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| The Real Reason Bush & Co. Don't Want Americans to See the Faces of the War Dead |
| 04.30.04 (4:30 pm) [edit] |
There is a saying that one person in your family dying is the equivalent to two of your close friends, four in your block, eight in your neighborhood, and so on until the equivalency encompasses the entire population of any continent. This says something about scale. We tend to connect with that which is closest and most accessible and most personally meaningful. It's hard to empathetically relate to the death or suffering of thousands who you don't know in the same way that you relate to the death or suffering of a loved one.
Beyond scale, we habituate to unpleasant information and events in much the same way as we do to constant physical stimulation. Simply put, we "dull out." We are creatures programmed to react to change - not constancy.
During the Vietnam war the media reported the weekly body count of U.S. servicepersons killed in the conflict. These reports went on inexorably, week after week after week. And over time, perceptually, these numbers became just another mildly interesting statistic dropped in between the local news, sports and the weather. Predictably, the nation became habituated to the magnitude of the toll.
And then on June 27, 1969 Life Magazine published the [i]pictures[/i] of a single week's Vietnam War American dead. Page after page after page of bright young faces and the realization that they were all gone, killed, dead. These faces had [i]families[/i]. And these were just the [i]American[/i] dead. The totality of the pictures made a statement that transcended all the rhetoric on both sides of the issue. They were shocking where the the numbers were not. The pictures personalized the war. They made it accessible. And for a brief moment Life Magazine wiped away the habituation. And I'm sure that even though it probably wasn't their intent, Life made some people re-think the war.
What makes the Vietnam War Memorial such an emotionally charged and magnificently successful monument is in part how scale is used on several micro and macro levels at the same time causing the viewer to simultaneously focus on the 50,000 dead and on each individual loss.
The day after Memorial Day I went out to the Veteran's Cemetery in Los Angeles. At other times of the year the cemetery is just there - a wide expanse of grass on the south end where the more recent dead are buried, and looking north, a gently curving hillside of uniformly spaced vertical tombstones. If the tombstones were not in the distance, the cemetery could be mistaken for a park. But on Memorial Day, tiny flags are placed on each grave - thousands of flags, a sea of flags and the cemetery takes on a special meaning. No matter what your position with respect to war, any war, on this day the cemetery brings abstract "commitment" into focus. And for a brief moment habituation is wiped away.
These brief moments brings us back into contact with who we are and how we got here. They re-ground us. And in doing so they help to bring us all together.
[b]Source:[/b]
"From Sea to Shining Sea" by Gary Fisher on http://www.armchair.com/warp/...
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| Americans and Iraqis Agree: End the U.S. Occupation of Iraq ... |
| 04.30.04 (4:23 pm) [edit] |
[b]The majority of Americans and Iraqis agree:-- the U.S. Occupation of Iraq should[i] end[/i], and should [i]end now[/i] ... [/b]The corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc.[i] junta:-- do not respect [/i]the U.S. Constitution & Bill of Rights -- [i]do not respect [/i]the rule of law --[i] do not respect [/i]"We the People" or the Iraqi people ... Therefore, does our collective opinion[i] matter [/i]to our (s)elected leaders??? ... It certainly [i]should[/i]!!! ... And if the neo-con, neo-fascist Bush regime does not respond, then we must [i]take action [/i]by contacting Congress http://www.congress.org and also[i] by voting [/i]in November to hold them [i]accountable [/i]...
There is one thing that most Iraqis and many Americans agree on: it's time to end the occupation. A [i]New York Times/CBS [/i]poll http://www.nytimes.com/2004/0... shows plummeting support for the war in Iraq at home:
"Asked whether the United States had done the right thing in taking military action against Iraq, 47 percent of respondents said it had, down from 58 percent a month earlier and 63 percent in December, just after American forces captured Saddam Hussein." Almost as many (46 percent) want the U.S. to withdraw from Iraq as those who agree that we should stay the course.
That sentiment is echoed even more resoundingly in Iraq, where a new [i]USA Today/CNN/Gallup [/i]poll reveals that only a third believe that the U.S. occupation is doing more good than harm, and a solid majority support an immediate military pullout irrespective of the chaos that may ensue. [i]USA Today [/i]reports http://www.usatoday.com/news/... , "Asked whether they view the U.S.-led coalition as 'liberators' or 'occupiers,' 71 percent of all respondents say 'occupiers.'" Those numbers get worse if Kurds are excluded from the results.
Not surprisingly much of the rising anger at the occupation is being directed at the U.S. troops: "Bearing the brunt of Iraqis' ill feeling: U.S. troops. The most visible symbol of the occupation, they are viewed by many Iraqis as uncaring, dangerous and lacking in respect for the country's people, religion and traditions." - http://www.alternet.org/waron...
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| Are Foes of Israeli Policy Enemies of Jews??? ... |
| 04.29.04 (11:12 pm) [edit] |
[b]There are significant debates occurring today in our nation and around the world regarding Israeli policy, the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and anti-semitism ... [/b]
It is understandable that all conscientious citizens should be concerned about heinous bigotry and hatred by any group towards those who hold different beliefs, heritages and/or cultures ... The Holocaust that resulted in the massacre of millions of Jews, Dissidents, anti-Nazi Protestors, Intellectual Elites and others, whom Hitler's Nazi Party considered dangerous or unfit to live in their New World Order was a horrendous tragedy in the history of mankind. We must all be prepared to fight against any such horror being perpetrated again, by any nation hijacked by tyrannical arrogant zealots, upon other human beings who are tragically demonized for pernicious motives buried inside of insane ideologies with gluttonous lusts for infinite power and vast riches ... (The neo-con, neo-fascist Bush cabal unfortunately fits into this ugly profile of neo-imperial imposition of their bizarre Global Corporate Empire unwillingly upon the rest of the world ...)
To dissent, disagree and/or question a government's decisions and actions, however, is the highest form of patriotism. If the horrors of Nazi Germany teach us anything, it is that to follow a misguided, idealistic and corrupt zealot leads to chaos & misery, murderous atrocities and disastrous consequences. For conscientious citizens who dare to dissent, disagree and/or question their leaders, to be intimidated, slandered, libelled and/or destroyed, ends up creating the very type of fascist political environment enabling blood-thirsty leaders to wantonly abuse power against its' most vulnerable citizens as well as commit unconscionable atrocities against innocent people.
There is no absolute right or wrong side in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. The Palestinian suicide-bombers are committing atrocities against the Israelis by killing innocent people. The Israeli government is committing atrocities against the Palestinian people by illegally occupying land that is in contravention/violation of UN Resolutions 242, 446, etc. http://www.jatonyc.org/UNreso... . The Israeli government has no right to roll massive tanks into villages like Jenin and wipe-out local populations of innocent men, women and children. The Palestinian people have no tanks and massive armaments, so they fight back using suicide bombers. It is a cycle of death that has increased dramatically under the Bush/Sharon administrations.
[b]Is it anti-semitic to question or criticize or disagree with Bush and Sharon??? [/b][b][i]No, of course it isn't[/i]!!![/b] And when such emotive rhetoric is used in order to intimidate, scare and terrify people into being silent, then we undermine the very freedom to discuss and resolve conflicts through diplomacy that is necessary in order to live humanely in accordance with a system of laws, in a civilized world.
"We the People" must not be afraid to demand that our leaders' insane exploitation of the tools of death and destruction [i]be put away[/i], and that the un-sexy, painful and slow process of reason, diplomacy and compromise[i] be brought to bear [/i]in order to solve problems. Arm-chair chicken-hawks find it easy and emotionally satisfying to see immediate action of violence perpetrated against a so-called enemy. The "let's-wipe-'em-out" philosophy mistakenly is adopted by the adolescent mind who sees brute force as the solution, because frankly it requires no brain-matter, no intellect and no give-and-take. Reason, diplomacy and compromise require greater intellectual faculties, patience and the mature adult recognition that to live in the world, one might not have everything that one wants-- one must be willing to share and participate with others who are different.
Eventually Israeli and Palestinian citizens will tire of the blood-shed and violence (as did the Irish Catholics and Protestants) and will agree to a compromise solution-- There will be no perfect solution and there will be both progress and setbacks. However, the current direction set by Bush and Sharon is bankrupt, barbaric and bloody, and it is a disgrace to humanity and civilization.
"We the People" should reject the corrupt Bush regime, who have done no favors for the United States of America, for Israel, for the Palestinians, for the Iraqis, or for any peoples around the world.
An article worth pondering is "[b]Are foes of Israeli policy enemies of Jews?[/b]" by[i] Matthew Schofield[/i], Knight-Ridder News Service on http://www.kentucky.com/mld/h... :
Delegates to one of the largest European anti-Semitism conferences in recent memory struggled yesterday with a question that kept coming up: Should opposition to Israeli policy be considered anti-Jewish?
Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, who is Jewish, addressed it. German President Johannes Rau talked about it. So did Secretary of State Colin Powell.
"Logically, I should associate with the Palestinian people," Wiesel said at the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe conference. "But I cannot."
He added that while it's difficult to dismiss the argument of a people wanting a homeland, suicide bombings by Palestinians are a crime against humanity, and the Palestinian position seeks the elimination of Israel.
The question has relevance. Several European countries recently criticized Israel for the killing of Hamas founder Sheik Ahmed Yassin and, just weeks later, his successor, Abdel Aziz Rantisi, calling the deaths "extra-legal assassination."
It isn't anti-Semitic to criticize Israel's policies, Powell said, then added: "But the line is crossed when Israel or its leaders are demonized or vilified, for example, by the use of Nazi symbols and racist caricatures."
Two reports issued this week found that anti-Semitic attacks are increasing worldwide, with France, the United Kingdom, Russia and Germany joining Canada as the countries with the largest number of cases.
The conference, organized to discuss the rise in anti-Semitism, brought delegates from 55 countries to a symbolic site: a large conference room in what 60 years ago was Nazi Germany's Central Bank. Not far from this Berlin government office, now the Foreign Ministry, Adolf Hitler planned the Holocaust.
The Nazis killed an estimated 6 million Jews under Hitler.
"Once upon a time, when both the world and I were young, gigantic meetings were being held in Berlin for anti-Semitism," Wiesel said, adding that the German capital was an appropriate site for this conference. "Let us hope now the cycle has been closed."
No one at the conference thought it had been, however. Simone Veil, a French survivor of the Bergen Belsen concentration camp, said that even as old excuses for anti-Semitism fail, new ones are created.
"Anti-Semitism in France has lost its roots, it lost its traditional arguments," she said. "And yet it persists. And yet it rises again."
She added that the new wave of hatred for Jews comes from young supporters of Palestine.
A report by Human Rights First criticized the "official indifference" of "European government's response to rising anti-Semitism in the region."
"Governments cannot address crimes they do not record or report," said Michael Posner, the group's executive director.
Still, a report from Tel Aviv University, while noting the increase in serious incidents, said: "In one very important respect there is a great difference between the present and the 1930s: awareness to and analysis of anti-Semitism have been fostered by a large number of surveys, polls, conferences and international (or at least European) seminars, many of which are conceived and conducted by non-Jews."
Rau, Germany's president, said his country and Europe are very different from what they were in the 1930s. As Nazism rose, anti-Semitism became official state policy. Now, he added, while Nazism exists in Germany, the government is strongly opposed to it.
"There are many who, like me, experienced the Nazi era themselves, wished and hoped that anti-Semitism and xenophobia would have no place in the world," he said.
Still, Europe needs more "civil courage," he said, individuals willing to stand against acts of xenophobia, racism and anti-Semitism.
He added that while the increase in anti-Semitic activity is a cause for concern, criticism of Israel need not be.
"Strong criticism is allowed, and needed," he said.
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| ... My Country, Right And Wrong??? ... |
| 04.29.04 (7:14 pm) [edit] |
"[i]The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane[/i]." -- Marcus Aurelius
[b]We are endowed with individual brain-power and are not robots unless we choose to hand-over our conscience, mind and soul to others ... [/b]Such blind obedience is diametrically opposed to everything that our Founding Fathers intended for our nation ... They intended that we think for ourselves; that we question our leaders; and that we hold our public officials accountable ... Our freedom to think for ourselves, question, critique and analyze the facts is crucial to being an intelligent and responsible citizen in a democratic society ...
George Washington was offered the position as a King after defeating the British, which he turned down and wisely said that our nation should be different from the monarchies of Europe ... Indeed, when asked to run (which he certainly would have won, because he was so revered) for a second term as president, George Washington turned it down, because he claimed that it was important to demonstrate to the nation that an orderly transfer of power from one administration to the next[i] could occur [/i]... How[i] wise [/i]he was ... How[i] far [/i]we've fallen ... The Founding Fathers would hang their heads in shame and weep at the neo-con, neo-fascist crooks, liars, opportunists and war criminals in the corrupt Bush regime who [i]will do anything, absolutely anything [/i]to hang onto power like leeches and swindle our nation to enrich themselves ... [b]Read on ...[/b]
"[i]My country, right or wrong[/i]." I've always subconsciously ascribed those words to some great American soldier-statesman, perhaps George Washington or Nathan Hale. I expect many have likewise assumed. Perhaps that's because it's been a soldier's credo and an inspiration to generations of patriotic Americans. In fact, that verbatim phrase, [i]My country, right or wrong[/i]! was emblazoned between the painted flag and the field elevation notice that graced the portal of the flight operations shack on an Arctic airbase where I was stationed for a time. Stand on that flight line, and you read those words: "[i]My country, right or wrong[/i]!"
Such words seem appropriate above a military portal. They did even then - perhaps especially then. It was the Sixties. Like today, they declare commitment in the face of doubt. Tennyson said it best: [i]Theirs not to make reply, Theirs not to reason why, Theirs but to do and die[/i]. Like military service itself, such messages are unambiguous, unwavering in the face of the cognitive dissonance and conflict every thinking soldier experiences: [i]My country, right or wrong[/i]. It holds no place for either subtlety or those who would deign to be subtle. I never questioned such words while in uniform and under oath. Few have. Commitment is part of our strength as a people. But as a civilian - an American civilian - I reject the statement out of hand. As an American and a still free man, I'm committed to reason not to oaths of obedience.
In the final accounting, America is a place of civilians. As such we have a responsibility to those whose time it is to do and die. That responsibility is clear and is specific in our nation's Bill Of Rights. [u]As free Americans ours is to make reply. Ours is to reason why[/u].
Ours is a government by, for, and of the people, and people is just another way of saying human beings. And what is a human being if not a thinking, reasoning, self-aware being? As every honorable veteran knows, when a soldier in the service of America accepts My country, right or wrong, he does so as a deliberate act of free will and human dignity. But he does surrogate his personal freedom of choice for some period when he takes the oath. He does so as an act of trust, firm in the knowledge that his civilian leadership will be a just and responsible leadership. He trusts that his civilian leadership will be honest and act honorably under the flag of his country. One cannot deny, however, that the soldiers sailors, airmen, and marines of mine and subsequent generations have not always seen their trust in the modern crop of civilian leaders justified.
[i]My country, right or wrong [/i]is an illusion built and sustained upon the naiveté of our expendable youth and that of the adults who would sacrifice them to the will of whomever holds power. But through disillusionment comes knowledge. Many Americans know better. As we grow older and see our children sent into harm's way and used as harm's ministers, mine, of all generations, should be skeptical of those who send them. There were few active protests of the Korean War. There were many protests of the Vietnam war, but few substantive until its third year and a widespread draft that took the privileged sons as well as the expendable sons of the traditionally expendable classes. Iraq, however, was protested by the world and by rational Americans from its very first moment. But not by our soldiers. Our soldiers cannot hold our leaders accountable and do their jobs effectively. Theirs not to make reply, Theirs not to reason why, Theirs but to do and die. We must speak and act for them, or we must turn our backs and let them continue to do and die, alone, abandoned to the will of the corrupt, the frightened, the insane among us.
When any American soldier who has served his country in the decades after WW-II returns to civilian life, wiser, perhaps jaded by what he's seen or felt, and he still accepts such platitudes as [i]My country, right or wrong[/i], he abdicates his will, his intellect, and his constitutional responsibility as an American. He subjugates reason to bias. He becomes derelict in his duty to protect the republic and the civilian public who know not what he knows, who've seen nothing of what he's seen, and hopefully never will. When faced with an obviously corrupt civilian government, it is a veteran's duty to act against that corruption in the ways our constitution abundantly provides and fiercely protects.
We approach this duty each in our own way. This past week we've seen the usual pinheaded news coverage of Bush administration flaks criticizing the Democratic Party's candidate, John Kerry, for his rebellious 1971 act of tossing his medals (campaign ribbons) over a fence - the White House fence. Kerry, following his Vietnam service, led the activist group Vietnam Veterans Against The War. This writer neither presumes to condone or to condemn the young Kerry's actions here. His was perhaps an extreme and to many an inappropriate expression of disillusionment with his government. But that a veteran - be it John Kerry or John Doe - has earned medals to toss, means he once stood his ground for his country, right or wrong.
In Kerry's case, that three Purple Hearts, a Silver Star, and a Bronze Star, were earned is fairly conclusive proof that he stood his ground more than once. That is a far, far greater expression of patriotism, honor, and understanding of ones duty to the republic than is the quick and mindless criticism of a symbolic act of protest. Many of those critics are those already guilty of abdicating their public responsibility. I speak of the pinheads of the corporate press. But that the pinheads are being manipulated to critique rather than to analysis by those who ran from the fight while under oath, and worse still, by those who would stoop to serve those who ran, says far more than their empty words could ever hope to say.
The administration's flaks are criticizing John Kerry's actions for obvious political gain. So be it. But, by doing so the flacks and their press lackeys are also criticizing every veteran who speaks out against the Bush Administration's atrocities from the perspective of a veteran's unique experience. In the case of many a Vietnam veteran, that is the experience of unjust war and its ravages. For when reason fails, when voting fails, when law fails, when discourse fails, then protest is the veteran's only recourse short of armed rebellion. Who among us knows better what is being wrought in our name than does the combat veteran? Yet we are encouraged to criticize rather than to learn from him.
Perhaps that's intended. Perhaps it's programmed into our unique sense of nationalism. After all, America - through the wisdom of its founders - is mandated to be a nation of civilians led by civilians. But our system, as with every system of governance, is vulnerable also to the will of the corrupt. In such a milieu, even a civilian leader - particularly one not elected to office, nor especially bright or demonstrably honest - can be a willing or wholly unwitting traitor to our constitutional republic and the foundations of human dignity upon which it was crafted. Given the unimaginable power at his disposal, such a leader can become an equally unwitting tyrant. All that is required for a system of government - any system of government - to fail, is that both leader and led share a mutual ignorance or bias.
From ignorance derives fear. From bias derives irrationality and dishonesty. No nation or form of government is immune. Our current president and the criminal manipulators and incompetents with whom he finds himself surrounded, are empirical proof of the American system's vulnerability to corruption.
When I hear this president make such infantile proclamations as "You're either with us, or you're with the terrorists," and his mangled, "I'm not about nuancing," or his more than color-blind "I see things in black and white," it leaves no room for the intelligent or the informed or the fair-minded portion of a civilian population to exercise their uniquely human attribute of deductive reasoning. It also removes any hope or possibility whatsoever, that one of the best and brightest has ascended the throne. Demonstration - dramatic or symbolic protest - is the enlightened patriot's only viable recourse.
However, for many Americans, simplistic platitudes are the granite rocks upon which their patriotism stands. Intractable. No thinking required. And when it comes to simplistic platitudes,[i] My country, right or wrong [/i]is the most simplistic of the lot. What could be a clearer declaration? What could be easier to understand? What could better appeal to, or better reinforce adamant bias?
[i]My country, right or wrong[/i]!
As an American I suddenly see America as being hardly recognizable as my country at all, right, wrong, or indifferent. I cannot help but be repulsed beyond words by her actions in my name. I am repulsed by a once-proud and always courageous military suddenly run by a herd of civilian murderers and thieves and being used as their personal pirates. At the head of them struts a miscreant whom every evidence declares should have been charged before a military court's martial for desertion in time of war long before being allowed to steal and subsequently disgrace our country's presidency and her people.1 Yet, this never befell the fortunate son. Instead he "soldiers" on a free man. He remains free to arrange the indiscriminate slaughter of uncounted thousands of men, women, and children in a defenseless country, civilians who have done nothing to America more onerous than living upon the world's second largest and most priceless oil reserves. Make no mistake, those oil reserves are what the deserter and his criminal handlers lust for beyond human and humane reason.
They have used our soldiers to kill thousands of innocents that they may get their already greasy hands on that black gold buried beneath the ever more bloodied sands of Iraq. Any defenders of their homeland our soldiers encounter are killed, and their memory publicly desecrated by a stupid embedded American press that reports on them as the thugs and murderers. On Friday evening in Florida the miscreant reaffirmed his delusion, "America," he said, "will never be run out of Iraq by a bunch of thugs and killers." Since I doubt he was refering to his own administration, the naïve press ate it up at face value. But that brave if misguided statement by the president is code. The miscreant speaks in code. It tells his handlers that he'll continue to provide them the ways and the means to murder countless more civilians, and countless more than that until they get what they came for - or more accurately what they sent America's sons and daughters to take for them while they sit safely at home just as each of them sat out that 'ol crazy Asian war. It is code that tells other of his handlers that they will be paid handsomely by the taxpaying parents of America's sons and daughters to manufacture the weapons their children will use to kill the children of others. It appears that the killing of children is condoned by our president, but only if those children have already been born.
I'm proud to say the logic escapes me.
The logic of virtually everything this administration does in the blasphemed name of freedom, security, decency, escapes me. It should revile all people of good will. Virtually everything being carried out in our name by these madmen is in violation of our American constitutional principles, yet we hear nothing of substance from the self-proclaimed patriots who seem to be everywhere one looks today.
We are truly a nation whose majority population believes in, [i]My Country, right or wrong[/i].
But that phrase, its origins and its true meaning will resonate with and disturb free thinking Americans every time we hear it, and the more often we hear it, the more clearly it illustrates how far we've fallen as a peoples.
For the phrase -[i] My country, right or wrong [/i]- as a direct quotation, is incorrect. In fact, just like virtually everything else the majority of Americans are willing to believe, it's wrong as hell.
The actual quotation, as spoken by the celebrated German-born, United States Senator, Carl Schurz back in the Nineteenth Century, is very different from that with which we've grown familiar and to which we've obediently ascribed in the post-millennial darkness that is Twenty-First Century America. It's worlds-apart different. It's true meaning diametric to the blind obedience implied by the corrupt, "[i]My Country, Right Or Wrong[/i]."
Of course those self-appointed guardians of mindless loyalty who so fondly call themselves patriots in today's kinder, dumber America, would not only encourage the popular corruption of Schurz's actual, and brilliantly Jeffersonian original words, but would be very happy to never so much as see the entire statement in historically accurate context. So, on the assumption that our self-appointed leaders and simplistic herd of "patriots" would have lost interest in this tome by now, (we are, after all, several pages deep, and still no hint of cartoons or feel good platitudes) here's what the man - and true patriot - Carl Schurz actually said. You'll find it incredibly relevant today.
"[i]My country[/i]," declared Senator Carl Schurz, "[i]If right, to be kept right, and, if wrong, to be set right[/i]." What, I ask, could be more different from the simplistic if not wholly mindless, [i]My Country, Right Or Wrong[/i], to which we've become conditioned?
Nothing, that's what. Nothing could be more different in its meaning and intent as the foundation of a democratic republic than those two phrases are, one from the other.
But that's not all Senator Schurz said that day. "The American people" Schurz continued, "should be specially careful not to permit themselves to be influenced in their decisions by high-sounding phrases of indefinite meaning, by vague generalities, or by seductive catchwords appealing to unreasoning pride and reckless ambition. More than ever, true patriotism now demands the exercise of the soberest possible discernment.
"I am far from denying that this republic, as one of the great powers of the world, has its responsibilities. But what is it responsible for? Is it to be held, or to hold itself, responsible for the correction of all wrongs done by strong nations to weak ones, or by powerful oppressors to helpless populations? Is it, in other words, responsible for the general dispensation of righteousness throughout the world? Neither do I deny that this republic has a mission, and I am willing to accept what we are frequently told, that this mission consists in 'furthering the progress of civilization.' But does this mean that wherever obstacles to the progress of civilization appear, this republic should at once step in to remove those obstacles by means of force, if friendly persuasions do not avail?
Every sober-minded person will admit that under so tremendous a task any earthly power, however great, would soon break down."
Quite different from, [i]My Country, Right Or Wrong[/i]. Don't you agree? In fact, the actual statement is about as different in its meaning as it could possibly be from the dumbed-down byte with which we're today familiar.
When looked at in context, if we were to but replace the word "civilization" with the popular noun of the moment - democracy - the entire statement could have come from one of the few patriotic Americans who grace that same senate floor today. One can almost see Robert Byrd, his hand and voice shaking less with age than with outrage, as he rails against this thing - this unrecognizable thing - which the land and the idea that we still call America has become at the oh-so-steady, blood and oil stained hands that now hold our nation's tiller as they drive her steady onward, straight on to the waiting rocks.
[b]About The Author:[/b]
Dom Stasi is Chief Technology Officer for a national satellite network based in Los Angeles. He was the original chief engineer who helped design and build both HBO and MTV's satellite infrastructures. Mr. Stasi flew aerial reconnaissance during the cold war and was a member of the Project Apollo technical team. A frequently published science and technology writer, the opinions expressed in this piece are solely his own. - http://www.informationclearin...
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| ... Hey Dubya & Cheney: Show Us The Money That You Illegally Misappropriated!!! ... |
| 04.29.04 (5:21 pm) [edit] |
[b]The corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta[/i] behave as though they are a neo-imperial dictatorship ... [/b]The neo-con, neo-fascist Bush cabal of liars, thieves, embezzlers, fraudsters, felons and war criminals have [i]no respect [/i]for the U.S. Constitution & Bill of Rights -- [i]no respect [/i]for the rule of law -- and, [i]no respect [/i]for "We the People" ... The despicable Bushies seem to have misappropriated funds allocated by Congress (... the Founding Fathers purposely allow the people's representatives in Congress to allocate funds, and[i] not [/i]the Executive Branch in order to avoid a tyrannical emperor hijacking our nation and abusing power, as the criminal Bushies[i] are doing today [/i]...) for security purposes following 9/11 ... This is illegal under the law and warrants[i] trial for impeachment [/i]followed by [i]trial for treason [/i]...
[b]Congress is asking for an explanation ... Read on ...[/b]
[u][b]Show Us The Money[/b][/u] - http://www.tompaine.com/featu...
[i]David R. Obey is the ranking member of the Committee on Appropriations in the House of Representatives, and Robert C. Byrd is the ranking member of the Committee on Appropriations in the Senate[/i].
Dear Mr. President,
On Sept. 14, 2001, just three days after the tragic events of September 11, the Congress of the United States established a $40 billion Emergency Response Fund to assist the victims of those terrorist attacks and to strengthen homeland and national security.
In response to the extraordinary events of that day, the Congress chose to grant an extraordinary amount of flexibility to the Executive Branch. However, the terms of the law were clear. Namely, the president was required by law to keep the Congress fully informed through consultation with the chairmen and ranking members of the House and Senate Appropriations Committees prior to the expenditure of funds. Also, the administration was required by law to provide Congress with quarterly reports detailing the use of these funds.
To the best of our knowledge, as the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee and the ranking member of the House Appropriations Committee during 2002, we were provided no consultations by the White House, as required by law, about the use of the $20 billion of funds that were made available to the president for allocation. If this is not an accurate view, please advise us of any record of consultations with Appropriations Committees of the House of Representatives and the Senate, as was required by statute prior to the expenditure of these funds.
We have numerous concerns about the administration's stewardship of these funds. According to a recent book by Bob Woodward entitled Plan of Attack, the White House used $700 million of appropriated funds in 2002 to prepare bases in the Persian Gulf region for an attack on Iraq. The Department of Defense has confirmed that $178 million that was transferred from the $40 billion Emergency Response Fund was used in the summer of 2002 for "Supporting the global war on terrorism" in Kuwait, Qatar and other nations in the Persian Gulf region, several months before Congress approved the Iraq war resolution. These funds were spent on 21 projects. We have no record of consultation prior to the expenditure of these funds, nor is there sufficient detail in the Department of Defense quarterly reports to indicate whether funds were used to prepare for the war in Iraq.
In addition, the administration has failed to effectively manage the September 11 Emergency Response Fund. The law required the Office of Management and Budget to report to the Congress on a quarterly basis on the uses of the fund. Yet Congress has not received such a report for nearly one year. The last report was sent on May 9, 2003, reflecting obligations through Feb. 28, 2003, some 14 months ago.
On Sept. 30, 2003, the administration notified Congress of the allocation of $290 million from the Emergency Response Fund. to support the government in Afghanistan. In the transmittal, the director of the Office of Management and Budget indicated that the funds would be drawn from funds previously allocated to the Department of Defense. Yet the May 9, 2003 OMB quarterly report indicated that as of Feb. 28, 2003, DoD had already obligated all but $21 million of its funds. While we had objection to the support for the government of Afghanistan, your report begs the question, from whence came the money? Further, why has there been no quarterly report since May 9, 2003?
On March 12, 2004, the administration transferred $4 million from the Emergency Response Fund to finance a Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction. This commission was created, without authorization from Congress, by an executive order that does nothing to guarantee the panel's independence from the White House, and that does not endow the commission with the power to subpoena necessary information from potentially uncooperative witnesses. Again, there was no consultation with the Congress, as required by law, prior to the allocation of these funds.
When the Congress provided the extraordinary authorities in response to the Al Qaeda attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, it expected that tax dollars would be managed carefully so as to provide assistance to the victims of the attack, to secure our homeland and to improve our national security. The letter of the law and consultation with the Congress in the expenditure of appropriated funds provides our citizens with assurance that their tax dollars are spent in accordance with congressional intent. Transparency in this regard is critical. We need a full accounting of the entire $40 billion Emergency Response Fund.
Thank you for your prompt attention to this matter.
Sincerely,
David R. Obey
Ranking Member
Committee on Appropriations
United States House of Representatives
Robert C. Byrd
Ranking Member
Committee on Appropriations
United States Senate
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| ... March of the Banana Republicans ... |
| 04.29.04 (1:37 pm) [edit] |
[b]Are we faced with another banana republican coup d'etat in November?[/b] Dubya and his corrupt cabal of neo-con, neo-fascists rigged the 2000 presidential (s)election with the help of the Supreme Fascist Antonin Scalia, the Bush Crime Family toady http://www.tblog.com/template... ... What does the corruption of our Republic result in for our government and the choices that we have to represent[i] our [/i]real interests? America belongs to "We the People" and not the Bush Crime Family, gluttonous corporations, wealthy oligarchs and hyper-rich plutocrats ... http://www.tblog.com/template...
[b]Read on ...[/b]
[b][u]March of the Banana Republicans[/u][/b]
In a democracy, Alexander Hamilton believed: "The differences of opinion, and the jarrings of parties . . . often promote deliberation and circumspection; and serve to check the excesses of the majority." Although these jarrings and clashings sometimes seem messy, contentious and wasteful, in fact they are one of the great strengths of democracy in both peacetime and wartime.
If, however, a single viewpoint or party is able to drown out or suppress the views of others, a different dynamic sets in. One-party dominated states and hierarchical, command-driven social systems are notorious for their tendency to make disastrous decisions, in the areas of both domestic and foreign policy. China's cultural revolution and the Soviet Union's failed economic development plans are among the most extreme but not the only cases in point. In the field of foreign affairs, Napoleon and Hitler both disdained dissenting advice and found doom attacking Russia. Saddam Hussein met a similar fate when, after fighting a debilitating war with Iran, he invaded Kuwait and triggered the wrath of other nations. As we detailed in our previous book, Weapons of Mass Deception, the Bush administration seems to have made the same mistake when it believed its own propaganda promoting war with Iraq.
The U.S. military has a term for this type of information system: "incestuous amplification," which Jane's Defense Weekly defines as "a condition in warfare where one only listens to those who are already in lock-step agreement, reinforcing set beliefs and creating a situation ripe for miscalculation." Psychologists have a similar term: "group polarization," which describes the tendency for like-minded people, talking only with one another, to end up believing a more extreme version of what they thought before they started to talk.
The Republican Party's philosophy and political organizing strategies have been remarkably successful at helping the party achieve and consolidate power in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Simultaneously, however, they have created conditions that make incestuous amplification and group polarization more likely in disparate areas of America's political arena.
[i][b]The Revolving Door [/b][/i]
Shortly after President Bush took office, one of his most trusted campaign advisors, Ed Gillespie, took a brief break from heading up his own lobbying and PR firm, Quinn Gillespie & Associates. Gillespie, whose clients have included Microsoft, Enron and Verizon, as well as the steel and logging industries, went to work for a few days as acting director of public affairs for the U.S. Commerce Department, where he assisted Secretary Donald Evans with the agency's reorganization under the newly elected Bush administration. Among his other activities, Gillespie arranged for the department to hire as its press secretary one of his own employees at Quinn Gillespie, Jim Dyke. Gillespie finished his work at the Commerce Department on February 15, 2001, and the following day he was back at work in his own office.
"Federal law requires departing government officials to wait one year to lobby agencies that employed them," observed Wall Street Journal reporter Jim VandeHei. "But that doesn't apply to Mr. Gillespie; his brief, 15-day tenure made him a temporary worker exempt from the cooling-off period. As a result, Mr. Gillespie is free to contact Mr. Evans on behalf of clients."
Gillespie was not alone. More than 150 Republican lobbyists worked on Bush's transition team. Diane Steed of the Coalition for Vehicle Choice, which was created by the Motor Vehicle Manufacturers of America to fight against higher fuel efficiency standards, advised the Department of Transportation. Jack Abramoff, a Republican lobbyist for Indian gambling, advised the Interior Department.
Many of Bush's permanent employees have also come from an inner circle of party-affiliated industry lobbyists. For the number-three spot at the Department of Labor, for example, Bush tapped Eugene Scalia, the son of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and a labor lawyer who has specialized in representing management in labor disputes related to worker safety, especially the dangers of repetitive-stress injuries.
With regard to environmental-policy jobs, virtually all of Bush's appointees have consisted of attorneys and lobbyists for the very industries they were appointed to oversee. Timber industry lobbyist Mark Rey became assistant secretary for agriculture with responsibility for national forests. Steven Griles, a leading lobbyist for the oil, gas and coal industries, became deputy secretary at the Department of the Interior. A lobbyist for drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge went to work as the Interior's envoy to Alaska. At the U.S. Justice Department, Wyoming attorney Tom Sansonetti – a Republican activist who has lobbied on behalf of coal-mining operations – was appointed to head the enforcement of environmental and natural-resource laws.
The revolving door between private lobbyists and government officials existed, of course, long before George W. Bush became president – but Bush has taken it to new levels. When Bill Clinton assumed the presidency, people who assisted with his presidential transition were barred from lobbying agencies they helped for six months. The Bush administration, by contrast, saw no problem with having someone like Gillespie work for the White House one day and literally go to work as a lobbyist on the following one. "Helping out this administration is good for the country," Gillespie told the Wall Street Journal. "Anything we can do to help President Bush initially or from here on out we are happy to do."
[b][i]Send My Regards to K Street [/i][/b]
Much of the real power and influence peddling in Washington, DC begins on K Street, a nondescript corridor of office buildings located a few blocks north of the White House. K Street is where the big lobbying firms and corporate trade associations have their headquarters. It is sometimes referred to as the fourth branch of government. Many of the top K Street lobbyists are, in fact, former government officials – senators, congressmen and their staffs that, after retiring from office (or after losing their last election) go to work as hired advocates for companies and industries. Their ability to influence government policy comes in part from the personal relationships they have with their former colleagues, and from the campaign contributions that corporations can channel to politicians who do their bidding. Lobbyists, as columnist Michael Kinsley has observed, are "a group of people who charge a lot of money to give disproportionate influence in our democracy to people with even more money."
Historically, however, the power of corporate lobbyists has been somewhat mitigated by the two-party system. Since the party in power could vary from one election to the next, K Street had to hire top names from both major parties as a way of ensuring access. Ideological differences between the parties therefore limited the ability of corporations to control the policy agenda. In addition to corporations, the Democratic Party needed to appeal to constituencies including the labor movement, minorities, environmentalists and other liberals who have historically turned out as voters and activists in support of the party's candidates.
As Nicholas Confessore observed in the July/August 2003 issue of the Washingtonian, the relationship between Democrats and lobbyists contained an "inherent tension": "For the most part, K Street groups supported Democrats because they had to and Republicans because they wanted to. The Democrats needed corporate money to stay competitive, but were limited by the pull of their liberal, labor-oriented base. Although the party became generally more pro-business during the 1980s, it had few natural constituencies on K Street." After Republicans achieved control over all sectors of the federal government in the early 21st century, however, corporate lobbyists were happy to jettison bipartisanship and throw their weight solidly behind the Republican machine, which targeted control of K Street by pressuring the major lobbying firms to hire only Republicans.
Party strategist Grover Norquist is one of the leading masterminds of this strategy. Working with Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, he launched the K Street Project in 1995 to compile a database of lobbyists. The database lists lobbyists' names, where they work, which party they belong to, where they have worked politically and how much money they have contributed to the candidates and causes of both parties. The purpose of the list is to decide who "deserves" access to the White House, Congress and federal agencies. Contributions to the wrong party can "buy you enemies," explained Congressman Thomas M. Davis III of Virginia, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee. According to Marshall Wittmann, a former Christian Coalition staffer who now works for Senator John McCain, the pressure on lobbyists has made Republican Majority Leader Tom DeLay "the Dirty Harry of Capitol Hill, the bad cop. Every K Street lobbyist is shaking in their boots because K Street lives on access, and DeLay can shut off their oxygen."
Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum is another key player in the K Street Project. In the months following the 2000 elections that gave Republicans the White House, Santorum began convening a private meeting each Tuesday morning of Republican lobbyists, attended sometimes by representatives from the White House and other senators. Democrats and journalists were not invited.
"The chief purpose of these gatherings is to discuss jobs – specifically, the top one or two positions at the biggest and most important industry trade associations and corporate offices," Confessore reported. "Every week, the lobbyists present pass around a list of the jobs available and discuss whom to support. Santorum's responsibility is to make sure each one is filled by a loyal Republican – a senator's chief of staff, for instance, or a top White House aide, or another lobbyist whose reliability has been demonstrated. After Santorum settles on a candidate, the lobbyists present make sure it is known whom the Republican leadership favors."
Republican dominance on K Street has further enhanced the party's fundraising advantage over Democrats. "An analysis of political donations by industry groups shows that over the past decade, 19 major sectors have shifted from a roughly 50-50 split between the two main parties – or in some cases, a slightly pro-Democratic tilt – to a solid alignment with the Republican Party, which now enjoys advantages exceeding 5 to 1 in some of these sectors," the Washington Post reported in November 2002.
Key industries that have shifted Republican include accounting, aerospace, alcoholic beverages, commercial banking, defense, health care and pharmaceuticals. "Just like the Democrats get a 90-10 split from the trial lawyers and labor, we will have 90-10 in the staffing on K Street and 90-10 business giving," Grover Norquist gloated in November 2002. But trial lawyers and labor give only a fraction of the amount that corporations donate to election campaigns. In 2002, contributions from businesses accounted for 73 percent of all election giving, compared to only 7 percent for labor. (Most of the remainder came from "ideological" or "other" donors, such as environmental groups, the National Rifle Association, clergy or nonprofit organizations.)
In place of the "inherent tension" that existed between Democratic politicians and K Street lobbyists, their ideological closeness with Republicans has made the party and its corporate supporters virtually indistinguishable. "Tom DeLay, Grover Norquist, and others have set up a K Street patronage operation that effectively obliterates the distinction between conservatives and corporatists," conservative columnist David Brooks observed in June 2002. "And remember, when they brag about the growing merger between conservatives and the business community, they are talking about something akin to a merger between Sam's Video Shack and Blockbuster. The culture of the corporate community is bound to dominate the culture of conservatism, not the other way around."
Another indicator of the growing closeness of the corporate-conservative relationship is that corporations and their trade lobbies have gone beyond merely trying to influence politicians in Washington and have become propaganda machines that work to sell the Bush administration's policies to the general public.
"Beginning in the 1990s, Washington's corporate offices and trade associations began to resemble miniature campaign committees, replete with pollsters and message consultants," Confessore writes. "To supplement PAC [Political Action Committee] giving, which is limited by federal election laws, corporations vastly increased their advocacy budgets, with trade organizations spending millions of dollars in soft money on issue ad campaigns in congressional districts. And thanks to the growing number of associations whose executives are beholden to DeLay or Santorum, these campaigns are increasingly put in the service of GOP candidates and causes."
During the Iraq war, for example, radio conglomerate Clear Channel Communications had its stations sponsor pro-war rallies nationwide and even banned the Dixie Chicks from their playlist after one band member criticized Bush. Companies such as General Motors, Verizon and Morgan Stanley have lobbied their stockholders and customers to promote Bush administration tax cuts, and the pharmaceutical industry both helped write and promote Bush's Medicare plan.
[i][b]Double Standard [/b][/i]
While Bill Clinton occupied the White House, the nonprofit Center for Public Integrity stirred a major public scandal when it obtained a list of White House guests and found that Democratic Party donors and fundraisers, who raised hundreds of thousands of dollars, were among the guests who spent nights at the historic Lincoln bedroom. The CPI's 1996 report, titled "Fat Cat Hotel," sparked a Republican-led Senate investigation and became the topic of thousands of news reports and critical editorials, with headlines such as "Clinton's Cash Hunt," "Lincoln Bedroom Becomes Another Soiled Symbol," "Dozing for Dollars," and "Anatomy of a Scandal."
By contrast, there was almost no reporting – let alone outrage or Senate investigation – when the CPI reported, seven months after Bush took office, that the "fat cat hotel" was "still open for business." According to a list released by the White House, many of the new administration's guests had been major political donors, including at least six "Bush Pioneers" – people who raised more than $100,000 for his presidential campaign. In a Republican-dominated political climate, no one raised an eyebrow about this sort of thing, because the investigating body – the U.S. Senate – was controlled by the same political party that ran the hotel.
Haley Barbour, who was elected governor of Mississippi in 2003, exemplifies the synergistic relationship between lobbying and fundraising. Barbour is the former chairman of the Republican National Committee and also owns his own lobby shop, Barbour, Griffith & Rogers, which represents 50 major clients, including representatives of the tobacco, automobile, pharmaceutical, health care and transportation industries. Shortly after Bush took office, the company was named by Fortune magazine as the number one lobbying firm in Washington. It is also all male and all Republican. "Even receptionists and secretaries have to be Republican to be hired," noted the New York Times in a July 2001 profile.
Barbour is also the man in charge of raising money for Republican Senate campaigns. For some of them, including Mississippi Senator Trent Lott, he has raised millions of dollars, much of it coming in the form of large contributions from Barbour's own clients. Not surprisingly, money translates into influence. According to Charles Lewis, executive director of the nonprofit Center for Public Integrity, Barbour gave his corporate clients "a pipeline into Republican members of the Senate," and Barbour himself pretty much agrees. "People in the Senate have already made up their mind about me," he says. "I can't improve on my standing with these guys. I've worked closely with them over the years. They've been nice to me, and doors open to me, and they are willing to listen to my opinion on issues that they are dealing with on behalf of my clients. If you called anyone in town, they would tell you I cannot improve my standing with these senators."
Barbour's company is also closely tied to another firm, New Bridge Strategies, which was set up in June 2003 to help companies get the sweetest contracts for rebuilding Iraq. The president of New Bridge is Joe Allbaugh, a longtime close advisor of President Bush and a member of the so-called "iron triangle" of advisors – himself, Karen Hughes and Karl Rove – who have formed Bush's inner circle since he first ran for governor in 1994. The other top officers at New Bridge Strategies are Ed Rogers and Lanny Griffith – Barbour's partners at Barbour, Griffith & Rogers, where Allbaugh's wife Diane also happens to work as an attorney. You might think these guys waste a lot of time shuttling back and forth between their jobs at BG&R and their jobs at New Bridge. Fortunately, that's not much of a problem, because they all share office space on the same floor of the same building, a couple of blocks from the White House.
And Barbour isn't the only well-connected Republican with one foot in government and the other in the Iraq contracting business. Douglas Feith is the U.S. Undersecretary of Defense and one of the most influential advocates within the Bush administration for war with Iraq. Feith is currently in charge of reconstruction at the Pentagon, while his former law partner, Marc Zell, is "assisting regional construction and logistics firms to collaborate with contractors from the United States and other coalition countries" through their former law firm – previously called Feith & Zell, now rechristened Zell, Goldberg & Co.
With this kind of Republican clout, it isn't terribly surprising that the actual contracts for rebuilding Iraq have also gone to companies that give big donations to the Republicans. Weeks before the first bombs dropped in Iraq, the Bush administration began its plans for rebuilding the country. The plans were developed in secret, according to ABC News, with only a handful of companies allowed to bid on contracts for the reconstruction of Iraqi schools, airports, roads, bridges, hospitals and power plants. The companies allowed to bid were all generous political donors, mostly to Republicans: Bechtel, Fluor, Parsons, the Washington Group and Halliburton – Vice President Dick Cheney's old firm.
In October 2003, the Center for Public Integrity tallied the contracts that had been awarded by then to projects in Iraq and found that the recipient companies "donated more money to the presidential campaigns of George W. Bush – a little over $500,000 – than to any other politician over the last dozen years." The biggest winner by far was KBR, a subsidiary of Halliburton. KBR got $2.3 billion in Iraq contracts, followed by Bechtel ($1 billion) and International American Products ($527 million).
The pattern is this: Companies like Halliburton give money to support Republican politicians, who in turn use their clout to ensure that the companies get fat contracts, who in turn give a portion of their profits to keep Republicans in power. Around and around the circle goes, and everybody gets a piece – except, of course, for the rest of the American people, who pay the bill for all this fun with their tax dollars and the mounting federal deficit.
The danger in all of these interlocking relationships is that it breeds the "incestuous amplification" of one-sided thinking, leading to serious errors of judgment by policymakers. This helps explain how the Bush administration managed to convince itself that Iraq truly did possess awesome weapons of mass destruction, that it was closely tied to Al Qaeda, and that the people of Iraq would greet a U.S. invasion of their country as liberation.
Much of the administration's intelligence information about Iraq actually came from the Iraqi National Congress (INC), an organization created and funded by the U.S. government at the behest of the first Bush administration for the purpose of creating conditions for Saddam Hussein's overthrow. Not surprisingly, the information from the INC and its head, Ahmed Chalabi, tended to reinforce the already-existing assumptions of policymakers in the second Bush administration, even when that information contradicted other reports coming from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.
The INC's "intelligence isn't reliable at all," said Vincent Cannistraro, a former senior CIA official and counterterrorism expert. "Much of it is propaganda. Much of it is telling the Defense Department what they want to hear. And much of it is used to support Chalabi's own presidential ambitions. They make no distinction between intelligence and propaganda, using alleged informants and defectors who say what Chalabi wants them to say, [creating] cooked information that goes right into presidential and vice-presidential speeches."
[i][b]John Stauber is the founder and director of the Center for Media & Democracy. He and Sheldon Rampton write and edit the quarterly 'PR Watch: Public Interest Reporting on the PR/Public Affairs Industry[/b][/i]. - http://www.alternet.org/story...
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| Corrupt GOP Bush Regime Is Disconnected From Reality ... |
| 04.28.04 (9:38 pm) [edit] |
"[i]No matter what way you look at it, the American economy is the strongest it's been in 10 years[/i]." - Tom DeLay, 4/27/04, http://online.wsj.com/article...,,BT_CO_20040427_008761-s earch,00.html?collection=autowire/ 30day&vql_string=DeLay+an d+economy%3cin%3e(article -body)
"[i]From late December, when the federal program designed to help the long-term unemployed began phasing out, through the end of March, an estimated 1.1 million jobless workers will have exhausted their regular unemployment benefits[/i]." - Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, 3/25/04, http://www.cbpp.org/3-25-04ui...
[b]The corrupt neo-fascist Bush regime is disconnected from reality ... [/b] Of course, for those traitorous war-profiteers, corporate robber-barons, wealthy oligarchs, hyper-rich plutocrats, and bought-and-paid-for-polit icos-on-the-take (like Bug-Exterminator-cum-Fasc ist Tom DeLay) these are boon-times with [i]lots of money to be made by swindling, plundering and looting [/i]the American people [i]as well as [/i]sovereign nations around the world ... For the majority of the American Working people, this is a disastrous time with the highest deficits/debts in our nation's history while the despicable neo-con Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta[/i] is wildly spending on gluttonous corporations & the obscenely rich to pay for their lavishly excessive life-styles, while the rest of us are being ruthlessly impoverished, exploited and made miserable ...
[b]ECONOMY: [i]Disconnected from Reality[/i][/b] - http://www.americanprogress.o...
As the economy still struggles to shake the doldrums, the Bush administration in the last few months has made some strange economic declarations, while its conservative allies in Congress have resorted to outright fantasy. First, the White House said offshoring U.S. jobs was a good thing, then it claimed cutting off millions from federal overtime protection will be good for workers struggling with stagnating wages. Then the president, seemingly unconcerned with the gas price crisis hitting average families, refused to personally intervene after his longtime friends in the Saudi Arabian government cut oil production and raised gas prices (Bush's refusal did nothing to tamp down speculation that he is working with the Saudis to manipulate oil prices for the 2004 election). And yesterday, the administration actually claimed that lower drug prices for American consumers would be bad for the economy, despite economic data to the contrary. For more on conservatives' disconnect from economic realities, see yesterday's American Progress column http://www.americanprogress.o... by senior economist Christian Weller and research associate John Lyman.
[b]TOM DELAY'S FANTASY WORLD:[/b] Meanwhile, the WSJ reports that while even some conservatives on Capitol Hill "are clearly nervous about letting the economic recovery speak for itself," House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-TX) said, "no matter what way you look at it, the American economy is the strongest it's been in 10 years." It seems DeLay hasn't seen the data which shows more than 8 million Americans are out of work, more than one million have exhausted their unemployment benefits, consumer debt is at record levels, wages are stagnating, and more than 40 million Americans are living without health insurance. See this new American Progress backgrounder http://www.americanprogress.o... of how rhetoric from conservatives compares with the harsh economic reality for millions of Americans.
[b]GOOD NEWS – THWARTING BUSH'S EFFORT TO PUSH OFFSHORING:[/b] The White House has done its best to encourage U.S. companies to move jobs overseas – from encouraging offshoring to endorsing tax breaks for companies that move abroad, to sponsoring conferences teaching corporate executives how to move operations offshore. But at least some companies aren't biting. As the NYT reports "Even as the prospect of high-skilled American jobs moving to low-wage countries ignites hot political debate" some U.S. entrepreneurs are finding that offshoring "is not always as effective as advertised." Many companies "are concluding that the cost advantage does not always justify the effort" and that "for many of the most crucial technology tasks, a work force operating within the American business environment better suits their needs."
[b]POLL – INVESTORS DON'T LIKE BUSH'S PUSH FOR OFFSHORING:[/b] As more companies try to hide their offshoring practices, new Gallup poll finds that while some on "Wall Street may love offshoring jobs to low-cost foreign countries, investors do not. Most think it's bad for the U.S. economy, and they appear to support tough measures against corporate America to control it." Specifically, 66% of investors surveyed said they think offshoring is "bad for the economy.'' 76% described a variety of curbs as effective ways to deal with offshoring including requiring all government-related jobs to be performed in the United States, improving the quality of education in the United States, and reducing the cost of health care benefits to companies to make it cheaper to hire U.S. workers. A full 72% said they thought tax penalties for companies that move jobs out of the country would work.
[b]RED-HERRING – WHITE HOUSE SAYS LOWER DRUG PRICES MEAN JOBLESSNESS:[/b] Showing how desperate the Bush administration is to defend its campaign contributors in the drug industry, the White House actually claimed yesterday that bipartisan legislation "to allow Americans to legally import cheaper prescription drugs would lead to U.S. jobs losses." With no data to back up the claims, the administration told a Senate panel that pharmaceutical industry jobs would be lost – a direct contradiction of new research that shows importation could actually add to pharmaceutical industry profits and jobs because more people who simply cannot buy medicine would be able to re-enter the pharmaceutical market. The issue has transformed from a purely health issue to an economic one: with Americans being squeezed by the highest drug prices in the world, more and more families are being forced to use dwindling disposable income on medicines.
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| Conservative Economic Rhetoric Versus Reality ... |
| 04.28.04 (7:37 pm) [edit] |
[b]Dubya's ponzy scheme has enriched his own criminal family and that of his gluttonous corporate cronies, campaign contributors and political toadies ... [/b]However, the corrupt Bush regime's insane, reckless and rapacious economic policies are [i]tragically destructive[/i] for the majority of Americans and Working people ... http://www.tblog.com/template...
"We the People" must learn quickly to separate the traitorous Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta's[/i] neo-orwellian rhetoric from the cold, hard and unpleasant reality of impoverishment of our nation's citizenry under the vile Bush Crime Family ...
[b]Read on ...[/b]
[b][u]Conservative Economic Rhetoric vs. Reality[/u][/b] - http://www.americanprogress.o...
[i][b]On Employment[/b][/i]
[u]Rhetoric[/u]: "There are more Americans working today than ever before." – Heritage Foundation, Issues 2004
[u]Reality[/u]: The American economy has lost nearly 2 million jobs since President Bush was elected – the worst record of job losses during a recovery since Herbert Hoover.
[u]Reality[/u]: The unemployment rate has gone from 4.2 percent to 5.7 percent under Bush, and increased again just last month.
[i][b]On Job Creation[/b][/i]
[u]Rhetoric[/u]: "America's economy is strong and getting stronger. . . and new jobs were created in March." – President Bush, April 2, 2004
[u]Reality[/u]: The past few years have seen the worst monthly average job creation during a recovery in over 60 years.
[u]Reality[/u]: No other post-war administration has had as few good months of good labor market performance as the Bush administration. This includes the Kennedy and Ford administrations, which were in office for shorter periods of time than Bush's has been.
[b][i]On Unemployment[/i][/b]
[u]Rhetoric[/u]: "The unemployment rate edged up slightly to 5.7 percent [in March], which is low by historical standards …. It is already within the healthy range that most economists consider close to full employment." – Heritage Foundation, Web Memo #468
[u]Reality[/u]: The unemployment rate is low because many workers have simply given up looking for work. If this "missing labor force" were properly counted, the unemployment rate would average well above 7 percent.
[u]Reality[/u]: The unemployment rate has risen from a low point of 3.9 percent in December 2000 and remained consistently at or above 5.6 percent for several months. In fact, the unemployment rate was 5.6 percent when the recovery started in November 2001.
[b][i]On Real Wages[/i][/b]
[u]Rhetoric[/u]: "Average real wages have risen by 3 percent over the last three years." – Heritage Foundation, Issues 2004
[u]Reality[/u]: According to the Economic Policy Institute, 2003 was the worst year since 1998 for growth in real (inflation adjusted) hourly wages. While GDP has been growing strongly - 4.1 percent in the fourth quarter following 8.2 percent in the third quarter of 2003 – total wage and salary income saw meager increases of 0.8 percent and 1.3 percent at the same time.
[u]Reality[/u]: Wages have increased by less than 1 percent since the start of the recession through January 2004. That increase is at about half the rate of prior recoveries.
[b][i]On Tax Cuts and Recession[/i][/b]
[u]Rhetoric[/u]: "The conservative remedy of lower taxes and free trade halted the recession in its tracks." – Heritage Foundation, Issues 2004
[u]Reality[/u]: President Bush's tax cuts have made it harder for Americans to find jobs because they were targeted towards the rich, created enormous deficits and put economic growth in jeopardy.
[u]Reality[/u]: Most American households received less than the average tax cut (in 2003 the average cut was $1800, but the majority of Americans got less than $850 in tax cuts). Gains from these cuts were more than offset by cost increases in medical care (up 4.5 percent since last year), tuition (up 28 percent over the last three years) and housing. Government expenditures for programs that help working families to meet these rising costs have now been reduced to pay for the tax cuts.
[b][i]On Financial Aid[/i][/b]
[u]Rhetoric[/u]: "More students are receiving federal Pell grants than when President Bush took office." - Rod Paige, Secretary of Education, March 4, 2004
[u]Reality[/u]: Financial aid is primarily based on family income. Median household income, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, has fallen for the last two years for which data is available (2001 and 2002).
[u]Reality[/u]: College tuition has gone up 28 percent over the last three years. Financial aid – much of which comes in the form of loans – has not been able to offset these costs. That is despite an alarming rise in debt among recent college graduates, families are still struggling to pay the bills.
[b][i]On Health Care[/i][/b]
[u]Rhetoric[/u]: "Even if you don't have health insurance you are still taken care of in America. That certainly could be defined as universal coverage." - Secretary Of Health And Human Services Tommy Thompson, Seattle Times, March 3, 2004.
[u]Reality[/u]: The number of people with health insurance rose by 1.5 million and the number without increased by 2.4 million from 2001 to 2002. Currently, 43.6 million Americans lack health insurance. As health insurance coverage is declining, out-of-pocket medical expenditures rise. From 2000 to 2003, inflation adjusted out-of-pocket expenditures rose by more than 7 percent taking a bite out of consumption for other items.
[u]Reality[/u]: The overwhelming majority of Americans without health insurance say they don't have it because it is too expensive. Only 5 to 7 percent report that they don't need or don't want healthcare coverage.
[b]For another article outlining the break by moderate Republicans also opposed to the corrupt Bush regime's extremist favoritism towards corporations, wealthy oligarchs and hyper-rich plutocrats, read "A Task of Moderation" on [/b] http://nytimes.com/2004/04/28... .
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| Bush's Negroponte: Sleeping Ambassador or Death Squad Diplomat??? |
| 04.28.04 (5:52 pm) [edit] |
[b]The corrupt Bush regime rewards its' henchmen, death squads, liars, traitors, embezzlers, and war criminals[i] quite nicely [/i]with plush-plumb positions and other goodies (e.g. no-audit, no-accountability contracts) at US Taxpayer expense, so long as these neo-con goons and neo-fascist thugs are above all [i]loyal[/i] to the Bush Crime Family http://www.tblog.com/template... ... [/b]Don't confuse this with[i] loyalty [/i]to the United States of America: [i][u]that[/u] doesn't count!!! [/i]... In fact, if someone proves[i] loyal [/i]to the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights, they are punished, smeared, slandered, libelled and destroyed by the traitorous Bush/Cheney Inc [i]junta[/i] ...
[b]Read on ...[/b]
As reports are coming in that yet more Iraqi civilians are being killed in Iraq [The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk ], is it any wonder that the Honduras reneged on their commitment to participate in the effort to rebuild just as Bush announced that their former Ambassador from the U.S. was taking over?
During a recent press conference, President Bush recently scolded a reporter to not undermine the importance of our allies contributions in Iraq. There is much evidence that they may have withdrawn due to his recent appointment of John Dimitre Negroponte to Ambassador of Iraq. To the people of the Honduras, the mention of his name alone undoubtedly conjured up bloody memories of the CIA-backed death squads and countless atrocities.
"The Honduran military committed hundreds of human rights abuses since 1980, many of which were politically motivated and officially sanctioned," the IG (Inspector General of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency) acknowledged. "CIA reporting linked Honduran military personnel to 'death squad' activities." One CIA cable released with the report identified the "Honduran Anti-communist Liberation Army," a secret military squad that engaged in "surveillance, kidnappings, interrogations under duress, and execution of prisoners who were Honduran revolutionaries." - excerpt [Parascope.com]
Not to mention the murder of approximately 70,000 people in El Salvador [BBC], and 40,000 Nicaraguans [PeaceCorpsOnline.com], as well as 30,000 Guatemalans [NWO.Media].
How closely can all of those atrocities be tied to Bush's nominee for the position of Iraqi Ambassador? As Ambassador to the Honduras, it is possible that he was merely asleep the entire time he was on duty, and it was merely negligence which allowed his assigned country to become a major staging and training grounds for the Reagan-Bush cabinet's Iran-Contra affair. Negroponte may not have meant to misrepresent the abuses by the CIA backed military in his reports, and it may have been only accidental that the years of obfuscation thwarted any possibility of proper Congressional oversight of illegal CIA covert operation.
That's the ticket.
Although the sheer number of mass murders filtered through into U.S. reports, it was only the occasional murder of an Archbishop, that group of nuns, or a Seattle man down there helping to construct a water supply that made headlines.
The widespread use of American aerial surveillance to direct the Contra murderers to villages where only women and children were present to be killed, the routine use of torture, the encouragement of drug-smuggling into the U.S. to provide funding for the U.S.-backed forces all were revealed only after Negroponte had left his post as U.S. Ambassador to the Honduras. And who could forget the Honduran Anti-communist Liberation Army's ever popular practice of dropping victims from helicopters while they were in flight?
Make no mistake about it -- both Iraqi rebels and Al Qaeda terrorists see Negroponte's appointment as the first stage in implementing a policy of covert violence against their right to sovereignty and will effectively use it to recruit and incite radicals to commit more acts of violence against us. It's no coincidence that our Office of Homeland Security issued a heightened security alert just as Bush announced his plans for Negroponte.
Senators who stand ready to rubberstamp Bush's nominee should think about this: Whether or not Ambassador Negroponte advocated death squads or the indiscriminate murder of the general population in the past isn't the problem. What matters is that it happened on a large scale over a long period of time while under his watch. And with that in mind, once he's installed, will America be any safer than when Saddam Hussein was running the place?
And speaking of sleeping while on duty, let's not forget how far Iraq has slid into open rebellion since Mzzz. Condoleezza started running her Iraq Stabilization Group just five months after Bush publicly declared that the major war operations were over. - http://www.smirkingchimp.com/...
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| Supreme Court Fascist Antonin Scalia Shows He Wants A U.S. Dictatorship |
| 04.28.04 (3:11 pm) [edit] |
[b]Supreme Court Fascist Antonin Scalia is a Bush Family toady who should be impeached from office. [/b]Scalia is the fascist ideologue who celebrated his hijacking of the 2000 presidential election, by going home and toasting his installation of the Mad King George in the White House with a martini, while U.S. Constitutional experts have agreed that it was one of the worst U.S. Supreme Court decisions on principle since the Dred Scott decision http://www.tompaine.com/featu... ... Slut Scalia goes duck hunting with his Pimp Cheney and then refuses to recuse himself ... Why??? [i]Too much is at stake!!! [/i]... Scalia is [i]on-the-take [/i]for the Bush Crime Family who have given him and his idiot off-spring[i] fat pay-checks [/i]... Now he is behind one of the most vile cover-ups in our nation's history that would demonstrate that the Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta[/i] promised a war in Iraq to enrich their corporate cronies (an act of treason) in the summer of 2001 ... The wholesale rape of the American public by Bush, Cheney and their Energy Cronies resulting in heinous warfare planned for war-profiteering is an act of treason and should be made public ...
Consider "[b]Scalia Shows His Cards[/b]" by [i]David J. Sirota and Christy Harvey and Judd Legum[/i], The Progress Report, on http://www.alternet.org/story... :
In a last ditch effort to keep the American people in the dark, Solicitor General Theodore Olson argued before the Supreme Court that the activities of Vice President Cheney's 2001 energy task force should remain completely secret. The argument has already been rejected by two federal courts. To avoid making even the most preliminary disclosures, the vice president has had to defy an explicit court order.
At issue is a relatively obscure 1972 law, the Federal Advisory Committee Act, which requires government advisory committees that have members from outside the government to meet in public. Although no formal members of Cheney's energy task force were from outside government, a 1993 federal appeals court ruling – stemming from efforts by conservatives to learn the details of then first lady Hillary Clinton's health care task force – found that outsiders who play an active role should be considered members. It is already well-known that former Enron CEO Ken Lay and other energy industry executives were involved in shaping the nation's energy policy through the task force. But Dick Cheney doesn't believe the American people have the right to know the extent of their involvement. See the amicu s brief American Progress filed with the Supreme Court about this case.
Particularly receptive to Cheney's arguments: long-time friend and duck hunting partner Justice Antonin Scalia. After flying on Cheney's government jet to a private Louisiana retreat in January, Scalia insisted that "his friendship with Cheney did not effect his ability to impartially decide the legal issue before the court." Specifically, Scalia claims his friendship with Cheney is irrelevant because "nothing the court says on those subjects will have any bearing upon the reputation and the integrity of Richard Cheney." Yet, during yesterday's argument Scalia "left little doubt that he agreed with the Bush administration's argument." At one point during the argument Scalia said "I'm asking whether they were members of the committee, and the answer has to be no." Scalia elaborated that the notion a private individual should be considered a member of the panel regardless of that person's formal designation was "not plausible."
Many have http://www.washingtonpost.com... suggested the administration has devoted significant taxpayer resources to withhold information from the American people, hoping to avoid " a major embarrassment for the president" by revealing how he allowed energy executives to write the nation's energy policy. But Paul Krugman suggests an even more frightening motivation: "the administration is really taking a stand on principle." The case is indicative of the "administration's deep belief that it has the right to act as it pleases, and that the public has no right to know what it's doing." The arguments presented in yesterday's case were "'strikingly similar' to those [the administration] makes for its right to detain, without trial, anyone it deems an enemy combatant."
However the Supreme Court rules, it is clear that the national energy policy produced by the vice president has the fingerprints of industry executives all over it. First, the task force recommends opening up the nation's treasured Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling and examining "the potential for the regulated increase in oil and natural gas development on other federal lands." Another revolutionary idea: more coal power plants. The task force notes "the U.S. has enough coal to last for another 250 years. Yet very few coal-powered electric plants are now under construction." Meanwhile, the task force cautions "the day [renewable energy sources] fulfills the bulk of our needs is still years away."
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| Bush Is "Eager" To Testify Before The 9/11 Whitewash Commission!!! Uh-huh!!! |
| 04.28.04 (3:10 pm) [edit] |
[b]No wonder Bush is supposedly "eager" to testify before the 9/11 Whitewash Commission ... [/b]Hell, the 9/11 Whitewash Commission toadies, lackies and ass-lickers have let the corrupt Bush regime 'off-the-hook' in a [i]despicable display of sycophantic simpering and sucking-up [/i]that would make any sane men/women [i]sick to their stomachs [/i]... Moreover, the 9/11 Whitewash Commission traitorously agreed (1) to allow the Veep-[i]n[/i]-Creep Cheney & his Chimp Dubya to appear [i]locked-at-the-hip together [/i](against all standards and good practices), (2) that [i]no follow-up will be allowed[/i],-- and this is the [i]unbelievable scandal[/i]: (3) [i]no transcription or recording[/i] of their testimony is permitted ... So if the corrupt Bush/Cheney liars-[i]cum[/i]-traitors turn around tomorrow and deny [i]anything and/or everything[/i], "We the People" have no authoritative transcript ... This is [i]appalling [/i]...
[b]Read on ...[/b]
Bush "eager" for 9/11 questions?
So Bush is 'looking forward to 9/11 questions'? http://story.news.yahoo.com/n... Umm...yeah, sure. The GOP is straining to pull something positive from his appearance before the 9/11 commission tomorrow, going so far as to frame the hearings as a governmental rap session http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/s... : 'You should not look at this as an adversarial process. We are all working toward the same objective here.'
Cynical? Maybe. But the facts surrounding the hearing (forget the facts surrounding 9/11 itself for now), don't exactly paint a picture of a president eager to, as far as the truth is concerned, 'bring it on.'
First, the president did everything in his power to thwart the creation of the commission. After realizing that the families of the victims and the American people as a whole wouldn't stand for it, the 'independent' commission was created with Henry Kissinger at the helm. Appointing Kissinger to head a commission seeking truth in government is like, well, just pick your metaphor: letting the fox guard the henhouse, giving Limbaugh the key to the pharmacy etc.
Former Republican Governor of N.J., Thom Kean then replaced Kissinger and spent months awaiting documents the White House refused to hand over. Finally, under threat of subpoena, some were turned over but by that time, the commission's expiration date was swiftly approaching. Bush agreed to extend the deadline only, once again, under pressure from the American people.
Then came Condi's refusal to testify. The White House's efforts to prevent her from testifying culminated in her off the record and timed testimony — two hours to be exact. Bush himself, the President, the Commander-in-chief, will only testify with his Vice present. This, after initially agreeing only to meet with the head of the commission and then only for an hour. In addition, the testimony won't be under oath and there will be no transcription or recording permitted:
'Only note-takers will be allowed to record what they can.'
Former RNC chairman Rich Bond may have put his finger on one reason for Bush's 'looking forward' to questions he did everything in his power to prevent; that appearances are what this administration is about: 'This is a closure in terms of procedures and in terms of some of [i]the symbolism that is associated with the commission[/i]...once Bush and Cheney testify, the administration will be able to say that "all interested parties" right up to the president had appeared before the panel "and no stone was left unturned."' - Yeah, right!!!
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| Reich Marshal Cheney Wants A Dictatorship: Why Is He Hiding His Criminal Activities??? |
| 04.28.04 (12:33 pm) [edit] |
[b]Veep-[i]n-[/i]Creep Cheney desperately wants to [i]hide his criminal activities [/i]in formulating [i]the most heinous fraud and rape of the American people in our nation's history[/i], by his so-called Energy Task Force because it is highly probable that he promised his Energy Cronies and Corporate Pimps (Halliburton, Bechtel, Carlyle Group, Unocal, Big Oil, the Military Industrial Complex) that he would [i]invade Iraq in the summer of 2001[/i] (before 9/11) in order to pay-them-all-back with treasonous war-profits and gluttonous US Taxpayer dollars (and U.S. Soldiers lives). If this [i]truth [/i]comes out and is made public, then he could be charged with criminal fraud and treason and spend the rest of his despicable life, along with the [i]useless[/i] Useful Idiot Dubya in prison ... [i]where they both belong [/i]...[/b]
You may also want to check-out [i]NOW with Bill Moyers [/i]on this topic on http://www.pbs.org/now/politi...
[b]Read also ...[/b]
[b]Why hide facts about energy task force? - http://www.charlotte.com/mld/...
Worst possibility?: [i]The administration is taking a stand on principle. Or are there other possibilities?[/i][/b]
There's a deep mystery surrounding Dick Cheney's energy task force, but it's not about what happened back in 2001. Clearly, energy industry executives dictated the content of a report that served their interests.
The real mystery is why the Bush administration has engaged in a three-year fight to hide the details of a story whose broad outline we already know.
One possibility is that there is some kind of incriminating evidence in the task force's records.
Another is that the administration fears that full disclosure will highlight its chummy relationship with the energy industry.
But there's a third possibility: that the administration is really taking a stand on principle. And that's what scares me.
Could there be a smoking gun in the records? Well, maybe Cheney was already divvying up Iraq's oil fields in 2001, but I'd be surprised to find anything that clear-cut. It's more likely that the administration fears that releasing the task force's records would alert the public to the obvious.
Those of us who have been following such things know that the Bush administration is so deeply enmeshed in the energy industry that it's hard to know where one ends and the other begins.
Campaign contributions are part of it, but it's also personal: George Bush and Dick Cheney are only two of the many members of the administration who grew rich by relying on the kindness of energy companies. Indeed, the day after the executive director of Cheney's task force left office, he went into business as an energy industry lobbyist.
In return, the Bush administration has given energy companies a lot to celebrate. One policy decision alone, effectively scrapping "new source review" in regulating power plant pollution, is worth billions of dollars to industry donors.
But if we know all this, why does the release of the task force's records matter? The answer, I think, is that there's a big difference between compelling circumstantial evidence and a more or less official confirmation.
Consider, as a parallel, the case of the nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. It was pretty clear by last summer that Saddam Hussein didn't have the weapons that were the ostensible reason for war. But it wasn't until January, when David Kay admitted that there was nothing there, that the absence of WMD got traction with the broad public.
The main public justification for the Cheney task force was the 2000-2001 electricity crisis in California. For at least two years, we've known that this crisis was largely the result of market manipulation by energy companies -- and surmised that some of those same companies were advising Cheney on energy policy. But the public will pay a lot more attention if it turns out there is documentation that any energy executives were telling Cheney how to solve power shortages even as their traders were busily creating those shortages.
Still, Cheney's determination to keep his secrets probably reflects more than an effort to avoid bad publicity. It's also a matter of principle, based on the administration's deep belief that it has the right to act as it pleases, and that the public has no right to know what it's doing.
As Linda Greenhouse recently pointed out in The New York Times, the legal arguments the administration is making for the secrecy of the energy task force are "strikingly similar" to those it makes for its right to detain, without trial, anyone it deems an enemy combatant. In both cases, as Greenhouse puts it, the administration has put forward "a vision of presidential power ... as far-reaching as any the court has seen."
That same vision is apparent in many other actions.
Just to mention one: We learn from Bob Woodward that the administration diverted funds earmarked for Afghanistan to preparations for an invasion of Iraq, without asking or even notifying Congress.
What Cheney is defending, in other words, is a doctrine that makes the United States a sort of elected dictatorship: a system in which the president, once in office, can do whatever he likes, and isn't obliged to consult or inform either Congress or the public.
Not long ago I would have thought it inconceivable that the Supreme Court would endorse that doctrine. But I would also have thought it inconceivable that a president would propound such a vision in the first place.
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| After The "Great Job [sic]" Dubya's Done In Iraq, Now The Neo-Cons Want To Invade Iran!!! |
| 04.28.04 (12:32 pm) [edit] |
[b]U.S. Undersecretary of State John Bolton is one of those neo-con, neo-fascist arm-chair chicken-hawks in a corrupt Bush regime full of crazy arm-chair chicken-hawks who lust for war ([i]because they never served, and they'll never be sent [/i]...)-- and these traitors to our nation take their orders from Ariel Sharon and the Likud Party in Israel who now formulate U.S. Foreign & Domestic policies-- and the American people are simply their pawns, cannon-fodder and neo-slaves ...[/b]
Now, the[i] neo-con War Criminals [/i]are posturing to invade Syria and Iran http://www.counterpunch.org/l... http://www.wnd.com/news/artic... http://www.wnd.com/news/artic... ... These arrogant neo-con con-artists ruthlessly perpetrated criminal lies, deceptions & falsehoods upon us regarding phony WMDs posing a so-called "imminent threat" to our national security [i]once already [/i]... What is the old saying (that Bush can never remember and stupidly stumbles over ...): "[b]Fool me [i]once[/i], shame on[i] you [/i]... Fool me [i]twice[/i], shame on [i]me[/i][/b]" ... Let us not be fooled by the liars, traitors, thieves, swindlers, embezzlers, felons and criminals in the corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta, yet again [/i]...
Consider "[b]U.S. Official Urges Tough Stance On Iran[/b]" by[i] Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty [/i]on http://www.rferl.org/features... :
[b]A top U.S. disarmament official says the international community must prepare to take tougher measures against Iran if it continues what he calls its pattern of deception about its nuclear program[/b].
U.S. Undersecretary of State John Bolton told a UN conference on nonproliferation yesterday that there is no reason to believe Iran it is abandoning its nuclear-weapons program, which would be a violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
"There is no conceivable economic justification for Iran to build costly nuclear fuel cycle facilities to support a small 'quote-unquote' nuclear power program," Bolton said. "It is clear that the primary role of Iran's nuclear power program is to serve as a cover and a pretext for the import of nuclear technology and expertise that can be used to support nuclear weapons development."
The International Atomic Energy Agency last month reported that Iran had hidden key aspects of its nuclear program from the agency.
Bolton said if Iran continues to fail to comply, the matter should be referred to the Security Council as a threat to international peace and security. The council could authorize sanctions, if necessary.
Bolton told the conference that countries that illicitly develop nuclear weapons under the treaty should lose the right to develop nuclear technology for peaceful uses.
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| A Return To The Military Draft? ... Sure, If Bush, Cheney & The Neo-Cons Are Forced To Sign-Up!!! |
| 04.27.04 (4:26 pm) [edit] |
[b]Why are the kids of poor and working American families the vast majority of those who are sent to Iraq (to fight and be killed or maimed for life -- used as the vile Bushies 'cannon-fodder' ...) in order to enrich the traitorous Bush & Cheney Crime Families, Halliburton, Bechtel, Carlyle Group, Unocal, Big Oil, the Military Industrial Complex, etc.??? ...[/b] There are rumours that [i]behind the scenes [/i] the corrupt Bush regime will initiate a Military Draft [i]once the November elections are over [/i]... Let us insist that the Bush & Cheney Crime Family members, the neo-cons, the kids of the Halliburton et al. executives and all other pro-war arm-chair chicken-hawks[i] be the first to be called-up[/i]!!! After all, aren't those who lust for war [i]patriotic too[/i]??? ...
Consider "[b]A return to the military draft?[/b]" by [i]Leo Morris [/i]on http://www.fortwayne.com/mld/... :
[b]Government would face an extraordinary challenge in making the case that serving the country should become universal.[/b]
No one is going to allow re-instatement of the draft in a presidential election year. But the issue has been raised in both major political parties, so it's something we'd better start thinking about.
It's more important than ever for Americans to decide whether Iraq is a misguided foreign adventure or an integral part of the overall war on terror. Involuntary servitude in support of an isolated and divisive national commitment is not something we have historically tolerated. But if we are truly in a generation-long struggle against a new kind of enemy, in a sense we have all already been conscripted.
The most vocal advocates of the draft's return seem not to grasp how it has functioned in America. "Disproportionate numbers of the poor and members of minority groups compose the enlisted ranks of the military," complains Rep. Charles B. Rangel, D, N.Y.
And Sen. Chuck Hegel, Republican of Nebraska, wonders if we should "continue to burden the middle class who represent most all of our soldiers, and the lower-middle class." Rangel is a vehement opponent of the war in Iraq and clearly believes a draft is the way to demolish American support for it. Hegel seems honestly to think that war should be a shared burden. Both of them see a military draft as a great leveler that it has never really been.
Conscription was established for the Civil War, but anyone could be released from it by furnishing a substitute or, early on, merely paying the sum of $300. In World War I, exemptions were granted to men who had dependent families, physical disabilities or indispensable duties at home, and a "conscientious objector" status was included for members of pacifistic religious organizations who agreed to perform alternative service. In the Vietnam era, educational deferments were added.
"These loopholes and other technicalities," according to the Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, "tended to discriminate against working-class and poor men, and thus a higher percentage of those groups were drafted." The draft's "unfairness," in fact, became a major social issue during Vietnam.
Under current registration guidelines, men 18 to 25 are still required to sign up. If a draft were reinstated, there would be fewer reasons to excuse the young men; a full-time college student, for example, would be deferred only to the end of the current semester, though a senior could postpone enlistment to the end of the current academic year. But does anyone suppose those rules would still stand when the reality of the draft hit home? During the Vietnam War, not a single member of Congress had a child who was drafted.
Whether we might actually need a draft in the near future depends, again, on which war you're looking at. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld says no one in the administration thinks a draft is "appropriate or necessary." But he says that "all we're trying to do is sustain 135,000 in Iraq," a task that can be done by figuring out better ways to deploy the current 1.4 million on active duty and roughly 900,000 in the Reserves and National Guard. But many critics argue that the 135,000 we have in Iraq isn't nearly enough, considering the escalating chaos there (Sen. John McCain, Republican from Arizona, says we need at least another full division of 10,000), and we also have continuing commitments in places such as South Korea, Kosovo, Haiti and Liberia. And if we are stretched thin now, what will our needs be if the overall war on terror goes on for, say, 25 years, a not-unrealistic amount of time, considering the way the administration talks?
How to pay for a draft is something even its advocates don't want to talk about now. The cost of Iraqi operations this year (if things stay as they are) is estimated at $75 billion. Just keeping 20,000 troops there an extra 90 days (a plan just announced) will cost $700 million. Sending 10,000 more there would add nearly $1.7 billion. Those figures don't include the cost of training new recruits, housing them, transporting them and feeding them.
Beyond the practical and technical aspects of a draft, there is a deep philosophical divide over its morality.
During the War of 1812, Daniel Webster argued that nowhere in the Constitution could a justification for conscription be found and that "to maintain this doctrine" was an exercise "of perverse ingenuity to extract slavery from the substance of a free government." That sentiment was echoed in 1979 by, some may be surprised to learn, Ronald Reagan, who wrote of the draft, "It rests on the assumption that your kids belong to the state." In this view, involuntary military service violates the very principles of individual liberty this country was founded on, more suited to a totalitarian regime than a free society.
Others see it differently. Staci B. Haldi of the History News Service believes a "truly universal draft" -- affecting men and women and having no exemptions -- would "strengthen our country, our armed forces and our democracy." Military service, she says, is a responsibility that should fall on everyone's shoulders because it would reinforce "the positive relationship between military service and political rights," and make an administration "more responsive to the public" and "more circumspect about taking on so many military commitments."
Author and minister Johann Christoph Arnold thinks a military draft, coupled with conscientious-objector options for alternative service, would sober the minds of our young people "who have not appreciated the freedom and standard of living our country offers us." Deciding on which side to stand is one of life's most vital skills, and such a draft would "present every young person with a choice between two paths, both of which require courage."
There is no question that our republican form of government requires duties from its citizens. We must pay our taxes, even when they go for things we don't support or even approve of. But those obligations are imposed on us by a legitimate state in return for protection of our basic rights. And what government does requires the consent of the governed.
And that consent must be informed consent. America's efforts in Vietnam failed because America's leaders did not persuasively make the case that the efforts were worth it. Americans no longer could tolerate squandering their children in a cause they did not believe in. If the Bush administration seeks to learn any lesson from the country's Vietnam experience, let it be that one.
If we were invaded tomorrow, there would be no need for a draft. We would all be soliders. So when Americans feel they are under attack -- as they did not feel in Vietnam, as they did feel on 9/11 -- they will support a draft that asks for all to participate in the struggle.
If Iraq truly is part of the overall struggle against terror, the administration must make that case often and strongly. If the case is made, a draft will be seen as a valid part of our contract with a legitimate government. If it isn't, and this is but one of many "pre-emptive strikes" the country doesn't understand, our leaders won't be able to get our attention, let alone our sons and daughters.
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| Letter by Prominent U.K. Diplomats to Poodle Blair Regarding "Failed U.S. Foreign Policies" ... |
| 04.27.04 (4:26 pm) [edit] |
[b]The following letter was sent this week by 52 prominent U.K. diplomats to Poodle Blair regarding his [i]simpering suck-up [/i]to the Mad King George and their "failed U.S. foreign policy" ... [/b]Naturally these well-educated, experienced and knowledgeable individuals want the insane direction established by the neo-con, neo-fascists in the corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc.[i] junta [/i]to be [i]brought to a halt![/i] ... [b]So do many well-educated Americans of conscience, integrity and patriotic loyalty to the U.S. Constitution & Bill of Rights[/b] ...
[b]Read on ...[/b]
Dear Prime Minister:
We the undersigned, former British ambassadors, high commissioners, governors and senior international officials, including some who have long experience of the Middle East and others whose experience is elsewhere, have watched with deepening concern the policies which you have followed on the Arab-Israel problem and Iraq, in close co-operation with the United States. Following the press conference in Washington at which you and President Bush restated these policies, we feel the time has come to make our anxieties public, in the hope that they will be addressed in Parliament and will lead to a fundamental reassessment.
The decision by the US, the EU, Russia and the UN to launch a "road-map" for the settlement of the Israel/Palestine conflict raised hopes that the major powers would at last make a determined and collective effort to resolve a problem which, more than any other, has for decades poisoned relations between the West and the Islamic and Arab worlds. The legal and political principles on which such a settlement would be based were well-established: President Clinton had grappled with the problem during his presidency; the ingredients needed for a settlement were well-understood and informal agreements on several of them had already been achieved. But the hopes were ill-founded. Nothing effective has been done either to move the negotiations forward or to curb the violence. Britain and the other sponsors of the "road-map" merely waited on American leadership, but waited in vain.
Worse was to come. After all those wasted months, the international community has now been confronted with the announcement by Ariel Sharon and President Bush of new policies which are one-sided and illegal and which will cost yet more Israeli and Palestinian blood. Our dismay at this backward step is heightened by the fact that you yourself seem to have endorsed it, abandoning the principles which for nearly four decades have guided international efforts to restore peace in the Holy Land and which have been the basis for such successes as those efforts have produced.
This abandonment of principle comes at a time when, rightly or wrongly, we are portrayed throughout the Arab and Muslim world as partners in an illegal and brutal occupation in Iraq.
The conduct of the war in Iraq has made it clear that there was no effective plan for the post-Saddam settlement. All those with experience of the area predicted that the occupation of Iraq by the coalition forces would meet serious and stubborn resistance, as has proved to be the case. To describe the resistance as led by terrorists, fanatics and foreigners is neither convincing nor helpful. Policy must take account of the nature and history of Iraq, the most complex country in the region. However much Iraqis may yearn for a democratic society, the belief that one could now be created by the coalition is naive. This is the view of virtually all independent specialists on the region, both in Britain and in America. We are glad to note that you and the President have welcomed the proposals outlined by Lakhdar Brahimi. We must be ready to provide what support he requests, and to give authority to the United Nations to work with the Iraqis themselves, including those who are now actively resisting the occupation, to clear up the mess.
The military actions of the coalition forces must be guided by political objectives and by the requirements of the Iraq theatre itself, not by criteria remote from them. It is not good enough to say that the use of force is a matter for local commanders. Heavy weapons unsuited to the task in hand, inflammatory language, the current confrontations in Najaf and Fallujah, all these have built up rather than isolated the opposition. The Iraqis killed by coalition forces probably total between ten and fifteen thousand (it is a disgrace that the coalition forces themselves appear to have no estimate), and the number killed in the last month in Fallujah alone is apparently several hundred including many civilian men, women and children. Phrases such as "We mourn each loss of life. We salute them, and their families for their bravery and their sacrifice", apparently referring only to those who have died on the coalition side, are not well judged to moderate the passions these killings arouse.
We share your view that the British Government has an interest in working as closely as possible with the US on both these related issues, and in exerting real influence as a loyal ally. We believe that the need for such influence is now a matter of the highest urgency. If that is unacceptable or unwelcome there is no case for supporting policies which are doomed to failure.
Yours faithfully,
Sir Brian Barder, former high commissioner, Australia; Paul Bergne, former diplomat; Sir John Birch, former ambassador, Hungary; Sir David Blatherwick, former ambassador, Ireland; Graham Hugh Boyce, former ambassador, Egypt; Sir Julian Bullard, former ambassador, Bonn; Juliet Campbell, former ambassador, Luxemburg; Sir Bryan Cartledge, former ambassador, Soviet Union; Terence Clark, former ambassador, Iraq; David Hugh Colvin, former ambassador, Belgium; Francis Cornish, former ambassador, Israel; Sir James Craig, former ambassador, Saudi Arabia; Sir Brian Crowe: former director-general, external and defence affairs, Council of the European Union; Basil Eastwood, former ambassador, Syria; Sir Stephen Egerton, diplomatic service, Kuwait; William Fullerton, former ambassador, Morocco; Dick Fyjis-Walker, ex-chairman, Commonwealth Institute; Marrack Goulding, former head of United Nations Peacekeeping; John Graham, former Nato ambassador, Iraq; Andrew Green, former ambassador, Syria; Victor Henderson, former ambassador, Yemen; Peter Hinchcliffe, former ambassador, Jordan; Brian Hitch, former High Commissioner, Malta; Sir Archie Lamb, former ambassador, Norway; Sir David Logan, former ambassador, Turkey; Christopher Long, former ambassador, Switzerland; Ivor Lucas, former assistant secretary-general, Arab-British Chamber of Commerce; Ian McCluney, former ambassador, Somalia; Maureen MacGlashan, foreign service in Israel; Philip McLean, former ambassador, Cuba; Sir Christopher MacRae, former ambassador, Chad; Oliver Miles, diplomatic service in Middle East; Martin Morland, former ambassador, Burma; Sir Keith Morris, former ambassador, Colombia; Sir Richard Muir, former ambassador, Kuwait; Sir Alan Munro, former ambassador, Saudi Arabia; Stephen Nash, ambassador, Latvia; Robin O'Neill, former ambassador, Austria; Andrew Palmer, former ambassador, Vatican; Bill Quantrill, former ambassador, Cameroon; David Ratford, former ambassador, Norway; Tom Richardson, former UK deputy ambassador, UN; Andrew Stuart, former ambassador, Finland; Michael Weir, former ambassador, Cairo; Alan White, former ambassador, Chile; Hugh Tunnell, former ambassador, Bahrain; Charles Treadwell, former ambassador, UAE; Sir Crispin Tickell, former UN Ambassador; Derek Tonkin, former ambassador, Thailand; David Tatham, former governor, Falkland Islands; Harold "Hooky" Walker, former ambassador, Iraq; Jeremy Varcoe, former ambassador, Somalia.
[u][b]Source[/b][/u]: http://www.independent-media....%20Reported
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| War on Iraq: More Bluster from Bush's Boobs & Buffoons to Cover-up Their Fiasco ... |
| 04.26.04 (5:01 pm) [edit] |
[b]Apparently the American public is the only citizenry on earth to fall for the corrupt Bush regime's illegal and immoral neo-con, neo-fascist ponzy-scam-turned-bloody- guerrilla-quagmire in Iraq that has continued to [i]spiral out-of-control into an unconscionable fiasco [/i] http://www.tblog.com/template... due to the incompetence, arrogance and corruption of Bush & his criminal cabal of Bumbling, Bungling, Baffle-headed Boobs & Buffoons ...
Every day must seem like a Monday in the Oval Office. Contrary to the bluster emanating from the White House, the Bush administration is drowning in a barrage of bad news[/b].
To begin with, that whole 'vision thing' has already been consigned to the trash bin of history. Iraq was supposed to be the first step toward a peaceful and democratic "greater Middle East." The Bush administration has apparently lost its appetite for that "plan" – a major initiative reflecting that modest scheme at the upcoming G-8 has been canned mainly because the Arab world isn't buying it.
"After the most recent developments on the ground, America's credibility is so damaged and there is such hatred that it becomes impossible for the Arab people to accept their leaders considering such an initiative," an Arab diplomat told http://www.csmonitor.com/2004... the [i]Christian Science Monitor[/i].
These "recent developments" include: "worse-than-expected violence in Iraq, the president's surprise alignment last week with Israeli leader Ariel Sharon on West Bank settlements and other sensitive issues, and the continuing deterioration of America's image among Arabs."
No democracy in the Middle East? Okay, we'll settle for getting the hell out of Iraq. Sorry, no good news there either. Hopes for a new UN resolution authorizing a multinational force in Iraq are already beginning to look shaky. The [i]Washington Post [/i]reports, http://www.washingtonpost.com...://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A4196 2-2004Apr25.html "Security Council envoys are concerned that the new resolution will convey only partial sovereignty to Iraq, leaving a new government with little legitimacy and ultimate power in the hands of the United States and its military allies."
While the UN has been brought in to put together the caretaker government that will take over on June 30, "U.S. officials made clear last week that the transitional government would have limited powers, with no authority to write new laws and no control over U.S. military forces that would continue to operate in Iraq." Though it is interesting to note that the White House is willing to scrap the provisional Iraqi constitution which represents the only genuine step taken toward a democratic Iraq.
The Bush administration may have to opt for its usual [i]flip-flop [/i]on that power issue, however, since it literally can't afford the occupation as it stands. The Rumsfeld "light is better" doctrine has turned out to be wildly off the mark, both in its estimates of the number of troops and type of equipment required to occupy Iraq. Not only is the Pentagon in desperate need of more feet on the ground, the soldiers themselves are furious at the Pentagon for not providing them with the heavy armor required to protect themselves.
[i]Newsweek [/i]reports, http://msnbc.msn.com/id/48259... "According to an unofficial study by a defense consultant that is now circulating through the Army, of a total of 789 Coalition deaths as of April 15 (686 of them Americans), 142 were killed by land mines or improvised explosive devices, while 48 others died in rocket-propelled-grenade attacks. Almost all those soldiers were killed while in unprotected vehicles, which means that perhaps one in four of those killed in combat in Iraq might be alive if they had had stronger armor around them, the study suggested. Thousands more who were unprotected have suffered grievous wounds, such as the loss of limbs."
So let's review the Bush's case for war. WMD found: nada. Prospects for peace in the Middle East: zero. Odds for a free and democratic Iraq: sinking rapidly. The price tag: $4.7 billion a month. - http://www.alternet.org/waron...
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| Rice's Freudian Slip ... |
| 04.26.04 (4:47 pm) [edit] |
[b]One for the record from the Condolizzard ...[/b]
Washington D.C.: There is a buzz over a comment the US National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, made at an apparently off-the-record Washington power dinner with the publisher of the [i]The New York Times[/i], Arthur Ochs Sulzberger jnr, and other [i]Times[/i] people at the home of the newspaper's Washington bureau chief, Philip Taubman.
According to an account in [i]New York [/i]magazine, Dr Rice said at one point: "[b]As I was telling my husb . . [/b].". then stopped and said: "[b]As I was telling President Bush . . [/b]." Eyebrows jumped; jaws dropped. There was a slight pause in the chatter. While the first phrase was correctly reported, there is a possibility the second one did not immediately follow. In which case, it is not at all clear whom or what Dr Rice, who is single, may have been talking about. Meanwhile, Mr Taubman is said to be put out by the publicity and told everyone to clam up.
What really [i]is [/i]going on in the Oval Office??? ... Methinks it makes the Clinton/Lewinsky affair pale in comparison ... The Bush/Condolizzard affair simply makes the mind boggle ([i]and the stomach turn[/i]) ... Poor Laura ...
[b]Source:[/b]
[b]The Washington Post[/b], http://www.smh.com.au/article...
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| Ratings of President and All Major Cabinet Members Drop to Their Lowest Levels of Bush Presidency |
| 04.26.04 (12:02 pm) [edit] |
[b]Ratings of President and All Major Cabinet Members Drop to Their Lowest Levels of Bush Presidency[/b] - http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/0...
President Bush's job rating, and those of the major members of his cabinet, have fallen to their lowest levels of the Bush presidency. But there is no evidence that Senator John Kerry has benefited from this decline.
According to a new Harris Poll of 979 adults surveyed by telephone by Harris Interactive® between April 8 and 15, 2004, President Bush and Senator Kerry enjoy equal support among all adults but President Bush has small leads among registered voters and likely voters.
[u]Most of the poll findings are good news for the Democrats. For example[/u]:
* President Bush's job ratings are down to 48% positive, 51% negative, the worst ratings of his presidency and the first time his negative rating is greater (albeit insignificantly) than his positive rating.
* Vice President Dick Cheney's ratings have fallen to 36% positive, 52% negative, compared to 41% positive, 48% negative in February.
* Secretary of State Colin Powell's ratings have fallen to 63% positive, 31% negative, also his worst ratings since he took office. However, he remains by far the most popular member of the cabinet.
* Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's ratings have fallen to 45% positive, 47% negative from 50% positive, 43% negative in February.
* Attorney General John Ashcroft's ratings have fallen to 40% positive, 45% negative compared to 44% positive, 42% negative in February.
All of these are their lowest ratings since they took office.
[u]A historical comparison[/u]
When President George Bush's current ratings are compared with other presidents in April before their re-election bid, the numbers are not encouraging for the president. Of all the presidents going back to Lyndon Johnson, only President George H. W. Bush and President James Carter had worse ratings at this time. All three of the presidents who won re-election -- President Nixon, President Reagan, President Clinton -- enjoyed somewhat or much better ratings in April of their re-election years.
[b]PRESIDENT BUSH AND HIS PREDECESSORS - JOB RATING IN APRIL BEFORE RE-ELECTION CAMPAIGN[/b]
President Date Positive Negative Not Sure
George W. Bush April 2004 48 51 1
Clinton** April 1996 52 47 *
George H. W. Bush April 1992 37 62 1
Reagan** April 1984 61 39 *
Carter April 1980 36 63 1
Ford April 1976 37 60 3
Nixon** April 1972 50 46 4
Johnson April 1968 57 43 -
* = Less than 0.5 percent.
** Re-elected.
[u]Importance of Issues[/u]
The issues which are seen to be most important by the largest numbers of people are either the economy or are related to national security and the war on terrorism.
The economy still tops the list at 28%, followed by "the war" (20%). Other national security issues mentioned by substantial numbers of people include military and defense issues (7%) and homeland security (6%).
Other issues, apart from those related to national security that are mentioned by significant numbers of people include jobs/employment (15%), health care (9%) and education (6%).
[b]It is a [i]mystery[/i] to those of us who study the issues closely that Bush's approval rating isn't at 1% with a 99% disapproval rating http://www.tblog.com/template... -- but then Hitler had a high approval rating until Germany was bombed by the Allies[/b].
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| Dubya Thought 'National Security' Would Mask His Lies, Lies and Lies ... |
| 04.26.04 (10:49 am) [edit] |
[b]"[i]We'll all be dead[/i]" was Bush's mind-numbingly imbecilic and dangerously foolish response to Bob Woodward's question about how history will remember his war in Iraq. http://www.memes.org/modules.... [/b]
Tragically, the neo-con's Buffoon-[i]n[/i]-Useful-I diot may[i] take us all down with him [/i]to prove that his tyrannically childish fantasies are "[i]right[/i]" [[i]sic[/i]]! ... Dubya is a corrupt and ignorant bully-boy who hides behind others in order to commit his heinous crimes http://www.tblog.com/template... . Dubya did not act upon warnings regarding 9/11 attacks, but instead abused and exploited 9/11 in order to wage his illegal and immoral neo-hitlerian warfare upon Iraq for oil and global hegemony. We should demand that Congress impeach the Bush/Cheney Inc.[i] junta [/i]from office before they start another World War on behalf of their traitorous neo-fascist Global Corporate Empire ... http://www.wnd.com/news/artic... http://www.wnd.com/news/artic...
Consider "[b]Bush Thought 'National Security' Would Mask His Lies[/b]" by [i]Joseph Ehrlich, of Sender, Berl & Sons [/i]on http://www.rense.com/general5... :
When Sender, Berl & Sons analyzed the red flags proving to our minds the President's complicity in the events of 9-11, we took a more careful look into a transcript of a Florida Town Hall meeting of December 5, 2001(from Federal News Service Transcript)
We wanted to share our thoughts with you
President Bush at this meeting said that:
"I saw an airplane hit the tower of a - of a - you know, the TV was obviously on, and I - I used to fly myself, and I said, "Well, there's one terrible pilot." And I said it must have been a horrible accident. But I was whisked off there; I didn't have much time to think about it."
[u]Analysis 1[/u]: What the 9-11 Commission accomplished is to let the American public know that prior to 9-11 President Bush and his advisors were fully aware and on guard for plane hijackings and domestic terrorism. President Bush didn't need much time to think about it. When he was apprised that a plane was hijacked prior to its striking the north World Trade Center tower, he and his team were compelled to send aloft US military/NORAD jets to protect major metropolitan areas under the pale of the known threat.
His statements to the public in view of the evidence we have produced do allow us to believe that he may have been tracking the events of that morning on a private military feed. Whether or not he in fact did so is not central, the concrete point being that there was no way he could allow himself to plead ignorance of what was going down, there was no way he could continue into a classroom to read with second graders, and there was no way he could ever believe that he was dealing with an errant pilot. Thus, we have a president three months after 9-11 lying to the American people with the obvious confidence that the truth behind 9-11 would never surface to the American public. Thus, when the families of the victims of 9-11 pushed and pushed for the 9-11 Commission to take root to investigate the events of 9-11, the Bush administration fought tooth and nail to impede it from ever happening. Now, it is apparent why they did not want the 9-11 Commission to take hold or anyone to appear before it. Now, they are counting on the American public to operate as the morons they deem them to be to overlook the obvious. Here is where we try to serve a purpose to highlight the obvious.
"And Jordan (President Bush addressing the child asking him the question at the Town Hall meeting), I wasn't sure what to think at first. You know, I grew up in a - a period of time where the idea of America being under attack never entered my mind, just like your daddy and mother's mind probably,"
[u]Analysis 2[/u]: The President tries to slip himself into the same status as the American public in confronting the events of 9-11, when nothing could be further from the truth. Contrary to what he declared to a national television audience in December 2001, he certainly knew that an attack on America was imminent, and on hearing about a plane hijacking, he knew that such fact was in accord with warnings and fears of the intelligence services. Further, to compound the point, he made this point even after knowing that the plane went into a landmark New York City property. This is the posture of an aristocrat, an arrogant elitist, who thinks he will never be held to task for what he says; that he can say what he pleases, when he pleases, and no would ever dare hold him to task for it.
"But I knew I needed to act. I knew that if the nation's under attack, the role of the commander-in-chief is to respond forcefully to prevent other attacks from happening. And so I talked to the secretary of Defense, and one of the first acts I did was put our military on alert."
[u]Analysis 3[/u]: Our President, who has told us he would move heaven and earth to protect this country, did not even circumvent entering a classroom when he well knew that America was under attack. He didn't need Andrew Card to tell him that America was under attack after the second plane went into the south World Trade Center tower, but he and his administration acted that way thinking that the truth would be permanently hidden from the American people under the cover of "national security." Yes, by his own admission, under the known facts, now known to the American people, he needed to act. He needed to send up jets to intercept the plane, leave a known target area and stand ready to make presidential decisions regarding planes headed for major metropolitan areas. The only matter of national security for the Bush administration to protect is the sad inescapable reality that the barn door was left completely open to allow the events of 9-11 to take place as they did. President Bush did not put the military on alert, he and administration did everything to assure that no one who could impede 9-11 knew anything to stop the events that unfolded. After they did unfold, the President brazenly takes the position that he quickly and timely put the military on alert to protect the country.
"By the way, we're heading into a new era. One of the positive things that come out of the evil was we're reassessing relationships in order to make the world more peaceful."
[u]Analysis 4[/u]: There is no question that President Bush is characterizing his own complicity under the pale of unadulterated evil. His admission that America was heading in a new era caused SenderBerl to urge Congress not to allow him to invade Iraq, since the predicate for the invasion was the fruit of the poisonous tree. If the Congress is upset that the basis for taking the nation to war connects to a false WMD predicate, then we suppose that it surely will have something to say and do once the obvious becomes mainstream. SenderBerl is adamant that evil must be confronted and challenged and thereby it has highlighted that those behind the new world order agenda have been in pursuit of an evil agenda all along. The President properly characterizing it as evil should fly right back into his face and those collusive in the events of that truly tragic day.
"I haven't regretted one thing I've decided, and that's the truth. Every decision I made I stand by, and I'm proud of the decisions I've made." (Applause, cheers. [Yuk... The imbecilic nit-wit doesn't even comprehend the consequences of his disastrous decisions.])
[u]Analysis 5[/u]: If he's proud of the decisions he's made, then he will have to accept the ultimate punishments that await him since SenderBerl firmly believes in ultimate justice, whether in this world or the next. One of our most visited analyses is the one where we prove through a Straussian review of the Star Wars movie how the new world order group, including the President, believes that mass murder aids future order (control and domination by the elitist centrix) and thus is good, not evil. If you are willing to allow those who believe that taking 3000 souls on 9-11 and undermining the fabric and foundation of this nation is somehow aligned with good not evil, then you can continue to sit passively by and await your future. For everyone else, it's time to wake up and act. The President is scheduled to appear this week before the 9-11 Commission with Cheney to answer questions. If they are softball questions and do not confront the President on the slew of evidence that 9-11 was allowed to happen, and the evidence that this administration was in fact complicit, then we will recognize that the future of this country is totally inapposite to the one we all carry an obligation to protect for our children.
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| ... The Rich Get Richer / The Rest Of Us Get Iraq!!! ... |
| 04.24.04 (8:40 am) [edit] |
[b]Bush is the[i] only [/i]war-time neo-con, neo-fascist Buffoon-cum-Traitor-cum-W ar-Criminal ever to lead us into an illegal and immoral war-turned-bloody-guerril la quagmire while giving traitorous & irresponsible tax cuts, tax loopholes & tax boondoggles to gluttonous corporations, wealthy oligarchs and hyper-rich plutocrats ... [/b]It would be absolutely hilarious [if it wasn't a tragedy] to listen to Dubya's mind-numbing screed written by Karl (America's Joseph Goebbles & Bush's Brain) Rove, hypocritically lecturing us all on the [i]glories of sacrifice[/i] [Uh-huh, yeah right!]-- while AWOL Drunkardly Deserter Dubya, Chain-Gang Cheney-the-Criminal, Perjurer Condi Rice, Rummy-Dummy Rumsfeld, 'Murky' Wolfowitz and the rest of the squalid cabal of neo-con thugs & neo-fascist goons [i]NEVER SERVED IN BATTLE FOR A SINGLE DAY in their sordid and useless lives [/i]... Moreover, the corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc.[i] junta [/i]traitorously has placed the back-breaking burden of their criminal activities and atrocious[i] Crimes Against Humanity [/i]upon America's Middle Class and Working People (and deprive the weakest, poorest and most vulnerable among us of help), while these [i]despicable blood-suckers [/i]"Take the Money and Run" ...
Consider "[b]The rich get richer, the rest get Iraq[/b]" by[i] Richard Reeves [/i]on http://www.smirkingchimp.com/... :
All right, here's the plan. The Bush Plan. Only the rich kids get into the good colleges, like Yale, with big federal tax cuts financing even bigger tuitions. The poor kids and middle-class kids get drafted into the military to fight preventive wars around the globe.
I exaggerate. I hope. But you could make the case that this is what is really going on in the United States today. Last Tuesday, Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, a Republican who served in Vietnam, questioned Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz during a hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about the rising costs and dangers of occupying Iraq, then concluded:
"There is not an American who doesn't understand what we are engaged in and what the prospects are for the future. ... Those who are serving today and dying today are the children of the middle and lower middle class. Why shouldn't we ask all of our citizens to bear some responsibility and pay some price?"
He went on to say that the United States is making military commitments today -- particularly a 25-year war against terrorism -- that it cannot possibly meet with today's all-volunteer military. Then he spoke the unspeakable: "We must consider a draft."
Sen. Joseph Biden of Delaware, the ranking Democrat on the committee, added later: "The whole notion of shared burden is something we should be talking about well beyond the issue of just the draft."
Why not indeed? Ending the draft was Richard Nixon's biggest dirty trick. He managed to pull it off in 1973 as a way to stop student demonstrations against the war in Vietnam. It worked; most students went back to studying after they did not have to face the risk of being sent out to die for the mistakes of their elders.
One result of all that was to give the White House the opportunity to plan wars in secret and execute them without the consent of the governed. War has become a spectator sport for most of us. To be more specific: If there had been a draft, we would not be in Iraq, because President Bush and his gang would have had to persuade the Congress and country that we were in grave danger from the inhabitants of that particular rats' nest.
Meanwhile, life goes on as usual at home. The rich get richer and ... we all know the rest. The New York Times confirmed it the day after Hagel spoke, under the front-page headline: "As Wealthy Fill Top Colleges, Concerns Grow Over Fairness."
The newspaper reported what any parent of a college student, me among them, already knew: People with significant money are the only Americans who can meet bills of $40,000 a year for tuition, room and board -- and the tens of thousands of dollars more for private school educations, tutoring and coaching often necessary to get into the best private and state universities.
The spreading gaps in American incomes are turning around one of the United States' greatest achievements (and investments), the democratization of the best education that began with the GI Bill after World War II. Until then, Americans knew their place. Harvard and Yale were, more or less, the places for the children of their own graduates -- and most applicants were accepted because most Americans never even thought of applying.
Then, in a new America, everyone began to think Harvard or the University of Michigan or Stanford was their place, too. Soon only one in 10 applicants were being accepted, and the schools were getting better and better because smart middle-class kids, and some smart poor ones, too, were replacing all the rich kids at Daddy's school, say, Yale. I'm not naming any names here.
Speaking of who gets in and who doesn't, which means who runs America one day, the president of Harvard, Lawrence Summers, told the Times: "It's very much an issue of fairness. An important purpose of institutions like Harvard is to give everyone a shot at the American dream."
That's the way it should be. But the tide and all the costs have begun to turn back toward the past. The percentage of students at the 250 highest-rated colleges and universities who come from families in the top quarter of incomes has risen from 46 percent in 1985 to at least 55 percent now. It is a turn that few welcome. After all, if it continues, we will forever have presidents named George Bush.
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| Traitor Bush's 'US Military Budget': An Exercise in Big Lies & Hypocrisy ... |
| 04.23.04 (3:39 pm) [edit] |
[b]It is by now [i]well known [/i]that Karl (America's Joseph Goebbles & Bush's Brain) Rove uses the Nazi handbook to propagadate the corrupt Bush regime's neo-con, neo-orwellian lies, deceptions & falsehoods: ""[i]If you tell a lie enough times, it becomes accepted as truth, and, the bigger the lie, the more likely it is to be accepted[/i]." - Goebbles, Hitler's Minister for Propaganda, http://www.killer-essays.com/... ... [/b]The corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc.[i] junta [/i]mendaciously tells us how they allocate whatever is needed by the U.S. Military for their illegal and immoral neo-con warfare http://www.antiwar.com/pat/?a... ... [i]Ooopppsss[/i], what they[i] really [/i]mean is that they are funnelling all of the U.S. Taxpayer Dollars swindled from America's Middle-Class & Working people to Halliburton, Bechtel, Carlyle Group, Unocal, Big Oil, the Military Industrial Complex ... while the[i] rich get richer [/i]with more insane, irresponsible and traitorous tax-cuts for neo-fascist corporations and the hyper-gluttonous wealthy oligarchs & plutocrats who "get away with murder" http://www.thenation.com/outr... from their Commander-[i]n[/i]-Slut: the Mad King George ...
"The President looks to the commanders in the theater to make the determinations of what is needed for our troops. They're the ones who are in the best position to look at circumstances on the ground and determine what is needed. And we have received assurances from Pentagon officials that the resources they have at this time are more than enough to meet their needs."
- [i]White House spokesman Scott McClellan[/i], 4/21/04, http://www.whitehouse.gov/new...
Military officials say "more money will be needed soon" and have "identified unmet funding needs, including initiatives aimed at providing equipment and weapons for troops in Iraq. The Army has publicly identified nearly $6 billion in funding requests that did not make Bush's $402 billion defense budget for 2005" including "$132 million for bolt-on vehicle armor...The Marine Corps' unfunded budget requests include $40 million for body armor, lightweight helmets and other equipment."
- [i]Washington Post[/i], 4/21/04, http://www.washingtonpost.com...://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A2890 3-2004Apr20.html
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| Dubya's Iraq War Costs Mount: Halliburton et al. Execs Can't Be Too Rich!!! |
| 04.23.04 (11:41 am) [edit] |
[b]The corrupt Bush regime's corporate-take-all pimps-[i]n[/i]-paymasters certainly can't be [i]TOO[/i] rich, even if the rest of us are bankrupted and impoverished in order to keep 'em living in lavish, obscenely obese life styles akin to Emperor Caligula ... [/b]These neo-con thugs & neo-fascist goons in the Bush/Cheney Inc.[i] junta [/i]are swindling, plundering and looting us at levels unseen in our nation's history ... War-profiteering used to be considered treason and was a crime punishable by prison and fines:-- During WW2 for example, Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt confiscated war-profits and set prices to keep corporate robber-barons and vile opportunists from "[i]eating the flesh and drinking the blood[/i]" of soldiers and innocent victims of war ... Contrast that with Bush & Cheney (Halliburton, Bechtel, Carlyle Group, Unocal, Big Oil, the Military Industrial Complex, etc.) who are [i]celebrating[/i] their record-level neo-con con-game-[i]cum[/i]-massa cre-and-slaughter guerrilla quagmire, as they are [i]gorging on the flesh and swilling lakes of blood [/i]of our soldiers and innocent civilians, as they wage their blood-thirsty wars for Global Corporate Power & Wealth ... It's called [i]Crimes Against Humanity [/i]...
[u][b]War Costs Mount as Administration Mishandles Iraq[/b][/u] - http://www.americanprogress.o...
Having received more than $200 billion to prosecute President Bush's war and occupation in Iraq, the administration is now hinting that billions more will be requested from taxpayers as early as this summer. The pattern is clear: underestimate real costs; deny problems on the ground; and then force the American public to pony up at the last minute to clean up the mess from the administration's inadequate planning in Iraq.
[b]1. The Bush administration's failure to adequately plan for post-war Iraq is costing Americans dearly in lives and funds. [/b]More than 700 American soldiers have died so far in Iraq, with the death toll rising rapidly more than one year after the initial invasion. The president's "coalition of the willing" is deteriorating and Americans are being asked to shoulder more of the burdens for occupying Iraq.
[b]2. The failure to maintain control on the ground is severely hindering reconstruction and democracy building efforts in Iraq.[/b] Less than three months before the transfer of authority to Iraqis, U.S. troops face a rising nationalist insurgency spreading across Iraq. As a result of the violence, two major contractors have suspended reconstruction efforts and billions of dollars in reconstruction grants have been diverted to private security firms.
[b]3. President Bush refuses to level with Americans about the costs and sacrifices necessary for success in Iraq.[/b] President Bush told Americans the war and transition to democracy in Iraq would be easy and essentially cost-free. None of his predictions have come true. Americans were not greeted as liberators. Iraqi oil supplies have not paid for reconstruction. The international community is not solidly behind his efforts. Given these failures, the American public has a right to know how President Bush plans to get out of this mess and what it will cost.
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| Bush's Animal Farm: Let Them Eat Rabbit!!! Who Is Mistah Rabbit??? ... |
| 04.22.04 (6:25 pm) [edit] |
[b]Little Pig Georgey-boy had just caught a rabbit. [/b]On his way home, walking down a dusty road carrying the furry, squirming little creature he tried to console his captured carrot-eater.
"Mistah Rabbit," he said. "Pretty li'l rabbit, sweet li'l rabbit, why are you wiggling so much. I ain't gonna do nothin' but knock you upside your head an' skin an' cook ya."
Attention: my dear rabbit readers, analysts at [i]United for a Fair Economy[/i] http://www.stw.org/ have just released a new report called "[b]Shifty Tax Cuts: [i]How They Move the Tax Burden off the Rich and onto Everyone Else[/i][/b]."
Here are some of the key findings in the report. (Go to http://FairEconomy.org/press/... to see the full report).
... For fiscal years 2002-2004, state governments filled approximately $200 billion in budget gaps by raising state taxes and fees and by cutting services. And during those same years, newly enacted federal tax cuts delivered about as much money – $197.3 billion – in new tax breaks for the wealthiest one percent of Americans (households making more than $337,000 a year).
"Had that money instead been directed to state fiscal aid, it could have prevented virtually all recent tax hikes and service cuts at the state level, which fall hardest on low- and middle-income Americans," write the report's authors.
... The choice to send nearly $200 billion to the top one percent rather than to state governments underscores just one way the federal tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 are actually "tax shifts," not tax cuts, for the vast majority of Americans.
... Between 2000 and 2003, the United States saw a federal-to-state tax shift of historic magnitude: the share of the total tax burden borne at the state and local level jumped 15 percent.
"This is the largest such shift in the tax burden since the period 1947-1950. This shift is making the tax system more regressive."
Amazingly, in 2002, Americans in the bottom 20 percent of households paid 11.4 percent of their income in state and local taxes, while those in the top 1 percent paid only 5.2 percent of their income in state and local taxes – less than half the rate of the poorest fifth.
... Since 1962, the share of total federal receipts collected from the regressive payroll tax, which collects proportionately more from low-income workers than high-income workers, has risen from 17 percent of total receipts to 40 percent – an increase of 135 percent.
Meanwhile, the total share supplied by progressive income and corporate taxes has dropped from 63 percent of total receipts to 52 percent, which is a decline of 17 percent.
... Between 1980 and now, the main tax on wage income – the payroll tax – has jumped 25 percent.
In the same period, top tax rates on investment income and large inheritances have been cut between 31 percent and 79 percent. "Taxes on wealth are falling fast with shrinking taxes on capital gains, dividends and estate taxes." Oh, it gets better.
... Since 1962, the share of federal revenues contributed by corporations has declined by two-thirds, while the share contributed by individuals has risen 17 percent.
... Current tax policies are fueling the national debt, imposing an average $13,000 in additional debt on each man, woman and child in America between 2002 and 2007 -or more than $52,000 in added debt per family of four.
... During the summer of 2003, millions of parents received $400-per-child checks from the IRS – an advance payment for the expanded federal child tax credit. But, at the same time, many of those same parents saw their local and state taxes increase.
Some will consider this a propaganda piece encouraging class warfare. Call it what you want.
As billionaire Warren Buffet points out, "If class warfare is being waged in America, my class is clearly winning."
Let them eat rabbit!
Pig Georgey-boy Bush, Fat Hog Cheney, the Condolizzard, Snake-in-the-Grass Rumsfeld, Weasel Wolfowitz and the rest of the neo-con pigs, hogs, snakes, vultures and other destructive varmints and vermin are indeed, eating all of us rabbits!
[b]Source:[/b]
"Shifty Tax Cuts", By Sean Gonsalves, AlterNet, on http://www.alternet.org/story...
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| Bush Still Has Not Explained Ties to Saudi Arabia ... |
| 04.22.04 (10:02 am) [edit] |
[b]The corrupt Bush regime still has not come out and denied accusations that they colluded with the Saudi Royal Family to[i] price-gouge [/i]consumers during the busy spring/summer season when Americans are on the road and buy more petrol/gas, and then [i]price-fix [/i]downwards the oil costs, just before the presidential election in November, in order to seduce sleepy-headed Americans into being fooled [i]yet again [/i]...[/b] Prince Bandar, Saudi Arabia's Ambassador to the US called Larry King/Bob Woodward http://www.guerrillanews.com/... [i]in a fit of panic [/i](probably at the request of the Bush Crime Family with whom he is closely associated ...) and yet he [i]did not contradict [/i]Bob Woodward's account ...
Four days after esteemed journalist Bob Woodward revealed new ties between President Bush and the Saudi Arabian government, the president has yet to directly address the charges. According to Woodward, Saudi Arabia issued a "pledge" to Bush to "increase [oil] production several million barrels a day" over the summer "as we get closer to the election"1.
Last month, Saudi Arabia led the fight within OPEC to cut production and raise gas prices in America to record levels2. However, since Woodward's charges became public, the president has not answered whether that earlier move by the Saudis was part of a deliberate effort to raise prices now so that prices could then be lowered closer to the election.
The new allegations once again put President Bush's close ties to the Saudis front and center. Despite the Saudi government's potential ties to terrorists and 9/113, the president still calls the Saudis "our friend"4 and Vice President Cheney continues to dote on the royal family5. As[i] CBS News [/i]reports, Bush has "personal and deep financial ties with the Saudi royal family"6. Author and journalist Craig Unger, who wrote[i] House of Bush, House of Saud[/i], http://www.buzzflash.com/prem... documents $1.4 billion that has "made its way" from the Saudi royal family to "entities tied" to the Bush family.
[b]Sources:[/b] - http://www.misleader.org/dail...
1. "Saudi Envoy Promised Bush a Drop in Oil Prices Ahead of Election", Bloomberg News, 04/09/2004.
2. "Saudi envoy plays nice with White House on oil supply", USA Today, 04/02/2004.
3. "Saudi Government Provided Aid to 9/11 Hijackers, Sources Say", Los Angeles Times, 08/02/2003.
4. President Bush Vows to Bring Terrorists to Justice, 05/16/2003.
5. White House Photo Gallery.
6. "The Tangled Web Of U.S.-Saudi Ties", CBS News, 04/20/2004.
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| Bush's Lunatic Mideast Madness: Legitimizes Terrorism & Skyrocketing Violence ... |
| 04.21.04 (4:40 pm) [edit] |
"[i]US policy towards the Middle East is driven by a rarefied form of madness. It’s time we took it seriously[/i]." - George Monbiot
[b]Maybe Bush thinks his lunatic madness brought on by neo-nazi, neo-cons will get him [i]re-elected [/i] http://www.zmag.org/content/s... ... But in order to[i] frighten [/i]the majority of Americans into voting for him, he is committing tragic and heinous blood-thirsty [i]Crimes Against Humanity[/i] ... Three recent articles are well worth reading and reflecting upon:--[/b]
[b]1. Their beliefs are bonkers, but they are at the heart of power [/b]
[i]US Christian fundamentalists are driving Bush's Middle East policy [/i] by George Monbiot on http://www.guardian.co.uk/Col...,5673,1195727,00.html - [i]Excerpt [/i]-
"In the United States, several million people have succumbed to an extraordinary delusion. In the 19th century, two immigrant preachers cobbled together a series of unrelated passages from the Bible to create what appears to be a consistent narrative: Jesus will return to Earth when certain preconditions have been met. The first of these was the establishment of a state of Israel. The next involves Israel's occupation of the rest of its "biblical lands" (most of the Middle East), and the rebuilding of the Third Temple on the site now occupied by the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa mosques. The legions of the antichrist will then be deployed against Israel, and their war will lead to a final showdown in the valley of Armageddon. The Jews will either burn or convert to Christianity, and the Messiah will return to Earth. ..."
"We can laugh at these people, but we should not dismiss them. That their beliefs are bonkers does not mean they are marginal. American pollsters believe that 15-18% of US voters belong to churches or movements which subscribe to these teachings. A survey in 1999 suggested that this figure included 33% of Republicans. The best-selling contemporary books in the US are the 12 volumes of the Left Behind series, which provide what is usually described as a "fictionalised" account of the Rapture (this, apparently, distinguishes it from the other one), with plenty of dripping details about what will happen to the rest of us. The people who believe all this don't believe it just a little; for them it is a matter of life eternal and death.
And among them are some of the most powerful men in America. John Ashcroft, the attorney general, is a true believer, so are several prominent senators and the House majority leader, Tom DeLay. Mr DeLay (who is also the co-author of the marvellously named DeLay-Doolittle Amendment, postponing campaign finance reforms) travelled to Israel last year to tell the Knesset that "there is no middle ground, no moderate position worth taking".
So here we have a major political constituency - representing much of the current president's core vote - in the most powerful nation on Earth, which is actively seeking to provoke a new world war. Its members see the invasion of Iraq as a warm-up act, as Revelation (9:14-15) maintains that four angels "which are bound in the great river Euphrates" will be released "to slay the third part of men". They batter down the doors of the White House as soon as its support for Israel wavers: when Bush asked Ariel Sharon to pull his tanks out of Jenin in 2002, he received 100,000 angry emails from Christian fundamentalists, and never mentioned the matter again.
The electoral calculation, crazy as it appears, works like this. Governments stand or fall on domestic issues. For 85% of the US electorate, the Middle East is a foreign issue, and therefore of secondary interest when they enter the polling booth. For 15% of the electorate, the Middle East is not just a domestic matter, it's a personal one: if the president fails to start a conflagration there, his core voters don't get to sit at the right hand of God. Bush, in other words, stands to lose fewer votes by encouraging Israeli aggression than he stands to lose by restraining it. He would be mad to listen to these people. He would also be mad not to."
[b]2. Sharon's "Courageous" Plan[/b]
[i]Bush Legitimizes Terrorism[/i] by Robert Fisk on http://www.counterpunch.com/f... - [i]Excerpt[/i] -
"Two nights ago, this most dangerous man, George Bush, talked about "freedom in Iraq". Not "democracy" in Iraq. No, "democracy" was no longer mentioned. "Democracy" was simply left out of the equation. Now it was just "freedom"--freedom from Saddam rather than freedom to have elections. And what is this "freedom" supposed to involve? One group of American-appointed Iraqis will cede power to another group of American-appointed Iraqis. That will be the "historic handover" of Iraqi "sovereignty". Yes, I can well see why George Bush wants to witness a "handover" of sovereignty. "Our boys" must be out of the firing line--let the Iraqis be the sandbags. ..."
"Because this is what George Bush's lunacy and weakness can lead to. We all have lands that "God" gave us. Didn't Queen Mary die with "Calais" engraved on her heart? Doesn't Spain have a legitimate right to the Netherlands? Or Sweden the right to Norway and Denmark? Every colonial power, including Israel can put forward these preposterous demands.
What Bush has actually done is give way to the crazed world of Christian Zionism. The fundamentalist Christians who support Israel's theft of the West Bank on the grounds that the state of Israel must exist there according to God's law until the second coming, believe that Jesus will return to earth and the Israelis--for this is the Bush "Christian Sundie" belief--will then have to convert to Christianity or die in the battle of Amargeddon. ..."
[b]3. Bush Outsources Mideast Policy[/b]
By Patrick J. Buchanan on http://www.antiwar.com/pat/?a... -[i] Excerpt [/i]-
"What did Bush give up? None of the Palestinians driven out of their homes by the Irgun massacre at Deir Yassin and during the 1948 war will ever be allowed to return. Palestinian rights in that 78 percent of Palestine that is already Israel, and in the sectors of the remaining 22 percent Sharon plans to annex, are forfeit forever. At Camp David, Ehud Barak offered Arafat a more generous peace than Bush, under Sharon's direction, is willing to give the Palestinians.
Second, major Israeli settlements on the occupied West Bank, planted by Sharon in violation of international law, which every U.S. president has called "obstacles to peace," are now deeded to Israel. Like Lord Balfour, Bush is surrendering title to Arab lands he does not own and surrendering Palestinian rights that are not his to give up.
As for the Sharon Wall that snakes in and out of the West Bank, incorporating Palestinian fields, olive groves, homes and villages, Bush no longer insists it be confined to Israeli territory.
What does the mini-Munich mean? The great Zionist land thief has gotten America's blessing to keep his stolen goods. George Bush has out-sourced his Mideast policy to Tel Aviv. The custodian of our reputation for decency and honor in an Arab world of 22 nations is now Sharon. As for Palestinians who put their faith and trust in the United States, they have been exposed as fools.
Can anyone in the White House believe that Bush's capitulation is anything but a formula for endless war and enduring hatred of an America that cannot say no to Ariel Sharon?"
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| Questions For Paul Wolfowitz ... But Why Haven't Rumsfeld & Wolfowitz Been Fired??? ... |
| 04.21.04 (10:39 am) [edit] |
[b]Why haven't the arrogant incompetents: Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz been[i] fired [/i]by Bush and Cheney??? ... Answer:[i] Because the gruesome foursome are all neo-con, neo-fascist collaborators in their heinous [u]Crimes Against Humanity[/u], and must 'stick together' in order to protect their sordid & squalid lies and treasonous criminal activities [/i]...[/b] Bush doesn't have the[i] balls [/i] (courage) to fire any of his subordinates who could[i] tell (more) tales [/i]about how our prez is a[i] crooked-idiot-cum-traitor ous-asshole [/i]... Cheney is a [i]sleezy-slut-n-treasono us-liar [/i]thrilled to death because his corporate pimps (Halliburton, Bechtel, Carlyle Group, Unocal, Big Oil, the Military Industrial Complex, etc.) are [i]making out 'big-time' [/i]as they continue to [i]rape[/i] Americans & Iraqis for [i]all we're worth [/i]...
The [i]arrogant self-proclaimed so-called [/i]"geniuses" [[i]sic[/i]] and [i]buffoon-boy-duo [/i]Rummy & Wolfy have [i]cocked-up[/i] their blood-thirsty Iraq fiasco so badly, that these war criminals should be sent off to prison to await trial for treason (incompetence warrants them paying reparations) ... Instead, the traitorous cabal of [i]neo-con, neo-nazis in the corrupt Bush regime [/i]are unconscionably [i]celebrating[/i] their Death Cult (as these war criminals insanely[i] plan more [/i]invasions of Middle East sovereign nations, based upon [i]more lies, deceptions and falsehoods[/i]), as more American soldiers and innocent Iraqi civilians are ruthlessly slaughtered each day, for oil, gluttonous corporate profits, global hegemony and Israel's illegal and immoral expansion of their territories http://www.antiwar.com/pat/?a... ...
[b]Questions for Paul Wolfowitz [/b]- http://www.americanprogress.o...
Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz is scheduled to testify before the Senate and House Armed Services Committee this week. Rising violence in Iraq this month has forced the Pentagon to extend the tours of 20,000 soldiers originally scheduled to return home. The hearings will provide Congress with an opportunity to closely question Wolfowitz on his previous statements and predictions about post-war Iraq.
[b]Troop Levels[/b]
1. [i] Do you still believe Army Gen. Eric Shinseki's professional estimate of troop levels for Iraq was "wildly off the mark"?[/i]
- In the march to war, Wolfowitz took the unusual step of publicly rebuking Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki for his estimate that "several hundred thousand troops" would be necessary to provide security in post-war Iraq. At the time, Wolfowitz dismissed Shinseki's estimate as "wildly off the mark" and said "the notion that it would take several hundred thousand American troops just seems outlandish."
- There are now 135,000 American troops deployed in Iraq. Recently, about 20,000 soldiers who were due to return from Iraq had their tours extended. The Bush administration has effectively out-sourced the security mission to a veritable private army, which is increasing draining resources from civilian reconstruction.
- Gen. Anthony Zinni, former CENTCOM commander, questioned how the escalating war in Iraq could have caught Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz's boss, off guard. "I'm surprised that he is surprised because there was a lot of us who were telling him that it was going to be thus. Anyone could know the problems they were going to see. How could they not?"
[b]Sources:[/b] Congressional Testimony, March 4, 2003; Washington Post, April 15, 2004; Associated Press, April 10, 2004; San Diego Union-Tribune, April 16, 2004.
[b]Reconstruction Costs[/b]
2. [i]Last year, you testified that the reconstruction could be largely financed with Iraqi oil revenues. The American taxpayer has now spent over $18 billion on reconstruction. In light of this, can you give us your best estimate of how much Iraqi oil revenues will provide?[/i]
- A little over a year ago, Wolfowitz testified on Capitol Hill, "There's a lot of money to pay for this. It doesn't have to be U.S. taxpayer money. We are dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon." Wolfowitz also told Congress "oil revenues of Iraq could bring between $50 and $100 billion over the course of the next two or three years…We're dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon."
- Coalition Administrator Paul Bremer has said that current and future oil revenues will be insufficient for rebuilding Iraq, despite the administration's prewar promises. Plagued by poor infrastructure, outdated equipment, sabotage, and continuing attacks on pipelines, the Iraq oil industry has yet to produce at the CPA target goal of 3 billion barrels a day. According to a recent report by the Congressional Budget Office, "Iraqi oil revenues are likely to cover only recurring Iraqi government costs, with little remaining for the capital investment required in the U.N., World Bank and CPA assessments."
[b]Sources:[/b] Congressional Testimony, March 27, 2003; International Oil Daily, September 23, 2003; Wall Street Journal, September 5, 2003; Congressional Budget Office, January 2004.
3. [i]Knowing what you know now, what is your estimate for immediate future costs? How much money will be needed in the FY05 supplemental request?[/i]
- The World Bank and the Coalition Provisional Authority estimate that the reconstruction will cost over $55 billion over the next four years. The United States has already provided close to $19 billion in assistance.
- Despite touting over $13 billion in pledges from international donors at the October Madrid conference, the United States continues to bear the brunt of the costs of reconstruction. The latest White House report to Congress confirms that "very few new pledges" have come in since Madrid. According to the World Bank, less than $1 billion in grants for 2004 have been disbursed.
- The administration failed to include any funding for Iraq in its fiscal year 2005 budget request. Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee last month, the military chiefs warned that delaying the supplemental until after the November elections could create a shortfall in funding for military operations at the end of the fiscal year.
[u]Follow-up[/u]: [i]Why don't you send it up now?[/i]
[b]Sources: [/b]World Bank Iraq Assessment, Oct. 2, 2003; Second Quarterly Report to Congress, Office of Management and Budget, April 5, 2004.
[b]Shadow Government[/b]
4. [i] Why would Colin Powell refer to the Office of Special Plans as Douglas Feith's "Gestapo office"?[/i]
- Bob Woodward's new book, "Plan of Attack," says that Powell felt that Cheney, Wolfowitz, and Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith had established what amounted to a "separate government." Woodward says that Powell called the Office of Special Plans, "Feith's Gestapo office." Its mission was to collect and cook "the most alarmist pre-war intelligence against Saddam Hussein and then stovepiped it to the White House via Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney, unvetted by the intelligence agencies."
- Ken Pollack, a former National Security Council expert on Iraq, told the New Yorker that the Administration "created stovepipes to get the information they wanted directly to the top leadership… They always had information to back up their public claims, but it was often very bad information."
[b]Sources:[/b] Washington Post, April 17, 2004; Seymour Hersh, The New Yorker, Oct. 27, 2003; InterPress Service, Nov. 5, 2003; Los Angeles Times, Oct. 31, 2003; Associated Press, May 30, 2003.
[b]Ahmed Chalabi[/b]
5. [i]Did you place too much confidence in the Iraqi exiles? Given Ahmed Chalabi's record and 40-year absence, why did you find him a credible source?[/i]
- The government's own reviews show that much of the intelligence information provided by Chalabi and his exile Iraqi National Congress was misleading and even falsified. In early-March 2004, Admiral Lowell Jacoby, director of defense intelligence, admitted the Iraqi National Congress provided information that "was either fabricated or embellished." The National Intelligence Council believed the group's intelligence was questionable.
- In an interview with the London Telegraph, Chalabi said he and his group were "heroes in error" and "what was said before is not important." On "60 Minutes", he pinned the blame on the administration for believing the information he provided, "intelligence people who are supposed to do a better for their country and their government did not do such a good job."
[u]Follow-up[/u]: [i]Why is the department still paying Chalabi's group $340,000 a month? [/i]
[b]Source:[/b] New York Times, March 11, 2004; U.S. News and World Report, April 12, 2004; Knight Ridder Newspapers, February 22, 2004; "60 Minutes," March 7, 2004.
[b]The First Gulf War[/b]
6. [i]The first Bush administration concluded that invading Baghdad in 1991 would have led to "mission creep" and "incalculable human and political cost." What made you think it would be easier this time around?[/i]
- In "A World Transformed," Bush Sr. and former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft said that "trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq, would have violated our guideline about not changing objectives in midstream, engaging in 'mission creep,' and would have incurred incalculable human and political cost."
- In a 1991 speech, then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney argued, "I think that the proposition of going to Baghdad is also fallacious. I think if we were going to remove Saddam Hussein we would have had to go all the way to Baghdad, we would have to commit a lot of force… And once we'd done that and we'd gotten rid of Saddam Hussein and his government, then we'd have had to put another government in its place… it would have been a mistake for us to get bogged down in the quagmire inside Iraq."
- As Undersecretary of Defense for Policy under Cheney, Wolfowitz was in a crucial position to influence the decision when and how to cease offensive operations as Saddam's forces fled Kuwait. It was the view of virtually all senior members of the first Bush national security team that overthrowing Saddam by force and occupying all of Iraq would be difficult, costly and require extensive international support.
[b]Source:[/b][i] Origins of Regime Change in Iraq[/i], Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, March 19, 2003; Winston-Salem Journal, April 18, 2004; Cheney speech at the Soref Symposium, April 29, 1991.
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| Bush: Freedom is Slavery ... |
| 04.20.04 (4:31 pm) [edit] |
[b]The so-called "Patriot Act" [[i]sic[/i]] is a misleading appellation permitting the corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta[/i] to grab neo-fascist imperial powers that enable them to trample upon the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights ... [/b]
The neo-con Bush/Cheney cabal of liars, felons, swindlers, embezzlers and war criminals who have hijacked our nation are trying to[i] fool, intimidate and terrorize [/i]us into giving up our freedoms and liberties-- enabling them to conduct illegal and immoral searches and seizures of our citizenry (... that in fact, does not, protect us against terrorists-- but instead harms those of us who express our disagreement and dissent against the neo-fascist tranformation of our democracy into a dictatorship by the ugly and traitorous Bush regime ...) ...
Visit the ACLU web-site for more information regarding the Bush's neo-nazi style "Patriot Acts" [[i]sic[/i]] on http://www.aclu.org/SafeandFr...
Consider [b]"Bush says: "[i]Patriot Act defends liberty[/i]" [Bullshit!]" [/b]on http://www.theolympian.com/ho... :
President Bush defended the Patriot Act on Monday and said none of the controversial anti-terrorism law's provisions should be allowed to expire. [Wrong! The Patriot Act must not be extended or made permanent. Contact Congress on http://www.congress.org .]
"The Patriot Act defends our liberty," he said at a convention of township supervisors and emergency service personnel. "It's essential law." [Bush is wrong again [i]as usual[/i], as Constitutional Legal Experts agree that the Patriot Act does not make us safer and tramples upon our liberties: [u]It does not defend our liberty[/u].]
Bush said the legislation should be expanded to allow subpoenas in terrorism cases to be issued without approval of a judge or grand jury, to allow terror suspects to be held without bail and to make sabotage of defense or nuclear facilities that results in loss of life punishable by death. [Bush is [i]full-of-shit [/i]and doesn't know what he is talking about-- The Patriot Act should be over-turned and rejected in order to safeguard our U.S. Constitution & Bill of Rights.]
Critics say the law encroaches on civil liberties, but Bush called it necessary to prevent future attacks. "It's a law that is making America safer. ... It doesn't make any sense" to scale it back, he said.
The law was passed 45 days after the Sept. 11 attacks. It gives federal agents more power to spy on U.S. citizens and noncitizens while hunting alleged terrorists. It expanded federal law enforcement power by permitting the CIA and FBI to share evidence. It also gives terrorism investigators evidence-gathering tools that have long been used in criminal probes.
"The best way to secure our homeland is to stay on the offensive against the terrorist network," Bush said. [Does that mean we attack any sovereign nation that has nothing to do with terrorism? Does that mean the Bushies attack any "enemies" who disagree with their criminal activities? Yep, according to Bush [i]it does[/i]!]
Sixteen sections of the law that expand law enforcement's surveillance powers will expire on Dec. 31, 2005, unless Congress votes to renew them. Republicans think that prospect is an issue that will help them win the support of voters who worry about future attacks. Bush will talk about the issue again today in Buffalo.
Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, the likely Democratic presidential nominee, voted for the Patriot Act. But he now says the Bush administration has misused it. He says he would change it to eliminate "fishing expeditions into people's library and business records."
Kerry spokesman Phil Singer accused Bush Monday of "playing election-year politics with the Patriot Act." Kerry, he said, would expand the law to ensure that all financial institutions are subject to money-laundering regulations and to freeze assets of foreign banks known to hold terrorist groups' funds.
In Pittsburgh, the president noted Kerry's Patriot Act vote, as well as his votes for the war with Iraq and Bush's education reforms. Kerry now criticizes the conduct of the war and wants to change the education reforms. [Kerry now realizes that in the aftermath of 9/11, that too much power was handed over to an insane neo-con Bush cabal who have abused their offices and should be impeached.]
"If he can find a third side to an issue, I'm confident he'd take it," Bush said. [Bush is the biggest flip-flopper and hypocrite who will [i]sell his own mother [/i]for a vote. Bush is a dangerously [i]stupid criminal-cum-idiot[/i].]
The legislatures of Alaska, Hawaii, Vermont and Maine have passed resolutions calling for changes to the Patriot Act. Laura Murphy, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's legislative office, says it "went too far, too fast."
[b]A [i]USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll [/i]taken in February found that 71 percent of Americans disapprove of a section that allows agents to delay telling people that their homes have been searched secretly. About half said they were uneasy about a provision that allows the FBI to obtain records from hospitals, bookstores and libraries and another that allows agents to ask banks whether terrorism suspects have accounts with them[/b].
Monday's trip was Bush's 27th visit to Pennsylvania. He lost the state to Democrat Al Gore in 2000 and hopes to win the state's 21 Electoral College votes this fall. It takes 270 electoral votes to win the presidency. State polls show Bush has a slight lead over Kerry. [Jeez, Americans are asleep and will wake-up and find they are living a nightmare under Bush.]
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| Health Care: Time To Talk About The Uninsured ... |
| 04.20.04 (10:26 am) [edit] |
[b]The U.S. is the only industrialized nation in the world to ignore the plight of our citizens who fall ill and have no health care coverage. The majority of Americans support a Universal Health Care system, but the neo-con, neo-fascists in office don't want us to have basic health care-- [/b]Like the old slave-masters before the American Civil War, they consider us their neo-slaves and don't give a damn if we fall ill and die (in fact, it's an expense saved-- so they can exploit us while they gorge on fat gluttonous profits ...) ... Approximately 44 million American citizens have no health care coverage and over 18,000 American citizens are left to die each year due to lack of health care ... Of course, these neo-con hypocrites who claim to "love life [[i]sic[/i]]" don't want us to be cared for if we fall ill (it eats into their obscenely obese profit-margins ...)-- Once we are "out-of-the-womb" they abuse us as disposable working slaves and cannon-fodder ...
According to the Institute of Medicine, the U.S. has a whopping health care problem which affects the entire nation. The swelling numbers of the uninsured in America is a problem which can no longer be ignored or brushed under the carpet as someone else's problem. The United States spends $35 billion every year to treat people with no insurance, while the economy loses between $65 billion and $130 billion in productivity. Over 18,000 25- to 64-year-olds die every year as a result lacking health insurance. Currently, 43.6 million Americans lack health insurance, and the trend is only getting worse. As costs spiral, more and more Americans, many of them children, are left to struggle for basic health care. The IOM has challenged Congress and the President to find a way to insure every American over the next decade.
[b]CONSERVATIVE FOOT DRAGGING:[/b] Sen. Bill Frist (R-TN) and Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson both said the IOM challenge to cover the uninsured was impossible; unbelievably, Thompson even claimed we already have universal coverage. Meanwhile, President Bush's tax credit proposal would potentially "cause more than 1 million people who have employer-based coverage to become uninsured."
[b]LOWER CARE, HIGHER COSTS:[/b] Urban Institute researchers found the uninsured receive about half the care of those in private insurance. Since escalated cost causes many uninsured Americans to delay or defer treatment, the care they do get is the most expensive and least efficient, like emergency or hospital care. And according to a study by the California Public Interest Research Group Education Fund, uninsured Americans pay on average 68% more than the federal government for commonly prescribed drugs, such as those used to treat arthritis, high cholesterol and ulcers. And since many of the drugs in the survey treat chronic conditions, the price of refills can really add up quickly. For example, "an uninsured person regularly taking Zocor for high cholesterol...would pay at least $1,672 for a year's supply of Zocor. The government, on the other hand, must pay only $814 for the same quantity...a savings of $858." Which uninsured Americans are paying top dollar? The most expensive cities are Baltimore (at a whopping 84% higher average cost for medications), San Diego, Washington, D.C. and Philadelphia.
[b]SOME SUGGESTIONS TO FIX HEALTH CARE:[/b] Sen. Hillary Clinton proposed some basic structural changes to the health care system in this week's NY Times Magazine. First, change the way health care is delivered. One way to do this? Give Americans responsibility for keeping custody of their medical records, to create a "personal health record"; doing so would allow Americans to "assume more responsibility for improving their own health and lifestyles." Also, it's time for the medical field to harness technology. It's time to put health files – "test results, lab records, X-rays" – into a computer system accessible in seconds by doctors' offices and emergency rooms and to disseminate research. Finally, it's important to "recognize the larger factors that affect our health – from the environment to public health." A preemptive strike against factors which sicken Americans, like lead in the drinking water, obesity and smog, is more efficient than waiting for the effects to show in illness and injury.
[b]Source:[/b]
The Center for American Progress on http://www.americanprogress.o...
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| A Conservative Perspective: Thinking the Unthinkable!!! ... |
| 04.19.04 (4:56 pm) [edit] |
"[i]President Bush had best begin to think the unthinkable[/i]." - Patrick J. Buchanan
The problem is with Buchanan's assumption: "Dubya" and "Think" is an[i] oxymoron [/i]... Dubya [i]can't[/i] think ... Dubya is a superficial[i] ne'er-do-well-cum-imbecil e[/i] who has gotten us into a [i]bloody nightmarish fiasco and dire mess [/i]that he doesn't have a clue (nor does the Useful Idiot-N-Criminal give a damn) how to get us out ...
It is time for a regime change [i]here at home [/i]...
Read "[b]Thinking the unthinkable[/b]" by [i]Patrick J. Buchanan [/i]on http://www.worldnetdaily.com/... :
"I hope you got a sense of conviction about what we're doing," said the president, as he ended his primetime press conference.
We certainly did. Indeed, listening Tuesday night, one must concede the convictions, the earnestness and the resolve of the president that he is doing what he believes best for America. And he has put his presidency on the line behind those beliefs.
"The consequences of failure in Iraq would be unthinkable," he declared. "Every friend of America would be betrayed to prison and murder as a new tyranny arose. Every enemy of America would celebrate, proclaiming our weakness and decadence, and using that victory to recruit a new generation of killers."
There is truth here. Prison and murder were the fate of America's allies when China fell in 1949 and Saigon in 1975. Millions who had declared themselves on our side in the war against communism paid with their lives. The president is also right that America's enemies will rejoice in any U.S. defeat.
That raises the question: Why did he risk such a defeat and humiliation?
Who failed to alert him as to what the consequences might be before he invaded? Who told him this would be a "cakewalk"? Who said we would be welcomed with flowers, that democracy would blossom in Iraq and across the Middle East? Who led him up the garden path? And why are they still there?
President Bush's dilemma is this: Americans may agree that a defeat in Iraq would be a disaster, but they are not convinced that democracy in Iraq is so vital that Americans should bleed and die indefinitely to attain it.
And why should they be?
They signed on to a war to disarm and destroy a tyrant, not to decide what kind of government Iraq has. The U.S. commitment to democracy in Iraq is a classic case not only of mission creep, but of bait-and-switch.
In his opening statement, Bush gave five reasons why the "success of free government in Iraq is vital." Not one justifies a war.
"A free Iraq is vital," he said, "because 25 million Iraqis have as much right to live in freedom as we do." Fine. So do 17 million Syrians and 70 million Iranians. Is it our duty, also, to invade and fight for their freedom? Or is that perhaps their job?
"A free Iraq will stand as an example to reformers in the Middle East." But do these "reformers" really lack for examples of freedom? And if their fathers could overthrow the old imperial powers themselves, why cannot the sons rid themselves of their own miserable tyrants?
"A free Iraq will show that America is on the side of Muslims who wish to live in peace, as we've already shown in Kuwait and Kosovo, Bosnia and Afghanistan." But if we've already shown that in Kuwait, Kosovo, Bosnia and Afghanistan, why in blazes do we have to show it again in Iraq? How much proof do these people need that we are on the "side of Muslims who wish to live in peace"?
"A free Iraq will confirm to the Muslim world that America's word, once given, can be relied upon even in the toughest times."
Now, this is a crucial point. U.S. credibility is on the line. But who made the rash judgment to put it there? And is President Bush now asking Americans to support a wider war because he blundered in committing his country to democracy in a land where it never existed and where thousands are willing to fight to the death to resist our style of democracy?
"Above all, the defeat of violence and terror in Iraq is vital to the defeat of violence and terror elsewhere, and vital, therefore, to the safety of the American people."
Here we come to the great Wilsonian fallacy that may yet destroy the Bush presidency. He has embraced the nonsense that unless Iraq is free, America is unsafe. But Iraq has never been free – yet, America has almost always been safe and secure.
The president calls failure in Iraq unthinkable. But the alternative may be an open-ended war the American people never signed on to, and, if present polls are any indication, may not be willing to support indefinitely.
Iraq is not Vietnam, but, for President Bush, there are troubling similarities to other unhappy moments in American history. Truman's presidency was broken by the "no-win war" in Korea. LBJ's presidency was broken by his failure to "win or get out" of Vietnam.
What does a president do if he believes a war is just and necessary, but the people come to believe it is the wrong war, in the wrong place, at the wrong time, with the wrong enemy?
We are not at that point yet, but we are getting there. And President Bush had best begin to think the unthinkable.
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| George W. Bushy-boy: Self-Deluded "Messiah" & Intellectual Dim-Wit!!! ... |
| 04.19.04 (4:10 pm) [edit] |
[b]Dubya will go down into history as a congenital idiot and child(ish) president, unfit for office:-- [/b]the imbecilic baby-boy of the Bush Crime Family, with a life-long history of failure, but whose Poppy has bailed the [i]ne'er-do-well-cum-buff oon [/i]out of every fiasco and drunken squalor resulting in others paying the price, while Dubya 'swans-off' and screws-up the lives of other people [i]yet again [/i]... AWOL Dubya was a deserter in a drunken stupor during Vietnam while better men went into battle many of whom died, were maimed for life or returned home scarred and angry at the unjust and foolhardy war ... Now the cowardly neo-con, arm-chair chicken-hawks sit back on their fat hypocritical asses, lusting for the deaths of others, when none of these neo-fascist thugs & neo-nazi goons ever face(d) any danger in their own pathetic, destructive and squalid lives ...
Consider "[b]George Bush, Self-deluded Messiah[/b]" by [i]David Corn[/i], The Nation on http://www.alternet.org/story... :
It's hard to know what is more disturbing. That George W. Bush misled the public by stating in the months before the Iraq war that he was seriously pursuing a diplomatic resolution when he was not. That he didn't bother to ask aides to present the case against going to war. That he may have violated the U.S. Constitution by spending hundreds of millions of dollars secretly to prepare for the invasion of Iraq without notifying Congress. That he was misinformed by the CIA director about one of the most critical issues of the day and demanded no accountability. Or that he doesn't care if he got it wrong on the weapons of mass destruction.
Bob Woodward's new book, [i]Plan of Attack[/i], illustrates all these points. The full book, which details Bush's march to war, is not yet out, but as is routine for a Woodward book, the more noteworthy passages have preceded the book's release via a well-orchestrated PR blitz (60 Minutes, installments in Woodward's Washington Post, and leaks). And before this book – which follows Woodward's Bush at War, a mostly pro-Bush chronicling of the war in Afghanistan – hits the racks, it is already possible to draw conclusions. (Isn't life in the information age wonderful?)
Let's assume Woodward has gotten the story right. He may not deserve the full benefit of the doubt. Everything in the book is apparently drawn from off-the-record interviews except for two sessions with Bush. And some longtime WoodwardVeil, ended with a supposedly secret deathbed interview with CIA director William Casey that did not pass the smell test. But after Bush at War was published, the Bush crowd did not take exception to Woodward's work. So it is clear that he has the access and contacts (particularly with Secretary of State Colin Powell) to pen an insider's account of the Bush crowd.
The disclosure that appears to unsettle the White House the most is Woodward's assertion that in mid-January 2003 Bush decided to proceed with the invasion of Iraq. Woodward also notes that in November 2001, Bush asked the Pentagon to whip up a plan for war with Iraq. Such an order can be defended by the administration as prudent planning. After all, in the post-9/11 world, you never know when you might need such a plan. (Yes, General Tommy Franks lied to the public in May 2002 when he said, "My boss has not yet asked me to put together a plan" for attacking Iraq. Who, though, expects a military commander to reveal his secret plans?) But in the months before the war, the White House insisted that Bush was pursuing diplomatic options in good faith. At a November 20, 2002, speech in Prague, Bush said, "Our goal is to secure the peace through the comprehensive and verified disarmament of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction." And in late January, Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer said, "Nobody, but nobody, is more reluctant to go to war than President Bush....He does not want to lead the nation to war."
But, according to Woodward, Bush was already leading the nation to war, having made the decision on January 11. National security adviser Condoleezza Rice – who has become the administration's explainer-in-chief – suggests that Bush was merely thinking aloud at the time. But Woodward's account is pretty strong, noting that the Saudis were informed before Bush bothered to tell his secretary of state.
Which brings us to Disturbing Matter Number Two. So you're president and you're about to go to war – wouldn't it be a useful exercise to have your secretary of state tell you all the reasons this might not be a good idea? But when Bush got around to sharing his decision with Powell, no such conversation ensued. Powell merely noted there will be "consequences." Bush did not ask for details. Nor did the two discuss what to do about such "consequences." In fact,[i] Plan of Attack [/i]seems to contain few, if any scenes, in which Bush and his aides consider options other than a full-scale military invasion. (At the time, some non-government policy experts were suggesting more aggressive inspections or military action short of invasion and occupation.) Nor, according to the book, did Bush and his aides seem particularly interested in planning for the post-invasion period – or planning operations to secure the weapons of mass destruction that were supposedly in Iraq.
The Bush-Powell non-conversation comes across as representative of an overall shallowness that infected Bush administration deliberations on the topic of war in Iraq. (Just last week, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said that neither he nor anyone else thought that post-war Iraq would be as tough a mission as it has been. That is simply not true. Many experts – even in the State Department – predicted the exact sort of problems that are plaguing U.S. policy right now.) And while Powell does come out positively in the World According to Woodward, he, too, can be held accountable for enabling the simplism of the Bush gang by being the good soldier who promoted and defended in public a policy that he did not believe was best for the nation or the world. What good is being the grownup in the room, if you let the kiddies take control?
Powell's role in the Woodward book – as a source, as a character – makes for good public affairs soap opera. Conservatives have quickly attacked him for being disloyal and placing his own agenda ahead of the man he serves. (If only he had truly done so when it counted.) What has received less attention in the ongoing gabfest over Woodward's latest is his charge that in the summer of 2002, the Pentagon, following Bush's orders, spent $700 million preparing for war with Iraq – upgrading airfields, bases, weapons storage facilities – and did not tell Congress. Last time I checked Section Nine of Article Two of the U.S. Constitution (this morning), it read, "No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law." This means Congress decides where the money goes. Congress did not appropriate funds for these purposes, according to Woodward. That is, Bush took money appropriated for other reasons and had the Pentagon use it for his war in Iraq. There are, of course, procedures governing secret spending by a president and the Pentagon, but such spending still – in theory – is supposed to be overseen by members of Congress. Then, at least, spending hidden from the public is not kept secret from the public's representatives. But in this instance, if Woodward is correct, Bush assumed imperial power and violated a basic premise of the republic. Are any of the Republican leaders of Congress interested in an investigation? Don't hold your breath.
Republicans and conservatives, instead, are paying more attention to Woodward's account of a December 21, 2002 meeting at the White House, when senior CIA officials briefed Bush on the evidence the agency had regarding Saddam Hussein's supposed weapons of mass destruction. When Bush expressed doubts, CIA chief George Tenet reportedly said, "It's a slam-dunk case." A-ha, Bush supporters cry, this shows Bush did not misrepresent the evidence. What's the president to do when his CIA chief tells him the evidence is solid? Well, Bush could have asked to read the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq himself. It was only 90 pages. And White House officials have conceded that neither Bush nor Rice read that document, which had been produced the previous October. The summary conclusions of the NIE did say that Hussein had chemical and biological weapons, but the NIE also noted that various analysts took exception to key findings of the NIE. If Bush had read the NIE he would have seen there was internal dispute over what Hussein had and whether he posed a serious WMD threat.
Moreover, Tenet's assertion does not get Bush off the hook for his own misleading assertions. Many times Bush exaggerated the WMD threat in public. He said Hussein might possess a nuclear weapon, when the CIA had told Bush he did not. He claimed Hussein was maintaining a "massive stockpile" of biological weapons, when the CIA had only reported Hussein had a development program. Bush accused Iraq of maintaining a "growing fleet" of unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to strike the United States with biological and chemical weapons. The intelligence community said that Iraq, at most, was developing such UAVs (although U.S. Air Force analysts, the best experts on this subject, disagreed that these UAVs could be used for such attacks). And, as is well-documented, Bush said that Hussein was in cahoots with al Qaeda, even though U.S. intelligence had no evidence to support such a bold statement. Tenet might have believed – wrongly – that he had a "slam-dunk case" on the WMDs, but Bush still regularly misrepresented what his government knew about the WMD threat.
Woodward also notes that after the December 21, 2002, session at the White House, Tenet told associates he should have said the evidence on weapons was not ironclad. So if Woodward's telling is accurate, this is the situation: the CIA director misleads the president, who then subsequently misleads the public and the world in order to start a war that causes the deaths of thousands and many other troubles. Is Bush upset by this? Not at all. How can we tell? First, he has retained and repeatedly praised Tenet, who committed one of the biggest errors ever made by a CIA director. Second, Bush says so himself.
In his "60 Minutes" appearance, Woodward told Mike Wallace that when he mentioned to Bush that people were concerned about the failure to find WMDs in Iraq, Bush replied, "You travel in elite circles." Bush was not only saying that he was not mad about this, but that the missing WMDs were of minimal importance because the matter only bothered elite intellectuals. Discussing this, Woodward said he believed Bush had a disdain for "the fancy-pants intellectual world." Is this chilling? A president takes the country and the world to war for a very specific reason, and then this reason turns out to have been wrong. Yet that does not bother him in the least, and he brushes aside the matter by suggesting only elitists care about it. Talk about denial. A frightening mental mechanism is at work here. If Bush can dismiss all concerns and criticisms of his actions as merely the gripes of too-smart-for-their-own-g ood snobs, he then is free to live untroubled in a reality of his own (or Dick Cheney's) making, one unencumbered by competing views and ideas. The leader of the free world is in a bubble.
Bush told Woodward that he remained certain the war had been the right move because he has a "duty to free people." That is not how he had depicted his obligations before the war. Then he claimed his duty was to defend the United States. This remark – coupled with Bush's comment that "there is a higher father that I appeal to" – does make it seem that Bush believes he is on a mission from God. That might scare some, but it would not be so problematic if Bush also believed that God expects him to engage in self-examination and critical and honest discourse before mounting an action that claims thousands of lives and if Bush took into this heart the fact that God (assuming God exists) created intellectuals, experts, skeptics and critics as well as cowboys, oil rig workers, and truck drivers (not that any of these folks cannot be fancy-pants eggheads as well).
The Woodward book is not a full-fire blast like Richard Clarke's book. But it is in several ways more disquieting. Clarke assails Bush and Company for getting the policy wrong – before and after 9/11. Woodward depicts a president who eschews accountability and responsibility, who is embedded in a world detached from critical or challenging perspectives, who appears incapable of self-doubt, who mistakes stubbornness for leadership, and who, while looking to serve that higher father, is likely to provide Woodward more material for the next book – if he gets the chance.
[b]David Corn is the Washington editor of The Nation and the author of "[i]The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception[/i]" (Crown Publishers).[/b]
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| Another Whistle-Blower: An Honest Appraisal, and the Way Ahead ... |
| 04.19.04 (12:25 pm) [edit] |
[b]"April is the cruelest month" ... Hmmm ... [/b]The neo-con neo-fascists are taking this month to launch a vile neo-orwellian propaganda campaign devised in order to slander, libel, intimidate, scare and destroy anyone who refuses to bow-down and genuflect before the corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta [/i]... The traitorous and criminal Bushies have betrayed our nation and emboiled us in a bloody guerrilla quagmire in Iraq ... Now is the time for us to stand-up to these vicious crooks, liars, thieves and war criminals and oust them for good ...
Refer to "[b]An Honest Appraisal, and the Way Ahead[/b]" by [i]Karen Kwiatkowski, Lt. Col. USAF (ret.), [/i]Military Weekly, on http://militaryweek.com/inclu... :
"April is the cruelest month" is the first line of T.S. Eliot's 1922 epic [i]The Wasteland[/i]. These days, our man in Baghdad, Civilian Administrator L. Paul Bremer III, must be wondering if his memoirs of the last year should start with the same line. Upon reflection, back home in Washington, Bremer may wish to appropriate Eliot's title as well.
This April is particularly cruel with bills coming due for a lack of post-invasion planning, failure to develop an exit strategy, and for a persistent glaring void between the ears of the Bush administration regarding Iraq's history, economy and culture. As of this writing, nearly 700 American soldiers have paid the ultimate price for these oversights.
Neoconservatives pleaded and postured for preemptive war in Iraq, but they under-estimated one of the few "successes" of Saddam Hussein's secular dictatorship. Saddam's costly, protracted war with Iran, his failed invasion of Kuwait and the resultant humiliation of a Versailles-esque settlement, plus a dozen years of global sanctions and U.S./U.K. bombings combined, have produced many negative effects. But these realities have transformed various religious and ethnic groups from the provinces into something new: Iraqis against the world.
Iraqi national identity need not be permanent to throw a monkey wrench into the U.S. self-help project in Mesopotamia. Violent civil war or a Czech and Slovak style "velvet divorce" are future options for Iraq. But this month, we've witnessed a predictable side effect of our military and political occupation. Iraqis have heard the words of Mr. Bush, and they seem to agree. You're either with us, or you're against us.
The lies and executive pressure that convinced Congress to grant the current president extraordinary war powers are now behind us. Indeed, politicians usually prove more adept at killing and maiming the younger generations than saving them.
Now is the time for practical, not political, minds to hold sway.
In discussing Iraq, Senator Ted Kennedy recalls Vietnam. He takes grief not for his facts, but because, as a natty neoconservative talking point goes, "Why, his own brother got us into Vietnam!" Robert Dreyfuss reminds us that in 1968, following the Tet Offensive, the party in the White House became traumatized by that war's reality, and fell into disarray. Perhaps this is the one dangerous parallel that agonizes 21st century Republicans. And Senator Robert Byrd equates Tennyson's Charge of the Light Brigade to the modern military blunders of the current administration in a moving address before a nearly empty Senate Chamber.
Conversely, the twenty most influential American newspapers editorialized this week: when it comes to Iraq, we need to stay the course. These editorial boards mean well. But it is clear that they either honestly don't know or perversely refuse to recognize the one fundamental reason why we have had over 135,000 American troops under deadly fire for the past year in Iraq.
Here's a hint: It isn't liberation, democracy, counter-terrorism, a search for weapons of mass destruction, humanitarian concerns, or even oil or Israel's security interests. It is simple geo-strategic military positioning, a classic Cold War model, aimed at punishing future enemies and rewarding allies by leveraging regional oil flow, water allocations, and weapons development. This, and nothing else, explains why the EU is nervous, the Russian President antsy, and the Chinese Prime Minister coy.
Fortunately, we don't have to take the self-serving advice of neoconservatives and editorial boards. We can save our working class sons and daughters from unnecessary death, disease, or lifelong debilitation courtesy this boutique war imposed on us by chickenhawk academics and lying old men. We do have options.
One option is to simply withdraw. Toss a key, or not, over the fence and redeploy home. Write off the whole experiment as a bad decision taken by a mediocre president unrestrained by a frightened Congress, a docile Supreme Court, a lazy domestic media, and a too-busy-to-pay-attention electorate.
This option is typically rejected as immoral and bad for the Iraqi people. Of course, the Bush Doctrine of selective, preemptive, full-scale war based on jury-rigged or incompetent intelligence, and severely outmoded, but cherished, security paradigms gets first prize in the "immoral and bad for the Iraqi people" category.
In keeping with the Administration's preference that things be either/or, there is another option. Toss a hundred keys over a hundred city walls, and militarily pull back into a subset of friendly Guantanamo-style Iraqi outposts. In places like Kurdish Mosul or Shia Basra, we can pick our own friendly hosts and spend the bulk of the $67 billion base building and security money on these must-have facilities. As we withdraw to our friendly zones, we get to keep military access. As cities like Baghdad and Fallujah settle down, we might negotiate with the emergent leadership there for additional military access. Or not.
This is an approach that will save American lives and American tax dollars. It compromises on the American oil and infrastructure development contracts. It won't guarantee that the Mosul-to-Haifa oil pipeline – a booster for the Israeli economy – will be finished on schedule, if ever. It does not protect the right of expatriate crooks like Ahmad Chalabi to run the country under our tutelage.
The "hundred keys" option offers Iraq self rule, but it sacrifices the neoconservatives' adoration for overwhelmingly strong and centralized federal governments. Adding neoconservative insult to injury, this option also requires us to not only decentralize, but give up U.S. control over Iraqi banks and Iraqi oil production.
Yes, changes would have to be made. Doing so sooner rather than later will save American lives, while preserving at least some existing American contracts. It will, in a small way increase unemployment in Iraq, as the U.S. appointed Governing Council, the U.S. appointed bureaucratic Ministers, and the entire American staff of handlers will all be kicked off the rebuild Iraq gravy train funded by American tax dollars.
These are the types of choices that originate from an honest assessment of why we are in Iraq in the first place: military geo-strategic positioning, with a side of economic welfare for a few fat cat American companies. The neoconservative pipe dream of the reformation of Islam, and a stirring of the democratic heart of the Middle East is, as it always was, delusional window dressing.
April was the cruelest month for T.S. Eliot. It is a month of change; a month that breaks comfortable habits without kindness or remorse. When it comes to fixing our Iraq policy, we need only to appraise, with brutal honesty, what we really want and what we are really willing to spend to achieve it. The practical compromises are self-evident. One hopes we might make them before another April rolls around.
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| Powell Spills the Goods on Bush's Flawed Iraq Disaster!!! ... |
| 04.19.04 (10:55 am) [edit] |
[b]Do you really trust this imbecilic band of neo-con buffoons, liars, frauds, embezzlers, felons and criminals in the corrupt neo-fascist Bush regime to competently conduct such a[i] serious endeavour [/i]as warfare? ... [/b]Of course [i]not[/i]! ... The bloody war in Iraq is both illegal and immoral and as such, the traitorous Bush/Cheney Inc.[i] junta [/i]should be impeached and sent off to the International Court at the Hague to be tried for [i]Crimes Against Humanity [/i]...
[u][b]Powell Spills Goods on Flawed Iraq War[/b][/u]
In Bob Woodward's latest book, "[i]Plan of Attack[/i]," Secretary of State Colin Powell confirms what critics of the war in Iraq have known all along. The Bush administration – against the strong desires of most of the world community – sent the United States to war under false pretenses, based on distorted intelligence, and with no hard plan for dealing with the aftermath. Powell understood best what other Bush administration officials chose to ignore: the United States would not be greeted as liberators in Iraq and it would not be a cost free war.
[b]1. The Bush administration trumped up intelligence about weapons of mass destruction to win public support for an ideological war in Iraq.[/b] Secretary Powell received the unfortunate charge of presenting the Bush administration's bogus intelligence assessment to the U.N. Security Council just prior to the U.S. invasion last year. Unfortunately for Powell and the nation, we now have independent confirmations that Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction and was not in collusion with al Qaeda prior to our invasion.
[b]2. The war in Iraq diverted critical resources from the fight against al Qaeda.[/b] Woodward's book reveals that President Bush ordered Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld to secretly draw up plans to invade Iraq less than two months after the terrorist attacks on 9/11. Rather than finishing off al Qaeda and bin Laden, President Bush changed focus to a fight a less immediate threat in Iraq. And in his rush to war he informed Prince Bandar, the Saudi ambassador to the United States, before telling his own Secretary of State.
[b]3. The administration failed to plan for the aftermath of war and has created a terrorist front in Iraq where none existed before.[/b] Secretary Powell correctly assessed the risks in Iraq. Less than three months before transferring sovereignty to Iraqis, the Bush administration still has no concrete political plan for the nation and is quickly losing control of security on the ground. Rather than decreasing threats of terror in Iraq, President Bush's unwise war has now created a central front for terrorists determined to kill Americans.
[b]Source:[/b]
The Center for American Progress on http://www.americanprogress.o...
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| Most Americans Not 'Buying' Bush's Shit-Filled Tax Cut Rhetoric (i.e. Lies)! |
| 04.19.04 (10:31 am) [edit] |
[b]The corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc.[i] junta [/i]are screwing America over as these neo-con thugs & neo-fascist goons 'Take the Money & Run' ... [/b]But even the lazy-minded brain-dead sheep in the American public aren't falling for Bush's shit-filled tax cut lies, deceptions and propaganda[i] 'hook-line-and-sinker' [/i]... Dubya, Cheney, Rice & Rove ([i]The 4 Stooges[/i]) may mistakenly think they can[i] reel us all in[/i], and that we'll [i]bite their bait[/i]: [i]but their bait is rotten [/i]...
[b]Polls: Americans Not Buying Bush Tax Cut Rhetoric[/b] - http://www.misleader.org/dail...
President Bush is scheduled to tout his tax cuts today at a Tax Day event in Iowa. He is expected to repeat his oft-heard mantra that tax cuts have helped all Americans. But according to a new poll by [i]Money Magazine,[/i] "60% of Americans said the Bush tax cut did not personally help them"1. Meanwhile, almost half of all Americans say that their taxes have risen under Bush2. And a look at the record shows exactly why that majority opinion is factually correct.
According to a non-partisan analysis, in the year 2006 88% of Americans will receive less than $100 from the president's 2003 tax cut3. Additionally, the president has refused to extend the full child tax credit to 16 million children4, including 250,000 children of military families5. At the same time, the president's 2004 budget proposed an increase of almost $6 billion in new federal taxes and fees6 while creating record-deficits that have forced states to raise taxes by $14.5 billion since 20017. And to top it off, he has reduced IRS audits of large profitable corporations whose tax rates have plummeted8, while increasing IRS audits of ordinary Americans9.
Of course, there is a handful of people who are reaping a personal windfall from Bush's tax policy: President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and their top campaign donors. The president himself pocketed more than $30,000 in new tax breaks this year while the Vice President took in an extra $11,00010. And a new Public Campaign report shows that top Bush-Cheney contributors are raking in even more11. For instance, Charles Cawley, CEO of credit card giant MBNA, raised more than $200,000 for the Bush-Cheney campaign and was rewarded with at least $276,000 in tax breaks. Similarly, William MaGuire, CEO of UnitedHealth Group, raised more than $100,000 for the Bush-Cheney campaign and will get at least $329,000 in new tax breaks from President Bush.
[b]Sources:[/b]
1. "Money poll: Tax cuts unpopular", CNN Money, 04/15/2004.
2. "ASSOCIATED PRESS POLL: Most prefer balanced budget to tax cuts", Grand Forks Herald, 04/15/2004.
3. "Most Taxpayers Get Little Help From Latest Bush Tax Plan", Citizens for Tax Justice, 05/30/2003.
4. "Bush Tax Plan's Child Credit Boost Leaves Behind One in Four of America's Children", Citizens for Tax Justice, 05/29/2003.
5. "Study: Military kids slighted on tax credit", USA Today, 06/04/2003.
6. "Bush's 2004 Budget Proposes More Fees", Washington Post, 04/19/2003.
7. State Budget & Tax Actions 2003, National Conference of State Legislatures.
8. "Corporate tax burden shows sharp decline", Associated Press, 04/13/2004.
9. "IRS More Likely to Audit Individuals", Los Angeles Times, 04/12/2004.
10. "Bushes, Cheneys Reaped Tax Benefits", Associated Press, 04/14/2004.
11. Campaign Money Watch, 04/15/2004.
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| What Is The Neo-Fascist Press Doing??? Suppressing The Bad News!!! ... |
| 04.17.04 (10:08 am) [edit] |
[b]The corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc.[i] junta [/i]are transforming the USA into a neo-fascist stalinist-style dictatorship before our very eyes ... [/b]Tragically, the corporate-owned right-wing media is playing along with this[i] heinous treason [/i]... Refer to "The Conservative Right-Wing Press Corps Is Letting "We the People" Down!!!" on http://www.tblog.com/template... ...
Read "[b]Suppress That[/b]!" by [i]Matt Bivens[/i], The Daily Outrage by The Nation, on http://www.thenation.com/outr... :
Eye-witness accounts from Fallujah -- for example, "Sarajevo on the Euphrates" just published by The Nation -- make clear what's incredibly obvious: It's intense urban combat, which means all sorts of collateral damage -- mosques, hospitals, ambulances, women, children.
A Fallujah hospital director told The Associated Press most of the 600 dead recorded so far were civilians. But most American media have glossed quickly over that -- just as they on other days when the brunt of the war fell on civilians.
One of the only news networks that's been broadcasting from the heart of the violence has been Qatar-based Al-Jazeera.
"Al-Jazeera had their reporter literally embedded in the middle of the chaos -- and I don't mean the lame embedded Western journalists type of thing they had going at the beginning of the war (you know -- embedded in the Green Zone and embedded in Kuwait, etc.)," reports the engaging Girl Blog from Iraq -- one of those pro-freedom-and-democracy Iraqis we ought to pay more attention to. After days spent tracking events in Fallujah, she recalls being impressed by an Al-Jazeera correspondent "actually standing there, in the middle of the bombing, shouting to be heard over the F-16s and helicopters blasting away at houses and buildings."
Now, Al-Jazeera is of, by and for the Arab world. So it brings that to the table. It's going to give less benefit of the doubt to American intentions and actions, and more to Arab intentions and actions. While we speak of insurgents, Al-Jazeera speaks of resistance fighters, and suggests the US military is doing very little to avoid civilian deaths. This, not surprisingly, has rubbed some US officials wrong, and they have begun to carp that Al-Jazeera, in one top general's words, is "not truthful."
It seems to me that this goes too far -- and also does a grave disrespect to Al-Jazeera journalists who are putting themselves in the path of that general's helicopter gunships, Marine snipers and air strikes so as to get out film footage of what's happening.
But I expect top military and government officials to reject criticism, that's what they do best (in all societies and at all times).
What I find unforgivable is, again, CNN. The news channel steps into this US government vs. Al-Jazeera spat and attacks Al-Jazeera -- not for having dreamed up events that hadn't happened, say, or for having used film footage misleadingly -- but simply for thinking that civilian casualties matter.
The network's Daryn Kagan -- last seen confusing viewers about whether the boy who yawned at a George W. Bush speech really existed -- this week interviewed Al-Jazeera's editor, Ahmed Al-Sheik.
Kagan cited US officials as saying "the pictures and the reporting that Al- Jazeera put on the air only adds to the sense of frustration and anger and adds to the problems in Iraq," and asked, "In fact, is your network misrepresenting the facts as you see them on the ground in Iraq?"
"I don't think so. I think we are being very accurate," editor Al-Sheik replied. "What we have been showing represents what takes place on the ground. We have been showing bodies of people who were killed, bodies and the graveyards where people are burying them ... pictures of US helicopter gunships and F-16 fighter jets bombing Fallujah."
Kagan then countered with a garbled question exactly reflective of our garbled thinking about the whole rest of the non-American planet. Read it with the slow respect one must pay to anything this soulless:
[b]Isn't the story, though, bigger than just the simple numbers, with all due respect to the Iraqi civilians who have lost their lives -- the story bigger than just the numbers of people who were killed or the fact that they might have been killed by the US military, that the insurgents, the people trying to cause problems within Fallujah, are mixing in among the civilians, making it actually possible that even more civilians would be killed, that the story is what the Iraqi insurgents are doing, in addition to what is the response from the US military?[/b]
FAIR, the media watchdog, scathingly takes the measure of this: "When reports from the ground are describing hundreds of civilians being killed by US forces, CNN should be looking to Al Jazeera's footage to see if it corroborates those accounts -- not badgering Al Jazeera's editor about why he doesn't suppress that footage."
* * *
Let me leave you with some of Girl Blog from Iraq's relevant sentiments:
[i]Western news networks are far too tame. They show the Hollywood version of war: strong troops in uniform, hostile Iraqis being captured and made to face "justice" and the White House turkey posing with the Thanksgiving turkey ... Which is just fine. But what about the destruction that comes with war and occupation? What about the death?
I don't mean just the images of dead Iraqis scattered all over, but dead Americans too. People should have to see those images. Why is it not OK to show dead Iraqis and American troops in Iraq, but it's fine to show the catastrophe of September 11 over and over again?
I wish every person who e-mails me supporting the war, safe behind their computer, secure in their narrow mind and fixed views, could actually come and experience the war live. I wish they could spend just 24 hours in Baghdad today and hear Mark Kimmett talk about the death of 700 "insurgents" like it was a proud day for Americans everywhere ...
Still, when I hear talk about "anti-Americanism" it angers me. Why does America identify itself with its military and government? Why does being anti-Bush and anti-occupation have to mean that a person is anti- American? We watch American movies, listen to everything from Britney Spears to Nirvana and refer to every single brown, fizzy drink as "Pepsi".
I hate American foreign policy and its constant meddling in the region ... I hate American tanks in Baghdad and American soldiers on our streets and in our homes on occasion ... why does that mean that I hate America and Americans? Are tanks, troops and violence the only face of America?[/i]
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| The Rice Capades ... |
| 04.16.04 (10:13 am) [edit] |
[b]Condoleezza Rice, the corrupt, over-rated and incompetent National Security Amateur has a[i] life-long reputation[/i] of [i]sucking-up to those who can advance her prospects [/i]... [/b]Meanwhile, while the self-obsessed, arrogant and 'not-as-bright-as-neo-con -court-jesters-like-to-pr etend' Rice [i]jumps through hoops like a dog in a circus act to please her neo-con, neo-fascist masters-cum-slave-owners[ /i], her substantive contributions ([i]or lack thereof[/i]) are inept, destructive and down-right criminal ... Rice not only deserves to be fired but should be investigated for criminal wrong-doing (If Sandy Berger had behaved as outrageously irresponsibly as Rice, then he would have been crucified ... Sandy Berger met daily with CIA & FBI directors -- Rice spent time watching football and working out in the gym with dumb Dubya) ... http://www.tblog.com/template...
Consider "[b]The Rice Capades[/b]" by [i]Joshua Kurlantzick[/i], The American Prospect, on http://www.prospect.org/web/p... :
[u][b]Condi's problems didn't start with the 9-11 commission. She's been screwing things up from the start[/b][/u].
Between May and July 2001, the National Security Agency intercepted more than 30 private communications suggesting an imminent terrorist attack. In June, U.S. intelligence discovered that leading al-Qaeda operatives were vanishing from sight, possibly in preparation for a strike. By August, the CIA was reporting that Khalid al-Mindhar, Nawaf al-Hazmi, and other associates of Osama bin Laden had entered the United States. A month later, these men would participate in the September 11 hijackings.
U.S. counterterrorism specialists prepared a briefing in July 2001 for top government officials, warning, "We believe that [Osama bin Laden] will launch a significant terrorist attack against U.S. and/or Israeli interests in the coming weeks. The attack will be spectacular and designed to inflict mass casualties." Richard Clarke, then the White House's top counterterrorism official, made many requests to National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice for urgent cabinet-level meetings. Several top counterterrorism officials, a congressional commission that investigated 9-11 learned, "were so worried about an impending disaster ... that they considered resigning and going public with their concerns." CIA Director George Tenet "was around town literally pounding on desks saying that something is happening, this is an unprecedented level of threat information," Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage told Congress.
Such a potential impending disaster might have seemed tailor-made for Rice. After all, she had been groomed by the Republican foreign-policy elite to become a top-flight decision-maker. And, since her time as a director for Soviet affairs on the first Bush administration's National Security Council (NSC), Rice had prided herself on her convictions that America should neither shy away from potential threats nor outlaw the use of significant force to combat our enemies. Furthermore, because of her experience on that NSC, Rice supposedly possessed the toughness and the willpower to push cabinet members toward a common policy that would defend America in a time of great danger. Indeed, since she had been named George W. Bush's top foreign-policy adviser during the 2000 presidential campaign, Rice had been featured in a series of fawning profiles in major newspapers and magazines, becoming the administration's major foreign-policy mouthpiece and frequently appearing on Sunday talk shows to provide detailed, eloquent presentations. She'd even inspired a fan club that promoted her presidential chances in 2008.
Unfortunately, as we now know from Clarke and other sources, Rice did little to address the gathering threat. In her recent testimony before the 9-11 commission, Rice admitted that the United States had not been on "war footing" against terrorism before September 11, and complained that the threats to the United States, during the summer of 2001, were too vague to warrant taking action. Indeed, Clarke was not allowed to brief the president during the summer of 2001, and Rice convened no meetings of cabinet principals that summer to deal with al-Qaeda terrorism -- just the kind of high-level attention that had helped prevent terrorist attacks on the eve of the 2000 millennium celebrations. "[T]here were other priorities," Rice told the commission.
In part, the failure to prevent the events of 9-11 was, like certain other key Bush administration foreign-policy failures, a result of Rice's personal flaws. Though the media have often portrayed the national-security adviser as a tough, decisive policy-maker, in reality Rice often has been a terrible mediator, creating fragmented, disunified policy. Ideally, a national-security adviser would firmly guide an internal administration debate toward an end point, present a policy recommendation to the president, and then force the administration to follow the president's decision. "You'd think the NSC would lay down the law," says one former official. "Condi did nothing ... . If there was a strong national-security adviser who'd instill discipline, that would have stopped ... debate."
But the Bush administration's policy disasters are not due merely to Rice's flaws as a traffic cop. They are a direct reflection of the flaws and blind spots of modern conservative foreign-policy thought. For nearly two decades, Condoleezza Rice was marinated in this thought, studying under mentors like George Bush Senior and Brent Scowcroft and alongside luminaries like Paul Wolfowitz. Conservatism's focus was chiefly on dangerous states and their dangerous weapons, like long-range missiles. Its preferred means of dealing with threats were military force and unilateral action, rather than State Department diplomacy, of which conservatives were suspicious. Both the focus and the means were unsuited for the globalized post-Cold War world, and horrifically so for the post-9-11 world. But it was tragic that the 1990s conservative establishment, which spent the decade rallying itself into a coherent force situated around key think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute, developed a kind of all-or-nothing groupthink -- a stifling unity in which even mild dissenters are scourged as traitors.
When an administration born in the world of late 1980s and '90s conservatism -- a world of unyielding ideology formed in direct opposition to the Clintonites -- came to power, it failed to adapt to changes in the international environment, refusing to understand the ramifications of globalization and the growing danger of nonstate threats. And Rice has shown no propensity at all for independent thought. At a time when the president -- and, more importantly, the nation -- needed a skeptic in charge of the NSC, Rice showed unquestioning fealty to conservative groupthink, usually siding with the administration's most hawkish officials. She finds it easier to confront people like Clarke or Secretary of State Colin Powell, who advocate solutions contrary to 1990s conservatism -- multilateralism, or the recognition, as Clarke has said, that "the boundaries between domestic and foreign [security] have blurred" as nonstate actors have grown in power.
In addition, Rice has never really had the authority within the administration that a national-security adviser should. Before September 11, she allowed Rumsfeld and other hawkish officials to make missile defense and the dissolution of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty priorities, even as al-Qaeda's shadow loomed over New York and Washington. Meanwhile, Rice led cabinet-level meetings prior to 9-11 on a series of other state threats, such as Russia, her one area of actual expertise. And, even after September 11, the administration still has not focused seriously enough on the nonstate actors that threaten America, or diverged from its 19th-century, Metternichian worldview. As a result, America today is more hated around the world than at any time in decades, Americans are dying needlessly, and al-Qaeda is flexing more muscle than it did before 9-11. The failure of Condoleezza Rice, all but engineered to be a conservative icon, is the failure of the 1990s conservative establishment itself.
At an age when most people have yet to buy their first home, Condoleezza Rice had already held a series of prestigious positions in government and academia. A junior political-science professor at Stanford University in the 1980s, she impressed Scowcroft with her insights at a 1984 Stanford faculty seminar on arms control. Five years later, when Scowcroft became Bush Senior's national-security adviser, he made the precocious prof his director for Soviet affairs on the National Security Council. She was quickly promoted to senior director, and often served as a personal tutor to President Bush on the changing dynamics of the collapsing Soviet Union.
When Bush lost in 1992, Rice returned to Stanford, where she served as provost for six years. After leaving the school in 1999 to join Texas Governor George W. Bush's presidential campaign team, Rice grew close to the candidate. Bush reportedly liked Rice's ability to quickly synthesize foreign policy and present it to him in digestible amounts; the two also shared many interests, including football (Rice has said she wants to be NFL commissioner one day). And, as James Mann writes in his book[i] Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet,[/i] she became friendly with other leading conservatives who would ultimately serve as Bush's top advisers.
By then, Rice had already absorbed two decades of conservative wisdom. She was not yet a neoconservative, though. Like more traditional conservatives, she was mostly focused on great-power relations, and she seemed unwilling to risk the kind of destabilization that could result from neocons' democratization ideas.
Yet she, like the rest of the conservative establishment, had settled upon what Ivo H. Daalder and James M. Lindsay, authors of [i]America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy[/i], call the "hegemonist worldview." This worldview "looked no different ... than it had to Cardinal Richelieu or Prince von Metternich," Daalder and Lindsay wrote. "States sought to advance their own narrow interests," and military power -- even unilateral power -- was the best way of doing so. So, in a 2000 article in Foreign Affairs, Rice spent little time talking about terrorism, globalization, or other nonstate issues, instead advising America to focus on its relationship with major powers and ensure that the U.S. military was strong enough to fight for U.S. interests.
When Bush became president, Rice was thrown into an extremely contentious situation. The president named some of the most experienced bureaucratic infighters in recent history to positions at the State Department, the Defense Department, and the Central Intelligence Agency. Complicating matters, Bush had picked a vice president who would be taking a more sizable role in foreign policy than any veep in history; none previous had joined NSC meetings with other cabinet principals. Rice had learned management from Scowcroft, whose style was to build consensus slowly. But it was now clear, as Rice might have sensed, that the Scowcroft model simply didn't fit anymore. "Positions were sometimes argued rather aggressively in [the first] Bush [administration], but disagreements were sorted out in private, not by public utterances that got out ahead of agreed policy," says a Bush Senior NSC staffer.
Yet from the beginning, Rice made moves that ended up encouraging just that sort of public bickering. In early 2001, she and her deputy, Stephen Hadley, decided to hand over more responsibility for policy-making to cabinet members. Rice slashed the NSC's size by 30 percent and even reportedly said that she didn't want anyone in Washington knowing her views on various policy issues. "Rice made the calculation that she couldn't go up against the titans" -- Cheney, Rumsfeld -- "in a big way," says one former official. Says another: "There was a feeling early on under Bush and Rice that the Clinton NSC had gotten too strong. Steve Hadley was overtly pushing people in meetings -- 'Look, we shouldn't be doing this, we need to devolve down.' But it wasn't really possible, because there was too much fighting in the interagency process."
Indeed, according to this former official, after Argentina's economy collapsed in a morass of debt in early 2001, Rice and Hadley tried to hand over Argentina policy-making to the Treasury Department. But there was combat between the Treasury Department and other agencies over the Argentine debt, and Rice allowed internal debate to continue, helping to poison the U.S.-Argentine relationship.
At the same time, when Rice did help mediate the infighting, it was almost always to further the conservative goals developed in the 1990s, such as obsessing over national missile defense and breaking U.S. ties to multilateral institutions like the International Criminal Court. On these issues, one former official remembers, Rice "restricted debate [to] limit the amount of information you get in ... . You're more likely to succumb to groupthink." As[i] The Washington Post [/i]has reported, on September 11, Rice was to deliver a foreign-policy address at Johns Hopkins University on "the threats and problems of today and the day after" that would have promoted missile defense as the cornerstone of America's national-security strategy. As Clarke writes in his book, "[T]he daily NSC staff briefings were filled with detailed discussion about the ABM Treaty and other issues that I thought were vestigial Cold War concerns."
Similarly, before Bush's first visit to Europe in June 2001, Rice and other NSC staffers attended an interagency meeting to plan the trip. A Defense Department official arrived at the meeting with a "Rummygram" -- a concise, sharply worded Rumsfeld memo -- which showed that the Pentagon was already fighting the intra-administration battle to the death. The memo contained suggestions that, if implemented, would have radically changed U.S. policy in Europe, including pulling America back from NATO.
The same Bush staffers, Clarke has said, thought focusing on al-Qaeda was "rather odd." After all, al-Qaeda, which couldn't be dealt with on a state-to-state level, didn't fit in the conservatives' paradigm. But officials who criticized this conservative worldview were quickly ousted. Before September 11, Rice essentially demoted Clarke, perhaps the most knowledgeable person in the administration on al-Qaeda. Clinton-era National Security Adviser Sandy Berger "was effective in saying, 'We're heading down the wrong path. Let's reassess where we're going,'" says one former official who served under both Bill Clinton and Bush. Rice, it seems, could not do the same.
When the administration hasn't made the mistake of sticking to its guns with catastrophic consequences, it has made the opposite mistake of lurching all over the place, as it has with regard to China and Taiwan. The dance began in April of 2001, when a U.S. spy plane on a surveillance mission off the coast of southern China bumped into a Chinese plane and made an emergency landing in China, where authorities essentially held the pilots captive. The U.S. reaction to the incident was often contradictory, with some hawkish officials vowing that Washington would get its pilots and plane back without making any concessions, while others were counseling that America should express regret for the Chinese pilot's death. Ultimately, doves, led by Powell, seemed to prevail: Bush sent Chinese President Jiang Zemin a letter saying that the United States was very sorry for the Chinese pilot's death (but not apologizing for the crash itself). China released the pilots.
From there, policy-making on China only grew more muddled. Shelley Rigger, an expert on Taiwanese politics at Davidson University, says the Bush administration has sent mixed messages to both Beijing and Taipei on how strongly it backs Taiwan. Until 2003, hawks at the Defense Department and at America's de facto embassy for Taiwan, who had spent the 1990s at organizations like the American Enterprise Institute focusing on China as one of the gravest state threats to the United States, gained the upper hand. Rice, who seemed suspicious of State Department doves, did not stop the hawks. "Until [mid] 2002, the NSC basically allowed the Pentagon a long leash on Taiwan," says one U.S. official. Top Taiwanese defense officials were invited to the Pentagon, and Wolfowitz held meetings with Taiwanese leaders, a break from the past practice of having the Taiwanese meet only lower-ranking U.S. officials. Rice allowed the Pentagon to have a say on political issues as well, once the sole province of Foggy Bottom. Under Rice, says one former official, the Defense Department was "much more closely involved" in China and Taiwan policy details than in the past.
Emboldened by this tilt toward Taipei, Taiwanese President Chen Shui-bian decided to call a referendum, timed to the March 2004 presidential election in Taiwan, that would ask the Taiwanese whether China should renounce the use of force against the island. China reacted furiously, saying that a referendum could provoke war. Bush and Rice tried to scramble in the other direction. In the fall of 2003, with Bush's blessing, the National Security Council quietly sent Jim Moriarty, NSC senior director for Asian affairs, to Taipei, to ask Chen to scuttle the referendum.
Yet even as Rice was dispatching Moriarty, she could not keep administration hawks on the same page as Bush. At a dinner for Chen in New York in October 2003, Therese Shaheen, the hawkish former head of the de facto U.S. embassy for Taiwan, told the audience that Bush was Chen's "secret guardian angel," and in New York, Chen was allowed by U.S. officials to meet with supporters and the international media. (Because the United States officially recognizes only mainland China, previous Taiwanese presidents had usually been kept in airport transit hotels while in America.)
With the administration divided on policy, neither Taiwan nor China received a consistent message. According to Rigger, Chen focused on the anti-China statements from hawks and pushed forward with his referendum. The United States grew angrier, and one former U.S. official says Moriarty called a Taiwanese national-security adviser into his office and berated the man -- highly unusual behavior for an American official.
Ultimately, Bush had to inject himself directly into the policy debate, using a December 2003 bilateral meeting with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao to tell reporters that the United States opposed the Taiwanese referendum. It was a slap in the face to Taipei, and Beijing reacted by replaying Bush's statement ad nauseam in the Chinese media. Embarrassed, Bush had to tack back again, publicly warning Beijing that his statement did not mean Washington would not continue supporting Taiwan. "The administration [still] doesn't speak with one voice on this," says Ken Lieberthal, who served on the National Security Council under Clinton. "Taiwan thinks the Department of Defense is their savior ... [and tries] to get the Department of Defense to carry their water," agrees one American official.
Ultimately, Chen was re-elected by a narrow margin, but his relationship with Washington was compromised by U.S. infighting that Rice did nothing to control -- and now the United States will have to deal with the Taiwanese leader for another term.
For a time, the 9-11 attacks shocked the administration into a more proactive, multilateral approach on terrorism. Rice became more assertive, functioning as an active participant who pushed issues to a close rather than simply a mediator.
But she still allowed the 1990s groupthink mentality and ignorance of nonstate actors to dominate. Right after 9-11, top administration hawks, including Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld, tried to switch the focus from a nonstate threat -- al-Qaeda -- that had just killed almost 3,000 Americans to a state threat -- Iraq -- that could be more easily handled though military force, a linchpin of the hegemonist worldview. Rice did not prevent Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld from trying to focus attention on Saddam Hussein, even as Wolfowitz sent former CIA Director James Woolsey, a close friend, to London to investigate the crackpot theories of Laurie Mylroie, a terrorism specialist who believes that Hussein has had a role in many acts of terrorism on American soil, including September 11.
Ultimately, the preponderance of evidence implicating al-Qaeda in the 9-11 attacks became so overwhelming that it made no sense to even consider attacking any place other than Afghanistan. The war was fought well, and U.S.-led forces quickly overthrew the Taliban. But shortly afterward, the conservative ideology reasserted itself. Rumsfeld and other hawks, disdainful of multilateralism and using the military for reconstructing societies -- even broken societies that had bred terrorists -- scuttled the possibility of rescuing Afghanistan from failed-state status.
Rice, who in her 2000[i] Foreign Affairs [/i]piece had also denigrated the Clinton-era use of the military for peacekeeping, went along. Indeed, after 9-11, Rice allowed the United States to be pulled away from its European allies, who wanted to contribute to the war on terrorism but were distrusted by hawks at the Pentagon and other parts of the administration. Shortly after the war in Afghanistan, the[i] Prospect [/i]has learned, some multilateralist administration officials wanted to support a NATO rapid-response force. One former official remembers, "A high defense official, when briefed on the idea by the NSC, paused and said, 'Don't do that -- if it existed, we'd have to use it.'" Chastened, the National Security Council allowed the idea to fester well into 2002, infuriating Europe and preventing NATO from taking a larger role in Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, according to a former official, Rice allowed the Department of Defense to scuttle the funding of reconstruction projects in Afghanistan and Pakistan, which Rumsfeld disdained. Worse, Flynt Leverett, a former NSC staffer, told The [i]Washington Post [/i]that Arabic-speaking Special Forces and CIA officers, who had been effectively tracking Osama bin Laden and other top al-Qaeda leaders, were taken out of Afghanistan in March 2002 to begin preparing for a war in Iraq.
By the summer of 2002, it was becoming increasingly obvious that the White House was gunning for the state actor that, for more than a decade, had been central to conservatives' worldview. In the buildup to war with Iraq, Rice did give Powell a hearing. In the fall of 2002, she famously arranged for a private dinner at which the secretary of state counseled the president to use the United Nations to pressure Iraq. The dinner, as Daalder and Lindsay note, ultimately resulted in Bush using Powell's methods -- working through the UN, at first -- to achieve Cheney and Rumsfeld's aims of toppling Hussein.
But in many other respects, Cheney, Wolfowitz, and Rumsfeld were allowed to dominate the NSC on Iraq. Rice "relished [an] opportunity to rein in the State Department ... . But there was less effort to rein in Rumsfeld" when the secretary of defense did not follow the president's policy instructions and tried to scuttle the peace process, says one observer close to several cabinet members. As [i]Time [/i]magazine reported in April, Pentagon officials simply "skipped meetings of Rice's group that was planning for a postwar Iraq."
Again, on a central part of the conservative worldview -- attacking Iraq -- any dissenters were purged, and any sustained self-reflection inside the NSC seemed impossible. In the summer of 2002, Ben Miller, an NSC Iraq expert on loan from the CIA, was dismissed from the council, an acquaintance says, because he did not agree that Iraq was a gathering threat.
In speeches, Rice began linking Hussein's regime to al-Qaeda, and she mimicked Cheney's rhetoric about the threat of Iraq's supposed nuclear program with the now-infamous phrase, "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."
Greg Thielmann, former head of the proliferation-analysis office of the State Department's intelligence bureau believes that Rice ignored any evidence from the State Department that contradicted the administration's assessments of Hussein's weapons-of-mass-destructi on programs.
On talk shows, Rice told the public that aluminum tubes that Iraq had been trying to purchase were used as centrifuges for enriching uranium, though many intelligence analysts strongly disputed this claim. In fact, shortly after the Iraq War ended, the United States found two suspicious mobile trailers in Iraq. Thielmann says the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency rushed out an intelligence white paper saying that the trailers had been used for making weapons of mass destruction -- without waiting for U.S experts to examine them closely or including the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research in the white-paper deliberations. These Winnebagos of mass destruction turned out to be unrelated to biological or chemical weapons production.
Worse, Rice did not guide the planning for postwar Iraq, which quickly descended into chaos and has lately morphed into something worse. In the fall of 2003, Rice finally tried to exert more control over the Iraq reconstruction process, with the White House announcing last October that she would take a more central role in approving decisions having to do with the U.S. occupation. The [i]Washington Post [/i]quoted officials as saying that the change would allow Rice to "crack the whip." Of course, as the[i] Post's [/i]Glenn Kessler and Peter Slevin noted, this October announcement was "met by puzzlement throughout the foreign-policy community," which wondered, "Isn't that what the national-security adviser is supposed to do in the first place?"
Today, speculation is mounting about whether Rice would stay on for a second Bush term. She has not ruled out leaving the administration, but has also been mentioned as a possible secretary of state, though friends have said she may want to take some time away from government. But while Rice may be tired of the interagency strife, she has not used her frustration to fix the NSC process, or to rein in the hawks. She has also refused to backtrack on many of her prewar claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, or Iraq's links to al-Qaeda. Powell and Rumsfeld continue to clash publicly. The administration remains divided over what role the United Nations should play in a post-U.S. occupation of Iraq. Rice continues to marginalize Foggy Bottom and, even today, focus her energies on the same priorities that obsessed conservatives in the 1990s. The White House has made little effort to try to understand some of the broader causes of terrorism, has focused on changing regimes in states that it believes foster terrorism, and has not spent enough time combating al-Qaeda's medieval theology with American democratic ideology (rather than just with force).
Then again, how could Rice have been intellectually capable of doing any different? She was the perfect child of 1990s conservatism, formed by the leaders of the movement while the conservatives were in exile. When the exiles stormed the barricades, they took their echo-chamber worldview with them into power. And while the media have often focused on the domestic implications of the Bush administration's conservatism -- its fealty to tax cuts above all else, its focus on big business at the expense of a truly level economic playing field -- it is this intellectual scandal, this failure to adapt to the world, that has ended up costing America the most.
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| Join the Call to Action for Impeachment of the Corrupt Bush Regime ... |
| 04.15.04 (6:06 pm) [edit] |
[b]Join the Call for an [i]Impeachment Inquiry [/i]of Bush and Cheney[/b]
[u][b]Help us Get Congress to Take Action[/b][/u]
You can help the call for an [i]impeachment inquiry [/i]of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. Sign our online Petition on http://www.votenader.org/get_... .
George W. Bush and Dick Cheney should be [i]impeached[/i] for two reasons:
1. They led the United States into an illegal, unconstitutional war in Iraq.
2. They misled the Congress and the American people with five falsehoods that led to war.
All it takes is one Member of the House of Representatives to call for an [i]Impeachment Inquiry [/i]to start the process to investigate the two grounds. If the House then votes by a simple majority for Articles of Impeachment, the Senate would then undertake a trial of the President and Vice President. They would only be convicted, and impeached, if two-thirds of the Senate agrees.
Ralph Nader has issued a press release http://www.votenader.org/medi... urging an impeachment inquiry that provides more details on these points.
The purpose of this petition is to show Congress that people in their district support an[i] impeachment inquiry [/i]of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and will stand up for fact-finding for truth if a member of Congress has the courage to start the Inquiry.
[b]Source:[/b]
Nader's Petition for Impeachment on http://www.votenader.org/get_...
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| Bremer is 'Powerless to Restrain the US Military' ... |
| 04.15.04 (4:56 pm) [edit] |
[b]Divisions within the US leadership in Baghdad are hampering negotiations to end the stand-off between the radical cleric Muqtada Sadr and the 2,500 American troops who are surrounding him.[/b]
Sadr, who has taken refuge with his black-clad militiamen in the holy city of Najaf in southern Iraq, has dropped all conditions for talks with the US. Previously he demanded that US soldiers leave Najaf, free his followers who had been arrested and end the siege of Fallujah.
"It is very difficult to know who is taking the decisions on the American side," said Hussain al-Shahristani, an influential Shia figure, in an interview with The Independent. "You hear one thing from [Paul] Bremer [the chief US civilian official] and another thing from the US army."
Earlier in the week negotiators persuaded Sadr to order his Army of the Mehdi militiamen to withdraw from police stations in Najaf, only to hear a few hours later the US army announce its intention to kill or capture the young clergyman. Foreign diplomats, Coalition Provisional Authority officials and Iraqi politicians also say that Mr Bremer, though it was he who first sought a confrontation with Sadr by closing his newspaper, has very little influence on decisions taken by the US military.
The US Marines have undertaken to subdue Fallujah, west of Baghdad, apparently without regard for civilian casualties. Doctors in the local hospital estimate these to total more than 600 dead and 1,200 wounded, many of them women and children. Iraqi politicians believe that Mr Bremer knows the siege is provoking a backlash against the occupation, but cannot restrain the US military.
"There will be a massacre if the Americans go into Najaf," declared Dr Shahristani. He pointed out that the office of Sadr is close to the holy shrine of Imam Ali, sacred to 130 million Shias, which would certainly be damaged in the fighting. If Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the revered religious leader of the Iraqi Shia, strongly condemns an American incursion then Shia leaders believe that there will be an uprising all over Iraq.
Earlier Sadr said: "I fear only God. I am ready to sacrifice my blood for this country. I call on the Iraqi people not to let my killing put an end to their rejection of the [American] occupation."
Dr Shahristani, imprisoned for many years by Saddam Hussein until he escaped during the 1991 Shia uprising, said there was less likelihood of fighting in Kerbala, where Sadr's forces are weaker. But in Najaf his militiamen control the shrine of Imam Ali, with its golden dome, in the centre of the city.
He estimated that "some 15 per cent of Iraqi Shias support Sadr and the same proportion dislike him intensely. The majority do not accept his methods but they think that he has been unfairly treated by the US when they closed his newspaper and arrested or shot at his supporters".
Sadr appears eager to defuse the crisis. He has asked the supreme Shia authority in Iraq, the Marjaiya, to negotiate terms with members of the US-appointed Iraqi Governing Council. An Iranian foreign ministry delegation has arrived in Baghdad to help resolve the crisis.
The seriousness of the situation facing the Americans in Iraq was underlined yesterday when US forces said that they had lost 87 soldiers killed and 560 wounded in the past two weeks. The total far exceeds the number of US casualties in the first two weeks of the war last year.
The US army commanders, going by their statements, appear to have little understanding of the political cost of their actions this month. General Richard Myers, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, said yesterday in Kuwait that "Sadr's recent activities have further marginalised him and he is in a very weak position".
Many Shia observers disagree, saying that the American pursuit of Sadr, who was previously seen as a maverick, has gained him the reputation of a martyr among the Shia and he is much more popular than he was before.
[b]Source:[/b]
"Bremer 'is powerless to restrain the US military'" by Patrick Cockburn, Independent UK on http://news.independent.co.uk...
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| Milk & Honey & Flip-Flops & Votes ... |
| 04.15.04 (4:51 pm) [edit] |
[b]Why would Bush go against decades of U.S. policy and flip-flop in his previous statements (not to mention the various UN and Geneva violations) to green-light Ariel Sharon's land grab?[/b] The decision, characterized http://www.nytimes.com/2004/0... as a 'costly blow...to America's credibility as an honest broker for a Middle East peace,' may even endanger our security as 'moderate Arab nations — as well as the European allies, for that matter — are furious...' And why such a drastic decision so close to November?
Some suspect an electoral[i] tit for tat[/i]. http://www.thenation.com/doc.... In exchange for the Bush stamp of approval, a huge boost for Sharon as he faces opposition from the most right-wing elements of his coalition, Sharon will: 'give Bush's declining popularity a boost when he helps the US President reframe our current war against the people of Iraq as a struggle against terrorism.'
Yet there are other possiblities whose benefits are more direct. The most obvious is the Jewish vote. As some key states boast sizable Jewish communities (Ohio, Illinois, New Jersey, Florida), it's easy to see why Bush might seek to court them. Yet in the 2000 election the overwhelming majority of American Jews voted Democrat — roughly 80%. And this time, though early polls have shown a bit more support for the president, some predict http://washingtontimes.com/na... that further erosion of the separation of church and state and even Bush's enthusiasm over 'The Passion' are likely to send fence-sitters back to the Democrats.
If Bush's unabashedly pro-Sharon policies have been in service of the Jewish vote, it's been less than successful. According to one Jewish leader http://washingtontimes.com/na... : 'given the effort the White House has made to court the Jewish vote, I have to imagine that Karl Rove has got to be upset about the small size of those gains.'
Another, less publicized, possibility is the increasing support for Sharon's policies among American Evangelicals — a group whose support Bush absolutely depends on. According to Evangelical theology, Jesus will only return when the biblical land of Israel is reclaimed by the Jews. And, indeed, a recent poll showed http://www.religionnews.com/p... that more American Evangelicals supported Israel's controversial assassination of a Hamas spiritual leader than even Israelis themselves did.
[b]Source:[/b]
AlterNet, http://www.alternet.org
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| Bush in "Over-His-Head": U.S. Officials Can't Agree On How To Clean-Up Their Own Fiasco In Iraq!!! |
| 04.15.04 (11:02 am) [edit] |
[b]The corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta[/i] can't even agree internally on how to clean-up their own fiasco in Iraq!!! Dumb Dubya [i]ain't[/i] a leader ... [/b]The numb-skull Dubya is clearly [i]too stupid [/i]to be President and is clearly in "[i]over-his-head[/i]" ... Isn't it time for a President able to set direction, ask the right questions, and for goodness sake: THINK??? ... It sure as hell,[i] ain't [/i]Bush!!! ...
Consider "[b]'Americans at odds on right approach'[/b]" by [i]Owen Bowcott,[/i] the Guardian UK, on http://politics.guardian.co.u...,11538,1192167,00.html :
The former British envoy to Baghdad Sir Jeremy Greenstock acknowledged yesterday that US officials had differed on how to deal with Iraq.
But speaking two weeks after leaving his last foreign posting for retirement in London, he dismissed reports of a fundamental split between US and British officials in the Coalition Provisional Authority.
Michael Rubin, a former US official in the CPA, has claimed that the relations between Sir Jeremy and Paul Bremer, the US chief representative and head of the CPA, had become uncooperative.
"Most British diplomats don't agree with President [Bush's] agenda," Mr Rubin was reported to have told the Daily Telegraph.
Yesterday Sir Jeremy told the Guardian: "I have never met Mr Rubin. He has not sat in on any of my meetings. I don't recognise the characterisation he has put on the relationship I had with Bremer. It's rubbish. We had the closest of relationships I have ever seen between two countries.
"Bremer was the boss. I supported his work and his decisions. There were many more disagreements between Americans and Americans. We were all part of the same team. I think the two approaches [military and political] complemented each other."
American diplomats are reported to have believed that British officials pursued a policy of avoiding confrontation, and suspected that they were repeating the mistakes of the British occupation in the 1920s, which culminated in a Shia revolt.
"There was never any discussion about how we thought we were in the right because we ran the place 90 years ago," Sir Jeremy said.
He endorsed America's use of military force to subdue the forces led by Moqtada al-Sadr.
Sir Jeremy is due to take up a post with the Ditchley Foundation, founded to promote Anglo-American links, in the summer.
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| Fallujah Ceasefire Broken: Bush's Blood-thirsty Massacres Continue Unabated ... |
| 04.15.04 (10:37 am) [edit] |
[b]The corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc.[i] junta [/i]must be thrilled to watch their own blood-thirsty massacres of their own inept making, [i]continue unabated [/i]... [/b]AWOL Dubya, Creep-[i]N[/i]-Veep Cheney and all the rest of the cowardly neo-con arm-chair chicken-hawks who [i]lust[/i] for illegal and immoral warfare to enrich themselves and their traitorous war-profiteers (Halliburton, Bechtel, Carlyle Group, Unocal, Big Oil, the Military Industrial Complex, etc.) are enjoying this war for war-profits and global hegemony [i]that they won't sacrifice for, or go into battle themselves to fight [/i]... Oh no,[i] they send the rest of us to go fight and die[/i], and ask [i]the rest of us to bear their criminal costs in U.S. taxpayer dollars stolen from the U.S. Treasury by the Bushies (while they give themselves immoral tax cuts for corporations and the rich) [/i]-- Meanwhile, AWOL Dubya 'swans off' on vacation to his Saddam-Hussein-style Crawford Palace and they all get [i]richer and richer by swindling, plundering and looting the U.S. Taxpayers & Iraqi people[/i], while [i]sitting on their fat asses while others are massacred, maimed-for-life and miserably impoverished [/i]...
Call upon Congress http://www.congress.org to [i]impeach[/i] the insanely criminal and incompetent Bush regime for perpetrating their unconscionable[i] Crimes Against Humanity [/i]... It is outrageous that this[i] never-ending blood-shed [/i]should continue[i] day-in-and-day-out[/i] in an illegal and immoral neo-con, neo-fascist war waged based upon treasonous lies, deceptions and falsehoods regarding phony WMDs and a phony non-existent threat posed to our national security, fabricated by the corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta[/i] in order to intimidate, scare and enslave us ...
Read "[b]Falluja ceasefire broken[/b]" on http://english.aljazeera.net/...
Occupation forces in Iraq have used F16 fighter planes to bomb the Nizal neighbourhood in Falluja, [i]Aljazeera TV's[/i] correspondent has reported.
He also said the occupation on Tuesday pushed several tanks through the only open gateway used as an exit for Iraqi families in an apparent violation of the latest ceasefire in Falluja.
"The invading forces were met with fierce resistance by the Falluja defenders which forced the US tanks into a quick withdrawal," correspondent Abd Al-Adhim Muhammad reported.
"Five were killed and several others injured in the battles between the resistance fighters and the occupation troops."
The US fighter planes dropped stun bombs to cover their troops withdrawal, he added.
[b]US denial[/b]
But occupation troops denied any violation of the ceasefire.
"Up to this moment and based on my sources, there is no violation ... but as we have always said, the coalition forces have the right to defend themselves in case there were violations by the other side," Garth Billy, occupation authority spokesperson said in an interview with [i]Aljazeera TV[/i].
Billy also denied the US is targeting civilians.
"There are very clear rules of engagement in every battle. The coalition forces follow specific, deliberate and strong rules of conduct. Thus, among our basic objectives is to minimise the number of innocent civilian casualties.
"But I may add that some fighters are 100% ready to put themselves in hospitals, schools and houses. As a result, there were civilian casualties, which is something tragic. We prefer if those fighters would come out into neutral zones to fight against the coalition forces."
[b]US helicopter downed[/b]
Also on Tuesday, a US MH-53 helicopter crashed southeast of Falluja and marines who rushed to secure the crash site came under attack and sustained casualties.
A Marine officer said it was not known how many people were aboard the helicopter, which can carry up to 55 people.
He said the aircraft which crashed on Tuesday did not belong to the Marine Corps, but to another US government agency.
Witnesses told Aljazeera it was hit by ground fire during heavy fighting in the area.
The officer said marines sent to the crash site, about 20km southeast of Falluja, came under attack and sustained unspecified casualties.
As the marines were taking the casualties to a trauma centre, they were ambushed by fighters firing mortars and rocket-propelled grenades and suffered more casualties, the officer said, without giving further details.
The crash came just two days after an Apache helicopter was downed by fighters in the same area with the loss of two crewmen.
[b]Falluja ceasefire [/b]
The temporary ceasefire announced on Sunday was renewed late on Monday, said Iraqi negotiators.
A delegation representing the Association of Muslim Scholars (AMS) and the Iraqi Islamic party was sent to Falluja for a third round of negotiations on Monday. The AMS is the highest Sunni authority in Iraq.
The main sticking point is who will take responsibility for security after US forces withdraw, reported Muhammad.
Residents are calling for Iraqi police and civil defence units from the city to replace the troops.
For its part, US forces want to secure promises that they will not be attacked during the withdrawal.
The occupation besieged Falluja, 65km west of Baghdad, nine days ago in an effort to crush the resistance in the city of 300,000. Troops had completely sealed the city, preventing anyone from entering or leaving.
[b]Civilian toll mounts[/b]
Since then, the toll among Iraqis in Falluja has topped 700 and another 1200 have been injured, according to medical and US military personnel.
On the ground, minor skirmishes have broken out since the ceasefire, but the situation has been relatively calm.
Iraqi fighters in the Golan neighbourhood, the scene of fierce battles last week, continued to patrol the streets. They have vowed to resume fighting if occupation troops break the ceasefire.
Medical sources at Falluja's only functioning hospital said the main injuries being treated were gunshot wounds inflicted by US snipers, reported our correspondent.
He spoke to civilians at the hospital who said they were fleeing the city when they came under attack. There were several casualties, including a child, the distraught father told him.
Elsewhere, mortar rounds slammed into central Baghdad's busy district on Tuesday, killing an Iraqi motorist, witnesses said.
One bomb landed in a busy street, killing a driver and gouging a crater in the road. Another sent smoke rising from the so-called Green Zone which houses the occupation headquarters. There were no reports of casualties. A third round hit a parking lot by the Tigris.
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| Why Al Qaeda Desperately Want Bush Re-(s)elected To Make Their Lives Easy!!! |
| 04.15.04 (9:21 am) [edit] |
[b]Food for thought ... A must-read is "[i]The House of Bush, House of Saud[/i]" http://www.buzzflash.com/prem... that clearly shows how the Bush Crime Family colluded with the Saudi Royal Family to cover-up their sordid and squalid criminal activities and betray our nation ... Bush let the bin Laden family escape from American on 9/11 and has covered-up the Saudis involvement in 9/11, and instead waged an illegal and immoral war upon Iraq (that had nothing to do with 9/11 and no WMDs ...) ...
"Al Qaeda will want Bush back" [/b]
[i]As we approach November, Bin Laden and his associates will increase the frequency and intensity of their attacks to ensure that George W Bush Wins. Al Qaeda will be determined to make security a bigger issue than economy.[/i]
Most recently we have seen two examples of Al Qaeda’s political acumen. Their attack in Spain was so well timed that it swung the elections in favour of the anti-war socialist party.
The second instance of Al Qaeda’s political smarts is the recent incessant attacks against soft targets in Iraq and on American troops to underscore the absence of security and stability in Iraq. It probably prevented President George W Bush from having another ‘top gun’ electoral campaign moment on the anniversary of the Iraq invasion.
These attacks have sent the message to the world that America’s invasion of Iraq has increased terrorism not decreased it. Instead of making the world a safer place, America has now endangered its allies as the attacks on Spain and Turkey suggest.
Al Qaeda not only seems to understand the nature of politics and media in democratic societies but also knows how to work the system to gain strategic advantages.
It would be naïve to assume that Al Qaeda will not vote in the coming American elections in November 2004. The issue that we must ponder is how it’s going to cast its ballot? To understand how Al Qaeda will vote, we must try to figure out whom it will prefer in the White House, Bush or Kerry?
If John Kerry wins in November he will probably make the following changes in American foreign policy:
1. He will roll back American unilateralism and seek more international cooperation from Europe, South Asia, Middle East and the UN. Instead of a coalition of the coerced, Kerry will seek a truly international coalition. Coalitions built through a multilateral process will present fewer fissures in the anti-terror campaign for Al Qaeda to exploit.
2. Most probably John Kerry will be interested in reducing rather than expanding the scope and objectives of counter-terrorism. Neocon goals such as reshaping the Middle East, reforming Islam, reconstituting the United States defence doctrines and redefining old Europe, will be abandoned and under Kerry the US will concentrate more on eliminating Al Qaeda and associates than anything else.
3. Much of soft anti-Americanism worldwide is a result of anti-Bushism. Regardless of what Americans think, most of the world finds President Bush uncouth, obnoxious, arrogant, crude and a bully. His defeat itself will reduce anti-Americanism globally and will increase American prospects for victory in this war on terror.
Will Al Qaeda be happy with these developments? I doubt it. Anti-Bushism has helped them divide the world and the growing anger in the Muslim world as a result of George Bush’s policies has helped them gain recruits, clones and support. If Bush loses in November they will lose an important asset. Al Qaeda will become the sole target of US energies and surely that must be a disturbing thought to even those who relish the idea of dying while fighting America.
If George W Bush wins in spite of a terrible economy and millions of job losses:
1. He might interpret the victory as an endorsement of his anti-terror strategy and probably continue to expand the scope and objectives of his war on terror. Perhaps regime changes in Iran, Syria, Egypt and Saudi Arabia may be back on the ‘to do’ list. It is possible that Spain may also figure on the list of regime changes.
2. It is also possible that many European and Middle Eastern states may stop cooperating with the US. Already many nations resent President Bush’s policies and style, they may begin to actively oppose his global agenda. The easiest way to do so is to withdraw from the coalition and call for more UN participation. We might see more and more nations following Spain’s example and disengaging from the American bandwagon.
All of the above will help Al Qaeda pursue its strategic goals: undermine the West, hurt Americans and American interests, destabilise politics and economies in South Asia and the Middle East and cement the growing cleavages between the US and Europe and the US and the Muslim World.
It is in Al Qaeda’s interest that President Bush stays in the White House. Thus at the moment they are anti-American but Pro-Bush. Come November they will vote for Bush. How you may ask?
Fear is the key. If the American voters feel reasonably secure on the terrorism issue then they will focus on economy, unemployment and on cultural issues such as the gay marriage controversy.
If at the time of the elections the priorities of American voters are:
(1) Economy, (2) Culture, and then (3) Security, or
(1)Economy, (2) Security and (3) Culture, John Kerry will probably win.
However if by November the voter is either thinking:
(1) Security, (2) Culture and then (3) Economy, Bush will win with a landslide and if the voter is thinking:
(1) Security, (2) Economy and (3) Culture, Bush may win narrowly.
Al Qaeda can make security a more pressing issue than economy by increasing their activities and even by targeting America again. Karl Rove, the president’s political guru will probably work to ensure that culture continues to figure in the American voter’s mind.
But if Bin Laden and Al Zawahiri are both arrested/killed soon, then security will be out of the reckoning and Kerry will win unless new jobs are created in hurry.
As we approach November, Bin Laden and his associates will increase the frequency and intensity of their attacks to ensure that George W Bush Wins. Al Qaeda will be determined to make security a bigger issue than economy so the worse the economy gets the worse terrorism we are likely to see.
[b]Dr. Muqtedar Khan is a Non-resident fellow at Brookings Institution. He is also the Chair, Political Science, at Adrian College in Michigan. He is the author of American Muslims: Bridging Faith and Freedom (Amana, 2002)[/b] - http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/...
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| Let Us Call for Open Government ... |
| 04.15.04 (9:03 am) [edit] |
[b]The corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta[/i] are criminally transforming our nation into a 3rd world-style military dictatorship and neo-con neo-fascist tyrannical war machine serving their Global Corporate Empire ... [/b]Dubya has only held 11 press conferences to-date in his sordid neo-hitlerian presidency ... (In the same period of time, both his father and Clinton held 72 press conferences ... [i]Hmmm ... but then Dubya ain't so good at thinking, speaking or answering questions because he is so obviously stupid [/i]...)
We need to return to a democratic form of government ... an open and transparent form of government ... Ironically, Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Powell, Wolfowitz and their neo-con cabal of fascist liars, thieves, traitors and criminals all criticized Saddam Hussein for his 'closed' and 'secretive' government that hid from his people-- and these hypocrites called for 'transparency' in Iraqi government ... [i]Hmmm[/i] ... These neo-orwellian thugs and neo-con goons in the Bush regime love to[i] tell the Big Lie [/i]and [i]Commit Crimes against Us[/i] that they hypocritically condemn others for perpetrating upon their people ...
[b]Statement of John Podesta
[i]On Open Government[/i][/b]
President Bush has led the most secretive administration in modern memory, blocking open debate over issues of critical importance to all Americans. Now more than ever, we need an engaged and alert public, ready to confront the challenges before us. Instead, the Bush administration has sought to avoid accountability by keeping the public in the dark.
The [i]Center for American Progress [/i]is part of a new coalition, OpenTheGovernment.org, which today released a report identifying the "Ten Most Wanted Documents" that are being withheld from the public. Topping this list is the administration's refusal to declassify 28 pages from Congress' report on pre-9/11 intelligence failures. Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL), the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, estimated that "95 percent of that information could be declassified" without harming national security. Nonetheless, the administration has continued to stonewall, reportedly because the report contains information embarrassing to Saudi Arabia, which the administration has sought to protect.
Also making the most-wanted list are documents on PATRIOT Act implementation, treatment of post-9/11 detainees, and no-bid contracts for companies like Halliburton. (For the full list, see www.OpenTheGovernment.org on http://openthegovernment.org/... )
This penchant for secrecy undermines America's founding principles. Without reasonable access to government information, the public is unable to evaluate whether the administration is behaving responsibly and in the public interest. Excessive secrecy undercuts confidence in the workings of our government. It's time to let the sunshine in.
[b]Source:[/b]
[i][b]John D. Podesta is the president and chief executive officer of the[i] Center for American Progress[/i]. He served as chief of staff to President Bill Clinton[/b][/i]. The[i] Center for American Progress [/i]on http://www.americanprogress.o...
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| Ideological Hegemony: Thought Control in America!!! ... |
| 04.14.04 (4:41 pm) [edit] |
In June 2003 a[i] Washington Post-ABC News [/i]poll found that about 1 in 4 Americans (incorrectly) believed Iraq had used weapons of mass destruction during the recent war with the United States. [1] A separate poll in the same month found that 34% of Americans believed the United States had already found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. [2] In September another poll found that 69% of Americans believed Saddam Hussein was personally involved in 9-11. [3] Even the Bush administration has been forced to admit that these claims are not true. These misconceptions are the outcome of a system of thought control called ideological hegemony. Hegemony operates through many mechanisms including the media, education system, newspeak and others with the primary function of maintaining support for the dominant socio-economic system in the United States.
In all class societies, the ruling class can maintain control through violence and/or ideology. If the majority can be persuaded that the rule of the ruling class is legitimate then it can be maintained with less violence. Examples of ideologies that serve this function include the divine right of kings, social Darwinism and Marxism-Leninism. All of them acted to legitimize the rule of specific elites in certain societies and helped those elites maintain power. Some hierarchical societies rely more on violence, others rely more on ideology. The United States relies more on ideology, although a certain degree of force is used.
In Russia prior to 1905 there were a number of large peasant revolts over the centuries that could have potentially threatened the power of the monarchy. However, all such revolts did not see the monarchy as the problem. They assumed that it was various “bad apples” which caused their problems, not the social system. The rebels believed the oppressive actions the monarchy took were the result of bad advisers, corrupt officials or other glitches in the system - but never the outcome of having a monarchy. This belief that the monarchy was not to blame, the system just needed a few reforms, helped prevent the system from being overthrown as most rebellions against the monarchy didn’t seek to overthrow it. The monarchy did not fall until after most stopped believing that the problems were the result of “bad apples” rather than being inherent in a monarchical system.
Ideological hegemony in the United States operates in a similar manner. Certain fundamental principles are never questioned - capitalism, private property, the state, imperialism and other assumptions. So long as those fundamental principles are not questioned debates can rage back & forth and all sorts of different positions can be formulated. The more vigorous the debate is the more it will tend to shore up the status quo as it will make society seem more open and pluralistic than it really is. Thought is bounded, with liberalism on one end, conservativism on the other end and various other ideologies in-between (I count libertarian capitalism as being within this spectrum). The legitimacy of private property, the state, etc. is always assumed.
For example, it is generally assumed that most US interventions into other countries in recent history are intended to be benevolent. Some may argue that such interventions don’t have the positive effects their supports desire or that they aren’t worth the costs, but the assumption that the US acts with benevolent intentions, even if it makes mistakes sometimes, is assumed to be true. Similar assumptions are made about capitalism, the state, etc. Some may argue these things need to be reformed but the vast majority assumes they are legitimate. So long as that assumption is held by a large majority of Americans the system will be secure, just as the monarchy was secure in Russia when the vast majority assumed its legitimacy. Anyone dissatisfied with the status quo will end up being drawn to various reform schemes, voting for different politicians and the like instead of supporting the overthrow of the system.
These assumptions are both shared by the vast majority of Americans and transmitted to the populace through a variety of mechanisms. In an important sense hegemony, once established, is self-perpetuating. Those who believe in these ideas, to varying degrees, tend to advocate and promote them, passing them on to others and to the next generation. These values are also transmitted, often indirectly, in movies, novels, scholarship, entertainment and other forms of communication that reaches large numbers of people. This isn’t necessarily intentional or explicit.
Critics play an important role in perpetuating ideological hegemony. If even the most ardent critics of the current regime share these basic assumptions then it will serve to reinforce those assumptions. If even they share these assumptions then even fewer will question them, as doing so would seem insane. Those dissatisfied with the status quo will tend to become involved with movements and ideologies that accept these fundamental principles and therefore will not represent much of a threat to the dominant socio-economic system.
The kind of ideological hegemony that operates in America is different from the mechanisms used by totalitarian states to maintain control. Totalitarian societies tend to rely more on violence to control the population, although they usually also have an ideology to support the status quo. The United States does occasionally use violence to control dissent, such as the frame up of Sherman Austin, and has around 100 political prisoners. [4] However, force is not used against dissidents on nearly the scale it is in totalitarian states, where dissidents are systemically rounded up. Most dissidents in the United States can criticize the government with low odds of going to jail for it. So long as their ideas are kept marginalized, so long as the vast majority continues to believe in the system, dissidents do not represent much of a threat to the status quo. Allowing most dissidents to exist, but marginalizing their views, actually strengthens hegemony because it makes the system seem freer and more open. In a totalitarian system the spectrum is narrower and all dissent is suppressed, while the ideological hegemony that exists in the United States just marginalizes dissent, instead of suppressing it, and acts to insure that most people continue to believe in the system.
Neither ideological hegemony nor the existence of an elite ruling over the United States is some giant conspiracy. They are both the outcome of the way American society is set up and a long historical evolution. Hegemony is the result of the way the media, education system and other institutions are set up and have evolved. The structure of the system is such that those who are outside the liberal-conservative spectrum tend to be weeded out when rising up the hierarchy for positions involved in perpetuating hierarchy (editors, teachers, etc.), not as the result of a conspiracy but as the result of the way the system operates, and those who are not weeded out are marginalized. Whenever any society is divided into hierarchies (rich and poor, powerful and powerless) an elite is formed consisting of those on the top of the hierarchy. Several centralized, hierarchical institutions including large corporations, a powerful military and a bureaucratic state run the United States. Those on the top of these institutions, what sociologist C. Wright Mills called the power elite, have far greater power, wealth and prestige than those below them.
Hegemony operates through many institutions and mechanisms. The news media reinforces it by emphasizing facts that are consistent with the liberal-conservative spectrum while downplaying facts that might cast down on it. The education system reinforces hegemony by training the population to obey authority and indoctrinating children with the fundamental principles underlying hegemony, principles which they usually continue to believe as adults. Both of these largely exclude dissident views. Hegemony is written into the very structure of our language, through a process called newspeak. And there are also other elements to hegemony, but these are the main ones addressed here. In addition, some of these institutions have functions other than directly reinforcing hegemony. The education system is a kind of Keynesianism and the media helps create artificial scarcity, for example. These other functions are not examined here, the focus is on how each of these institutions acts to create and reinforce ideological hegemony.
[b]The Media [/b]
There are many models about how the news media works. One is the “fair and objective” model that asserts that, for the most part, the media objectively and fairly report on the events of the day and give an accurate picture of reality. Overall, coverage is balanced and does not reflect any ideological bias. One variant of this is the idea that the media are highly critical of the powers that be and act to expose government or corporate abuse & wrongdoing. Another model is the “liberal bias” theory, which asserts that the media is biased in favor of liberalism. A third theory is the propaganda model, which asserts that the media as a whole is neither liberal nor conservative but acts as propaganda for the interests of business, political and military elites. Within the media, the “fair and objective” model is the theory promoted the most. The “liberal bias” theory is not promoted by the media as much, but one can still find it advocated within the media. The propaganda model almost never referred to within the media and most of the exceptions are criticisms of it. The evidence favors the propaganda model by a large margin, and overwhelmingly disproves the “fair and objective” model.
In the United States the media are for-profit companies and usually owned by other large corporations. Those who manage and control these corporations, the business elite, have common interests with other members of the business elite and with the state. The media are also dependant on other corporations for advertising, from which they derive their main revenue. The products they produce are not their shows; the products they produce are audiences, which they sell to advertisers. Advertisers tend to prefer wealthier audiences to poorer ones because wealthier ones are more likely to be able to afford their products and to be able to buy larger quantities of their products. You don’t see many advertisements geared towards homeless people. Thus what the media produces tends to be geared towards attracting the wealthier, and tends to go along with their prejudices and beliefs. The media also depends disproportionately on the government as a news source. These factors act to mold what the media reports. Coverage tends to stay within the liberal-conservative spectrum; things outside of it are marginalized. Unlike a totalitarian system, they aren’t necessarily 100% excluded but are marginalized.
Corporate ownership of news media creates a huge conflict of interest. Shortly after [i]ABC[/i] (including the [i]ABC [/i]radio network) was acquired by Disney Jim Hightower’s leftist talk show, which was very critical of Disney, was cancelled. [5] In 1998 [i]ABC[/i] cancelled a [i]20/20 story [/i]that investigated allegations that Disney allowed known child molesters to gain employment at Disney World without a background check. [6] Things aren’t always that direct, though. Only the wealthy can afford to set up a newspaper with a wide circulation or a major news network. Others are excluded, and so the news tends to reflect the views of the wealthy owners while the less wealthy tend to be excluded even if there is no explicit censorship policy.
The dependency on advertising for revenue also influences coverage. A survey of 55 members of the Society of American Business Editors and Writers at the society’s 1992 conference found that 80% believed advertiser pressure was a growing problem and that 45 percent knew of instances where news coverage was compromised by advertiser pressure. [7] In 2001[i] NBC [/i]agreed to run ads for Amazon.com during certain programs, including news programs like [i]Today, on NBC[/i], [i]CNBC and MSNBC [/i]in exchange for a percentage of the sales generated. Riverside, California’s Press-Enterprise had a box in their March 8th, 2001 newspaper that read, "More than 125,000 daily Press-Enterprise readers have eaten at a Mexican restaurant in the past 30 days. Advertise your restaurant in Riverside and San Bernardino for under $250.00 and get a free feature story." [8] The influence of advertisers isn’t always this direct and explicit, though. A publication which ran stories critical of corporate power and which questioned the dominant socio-economic system could not expect to get much advertising from those same corporations, even if such stories were only a small percentage of content. It would be unable to compete in the marketplace, thus the pro-corporate publications tend to dominate the media.
The media is also dependent on its supply of “raw materials” (information), which tend to come disproportionately from the government and, to a lesser extent, big business. For example, the allegations about President Bush going AWOL when he was in the National Guard were known for years and circulated in left-wing circles in the run up to the 2000 election but were mostly ignored by the media. It wasn’t until early 2004 that the media paid much attention to this, because a powerful democrat (John Kerry) decided to bring it up and attack Bush with it, causing it to become a big issue. The media implicitly takes the point of view of the American government, referring to government military forces as “our” troops and “our” fighters, as if the networks owned them. They identify with the actions of the government. The invasion of Iraq provides another example of this. Sixty-three percent of sources on [i]ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer Reports, Fox’s Special Report with Brit Hume, and PBS’s NewsHour With Jim Lehrer [/i]in the first three weeks of the invasion were government officials or ex-officials, giving it a strong pro-war slant. Anti-war sources made up 10% of all sources and only 3% of US guests. Polls at the time showed over 25% of Americans were anti-war. [9]
There are many other examples of these factors acting to slant the news. There is a major controversy over the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq but this is not the first time in recent memory that a President’s excuse for war has been proven false. Clinton bombed Yugoslavia over the allegation that it was committing genocide in Kosovo, but a subsequent NATO investigation found fewer than 3,000 corpses, both civilian and military, on all sides. NATO’s own figures state that 2000 people died on both sides in the year of fighting prior to the bombing. Just as there is little evidence to support the claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, there is also little evidence to support the claim that Yugoslavia was engaging in genocide in Kosovo. [10] This failure to find evidence of genocide did not cause a controversy for Clinton, nor did the discrediting of Bush the first’s lies over the Gulf War create a controversy. This is because of the guerilla war against American troops in Iraq, which did not happen in Yugoslavia or the Gulf War. This has both kept Iraq in the news and caused a large portion of the elite (including the business class that owns and funds the media) to come to the conclusion that the invasion was a mistake and/or Bush bungled it. Opposition politicians and dissatisfied government officials have brought attention to the failures to find WMDs and other controversies surrounding the war by criticizing Bush for it. In Yugoslavia and other cases politicians & government officials didn’t criticize the President over the fraudulent nature of his pretexts for war, and so after the war the media followed the lead of the government and devoted little coverage to it. Government officials & ex-officials still dominate news coverage, both positive and negative. Seventy-six percent of all sources in stories about Iraq on [i]ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News[/i] in October 2003 were current or former government or military officials. [11]
In the summer of 2003 the media started raising the issue of Bush’s “16 words” in his state of the union address alleging that Iraq sought to buy uranium from “a country in Africa.” The documents used to support this assertion were shown to be a crude forgery by the International Atomic Energy Association in March, but the media didn’t pay much attention to it until the summer. The reason is that prominent democrats ignored it until the summer when they used it to attack Bush, at which point the media then started paying attention to the story. The democrats act as a left-wing limit to debates within the media and the republicans a right-wing limit. If they both agree on something then there is usually little debate on the issue.
Western media rarely reports the names of the various groups engaged in the guerilla war against the US occupation. This aids the government’s propaganda that they are all “Saddam remnants” and “foreign terrorists.” Here is a partial list of groups involved in the insurgency:
*Active Religious Seminary *Al-Anbar Armed Brigades *Al-Faruq Brigades *Armed Vanguards of Mohammad's Second Army *Black Banner Organization *General Command of the Armed Forces, Resistance and Liberation in Iraq *General Secretariat for the Liberation of Democratic Iraq *Harvest of the Iraqi Resistance *Hasad al-Muqawamah al-'Iraqiyah *Iraqi Communist Party-Al Cadre *Iraqi National Islamic Resistance *Iraqi Resistance Brigades *Jihad Cells *Liberating Iraq's Army *Mujahideen Battalions of the Salafi Group of Iraq *Muslim Fighters of the Victorious Sect (aka, Mujaheddin of the Victorious Sect) *Muslim Youth *Nasserites *National Iraqi Commandos Front *Patriotic Front *Political Media Organ of the Ba‘ath Party (Jihaz al-Iilam al-Siasi lil hizb al-Baath) *Popular Resistance for the Liberation of Iraq *Saddam's Fedayeen *Salafist Jihad Group *Snake Party *Sons of Islam *Unification Front for the Liberation of Iraq *Wakefulness and Holy War *White Flags [12]
As one can see just by looking at the names on this list, there are a variety of different groups involved in the insurgency; they are not all “Saddam remnants” and “foreign terrorists” as the government claims. Most groups can be divided into three different factions: the loyalists (who are pro-Baathist/pro-Saddam), Islamists (who want to build a Muslim theocracy in Iraq), and nationalists (who are secular & anti-Saddam but want the US out). Examples of the loyalists include Saddam’s Fedayeen & Political Media Organ of the Ba’ath Party, of the Islamists Armed Vanguards of Mohammad’s Second Army & Al-Faruq Brigades, and of the nationalists General Secretariat for the Liberation of Democratic Iraq & Al-Anbar Armed Brigades.
Discovering this isn’t hard even if you have few resources, just search the web for “Iraqi insurgency” and you’ll discover plenty of information. The major news organizations, who have enough resources that they could actually go to Iraq and directly report on these groups if they wanted to, do not report on the facts of these groups because they rely almost entirely on government sources for their information about the insurgency, and government sources rarely mention the names or ideologies of these groups. The failure to report on these resistance groups further illustrates the media’s tendency to take government statements at face value.
These cases aren’t limited to the Iraq war. A classic example is the Cambodia/East Timor comparison. Both Cambodia and East Timor experienced genocides at about the same time yet received very different media coverage. In Cambodia the Khmer Rouge won a civil war against the US-backed government, after suffering from large-scale US bombing of the country that killed several hundred thousand Cambodians. The Khmer Rouge was a brutal dictatorship that murdered huge numbers of Cambodians. In 1979 the Khmer Rouge were forced out of power by an invasion from state socialist Vietnam, which brought their genocide to an end. The US supported the Khmer Rouge’s subsequent guerilla war against the Vietnamese in order to hurt Vietnam, but it failed to bring the Khmer Rouge back to power.
In December 1975 Indonesia invaded and took over East Timor, with US support. Indonesia’s following genocide in East Timor slaughtered between a fourth and a third of the population. The worst of the genocide occurred in the first 5 years after the invasion. The US supported the invasion & genocide and supplied East Timor with most of the arms used to carry it out. As atrocities increased the US flow of weapons increased, to insure that the killings could continue and Indonesia wouldn’t run out of weapons. All that was necessary for the US to stop this was to cut off the supply of weapons. The government in Indonesia at the time was actually put in power by a CIA coup in 1965 that resulted in the murder of between 500,000 and a million Indonesians.
These two genocides occurred at the same time and had many similarities but had very different media coverage. Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge was an official enemy and coverage of the genocide there was extensive, with little skepticism towards atrocity claims. Coverage of the genocide in East Timor was far less and largely just regurgitated State Department and Indonesia lies. Media coverage declined as the atrocities in East Timor worsened. When they reached their highest point coverage declined to zero. Between 1975 and 1979 the [i]New York Times [/i]gave 70 column inches to Timor but 1,175 column inches to Cambodia. The [i]New York Times [/i]is on the liberal end of the spectrum and tends to be more critical of US foreign policy than many of its competitors. To this day, most Americans have never heard of the genocide in East Timor. When official enemies commit atrocities the media plays it up, but when the US commits atrocities the media plays it down.
There are many other examples of this pattern of marginalizing US atrocities while emphasizing enemy atrocities. In the 1990s the US supported genocide in Turkish Kurdistan. While suppressing the insurgency of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which was fighting for an independent Kurdish state, the Turkish state murdered tens of thousands of innocent Kurds, destroyed over 3,000 villages and outlawed the Kurdish language. The US supported all this and provided 80% of the weapons to do it. This genocide received relatively little coverage and most of the coverage it did receive failed to make the link to US funding of genocide. One of the standard pieces of war propaganda against Iraq was that Saddam “gassed his own people.” The people he gassed were also Kurds. Between 1990-1999 the term “genocide” was used by the[i] Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Washington Post, Newsweek, and Time [/i]to describe the actions of Iraq against the Kurds 132 times, while it was used by the same publications to describe the actions of Turkey against the Kurds only 14 times. When an enemy, like Iraq, murders Kurds it gets lots of play but when an ally, like Turkey, murders Kurds it gets less play.
At the end of this genocide in Turkey the US led a NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, using the pretext that Yugoslavia was committing genocide in Kosovo. Turkey is a NATO member; the claim that NATO attacked Yugoslavia because it was committing genocide when one of NATO’s own members was committing genocide is not credible. The media’s focus on the alleged genocide in Kosovo (which was later shown to be greatly exaggerated, after the media stopped paying attention) can be contrasted with the downplaying of US-supported genocide in Turkey. In 1999 & 1998 the [i]Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Washington Post, Newsweek, and Time [/i]used the term “genocide” to describe Yugoslav actions in Kosovo 220 times, while the same number for Turkey’s genocide against the Kurds was 14. [13] The large focus on refuges fleeing Kosovo can also be contrasted with the ignoring of refuges fleeing Afghanistan during the US-Taliban war started a few years later.
This applies not only to genocide but also to the murder of dissidents. On October 19th, 1984 Polish police murdered the priest and dissident Jerzy Popieluszka. American media gave this brutal murder extensive coverage, much of it well deserved. In the 18 months after the murder, the[i] New York Times [/i]published 1183 column inches and 78 articles (10 on the front page) on it,[i] Time and Newsweek [/i]gave it 16 articles and 313 column inches, and [i]CBS[/i] news aired 46 news programs, 23 evening news programs on it. On March 18th, 1980 the head of the Catholic Church in El Salvador, Oscar Romero, was murdered by the US-backed dictatorship in El Salvador for his outspoken criticism of that dictatorship. It received much less coverage from American media. In the following 18 months the[i] New York Times [/i]printed 16 articles and 219 column inches on it, [i]Time and Newsweek [/i]3 articles and 86.5 column inches, and[i] CBS [/i]news aired 13 news programs, 4 evening news programs on it. In fact, the murder of 100 religious dissidents by US-backed dictatorships in Latin America between 1964-1985, including 4 American churchwomen, received less total coverage than the murder of Jerzy Popieluszka. In the 18 months following each murder/disappearance the [i]New York Times [/i]printed 57 articles (8 on the front page) and 604.5 column inches, [i]Time and Newsweek [/i]10 articles and 247.5 column inches and [i]CBS [/i]aired 37 news programs, 16 evening news programs on these 100 murders. The murder of a single priest by an official enemy, in this case a Soviet satellite state, received more coverage than the murder of 100 religious dissidents by US-backed dictatorships in Latin America. [14]
There are many other examples of the media whitewashing or ignoring US-backed dictatorships. In the ten years prior to the overthrow of the US-backed dictator of Nicaragua, Anastasio Somozo, US television, all networks, devoted one hour of coverage to Nicaragua, all of which was on the 1972 earthquake. Between 1960 and 1978 the [i]New York Times [/i]had a grand total of 3 editorials on Nicaragua. [15] When the Sandinistas overthrew Somoza in 1979 coverage increased and the media began demonizing the Sandinistas. Sandinista human rights abuses, atrocities and dictatorial behavior were far less than the preceding Somoza dictatorship, and the surrounding US-backed dictatorships (which relied on extreme state terror to maintain control), but were given far more attention by the media.
Many facts that would make the government look bad, not only US-backed dictatorships, tend to be ignored or downplayed. One of the less publicized conclusions of the official Dutch inquiry into the 1995 Srebrenica massacre was that the US backed Islamist terrorists in Bosnia in the early ‘90s and flew in weapons and Mujahideen (Muslim fundamentalist terrorists) from Afghanistan to Bosnia. This was one facet of the US-NATO campaign to dismember Yugoslavia into several Western client states. The groups the US supported in this operation were some of the same people it would later fight in its so-called “war on terrorism” several years later. There were reports on this finding in European media, [16] but I have been unable to find a single report on it in American media.
Bosnia was not the first place the US supported Islamist terrorists; the US also did it earlier against the USSR in Afghanistan. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the American invasion of South Vietnam have many similarities. In Afghanistan the USSR claimed that it had not invaded, that it was invited in by the legitimate government to defend it from terrorists sponsored by Pakistan and the United States. Of course, the government that “invited” the USSR in happened to be a Soviet satellite state. Once in the USSR repeatedly overthrew the Afghan government whenever it wouldn’t go along with Moscow’s orders. In Soviet mythology there was no Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, there was instead a Soviet defense of Afghanistan.
In South Vietnam the US claimed that it didn’t invade but was invited in by the legitimate government to defend it from terrorists sponsored by outside forces. Of course, the government that “invited” the US in happened to be an American satellite state. Once in the US repeatedly overthrew the South Vietnamese government whenever it wouldn’t go along with Washington’s orders. In American mythology there was no American invasion of South Vietnam, there was instead an American defense of South Vietnam.
The stories spun by each government were very similar, as were the invasions themselves. In Afghanistan American media ridiculed Soviet propaganda & lies and called the invasion what it was, an invasion. Soviet media adhered to the government line. In the invasion of South Vietnam American media never called it an invasion, instead they adhered to the US government line that it was not an invasion. The common myth that the media were anti-war is just self-serving propaganda (see chapters 5 & 6 of [i]Manufacturing Consent [/i]by Edward Heman & Noam Chomsky). In reality the media overall stayed within the government paradigm, viewing it as a defense against foreign sponsored guerillas. Criticism of the war within the media was limited to the idea that it was a “mistake,” that this “defense of South Vietnam” was not worth the costs and based on an erroneous analysis. This differs from the position of the peace movement which argued that it was an invasion that was fundamentally immoral and wrong. The later position was largely excluded from the debate within the media.
While American media correctly referred to Soviet satellite states as satellite states on many occasions, American satellite states were never identified. When the USSR invades other countries and makes them do it’s bidding those are (correctly) called Soviet satellite states but when the US invades other countries and does the same thing not only are they not called satellite states but the invasions often aren’t called invasions.
The groups fighting against Soviet aggression in Afghanistan, supported by the US, were predominantly Muslim fundamentalist terrorists (Mujahideen), many of who would later go on to fight against the US. Bin Laden was among their ranks, as were many other people who the FBI claims are members of Al-Qaeda. During their war with the USSR the Mujahideen used many terrorist tactics, including targeting of civilians, assassination of soviet officials, and throwing acid into the faces of unveiled women. While they were doing this against the USSR American media identified them as “freedom fighters.” They were the good guys in Rambo 3. After they started doing the same thing to the US they started calling them “terrorists” instead of “freedom fighters.” Enemies are identified as “terrorists” and allies as “freedom fighters” even if their tactics remain the same.
One should not get the impression that American media functions as a totalitarian system, however. The system functions primarily as self-censorship. Because totalitarian press censorship is not in place there is occasional “leakage” of things through the media that do not otherwise conform to the liberal-conservative paradigm. For example, on November 26th, 2003 the Washington Post website held an online discussion with Noam Chomsky on his latest book, [i]Hegemony or Survival[/i]. [17] Noam Chomsky is an anarchist and probably the best-known dissident in the United States. In a totalitarian system his views would be completely excluded and suppressed. Instead, American media marginalize it to the point where only a tiny number will come across it but do not 100% exclude it. This can actually make the system more effective, as it makes the system look more open than it really is and disguises it’s function as a form of thought control.
The inverse of the marginalizing of dissidents is the media’s tendency to rely disproportionately on the powerful and to reflect their views. Between January 1st, 2001 and December 31st, 2001 more than one third of the quoted Americans (and more than one fourth of the sources) on [i]ABC World News Tonight, NBC Nightly News and CBS Evening News [/i]were elite Washington politicians. Seventy-five percent of those politicians whose partisan affiliations could be identified were Republican, twenty-four percent were Democrat, and only one percent was third party/independent. James Jeffords, the centrist Vermont Republican who defected to the Democrats and was temporarily an independent during the transition, made up 83 percent of the independent sources quoted. The 9-11 attacks increased the reliance on Republican sources. Prior to it Republicans were 68 percent, Democrats 31 percent and independents 1 percent. After the attacks, Republicans were 87 percent, Democrats 13 percent and independents .1 percent. The slant towards Republicans is due to the fact that they control the executive branch of the government and the media tend to rely on it more, making more quotes, etc. from the President, members of the cabinet, etc. When that is factored out, the ratio of sources is 51% Republican, 48% Democrat and 2% third party/independent. George Bush alone was 9% of all quoted sources and 33% of all partisan sources. Of the “experts” used as sources, corporate representatives and economists were the most common (at 7% each), while non-governmental organizations and organized labor were quoted very little (3% and .2%). Representatives from big business were quoted 35 times more often than representatives of labor. While business & economic issues made up 15% of total coverage, only 1% of total coverage was on labor issues and in labor stories business association representatives (26%), economists (19%) & politicians (15%) were quoted far more often than labor representatives (2%). These news shows also tend to rely disproportionately on men and whites. [18]
This distortion of the news in favor of the powerful happens not only in foreign policy but also on domestic issues, such as the “anti-globalization” protests against the WTO, IMF and World Bank. The media, not “anti-globalization” activists, invented the label “anti-globalization.” The press generally prefers to focus on sensationalistic reports of protestor violence and assorted side issues rather than look at the critique of these institutions offered by activists. When there is no protestor violence or property destruction the media largely ignores the story (even if there’s lots of police violence) but when there is violence or property destruction by protestors the media covers it but mostly ignores the issues they are protesting. The average consumer of news would have very little idea of what the IMF, WTO and World Bank is, let alone why many oppose them. On April 16 a story on the front page of the [i]Washington Post[/i], reporting on the demonstrations against the IMF & World Bank, discussed activists “body odor,” claimed that “the fad factor cannot be denied” and incorrectly claimed that the protests were "a demonstration without demands." It was actually a demonstration with demands that the [i]Washington Post [/i](and most of the rest of the media) chose to ignore, preferring to focus on activist’s “body odor,” drinking habits and fashion. The media often refers to opponents of “free trade” as “anti-trade,” which is a misrepresentation because most are not against all trade, just the form of trade currently being practiced.
The[i] New York Times [/i]ran five opinion pieces against the April 16th anti-IMF/World Bank demonstrations and none in favor. Opinion pieces in the [i]Washington Post [/i]against the demonstrations totaled 3,780 words while supporters of the demonstrations had 1,825 words. In addition, when “anti-globalization” views get in the media they are usually from the moderate wing of the movement. The more radical segments are almost universally ignored. Anarchists played a major role in these demonstrations yet anarchist views were almost never portrayed accurately in the media and anarchist opinion pieces never ran in the major papers. Instead anarchists were portrayed as crazed bomb-throwing advocates of chaos.
The focus on violence is also very one-sided. For the media, protestor violence is a big deal but police violence is not. Police can bring body armor, tear gas and other weapons and the media thinks nothing of it, but if protestors brought the same equipment the media would demonize them over it. Police are rarely referred to as violent, even when they are violent towards protestors or others. They are assumed to be legitimate. Police violence is played down (and usually isn’t even called violence), while alleged protestor violence is emphasized and denounced. According to an ACLU report on demonstrations against the WTO in Seattle that began on November 30th:
“For several days, it was illegal publicly to express anti-WTO opinions in a large section of downtown Seattle. … Scores of citizens reported being prevented by police from engaging in peaceful, lawful expression within the zone. Police ordered citizens to remove buttons or stickers from their clothing, confiscated signs and leaflets, and blocked citizen entry to the core of downtown … Despite police and media descriptions to the contrary, the protests during the WTO conference did not constitute a riot. They were noisy and disruptive, yet demonstrators were overwhelming peaceful. Not so the police. … [police] approved the use of tear gas, pepper spray, rubber bullets and clubs against people who were demonstrating peaceably, against demonstrators who had not received or who were trying to obey police orders, against bystanders, and to quell disturbances the police themselves had provoked. … The Seattle Police Department used massive amounts of tear gas against crowds even when such use was not necessary to protect public safety or the safety of officers. … [Police] used pepper spray repeatedly against nonviolent protesters who posed no threat to public safety or to the safety of officers. … Rubber bullets were used against people who posed no threat. … rank-and-file officers engaged in acts of brutality … The police made hundreds of improper arrests, detaining for days people who would never stand trial. … Individuals arrested during the anti-WTO demonstrations were mistreated and witnessed others being mistreated by jail officers.” [19]
This sharply contrasts with the picture painted by the media of officers reacting against rioting protestors. The media inverted the chronology – putting the destruction of corporate property by a minority of activists before the use of pepper spray & tear gas by police and portraying police violence as a reaction against it. Numerous eyewitnesses have reported that the police started attacking demonstrators prior to the destruction of corporate property and Detective Randy Huserik, of the Seattle police, admitted that pepper spray was used on non-violent activists prior to the attacks on corporate property. The media instead blindly regurgitated a pro-police story. [20] The media’s description of the destruction of corporate property as “violence” also shows how they implicitly assume the legitimacy of property rights.
Similar patterns existed in coverage of other “anti-globalization” demonstrations. In the demonstrations against the G8 in Genoa, Italy the media largely ignored the positions of the demonstrators, again focusing excessively on violence, and whitewashed police brutality, which resulted in the death of one protestor. During the demonstrations the media blindly regurgitated police defenses of their actions, but when these were exposed to be frauds the media ignored it. Pietro Troiani, a senior police officer, admitted to planting bombs with demonstrators in order to justify a raid on activists but American media didn’t run a single story on it. [21]
[i]PBS [/i]and [i]NPR[/i] are structured a little differently but tend to stick to a similar line as commercial media. Although not directly owned by corporations, they are dependant on corporate funding and also receive significant funding from government sources, including the Corporation for Public Sources. As such they tend to slant things in manner similar to the rest of the media, although they are on the liberal end of the spectrum and aren’t quite as bad as some other outlets.
For example, twenty-six percent of sources on all weekday broadcasts of “All Things Considered” and “Morning Edition” on[i] NPR [/i]from September through December 1991 were government sources. Fifty-three percent of Washington-based stories were led with a quote major administration official or a member of congress. Representatives of organized citizen groups and public interests experts made up only seven percent of sources. Twenty-six out of twenty-seven regular commentators were white and only twenty-one percent of sources were women. [22]
The sources on[i] PBS’s NewsHour [/i]during the Kosovo conflict were slanted in favor of the government. Between March 25 and April 8 1999 critics of the NATO bombing made up 10% of sources. Only six percent of sources were Yugoslavian government officials, Serbians or Serbian-Americans, the groups most likely to criticize the NATO bombings. Non-Serbian American sources against the bombing made up 4% of sources. Thirty-nine percent of sources and 42% of live interviewees were current or former government officials. Albanian refugees and spokespeople from the Kosovo Liberation Army (the CIA-backed NATO proxy army) made up another 17% of sources. [23]
Local media and student media overall tend to follow a similar line as corporate media but because they are structured differently do not always do this 100%. In some cases large corporations directly own local news sources and in those cases they operate the same as the rest of the media. In other cases they are owned by small businesses and are not owned by the elite. The elite usually does not own student-run news sources, either. However, both of these tend to follow the focus of the major (corporate-owned) news media. If something is on the front page of the [i]New York Times [/i]and other major corporate media the local/student editors will tend to put that on their front page as well, and focus attention on it. In addition, they tend to rely on government sources, are dependant on advertising as a source of revenue and are susceptible to pressure from the local business community, local government and/or school administration. These tend to act to constrain coverage within student and local media. Leakage is a little easier in these media, however, as they are not directly owned by big business. While a letter to the editor advocating Communism would have a very difficult time being printed in the major papers, local and student media are sometimes more open to printing various dissident views.
The effect of all this is to inhibit an understanding of events in the world in a manner that benefits the power elite. It is not totally effective but has a successful record. The Center for Studies in Communication of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst conducted surveys that found:
“those who watched the most television on the Gulf War were the least informed about basic facts of life in the region. Among the most frequent watchers, 32 percent thought Kuwait was a democracy; only 23 per cent were aware that there were other occupations in the Middle East besides Iraq's, and only 10 per cent had heard of the intifada, the most sustained revolt in modern Middle East history. When queried as to which three nations vetoed the recent United Nations resolution calling for an international peace conference (the United States, Israel, and Dominica), 14 per cent correctly identified the U.S., but another 12 per cent thought it has to be Iraq. The Center's polls showed that only 13 per cent of these TV viewers were aware of what official U.S. policy was toward Iraq before the August 2 invasion." [24]
An October 2003 study by the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) looked at three common misperceptions among the public: that Saddam Hussein was directly link to the 9-11 attacks, that weapons of mass destruction have already been found in Iraq and that world opinion favored the US-led invasion of Iraq. Massive evidence disproves all three misperceptions and even the Bush administration admits they are false. It found that belief in these misperceptions correlates with support for the war. These misperceptions are a by-product of the propaganda offensive launched by the Bush administration in late summer 2002 which attempted to use 9-11 to justify the war and successfully convinced Americans that Saddam was a grave danger to America who supported terrorism, had a deadly weapons arsenal to use on the US, etc. It also piggybacked on negative perceptions of Iraq created by earlier war propaganda under Clinton & Bush the first (while the US was supporting Saddam there wasn’t anti-Iraq propaganda from the government, but after the US came into conflict with Iraq Saddam was demonized as “the next Hitler”). That propaganda campaign was blindly regurgitated by the media, which, with a few exceptions, showed little skepticism towards it until after the completion of the invasion. By September 2003 70% of Americans had come to believe that Saddam was directly linked to 9-11.
The PIPA study also found that for most news outlets watching more news did not decrease belief in these misperceptions and for some news outlets belief in these misperceptions actually increased as more news was watched, showing again the media’s role as purveyor of misinformation that benefits the powerful. Belief in these misperceptions varied depending on one’s news source. [i]Fox News [/i]had the worst record, with 80% of viewers believing one or more misperceptions. NPR & PBS had the best record, but even they did poorly with 23% of viewers believing one or more misperceptions. [25]
[i]NPR & PBS[/i], the sources that produced the lowest amount of those misconceptions, also happen to be among those sources most frequently singled out by conservative critics alleging the media has a “liberal bias.” Much of the evidence in favor of the “liberal bias” model is flawed and most of what isn’t fits better with the propaganda model (of media subservience to the powerful) than with the “liberal bias” model. The basic theory behind the liberal bias model is that most journalists are liberal and they tend to reflect this in their reporting. Surveys have found that most journalists are moderates, not liberals, [26] but even if we disregard this the model is faulty because it doesn’t take into account where power lies. The average journalist doesn’t have a great deal of control over the media; power is concentrated in the hands of the corporations who own the media.
In addition, liberals support capitalism, the state, private property, and the right of the US to intervene in other countries, as do conservatives. Liberals support the main features of the current system; they just want to make a few modifications. As liberals, conservatives and centrists all support capitalism (and the state, etc.) the number of journalists who believe in those things vastly outnumbers those who don’t. By their logic, the media should have an extreme pro-capitalist (and pro-statist, etc.) bias that vastly dwarfs the alleged liberal bias.
A liberal bias, or the appearance of it, would actually help support the system as it would more firmly limit thoughts within an ‘acceptable’ range. If the media is seen as being so liberal, adversarial and extreme in their opposition to power then anyone who questions it’s basic assumptions (private property, etc.) will be seen as going completely off the planet. Accusations of the media having a “liberal bias” help to discipline the media and ensure that it continues to reinforce hegemony. Whenever it departs from the liberal-conservative line critics of the “liberal media” pounce and pressure it back in line.
One example of this is the book Bias by Bernard Goldberg, a number one[i] New York Times [/i]bestseller, which advocates the “liberal media” theory. The book is very poorly researched and doesn’t even have footnotes/endnotes, a bibliography or an index. Most of his assertions have little evidence to support them, just vague impressions. “Instead of numbers or specific instances of biased coverage, Goldberg prefers broad generalizations.” [27] Some assertions actually support the propaganda model more than the liberal bias model, such as the claims that news organizations are mainly focused on profit and oriented towards whites. Many quotes are not footnoted/endnoted and do not give enough information to look them up.
Most of his assertions are focused towards the center and liberal wings of the media. It is true that certain segments of the media are liberal (the[i] New York Times, NPR, [/i]and others) but it does not follow that the entire media are liberal. The appendix of Bias includes editorials he published in the [i]Wall Street Journal [/i]accusing the media of having a liberal bias. Does the[i] Wall Street Journal [/i]have a liberal bias? Do talk radio and [i]Fox News[/i]? He presents no evidence to support such a claim. Showing that even the more conservative sections of the media are liberal is important to prove his case – if even they are liberal then obviously the rest of the media is liberal. The inverse holds true for the model presented in this essay, that the media is subservient to the powerful. If that is the case then even those publications that tend to be more critical of the powerful, like the [i]New York Times[/i], should tend to slant the news in favor of the powerful. Evidence to show that this is the case was presented earlier, such as the East Timor/Cambodia comparison. Goldberg, however, fails to present evidence to show that the conservative wing of the media ([i]Wall Street Journal/Fox News/Talk Radio[/i]) is biased against conservatives.
Some may object that corporate media gives people what they want and the current state of journalism, biased or otherwise, is the result of people wanting it. This is based on the myth that anything having to do with a market is a reflection of “what people want” and somehow democratic. No doubt slaves, bought and sold on the market, would have disputed such an idea. Markets tend to skew towards those with more wealth because more profit can be made by catering to their desires and needs. It’s “one dollar, one vote” and those with more dollars have more influence. In the case of the media the customers are not the general public but advertisers. Those advertisers tend to prefer customers with more wealth because they can sell more products that way. There aren’t many advertisements directed towards homeless people. Thus the media tends to reflect the views & prejudices of the advertisers, the wealthier strata they are oriented towards and the business elite that controls the media.
In addition, there are several examples of media bias not reflecting the views of the general population. In the invasion of Iraq, only 10% of sources used were anti-war while over 25% of the population was anti-war (see above). In the debate on healthcare in the early ‘90s the media mainly presented the debate as one between Clinton’s proposals and his conservative opponents. The majority of the population favored the single-payer option but, with a few exceptions, the media largely ignored that idea. The debate was restricted and excluded the position supported by the majority of Americans. [28] These show that the media is not simply reflecting public opinion. Although the media is often effective at molding public opinion, it is not always so as demonstrated by the healthcare debate. Americans didn’t decide that they don’t want to know the names and platforms of the various groups fighting the guerilla war against American troops in Iraq. Nor did people decide that they didn’t want to know about the US-sponsored genocide in East Timor. They couldn’t have – most didn’t know about it because the media gave very little coverage to it.
This media system didn’t just appear out of thin air, it has been evolving for a long time. In the late 19th century as industrial capitalism was taking hold and industry was being concentrated into smaller and smaller hands the media also became more concentrated. Large corporations began buying out newspapers and/or withdrawing advertising from publications that were too critical of corporate power. This wasn’t the result of a giant conspiracy of business owners but of many people acting in similar ways because they were in similar situations.
The First World War was a major step towards creating the media system we have today. The Wilson administration, “established a government propaganda commission, called the Creel Commission, which succeeded, within six months, in turning a pacifist population into a hysterical, war-mongering population which wanted to destroy everything German, tear the Germans limb from limb, go to war and save the world.” [29] The Creel Commission pioneered Public Relations techniques used to manipulate public opinion and the use of corporate media to whip up war hysteria. It found that flooding news channels with “facts” (official information) allowed them to control news coverage. During the war the government stepped up censorship and actively suppressed anti-war publications and groups, many of which were socialist or anarchist. The previously growing Socialist Party, USA was broken, never to recover, and the anarchist-leaning Industrial Workers of the World was turned into a shell of it’s former self. Repression against dissidents continued after the end of the war as similar propaganda techniques were used to create the Red Scare. By attacking dissident organizations and publications this repression accelerated the concentration of the media into corporate hands.
As new media came about government intervention also played a significant role in keeping it primarily under corporate control and loyal to the government. In the late 1920s the predecessor to the Federal Communications Commission granted licenses to operate radio stations primarily to commercial sources, largely excluding non-commercial stations. Prior to that there was relatively little regulation of radio and non-commercial groups, especially educational institutions, tended to dominate radio. Over the next several years there was a popular movement attempting to reverse this decision but it was defeated. [30] Similar principles favoring corporations over non-profit organizations were later followed for television station licenses. Corporations dominate broadcasting because the government chooses to have corporations dominate broadcasting. Government policies and laws, such as the 1996 Telecommunications act, along with various subsidies, including the use of publicly owned airways free of charge, have continued to influence to structure of the media up to the present day.
Most of this is the result of the way the media and society is set up. Heads of the media don’t get together in a big smoke-filled room and scheme how to fool Americans. Bias is the outcome of the institutional structure of the media, not some giant conspiracy. Some groups do consciously attempt to manipulate the media and sometimes these take the form of conspiracies (a group of people working together in secret to achieve some goal). For example, the CIA has been known to infiltrate media organizations and keep journalists on its payroll. It “also owns dozens of newspapers and magazines the world over.” [31] The CIA altered the movie versions of George Orwell’s “1984” and “Animal Farm” to tone down Orwell’s “pox on both houses” message, making them more anti-Communist and less anti-capitalist. [32] In 1999[i] CNN [/i]allowed Army PSYOPS officers, government propaganda experts, to work in the news division at[i] CNN’s [/i]Atlanta headquarters. [33] CNN eventually admitted this, [34] but most of the media ignored it. These are exceptions to the norm, however. Most media bias is the outcome of institutional structure. That same structure also makes it easier for powerful groups to manipulate the media through conspiracies or other means, magnifying their effect.
[b]For the entire article click on[/b] http://question-everythin g.ma...
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| Bush Avoids the Obvious Questions Last Night ... And Panders to Neo-Fascists! |
| 04.14.04 (11:40 am) [edit] |
[b]Last night's embarrassing [i]exhibition-cum-disgrac eful [/i]performance by the Hapless Boob Dubya just reinforces the fact that we're in[i] deep, deep trouble [/i]with a Dumb-Bunny President Bush, in [i]Way Over His Imbecilic Head[/i] ...[/b]
Firstly, Dubya panders to his neo-fascist cronies in the corporate-owned neo-con propaganda media who throws their Useful Idiot Puppet[i] soft-cotton-ball [/i]questions:
[i]"Must-call", indeed[/i].
Did you notice how after the president refused to answer Mike Allen's question about why he and vice-president insist on appearing together before the 9/11 Commission he waived off a bunch of other questions saying "[i]I've got some must-calls. I'm sorry[/i]."
He then called on Bill Sammon ([i]of the neo-con, neo-fascist right-wing propaganda outlets: Washington Times and Fox News[/i]) who rewarded the president by helping him regain his balance with this laughable strawman question: "You have been accused of letting the 9-11 threat mature too far, but not letting the Iraq threat mature far enough. First, could you respond to that general criticism?"
[i]Clearly a "must-call"[/i]. - http://www.talkingpointsmemo....
Consider also "[i][b]Mr. Bush's Press Conference[/b][/i]" in the NY Times, on http://www.nytimes.com/2004/0... :
Happily, President Bush finally held a prime-time news conference last night. Unhappily, he failed to address either of the questions uppermost in Americans' minds: how to move Iraq from its current chaos, and what he has learned from the 9/11 investigations.
Mr. Bush was grave and impressive while reading his opening remarks, which focused on the horrors of terrorism and the great good that could come from establishing a free and democratic Iraq. No one in the country could disagree with either thought. But his responses to questions were distressingly rambling and unfocused. He promised that Iraq would move from the violence and disarray of today to full democracy by the end of 2005, but the description of how to get there was mainly a list of dates when good things are supposed to happen.
There was still no clear description of exactly who will accept the sovereignty of Iraq from the coalition on June 30. "We'll find out that soon," the president said, adding that U.N. officials are "figuring out the nature of the entity we'll be handing sovereignty over" to. In Mr. Bush's mind, whatever happens next now appears to be the responsibility of the United Nations. That must have come as a surprise to the U.N. negotiators and their bosses, who have not agreed to accept that responsibility and do not believe that they have been given the authority to make those decisions.
Mr. Bush did concede that the Iraqi security forces had not performed well during the violence and that more American troops would probably be needed. But his rhetoric, including the repetition of the phrase "stay the course," did not seem to indicate any fresh or clear thinking about Iraq, despite the many disturbing events of recent weeks.
The second issue that has overwhelmed the nation in recent days is the 9/11 investigating commission. While repeatedly expressing his grief over the deaths related to the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, Mr. Bush seemed to entertain no doubts about the rightness of his own behavior, no questions about whether he should have done something in response to the domestic terrorism report he received on Aug. 6, 2001.
The United States has experienced so many crises since Mr. Bush took office that it sometimes feels as if the nation has embarked on one very long and painful learning curve in which every accepted truism becomes a doubt, every expectation a question mark. Only Mr. Bush somehow seems to have avoided any doubt, any change.
Yeah, and Mr. Bush barked like Communist Leader Vladmir Illyich Lenin about "Changing the World" without telling us just what the sacrifices will be ... Our sacrifices, since Dubya and his rich corporate cronies don't make any sacrifices ...
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| Shameful: Deaths of Scores of Mercenaries in Iraq Not Reported ... |
| 04.13.04 (4:48 pm) [edit] |
[b]It is outrageous that mercenaries ([i]usually miserably poor and desperate people unable to find jobs[/i]) are being exploited and in so doing, the American people are being cynically manipulated and unconscionably preyed upon by the traitorous Bush Vultures ... [/b]Democratic nations have a tradition of[i] putting in place official military organizations [/i]in order to avoid corrupt leaders building private armies; using mercenaries to hijack the country and installing fascist military [i]juntas[/i] ... Adolf Hitler and other vile dictators always start out by hiring private armies loyal to themselves, which is why democracies build formal military structures accountable to their civilian governments (and [i]not[/i] to political parties, corporations or individuals) ...
We have had no discussion in our country as to the consequences of "privatizing the military", using mercenaries and benefitting gluttonous corporations, in order to support dictators (e.g. Liar-cum-Embezzler Ahmed Chalabi) abroad (and/or Herr Fuhrer Bush & Reich Marshal Cheney here at home) ... The ruthless neo-con thugs and neo-fascist goons in the corrupt Bush regime are placing our nation, our democracy and our system of government in perilous danger, by recruiting private firms, mercenaries and corporations whose loyalty is not to the United States of America, but instead to their paymasters ... Please contact Congress http://www.congress.org and demand an explanation of this tyrannical transformation of our U.S. Military into a Neo-Fascist Private Army abused by the dictatorial Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta[/i] for pernicious motives (power, intimidation, corporate profits, etc.) and in order to avoid their proper and rightful accountability to their bosses: "We the People" ...
It is shameful that the neo-con Bushies are so utterly callous to the deaths of those poor human beings whom they immorally (and possibly illegally) recruit for ugly motives of warfare, global corporate power, and to perpetuate their death cult ... At least 80 foreign mercenaries - security guards recruited from the United States, Europe and South Africa and working for American companies - have been killed in the past eight days in Iraq.
Lieutenant-General Mark Kimmitt admitted on Tuesday that "about 70" American and other Western troops had died during the Iraqi insurgency since April 1 but he made no mention of the mercenaries, apparently fearful that the full total of Western dead would have serious political fallout.
He did not give a figure for Iraqi dead, which, across the country may be as high as 900.
At least 18 000 mercenaries, many of them tasked to protect US troops and personnel, are now believed to be in Iraq, some of them earning $1 000 (about R6 300) a day. But their companies rarely acknowledge their losses unless - like the four American murdered and mutilated in Fallujah three weeks ago - their deaths are already public knowledge.
The presence of such large numbers of mercenaries, first publicised in The Independent two weeks ago, was bound to lead to further casualties.
But although many of the heavily armed Western security men are working for the US Department of Defence - and most of them are former Special Forces soldiers - they are not listed as serving military personnel. Their losses can therefore be hidden from public view.
The US authorities in Iraq, however, are aware that more Western mercenaries lost their lives in the past week than occupation soldiers over the past 14 days.
The coalition has sought to rely on foreign contract workers to reduce the number of soldiers it uses as drivers, guards and in other jobs normally carried out by uniformed soldiers.
Often the foreign contract workers are highly paid former soldiers who are armed with automatic weapons, leading to Iraqis viewing all foreign workers as possible mercenaries or spies.
[b]Source:[/b]
"[b]Deaths of scores of mercenaries not reported[/b]" by [i]Robert Fisk and Patrick Cockburn[/i], "The Star" Baghdad, on http://www.informationclearin...
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| While AWOL Dubya Was Vacationing, Osama bin Laden Planned Murderous Attacks on US! |
| 04.13.04 (2:27 pm) [edit] |
[b]As much as the neo-con, neo-fascist mad-dogs, court-jesters and buffoons would love to blame the 9/11 attack upon America upon the Democrats, Bill Clinton, John Kerry, and/or anyone who [i]dares to even question [/i]the Neo-Imperial Mad King George:-- [/b]the [i]fact of the matter is [/i]that [i]we now know[/i] that AWOL Dubya was[i] off in never-never-land[/i], vacationing and[i] didn't take any actions whatsoever to attempt to thwart [/i]Osama bin Laden's murderous attacks upon America ... In fact, as usual for the lazy-minded Dubya, [i]he was off-duty (AWOL) at the time [/i]... and as in the [i]current catastrophic morass [/i]in Iraq, [i]he prefers to play cowboy at Crawford[/i], because he is in [i]over his Numb-Skull Head [/i]and the Mad King George simply [i]doesn't have a clue [/i]what to do in a crisis ... Poppy Bush has always [i]picked-up the pieces [/i]of Dubya's life-long failures, but he [i]can't pick-up the pieces [/i]of the Mad King George's [i]disastrous failures now [/i]...
Consider "[i][b]'While Bush vacationed, bin Laden planned murderous attacks'[/b][/i]" by [i]Bill Gallagher[/i], Niagara Falls, on http://www.smirkingchimp.com/... :
President Bush was told flat-out that Osama bin Laden planned an assault on the United States and was directing his followers to hijack airplanes to carry out the murderous attacks. The president was made aware of this chilling information in an Aug. 6, 2001 briefing, while he was on an extended vacation at his Texas ranch, more than a month before the terrible events of Sept. 11.
The Associated Press reports the CIA-prepared PDB -- the president's daily intelligence briefing -- contained the dire warning that al-Qaeda was preparing to use explosives and airplanes in an attack on U.S. soil. This revelation upends the White House's repeated assertions that the briefing about the al-Qaeda threat was merely "historic."
And it also makes National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice's testimony before the 9/11 Commission, where she declared under oath that "there was no specific time, place or method" mentioned in the intelligence report, suspect at best, and raises the specter of perjury.
The briefing title alone, "Bin Laden Determined To Strike in U.S." should have set off alarms, but this president and his court see and hear what they want. Rice insisted the title was meaningless and said, "This was not a threat report." Well, it sure as hell wasn't a greeting card.
Then, in Clintonian parsing that should have caused laughter to erupt, the president's "warrior princess" made a distinction sure to please her king, telling the 9/11 Commission, "The PDB does not say the United States is going to be attacked. It says bin Laden would like to attack the United States." I would like to and I am going to call Condi Rice a fraud and a third-rate political hack posing as a national security adviser.
She is, however, the perfect Bush operative. Rice is a first-rate performer and truth-spinner extraordinaire. She promises candor as she conceals. She's cool and organized and appears to do everything ever so right.
She embraces the president's creed of public service based on unflinching loyalty to his political interests, the interests of his family and the international oil industry.
Condi knows how Bush thinks (that's a frightening thought in itself), and she reflects his glib arrogance. We are infallible and never admit mistakes. Responsibility and accountability are vices. If something goes wrong, somebody else did it.
Repeat the lies over and over until you actually believe them yourself, and never respond to a question. Just keep talking and answer the question you asked yourself.
Most academics I know are thoughtful and reflective. They speak carefully, often subtly. They see nuances. But not Condi, the always-confident, opinion-spewing automaton. If cliches grew warts, she'd look like a toad. She never stops yakking, often repeating the same threadbare lines, especially when it comes to protecting and promoting the interests of George W. Bush, her patron and protector. And she's so loyal, an indispensable virtue for a Bush operative.
So loyal, in fact, that when the national interest is in conflict with the president's political interest, she always opts to protect the boss -- and, of course, her own cherished image.
That's what Rice did in her testimony before the 9/11 Commission. If her adoring fans in the media stopped gushing over her theatrical performance for two minutes and thought about its lack of substance, they might realize the truth about Condi Rice. She is dangerous, in way over her head, and her judgments and decisions are an ongoing threat to our national security.
Rice insisted the warnings about bin Laden's intentions were "frustratingly vague" and merely "historical information." An aside: Did Bush actually read the report? I would not be surprised to learn that the man who brags that he doesn't read newspapers didn't bother even to scan the bin Laden intelligence report.
In that case, who read it for him? Condi? His wife, Laura, the former librarian? Whoever saw the actual words must have told George W. to listen up and do something. Or, perhaps, they didn't. Or, more likely, he didn't listen. "Hurry up, Condi. I've got some wood to chop."
How might Bush have reacted if the briefing were entitled, "Saddam Hussein Determined to Attack Inside the United States"? Red alerts! See what Cheney wants me to do. Call in everyone. Let's move now. Set up a television address to the nation. Call my daddy and Billy Graham.
As we've learned, no information pointing to the bogus threat of Saddam Hussein and Iraq was too "vague." The quality of the intelligence didn't matter one whit. It could be broad, unsourced and unconfirmed. "Historical information," you say? The case against Saddam was largely built with dated information and historical assessments that were inoperative for a decade. But that didn't matter. That's the kind of stuff Bush wanted and Condi and the boys provided it.
Whispers about Saddam were amplified and the media broadcast them as loud, unchallenged truths, while a bullhorn in the ear about bin Laden and al-Qaeda's intentions was simply not heard, because no one who wanted to remain in the president's favor wanted to listen.
This duplicity stems from George W. himself -- his intellectual laziness, his lack of curiosity, and his reliance on instinct, visceral feeling and what his "gut" tells him rather than the truth found in facts.
That brings us to the horrible situation in which we now find ourselves in Iraq. Bush and those around him believed Iraq would be a "cakewalk," and that the people in our new colony would appreciate us forever. On the eve of the war, Dick Cheney said with assurance, "We will, in fact, be greeted as liberators."
That has not happened and the "liberators" are in deadly danger every day. Tragically, the bloodshed for the Iraqi people and U.S. troops shows no signs of letting up. Sure, terrorists, drawn by the war itself, are responsible for some of the violence. But much more is now open resistance and rebellion from Iraqis who wanted to be rid of Saddam, but also say it's time to end the occupation and let them determine their own destiny.
Bush and the neocons who planned the war with Iraq long before Sept. 11 relied almost exclusively on the information and views of one man: Ahmed Chalabi, a convicted bank embezzler and con man who headed the Iraqi National Congress, a group of Iraqis in exile opposed to Saddam.
Chalabi had not set foot in Iraq for nearly 30 years prior to the invasion and he had little, if any, support among the Iraqi people. But he was the darling of Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and Wolfowitz, and his word was golden for the warmongers.
But Chalabi's information about Saddam's weapons, enriched uranium shopping, aluminum tubes and mobile biological labs turned out to be bogus -- pure crap. Even Colin Powell now admits the worst of the phony claims he sold came from the Iraqi National Congress (read: Chalabi).
The administration also relied on Chalabi in planning for post-war Iraq and the restoration of sovereignty for the Iraqi people. Should we be surprised that every important thing the lying crook told us was false?
I met with some Detroit-area imams last week, on the day U.S. forces bombed a mosque compound and hundreds were killed in Fallujah. Their views about how to end the bloodshed are far different from the Bush administration's.
The Shiite clerics, all born in Iraq or other Middle Eastern nations, say neutral international forces are required to end the violence and build a democracy.
"The United Nations should have a role in helping the Iraqi people to form their own government until the nation can have free elections," says Imam Hassan Qazwini of the Islamic Center of America.
The religious leaders insist the hand-picked Iraqi Governing Council is not representative of the people and scheduling free elections is long overdue.
Imam Husham Al-Husainy smiles, knowing full well the irony of his words. "So, let's have an election. What are we afraid of? If we are really democrats and love democracy, let's have an election in Iraq."
These men know the U.S. government fears an Iraq with an Islamic government. But what do we say to the Shiites, who represent 60 percent of the Iraqi people and who bore the brunt of Saddam's oppression? They were always cut out of power.
They believe their time has come, and a religious state should not be feared.
Imam Ali Elahi says, "If there is an election and the majority chooses an Islamic government, that's fine as long as they respect the civil rights of every individual in the country. Why should that be a concern? If the majority chooses that form of government and respects minority civil and human rights, what is our problem with it?"
The president doesn't even need an unread briefing on this one. The concern for George W. Bush and his colonial counselors is that they couldn't control that government. And then, what's the use of conquest if you can't control the conquered people and their resources?
[i][b]Bill Gallagher, a Peabody Award winner, is a former Niagara Falls city councilman who now covers Detroit for Fox2 News. His e-mail address is gallaghernewsman@aol.com[/b][/i].
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| Attorney General John Ashcroft Exposed: Negligence in (In)Action!!! |
| 04.13.04 (10:59 am) [edit] |
[b]Attorney General John Ashcroft is a religiosity[i]-zealot-cum -loon[/i], with no respect for the U.S. Constitution & Bill of Rights ... Ashcroft coerces his staff into attending [i]bizarre so-called 'prayer meetings' [/i]where he rants and raves like a mad-man possessed ([i]and not by God[/i]), and he desperately wants[i] more and more state power [/i]via the un-democratic neo-stalinist[i] [/i]Patriot ([i]sic[/i]) Acts in order to [i]intimidate[/i] "We the People" ...[/b]
[b]CLAIM:[/b]
For the post-9/11 emergency counterterrorism bill, the FBI "came to me with a $670 million request, and we counseled them to take that to $ 1.1 billion."
– [i]Attorney General John Ashcroft, 2/28/02[/i]
[b]FACT:[/b]
"In the early days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the Bush White House cut by nearly two-thirds an emergency request for counterterrorism funds by the FBI... The document, dated Oct. 12, 2001, shows that the FBI requested $1.5 billion in additional funds to enhance its counterterrorism efforts with the creation of 2,024 positions. But the White House Office of Management and Budget cut that request to $531 million. Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, working within the White House limits, cut the FBI's request for items such as computer networking and foreign language intercepts by half, cut a cyber-security request by three quarters and eliminated entirely a request for 'collaborative capabilities.'"
– [i]WP, 3/22/04[/i], http://www.washingtonpost.com...
[u][b]Ashcroft Exposed[/b][/u] - http://www.americanprogress.o...
Today, Attorney General John Ashcroft undertakes the formidable task of defending his lackluster counterterrorism record before the 9/11 Commission. According to draft reports prepared by the commission, Ashcroft was "[i]largely uninterested in counterterrorism issues before Sept. 11, despite intelligence warnings that summer that al Qaeda was planning a large, perhaps catastrophic, terrorist attack[/i]." In a desperate attempt to preserve his reputation, Ashcroft repeatedly lied about his record to a joint Congressional committee in February 2002. For example, Ashcroft said that, immediately after 9/11, the FBI "came to me with a $670 million request, and we counseled them to take that to $ 1.1 billion." But an internal Justice Department document http://www.americanprogress.o...%7bE9245FE4-9A2B-43C7-A52 1-5D6FF2E06E03%7d/OMBPASS BACK.PDF obtained by [i]American Progress [/i]reveals that "the FBI requested $1.5 billion in additional funds to enhance its counterterrorism efforts" which Ashcroft cut to $531 million. Ashcroft spokesman Mark Corallo attempted to dismiss the documents because they were circulated by a "think tank run by top former Clinton aide John Podesta" – but he did not dispute their authenticity or validity. See the internal documents obtained by [i]American Progress[/i] on http://www.americanprogress.o... .
[u][b]ASHCROFT SLASHED COUNTERTERRORISM IN HIS FIRST MONTH[/b][/u]: Ashcroft told Congress in February 2002 he "requested an increased funding for counterterrorism efforts of $436 million" prior to 9/11 for the 2002 budget. But a new analysis by [i]American Progress[/i] http://www.americanprogress.o...%7bE9245FE4-9A2B-43C7-A52 1-5D6FF2E06E03%7d/CUTTING COUNTERTERROR.PDF reveals that the 2002 counterintelligence budget proposed by Ashcroft cut counterintelligence spending by more than $476 million – a 23% cut from 2001 funding levels. Internal Justice Department documents obtained by [i]American Progress [/i]reveal that in August 2001, the FBI specifically requested additional funds http://www.americanprogress.o...%7bE9245FE4-9A2B-43C7-A52 1-5D6FF2E06E03%7d/FBI03RE QUEST.PDF to bolster counterterrorism resources, including 248 counterterrorism agents and support staff, 54 translators to review a backlog of foreign language intelligence, and 200 professional intelligence researchers to analyze the intelligence. But Ashcroft ignored the request and instead cut counterterrorism funding in critical areas, including a $65-million reduction for counterterrorism equipment grants, a $20-million reduction for border control, and a $1.4-million reduction for the National Domestic Preparedness Office.
[u][b]ASHCROFT'S MISPLACED PRIORITIES[/b][/u]: In May 2001, Ashcroft wrote a "budget goals memo" outlining his top seven priorities. Counterterrorism was not mentioned. Former FBI counterterrorism chief Dale Watson said he "'fell off my chair' when he learned that Mr. Ashcroft had failed to list combating terrorism as one of the department's priorities." In November 2001, Ashcroft released a revised strategic goals memo which included the same seven priorities, with one addition inserted at the top of the list. The new number one priority? "Protect America Against the Threat of Terrorism."
[u][b]WHY DID ASHCROFT STOP FLYING COMMERCIAL AIRLINES PRIOR TO 9/11?[/b][/u]: Months before 9/11 Ashcroft began "traveling exclusively by leased jet aircraft instead of commercial airlines." Ashcroft started flying on the $40 million GulfStream 5 – at a cost to taxpayers of $1600 an hour – because of an FBI threat assessment. But the FBI would not say "what the threat was, when it was detected or who made it." The jet was supposed to be "for use in special investigations and for the transport of terrorists and other dangerous suspects." Months after 9/11, in an attempt to deflect criticism, a Justice Department spokesman said the threat was about "nonspecific threats against Ashcroft's life." (See Ashcroft's own ramblings on the subject in this video http://www.americanprogress.o... ). But the FBI threat assessment has never been made public. Until Ashcroft releases the document, questions about his conduct will persist.
[u][b]WHY DID ASHCROFT ALLOW BIN LADENS TO LEAVE THE U.S. WITHOUT QUESTIONING?[/b][/u]: Two dozen members of the bin Laden family were permitted to violate the ban on private aviation imposed after 9/11 so they could quickly return to Saudi Arabia. None of the bin Ladens were questioned by the FBI or the Justice Department before departing, even though many had direct ties to Osama bin Laden and might have provided valuable information about Osama's finances, associates and supporters.
[u][b]IF YOU ARE UNSUCCESSFUL, CHANGE THE DEFINITION OF SUCCESS[/b][/u]: On Oct. 10, 2001, Ashcroft, President Bush and FBI director Robert Mueller appeared at FBI headquarters to announce the creation of the Most Wanted Terrorists list. Bush called the 22 individuals placed on the list "the most dangerous [terrorists] -- the leaders and key supporters, the planners and strategists." Bush added, "They must be found. They will be stopped, and they will be punished." But thirty months later, at least 20 of the terrorist are still at large. Yet, Ashcroft bragged in October 2003 that "two-thirds of al-Qaida's leadership worldwide is either in custody or dead."
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| Israel Condemns Bush's Bungling U.S. Set-Backs In Iraq!!! |
| 04.12.04 (7:06 pm) [edit] |
[b]Even the hard right-wing Israeli extremists in the Likud Party may slowly come to realize that [i]making a pact with the Devil isn't in their own best interest[/i], particularly when the Devil is as[i] Stupid [/i]as Dubya ... [/b]If you are establishing a partnership, better a Smart Man than an Imbecilic Hapless Boob ... Prior to Dubya's illegal and immoral incursion into Iraq, U.S. Military Experts, Middle-East Analysts, as well as Intelligence Analysts warned the corrupt Bush regime that they would need a Strategy, a Plan, a Road-Map for dealing with the 'post-war' Iraq ... The arrogant bunglers and incompetents (Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Powell, Wolfowitz & Neo-con NumbSkulls) fired General Shinsheki for suggesting that more troops were needed http://www.dailykos.com/story... than he was given by the neo-con buffoons -- Tonight, General Abazaid says he needs more troops and has asked for two new battalions to be sent to Iraq (BBC News / http://www.washingtonpost.com... ) ... Israel would do better to support Kerry for President, because at least he [i]has[/i] a [i]Brain[/i] ... Dubya is [i]Too Stupid [/i]to be President ...
Consider "[b]Israel concerned setbacks in Iraq could harm state security[/b]" by [i]Arieh O'Sullivan[/i], the right-wing Jerusalem Post, on http://www.jpost.com/servlet/... :
The defense establishment, monitoring the unfolding escalation in Iraq, is increasingly concerned that American setbacks there could have grave consequences for Israel's security.
This could impact not only the defense budget, but also a change in the army's long-range security concept.
Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz convened a security assessment with top IDF brass and other security officials late Thursday to weigh the implications for Israel.
"The success of the United States there is vital for the entire region and if things deteriorate or get out of control then we will have much to be concerned about," said a defense official familiar with the discussions held.
Intensified fighting between Sunni rebels and Shi'ite militias against the American and coalition forces could lead to a civil war. But top IDF officers do not believe the conflict will cause the US to stage a premature withdrawal.
"I don't think the Americans will quit Iraq so quickly. Even after the elections in the US and even if there is a change I don't' see the Americans getting out of Iraq so quickly," said Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Moshe Ya'alon.
Speaking on Channel 2's Meet The Press, Ya'alon predicted a "hot summer" in Iraq. He said the present crisis in Iraq is causing them to rethink the new post-Saddam environment.
"We have to take into account all the possible scenarios," Ya'alon said. "We have the power to defend ourselves and to transmit deterrence. The American component, on condition that it succeeds, helps us. If it fails, then we have to take this into account and apparently invest more attention to it...
"The American aim is to stabilize the situation, and the situation there is not stable, but even in the second week of the war there were analysts who were describing the American campaign as a failure. It is not a simple challenge," Ya'alon said.
The events now come after the IDF has retooled its long-term strategic planning, which to a large extent dismisses the "Eastern Front" concept. There is concern that this may have been premature. But the alarming sentiments being expressed now by the defense establishment also come in the context of budgetary considerations.
Finance Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has earmarked about another NIS 1 billion for the defense budget "should an emergency situation arise." Senior IDF officers have expressed assurance that the necessary "emergency" will be found.
Ya'alon defined the American campaign in the Middle East as one "imposing responsibility on governments." He said this was true regarding leaders of Syria and Iran as well as Yasser Arafat.
"The United States is demanding responsibility. If they succeed, then it certainly serves the moderates in the region and has a positive impact on us. It is a threat against the extremists and so they are acting now to cause the US to fail," Ya'alon said. "It is in our interest that the US succeed," he added.
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| Spot-That-Whopper: Condoleezza Rice's Cover-Up Caves In!!! |
| 04.12.04 (4:36 pm) [edit] |
[b]Spot-That-Whopper: Condoleezza Rice
[i]Oh, that non-historical new threat information [/i]…[/b]
Q: Isn't it a fact, Dr. Rice, that the August 6th [Presidential Daily Briefing] warned against possible attacks in this country? And I ask you whether you recall the title of that PDB?
A: I believe the title was, "Bin Laden Determined To Attack Inside the United States."
[i][b]Now, the ... [/b][/i]
Q: Thank you.
A: No, Mr. Ben-Veniste ...
Q: I will get into the ...
A: I would like to finish my point here.
Q: I didn't know there was a point.
A: Given that—you asked me whether or not it warned of attacks.
Q: I asked you what the title was.
A: You said, did it not warn of attacks. It did not warn of attacks inside the United States. It was historical information based on old reporting. There was no new threat information. And it did not, in fact, warn of any coming attacks inside the United States [[i]italics Chatterbox's[/i]].
—[i]Exchange between Richard Ben-Veniste of the 9/11 commission and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice[/i], [i]April 8, 2004[/i].
We have not been able to corroborate some of the more sensational threat reporting, such as that from a [[i]text deleted[/i]] service in 1998 saying that Bin Laden wanted to hijack a U.S. aircraft to gain the release of "Blind Shaykh" 'Umar' Abd-al Rahman and other U.S.-held extremists.
—[b]Nevertheless, FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks.[/b] …
—[i]The Presidential Daily Briefing for Aug. 6, 2001, made public by the White House on April 10, 2004[/i].
[b]Source:[/b]
Timothy Noah, Slate, http://slate.msn.com/id/20986...
[u][b]Condi's Cover-up Caves In[/b][/u]
A small but significant White House cover-up fell apart this past weekend.
When the White House finally released the August 6, 2001 President's Daily Brief, it marked the end of a two-year effort on the part of the Bush administration to prevent the public from learning that a month before the 9/11 attacks--and weeks after the U.S. government had collected "chatter" indicating Osama bin Laden was planning a major strike--Bush received information indicating that al Qaeda was intent on mounting attacks within the United States.
Condoleezza Rice was instrumental in the attempt to keep the contents of this PDB--which was entitled "Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US" and which noted that al Qaeda "apparently maintains a support structure [in the United States] that could aid attacks" and that the FBI had detected "suspicious activity...consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks"--from becoming known. And it is obvious why it was so important for her and the White House to smother this PDB.
The existence of the August 6 PDB was first revealed by [i]CBS News' [/i]David Martin on May 15, 2002. But Martin's report only referred to the PDB in one sentence that noted the PDB had warned that an attack by bin Laden could involve hijacking U.S. aircraft. [i]CBS[/i] did not report the title of the briefing or any other material it contained. A media furor erupted after the White House acknowledged Bush had received this PDB. The day after the [i]CBS News [/i]report, The[i] New York Times [/i]carried a front-page story with a headline declaring, "[u]Bush Was Warned Bin Laden Wanted To Hijack Planes[/u]."
The disclosure of the PDB came at an especially awkward time for the White House. Two weeks earlier, news reports revealed that an FBI agent in Phoenix in July 2001 had written a classified memo suggesting that a group of Middle Eastern aviation students might be linked to terrorists (including bin Laden) and that the FBI had not taken any action in response to this agent's investigation. The "Phoenix memo" received a flood of media coverage, and the Bush administration--which heretofore had not had to field any tough questions about the government's pre-9/11 performance-- was confronted with queries about the negligent handling of the agent's prescient report. At the same time, the case of Zacarias Moussaoui was in the news. On May 15, the Times reported that before 9/11 an FBI agent had speculated that Moussaoui, the suspicious aviation student arrested by the FBI on immigration charges in the summer of 2001, might have been planning to fly a plane into the World Trade Center. News reports had previously indicated that the FBI had not pursued the Moussaoui case vigorously prior to September 11.
The Phoenix memo, the Moussaoui case--all of this placed the administration on the defensive for the first time since 9/11, as the White House fended off suggestions (and accusations) that the federal government, on Bush's watch, had missed crucial tips and opportunities to thwart the horrific attacks. Then came news of the August 6 PDB.
The White House reaction was predictable: stonewall. The Bush crew clearly did not want American citizens to discover that he had been told that bin Laden was aiming to conduct attacks in the United States, and they did not want to have to answer the inevitable questions (such as, what did the president do in response to this briefing?). So Team Bush started spinning, and its lead twirler was Rice.
On May 16, she held a briefing for reporters and described the PDB as "not a warning" and no more than an "analytic report that talked about [bin Laden's] methods of operations, talked about what he had done historically, in 1997, 1998. It mentioned hijacking, but hijacking in the traditional sense, and in a sense said that the most important and likely thing was they would take over an airliner holding passengers and demand the release of one of their operatives." She did not refer to the title or the other elements of the PDB unrelated to hijacking, including the report that al Qaeda members had apparently set up a support network in the United States. She did her best to make the PDB seem rather dull:
"This was generalized information that put together the fact that there were terrorist groups who were unhappy [with] things that were going on in the Middle East as well as al Qaeda operatives, which we'd been watching for a long time, that there was more chatter than usual, and that we knew that they were people who might try a hijacking. But, you know, again, that terrorism and hijacking might be associated is not rocket science."
That ho-hum description hardly matches the actual memo. And several days after the PDB story broke, Ari Fleischer, then Bush's press secretary, told reporters that the headline on the document was "[u]Bin Laden Determined To Strike the United States[/u]." That is, he had changed an "in" to a "the"--an alteration of significance, since the White House line has been that the pre-9/11 chatter had the administration looking for attacks on targets outside the United States. A May 19 , 2002, front-page[i] Washington Post [/i]story did report the correct title of the PDB and did state that the briefing had noted that al Qaeda members were living or traveling to the United States. But such reporting was overwhelmed by a White House, PR blitz that maintained the PDB was no big deal.
Rice, Fleischer and their colleagues succeeded more or less. The issue of the August 6, 2001, PDB went away. But there was another front to worry about. In 2002, the House and Senate intelligence committees were conducting a joint 9/11 inquiry. When the committees requested access to PDBs received by Bush and Bill Clinton, the Bush White House said no. As the final report of the joint inquiry noted, "Ultimately, this bar was extended to the point where CIA personnel were not allowed to be interviewed regarding the simple process by which the PDB is prepared."
The joint inquiry did interview intelligence community officials aware of the contents of the August 6 PDB. And the final report of the committees, which was released last summer, strongly hinted at what had been in the PDB. The committees got it right, noting that intelligence material gathered in early August 2001 had informed "senior government officials" that bin Laden had wanted to conduct attacks in the United States and that al Qaeda had a support structure in the United States. But the committees were unable to portray the PDB definitively or to provide the title. Only a few reporters picked up on the obvious hints placed in the final report. For the most part, the cover-up was still holding.
The independent 9/11 commission finally forced the August 6 PDB out of Bush's clutches. But first the White House put up a fight, refusing to allow the full commission to see this and other PDBs. The commission and the White House negotiated an agreement under which one commissioner, Jamie Gorelick (a Democrat), and the panel's executive director, Philip Zelikow (a Republican), were able to review the PDBs and report back to the other commissioners, after the White House vetted the notes they had taken. September 11 family members complained about the arrangement. They believed the full commission should have access to the PDBs, and they worried about Zelikow's credibility. (He served with Rice in the first Bush administration, co-wrote a book with her, worked on the Bush II transition team with her, and was appointed by George W. Bush to be on the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.) This deal did seem to provide the White House the opportunity to continue to suppress specifics about the PDB.
But Richard Clarke got in the way. His book and his testimony to the 9/11 commission brought far more attention to the panel and to the issue of whether the Bush administration had not regarded the al Qaeda threat seriously before September 11. His dramatic appearance also highlighted the White House's refusal to permit Rice to testify. With the White House trying to limit the commission's actions, its attempt to sit on the August 6 PDB became one more example of the administration's reluctance to cooperate fully. (Earlier this year, the White House had opposed the commission's request to add two months to its end-of-May deadline and had said Bush would not consent to an interview with all of the panel's commissioners; it then retreated on each point.)
When Rice did appear, Democratic commission members--particularly Richard Ben-Veniste--grilled her on the PDB, disclosing information from the PDB and forcing her to reveal its title. But she tried to stick to her previous characterization of the PDB, noting it presented "historical information based on old reporting." That depends on what the definition of "historical" is. The PDB did run through material dating back several years to show that "bin Laden since 1997 has wanted to conduct terrorist attacks in the U.S." But it also noted that al Qaeda was currently maintaining a "support structure" in the United States. And it cited information obtained in May 2001 that suggested "that a group of bin Laden supporters was in the U.S. planning attacks with explosives." (The White House said it reacted aggressively to this tip-off and it was unrelated to 9/11.) Rice repeatedly referred to the PDB as a "historical" document and did not accept Ben-Veniste's invitation to call for its declassification. When Ben-Veniste asked Rice if she had ever told Bush before August 6, 2001, of the existence of al Qaeda cells within the United States, she did not answer the question.
With so much attention focused on the PDB, it became inevitable that the Bush White House would have to release it. The administration has established a rather clear pattern. When it comes to sharing information with the public about controversial matters, it holds the line as long as it can--until politics dictate otherwise. This is the SOP for elected officials. But Bush does seem to dig in his heels more than most. After two years of hiding the PDB, the administration let it out on a Saturday night--a rather convenient time to make inconvenient information available.
When the White House released the document, it held a background briefing with reporters on a conference call. During this sessions, one White House official said, "The release of this PDB should clear up the myth that's out there that somehow the President was warned about September 11th." But the point of the PDB was not that Bush had been warned specifically about 9/11. At issue was what he had been told about the prospect of a bin Laden strike inside the United States, as well as what, if anything, he did in response. Under questioning from Commissioner Timothy Roemer, a former Democratic congressman, Rice had said the PDB was "most certainly an historical document that says, 'Here's how you might think about al Qaeda.'" But there are no public indications that after he received this briefing that Bush thought at all about the possibility of an al Qaeda attack in the United States. Maybe he did. But during the background briefing, a White House official declined to discuss how Bush reacted to the August 6 briefing: "That's a confidential relationship between the briefer who briefs the President each morning and the President. So not only do we not know, but it's not the sort of thing that we would discuss."
The day after the PDB was released, Bush held a short media availability at Fort Hood, Texas, and insisted that the August 6 briefing "said nothing about an attack on America. It talked about intentions, about somebody who hated America. Well, we knew that." When asked if he was "satisfied" that every agency had done all it should have prior to 9/11, Bush redefined the question: "I'm satisfied that I never saw any intelligence that indicated there was going to be an attack on America at a time and a place of an attack." It was a non sequitur. No one has suggested he saw such intelligence.
The PDB controversy is not about whether Bush received a specific warning a month before 9/11. It concerns his administration's attitude toward al Qaeda and the possibility of domestic attacks prior to September 11 and whether the White House has truly been willing to see the full 9/11 tale uncovered and told. The evidence is mounting that al Qaeda was not the priority it should have been in the first seven months of Bush's presidency. Yet the White House is unable to acknowledge that it made a misjudgment. Much of the public might even believe that it was a natural mistake for a new administration to underestimate the abilities and reach of a madman hunkered down in faraway Afghanistan. In a way, such a screw-up may be more forgivable than Bush and his lieutenants' efforts to cover up information and prevent the 9/11 commission from completing a thorough examination.
Bush lost the PDB battle, but the war is not over. The 9/11 commission is working hurriedly to finish its report by the congressionally mandated date of July 28. No doubt, the commission will have to tussle with the White House over the declassification of other material. Will the administration once more attempt to censor significant information? Could this delay the release of the report? Declassification fights tied up the congressional intelligence committees' 9/11 report for eight months. A repeat would push the unveiling of the 9/11 commission's report until after the election, but commission officials say they are determined to avoid such a fate.
The 9/11 commission has not constantly inspired confidence, but thanks to the panel, Rice's PDB cover-up, after two years, caved in. Still, suspicious minds would be right to wonder: Are there other cover-ups, which are not yet publicly known, that will end up more to Bush and Rice's liking?
[b]Source:[/b]
David Corn, The Nation, http://www.thenation.com/capi...
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| Osama bin Laden Must Be Laughing At The Hapless Boob Dubya!!! |
| 04.11.04 (6:08 pm) [edit] |
[b]Osama bin Laden must really be [i]laughing his head-off [/i]at the hapless boob Dubya!!! [i]Really[/i]!!![/b]
Prior to the 9/11 attacks upon America, Dubya had the intelligence information that Osama bin Laden & Al Qaeda were plotting "something big" here in the U.S.A. ([i]Not Saddam Hussein or Iraq, as the neo-con, neo-fascists in the corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc. junta mendaciously propagandized along with their phony WMDs lies [/i]...) ... and Dubya did absolutely NOTHING, thereby aiding and abetting his good buddy, Osama and the bin Laden family, whom have close ties with the Bush Crime Family ...
Now, the American people are being told ever more neo-con neo-orwellian bullshit-- [i]that nothing can be done, absolutely nothing[/i], without a detailed advanced warning that includes [i]specific [/i]time-tables, ways-and-means, and targets!!! Ha ha ha!!! Only an idiot ([i]or a neo-con buffoon[/i]) would believe the neo-fascist[i] spin (i.e. lies) [/i]propagated by the corrupt Bushies ...
[b][u]Is this the memo that could have stopped 11 September[/u]?[/b]
[b]Key points[/b]
• Bush warned of 9/11 attack weeks before
• Confidential memo released as part of ongoing inquiry
• Democrats argue that Bush did not take threat seriously
• FBI detected patterns of suspicious activity in this country"
[b]Key quote[/b]
"It said Osama bin Laden had designs on America. Well, I knew that. I was satisfied that some of the matters were being looked into." - George Bush, on the memo
[b]Story in full [/b]THE [u]US president[/u], George Bush, was personally warned that [u]Osama bin Laden[/u] could be planning an attack on the United States five weeks before the terrorist atrocity of [u]11 September[/u], 2001, it emerged yesterday.
A confidential [u]CIA[/u] memo has been released by the White House showing Mr Bush was also warned that al-Qaeda was studying a possible plan to hijack commercial aircraft into the US embassy in Kenya.
The document, declassified as part of the inquiry in the United States into the use of intelligence before the 11 September attacks, was seized on by [u]Democrats[/u] to argue that the Bush administration failed to take the terrorist threat seriously until al-Qaeda had struck.
Entitled Osama bin Laden Determined To Strike in US, the memo warned that the unsuccessful "millennium plot" to attack Los Angeles International airport on New Year’s Eve of 1999 "may have been part of bin Laden’s first serious attempt to strike in the US".
Its fears had been reinforced by a "clandestine source" who warned in 1998 that a "bin Laden cell in New York was recruiting Muslim-American youth for attacks".
And bin Laden himself, the memo said, had made clear his intention to "follow the example of World Trade Centre bomber Ramzi Yousef and bring the fighting to America".
The CIA said it had been unable to corroborate the "sensational" threat "that bin Laden wanted to hijack a US aircraft" to try and negotiate the release of Islamic extremists held by the United States.
However, it added that the [u]FBI[/u] had detected "patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York".
The "presidential daily briefing", or PDB, was given to Mr Bush at his ranch in Texas on 6 August, 2001. It offered no suggestion that hijacked aircraft would be flown into US targets on suicide missions.
Mr Bush, who yesterday attended an Easter Sunday service with troops at a US army base, said he was pleased to have the chance to remove doubts about how much he knew. [Bullshit. Dubya was forced to release the memo.]
"I wanted to know whether there was anything, any actionable intelligence," he told reporters as he left church yesterday. [Dubya: too stupid to know? Jeez ... We need better than shit-for-brains for a president.]
"It said Osama bin Laden had designs on America. Well, I knew that. I was satisfied that some of the matters were being looked into." [Dubya: satisifed to sit on his fat ass and do nothing except plan his illegal & immoral neo-con incursion into Iraq to enrich the Bush Crime Family, Halliburton, Bechtel, Carlyle Group, etc.]
Had the memo pointed to threats of attacks on New York and Washington, he said, "I would have moved mountains" to prevent it ... I’m satisfied that I never saw any intelligence that indicated there was going to be an attack on America." [Dubya apparently lacked the pea-brains to move anyone or anything to investigate the intelligence, or even warn the American people, and ergo, should be impeached.]
The memo had been the talk of Washington since Condoleezza Rice, [u]the US national security adviser[/u], referred to it when testifying to the 9/11 panel to a live television audience of millions last week. [Rice committed perjury and should be fired and sent to prison.]
Ms Rice, Mr Bush’s closest aide, repeatedly insisted the memo was "not a threat report" and insisted that neither she nor the president were "briefed about the use of airplanes as weapons". [But the CIA, FBI & NSA knew that airplanes would be hijacked, so overrated NSA Rice is unfit to do anything other than watch football with Dubya.]
The White House released the whole memo yesterday after selected leaks appeared in the US media which seemed to contradict Dr Rice’s testimony. [Of course, because Rice committed perjury and is a liar and incompetent buffoon.]
The 9/11 panel, which includes a former Watergate prosecutor, demanded to see the document and clear up doubts about Dr Rice’s testimony. Republican senators said yesterday that she had been vindicated. [Of course, because Repug toadies are getting massive bribes from Halliburton and corporations with a vested interest in keeping their corporate-puppet Dubya in office, even if the USA is destroyed in the process.]
"This backs up what Condoleezza Rice testified to," said James Thompson, a Republican member of the commission. [Toady Thompson wants to get his invites to White House soirees.]
"The memo didn’t call for anything to be done by the president. There is no smoking gun, not even a cold gun," he said. [The memo is the smoking gun, asshole.]
Bob Kerrey, a former Democrat senator, said the memo should have been intriguing enough for the president to push for more intelligence information.
"The whole argument the government used was that we were focusing overseas, that we thought the attack was coming from outside the United States," he said. "This memo said an attack could come in the United States. And even then, we didn’t scramble our [intelligence] agencies," he said.
The memo assured Mr Bush that the FBI was "conducting approximately 70 full field investigations throughout the US that it considers bin Laden-related". [But Dubya & Rice lacked the mental capacity to follow-up, because they were too busy watching football games and committing other sordid crimes in the Oval Office.]
Slade Gorton, a [u]Republican[/u] member of the panel, said yesterday that he would like to know why the 70 FBI investigations failed to reveal the al-Qaeda plot to hijack the four aircraft. [So would the rest of us.]
"It seems to me the FBI has more questions to answer than Condoleezza Rice or ... anyone who has testified before us so far," he said. [Uh-huh, let's let Condi Rice 'off-the-hook' after all, even if she is a liar and a traitor, she can string 2 sentences together, unlike Dubya who can't string 2 words together!]
The release of the memo had long been resisted by the White House, on the grounds that the presidential daily briefing is the most sensitive document received by the president. [Or, is it because the memo shows that Dubya & Rice didn't do their jobs!]
Mr Bush is briefed daily by the CIA and normally reviews the document with George Tenet, the agency’s director. [But according to Cabinet Officials, Dubya is usually staring off into space, with a hapless grin on his stupid face.]
Although a similar intelligence inquiry is being conducted in London, it will meet in private and is being chaired by a former civil servant known to be friendly towards Tony Blair.
[b]Full text of memo from the FBI to George Bush on 6 August, 2001[/b]
CLANDESTINE, foreign government, and media reports indicate bin Laden since 1997 has wanted to conduct terrorist attacks in the US. Bin Laden implied in US television interviews in 1997/1998 that his followers would follow the example of World Trade Centre bomber Ramzi Yousef and "bring the fighting to America".
After US missile strikes on his base in Afghanistan in 1998, bin Laden told followers he wanted to retaliate in Washington, according to [name deemed classified by the FBI] service. An Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) operative told an [classified] service at the same time that bin Laden was planning to exploit the operative’s access to the US to mount a terrorist strike.
The millennium plotting in Canada in 1999 may have been part of bin Laden’s first serious attempt to implement a terrorist strike in the US. Convicted plotter Ahmed Ressam has told the FBI that he conceived the idea to attack Los Angeles International Airport himself, but that bin Laden lieutenant Abu Zubaydah encouraged him and helped facilitate the operation. Ressam also said that in 1998 Abu Zubaydah was planning his own US attack.
Ressam says bin Laden was aware of the Los Angeles operation. Although bin Laden has not succeeded, his attacks against US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 demonstrate that he prepares operations years in advance. Bin Laden associates surveilled our embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam as early as 1993, and some members of the Nairobi cell planning the bombings were arrested and deported in 1997.
Al-Qaeda members - including some who are US citizens - have resided in or travelled to the US for years, and the group apparently maintains a support structure that could aid attacks. Two al-Qaeda members found guilty in the conspiracy to bomb our embassies in East Africa were US citizens, and a senior EIJ member lived in California in the mid-1990s. A clandestine source said in 1998 that a bin Laden cell in New York was recruiting Muslim-American youth for attacks.
We have not been able to corroborate some of the more sensational threat reporting, such as that from a [classified] service in 1998 saying bin Laden wanted to hijack a US aircraft to gain the release of "Blind Shaykh", ’Umar ’Abd al-Rahman and other US-held extremists. Nevertheless, FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York. The FBI is conducting approximately 70 full field investigations throughout the US that it considers bin Laden-related. CIA and the FBI are investigating a call to our embassy in UAE in May saying that a group of bin Laden supporters was in the US planning attacks with explosives.
[b]Source:[/b]
Scotman.com, http://news.scotsman.com/inde...
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| Bush May Find He's Running Against Sweep of History |
| 04.11.04 (1:02 pm) [edit] |
[b]Kevin Phillips was the chief political strategist for Richard Nixon's victory in 1968 and wrote the bombshell book on the emerging republican majority.[/b] Ten years ago his best-selling book on the politics of rich and poor influenced the 1992 elections. In his new book,[i] WEALTH AND DEMOCRACY[/i], he is writing about how big money and political power are the invisible hand in the hidden story of the American experience ... Read Bill Moyers' interview with Kevin Phillips on http://www.pbs.org/now/transc... . The following article by Kevin Phillips is well worth reflecting upon ...
[u][b]Bush May Find He's Running Against Sweep of History[/b][/u] - http://www.latimes.com/news/p...,1,7371303.story
[i]In 1920, 1952 and 1968, voters became disillusioned by war-related events[/i]
Early April's good news for the Bush White House is principally economic — job data suggesting that the November presidential election shouldn't be driven by high unemployment rates and associated resentments. The bad news, though, is the rising chance that the campaign will echo 20th century contests that were enlivened by voter bitterness over wartime mismanagement or postwar failures.
A year ago, foreign affairs — the combination of his response to Sept. 11, firmness against terrorism and apparent military success in Iraq — was the source of President Bush's highest approval ratings in national polls. His national security credentials looked to be a strong Republican trump for November. Not any more.
An emerging web of interrelated vulnerabilities — the developing sense that the pre-9/11 White House was inattentive, or worse, to the terrorist threat and Al Qaeda; the Bush family's business and financial ties to the Saudis and Osama bin Laden clan; the clamor over not finding Iraqi weapons of mass destruction; and administration attempts to blame Saddam Hussein for 9/11 — threatens to weaken the president's foreign policy bona fides. Now come the rising chaos in U.S.-occupied Iraq and the lack of a plan to deal with it.
All this is beginning to undercut the president's approval ratings. One recent poll showed public support for Bush's handling of Iraq plummeting from 59% in mid-January to just 40% in early April.
Historically, such voter disillusionment has fed incendiary politics. More than virtually any other people, Americans have refought major wars and their unfortunate consequences in postwar election debates. Today's Iraq-Saudi-9/11 issue appears to be signaling a similar political slugfest.
After World War I, the ostensible "war to end all wars," Americans were appalled by European bickering and ethnic politics at the Versailles peace conference and voted to stay out of postwar Europe and the new League of Nations. Disenchantment surged again in 1952, after victory in World War II gave way to communist triumphs in Eastern Europe and China, and U.S. troops got bogged down in a stalemated Korean War. In both postwar periods, popular disillusionment translated into political upheaval.
In 1968, anxious politicians and voters pushed for peace plans and strategies to end the Vietnam War. Parenthetically, the Democrats lost the White House again that year, just as they had in 1920 and 1952. Then in 1992, George H.W. Bush became the first 20th century president to be defeated after an international military success. The victory lost luster when Hussein was left in power and debate flared over Bush's prewar policies of helping to arm Iraq.
In all these elections, public concern over wartime miscalculations or unexpected postwar chaos or revolution ballooned enough to convince voters to change parties in the White House, though the economies of the times were recovering or prosperous. Voters spurned false "war" analogies about not changing horses in midstream. One could say that they opted to change guides mid-disaster.
In terms of postwar debacles, the spreading uprising and lawlessness in Iraq could rival unstable Europe in 1919-20, the expansion of communism after World War II and the breakdown of U.S. power after Vietnam.
Current polls show that half or more of respondents in 13 foreign nations believe the conflict in Iraq has undermined the war on terrorism and that the U.S. has become less trustworthy. Just as his father was politically embarrassed in 1991-92 by his prewar coziness with Iraq, President Bush seems to have been ill-served by his personal grudge against Iraq and his family's political and business connections to the Saudi royal family and the wealthy Bin Ladens.
Indeed, the "Arab connection" may be one explanation for the administration's apparent pre- 9/11 inattention to the terrorist threat. In response to a series of questions last week by 9/11 commission member John F. Lehman about Saudi Arabia supporting radical Islamic schools and impeding U.S. investigations of Al Qaeda, Condoleezza Rice testified that she had little knowledge of such activities before the attacks.
The 9/11 commission reportedly will ask Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft and a former acting FBI director, Thomas Pickard, about arrangements to fly out members of the Bin Laden family and other apprehensive Saudis from the United States immediately after the terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon.
It's tempting to suggest that, by comparison, the war-related and postwar failures at issue in 1920, 1952 and 1968 were less personally tied to individuals. But the Bushes' apparent deceits span two generations, two presidencies and two Iraqi wars. By early April, the president's approval ratings for dealing with terrorism had fallen to 53%. It's possible that the public could be even more sour six months hence as election day draws nigh.
David Griffin, a professor at the Claremont School of Theology, has published a book titled "The New Pearl Harbor." He contends that U.S. officials must have had at least some knowledge of what was coming on 9/11. The public is still far from ready to buy this kind of allegation. But who would have imagined a year ago that in April 2004 we'd be watching a White House beleaguered by chaos in Iraq and hyper-defensive about its pre-9/11 preparedness for a terrorist attack on U.S. soil.
The 1920 debate over the proposed League of Nations and flawed postwar map of war-torn Europe was fierce, as was the name-calling in 1952 over how a U.S. victory in WWII had turned into communist gains. The mess in Vietnam helped to shape the 1968 election and echoed into 1972. But this year, the records of two Bush administrations in the Persian Gulf and the enigma of 9/11 could loom as large — and with their own unique sweep.
[b]By Kevin Phillips, Kevin Phillips' latest book is "[i]American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush[/i]."[/b], http://www.latimes.com/news/p...,1,7371303.story
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| Why Passive Condi Rice Should Be Fired ... Dubya's No-Can-Do NSA ... |
| 04.11.04 (9:05 am) [edit] |
[b]"Young Americans are bravely fighting and dying in Iraq ..." ... and meanwhile George W. is[i] vacationing [/i](Bush has taken/stolen 500 days for [i]vacationing[/i] ... 40% http://www.tblog.com/template... of his presidency has been spent on [i]vacation [/i]... more than any other president in U.S. history ... defrauding the USA ...) while [i]playing cowboy [/i]on his Crawford Ranch, while Iraq is [i]spinning out of control [/i]... [i]Jeez[/i] ... Rice[i] constantly flies [/i]to wherever Dubya[i] [u]is[/u] [/i]in order to [i]sit on his lap [/i]because the over-rated NSA is terrified to be [i]out of his sight[/i], where[i] she might be forced to do some real work (and have to associate with "low-life" underlings in the "bowels of the organization" who know what the hell is going on ... unlike herself & Dumb-Dubya ...) [/i]instead of [i]sucking-up [/i]to her neo-paymasters, the Bush Crime Family ... [i]Jeez[/i] ... [/b]Isn't it time to get rid of this insanely arrogant and irresponsible cabal of neo-con incompetents and neo-fascist crooks in the corrupt Bush regime??? ... [i]Of course it is [/i]...
Consider "[b]Our New No-Can-Do Nation[/b]" by [i]Maureen Dowd[/i], NY Times, on http://www.nytimes.com/2004/0... :
Young Americans are bravely fighting and dying in Iraq, trying to fulfill the audacious vision of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to remold Iraq in the image of America.
But while we try to turn them into us, who have we become?
The president presents himself as an avatar of American values, plain-spoken cowboy and tough flyboy.
But Condi Rice's testimony on Thursday raises the depressing possibility that we've lost the essence of our frontier spirit: the ingenious individualist who gets around the system and faces down the drones.
From Abigail Adams to Tom Sawyer to Bugs Bunny to Jimmy Stewart's Jefferson Smith to Indiana Jones, the best American character is plucky, nimble, clever, inventive.
So it's disturbing to see our government reacting to crises with a jaded shrug and lumbering gait, especially since we are up against such a creative, chameleonlike enemy.
Consider the pathetic performance of NASA, which inverted its motto to "Failure is an option" by shrugging off warnings about the safety of the seven Columbia astronauts who burned up coming back to earth, and not trying to send up a rescue shuttle.
This no-can-do spirit marked George Tenet's lame excuses to senators in February who wanted to know why the C.I.A. never picked up the trail of Marwan al-Shehhi, the pilot who crashed Flight 175 into the south tower on 9/11, even though the Germans gave the agency his name and phone number. "They didn't give us a first and a last name until after 9/11," Mr. Tenet said.
And what would Eliot Ness say about an F.B.I. that is less computer savvy than American preschoolers and Islamic terrorists? The F.B.I. is only halfway through modernizing its computers, which could not, before 9/11, do two searches at once, such as "Al Qaeda" and "flight schools." Can't we draft Bill Gates for duty?
This ominous passivity was threaded through the testimony of Ms. Rice, a brainy and accomplished woman who should represent the best of America. She blamed "systemic" and "structural" impediments that prevented the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. from sharing. She complained that other people hadn't recommended what she should do; even the terrorists were faulted for not giving specifics.
The screeching chatter in the spring and summer of 2001 — "There will be attacks in the near future" — did not yank Mr. Bush and his team from their Iraq fixation. "But they don't tell us when," Ms. Rice protested. "They don't tell us where, they don't tell us who, and they don't tell us how." Paging Nancy Drew.
Inconclusive intelligence did not bother the Bush team when it wanted to be "actionable" on Iraq, or engage in "tit for tat" with Saddam.
The Aug. 6, 2001, presidential daily briefing — remarkably headlined "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States" — mentioned Al Qaeda's wanting to hijack planes and the 70 F.B.I. field investigations into suspected Al Qaeda sleeper cells in the U.S.
The briefing had three-month-old information that Al Qaeda was trying to sneak into the country for an explosives attack. No wonder the C.I.A. chief and counterterrorism czar were running around with their hair on fire.
What should have made Condi hysterical, she deemed "historical."
W. kept fishing and denouncing Saddam, while Condi sat for a glam Vogue photo shoot and interview.
On Iraq, they ran roughshod over the system. On Al Qaeda, Condi blamed the system, saying she couldn't act on Richard Clarke's plan until there was a strategy, a policy, "tasking," meetings, etc.
The F.B.I. officials who ignored Coleen Rowley as she tried to break through the obtuse leadership of Louis Freeh's F.B.I. to get evidence on Zacarias Moussaoui, and Kenneth Williams, the Phoenix agent who outlined the Al Qaeda plot to train Arab terrorists in our flight schools, have not been held accountable. Why aren't the heroic Ms. Rowley and Mr. Williams running something?
Dick Clarke has struck a chord because his passionate efforts reflected those great American virtues of ingenuity and brashness. Even if he was a bit of a cowboy, loading up his .357 sidearm to return to the West Wing the night after 9/11, at least he was not dozing through High Noon.
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| Dubya's Biggest Shell Game ... |
| 04.10.04 (6:57 pm) [edit] |
[b]Dubya's Biggest Shell Game ... [/b]Well, maybe it[i] is [/i]the insane Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta's [/i]illegal and immoral neo-con, neo-fascist bloody war-turned-guerrilla-quag mire in Iraq ... But [i]competing for the title of Dubya's Biggest Shell Game [/i]would also have to be Dubya's[i] irresponsible and reckless tax cuts, tax loopholes & boondoggles [/i]for gluttonous corporations and the hyper-rich plutocrats, who are living like Neo-Emperors, while the Gap Between the Haves and the Have Nots is skyrocketing to levels unseen in over 75 years ... Americans are being scammed, swindled and looted by Dubya and his band of neo-fascist thieves using their traitorous deficit spending on [i]Welfare for Corporations & Hyper-Rich Plutocrats [/i]resulting in record-level high debts that are endangering our nation and our people ... America's Middle-Class is shrinking and Working People are being transformed into neo-slaves, as our standard of living diminishes and our nation's infrastructure crumbles around us ...
[u][b]Shell Game[/b][/u] - http://tompaine.com/feature2....
[b]I remember the day last summer when I got my $400 tax cut[/b], President Bush’s advance on an increased child credit. I was happy to get the 400 bucks, but within a week I started to wonder if it was an illusion.
First, due to state and local budget cuts, my daughter’s elementary school laid off our librarian, cut lunchroom monitors and cancelled hiring for an art teacher. Then I got a request from another parent asking each family to chip in 39 bucks for new chairs at the school, so the kids could have decent seating. Then I got my property tax bill, reflecting a 100 percent increase in local property taxes.
Like most Americans, I don’t look forward to tax day. Nor am I enthusiastic about everything our government does with my money. But I don’t resent paying for the peace, order and public services that we all enjoy. I confess that there are a lot of things government does that I take for granted because they function well and are invisible.
As we all prepare our tax forms and pony up to fund our government, it's important to understand that there's another invisible element at work here. The "tax cuts" that most working Americans have received under the Bush administration are actually not tax cuts, but tax shifts. Here are the five most fundamental:
[b]Tax Shift #1:[/b] [i]From Federal Taxes to State Taxes. Since 2002, state governments have closed $200 billion in budget gaps by raising taxes and cutting services[/i]. During those same years, newly enacted federal tax cuts delivered about as much money—$197.3 billion—in new tax breaks for the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans (households making more than $337,000 a year). In essence, Bush chose to force tax hikes in the states in order to give tax breaks to multi-millionaires.
[b]Tax Shift #2:[/b] [i]From Progressive to Regressive Taxes. President Bush has focused on reducing income tax rates[/i]. But 71 percent of us pay more in payroll taxes (Social Security and Medicare) than in income taxes. Payroll taxes are regressive: high-income people pay a lower tax rate than low-income people. The opposite is true of progressive taxes, such as federal income, corporate and estate taxes. Since the early '60s, this trio of progressive tax rates has dropped precipitously. But the regressive payroll tax rate has risen.
[b]Tax Shift #3:[/b] [i]From Taxes on Wealth to Taxes on Work[/i]. Politicians talk about the virtues of hard work, but their tax policies speak otherwise. Between 1980 and today, the main tax rate on work income—the payroll tax—has jumped 25 percent. In the same period, top tax rates on investment income and large inheritances have been cut between 31 and 79 percent.
This tax shift from wealth to work means that a person who derives millions of dollars in dividend income solely from his investments now pays a marginal tax rate of just 15 percent. Compare that with a schoolteacher with an adjusted gross income over $28,400 who pays a payroll tax rate of 15.3 percent, plus a marginal income tax rate of 28 percent, for a total marginal rate of more than 43 percent!
[b]Tax Shift #4:[/b] [i]From Corporations to Individuals[/i]. Corporate lobbyists complain that the United States overtaxes business. But since 1962, the share of federal revenues contributed by corporations has declined by two-thirds, while the share contributed by individuals and unincorporated small business has risen 17 percent.
[b]Tax Shift #5:[/b] [i]From Current Taxpayers to Future Generations[/i]. President Bush sold his tax cuts using the line, "It’s your money." He left out the other side ofthe story: "It’s your children’s debt." According to Citizens for Tax Justice, between 2002 and 2007, Bush’s fiscal policies will impose $13,000 in additional debt on each man, woman and child in America.
Because of this tax shift, any "cuts" that ordinary taxpayers get will be lost to state and local tax increases and services cuts. Even the "married with children" families who have been thought to be big beneficiaries are losers after the tax shifts. The real winners in three years of Bush "tax cuts" are the very wealthy, those with incomes of more than $500,000. For them, these tax cuts are real windfalls. For the rest of us, though, they end up being burdens.
So as you prepare to crank out your tax forms, take note of how much you're paying. You might get the sensation—as I do—that your dollars are being shuffled around in a grand shell game of paperwork and political rhetoric.
[b]Chuck Collins is program director at [i]United for a Fair Economy [/i]and co-author, with Bill Gates Sr., of [i]Wealth and Our Commonwealth: Why America Should Tax Accumulated Fortunes [/i](Beacon, 2003).[/b]
[b]Visit [i]United For A Fair Economy [/i]on http://www.faireconomy.org/ for more information or to get involved[/b].
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| Is The U.S.-Appointed Iraqi Government Close To Collapse??? ... |
| 04.10.04 (3:10 pm) [edit] |
[b]The dire situation in Iraq is quickly [i]spinning out of control[/i], [/b]and although the neo-con, neo-fascist Bush regime vainly attempts to put their neo-orwellian propaganda spin ([i]lies[/i]) on the horrendous massacre and slaughter of U.S. Soliders & innocent Iraqi Civilians in Dubya's illegal and immoral war-turned-bloody-guerril la-quagmire on behalf of their traitorous war-profiteers (Halliburton, Bechtel, Carlyle Group, Unocal, Big Oil, the Military Industrial Complex, etc.) ... the [i]reality[/i] is that if U.N. intervention is not forthcoming soon, Iraq may collapse into a horrific civil war ... At which point, the insane and criminal Bushies should be arrested and sent to the International Court at the Hague to be tried for their heinous [i]Crimes Against Humanity [/i]...
Consider "[i][b]US-Appointed Iraqi Government Close to Collapse[/b][/i]?" by [i]Juan Cole[/i], on http://www.antiwar.com/cole/?... :
AP reported http://www.stltoday.com/stlto...+hits+Fallujah+after+wome n,+children+flee that the US-appointed Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) issued a demand early on Saturday that the US cease its military action against Fallujah and stop employing "collective punishment."
Not only has what many Iraqis call "the puppet council" taken a stand against Bush administration tactics in Iraq, but individual members are peeling off. Shiite Marsh Arab leader Abdul Karim al-Muhammadawi suspended his membership in the council on Friday. A Sunni member, Ghazi al-Yawir, has threatened to resign if a negotiated settlement of the Fallujah conflict cannot be found. Old-time Sunni nationalist leader Adnan Pachachi thundered on al-Arabiya televsion, "[i]It was not right to punish all the people of Fallujah, and we consider these operations by the Americans unacceptable and illegal[/i]." For him to go on an Arab satellite station much hated by Donald Rumsfeld and denounce the very people who appointed him to the IGC is a clear act of defiance. There are rumors that many of the 25 Governing Council members have fled abroad, fearful of assassination because of their association with the Americans. The ones who are left appear on the verge of resigning.
This looks to me like an incipient collapse of the US government of Iraq. Beyond the IGC, the bureaucracy is protesting. Many government workers in the ministries are on strike and refusing to show up for work, according to [i]ash-Sharq al-Awsat[/i]. Without Iraqis willing to serve in the Iraqi government, the US would be forced to rule the country militarily and by main force. Its legitimacy appears to be dwindling fast. The "handover of sovereignty" scheduled for June 30 was always nothing more than a publicity stunt for the benefit of Bush's election campaign, but it now seems likely to be even more empty. Since its main rationale was to provide more legitimacy to the US enterprise in Iraq, and since any legitimacy the US had is fading fast, and since a government appointed by Bremer will be hated by virtue of that very appointment, the Bush administration may as well just not bother.
The Interior Minister, Nuri Badran, who was dismissed by Paul Bremer on Thursday, appears to have gone into exile in Jordan. He was probably let go because he objected to the twin US assaults, on Fallujah and on the Sadrist Shiites, or at least to the way it was being done.
The degree of hatred for the United States in the Muslim world is growing by the minute, as the events in Fallujah are broadcast throughout the region. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak's warning to Bush that by invading Iraq he would be creating 100 Bin Ladens may well come to pass. For more on this see the [i]Washington Post[/i]. http://www.washingtonpost.com...
Part of what caused this incipient collapse of the US-appointed Iraqi government is that the US military decided to besiege the entire city of Fallujah to get at insurgents who killed 4 US Blackwater mercenaries last week, even though reports indicated that the guerrillas left the city after the killings. Those guerrillas, supported by civilian demonstrations and desecration of the mercenaries' bodies, announced that they were taking revenge for the Israeli murder of Hamas clerical leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. Just as the Israelis and their American amen corner helped drag the US into the Iraq war, so they also have inflamed Iraqi sentiment against the US by spectacular uses of state terror against Palestinians. Both the Sunni and the Shiite uprisings in Iraq in the past week in a very real sense were set off by Sharon's whacking of Yassin, a paraplegic who could easily have been arrested. (Only once Muqtada al-Sadr announced his support for Hamas was he targeted by the Neocon-dominated Coalition Provisional Authority for arrest, convincing him that he had nothing to lose and had better launch an insurgency).
The siege and assault on Fallujah during the past 5 days have killed some 400 Iraqis and wounded 1000, according to eyewitnesses. The civilians in the city had begun wanting for food and water. On Friday, the US appears to have spread panic by broadcasting warnings of an imminent attack and encouraging women and children to leave. Large numbers have streamed out. Some attempted to take their men with them, but Marines refused to allow male civilians out. Some families chose to remain together and face further bombardments rather than split up.
One Marine was killed and another wounded at Fallujah on Friday.
AP said, ' [i]Throughout the afternoon, fighting was reduced to sporadic gunfire. But when night fell, heavy explosions resumed as an AC-130 gunship strafed targets and soldiers and insurgents engaged in a mortar battle. Marines said they had come under fire and wanted to return fire. The AC-130 hit a cave near Fallujah where insurgents took refuge after attacking Marines. A 500-pound laser-guided bomb also struck the cave, said spokesman 1st Lt. Eric Knapp[/i]. '
The US announced a pause in the fighting to allow the Iraqis to "tend to their dead." This statement of Paul Bremer's is obviously a cruel taunt, and indicative of the fury and hatred of the American administration of Iraq toward the people of Anbar province, who have fiercely resisted the American occupation, largely out of Iraqi nationalist or Sunni fundamentalist motives.
At the western edge of Baghdad, guerrillas set off a spectacular explosion when they hit a fuel convoy, killing a US soldier and an Iraqi driver, and wounding 12 others. (Eyewitnesses spoke of lots of bodies, so the casualties are probably greater). Two American soldiers and several mercenaries may have been taken hostage.
Another US soldier was killed in Baghdad when his base was attacked. Substantial guerrilla groups engaged US troops in Baqubah and Muqdadiyah north of the capital.
[i][b]Juan Cole is Professor of History at the University of Michigan. Visit his blog: http://www.juancole.com/ .[/b][/i]
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| The Neo-Cons Have A Severe Learning Disability: Congenital Criminality |
| 04.10.04 (9:51 am) [edit] |
[b]The corrupt neo-con Bush regime is[i] chocker-block full of congenital weirdos [/i]...[/b]
Dubya is a [i]congenital idiot [/i]who can't think for himself, but instead reads ([i]and doesn't even read that well[/i]) from neo-orwellian propaganda scripts provided by his neo-fascist thugs & goons ...
Cheney is a [i]congenital criminal [/i]who slithers through campaign fund-raisers spouting the same tired old lies, deceptions and falsehoods that have been disproved and discredited [i]over and over again [/i]...
Rumsfeld & Wolfowitz are[i] congenital buffoons [/i]who have miserably bungled the illegal and immoral war on Iraq, while still arrogantly (and laughably) proclaiming & shouting their genius to anyone dumb enough to listen ...
Rice is a [i]congenital lap-dog-cum-liar [/i]who is over-rated, can't "connect-the-dots" and doesn't take any action that Dubya doesn't [i]order/ask [/i]her to take ... Like a monkey in a circus who jumps thru hoops, the neo-cons uproariously applaud her for being able to[i] string-two-[u]sentences[/ u] together [/i]([i]... so could Joseph Goebbles ...[/i]), unlike Dubya who can't [i]string-two-[u]words[/u ] together [/i]...
The rest of the neo-fascist Bush cabal are comprised of [i]congenital liars, felons, war criminals and cowardly traitors-cum-arm-chair-ch icken-hawks[/i], quite willing to send [i]others[/i] off to fight & die in neo-hitlerian wars that [i]these neo-con thugs & goons are too cowardly[/i] to go fight & die in themselves ...
Consider "[b]Neocons: Learning Disabled[/b]" by [i]Charley Reese[/i], on http://www.antiwar.com/reese/... :
The Bush administration, I fear, is severely learning-disabled.
Rational people, acting as individuals or as a group, learn from their mistakes. They gather data, they make decisions, and they take actions. Then they assess the feedback from reality and adjust.
For example, if you rely on a person and learn that he or she has lied to you, then you get rid of that person. If you hire people to do a job and they fail miserably, then you fire them and replace them with more competent people. If your adviser predicts one outcome and the opposite outcome occurs, then you dump your adviser.
All of these things have happened to the Bush administration, and it has acted as if they had not happened. Ahmed Chalabi, convicted bank embezzler and head of the Iraqi National Congress, has practically boasted that he and his group misled the United States in order to manipulate us to get rid of Saddam Hussein. He's still listened to and is about to be put into power in Iraq.
The CIA, the FBI and the Defense Intelligence Agency all failed to detect signs of the impending attack, which was easy to see was coming. Even I predicted a terrorist attack inside the United States in a column in August 2001. I had no idea what kind of attack or when it would happen, but only a fool would imagine that we could meddle in Middle Eastern affairs and remain immune from blowback.
Well, I hope you share the president's faith. The same people who failed to protect us in September 2001 are still where they were. So is Paul Wolfowitz, the architect of the Iraq War, who said we would be greeted with flowers and dancing in the streets. Bush ought to put him in charge of Iraq. He deserves to live in Baghdad for the rest of his life.
Another failure to learn from is the arrest warrant issued for cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. In Palestine, Yasser Arafat's popularity could be in the subbasement, but as soon as the Israelis threaten him with exile or assassination, what happens? The Palestinians rally to his side. You don't need a degree in Middle Eastern studies to figure out that the way to make Muqtada al-Sadr a national hero is to threaten him with arrest or death, which the Bush administration has done. It's that old rule of human nature. A guy might be an SOB, but he's our SOB, and don't you outsiders mess with him. Somebody should slip Bush a note and remind him that in Iraq, we are the outsiders.
Normally, when an individual disregards feedback from reality and keeps repeating the same actions that produce bad outcomes, he's pronounced insane. In the case of the Bush administration, its behavior just tells us that it is driven by ideology rather than by reality.
An ideologue shares a lot of traits with the insane. His ideology provides him with all the answers to all the questions. When reality throws up facts that don't jibe with the ideology, he ignores reality and sticks with his ideology.
That's the basic problem with the Bush administration. Its members have all the answers, and reality be damned. No matter what happens on the ground in Iraq, they proceed with their belief that a people who have never known democracy nevertheless hunger for it and love us for giving them the chance to experience it. If the atrocity in Fallujah is an example of Iraqi love, it's pretty darn tough love.
Ideologues are dangerous, whether their ideology is the neoconservative variety, Zionism, communism or Islamic extremism. Their minds all work the same way: We know the answers; don't try to confuse us with facts. I am deeply grieved about every young American who is killed or maimed in Iraq. Their sacrifice is for a lunatic idea and nothing else.
[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].
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| Dubya's Inferno: All Hell Breaks Loose in Iraq!!! ... |
| 04.09.04 (7:45 pm) [edit] |
... Number of U.S. service members killed in Iraq since Operation Iraqi Freedom began on March 19, 2003: [b]649[/b]
... Number killed since George W. Bush declared an end to "major combat" on May 1, 2003: [b]508[/b]
... Number killed this month: [b]58[/b]
([i]As of Friday, April 9[/i])
[b]Source:[/b] U.S. Department of Defense, http://www.defenselink.mil/ne...
[b]Dubya's Inferno of Hell in Iraq demonstrates the insane neo-con, neo-fascist Bush regime's corruption and incompetence in waging war and resolving conflicts ... [i]Read on [/i]...[/b]
On the first anniversary of Saddam Hussein’s fall, all hell broke loose in Iraq, with Sunni and Shiite resistance fighters battling US-led forces while continuing to hold three Japanese and several other foreign hostages.
Fierce fighting that has convulsed the Sunni cities of Fallujah and Ramadi reached the western fringe of Baghdad, where Iraqis killed nine in an attack on a US fuel convoy, and said they had seized four Italians and two Americans. A Reuters journalist saw two captive foreigners in a mosque in a village in the Abu Gharib district.
At the scene of the convoy attack, a dead foreigner lay on the road bleeding from the head as an Iraqi beat him.
Teenage fighters with rocket-propelled grenades and rifles lurked on bridges or in derelict lots near the main highway leading west toward the embattled town of Fallujah.
Iraq’s US administrator Paul Bremer said US forces had unilaterally suspended operations in Fallujah at midday after a crackdown on resistance fighters to allow aid in and hold unprecedented talks with resistance fighters.
This week’s bloodshed has shown how far the United States is from securing the country whose dictator it toppled on April 9, 2003. Iraqis traumatized by 35 years of Baathist rule then hoped Saddam Hussein’s removal would bring them freedom and a better life. Today they face an uncertain future after 12 months of violence that is sapping a reconstruction drive, hampering oil exports to pay for it and frightening off foreign investors.
In the past week, hundreds of Iraqis and at least 51 US and allied soldiers have been killed. A British civilian was also killed, the Foreign Office in London said on Thursday. He was working for a US security firm.
Baghdad streets were quiet yesterday as many residents feared more violence.
“America is the big devil and Britain and Blair are the lesser devils,” a preacher at Baghdad’s Umm Al-Qura Mosque told an angry congregation. Reflecting a growing hostility to outsiders, one worshiper said: “When we get the order for jihad, no foreigner will be safe in Iraq.”
US-led troops retook the eastern town of Kut two days after Ukrainian soldiers withdrew after clashes with Shiite fighters loyal to cleric Moqtada Sadr, who launched an uprising across southern Iraq this week.
Bremer announced the Fallujah cease-fire after five days of street fighting. The director of the main hospital said 450 Iraqis had been killed and 1,000 wounded in the city this week. Marines launched “Operation Iron Resolve” in Fallujah after last week’s killing and mutilation of four US security guards. The ferocity of the crackdown has angered Iraqi politicians working with Bremer’s administration.
“We are seeing the liquidation of a whole city,” Governing Council member Ghazi Ajil Al-Yawar told Al-Jazeera television, saying he might resign in protest over the treatment of Fallujah. “These operations were a mass punishment for the people of Fallujah,” Adnan Pachachi, one of the most pro-American members of the US-picked Governing Council, told Al-Arabiya TV. “It was not right to punish all the people of Fallujah and we consider these operations by the Americans unacceptable and illegal.”
After Friday prayers, clashes erupted in the mixed Sunni-Shiite town of Baqubah, north of Baghdad, as resistance fighters fought US troops and attacked buildings.
Shooting also broke out after a demonstration in the northern city of Mosul, witnesses said. They said at least three Iraqis were killed in fighting around Mosul city hall and a dawn-to-dusk curfew had been imposed. Clashes in Karbala between Shiite fighters and Polish and Bulgarian troops killed 15 Iraqis.
Shiite militiamen still control the center of Najaf, where Sadr is thought to be holed up. The violence erupted as Shiite pilgrims thronged Karbala for Arbaeen, a religious occasion that climaxes this weekend.
Sunnis and Shiites prayed together in the southern city of Basra, in one of many shows of solidarity seen across Iraq.
A major international oil conference due to take place in the city later this month was canceled due to security fears.
In Baghdad, new razor wire barriers blocked streets around Paradise Square where US Marines and Iraqis dragged down Saddam’s statue a year ago. Loudspeaker messages warned the public to stay away. The measures appeared designed to foil possible anniversary protests against the US-led occupation.
Posters of Sadr fluttered on a green sculpture symbolizing a new Iraq erected on the plinth where Saddam’s statue once stood. A US soldier later climbed a ladder to pull down the Sadr pictures in an eerie echo of last year’s iconic images.
[b]Source:[/b]
"All Hell Breaks Loose in Iraq", by Naseer Al-Nahr, Arab News, on http://www.arabnews.com/?page...§ion=0&article=42850&d=10 &m=4&y=2004
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| U.S. Appointed Governing Council Condemns U.S. Genocide In Iraq!!! |
| 04.09.04 (2:48 pm) [edit] |
"[i]The read we get on the people of Iraq is there's no question they want to get rid of Saddam Hussein and they will welcome us as liberators[/i]." - Veep Dick Cheney, Meet the Press, March 2003, http://www.uexpress.com/richa...
[b]Isn't it about time to get rid of the corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta[/i]??? ... [/b]If anything, Rice's contemptible perjury yesterday before the 9/11 [i]Whitewash[/i] Commission http://www.americanprogress.o... demonstrates that this corrupt gang of Bush/Cheney neo-con thugs and neo-fascist goons, are not[i] only [/i]liars, thieves and traitors-- but [i]also [/i]wittingly or unwittingly dangerously incompetent war criminals ... The current situation in Iraq calls for a new U.S. administration capable of working closely with Congress, the U.N. and other nations to recover from this bloody fiasco and horrendous mess, created by the insane Bushies for their own aggrandizement, power and riches ...
[b]Members of Iraq's US-appointed governing council have condemned the US military operation in Falluja after four days of bitter fighting.[/b]
One member described the operation as "[i]genocide[/i]" after doctors in the Sunni Muslim city of 300,000 reported 450 deaths and 1,000 injured this week.
The fugitive leader of the country's parallel Shia unrest has demanded the withdrawal of troops from Iraq.
The US has declared a truce in Falluja but fighting continued as night fell.
Gunfire and mortar blasts echoed across the city west of Baghdad and a marine officer who spoke to AFP news agency on condition of anonymity predicted it would "get worse before it gets better".
Another officer, Maj Pete Farnum, said his men had tried to keep the noon (0800 GMT) truce on Friday but attacks by militants had not eased.
"We went into pause but the enemy kept attacking us on the western side of the city," he said.
"We had to defend ourselves so we asked for permission to return to offensive operation. This was granted."
However, the ferocity of the battle for the city appeared to have eased since the US administrator in Iraq, Paul Bremer, announced the 24-hour truce to allow for peace talks.
US troops are said to be allowing women and children to leave the city but are stopping men as they search for suspects in the killing and horrific mutilation of four American security guards in Falluja at the end of March.
[b]Coalition lashed [/b]
Ghazi Ajil al-Yawer, a Sunni Muslim member of the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC), said he was ready to resign if the US did not seek a peaceful solution to the crisis in Falluja.
"How can a superpower like the US put itself in a state of war with a small city like Falluja? This is genocide," he told AFP news agency on Friday, the first anniversary of the fall of Saddam Hussein.
Fellow IGC member Adnan Pachachi said the Falluja offensive was "illegal and totally unacceptable" whilst Kurdish IGC member Mahmoud Uthman described US policy as counter-productive.
The Iraqi interim Human Rights Minister, Abdel Basit Turki, and a member of the Iraqi Governing Council's rotating presidency, Iyad Allawi, both resigned on Friday without giving a reason for their decision.
Moqtada Sadr, the radical cleric whose followers have been directing violent unrest in Shia areas since Sunday, has demanded the withdrawal of coalition troops from Iraq.
Speaking in a sermon read out at Friday Prayers by an aide in the town of Kufa, he said US President George W Bush could no longer point to Saddam Hussein or weapons of mass destruction as reasons to be in Iraq.
"You are now fighting an entire nation, from south to north, from east to west, and we advise you to withdraw from Iraq," said Mr Sadr, who is the subject of a coalition arrest warrant.
[b]'Serious' threat [/b]
President Bush has been consulting other coalition leaders by telephone, speaking to Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski and El Salvadoran President Francisco Flores.
A senior US commander, Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, said in Baghdad that operations to quell Shia unrest were going well.
UK Foreign Secretary Jack Straw has said the coalition is facing its "most serious" threat since the end of the war.
The US has reported the deaths of at least 42 of its soldiers in combat since Sunday and militants are holding a number of foreign nationals hostage, including three Japanese citizens, two Palestinians and a Canadian.
Russia has called on the sides in Iraq to show restraint and warned of "an impending humanitarian disaster" in Falluja.
[b]Source:[/b]
"Iraqi allies warn US over Falluja", BBC News, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/mi...
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| White House Credibility on National Security Collapsing ... |
| 04.09.04 (11:27 am) [edit] |
[b]The traitorous Bush White House simply isn't credible on safeguarding our nation's national security ... [/b]Frankly, the corrupt Bush regime don't really care about democracy here at home or abroad ... The neo-cons don't really care about national security here at home or abroad ... The neo-fascist Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta[/i] care only about expanding their crazed power and vast riches and don't care whom they harm or destroy in the process ... We need to oust the insane puppet Bush regime who parrot the rapacious and murderous policies of Halliburton, Bechtel, Carlyle Group, Unocal, Big Oil, the Military Industrial Complex, etc. ...
[u][b]White House Credibility on National Security Collapsing[/b][/u] - http://www.americanprogress.o...
The White House has an accountability problem. In the wake of National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice's testimony yesterday, the American public is still looking for hard facts – not blame – about what happened before 9/11. No one – Republicans and Democrats alike – believes the White House could have prevented the attacks. But the public at least expects a hard try and straight answers about the administration's priorities, successes, and failures. As the [i]New York Times[/i] states today, "there was the lingering question of whether anyone in the Bush White House is capable of admitting error."
[b]1. The White House continues to deny that it made any mistakes in its handling of pre-9/11 security.[/b] Dr. Rice's opening statement managed to blame security breakdowns on every president from Woodrow Wilson through Bill Clinton, the FBI, the CIA, Richard Clarke, and most other institutions of government for what is ultimately her responsibility and that of President Bush – protecting the nation. She offered no apologies. She made no concessions. And, unlike Richard Clarke, she accepted no responsibility for 9/11.
[b]2. The White House did not do everything in its power to address al Qaeda and protect the nation before 9/11.[/b] The American public learned yesterday that President Bush received an intelligence briefing on August 6, 2001, ominously titled, "[u]Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States[/u]." The memo contained explicit warnings about suspicious activities "consistent with preparations for hijacking," and told of 70 full field FBI operations aimed at domestic terrorist activities. Yet President Bush convened no high level meetings. He did nothing to move the government into high alert. There was no response to the USS Cole bombing. Prior to the memo, there was no response to the USS Cole bombing. And the administration actually cut counterterrorism funding.
[b]3. The White House can not be trusted to tell the American public the truth about national security issues. [/b]Most Americans understand Dr. Rice's claim that there was "no silver bullet" that could have prevented 9/11. But the public deserves the truth – a scarce commodity around the White House these days. Al Qaeda wasn't a top priority for the White House. The administration missed several important warnings. And until the White House comes clean on its role, the American public should be skeptical of any future national security claims from the administration.
[b]Source:[/b]
The Center for American Progress on http://www.americanprogress.o...
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| Bush's Bloody Guerrilla Quagmire in Iraq: The First Stages of a 2nd War ... |
| 04.09.04 (8:28 am) [edit] |
[b]We badly need a regime change in the USA in order to put in place an Executive President who can work effectively with Congress, the U.N. and other nations, in order to clean-up this bloody fiasco and horrific mess in Iraq, criminally perpetrated by the corrupt Bush regime ... [/b]Bush is unfit to lead our nation, [i]and is in deep waters, way over his imbecilic head [/i]... Cheney is a corrupt neo-con criminal trying to[i] hijack and destroy our nation in order to expand his own power and riches [/i]... Rice is an over-rated neo-slave who is [i]willing to lie in order to protect her neo-masters[/i]: the Bush Crime Family ... The rest of the neo-fascist neo-cons are reckless and dangerous warmongers who have ruthlessly fumbled, bumbled and stumbled others [i](U.S. Soldiers & Innocent Civilians are making the so-called "sacrifice"-- none of the neo-con arm-chair chicken-hawks go risk their own lives in their own wars ...)[/i] into their bloody guerrilla quagmire in Iraq-- endless warfare, death, misery and chaos-- while these liars, thieves and traitors wantonly grab their gluttonous war-profits ... Let us put a stop to this insanity and oust the corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc.[i] junta [/i]... [i]One man's loss is another man's gain? Just ask Halliburton, Bechtel, Carlyle Group, Unocal, Big Oil, the Military Industrial Complex, etc. [/i]...
[b]IRAQ: [i]Ongoing Major Combat Operations[/i][/b] - http://www.americanprogress.o...
The widespread, deadly insurgency that has exploded in Iraq this week could be "the first stages of a second war for the country," and the top U.S. commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, warned the violence "is likely to continue 'for some time' and may spike in the coming week." President Bush declared victory last May, proclaiming "major combat operations" were over while standing under a "Mission Accomplished" banner. However, the White House, while planning for war, did not adequately plan for peace, and a series of missteps in the country has thrown the country into chaos. The military now faces "the street-to-street, house-to-house combat they thought they had dodged in last year's rapid invasion." As the violence spreads to once-secure areas, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld announced yesterday that troops scheduled to leave in upcoming weeks might be asked to serve beyond their one-year tours. As American Progress reports, the Iraq transition is fast approaching and the White House still has a very long to-do list.
[u][b]THE UPRISINGS – SHIITES[/b][/u]: According to U.S. intelligence officials, American forces in Iraq "are confronting a broad-based Shiite uprising that goes well beyond supporters of one militant Islamic cleric who has been the focus of American counterinsurgency efforts." This is in direct contradiction to statements made by top Administration officials Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who have tried to downplay the scope of the unrest. "Mr. Rumsfeld told reporters at the Pentagon that the fighting in Iraq was just the work of 'thugs, gangs and terrorists,' and not a popular uprising. General Myers added that 'it's not a Shiite uprising. Sadr has a very small following.'" The good will many Shiites felt toward Americans for toppling Saddam Hussein has been squandered and "American intelligence officials now believe that hatred of the American occupation has spread rapidly among Shiites, and is now so large that Mr. Sadr and his forces represent just one element." And the line has blurred between insurgents and civilians; a growing number of Iraqis are identifying with Sadr's Mahdi Army. "Destroying the Mahdi Army, ...might be possible only by destroying Sadr City."
[u][b]THE UPRISINGS – SUNNIS[/b][/u]: The White House has also attempted to downplay the scope of the Sunni revolt, narrowing its focus on the former leaders of the Baath Party and previous members of Saddam Hussein's government. However, according to intelligence, the problem is much larger than that. "The Sunni rebellion also goes far beyond former Baathist government members. Sunni tribal leaders, particularly in Al Anbar Province, home to Ramadi, the provincial capital, and Fallujah, have turned against the United States and are helping to lead the Sunni rebellion." The result? "The United States is facing two broad-based insurgencies that are now on parallel tracks."
[u][b]LOSING ALLIES[/b][/u]: In more violence in Iraq, a dozen foreign civilians were kidnapped and a British civilian is missing. Seven hostages were released, but hostage takers threatened to burn three of the remaining victims alive if their demands were not met. The surge in deadly violence has led many American allies to rethink their involvement in the war. Britain and Italy have said they will stay the course. However, South Korea, the Ukraine, Bulgaria, Spain and Kazakhstan have all recently announced steps to reconsider their roles. This pulling back unfortunately comes at the same time the U.S. is attempting to build a global force to protect the United Nations in Iraq, a proposal "essential to the fragile political transition because the Bush administration is relying on the United Nations to return to Iraq to help organize elections after the occupation ends on June 30." [i]American Progress' [/i]Ruy Teixeira discusses how the American public's attitude has changed on the war in Iraq. http://www.americanprogress.o...
[u][b]OUTSOURCING SECURITY[/b][/u]: The WP reports, "Under assault by insurgents and unable to rely on U.S. and coalition troops for intelligence or help under duress, private security firms in Iraq have begun to band together in the past 48 hours, organizing what may effectively be the largest private army in the world, with its own rescue teams and pooled, sensitive intelligence." The U.S. military and coalition forces, spread thin, have been unable to respond to pleas for help by besieged security contractors, who have now been left to fight for themselves.
[u][b]LOSING FAITH[/b][/u]: Americans are becoming "increasingly skeptical about President Bush's handling of the situation" in Iraq. According to a new poll by the Pew Research Center, http://people-press.org/repor... over half of Americans - 53 percent - disapprove of the way Bush is handling Iraq. And less than one-third think the President has a clear plan for resolving the situation in Iraq, down from 44% in December.
[b]Refer also to "[i]Uprising Could Signal a Second War for Iraq - The insurgency raises tactical questions and has some comparing the situation to Vietnam[/i]." on[/b] http://www.latimes.com/news/n...,1,7881902.story?coll=la-home-headli nes
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| Why Condoleezza Rice Is A Lousy NSA & George W. Bush Is A Lousy President!!! |
| 04.08.04 (6:03 pm) [edit] |
[b]Apparently, in the [i]Doctrine According to Rice & Bush[/i]: If someone [i]doesn't order [or ask] you to do something[/i], then it[i] isn't your responsibility [/i]to get it done ... It [i]isn't your responsibility [/i]to use your initiative, 'connect-the-dots', follow-up with instructions you give to subordinates, and/or ask questions regarding information given to you by your subordinates ... [/b]Watching football games together and watching their stock-market portfolios rise as they plan for their illegal and immoral neo-con wars on nations that don't even threaten us, and funnelling US taxpayer funded goodies to corporate cronies takes precedence over our national security ... [b]Condi Rice is a lousy NSA and George W. Bush is a lousy President [/b]...
Refer to "[b]Condi Lousy: [i]Why Rice is a bad national security adviser[/i][/b]" by[i] Fred Kaplan[/i], Slate, on http://slate.msn.com/id/20984... :
One clear inference can be drawn from Condoleezza Rice's testimony http://www.nytimes.com/2004/0... before the 9/11 commission this morning: She has been a bad national security adviser—passive, sluggish, and either unable or unwilling to tie the loose strands of the bureaucracy into a sensible vision or policy. In short, she has not done what national security advisers are supposed to do.
The key moment came an hour into the hearing, when former Watergate prosecutor Richard Ben-Veniste took his turn at asking questions. Up to this point, Rice had argued that the Bush administration could not have done much to stop the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Yes, the CIA's sirens were sounding all summer of an impending strike by al-Qaida, but the warnings were of an attack [i]overseas[/i].
Ben-Veniste brought up the much-discussed PDB—the President's Daily Briefing by CIA Director George Tenet—of Aug. 6, 2001. For the first time, he revealed the title of that briefing: "[i][b]Bin Laden Determined To Attack Inside the United States[/b][/i]."
Rice insisted this title meant nothing. The document consisted of merely "historical information" about al-Qaida—various plans and attacks of the past. "This was not a 'threat report,' " she said. It "did not[i] warn [/i]of any coming attack inside the United States." Later in the hearing, she restated the point: "The PDB does not say the United States is[i] going [/i]to be attacked. It says Bin Laden would[i] like [/i]to attack the United States."
To call this distinction "academic" would be an insult to academia.
Rice acknowledged that throughout the summer of 2001 the CIA was intercepting unusually high volumes of "chatter" about an impending terrorist strike. She quoted from some of this chatter: "attack in near future," "unbelievable news coming in weeks," "a very, very, very big surprise." She said some "specific" intelligence indicated the attack would take place overseas. However, she noted that very little of this intelligence was specific; most of it was "frustratingly vague." In other words (though she doesn't say so), most of the chatter might have been about a foreign or a domestic attack—it wasn't clear.
Given that Richard Clarke, the president's counterterrorism chief, was telling her over and over that a domestic attack was likely, she should not have dismissed its possibility. Now that we know the title of the Aug. 6 PDB, we can go further and conclude that she should have taken this possibility very, very seriously. Putting together the facts may not have been as simple as adding 2 + 2, but it couldn't have been more complicated than 2 + 2 + 2.
The Aug. 6 briefing itself remains classified. Ben-Veniste urged Rice to get it declassified, saying the full document would reveal that even the premise of her analysis is flawed. The report apparently mentions not historical but "ongoing" FBI precautions. Former Democratic Sen. Bob Kerrey added that the PDB also reports that the FBI was detecting a "pattern of activity, inside the United States, consistent with hijacking."
Responding to Ben-Veniste, Rice acknowledged that Clarke had told her that al-Qaida had "sleeper cells" inside the Untied States. But, she added, "There was no recommendation that we do anything" about them. She gave the same answer when former Navy Secretary John Lehman, a Republican and outspoken Bush defender restated the question about sleeper cells. There was, Rice said, "no recommendation of what to do about it." She added that she saw "no indication that the FBI was not adequately pursuing" these cells.
Here Rice revealed, if unwittingly, the roots—or at least some roots—of failure. Why did she need a recommendation to do something? Couldn't she make recommendations herself? Wasn't that her job? Given the huge spike of traffic about a possible attack (several officials have used the phrase "hair on fire" to describe the demeanor of those issuing the warnings), should she have been satisfied with the lack of any sign that the FBI [i]wasn't [/i]tracking down the cells? Shouldn't she have asked for positive evidence that it was tracking them down?
Former Democratic Rep. Tim Roemer posed the question directly: Wasn't it your responsibility to make sure that the word went down the chain, that orders were followed up by action?
Just as the Bush administration has declined to admit any mistakes, Condi Rice declined to take any responsibility. No, she answered, the FBI had that responsibility. Crisis management? That was Dick Clarke's job. "[If] I needed to do anything," she said, "I would have been asked to do it. I was not asked to do it."
Jamie Gorelick, a former assistant attorney general (and thus someone who knows the ways of the FBI), drove the point home. The commission's staff has learned, she told Rice, that the high-level intelligence warnings were not sent down the chain of command. The secretary of transportation had no idea about the threat-chatter nor did anyone at the Federal Aviation Administration. FBI field offices and special agents also heard nothing about it. Yes, FBI headquarters sent out a few messages, but have you seen them? Gorelick asked. "They are feckless," she went on. "They don't tell anybody anything. They don't put anybody at battle stations."
Bob Kerrey was blunter still. "One of the first things I learned when I came into this town," he said, "was that CIA and FBI don't talk to each other." It has long been reported that regional agents deep inside the FBI wrote reports about strange Arabs taking flight lessons and that analysts inside the CIA were reporting that Arab terrorists might be inside the United States. If both pieces of information were forced up to the tops of their respective bureaucracies, couldn't someone have put them together? "All it had to do was be put on intel links and the game's over," Kerrey said, perhaps a bit dramatically, the conspiracy "would have been rolled up."
This was one of Clarke's most compelling points. In his book, testimony, and several TV interviews, Clarke has argued that the Clinton administration thwarted al-Qaida's plot to set off bombs at Los Angeles airport on the eve of the millennium because intelligence reports of an impending terrorist attack were discussed at several meetings of Cabinet secretaries. Knowing they'd have to come back and tell the president what they were doing to prevent an attack, these officials went back to their departments and "shook the trees" for information. When Bush came to power, Rice retained Clarke and his counterterrorism crew, but she demoted their standing; terrorism was now discussed (and, even then, rarely) at meetings of[i] deputy [/i]secretaries, who lacked the same clout and didn't feel the same pressure.
Rice's central point this morning, especially in her opening statement, was that nobody could have stopped the 9/11 attacks. The problem, she argued, was cultural (a democratic aversion to domestic intelligence gathering) and structural (the bureaucratic schisms between the FBI and the CIA, among others). But this is the analysis of a political scientist, not a policymaker. Culture and bureaucracies form the backdrop against which officials perceive threats, devise options, and make choices. It is good that Rice, a political scientist by training, recognized that this backdrop can place blinders and constraints on decision-makers. But her job as a high-ranking decision-maker is to strip away the blinders and maneuver around the constraints. This is especially so given that she is the one decision-maker who is supposed to coordinate the views of the various agencies and present them as a coherent picture to the president of the United States. Her testimony today provides disturbing evidence that she failed at this task—failed even to understand that it was part of her job description.
[b]Fred Kaplan writes the "War Stories" column for Slate[/b].
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| 9/11 Victims' Family Members "Not Convinced" By Condoleezza Rice!!! |
| 04.08.04 (1:36 pm) [edit] |
[b]This morning, following the misleading testimony given by NSA Condoleezza Rice, some family members of victims of the 9/11 tragedy expressed their disappointment that Rice and the Bush White House are not forthcoming and straight-forward regarding the failures that permitted Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda to strike in New York, Washington DC and Pennsylvania, leading to the deaths of nearly 3000 US citizens ...[/b]
One mother who lost her son, reported on [i]ABC News[/i], that she believed it was imperative for the White House to declassify the intelligence briefings provided to the President by the National Security Adviser, in the days leading-up to the 9/11 attacks upon America ...
It is disappointing that the 9/11[i] Whitewash [/i]Commission allowed their own partisanship to bias their questioning-- and most of the questions asked of Condi Rice were inadequate and in some cases, [i]purposely designed to make an apologetic case [/i]for the Bush White House, instead of [i]seeking the truth [/i]...
Also consider "[b]9/11 Widows Not Convinced Enough Was Done on Terror[/b]" by [i]MARIA NEWMAN[/i], NY TIMES, on http://www.nytimes.com/2004/0... :
Four women whose husbands died in the World Trade Center said today they were not convinced that Condoleezza Rice and President Bush did all they could to prevent the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
The women, who are known as the "Jersey Girls" in Washington, are part of a core group of politically active relatives of 9/11 victims who prodded Congress and the White House to create the panel that questioned Ms. Rice, the national security adviser, today. But as they watched Ms. Rice testify in Washington, the four women, who were appearing on the [i]MSNBC[/i] program "[i]Hardball[/i]," said they were disappointed at how much Ms. Rice said she did not know about information that might have prevented the attacks.
"She said she didn't know a lot of things," said Kristen Breitweiser of Middletown, N.J., whose husband died at the World Trade Center. "I would question, what exactly did she know? And if she didn't know it, then who else did? It's her job to know that information. It's her job to relay that information to the president and to inform the public.
"If the public had been better informed, lives would have been saved," she said.
That point was echoed by Lori Van Auken, of East Brunswick, who asked, "Whose job is it to convey urgency to the president if not the national security adviser's?"
The four women, who did not know each other until after they all lost their husbands, have been keeping up the pressure, along with other relatives of those who died, that helped lead to Ms. Rice's being allowed to testify today.
The women said they did not think Ms. Rice was treated too harshly by some commission members who took her to task and challenged any assumption that there just were not enough clues before Sept. 11 to warrant action. In some of the toughest questioning, Richard Ben-Veniste, a Democratic commission member and former Watergate prosecutor, asked her about a memo dated Aug. 6, 2001, that contained information about the cells. Under his questioning, she said that document, which is classified, was titled "[u]Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States[/u].' "
The four widows, who have followed the work of the commission closely, said the disclosure of the memo's title should convince many Americans that the administration knew more than has previously been admitted.
"I think that for the past two years American have been operating under a misnomer, that we didn't have knowledge, that this was a surprise, that nobody knew anything," said Mindy Kleinberg of East Brunswick, another widow. "What people are learning today is that that's not true."
Ms. Rice, however, insisted that the memo did not warn of attacks inside America. "It was historical information based on old reporting," she said. "There was no new threat information, and it did not, in fact, warn of any coming attacks inside the United States." [b][Condi Rice is clearly[i] lying [/i]on this point-- a memo that says that bin Laden intends to strike inside of the US, is not "historical information", but should have been investigated and warnings to the American people should have been forthcoming prior to the 9/11 attacks upon America. P.S. Wasn't "historical information" regarding Iraq's WMDs "good enough" to wage a war-- but apparently in the[i] Doctrine According to Condi Rice[/i], it is [i]not[/i] "good enough" to warn the American people regarding the threat of terrorism, here at home!][/b]
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| Sleezy Rice Accused of Ignoring Al Qaeda Threat Prior to 9/11 ... |
| 04.08.04 (11:23 am) [edit] |
[b]Condolizzard Rice has been accused of ignoring threats of Al Qaeda prior to 9/11 ... [/b]Not only has Richard Clarke provided evidence of the corrupt Bush regime's unconscionable negligence and malfeasance ... Not only others within the State Department, NSA, CIA, FBI, etc. who are disgusted with the gluttonous corporate-owned Bushies ... But increasingly conscientious whistle-blowers are [i]coming out of the closet [/i]to expose the[i] ugly truth [/i]to the American people:-- Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Powell, and their neo-con cabal of crooks are[i] unfit [/i]to safeguard America's national security-- It is time to [i]get rid [/i]of this insane neo-con, neo-fascist cabal who [i]do not protect us[/i], but instead [i]place us in greater danger [/i]by illegally and immorally, [i]pre-emptively invading sovereign nations [/i]that pose(d) no threat to our country-- and irresponsibly let the real terrorists (Osama bin Laden & Al Qaeda) [i]off-the-hook [/i]...
Consider "[b]Rice faces accusation on eve of testimony[/b]" by [i]Julian Borger in Washington[/i], Guardian UK, on http://www.guardian.co.uk/sep...,11209,1188133,00.html :
A senior terrorism expert said yesterday that he had delivered a final desperate warning of an inevitable terrorist attack to Condoleezza Rice five days before al-Qaida struck New York's World Trade Centre and the Pentagon in Washington.
On the eve of the national security adviser's public appearance today to defend the Bush administration's record before the commission studying the September 11 attacks, Gary Hart, a former Democratic presidential candidate who co-chaired an earlier three-year public study of the threats to US security in the 21st century, told the Guardian his warning had been ignored.
"She [Rice] said: 'I'll discuss it with the vice-president'," Mr Hart said; but he felt the response was a brush-off.
"All I can say is she didn't feel the degree of urgency I thought was necessary," he said. He said he has known Ms Rice for 20 years, since she had volunteered to work on his Colorado Senate campaign.
Ms Rice will speak under oath for more than two hours to the national commission examining whether more could have been done to prevent the September 11 attacks. She is expected to make a detailed rebuttal of the allegations by Richard Clarke, a former White House chief counter- terrorist adviser, that the Bush team virtually ignored the al-Qaida threat because of its fixations on Iraq and strategic missile defence.
Mr Hart's comments add weight to Mr Clarke's argument and make Ms Rice's task even harder.
Together with Warren Rudman, a veteran Republican politician, Mr Hart chaired the US commission on national security/21st century, which was established by President Bill Clinton in October 1998 and told to report to the incoming president in early 2001.
That report predicted: "America will become increasingly vulnerable to hostile attack on our homeland [and] Americans will likely die on American soil, possibly in large numbers."
It recommended a national homeland security agency.
To the surprise of the 14 commissioners, Mr Hart said, the recommendations were ignored. The post of homeland security adviser was established in the White House only after the September 11 attacks.
"We were not just another federal commission. This was supposed to be - and was - the most comprehensive review of US national security since 1947," Mr Hart said in Denver, where he now works for an international law firm.
He said that in the first week of February 2001 he and other commissioners briefed Ms Rice, the secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld, and the secretary of state, Colin Powell, to convey their fears personally.
"They were respectful and attentive, interested in what we were saying" - but nothing was done .
In early May 2001, when Congress was contemplating legislation to establish a homeland security agency, President Bush publicly called on it to shelve the issue while it was considered by Mr Cheney.
But the senior White House national security officials did not meet to discuss the terrorist threat until the first week of September.
"Imagine eight months before Pearl Harbor, an officially designated group of 14 Americans had told Roosevelt that the Japanese would attack some place somewhere and Roosevelt did nothing," Mr Hart said.
He complained that the September 11 commission had not asked him or his former colleagues to testify.
But Al Felzenberg, a spokesman for the commission, said it had read the Hart-Rudman report, its staff had talked to some of Mr Hart's fellow commissioners, and might talk to Mr Hart himself.
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| ... Stop The War On The Iraqi People ... |
| 04.08.04 (8:48 am) [edit] |
[b]Bush's insane illegal & immoral neo-con war-turned-bloody-guerril la quagmire in Iraq has turned into a major fiasco and a bloody mess (... [i]Intelligence and Military Experts warned prior to the traitorous neo-con invasion over a year ago, that Dubya's insane neo-imperial form of neo-fascist global corporate empire would not be able to be forceably imposed upon Iraq [/i]...) ... [/b]It is time to call for the[i] impeachment [/i]of the corrupt, sluttish Bush regime who are responsible for heinous [i]Crimes Against Humanity[/i], in order to enrich their corporate pimps: Halliburton, Bechtel, Carlyle Group, Unocal, Big Oil, the Military Industrial Complex, etc. ...
[u][b]Stop the war on the Iraqi people[/b][/u] - http://www.wsws.org/articles/...
Little more than a year after the invasion of Iraq and four months after the capture of Saddam Hussein, the Bush administration has unleashed a new and bloody military offensive against the Iraqi people.
These attacks against civilian population centers constitute war crimes. They are being carried out with the deliberate aim of intimidating the growing popular resistance to the US occupation. The Iraqi dead surely number in the hundreds, though a precise figure is not known. Many hundreds more men, women and children have been wounded as rockets, shells and heavy machine-gun fire rain down on densely populated urban neighborhoods.
American working people must demand an immediate halt to this slaughter and the withdrawal of all US troops from Iraq. The claim that this violence is justified retaliation for attacks on Iraq’s occupiers merits only contempt.
What is unfolding in Iraq is an uprising by the country’s most oppressed workers and, in response, a brutal campaign of colonial subjugation. While mouthing phrases about democracy, the US government—Democrats and Republicans alike—is seeking to drown the democratic aspirations of the Iraqi working people in blood.
Both the Shiite slums of Baghdad’s Sadr City and the largely Sunni population of Fallujah have been hit with massive firepower from helicopter gunships, tanks and artillery. The casualties include women and children slain by 50-caliber bullets crashing through the walls and doors of their homes. Hospitals have been shelled as well as ambulances. In one case, US forces fired on an ambulance carrying a wounded pregnant woman to the hospital, killing both the woman and her unborn child.
The operation conducted by US Marines in Fallujah has unfolded under a veil of secrecy, with the media barred from the scene. The US military has subjected this town of 500,000 to a siege, barricading all roads in and out. Food deliveries have been halted and people prevented from going to work. Access to Fallujah’s main hospital, which is situated across the Euphrates River, has been cut off. A smaller private hospital inside the city has been shelled by tanks and helicopters.
The correspondent from Aljazeera, one of the only sources reporting from the besieged city, witnessed a burning car outside the hospital with the body of the driver still inside. He also reported that the residential neighborhood of Golan had been struck by missiles and cluster bombs, with a number of houses destroyed.
Ostensibly, the siege of Fallujah—dubbed Operation Vigilant Resolve—is in retaliation for the killing and mutilation of four American paramilitary operatives in the city last week. The incident, in which large numbers of men and youth participated, laid bare the depth of popular hostility toward the occupation.
In reality, this operation is a further, planned escalation of iron-fisted tactics already introduced by US forces in the week leading up to the killing of the four American mercenaries. Marines had already blockaded the main roads, in what now appears to have been a dress rehearsal for the present | |
