sovereignty" and the "end of U.S. occupation" in Iraq. A real "end to occupation" requires the withdrawal of U.S. troops. Transferring nominal authority from one U.S.-selected Iraqi agency to another U.S.-vetted Iraqi organization does not equal an end to occupation.
2) Bush needs to be able to claim "the occupation is over" and "troops are being withdrawn" as he enters summer campaigning for November. The reality will be the military occupation continuing, with a U.S.-backed "sovereign" government "requesting" that U.S. troops remain. The U.S. will withdraw 20,000-25,000 troops with great fanfare, ignoring and hoping the voters will forget about the 100,000 or so U.S. troops that will remain, and the likely continuation of significant casualties among U.S. troops. (Just today Rumsfeld authorized 30,000 additional troops for the Army.)
3) U.S. plans for massive privatization in Iraq have faltered because of a lack of potential buyers. Profiteers are concerned that without something resembling an official government in Iraq, U.S. efforts to sell of Iraqi assets will be recognized as illegal under international law and could be overturned when something closer to a truly legitimate and representative government takes over. So the U.S. has every interest in insuring that a transitional phase includes something that can be called a "sovereign Iraqi government," but which in fact remains under U.S. control, to insure that the privatization plan goes ahead before a real end to the occupation.
WHY DID THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION CHANGE THEIR LINE ON THE UN?
1) The utter and all-too-public failure of the U.S. occupation (especially the continuing deaths of U.S. soldiers) in Iraq seems to have led to an internal power shift within the Bush administration, with the Pentagon ideologues tactically [and almost certainly temporarily] giving way to electorally-focused considerations. In the battle between Rumsfeld/Cheney and Karl Rove, Rumsfeld/Cheney seem to have blinked first.
2) There is no doubt that unilateralist, anti-UN sentiments continue to dominate the Bush White House. But hypocrisy aside, changes are afoot. One piece of evidence is Dick Cheney's unexpected European foray. While arrogantly refusing to even hint at an apology for launching Washington's war in the face of UN and broad international opposition, the fact that he left his undisclosed location at all to travel to European capitals urging greater international support for the U.S. in Iraq, even calling (once -- not repeated) on the UN to respond to the request of the Iraqis, indicates a significant level of pressure on Cheney's longstanding antagonism to multilateralism and the UN.
WHAT DID KOFI ANNAN AGREE TO?
1) The secretary-general agreed to "send a technical mission to Iraq to establish whether elections for a transitional national assembly can be held before the transfer of sovereignty on 30 June, and if not, what alternative arrangement would be acceptable."
2) The language is significant, since "alternative arrangements" could refer to a wide range of possible alternatives, essentially broadening the U.S.-defined mandate. Those alternatives could include not only the nature of the elections but also a challenge to the validity of the U.S.-imposed deadline itself. That is, the UN mission could conclude that elections are possible at a time beyond June 30th. An internal UN study in Iraq from last August determined that it would take six months to organize elections.
3) It is clear that Annan's decision was partly based on the call from Iraqis beyond the U.S.-appointed Governing Council. Specifically, it is clear that al-Sistani's call for the UN to determine the feasibility of elections played a part in his decision.
WHY IS AYATOLLAH AL-SISTANI SO COMMITTED TO ELECTIONS AND WHY DID HE ASK FOR UN HELP?
1) While al-Sistani represents a Shi'a current that does not call for complete clerical control of government, he is eager to realize the likely political potential inherent in the 60% Shi'a majority in Iraq.
2) The U.S.-proposed selection system (a longstanding Bush preference over elections…) for choosing an Iraqi parliament would not only privilege the U.S.-selected Iraqi Governing Council who would choose most of the assembly members, but would give a functional veto to the U.S. occupation officials themselves. (In each of the 18 regions the Coalition Provisional Authority -- Bremer and company -- would appoint five of the fifteen members. Since eleven votes would be needed to approve candidates, the CPA would be able to veto anyone they didn't like.)
WHAT IS THE DANGER TO THE UNITED NATIONS IF IT REFUSES TO RETURN TO IRAQ UNDER U.S. TERMS? IF IT AGREES TO U.S. TERMS?
1) If the UN completely rejects the U.S. proposal that it return to Iraq under the auspices of the U.S. occupation, it faces the possibility of escalating marginalization by the Bush administration, further threats to its independence, and the likelihood of being deemed "irrelevant" by the world's sole super-power. Washington might make additional cuts in dues to the world organization and the humanitarian agencies, reduce its already insufficient political support, and increase its threats and punishments of UN member states who stand defiant.
2) If the UN agrees to return to Iraq under terms set by the U.S. occupation, the dangers are even higher. The global organization risks a serious loss of international credibility, and the danger of being deemed an agent or facilitator of occupation. Aside from the credibility factor itself, UN staff in Iraq would again face the likely possibility of physical attack, based on the opposition's view that the UN was acting as an agent of an illegitimate occupation. Passed under extreme U.S. pressure, Security Council resolution 1483 arguably provides a kind of forced legality to the U.S. occupation of Iraq; it does not provide any legitimacy.
SO, WHAT DO WE CALL FOR?
1) We call for an end to U.S. occupation, and withdrawal of American troops. Because the U.S. invasion destroyed the governing capacity in Baghdad and undermined security for civilians throughout much of the country, the withdrawal of the U.S. forces should be followed by a temporary combined mandate for the United Nations, Arab League, and OIC (Organization of the Islamic Conference) to provide direct support for Iraq's reclaiming of sovereignty. That would include election assistance, humanitarian and reconstruction aid (including control over all international funds, including those coming from the U.S. Congress, designated for Iraqi rebuilding), and peacekeeping/security deployment.
2) The UN investigation team should reject the artificial U.S.-imposed June 30th deadline, and broaden its mandate to examine what conditions would have to change before an election could be organized, assess what time frame would be required to accomplish those changes, and determine whether any election conducted under foreign military occupation could be free and fair.
WHAT ABOUT THE WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION THAT WEREN'T?
We were right. They lied.
No gloating -- too many people have died.
[i]By Phyllis Bennis, Institute for Policy Studies[/i]
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| Iraq Commission Could Pose Serious Threat to Bush ... THAT'S WHY ... |
| 01.29.04 (5:51 pm) [edit] |
[b]Iraq Commission Could Pose Serious Threat to Bush[/b], http://www.commondreams.org/h...
THAT'S WHY:
1. IT IS IMPERATIVE TO CONTACT CONGRESS AND DEMAND AN INDEPENDENT COMMISSION TO FIND AND REPORT THE TRUTH TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE: http://www.congress.org
2. BUSH NEEDS TO BE OUSTED FROM OFFICE BECAUSE HE DOES NOT WANT THE TRUTH TO COME OUT
3. WAR ON IRAQ HAS RESULTED IN THE DEATHS OF 519 U.S. SOLDIERS AND THOUSANDS OF IRAQI PEOPLE
[b]WASHINGTON[/b] - An independent commission to investigate intelligence failures before last year's invasion of Iraq being demanded by Democrats could pose a serious political threat to President Bush.
But analysts said with Bush's Republicans in control of both houses of Congress he stood a good chance of avoiding such an investigation, which would keep the issue alive in the run-up to November's presidential election.
"The administration wants as little attention as possible paid to the process by which they concluded that war with Iraq was a good idea," said Steven Walt, dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
"A commission would keep the issue in the news for another year. That's the last thing they want," he said.
Following Senate testimony on Wednesday from former U.S. weapons hunter David Kay that that U.S. intelligence about Saddam Hussein's suspected weapons of mass destruction had been fundamentally flawed, Democrats redoubled their calls for an independent inquiry. Kay himself backed the idea.
In a worrying sign for the White House, Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain, known for his independent streak, broke party ranks to support the call.
"We need an independent commission to continue to investigate this because these questions need to be answered, including ... why it is that we have so badly missed the mark on this and other cases," McCain said.
[b]RICE DEFLECTS CALLS [/b]
The administration sent national security adviser Condoleezza Rice to appear on Thursday morning news shows on ABC, NBC and CBS to deflect the calls.
"We simply believe that there is work still to be done. The Iraq Survey Group is trying to complete its work," she told NBC's Today Show.
"In fact, the intelligence community has its own investigation, inquiry going on -- a kind of audit of what was known going in and what was found when they got there. They have an external panel that is doing that for them. A lot is going on," Rice said.
University of Chicago political scientist Robert Pape said the fact Rice was on three shows suggested the White House was worried. The issue is certain to remain front and center in the ongoing presidential campaign.
"The fact Rice was out there on three shows tells you the momentum for an inquiry is building and she felt she needed to get out ahead of it and nip it in the bud," Pape said.
Kay was careful to say he did not believe intelligence had been manipulated by the administration making its case for invading Iraq -- just that it had been wrong.
"Certainly the intelligence service believed that there were WMD (weapons of mass destruction). It turns out we were all wrong, probably in my judgment, and that is most disturbing," he said.
[b]KENNEDY: DATA "MANIPULATED" [/b]
Massachusetts Sen. Edward Kennedy had a starkly different view. "What has happened was more than a failure of intelligence -- it was the result of manipulation of the intelligence to justify a decision to go to war," he said.
Joseph Cirincione, author of a study released this month concluding Iraq had no threatening weapons of mass destruction by the late 1990s, said: "The administration is playing for time because it sees this mainly as a political problem.
"They hope to stall until after the November presidential election and are less interested in seeing what went wrong than in avoiding blame," he said.
"It is lame to claim they need more time for internal investigations. Almost everything (Secretary of State) Colin Powell told the U.N. last February about Iraq's alleged weapons was wrong. Why was that? The President doesn't have an answer," said Cirincione, an analyst with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
With Republicans controlling both houses of Congress, the administration stands a good chance of stonewalling calls for a commission if its troops in the legislature hold firm.
But if the situation on the ground in Iraq were to deteriorate or more officials came forward with information, whether by name or anonymously, pressure for an independent commission could mount.
"What needs to happen now is for another important Republican to break ranks or more information to come forth. Otherwise, the administration will probably weather the storm," said Pape.
[i]By Alan Elsner [/i]
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| The First Lie: Dubya's UNCONSTITUTIONAL LUST for WAR |
| 01.29.04 (6:44 am) [edit] |
[b]The First Lie[/b], http://www.commondreams.org/v...
While all of the Democratic presidential candidates (except Sen. Joseph Lieberman) criticize President George W. Bush for his unilateral recklessness in starting a war against Iraq, they are missing a larger point: The invasion was not just reckless. It was unconstitutional.
It is time to set the record straight. The United States Congress never voted for the Iraq war. Rather, Congress voted for a resolution in October 2002 which unlawfully transferred to the president the decision-making power of whether to launch a first-strike invasion of Iraq. The United States Constitution vests the awesome power of deciding whether to send the nation into war solely in the United States Congress.
Those members of Congress-including certain Democratic presidential candidates-who voted for that October resolution cannot now claim that they were deceived, as some of them do. By unlawfully ceding the war-declaring power to the president, they allowed the president to start a war against Iraq based on whatever evidence or whatever lies he chose. The members of Congress who voted for that October resolution are as complicit in this illegal war as is the president himself.
Imagine this: The United States Congress passes a resolution which states: "The President is authorized to levy an income tax on the people of the United States as he determines to be necessary and appropriate in order to pay for subsidies to U.S. oil companies." No amount of legal wrangling could make such a resolution constitutional. Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution grants the power to levy taxes exclusively to the United States Congress.
Now let us turn to reality. In October 2002, Congress passed a resolution which stated: "The President is authorized to use the Armed Forces of the United States as he determines to be necessary and appropriate in order to 1) defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq; and 2) enforce all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq." As he determines to be necessary and appropriate.
Congress cannot transfer to the president its exclusive power to declare war any more than it can transfer its exclusive power to levy taxes. Such a transfer is illegal. These are non-delegable powers held only by the United States Congress.
In drafting the War Powers Clause of Article I, Section 8, the framers of the Constitution set out to create a nation that would be nothing like the model established by European monarchies. They knew the dangers of empowering a single individual to decide whether to send the nation into war. They had sought to make a clean break from the kings and queens of Europe, those rulers who could, of their own accord, send their subjects into battle. That is why the framers wisely decided that only the people, through their elected representatives in Congress, should be entrusted with the power to start a war.
The wars of kings and queens of Europe had brought not only havoc and destruction to the lives of those forced into battle and those left to suffer their loss. They had also brought poverty. They were stark symbols that the subjects living under such monarchies lacked any voice or any control over their destiny.
The War Powers Clause of the Constitution emerged from that collective memory: "Congress shall have power...To declare war... " No other language in the Constitution is as simple and clear.
Thomas Jefferson called it "an effectual check to the Dog of war." George Mason said that he was "for clogging rather than facilitating war." James Wilson stated: "This system will not hurry us into war; it is calculated to guard against it. It will not be in the power of a single man, or a single body of men, to involve us in such distress; for the important power of declaring war is vested in the legislature at large."
Several years after the adoption of the Constitution, James Madison would write: "In no part of the constitution is more wisdom to be found, than in the clause which confides the question of war and peace to the legislature, and not to the executive department."
Some might ask how George W. Bush's war against Iraq is different from other U.S wars. Congress has not declared war since World War II. While some of the U.S. military actions since that time have received the equivalent of a congressional declaration, others have not. There have been other violations of the War Powers Clause of the Constitution.
But today we face an extraordinary moment in United States history. The president of the United States launched a premeditated, first-strike invasion of another country, the likes of which this nation has never before seen. This massive military operation sought to conquer and occupy Iraq for an indefinite period of time. This was not a random act of raw power. It was the first salvo of a new and dangerous U.S. doctrine, a doctrine which advocates the unprovoked invasion and occupation of sovereign nations. This new doctrine threatens to destabilize the world, creating a new world order of chaos and lawlessness.
Now more than ever, the Constitution and the rule of law must apply. And, now more than ever, the truth must be told. The first lie about the Iraq war was not that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or ties to Al Qaeda. The first lie told to the American people is that Congress voted for this war.
In the midst of the rushed congressional debate in October 2002, U.S. Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-W. Va.) warned that the resolution under consideration was unconstitutional. "We are handing this over to the President of the United States," Byrd said. "When we do that, we can put up a sign on the top of this Capitol, and we can say: 'Gone home. Gone fishing. Out of business.'" Byrd added: "I never thought I would see the day in these forty-four years I have been in this body... when we would cede this kind of power to any president."
The Iraq war is in direct violation of the United States Constitution. The president and the members of Congress who voted for that October resolution should be held accountable for sending this nation into an illegal war.
It is time to hold up the Constitution to the faces of those who dare to defy it. It is time to demand our country back.
[i]John C. Bonifaz is an attorney in Boston and the author of 'Warrior-King: The Case for Impeaching George W. Bush'. (NationBooks-NY, January 2004)[/i]
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| WMD: Now It is Bush's Turn to Face Uncomfortable Truths |
| 01.29.04 (6:41 am) [edit] |
[b]WMD: Now It is Bush's Turn to Face Uncomfortable Truths[/b], http://www.commondreams.org/h...
The Bush administration was in full retreat yesterday over its claims about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction as the man with the task of uncovering that arsenal sought to shift the blame away from the White House and on to the intelligence community.
David Kay, who until last week headed the US-appointed Iraq Survey Group looking for WMD, repeated his belief that no such weapons existed. Giving evidence before a senate committee, Mr Kay said: "We were almost all wrong - and I certainly include myself here." He added: "We have not discovered any evidence of stockpiles [of weapons]."
Mr Kay said that while the group's 1,400-strong team was still searching for weapons, he believed that efforts so far had been "sufficiently intense" to conclude that no WMD would be found.
But just as the Hutton report did not find fault with the Government, Mr Kay refused to criticize the Bush administration, claiming that while the intelligence cited by the President and his senior staff was flawed there was no political pressure on intelligence analysts to "skew" their findings.
"[I spoke to many intelligence analysts] and not in a single case was the explanation that 'I was pressured to this'. I deeply think that is a wrong explanation," he said.
"We had a number of surprises. It's quite clear we need capabilities that we do not have with regard to intelligence."
George Bush is rapidly backing away from his claims that Saddam Hussein possessed WMD, saying instead that the war was justified because the Iraqi leader posed a "grave and gathering threat to America and to the world". In his recent State of the Union address, he referred to "weapons of mass destruction-related program activities".
Challenged by reporters on Tuesday to stand by his claim that Saddam possessed WMD, Mr Bush said: "I think it is important we let the Iraq Survey Group do its work so we can find out the facts and compare the facts to what we thought."
There is a sense that the WMD issue could present a problem for Mr Bush as he campaigns for re-election. The comments he made about the threat posed by Saddam will be held up to scrutiny. Senior officials have admitted that the question of flawed intelligence is something the White House will be forced to confront sooner or later.
Of all the senior officials who made claims about WMD, Vice-President Dick Cheney remains the only one who continues to make the case that Iraq was armed. There are rumors that Mr Bush may be considering dropping Mr Cheney as his running mate in the election.
Critics of the Bush administration claimed that intelligence was "cherry picked" and skewed to make the case for war and that caveats about the lack of solid intelligence about Saddam's capabilities were ignored for political reasons. They said putting the blame on the intelligence community amounted to a "whitewash".
Scott Ritter, a former chief UN weapons and an outspoken critic of the invasion of Iraq, said last night: "I am at a loss to explain what happened in the UK and in the US. I think we were overwhelmed by the theocracy of evil in that we assumed he intended to obtain WMD and then everything that happened was interpreted with that assumption. It's insane."
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| Why Hasn't Condi Rice Been FIRED? 9/11 Panel Slams Government Incompetence |
| 01.29.04 (6:39 am) [edit] |
Why hasn't Condi Rice been FIRED? Documents on her desk provided advance warning of the attack on 9/11!
Dubya is too close to Rice. Whereas Clinton's relationship with Lewinsky didn't cause the deaths of thousands of Americans, Dubya and Rice's bizarre "frienship" is obscene because their mutual admiration society is killing Americans and others daily. No wonder they refuse to support an independent investigation into the so-called intelligence failures surrounding the phony WMDs in Iraq: They'd both be headed for the clinker: At least they'd be together!
[b]9/11 panel slams government incompetence[/b]
As it turns out, we don't really need these elaborate homeland security measures to prevent terrorists from entering the country. The 9/11 commission has found that a little common sense and following standard procedure would have prevented the 9/11 hijackers from entering the country.
The [i]Washington Post [/i]reports http://www.washingtonpost.com... , " The U.S. government fumbled repeated opportunities to stop many of the men … from entering the country, missing fraudulent passports and other warning signs that should have attracted greater scrutiny … The new findings by the independent commission investigating the terrorist strikes stand in marked contrast to the contentions of many senior U.S. officials, who for more than two years have portrayed the 19 hijackers as law-abiding travelers who did little to attract government suspicion and who, in nearly all cases, entered or resided in the country legally."
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| American Civil Liberties Union Took Sides With Rush Limbaugh |
| 01.28.04 (9:43 pm) [edit] |
[b]ACLU, Limbaugh Strange Bedfellows in Florida Case[/b], http://au.news.yahoo.com/0401...
The American Civil Liberties Union took sides with Rush Limbaugh on Monday by complaining that Florida investigators violated the conservative radio host's rights when they seized his medical records.
The odd coupling of the civil liberties group and the broadcaster beloved for bashing liberals came in a criminal probe of Limbaugh's admitted use of prescription painkillers, in which authorities in Palm Beach County used a search warrant to seize files from his doctors.
In a friend-of-the-court petition to Florida's Fourth District Court of Appeal, the ACLU said investigators violated Limbaugh's constitutional right to privacy when they took the records in a raid rather than notifying Limbaugh and using a subpoena, which would have given Limbaugh the right to object before the seizure.
"For many people, it may seem odd that the ACLU has come to the defense of Rush Limbaugh. But we have always said that the ACLU's real client is the Bill of Rights," ACLU Florida executive director Howard Simon said in a written statement.
The Palm Beach County State Attorney's Office defended its handling of the seizure.
"The Florida statutes dictate the process that the state must follow to pursue these types of documents. We are simply following the statutes," said Mike Edmondson, a spokesman for the state attorney.
Limbaugh, whose program reaches an estimated 20 million listeners a week, said in October that he had suffered for years from an addiction to prescription painkillers.
He spent five weeks in drug rehabilitation before returning to the air in mid-November, assuring his audience that his therapy had not turned him into a "linguine-spined liberal."
Prosecutors seized his medical records in hopes they would shed light on allegations Limbaugh shopped around for different doctors to write out multiple prescriptions.
The ACLU said the Limbaugh case will "impact the security of medical records and the privacy of the doctor-patient relationship of every person in Florida."
Limbaugh's attorney, Roy Black, welcomed the ACLU's move.
"The issues raised in this appeal effect all Floridians, regardless of their political inclinations," he said in a statement.
([i]Reporting by Jim Loney, editing by Cynthia Osterman; Reuters Messaging[/i]: jim.loney.reuters.com@reuters.net; Miami newsroom +1 305 810 2688 or e-mail miami.newsroom@reuters.com))
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| NEOCON LIES DEBUNKED ... NIXON'S TREASON: He Stopped an Early Peace in Vietnam |
| 01.28.04 (6:44 am) [edit] |
NEOCON LIES DEBUNKED ... 20,000 Americans and countless Vietnamese died because Nixon and Kissinger undermined the peace talks agreed between President Johnson's administration and the North & South Vietnamese. This act of treason by Nixon and Kissinger was committed in order to steal the 1968 election. Dubya rigged the 2000 election and is using dirty tricks to try to hijack the USA in November 2004! [i] Read on [/i]
[b]NIXON'S TREASON: He Stopped an Early Peace in Vietnam[/b], http://www.tompaine.com/featu...
A biography of Richard Nixon has made media headlines in in September 2000: mostly for the wrong reasons. [i][u]The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon [/u][/i]by Anthony Summers makes the claim that Nixon beat his wife in 1962 and that in 1974 he was so looped from self-prescribing the mood-altering prescription drug Dilantin that his Secretary of Defense, James R. Schlesinger, had to tell military commanders to confirm all orders emanating from the White House with the Pentagon or the State Department.
The wife-beating story is obviously second hand. No one can possibly verify it except Pat and Dick, and they're dead. Summers tries to puff it up by claiming that Nixon's psychological profile fits that of typical batterers. Nixon may have been a bastard but there's no hard evidence that he was a batterer. Violence against women is serious business, but even Richard Nixon deserves to be considered innocent until proven guilty.
The sources for the Dilantin include Schlesinger himself, as well as Jack Dreyfus, the founder of the Dreyfus Fund, who apparently loved Dilantin so much he gave bottles of one-thousand 100 milligram capsules to all his friends. The Dreyfus story adds to other absurdist stories of the Nixon presidency. Recall Nixon's famous photo-op with Elvis Presley. In order to gain credibility with young people, Nixon deputized Elvis to help fight the war on drugs. Presley, of course, was zonked at the time.
There is a third major accusation that Summers makes in his biography. And this, a consequential historical story, has been ignored by the media. In order to win the presidential campaign of 1968, Summers says, candidate Nixon undermined a serious initiative to end the Vietnam War.
This is not the first time that this charge has been raised.
Tom Wicker, in his 1991 book, One of Us, Richard Nixon and the American Dream, cites, but then dismisses, intelligence reports that "high-level Nixon campaign officials" tried to reach South Vietnam's President Nguyen Van Thieu to urge him to oppose a peace initiative that President Johnson was negotiating with the North Vietnamese. To Wicker, it was "hard to believe" that Nixon would undermine an effort to end the war. "Obviously, it would be fatal for the Nixon campaign to be connected with an effort to delay a bombing halt, possibly a peace settlement, for domestic political purposes," Wicker says.
In writing his biography, Wicker ignored Seymour Hersh's 1983 book, The Price of Power: Kissinger in the White House. In it, Hersh describes Henry Kissinger as advising the Democrats on Vietnam policy and then secretly reporting what he knew about peace negotiations to the Nixon campaign.
This contact, between Kissinger and Nixon, is confirmed in RN, Nixon's memoir. According to Nixon, Kissinger warned him in September 1968 that Johnson would call a bombing halt in late October. Johnson and Democratic presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey had finally come to understand that to win the election they would have to find a way out of the war and, in late October, there was movement in Hanoi and Washington towards starting peace negotiations.
Hersh describes Nixon sending Anna Chennault to lobby South Vietnamese President Thieu to urge him to obstruct the effort to start peace negotiations. Chennault was a vice president of the Republican election finance committee and chairwoman of Republican Women for Nixon. As head of Flying Tiger Airlines, a company originally formed, with CIA backing, to assist Chiang Kai-shek in his war against the Chinese Communists, Mrs. Chennault had high-level contacts in the South Vietnamese government.
This is authenticated in the 1986 book The Palace File by Nguyen Tien Hung and Jerrold Schecter. Hung was an advisor to President Thieu and Schecter was Time magazine's Diplomatic Editor. "During the closing week of the election, Nixon's campaign manager John Mitchell, called [Chennault] 'almost every day' to persuade her to keep Thieu from going to Paris for peace talks with the North Vietnamese," they write. She was successful. Five days before the American election, Thieu announced his refusal to participate in the peace talks.
This is again confirmed by Stanley Karnow in his revised (1991) and updated Vietnam: A History which, in its first edition, was the basis for the PBS series. As Karnow writes, "through one of Nixon's foreign policy aides, Richard Allen, [Kissinger] contacted the Republicans, offering to furnish them with covert information on Johnson's moves. A clandestine channel was set up through Nixon's campaign manger, John Mitchell, and Kissinger guided the Republicans secretly on the Vietnam issue for nearly two months -- thus supplying Nixon with the ammunition to blast Humphrey for 'playing politics with war.'"
Karnow further documents Chennault's advice to Thieu to obstruct the peace negotiations. And he supplies new information that Johnson, suspicious of Nixon's intrigues, was bugging the conversations that Chennault had with Thieu.
Anthony Summers's book provides the authentication for what we already know -- but which the media deems less interesting than gossip about Nixon's marriage or his penchant for mood-changing drugs. Unlike earlier biographers, Summers had access to FBI documents, though much of what Hoover found out is still covered up. Although Johnson ordered the FBI to investigate the Nixon-Chennault-Thieu connection, Hoover told Chennault not to worry, that "the bureau was 'making a show' of obeying Johnson's orders."
Nevertheless, what FBI and other documents show is that in the final days of the 1968 campaign, with peace negotiations in the offering, Nixon urged Thieu to stonewall President Johnson in order to undermine the prospect of peace negotiations. As Nixon told Chennault to tell Thieu, he could expect a "better deal" when Nixon became president.
The question remains why neither Johnson nor Humphrey blew the whistle on Nixon during the last days of the campaign. The fact is that they lacked conclusive evidence of what Nixon was doing. Without a smoking-gun, they themselves would have been accused of unprecedented partisanship and attempting to steal the election. Once Nixon won, such an accusation, still without conclusive evidence, would have greatly compromised the country's Vietnam position.
That Nixon sabotaged peace to win the 1968 election can no longer be dismissed as speculation, theory, or even Nixon-bashing, however. The documents provide the smoking-gun. It's history. It happened.
According to Nixon's memoirs (and verified by the public opinion polls at the time), LBJ's bombing halt and his declared intention to enter peace negotiations, "resulted in a last-minute surge of support for Humphrey" which was "dampened on November 2, when President Thieu announced his government would not participate in the negotiations Johnson was proposing." Nixon won the election by a narrow margin and the war continued.
The media's obsession with private lives instead of public issues is destroying our democracy. It's Nixon's treason and not his marriage or his self-medication that is the major story.
[b]For a citizen, even a candidate, to secretly undermine the affairs of state is a serious crime, perhaps even treason. More than 20,000 American soldiers and millions of Southeast Asians died as a result of Nixon's successful attempt to steal the 1968 election. [/b]
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| Daniel Ellsberg : Leak Against This WAR! |
| 01.28.04 (6:38 am) [edit] |
"[i]All wars are follies, very expensive and very mischievous ones[/i]." – Benjamin Franklin
[b]Leak against this war [/b]
[i][b]US and British officials must expose their leaders' lies about Iraq - as I did over Vietnam[/b][/i], http://www.guardian.co.uk/Ira...,2763,1132043,00.html
[b]by Daniel Ellsberg [/b]
After 17 months observing pacification efforts in Vietnam as a state department official, I laid eyes upon an unmistakable enemy for the first time on New Year's Day in 1967. I was walking point with three members of a company from the US army's 25th Division, moving through tall rice, the water over our ankles, when we heard firing close behind us. We spun around, ready to fire. I saw a boy of about 15, wearing nothing but ragged black shorts, crouching and firing an AK-47 at the troops behind us. I could see two others, heads just above the top of the rice, firing as well.
They had lain there, letting us four pass so as to get a better shot at the main body of troops. We couldn't fire at them, because we would have been firing into our own platoon. But a lot of its fire came back right at us. Dropping to the ground, I watched this kid firing away for 10 seconds, till he disappeared with his buddies into the rice. After a minute the platoon ceased fire in our direction and we got up and moved on.
About an hour later, the same thing happened again; this time I only saw a glimpse of a black jersey through the rice. I was very impressed, not only by their tactics but by their performance.
One thing was clear: these were local boys. They had the advantage of knowing every ditch and dyke, every tree and blade of rice and piece of cover, like it was their own backyard. Because it was their backyard. No doubt (I thought later) that was why they had the nerve to pop up in the midst of a reinforced battalion and fire away with American troops on all sides. They thought they were shooting at trespassers, occupiers, that they had a right to be there and we didn't. This would have been a good moment to ask myself if they were wrong, and if we had a good enough reason to be in their backyard to be fired at.
Later that afternoon, I turned to the radio man, a wiry African American kid who looked too thin to be lugging his 75lb radio, and asked: "By any chance, do you ever feel like the redcoats?"
Without missing a beat he said, in a drawl: "I've been thinking that ... all ... day." You couldn't miss the comparison if you'd gone to grade school in America. Foreign troops far from home, wearing helmets and uniforms and carrying heavy equipment, getting shot at every half-hour by non-uniformed irregulars near their own homes, blending into the local population after each attack.
I can't help but remember that afternoon as I read about US and British patrols meeting rockets and mines without warning in the cities of Iraq. As we faced ambush after ambush in the countryside, we passed villagers who could have told us we were about to be attacked. Why didn't they? First, there was a good chance their friends and family members were the ones doing the attacking. Second, we were widely seen by the local population not as allies or protectors - as we preferred to imagine - but as foreign occupiers. Helping us would have been seen as collaboration, unpatriotic. Third, they knew that to collaborate was to be in danger from the resistance, and that the foreigners' ability to protect them was negligible.
There could not be a more exact parallel between this situation and Iraq. Our troops in Iraq keep walking into attacks in the course of patrols apparently designed to provide "security" for civilians who, mysteriously, do not appear the slightest bit inclined to warn us of these attacks. This situation - as in Vietnam - is a harbinger of endless bloodletting. I believe American and British soldiers will be dying, and killing, in that country as long as they remain there.
As more and more US and British families lose loved ones in Iraq - killed while ostensibly protecting a population that does not appear to want them there - they will begin to ask: "How did we get into this mess, and why are we still in it?" And the answers they find will be disturbingly similar to those the American public found for Vietnam.
I served three US presidents - Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon - who lied repeatedly and blatantly about our reasons for entering Vietnam, and the risks in our staying there. For the past year, I have found myself in the horrifying position of watching history repeat itself. I believe that George Bush and Tony Blair lied - and continue to lie - as blatantly about their reasons for entering Iraq and the prospects for the invasion and occupation as the presidents I served did about Vietnam.
By the time I released to the press in 1971 what became known as the Pentagon Papers - 7,000 pages of top-secret documents demonstrating that virtually everything four American presidents had told the public about our involvement in Vietnam was false - I had known that pattern as an insider for years, and I knew that a fifth president, Richard Nixon, was following in their footsteps. In the fall of 2002, I hoped that officials in Washington and London who knew that our countries were being lied into an illegal, bloody war and occupation would consider doing what I wish I had done in 1964 or 1965, years before I did, before the bombs started to fall: expose these lies, with documents.
I can only admire the more timely, courageous action of Katherine Gun, the GCHQ translator who risked her career and freedom to expose an illegal plan to win official and public support for an illegal war, before that war had started. Her revelation of a classified document urging British intelligence to help the US bug the phones of all the members of the UN security council to manipulate their votes on the war may have been critical in denying the invasion a false cloak of legitimacy. That did not prevent the aggression, but it was reasonable for her to hope that her country would not choose to act as an outlaw, thereby saving lives. She did what she could, in time for it to make a difference, as indeed others should have done, and still can.
I have no doubt that there are thousands of pages of documents in safes in London and Washington right now - the Pentagon Papers of Iraq - whose unauthorised revelation would drastically alter the public discourse on whether we should continue sending our children to die in Iraq. That's clear from what has already come out through unauthorised disclosures from many anonymous sources and from officials and former officials such as David Kelly and US ambassador Joseph Wilson, who revealed the falsity of reports that Iraq had pursued uranium from Niger, which President Bush none the less cited as endorsed by British intelligence in his state of the union address before the war. Both Downing Street and the White House organised covert pressure to punish these leakers and to deter others, in Dr Kelly's case with tragic results.
Those who reveal documents on the scale necessary to return foreign policy to democratic control risk prosecution and prison sentences, as Katherine Gun is now facing. I faced 12 felony counts and a possible sentence of 115 years; the charges were dismissed when it was discovered that White House actions aimed at stopping further revelations of administration lying had included criminal actions against me.
Exposing governmental lies carries a heavy personal risk, even in our democracies. But that risk can be worthwhile when a war's-worth of lives is at stake.
· [i]Daniel Ellsberg is the author of Secrets: a Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers[/i]. http://www.ellsberg.net/
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| Dubya's Corporate Media Doesn't Want To Tell US The Truth! |
| 01.28.04 (6:34 am) [edit] |
The carnage in Iraq continues daily unabatted but Dubya's corporate media doesn't want to tell us the truth!
[b]Widespread attacks kill 13 in Iraq
[i]Six U.S. soldiers, two CNN employees among dead[/i][/b], http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD...
[b]BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Five attacks claimed the lives of 13 people in Iraq on Tuesday, including six U.S. soldiers, two CNN employees, four Iraqi policemen and an Iraqi civilian, according to police and military sources.[/b]
Three Combined Joint Task Force 7 soldiers were killed and three were wounded in a roadside bomb attack near Iskandariyah at 8 p.m. (noon ET) Tuesday.
They were traveling in a convoy when their vehicle struck the device. The wounded soldiers were evacuated to the 28th Combat Support Hospital.
In Khaldiyah, west of Baghdad, a roadside bomb killed three U.S. soldiers and an Iraqi civilian at about 1 p.m. (5 a.m. ET), a U.S. military spokesman said. One U.S. soldier and three Iraqis were wounded in the blast, the spokesman said.
Khaldiyah is between Fallujah and Ramadi, and also lies in the Sunni Triangle. The military said it is investigating the attack.
On the outskirts of Baghdad Tuesday, two CNN employees were killed and a third was wounded when the cars they were traveling in came under fire. They were returning to Baghdad in a two-car convoy from an assignment in the southern city of Hillah when they were ambushed on the outskirts of the city.
Translator/producer Duraid Isa Mohammed and driver Yasser Khatab died of multiple gunshot wounds. Cameraman Scott McWhinnie, in the other vehicle, was grazed in the head by a bullet.(Full story on http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD... )
In the holy Shiite city of Karbala, an Iraqi policeman was killed and two others were wounded Tuesday when assailants drove up to the headquarters of Polish coalition troops and opened fire, according to police sources.
In Ramadi, gunmen shot dead three additional Iraqi police officers Tuesday outside a police station, according to U.S. Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt.
Kimmitt also said the coalition was working throughout Iraq to make arrests and seize weapons. In raids in Bayji, "three armed attackers were killed when they confronted coalition soldiers as soldiers raided four locations," Kimmitt said.
He said the soldiers "were attempting to capture individuals who were suspected members of Mohammed's Army, an anti-coalition cell operating in the area. The soldiers captured five personnel, involving three targets."
Over the weekend, five U.S. soldiers and four Iraqi civilians were killed in three bomb attacks in the Sunni Triangle, U.S. military officials said. Also, three attacks in a 24-hour period between January 21 and 22 in the area killed nine people, including two U.S. soldiers. (Full story on http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD... )
Since the war began in Iraq in March, 518 U.S. soldiers have been killed, according to military figures -- 361 in what the military describes as "hostile." Since President Bush declared major combat operations over on May 1, 379 U.S. soldiers have died in Iraq -- 246 of them in hostile circumstances.
[b]U.N. election help headed to Iraq[/b]
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said Tuesday he is ready to send a mission to Iraq to decide if and when elections can be held.
Annan said he has concluded "that the United Nations can play a constructive role in helping to break the current impasse" over whether to hold direct elections or caucuses to choose a transitional national assembly. (Full story on http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD... )
Annan said the ability of the Coalition Provisional Authority to provide adequate security is a key factor in the decision.
Most U.N. staff pulled out of Iraq in October, two months after a bomb attack on its Baghdad headquarters killed 22 people, including top U.N. envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello. (Full story on http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD... )
[b]Other developments[/b]
• In Baghdad, a gang claiming to be from an Islamic party took over a Red Crescent office Tuesday in an upscale Baghdad neighborhood, and at least one staffer was wounded in the incident, a Red Crescent official told CNN. Iraqi police were at the scene.
• Also in Baghdad, the military said authorities who were checking a car for explosives near Iraq Governing Council offices Tuesday did not find a bomb, reversing a previous military report that explosives had been found. According to the military, the car went through a checkpoint, and a bomb-sniffing dog indicated it might contain explosives. The area was cordoned off, but soldiers did not find explosives.
• Late Monday, a rocket struck an open parking lot in central Baghdad's "Green Zone," where the coalition has its headquarters. U.S. military officials said no one was injured, and there was no damage to property.
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| Bush Lying About Lying About WMD! |
| 01.28.04 (6:28 am) [edit] |
Bush is lying about lying about phony WMD in Iraq! Bush should be impeached for lies that led us into a war that have resulted in the deaths of over 519 U.S. Soldiers and over 15,000 Iraqi Civilians!
[b]Bush Backs Away From His Claims About Iraq Arms[/b], http://www.nytimes.com/2004/0...
WASHINGTON, Jan. 27 — President Bush declined Tuesday to repeat his claims that evidence that Saddam Hussein had illicit weapons would eventually be found in Iraq, but he insisted that the war was nonetheless justified because Mr. Hussein posed "a grave and gathering threat to America and the world."
Asked by reporters if he would repeat earlier expressions of confidence that the weapons would be found in light of recent statements by the former chief weapons inspector in Iraq, David A. Kay, that Mr. Hussein had gotten rid of them well before the war, Mr. Bush did not answer directly.
"I think it's very important for us to let the Iraq Survey Group do its work, so we can find out the facts and compare the facts to what was thought," he said at an appearance with the visiting president of Poland.
Mr. Bush praised Dr. Kay's work and came to the defense of the Central Intelligence Agency, whose reporting on Iraq's weapons programs Dr. Kay sharply criticized in interviews over the weekend. "These are unbelievably hard-working, dedicated people who are doing a great job for America," Mr. Bush said of the intelligence community.
Yet at the White House and on Capitol Hill, many officials said it was obvious that the intelligence reports about Iraq had been deeply flawed. They said they doubted that Mr. Bush would have the luxury of waiting to confront the issue.
Democrats demanded that an independent panel examine how the National Intelligence Estimate — the 2002 document that Mr. Bush used as the basis of his comments that Iraq posed a direct threat to the United States and its allies — could have been so flawed. The White House expressed no interest in the formation of such a panel.
"I think it is critical that we follow up and find out what went wrong," the Senate minority leader, Tom Daschle of South Dakota, said on Tuesday, before meeting with Mr. Bush with a group of other Congressional leaders from both parties. At the meeting, Mr. Daschle noted that Congressional leaders had depended on sound intelligence in voting on the war. Officials knowledgeable about the exchange said Mr. Bush interrupted Mr. Daschle and argued that the Iraq war was a "worthy" effort and that the administration had not manipulated the evidence. The president also said he had not given up the search for the weapons.
Dr. Kay resigned last week as head of the Iraq Survey Group. In an interview with Reuters last week, he said one reason he stepped down was that his team had been diverted to some degree to help battle the insurgency.
In private, some administration officials acknowledged Tuesday that Dr. Kay's conclusion that the intelligence was deeply flawed was becoming an unwelcome political problem that the White House would have to confront, either now or when the presidential campaign heats up.
Two administration officials reported that a debate has erupted within the administration over whether Mr. Bush should soon call for some kind of reform of the intelligence-gathering process. But the officials said Mr. Bush's aides were searching for a formula that would allow them to acknowledge intelligence-gathering problems without blaming the Central Intelligence Agency or the director of central intelligence, George J. Tenet, who approved that National Intelligence Estimate.
"We spent the summer with the White House and the agency spitting at each other," said one official, recalling the arguments over who was to blame for Mr. Bush's inaccurate accusation in the State of the Union address last year that Saddam Hussein had tried to buy nuclear material in Africa. "We can't afford another of those."
Two Democratic members of the Senate Intelligence Committee said Tuesday that senior members of the administration continue to exaggerate evidence about unconventional weapons.
"Just within the last few days, Vice President Cheney has said that it is clear that a couple of vehicles that were found in Iraq were mobile biological weapons labs, exactly the opposite of what David Kay is reportedly saying," said Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan.
Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, Democrat of West Virginia, said the "overwhelming question" surrounding the intelligence issue remained "was this a predetermined war or not?"
In a recent interview, Senator John Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat who won his party's New Hampshire primary on Tuesday, said he had been "repeatedly misled" about the evidence by a number of administration officials. He cited Mr. Cheney, but also noted that Secretary of State Colin L. Powell — who had been the most cautious in the administration about the evidence — told him that the reason to vote to authorize military action was Mr. Hussein's weapons ability — and that other reasons, including bringing democracy to Iraq, were secondary.
But in public on Tuesday, Mr. Bush, while careful in his claims, made it clear that he had no regrets.
"There is just no doubt in my mind that Saddam Hussein was a grave and gathering threat to America and the world," Mr. Bush told reporters as he met with the Polish president, Aleksander Kwasniewski. "There is just no doubt in my mind. And I say that based upon intelligence that I saw prior to the decision to go into Iraq, and I say that based upon what I know today."
Yet Mr. Bush's own words on the subject have been a moving target. In the State of the Union address a week ago, he referred to "weapons of mass destruction-related program activities" that inspectors had found, drawing the wording from Dr. Kay's interim report last fall. He did not mention Dr. Kay's other conclusions: that those activities were largely in research and development, that most made little progress, and that they were intended to deceive Mr. Hussein into thinking that he was spending money fruitfully.
Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman, argued Tuesday that Mr. Bush had never said that Iraq posed an "imminent" threat, but only a "grave and growing" one. That may be literally correct, but both Mr. Bush and his aides made it clear many times that they believed Mr. Hussein already had unconventional weapons.
For example, on Oct. 7, 2002, during a speech in Cincinnati that laid out how America was threatened by Mr. Hussein, Mr. Bush said: "If we know Saddam Hussein has dangerous weapons today — and we do — does it make any sense for the world to wait to confront him as he grows even stronger and develops even more dangerous weapons?"
Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, speaking to the House Armed Services Committee on Sept. 18, 2002, said, "We do know that the Iraqi regime currently has chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction."
Such statements were important then because Mr. Bush had to convince the country and his allies that, especially in the post-Sept. 11 world, he could not wait to build a broader coalition against Mr. Hussein.
[b]Moreover, international law has been far more forgiving of "pre-emptive war" against a country about to begin a strike of its own than it is of "preventive war" against a country that may, some day, pose a challenge to another state. That is seen more as an act of raw power than of self-defense[/b].
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| Dubya Begs United Nations To Save His SORRY ASS! |
| 01.28.04 (6:23 am) [edit] |
Dubya is begging that awful, terrible, irrelevant United Nations to save his SORRY ASS!
[b]UN to decide feasibility of Iraq election
[i]US looks to Annan for compromise over poll[/i][/b], http://www.guardian.co.uk/Ira...,2763,1132742,00.html
Kofi Annan, the UN secretary general, said yesterday he would send a team to Iraq to determine if elections could be held in the summer.
The US and Britain hope the mission will find a compromise between Washington's idea of regional caucuses to choose an Iraqi government and the demands for direct elections from Iraq's most respected Shia cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani
Mr Annan said the mission would report on whether elections could be held by June 30, the date that power will be transferred to the Iraqis, and if not it would suggest an alternative.
The US-led administration in Baghdad, the coalition provisional authority (CPA), has said it is impractical to hold direct elections so soon, because there is no fair electoral roll, voter registration or constituency boundaries.
Instead it has proposed a system of selection and indirect elections.
But Ayatollah Sistani has led opposition to the plan, calling instead for direct elections to choose a government.
Mr Annan has written to Ayatollah Sistani telling him he believes it would not be possible to hold elections by the summer. The cleric has indicated he may accept a compromise, as long as it has the sanction of the UN.
"Consensus amongst all Iraqi constituencies would be the best guarantee of a legitimate and credible transitional governance arrangement for Iraq," Mr Annan said yesterday in Paris.
UN officials say privately there are few practical obstacles to early elections, rather the problem is the unstable political situation.
"On the technical side, the issues are; can you create an electoral roll, and is there a controlled environment," one UN official told the Guardian.
What worries the UN is in the current environment with virtually no party identification among the population, a rushed election could be hijacked. "Early polls become very volatile, you don't necessarily get a very democratic outcome," the official said.
This was echoed by the UN envoy to Iraq, Lakhdar Brahimi, who said yesterday that premature elections in Iraq could do more harm than good and signaled he would not play the kind of leadership role there that Washington wanted him to play.
"If you get your priorities wrong, elections are a very divisive process," he said.
"They create tensions. They create competition. And in a country that is not stable enough to take that ... one has to be certain it will not do more harm than good."
It is expected that the UN team will take two to three weeks to produce its report.
Mr Annan also said the visit was dependent on the CPA guaranteeing the security of his staff.
This will be the first time UN diplomats have returned to Baghdad since the bombing of their headquarters in the city in August, in which 22 people were killed, including the UN's special envoy, Sergio Vieira de Mello.
Yesterday, three American soldiers and two Iraqi civilians were killed in a bomb blast in Khaldiya, 50 miles west of Baghdad. Another soldier was injured in the explosion, which appeared to have been caused by a large roadside bomb. Another three American soldiers were killed and three others wounded when a roadside bomb exploded near Iskandariyah, 27 miles south of Baghdad.
Until now Washington has excluded the UN from the political process in Iraq. In the political framework for Iraq, agreed between the CPA and the Iraqi governing council in November, the UN is not even mentioned. That was despite the fact that the previous month the UN security council agreed to strengthen the the role of the governing council in working towards a representative Iraqi government, under resolution 1511.
The UN may also be encouraged to play a military role. In the months before the US hands over power to the Iraqis it must agree with the Iraqi governing council what role the US military will play in future. There is considerable opposition to the US military occupation across the country and American commanders may find it hard to strike an agreement with a future Iraqi government.
Officials in the CPA have considered a compromise in which US forces would continue to lead military operations but as part of a UN peacekeeping force.
Yesterday, after talks with the French president, Jacques Chirac, Mr Annan said a UN peacekeeping force was not planned but the security council may approve a broader, multinational force in Iraq for the first time.
"I don't think for the moment that the question of sending blue helmets has been raised," he said.
"One could foresee a multinational force authorised by the security council."
• [b]Two CNN employees were killed and another slightly wounded in an ambush in Iraq, the international news organisation said yesterday.[/b]
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| Veep Cheney Says "DEFICITS DON'T MATTER"!!! That Says It ALL!!! |
| 01.27.04 (7:13 pm) [edit] |
Veep-N-Creep Cheney says "[i]deficits don't matter[/i]" and that rape of America is "[i]our due[/i]" referring to his smelly, sluttish self and his corporate pimps. [b]That says it all [/b]about Dubya and Cheney's arrogant corruption and blatant incompetence. They run the USA like their best buddy Kenny-boy Lay ran Enron: [i][b]INTO THE GROUND[/b][/i]!
[b]Passing the Bill to our Children[/b], http://www.commondreams.org/v...
[i][b]'Reagan proved deficits don't matter[/b][/i]," Dick Cheney told Paul O'Neill during a Cabinet meeting. "[i][b]We won the (2002) midterms. This is our due[/b][/i]."
No one is disputing the words of the former Treasury secretary in the new book, "The Price of Loyalty." Since Cheney had been responsible for bringing the "straight shooter" O'Neill into the Bush administration, we can take O'Neill's words for the truth.
Cheney's remarks bring this question to mind: What kind of a government is this? The idea that it is the Bush administration's "due" to run deficits and leave the bills for future taxpayers is a startling one. Governments run deficits, but it is the rare one that believes they are its right.
By "due," Cheney meant that because Republicans won the midterm elections on a platform of more tax cuts and deficit increases, they could pass still more tax cuts and run up still more deficits. Voters knew that a Clinton surplus of $200 billion had been transformed into a $200 billion deficit under Bush (it is now $450 billion), and voted for Republicans anyway.
That's what Cheney meant by "Reagan proved deficits don't matter." For Cheney, Reagan proved there was no political cost to big deficits.
But O'Neill, the treasurer, was talking economics. He worried about more tax cuts on top of the rising deficit, and Bush, briefly, showed some interest, asking if they hadn't already done enough for wealthy taxpayers. Adviser Karl Rove admonished Bush to "stick to principle" – the principle being that deficits were his due – and the debate was over.
A month later, Cheney called O'Neill to suggest he announce his wish to retire. "I'm too old to begin telling lies now," said O'Neill, so Cheney fired him.
These are big revelations. One thinks of presidents who heard different points of view: John Kennedy's Treasury secretary was Republican C. Douglas Dillon, and Kennedy heard all sides during the Cuban missile crisis. Lyndon Johnson kept George Ball in his Cabinet though Ball argued strenuously against escalation in Vietnam. Bill Clinton heard differing views from Bill Cohen, Sandy Berger and Madeleine Albright on Kosovo.
The notion that "deficits don't matter" can be defended politically only as long as voters agree. In polls prior to the 2002 midterms, voters worried about Bush's deficit and said they would rather have a tax increase than tax cut – then voted Republican. For Cheney and Rove, that was proof that deficits don't matter.
Even politically, that's a game that lasts only so long. Nations don't like the idea of passing the bill to their children any more than individuals do, and though they will accept deficits to stimulate the economy, when needed, the idea that they "don't matter" or are government's "due" is a strange one.
O'Neill clearly hit a nerve with his book, and the administration lost no time reacting. "We didn't listen to O'Neill's wacky ideas when he was in the White House; why should we start listening to him now?" one senior official told CNN.
Wacky? Where would we be if treasurers didn't worry about deficits and argue with presidents and vice presidents when they feel economic policy is politicized. The political parties have swapped economic roles in recent years – Republicans becoming big spenders and Democrats budget balancers – but between those extremes lies good economics, and the treasurer's job is to point that out.
There's a time for deficits and one for surpluses, and how money is spent should be part of any government debate. Bush's silencing of his treasurer for making economic arguments should disturb us all. While it may be possible (though dangerous) to argue that "deficits don't matter" politically, it is a terrible economic argument.
A budget deficit represents an intergenerational transfer: We pay lower taxes today so our children can pay higher ones tomorrow. Saddle future taxpayers with enough debt, as Bush is doing, and they will be unable to meet their own needs. Saddle them with debt at the very time programs such as Social Security and Medicare face deficits, and you risk social catastrophe.
The politicians that dispatched O'Neill don't worry about future taxpayers. They want votes today, and if they can get them via tax cuts, Medicare drug subsidies, amnesty for illegal immigrants and promises of going to Mars, what do they care about the bills? They'll be back on their ranches.
In two months, California voters will have a chance to vote on this issue of debt versus taxes. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (who unlike Bush cannot run deficits or print money), wants voters to approve a $15 billion bond to close a current account gap.
Normally, bonds are floated to pay for capital projects – schools, highways, dams, etc. – passing both cost and benefits off to the future.
Borrowing to pay current bills is a risky idea. In last week's Field Poll, Californians said they preferred a tax increase to Schwarzenegger's bonds.
Following Cheney's dictum, however, Schwarzenegger – who ran against tax increases and even a vehicle license fee increase (the VLF is a sound and progressive tax) – can say debt doesn't matter, and passing the bill to our children is his due.
- [i]James O. Goldsborough [/i]
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| Why Dubya Is TOO STUPID To Be President! |
| 01.27.04 (6:50 am) [edit] |
Dubya has proved that he is [i]TOO STUPID [/i]to be President! [i]NO WMD IN IRAQ[/i]: So David Kay says this morning in an interview with Matt Lauer (NBC Today Show) that Dubya was misled by the US Intelligence Agencies. Yeah, so Dubya doesn't have the [i]BRAINS[/i] to ask tough questions? Apparently not!
A President should have the intellectual capacity and courage to ask tough questions and demand solid evidence before he takes our country to WAR! During the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Generals told Kennedy to go to war with Russia. Kennedy asked tough questions and was not led into a nuclear war with Russia that the Generals wanted. Kennedy was not a Useful Idiot, Kennedy was too smart to be their puppet.
Dubya[i] IS[/i] a Useful Idiot of the neocons and the corrupt corporate interests! Dubya was told that the evidence in Iraq was not certain, but as Paul O'Neill confirmed: Dubya said "Find me an excuse". We are being lied to: [b]Dubya is either corrupt or stupid or both![/b]
[b]From Iraq to Libya, US knew little on weapons:
Doubts that Hussein had WMD raise questions about war's rationale and intelligence reliability.[/b], http://www.csmonitor.com/2004...
WASHINGTON – When it comes to unconventional weapons, Iraq may have been far from the most dangerous country in the world after all. In recent days a string of surprising revelations has scrambled the world's proliferation threat assessments.
Iraq's weapons programs were apparently in shambles, for instance, while Libya's were surprisingly advanced. Pakistan's nuclear scientists might have been rogue agents, proffering secrets for cash. And it appears that North Korea may be the most advanced rogue nuclear nation of all, with an advanced capacity to produce fissile material.
The bottom line: In the shadowy world of intelligence, judging capacities to produce biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons is among the most difficult estimating jobs of all.
"These intelligence estimates are not good enough to support a policy of preemptive war," says Joseph Cirincione, of the nonproliferation project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington D.C.
It is still possible that traces of weapons of mass destruction will be found in Iraq. The capture of Saddam Hussein might convince cowed scientists that the old regime is never coming back, leading to new tips, documents, or even buried equipment.
But after months of weapons hunting, the US right now is coming up with little. This was underscored over the weekend by forceful comments from the CIA's former chief weapons inspector, David Kay, who characterized Iraq's unconventional weapons programs as being in "disarray" under a leadership that was increasingly out of touch with reality.
Mr. Kay said that almost certainly Iraq had no stockpiles of such weapons, as the administration said it likely did prior to its invasion of the country last year. Iraq did maintain some test capability in regards to chemical weapons, said Kay, and may have been continuing research and development on biological weapons prior to its downfall.
The Hussein regime had made some effort to restart a nuclear program dismantled in the wake of the 1991 Gulf War, but it had made little progress, according to Kay. And he said one dominant feature of all Iraq's unconventional weapons programs was corruption, in the sense that scientists and lower-level officials fooled higher-ups about the real lack of progress, solely to reap money and other benefits.
"The regime was no longer in control. It was like a death spiral," Kay told The New York Times.
Critics of the administration's use of weapons intelligence prior to the Iraq war said Kay's findings should have come as no surprise to anyone. "My reaction? I told you so," says Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association.
IN the run-up to war, the administration clearly took the worst-case scenario for almost all aspects of unconventional weaponry when building its case for invasion, according to Mr. Kimball. It ignored other evidence, including fresh intelligence produced by UN inspectors.
"The [unconventional weapons] programs were essentially in a state of suspension," says Kimball.
It shouldn't be surprising that Iraq's leaders were themselves in the dark about the program, says Kimball. That same dynamic may have been at work in Pakistan, where nuclear scientists apparently sold weapons technology without the central government's knowledge.
Pakistani offiicals indicated over the weekend that several scientists - who they declined to name - had large bank accounts tied to technology sales.
Thus the most dangerous weapons proliferator in Iraq's region might not have been Iraq itself, but an ally of the United States. Libya's uranium enrichment technology, for instance, is very similar to that used by Pakistan. Now that Libya has pledged to give up its unconventional weapons programs, it turns out its equipment was much better than believed, according to international inspectors who have visited the country.
And North Korea may have the most dangerous programs of all. A group of private experts that recently toured North Korea's nuclear sites said last week that they were shown evidence that Pyongyang is at least producing plutonium metal.
Siegfried Hecker, a senior fellow at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, told Congress that he handled a small sample of what was alleged to be plutonium during the trip, and that its color and weight seemed about right.
In addition, the 8,000 spent fuel rods stored in the Yongbyon nuclear facility appear to have been withdrawn, perhaps in preparation for reprocessing for plutonium extraction.
"For all intents and purposes ... those fuel rods are gone," Dr. Hecker told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
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| A War Culture |
| 01.27.04 (6:44 am) [edit] |
[b]A War Culture [/b]
Our country, if you look at its history, has fought an awful lot of wars, and it's no wonder that militarism is always just beneath the surface of our culture, even in times of peace.
Americans fought in the French and Indian War, the American Revolution, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the War Between the States, the Spanish-American War, the Philippines Insurrection, World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the war against the Serbs, the war in Afghanistan and the Iraqi wars.
Interspersed among all of those are about 300 years of Indian wars and minor military incursions into such places as China, Lebanon, Panama, Nicaragua, Haiti, Grenada, Libya, Somalia and perhaps others that I have missed. Our national anthem is a war song based on a poem written during the War of 1812. Many television stations, when they sign off, run a film of military jets flying above the flag.
Even our language is full of references to war. Politicians, pink-fingered and manicured, nevertheless always "fight" for this or that program or policy. The expression "lock, stock and barrel" does not refer to whiskey barrels but to the parts of a rifle. To say that someone has "shot his wad" is a reference to soldiers who forgot to put the bullets into their black-powder rifles. We say winning an election is a "victory." We sometimes talk about a "double-barreled" threat or say that something is "on target." Election efforts are called "campaigns." We often speak of sports teams "battling back." We conduct "wars" on social problems such as poverty and drug abuse. As an aside, I should point out that the Arabic word "jihad" is like our English word "war." It can mean either physical combat or a personal, social or political struggle.
I'm sure you can think of more expressions or words. We often use a World War II acronym, "snafu," which stands for "situation normal, all f— up." We sometimes say "ground zero," which is a reference to the impact point of a nuclear weapon.
Of course, in addition to our real and historical involvement in wars, our entertainment culture is saturated with violence. Our civilian police departments are being militarized. It's an odd country indeed for anyone to suggest gun control, and, of course, the peace movement in the United States has always been a minority faction. Pacifism has often been equated with treason, and to many Americans patriotism means simply a willingness to go to war (or, more often, a willingness for some of our younger citizens to go to war).
My own life has been molded by the war culture. I was 2 years old when World War II started in Europe and 8 when it ended in the Pacific. Thus, most of my childhood was filled with war. I saw so much newsreel footage of American bombs falling on German cities that I used to carry a hard-rubber ball in my pocket to "bomb" columns of ants on the sidewalk. I assumed as a given that I would take my turn in uniform. I have always assumed that violence itself is a given. Except for a few trips, I've never slept in a house without a loaded gun. I've always been psychologically prepared to kill if the need arises.
I confess that I was less upset by the Sept. 11 attack than many people. Having become calloused with the massive casualties of World War II, with so many images of destroyed cities and dead bodies stored in my brain, my first reaction was: "Only 3,000 dead? That's not too bad."
Thank God I realized how warped by the war culture I was and tried hard to rear my own children differently. In the world as it is, we probably cannot avoid war, but we should certainly stop glorifying it and should crack down on the gratuitous violence on television, in movies and in video games. Exposure to violence, even make-believe violence, does produce emotional calluses.
We need for our children and grandchildren a culture of life, not a culture of death.
- [i]Charley Reese has been a journalist for 49 years, reporting on everything from sports to politics. From 1969-71, he worked as a campaign staffer for gubernatorial, senatorial and congressional races in several states. He was an editor, assistant to the publisher, and columnist for the Orlando Sentinel from 1971 to 2001. He now writes a syndicated column three times a week for King Features, which is carried on Antiwar.com. Reese served two years active duty in the U.S. Army as a tank gunner.[/i]
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| Iraqi self-rule splits White House |
| 01.27.04 (6:40 am) [edit] |
[b]The struggle for the pea-sized miniscule brain of Dubya continues between the insane neocon war-mongers in the White House responsible for the massacre of tens of thousands, and the fascist pigs in the White House who watch the election polls and simply want to remain in power to continue their grab for power and riches. Either way, [i]this[/i] White House is a disaster for the working people of the USA.[/b]
[b]Iraqi self-rule splits White House[/b], http://www.sunherald.com/mld/...
WASHINGTON - The Bush administration is deeply divided over how to defuse opposition to a U.S.-backed plan for restoring self-rule to Iraq and avert even deeper instability.
Publicly, the White House and the U.S. administrator in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, remain committed to turning over power on July 1 to an interim government selected by an interim assembly chosen through regional caucuses.
But privately, President Bush's national security aides are debating a number of U.S. and British fallback options, including acceding to a demand by Iraq's most revered Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani, that the assembly be directly elected.
Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld favor a proposal to turn over power early - by April 1 - to the Governing Council, a body of U.S.-installed Iraqi leaders, said senior U.S. officials, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The council would be expanded from its current 25 seats to include more Shiites. The aim would be to persuade Sistani to agree to delaying elections, they said.
"This proposal came up in September and Bremer shot it down," said one senior U.S. official. "It has come back to life."
Adnan Pachachi, who holds the council's rotating presidency, heavily promoted the idea during a visit to Washington earlier this month.
But the State Department, the National Security Council staff and the CIA oppose the idea, the officials said.
National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and senior U.S. diplomats prefer a "go slow" approach, said the second senior U.S. official.
They want to wait to hear from a United Nations fact-finding team that U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan is expected to send to Iraq to determine whether conditions exist for free and credible elections, he said.
Their hope is that the team will confirm the Bush administration's contention that there's insufficient time to organize elections and persuade Sistani to drop his demand.
In case Sistani refuses to compromise, options presented by British and U.S. experts include holding elections for the interim assembly in some parts of the country or having national elections that wouldn't meet international standards, the second senior U.S. official said.
Another option would be to delay the turnover of self-rule until polls can be organized, a move that would be opposed by White House political aides who want Bush to be able to campaign for re-election on the successful restoration of Iraqi sovereignty.
A White House spokesman declined to comment on any of the options.
One reason for the opposition to the proposal favored by Cheney and the Pentagon, the second senior official said, is that it would keep in power Iraqis with little popular support, including Ahmad Chalabi, a secular Shiite close to neoconservatives in the Pentagon and White House.
Chalabi, a former businessman who opposed Saddam Hussein for years from exile, has long been distrusted by the CIA and State Department. He won favor with neoconservatives with his pledges to seek peace with Israel and provide bases in the heart of the Muslim world to U.S. troops fighting the war on terrorism.
Many Iraqis regard Chalabi and other members of the Governing Council as American stooges. Many experts fear that turning power over to them could be as destabilizing as spurning Sistani's demand for elections.
In a statement read to thousands of worshippers at mosques on Friday, Sistani pronounced the Governing Council illegal, calling it "an un-elected body."
Should the United States proceed with its plan to restore self-rule, Sistani could trigger a Shiite uprising with a religious order declaring the interim government illegitimate.
The United States contends that there's insufficient time to undertake the enormous bureaucratic and logistical task of preparing and holding elections before July 1. One major problem is that there are no voter registration rolls.
Ensuring security would be a massive undertaking, especially amid a rotation of U.S. forces now getting under way that involves replacing tens of thousands of troops in Iraq with fresh soldiers from the United States.
There's also a concern that elections would favor majority Shiites - about 60 percent of Iraq's 25 million people - over minority Sunni Muslims and ethnic groups such as the Kurds, and bring to power leaders who favor an Iranian-style theocratic regime.
Cheney and Rumsfeld apparently believe that handing power to a larger Governing Council that included Shiites loyal to Sistani could placate Sistani while ensuring the continued influence of Chalabi and other secular, pro-American members.
Their influence could be decisive on the issue of U.S. military bases in Iraq.
U.S. officials are working out with Governing Council members the terms of an agreement that would provide for the long-term presence of U.S. troops in Iraq.
A third senior U.S. official said Cheney and Rumsfeld are concerned that elections could lead to the installation of an anti-U.S. interim government that could junk the accord.
The second senior official said he was "surprised" by Cheney's support for the idea because Cheney had been deeply upset by ties that Chalabi forged with senior clerics in Iran.
"Chalabi is back in Cheney's good graces," he said.
A sign of the support Chalabi still enjoys in the White House was evident in his presence as a guest of first lady Laura Bush at the State of the Union address last week.
- [i]JONATHAN S. LANDAY[/i]
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| The Roots of Corporate Fascism in America |
| 01.26.04 (5:09 pm) [edit] |
[b]The Roots of Corporate Fascism in America[/b], http://alexconstantine.50megs...
[i][b]The 1930s: Nazis Parading on Main Street - Part 1: The Plot Against Roosevelt[/b][/i]: http://www.spiritone.com/~gdy52150/1930s.htm
One cannot hope to gain an understanding of fascism in America without first looking at its roots in the 1930s. For most readers, the 1930s evokes images of the Great Depression and Dust Bowl. However, this wrenching decade of world economic turmoil involved far more serious events. From the beginning of the decade, events were conspiring to unleash on an unsuspecting world the horrors of the Second World War and the unfathomable inhumanity of the Holocaust. The Second World War would go on to shape the geopolitical scene for the remainder of the century. Claims arising from the Holocaust would still be front-page headlines as the world entered the 21st century.
The 30's were a decade in which Nazis openly paraded, unopposed, in the streets of America and were supported by many. Much of the details of 1930's fascism are still shrouded in secrecy. It's been over a half-century since the end of the war, yet news is still surfacing of corporate America's dealings with the Nazis. As of yet, no one has exposed, in a comprehensive manner, the connections between the 1930's fascists and today's American right wing. Many of the events of the decade have been quietly swept under the rug, such as the plot against Roosevelt. The press downplayed the assassination attempt at the time, and, even today, most are still unaware of it.
Just as economic hardships in Germany led to the rise of Hitler, many Americans hit by the depression joined the fascist ranks. Likewise, it was the long and deep recession of the 1980s that lead to a reemergence of fascism, not only in the United States but worldwide, as the world transformed from the industrial age to the information age.
The 30s saw membership in fascist groups expand, with some groups claiming over a million members. This influence extended to the very end of the twentieth century. Many of today's far right extremist groups were founded by former pro-Nazis, an example being the Posse Comitatus founded by former Silver Shirt leader, Henry Lamont Beach. Other far right extremists groups, such as the World Anti-Communist League, are rife with former pro-Nazis and even Nazi war criminals. The Republican Party has been infested with Nazi war criminals. Many of the ethnic heritage groups the Republican Party set up under Nixon are nothing short of havens for former Nazi war criminals. The American Security Council founded in the 1950s was formed by elements from three pro-Nazi groups of the 30s, and exerted a serious influence on the Reagan administration, as did the LaRouche fascist group. A later chapter will explore the fascist connections and nature of today's far right extremist groups in more detail.
The rhetoric of today's right-wing extremists is telling evidence of their connection to the fascists of the 30s. The current wild-eyed claim among many in militia groups about Russian or UN troops massing on the Canadian border is nothing but recycled rhetoric from the fascists of the 30s. The 1960s right wing group, the Minutemen, made a similar claim. Their version had the Red Chinese massing along the Mexican border for an invasion. This, too, can be traced back to the 30s, when fascists claimed Jews were massing along the Mexican border for an invasion.
The previous chapter detailed how the Nazi battle plan created economic sabotage through the use of cartels and patent agreements. This chapter will begin focusing on a second part of that battle plan. With the exception of Russia, Hitler never invaded a country without first unleashing his agents to create domestic unrest. The United States was no exception. The Nazi's web of intrigue in the United States extended far beyond the use of spies and noisy street agitators such as the Silver Shirts. The Nazis found willing accompanists in the media, the halls of congress, as well as corporate boardrooms.
This chapter will not be a boring listing of the fascist groups of the 30s, if such a list could ever be complete. Fortunately, the fringe right has always been badly fragmented, indeed, it would be cause for great concern to see a consolidation today among the various groups. However, the fragmentation of the 30s was even greater than it is today.1 There were well over 700 different fascist groups during the 30s. The American-National-Sociali st Party, German-American Bund, Christian Front, the Silver Shirts, America First Committee, the Christian Mobilizer, National Workers League and the Committee of One Million were some of the more prominent fascist groups at the time. In addition, many factions of the Mothers Movement were openly fascist.
This chapter will focus on the parallels and common elements of the fascist groups of the 30s with those of today. The parallels are numerous, as striking as they are disturbing, and should stand as a vanguard, warning of the hidden agenda of right wing elements in this country. Among the many common elements between yesterday's fascists and today's far right groups are the intense hatred of minorities and unions, isolationism, destructive division, nationalism and religion. The Identity religion common to so many of today's far right groups will be shown to have evolved directly from fascist groups of the 30s.
However, the real story of fascism from the 30s and 40s is one of traitors and seditionists escaping justice after the war's end. As the following quote taken from Facts and Fascism by George Seldes shows:
"[i]Only the little seditionist and traitors have been rounded up by the FBI. The real Nazi Fifth Column in America remains immune. And yet there is evidence that those in both countries who place profits above patriotism---and fascism is based entirely on profits although all of its propaganda speaks of patriotism---have conspired to make America part of the Nazi Big Business system. Thurman Arnold, assistant district attorney of the United States, his assistant, Norman Littell, and several congressional investigations, have produced incontrovertible evidence that some of our biggest monopolies entered into secret agreements with the Nazi cartels and divided the world among them. Most notorious of all was Alcoa, the Mellon-Davis-Duke monopoly which is largely responsible for America not having sufficient aluminum with which to build airplanes before and after Pearl Harbor, while Germany had an unlimited supply. Of the Aluminum Corporation sabotage, and that of other leading companies, the press said very little, but several books have now been written out of the official record[/i]."2
It is this unbridled corporatism that is the very heart of fascism. Notice how the words of George Seldes written in 1943 are still true today about those that place profits above patriotism. This writer remembers that it was a stated objective of the first Bush administration to determine which corporations were responsible for supplying Iraq with the equipment to produce chemical and biological weapons, and to bring them to justice. Ten years after the Gulf War, not a single corporation has been charged, and the media has quietly swept that pledge under the rug. As Seldes stated, they are immune.
More odious is that Dick Cheney , Secretary of Defense in the first Bush administration and the current vice-president, sold Iraq dual-use equipment during his tenure as CEO of Halliburton. Such equipment can be used to rebuild Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. As Secretary of Defense, Cheney awarded several contracts to Halliburton's subsidiary, Brown and Root Services, for reports as to how private companies could provide logistical support to troops in potential war zones. From 1992 to 1999, with Cheney at Halliburton's helm, Brown and Root was awarded a total of $1.2 billion in defense contracts. Here again we see a revolving door between corporate America and government. A door leading only to servitude. Not one mention of these deals was made in the press during the 2000 election campaign. Nor was the failure to prosecute the companies that supplied Iraq with the weapons of mass destruction ever mentioned. While the press viciously accused President Clinton of wagging the dog after UN inspectors were forced to leave Iraq, they made no mention of Cheney selling dual use equipment to Iraq.
Here we have the heart of the problem of the next century: corporate power. Corporations have acquired too much power. They have become so powerful they can openly flaunt our labor laws, our environmental laws and even sell materials for weapons of mass destruction without fear. The problem has become so widespread, and corporations have become so powerful, that society now serves the corporations rather than corporations serving society.
There is a solution, however. See the last chapter and the proposed amendment to the constitution limiting the rights of corporations. In short, as we progress into the new century, the right wing issues at the forefront of today's political scene are nothing more than recycled pro-fascist issues of the 30s. It is an agenda of corporate rule. The GATS treaty currently being negotiated and the now-dead Multi-Lateral Investment Agreement, are nothing more than attempts to go global with fascist corporatism.
Due to the depths of the depression the early 1930s were rife with grandiose plots. In the fall of 1933, Americans learned of a sensational plot by General Art Smith and his Khaki Shirts. Smith a soldier of fortunate had formed a tight knit band of around thirty to one hundred followers. Smith was a raging anti-Semitic and the Khaki Shirts had killed a heckler in New York City in July. As his reputation grew so did his ambitions. Smith’s idol was Mussolini and he boasted that a million men would follow him and they would kill every damn Jew in the United States. He announced he would march on Washington and seize the government much as Mussolini had done in Italy. Unfortunately, Smith was arrested In Philadelphia on October 12 upon a tip police received about a arms cache.113
There is no better place to begin studying the fascism of the 1930s than to start with the one element that was common to all of these fascist groups, and at the heart of their ideology. Fortunately, such an element exists simply it was the visceral hatred of Roosevelt and liberalism by the native fascist. It would take until the 1990s before we would see such a vicious level of hate displayed in mainstream politics again, with the Republican attack on President Clinton. Both events will show how far right wing extremists will go to gain power and subvert democracy.
There is no better event to begin with than the coup d'état against Roosevelt financed by Irenee du Pont along with the Morgans and a few other wealthy industrialists of the time. Others involved with the plot were Robert Clark heir to the Singer Sewing machine corporation, Grayson Murphy, Director of Goodyear and the Pew family of Sun Oil fame. During the war all three of these corporations were involved in aiding of the Nazi empire. Singer's plant located on the east side of the Elba was used to manufacture machine guns. Today, Singer has given up the sewing machine business and is now engaged in defense contracting.
Central to the plot were two groups, the American Legion and the Liberty League. The reader should recall that the American Legion was formed and financed by the Morgans and Murphy in 1919 to be used primary to break strikes. Several high-ranking officials from the American Legion were associated with the plot: William Doyle, a former state commander of the American Legion and Gerald MacGuire, a former commander of the Connecticut American Legion.
Irenee was the power behind the du Pont throne at the time held a controlling interest in General Motors. He was an avid fascist and supporter of Hitler, tracking Hitler's career closely from the 1920s. On September 7, 1926, du Pont gave a speech before the American Chemical Society, in which he advocated the creation of a race of supermen. Injecting special drugs into them during childhood would create these supermen. Not every child would receive such injections du Pont insisted that only those of pure blood would get the injections.96
Throughout the 1930s, the du Ponts invested heavily in Hitler's Germany through their corporate empire. General Motors under the control of the du Pont family had invested thirty million dollars alone into I.G. Farben. Wendell Swint, du Pont's foreign relation's director knew that I.G. and Krupp had arranged to contribute one half of a percent of its payroll to the Nazi party. Swint testified before the 1934 Munitions Hearings that du Pont was fully aware that it was financing the Nazis through the Opal division of General Motors. Even more telling is the amount of financial backing the du Ponts provided pro-Hitler groups in the United States.Starting in 1933 du Pont provided financing for the American Liberty Lobby, Clark's Crusaders who claimed 1,200,000 members and the Liberty League.3
In 1934 Irenee du Pont and William Knudsen, the president of General Motors along with friends of the Morgan Bank and others set into motion a plot to overthrow FDR. They provided three million in funding for an army of terrorists that was modeled after the French fascist group, Croix de Feu.4 The objective of the plot was to either force Roosevelt to take orders from this group of industrialists as part of a fascist style government or to execute him if he chose not to cooperate.
The plotters selected General Smedley Butler, a WWI hero to head the plot. Butler was overtly opposed to fascism and had spoken out denouncing Mussolini as a murderer and thug in 1931. The Italian government demanded an apology and President Hoover complied along with placing Butler under arrest for court-martial proceedings. Roosevelt then governor of New York spoke out against the charges against Butler. Roosevelt had been responsible for awarding Butler's Second Medal of Honor for his service in Haiti. President Hoover then backed down and Butler received a mild reprimand for refusing to retract his words.
The plotters had selected Butler because of his immense popularity among veterans. Butler had spoken words of encouragement to the Bonus Marchers and was a relentless in his pursuit for better treatment of American veterans. Gerald MacGuire and Bill Doyle first approached Butler at his home. Both were wounded veterans of WWI. Both.played on Butler's sympathy for veterans. However, Butler was not an easy man to fool. After pleasantries were exchanged a short discussion of each man's service in WWI followed before MacGuire worked up the nerve to present his plan to Butler.
According to the MacGuire they wanted Butler to attend a American Legion convention and give a speech in favor of the gold standard. Butler immediately asked what about the bonus for the veterans. The best answer MacGuire could produce was they wanted the veterans to be paid in gold and not "rubber" money. Butler was suspicious both MacGuire and Doyle were dressed in fancy tailored suits and they had pulled into his driveway with a chauffeured limousine. With his suspicions arouse Butler refused to give them an affirmative reply but he left the door open a crack to learn more.
Unbeknown to the plotters however, Butler was a man of honor and believed in the constitution and democracy. He had a reputation of absolute honesty and was careful in how his name was used and by whom it was used by. Stringing MacGuire along several more meetings transpired between Butler and MacGuire before the later left for Europe.
MacGuire was a bond salesman for Clark and had been sent to Europe to study how the fascist in Europe used the veterans. Upon his return from Europe MacGuire once again sought out Butler. Additional meetings followed one in which MacGuire laid out 18 thousand dollar bills to prove that he had enough funding for Butler to attend a American Legion Convention with 200 hundred or so of his friends. Butler refused to attend, again he was suppose to give a speech in favor of the gold standard. In one meeting MacGuire implied they had inside men within the Roosevelt Administration that kept them fully informed. Butler did observe that the events MacGuire had predicted came true in several cases. In one case it was the dismissal of and administration personnel and in another the Legion passing a resolution in favor of the gold standard.
In another meeting MacGuire threaten Butler that if he didn't accept leadership of the plot that MacArthur would replace him. MacGuire claimed that the Morgans favored MacArthur and that he had held out for Butler. Another name mentioned in case Butler refused to head the plot was former American Legion head Hanford MacNider of Iowa. MacArthur was widely unpopular with the veterans for leading the charge against the bonus marchers. MacNider was also unpopular with the veterans as he opposed the early payment of the bonus. MacGuire noted this and informed Butler that MacNider would soon switch his view on the bonus. Within a week Butler noted MacNider's switch.
There were other meetings with Butler, who eventually demanded to meet with the leaders of the plot. Clark then met with Butler offering him a bribe to read a speech(once again favoring the gold standard) before the American Legion written by John W. Davis, a former Democratic presidential candidate and chief counsel to J.P. Morgan. Butler bristled at being offered a bribe. Clark backed off, and announced that he was withdrawing his own support from the effort. In response, the plotters brought in Frank N. Belgrano JR, a senior vice president of the bank that handled Mussolini's business accounts to head the American Legion.
Eventually MacGuire had to confess to Butler that the plot involved replacing Roosevelt. MacGuire suggested that Roosevelt was tired and needed an assistant to run the country while he attended to ceremonial activities much like the King of Italy had relinquished power to Mussolini. Butler bristled at the idea.
In July, the Morgan-Mellon controlled press including Henry Luce's Fortune magazine unleashed a propaganda blitz extolling the virtues of fascism. In August the American Liberty League appeared. Butler had been informed of the appearance of this group as part of the plot beforehand.
Morgan and du Pont cronies including John J. Raskob funded the League. Included in the League's advisory council were Dr. Samuel Hardin Church, who ran the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, W.R. Perkins of National City Bank, Alfred Sloan, CEO of GM. former New York Supreme Court Justice Joseph M. Proskauer, the general counsel to the Consolidated Gas Company and J. Howard Pew of Sun Oil and the financier of the openly fascist Sentinels of the Republic. Others included David Reed, the Republican Senator from Pennsylvania who remarked on the floor of the senate in May 1932: ``[i]I do not often envy other countries and their governments, but I say that if this country ever needed a Mussolini, it needs one now[/i]."
Fearing the plot was about the climax with the appearance of the Liberty League, Butler wanted to go public with what he knew. However, he knew he would be ridiculed without someone else to collaborate his story. Seeking out help from a newspaper reported that he trusted as being forthright. Butler had Paul French interview MacGuire. In the interview with French MacGuire confirmed what he had told Butler and also confirmed his ebullience for fascism as follows:
"[i]We need a fascist government in this country… to save the nation from the communists who want to tear it down and wreck all that we have built in America. The only men who have the patriotism to do it are the soldiers, and Smedley Butler is the ideal leader. He could organize a million men overnight[/i]."75
Once French had confirmed the plot, Butler informed the Roosevelt administration. Roosevelt realized that with the backing of such a plot from such high sources, it couldn't be dismissed as a crackpot scheme. Yet, he also was well aware that by arresting the leaders of such industrial powerhouses of the day, he could create a national crisis that would abort the fledging economic recovery and perhaps trigger another Wall Street crash.
To foil the plot FDR had news of the plot leaked to the press and formed a special House committee to investigate the matter. The McCormick-Dickstein Committee agreed to hear Butler's story in a secret session meeting in New York City on November20, 1934. Over four days the committee heard Butler and French presented the plot followed by the testimony of MacGuire. Although, Butler failed to testify that MacGuire offered him $750 for each speech he delivered if he included a remark favorable to the gold standard a secret report reached the White House from Val O'Farrell a former New York City detective confirming it.
Both McCormick and Dickstein described MacGuire's testimony as hanging himself. MacGuire was caught lying several times. The committee determined that MacGuire did have in his possession the thousand dollar bills mention and was in the proper location after he claimed he was elsewhere. George Seldes noted that all of the principals in the case were American Legion Officials and conservative financial backers. Other administration officials urged the committee to get to the bottom of the case. McCormick indicated that Butler's testimony was not the first of the plot, that the committee had been in possession of other evidence for five weeks.
With many of the country's leading papers openly pro-fascist, coverage of the plot was promptly buried or dismissed as ravings of a mad man. On November 22, the Associated Press struck a low blow at Butler in the headline Cocktail Putsch" Mayor Says.108 Mayor LaGuardia had came out against Butler.
Butler however, received fresh support from James Van Zandt, who revealed to the press that he also had been approached by the plotters. Van Zandt was the head of the VFW. Van Zandt claimed that besides himself, MacArthur, Theordore Roosevelt Jr. and MacNider had all been sounded out. After anouncing that Clark would be subpoenaed to appear before the committee as soon as he returned from Europe the committee quickly adjourned without calling additional witiness. Not a single name mentioned in all of the testimony ever appeared before the committee. Writer John Spivak learned that Frank Belgrano had been called to testify but had returned home after never being called by the committee.
The committee lived until formally dissolved on January 3. No other witnesses ever appeared before the committee. When one is rich enough, one is immune from the laws regardless of how damning the evidence is. On February 15 the committee released its preliminary findings.
In the last few weeks of the committee's official life it received evidence showing that certain persons had made an attempt to establish a fascist organization in this country. No evidence was presented and this committee had none to show a connection between this effort and any fascist activity of any European country. There is no question that these attempts were discussed, were planned, and might have been placed in execution when and if the financial backers deemed it expedient. This committee received evidence from Maj. Gen Smed- ley D. Butler (retired), twice decorated by the Congress of the United St;Ltes. He testified before the committee as to conversations with one Gerald C. MacGuire in which the latter is alleged to have suggested the formation of a fascist army under the leadership of General Butler MacGuire denied these allegations under oath, but your committee was able to verify all the pertinent statements made by General Butler,. with the exception of the direct statement suggesting the creation of the organization.
This, however, was corroborated in the correspondence of MacGuire with his principal, Robert Sterling Clark, of New York City, while MacGuire was abroad studying the various forms of veterans organizations of Fascist character This committee asserts that any efforts based on lines as suggested in the foregoing and leading off to the extreme right, are just as bad as efforts which would lead to the extreme left. Armed forces for the purpose of establishing a dictator- ship by means of Fascism or a dictatorship through the' instrumentality of the proleteriat, or a dictatorship predicated on racial and religious hatreds, have no place in this country. 109
The total vindication of Butler was muffled by the press. The New York Times failed to report the committee's findings on the plot. Instead it chose to report on the committee's recommendation of registering all foreign propagandist. Buried deeply in the pages the Times briefly acknowledge that Butler's story had been proven to be true. Much the same held true for the rest of the nation's newspapers. The story would be killed by not reporting it. John Spivak had been tipped off that the committee findings were censored. A veteran Washington correspondent had told Spivak that the decision had been made by a Cabinet member. The implication was that the release of certain names would embarrass the Democratic Party. At least two prominent Democrats who had been presidential candidates had been involved. John Davis who now was a lawyer for the Morgans and Al Smith now a crony of the du Ponts. About a week after receiving the tip Spivak accidentally stumbled across the uncensored report. Spivak copied the uncensored version and then compared it to the official version. The censored portions of the testimony given by Butler and French can be found in The Plot to Seize the White House.107
Even more curious is the fact not a single person ever faced charges. Spivak had went to the Justice department and was informed that the Justice Department had no plans to prosecute. The American Civil Liberties Union issued an angry statement on the lack of justice stemming from the committee's findings.
The Congressional Committee investigating un-American activities has just reported that the Fascist plot to seize the government. . . was proved; yet not a single participant will be prosecuted under the perfectly plain language of the federal conspiracy act making this a high crime. Imagine the action if such a plot were discovered among Communists! Which is, of course, only to emphasize the nature of our government as representative of the interests of the controllers of property. Violence, even to the seizure of govern- ment, is excusable on the part of those whose lofty motive is to preserve the profit system. . . 110
Obviously powerful forces had been brought to bear on the committee. Forces more powerful than the government that are immune from the country's laws. Perhaps, Spivak explains why the plot failed best.
The takeover plot failed because though those involved had astonishing talents for making breathtaking millions of dollars, they lacked an elementary understanding of people and the moral forces that activate them. In a money-standard civilization such as ours, the universal regard for anyone who is rich tends to persuade some millionaires that they are knowledgeable in fields other than the making of money. The conspirators went about the plot as if they were hiring an office manager; all they needed was to send a messenger to the man they had selected. 111
However, four years after the formation of a congressional committee, the committee released a white paper concluding that certain persons had attempted to establish a fascist government. Further investigations disclosed that over a million people had contracted to join the terrorist army and that Remington, a du Pont subsidiary would supply the arms and munitions5.
As the du Ponts saw their plot crashing in around them, they chose to work within the system to gain power just as Hitler did after the failed Beer Hall Putsch. In the1936 presidential race the du Ponts and the American Liberty League backed Alf Landon.
The fascist groups initially had agreed to back Father's Coughlin's third party candidate, Bleakley. After agreeing to back Bleakley Fritz Kuhn, the leader of the American Bund visited Nazi Germany ahead of the election and conferred with the leaders of the Nazi party. At the urging of Hitler's henchmen he returned backing Landon and urging other fascists to do the same.
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| CAN A LIAR PROTECT US??? The Short Answer Is NOPE!!! |
| 01.26.04 (7:58 am) [edit] |
[b]CAN A LIAR PROTECT US??? The short answer is NOPE!!!
Perhaps this explains one of the reasons that between 46%-52% of Americans polled would vote for Kerry over Bush!!! Bush would only receive 42%-44% of the votes if the election were held today!!!
No one in the world with any brains believes a thing that comes out of this foul-mouthed Bush administration of LIARS!!!
Even the CIA doesn't think that Bush can protect our nation!!![/b]
[b]Intelligence: Former CIA Official Calls Out The White House For "Aiding and Abetting Terrorists"[/b],
http://www.guerrillanews.com/intelligence/doc3813.html" title="http://www.guerrillanews.com/intelligence/doc3813.html" target="_blank"http://www.guerrillanews.com/...
A near perfect storm is brewing on both sides of the Atlantic for the Bush and Blair governments. On Wednesday, advance copies of the so-called Hutton report are going to be released to the British public. As Gordon Thomas reports, it's expected to be devastating for Blair and many in his inner circle. The Guardian calls tomorrow the beginning of the "toughest 24 hours of the prime minister's political career."
On Friday, U.K. top U.K. intelligence officials issued what many called a "pre-emptive" strike against Blair attempting to absolve themselves of blame for the Iraq deception.
Here in the U.S., where many citizens don't seem to be particularly upset we went to war on false pretenses, the Bush administration is nevertheless feeling the heat following statements by David Kay, the U.S.' top WMD hunter. Last week, Kay shocked the world, saying he believed the evidence shows that Iraq never had any stockpiiles of banned weapons. This weekend Kay tried to lay the blame on the CIA for the "failure" to detect that Saddam had ceased his weapons programs - even though Vice President Cheney and others in the Bush White House had established their own ad hoc intelligence operation that sought to prove that Iraq had WMD when they weren't getting the answers they wanted from the CIA and other spy agencies.
As Salon reports, there is a war going on in the White House - against the intelligence community itself. This week's guerrilla is former CIA official Larry C. Johnson. As Salon reports, Johnson sent an unprecedented letter to Republican Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert demanding that Congress hold the White House accountable for deliberately revealing the identity of undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame:
The CIA Revolt Against the White House: Former intelligence official Larry C. Johnson blasts the Bush administration's "outright pattern of bullying." By Mark Follman
Salon, Jan. 23, 2004 | In President Bush's State of the Union address, national security was a core theme, and with good reason: Recent polls show Bush enjoys far more popular support for his aggressive foreign policy and terror-fighting tactics than on domestic issues. Undoubtedly, the president's reelection campaign will tout two swift, decisive military victories in Afghanistan and Iraq, and argue the homeland is more secure since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
But for almost a year, the White House has been quietly fighting a contentious battle at home on the national security front -- against the U.S. intelligence community itself. Vocal retired intelligence officials, and anonymous active ones, have protested repeatedly that the White House has coerced intelligence agencies to rig findings and analysis to suit administration aims. An egregious example: The long-held goal of removing Saddam Hussein from power, by unilateral war if necessary. The consequences of such White House intimidation could be disastrous, the intelligence veterans say, with the integrity of their work -- and national security -- put at grave risk.
The latest salvo was launched this week when a group of respected former CIA officials, led by decorated analyst Larry C. Johnson, sent a letter to Republican Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert demanding that Congress hold the White House accountable for deliberately revealing the identity of undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame. Johnson, who also served as deputy director for the State Department's Office of Counter Terrorism, says the administration's political tactics are clear. "With this White House, I see an outright pattern of bullying," he told Salon in an interview Thursday. "We've seen it across different agencies, a pattern of going after anybody who's a critic. When people raise legitimate issues that may not be consistent with existing administration policy, those people are attacked and their character is impugned."
Indeed, the clash between an increasingly vocal faction of veteran spooks and a heavy-handed Bush administration exploded into unprecedented open revolt in July of last year, after former U.S. ambassador Joseph Wilson exposed the administration's flagrant misuse of intelligence to promote the invasion of Iraq. In a seemingly vindictive reprisal, the administration leaked the identity of Plame, Wilson's wife, to conservative columnist Robert Novak and other journalists.
Perhaps indicative of just how deep the conflict runs, Johnson has particularly harsh words for a normally tough-talking president who stands by while "the most sensitive security assets of the United States" are compromised. Such behavior, he says, ultimately amounts to treason. "When you expose clandestine human intelligence sources," he fumes, "you aid and abet terrorists."
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| No Stinking Empire |
| 01.26.04 (7:09 am) [edit] |
[b]No Stinking Empire[/b], http://antiwar.com/reese/?art...
The Army of World War II, you might say, was the last Army of the republic. It performed great deeds, but there was not much luxury, not even for the generals and admirals. Nobody was paid much. Travel was by military plane, troop train or warship, even for generals, admirals and world leaders.
Not so in today's imperial Army. According to Chalmers Johnson, an excellent writer, in his new book, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic, the Defense Department maintains a fleet of 71 Lear jets, 13 Gulfstream IIIs and 17 Cessna Citation luxury jets. That's in case any of the brass wish to visit the military's ski resort in the Bavarian Alps or any of the 234 military golf courses around the world. The secretary of defense, of course, has his own private Boeing 757.
Or maybe the brass might wish to visit some of the 702 overseas bases the United States has in 130 countries, or perhaps the 6,000 it has in the United States. The commander in chief, of course, has Air Force One and an entourage traveling with him that would rival any of the triumphal marches of Roman emperors.
Johnson says the Pentagon reports that some 253,288 uniformed personnel are deployed overseas, plus a roughly equal number of dependents and Defense Department civilian employees. He also says the Pentagon figures don't include bases in Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Qatar and Uzbekistan. Except for the one in Kosovo, those were all set up following the Sept. 11 attacks.
Excuse me, but I'm old-fashioned. I was a $70-a-month private who ate Army cooking and took his turn at KP (kitchen police), all of which is now done by civilian contractors, or so I'm told. Besides, I thought the Cold War was over. I thought the idea, after the Soviet Union collapsed, was to close overseas bases and bring the troops home. I seem to recall that the president, in his first campaign, promised a modest foreign policy and even hinted at reducing overseas deployments.
Instead, he's announced an aggressive foreign policy of pre-emptive attacks, has made war on two countries and has increased overseas deployment. In the process, of course, he has strained the Army and had to call up reserves and National Guardsmen in numbers not seen since World War II.
Since there is virtually no coverage of the Defense Department other than the SecDef's smart-alecky news conferences, I highly recommend Johnson's new book as well as his old one, "Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of an American Empire." If you look at the original publication date of his first book, you will find that it is quite prophetic.
From whence comes the American itch to control the world? That's an interesting question. One wonders why, when Washington, D.C., is the AIDS capital of America, the president is so keen on spending American tax dollars to fight AIDS in Africa. Alas, perhaps the answer is as simple as the fact that the district has neither oil nor uranium, not to mention its habit of voting heavily Democratic.
The old Marxist answer was that as capitalists finished exploiting the domestic market, they would inevitably seek to expand overseas. I don't think the old grump foresaw the rise of global corporations, which now seek to turn the entire Earth into one domestic market – for themselves, of course.
The truth is quite simple: An empire increases the danger for the American people, as empires always make more enemies than friends, not to mention inciting envy and hatred. Maintaining an empire will eventually break us, as it has every single empire of the past.
To paraphrase a Mexican bandit in a classic movie, "I don't want no stinking empire." I want my republic back. It was cheaper to run, much freer and was viewed affectionately by the world because it minded its own business. If it means a return to KP and putting generals and admirals in the jump seats of cargo planes and in a bunk in a warship, so be it. That's little-enough hardship for generals who like to direct their wars as far from the sound of guns as possible.
- [i]Charley Reese has been a journalist for 49 years, reporting on everything from sports to politics. From 1969-71, he worked as a campaign staffer for gubernatorial, senatorial and congressional races in several states. He was an editor, assistant to the publisher, and columnist for the Orlando Sentinel from 1971 to 2001. He now writes a syndicated column three times a week for King Features, which is carried on Antiwar.com. Reese served two years active duty in the U.S. Army as a tank gunner.[/i]
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| The Finality of Evil: America vs. Human Nature |
| 01.25.04 (7:18 am) [edit] |
[b]The Finality of Evil: America vs. Human Nature[/b], http://www.reason.com/hod/jt0...
From the audacious title, to an opening that quotes [b]Thomas Paine's [/b]rebuke of the "[i][b]sunshine patriot[/b][/i]," to a proposal for immediately widening the war against al-Qaeda to include Hamas and Hezbollah, An End to Evil is a worthy election-year polemic from Richard Perle and David Frum. The[b] work [/b]is clearly meant to help define foreign policy for a second Bush Administration, and it may well do that if sloganeering continues to displace actual strategic planning.
Perle and Frum (P-F, for now) are very good at what they do: arguing for a robust exercise of American power at each and every potential and perceived threat. They obviously and honestly think that bold action will make Americans safer. P-F would literally spend whatever is necessary, "borrow responsibly," and build a force capable of confronting evil anywhere on the planet.
But is that even possible, let alone the right goal?
"[i]The United States may be able to defeat, even destroy, al-Qaeda, but it cannot rid the world of terrorism, much less evil[/i]," is how Jeffrey Record concludes his recent study on the war on terror. Though P-F try to dismiss Record with the defeatist-pessimist label they are so fond of attaching to contrary views, he has some standing as a professor in the [b]Department of Strategy and International Security at the Air Force's Air War College[/b].
P-F try to anticipate criticism from professional military strategists by asserting that the Pentagon is trapped by blinkered thinking, doomed to fight yesterday's wars. Yes, there is surely some of that. But that stain does not indict everyone. In fact, considering Record's background it is hard to shoot him down as obviously hostile to the P-F worldview. The Air Force's Air War College is not some muddy-boots, let's-charge-up-the-hill institution. Record also did a tour as a staffer for Sen. Sam Nunn (D.-Ga.). That's Nunn, an heir to the Henry "Scoop" Jackson line of pro-defense Democrats, which at one time counted a young Richard Perle among them.
In the 1980s Nunn helped along two key aspects of the current P-F strategy, the B-2 bomber and the closing of obsolete military bases in pursuit of a leaner, meaner force. It might be only a slight stretch to say that without Nunn's support neither would've happened. So Record's pedigree is not obviously impeachable as defeatist-pessimist.
And when Record says that the war on terror "violates the fundamental strategic principles of discrimination and concentration," P-F need to have some rejoinder. And they do not.
Further, Record notes that the Bush administration thus far has conflated threats from various sources into one great meta-threat, oblivious to opportunities and tactics which might cleave the whole jumble of bad actors in coherent, deterable, and defeatable chunks. The greatest mistake, Record reasons, is lumping rogue states together with terrorist groups:
[i]Or to put it another way, unlike terrorist organizations, rogue states, notwithstanding administration declamations to the contrary, are subject to effective deterrence and therefore do not warrant status as potential objects of preventive war and its associated costs and risks. One does not doubt for a moment that al-Qaeda, had it possessed a deliverable nuclear weapon, would have used it on 9/11. But the record for rogue states is clear: none has ever used WMD against an adversary capable of inflicting unacceptable retaliatory damage. Saddam Hussein did use chemical weapons in the 1980s against helpless Kurds and Iranian infantry; however, he refrained from employing such weapons against either U.S. forces or Israel during the Gulf War in 1991, and he apparently abandoned even possession of such weapons sometime later in the decade. For its part, North Korea, far better armed with WMD than Saddam Hussein's Iraq, has for decades repeatedly threatened war against South Korea and the United States but has yet to initiate one[/i].
The P-F world view explicitly rejects deterrence against states, groups, and—one suspects—that loud-mouthed kid down the block. Only direct action will suffice, action like a blockade against North Korea until its government falls and China becomes responsible for the resulting basketcase. Oh, but first the U.S needs to move its troops out of range of the nuclear hell that might rain on Seoul.
P-F also refuse to discriminate between different terror groups. To them a terror attack anywhere is part of the same fabric of evil. In doing so they effectively defuse Record's [i][b]reductio ad absurdum [/b][/i]argument that the U.S. cannot fight Basque terrorists and the Tamil Tigers too, can it? Sure we can, P-F say.
But this position then commits the U.S. to a dangerous path. Record notes that "this objective is both unattainable and strategically unwise. It is unattainable because of the sheer number and variety of terrorist organizations. It is strategically unwise because it creates unnecessary enemies at a time when the United States has more than enough to go around."
Treating all bad actors just the same might be fine if you are a judge or a prosecutor, but as a dispenser of scarce military resources it is recipe for disappointment, if not defeat.
"Even if all terrorism is evil, most terrorist organizations do not threaten the United States. Many pursue local agendas that have little or no bearing on U.S. interests," Record says. Those elements which pose the greatest threat to U.S. must draw the greatest attention.
What ultimately sinks the P-F call for perpetual war against all evil is its refusal to acknowledge the limits to American military power. They severely underestimate the need for American manpower to secure victories that superior firepower mated to a steely will might win. Record notes that Bush administration war planners had hoped for no more than 60,000 boots on the ground in Iraq at this stage instead of nearly 200,000 allied troops now in country. P-F inexplicably recall Pentagon brass predictions of 250,000 troops required to do the job as proof of the Army's hide-bound ways.
Moreover, P-F do not seem to appreciate, even as they heap much-deserved praise on U.S. forces, that America may not soon possess the fighting force it had in spring of 2002. Men and machines wear down in the crucible of combat. The [b]massive troop rotation [/b]now under way and vaguely imperial "[b]stop-loss[/b]" orders may paper over shortcomings, but these limitations still circumscribe the range of the possible for U.S. military forces.
[b]But a doctrine that declares war on human evil does not recognize this element of reality. The next step is clear: declare war on the second law of thermodynamics[/b].
[i]Contributing editor Jeff Taylor writes the weekly Reason Express [/i]
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| It's Just Wrong What We're Doing In Iraq ... |
| 01.25.04 (7:04 am) [edit] |
[b]It's Just Wrong What We're Doing In Iraq ...[/b], http://www.informationclearin...
[i]In an exclusive interview, repentant Vietnam War architect Robert McNamara breaks his silence on Iraq: The United States, he says, is making the same mistakes all over again[/i]
[b]Saturday, January 24, 2004: (Globe & Mail)[/b] [i][b]'Yet we were wrong, terribly wrong. We owe it to future generations to explain why[/b][/i]."
With those words, written nine years ago, Robert McNamara began an extraordinary final phase of his career -- devoted to chronicling the errors, delusions and false assumptions that turned him into the chief architect and most prominent promoter of the Vietnam war.
No historic figure has put so much effort into self-examination: At the age of 87, he has now written three very detailed and analytical books, and starred in one very good movie, devoted to the fundamental mistakes that led the United States into the most politically costly and least successful war in its history.
What, then, does he think about Iraq? Until now, the former secretary of defence has avoided comment on the actions of that job's current occupant, Donald Rumsfeld. The two are often compared to each other in their autocratic leadership styles and in their technocratic, numbers-driven approaches to war. And their wars, of course, are often likened. But Robert McNamara has insisted in staying out of the fray.
He decided to break his silence on Iraq when I called him up the other day at his Washington office. I told him that his carefully enumerated lists of historic lessons from Vietnam were in danger of being ignored. He agreed, and told me that he was deeply frustrated to see history repeating itself.
"We're misusing our influence," he said in a staccato voice that had lost none of its rapid-fire engagement. "It's just wrong what we're doing. It's morally wrong, it's politically wrong, it's economically wrong."
While he did not want to talk on the record about specific military decisions made Mr. Rumsfeld, he said the United States is fighting a war that he believes is totally unnecessary and has managed to destroy important relationships with potential allies. "There have been times in the last year when I was just utterly disgusted by our position, the United States' position vis-à-vis the other nations of the world."
On Monday night, we heard the United States at its very worst with George W. Bush's caustic State of the Union address, in which he declared, over and over, that America is serving God's will directly and does not need "a permission slip" from other nations since "the cause we serve is right, because it is the cause of all mankind."
That vision of manifest destiny, stripped of any larger view, has led down some unfortunate roads. The Iraq action, which would have been conducted in some form or another at some point under any imaginable government, would have been far better conceived if its executors had read Mr. McNamara's works instead of the Book of Revelation.
In 1995, in his memoir In Retrospect, Mr. McNamara published a list of the 11 specific mistakes he believed the United States had made in and around the Vietnam war that still had relevance in the very different political and military climate of the 21st century.
I have always been wary of comparisons between Vietnam and Iraq. The circumstances are profoundly different, and the scale of conflict and death is nowhere near the same. Vietnam was a small nation engaged in a civil war that Americans misread as a Chinese incursion on all of Asia, while Iraq has been strangled by one of history's worst totalitarian dictators. The American mistake was its belief that the dictator's removal would be sufficient.
But to read Mr. McNamara's 1995 list today (see sidebar) is to read an uncanny analysis of the missteps of the Iraq campaign. He told me that this list has come to haunt him as he watches the Mesopotamian misadventure unfold.
Chief among the discoveries that led him to see Vietnam as a mistake, he said, was his realization that the United States could not, by itself, properly analyze the actions and ground-level conditions necessary to achieve the complex and ambiguous goals of a war -- reversing the influence of communism in Asia, in Vietnam's case, or bringing democracy to the Arab world, in Iraq's.
"And the reason I feel that is that we're not omniscient," he said. "And we've demonstrated that in Iraq, I think." He pointed to Washington's failure to appreciate the complexities of Iraqi culture, and therefore to anticipate the extended guerrilla war it is now engaged in -- a chief mistake of Vietnam. Without the full involvement of other major nations, he said, such mistakes will always be made.
"And if we can't persuade other nations with comparable values and comparable interests of the merit of our course, we should reconsider the course, and very likely change it. And if we'd followed that rule, we wouldn't have been in Vietnam, because there wasn't one single major ally, not France or Britain or Germany or Japan, that agreed with our course or stood beside us there. And we wouldn't be in Iraq."
In his recent book Wilson's Ghost, Mr. McNamara argued that military forces should sometimes be used to oust dictators guilty of grave crimes against humanity. However, he said, this can succeed politically and militarily only if it is done with broad international support under the aegis of a body such as the United Nations (which helped intervene in East Timor) or NATO (which led the charge in the Balkans).
"The United States is today the strongest power in the world, politically, economically and militarily, and I think it will continue to be so for decades ahead, if not for the whole century," he told me. "But I do not believe, with one qualification, that it should ever, ever use that power unilaterally -- the one qualification being the unlikely event we had to use it to defend the continental U.S., Alaska or Hawaii."
Mr. McNamara said it is particularly upsetting to see that the White House administration has ignored or failed to heed key recommendations coming from military officers on the ground in Iraq -- a crucial and oft-repeated mistake in Vietnam. American military officials in Iraq complained early that their forces were ill-equipped for the complex work of nation-building and policing, but the White House has until very recently refused to discuss using UN peacekeeping forces for such work.
Last week, the United States indicated that it is seeking the UN's assistance in the nation-building effort, a move that Mr. McNamara said is vital if the war is ever to be brought to an end, and civil life restored in Iraq.
"Many people, myself among them, thought the United Nations should have played a much greater role in connection with Iraq than it has, and I'm personally very pleased to see that the administration is thinking today of increasing the role of the UN. . . . I hope the UN will accept."
To appreciate the staggering scale of the lessons Mr. McNamara has learned, everyone ought to see the new feature documentary about him, The Fog of War. Its director, Errol Morris, is certainly the best non-fiction filmmaker alive (his Fast, Cheap and Out of Control is the most action-packed movie ever made about the philosophy of being). This film, focused tightly on the bombings of Japan in the Second World War and Vietnam in the 1960s, offers a profound fourth volume to Mr. McNamara's continuing mea culpa.
In it, he suggests repeatedly that his faith in superior military technology and the scientific potential of data processing (he was known to his 1960s critics as "an IBM machine with legs") led him to underestimate the difficulties and complexities of the cultures in which he was fighting.
The same fundamental fallacy, he said, is present today. Even though computerized and laser-guided weapons allow campaigns to be waged with only a few dozen American deaths and hundreds of foreign deaths (as opposed to the tens of thousands of American deaths and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese deaths in the 1960s and 1970s), it has become no easier to achieve society-transforming military goals, or to extricate yourself from an invaded nation.
"The new circumstances and new technology didn't help us in Iraq, and the issue there was allegedly the risk of proliferation of nuclear weapons. You can't get anything more fundamental than that. The case for this was certainly made forcefully -- I think erroneously, but it was very well made. . . . And now we've just got to repair these fissures, these breaks in our relationship with many, many important powers in the world, and many important institutions."
He said many lives have been unnecessarily lost around the world because the United States has refused to support the International Criminal Court, an institution he believes could have provided an alternative to war in Iraq.
"Let's think about that in human terms -- you have to reduce the risk of killing and catastrophe," he said. "We've got to do that, and we're not paying nearly enough attention to it. And one illustration is, we don't support things that would have that as their goal . . . for example, this international court. The U.S. is totally opposed to it. I think they're absolutely wrong. We've not only refused to support it, we try to buy off countries that are supporting it."
Mr. McNamara broadly declined to discuss specific decisions made by Mr. Bush -- "I don't want to get in an argument with Bush and the administration. I don't think that advances my interests at all," he said. But he didn't mind adding that he was dismayed that members of the Republican administration have likened their position after Sept. 11, 2001, to that of John F. Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis, which had been Mr. McNamara's moment of truth. Mr. Bush, he said, wouldn't have been up to it. And Mr. Kennedy would have handled Iraq differently.
Just over a year ago, Mr. McNamara travelled to Cuba and learned just how perilous that moment had been: Cuba, Fidel Castro admitted, had been home to a nuclear arsenal, and he had been willing to sacrifice his own island nation in order to launch a nuclear attack on the United States. The world really did come within moments of ending.
More than anything else, this revelation has led Mr. McNamara to argue that the Kennedy approach to the world ought to be emulated. Mr. McNamara was the first to argue, based on his own diary, that had he lived, JFK would have ended the Vietnam war in 1965.
I take that claim with a grain of salt, since I believe that Mr. Kennedy's record of endlessly reversing himself and caving in to the authority of his military commanders would have trumped his better convictions.
Nevertheless, recently declassified documents have lent the notion credence. And I do believe Mr. McNamara when he says that the Kennedy taste for international co-operation would have served the world better than the White House's current with-us-or-against-us approach.
"I don't believe that Kennedy would be reacting the way Bush is. For one thing, Kennedy reached out. A critic in those early days of the administration was John Kenneth Galbraith [the Canadian economist, who believed Vietnam was a bad idea]. And Kennedy reached out, and appointed him to a high-level position, and he talked to him about Vietnam. You don't see that today."
[b]McNamara's 11 Lessons[/b]
In 1995, former U.S. secretary of defence Robert McNamara published In Retrospect, the first of his three books dissecting the errors, myths and miscalculations that led to the Vietnam War, which he now believes was a serious mistake. Nine years later, most of these lessons seem uncannily relevant to the Iraq war in its current nation-building, guerrilla-warfare phase.
1. We misjudged then -- and we have since -- the geopolitical intentions of our adversaries . . . and we exaggerated the dangers to the United States of their actions.
2. We viewed the people and leaders of South Vietnam in terms of our own experience. . . . We totally misjudged the political forces within the country.
3. We underestimated the power of nationalism to motivate a people to fight and die for their beliefs and values.
4. Our judgments of friend and foe alike reflected our profound ignorance of the history, culture, and politics of the people in the area, and the personalities and habits of their leaders.
5. We failed then -- and have since -- to recognize the limitations of modern, high-technology military equipment, forces and doctrine. . . . We failed as well to adapt our military tactics to the task of winning the hearts and minds of people from a totally different culture.
6. We failed to draw Congress and the American people into a full and frank discussion and debate of the pros and cons of a large-scale military involvement . . . before we initiated the action.
7. After the action got under way and unanticipated events forced us off our planned course . . . we did not fully explain what was happening and why we were doing what we did.
8. We did not recognize that neither our people nor our leaders are omniscient. Our judgment of what is in another people's or country's best interest should be put to the test of open discussion in international forums. We do not have the God-given right to shape every nation in our image or as we choose.
9. We did not hold to the principle that U.S. military action . . . should be carried out only in conjunction with multinational forces supported fully (and not merely cosmetically) by the international community.
10. We failed to recognize that in international affairs, as in other aspects of life, there may be problems for which there are no immediate solutions. . . . At times, we may have to live with an imperfect, untidy world.
11. Underlying many of these errors lay our failure to organize the top echelons of the executive branch to deal effectively with the extraordinarily complex range of political and military issues.
By DOUG SAUNDERS
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| The Bush Administration CORPORATE CRONIES |
| 01.24.04 (8:10 am) [edit] |
[b]The Bush Administration CORPORATE CRONIES[/b], http://www.opensecrets.org/bu...
Comedian Jon Stewart once joked that watching President George W. Bush pick his White House staff was like watching "the old band get back together." It’s true that many of Bush’s choices for his incoming cabinet and top White House posts come from former Republican administrations, going all the way back to Gerald Ford. But what’s notable about this administration is not only the bona fide government credentials that the staff sports—it’s also the corporate connections they bring into the White House.
George Bush, of course, is a Texas oilman, although not a very successful one. His company, Arbusto, merged with Spectrum 7 in 1984 as it was on the verge of bankruptcy. Spectrum was bought out by Harken Energy in 1986, giving Bush a seat on Harken’s board, some stock options and a $120,000 consulting contract. As the first president to have an MBA, Bush has surrounded himself with people with similar (and more successful) corporate backgrounds. Vice President Dick Cheney was, until last year, the CEO of Halliburton, the world’s largest oil field services company. Halliburton, through its European subsidiaries, sold spare parts to Iraq’s oil industry, despite U.N. sanctions. The Bush administration is already considering whether or not it should alter the sanctions policy against Iraq, hinting that it might allow for more normalized trade with the country.
Of course, everyone knows that the U.S. oil industry has a secure foothold in the White House. But when he handed out cabinet posts and picked his top advisors, Bush left no industry out in the cold. From old school automobile manufacturers to fledgling biotech companies, just about every sector was covered. Below is a list of the corporations represented in the Bush White House. You won’t find every cabinet member or senior adviser listed here. Education Secretary Rod Paige, for example, was a school superintendent in Houston before coming to Washington. Senior adviser Karl Rove and counselor to the president, Karen Hughes, have political backgrounds. Environmental Protection Agency head Christine Todd Whitman, the former New Jersey governor, raised most of her campaign money within the state. But those on Bush’s staff who don’t have extensive corporate connections http://www.opensecrets.org/ca... are the exception, not the rule:
Click on CHART of President Bush's Incoming Cabinet on http://www.opensecrets.org/bu...
Click on CHART of President Bush's Advisors on http://www.opensecrets.org/bu...
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| The Bush Record is a Miserable Failure ... |
| 01.24.04 (8:03 am) [edit] |
[b]The Bush Record is a Miserable Failure ... Click on http://www.adaction.org/Campa... for Dubya's List of Failures ... [/b]
[b]Bush's Defense of Big Business:[/b]
While corporate scandals have destroyed investors' confidence in the economy, the Bush Administration has talked a tough game, but not really called for effective reform of business law. Despite signing recently enacted legislation, Bush is still more "talk" than "walk." For example, Bush says he favors $100 million in additional funding next year for the Securities and Exchange Commission, which regulates public companies. The Senate Democrats' proposal nearly triples that. Democrats also are pushing for a new agency to specifically deal with overseeing accounting agencies. In response to queries about his own insider trading, Bush has responded that, "things aren't exactly black and white when it comes to accounting procedures." Democrat Minority Leader Richard Gephardt's response? "With all due respect, accounting should be black and white."
As a former Texas oilman, Bush has surrounded himself with staffers who have similar corporate backgrounds. Vice President Cheney, for example, was the CEO of Halliburton, the world's largest oil fields' service company. When Bush picked his cabinet and top advisors, he "left no industry out in the cold." See the complete roster on http://www.opensecrets.org/bu... .
Bush has lobbied for a prescription drug plan backed by industry over a Democratic alternative that would provide more comprehensive coverage. He decided to compromise on the patients' bill of rights rather than allow Congress to pass a bill that health care providers claimed would cost more. The Bush Administration also proposed easing confidentiality rules governing Americans' medical records -- a decision hailed by the insurance industry.
Bush signed legislation that repealed workplace ergonomics rules. Bush has replaced the rules with unenforceable, voluntary standards. The Bush Administration also suspended a Clinton Administration rule that directed federal agencies to evaluate whether prospective contractors violated workplace safety laws.
"When there's an issue that has divided business and labor, [the Bush Administration has] sided with business," said Bill Samuel, AFL-CIO legislative director.
---- [i]Article by Dana Milbank and Mike Allen in The Washington Post[/i], 7/8/02. http://www.washingtonpost.com...¬Found=true
[b]Related Articles:[/b]
Bush Incorporated is Open for Business http://www.alternet.org/story... on Alternet.org, 2/6/01 by Jim Hightower
When it Comes to Big Business, Bush Means Business http://www.dfw.com/mld/starte... by Molly Ivins, 6/30/01
Snapshot of Professional and Economic Interests Reveals Close Ties Between Government, Business http://www.alternet.org/story... on The Public i, 1/14/02 by Derek Wetherell
Bush Talks to Business Officials About Reforms to Keep Companies Honest http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/bu... Dallas Fort Worth Star-Telegram, 3/7/02 by Sonya Ross
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| Permanent Tax Cuts Permanently Threaten America |
| 01.24.04 (7:51 am) [edit] |
[b]Permanent Tax Cuts Permanently Threaten America[/b]
President Bush continues to insist – in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence – that trillions of dollars in tax cuts for the wealthy will create jobs and stimulate the economy without any long-term budgetary consequences. With 2.5 million jobs lost and record budget deficits accumulated on his watch, the president’s tax cuts have done little to address the issue of job creation and will likely create greater problems for workers in the future by draining job training and education funds and slowing economic growth. Now he wants to dole out another $1 trillion in taxpayer funds to the richest Americans over the next decade by making his tax cuts permanent.
[b]1. Permanent tax cuts for the wealthy will bleed the U.S. treasury for years to come.[/b] In 2013 alone – 12 years after the recession and 9/11 – the tax cuts will cost us more than $600 billion a year, including interest. As it stands now, the U.S. is projected to accumulate a $5 trillion deficit over the next decade due to the president’s unsustainable tax cut and spending proposals. Without a change in direction, Americans will be forced to pay massive amounts of new taxes or deal with huge cutbacks in important public programs including national defense, Medicare, and Social Security.
[b]2. President Bush’s tax cuts hurt the middle class.[/b] The president maintains that his tax cuts will stimulate growth and create jobs in the long-term. But in creating large budget deficits, the tax cuts will actually reduce economic growth and job opportunities over the next decade while forcing state and local governments to raise taxes on middle class families to make up for lost revenue. Similarly, the direct benefits for the middle class will be paltry – estimates from the Urban Institute and Brookings Institution show that the top 1 percent of earners will reap an additional $58,000 a year once the tax cuts are made permanent, while middle income earners will get only $655 a year.
[b]3. The president and his conservative allies in Congress want to push off debate about the consequences of permanent tax cuts until after the next election.[/b] It’s bad enough that the president wants to shift billions of dollars to the wealthy and saddle younger generations with mounds of debt and a declining standard of living. It’s even worse when the president and his congressional allies refuse to level with the American public until after the next elections. According to AP, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) said, “Congress will act a year from now, ‘a long time before the 10 years runs out,’ to make them permanent,” – and well beyond any potential adverse reactions from the electorate. This is on top of pushing off debate on $50 billion in new spending for Iraq until after the November elections.
[i]Daily Talking Points is a product of the Center for American Progress, a non-partisan research and educational institute committed to progressive principles for a strong, just and free America[/i]. http://www.americanprogress.o...
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| Claim Vs. Fact: Cheney, Halliburton & the Government |
| 01.24.04 (7:46 am) [edit] |
[b]Claim Vs. Fact: Cheney, Halliburton & the Government[/b]
Vice President Dick Cheney has gone to great lengths to claim that there are very few connections between Halliburton and the U.S. government. He has also claimed that scrutiny of Halliburton only comes from political opponents who are “desperate.” In each of his claims, the facts tell a very different story.
[b]Government Contracts[/b]
“[i]The government had absolutely nothing to do with [my economic success at Halliburton[/i]].” – Dick Cheney, 10/5/00
FACT: “Cheney's comment left out how closely Dallas-based Halliburton's fortunes are linked to the U.S. government. The world's largest oil services firm is a leading U.S. defense contractor and has benefited from financial guarantees granted by U.S. agencies. During Cheney's five years as chairman and chief executive, Halliburton was identified as a potential participant in 10 loans or loan guarantees valued at a total of $1.8 billion awarded by the U.S. government. Additionally, during Cheney's tenure, the U.S. Defense Department granted Halliburton contracts valued at about $1.8 billion, according to department records.” In 1999 alone, “the Pentagon ranked Halliburton the No. 17 recipient of ''prime contract awards'' with $657.5 million.” -
– Bloomberg News, 10/6/00
“[i]I wouldn't know how to manipulate the [government contract] process if I wanted to[/i].” – Dick Cheney, 1/22/04
FACT: “A report by the Washington-based Center for Public Integrity suggested that Halliburton essentially cashed in - doubling the value of its government contracts - on Cheney. The company took in revenue of $ 2.3 billion on government contracts ,” which was “up $1.2 billion from the five-year period before he arrived.”
– LA Times, 10/19/00 ; Chicago Tribune, 8/10/00 ; AFP, 12/14/03
[b]Charges Against Halliburton[/b]
“Cheney said, ‘[i]Halliburton gets unfairly maligned simply because of their past association with me.' He said allegations of corruption stem from ‘desperate' political opponents who ‘can't find any legitimate policy differences to debate. He said critics haven't produced any evidence to support their claim, which he said is unfounded[/i].” – Dow Jones, 1/22/04
FACT: Halliburton itself has acknowledged that it “accepted up to $6 million in kickbacks” in its no-bid contract work in Iraq . Additionally, it is the Bush Administration – not “political opponents” that is looking into allegations that the company overcharged the government by $61 million. And it is the Bush Administration that " repeatedly warned the company that the food it was serving the 110,000 U.S. troops in Iraq was 'dirty'” with an audit finding "blood all over the floor" of its kitchens, "dirty pans," and "rotting meats ... and vegetables." – Boston Globe, 1/23/04; CBS, 12/12/03;
[b]Cheney's Continued Links to Halliburton[/b]
Vice President Dick Cheney continues to say that he has no ties to Halliburton since joining the GOP ticket in 2000. He also promised to clear himself from any conflict of interest should he become Vice President. In each of his claims, the facts tell a very different story.
“[i]But what I'll have to do, assuming we're successful [in the election], is divest myself, that is, sell any remaining shares that I have in the company[/i].” – Dick Cheney, 7/30/00
FACT: A congressional report found that Cheney still owns “more than 433,000 Halliburton stock options,” including “100,000 shares at $54.50 per share, 33,333 shares at $28.125 and 300,000 shares at $39.50 per share.” – CNN, 9/25/03
“[i]I severed my ties with Halliburton when I became a candidate for Vice President in August of 2000[/i].” – Dick Cheney, 1/22/04
FACT: Along with the 433,000 stock options, “ Cheney still receives about $150,000 a year” from Halliburton.
– CNN, 10/25/03
“[i]What happens financially [by joining the GOP ticket], obviously, is I take a bath , in one sense[/i].” – Dick Cheney, 7/25/00
FACT: Halliburton “has agreed to let Mr. Cheney, the Republican vice-presidential candidate, retire with a package worth an estimated $20 million, according to people who have reviewed the deal.” – NY Times, 8/12/00
[b]Conflict of Interest[/b]
“[i]I'll do whatever I have to do to, Sam, to avoid a conflict of interest. I will eliminate the conflict. I can assure you, I've said repeatedly, I will not tolerate or be party to a conflict of interests while I'm vice president. I'll do whatever I have to do to resolve that conflict[/i].” – Dick Cheney, 8/27/00
FACT: A congressional report found that “the more than 433,000 stock options he possesses ‘is considered among the 'ties' retained in or 'linkages to former employers' that may 'represent a continuing financial interest' in those employers which makes them potential conflicts of interest.” – CNN, 9/25/03
[b]Cheney's Tenure at Halliburton[/b]
Vice President Dick Cheney has told many stories about his time at Halliburton. And even as criticism mounts over Halliburton's treatment of U.S. troops and taxpayers, he continues to say he is proud of the company.
“[i]I had a firm policy that I wouldn't do anything in Iraq even arrangements that were supposedly legal. We've not done any business in Iraq since the sanctions were imposed and I had a standing policy that I wouldn't do that[/i].” – Dick Cheney, 8/27/00
FACT: “According to oil industry executives and confidential United Nations records, however, Halliburton held stakes in two firms that signed contracts to sell more than $73 million in oil production equipment and spare parts to Iraq while Cheney was chairman and chief executive officer of the Dallas-based company. Two former senior executives of the Halliburton subsidiaries say that, as far as they knew, there was no policy against doing business with Iraq . One of the executives also says that although he never spoke directly to Cheney about the Iraqi contracts, he is certain Cheney knew about them. The Halliburton subsidiaries joined dozens of American and foreign oil supply companies that helped Iraq increase its crude exports from $4 billion in 1997 to nearly $18 billion in 2000. Since the program began, Iraq has exported oil worth more than $40 billion.” – WP, 6/23/01
[b]Halliburton's Reputation[/b]
“[i]Halliburton is a fine company, and I'm pleased that I was associated with the company[/i].” – Dick Cheney, 8/7/02
FACT: Halliburton has acknowledged that it “accepted up to $6 million in kickbacks” in its contract work in Iraq . It is also under scrutiny over allegations of overcharging the government by $61 million in Iraq – a practice the company was previously fined $2 million for. The company also potentially faces criminal charges in a $180 million international bribery scandal during the time Cheney was CEO of the company. The Pentagon has also " repeatedly warned the company that the food it was serving the 110,000 U.S. troops in Iraq was 'dirty'” with an audit finding "blood all over the floor" of its kitchens, "dirty pans, dirty grills, dirty salad bars and rotting meats…and vegetables." – B. Globe, 1/23/04; CBS, 12/12/03 & 4/12/03; W. Post, 1/21/04; AFP, 12/14/03
[b]Center for American Progress[/b], http://www.americanprogress.o...
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| Democracy at Risk |
| 01.23.04 (6:35 am) [edit] |
[b]Democracy at Risk[/b], http://www.nytimes.com/2004/0...+VdILhk7u2nSO7yIsl1w
The disputed election of 2000 left a lasting scar on the nation's psyche. A recent Zogby poll found that even in red states, which voted for George W. Bush, 32 percent of the public believes that the election was stolen. In blue states, the fraction is 44 percent.
Now imagine this: in November the candidate trailing in the polls wins an upset victory — but all of the districts where he does much better than expected use touch-screen voting machines. Meanwhile, leaked internal e-mail from the companies that make these machines suggests widespread error, and possibly fraud. What would this do to the nation?
Unfortunately, this story is completely plausible. (In fact, you can tell a similar story about some of the results in the 2002 midterm elections, especially in Georgia.) Fortune magazine rightly declared paperless voting the worst technology of 2003, but it's not just a bad technology — it's a threat to the republic.
First of all, the technology has simply failed in several recent elections. In a special election in Broward County, Fla., 134 voters were disenfranchised because the electronic voting machines showed no votes, and there was no way to determine those voters' intent. (The election was decided by only 12 votes.) In Fairfax County, Va., electronic machines crashed repeatedly and balked at registering votes. In the 2002 primary, machines in several Florida districts reported no votes for governor.
And how many failures weren't caught? Internal e-mail from Diebold, the most prominent maker of electronic voting machines (though not those in the Florida and Virginia debacles), reveals that programmers were frantic over the system's unreliability. One reads, "I have been waiting for someone to give me an explanation as to why Precinct 216 gave Al Gore a minus 16022 when it was uploaded." Another reads, "For a demonstration I suggest you fake it."
Computer experts say that software at Diebold and other manufacturers is full of security flaws, which would easily allow an insider to rig an election. But the people at voting machine companies wouldn't do that, would they? Let's ask Jeffrey Dean, a programmer who was senior vice president of a voting machine company, Global Election Systems, before Diebold acquired it in 2002. Bev Harris, author of "Black Box Voting" (www.blackboxvoting.com), told The A.P. that Mr. Dean, before taking that job, spent time in a Washington correctional facility for stealing money and tampering with computer files.
Questionable programmers aside, even a cursory look at the behavior of the major voting machine companies reveals systematic flouting of the rules intended to ensure voting security. Software was modified without government oversight; machine components were replaced without being rechecked. And here's the crucial point: even if there are strong reasons to suspect that electronic machines miscounted votes, nothing can be done about it. There is no paper trail; there is nothing to recount.
So what should be done? Representative Rush Holt has introduced a bill calling for each machine to produce a paper record that the voter verifies. The paper record would then be secured for any future audit. The bill requires that such verified voting be ready in time for the 2004 election — and that districts that can't meet the deadline use paper ballots instead. And it also requires surprise audits in each state.
I can't see any possible objection to this bill. Ignore the inevitable charges of "conspiracy theory." (Although some conspiracies are real: as yesterday's Boston Globe reports, "Republican staff members of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee infiltrated opposition computer files for a year, monitoring secret strategy memos and periodically passing on copies to the media.") To support verified voting, you don't personally have to believe that voting machine manufacturers have tampered or will tamper with elections. How can anyone object to measures that will place the vote above suspicion?
What about the expense? Let's put it this way: we're spending at least $150 billion to promote democracy in Iraq. That's about $1,500 for each vote cast in the 2000 election. How can we balk at spending a small fraction of that sum to secure the credibility of democracy at home?
- [i]Paul Krugman[/i]
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| GOP Cyber-Snooping Bust |
| 01.23.04 (6:34 am) [edit] |
[b]Infiltration of files seen as extensive
[i]Senate panel's GOP staff pried on Democrats[/i][/b], http://www.boston.com/news/na...
WASHINGTON -- Republican staff members of the US Senate Judiciary Commitee infiltrated opposition computer files for a year, monitoring secret strategy memos and periodically passing on copies to the media, Senate officials told The Globe.
From the spring of 2002 until at least April 2003, members of the GOP committee staff exploited a computer glitch that allowed them to access restricted Democratic communications without a password. Trolling through hundreds of memos, they were able to read talking points and accounts of private meetings discussing which judicial nominees Democrats would fight -- and with what tactics.
The office of Senate Sergeant-at-Arms William Pickle has already launched an investigation into how excerpts from 15 Democratic memos showed up in the pages of the conservative-leaning newspapers and were posted to a website last November.
With the help of forensic computer experts from General Dynamics and the US Secret Service, his office has interviewed about 120 people to date and seized more than half a dozen computers -- including four Judiciary servers, one server from the office of Senate majority leader Bill Frist of Tennessee, and several desktop hard drives.
But the scope of both the intrusions and the likely disclosures is now known to have been far more extensive than the November incident, staffers and others familiar with the investigation say.
The revelation comes as the battle of judicial nominees is reaching a new level of intensity. Last week, President Bush used his recess power to appoint Judge Charles Pickering to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, bypassing a Democratic filibuster that blocked a vote on his nomination for a year because of concerns over his civil rights record.
Democrats now claim their private memos formed the basis for a February 2003 column by conservative pundit Robert Novak that revealed plans pushed by Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, to filibuster certain judicial nominees. Novak is also at the center of an investigation into who leaked the identity of a CIA agent whose husband contradicted a Bush administration claim about Iraqi nuclear programs.
Citing "internal Senate sources," Novak's column described closed-door Democratic meetings about how to handle nominees.
Its details and direct quotes from Democrats -- characterizing former nominee Miguel Estrada as a "stealth right-wing zealot" and describing the GOP agenda as an "assembly line" for right-wing nominees -- are contained in talking points and meeting accounts from the Democratic files now known to have been compromised.
Novak declined to confirm or deny whether his column was based on these files.
"They're welcome to think anything they want," he said. "As has been demonstrated, I don't reveal my sources."
As the extent to which Democratic communications were monitored came into sharper focus, Republicans yesterday offered a new defense. They said that in the summer of 2002, their computer technician informed his Democratic counterpart of the glitch, but Democrats did nothing to fix the problem.
Other staffers, however, denied that the Democrats were told anything about it before November 2003.
The emerging scope of the GOP surveillance of confidential Democratic files represents a major escalation in partisan warfare over judicial appointments. The bitter fight traces back to 1987, when Democrats torpedoed Robert Bork's nomination to the Supreme Court. In the 1990s, Republicans blocked many of President Clinton's nominees. Since President Bush took office, those roles have been reversed.
Against that backdrop, both sides have something to gain and lose from the investigation into the computer files. For Democrats, the scandal highlights GOP dirty tricks that could result in ethics complaints to the Senate and the Washington Bar -- or even criminal charges under computer intrusion laws.
"They had an obligation to tell each of the people whose files they were intruding upon -- assuming it was an accident -- that that was going on so those people could protect themselves," said one Senate staffer. "To keep on getting these files is just beyond the pale."
But for Republicans, the scandal also keeps attention on the memo contents, which demonstrate the influence of liberal interest groups in choosing which nominees Democratic senators would filibuster. Other revelations from the memos include Democrats' race-based characterization of Estrada as "especially dangerous, because . . . he is Latino," which they feared would make him difficult to block from a later promotion to the Supreme Court.
And, at the request of the NAACP, the Democrats delayed any hearings for the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals until after it heard a landmark affirmative action case -- though a memo noted that staffers "are a little concerned about the propriety of scheduling hearings based on the resolution of a particular case."
After the contents of those memos were made public in The Wall Street Journal editorial pages and The Washington Times, Judiciary Chairman Orrin Hatch, Republican of Utah, made a preliminary inquiry and described himself as "mortified that this improper, unethical and simply unacceptable breach of confidential files may have occurred on my watch."
Hatch also confirmed that "at least one current member of the Judiciary Committee staff had improperly accessed at least some of the documents referenced in media reports." He did not name the staffer, who he said was being placed on leave and who sources said has since resigned, although he had apparently already announced plans to return to school later this year.
Officials familiar with the investigation identified that person as a legislative staff assistant whose name was removed from a list of Judiciary Committee staff in the most recent update of a Capitol Hill directory. The staff member's home number has been disconnected and he could not be reached for comment.
Hatch also said that a "former member of the Judiciary staff may have been involved." Many news reports have subsequently identified that person as Manuel Miranda, who formerly worked in the Judiciary Committee office and now is the chief judicial nominee adviser in the Senate majority leader's office. His computer hard drive name was stamped on an e-mail from the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League that was posted along with the Democratic Senate staff communications.
Reached at home, Miranda said he is on paternity leave; Frist's office said he is on leave "pending the results of the investigation" -- he denied that any of the handwritten comments on the memos were by his hand and said he did not distribute the memos to the media. He also argued that the only wrongdoing was on the part of the Democrats -- both for the content of their memos, and for their negligence in placing them where they could be seen.
"There appears to have been no hacking, no stealing, and no violation of any Senate rule," Miranda said. "Stealing assumes a property right and there is no property right to a government document. . . . These documents are not covered under the Senate disclosure rule because they are not official business and, to the extent they were disclosed, they were disclosed inadvertently by negligent [Democratic] staff."
Whether the memos are ultimately deemed to be official business will be a central issue in any criminal case that could result. Unauthorized access of such material could be punishable by up to a year in prison -- or, at the least, sanction under a Senate non-disclosure rule.
The computer glitch dates to 2001, when Democrats took control of the Senate after the defection from the GOP of Senator Jim Jeffords, Independent of Vermont.
A technician hired by the new judiciary chairman, Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, apparently made a mistake that allowed anyone to access newly created accounts on a Judiciary Committee server shared by both parties -- even though the accounts were supposed to restrict access only to those with the right password.
-[i] By Charlie Savage, Globe Staff[/i]
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| Halliburton Tells Pentagon Workers Took Kickbacks to Award Projects in Iraq |
| 01.23.04 (6:31 am) [edit] |
[b]Halliburton Tells Pentagon Workers Took Kickbacks to Award Projects in Iraq[/b], http://story.news.yahoo.com/n...
WASHINGTON -- Halliburton Co. (NYSE:HAL - News) has told the Pentagon that two employees took kickbacks valued at up to $6 million in return for awarding a Kuwaiti-based company with lucrative work supplying U.S. troops in Iraq, Friday's Wall Street Journal reported.
The disclosure is the first firm indication of corruption involving U.S.- funded projects in Iraq and raises new questions about Halliburton's dealings there. The company's work already is being scrutinized because of accusations that the U.S. government was overcharged for gasoline under another controversial contract.
Halliburton has strenuously defended its Iraq work as fairly priced and free of taint. A discovery of kickbacks could expose the company to hefty fines and other punishments such as potential fraud charges. At the least, contracting experts say, Halliburton will be required to reimburse the money.
Any blow could be softened by the fact that Halliburton itself disclosed the misconduct to the Pentagon inspector general's office this week. That disclosure came just days after the top Defense Department auditor asked the office to investigate whether Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root overcharged for fuel deliveries by more than $61 million.
The latest revelation, though, is sure to increase the already intense scrutiny Halliburton has received from congressional Democrats, some of whom charge that the Houston-based company benefited from political favoritism in securing lucrative work in Iraq. The news also is likely to further raise suspicions abroad that Iraq reconstruction work is largely benefiting U.S. companies and their employees.
[i]Wall Street Journal Staff Reporter Neil King Jr. contributed to this report[/i].
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| Bush Seeks $40 Billion for Iraq After Election: Double or Triple This Amount |
| 01.22.04 (7:10 am) [edit] |
The Bush administration have a lousy track-record for estimating the costs of their "adventures". Remember they falsely claimed that their Iraq war would "pay for itself"! Instead, the U.S.A. is bearing 99% of the costs alone and over $96 Billion has been squandered out of the $167 Billion authorization.
So the following article's report that Bush will seek another $40 Billion for Halliburton, ooopppsss, Iraq, should be [b]doubled or tripled[/b]!
[b]Bush May Seek Billions for Iraq After Election [/b]
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Bush may seek an additional $40 billion or more for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan next year -- on top of the $400-billion military budget he will send to Congress next month, congressional sources and budget analysts said on Wednesday.
But Bush is unlikely to send the request to Congress until after the November presidential election to minimize any political damage, the sources said.
Bush's Democratic challengers have criticized the high cost of the war in Iraq and its chaotic aftermath. They say Iraq has cost $120 billion so far despite initial administration assurances that it would be "an affordable endeavor."
White House budget officials said it is premature to speculate about an emergency war supplemental for the 2005 fiscal year starting Oct. 1.
But congressional sources said preliminary planning is underway and a request would be send to Congress in late 2004 or early 2005.
"Every presidential contender is going to be subject to political demands. But no matter who wins (the election), we're going to see a request," one congressional aide said.
Its size could vary widely depending on the number of U.S. troops in Iraq, budget analysts and congressional aides said.
If the administration can reduce the number of troops there from more than 100,000 to 75,000, about another $25 billion would be needed in fiscal 2005 to supplement the military's regular budget, said Steven Kosiak, a defense analyst with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.
Operations in Afghanistan and elsewhere could add another $15 billion. Kosiak said the emergency request could total $40 billion to $50 billion.
Other analysts and congressional aides said it could be closer to $75 billion or $100 billion. U.S. military plans hinge on a smooth hand-over of political power by June 30 and rebuilding the Iraqi Army.
"They're playing it week by week because they don't know ... Things could go worse than expected or they could go better than expected," said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a defense policy research group.
A senior congressional aide attributed the push for additional funds to concerns that Bush's "new budget contains little or no money for Iraq's shadow rulers after June 30."
[i]TOPPING OFF [/i]
Bush won approval from Congress last year for two war supplementals -- one for $79 billion and another for $87.5 billion for Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.
"It's a little early to be speculating about the deployment (in Iraq) for October and beyond," an administration official said on Wednesday.
Bush has been under pressure from his conservative Republican base to rein in record budget deficits, expected to hit $500 billion this fiscal year alone.
In his $2.3 trillion budget for fiscal 2005, to be sent to Congress on Feb. 2, Bush wants to limit growth in discretionary spending to less than 4 percent. The Defense Department is expected to receive more than $400 billion, a modest increase.
That would cover normal Pentagon activities -- not peacekeeping or combat operations, which would be funded through an emergency request.
"It is uncertain what level of resources will be required and it's uncertain when they will need it. But they will need to have to come to ask for additional money at some point in fiscal 2005," said Kosiak.
Others said the administration would need up to $100 billion on top of the Pentagon's normal budget, and the only issue was timing.
"From a budget standpoint, I don't think they have to put in another (supplemental) this year," Pike said.
Proposing it before the election would only "give the Democrats an opportunity to stage another food fight on the president's Iraq policy," Pike added.
[i]by Adam Entous[/i], http://www.reuters.com/newsAr...;jsessionid=YELXP2DKDFVVU CRBAEZSFEY?type=topNews&s toryID=4180257
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| Multiple Corporate Personality Disorder |
| 01.22.04 (6:56 am) [edit] |
[b]Multiple Corporate Personality Disorder[/b]
We hate to sound like your parents, but people must take responsibility for their actions.
Steal from the grocery store, go to jail.
Double park, pay the ticket.
But why doesn't this simple principle apply to corporations and their executives?
As of this writing, of all of the corporate crimes committed that have cost the United States hundreds of billions of dollars over the past couple of years, only two top level executives are in prison.
That's it -- two.
Now, ask yourself, if working class people committed crimes that cost the nation hundreds of billions of dollars -- inconceivable as it is -- how many would be in prison? The whole lot of them.
So, how is it that corporations and their executives get away with it? It's the nature of the beast.
And perhaps that's why we should consider doing away with it -- the corporation that is.
After all, if a corporation means a legal structure to allow human beings to get away with wrongdoing without paying a price, then it's a machine that produces injustice.
Let's say that a corporation is caught fixing its books, committing in effect a $2.7 billion fraud. That would be a case very similar to the case of HealthSouth.
Under U.S. federal law, if a health care corporation is convicted of a serious crime, that company can no longer do business with the government, in this case the Medicare and Medicaid program. And in HealthSouth's case, that means life and death.
So, the company hires one of the nation's best corporate crime defense attorneys -- Bob Bennett and says to him, "Save us from the corporate death penalty."
And Bob goes to the U.S. Attorney prosecuting the case and says, "Hey, look, we blew it, here's my phone number, we'll give you everything you want. Just don't indict us. Please don't indict us."
And the U.S. Attorney indicts 16 top executives. And the company is on the road to getting off scot free.
That's one way a corporation morphs to get out of accepting responsibility for its sins -- blame the human beings.
But sometimes, the corporate executives say, "Hey, we don't have to take the heat. Let's cough up a defunct subsidiary to plead guilty -- and the government can ban that unit from doing business with Medicare. Who cares about a defunct subsidiary? That unit never did business with Medicare anyway."
So, there's a guilty plea, there's a corporate fine, there is a touch of adverse publicity -- but nobody's hurt. Crime without punishment.
Or let's say that the corporation wants to plea to a lesser offense, but not draw any publicity to the case. This too happens. The corporate lawyer can go to the Justice Department and cut a deal where the Department will agree not to put out a press release about the case. A number of criminal defense lawyers have told us they have done this.
The Justice Department issued a memo earlier this year titled "Federal Prosecution of Business Organization."
The memo gives prosecutors discretion to grant corporations immunity from prosecution in exchange for cooperation.
These immunity agreements, known as deferred prosecution agreements, or pre-trial diversion, were previously reserved for minor street crimes.
They were never intended for major corporate crimes.
In fact, the U.S. Attorneys' Manual explicitly states that a major objective of pretrial diversion is to "save prosecutive and judicial resources for concentration on major cases."
Since the memo was issued, there have been a rash of deferred prosecution agreements in cases involving large corporations, including a settlement with a Puerto Rican bank on money laundering charges and a Pittsburgh bank on securities law charges.
And some corporate crime defense attorneys believe that it is possible to enter these agreements with the Justice Department so as to avoid any publicity.
"This is a favorable change for companies," said Alan Vinegrad, a partner at Covington & Burling in New York. "The memo now explicitly says that pre-trial diversion, which had been reserved for small, individual, minor crimes, is now available for corporations."
Vinegrad said that while there have been a handful of publicized pre-trial diversion cases by corporations, it is conceivable that the Justice Department can cut these kind of deals with companies without filing a public document -- and therefore without any publicity to the case.
Harry Glasbeek is a professor of criminal law at York University in Toronto. He has studied corporate crime and written a book about it called Wealth By Stealth: Corporate Crime, Corporate Law, and the Perversion of Democracy.
Glasbeek says that the creation of the corporation allowed for this "fungibility of responsibility."
"Sometimes the executives plead the corporation to relieve the executives from responsibility," Glasbeek told us recently. "Sometimes the corporation causes the executives to plead, a couple of people take the fall. And it is very difficult. We have created a separate entity with separate property. So, you have multiple personalities with different legal duties and rights that the actors are allowed to take on at any one time. That allows a shifting of responsibility that we cannot control."
We call it Multiple Corporate Personality Disorder (MCPD).
Glasbeek says this disorder undermines our notion of responsibility, which "supposedly depends on the individual taking responsibility for his or her own actions."
"What we have designed is a creature that allows that responsibility to be shifted at the whim of those people who are actually operating that system," Glasbeek said. "That's an endemic design flaw."
Glasbeek has no illusions that criminal prosecution will bring corporate criminals to justice.
"My notion of prosecuting more often is to bring attention to this embedded difficulty -- it is not because I believe that this will actually change the situation in and of itself," he said.
We believe that justice can be done -- and must be done. But only two things work in bringing justice to corporations.
One is to criminally convict the corporate criminals and apply the death penalty in cases of serious wrongdoing.
And the other is to criminally prosecute high-ranking corporate executives who commit serious crimes and throw them in prison.
[i]by Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman[/i], http://www.commondreams.org/v...
[i]Russell Mokhiber is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate Crime Reporter. Robert Weissman is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Multinational Monitor. They are co-authors of 'Corporate Predators: The Hunt for MegaProfits and the Attack on Democracy' (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press; http://www.corporatepredators...[/i]).
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| President Bush's SOTU Rings Hollow ... |
| 01.21.04 (3:51 pm) [edit] |
[b]President Bush's 'State of the Union' (SOTU) Rings Hollow ...[/b]
[b]Ho-hum. More deception[/b] ... http://www.alternet.org
Those who hoped that if President Bush was to spend perhaps a full half of his State of the Union Speech on national security issues he would have the common decency to acknowledge that nothing he said about Iraq in last year's declaration of war SOTU has turned out to be true were sorely disappointed last night, as scholars and others pointed out in the [i]Washington Post[/i] http://www.washingtonpost.com... . "[i]It rings kind of hollow[/i]," said Flynt L. Leverett, who until last year was a staff member on Bush's National Security Council specializing in Middle East issues, of Bush's dodgy language on Iraqi WMDs. "[i]He can't say, 'I took us to war on a false pretense[/i].'"
[b]I urge you to read also:[/b]
State of Whose Union?, http://www.alternet.org/story...
Don't be Fooled by Dubya's Sales Pitch on the Economy, http://tompaine.com/feature2....
Dubya's 'State of the Union' Screed ..., http://www.tblog.com/template...
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| Dubya's 'State of the Union' Screed ... |
| 01.20.04 (7:43 pm) [edit] |
[b]Dubya's 'State of the Union' Screed ...[/b]
[i][b]... Cheney, Rice & Rove's Mendacious Propaganda ...[/b][/i]
[b]ON FOREIGN POLICY[/b]
* Dubya's brute force "[i]you're with us or against us[/i]" neo-con attacks against our "enemies" are going to be shoved up your a*ses ...
* America supports me (Dubya) because I just repeat the mantra "[i]9/11 ... 9/11 ... 9/11 ... 9/11 ... 9/11[/i] ..." over and over and over again, and I can attack anybody ([i]like Saddam Hussein[/i]) even if they have nothing to do with 9/11 ...
* Nobody is asking about Osama bin Forgotten ([i]who was responsible for 9/11[/i]), so I (Dubya) ain't gonna' mention his name or the growth of Al Qaida's terrorist network ...
* Diplomacy doesn't work ... Takes too long & I (Dubya) want my wars [i]NOW[/i] ... Anyone who proposes diplomacy is looking backwards not forwards towards pre-emptive wars that I intend to wage whenever I want, on whatever pretext I see fit ([i]whether it is the truth or not[/i]) ...
* You must become a [i]"democracy" Dubya-style[/i], or we ([i]the neo-cons[/i]) are going to invade you ...
* To hell with the International Community: if they don't like[i] whatever [/i]the hell I (Dubya) want to do, [i]whenever[/i] the hell I want to do it, to hell with 'em ...
* Our friends and allies are those who [i]lay-down[/i], open their legs and let themselves be raped by our (Dubya's) corporate cronies ...
* Our friends and allies[i] believe whatever [/i]I (Dubya) say, even if it isn't the truth ...
* Invading Iraq was a great idea, because Saddam Hussein [i]'maybe, might possibly' [/i]have fantasized about WMDs ... and as such,[i] 'maybe he might possibly' [/i]have one day, gotten 'em ... After all, what's the difference between having WMDs and fantasizing about having WMDs? ...
* Thanks to the military for the courage and character to [i]DIE for me [/i](Dubya) ... Hell, Dubya & his cronies [i]don't have to [/i]go fight & DIE ...
* Dubya panders to the military in order to ensure that they'll support him in November ... Plenty of money for the[i] military industrial complex [/i]... To hell with the American people's[i] standard-of-living [/i]...
* We ([i]neo-cons[/i]) are going to put hundreds of millions of taxpayers dollars into propaganda TV & Radio in the Middle East to tell 'em how wonderful the "freedom" to be raped by our corporate cronies really is ...
* Beware if you don't worship me (Dubya) ... Or, I'm gonna' get you ... I'm gonna' shove my neo-con pre-emptive doctrine up your a*ses ... [i]smirk-smirk-smirk[/i]
[b]ON HOMELAND SECURITY[/b]
* Pass the [i]Patriot Acts [/i]... I'm (Dubya) getting damned tired of criticism and want to sic my attack-dogs on you ...
* We (Ashcroft) are going to track your movements ...
* The way we protect you is to [i]attack any country or nation[/i], anytime we want ([i]Dubya ain't investing here at home in firemen, immigration officers, border control and/or police, inside our own borders[/i]) ...
* I'm (Dubya) gonna' shove the [i]Patriot Acts [/i]up your a*ses ...
* Big Brother is WATCHING YOU ... [i]smirk-smirk-smirk[/i]
[b]ON DOMESTIC & ECONOMIC POLICIES[/b]
* Dubya calls on Congress to make permanent all of the tax cuts, especially those for the corporations & the rich, who are having the time of their lives ... ([i]the others are bones thrown to the poor dumb dogs in the middle-and-working classes to keep 'em from howling ... but who will be deprived of basic needs and services[/i]) ...
* Dubya's economy is great for corporations and the richest-of-the-rich ... [i]Who the hell else matters?[/i] You're a non-person unless you are rich ...
* I've (Dubya) done everything I'm going to do about corporate swindles ([i]my best buddy Kenny-boy (Enron) Lay has gotten off 'scot-free'[/i]), and don't depend upon any reforms of corporate accounting standards or SEC investigations of my corporate campaign contributors ... "[i]Freedom[/i]" means corporate rape ...
* Health care is great [i]if you can afford it [/i]... if you can't: to hell with you ...
* No Universal Health Care ...[i] not everybody deserves health care[/i] ... only if you're rich enough to afford it ...
* Dubya's [i]priorities [/i]are the Health Industry Top-Dogs & Fat-Cats, Insurance Companies, HMOs, Pharmaceutical Big-Wigs, etc ...
* Corporations, doctors and anybody who is rich should be protected from [i]legal redress and remedies [/i]if they poison you, harm you, or f*ck-up your operation ...
* If you don't have a job, to hell with you ...
* If you can afford good services, education, health care, etc. great .... Otherwise, to hell with you ...
* Immigrants are welcome to take jobs at slave labor wages that'll force wages down for everybody else and make massive profits for my (Dubya's) corporate cronies ...
* Your social security is being [i]"eyed"[/i] by my (Dubya's) [i]green-eyed corporate swindlers [/i]in Wall Street who see the chance to plunder, loot & steal your retirement savings ...
* Prisoners are going to get programs administered by my (Dubya's) corporate cronies ... another[i] boondoggle [/i]that makes me look compassionate, but really diverts funds into my buddies bulging pockets ...
* Tax cuts, tax cuts, tax cuts, tax cuts, tax cuts -- Let's not forget Cheney's "[i]deficits don't matter[/i]" -- my (Dubya's) corporate cronies and Cabinet Members ([i]who average over $10 million per year in income[/i]) are having the time of their lives ... to hell with the rest of you ...
* Dubya tries oh so hard to award no-audit, no-accountability boondoggles to any and every special interest ([i]e.g. Community Colleges, Leave-No-Rich-Child-Behin d, Drugs, Pro-Marriage Counsels, so-called Job Training [sic] Programs, etc[/i].) that panders to [i]special interests[/i], but doesn't address any real issues ...
* Congress had better get their "[i]priorities[/i]" right: I (Dubya) am submitting my [i]'wish-list [/i]of [i]corporate pork'[/i], and Congress will be blamed for the consequential [i]budget deficits, slashed services[/i], and, the [i]deterioration in the standard-of-living [/i]for the American [i]middle-and-working [/i]classes ... To hell with anybody who isn't rich ...
* Everything is [i]wonderful[/i] ... We (Dubya's regime) are all [i]singing Kumbaya [/i]& Condi & I can hardly wait for the Super Bowl ... to hell with the 3.5 million homeless, the 9-15 million jobless, the 25 million families who live below the poverty line, the 45 million without health care, etc. oh, and to hell with those US Soldiers & innocent Iraqis being massacred daily to enrich Halliburton, Bechtel, Carlyle Group, Unocal, etc. ...
* I'm (Dubya) gonna' shove my[i] corporate-take-all [/i]rape of America up your a*ses ... [i]smirk-smirk-smirk[/i]
[b]ON RELIGION[/b]
* No [i]separation of church and state [/i]... you believe in my (Dubya's) faith-based initiatives, or to hell with you ...
* Lots of taxpayer dollars to be diverted to my (Dubya's) faith-based initiatives in order to pander to the [i]Religious Right [/i]who will tell the rest of us how to live Christian-style ([i]warfare, corporate rape, deny basic needs to citizens[/i])... and ensure that I (Dubya) am re-elected in November ...
* If you're gay, go back "[i]into the closet[/i]" ... to hell with you ...
* I (Dubya) stand up for marriage and condemn gay marriage ... but you'll notice I don't condemn divorce, which is worse for children ([i]since alot of the hypocrites in the GOP are divorced[/i]) ... How [i]sacred[/i] do the Bushies really consider marriage? ... Hmmm ...
* If you are young, don't have sex, or else we'll brand a [i]'scarlett letter' [/i]on your chest ... abstinence, or to hell with you ...
* If you're a druggie ([i]like Rush Limbaugh[/i]?) we (Dubya) really [i]want you to stop [/i]... and we will give money to our corporate cronies to[i] tell you to stop [/i]...
* I'm (Dubya) gonna' shove my religious ideology and dogma up your a*ses ... [i]smirk-smirk-smirk[/i]
* Tug at those [i]'heart-strings' [/i]... Sentimental letter sent to Dubya by a[i] 2 or 10 year old [/i]little girl who is real, real thankful that we've invaded and are occupying Iraq! ... So it must be right! ... [i]smirk-smirk-smirk[/i]
[b]I (Dubya) want [i]bi-partisanship [/i]... By God, I (Dubya) want a [i]bi-partisan [/i]effort to blindly [i]carry-out [/i]my orders, or else I'll shove my orders up your a*ses, anyway ... [/b][i]smirk-smirk-smirk [/i]... I'm also getting damned sick and tired of those "[i]activist[/i]" ([i]those who disagree with my imperial whims[/i]) judges who don't carry-out my orders ... [i]smirk-smirk-smirk [/i]...
[b]God Bless You Everyone ([i]So Long As You Agree With Me, Dubya[/i]) Or Else God Is Damning You To The Fires Of HELL ([i]Pat Robertson said so[/i]) ... [i]smirk-smirk-smirk[/i][ /b]
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| Iraqi People Want U.N. To Oversee Elections - They Don't Want U.S. Election 2000! |
| 01.20.04 (7:22 am) [edit] |
The Iraqi people want the United Nations to oversee their elections and they want their elections NOW! The Iraqi people don't want U.S. style elections ala[i] Election 2000 [/i]that represented a coup d'etat by Bush/Cheney who hijacked the U.S. government!
Why doesn't the U.S. want Iraq to hold elections? Ask Halliburton, Bechtel, the Carlyle Group, Unocal, and other companies who need alot more time to cash-in on Dubya's Iraqi Neocon Game! (Dubya wouldn't hold elections in the [i]U.S.[/i] if he didn't have to!)
[b]UN May Side With Iraqis Over US on Early Elections[/b], http://antiwar.com/article.ph...
[b]U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan agreed Monday to send a team of experts to Baghdad to assess the feasibility of holding direct elections in Iraq this year, an idea the United States has already rejected as impracticable. [/b]
''The issue now is whether the technical, political or security conditions exist for general direct elections to take place as early as May this year,'' Annan told reporters after nearly four hours of closed-door talks with representatives of both the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Baghdad and the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC).
If elections are logistically not feasible, Annan was asked to provide alternatives for the U.S.-occupied nation.
The United States has opted for limited elections by regional caucuses which, some critics argue, are vulnerable to manipulation and would very likely result in pro-U.S. candidates being elected to the proposed Iraq transitional government.
Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, a powerful Shiite cleric, has publicly rejected choosing caucuses and is demanding direct nation-wide elections before July, a request that has been spurned by the CPA and the IGC as not logistically possible.
The cleric's call is not surprising, since the concept of regional caucuses is a ''novel democratic practice'' the Arabs have never heard of, Salim Lone, a former U.N. spokesman in Baghdad, told IPS.
The crisis created by Sistani's rejection of the U.S. plan highlights yet again the isolation of the CPA and its head, Ambassador Paul Bremer, said Lone.
''It is Sistani's implicit support for the American occupation which has been instrumental in restraining a Shiite revolt in Iraq,'' he pointed out.
But support from Shiites, who comprise more than 60 percent of Iraq's 27 million people, has from the beginning been explicitly predicated on speedy elections, which would end a century of marginalisation of the country's Shiite majority, Lone added.
Like U.S. officials, Annan has also expressed the view that it might not be practicable to hold nation-wide elections by Jul. 1, when the CPA will hand over power to an Iraqi government.
According to some Arab diplomats, there is a strong possibility the U.N. technical team will concur with Annan and Washington.
If this happens, said one diplomat, the United States will tell Sistani, ''Well, even U.N. experts say that direct elections cannot be held before July'', he added.
Asked whether Washington was using the United Nations as a convenient cover for its own objectives, Annan told reporters, ''Our sole objective is to help the Iraqi people''.
''I believe that there is widespread agreement among us that the United Nations will have an important role to play in working with the Iraqi provisional government from July onwards, on key constitutional and electoral issues,'' he added.
''We agreed that partnership would be necessary, and we are also going to be active in recovery, reconstruction and in the humanitarian and human rights fields,'' said the U.N. chief.
Asked about massive Shiite demonstrations in Iraq demanding direct elections, Bremer told reporters Monday, ''One of the reasons why we sent our troops to Iraq was for freedom (for the Iraqis) and to allow them to participate in democracy. And one of the beauties of democracy is freedom of speech and freedom of assembly''.
''We welcome peaceful demonstrations but some of them have not been very friendly,'' he added. ''The interesting thing is that the Iraqi people want sovereignty back”.
”Our problem is how to get a transparent process by which to get a transitional legislature chosen to whom we can hand sovereignty''.
''Obviously, there is a risk for the United Nations to return to Iraq,'' Jim Paul of the New York-based Global Policy Forum, told IPS.
Annan has always said he was concerned about security in Iraq. That might be a legitimate excuse, Paul added, but the U.N. leader has had more than security on his mind.
''The United Nations has already frittered away some of its credibility,'' according to Paul. And so, it wants to make sure it has an important future role to play in Iraq. But neither the CPA nor the IGC has yet spelled out that key role. ''That's the danger,'' he added.
With impending elections, said Paul, the IGC also does not want to be seen as merely a puppet of the United States.
Members of the IGC, he said, have to distance themselves from the United States if they want to get elected to office. Currently, they are viewed as creatures of Washington.
''So the United Nations is in a way the card they want to play. They are much keener than the United States to get the United Nations into Iraq. They want the United Nations as a cover.''
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| AXIS OF STUPIDITY ... |
| 01.19.04 (6:59 pm) [edit] |
[b]The AXIS OF STUPIDITY is Shrub Dubya Shrub, Dick Cheney, Condi Rice, and Karl Rove, who have depicted the entire world as "[u]either with us or against us[/u]". In so doing, their feeble attempts to blame the U.N., Clinton, the French, 9/11 and the Martians from Outer Space, for all of their problems, is becoming the joke of the 21st Century![/b]
[b]Deeply thought-provoking article:[/b] After Depicting 'Axis of Evil': Gains and Problems, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/0...
[b]Another thought-provoking article as the situation in Iraq continues to deteriorate[/b]: Bush and Bremer meet as Shi'ites demand poll, http://news.ft.com/servlet/Co...
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| Martin Luther King: Terrorist? |
| 01.19.04 (11:46 am) [edit] |
[b]Martin Luther King: Terrorist?[/b], http://www.alternet.org/story...
Let's not mince words. Were Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. alive today, he would be at risk for being imprisoned indefinitely, without charges or access to legal counsel, as an "enemy combatant."
He would be decried, by powerful figures inside and outside government, as at worst a domestic terrorist, at best a publicity seeking menace whose criticisms of America gave comfort to our unseen enemies.
King would not have the opportunity to engage in repeated nonviolent civil disobediences. Media would be quickly bored by the spectacles; a nation accustomed to police violence against protesters yawns at the tanks, rubber bullets, chemical weapons, and "preventative" arrests now commonly used against those who employ the same tactics King himself once used. The felony charges against King would put him away for years – if he were allowed to stand trial at all.
The powerful black religious networks that produced King and so many other courageous civil rights leaders would be attacked by federal prosecutors as providing financial support for terrorism. Church groups' tax exemptions would be lifted; records would be seized. Charges would be brought, perhaps under federal RICO statutes or Patriot Act provisions. The FBI harassment that hounded King throughout his career would today be fiercer, and subject to no judicial oversight.
In an era where a federal holiday has served to both commemorate and sanitize the history of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., white America has forgotten just how radical and controversial a figure he was in his time. Many of these charges – domestic terrorist, commie dupe, publicity hound – were leveled against King during the 14 long-but-so-short years of his national prominence. The police were violent. The church groups were criticized.
The differences, today, are twofold. First, our government has granted itself enormously greater legal powers to crush dissent. And, secondly, much of the public, taught by years of government rhetoric and media sensationalism to dismiss dissenters as violent and illegitimate, is predisposed to let the government get away with it. Moral appeals by leaders like King would have far less chance of success. We no longer grant presumed moral authority to either religious leaders or to those wronged by the world; in today's media-saturated, scandal-obsessed age, King's moral failings (e.g., his various affairs) might well be used to undermine his movement.
Moreover, today, we've heard it all before. The world is brought to our doorstep, teeming with suffering, each day. Sadly, as our planet's woes have become more immediate, and America's role in its inequalities more obvious to those who would look, many of us have chosen to tune out – out of fear, or boredom, or despair that we ordinary people can do little to change things.
Ordinary people can change the world, of course – King is one of our country's shining examples, still recent enough that many of us were alive during his lifetime. But as his holiday becomes sanitized, and his image becomes lionized beyond all recognition, it has become harder and harder to draw personal inspiration from his story – or his politics.
This year, even more than in the past, it has become essential to remember that King did far more than have a dream. Along with Mohandas Gandhi, he was one of the two most internationally revered symbols of nonviolence in the 20th century. He spent his adult life defying authority and convention, citing a higher moral authority. He gave hope and inspiration for the liberation of people of color on six continents.
King is not a legend because he believed in diversity trainings and civic ceremonies. He is remembered because he took serious risks and, as the Quakers say, spoke truth to power. Unfortunately, we don't hear his powerful indictments of poverty, the Vietnam War, and the military-industrial complex. Today, as American soldiers fight two major wars on the far side of the world, and the U.S. military wades quietly into a half dozen more – all in non-white countries – they're more timely than ever.
But it's not likely we'll hear much on the networks of King pronouncing the spiritual death of a country that would spend so much to kill and so little to help people live. That's a little too touchy nowaways.
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| Car Bomb Explodes Today in Central Baghdad Killing At Least 20 People |
| 01.18.04 (5:36 am) [edit] |
A car bomb explodes today in central Baghdad killing at least 20 people, but don't worry folks only 2 were Americans. The rest, according to the neocons, are only "Ay-hrabs", so they are expendable. Nobody in the Bush administration gives a damn about the over 502 U.S. soldiers and the many thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians killed to-date. When will this carnage come to an end?
[b]Car bomb explodes in central Baghdad,
Blast kills at least 20, near coalition headquarters[/b], http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3...
What is Shrub's "Mother Hen" (Dubya's nickname for Condi) Concealeezza Rice who he put in charge of his Iraq Stablization Group (ISG) http://query.nytimes.com/gst/... doing? Maybe she is out buying pretzels and beer for the upcoming Super Bowl! Rumor has it Shrub and Condi are more worried about who will make it to the football finals than the chaos in Iraq!
Recently, when interviewed ... well, you decide:
[i]Side-by-side clips of Condoleeza Rice contradicting herself, George W. wobbling unsteadily under hard questions from the British press (Q: "Is American credibility on the line over Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq?" A: "Uh…. I'm not exactly sure what that means…"), show just how equivocal the current US administration is.
Condi, for instance, is confronted on a news show about the claim that Iraq tried to get weapons-grade uranium from Nigeria. This claim was removed from an earlier speech because the CIA director thought it wasn't solid enough, Condi says. "How did it get back in to the State of the Union speech?" asks the host. "It's not a matter of it getting back in," she replies, deadpan, but a little flustered. "People forgot."[/i] http://www.vivelecanada.ca/ar...
[b]This is supposed to be a "genius"? This is supposed to be a National Security Advisor? Hmmm ...[/b]
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| War For OIL??? ... I KNOW SO!!! ... Connect The Dots!!! |
| 01.17.04 (8:45 pm) [edit] |
[b]War For OIL??? ... I KNOW SO!!! ... Connect The Dots!!!
In "[i]The Price of Loyalty[/i]," authored by Ron Suskind, he confirms the following[/b]:
Suskind says O'Neill and other White House insiders he interviewed gave him documents that show that in the first three months of 2001, the administration was looking at military options for removing Saddam Hussein from power and planning for the aftermath of Saddam's downfall -- including post-war contingencies such as peacekeeping troops, war crimes tribunals and the [i][b]future of Iraq's oil[/b][/i].
"There are memos," Suskind tells Stahl, "One of them marked 'secret' says 'Plan for Post-Saddam Iraq.'"
A Pentagon document, says Suskind, titled "[i][b]Foreign Suitors For Iraqi Oilfield Contracts[/b][/i]," outlines areas of oil exploration. "[i][b]It talks about contractors around the world from...30, 40 countries, and which ones have what intentions on oil in Iraq[/b][/i]," Suskind says. [i]More on [/i] http://www.notinourname.net/w...
Moreover, in "[b]US Plans to Keep Control of Iraq Oil[/b]", http://www.commondreams.org/h... , Evelyn Leopold reports:
[b]UNITED NATIONS [/b]- In hopes of getting strong U.N. support, the United States has made concessions in its quest to lift 13-year-old trade sanctions against Iraq, opening the door for the return of U.N. arms inspectors.
But the resolution, expected to be adopted by Friday, still gives the United States and Britain wide-ranging powers to run Iraq and control its oil industry until a permanent government is established, which could take years.
The text, the third version distributed on Monday, seeks to accommodate some of the criticism by France, Russia, China and other U.N. Security Council members, particularly what they see as an attempt to sideline the United Nations but obtain privileges the world body has under international law.
While few expect any country to veto the text, the United States wants a large majority in the 15-nation council.
Without U.N. action to lift the sanctions, imposed when Iraqi troops invaded Kuwait in 1990, Washington would be in a legal no man's land, with many firms unwilling to engage in trade with Iraq, and oil exports open to lawsuits.
Russia's U.N. Ambassador Sergei Lavrov said he "welcomed the mood of the co-sponsors to really try their best to respond to as many question as they can." But he said council members wanted "more clarity" at the lack of any time limit or renewal of the resolution.
In deference to Russia, which was favored in contracts by the ousted government of President Saddam Hussein, the resolution phases out the existing U.N.-run oil and civilian supply network over six months instead of four months.
It does not guarantee that all contracts in the so-called oil-for-food pipeline will be honored, such as the $4 billion owed Russian firms, but leaves time to sort them out.
[b]'NEVER SAY NEVER' [/b]
On the political role of the United Nations, the draft calls for a high-level special representative with "independent responsibilities." The envoy would "work intensively" with the United States and Britain "to facilitate a process leading to an internationally recognized, representative government of Iraq" but his or her duties are still vague.
U.S. Ambassador John Negroponte said Washington could offer further changes but it was unlikely. "Never say never," he said. "But ... we have gone just about as far as we can in meeting the concerns expressed by other delegations."
The resolution, he said, foresaw no role for U.N. arms inspectors. But the new text mentions their mandate in U.N. resolutions since 1991, and opens the door for their return to verify Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction.
Most controversial is shielding Iraq's oil revenues and a special Development Fund set up to administer them until 2008 from any lawsuits, attachments or claims. This is usual for a fund administered by the United Nations but not one over which the world body has no power.
However, the new text says buyers of Iraqi oil are not necessarily immune from suits, such as cases of oil spills.
Money from the fund can be spent by the United States and Britain for the benefit of the Iraqi people. An international board, including the United Nations, will monitor the fund.
Troubling to international law experts is the rewriting of the 1949 Geneva Conventions on the duties of occupying powers, such as the United States and Britain. They are not supposed to create a new permanent government or commit Iraq to long-term contracts, such as oil exploration, under the Geneva treaties.
"The United States is asking the Security Council to authorize it to do a series of things that would otherwise violate international law under the guise of ending sanctions," said Morton Halperin, a former State Department official and director of the Open Society Institute in Washington.
"The purpose of this resolution is to relieve the United States of both its obligations and the limits of what it can do as an occupying power under international law by having the Security Council supersede the requirements of the Geneva Convention," he said in an interview.
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| Bearing Witness |
| 01.17.04 (7:08 am) [edit] |
[b]Someone once said "[i]where there is smoke, there is fire[/i]" ... O'Neill sounds a hell of a lot more credible, than the White House (who is not disputing the O'Neill's facts) and whose sordid account of Dubya is corroborated by other sources.[/b]
[b]Bearing Witness[/b], http://www.tompaine.com/featu...
Richard Blow is the former executive editor of [i]George Magazine[/i]. He is author of [i]American Son: A Portrait of John F. Kennedy, Jr[/i]., and is writing a book about Harvard University.
[b]I am reluctant [/b]to begin writing about The[i] Price of Loyalty[/i], the new book about Paul O'Neill by former Wall Street Journal writer Ron Suskind, by talking about the nature of loyalty, for a single reason: That's what the White House would want me to do.
Rather than addressing the substance of this book, the Bush administration has tried to change the subject to the ethics of O'Neill's cooperation with it, even launching an inquiry into whether documents that O'Neill gave to Suskind were classified.
It's not that the question of O'Neill's loyalty isn't an interesting one. As someone who's faced this same issue in writing a book, I'm fascinated by its various incarnations and how others have wrestled with its burdens. Did O'Neill owe his loyalty to Bush? To the presidency? To the public, or to his own conscience? There's no easy answer here, and people can make up their own minds better than any columnist or White House spinner can do it for them.
Anyway, that conversation is of lesser importance right now. This is a very valuable book, certainly the best book about the Bush White House to date, and a discussion about its contents is more important than one about its ethics. The substance of this book, along with the fact that O'Neill isn't making a dime off it, elevates it above a simple tell-all. The [i]Price of Loyalty [/i]is not about cashing in, it's about conscience.
It tells the story of Paul O'Neill's two years as Secretary of the Treasury. They do not sound enjoyable. Bush chose O'Neill because the Alcoa chairman was friendly with many longtime players from previous Republican administrations, knew the issues and was close with Alan Greenspan.
But O'Neill was never part of the Bush inner circle. As Suskind tells the story, O'Neill was a lonely voice for fiscal sanity in the White House who urged the president to balance the tax cuts he had promised during the campaign with caution about a wobbly economy and rising deficits.
O'Neill lost that battle and numerous others, although one gets the feeling that it wasn't so much the fact that he lost as how he was beaten that demoralized him. O'Neill believed in process—the idea that people making weighty decisions about the future of the country should have a system for unearthing the most solid facts and encouraging the most vigorous debates.
The Bush White House did not agree. Suskind and O'Neill paint a picture of a White House that is so cynical, so obsessed with ideology and power at the expense of meaningful public policy that even the possibility of a second term for this crowd is deeply depressing.
At the center is the president, who comes across looking more like Ronald Reagan than like his father. He is often disengaged and frequently ignorant. He repeats the mantra that he has to stick to his campaign promises, but not for the reasons one would hope. Instead, Bush comes across as so intellectually overwhelmed that he hangs onto those campaign promises like a drowning man clinging to an ocean buoy in a stormy sea. They provide an intellectual center for a man who appears to lack one.
As if to obscure the president's inability to extemporize, Cabinet meetings are carefully scripted; its members are told in advance when to speak and what to say. And Bush has a nasty streak; there's an excruciating anecdote in which a woman seated between Bush and O'Neill at an economic conference says that she's seated next to one of her heroes. "The President smirked," Suskind writes. "'Who, O'Neill?'" Bush reached around the woman to tap O'Neill on the shoulder. "'We found one, O'Neill,'" he said.
You know you are not long for your job when the president humiliates you in public. There is, of course, an inner circle, and O'Neill is not part of it. It consists of Dick Cheney and Karl Rove.
Cheney comes across as a truly appalling man—manipulative, Machiavellian, two-faced, absolutely uninterested in honest discussion of policy-making and above all determined to exploit his boss' intellectual vacuum to push his own extremist agenda.
Next to him is Karl Rove, who believes in nothing but what is politically expedient. Both men, and to a lesser extent chief of staff Andrew Card and National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice, tightly control access to their president. Bush, who has admitted that he doesn't even read newspapers, seems to like it this way.
Back at the beginning of his administration, Bush aides spoke of how theirs would be a businesslike White House, run by a Harvard MBA, in contrast to the chaotic exuberance of the Clinton White House. But when a real chief executive comes into the picture—one who worked his way into the job, unlike Cheney or Bush, who were hired for their political connections—the president has no tolerance for his thoughts on corporate governance, whether it applies to Enron or the White House itself. After the midterm elections of 2002, Bush summarily dispatched O'Neill—although it was actually Cheney who made the telephone call.
It's worth comparing The [i]Price of Loyalty [/i]to Bob Woodward's [i]Bush at War[/i], which painted a strikingly laudatory picture of the White House but lacked a single on-the-record source. The [i]Price of Loyalty [/i]feels credible; [i]Bush at War [/i]felt like a naked payoff for access and a ploy for more. But for all of Woodward's vaunted access, he couldn't do what Suskind did: Find someone who was willing to be quoted by name.
Ultimately that makes [i]The Price of Loyalty [/i]a more important book, and, I hope, a more enduring one.
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| The Arrogance of George Will |
| 01.17.04 (7:03 am) [edit] |
[b]George Will is a corrupt "journalist". He really doesn't deserve to be called a "journalist". [/b]He is a neocon editorialist who apparently takes bribes and regurgitates neocon propaganda. I have no respect for him anymore.
The tale of Conrad Black http://www.observer.com/pages... , the media magnate facing inquiries by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Justice Department for looting millions from Hollinger International, the newspaper company he controlled, is foremost a story of rotten greed and corporate abuse. But, it's also a tale about media corruption and the lack of journalistic ethics.
"My business is my business. Got it?" That was syndicated columnist George Will's http://www.washingtonpost.com... reply when asked why he didn't tell his readers in a column-- defending Black's political views on Iraq--that he had been a member of an advisory group set up by Black and had received $25,000 per diem for each meeting he attended.
You'd think that Will's arrogant reply would have elicited quick rebuke--hell, even outrage--from his editors at the Washington Post. Instead, after the New York Times revealed Will's renumerative affiliation with Black in a front-page story http://www.commondreams.org/h... , Alan Shearer, editorial director and general manager of the Washington Post Writers' Group, peeped up: "I think I would have liked to have known."
So, it was heartening to see the Post's Ombudsman Michael Getler finally weigh in last Sunday http://www.washingtonpost.com... . After quoting Fred Hiatt http://www.washingtonpost.com... , editor of the Post's editorial page--who argued lamely that Will's "lack of disclosure doesn't strike me as a major lapse"--Getler blasted the Post's influential and widely syndicated columnist for his arrogant failure to disclose his conflict of interest.
"My own view," Getler wrote http://www.washingtonpost.com... , "is one that is troubled by this omission. It is important to be reminded, as Hiatt points out, that this financial relationship ended more than two years before the column reference. Yet it seems to me that all journalists and commentators need to be scrupulous in making known any possible conflict of interests, real or likely to perceived. Sometimes it needs to be done in print, but it certainly must be made known to editors, who can make their own decision before publication or distribution. It shouldn't be so easy to just say 'got it' when it comes to conditions for access to the columns of the country's newspapers and magazines."
Or as Gilbert Cranberg, the former Chair of the Professional Standards Committee of the National Conference of Editorial Writers http://www.ncew.org/ , put it in a letter to theNew York Times two weeks earlier, "The code of ethics of the National Conference of Editorial Writers, the organization of editorial page editors and writers puts it plainly: 'The writer should be constantly alert to conflicts of interest, real or apparent, including those that may arise from financial holdings, secondary employment, holding public office or involvement in political, civic or other organizations. Timely public disclosure can minimize suspicion. Editors should seek to hold syndicates to these standards."
As Getler noted, Will is no novice when it comes to flouting journalistic ethics http://www.fair.org/activism/... . In fact, as Nation columnist Eric Alterman http://www.msnbc.msn.com/Defa... makes clear in his valuable book, http://www.amazon.com/exec/ob... [i]The Sound and the Fury:The Washington Punditocracy and The Collapse of American Politics[/i], super-pundits like Will "never developed a recognizable code of ethics." Remember "Debategate"--when Will helped Ronald Reagan in his debate with President Jimmy Carter and then, appearing on "Nightline" as an impartial observer, credited his pupil with a "thoroughbred performance"? At the time, a Los Angeles Times media critic called Will "a political shill," Chicago columnist Mike Rokyo called him a "lapdog," and the New York Daily News kicked him off their editorial pages (though it reinstated him too soon after).
Even Ben Bradlee http://www.pbs.org/newshour/c... , Alterman reports, then the nation's most respected newspaperman, and editor of Will's flagship daily the Washington Post, later complained that if it had been up to him, "I would have canned him on the spot." The denunciations were so vehement that Will was forced to respond with some pap about how he had accepted the invitation to help prepare Reagan for his debate as a columnist, rather than as a journalist. "But, far from resulting in Will's losing his job," Alterman writes, "the controversy only added to Willian lore, further blurring the line between watchdogs and the watched."
These days, as that line has become ever more blurred--largely due to media conglomeratization, http://www.thenation.com/dire... Murdochization and the media's political timidity--it's worth commending Ombudsman Getler for trying to hold lapdog Will to some standard of accountability.
[b]The Nation[/b], http://www.thenation.com/edcu...
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| How can we make you understand? |
| 01.17.04 (6:55 am) [edit] |
[b]How can we make you understand?[/b]
What's wrong with this sentence? From the [i]Washington Post[/i] http://www.washingtonpost.com... : "After weeks of quiet overtures and secret letters to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, administration officials say they are baffled over exactly what he wants – and even more confused about what it will take to get him to back off his demand for direct elections."
We'll translate: What does he want? Democracy! When does he want it? Now! [i]More »[/i] http://www.alternet.org/waron...
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| Halliburton Awarded Another Boondoggle by Dubya |
| 01.17.04 (6:53 am) [edit] |
[b]Dubya has awarded his corporate cronies at Halliburton another boondoggle, at the expense of the good old American taxpayer![/b]
So Halliburton can price-gouge taxpayers on the price of petrol, poison our U.S. troops with dirty food, and, over-charge on their services in no-bid, no-competition, no-audit, and no-accountability contracts; and Cheney still sees that they get their vast rewards in exchange for the Veep's bribes and campaign contributions to Dubya!
[b]KBR, Halliburton Subsidiary wins new Iraq contract[/b], http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/mi...
[b]Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR) [/b]has won a new US army contract to help repair Iraq's dilapidated oil industry.
Parsons Iraqi Joint Venture and Worley Group also will share in the $2bn (£1.1bn; 1.6bn euros) worth of work.
The appointment is likely to raise eyebrows as KBR has been accused of overcharging the US military for fuel.
The Pentagon is mulling whether to investigate KBR's owner, Halliburton, over the allegations. The company has denied any wrongdoing.
[b]North-South divide[/b]
Halliburton, whose former chief executive was US Vice President Dick Cheney, had looked to be in the clear after an earlier inquiry.
Under the terms of the contracts, KBR will develop Iraq's southern oil fields, while Parsons and Worley will work together in the north of the country.
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| Wes Clark's REAL WORDS and Not ORWELLIAN SPIN by Dubya's Neocon Liars |
| 01.16.04 (11:31 am) [edit] |
[b]Read Wes Clark's [i]REAL WORDS [/i]and not the [i]ORWELLIAN SPIN [/i]fabricated by Dubya's neocon liars.[/b]
[b]General Wesley K. Clark
"Remarks on Counter-Terrorism"[/b], http://www.clark04.com/speech...
Thank you President Hutson for that kind introduction and for having me here today at the Franklin Pierce Law Center. It's always nice to be on the same stage with a fellow officer - even if you are a Navy man. I'd also like to thank the faculty and students for peeling themselves away from their books for a little politics. I know you don't get enough of it up here.
Two years ago, our nation was rocked by a tragedy so horrific that you'd be hard pressed to find an American who didn't remember exactly where they were and what they were doing when it happened.
The world we knew on September 10, 2001 seems to be gone. In its place is a new world: one where the threat of terrorism looms large - in our subways, on our airplanes, at our harbors.
The effects of that day are indelibly stamped on nearly every aspect of American life.
At home, two weeks ago, we rang in the New Year at terror alert code orange. Once again, we were a nation on edge, looking over our shoulders for the smallest sign of danger.
Abroad, we are a nation at war. In total, more than 130,000 service men and women are still on the front lines in Iraq and Afghanistan. Our all-volunteer Army is stretched almost to the breaking point. And since September 11th, our nation has buried almost 600 soldiers, and more than 10,000 have been wounded.
Two years after 9-11, the war on terrorism is far from over.
Like most Americans, and like most of America's allies, I rallied behind President Bush in the weeks and months after 9-11, eager for him to lead our country through a time of crisis. I supported him when he grabbed that bullhorn at Ground Zero and when he stood before a Joint Session of Congress in late September 2001.
But today, despite his tough talk, George Bush still hasn't finished the job he started. Osama bin Laden and the al Qaeda network are still at large. Mullah Omar, the leader of the Taliban, is still on the loose, and al Qaeda seems to still be a functional organization. New terrorist cells have been formed and old ones reinvigorated. The Administration's failure to create the conditions for stability in Afghanistan have left the nation with a resurging Taliban presence and the warlords are gaining renewed strength. And opium production, which al Qaeda uses to fund its efforts, is back on the rise.
At home, two years after 9-11, America remains insufficiently protected from terrorist attacks. Our borders, ports, critical infrastructure, and nuclear facilities are vulnerable targets, and our cash-starved states can't afford the first-responders we need to keep our communities safe.
Like many Americans, I've lost faith in our Commander in Chief. He has failed to lead effectively and honestly, and every day, Americans live at risk because of his failures.
After September 11th, we witnessed one of the greatest showings of solidarity in world history - including nearly every Muslim nation. Today, with brash arrogance, we've alienated almost every single one of them, including some of our oldest allies. We've gone from a world united with us against terrorism to a world deeply divided and increasingly hostile toward America.
Even worse, recent polls show that today, in a stark reversal, many citizens of Muslim countries think more highly of Osama bin Laden than they do of George W. Bush and the United States.
The bottom line: George Bush hasn't done his job. Al Qaeda is at large. Our world is more divided. Our reputation has been compromised. Our homeland is unnecessarily at-risk. We can - and we must - do better.
In this election, the question we need to ask ourselves is simple: Have we done all we can do to make America safe? Have we used our resources wisely to ensure success in the years ahead?
The answer I'm finding in city after city, stop after stop, is a resounding "no."
The question now is who has the best vision to make America safer four years from today.
I am running for president to take on terrorism, to stomp out the al Qaeda network, and protect America at home and abroad. Because we need a higher standard of leadership in America. One that puts the nation's interests above political interests. Not one that puts old rivalries above new threats.
Within days of the September 11th attacks, President Bush pinned responsibility on Al Qaeda and the Taliban regime. He called them murderers and vowed that the United States would retaliate. And we did. President Bush declared that our forces would "smoke [Al Qaeda] out of their holes" and would get bin Laden dead or alive.
But instead of ferreting out Al Qaeda, the Bush Administration militarized the war on terror. He pulled a world class bait and switch, and turned America's attention, energy and resources to Iraq. In fact, it's been months since Mr. Bush has even mentioned Osama bin Laden. The only name we hear is Saddam Hussein, and the only country we hear about is Iraq. And according to former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, this isn't a coincidence: The Bush Administration starting planning their actions against Iraq during their first days in the White House - long before the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and despite being warned that our greatest threat was Osama bin Laden, not Saddam Hussein.
But diverting our attention from al Qaeda hasn't made the problem go away. Ending the dictatorship in Iraq has not gained us ground against a loose but lethal network of jihadists that now reside in Europe, Africa, Asia and the Middle East. On the contrary, there have been more Al Qaeda operations in the last several months than in any comparable period - in Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Morocco.
The Bush Administration says that rooting out terrorism is going to be a "long, hard slog." I agree. Quashing terrorism is not easy. And if we continue with George W. Bush, the slog is going to be a lot longer and harder than necessary.
Today, I'm announcing my strategy to fight terrorism, destroy al Qaeda, and protect America. My counter terrorism plan has three parts: first, a concerted effort to reengage our allies and work with the Islamic world; second, an all out offensive to destroy al Qaeda wherever it remains; and third, a strong homeland security to defend America's borders.
[b]First, we need to isolate terrorists rather than isolating ourselves.[/b] We can't win the war unilaterally or by military force alone. That means we must restore the alliance that the Bush Administration has spent the last three years undercutting. As President, I will launch a new Atlantic Charter with our European allies to meet the new threats of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, and strengthen our response to the old threats that are still with us. The central premise of the Charter will be a commitment from all to work together as a first, not last resort.
If necessary, America will always reserve the right to act alone in defense of our country. But the only way to win the war against the al Qaeda network is to work cooperatively with our friends and allies - and to only rely on force as a last resort. We need to have every government in the civilized world energized to stop al Qaeda operatives in their tracks, keep them from recruiting, raising money or operating on their territory, and alleviating the conditions that have promoted the rise of terrorism in the first place. Achieving full cooperation from the international community is not a military mission. It is a matter of law, diplomacy and persuasion. That is what I will work toward as president - developing real partnerships -- partnerships where nations use intelligence, law-enforcement and financial means to stop the al Qaeda network.
We need to broaden NATO's scope so that it's more than a military alliance. It must truly live up to its charter and strategic concept - helping to harmonize laws, track proliferation and anti-proliferation efforts, and help focus worldwide counterterrorism efforts. This means enhancing NATO's structure to be able to deal with the full array of intelligence and legal, commercial, and law enforcement activities essential to detecting, identifying, detaining and prosecuting terrorists, their networks of supporters, and those who would proliferate weapons of mass destruction. And, if necessary, it means mustering the national and international resolve essential to employing military forces as a last resort.
Using NATO as our focal point, we must reach out to and engage the Islamic world. For example, Saudi Arabia must accept its responsibilities to halt the invective of hatred and disassemble the terrorist financing networks. Working with NATO and other interested governments, the Saudis should realign their policies to promote greater internal economic development based on effective secular education and greater opening to the West.
We must put special effort into our policy toward the Muslim world. The fight against terrorism is their fight as much as it is ours. Instead of alienating people and nations in that part of the world, as the Bush Administration has done, we should work together, as a united front, against al Qaeda to identify, target, and disrupt terrorist organizations and the finance and logistical efforts behind them. And we should be working in favor of reforms that will undercut the abilities of any remaining terrorists.
But there is no country whose future will be more important in the war against al Qaeda than Pakistan. Right now, we know that the Taliban and al Qaeda are operating beyond the rule of law in Pakistan. We know that Pakistani laboratories are responsible for selling nuclear weapons technology to Iran and North Korea. And we know that many religious schools there, the radical madrassas, are educating tens of thousands for Jihad in Kashmir and against the United States.
We must present President Musharaff of Pakistan with a clear choice: either work with America and the civilized world to defeat al Qaeda and stop the proliferation of nuclear technology -- or become another outlaw nation. Recent events indicate that Pakistani leaders may be ready for a real break with the past, and I encourage them to continue down that path.
Early in my Administration, I will invite President Musharaff to Washington to meet with me and with congressional leaders. In those meetings, I will offer a dramatic multi-billion dollar assistance program and a new relationship with America.
But this new relationship and new assistance will require real change by the government. No longer will we turn a blind eye to nuclear technology exports. No longer will we ignore the religious schools that preach hate and justify terrorism. And no longer will we accept weakness as an excuse not to go into the outlying provinces to root out al Qaeda and the Taliban.
[b]Second, we have to recognize that even with the full weight of international law, diplomacy, and law enforcement, some use of military force may still be necessary.[/b] In that event, I have a plan to take the offensive and extinguish al Qaeda once and for all. To do this right, we will have to bring our allies in so that they are as committed to success as we are. Today, because the reputation of the United States is at an all-time low, many countries around the world have resisted the presence of special operations forces on their territory. Others have refused American troops because the United States has not sought international legitimacy for its actions.
To address this problem, we will ask NATO to create a combined Joint Counter-Terrorism Strike-Force, composed of forces from NATO members and nations outside the alliance, including Arab countries like Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, as well as South Africa, Singapore, and the Philippines. The Strike Force's number one mission will be to seek out, capture and destroy al Qaeda operatives and their associates. It will be built using same combined joint task force concept developed by NATO during the 1990s.
The first mission of this new Joint Counter-Terrorism Strike Force will be to take down Osama bin Laden. With help from Arab countries, who may have intelligence and access that Americans can't get, I will send that Strike Force into the border areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan where most believe bin Laden is holed up and where he and his deputies continue to order terrorist attacks. I will work directly with other countries and our military to refocus our energies where they should have been all along: on capturing or killing those who committed the attacks on September 11 and making sure they can never, never attack our country again.
[b]Third and finally, we can't be secure abroad unless we're secure at home.[/b] Right now, two years after September 11th, we're short on homeland security and long on homeland insecurity. While we've taken steps to protect our borders, we have not gone far enough to protect our citizens.
We've manned our airplanes with marshals and beefed up security at airports, but other points of entry are still wide open. Our borders to the north and south are guarded inconsistently. Most packages and freight soar right through customs without the slightest inspection. Most bridges, tunnels, and nuclear power plants are completely unguarded. And a litany of federal mandates have been passed on to the states without a dime of federal funding - forcing states to cut their programs to pay for the exorbitant costs of police, firefighters, and other first responders. To put it in perspective, every time we go to higher state of alert, it costs cities $70 million dollars a week, money they desperately need during this economic downturn for everything from schools to health care.
What has the Bush Administration done to protect the homeland? They've shortchanged vital areas of homeland security -- providing little of the funding needed for our police, fire fighters, and other first responders. And they haven't done enough to secure our most vulnerable facilities. The result is continuing vulnerability on nearly every front. Right now, for example, there are at least 123 chemical facilities in the United States that can literally be turned into weapons of mass destruction, producing plumes of deadly vapor clouds capable of injuring or killing more than a million people. As president, I will not rest until Americans are safe from the threat of terrorism.
We will set high standards in cyber security, in bio-weapons defense, and in critical infrastructure protection. And my Homeland Economic Security Fund will invest $40 billion dollars to directly fund jobs that immediately improve our security. The fund will improve our defenses against terrorist attacks by paying to train more firefighters and police officers, and to hire more Coast Guard, Customs Service and law enforcement personnel. It will also pay for construction projects to safeguard bridges, ports and tunnels, and fund high-tech efforts to develop ways to detect nuclear, biological and chemical weapons and materials.
As part of my national security strategy, I will also implement a new national service program called the Civilian Reserves. In the aftermath of the attacks of September 11th, people were asking what they could do to help their country. Here in New Hampshire, people lined up to give blood until the blood banks said "no more." In times like those, we see a tremendous desire on the part of Americans to volunteer, but we have no way of organizing their efforts, cultivating their talents, and utilizing them where they are needed most. The Civilian Reserves will reinvigorate that American ethic of service, tap our vast reservoir of skill, and call millions more Americans to duty. The Civilian Reserves will work in partnership with professional first responders and other non-profit and non-governmental organizations.
America has always had the power to confront the threat from al Qaeda. But instead of using law, diplomacy, economics and military means to defeat this threat, our will and our energy have been focused on Iraq. While still ensuring success in Iraq, I will return America's focus to the more urgent threat from al Qaeda.
With help from others, with a new relationship with key Islamic countries, with a strong homeland defense, and with the power of our military and joint operations, I pledge to you today that we will prevail in our fight against global terrorism. I will bring a higher standard of leadership to America, leadership that will win the war on terrorism while living up to our ideals, and retaining the respect of the world.
Thank you.
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| Anti-War College Dropout BILL GATES Doesn't Like Bush! |
| 01.16.04 (6:58 am) [edit] |
Anti-war, college dropout Bill Gates doesn't like Bush! Gates is showing the rich how to behave but they are too stupid and greedy to understand his lesson. His own father has come-out strongly along with Warren Buffet against Dubya's immoral re-distribution of wealth to the rich. As Bill Gates says "[i]you can only drive one fancy car at a time. Give that same money to people who are struggling to get by, and they will spend every penny, producing that famous multiplier effect that we all learned about in Econ 101[/i]."
What George doesn't know, The president fails to realize that the only way out of this economic slowdown is government spending, http://dir.salon.com/news/col...
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| Chicken-Hawk Dubya is ANTI-WAR FOR HIMSELF, but PRO-WAR FOR OTHERS |
| 01.16.04 (6:40 am) [edit] |
Chicken-hawk Dubya is ANTI-WAR FOR HIMSELF and went missing-in-action during Viet Nam, when better men served and died while he escaped into a Champagne Brigade at which he didn't even bother to show-up for his duty. Rumor has it he was partying in Florida. Hypocritical Dubya is however PRO-WAR FOR OTHERS, including poor and low-income kids who don't have a powerful and rich Poppy to get them out of service.
[b]The Chicken Hawk Factor[/b], http://www.alternet.org/story...
"There's more combat experience on the 7th floor of the State Department than in the entire Office of the Secretary of Defense," quipped the high-ranking State Department official to a room filled with senior military officers last month. The statement "generated riotous applause," according to an eyewitness quoted in the Nelson Report, a private newsletter subscribed to by foreign-policy heavyweights and embassies in Washington.
The incident revealed the growing importance of the "Chicken Hawk" factor in the increasingly rancorous debate over the Bush administration's push toward war on Iraq and beyond. At the moment, the military brass is leading the opposition. It includes both the folks who will have to fight this war and those who have retired from the service. The list of former generals includes Secretary of State and former Joint Chiefs Chairman Colin Powell and his deputy, U.S. Naval Academy grad and Vietnam veteran Richard Armitage; as well as veterans of the Gulf War, including most famously Bush Sr.'s national security adviser, ret. Gen. Brent Scowcroft; the Gulf War commander, ret. Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf; and his logistics chief and later successor at Central Command, ret. Gen. Anthony Zinni.
"It is interesting to me that many of those who want to rush this country into war and think it would be so quick and easy don't know anything about war," said Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.), one of the most outspoken skeptics of the war with Baghdad. "They come at it from an intellectual perspective versus having sat in jungles or foxholes and watched their friends get their heads blown off," the Vietnam veteran added. Hagel is not alone. Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), a highly decorated fellow Vietnam veteran who turned against the war, is also openly skeptical.
At the moment, the vast majority of the men pushing for war in Washington are what The New Hampshire Gazette defines as "Chicken Hawks": "public persons – generally male – who (1) tend to advocate military solutions to political problems, and who have personally (2) declined to take advantage of significant opportunity to serve in uniform during wartime."
That "significant opportunity" for most of Bush's war party faced was, of course, the Vietnam War. [b]Dubya famously avoided the draft by getting a posting with the Texas National Guard, the kind of dodge that Powell referred to in his memoirs as being reserved for "the sons of the powerful." [/b]Cheney, however, avoided the uniform altogether, mumbling to one reporter that he "had other priorities in the Sixties than military service." Rumsfeld, the other leading Cabinet hawk, flew jets for the Navy between the Korean and Vietnam wars but never saw combat.
In fact, the only cabinet member with combat experience is Powell.
The sub-cabinet level also suffers from a distinct deficit in war-time experience. Cheney's hawkish and powerful chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, scooted through the sixties at Yale University and Columbia Law School, while Rumsfeld's top deputies, Paul Wolfowitz and Peter Rodman, completed graduate degrees before entering the national-security bureaucracy. The number three at the Pentagon, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, the administration's most avid champion of the Iraq war and its staunchest supporter of Israel's right-wing government, turned 18 only after the draft ended and, like Libby, went to law school.
Other major administration hawks, such as Elliott Abrams – of Iran-Contra fame and now a member of the National Security Council in charge of democratizing the Middle East – and Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Strategy John Bolton also avoided military service during the height of the Vietnam War, reportedly for medical reasons. They, too, were law school-bound.
As for the ''axis of incitement'' – those beating the war drums loudest outside the administration – members of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), the Center for Security Policy (CSP), and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) also appear to have done what they could to avoid the uniform during the Vietnam War. The chairman of Rumfeld's Defense Policy Board (DPB) and one of the most visible advocates of military action to oust Saddam, Richard Perle, spent Vietnam at the University of Chicago (along with Wolfowitz) before joining the staff of Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson, who at the time was among the last remaining Democrats to support the Vietnam war.
"Maybe Mr. Perle would like to be in the first wave of those who go into Baghdad," Hagel quipped recently, earning him an outraged rebuke by the editors at the Wall Street Journal who called the crack "particularly shabby." Another highly visible super-hawk and Perle protégé, CSP founder-director Frank Gaffney, also avoided military service during Vietnam.
Here's a startling fact: only four of the 32 prominent right-wingers who authored the now-famous Sept. 20 PNAC letter to Bush urging him to extend the war on terrorism to Iraq – as well as Afghanistan, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, and the Palestinian Authority – have any military experience. And three of those four were in the reserves like Bush. Among the signatories who have become fixtures on TV talk shows and op-ed pages arguing why the U.S. must invade Iraq, stand by Sharon, or "remake the face of the Arab world" are: Weekly Standard editor William Kristol, his sidekick Robert Kagan, the Canadian-bred columnist Charles Krauthammer, Christian Right leader Gary Bauer, moralist William Bennett, former Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz, former New Republic editor Martin Peretz, and former UN ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, alongwith Perle and Gaffney.
Other armchair hawks include Michael Ledeen – yet another omnipresent Iran-contra alum who says that the word "stability" gives him the "heebie-jeebies" – who spent Vietnam curled up comfortably at a university library carrel reading Machiavelli. Rumsfeld intimate and DPB member Kenneth Adelman, who claims that a military campaign against Baghdad would be a "cakewalk," also avoided service.
This glaring disparity between experience and rhetoric has not been lost on the military brass. "It's pretty interesting that all the generals see it the same way, and all the others who have never fired a shot and are hot to go to war see it another," noted Zinni, who as chief of the U.S. Central Command in the late 1990s was responsible for U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf region. The main concern of ex-generals like Zinni and Schwarzkopf is that an invasion will burden the military with an impossible and perhaps interminable political task. "Do we really want to occupy Iraq for the next 30 years?" asked former Navy Secretary and Vietnam veteran James Webb in a Washington Post column last week.
But the Chicken Hawks have not been shy about counterattacking Zinni and Co., arguing, like Clemenceau, that "war is too important to be left to the generals." The New Republic editor Peter Beinert claimed in a column that "over and over during the nineties, the generals with firsthand battlefield experience guessed wrong – and the civilians without it guessed right – about what would happen when the United States went to war." According to Beinert, military leaders have "repeatedly overestimated the enemy" since Vietnam.
The attitude of rightwing hawks was best summarized last week in the Washington Post by Eliot Cohen, one of the four signers of the PNAC letter who actually served in the Army reserves, albeit in the war-free 1980s. He wrote: "Being a veteran is no guarantee of a strategic wisdom," and as a consequence, veterans "should receive no special consideration for their views."
[b]Published in September 2002 before Dubya's invasion of Iraq.[/b]
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| On to Mars? |
| 01.15.04 (9:59 am) [edit] |
[b]On to Mars?[/b], http://www.washingtonpost.com...
IF ALL President Bush had in mind was beginning the long, slow process of phasing out the troubled space shuttle when he declared yesterday that he wants to "give NASA a new focus and vision for future exploration," then it's hard not to approve. But a directive to return to the moon and ultimately use it as a "launching point for missions beyond" seems more likely to result in yet another ambitious but unfocused and underfinanced goal for NASA. The nation faces a yawning budget deficit, educational and health needs, and an international terrorist threat. That makes this an odd moment to embark on a dispensable project of great expense.
It was difficult, from listening to his speech and the briefings preceding it, to fathom the president's intentions. The White House stated that extra spending on the project would be limited to "mostly existing funds." More concretely, the plan is to transfer $11 billion of NASA's current budget into a program to build a new manned space vehicle, and increase the space agency's budget by $1 billion over the next five years. Yet NASA's record of confining itself to predicted costs is not good. The space shuttle has constantly overrun its budget. During the presidency of George H.W. Bush, NASA estimated it would take more than $400 billion to get to Mars -- and that was in 1989 dollars. Notwithstanding the question of whether this is the best way to spend $12 billion at the moment, it does sound, by space program standards, like a gross underestimate of what the real costs will be.
More serious than the price, though, is the absence of clear arguments for the project. The president argued that "the human thirst for knowledge cannot be satisfied with even the most vivid pictures." But the need for space travel just for space travel's sake is questionable. There must be concrete scientific reasons to set up a permanent colony on the moon -- goals that can be achieved only by sending human beings to the moon, as opposed to robotic probes. Sending astronauts into space just to have astronauts in space would be a sad misuse of NASA's stunning intellectual and technical resources.
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| "It is victory or holocaust"! |
| 01.15.04 (9:57 am) [edit] |
[b]"It is victory or holocaust". Neo-con's insane mantra![/b]
[b]Neo-conservatism, hardcore[/b], [i]Jim Lobe[/i], http://www.atimes.com/atimes/...
WASHINGTON - If hardcore neo-conservatives Richard Perle and David Frum had their way, the Bush administration would be issuing ultimatums on virtually a daily basis.
In their new book, An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror, Perle, the well-connected former chairman of the Defense Policy Board, and Frum, a former White House speechwriter, call for the administration to, among many other things:
1. Actively promote, presumably through direct action, the secession of the oil-rich eastern province of Saudi Arabia, unless the Saudi government provides its "utmost cooperation in the war on terror."
2. Cut off the flow of oil (from Iraq) and arms supplies to Syria, and pursue suspected "terrorists" into its territory, unless Damascus implements a thoroughgoing "Western reorientation" of its policies, economy and political system.
3. Prepare to launch preemptive strikes against North Korea's nuclear facilities (although "we do not know where all these facilities are"), unless Pyongyang "immediately surrenders all of its nuclear material, closes its missile bases and agrees to the permanent presence of international inspectors".
4. Explicitly reject the jurisdiction of the United Nations Charter, unless it is amended to accommodate Washington's new strategic doctrine of "preemption".
5. Help "dissidents" overthrow the government of Iran - "the regime must go".
In what they call a "manual for victory", the two authors, both resident fellows at the American Enterprise Institute, describe an extremely dangerous world in which the greatest current evil, "militant Islam", can be found everywhere - from "Indonesia to Indiana" (not to mention "in some remoter areas of Venezuela", Paraguay, Brazil and northern Nigeria) ... The stakes could not be higher.
Militant Islam "seeks to overthrow our civilization and remake the nations of the West into Islamic societies imposing on the whole world its religion and law", write the authors.
Nor do such ambitions represent only a tiny minority of Muslims, as US President George W Bush himself has contended. The militants' goals command wide support among Muslims worldwide, including in the United States, where the "loyalty" of US Muslims requires special scrutiny by law enforcement and their fellow citizens, according to Perle and Frum. "The roots of Muslim rage are to be found in Islam itself," they write. "There is no middle way for Americans," they warn. "[b]It is victory or holocaust[/b]."
If all this sounds a little terrifying, it is because Perle and Frum are deeply concerned that the administration's determination - and that of the country as a whole - to wage the "war on terror" to its bitter end is flagging. "We can feel the will to win ebbing in Washington; we sense the reversion to the bad old habits of complacency and denial."
This book, then, is designed to re-energize the effort, and must be taken seriously because it no doubt echoes arguments that are currently being made at the highest levels of the Bush administration. While Frum, who allegedly coined the phrase "axis of evil" linking Iraq to Iran and North Korea in Bush's 2002 State of the Union address, is known more for his rhetoric than his foreign-policy expertise, Perle has been a fixture of the national-security policy scene for more than 30 years.
Known as the "Prince of Darkness" for his opposition to arms-control agreements with the Soviet Union as a senior Pentagon official under former president Ronald Reagan, he has been one of Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz's best friends since 1969, as well as the mentor of Douglas Feith, the ultra-Zionist under secretary of defense whose office oversaw preparations for the Iraq invasion and the postwar occupation.
A longtime ally of both Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney, Perle was described by the Washington Post last year as the "intellectual guru of the hardline neo-conservative movement in foreign policy", who enjoys "profound influence over Bush policies". it is thus safe to say that Perle's views count, and the fact that he believed already in October - when the book (published by Random House) went to print - that the administration was losing its zeal is significant.
Perle and Frum naturally blame the State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), retired military officers and senior officials from the administration of the current president's father - in other words, all the foreign-policy specialists and "realists" who initially raised questions about going to war in Iraq - for resisting their calls for expanding the war to Syria, Iran, North Korea and even Saudi Arabia.
And they categorically reject, albeit often defensively, any notion that the loss in momentum might be due more to over-optimistic predictions by themselves and their friends in the offices of Cheney and Rumsfeld about the ease with which US forces could occupy Iraq without significant international support.
More than once, they insist that if only the White House had installed their hero, Iraqi National Congress chief Ahmad Chalabi, as president of a provisional government before the invasion, all would be well today. "Seldom has the foreign-policy bureaucracy inflicted such shameful damage on American interests than in its opposition to working with Saddam [Hussein]'s Iraqi opponents," they write.
But the authors fail to note that since he was virtually carried to Baghdad on the shoulders of the invading US forces, Chalabi's main power base does not appear to have expanded much beyond his US-trained militia and his friends back in the Pentagon.
Indeed, a persistent theme in the book is that if Washington really prevails in the "war on terror", it will be no thanks to the bureaucrats who run the State Department and the CIA, whose apparatchiks are "blinded by the squeamishness that many liberal-minded people feel about noticing the dark side of Third World cultures".
Hence, CIA director George Tenet "has failed. He should go," while "we should increase sharply the number of political appointees in the State Department and expand their role". Such measures should ease adoption of the neo-conservatives' agenda, which includes not only ultimatums but also simple directives, such as:
* Work fastidiously to isolate France from the rest of Europe while doing "our utmost to preserve our British ally's strategic independence from [emphasis added] Europe", in part by offering UK arms manufacturers preferential treatment, and promoting an Anglo-American defense condominium that would also include Australia and Canada.
* Forge a defense partnership "with Japan, Australia, and other willing Asian democracies as intimate and enduring as the NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization] alliance. China should know that any attempt to bully any of its democratic neighbors will be resisted by all of them - no ifs, buts or exceptions."
* "Cease criticizing Israel for taking actions against Hamas and Hezbollah (or similar groups) analogous to those the United States is taking against al-Qaeda. The distinction between Islamic terrorism against Israel, on the one hand, and Islamic terrorism against the United States and Europe, on the other, cannot be sustained."
* Avoid turning Iraq into a "ward of the United Nations or the 'international community'," because "once the international bureaucrats get their hands on society, they never let go".
This last point is illustrated by a curious list of countries, including Cambodia and Somalia, where the authors apparently believe - mistakenly - that the United Nations remains in charge.
That is one of a striking number of factual errors, illustrating either the haste with which the book, which even lacks an index, was put together, or simple ignorance on the part of the authors. They contend, for example, that "Saudi-inspired extremists" launched wars against Christian communities on Indonesia's Sulawesi and Maluku islands, when they are apparently referring to Laskar Jihad, a militia that most experts believe was not only inspired but armed by elements in Indonesia's military.
Frum and Perle make similar assumptions about the indigenous insurgency in Indonesia's Aceh province and what are predominantly ethnic, rather than religious, clashes in northern Nigeria. Indeed, much as they invariably attributed Soviet aggression to various nationalist, ethnic and reformist movements during the Cold War, Perle and Frum now seem determined to find a "militant Muslim" and/or Saudi-Wahhabi hand in conflicts or terrorism from Mindanao to Lake Maracaibo.
And just as in the Cold War, they appear to prefer authoritarian to democratic regimes if the latter risks empowering Islamic radicals, as they make clear in yet another directive: "In the Middle East, democratization does not mean calling immediate elections and then living with whatever happens next," they write.
"That was tried in Algeria in 1995 [sic], and it would have brought the Islamic extremists to power as the only available alternative to the corrupt status quo. Democratization means opening political spaces in which Middle Eastern people can express concrete grievances in ways that bring action to improve their lives."
While the authors stress that democratization also requires protecting minorities and women, the message that comes through is that democracy is not their highest priority, the neo-conservatives' frequent protestations to the contrary notwithstanding.
It is clear from recent events - particularly Bush's criticism of Taiwan, his tentative feelers toward Iran, and his warm words for Libya ("an implacably hostile regime", according to the authors), as well as the acceleration of the transition timetable in Iraq - that the neo-cons' influence has waned further in the months since the book was sent to print.
No surprise, really: after watching Bush's poll numbers plummet as US casualties rose beginning last summer, the president's political adviser Karl Rove reportedly issued a directive of his own several months ago: "No war in '04," an election year.
The neo-cons might be down but they are most certainly not out. They and their administration allies, notably Cheney, have shown that they retain sufficient influence for now to prevent any major softening in the hard lines on North Korea and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
If Bush wins a second term with Cheney at his side, neo-conservatives such as Perle might well find themselves back on top. If so, you may be able to buy this book on remainder and use it as a scorecard.
([i]For excerpts from An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror, click here [/i]http://www.atimes.com/atimes/... .)
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| White House Investigates Its Critics, But Not Its Sycophants |
| 01.14.04 (6:41 am) [edit] |
[b]White House Investigates Its Critics, But Not Its Sycophants[/b]
[b]NOW:[/b] "The Treasury Department has asked for an investigation into how a possibly classified document appeared in a televised interview of ex-Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill." - [i]CNN, 1/12/04[/i]
[b]THEN:[/b] No investigation was requested after the Providence Journal reported that "Bob Woodward said the president gave reporters 90 minutes, often speaking candidly about classified information. 'Certainly Richard Nixon would not have allowed reporters to question him [about classified information] like that. Bush's father wouldn't allow it. Clinton wouldn't allow it." [i]- Providence Journal, 4/10/02[/i]
[b]Center for American Progress[/b], http://www.americanprogress.o...
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| Army War College Criticizes the Bush Administration's Handling of War |
| 01.13.04 (7:22 am) [edit] |
What right do the Bush administration and the GOP have to criticize the Democratic candidates potential handling of National Security issues? Nobody could handle the war issues any worse than Bush!
[b]Study Published by Army Criticizes War on Terror's Scope[/b], http://www.washingtonpost.com...
A scathing new report published by the Army War College broadly criticizes the Bush administration's handling of the war on terrorism, accusing it of taking a detour into an "unnecessary" war in Iraq and pursuing an "unrealistic" quest against terrorism that may lead to U.S. wars with states that pose no serious threat.
The report, by Jeffrey Record, a visiting professor at the Air War College at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama, warns that as a result of those mistakes, the Army is "near the breaking point."
It recommends, among other things, scaling back the scope of the "global war on terrorism" and instead focusing on the narrower threat posed by the al Qaeda terrorist network.
"[T]he global war on terrorism as currently defined and waged is dangerously indiscriminate and ambitious, and accordingly . . . its parameters should be readjusted," Record writes. Currently, he adds, the anti-terrorism campaign "is strategically unfocused, promises more than it can deliver, and threatens to dissipate U.S. military resources in an endless and hopeless search for absolute security."
Record, a veteran defense specialist and author of six books on military strategy and related issues, was an aide to then-Sen. Sam Nunn when the Georgia Democrat was chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
In discussing his political background, Record also noted that in 1999 while on the staff of the Air War College, he published work critical of the Clinton administration.
His essay, published by the Army War College's Strategic Studies Institute, carries the standard disclaimer that its views are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the Army, the Pentagon or the U.S. government.
But retired Army Col. Douglas C. Lovelace Jr., director of the Strategic Studies Institute, whose Web site carries Record's 56-page monograph, hardly distanced himself from it. "I think that the substance that Jeff brings out in the article really, really needs to be considered," he said.
Publication of the essay was approved by the Army War College's commandant, Maj. Gen. David H. Huntoon Jr., Lovelace said. He said he and Huntoon expected the study to be controversial, but added, "He considers it to be under the umbrella of academic freedom."
Larry DiRita, the top Pentagon spokesman, said he had not read the Record study. He added: "If the conclusion is that we need to be scaling back in the global war on terrorism, it's not likely to be on my reading list anytime soon."
Many of Record's arguments, such as the contention that Saddam Hussein's Iraq was deterred and did not present a threat, have been made by critics of the administration. Iraq, he concludes, "was a war-of-choice distraction from the war of necessity against al Qaeda." But it is unusual to have such views published by the War College, the Army's premier academic institution.
In addition, the essay goes further than many critics in examining the Bush administration's handling of the war on terrorism.
Record's core criticism is that the administration is biting off more than it can chew. He likens the scale of U.S. ambitions in the war on terrorism to Adolf Hitler's overreach in World War II. "A cardinal rule of strategy is to keep your enemies to a manageable number," he writes. "The Germans were defeated in two world wars . . . because their strategic ends outran their available means."
He also scoffs at the administration's policy, laid out by Bush in a November speech, of seeking to transform and democratize the Middle East. "The potential policy payoff of a democratic and prosperous Middle East, if there is one, almost certainly lies in the very distant future," he writes. "The basis on which this democratic domino theory rests has never been explicated."
He also casts doubt on whether the U.S. government will maintain its commitment to the war. "The political, fiscal, and military sustainability of the GWOT [global war on terrorism] remains to be seen," he states.
The essay concludes with several recommendations. Some are fairly noncontroversial, such as increasing the size of the Army and Marine Corps, a position that appears to be gathering support in Congress. But he also says the United States should scale back its ambitions in Iraq, and be prepared to settle for a "friendly autocracy" there rather than a genuine democracy.
[i]To read the full report, go to[/i] http://www.washingtonpost.com...
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| Another Bush Lie: Weapons Cache Found in Iraq Not Banned Chemicals |
| 01.11.04 (7:15 pm) [edit] |
[b]Another Bush Lie:[/b] Weapons cache found in Iraq may be mustard gas, but not the banned chemicals that the Bush administration originally said were capable of killing thousands of people.
The ten-year old blister agents were buried for over 10 years. Uh-huh, yup, these old agents really represented a [i][u][b]real threat[/b][/u][/i] to our national security. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!
[b]Suspicious shells found in southern Iraq: Mortars thought to hold blister agent left over from war with Iran[/b], http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD...
BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Danish troops have found suspicious mortar shells in southern Iraq that officials believe contain blister agents, the United States and Denmark announced Saturday.
Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, a U.S. Army spokesman, said Saturday that the 120 mm mortars were filled with liquid.
The shells are at least 10 years old, and a U.S. Army official said he suspects the ordnance was surplus from the Iran-Iraq war in the mid-1980s. Blister agents are used in chemical weapons.
A release on the Danish army operational command Web site said that in a routine collection of old ammunition, the 36 heavy mortar grenades were found in a dried-up marsh Friday. They were buried and packed in plastic.
"Most were wrapped in plastic bags, and some were leaking," Kimmitt said.
The shells were found 20 kilometers (12 miles) north of the city of Qurnah by Danish engineers and Icelandic munitions experts.
Several hundred Danish soldiers are working with a British-led multinational force responsible for security in southern Iraq.
Both the U.S. and British governments cited the threat of illicit weapons of mass destruction as a main reason for launching the Iraq war. However, no such weapons have been found so far.
The U.S. pulled 400 weapons-disposal experts from Iraq this month in what The New York Times called "a sign that [the] administration might have lowered its sights." The move raised suspicions that weapons are unlikely to be found.
The White House played down the move, saying the group focused on hunting weapons was remaining in Iraq.
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| Spin of the Week: Bush and Hitler |
| 01.10.04 (4:38 pm) [edit] |
[image]SpyMaster_24180389 2.jpg[/image]
[b]Spin of the Week: PR Watch, January 9, 2004 [/b]on http://www.guerrillanews.com/...
[i][b]Bush and Hitler http://www.rnc.org/Newsroom/R... [/b][/i]
The [b]Republican National Committee [/b]is complaining about advertisements comparing George W. Bush to Adolf Hitler that were posted briefly on on MoveOn.org's "Bush in 30 Seconds" web site, which invites people to submit their own creative TV spots criticizing the Bush administration's performance. MoveOn has responded that the ads were submissions http://moveonvoterfund.org/sm... to their contest and that it is "deliberately and maliciously misleading" to accuse MoveOn of "sponsoring" them. "None of these was our ad, nor did their appearance constitute endorsement or sponsorship by [b]MoveOn.org Voter Fund[/b]," states MoveOn founder Wes Boyd. "They will not appear on TV. We do not support the sentiment expressed in the two Hitler submissions. They were voted down by our members." The finalists in the contest http://www.bushin30seconds.or... include some clever submissions. If nothing else, the contest is an interesting way to break down the barrier between advertiser and audience. (Is comparing Bush to Hitler worse than leading Republican strategist Grover Norquist's http://www.disinfopedia.org/w... recent comparison of the estate tax to the Nazi Holocaust http://www.washingtonpost.com... ?)
[Read the director of one of the "Hitler" spots response to the controversy here http://www.guerrillanews.com/... in the GNN forums]
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| Former Bush Cabinet Member Calls Dubya A "Blind Man in a Roomful of Deaf People" |
| 01.09.04 (6:22 pm) [edit] |
Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, a Cabinet member in the Bush administration confirms what we all know to be true, that Dubya is a "blind man in a roomful of deaf people". Dubya's too stupid to be president, as we have witnessed over the past 3 years in a serious of chaotic and irrational decisions, creating miserable conditions at home and abroad.
[b]O'Neill Calls Bush a Disengaged President[/b] Guerrilla News Network http://www.guerrillanews.com
WASHINGTON - Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, pushed out of the administration for not being a team player, says President Bush (news - web sites) was so disengaged during Cabinet meetings that he was like a "blind man in a roomful of deaf people."
O'Neill, who has kept silent about the circumstances surrounding his ouster from the Cabinet 13 months ago, is now ready to give his side of the story with a tell-all book that paints Bush as a disengaged president who didn't encourage debate either at Cabinet meetings or in one-on-one meetings with his Cabinet secretaries.
To promote the book which will be out Tuesday, O'Neill was appearing Sunday on CBS's "60 Minutes" in an interview with correspondent Lesley Stahl.
In an excerpt released by CBS, O'Neill said that a lack of real dialogue characterized the Cabinet meetings he attended during the first two years of the administration and gave O'Neill the feeling that Bush "was like a blind man in a roomful of deaf people."
O'Neill said that the atmosphere was similar during the one-on-one meetings he held with Bush.
Speaking of his first meeting with the president, O'Neill said, "I went in with a long list of things to talk about and, I thought, to engage (Bush) on. ... I was surprised it turned out me talking and the president just listening. It was mostly a monologue."
O'Neill is described as the principal source for the new book, "The Price of Loyalty," being published by Simon and Schuster, and written by Ron Suskind, a former reporter for The Wall Street Journal.
In addition to interviews with O'Neill, Suskind drew on 19,000 documents O'Neill provided, according to CBS, which said Suskind also interviewed dozens of Bush insiders to flesh out his account of the administration's first two years.
Asked about O'Neill's comment about a disengaged president, White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters Friday, "I think it's well known the way the president approaches governing and setting priorities. The president is someone that leads and acts decisively on our biggest priorities and that is exactly what he'll continue to do."
Asked about the administration's opinion of the upcoming book, McClellan said, "I don't do book reviews."
O'Neill, the former head of aluminum giant Alcoa, did not immediately respond to phone messages from The AP left at his office in Pittsburgh. But in an interview with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, O'Neill said he hoped his inflammatory comments did not overshadow the substantive issues he discusses in the book.
"If the 'red meat,' taken out of context, is all that people get out of this book, it will be a huge disappointment to me," he said. "Ideally, this book will cause people to stop and think about the current state of our political process and raise our expectations for what is possible."
O'Neill gained a reputation during his two years in the Bush Cabinet for frequently shooting from the lip with incendiary comments that shook up financial markets and antagonized Wall Street. O'Neill said he was just trying to discuss complicated public policy issues in greater depth than the television sound bites so often used by the typical Washington politicians.
O'Neill was fired in December 2002 when Bush shook up his economic team in search of better salesmen for a new round of tax cuts the president hoped would stimulate a sluggish economy.
O'Neill had publicly questioned the need for another round of tax cuts in light of the growing budget deficits. He was replaced by John Snow, former head of CSX Corp., who became a staunch advocate for new tax cuts, which Bush signed into law in May.
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| Dubya Backs Down on Promise to Find White House Leaker |
| 01.07.04 (12:16 pm) [edit] |
Dubya is backing down on his promise to find the White House leaker who exposed the secret identity of the CIA operative, Valerie Plame, whose husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV, who made public the Bushes lie about phony uranium yellow cake sales from Niger to Iraq that never took place.
Misleader.org publishes [u]President Wavers on Pledge to Help Find Leaker[/u], http://www.misleader.org/dail... :
When it was first reported that a "senior Bush Administration official" had leaked the name of undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame, President Bush dutifully pledged his full cooperation and assistance with the investigation. He said, "I'd like to know who leaked, and if anybody has got any information inside our government or outside our government who leaked, you ought to take it to the Justice Department so we can find out the leaker. I have told my staff, I want full cooperation with the Justice Department."1
But with the Justice Department now asking White House staff to sign forms that could definitively expose the leaker, the president appears unwilling to uphold that commitment.2 Specifically, the Washington Post now reports that the White House "declined to say Monday whether President Bush thinks his aides should sign the forms that would release reporters from any pledges of confidentiality" - and thus allow reporters to identify the White House leaker.3 (Time magazine reported that Karl Rove, Bush's senior adviser, was one of a number of top White House staff that has been sent the form by investigators).4
When asked about the President's stonewalling, White House spokesman Scott McClellan dismissed any inquiries, saying, "That's asking a specific question about matters that should be directed to the career officials at the Department of Justice."5 It was a sharp contrast to his previous comments attempting to specifically absolve Rove, the Vice President's Chief of Staff, Scooter Libby, and National Security Council official, Eliot Abrams, from any responsibility.6 McClellan also said that "no one wants to get to the bottom of this more than the President does." But three months ago, Bush refused to ask his staff to sign the same release form to minimize the investigation's cost and potential damage to national security. His apparent reticence to fully support the Justice Department's efforts to expose the leaker is now raising additional questions.
Sources:
1 "Remarks by President Bush and President Kibaki of Kenya in Press Availability", 10/06/2003.
2 "Bush Aides Face Request To Free Media To Give Names", Washington Post, 01/03/2004.
3 "No Word From Bush On Forms in Leak Probe", Washington Post, 01/06/2004.
4 "The CIA Agent Flap: FBI Asks for Reporters to Talk", Time.
5 "No Word From Bush On Forms in Leak Probe", Washington Post, 01/06/2004.
6 Press Briefing, 10/07/2003.
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| Intelligence Guerrillas of the Year |
| 01.06.04 (10:28 am) [edit] |
[b]Guerrillas of the Year[/b]
Guerrilla News Network (GNN) http://www.guerrillanews.com [i]Editor's Pick[/i], December 31, 2003
In GNN's first two years of existence we picked journalists (Greg Palast and Robert Fisk) for our coveted Guerrilla of the Year award (winners receive a Noam Chomsky bobblehead doll). This year there were more worthy nominations from the Fourth Estate, most notably Democracy Now's Amy Goodman, who consistently featured some of the best reporting on the War on Terror on the planet. Sadly, many other brave journalists didn't live to tell their stories:
Canadian photojournalist Zahra Kazemi died of a cerebral haemorrhage after her skull was smashed in an Iranian prison; ITV's Terry Lloyd was apparently shot by American troops in Iraq; Ukrainian cameraman Taras Protsyuk and Spaniard José Couso were killed when a U.S. tank fired on the Hotel Palestine in Baghdad; Jordanian cameraman for Al Jazeera Tarek Ayoub died after his Baghdad office was bombed by American troops; British freelance videographer James Miller was shot by Israeli forces in Gaza.
Call them our runners up in memoriam.
But this year's winners are not journalists at all. They are members of the growing legion of former U.S. military, State Department and intelligence officials who have stepped forward to expose the realities behind the neocon agenda.
Karen Kwiatkowski, whose upcoming book is set to blow the lid on Rumsfeld's Office of Special Plans, is one. Career diplomat John Brady Kiesling is another. In a March letter to his boss Colin Powell, he wrote: "[T]his Administration has chosen to make terrorism a domestic political tool, enlisting a scattered and largely defeated Al Qaeda as its bureaucratic ally. We spread disproportionate terror and confusion in the public mind, arbitrarily linking the unrelated problems of terrorism and Iraq."
There are many more.
We settled on five: former CIA operative Robert Baer, author of "Sleeping with the Devil"; former ambassador to Iraq Joseph Wilson, whose alleged CIA undercover operative wife was outed by the White House; former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, who heads up the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity; retired Special Forces officer Stan Goff, who helped found "Bring Them Home Now"; and retired Col. David Hackworth, whose web site, hackworth.com, is the best place to go for uncensored reports directly from soldiers in the field.
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