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Bush's Words/'Feelings' Are Cheap! Bush Is Disgusting & Isn't Fit To Be An AMERICAN!

04.30.04 (11:30 am) [edit]

[b]Bush has no concern for the lives of ordinary Iraqis (Nor does he give a shit about U.S. Soldiers ... Why should he? Bush is making a killing $$$ on war-profits along with Cheney and Halliburton, Bechtel, Carlyle Group and the rest of these blood-sucking warmongers!)[/b]

[b]Stop the slaughter in Iraq - Write Congress [/b] http://www.congress.org

Before the eyes of millions of people around the world, the US military has begun a systematic and deliberate slaughter in the Iraqi city of Fallujah. Speaking at the White House yesterday, President Bush publicly lifted all restraints on the conduct of the US troops. American forces, Bush declared, “will take whatever action is necessary” to subjugate the city.

On Wednesday, for the third day in a row, Fallujah suffered concerted bombardment by US warplanes and helicopter gunships. During the afternoon, jet fighters targeted an area of the southern suburbs with 10 laser-guided bombs, including a 1000-pound bomb that sent a massive explosion into the sky. As evening fell, jets and gunships launched missiles against buildings in the northwestern working class suburb of Jolan, which had also been subjected to heavy bombing on Tuesday. In the western area of the city, gunships strafed buildings and streets with 105mm cannon and machine gunfire well into the night.

The number of Iraqi casualties over the past several days is not known. What is known is that residential districts have been pounded. According to Associated Press, ambulances could not reach the areas that were attacked last night. Witnesses reported “large numbers of dead and wounded”. At least 25 buildings were reduced to rubble. One hospital reported to Al Jazeerah that it had taken in 10 wounded after the shelling in the afternoon.

It is necessary to cut through the fog of lies, distortions and Orwellian double-speak that the American establishment is attempting to cast over what is taking place in Fallujah.

Amidst the footage of an assault by state-of-the-art American air power, General Mark Kimmitt told the media that the US forces were respecting a “ceasefire” and only carrying out “a series of defensive responses” to attacks by fighters within the city. The Iraqi defenders have been repeatedly slandered in official press conferences and media reports as isolated supporters of the former Baathist regime or foreign terrorists. The only objective of the US assault is declared to be arresting those responsible for killing four American contractors on March 30.

The reality is that the attack is a deliberate and calculated reprisal against the entire population of the city for defying the US occupation of Iraq. The continued resistance to the US that is organised from within Fallujah—despite massive repression—has made it a symbol of the Iraqi people’s opposition to the invasion and subjugation of their country.

When US troops first entered the city just over a year ago, they were met with demonstrations demanding they leave. American paratroopers responded by murdering 13 people and wounding as many as 100 more. In retaliation for subsequent guerilla attacks on US forces, the city was subjected to numerous raids last year. Hundreds of men were dragged away to prison camps. The resistance, however, continued to grow, to the point where US troops withdrew from the city last December.

The current US offensive is the revenge. It was planned long before the events of March 30 and had already been delegated to the marine division that had moved into the area several weeks earlier. Marine General John Sattler boasted Wednesday: “When the marines came in [to Fallujah], they brought a substantially larger force than the one they replaced, with the intent of making sure they had the forces that were necessary to go in and reestablish or establish law and order.... The intent all along was to go into Fallujah.... It was a calculated, stepped-up process....”

The killing of the four contractors was simply used as the pretext to launch an attack.

Fallujah has been under siege for close to a month. As many as 700 people were killed during the first US blitz from April 5 to April 9, with many of the dead buried in shallow graves in backyards and football stadiums. At least 70,000 people have been forced to flee the city. There is no electricity. Parts of the city have no water. There is no functioning sewerage system; no garbage collection; and the hospitals are breaking down under the volume of wounded.

Now, after weeks of preparation, the US military has launched an offensive aimed at forcing the 150,000 or so people still defending the city into a humiliating submission. At the same time, US forces outside Najaf and in Baghdad are stepping up attacks on the Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr’s militiamen and supporters who rose up this month against the tyranny of the occupation. Dozens of Shiite fighters have been killed over the past two days.

General Kimmitt implied on Tuesday that the US military was prepared to sit outside Fallujah and bomb the areas not under its control for as long as “six to eight weeks”. Marines and armoured units, however, are positioned for a ground assault whenever the city’s defences have been sufficiently weakened. The New York Times reported yesterday that a column of tanks and other vehicles was moving through checkpoints to the city’s west. Marine commanders reportedly requested tank reinforcements after the city’s defenders halted the first attack.

What is unfolding in Fallujah is on a par with the atrocities committed by the Nazis against the occupied people of Europe. The calculation of the Bush administration is that by inflicting death and destruction on the people of Fallujah, it will intimidate the entire Iraqi people into accepting the reduction of Iraq to a client-state of US imperialism. On June 30, a puppet Iraqi government, made up of only those who have, to one extent or another, collaborated with the American occupation, will be installed. It will have no powers over its territory or its armed forces.

The US media is playing an utterly criminal role in facilitating this agenda. Leading newspapers such as the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post and New York Times have editorially called for and endorsed the assault on Fallujah. The cable stations, from CNN to Fox, are literally baying for blood and demanding the marines go into the city.

An inevitable logic lies behind both the views of the American establishment and the bloodbath being unleashed in Fallujah. Iraq was not invaded to bring democracy but in order to reduce it to the status of a colony and plunder its wealth and energy resources for the benefit of US transnationals and banks, as part of a broader perspective of using military power to overcome American capitalism’s long-term economic decline.

There is no turning back for the American ruling elite. Driven by its economic crisis, it is attempting to reorganise the globe under its hegemony. The oil- and resource-rich regions of the Middle East and Central Asia are central to its strategy. Republicans and Democrats alike are committed to continuing the occupation of Iraq and are therefore driven to call for murderous methods to crush the resistance of the Iraq people, which has threatened the US grip over the country in the past four weeks.

Millions of Americans, and working people around the world, are watching the scenes from Iraq with horror and disgust. A war carried out on the basis of lies and deception has degenerated into the slaughter of mass Iraqi resistance, with rapidly increasing US casualties. At least 1,000 young American soldiers have been killed or wounded this month alone.

The American and international working class is the only social force that is capable of defending the people of Fallujah and Iraq, and ending the atrocities. Rallies and meetings should be organised to demonstrate solidarity and to demand the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all American and other occupation troops from Iraq, with the payment of war reparations to the Iraqi people. Those responsible for the war and the massacres being committed by the occupation forces are guilty of war crimes and should be prosecuted.

This includes the international allies of the Bush administration in Britain, Australia, Italy and elsewhere, who continue to justify and defend the actions of US imperialism. Bush’s principal ally, Britain’s Prime Minister Tony Blair, declared in parliament yesterday as bombs rained down on Fallujah: “It is right that the American forces try to make sure that order is restored to that city.”

The carnage in Iraq poses the need for more than immediate political action however. It highlights the incompatibility between the interests of the vast mass of the world’s population and imperialism, in which a handful of powerful states dominate every aspect of the globe’s economic and political life on behalf of the major corporations and wealthy. A unified international socialist movement needs to be built that can lead the working class into a struggle against the profit system and the future it is offering of colonialism and war. - http://www.wsws.org/articles/...

One Year Later, Dubya's "Mission" Is Sure As Hell Not "Accomplished"!!!

04.30.04 (11:23 am) [edit]

[i][b]Bush's Iraq speech on the USS Lincoln didn't foreshadow escalating insurgency in 2004[/b][/i].

One year ago Saturday, President Bush stood on the flight deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln and declared major combat operations in Iraq over. What he and other administration officials may not have foreseen was that political combat for the soul of a shattered nation was just beginning.

Since then the US effort to rebuild Iraq has been caught in a cruel vise of time. To their surprise, provisional authority officials discovered that 30 years of oppression by Saddam Hussein had destroyed much of Iraq's civil society. Restoring a form of representative government would be harder than they had thought.

But the US hasn't had the luxury of time. The June 30 date to give Iraqis back limited sovereignty is looming nearer, while a determined insurgency wages a vicious battle to push Americans out and convince ordinary Iraqis that their gunmen own the future. Meanwhile, it's become obvious that for good or ill the US invasion of Iraq has loosed enormous change on the world. The security of the American people, the freedom of Iraqis, the very shape of the Middle East - all may hinge on the current struggle for Iraq's hearts and minds. "The days and weeks immediately ahead are fateful and they are perilous," said Sen. Joe Lieberman (D) of Connecticut in a speech at the Brookings Institution.

The May 1, 2003, appearance of Mr. Bush, wearing a flight suit and standing on the deck of a carrier in front of a "Mission Accomplished" banner, now seems premature to even the White House itself.

Karl Rove, the president's chief political adviser, has since said that he regrets the use of the banner and its implication that the hard part in Iraq was over. He has insisted, however, that he believes the banner was meant to refer to the mission of the Abraham Lincoln itself.

Administration officials also insist that much of the country remains peaceful, and that the physical reconstruction of Iraq has continued apace, with oil production back to prewar levels, electricity coming back, schools reopening, and so forth.

Health care spending in Iraq is now 30 times what it was under the regime of Saddam Hussein, noted Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz in a recent congressional appearance.

Furthermore, the US has reversed itself on some initial occupation decisions that have turned out to be counterproductive. Baath Party officials from the old regime will no longer be automatically disqualified from government-related jobs. The use of former Iraqi Army generals to negotiate a possible end to the standoff with insurgents in Fallujah marks something of a turning point. "What that essentially reveals is how big a mistake it was to get rid of the old Army," says Pat Lang, the former head of Middle East intelligence at the Defense Intelligence Agency.

But that being said, the reconstruction period in Iraq has been much more difficult than the White House predicted in the wake of last year's initial push into the country. The ease of the initial military thrust may have been deceptive. To trap the US with a draining insurgency might have been the old regime's strategy all along. In any case, the US underestimated the devastation, both physical and mental, that Mr. Hussein would leave in his wake.

"More could have been done in the pre-war planning for postwar operations," said retired Army Gen. John Keane, who was vice chief of staff of the Army until last fall, in a recent congressional appearance.

General Keane said that he had not predicted how passive Iraq's people would be after 35 years of political repression, and how that would make them skeptical of all authority and wary of the Americans' insistence that they were liberators.

That sentiment is echoed by Mario Mancuso, a former Special Operations commander who spent close to a year in Iraq, including five months around Najaf. "I found a brutalized, traumatized, and paranoid people by and large," he says.

The US knew Iraqis as a whole were educated and industrious - the Germans of the Middle East, in an old Western stereotype. What they hadn't counted on was how much they had been beaten down, and how they would have to try and coax locals out of a battened-down survival mode. "We likely overstated how much they could help us," says Mancuso.

Meanwhile, the infrastructure of Iraq was decrepit. The US had thought it would have to protect electricity plants, oil pipelines, and other key installations against sabotage. It hadn't counted on having to protect them against rust.

"We received the country in terrible shape but not as a result of the conflict - only as the result of the lack of maintenance for the last decade or two," says John Reppert, an expert at the Marshall Center in Garmisch, Germany.

Thus the US is now in a very difficult position, notes Dr. Reppert. The US still must provide physical security for months to come in Iraq, with the steady drain of casualties that entails. Since last May, over 600 US soldiers have died.

Yet at the same time, its political control will inevitably begin to dwindle as the UN becomes more involved and Iraqis themselves agitate for more control. Ultimately, the Iraqi government will almost certainly be better than that of Hussein - but it may be far from the Jeffersonian democracy the US says it wants.

"We are going to have to abide by our decision to empower the Iraqis and to live with the decisions they make," Judith Yaphe, an Iraqi expert at the National Defense University, recently told Congress.

[u]A year later, mission still not accomplished[/u], http://www.csmonitor.com/2004...

One Year Later, Dubya's "Mission" Is Sure As Hell Not "Accomplished"!!!

04.30.04 (11:22 am) [edit]

How Bush And The Neo-Conservatives Are Putting The World At Risk

04.30.04 (11:09 am) [edit]

President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney are meeting with the 9/11 Commission today at the White House. [From yesterday's interview when the useless 9/11 Whitewash Committee gave Bush and Cheney a pass and let them lie.]

Their words will neither be recorded for history nor broadcast to the nation. The White House is insisting that no recording or transcript be made of their comments and only one member of the 10-person panel will be allowed to take notes. Bush and Cheney, who are not testifying under oath, will also be joined by White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and another lawyer from the counsel's office.

Melvin Goodman, former CIA and State Department analyst. He is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and director of the Center's National Security Project. He is the author of the new book "Bush League Diplomacy: How the Neoconservatives Are Putting the World at Risk" (Prometheus)

------------------------- ------------------------- ------------------------- -----

RUSH TRANSCRIPT:

This transcript is available free of charge, however donations help us provide closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing on our TV broadcast. Thank you for your generous contribution.
Donate - $25, $50, $100, more... http://www.democracynow.org/a...

AMY GOODMAN: We're joined in our Washington studio right now by Melvin Goodman. He is a former CIA and State Department analyst, now Senior Fellow at the Center for International Policy, and head of the center's National Security Project. He has just co-written a book called "Bush League Diplomacy: How the Neo-Conservatives are Putting the World at Risk." With these kinds of stipulations and restrictions on the White House testimony before the 9-11 Commission, I’m surprised the commissioners are allowed to listen, Mel Goodman?

MEL GOODMAN: Well, why did they agree to such an arrangement, that's what I can't understand. They had some leverage on the White House because of the support of the families of the people who were lost on 9-11. I think they should have used that leverage. I don't think they should have been rolled over so easily. Now that they have them, it is going to be difficult to compare the remarks of one to the other with both in the room at the same time. I hope what they do, however, is not dwell so much on 9-11. I think we know what happened at 9-11. We know what a terrible failure it was on the part of the CIA and FBI. And the White House was to a certain extent asleep at the switch as well, but if Bush is going to talk about the need for intelligence reform, I would like to know, does he have any ideas whatsoever about what can be done with the intelligence community. Here is where the center of gravity is for what went wrong on 9-11. Here is where the center of gravity will be for avoiding another terrorist attack and responding in a way that's more efficient so so many lives are not lost as they were on 9-11. That's what they have to hear from Bush and Cheney. I don't think they're going to be hearing those things.

AMY GOODMAN: Why did they roll over, and what is the role of Phillip Zelikow, the director of the 9-11 commission? We have reported in the past that he is the co-author of a book with Condoleezza Rice. So, they clearly are colleagues and are close.

MEL GOODMAN: Well, he has ties to the first George Bush administration from 1989 to 1992. He has a very close working relationship, professional relationship with Condi Rice. He headed a case study project at Harvard and took hundreds of thousands of dollars from the CIA. He used CIA documentation and produced case studies that exonerated the CIA from any charges of politicization of intelligence, particularly with regard to the Soviet Union. He has generally been an administration voice in all of the matters that he has dealt with, whether they are Democratic or Republican administrations. He didn't do a very good job in editing the Kennedy tapes, and archivists have been appalled by the work that Earnest Mae, who he named a staff member on the commission and Phillip Zelikow did. Having said that, however, the staff studies that we have seen so far, and there have been about a dozen of them, have not been bad. My problem there is, the print media has done a poor job. Only "The New York Times" has done one article on the staff studies that point to all of the failures. In fact, if you compare the questioners of the commission, which I have done, to the factual content of the staff studies, you have to wonder if the commissioners are even reading the staff studies. Because there's very good information in there about CIA failure and FBI failure and what went wrong at the Pentagon, and these questions are not being addressed. They spent far more time with Richard Clarke’s credibility, even though Clarke’s charges hold up extremely well on the reduced urgency on the Bush administration with regard to terrorism and the war on Iraq against the diversion against the so-called war against terrorism. So you have to wonder who is dotting i's and crossing t's on this commission.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Mel Goodman, in your book, you talk quite a bit about how the Bush administration has radically changed the US foreign policy in the world, actually since World War II. You talk about the policy that emerged from World War II, more emphasis on collective security and more emphasis on diplomacy, and that this has been essentially shattered. Could you talk a little bit about that?

MEL GOODMAN: Yes, Juan, I think there are two fundamental points here. One, what Bush has done is turned upside-down 50 years of bipartisan foreign policy on the part of Democratic and Republican administrations. He has walked away from the international organizations. He has walked away from the United Nations. He has abandoned arms control. He is deploying a national missile defense which is now funded at over $10 billion a year in the current defense budget, which makes it the most expensive weapon system that we have in the defense budget. He has abrogated the anti-ballistic missile treaty, which was the cornerstone to deterrence and arms control. He has walked away from multilateralism and walked away from deterrence and containment. When you look at the war against Iraq, it's really symptomatic of a larger way of looking at the world that's putting the United States at a tremendous risk. This was a so-called pre-emptive war. You cannot go to war preemptively unless you have intelligence that gives you the knowledge to go to war. We didn't have such intelligence. So the White House created it. The CIA tailored it. The other point that is important is Iraq is far worse than Vietnam. In the case of Vietnam, I think Johnson and Nixon realized they were in a mess. They didn't know how to get out of it, and it took a very long time, but they compartmented Vietnam, and they tried to protect other aspects of American foreign policy. They established an opening to China, and improved relations with the Soviet Union, and they entered into arms control agreements with the Soviet Union, both SALT and ABM. They engaged in incremental and step by step arrangements in the Middle East, even with Syria and Israel, there was one, two with Egypt and Israel. This administration is not doing any of that. They're not only not compartmenting Iraq, but they're worsening our relations everywhere around the world, particularly if you look at the press conference between Sharon and Bush that took place in this town two weeks ago.

AMY GOODMAN: Mel Goodman, on that issue of the press conference and Sharon and Bush, what about the issue of assassination? In “Bush League Diplomacy: How the Neoconservatives are Putting the World at Risk,” you address the issue of Bush lifting the ban on assassination.

MEL GOODMAN: Yeah. This is very dangerous. One thing that took place about a year half ago that we gave very little attention to, was when the CIA was controlling a Predator with a Hellfire missile and blew up a car in the desert in Yemen that supposedly had a driver who was from al-Qaeda. But there was also an American citizen in that car. Four people died in that explosion. You talk about depriving people of due process. This was an American citizen in the car, murdered by the CIA. There was never an investigation. There was never any attempt on the part of the congress to look on this. I think we know now from the Church Commission reports in the mid 1970's how dangerous it is to turn the CIA loose on this kind of political assassination. What I fear with the combination of preemptive war and attack, military dominance a return to low-yield nuclear weapons, which this administration has endorsed even though the uniformed members of the military want low yield nuclear weapons. They’re dangerous, and you can't fight on a battlefield where you have low yield weapons and unleashing the CIA. This policy is totally out of control.

AMY GOODMAN: John Negroponte. He looks like he's about to be confirmed, now US ambassador to the United Nations, more importantly, before that, ambassador to Honduras. We have done a lot on this with people have appealed to him 20 year ago, as Honduras was the staging ground for the illegal Contra War, to deal with the victims in Honduras of a CIA-trained battalion 316. What do you know about this?

MEL GOODMAN: The very simple thing about John Negroponte, that has to be known, is that he was part of the cover-up of the human rights disasters and murders and civil rights abuses that took praise in Honduras during the time that he was ambassador. Part of this was part of the Contra War, but the cover-up is something that never should have been tolerated. So, if you look around the administration and you say Elliot Abrams in the White House who is supposed to be in control of Middle East policy, even though he has no knowledge whatsoever of the Middle East, and if he had not been pardoned, he would have been in jail. Negroponte was involved in a cover-up. John Poindexter, who is no longer in the administration, also had to be pardoned, or he would have been in jail. The abuses of this administration and the politicization of every department and agency of this government is on another scale. That's why I strongly believe that no president has reduced America’s international stature the way this president has.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Mel Goodman, to return to Iraq for a second. We're hearing reports now that Paul Bremer and the Coalition Provisional Authority leaders have begun to meet with a lot of the former Ba'ath party leaders in an effort to find some group within the country that can achieve stability before the June 30 deadline. Any thoughts about that as now even former generals in the Iraqi army and other major leaders are being talked to about coming back into some sort of power.

MEL GOODMAN: The problem with that is it's probably too late. We're scrambling once again. It was Bremer who came in to replace General Gardner, who made the decision to let the Iraqi military go, and let the iraqi police go, to let Iraqi law enforcement people go. Don't deal with the Ba'athists. These were all the people who were responsible for a certain amount of order in the country, in the country of Iraq. To try to patch this together now as Bremer is leaving and Negroponte is coming in to man this huge American embassy that will have more than 1,000 American officials in it, but still not real authority, because the military is still running the country of Iraq, the American military. So, it's not going to be sovereignty or limited sovereignty for the Iraqis. There's not going to be real control on the part of the ambassador.

AMY GOODMAN: We'll take on that issue of a little bit of sovereignty with Phyllis Bennis next, who will join us in our Washington studio. Mel Goodman, I want to thank you for being with us. Long-time CIA analyst and now co-author of the book, "Bush League Diplomacy: How the Neoconservatives are Putting the World at Risk."

Those Who Hate Palestinians Are As Bad As Those Who Hate Jews ...

04.29.04 (9:25 pm) [edit]

There are bigots who hate the Palestinian people and they are as misguided, foolish, illogical, destructive and are as [u]bad[/u] as those bigots who hate Jews ...

[u]Three excellent articles that address the insanity of the hate-filled neo-cons are[/u]:

Are Foes of Israeli Policy Enemies of Jews? - http://www.tblog.com/template...

Criticize Israel? - http://www.zmag.org/content/s...

Can Sharon win by force? - http://www.zmag.org/content/s...

Consequences Of Imperial Warfare: Bush Turns Us Into Barbarians

04.29.04 (9:19 pm) [edit]

[i]A significant thing: it is not the head of a civilization that begins to rot first. It is the heart[/i]. -Aimé Césaire

Jaw agape and fangs unsheathed, American colonialism has lashed out with severe brutality against the newly-unified Iraqi resistance, counting on its military might to crush the aspirations of Iraqis who seek to liberate their country from foreign control.

Relying so heavily on the force of arms against a people it claims to liberate, the US has inverted Clausewitz's famous dictum that war is a continuation of politics by other means; our policy now is politics as a continuation of war by other means.

But it so happens that this is a double-edged sword with both edges thrust firmly into the heart of the occupation. For no matter how many Iraqi patriots America kills, ten more will spring forward for each who has fallen; and no matter how many are silenced by American bullets, the viciousness and arrogance with which those bullets were fired will speak loudly and convincingly to thousands of Iraqis who will be inspired to resist.

To illustrate our point it is necessary only to direct our gaze upon that great unfolding tragedy of Fallujah, the epicenter and icon of Iraqi resistance. US forces surrounded and attacked the city on the grounds of pursuing Iraqis who killed and then mutilated the bodies of four American mercenaries. The massive assault was carried out with the usual concern for civilian life: namely, none.

'Precision' weapons such as 2,000 lb. bombs and the massive Specter gunship, armed with four high-powered machine guns, were brought to bear against the town, as were attack helicopters and 60-ton tanks. Our troops employed such life-saving tactics as lobbing 18 tank shells into one house to kill one person and firing helicopter missiles at a rebel wielding a slingshot. (1) One Fallujah resident explained to the press, "As soon as the Americans see a group of people in the streets, they shoot at them, people venture out only if their homes risk being bombarded or if they must carry the dead or wounded to the city's clinics." A young Iraqi member of the US-created Civil Defense Corps saw "heavy bombings" with the town market hit, and "tanks ringing the town." (2) US snipers in the city, perhaps the only precision weapons deployed, have put their uniqueness to good use: shooting through ambulance windshields and killing their drivers. (3)

What were the broad consequences of this operation for the people of Fallujah? Thousands have fled and over 600 have been killed; the main hospital director said "most of the 600 dead in Fallujah were women, children, and elderly." (4) Another volunteer doctor reported that "The main hospital was taken over by the Americans. Doctors and patients had to evacuate to local health clinics." This resulted in even more suffering: "patients had to lie on the ground because of a shortage of beds. We were doing operations in the open. But we didn't have enough sterilizing equipment." He added, "About half the injured are women, children, and the elderly." (5) Those who needed to be operated upon received no anesthetics, which were "lacking", according to a Red Crescent official. (6) Such were the horrors under which thousands suffered and hundreds died.

Let us be honest with ourselves: this barbarous assault had nothing to do with capturing anyone. One never sets out to capture a handful of people by mounting a military assault on a town of 300,000,. Those rebels responsible for the four US deaths most likely melted away into more remote areas long ago. In fact, US officials have now dropped the demand for a hand-over of the offending rebels altogether. (7) No, this vicious attack upon an entire city bore the hallmarks not of any manhunt, but rather that of an arrogant power lashing out at what infuriates it most: humiliation.

For the open, unrestrained, and public attack on those four "security contractors" with guns in tow - probably on their way to kill Iraqis marked a definitive crossing of that line in colonial relations which separates occupier and occupied, dominator and dominated. The destruction, dismemberment and hanging of the bodies of men who usually have their heels placed on the neck of the native represents a violent rejection of the rules of colonialism. Our forces, which throughout our history are used to burying our enemies alive in the sands or napalming and carpet-bombing them into oblivion, could not tolerate the native's unforgivable crime of raising his eyes to meet ours. Thus began an orgy of violence to render the native not only blind, but deaf, dumb, and dead.

But listen closely: the jarring sound of a thousand Starbucks café doors bursting open fills the air; and a thousand "liberals", their tempers hotter than the cappuccinos they wield, start shrieking: "You endorse barbaric violence! You have no absolute moral values!" What these sages fail to understand is that anti-colonial struggle does not unfold like pull-out sofa-beds in their living rooms, nor does it bloom like budding flowers in their gardens. As Frantz Fanon, the most powerful writer on colonialism and a famous figure of the Algerian liberation campaign against the French, wrote: "The violence with which the supremacy of white values is affirmed and the aggressiveness which has permeated the victory of these valuesmean that, in revenge, the native laughs in mockery when Western values are mentioned in front of him [...] the colonized masses mock at these very values, insult them, and vomit them up."

More notable is the peculiar timing the liberal faction has chosen to invoke its noble "absolute moral values." Where were they when hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were dying of sanctions? Where were they when thousands more were being killed during the first phase of the war? The answer: precisely where they are now, on the sidelines or complicit in imperialism, when Iraqis are being made homeless, amputated upon without anesthetics, and gunned downed like wild beasts. Only when violence is being committed by a force completely out of their control do they raise a voice of indignant protest. Such consistent cowardice certainly takes the "absoluteness" of their values right out of them.

What our liberals fail to comprehend, our generals grasp with ease. Brigadier General Kimmit, when informed about Arab anger at seeing so many slain Iraqi innocents on TV, responded: "Change the channelThe stations that are showing Americans killing women and children are not legitimate news sources." (8) Any outlet shedding light on the havoc wrought by American armor, or focusing on the deaths of Iraqi women and children, is "not legitimate." That the hospital reports confirm these "not legitimate" channels is of course irrelevant; what is relevant is our racism, our dismissal of Arab life, the "legitimacy" of which is derived from firing the bullet rather than being pierced by it.

Kimmit himself knows this full well. But knowing the dialectics of colonialism, the general is also a part of it: the colonizer's side. His crass dismissal of the native's life, both in rhetoric and action, are strands of a thread trying to symbolically sow back together the bodies of those four dismembered hired guns an attempt to sow back together the status and position of colonial power.

It is an attempt that will fail. Iraqis have already crossed the threshold of enduring resistance; the bridge beyond that threshold was laid by the same arrogance and brutality now being employed to sever it. A Baghdadi day-laborer who was long experiencing what a reporter called "humiliation, fear, anger, and depression," said, "in the last two weeks, these feelings blow up inside me. The Americans are attacking Shiite and Sunni at the same time. They have crossed a line. I had to get a gun." A young 13 year-old boy in Baghdad said, "We may be scared of [American] weapons. But we're not scared of them." (9)

The people have discovered, to borrow Fanon's words, "that the settler's skin is not of any more value than a native's skin; and it must be said that this discovery shakes the world in a very necessary mannerFor if, in fact, my life is worth as much as the settler's, his glance no longer shrivels me up or freezes mein fact, I don't give a damn for him. Not only does his presence not trouble me, but I am already preparing such efficient ambushes for him that soon there will be no way out but that of flight."

This is true not of one or two individuals but the entire city: the US press recently reported that the siege of Fallujah has "produced a powerful backlash in the capital. Urged on by leaflets, sermons, and freshly sprayed graffiti calling for jihad, young men are leaving Baghdad to join a fight that residents say has less to do with battlefield success that with a cause infused with righteousness and sacrifice." The American reporters also came upon a group of young men discussing the need to resist among them "a dentist, a prayer leader, a law student, [and] a lieutenant colonel in the Iraqi police" As one teenager hopped into a truck with other volunteers, he smiled and shouted to the reporters, "We will defeat you, God willing." (10)

Fallujah resonates with Iraqis beyond bravado and an increasing will to fight - it has had the thoroughly revolutionary effect of uniting the previously discordant Sunni and Shia groups in solidarity for a common cause. Last week in Baghdad, "Solemn announcements boomed from mosquesbeseeching Iraqis for donations of blood, money and medical supplies for 'your sons and brothers struggling in Fallujah'. And across the capital, Shiite Muslims joined the Sunnis in rolling up their sleeves and reaching into their pockets." One poor old woman had arrived with the last food in her home, ready to donate "for my brothers in Fallujah". Both Sunnis and Shias "filled a tent erected behind the shrine, flexing and unflexing their fists to push blood from their veins into plastic sacks that would be carried to war wounded in Fallujah," a scene repeated across 70 Sunni mosques across Baghdad. (11)

A day later almost 200,000 Iraqis, "many of them Shias, crowded into the precinct of Baghdad's largest Sunni mosque to denounce the American occupation and pledge solidarity with the people of Fallujah" and the Shiite uprising. (12) The main preacher thundered, "The Americans invaded the land of Iraq, but they did not penetrate its people or their souls." He later declared, "The Americans are carrying out vicious terrorist attacks on the people of Falluja," and "hundreds of people wept" in response. Shias and Sunnis organized large aid convoys and led them toward Fallujah to relieve the plight of their fellow countrymen, bypassing or overrunning US military blockades. (13)

This heroic display of sacrifice and solidarity, achieved by a people beaten and battered time and time again, rings as a thundering indictment of those racist liberals and pundits who brandish the threat of "civil war" in Iraq to maintain our stranglehold on that country.

Of course, this has not prevented certain "practical men" from insisting on the feasibility of "pacifying" Fallujah and Najaf, of reestablishing control and crushing and isolating militants. For them, the superficial is the whole. The lull in violence in Fallujah, brought about by the partial cease-fire, combined with Sadr's signs of willingness to negotiate in Najaf, signal to them that the troubles are nearing an end.

But the dynamics of colonialism are not those of a set-piece battle. The fact that the colonial apparatus is negotiating with Sadr at all shows that they understand he is a force who must be reckoned with. Sadr's maneuvering to avoid a bloodbath in Najaf also shows that he is tactful, not suicidal. In an insurgency, there is no army on the battlefield to be destroyed; the army is the people, who can be mobilized at a moment's call with any number of light weapons.

The New York Times recently saw this process in motion: "The Khadamiya bazaar exploded in a frezy. Shopkeepers reached beneath stacks of sandals for Kalashnikov rifles. Boys wrapped their faces in black cloth. Men raced through the streets, kicking over crates and setting up barriers. Some handed out grenades. Within minutes this entire Shiite neighborhood in central Baghdad mobilized for war." (14) Given that mass support for the resistance has only spread, the idea that it will simply fizzle out as if by magic is utterly baseless.

The supposed lull in fighting does not even reflect actual conditions on the ground. On April 12, guerrillas shot down an Apache helicopter 3 miles outside Baghdad's airport and "cut off communications between military posts on a key road leading west from the city," where numerous ambush attacks have been launched. (15) These attacks also extend to the south of Baghdad, where "A convoy of flatbed trucks carrying M113 armored personnel vehicles was ambushed and burnt." US supply lines to Fallujah, Ramadi, and further forces down south have also been disrupted. (16)

Insurgents have also "sharply increased the sophistication, coordination and aggressiveness of their tactics" according to US Army officers, blowing up and crippling bridges and highways to be used by American convoys, reflecting what one colonel described as "a regional or even national level of organization." This has been precipitated by what another US major described as "a marriage of convenience between Sadr's militia and Saddam loyalists." (17)

But we must look behind the propaganda to truly grasp this remarkable development. The "Saddam loyalists", who were expected to blow up bridges to halt the American advance in March 2003, never materialized. They have taken action only now -and in cooperation with the poorest element of the Shia community. Why? We must admit that that these so-called "Saddam loyalists" were never loyal to Saddam that they are in fact genuine nationalists within what was the Iraqi Army has been proven through both their past inaction and present action.

This applies even to Fallujah, where one US soldier said, "It's the fight that never came last year. I guess these guys didn't really want to die for Saddam. But all this anti-American feeling is now uniting them." (18) Such "anti-American feeling" is quite understandable, given that Iraqis are being murdered in assaults planned by American commanders who hold Nazi attitudes towards Arabs as "untermeschen", according to a senior British officer. (19)

The most desperate argument now being aired by assorted 'experts', however, is that regardless of the violence, all Iraq needs is to "move the political process forward." But the utter failure of the occupation authorities to exercise its political-diplomatic muscle in coping with the resistance is a good indication that those muscles have either atrophied or never existed. The Iraqi Governing Council almost completely fell apart when the atrocities in Fallujah took place; four members resigned and the others were forced to denounce it in strong terms as "collective punishment" to avoid appearing like complete puppets in front of the populace. (20)

Even the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, trained and funded by the US, has failed the occupation. A whole battalion refused to serve in Fallujah, announcing "We did not sign up to fight Iraqis." One Iraqi soldier, whose comrades were jailed for not partaking in the fighting, declared, "How could an Iraqi fight an Iraqi like this? This meant that nothing had changed from the Saddam Hussein days. We refused en masse."(21) Others simply dropped out or defected to the resistance.

The response of American officials has been laughably pathetic. One general blithely announced, "The lines are blurring for a lot of Iraqis right now, and we're having a lot of problems with security functions right now." (22) The truth of the matter is that the lines are not "blurring" but sharpening, as more and more Iraqis come to see the undesirability of colonialism and the violence with which it announces its presence.

No credible occupation-backed domestic government or military force exists. It is therefore not possible to speak of any legitimate political process in the colonial context. Come the June 30th "handover", there will be nothing to hand over to anyone and no one to hand over anything to. No amount of violence or sophistry will suffice to inflate this farce enough to prevent its puncturing by that demand which many Iraqis are now willing to lay down their lives for: freedom.

Implicit in any recognition of this demand for freedom is an obligation upon the citizens of that nation which is denying freedom's fulfillment: absolute, unwavering, and resolute struggle against the platform of war by the people of the United States. This is, in essence, a demand to re-civilize ourselves. We must shatter the illusions crafted by our own elite that so often send us cowering into the corners of hatred and paranoia against this or that invented or exaggerated demon.

It is high time for us to cease imagining that we are merely "defending" ourselves against ubiquitous - and convenient - "barbarians at our gates." Let us instead open our eyes, and look upon those charred, mangled gates of Chile, Nicaragua, Indonesia, Vietnam, Palestine and now Iraq with an honest gaze. Let us angle away from the homes and bodies of the racial Other those torches we have been wielding so violently for decades, and instead aim them towards our own very real demons of racism and oppression to set them aflame; in their burning fires we may yet illuminate our own humanity and rediscover our innate connection with peoples abroad.

[b]Notes:[/b]

1. "In Falluja, Ceasefire Doesn't Reduce Tension, or Danger." New York Times. April 13,

2004.

2. "Fallujah: a ghost town where scared residents bury their dead in their yards." Agence

France Press. April 11, 2004.

3. Eye-witness account from Raul Mahajan , who has been blogging from Iraq at www.empirenotes.org. Leveled with the usual charge of not being white enough to be telling the truth, he has posted pictures of an ambulance with a bullet hole in the windshield at driver's chest level (April 14, 2004).

4. "Around 770 Die in Recent Iraq Fighting." Hamza Hendawi, Associated Press. April 12, 2004.

5. "Americans 'drop demand for handover of killers in Falluja atrocity'." Jonathan Steele, The Guardian, April 14, 2004.

6. see note 2.

7. see note 5.

8. "U.S. Looks for New Solution in Cease-Fire." Nicholas Riccardi and Tony Perry, Los Angeles Times, April 12, 2004.

9. "Anti-U.S. Outrage Unites a Growing Iraqi Resistance." Jefrrey Gettleman, New York Times, April 11, 2004.

10. "Fallujah Gains Mythic Air." Karl Vick and Anthony Shadid, Washington Post, April 13, 2004.

11. "Rallying Around an Insurgent City." Karl Vick, Washington Post, April 9, 2004.

12. "Sunni and Shia unite against common enemy." Jonathan Steele and Rory McCarthy, The Guardian, April 10, 2004.

13. "Sunni and Shia guerrillas unite against US." David Blair, Daily Telegraph, April 12, 2004.

14. "At Word of U.S. Foray, A Baghdad Militia Erupts." Jeffrey Gettleman, New York Times, April 7, 2004.

15. see note 12 and note 8.

16. "Allies keep shaky truces alive as Sadr pulls back." Patrick Cockburn, The Independent, April 13, 2004.

17. "Insurgents Display New Sophistication." Thomas E. Ricks, Washington Post, April 14, 2004.

18. see note 1.

19. "British commanders condemn US military tactics." Sean Rayment, Telegraph, April 12, 2004.

20. "Fallujah Bloodbath threatens US-Appointed Iraqi Government with Collapse" Juan Cole blog of April 10, 2004, citing AP report. www.juancole.com

21. "US holding 200 Iraqi 'mutineers'." Reuters, April 18, 2004.

22. "Iraqi Battalion Refuses to 'Fight Iraqis'." Thomas E. Ricks, Washington Post, April 11, 2004.

[u]M. Junaid Alam, 21, Boston, co-editor & webmaster of Left Hook, feedback: alam@lefthook.org[/u] - http://www.counterpunch.com/a...

Dubya's Ponzy Scheme: GOP Economic Rhetoric Versus Reality ...

04.29.04 (5:11 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... .

[u]By Winston Smith[/u], http://www.tblog.com/template...

Isn't Health Care A Safeguard For Human Dignity???

04.29.04 (11:44 am) [edit]

"Health care is an essential safeguard of human life and dignity and there is an obligation for society to ensure that every person be able to realize this right." http://www.pnhp.org/

The majority of Americans support Universal Health Care http://www.pnhp.org/news/2003... which is a necessity for our people. The U.S.A. is the only industrialized nation not to provide health care for its citizens. Over 45 million citizens lack health care and either live in pain, go bankrupt or die. Over 18,000 Americans die each year because they lack health care coverage. http://www.wsws.org/articles/...

Check out a workable plan that would provide Universal Health Care for our citizens on http://www.kucinich.us/issues...

Physicians For A National Health Care Programme

04.29.04 (11:43 am) [edit]

Physicians For A National Health Care Programme

04.29.04 (11:39 am) [edit]

New Searchable Database Charts Bush/Cheney Lies ...

04.29.04 (11:31 am) [edit]

As the September 11th Commission grills President Bush and Vice President Cheney about their contradictory statements today, we wanted to alert you to a powerful new tool to help journalists, activists and the public compare the Bush administration's claims against well-documented facts. The Center for American Progress today launched a comprehensive Claim vs. Fact database at www.claimvfact.org that documents statements from conservatives like President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Members of Congress and Fox News personalities, and compares those statements to the facts. Each fact is sourced, and in many cases includes a web link directly to that source.

The database has more than 400 entries so far, but THEY NEED YOUR HELP BUILDING IT. If you know of a lie, distortion or dishonest statement from a Bush Administration official or another conservative that isn't already in the database, please go to their submission page at:

http://tinyurl.com/3e8xc" title="http://tinyurl.com/3e8xc" target="_blank"http://tinyurl.com/3e8xc

or

http://www.americanprogress.org/site/apps/fc/form.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=50898" title="http://www.americanprogress.org/site/apps/fc/form.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=50898" target="_blank"http://www.americanprogress.o...

There you can submit an entry for addition to the database, so that the tool grows and becomes a real-time tracker of lies. - http://www.misleader.org/dail...

New Searchable Database Charts Bush/Cheney Lies

04.29.04 (11:30 am) [edit]

New Searchable Database Charts Bush/Cheney Lies

04.29.04 (11:29 am) [edit]

New Searchable Database Charts Bush/Cheney Lies ...

04.29.04 (11:28 am) [edit]

Bush Uses Nazi Tactics To Win Election: WAR FEVER, HATRED & RELIGIOUS BIGOTRY

04.29.04 (10:59 am) [edit]

George Bush:

...foolish firebug who set himself alight trying to ignite Armageddon in the Middle East, now frantically peeing his own pants to douse the flame?

...or an implacable armchair Zhukov crushing Fallujah in deadly rings of steel and righteous determination?

No question the White House is pushing the second version.

And for that a lot of people in Fallujah are going to die.

Call them collateral damage in the main battle: the U.S. presidential election.

The reports about Rove's "No War in 2004" diktat were obviously greatly exaggerated.

Absent any shiny election-year credentials as conqueror, leader, or wealthmaker, Bush has decided to focus on process, not results.

The process: war.

Bush came out of the closet as our "war president" during his notorious interview with Tim Russert.

In B-school speak our prez has decided to "return to his core competency": knocking things down and screwing things up.

Apparently it was decided we needed to intensify the war in Iraq in a concerted effort to obscure, overshadow, and supersede Kerry and his authentic warrior credentials with some high profile, 21st century Sturm und Drang.

The Rove scenario has Kerry reprising his Vietnam-era role: not as hero but as anti-war bellyacher a.k.a. traitor and party pooper who dares to "undermine our troops again" by trying to interfere with the slaughter and our innocent appreciation of it.

Karen Hughes and the usual GOP suspects are hard at work denigrating Kerry's Vietnam achievements and impugning his integrity. One of the most ludicrous -- or shameful, if Bush wins the election -- artifacts of this campaign will be the US News and World Reports cover photograph contrasting the red, white, and blue proud Bush in full military fig with Kerry skulking along in civilian polyester under an immense helmet of blow-dried hair.

At the same time, Bush gives the American people what they want: a massive exhibition of remorseless American firepower in Fallujah.

Bush's gift to us is to let us share, at least vicariously via Wolf Blitzer, the overpowering thrill of leveling a city block filled with faceless Arabs with a load of AC-130 ordnance.

We might be in the wrong place and the wrong time and with no good options. But cutting loose with a "precision" tank and gunship assault against a crowd of desperate insurgents scuttling through Fallujah's ramshackle slums gives us that feeling of power and potency that lasts as long as a hit of crack..

Never mind that it exacerbates the political and security crisis in Iraq and exposes our hundred thousand plus troops in Iraq to the murderous rage of the inhabitants of the dismal country they will be occupying, fighting, and dieing in for the rest of the decade.

We will deal with that after the election -- or never.

I guess that's why we aren't supposed to see coffin photos yet. The Iraq war is about immediate gratification and endlessly postponed and easily ignored consequences.

War Bush-style is more of a journey than a destination, doncha see? And we're all invited along for the ride.

Maybe there will be a time for Bush to parade his manly, dignified grief over the fallen after fear-stoked binge of revenge and violence has run its course and we ache to demonstrate our profound humanity and fill the void in our exhausted, shame-filled souls.

Can Bush distract the American public with a series of splashy blitzkriegs against dehumanized Arab fanatics, thugs, and sadists?

Or will his poll numbers follow the future of our desperately mismanaged adventure in Iraq into bloody oblivion?

The Iraq war is a titanic failure of moral and political leadership, with tremendous costs and terrible and irremediable consequences. Even with the immense resources and initiative available to the president of the United States, the truth can't be hidden from people who are willing to see it.

It becomes ever more clear that the election is not about Bush vs. Kerry.

It's about us.

Whether we as a people will endure the continued misrule of a president who isn't trying to shoot his way out of trouble in Iraq...

...as much as he is trying to kill his way back into the White House.

If Bush wins the election, don't blame Kerry...

...blame us.

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/article.php?sid=15970&mode=nested &order=0" title="http://www.smirkingchimp.com/article.php?sid=15970&mode=nested &order=0" target="_blank"http://www.smirkingchimp.com/...

Bush Uses Nazi Tactics To Win Election: WAR FEVER, HATRED & RELIGIOUS BIGOTRY

04.29.04 (10:57 am) [edit]

Bush Is A Lousy President, Lousy Leader Because He Can't Control Departments

04.28.04 (8:38 pm) [edit]

[b]Rifts widen in Bush's foreign policy team

Backers of Powell's multilateralism clash with go-it-alone conservatives over the administration's direction[/b]. - http://www.csmonitor.com/2004...

When it comes to Iraq, the Bush administration's foreign policy team is speaking with one voice: All the players are saying that despite faulty prewar intelligence, the president's decision to go to war was right.
But behind the unanimity is dissonance in tones and forcefulness that suggests the deeper differences that have been part of the Bush foreign policy since the beginning. The failure to see eye to eye extends to the so-called Bush doctrine of preemptive war - one of the administration's defining policies - and reaches to the president's top foreign-policy players.

The continuing differences have only added to President Bush's woes as the White House has grappled with questions of whether what the administration knew about Iraq justified a war. But the bigger issue, some experts say, is what the differences suggest about the administration's ability to confront continuing problems, like North Korea and Iran, especially as Bush enters a battle for reelection.

With key members of the Bush foreign policy team expected to leave their posts at the end of the term - including National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of State Colin Powell - some are trying to set the record straight on the role they've played. They are also, clearly, trying to shape the direction things might go in a second term.

"Perhaps a second term would resolve things, but right now there continues to be a very fundamental disagreement," says Karl Inderfurth, a Clinton administration State Department official now at George Washington University. The highly visible rift is between elements "led by the vice-president, the secretary of defense, and his deputy, who hold to a notion of America's unique right to unfettered action, and others, allied with Secretary Powell, who continue to argue for an emphasis on what he has called a 'strategy of partnership' with the international community."

Mr. Inderfurth says that two recent comments typify the internal differences. At a closely watched security conference in Munich last week, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in a spirited defense of the administration's national security strategy that "the higher the risk and the danger, the lower the threshold for action."

Also in recent days, Mr. Powell - who revealed in a Washington Post interview that he might have recommended differently on going to war with Iraq if he knew a year ago what's known now - has preferred to stress that Bush is not looking to respond to threats with force "if there are other ways to solve the problem."

"Here you have the two most prominent cabinet officials," says Inderfurth, "one hyping preemptive action and the other playing it down."

Some observers say the differences, played out in public, hurt the president - especially with Americans paying more attention to foreign-policy questions because of the 100,000 US soldiers in Iraq.

"Presidents always look bad when their main advisers are squabbling publicly over what the White House should be doing or has done," says James Lindsay, a foreign-policy expert with the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. "It hurts the president especially in this case because he's been under such criticism from Democrats for not coming clean on the intelligence aspects of the Iraq war."

Mac Destler, an expert in US foreign policy at the University of Maryland, recalls that Ronald Reagan, as a candidate against an incumbent president, criticized Jimmy Carter for a foreign policy team that failed to speak with one voice. "The problem for a president is that if [the division] reaches critical mass," he says, "it can end up diluting what should be a political advantage for the incumbent."

But Danielle Pletka, a foreign policy expert at the American Enterprise Institute, says the Bush team has been "remarkably unified" on the issue of going to war with Iraq. She suspects that "people are so habituated to hearing about the deep divisions in the administration over foreign policy matters that they are looking for them." That doesn't mean they don't exist - they do on some issues, she says, like North Korea and Iran - just not over the justification of war with Iraq.

How Bush's foreign policy might shift if he is reelected will hinge on key appointments. Powell, who customarily answers questions about his tenure by saying he serves at the pleasure of the president, is not expected to return for a second term.

Many observers say some of Powell's recent actions, like his qualifying his enthusiasm for war and reemphasis on multilateral action, reflect a man trying to set the record straight on his legacy. "He's on his way out, so he's paying a little more attention to his place in history in these final months," says one insider at the State Department. "He's the good soldier as everybody says, but he also knows there are already books being written about him. He wants it remembered that he's the one who convinced the president to go to the UN before going to war, things like that."

Closer to the president, Ms. Rice has said this will be her last year in the White House - though that careful language does not rule out taking the top slot either at State or at the Pentagon. How Bush would fill those positions would reveal the way he wants America to be viewed by the world. Noting that Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz - dubbed the architect of the Iraq war - would love to take over at State, former Reagan administration official Lawrence Korb says "that certainly sends a very different signal than if you pick a Senator [Richard] Lugar or [Chuck] Hagel," two moderate Republicans.

Dubya's Environmental Record Is A DISASTER As He Panders To BIG OIL

04.28.04 (5:12 pm) [edit]

President Bush yesterday tried to deflect questions about his environmental record by claiming that he supports efforts to reduce America's fossil fuel usage1. He said he had "introduced ideas like a hydrogen-powered automobile, put money behind it and research behind it" so that so that we will be "less dependent on foreign sources of energy" and we will "improve the environment." But Bush's hydrogen-automobile proposal is purposely engineered to be fossil fuel dependent, and it is paid for by taking money out of programs that are actually reducing fossil fuel use.

As Mother Jones reported, "the Bush Administration has been working quietly to ensure that the system used to produce hydrogen will be as fossil fuel-dependent - and potentially as dirty - as the one that fuels today's SUVs. According to the administration's National Hydrogen Energy Roadmap, drafted last year in concert with the energy industry, up to 90% of all hydrogen will be refined from oil, natural gas, and other fossil fuels"2. Such a system, experts say, would effectively eliminate most of the benefits offered by hydrogen because the Bush plan's use of oil/coal/gas to create fuel cells would generate large amounts of pollution. Not surprisingly, such a system would insure the massive profits of the energy industry, which bankrolls Bush's campaign3.

Bush is, in part, paying for this fossil-fuel-based program by stripping funding from programs that are actually reducing fossil fuel use in America. As AP reported, Bush moved money into his hydrogen program at the same time he "ended an eight-year program to help automakers develop high-mileage, family size cars" such as the successful hybrids now beginning to permeate the U.S. market4. Additionally, Bush proposed reducing "federal funding for renewable energy and efficiency research program by more than $200 million in 2002"5.

[u]Sources[/u]: - http://www.misleader.org/dail...

1. President Bush Touts Benefits of Health Care Information Technology, 04/27/2004.

2. "Hydrogen's Dirty Secret", Mother Jones, May/June 2003.

3. OpenSecrets.Org.

4. "Bush abandons high-mileage car program for hydrogen fuel-cell approach", Environmental News Network, 01/10/2002.

5. "Proposed Bush Budget Cuts Renewables and Energy Efficiency Programs", Resources for the Future, 04/11/2001.

Dubya's Disastrous Legacy: Horrible Trauma Cases in Iraq

04.28.04 (4:46 pm) [edit]

Atrios links the Washington Post story everyone's talking about today about the horrific injuries that the military hospitals in Iraq are dealing with and the trauma it is causing for the doctors and surgical teams. Atrios says:

[i]This stuff is just so horrible. I really hope Kerry gets out in front of this and proposes massive increases in VA funds. You can have my goddamn tax cut back. I'd rather pay out the money that way and get some quality care for these people than throw it into their change cups a few years from now.

I hate what these bastards have done, and I hate that they'd rather bankrupt the government than take care of the mess they've made. Assholes[/i].

Which I think rather misses the point of the article. The problem isn't lack of funds, it's that these guys are surviving hideous injuries that would have killed them just a few years ago.

[i]More and more in Iraq, combat surgeons say, the wounds involve severe damage to the head and eyes -- injuries that leave soldiers brain damaged or blind, or both, and the doctors who see them first struggling against despair.

For months the gravest wounds have been caused by roadside bombs -- improvised explosives that negate the protection of Kevlar helmets by blowing shrapnel and dirt upward into the face. In addition, firefights with guerrillas have surged recently, causing a sharp rise in gunshot wounds to the only vital area not protected by body armor.[/i]

[i]The neurosurgeons at the 31st Combat Support Hospital measure the damage in the number of skulls they remove to get to the injured brain inside, a procedure known as a craniotomy. "We've done more in eight weeks than the previous neurosurgery team did in eight months," Poffenbarger said. "So there's been a change in the intensity level of the war."[/i]

With advanced surgical techniques and the military's capability for moving casualties from the field to the hospital in record quick times, they are saving people with devastating brain injuries and people who are blinded and disfigured and paralyzed. There is nothing more money can do for injuries like this, which is what the doctors in the article point out.

[i]"See all that dark stuff? That's dead brain," he said. "That ain't gonna regenerate. And that's not uncommon. That's really not uncommon. We do craniotomies on average, lately, of one a day."

"We can save you," the surgeon said. "You might not be what you were."

Accurate statistics are not yet available on recovery from this new round of battlefield brain injuries, an obstacle that frustrates combat surgeons. But judging by medical literature and surgeons' experience with their own patients "three or four months from now 50 to 60 percent will be functional and doing things," said Maj. Richard Gullick.

"Functional," he said, means "up and around, but with pretty significant disabilities," including paralysis.

'Broken soldiers'

The remaining 40 percent to 50 percent of patients include those whom the surgeons send to Europe, and on to the United States, with no prospect of regaining consciousness. The practice, subject to review after gathering feedback from families, assumes that loved ones will find value in holding the soldier's hand before confronting the decision to remove life support.

"I'm actually glad I'm here and not at home, tending to all the social issues with all these broken soldiers," Carroll said.

But the toll on the combat medical staff is itself acute, and unrelenting[/i].

[i]In a comprehensive Army survey of troop morale across Iraq, taken in September, the unit with the lowest spirits was the one that ran the combat hospitals until the 31st arrived in late January. The three months since then have been substantially more intense.

"We've all reached our saturation for drama trauma," said Maj. Greg Kidwell, head nurse in the emergency room[/i].

The real solution to this problem is to get those Americans out of Iraq, not to throw money at yet another government program. Besides, if you want the best of care for these broken people why would you send them to a shabby hospital system like the VA anyway? Why throw money at the VA when there are thousands of state of the art hospitals all over the US? Let them go to real doctors at real hospitals, not government facilities which are all run as efficiently as Amtrak. Better yet, bring them home before any more get hurt.

Anyway, the point is, even if you gave the VA billions, it won't help. The cases that are demoralizing the doctors are the hopeless ones like brain injuries and missing eyes. These are permanent disabilities. No amount of money will replace eyes or fix an injured brain or spine. A significant number of these soldiers are making the return trip only so their families can see them one last time before they pull the plug. - http://www.antiwar.com/blog/i...

Justice Department Reviewing Ashcroft on Possible FEC Violations

04.28.04 (10:56 am) [edit]

The Justice Department's Public Integrity Section is reviewing allegations that Attorney General John D. Ashcroft may have violated federal campaign finance and disclosure laws based on information developed by the Federal Election Commission.

The section is responsible for determining whether allegations merit investigation as potential criminal violations of campaign finance and disclosure laws and for making recommendations as to whether a special counsel would be needed when a potential conflict of interest with senior Justice officials exists.

At issue is the valuable campaign fundraising list of then-Sen. Ashcroft (R-Mo.). He had claimed ownership of the fundraising list during an FEC inquiry, but had not reported it as an asset on his Senate or Justice Department financial disclosure statements.

Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine disclosed the review in an April 14 letter to the National Voting Rights Institute (NVRI), an election law interest group, which disclosed it to The Washington Post.

The institute triggered the original FEC investigation almost three years ago, which resulted in a determination in December that Ashcroft's 1998 leadership political action committee, Spirit of America, and his Senate reelection campaign committee, Ashcroft 2000, had committed at least four violations of federal campaign laws. The two committees agreed to pay a $37,000 fine to settle the issue.

The violations arose when the Spirit of America PAC in 1999 and 2000 earned $165,000 from renting its mailing list to outside groups and transferred $112,000 of that money to the Ashcroft 2000 campaign committee. Election laws, the FEC ruled, permitted the PAC to donate $5,000 for the primary and $5,000 for the general election to his Senate campaign committee.

During the FEC inquiry, Ashcroft campaign committee lawyers described him as the owner of the PAC mailing list, which would have exempted the fund transfers from any limitations. The FEC last year rejected that assertion because Ashcroft did not disclose his ownership or the rental income in his 1998 and 1999 Senate financial disclosures. He also did not report the mailing list as an asset in his required filings as attorney general.

Because the FEC can deal only with civil violations, the NVRI asked Deputy Attorney General James B. Comey Jr. on Jan. 15 to appoint a special counsel to investigate whether Ashcroft or his committees had broken any criminal laws.

On March 4, having received no answer from Comey, the NVRI asked the inspector general to investigate "potential civil and criminal violations of federal law" by Ashcroft and the two campaign committees.

Fine wrote to the NVRI that the "matters in your previous letter to the deputy attorney general . . . had been referred to the Public Integrity Section for its review." There was no reference to the possible appointment of a special counsel.

Lisa Danetz, an NVRI lawyer, said yesterday that "we hope and expect that the Justice Department will diligently investigate the charges against the attorney general."

Ashcroft, who lost his reelection campaign before being appointed attorney general by President Bush, has avoided direct involvement with his fundraising committees' legal problems, even though he was the founder and a major figure in both. To make their case, committee lawyers instead used documents he signed, including one that they said established his ownership of the mailing list. The attorney general was not interviewed during the FEC inquiry.

Mark Corallo, Ashcroft's spokesman at Justice, said last month that the attorney general's disclosure statement "is complete." - http://www.washingtonpost.com...

Justice Department Reviewing Ashcroft on Possible FEC Violations

04.28.04 (10:54 am) [edit]

Republican Senator Lugar Chides Bush For Incompetence

04.28.04 (10:52 am) [edit]

Deft diplomacy will be needed when the United States seeks a U.N. resolution to endorse its plan to transfer power in Iraq, Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., said Monday, but within the Bush administration, "diplomacy is deficient."
President Bush's decision to invade Iraq was opposed by many countries, including several who are represented in the U.N. Security Council. Until his recent shift to seek a U.N. resolution for on the transfer of power, Bush has resisted a significant role for the international organization in reconstructing Iraq.

"Even if the decisions are correct, the diplomacy is deficient," Lugar said at a breakfast with Washington reporters. "By that I simply mean not many people agree with us, or like us or are prepared to work with us. That will really have to change."

He laid the responsibility for the poor international relations at Bush's doorstep.

"It starts with the president and proceeds, really, through the Cabinet and those who are advising him. Each administration has to determine which kind of tone it wants to establish in these matters, and that obviously starts with the president," he said.

In addition to improving U.S. relations with the United Nations, Lugar said, the Bush administration will have to explain to voters why it has changed its view about the United Nations' appropriate role and deal with the growing anti-American sentiment in Iraq.

"Americans will say why in the world should the French and Russians . . . after we have done all the fighting, have all the people on the ground, have paid all the money, why should they have a say in this? But then we're back to square one, where is where our administration has been until a short time ago, which is that they shouldn't have any say," Lugar said.

"When you see the polling of the Iraqis now, they don't like us; they resent our being there," he said. Asked whether the United States should leave immediately, Lugar said, "They say no, but they don't want the U.S. there any longer than you have to be - and that's among the more benign people, not the insurgents."

Lugar, the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, has been nudging the Bush White House since before the war started to also have a plan for postwar Iraq. Although Lugar is well regarded on Capitol Hill and elsewhere in Washington for his foreign policy expertise, recent news analyses have painted him as largely ignored by the Bush administration.

He did not dispute that characterization at the hour-long meeting with journalists.

"They're going to have to determine, really, who they want to have around the table," he said. "I do not purport to have played a significant role in those talks."

Lugar said he has had only one long conversation with Bush - 90 minutes when the two traveled to Indiana last fall on Air Force One.

But even if the White House doesn't solicit his advice, Lugar said, he has evidence that Bush and other top officials take note of his comments, although they don't necessarily take his advice.

For instance, Lugar said, the day after he said the June 30 deadline should be reconsidered, Bush publicly said it was a firm date; and when Lugar said it was important for the White House to name an ambassador to Iraq, John Negroponte was nominated within days; and that when Lugar said it was important to conduct a hearing on Negroponte's nomination quickly, the administration initially said it would take more time, then agreed to an earlier date.

Nevertheless, he said, "the administration people have kept their counsel. The suggestion has been that perhaps I might be more intrusive. Sort of go down to the White House and hammer on the door and say, 'I'm here, and we ought to be talking.' " - http://www.fortwayne.com/mld/...

BUSH & CHENEY PROFITTING OFF OF ENRON & HALLIBURTON -- NOT KERRY!!!!!

04.28.04 (10:50 am) [edit]

[b]Bush Campaign Hired Jets from Enron, Halliburton [/b]

During the 2000 presidential election recount battle, George W. Bush's campaign used jets owned by several large corporations, including Enron Corp. and Halliburton Co., that are now under federal investigation, according to Internal Revenue Service records and officials.

Republicans said yesterday that there was nothing improper about the use of the corporate planes, for which the Bush-Cheney Recount Fund paid more than $13,000 to Enron and $2,400 to Halliburton, the company Dick Cheney ran before becoming vice president.

''Our use of planes was in full compliance with federal election law,'' said Benjamin Ginsberg, a lawyer for the Bush-Cheney recount fund.

Republicans said the amount the Bush campaign spent on corporate planes was a tiny fraction of the $13.8 million it paid out during the five-week recount battle. Bush won the White House after the Supreme Court blocked the recount of thousands of disputed Florida ballots.

Democrats said the payments were proof that Bush and Cheney were compromised by their close business ties.

''The Bush administration literally flew into power on Enron's and Halliburton's private jets,'' said Bill Buck, a spokesman for the Democratic National Committee.

The recount committee for Al Gore, the Democratic candidate in 2000, did not report using any corporate jets in its Internal Revenue Service filings.

Federal law allows presidential candidates to use corporate jets so long as they reimburse the companies. They are required to pay the equivalent of a first-class ticket on a commercial flight or normal charter rates, said a spokesman for the Federal Election Commission.

The White House declined to comment.

Enron, a major financial backer of Bush's campaigns, was the world's biggest energy trader before it collapsed amid revelations of losses from off-the-books partnerships.

Cheney was chief executive of Halliburton, which provides products and services to the energy industry, from 1995 to 2000. The Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating how the company accounted for cost overruns on construction jobs. - http://www.commondreams.org/h...

Bush's Attacks on Kerry's Vietnam Record Beyond Hypocritical - Bush is Despicable!!!

04.28.04 (10:47 am) [edit]

In the course of the past week an odd double standard has emerged in the presidential campaign. Every sentence and gesture of the young John Kerry has been scrutinized -- and often deliberately misinterpreted -- for signs of insincerity, self-promotion, lack of patriotism and fledgling Francophilia.

The sentences and gestures of the young George W. Bush, on the other hand, remain shrouded in obscurity. You don't build a record if you don't show up, and that's exactly what Bush did during the Vietnam War.

The Republicans have subjected Kerry's time in Vietnam to the kind of going-over normally accorded war criminals. Did he really deserve that third Purple Heart? How big, exactly, was that piece of shrapnel that had to be removed from his left arm?

We could, I suppose, ask an equivalent question of Bush, but only if they awarded Purple Hearts for paper cuts incurred in the campaign headquarters of the Republican Senate candidate for whom Bush worked during the year he was supposed to be serving with the Air National Guard in Alabama.

Kerry's leadership of Vietnam veterans who opposed the war has also come under attack. Last week a gang of Republican congressmen took to the House floor to charge that Kerry had undermined the war effort and betrayed his comrades in arms. "What he did was nothing short of aiding and abetting the enemy," said Texas Rep. Sam Johnson, who then took to calling Kerry "Hanoi John."

What Kerry did, in actuality, was provide a forceful voice and prudent guidance to a movement of angry men who had sacrificed for their country in a war that, by 1971, no longer had a plausible purpose but nonetheless continued to rage. By the time Kerry appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and posed his memorable question -- "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?" -- it was plain that no one in the Nixon administration really believed that the war could be won.

The war not only dragged on, however, but Nixon expanded it to Cambodia (a decision that predictably destabilized the regime of Prince Norodom Sihanouk and in turn helped bring the Khmer Rouge to power). A number of antiwar activists, veterans among them, responded with a kind of crazed desperation, proposing increasingly confrontational actions. Like many antiwar leaders of the time, Kerry was fighting a two-front war: against the administration in the court of public opinion but also against those of his comrades who wanted to direct the movement into self-destructive spasms of rage.

It was precisely because Kerry's impulses were so mainstream that the Nixon White House feared him. Nixon didn't sit around with his goon squad of Bob Haldeman and Chuck Colson plotting against Kerry because they thought Kerry was Hanoi John. On the contrary, Kerry had to be taken down because his patriotism was so glaringly obvious.

He had, after all, joined the service despite the grave doubts -- to which he gave voice in his Yale class oration in the spring of 1966 -- he harbored about the war. He had thrown himself in harm's way repeatedly while skippering "swift boats" in the Mekong Delta. He had worked to build an effective, law-abiding antiwar movement. Such men were dangerous.

There are days in this campaign when Kerry must think he's still up against Nixon and his thugs. The same slanders that Dick and his boys cooked up then -- Kerry as dangerous radical, Kerry as inauthentic liberal -- are being served up now by Nixon's ethical heirs.

Did Kerry make mistakes during his years in the antiwar movement? Sure he did, beginning with his studied (but clumsy) ambiguity about the fate of his medals and ribbons. But what is the standard we judge him by? When Kerry was fighting in Vietnam, and then fighting to change a disastrous policy at home, Bush had become the invisible man to his fellow aviators in the National Guard; Dick Cheney had, by his own admission, "other priorities" than the war and picked up four separate draft deferments, and junior exterminator Tom DeLay was risking life and limb in a daily battle against termites. Bush, in his own words, was "young and irresponsible," and Kerry all but reeked of responsibility. Bush was Prince Hal and Kerry King Henry and, when it comes to maturity of judgment, they remain so to this day.

[u]Prince Hal vs. King Henry[/u], Harold Meyerson, http://www.washingtonpost.com...

Bush Attacks On Kerry's Vietnam Record Beyond Hypocritical - Bush Is Despicable!!!

04.28.04 (10:46 am) [edit]

No-Show Bush "Should Have The Decency To Respect Those Who Did Serve"

04.28.04 (10:43 am) [edit]

When John Kerry released his military records to the public last week, Americans learned a lot about Mr. Kerry's exceptional service in Vietnam. They also learned a lot about the Republican attack machine.

The evaluations were uniformly glowing. One commander wrote that Mr. Kerry ranked among "the top few" in three categories: initiative, cooperation and personal behavior. Another commander wrote, "In a combat environment often requiring independent, decisive action, Lt. j.g. Kerry was unsurpassed." The citation for Mr. Kerry's Bronze Star praises his "calmness, professionalism and great personal courage under fire."

In the United States military, there's no ideology — there are no labels, Republican or Democrat — when superiors evaluate a man or woman's service to country. Mr. Kerry's commander for a brief time, Grant Hibbard, now a Republican, gave Mr. Kerry top marks 36 years ago.

Now the standards are those of politics, not the military. Despite his positive evaluations, Mr. Hibbard recently questioned whether Mr. Kerry deserved one of his three Purple Hearts.

In the heat of a political campaign, attacks come from all directions. That's why John Kerry's military records are so compelling; they measure the man before his critics or his supporters saw him through a political lens. These military records show that John Kerry served his country with valor, and that those who served with him and above him held him in high regard. That's honor enough for any veteran.

Yet the Republican attack machine follows a pattern we've seen before, whether the target is Senator John McCain in South Carolina in 2000 or Senator Max Cleland in Georgia in 2002. The latest manifestation of these tactics is the controversy over Mr. Kerry's medals.

John Kerry was awarded three Purple Hearts, a Bronze Star and a Silver Star for his service in Vietnam. In April 1971, as part of a protest against the war, he threw some ribbons over the fence of the United States Capitol.

Republicans have tried to use this event to question his patriotism and his truthfulness, claiming he has been inconsistent in saying whether he threw away his medals or ribbons. This is no more than a political smear. After risking his life in Vietnam to save others, John Kerry earned the right to speak out against a war he believed was wrong. Make no mistake: it is that bravery these Republicans are now attacking.

Although President Bush has not engaged personally in such accusations, he has done nothing to stop others from making them. I believe those who didn't serve, or didn't show up for service, should have the decency to respect those who did serve — often under the most dangerous conditions, with bravery and, yes, with undeniable patriotism.

[u]Medals of Honor[/u], Wesley K. Clark, a former Democratic presidential candidate, was commander of NATO forces from 1997 to 2000. - http://www.nytimes.com/2004/0...

No-Show Bush "Should Have The Decency To Respect Those Who Did Serve"

04.28.04 (10:42 am) [edit]

Bush & Cheney Stoop to New Lows to Smear Kerry with Ugly Propaganda

04.27.04 (2:34 pm) [edit]

"Have you no sense of decency, sir?"

It was the classic question posed by Joseph Welch to Sen. Joseph McCarthy 50 years ago during the Red-hunter's hearings investigating the Army for alleged communist influence. With his query, Welch, the Army's special counsel, began the undoing of McCarthy.

Unfortunately, the question needs to be asked again. It needs to be posed to shamelessly partisan Republicans who can't stand the fact that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are facing off against a Democrat who fought and was wounded in Vietnam. Cheney said in 1989 that he didn't go to Vietnam because "I had other priorities in the '60s than military service." While Kerry risked his life, Bush got himself into the National Guard.

Funny, isn't it? When Bill Clinton was running against Republican war veterans in 1992 and 1996, the most important thing to GOP propagandists and politicians was that Clinton didn't fight in Vietnam. Now that Republican candidates who didn't fight in Vietnam face a Democrat who did -- and was awarded the Silver Star, the Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts while he was there -- the Republican machine wants to change the subject.

Thus the shameful display on the floor of the House of Representatives last week as one Republican after another declared that what mattered was not Kerry's service but that he decided afterward that the Vietnam War was a terrible mistake for our country.

The decorated combat veteran was transformed from a hero to "Hanoi John," in the phrase of Rep. Sam Johnson, a Texas Republican. Johnson deserves our gratitude for his seven years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam. But his agenda last week had election-year politics stamped all over it. Johnson declared that in speaking out against the war, Kerry showed "his true colors, and they are not red, white and blue." Kerry, Johnson said, was engaged in "nothing short of aiding and abetting the enemy."

Rep. John Kline, a Minnesota Republican who served as a helicopter pilot in Vietnam, argued that Kerry's service "does not excuse his joining ranks with Jane Fonda and others in speaking ill of our troops or their service, then or now." Thanks for your service, Mr. Kline, but that "then or now" part is demagogic: Yes, Kerry criticized what our troops were asked to do in Vietnam. But have you ever heard Kerry speak ill of our men and women under arms in Iraq? The Republican agenda is obvious: to distract attention from the contrast of Kerry having served in a war theater while Bush and Cheney stayed home.

It seems to be a habit. When Bush faces a Vietnam War hero in an election, a Vietnam veteran perfectly happy to trash his opponent always turns up. In the case of Ted Sampley, the same guy who did Bush's dirty work in going after Sen. John McCain in the 2000 Republican primaries is doing the job against Kerry this year. Sampley dared compare McCain, who spent five years as a Vietnam POW, with "the Manchurian Candidate." Now, Sampley says that Kerry "is not truthful and is not worthy of the support of U.S. veterans. . . . To us, he is 'Hanoi John.' " Is that where Sam Johnson got his line?

One person who is outraged by the attacks on Kerry is McCain. When I reached the Arizona Republican, I found him deeply troubled over the reopening of wounds from the Vietnam era, "the most divisive time since our Civil War." He called Sampley "one of the most despicable characters I've ever met." McCain said he hoped that in the midst of a war in Iraq, politicians "will confront the challenges facing us now, including the conflict we're presently engaged in, rather than refighting the one we were engaged in more than 30 years ago."

McCain recalled that he had worked with Kerry on "POW/MIA issues and the normalization of relations with Vietnam" and wanted to stand up for his war comrade because "you have to do what's right." Speaking of Kerry, McCain said: "He's my friend. He'll continue to be my friend. I know his service was honorable. If that hurts me politically or with my party, that's a very small price to pay."

Now that McCain has spoken, will Bush have the guts to endorse or condemn the attacks on Kerry's service? Or will he just sit by silently, hoping the assaults do their work while he evades responsibility? Once more, Welsh's words call out for an answer: "Have you no sense of decency, sir?" - http://www.washingtonpost.com...

Bush's Hypocrisy: Budget Antics Causing More Iraq Casualties

04.27.04 (2:32 pm) [edit]

President Bush has promised to listen to military commanders and give the troops whatever they need to defend themselves in Iraq. White House spokesman Scott McClellan said last week that the "the President looks to the commanders in the theater to make the determinations of what is needed for our troops"1. Yet the President continues to withhold funding that military officials say is desperately needed to plug shortfalls in armor and protection equipment2. And, according to a new study, those shortfalls have meant 25% more American casualties in Iraq3.

According to Newsweek, an unofficial study circulating through the army shows that of the 190 soldiers killed by landmines, improvised explosive devices, or rocket-propelled grenade attacks, "almost all those 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." Additionally, "thousands more who were unprotected have suffered grievous wounds, such as the loss of limbs."

Instead of following through on his promise to give the military the protection equipment it needs, however, President Bush has left major funding holes in the most basic areas. The situation has gotten so dire that military commanders last week desperately begged Congress to fill key shortfalls left by the President's budget. They described a $132 million shortfall for bolt-on vehicle armor, an $879 million in shortfall for combat helmets, and a $40 million shortfall for body armor. Meanwhile, according to the Chicago Tribune, the White House has "dramatically reduced the number of Abrams tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles in Iraq" -- even as the fighting intensified, leaving troops to "ride in lightly protected Humvees, trucks and troop carriers" that are much more vulnerable to attack4.

[u]Sources[/u]: - http://www.misleader.org/dail...

1. Press Briefing by Scott McClellan, 04/21/2004.

2. "War May Require More Money Soon", Washington Post, 04/21/2004.

3. "The Human Cost", Newsweek, May 3, 2003.

4. "Insurgents' escalation taxing U.S. capabilities", Chicago Tribune, 04/24/2004.

THE FUN OF NO HEALTH CARE IN THE U.S.A.:-- 18,000 Americans Die Each Year & More Live in Agony!!!

04.27.04 (2:28 pm) [edit]

[b][u]Study Blames 18,000 Deaths in USA on Lack of Insurance[/u][/b]

More than 18,000 adults in the USA die each year because they are uninsured and can't get proper health care, researchers report in a landmark study released Tuesday.

The 193-page report, ''Care Without Coverage: Too Little, Too Late,'' examines the plight of 30 million -- one in seven -- working-age Americans whose employers don't provide insurance and who don't qualify for government medical care.

About 10 million children lack insurance; elderly Americans are covered by Medicare.

It is the second in a planned series of six reports by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) examining the impact of the nation's fragmented health system. The IOM is a non-profit organization of experts that advises Congress on health issues.

Overall, the researchers say, 18,314 people die in the USA each year because they lack preventive services, a timely diagnosis or appropriate care.

The estimated death toll includes about 1,400 people with high blood pressure, 400 to 600 with breast cancer and 1,500 diagnosed with HIV.

''Our purpose is simply to deliver the facts, and the facts are unequivocal,'' says Reed Tuckson, an author of the report and vice president for consumer health at UnitedHealth Group in Minnetonka, Minn.

Among the study's findings is a comparison of the uninsured with the insured:

* Uninsured people with colon or breast cancer face a 50% higher risk of death.

* Uninsured trauma victims are less likely to be admitted to the hospital, receive the full range of needed services, and are 37% more likely to die of their injuries.

* About 25% of adult diabetics without insurance for a year or more went without a checkup for two years. That boosts their risk of death, blindness and amputations resulting from poor circulation.

Being uninsured also magnifies the risk of death and disability for chronically sick and mentally ill patients, poor people and minorities, who disproportionately lack access to medical care, the landmark study states.

''The report documents the immense consequence of having 40 million uninsured people out there,'' says Ray Werntz, a consumer health expert with the Employee Benefit Research Institute. ''We need to elevate the problem in the national conscience.''

Calculating the cost in human suffering, he says, ''is one way to get there.'' - http://www.commondreams.org/h...

Bush afraid to let public see deadly reality of needless war

04.27.04 (2:26 pm) [edit]

[b]Editors' note[/b]: As of Sunday, April 25, a total of 718 American sons and daughters have come home from Iraq in flag-draped coffins, 117 in April alone. While President George W. Bush does not seem to be concerned about this -- he hasn't attended a single military funeral since launching the war -- he does seem to be concerned about the American people seeing images of the carnage his disastrous policies have wrought.

It is an image of dignity and respect -- photographs of flag-draped coffins. Some of the pictures show white-gloved soldiers doing their somber duty carrying the remains of the fallen. One is a poignant scene of the inside of a cargo plane where 20 coffins are secured to be flown to the military mortuary in Dover, Del.

The photos are riveting and thought-provoking. You think of young lives lost and the grief anguished families are experiencing. There is nothing exploitive about the pictures. They are, above all, respectful and reverential.

The images, however, capture the tragic reality of war and that's why George W. Bush doesn't want you to see any more of them. The truth is the president's torturer, and any image that challenges his arrogant fantasies must be stopped.

He has succeeded in creating a false image of himself, and he has been widely successful in selling the phony reasons for war and images he's fabricated to the American people. Grim, vivid reality cannot be tolerated.

The first picture published came from a military contract employee who took the shot of a transport plane loaded with the coffins while it was parked at the Kuwait International Airport. Tami Silicio and her husband, David Landry, were fired because they "violated Department of Defense and company policies by working together to photograph and publish the flag-draped caskets of our servicemen and women being returned to the United States," said William Silva, president of Maytag Aircraft.

Silva admits the firings came after the Seattle Times published the picture and he told the Washington Post the military had "very specific concerns" about the photo. The couple did not accept money and Silicio says her only motive was to let Americans share in the grief and to show parents of the dead how respectfully remains are treated and that "their children weren't thrown around like a piece of cargo."

A few days later, Russ Kick, a First Amendment activist, won a long struggle with the Air Force to obtain photos of Iraq war dead. He filed a Freedom of Information Act request that was initially denied. Kick appealed and the Air Force relented, sending him 361 pictures of coffins arriving at the Dover Air Force Base.

Military photographers took the pictures for historic reasons. The photos are professional, subdued and, of course, dignified. But when Kick posted the pictures on his Web site, www.thememoryhole.org, the White House and the Pentagon went into a tizzy.

President Bush said he wants to protect the privacy of the families and no more coffin photos will be released. A Pentagon official insisted the ban was not related to any concern about public opinion. Sure.

John Molino, a Deputy Undersecretary of Defense, said the censorship is necessary because "we don't want the remains of our service members who have made the ultimate sacrifice to be subject to any kind of attention that is unwarranted or undignified."

The censorship has nothing to do with protecting dignity and has everything to do with protecting George W.'s political hide. Actually, his father first initiated the ban on public access to pictures and videos of returning war dead in 1991.

As Gulf War I began, Bush the Elder feared a repeat of the Vietnam-era images of an unrelenting stream of coffins returning home. Forget a free society and a Constitution that protects expression, these are forbidden images, unfit for the eyes of the American people.

Barbara Bush, wife and mother of the presidents, already stated her aversion to such unpleasant images, and perhaps she's making the call here.

In March of last year, as the invasion of Iraq began, Mrs. Bush told Diane Sawyer of ABC News that she wouldn't watch any television reports about her boy's war because, she said, "Why should we hear about body bags and death and how many? ... Oh, I mean, it's not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?"

Jane Bright of West Hills, Calif., disagrees. Her 24-year-old son Evan Ashcraft was killed in combat in Iraq last July. She told CBS, "We need to stop hiding the deaths of our young. We need to be open about their deaths."

President Bush fears openness about anything, especially Iraq. He and his handlers want to control every image and the reality of war -- death, suffering and destruction -- must be suppressed.

It's all about images. While money is the mother's milk of politics, image is the honey. Sweet and smooth, it cloaks and covers, dominating what it touches.

The bees in the Bush White House are always busy, working to ensure that the images they create will stick in the public's mind. Any other image, not of their making, will be forbidden, squashed or censored.

One image they hoped would endure forever was the triumphant commander in chief in his flyboy suit strutting across the deck of an aircraft carrier draped with a banner reading "Mission Accomplished."

We never saw the reality of worried Pentagon professionals who knew Iraq was still a tinderbox and that planning for a post-Saddam nation ranged from little to nonexistent.

We never saw the image of the search for the outlawed weapons arsenals we were told were there and were the most urgent reason for the invasion and war. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld told us he knew "exactly" where to find them.

Then there is the image of the brave and compassionate crusader -- the president paying a surprise visit, serving a prop Thanksgiving turkey dinner to the thrilled and hungry troops in Iraq. Those chosen for the meal, the image -- and, thus, the politically correct photo op -- were picked based on their race and gender.

The reality we didn't see was the other troops eating cold sandwiches because Halliburton, the company given the no-bid contract for military food service in Iraq, regularly screwed up and used the concession to overbill the taxpayers millions of dollars for meals never served.

The image of Saddam's big statue toppling left the desired impression that this was not aggression and imperialism but rather liberation, and that George W. Bush, the father of freedom in the Middle East, was doing God's work.

We never see the reality of occupying forces shutting down newspapers and shooting reporters and photographers.

Bush loves the image of the despised, bearded and disheveled Saddam Hussein rooted from hiding in his spider-hole. Here's the murderous dictator whose regime posed an immediate threat to our national security. The next picture we'll see of him will be in the hangman's noose.

The reality we don't see is President Reagan's special envoy to Iraq, Donald Rumsfeld, presenting the then-beloved Saddam an expensive pair of cowboy boots from Ronald Reagan in recognition of their great friendship.

Rumsfeld also provided Saddam with U.S. satellite photos the Iraqi "madman" would then use to guide nerve gas attacks on Iranian soldiers and Kurdish villages. We helped Saddam use horrible weapons on his own people, and now we're going to put him on trial.

In his new book, "Plan of Attack," Bob Woodward tells us Bush gave the order to commence the war with the image of noble, public purpose, as the gallant protector of our national security, telling the generals this must be done "for the peace of the world and the freedom of the Iraqi people."

The realty is a world with less peace and more violence, and the Iraqi people are far from freedom in a land increasingly hostile to the "liberating" armies. It's a bloody mess. America is less secure and we have never been more despised in the Arab world.

George W. and Field Marshall Rumsfeld sell the image of free enterprise and a new, sovereign Iraqi government bringing freedom, peace and stability there.

The reality is that the "privatized" war has produced profiteering, mercenaries, cronyism and corruption, and the American taxpayers will get stuck with the tab as our Iraqi puppets enjoy the looting.

But, sadly, Bush's use of image works very effectively and truth doesn't trump it. A new poll shows that 57 percent of Americans still believe Saddam gave "substantial support" to al-Qaeda. The University of Maryland survey also shows 45 percent have the impression that there was "clear evidence" Iraq worked closely with Osama bin Laden, and 60 percent believe that Iraq either had weapons of mass destruction or a major program to develop them.

There is no evidence or truth to any of those beliefs, but it shows we are clearly living in an age of cognitive dissonance, in which people cling to whatever fits their own opinions and facts don't interfere with their false beliefs.

That's just the way the president likes it and his drones in the corporate media helped him do it. George W. Bush is politically secure as long as the American people are content licking the honey of his images and refuse to swallow the bitter reality and truth of his deeds. - http://www.smirkingchimp.com/...

Religious leaders uneasy with Bush's rhetoric

04.27.04 (8:30 am) [edit]

Is President Bush using inappropriately religious language as he talks daily about the possibility of war with Iraq?

Some religious leaders say they are becoming uncomfortable with the strongly religious tone of Bush's rhetoric, worried that he is usurping the role of preacher or possibly inciting Islamic fundamentalists with his good-versus-evil references.

In two recent speeches, at the annual convention Monday of the National Religious Broadcasters and at the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday, Bush said he welcomed faith to solve the nations' deepest problems and was greeted on both occasions with "amens." To some, however, he sounded more like an evangelical Christian minister than an elected political leader.

In discussing a likely war in Iraq with Australian Prime Minister John Howard this week, Bush said freedom for the Iraqi people is not a gift the United States can provide, but instead "liberty is God's gift to every human being in the world." To some, his word's implied that a war against Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein would be a divinely endorsed act of liberation.

Going beyond religious references even of such presidents as Abraham Lincoln -- who once said he hoped that the nation during the Civil War was on God's side -- Bush told the religious broadcasters this week: "We're being challenged. We're meeting those challenges because of our faith."

The White House defends the president's language as expressions of his personal beliefs and says he has every right to speak with fervor about his faith.

But the Rev. William Gaddy, a Baptist minister who heads the Interfaith Alliance Foundation in Washington, disagrees. "The president of this nation has as his job to promote the common good. It's not his job to promote sectarian beliefs," he said.

Elaine Pagels, of Princeton University's Department of Religion, argues that Bush is betraying the religious diversity of the nation when he speaks of war in absolutist terms. "This is not political discourse," Pagels said. "This is the language of religious zealots, Christian and Muslim. When he speaks of the 'axis of evil,' he is placing those who disagree with him in the realm of evil."

The effect of injecting religion into a debate about war, Pagels said, is to halt discourse and to provoke one's target (in this case, mainly Iraq but also North Korea and Iran) into a shouting match about who is more evil. She said that while she believes it is appropriate to label some acts (such as the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001) as evil, much of the rest of the world is appalled by the way Bush has been branding countries and certain peoples as evil.

Responding to such criticism, Bush said Monday he will increasingly stress that his quarrel is with Saddam Hussein, not the Iraqi civilian population.

Gaddy accuses the president of going beyond acceptable limits of generalizing about religious beliefs, moving instead to active proselytizing. In analyzing the president's rhetoric in the last few years, Gaddy said: "You see a growing feeling he [believes] he is, in fact, a divinely chosen leader in this moment of history. It's as if he discovered the power of religion late in life and thinks the nation needs to [do the same]."

Such groups as the nondenominational National Council of Churches have been expressing uneasiness over Bush's faith-based initiative -- permitting more flexibility with federal funds to expand the ministries of synagogues, mosques and other religious groups to assist the needy. When these groups lobbied Congress to block Bush's proposed law that would allow such flexibility, the president instead issued an executive order forbidding the federal government from discriminating against religious institutions when dispensing funds. But he is still asking Congress to approve it.

After the Columbia shuttle disaster, Bush invoked "the Creator who names the stars" and quoted the Old Testament prophet Isaiah, saying, "Lift your eyes and look to the heavens ... ," as a way to comfort the nation.

Religious leaders such as Gaddy do not contest the use of religious references in such a context. But they do fault his citation of his Christian faith in justifying a war.

The White House has countered, though, that the president will continue to use such references because it is how he thinks and because a majority of Americans agree with him. [It represents the cynical manipulation of ignorant and superstitious people by a ruthless and tyrannical Bush White House.] - http://www.post-gazette.com/n...

Sneak and Peek: It's Worse Than You Think!!!

04.27.04 (8:13 am) [edit]

[b]When Congress passed the USA PATRIOT Act in 2001, it granted law enforcement authorities unprecedented surveillance powers. Lawmakers approved the act not only because of the crisis of 9/11, but because it was aimed primarily at foreign nationals.[/b]

[i]Most Americans believed the powers would never be applied to them, according to Georgetown University law professor David Cole. But Cole says history shows that once the American government goes after foreigners, it's only a matter of time before it turns the same laws on Americans[/i].

[i]A graduate of Yale Law School, Cole is a volunteer staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights and teaches at Georgetown University Law Center alongside Patriot Act author Viet Dinh, who has called Cole "the Clarence Darrow of his generation" for his defense of underdogs[/i].

[i]Wired News spoke with Cole about his new book, Enemy Aliens, and efforts to revise the Patriot Act[/i].

Wired News: Critics have accused the government of overreaching with the Patriot Act. The government in turn has accused critics of misinterpreting and mischaracterizing the law to generate fear about it. Have critics overreacted?

David Cole: The Patriot Act has become a symbol for a much broader range of concerns about this administration's abuse of civil liberties in the war on terrorism. Many of those are real abuses that warrant real concern, but don't stem specifically from the Patriot Act. Rather, they stem from initiatives that the Bush administration undertook outside the authority of the Patriot Act, such as the mass preventive detention campaign that John Ashcroft undertook after 9/11, which to date has led to more than 5,000 foreign nationals being detained.

WN: In January, Attorney General John Ashcroft said that neither the court system nor Congress had "reported a single example of civil-liberties abuse under the Patriot Act, despite intense scrutiny." Is this true?

Cole: I can give you one example that's exactly contrary to what John Ashcroft says. In January, a federal district court in California, in a case that I have argued —Humanitarian Law Project v. Ashcroft —declared unconstitutional a provision of the Patriot Act that makes it a crime for people to provide expert advice or assistance to any organization that has been designated a terrorist organization.

The Humanitarian Law Project is a human-rights organization in California that had been providing advice and assistance to the Kurdistan Workers Party in Turkey. The Kurdistan Workers Party seeks to further the Kurds' interest. It does so through political and violent means. The Humanitarian Law Project was seeking to encourage the Kurdish group to pursue the rights of the Kurds through lawful means by giving them expert advice and assistance on human-rights advocacy. Even though the intent of our client was to discourage the use of violence and encourage the use of peaceful means to resolve their disputes, the Patriot Act makes no distinction between advocacy of human rights and advocacy of terrorism.

WN: From a civil-liberties perspective, which Patriot Act provisions represent the most egregious violations?

Cole: The provision that authorizes the government to freeze an organization's and individual's assets on the basis of secret evidence that they have no opportunity to confront or rebut (is one example).

But the immigration provisions are the most troubling provisions. Sections 411 and 412 give the government power to deny entry to foreign nationals based on pure speech and to deport foreigners, including permanent residents, based on innocent association with any group that the attorney general doesn't like and puts on a blacklist. They allow the attorney general to lock up foreigners without charges and without making a showing to a court that they are dangerous or a risk of flight.

Section 218 removes the probable cause requirement for wiretaps and searches whenever the government has a significant foreign intelligence interest in a criminal investigation. It is one of the most questionable provisions in the act constitutionally, and is very likely to be challenged when the government seeks to use evidence obtained in one of these wiretaps. But thus far we haven't got there.

The libraries provision (Section 215) gives the government the power to get records from any business without showing that the suspect is a terrorist, a criminal or even a foreign agent.

And the "sneak and peek" provision, which allows the government to delay notification to homeowners of searches—to engage in secret searches whenever the government says that prior notice would undermine the criminal investigation, which they're going to be able to say in every case.

WN: Viet Dinh, the main author of the Patriot Act, said Section 215 simply grants law enforcement the same type of investigative powers in national security cases that it already has in criminal cases. Is that an accurate summation of the section?

Cole: I don't think so. There are several differences between that pre-existing authority and the Section 215 authority. Under the criminal side, you have to have a pending criminal investigation that is serious enough to empanel a grand jury of the citizenry. Under Section 215, you don't have to have any grand jury in place at all. You only have to have a foreign intelligence investigation, which can be as minimal as having an individual that is an employee of an organization whose membership is more than 50 percent foreign. You can have an investigation into a British national who is living here simply on the basis that he is an employee of Amnesty International. You don't have to make any showing that he's a terrorist, you don't have to make any showing that Amnesty International is a terrorist organization.

The second significant difference between the criminal authority and the authority under Section 215 is that the subpoena under the criminal authority is not a secret. The individual can go to the press and complain about it, as Monica Lewinsky and Kramer Books did when the government sought President Clinton's or Monica Lewinsky's book-purchasing records. That means there's going to be a level of public scrutiny that will deter abuse.

Under Section 215, the entity to whom the request is made is barred by law from disclosing that to anyone other than the lawyer who helps them respond to it. That gag order means that the government investigators know in most cases this will never come to public light.

WN: You and Dinh are colleagues at Georgetown University. How does that relationship work out, with you being opposed to certain provisions of the act and him supporting it?

Cole: Viet and I are actually good friends. We disagree deeply about many of these provisions, but we remain good friends. I don't doubt Viet's or other people's good intentions in seeking to keep us safe, but I believe they went too far in the Patriot Act. I don't hold anyone personally responsible. The act was enacted at a time where it was very difficult to have any reasoned debate about the civil liberties concerns. This was six weeks after 9/11 in the heart of the anthrax scare. So it was passed in a very rapid and unthinking way. Only one senator voted against it. Yet today many of the senators who voted for it have sharply criticized it.

WN: The government was criticized for not acting on information it had before 9/11. Are we hitting them from both sides, saying they didn't do enough before 9/11 and now they're doing too much?

Cole: If there are shortcomings and problems that were identified that existed before 9/11, we needed to respond to them. But I don't think the Patriot Act for the most part is a fix for the problems that have been identified. One example is we didn't put sufficient resources into analysis of data. We had lots of data but weren't analyzing it well. The Patriot Act doesn't say 'Let's put more money into analysis.' It just gives the government broader authority to collect more and more data, much of which won't have anything to do with terrorism.

Another frequent criticism of pre-9/11 is the failure to communicate between the various law enforcement and intelligence entities. Almost nothing in the Patriot Act addresses that problem because primarily it's a bureaucratic problem. It's not a problem of the law. We have many, many entities and you need to respond by bureaucratic reform rather than by expanding the government's power.

WN: Have you changed the way you live or conduct your activities since the passage of the Patriot Act? Have you become more cautious about the information you give out or otherwise become more careful about leaving a trail?

Cole: No, I don't think so. I don't expect that I'm going to be the target of these measures. One of the reasons that measures like the Patriot Act do get through relatively easily is that many people believe it's going to be somebody else who is going to feel the brunt. The fact that it's somebody else's ox that is likely to be gored does not mean that we shouldn't be concerned.

My book, Enemy Aliens, argues that the pattern of government responses to national security is to first target foreign nationals and then later to expand those tactics to Americans. It's only when they actually get extended to broader and broader segments of the American citizenry that the political process works to say, 'Wait a minute, you went too far.' But my view is that if it's going too far when it affects all of our rights, then we ought to stop it before it gets there.

WN: Is it possible to balance security and freedom?

Cole: Absolutely. In fact, I think in some instances, civil liberties provisions and protections create incentives to do a more effective job. For example, the probable-cause requirement of the Fourth Amendment—which requires you to have some objective suspicion of criminal activity before you search somebody's home or take them into detention—requires the government to develop good evidence on individuals, to do the hard work of investigation rather than to, in a lazy way, sweep broadly and pick lots of people up without good reason. Those kinds of measures have not proven to be very successful in identifying terrorists.

I think there are trade-offs between liberty and security, and most of the rights in the Bill of Rights are not absolute. But our Constitution is premised on the notion that you do have to balance liberty and security.

WN: One of the most common responses to criticism of government surveillance is: If you're not doing anything wrong, then you don't have anything to fear from the government. What do you say to that?

Cole: Yeah, they said that to Martin Luther King Jr., who was one of the greatest national heroes and yet had his personal life intruded upon and bugged for years by the FBI, including surveillance of his private sexual relationships in his private hotel room in Washington, D.C. At one point the FBI threatened to make (the surveillance) public if he didn't turn down the Nobel Peace Prize. History shows that many, many innocent people get caught up as targets of government surveillance and government detention.

WN: An unlikely coalition of Republican and Democratic legislators, as well as conservative and liberal organizations, has backed legislation introduced last year—the Security and Freedom Ensured Act of 2003, or SAFE Act—that would restore some checks and balance to the Patriot Act. Would this be a reasonable compromise, rather than retiring the Patriot Act?

Cole: Oh yeah, I think that the SAFE Act is a good start. One of the problems with the SAFE Act is it doesn't address the immigration provisions, the foreign-national provisions. But there will soon be introduced a bill called the Civil Liberties Restoration Act, which would deal with that side of the problem. I'm not of the view that the Patriot Act needs to be repealed. I think that there are many provisions of the Patriot Act that are non-controversial, there are many provisions that are helpful and that we need to focus on the ones that are problematic.

WN: What is the likelihood that something like this would be passed? The SAFE Act is stalled and not going anywhere.

Cole: It's hard to say. Most of the provisions of the Patriot Act had been introduced prior to the Patriot Act (and) never went anywhere, and then they did. The sunset clause of the Patriot Act surveillance provisions means that Congress will have to confront those provisions. I think that will be an opportunity to debate and put in place some of the reforms suggested in the SAFE Act and the Civil Liberties Restoration Act.

One year after 9/11, National Public Radio did a poll and found that only 7 percent of Americans felt they had given up important liberties in the war on terrorism. Two years after 9/11, NBC or CBS did a very similar poll and they found that now 52 percent of Americans report being concerned that their civil liberties are being infringed by the Bush administration's war on terrorism. That's a huge shift.

You see that shift reflected in the fact that all of the following people have criticized the Patriot Act: Al Gore, Newt Gingrich, Howard Dean, Dick Armey, John Kerry and Bob Barr. It would be very hard to come up with any issue on which those six people agree, and yet they all agree that there are fundamental problems with the Patriot Act.

The real question is, when the next terrorist attack occurs, are we going to remember the lessons that are now being learned about whether we went too far, or is the public going to say we didn't go far enough and pass Patriot Act II and more? This is a critical moment for the public to engage on this issue about the proper balance between liberty and security.

My hope is that the next time around, Congress will hear from the civil liberties concerns before they pass the act. And that there will be a recognition that while we need to give the government sufficient authority to keep ourselves secure, we also need to ensure that we limit the government's ability to render us more insecure by its own abuses directed toward the citizenry. Only time will tell.

[u]Kim Zetter covers privacy, security, cyberterrorism and public policy for Wired News[/u] - http://www.tompaine.com/featu...

Saudi Arabia Gets It Right: It's The Neo-Con "Crazies" Versus Everyone Else!!!

04.27.04 (8:05 am) [edit]

Prince Saud al-Faisal, the foreign minister of Saudi Arabia, pretty much got Iraq right, in an interview in today's [i]Wall Street Journal[/i]. Israel's ambassador to the United Nations, Dan Gillerman, didn't. And the difference between their two views tells you all you need to know about the struggle over Iraq's future.

[b]First[/b], Gillerman: Quoted in today's [i]New York Times [/i], http://www.nytimes.com/2004/0... Gillerman is crabby about the fact that the UN representative for Iraq, Lakhdar Brahimi, not unreasonably, called Israel's treatment of the Palestinians a "poison" that infects the entire region. That, said Gillerman, is enough to disqualify Brahimi for the task of putting Iraq back together. It ought to be noted (see my entry yesterday in this column, Chalabi Out) that Ahmad Chalabi—the neocons favorite Iraqi and a close ally of Israel—also blasted Brahimi over the weekend, calling him "an Algerian with an Arab nationalist agenda."

[b]Next[/b], Prince Saud: In a sit-down talk with (pro-Chalabi) [i]Wall Street Journal[/i] editors, Saud bluntly attacked the U.S. decision to disband the Iraqi army. Saudi Arabia, he said, might send troops to help stabilize Iraq, but only if Iraq is allowed to have a real army with real sovereignty. He also attacked the U.S. decision to purge Iraq's Baathists from the army. Both actions, of course, were demanded not only by Chalabi, but by Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith and their friends at the American Enterprise Institute.

"Right now Saudi Arabia wouldn't contribute anybody to go to Iraq," said the prince. "But you change the circumstances and that is a different ballgame." One way to change the circumstances, said Prince Saud, would be to give control to the United Nations, along with the establishment of a strong Iraqi military force. "If you promise to transfer power on a certain date, you must transfer on the date you announce. But give it the credibility it needs. Give it its own armed forces, and those forces must have the power to be credible. Unless you are transferring authority, it doesn't really mean anything."

So here are the two sides. On one side are the neocons, Israel and Ahmad Chalabi, all of whom are attacking Brahimi. On the other side are Secretary of State Powell, the Bush administration's centrists, Saudi Arabia and, well, pretty much the rest of the world. Which side are[i] you [/i]on? Do you want the United States to run Iraq like the Virgin Islands, or do you want the United Nations to take over and right things? Of course, if the United States attacks Najaf and Fallujah in the next few days, all this will be moot. Iraq will explode, the UN mission will collapse, the June 30 date will probably be postponed, more U.S. troops will go to Iraq.

Who do you think is pushing that[i] neat [/i]solution?

Saudi Arabia Gets It Right: It's The Neo-Con "Crazies" Versus Everyone Else ...

04.27.04 (8:03 am) [edit]

Bush's Hypocrisy: Budget Antics Causing More Iraq Casualties

04.27.04 (7:58 am) [edit]

Bush's Hypocrisy: Budget Antics Causing More Iraq Casualties

04.27.04 (7:56 am) [edit]

FREE ON-LINE MUSIC: IDIOT SON OF AN ASSHOLE!

04.26.04 (7:21 pm) [edit]

[b]It only takes a few minutes to load ...

Free on-line music ...

Idiot Son of An Asshole [/b] http://www.bushflash.com/idio...

BUSH HAS OVER 3 TIMES THE NUMBER OF IDIOT LISTINGS ON GOOGLE THAN KERRY!!!

04.26.04 (6:52 pm) [edit]

[b]Since the neo-conservative fuckwits on Tblog are having a go at playing games on Google, I did a little test of my own.[/b]

Go onto [b]Google[/b]-- http://www.google.com

* * *

If you enter: [b]Bush idiot[/b]

About[b] 325,000 [/b]listings are found!

* * *

If you enter: [b]Kerry idiot[/b]

About [b]106,000 [/b]listing are found!

* * *

[b]He he he ...[/b]

* * *

[b]One of the best is[/b]: http://www.plyrics.com/lyrics...

Laugh at Neo-Cons: Bush Has To Hide Behind Proto-Mommy

04.26.04 (6:25 pm) [edit]

[b]"We the People" should see past the phony, plastic facade into the shallowness, cowardliness and lack of character of George W. Bush ... [/b]Dubya is a dangerously stupid man who has created a disastrous bloody fiasco in the Middle East (neo-con, neo-fascist illegal & immoral warfare to grab oil & global hegemony http://www.wnd.com/news/artic... ) and a train-wreck of an economy here at home (highest deficits in our nation's history created by awarding immoral & treasonous tax cuts, tax loopholes & tax boondoggles for corporations & the richest of the rich http://www.thenation.com/outr... ) ... Please contact the White House http://www.congress.org and Congress http://www.congress.org and demand that Bush grow-up and start to behave like an adult instead of a 13 year-old adolescent with more testosterone than brains, and with major ego problems resulting in a bully-boy complex that the traitorous neo-cons and gluttonous corporate robber-barons exploit for their own sordid & squalid motives ... http://www.tblog.com/template...

Yesterday the president's longtime handler and current campaign advisor Karen Hughes was on CNN attacking http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPO... John Kerry's military service record and subsequent work as a Vietnam war protestor.

But before getting lost in the details of Hughes' attacks, let's draw back and see the big picture http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPO... -- something the press would do well to consider and try.

What's the signature pattern of the president's life?

When he faces a challenge or a tough scrape, [i]he lets his family and friends bail him out, do his fighting for him[/i]. You see it again and again through failed businesses, legal scrapes, the whole matter of ducking service in Vietnam and then getting help cleaning up subsequent unfortunateness while he was serving in the Texas Air National Guard.

It's even come up again and again on the campaign trail. George W. Bush has faced three opponents (McCain, Gore and Kerry) since he came onto the national political stage -- each served in Vietnam, though each under very different circumstances. He's had his lieutenants attack the service of each one.

So here we have the same pattern again -- no different. The president wants to challenge John Kerry's military service. So he gets Karen to do it for him. You can get tripped in the chutzpah of this because this not only throws light on an earlier period when the president couldn't fight his own fights,[i] it repeats the pattern[/i].

But here's some free advice for Kerry. http://www.johnkerry.com/

Don't get mixed up on the details. Take this directly to the president. Tell him to turn over a new leaf in life and stop being a coward. If the president wants to attack or question your war record or what you did after the war, tell him to do it himself. No special deals, no hidden help from family retainers, no hiding behind Karen Hughes. Tell him, for once, to fight his own fights.

[u]Tell Dubya To Start Fighting His Own Fights, Instead Of Hiding Behind His Henchmen[/u]!, by WinstonSmith, http://www.tblog.com/template...

Revelations of Bush-Saudi Family Ties Disturbing [And Treasonous?]

04.26.04 (9:09 am) [edit]

Why the Bush White House cooperated so assiduously with Bob Woodward for his new book, [i]Plan of Attack[/i], remains puzzling. Woodward's career has been unique: Having gotten a taste for changing history with his early 1970s Watergate reporting, he continues to want to be a player in current events, not merely history's chronicler.

Woodward's first book on the Bush presidency, Bush at War, was considered a plus for President Bush. But why was that book aided by the White House?

One answer, of course, is that Bush's handlers decided Woodward could write a book without the president's approval, so by cooperating they could help shape it. Woodward is a curious hybrid: an investigative reporter who values the status quo. He is the official scribe of Washington power politics. Woodward's books are written in a mock heroic style, shorn of editorial comment, which anoints all the participants with grandeur and gravitas -- especially, in the case of Bush at War, President Bush.

Since the Watergate days, Woodward has been dogged by rumors that he has ties to the CIA, because his military service included intelligence work in the vicinity of Gen. Alexander Haig, who became President Richard Nixon's last chief of staff and one of the perennial candidates suspected of being ''Deep Throat,'' the principal source for Woodward and Carl Bernstein's Watergate work. Nonetheless, Woodward seems sympathetic to those in the CIA who think the agency is being misused and abused, this time by its director, George Tenet.

Woodward and his books embody the Washington establishment's view of how the world works: They are hymns to the powerful, cartoonlike in the simplicity of their presentation. Woodward's establishment (made up of long-term government and legal insiders and media-world movers and shakers) turned against Bill Clinton at the end of his besieged presidency, concluding that Clinton was just too ''Arkansas'' for its taste.

Some of Woodward's revelations in [i]Plan of Attack [/i]confirm the obvious, but they have to be taken seriously.

And serious they are. The most shocking is not Bush's march to war in Iraq beginning shortly after taking office, since that by now is well-known and hardly disputed. [And warrants impeachment.] It is the Bush administration's ongoing close ties to the Saudis, and the remarkable fact that Prince Bandar was shown the Iraq war plan and told that the war was on before Secretary of State Colin Powell was informed it was a go.

Even more disturbing, Woodward writes of the Saudis' pledge to ''fine-tune oil prices over 10 months to prime the economy for 2004'' to help ensure a second term for Bush.

Of all the venom aimed by the Republican's far-right legions at Bill Clinton, accusations that he took money and had corrupt relationships with shady foreign figures lurking around Little Rock were particularly prominent.

Over the years, the Saudi royal family and the Bush family have been so close they appear related. Today's high gas prices allow the Saudis to take their profits now. They will barely notice the dip that will take place in the fall, and after Nov. 5 the prices will be able to rise again.

During the Iraq invasion, our military made use of the high-tech underground command-and-control bases we built in Saudi Arabia over the years, and our government continues to look the other way even after the Saudis nurtured 15 of the 19 terrorists who manned the 9/11 attacks; and it looks the other way as the Saudi royal family suppresses whomever it wishes and enriches those it chooses to, including the Bush family and its circle.

Those in Woodward's establishment consider such circumstances business as usual: Some people always profit off of others' misery.

But, given Woodward's book, it appears that Washington's power brokers harbor some discontent. That might be because the bellicose Bush brigade is not showing the requisite competence to handle all they bit off. The chewing has been hard and unsightly for a while. Woodward's book might be an attempt to correct such behavior, a signal to announce a Trump-like, ''You're fired'' to George Tenet. If the public doesn't care about the message, Woodward and those he represents do. And they expect the Bush White House to pay attention. - http://www.suntimes.com/outpu...

Refer to [i]House of Bush, House of Saud [/i]on http://www.buzzflash.com/prem...

Revelations of Bush-Saudi Family Ties Disturbing [And Treasonous?]

04.26.04 (9:08 am) [edit]

>>> The New World Order <<<

04.26.04 (8:42 am) [edit]

The Pentagon's ban on media coverage of American casualties has been breached: http://www.motherjones.com/ne... .

Number of U.S. service members killed in Iraq since Operation Iraqi Freedom began on March 19, 2003: [b]707[/b]

Number killed since George W. Bush declared an end to "major combat" on May 1, 2003: [b]569[/b]

Number killed this month: [b]111[/b]

([i]As of Friday, April 23, 2004[/i])

[b]Source:[/b] U.S. Department of Defense, http://www.defenselink.mil/ne...

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[b]Quotes of the Week:[/b]

"[i]One senior American officer said that in any urban fight, American troops could turn Falluja into 'a killing field in a couple of days…' One senior American officer said, 'How Falluja is resolved has huge reverberations, not just in Iraq but throughout the entire area.' Or, as another senior officer put it, 'We have the potential to turn this into the Alamo if we get it wrong[/i].'" (Eric Schmitt, U.S. General at Falluja Warns a Full Attack Could Come Soon, the New York Times)

"[i]A security contractor killed in Iraq last week was once one of South Africa's most secret covert agents, his identity guarded so closely that even the Truth and Reconciliation Commission did not discover the extent of his involvement in apartheid's silent wars… In South Africa he joined the SA Defence Force's secret Project Barnacle, a precursor to the notorious Civil Co-operation Bureau (CCB) death squad… In 1985 he was involved in planning the now notorious SADF raid on Gaborone in which 14 people, including a five-year-old child, were killed[/i]." (Julian Rademeyer, Iraq victim was top-secret apartheid killer, the Sunday Times [of South Africa])

"[i]A former British soldier shot while guarding workers in Iraq predicted being 'over-run' in an e-mail the night before his death in the town of Hit… Mr Bloss, who is believed to have served with the parachute regiment in Northern Ireland, was working for a Virginia-based security firm, Custer Battles[/i]." (Iraq Briton's final tragic e-mail, BBC News)

"[i]In the first months of the occupation, [said Bessam Jarrah, an Iraqi surgeon,] we, the educated people, thought America would show us a humanitarian way, a political way, to solve problems… But this use of force means the efforts to find a political solution for Iraq has failed, and now America is using Saddam's approach to problems: brute force. America won the war on April 9 last year; they lost the war on April 9 this year. That is what Iraqis feel[/i]." (Alissa J. Rubin, Carnage Dims Hopes for Political Way in Iraq, the Los Angeles Times)

[b]A new word order [/b]

[u]Imagine that[/u]: The Iraqis of Fallujah in "the Alamo" and a British "security contractor," with previous experience in Northern Ireland, working for the oddly named Custer Battles, a Virginia "security firm," and dying in the Iraqi town of Hit. Custer Battles, by the way, also " has the airport security contract in Baghdad. Airport security in this context does not mean bored attendees standing by an X-ray machine, but rather former Green Berets and Ghurka fighters defending the airport from mortars, rockets and snipers."

So we now have potential Iraqi Davy Crocketts and Jim Bowies facing off against the modern equivalent of "the Seventh Cavalry," filled with Gurkhas, Chileans of the Pinochet regime, South African former death squad members, former British special forces officers, American ex-Seals and the like amid what Alissa Rubin of the Los Angeles Times calls a "culture of impunity" in Iraq. Though she's referring to the world of Iraqi kidnappers and assassins, the word "impunity," which means "exemption from punishment, penalty, or harm," and has an old-fashioned imperial edge to it, also catches something of the Bush administration stance toward Iraq and the greater world.

The men of Custer Battles guard Baghdad's airport, while the men of Blackwater USA -- if still waters run deep, how do blackwaters run, and where do they get these names? -- four of whom were killed and mutilated in Fallujah, provide the fulltime security team of ten guarding our "administrator" in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, and various members of the Iraqi Governing Council. They are part of a new word and world order taking disheveled shape in what may indeed become the "killing fields" of Iraq, an order that we have no reasonable language whatsoever to describe.

In Imperial China, a new dynastic emperor ascending the throne performed a ceremony involving what was called "the rectification of names." This was on the theory that the previous dynasty had fallen, in part, because the gap between reality and the way it was named had grown to abyss-like proportions. Of course, this yawning gap between the world out there and the words used to describe it has been an essential aspect of Bush-induced American reality since September 11, 2001. It has been at the heart of the American bubble (like the moving "bubble" within which our President travels the world, emptying the centers of whole cities as he passes by in the process of creating some kind of Potemkin planet).

We can see the results of this in an unnerving survey just conducted by the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) at the University of Maryland (www.pipa.org/) and discussed this week by Jim Lobe of Inter Press News (Bush's believe it or not). Not only, he reports, does "a majority of the public still believe Iraq was closely tied to the al-Qaeda terrorist group and had WMD stocks or programs before US troops invaded the country 13 months ago," but a significant majority believe that Saddam's Iraq was in some way involved in the 9/11 attacks and believe that "experts" back them on all these points. They believe as well that global opinion favored our going to war with Iraq or at least was "evenly balanced" on the subject -- and most of these figures vary at best only slightly from prewar polling figures (even as dissatisfaction over presidential "handling" of post-war Iraq policy has risen dramatically). Holding such misperceptions is, in turn, closely correlated with the urge to reelect George Bush in November.

Explain this as you will -- and certainly a ceaseless drumbeat of administration "explanations," magnified (until just about yesterday) in the echo chamber of the media, has to account for much of this -- the disjuncture between the world and how Americans insist on seeing it remains wide indeed and a willingness to acknowledge this in the mainstream -- certainly among mainstream politicians -- low indeed. For instance, all of official Washington, as Tony Karon of Time magazine recently wrote, speaks as one about "staying the course" in Iraq, and though that "course" is, at best, an obstacle course, woe be to anyone who breaks ranks. ("Washington may be deeply divided over how the Bush administration took America into Iraq, but there is a remarkable unanimity in support of the President's resolve to finish the job.")

This is what passes for "security" thinking in America just as companies like Custer Battles, Dyncorp, and Blackwater USA pass for "security firms." Such thinking -- and the language that goes with it -- is part and parcel of the creation of what should perhaps be called a National Insecurity State itself teetering atop an Insecurity Planet.

Bush administration officials have assumed that the globe's only superpower can simply insist on and define the reality it wants; and no one, whatever the objections, will have the brute power to redefine it. The world, however, is -- as they are discovering in Iraq -- a far more complex and recalcitrant place than they've cared to imagine.

With that in mind, let's consider a few of the key terms that both in government pronouncements and in media coverage of Iraq add up to the bubble language that stands between Americans and a reasonable perception of the world out there:

[u]"Security firms"[/u]: It's in the nature of human beings, when they take marginal activities and bring them into the mainstream to want to professionalize them and so upgrade their status. Once upon a time, there were scattered "soldiers of fortune" and "mercenaries" in our world, former soldiers or wannabe soldiers who, as in Southern Africa in the 1980s, sold themselves to any bidder and shouldered arms for various, largely right-wing regimes. Now, this seat-of-the-pants mercenary business has become a $100 billion dollar global operation (with the U.S. government as its largest employer) and you can search our press far and wide rarely coming across the terms "mercenary," "soldier of fortune," "hired guns," "rent-a-cops," or anything else that might bring us closer to the tawdry reality of what these so-called security companies are actually selling. The employees of these firms are in turn usually called "contractors" in our press -- which sounds like such an up-and-up, modest, business-like thing to be -- even when they're heavily armed and out in the field fighting Iraqis. Of course, the basic "gap" here lies in the very word "security." You simply can't have a more "secure" world in which such firms can freely make multimillions of dollars by hiring out to the highest -- and most powerful -- bidders.

In Iraq, this new "security" business has already reached monumental proportions. Looking at the military situation there logically, as Paul Rogers, the sober geopolitical analyst for the openDemocracy website, recently did (A strategy disintegrates), you can see why. Though we now have perhaps 135,000 American troops in Iraq, "what has to be remembered is that a large proportion of [them]… are reservists working on a wide range of projects. The core group of perhaps 80,000 combat troops is far too small to secure Iraq even if it were aided by effective Iraqi forces, and these are simply not there."

As it stands, reports Brendan O'Neill at the Alternet website (Outsourcing the Occupation), American troop strength is so low that most Iraqis -- 77% by one poll -- have never had an encounter with a member of the occupation forces. (This reflects as well the strain of the Pentagon's being committed to an ever greater global imperial mission with ever smaller military forces -- since so much of the Pentagon's budget actually goes into the creation of a vast array of 21st and 22nd century high-tech weapons and into the "pockets" of the megacorporations that create them.) As a result, in places like Najaf, it's been the "contractors," often brutal forces under no legal constraints or oversight in a land of which they know nothing, who have been left in small numbers to man the battlements.

The men of Blackwater and Custer Battles now find themselves at war and, as O'Neill reports, often can't even call on the U.S. military for backup when attacked. As a result, the various, otherwise competitive private outfits in Iraq are beginning to band together -- with their own helicopter support teams and their own intelligence -- to defend themselves more effectively. The Bush administration has for months now been hyping the infiltration of dangerous and unscrupulous "foreign fighters" into Iraq. As it happens they've been right. According to Brookings Institute expert Peter W. Singer, "We're talking somewhere between 15,000 and 20,000 private personnel, and that is expected to rise to 30,000 when the coalition hands over power to Iraqis on 30 June." These men, living in their own Wild West, are, for some Iraqis, "the most hated and humiliating aspect" of an occupation which probably couldn't continue without them.

As the different "security contractors" mesh more closely with each other, they are, in a sense, becoming the real "coalition" in Iraq -- in conjunction of course with the American military. Here is how David Barstow described the situation in a recent front-page piece in the New York Times (Security Companies: Shadow Soldiers in Iraq):

"They have come from all corners of the world. Former Navy Seal commandos from North Carolina. Gurkas from Nepal. Soldiers from South Africa's old apartheid government. They have come by the thousands, drawn to the dozens of private security companies that have set up shop in Baghdad. The most prized were plucked from the world's elite special forces units. Others may have been recruited from the local SWAT team.

"But they are there, racing about Iraq in armored cars, many outfitted with the latest in high-end combat weapons. Some security companies have formed their own 'Quick Reaction Forces,' and their own intelligence units that produce daily intelligence briefs with grid maps of 'hot zones.' One company has its own helicopters, and several have even forged diplomatic alliances with local clans… With every week of insurgency in a war zone with no front, these companies are becoming more deeply enmeshed in combat, in some cases all but obliterating distinctions between professional troops and private commandos."

In this, Iraq is leading the way into a new world of war-fighting that places not security by pell-mell "insecurity" and -- since such mercenaries are, in the end, answerable to no one -- complete impunity at the heart of the Bush administration's new global order.

[u]"Coalition"[/u]: It's in this context that the continued use of the term "coalition" should obviously be reconsidered. The term has been an endlessly used -- and rarely challenged -- cover for Bush administration go-it-alone-ism. From the beginning, of course, the formation of the "coalition" -- against the desires of popular majorities in almost every one of the joining states -- involved major arm-twisting and/or large-scale bribery of a sort that has been as striking as it's been under-reported. Most members of the coalition, ranging from Poland to El Salvador, seem to have received some financial support from us for their "contributions" and were generally using their troops as pawns in bargaining for advantageous terms from the U.S. in other areas entirely; or were currying favor with the Bush administration in hopes of other kinds of help (as the South Korean government was in order to ameliorate the American negotiating stance toward North Korea); or were hoping to get cut in on lucrative "reconstruction" deals (almost all of which went to American firms anyway); or, in the case of Japan, was using Iraq to break the "peace constitution" that came out of the post-World War II American occupation of that country.

Almost all of these countries sent minimal numbers of troops, often of a relatively peaceful type (say, engineering forces), and in many cases only to engage in peacekeeping work, not to fight a war. Now, these countries are starting to fall away. This week Spain, Honduras and the Dominican Republic announced that they would withdraw their troops; the South Koreans hesitated over their promise to send another 3,500 troops, while Polish officialdom faltered slightly in its commitment; the Thais, who are reconsidering their commitment, asked for U.S. troops to "protect" their 400 troops in Karbala; and so on. Only Britain indicated that it might send more troops, while the European Union's top diplomat, Javier Solano, ruled out any NATO role there in the near future. This is obviously part of a process of delamination which could sooner or later reduce the "coalition" largely to the Americans, the mercenaries, and the Brits (in that order) -- which is generally the truth of the matter anyway. What should the term for the "coalition" be then?

[u]"Sovereignty"[/u]: The Bush administration has been touting the July 1 "hand-over" of "sovereignty" to some as-yet-unknown Iraqi administrative body for many months. "Sovereignty" is usually defined as "complete independence and self-government" or "supremacy of authority or rule as exercised by a sovereign or sovereign state." It's a term that high administration officials from the President on down seem to bring up almost daily in public briefings of every sort in Washington and Baghdad. It's often referred to as putting an "Iraqi face" (read: mask) on occupied Iraq.

Friday, the lead paragraph of a front-page New York Times piece by Steven R. Weisman with the modest title, White House Says Iraq Sovereignty Could Be Limited, was:

"The Bush administration's plans for a new caretaker government in Iraq would place severe limits on its sovereignty, including only partial command over its armed forces and no authority to enact new laws, administration officials said Thursday."

In fact, the Iraqi army, such as it is, will not be under Iraqi command; an American military army of occupation will remain, ensconced in permanent bases; the privatized economy will be beyond the reach of the new "supreme" body; and L. Paul Bremer has nailed in place a whole untouchable infrastructure that the new body will be able to do nothing about -- so just remind me under these circumstances, what exactly does "sovereignty" mean and why does our media continue to use the term?

Several weeks ago, Jonathan Schell, on a panel at a conference on covering the Iraq war at the Journalism School of the University of California at Berkeley, suggested that not only do the Americans have no intention of turning actual sovereignty over to the Iraqis but that, in fact, they do not possess sovereignty in Iraq and so, in a sense, have nothing not to turn over. How true that is likely to prove.

[u]"Democracy"[/u]: We entered Iraq to bring "democracy" to an oppressed and tyrannized people -- so this administration said over and over again (particularly as other explanations for our invasion slowly peeled away). But, as with sovereignty above, our administrators and the men they report back to in Washington have had a very specific definition of "democracy," one you're not likely to find in any dictionary -- and it's had nothing whatsoever to do with "elections" or "the will of the people." It's had to do with maneuvering to get Iraqis of our choice, mainly exiles, preferably led by Ahmed Chalabi into whatever passed for control in Iraq.

In recent Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings on Iraq, historian Juan Cole offered the following as part of his testimony on U.S. Mistakes in Iraq:

"One strategy that might have forestalled a lot of opposition would have been to hold early municipal elections. Such free and fair elections were actually scheduled in cities like Najaf by local US military authorities in spring of 2003, but Paul Bremer stepped in to cancel them. A raft of newly elected mayors who subsequently gained experience in domestic politics might have thrown up new leaders in Iraq who could then move to the national stage. This development appears to have been deliberately forestalled by Mr. Bremer, in favor of a kind of cronyism that aimed at putting a preselected group of politicians in power. In Najaf, the US appointed a Sunni Baathist officer as mayor over this devotedly Shiite city. He had turned on Saddam only at the last moment. Since Sunni Baathists had massacred the people of Najaf, he was extremely unpopular. He took the children of Najaf notables hostage for ransom and engaged in other corrupt practices. Eventually even the US authorities had to remove him from power and try him. But the first impression the US made on the holy city of Najaf, and therefore on the high Shiite clerics such as Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, was very bad."

The same might be said more generally of nationwide elections. Month after month, the Americans resisted Ayatollah Sistani's insistence that national elections be organized quickly, well before the November American presidential election. They resisted for so long, in fact, that their argument -- it was impracticable -- finally came true. Now under ludicrously worse conditions, they will turn over only, it seems, the supposed power to organize national elections within seven months to whatever new body is decided upon -- a body guaranteed to be seen by many or most Iraqis as without legitimacy. In the meantime, the Americans will remain an occupying force, at least theoretically in control of more or less everything. What do we call this?

[b]Iraq today [/b]

[u]"Insecurity"[/u]: The essence of Iraq today might be summed up in the word "insecurity." The continued employment of brute force by the Americans -- the decision as in Fallujah to, in the words of a British officer in Basra, use "a sledgehammer to crack a walnut" -- has evidently turned even the merchants on the commercial Boulevard of Outer Karada in middle-class Baghdad, who should be America's staunchest allies, against us. Edward Wong of the New York Times writes that these merchants tend to feel that "the fighting in Falluja had proven the occupiers to be barbarians" (Battle for Falluja Rouses the Anger of Iraqis Weary of the U.S. Occupation):

"'Frankly, we started to hate the Americans for that,' Towfeek Hussein, 36, an electronics salesman, said of the siege of Falluja as he sat behind a desk in his shop. 'The Americans will hit any family. They just don't care. Children used to wave to the American soldiers when their patrols passed by here. Two days ago, the children turned their faces away.'

"More than anything else, Falluja has become a galvanizing battle, a symbol around which many Iraqis rally their anticolonial sentiments. Some say the fighting there exposes the lie of American justice by showing that the world's sole superpower is ready to avenge the killings and mutilation of four American security contractors by sending marines to shell and invade a city of 300,000 people… The gap between the expectations of many Iraqis and the flagging abilities of the occupiers to improve conditions seems to have widened to a chasm."

At the Mother Jones on-line website, Nir Rosen writes of life in Baghdad this way in a piece that describes the assassination of a Iraqi police colonel in broad daylight on a major thoroughfare (Everyday Chaos):

"And the attacks are everywhere in Baghdad. The violence is relentless. You will never hear about most of it, because the American reporters here don't hear about most of it. Baghdad is a huge sprawling city with a barely functional communications infrastructure, and it's impossible for the journalists or the occupying army to know what is happening everywhere. We only hear the distant thunder of the explosions.

"All day and all night, Baghdad shakes with explosions; explosions from bombs, from rocket-propelled grenades, from artillery, from guns. But it's usually impossible to figure out just where the firing is taking place, even if you're foolish enough to search for the fighting after dark, when gangs and feral dogs own the streets. There are systematic assassinations of policemen, translators, local officials, and anybody associated with the American occupiers. In the Sunni neighborhood of Aadhamiya, the Americans come under attack on a nightly basis, and the streets erupt in cheers and whistles at the sounds of the first explosions. Most of the time, the Americans stay behind their concrete walls and big guns. But the Iraqi police have only handguns and a few AK-47's to use against a foe armed with car bombs and heavy weaponry. So the new Iraqi police are hunted at all times in all places, and they are losing every day. The pace of the violence has become so constant, it's almost normal, almost mundane."

This is not quite the Iraq we usually read much about.

In the meantime, just to offer a list of recent events in that unraveling country in no particular order: Major highways into and out of Baghdad have been shut down due to constant guerrilla attacks, with the dangers of shortages rising; 1,500 foreign engineers have reportedly fled the country so far; reporters largely don't dare to leave Baghdad, and often not even their hotels for fear of kidnapping or death; the BBC is reducing its staff in the country to barebones; the police and civil defense forces as well as the new army largely refused to fight in recent weeks and, according to American Major General Martin Dempsey, about 10% of them simply went over to rebels; some reconstruction projects have halted entirely and large contractors are beginning to either shut down, suspend work in the country, or withdraw workers -- GE and Siemens did so the other day, slowing work in particular on the countries power/electricity output as another hot summer with limited lights and air-conditioning looms; some of Saddam's former generals are being dusted off, as de-Baathification is chucked out the window, and put in charge of the "new" Iraqi army, while in Kut, the police chief and his deputy have been replaced with two of Saddam's former Republican Guards; kidnappings of foreigners continue apace as do targeted assassinations of translators, policemen, anyone working with the Americans; shootings of people who look "non-Arab, whether Western, Asian, or African are becoming routine"; at a desert camp in southern Iraq, American troops sleep in their trucks and Humvees because Iraqi merchants are afraid to deliver tents to them, while goods pile up at Baghdad Airport because Iraqi truckers refuse to drive the main highway to the capital or drive supplies to U.S. bases; suicide bombers hit Basra devastatingly last week as, on Saturday, suicide boats went after oil facilities in Basra harbor, and that seems to be but a beginning to such a list.

Finally, I recommend a piece first spotted by the editors of Antiwar.com from Army News Service about a squad of puzzled soldiers bringing "democracy" to Iraq by tearing down posters of the radical Shiite cleric al-Sadr in the shops of a Baghdad neighborhood and causing a near riot. It ends on the following paragraph -- a quote from the captain who ordered the posters torn down -- worthy, I suspect, of The Onion, rather than the Army News Service:

"I think it was important [to remove the posters] because al-Sadr currently stands for all things that are anti-coalition… It's important to show that we can deal with the propaganda in a non-threatening way, rather than coming in hard and forcefully."

[u]"Escalation"[/u]: Here's an old Vietnam-era term that might prove modestly useful in the new Iraq.

[u]Troops[/u]: Our military forces in Iraq are now at 135,000 and General Abizaid, Centcom commander, is considering asking for more. The British are also evidently planning to send in another 1,700 troops and possibly expand their area of operations, and private "security firms" may add up to 10,000 more well-paid mercenaries, bringing their numbers to 30,000. In the meantime, the President is evidently on the verge of deciding to order the Marines to take Fallujah, no matter whether it becomes an Iraqi "Alamo" or not. This is unsurprising. For the men (and woman) of this administration, brute force and the threat of force is the only option they really know. It is, in fact, option A, B, and C. They really have nothing else in their arsenal and frustration has set in.

[u]Funds[/u]: It's no shock to discover, given the last weeks in Iraq, that funds are running short. The Bush administration has been reluctant -- for obvious reasons -- to ask Congress to appropriate more money before the November election. (Why tell the American people what the ever-growing price tag is on "their" occupation?) Still just this week, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Richard B. Myers told Congress that the military part of the occupation, already costing $4.7 billion a month, was about to experience a $4 billion "shortfall" by late this summer. This would include the $700 million dollars needed to keep those 20,000 extra troops in Iraq for three more months and the higher fuel costs the military is paying due, in part, to OPEC/Saudi oil production cuts.

According to the Los Angeles Times, the general's figure doesn't seem to cover the half of it. The Army alone has "identified" $6 billion "in funding needs that were not addressed in the defense budget" including funds for repairing worn and destroyed equipment in Iraq, adding heavy armor to vehicles, buying combat helmets, boots, underwear, and so on.

The Marines, Jonathan Weisman of the Washington Post reports, have their own list of unmet needs including $40 million for body army, lightweight helmets and other equipment. His piece includes the following curious passage:

"Scrambling to fill its needs, the Pentagon last week diverted 120 armored Humvees purchased by the Israel Defense Forces to Iraq. Yesterday, the Army announced a $110 million contract for still more armored Humvees."

How the $4 billion "shortfall" and the $6 billion-plus-plus in unmet needs mesh -- is the $4 billion included in the $6 billion figure? -- I have no idea. But I think you can count on the fact that from here on, funds for the occupation are only going to escalate.

[u]Detainees[/u]: And, oh yes, in the escalatory realm, Aaron Glantz of Inter Press Service reports far higher figures for Iraqi detainees than I've previously seen. He writes: "The U.S. military is currently holding more than 20,000 Iraqis behind bars -- most of them taken during house to house searches by the U.S. military." Maybe we could just imprison the whole population and be done with it.

[u]"Reconstruction"[/u]: There has been endless talk about "reconstructing" Iraq. It's what we're there for, aren't we? But what exactly is this "reconstruction." Here's one thing we now know: perhaps 20-25% of all reconstruction monies going into corporate hands are being spent on "security" -- think "insecurity" -- in Iraq.

Now, we have another figure to go with that. According to Tom Regan of the Christian Science Monitor in a piece entitled, Operation kickback?:

"Iraq's private companies routinely pay bribes to get reconstruction contracts - often to Iraqi officials but sometimes to employees of US contractors. That's one of the allegations that has been made by a special investigation undertaken by public radio's Marketplace and the Center for Investigative Reporting, and funded by The Economist magazine. The result, according to experts monitoring the situation, is almost 20 percent of the billions of American taxpayers dollars being spent to rebuild Iraq is being lost to corruption."

He adds that "every Iraqi ministry is touched by corruption, the report alleges" and that "the problem is as deeply embedded in Washington as it is in Baghdad… in the past three months, US investigators have disputed more than $1 billion worth of contract fees because of 'inflated charges, incompetence, lack of documentation to support invoices and kickbacks related to subcontract awards.'"

Now, add to the moneys being poured into security and being siphoned off by corruption, the unknown percentage of reconstruction funds that are simply and legally pocketed by large corporations like Bechtel and Halliburton as profits for their work and you have to wonder exactly how much of these Iraqi-bound, congressionally-mandated funds actually make it anywhere near any reasonable group of Iraqis. I mean, we may be talking about one of the great scams of history here, the sort of thing that could make Teapot Dome seem like a sprinkle on a spring day and, given all this, should we still really be talking about "reconstructing" Iraq?

And then we need some term to cover whatever the downward spiraling process is that we're watching (and the Iraqis are experiencing). We could, of course, just turn the term "reconstruction" upside down and talk about the "deconstruction" of Iraq, intended or otherwise, but perhaps the term "devolution" would better fit the larger situation -- and our world itself.

The question that lies under all this language, somewhere beneath the gap between our description of reality and what's going on out there, beneath the new word and world order, somewhere deep in that dark abyss, is whether, as Paul Rogers of openDemocracy puts the matter, the U.S. situation in Iraq is "actually becoming unsustainable." Put another way, whatever the immediate profits and advantages, even to the Bush administration, is such a world unsustainable?

What, I wonder, will this administration do, to take but a simple example, if fighting boils up again in the land that time forgot -- Afghanistan -- now seemingly covered with opium poppies, in a state of remarkable disarray, still filled with warlords, and with a resurgent Taliban? Just the other day a story from that land broke through to Americans because an American soldier killed in an ambush there happened to be a former National Football League player who had walked away from multimillions to become a member of the Army Rangers.

We know that George Bush imagines himself striding into town as The Law in a western; but, wedded to the gun as he is, the ranks of his supporters filling with mercenaries as they are, what he seems to be intent on creating is a spaghetti-western world -- and, given his corporate cronies, A Fistful of Dollars wouldn't be a bad title for his "film," which unfortunately also happens to be our world.

[b]Additional dispatches from Tom Engelhardt can be read throughout the week at TomDispatch.com, a web log of [i]The Nation Institute[/i][/b]. - http://www.motherjones.com/ne...

>>> The New World Order <<<

04.26.04 (8:39 am) [edit]

Bush Refuses To Level With Congress, American People About Iraq War Price

04.25.04 (7:40 am) [edit]

[b]Squirrely Budgeting [/b]

"EVERY GROUND squirrel in this country knows that it's going to be $50 to $75 billion in additional money required to sustain us in Iraq for this year," said Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) Perhaps the Bush administration should consult the squirrels. The costs of its operations in Iraq are mounting daily, but the administration still won't level with Congress or the American people about the price.

The most immediate problem is that the extra $87 billion approved by Congress to fund operations in Iraq and in Afghanistan for 2004 could turn out to be insufficient to make it through the end of the fiscal year Sept. 30. Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said last week that the military is running $4 billion short of what's needed; that calculation, already a few months old, doesn't include another $700 million for extra troops. The Pentagon has speeded up its usual mid-year spending review to see whether more is required, or whether it has enough extra tucked away in other accounts to tide it over.

Meanwhile the administration's budget for the year beginning Oct. 1 allocates no money for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. The administration says that, unless circumstances change, it won't submit a spending request until January. By that point, the military will already be several months into the fiscal year -- and the election will be safely over without the American people having seen the extra bill. Then, if history is a guide, the administration will insist that the financial situation is so dire that Congress must act at once.

This is no way to run a budget, and it's an even worse way to run a war. As a budgetary matter, the effort in Iraq is a cost that ought to be acknowledged and taken into account as Congress debates what the country can afford to spend elsewhere, in programs or tax cuts. As a military matter, it's irresponsible to force officials to scrounge for savings to cover year-end costs, deferring scheduled maintenance or canceling training missions. Officials have more latitude to handle the 2005 costs through accounting gimmicks such as dipping into money that's supposed to be spent later in the year and replenishing those accounts once the supplemental funds come in. This "cash-flowing" has been done before, but it would be unprecedented and somewhat risky to do it on such a massive scale.

The administration insists, as it has in past episodes of this debate, that the delay is needed to accurately gauge how much is required. True, as has been shown recently in Iraq, plans (and therefore budgets) change. But the administration produced last year's $87 billion request in September, and even allies such as Mr. Hagel and Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.), vice chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, see political calculations at work in its plan this time around to put off a new request until after the election. White House press secretary Scott McClellan said last week that if troops "need additional resources, as the president has said, they will get those resources." But it's clear that the White House wants to hear from the Pentagon that it can scrape by with what it's already got. Armed Services Chairman Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.) is considering putting $20 billion for Iraq in the defense authorization bill. Mr. Hunter and other lawmakers are wise not to wait for a reluctant White House to act; the White House would be wise to change its stance. As Mr. Hagel said, "the administration would be well-served here to come forward now, be honest about this, because . . . confidence in this policy is going to be required to sustain it." - http://www.washingtonpost.com...

Bush Refuses To Level With Congress, American People About Iraq War Price

04.25.04 (7:38 am) [edit]

Bush's October Surmise: A Case of Worst Scenarios

04.25.04 (7:34 am) [edit]

It has often been pointed out that I might enjoy wider circulation as a writer if I didn't use rude words in my pieces, nor would it hurt if I stuck to the 800 word limit like normal columnists (Ann Coulter). Some readers have suggested a 50 word limit, or maybe I could just write photo captions. I have poo-pooed this advice in the past (poo-poo is not the exact word I used) but I know my readers are very sensitive. Some are so sensitive they could find work detecting W± bosons at the CERN laboratory in Geneva. Suffice it to say their piteous entreaties have pierced my ventricle. Henceforward I will stick to 800 words, none of them naughty words of the type frowned upon by school librarians, William Bennett, or certain parties at the Vatican (you know who you are). There goes my column about Donald Rumsfeld, Belching Rectum Beast of Arabia. Let us instead turn to an issue both wholesome and entertaining for the whole family: the absolute certainty of an October Surprise.

What is an October Surprise? I'm glad I asked. The expression 'October Surprise' was coined (in a twist of fate so ironic that it would suffocate a bison in the prime of its youth) by then-Vice Presidential candidate George H.W. Bush, Sr., referring to the possibility that President Jimmy Carter would manipulate an ongoing hostage situation in Iran in order to clinch his re-election. The American national election occurs on November 2nd (November 4th for Republicans -- don't forget to vote!) Consequently, any skullduggery, shenanigans, or monkey business intended to skew the outcome of a national election ought to occur in October, so that even very slow people would have a chance to absorb the effect before voting day. An October Surprise is dirty pool. It's like slipping a live macaque down the back of your opponent's shorts during the Olympic pole-vaulting competition. It's also exactly the kind of boost George W. Bush, Jr. is going to need if he wants to win his first presidential election.

Here's the scary part: Junior is not the only one who thinks an October Surprise might liven things up this November. Osama bin Laden has something other than Halloween on his mind (he's going as Andy Gibb this year, by the way the whole outfit with the white sparkly jumpsuit and everything, according to the West Asian Poppy Grower's Almanac). Just about anybody with a money belt full of C4 and thumbtacks is thinking the same thing. If Spain is any example, one well-aimed petard on October 30 and the USA will vote for Fidel Castro come November 2nd (or 4th, for you Republicans. Don't forget!) So an October Surprise could come from a variety of highly motivated persons with nothing to lose, consequence-wise. Who will win this egg-and-spoon race from Megiddo to Armageddon? Certainly not the American public.

There are several October Surprise scenarios being bruited about, many of them crackpot in nature, viz. huge numbers of poorly tuned banjoleles will rain down from the heavens on October 27th, causing the man in Bill Clinton's old office to declare a state of national emergency and postpone or cancel the election. There are, however, more plausible suggestions ahoof. The three most popular go as follows: First, the capture or death of Osama bin Laden is announced, the War on Terror is declared won, and a triumphant Bush rides the wave of popular approval to his first elected term. Second, a catastrophic terrorist attack within the United States (or Guam), engineered by actual terrorists or by operatives within the US government, unifies a terrified electorate behind Bush because he's a homicidal maniac and that's what you need in these situations. The third scenario, based on news reports that long-range missile parts of the appropriate vintage are even now being salted around the Iraq desert by US operatives, states that WMD (Weapons of Melvin Destruction) will be 'discovered' in Iraq. A thoroughly vindicated Bush rides wave of popular etc. There are myriad variations, but the underlying themes remain constant: either things go improbably right, or things go improbably wrong.

In either case Bush wins and off to Tartarus we go. There is nigh-universal agreement that something will happen Octoberish; the bad news is the above scenarios are optimistic. The worst-case scenario (there are 24 worst in a case of scenario, each 425 ml.) is also the most likely: Bush and his rollicking band of booty bandits (booty in the sense of treasure) will attempt to mount their own October Surprise (cache of Iraqi WMD found in Osama bin Laden's beard), leaving the remaining thousands of terrorists free to stage an early Guy Fawkes day celebration at the poorly secured domestic nuclear facility of their choice. Trick or Treat, kiddies.

[b]Ben Tripp is a screenwriter and cartoonist. Ben also has a lot of outrageously priced crap for sale here. If his writing starts to grate on your nerves, buy some and maybe he'll flee to Mexico. If all else fails, he can be reached at: credel@earthlink.net[/b] - http://www.counterpunch.com/t...

Bad Bush, Worse Bush ...

04.25.04 (7:31 am) [edit]

Former President Bill Clinton is hard at work on his long-awaited autobiography.

Word on the street is that, while Clinton and his publisher want to get the book out this year, a lot of Democrats are worried that the dynamic former president's book tour could draw energy away from their campaign to remove the man who replaced Clinton.

Clinton does have a way of sucking the air out of any political space he enters.

But we won't shed too many tears for Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, the presumptive Democratic nominee against President Bush. Kerry is a very different man from Clinton, for better or worse, and only the Republican spin machine, which is already working overtime, will bother much with comparisons of the two.

Just in case, however, comedian Al Franken has suggested a title for the Clinton book that could be helpful.

Franken, the host of "The O'Franken Factor" radio show on the Air America network, says Clinton, who succeeded former President George Herbert Walker Bush, ought to title the book: [i]Between the Bad Bush and the Worse Bush[/i]. - http://www.madison.com/captim...

Get Back, Loretta: Bush's rollback of women's rights

04.24.04 (7:55 am) [edit]

Sunday's [i]March for Women's Lives[/i], http://www.marchforwomen.org/... which is expected to draw 750,000 people to the National Mall in Washington, D.C., is a good time to look at George Bush's overall record on women's issues. It's nothing to crow about (unless you're Rush Limbaugh). The administration has been steadily rolling back federal policies that help women. Abortion is just the visible part of this backlash, because it's such a hot-button issue for Bush's right wing legions. But the rest of his agenda is flying far under the radar.

Now, the [i]National Women's Law Center [/i] http://www.nwlc.org/ has released an extensive report on "the erosion of hard-won gains for women under Bush." It's called "[i]Slip-Sliding Away[/i]," http://www.nwlc.org/pdf/Admin... and it examines 10 major areas of concern, from the workplace to the child care center and from the classroom to the military barracks. In each place, Bush's policies make it harder for women to achieve equal rights.

For example, the Department of Labor has "refused to use tools at its disposal to identify violations of equal pay laws," according to the report. Meanwhile, the Department of Justice has "weakened enforcement of the laws against job discrimination and even abandoned pending sex discrimination cases." In schooling, the administration has proposed "reducing funding for, and even eliminating, programs that provide gender equity." The Department of Education has refused to investigate the pervasive exclusion of women from math and science programs. And despite an outcry over previous attempts to weaken Title IX protections for women in schools, the DOE is still pursuing that goal by failing to use its "scarce resources to enforce the law."

In addition, the administration has "archived" material on sexual harassment, making it unavailable to the public, notes the report. The president's budget proposes slashing funds for services to battered women and a national domestic-violence hotline. The Department of Defense has allowed the charter of a 55-year-old committee that promoted the recruitment of women in the military to lapse. Current policy prohibits a servicewoman from having an abortion at an overseas military hospital unless she has been raped or her life is in danger—and even then, she must pay for the procedure herself.

Other moves, such as closing the White House Office for Women's Initiatives and Outreach and padlocking key offices of the Labor Department's Women's Bureau, occurred some time ago. But the rollback has steadily advanced. By now, key advisory panels in social services include people hostile to women's interests. Several Bush nominees to the federal bench have distinguished themselves with sexist comments. One potential jurist declared that women must be "submissive" to their husbands; another opined that women might not have the right to litigate against verbal sexual harassment.

Then there are the broader policy decisions that affect women's lives, such as cutting child-care budgets, freezing funds for after-school programs, and imposing harsh new requirements on welfare recipients. Plans to transform Medicare and privatize Social Security affect women disproportionately because they are more likely than men to be poor. It remains to be seen how single mothers will fare under the president's initiative to encourage marriage.

The report acknowledges that the administration has taken some constructive actions, such as prosecuting people who smuggle women into the country for prostitution. But the pattern is one of "serious steps backward."

Will John Kerry take these findings and run with them? If so, he'll be taking a risk when it comes to the dude vote. (Remember, only 22 percent of white males voted for Al Gore.) And Bush is unlikely to raise the issue on his own; it's the kind of thing he'd mention only in the right circles, and quietly. If he's to be held to account, women will have to do it. It's a matter of liberty—and life. - http://villagevoice.com/issue...

Get Back, Loretta:-- Bush's rollback of women's rights

04.24.04 (7:49 am) [edit]

Church group calls Bush's clean air policies 'immoral'

04.24.04 (7:47 am) [edit]

A national group of Christian leaders is sending a scathing letter to President Bush on Earth Day, accusing his administration of chipping away at the Clean Air Act.

"In a spirit of shared faith and respect, we feel called to express grave moral concern about your 'Clear Skies' initiative -- which we believe is The Administration's continuous effort to weaken critical environmental standards to protect God's creation," the National Council of Churches wrote in an advance copy of the letter provided to The Associated Press.

The New-York based group, which represents 50 million people in 140,000 Protestant, Anglican and Orthodox denominations, argued in the letter that the administration's proposed changes to certain Clean Air Act rules will allow "some of the country's biggest polluting facilities to avoid installing air pollution control equipment when they significantly increase polluting emissions."

The Environmental Protection Agency did not immediately return calls for comment on Wednesday.

In the past, the EPA has defended the so-called "new source review" rule changes proposed last August. Marianne Horinko, the EPA's acting administrator at the time, said they "will result in safer, more efficient operation of these facilities and, in the case of power plants, more reliable operations that are environmentally sound and provide more affordable energy."

Rev. Bob Edgar, a United Methodist minister and the church council's general secretary, questioned the administration's rhetoric on air pollution.

"The people we talk to, both inside and outside the administration, say ... that these changes will in fact weaken, not strengthen the Clean Air Act. And we will in fact have dirtier air and less compliance," said Edgar, who pushed various environmental laws through Congress during six terms representing a suburban Philadelphia district in the U.S. House of Representatives from the mid-1970s to mid-80s.

In December a federal appeals court temporarily blocked the new rules from taking effect, agreeing with more than a dozen states and cities that contended the changes could cause irreparable harm to their environments and public health.

The church council said it was sending its two-page letter to the president on Thursday, as people all over the country celebrate Earth Day. It took out a full-page ad in The New York Times, scheduled to run in Thursday editions, calling on Bush to leave the Clean Air Act's new source review rules in place.

The council also is urging ministers across the country to talk about the problems of air pollution during this week's services.

Monica Myers, pastor at Seattle's Northwest Christian Church, a Disciples of Christ congregation, said she doesn't plan to bash Bush in her sermon on Sunday. Instead, she said she'll simply remind her congregation that pollution and other environmental problems tend to affect the poor more harshly than those who can afford to live in places far away from polluting factories or toxic waste sites.

"I want to emphasize that their faith should direct them as they vote," she said. "Responsible Christians should weigh the teachings of Jesus Christ, especially as they speak of those who are poor and marginalized."

The church council is one of a growing number of religious groups that have been voicing harsh criticisms of environmental policies they characterize as an assault on God's creation.

The council joined the Evangelical Environmental Network in a "What would Jesus drive?" campaign in November 2002, urging the auto industry to adopt stricter emissions standards and calling on SUV owners to switch to more fuel-efficient vehicles.

Last year it put on a conference dubbed "Enough for All" at Seattle University, focusing on ways to promote environmental stewardship in a global economy dominated by free trade and consumerism.

[u][b]LETTER TEXT[/b][/u]

The text of the National Council of Churches' Earth Day letter to President Bush:

Dear Mr. President,

In a spirit of shared faith and respect, we feel called to express grave moral concern about your "Clear Skies" initiative -- which we believe is The Administration's continuous effort to weaken critical environmental standards that protect God's creation. Our concern over the "Clear Skies" initiative follows our strong disapproval over your Administration's decision to change federal air pollution rules that weaken "New Source Review" provisions of the Clean Air Act -- allowing some of the country's biggest polluting facilities to avoid installing air pollution control equipment when they significantly increase polluting emissions.

We do not come to these positions casually, nor are we alone in our views. A growing number of religious Americans have come to recognize a solemn obligation to measure environmental policies against biblically mandated standards for stewardship and justice.

Respected scientific estimates, some by the federal government itself, cause us to question whether this "Clear Skies" proposal meets fundamental moral responsibilities as set out by the Bible.

The book of Genesis records that God beholds creation as "very good" (Genesis 3:1) and commands us to "till and tend the garden" (Genesis 2:15).

Protection of the global climate is an essential requirement for faithful human stewardship of God's creation on Earth. Our own National Academy of Sciences --- joining an overwhelming scientific consensus --- concluded in 2001 that carbon emissions from power plants are significantly contributing to the increase in global warming. Yet your initiative pointedly does not set mandatory standards of reduction for these emissions. A multi-pollutant approach must address all significant emissions from power plants, including carbon emissions.

Clean air is as essential to life as a stable climate. Yet the Environmental Protection Agency reports that millions of Americans live in areas that have been deemed unhealthy to breathe. Power plants are the single greatest source of industrial air pollution in the nation. The American Lung Association asserts that the attainment of reductions of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and mercury that would take effect under the existing Clean Air Act will be delayed for years if "Clear Skies" is adopted by Congress.

Our Bible sets forth a paramount obligation to "defend the poor and the orphan; do justice to the afflicted and the needy" (Psalms 82:3) and calls us to "satisfy the needs of the afflicted, _ 1/8and_ 3/8 then your light shall rise in the darkness" (Isaiah 58: 10).

Poor people, who have limited access to health care; senior citizens, who may have compromised immune systems; and children, who pound for pound breathe 50 percent more air pollution than adults, are disproportionately hurt by air pollution. Epidemiological studies from leading health scientists have shown that air pollution from power plants increases respiratory distress, asthma attacks, visits to the emergency room and even premature death. Again, Mr. President, we question the rationale of delaying power plant pollution reductions by the enactment of your "Clear Skies" initiative, as the American Lung Association has pointed out, rather than simply enforcing the reduction attainments of the Clean Air Act. This means more trips to the emergency room, more asthma attacks, more chronic bronchitis and more premature death, with the greatest impact falling on those least able to defend themselves: the poor, the elderly, and our children.

We are reminded that "The Earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof" (Psalms 24:1). And we are also reminded that a nation is judged for its transgressions "because they sell the righteous for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals" (Amos 6:2).

The private use of creation's bounty must serve the needs of all God's children. Yet we are concerned that powerful corporate interests have had disproportionate influence in shaping and reaping benefits from a clean air program which should serve the common good.

Finally, we have a solemn duty to the future well-being of Earth and all life within it, "the covenant which I make between me and you and every living creature for perpetual generations (Genesis 9:12)."

Yet we believe that the Administration's energy, clean air, and climate change programs prolong our dependence on fossil fuels, which is depleting Earth's resources, poisoning its climate, punishing the poor, constricting sustainable economic growth and jeopardizing global security and peace.

We represent broad perspectives from communities of faith. We do not seek confrontation. But we believe there are reasonable and prudent alternatives to the course you have set. And, in light of fundamental mandates of scripture, we believe we must bring forward our perspectives to members of our respective communities and denominations.

We have written previously to you voicing our concerns on these important issues. We now request an opportunity to meet with you in person to discuss our concerns.

[b]Source:[/b] National Council of Churches - http://seattlepi.nwsource.com...

[b]On the Net:[/b] National Council of Churches: www.ncccusa.org/

[b]EPA:[/b] www.epa.gov/

Thick As Thieves: The Bush Crime Family & The Saudi Royal Family

04.24.04 (7:44 am) [edit]

[b]The Royal Business

[i]In this slick little Bush family saga, Bandar is the prince, and we're the paupers[/i][/b]

Bit by bit, the Bush family's personal ties to the Saudi royal family and their intertwined social and business arrangements are emerging as the scandal over Iraq grows. Bob Woodward, for example, further elaborates the familial ties between Papa and Junior Bush and Prince Bandar, the Saudi ambassador in Washington, and his wife. The families, he reports in Plan of Attack, are locked together, with Bandar coming and going into the Oval Office, the Prince's wife inviting a lonely Bush daughter over for Thanksgiving dinner, and so on. Prince Bandar got the news of the coming war with Iraq before anyone else, and the president made sure the prince was a happy camper before going forward. Just to make sure the prince knew he was for real, Bush got Cheney to tell the prince, that, for sure, "Saddam was toast. " All in all, the Bush clan regards Prince Bandar and his wife are family, and vice versa.

Being adopted into the Saudi royal family is no small event in the transplanted Connecticut Yankee WASP's life. After all, there are an estimated 5,000-plus Saudi princes, each one of whom is given $500,000 at birth as a sort of start-up fee. The family propagates at the extraordinary rate of 35 to 40 princes a month. The founding King Ibn Saud kept four wives, four concubines, and four slaves, whose numbers he replenished frequently. He married into 30 tribes, deftly building the country by tying it together into a network of mothers and children.

The bedrock of the relationship between the U.S. and the Saudi royal family is Aramco, which began as a joint venture between the international oil giants Standard Oil and Texaco for exploration and development of the kingdom's immense oil and gas reserves, a business endeavor producing billions of dollars in revenues for the royal family. That money is turned right around and paid to American defense contractors for armaments of all types. Woodward says Bandar realized that Bush would need to show some economic progress before the 2004 election and that meant getting Saudi help in dropping the price of oil. "They're high," Woodward told 60 Minutes, referring to oil prices. "And they could go down very quickly. That's the Saudi pledge. Certainly over the summer, or as we get closer to the election, they could increase production several million barrels a day and the price would drop significantly."

Of course, the Saudis aren't talking about a drop in prices to Joe Six Pack, the prince's term for the American public. It means a drop in price to the American oil men in an effort to inflate their profits, because, after all, they are major supporters of Bush and have been pumping money into his campaign.

However, what the prince told Woodward, and what was going down in Washington after 9-11 are two different things. Flooding the market with oil can mean different things to different people at different times.

As Bush was ramping up for the Iraq war, OPEC feared that the U.S. would use its expected new-found control of Iraqi oil to hurt the cartel's power. In the fall of 2002, Saudi oil people in Washington were speculating (i.e., warning) that should the U.S. invade Iraq and then turn around and flood the market with Iraqi oil in an effort to wreck OPEC, Saudi Arabia was prepared to open the gates and together with Iran, the region's other big producer, flood the world oil markets, forcing prices downward. The last thing on anyone's mind was helping out consumers. As always, the suckers were paying top dollar for gasoline, home heating oil, and natural gas purchased from the big international companies, which still control international markets because of their clamp on refining and distribution.

If the Saudis decided to let the so-called free market take over, flooding the globe with crude and sending oil prices into a steep dive, then the U.S. would be faced with a true nightmare. Lower prices would finish off not only smaller international companies that had been enticed into the oil play by high prices, but could wipe out the domestic oil companies in the U.S. , causing sheer political hell for President Bush in his little oil bastion of Houston. - http://villagevoice.com/issue...

On Earth Day, Bush's EPA Plots to Weaken Clean Air Laws

04.23.04 (9:21 am) [edit]

On Earth Day 2002, President Bush said that "we should do more at the federal level" to deal with air pollution1. But today on Earth Day, the Bush Administration has invited oil executives to a meeting with Environmental Protection Agency officials to discuss reducing air pollution standards.

Instead of proposing higher fuel efficiency standards or conservation measures to deal with high gas prices, the Wall Street Journal reports that the Bush Administration is meeting with oil executives to consider a plan to reduce pollution standards for gasoline2. The plan, which would permit more dangerous sulfur toxins in the air, would cut only a nickel off the price of a gallon of gas - and not in every market. Meanwhile, sulfur levels in the air would be permitted to rise, increasing smog and potentially raising the incidence of serious health problems. The EPA notes that sulfur has been associated with serious respiratory illness and asthma while also aggravating existing cardiovascular diseases3.

Of course, the president also has one other option to deal with the gas price crisis: instead of using the crisis to weaken environmental laws, he could simply pressure the Saudis to increase oil production. Last month the Saudis led the charge to reduce oil supplies and the result has been a major increase in American gas prices4. And while Bob Woodward's new book reports that the Saudis pledged to increase production before the November 2004, the president has so far refused to compel them to increase production now5. His refusal runs counter to his pledge as a candidate in 2000 to use the power of the White House to pressure oil-producing countries. As he said, "the president of the United States must jawbone OPEC members to lower the price"6.

[u]Sources[/u]: - http://www.misleader.org/dail...

1. President Calls for Conservation and Stewardship on Earth Day, 04/22/2002.

2. Wall Street Journal, 4/21/04.

3. US Environmental Protection Agency.

4. "Saudi envoy plays nice with White House on oil supply", USA Today, 04/02/2004.

5. "Saudi Envoy Promised Bush a Drop in Oil Prices Ahead of Election", Bloomberg News, 04/19/2004.

6. "Fuel oil prices skyrocket in frigid New Hampshire; and candidates talk tough", CNN, 01/29/2000.

On Earth Day, Bush's EPA Plots to Weaken Clean Air Laws

04.23.04 (9:20 am) [edit]

Unpatriotic Bush Refuses to Allow Us to Bear Witness

04.23.04 (9:18 am) [edit]

Fans of the cartoon strip "Doonesbury" have been following the travails of B. D., the football-helmeted Vietnam vet who somehow wound up back under fire in Iraq. In a series of strips that one Colorado paper decried as unnecessarily "graphic violent battlefield depictions," B. D. was wounded and lost his lower leg. Most of the response has apparently been far more positive than the Colorado newspaper's, but the strip's creator, Garry Trudeau, is lucky that he works with ink rather than film. In the real Middle East, an American worker in Kuwait was fired this week when a newspaper printed a photo she had taken of a cargo plane full of coffins draped in American flags.

Tami Silicio, an employee of a military contractor, had sent the picture to a friend, who passed it on to [i]The Seattle Times[/i], which published it last Sunday. Ms. Silicio told the newspaper that she had wanted to show the families how carefully the cargo workers tended to the coffins. But her employer fired her for disobeying government and company rules, and for good measure dismissed Ms. Silicio's husband as well.

Since 1991, the Defense Department has prohibited taking photographs of the coffins of members of the armed services while they are being transported back to the United States. The reverent portrait Ms. Silicio produced demonstrates how irrational that policy is. The theory seems to be that the pictures are intrusive, or possibly hurtful, to bereaved families. But it seems far more likely that the Pentagon is concerned about the impact that photos of large numbers of flag-draped coffins may have on the American public's attitude toward the war.

That certainly underestimates the fortitude of average citizens, who are able to accept the cost of war whenever they are confident that the cause is right. American men and women are currently suffering danger, death and injury every day in Iraq. The least those of us back home can do is to bear witness to the sacrifice of the real soldiers as well as the fictional.

[It is anti-christian (as well as cowardly) to prevent us from bearing witness.]

[u]The Real War [/u]- http://nytimes.com/2004/04/23...

Anti-Christian: Bush Pentagon Prevents Us From Bearing Witness

04.23.04 (9:15 am) [edit]

Smoke & Mirrors: Bush Isn't Really Handing Over Sovereignty to the Iraqi People

04.23.04 (9:12 am) [edit]

The Bush administration's plans for a new caretaker government in Iraq would place severe limits on its sovereignty, including only partial command over its armed forces and no authority to enact new laws, administration officials said Thursday.

These restrictions to the plan negotiated with Lakhdar Brahimi, the special United Nations envoy, were presented in detail for the first time by top administration officials at Congressional hearings this week, culminating in long and intense questioning on Thursday at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee's hearing on the goal of returning Iraq to self-rule on June 30.

Only 10 weeks from the scheduled transfer of sovereignty, the administration is still not sure exactly who will govern in Baghdad, or precisely how they will be selected. A week ago, President Bush agreed to a recommendation by Mr. Brahimi to dismantle the existing Iraqi Governing Council, which was handpicked by the United States, and to replace it with a caretaker government whose makeup is to be decided next month.

That government would stay in power until elections could be held, beginning next year.

The administration's plans seem likely to face objections on several fronts. Several European and United Nations diplomats have said in interviews that they do not think the United Nations will approve a Security Council resolution sought by Washington that handcuffs the new Iraq government in its authority over its own armed forces, let alone foreign forces on its soil.

These diplomats, and some American officials, said that if the American military command ordered a siege of an Iraqi city, for example, and there was no language calling for an Iraqi government to participate in the decision, the government might not be able to survive protests that could follow.

The diplomats added that it might be unrealistic to expect the new Iraqi government not to demand the right to change Iraqi laws put in place by the American occupation under L. Paul Bremer III, including provisions limiting the influence of Islamic religious law.

Democratic and Republican senators appeared frustrated on Thursday that so few details were known at this late stage in the transition process, and several senators focused on the question of who would be in charge of Iraq's security.

Asked whether the new Iraqi government would have a chance to approve military operations led by American commanders, who would be in charge of both foreign and Iraqi forces, a senior official said Americans would have the final say.

"The arrangement would be, I think as we are doing today, that we would do our very best to consult with that interim government and take their views into account," said Marc Grossman, under secretary of state for political affairs. But he added that American commanders will "have the right, and the power, and the obligation" to decide.

That formulation is especially sensitive at a time when American and Iraqi forces are poised to fight for control of Falluja.

In another sphere, Mr. Grossman said there would be curbs on the powers of the National Conference of Iraqis that Mr. Brahimi envisions as a consultative body. The conference, he said, is not expected to pass new laws or revise the laws adopted under the American occupation.

"We don't believe that the period between the 1st of July and the end of December should be a time for making new laws," Mr. Grossman said.

As envisioned by Mr. Brahimi, the caretaker government would consist of a president, a prime minister, two vice presidents or deputy prime ministers and a cabinet of ministers in each agency. A national conference of perhaps 1,000 Iraqis would advise it, possibly by establishing a smaller body of about 100 Iraqis.

His plan would supplant an earlier American proposal that would have chosen an Iraqi assembly through caucuses.

Since last November, when the June 30 transfer of sovereignty was approved by President Bush and decreed by Mr. Bremer in Iraq, the United States has insisted that Iraq would have a full transfer of sovereignty on that date.

Mr. Grossman, however, referred in testimony on Wednesday to what he said would be "limited sovereignty," a phrase he did not repeat on Thursday, apparently because it raised eyebrows among those not expecting the administration to acknowledge that the sovereignty would be less than full-fledged.

The problem of limiting Iraq's sovereignty is more than one of terminology, several administration officials said in interviews this week.

The proposed curbs on Iraqi sovereignty are paving the way for what officials and diplomats say is shaping up as another potential battle with American allies as the United Nations is asked to confer legitimacy on the new government.

"Clearly you can't have a sovereign government speaking for Iraq in international forums, and yet leave open this possibility that we'll do something they won't particularly like or disagree with," said an administration official. "There's got to be something to be set up to deal with that possibility."

Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, the ranking Democrat on the foreign relations panel, and Senator Jon Corzine, a New Jersey Democrat, pressed Mr. Grossman on that point.

European and United Nations diplomats said that because the main task of the caretaker government would be to try to secure the support of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the Iraqi Shiite leader whose supporters are unhappy with some of the laws enacted by the Iraqi Governing Council, there may have to be a change in these laws.

Under the basic legal framework pressed by Mr. Bremer, Islam is only one of many foundations of the law. Ayatollah Sistani's supporters want Islam to govern such matters as family law, divorce and women's rights. Mr. Bremer had at one time threatened to veto any such changes, but even some administration officials acknowledge that the idea of telling the new Iraqi government it cannot enact new laws is unrealistic.

A European official familiar with Mr. Brahimi's thinking said the envoy wants the caretaker government and its consultative body "to find a consensus on the fundamental law to make sure Sistani is invested."

"Everybody wants to have Sistani on board," said this diplomat. "For that you'll have to pay a price."

The skeptical tone of the foreign relations hearing was set by the committee's chairman, Senator Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, who said that without clearer answers, "we risk the loss of support of the American people, the loss of potential contributions from our allies and the disillusionment of Iraqis."

But Mr. Grossman said Mr. Brahimi's plans were still so vague that they have not yet been put in writing to be incorporated into Iraqi regulations.

Mr. Grossman was also asked what would happen if the new government wanted to adopt a foreign policy opposed by the United States, such as forging close relations with two neighbors, Iran and Syria.

The United States, he replied, would have to use the kind of persuasion used by any American ambassador in any country.

[u]White House Says Iraq Sovereignty Could Be Limited[/u], By STEVEN R. WEISMAN, New York Times - http://nytimes.com/2004/04/23...

Let's Take America Back: Our Nation Has Suffered A Staggering Decline Under Bush

04.23.04 (9:08 am) [edit]

Looking for a savvy, sassy and strategic agenda to counter the rightwing and take America back from the most extremist Administration of our lifetime? Pick up a copy of [i]Taking Back America--And Taking Down the Radical Right[/i], http://www.nationbooks.org/bo... a new collection of articles which I co-edited with [i]Campaign for America's Future [/i]head Robert Borosage.

Featuring illuminating and inspiring contributions from Bill Moyers, Barbara Ehrenreich, Benjamin Barber, William Greider, Robert Reich, Danny Goldberg, Joel Rogers, Reps. Jesse L. Jackson and Jan Schakowsky and other leading scholars, thinkers and advocates, NationBooks' Taking Back America offers positive alternatives to the reactionary policies of the Bush Administration.

It's not hard for progressives (or any sane citizen, for that matter) to see that we're in the fight of our lives. George Bush's policies have ravaged our country. Since he took office, America has suffered a staggering decline, moving from prosperity to recession, from peace to war, from record budget surpluses to record deficits. This Administration's legacy is one of preemptive strikes ; de-stabilizing tax cuts; the rollback of protection for workers; consumers and the environment; an assault on the rights of women and minorities; and a crony,capitalist corruption devoid of shame.

Progressives have no choice but to rouse themselves, to build the arguments, movements, and institutions needed to turn this country around. It is time to take back America--and build a country that is safer, healthier, better educated, more secure and committed to shared prosperity and opportunity for all. But we must work in smart and coordinated ways. And while many translate this into electoral terms---and we [i]must[/i] defeat Bush in 2004--it is also more than a matter of changing the occupants of the White House. The challenge requires a coherent critique of the conservative ideas that have dominated the past 25 years. It requires bold new vision and vast citizen mobilization to counter the entrenched and growing power of corporate lobbies and restore an America that lives up to its democratic promise. It is a journey not of a year but of a decade or more.

What is hopeful is that on fundamental questions, Bush and the Right are out of tune with the majority of Americans. In area after area, Americans prefer progressive alternatives to the failed policies of the conservative right--- investment in health care and education over tax cuts, fair trade over free trade, corporate accountability over deregulation, environmental protection over laissez-faire oversight, defending Social Security and Medicare over privatizing them, public schools over vouchers, raising the minimum wage over eliminating it. Moreover, civilizing causes like civil rights, reproductive choice and environmental protection are now mainstream values.

It is increasingly clear that Americans face challenges that will never be addressed by the rightwing extremists now in power. [i]Taking Back America [/i] http://www.nationbooks.org/bo... features thinkers, writers and strategists intent on laying out an agenda that makes sense for most Americans. It offers policies that are commensurate with the size of the challenge. But it is also filled with strategic insights and good ideas about how to build the capacity to reach out to citizens, to mobilize allies, to identify, recruit, train and support the next generation of leaders.

It is time, as Senator Paul Wellstone said in one of his last speeches, not to duck, not to hide, not to bite our tongues or bide our time. It is time to stand up, to speak out. We need to return to a politics of passion and principle that asserts our values, our ideas and our energy and develop the independent capacity to drive our causes into the political debate and electoral arena.

Click here http://www.nationbooks.org/bo... for more information about [i]Taking Back America[/i].

And sign up for the [i]Campaign for America's Future[/i] http://www.ourfuture.org/ "Take Back America" conference and Awards Dinner to be held from June 2 to June 4th, in Washington DC. Our book arises largely from last year's extraordinary conference at which over 2,000 progressives gathered to share ideas and strategy. (Click here to watch online highlights.) This year, John Sweeney, Jesse Jackson, Rep. Jan Schakowsky, Julian Bond, Gerald McEntee, Kim Gandy, Sen. Jon Corzine, Arianna Huffington and many others are all scheduled to speak. Click here for info and to register.

And, if you're going to be in New York City on May 14 and 15, check out " What We Stand For: Ideas and Values to Take Back America," a conference organized by the Nation Institute and the New Democracy Project featuring many contributors to the book--as well as Paul Krugman, Joe Trippi, Gary Hart, Kevin Phillips, Eliot Spitzer, David Cole, Lori Wallach, Ellen Chesler, Eli Pariser,and Anne-Marie Slaughter.

I'm also heading to Los Angeles this weekend--along with other [i]Nation[/i] folk--to participate in the[i] Los Angeles Times' [/i]annual Festival of Books. Friday night, I'll be at Santa Monica's Track 16 Gallery for what I anticipate will be a spirited conversation about the state of the nation and [i]The Nation[/i]-- with nationally syndicated columnist and [i]Nation [/i]contributing editor Robert Scheer. Seating is limited. - http://www.thenation.com/edcu...

Media & Press Should Report-- Not Suck-up To Corrupt Bushies ...

04.22.04 (9:17 pm) [edit]

The American press needs to end its lovey-dovey relationship with the Pentagon. The Pentagon has provided ample evidence that it can propagandize the American people without the help of a lap-dog press.

It is not the job of the press to support the troops. That is the duty of the American people, their loved ones and their folks back home. Thank God that support is present today, because, being a Vietnam-era veteran, I can well remember when it was absent.

No, the job of the press is to provide the American people with accurate information about the military and its activities. In doing that, no reporter should ever reveal anything that would endanger an American military person's life or the mission. That said, that's the end of it. It is not a journalist's job to be a cheerleader, a public-relations person or a civic booster.

The military and the press have two separate functions. The job of the military is to kill people and destroy assets. The job of the press is to report on the process. If the brass want to call killing civilians "collateral damage," so be it, but journalists should report that civilians have been killed. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan once wrote a wonderful article on the danger of the press allowing the government — any government — to choose its language.

One sees entirely too much of that these days. Analyze, if you will, the coverage of the American military in Iraq. We should be reporting on the daily lives of the soldiers, on what their problems are and on what their true thoughts and feelings are. Most of what I read or see coming out of Iraq looks like a rewrite of a Pentagon press release. The Pentagon seems to have quite effectively muzzled not only the press but its own troops.

You can't tell me that the American GIs — famous for more than 200 years for speaking their minds and griping — are now uttering the robotlike banalities the press is reporting. At least, I hope they're not.

It is quite clear now that the occupation of Iraq is not going well. It can't be when a year into it, 87 Americans are killed in half a month and another 570 wounded in the same two-week period. After a year, if we had done it right, Americans ought to be able to mingle freely with the Iraqi population instead of huddling behind fortified compounds and barricades.

Apparently, however, a lot of journalists venture only between their fortified hotel and the fortified compound known as the green zone, which houses the occupation authority. Unfortunately, that is only a tiny, tiny fraction of Iraq. Iraq and the Iraqi people are in the "red zone." And that's where the reporters ought to be. Otherwise, there's no point in their being there.

There is some good reporting coming out of Iraq, but by and large, the news, especially television, is awful, and by that I mean superficial to an extreme degree. Why hasn't some enterprising journalist interviewed the cleric the Army is so keen to kill? Why is it that only Al-Jazeera journalists are inside Fallujah? Where are the profiles of Iraqi leaders?

If the brass will not allow reporters to talk to the troops without a minder being present, then journalists ought to report that. Sometimes it seems that there is not that much difference between Saddam Hussein and the American occupation as far as freedom of the press is concerned. We seem to be conducting a vendetta against any foreign journalist or organization that doesn't agree with the official line.

All we know for sure is that the situation in Iraq is worse than both the Pentagon and the press led us to believe. - http://reese.king-online.com/...

[u]Two excellent blogs related to this issue are also[/u]:

The Conservative Right-Wing Press Corps Is Letting "We the People" Down!!! - http://www.tblog.com/template...

Bush's Lunatic Mideast Madness: Legitimizes Terrorism & Skyrocketing Violence ... - http://www.tblog.com/template...

Fascism-in-Action: Corporations With Guns in Iraq

04.22.04 (8:27 am) [edit]

Newspapers and TV outlets were condemned for showing the bodies of four Americans identified as "contractors" who were brutally killed, burned and then gleefully put on display in Iraq. As if Americans were not capable of acting exactly as the Iraqis did. Individuals and peoples remember what they want to remember and forget what they want to forget. For those who have forgotten, or the millions of Americans who are too ignorant to have known, our libraries are full of pictures of white people dancing and eating Southern-fried chicken as they partied around the burnt corpses of lynched African-Americans. So please spare us the shock and awesome indignation at Iraqi behavior.

Who were the "four U.S. contractors" who met their deaths in Fallujah? They were described in [i]The Washington Post [/i]as "elite commandos … hired by the U.S. government to protect bureaucrats, soldiers and intelligence officers."

The contractors were employees of Blackwater Security Consulting, four of some 400 Blackwater employees in Iraq who are making up to $1,000 a day.

American news organizations are not doing the truth a favor when they call these hired guns "U.S. military contractors." They are not even being accurate: The men were not contractors to the government, but Hessians or mercenary soldiers in the employ of a corporate warlord, namely Blackwater Security Consulting. Let’s call these people what they are, even though Americans have yet to feel completely comfortable with the idea of killing for money.

Perhaps to help us get over any queasiness we might be experiencing in that department, a number of stories about the Blackwater mercenaries have stressed that they were former members of elite units of the American military. It has even been said that they gave their lives for "freedom." Whose freedom is left unsaid, but surely no more overused and abused word can be found in contemporary American English. The patriotic crap aside, if these men’s primary motives for being in Iraq were flag and country, they’d still be in the armed services. At a pay grade of $350,000 a year, we know why they were there.

Does that justify killing them? No, nothing can justify taking human life—but if you take one-third of a million dollars a year to walk around in somebody else’s country with a machine gun, and you get wasted by the locals, I don’t think you deserve a very big or elaborate funeral. They were there for the money, and these men—elite ex-soldiers that they were—knew the risks, and they took them. So be it.

Evidently, thousands of mercenaries have been put to work in Iraq, and this raises some troublesome questions. Is all this stuff we are fed on TV and in the newspapers about the new and democratic Iraqi Army and constabulary just lies? Why aren’t Iraqis guarding "bureaucrats, soldiers and intelligence officers"? Why aren’t soldiers guarding themselves?

Sooner or later, the American troops are going to find out about this. Is it going to occur to the young gung-ho guys, who volunteered right out of high school, that they are risking life and limb for chump change while other men (and probably a few women) with the same skill sets are getting rich? What will be the reaction of the middle-aged reservists and National Guard people serving for a few hundred dollars a month, at the risk of job and mortgage, when they find out about the thousands of mercenaries being paid a king’s ransom to do for money what they do for country? If there is a morale problem now, as these stories about suicides among our service people suggest, what, pray tell, will be the state of morale then?

What will be the morale of the members of Congress who worry about where the money is coming from when it gets through to them that the United States is fighting this war with $1,000-a-day soldiers? As with all formulae offered as automatic and invariably successful solutions to difficult problems, privatization works only sometimes. It works with garbage collection, where it saves money. It does not save money with Medicare, and it certainly does not save money waging war.

Not only does privatization not save money waging war, it creates problem after problem, only some of which are visible at this juncture. If captured, are these mercenaries prisoners of war and subject to the Geneva Convention, or can they licitly be shot as spies and saboteurs?

We know that there are thousands of mercenaries now loose in Iraq. Only some of them work for Blackwater. Apparently, there are a number of companies who hire these people, so the question arises about how much control the American authorities have over the irregulars running about the country. Dyncorp mercenaries in the former Yugoslavia were accused of rape and robbery. The point is that they are not subject to military discipline, and even if they commit no acts universally regarded as criminal, they may still do things that offend the Iraqis: They might drink alcohol, use insulting gestures, whistle at women or find a dozen ways to get into trouble doing things which are innocent enough if done in Indiana, but which are incendiary acts if done in Basra.

It is astonishing that a military establishment which has poured billions upon billions into the development of communication technology that allows for close command and control never before dreamt of by military commanders can have sanctioned such a use of mercenaries. They have armed mercenaries all over the country over whom they can exercise no effective supervision and whom they cannot even communicate with. In a situation where the Americans know they are walking on egg shells, where innocent but explosive misunderstandings can occur at any minute, the introduction of swaggering, overpaid and undersupervised commando types is little more than idiotic.

Another question hanging in the air is why the Bush administration has resorted to the wholesale use of mercenaries. What you may lose in command and control with military operations of one sort or another carried out by commercial contract, you gain in secrecy and, as John Dean is making a point of, we have an administration in Washington of secrecy fetishists. It is much harder to dig out what the corporate warlords, who are immune from the Freedom of Information Act and most other forms of inquiry, are up to. We know, for example, that the State Department has hired a war corps to carry out various military duties in Colombia, but precise knowledge of what they are doing is gained only by a reporter risking life and safety—and even then, the facts may remain hidden.

The administration may be using mercenaries because it does not have enough troops, enough "boots on the ground," as the tough guys like to say. President Bush et al. were warned, you may remember, before they launched us into their Iraqi folly, that they would need twice the number of soldiers they had committed to the operation. The warning was laughed off, and the general who did the warning was retired from active duty.

Hiring mercenaries is one method of trying to make up for the gap between troop strength and troop requirements. Hiring mercenaries enables the administration, it hopes, to fill the gap without having to admit it was wrong. Moreover, it seems that the administration was so wrong on its troop estimates that there is no other way to make up the deficit except by the use of hired guns. This alliance of 34 countries contributing troops is a joke. The United Kingdom has 11,000 troops in Iraq. No other country has more than 2,700, and that’s Italy. The Spanish have 1,300 and they’re leaving. Twenty-six countries have less than 500 soldiers, and of that group 10 nations have fewer than 100 soldiers. Moldova has 24 men there and Estonia has 55, so they are both dwarfed by Japan, which has a grand total of 75 troopers in Iraq. How many American soldiers does it take to guard the Japanese and Moldovians? Or are we to assume that the 121 Latvian soldiers can speak Arabic and can get on by themselves?

So other than going out on the market and buying soldiers, where can Mr. Bush find them? He could make a speech imploring our best young people to enlist to fight the evil-doers and weapons-of-mass destructioneers and then see what that gets him at the recruiters. Or let’s go back to conscription. It will not be easy for George Bush to lose the November election, but proposing to reinstate the draft is one way he can.

So it’s mercenaries or nothing, but aside from the money, there will be hell to pay for this.

[u]Privatization in Iraq: ‘Contractors’ With Guns, By Nicholas Von Hoffman, New York Observer[/u], http://www.observer.com/pages...

President Bush's Religious War Against Evil: Then He Should Turn On Himself: Bush Is Evil!

04.22.04 (8:21 am) [edit]

Bush is an evil man: More Israelis have died in terrorist attacks since Bush took over than in the prior 30 years combined. More US Soldiers have died in an unnecessary war, than since Vietnam. Four times the number of Palestinians are slaughtered every day than Israelis die in battle. More innocent Iraqi civilians have been massacred by Bush than since the Saddam Hussein's civil war in the 1980s.

Is the war against terrorism a political or a religious struggle? One might be forgiven for assuming that it is a political struggle - an effort to eliminate the use of violence and terror to achieve political ends. For President Bush, however, it very much seems to be a religious struggle as well - or instead of - a political matter. In his first major statement on the issue, he told Americans that "our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil."

This statement was made, by the way, during a speech at the National Cathedral. The religious implications of it simply cannot be ignored or dismissed. As James Carroll argues: http://atheism.about.com/gi/d...://commondreams.org/views03/0708%2D03.htm

[i]The unprecedented initiatives taken from Washington in the last two years are incomprehensible except in the context of this purpose. ...What the president may not know is that the worst manifestations of evil have been the blowback of efforts to be rid of it.

What is permitted to be done in the name of ''ridding the world of evil''? Is lying allowed? Torture? The killing of children? Or, less drastic, the militarization of civil society? The launching of dubious wars?

What is evil anyway? Is it the impulse only of tyrants? Of enemies alone? Or is it tied to the personal entitlement onto which America, too, hangs its bunting? Is evil the thing, perhaps, that forever inclines human beings to believe that they are themselves untouched by it? Moral maturity, mellowed across the distance of history, begins in the acknowledgement that evil, whatever its primal source, resides, like a virus in its niche, in the human self. There is no ridding the world of evil for the simple fact that, shy of history's end, there is no ridding the self of it. [/i]

Carroll calls Bush the "selfless president" - not as a compliment, but as a warning. Bush is "selfless" not in the sense of being altruistic but because he seems to lack a sense of self - a lack of the self-knowledge that would reveal that there is evil in all of us and allow for an understanding of others.

Bush is indeed shallow and stupid, but he is also evil.

For those who mistakenly call Islam evil, more deaths have occurred in the name of Christianity and Judaism in recent times, than under the Muslim faith.

President Bush's Religious War Against Evil - Then He Should Turn On Himself: Bush Is Evil!

04.22.04 (8:13 am) [edit]

Kerry's Military Records: "I Request Duty in Vietnam" VS Bush was AWOL : "Give Me Another Drink"!

04.22.04 (7:46 am) [edit]

[b]"I request duty in Vietnam"[/b] -- the first line in one of the documents http://www.johnkerry.com/abou... from John Kerry's service records, now posted on the Kerry website http://www.johnkerry.com/abou...

[b]VERSUS[/b]

AWOL Drunkardly Bush who requested directions to the nearest Bar to swill more Booze instead of serving in Vietnam http://www.awolbush.com

Our Allies Are Deserting The Bush Titanic Ship Of Disaster

04.21.04 (9:05 am) [edit]

[b]Jordan's king snubs Bush, cancels meeting[/b]

[i][b]Key Mideast ally "irked" over US support for Sharon's territorial claims[/b][/i].

King Abdullah of Jordan abruptly postponed a visit with US President George Bush scheduled for Wednesday. Jordanian officials said the meeting had become impossible because of Mr. Bush's recent support for "Israel's territorial claims in the West Bank," reports The New York Times.

Jordan said that the meeting would be put off until the conclusion of current discussions with US officials "to clarify the American position on the peace process and the final situation in the Palestinian territories, especially in light of the latest statements by officials in the American Administration."

After meeting last week with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Bush broke with decades-old US policy and supported Israel's right to keep some settlements in the West Bank. This complicates Palestinian demands that refugees be able to return to homes they abandoned in the years after the Jewish state was founded in 1948. The Times reports that Jordanian officials made clear that King Abdullah had been "irked" by Mr. Bush's declarations in the meeting with Sharon and would therefore bypass Washington.

The king's meeting with Bush was expected to focus on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the situation in Iraq, and ways to enhance bilateral cooperation, especially in the economic arena, reports The Jordan Times. The Arab League welcomed the cancellation of the meeting, reports United Press International. A high-ranking official reportedly told UPI that "the cancellation of the meeting expresses the state of high anger prevailing in the Arab world over Bush's endorsement of Israeli stances." The official said if King Abdullah had "acted differently, he would have embarrassed the Arab peoples and challenged their national sentiments."

The US sought to play down the snub, reports Reuters. "We understand that there are some domestic issues involved here and we respect King Abdullah's decision to postpone (the meeting) for a couple of weeks," said White House spokesman Scott McClellan. The meeting has tentatively been rescheduled for the first week in May. Another Reuters report says that the snub "revealed only a fraction of the humiliation felt by Washington's Arab friends," after Bush's dramatic shift in US policy.

Jordan has allowed thousands of Palestinian refugees into the country since the creation of Israel, and fears an ultimate rejection of the "right of return" for Palestinians will lead to their permanent integration in the kingdom, reports Reuters. Palestinian refugees or their descendants make up the majority of Jordan's 5 million people.

The past few days have seen several challenges to the Bush administration's foreign policy. Hours after Spain's new Prime Minister Jose Luis Zapatero was sworn in on Sunday, he ordered the withdrawal of the 1,300 Spanish troops from Iraq as soon as possible. Spain has been a key US ally in the war in Iraq and the larger war on terror.

As the The Christian Science Monitor points out, those troops (which account for less than 1 percent of the coalition troops in Iraq) "will scarcely be missed."

However, the Monitor reports, Mr. Zapatero's decision "will kindle new flames of doubt, threatening the coalition as governments rethink their commitment in the light of the flaring violence in Iraq and the country's uncertain future." As an example of this possible domino effect, the report asserts that US hopes of convincing NATO to play a role in southern Iraq appear "dimmed." According to the Monitor report, "further pullouts would have little military impact, but would send politically damaging messages of distrust about how US forces are dealing with the insurgency in Iraq."

Late Monday night Honduran President Ricardo Maduro announced he will also withdraw from Iraq the nearly 370 Honduran soldiers under Spanish command. The Dominican Republic said its 300 troops would remain until August, and El Salvador said its troops would remain in Iraq under Polish command, reports Voice of America.

By Matthew Clark | csmonitor.com - http://www.csmonitor.com/2004...

Bush Moves Beyond Incompetence Into The Realm Of Hitlerian Destruction

04.21.04 (8:47 am) [edit]

Of course, the President is more than incompetent these days. He seems deliberately intent, like a boy who has built a tower of blocks, to make sure everyone in the room is watching, when the tower crashes to the ground.

With American soldiers already extended, with kidnappings breaking out across a country that has forever been the world's cosmopolitan crossing grounds, and with hard-won structures of peace at the very precipice of legitimation, the President says essentially, Bring It On!

To be sure, the President has not built a pretty tower to begin with. But when pieces of real people's lives come crashing down, time after time, we should have the right to grab the President's hands and say, now George, stop that!

What is the account of things that makes the pattern of this President's choices sane? Even in war there is a difference between a commander-in-chief and a warmonger. Even as a pacifist I have respect for a soldier's duty to a commander-in-chief. But have Americans as a nation fallen so deeply into the delusions of war making that kill has become our favorite word?

Bush's provocations are systematic enough to be considered deliberate. More war, less peace. The greater the calamity, the more the people cower under his rule. You figure out where that gets us. And how long this has been going on.

So we can wax nostalgic about that day in August, 2001, when the President was perhaps merely incompetent.

What about that sultry day at the Crawford Ranch in Texas? When intelligence reports indicated chatter of hijacking. Was that day anything like yesterday? When US officials warned American troops to watch out, because there was chatter and scattered clues? Uniforms for sale, Humvees missing. Sound the alarm.

If Aug. 6 was like yesterday, and if yesterday's intelligence was considered actionable enough to put the troops on alert--even if no specific time or place of attack was known in advance--then what about Aug. 6?

On Aug. 6, so far as we've been told, vague chatter about hijacking and sleeper cells was not considered actionable enough to sound the alarm. Yet today, a "uniform scare" is being broadcast worldwide.

Meanwhile, Bush's isolation from the rest of world is now legitimated only by his perplexing tolerability at home. Why is it not time for Americans to come to their senses, stop the kill talk, and demand mature recognitions from themselves and their President?

Paid experts go on television to proclaim flat out that leaders overseas are not being truthful. But when are these experts ever so clear about matters closer to home? What, exactly, are these experts being paid to do?

It appears that pressures and possibilities are springing to life this April: 9/11 families pressing questions in Washington, Grand Ayatollahs arranging cease fires in Iraq, Iranian ambassadors counseling their Muslim fellows, UN envoys looking for material leadership, and behold, even a British Prime Minister demanding more caution on the ground. Suddenly, global talent is mobilized to weave a tatter of sanity.

Meanwhile in Washington, a fashionable talk of kill, kill, kill. But the American people and their paid experts have got to snap out of their kill talk. The sooner this happens, the less we will all have to regret.

[b]Greg Moses writes for the Texas Civil Rights Review. He can be reached at: gmosesx@prodigy.net [/b]- http://www.counterpunch.com/m...

Bush's 'Bird-of-a-Feather' Iraqi Ambassador/Dictator: A Torturer's Friend

04.21.04 (8:41 am) [edit]

[b]Negroponte, a Torturer's Friend[/b]

Bush's announcement that he intends to appoint John Negroponte to be the U.S. ambassador to Iraq should appall anyone who respects human rights.

Negroponte, currently U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., was U.S. ambassador to Honduras in the 1980s and was intimately involved with Reagan's dirty war against the Sandinistas of Nicaragua. Reagan waged much of that illegal contra war from Honduras, and Negroponte was his point man.

According to a detailed investigation the Baltimore Sun did in 1995, Negroponte covered up some of the most grotesque human rights abuses imaginable.

The CIA organized, trained, and financed an army unit called Battalion 316, the paper said. Its specialty was torture. And it kidnapped, tortured, and killed hundreds of Hondurans, the Sun reported. It "used shock and suffocation devices in interrogations. Prisoners often were kept naked and, when no longer useful, killed and buried in unmarked graves."

The U.S. embassy in Honduras knew about the human rights abuses but did not want this embarrassing information to become public, the paper said.

"Determined to avoid questions in Congress, U.S. officials in Honduras concealed evidence of human rights abuses," the Sun reported. Negroponte has denied involvement, and prior to his confirmation by the Senate for his U.N. post, he testified, "I do not believe that death squads were operating in Honduras."

But this is what the Baltimore Sun said: "The embassy was aware of numerous kidnappings of leftists." It also said that Negroponte played an active role in whitewashing human rights abuses.

"Specific examples of brutality by the Honduran military typically never appeared in the human rights reports, prepared by the embassy under the direct supervision of Ambassador Negroponte," the paper wrote. " The reports from Honduras were carefully crafted to leave the impression that the Honduran military respected human rights."

So this is the man who is going to show the Iraqis the way toward democracy?

More likely, as the insurgency increases, this will be the man who will oversee and hush up any brutal repression that may ensue.

-- [u]Matthew Rothschild, The Progressive [/u]- http://www.progressive.org/we...

Did Bush Cut Secret Oil Deal With Saudis Ahead of 2004 Election?

04.21.04 (8:38 am) [edit]

The White House and a top Saudi official are denying allegations that before the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration made a secret deal with Saudi ambassador Prince Bandar bin Sultan involving oil price fixing ahead of the November presidential elections.

The charge came in an interview Sunday on 60 Minutes with Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward. His new book “Plan of Attack” hit news stands yesterday and has already caused a firestorm of controversy. Here is an excerpt from 60 Minutes Host Mike Wallace’s interview with Bob Woodward.

WALLACE: Prince Bandar enjoys easy access to the Oval Office. His family and the Bush family are close. And Woodward told us that Bandar has promised the president that Saudi Arabia will lower oil prices in the months before the election to ensure the US economy is strong on Election Day.

And you also say, 'Bandar wanted Bush to know that the Saudis hoped to fine-tune oil prices to prime the economy in 2004. What was key, Bandar understood, were the economic conditions before a presidential election.'

Oil prices are at an all-time high.

WOODWARD: They're high, and they could go down very quickly. That's the Saudi pledge. Certainly over the summer or as we get closer to the election, they increase production several million barrels a day and the price would drop significantly.

Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward speaking this Sunday on 60 Minutes.

Record-high gasoline prices have become a hot issue in the presidential race. Democratic presidential hopeful John Kerry was quick to attack Bush at a campaign stop in Florida yesterday. He said that if the allegation of a secret White House deal with the Saudis is true, it is “outrageous and unacceptable to the American people.” Both the White House and the Saudi government denied the allegation.

Another allegation in Woodward’s book that is causing a stir is that National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld were the first to know about his decision to go to war in January 2003.

What has caused a stir over the past several days is Woodward’s charge that before Bush informed Secretary of State Colin Powell of his decision, he gave Cheney and Rumsfeld permission to inform Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar bin Sultan about the war plans. Woodward says they even showed Bandar a top-secret map of the war plan. Woodward charges that Cheney and Rumsfeld first briefed Bandar at the White House on January 11, 2003.

WOODWARD: Saturday, January 11th, with the president's permission, Cheney and Rumsfeld call Bandar to Cheney's West Wing office. And the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Myers, is there with a top-secret map of the war plan. And it says "Top Secret. No foreign." "No Foreign" means "no foreigners are supposed to see this." They describe in detail the war plan for Bandar. And so Bandar, who's skeptical because he knows in the first Gulf War we didn't get Saddam out, so he says to Cheney and Rumsfeld 'So Saddam, this time, is going to be out, period?' And Cheney, who has said nothing, says the following: 'Prince Bandar, once we start, Saddam is toast.'

WALLACE: And after Bandar left, Cheney said...

WOODWARD: 'I wanted him to know that this is for real. We're really doing it.' Now, Bandar--this isn't enough for Bandar. Cheney, Rumsfeld, he said to them--he said, 'I have to hear this from the president.' Then two days later, Bandar is called to meet with the president, and the president says 'Their message is my message.'

At that meeting Woodward describes, Rumsfeld reportedly told Bandar, “You can take this to the bank,” Then, pointing at the map of the war plan, Rumsfeld said “This is going to happen.”Woodward characterizes Powell as being opposed to invading Iraq. Yesterday, Powell denied Woodward’s allegation that he was kept out of the loop.

[u]Jim Paul, Executive Director of Global Policy Forum. He is based at the United Nations and monitors events there. He has authored a number of reports on oil companies and Iraq.[/u] - http://www.democracynow.org/a...

Bush's Dangerous Religion

04.21.04 (8:35 am) [edit]

[b]George Bush's global holy war threatens our Presidency—and perhaps the future of our nation

Turning Point[/b] - http://villagevoice.com/issue...

Who can dispute that Americans of all political and personal beliefs can now see that the nation is at a turning point in its history. It is hard to think otherwise.

The president has led us into a war of civilizations and cultures. He says he is guided in all decisions by "the Almighty." He has done nothing that would give us reason to doubt that he truly believe this in his bones. Eerie, is it not, that the Al Qaeda killers who follow Osama bin Laden and seek to destroy the United States claim they have God on their side, too.

Is this an argument for moral equivalence? Absolutely not. Moreover, moral equivalency is not the grave issue before the American citizenry today. The state of our presidency—and perhaps the future of our country—is.

The president, who was led to born-again religion by Texas evangelists some years ago, after a wayward youth, spoke again of the will of God at his recent speech-cum-press conference. Referring to the war in Iraq, he said, "[F]reedom is not this country's gift to the world. Freedom is the Almighty's gift to every man and woman in this world." Then he added: "And, as the greatest power on the face of the earth, we have an obligation" to carry out the Lord's mission.

Some of Mr. Bush's own supporters have grown increasingly anxious about Iraq and its ramifications. In part, this is because of the continuing accumulation of documentary evidence that the president and his coterie of more secular hawks took the nation into a pre-emptive war against Iraq on the basis of hyped intelligence and false claims. The claims were that Iraq (1) was linked to the September 11, 2001, suicide-plane attacks on New York and Washington, (2) possessed large stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, and (3) posed a serious, urgent threat to the United States.

Many presidents have invoked God in speeches and policy decisions, especially during times of war when soldiers were dying for country. And most presidents have told lies of various kinds during their tenures. But I know of no president, certainly no modern president, who said he was acting in God's name while telling lies in order to prod the country into a war against an adversary that, though a vile dictatorship, was no real threat to our security—and had no significant link to the bin Laden forces that attacked us in 2001.

Bob Woodward, the chronicler of official Washington, whose new book, Plan of Attack, is out this week, writes that Bush told him in an interview that during the buildup to the war, "I was praying for strength to do the Lord's will. . . . I'm surely not going to justify war based on God. Understand that. Nevertheless, in my case, I pray that I be as good a messenger of His will as possible." At another point, asked whether he consulted his father about going to war, the book quotes the president saying: "There is a higher father that I appeal to."

In a television appearance, Woodward said that the president's global plans are so far-reaching and ambitious that they will cause many people to "tremble." Woodward said the president told him he feels an overarching duty to liberate people all over the world.

Apart from recent events, what is known about Bush's world "vision"—from published position papers and other source materials—is that he seeks a major expansion, both in technology and troops, in our military capacity. The goal, as delineated in these materials, is to be able to carry out several major wars at the same time around the world.

All the Bush officials who drew up the policy blueprint for the Iraq war are founding signatories of a Washington think tank, Project for the New American Century (PNAC), formed in 1997 by a group of Reaganite neo-conservatives with views that lean heavily toward building an American global empire. They were all sitting out the Clinton years waiting for an opening for their military vision. All are now in key government positions. A partial list includes Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, I. Lewis Libby (Cheney's chief of staff), and Paul Wolfowitz (Rumsfeld's number two at the Pentagon). None of these men have ever experienced war. Only one, Rumsfeld, has served in the military; for three peacetime years after college ROTC, he was a navy pilot.

There is nothing secret about this fraternity. Their plans are in the open. You can read their think-tank product at newamericancentury.org. Their most famous document is there in its entirety. Titled "Rebuilding America's Defenses," it was published in September 2000, just before Bush was elected president.

The central goal in this report calls for a large expansion and modernization of the armed forces to a point where the military can "fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theater wars." Also in the report is a sentence that reads, "The process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor." For these think-tank hawks, apparently, September 11, 2001, was that event.

Despite the evidence that the public was misled into the Iraq war, neither Bush nor any of the war's architects have accepted responsibility for the false claims or admitted to a single substantial mistake through all the promotion, planning, and execution of the invasion and the ongoing military occupation.

Though Mr. Bush declared major combat over in Iraq nearly a year ago, the war continues and the fighting against insurgent forces is nearly as fierce as in the first weeks of the invasion. The toll of dead and wounded has mounted into the thousands on both sides—tens of thousands on the Iraqi side.

During his televised press conference, the president said that even if some mistakes had occurred, invading Iraq was the right thing do. This was so, he said, because this war will "change the world." By my count he made this hubristic claim three times that night. The last came toward the end, when, in a sermon-like tone, as if imploring the national audience to take his words seriously, he proclaimed, "We're changing the world. . . . It's a conviction that's deep in my soul."

Americans take his faith seriously. Many of them, however, may not trust his presidential judgments.

Bush also said that night, "This country must go on the offense and stay on the offense." Americans have a right to wonder if his plan for the world means that we will be at war for generations.

Prince Bandar Confirms Woodward Account of Bush's Treason

04.21.04 (8:24 am) [edit]

[b]Just how scared is the Bush ThugCo of the Woodward book?[/b]

[i]So scared, they get the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia to do a call-in to Larry King. That's how scared[/i].

[u]The bad news for ThugCo - Woodward got Bandar to cop to just about everything[/u].

KING: We have made the connection. With us on the phone is Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia. Who wants to go first? Do you hear Bob OK, Prince?

WOODWARD: Have you read the book, ambassador?

BANDAR BIN SULTAN, SAUDI AMBASSADOR TO U.S.: No, but I read snippets of it.

WOODWARD: The parts pertaining to you, and there seems to be some contention about this meeting January 11 in the White House. You know, Don Rumsfeld is on record saying he looked you in the eye and said, "you can take this to the bank, Ambassador, this is going to happen," and the "this" is the war plan. And...

KING: I'll let him respond to that part. Prince, is that true?

BIN SULTAN: Larry, number one, Bob Woodward is a first class journalist and reporter. And ...

KING: OK, and number two?

BIN SULTAN: And number two, I will never contradict Bob Woodward.

WOODWARD: OK.

KING: So what's number three?

BIN SULTAN: And number three is, what he said is accurate. However, there was one sentence that was left out.

KING: And that is?

BIN SULTAN: Both Vice President Cheney and Secretary Rumsfeld told me before the briefing that the president has not made a decision yet, but here is the plan, and then the rest is accurate.

WOODWARD: Then why would they say, "You can take this to the bank, it's going to happen," and then, as I understand it, the vice president said, "when this starts Saddam is toast." Is that correct?

BIN SULTAN: This is absolutely correct, but underlined when, because my response was last time we tried this, we left Saddam in place, and I don't think anybody in the Middle East would like to try this again if Saddam would stay in place, and that's the rest of the story. So what Bob said was accurate, except that I was informed that the president has not made a decision yet.

WOODWARD: But then why would they have the meeting to contradict what you're saying, Ambassador? And you have not read the transcripts of my interview with the president, and the president said to you that the message they sent to you was his message. This is, you know, as everyone knew, there was extensive planning going on for war. Why would they have this meeting to tell you a maybe? Doesn't make sense.

BIN SULTAN: Because the whole aspect is that the president, if I make the decision, this plan, you can take it also to the bank, like what's his name, Rumsfeld, said.

Remember, Bob, I was briefed by Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney and by General Powell about Plan 1001, and at that time, we were not sure if the Americans...

WOODWARD: This was for the first Gulf War.

BIN SULTAN: ... were going to go to war or not.

WOODWARD: Right. And -- but they didn't tell you, "You can take this to the bank, this is going to happen." I, you know, if we were to get out the...

KING: Let's ask it this way. Prince Bandar, after that meeting, did you think they were going to war?

BIN SULTAN: I was -- to be honest with you, not sure, but I was -- my gut feeling was telling me that if Saddam Hussein does not respond the right way, yes, they were going to go to war, but I can -- must emphasize that this is January. Between January and March, everybody emphasized to me that they want to go to the U.N. They want to try all other venues. But if Saddam does not respond positively, then they have to be ready. I think this president was thinking, "I cannot bluff," and President Johnson always, I was told, said, "Don't tell a fellow to go to hell unless you intend to send him there," and I think President Bush was intending to send Saddam to hell if he does not respond.

KING: Let me get in one more thing, Prince Bandar.

BIN SULTAN: Yes, sir.

KING: The story that Mr. Woodward has about the promise to lower the oil prices by the election. Your government has denied has.

WOODWARD: That's not my story. What I say in the book is that the Saudis, and maybe you looked at this section of the book, Ambassador, that the Saudis hoped to keep oil prices low during the period for -- before the election, because of its impact on the economy. That's what I say.

BIN SULTAN: I think the way that Bob said it now is accurate. We hoped that the oil prices will stay low, because that's good for America's economy, but more important, it's good for our economy and the international economy, and this is not -- nothing unusual. President Clinton asked us to keep the prices down in the year 2000. In fact, I can go back to 1979, President Carter asked us to keep the prices down to avoid the malaise. So yes, it's in our interests and in America's interests to keep the prices down.

KING: Do you want President Bush...

BIN SULTAN: But that was not a deal.

KING: Do you want President Bush to be reelected?

BIN SULTAN: We always want any president who is in office to be reelected, Larry, but that is the American choice. This is not our call. This is the American people's call.

KING: OK, I think we've cleared up... WOODWARD: Could I just, I'm sorry to go back on this, but Prince Bandar, why would the president tell me on the record two days later that he called Colin Powell in and said he had decided on war? This was a 12-minute meeting. I went through this for some time with the president, and then the president would ask Powell, "will you be with me?" And Powell said, "I will be with you. I will support a war," and then the president said to former General Powell, now Secretary of State Powell, "time to put your war uniform on."

I know that Powell left that meeting saying, he's going to do it. He had made that decision, and you look at what Rumsfeld has said and others, and as you may be aware, there might be tape recordings that would show that the version I have is the accurate one. What's going on here?

BIN SULTAN: Bob, I believe Secretary Powell/General Powell's response does not surprise me. He's a very loyal soldier and a statesman. And I believe he puts a lot of weight on loyalty, and he disdains disloyalty. Therefore, I believe if your account is accurate, which I have no reason to discount it, that general -- Secretary Powell told the president his views. Once the commander in chief made his mind up, General Powell -- Secretary Powell decided it's right to support the commander-in-chief.

KING: I got to get a break.

BIN SULTAN: That is the only thing I can say about this.

KING: Thank you, Prince Bandar, thank you for responding to our call. That's Prince Bandar, the ambassador from Saudi Arabia.

http://www.blah3.com/graymatter/archives/0 0001318.html" title="http://www.blah3.com/graymatter/archives/0 0001318.html" target="_blank"http://www.blah3.com/graymatt...

Transcript
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"If only Osama had faxed an X-marks-the-spot map to the Crawford ranch showing the Pentagon, the Capitol, the twin towers and the word "BOOM!" scrawled in Arabic." - Dowd

[b]Guerrilla News[/b], http://www.guerrillanews.com/...

Remind Dubya & Congress: Bush Ain't A King and Needs to be Held Accountable ...

04.20.04 (8:52 pm) [edit]

There are a number of disturbing revelations in Bob Woodward’s new book,[i] Plan of Attack[/i], at least as he explained it Sunday on 60 Minutes. One is that President Bush told National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice that he wanted to focus on Iraq five days after the September 11 attacks. Another is that he decided to go to war without first consulting Secretary of State Colin Powell.

But just as alarming is that Bush misled Congress in July 2002 by spending $700 million lawmakers thought they had assigned to fight the war in Afghanistan, using it instead to plan the war against Iraq. As Woodward told Mike Wallace, “Some people are gonna look at a document called the Constitution, which says that no money will be drawn from the Treasury unless appropriated by Congress. Congress was totally in the dark on this.”

It’s not the first time and you can bet it won’t be the last. In 2003, the administration hid the estimate of the Medicare prescription-drug plan to ensure that conservative lawmakers didn’t balk over the bill’s cost and vote the plan down. On numerous other measures, such as the No Child Left Behind bill, the administration put its mouth one place and its spending priorities somewhere else. And twice this year Bush has installed judges who could not win Senate confirmation, thwarting the Senate’s “advise and consent” role.

Of course, Bush has never prized Congress as a co-equal branch of government. Vice President Dick Cheney repeatedly ignored questions from the General Accounting Office about his energy panel. Some lawmakers complained after 9-11 that they got more information from news reports than from intelligence briefings. And the White House’s stubbornness in stopping a committee hearing led Republican Representative Dan Burton to complain to USA Today in 2002, “This is not a monarchy.”

Congress comes back this week from its spring recess, so this is the perfect time for lawmakers to ask Bush about this latest revelation. While Democrats will likely lead the charge, Republicans should be steaming mad, too. Bush’s decision to mislead Congress time and again should force lawmakers to demand that the president start treating them with honesty and respect.

Bush needs all the help he can get. Many of his legislative priorities, such as the energy bill, remain stalled. With the conventions and election day fast approaching, Congress has a narrow window in which to get its work done. Senator Edward Kennedy has promised to attach a raise in the minimum wage to each bill in the hope of getting it passed, and procedural maneuvers -- such as the increased use of the cloture vote by Senate Republicans -- are only adding to the feeling of gridlock on Capitol Hill. Rather than alienating lawmakers in such an environment, Bush should appeal to them to give him a record to run on.

Instead, he has given Democrats more ammunition to question, and likely block, parts of his agenda. In an April 7 speech on the Senate floor, Senator Robert Byrd said, “It is staggeringly clear that the administration did not understand the consequences of invading Iraq a year ago, and it is staggeringly clear that the administration has no effective plan to cope with the aftermath of the war and the functional collapse of Iraq.”

After Bush’s prime-time press conference last week, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi noted that the United States has spent billions of dollars to rebuild Iraq, even though the administration said Iraq’s oil reserves would cover the cost.

It is lawmakers’ responsibility to ask tough questions of the president, especially as the death toll in Iraq continues to rise and important allies like Spain abandon the military effort. Members of Congress should remind voters that honest conversations about our role there would have been useful before the war began -- and that such discussions would have been possible if the administration had been honest about what it knew. One thing that voters don’t like is feeling that they’ve been lied to. It didn’t work for Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon. Voters should remind lawmakers that it won’t work for George W. Bush, either.

[u]Repeat Offender, Bob Woodward caught Bush lying to Congress. It wasn't the first time[/u], Mary Lynn F. Jones is online editor of The Hill. Her column on Capitol Hill politics runs each week in the online edition of The American Prospect. http://www.prospect.org/web/p...

Discredited Liar Poodle Powell Spins and Spins, But Does Not Deny Sordid Facts ...

04.20.04 (8:28 am) [edit]

[b]Powell Says He Was 'Committed' to Iraq War

[i]Responding to Book, Secretary Cites His Close Involvement in Planning of Attack [/i][/b]

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, responding to a new book about the Bush administration's decision to go to war in Iraq, said yesterday he was closely involved with planning for the attack and had been as "committed as anyone else" to toppling the government of Saddam Hussein.

The book, "Plan of Attack" by Bob Woodward, describes Powell as an opponent of the war strategy pushed by Vice President Cheney, and recounts that the Saudi ambassador, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, learned of the decision to go to war before Powell. But Powell said he was committed from the start to President Bush's war plan if diplomacy failed and that he was well informed about Bush's strategy.

"My support was willing and it was complete, no matter how others might try to impose their policy wishes on my body," Powell said in an interview with the Associated Press.

Powell's statement came on a day the Bush administration scrambled to provide its own version of potentially damaging revelations in the Woodward book, one involving secret expenditures on forward U.S. bases in Kuwait and one describing close collaboration with Saudi Arabia to lower U.S. gasoline prices before the 2004 election.

During the interview with the AP, Powell acknowledged for the first time that he and others had talked to Woodward, a Washington Post assistant managing editor, as "part of our instructions from the White House."

"It was an opportunity to help him write a history, a contemporary history of this period," he said. "It was no secret that all of us were encouraged to talk to Mr. Woodward. In my case, it was just a couple of phone calls."

The book depicts Powell as deeply conflicted about the war. Although it shows him supporting the ouster of Hussein, it portrays him as resisting the unilateral, hard-line approach taken by Cheney. In the end, his loyalty to the president led him to support the decision to go to war.

However, he also took credit for persuading the administration to take its case to the United Nations before ultimately abandoning the diplomatic route.

Once Bush decided on action, Powell said in a separate interview on "The Sean Hannity Show," "I'd be with him for the whole way. I don't quit on long patrols."

Regarding the assertion in the book that Bandar got earlier intelligence briefings on the war preparations than he did, Powell told the AP: "I was intimately familiar with the plan, and I was aware that Prince Bandar was being briefed."

When Powell saw Bush two days after the briefing for Bandar, Powell said the president did "not convey to me a decision on that date, either. He sent me back to do my diplomatic work."

Congressional leaders reacted cautiously yesterday to suggestions that Congress had not been informed of $700 million in expenditures on a "massive, covert public works program" in Kuwait in 2002, well before Congress had passed a resolution authorizing the president to go to war in Iraq.

Lawmakers were kept largely in the dark about the money being channeled into the building of airfields, pipelines and infrastructure needed to launch the war, according to the book. "Congress, which is supposed to control the purse strings, had no real knowledge or involvement, had not even been notified that the Pentagon wanted to reprogram the money," Woodward writes.

Yesterday, a senior Pentagon budget official said, "All of the funds we provided were consistent with existing authorities at the time."

The official said that although the U.S. Central Command had indeed requested $750 million in July 2002 for the Iraq contingency, budget officials made available only $178 million, of which none was for Iraq.

He described these funds as being for such things as communications equipment, fuel and improvements to forward headquarters in the Persian Gulf region.

Only after Congress approved the Iraq war on Oct. 11, 2002, did the Pentagon notify Congress of its intention to use $63 million for five military construction projects. The Pentagon also approved $800 million to prepare for a possible invasion of Iraq.

Rep. C.W. Bill Young (R-Fla.), chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, said that since Sept. 11, 2001, Congress has approved about $159 billion in emergency defense funds, and that "in most cases, these funds were provided with unprecedented flexibility."

But Democrats charged that the issue raised in the book points to Congress's abdication of oversight.

By mid-2002, said Scott Lilly, former Democratic chief of staff on the committee, "there was a high degree of discomfort over the fact that Congress had provided them with more latitude than they should have, and they were pushing the absolute limits on the latitude we gave them."

Fallout from the book spilled over into the presidential campaign when Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.), the presumed Democratic nominee, called an alleged promise by Bandar to lower oil prices before the election "outrageous" and "unacceptable."

Woodward's book described Bandar as hoping "to fine-tune oil prices over 10 months to prime the [U.S.] economy for 2004." On CBS's "60 Minutes" Sunday, Woodward referred to a Saudi "pledge" to lower oil prices before the election, but he did not say that was tied to an effort to reelect Bush.

A top Saudi official denied any deal yesterday. "The allegation that the kingdom is manipulating the price of oil for political purposes or to affect elections is erroneous and has no basis in fact," said Adel Al-Jubeir, foreign affairs adviser to Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah.

The notion of a Saudi scheme to lower oil prices to help Bush was undercut March 31, when Saudi Arabia joined other Organization for Petroleum Exporting Countries members in announcing production cuts aimed at raising oil prices 4 percent.

But the next day, Bandar briefed national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and told reporters Saudi Arabia wanted to lower oil prices from $34 a barrel to $22 to $28.

[u]By Dan Morgan, Washington Post[/u], http://www.washingtonpost.com...

Losing Control: It's Beginning To Look Alot Like Watergate

04.20.04 (7:44 am) [edit]

[b]Echoes of Watergate[/b] fill the air: a president is charged with misdeeds. He is besieged by plans gone awry, betrayed by underlings blowing whistles, harassed by a once-compliant press and barraged by querulous demands for data, documents and testimony.

George W. Bush, who reveres power, is losing his own as events in Washington and Iraq, and their public portrayal, slip from his grasp. His predicaments are rooted less in Lord Acton's adage that "power corrupts" than its corollary that power seduces its holders into overestimating their strength and ignoring its limits. Bush has an inflated sense of several variants of power: bending others to one's will, be they subjects, messengers, adversaries or enemies; silencing dissent; protecting secrets; and building and preserving credibility. The latter is especially important in an election year.

The rising visibility of major White House miscalculations before and after 9/11, including the deteriorating situation in Iraq, have unleashed a skunky whiff of Watergate into Washington's springtime air. Bush's credibility is sinking as did Richard Nixon's when caught covering up the misdeeds of his "plumbers;" his clandestine re-election campaign crew that spied on Nixon's opponents. Bush faces a wider range of potential scandals, which include:

. Iraq: the rationale for, cost of, and occupation plans following America's conquest (DOS, DOD, CIA, FBI);
. Suppressed Medicare costs (HHS) and bioterrorism studies (DOD);
. Insufficient terrorism preparedness and prevention, domestic and international, before and after 9/11 (CIA, FBI, DOD, etc.);
. Mounting fiscal deficits and tax relief only for the wealthy (Treasury, OMB); and
. Skewed or suppressed scientific research and policies (NIH, HHS, FDA, EPA).

Furthermore, criminal jeopardy may lurk beneath headlines in the "outing" by senior White House officials of a CIA spy (Valerie Plame) married to an Iraq-issue defector (former Ambassador Joseph Wilson III). In that case, any Bush-Ashcroft effort to delay or derail the special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, will evoke memories of Nixon's "Saturday Night Massacre" when he fired a prosecutor who was closing in on him.

Nascent scandals also lie in energy policy (including the vice president's list of advisors, on the Supreme Court's current docket), the environment (relaxing arsenic and mercury rules), frayed relations with allies and the United Nations, and on and on . . . In each trouble spot are current and former officials with information and documents that will, almost surely, further tarnish Mr. Bush and his closest advisors.

With so many problems and news from Iraq growing steadily more grisly, Mr. Bush's presidency, like Nixon's, is developing a troubled aura. This will likely beget further difficulties because, as a president's power wanes, the loyalty and obedience of his inner circle and lower-level public employees tends to shrink apace, with each major leak leading to more and larger spurts, like when pressure increases within a frayed hose.

With so many problems, no wonder Watergate references are escalating. Veteran journalist Daniel Schorr suggests that Richard Clarke's evidence of administration laxity toward terrorism has "exploded" Mr. Bush's control of his destiny, as did "former White House counsel John Dean, who started President Nixon down the road to ruin." Mr. Dean himself, meanwhile, just published a litany of Bush abuses of power titled Worse than Watergate. And Sen. Ted Kennedy now calls Iraq "George Bush's Vietnam," charging that "this president has now created the largest credibility gap since Richard Nixon."

A newspaper editorial about Shiite-Sunni collaborations in Iraq is headlined: "U.S. enemies list grows in Iraq." Those who remember Nixon's chicanery recall his "enemies list" of critics, and how he abused the IRS and other government agencies to harass them. Given the Bush administration's fierce assaults against its critics, from former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill to Ambassador Wilson to Bush's own former terrorism "czar" Clarke, it would be no surprise to find that he, like the paranoiac Nixon, keeps a similar list, which is likely to grow as his aura of invincibility fades.

The president and his administration, in Watergate mode, already find themselves focusing more on damage control than new initiatives, both in Washington and Baghdad. They spend time with lawyers and spinmeisters, rather than policy advisors, and are bogged down in old problems, which prevents them from focusing on the cascade of new ones. Their power to "embed" or bully the skeptical media is diminishing. And Mr. Bush's re-election campaign is increasingly shrill, scattered, partisan and reactive—not the image of serene confidence and control he hoped to project.

Watergate words like "credibility gap," "cover-up," "stonewall," and "crisis" abound. As for Iraq, we now hear Vietnam echoes like "chaos," "quagmire" and "nightmare" instead of "liberation," "freedom" and "democracy."

As Clarke and others before him warned, the Iraq "liberation" is proving a double blunder, creating more problems than it solved, while diverting resources needed to capture and shut down Al Qaeda's leadership and give Afghanistan and its people the recovery, hope, security and democracy America promised them. The Iraq invasion was launched and celebrated on mighty words and gestures ("liberation," "national security," "Mission Accomplished"). However, reality was quite different, largely because the ideological Mr. Bush confused words with facts and also confused two types of power: the military might to kill and conquer with the very different strengths needed to rebuild a shattered society, establish order and security, and impose democracy upon its mutually mistrustful citizens.

So, as Iraq continues to spew bad news and Watergate mode prevails in Washington, Mr. Bush will face a growing chorus of highly credentialed detractors, revealers, accusers and questioners. For example, the Defense Department now concedes that it may require many more troops to "pacify" Iraq. There are new reports of prewar warnings by skeptical generals who were pushed around or pushed aside by Donald Rumsfeld. Nothing has been heard for many months from General Edward Shinseki, the Army Chief of Staff sidelined by Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz for maintaining before the Iraq invasion, quite correctly, that many more U.S. troops than were allocated were needed to maintain control after Saddam was dispatched.

Mr. Bush's multiple misrepresentations and misjudgments put him in position to break a key Watergate speed record. From the Watergate burglary on June 17, 1971 to Nixon's resignation on Aug. 8, 1974, it took some 38 months. In between, Nixon managed to keep the tawdry facts and circumstances under sufficient control to win re-election in 1972. In contrast, from the first "new product" announcement of the Iraq invasion in early September, 2002, to election day November 2, 2004, is a mere 26 months, which would beat Nixon's record by 33 percent.

Iraq also may eclipse the presidential war blowback record set by Vietnam. Of course, no civilized exit strategy for American hegemony and troops currently exists and the likelihood of an international takeover is diminished because of (a) little support among our NATO allies, (b) a timorous United Nations, further weakened by the Bush administration's lack of respect and support, and (c) Bush's continued refusal to relinquish effective control. It took six years, from 1962 to 1968, for Vietnam to undo a president, Lyndon Johnson; five years if you count only his time as president. In contrast, the Iraq war began in March, 2003, fewer than 19 months before Election Day 2004.

So, Mr. Bush, ever precocious in his reach for and use of power, is being quickly undone, in part, by chronically miscalculating its potency and limits. Call it hubris, the blind pride and arrogance that often precipitates a fall from power. Mr. Bush sees himself as Ronald Reagan's heir—the cheerful and Teflon-coated conservative. Instead, he may find deeper and stickier genetic ancestry in the dark and ultimately disgraced Nixon.

[u]Losing Control[/u], Thomas R. Asher is a lawyer and president of The American Council, a policy research organization based in Washington, D.C. and Amherst, Mass. Until 1998, he was the board chair of the Center for Responsive Politics - http://www.tompaine.com/featu...

Bush Legitimizes Terrorism

04.20.04 (7:37 am) [edit]

[b]Sharon's "Courageous" Plan

Bush Legitimizes Terrorism[/b]

So President George Bush tears up the Israeli-Palestinian peace plan and that's okay. Israeli settlements for Jews and Jews only on the West Bank. That's okay. Taking land from Palestinians who have owned that land for generations, that's okay. UN Security Council Resolution 242 says that land cannot be acquired by war. Forget it. That's okay.

Does President George Bush actually work for al-Qa'ida? What does this mean? That George Bush cares more about his re-election than he does about the Middle East? Or that George Bush is more frightened of the Israeli lobby than he is of his own electorate. Fear not, it is the latter.

His language, his narrative, his discourse on history, has been such a lie these past three weeks that I wonder why we bother to listen to his boring press conferences. Ariel Sharon, the perpetrator of the Sabra and Shatila massacre (1,700 Palestinian civilians dead) is a "man of peace" - even though the official 1993 Israeli report on the massacre said he was "personally responsible" for it. Now, Mr Bush is praising Mr Sharon's plan to steal yet more Palestinian land as a "historic and courageous act".

Heaven spare us all. Give up the puny illegal Jewish settlements in Gaza and everything's okay: the theft of land by colonial settlers, the denial of any right of return to Israel by those Palestinians who lived there, that's okay. Mr Bush, who claimed he changed the Middle East by invading Iraq, says he is now changing the world by invading Iraq! Okay! Is there no one to cry "Stop! Enough!"?

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.

Iraqi history is already being written. In revenge for the brutal killing of four American mercenaries - for that is what they were - US Marines carried out a massacre of hundreds of women and children and guerillas in the Sunni Muslim city of Fallujah. The US military says that the vast majority of the dead were militants. Untrue, say the doctors. But the hundreds of dead, many of whom were indeed civilians, were a shameful reflection on the rabble of American soldiery who conducted these undisciplined attacks on Fallujah. Many Baghdadi Sunnis say that in the "New Iraq"--the Iraqi version, not the Paul Bremer version - Fallujah should be given the status of a new Iraqi capital.

Vast areas of the Palestinian West Bank will now become Israel, courtesy of President Bush. Land which belongs to people other than Israelis must now be stolen by Israelis because it is "unrealistic" to accept otherwise. Is Mr Bush a thief? Is he a criminal? Can he be charged with abetting a criminal act? Can Iraq now claim to Kuwait that it is "unrealistic" that the Ottoman borders can be changed? Palestinian land once included all of what is now Israel. It is not, apparently, "realistic" to change this, even to two per cent?

Is Saddam Hussein to be re-bottled and put back in charge of Iraq on the basis that his 1990 invasion of Kuwait was "realistic"? Or that his invasion of Iran--when we helped him try to destroy Ayatollah Khomeini's revolution--was "realistic" because he initially attacked only the Arabic-speaking (and thus "Iraqi") parts of Iran?

Or, since President Bush now seems to be a history buff, are the Germans to be given back Danzig or the Sudetenland? Or Austria? Or should we perhaps recreate the colonial possessions of the past 100 years? Is it not "realistic" that the French should retake Algeria - or part of Algeria - on the basis that the people all speak French, on the basis that this was once part of the French nation? Or should the British retake Cyprus? Or Aden? Or Egypt? Shouldn't the French be allowed to take back Lebanon and Syria? Why shouldn't the British re-take America and boot out those pesky "terrorists" who oppose the rule of King George's democracy well over 200 years ago?

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.

I kid thee not. This is the Christian fundamentalist belief, which even the Israeli embassy in Washington go along with--without comment, of course--in their weekly Christian Zionist prayer meetings. Every claim by Osama bin Laden, every statement that the United States represents Zionism and supports the theft of Arab lands will now have been proved true to millions of Arabs, even those who had no time for Bin Laden. What better recruiting sergeant could Bin Laden have than George Bush. Doesn't he realise what this means for young American soldiers in Iraq or are Israelis more important than American lives in Mesopotamia?

Everything the US government has done to preserve its name as a "middle-man" in the Middle East has now been thrown away by this gutless, cowardly US President, George W Bush. That it will place his soldiers at greater risk doesn't worry him--anyway, he doesn't do funerals. That it goes against natural justice doesn't worry him. That his statements are against international law is of no consequence.

And still we have to cow-tow to this man. If we are struck by al-Qa'ida it is our fault. And if 90 per cent of the population of Spain point out that they opposed the war, then they are pro-terrorists to complain that 200 of their civilians were killed by al-Qa'ida. First the Spanish complain about the war, then they are made to suffer for it--and then they are condemned as "appeasers" by the Bush regime and its craven journalists when they complain that their husbands and wives and sons did not deserve to die.

If this is to be their fate, excuse me, but I would like to have a Spanish passport so that I can share the Spanish people's "cowardice"! If Mr Sharon is "historic" and "courageous", then the murderers of Hamas and Islamic Jihad will be able to claim the same. Mr Bush legitimised "terrorism" this week--and everyone who loses a limb or a life can thank him for his yellow streak. And, I fear, they can thank Mr Blair for his cowardice too.

[u]By Robert Fisk, Independent UK[/u], http://www.counterpunch.com/f...

Bush Attacked Because The Idiot Is A Liar, A Traitor & A Criminal ...

04.19.04 (5:12 pm) [edit]

[b]'Leadership secrets of George W. Bush'[/b] - http://www.smirkingchimp.com/...

I figure it's just about time for me to share my leadership secrets, since I've now established my street cred as the world's only Immaculately, Perfectly Defectless and Infallible Leader(tm). So here ya are. Take notes.

[b]GO BY YOUR GUT [/b]- Now, I done heard all this yakkity-yak b.s. about how CEO's and leaders and stuff are supposed to "read books" and "learn stuff" and "talk to people" and "study problems." Who the hell has time for that when there's NASCAR on TV? Dang, what a bunch o' hot air. I'm here to tell ya that ya gotta go by your gut. Trust your gut. I do, and it's never failed me.

My gut told me that cutting taxes not once but three times would create millions of new jobs, get rich people to invest in new businesses, and spur so much growth we wouldn't run any deficits. Okay, so that one didn't work out so well - YET. Let's move on. My gut also told me that Saddam Hussein had Weapons of Mass Destruction, and he was fixin' to use them weapons on a country run by a certain Yours Truly.

Okay, this leads me to my section on HOW TO DEAL WITH MISTAKES, IF YOU NEVER, EVER MAKE THEM. Here's my Five Point Guide:

1) [b]NEVER admit a mistake[/b]. Ever. Not ever. Everything you do is right, perfect, and brilliant. I, myself, have never made a mistake. Some snarky-ass New York media elitist asked me a "gotcha" question at a press conference recently - I think he was tryin' to get me to apologize for a mistake or somethin'. See the tricky part in that? How could I apologize if never MADE a dang mistake?

"Now," you're probably askin', "what if I'm not immaculately, perfectly defectless and infallible like you are, Dubya?" Well, dadgummit, you CAN BE! See? Here's how it works in the case of Iraq. (You might want to get a crayon and write this down.).

I decided to go into Iraq because Saddam Insane had nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, and he was fixin' to use them on us. This was the right decision, even though there were no weapons. Why? Because I made it. I never make mistakes. Therefore, it HAD to be the right decision! Once you get this "Circle of Infallibility™" goin', you can work backwards to the logic part! In this case, all I had to was to change out the reason we went in from "being threatened by an insane guy" to "givin' the gift of freedom to a bunch of oppressed Muslimist heathens." Done deal.

2) [b]SAY YOU DO MAKE A MISTAKE [/b]- Now this has never happened to me personally, so I'm gonna have to make some stuff up. Here's what I would do, if this ever happened to me, which it won't: First, DENY IT. You never make mistakes. While you're denying it, figure out WHO is saying you made a mistake, and GET THE BASTARD. I mean take him down HARD. Wreck his life, go after his family, whatever. He's sayin' bad and wrong things about you - he's fair game. Next, SEE IF THERE'S ANY EVIDENCE YOU MADE A MISTAKE, and FLUSH IT. If all else fails, find somebody who works for you (doesn't matter who - pick anybody) and say that he/she was responsible.

See how easy that was? I don't know why everybody things being a leader is so dang hard.

3) [b]SAY YOU MAKE A REALLY BIG MISTAKE [/b]- Let's say you, uhhhh, do something that upsets a lot of hand-wringing, ivory-tower, never-met-a-payroll elitists in the media. For me, that's the whole Iraq deal. For you, it might be putting out a product that kills people, like that Ford Pinto deal. Here's whatcha do.

FIRST - Go through everything I said above - DENY. GET THE BASTARD. DESTROY THE EVIDENCE. FIND A PATSY.

4) [b]IF EVERYTHING ELSE FAILS, CHANGE THE DANG SUBJECT[/b]! (Refer to #1 "Circle of Infallibility™" Above) In your case, Mr. Death Car, you might say that the whole point of making a car that killed people was so that these lucky people could meet Jesus sooner, since you are a very religious person. Killing people then become far from a destructive act - it becomes part of your glorious spiritual mission. Say that Jesus told you to do this. That makes anyone who criticizes your making cars that kill people an anti-God, secular humanist lefty-liberal hate-American-business-fi rst, outside-the-mainstream loser boy (or girl).

5)[b] YOUR HOLE CARD -- ALWAYS EMPHASIZE THAT GOD IS TALKING TO YOU, AND YOUR JUST DOING WHAT THE BIG GUY WANTS[/b] - I can't tell how important this is - and in my case, it's actually true! The amazing thing is that the thing I want to do - invade Iraq, give tax cuts to the rich, cut veterans' benefits, drill for oil in national parks - is always EXACTAMUNDO what God wants to do! Can you beat that? What this means is that anyone who is against what you want to do is a sinner - a tool of Satan. Sinners are evil-doers. Evil-doers must be destroyed. See? What you want to do - WILL OF GOD. Folks who oppose you - EVIL-DOERS WHO MUST BE DESTROYED. Man, it doesn't get simpler than that! That makes running a small company, a big company, or a whole dang country a breeze!

[u][b]FINALLY - FREQUENT VACATIONS ARE A MUST[/b][/u]. You're a leader. Checking your gut all the time is exhausting. If you're not vacationing at least 40% of the time, you're pushing yourself TOO DANG HARD!

Neo-Cons Want War in Iran ... More WMDs Lies & Fabrications?

04.19.04 (9:46 am) [edit]

The insane neo-cons now want war with Iran! ... Iran's population is almost three times that of Iraq and their geographical size more than twice that of Iraq! ... Do you really trust the neo-cons to tell the truth about Iran? Of course NOT if you have any brains!

More WMDs lies and fabrications? ... Don't believe a thing you hear the neo-cons say about Iran ... Iran poses no threat to our nation ... Ariel Sharon has ordered his Useful Idiot Puppet Bush to wage war upon Iran ... America should tell Sharon and the neo-cons to Go To Hell!

P.S. By the way, the neo-cons have fucked-up Iraq so badly, do you really think they could take on Iran? Ho ho ho ho ho.

[u][b]Neocons See Iran Behind Shi'ite Uprising[/b][/u]

Neo-conservatives close to the administration of President George W Bush are pushing for retribution against Iran for, they say, sponsoring this week's Shiite uprising in Iraq led by radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.

Despite the growing number of reports that depict the fighting as a spontaneous and indigenous revolt against the U.S.-led occupation, the influential neo-cons are calling on Bush to warn Tehran to cease its alleged backing for al-Sadr and other Shia militias or face retaliation, ranging from an attack on Iranian nuclear facilities to covert action designed to overthrow the government.

But independent experts say that while Iran has no doubt provided various forms of assistance to Shia factions in Iraq since the ouster of former President Saddam Hussein one year ago, its relations with Sadr have long been rocky, and that it has opposed radical actions that could destabilize the situation.

"Those elements closest to Iran among the Shiite clerics (in Iraq) have been the most moderate through all of this," according to Shaul Bakhash, an Iran expert at George Mason University here.

Many regional specialists agree that Iran has a strategic interest in avoiding any train of events that risks plunging Iraq into chaos or civil war and partition.

Neo-conservatives centered in Vice President Dick Cheney's [Gestapo] office and among the civilian leadership in the Pentagon have strongly opposed any détente with Iran, and have frequently blamed it for problems the United States has encountered in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

Neo-conservatives outside the administration, such as former Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle and his colleagues at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), Michael Ledeen and Reuel Marc Gerecht, called even before the Iraq war for Washington to support indigenous efforts to oust the "mullahcracy" in Tehran, which is seen as an archenemy of both the United States and Israel.

Some neo-conservatives have seized on Sadr's uprising as a new opportunity both to raise tensions against Iran and to divert attention from Washington's bungling of relations with the Shia community in Iraq.

Top U.S. officials both here and in Iraq have not yet named Iran as the hidden hand behind Sadr, although a senior reporter at the right-wing Washington Times, Rowan Scarborough, quoted unnamed "military sources" Wednesday as telling him that Sadr "is being aided directly by Iran's Revolutionary Guard and by Hezbollah, an Iranian-created terrorist group based in Lebanon."

Unnamed "Pentagon officials" gave a similar account to the New York Times, although Times reporter James Risen stressed that CIA officials disagreed with that analysis, adding, "some intelligence officials believe that the Pentagon has been eager to link Hezbollah to the violence in Iraq to link the Iranian regime more closely to anti-American terrorism."

The Iran hand was first raised in connection with Sadr's revolt by Michael Rubin, who just returned as a "governance team advisor" for the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Iraq to his previous position as a resident fellow at AEI.

In a column published in the Los Angeles Times on Sunday, he complained that Washington and the CPA had failed to provide liberal and democratic Iraqi leaders with anything like the kind of support that Iran was supplying to radical Shia leaders and their "gangs."

Rubin said that on a visit to the Shia-dominated south he found that Iranians were pouring money and arms to key Islamist parties, including the Da'wa, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), and Sadr himself, whose rise over the past year, according to Rubin, is explained by the "ample funding he receives through Iran-based cleric Ayatollah Kazem al Haeri, a close associate of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameini."

Another senior CPA adviser, Larry Diamond, a neo-conservative who specializes in democratization at the California-based Hoover Institution, told IPS this week that Sadr's Mahdi Army, and other Shia militias, are being armed and financed by Iran with the aim of imposing "another Iranian-style theocracy."

"Iran is embarked on a concerned, clever, lavishly-resourced campaign to defeat any effort for any genuine pluralist democracy in Iraq," said Diamond. "The longer we wait to confront the thug, the more troops he'll have in his army, the more arms he'll have and financial support – virtually all coming from Iran – the more he will intimidate and kill sincere democratic actors in the country, and the more impossible our task at building democracy will become."

"I think we should tell the Iranian regime that if they don't cease and desist, we will play the same game, that we will destabilize them," he added.

On Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal's editorial page took up the same theme, arguing that Sadr has talked "openly of creating an Iranian-style Islamic Republic in Iraq (and) has visited Tehran since the fall of Saddam. "His Mahdi militia is almost certainly financed and trained by Iranians," the editorial continued, adding, "Revolutionary Guards may be instigating some of the current unrest."

"As for Tehran, we would hope the Sadr uprising puts to rest the illusion that the mullahs (in Tehran) can be appeased. As Bernard Lewis teaches, Middle Eastern leaders interpret American restraint as weakness. Iran's mullahs fear a Muslim democracy in Iraq because is it a direct threat to their own rule."

"If warnings to Tehran from Washington don't impress them, perhaps some cruise missiles aimed at the Bushehr nuclear site will concentrate their minds," the Journal suggested.

On Wednesday, New York Times columnist William Safire asserted the existence of an axis involving Sadr, Iran, Hezbollah and Syria. "We should break the Iranian-Hezbollah-Sadr connection in ways that our special forces know how to do," he wrote.

But this line of reasoning appears particularly curious to Bakhash, who notes that the Sadr family, including Moqtada himself, is precisely the kind of Iraqi Shiite who would be deeply suspicious of Tehran.

"Sadr's father was a strong Iraqi nationalist, like Moqtada himself," he told IPS. "He often used to question why there were in Iraq ayatollahs who spoke Arabic with a Persian accent."

Like other experts, Bakhash believes that Iran has indeed been heavily involved with the Iraqi Shia community, but sees the leadership providing far more support to SCIRI and its Badr brigades than to Sadr, who, from Tehran's point of view, is seen as untrustworthy.

Bakhash also questions the neo-conservative assumption that Iran wants to destabilize Iraq now. "Obviously the Iranians are not unhappy to see the Americans discomfited in Iraq, but I don't think it's the policy of the Iranian government to destabilize Iraq right along its own border," he said.

Middle East historian Juan Cole of the University of Michigan also questions the notion of a link between Iran and Sadr in the current uprising. While Sadr's views on theocratic government are consistent with those of Iranian hardliners, according to Cole, his outspoken Iraqi nationalism poses a major challenge to Khameini's claim to authority over all Shiite religious communities, including those outside Iran.

Contrary to the Journal's assumptions, adds Cole, Sadr did not receive much encouragement from the Iranian leaders he met in Tehran. "The message he got was that he should stop being so divisive and should cooperate more with the other Shiite leaders."

Geoffrey Kemp, an Iran specialist at the Nixon Center and Middle East adviser on former president Ronald Reagan's National Security Council staff, says he has little doubt the Iranians have influence with several different Shiite groups, and that there might even be "rogue elements" inside Iraq who back Sadr.

But he agrees that Tehran's strongest ties are with SCIRI and the Badr Brigades, who were trained by the Revolutionary Guard inside Iran during Hussein's rule. "The situation is far too complex to make simplistic statements about what Iran is or is not doing," Kemp told IPS. "But to suggest that this is an Iranian-inspired insurrection is a stretch."

"The neo-conservatives are all so heavily invested in the success of Iraq that instead of blaming the Pentagon for some extraordinary blunders, they want to blame everyone else – the State Department, the Iranians, the Syrians for the mess that was partly of their own making.

[u]Jim Lobe, works as Inter Press Service's correspondent in the Washington, D.C., bureau. He has followed the ups and downs of neo-conservatives since well before their rise in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks[/u]. - http://www.antiwar.com/lobe/?...

Dubya: The Case of Cheney's Brain & The Ghoulish 'Vision Thing'

04.19.04 (9:32 am) [edit]

Maybe I shouldn't be hard on the president for flunking his pop quiz on foreign policy. After all, it wasn't a take-home exam and he didn't have Dick Cheney by his side.

But when a reporter at the prime-time news conference asked what errors he'd made and what lessons he learned, the president was stumped. "I'm sure something will pop into my head here in the midst of this press conference, with all the pressure of trying to come up with an answer, but it hadn't yet," he said.

After another golly-gee-whiz stumble, he added, "you just put me under the spot here and maybe I'm not as quick on my feet as I should be in coming up with one."

Of course, if he needs a little help, I'm happy to share a few of the greatest hits from his bloopers reel. Mistakes? Howsabout them weapons of mass destruction? Howsabout the persistent links to nuclear weapons? Howsabout the connection between Saddam Hussein and 9/11. Howsabout the "Mission Accomplished" speech or the idea that Iraqis would see us as liberators not occupiers? Anyone hear an "oops"?

In the aftermath, many called the president's refusal to admit mistakes a savvy political strategy: strong men never say they're sorry. But I think there's something much more chilling going on. He truly doesn't believe he made any mistakes.

Last year, we launched a pre-emptive, unilateral war (OK, there are 60 New Zealanders, 230 Nicaraguans and 27 soldiers from Kazakhstan, etc.) on the explicit grounds that Saddam was an imminent threat to our nation. Now the moral justification for this war has simply, seamlessly and without explanation morphed from defending ourselves to "changing the world."

The president said that even if he'd known then what he knows today, he would still have invaded Iraq. In an honest, passionate moment he proclaimed, "Freedom is the Almighty's gift to every man and woman in this world. And as the greatest power on the face of the Earth, we have an obligation to help the spread of freedom. ...That is what we have been called to do, as far as I'm concerned."

But is that what the Senate felt called to do when it gave him the chit for war? Or the country?

It's not just that "weapons of mass destruction" have become "weapons of mass destruction program-related activities." The commander in chief has become the evangelist.

Remember when we disparaged George the Father for his breezy dismissal of "the vision thing"? What was he? A mere pragmatist. Well, George the Son has the vision thing in its pure tunnel form: the facts don't blur the fixed view.

In Texas, they talk about a man who is all hat and no cattle. But in Washington, we have a Texan who is all vision and no reality.

When another reporter asked the president how he got "it" -- the WMDs, our welcome as liberators -- so wrong, Bush stumbled again. Wrong isn't on his answer sheet because he's conflated two definitions of the same word: the wrong that's "incorrect" and the wrong that's "immoral." And if what he's done is moral it cannot be a mistake.

Time and again he has proudly described himself as a man who sees the world in black and white. "We are in a conflict between good and evil." "There is no neutral ground between good and evil." "You're either evil or you're good. This great nation stands on the side of good."

But what happens in his world when right people do wrong things? They don't. Morality is mistake-proof. If the mission is right, everything else is a detail. Do I hear the word "crusade"?

Historian Alan Lichtman says the Bush vision "combines Teddy Roosevelt's triumphalism and Jerry Falwell's moralism. If you are on a moral crusade you cannot admit you are on the wrong path. If you are doing the good moral work you cannot apologize." Right and wrong are not facts; they're ideals.

The terrible irony is that Iraq has -- now -- become a front line on the war on terror and a training ground for terrorists. We can't declare victory and leave, as was famously said of Vietnam. It is indeed unthinkable to depose a tyrant and see him replaced by civil war or a religious despot. We are left seeking a pragmatist to lead us out of Bush's ideological mess.

The other day, a 20-year-old corporal fighting in Fallujah said, "I just hope we end up improving this country. Otherwise, I'll figure this was a waste of time."

These young men and women are left to correct the mistakes of a president who doesn't even know he made them. So much for the vision thing.

[u]The Vision Thing by Ellen Goodman[/u], http://www.smirkingchimp.com/...

Bush's Death Toll Tops 700 U.S. Soldiers Killed for Halliburton, Etc.

04.18.04 (4:49 pm) [edit]

When will Bush's death toll come to an end? When Halliburton tells Bush that they've wrung all the ugly war-profits from the US and Iraq that this particular war will bear until the neo-con's next war (Syria, Iran, etc.?)!

U.S. troop deaths in Iraq reached 700, with 504 killed in combat, on Sunday as the military added 11 American casualties to the war's death toll.

Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, meanwhile, said Sunday that he will withdraw Spanish troops from Iraq "in the shortest time possible."

Zapatero, who was sworn into office Saturday, had previously vowed to bring home Spain's 1,300 troops if the United Nations did not have "political and military control" in Iraq by June 30.

The U.S. casualties announced Sunday included five Marines killed in fierce fighting near Iraq's border with Syria.

The Marines were killed Saturday when a patrol reported coming under attack by insurgents with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades near the town of Husaybah, the Marines said.

Reinforcements, backed by helicopters, also came under fire by insurgents operating from near Husaybah's former Baath Party headquarters, the military said.

The fight continued through the night, the Marines said, pitting their troops against 120 to 150 insurgents. The Marines estimated 25 to 30 insurgents were killed in the attack.

They also reported seeing women and children surrounding mortar positions but could not tell if they were there voluntarily. They said the insurgents fired at medical helicopters carrying wounded Marines from the battlefield.

Elsewhere, three U.S. soldiers were killed Saturday when their 1st Armored Division convoy was ambushed near the southern Iraqi town of Diwaniyah.

Three Iraqi civilians and a member of radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's militia, the Mehdi Army, were also killed, Iraqi police in Diwaniyah said.

A ninth American, assigned to the 1st Marine Expeditionary Unit, was killed Saturday in fighting west of Baghdad in the violent Anbar province.

Officials announced two more deaths Sunday. A U.S. soldier was killed and two others injured Saturday when their tank rolled over in north Baghdad, and another soldier died of wounds received Saturday in a roadside bombing.

[b]Najaf, Fallujah relatively calm[/b]

Two Iraqi cities that have been centers of fighting between insurgents and U.S.-led coalition troops -- Najaf and Fallujah -- were relatively calm Sunday.

No talks were scheduled about the situation in Fallujah, the city west of Baghdad where fierce fighting dominated the first two weeks of April.

Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Sunday that U.S. forces in Fallujah faced the "worst of the worst" of Iraqi insurgents, who he said use women and children as shields.

Myers said the military sees a "pretty good coordination" in Fallujah between former elements of the Saddam Hussein regime and terrorists possibly coordinated by fugitive al Qaeda suspect Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

"We don't know for sure that he's there, but he's been there before," Myers said on CNN's "Late Edition."

Coalition troops remained deployed outside the Shiite Muslim holy city of Najaf in south-central Iraq, where al-Sadr and his Mehdi Army were holed up.

Minor clashes were reported elsewhere in southern Iraq between al-Sadr supporters and other coalition forces.

Al-Sadr's supporters have been fighting allied troops since the coalition closed their newspaper and arrested one of his deputies in connection with the killing of a rival cleric last year.

The coalition is seeking to capture or kill al-Sadr, who is wanted for questioning in the same killing, but it is feared that military action could spark further violence.

Several parties, including Iranians, are trying to negotiate with al-Sadr.

Myers said al-Sadr "has been marginalized" by other Shiite clerics and that he saw no signs of Sunnis and Shiites uniting against the coalition.

"Right now he has been so marginalized there is not a city under his control," Myers said. "His militia has either melted away, or been either killed or captured."

Al-Sadr's spokesman, Sheikh Qais al-Khazaaly, said Sunday that the cleric was "willing to die in Najaf as his father did."

Al-Sadr's father, Grand Ayatollah Muhammed al-Sadr, and his two older brothers were assassinated by the Saddam regime in 1999.

But, Myers said, al-Sadr's marginalization kept him at bay.

"Why [go in to Najaf] when you don't have to?" he said. "I think Sadr has shown by his statements that he is not only anti-coalition, he is anti-Iraqi. He does not want progress in Iraq."

Myers also said the U.S. authorities were not concerned that Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani -- the most senior Shiite cleric in Iraq -- had rejected the violence of the insurgents as well as that of the coalition.

"He is his own thinker," Myers said. "He is for progress [and] certainly doesn't want a theocracy."

Pope John Paul II called on Iraqi kidnappers Sunday to show "humanity" and free their hostages, including U.S. Army Pfc. Keith Matthew Maupin, 20, a reservist from Batavia, Ohio. (Full story)

[b]New Iraqi military leaders chosen[/b]

Amid concerns that Iraq's security forces were inadequate to the task of securing the country, defense minister Ali Allawi announced newly appointed military leaders in his ministry and said the new Iraqi military would eventually number 200,000.

"Iraqi forces will be defensive in nature, composed of volunteers only," Allawi said in Baghdad. "The military will serve their people without religious or sectarian or tribal or political discrimination."

Allawi also said he was confident Iraqi forces would be able to handle "the enemies of Iraq [who] are carrying out aggressive acts to get Iraq back to the old days."

The coalition announced that the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps had captured a suspected anticoalition leader near the northern city of Tikrit early Sunday.

Hakeem Badour Khalaf, the coalition said, has been implicated in the deaths or injuries of at least three people, including two U.S. soldiers and an interpreter.

In Baghdad, the Advisory City Council helped in the selection of a mayor Sunday. The council heard from the final eight mayoral candidates who were chosen from more than 90 applicants.

The Coalition Provision Authority has the final say in the matter after the council provides a list of the three candidates with the most votes. Coalition officials said they expected to confirm the council's choice.

[u]Eleven more U.S. troops die in Iraq[/u] - http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD...

Dubya Dolls: Dress-up Captain Queeg Bush to Reflect His Weak & Corrupt Character

04.18.04 (8:54 am) [edit]

[u]Dressing up the President to reflect his true character[/u] - http://www.villagevoice.com/i...

Even as his Captain Queeg–ish press conference performance tore up the airwaves, an invitation to dress the prez "in hilarious outfits that reflect his true character" crossed our desk. Alas, it was not from the White House (we have some things we'd like to dress down George about while we dress him up), but rather from the folks behind the Dubya doll, a 7.25-inch refrigerator-magnet who follows on the heels of Michelangelo's David, Venus de Milo, and other fridge dolls of seasons past. In his most recent incarnation, the miniature commander in chief (really a paper doll with a magnetic bod that alleviates the tabs conventional paper dolls depend on) has his pick of three costumes: a Dorothy dress for state visits to Oz (with the added fillip of Dick Cheney in a basket as Toto), a bloody tool, for masquerading as Texas Chainsaw Dubya, and a flowered bikini, for lazy afternoons under the Crawford sun. Don't think Bushie in any outfit is a laughing matter? Cheer up: The Republican convention—when you'll get a chance don your own Dorothy dress, wave a placard, and scream right in his face—is only four months away. (Dubya Dolls, $19.99 at www.dubyadolls.com)

Failures To Blame For Blood-Thirsty Fiascos: Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld & Rice

04.18.04 (8:51 am) [edit]

The minute reexamination of the Bush administration's response to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks has obscured much more important failings that continue to endanger our national security. There is no doubt that the administration could have performed better than it did both before and after Sept. 11. On the other hand, the recriminations are unfair. Knowing which of the many possible threats that intelligence agencies constantly identify are real and require dramatic action is the very hardest part of decision-making. Requiring perfection in this area is simply unrealistic.

We can, however, hold the administration responsible for failing to heed warnings that the United States' armed forces were too small, that the important wars in Afghanistan and Iraq could not be waged primarily with air power and that only large deployments of ground forces throughout both countries could secure America's aims and strengthen America's security. It is ironic that critics of the administration are so focused on rehashing past failures while ignoring policies that are preparing us for future disasters.

For nearly a decade, observers have argued that America's armed forces were too small to accomplish the many missions they faced and might face. The reduction in the size of the armed forces following the end of the Cold War was too drastic. It reflected a desire to reap repeated "peace dividends" more than any realistic evaluation of the strategic situation. In the 10 years after 1990, the Army was cut from 18 active divisions to 10, with comparable reductions in the other services. As a result, many Army leaders found it painful to contemplate keeping even two combat brigades (out of 33) in Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s.

It might seem that Sept. 11 would have changed all of that. As the Bush administration immediately ordered the beginning of hostilities against Afghanistan, followed shortly by war against Iraq, surely it realized that the armed forces appropriate for a "strategic pause" were inadequate for a period of large-scale war and massive peacekeeping. Not so. The Army today (like all the other armed services) is smaller than it was in 1997. But the problem has changed from maintaining 15,000 to 20,000 troops in the Balkans to keeping more than 135,000 in Iraq, in addition to continued deployments in the Balkans and Afghanistan.

America has already paid a high price for this parsimony. Failure to deploy ground forces to Afghanistan permitted a large number of al Qaeda fighters who had concentrated north of Kabul to escape to the inaccessible mountains on the Pakistani border. Failure to take control of Kabul, Kandahar, Herat and other critical cities has seriously hindered the United States from establishing a stable and legitimate government in Afghanistan.

In Iraq, the price has been even higher. Failure to get ground forces rapidly into the Sunni Triangle allowed more than 15,000 Republican Guard soldiers and other of Saddam Hussein's troops to melt away into the countryside -- with their weapons and expertise -- and form the nucleus of the resistance to the United States and the new Iraqi government. Failure to take immediate and full control of Baghdad permitted looting and disorder that began the process of discrediting the U.S. presence in the country. Failure to maintain adequate force levels since then has led to a failure to quell the growing insurgency and critical delays in reestablishing stability and civil society in Iraq.

All these failures flowed from a greater failure of understanding. This administration came to office with a belief that war is all about destroying targets, that ground forces are unnecessary and that technology is supreme. Much to our sorrow, we have experienced the fact that none of those beliefs are true. Wars of regime change cannot be fought mainly with missiles. Ground forces that can interact with people, perform police functions and maintain order must be present in large numbers during and after hostilities. Excessive haste in withdrawing the inadequate numbers of troops the United States sent to Iraq has only exacerbated these problems.

We must increase the U.S. presence in Iraq substantially, although we will pay a high price for that policy at such a late date. But where will the troops come from? They can come, at this point, only from keeping troops in Iraq who have already served their year there or from sending back troops who have just returned from their missions in Iraq. This policy will destroy morale and harm recruitment and retention, and it will seriously undermine training. Yet it is the only policy we can follow now.

And what if another crisis arises elsewhere? Kosovo is simmering very near a boil, Iran is playing brinkmanship games with U.N. weapons inspectors and who knows where Crisis X -- the one we will probably find ourselves engaged in -- is developing? All we can know for sure is that the tank is dry.

These are the issues that deserve blue-ribbon panels and the urgent attention of Congress. The people to blame for Sept. 11 are Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. The people to blame for our failures since then are Donald Rumsfeld and the Bush administration -- as well as the many critics who have urged even greater defense reductions and those who seek to score cheap political points rather than addressing the real issues.

[u]By Frederick W. Kagan, The writer is a military historian and co-author of "While America Sleeps: Self-Delusion, Military Weakness, and the Threat to Peace Today[/u]." - http://www.washingtonpost.com...

Powell Should Have Quit in Face of Bush-Cheney Neo-Con 'Gestapo'

04.18.04 (8:48 am) [edit]

When Colin Powell decided that Dick Cheney's crazy "fever," as he called the vice president's obsession with linking 9/11 and Saddam, was leading the country into a war it did not need to fight, he should have bared his heart to the president and made his case using the Powell doctrine — with overwhelming force.

Mr. Bush probably wouldn't have listened. He was in Mr. Cheney's gloomy sway, and Rummy's bellicose sway. And W. felt competitive with his more popular top diplomat.

But Mr. Powell should have tried. And if the president didn't listen, the secretary should have quit — not let himself be used by the vice president and his "Gestapo office" of Pentagon neocons, as Mr. Powell referred to them, to put a diplomatic fig leaf on a predetermined war plan and to present bogus intelligence to the U.N.

He knew his word held enormous weight around the world. And he knew he was the only one, out of all the officials in on the clandestine rush to war, who had fought in a war. He should have spoken up for all those soldiers who would fight and die and be maimed for Dick Cheney's nutty utopian dream of bombing the world into freedom, and W.'s dream of being so forceful with Saddam, the slime bag who survived his father's war, that he would forever banish his family's bête noire — the wimp factor.

It would have been much more honorable than playing Achilles sulking in his Foggy Bottom tent, privately pouting to Bob Woodward that he had warned the president about the Pottery Barn effect — break Iraq and "you know you're going to be owning this place" — and tattling that his colleagues were engaged in "lunacy."

"At times, with his closest friends, Powell was semidespondent," his pal Mr. Woodward writes in "Plan of Attack." "His president and his country were headed for a war that he thought might just be avoided, though he himself would not walk away."

Mr. Woodward, who is clearly channeling Mr. Powell, as he has done to present Mr. Powell's side of the story in past books, recreates his innermost thoughts: "He saw in Cheney a sad transformation. The cool operator from the first gulf war just would not let go. Cheney now had an unhealthy fixation. Nearly every conversation or reference came back to Al Qaeda and trying to nail the connection with Iraq. He would often have an obscure piece of intelligence. Powell thought that Cheney took intelligence and converted uncertainty and ambiguity into fact. It was about the worst charge that Powell could make about the vice president. But there it was."

Everyone in Washington has been puzzling over how Mr. Cheney, a reasonable, cautious, popular man in the first Bush administration, turned into Pluto, king of the underworld and proponent of worst-case scenarios and pre-emption.

But Mr. Powell shared his dread, Cassandra-like, with Mr. Woodward: "The more Powell dug, the more he realized that the human sources were few and far between on Iraq's W.M.D. It was not a pretty picture."

George Tenet comes across in the book as another profile in cravenness. On Dec. 21, 2002, the C.I.A. chief went to the Oval Office with an aide to present "The Case" on W.M.D. Even Mr. Bush, already deeply enmeshed in war plans, was taken aback at the paucity of it. "Nice try," Mr. Bush said. "I don't think this is quite — it's not something that Joe Public would understand or would gain a lot of confidence from." Turning to Mr. Tenet, he added: "I've been told all this intelligence about having W.M.D. and this is the best we've got?"

When the president asked how confident he was, Mr. Tenet, premier apple polisher, gave Mr. Bush the answer he wanted to hear: "Don't worry, it's a slam dunk!"

Just as the Democratic president ducked behind the parsed line, "I did not have sexual relations with that woman," so the Republican president ducked behind the parsed line, "I have no war plans on my desk."

The plans for invading "The House of Broken Toys," as the C.I.A. referred to Iraq, may not have been sitting on his desk, but he secretly started planning with Rummy for war with Iraq in November 2001, and with Tommy Franks starting the next month. Once they were thick into the planning, the president couldn't turn back, of course. That would make him like the loathed Bill Clinton — a lot of bold talk and not much action — not like "The Man," as Mr. Cheney called his warrior president.

[u]By Maureen Dowd, NY Times[/u], http://www.nytimes.com/2004/0...

Bush Can't Recall His "Mistakes". Let Me Help You, George W.: YOUR F*CK-UP IN IRAQ!

04.17.04 (8:48 am) [edit]

[b]Bush Recalls No Mistakes In Presidency

[i]Let Me Help: Ill-Advised Invasion Of Iraq, For One[/i][/b]

President George W. Bush told reporters at a rare prime-time news conference that he couldn't think of any mistakes he has made since he was inaugurated.

The president appeared totally flummoxed when asked to name one. He hemmed and hawed and aw-shucked, suggested that such a question was better left to historians.

He complained about being asked such a question "in the midst of this press conference with all the pressure of trying to come up with an answer."

He then veered toward humility. "I don't want to sound like I've made no mistakes. I'm confident I have." But he said he just wasn't "as quick on my feet as I should be in coming up with one."

Well, let me try to help. Let's start with his invasion of Iraq.

That Bush mistake is one we will be paying for indefinitely, both in the human cost -- not to mention the diplomatic and financial price ($121 billion so far).

The mistake was the false premise underlying the U.S. invasion, a trumped-up claim that Bush insisted on repeating Tuesday night when he claimed that Saddam Hussein was "a threat to the region, he was a threat to the United States."

And he had weapons of mass destruction that posed an imminent danger to us.

"Of course I want to know why we haven't found a weapon yet," he told reporters after a year-long search has turned up no evidence of such weapons. "But I still know Saddam Hussein was a threat. He was a threat because he had used weapons of mass destruction on his own people."

As for the weapons, the president said wistfully: "They could still be there."

The president has a large taxpayer-financed staff that is supposed to prepare him for likely questions he would face at a news conference.

But either Bush or the staff flubbed a question that every reporter in Washington could have predicted: Would he apologize for the government failures that led to the Sept. 11 attacks?

The question was a natural because Richard Clarke, his former counterterrorism director, had offered such an apology last month.

But don't expect one from the president. He wasn't responsible for 9/11. Osama bin Laden was, Bush replied.

Meanwhile, the American casualty toll continues to mount in Iraq and is beginning to get the attention of the American people.

And though he rejects the analogy, the U.S. involvement in Iraq is starting to look like the Vietnam quagmire.

Asked about any parallel with Vietnam, Bush dismissed such a comparison, saying it would send the wrong message to the troops and the wrong message to the enemy. That sure reminds me of Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon.

Even more reminiscent was Bush's constant refrain: "We are going to stay the course." It was 1967 and 1970 all over again.

Bush wants us to forget the promises that his administration made before the war that happy Iraqis would welcome the U.S. military invaders as liberators.

And he shamelessly continues his faltering effort to depict the invasion of Iraq as somehow connected to the war on terrorism.

In doing so, Bush is trying to get off the hook for failing to keep his eye on the ball, which would have been to focus on the fight in Afghanistan and the hunt for Osama bin Laden.

Iraq -- which should have been a sideshow -- has dominated his radar screen since he became president.

Both Clarke and former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill have attested to Bush's determination to get rid of Saddam Hussein from day one.

It was a policy in search of justification. And his ongoing attempts to connect the 9-11 tragedy with Saddam Hussein would be laughable if they weren't so blatantly dishonest.

Bush acknowledges he faces tough times and that he plans to send more troops to Iraq and they will be there for an indefinite period, probably long after the United States returns sovereignty to the Iraqi people on June 30.

Maybe after June, the president will find time to ponder whether he has made any mistakes.

[u]The Boston Channel [/u]- http://www.thebostonchannel.c...

POLL RESULTS ON: Bush's Cocked-up Mistakes!!!!!!

04.17.04 (8:44 am) [edit]

The President needed your help and [i]Progress Report [/i]readers came through in spades. After the President was unable to name his biggest national security mistake since taking office (or any mistake at all), we set up a poll. More than 22,000 readers responded. Here are the results, which have been forwarded to the President.

Invading Iraq without a plan for the aftermath, 34.09%

Telling the American people that Iraq definitely possessed WMD, 26.34%

Failing to send U.S. troops into Tora Bora to capture Osama bin Laden in November 2001, 5%

Disparaging Army Gen. Eric K. Shinseki when he said more troops would be needed in Iraq, 1.71%

Focusing on missile defense while ignoring repeated warnings of an imminent al Qaeda attack before 9/11, 32.55%

The Center for American Progress poll results on http://www.americanprogress.o...

CEO Pay/Worker Pay Ratio Reaches 301-to-1! Believe Me, These Over-Rated Con-Artists Aren't Worth It!

04.17.04 (8:40 am) [edit]

[b]CEO Pay/Worker Pay Ratio Reaches 301-to-1

Average Worker Takes Home $517 a Week; Average CEO $155,769 a Week[/b]

[b]Fascism-in-Action: [i]These over-rated con-artists, embezzlers and swindlers aren't worth it[/i]![/b]

After declining for the last two years, the gap in pay between average workers and large company CEOs surpassed 300-to-1 in 2003. In 2002, the ratio stood at 282-to-1. In 1982, it was just 42-to-1.
According to Business Week's 54th Annual Executive Compensation Survey, published this week, the average large company CEO received compensation totaling $8.1 million in 2003, up 9.1% from the previous year. Business Week's survey covers the 365 largest companies that have reported their executive pay to date.

[i]From 1990 to 2003[/i]:

CEO pay rose 313%
The S&P 500 rose 242%
Corporate profits rose 128%
Average worker pay rose 49%
Inflation rose 41%

The average production worker fared less well in 2003. Their annual pay was $26,899 in 2003, up just 2.1% from 2002 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The average worker took home $517 in their weekly paycheck in 2003; the average large company CEO took home $155,769 in their weekly pay.

If the minimum wage had increased as quickly as CEO pay since 1990, it would today be $15.71 per hour, more than three times the current minimum wage of $5.15 an hour.

"While workers are increasingly anxious about their job security, and how they will pay the rising costs of everything from health insurance to housing, from college to gasoline, corporate executives continue to distance themselves from the cares and worries of those they lead. It sends a poor message to demand cost cutting from the factory floor, while costs in the executive suite are left to soar,"said Scott Klinger, spokesperson for United for a Fair Economy, an independent national non-profit that raises awareness of growing economic inequality.

"Boards remain far too clubby in the post-Enron world. We need some new board members who can say 'no' to executive pay packages that widen the chasm among those who collectively create shareholder value,"said Klinger.

[b]CONTACT:[/b] United For A Fair Economy
Betsy Leondar-Wright, 617-423-2148 x13 - http://www.commondreams.org/n...

Who Really Pays the Taxes in America? Not the Fascists: Not Corporations & Not the Rich & Not Bush!

04.17.04 (8:34 am) [edit]

[b]Who Really Pays Taxes in America?[/b]

Recent news articles about skyrocketing tax fraud and corporate tax dodging have prompted a high level of public concern about the overall fairness and effectiveness of our current tax system. AskQuestions.org – an online news site that addresses issues raised by public demand – released a report today on “Who Really Pays Taxes in America?”

Drawn primarily from government statistics, the report describes not only how the tax burden has shifted from corporations to private citizens over the past 20 years, but also a disturbing new twist: the richest American households pay about 30 percent less tax – which includes federal, state, and local taxes combined -- than middle-income households pay. And the public apparently understands what’s going on: an AP poll released Tuesday reports that 49 percent of Americans believe their taxes have gone up, not down, as a result of the Bush tax cuts, consider all the new local and state taxes imposed in response to withering Federal grants to the states. And new CNN/Money Magazine poll reports that, "60% of Americans said the Bush tax cut did not personally help them."

In his proposed budget for 2005, President Bush cuts another $6 billion in federal aide to states, even though 30 states already face shortfalls totaling about $40 billion next year and more cutbacks in state spending are inevitable, as well as more increases in local taxes. While there are no national statistics that add up the costs, anecdotal evidence is clear. One California couple received a $100 tax refund from President Bush for 2003, but paid $515 in new local taxes. A self-employed man living in Nassau County, NY got a $300 tax rebate last year, but his property taxes went up $2,250.

While honest taxpayers deal with their growing burden, the independent IRS Oversight Board reported that tax fraud is $311 billion dollars per year – more than federal spending on Medicare in 2003 and greater than the gross revenues of either Walmart or General Electric. The Board continually requests funding to strengthen resources for IRS enforcement, but because some of the biggest campaign contributors may be the country’s worst tax cheaters, the incentives for auditing tax cheats is nil. As a result, audits are focused on those at the bottom of the income scale.

Yesterday, David Cay Johnston reported in The New York Times that corporate audit rates have dropped by half in recent years, and noted that in 2003 the IRS conducted face-to-face audits with only seven out of 1000 corporations (compared to 29 per thousand in 1992).

“If we simply collected the taxes cheaters are withholding from the system, we would have enough money to pay the college fees of every student in America, or to provide health insurance for small business employees,” says the AskQuestions.org report.

AskQuestions.org practices “bottom-up” journalism by inviting the public to submit questions. The most popular questions are handed over to professional researchers and reporters. Answering “Who Really Pays Taxes?” required the AskQuestions.org team to assemble a dozen practical suggestions from a range of experts about increasing the fairness of the tax code while also making it more effective at stimulating sustained economic growth.

Neither Presidential candidate is likely to talk about fraud and favoritism during the election campaign, but voters apparently want answers on these very issues. And the AskQuestions report frames the debate from a voter’s perspective, so that people will be armed with the information they need in order to raise their concerns with the candidates.

[b][i]Authored by the Executive Director of AskQuestions.org, Cheryl Woodard, the full report is available online, along with the public questions and comments that prompted the article at http://www.askquestions.org/d... [/i]

Woodard is a co-founder of several computer magazines, including PC Magazine and Macworld. A full-time business consultant to magazine publishers, Woodard sits on the board of directors at the Independent Press Association. The AskQuestions.org project is a collaboration between Woodard and journalist Mark Dowie, Berkeley city councilmember Linda Maio, and writer/publisher Ted Nace. Woodard's email is cheryl@askquestions.org. [/b] - http://www.commondreams.org/v...

Convoluted Conservative Fascism: You Don't Deserve This!!!!!

04.17.04 (8:28 am) [edit]

[b]TAXES: The Bush Tax Cut Myth[/b]

Having personally pocketed more than $30,000 in new tax breaks, President Bush today will celebrate April 15 by touting his tax policy's effect on the economy. Bush will visit Des Moines, Iowa – a city that has seen its unemployed population double since the President took office. His speech will most likely ignore the fact that his latest tax cut gave less than $100 to 87% of Iowans, excluded more than 125,000 Iowa kids from the child tax credit, while doing nothing to deal with the fact that Iowa has seen 27,000 more workers added to its unemployment roster. While the White House continues to claim that "every American who pays taxes has benefited from the president's tax relief," two new polls show that Americans are not fooled by this deceptive rhetoric, and understand that most of the tax benefits went to a small wealthy sliver of the population. A new Money Magazine poll shows "60% of Americans said the Bush tax cut did not personally help them" while an AP poll shows that "49% of Americans said their overall tax burden — including federal, state and local taxes — had gone up" since President Bush took office. Just 13% said their taxes had gone down. Of course, there was a select group of people who did benefit: a new Public Campaign study shows how Bush campaign donors are reaping a windfall.

[u]POLL NUMBERS REFLECT TAX REALITY[/u]: The new poll numbers are not surprising: USA Today reports the tiny tax cuts middle-class families received from Bush's tax bills are even smaller than promised. Additionally, the White House has left out more than 20 million children (including more than 250,000 children of U.S. service men/women) from the full child tax credit, and has refused to push Congress to expand it. Meanwhile, middle-class families are now being forced to deal with increased state/local taxes and higher fees needed to make up for the deficits the Bush tax cuts created. And while President Bush continues to parrot the "tax cuts create jobs" line – the Gadflyer's Paul Waldman points out just how inefficient the White House's tax cuts have been as a job creator: even if the economy added 300,000 jobs a month for the rest of the year, each job created would have cost U.S. taxpayers $871,046 in tax cuts. For more on the tax cut debate, see American Progress's new Tax Day report.

[u]CORPORATE SHILLS COMPLAIN, WHILE MIDDLE-CLASS GETS STIFFED[/u]: Recent studies have confirmed that the corporate tax rate has declined sharply, with more than 60% of U.S. companies paying no taxes at all. These companies' taxes went down at the same time their profits expanded. But that hasn't stopped corporations from perpetuating a myth that they are overtaxed: Forbes Magazine today published an article complaining about how U.S. corporations are supposedly being ravaged by high tax rates. While the official numbers at first glance appear shocking, a tax consultant admits the truth: "Corporations usually pay a smaller amount than they report on the balance sheet" because of other loopholes. And while the IRS has increased its auditing of ordinary citizens, corporate tax audits have plummeted. And as the St. Petersburg Times editorial board notes, "for most corporations, April 15 is just another day they don't have to worry about paying taxes...The message is clear: Corporations have been allowed, even encouraged, to dodge their tax responsibility." Read this American Progress report on the corporate tax void.

[u]WHITE HOUSE ENCOURAGES CORPORATE TAX EVASION[/u]: The Christian Science Monitor notes one reason for falling corporate tax revenues is so-called "corporate inversions" – the euphemism for a U.S. company acquiring a mailing address in a tax haven country like Bermuda to avoid all U.S. taxes. ABC News reported on 7/12/02 that while President Bush "says the Bermuda loophole should be closed, he has yet to support any of the bills that would do so." In fact, in 2002 the White House worked to strip out House-passed provisions barring federal contracts from going to the scores of U.S. companies that have used the scheme to avoid paying their fair share. The Monitor sums up the situation by noting that the growing "burden on middle-income people and dearth of corporate receipts raise issues of fairness."

[u]COUNTRY CLUB MILLIONAIRES COMPLAIN ABOUT HARDSHIPS[/u]: The data is clear: the top 1% of Americans – people who make an average of $1 million a year – will receive more than $1 trillion in total tax breaks from the Bush tax cuts. Every year, each of these millionaires will get more than $50,000 in new tax cuts. But that hasn't stopped these super-wealthy individuals from complaining: In Denver this evening, "some of the city's wealthiest residents will celebrate by gathering at the Denver Country Club and singing songs about how poor they are now that they've paid the IRS."

[b]9/11: Administration Tales Unravel[/b]

The Administration has repeatedly cited President Bush's daily meetings with CIA Director George Tenet as proof that he was engaged in the terrorism issue prior to 9/11. Appearing on Sean Hannity's radio program National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice said "George Tenet met with the president every morning. And so if he needed any more authority from us he would have been right there to ask the president." But, testifying before the 9/11 Commission yesterday, Tenet told the commission that while Bush was vacationing at his ranch in August 2001 – the critical weeks leading up to the attack – he never once talked to the President, either in person or on the phone. Later in the day, Tenet's spokesman said that the CIA director "momentarily forgot" that he met with the President once on August 17. Rice has also testified that she was not in Crawford during the month of August. This directly contradicted Tenet's March 19 testimony to the committee – which has since been retracted – that the August 6 Presidential Daily Brief was presented to the President with Rice present. In any event, the notion that the President was engaged on a daily basis with his top national security and intelligence personnel in the weeks prior to 9/11 has proven to be completely false.

[u]PRESIDENT BUSH ON VACATION FROM NATIONAL SECURITY ISSUES[/u]: In fact, according to Slate, the President spent 96 days prior to 9/11 on his ranch, at Camp David or at the Bush compound in Kennebunkport – about 40% of his presidency to that point. Over his entire term Bush has spent 500 days at vacation spots. Meanwhile, the average American worker takes 2 weeks of vacation per year. We know the President met with Tenet no more than once while on vacation in August 2001. If the Administration is to be believed, and the President's meetings with Tenet were critical to his understanding of terrorism issues, then a fair question for the Administration is, did the President's absenteeism have an adverse impact on the nation's ability to combat terrorism?

[u]ASHCROFT PLAYING POLITICS WITH 9/11 COMMISSION[/u]: Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) "called on former deputy attorney general Jamie S. Gorelick to resign from the commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks...because she wrote a memo nine years ago setting out the procedures for FBI information sharing." Sensenbrenner's actions were spurred by Attorney General John Ashcroft's decision to declassify the 1995 memo in an attempt to discredit Gorelick. But under questioning by the committee Ashcroft later admitted "that his own deputy attorney general, Larry Thompson, had renewed the terms of the Gorelick memo in August 2001." Further, Ashcroft attempted to blame Gorelick for creating restrictions on interagency information sharing – what he refers to as "the Wall." But, as Gorelick noted, such restrictions were not created by her but by judicial interpretations of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that occurred in the mid-80s. A senior member of the commission staff called the memo Ashcroft declassified "a red herring." Ashcroft's attempt to smear Gorelick was also rejected by the Chairman of the Commission, former Republican Governor of New Jersey Thomas Kean, who said "We don't want to get in a fight with the attorney general, and I hope he doesn't want to get in a fight with us...[but] people ought to stay out of it."

[b]IRAQ: Broken Promises[/b]

Breaking a Pentagon commitment from last fall to limit troop assignments in Iraq to 12 months, defense officials yesterday said "about 20,000 U.S. soldiers due to return from Iraq to their home bases this month and next will have their tours extended at least three months in a plan the Pentagon finalized yesterday." The plan, details of which will be released today, allows few soldiers to escape the extension. The original plan "was to bring troops home as a fresh contingent of about 110,000 moved into Iraq over the past few months. Most of the 20,000 being retained were winding up year-long tours."

[u]MORE BROKEN PROMISES[/u]: Army official Lt. Gen. Richard A. Cody also announced yesterday that Gen. John Abizaid, head of U.S. forces in Iraq, will "decide by July whether to keep the troop level elevated by drawing more fresh forces from home bases." Doing that "would require the Army to break its plan to ensure that some troops get a full 12 months at home after a deployment before being sent out again."

[u]MILITARY FAMILIES SPEAK OUT[/u]: Frustrated with an ongoing war, military families and veterans urged President Bush yesterday to end the war in Iraq. "After a news conference, the families and veterans joined about 40 supporters in a march to the White House a few blocks away where they laid pink, white and yellow carnations in memory of the more than 670 American troops killed since the war began last year." According to Michael Hoffman, a Marine who spent two months in Iraq fighting a war he opposed, the country has deteriorated into chaos. He said "We are not making a better world for the Iraqis."

[u]INSECURITY[/u]: U.N. envoy to Iraq Lakhdar Brahimi announced plans yesterday for an interim government to take over Iraq between the transfer of power on July 1 and subsequent elections. "Differing sharply from the Bush administration's assessment," Brahimi said there must be "considerable" improvement in security if the promised national elections will be held as scheduled in January. Brahimi also condemned the strategies of collective punishment and besieging civilian populations, which have been employed by the U.S. coalition in the town of Fallujah. "The collective punishments are not acceptable, cannot be acceptable, and to cordon off and besiege a city is not acceptable," he said. "There is no military solution to the problems and … the use of force, especially of excessive use of force, makes matters worse." American Progress national security expert P.J. Crowley says we need better answers from the Administration on Iraq.

[b]The Center for American Progress [/b]- http://www.americanprogress.o...

Polls: Americans Not Buying Bush Tax Cut Rhetoric

04.16.04 (8:19 am) [edit]

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 Money Magazine, "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.

[u]Sources[/u]: - http://www.misleader.org/dail...

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.

Bush "Misspoke" (i.e. Lied) Again: This Time It's His 'Mustard Gas' Propaganda!

04.15.04 (10:11 pm) [edit]

[b]Either Bush is a congenital liar or an imbecilic dim-wit or both: Either way, shouldn't we get rid of this immoral creep:[/b]

Once again, President Bush misspoke on a weapons issue, telling the nation that 50 tons of mustard gas were found in Libya - twice the amount actually uncovered.

The White House moved quickly Wednesday to correct the record, with press secretary Scott McClellan seeking out reporters to point out the mistake. The president should have said in his Tuesday night address and press conference that 23.6 tons of mustard gas were found in Libya, instead of 50 tons, McClellan said.

Bush used the 50-ton figure twice.

The first time, he was making the case that his decision to go to war in Iraq has produced foreign policy successes elsewhere. The president argued that Libya's agreement last December to dismantle its weapons of mass destruction programs was the result of the U.S.-led war to topple Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

``Colonel Gadhafi made the decision, and rightly so, to disclose and disarm for the good of the world,'' Bush said, referring to Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi. ``By the way, they found, I think, 50 tons of mustard gas, I believe it was, in a turkey farm, only because he was willing to disclose where the mustard gas was. But that made the world safer.''

The second time, Bush was using the example of the Libyan mustard gas disclosure to suggest that weapons of mass destruction could still turn up in Iraq. Though Bush's prewar allegations of Saddam's alleged weapons were his main rationale for going to war, none has yet been found.

``They could still be there,'' Bush said Tuesday of the Iraq weapons. ``They could be hidden, like the 50 tons of mustard gas in a turkey farm.''

The White House's fast acknowledgement of this error was sharply different from its handling of Bush's now-discredited claim in his January 2003 State of the Union address that Iraq had sought uranium from Africa for weapons.

It wasn't until July 2003 that the White House said the statement, largely based on evidence of Iraqi activities in Niger that turned out to be forged and that had been doubted beforehand by some in the intelligence community, should not have been included in the speech.

When Clinton lied about 'sex' he was crucified by the right-wing media propagandists. Bush can lie over and over and over and over and over again, and non-persuasive excuses and un-convincing rationalizations are fabricated. Why? Perhaps because corporations now own our state-controlled Stalinist-media who panders to their Useful Idiot.

[u]White House: Bush Erred (Lied) on Mustard Gas[/u] - http://cnn.netscape.cnn.com/n...

While Corporations and the Wealthy Benefit from Huge Tax Cuts Poor Families Still Struggle

04.15.04 (5:38 pm) [edit]

Huge tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans have robbed the federal government of much needed revenue that could help fund programs for children, the Children's Defense Fund (CDF) said today. According to statistics released by CDF, the lost revenue could provide enough funds in 2004 to pay for Head Start for all eligible children, provide comprehensive health insurance for the nation's more than nine million uninsured children, and ensure that all poor families have affordable housing.

The Bush Administration's tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 heavily favored wealthy Americans while offering little or nothing to working families. In 2004, the average millionaire can expect to receive a tax cut of over $100,000. By 2010 when the tax cuts are fully implemented, the richest 1 percent of Americans will have received 52 percent of the benefits from the tax cuts, according to the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center.

Corporations are also reaping huge benefits from the new tax cuts. Business tax cuts alone amounted to $44.3 billion in fiscal year 2002 and are projected to be $64 billion in FY 2004. These tax breaks, combined with the increased use of tax loopholes, shelters, and subsidies, have resulted in corporate tax levels that are among the lowest seen in the last 70 years. According to a recent GAO report, between 1996 and 2000, 61 percent of American corporations paid no income taxes at all, and in 2000, 94 percent paid less than 5 percent of their total income in taxes. The revenue lost as a result of the business tax cuts in 2002 would have provided enough income to allow all of the nation's 5.4 million poor families with children to escape from poverty that year.

At the same time that the Administration pursued generous tax cuts for the wealthy?which were not paid for in the budget?it failed to aid 12 million American children by speeding up the refundability of the Child Tax Credit (CTC). It would also have provided the average poor family of three with an additional $193. The Administration fought for more tax breaks for millionaires, while denying poor families this modest amount that would have cost roughly 1 percent of the 2003 tax bill.

"This April 15th should serve to remind us that the Administration is favoring corporations and the wealthy rather than aiding the millions of families with children who are the backbone of this nation, many of whom are struggling to stay afloat," said Deborah Cutler-Ortiz, Director of the Family Income Division at the Children's Defense Fund.

[b]CONTACT:[/b] Children's Defense Fund
John Norton (202) 662-3609 - http://www.commondreams.org/n...

Bush's Credibility Shot With Never-Ending Lies and Dangerous Partisanship!

04.15.04 (9:44 am) [edit]

So much for the constructive mediator. In a costly blow yesterday to America's credibility as an honest broker for a Middle East peace, President Bush endorsed Israeli plans to retain some West Bank settlements and to essentially reject the Palestinians' "right of return."

It has long seemed inevitable that a lasting peace would allow Israelis to keep some of the large West Bank settlements contiguous to Jerusalem and would offer, at most, a very limited right of return for the Palestinians whose families fled at the dawn of a Jewish state. But by accepting Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's terms absent any negotiation between the parties, Mr. Bush is essentially supporting Israel's right to impose a settlement of its choice on the Palestinians.

Mr. Bush's drastic and unfortunate policy reversal was announced as a beaming Mr. Sharon stood next to him in the White House. Mr. Sharon was eager to secure American backing on these issues in exchange for his plan to withdraw from the Gaza Strip, a decision that has proved to be quite divisive within his Likud Party. Mr. Bush, the affable host, obliged, just as two days earlier he had seemed to oblige a different guest, President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, at his Texas ranch. Then, as this page approvingly noted, Mr. Bush indicated that he was not prepared to approve Mr. Sharon's plans to declare unilaterally that Israel would keep its West Bank settlements on the Israeli side of the recen