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Dubya's Support of Terrorism:-- Neo-Con War Attracted Al Qaeda to Iraq & U.S.A.!

03.31.04 (4:21 pm) [edit]

[b][u]Mistakes in Iraq [/u][/b]

It is now only three months until the US-led coalition hands power over to the Iraqis but the security position in the country is very poor indeed. Precisely why this should be so after a year of military occupation is worth examining.

The terror is coming from both diehard Baathists and foreign fighters, almost certainly organized by elements of Al-Qaeda [who have been attracted to Iraq in the aftermath of Bush's war (see below). This much is clear. However whether these two groups who would once have had no time for each other are now acting in concert is still unclear. Where they are drawing their munitions and explosives from is also unclear. How foreign fighters are infiltrating into Iraq is still unclear. It points to a substantial intelligence failure.

This has happened for two reasons. The first is that though they claimed to be liberators, the coalition was very quickly seen as occupiers. Moderate Iraqis said they were glad to be rid of Saddam and his regime but in the next breath earnestly wished the Americans and their allies would go home. Why the coalition has failed to win the trust of ordinary Iraqis has much to do with the fact that he Americans have a fundamental lack of insight and understanding both of Iraq and of the wider Middle East.

The coalition expected to be welcomed as liberators and to have a grateful population fall in behind Washington’s leadership. As the high command of the old regime was killed or captured, they assumed that the initial fear of a Baathist return to power would be transformed into enthusiastic support for the coalition. By the time of Saddam’s eventual capture in December, public disillusionment with the Americans was pretty well complete. Saddam’s capture was celebrated but little credit was given to the US. The key consideration is this: No insurgency can survive without the support and protection of part of the population. Baathist resistance in Saddam’s old heartland around Tikrit undoubtedly benefits from old loyalties among locals. But the ability of foreign insurgents to survive anywhere in the Iraqi landscape, where they ought to stick out like sore thumbs, is deeply troubling. It would seem to demonstrate how unsuccessful the Americans have been in persuading Iraqis that they must rally around their interim government. That lack of enthusiasm has a lot to do with perceptions of the interim government as a creature of Washington’s policy.

This is extremely dangerous. Instead of venting their anger and frustration on the Americans and their coalition allies, Iraqis should be working calmly and determinedly toward building their own future. Unfortunately, discontent with the coalition is being exploited by the insurgents in order to sow discord which is designed to undermine the future of a free and diverse Iraq. Both the coalition and the Iraqis are making a serious mistake for which ultimately the Iraqis will pay the real price.

[i]Arab News[/i], http://www.arabnews.com/?page...§ion=0&article=42345&d=1& m=4&y=2004

[u][b]U.S. Attracted Al Qaeda to Iraq[/b][/u]

The United States struggled before the war to convince the world there was a link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda network, but five months of US-led occupation of Iraq may have created precisely such an unholy alliance.

Stripped of their privileged positions under the ousted dictator's brutal regime, Saddam's henchmen may finally have thrown in their lot with their ideological adversaries in Osama bin Laden's terror network to wage war on their common foe, analysts say.

A quartet of arrests made by Iraqi police immediately after a massive car bombing that killed 83 people in the Shi'ite Muslim holy city of Najaf last week provided the hardest evidence yet of the fledgling marriage of convenience between Saddam and the militants.

Two of the detainees were Saudis espousing al-Qaeda's militant brand of Islam. The others were former henchmen of the ousted dictator.

"Even though they are two entirely different organisations with very different aims and objectives, they both have an interest in creating disorder and chaos in Iraq, and they have complementary capabilities," said Joost Hiltermann of the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think-tank.

"Regime elements have access to the explosives and the expertise, and al-Qaeda-like groups are prepared to kill themselves," the Baghdad-based analyst said.

But Hiltermann insisted that Washington's pre-war claims of ties between Saddam and al-Qaeda still remained entirely unconvincing.

[i]Only since the war [/i]

"I see no information that links al-Qaeda to Saddam Hussein's people before the war, and the Americans never provided any hard evidence, so it is an alliance that postdates the war, not predates it," he said.

Professor Barry Buzan, international security specialist at the London School of Economics, agreed.

"I find it quite plausible that with the Americans having made such a big target of themselves in Iraq, an alliance should come into existence now purely on opportunistic grounds," he said.

"But I see no evidence of such a connection before the war and those people who made political mileage out of there being one have shut up."

Both analysts concurred that the US-led occupation had turned Iraq into a magnet for al-Qaeda.

Borders rendered porous by the collapse of Saddam's iron rule have opened the way for a host of foreign infiltrators, not only Islamic militants but also bank robbers and highwaymen.

A sweeping clampdown finally launched by the authorities in neighbouring Saudi Arabia following a triple suicide bombing in Riyadh in May has also helped to propel Islamic militants into Iraq to launch attacks on their US foes.

[i]Americans are a target [/i]

"Al-Qaeda and Al-Qaeda-like groups have every reason for going into Iraq - it's a perfect recruiting ground, the Americans are there as a target and they have got the world's press," said Buzan.

Three deadly car bombings in as many weeks and a guerrilla war that has cost more US lives than the invasion itself have convinced even US officials here that they are now on a new frontline in their worldwide war with the militants.

"I think it's true that Iraq now faces an important terrorist threat," US civil administrator Paul Bremer told a Baghdad news conference this week.

"We have seen an influx of both foreign fighters and foreign terrorists in the last months. It shows that Iraq is one of the battlefields in the worldwide war on terrorism."

Many Iraqis at the receiving end of the violence plaguing the country are also convinced that al-Qaeda militants are at work here in league with members of the ousted regime.

Sayyed Ali al-Waadi al-Musawi, who was the target of the latest in a string of assassination attempts against Shi'ite clerics here earlier this week, said he believed they were a deliberate bid by militants and Saddam loyalists to stoke communal tensions.

"There are a lot of enemy groups that we know about such as followers of the old regime and al-Qaeda," said Sayyed Ali, the agent in the capital of Shi'ite Islam's top cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani.

"One of the problems is that there are lots of mercenaries here in Iraq now because of the open borders.

"We want Sunnis and Shi'ites to be united but there are foreign hands that are trying to fuel communalism here," he said.

[i]News24.com[/i], http://www.news24.com/News24/...,,2-10-1460_1413564,00.html

[u][b]Bush Attracts Al Qaeda to the U.S.A[/b][/u].

" Al Qaeda sleeper cells are believed to be operating in 40 states in the USA, according to the FBI and other federal authorities, awaiting orders and funding for new attacks in the United States. Financed in part by millions of dollars solicited by an extensive network of bogus charities and foundations, the cells use Muslim communities as cover and places to raise cash and recruit sympathizers."

[i]Islamic sleeper cells invade the U.S[/i]., http://www.washtimes.com/nati...

What Condi Rice Says Doesn't Matter-- It's Dubya's Words (Or Lack Thereof)!!!

03.31.04 (4:08 pm) [edit]

[b]'Al-Qaida' didn't rush to Bush's lips[/b]

I really don't care what Condi Rice has to say.

I ignore the yarn the White House national security adviser spins about the level of concern the Bush team had about the terrorist threat from al-Qaida during its first months in office.

Because Rice isn't president of the United States. George W. Bush is. And so we must read his lips.

Here is what those lips said publicly about al-Qaida between Jan. 1, 2001, just before Bush was sworn in as president, and Sept. 10, 2001: Nothing.

There were zero references to al-Qaida during these months. That's according to Federal News Service, which transcribes every presidential utterance - speeches, news conferences, impromptu musings at photo ops, off-the-cuff remarks made striding toward a helicopter, official comments with foreign dignitaries. The search was conducted including the phrase "al Q" - to capture every possible spelling or translation for al-Qaida. Still nothing.

Of course, the president did mention terrorism, terrorists and counterterrorism 24 times before 9/11. But eight of these comments referred to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Another eight involved a range of terrorist threats, including ethnic terrorism in Macedonia and Basque separatists in Spain.

In the remaining eight references to terrorism, the new president offered his idea for how to combat it: the Reagan-era missile-defense system formerly known as Star Wars.

On Jan. 8, 2001, after a meeting in Austin, Texas, with congressional defense experts, the president-elect referred to missile defense as necessary to guard against "the real threats of the 21st century." In a Feb. 10, 2001, radio address, Bush said, "we must make sure our country itself is protected from attack from ballistic missiles and high-tech terrorists." On Feb. 27, in Bush's first address before a joint session of Congress, the new president delivered the clearest exposition of his thoughts on terrorism.

"Our nation also needs a clear strategy to confront the threats of the 21st century, threats that are more widespread and less certain. They range from terrorists who threaten with bombs to tyrants and rogue nations intent upon developing weapons of mass destruction," Bush said. "To protect our own people, our allies and friends, we must develop and deploy effective missile defenses."

During the spring and summer, Bush repeatedly pushed the missile-defense system - still not successfully tested - as the antidote to terror. He brought it up in conversations with Spanish president Jose Maria Aznar in Madrid; with Russian journalists on the eve of Bush's first meeting with Vladimir Putin and with Putin himself; with NATO leaders in Brussels and at the World Bank in Washington.

At the Genoa summit of western leaders in July - where, we now know, intelligence agencies feared a terrorist might try to slam an aircraft into the meeting - Bush pressed skeptical allies about going forward with "Star Wars" to fight terror.

Of course, there were other things on the president's mind. Like tax cuts. Bush promoted tax cuts or cutting taxes 81 times. He called for an end to the "death tax" - the inheritance tax levied on heirs to the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans - an additional 54 times. The president put in a word for health care 62 times.

And there was always Saddam Hussein. Bush's first visit abroad, to Mexico, was dominated by news of renewed U.S. bombing of Iraqi targets. Days later, after his first chat with British Prime Minister Tony Blair at Camp David, Bush said they'd talked about keeping Hussein at bay. That was on Feb. 23, 2001.

It is possible that Bush was privately obsessed with terrorism and al-Qaida and chattered about it behind closed doors. It's just not likely. Presidents use public statements for a purpose: to promote their agenda and to prepare the public for what might come.

Bush is, by his own account, a plainspoken man. He says what he means and means what he says. He implores us often to take him at his word. And so we should.

[i][b]By Marie Cocco, Newsday.com[/b][/i], http://www.newsday.com/news/c...,0,2854884.column?coll=ny-news-colum nists

Rice Couldn't Figure Out Airplanes Might Be Used on 9/11? CIA, FBI & NSA Did, But She Ignored Them!

03.31.04 (7:39 am) [edit]

[b]CLAIM[/b]: "I don't think anybody could have predicted that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile." – National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, 5/16/02 http://www.whitehouse.gov/new...

[b]FACT[/b]: On August 6, 2001, the President personally "received a one-and-a-half page briefing advising him that Osama bin Laden was capable of a major strike against the US, and that the plot could include the hijacking of an American airplane." In July 2001, the Administration was also told that terrorists had explored using airplanes as missiles. [Source: NBC , 9/10/02; [i]LA Times[/i], 9/27/01 http://www.latimes.com/news/n... ]

"Former National Security Advisor Sandy Berger told Condoleezza Rice that al Qaeda terrorism would be the single most important problem the Bush administration would deal with while in office, and handed her a huge file on the matter. Rice has admitted that she did not read that file until after the attacks of September 11 had taken place." - http://www.truthout.org/docs_...

"Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage contradicted Rice's claim that the White House had a strategy before Sept. 11 for military operations against al Qaeda and the Taliban. The CIA contradicted Rice's earlier assertion that Bush had requested a CIA briefing in the summer of 2001 because of elevated terrorist threats. And Rice's assertion this week that Bush had told her on Sept. 16, 2001, that "Iraq is to the side" appeared to be contradicted by an order signed by Bush on Sept. 17 directing the Pentagon to begin planning military options for an invasion of Iraq." - http://victoria.indymedia.org...

"Democratic commission member Richard Ben-Veniste disclosed this week that Rice had asked, in her private meetings with the commission, to revise a statement she made publicly that "I don't think anybody could have predicted that those people could have taken an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center ... that they would try to use an airplane as a missile." Rice told the commission that she had misspoken [i.e. lied]; the commission has received information that prior to Sept. 11, U.S. intelligence agencies, and Clarke, had talked about terrorists using airplanes as missiles." - http://victoria.indymedia.org...

'Connect-the-Dots': Rice is a liar and an overrated incompetent who should [u]not be allowed to wriggle out of being accountable[/u] for the worst terrorist attack upon our nation in our 229 year history.

Terrorism A Priority For The Corrupt Iraqi Oil Obsessed Bushites??? HO HO HO!!!

03.31.04 (7:13 am) [edit]

[b]9/11 Panel Told Terrorism Initially Not 'Urgent' for Bush [/b]

[i][b]Clarke Defends Claims Made in Memoir [/b][/i]

Former top counterterrorism adviser Richard A. Clarke told a special commission today that the Bush administration initially did not treat terrorism as "an urgent issue" and sidetracked his proposals to deal with the threat more aggressively.

Clarke, appearing before the bipartisan commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, also criticized the FBI's performance in assessing domestic threats from the al Qaeda terrorist network before the attacks and called for the creation of a new domestic intelligence agency.

The testimony by Clarke, who has served in the past four administrations, came amid a political firestorm over the publication this week of a book in which he described the Bush administration as relatively lax in its approach to terrorism before Sept. 11 and obsessed with trying to blame Iraq afterward.

Clarke, who headed the National Security Council's Counterterrorism Security Group under Presidents Bush and Clinton, apologized in his opening statement to relatives of the Sept. 11 victims, some of whom attended the hearing.

"Your government failed you, those entrusted with protecting you failed you, and I failed you," Clarke said. "For that failure, I would ask . . . for your understanding and forgiveness."

Clarke said that in the Clinton administration, there was no higher priority that fighting terrorism in general and al Qaeda in particular. But he said that "the Bush administration in the first eight months considered terrorism an important issue, but not an urgent issue." He and CIA Director George J. Tenet "tried very hard to create a sense of urgency," Clarke said. "Although I continued to say it was an urgent problem, I don't think it was ever treated that way."

In a morning session, the commission was told of confusion within the nation's intelligence community during both the Clinton and Bush administrations about whether the CIA had the authority to kill al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

But even if he had been killed, that would not have prevented the Sept. 11 attacks, Tenet testified.

"I believe that this plot line was off and running," he told the 10-member panel investigating the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. "Operators were moving into this country. . . . This plot was well on its way," he said.

"Decapitating one person -- even bin Laden in this context -- I do not believe we would have stopped this plot."

Under questioning by Republican members of the commission, Clarke, who said he voted Republican in 2000, rebutted charges by the White House that he was engaged in a partisan political attack. He also dismissed reports that he was seeking a high-level post in a future Democratic administration should Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts win the November election against President Bush.

"I will not accept any position in a Kerry administration, should there be one," Clarke said, stressing that he was speaking "on the record, under oath."

Asked about his book's strong criticism of the Bush administration compared to a greater focus on shortcomings of the Clinton administration during his 15 hours of previous testimony to the Sept. 11 commission in closed session, Clarke noted that no one on the panel had asked him his opinion of the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

"By invading Iraq . . . the president of the United States has greatly undermined the war on terrorism," Clarke told the commission today.

[b]For the rest of the article[/b], click on http://www.washingtonpost.com...

Neo-Con Buffoons Don't Know Recent History: U.S. Appointed the IGC - Duh!!!

03.31.04 (7:07 am) [edit]

[b]Apparently neo-con buffoons rant without knowing history, even [u]recent[/u] history: the U.S. appointed their puppet Iraqi/Interim Governing Council (IGC) that is not an elected body and therefore does not represent the Iraqi people! Duh!!! Geez ... When will they ever learn??? ... (Juan Cole's article is a new article http://www.antiwar.com/cole/?... , not an editorial ... )[/b]

The IGC is a U.S. appointed body http://sandiego.indymedia.org...

9/11 Family Steering Committee's Statement Regarding Rice's Testimony

03.31.04 (6:51 am) [edit]

[b]The Family Steering Committee Statement
Regarding Condoleezza Rice's Testimony [/b]

The Family Steering Committee is pleased to learn that Condoleezza Rice will testify under oath in a public hearing.

This is good news and will undoubtedly make the 9/11 Commission's Final Report more complete, comprehensive, and transparent in nature.

More than anything, the families want to know why our nation was so vulnerable to 19 hijackers on the morning of 9/11. We look forward to Ms. Rice answering questions about her priorities as National Security Advisor to the President, the processes used before, and after, 9/11 to share critical intelligence and other related data regarding this country’s counter terrorism activities within the government, her knowledge of Al-Qaeda, and her role, and the role of the NSC--leading up to, on, and after the morning of 9/11.

We are hopeful that the information gleaned from Ms. Rice's public testimony can be used by the Commission as part of their investigation and be included in their Final Report and Recommendations to help minimize the chances of a future attack and thus, save lives.

Upon the signing of the 9/11 Commission into law, President Bush stated that the Commission's work was their most solemn duty. He also stated that the Commission must go wherever the facts may lead. We hope that the following qualifying language presented in the letter to the Commission regarding Ms. Rice's testimony does not now contradict these words:

"[i]The Commission must agree in writing that it will not request additional public testimony from any White House official, including Dr. Rice. The National Security Advisor is uniquely situated to provide the Commission with information necessary to fulfill its statutory mandate. Indeed, it is for this reason that Dr. Rice privately met with the Commission for more than four hours on February 7, fully answered every question posed to her, and offered additional private meetings if necessary. Despite the fact that the Commission will therefore have access to all information of which Dr. Rice is aware, the Commission has nevertheless urged that public confidence in the work of the Commission would be enhanced by Dr. Rice appearing publicly before the Commission. Other White House officials with information relevant to the Commission's inquiry do not come within the scope of the Commission's rationale for seeking public testimony from Dr. Rice. These officials will continue to provide the Commission with information through private meetings, briefings, and documents, consistent with our previous practice[/i]."

Consistent with Bush’s statement upon the formation of the Commission, the FSC sincerely hopes that the commission will be given full and unfettered access to any officials in the White House whom they feel it is necessary to interview under oath.

The above condition, which prohibits them from seeking further public testimony, is of particular concern because decisions made by those officials on the day of 9/11 are critically important to provide a full accounting to the American public.

Nevertheless, the families are cautiously optimistic that Dr. Rice's public appearance before the Commission will enhance its ability to produce the kind of Final Report that the nation deserves.

[i][b]The Family Steering Committee (FSC) is an independent, nonpartisan group of individuals who lost loved ones on September 11, 2001. The FSC does not receive financial or other support from any outside organizations[/b][/i] -
http://www.911independentcommission.org/" title="http://www.911independentcommission.org/" target="_blank"http://www.911independentcomm...

Bush's War: Today 5 U.S. Soldiers Killed in Iraq - Iraqis Drag 4 Corpses Through Streets!

03.31.04 (6:38 am) [edit]

[u][b]5 U.S. soldiers killed west of Baghdad[/b][/u] - http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4...

BAGHDAD, Iraq - A bomb exploded under a U.S. military vehicle west of Baghdad on Wednesday, killing five American soldiers, the military said. At least four people, possibly foreign nationals, were killed in a separate attack in the area.

The explosive device that killed the Americans blew up when their vehicle ran over it, Army Col. Jill Morgenthaler said in Baghdad. The attack occurred in Anbar province, which encompasses Fallujah, Ramadi and other towns where anti-U.S. insurgents are active, she said.

Residents said the bomb attack occurred in Malahma, 12 miles northwest of Fallujah.

In an apparently unrelated attack Wednesday, gunmen in Fallujah attacked two civilian cars that residents said were carrying foreign nationals. The occupants of the cars were killed and their vehicles were set on fire. Witnesses saw four bodies.

Footage from Associated Press Television News showed a charred body of one of the slain men, and the targeted vehicles in flames nearby. Some of the slain men were wearing flak jackets, said Safa Mohammedi, a resident.

APTN footage showed one American passport near a body.

Another resident, Abdul Aziz Mohammed, said angry crowds dragged the bodies through the streets, dismembered them and hanged some of the mutilated corpses.

“The people of Fallujah hanged some of the bodies on the old bridge like slaughtered sheep,” Mohammed said. “I saw it myself.”

The identities of the slain men were unclear. One resident displayed what appeared to be dog tags taken from one body. Residents also said there were weapons in the targeted cars.

[b]Earlier attacks[/b]

In separate bombings Tuesday outside Baghdad, a U.S. soldier was killed and seven Iraqis were wounded.

A suicide bomber blew up explosives in his car outside the house of a police chief south of Baghdad on Tuesday, killing himself and wounding seven Iraqis, officials said.

Guerrillas often target the police because they view them as collaborators with the U.S.-led occupation, and they often make easier targets because they are not as armed and protected as U.S. troops.

The attack came after the head of a U.N. team said better security is vital if Iraq wants to hold elections by a Jan. 31 deadline.

West of Baghdad, one American soldier was killed and a second was wounded by a roadside bomb Tuesday, the U.S. military said.

The injured soldier was airlifted to a combat support hospital after the explosion near Ramadi, said Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the military’s deputy director of operations.

U.S. Marines operate in the area, but Kimmitt did not say whether the casualties were Marines.

Ramadi was also the scene Tuesday of a grenade attack on a U.S. Humvee, setting it on fire, witnesses said. Four soldiers who were in the vehicle were seen being rushed away in another Humvee. A U.S. spokeswoman in Baghdad could not confirm the attack.

It was unclear whether the two incidents were related.

Meanwhile, in the southern city of Najaf, Iraqis protesting delays in processing their applications for police jobs hurled stones at Spanish soldiers and Iraqi police, smashed windows and burned a guardhouse on Tuesday, witnesses said.

Witnesses also reported gunfire during the three-hour riot, and at least three police officers and two protesters were wounded.

Spanish radio station Cadena Ser reported that a female Spanish soldier and five Iraqis were injured, but the Spanish Defense Ministry in Madrid denied that a Spanish soldier was injured.

[u][b]Iraqis Drag Four Corpses Through Streets [/b][/u] - http://story.news.yahoo.com/n...

FALLUJAH, Iraq - Jubilant residents yanked the bodies of four foreigners — one a woman, at least one an American — out of their burning cars Wednesday, dragged the charred corpses through the streets, and hung them from the bridge spanning the Euphrates River. Five American troops died in a roadside bombing nearby.

The brutal treatment of the four corpses came after they were killed in a rebel attack on their SUVs in the Sunni Triangle city about 35 miles west of Baghdad, scene of some of the worst violence on both sides of the conflict since the beginning of the American occupation a year ago.

It was reminiscent of the 1993 scene in Somalia, when a mob dragged the corpse of a U.S. soldier through the streets of Mogadishu, eventually leading to the American withdrawal from the African nation.

In one of the bloodiest days for the U.S. military this year, five American troops died when their military vehicle ran over a bomb in a separate incident 12 miles to the northwest, among the reed-lined roads through some of Iraq (news - web sites)'s richest farmland.

Residents said the bomb attack occurred in Malahma, 12 miles northwest of Fallujah, where anti-U.S. insurgents are active. U.S. Marines operate in the area, but it was unclear whether the slain troops were Marines.

Chanting "Fallujah is the graveyard of Americans," residents cheered after the grisly assault on two four-wheel-drive civilian vehicles, which left both in flames. Others chanted, "We sacrifice our blood and souls for Islam."

Associated Press Television News pictures showed one man beating a charred corpse with a metal pole. Others tied a yellow rope to a body, hooked it to a car and dragged it down the main street of town. Two blackened and mangled corpses were hung from a green iron bridge across the Euphrates.

"The people of Fallujah hanged some of the bodies on the old bridge like slaughtered sheep," resident Abdul Aziz Mohammed said. Some of the corpses were dismembered, he said.

Beneath the bodies, a man held a printed sign with a skull and crossbones and the phrase "Fallujah is the cemetery for Americans."

APTN showed the charred remains of three slain men. Some were wearing flak jackets, said resident Safa Mohammedi.

One resident displayed what appeared to be dog tags taken from one body. Residents also said there were weapons in the targeted cars. APTN showed one American passport near a body and a U.S. Department of Defense (news - web sites) identification card belonging to another man.

U.S. military officials in Washington said the situation was still confused but they did not think the victims were American soldiers and believed the SUVs were not American military vehicles.

Witnesses said the two vehicles were attacked with small arms fire and rocket propelled grenades.

Hours after the attack, the city was quiet. No U.S. troops or Iraqi police were seen in the area.

Fallujah is in the so-called Sunni Triangle, where support for Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) was strong and rebels often carry out attacks against American forces.

In nearby Ramadi, insurgents threw a grenade at a government building and Iraqi security forces returned fire Wednesday, witnesses said. It was not clear if there were casualties.

Also in Ramadi, a roadside bomb exploded near a U.S. convoy, witnesses said. U.S. officials in Baghdad could not confirm the attack.

On Tuesday in Ramadi, one U.S. soldier was killed and another wounded in a roadside bombing, said Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt.

Northeast of Baghdad, in the city of Baqouba on Wednesday, a suicide bomber blew up explosives in his car when he was near a convoy of government vehicles, wounding 14 Iraqis and killing himself, officials said.

The attacked convoy is normally used to transport the Diala provincial governor, Abdullah al-Joubori, but he was elsewhere at the time, said police Col. Ali Hossein.

On Tuesday, a suicide bombing outside the house of a police chief in Hillah, about 60 miles south of Baghdad, killed the attacker and wounded seven others.

A bomb exploded late Tuesday in a movie theater that had closed for the night. Two bystanders were wounded by flying glass, said its owner, Ghani Mohammed.

The latest violence came two days after Carina Perelli, the head of a U.N. electoral team, said better security is vital if Iraq wants to hold elections by a Jan. 31 deadline. The polls are scheduled to follow a June 30 transfer of sovereignty to an Iraqi government.

Top U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer said Tuesday he had appointed 21 anti-corruption inspectors general to government departments to try to prevent fraud. More will be named in coming days, he said.

The inspectors will work with two other newly formed, independent agencies. Together, they will "form an integrated approach intended to combat corruption at every level of government across the country," Bremer said.

What Success? Today 5 US Soldiers Killed in Iraq - Iraqis Drag 4 Corpses Through Streets!

03.31.04 (6:32 am) [edit]

U.S. Occupation IGC Bars U.N. From Overseeing Elections!!! Surprise! Surprise! Surprise!

03.31.04 (6:24 am) [edit]

[b]Iraqi Council Bars UN from Overseeing Elections [/b]

[i]Al-Hayat [/i]reports that the Interim Governing Council (IGC) is rejecting any role for the United Nations in overseeing Iraqi elections save that of "help and consultation). Iraqi National Congress spokesman Intifadh Qanbar said that the UN delegation was told by the IGC that elections would have to be a purely Iraqi affair, that Iraqis would have to take the leading role in them, and that there would be no UN role in administering elections. He also said that no interference would be brooked from Iraq's neighbors.

Qanbar and the INC sharply criticized UN special envoy Lakhdar Brahimi for having opposed the first Gulf War (which aimed at forcing Saddam back out of Kuwait), and blamed him for meeting with Saddam in 1998. He also criticized Brahimi's statement that Iraq might face a civil war. Muhammad Bahr al-Ulum, a cleric now in the last days of his temporary presidency of the IGC, had also complained two days ago in Kuwait that Brahimi's report on Iraq had lacked balance.

Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress has rejected charges that he had misused American funds, saying that such charges derived from the CIA and that they were false.

Chalabi was supported by the CIA and the State Department around 1992 to 1996 or so, when they dropped him because he could not give an accounting of the millions of dollars they had given him to overthrow Saddam. He was then picked up by the Pentagon instead, and especially once the Bush administration came to power.

The attempt by the INC to marginalize Brahimi and the United Nations reflects Chalabi's fear that he would not be able to win a fair, UN-supervised election. One fears he plans on vote-buying and other corrupt acts to be elected or appointed to a high Iraqi governing post, possibly as Prime Minister. Although the al-Hayat story says that the IGC wants to limit the UN role, if one looks carefully this move seems to be coming mainly from Chalabi and his people.

[i][b]By Juan Cole[/b][/i], http://www.antiwar.com/cole/?...

Dubya's Reign of Terror and the Destruction of Democracy

03.30.04 (11:24 am) [edit]

[b]Floor Statement of Sen. Daschle on the Abuse of Government Power[/b]

Mr. President, last week I spoke about the White House's reaction to Richard Clarke's testimony before the 9-11 Commission. I am compelled to rise again today, because the people around the President are systematically abusing the powers and prerogatives of government.

We all need to reflect seriously on what's going on. Not in anger and not in partisanship, but in keeping with our responsibilities as Senators and with an abiding respect for the fundamental values of our democracy.

Richard Clarke did something extraordinary when he testified before the 9-11 Commission last week. He didn't try to escape blame, as so many routinely do. Instead, he accepted his share of responsibility and offered his perceptions about what happened in the months and years leading up to September 11.

We can and should debate the facts and interpretations Clarke has offered. But there can be no doubt that he has risked enormous damage to his reputation and professional future to hold both himself and our government accountable.

The retaliation from those around the President has been fierce. Mr. Clarke's personal motives have been questioned and his honesty challenged. He has even been accused, right here on the Senate floor, of perjury. Not one shred of proof was given, but that wasn't the point. The point was to have the perjury accusation on television and in the newspapers. The point was to damage Mr. Clarke in any way possible.

This is wrong–and it's not the first time it's happened.

When Senator McCain ran for President, the Bush campaign smeared him and his family with vicious, false attacks. When Max Cleland ran for reelection to this Senate, his patriotism was attacked. He was accused of not caring about protecting our nation -- a man who lost both legs and an arm in Vietnam, accused of being indifferent to America's national security. That was such an ugly lie, it's still hard to fathom almost two years later.

There are some things that simply ought not be done – even in politics. Too many people around the President seem not to understand that, and that line has been crossed. When Ambassador Joe Wilson told the truth about the Administration's misleading claims about Iraq, Niger, and uranium, the people around the President didn't respond with facts. Instead, they publicly disclosed that Ambassador Wilson's wife was a deep-cover CIA agent. In doing so, they undermined America's national security and put politics first. They also may well have put the lives of Ambassador Wilson's wife, and her sources, in danger.

When former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill revealed that the White House was thinking about an Iraq War in its first weeks in office, his former colleagues in the Bush Administration ridiculed him from morning to night, and even subjected him to a fruitless federal investigation.

When Larry Lindsay, one of President Bush's former top economic advisors, and General Eric Shinseki, the former Army Chief of Staff, spoke honestly about the amount of money and the number of troops the war would demand, they learned the hard way that the White House doesn't tolerate candor.

This is not "politics as usual." In nearly all of these cases, it's not Democrats who are being attacked.

Senator McCain and Secretary O'Neill are prominent Republicans, and Richard Clarke, Larry Lindsay, Joe Wilson, and Eric Shinseki all worked for Republican Administrations.

The common denominator is that these government officials said things the White House didn't want said.

The response from those around the President was retribution and character assassination -- a 21st Century twist to the strategy of "shooting the messenger."

If it takes intimidation to keep inconvenient facts from the American people, the people around the President don't hesitate. Richard Foster, the chief actuary for Medicare, found that out. He was told he'd be fired if he told the truth about the cost of the Administration's prescription drug plan.

This is no way to run a government.

The White House and its supporters should not be using the power of government to try to conceal facts from the American people or to reshape history in an effort to portray themselves in the best light.

They should not be threatening the reputations and livelihoods of people simply for asking – or answering – questions. They should seek to put all information about past decisions on the table for evaluation so that the best possible decisions can be made for the nation's future.

In Mr. Clarke's case, clear and troubling double standards are being applied.

Last year, when the Administration was being criticized for the President's misleading statement about Niger and uranium, the White House unexpectedly declassified portions of the National Intelligence Estimate. When the Administration wants to bolster its public case, there is little that appears too sensitive to be declassified.

Now, people around the President want to release parts of Mr. Clarke's earlier testimony in 2002. According to news reports, the CIA is already working on declassifying that testimony – at the Administration's request.

And last week several documents were declassified literally overnight, not in an effort to provide information on a pressing policy matter to the American people, but in an apparent effort to discredit a public servant who gave 30 years of service to his American government.

I'll support declassifying Mr. Clarke's testimony before the Joint Inquiry, but the Administration shouldn't be selective. Consistent with our need to protect sources and methods, we should declassify his entire testimony.

And to make sure that the American people have access to the full record as they consider this question, we should also declassify his January 25 memo to Dr. Rice, the September 4, 2001 National Security Directive dealing with terrorism, Dr. Rice's testimony to the 9-11 Commission, the still-classified 28 pages from the House-Senate inquiry relating to Saudi Arabia, and a list of the dates and topics of all National Security Council meetings before September 4, 2001.

I hope this new interest in openness will also include the Vice President's Energy and Terrorism Task Forces. While much, if not all, of what these task forces discussed was unclassified, their proceedings have not been shared with the public.

There also seems to be a double standard when it comes to investigations.

In recent days leading congressional Republicans are now calling for an investigation into Mr. Clarke. As I mentioned earlier, Secretary O'Neill was also subjected to an investigation. Clarke and O'Neill sought legal and classification review of any information in their books before they were published.

Nonetheless, our colleagues tell us these two should be investigated, at the same time there has been no Senate investigation into the leaking of Valerie Plame's identity as a deep cover CIA agent; no thorough investigation into whether leading Administration officials misrepresented the intelligence regarding threats posed by Iraq; no Senate hearings into the threat the chief Medicare Actuary faced for trying to do his job; and no Senate investigation into the reports of continued overcharging by Halliburton for its work in Iraq.

There is a clear double standard when it comes to investigating or releasing information, and that's just is not right. The American people deserve more from their leaders.

We're seeing it again now in the shifting reasons the White House has given for Dr. Rice's refusal to testify under oath and publicly before the 9-11 Commission.

The people around the President first said it would be unprecedented for Dr. Rice to testify. But thanks to the Congressional Research Service, we now know that previous sitting National Security Advisors have testified before Congress.

Now the people around the President are saying that Dr. Rice can't testify because it would violate an important constitutional principle: the separation of powers.

We will soon face this debate again when it comes time for President Bush and Vice President Cheney to meet with the 9-11 Commission. I believe they should lift the limitations they have placed on their cooperation with the Commission and be willing to appear before the entire Commission for as much time as the Commission deems productive.

The all-out assault on Richard Clarke has gone on for more than a week now. Mr. Clarke has been accused of "profiteering" and possible perjury. It is time for this to stop.

The Commission should declassify Mr. Clarke's earlier testimony. All of it. Not just the parts the White House wants. And Dr. Rice should testify before the 9-11 Commission, and she should be under oath and in public.

The American people deserve to know the truth -- the full truth -- about what happened in the years and months leading up to September 11.

Senator McCain, Senator Cleland, Secretary O'Neill, Ambassador Wilson, General Shinseki, Richard Foster, Richard Clarke, Larry Lindsay ... when will the character assassination, retribution, and intimidation end?

When will we say enough is enough?

The September 11 families – and our entire country – deserve better. Our democracy depends on it. And our nation's future security depends on it.

http://democrats.senate.gov/" title="http://democrats.senate.gov/" target="_blank"http://democrats.senate.gov/~dpc/releases/2004330506.html

WHITEWASH: BUSH WILL ONLY LET CONDI TESTIFY IF NO OTHER WHITE HOUSE OFFICIALS ARE CALLED ... GEEZ ..

03.30.04 (9:09 am) [edit]

[b]Rice to Testify in Public Under Oath [/b]

Bowing to pressure, the White House will allow National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice (news - web sites) to testify in public under oath before the commission investigating the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. President Bush (news - web sites) and Vice President Dick Cheney (news - web sites) also agreed to speak with the full panel privately.

[b]To reach the compromise, the administration said Tuesdsay it had won agreement from the commission that it would seek no further public testimony from White House officials and that Rice's appearance would not be viewed as a precedent[/b].

The commission welcomed the decision in a statement which said, "We will work with the White House to schedule both sessions promptly."

Bush and Cheney have agreed to a single joint private session with all 10 commissioners, with one commission staff member present to take notes of the session, White House counsel Alberto Gonzales said in a letter to the panel. Previously, the administration was only offering private interviews of Bush and Cheney with just the commission chairman and vice chairman.

Commissioner Slade Gorton, a former Republican senator from Washington, said the Sept. 11 panel accepted the proposal in a meeting Tuesday morning, including the stipulation that it not call other White House officials because "we hadn't planned to."

"I think the White House would have been better off if it had made the agreements sooner, but I'm delighted," said Gorton. "I have felt all along that her public testimony would be good for the country."

The panel was meeting to discuss scheduling for the Rice testimony and Bush-Cheney session, which would be with the full panel and for an unlimited time period. Gorton said a previous proposal to make public notes from Rice's private meeting with the panel in February is now moot and won't be done.

Gonzales' letter conditioned the White House's decision on written assurances from the commission that such a step does not set a precedent and that the commission does not request "additional public testimony from any White House official, including Dr. Rice."

Subject to the conditions, the president will agree "to the commission's request for Dr. Rice to testify publicly regarding matters within the commission's statutory mandate," Gonzales' letter said.

"The president recognizes the truly unique and extraordinary circumstances underlying the commission's responsibility to prepare a detailed report on the facts," Gonzales added.

A leading Democrat in Congress praised the panel for insisting on Rice's public testimony under oath.

"The administration's reversal shows that it was using executive privilege as an excuse to keep Dr. Rice from testifying," said Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y. "But the dedication and bull's eye integrity of the commission has succeeded and now hopefully we will be a lot closer to the truth."

Republican leaders focused their praise on Bush. "We applaud the decision of the President to allow the National Security Adviser, Dr. Condoleezza Rice, to testify before the 9/11 Commission," House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, both Republicans, said in a joint statement. "This is a unique event given the extraordinary nature of September 11, 2001."

Hastert and Frist added, "We do not believe Dr. Rice's testimony ... should be seen as setting any precedent, and it should not be cited as setting precedent for future requests for a National Security Adviser or any other White House official to testify before a legislative body."

The decision to have Rice testify follows the publication of former White House counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke's book, in which he charges that the Bush administration was slow to act against the threat of al-Qaida.

Rice offered a rebuttal on Sunday to criticism by Clarke that President Clinton (news - web sites) "did something, and President Bush did nothing" before Sept. 11 and that both "deserve a failing grade."

Rice responded in televised news interviews. "I don't know what a sense of urgency — any greater than the one that we had — would have caused us to do differently," she said.

Clarke testified before the commission last week.

Questions for Bush & Condi Rice ...

03.30.04 (9:02 am) [edit]

[b]Questions for Bush & Condi Rice ... But will they be asked the right questions since the 9/11 Commission is comprised of corrupt Bush administration toadies and lackeys? ...[/b]

What did the Bush regime know in advance of Sept. 11?

Why did George W. Bush and Richard Cheney both tell Sen. Tom Daschle not to launch a Congressional investigation into the events of Sept. 11, until the families of 9/11 victims refused to take no for an answer?

Why did the new Bush regime tell the FBI to "back off" investigating the Saudis and Bin Laden after he took power, and withhold funds earmarked for these investigations?

Why did George W. Bush take a month-long vacation after learning that a terrorist threat loomed?

Why did Bush and his party repeatedly block attempts to heighten airline security before Sept 11?

Why did Bush continue reading a children's book to schoolchildren after learning on Sept. 11 that America was under attack?

Why did American fighter jets not respond for an hour after learning of the hijackings?

Why was there a sudden swelling of insider trading options against United and American airlines on September 10, 2001?

Why were 11 members of the Bin Laden family whisked out of the USA on a charter jet on September 18, 2001, when American airspace was forbidden to air travel, and against the vociferous objections of the FBI, which was not allowed to question them?

Why did Florida Gov. Jeb Bush install martial law in Florida on Sept 7, 2001?

When Florida Gov. Jeb Bush was informed of the attacks in New York and Washington, why did he reply, "Was it the terrorists?"

Why was John Ashcroft advised not to fly commercial aircraft in the months preceding Sept. 11?

Why did the Bush regime repeatedly ignore warnings from foreign intelligence agencies that an attack was imminent?

Why has Bush told us that an attack of commercial airliners on American buildings was unthinkable, when the FBI knew otherwise and in fact military precautions were taken against just such attacks in Genoa, Italy?

Why do the mainstream media and virtually all elected representatives fail to mention the heavy financial interest that both Bush and Cheney have in their relationship with the Saudis, and in their negotiations with the Taliban for an oil pipeline through Afghanistan?

Why do the mainstream media fail to connect the FBI intelligence failures with the Bush regime's obstruction of their Al Qaeda monitoring and withholding of funds from such investigations?

Why is the name of John O'Neill, who resigned in disgust from his post as lead FBI investigator of Al-Qaeda in August 2001, took a job at the World Trade Center, and died on Sept. 11, not a household word ?

Why are the sexual conduct of Bill Clinton and Gary Condit considered scandals, but Bush's "see no evil" conduct towards Al-Qaeda not considered a scandal ?

Why do we pay billions of dollars annually for military defense and intelligence which seems to buy us nothing?

Why has Bush sought, and gained, unparalleled political capital for his moment of greatest shame?

Why do the mainstream media and virtually all elected representatives discount, without any consideration, the possibility that Bush was knowingly looking the other way in order to gain this political and financial capital?

Why are we expected to assume that the man who stole the American presidency in broad daylight is too ethical to have sacrificed American lives for his own political and financial gain?

Why are we now hearing that it's OK to ask a few general questions, but we must not assign blame , and above all, we must not assign blame to George W. Bush? Everyone else, especially Bill Clinton who tried to fight terrorism but was stopped by a Republican Congress obsessed with his sex life, is wrongly be blamed.

Poverty Trap for Palestinian Refugees

03.30.04 (5:36 am) [edit]

[b]Poverty trap for Palestinian refugees[/b]

[i][b]Amal Akar lost a daughter to cancer two years ago because she could not afford medical treatment. Now a second daughter faces the same fate[/b][/i].

More worryingly, Akar's story is not uncommon. The 36-year-old mother of seven lives in the deprived Shatila camp for Palestinian refugees in Lebanon where poverty is the norm.

With the limited assistance offered by the UN refugee agency and a jobless husband, she is virtually penniless.

"We borrowed money and I sent letters to newspapers asking for help to no avail. I don't know what to do," she said, while carrying a crying baby in her arms.

[b]Job bans[/b]

Part of the problem is that refugees are restricted from taking certain posts.

These restrictions on Lebanon's 400,000 Palestinian refugees have been mounting since the end of the country's 15-year civil war in 1990. They are banned from 73 job categories including professions such as medicine, law and engineering.

They are not allowed to own property, unlike other foreigners, and are denied access to the Lebanese healthcare system.

Shatila's homes are densely packed and neglected with narrow, stinking alleys, the dirty walls covered with posters of smiling men killed during the Palestinian Intifada.

"I don't mind going anywhere in the world, just get me out of here," says Akar. "I don't want to settle in Lebanon. All that we have here is trouble and poverty."

[b]Few choices[/b]

But who said settling was an option?

The Lebanese government has said repeatedly that it will not allow Palestinian refugees to settle. It says that granting them work permits and rights to own land will encourage them not to leave and jeopardise their right of return.

Local analysts, however, attribute this stance to political reasons, saying that the refugees' Sunni Muslim majority will upset the balance of sectarian power in the country, currently in the favour of Lebanon's Shia. They also argue that Palestinians are paying the price of the influx of Syrian workers who do not need work permits in Lebanon due to the huge Syrian influence in the country.

"They [the government] consider these things as acts of settlement. Do they think that if I work or own the roof above my head then I won’t go back home?" said Khalid Abu al-Nur, of the Democratic Front of the Liberation of Palestine, one of many Palestinian groups that has an office in the camp.

"These are lame excuses. We are talking about basic human rights. Refugees in Syria and Jordan are entitled to these rights. What's so special about Lebanon?" he said.

[b]Camp life[/b]

According to refugees, those living in other camps are not allowed even to obtain construction tools such as cement to fix their houses.

"We can only do this here because we have Syrians living in the camp," said Ahmad Abd al-Hadi, referring to the Syrian influence in Lebanon.

Refugees in Lebanon live in 12 camps nationwide. According to the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), the largest camp is Ain al-Hilwa, located in the southern city of Sidon (48km south of the capital) and famous for armed conflicts among various factions of Palestinian groups. It houses 75,000 refugees.

The second-largest camp is Nahr al-Barid in northern Lebanon with some 29,000 registered refugees, while the Shatila camp houses just more than 12,000 refugees.

In 2003, heavy opposition by the government thwarted a draft law presented by 10 members of the parliament that would allow each Palestinian the right to own 5000sq m in Lebanon like other foreigners.

[b]Suffering[/b]

"We are against settling the Palestinians, but they are suffering from a great deal of injustice here and they need to have their basic rights as humans,” said Muhammad Khansa, a Hizb Allah official and a chairman of the Ghubairi municipality where the Shatila camp is located.

Apart from the lack of basic services, people are finding it harder to secure food. Umm Rashid, a 69-year-old mother of seven, is classified by the UNRWA as a "special hardship case" or as UNRWA spokeswoman Huda al-Tirk puts it: "the poorest of the poor".

She lives on minimal financial aid and a package of basic commodities provided by the agency, along with a $30 monthly salary paid by the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) for the loss of one of her sons during the conflict with Israel.

But to make ends meet in a country where the minimum wages stand at $250 per month, she sells tools and groceries.

[b]Scraping by[/b]

Other people run small stores inside the camp, or cross the road to find jobs in neighbouring areas, benefiting from Khansa's sympathetic "turn a blind eye" policy.

"The Lebanese hire Palestinians because they don't require any kind of medical or social securities, and they can work for as long as 12 hours a day without complaining," said Nuhad Hamad, a middle-aged Palestinian woman who runs a local institute that provides basic vocational training and educational services to the camp's inhabitants.

UNRWA also provides jobs opportunities to the Palestinians, employing more than 2000 health and educational staff in its schools and clinics.

"We know it's little but this is what we can do," al-Tirk said, citing the rising population in the camps as one of the main obstacles against providing more services.

[b]Budget[/b]

The agency's budget is dependant on donors from the US, the European Union and other countries, al-Tirk says. The 2004 budget is $351 million, $53 million of which is for Lebanon-based camps.

Palestinian organisations, including Hamad's Najdeh institute, try to fill the gap. It provides vocational training, literacy courses, private tutoring and a children's nursery. Classes, however, are modestly equipped and some courses stop due to a lack of funding.

Teachers are university graduates unable to find jobs elsewhere. They work for $3 per day.

"But we sometimes deduct from our salaries to keep the courses running," Hamad said in her small office, where a map of the occupied territories stood to remind her of a home she never saw.

Students are reminded, too.

Each class has a poster listing the students' names and their origins in Palestine. Some of them do not seem to need the reminder, though, such as 13-year-old Sally al-Lahham, who drew a picture of a woman drying her clothes in the open air next to a tent.

Asked about the meaning of the picture, she replied with a smile: "It resembles the displaced Palestinians."

[i][b]By Alaa Shahine, Aljazeera [/b][/i]- http://english.aljazeera.net/...

Israeli Assassinations: Defence or Murder?

03.30.04 (5:31 am) [edit]

[b]Defence or murder?[/b]

[b]Does Israel have a legal right to assassinate its enemies - or are such executions war crimes? After two years deliberating, its supreme court is set to decide.[/b]

A half-blind man in a wheelchair is blown apart on a crowded city street. An insecure 16-year-old boy is coaxed into donning an explosive vest. Are the events of last week in Israel a preview of the future of warfare in the age of "asymmetric" conflict? And if so, what rules of law and morality should govern such a conflict, bringing its conduct into some semblance of conformity with recognised humanitarian principles?
When Israel killed the Hamas founder and spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin with a missile launched from a helicopter, it provoked a storm of criticism. As one Israeli commentator put it, this was the mother of all targeted assassinations. From Kofi Annan to Jack Straw to the European Union's Javier Solana, international statesmen lined up to denounce the strike as unlawful. Among the western liberal democracies, only the United States stood partly aside from the chorus of condemnation - its muddled response a telling reflection of its own contentious anti-terrorist war.

Israel countered by describing Yassin as the "godfather of the suicide bombers" and giving notice that its campaign of targeted killings would be intensified. Anyone involved in the terrorist war against Israel should know there is no immunity, said the country's public security minister the day after the attack.

The morality and legality of assassinating terrorist suspects is being argued out around the world, and is one of the hottest topics in the field of international law. Such discussions often seem merely theoretical, unlikely to have any impact on the actions of the governments involved. But in the case of Israel, there is one body whose assessment of the question could have real and immediate consequences - the country's own supreme court. Within months, the court is likely to deliver its decision in a case brought by two non-profit groups seeking a declaration that the Israeli government's policy of targeted killing is contrary to international law and should be halted.

"I believe this may be the most important case that the supreme court has yet been asked to consider," says one of the lawyers for the petitioners, Michael Sfard. In line with the significance of the moral, legal and security issues at stake, the court has not rushed to a decision. It has had the case before it for two years. Nevertheless Sfard is confident that the case is now in "the final few metres". The groups he represents and the Israeli government have been asked to submit their final briefs.

The first targeted killing in response to the violence of the current Palestinian intifada took place in November 2000, when the Fatah activist Hussein Abayat was killed in a helicopter attack near Bethlehem. Since then, well over 100 Palestinian militants have been the victims of such attacks (not counting the roughly equal number of bystanders who have also died).

At first the assassinations were directed at people who were said to be "ticking time bombs" - individuals who were actively involved in organising terrorist attacks. But more recently the Israeli military has shifted to a wider range of targets, including figures such as Sheikh Yassin, who are leaders of militant groups rather than actual bomb-makers. The government of Ariel Sharon openly acknowledges these targeted strikes as an essential part of its armed struggle to protect Israel's citizens against terrorism.

According to Sfard, though, the killings are not merely unjustified - they are war crimes, perhaps even crimes against humanity. However much we may castigate terrorists, he argues, we must accept that they are not soldiers but civilians, and must be fought with law enforcement methods. That means they can be killed only when there is no other way to prevent them from carrying out an attack that would endanger human life. Otherwise suspected terrorists should be detained and put on trial before they can lawfully be punished for their actions.

"If a terrorist - or any criminal - is threatening someone's life, then you can do everything necessary to stop him," says Sfard. "But these assassinations target people at home, sleeping in their beds, or when they're simply driving in their cars - they're not endangering anyone at the time when they're killed." To kill under these circumstances is simply execution - but carried out without any trial or proof of guilt.

Not surprisingly, the Israeli government and its supporters present the matter in an entirely different way. They argue that Palestinian militants may not be soldiers, but they are still participants in an armed conflict - determined fighters who aim to kill Israeli civilians and who have engineered a concerted campaign of atrocities.

"These targeted killings are almost always legitimate," argues Yoram Dinstein of Tel Aviv University, one of the country's foremost authorities on the laws of war. Under these, he points out, civilians who join in a conflict by directly participating in hostilities make themselves a lawful target for enemy forces. And that doesn't just mean the people who carry out terrorist missions, but also those who equip and send them. "There is no difference in this respect between the person who blows himself up and the dispatcher," Dinstein argues.

Are the leaders of Hamas criminals or combatants? The terms of the question echo a familiar argument over Guantánamo Bay and America's proclaimed war against al-Qaida. In the Israeli-Palestinian case, though, few would deny that there is an armed conflict going on. The crux of the case is therefore likely to come down to a dispute about what it means for someone to take a direct part in hostilities. In the law, this is a notoriously slippery and contested concept - all the more so in the age of low-intensity terrorist warfare.

Like much of the modern law of war, the guiding principle here can be found in the horrific experience of "total war" in the second world war. The aim was to make sure that it was no longer acceptable to target civilians assisting in the general war effort - which in a modern society could be taken to cover almost any adult. But are those who train and equip suicide bombers taking part in hostilities? What about those such as Sheikh Yassin who approve strategic decisions - for instance by giving the go-ahead for women to be used in suicide missions?

And if these people lose their immunity from attack, is that true only while they are directly engaged in terrorist activity? Or do they forfeit their civilian status indefinitely - so that they can be attacked not just when they're fitting an explosives belt or poring over a list of targets, but when they're sleeping, driving, or leaving a mosque? And what about the inherent problem of targeting suspects who don't admit that they are fighters? These are the issues that Israel's supreme court will have to grapple with.

There is no clear legal precedent, and the court will have to base its decision on a view about how the underlying principles of the law should be applied in this unforeseen kind of war. But there are a couple of factors that it might fall back on. The court might make a distinction between the military and political wings of organisations such as Hamas - so that it might rule that only those involved in the military chain of command could be attacked. And it might specify that targeted killings are never permissible when the suspected terrorists can be apprehended without the risk of serious loss of life.

In such an emotive case, though, the factors shaping its decision may not be entirely legal. Sfard believes the biggest obstacle he and his colleagues face is a political one. "The justices are in a very problematic position," he argues. "I am sure that they don't want to be the first judges from a liberal democratic country to authorise a policy of execution without trial - but if the policy was put to a popular vote, it would certainly win. It may be difficult for the court to take a step that would be seen by much of the public as harming the government's power to defend the nation's security."

In fact, there may be a middle way the court could choose, as Dinstein points out. "I don't believe the court will rule against the government in total," he says. But he adds that the present supreme court is notoriously activist: it won't want simply to give the government free rein. Therefore the judges may set some guidelines on the practice of targeted killing, and at the same time extend a wide degree of deference to the Israeli army as to how it applies these guidelines in practice. For instance, they might say that military commanders are best placed to judge whether a particular killing is militarily necessary to defend the country against the risk of future attacks.

Whenever it comes, the court's decision is likely to be minutely scrutinised and passionately disputed. Judges on the American supreme court have already said that they may look to the Israeli legal system for precedents when they consider the ground rules for the US war on terror. The new international criminal court (though it is unlikely to have jurisdiction over Israeli or American actions for the foreseeable future) may also have to consider the use of force against terrorists at some point. Israel's justices will be the first to enter this legal minefield, but they will certainly not have the final word on the subject.

· [i][b]Anthony Dworkin is editor of the Crimes of War website: [/b][/i] http://www.crimesofwar.org/ . http://www.guardian.co.uk/isr...,2763,1180910,00.html

Phony U.S. 'Missile Defense' Is USELESS Because It's Another Corporate Boondoggle!!!!!

03.29.04 (5:09 pm) [edit]

[b]Bush's Latest Missile-Defense Folly

Why spend billions on a system that might never work?[/b]

Forces are finally converging for a genuine debate on President Bush's missile-defense program. The Republican-controlled Congress is looking for ways to cut $9 billion from the military budget (which, at $420 billion, is getting unmanageable even for hawkish tastes). It's becoming painfully clear that rogues and terrorists are more likely to attack us with planes and trains than with nuclear missiles. And a recent series of technical studies—bolstered on Thursday by a high-profile Senate hearing—has dramatized just how difficult, if not impossible, this project is going to be.

Bush's budget for next year includes $10.7 billion for missile defense—over twice as much money as for any other single weapons system. This summer, he's planning to start deploying the first components of an MD system—six anti-missile missiles in Alaska, four in California, and as many as 20 more, in locations not yet chosen, the following year.

Yet, except by sheer luck, these interceptors will not be able to shoot down enemy missiles. Or, to put it more precisely, Bush is starting to deploy very expensive weapons without the slightest bit of evidence that they have any chance of working.

In the past six years of flight tests, here is what the Pentagon's missile-defense agency has demonstrated: A missile can hit another missile in mid-air as long as a) the operators know exactly where the target missile has come from and where it's going; b) the target missile is flying at a slower-than-normal speed; c) it's transmitting a special beam that exaggerates its radar signature, thus making it easier to track; d) only one target missile has been launched; and e) the "attack" happens in daylight.

Beyond that, the program's managers know nothing—in part because they have never run a test that goes beyond this heavily scripted (it would not be too strong to call it "rigged") scenario.

It's as if some kid were to hit a baseball thrown by a pitching machine straight down the middle at 30 mph and, on the basis of that feat, claimed he could hit whatever Mark Prior might throw him from a real mound, pitch after pitch after pitch, without fail.

There is, in other words, a vast distance between the Pentagon's current level of testing and the level that would need to be done before anyone could begin to claim that a missile-defense system might shoot down real enemy missiles in a real nuclear attack.

The latest annual report by Thomas Christie, the Pentagon's director of operational testing and evaluation, reveals just how incalculably vast this distance is. (The report was published with no fanfare at the end of last year and has appeared on private Web sites—but not the Pentagon's—in the past two weeks.)

Christie's bottom line is that we're rushing into this thing blind. Assessments of the system's capabilities are based primarily on "modeling and simulations" or on canned tests of "components and sub-systems," not on "operational tests of a mature, integrated system." Nothing can be reliably inferred from these data, because we don't know enough about the actual system that might be built and, therefore, don't know whether it bears any resemblance to the simulations. Or, as Christie puts it: "Due to the immature nature of the systems they emulate, models and simulations cannot be adequately validated at this time."

Step back and look at what a missile-defense system would involve. Broadly speaking, it would be a meshing of six separate operations: 1) an early warning radar, which would detect a missile launch; 2) satellite-based sensors that would distinguish missiles from deliberate decoys and random space clutter; 3) X-band radar that would track the missiles and control the firing of "kill vehicles" (anti-missile missiles that would shoot down enemy missiles); 4) the kill vehicles themselves; 5) booster rockets to launch the kill vehicles; and 6) the automated command-control-communica tions network that would connect all the above into a seamless system.

The anti-missile missiles that Bush plans to deploy later this year are the simplest elements of this system. Yet, Christie notes, they aren't ready for prime time, either—or, as he puts it, their development has been "hindered" by several shortcomings. There is currently no deployable rocket to boost them into space. Sensors, which would guide the kill vehicles to their targets, are not placed in the most optimal locations. (In the tests to date, a "transmitter" has been attached to the target, making it easy for radars to track.) A ship-based radar, which would be more flexible, won't be ready even for testing until, as Christie delicately puts it, "the post-2005 time-frame."

In general, Christie writes, kill vehicles need to be tested "at higher closing velocities and against targets with [radar] signatures, counter-measures [such as decoys], and flight dynamics more closely matching the projected threat." For now, he continues, "the small number of tests would limit confidence" in the performance of the system—or, for that matter, of any component in the system.

For many of these components, tests will not be ready for a while. The upgraded version of the Patriot air-defense missile, known as PAC-3, has shown "shortcomings" in operational testing. Further tests are scheduled—three this year, 12 next year, five in 2006, and seven in 2007—but, Christie notes, "the adequacy of this testing cannot be fully assessed because detailed objectives for most of the tests ... are not yet defined." In other words, the program managers not only haven't yet tested the missile; they haven't yet figured out what they need to test. Ditto for the vital Space Tracking Surveillance System. "The full capabilities of STSS," Christie writes, "cannot be tested until ... 2006 and 2008."

Meanwhile, the Pentagon is not exactly stepping into gear. In the Senate Armed Services Committee hearings on Thursday, Sen. Carl Levin, the panel's ranking Democrat, pointed out that seven of the eight flight tests scheduled for 2003 and 2004 have been canceled or delayed until next year.

The trade publication Aerospace Daily reports today that the Airborne Laser—a program that involves attaching a kill laser to a modified Boeing 747—is suffering major cost overruns (its $3 billion budget over the next five years is soaring to $5 billion), and its first tests, once scheduled for December 2004, have been pushed back to the middle of next year at the earliest.

Here's the question smacking us all in the face, proponents and opponents alike: How much are we willing to spend, over how long a period of time, not to build an effective missile-defense system but just to discover whether such a thing is feasible?

The Pentagon plans to spend at least another $50 billion over the next five years—through about the time when the Space Tracking Surveillance System will just be starting its tests (in other words, not just well before the system is ready for action but well before we'll have discovered whether it will ever be ready). If at the end of the day we ended up with an effective defense against missiles, it would almost certainly be worth the cost. But in fact, we might discover that it isn't feasible after all.

Already, the $10.7 billion that Bush is spending for fiscal year 2005 is more than the entire U.S. Army is spending on research and development. More to the point, it's nearly twice as much as the Department of Homeland Security is spending on customs and border patrol.

The world poses a "spectrum of threats," as strategists like to say, and there's only so much money to deal with them. Where should we focus our attention and resources: on tangible, present-day threats that can be addressed by means that don't involve bumping up against the laws of physics—or on hypothetical threats of the future that this administration is trying to defeat with technology that might never get out of the lab?

[i][b]Fred Kaplan writes the "War Stories" column for Slate[/b][/i]. - http://slate.msn.com/id/20970...

Condosleezie Rice Is A Discredited Liar and Traitor

03.29.04 (10:58 am) [edit]

[b]10 Minute Rice: Three Lies And No Apology[/b]

Condi Rice, Bush's National Security Adviser, appeared on[i] 60 Minutes [/i]Sunday evening, but, unlike Bush anti-terrorism adviser Dick Clarke at the 9/11 Probe, she did not swear on the Bible that what she would say would be the truth. While Clarke on [i]60 Minutes [/i]last Sunday allowed himself to be probed and turned inside and out for nearly the entire program, the edited tape of the Rice interview with Ed Bradley lasted around 10 minutes, and she said nothing new. The short episode came across as political spin to control the bleeding, and nothing more.

[b]Rice's Lie #1 [/b]([i]transcript[/i]: http://www.cbsnews.com/storie... )

DICK CLARKE (video):
I said 'Mr. President, we've done this before. We - we've been looking at this. We looked at it with an open mind, there's no connection.' He came back at me and said, 'Iraq, Saddam - find out if there's a connection.' And in a very intimidating way. I mean, that we should come back with that answer....

CONDOLEEZZA RICE:
I - I have never seen the president say an - anything to an - people in an intimidating way, to try to get a particular answer out of them. I know this president very well. And the president doesn't talk to his staff in an intimidating way to ask them to produce information - that is false.

OUR RESPONSE:
Clarke and two others were in the room with Bush. The others have gone on record as agreeing with Clarke's description of the meeting. Condi was not present.

[b]Rice's Lie #2[/b] ([i]transcript[/i]: http://www.cbsnews.com/storie... )

VOICE OVER:
All week long, the White House said it had no recollection that the September 12 meeting ever took place, and that it had no record that President Bush was even in the situation room that day. But two days ago, they changed their story, saying the meeting did happen.

CONDOLEEZZA RICE:
"None of us recall the specific - conversation....

OUR RESPONSE:
Actually, two lies here. First, the White House said the meeting didn't happen, then they changed their story. Second, Condi misleads Bradley by saying "us" did not recall the specific conversation. Of course "us" didn't since it has already been established that "us" was not in the room at the time of the conversation.

[b]Rice's Lie #3 [/b]([i]transcript[/i]: http://www.cbsnews.com/storie... )

ED BRADLEY:
Clarke has alleged that the Bush administration underestimated the threat from - from al Qaeda, didn't act as if terrorism was an imminent and urgent problem. Was it?

CONDOLEEZZA RICE:
Of course it was an urgent - problem....

ED BRADLEY: :
But even the former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Hugh Shelton, has said that the Bush administration pushed terrorism, and I'm quoting here, farther to the back burner.

CONDOLEEZZA RICE:
I just don't agree....

ED BRADLEY:
After 9/11, Bob Woodward wrote a book in which he had incredible access and interviewed the president of the United States. He quotes President Bush as saying that he didn't feel a sense of urgency about Osama bin Laden. Woodward wrote that bin Laden was not the president's focus or that of his nationally security team. You're saying that the administration says fighting terrorism and al-Qaeda has been a top priority since the beginning.

CONDOLEEZZA RICE:
I'm saying that the administration took seriously the threat - let's talk about what we did....

ED BRADLEY: :
You'd listed the things that you'd done. But here is the perception. The chairman of the joint chiefs of staff at that time says you pushed it to the back burner. The former Secretary of the Treasury says it was not a priority. Mr. Clarke says it was not a priority. And at least, according to Bob Woodward, who talked with the president, he is saying that for the president, it wasn't urgent. He didn't have a sense of urgency about al Qaeda. That's the perception here.

CONDOLEEZZA RICE:
Ed, I don't know what a sense of urgency - any greater than the one that we had, would have caused us to do differently.

OUR RESPONSE:
It's clear that Bradley wants to discuss the Clarke charge that the Bush administration changed terrorism from the top priority to one of secondary concern, and Rice attepts to twist the question of giving terrorism "top priority" to taking terrorism "seriously," which are two different things. Then Bush is quoted as saying terrorism was not "urgent." Rice ignores this documented quote and goes on to disagree with Bush. As such, she is attempting to mislead by changing the terms from "top priority" to "seriously," and to simply ignore the evidence presented that Bush disagrees with her. As such, she is on auto-pilot as she lies, spinning the implicit scenario she wants Bradley to accept.

Finally, Bradley repeatedly gave Rice the program's forum to apologize for 9/11 to the millions of viewers watching the show, like Clarke did on the show last week and previously to that under oath in front of the 9/11 Panel, but she refused each time. ([i]transcript[/i]: http://www.cbsnews.com/storie... )

--[i][b]By Jerry Politex, BushWatch[/b][/i], 03.29.04 - http://bushwatch.org/bush.htm...

Israel's Extremist Isolation – and America's Danger

03.29.04 (7:14 am) [edit]

[b]Israel's Isolation – and America's [/b]

"Israel has a right to defend itself," said President Bush. And against whom was Israel defending itself at dawn on Monday?

A half blind and deaf paraplegic being wheeled out of a mosque after prayers, Sheik Ahmed Yassin was struck by missiles that blew him to pieces. In carrying out the assassination of the founder and spiritual leader of Hamas, Ariel Sharon used a U.S. Apache helicopter gunship. Thus, in Islamic eyes, we are passive accomplices in the killing.

Instantly, protests erupted in Mosul and Basra. Ayatollah al-Sistani, the Shi'ite leader on whom we depend for a peaceful transfer of power in Iraq, was enraged: "(T)his morning, the occupying Zionist entity committed an ugly crime against the Palestinian people by killing one of their heroes, scholar-martyr Ahmed Yassin."

Sharon's defenders say the sheik had sanctioned terror attacks on innocent Israelis. But why did Israel not then seize him, expose his complicity in murder, and put him in prison, as Israel had before? Why convert this crippled old sheik into a martyr-saint? Why enhance the prestige of Hamas?

Has the killing made Israel more secure? If so, why were Israeli buses deserted all week? Has it made us more secure? Why then were the travel advisories issued to Americans in the Middle East? Why are U.S. embassies shutting down? How does inflaming the Islamic world against us advance the president's goal of persuading the world that Islam is not America's enemy?

President Bush must begin to realize that his blind solidarity with Sharon, who has shown himself contemptuous of America's interests in the larger region, is among the greatest crosses we have to bear in the war on terror.

A year after the fall of Baghdad, Bush's men are boasting of his triumphs – the overthrow of the Taliban, the liberation of Iraq, not one act of terror on U.S. soil in two years. But consider the war from bin Laden's vantage point.

The murderous strike of 9-11 electrified America-haters, but produced blowback and near total disaster for bin Laden. In weeks, Bush had united a great coalition, smashed the Taliban and almost finished Osama himself at Tora Bora. Then came Iraq.

Here Bush played straight into bin Laden's hand. By attacking a prostrate Arab nation that played no role in 9-11, we united Arab and Islamic peoples in hatred of America. We shattered alliances and ignited a guerrilla war.

According to a Pew poll, U.S. prestige in the Muslim world has never been lower. Bush is widely detested. In Pakistan, 65 percent of the people hold Osama in high regard, while 8 percent are positive on Bush. We are losing the hearts and minds of the Islamic young, creating a spawning pool out of which future terrorists will emerge.

Now, an attack in Madrid has left 200 dead and blown a hole in our coalition. A socialist has come to power who intends to pull Spanish troops out of Iraq. Poland, too, has begun to waver

As Bush wins battles, Osama advances toward his strategic goals: Demonization of America as the enemy of Islam, isolation of America as an imperialist aggressor against Arab nations and the enabler of Sharon, and unification of Islam's young behind bin Laden's ultimate war aim: the expulsion of America from all Muslim lands.

The legendary Col. John Boyd described strategy as appending to oneself as many centers of power as possible, while isolating one's enemy from as many centers of power as possible.

Bush I did this brilliantly in the Gulf War, isolating Saddam. Bush II did it brilliantly in the Afghan war, isolating the Taliban. Now Bush has fallen into the trap his father avoided. He is letting Ariel Sharon create the perception that America's war and Israel's war are one and the same.

In the Middle East, Sharon has no friends. He does not care whom he alienates. But we are a world power with friend, allies and interests in 22 Arab and 57 Muslim countries.

To protect our interests, to win our war on Al Qaeda, it is imperative that we not let ourselves become as isolated as Israel is today.

Between America and Israel there are thus common interests and a collision of interests. Sharon does not want us to confine our war on terror to those who attacked us on 9-11. He wants us to expand our list of enemies to include his list of enemies: Arafat, Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia. He wants us to escalate "the firemen's war" into an American war on Israel's enemies, so, together, we can establish joint hegemony in the Middle East.

If Sharon and his acolytes in the Bush administration succeed in conflating Sharon's war with America's war, we could lose our war. Why cannot the president see what is going on?

[i][b]Patrick J. Buchanan was twice a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination and the Reform Party’s candidate in 2000. He is also a founder and editor of the new magazine, The American Conservative. Now a commentator and columnist, he served three presidents in the White House, was a founding panelist of three national television shows, and is the author of seven books. See his MSNBC site[/b][/i]., http://antiwar.com/pat/?artic...

10 Minute Rice on '60 Minutes': Three Lies And No Apology

03.29.04 (7:09 am) [edit]

2004 Rigged? Bush Activists Are Top Election Officials (The Umpire Takes Side) ...

03.29.04 (6:39 am) [edit]

[b]When the Umpires Take Sides[/b]

When Katherine Harris had to decide which candidate won Florida in 2000, many people were disturbed to learn she was both the state's top elections official and co-chairwoman of the Florida Bush-Cheney campaign. This year, that kind of unhealthy injection of partisanship into the administration of a presidential election could happen again.

Ms. Harris's successor is staying out of partisan politics this year, but other secretaries of state are diving right in. In Missouri, as important a swing state as Florida, the secretary of state has a top position in the Missouri Bush-Cheney campaign. In Michigan, another battleground state, the secretary of state has signed on as co-chairwoman of the Bush-Cheney campaign, and has been supporting an openly Republican voter registration drive.

When international observers monitor voting in new democracies, a key factor they look for is nonpartisan election administration. (A guidebook monitors use instructs that this can be done by the use of either "mainly professional" or "politically balanced" administrators.) This advice is rarely followed here at home. Decisions about voting machines and voter eligibility, and about who has won a close election, are often in the hands of partisan officials. The private companies that are rapidly moving into the elections field have political ties as well. To remove the appearance, and perhaps the reality, of bias, this culture of partisanship in election operations should be dismantled.

In most states, the top election arbiter is a secretary of state who ran for office as a Republican or Democrat. While some try to carve out a more independent identity once in the job, many are actively involved in electioneering for their party, or in their own campaigns for higher office. West Virginia's secretary of state, who has installed a new statewide voter database and made important decisions about what voting machines the state will use, is running in his state's Democratic primary for governor. Ohio's secretary of state, who has been overseeing the purchase of new machines in his state, is also running for governor.

Many of the decisions secretaries of state make have the potential to change an election's results. Purging voting rolls too aggressively, as Ms. Harris did in 2000, can change the party breakdown of the electorate. Not purging voters who are ineligible can, too. Decisions about whether and where to install more reliable voting machines can change the outcome. So can rules about processing new registrations and the location of polling places.

Private companies are playing a large, and growing, role in election administration. This trend has the potential to "professionalize" the system, but unfortunately, most of these companies have hurt their own credibility by getting involved in partisan politics. The chief executive of Diebold, one of the leading electronic voting-machine manufacturers, made headlines when he wrote a fund-raising letter saying he was committed to seeing President Bush re-elected. Other leading companies have, more quietly, abandoned their own neutrality. Accenture, which put together a voter database for Florida and is preparing one for Pennsylvania, is a generous donor to both parties, although it gives about twice as much money to Republicans as Democrats.

The idea of getting the secretary of state out of partisan politics is a foreign one to many states, where the job has always been an elective one. But at the very least, no state official who helps run elections should continue to be involved in political campaigns or other partisan activity. Companies that do this work should not make campaign contributions, and states should not hire them if they do. This country should start holding its election system to the same standards of impartiality that its election monitors routinely apply to others.

[i][b]N.Y. TIMES[/b][/i], http://www.nytimes.com/2004/0...

2004 Rigged? Bush Activists Are Top Election Officials (The Umpire Takes Side) ...

03.29.04 (6:37 am) [edit]

Condoleezza Rice Obfuscates And Makes An Asshole Of Herself On '60 Minutes'

03.28.04 (7:53 pm) [edit]

[b]Department of threading it awfully fine[/b].

From tonight's [i]60 Minutes [/i]interview http://www.cbsnews.com/storie... ...

ED BRADLEY: The secretary of state, defense, the director of the CIA, have all testified in public under oath before the commission. If - if you can talk to us and other news programs, why can't you talk to the commission in public and under oath?

CONDOLEEZZA RICE: Nothing would be better, from my point of view, than to be able to testify. I would really like to do that. But there is an important principle here edit it is a longstanding principle that sitting national security advisers do not testify before the Congress.

ED BRADLEY: But there are some people who look at this and say, "But this - this was an unprecedented event. Nothing like this ever happened to this country before. And this is an occasion where you can put that executive privilege aside. It's a big enough issue to talk in public."

CONDOLEEZZA RICE: It is an unprecedented event. We've said that many, many times. But this commission is rightly not concentrating on what happened on the day of September 11.. So, this is not a matter of what happened on that day, as extraordinary as it is - as it was. This is a matter of policy. And we have yet to find an example of a national security advisor, sitting national security advisor, who has - been willing to testify on matters of policy.

To call this explanation tortured is to give human rights abusers a bad name.

Look at these last two sentences of Rice' flagrantly bogus argument: "This is a matter of policy. And we have yet to find an example of a national security advisor, sitting national security advisor, who has - been willing to testify on matters of policy."

Each word of these two sentences was chosen to fit an unhelpful set of facts.

Sandy Berger twice testified in 1990s -- once in 1994 on Haiti and then again in 1997 during the Asian campaign contribution hearings. In 1994 though Berger was Deputy National Security Advisor. Constitutionally, it's not at all clear to me why a Deputy National Security Advisor should be more obliged to testify before congress than his boss. But that's their out in this case.

Then in 1997, when he was NSC Director, he was testifying in the course of an investigation into a scandal -- but certainly one with policy implications, since I'm pretty sure what they were asking him about was whether money affected policy. Why this is a constitutionally significant distinction is lost on me too. But again, that's their out -- it wasn't about 'policy'.

National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski testified before congress in 1980. But again, that was in the context of an investigation -- into an accusation that Billy Carter, the then-president's brother, had tried to influence the US government on behalf of Libya.

But, again, that's not 'policy'. So apparently by Rice's standard, it doesn't count.

I think there's a growing realization in Washington this weekend that Rice is going to testify, whether she realizes it yet or not. Among several reasons why is the fact that her rationales for not testifying are just becoming more and more visibly bogus, drawing tortured distinctions of no clear constitutional import.

She might just as easily have argued that they have found no record of a National Security Advisor named Rice testifying before congress, or a female NSC Director testifying, or one who served under a Republican president. Each would have made about as much sense. And on top of this you have the fact that the separation of powers argument is questionable at best because the commission itself is not an arm of congress: http://www.9-11commission.gov... .

[i][b]Joshua Micah Marshall, TalkingPointsMemo[/b][/i] , http://www.talkingpointsmemo....

Dubya Didn't Give A Rat's Ass About Thwarting Bin Laden's 9/11 Attacks Upon America!!!

03.28.04 (7:43 pm) [edit]

[b]White House retreat on 9/11 claims [/b]

A member of the 9/11 commission said yesterday that national security adviser Condoleezza Rice indicated in a private session she was wrong to have once stated no one expected terrorists to use planes as missiles.

The White House reportedly also backpedaled yesterday on whether President Bush pressed counterterror czar Richard Clarke the day after the attacks to find evidence that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was involved.

Clarke said the meeting occurred in the White House Situation Room and presidential aides said earlier this week the meeting never happened. But CBS News reported last night that White House aides now concede the meeting "probably" occurred.

The conflicting versions of events before and after 9/11 will ensure that debate will continue through the weekend over Clarke's accusations that Bush downgraded the importance of counterterrorism.

Clarke, Rice and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld will all appear on talk shows tomorrow to press their case.

Rice, who has refused to testify before the panel under oath and in public, met with the commission privately for four hours Feb. 7.

One issue was her May 16, 2002, statement at the White House when she said, "I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center . . . that they would try to use . . . a hijacked airplane as a missile." Intelligence reports had detailed such plans as much as five years before 9/11.

Richard Ben-Veniste, a member of the 9/11 panel, said that during a closed door session Rice revised that statement.

"She corrected [herself] in our private interview by saying, 'I could not anticipate that they would try to use an airplane as a missile,' but acknowledging that the intelligence community could anticipate it," Ben-Veniste said.

"No reports of the use of airplanes as weapons were briefed or presented to Dr. Rice prior to May 2002," said her spokesman Sean McCormack.

The White House is insisting that Rice get another shot before the panel to rebuff sensational charges by Clarke, but commissioners are still balking at Rice's position that she cannot testify under oath and in public because of executive privilege.

"This [latest discrepancy] is yet another reason why we need to have Dr. Rice come before us in public rather than at the highest classified level," said Democratic commissioner Tim Roemer, a former Indiana congressman.

Even some of Rice's associates as well as congressional Republicans think muzzling Rice is a political blunder. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist said yesterday he supports the decision, but he added, "Personally, I think her voice is so good, so powerful that to have her come before the 9/11 commission publicly would be to the administration's benefit."

[i][b]BY KENNETH R. BAZINET and THOMAS M. DeFRANK
DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU[/b][/i], http://www.nydailynews.com/03...

Fascist Right-wingers: Faux Journalism is the Bush White House's New Ally

03.28.04 (11:20 am) [edit]

Real journalism may be reeling, but faux journalism rocks. As an entertainment category in the cultural marketplace, it may soon rival reality TV and porn. American television is increasingly awash in fake anchors delivering fake news, some of them far more trenchant than real anchors delivering real news. Even CNBC, a financial news network, is chasing after the success of the faux-anchor Jon Stewart; its new nightly fake newscast, presided over by a formerly funny "Saturday Night Live" fake anchor, Dennis Miller, is being promoted with far more zeal than was ever lavished on CNBC's real "News With Brian Williams."

Turn on real news shows like "Dateline NBC" and "Larry King Live," meanwhile, and you are all too likely to find Jayson Blair, the lying former reporter of The New York Times, continuing to play a reporter on television as he fabricates earnest blather about his concern for journalistic standards.

Elsewhere on the dial you'll learn that a fake news show (Stewart's "The Daily Show") has been in a booking war with a real news show ("Hardball") over who would first be able to interview the real (I think) Desmond Tutu. At such absurd moments, real journalism and its evil twin merge into a mind-bending mutant that would defy a polygraph's ability to sort out the lies from the truth.

This phenomenon has been good news for the Bush administration, which has responded to the growing national appetite for fictionalized news by producing a steady supply of its own. Of late it has gone so far as to field its own pair of Jayson Blairs, hired at taxpayers' expense: Karen Ryan and Alberto Garcia, the "reporters" who appeared in television "news" videos distributed by the Department of Health and Human Services to local news shows. The point of these spots - which were broadcast whole or in part as actual news by more than 50 stations in 40 states - was to hype the new Medicare prescription-drug benefit as an unalloyed godsend to elderly voters. They are part of a public relations campaign, which, with its $124 million budget, would dwarf most actual news organizations.

When one real reporter, Robert Pear of The New York Times, blew the whistle on these television "news" stories this month, a government spokesman defended them with pure Orwell-speak: "Anyone who has questions about this practice needs to do some research on modern public information tools." The government also informed us that Ryan was no impostor but an actual "freelance journalist." The Columbia Journalism Review, investigating further, found that Ryan's past assignments included serving as a television shill for pharmaceutical companies in infomercials plugging FluMist and Excedrin.

Given that drug companies may also be the principal beneficiaries of the United States' new Medicare law, she is nothing if not consistent in her journalistic patrons. But she is a freelance reporter only in the sense that Mike Ditka would qualify as one when appearing in Levitra ads. As for the mystery of Alberto Garcia's journalistic bonafides, it remains at this writing unresolved. His reporting career has not left a trace on any data bank. Perhaps he is the creation of Stephen Glass, the serial fantasist who once ruled the pages of The New Republic.

The more real journalism declines, the easier it is for such government "infoganda" (as The Daily Show's Rob Corddry calls it) to fill the vacuum. President George W. Bush tries to facilitate this process by shutting out the real news media as much as possible. By the start of this year, he had held only 11 solo press conferences, as opposed to his father's count of 71 by the same point in his presidency. (Even the criminally secretive Richard Nixon had held 23.) Bush has declared that he rarely reads newspapers and that he prefers to "go over the heads of the filter" - as he calls the news media - and "speak directly to the people." To this end, he gave a series of interviews to regional broadcasters last autumn - a holding action, no doubt, until Karen Ryan and Alberto Garcia could be hired to fill that role. When the president made an exception last month and took questions from an actual frontline journalist, NBC television's Tim Russert, his performance was so maladroit that the experiment is unlikely to be repeated soon.

There is no point in bothering with actual news people anyway, when you can make up your own story and make it stick. No fake news story has become more embedded in our culture than the administration's account of its actions on Sept. 11. As The Wall Street Journal reported on its front page this week - just as the former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke was going public with his parallel account - many of this story's most familiar details are utter fiction. Bush's repeated claim that one of his "first acts" of that morning was to put the military on alert is false. So are the president's claims that he watched the first airplane hit the World Trade Center on television that morning. (No such video yet existed.) Nor was Air Force One under threat as Bush flew around the country, delaying his return to Washington.

Yet the fake narrative of Sept. 11 has been scrupulously maintained by the White House for more than two years. Although the administration has tried at every juncture to stonewall the Sept. 11 investigative commission, its personnel, including the president, had all the time in the world for the producer of a TV movie, Showtime's "DC 9/11: Time of Crisis" The result was a scenario that further rewrote the history of that day, stirring steroids into false tales of presidential derring-do. To shore up the Karl Rove version of Sept. 11 once Richard Clarke went public with his alternative tale on last Sunday's "60 Minutes," the White House placed Condoleezza Rice on all five morning news shows the next day. The administration is confident that it can reinstate its bogus scenario - particularly given that Rice, unlike Clarke, is refusing to take the risk of reciting it under oath to the Sept. 11 commission.

After Sept. 11, similar fake-news techniques helped speed us into "Operation Iraqi Freedom." The runup to the war was falsified by a barrage of those "modern public information tools," including 16 words of Tom Clancy-style fiction in the State of the Union address. John Burns of The New York Times, speaking by phone from Iraq to a postmortem on war coverage sponsored by the University of California at Berkeley's journalism school this month, said of the real press back then: "We failed the American public by being insufficiently critical about elements of the administration's plan to go to war."

What few journalistic efforts were made to penetrate the trumped-up rationales for war were easily defeated by the administration's false news reports of impending biological attacks and mushroom clouds. To see how the faux journalism sausage was made, go to www.reform.house.gov/min, where a searchable database posted by Representative Henry Waxman identifies "237 specific misleading statements about the threat posed by Iraq" made by Bush and members of his administration.

As for the embedded journalists who filled in the rest of the story, a candid assessment was delivered by Lieutenant Colonel Rick Long, the former head of media relations for the Marine Corps, speaking at the Berkeley symposium: "Frankly, our job is to win the war. Part of that is information warfare." He added: "So we are going to attempt to dominate the information environment...Overall, we were very happy with the outcome."

[b]Frank Rich[/b], The New York Times http://www.iht.com/cgi-bin/ge...

Richard Clarke is Telling the Truth -- Dubya & Co. Are LIARS ...

03.28.04 (11:15 am) [edit]

I have no doubt that Richard Clarke, the former National Security Council official who has launched a broadside against President Bush's counterterrorism policies, is telling the truth about every single charge. There are three reasons for this confidence.

First, his basic accusations are consistent with tales told by other officials, including some who had no significant dealings with Clarke.

Second, the White House's attempts at rebuttal have been extremely weak and contradictory. If Clarke were wrong, one would expect the comebacks—especially from Bush's aides, who excel at the counterstrike—to be stronger and more substantive.

Third, I went to graduate school with Clarke in the late 1970s, at MIT's political science department, and called him as an occasional source in the mid-'80s when he was in the State Department and I was a newspaper reporter. There were good things and dubious things about Clarke, traits that inspired both admiration and leeriness. The former: He was very smart, a highly skilled (and utterly nonpartisan) analyst, and he knew how to get things done in a calcified bureaucracy. The latter: He was arrogant, made no effort to disguise his contempt for those who disagreed with him, and blatantly maneuvered around all obstacles to make sure his views got through.

The key thing, though, is this: Both sets of traits tell me he's too shrewd to write or say anything in public that might be decisively refuted. As Daniel Benjamin, another terrorism specialist who worked alongside Clarke in the Clinton White House, put it in a phone conversation today, "Dick did not survive and flourish in the bureaucracy all those years by leaving himself open to attack."

Clarke did suffer one setback in his 30-year career in high office, though he doesn't mention it in his book. James Baker, the first President Bush's secretary of state, fired Clarke from his position as director of the department's politico-military bureau. (Bush's NSC director, Brent Scowcroft, hired him almost instantly.) I doubt we'll be hearing from Baker on this episode: He fired Clarke for being too close to Israel—not a point the Bush family's political savior is likely to make in an election season. (For details on this unwritten chapter and on why Clarke hasn't talked to me for over 15 years, click here.)

But on to the substance. Clarke's main argument—made in his new book, Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror, in lengthy interviews on CBS's 60 Minutes and PBS's Charlie Rose Show, and presumably in his testimony scheduled for tomorrow before the 9/11 Commission—is that Bush has done (as Clarke put it on CBS) "a terrible job" at fighting terrorism. Specifically: In the summer of 2001, Bush did almost nothing to deal with mounting evidence of an impending al-Qaida attack. Then, after 9/11, his main response was to attack Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9/11. This move not only distracted us from the real war on terrorism, it fed into Osama Bin Laden's propaganda—that the United States would invade and occupy an oil-rich Arab country—and thus served as the rallying cry for new terrorist recruits.

Clarke's charges have raised a furor because of who he is. In every administration starting with Ronald Reagan's, Clarke was a high-ranking official in the State Department or the NSC, dealing mainly with countering weapons of mass destruction and terrorism. Under Clinton and the first year of George W. Bush, he worked in the White House as the national coordinator for terrorism, a Cabinet-level post created specifically for his talents. When the terrorists struck on Sept. 11, Condi Rice, Bush's national security adviser, designated Clarke as the "crisis manager;" he ran the interagency meetings from the Situation Room, coordinating—in some cases, directing—the response.

Clarke backs up his chronicle with meticulous detail, but the basic charges themselves should not be so controversial; certainly, they're nothing new. According to former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill's account in Ron Suskind's* The Price of Loyalty, Bush's top officials talked about invading Iraq from the very start of the administration. Jim Mann's new book about Bush's war Cabinet, Rise of the Vulcans, reveals the historic depths of this obsession.

Most pertinent, Rand Beers, the official who succeeded Clarke after he left the White House in February 2003, resigned in protest just one month later—five days before the Iraqi war started—for precisely the same reason that Clarke quit. In June, he told the Washington Post, "The administration wasn't matching its deeds to its words in the war on terror. They're making us less secure, not more." And: "The difficult, long-term issues both at home and abroad have been avoided, neglected or shortchanged, and generally underfunded." (For more about Beers, including his association with Clarke and whether there's anything pertinent about his current position as a volunteer national security adviser to John Kerry's presidential campaign, click here.)

Clarke's distinction, of course, is that he was the ultimate insider—as highly and deeply inside, on this issue, as anyone could imagine. And so his charges are more credible, potent, and dangerous. So, how has Team Bush gone after Clarke? Badly.

To an unusual degree, the Bush people can't get their story straight. On the one hand, Condi Rice has said that Bush did almost everything that Clarke recommended he do. On the other hand, Vice President Dick Cheney, appearing on Rush Limbaugh's show, acted as if Clarke were a lowly, eccentric clerk: "He wasn't in the loop, frankly, on a lot of this stuff." This is laughably absurd. Clarke wasn't just in the loop, he was the loop.

Cheney's elaboration of his dismissal is blatantly misleading. "He was moved out of the counterterrorism business over to the cybersecurity side of things ... attacks on computer systems and, you know, sophisticated information technology," Cheney scoffed. Limbaugh replied, "Well, now, that explains a lot, that answer right there."

It explains nothing. First, he wasn't "moved out"; he transferred, at his own request, out of frustration with being cut out of the action on broad terrorism policy, to a new NSC office dealing with cyberterrorism. Second, he did so after 9/11. (He left government altogether in February 2003.)

In a further effort to minimize Clarke's importance, a talking-points paper put out by the White House press office states that, contrary to his claims, "Dick Clarke never had Cabinet rank." At the same time, the paper denies—again, contrary to the book—that he was demoted: He "continued to be the National Coordinator on Counter-terrorism."

Both arguments are deceptive. Clarke wasn't a Cabinet secretary, but as Clinton's NCC, he ran the "Principals Committee" meetings on counterterrorism, which were attended by Cabinet secretaries. Two NSC senior directors reported to Clarke directly, and he had reviewing power over relevant sections of the federal budget.

Clarke writes (and nobody has disputed) that when Condi Rice took over the NSC, she kept him onboard and preserved his title but demoted the position. He would no longer participate in, much less run, Principals' meetings. He would report to deputy secretaries. He would have no staff and would attend no more meetings with budget officials.

Clarke probably resented the slight, took it personally. But he also saw it as a downgrading of the issue, a sign that al-Qaida was no longer taken as the urgent threat that the Clinton White House had come to interpret it. (One less-noted aspect of Clarke's book is its detailed description of the major steps that Clinton took to combat terrorism.)

The White House talking-points paper is filled with these sorts of distortions. For instance, it notes that Bush didn't need to meet with Clarke because, unlike Clinton, he met every day with CIA Director George Tenet, who talked frequently about al-Qaida.

But here's how Clarke describes those meetings:

[i][Tenet] and I regularly commiserated that al Qaeda was not being addressed more seriously by the new administration. ... We agreed that Tenet would ensure that the president's daily briefings would continue to be replete with threat information on al Qaeda[/i].

The problem is: Nothing happened. (It is significant, by the way, that Tenet has not been recruited—not successfully, anyway—to rebut Clarke's charges. Clarke told Charlie Rose that he was "very close" to Tenet. The two come off as frustrated allies in Clarke's book.)

The White House document insists Bush did take the threat seriously, telling Rice at one point "that he was 'tired of swatting flies' and wanted to go on the offense against al-Qaeda."

Here's how Clarke describes that exchange:

[i]President Bush, reading the intelligence every day and noticing that there was a lot about al Qaeda, asked Condi Rice why it was that we couldn't stop "swatting flies" and eliminate al Qaeda. Rice told me about the conversation and asked how the plan to get al Qaeda was coming in the Deputies' Committee. "It can be presented to the Principals in two days, whenever we can get a meeting," I pressed. Rice promised to get to it soon. Time passed.[/i]

The Principals meeting, which Clarke urgently requested during Bush's first week in office, did not take place until one week before 9/11. In his 60 Minutes interview, Clarke spelled out the significance of this delay. He contrasted July 2001 with December 1999, when the Clinton White House got word of an impending al-Qaida attack on Los Angeles International Airport and Principals meetings were called instantly and repeatedly:

[i]In December '99, every day or every other day, the head of the FBI, the head of the CIA, the Attorney General had to go to the White House and sit in a meeting and report on all the things that they personally had done to stop the al Qaeda attack, so they were going back every night to their departments and shaking the trees personally and finding out all the information. If that had happened in July of 2001, we might have found out in the White House, the Attorney General might have found out that there were al Qaeda operatives in the United States. FBI, at lower levels, knew [but] never told me, never told the highest levels in the FBI. ... We could have caught those guys and then we might have been able to pull that thread and get more of the conspiracy. I'm not saying we could have stopped 9/11, but we could have at least had a chance[/i].

That's what Clarke says is the tragedy of Bush's inaction, and nobody in the White House has dealt with the charge at all.

[b]Dick Clarke Is Telling the Truth, Why he's right about Bush's negligence on terrorism[/b]., By Fred Kaplan, Slate, http://slate.msn.com/id/20976...

Billionaires for Bush Get Serious ...

03.28.04 (9:22 am) [edit]

[b]The Birth of the Meta-Protest Rally?[/b]

The protests in mid-March that greeted President Bush on Long Island for a $2,000-a-plate fund-raiser after the groundbreaking for a nearby 9/11 memorial seemed pretty typical at first. The crowd of 200 or so activists carried the usual placards denouncing war, oil and environmental policies. One Sierra Club member wore a doormat decorated with tufts of glued fuzz to resemble, she said, ''Mothra, the giant moth that defeated Godzilla.'' Across a vast artery of screaming traffic stood the Bush supporters, maybe 50 people. A small blond girl waved a big flag. Then a new group of Bush supporters tumbled out of a van on the wrong side of the street.

The men handsome in tuxedos and top hats and the women stunning in ball gowns with elbow-length gloves, they marched boldly past the protesters. They shouted, ''We want Bush!'' One placard they held up read, ''Because He's Just Like Us.'' Hisses traveled through the body of the mob, as a policeman stopped traffic so they could cross. Applause erupted from the ranks of the flag-wavers at the arrival of such beautiful people. Pro-Bush people happily backed up, ceding the most prime piece of their ''free speech zone.'' Then it happened. Halfway across the street -- in that moment of eerie suspension as the bare flick of a police officer's hand caused the dragon of traffic to pause -- you could see the epiphany. The newcomers unfurled their giant banner: ''Billionaires for Bush.'' The revelation -- is this somebody's idea of joke? -- moved across the faces of the crowd like a wave undulating through a sports arena. Amid the hand-drawn placards, the Billionaires unsheathed their professionally printed, brightly colored laminated posters.

''Leave No Billionaire Behind.''

''Corporations Are People Too.''

The Billionaires popped corks and drank bubbly from flutes. Huge cigars and cigarette holders appeared.

When the Billionaires started a chant -- ''Tax Work Not Wealth'' -- the pro-Bush folks shouted back, ''Tax Cuts!'' But irony has a toxic effect on earnestness. The counterchant quickly faded, and right away the anger began to smolder.

''How many of you Billionaires put somebody to work, huh?'' a Bush supporter named Nick Diaz shouted.

''Work?'' replied Phil T. Rich (otherwise known as Andrew Boyd). ''We've put 2.7 million people out of work.''

''You're barking up the wrong tree,'' Diaz huffed. ''Why are you here? Nobody's going to listen to you.''

But, of course, everybody was listening to them.

Originally named ''Billionaires for Bush (or Gore)'' in 2000, the group dropped the ''or Gore'' after the election. For improvisational volunteers, they are surprisingly organized. Their Web site, billionairesforbush.com, carries all the downloadable info needed to start a local chapter. ''We're like a virus,'' Rich said. According to Iona Bigga Yacht (aka Alice Meaker), director of field organizations, there are 20 chapters, some of which are just starting up. During the Long Island protest, some folks crossed the street from the anti-Bush side to find out how to start a local chapter.

Two days before the Long Island protest, at the Billionaires' weekly meeting, the evening progressed through committee reports and planning for future events, like the Spring Bling-Bling Billionaire Ball. Since so much of street theater begins with the characters they invent, there was some oohing and ahhing over names, like the group's costume designer Miyong Noh's ethnically synch-ed K. Ching. Others liked Elizabeth Felicella's Cora Uptonproud and Jon Wagner's Robb deVerker. ''I'm of Belgian heritage,'' he explained.

After breaking up into small groups, one crew worked on new slogans for Bush's Long Island visit. They tossed up possibilities -- ''Jobless Recovery: It's the Best Kind'' -- then tossed them out again.

''How about 'Outsource Now!''' said Quid Pro Quo (aka Ben Maurer). Like his name, Quo lacks the nuance found among many Billionaires. A stout fellow with a ward heeler's eagerness, he quickly and frequently slips out of character and starts to wail like an unwashed protester.

Yet this is where street theater can transcend parody. The sensibility here is probably closest to the Onion newspaper. The Onion's cunning irony -- ''Bush Reaches Out to Hispanic Community With Generous Tip'' -- works only if the prose is fitted into the deadpan style of newspaper headlines. Similarly, the Billionaires for Bush need to maintain character within the inert form that has become the political protest. It requires finding precisely the right balance of earnest intent and absurdity, that fine line -- as Nigel Tufnel called it in ''This Is Spinal Tap'' -- ''between clever and stupid.''

Staying in character is important but never easy. On the street in Long Island, Phil T. Rich was zinging the crowd with supercilious one-liners while Quid Pro Quo couldn't resist lapsing into complex discussions of, say, the history of the mujahedeen. Other Billionaires tried to keep the mood light with parody.

''Do you have a real job?'' shouted a Bush supporter.

''I live off my trust fund,'' said Monty Moneybucks (Seth Appel).

''Work is for suckers,'' said Robin Eublind (Paul Bartlett).

Then a woman named Theresa MacKnight, who was standing among the Bush supporters, just couldn't take it anymore. ''You're talking in a character mode,'' MacKnight shouted. ''You get all dressed up to get your picture in the paper. But what are the answers to our problems?''

''Never have so many sacrificed so much to enrich so few!''

''What are the answers to our problems?'' MacKnight shrieked. ''Was 9/11 a problem?'' And right away, you could feel it, like a cold chill whipping in at the end of a nice afternoon. If no earnest protest can withstand irony, no irony can withstand the invocation of that September morning. ''I had a cousin who was a firefighter,'' MacKnight cried out. ''He perished in 9/11.'' The chants ceased. The center of gravity shifted.

Andrew Boyd (Phil T. Rich), said, ''Ma'am, we're not making fun--''

''You sure are,'' MacKnight screamed. ''Tell his widow and his two kids!'' There was an unnerving pause.

Boyd took off his top hat and pocketed his cigar. He actually said, ''I'm coming out of character.'' He stepped toward her. As if afraid, MacKnight bolted away some 15 feet. A big man put out his hand and said, ''She doesn't want to talk to you.''

''I'm sorry for your loss,'' Boyd said quietly down a vast stretch of sidewalk.

Undeterred, Quid Pro Quo, who never did quite get into character, bounded over to MacKnight. He was all John Belushi energy, a fast-talker so full of exuberance that within minutes Quo and MacKnight were huddled beside an office building, having an intense but honest discussion. Quo unreeled mountains of facts about Bush. It lasted 15 minutes this passionate dialogue, this actual political exchange. And then. . . .

They hugged.

A certain lightness of being reclaimed the Billionaires. Sparkling cider once again filled the flutes, and more chants cranked up. As late afternoon arrived, the Billionaires were almost the only people left on the pro-Bush side of the street. So they agreed to move base camp across the river of traffic, where the professional protesters were still in high dudgeon. Maybe there was somebody left over there who had yet to get the joke that has become America's political debate.

[i][b]Jack Hitt is a contributing writer for the New York Times magazine[/b][/i]. - http://www.nytimes.com/2004/0...

CIA Warned Dubya Daily About Threats of Terrorism, But Brain-Dead Dubya Didn't Respond!

03.28.04 (9:17 am) [edit]

[b]9/11 Panel Provokes a Discussion the White House Hoped to Avoid[/b]

In the summer of 2001, according to witnesses interviewed by the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 hijackings, President Bush was told repeatedly of terror warnings pouring into American intelligence agencies, mostly about threats overseas.

The director of central intelligence, George J. Tenet, who briefed Mr. Bush on threats almost daily, "was around town literally pounding on desks saying that something is happening, this is an unprecedented level of threat information," said Richard Armitage, the deputy secretary of state, who was quoted in a Congressional report last year.

But even as the warnings spiked in June and July that year, there appeared to be little sense of alarm at the White House, officials of the Central Intelligence Agency told the commission. It was not until Sept. 4 that Mr. Bush's national security team approved a plan intended to eradicate Al Qaeda and not until Sept. 10 that Mr. Tenet was told to put the plan into effect.

Now, nearly two and half years later, the issue of whether Mr. Bush and his advisers failed to respond adequately to the threat of terror before Sept. 11, 2001, has become the focus of intense scrutiny and debate in Washington.

The White House had long hoped to avoid just such a discussion of Mr. Bush's actions before the hijackings, fearing it would draw attention to the first months of his presidency rather than the period after Sept. 11 when he took military action against Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. The White House had opposed the creation of the independent commission and for many months cooperated reluctantly with the panel.

White House fears were realized this week when Richard A. Clarke, the former White House counterterrorism coordinator, depicted the first months of the Bush presidency as a time of indecision and inaction on terrorism. Many of the preliminary findings of the commission supported the picture Mr. Clarke outlined in his new book, "Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror," published by Free Press.

Politically, as the presidential campaign rolls forward, a pivotal question is whether that portrait, which the White House worked feverishly to undermine, will raise questions about what has been a fundamental part of his re-election appeal. Mr. Bush is expected to defend his conduct when he answers questions to be asked by the commission's chairman and vice chairman, assuring continued attention on this phase of his presidency. They will question Mr. Bush in private for about an hour. Vice President Dick Cheney has also agreed to answer questions about his activities prior to the attacks.

On Sunday, Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, will appear on "60 Minutes," the CBS program on which Mr. Clarke first criticized his former White House colleagues a week ago.

The commission is expected to release a report on its finding in late July, when the Democrats will meet in Boston to nominate Mr. Bush's opponent.

Mr. Bush has often talked about how his presidency did not, in a real sense, begin until Sept. 11 when, he said, he found in the aftermath of the attacks the defining purpose of his presidency. Mr. Bush and his aides have made his prosecution of the war on terror the touchstone of his re-election campaign.

Mr. Bush and his aides say they believe that his leadership after Sept. 11 created an irrevocable bond with voters that would be nearly impossible to erase and will ultimately overshadow any questions raised about the pre-Sept. 11 period of his presidency.

Still, they have acknowledged that this would be a very different kind of election had it not been for the attacks, and that any advantage the president enjoys going into the election is because of that chapter of his presidency. The White House selected the time and place of the convention where Mr. Bush will be nominated — New York City, less than two weeks before the third anniversary of the attacks — with that in mind.

Several Republicans not associated with the Bush campaign said that they were concerned about the turn of events, warning that the commission findings and Mr. Clarke's testimony were a challenge to the central pillar of Mr. Bush's campaign appeal: his handling of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Senator John Kerry, Mr. Bush's likely opponent, has long said that a critical part of his own strategy to defeat Mr. Bush was to at least even the playing field on issues of national security and foreign affairs, and thus move the presidential debate to the issue of the economy.

"Let's be as generous as possible," said one Republican strategist, who said he did not want to be quoted by name in criticizing the White House. "If voters believe Clarke, than Bush's greatest strength — his response to terrorism — is significantly eroded. This Clarke stuff is significantly bad for Bush."

The net effect of the week's debate has, Mr. Bush's advisers argued, been to at best discredit Mr. Clarke and at worst cloud the issue. "I think in the end, he's not going to have any credibility," Charles Black, a Republican consultant with ties to the White House, said of Mr. Clarke. "I think any objective person watching this is going to come away saying this is confusing at best."

The White House is responding to Mr. Clarke and the commission's findings with a strategy that includes Ms. Rice's "60 Minutes" appearance. She has made multiple appearances this week to make a case that she was actively involved in the decision making before Sept. 11.

Beyond that, Mr. Bush's aides hope to shift any blame about security shortcomings to the Clinton administration, arguing that the Bush administration was hardly alone in underestimating the potential threat of a domestic terrorist attack and that Mr. Clinton had no success in eliminating Al Qaeda.

The White House strategy also involves what officials said would be a continued effort to discredit Mr. Clarke and to confuse the dispute with a battery of accusations and counteraccusations intended to increasingly make this dispute appear to be a partisan fight between Republicans and Democrats.

"Our analysis is that the Democrats were so eager to thrust the 9/11 hearings into the political arena that they resorted to an overreach that kind of ignored some basic facts that the American people know about President Bush," said Nicolle Devenish, Mr. Bush's campaign communications director. "The world was watching in the days and weeks after 9/11."

A review of the evidence produced this week provides relatively little direct information about Mr. Bush's thinking, statements or actions regarding terrorism in the months after he took office. The commission's reports suggest that he left the issue largely to top advisers, who studied it, but took no concrete action against Al Qaeda or Osama bin Laden.

The commission's reports show that Mr. Bush was warned repeatedly about terrorist threats, but they provide no indication that he urged his aides to accelerate their policy review or produce specific plans in response to the warnings, from outgoing Clinton administration officials and from Mr. Tenet, his own intelligence chief.

In May 2001, Ms. Rice recalled in a private meeting with the commission, Mr. Bush grew impatient with repeated warnings in his daily briefings. At one point, Ms. Rice said, the president expressed impatience with "swatting flies," and urged his advisers to take more aggressive steps against Al Qaeda. But there is no indication that his complaints had any impact.

Instead, the evidence suggests that Mr. Bush allowed the terrorism issue to drift down the list of White House priorities from the relatively high importance given it by President Bill Clinton's national security aides. For the most part, Mr. Bush advisers told the commission that they continued the operational activities of their predecessors.

On Aug. 6, 2001, Mr. Bush, was told in a briefing held at his ranch in Crawford, Tex., that Mr. bin Laden's followers were believed to be capable of hijacking commercial jets in the United States. It was a scrap of information, based on a single 1999 British intelligence report and not enough to be considered credible.

The briefing was disclosed by Ms. Rice in May 2002 in an apparent effort to show that Mr. Bush was eager for information about terrorism and wanted to know more about the possibility of a Qaeda attack in the United States. But this week, Richard Ben-Veniste, a commission member, said that the C.I.A. had advised the panel that the agency's official who met with Mr. Bush did not recall him requesting the information and that the agency itself had come up with the idea of briefing the president on terrorist activities involving aircraft.

[i][b]By DAVID JOHNSTON and ADAM NAGOURNEY, N.Y. TIMES[/b][/i], http://nytimes.com/2004/03/28...

CIA Warned Dubya Daily About Threats of Terrorism, But Brain-Dead Dubya Didn't Respond!

03.28.04 (9:14 am) [edit]

CLAIM vs. FACT: Bush Statement of March 25, 2004

03.28.04 (8:38 am) [edit]

[b]CLAIM vs. FACT: Bush Statement of March 25, 2004[/b]

[b]CLAIM[/b]:

“Had I known that the enemy was going to use airplanes to strike America, to attack us, I would have used every resource, every asset, every power of this government to protect the American people.''

- [i]President Bush[/i], 3/25/04 [[i]Source[/i]: http://news.bostonherald.com/... ]

[b]FACT[/b]:

On August 6, 2001, President Bush personally “received a one-and-a-half page briefing advising him that Osama bin Laden was capable of a major strike against the US, and that the plot could include the hijacking of an American airplane."

-[i] Dateline NBC[/i], 9/10/02

[b]FACT[/b]:

U.S. and Italian officials were warned in July 2001 that Islamic terrorists had considered "crashing an airliner into the Genoa summit of industrialized nations."

- [i]LA Times[/i], 9/27/01 [[i]Source[/i]: http://www.latimes.com/news/n... ]

[b]FACT[/b]:

A 1999 report prepared by the Library of Congress for the National Intelligence Council "warned that Osama bin Laden's terrorists could hijack an airliner and fly it into government buildings like the Pentagon." The report specifically said, "Suicide bomber(s) belonging to al-Qaida's Martyrdom Battalion could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives…into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the CIA, or the White House."

- [i]CBS News[/i], 5/17/02 [[i]Source[/i]: http://www.cbsnews.com/storie... ]

Traitor Bushies Made Big Mistakes in the War on Terror

03.28.04 (8:33 am) [edit]

[b]Big Mistakes in the War on Terror[/b]

In President Bush's handling of the war on terror, two facts stand out: Before Sept. 11, he failed to take military action against an enemy that had attacked us, and later, he took military action against an enemy that had not attacked us.

He has a rejoinder for anyone who accuses him of failing to move against Al Qaeda early in his term. He said Tuesday, "George Tenet briefed me on a regular basis about the terrorist threat to the United States of America, and had my administration had any information that terrorists were going to attack New York City on Sept. 11, we would have acted."

We would have acted? What a relief. Unfortunately, Osama bin Laden was not kind enough to phone the Oval Office with a schedule of events planned for New York and Washington that day.

The president's response couldn't have reassured anyone hearing former White House counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke accuse him of paying too little attention to Al Qaeda before Sept. 11. Everything unearthed in the investigation by the 9/11 commission confirms the charge. Former U.S. Deputy Atty. Gen. Jamie Gorelick, the only commission member allowed to see all the president's daily intelligence briefings from before the attacks, said they showed an "extraordinary spike" of warnings about Al Qaeda in 2001, with information that "would set your hair on fire."

Yet the administration didn't feel the burn. Military officials told the commission that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's "new team was focused on other issues and was not particularly interested in their counterterrorism agenda." In June, the White House asked Rumsfeld to draw up plans to go after Al Qaeda. He didn't get around to that until, um, after Sept. 11.

The president's supporters offer two defenses, which unfortunately contradict each other. The first is that the real blame lies with Bill Clinton, who should have gone after Al Qaeda long before Bush arrived. That criticism is perfectly accurate, and the commission left no doubt of Clinton's failures. Despite repeated attacks, he didn't grasp that we were at war. But if it was obvious that Clinton was negligent, why was Bush in no particular hurry to correct that mistake?

Not until Sept. 4, 2001, did the administration finally complete a plan to deal with Al Qaeda, and it would have taken a long time to implement. Former Republican Sen. Slade Gorton of Washington asked Rumsfeld, "What made you think, even when you took over and got these first briefings, given the history of Al Qaeda and its successful attacks on Americans, that we had the luxury even of seven months before we could make any kind of response, much less three years?"

The alternative excuse is that no one foresaw that Al Qaeda might kill thousands of people on U.S. soil. In this view, Bush shouldn't be blamed for failing to see what is obvious only in hindsight. But the president was in a position to identify dangers that weren't visible to everyone else.

Thanks to a daily barrage of scary, secret intelligence reports, Bush had ample warning that Al Qaeda, which had hit us before, was likely to hit us again. Yet he dawdled. If Hussein had invaded Kuwait on Jan. 20, 2001, would Bush have needed seven months to retaliate? But the bombing of the USS Cole took place in October 2000, and Al Qaeda's role was known by the time the new president arrived.

After Sept. 11, Bush did exactly what he should have done in taking the war to Afghanistan, with stunning success. But instead of keeping the focus there after the Taliban fell, Bush insisted on targeting Hussein--who played no part in Sept. 11, showed no intention of attacking the U.S. and, it now appears, had no weapons of mass destruction.

Our distraction was a favor to bin Laden. Because of the administration's obsession with Iraq, Clarke notes, "the U.S. Special Forces who were trained to speak Arabic, the language of Al Qaeda, [were] pulled out of Afghanistan and sent to Iraq. Intelligence platforms supporting the military were also redirected." Afghanistan and bin Laden, amazingly, no longer justified our full attention.

Today, bin Laden and his top aides are still at large. Meanwhile, U.S. troops are under siege from terrorists in Iraq. Another president might have done worse. But Bush has to answer for two mistakes: waiting too long to prosecute it and diverting it into a fight that had nothing to do with terrorism. We paid a price for the first, and we're paying a price for the second.

[i][b]By Steve Chapman, Chicago Tribune[/b][/i], http://fairuse.1accesshost.co...

National Republicans Against Bush Meetup Day In 18 Days!

03.27.04 (4:56 pm) [edit]

[b]National Republicans Against Bush Meetup Day In 18 Days![/b]

Meetup with other local Republicans who are against President Bush. Discuss the negative impact that President Bush has had on the US, the Republican Party, and what we can possibly do about it.

Click on http://repagainstbush.meetup.... for more information!

U.N. Reports Israel Blocking Food Aid to Palestinians in Gaza

03.27.04 (11:50 am) [edit]

[b]Israel blocking aid, food to Gaza: UN [/b]

United Nations on Friday said Israel was blocking the movement of staff and supplies into the Gaza Strip, which may mean an end to some crucial aid programmes for Palestinian residents.

Israel has blocked "nearly all" UN and other relief agency vehicles from going through the Erez checkpoint into Gaza for the past three weeks, and food shipments through the commercial crossing of Karni are also on hold, it said.

"These unacceptable limitations on access for humanitarian staff and goods are undermining UN operational capability to deliver essential services and food relief to Gaza's civilian population," the world body said in a statement.

"The heads of the United Nations agencies may have to reduce or terminate some critical relief operations." The statement said that the United Nations recognises Israeli security concerns and that senior UN officials have tried to talk to the Israeli government about the blockage without success.

"Because the restrictions persist, the UN is compelled to call publicly on the government of Israel to restore full access to Gaza for UN and humanitarian workers and goods," it said. According to the United Nations, its aid agencies provide more than half the basic social services in Gaza and help feed several hundred thousand people.

-([i][b]AFP[/b][/i]), http://www.hipakistan.com/en/...

The State of Israel Has Declared All-Out War On the Jewish People Worldwide

03.27.04 (6:42 am) [edit]

[b]The State of Israel Has Declared All-Out War On the Jewish People Worldwide [/b]

Ariel Sharon, the Prime Minister of Israel told the crowd at a Rome hotel. "We are witness to a great wave of anti-Semitism, and apart from the usual anti-Semitism against Jews, there is today the added hate of the collective Jew, which is Israel.”… “The best solution to anti-Semitism is immigration to Israel. It is the only place on Earth where Jews can live as Jews," he said. (BBC website of Monday, 17 November, 2003 (http:/ /news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east /3275979.stm)

Mr. Sharon has moved from the planning stages as stated in November, 2003, to the execution of the plan which has been in development since the days of Herzl, the founder of the Zionist movement, who stated in his diary “It is essential that the sufferings of Jews. . . become worse. . . this will assist in realization of our plans. . .I have an excellent idea. . . I shall induce anti-Semites to liquidate Jewish wealth. . . The anti-Semites will assist us thereby in that they will strengthen the persecution and oppression of Jews. The anti-Semites shall be our best friends”. (From his Diary, Part I, pp. 16)

In executing this plan they have successfully escalated anti-Semitism throughout the world. There is great pain that the press and politicians are calling the actions of the Zionist movement “Jewish actions.” With these words they are helping the Zionists to fulfill their dreams. We call upon the world again to understand that the state of “Israel” does not represent the Jewish faith and traditions and that Zionists are the greatest enemies to the Jewish people.

We appeal to people of good will in the media itself to open their minds and hearts to what we are proclaiming about the truth of Judaism, which has been distorted by the Zionists.

The promises of the Torah are always to be realized. This verse from the Torah demonstrates that those who are his enemies will pay a price when The kingdom of G-D will prevail.

Deuteronomy 32:43: Praise his People, O Nations: For he will avenge the blood of his servants. He will render vengeance against his adversaries and make expiation for his land and his People.

[i][b]By Russell Waxman Assistant Editor Please visit our web site at Jews Against Zionism www.jewsagainstzionism.com [/b][/i]- http://www.aljazeerah.info/27...%20o/The%20State%20of%20I srael%20Has%20Declared%20 AllOut%20War%20On%20the%2 0Jewish%20People%20Worldw ide%20By%20Russell%20Waxm an.htm

Israeli Holocaust Shrinking Palestine as an Ineffectual World Watches

03.27.04 (6:38 am) [edit]

[b]Palestine shrinks as an ineffectual world watches[/b]

Assassinations, house demolitions, land confiscation, restrictive permit regulations and the snaking of the “apartheid” wall through and around villages, cities and farms continue unabated as a shrinking Palestine marks Land Day on 30 March.

• Targeted assassinations in the Gaza Strip and West Bank have taken tens of lives including innocent bystanders, women and children. • Daily house demolitions have left thousands homeless. • Constructing the apartheid wall has confiscated thousands of hectares of land and made a new category of refugees between the wall and the “green line”.

Meanwhile, the international community looks on, promoting ineffectual peace plans that ignore human rights, refugee rights and international law.

Land Day commemorates the killing of six Palestinians 28 years ago by Israeli security forces inside 1948 Palestine/Israel as they were protesting expropriation of Palestinian land to build new Jewish colonies and expand existing Jewish cities. Now Land Day symbolizes resistance to ongoing land expropriation, unresolved claims to housing and property restitution and the 37-year occupation of West Bank and Gaza.

Palestinian land ownership shrinks to 10 per cent In 1948, Palestinians owned more than 90 per cent of the land in Mandate Palestine. Today, the indigenous Palestinian Arab population owns and controls about 10 per cent of its homeland (within Israel and the 1967 occupied territories) and more than half the original Palestinian population was displaced/expelled from Palestine.

A comprehensive, just and durable peace in the Middle East will remain elusive until: • Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip is ended; • Palestinian housing and property claims are resolved; • Israel admits its role in creating the Palestinian refugee problem and acknowledges the Palestinian refugee right of return; • Israel is held accountable for its obligations and responsibilities under international law; and • The international community puts forward peace proposals that include recognition of refugee rights, human rights and international law.

Badil, Bethlehem, BADIL, P.O. Box 728, Bethlehem www.badil.org Tel/Fax: 970-2-274-7346 or resource@badil.org - http://www.aljazeerah.info/27...%20n/Palestine%20shrinks% 20as%20an%20ineffectual%2 0world%20watches.htm

Israeli Holocaust Shrinking Palestine as an Ineffectual World Watches

03.27.04 (6:37 am) [edit]

Israel Uses Toxic Chemicals to Spread Mutations Among Negev Palestinians

03.27.04 (6:34 am) [edit]

[b]Israel Uses Toxic Chemicals to Spread Mutations Among Negev Palestinians [/b]

The Israeli Higher Court has finally ruled on Wednesday in favor of an appeal filed by "Adala", Legal Center for Defending the Palestinian Minority in Israel, preventing the so-called "Israel's Lands Bureau" along with the Israeli Agriculture Ministry from spraying the crops of Negev Palestinians with toxic chemicals.

Mr. Marwan Dallal, the advocate representing "Adala" Center who filed the appeal, said that the "Israel's Lands Bureau" has been spraying the agricultural crops of Negev Palestinians for two years now, under the pretext of growing these crops in "state lands", and to prevent them from further moving into more lands.

The chemical material sprayed on the lands and used by the Israelis is called "Randob", and is originally used to kill harmful weed, but the Israelis spray it on entire crops. The "Adala" Center argued that spraying this chemical poses a threat to the lives of citizens and animals in the Negev, asserting that these agricultural crops constituted the only source of livelihood for those citizens.

The Center added that the instructions for this chemical material prevents spraying it from the air, as well as prohibiting any contact between it and human beings, instructions the "Israel's Lands Bureau" was completely ignoring by using planes to spray this material over entire villages and population localities in the Negev.

The Center included expert testimonies by several scientists confirming the dangers of this chemical, revealing that it might cause genetic mutations among the newly born babies, as well as cancer. Dr. Ahmad Yazbak, a toxicologist, warned that the use of this material causes a rash in the eyes and skin, abortion, vomiting and difficulties in breathing.

The "Adala" Center has called on the "Israel's Lands Bureau" to stop spraying the Negev Palestinian crops with this material, but all the demands fell on deaf ears. The lands bureau continued to declare that the material they were using does not and have not caused any damages among the Palestinian population in the Negev.

Mr. Dallal mentioned in the appeal he filed before the court that the spraying of these crops contradicts criminal laws in Israel with regard to the use of toxic materials, adding that "Israel's Lands Bureau" is not the authorized body to spray any crops, as the Ministry of Agriculture was the only legal body entitled with this task for health and environmental reasons.

The Israeli government has started an ethnic cleansing campaign against the Palestinian residents of the Negev area, aiming to dispossess them from their lands, and occupy these lands with Israeli settlers. The Israeli government has used different means to carry out this campaign, including house demolitions, destruction of economic venues, deprivation of municipal services and finally chemical warfare using pest-control hazardous material.

[i][b]GAZA, March 25, 2004 (IPC + Al Aquds Al Arabi)-- [/b][/i] http://www.aljazeerah.info/27...%20n/Israel%20Uses%20Toxi c%20Chemicals%20to%20Spre ad%20Mutations%20Among%20 Negev%20Palestinians.htm

Israel Uses Toxic Chemicals to Spread Mutations Among Negev Palestinians

03.27.04 (6:31 am) [edit]

Israel Pushes White House to Accept Its Withdrawal Plan

03.27.04 (6:28 am) [edit]

[b]Israel Pushes White House to Accept Its Withdrawal Plan[/b]

Israel wants the Bush administration to agree that if it pulls forces and settlers from Palestinian areas, three settlement clusters in the West Bank and near Jerusalem would be retained by Israel in any final accord on its boundaries, according to administration and Israeli officials.

The request for American approval of the proposal for the three areas to stay a part of Israel was pressed this week by aides to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in intensive discussions with administration officials in preparation for Mr. Sharon's coming visit to the United States.

Administration officials said no decision had been made on Israel's request, which they said poses a quandary for President Bush. While he wants to encourage Mr. Sharon to carry out proposed withdrawals in Gaza and the West Bank, the timing is not ideal, and it remains unclear just how far — and how completely — Israel will withdraw.

Israel would like to keep two settlements outside Jerusalem, Maale Adumim and Gush Etzion, and another in the West Bank, Ariel, which has served as a suburb of Tel Aviv. This plan is seen by some in the administration as reasonable, especially if in the process it leads to withdrawals from Gaza and large parts of the West Bank.

But administration officials said Israel had not yet made clear how far it would withdraw from other Palestinian areas, and whether it would retain the right to send forces back in should there be a Palestinian attack on Israeli civilians.

"There is a belief in the administration that this is the best chance out there to encourage an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza," said an administration official, describing the view of some in the administration. "But everything is very tentative right now."

The official said the administration was reluctant to go along with an Israeli plan that would anger the Arab world at a sensitive time, with tensions still high after Israel's killing on Monday of the spiritual leader of Hamas, Sheik Ahmed Yassin.

The discussions between Israel and the United States come at a volatile time for American policies in the Middle East and accelerating involvement by Mr. Bush.

The White House announced Friday that Mr. Sharon would visit on April 14, and that President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt would visit Mr. Bush at his ranch in Crawford, Tex., just before that date. Later next month, King Abdullah of Jordan is to come to the White House.

The diplomatic action is focused on Mr. Sharon's plan to move unilaterally to pull forces and settlements out of Gaza and unspecified parts of the West Bank.

American officials say Mr. Sharon's plan has the potential of rekindling peace talks, however, and they want to be sure that the pullout does not lead to a takeover in Gaza by Hamas and other militant groups.

At the White House, administration officials made clear that they would like to announce American support of the withdrawal, in part because they think it would demonstrate the success of Mr. Bush's approach in the region. The president is battling charges by Democrats that he has been indifferent to the cause of peace in the Middle East.

But some in the administration are concerned that a withdrawal from Gaza may embolden Hamas and amount to the abandonment of Israeli negotiations with the Palestinians.

The Bush administration also wants Jordan and Egypt involved in shoring up the Palestinian security structure, a subject they say is sure to be discussed next month with Mr. Mubarak and King Abdullah.

Mr. Sharon faces difficulties selling his withdrawal plans to his fractious cabinet and is looking for an American blessing to clear the way, according to Israeli officials.

"This could really serve as a breakthrough and bring peace to the Middle East," an aide to Mr. Sharon asserted. "The stumbling block is the ministers inside the government."

Accordingly, Israeli officials say, Mr. Sharon seeks a range of assurances from Washington, with some more acceptable to the administration than others.

Israel wants Bush administration approval of the right to retaliate in Palestinian areas in the event of terrorist attacks, and wants any final territorial agreements to be predicated on a Palestinian effort to crack down on groups that carry out such attacks. Israel also wants an understanding from Washington that in a final deal with the Palestinian side, there will be no "right of return" by Palestinians — the right asserted by the millions of Palestinians who fled Israeli territory in 1948 and afterward to get their homes back.

These assurances are believed by Israel to be easier to get than the request — which one Israeli official called a "core issue" — that the three settlement clusters be kept by Israel under all circumstances. Together, these three areas encompass more than 50,000 of the 230,000 total settlers in the West Bank, according to Israeli officials.

American officials note that the three settlement areas were envisioned as part of Israel in the final proposals put forward by President Clinton in 2000.

The Palestinian leader, Yasir Arafat, rejected the Clinton proposals, but many experts say it is highly likely that any final negotiation will include Ariel, Maale Adumim and Gush Etzion as part of Israel.

Israeli officials said they had not abandoned the concept of negotiating with the Palestinian side to put in effect the peace plan known as the road map, which calls for a future Palestinian state next to Israel.

"In the absence of a Palestinian partner, we seek a package that would include steps on the ground to increase Israeli security and improve Palestinian lives," said Daniel Ayalon, the Israeli ambassador to the United States.

"We are also seeking assurances from the United States about the process, about sequencing, about the right of self-defense and about placing political pressure on the Palestinians to also implement their obligations on the road map," he added.

[i][b]By STEVEN R. WEISMAN, N.Y. TIMES[/b][/i], http://www.nytimes.com/2004/0...

U.S. Army Poll in Iraq: Troop Morale Low and Leadership Poor

03.27.04 (6:24 am) [edit]

[b]'US troops in Iraq losing stomach for fight'[/b]

Nearly three quarters American soldiers polled in Iraq said their battalion level command leadership is 'poor' and shows 'a lack of concern' for their soldiers.

The survey was conducted by the US Army and was published on Friday.

The soldiers also said 'unit cohesion is low'. Fifty two per cent have 'low' or 'very low' morale.

The latest survey was part of a study initiated by the army last summer after a number of suicides provoked concern about the mental well being of soldiers in Iraq.

The study faults the army for how it handles mental health problems, saying that some counsellors felt inadequately trained.

It also cites problems in distribution of anti-depressant medication and sleeping pills. Some of the anti-depressant pills, the Food and Drug Administration has said subsequently, encourages suicidal tendencies.

"Perhaps the most surprising findings were the grim conclusions about troop morale, which indicate that Iraq is taking a toll that goes beyond casualty figures," The Washington Post said.

"The Pentagon has been intensely worried that more frequent and longer combat tours will prompt more soldiers to get out of the Army rather than re-enlist, especially if it means a second stint in Iraq or Afghanistan. Army insiders say it is likely that brigades from three divisions that served in Iraq over the past year--the 101st Airborne, the 3rd Infantry and the 4th Infantry -- are likely to be sent back in 2005," the survey said.

The Pentagon data on morale, said the Post, also appear to give official confirmation to a more informal survey conducted last summer by Stars and Stripes, the military newspaper.

That survey found about half the troops who filled out questionnaire's described their units' morale as low and their training as insufficient, and said they did not plan to re-enlist.

The guerrilla war or insurgency or terrorism is taking its toll especially because it was unexpected.

American political leaders who sent the soldiers into battle without UN sanction had predicted confidently that Iraqis would welcome the Americans as liberators and receive the soldiers with fruits and flowers. Instead, they are facing bullets, especially in the 'Sunni triangle' but not entirely confined to that area.

Colonel Virgil Patterson, who oversaw the army survey, said he was 'somewhat surprised' by the findings on troop morale.

He noted that when the survey was taken, soldiers were still feeling the effects of a brutally hot Iraqi summer, and that since then troops have better living conditions and are better able to communicate with their families.

Patterson said he could not place the numbers in a historical context because similar surveys had not been conducted before.

This is the first time we have ever gone into an active combat theatre and asked soldiers how they are doing, so we have a comparative data," he said.

The study, conducted from late August through early October 2003, surveyed 756 army soldiers in Iraq and Kuwait, focusing on units that had engaged in combat.

Reaction to the results of the army survey was mixed among experts.

"It is not particularly surprising, especially given the frustrating nature of the combat they are facing now, with patrols and bombs going off," said Col (retd) Robert Killebrew, a Vietnam veteran.

"I would be extremely worried by the numbers. Having more than half the soldiers surveyed say they are unhappy should set off alarm bells," a senior army commander who spoke to The Washington Post said.

Jonathan Shay, a war veterans' psychiatrist, called it a 'painful report to lead'.

Shay, who has written two books on cohesion and leadership problems in the US military during the Vietnam War, said the report shows that morale and cohesion are 'extremely low' among troops in Iraq.

The official study faults the Army's handling of the mental health issues for troops and calls for the appointment of a 'czar' to coordinate such services in Iraq and Kuwait.

Patterson said that a medical specialist will fill the new position next month.

In its findings on suicide, the study confirmed data previously released by the army, namely that the rate among soldiers in Iraq in 2003 was higher than for the army generally but lower than that of US men of a similar age range

There were 23 confirmed suicides among army troops in Iraq in 2003 -- a rate of 15.6 per 100,000 soldiers. That compares with an army average in recent years of 11.9.

Colonel Bruce Crow, an army psychologist and expert in suicide prevention, said that soldiers who killed themselves generally tended to be younger, unmarried men.

[b]Rediff.com[/b], http://in.rediff.com/news/200...

U.S. Army Poll in Iraq: Troop Morale Low and Leadership Poor

03.27.04 (6:22 am) [edit]

US Complicity in Israel's Misdeeds

03.27.04 (6:19 am) [edit]

[b]US Complicity in Israel's Misdeeds [/b]

The murder of Hamas' spiritual leader, Sheik Yassin, makes perfect sense as long as you understand Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's strategy.

That strategy is to make peace impossible.

For three years, Sharon has done everything to prevent peace. He himself provoked the new uprising, re-invaded the occupied territories, destroyed the Palestinian Authority, forced Yasser Arafat into house arrest and launched an unprecedented, brutal campaign of assassinations, curfews, fences, destruction of property and random killing of Palestinians. The Israelis have killed about 2,700 Palestinians in the past three years, in contrast to about 700 Israelis killed in the same period.

At the same time, Sharon has refused all offers to negotiate, and whenever the Palestinians arranged a cease-fire on their side, Sharon broke it with a provocative raid or assassination. No other rogue state or rogue leader would have been allowed to get away with such behavior, but Israel has the U.S. government in its pocket. That's the answer to the question posed by the French ambassador to Great Britain as to why the world allows "this (expletive deleted) little country to cause the world so much trouble."

Sharon doesn't want peace, because he knows that any peace settlement would involve returning nearly all of the occupied territories to the Palestinians. Israel's goal has always been Palestine without Palestinians. He is greatly afraid that the world will lose patience and impose a settlement on Israel. Hence, his strategy is to make peace impossible so that he can impose unilaterally his own settlement – a settlement, of course, that will condemn the Palestinians to unlivable conditions.

Now, that's all well and good if you are an Israeli and don't mind condemning future generations to perpetual conflict, but what about Americans? This is, after all, not legitimately our conflict. I've traveled in Palestine and the Middle East, and while it's interesting, it's not high on my list of vacation spots. We would be much better off if the only Americans who ever went there were the crews of oil tankers.

Unfortunately, our politicians, by cravenly obeying the wishes of Israel and its powerful U.S. lobby, have made us a part of the conflict. We've already paid in blood and treasure. Anybody who doesn't understand that the attack on 9/11 was directly related to the Palestinian and Israeli conflict hasn't been paying attention.

The Arab world sees us – correctly – as an accessory before and after the fact to all the crimes Israel commits against the Palestinians and other Arabs in the area. We cannot load Israel down with modern weapons, with gifts of more than $90 billion of American tax dollars, with absolute protection from all attempts to hold it accountable under international law, and then pretend we are innocent. We are guilty by proxy of murder, land theft, destruction of property and all the other human misery that Israel has caused in the region.

So, if you're one of those rah-rah Israel First supporters, don't complain when the terrorists come looking for you. You've allowed your politicians to enlist you in somebody else's war, and in war there are always casualties on both sides.

America has become a nation of pathological irresponsibility. Nobody wants to take responsibility for his or her own actions, which is the basic cause of the litigation flood. Least of all do American politicians wish to do so. They would rather heap on the manure that the terrorism directed at us has nothing whatsoever to do with the policies they have followed for the past 30 years or more. In truth, it has everything to do with those policies.

So, if you or your loved ones get bloodied by terrorists, then blame your Christian Zionists, your Israel First crowd and your corrupt politicians who have their tongues in the ears and their hands in the pockets of the Israeli lobby.

[i][b]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[/b][/i]. http://antiwar.com/reese/?art...

The Armageddon Plan

03.27.04 (6:17 am) [edit]

[b]The Armageddon Plan [/b]

[i][b]During the Reagan era Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld were key players in a clandestine program designed to set aside the legal lines of succession and immediately install a new "President" in the event that a nuclear attack killed the country's leaders. The program helps explain the behavior of the Bush Administration on and after 9/11[/b][/i]

At least once a year during the 1980s Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld vanished. Cheney was working diligently on Capitol Hill, as a congressman rising through the ranks of the Republican leadership. Rumsfeld, who had served as Gerald Ford's Secretary of Defense, was a hard-driving business executive in the Chicago area—where, as the head of G. D. Searle & Co., he dedicated time and energy to the success of such commercial products as Nutra-Sweet, Equal, and Metamucil. Yet for periods of three or four days at a time no one in Congress knew where Cheney was, nor could anyone at Searle locate Rumsfeld. Even their wives were in the dark; they were handed only a mysterious Washington phone number to use in case of emergency.

After leaving their day jobs Cheney and Rumsfeld usually made their way to Andrews Air Force Base, outside Washington. From there, in the middle of the night, each man—joined by a team of forty to sixty federal officials and one member of Ronald Reagan's Cabinet—slipped away to some remote location in the United States, such as a disused military base or an underground bunker. A convoy of lead-lined trucks carrying sophisticated communications equipment and other gear would head to each of the locations.

Rumsfeld and Cheney were principal actors in one of the most highly classified programs of the Reagan Administration. Under it U.S. officials furtively carried out detailed planning exercises for keeping the federal government running during and after a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. The program called for setting aside the legal rules for presidential succession in some circumstances, in favor of a secret procedure for putting in place a new "President" and his staff. The idea was to concentrate on speed, to preserve "continuity of government," and to avoid cumbersome procedures; the speaker of the House, the president pro tempore of the Senate, and the rest of Congress would play a greatly diminished role.

The inspiration for this program came from within the Administration itself, not from Cheney or Rumsfeld; except for a brief stint Rumsfeld served as Middle East envoy, neither of them ever held office in the Reagan Administration. Nevertheless, they were leading figures in the program.

A few details about the effort have come to light over the years, but nothing about the way it worked or the central roles played by Cheney and Rumsfeld. The program is of particular interest today because it helps to explain the thinking and behavior of the second Bush Administration in the hours, days, and months after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Vice President Cheney urged President Bush to stay out of Washington for the rest of that day; Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld ordered his deputy Paul Wolfowitz to get out of town; Cheney himself began to move from Washington to a series of "undisclosed locations"; and other federal officials were later sent to work outside the capital, to ensure the continuity of government in case of further attacks. All these actions had their roots in the Reagan Administration's clandestine planning exercises.

The U.S. government considered the possibility of a nuclear war with the Soviet Union more seriously during the early Reagan years than at any other time since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Reagan had spoken in his 1980 campaign about the need for civil-defense programs to help the United States survive a nuclear exchange, and once in office he not only moved to boost civil defense but also approved a new defense-policy document that included plans for waging a protracted nuclear war against the Soviet Union. The exercises in which Cheney and Rumsfeld participated were a hidden component of these more public efforts to prepare for nuclear war.

The premise of the secret exercises was that in case of a nuclear attack on Washington, the United States needed to act swiftly to avoid "decapitation"—that is, a break in civilian leadership. A core element of the Reagan Administration's strategy for fighting a nuclear war would be to decapitate the Soviet leadership by striking at top political and military officials and their communications lines; the Administration wanted to make sure that the Soviets couldn't do to America what U.S. nuclear strategists were planning to do to the Soviet Union.

Under the Truman and Eisenhower Administrations the U.S. government had built large underground installations at Mount Weather, in Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains, and near Camp David, along the Pennsylvania-Maryland border, each of which could serve as a military command post for the President in time of war. Yet a crucial problem remained: what might happen if the President couldn't make it to one of those bunkers in time.

The Constitution makes the Vice President the successor if the President dies or is incapacitated, but it establishes no order of succession beyond that. Federal law, most recently the Presidential Succession Act of 1947, establishes further details. If the Vice President dies or cannot serve, then the speaker of the House of Representatives becomes President. After him in the line of succession come the president pro tempore of the Senate (typically the longest-serving member of the majority party) and then the members of the Cabinet, in the order in which their posts were created—starting with the Secretary of State and moving to the Secretary of the Treasury, the Secretary of Defense, and so on. The Reagan Administration, however, worried that this procedure might not meet the split-second needs of an all-out war with the Soviet Union. What if a nuclear attack killed both the President and the Vice President, and maybe the speaker of the House, too? Who would run the country if it was too hard to track down the next living person in line under the Succession Act? What civilian leader could immediately give U.S. military commanders the orders to respond to an attack, and how would that leader communicate with the military? In a continuing nuclear exchange, who would have the authority to reach an agreement with the Soviet leadership to bring the war to an end?

Ronald Reagan established the continuity-of-government program with a secret executive order. According to Robert McFarlane, who served for a time as Reagan's National Security Adviser, the President himself made the final decision about who would head each of the three teams. Within Reagan's National Security Council the "action officer" for the secret program was Oliver North, later the central figure in the Iran-contra scandal. Vice President George H.W. Bush was given the authority to supervise some of these efforts, which were run by a new government agency with a bland name: the National Program Office. It had its own building in the Washington area, run by a two-star general, and a secret budget adding up to hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Much of this money was spent on advanced communications equipment that would enable the teams to have secure conversations with U.S. military commanders. In fact, the few details that have previously come to light about the secret program, primarily from a 1991 CNN investigative report, stemmed from allegations of waste and abuses in awarding contracts to private companies, and claims that this equipment malfunctioned.

The exercises were usually scheduled during a congressional recess, so that Cheney would miss as little work on Capitol Hill as possible. Although Cheney, Rumsfeld, and one other team leader took part in each exercise, the Cabinet members changed depending on who was available at a particular time. (Once, Attorney General Ed Meese participated in an exercise that departed from Andrews in the pre-dawn hours of June 18, 1986—the day after Chief Justice Warren Burger resigned. One official remembers looking at Meese and thinking, "First a Supreme Court resignation, and now America's in a nuclear war. You're having a bad day.")

In addition to the designated White House chief of staff and his President, each team included representatives from the Departments of State and Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency, and also from various domestic-policy agencies. The idea was to practice running the entire federal government with a skeletal crew during a nuclear war. At one point there was talk of bringing in the governors of Virginia and Maryland and the mayor of the District of Columbia, but the idea was discarded because they didn't have the necessary security clearance.

The exercises were designed to be stressful. Participants gathered in haste, moved and worked in the early-morning hours, lived in Army-base conditions, and dined on early, particularly unappetizing versions of the military's dry, mass-produced MREs (meals ready to eat). An entire exercise lasted close to two weeks, but each team took part for only three or four days. One team would leave Washington, run through its drills, and then—as if it were on the verge of being "nuked"—hand off to the next team.

The plans were carried out with elaborate deception, designed to prevent Soviet reconnaissance satellites from detecting where in the United States the teams were going. Thus the teams were sent out in the middle of the night, and changed locations from one exercise to the next. Decoy convoys were sometimes dispatched along with the genuine convoys carrying the communications gear. The underlying logic was that the Soviets could not possibly target all the makeshift locations around the United States where the Reagan teams might operate.

The capstone to all these efforts to stay mobile was a special airplane, the National Emergency Airborne Command Post, a modified Boeing 747 based at Andrews and specially outfitted with a conference room and advanced communications gear. In it a President could remain in the air and run the country during a nuclear showdown. In one exercise a team of officials stayed aloft in this plane for three days straight, cruising up and down the coasts and back and forth across the country, refueling in the air.

When George H.W. Bush was elected President, in 1988, members of the secret Reagan program rejoiced; having been closely involved with the effort from the start, Bush wouldn't need to be initiated into its intricacies and probably wouldn't re-evaluate it. In fact, despite dramatically improved relations with Moscow, Bush did continue the exercises, with some minor modifications. Cheney was appointed Secretary of Defense and dropped out as a team leader.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet collapse, the rationale for the exercises changed. A Soviet nuclear attack was obviously no longer plausible—but what if terrorists carrying nuclear weapons attacked the United States and killed the President and the Vice President? Finally, during the early Clinton years, it was decided that this scenario was farfetched and outdated, a mere legacy of the Cold War. It seemed that no enemy in the world was still capable of decapitating America's leadership, and the program was abandoned.

There things stood until September 11, 2001, when Cheney and Rumsfeld suddenly began to act out parts of a script they had rehearsed years before. Operating from the underground shelter beneath the White House, called the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, Cheney told Bush to delay a planned flight back from Florida to Washington. At the Pentagon, Rumsfeld instructed a reluctant Wolfowitz to get out of town to the safety of one of the underground bunkers, which had been built to survive nuclear attack. Cheney also ordered House Speaker Dennis Hastert, other congressional leaders, and several Cabinet members (including Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman and Interior Secretary Gale Norton) evacuated to one of these secure facilities away from the capital. Explaining these actions a few days later, Cheney vaguely told NBC's Tim Russert, "We did a lot of planning during the Cold War with respect to the possibility of a nuclear incident." He did not mention the Reagan Administration program or the secret drills in which he and Rumsfeld had regularly practiced running the country.

Their participation in the extra-constitutional continuity-of-government exercises, remarkable in its own right, also demonstrates a broad, underlying truth about these two men. For three decades, from the Ford Administration onward, even when they were out of the executive branch of government, they were never far away. They stayed in touch with defense, military, and intelligence officials, who regularly called upon them. They were, in a sense, a part of the permanent hidden national-security apparatus of the United States—inhabitants of a world in which Presidents come and go, but America keeps on fighting.

[i][b]By James Mann, The Atlantic[/b][/i], http://www.theatlantic.com/is...

Families of American Soldiers NOT Amused by Bush's Sick Comedy Routine

03.26.04 (12:42 pm) [edit]

[b]Families of soldiers not amused by Bush's comedy routine[/b]

President Bush got some laughs at a Washington dinner when he spoofed the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but some family members of dead G.I.s said Thursday there was nothing funny about it.

"Those weapons of mass destruction have to be here somewhere," Bush joshed as he narrated a slide show of him looking behind furniture, as if hunting for the weapons of mass destruction.

"Nope, no weapons over there. Maybe under here," Bush joked Wednesday night at the annual dinner of Washington radio and TV correspondents, an event where Presidents typically poke fun at the press and themselves.

George Medina, 43, of Orange County, who lost a son in Iraq, heard about Bush's remarks when his outraged daughter, an Army sergeant, called him Thursday. "She was very upset," Medina said.

"This is disgraceful," Medina continued. "He doesn't think of all the families that are suffering. It's unbelievable, how this guy tries to run the country."

His 22-year-old son, Spec. Irving Medina, died Nov. 14 in Baghdad when an explosive device struck his convoy.

Charles Celestin, 28, of Coral Springs, Fla., and Irving Medina's brother-in-law, blasted the commander in chief's remarks.

"To be poking fun; it's just a travesty to the soldiers who lost their lives. I think it's disrespectful," he said.

The camp of Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry last night fired off a statement from Iraq war veteran Brad Owens, who said he was "insulted" by the President's comments.

"No weapons of mass destruction have been found and that is no joke - this is for real. This cheapens the sacrifice that American soldiers and their families are dealing with every single day," said Owens, who served in the Army Reserve.

The dinner performance put the President on the defensive for the second time this week. The Bush campaign was already dealing with fallout from testimony by former presidential aide Richard Clarke, who has claimed in a new book that Bush and his cabinet were looking for reasons to attack Iraq within hours of the 9/11 terror attack despite being told Saddam Hussein was not linked to it.

The President's dinner act also bombed with Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-Manhattan), who called it "out of line and in poor taste."

"It's disgusting that during his little performance on stage, the President seemed to forget that people are dying in Iraq because of weapons of mass destruction he lied about," Nadler said.

Asked whether the comment was appropriate, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said he was not at the dinner and so could not comment.

White House spokeswoman Claire Buchan noted that Bush ended his remarks at the dinner with a very serious tribute to U.S. forces serving in Iraq, but "was poking fun at himself" with the comments about weapons of mass destruction.

"Anyone who has followed the President's views on this knows how seriously he takes this issue," Buchan said. [Bullshit. Dubya profits from the blood and suffering of others and always has in his entire sorry life.]

[i][b]New York Daily News[/b][/i], http://www.sunherald.com/mld/...

Veep Cheney Said Richard Clarke 'Out of the Loop' & Not Involved in Counter-Terrorism!

03.26.04 (10:27 am) [edit]

[u][b]Excerpt from Fascist Pig Rush Limbaugh Interview with Corporate Pig Veep Cheney[/b][/u]: http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/h...

[b]RUSH[/b]: We are always happy to be able to talk to Vice President Dick Cheney who joins us now on the phone. Vice President Cheney, thank you for making time. It's great to have you with us once again.

[b]THE VICE PRESIDENT[/b]: Well, thanks, Rush. It's good to talk to you.

[b]Q[/b] All right, let's get straight to what the news is all about now, before we branch out to things. Why did the administration keep Richard Clarke on the counterterrorism team when you all assumed office in January of 2001?

[b]THE VICE PRESIDENT[/b]: Well, I wasn't directly involved in that decision. [u]He was moved out of the counterterrorism business over to the cyber security side of things, that is he was given a new assignment at some point here. I don't recall the exact time frame[/u].

[b]Q[/b] Cyber security, meaning Internet security?

[b]THE VICE PRESIDENT[/b]: Yes, worried about attacks on the computer systems and the sophisticated information technology systems we have these days that an adversary would use or try to the system against us.

[b]Q[/b] Well, now that explains a lot, that answer right there explains -- (Laughter.)

[b]THE VICE PRESIDENT[/b]: Well, he wasn't -- [u]he wasn't in the loop, frankly, on a lot of this stuff[/u]. And I saw part of his interview last night, and he wasn't --

[b]So, how could Richard Clarke have been in charge of 'everything' according to the neo-con buffoons? According to Cheney, Clarke was 'out-of-the-loop' early on in the administration (early 2001). I thought Bush was president, Cheney was vice-president and Rice was national security adviser? Didn't [i]they[/i] make any decisions? Of course, they did: Crappy-ones out of self-interest instead of national-interest[/b].

Bush, Cheney & Rice Let Osama bin Laden's Family ESCAPE ON 9/11: NOT Richard Clarke!!! HO HO HO!!!

03.26.04 (10:17 am) [edit]

Neo-con buffoons may not be aware that Richard Clarke was not the president (Dubya tragically has stolen that role) who allowed Osama bin Laden's family to escape the next day following 9/11, after Poppy Bush and the Carlyle Group was lunching with them on 9/11. They also might forget that Condi Rice was in charge and responsible for the National Security Agency, not Richard Clarke (tragically for the U.S.).

Craig Unger's article in the current issue of Vanity Fair called "Saving the Saudis" shows what happens when a source demonstrates moral courage. Numerous articles and documents cited by Unger originated with the work of the National Security News Service. NSNS's reporters would not have been able to provide such assistance without the help of brave people from the FBI, U.S. Customs, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the CIA.

Much is made in the article about a sheaf of secret FBI documents. Those documents appeared on NSNS's conference table after a meeting with government agents in the dark week after the 9-11 attacks. The agents were seeking NSNS's help in a matter related to the hunt for Osama bin Laden. The agents may have left the documents by accident, but NSNS staff is skeptical. The documents were secret FBI reports about an investigation of members of the bin Laden family in the United States during the 1990s. Some of us at NSNS suspect that the FBI field agents who had been looking into these matters and developing sources among the al-Qaeda membership where shocked when the White House defended the CIA intelligence failures and let the FBI take the brunt of the blame. Leaving the documents behind may have been an attempt by some brave FBI agents to expose the truth. This war between the FBI and CIA over terrorism is one of the most costly episodes of bureaucratic infighting in American history.

The CIA's coziness to Prince Turki al-Faisal, then the head of Saudi intelligence, actually prevented the FBI from doing its job — arresting criminals. This nonsense had been going on for years when 9-11 took place.

Recently, NSNS reporters met with one of FBI counter-terrorism chief John O'Neill's best agents, who had journeyed to Saudi Arabia to arrest a member of al-Qaeda for illegal money transfers. The agent walked into the meeting in the Saudi capital and watched CIA officers share top-secret spy satellite photography and documents with Prince Turki's deputies. "I felt like the odd man out," the agent said. When the Saudis asked what they could do for the FBI agent, the agent said he wanted to take a Saudi citizen into custody for illegal wire transfers. Before the Saudis could protest, CIA representatives expressed outrage that an FBI agent wanted to arrest this terrorist. The FBI agent went home empty handed. The CIA, it seems, is more interested in protecting Saudi terrorists than in arresting them.

This is especially disturbing since it is now known that the Saudi intelligence service and the Pakistani service kept up communications with top bin Laden aides until the spring prior to the 9-11 attacks. That information was withheld from the congressional joint inquiry even though both the Bush White House and CIA were aware of it. Prince Turki resigned as head of the Saudi intelligence service and became the Saudi ambassador to the Court of St. James in the aftermath of 9-11.

The truth is, only a handful of FBI agents, most of them in New York, ever understood the Saudi terrorist threat. One person who did not fathom it, nor did anything to try to stem it, was then-FBI Director Louis Freeh. Between George Tenet's coziness with Prince Turki and Saudi intelligence and Louis Freeh's refusal to understand the threat his agents were trying to explain, the United States was left wide open. One agent told NSNS that there was a huge cultural gap between counter-terrorism agents and Freeh, who was fascinated by organized crime but uninterested in the tedious work of chasing potential terrorists. The same discomfort Freeh had about Bill Clinton's personal behavior affected his view of John O'Neill, according to a former FBI official who worked for Freeh. O'Neill was married, yet had three girlfriends and was constantly in debt from an expensive lifestyle. "There was a sense that Freeh did not take O'Neill seriously because of the way he ran his personal life," according to the former FBI official.

The Craig Unger article in Vanity Fair, which cites some of NSNS's earlier work, demonstrates the effectiveness of NSNS and the talented journalists with whom we work. NSNS reporter David Armstrong did original work in the 1990s on President Bush's connections to Saudi executives who invested in Bush's unsuccessful oil ventures. Armstrong also developed government sources close to the now quashed Greenquest investigation, which examined the charities that helped pay for bin Laden's murderous activities.

In August 2001, one month before the FBI documents appeared in our office, NSNS reporter Sarah Banner had noticed that Republican advocate Grover Norquist, best known for his work on tax reform and missile defense, was also running a non-profit Islamic advocacy group. In June 2001, Norquist had proudly taken credit in the American Spectator for using his Islamic Free Market Institute to turn out the Muslim vote in Florida — an effort, he said, that helped put George Bush over the top. NSNS staff was amazed to find connections between Norquist's Islamic Institute, a former business partner of President Bush, and several charities under investigation for ties to al-Qaeda. These discoveries, along with Armstrong's investigation of Bush's previous Saudi connections, all went to the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Guardian and BBC soon after 9-11.

NSNS is continuing its investigation, uncovering new and exciting leads. Expect to see more from NSNS on the FBI's and CIA's roles in the terrorism war both at www.publicedcenter.org and in the national and international media.

The Bushies close relationship with the bin Laden family is suspect and should be investigated.

[i][b]Behind the Scenes: Bush saved the Saudis[/b][/i], http://www.publicedcenter.org...

Condi Rice's Refusal To Testify Under Oath Proves She Is A TRAITOR AND A LIAR...

03.26.04 (10:08 am) [edit]

[b]Last night MSNBC [/b]is reported http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4... that, according to a senior White House official, Richard Clarke's testimony on the 9/11 "terrorist attacks was considered so damaging that national security adviser Condoleezza Rice planned to ask the panel for a private interview to answer his allegations."

Again, the request is for a [i]private [/i]interview ([i]An audience granted by Queen Condi[/i]?). But if you read down into the piece it seems the hang-up may be that Rice or the White House don't want the testimony to be under oath.

The article says that "panel has consistently required anyone rebutting sworn testimony to be similarly under oath." Since Rice is now under fire and the Commission has more leverage, they may hold the line.

Now, what's going on here exactly?

Every White House tries to keep what we might call a penumbra of protection around White House aides. I [i]noted[/i] http://www.talkingpointsmemo.... yesterday that two of Rice's predecessors, Brzezinski in 1980 and Berger in 1997, have submitted to testify. But clearly it doesn't happen often.

Yet, having said that, it is very hard for me to grasp the constitutional issue implicated in Rice's taking an oath to tell the truth when she speaks to the Commission.

A constitutional issue involved in a presidential aide speaking to a fact-finding commission? Not a determinative one, I think. But yes, an issue.

Whether the testimony is public? [i]Maybe[/i].

But whether or not the testimony is sworn? I don't get that. This seems especially the case when she wants to appear[i] specifically to rebut other sworn testimony[/i]. How can you claim the need to preserve the confidentiality of the president's communications with his top aides, then break that confidence to refute someone's criticism, and then say you won't make the charges under oath?

As far as I can see this is not compelled testimony. So presumably Rice can simply decline to answer questions she thinks tread too closely on her confidential advice to the president, right? Certainly there could be some invocation of executive privilege?

Obviously, not having the testimony sworn gives her ... well, more leeway.

But I'm not sure what the grounds there are to justify it -- especially as she is now eager to speak with the Commission again to challenge Richard Clarke, who, as we know, had to make all his claims under oath. Once again, she wants to [i]lacerate her opponents[/i], http://www.talkingpointsmemo.... but [b]never on a ground that makes for even close to a fair fight[/b].

[b]Condi Rice should be fired. She is a traitor and a liar and unfit to serve as NSA[/b].

[i][b]Joshua Micah Marshall, TalkingPointsMemo[/b][/i] , http://www.talkingpointsmemo....

Israel, The Terrorist State: Implications of Israeli Terrorism & Assassination

03.26.04 (7:38 am) [edit]

[b]Killing Of Sheikh Yassin

The Chilling Implications Of This State Killing [/b]

IT DOESN'T take an awful lot of courage to murder a paraplegic in a wheelchair. But it takes only a few moments to absorb the implications of the assassination of Sheikh Yassin. Yes, he endorsed suicide bombings - including the murder of Israeli children. Yes, if you live by the sword, you die by the sword, in a wheelchair or not. But something went wrong with the narrative of the news story yesterday - and something infinitely more dangerous, another sinister precedent - was set for our brave new world.

Take the old man himself. From the start, the Israeli line was simple. Sheikh Yassin was the "head of the snake" - to use the words of the Israeli ambassador to London - the head of Hamas, "one of the world's most dangerous terrorist organisations". But then came obfuscation from the world's media. Yassin, the BBC World Service Television told us at lunchtime, was originally freed by the Israelis in a "prisoner exchange". It sounded like one of those familiar swaps - a Palestinian released in exchange for captured Israeli soldiers. And then, later in the day, the BBC told us that he had been freed "following a deal brokered by King Hussain (of Jordan)". Which was all very strange. He was a prisoner of the Israelis. This "head of the snake" was in an Israeli prison. And then, bingo, this supposed monster was let go because of a "deal". Sheikh Yassin was set free by no less than that law-and-order right- wing Likudist Benjamin Netanyahu when he was Prime Minister of Israel. King Hussain wasn't a "broker" between two sides. Two Israeli Mossad secret agents had tried to murder a Hamas official in Amman, the capital of an Arab nation which had a full peace agreement with Israel. They had injected the Hamas man with poison and the late King Hussain called the US President in fury and threatened to put the captured Mossad men on trial if he wasn't given the antidote to the poison and if Yassin wasn't released.

Netanyahu immediately gave in. Yassin was freed and the Mossad lads went safely home to Israel. So the "head of the snake" was let loose by Israel itself, courtesy of the Israeli Prime Minister - a chapter in the narrative of history which was conveniently forgotten yesterday. Which is all very odd. For if the elderly cleric really was worthy of state murder, why did Mr Netanyahu let him go in the first place? It was not a question that anyone wanted to ask yesterday.

But there was something infinitely more dangerous in all this. Yet another Arab - another leader, however vengeful and ruthless - had been assassinated. The Americans want to kill Osama Bin Laden. They want to kill Mullah Omar. They killed Saddam's two sons. The Israelis repeatedly threaten to murder Yasser Arafat. It's getting to be a habit.

No one has begun to work out the implications of all this. For years, there has been an unwritten rule in the cruel war of government-versus- guerrilla. You can kill the men on the street, the bomb makers and gunmen. But the leadership on both sides - government ministers, spiritual leaders - were allowed to survive.

Now all is changed utterly. Anyone who advocates violence is now on a death list. So who can be surprised if the rules are broken by the other side?

With all their own security, Bush and Blair may be safe, but what about their ambassadors and fellow ministers? Leaders are fair game. We will not say this. If, or when, our own political leaders are gunned down or blown up, we shall vilify the killers and argue a new stage in "terrorism" has been reached. We shall forget that we are now encouraging this all- out assassination spree.

[b]By Robert Fisk[/b], http://www.zmag.org/content/s...

Over-rated Condi Rice: The Off-Stage Queen Prima Donna in 9/11 Hearings

03.26.04 (6:35 am) [edit]

[b]Rice the off-stage prima donna in 9/11 hearings

[i]Bush's security adviser has cultivated a low profile, but is increasingly on the spot [/i][/b]

Throughout this week's theatrical congressional hearings on the September 11 attacks, a central character in the action remained resolutely off-stage, despite constant calls for her presence. In fact, the whole drama could well have been titled [i]Waiting for Condi[/i].

Condoleezza Rice has built a reputation on keeping a low profile in the ferocious foreign battles of the Bush administration. She has interpreted the job of national security adviser as being chiefly an interpreter of events and opinions for the president, not a protagonist.

But the scathing attack launched by her former counter-terrorist adviser, Richard Clarke, has made such studied neutrality impossible. With his White House memoir and each successive broadside at the administration, Mr Clarke has come closer to blaming her personally for the failure to prevent the attacks.

In a Wednesday night television interview, the former counter-terrorism tsar declared: "If Condi Rice had been doing her job and ... if she had a hands-on attitude to being national security adviser", crucial information about the hijackers would have bubbled up from field intelligence officers to policy-makers.

Mr Clarke's testimony has been made all the more damaging by the chorus of appeals by members of the congressional bipartisan committee investigating the September 11 attacks, and victims' relatives, for her to defend herself, under oath, at the hearings. One of the relatives, Carie Lemack, whose mother died in the attacks, said yesterday: "I implore her to come forward to say these things before the American people."

Urgently seeking to contain the damage, Ms Rice called journalists into her White House office. She pointed out that she had talked to the commission for four hours behind closed doors and insisted she "would like nothing better" than to testify in public. However, she had a responsibility to maintain the constitutional separation of powers. Cabinet secretaries are formally accountable to Congress, but the president's personal staff are answerable only to him.

It seemed like a quibble set against the high emotions of the inquiry, where many victims' relatives have brought pictures of the dead into the hearing room on Capitol Hill. But Ms Rice made more headway questioning Mr Clarke's credibility, producing his past emails and briefings from his time in the White House suggesting he believed at the time that everything possible had been done to forestall an attack.

Mr Clarke countered by arguing that he had merely been spinning the facts as a loyal administration servant - a cynical defence that had the effect of belittling the integrity of both sides in the row.

The problem for Ms Rice is that Mr Clarke's account does not stand alone. It restates, in more impassioned language, a number of accounts of the Bush administration's critical first months in office.

The former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Hugh Shelton, said the Bush administration pushed terrorism "farther to the back burner". And in a sympathetic portrait of the young administration, Bush at War, the president himself told the author, Bob Woodward, that he "didn't feel that sense of urgency" about going after Osama bin Laden.

It was undoubtedly the job of the national security adviser to set the priorities for a new president in his first weeks and months in office, particularly for a president as untutored in foreign affairs as George Bush.

When Mr Bush hired Ms Rice as an adviser during the election campaign, he said she could "explain to me foreign policy matters in a way I can understand". Ms Rice had another quality highly-prized by the then Texas governor: loyalty to the Bush family. She had served as an adviser in his father's White House, and had become a friend of the family, often holidaying at the Bush holiday home at Kennebunkport, on the north-eastern coast.

Ms Rice was undoubtedly a prodigy. She grew up in a modest, middle class home under segregation in Birmingham, Alabama, and emerged as an accomplished pianist, an ice-skater and an international relations expert. In 1993 she became the first woman, the first African American and the youngest person to become provost of Stanford University.

However, she was an expert on a defunct empire - the Soviet Union. Her doctoral thesis was on military relations between the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia, two states that had long since ceased to exist by the time she became national security adviser.

The team of seven foreign policy advisers she assembled for Governor Bush - a group she dubbed the Vulcans after the Roman god of fire, whose statue used to loom over her home town - were also specialists on cold war issues. There were no terrorism experts among them.

James Mann, a journalist who has written a history of Bush's war cabinet, argues: "They were fully prepared to deal with security issues of the sorts they had confronted in the past ... they were caught looking in the wrong direction."

In the early months of 2001, Ms Rice's Vulcans were consumed with recasting post-cold war relations with China and Russia. "It was as though they were preserved in amber," Mr Clarke recalled.

As for the pursuit of al-Qaida and Bin Laden, Ms Rice, multiple accounts say, insisted that the matter undergo the same comprehensive rethink as all other Clinton-era policies. The policy review took until September 4 2001.

Congress's commission of inquiry is due to report by July 26. If it is places disproportionate blame on Ms Rice, she might fall on her sword. But that is an unlikely scenario. The Bush family repays the loyalty of its acolytes. "She's very fond of the president, and he's very fond of her," said a senior Republican who knows her well. But he added: "She tends to be an impatient person and will certainly not stay on for four more years if the president wins re-election. She likes new challenges."

Ms Rice had once toyed with the idea of running for the governorship of California, but Arnold Schwarzenegger's triumph has put that beyond reach. More recently, she had been mentioned as a potential secretary of state or defence in a second Bush term. But that was before the hearings of the past few days. Her immediate concern now is political survival - her own and her boss's.

[Kenny-boy Lay, Enron, also has a PhD. So What!]

[b]Julian Borger in Washington, Guardian UK[/b], http://www.guardian.co.uk/sep...,11209,1178312,00.html

Israeli Tanks Advance On Gaza Strip City

03.26.04 (6:20 am) [edit]

[b]Israeli Tanks Advance On Gaza Strip City[/b]

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) - Several Israeli tanks advanced late Wednesday in the direction of Khan Younis, a city in the southern part of the Gaza Strip, witnesses said.

The Israeli military had no immediate comment.

Residents said 12 Israeli armored vehicles advanced from the Jewish settlement of Ganei Tal to the Palestinian side of a main intersection. They stopped in a part of a refugee camp targeted in earlier operations during which a number of buildings were destroyed.

Residents said there was some gunfire, but no casualties were reported. They said Israeli attack helicopters had been circling in the area for several hours.

Late Tuesday Israeli armored vehicles and bulldozers moved into the same area and destroyed some structures. The Israeli military said the buildings were used by Palestinian militants as cover for firing at soldiers and Jewish settlements.

Tension has been high in Gaza since Monday, when Israel assassinated the founder of Hamas, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, in a helicopter missile strike.

([i][b]AP[/b][/i]), http://www.libertyforum.org/s...

Israel 'Fabricated' Child-Bomber Story

03.26.04 (6:13 am) [edit]

[b]Israel 'fabricated' child-bomber story[/b]

[b]Palestinian leaders have accused Israel of fabricating a story about a 14-year-old Palestinian boy who planned to blow himself up[/b].

The Israeli army said he was caught wearing an explosive belt at an army roadblock in the northern West Bank.

The boy, identified as Husam Abdu from Nablus, was shown on TV screens around the world, with an explosive belt strapped to his waist.

The Israeli army said the boy told interrogators that his dispatchers promised that he would have sex with 72 virgins in heaven soon after his death.

"We know for sure this is a fabricated story from A to Z. Would you believe that a 13 or 14-year old would agree to blow up himself in return for a hundred shekels which he would receive after his death?

"It seems to me that the Israelis are bad liars as well," said Yaqub Shahin, a director-general of the Palestinian Authority ministry of information.

[b]Painting a 'terrorist' picture[/b]

In an interview with Aljazeera.net, Shahin accused Israel of seeking to justify slaughtering Palestinian children by spreading the false impression that they are used as human bombers.

"Their [Israel’s] goal is to besmirch Palestinian childhood so that when they slaughter the children, the world won’t feel sorry for them," he said.

Arab Knesset member Muhammad Baraka has also voiced "serious doubts" about the veracity of the Israeli narrative.

"I have very serious doubts about the whole story. I can't give the Israeli army the benefit of the doubt."

However, Baraka urged all parties to "keep children away from this sinister and bloody conflict.

"Using children as bombs is infinitely diabolical. It is totally inconsistent with all religious, moral and human values."

[b]Fatah denial[/b]

The armed wing of Fatah, the Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, has denied any involvement in the incident, accusing Israel of "concocting the whole story for the purpose of justifying the killing of more Palestinian children".

The Israeli newspaper Yedeot Ahranot reported on Thursday that Abdu told Shin Beth interrogators that an anonymous person had promised him 100 shekels if he blew himself up in the midst of Israeli soldiers.

Samir Khiwairah, a Nablus journalist who personally knows the boy’s family, told Aljazeera.net that the boy’s mental capacity to distinguish things is very low.

"I don't completely rule out the possibility that some evil person gave him the explosive belt and told him he would become a hero ... but this is a very tiny possibility."

Khiwairah said the Israeli army had a history of "fabricating and concocting stories" for the purpose of vilifying the Palestinians and winning public relations points.

[b]Similar story[/b]

A few weeks ago, another boy from Nablus, Muhammad Kuraan, made headlines when the Israeli army presented him to the media as a child who had been dispatched to blow himself up at an Israeli roadblock.

However, when the boy returned home, he reportedly told his family and relatives "Jews told me to do this or else they would kill me."

Aljazeera.net asked the Israeli army spokesman in Tel Aviv to explain why Abdu would accept 100 shekels to get blown up and what good the money could possibly do?

The army was also asked to explain why it had TV cameras ready at the roadblock more than two hours before the event.

Despite two hours of waiting, the army failed to provide an answer.

[b]Child-killing[/b]

The controversy of using children in the Israeli-Palestinian strife underscores the brazen ugliness of the conflict.

According to human rights groups operating in the occupied territories, the Israeli army has killed hundreds of Palestinian children since the outbreak of the Palestinian Intifada more than three and a half years ago.

According to a spokeswoman for the East Jerusalem-based Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group (HRMG), the Israeli army and paramilitary Jewish settlers have killed 263 Palestinian children from age 0-14 and 236 minors from the age of 15-18 during the ongoing Intifada.

The total number of Palestinians killed by Israel since the outbreak of the Intifada is estimated at 2670.

The figures for the injured and maimed are believed to be in the thousands.

The number of Israelis killed by Palestinians during the same period is around 838, including soldiers, settlers and civilians.

Israel claims its army does not target Palestinian civilians deliberately but admits, rather grudgingly, that the killing is carried out knowingly.

However, human rights groups argue forcefully that, in the final analysis, killing knowingly is killing deliberately.

[b]Aljazeera.Net[/b], http://english.aljazeera.net/...

So why is Clarke telling all now?

03.24.04 (6:12 am) [edit]

[b]So why is Clarke telling all now?[/b]

Richard Clarke has published a devastating critique of George W. Bush's national security policy. Of course, the allegations might not be the whole story, because lots of other people have their stories too. So it's a good thing that we have an ongoing investigation, in which people could go to jail if they lie.

In a bombshell appearance on "[i]60 Minutes[/i]" Sunday night, Clarke set forth the three arguments in his new book, "[i]Against All Enemies."[/i]

First, he asserts that the administration "ignored" the threat from al-Qaida right up to 9/11. Second, he argues that even after the attack from Osama bin Laden's forces, many in the administration wanted to ignore bin Laden's hide-out in Afghanistan and go after Iraq instead. Indeed, Clarke continues, the administration wrongly targeted Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9/11. Third, the president, having done a "terrible job" prosecuting the war on terror, now seeks to be re-elected by shamelessly spinning a three-year record of incompetence and distortion.

That's quite a litany of accusations, but they must be considered in three different lights.

The first light should shine down on Clarke's motivations. Having worked as a civil servant for 30 years, he resigns from the government in 2003. He spends the next year writing this tell-all book, published less than eight months before the presidential election.

Why is Clarke doing it? Is he seeking revenge on the Bush 43 people, who demoted him in 2001 after he'd been working the anti-terror beat at the White House for a decade? Is he trying to whip up a controversy to achieve best-sellerdom? Is he "auditioning" for a job with a hypothetical President John Kerry, as one Bush adviser put it? Or, alternatively, is he what he says he is - an "outraged" citizen, free to speak out against this malignant administration?

In any case, the White House has come down hard on its former employee: "Dick Clarke just does not know what he is talking about," snaps National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, about whom Clarke is harsh.

But of course, the second light should shine down on the Bush people's motivations. All the president's men and women have been good at offering general denials and denunciations of Clarke, but not so good at the point-by-point rebuttals. For example, Clarke claims that Bush personally leaned on him to, in effect, manufacture evidence against Iraq. The White House says that the president can't recall such a meeting, and besides, its records show that Bush wasn't where Clarke said he was. However, one senses lawyering in that crafted answer.

Yet a third light should shine down on the motivations of all Clinton administration alumni, including Clarke. Did President Bill Clinton do everything he could to smash al-Qaida in the 1990s? The record seems to show that he didn't do much, but of late Clinton loyalists seem bent on upwardly revising that record.

A story on the front page of Saturday's [i]New York Times [/i]stated that outgoing Clintonians "repeatedly warned" the incoming Bushites about the threat from al-Qaida. Yet the [i]Times [/i]story is 2-years stale; it is recycled from an article that appeared in [i]Time[/i] magazine in 2002. That story didn't go anywhere then. Maybe now the Clinton crew has more evidence - or maybe they just succeeded in peddling their story a second time.

Given these three different lights shining down on Clarke, on the Bush people and on the Clinton people, one might despair of ever learning the truth.

But happily, there's a way to get the facts on the table; it's called an investigation. Today Clarke is scheduled to testify, under oath, before the government's commission investigating 9/11. [CORRECTION: Richard Clarke, the former White House counterterrorism coordinator, is scheduled to testify today before the federal 9/11 Commission. James P. Pinkerton's column in Opinion yesterday gave an incorrect day. Pg. A08 ALL 3/24/04] And the Clinton people are similarly testifying. One assumes that the Bush people will also want to testify under oath - even the president himself. And there will be witnesses and corroborating evidence. That's a good start toward getting the truth out. Because, as Martha Stewart has learned, lying to the feds is a serious matter.

[b]By James P. Pinkerton, Newsday[/b], http://www.newsday.com/news/o...,0,3968904.column?coll=ny-viewpoints -headlines

Sharon's Murder of Yassin Endangers Americans in Iraq and Elsewhere

03.24.04 (6:09 am) [edit]

[b]Sharon's Murder of Yassin Endangers Americans in Iraq and Elsewhere[/b]

David R. Sands makes excellent points about the connection between Ariel Sharon's murder of Shaikh Ahmed Yassin on Monday and the security of Americans in Iraq and elsewhere. (I use the word "murder" to refer to extra-judicial killing outside the framework of conventional war between states).

Sands points out that Iraqis in the north and the south staged protests:

'[i] Protesters at two demonstrations against the U.S.-led coalition — one in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul and the other in the southern city of Basra — chanted in support of Sheik Ahmed Yassin. "Do not worry, Palestine. Iraq will avenge the assassination of Sheik Yassin," protesters in Mosul chanted[/i]. '

It is not as if Mosul and Basra were quiet or coalition forces needed more provocations. AP reported that ' [i]In the northern city of Mosul, gunmen shot at three members of Iraq's security forces, killing one and wounding two. ' And in Basra, it said, ' In other violence, two explosions in Basra wounded 13 British troops. The blasts occurred shortly after a demonstration by unemployed men. Rocks, gasoline bombs and a grenade were thrown during the demonstration, and soldiers fired tear gas. It wasn't clear whether the explosions were linked to the clashes[/i]. '

Sands also says, '[i] Several members of the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council expressed alarm over the killing. "The terrorist networks will use it as justification for more attacks," said Adnan al-Assadi, a member of the fundamentalist Shi'ite Dawa Party who serves on the council. "This could happen in Iraq because the Israelis are well protected in Israel and the Americans are more vulnerable here in Iraq." [/i]'

At a time when American soldiers and civilians throughout Iraq are already daily being targeted by Sunni Muslim guerrillas, for Ariel Sharon to order the murder of Yassin and seven others while they were leaving a mosque is an act of treason against his American ally. It doubles the danger for every American man and woman in Iraq.

Sands then points to the reaction of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, which is reported at greater length by AP :

Sistani said, ' [i]"We call upon the sons of the Arab and Islamic nations to close ranks, unite and work hard for the liberation of the usurped land and restore rights. This morning, the occupying Zionist entity committed an ugly crime against the Palestinian people by killing one of their heroes, scholar martyr Ahmed Yassin."[/i] '

Sistani is a man who can at will put hundreds of thousands of demonstrating Iraqis into the streets of Baghdad and Basra, posing a severe threat to US and UK troops and officials. And Sharon has managed to enrage him.

Some readers expressed surprise at Sistani's statement. But someone sent me a fatwa he issued on 9 April 2002, provoked by the Israeli attack on Jenin, which left 4,000 of the 16,000 camp residents homeless and killed tens. He wrote then, "Our Palestinian brothers and sisters in the holy, occupied territories in these days face continuous Zionist acts of aggression, the like of which has not been seen in modern history." All the major Shiite clergy in Iraq agree on this point, which is why it was frankly stupid for those great Arabists, Richard Perle and Doug Feith, to dream that the Shiites of Iraq (under a restored Hashemite monarchy) would moderate the Lebanese Hizbu'llah (Hezbollah). Reinforce it, more likely.

In fact, a lot of Sistani's feistiness and determination that Iraq is not going to end up with a long-term Western occupation derives from his low opinion of the Israeli treatment of Palestinians. The US can to some significant degree thank Ariel Sharon's iron fist for the distrust and suspicion with which their presence in Iraq is greeted.

And, of course, Hamas cadres are now talking about hitting US targets, something they have not usually done in the past.

Sistani is wrong to consider Ahmed Yassin a hero. His ideas were bigoted and hateful, and the tactic of killing civilians is despicable (I'm not favorably disposed in general toward killing anyone at all if it can be avoided). But Middle Easterners all know one thing that the American public, on the whole, ignores: Israel is assiduously stealing Palestinian land, tossing Palestinians out of their homeland, and oppressing Palestinians. Even Sharon's planned unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, which may or may not take place, will just result in more colonization of the West Bank. Israel's policies toward the West Bank are unparalleled in the contemporary world. There are countries that are attempting to annex territories and populations that would rather have independence. There are no other countries that insist on occupying a people whom they do not wish to absorb, but only to steal from. These policies do not justify killing civilians. But they explain why some misguided persons might resort to such a desperate and frankly evil measure. The Israelis engaged in terrorism in the 1940s when it was they who feared losing their homeland.

Everyone should be clear that murdering Yassin bestowed no operational advantage on Israel. Yassin was in the political and religious wing of Hamas. He did not plan or carry out tactical terrorist actions, though he certainly approved of them as a form of national liberation struggle (on the other hand he did sometimes talk of trying to achieve a 100-year truce with Israel; that aspect of this complex figure is gone, opening the way for a new generation of violent young men to come to the fore in Hamas, with no restraint whatsoever on their thirst for vengeance). Yassin was an old half-blind man in a wheel chair. Israel could have arrested him and tried him anytime Sharon chose. Sharon could even have had him executed after a fair trial, staying within the bounds of the rule of law. Who could have objected to a terrorist being tried and sentenced? To take him out, using American missiles, was just a fancy way of murdering him, destined to produce more hatred against the United States at a time when we don't need that. It is a form of state terrorism, designed to instill terror in a civilian population. Sharon is nothing more than a mafia don who rubs out other mafia dons, and doesn't care how many innocent women and children get sprayed by the machine gun fire (were Yassin's 7 companions all guilty of capital crimes? How would we know without a trial?) The lot of them belong in jail.

Sharon has done nothing for the US effort in Iraq. Has Israel offered any monetary aid to the US for the effort? The Israeli per capita income, at $17,000 a year, is higher than that of Spain, but the Spanish managed to contribute. Actually what I remember is that when the Israelis heard there was going to be a war, they came trooping to Washington with their hands out, asking for an extra $4 billion. Yes, folks, the US taxpayer was asked to fork over $4 billion to Ariel Sharon. Why? Because US men and women from Nebraska and Missouri and the other states were being put in harm's way in part to protect Israeli interests in the Middle East? We had to tax ourselves for the privilege of contributing to Israeli security?

So not only has Sharon done nothing for us or the Iraq effort, but ever since September 11 he has behaved with brutal insensitivity toward American interests. The weekend after that horrifying event, Sharon was attacking Palestinian targets, further inflaming anti-American feeling. A decent man would have put off such actions out of respect for the 3000 US dead. Indeed, a decent man would have sought peace and reinvigorated the Oslo process to help the US out. Sharon wouldn't recognize decency if he were served a steaming bowl of it next to the two lambs a day he must devour to stay at that obscene weight.

The most dangerous regime to United States interests in the Middle East is that of Ariel Sharon, not because he fights terrorists, but because he is stealing the land of another people and is brutalizing them in the process--and those are people with whom the rest of the Middle East and the Muslim world sympathizes. A US counter-insurgency fight against Muslim radical extremists requires winning hearts and minds, which is impossible as long as Sharon behaves the way he did Monday, since everyone in the region knows that the US coddles the Israeli Right. Israel once had a proper prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, who knew how to make peace and how to be a good partner for America. Sharon is not good enough to shine his shoes.

[b]By Juan Cole, Informed Consent[/b], http://www.juancole.com/2004_...

Sharon's Murder of Yassin Endangers Americans in Iraq and Elsewhere

03.24.04 (6:08 am) [edit]

...... Why George Bush is Insane ......

03.24.04 (6:04 am) [edit]

[b]Why George Bush is Insane [/b]

"Earlier this year I had a major operation for cancer. The operation and its after-effects were something of a nightmare. I felt I was a man unable to swim bobbing about under water in a deep dark endless ocean. But I did not drown and I am very glad to be alive. However, I found that to emerge from a personal nightmare was to enter an infinitely more pervasive public nightmare - the nightmare of American hysteria, ignorance, arrogance, stupidity and belligerence; the most powerful nation the world has ever known effectively waging war against the rest of the world. "If you are not with us you are against us" President Bush has said. He has also said "We will not allow the world's worst weapons to remain in the hands of the world's worst leaders". Quite right. Look in the mirror chum. That's you.

The US is at this moment developing advanced systems of "weapons of mass destruction" and it prepared to use them where it sees fit. It has more of them than the rest of the world put together. It has walked away from international agreements on biological and chemical weapons, refusing to allow inspection of its own factories. The hypocrisy behind its public declarations and its own actions is almost a joke.

The United States believes that the three thousand deaths in New York are the only deaths that count, the only deaths that matter. They are American deaths. Other deaths are unreal, abstract, of no consequence.

The three thousand deaths in Afghanistan are never referred to.

The hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children dead through US and British sanctions which have deprived them of essential medicines are never referred to.

The effect of depleted uranium, used by America in the Gulf War, is never referred to. Radiation levels in Iraq are appallingly high. Babies are born with no brain, no eyes, no genitals. Where they do have ears, mouths or rectums, all that issues from these orifices is blood.

The two hundred thousand deaths in East Timor in 1975 brought about by the Indonesian government but inspired and supported by the United States are never referred to.

The half a million deaths in Guatemala, Chile, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Uruguay, Argentina and Haiti, in actions supported and subsidised by the United States are never referred to.

The millions of deaths in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia are no longer referred to.

The desperate plight of the Palestinian people, the central factor in world unrest, is hardly referred to.

But what a misjudgement of the present and what a misreading of history this is.

People do not forget. They do not forget the death of their fellows, they do not forget torture and mutilation, they do not forget injustice, they do not forget oppression, they do not forget the terrorism of mighty powers. They not only don't forget. They strike back.

The atrocity in New York was predictable and inevitable. It was an act of retaliation against constant and systematic manifestations of state terrorism on the part of the United States over many years, in all parts of the world.

In Britain the public is now being warned to be "vigilant" in preparation for potential terrorist acts. The language is in itself preposterous.

How will - or can - public vigilance be embodied? Wearing a scarf over your mouth to keep out poison gas? However, terrorist attacks are quite likely, the inevitable result of our Prime Minister's contemptible and shameful subservience to the United States. Apparently a terrorist poison gas attack on the London Underground system was recently prevented. But such an act may indeed take place. Thousands of school children travel on the London Underground every day. If there is a poison gas attack from which they die, the responsibility will rest entirely on the shoulders of our Prime Minister. Needless to say, the Prime Minister does not travel on the underground himself.

The planned war against Iraq is in fact a plan for premeditated murder of thousands of civilians in order, apparently, to rescue them from their dictator.

The United States and Britain are pursuing a course which can lead only to an escalation of violence throughout the world and finally to catastrophe.

It is obvious, however, that the United States is bursting at the seams to attack Iraq. I believe that it will do this - not just to take control of Iraqi oil - but because the US administration is now a bloodthirsty wild animal. Bombs are its only vocabulary. Many Americans, we know, are horrified by the posture of their government but seem to be helpless.

Unless Europe finds the solidarity, intelligence, courage and will to challenge and resist US power Europe itself will deserve Alexander Herzen's definition (as quoted in the Guardian newspaper in London recently) "We are not the doctors. We are the disease".

[i][b]By Harold Pinter[/b][/i], http://www.theassassinatedpre...

Bush Refuses To Give Iraqis Their Freedom: Wait Until The Iraqi People Find Out!

03.23.04 (10:40 am) [edit]

[b][u]A Must-Read Satire[/u]: Bush Memo to Condi Rice: What is the definition of 'Sovereignty'? http://www.tblog.com/template...

U.S. will retain power in Iraq after transfer of sovereignty [/b]

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) The United States says Iraq will be sovereign, no longer under military occupation, on June 30. But most power will reside within the world's largest U.S. Embassy, backed by 110,000 U.S. troops.

The fledgling Iraqi government will be capable of tackling little more than drawing up a budget and preparing for elections, top U.S. and Iraqi officials say.

''We're still here. We'll be paying a lot of attention and we'll have a lot of influence,'' a top U.S. official said on condition of anonymity. ''We're going to have the world's largest diplomatic mission with a significant amount of political weight.''

In just over three months, the mantle of sovereignty in Iraq will be passed to an interim government. Its composition and the manner of its choosing will be decided after a United Nations team arrives this week.

But with Iraqi elections scheduled for December or January, the interim government will last a fleeting seven months at most: a butterfly's life, in legislative terms.

Since the U.S.-led occupation regime will have a hand in choosing Iraq's next government, the body will lack a mandate for anything but administrative tasks. Many envision a team of nonpartisan Iraqi technocrats who concentrate on keeping the country functioning.

''We don't expect them to enact any laws unless there is absolute need for them,'' Iraqi Governing Council member Adnan Pachachi said Sunday. ''We're not going to enter into any big contractual obligations either diplomatically or economically because those things should be done by an elected government.''

The short-lived government's main work includes passing the 2005 national budget and preparing for elections, the U.S. official told reporters in a dinner meeting.

The U.S. ambassador will hoard a large measure of influence on Iraq, and the fledgling government will wean itself only slowly from American money, troops and advisers, whom Pachachi said will be tutoring Iraq's rulers on governance issues across the board.

The American face in Iraq will undergo only a symbolic change, with the ambassador installed in a new chancery building but U.S. affairs still handled in Saddam Hussein's former Republican Palace.

The ambassador will also have a say in the spending of $8 billion of the massive $18.4 billion U.S. aid package approved by Congress in November, a huge tool with which to influence Iraq's affairs.

Americans ''will be heavily involved, so there will be continuous contacts with them,'' Pachachi said in an interview in a rented Baghdad mansion that serves as his headquarters.

Much of the day-to-day governance will be handled by a president or prime minister and the country's 25 ministers, some of whom Pachachi predicted will be holdovers selected by U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer.

Pachachi listed three options being considered for the country's interim government, a charged issue after the complex U.S. plan for a system of caucuses was mooted earlier this year.

A committee selected by the U.S.-picked Governing Council and occupation authorities could select one or a variation of the following options:

The existing 25-member Governing Council gains legislative power, but the monthly rotation of the presidency is jettisoned in favor of a president and deputies chosen from among the members.

The Governing Council is expanded to around 100 members and takes either a parliamentary role or an advisory role, electing a prime minister and president from within its ranks.

A general national conference is convened under U.N. auspices, and conference members choose a president and ministers and then disband. A second variation has the conference retaining legislative or advisory power.

The United Nations team that arrives at the end of the week will attend to technical aspects of selecting the interim government, Pachachi said. A second team that arrives in early April will include top U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, and will handle final negotiations, Pachachi said.

As Iraq marches toward independence, many U.S. moves will shape governance and society here long after the occupation's end.

A week ago, U.S. officials announced new restrictions on border crossing that won't be fully implemented for a year long after sovereignty is in the hands of Iraqis.

Bremer is also in the midst of appointing inspectors general for Iraq's ministries that, under current rules, can't be replaced by an incoming Iraqi government.

The U.S.-led authority is also establishing a corruption-fighting Committee on Public Integrity whose commissioner is being appointed to a five-year terms, and an Iraqi broadcasting authority akin to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission.

[b]By Jim Krane, Associated Press[/b], http://www.boston.com/dailyne...:.shtml

Death in Gaza: Will Nazi-Style Assassinations Make Israel Safer?

03.23.04 (7:23 am) [edit]

[b]Death in Gaza[/b]

The Israeli military's killing of Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the spiritual leader of the militant Palestinian group Hamas, is one of those pivotal events around which passions and hatreds coalesce. The Israeli government will defend the killing, while Palestinians plot revenge. It's always so. But the Bush administration must resist the temptation to simply issue a mild rebuke and call for restraint — it needs to do more.

Hamas has never accepted peace with Israel, and while Sheik Yassin was the group's spiritual leader, Israel accused him of responsibility for numerous terrorist attacks. Still, it's hard to see how his martyrdom will make Israel any safer. Hamas will now redouble its efforts to send human torpedos into Israel. The Palestinian Authority will be even less inclined to confront terrorists in its midst and less able to coax Hamas into observing a cease-fire. Moderate Arabs everywhere have been reacting with dismay and despair to Sheik Yassin's killing. The U.S. war on terrorism may also suffer as moderate Arab leaders feel compelled to distance themselves further from Washington.

One of Israel's most firmly held policies has always been that as a small Jewish state, it can never appear weak and must never shy away from hitting its enemies, no matter how politically inopportune this may be. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is perhaps the most inflexible Israeli advocate of the policy of an unflinching fist, but it has also been embraced by the most dovish of Israeli leaders.

Ultimately, any argument that the assassination was "worth it" is undermined by the fact that both sides will sink deeper into their separate passions. The hard, tragic truth is that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is locked in a cycle of violence in which assassinations, suicide bombings and mutual demonization seem destined only to grow, feeding the sense of victimhood that is consuming both the Jewish state and any future Palestinian state.

This cannot go on forever, and the United States must try, once again, to help both sides find a way out. The Bush administration is preoccupied with Iraq, but taking a pass on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not an option. Regardless of whatever is ultimately accomplished in Baghdad, a stable and peaceful Middle East is unthinkable if Israelis and Palestinians go on like this.

[b]N.Y. Times[/b], http://nytimes.com/2004/03/23...

Education Or Indoctrination: Conservatives Dumb-Down Homeschoolers

03.23.04 (7:21 am) [edit]

[b]Homeschoolers keep the faith

[u]For some homeschoolers, political causes shape daily lessons. Is this education - or indoctrination?[/u][/b]

At age 7, Jared Gamble's parents took him to a rally to protest the expansion of a greyhound racetrack in Lincoln, R.I., into a gambling casino 10 minutes from their home.

But the Gambles' participation in the protest that day wasn't just about their moral and civic opposition to the casino. As a homeschool family, they also considered the rally an academic field trip designed to teach their son about democracy in action

Jared, now a 16-year-old homeschooled junior, doesn't remember much of that day, but his own political activism is beginning to take root.

Over the past year, he's worked in Massachusetts to promote a traditional definition of marriage and even traveled to Virginia to volunteer for a week on the campaign of Jeff Frederick, a Christian candidate, who won election to the Virginia House of Delegates for the 52nd district. These activities, which Jared logs carefully, count for credit toward his high school diploma.

Homeschooling gives parents the opportunity to transmit values and political beliefs to their children to a degree that public schools generally cannot. Class schedules for homeschoolers are also more flexible, allowing time for students and parents to volunteer for political and social causes.

Until recently, most homeschool families' biggest lobbying efforts were expended on preserving their right to homeschool.

But as the movement has matured, one group has branched out into a more overtly political mission: urging evangelical Christian homeschoolers to volunteer for conservative causes and serve in political campaigns.

They've smoothed the path by offering - for credit - programs in civic involvement and government. It's not illegal, but this activism-for-academic-cre dit has raised eyebrows and drawn the ire of families who don't share the evangelicals' world view.

Of course evangelicals - despite the fact that they attract much of the media coverage of homeschooling - do not have a lock on the movement.

In fact, a 2000 survey by the National Opinion Research Center found that the religious affiliation in homeschooling families breaks down to 36.2 percent Catholic, 22.4 percent evangelical Protestant, 20.7 percent mainline Protestant, and 6.9 percent other religions.

Yet despite the presence of Muslim, Unitarian- Universalist, and gay and lesbian families in the homeschooling world, "conservative Protestants have quite handily come to dominate the politics," says Mitchell Stevens, professor of education and sociology at New York University.

In some ways, homeschooling families are united by one overriding political concern: keeping government at arm's length so they can enjoy the freedom to teach as they see fit.

Because homeschoolers are such a minority (between 1 and 2 million children are educated by a parent), the need for cooperation from all sectors is great, says Laura Derrick, a homeschool mom in Austin, Texas, who is active with the National Home Education Network.

Still, the public face of homeschooling is distinctly white, upper-middle-class, evangelical Christian.

While rival groups might like the same degree of attention, they simply do not have the reach or political clout of an organization like the Home School Legal Defense Association.

Four years ago, HSLDA's founder Michael Farris also launched Patrick Henry College - a conservative school designed for homeschooled students that emphasizes political leadership.

HSLDA recently launched a project called Generation Joshua that offers high-school level civics lessons through an online curriculum, provides opportunities to join a voter-registration drive, and coordinates student volunteers to help in local races where a conservative Christian candidate is in a close contest.

Generation Joshua's director, Ned Ryun, says that positioning students in campaigns is a great way for them to learn - even as they reap benefits for the candidates. In the 2002 elections, Mr. Ryun sent teams of high school and college students to seven tight races in Missouri. With moms as chaperones, these students phoned conservatives to get out the vote. Six of their candidates won.

Programs with conservative Christian ties, such as Generation Joshua, the Student Statesmanship Institute, and TeenPact want to ignite a passion for politics in young people.

They take a captive audience - homeschoolers - and offer them camaraderie with other like-minded students, a sense of purpose, and a feeling that they can make a difference. It's a potent combination.

Homeschooled kids are also a good fit for politics because they have more flexibility to pursue a subject in-depth than their public-school peers, says Elissa Nowland, who completed her high school degree at home in Andover, Mass., and is an alumna of TeenPact.

Jared, Elissa, and Hope Hodge of Waltham, Mass. - homeschoolers who all went through TeenPact - praise the system that educated them and take exception to the criticism they sometimes hear raised by the media - that they are being led like unthinking sheep into political activism.

They point out that homeschooled students score above average on standardized achievement tests, according to the National Home Education Research Institute. They also tend to do as well or better than conventionally educated students on the SATs. And high school graduates have seen increasing rates of acceptance at prestigious colleges.

In some cases, they also hold opinions that fly in the face of the mainstream that surrounds them.

"It's too hard to be conservative here [in Massachusetts] for us not to be thinking," Elissa says. "Conservative Christian homeschoolers are big on critical thinking, so they wouldn't be led by the nose."

Scott Somerville, staff attorney for HSLDA, insists that the organization exists simply to promote homeschooling. "It's not that the religious right is using homeschoolers to advance their agenda," he says. "It's that homeschoolers on both the left and right oppose the government's interference in teaching their kids."

No one is saying that Mr. Farris and his compatriots don't have a right as individuals to promote their viewpoint in the halls of Congress. But critics are troubled by the idea of taking an organization - the HSLDA - that purports to support all homeschoolers and making it the feeder system for an evangelical Christian political network.

For some homeschoolers, however, it's all about democracy in action. "Belonging to organizations that line up with our beliefs is to be encouraged," says Treon Goossen of Concerned Parents of Colorado, a home-school support group. "But it can't replace personal activism and the right to one's own viewpoint."

For Hope and some other homeschoolers, the politically active path they're on is one they see as beneficial for the country as a whole. It teaches critical thinking and encourages an acute awareness of current events - crucial requirements for the citizens of a healthy democracy.

"As Americans, if we don't take advantage of what our democracy offers, then we will lose it," she says.

[b]The Christian Science Monitor[/b], http://www.csmonitor.com/2004...

Privatization Worsens Outlook for Medicare and Social Security

03.23.04 (7:18 am) [edit]

[b]Privatization Worsens Outlook for Medicare and Social Security[/b]

Americans are anxious about their retirement, and for good reason. Private health insurers are providing fewer benefits at greater costs, and private pensions are slowly eroding. The only place where retirees can find solace is in the guaranteed benefits of Medicare and Social Security. These tremendously popular programs have helped to lift millions of elderly Americans out of poverty and allowed them to retire in dignity and in decent health. Despite their success, however, Medicare and Social Security face growing threats from those who would use financial projections "to infinity and beyond" to justify an entitlement-cutting and privatization agenda.

When the Medicare and Social Security trustees release their annual reports on Tuesday, much attention will be paid to their projected shortfalls. New long-term projections of 75 years or more - longer than the programs have existed - make the calculations very questionable. (Because the future is so uncertain, Congress and the administration have already rejected 10-year budget outlooks in favor of five-year projections.) But even without these new "infinite horizon" projections, the outlook for Medicare will inevitably be worse than in recent years, whereas it likely will remain unchanged for Social Security. One reason for the growing shortfalls in Medicare is the ill-advised move toward greater privatization of the program, which was the centerpiece of the new Medicare law President Bush enacted last year. Thus, the trustees report should be a cautionary note for those who seek to privatize Social Security.

Contrary to the original rationale for privatizing Medicare, the Medicare trustees' report will clearly demonstrate that privatization increases rather than decreases Medicare costs and thus worsens the program's financial outlook. That privatization costs money, and lots of it, is not a secret. Private companies want to make a profit for offering health insurance. In exchange, they are supposed to offer their services much more efficiently than the government does. Medicare used to reflect that compromise by paying private health plans 95 percent of Medicare's costs. The private plans broke their end of the bargain and fled the program, arguing they were underpaid. In passing the new Medicare law, President Bush and Congressional leaders acquiesced to the private plans' demands, removing any pretense that privatization would save money.

The new Medicare law dramatically increases payments to private health insurers. Even before enactment of the new law, private insurance plans were paid an average of 103 percent of what it would have cost traditional Medicare to care for their enrollees. The new Medicare law has already increased those overpayments to 107 percent and may eventually lead to overpayments of 125 percent or more. The Congressional Budget Office said private insurance companies would gain an additional $14 billion from the new law, while the White House estimated they would gain $46 billion in the next 10 years. Though Congressional and administration officials differed in their precise cost estimates, they agreed on one point: Medicare's cost for beneficiaries in private plans "would be substantially higher than the cost of those beneficiaries" in traditional Medicare. Thus, the drive to lure seniors out of traditional Medicare and into private health plans will result in the deterioration of the Medicare trust fund.

As the Medicare experience shows, there is no such thing as a free lunch. This also holds for Social Security. Under the proposals for Social Security that President Bush's Commission to Strengthen Social Security put forth in 2001, part of workers' contributions could be invested in individual accounts. Taxpayers have to pick up the tab for the lost revenue to Social Security. Massachussetts Institute of Technology Professor Peter Diamond, together with Brookings' Peter Orszag, estimated that this could total $3.1 trillion in 2001 dollars, if up to 2.5 percent of payroll were allowed to be invested in private accounts. Additionally, individual account holders would have to start paying fees to private management companies for handling their money. Average fees of 1.4 percent of assets each year are typical. Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, estimates that for a worker who placed $1,000 in an account every year for 40 years this would quickly lost more than $20,000 in lost savings. If President Bush has his way, and Social Security is privatized, its price tag will also skyrocket.

Medicare and Social Security are enormously successful programs. Generations of Americans rely on them for their current and future retirement needs. Radical changes, such as privatization, are likely to increase taxpayers' costs and undermine the guarantees Medicare and Social Security are supposed to provide. That would be a case of missing the forest not for the trees, but for the infinite horizon.

[b]Terri Shaw is the associate director for Domestic Policy and Christian E. Weller is a senior economist at the Center for American Progress[/b]. http://www.americanprogress.o...

Taking Stock One Year After the U.S. Invasion of Iraq

03.23.04 (7:16 am) [edit]

[b]Taking Stock One Year After the U.S. Invasion of Iraq[/b]

One year ago the United States unleashed its armed forces in an invasion of Iraq. Prior to the invasion, the Bush administration offered a variety of justifications for launching it and defended its war plan against critics who claimed that a U.S. invasion was unnecessary and would be immoral or unwise. For everyone except those blinded by partisan loyalty to the Bush administration, the truth is now all too obvious. The administration was wrong and the critics were right.

The president, the vice president, the secretaries of defense and state, and other leading figures in the Bush administration insisted confidently and repeatedly in interviews, speeches, and public forums that the Iraqi regime harbored vast stocks of chemical and biological weapons; that it was actively developing nuclear weapons; that it either possessed already or soon would possess effective means, including long-range missiles and unmanned aerial vehicles, of delivering so-called weapons of mass destruction far beyond its borders, even to the United States; that it had established links to members of al Qaeda; and that it was directing its military and related efforts toward wreaking great harm on the United States. Along the way, many auxiliary claims came forth involving, among other things, an alleged Iraqi attempt to obtain uranium “yellow cake” from Niger; procurement of aluminum tubes allegedly for use in Iraqi nuclear-weapons production; and an alleged April 2001 meeting in Prague between al Qaeda operative Mohammed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence agent. Administration leaders maintained that the conquest of Iraq (officially its “liberation”) would set off a chain reaction of democratization across the Middle East.

On March 17, 2003, just two days before the beginning of the U.S. invasion, President Bush said in an evening address to the nation:

[i]Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised. . . . The [Iraqi] regime . . . has aided, trained and harbored terrorists, including operatives of al Qaeda. The danger is clear: Using chemical, biological or, one day, nuclear weapons obtained with the help of Iraq, the terrorists could fulfill their stated ambitions and kill thousands or hundreds of thousands of innocent people in our country or any other. . . . Before the day of horror can come, before it is too late to act, this danger will be removed. . . . The tyrant will soon be gone. [Iraqi people] [t]he day of your liberation is near. . . . [W]e cannot live under the threat of blackmail. The terrorist threat to America and the world will be diminished the moment that Saddam Hussein is disarmed. . . . We are now acting because the risks of inaction would be far greater. . . . We choose to meet that threat now where it arises, before it can appear suddenly in our skies and cities. . . . [R]esponding to such enemies only after they have struck first is not self-defense. It is suicide. The security of the world requires disarming Saddam Hussein now. . . . [W]hen the dictator has departed, [the Iraqi people] can set an example to all the Middle East of a vital and peaceful and self-governing nation[/i].

On March 19, having ordered U.S. forces to begin the invasion, the president said in an evening address:

[i]We have no ambition in Iraq, except to remove a threat and restore control of that country to its own people. . . . Our nation enters this conflict reluctantly, yet our purpose is sure. The people of the United States and our friends and allies will not live at the mercy of an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder. . . . We will meet that threat now with our Army, Air Force, Navy, Coast Guard and Marines, so that we do not have to meet it later with armies of firefighters and police and doctors on the streets of our cities.[/i]

Despite a lingering unwillingness to admit in plain language that none of the president's claims about Iraqi threats has held up in the face of the facts brought to light during the past year, the administration has ceased to defend them and has resorted instead to denying that the president himself ever used the phrase “imminent threat”; to blaming faulty intelligence for misleading the president; and to justifying the war on the grounds that no matter what else might have been the case, Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator. Moreover, although the U.S. occupation of Iraq has made that country a magnet for Islamic holy warriors, suicide bombers, and planters of roadside IEDs (improvised explosive devices) and although terrorists have carried out horrendous retaliatory bombings in Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Indonesia, Turkey, and Spain, among other places, President Bush persists in his locker-room bravado and declares that the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq have made the world “a safer, freer place.”

Today, many prewar predictions can be tested against the actual outcomes of the war. We now know, for example, that U.S. forces have not been welcomed – at least, not for long or by many people – in Iraq. But in view of the thousands of deaths that they caused among civilians as well as Iraqi soldiers, the countless persons of all ages and both sexes that they injured, the vast destruction of property that they wreaked, and the widespread looting that they unleashed and then stood by watching, why would they have been welcomed? Many Iraqis, especially the Shiites and Kurds, are pleased to be rid of Saddam Hussein and his regime, but few of them relish the occupation of their country by U.S. troops or their subjugation to a foreign power. In the port city of Umm Qasr, hospital director Dr. Akram Gataa gave representative testimony for the southern region when he said, “Everyone was happy when the soldiers came here to get rid of the old regime but now people are wondering what this so-called freedom has brought them.” Dr. Gataa reported that the mood of the local people was turning quickly from frustration to resentment and anger, and he added: “All of us will fight them if they stay here too long. No Iraqi will accept this turning into the occupation of their country.”

Nor do the U.S. troops themselves enjoy serving as targets in the scores of attempts made daily to kill them. As one soldier said, “U.S. officials need to get our asses out of here. We have no business being here. . . . All we are here is potential people to be killed and sitting ducks.” Nearly 600 have died so far, thousands have been injured seriously, and many have had their mental states rearranged for the worse – approximately one thousand of the U.S. troops evacuated to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany were suffering from mental problems, according to hospital commander Colonel Rhonda Cornum. Violence can accomplish certain things, but neither “nation building” nor the promotion of sound mental health is among those things.

For many of us, none of these events has come as a surprise. Before the war, we told anyone who would listen that the administration had not made a convincing case for its impending invasion of Iraq and that its rosy forecast of the aftermath of a U.S. attack was so unlikely as to border on the fantastical.

Because the prosecution of a war serves so splendidly to promote government power and to gratify a president's delusions of war-leader “greatness“ (his prime claim to fame as he seeks reelection), however, one naturally suspects that the invasion of Iraq was never intended to serve the announced purposes, that the stated rationale was pure pretext all along. A close look at the backgrounds, expressed policy preferences, and actions of the neoconservative schemers who played such a prominent role in promoting the invasion – Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, and company – does nothing to diminish such suspicion. Indeed, if the pure-pretext explanation is not valid, then one is hard pressed to understand how the government, with its vast multi-billion-dollar intelligence apparatus, managed to get so many things wrong while isolated individuals with no privileged access to classified or inside information, such as I, managed to get them right all along.

Truth be known, this discrepancy testifies to the comic-opera quality of the whole undertaking. It illuminates the many ways in which the administration, the so-called intelligence community, the make-believe checks and balances in Congress and the courts, and the propaganda organs that masquerade as major independent news media have been engaged, and even now continue to engage, in something akin to one of those huge ballroom dances at the Palace of Versailles, each dancer moving in perfect harmony with all the rest, almost as if the entire performance had been – dare I say? – choreographed. Gazing though the unshuttered windows of power at this grandiose performance, the awed peasants perceive the elegantly costumed and magnificently coiffured dancers as they join and turn and separate, only to join and turn again in harmonious synchronization.

Thus, the Democratic challenger for the presidency is represented by his party and by the press as a stern critic of the war, but one has to wonder: where was his steely resolve in October 2002, when he voted in the Senate to hand over to the president the authority that the Constitution gives to Congress alone to declare war? Now, weaseling like a typical politician, he maintains that he was tricked – Bush “misled every one of us,” he declares – and that he voted as he did because he trusted George Bush to go to war only as a “last resort.” Can John Kerry have been so obtuse that he had no idea who held the reins at the Bush administration? Did he not know what Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, and the rest of that gang had been cooking up for decades in public as well as in private? Clarifying his stance, Kerry maintains not that Bush should not have gone to war but only that Bush should have formed a bigger coalition before doing so. Evidently an immoral and unwise war is hunky-dory if enough aggressors join forces to wage it.

To suppose that Kerry is antiwar and Bush prowar would be to mischaracterize a case of Tweedle Dumb and Tweedle Dumber. As a phrase used on another, similar occasion back in the 1960s reminds us, there's not a dime’s worth of difference between these two barons of the ruling oligarchy. The effusion of campaign blather and the election that will mercifully end it in November are all part of the ritual dance. In no event will the election's outcome materially affect the realities of death and destruction that U.S. and puppet forces are dishing out worldwide or the spasms of terrorist retaliation and assorted other “blowback” that are certain to follow. To imagine anything else is tantamount to forgetting the entire political history of this country during the past century.

Meanwhile, the dance continues. A congressionally approved blue-ribbon commission, though repeatedly obstructed by the president’s refusal to cooperate fully, strenuously probes the 9/11 disaster in preparation for its eventual preordained whitewash of presidential or administration responsibility. Another bipartisan, presidentially appointed panel, whose report has been conveniently scheduled to arrive well after the November election, digs into the “faulty intelligence” on which the administration relied prior to its invasion of Iraq. Weapons searcher David Kay has already admitted that “we were almost all wrong,” and the commission's goal of course is to “get to the bottom” of this matter – as if, at this late date, the whole world doesn't know exactly how the neocons spun the whole shebang in order to tell a plausible tale on behalf of their beloved war. On Capitol Hill, Congressional committees hold mock-serious hearings, going through the motions of searching for the facts about intelligence failures, military snafus, and cozy deals in the military-industrial complex. These dedicated public servants are always shocked – shocked! – when they happen to stumble onto the truth, but as well-rehearsed dancers they can be counted on not to stumble that way frequently. If John Q. Public thinks that any of this official investigatory activity will provide him with reliable information about how the government actually works, or even about how it intends to work, he is sacrificing a good opportunity to go fishing. It's all for show.

If you think I’m off base, then take the following test. Check the cast of characters a year from now, five years from now, ten years from now. See who’s prospered and who hasn’t. See whose head has rolled (don’t expect many) for misfeasance or malfeasance in public office. Check whether many politicians who came into office without great wealth somehow left office filthy rich. Check on their friends and relatives, too. Notice whose kids have been killed or wounded by roadside IEDs in whatever Third World hellhole the United States has invaded and occupied most recently (don't expect to find the scions of any government bigwigs among those blown to smithereens or driven mad by combat stress). Check whether the United States has managed to bring into being a glorious worldwide regime of democracy, peace, and prosperity and whether the world‘s peoples are hailing Uncle Sam with hosannas and strewing his global pathways with flowers in gratitude for his beneficent intervention (just don’t hold your breath waiting for this oft-promised outcome). I'm prepared to be wrong. If I am, I'll deliver a dollar for each of your donuts.

What we see in Iraq one year after the invasion might have been foreseen, and in fact was foreseen, by anybody who cared to take the trouble to look into the matter without ideological or religious blinders and with a modicum of historical background on the conduct of U.S. foreign policy during the past century. This war, like all the others, has been not so much a case of who knew what when, of well-intentioned mistakes and tragic miscalculations. It has been more a case of who told what lies to whom, to serve what personal, political, and ideological ends; of who paid the price in blood and treasure and who came out smelling like a rose; of mendacity and irresponsibility in high places and of colossal public gullibility in the face of relentless political opportunism. As the saying goes, the more things change . . .

[b]Robert Higgs is Senior Fellow in Political Economy at The Independent Institute and editor of its scholarly quarterly journal, The Independent Review. He is also the author of Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government and the editor of Arms, Politics and the Economy: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives. For further articles and studies, see the War on Terrorism and OnPower.org[/b]. http://www.independent.org/ti...

Misoverestimated: The Awful Truth About Colin Powell, No Backbone, Less Vision

03.23.04 (7:13 am) [edit]

[b]Misoverestimated

Yes, the hard-liners have outflanked and humiliated Colin Powell. But don't feel sorry for him. He has no one to blame but himself.[/b]

In July 2003, President George W. Bush made a five-nation tour of Africa. The purpose of the visit was to cast American foreign policy in a gentler light after the diplomatic donnybrook over Iraq -- by, among other things, showcasing the Bush administration's seriousness about combating Africa's AIDS pandemic.
But Africa didn't have the president's undivided attention. En route from Washington to Dakar, Senegal, Secretary of State Colin Powell met privately with Bush aboard Air Force One to discuss North Korea. It was a fraught subject for Powell. Shortly after taking office in 2001, he had told reporters that Bush planned to continue the Clinton administration's policy of engagement, only to be forced by the White House to eat his words the very next day: Any policy that carried the taint of Clintonism was to be reversed, and Bush did not do business with evil regimes. The president would later name North Korea a member of the "axis of evil," and just a month before his Africa trip, he had given a speech reaffirming his hard line toward Pyongyang.

For two years, Powell had worked behind the scenes to ease tensions with North Korea and keep the channels of communication open -- going so far as to hold a brief one-on-one discussion with his North Korean counterpart during an Association of Southeast Asian Nations summit in Brunei in July 2002, a meeting said to be impromptu but that actually was not.

Now, with postwar Iraq spinning out of control and North Korea apparently proceeding with its nuclear-weapons program, Powell felt the time had come to try to get Bush to take a more constructive approach to the simmering crisis in East Asia. During the meeting on Air Force One, Powell made the case for opening bilateral talks with Pyongyang. "You know, we probably ought to have some direct contact with the North Koreans," Powell told the president. Surprisingly, Bush agreed, marking a major about-face for a president not known for about-faces and seemingly paving the way for a bold initiative to help ease the standoff with North Korea. Bush's decision also handed Powell what looked to be a rare and important victory over administration hawks.

But seven weeks later, when six-party talks on North Korea began in Beijing, James Kelly, the assistant secretary of state for East Asia and the lead U.S. negotiator, went with instructions not to enter into bilateral discussions. During a break in the negotiations, the North Koreans tried to ask Kelly -- technically accountable only to Powell and the president -- a few questions directly. Kelly followed his instructions and refused to respond.

Colin Powell had lost another one.

When Powell was appointed secretary of state, such was his stature at home and abroad that he was widely expected to be the new administration's vicar of foreign policy. Three years on, he finds himself the fig leaf of that foreign policy -- the moderate front man for an administration that has been anything but moderate in its statecraft. On almost every critical issue -- the Kyoto Protocol, the future of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the Middle East peace process, North Korea, and, of course, Iraq -- Powell has been the odd man out, his influence minimal to nonexistent.

That's obvious in Washington, where Powell's vanishing act is a source of curiosity and not a little sadness. More importantly, it's obvious overseas; one U.S. official says French President Jacques Chirac recently told him, "When Powell agrees with us, we know it doesn't mean anything." Having hoped to model his tenure on that of another military man turned diplomat, George Marshall, who as Harry Truman's secretary of state devised the courageous plan to rebuild Europe in the aftermath of World War II, Powell now evokes comparisons to Warren Christopher and William Rogers, two of the least effective secretaries of state in recent memory.

Outgunned, undermined, and frequently humiliated, Powell is expected to step down next January whether or not Bush wins a second term. His unhappiness is an open secret. One former National Security Council staffer recalls being told by Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage back in 2002 that both Armitage and Powell wanted out but "can't leave because it would hurt the president." Powell has chosen to remain associated with a foreign policy that has been calamitous in its application, if not necessarily its goals. The irony, of course, is that it is a foreign policy over which Powell has exercised little influence. But resigning out of pique or principle is not the Powell way, and his willingness to conspire in his own diminishment is entirely in character: As an Army staffer during the Vietnam War, he failed to investigate reports of the My Lai massacre; as Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger's military attach? in the 1980s, he put aside his own objections and helped funnel weapons to Iran as part of the arms-for-hostages deal.

How did it all go so wrong for Powell? In part, he has fallen victim to the wrath of Dick Cheney; having soured on Powell since their days in the first Bush administration, and having witnessed firsthand Powell's bureaucratic skills (he is one of the all-time great Washington operators), the vice president set out to kneecap him this time around, usurping his authority, filling key positions with officials hostile to Powell, and otherwise maneuvering to thwart his influence. Powell has had problems, too, with other key administration figures, not least Bush himself; they have little personal chemistry and see the world through very different lenses.

His troubles with Cheney and Bush have rendered Powell a sympathetic figure outside conservative circles -- a tragic figure in the minds of many liberals. In fact, though, Powell has mostly been hobbled by his own liabilities. He came into office without a strong and specific idea either of what he wanted to accomplish at Foggy Bottom or of what America's role in the world should be. At heart he is a functionary, not a visionary, a doer rather than a thinker. Unfortunately for him, he is serving a president who likes to throw bombs (the metaphoric and occasionally the literal kind) at a moment in history when big thinking and bold action have been required. The neocons, for better or worse, had a vision, and something usually trumps nothing.

As his tenure winds down, Powell is finally getting a George Marshall moment, but probably not quite of the sort he had in mind. On July 1, the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq becomes the U.S. Embassy, and responsibility for administering Iraq passes from the Pentagon to the State Department, which was initially shut out of all postwar operations by the Pentagon and by Cheney. Denied the opportunity to conceive a reconstruction plan ? la Marshall, Powell will now spend his last months in office trying to tidy up the mess that his antagonists in the administration made.

The decision to wage preemptive war in order to depose Saddam Hussein and trigger a democratic revolution across the Arab world has shaken the international system to its core and will have repercussions for decades to come. Powell views every military engagement through the dark prism of his Vietnam experience and believes that war should always be a last resort. Thus, his friends and associates are unanimous in their view that this was not the policy he would have chosen had the decision been his -- certainly not while U.S. troops were still engaged in Afghanistan, and certainly not at the cost, in terms of American credibility, that was ultimately incurred. "It is not something he would have advocated," says one longtime colleague who, like most people interviewed for this story, insisted on anonymity out of respect for Powell, whom many in Washington still revere on a personal level.

And Powell dropped plenty of hints in public that he was unconvinced of the need to take out Hussein in the wake of September 11. Two months after the terrorist attacks, he was profiled by Bill Keller in The New York Times Magazine. By then it was already known that Iraq had been discussed by Bush and his senior advisers during a meeting at Camp David the weekend after 9-11, with Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz pushing the idea of regime change. Speaking to Keller a few days later, Powell said cooler heads had prevailed and seemed to take credit for helping keep Iraq on the back burner. "Iraq isn't going anywhere," he said. "It's in a fairly weakened state. It's doing some things we don't like. We'll continue to contain it." Asked a month later by Keller if he had changed his thinking about Iraq, Powell said had not.

But there are also indications that, even then, Powell had a sense of where events were heading and was, true to form, prepared to hold his nose and make himself useful. One source tells the Prospect that in the fall of 2001, Powell asked State Department officials for ideas on devising an inspections regime for Iraq that Hussein would reject as overly intrusive. The State Department was obviously not going to administer any future inspections, but because the United States held most of the intelligence about Iraq's alleged weapons programs, it was in a position to significantly influence the form any future inspections might take. Powell's request was thus not an idle one, nor was it seen as an innocent one; in fact, it apparently met with some internal resistance and was not pursued further. (Powell declined to be interviewed for this article, and, despite repeated requests, the State Department never made a spokesperson available to the Prospect.)

Eight months later, of course, Iraq was off the back burner. Powell continued to voice reservations. When Brent Scowcroft, who served as national-security adviser in the first Bush administration, wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal in August 2002 warning that an invasion of Iraq would be a costly diversion from the war on terrorism and could destabilize the Middle East, Powell called his former colleague to thank him. Likewise, one senior official on Capitol Hill says that when Powell told him that Bush had agreed to work through the United Nations to confront Iraq, Powell commented: "We get in there, we start negotiations. So we don't go war; how bad can that be?"

Through September and October of 2002, Powell marshaled support for a UN resolution setting out strict guidelines for new weapons inspections in Iraq and promising harsh penalties if Baghdad failed to cooperate. After weeks of haggling, Powell finally got France to go along, and Resolution 1441 was approved by the Security Council 15 to 0 on November 8. Inspections, led by Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei, began a month later. Almost immediately, however, administration officials went out of their way to discredit the process; even Powell expressed skepticism and impatience. And by then, of course, U.S. troops were already pouring into the Persian Gulf region. In late January, Blix and ElBaradei reported to the Security Council that they were getting only limited cooperation from Iraq, at which point the administration concluded it had all the justification it needed for war and decided to push, at Powell's behest, for a second resolution authorizing force.

According to The New York Times' Todd Purdum, Powell met with Bush in the Oval Office in mid-January and was told, "We're going to put our case down. I want you to do it. I have confidence in your ability, and people will listen when you speak." Powell was indeed the best face the administration could put forward, and though his February 5 presentation to the Security Council, prepared for him by the vice president's office and the National Security Council staff, failed to win over the French, Germans, or Russians, it clinched the case for war in the minds of many Americans. It has been referred to as Powell's Adlai Stevenson moment. Like Stevenson during the Cuban missile crisis, Powell was seen as the house dove, and because of his perceived dovishness, the words he delivered carried substantial weight.

No sooner did Powell speak than his aides let it be known -- Powell and the people around him are masters of the well-timed leak -- that prior to his UN appearance, the secretary of state had spent a number of hours at CIA headquarters sifting through the evidence he had been asked to present and had discarded reams of it, frustrated with the inadequate sourcing and selective use of intelligence. Among the discarded portions of the script: the now infamous allegation that Iraq had sought to purchase yellowcake uranium from Niger.

However, it appears that there was only so much cold water Powell was prepared to throw on the war planning. Analysts in the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), an internal clearinghouse for classified information, were deeply troubled by many of the claims being made by the White House concerning Iraq's weapons programs (and were ultimately vindicated). As has been widely reported, for instance, it was the INR that debunked the claim that Iraq's attempted procurement of high-strength aluminum tubing was proof of a plan to enrich uranium. After exhaustive research that drew on a number of expert sources, INR officials concluded that the tubes the Iraqis had purchased were incompatible with uranium enrichment.

But despite the expertise available to him in his own building, when Powell went to CIA headquarters, the Prospect has learned, he brought no one from the INR -- no one with the kind of knowledge that might have steered him away from other questionable claims -- and was accompanied only by Lawrence Wilkerson, his chief of staff. INR officials were sent copies of Powell's speech a few days before he went to the UN. Suggestions and corrections, scrawled in the margins, were delivered to Powell while he was at CIA headquarters. Included among the comments: the INR's findings concerning the aluminum tubes. The caution flags, however, were ignored. When the secretary of state addressed the Security Council, he not only included the aluminum-tubes claim but made several other assertions that have since proven to be inaccurate. A performance that looked to be the high point of Powell's illustrious career has now been thoroughly discredited and sits as an indelible stain on his record.

(Carl Ford, who was the assistant secretary of state in charge of the INR during this period, declined to be interviewed. Ford left the State Department last year. He is said to have told colleagues that he was retiring in part because he didn't relish the prospect of having to testify before Congress and share information that might be damaging to Powell.)

Powell's reward for doing the soldierly thing was a slap in the face to his department. On January 20, just after Powell met with Bush and agreed to go before the United Nations, Bush signed National Security Directive No. 24, which gave the Pentagon responsibility for administering postwar Iraq. In retrospect, it was a tragic decision, one that needlessly complicated efforts to stabilize Iraq and that has undoubtedly cost many American soldiers their lives. In the months prior to war, the State Department's Future of Iraq Project, headed by Tom Warrick of the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, conducted an exhaustive inquiry into what would be needed to stitch Iraq back together. Warrick's group, which ultimately produced a 13-volume, 2,500-page report, outlined a postwar scenario that has proven to be remarkably prescient. Among other things, it warned of a guerilla insurgency following Hussein's downfall, advised against disbanding the Iraqi army, and emphasized the need to restore basic services like water and electricity as quickly as possible to keep Iraqis from souring on the occupation.

All this was ignored. It was ignored because the bureau was viewed by neocons inside and outside the administration as a bastion of Arabist footdraggers committed to preserving the status quo in the Middle East. It was ignored because the State Department took a dim view of Ahmed Chalabi, the head of the Iraqi National Congress and darling of Cheney and the neocons, and refused to make him the centerpiece of its post-Hussein planning. And it was ignored because the Future of Iraq Project foretold a long and costly occupation, which Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld didn't want to hear. (They were convinced, based partly on Chalabi's assurances, that U.S. troops would be greeted as liberators and would be able to go home early.)

Initially, the State Department was almost completely frozen out of postwar operations. In March 2003, Rumsfeld pulled aside retired Lieutenant General Jay Garner, who had been tapped to lead the reconstruction effort, and told him that Warrick, then preparing to depart for Baghdad, had to be taken off Garner's team and would not be allowed to go to Iraq. Rumsfeld told Garner that the order "came from such a high level I can't say 'no.'" (It is universally assumed that the order came from Cheney.) And Richard Armitage has told associates that when Wolfowitz visited Baghdad last October -- a visit marred by a rocket attack on Wolfowitz's hotel -- the State Department was kept in the dark about his itinerary.

Powell's problems in the Bush administration start at the very top, with Bush himself. Though Powell was never promised the secretary of state's job, his appointment was a foregone conclusion, and his one interview with Bush was short, perfunctory, and pretty much content-free. "It didn't go into depth," says one Powell associate.

The relationship was built on an unsound foundation in that Powell was far more popular than Bush, and time has not closed the personal divide. One senior official from the first Bush administration says the president "respects Powell and listens to him, but they just don't click." A member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee claims the relationship is actually worse than that, saying: "The president doesn't like him very much. If Powell threatened to resign, the president would say, 'Go to hell.'"

The lack of any real bond has chilled the lines of communication between the two. The North Korea discussion that took place aboard Air Force One was not an isolated incident: Powell has told friends of multiple meetings with Bush in which he has left believing they were on the same page only to see the president later ignore his advice or do the opposite. "He'll feel that he's gotten his point across and will go back to the State Department and it will all fall apart," says a former colleague.

Occasions for agreement are rare because Powell and Bush simply have very different perspectives on how best to promote the national interest. Surely the most authentic expression of the president's worldview came at Camp David the weekend after 9-11. "At some point," he declared, "we may be the only ones left. That's OK with me. We are America." Powell, by contrast, believes coalitions and alliances are a necessity, not a luxury, and he is known to be deeply uncomfortable with the hegemonic-messianic impulses that have guided Bush's thinking since 9-11.

National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice has compounded Powell's troubles. Over the last three years, Rice has been the recipient of mostly glowing press coverage. She is a compelling figure, an African American woman serving as the president's closest foreign-policy aide and forging an almost familial relationship with him. But the gauzy tributes overlook (or ignore) one fairly significant detail: By most accounts, Rice has done a poor job.

She was never going to have an easy time of it. Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Powell all brought enormous stature and experience to the administration; Rice did not, yet she was thrust into a job that required her to serve as their referee and the honest broker among them. She has failed miserably in this role. She is too much of a partisan in policy debates, too eager to tell the president what he wants to hear and for her own views to prevail. As a result, she often fails to present Bush with a full menu of choices. "One thing a good national-security adviser does is make sure the president receives as many views as possible," says one former high-ranking U.S. diplomat. "But we now have a president who is not, on a number of issues, being given a chance to think through all the options."

It seems clear that Powell saw Rice as a potential threat early on. During the presidential transition, Powell held a meeting at his Virginia home to discuss North Korea with several mid-level Clinton administration officials. Rice also attended, flying in from Texas to take part. During the discussion, Powell made clear his support for the Clinton approach: engaging with Pyongyang and proceeding with the 1994 Agreed Framework, in which North Korea had agreed to cease its nuclear-weapons program in exchange for two light-water reactors and fuel-oil shipments. As one participant recalls, Powell completely dominated the session and seemed to go out of his way to cast developments in a positive light. "I had a sense that he did this deliberately, that he stepped out and steered the conversation in this direction rather than take a chance on where it might go with [Rice]," recalls one participant. "If she disagreed, he didn't give her a chance."

A senior official from the first Bush administration who knows both Rice and Powell well thinks her closeness to the president is the crux of the problem between her and Powell. "The president relies on her a lot, and I think she probably sees her role more as taking care of the president than running the [National Security Council] system," he says. More often than not, he adds, Rice is allied with Cheney and Rumsfeld, and this, combined with Bush's black-and-white perspective and preference for action over talk, has put Powell at a severe disadvantage. Asked if Powell feels that Rice has done an inadequate job of representing his views to Bush, the same official says, "I think Colin probably thinks that on balance that's true."

Rumsfeld, of course, has been a constant irritant for Powell. The two have known each other since the Nixon administration, when Rumsfeld was an economic adviser and Powell a White House fellow. Though they are now of equal rank, Rumsfeld still treats Powell as a subordinate. Rumsfeld hasn't hesitated to intrude on Powell's turf, either publicly -- with his gibe about "old Europe" in the run-up to the Iraq War -- or privately. Former State Department officials tell the Prospect that Rumsfeld has a habit of sending Powell brusque, often demeaning memos laying out the Pentagon's position on foreign-policy issues and essentially instructing the secretary of state how to go about his job. It is also widely believed that Newt Gingrich's scabrous attacks on the State Department last year -- first in a speech to the American Enterprise Institute, later in an article for Foreign Policy -- were done with the approval of Rumsfeld, to whom the former House speaker is an adviser.

Rumsfeld, however, would not exist but for Cheney, and the vice president, the wizard behind the curtain of this White House, has been the main source of Powell's misery. Bob Woodward has written that Cheney was incensed by the 25-minute acceptance speech Powell gave when Bush announced his nomination as secretary of state, and the relationship has not improved with time. When Powell made his ill-fated attempt at Middle East shuttle diplomacy in April 2002, he was subjected to a barrage of second-guessing back in Washington, most of it emanating from the vice president's office.

Ironically, it was Cheney, who as secretary of defense in the first Bush administration, gave Powell the biggest break of his career, bypassing a number of more senior four-star generals and naming the native New Yorker chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1989. Powell was no stranger to the executive branch; there was his stint in the Nixon White House, and he had gone on to serve in the Reagan administration, first as an aide to Weinberger, later as national-security adviser. During these tours of duty, he had proven himself to be a non-ideologue with a reverential attitude toward power and those who knew how to accumulate and use it. As military historian Eliot Cohen puts it, Powell was "fascinated by government as a game, learned its rules swiftly, and soon mastered it." When it came to core convictions, though, Powell had one: that the country's civilian leadership had failed the military badly during the Vietnam conflict and could never be allowed to do so again.

Cheney, as curt and aloof then as he is now, ran the Defense Department with an iron fist. Nonetheless, Powell managed to find room to maneuver. The Goldwater-Nichols Defense Department Reorganization Act of 1986 had made the chairman of the Joint Chiefs the principal military adviser to both the president and the secretary of defense, entitled to bypass the service chiefs, and Powell took full advantage of these augmented powers. Recognizing that the end of the Cold War would substantially alter U.S. military requirements, Powell took it upon himself to draft a plan for restructuring the armed forces. His diagnostic skills were better than his prescriptive ones: The strategy he came up with, called the "Base Force" plan, was notable chiefly for its timidity: Its main planks consisted of a 25-percent reduction in troops and some consolidation of major commands.

But what Powell lacked in vision he more than made up for in office savvy. He reduced the power and influence of the service chiefs in ways both symbolic and substantive. For instance, sessions of the joint chiefs took place in his office rather than the "tank," where they were normally held, and staff officers and note taking were both forbidden. Powell also seized control of the flow of information to Cheney. Previously, staff officers had briefed the secretary of defense and his aides on operational issues and other matters; now, Powell himself did all the briefing.

After George Bush Senior's defeat in 1992, Powell remained as Joint Chiefs chairman through nine tumultuous months in the Clinton White House. Two of the biggest issues facing the new administration were gays in the military and the crisis in the Balkans, and in both instances Powell expressed his opinions with a vigor that struck many observers as out of bounds for the president's chief military adviser -- verging, even, on insubordination.

As a candidate, Clinton had promised to end the military's ban on homosexuals, and the issue was thrust to the top of the agenda the moment he took office. The brass opposed lifting the ban, and Powell went out of his way to throw obstacles in Clinton's path; it was clear to the White House that he and the other chiefs were prepared to wage a battle royal on Capitol Hill to prevent the integration of gays into the military. Indeed, nine days before Clinton took office, Powell gave an address at the Naval Academy and urged midshipmen to resign in protest if they felt they couldn't abide the change in policy.

Troubling as that episode was, it paled in comparison to Powell's conduct in the debate over Bosnia. Powell had successfully encouraged the first President Bush not to intervene in the Balkans. During the 1992 campaign, he went public with his opposition, writing an op-ed for The New York Times lauding Bush's refusal to commit troops. When Clinton took over, he wanted military options concerning Bosnia; Powell gave him a litany of reasons not to get involved (including inflated troop estimates). "He did not frame the issue in a way that made it possible for the president to do what he wanted," says former Air Force Chief of Staff General Merrill "Tony" McPeak, who served under Powell from 1990 to 1993. "Instead, he said, 'Here's Option A, it is really stupid. Here's Option B, it is dumber than dirt.' It wasn't disloyalty, it wasn't because it was a Democratic administration; it was just because it was Powell's view. But when the president asks you to do something, you sit down and figure out how to do it."

Military historian Richard Kohn, who has written extensively and critically of Powell (but thinks his presence in the Bush administration has been a minor blessing), believes that because of Powell's bureaucratic skills, Cheney and others around Bush felt it necessary to tie him up and put him in a box. "They knew the book on Powell and set out to isolate him," Kohn said. Certainly, one reason Rumsfeld was given the Defense Department was to act as a counterweight to Powell and ensure that the former general's influence there was kept in check (Powell had pushed for Tom Ridge). When Wolfowitz, who has a long history of butting heads with Powell, was asked why he took the No. 2 spot at the Pentagon, he gave a one-word answer: "Powell."

Then there is John Bolton, the outspoken hard-liner currently serving as undersecretary of state for arms control and international security. He was appointed at Cheney's behest, presumably to serve as the vice president's eyes and ears at the State Department. Powell vehemently opposed Bolton and indicated to members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that he hoped to see the nomination killed. That didn't happen, and Bolton has proven to be a highly disruptive presence at Foggy Bottom -- needlessly complicating diplomatic efforts with his bombastic rhetoric, bypassing normal State Department procedures, even openly defying Powell. (In 2001, Powell mandated that INR analysts were to take part in staff meetings of all State Department senior policy officials. After complying for a few days, Bolton decided, in the words of one aide, that he wanted to "keep it in the family" and banished his INR liaison, an analyst named Greg Thielmann.)

Powell's tenure at Foggy Bottom has not been completely devoid of successes. He negotiated a peaceful, face-saving resolution to the crisis with China over a downed American spy plane in April 2001. He played a key role in back-channel discussions that led to Libya's recent decision to give up its nuclear ambitions and cooperate in the fight against terrorism. He was also instrumental in persuading Bush to dispatch U.S. Marines to Liberia last summer and to earmark more money for Africa's AIDS crisis. And he has proven to be an enormously popular figure within the State Department, giving the embattled institution a much-needed morale boost (by, among other things, surrounding himself with career diplomats rather than political appointees).

But measured against the expectations that greeted his appointment, these are puny achievements. What most troubles people who know Powell is the passivity with which he has endured the many setbacks and slights. For instance, there is no evidence that he protested the decision to put the Pentagon in charge of administering postwar Iraq; no evidence, either, that he tried to intervene when Warrick was barred from going to Baghdad, or that he spoke up when the Pentagon began blocking other State Department appointees to the Coalition Provisional Authority. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz have repeatedly muscled in on Powell's turf, Bolton has repeatedly subverted his authority. But if Powell has voiced any displeasure to the president, or even to Rice, it is the best-kept secret in Washington. "I don't think he's fighting, and I can't understand why," says one high-ranking official from the first Bush administration.

Actually, there is an explanation for Powell's inaction, and it has little to do with his uniformed past. True, he is a military man, accustomed to falling in line; as Caspar Weinberger once put it, "Colin is essentially a good soldier. He does his duty and carries out orders." Habits formed over a lifetime are hard to break, and Powell's natural inclination is to swallow his differences and salute. Yet it's the fact that those differences are never strongly held that mainly accounts for Powell's inaction. He has opinions but few, if any, real convictions, and there's no ground he won't cede in the interest of expediency and ambition. Says Richard Kohn, "He's a man with no core of ideology, vision, or principle other than to serve the United States."

The only times in his career that Powell put up a fight were over gays in the military and over Bosnia. He fought on those because they fed exactly into what has been his one true cause: protecting his beloved Army, from both potential Vietnams and from wooly-eyed civilians generally. But even then, the real story was not so much what he did as what he didn't do. These were cases in which he feared the country's civilian leadership was once again screwing things up for the Army, yet he didn't resign in protest -- even as he urged others to do just that. For Powell, even the Powell doctrine proved expendable. The Bush administration has turned the doctrine on its head in Iraq -- by waging preemptive war, by using less than overwhelming force, and by placing U.S. troops in a hostile environment with neither a plausible postwar plan nor an exit strategy. That Powell was complicit in this effort says pretty much all there is to say about his attachment to principle.

If there's a tragedy here, it's one mostly of Powell's making. For all their success in cutting Powell down to size, Cheney and company have not altered one basic fact: Bush needs Powell more than Powell needs him. Powell could have crippled the administration had he quit at any point in the last two years. Given his immense clout, he was in a position to raise important doubts about the administration's course on Iraq. In choosing not to confront Bush with his concerns, he not only failed his president; he failed the country. But even if Powell had spoken up, it's not clear what he could have offered Bush beyond procedural advice and critique. When Bill Keller asked him to describe his worldview back in the fall of 2001, the secretary of state answered with "an articulate and utterly uncontroversial discourse" that Keller aptly described as "uplifting nonpartisan boilerplate." Powell will get you where you want to go, but someone else has to provide the road map.

On the most critical issue confronting the United States, the rise of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism, Powell helped Bush implement a course of action conceived by the neocons. What he didn't do -- because he couldn't -- was propose a different course of action that might have led to the same goal of political reform in the Arab world but that wouldn't have involved waging an unpopular war on a trumped-up pretext, a war that has extracted an enormous cost in American lives and American prestige. Bush, by most accounts, is an impressionable sort -- "malleable," as one Bush family friend uncharitably puts it -- but selling him on an alternative vision would have required actually having one, which Powell plainly did not. That alternative vision -- hardheaded about the dangers facing the U.S. but aware that the war on terrorism can't be won without international cooperation -- will have to wait for a Kerry administration.

[b]By Michael Steinberger, The American Prospect[/b], http://www.prospect.org/print...

U.S. Business Groups Slam Bush Deception Over Iraq War

03.23.04 (7:10 am) [edit]

[b]US business group slams Bush 'deception' over Iraq war[/b]

NEW YORK (AFP) - A US business group that monitors federal spending took out a full-page advert in The New York Times, likening President George W. Bush (news - web sites) to a corrupt chief executive officer who has forfeited public trust.

Timed to coincide with the weekend anniversary of the US-led war against Iraq (news - web sites), the advertisement -- paid for by Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities -- said Bush's case for invasion "was built entirely out of falsehoods."

Highlighting the cost of the war in terms of hundreds of US casualties and tens of billions of dollars, the ad said the "state-sponsored deception" underpinning the conflict dwarfed the damage caused by the series of corporate scandals that recently rocked Wall Street.

"It's past time for finger pointing," it said.

"It's time for someone in this government to step forward and take personal responsibility for the deadly deceptions used to mislead this great nation into war.

"And that someone must be George W. Bush."

Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities was formed in 1996 on concerns that federal government spending priorities were undermining national security.

The group's 500 members include the present or former CEOs of Bell Industries, Eastman Kodak and Goldman Sachs, as well as CNN founder Ted Turner.

[b]U.S. National-AFP[/b], http://story.news.yahoo.com/n...

Israel: The Unmentionable Source of Terrorism in the World

03.22.04 (7:09 am) [edit]

[b]Israel: The Unmentionable Source of Terrorism in the World[/b]

The current threat of attacks in countries whose governments have close alliances with Washington is the latest stage in a long struggle against the empires of the west, their rapacious crusades and domination. The motivation of those who plant bombs in railway carriages derives directly from this truth. What is different today is that the weak have learned how to attack the strong, and the western crusaders' most recent colonial terrorism (as many as 55,000 Iraqis killed) exposes "us" to retaliation.

The source of much of this danger is Israel. A creation, then guardian of the west's empire in the Middle East, the Zionist state remains the cause of more regional grievance and sheer terror than all the Muslim states combined. Read the melancholy Palestinian Monitor on the Internet; it chronicles the equivalent of Madrid's horror week after week, month after month, in occupied Palestine. No front pages in the West acknowledge this enduring bloodbath, let alone mourn its victims. Moreover, the Israeli army, a terrorist organisation by any reasonable measure, is protected and rewarded in the west.

In its current human rights report, the Foreign Office criticises Israel for its "worrying disregard for human rights" and "the impact that the continuing Israeli occupation and the associated military occupations have had on the lives of ordinary Palestinians."

Yet the Blair government has secretly authorised the sale of vast quantities of arms and terror equipment to Israel. These include leg-irons, electric shock belts and chemical and biological agents. No matter that Israel has defied more United Nations resolutions than any other state since the founding of the world body. Last October, the UN General Assembly voted by 144 to four to condemn the wall that Israel has cut through the heart of the West Bank, annexing the best agricultural land, including the aquifer system that provides most of the Palestinians' water. Israel, as usual, ignored the world.

Israel is the guard dog of America's plans for the Middle East. The former CIA analysts Kathleen and Bill Christison have described how "two strains of Jewish and Christian fundamentalism have dovetailed into an agenda for a vast imperial project to restructure the Middle East, all further reinforced by the happy coincidence of great oil resources up for grabs and a president and vice-president heavily invested in oil."

The "neoconservatives" who run the Bush regime all have close ties with the Likud government in Tel Aviv and the Zionist lobby groups in Washington. In 1997, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (Jinsa) declared: "Jinsa has been working closely with Iraqi National Council leader Dr Ahmad Chalabi to promote Saddam Hussein's removal from office..." Chalabi is the CIA-backed stooge and convicted embezzler at present organising the next "democratic" government in Baghdad.

Until recently, a group of Zionists ran their own intelligence service inside the Pentagon. This was known as the Office of Special Plans, and was overseen by Douglas Feith, an under-secretary of defence, extreme Zionist and opponent of any negotiated peace with the Palestinians. It was the Office of Special Plans that supplied Downing Street with much of its scuttlebutt about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction; more often than not, the original source was Israel.

Israel can also claim responsibility for the law passed by Congress that imposes sanctions on Syria and in effect threatens it with the same fate as Iraq unless it agrees to the demands of Tel Aviv. Israel is the guiding hand behind Bush's bellicose campaign against the "nuclear threat" posed by Iran. Today, in occupied Iraq, Israeli special forces are teaching the Americans how to "wall in" a hostile population, in the same way that Israel has walled in the Palestinians in pursuit of the Zionist dream of an apartheid state. The author David Hirst describes the "Israelisation of US foreign policy" as being "now operational as well as ideological."

In understanding Israel's enduring colonial role in the Middle East, it is too simple to see the outrages of Ariel Sharon as an aberrant version of a democracy that lost its way. The myths that abound in middle-class Jewish homes in Britain about Israel's heroic, noble birth have long been reinforced by a "liberal" or "left-wing" Zionism as virulent and essentially destructive as the Likud strain.

In recent years, the truth has come from Israel's own "new historians," who have revealed that the Zionist "idealists" of 1948 had no intention of treating justly or even humanely the Palestinians, who instead were systematically and often murderously driven from their homes. The most courageous of these historians is Ilan Pappe, an Israeli-born professor at Haifa University, who, with the publication of each of his ground-breaking books, has been both acclaimed and smeared.

The latest is A History of Modern Palestine, in which he documents the expulsion of Palestinians as an orchestrated crime of ethnic cleansing that tore apart Jews and Arabs coexisting peacefully. As for the modern "peace process," he describes the Oslo Accords of 1993 as a plan by liberal Zionists in the Israeli Labour Party to corral Palestinians in South African-style bantustans. That they were aided by a desperate Palestinian leadership made the "peace" and its "failure" (blamed on the Palestinians) no less counterfeit. During the years of negotiation and raised hopes, governments in Tel Aviv secretly doubled the number of illegal Jewish settlements on Palestinian land, intensified the military occupation and completed the fragmentation of the 22 per cent of historic Palestine that the Palestine Liberation Organisation had agreed to accept in return for recognising the state of Israel.

Along with the late Edward Said, Ilan Pappe is the most eloquent writer of Palestinian history. He is also one of the most scholarly. This combination has brought him many admirers, but also enemies among Israel's academic liberal mythologists in Britain, one of whom, Stephen Howe, was given the Pappe book to review in the New Statesman of 8 March. Howe often appears in these pages; his style is to damn with faint praise and to set carefully the limits of debate about empire, be it Irish history, the Middle East or the "war on terror." In Pappe's case, what the reader doesn't know is Howe's personal link to the Israeli establishment; and what Howe does not say in his review is that here for the first time is a textbook on Palestine that narrates the real story as it happened: a non-Zionist version of Zionism.

He accuses Pappe of "factual mistakes," but gives no evidence, then denigrates the book by dismissing it as a footnote to another book by the Israeli historian Benny Morris, who has long atoned for his own revisionist work. To its credit, Cambridge University Press has published Pappe's pioneering and highly accessible work as an authoritative history. This means that the "debate" over Israel's origins is ending, regardless of what the empire's apologists say.

[i][b]By John Pilger, AntiWar.com[/b][/i], http://www.aljazeerah.info/Op...%20editorials/2004%20opin ions/March/21%20o/Israel% 20The%20Unmentionable%20S ource%20of%20Terrorism%20 By%20John%20Pilger.htm

Israel: The Unmentionable Source of Terrorism in the World

03.22.04 (7:07 am) [edit]

Eight Palestinians Killed by IOF, Six of Them in Deadly Attack on Abassan

03.22.04 (7:02 am) [edit]

[b]Eight Palestinians Killed by IOF, Six of Them in Deadly Attack on Abassan [/b]

KHAN YOUNIS, Palestine, March 21, 2004 (IPC + Agencies)-- An early morning invasion of the Israeli occupying forces (IOF) in the town of Abasan, south of Gaza Strip, left seven Palestinian citizens dead and nearly 17 others wounded, according to Palestinian medical sources.

Eyewitnesses told IPC correspondent on the phone that scores of Israeli tanks and several military bulldozers rolled into the town of Abasan, east of the southern Gaza Strip city of Khan Younis. The tanks opened heavy gunfire at the Palestinian citizens and their homes, while other forces surrounded the house of Basem Qudeih, who the Israelis claim he is wanted for carrying out resistance activities against the occupation.

The witnesses added that the bulldozers tore down Qudeih's home, and as Israeli soldiers attempted to arrest Basem, he blew himself up among the soldiers. "I heard the loud blast near the Qudeih residence, and then I saw a large number of Israeli helicopters with the red David's star emblem on their sides. These helicopters landed near the house and then quickly went up and away towards the east," Kifah Abu Toeimah, an eyewitness and a local resident of Abasan, told a local Palestinian radio .

Following the reported explosion, the Israeli occupying forces opened heavy indiscriminate fire and fired several tank shells towards the neighborhoods of the town, inflicting a large number of casualties and fatalities among the population.

Medical sources at Nasser hospital in Khan Younis declared that six Palestinians have been killed during the Israeli invasion. They were identified as Abdel Rahman Al Dardisi, 25, Tha'er Qudeih, Ra'fat Abu Toeima, Basem Qudeih, 20, his sister Samaher and his mother, Amneh.

The Palestinian Public Security Directorate in Khan Younis declared that the Israeli forces pulled out of the town four hours after their invasion, leaving behind massive damages to the town's homes and infrastructure.

Meanwhile, Palestinian hospital officials in Gaza City declared that a Palestinian citizen died today of wounds he sustained during an exchange of fire with the occupying forces in the town of Jabalya, north of Gaza Strip.

Ibrahim Al Hawwi, from Jabalya refugee camp, died today from wounds he sustained nearly 20 days earlier, when he exchanged fire with the Israeli occupying forces in Jabalya Town, north of Gaza Strip.

Earlier, a Palestinian boy was shot dead yesterday night by IOF during an incursion into the Balata refugee camp, Nablus governorate, WAFA news agency reported.

WAFA added that Mohammed Abu Mohsen, 17, was shot dead by the Israeli forces during an incursion into Balata refugee camp. The Israeli military vehicles opened heavy gunfire at Palestinian citizens and their homes, instantly killing Abu Mohsen.

As well, and in continuation to its collective punishment measures against the Palestinian population, the Israeli occupying forces tore down two Palestinian houses in Bethlehem governorate, eyewitnesses reported.

Palestinian security sources confirmed that the house of Rami Eisa in the Al Deheisha refugee camp and the house of Mohammed Daraghmeh, in Bethlehem City. Both houses were completely leveled to the ground, as none of the inhabitants were allowed to remove any personal belongings or furniture from them.

([i][b]IPC + Agencies[/b][/i]), http://www.aljazeerah.info/22...%20n/Eight%20Palestinians %20Killed%20by%20IOF,%20S ix%20of%20Them%20in%20Dea dly%20Attack%20on%20Abass an.htm

Israeli Terrorist Sharon Assassinated Shaikh Ahmed Yassin

03.22.04 (7:00 am) [edit]

[b]Sharon Assassinates Shaikh Ahmed Yassin, the Spiritual Leader of Hamas[/b]

=http://img33.photobucket.com/...

The founder of the Islamic resistance group Hamas, Shaikh Ahmed Yassin, was assassinated this Monday morning when he left the Mosque after the dawn prayers. Six other worshippers were also killed when Israeli helicopter gunships fired missiles at Yassin on March 22, 2004. (Photo by Ahmed Jadallah/Reuters, 3/22/04). http://www.aljazeerah.info

Fascist Dubya Will Retain Power in Iraq After Transfer of Sovereignty!!!!!

03.22.04 (6:56 am) [edit]

[b]U.S. will retain power in Iraq after transfer of sovereignty

What is the definition of sovereignty?[/b]

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) The United States says Iraq will be sovereign, no longer under military occupation, on June 30. But most power will reside within the world's largest U.S. Embassy, backed by 110,000 U.S. troops.

The fledgling Iraqi government will be capable of tackling little more than drawing up a budget and preparing for elections, top U.S. and Iraqi officials say.

''We're still here. We'll be paying a lot of attention and we'll have a lot of influence,'' a top U.S. official said on condition of anonymity. ''We're going to have the world's largest diplomatic mission with a significant amount of political weight.''

In just over three months, the mantle of sovereignty in Iraq will be passed to an interim government. Its composition and the manner of its choosing will be decided after a United Nations team arrives this week.

But with Iraqi elections scheduled for December or January, the interim government will last a fleeting seven months at most: a butterfly's life, in legislative terms.

Since the U.S.-led occupation regime will have a hand in choosing Iraq's next government, the body will lack a mandate for anything but administrative tasks. Many envision a team of nonpartisan Iraqi technocrats who concentrate on keeping the country functioning.

''We don't expect them to enact any laws unless there is absolute need for them,'' Iraqi Governing Council member Adnan Pachachi said Sunday. ''We're not going to enter into any big contractual obligations either diplomatically or economically because those things should be done by an elected government.''

The short-lived government's main work includes passing the 2005 national budget and preparing for elections, the U.S. official told reporters in a dinner meeting.

The U.S. ambassador will hoard a large measure of influence on Iraq, and the fledgling government will wean itself only slowly from American money, troops and advisers, whom Pachachi said will be tutoring Iraq's rulers on governance issues across the board.

The American face in Iraq will undergo only a symbolic change, with the ambassador installed in a new chancery building but U.S. affairs still handled in Saddam Hussein's former Republican Palace.

The ambassador will also have a say in the spending of $8 billion of the massive $18.4 billion U.S. aid package approved by Congress in November, a huge tool with which to influence Iraq's affairs.

Americans ''will be heavily involved, so there will be continuous contacts with them,'' Pachachi said in an interview in a rented Baghdad mansion that serves as his headquarters.

Much of the day-to-day governance will be handled by a president or prime minister and the country's 25 ministers, some of whom Pachachi predicted will be holdovers selected by U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer.

Pachachi listed three options being considered for the country's interim government, a charged issue after the complex U.S. plan for a system of caucuses was mooted earlier this year.

A committee selected by the U.S.-picked Governing Council and occupation authorities could select one or a variation of the following options:

The existing 25-member Governing Council gains legislative power, but the monthly rotation of the presidency is jettisoned in favor of a president and deputies chosen from among the members.

The Governing Council is expanded to around 100 members and takes either a parliamentary role or an advisory role, electing a prime minister and president from within its ranks.

A general national conference is convened under U.N. auspices, and conference members choose a president and ministers and then disband. A second variation has the conference retaining legislative or advisory power.

The United Nations team that arrives at the end of the week will attend to technical aspects of selecting the interim government, Pachachi said. A second team that arrives in early April will include top U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, and will handle final negotiations, Pachachi said.

As Iraq marches toward independence, many U.S. moves will shape governance and society here long after the occupation's end.

A week ago, U.S. officials announced new restrictions on border crossing that won't be fully implemented for a year long after sovereignty is in the hands of Iraqis.

Bremer is also in the midst of appointing inspectors general for Iraq's ministries that, under current rules, can't be replaced by an incoming Iraqi government.

The U.S.-led authority is also establishing a corruption-fighting Committee on Public Integrity whose commissioner is being appointed to a five-year terms, and an Iraqi broadcasting authority akin to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission.

[i][b]By Jim Krane, Associated Press[/b][/i], http://www.boston.com/dailyne...:.shtml

Former Anti-Terrorism Adviser Exposes Bush's Criminal Negligence

03.22.04 (6:51 am) [edit]

[b]Is Anybody in Charge?

[i]Former anti-terrorism adviser Richard Clarke exposes White House's criminal negligence [/i][/b]

In today's world, where state-worship is the secular faith of our age, and the idea that "the government will take care of it" is the centerpiece and source of all political discourse, the revelations of Richard Clarke, former terrorism czar, are nothing less than terrifying:

Clarke, a foreign policy hawk and career government official who served 5 Presidents – 3 of them Republicans – served as Bush II's chief counter-terrorism adviser on the national security staff, and, according to [i]Newsweek[/i],

"[i]Was known for pounding the table to urge his counterparts at the CIA, FBI and Pentagon to do more about Al Qaeda. But he did not have much luck, in part because in both the Clinton and early Bush administrations, the top leadership did not back up Clarke and demand results[/i]."

In his new book, Against All Enemies, Clarke recalls a high level meeting held in April, 2001, during which Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz scoffed at the threat posed by Osama bin Laden:

"[i]'Who cares about a little terrorist in Afghanistan?' The real threat, Wolfowitz insisted, was state-sponsored terrorism orchestrated by Saddam Hussein[/i]."

The meeting was supposed to have been about implementing Clarke's persistent efforts to do something about Al Qaeda. He had written to National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, in late January, 2001, urgently requesting some attention be paid to the growing threat of domestic terrorism orchestrated by Al Qaeda. It wasn't until April, however, that a high-level meeting was convened, at which, according to Clarke, Wolfowitz cited as evidence to the contrary the writings of conspiracy theorist Laurie Mylroie, who has created an entire oeuvre around the idea that Saddam Hussein was responsible not only for the 1993 WTC bombing, but also the Oklahoma City terror incident – and, quite possibly global warming. "We've investigated that five ways to Friday, and nobody [in the government] believes that," replied Clarke. "It was Al Qaeda. It wasn't Saddam."

But facts weren't going to get in the way of the neoconservative drive to invade and conquer Iraq, no matter what the price to truth, common sense, or the national interest. The neocons' relentless single-tracked agenda didn't permit any other conclusion but the one pointing to Saddam as the main danger, even as Al Qaeda gathered in the shadows.

Ideological blindness is one thing: deliberate diversion is another. It is the difference between incompetence and treason. But that difference, in the context of the Clarke revelations, seems to disappear in light of the numerous warnings received by U.S. government officials in the months and days prior to 9/11: As the target date of the terrorists drew nearer, the alarm bells - sounded by foreign intelligence agencies, including the British, the French, the Argentineans, and the Israelis, and some of our own people – were getting louder. But was anybody listening? Was anybody in charge?

Well, er, yes, but they were too busy pursuing the florid fantasies of the eccentric Ms. Mylroie to worry about "a little terrorist in Afghanistan."

Even in the wake of 9/11, this administration's Iraqi-mania didn't abate: indeed, according to Clarke, it was emboldened. And let's be clear, it wasn't just the President's neocon advisors whispering in his ear, cutting him off from reality. As Clarke relates, Bush II was supremely uninterested in the truth:

"[i]'The president dragged me into a room with a couple of other people, shut the door, and said, 'I want you to find whether Iraq did this.' Now he never said, 'Make it up.' But the entire conversation left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to come back with a report that said Iraq did this[/i].'

"[i]'I said, 'Mr. President. We've done this before. We have been looking at this. We looked at it with an open mind. There's no connection[/i].'

"[i]He came back at me and said, 'Iraq! Saddam! Find out if there's a connection.' And in a very intimidating way. I mean that we should come back with that answer[/i]."

Clarke compiled a report, which he characterizes as "a serious look," concluding that Iraq had nothing whatsoever to do with the events of 9/11. The CIA and the FBI both signed off on it, but when it was sent up to Condie Rice's office on its way to the President's desk, Clarke's report was intercepted "by the National Security Advisor or Deputy" and sent back with the message: "[i]Wrong answer. … Do it again[/i]."

With a deftly fortuitous sense of timing, Clarke's book is scheduled for release today [Monday], and is scheduled to testify before the 9/11 Commission on Tuesday. A Sunday night interview with [i]Sixty Minutes [/i]fires the first shot in a pyrotechnic display of fireworks, an unprecedented assault directed on an incumbent White House by a disillusioned top official.

Three years after the worst terrorist attacks in U.S. history, the seminal event of our era is still wreathed in mystery and mystification. While this administration uses 9/11 as a rationale for perpetual war, we are not supposed to examine the facts surrounding it too closely: having tried and failed to block the extension of the 9/11 Commission's deadline to submit a report, the White House has been parsimonious in doling out documents essential to the mission of the 9/11 investigating commission, which is charged with finding the proximate causes of the gigantic "intelligence failure" that made 9/11 possible. In spite of every attempt to narrow the Commission's mandate, however, Clarke's testimony is bound to elucidate the exact outlines of how and where that failure occurred.

What is interesting to note is that Clarke pinpoints the nixing of his post-9/11 report to the office of the National Security Advisor, run by Ms. Rice's chief deputy, Stephen J. Hadley – who, coincidentally, also played a similar role as bureaucratic bottleneck when it came to the Niger uranium allegations that somehow snuck into the President's 2003 State of the Union.

The Hadley connection doesn't end there, however. A Washington grand jury has recently subpoenaed all records of a heretofore little known entity, the White House Iraq Group, which met weekly in the Situation Room to coordinate the propaganda offensive in the run-up to war, with Hadley and other White House officials and advisors in regular attendance. He's also a source of the bogus "Mohammed Atta in Prague" story of a meeting between an Iraqi agent and one of the 9/11 plotters, a tall tale which he pushed, along with I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, long after it had been discredited. There is hardly a lie told by this administration that doesn't have Mr. Hadley's name signed to it. It was therefore not at all surprising when the administration point man hauled out on Sixty Minutes to provide a counterpoint to Clarke was none other than … Hadley.

The Republican attack machine is trying to paint Clarke as some kind of partisan Democrat – an unlikely characterization of a 30-year career in government at the highest levels, starting out in the Reagan administration. What we are witnessing here is yet the latest episode in an extraordinary series of whistle-blowing accounts by government insiders: Ambassador Joe Wilson, Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, and now Clarke, all patriotic Americans pointing to a dangerous vulnerability.

The neocon hijacking of American foreign policy was the cause of a significant area of blindness in this administration. The blinkered perspective of neocon apparatchiks, who routinely touted the crackpot theories of Laurie Mylroie as if they were sacred dogma, enabled Al Qaeda to hit at our soft underside, sight unseen until after the fact. This fatal loss of vision was due to the distorting effects of neocon ideology, specifically its Iraqi-centric view of the terrorist threat.

Aside from the folk tale of "[i]The Emperor's New Clothes[/i]," the only precedent is Soviet Russia in the 1930s, when dictator Joe Stalin endorsed the theories of Trofim Denisovich Lysenko – who rejected Mendelian principles of heredity, and believed that acquired characteristics could be inherited. Since this meant that human beings could be molded by an act of will, and advanced the Soviet goal of creating a "New Soviet Man," Lysenkoism was deemed politically correct by Stalin, and therefore had to be scientifically valid. Lysenkoism halted the development of the science of genetics in the Soviet Union until the late 1950s, when Lysenko was criticized and forced to resign his positions. But the damage had already been done: the progress of Soviet biological science was severely retarded.

A similar retardation process took place in the U.S. when it came to the science – or, rather, the art – or intelligence in the crucial prelude to the 9/11 terror attacks. The neo-Lysenkoism of Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld, which posited, a priori, the primacy of a threat emanating from Iraq, could not permit the inclusion of contradictory data. Go back to the drawing board, Clarke, Kwiatkowski, and others were told, and come up with the "right" answers.

In the Soviet Union, such "scientific" methods" led to the famines that decimated the country: wheat bred by Lysenko's methods somehow failed to deliver a cornucopia. In the U.S., circa September 2001, however, the neo-Lysenkoism of the top leadership had more spectacular consequences.

CIA director Richard Tenet's extraordinary rebuke to Vice President Dick Cheney on promulgating phony "intelligence" about Iraqi WMD and links to Al Qaeda, coupled with Clarke's assault on the White House's credibility, amount to an intramural fight that is threatening to bring down the Bush White House – and expose the inner workings of a government that, far from taking care of us, appears to be at least as dangerous to us as Al Qaeda. The public-spirited and patriotic motives of these whistle-blowing ex-officials now coming forward was best expressed in a letter to the Washington Post by Karen Kwiatkowski, whose expose of the Office of Special Plans "cooking" of bogus "intelligence" to push us into war led to her smearing by neocon mouthpiece George Will:

"[i]I understand that my speaking out about what I saw in the Pentagon during the run-up to the Iraq war is disconcerting to people who support the Bush administration's foreign policy. I expected to be questioned on the merit and detail of my observations and memories. Surprisingly, not one defender or advocate of our actions in Iraq and associated propaganda has done that. Instead, people so in love with war without having spent a single minute in a military uniform attack me for standing up to be counted. Vituperative? Try cowardly[/i]."

Smear and purge: that is the methodology of today's Lysenkoists in pushing their agenda. How like their Soviet predecessors. They cannot produce concrete results: they cannot successfully defend the country against terrorists with their mistaken and profoundly wrongheaded notions. But they sure can put up a fight against their accusers in the court of public opinion.

Oh, don't worry: the government will take care of it. If that is the faith that keeps us from believing in the inevitability of another 9/11, then God help us all.

[i][b]Justin Raimondo is the editorial director of Antiwar.com. He is also the author of Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement (with an Introduction by Patrick J. Buchanan), (1993), and Into the Bosnian Quagmire: The Case Against U.S. Intervention in the Balkans (1996). He is an Adjunct Scholar with the Ludwig von Mises Institute, in Auburn, Alabama, a Senior Fellow at the Center for Libertarian Studies, and writes frequently for Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. He is the author of An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard[/b][/i]. http://antiwar.com/justin/?ar...

Irresponsible Bush's Real Lousy Record on the Economy

03.21.04 (6:12 am) [edit]

[b]Administration's Real Record on Economy[/b]

President Bush wants the nation to believe that he inherited a rough economy and did the best he could with a difficult situation. But the administration's economic priorities over the last three years belie this convenient picture. As the nation continues to experience difficult economic times, the president argues that things are improving and that his supply-side policies have worked wonders in turning around the economy. With millions out of work and economic pressures rising on middle class families, the president's real record paints a different picture.

[b]1. The economic record: 2.3 million jobs lost; stagnant wages; rising health care and education costs; and the largest budget deficits in U.S. history. [/b]The facts are clear. The recession officially started on President Bush's watch. The administration's fiscal policies did not create adequate job growth or address rising pressures on middle class families. The administration's tax policies were not fiscally sound and are now responsible for a projected $5 trillion budget deficit over the next decade.

[b]2. President Bush chose massive tax cuts for the wealthy at every turn.[/b] The president had every opportunity to pursue fiscally responsible policies to help the struggling middle class, but for three consecutive years chose massive supply-side tax cuts for the most fortunate Americans.

[b]3. The president did not inherit economic problems; he created them.[/b] After inheriting record budget surpluses, the administration did nothing to help the jobless, failed to address the 43 million uninsured Americans, and jeopardized Social Security by pushing privatization schemes and threatening future cuts. His tax cut agenda produced a gigantic hole in the federal budget which will only lead to more painful cuts in services or higher taxes in the future. The administration's reckless economic policies only exacerbated problems by pushing short-term pay outs to the wealthy rather than sound proposals to help all Americans.

[i][b]The Center for American Progress[/b][/i], http://www.americanprogress.o...

On 9/11 Rumsfeld Said 'Iraq Is Better Target Than Afghanistan' - But Iraq Didn't Do 9/11!

03.21.04 (6:00 am) [edit]

[b]Did Bush Press For Iraq-9/11 Link?[/b]

(CBS) In the aftermath of Sept. 11, President Bush ordered his then top anti-terrorism adviser to look for a link between Iraq and the attacks, despite being told there didn't seem to be one.

The charge comes from the advisor, Richard Clarke, in an interview airing[i] Sunday at 7 p.m. ET/PT on 60 Minutes[/i].

The administration maintains that it cannot find any evidence that the conversation about an Iraq-9/11 tie-in ever took place.

Clarke also tells [i]CBS News [/i]Correspondent Lesley Stahl that White House officials were tepid in their response when he urged them months before Sept. 11 to meet to discuss what he saw as a severe threat from al Qaeda.

"Frankly," he said, "I find it outrageous that the President is running for re-election on the grounds that he's done such great things about terrorism. He ignored it. He ignored terrorism for months, when maybe we could have done something to stop 9/11. Maybe. We'll never know."

Clarke went on to say, "I think he's done a terrible job on the war against terrorism."

The No. 2 man on the president's National Security Council, Stephen Hadley, vehemently disagrees. He says Mr. Bush has taken the fight to the terrorists, and is making the U.S. homeland safer.

Clarke says that as early as the day after the attacks, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was pushing for retaliatory strikes on Iraq, even though al Qaeda was based in Afghanistan.

Clarke suggests the idea took him so aback, he initally thought Rumsfeld was joking.

Clarke is due to testify next week before the special panel probing whether the attacks were preventable.

His allegations are also made in a book being published Monday, "Against All Enemies."

Clarke helped shape U.S. policy on terrorism under President Reagan and the first President Bush. He was held over by President Clinton to be his terrorrism czar, then held over again by the current President Bush.

In the 60 Minutes interview and the book, Clarke tells what happened behind the scenes at the White House before, during and after Sept. 11.

When the terrorists stuck, it was thought the White House would be the next target, so it was evacuated. Clarke was one of only a handful of people who stayed behind. He ran the government's response to the attacks from the Situation Room in the West Wing.

"I kept thinking of the words from 'Apocalypse Now,' the whispered words of Marlon Brando, when he thought about Vietnam. 'The horror. The horror.' Because we knew what was going on in New York. We knew about the bodies flying out of the windows. People falling through the air. We knew that Osama bin Laden had succeeded in bringing horror to the streets of America," he tells Stahl.

After the president returned to the White House on Sept. 11, he and his top advisers, including Clarke, began holding meetings about how to respond and retaliate. As Clarke writes in his book, he expected the administration to focus its military response on Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. He says he was surprised that the talk quickly turned to Iraq.

"Rumsfeld was saying that we needed to bomb Iraq," Clarke said to Stahl. "And we all said ... no, no. Al-Qaeda is in Afghanistan. We need to bomb Afghanistan. And Rumsfeld said there aren't any good targets in Afghanistan. And there are lots of good targets in Iraq. I said, 'Well, there are lots of good targets in lots of places, but Iraq had nothing to do with it.

"Initially, I thought when he said "There aren't enough targets in-- in Afghanistan" I thought he was joking.

"I think they wanted to believe that there was a connection but the CIA was sitting there, the FBI was sitting there, I was sitting there saying we've looked at this issue for years. For years we've looked and there's just no connection."

Clarke says he and CIA Director George Tenet told that to Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and Attorney General John Ashcroft.

Clarke then tells Stahl of being pressured by Mr. Bush.

"The president dragged me into a room with a couple of other people, shut the door, and said, 'I want you to find whether Iraq did this.' Now he never said, 'Make it up.' But the entire conversation left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to come back with a report that said Iraq did this.

"I said, 'Mr. President. We've done this before. We have been looking at this. We looked at it with an open mind. There's no connection.'

"He came back at me and said, "Iraq! Saddam! Find out if there's a connection.' And in a very intimidating way. I mean that we should come back with that answer. We wrote a report."

Clarke continued, "It was a serious look. We got together all the FBI experts, all the CIA experts. We wrote the report. We sent the report out to CIA and found FBI and said, 'Will you sign this report?' They all cleared the report. And we sent it up to the president and it got bounced by the National Security Advisor or Deputy. It got bounced and sent back saying, 'Wrong answer. ... Do it again.'

"I have no idea, to this day, if the President saw it, because after we did it again, it came to the same conclusion. And frankly, I don't think the people around the president show him memos like that. I don't think he sees memos that he doesn't-- wouldn't like the answer."

Clarke was the president's chief adviser on terrorism, yet it wasn't until Sept. 11 that he ever got to brief Mr. Bush on the subject. Clarke says, prior to Sept. 11, the administration didn't take the threat seriously.

"We had a terrorist organization that was going after us! Al Qaeda. That should have been the first item on the agenda. And it was pushed back and back and back for months.

"There's a lot of blame to go around, and I probably deserve some blame too. But on January 24th, 2001, I wrote a memo to Condoleezza Rice asking for, urgently -- underlined urgently -- a Cabinet-level meeting to deal with the impending al Qaeda attack. And that urgent memo-- wasn't acted on.

"I blame the entire Bush leadership for continuing to work on Cold War issues when they back in power in 2001. It was as though they were preserved in amber from when they left office eight years earlier. They came back; they wanted to work on the same issues right away: Iraq, Star Wars. Not new issues, the new threats that had developed over the preceding eight years."

Clarke finally got his meeting about al Qaeda in April, three months after his urgent request. But it wasn't with the president or cabinet. It was with the second-in-command in each relevant department.

For the Pentagon, it was Paul Wolfowitz.

Clarke relates, "I began saying, 'We have to deal with bin Laden; we have to deal with al Qaeda.' Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, said, 'No, no, no. We don't have to deal with al Qaeda. Why are we talking about that little guy? We have to talk about Iraqi terrorism against the United States.'

"And I said, 'Paul, there hasn't been any Iraqi terrorism against the United States in eight years!' And I turned to the deputy director of the CIA and said, 'Isn't that right?' And he said, 'Yeah, that's right. There is no Iraqi terrorism against the United States."

Clarke went on to add, "There's absolutely no evidence that Iraq was supporting al Qaeda, ever."

When Stahl pointed out that some administration officials say it's still an open issue, Clarke responded, "Well, they'll say that until hell freezes over."

By June 2001, there still hadn't been a Cabinet-level meeting on terrorism, even though U.S. intelligence was picking up an unprecedented level of ominous chatter.

The CIA director warned the White House, Clarke points out. "George Tenet was saying to the White House, saying to the president - 'cause he briefed him every morning - a major al Qaeda attack is going to happen against the United States somewhere in the world in the weeks and months ahead. He said that in June, July, August.

Clarke says the last time the CIA had picked up a similar level of chatter was in December, 1999, when Clarke was the terrorism czar in the Clinton White House.

Clarke says Mr. Clinton ordered his Cabinet to go to battle stations-- meaning, they went on high alert, holding meetings nearly every day.

That, Clarke says, helped thwart a major attack on Los Angeles International Airport, when an al Qaeda operative was stopped at the border with Canada, driving a car full of explosives.

Clarke harshly criticizes President Bush for not going to battle stations when the CIA warned him of a comparable threat in the months before Sept. 11.

"He never thought it was important enough for him to hold a meeting on the subject, or for him to order his National Security Adviser to hold a Cabinet-level meeting on the subject."

Finally, says Clarke, "The cabinet meeting I asked for right after the inauguration took place-- one week prior to 9/11."

In that meeting, Clarke proposed a plan to bomb al Qaeda's sanctuary in Afghanistan, and to kill bin Laden.

Hadley staunchly defended the president to Stahl.

"The president heard those warnings. The president met daily with ... George Tenet and his staff. They kept him fully informed and at one point the president became somewhat impatient with us and said, 'I'm tired of swatting flies. Where's my new strategy to eliminate al Qaeda?'"

Hadley says that, contrary to Clarke's assertion, Mr. Bush didn't ignore the ominous intelligence chatter in the summer of 2001.

"All the chatter was of an attack, a potential al Qaeda attack overseas. But interestingly enough, the president got concerned about whether there was the possibility of an attack on the homeland. He asked the intelligence community: 'Look hard. See if we're missing something about a threat to the homeland.'

"And at that point various alerts went out from the Federal Aviation Administration to the FBI saying the intelligence suggests a threat overseas. We don't want to be caught unprepared. We don't want to rule out the possibility of a threat to the homeland. And therefore preparatory steps need to be made. So the president put us on battle stations."

Hadley asserts Clarke is "just wrong" in saying the administration didn't go to battle stations.

As for the alleged pressure from Mr. Bush to find an Iraq-9/11 link, Hadley says, "We cannot find evidence that this conversation between Mr. Clarke and the president ever occurred."

When told by Stahl that [i]60 Minutes [/i]has two sources who tell us independently of Clarke that the encounter happened, including "an actual witness," Hadley responded, "Look, I stand on what I said."

Hadley maintained, "Iraq, as the president has said, is at the center of the war on terror. We have narrowed the ground available to al Qaeda and to the terrorists. Their sanctuary in Afghanistan is gone; their sanctuary in Iraq is gone. Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are now allies on the war on terror. So Iraq has contributed in that way in narrowing the sanctuaries available to terrorists."

When Clarke worked for Mr. Clinton, he was known as the terrorism czar. When Mr. Bush came into office, though remaining at the White House, Clarke was stripped of his Cabinet-level rank.

Stahl said to Clarke, "They demoted you. Aren't you open to charges that this is all sour grapes, because they demoted you and reduced your leverage, your power in the White House?"

Clarke's answer: "Frankly, if I had been so upset that the National Coordinator for Counter-terrorism had been downgraded from a Cabinet level position to a staff level position, if that had bothered me enough, I would have quit. I didn't quit."

Until two years later, after 30 years in government service.

A senior White House official told [i]60 Minutes [/i]he thinks the Clarke book is an audition for a job in the Kerry campaign. [What a load of orwellian bullshit!]

[i][b]CBS News '60 Minutes'[/b][/i], http://www.cbsnews.com/storie...

U.S. Attacks Hit Pakistan, Killing Innocent Afghan Civilians

03.21.04 (5:54 am) [edit]

[b]US attacks hit Pakistan, Afghan civilians[/b]

A US helicopter gunship which entered Pakistani territory from Afghanistan while chasing militants has wounded three civilians in an attack, a Pakistani security official said on Saturday.

At least six Afghan civilians have also reportedly been killed and seven wounded in a US airstrike in Afghanistan's central province of Uruzgan, officials say.

Villagers in Pakistan's North Waziristan tribal region on the Afghan border said one person was also killed in the Friday night raid but the region's security chief said no one was killed.

"The helicopter entered Pakistan due to a navigational error," the security official, Mehmood Shah, told Reuters.

"Three civilians were injured".

US forces are not allowed to conduct combat operations inside Pakistan.

Villagers said the helicopter fired on a van, wounding the three, then made a second attack in which one person was killed.

Body parts had been found at the scene of the second attack, they said.

Pakistani forces have been battling Al Qaeda and other rebels in its tribal border lands in recent days with US assistance while US forces on the Afghan side have mounted their own offensive against the militants.

Meanwhile, many of the casualties in the Friday night US airstrike on an Afghan village were women and children, a provincial government official said, who declined to be identified.

Six people had been killed and seven wounded, said a police officer, who also declined to be identified.

A Pakistan-based Afghan news agency said seven people had been killed - three women and four men.

US military spokesman Lieutenant-Colonel Bryan Hilferty said he was unaware of any civilian casualties.

He said US aircraft had pounded suspected Taliban positions in the province on Friday morning, not evening, in retaliation for the killing of two US soldiers on Thursday in a fire fight in which five militants were also killed.

He said the air strikes in the Tarin Kot area killed three more suspected militants.

"I have no information that indicates coalition forces killed any civilians in Uruzgan," he said.

"Certainly I have no reports that women or children were killed."

US-led forces have stepped up a hunt for Taliban and Al Qaeda militants, including Osama bin Laden, in south and east Afghanistan launched since March 7, codenamed "Mountain Storm".

The United States has been criticised by many Afghans and rights groups for killing and wounding civilians in its pursuit of Taliban, Al Qaeda and fighters allied to them, launched after the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington.

The United Nations has called for details of investigations into such incidents to be made public.

In the worst US attack on civilians, in July 2002, 48 people were killed and 117 hurt when a US gunship attacked a wedding party in the province, Afghan officials say.

The US military eventually said 34 had been killed and 50 wounded - most women and children, but said the aircraft had come under fire.

- [i][b](Reuters)[/b][/i], http://www.abc.net.au/news/ne...

Over A Million People March Against Dubya's Occupation of Iraq

03.21.04 (5:52 am) [edit]

[b]Worldwide protests demand Iraq pullout[/b]

More than a million antiwar protesters have poured into the streets of cities around the globe on the anniversary of the invasion of Iraq to demand the withdrawal of U.S.-led troops.

From Sydney to Tokyo, from Santiago, Chile, to Madrid, London, New York and San Francisco, demonstrators on Saturday condemned U.S. policy in Iraq and said they did not believe Iraqis were better off or the world safer because of the war.

Journalists estimated that at least a million people streamed through Rome, in probably the biggest single protest.

In London, two anti-war protesters evaded security to climb the landmark Big Ben clock tower at the Houses of Parliament, unfurling a banner reading "Time for Truth."

About 25,000 demonstrators gathered in central London, many carrying "Wanted" posters bearing images of President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair, his main war ally.

In most places, the demonstrators numbered in the tens of thousands, compared with hundreds of thousands who marched in big cities on February 15, 2003, to try and prevent the conflict.

The peaceful protests began in Asia and moved to Europe and the Americas in what organisers billed "a global day of action."

In New York, scene of the September 11, 2001, hijacked plane strikes by Islamic militants, tens of thousands created a sea of signs in midtown Manhattan, many of them criticising Bush, who is running for re-election in November.

Among the signs spotted in the crowd were, "Money For Jobs and Education not for War and Occupation" and "Bush Lies" and "End Occupation of Iraq."

[b]TEXAS PROTEST[/b]

Anti-war activists gathered at a park in the small central Texas town of Crawford but out of sight of Bush's ranch there. Others gathered in Fayetteville, North Carolina, home of Fort Bragg, one of the biggest U.S. military basis.

Soldiers, veterans and local residents staged two counter-demonstrations, but there were military veterans and families among the anti-war groups.

"I hate George Bush and everything he stands for and this war of vanity," said Don Marshburn, 72, a disabled Navy veteran from Newton Grove North Carolina. "I'm sick of bombs. It didn't do anything over there and it didn't do anything over here."

About 2,000 protested at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and several hundred in Chicago.

New York's crowd was the largest in the United States on the day, with organisers estimating up to 100,000 protesters. Police did not give an official estimate.

"Hey Hey, Ho Ho, George Bush has got to go," marchers chanted at the rally organised by the United For Peace and Justice coalition of left-leaning groups.

"The thing they all object to is Bush," said demonstrator, Reeves Hamilton, 30. "It doesn't make sense to bomb countries that have nothing to do with September 11."

He said he supported troops going into Afghanistan to fight al Qaeda militants responsible for the attacks, but not the invasion of Iraq, which Bush ordered to rid the country of its purported weapons of mass destruction.

At a campaign rally in Florida, Bush touted Iraq as an "essential victory" in Washington's war on terror and hit back at criticism of his decision to invade without more international support.

[b]BUSH ON THE DEFENSIVE[/b]

"I'm all for united action, and so are our 34 coalition partners in Iraq right now," he said. "Yet America must never outsource America's national security decisions to the leaders of other countries."

A year after the start of the Iraq war, Saddam Hussein has been overthrown and captured, but no weapons stockpiles have been found.

Concern over the war has been most evident in Spain, where thousands demonstrated a week after voting out the conservative government that sent troops to Iraq. Many Spaniards blamed Madrid's support for the war for the March 11 train bombs, blamed on Islamic militants, which killed 202 people.

Spanish Prime Minister-elect Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero has pledged to pull Spanish troops out of Iraq. He has called the war a "disaster" and a "fiasco."

Many in Iraq said their lives had improved since Saddam was toppled, but others said guerrilla attacks and lawlessness left them fearful.

Guerrillas killed a U.S. Marine near the town of Fallujah, west of Baghdad, on Saturday, raising to 393 the number of U.S. troops killed in combat or in attacks in Iraq in the past year. The number of non-combat deaths is 183.

[i][b]By Grant McCool, (Reuters)[/b][/i], http://www.reuters.co.uk/news...

Dubya's Irresponsible Budget's Red Ink Colors Turmoil in GOP

03.20.04 (7:09 am) [edit]

[b]Budget's red ink colors turmoil in GOP[/b]

WASHINGTON -- Red ink is making Republicans feel blue.

As Democrats hammer away at a record budget deficit that has emerged since President Bush took office, the GOP is struggling with itself over how--and how much--to close the gap between federal revenues and spending.

Already the White House effort to make Bush's tax cuts permanent appears to be in jeopardy, at least for this year. Pressure is growing on the president to veto a popular transportation bill that could test the White House's resolve in getting spending under control.

"There is a real fight over the heart and soul of the Republican Party over the deficit," said Stan Collender, a longtime budget analyst and head of the Washington office of Financial Dynamics, an international communications company.

A deficit that could exceed a record $500 billion this year is giving the GOP some pause and Democrats some live political ammunition. But few Republicans see the deficit issue as a major threat to Bush's re-election bid.

Rep. Ray LaHood (R-Ill.) said Americans support the administration's defense spending increases to fight the war on terrorism and its tax reductions to bolster the economy.

Although the GOP has a plan to cut the deficit in half within five years, there is growing unrest over whether this can be accomplished and whether the party should take even stronger steps to deal with the red ink.

"Frankly, we have made it worse with the Medicare prescription drug package," said Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), a conservative who wants tougher spending restraints and would like to see the president use his veto pen to strike down some spending increases. So far, Bush has not vetoed a single bill.

Republicans are arguing among themselves whether the president's tax cuts should be scaled back to lower the deficit. Most GOP lawmakers are against the idea, but that they are even talking about it now is a marked change.

Some members, such as Rep. Jo Ann Emerson (R-Mo.), believe that the long-term deficit is serious enough to consider sacrificing some tax cuts. "If we are going to be serious about getting rid of the deficit, then we have to be willing to go across the board" to include tax cuts as well as spending increases, she said.

GOP conservatives, unhappy over the surging costs of the new Medicare benefit and a long-term deficit that could harm the economy, applied pressure on the House leadership over the last week to include deficit enforcement measures in the annual budget resolution.

[b]Reining in the deficit[/b]

The House Budget Committee complied on Wednesday, essentially requiring that any additions to the budget be offset by subtractions elsewhere. But the committee excluded future tax cuts from this requirement, even though some moderate Republicans had pushed for including them.

The Senate took the opposite approach in its budget resolution, passed last week. With the help of a few moderate Republicans, the Senate approved new deficit-control rules that apply to future tax cuts as well as spending increases.

These clashing approaches to deficit control are likely to spark a major fight between the two GOP-controlled houses when the budget resolution goes to a House-Senate conference committee.

Rep. Gil Gutknecht (R-Minn.), a member of the House Budget Committee, said any future tax cuts should be subject to these budget enforcement rules, but his view did not prevail. He said GOP conservatives "were willing to look the other way" on the deficit during a time of recession and war.

But now, he said, as these events start to settle down, "a lot of us think it is time to get back to the knitting."

A six-year transportation measure may be part of that "knitting." The White House has threatened a veto if the bill exceeds $256 billion. The Senate approved a $318 billion bill last month, and the House leadership is talking about spending $272 billion. House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) has raised questions about the $256 billion figure, and has said he will work with Bush to pass an acceptable bill.

But if the president is to regain credibility over the deficit issue, he cannot back down on the highway bill, said Michael Franc, vice president of government for the conservative Heritage Foundation. "It is one of those litmus tests where he can stare down profligate members and score a lot of points with his political base," he said.

There is already talk among Republicans of avoiding an election-year showdown over the transportation bill. One proposal is to pass a temporary authorization bill for one or two years. But to deficit hawks, postponement is no way to deal with the red ink.

[b]`Republicans are in denial'[/b]

Bush came to power advocating the tax-cut agenda that President Ronald Reagan began in the 1980s. But a recession, terrorism, a war with Iraq and tax reductions helped turn a surplus into a large deficit. Now many conservatives fear that the deficit will threaten that agenda in the future.

"Republicans are in denial," said Bruce Bartlett, an economist who worked for Reagan, Bush's father and former Rep. Jack Kemp (R-N.Y.), co-author of the tax cut Reagan adopted.

"I think we're in the calm before the storm," he said. "At the moment, the deficit is an abstraction. Inflation and interest rates are at historic lows. Sooner or later, one or the other, or both, are going to rise. At that point action is going to have to be taken."

Bartlett added that any deficit-reduction package likely would have to include scaling back tax cuts, arguing that pressure from financial markets would force them to be put on the table. "They have been spending money like there is no tomorrow," he said.

Rep. Jim Nussle (R-Iowa), chairman of the House Budget Committee, denied that Republicans are deeply conflicted over how to rein in the deficit, and by how much. Indeed, some of the public grumbling within the party waned when his panel decided to adopt tougher budget enforcement provisions.

In an interview, Nussle said the nation had a balanced budget on Sept. 10, 2001, a day before the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, "and it didn't protect us," so spending had to be increased in the short term.

He rejected claims made by former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill in a recent book that the administration did not care about controlling the deficit.

"Paul O'Neill is probably the most insignificant secretary of the Treasury that I've ever had the opportunity to meet," Nussle said.

[i][b]By William Neikirk, Chicago Daily Tribune[/b][/i], http://www.chicagotribune.com...,1,4817453.story?coll=chi-printnews- hed

Dubya's Criminal Medicare Fraud

03.20.04 (7:04 am) [edit]

[b]The Medicare fraud[/b]

After some extraordinary late-night arm-twisting in the U.S. House last November, the Medicare prescription drug bill passed by just five votes. It carried a high price tag, $395 billion over 10 years, and many conservative Republicans balked at that cost. Just enough were persuaded to hold their noses and vote to provide a new Medicare drug benefit even though it guaranteed more federal debt.

Only a couple of months later, President Bush was forced to admit in his proposed budget that the $395 billion price tag was a fiction. The real estimated cost of the law was $534 billion.

The president and others insisted they, too, were blindsided by the higher figure.

That story was unconvincing at the time. And last week it was revealed that the government's top expert on Medicare costs had told colleagues that he had projected a much higher cost for the bill months before the vote, but he had been threatened with the loss of his job if he told lawmakers about the true cost. The drug bill, actuary Richard Foster estimated as early as June of 2003, would cost $551 billion, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported.

Foster told The New York Times last week that he had been warned by senior Medicare officials that if he shared that data with lawmakers, "they would try and fire me." The Times reported that Tom Scully, who was the chief of Medicare at the time, confirmed that he told Foster to withhold certain information from Congress. Scully denied that he threatened to fire Foster.

The whole sorry mess is now being investigated by the inspector general's office of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Even before the investigation begins, however, it is clear that the Medicare drug benefit was sold to Congress on the basis of cooked numbers. That's nothing but fraud. If the true cost estimates had been known at the time of the vote, the bill almost certainly would have failed to draw support from enough conservatives to pass it.

Republicans and Democrats can argue and snipe at each other for months, and probably will, over the particulars of how they were duped. Democratic umbrage might be tempered by the reality that many of them wanted even higher spending on prescription drugs.

There's a simple way to fix this: Congress should rescind the law.

Even at $395 million it was a poorly designed benefit and a costly mistake in a country faced with huge, growing federal deficits. At $534 billion--and counting--it's unconscionable.

Most of the law's provisions don't take effect until 2006. The drug discount card that the government is planning to offer could still be made available at a reasonable cost to the government.

Many people didn't understand the complicated benefit, and many of those who did were less than impressed. Even the government's attempts to promote the new law reek of desperation. It was recently reported that the Department of Health and Human Services produced and distributed fake video news reports to local TV stations in hopes that the stations would run them as if they were real news. Some stations have apparently done so.

No public relations campaign can camouflage the gaping flaws in this law and the dishonest way in which it was sold. Congress should kill it.

[i][b]Chicago Daily Tribune[/b][/i], http://www.chicagotribune.com...,1,950820.story?coll=chi-printedito rial-hed

Security Expert Warns That Bush Is Stupidly Squandering U.S. Taxpayer Money

03.20.04 (7:01 am) [edit]

[b]An Enormous Waste of Money[/b]

[b]A security expert argues that America is spending its money ineffectively in the fight against terrorism [/b]

March 17 - The coordinated train bombings last Thursday in Spain marked the country’s deadliest terror attack ever, killing at least 200 and injuring at least 1,500. Indications—still unconfirmed—that Islamic fundamentalists with ties to Al Qaeda may have been behind the blasts have prompted emergency meetings among European leaders and raised fears of another attack on the United States. But are Washington’s precautions enough? And has its allocation of resources focused too much on air safety and not enough on other forms of public transportation?

NEWSWEEK’s Jennifer Barrett discussed some of these issues with security expert Bruce Schneier, whose most recent book, “Beyond Fear” (Copernicus Books), offers a comprehensive look at the challenges of keeping a nation secure from terrorism. Schneier—who believes Americans should keep the threat of terror in perspective by reminding themselves that such attacks are extremely rare—also evaluates the effectiveness of proposed measures ranging from a national ID card system to federalized airport security. [i]Excerpts[/i]:

[b]NEWSWEEK: How much better prepared is the United States today in preventing a large-scale terror attack than it was before September 11?[/b]

[b]Bruce Schneier: [/b]Psychologically, we expect it, so we are more psychologically prepared. But securitywise, we are probably much less secure than we were.

[b]Why do you say that?[/b]

We have built a geopolitical situation where more people dislike America, more people hate us, and in that respect we have made the world a more dangerous place. Though we have also done a lot of good things to increase our security. We have arrested and neutralized terrorist cells. We have disrupted terrorist funding. Our investigations—both internal in the U.S. and abroad—are much better. We are better able at preventing plots and uncovering them. Nine-11 was a very unfortunate intelligence accident. A lot of those sorts of things tend not to work because they get foiled. We were very unlucky. We are probably better prepared in that we kind of expect these things—local governments, when something like this happens, are going to be more ready because they have thought about it. In terms of the aftermath, we are more prepared. [But] in terms of whether we’ve made the world safer in the past two years, most of the things we’ve done have been irrelevant and some have been harmful.

[b]Can you give some examples?[/b]

We’re still living in a world where politics trumps security. The things that tend not to work are the broad surveillance measures. We are spending $10 billion on a program to fingerprint foreigners, for example.

[b]You don’t support that program?[/b]

As a consumer, I need to ask, is that $10 billion being well spent?

[b]What do you think?[/b]

I think it is an enormous waste of money. The amount of security I’m getting is not nearly worth that cost. I’d much rather take that money and see it spent elsewhere.

[b]How would you like to see it spent?[/b]

On people—human intelligence. What is a fee for an FBI agent? Can I hire a thousand FBI agents for the same amount of money? That sounds like a way better security investment. It’s the philosophy. "Will this make us safer?" is the wrong question to ask. The right question to ask is: is it worth it? Many things that will make us safer aren’t worth it. We also have to look at the underlying policies that bring about the situation. You can imagine living in a community where the landlord keeps hornets’ nests, and he keeps whacking the nests. And then he keeps telling you, you need to buy protective clothing. He’s right, but I wish he’d stop whacking the nest. In a sense that’s what we are doing. Far better for our security would be to deal with the underlying geopolitical situations that cause the problem. That may be politically untenable, but as a security professional, that is the best way to spend your money.

[b]What have we done right?[/b]

Good security centers around people, so things we’ve done that empower people have generally been good. To the extent that we have trained more agents in Islamic languages, that has been a good thing. To the extent that we have gone around the world and disrupted terrorist funding networks, that’s been a good thing. But to the extent that we have ignored the Saudi Arabian terrorist ties, that is a bad thing.

[b]You said broad surveillance measures tend not to work. So would it be feasible—or even practical—for the U.S. to try to install the sorts of security measures in subway and train stations that are in place at airports?[/b]

If you think of the number of situations where people gather en masse—whether they are public transportation or stadiums or theaters or shopping malls or monuments—you come up with a list of hundreds of thousands of potential targets. And installing preventive screening at all of them fundamentally makes no sense because the attacker will be smart enough to go where you didn’t screen. So if you install all of these security measures in subways, and next time the terrorists bomb shopping malls, the money will have been wasted. This is the fallacy of defending against yesterday’s attack. Unless you go after the attackers, and the fundamental causes, all you will do is force the attackers to modify their tactics. And that is largely a waste of money.

[b]So all this money spent on increased security …[/b]

Well, think about Spain. They probably spent a lot of money securing their aircraft in the wake of 9/11. Do those people now think that money was well spent? They probably don’t.

[b]Well, you could argue that the money was well spent precisely because we haven’t had another successful terror attack involving an airliner since 9/11. Also, the increasing security measures helped people feel more comfortable flying again after the attacks[/b].

That is an important point to make. There are reasons you do security things other than security. I’m a security professional, so I tend to discount those nonsecurity issues, but peace of mind is very important. I call it security theater. It doesn’t actually do any good, but it makes people feel better. It’s an important psychological thing … It made people feel better, it helped our economy. The right question is not whether this does any good but whether the trade-off is worth it.

[b]Do you think the money we’ve spent—and the way we’ve spent it—on homeland security measures is worth it?[/b]

I think it’s an enormous waste of money. Politicians tend to prefer security countermeasures that are very visible, to make it look like they’re doing something. So they will tend to pick things that are visible even if they are less effective. Training FBI agents in Arabic is a really good idea, but no one is going to see it. Fingerprinting foreigners at the border is a very visible thing that, even if it is less effective, is going to look like we’re doing something.

[b]Do you think the Madrid bombings, assuming they were carried out by Al Qaeda, were effective as a political tool given the surprise upset victory three days later of the Socialist Party, which wants to pull Spanish troops out of Iraq?[/b]

I thought the exact opposite. Al Qaeda wants escalation. When they attacked the United States, they wanted us to attack back with force because that would enrage more Arabs, which enrages more of us, and makes the conflagration worse. I’m amazed that people are saying that the victory for the antiwar people in Spain was a victory for Al Qaeda. I’m proud of Spain. They could have reacted like the U.S. and said they would use even more force. They reacted with restraint.

[b]Well, it depends on what you think their goal was with these attacks. If they wanted to isolate the United States, and persuade Spain to leave Iraq, then you could argue that they succeeded[/b].

The U.S. in Iraq plays into the terrorists’ hands. It gives them more people to kill. It proves we’re an occupying nation. What Al Qaeda wants is to cause a holy war. They wanted us to invade Iraq. By denying liberties for thousands of Americans, by moving our nation toward a police state and rattling sabers throughout the world, we proved them right. We legitimized them by claiming we were at war with them. They don’t deserve the designation of enemy combatants. They are criminals and should be treated as such.

[b]What changes would you like to see in the way the U.S. approaches security?[/b]

What I push for is more balanced approaches toward security. It is just one of the goals of our country. If we took every single person in this country and locked each of them in a box, we would be more secure, but it wouldn’t be a better society. I would much rather live in a country that people run to than run from.

[i][b]By Jennifer Barrett, Newsweek,[/b][/i] http://msnbc.msn.com/id/45496...

Security Expert Confirms Bush is Squandering U.S. Taxpayer Money

03.20.04 (6:59 am) [edit]

Homeland Security Legislation Has Gone Too Far: Bush Tramples on Us

03.20.04 (6:38 am) [edit]

[b]A misuse of local police[/b]

PROPOSED LEGISLATION in Congress goes too far in the name of homeland security.

In the House, a bill going by the acronym CLEAR -- the Clear Law Enforcement for Criminal Alien Removal act -- would compel local police officers to enforce federal immigration laws, including investigating, detaining, and removing illegal immigrants. States where police refused this work would lose federal funding.

Police officers are needed to focus on preventing and fighting crime. If they are also forced to become immigration agents, they could lose a crucial tool: conversation. Communities that are willing to work with police can provide tips and information.

Last year, in a letter to Senator Edward Kennedy, Boston's former police commissioner Paul Evans pointed out that local and state police departments in Massachusetts have worked hard to win the trust of immigrant communities. Evans said that the CLEAR act could threaten this progress by discouraging immigrants to come to police. Police officials across the country have stated similar concerns. They need unimpeded access to immigrant victims and witnesses.

A related concern is that the CLEAR act could lead criminals to prey on undocumented immigrants who would be afraid to report crimes to police. This could create a grim subculture where robbery, domestic violence, and other offenses were accepted as the price of life in America.

The bill also overlooks the fact that many police departments already have responsibilities that outstrip their resources. Enforcing immigration law would add to the burden.

The Senate version, the Homeland Security Enhancement Act, has similar provisions and adds that states should not be allowed to issue driver's licenses to illegal aliens.

States should be left to make this decision based on their own circumstances. California, for example, struggled over the issue of distributing licenses to its estimated 2 million illegal aliens who drive. The disadvantage is that licenses seem to encourage illegal immigrants by making it easier for them to live in the state. The benefit is that California could have more information about drivers and test their skills. It is also a way to acknowledge that even illegal immigrants make substantial contributions to their state economies. Last year, California briefly adopted a system to train, test, insure and license drivers. But the law was repealed, and now state officials are back to debating the matter.

Immigration policies need reform. And 9/11 has left the country with a mandate to increase security. But this work cannot be piled on the backs of local police, and local needs cannot be ignored.

[b]The Boston Globe[/b], http://www.boston.com/news/gl...

Liar Dubya & Poodle Blair: History Will Damn Them

03.20.04 (6:35 am) [edit]

[b]History will damn them

[i]We must not accept our leaders' illegal occupation of a sovereign state [/i][/b]

Imagine, for a moment, the following scenario. American and British troops battle their way into Iraqi territory, sprayed with anthrax shells and gas bombs. In Cyprus and Tel Aviv, rockets explode, loaded with biological agents. After a bitter struggle, coalition forces seize control of the country. They find concealed rocket silos with missiles primed for attacks on distant European targets; plans are found for rocket attacks on London. At other sites they find an advanced nuclear bomb project and barrels full of chemical weapons. They flush out an al-Qaida stronghold where they find the battle plan of world terrorism. Saddam and Bin Laden were, after all, in cahoots.

A year ago this was the fanciful vision that pushed Blair to side with Bush and go to war in Iraq. They braced their troops and populations for the worst, and the more gullible believed them (I talked to Londoners planning their evacuation route from the capital). The rest of us saw the arguments for the claptrap they were. The reality from March 20 last year to March 20 this year has been grotesquely different. Two of the world's most sophisticated armed forces brushed aside a tinpot army of soldiers without boots, smashed Iraq's cities to pieces, killed thousands of civilians and captured Iraq's oil more or less intact. There were, as any intelligent observer could have told them, no WMD, no centre of world terrorism, no aggressive intent.

In the past 12 months, deserters from the Bush/Blair cause have revealed piecemeal the reality. War was planned long in advance against a soft Arab target that nobody much liked. The intelligence services knew that they were being asked to endorse fairy tales. The attorney general has come clean on how he was forced to turn an illegal war into a lawful war of defence against the Iraqi threat. The duplicity was systematic, and remains so. Blair has no regrets. He bays defiant nonsense about the terrible menace that has been removed, and the greater terrorist menace still at large. Not once has he expressed regret for what a dozen years of sanctions and war inflicted on the Iraqi people. Enough that his cause is just.

There is no pleasure in saying, a year on, that we told you so. Invasion invited worldwide hostility, divided (and still divides) Europe, weakened the UN and, above all, provoked precisely the confrontation with terror that the war was supposed to alleviate. I have been told to stop carping and let the British and Americans get on with the job of ruling Iraq now they are there. But this is tantamount to endorsing the war. Why are the US and Britain there, in illegal occupation of a sovereign state? Why should we accept this reality and knuckle down to Blair's call to arms? Today's demonstration is a reminder that what was a war of unprovoked aggression a year ago has not been changed by victory.

I have had many arguments, too, about the vexed question of oil. The view that oil is some kind of Marxist red herring is widespread. But in this case there can be no other conclusion. Oil installations and oil lines were captured and guarded first; the oil ministry was protected while priceless art treasures were being ransacked. The second largest oil reserves are now safe once again for the wider world market and the global oil companies. Popular ignorance about the nature of oil politics has played into coalition hands, just as popular indifference to the use of major US companies in rebuilding what the US armed forces knocked down has deflected debate from issues that should shock international opinion.

The most familiar argument in favour of the war, repeated mantra-like in all circles, is that a much-hated dictator has been overthrown. This week's opinion poll purports to show how grateful the Iraqis now are for their liberation. No one would wish Saddam Hussein back. The problem is that the reason for going to war was quite different. If unseating tyrants was the priority, Saddam should have been unseated long ago. War in 2003 was about protecting British and American interests, not liberating Iraq, a posture of self-interest rather than magnanimity. This was the same motive for declaring war on Hitler in 1939. It was not dictators that the west could not stomach, but the threat to their interests and way of life (again).

In this sense, the analogy drawn last year that Saddam had to be confronted like Hitler was truer than might have been supposed. Parliament was bamboozled into accepting that Saddam posed an immediate threat to Britain. There were honourable motives for declaring war on Hitler, as there are for unseating Saddam, but that is not what, a year ago, we were offered. Liberation was the means to dress war up as legitimate. So much so that there must be a large number in Britain and the US who think that unseating Saddam really was the reason that war began.

One more battery turns on the anti-war lobby: look at Madrid, look at the daily attacks in Iraq or Israel. Blair was right. Terrorism is the chief threat we face, and the war against terror must unite us all. This has little to do with Iraq. Attacks against the occupiers were provoked by war. Attacks in Israel are part of a different struggle for Palestinian liberation. The assault in Madrid is part of a longer confrontation between militant Islam and western cultural and economic imperialism. Lumping them all together as evidence that a war against terror is the primary object of our foreign policy is nonsense.

"Terror" is not an organisation or a single force. It is related to a variety of political confrontations, each of which has to be understood in its own terms. "Terror" cannot be fought as if it were a war against a hidden, global and undifferentiated enemy. The threat, such as it is, has been exacerbated by the arrogant display of naked power shown by the US, Britain and its motley coalition. But the real changes to "our way of life" are the consequence of the panicky western response to terrorism, which has eroded civil liberties and the rule of law and threatens to smother us with a security net that will undermine the so-called "democratic" values that the west is pledged to preserve. This is an unnecessary price to pay, but we will all see the surveillance state grow unless democratic non-compliance reasserts itself.

What, then, are the alternatives? Could anything different have been done? Should something different be done now? Of course. War should have been avoided and other ways explored to get Iraq to re-enter the world economy, and to feed and supply its population properly. The west could show that it is serious about tackling the question of a Palestinian state, instead of using it as a figleaf to clothe its ambitions in the region. Blair could show that he values a commitment to a common European defence and foreign policy, which might have avoided war altogether.

Today we could confront terrorism differently. It is a profound irony that Blair has helped to defuse the Ulster crisis and reduce terrorism by the very means that he has abandoned in his crusading zeal against the world enemy. Terrorists do not blow people up just because they are nihilistic thugs. Terrorism is born of fear, resentment and powerlessness in the face of the massive power and cultural expansion of the west; it is about real issues for those who perpetrate its acts of violence. Palestinians die because they want to free Palestine. Understanding those issues on their own terms and adjusting our politics in order to do so does not mean that we endorse violence.

Last year Blair told the British people: "Let history be my judge." The history of the past year has been damning, but there is an opportunity for the people to judge as well. The same message that the Spanish people sent to José Aznar can also be sent to Bush and Blair. It will not solve the world's problems, but it might make the world a safer place.

· [i][b]Richard Overy is professor of modern history at King's College London, and author of The Dictators, to be published by Penguin in June [/b][/i] - http://www.guardian.co.uk/com...,3604,1173989,00.html

Liar Bush Plans Phony 'Kerry is Indecisive' Orwellian Campaign - More Bush Lies

03.20.04 (6:33 am) [edit]

[b]90-Day Media Strategy by Bush's Aides to Define Kerry[/b]

WASHINGTON, March 19 — President Bush's campaign is following an aggressive and precise 90-day media strategy to define Senator John Kerry as indecisive and lacking conviction, with a coordinated blitz of advertisements, speeches and sound bites, senior campaign advisers said this week.

The goal, several campaign aides said, is to first strip Mr. Kerry of the positive image that he carried away from the Democratic primary contests and then to define him issue by issue in their own terms before the summer vacation season. The central thrusts will be national security and taxes, they said.

The aides said the strategy was planned weeks ago in coordination with Karl Rove, Mr. Bush's chief political aide, while Mr. Kerry was battling for his party's nomination.

The aides are following a tight timetable, they said, and they want to have defined Mr. Kerry on their terms between now and early June, when they expect voters to stop paying close attention to politics, at least for a time. In addition, Mr. Kerry will very likely have a much larger war chest with which to fight by then, reducing the effect of the Republican media blitz.

"We just see this as the greatest window of opportunity, not that there won't be others," said Mark McKinnon, Mr. Bush's head media strategist. "It's easiest to define somebody when they're ill-defined, and John Kerry's ill-defined."

The Bush aides pronounce their efforts a success so far, and point to polls showing that Mr. Kerry's ratings are dropping while Mr. Bush's are rising, a huge relief to a campaign that just a couple of weeks ago was criticized even by some Republicans as appearing flat-footed.

"If you look at the average balance of the public polls now, the president's either even, or up one or two points," said Matthew Dowd, the president's chief campaign strategist. "And two weeks ago he was down three or four."

This early drive by the Bush campaign is in marked contrast to the approach of the Kerry organization, whose strategists say they believe the period before June is important but not as crucial as Mr. Bush's team asserts. Calling the Bush campaign's depictions of their candidate "distortions," Mr. Kerry's strategists said the labels would not stick. Mr. Kerry is on vacation in Idaho this week.

"The notion that you have a one-sided definition that takes hold five months before an election is ridiculous," said Bob Shrum, a senior advisor to Mr. Kerry. "I don't think the Bush campaign's caricatures are going to stand up to the reality. Voters are smarter than that."

Mr. Shrum added that the campaign had months in which to define Mr. Kerry and critique Mr. Bush.

The Republicans' move comes unusually early in the campaign season. That helps explain the intensive volley of accusations and counteraccusations between the campaigns that is more common in October than March, and which some members of both parties worry will turn off voters.

But Mr. Bush's aides and strategists said that they had a unique opportunity to strike now, when polls show that most prospective voters do not have a good idea about who Mr. Kerry is — and when Mr. Kerry is neither financially nor strategically equipped to respond in kind.

So far, Mr. Bush's campaign has spent nearly $20 million in advertisements while Mr. Kerry has spent nearly $2 million on commercials since effectively clinching the nomination on March 2. Mr. Bush's advisers emphasized that they will by no means let up after June and still expect an extremely close fight in November. "My guess is this race is going to be roughly tied for a while," Mr. Dowd said.

The Bush campaign's strategy began in earnest last week, with its first confrontational advertisement, asserting that Mr. Kerry would raise taxes significantly and weaken the Patriot Act, "used to arrest terrorists and protect America." It intensified this week with a new, multipronged effort to define Mr. Kerry as "weak on defense" and too unsteady to lead the nation in the war on terror. The campaign did that most precisely with a new advertisement broadcast in West Virginia on Tuesday highlighting Mr. Kerry's vote against the $87 billion package to support military efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Vice President Dick Cheney reinforced it at a speech at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library on Wednesday at which he said Mr. Kerry's record was not impressive "for someone who aspires to become commander in chief in this time of testing for our country." Campaign aides and surrogates reinforced the message further in cable news interviews and in conference calls with reporters throughout the week.

The Republican National Committee, which works closely with the campaign on its message, fanned the flames with e-mail messages to reporters and supporters with the heading "John Kerry International Man of Mystery," making fun of his statement that "I've met more leaders" who wanted him to win, and followed with an Internet advertisement on the same theme.

White House and campaign officials were reluctant to disclose details of their plans for the weeks ahead. But several hinted that they would soon attack Mr. Kerry more forcefully on his tax policy, in part by discussing votes in his Senate career supporting taxes that had an effect on the middle class, not just the wealthy.

Bush campaign officials said they were almost certain which themes they would be striking and what sorts of advertisements they would be showing at just about any given moment between now and June, even while acknowledging their plans could change on a dime.

"The goal is right now," said a Bush adviser, "while he's weak, while they're financially struggling, to strip him of all the good that somehow in my opinion erroneously got attached to him."

The advisers contended that that would be relatively easy to do because impressions of him are so ill-formed with many voters. "He peels like an onion," said an associate of Mr. Bush. "People aren't like, `I really believe in this guy and I'm not willing to accept that information.' They accept it very easily. With some candidates there's a hard shell. With him there's a soft skin."

Polls show that many voters say they do not know enough about Mr. Kerry to form very strong opinions. In a New York Times/CBS poll taken March 10 to 14, more than 40 percent of Americans surveyed said they were either undecided or did not know enough about him when asked if they had a favorable or unfavorable opinion of Mr. Kerry. The margin of sampling error was plus or minus 3 percentage points.

Mr. Kerry's campaign acknowledges that he is nowhere near as well-known as is Mr. Bush. But it contended that was more of a problem for Mr. Bush, who they said was trying to turn the election into a referendum on Mr. Kerry rather than one about the president.

"The important thing to remember is that the American people see George Bush as the steward of a bad economy, the leader who led them to war under false pretenses," said Stephanie Cutter, a spokeswoman for Mr. Kerry, striking two themes the campaign believes will be a strong suit against the president.

Kerry campaign officials said they would not be pulled into competing at Mr. Bush's pace, though they would fight back hard, as they have done with surrogates on cable news, e-mail messages to supporters and reporters, Web videos and, to a lesser extent for now, television commercials.

"We're going to fight back when we need to fight back," Mr. Shrum said, adding he did not believe the Bush campaign was as planned out as the Republicans claimed.

Some Republicans said for the last couple of weeks at least, Mr. Kerry's campaign had seemed to be playing more defense than offense.

"The Bush people have stabilized the ballot," said Bill McInturff, a Republican pollster whose firm, Public Opinion Strategies, is releasing a new survey of likely voters showing negative shifts in Mr. Kerry's favorability rating.

But other Republican and campaign officials said they expected Mr. Kerry to come back strongly after his vacation ends next week. And Mr. Dowd said these have been only two good weeks in a long campaign — helped along by missteps from Mr. Kerry that the campaign cannot count on week to week. "Most campaigns start with a plan," he said, "very few end with a plan."

[b]By JIM RUTENBERG, N.Y. TIMES[/b], http://www.nytimes.com/2004/0...

Widely-reported Israeli Story ‘Pure Fabrication’ Condemned by Human Rights Groups

03.19.04 (8:20 am) [edit]

[b]Human Rights Groups Slam Israel's Use of Palestinian Boy Abdullah Qura'an in Propaganda

[u]Widely-reported Israeli Story ‘Pure Fabrication’ [/u][/b]

Three human rights groups condemned on Wednesday Israel’s use of a Palestinian boy in its propaganda following an alleged attempt by Palestinians to smuggle a bomb through a military roadblock with the help of an unwitting 11-year-old boy, who along with eyewitnesses, relatives and Palestinian sources belied and refuted the story that was widely reported by Israeli officials and media as “pure Fabrication.”

The Gaza Community Mental Health Program (GCMHP), Defence for Children International/Palestine Section (DCI/PS), and Physicians for Human Rights-Israel condemned “the [alleged] use of a Palestinian child to carry explosives, and the Israeli Occupation for using him in their propaganda.”

Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) used the incident, in which allegedly a bomb linked to a mobile phone was found in one of three bags carried by Abdullah Qura’an at the Hawara roadblock, south of the northern West Bank city of Nablus, to publicize what they allege is the growing use of children by anti-occupation activists.

Back in school Tuesday, Qura’an said he had done nothing wrong. “These people (the IOF) are liars, I don’t believe them, and if it was a bomb, they would not have let me go so easily,” he said.

Qura’an, who earns a small amount as a porter carrying bags at the Huwara roadblock, said he met two men at the roadblock on Monday. He said he and a friend raced to their vehicle ahead of a crowd of other children to get the business.

“They gave us a small travel bag, a plastic bag, and a bottle of water,” Qura’an said. The men told him to deliver the goods - described as clothes and auto parts - to a woman on the other side of the roadblock.

Nervous IOF soldiers manning the roadblock confiscated the bags and cleared the area, Qura’an said. A bomb squad came in and blew up the bags.

Eyewitnesses told the Ramallah-based Palestinian daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida that within five to fifteen minutes, Israeli journalists were on the scene and that no nails or shrapnel, from an alleged bomb, were seen after the bags were blown up.

The boy said he was interrogated for several hours and released.

“They are lying,” he said. “I never saw a bomb. If the bag really contained a bomb, why did they release me?”

Contrary to Israeli reports that Qura’an was given sweets after the bags were taken from him, the boy said IOF soldiers slapped him on the face and kicked his body.

“One of the soldiers slapped me several times and kicked me during the investigation,” he told Al-Hayat Al-Jadida on Wednesday.

IOF reconstructed the incident for reporters on Tuesday.

The IOF spokeswoman Maj. Sharon Feingold accused Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades of exploiting the boy.

A local leader of Al Aqsa, Hashem Abu Hamdan, denied any connection and suggested the story had been made up by Israel, an opinion expressed by many Palestinians Tuesday.

“There is no shortage of adult fighters,” said Abu Hamdan. “The aim of the Israeli army is to defame the Martyrs Brigades. We do not use children, because this is inhuman and contravenes our traditions and morals. They are lying.”

Qura’an, who along with many children his age earn a living as porters (carry other people’s bags using carts) at IOF checkpoints, said he was unaware that he was carrying a bomb. “Two men in their thirties paid me five shekels (one dollar), and asked me to deliver the bag to a woman who was waiting in a Subaru on the other side of the checkpoint,” he said.

“I was with a friend of mine from the village of Kufr Qallil, who uses a cart to transport big bags,” he added. “I was carrying three bags. When we reached the checkpoint, a female soldier started searching the bags. Suddenly, before she touched the third bag, soldiers came and took me to the side. I didn’t know what was happening.”

Many children like Qura’an, who can move with relative freedom compared with their parents, are supporting their families, by finding odd jobs. One of these jobs is carrying bags at IOF roadblocks.

Qura’an, a sixth-grader at the UNRWA school in the Balata refugee camp, said he did not see any wires hanging out of the bag or anything else arousing suspicion, he told journalists Tuesday. “I didn’t do anything wrong. This is what I do for a living and to help my family.”

His 42-year-old mother Dalal said that the entire Israeli “version” of what had happened to her son was “pure fabrication.”

“They (the IOF) want to give a negative image of us to the world-- that we abuse children,” she told Al-Hayat Al-Jadida.

She said that Abdullah has five brothers. His eldest brother, 18, was crippled when IOF shot him with live ammunition.

Qura’an’s older brother, Muhammad, claimed that Israel staged the incident in an attempt to win the sympathy of international public opinion and to score PR points.

“We have been told many journalists were at the checkpoint before the alleged incident,” he said.