[pjnews] Never-ending War/ Virtual March on Washington
U.S. OFFICIAL SAYS SYRIA, IRAN WILL BE DEALT WITH AFTER IRAQ WAR Ha'aretz, 2/18/03 http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/263923.html U.S. Undersecretary of State John Bolton said in meetings with Israeli officials on Monday that he has no doubt America will attack Iraq, and that it will be necessary to deal with threats from Syria, Iran and North Korea afterwards. Bolton, who is undersecretary for arms control and international security, is in Israel for meetings about preventing the spread of weapons of mass destruction. In a meeting with Bolton on Monday, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said that Israel is concerned about the security threat posed by Iran. It's important to deal with Iran even while American attention is turned toward Iraq, Sharon said. Bolton also met with Foreign Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and H! ousing and Construction Minister Natan Sharansky. -- Virtual March on Washington Headquarters http://www.winwithoutwarus.org/ Welcome. MoveOn.org is hosting the online headquarters for the Virtual March on Washington on February 26th, sponsored by the Win Without War Coalition. Please join us NOW for the march. On February 26th, every Senate office will receive a call every minute from a constituent, as they receive a simultaneous flood of faxes and e-mail. Hundreds of thousands of people from across the country will send the collective message: Don't Attack Iraq. Every Senate switchboard will be lit up throughout the day with our message -- a powerful reminder of the breadth and depth of opposition to a war in Iraq. And on that day, antiwar rooms in Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles will highlight the day's progress for the national media, while local media can visit the antiwar room online to monitor this constituent march throughout the day. We need your help NOW to make the Virtual March a reality. You can (1) prepare a free fax for transmission on the day of the march, and (2) register to make phone calls to Congress on the day of the march below. We're lining people up for every minute of the day in every state. Faxes are very easy and phone calls are the most effective. Do both or do whatever you can. Register NOW to take part in the Virtual March on Washington on February 26th. You are committing to making three calls to your Senators and the White House at the times of day you select. At that time, your comment below will be displayed in our antiwar rooms and online
[pjnews] UN Inspectors call U.S. tips 'garbage'
A wild goose chase: Weapons inspectors call U.S. tips 'garbage' February 21, 2003 Topic: War Terrorism So frustrated have the inspectors become that one source has referred to the U.S. intelligence they've been getting as garbage after garbage after garbage.
[pjnews] Looking for a way out of war with Iraq
http://www.capitolhillblue.com/artman/publish/article_1796.shtml White House advisors looking for a way out of war with Iraq By CHB Staff Feb 20, 2003, 05:47 Some strategists within the Bush Administration are urging the President to look for an exit strategy on Iraq, warning the tough stance on war with the Arab country has left the country in a no win situation. At this point, the United States and Britain does not have the support for passage of a second UN resolution, admits a White House aide. In addition, Republican leaders in both the House and Senate are telling the Presidently privately that he is losing support in Congress for a go it alone war against Iraq. The President's war plans are in trouble, there's no doubt about that, says an advisor to House Speaker Dennis J. Hastert. Some Republican members want a vote on military action and some of those say they would, at this point, vote against such action. Some White House advisors are urging the President to consider complying with the UN position or to look for other face saving ways to avoid war with Iraq. President Bush, however, is reported to be hanging tough on plans to invade Iraq, even though his closest advisors tell him such a move could be disasterous politically. The President has backed himself and the nation into a corner in a no win situation, says political scientist George Harleigh. World opinion is against him. Public opinion polls show support eroding among Americans. Republican campaign strategist Vern Wilson says he is advising his clients to put some distance between themselves and the President on war with Iraq. When you have former military leaders questioning the wisdom of war, then you have Vietnam and Gulf War veterans marching against the war, when you have Republicans in Congress questioning the President's judgment, it tells me we could have a problem, Wilson said Wednesday. The escalating loss of support for the U.S. officials has led to an increase of defiance by Iraqi officials, who have yet to live up to promises of increased support and aid to U.N. inspectors looking for the country's suspected weapons of mass destruction. Taking heart from the split in the Security Council regarding possible military action against the country. and the world-wide protests against war, Iraq has changed from saying that its officials are complying with U.N. demands to asking for a lifting of sanctions instituted against Iraq after it was forced out of Kuwait more than 10 years ago. We have not seen any positive moves on the part of Iraq, one U.N. official in Iraq told The Washington Post, while another said, They are not fulfilling their promises. U.N. inspectors returned to Iraq in November after the Security Council unanimously passed Resolution 1441, a strongly worded document that promised serious consequences should Iraq not live up to the stipulations outlined in the document. Those included giving U.N. inspectors unrestricted access inside Iraq and orders to report any interference by Iraq with the inspections. However, since last Friday, when lead weapons inspectors Hans Blix and Mohammad ElBaradei reported to the Security Council, the United Nations has not seen Iraq carry through on promises to deliver documents about old weapons programs nor have there been interviews with scientists involved with possible weapons technology. Large anti-war demonstrations were staged in several cities around the world. The United States and Britain are having trouble finding support for anything stronger than additional inspections in Iraq in their Security Council deliberations.
[pjnews] Diary from a human shield in Iraq
FROM: JOHN ROSS ON THE ROAD TO BAGHDAD [EMAIL PROTECTED] COUNTDOWN TO THE CATACLYSM: HUMAN SHIELDS IN BAGHDAD WAITING FOR BUSH TO BOMB BAGHDAD (Feb 22nd) The Syrian-Iraqi border after midnight is a dimly-lit No Man¹s Land. We sit in a smoke filled café on the Syrian side, dining on kabobs and guzzling Turkish coffee on the house. When George Bush pounds a podium while multiple American flags unfurl behind him on the café TV, the truck drivers, low-rent travelers, and Human Shields in attendance convulse in waves of laughter and derision at the U.S. president¹s cowboy shtick. This trip has been filled with such media moments as viewed from the far side of the tube. In Ankara waiting on the Iraqi visas, we watch Bush brag that he will feed the people of that axis of evil republic which Washington has starved for the past decade, and once again the room collapses in hilarity. The Bush act plays very badly in this seething corner of a world he seeks to conquer with bombs and bribery and his yahoo demeanor makes it into one of the top comedy acts east and west of the Tigris and the Euphrates. The Iraqi slice of the border is more congenial than the Syrianside where every one of one's names (mother, father, your own) ispainstakingly inscribed in Arabic longhand. Here Saddam¹s portrait smilesbroadly as dour immigration officials register and sometimes confiscate allcell and sat phones, laptops, video cams, and other electronic gear (I try to register my alarm clock which bears the insignia of an obscure Mexican football team but the Migra man waves me away.) By dawn the inventory is complete and the British Shields are kicking around a soccer ball with the Iraqi border guards. Godfrey, my 68 year-old companero as grandfather of this journey to the end of night is leafing through a dog-eared edition of King Lear, an appropriate text given who is at the helm of the nation we are about to plunge into. The Human Shield Action Caravan, 35 bedraggled anti-war warriors, entered Iraq in two battered but brave London double-decker buses on the morning of February 15th, a day set aside for unprecedented protest against the Bush-Blair war on this still-resilient republic. Although we are trying to reach Baghdad for a huge, wild mid-day rally, the rage is patent enough on the border, a dusty, fly-specked wedge of desert where the kids press up against the bus chanting and dancing so feverishly that you can feel the heat of their bodies even upstairs on the double-deckers. The frenzy feels dangerous as they wave portraits of Saddam and rain curses down on George Bush, and their youthful energies seem capable of dismantling our wheezing machines. As we roll through the oil-splotched desert, we follow the world-wide marches on truck stop TV screens, the customers loudly dissing Bush and buying us jiggers of tea and fragrant coffee, a timely reminder of how fervently much of the world hates Yanqui Doodle imperialism but not necessarily the American people. Although for a few brief moments in the aftermath of 9-11, my fellow citizens seemed to grasp this universal reality, that understanding has faded to black in Bush's endless demonizing of Saddam Hussein as the henchman of Osama Bin Ladin, an accusation bereft of any shred of truth indeed Bin Ladin once put a fatwa on the Iraqi kingpin¹s head. Given 20 years of war and affliction, much of it manufactured in the U.S.A, Baghdad is not what you would expect. Rather, it is a thoroughly streamlined capital of 6,000,000, skyline by modernesque high-rises with ample green space and boulevards broad as Texas, a sort of middle eastern Houston powered by great gobs of oil money (SUVs have become an increasing hazard here.) The first Bush tried to bomb this metropolis back to the stone age but the Iraqi people built it all up again in record time and now Baby Bush seeks to re-flatten this city and let the construction contracts to Dick Cheney's Brown Root (a division of Halliburton Inc.) Yet despite the evil Bushwa that envelops them, the residents of this wondrous burg repeatedly stop you on the streets just to tell you how much they love you. Yes, love you! In four decades of gallivanting the globe, that has never happened to this reporter before. The Shields are presently ensconced in a moderately priced hotel at government expense until we can figure out how to wiggle off this hook. The Tigris, a slow-moving Mississippi of a river meanders not a block from our balconies. We are busy plotting the logistics of how to keep Bush¹s bombs from creaming the civilian population on the ground and trying hard not to squabble amongst ourselves, a task made gnarly by the re-appearance of the action's very dodgy instigator, Ken Nichols O'Keefe, a seemingly suicidal once-upon-a-time Persian Gulf marine with dotted lines tattooed around his throat that read cut here. Miffed by a revolt of his passengers way back in Rome to which he diverted the caravan in a failed
[pjnews] Native American Women's Way to Peace
Native American Women's Way to Peace Moccasin Makers and War Breakers A call to action by the women of the world. We have the power to stop the war! Before the men can go to war, the women must make their moccasins. In the tradition of our ancestors, it was customary for the women to make the moccasins worn by the men who were going to war. If the women did not want war, they did not make the moccasins. Our ancestors belonged to the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. Europeans called them Iroquois. We overcame a horrible legacy of war and violence when Deganawida, the Peace Maker, gave us our Great Law of Peace. The United States Senate has acknowledged that our law served as a model for the Constitution of the United States (U.S. S. Con. Res. 76, 2 Dec. 1987). The U.S. Constitution was, in turn, a model for the Charter of the United Nations. Our law is the basis of modern international law. The Americans copied our laws and customs, but they did not understand them. Our ancestors recognized the sovereignty of all men and women by solving community conflicts through discussion in a People's Council. In our tradition, three criteria must be kept in mind through all deliberations 1) Peace: meaning peace must be kept at all costs. 2) Righteousness: meaning decisions must be morally right taking into consideration the needs of seven generations to come. 3) Power: meaning the power of the people must be maintained including the equal sovereignty of all men and all women. Conflicts between nations were also resolved through diplomacy and concensus. War - or the use of violence- was only a last resort. Even then, the women and children of the opponents were spared. Throughout, our ancestors always respected the other nation's different customs, laws and ways of life, whether they approved of them or not. They would work out agreements on how to live side by side. Therefore we have stood by and not become involved in this current conflict. But we see now that it has gone too far. Innocent lives and mother earth is at stake. As women and caretakers of this earth, we have decided to speak up. According to the law of our ancestors, the soil of North America is vested in the women. Serious decisions about warfare had to involve the other half of the people - the women - the bearers of life, the nurturers of the earth. We are now facing an unnecessary war. We have a duty to use our power to do good. We have decided to remind all humanity of this important truth. War cannot happen without the support of women. We ask the women of the world to come forward and play their rightful role as the progenitors, the creators of all men, of all humanity, the caretakers of the earth and of all that lives upon it. As women, we know the pain and suffering of childbirth. We feel a deep loss when our children die. This understanding compels us to act to stop the destruction of lives. The children must not suffer. Not our children. Not the children of anyone we disagree with. We respect the sovereign and sacred right of each individual to live on this earth. We ask you, the women of the world, and the men who support us, to come forward and stop this madness. This decision to go to war will cause the deaths of thousands of innocent men, women and children. It is a decision that has been made primarily by men without the input of the people of the nation, without the imput of the women. Most of these men have grandmothers, mothers, wives, girlfriends, sisters, aunts, daughters, nieces, granddaughters, nannies, etc. We are asking all of these women to put pressure on these men - men like President George Bush, Colin Powell, Secretary Rumsfeld, Prime Minister Tony Blair, Saddam Hussein, Prime Minister Jean Chretien, Ariel Sharon, the Palestinians, the North Koreans and anyone else who is involved in causing the current threat to destroy the world. Women, bring your men to their senses. Women, remember your power. Remember your responsibility. Every person has personal power. We must all use our power to do good. We must stop the war. We must maintain the Peace. We must hold back the moccasins. Perhaps you could send the Peace Moccasin message around and to President George Bush at [EMAIL PROTECTED] and to the UN Security Council [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], Commissioner for Human Rights at [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Kahn-Tineta Horn, Mohawk mother grandmother Kahente Horn-Miller, Mohawk mother Karonhioko'he, Daughter Kokowa, Daughter Grace Lix-xiu Woo, Aunt Sister Place your name here and send it [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[pjnews] 2/26 Virtual March on Washington reminder
Don't forget to register and participate. It only takes a few moments, but the combined effect will likely be quite powerful... Virtual March on Washington Headquarters http://www.winwithoutwarus.org/ Welcome. MoveOn.org is hosting the online headquarters for the Virtual March on Washington on February 26th, sponsored by the Win Without War Coalition. Please join us NOW for the march. On February 26th, every Senate office will receive a call every minute from a constituent, as they receive a simultaneous flood of faxes and e-mail. Hundreds of thousands of people from across the country will send the collective message: Don't Attack Iraq. Every Senate switchboard will be lit up throughout the day with our message -- a powerful reminder of the breadth and depth of opposition to a war in Iraq. And on that day, antiwar rooms in Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles will highlight the day's progress for the national media, while local media can visit the antiwar room online to monitor this constituent march throughout the day. We need your help NOW to make the Virtual March a reality. You can (1) prepare a free fax for transmission on the day of the march, and (2) register to make phone calls to Congress on the day of the march below. We're lining people up for every minute of the day in every state. Faxes are very easy and phone calls are the most effective. Do both or do whatever you can. Register NOW to take part in the Virtual March on Washington on February 26th. You are committing to making three calls to your Senators and the White House at the times of day you select. At that time, your comment below will be displayed in our antiwar rooms and online. To learn more and to find out how you can participate, go to http://www.moveon.org/winwithoutwar/
[pjnews] 1/2 The Project for the New American Century
For further documentation on The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) go to its website at: http://www.newamericancentury.org/ _ Of Gods and Mortals and Empire By William Rivers Pitt t r u t h o u t .com Friday 21 February 2003 To plunder, to slaughter, to steal, these things they misname empire; and where they make a wilderness, they call it peace. - Tacitus It sounded like two behemoth icebergs colliding in the North Atlantic, but you needed the right kind of ears to hear it. Two immensely powerful forces crashed into each other over the weekend of February 15th, and the resulting thunder has set the world to trembling. On one side were the people, who took to the streets all across the world by the tens of millions to stand against George W. Bush's push for pre-emptive war on Iraq. The numbers, and the locations, were staggering. More than 100,000 people took to the streets of Sydney, Australia, a nation that has been solidly in Bush's corner on this matter. In Spain, another member of Bush's Coalition of the Willing, several million protesters took over Madrid, Barcelona and 55 other cities. Italy, another Bush ally, saw over a million citizens take to the streets of Rome. Britain, Bush's go/no go ally of allies, saw over a million people protesting in London. Police there said it was the largest demonstration in that nation's long history. The Netherlands saw one hundred thousand protesters, as did Belgium and Ireland. There were protesters by the tens of thousands in Sweden, Switzerland, Scotland, Denmark, Austria, Canada, South Africa, Mexico, Greece, Russia and Japan. 500,000 protesters demonstrated in Germany, joined by three members of Gerhard Schroder's cabinet who defied their Chancellor by being there. It was the largest demonstration ever in post-war Germany. Another 500,000 people marched in Paris and 60 other French cities. The United States of America saw protests from coast to coast in over 100 cities nationwide. New York City was paralyzed by over a million marchers. San Francisco was taken over by well over 200,000 protesters, and Los Angeles saw over 100,000 people take to the streets. Thousands upon thousands joined them in Chicago, Philadelphia, Miami and Seattle. This was a gathering of ordinary citizens who came together in the streets of the world in an organized event that has no precedent in all of human history. They were brought together by a global word-of-mouth activism rooted entirely in the Internet. Were it not for this planetary connection, no such coordination could have ever taken place. Once upon a time, the world wide web was a realm dominated by dreams of profit and marketing. Those dreams have soured, leaving behind a marvelous network now utilized by very average people who can, with the click of a button, bring forth from all points on the compass a roaring deluge of humanity to stand against craven injustice and ruinous war. The weekend of February 15th saw this force ram headlong into the will of men who walk in shadow, whose hands wield lightning and steel, pestilence and famine. In their ranks stand Presidents, Prime Ministers, corporate magnates, untouchable billionaires, and the advisors who whisper to them of empire and domination. They are few in number, but life and death flows from their fingertips in freshets and gouts. These men control the armies and navies of great nations, nuclear and chemical nightmares beyond measure, unassailable technological weapons and walls, the financial cords which hold the package together, the water, the air, the oil, the law, and a global media machine by which they can obscure their designs with pleasing lies. No mere citizen could do what these men in one moment can do with the crooking of a little finger. With a word, they can erase cities, deprive an entire populace of water and light, unleash disease and famine, annihilate the economies of dozens of nations, and imprison forever anyone who dares dissent. These men bleed, they sicken, they die, but in their time of life they can punch holes in the sky large enough to make Zeus wince with envy. Like the millions who marched, the gathering of such fearful powers into the hands of so few is also without precedent in all of human history. There was, among the millions who stormed the planet last weekend, a misconception that masked the true reason for their presence in the streets. A great many people believe this looming war with Iraq is about old grudges and oil. There is logic in this; Iraq has the second largest proven stores of precious petroleum in the world, and there is a definite history of malice between House Bush and House Hussein. The truth of the matter is far more broad and deep, belittling all talk of terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, and even oil. The men who pursue their goals by way of this war have a
[pjnews] 2/2 Project for the New American Century
continued... Of Gods and Mortals and Empire By William Rivers Pitt t r u t h o u t .com Vice President Dick Cheney is a founding member of PNAC, along with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz is the ideological father of the group. Bruce Jackson, a PNAC director, served as a Pentagon official for Ronald Reagan before leaving government service to take a leading position with the weapons manufacturer Lockheed Martin. PNAC is staffed by men who previously served with groups like Friends of the Democratic Center in Central America, which supported America's bloody gamesmanship in Nicaragua and El Salvador, and with groups like The Committee for the Present Danger, which spent years advocating that a nuclear war with the Soviet Union was winnable. PNAC has recently given birth to a new group, The Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, which met with National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice in order to formulate a plan to educate the American populace about the need for war in Iraq. CLI has funneled millions of taxpayer dollars to support the Iraqi National Congress and the Iraqi heir presumptive, Ahmed Chalabi. Chalabi was sentenced in absentia by a Jordanian court in 1992 to 22 years in prison for bank fraud after the collapse of Petra Bank, which he founded in 1977. Chalabi has not set foot in Iraq since 1956, but his Enron-like business credentials apparently make him a good match for the Bush administration's plans. PNAC's Rebuilding America's Defenses report is the institutionalization of plans and ideologies that have been formulated for decades by the men currently running American government. The PNAC Statement of Principles is signed by Cheney, Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld, as well as by Eliot Abrams, Jeb Bush, Bush's special envoy to Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad, and many others. William Kristol, famed conservative writer for the Weekly Standard, is also a co-founder of the group. The Weekly Standard is owned by Ruppert Murdoch, who also owns international media giant Fox News The desire for these freshly empowered PNAC men to extend American hegemony by force of arms across the globe has been there since day one of the Bush administration, and is in no small part a central reason for the Florida electoral battle in 2000. Note that while many have said that Gore and Bush are ideologically identical, Mr. Gore had no ties whatsoever to the fellows at PNAC. George W. Bush had to win that election by any means necessary, and PNAC signatory Jeb Bush was in the perfect position to ensure the rise to prominence of his fellow imperialists. Desire for such action, however, is by no means translatable into workable policy. Americans enjoy their comforts, but don't cotton to the idea of being some sort of Neo-Rome. On September 11th, the fellows from PNAC saw a door of opportunity open wide before them, and stormed right through it. Bush released on September 20th 2001 the National Security Strategy of the United States of America. It is an ideological match to PNAC's Rebuilding America's Defenses report issued a year earlier. In many places, it uses exactly the same language to describe America's new place in the world. Recall that PNAC demanded an increase in defense spending to at least 3.8% of GDP. Bush's proposed budget for next year asks for $379 billion in defense spending, almost exactly 3.8% of GDP. In August of 2002, Defense Policy Board chairman and PNAC member Richard Perle heard a policy briefing from a think tank associated with the Rand Corporation. According to the Washington Post and The Nation, the final slide of this presentation described Iraq as the tactical pivot, Saudi Arabia as the strategic pivot, and Egypt as the prize in a war that would purportedly be about ridding the world of Saddam Hussein's weapons. Bush has deployed massive forces into the Mideast region, while simultaneously engaging American forces in the Philippines and playing nuclear chicken with North Korea. Somewhere in all this lurks at least one of the major theater wars desired by the September 2000 PNAC report. Iraq is but the beginning, a pretense for a wider conflict. Donald Kagan, a central member of PNAC, sees America establishing permanent military bases in Iraq after the war. This is purportedly a measure to defend the peace in the Middle East, and to make sure the oil flows. The nations in that region, however, will see this for what it is: a jump-off point for American forces to invade any nation in that region they choose to. The American people, anxiously awaiting some sort of exit plan after America defeats Iraq, will see too late that no exit is planned. All of the horses are traveling together at speed here. The defense contractors who sup on American tax revenue will be handsomely paid for arming this new American empire. The corporations that own the
[pjnews] MSNBC Internal Memo re: Donahue Firing
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0225-09.htm MSNBC fired Phil Donahue on Tuesday, abruptly ending the veteran talk show host's return to television after six months of poor ratings... -- And now we receive this news... Leaked internal report says Donahue presented a difficult public face for NBC in a time of war. The study went on to claim that Donahue presented a difficult public face for NBC in a time of war..He seems to delight in presenting guests who are anti- war, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration's motives. The report went on to outline a possible nightmare scenario where the show becomes a home for the liberal antiwar agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity. http://www.allyourtv.com/0203season/news/02252003donahue.html Commentary: The Surrender Of MSNBC Written by Rick Ellis, Wednesday, February 25th, 2003 While the official announcement wasn't a surprise to anyone working at the network, MSNBC officially canceled the primetime show Donahue on Tuesday, citing disappointing ratings. And in fact, if you look at the raw ratings numbers, the struggling news channel may have a point. Originally conceived as a liberal alternative to the popular O'Reilly Factor, the show started slow and never recovered. During this month, a sweeps period in which ratings are watched closely to set advertising rates, Donahue averaged 446,000 viewers. O'Reilly drew 2.7 million viewers, up 28 percent from February 2002, according to Nielsen Media Research. But as it turns out, the picture isn't as clear as it initially seems. While Donahue does badly trail both O'Reilly and CNN's Connie Chung in the ratings, those numbers have improved in recent weeks. So much so that the program is the top-rated show on MSNBC, beating even the highly promoted Hardball With Chris Matthews. Although Donahue didn't know it at the time, his fate was sealed a number of weeks ago after NBC News executives received the results of a study commissioned to provide guidance on the future of the news channel. That report--shared with me by an NBC news insider--gives an excruciatingly painful assessment of the channel and its programming. Some of recommendations, such as dropping the America's News Channel, have already been implemented. But the harshest criticism was leveled at Donahue, whom the authors of the study described as a tired, left-wing liberal out of touch with the current marketplace. The study went on to claim that Donahue presented a difficult public face for NBC in a time of war..He seems to delight in presenting guests who are anti- war, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration's motives. The report went on to outline a possible nightmare scenario where the show becomes a home for the liberal antiwar agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity. A source close to Donahue claims that while he wasn't aware of the specific study, the tone and outcome aren't surprising. It's not a coincidence that this decision comes the same week that MSNBC announces its hired Dick Armey as a commentator and has both Jesse Ventura and Michael Savage joining the network as hosts. They're scared, and they decided to take the coward's road and slant towards the conservative crowd that watch Fox News. While that assessment may be a bit harsh, it seems clear that MSNBC has surrendered quicker than most recent Mike Tyson opponents. Rather than building a unique voice, the news channel has opted to become a lesser alternative to the Fox News Channel. And that decision was one that even the NBC News study recommended against making. The temptation is to chase the audience that is already out there and play to what seems to be working at Fox. But there is another road, and if we build our unique voices from within, we have a chance to develop a loyal and valuable audience. Well, I guess now we'll never know.
[pjnews] Upcoming Anti-war Actions
From: War Times [EMAIL PROTECTED] This message comes to you from United for Peace and Justice, a national anti-war coalition. War Times is part of UFPJ's national leadership body. URGENT URGENT ACTION ALERT!! From United for Peace and Justice Reports now emanating from the White House and 110 Downing Street in London clearly indicate the dogged determination of the Bush administration with the strong backing of Tony Blair's Labor government, to wage war against Iraq as soon as possible. In complete defiance of global anti-war public opinion -- that brought millions of people into the streets throughout the United States, Britain and every corner of the world -- Wasshington and London are pressing forward. The massive U.S. military buildup in the Gulf region is now driving the Iraq crisis diplomacy. The war hawks' message to the United Nations and the people of the world is, To hell with you. We're waging war whether you like it or not! But there is still a chance to stop this war. We stand on the edge of a global catastrophe, and our response must be based on the needs of a world-wide crisis-level mobilization. Over the next few weeks and months the antiwar movement must be on an emergency footing. We must surpass the determination of President Bush and the warmongers to wage war by escalating all of our efforts to prevent war. Our message to Bush, to Blair, to the governments around the facing massive U.S. pressure to join their crusade, is The World Says No to War! The next weeks are critical for demonstrating continued widespread local, national and global opposition to the rapid war preparations underway by the U.S. Our challenge to the war drive comes in the form of cities saying no to war, of massive outpouring of people into the streets to demonstrate our opposition, of political pressure on our elected officials, of demonstrations of thanks to the United Nations and governments still standing defiant of the U.S. pressure for war. Several activities are now planned in the coming weeks to show opposition to a war against Iraq. United for Peace and Justice urges everyone to actively participate in ALL of the various protest activities indicated below. We must double and triple all of our efforts to march in the streets, to lobby in the suites, to go to jail as well as to write, e-mail and call the White House, our legislators and the media with one clear message, THE WORLD SAYS NO TO WAR! Below are some priority days of action to focus on. We recognize that there are many, many other fabulous initiatives for peace activists to join and we encourage you to seek them out and share your events with the world by posting to www.unitedforpeace.org March 1: PILGRIMAGE OF PRAYER AND WITNESS FOR PEACE IN WASHINGTON, DC People who are based in or near Washington, DC are encouraged to participate in this African-American led, faith-based, multi-racial event. Meet at the U.S. State Department, 2201 C Street, NW on March 1 at Noon. For more information, call Black Voices for Peace, 202-232-5690 March 5: ONE-DAY NATIONAL STUDENT STRIKE -- Books Not Bombs! Stop The War Against Iraq! and the NATIONAL MORATORIUM TO STOP THE WAR The National Youth and Student Peace Coalition (NYSPC) calls upon students on campuses across the United States to join us in a one-day student strike on March 5th, 2003. For more information see the National Youth and Student Coalition Website. Walk out of school (if you?re a student) or cancel your classes (if you're a professor). Show your determination to stop this war! Call in sick or close your business. For ideas on the national moratorium, go to http://www.notinourname.net/call_for_the_moratorium.html MARCH 8: JOIN WOMEN AROUND THE WORLD TO CALL FOR PEACE AND JUSTICE ON INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S DAY For 92 years women around the world have been marking International Womens Day with calls for a more peace and justice-centered world. We urge you to join in this rich tradition and COME TO WASHINGTON D.C. FOR THE WOMEN-LED ANTI-WAR MARCH ON SATURDAY, MARCH 8, 2003 or to organize an International Womens Day Peace and Justice event in your community. Post your events at www.unitedforpeace.org United for Peace and Justice and other groups have made International Womens Day actions a priority both because of the impacts war has on women and children and because this years celebration falls on the day following Hans Blixs next report to the United Nations Security Council. March 8 in Washington, DC 11:00 a.m. - RALLY at Malcolm X Park (16th St. between U and Euclid NW) 1:00 p.m. March to Encircle the White House Join with Alice Walker, Vandana Shiva, comedian Janeane Garofalo, Dr. Helen Caldicott, Granny D, Susan Griffith, Barbara Ehrenreich, Amy Goodman, Rania Masri, Michelle Shocked, feminist theologian Chung Hyun Kyung, Nobel Peace Laureate Jody Williams, Cheri Honkala, Maxine Hong Kingston, Inga Muscio, Terry Tempest Williams, Medea Benjamin, Starhawk, and many others
[pjnews] Iraqi Star Witness Said Weapons Were Destroyed
Fairness Accuracy In Reporting Media analysis, critiques and activism MEDIA ADVISORY: Star Witness on Iraq Said Weapons Were Destroyed: Bombshell revelation from a defector cited by White House and press February 27, 2003 On February 24, Newsweek broke what may be the biggest story of the Iraq crisis. In a revelation that raises questions about whether the WMD [weapons of mass destruction] stockpiles attributed to Iraq still exist, the magazine's issue dated March 3 reported that the Iraqi weapons chief who defected from the regime in 1995 told U.N. inspectors that Iraq had destroyed its entire stockpile of chemical and biological weapons and banned missiles, as Iraq claims. Until now, Gen. Hussein Kamel, who was killed shortly after returning to Iraq in 1996, was best known for his role in exposing Iraq's deceptions about how far its pre-Gulf War biological weapons programs had advanced. But Newsweek's John Barry-- who has covered Iraqi weapons inspections for more than a decade-- obtained the transcript of Kamel's 1995 debriefing by officials from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the U.N. inspections team known as UNSCOM. Inspectors were told that after the Gulf War, Iraq destroyed all its chemical and biological weapons stocks and the missiles to deliver them, Barry wrote. All that remained were hidden blueprints, computer disks, microfiches and production molds. The weapons were destroyed secretly, in order to hide their existence from inspectors, in the hopes of someday resuming production after inspections had finished. The CIA and MI6 were told the same story, Barry reported, and a military aide who defected with Kamel... backed Kamel's assertions about the destruction of WMD stocks. But these statements were hushed up by the U.N. inspectors in order to bluff Saddam into disclosing still more. CIA spokesman Bill Harlow angrily denied the Newsweek report. It is incorrect, bogus, wrong, untrue, Harlow told Reuters the day the report appeared (2/24/03). But on Wednesday (2/26/03), a complete copy of the Kamel transcript-- an internal UNSCOM/IAEA document stamped sensitive-- was obtained by Glen Rangwala, the Cambridge University analyst who in early February revealed that Tony Blair's intelligence dossier was plagiarized from a student thesis. Rangwala has posted the Kamel transcript on the Web: http://casi.org.uk/info/unscom950822.pdf. In the transcript (p. 13), Kamel says bluntly: All weapons-- biological, chemical, missile, nuclear, were destroyed. Who is Hussein Kamel? Kamel is no obscure defector. A son-in-law of Saddam Hussein, his departure from Iraq carrying crates of secret documents on Iraq's past weapons programs was a major turning point in the inspections saga. In 1999, in a letter to the U.N. Security Council (1/25/99), UNSCOM reported that its entire eight years of disarmament work must be divided into two parts, separated by the events following the departure from Iraq, in August 1995, of Lt. General Hussein Kamel. Kamel's defection has been cited repeatedly by George W. Bush and leading administration officials as evidence that 1) Iraq has not disarmed; 2) inspections cannot disarm it; and 3) defectors such as Kamel are the most reliable source of information on Iraq's weapons. * Bush declared in an October 7, 2002 speech: In 1995, after several years of deceit by the Iraqi regime, the head of Iraq's military industries defected. It was then that the regime was forced to admit that it had produced more than 30,000 liters of anthrax and other deadly biological agents. The inspectors, however, concluded that Iraq had likely produced two to four times that amount. This is a massive stockpile of biological weapons that has never been accounted for, and capable of killing millions. * Secretary of State Colin Powell's February 5 presentation to the U.N. Security Council claimed: It took years for Iraq to finally admit that it had produced four tons of the deadly nerve agent, VX. A single drop of VX on the skin will kill in minutes. Four tons. The admission only came out after inspectors collected documentation as a result of the defection of Hussein Kamel, Saddam Hussein's late son-in-law. * In a speech last August (8/27/02), Vice President Dick Cheney said Kamel's story should serve as a reminder to all that we often learned more as the result of defections than we learned from the inspection regime itself. * Deputy National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley recently wrote in the Chicago Tribune (2/16/03) that because of information provided by Iraqi defector and former head of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs, Lt. Gen. Hussein Kamel, the regime had to admit in detail how it cheated on its nuclear non-proliferation commitments. The quotes from Bush and Powell cited above refer to anthrax and VX produced by Iraq before the 1991 Gulf War. The administration has cited various quantities of chemical and biological weapons on many other occasions--
[pjnews] How the news will be censored in this war
http://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=381438 A new CNN system of 'script approval' suggests the Pentagon will have nothing to worry about by Robert Fisk INDEPENDENT (London) 25 February 2003 Already, the American press is expressing its approval of the coverage of American forces which the US military intends to allow its reporters in the next Gulf war. The boys from CNN, CBS, ABC and The New York Times will be embedded among the US marines and infantry. The degree of censorship hasn't quite been worked out. But it doesn't matter how much the Pentagon cuts from the reporters' dispatches. A new CNN system of script approval-- the iniquitous instruction to reporters that they have to send all their copy to anonymous officials in Atlanta to ensure it is suitably sanitised-- suggests that the Pentagon and the Department of State have nothing to worry about. Nor do the Israelis. Indeed, reading a new CNN document, Reminder of Script Approval Policy, fairly takes the breath away. All reporters preparing package scripts must submit the scripts for approval, it says. Packages may not be edited until the scripts are approved... All packages originating outside Washington, LA (Los Angeles) or NY (New York), including all international bureaus, must come to the ROW in Atlanta for approval. The date of this extraordinary message is 27 January. The ROW is the row of script editors in Atlanta who can insist on changes or balances in the reporter's dispatch. A script is not approved for air unless it is properly marked approved by an authorised manager and duped (duplicated) to burcopy (bureau copy)... When a script is updated it must be re-approved, preferably by the originating approving authority. Note the key words here: approved and authorised. CNN's man or woman in Kuwait or Baghdad-- or Jerusalem or Ramallah-- may know the background to his or her story; indeed, they will know far more about it than the authorities in Atlanta. But CNN's chiefs will decide the spin of the story. CNN, of course, is not alone in this paranoid form of reporting. Other US networks operate equally anti-journalistic systems. And it's not the fault of the reporters. CNN's teams may use cliches and don military costumes-- you will see them do this in the next war-- but they try to get something of the truth out. Next time, though, they're going to have even less chance. Just where this awful system leads is evident from an intriguing exchange last year between CNN's reporter in the occupied West Bank town of Ramallah, and Eason Jordan, one of CNN's top honchos in Atlanta. The journalist's first complaint was about a story by the reporter Michael Holmes on the Red Crescent ambulance drivers who are repeatedly shot at by Israeli troops. We risked our lives and went out with ambulance drivers... for a whole day. We have also witnessed ambulances from our window being shot at by Israeli soldiers... The story received approval from Mike Shoulder. The story ran twice and then Rick Davis (a CNN executive) killed it. The reason was we did not have an Israeli army response, even though we stated in our story that Israel believes that Palestinians are smuggling weapons and wanted people in the ambulances. The Israelis refused to give CNN an interview, only a written statement. This statement was then written into the CNN script. But again it was rejected by Davis in Atlanta. Only when, after three days, the Israeli army gave CNN an interview did Holmes's story run-- but then with the dishonest inclusion of a line that said the ambulances were shot in crossfire (ie that Palestinians also shot at their own ambulances). The reporter's complaint was all too obvious. Since when do we hold a story hostage to the whims of governments and armies? We were told by Rick that if we do not get an Israeli on-camera we would not air the package. This means that governments and armies are indirectly censoring us and we are playing directly into their own hands. The relevance of this is all too obvious in the next Gulf War. We are going to have to see a US army officer denying everything the Iraqis say if any report from Iraq is to get on air. Take another of the Ramallah correspondent's complaints last year. In a package on the damage to Ramallah after Israel's massive incursion last April, we had already mentioned right at the top of our piece that Israel says it is doing all these incursions because it wants to crack down on the infrastructure of terror. However, obviously that was not enough. We were made by the ROW (in Atlanta) to repeat this same idea three times in one piece, just to make sure that we keep justifying the Israeli actions... But the system of script approval that has so marred CNN's coverage has got worse. In a further and even more sinister message dated 31 January this year, CNN staff are told that a new computerised system of script approval will allow authorised script approvers to mark
[pjnews] Howard Zinn on War
War, by Howard Zinn http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0227-12.htm As I write this, it looks like war. This, in spite of the obvious lack of enthusiasm in the country for war. The polls that register approve or disapprove can only count numbers, they cannot test the depth of feeling. And there are many signs that the support for war is shallow and shaky and ambivalent.. That's why the numbers showing approval for war have been steadily going down. This administration will not likely be stopped, though it knows its support is thin. In fact, that is undoubtedly why it is in such a hurry; it wants to go to war before the support declines even further. The assumption is that once the soldiers are in combat, the American people will unite behind the war. The television screens will be dominated by images showing smart bombs exploding, and the Secretary of Defense will assure the American people that civilian casualties are being kept to a minimum. (We're in the age of megadeaths, and any number of casualties less than a million is no cause for concern). This is the way it has been. Unity behind the president in time of war. But it may not be that way again. The anti-war movement will not likely surrender to the martial atmosphere. The hundreds of thousands who marched in Washington and San Francisco and New York and Boston - and in villages, towns, cities all over the country from Georgia to Montana - will not meekly withdraw. Unlike the shallow support for the war, the opposition to the war is deep, cannot be easily dislodged or frightened into silence. Indeed, the anti-war feelings are bound to become more intense. To the demand Support Our GIs, the movement will be able to reply: Yes, we support our GIs, we want them to live, we want them to be brought home. The government is not supporting them. It is sending them to die, or to be wounded, or to be poisoned by our own depleted uranium shells. No, our casualties will not be numerous, but every single one will be a waste of an important human life. We will insist that this government be held responsible for every death, every dismemberment, every case of sickness, every case of psychic trauma caused by the shock of war. And though the media will be blocked from access to the dead and wounded of Iraq, though the human tragedy unfolding in Iraq will be told in numbers, in abstractions, and not in the stories of real human beings, real children, real mothers and fathers - the movement will find a way to tell that story. And when it does, the American people, who can be cold to death on the other side, but who also wake up when the other side is suddenly seen as a man, a woman, a child - just like us - will respond. This is not a fantasy, not a vain hope. It happened in the Vietnam years. For a long time, what was being done to the peasants of Vietnam was concealed by statistics, the body count, without bodies being shown, without faces being shown, without pain, fear, anguish shown. But then the stories began to come through - the story of the My Lai massacre, the stories told by returning GIs of atrocities they had participated in. And the pictures appeared - the little girl struck by napalm running down the road, her skin shredding, the mothers holding their babies to them in the trenches as GIs poured rounds of bullets from automatic rifles into their bodies. When those stories began to come out, when the photos were seen, the American people could not fail to be moved. The war against Communism was seen as a war against poor peasants in a tiny country half the world away. At some point in this coming war, and no one can say when, the lies coming from the administration - the death of this family was an accident, we apologize for the dismemberment of this child, this was an intelligence mistake, a radar misfunction - will begin to come apart. How soon that will happen depends not only on the millions now - whether actively or silently -- in the anti-war movement, but also on the emergence of whistle blowers inside the Establishment who begin to talk, of journalists who become tired of being manipulated by the government, and begin to write to truth. . And of dissident soldiers sick of a war that is not a war but a massacre --how else describe the mayhem caused by the most powerful military machine on earth raining thousands of bombs on a fifth-rate military power already reduced to poverty by two wars and ten years of economic sanctions? The anti-war movement has the responsibility of encouraging defections from the war machine. It does this simply by its existence, by its example, by its persistence, by its voices reaching out over the walls of government control and speaking to the consciences of people. Those voices have already become a chorus, joined by Americans in all walks of life, of all ages, in every part of the country. There is a basic weakness in
[pjnews] E-mail the Pope to Go to Iraq
Subject: An Appeal from Dr. Helen Caldicott to the Pope From: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] helen caldicott Sent: Saturday, March 01, 2003 11:01 AM Dear Friends, I write this appeal for your help as a pediatrician, a mother, and a grandmother -- and I am writing about the lives of tens of thousands of children. Although the current administration has demonstrated it has no reservations about slaughtering up to 500,000 innocents in Iraq, there is one person whose life they absolutely will not risk. That person is Pope John Paul II. The Pope has already formally denounced the proposed war, calling it a defeat for humanity, and also has sent his top spokesperson. However, to stop the war, he now must take a historically unprecedented action of his own and travel to Baghdad. The Pope's physical presence in Iraq will act as the ultimate human shield, during which time leaders of the world's nations can commit themselves to identifying and implementing a peaceful solution to a war that the world's majority clearly does not support. To persuade the Holy Father to take this unusual but potent action, he must hear from you and millions of others around the world who have already been inspired to stand up and speak out for peace. A mountain of surface mail, email, faxes, and phone calls are our devices to inspire him. Please understand that your taking just a few minutes right now to communicate with him may ultimately spare the lives of thousands of innocent people who at this moment live in complete terror from the threat of an imminent U.S.-lead military strike on their homeland. So here is what you can do to be a part of this powerful final action to stop the march to war in Iraq. 1. Do not simply forward the letter below. Its power depends upon your sending it directly, as a personal communication to the Pope. 2. Simply cut and paste the letter below into a new email. Also cut and paste the Vatican email address we have provided. 3. At the close of the letter, type in your name, city and state--no need to include your address. 4. Either email, [EMAIL PROTECTED] (or if that doesn't work, try: [EMAIL PROTECTED]), FAX ([from USA] 011- 39-06698-85378--from other countries drop the 011 prefix -- or send a hard copy of this letter to the addresses in the letter below. DO NOT put Italy anywhere on the envelope, as this will send your mail into the Italian mail system which is separate and independent of the Vatican system. Should you wish to phone the Vatican directly, (from USA) dial 011-39-06-69-82--all other countries must use their appropriate international prefix. 5. Pass this original email on to as many people you can so as to assure a critical mass is reached in this action. 6. Note that as you and others begin sending your letters, faxes and emails, there will be a simultaneous effort to alert the media of this action, so as to be sure it is publicly known throughout the world. Thank you for participating in this formal request of the Pope. We just may stop this war in Iraq -- and save these childrens' lives. Dr. Helen Caldicott Sample letter: His Holiness John Paul II Apostolic Palace 00120 Vatican City State Europe Your Holiness: I write to you today out of a sense of great urgency. As you know the United States of America is on the verge of launching what may be one of the most cataclysmic wars in history using weapons of mass destruction upon the Iraqi people, fifty percent of whom are less than 15 years of age. Conservative estimates are that such a war will result in the death of 500,000 Iraqis. It seems clear that, at this time, you are the only person on Earth who can stop this war. Indeed, your physical presence in Baghdad, will prevent the impending slaughter of hundreds of thousands of human beings, and force the international community of nations to identify and implement a truly peaceful resolution to this unprecedented, preemptive aggression. I implore you to travel to Baghdad and to remain there until a peaceful solution to this crisis has been implemented. The lives of the people of Iraq rest in your hands - as does the fate of the world. With hope, Your name, Your City, State, Country === National Council of Churches Leaders Ask Pope To Stop Bush ROME, Italy - A U.S. church leaders delegation in Rome February 26-27 delivered a plea to Pope John Paul II during a public audience, asking that he come to New York to address the U.N. Security Council -- and, in so doing, address the U.S. public -- on his opposition to war with Iraq. http://indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=241192 Papal envoy presses Bush on Iraq BBC, 3/1/03 Pope John Paul II has decided to send a personal envoy to Washington to deliver a message to United States President George W Bush about the threatened war against Iraq. The Vatican has already made it amply clear that it opposes
[pjnews] The Bottom Line On Iraq
Published on Wednesday, February 19, 2003 The Bottom Line On Iraq: It's The Bottom Line by Arianna Huffington Boys, boys, you're all right. Sure, it's Daddy, oil, and imperialism, not to mention a messianic sense of righteous purpose, a deep-seated contempt for the peace movement, and, to be fair, the irrefutable fact that the world would be a better place without Saddam Hussein. But there's also an overarching mentality feeding the administration's collective delusions, and it can be found by looking to corporate America's bottom line. The dots leading from Wall Street to the West Wing situation room are the ones that need connecting. There's money to be made in post-war Iraq, and the sooner we get the pesky war over with, the sooner we (by which I mean George Bush's corporate cronies) can start making it. The nugget of truth that former Bush economic guru Lawrence Lindsey let slip last fall shortly before he was shoved out the oval office door says it all. Momentarily forgetting that he was talking to the press and not his buddies in the White House, he admitted: The successful prosecution of the war would be good for the economy. To hell with worldwide protests, an unsupportive Security Council, a diplomatically dubious Hans Blix, an Osama giddy at the prospect of a united Arab world, and a panicked populace grasping at the very slender reed of duct tape and Saran Wrap to protect itself from the inevitable terrorist blow-back -- the business of America is still business. No one in the administration embodies this bottom line mentality more than Dick Cheney. The vice president is one of those ideological purists who never let little things like logic, morality, or mass murder interfere with the single-minded pursuit of profitability. His on-again, off-again relationship with the Butcher of Baghdad is a textbook example of what modern moralists condemn as situational ethics, an extremely convenient code that allows you to do what you want when you want and still feel good about it in the morning. In the Cheney White House (let's call it what it is), anything that can be rationalized is right. The two were clearly on the outs back during the Gulf War, when Cheney was Secretary of Defense, and the first President Bush dubbed Saddam Hitler revisited. Then Cheney moved to the private sector and suddenly things between him and Saddam warmed up considerably. With Cheney in the CEO's seat, Halliburton helped Iraq reconstruct its war-torn oil industry with $73 million worth of equipment and services -- becoming Baghdad's biggest such supplier. Kinda nice how that worked out for the vice-president, really: oversee the destruction of an industry that you then profit from by rebuilding. When, during the 2000 campaign, Cheney was asked about his company's Iraqi escapades, he flat out denied them. But the truth remains: When it came to making a buck, Cheney apparently had no qualms about doing business with Hitler revisited. And make no mistake, this wasn't a case of hard-nosed realpolitik -- the rationale for Rummy's cuddly overtures to Saddam back in '83 despite his almost daily habit of gassing Iranians. That, we were told, was all about the enemy of my enemy is my friend. No, Cheney's company chose to do business with Saddam after the rape of Kuwait. After Scuds had been fired at Tel Aviv and Riyadh. After American soldiers had been sent home from Desert Storm in body bags. And in 2000, just months before pocketing his $34million Halliburton retirement package and joining the GOP ticket, Cheney was lobbying for an end to U.N. sanctions against Saddam. Of course, American businessmen are nothing if not flexible. So his former cronies at Halliburton are now at the head of the line of companies expected to reap the estimated $2 billion it will take to rebuild Iraq's oil infrastructure following Saddam's ouster. This burn-and-build approach to business guarantees that there will be a market for Halliburton's services as long as it has a friend in high places to periodically carpet bomb a country for it. In the meantime, Halliburton, among many other Pentagon contracts, has a lucrative 10-year deal to provide food services to the Army that comes with no lid on potential costs. Lenin once scoffed that a capitalist would sell rope to his own hangman. And, while the man got more than a few things wrong, he's been proven right on this one time and time again: from Hewlett-Packard and Bechtel helping arm Saddam back in the 80s, to the good folks at Boeing, Hughes Electronics, Lockheed Martin, and Loral Space whose corporate greed helped China steal rocket and missile secrets -- and point a few dozen long-range nukes our way. Clearly, our national interest runs a distant second when pitted against the rapacious desires of special interests and the politicians they buy with massive campaign contributions. Oil and gas companies donated $26.7 million to Bush and his fellow Republicans during the 2000 election
[pjnews] Advisors Warn Bush of Humiliating Defeat at UN
Capitol Hill Blue http://www.capitolhillblue.com/artman/publish/printer_1870.shtml Advisors warn Bush he faces humiliating defeat on UN resolution By CHB Staff Mar 4, 2003, 06:22 Senior aides to President George W. Bush say he faces a humiliating defeat before the United Nations Security Council next week. And signs emerged today that the U.S. may withdraw the resolution from security council consideration. Secretary of State Colin Powell, fresh from his latest round of meetings with representatives of countries on the Security Council, delivered the bad news to Bush on Monday. You will lose, Mr. President, Powell told Bush. You will lose badly and the United States will be humiliated on the world stage. President BushPowell told Bush he has only four of the nine votes needed for approval of a second resolution. As a result, some White House advisors are now urging the President to back off his tough stance on war with Iraq and give UN weapons inspectors more time. We have no other choice, admits one Bush advisor. We don't have the votes. We don't have the support. Presidential spokesman Ari Fleisher, in today's press briefing, appeared to signal a U.S. retreat from demanding a vote next week, saying the president has said he believes that a vote is desirable. It is not mandatory. John Negroponte, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said that while it is too early for the United States to withdraw the resolution, we haven't crossed that bridge, Negroponte said. Powell told Bush on Monday that Turkey's refusal to allow U.S. troops to stage at the country's border with Iraq doomed any chance of consensus at the UN. Many were watching Turkey, Powell told Bush. Had they agreed, it might have helped us sway critical votes. Powell met privately today with Mexico Foreign Minister Luis Ernesto Derbez to try and parse new language for the second resolution to satisfy a Mexican request to modify the text and extend the deadline for weapons inspections. It (the meeting) did not produce results, a Powell spokesman said afterwards. Publicly, Powell is leaving the door open for the U.S. to withdraw the resolution, telling a German television interviewer: At the start of next week we'll decide when, depending on what we have heard, we will vote on a resolution. It will be a difficult vote for the U.N. Security Council. Some Bush aides now admit privately that the President, for all his tough talk, may have to back down and postpone his plans to invade Iraq in the near future, delaying any invasion until April or May at the earliest. The vote in Turkey fucked things up big time, grumbles one White House aide. It pushes our timetable back. On the other hand, it might give us a chance to save face. Saving face could mean backing away from a showdown with the UN Security Council next week and agreeing to let the weapons inspection process run its course. The arrest of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed gives us some breathing room, says a Bush strategist. We can concentrate on the favorable publicity generated by the arrest and the valuable intelligence we have gained from that event. Mohammed, arrested in Pakistan, masterminded the 9-11 terrorist attacks. CIA agents found computer files, memos and other materials which pointed to plans for new attacks against the U.S. The prudent thing to do would be to let Iraq cool off on a back burner and concentrate on Mohammed, says Republican strategist Arnold Beckins. Saddam isn't going anywhere. There's too much heat on him right now for him to pull something. But a delay would not mean a war with Iraq is off. Most Bush strategists and Pentagon military planners agree that the U.S. will probably have to take military action sooner or later. Right now, only the U.S., Britain and Spain favor immediate military action against Iraq. With most of the other allies lining up against the U.S., Bush faces both a diplomatic and public relations nightmare if he proceeds against Hussein without setting a proper public stage. We've always needed an exit strategy, admits a White House aide. Circumstances have given us one. Perhaps we shouldn't ignore it. © Copyright 2003 Capitol Hill Blue - Las Vegas SUN http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/text/2003/mar/04/030404249.html March 04, 2003 U.S. May Consider Resolution Withdrawal By RON FOURNIER,ASSOCIATED PRESS WASHINGTON (AP) - With other nations' opposition hardening, the White House left open the possibility Tuesday that it would not seek a United Nations vote on its war-making resolution if the measure was clearly headed for defeat. U.S. troop strength in the Persian Gulf neared 300,000, and President Bush and his advisers were looking beyond the diplomatic showdown in the U.N. to make plans for a public relations buildup to potential war with Iraq. One option under serious consideration was Bush giving Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein a final ultimatum, perhaps with a short-term
[pjnews] American Media Dodging UN Surveillance Story
AMERICAN MEDIA DODGING U.N. SURVEILLANCE STORY By Norman Solomon / Creators Syndicate Three days after a British newspaper revealed a memo about U.S. spying on U.N. Security Council delegations, I asked Daniel Ellsberg to assess the importance of the story. This leak, he replied, is more timely and potentially more important than the Pentagon Papers. The key word is timely. Publication of the secret Pentagon Papers in 1971, made possible by Ellsberg's heroic decision to leak those documents, came after the Vietnam War had already been underway for many years. But with all-out war on Iraq still in the future, the leak about spying at the United Nations could erode the Bush administration's already slim chances of getting a war resolution through the Security Council. As part of its battle to win votes in favor of war against Iraq, the London-based Observer reported on March 2, the U.S. government developed an aggressive surveillance operation, which involves interception of the home and office telephones and the e-mails of U.N. delegates. The smoking gun was a memorandum written by a top official at the National Security Agency -- the U.S. body which intercepts communications around the world -- and circulated to both senior agents in his organization and to a friendly foreign intelligence agency. The Observer added: The leaked memorandum makes clear that the target of the heightened surveillance efforts are the delegations from Angola, Cameroon, Chile, Mexico, Guinea and Pakistan at the U.N. headquarters in New York -- the so-called 'Middle Six' delegations whose votes are being fought over by the pro-war party, led by the U.S. and Britain, and the party arguing for more time for U.N. inspections, led by France, China and Russia. The NSA memo, dated Jan. 31, outlines the wide scope of the surveillance activities, seeking any information useful to push a war resolution through the Security Council -- the whole gamut of information that could give U.S. policymakers an edge in obtaining results favorable to U.S. goals or to head off surprises. Three days after the memo came to light, the Times of London printed an article noting that the Bush administration finds itself isolated in its zeal for war on Iraq. In the most recent setback, the newspaper reported, a memorandum by the U.S. National Security Agency, leaked to the Observer, revealed that American spies were ordered to eavesdrop on the conversations of the six undecided countries on the United Nations Security Council. The London Times article called it an embarrassing disclosure. And the embarrassment was nearly worldwide. From Russia to France to Chile to Japan to Australia, the story was big mainstream news. But not in the United States. Several days after the embarrassing disclosure, not a word about it had appeared in America's supposed paper of record. The New York Times -- the single most influential media outlet in the United States -- still had not printed anything about the story. How could that be? Well, it's not that we haven't been interested, New York Times deputy foreign editor Alison Smale said Wednesday night, nearly 96 hours after the Observer broke the story. We could get no confirmation or comment on the memo from U.S. officials. The Times opted not to relay the Observer's account, Smale told me. We would normally expect to do our own intelligence reporting. She added: We are still definitely looking into it. It's not that we're not. Belated coverage would be better than none at all. But readers should be suspicious of the failure of the New York Times to cover this story during the crucial first days after it broke. At some moments in history, when war and peace hang in the balance, journalism delayed is journalism denied. Overall, the sparse U.S. coverage that did take place seemed eager to downplay the significance of the Observer's revelations. On March 4, the Washington Post ran a back-page 514-word article headlined Spying Report No Shock to U.N., while the Los Angeles Times published a longer piece that began by emphasizing that U.S. spy activities at the United Nations are long-standing. The U.S. media treatment has contrasted sharply with coverage on other continents. While some have taken a ho-hum attitude in the U.S., many around the world are furious, says Ed Vulliamy, one of the Observer reporters who wrote the March 2 article. Still, almost all governments are extremely reluctant to speak up against the espionage. This further illustrates their vulnerability to the U.S. government. To Daniel Ellsberg, the leaking of the NSA memo was a hopeful sign. Truth-telling like this can stop a war, he said. Time is short for insiders at intelligence agencies to tell the truth and save many many lives. But major news outlets must stop dodging the information that emerges. ___ Norman Solomon is co-author of the
[pjnews] MSNBC's Double Standard on Free Speech
Fairness Accuracy In Reporting Media analysis, critiques and activism ACTIVISM UPDATE: MSNBC's Double Standard on Free Speech Turd World is OK-- anti-war, anti-Bush is not March 7, 2003 MSNBC's claim to be championing free speech by hiring hate-talk radio host Michael Savage is disingenuous in the extreme. Defending its decision to give a weekly program to a commentator who specializes in diatribes against various groups, the MSNBC cable network called hiring Savage-- whose show will premiere on Saturday, March 8-- a legitimate attempt to expand the marketplace of ideas (Electronic Media, 2/25/03). This was a response to critics of Savage's record of racism, misogyny and homophobia, which includes dismissing child victims of gunfire as ghetto slime, referring to non-white countries as turd world nations, calling homosexuality perversion and asserting that Latinos breed like rabbits. (For more Savage quotes, see FAIR action alert, 2/12/03.) The news channel-- co-owned by Microsoft and General Electric/NBC-- declared in its formal statement: By bringing our viewers a wide range of strong, opinionated voices, MSNBC underscores its commitment to ensuring that its perspective programming promotes no one single point of view. We encourage debate and we would neither expect, nor want, our audience to agree with everything on our channel. But this enthusiasm for a wide range of strong, opinionated voices rings hollow in the wake of MSNBC's firing of host Phil Donahue. (FAIR's founder, Jeff Cohen, worked as a senior producer for Donahue.) His show was cancelled despite having the best ratings on the network; this occurred, according to published reports, after a study commissioned by NBC described Donahue as a tired, left-wing liberal out of touch with the current marketplace who would be a difficult public face for NBC in a time of war (All Your TV, 2/25/03). He seems to delight in presenting guests who are anti-war, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration's motives, the report noted, warning that the Donahue show could be a home for the liberal antiwar agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity. Network insiders echoed these qualms. In an email leaked to the website All Your TV (3/5/03), one executive suggested that MSNBC could take advantage of the anticipated larger audience who will tune in during a time of war to reinvent itself and cross-pollinate our programming by linking pundits to war coverage. It's unlikely that we can use Phil in this way, particularly given his public stance on the advisability of the war effort, the email said. All Your TV's Rick Ellis quoted a network source: I personally like Donahue, but our numbers were telling us that viewers thought he has too combative, and often said things that some respondents considered almost unpatriotic. According to published reports, these fears led MSNBC to micromanage the Donahue show. He was often told what kinds of subjects to showcase and what kind of guests to have. And he was often chided for being too tough on some guests, consumer advocate Ralph Nader wrote (Common Dreams, 3/3/03). In the past few months, the corporate 'suits' even told Donahue that he had to have more conservative or right-wing guests than liberals on the same hour show. Given this treatment of Donahue's progressive, anti-war views, it is hypocritical for MSNBC to claim that it is hiring Savage merely to expand the marketplace of ideas, provide a wide range of strong, opinionated voices and encourage debate. While hatred of turd world immigrants is a viewpoint that the news channel seems comfortable promoting, progressive criticism of a war with Iraq is too controversial. Savage, who has called on the government to arrest the leaders of the antiwar movement in case of war (Boston Globe, 3/3/03), is in no position to pose as a free-speech martyr. I'll put you in jail! was his response to critics of his MSNBC hiring, whom he referred to as stinking rats who hide in the sewers (2/27/03). Noting that we have a Republican president. We have a Republican attorney general, Savage suggested he would sic the government on his enemies: I have millions of people who vote. Mr. Bush wants to get re-elected, and just consider me a politician at that point. I'm going to ask for a trade in favor. If they keep it up, my favor is going to be I want these groups investigated. If they're doing nothing illegal, fine. If they've crossed the line, then put 'em out of business. When activists in Oregon organized against Savage's show last year, he issued thinly veiled threats of violence, saying he would release the names and addresses of these little hateful nothings to his fans (Salon.com, 3/5/03): I'm warning you if you try to damage me any further with lies, be aware of something: That which you stoke shall come to burn you, the ashes of the fireplace will come and burn your own house down. Be very careful, you
[pjnews] Bush Presses for War
BUSH PRESSES FOR WAR Bill Hartung There was a surreal quality about President Bush's news conference setting out his case for why the United States must abandon diplomacy and accelerate the march toward war with Iraq. In a mood that many analysts described as somber but which I perceived as robotic and distant, Bush called out the names of a pre-selected list of reporters and responded to their questions with snippets of his stump speech about why Saddam Hussein is an evil man who must be subjected to regime change. The weakest element of Bush's presentation was his failure to explain what the rush is all about. Saddam Hussein's regime is beginning to cooperate more fully with UN weapons inspectors, no doubt in significant part because of the threat of force posed by U.S. forces gathering in the region. He has no missiles that can reach the United States. The International Atomic Energy Agency (which Bush inadvertently referred to as the IEAE instead of the IAEA during his press conference) has suggested that not only does Iraq not currently possess nuclear weapons or the facilities to make them, but that with a few more months of inspections, the agency should be in a position to verify whether all remnants of Iraq's nuclear weapons program have been eliminated. What remains of Iraq's chemical and biological weapons programs is really all that is at issue now, and top UN inspector Hans Blix is clearly of the opinion that the with the increased cooperation created by the threat of force these programs too can be substantially dismantled. Given these realities, where is the case for a war that the Bush administration seems ready to launch within weeks, if not days? It's all about ideology. It's clearly not about the facts of the case - otherwise Bush wouldn't have trotted out that discredited line about a poison factory in Northern Iraq. The so-called factory, which was referenced in Colin Powell's Security Council presentation last month, is in an enclave in Northern Iraq controlled by the Islamic group Al Ansar, a split-off from the anti-Saddam Kurdish movement in Northern Iraq which gets the bulk of its material support from Iran, Saddam Hussein's longstanding regional adversary. Not only does Al Ansar have no operational links to Saddam Hussein, but the poison factory is not a poison factory. A group of international journalists, including one from the United States' only staunch anti-Iraq ally, the United Kingdom, visited the alleged poison factory site after Powell's presentation and found a hodge podge of shacks with barely enough electricity to run a few light bulbs, much less power a chem/bio weapons laboratory. It's quite likely that the Bush administration's new rumors about hidden Iraqi missile production capabilities and other alleged transgressions will prove equally dubious upon inspection. But the administration is banking on the fact that once the war starts; the time for these kinds of questions will have passed. My friend and colleague Michael Klare, a respected arms analyst who heads the Five Colleges' Peace and World Security Studies program in Western Massachusetts, gave his take on Bush's press conference in a radio interview on WBAI in New York this morning. He said that Bush's demeanor represented the somber tone of a man who truly believed what he was saying - that Saddam Hussein is the greatest threat to peace in the world, that the United States has a God-given responsibility to remove him from power, and so forth. This is far scarier than the notion that Bush is the front man for Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, and probably closer to the truth. The Bush doctrine of preemption mixed with Bush's own peculiar brand of religious faith yields a policy in which overthrowing governments that the President perceives to be a potential threat to the United States at some unspecified future date is not merely seen as a policy option, but as a moral obligation. The fact that the leaders of most major religious denominations in the U.S., not to mention many of our major allies and the vast majority of the world's people, oppose a war with Iraq, does not seem to weigh particularly heavily in Bush's calculations. He has described the millions who marched against the war on the week-end of February 15th and 16th as the equivalent of a focus group and suggested that they won't change his mind, and he has apparently lectured an emissary of the pope on why going to war with Iraq is in fact the moral and holy thing to do, regardless of what the Vatican or any other religious authority may say on the subject. So, where does that leave us? With a lot of work to do. We need the biggest turnouts we can muster at this weekend's International Women's Day actions against the war, and we need to stay strong and courageous if and when the bombs start falling. We need to continue to voice support for the governments that are willing to veto or vote against a war resolution in the
[pjnews] UN Inspectors Criticize CIA Data on Iraqi Sites
Top Inspectors Criticize CIA Data on Iraqi Sites By Bob Drogin and Greg Miller, LA Times Staff Writers Saturday 08 March 2003 Blix and Elbaradei reject key intelligence claims. Some U.S. officials admit quality is poor. UNITED NATIONS -- On the eve of a possible war in Iraq, a question looms increasingly large: If U.S. intelligence is so good, why are United Nations experts still unable to confirm whether Saddam Hussein is actively concealing and producing illegal weapons? That troubling issue erupted Friday when top U.N. weapons inspectors expressed frustration with the quality of intelligence they have been given. I would rather have twice the amount of high-quality information about sites to inspect than twice the number of expert inspectors to send, Hans Blix, who heads the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, told the Security Council. Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, went further, charging that documents provided by unidentified states may have been faked to suggest that the African country of Niger sold uranium to Iraq between 1999 and 2001. He said inspectors concluded that the documents were not authentic after scrutinizing the form, format, contents and signatures ... of the alleged procurement-related documentation. ElBaradei also rejected three other key claims that U.S. intelligence officials have repeatedly cited to support charges that Iraq is secretly trying to build nuclear weapons. Although investigations are continuing, ElBaradei said, nuclear experts have found no indication that Iraq has tried to import high-strength aluminum tubes or specialized ring magnets for centrifuge enrichment of uranium. Inspectors also have found no indication of nuclear-related prohibited activities in newly erected buildings or other sites identified by satellite, ElBaradei said. After three months of intrusive inspections, we have to date found no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapons program in Iraq, ElBaradei said. Bush administration officials insist that they are providing all relevant information to the U.N. teams. But some officials privately acknowledge that the quality and quantity of intelligence are thin. We have some information, not a lot, said one U.S. official familiar with the CIA's daily packages of material it delivers to a Canadian official at the U.N. who handles intelligence issues for Blix. Although U.N. teams have conducted nearly 600 inspections of about 350 sites since November, only 44 were of new sites based on fresh tips. The issue spilled into Congress this week when Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) accused the administration of deliberately withholding information on suspected Iraqi weapons facilities from Blix's teams. Levin, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee and a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the inspectors have been given only a small fraction of the sites that appear on classified lists circulated in the intelligence community. He warned of a nightmare scenario if U.S. troops are attacked with weapons of mass destruction from sites that could have been inspected had the CIA shared information. Levin also accused the White House of seeking to undermine the inspection process, saying the administration has withheld data in part because they genuinely believe the inspections were useless and said so from the beginning. But CIA officials rejected the charges. In a letter to key lawmakers released Thursday night, CIA Director George J. Tenet said the agency has provided detailed information on all of the high-value and moderate sites to the United Nations. Tenet said the CIA has shared information on all but a handful of sites -- even those deemed of lower interest -- with the current weapons inspectors or those who worked in Iraq between 1991 and 1998. Blix's team has visited far more than half of these 'lower interest sites,' Tenet said. He said the CIA shared its analysis of Iraq's 12,000-page Dec. 7 declaration to the United Nations of its weapons programs and inventory. Both U.S. and U.N. officials sharply criticized the document as untruthful and incomplete. We've briefed them on missiles, we've briefed them on the nuclear program, we've briefed them on chemical weapons, on biological weapons, on a whole range of subjects, Tenet added. A U.S. intelligence official said some of the information the CIA has compiled is of such low value that it would not be useful to inspectors. You don't swamp the U.N. with everything we have ever heard, the official said. Asked whether the CIA would withhold important information, the official said, The logic of that escapes me. Other officials said that the CIA has shared its best data with inspectors, but that the information may not be enough. One congressional source said the intelligence community has identified hundreds of suspect sites, including dozens that are of top or high value.
[pjnews] Some US Evidence on Iraq Called Fake
Some Evidence on Iraq Called Fake U.N. Nuclear Inspector Says Documents on Purchases Were Forged By Joby Warrick Washington Post Staff Writer Saturday, March 8, 2003; Page A01 A key piece of evidence linking Iraq to a nuclear weapons program appears to have been fabricated, the United Nations' chief nuclear inspector said yesterday in a report that called into question U.S. and British claims about Iraq's secret nuclear ambitions. Documents that purportedly showed Iraqi officials shopping for uranium in Africa two years ago were deemed not authentic after careful scrutiny by U.N. and independent experts, Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), told the U.N. Security Council. ElBaradei also rejected a key Bush administration claim -- made twice by the president in major speeches and repeated by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell yesterday -- that Iraq had tried to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes to use in centrifuges for uranium enrichment. Also, ElBaradei reported finding no evidence of banned weapons or nuclear material in an extensive sweep of Iraq using advanced radiation detectors. There is no indication of resumed nuclear activities, ElBaradei said. Knowledgeable sources familiar with the forgery investigation described the faked evidence as a series of letters between Iraqi agents and officials in the central African nation of Niger. The documents had been given to the U.N. inspectors by Britain and reviewed extensively by U.S. intelligence. The forgers had made relatively crude errors that eventually gave them away -- including names and titles that did not match up with the individuals who held office at the time the letters were purportedly written, the officials said. We fell for it, said one U.S. official who reviewed the documents. A spokesman for the IAEA said the agency did not blame either Britain or the United States for the forgery. The documents were shared with us in good faith, he said. The discovery was a further setback to U.S. and British efforts to convince reluctant U.N. Security Council members of the urgency of the threat posed by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Powell, in his statement to the Security Council Friday, acknowledged ElBaradei's findings but also cited new information suggesting that Iraq continues to try to get nuclear weapons components. It is not time to close the book on these tubes, a senior State Department official said, adding that Iraq was prohibited from importing sensitive parts, such as tubes, regardless of their planned use. Iraqi President Saddam Hussein pursued an ambitious nuclear agenda throughout the 1970s and 1980s and launched a crash program to build a bomb in 1990 following his invasion of neighboring Kuwait. But Iraq's nuclear infrastructure was heavily damaged by allied bombing in 1991, and the country's known stocks of nuclear fuel and equipment were removed or destroyed during the U.N. inspections after the war. However, Iraq never surrendered the blueprints for nuclear weapons, and kept key teams of nuclear scientists intact after U.N. inspectors were forced to leave in 1998. Despite international sanctions intended to block Iraq from obtaining weapons components, Western intelligence agencies and former weapons inspectors were convinced the Iraqi president had resumed his quest for the bomb in the late 1990s, citing defectors' stories and satellite images that showed new construction at facilities that were once part of Iraq's nuclear machinery. Last September, the United States and Britain issued reports accusing Iraq of renewing its quest for nuclear weapons. In Britain's assessment, Iraq reportedly had sought significant amounts of uranium from Africa, despite having no active civil nuclear program that could require it. Separately, President Bush, in his speech to the U.N. Security Council on Sept. 12, said Iraq had made several attempts to buy-high-strength aluminum tubes used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons. Doubts about both claims began to emerge shortly after U.N. inspectors returned to Iraq last November. In early December, the IAEA began an intensive investigation of the aluminum tubes, which Iraq had tried for two years to purchase by the tens of thousands from China and at least one other country. Certain types of high-strength aluminum tubes can be used to build centrifuges, which enrich uranium for nuclear weapons and commercial power plants. By early January, the IAEA had reached a preliminary conclusion: The 81mm tubes sought by Iraq were not directly suitable for centrifuges, but appeared intended for use as conventional artillery rockets, as Iraq had claimed. The Bush administration, meanwhile, stuck to its original position while acknowledging disagreement among U.S. officials who had reviewed the evidence. In his State of the Union address on Jan. 28, Bush said Iraq had attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for
[pjnews] US Canvassing the Votes to Gain Legitimacy
Canvassing the Votes to Gain Legitimacy March 13, 2003 By DAVID E. SANGER NY Times WASHINGTON, March 12 - As President Bush called around the world today with an intensity his father might admire, his aides were arguing behind the scenes over a single question: how many votes does it take to confer an aura of international legitimacy on an attack against Iraq? More votes, it seems, than the president had in hand when his aides emerged tonight from the White House situation room. Over the next day or two, the White House will have to deal with the warnings that Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and others have expressed in private conversations. President Bush said publicly on Thursday that he would bring the issue to a vote, win or lose, and today White House officials were still insisting that is the case. Mr. Powell, however, according to diplomats who have talked to him, is cautioning that it would be better to scrap the vote entirely than to go to war against the expressed wishes of a majority of the Security Council. Colin hasn't given up on the possibility of a victory, said one Arab official involved on the sidelines of the negotiations. He might have eight tonight, and that would be respectable. With a lot of luck they could get nine, a supervote. But this evening some of those votes seemed iffy at best, and imaginary at worst. If Mr. Bush and his aides cannot persuade and arm-twist wavering members into voting for an ultimatum along the lines the British have proposed, the United States will find itself in a place it has never been before: openly, unashamedly, starting a conflict that the Security Council says cannot be conducted in its name. That never happened during the Korean War, when President Truman won United Nations backing to counter North Korea's invasion of South Korea. To this day the American-led command along the DMZ flies the United Nations flag. During the Cuban missile crisis, President Kennedy wanted the imprimatur of the Organization of American States before he ordered a naval quarantine on Cuba. He got it. Even during the Kosovo conflict, the Security Council was frozen in place, but President Clinton forced action through NATO, muting charges of American unilateralism. But this is different. Mr. Bush says he is willing to go to war without the cover of any international organization other than the coalition of the willing that he is organizing. That is exactly the script that Vice President Dick Cheney warned about last summer when he said it would be worse to lose a vote than to act in the name of enforcing existing United Nations resolutions. But eventually the president decided it was worth the risk, and that looked like a good call in November, when the Council unanimously passed Resolution 1441, calling for Iraq's immediate disarmament. White House officials insist that Mr. Bush - while frustrated and angry at France, Germany, Russia and Mexico - has no regrets. They say he had to test his own thesis that Iraq would decide whether this is the United Nations or the League of Nations. Now, however, Mr. Bush must decide in the next 36 hours or so whether to attempt a vote. And that decision hinges on how he defines victory, and whether he is deterred by the specter of defeat. You can see, talking to American diplomats, the tension inside the American administration, said Inocencio F. Arias, the Spanish representative to the United Nations. You can see they are fighting a battle there. They don't say anything. You can see it in their body language. Veto threats from France and Russia are no longer the chief concern. That's not the issue, one senior administration official said, as the president cajoled and argued over the phone today with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan, among others. Do you really need nine? Wouldn't eight - an actual majority - suffice? the official said. This isn't about the rules of the U.N., he added. It's about showing that we are not alone. While Mr. Bush insists that America needs no other nation's permission to act, his actions in the last two days reveal that he would like to claim at least a moral victory. With eight votes, one friend of Mr. Bush's said today, he could go on television the night of the U.N. vote and say, `We are backed by a majority of the Security Council.' And that would help a lot. Mostly it would help Tony Blair, the British prime minister, who needs a second vote to win approval in Parliament to commit British forces to war. But if it appears that the vote will be lost, Mr. Blair may be in worse shape than before. With that in mind, the hawkish elements of the administration - including Mr. Cheney - are said to favor avoiding a vote if the alternative is defeat. One possibility discussed here today is that the White House, if short of votes, will declare that at the request of its co-sponsors, Britain and Spain, it is withdrawing the resolution. It may
[pjnews] 2/16 Candlelight Vigils Worldwide
Join a Candlelight Vigil, Or Start Your Own Sunday, March 16 at 7PM citizens around the globe will be holding candlelight vigils for peace. To find out about the one nearest you, or to plan one in your own neighborhood, please visit http://www.globalvigil.org. Hundreds have already been planned, but hundreds more are needed. TrueMajority, MoveOn.org, and the Win Without War coalition, together with Archbishop Desmond Tutu and many faith-based organizations, are calling this vigil, and we need your help. Beginning in New Zealand, this will be a rolling wave of candlelight gatherings that will quickly cross the globe. It's up to you to make this happen. We're hoping that thousands of small groups around the world will be inspired to come together and stand for peace. It's time for the world to come together in this moment of darkness and rekindle the light of reason -- and of hope. It's time to renew our commitment to building a positive world for our children. With your help, we will see the first candlelight vigil to sweep around the globe on the evening of March 16th. Together, we will lead the nations of the world away from an unnecessary war and toward a peaceful and prosperous future. This is a key moment in history. Be a part of it. Go to: http://www.globalvigil.org Sincerely, Ben Cohen, President of TrueMajority Co-founder Ben Jerry's Ice Cream I am writing this email on my own and not on behalf of Ben Jerry's, which is not associated with the TrueMajority campaign
[pjnews] Robert Fisk in Baghdad
Bubbles of Fire Tore into the Sky Above Baghdad Robert Fisk - The Independent 21 March 2003 It was like a door slamming deep beneath the surface of the earth; a pulsating, minute-long roar of sound that brought President George Bush's supposed crusade against terrorism to Baghdad last night. There was a thrashing of tracer on the horizon from the Baghdad air defences the Second World War-era firepower of old Soviet anti-aircraft guns and then a series of tremendous vibrations that had the ground shaking under our feet. Bubbles of fire tore into the sky around the Iraqi capital, dark red at the base, golden at the top. Saddam Hussein, of course, has vowed to fight to the end but in Baghdad last night, there was a truly Valhalla quality about the violence. Within minutes, looking out across the Tigris river I could see pin-pricks of fire as bombs and cruise missiles exploded on to Iraq's military and communications centres and, no doubt, upon the innocent as well. The first of the latter, a taxi driver, was blown to pieces in the first American raid on Baghdad yesterday morning. No one here doubted that the dead would include civilians. Tony Blair said just that in the Commons debate this week but I wondered, listening to this storm of fire across Baghdad last night, if he has any conception of what it looks like, what it feels like, or of the fear of those innocent Iraqis who are, as I write this, cowering in their homes and basements. Not many hours ago, I talked to an old Shia Muslim lady in a poor area of Baghdad. She was dressed in traditional black with a white veil over her head. I pressed her over and over again as to what she felt. In the end, she just said: I am afraid. That this is the start of something that will change the face of the Middle East is in little doubt; that it will be successful in the long term is quite another matter. The sheer violence of it, the howl of air raid sirens and the air-cutting fall of the missiles carried its own political message; not just to President Saddam but to the rest of the world. We are the super-power, those explosions said last night. This is how we do business. This is how we take our revenge for 11 September. Not even George Bush made any pretence in the last days of peace to link Iraq with those international crimes against humanity in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. But some of the fire that you could see bubbling up through the darkness around Baghdad last night did remind me of other flames, those which consumed the World Trade Centre. In a strange way, the Americans were without the permission of the United Nations, with most of the world against them acting out their rage with an eerily fiery consummation. Iraq cannot withstand this for long. President Saddam may claim, as he does, that his soldiers can defeat technology with courage. I doubt it. For what fell upon Iraq last night and I witnessed just an infinitely small part of this festival of violence was as militarily awesome as it was politically terrifying. The crowds outside my hotel stood and stared into the sky at the flashing anti-aircraft bursts, awed by their power.
[pjnews] Updates from Iraq Peace Team
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: IPT Update: A Campaign Unlike Any Other (March 22, 2003) Dear Friends, In Baghdad as I write, things are relatively quiet. Today Iraq Peace Team delegate Wade Hudson had a chance to take a limited drive around Baghdad with a driver and a government minder. After passing by the still smoking Ministry of Foreign Affairs building, he drove to a residential neighborhood where he reports having seen a bomb crater 8 to 12 feet deep in the middle of a wide, divided street. Traffic in one direction was blocked. He also reported passing by many small homes in the neighborhood with all of their front windows blown out, presumably from the blast that created the crater. A few hours ago, we spoke with Kathy Kelly at the Al Fanar hotel in downtown Baghdad. Kathy told us that they will be going around and visiting some hospitals tomorrow where there are apparently quite a lot of children. It is expected that the worst is yet to come. This grim forecast is not mitigated by Gen. Tommy Franks' promise earlier today of a campaign unlike any other in history, a campaign characterized by shock, by surprise, by flexibility, by the employment of precise munitions on a scale never before seen, and by the application of overwhelming force. We are getting unconfirmed reports of fighting in Basra, Iraq's second largest city. Regretfully, we have no IPT presence outside of Baghdad. We are trying to reach friends in Basra and have had little success. Just two very shaky connections that were terminated after less than a minute. --- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: IPT Update: The Living and the Dead (March 23, 2003) Tonight, as we mourn the mounting casualties on both sides of the battle in Iraq, I wanted to share this excerpt from a statement against war issued by a group of women peacemakers during World War One: Whoever may be the enemy, our sons are bidden to fight in the next war. We know their lives will be sacrificed in vain. War settles nothing. Every victory has within its womb the seeds of future war. No country is ever wholly in the right or wholly in the wrong. In every nation there are good and bad. You cannot punish the pride of an Emperor by killing numbers of his peasants. We are not willing to go through the long months of pregnancy and labor merely to produce more cannon fodder. One of the first U.S. casualties in Iraq was Kendall Waters-Bey, a 29-year-old Marine from Baltimore, Maryland. He died, along with 11 others, when his helicopter crashed near Umm Qasr. Michelle Waters, the Marine's oldest sister, spoke to a reporter for the Baltimore Sun shortly after hearing news of her brother's death, It's all for nothing, that war could have been prevented, she lamented. Now, we're out of a brother. [President] Bush is not out of a brother. We are. Similar despair must grip the family members of the two dead Iraqi soldiers I saw in a photograph today. Their lifeless bodies were collapsed in a trench, one soldier still gripping his white flag of surrender. In the face of such overwhelming tragedy, we offer up an unusual story. It is the story of a young girl and a birthday party in Baghdad. We hope you will find some glimmer of hope in this parable of the human spirit: Amal Shamuri is the fifth child in a family of eight, living in a small apartment off Baghdad's Karrada shopping district. Irrepressible and precocious, Amal joked last January that she wouldn't mind a war if George Bush would only bomb her school. Today was a different story. Today, Amal celebrated her thirteenth birthday on the fourth day of American air strikes on Baghdad with plumes of black smoke surrounding the city and darkening the sky, reportedly from oil set afire by Iraqi forces defending the capitol. Her family and friends gathered with members of the Iraq Peace Team in a small garden near the Tigris river to mark the occasion. They blew balloons and soap bubbles, strung party streamers, played tag, and ate barbecued chicken, potato salad, deviled eggs, and chocolate cake. True to form, the kids ate the cake first, before serving the rest of the meal to the adults present. Cruise missiles exploding to the south and east occasionally interrupted the party, one powerful enough to rattle tableware and partygoers alike. The explosions only temporarily silenced the festivities; but with moments the garden once again erupted to squeals of laughter and boisterous childhood games, played beneath rising plumes of air-borne debris and smoke in the distance. 'Life is more powerful than death,' said Shane Claiborne, age 27, from Philadelphia. 'How can George Bush bomb these kids?,' he asked. Lisa Ndejuru, age 32, from Montreal, quietly remarked, 'What a day to be thirteen.' Amal's mother, Kareema, sat silently to one side, watching her kids play. Her husband died in a car accident eight years ago, leaving her to raise eight children by herself. To her credit, none of
[pjnews] Reporter Robert Fisk Visits Baghdad Hospital
http://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=389918 This is the reality of war. We bomb. They suffer Veteran war reporter Robert Fisk tours the Baghdad hospital to see the wounded after a devastating night of air strikes 23 March 2003 Donald Rumsfeld says the American attack on Baghdad is as targeted an air campaign as has ever existed but he should not try telling that to five-year-old Doha Suheil. She looked at me yesterday morning, drip feed attached to her nose, a deep frown over her small face as she tried vainly to move the left side of her body. The cruise missile that exploded close to her home in the Radwaniyeh suburb of Baghdad blasted shrapnel into her tiny legs. They were bound up with gauze and, far more seriously, into her spine. Now she has lost all movement in her left leg. Her mother bends over the bed and straightens her right leg which the little girl thrashes around outside the blanket. Somehow, Doha's mother thinks that if her child's two legs lie straight beside each other, her daughter will recover from her paralysis. She was the first of 101 patients brought to the Al-Mustansaniya College Hospital after America's blitz on the city began on Friday night. Seven other members of her family were wounded in the same cruise missile bombardment; the youngest, a one-year-old baby, was being breastfed by her mother at the time. There is something sick, obscene about these hospital visits. We bomb. They suffer. Then we turn up and take pictures of their wounded children. The Iraqi minister of health decides to hold an insufferable press conference outside the wards to emphasise the bestial nature of the American attack. The Americans say that they don't intend to hurt children. And Doha Suheil looks at me and the doctors for reassurance, as if she will awake from this nightmare and move her left leg and feel no more pain. So let's forget, for a moment, the cheap propaganda of the regime and the equally cheap moralising of Messrs Rumsfeld and Bush, and take a trip around the Al-Mustansaniya College Hospital. For the reality of war is ultimately not about military victory and defeat, or the lies about coalition forces which our embedded journalists are now peddling about an invasion involving only the Americans, the British and a handful of Australians. War, even when it has international legitimacy-- which this war does not-- is primarily about suffering. Take 50-year-old Amel Hassan, a peasant woman with tattoos on her arms and legs but who now lies on her hospital bed with massive purple bruises on her shoulders. They are now twice their original size. Hassan was on her way to visit her daughter when the first American missile struck Baghdad. I was just getting out of the taxi when there was a big explosion and I fell down and found my blood everywhere, she told me. It was on my arms, my legs, my chest. Amel Hassan still has multiple shrapnel wounds in her chest. Her five-year-old daughter Wahed lies in the next bed, whimpering with pain. She had climbed out of the taxi first and was almost at her aunt's front door when the explosion cut her down. Her feet are still bleeding although the blood has clotted around her toes and is staunched by the bandages on her ankles and lower legs. Two little boys are in the next room. Sade Selim is 11; his brother Omar is 14. Both have shrapnel wounds to their legs and chest. Isra Riad is in the third room with almost identical injuries, in her case shrapnel wounds to the legs as she ran in terror from her house into her garden as the blitz began. Imam Ali is 23 and has multiple shrapnel wounds in her abdomen and lower bowel. Najla Hussein Abbas still tries to cover her head with a black scarf but she cannot hide the purple wounds to her legs. Multiple shrapnel wounds. After a while, multiple shrapnel wounds sounds like a natural disease which, I suppose-- among a people who have suffered more than 20 years of war-- it is. And all this, I asked myself yesterday, was all this for 11 September 2001? All this was to strike back at our attackers, albeit that Doha Suheil, Wahed Hassan and Imam Ali have nothing-- absolutely nothing-- to do with those crimes against humanity, any more than has the awful Saddam? Who decided, I wonder, that these children, these young women, should suffer for 11 September? Wars repeat themselves. Always, when we come to visit those we have bombed, we have the same question. In Libya in 1986, I remember how American reporters would repeatedly cross-question the wounded: had they perhaps been hit by shrapnel from their own anti-aircraft fire? Again, in 1991, we asked the Iraqi wounded the same question. And yesterday, a doctor found himself asked by a British radio reporter-- yes, you've guessed it Do you think, doctor, that some of these people could have been hit by Iraqi anti-aircraft fire? Should we laugh or cry at this? Should we always blame them for their own wounds? Certainly we should ask
[pjnews] Talking Points Next Steps As War Begins
UNITED FOR PEACE JUSTICE Talking Points Next Steps As War Begins 20 March 2003 by Phyllis Bennis John Cavanagh This preventive war (it isn't even preemptive because there is no imminent threat to preempt) is among the most dangerous and reckless actions ever taken by a U.S. president. It isn't the first time the U.S. has launched an unjustified illegal war. But it is the first time such a war has been justified through a doctrine of preemptive war that abandons all understandings that war, with all its horrors, can be used only as the last possible resort when a nation's security and survival are threatened. The war at home -- This war threatens Americans. We are now at greater risk. This war will increase anti-American sentiments around the world, and will serve as a recruiting poster for al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations. This war is based on a false linkage to the September 11 attacks. Bush's speech spoke of going after outlaw regimes that have weapons of mass murder with the army, navy, etc., so we don't have to go after them with police and doctors on the streets of our cities. Clearly implying Iraq is responsible for the World Trade Center attacks, this lie is designed to keep Americans frightened and willing to accept a new war in the hopes it will make us safer. This war threatens our Constitution. The cover of war will lead to even greater shredding of our civil liberties than ever before. This war isolates our country. As ranking diplomat John Brady Kiesling said in resigning his post in protest of the war, We have begun to dismantle the largest and most effective web of international relationships the world has ever known. Our current course will bring instability and danger, not security. The War Abroad -- This war will be devastating for Iraq and Iraqis. The Pentagon's plan of shock and awe to open the main air attack against Baghdad will send 3,000 cruise missiles and precision-guided bombs into a crowded city of 6 million people. That is ten times the number of such bombs used in the entire Gulf War in 1991. The humanitarian consequences will be severe. Beyond those killed or injured directly by bombs and other weapons, many more will likely be killed by denial of clean water, hospital systems knocked out, insufficient food, etc. The Pentagon's much-vaunted non-lethal weapons (e-bombs, micro-wave based weapons, etc.) may not kill people directly, but they act to wipe out all computer chips in a given area (thus knocking out hospital machinery, ambulances, cars - as well as journalists' digital cameras and computers) or destroy electrical generating capacity (including water pumps, hospitals, etc.) Media attention is focused almost entirely on strategy, U.S. mobilization, U.S. troops -- the effect is to sideline any concern about Iraqi civilians. The U.S. is thoroughly isolated internationally. The coalition to disarm Iraq that has replaced the inaccurately-named coalition of the willing is not serious. If not for Britain and Australia it would not pass the laugh test. Key allied countries -- Kuwait, Saudi Arabia -- are not listed; they are too embarrassed and under too much domestic pressure. Israel is not listed; the U.S. is too afraid of international reaction. Those listed --- from Afghanistan (no need to say more) to Uzbekistan (whose human rights record is barely better than that of Iraq). Includes only two African countries, the European contingent are all NATO wannabes (Albania, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Romania, Slovenia). Virtually none are actually providing military assistance. Key focus points -- This is an illegitimate war, and stands in violation of the UN Charter and international law. We hold the U.S. accountable for this illegal war. The United Nations and Security Council members did not collapse under U.S. bribes and threats, because of what the New York Times called the second super-power -- global public opinion opposed to this war. The UN actually emerged more relevant than ever as a venue for grouping international opposition to Washington's unilateral push towards war. While the UN leadership's response was disappointing -- the inspectors and aid workers should not have all been pulled out so soon -- this is not a UN war, even in name. We should demand that Congress refuse to pay for waging an illegal war. We should also be clear that the U.S. is accountable for paying the costs of rehabilitating Iraq's war-shattered infrastructure as well as the emergency costs of refugees, food aid, etc. That money should be channeled through the UN humanitarian agencies, not paid to U.S. corporations, especially those (like Halliburton - already offered a $1 billion + contract) with direct links to the Bush administration. The U.S. should not be allowed to seize Iraqi oil funds for that use. As Secretary General Kofi Annan told the Council, the U.S. is responsible for Iraqi civilians during the war, and in any area under military
[pjnews] Wartime Propaganda and Censorship
Latest Information on Iraqi Civilian Causalities Al-Jazeera show dead kids killed by US bombing in Basra http://www.aljazeera.net/news/arabic/2003/3/3-22-26.htm 50 civilians dead in Basra: filmed - 23.03.2003 http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=89923 Iraq Body Count March 23: Between 126-199 Civilian Had been Killed http://www.iraqbodycount.net/ -- Another sign the war is not going well: The Pentagon has imposed strict censorship. Work is paralyzed at the coalition press-center in Kuwait. Journalists are not able to get any information except for the hourly press communiqué from the command. All reports coming from embedded journalists attached are now being strictly censored by the military. All live broadcasts, such as those seen during the first day of the war, are now strictly prohibited by a special order from the coalition command. The required time delay between the time news video footage was shot and the time it can be broadcast has been increased to a minimum of 4 hours. This sort of strict censorship is the most convincing sign that the war is not going as planned. http://www.aeronautics.ru/news/news002/news076.htm - War-time propaganda excerpt: Propaganda success breeds contempt for the old-fashioned notion that politicians require the informed consent of the people before they go to war. The media bears much of the blame; it has been so painfully slow in refuting administration double talk that Karl Rove and Andrew Card can count on a fairly long interval between propaganda declaration and contradiction; or they can bet that the contradiction will be so muted as to be insignificant. Thus could the president brazenly include the discredited aluminum tubes in his State of the Union address. Meanwhile, stories designed to frighten the public onto a war footing proliferate. Colin Powell tells the Security Council of a poison factory linked to al Qaeda in northern Iraq. Reporters visit a compound of crude structures and find nothing of the kind, so an unidentified State Department official responds by saying that a 'poison factory' is a term of art. Powell cites new British intelligence on Saddam's spying capabilities; British Channel 4 reveals that this new dossier is plagiarized from a journal article by a graduate student in California. The administration raises its terrorist threat level to orange, causing widespread anxiety and duct-tape purchases (a handy placebo for a faltering economy); ABC News reports (at last, a rapid response) that the latest terror alert was largely based on fabricated information provided by a captured al Qaeda informant who subsequently failed a lie-detector test. Powell announces a new threat from an Iraqi airborne drone; the drone, patched together with tape and powered by a small engine with a wooden propeller, turns out to have a maximum range of five miles. The administration trumpets alleged attempts by Iraq to purchase uranium from Niger; the IAEA concludes that the incriminating documents were forged. On March 7, Powell is back in the Security Council brandishing . . . aluminum tubes!: There is new information . . . available to us . . . and the IAEA about a European country where Iraq was found shopping for these kinds of tubes . . . [tubes] more exact by a factor of 50 percent or more than those usually specified for rocket-motor casings. When I ask the State Department the name of the European country, I am informed that said country wishes to remain anonymous. (So did Nayirah al-Sabah.) When I inquire with the IAEA about the new evidence, I am told that El Baradei's analysis, presented before Powell's declaration, is unchanged: Extensive field investigation and document analysis have failed to uncover any evidence that Iraq intended to use these 81mm tubes for any project other than the reverse engineering of rockets. The question is, why do they get away with it? George Orwell blamed slovenliness in the language, like the phrase weapons of mass destruction. Most people think it means nuclear weapons, sure to kill hundreds of thousands. With no A-bombs in sight in Iraq, Bush can still shout about nerve gas and poison gas =F7 also weapons of mass destruction =F7 and unsophisticated folks think he's still talking about A-bombs. Bad as they are, chemical and biological weapons are very unlikely to kill in the same quantities as nuclear weapons, but Bush gets a free ride on sloppy English. PR practitioners say it's easy for politicians to have their way. Peter Teeley, Bush the First's press secretary when he was vice president, explained it this way: You can say anything you want during a debate, and 80 million people hear it. If it happens to be untrue, so what. Maybe 200 people read [the correction] or 2,000 or 20,000. Hermann Goering was more specific: Why, of course, the people don't want war, he told G.M. Gilbert at the Nuremberg war-crimes tribunal. Voice or
[pjnews] Weaponsgate: Is Lying About The Reason For War An Impeachable Offense?
a pattern of manipulation by this administration. Graham has good reason to complain. According to the New York Times, he was one of the few members of the Senate who saw the national intelligence estimate that was the basis for Bush's decisions. After reviewing it, Senator Graham requested that the Bush Administration declassify the information before the Senate voted on the Administration's resolution requesting use of the military in Iraq. But rather than do so, CIA Director Tenet merely sent Graham a letter discussing the findings. Graham then complained that Tenet's letter only addressed findings that supported the administration's position on Iraq, and ignored information that raised questions about intelligence. In short, Graham suggested that the Administration, by cherrypicking only evidence to its own liking, had manipulated the information to support its conclusion. Recent statements by one of the high-level officials privy to the decisionmaking process that lead to the Iraqi war also strongly suggests manipulation, if not misuse of the intelligence agencies. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, during an interview with Sam Tannenhaus of Vanity Fair magazine, said: The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason. More recently, Wolfowitz added what most have believed all along, that the reason we went after Iraq is that [t]he country swims on a sea of oil. Worse than Watergate? A Potential Huge Scandal If WMDs Are Still Missing Krugman is right to suggest a possible comparison to Watergate. In the three decades since Watergate, this is the first potential scandal I have seen that could make Watergate pale by comparison. If the Bush Administration intentionally manipulated or misrepresented intelligence to get Congress to authorize, and the public to support, military action to take control of Iraq, then that would be a monstrous misdeed. As I remarked in an earlier column http://writ.news.findlaw.com/dean/dean/20020719.html, this Administration may be due for a scandal. While Bush narrowly escaped being dragged into Enron, it was not, in any event, his doing. But the war in Iraq is all Bush's doing, and it is appropriate that he be held accountable. To put it bluntly, if Bush has taken Congress and the nation into war based on bogus information, he is cooked. Manipulation or deliberate misuse of national security intelligence data, if proven, could be a high crime under the Constitution's impeachment clause. It would also be a violation of federal criminal law, including the broad federal anti-conspiracy statute http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/ts_search.pl?title=18sec=371, which renders it a felony to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose. It's important to recall that when Richard Nixon resigned, he was about to be impeached by the House of Representatives for misusing the CIA and FBI. After Watergate, all presidents are on notice that manipulating or misusing any agency of the executive branch improperly is a serious abuse of presidential power. Nixon claimed that his misuses of the federal agencies for his political purposes were in the interest of national security. The same kind of thinking might lead a President to manipulate and misuse national security agencies or their intelligence to create a phony reason to lead the nation into a politically desirable war. Let us hope that is not the case. John Dean, a FindLaw columnist, is a former Counsel to the President of the United States. Copyright © 1994-2003 FindLaw From [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sat Jun 14 19:14:56 2003 Received: from mail.riseup.net (mail.riseup.net [216.162.217.191]) by typhoon.enabled.com (8.12.9/8.12.9) with ESMTP id h5F2EnTZ082362 (version=TLSv1/SSLv3 cipher=EDH-RSA-DES-CBC3-SHA bits=168 verify=OK) for [EMAIL PROTECTED]; Sat, 14 Jun 2003 19:14:54 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from [EMAIL PROTECTED]) Received: from mail.riseup.net (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by mail.riseup.net (Postfix) with SMTP id 9148D6FD29 for [EMAIL PROTECTED]; Sat, 14 Jun 2003 19:14:45 -0700 (PDT) Received: from localhost (127.0.0.1) (SquirrelMail authenticated user parallax) by mail.riseup.net with HTTP; Sat, 14 Jun 2003 19:14:47 -0700 (PDT) Message-ID: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Sat, 14 Jun 2003 19:14:47 -0700 (PDT) From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] User-Agent: SquirrelMail/1.4.0 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain;charset=iso-8859-1 X-Priority: 3 Importance: Normal Subject: [pjnews] George W. Bush's resume X-BeenThere: [EMAIL PROTECTED] X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: Peace + justice news and commentaries peace-justice-news.enabled.com List-Unsubscribe: http://lists.enabled.com/mailman/listinfo/peace-justice-news
[pjnews] Media's War Coverage: The China Syndrome
May 13, 2003 The China Syndrome By PAUL KRUGMAN A funny thing happened during the Iraq war: many Americans turned to the BBC for their TV news. They were looking for an alternative point of view something they couldn't find on domestic networks, which, in the words of the BBC's director general, wrapped themselves in the American flag and substituted patriotism for impartiality. Leave aside the rights and wrongs of the war itself, and consider the paradox. The BBC is owned by the British government, and one might have expected it to support that government's policies. In fact, however, it tried hard too hard, its critics say to stay impartial. America's TV networks are privately owned, yet they behaved like state-run media. What explains this paradox? It may have something to do with the China syndrome. No, not the one involving nuclear reactors the one exhibited by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation when dealing with the government of the People's Republic. In the United States, Mr. Murdoch's media empire which includes Fox News and The New York Post is known for its flag-waving patriotism. But all that patriotism didn't stop him from, as a Fortune article put it, pandering to China's repressive regime to get his programming into that vast market. The pandering included dropping the BBC's World Service which reports news China's government doesn't want disseminated from his satellite programming, and having his publishing company cancel the publication of a book critical of the Chinese regime. Can something like that happen in this country? Of course it can. Through its policy decisions especially, though not only, decisions involving media regulation the U.S. government can reward media companies that please it, punish those that don't. This gives private networks an incentive to curry favor with those in power. Yet because the networks aren't government-owned, they aren't subject to the kind of scrutiny faced by the BBC, which must take care not to seem like a tool of the ruling party. So we shouldn't be surprised if America's independent television is far more deferential to those in power than the state-run systems in Britain or for another example Israel. A recent report by Stephen Labaton of The Times contained a nice illustration of the U.S. government's ability to reward media companies that do what it wants. The issue was a proposal by Michael Powell, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, to relax regulations on media ownership. The proposal, formally presented yesterday, may be summarized as a plan to let the bigger fish eat more of the smaller fish. Big media companies will be allowed to have a larger share of the national market and own more TV stations in any given local market, and many restrictions on cross-ownership owning radio stations, TV stations and newspapers in the same local market will be lifted. The plan's defects aside it will further reduce the diversity of news available to most people what struck me was the horse-trading involved. One media group wrote to Mr. Powell, dropping its opposition to part of his plan in return for favorable commission action on another matter. That was indiscreet, but you'd have to be very naïve not to imagine that there are a lot of implicit quid pro quos out there. And the implicit trading surely extends to news content. Imagine a TV news executive considering whether to run a major story that might damage the Bush administration say, a follow-up on Senator Bob Graham's charge that a Congressional report on Sept. 11 has been kept classified because it would raise embarrassing questions about the administration's performance. Surely it would occur to that executive that the administration could punish any network running that story. Meanwhile, both the formal rules and the codes of ethics that formerly prevented blatant partisanship are gone or ignored. Neil Cavuto of Fox News is an anchor, not a commentator. Yet after Baghdad's fall he told those who opposed the liberation of Iraq a large minority that you were sickening then; you are sickening now. Fair and balanced. We don't have censorship in this country; it's still possible to find different points of view. But we do have a system in which the major media companies have strong incentives to present the news in a way that pleases the party in power, and no incentive not to.
[pjnews] US Troops in Iraq Afraid To Go Out At Night
. Halliburton, Vice President Dick Cheney's old company, has major contracts to extinguish oil fires in Iraq, build US bases in Kuwait and transport British tanks. The most likely giant to hoover up the reconstruction contracts in Iraq is the Bechtel corporation whose senior vice president, retired general Jack Sheehan, serves on President Bush's defence policy board. This is the same Bechtel which - according to Iraq's pre-war arms submission to the UN, which Washington quickly censored - once helped Saddam build a plant for manufacturing ethylene, which can be used in the making of mustard gas. On the board of Bechtel sits former secretary of state George Schultz, who again just happens to be chairman of the advisory board of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq which has, of course, close links to the White House. Iraqi reconstruction is likely to cost $ 100bn which - and this is the beauty of it - will be paid for by the Iraqis from their own future oil revenues, which in turn will benefit the US oil companies. All this the Iraqis are well aware of. So when they see, as I do, the great American military convoys humming along Saddam's motorways south and west of Baghdad, what do they think? Do they reflect, for example, upon Tom Friedman's latest essay in The New York Times, in which the columnist (blaming Saddam for poverty with no mention of 13 years of US-backed UN sanctions) announces: The Best Thing About This Poverty: Iraqis are so beaten down that a vast majority clearly seem ready to give the Americans a chance to make this a better place. I am awed by this and other expert comments from the US East Coast intelligentsia. Because it sounds to me, watching America's awesome control over this part of the world, its massive firepower, bases and personnel across Europe, the Balkans, Turkey, Jordan, Kuwait, Iraq, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Bahrain, Doha, Oman, Yemen and Israel, that this is not just about oil but about the projection of global power by a nation which really does have weapons of mass destruction. No wonder that soldier told me not to go out after dark. He was right. It's no longer safe. And it's going to get much worse. From [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tue Jun 17 20:57:29 2003 Received: from mail.riseup.net (mail.riseup.net [216.162.217.191]) by typhoon.enabled.com (8.12.9/8.12.9) with ESMTP id h5I3vSTZ053393 (version=TLSv1/SSLv3 cipher=EDH-RSA-DES-CBC3-SHA bits=168 verify=OK) for [EMAIL PROTECTED]; Tue, 17 Jun 2003 20:57:29 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from [EMAIL PROTECTED]) Received: from mail.riseup.net (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by mail.riseup.net (Postfix) with SMTP id C7DA06FC47 for [EMAIL PROTECTED]; Tue, 17 Jun 2003 20:57:27 -0700 (PDT) Received: from localhost (127.0.0.1) (SquirrelMail authenticated user parallax) by mail.riseup.net with HTTP; Tue, 17 Jun 2003 20:57:27 -0700 (PDT) Message-ID: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Tue, 17 Jun 2003 20:57:27 -0700 (PDT) From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] User-Agent: SquirrelMail/1.4.0 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain;charset=iso-8859-1 X-Priority: 3 Importance: Normal Subject: [pjnews] The lies that led us into war X-BeenThere: [EMAIL PROTECTED] X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: Peace + justice news and commentaries peace-justice-news.enabled.com List-Unsubscribe: http://lists.enabled.com/mailman/listinfo/peace-justice-news, mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] List-Archive: http://lists.enabled.com/pipermail/peace-justice-news List-Post: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] List-Help: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] List-Subscribe: http://lists.enabled.com/mailman/listinfo/peace-justice-news, mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] X-List-Received-Date: Wed, 18 Jun 2003 03:57:29 - Independent-UK http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politics/story.jsp?story=411300 The lies that led us into war ... Glen Rangwala shows how the UK and the US manipulated UN reports - and conjured an anthrax dump from thin air 01 June 2003 One key tactic of the British and United States governments in their campaign on Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction was to talk up suspicions and to portray possibility as fact. The clearest example was the quotation and misquotation of the reports of United Nations weapons inspectors. Iraq claimed it had destroyed all its prohibited weapons, either unilaterally or in co-operation with the inspectors, between 1991 and 1994. Although the inspectors were able to verify that unilateral destruction took place on a large scale, they were not able to quantify the amounts destroyed. For example, they were able to detect that anthrax growth media had been burnt and buried in bulk at a site next to the production facility at al-Hakam. There was no way - and there never will be - to tell from the soil samples the amount destroyed. As a result, UN inspectors recorded this material as unaccounted for: neither verified destroyed
[pjnews] Bush's Christian Blood Cult
Bush's Christian Blood Cult: Concerns Raised by the Vatican by Wayne Madsen (The following story was originally published by CounterPunch www.counterpunch.org on April 22, 2003. Reprinted with permission from the author) April 28, 2003, 1700 hrs PDT (FTW) -- George W. Bush proclaims himself a born-again Christian. However, Bush and fellow self-anointed neo-Christians like House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, John Ashcroft, and sports arena Book of Revelations carnival hawker Franklin Graham appear to wallow in a Christian blood lust cult when it comes to practicing the teachings of the founder of Christianity. This cultist form of Christianity, with its emphasis on death rather than life, is also worrying the leaders of mainstream Christian religions, particularly the Pope. One only has to check out Bush's record as Governor of Texas to see his own preference for death over life. During his tenure as Governor, Bush presided over a record setting 152 executions, including the 1998 execution of fellow born-again Christian Karla Faye Tucker, a convicted murderer who later led a prison ministry. Forty of Bush's executions were carried out in 2000, the year the Bush presidential campaign was spotlighting their candidate's strong law enforcement record. The Washington Post's Richard Cohen reported in October 2000 that one of the execution chamber's tie-down team members, Fred Allen, had to prepare so many people for lethal injections during 2000, he quit his job in disgust. Bush mocked Tucker's appeal for clemency. In an interview with Talk magazine, Bush imitated Tucker's appeal for him to spare her life -- pursing his lips, squinting his eyes, and in a squeaky voice saying, Please don't kill me. That went too far for former GOP presidential candidate Gary Bauer, himself an evangelical Christian. I think it is nothing short of unbelievable that the governor of a major state running for president thought it was acceptable to mock a woman he decided to put to death, said Bauer. A former Texas Department of Public Safety officer, a devout Roman Catholic, told this reporter that evidence to the contrary, Bush was more than happy to ignore DNA data and documented cases of prosecutorial misconduct to send innocent people to the Huntsville, Texas lethal injection chamber. He said the number of executed mentally retarded, African Americans, and those who committed capital crimes as minors was proof that Bush was insensitive and a phony Christian. When faced with similar problems in Illinois, Governor George Ryan, a Republican, commuted the death sentences of his state's death row inmates and released others after discovering they were wrongfully convicted. Yet the Republican Party is pillorying Ryan and John Ashcroft's Justice Department continues to investigate the former Governor for political malfeasance as if Bush and Ashcroft are without sin in such matters. Hypocrisy certainly rules in the Republican Party. Bush's blood lust has been extended across the globe. He has given the CIA authority to assassinate those deemed a threat to U.S. national interests. Bush has virtually suspended Executive Orders 11905 (Gerald Ford), 12306 (Jimmy Carter), and 12333 (Ronald Reagan) which prohibit the assassination of foreign leaders. Bush's determination to kill Saddam Hussein, his family, and his top leaders with precision-guided missiles and tactical nuclear weapon-like Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB) bombs is yet another indication of Bush's disregard for his Republican and Democratic predecessors. It now appears that in his zeal to kill Hussein, innocent civilian patrons of a Baghdad restaurant were killed by one of Bush's precision Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAMs). Like it or not, Saddam Hussein was recognized by over 100 nations as the leader of Iraq -- a member state of the United Nations. Hussein, like North Korea' Kim Jong Il, Syria's Bashir Assad, and Iran's Mohammed Khatami, are covered by Executive Order 12333, which the Bush mouthpieces claim is still in effect. Bush's Christian blood cult sees no other option than death for those who become his enemies. This doctrine is found no place in Christian theology. Bush has not once prayed publicly for the innocent civilians who died as a result of the U.S. attack on Iraq. He constantly embeds himself with the military at Goebbels-like speech fests and makes constant references to God when he refers to America's victory in Iraq, as if God endorses his sordid killing spree. He makes no mention of the children, women, and old men killed by America's precision-guided missiles and bombs and trigger-happy U.S. troops. In fact, Bush revels in indiscriminate bloodletting. Since he never experienced such killing in Southeast Asia, when he was AWOL from his Texas Air National Guard unit, Bush just does not seem to understand the horror of parents watching children having their heads and limbs blown off in a sudden blast of shrapnel, or children witnessing their parents
[pjnews] Action: AARP is selling out on Medicare
/8.12.10) with ESMTP id hAN6VIdE095126 (version=TLSv1/SSLv3 cipher=EDH-RSA-DES-CBC3-SHA bits=168 verify=OK) for [EMAIL PROTECTED]; Sat, 22 Nov 2003 22:31:19 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from [EMAIL PROTECTED]) Received: from mail.riseup.net (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by mail.riseup.net (Postfix) with SMTP id B98847114B for [EMAIL PROTECTED]; Sat, 22 Nov 2003 22:31:19 -0800 (PST) Received: from localhost (127.0.0.1) (SquirrelMail authenticated user parallax) by mail.riseup.net with HTTP; Sun, 23 Nov 2003 01:31:19 -0500 (EST) Message-ID: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Sun, 23 Nov 2003 01:31:19 -0500 (EST) From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] User-Agent: SquirrelMail/1.4.2 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain;charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Priority: 3 Importance: Normal Subject: [pjnews] NYT: F.B.I. Scrutinizes Antiwar Rallies X-BeenThere: [EMAIL PROTECTED] X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: Peace + justice news and commentaries peace-justice-news.enabled.com List-Unsubscribe: http://lists.enabled.com/mailman/listinfo/peace-justice-news, mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] List-Archive: http://lists.enabled.com/pipermail/peace-justice-news List-Post: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] List-Help: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] List-Subscribe: http://lists.enabled.com/mailman/listinfo/peace-justice-news, mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] X-List-Received-Date: Sun, 23 Nov 2003 06:31:19 - http://tinyurl.com/w6be November 23, 2003 F.B.I. Scrutinizes Antiwar Rallies By ERIC LICHTBLAU, New York Times WASHINGTON, Nov. 22 The Federal Bureau of Investigation has collected extensive information on the tactics, training and organization of antiwar demonstrators and has advised local law enforcement officials to report any suspicious activity at protests to its counterterrorism squads, according to interviews and a confidential bureau memorandum. The memorandum, which the bureau sent to local law enforcement agencies last month in advance of antiwar demonstrations in Washington and San Francisco, detailed how protesters have sometimes used training camps to rehearse for demonstrations, the Internet to raise money and gas masks to defend against tear gas. The memorandum analyzed lawful activities like recruiting demonstrators, as well as illegal activities like using fake documentation to get into a secured site. F.B.I. officials said in interviews that the intelligence-gathering effort was aimed at identifying anarchists and extremist elements plotting violence, not at monitoring the political speech of law-abiding protesters. The initiative has won the support of some local police, who view it as a critical way to maintain order at large-scale demonstrations. Indeed, some law enforcement officials said they believed the F.B.I.'s approach had helped to ensure that nationwide antiwar demonstrations in recent months, drawing hundreds of thousands of protesters, remained largely free of violence and disruption. But some civil rights advocates and legal scholars said the monitoring program could signal a return to the abuses of the 1960's and 1970's, when J. Edgar Hoover was the F.B.I. director and agents routinely spied on political protesters like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The F.B.I. is dangerously targeting Americans who are engaged in nothing more than lawful protest and dissent, said Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union. The line between terrorism and legitimate civil disobedience is blurred, and I have a serious concern about whether we're going back to the days of Hoover. Herman Schwartz, a constitutional law professor at American University who has written about F.B.I. history, said collecting intelligence at demonstrations is probably legal. But he added: As a matter of principle, it has a very serious chilling effect on peaceful demonstration. If you go around telling people, `We're going to ferret out information on demonstrations,' that deters people. People don't want their names and pictures in F.B.I. files. The abuses of the Hoover era, which included efforts by the F.B.I. to harass and discredit Hoover's political enemies under a program known as Cointelpro, led to tight restrictions on F.B.I. investigations of political activities. Those restrictions were relaxed significantly last year, when Attorney General John Ashcroft issued guidelines giving agents authority to attend political rallies, mosques and any event open to the public. Mr. Ashcroft said the Sept. 11 attacks made it essential that the F.B.I. be allowed to investigate terrorism more aggressively. The bureau's recent strategy in policing demonstrations is an outgrowth of that policy, officials said. We're not concerned with individuals who are exercising their constitutional rights, one F.B.I. official said. But it's obvious that there are individuals capable of violence
[pjnews] 2/2 Cover-up: Insecticide causes Mad Cows
was announced to the public. Purdey speculates that Bruton might have known more than what was revealed in his last scientific paper. In 1996, leading Alzheimer's researcher Tsunao Saitoh, 46 and his 13-year-old daughter were killed in La Jolla, California, in what a Reuters report described as a very professionally done shooting. What Alzheimer's Disease, Mad Cow Disease, and CJD have in common, is abnormal brain proteins and a putative link to organophosphates. Other neurodegenerative diseases and even Gulf War syndrome among returning veterans has been attributed, in part to the insecticide. But the sidelined scientists' suspicions are still largely ignored. In their favour at the moment, is a growing unease on the part of the public. As BSE forges on and Governments panic, Science may be out to lunch on BSE, compromised by bovine spongythinking myopathy. Mark Purdey funds his own research, testing/labs/travel to cluster sites. Donations to his research fund will help him carry on his work. Mark Purdey Research Fund, High Barn Farm, Elworthy, Nr Taunton, Somerset TA4 3PX, UK. http://www.cjdalert.com Note from Jonathan Campbell If organophosphates are indeed the causal factor in BSE and nvCJD, the agrochemical giants such as Monsanto, Syngenta, and Aventis have more to fear than litigation. As the toxic effects and persistence of organochlorine pesticides became known, the agrochemical industry shifted to organophosphates, which represent the majority of insecticides and herbicides in use today. They are the underpinning of highly mechanized, pesticidal agriculture, which is used to grow more than 90% of U.S. produce. Most non-organic produce today has measurable residues of organophosphate pesticides. Evidence of danger of these widely-used chemicals is a serious threat to a cornerstone of U.S. agribusiness. Additionally most of the revenue and sales advantage of genetically modified crops - such as Roundup-Ready Soybeans - are based on the widescale use of organophosphorus herbicides such as Roundup and Liberty (Basta). Serious health concerns regarding this class of pesticides would place the genetic engineering of crops into question. Jonathan Campbell, Alternative Health Consultant Natural Therapies for Chronic Illness 36 Hartwell Ave., Littleton, MA 01460 Phone: 978-486-4140 http://www.cqs.com From [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sun Dec 28 21:26:40 2003 Received: from mail.riseup.net (mail.riseup.net [216.162.217.191]) by typhoon.enabled.com (8.12.10/8.12.10) with ESMTP id hBT5QcdE092860 (version=TLSv1/SSLv3 cipher=EDH-RSA-DES-CBC3-SHA bits=168 verify=OK) for [EMAIL PROTECTED]; Sun, 28 Dec 2003 21:26:40 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from [EMAIL PROTECTED]) Received: from mail.riseup.net (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by mail.riseup.net (Postfix) with SMTP id E7B166FF42 for [EMAIL PROTECTED]; Sun, 28 Dec 2003 21:26:39 -0800 (PST) Received: from localhost (127.0.0.1) (SquirrelMail authenticated user parallax) by mail.riseup.net with HTTP; Mon, 29 Dec 2003 00:26:40 -0500 (EST) Message-ID: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Mon, 29 Dec 2003 00:26:40 -0500 (EST) From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] User-Agent: SquirrelMail/1.4.2 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain;charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Priority: 3 Importance: Normal Subject: [pjnews] Convicted Felons Program Voting Machines X-BeenThere: [EMAIL PROTECTED] X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: Peace + justice news and commentaries peace-justice-news.enabled.com List-Unsubscribe: http://lists.enabled.com/mailman/listinfo/peace-justice-news, mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] List-Archive: http://lists.enabled.com/pipermail/peace-justice-news List-Post: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] List-Help: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] List-Subscribe: http://lists.enabled.com/mailman/listinfo/peace-justice-news, mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] X-List-Received-Date: Mon, 29 Dec 2003 05:26:40 - http://www.wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,61640,00.html Con Job at Diebold Subsidiary 10:05 AM Dec. 17, 2003 PT SAN FRANCISCO -- At least five convicted felons secured management positions at a manufacturer of electronic voting machines, according to critics demanding more stringent background checks for people responsible for voting machine software. Voter advocate Bev Harris alleged Tuesday that managers of a subsidiary of Diebold, one of the country's largest voting equipment vendors, included a cocaine trafficker, a man who conducted fraudulent stock transactions and a programmer jailed for falsifying computer records. The programmer, Jeffrey Dean, wrote and maintained proprietary code used to count hundreds of thousands of votes as senior vice president of Global Election Systems, or GES. Diebold purchased GES in January 2002. According to a public court document released before GES hired him, Dean served time in a Washington state correctional facility
[pjnews] The Awful Truth about George W. Bush
The New York Times 13 January 2004 The Awful Truth By Paul Krugman People are saying terrible things about George Bush. They say that his officials weren't sincere about pledges to balance the budget. They say that the planning for an invasion of Iraq began seven months before 9/11, that there was never any good evidence that Iraq was a threat and that the war actually undermined the fight against terrorism. But these irrational Bush haters are body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freaks who should go back where they came from: the executive offices of Alcoa, and the halls of the Army War College. I was one of the few commentators who didn't celebrate Paul O'Neill's appointment as Treasury secretary. And I couldn't understand why, if Mr. O'Neill was the principled man his friends described, he didn't resign early from an administration that was clearly anything but honest. But now he's showing the courage I missed back then, by giving us an invaluable, scathing insider's picture of the Bush administration. Ron Suskind's new book The Price of Loyalty is based largely on interviews with and materials supplied by Mr. O'Neill. It portrays an administration in which political considerations -- satisfying the base -- trump policy analysis on every issue, from tax cuts to international trade policy and global warming. The money quote may be Dick Cheney's blithe declaration that Reagan proved deficits don't matter. But there are many other revelations. One is that Mr. O'Neill and Alan Greenspan knew that it was a mistake to lock in huge tax cuts based on questionable projections of future surpluses. In May 2001 Mr. Greenspan gloomily told Mr. O'Neill that because the first Bush tax cut didn't include triggers -- it went forward regardless of how the budget turned out -- it was irresponsible fiscal policy. This was a time when critics of the tax cut were ridiculed for saying exactly the same thing. Another is that Mr. Bush, who declared in the 2000 campaign that the vast majority of my tax cuts go to the bottom end of the spectrum, knew that this wasn't true. He worried that eliminating taxes on dividends would benefit only top-rate people, asking his advisers, Didn't we already give them a break at the top? Most startling of all, Donald Rumsfeld pushed the idea of regime change in Iraq as a way to transform the Middle East at a National Security Council meeting in February 2001. There's much more in Mr. Suskind's book. All of it will dismay those who still want to believe that our leaders are wise and good. The question is whether this book will open the eyes of those who think that anyone who criticizes the tax cuts is a wild-eyed leftist, and that anyone who says the administration hyped the threat from Iraq is a conspiracy theorist. The point is that the credentials of the critics just keep getting better. How can Howard Dean's assertion that the capture of Saddam hasn't made us safer be dismissed as bizarre, when a report published by the Army War College says that the war in Iraq was a detour that undermined the fight against terror? How can charges by Wesley Clark and others that the administration was looking for an excuse to invade Iraq be dismissed as paranoid in the light of Mr. O'Neill's revelations? So far administration officials have attacked Mr. O'Neill's character but haven't refuted any of his facts. They have, however, already opened an investigation into how a picture of a possibly classified document appeared during Mr. O'Neill's TV interview. This alacrity stands in sharp contrast with their evident lack of concern when a senior administration official, still unknown, blew the cover of a C.I.A. operative because her husband had revealed some politically inconvenient facts. Some will say that none of this matters because Saddam is in custody, and the economy is growing. Even in the short run, however, these successes may not be all they're cracked up to be. More Americans were killed and wounded in the four weeks after Saddam's capture than in the four weeks before. The drop in the unemployment rate since its peak last summer doesn't reflect a greater availability of jobs, but rather a decline in the share of the population that is even looking for work. More important, having a few months of good news doesn't excuse a consistent pattern of dishonest, irresponsible leadership. And that pattern keeps getting harder to deny.
[pjnews] US military 'brutalised' Reuters journalists
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1121981,00.html US military 'brutalised' journalists News agency demands inquiry after American forces in Iraq allegedly treated camera crew as enemy personnel Luke Harding in Baghdad Tuesday January 13, 2004 The Guardian The international news agency Reuters has made a formal complaint to the Pentagon following the wrongful arrest and apparent brutalisation of three of its staff this month by US troops in Iraq. The complaint followed an incident in the town of Falluja when American soldiers fired at two Iraqi cameramen and a driver from the agency while they were filming the scene of a helicopter crash. The US military initially claimed that the Reuters journalists were enemy personnel who had opened fire on US troops and refused to release them for 72 hours. Although Reuters has not commented publicly, it is understood that the journalists were brutalised and intimidated by US soldiers, who put bags over their heads, told them they would be sent to Guantanamo Bay, and whispered: Let's have sex. At one point during the interrogation, according to the family of one of the staff members, a US soldier shoved a shoe into the mouth one of the Iraqis. The US troops, from the 82nd Airborne Division, based in Falluja, also made the blindfolded journalists stand for hours with their arms raised and their palms pressed against the cell wall. They were brutalised, terrified and humiliated for three days, one source said. It was pretty grim stuff. There was mental and physical abuse. He added: It makes you wonder what happens to ordinary Iraqis. The US military has so far refused to apologise and has bluntly told Reuters to drop its complaint. Major General Charles Swannack, the commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, claimed that two US soldiers had provided sworn evidence that they had come under fire. He admitted, however, that soldiers sometimes had to make snap judgments. More often than not they are right, he said. On January 2 Reuters' Baghdad-based cameraman Salem Ureibi, Falluja stringer Ahmed Mohammed Hussein al-Badrani and driver Sattar Jabar al-Badrani turned up at the crash site where a US Kiowa Warrior helicopter had just been shot down, killing one soldier. The journalists were all wearing bulletproof jackets clearly marked press. They drove off after US soldiers who were securing the scene opened fire on their Mercedes, but were arrested shortly afterwards. The soldiers also detained a fourth Iraqi, working for the American network NBC. No weapons were found, the US military admitted. Last night the nephew of veteran Reuters driver and latterly cameraman Mr Ureibi said that US troops had forced his uncle to strip naked and had ordered him to put his shoe in his mouth. He protested that he was a journalist but they stuck a shoe in his mouth anyway. They also hurt his leg. One of the soldiers told him: 'If you don't shut up we'll fuck you.' He added: His treatment was very shameful. He's very sad. He has also had hospital treatment because of his leg. Last August a US soldier shot dead another Reuters cameraman, Mazen Dana, after mistaking his camera for a rocket launcher while he filmed outside a Baghdad prison. An internal US investigation later cleared him of wrongdoing. During the war last April another of the agency's cameramen, Ukrainian Taras Protswuk, was killed after a US tank fired a shell directly into his room in the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad, from where he had been filming. Last night Simon Walker, a spokesman at Reuters head office in London, confirmed that the agency had made a formal complaint to the Pentagon last Friday. He said: We have also complained to the US military. We have complained about the detention [of our staff] and their treatment in detention. We hope it will be dealt with expeditiously. A spokeswoman for the US military's coalition press and information centre in Baghdad hung up when the Guardian asked her to comment. The top US military spokesman in Iraq, Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, later admitted that they had received a formal complaint and that there was an on-going investigation into the incident. Journalists based in Baghdad have expressed concern that the US military is likely to treat other media employees in Iraq as targets. From [EMAIL PROTECTED] Thu Jan 15 22:13:20 2004 Received: from mail.riseup.net (mail.riseup.net [216.162.217.191]) by typhoon.enabled.com (8.12.10/8.12.10) with ESMTP id i0G6DIwl076132 (version=TLSv1/SSLv3 cipher=EDH-RSA-DES-CBC3-SHA bits=168 verify=OK) for [EMAIL PROTECTED]; Thu, 15 Jan 2004 22:13:20 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from [EMAIL PROTECTED]) Received: from mail.riseup.net (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by mail.riseup.net (Postfix) with SMTP id B366C70ED3 for [EMAIL PROTECTED]; Thu, 15 Jan 2004 22:13:15 -0800 (PST) Received: from localhost (127.0.0.1) (SquirrelMail authenticated user parallax
[pjnews] Emotional Elder Bush Attacks Son's Critics
see also: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A40578-2004Mar31.html Bush Counsel Called 9/11 Panelist Before Clarke Testified http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/02/politics/02PANE.html?hp Bush Aides Block Clinton's Papers From 9/11 Panel - This is actually pretty funny... http://snipurl.com/56hl 30 March 2004 Emotional Elder Bush Attacks Son's Critics SAN ANTONIO, Texas (Reuters) - An emotional former President George H.W. Bush on Tuesday defended his son's Iraq war and lashed out at White House critics. It is deeply offensive and contemptible to hear elites and intellectuals on the campaign trail dismiss progress in Iraq since last year's overthrow of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, the elder Bush said in a speech to the National Petrochemical and Refiners Association annual convention. [ed. note- read that paragraph again] There is something ignorant in the way they dismiss the overthrow of a brutal dictator and the sowing of the seeds of basic human freedom in that troubled part of the world, he said. The former president appeared to fight back tears as he complained about media coverage of the younger Bush that he called something short of fair and balanced. It hurts an awful lot more when it's your son that is being criticized than when they used to get all over my case, said Bush, who has often complained about media coverage of both Bush presidencies. Iraq has been torn by violence and instability since a U.S.-led invasion last year toppled Saddam in the hunt for his alleged weapons of mass destruction. No such weapons have been found but the Bush administration says progress toward a stable democracy is being made. The former president, who waged the first Gulf War against Saddam in 1991, described progress in Iraq as a miracle. Iraq is moving forward in hope and not sliding back into despair and terrorism, he said. Some critics of the war say the White House focused resources on Iraq instead of the hunt for Osama bin Laden, whom Washington blames for the Sept. 11 attacks.
[pjnews] Rice's Testimony: Claims vs. Facts
Center for American Progress (http://www.americanprogress.org/) Claim vs. Fact: Rice's QA Testimony Before the 9/11 Commission Planes as Weapons CLAIM: I do not remember any reports to us, a kind of strategic warning, that planes might be used as weapons. [responding to Kean] FACT: Condoleezza Rice was the top National Security official with President Bush at the July 2001 G-8 summit in Genoa. There, U.S. officials were warned that Islamic terrorists might attempt to crash an airliner into the summit, prompting officials to close the airspace over Genoa and station antiaircraft guns at the city's airport. [Sources: Los Angeles Times, 9/27/01; White House release, 7/22/01] CLAIM: I was certainly not aware of [intelligence reports about planes as missiles] at the time that I spoke in 2002. [responding to Kean] FACT: While Rice may not have been aware of the 12 separate and explicit warnings about terrorists using planes as weapons when she made her denial in 2002, she did know about them when she wrote her March 22, 2004 Washington Post op-ed. In that piece, she once again repeated the claim there was no indication that terrorists were preparing to attack the homeland using airplanes as missiles. [Source: Washington Post, 3/22/04] August 6 PDB CLAIM: There was nothing about the threat of attack in the U.S. in the Presidential Daily Briefing the President received on August 6th. [responding to Ben Veniste] FACT: Rice herself confirmed that the title [of the PDB] was, 'Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States.' [Source: Condoleezza Rice, 4/8/04] Domestic Threat CLAIM: One of the problems was there was really nothing that look like was going to happen inside the United States...Almost all of the reports focused on al-Qaida activities outside the United States, especially in the Middle East and North Africa...We did not have...threat information that was in any way specific enough to suggest something was coming in the United States. [responding to Gorelick] FACT: Page 204 of the Joint Congressional Inquiry into 9/11 noted that In May 2001, the intelligence community obtained a report that Bin Laden supporters were planning to infiltrate the United States to carry out a terrorist operation using high explosives. The report was included in an intelligence report for senior government officials in August [2001]. In the same month, the Pentagon acquired and shared with other elements of the Intelligence Community information suggesting that seven persons associated with Bin Laden had departed various locations for Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States. [Sources: Joint Congressional Report, 12/02] CLAIM: If we had known an attack was coming against the United States...we would have moved heaven and earth to stop it. [responding to Roemer] FACT: Rice admits that she was told that an attack was coming. She said, Let me read you some of the actual chatter that was picked up in that spring and summer: Unbelievable news coming in weeks, said one. Big event -- there will be a very, very, very, very big uproar. There will be attacks in the near future. [Source: Condoleezza Rice, 4/8/04] Cheney Counterterrorism Task Force CLAIM: The Vice President was, a little later in, I think, in May, tasked by the President to put together a group to look at all of the recommendations that had been made about domestic preparedness and all of the questions associated with that. [responding to Fielding] FACT: The Vice President's task force never once convened a meeting. In the same time period, the Vice President convened at least 10 meetings of his energy task force, and six meetings with Enron executives. [Source: Washington Post, 1/20/02; GAO Report, 8/03] Principals Meetings CLAIM: The CSG (Counterterrorism Security Group) was made up of not junior people, but the top level of counterterrorism experts. Now, they were in contact with their principals. [responding to Fielding] FACT: Many of the other people at the CSG-level, and the people who were brought to the table from the domestic agencies, were not telling their principals. Secretary Mineta, the secretary of transportation, had no idea of the threat. The administrator of the FAA, responsible for security on our airlines, had no idea. [Source: 9/11 Commissioner Jamie Gorelick, 4/8/04] Previous Administration CLAIM: The decision that we made was to, first of all, have no drop-off in what the Clinton administration was doing, because clearly they had done a lot of work to deal with this very important priority. [responding to Kean] FACT: Internal government documents show that while the Clinton Administration officially prioritized counterterrorism as a Tier One priority, but when the Bush Administration took office, top officials downgraded counterterrorism. As the Washington Post reported, these documents show that before Sept. 11 the Bush Administration did not give terrorism top billing. Rice admitted that we decided to
[pjnews] Time to Act
http://www.soulofacitizen.org/articles/Time.htm TIME TO ACT By Paul Rogat Loeb The ad in the airline magazine shows a young boy on a swing, the backdrop for an interactive pager being held by a mans hands. Maybe you dont have to send an e-mail right now, says BellSouths ad for their interactive paging service. But isnt it cool that you can? The ad, with its headline of [EMAIL PROTECTED], celebrates a world where our jobs engulf our every waking moment. Its not just our workplaces. Our lives in general seem faster, more complicated, more at the mercy of distant powers and principalities. We have less time for our families, and less room to ask where we want to go as a society and as a planet. The very pace of environmental crises, global economic shifts and the threats of war and terrorism make it harder to address them. If were to act effectively as engaged citizens, were going to have to slow down our lives, our culture, and a world that seems to be careening out of control. People talk of these pressures wherever I go. Id like to be more involved in my community, they say, to take a stand on important issues. But I just dont have the time. I hear this from low-wage workers holding two jobs to make ends meet, from professionals working late nights and weekends, for students beleaguered by outside jobs and debt. Its true for all of us stretched between escalating workplace demands and a sense that well never catch up on everything else we have to do, much less change a culture that keeps us scrambling, as if in Alice in Wonderland world, simply to keep from falling further behind. The pace and length of the working week was once the central issue in the labor movement. In 1791, carpenters struck for the ten-hour day, challenging employers who paid flat daily wages during the long summer shifts and then switched to piecework during the shorter winter days. A movement to make this a universal standard grew throughout the nineteenth century, in response to the 70-hour weeks of Americas new industrial enterprises. By the 1860s, the labor movement made the eight-hour day its central focus, with marches, rallies, and related political campaigns. A hundred thousand New York City workers, mostly in the building trades, struck and won this right in 1872, followed by other workers, industry by industry, like the printers in 1906 and the steelworkers in 1923. Finally, in 1940, Roosevelt instituted the universal 40-hour week, with mandatory overtime when employers exceeded it. The workers who won these changes fought for time with their families, but also for time to educate themselves and act as citizens. And then the debate over the pace and speed of life quietly stopped. As Harvard economist Juliet Schor has examined, Americans working hours have been steadily increasing for the past 30 years. Between 1969 and 1987 alone, paid employment by the average American worker jumped by over 160 hours per year, or the equivalent of an entire extra month on the job. We now work the equivalent of nearly nine weeks more a year than our European counterparts. This burden threatens to expand even more so as Congressional Republicans push to end the deterrent of overtime pay in sector after sector of the workforce. That doesnt count employers simply breaking the lawlike the Wal-Mart managers now being sued in 28 states for allegedly forcing employees to punch out after an eight-hour day, and then continue working for no pay at all. The increase of work hours complements a more general politics of the whip Whatever our jobs, most of us now work harder than we used to, do more in less time, and worry more about being downsized. This is true whether were on a factory assembly line, writing code for a software company desperately struggling to survive, or teaching the kids of the poor in an underfunded school. If were going to have a decent future, and not become losers in an increasingly divided economy, were told that we need to become wheeling and dealing self-promoters constantly selling ourselves to survive. Meanwhile, we spend more hours driving to and from our jobs, as urban sprawl, escalating housing prices, and lack of decent public transit options raise the stress of our commutes. Once we could rely on employer-funded pensions and Social Security, confident that if we worked long enough, our old age would be provided for. Now, for most of us, saving for retirement has become an uncertain journey through treacherous shoals. The US has long been the only advanced industrial nation in the world not to offer universal healthcare, but most of us used to be covered through our jobs. Now we pay more and more to get less and less, and spend hours choosing between equally bad options, trying to cover our families as best we can. We may have no choice but to negotiate our individual passages through these varied pressures. But as in the past, making any significant dent in them will require
[pjnews] Why Rice is a bad national security adviser
see also: http://www.counterpunch.com/madsen04082004.html Rice (and the record) proves it: Bush knew, but failed to act - A thorough summary and analysis... http://slate.msn.com/id/2098499/ Condi lousy: Why Rice is a bad national security adviser By Fred Kaplan One clear inference can be drawn from Condoleezza Rice's testimony before the 9/11 commission this morning: She has been a bad national security adviserpassive, sluggish, and either unable or unwilling to tie the loose strands of the bureaucracy into a sensible vision or policy. In short, she has not done what national security advisers are supposed to do. The key moment came an hour into the hearing, when former Watergate prosecutor Richard Ben-Veniste took his turn at asking questions. Up to this point, Rice had argued that the Bush administration could not have done much to stop the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Yes, the CIA's sirens were sounding all summer of an impending strike by al-Qaida, but the warnings were of an attack overseas. Ben-Veniste brought up the much-discussed PDBthe president's daily briefing by CIA Director George Tenetof Aug. 6, 2001. For the first time, he revealed the title of that briefing: Bin Laden Determined To Attack Inside the United States. Rice insisted this title meant nothing. The document consisted of merely historical information about al-Qaidavarious plans and attacks of the past. This was not a 'threat report,' she said. It did not warn of any coming attack inside the United States. Later in the hearing, she restated the point: The PDB does not say the United States is going to be attacked. It says Bin Laden would like to attack the United States. To call this distinction academic would be an insult to academia. Rice acknowledged that throughout the summer of 2001 the CIA was intercepting unusually high volumes of chatter about an impending terrorist strike. She quoted from some of this chatter: attack in near future, unbelievable news coming in weeks, a very, very, very big uproar. She said some specific intelligence indicated the attack would take place overseas. However, she noted that very little of this intelligence was specific; most of it was frustratingly vague. In other words (though she doesn't say so), most of the chatter might have been about a foreign or a domestic attackit wasn't clear. Given that Richard Clarke, the president's counterterrorism chief, was telling her over and over that a domestic attack was likely, she should not have dismissed its possibility. Now that we know the title of the Aug. 6 PDB, we can go further and conclude that she should have taken this possibility very, very seriously. Putting together the facts may not have been as simple as adding 2 + 2, but it couldn't have been more complicated than 2 + 2 + 2. The Aug. 6 briefing itself remains classified. Ben-Veniste urged Rice to get it declassified, saying the full document would reveal that even the premise of her analysis is flawed. The report apparently mentions not historical but ongoing FBI precautions. Former Democratic Sen. Bob Kerrey added that the PDB also reports that the FBI was detecting a pattern of activity, inside the United States, consistent with hijacking. Responding to Ben-Veniste, Rice acknowledged that Clarke had told her that al-Qaida had sleeper cells inside the Untied States. But, she added, There was no recommendation that we do anything about them. She gave the same answer when former Navy Secretary John Lehman, a Republican and outspoken Bush defender restated the question about sleeper cells. There was, Rice said, no recommendation of what to do about it. She added that she saw no indication that the FBI was not adequately pursuing these cells. Here Rice revealed, if unwittingly, the rootsor at least some rootsof failure. Why did she need a recommendation to do something? Couldn't she make recommendations herself? Wasn't that her job? Given the huge spike of traffic about a possible attack (several officials have used the phrase hair on fire to describe the demeanor of those issuing the warnings), should she have been satisfied with the lack of any sign that the FBI wasn't tracking down the cells? Shouldn't she have asked for positive evidence that it was tracking them down? Former Democratic Rep. Tim Roemer posed the question directly: Wasn't it your responsibility to make sure that the word went down the chain, that orders were followed up by action? Just as the Bush administration has declined to admit any mistakes, Condi Rice declined to take any responsibility. No, she answered, the FBI had that responsibility. Crisis management? That was Dick Clarke's job. [If] I needed to do anything, she said, I would have been asked to do it. I was not asked to do it. Jamie Gorelick, a former assistant attorney general (and thus someone who knows the ways of the FBI), drove the point home. The commission's staff has learned,
[pjnews] Snares and Delusions in Iraq
http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/0,1518,295119,00.html The New York Times 13 April 2004 Snares and Delusions By PAUL KRUGMAN In his Saturday radio address, George Bush described Iraqi insurgents as a small faction. Meanwhile, people actually on the scene described a rebellion with widespread support. Isn't it amazing? A year after the occupation of Iraq began, Mr. Bush and his inner circle seem more divorced from reality than ever. Events should have cured the Bush team of its illusions. After all, before the invasion Tim Russert asked Dick Cheney about the possibility that we would be seen as conquerors, not liberators, and would be faced with a long, costly and bloody battle. Mr. Cheney replied, Well, I don't think it's likely to unfold that way, Tim, because I really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators. Uh-huh. But Bush officials seem to have learned nothing. Consider, for example, the continuing favor shown to Ahmad Chalabi. Last year the neocons tried to install Mr. Chalabi in power, even ferrying his private army into Iraq just behind our advancing troops. It turned out that he had no popular support, and by now it's obvious that suspicions that we're trying to put Mr. Chalabi on the throne are fueling Iraqi distrust. According to Arnaud de Borchgrave of U.P.I., however, administration officials gave him control of Saddam's secret files -- a fine tool for blackmail -- and are letting him influence the allocation of reconstruction contracts, a major source of kickbacks. And we keep repeating the same mistakes. The story behind last week's uprising by followers of Moktada al-Sadr bears a striking resemblance to the story of the wave of looting a year ago, after Baghdad fell. In both cases, officials were unprepared for an obvious risk. According to The Washington Post: One U.S. official said there was not even a fully developed backup plan for military action in case Sadr opted to react violently. The official noted that when the decision [to close Sadr's newspaper] was made, there were very few U.S. troops in Sadr's strongholds south of Baghdad. If we're lucky, the Sadrist uprising will eventually fade out, just as the postwar looting did; but the occupation's dwindling credibility has taken another huge blow. Meanwhile, Mr. Bush, who once challenged his own father to go mano a mano, is still addicted to tough talk, and still personalizes everything. Again and again, administration officials have insisted that some particular evildoer is causing all our problems. Last July they confidently predicted an end to the insurgency after Saddam's sons were killed. In December, they predicted an end to the insurgency after capturing Saddam himself. Six weeks ago -- was it only six weeks? -- Al Qaeda was orchestrating the insurgency, and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was the root of all evil. The obvious point that we're facing widespread religious and nationalist resentment in Iraq, which is exploited but not caused by the bad guy du jour, never seems to sink in. The situation in Falluja seems to have been greatly exacerbated by tough-guy posturing and wishful thinking. According to The Jerusalem Post, after the murder and mutilation of American contractors, Mr. Bush told officials that I want heads to roll. Didn't someone warn him of the likely consequences of attempting to carry out a manhunt in a hostile, densely populated urban area? And now we have a new villain. Yesterday Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez declared that the mission of the U.S. forces is to kill or capture Moktada al-Sadr. If and when they do, we'll hear once again that we've turned the corner. Does anyone believe it? When will we learn that we're not going to end the mess in Iraq by getting bad guys? There are always new bad guys to take their place. And let's can the rhetoric about staying the course. In fact, we desperately need a change in course. The best we can realistically hope for now is to turn power over to relatively moderate Iraqis with a real base of popular support. Yes, that mainly means Islamic clerics. The architects of the war will complain bitterly, and claim that we could have achieved far more. But they've been wrong about everything so far -- and if we keep following their advice, Iraq really will turn into another Vietnam.
[pjnews] New Reports on U.S. Planting WMDs in Iraq
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0413-02.htm Published on Tuesday, April 13, 2004 by the Mehr News Agency (Tehran, Iran) New Reports on U.S. Planting WMDs in Iraq BASRA - Fifty days after the first reports (http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0313-08.htm) that the U.S. forces were unloading weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in southern Iraq, new reports about the movement of these weapons have been disclosed. Sources in Iraq speculate that occupation forces are using the recent unrest in Iraq to divert attention from their surreptitious shipments of WMD into the country. An Iraqi source close to the Basra Governors Office told the MNA that new information shows that a large part of the WMD, which was secretly brought to southern and western Iraq over the past month, are in containers falsely labeled as containers of the Maeresk shipping company and some consignments bearing the labels of organizations such as the Red Cross or the USAID in order to disguise them as relief shipments. The source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, added that Iraqi officials including forces loyal to the Iraqi Governing Council stationed in southern Iraq have been forbidden from inspecting or supervising the transportation of these consignments. He went on to say that the occupation forces have ordered Iraqi officials to forward any questions on the issue to the coalition forces. Even the officials of the international relief organizations have informed the Iraqi officials that they would only accept responsibility for relief shipments which have been registered and managed by their organizations. The Iraqi source also confirmed the report about suspicious trucks with fake Saudi and Jordanian license plates entering Iraq at night last week, stressing that the Saudi and Jordanian border guards did not attempt to inspect the trucks but simply delivered them to the U.S. and British forces stationed on Iraqs borders. However, the source expressed ignorance whether the governments of Saudi Arabia and Jordan were aware of such movements. A professor of physics at Baghdad University also told the MNA correspondent that a group of his colleagues who are highly specialized in military, chemical and biological fields have been either bribed or threatened during the last weeks to provide written information on what they know about various programs and research centers and the possible storage of WMD equipment. The professor also said these people have been openly asked to confirm or deny the existence of research or related WMD equipment. A large number of these scientists, who are believed to be under the surveillance of U.S. intelligence operatives, have claimed that if they refuse to comply with this request, they may be killed or arrested on charges of concealing the truth if these weapons are found by the Bush administration in the future. He said that the Iraqi scientists believe their lives would be in danger if they decline to cooperate with the occupation forces, especially when they recall that senior U.S. officer Michael Peterson once said, Iraqi scientists are at any case a threat to the U.S. administration, whether they talk or not. A source close to the Iraqi Governing Council said, In the meantime, many suspect containers disguised as fuel supplies have been moved about by some units of the U.S. special forces. The move has been carried out under heavy security measures. Also, there are unofficial reports that the containers held biological and bacteriological toxins in liquid form. It is possible that the news about the discovery of the WMDs would be announced later. He also said that such mixtures had been used by the Saddam regime in the 1990s. The source added that some provocative actions such as the closure of Al-Hawza periodical by U.S. administrator Paul Bremer, the secret meetings between his envoys with some extremist groups who have no relations with the Iraqi Governing Council, the sudden upsurge in violence in central and southern Iraq, a number of activities which have stoked up the wrath of the prominent Shia clerics, and finally, the spate of kidnappings and the baseless charges against the Iranian charge daffaires in Baghdad are providing the necessary smokescreen for the transportation of the WMD to their intended locations. He said they are quite aware that the White House in cooperation with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has directly tasked the Defense Department to hide these weapons. Given the recent scandals to the effect that the U.S. president was privy to the 9/11 plot, they might try to immediately announce the discovery of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in order to overshadow the scandals and prevent a further decline of Bushs public opinion rating as the election approaches.
[pjnews] Even true believers fear Iraq civil war
http://www.boiseweekly.com/more.php?id=1191_0_1_0_M 21 April 2004 Fables of the reconstruction: Secret coalition memo revealed A Coalition memo reveals that even true believers see the seeds of civil war in the occupation of Iraq By Jason Vest AS THE SITUATION in Iraq grows ever more tenuous, the Bush administration continues to spin the ominous news with matter-of-fact optimism. According to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Iraqi uprisings in half a dozen cities, accompanied by the deaths of more than 100 soldiers in the month of April alone, is something to be viewed in the context of good days and bad days, merely a moment in Iraqs path towards a free and democratic system. More recently, the president himself asserted, Our coalition is standing with responsible Iraqi leaders as they establish growing authority in their country. But according to a closely held Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) memo written in early March, the reality isnt so rosy. Iraqs chances of seeing democracy succeed, according to the memos author a US government official detailed to the CPA, who wrote this summation of observations hed made in the field for a senior CPA director have been severely imperiled by a years worth of serious errors on the part of the Pentagon and the CPA, the US-led multinational agency administering Iraq. Far from facilitating democracy and security, the memos author fears, US efforts have created an environment rife with corruption and sectarianism likely to result in civil war. Provided to this reporter by a Western intelligence official, the memo was partially redacted to protect the writers identity and to avoid inflaming an already volatile situation by revealing the names of certain Iraqi figures. A wide-ranging and often acerbic critique of the CPA, covering topics ranging from policy, personalities, and press operations to on-the-ground realities such as electricity, the document is not only notable for its candidly troubled assessment of Iraqs future. It is also significant, according to the intelligence official, because its author has been a steadfast advocate of transforming the Middle East, beginning with regime change in Iraq. The trigger for civil war Signs of the authors continuing support for the US invasion and occupation are all over the memo, which was written to a superior in Baghdad and circulated among other CPA officials. He praises Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmed Chalabi, and laments a lack of unqualified US support for Chalabi, a long-time favorite of Washington hawks. (It bears noting that Chalabi was tried and convicted in absentia by the Jordanian government for bank embezzlement, in 1989, and has come under fire more recently for peddling dubious pre-war intelligence to the US.) The author also asserts that what we have accomplished in Iraq is worth it. And his predictions sometimes hew to an improbably sunny view. Violence is likely, he says, for only two or three days after arresting radical cleric Muqtada al Sadr, an event that would make other populist leaders think twice about bucking the CPA. Written only weeks ago, these predictions seem quite unwarranted, since simply trying to arrest al Sadr has resulted in more than two weeks of bloody conflict with no end in sight and seems to have engendered more cooperation between anti-Coalition forces than before. Yet the memo is gloomy in most other respects, portraying a country mired in dysfunction and corruption, overseen by a CPA that handle(s) an issue like six-year-olds play soccer: Someone kicks the ball and one hundred people chase after it hoping to be noticed, without a care as to what happens on the field. But it is particularly pointed on the subject of cronyism and corruption within the Governing Council, the provisional Iraqi government subordinate to the CPA whose responsibilities include re-staffing Iraqs government departments. In retrospect, the memo asserts, both for political and organizational reasons, the decision to allow the Governing Council to pick 25 ministers did the greatest damage. Not only did we endorse nepotism, with men choosing their sons and brothers-in-law; but we also failed to use our prerogative to shape a system that would work our failure to promote accountability has hurt us. In the broadest sense, according to the memos author, the CPAs bunker-in-Baghdad mentality has contributed to the potential for civil war all over the country. [CPA Administrator L. Paul] Bremer has encouraged re-centralization in Iraq because it is easier to control a Governing Council less than a kilometer away from the Palace, rather than 18 different provincial councils who would otherwise have budgetary authority, he says. The net effect, he continues, has been a desperation to dominate Baghdad, and an absolutism born of regional isolation. The memo also describes the CPA as handicapped by [its] security bubble, and
[pjnews] From Terrell Unit in Texas to Abu Ghraib
see also: http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0510-06.htm Bush Circles Wagons, But Cavalry Has Joined the Indians http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0510-07.htm Bush's Backing of Rumsfeld Shocks and Angers Arabs http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0510-03.htm Red Cross Was Told Iraq Abuse 'Part of the Process' http://www.counterpunch.org/fisk05072004.html Robert Fisk: Betrayed by Images of Our Own Racism http://www.blackcommentator.com/89/89_cover_change_world.html The Black Commentator: US Unfit to Change the World -- http://www.counterpunch.org/zaitchik05072004.html May 7, 2004 From Terrell Unit in Texas to Abu Ghraib Doesn't It Ring a (Prison) Bell By ALEXANDER ZAITCHIK If the president wasn't so forthright about his disinterest in the world, it would have been hard to believe him Wednesday when he said the abuse in Abu Ghraib prison doesn't represent the America I know. But who can doubt him? To represent the America George W. Bush knows, there would have to be explosive snapshots of Iraqi detainees lounging by the Abu Ghraib pool, barbequing ribs and snorting primo Bolivian coke off empty cases of Coors Light. There would have to be shocking reports of prisoners with family members on the Iraqi Governing Council being handed sweetheart deals on professional sports franchises and energy firms. But being stripped, hooded and urinated on while your friend is forced to masturbate next to you? The only member of the Bush clan who knows about that kind of thing is Jenna. Of course, if the President were more of a newspaper-reading sort of feller, he wouldn't have been so shocked by the pictures. As a tough-on-crime Texan, he would have recognized such treatment immediately, perhaps even feeling a little swell of pride. If he'd ever put down the Bible for a broadsheet after his conversion, he'd know that Texas prison is one of the most feared phrases in the languageÐand he'd know why. When he sat down in front of Arab tv audiences on Wednesday to explain the true American way, he could have pointed to an October, 1999 story in the Austin American Statesman that detailed how female prisoners there were regularly kept in portable detention cells for hours at a time in summer heat with no water. In fear of more time in the cages, the article explains, many women submit sexually to their oppressors and are raped, molested and forced to perform sodomy on their captors. And in 1996, if Bush hadn't so busy handling the transfer of $9 billion in public funds over to the University of Texas Investment Management Company, the governor might have had time to read about the videotape that surfaced that year depicting prison guards brutalizing inmates in the Brazoria County Detention Center in Angleton, TX. The tape, which was originally shot for use as a training video, showed riot-clad guards beating prisoners (arrested on drug violations) and forcing them to crawl while kicking them and poking them with electric prods. Had Bush cleared a little time to watch this video, he would had an easier time digesting the images out of Abu Ghraib, and thus saved himself those few moments of humiliating supplication in front of all those Arabs, based as they were on the faulty assumption that those pictures weren't America. If only some governor's aide had told him in 1999 about the hunger strike at the notorious Terrel Unit facility in Livingston, TX, where death-row prisoner Michael Sharp said before his execution, many guards think it is their patriotic duty to torture and brutalize prisoners. If only he had not been so busy reclining in box seats at Rangers home games, the governor might have known that prisoners' attorney Donna Brorby had described Texas' super-max prisons as the worst in the country, where guards reportedly gas prisoners and throw them down on concrete floors while handcuffed. Then the president might have been better equipped to recognize his country in those pictures. Considering all the downtime the President has spent in the Lone Star State since 2000, he might have even heard about the 2002 conclusion of the 30-year legal battle Ruiz v. Johnson. In its write up of the case, the Austin Chronicle reported the words of Texas Judge William Wayne Justice, written after hearing lengthy expert and inmate testimony on prison conditions: Texas prison inmates continue to live in fearS More vulnerable inmates are raped, beaten, owned, and sold by more powerful ones. Despite their pleas to prison officials, they are often refused protection. Instead, they pay for protection, in money, services, or sex. Correctional officers continue to rely on the physical control of excessive force to enforce order. Those inmates locked away in administrative segregation, especially those with mental illnesses, are subjected to extreme deprivations and daily psychological harm. But no, the abuse at Abu Ghraib does not represent any America that George Bush could possibly have known
[pjnews] U.S. may be winning battles in Iraq, losing war
see also: http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0511-04.htm Coalition military intelligence officials estimated that 70% to 90% of prisoners detained in Iraq since the war began last year had been arrested by mistake, according to a confidential Red Cross report given to the Bush administration earlier this year. Yet the report described a wide range of prisoner mistreatment including many new details of abusive techniques that it said U.S. officials had failed to halt, despite repeated complaints from the International Committee of the Red Cross... http://msnbc.msn.com/id/4934116/ Dissension grows in senior ranks on strategy Some officers say U.S. may be winning battles in Iraq, losing war By Thomas E. Ricks Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, May 9, 2004; Page A01 Deep divisions are emerging at the top of the U.S. military over the course of the occupation of Iraq, with some senior officers beginning to say that the United States faces the prospect of casualties for years without achieving its goal of establishing a free and democratic Iraq. Their major worry is that the United States is prevailing militarily but failing to win the support of the Iraqi people. That view is far from universal, but it is spreading, and being voiced publicly for the first time. Army Maj. Gen. Charles H. Swannack Jr., the commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, who spent much of the year in western Iraq, said he believes that at the tactical level at which fighting occurs, the U.S. military is still winning. But when asked whether he believes the United States is losing, he said, I think strategically, we are. Army Col. Paul Hughes, who last year was the first director of strategic planning for the U.S. occupation authority in Baghdad, said he agrees with that view and noted that a pattern of winning battles while losing a war characterized the U.S. failure in Vietnam. Unless we ensure that we have coherency in our policy, we will lose strategically, he said in an interview Friday. I lost my brother in Vietnam, added Hughes, a veteran Army strategist who is involved in formulating Iraq policy. I promised myself, when I came on active duty, that I would do everything in my power to prevent that [sort of strategic loss] from happening again. Here I am, 30 years later, thinking we will win every fight and lose the war, because we don't understand the war we're in. The emergence of sharp differences over U.S. strategy has set off a debate, a year after the United States ostensibly won a war in Iraq, about how to preserve that victory. The core question is how to end a festering insurrection that has stymied some reconstruction efforts, made many Iraqis feel less safe and created uncertainty about who actually will run the country after the scheduled turnover of sovereignty June 30. Inside and outside the armed forces, experts generally argue that the U.S. military should remain there but should change its approach. Some argue for more troops, others for less, but they generally agree on revising the stated U.S. goals to make them less ambitious. They are worried by evidence that the United States is losing ground with the Iraqi public. Some officers say the place to begin restructuring U.S. policy is by ousting Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, whom they see as responsible for a series of strategic and tactical blunders over the past year. Several of those interviewed said a profound anger is building within the Army at Rumsfeld and those around him. A senior general at the Pentagon said he believes the United States is already on the road to defeat. It is doubtful we can go on much longer like this, he said. The American people may not stand for it -- and they should not. Asked who was to blame, this general pointed directly at Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz. I do not believe we had a clearly defined war strategy, end state and exit strategy before we commenced our invasion, he said. Had someone like Colin Powell been the chairman [of the Joint Chiefs of Staff], he would not have agreed to send troops without a clear exit strategy. The current OSD [Office of the Secretary of Defense] refused to listen or adhere to military advice. Like several other officers interviewed for this report, this general spoke only on the condition that his name not be used. One reason for this is that some of these officers deal frequently with the senior Pentagon civilian officials they are criticizing, and some remain dependent on top officials to approve their current efforts and future promotions. Also, some say they believe that Rumsfeld and other top civilians punish public dissent. Senior officers frequently cite what they believe was the vindictive treatment of then-Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric K. Shinseki after he said early in 2003 that the administration was underestimating the number of U.S. troops that would be required to occupy postwar
[pjnews] The America We Know
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=18659 The America We Know By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor, Berkeley Daily Planet May 11, 2004 There is videotape of the beatings by the six guards, available on the Internet for download. Soft, grainy and shot from a distance, still, what is happening is unmistakable. Two prisoners are lying sprawled on the floor, face down, unresisting. An L.A. Times news article graphically describes the scene: [One of the guards] sits astride [one of the prisoners and] begins punching him with alternating fists, landing a total of 28 blows. At one point, [the guard] can be seen lifting [the prisoner's] head by the hair in what looks like an effort to get a better angle for his punch. A few feet away, the tape shows [a second guard] slugging [the other prisoner] and using his right knee to pummel him in the neck area as the [prisoner] lies motionless. ... One [guard] is seen shooting the [prisoners] with a gun that fires balls of pepper spray, while another sprays their faces with mace. The video also shows one of the guards giving a kick to the head of one of the prisoners with the toe of his boot. No, the videotape is not of Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad. As far as I know, no such videos exist. The video of which I speak documents the beating of two United States citizens juvenile prisoners under the control of the State of California by guards of the California Youth Authority at the Chaderjian Youth Correctional Facility in Stockton, California. Chaderjian. Abu Ghraib. It is easy to get them confused, I suppose. (Both the San Joaquin County District Attorney's office and the office of California Attorney General Bill Lockyer, by the way, have declined to bring charges against the guards in the incident, citing their contention that there was no reasonable likelihood of conviction of the guards in a California courtroom.) This week, President George Bush went before representatives of various Arab-language television stations and stated-in reaction to the photos of prisoner abuse by U.S. soldiers coming out of Abu Ghraib-that [this] does not represent the America that I know. No, I suppose not. Mr. Bush has never been a black or Latino kid, locked up by the CYA. What one finds most disturbing about the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuses is this national display of collective shock and surprise as television commentators pass serious comments about the meaning of it all the widened eyes, the caught breath, the hand over open mouth, the calling in of the multitude of expert commentators, the incredulity that Americans, of all people, could be the author of such acts. Has no one been paying attention? [This] does not represent the America that I know, says Mr. Bush. The president must, one must guess, therefore never watch broadcast television. The physical abuse by United States guards of prisoners incarcerated in United States jails is so well known and widespread that it is a running, national joke. Watch any sitcom long enough, and sooner or later, someone will make a threat about someone going to prison and having to do the laundry of a 300-pound cellmate named Bubba. It is a joke if one misses the point about people being raped in United States prisons, a condition that does not invoke calls for investigation, intervention and reform, but merely a David Letterman or Jerry Seinfeld smirk. Yes. How very funny. America shocked shocked! at the Abu Ghraib humiliations? Why should we be? The humiliation of individuals has become an American obsession; it is, in fact, the growing American pastime, surpassing football and baseball as our national sport. We used to hold contests in which people competed, and then judges awarded a prize to the person who they thought performed the best. It was the thrill of the victory in which we wanted to share. The camera focused on the joyous, beaming Star Search winners while the second- and third-placers, mercifully, were hustled offstage before their frozen smiles shattered and their tears flowed over the loss of just-missed dreams. Now, voyeurs of despair, it is the agony of the losers on which we dwell. Televised contest after contest from ESPN's new announcer to Donald Trump's Fired! to American Idol to Elimidate puts the spotlight not on just the losing, but the degradation of those who lose. Our reveling wallow in the culture of suffering has become so widespread that now one national automobile manufacturer I cannot recall their name because having watched it once, I have to turn it quickly off because I do not want the sickening images in my head begins with a montage of horrific, swollen knots on people's heads, then moves to a young yuppie admiring a car and, turning, still distracted, busting his head on an overhanging fixture, knocking himself to the floor. My god. It is the equivalent of selling hamburgers by watching photos of the carnage resultant from highway accidents. America's
[pjnews] NYT: Harsh Methods Aren't Torture
see also: http://snipurl.com/6g8j Iraqi Says He Is Prisoner in Photo Saleh blames his arrest on a misunderstanding and bad luck. He went to the Iraqi police to report a suspicious vehicle. He was carrying a large amount of cash, which he planned to use to buy furniture for his wedding. Once they discovered the cash, the police got suspicious of him and turned him over to the Americans. [...] Saleh said the torture at the hands of the Americans began seven days after he arrived at the prison, when Graner put a bag on his head and tied his hands in the back. He pulled me by the back of the neck and started hitting me with an iron bar, he said. Then he threw me into a room. Saleh asked a fellow prisoner, whose hands were also tied behind his back, to lift his hood with his shoulder. I quickly told him to put the hood back on, Saleh said. I became hysterical. I couldn't believe what I saw. Everyone was naked in the room. I never saw such a thing under Saddam. [snip] - Fairness Accuray In Reporting Media analysis, critiques and activism http://www.fair.org/activism/times-torture.html ACTION ALERT: Harsh Methods Aren't Torture, Says the NY Times May 14, 2004 The New York Times, revealing the interrogation techniques the CIA is using against Al-Qaeda suspects, seemed unable to find a source who would call torture by its proper name. The May 13 article, headlined Harsh CIA Methods Cited in Top Qaeda Interrogation, described coercive interrogation methods endorsed by the CIA and the Justice Department, including hooding, food and light deprivation, withholding medications, and a technique known as 'water boarding,' in which a prisoner is strapped down, forcibly pushed under water and made to believe he might drown. The article took pains to explain why, according to U.S. officials, such techniques do not constitute torture: Defenders of the operation said the methods stopped short of torture, did not violate American anti-torture statutes, and were necessary to fight a war against a nebulous enemy whose strength and intentions could only be gleaned by extracting information from often uncooperative detainees. The article seemed to accept that the techniques described are something other than torture: The tactics simulate torture, but officials say they are supposed to stop short of serious injury. The implication is that only interrogation methods that cause serious physical harm would be real and not simulated torture. The article quoted no one who said that the CIA methods described were, in fact, torture. Yet it would have been easy to find human rights experts who would describe them as such. The website of Human Rights Watch (www.hrw.org) reports that the prohibition against torture under international law applies to many measures, including near drowning through submersion in water. Amnesty International U.S.A. (www.amnestyusa.org) names submersion into water almost to the point of suffocation as a form of torture, and emphasizes that torture can be psychological, including threats, deceit, humiliation, insults, sleep deprivation, blindfolding, isolation, mock executions...and the withholding of medication or personal items. The article did quote the Geneva Conventions' prohibition against violence to life and person, in particular...cruel treatment and torture and outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment. But it did not quote the definition of torture under international law, contained in the 1984 Convention Against Torture, which makes it clear that psychological as well as physical methods of coercion are prohibited. According to the Convention, torture is: any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. Noting the Convention's reference to consent or acquiescence would have been helpful in evaluating the claims made by officials in the article that the U.S. can skirt prohibitions on torture if detainees are formally in the custody of another country. In fact, the Convention Against Torture, which the U.S. signed in 1994, explicitly prohibits sending a person anywhere where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture. If the Times had included independent human rights or international law experts in the article, this information could have been available to readers. Even talking to military sources could have produced a more straightforward account of what kind
[pjnews] 1/2 Rumsfeld Pushed for Expanded Interrogation
see also: http://snipurl.com/6g8r Report: Rumsfeld OK'd Prisoner Program http://snipurl.com/6gsc Abuse Scandal Focuses on Bush Foundation -- http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040524fa_fact Annals of National Security: THE GRAY ZONE by SEYMOUR M. HERSH How a secret Pentagon program came to Abu Ghraib. The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focussed on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq. Rumsfelds decision embittered the American intelligence community, damaged the effectiveness of élite combat units, and hurt Americas prospects in the war on terror. According to interviews with several past and present American intelligence officials, the Pentagons operation, known inside the intelligence community by several code words, including Copper Green, encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq. A senior C.I.A. official, in confirming the details of this account last week, said that the operation stemmed from Rumsfelds long-standing desire to wrest control of Americas clandestine and paramilitary operations from the C.I.A. Rumsfeld, during appearances last week before Congress to testify about Abu Ghraib, was precluded by law from explicitly mentioning highly secret matters in an unclassified session. But he conveyed the message that he was telling the public all that he knew about the story. He said, Any suggestion that there is not a full, deep awareness of what has happened, and the damage it has done, I think, would be a misunderstanding. The senior C.I.A. official, asked about Rumsfelds testimony and that of Stephen Cambone, his Under-Secretary for Intelligence, said, Some people think you can bullshit anyone. The Abu Ghraib story began, in a sense, just weeks after the September 11, 2001, attacks, with the American bombing of Afghanistan. Almost from the start, the Administrations search for Al Qaeda members in the war zone, and its worldwide search for terrorists, came up against major command-and-control problems. For example, combat forces that had Al Qaeda targets in sight had to obtain legal clearance before firing on them. On October 7th, the night the bombing began, an unmanned Predator aircraft tracked an automobile convoy that, American intelligence believed, contained Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban leader. A lawyer on duty at the United States Central Command headquarters, in Tampa, Florida, refused to authorize a strike. By the time an attack was approved, the target was out of reach. Rumsfeld was apoplectic over what he saw as a self-defeating hesitation to attack that was due to political correctness. One officer described him to me that fall as kicking a lot of glass and breaking doors. In November, the Washington Post reported that, as many as ten times since early October, Air Force pilots believed theyd had senior Al Qaeda and Taliban members in their sights but had been unable to act in time because of legalistic hurdles. There were similar problems throughout the world, as American Special Forces units seeking to move quickly against suspected terrorist cells were compelled to get prior approval from local American ambassadors and brief their superiors in the chain of command. Rumsfeld reacted in his usual direct fashion: he authorized the establishment of a highly secret program that was given blanket advance approval to kill or capture and, if possible, interrogate high value targets in the Bush Administrations war on terror. A special-access program, or sapsubject to the Defense Departments most stringent level of securitywas set up, with an office in a secure area of the Pentagon. The program would recruit operatives and acquire the necessary equipment, including aircraft, and would keep its activities under wraps. Americas most successful intelligence operations during the Cold War had been saps, including the Navys submarine penetration of underwater cables used by the Soviet high command and construction of the Air Forces stealth bomber. All the so-called black programs had one element in common: the Secretary of Defense, or his deputy, had to conclude that the normal military classification restraints did not provide enough security. Rumsfelds goal was to get a capability in place to take on a high-value targeta standup group to hit quickly, a former high-level intelligence official told me. He got all the agencies togetherthe C.I.A. and the N.S.A.to get pre-approval in place. Just say the code word and go. The operation had across-the-board approval from Rumsfeld and from Condoleezza Rice, the national-security adviser. President Bush was informed of the existence of the program, the
[pjnews] Guantanamo Abuse Same as Abu Ghraib
see also: http://snipurl.com/6hpa US forces were taught torture techniques: Soldiers' accounts reveal widespread use of sleep deprivation and mock executions http://www.ipsnews.net/africa/interna.asp?idnews=23734 Bush torture techniques not confined to interrogation, or to Iraq Evidence Grows of More Widespread Abuse http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2004-05-13-warnings_x.htm?csp=24 U.S. missed chances to stop abuses -- http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A25266-2004May13.html 13 May 2004 Democrats Sharply Question Wolfowitz at Hearing By Thomas E. Ricks Washington - Senate Democrats lit into the Bush administration's Iraq policies Thursday, using an uncharacteristically contentious hearing on additional war spending to attack the Pentagon's No. 2 official in unusually personal and bitter terms. After listening to Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz testify before the normally stately Senate Armed Services Committee for several hours, Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., said, What I've heard from you is dissembling and avoidance of answers, lack of knowledge, pleading process - legal process. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., then hit Wolfowitz, who is seen as a major architect of the Bush administration's approach to Iraq, with a virtual indictment. You come before this committee ... having seriously undermined your credibility over a number of years now, she said. When it comes to making estimates or predictions about what will occur in Iraq, and what will be the costs in lives and money ... you have made numerous predictions, time and time again, that have turned out to be untrue and were based on faulty assumptions. She quoted to him from his previous testimony from the runup to the war, in which he asserted that the Iraqi people would see the United States as their liberator, that Iraq could finance its own reconstruction and that then-Army chief Gen. Eric Shinseki's estimate that it would take several hundred thousand troops to occupy Iraq was outlandish. Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., usually the committee's fiercest critic of the Bush administration's stance on Iraq, seemed almost tame by comparison, using his questioning time simply to criticize the administration's arrogance and remind his colleagues to fulfill their constitutional duties. Wolfowitz, a former Yale political scientist who seems to enjoy political debate more than most senior Bush officials, ignored many of the attacks, including most of Clinton's charges. But he told her that in disagreeing with Shinseki's estimates on the troop requirements for postwar Iraq, he simply was siding with another senior Army general who was closer to the action, Gen. Tommy Franks, who was then chief of the Central Command, the U.S. military headquarters for Iraq and the Middle East. [snip] -- The Guardian-U.K. http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1216645,00.html 14 May 2004 Guantanamo Abuse Same as Abu Ghraib, say Britons By Suzanne Goldenberg, Tania Branigan and Vikram Dodd Two British men who were held at Guantanamo Bay claimed that their US guards subjected them to abuse similar to that perpetrated at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. In an open letter to President George Bush, Britons Shafiq Rasul and Asif Iqbal accused US military officials of deliberately misleading the public about procedures at Guantanamo. Mr Rasul and Mr Iqbal, who were freed in March after being arrested in Afghanistan and held without charge for more than two years, allege that heavy-handed treatment was systematic. From the moment of our arrival in Guantanamo Bay (and indeed from long before) we were deliberately humiliated and degraded by methods we now read US officials denying, the men write. The men describe a regime that included assaults on prisoners, prolonged shackling in uncomfortable positions, strobe lights, loud music and being threatened with dogs. At times, detainees would be taken to the interrogation room and chained naked on the floor, the letter says. Women would be brought to the room to inappropriately provoke and indeed molest them. It was completely clear to all the detainees that this was happening to particularly vulnerable prisoners, especially those who had come from the strictest of Islamic backgrounds, the letter says. Mr Iqbal and Mr Rasul have issued repeated allegations of abuse at the camp since their release last March. Previous allegations were dismissed by the US embassy in London, but after two weeks in which America has been convulsed by images of torture and humiliation, their latest challenge looked set to receive a more serious hearing. The spotlight has shifted from Abu Ghraib to other detention facilities in America's war on terror as reports emerge from Afghanistan, as well as Iraq. Shortly before their release last March, the two men say a new practice was instituted in what became known as the Romeo
[pjnews] Iraq War Planner on the Way Out
http://www.prospect.org/web/printfriendly-view.ww?id=7760 Ye of Little Feith Why one of Doug Feith's underlings thinks he might go to jail. By Laura Rozen Web Exclusive: 05.18.04 There was a time when Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith seemed to run a secret foreign policy from his office on the fourth floor of the Pentagon. As creator of the Office of Special Plans, Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith presided over a secretive intelligence unit that was briefed by Iraqi exile leader Ahmad Chalabi and sifted through CIA intelligence looking for evidence of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and connections between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. His underlings Harold Rhode and Larry Franklin jetted off to Rome in December 2001 for secret meetings with Iran-Contra figures Michael Ledeen and Manucher Ghorbanifar. Who knew where the revolution would spread after Iraq? But now Feith's job security is far from certain. And when he gave a talk on Winning Iraq at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) on May 4, he found himself in the awkward position of trying to explain why we don't appear to be winning at all. He made a go of it, though, trying to put a positive spin on the disastrous recent events before an audience of about 100 diplomats and journalists. It's well-known that no prewar prediction will unfold perfectly, and that there will be setbacks that require adjustments, Feith said, sitting alone at a table in his dark gray suit and round wire-frame glasses. In war, plans are, at best, the basis for future changes. Feith may have been among friends, but even they were not going to let him and his co-workers at the Pentagon off easy. A panel of military analysts who preceded him at the AEI event blamed the Bush administration and unnamed Pentagon planners for failing to provide an adequate number of troops and resources for the United States to stabilize Iraq. I fault the [Iraq War planners] for forgetting the fundamental nature of war -- the inherent uncertainties, said Thomas Donnelly, an AEI military expert, a former staffer at the Project for the New American Century, and a member of the predecessor to the House Armed Services Committee. President Bush asked for a plan for a regime change. And what he got was a plan for regime removal. Iraqis are asking themselves, Who is more likely to bring stability, the Americans or the insurgents? Steve Metz, a military analyst at the U.S. Army War College, told the audience. And it appears to a lot of Iraqis that the insurgents have the ability to turn off the instability, while the Americans have yet to demonstrate that they can turn off the instability. In a question-and-answer session, the AEI's Danielle Pletka expressed dismay that the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) had recently reversed course and decided to allow low-level former Baath Party members to be considered for Iraqi government jobs. Pletka's question reflected the continued loyalty of many at the AEI to Chalabi. But that neocon loyalty to him has been under siege in recent weeks. For months, news organizations have reported that the information from defectors provided by Chalabi to Feith and the U.S. government had turned out to be bogus. Then, earlier this month, a Newsweek article said U.S. intelligence had intercepted Chalabi passing sensitive U.S. information to Iran. An article in Salon on May 3 then quoted Feith's own former law partner, L. Marc Zell, calling Chalabi a treacherous, spineless turncoat. (In a follow-up letter letter to Salon on May 5, Zell denied consenting to the interview.) After the conference, Feith's deputy, Middle East expert Harold Rhode, furtively discussed Zell's reputed comments in a huddle in the corner. What's up with Zell? someone asked Rhode. I have no idea, Rhode replied, shaking his head. For his part, Feith said he hadn't seen the Salon article. Nevertheless, he may have taken a look after being told that the article, citing Iraqi Defense Minister (and Chalabi nephew) Ali Allawi, reported that he would be forced to resign his job at the Pentagon later this month. When asked about this by a reporter after the conference, Feith let out a pained chuckle. They are always saying that, he said, before being rescued by Pletka and ushered from the room. Others, however, are less sanguine. He was very arrogant, Karen Kwiatkowski, Feiths former deputy, says, describing what it was like to work with him. He doesn't utilize a wide variety of inputs. He seeks information that confirms what he already thinks. And he may go to jail for leaking classified information to The Weekly Standard. (As she explains, an article appeared in The Weekly Standard that included a leaked memo written by Feith alleging ties between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.) It seems unlikely that Feith will face time for the leaked memo. But he may well be forced to look for a new job soon. As he knows all too well, regime change isn't pretty. Laura Rozen
[pjnews] Justice Memos Explained How to Skip Prisoner Rights
see also: http://snipurl.com/6kfj Washington Post: New Details of Prison Abuse Emerge http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0521-03.htm New Iraq Prison Abuse Images Show 'Savage Beatings' http://snipurl.com/6l5x Prisoners faced 'mock' executions, says soldier - http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0521-06.htm Published on Friday, May 21, 2004 by the New York Times Justice Memos Explained How to Skip Prisoner Rights by Neil A. Lewis WASHINGTON, May 20 A series of Justice Department memorandums written in late 2001 and the first few months of 2002 were crucial in building a legal framework for United States officials to avoid complying with international laws and treaties on handling prisoners, lawyers and former officials say. The confidential memorandums, several of which were written or co-written by John C. Yoo, a University of California law professor who was serving in the department, provided arguments to keep United States officials from being charged with war crimes for the way prisoners were detained and interrogated. They were endorsed by top lawyers in the White House, the Pentagon and the vice president's office but drew dissents from the State Department. The memorandums provide legal arguments to support administration officials' assertions that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to detainees from the Afghanistan war. They also suggested how officials could inoculate themselves from liability by claiming that abused prisoners were in some other nation's custody. The methods of detention and interrogation used in the Afghanistan conflict, in which the United States operated outside the Geneva Conventions, is at the heart of an investigation into prisoner abuse in Iraq in recent months. Human rights lawyers have said that in showing disrespect for international law in the Afghanistan conflict, the stage was set for harsh treatment in Iraq. One of the memorandums written by Mr. Yoo along with Robert J. Delahunty, another Justice Department lawyer, was prepared on Jan. 9, 2002, four months after the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. The 42-page memorandum, entitled, Application of treaties and laws to Al Qaeda and Taliban detainees, provided several legal arguments for avoiding the jurisdiction of the Geneva Conventions. A lawyer and a former government official who saw the memorandum said it anticipated the possibility that United States officials could be charged with war crimes, defined as grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions. The document said a way to avoid that is to declare that the conventions do not apply. The memorandum, addressed to William J. Haynes, the Pentagon's general counsel, said that President Bush could argue that the Taliban government in Afghanistan was a failed state and therefore its soldiers were not entitled to protections accorded in the conventions. If Mr. Bush did not want to do that, the memorandum gave other grounds, like asserting that the Taliban was a terrorist group. It also noted that the president could just say that he was suspending the Geneva Conventions for a particular conflict. Prof. Detlev Vagts, an authority on international law and treaties at Harvard Law School, said the arguments in the memorandums as described to him sound like an effort to find loopholes that could be used to avoid responsibility. One former government official who was involved in drafting some of the memorandums said that the lawyers did not make recommendations but only provided a range of all the options available to the White House. On Jan. 25, 2002, Alberto R. Gonzales, the White House counsel, in a memorandum to President Bush, said that the Justice Department's advice was sound and that Mr. Bush should declare the Taliban as well as Al Qaeda outside the coverage of the Geneva Conventions. That would keep American officials from being exposed to the federal War Crimes Act, a 1996 law, which, as Mr. Gonzales noted, carries the death penalty. The Gonzales memorandum to Mr. Bush said that accepting the recommendations of the Justice Department would preserve flexibility in the global war against terrorism. The nature of the new war places a high premium on other factors such as the ability to quickly obtain information from captured terrorists and their sponsors in order to avoid further atrocities against American civilians, said the memorandum, obtained this week by The New York Times. The details of the memorandum were first reported by Newsweek. Mr. Gonzales wrote that the war against terrorism, in my judgment renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners. Mr. Gonzales also says in the memorandum that another benefit of declaring the conventions inapplicable would be that United States officials could not be prosecuted for war crimes in the future by prosecutors and independent counsels who might see the fighting in a different light. He observed, however, that the disadvantages
[pjnews] Bush Outsourced His Own Fundraising!
http://www.moveon.org FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: Jessica Smith, Trevor FitzGibbon, Fenton Communications 202-822-5200 Friday, May 21, 2004 BUSH OUTSOURCES HIS OWN FUNDRAISING VOTER OPERATIONS Plays Up Patriotism at Home, Operates Key Political Centers in India The Bush Administration has taken its strong support for outsourcing even further than once thought, opting to move its key political operations offshore. Specifically, the Hindustan Times of India (http://snipurl.com/6l6c) reports that over a 14 month period in 2002 and 2003 when the Republican Party was playing up patriotism, the fund-raising and vote-seeking campaign for the Republican Party was done, in part, by two call centers located in India. According to the report, the Republican National Committee sent its voter database to the India operation and used 125 staff in India to solicit political contributions ranging between $5 and $3,000 from thousands of registered Republican voters. While the contract for running the campaigns was originally awarded to Washington-based Capital Communications Group, for cost and efficiencies gains, the company outsourced the work to HCL Technologies that in turn sent it offshore. This is a classic case of the hypocrisy of this White House. Millions of America's men and women have lost their jobs; meanwhile, George Bush is sending even his campaign operation overseas in an attempt to save his own job, said Peter Schurman, Executive Director of MoveOn.org. Under public pressure, President Bush has tried to downplay his support for outsourcing. But this new story is consistent with his Administration's actions in support of shipping American jobs overseas. Late last year, the New York Times reported that the Bush Commerce Department co-sponsored a conference at the lavish Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York that was designed to encourage American companies to put operations and jobs in China (http://www.iht.com/articles/121030.html). Then, this year, the President's top economic adviser said outsourcing was a plus for the economy (http://snipurl.com/6l6h). For full citations and links to the cited documents, visit: http://www.misleader.org.
[pjnews] Outsourcing Blame
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/outsourcing_blame.php Outsourcing Blame William D. Hartung May 21, 2004 The U.S. policy of privatize first, ask questions later has led to some sticky situationsnot the least of which was the training of Iraq's new army. William Hartung explains why nations tend to maintain a monopoly over the use of force during wartimeand why the United States must return to that ideal. It's all about accountablity, he says. The war on Iraq has made us all painfully aware of the Pentagon's growing reliance on private companies. Commercial firms have been hired to do everything from cooking meals to interrogating prisoners to providing security for U.S. proconsul Paul Bremer. Peter Singer of the Brookings Institution estimates that for every 10 troops on the ground in Iraq, there is one contract employee. That translates to 10,000 to 15,000 contract workers, making them the second-largest contingent (between America and Britain) of the coalition of the willing. Military outsourcing is nothing new. The latest wave of military privatization started in the first Bush administration, when Defense Secretary Cheney asked Halliburton to study what it would cost to have a private company take charge of getting U.S. forces overseas in a hurry. Halliburton was hired to do just that in Somalia, employing 2,500 people. The Clinton administration picked up where Bush/Cheney left off, hiring Halliburtonthen run by Cheneyas the logistics arm for the war in Kosovo. Halliburton's contract started out as a $180 million deal but soon mushroomed to more than $2.5 billion as the company built Camp Bondsteel and other military facilities on lavish, cost-plus terms. The 1990s military outsourcing boom was driven by a combination of practicality and ideology. With post-cold war troop strength dropping from 2.1 million to 1.4 million, there was a certain logic to contracting out nonmilitary functions like laundry and meals, to free soldiers for strictly military duties. But the urge to privatize soon expanded to include anything and everything, up to and including hiring former Green Berets and Navy SEALs for serious security and training functions. The privatize first, ask questions later mentality has led to the situation we face now in Iraq, where private companies are performing front-line military functions ranging from providing security to the Coalition Provisional Authority (Blackwater) to training the new Iraqi army (Vinnell) to protecting oil pipelines (Erinys) to interrogating prisoners (CACI). Before the 1990s privatization push, private firms had periodically been used in lieu of U.S. forces to run covert military policies outside the view of Congress and the public. Examples range from Air America, the CIA's secret air arm in Vietnam, to the use of Southern Air Transport to run guns to Nicaragua in the Iran/contra scandal. What we are seeing now in Iraq is the overt use of private companies side by side with US forces. But many of the same issues of democratic accountability and military effectiveness (or more often lack thereof) hold true, whether the use of the companies is overt or covert. There is a reason that governments have historically maintained a monopoly over the use of force. Allowing private companies into the mix interferes with the ability of citizens to hold their government accountable for when and how force is used. The role of CACI in the torture scandal at Abu Ghraib prison is only the latest example of this problem. The Army's internal investigation of abuses there singled out a CACI employee, alleging that he had been involved in directing some of the incidents for which Army reservists are now facing courts-martial. But this man has neither been brought out of Iraq nor brought up on criminal charges because military contractors are not subject to the code of military justice, and their status under U.S. criminal law is vague. Other problems of accountability abound. A top Army logistics officer reported last summer that in large parts of Iraq troops were not receiving fresh food and water because contractors were refusing to go into danger zones. When Vinnell was hired for $48 million to train the initial elements of the new Iraqi army, Steven Rosenfeld reported for TomPaine.com that the firm botched the job so badly that reinforcements had to be called in from the Jordanian army and other contractors. The contract was not renewed. The Vinnell case is the exception. More often, private contractors fail upward. Take Halliburton. Despite overcharging for gasoline it brought to Iraq from Kuwait, charging for three times as many meals as it was serving to troops and taking millions of dollars in kickbacks, the company continues to get new contracts. (Press reports suggest that Halliburton could take in up to $18 billion from its work in Iraq alone.) So much for accountability. Key members of Congress have started to press for action on this issue. Rep. Jan
[pjnews] Rafah Aftermath
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0522-03.htm Published on Saturday, May 22, 2004 by the Guardian/UK The Day the Tanks Arrived at Rafah Zoo Among ruined houses, a haven for Gaza's children lies in rubble by Chris McGreal in al-Brazil, Rafah Ask to be directed to the latest wave of Israeli destruction in Rafah's al-Brazil neighborhood and many fingers point towards the zoo. Amid the rubble of dozens of homes that the Israeli army continued yesterday to deny demolishing, the wrecking of the tiny, but only, zoo in the Gaza Strip took on potent symbolism for many of the newly homeless. The butchered ostrich, the petrified kangaroo cowering in a basement corner, the tortoises crushed under the tank treads - all were held up as evidence of the pitiless nature of the Israeli occupation. People are more important than animals, said the zoo's co-owner Mohammed Ahmed Juma, whose house was also demolished. But the zoo is the only place in Rafah that children could escape the tense atmosphere. There were slides and games for children. We had a small swimming pool. I know it's hard to believe, looking at it now, but it was beautiful. Why would they destroy that? Because they want to destroy everything about us. [snip] -- http://snipurl.com/6lmd Child Killed in Rafah; Incursion Ongoing By LEFTERIS PITARAKIS, Associated Press Writer RAFAH, Gaza Strip - A 3-year-old Palestinian girl was shot dead Saturday as a senior U.N. official toured a battle-scarred refugee camp where Israeli troops continue the hunt for weapons-smuggling tunnels and militants. The United Nations condemned the completely unacceptable destruction of houses, which has left 1,650 Palestinians homeless in the last 10 days. In the West Bank, four people were wounded by a Palestinian suicide bomber near an Israeli army checkpoint. On Friday, Israeli troops pulled back from the Brazil and Tel Sultan neighborhoods of Rafah, leaving behind dozens of damaged or destroyed buildings, torn-up roads and flattened cars. The army said it was redeploying forces and that its offensive aimed at capturing militants and uncovering tunnels that stretch across the nearby Egyptian border would continue. Peter Hansen, head of the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, visited the two areas Saturday. A few shops opened so residents could stock up, and people ventured tentatively outside, waving white flags and strips of cloth. Despite the partial withdrawal of troops, bursts of machine-gun fire could be heard as Hansen toured a street littered with clothes, mattresses and the collapsed corrugated tin roofs of devastated houses. The human price has been extremely high for this operation, Hansen said. He said 1,650 Palestinians had been made homeless over the past 10 days of the operation, including a brief Israeli incursion into Rafah last week. More than 11,000 Rafah residents have been made homeless by Israeli demolitions since 2000. Municipal officials said at least 43 homes were demolished and dozens more damaged in the camp this week. The army said five houses were destroyed after they were used as cover by militants to attack troops. I think that the destruction is probably even worse than I've seen ... and is indeed completely, completely unacceptable, Hansen said. In Tel Sultan, where workers struggled to restore water and electricity supplies and clear sewage from the streets, some angry residents refused to speak to the U.N. envoy. People want actions and not words, said resident Sami Khateeb. We don't want food, all we need is to live like human beings, the world should feel our suffering, they should act to end this aggression. Forty-one Palestinians have been killed since Operation Rainbow began Tuesday, including gunmen and eight demonstrators hit by a tank shell during a protest march. A 3-year-old girl was killed Saturday in the Brazil neighborhood while Hansen's delegation was in the area. Relatives said Rawan Mohammed Abu Zeid was killed by a gunshot to the head as she walked to a shop to buy candy. We were playing in the house when she told me she wanted some candy, said her brother Diyab Abu Zeid, 19, crying uncontrollably on the telephone. The older kids in the neighborhood were going to the store so I let her go with them. There was no one in the street but the kids, not even other adults, he added. The army said it had no reports of shots being fired in the area. Israel says its offensive has resulted in the arrest of dozens of militants and the killing of a local leader of the armed group Hamas. The army also said it had discovered one arms-smuggling tunnel during the operation. Overnight, tanks, jeeps and bulldozers moved into a sparsely populated area on the outskirts of the town of Rafah, next to the camp, witnesses and Palestinian security forces said. Farmer Barakat Abu Halaweh, 40, said armored vehicles flattened greenhouses and chicken coops and ordered him and his family of 15 to
[pjnews] The religious warrior of Abu Ghraib
see also: http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0521-08.htm Iraq: The Picture Gets Worse Two pictures put up in an internet café in Baghdad make for a vivid statement how Iraqis have come to see U.S. occupiers. One shows a woman in the United States hugging her dog. A second shows a hooded Iraqi prisoner sitting on the ground, hands tied behind his back. A soldier holds a gun to his head... May 12, 2004 letter to the editor, as published in the Boston Globe THE BUSH administration seems to have a serious problem with reality. The most recent reality challenge is the policy of torture in both Iraq and Afghanistan, which the administration is frantically redefining as abuse, excesses, and humiliation. We even have Secretary Rumsfeld describing footage of several American soldiers having sex with a female Iraqi prisoner. Let's have a little plain English here. Having sex with a prisoner is known as rape. Systematic beatings are called torture. Excesses that lead to death are called murder. The hundreds of women and children in mass graves in Fallujah are the product of a massacre. Taken together, all of these add up to atrocities. The dissemination of incomplete information from imperfect intelligence is called lies. The billions of dollars that Halliburton and Bechtel have reaped in profits are called war profiteering. The invasion of Iraq is called illegal. The destruction of America's international standing is called permanent. And Texaco/Phillips's high bid for Iraqi oil is called why we are in Iraq. ERICA VERRILLO, Williamsburg - http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1220781,00.html The religious warrior of Abu Ghraib An evangelical US general played a pivotal role in Iraqi prison reform Sidney Blumenthal Thursday May 20, 2004 The Guardian Saving General Boykin seemed like a strange sideshow last October. After it was revealed that the deputy undersecretary of defence for intelligence had been regularly appearing at evangelical revivals preaching that the US was in a holy war as a Christian nation battling Satan, the furore was quickly calmed. Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, explained that Boykin was exercising his rights as a citizen: We're a free people. President Bush declared that Boykin doesn't reflect my point of view or the point of view of this administration. Bush's commission on public diplomacy had reported that in nine Muslim countries, just 12% believed that Americans respect Arab/Islamic values. The Pentagon announced that its inspector general would investigate Boykin, though he has yet to report. Boykin was not removed or transferred. At that moment, he was at the heart of a secret operation to Gitmoize (Guantánamo is known in the US as Gitmo) the Abu Ghraib prison. He had flown to Guantánamo, where he met Major General Geoffrey Miller, in charge of Camp X-Ray. Boykin ordered Miller to fly to Iraq and extend X-Ray methods to the prison system there, on Rumsfeld's orders. Boykin was recommended to his position by his record in the elite Delta forces: he was a commander in the failed effort to rescue US hostages in Iran, had tracked drug lord Pablo Escobar in Colombia, had advised the gas attack on barricaded cultists at Waco, Texas, and had lost 18 men in Somalia trying to capture a warlord in the notorious Black Hawk Down fiasco of 1993. Boykin told an evangelical gathering last year how this fostered his spiritual crisis. There is no God, he said. If there was a God, he would have been here to protect my soldiers. But he was thunderstruck by the insight that his battle with the warlord was between good and evil, between the true God and the false one. I knew that my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol. Boykin was the action hero side of his boss, Stephen Cambone, a conservative defence intellectual appointed to the new post of undersecretary of intelligence. Cambone is universally despised by the officer corps for his arrogant, abrasive and dictatorial style and regarded as the personal symbol of Rumsfeldism. A former senior Pentagon official told me of a conversation with a three-star general, who remarked: If we were being overrun by the enemy and I had only one bullet left, I'd use it on Cambone. Cambone set about cutting the CIA and the state department out of the war on terror, but he had no knowledge of special ops. For this the rarefied civilian relied on the gruff soldier - a melding of ignorance and recklessness, as a military intelligence source told me. Just before Boykin was put in charge of the hunt for Osama bin Laden and then inserted into Iraqi prison reform, he was a circuit rider for the religious right. He allied himself with a small group called the Faith Force Multiplier that advocates applying military principles to evangelism. Its manifesto - Warrior Message - summons warriors in this spiritual war for souls of this nation and the world ... Boykin
[pjnews] DOJ Reclassifies Public Information
see also: http://www.thehill.com/news/051804/binladen.aspx Who let bin Ladens leave U.S.? Bush refuses to answer 9/11 commission's queries http://villagevoice.com/issues/0420/mondo5.php Why Were We on Our Own? 9-11 inquiry merely hints at the feds' inaction on the fatal day - The New York Times 20 May 2004 Material Given to Congress in 2002 Is Now Classified By ERIC LICHTBLAU WASHINGTON, May 19 - The Justice Department has taken the unusual step of retroactively classifying information it gave to Congress nearly two years ago regarding a former F.B.I. translator who charged that the bureau had missed critical terrorist warnings, officials said Wednesday. Law enforcement officials say the secrecy surrounding the translator, Sibel Edmonds, is essential to protecting information that could reveal intelligence-gathering operations. But some members of Congress and Congressional aides said they were troubled by the move, which comes as critics have accused the Bush administration of excessive secrecy. What the F.B.I. is up to here is ludicrous, Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, said in an interview. To classify something that's already been out in the public domain, what do you accomplish? It does harm to transparency in government, and it looks like an attempt to cover up the F.B.I.'s problems in translating intelligence. F.B.I. officials gave Senate staff members two briefings in June and July of 2002 concerning Ms. Edmonds, who said the F.B.I.'s system for translating intelligence was so flawed that the bureau missed chances to spot terrorist warnings. But the F.B.I. now maintains that some of the information discussed was so potentially damaging if released publicly that it is now considered classified, according to a memorandum distributed last week within the Senate Judiciary Committee. The material could also play a part in pending lawsuits, including Ms. Edmonds's wrongful termination suit and a lawsuit brought by hundreds of families of Sept. 11 victims who have sought to take testimony from her. Any staffer who attended those briefings, or who learns about those briefings, should be aware that the F.B.I. now considers the information classified and should therefore avoid further dissemination,'' the Judiciary Committee memorandum said. An F.B.I. official who spoke on condition of anonymity said the decision to classify the material was made by the Justice Department, which oversees the bureau. The Justice Department declined to comment on Wednesday. The F.B.I. told Congressional officials that it was classifying topics including what languages Ms. Edmonds translated, what types of cases she handled, and what employees she worked with, officials said. Even routine and widely disseminated information - like where she worked - is now classified. Ms. Edmonds, who is Turkish-American, began working for the F.B.I. shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks as a translator in the F.B.I.'s Washington field office with top-secret security clearance, but she was let go in the spring of 2002. She first gained wide public attention in October of that year when she appeared on 60 Minutes'' on CBS and charged that the F.B.I.'s translation services were plagued by incompetence and a lack of urgency and that the bureau had ignored her concerns. The Justice Department's inspector general is investigating her claims. The F.B.I. has taken steps to improve its translation operations, including hiring more linguists. But Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, wrote in March to the Justice Department that he still had grave concerns'' about the F.B.I.'s ability to translate vital counterterrorism material. Ms. Edmonds testified in a closed session this year before the Sept. 11 commission, and she has made increasingly vehement charges about the F.B.I.'s intelligence failures, saying the United States had advance warnings about the attacks. Families of the Sept. 11 victims - who are suing numerous corporate and Saudi interests whom they accuse of having links to the attacks - have sought to depose her as a witness, but the Justice Department has blocked the move by saying her testimony would violate the state secret privilege.'' Her lawyer could not be reached for comment on Wednesday. While some Congressional officials said they were confident the Justice Department had followed proper procedure in classifying the information, others said they could not remember any recent precedents and were bothered by the move. I have never heard of a retroactive classification two years back,'' said an aide who spoke on condition of anonymity because the subject is classified. It would be silly if it didn't have such serious implications,'' the aide said. People are puzzled and, frankly, worried, because the effect here is to quash Congressional oversight. We don't even know what we can't talk about.'' Senator Grassley said, This is about
[pjnews] Did Somebody Say War?
http://snipurl.com/6me1 A videotape obtained Sunday by Associated Press Television News captures a wedding party that survivors say was later attacked by U.S. planes early Wednesday, killing up to 45 people. The dead included the cameraman, Yasser Shawkat Abdullah, hired to record the festivities, which ended Tuesday night before the planes struck. The U.S. military says it is investigating the attack, which took place in the village of Mogr el-Deeb about five miles from the Syrian border, but that all evidence so far indicates the target was a safehouse for foreign fighters. There was no evidence of a wedding: no decorations, no musical instruments found, no large quantities of food or leftover servings one would expect from a wedding celebration, Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt said Saturday. There may have been some kind of celebration. Bad people have celebrations, too. But video that APTN shot a day after the attack shows fragments of musical instruments, pots and pans and brightly colored beddings used for celebrations, scattered around the bombed out tent. [snip] http://snipurl.com/6me4 Morgue Records Show 5,500 Iraqis Killed http://snipurl.com/6nbo May 24, 2004 New York Times Did Somebody Say War? By BOB HERBERT, OP-ED COLUMNIST President Bush fell off his bike and hurt himself during a 17-mile excursion at his ranch in Crawford, Tex., on Saturday. Nothing serious. A few cuts and bruises. He was wearing a bike helmet and a mouth guard, and he was able to climb back on his bike and finish his ride. A little later he left the ranch and went to Austin for a graduation party for his daughter Jenna. And then it was on to New Haven, where daughter Barbara will graduate today from Yale. Except for the bicycle mishap, it sounded like a very pleasant weekend. Meanwhile, there's a war on. Yet another U.S. soldier was killed near Falluja yesterday. You remember Falluja. That's the rebellious city that the Marines gave up on and turned over to the control of officers from the very same Baathist army that we invaded Iraq to defeat. It's impossible to think about Iraq without stumbling over these kinds of absurdities. How do you get a logical foothold on a war that was nurtured from the beginning on absurd premises? You can't. Iraq had nothing to do with Sept. 11. The invasion of Iraq was not part of the war on terror. We had no business launching this war. Now we're left with the tragic absurdity of a clueless president riding his bicycle in Texas while Americans in Iraq are going up in flames. How bad is the current situation? Gen. Anthony Zinni, the retired Marine Corps general who headed the U.S. Central Command (which covers much of the Middle East and Central Asia) from 1997 to 2000, was utterly dismissive about the administration's stay the course strategy in Iraq. The course is headed over Niagara Falls, he said in an interview with 60 Minutes, adding, It should be evident to everybody that they've screwed up. When the weapons of mass destruction rationale went by the boards, the administration and its apologists tried to justify the war by asserting that the U.S. could use bullets and bombs to seed Iraq with an American-style democracy that would then spread like the flowers of spring throughout the Middle East. Anthony Cordesman, a Middle East expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, addressed that point last week in a report titled, The `Post Conflict' Lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan. At this point, the report said, the U.S. lacks good options in Iraq although it probably never really had them in the sense the Bush administration sought. The option of quickly turning Iraq into a successful, free-market democracy was never practical, and was as absurd a neoconservative fantasy as the idea that success in this objective would magically make Iraq an example that would transform the Middle East. The president's reservoir of credibility on Iraq is bone dry. His approval ratings are going down. Conservative voices in opposition to his policies are growing louder. And the troops themselves are becoming increasingly disenchanted with their mission. Yet no one knows quite what to do. Americans are torn between a desire to stop the madness by pulling the plug on this tragic and hopeless adventure and the realization that the U.S., for the time being, may be the only safeguard against a catastrophic civil war. The president is scheduled to give a speech tonight to lay out his clear strategy for the future of Iraq. Don't hold your breath. This is the same president who deliberately exploited his nation's fear of terrorism in the aftermath of Sept. 11 to lead it into the long dark starless night of Iraq. As for the Iraqis, they've been had. We're not going to foot the bill in any real sense for the reconstruction of Iraq, any more than we've been willing to foot the bill for a reconstruction of the public school system here at
[pjnews] Ebert's Review of Fahrenheit 9/11
http://www.suntimes.com/output/entertainment/cst-ftr-cannes18.html LESS IS MOORE IN SUBDUED, EFFECTIVE '9/11' May 18, 2004 BY ROGER EBERT, FILM CRITIC CANNES, France -- Michael Moore the muckraking wiseass has been replaced by a more subdued version in Fahrenheit 9/11, his new documentary questioning the anti-terrorism credentials of the Bush regime. In the Moore version, President Bush, his father and members of their circle have received $1.5 billion from Saudi Arabia over the years, attacked Iraq to draw attention from their Saudi friends, and have lost the hearts and minds of many of the U.S. servicemen in the war. The film premiered Monday at the Cannes Film Festival to a series of near-riot scenes, as overbooked screenings were besieged by mobs trying to push their way in. The response at the early morning screening I attended was loudly enthusiastic. And at the official black-tie screening, it was greeted by a standing ovation; a friend who was there said it went on for at least 25 minutes, which probably means closer to 15 (estimates of ovations at Cannes are like estimates of parade crowds in Chicago). But the film doesn't go for satirical humor the way Moore's Roger Me and Bowling for Columbine did. Moore's narration is still often sarcastic, but frequently he lets his footage speak for itself. The film shows American soldiers not in a prison but in the field, hooding an Iraqi, calling him Ali Baba, touching his genitals and posing for photos with him. There are other scenes of U.S. casualties without arms or legs, questioning the purpose of the Iraqi invasion at a time when Bush proposed to cut military salaries and benefits. It shows Lila Lipscomb, a mother from Flint, Mich., reading a letter from her son, who urged his family to help defeat Bush, days before he was killed. And in a return to the old Moore confrontational style, it shows him joined by a Marine recruiter as he encourages congressmen to have their sons enlist in the services. Despite these dramatic moments, the most memorable footage for me involved President Bush on Sept. 11. The official story is that Bush was meeting with a group of pre-schoolers when he was informed of the attack on the World Trade Center and quickly left the room. Not quite right, says Moore. Bush learned of the first attack before entering the school, decided to go ahead with his photo op, and began to read My Pet Goat to the students. Informed of the second attack, he incredibly remained with the students for another seven minutes, reading from the book, until a staff member suggested that he leave. The look on his face as he reads the book, knowing what he knows, is disquieting. Fahrenheit 9/11 documents the long association of the Bush clan and Saudi oil billionaires, and reveals that when Bush released his military records, he blotted out the name of another pilot whose flight status was suspended on the same day for failure to take a physical exam. This was his good friend James R. Bath, who later became the Texas money manager for the bin Laden family (which has renounced its terrorist son). When a group of 9/11 victims sued the Saudi government for financing the terrorists, the Saudis hired as their defense team the law firm of James Baker, Bush Sr.'s secretary of state. And the film questions why, when all aircraft were grounded after 9/11, the White House allowed several planes to fly around the country picking up bin Laden family members and other Saudis and flying them home. Much of the material in Fahrenheit 9/11 has already been covered in books and newspapers, but some is new, and it all benefits from the different kind of impact a movie has. Near the beginning of the film, as Congress moves to ratify the election of Bush after the Florida and Supreme Court controversies, it is positively eerie to see 10 members of Congress -- eight black women, one Asian woman and one black man -- rise to protest the move and be gaveled into silence by the chairman of the session, Al Gore. On the night before his film premiered, Moore, in uncharacteristic formalwear, attended an official dinner given by Gilles Jacob, president of the festival. Conversation at his table centered on the just-published New Yorker article by Seymour Hersh alleging that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld personally authorized use of torture in Iraqi prisons. Moore had his own insight into the issue: Rumsfeld was under oath when he testified about the torture scandal. If he lied, that's perjury. And therefore I find it incredibly significant that when Bush and Cheney testified before the 9/11 commission, they refused to swear an oath. They claimed they'd sworn an oath of office, but that has no legal standing. Do you suppose they remembered how Clinton was trapped by perjury and were protecting themselves? Would something like that belong in the film? My contract says I can keep editing and adding stuff right up until the release date, Moore said. He said he
[pjnews] 1/3 Gore speech
http://MoveOnPAC.org Former Vice President Al Gore delivered a major foreign policy address in New York City today [5/26], sponsored by MoveOn PAC, linking the Abu Ghraib prison abuses to deep flaws in President Bush's Iraq policy and calling for the resignation of 6 members of the Bush Administration team responsible for the failed policy and abuse of prisoners in Iraq. The members include Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Dr. Condoleezza Rice, National Security Advisor, George Tenet, Director of Central Intelligence Agency, Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Secretary of Defense, Douglas J. Feith, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, and Stephen A. Cambone, Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence. Gore identified the various ways in which all Americans--soldiers in Iraq, residents and travelers abroad, and citizens at home-- are endangered by the bitterness created throughout the Islamic world-- and beyond-- by US policy. The text of his speech follows: George W. Bush promised us a foreign policy with humility. Instead, he has brought us humiliation in the eyes of the world. He promised to restore honor and integrity to the White House. Instead, he has brought deep dishonor to our country and built a durable reputation as the most dishonest President since Richard Nixon. Honor? He decided not to honor the Geneva Convention. Just as he would not honor the United Nations, international treaties, the opinions of our allies, the role of Congress and the courts, or what Jefferson described as a decent respect for the opinion of mankind. He did not honor the advice, experience and judgment of our military leaders in designing his invasion of Iraq. And now he will not honor our fallen dead by attending any funerals or even by permitting photos of their flag-draped coffins. How did we get from September 12th , 2001, when a leading French newspaper ran a giant headline with the words We Are All Americans Now and when we had the good will and empathy of all the world -- to the horror that we all felt in witnessing the pictures of torture in Abu Ghraib. To begin with, from its earliest days in power, this administration sought to radically destroy the foreign policy consensus that had guided America since the end of World War II. The long successful strategy of containment was abandoned in favor of the new strategy of preemption. And what they meant by preemption was not the inherent right of any nation to act preemptively against an imminent threat to its national security, but rather an exotic new approach that asserted a unique and unilateral U.S. right to ignore international law wherever it wished to do so and take military action against any nation, even in circumstances where there was no imminent threat. All that is required, in the view of Bush's team is the mere assertion of a possible, future threat -- and the assertion need be made by only one person, the President. More disturbing still was their frequent use of the word dominance to describe their strategic goal, because an American policy of dominance is as repugnant to the rest of the world as the ugly dominance of the helpless, naked Iraqi prisoners has been to the American people. Dominance is as dominance does. Dominance is not really a strategic policy or political philosophy at all. It is a seductive illusion that tempts the powerful to satiate their hunger for more power still by striking a Faustian bargain. And as always happens -- sooner or later -- to those who shake hands with the devil, they find out too late that what they have given up in the bargain is their soul. One of the clearest indications of the impending loss of intimacy with one's soul is the failure to recognize the existence of a soul in those over whom power is exercised, especially if the helpless come to be treated as animals, and degraded. We also know -- and not just from De Sade and Freud -- the psychological proximity between sexual depravity and other people's pain. It has been especially shocking and awful to see these paired evils perpetrated so crudely and cruelly in the name of America. Those pictures of torture and sexual abuse came to us embedded in a wave of news about escalating casualties and growing chaos enveloping our entire policy in Iraq. But in order understand the failure of our overall policy, it is important to focus specifically on what happened in the Abu Ghraib prison, and ask whether or not those actions were representative of who we are as Americans? Obviously the quick answer is no, but unfortunately it's more complicated than that. There is good and evil in every person. And what makes the United States special in the history of nations is our commitment to the rule of law and our carefully constructed system of checks and balances. Our natural distrust of concentrated power and our devotion to openness and democracy are what have lead us as a people to consistently choose good over evil in our collective aspirations
[pjnews] 2/3 Gore speech
continued: And the worst still lies ahead. General Joseph Hoar, the former head of the Marine Corps, said I believe we are absolutely on the brink of failure. We are looking into the abyss. When a senior, respected military leader like Joe Hoar uses the word abyss, then the rest of us damn well better listen. Here is what he means: more American soldiers dying, Iraq slipping into worse chaos and violence, no end in sight, with our influence and moral authority seriously damaged. Retired Marine Corps General Anthony Zinni, who headed Central Command before becoming President Bush's personal emissary to the Middle East, said recently that our nation's current course is headed over Niagara Falls. The Commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, Army Major General Charles H. Swannack, Jr., asked by the Washington Post whether he believes the United States is losing the war in Iraq, replied, I think strategically, we are. Army Colonel Paul Hughes, who directed strategic planning for the US occupation authority in Baghdad, compared what he sees in Iraq to the Vietnam War, in which he lost his brother: I promised myself when I came on active duty that I would do everything in my power to prevent that from happening again. Noting that Vietnam featured a pattern of winning battles while losing the war, Hughes added unless we ensure that we have coherence in our policy, we will lose strategically. The White House spokesman, Dan Bartlett was asked on live television about these scathing condemnations by Generals involved in the highest levels of Pentagon planning and he replied, Well they're retired, and we take our advice from active duty officers. But amazingly, even active duty military officers are speaking out against President Bush. For example, the Washington Post quoted an unnamed senior General at the Pentagon as saying, the current OSD (Office of the Secretary of Defense) refused to listen or adhere to military advice. Rarely if ever in American history have uniformed commanders felt compelled to challenge their commander in chief in public. The Post also quoted an unnamed general as saying, Like a lot of senior Army guys I'm quite angry with Rumsfeld and the rest of the Bush Administration. He listed two reasons. I think they are going to break the Army, he said, adding that what really incites him is I don't think they care. In his upcoming book, Zinni blames the current catastrophe on the Bush team's incompetence early on. In the lead-up to the Iraq war, and its later conduct, he writes, I saw at a minimum, true dereliction, negligence and irresponsibility, at worst, lying, incompetence and corruption. Zinni's book will join a growing library of volumes by former advisors to Bush -- including his principal advisor on terrorism, Richard Clarke; his principal economic policy advisor, former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, former Ambassador Joe Wilson, who was honored by Bush's father for his service in Iraq, and his former Domestic Adviser on faith-based organizations, John Dilulio, who said, There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus. What you've got is everything, and I mean everything, run by the political arm. It's the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis. Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki told Congress in February that the occupation could require several hundred thousand troops. But because Rumsfeld and Bush did not want to hear disagreement with their view that Iraq could be invaded at a much lower cost, Shinseki was hushed and then forced out. And as a direct result of this incompetent plan and inadequate troop strength, young soldiers were put in an untenable position. For example, young reservists assigned to the Iraqi prisons were called up without training or adequate supervision, and were instructed by their superiors to break down prisoners in order to prepare them for interrogation. To make matters worse, they were placed in a confusing situation where the chain of command was criss-crossed between intelligence gathering and prison administration, and further confused by an unprecedented mixing of military and civilian contractor authority. The soldiers who are accused of committing these atrocities are, of course, responsible for their own actions and if found guilty, must be severely and appropriately punished. But they are not the ones primarily responsible for the disgrace that has been brought upon the United States of America. Private Lynndie England did not make the decision that the United States would not observe the Geneva Convention. Specialist Charles Graner was not the one who approved a policy of establishing an American Gulag of dark rooms with naked prisoners to be stressed and even -- we must use the word -- tortured -- to force them to say things that legal procedures might not induce them to say. These policies were designed and insisted upon by the Bush White
[pjnews] 3/3 Gore speech
continued: When a business enterprise finds itself in deep trouble that is linked to the failed policies of the current CEO the board of directors and stockholders usually say to the failed CEO, Thank you very much, but we're going to replace you now with a new CEO -- one less vested in a stubborn insistence on staying the course, even if that course is, in the words of General Zinni, Headed over Niagara Falls. One of the strengths of democracy is the ability of the people to regularly demand changes in leadership and to fire a failing leader and hire a new one with the promise of hopeful change. That is the real solution to America's quagmire in Iraq. But, I am keenly aware that we have seven months and twenty five days remaining in this president's current term of office and that represents a time of dangerous vulnerability for our country because of the demonstrated incompetence and recklessness of the current administration. It is therefore essential that even as we focus on the fateful choice, the voters must make this November that we simultaneously search for ways to sharply reduce the extraordinary danger that we face with the current leadership team in place. It is for that reason that I am calling today for Republicans as well as Democrats to join me in asking for the immediate resignations of those immediately below George Bush and Dick Cheney who are most responsible for creating the catastrophe that we are facing in Iraq. We desperately need a national security team with at least minimal competence because the current team is making things worse with each passing day. They are endangering the lives of our soldiers, and sharply increasing the danger faced by American citizens everywhere in the world, including here at home. They are enraging hundreds of millions of people and embittering an entire generation of anti-Americans whose rage is already near the boiling point. We simply cannot afford to further increase the risk to our country with more blunders by this team. Donald Rumsfeld, as the chief architect of the war plan, should resign today. His deputies Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith and his intelligence chief Stephen Cambone should also resign. The nation is especially at risk every single day that Rumsfeld remains as Secretary of Defense. Condoleeza Rice, who has badly mishandled the coordination of national security policy, should also resign immediately. George Tenet should also resign. I want to offer a special word about George Tenet, because he is a personal friend and I know him to be a good and decent man. It is especially painful to call for his resignation, but I have regretfully concluded that it is extremely important that our country have new leadership at the CIA immediately. As a nation, our greatest export has always been hope: hope that through the rule of law people can be free to pursue their dreams, that democracy can supplant repression and that justice, not power, will be the guiding force in society. Our moral authority in the world derived from the hope anchored in the rule of law. With this blatant failure of the rule of law from the very agents of our government, we face a great challenge in restoring our moral authority in the world and demonstrating our commitment to bringing a better life to our global neighbors. During Ronald Reagan's Presidency, Secretary of Labor Ray Donovan was accused of corruption, but eventually, after a lot of publicity, the indictment was thrown out by the Judge. Donovan asked the question, Where do I go to get my reputation back? President Bush has now placed the United States of America in the same situation. Where do we go to get our good name back? The answer is, we go where we always go when a dramatic change is needed. We go to the ballot box, and we make it clear to the rest of the world that what's been happening in America for the last four years, and what America has been doing in Iraq for the last two years, really is not who we are. We, as a people, at least the overwhelming majority of us, do not endorse the decision to dishonor the Geneva Convention and the Bill of Rights. Make no mistake, the damage done at Abu Ghraib is not only to America's reputation and America's strategic interests, but also to America's spirit. It is also crucial for our nation to recognize -- and to recognize quickly -- that the damage our nation has suffered in the world is far, far more serious than President Bush's belated and tepid response would lead people to believe. Remember how shocked each of us, individually, was when we first saw those hideous images. The natural tendency was to first recoil from the images, and then to assume that they represented a strange and rare aberration that resulted from a few twisted minds or, as the Pentagon assured us, a few bad apples. But as today's shocking news reaffirms yet again, this was not rare. It was not an aberration. Today's New York Times reports that an Army survey of
[pjnews] DU Sickness in Returning US Troops
http://snipurl.com/6jd6 Depleted Morality: The first signs of uranium sickness surface in troops returning from Iraq By Frida Berrigan, In These Times Its a year into the occupation and U.S. troops are being killed at a rate of more than four a day. These deaths from roadside bombs, suicide attackers, anti-U.S. militia and mobs of angry civilians make headlines. More quietly, American soldiers also are beginning to suffer injuries from a silent and pernicious weapon material of U.S. origindepleted uranium (DU). DU weaponry is fired by U.S. troops from the Abrams battle tank, A-10 Warthog and other systems. It is pyrophoric, burning spontaneously on impact, and extremely dense, making DU munitions ideal for penetrating an enemys tank armor or reinforced bunker. It also is the toxic and radioactive byproduct of enriched uranium, the fissile material in nuclear weapons. When a DU shell hits its target, it burns, losing anywhere from 40 percent to 70 percent of its mass and dispersing a fine toxic radioactive dust that can be carried long distances by winds or absorbed into the soil and groundwater. The U.S. Army and Air Force have fired 127 tons of DU munitions in Iraq in the last year, says Michael Kilpatrick, the Pentagons director of the Deployment Health Support Directorate. At the beginning of Aprilthe deadliest month of the war and occupation so fara New York Daily News investigation found that four National Guardsmen have been contaminated by radioactive dust. The men were part of the 442nd Military Police Company based in Orangeburg, New York, which went to Iraq last summer to guard convoys and prisons and train the new Iraqi police. While the whole company is due back in the United States by the end of April, a number of soldiers were sent home early, suffering from persistent headaches and fatigue, nausea and dizziness, joint pain and excessive urination. They sought medical attention and testing from the Army but were ignored. Nine of the returned soldiers, frustrated with this treatment, sought independent testing and examination from a uranium expert contracted by the New York Daily News. The independent experts tests showed four of the soldiers had high levels of depleted uranium in their systems. Asaf Durakovic, a physician and nuclear medicine expert with the Uranium Medical Research Center based in Washington, examined the GIs and performed the testing. The Daily News quoted him as saying: These are amazing results, especially since these soldiers were military police not exposed to the heat of battle. Other American soldiers who were in combat must have more depleted uranium exposures. Second Platoon Sergeant Hector Vega tested positive for DU exposure. He is a 48-year-old retired postal worker from the Bronx and has served in the National Guard for 27 years. After being stationed in Iraq last year, he suffers from insomnia and constant headaches. Durakovic found that Vega and three of his fellow Guardsmen are the first confirmed cases of inhaled depleted uranium exposure from the current Iraq conflict. These cases raise the specter of much more widespread radiation exposure among coalition soldiers and Iraqi civilians than the Pentagon predicted. Pentagon spokesmen consistently have maintained that depleted uranium is safe for U.S. troops and Iraqi civilians. In May 2003, the Associated Press quoted Lt. Col. Michael Sigmon, deputy surgeon for the U.S. Armys V Corps, saying, There is not really any danger, at least that we know about, for the people of Iraq. Sigmon asserted that children playing with expended tank shells would have to eat and then practically suffocate on DU residue to cause harm. Yet, according to a 1998 report by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, the inhalation of DU particles can lead to symptoms such as fatigue, shortness of breath, lymphatic problems, bronchial complaints, weight loss and an unsteady gait. These symptoms match those of sick veterans of the Gulf and Balkan wars. In November 1999, NATO sent its commanders the following warning: Inhalation of insoluble depleted uranium dust particles has been associated with long-term health effects, including cancers and birth defects. A study that same year found that depleted uranium can stay in the lungs for up to two years. When the dust is breathed in, it passes through the walls of the lung and into the blood, circulating through the whole body, wrote Dr. Rosalie Bertell, a Canadian epidemiologist. When inhaled, she concluded, DU represents a serious risk of damaged immune systems and fatal cancers. A four-year study released last year by the Defense Department and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also found significantly higher prevalences of heart and kidney birth defects in the children of Gulf War veterans, though it did not mention DU specifically. The Pentagons professions of DUs safety also is directly contradicted by the Armys training
[pjnews] Who Would Try US Civilian Contractors for Iraqi Abuses?
see also: http://snipurl.com/6qov Amnesty International blasts US 'war on terror'; 'The United States has lost its moral high ground' http://snipurl.com/6qp9 The U.S. civilian interrogators questioning prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq work not under a military contract but on one from the Department of the Interior, a bureaucratic twist that could complicate any effort to hold them criminally responsible for abuse of detainees or other offenses... --- http://snipurl.com/6qp1 The New York Times 26 May 2004 Who Would Try Civilians of U.S.? No One in Iraq By ADAM LIPTAK Though civilian translators and interrogators may have participated in the abuse at Abu Ghraib prison, prosecuting them will present challenges, legal experts say, because such civilians working for the military are subject to neither Iraqi nor military justice. On the basis of a referral from the Pentagon, the Justice Department opened an investigation on Friday into the conduct of one civilian contractor in Iraq, who has not been identified. We remain committed to taking all appropriate action within our jurisdiction regarding allegations of mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners, Mark Corallo, a Justice Department spokesman, said in a statement. Prosecuting civilian contractors in United States courts would be fascinating and enormously complicated, said Deborah N. Pearlstein, director of the U.S. law and security program of Human Rights First. It is clear, on the other hand, that neither Iraqi courts nor American courts-martial are available. In June 2003, L. Paul Bremer III, the chief American administrator in Iraq, granted broad immunity to civilian contractors and their employees. They were, he wrote, generally not subject to criminal and civil actions in the Iraqi legal system, including arrest and detention. That immunity is limited to their official acts under their contracts, and it is unclear whether any abuses alleged can be said to have been such acts. But even unofficial conduct by contractors in Iraq cannot be prosecuted there, Mr. Bremer's order said, without his written permission. Similarly, under a series of Supreme Court decisions, civilians cannot be court-martialed in the absence of a formal declaration of war. There was no such declaration in the Iraq war. In theory, the president could establish new military commissions to try civilians charged with offenses in Iraq, said Jordan Paust, a law professor at the University of Houston and a former member of the faculty at the Army's Judge Advocate General's School. The commissions announced by President Bush in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks do not, however, have jurisdiction over American citizens. That leaves prosecution in United States courts. There, prosecutors might turn to two relatively narrow laws, or a broader one, to pursue their cases. A 1994 law makes torture committed by Americans outside the United States a crime. The law defines torture as the infliction of severe physical or mental pain or suffering. But some human rights groups suspect that the administration may be reluctant to use the law, because its officials, including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, have resisted calling the abuse at Abu Ghraib torture. If they don't want to use the word `torture,' Ms. Pearlstein said, prosecutions under the torture act aren't likely. A 1996 law concerning war crimes allows prosecutions for violations of some provisions of the Geneva Conventions, including those prohibiting torture, outrages upon personal dignity and humiliating and degrading treatment. Bush administration lawyers cited potential prosecutions under the law as a reason not to give detainees at Guantánamo Bay the protections of the Geneva Conventions. But the administration has said that the conventions apply to detainees in Iraq. Both the torture law and the war-crimes law provide for long prison sentences, and capital punishment is available in cases involving the victim's death. The broader law, the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act, allows people employed by or accompanying the armed forces outside the United States to be prosecuted in United States courts for federal crimes punishable by more than a year's imprisonment. People who are citizens or residents of the host nations are not covered, but Americans and other foreign nationals are. The law has apparently been invoked only once, in a case involving charges that the wife of an Air Force staff sergeant murdered him in Turkey last year. The case will soon be tried in federal court in Los Angeles. The law was passed to fill a legal gap that had existed since the 1950's, when Supreme Court decisions limited the military's ability to prosecute civilians in courts-martial during peacetime. In 2000, a three-judge panel of the federal appeals court in New York, citing that gap, reluctantly overturned the conviction of an American civilian who had sexually abused a child in Germany. In an
[pjnews] 1/2 How Ahmed Chalabi used NYT reporter Judith Miller
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/05/27/times/ 27 May 2004 Not fit to print: How Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraq war lobby used New York Times reporter Judith Miller to make the case for invasion. By James C. Moore When the full history of the Iraq war is written, one of its most scandalous chapters will be about how American journalists, in particular those at the New York Times, so easily allowed themselves to be manipulated by both dubious sources and untrustworthy White House officials into running stories that misled the nation about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. The Times finally acknowledged its grave errors in an extraordinary and lengthy editors note published Wednesday. The editors wrote: We have found ... instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been ... In some cases, the information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged. Looking back, we wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining the claims as new evidence emerged -- or failed to emerge ... We consider the story of Iraq's weapons, and of the pattern of misinformation, to be unfinished business. And we fully intend to continue aggressive reporting aimed at setting the record straight. The editors conceded what intelligence sources had told me and numerous other reporters: that Pentagon favorite Ahmed Chalabi was feeding bad information to journalists and the White House and had set up a situation with Iraqi exiles where all of the influential institutions were shouting into the same garbage can, hearing the same echo. Complicating matters for journalists, the accounts of these exiles were often eagerly confirmed by United States officials convinced of the need to intervene in Iraq. Administration officials now acknowledge that they sometimes fell for misinformation from these exile sources. So did many news organizations -- in particular, this one. The reporter on many of the flawed stories at issue was Judith Miller, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and authority on the Middle East. The Times, insisting that the problem did not lie with any individual journalist, did not mention her name. The paper was presumably trying to take the high road by defending its reporter, but the omission seems peculiar. While her editors must share a large portion of the blame, the pieces ran under Miller's byline. It was Miller who clearly placed far too much credence in unreliable sources, and then credulously used dubious administration officials to confirm what she was told. And of all Miller's unreliable sources, the most unreliable was Ahmed Chalabi -- whose little neocon-funded kingdom came crashing down last week when Iraqi forces smashed down his door after U.S. officials feared he was sending secrets to Iran. Even before the latest suspicions about Chalabi, a reporter trying to convince an editor that the smooth-talking exile was a credible source would have a difficult case to make. First, he was a convicted criminal. While living in exile from Iraq, Chalabi was accused of embezzling millions from his Petra Bank in Amman, Jordan. Leaving the country in the trunk of a car reportedly driven by Crown Prince Hassan of Jordan, Chalabi was convicted in absentia and still faces 22 years in prison, if he ever returns. Evidence presented in the trial indicated Chalabi's future outside of Jordan was secured by $70 million he stole from his depositors. Chalabi maintains his innocence and has suggested his prosecution was political because he was involved in efforts to overthrow dictator Saddam Hussein in neighboring Iraq. Even more damning, Chalabi was a player, an interested party with his own virulently pro-war agenda -- a fact that alone should have raised editorial suspicions about any claims he might make that would pave the way to war. He was also a highly controversial figure, the subject of bitter intra-administration battling. He was the darling of Richard Perle and his fellow neocon hawks, including such ardent advocates of the war as Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, but was viewed with deep suspicion by both the State Department and the CIA. State in particular had turned its back on Chalabi after his London-based Iraqi National Congress spent $5 million and an audit was unable to account for most of its expenditure. One might have hoped that American journalists would have been at least as skeptical as the State Department before they burned their reputations on Chalabi's pyre of lies. But even the most seasoned of correspondents and the most august of publications, including the Times and the Washington Post, appear to have been as deftly used by Chalabi as were the CIA, the Department of Defense and the Bush administration. Miller, however, is the only journalist whose reliance on Chalabi became a matter of public debate. An e-mail exchange between the Times' Baghdad bureau chief, John Burns, and Miller was
[pjnews] 2/2 How Ahmed Chalabi used NYT reporter Judith Miller
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/05/27/times/ Not fit to print: How Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraq war lobby used New York Times reporter Judith Miller to make the case for invasion. continued... It turned out that the aluminum tubes were covered with an anodized coating, which would have been machined off to make them usable in a centrifuge. But that change in the thickness of the tube wall would have rendered the tubes useless for a centrifuge, according to a number of nuclear scientists who spoke publicly after Miller's story. Aluminum, which has not been used in uranium gas separators since the 1950s, has been replaced by steel. The tubes, in fact, were almost certainly intended for use as rocket bodies. Hussein's multiple-launch rocket systems had rusted on their pads and he had ordered the tubes from Italy. Medusa 81, the Italian rocket model name, was stamped on the sides of the tubes, and in a factory north of Baghdad, American intelligence officers later discovered boxes of rocket fins and motors awaiting the arrival of the tubes of terror. The probable source for Miller's story, in addition to U.S. intelligence operatives, was Adnan Ihsan Saeed, an Iraqi defector Miller was introduced to by Chalabi. Miller had quoted him in a December 2001 report when Saeed had told her he had worked on nuclear operations in Iraq and that there were at least 20 banned-weapons facilities undergoing repairs. Of course, no such facilities have been found -- meaning Saeed was either lying or horribly uninformed. I had no reason to believe what I reported at the time was inaccurate, Miller told me. I believed the intelligence information I had at the time. I sure didn't believe they were making it up. This was a learning process. You constantly have to ask the question, 'What do you know at the time you are writing it?' We tried really hard to get more information and we vetted information very, very carefully. But Miller's entire journalistic approach was flawed. A few months after the aluminum tubes story, a former CIA analyst, who has observed Miller's professional products and relationships for years, explained to me how simple it was to manipulate the correspondent and her newspaper. The White House had a perfect deal with Miller, he said. Chalabi is providing the Bush people with the information they need to support their political objectives with Iraq, and he is supplying the same material to Judy Miller. Chalabi tips her on something and then she goes to the White House, which has already heard the same thing from Chalabi, and she gets it corroborated by some insider she always describes as a 'senior administration official.' She also got the Pentagon to confirm things for her, which made sense, since they were working so closely with Chalabi. Too bad Judy didn't spend a little more time talking to those of us in the intelligence community who had information that contradicted almost everything Chalabi said. Long after the fact, Miller conceded in her interview with me that she was wrong about the aluminum tubes, but not that she had made a mistake. We worked our asses off to get that story, she said. No one leaked anything to us. I reported what I knew at the time. I wish I were omniscient. I wish I were God and had all the information I had needed. But I'm not God and I don't know. All I can rely on is what people tell me. That's all any investigative reporter can do. And if you find out that it's not true, you go back and write that. You just keep chipping away at an assertion until you find out what stands up. In that description of her methodology, Miller described a type of journalism that publishes works in progress, and she raises, inadvertently, important questions about the craft. If highly placed sources in governments and intelligence operations give her information, is she obligated to sit on it until she can corroborate? How does a reporter independently confirm data that even the CIA is struggling to nail down? And what if both the source and the governmental official who corroborates it are less than trustworthy? According to Todd Gitlin of Columbia University's school of journalism, a reporter in that position needs to ladle on an extra helping of doubt. Independent corroboration is very hard to come by. Since she's been around, if you're aware that such echo-chamber effects are plausible, what do you do? I think you write with much greater skepticism, at times. I think you don't write at all unless you can make a stronger case when you are aware that people are playing you and spinning you for their purposes. More than skepticism, though, Gitlin believes that news organizations have a responsibility to explain possible motivations for whoever is leaking the information to reporters. This can be done without identifying the source, he insists, and the Times, as well as a few other papers, is supposedly in the midst of adopting this protocol. Miller's centrifuge story, although
[pjnews] From the Military Ranks to the Streets
http://snipurl.com/6r4g From the Ranks to the Street By Jocelyn Y. Stewart, Los Angeles Times After the homecomings are over and the yellow ribbons packed away, many who once served in America's armed forces may end up sleeping on sidewalks. This is the often-unacknowledged postscript to military service. According to the federal government, veterans make up 9% of the U.S. population but 23% of the homeless population. Among homeless men, veterans make up 33%. Their ranks included veterans like Peter Starks and Calvin Bennett, who spent nearly 30 years on the streets of Los Angeles, homeless and addicted. Or Vannessa Turner of Boston, who returned injured from Iraq last summer, unable to find healthcare or a place to live. Or Ken Saks, who lost his feet because of complications caused by Agent Orange, then lost his low-rent Santa Barbara apartment in an ordeal that began when a neighbor complained about his wheelchair ramp. I'm 56 years old, Saks said. I don't want to die in the streets . This is what our [soldiers in Iraq] are coming home to? They're going to live a life like I have? God bless them. Studies indicate that some will live such a life. Male veterans are 1.3 times more likely to become homeless than non-veterans, women 3.6 times more likely. According to the Department of Veterans Affairs, the estimated number of homeless Vietnam veterans is more than twice the number of soldiers, 58,000, who died in battle during that war. In the past, data quantifying homelessness among veterans did not exist, said Phillip Mangano, who heads the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness. It's been precisely the lack of research that had us groping in the dark as far as what our response should be, he said. But in 1996, a comprehensive study on homelessness by the Census Bureau, co-sponsored by the VA and other federal agencies, offered a disturbing look at the men and women who once wore uniforms. Although 47% of homeless veterans served during the Vietnam era, the study found, soldiers from as far back as World War II and as recent as the Persian Gulf War also ended up homeless. It is impossible to know exactly how many U.S. veterans are on the streets, but experts estimate that about 300,000 of them are homeless on any given night and that about half a million experience homelessness at some point during the year. Now, as fighting continues in Iraq and Afghanistan (news - web sites), social service providers wonder what will happen to this generation of service men and women returning home from war. What are they going to do for these guys when they come home other than wave a flag and buy them a beer? asked Paul Camacho, a professor of social science at the University of Massachusetts Boston and a Vietnam veteran. Nobody can pinpoint a single cause for homelessness among veterans. As with non-veterans, the reasons vary: high housing costs, unemployment, substance abuse, poor education. Veterans may also contend with war injuries, post-traumatic stress syndrome and frayed family relations. The transformation from spit-polish soldier to urban nomad is as much a question of what does not happen in a person's life as of what does. The strict, orderly world of military life where every soldier is housed, fed and treated when ill does not necessarily prepare veterans for the randomness of life outside. Even the VA loan guarantee, which has helped generations of veterans purchase homes, is useless for those too troubled, or earning too little, to take advantage of it. Homelessness among veterans is currently the topic of joint talks between the departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs, said Peter Dougherty, the VA's director of homeless veterans programs. Traditionally, what happens to you after you leave has not been a concern of [the] service, he said. The Defense Department has created a Transition Assistance Program designed to help smooth the switch from military to civilian life but such efforts lag far behind the problem, experts say. Thousands of veterans struggle every day for survival in a fight that most are not prepared to wage. (read the rest of this article, including veterans' stories at http://snipurl.com/6r4g)
[pjnews] Meet the New Leader of Iraq
see also: http://snipurl.com/6rju Iraq War Woes Deepen Internal Pentagon Tensions http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2004-05/30jensen.cfm It's Not Just The Emperor Who Is Naked, But The Whole Empire -- http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=526008 Exiled Allawi was responsible for 45-minute WMD claim By Patrick Cockburn 29 May 2004 The choice of Iyad Allawi, closely linked to the CIA and formerly to MI6, as the Prime Minister of Iraq from 30 June will make it difficult for the US and Britain to persuade the rest of the world that he is capable of leading an independent government. He is the person through whom the controversial claim was channelled that Iraqi weapons of mass destruction could be operational in 45 minutes. Dr Allawi, aged 59, who trained as a neurologist, is a Shia Muslim who was a member of Saddam Hussein's Baath party in Iraq and in Britain, where he was a student leader with links to Iraqi intelligence. He later moved into opposition to the Iraqi leader and reportedly established a connection with the British security services. His change of allegiance led to Dr Allawi being targeted by Iraqi intelligence. In 1978 their agents armed with knives and axes badly wounded him when they attacked him as he lay asleep in bed in his house in Kingston-upon-Thames. Dr Allawi became a businessman with contacts in Saudi Arabia. He was charming, intelligent and had a gift for impressing Western intelligence agencies. After the 1991 Gulf War, the Iraq National Accord (INA) party, which he helped to found, became one of the building blocks for the Iraqi opposition in exile. The organisation attracted former Iraqi army officers and Baath party officials, particularly Sunni Arabs, fleeing Iraq. In the mid-1990s the INA claimed to have extensive contacts in the Iraqi officer corps. Dr Allawi began to move from the orbit of MI6 to the CIA. He persuaded his new masters that he was in a position to organise a military coup in Baghdad. With American, British and Saudi support, he opened a headquarters and a radio station in Amman in Jordan in 1996, declaring it was a historic moment for the Iraqi opposition. After a failed coup attempt that year there were mass arrests in Baghdad. Abdul-Karim al-Kabariti, the Jordanian prime minister of the day, said that INA's networks were all penetrated by the Iraqi security services. Dr Allawi and the INA returned to Iraq after the fall of Saddam and set up offices in Baghdad and in old Baath party offices throughout Iraq. There were few signs that they had any popular support. During an uprising in the town of Baiji, north of Baghdad, last year, crowds immediately set fire to the INA office. Dr Allawi was head of the security committee of the Iraqi Governing Council and was opposed to the dissolution of the army by Paul Bremer, the US viceroy in Iraq. He stepped down in protest as head of the committee during the US assault on Fallujah. But his reputation among Iraqis for working first with Saddam's intelligence agents and then with MI6 and the CIA may make it impossible for them to accept him as leader of an independent Iraq.
[pjnews] Unhappy Birthday, World Bank!
-- If you pass this comment along to others -- periodically but not repeatedly -- please explain that Commentaries are a premium sent to Sustainer Donors of Z/ZNet and that to learn more folks can consult ZNet at http://www.zmag.org Today's commentary: http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2004-05/15engler.cfm Unhappy Birthday, World Bank! By Mark Engler In 1994, when the IMF and World Bank were celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of their creation, very few people in this country could tell you anything about the twin fixtures of corporate globalization. Globalization itself was only beginning its life as a buzzword, almost always used to celebrate an uncontroversial march of progress into the 21st century. Ten years, several regional financial crises, and hundreds of worldwide protests later, the cheerful anonymity that shielded these institutions from criticism has long since disappeared. On April 24, protesters rallied outside the spring meetings of the IMF and World Bank to wish the financial bodies an unhappy sixtieth birthday. They highlighted the dramatic manner in which the development debate has changed in just a few years. And they denounced the nefarious IMF/World Bank policies that remain important elements of the Bush administration's imperious foreign policy. Much of the credit for the IMF/World Bank's deepening image crisis of past years belongs to the organizations of the 50 Years Is Enough Network. Ten years ago, a diverse coalition of environmental, faith-based, and development policy groups formed the network, which has expanded to include over 200 US organizations and 185 international partners in more than 65 countries. Their aim was to publicize grassroots criticisms of the harms inflicted by the IMF and the World Bank on the developing world, and to advance a series of sweeping reforms. In the fall of 1995, they gathered over a hundred people to demonstrate outside the institutions' meetings. By April 2000, in the wake of the Seattle protests, that number grew to 25,000. US mobilizations have been mirrored by raucous demonstrations overseas, many in the countries most affected by IMF/World Bank policy. The demands of the weekend's protest mirror the original platform promoted by the network ten years ago: democratic reforms to force greater openness and accountability upon bodies accustomed to directing foreign economies based on closed-door sessions in Washington, DC. An end to structural adjustment mandates which increase poverty and inequality in the developing world. Discontinuation of the many IMF/World Bank projects that failed to meet even rudimentary environmental standards. And debt cancellation for poor countries whose foreign debts prevent them from making basic investments in health and education. Today the legitimacy of those demands, or at least moderate versions of them, is acknowledged by virtually all fair-minded observers of development policy, including a growing number who have defected from the World Bank itself. Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate and former Chief Economist at the Bank, states that even those in the Washington establishment, now [agree] that rapid capital market liberalization without accompanying regulations--a core element of neoliberal globalization that contributed mightily to financial collapse in East Asia--is dangerous. Stiglitz further argues that demands such as the need for better ways of restructuring debts might have seemed controversial a short while ago. Today they are either in the mainstream or are gradually being accepted. By 1997 Bank President James Wolfensohn was compelled to admit to critics that Adjustment has been a much slower, more difficult and more painful process than the Bank recognized at the outset. A few years later, structural adjustment had become a taboo phrase, eliminated altogether from IMF/World Bank rhetoric. Other changes go beyond rhetoric. In 2000, the Congress passed a measure requiring US opposition to any IMF/World Bank loan mandating user fees or service charges on poor people for primary education or primary healthcare. The institutions have since abandoned such fees. In past months Argentina, a star pupil of the IMF which saw its economy implode in late 2001, has bucked the Fund's demands to cut public spending to benefit private creditors. Bank officers and activists alike recognize that this successful act of defiance could make Argentina an influential role model for other countries seeking ways to break the neoliberal stranglehold on their economies. Social movement pressure, along with its own failure to deliver on promises of economic growth, is spelling out a slow but steady decline for the neoliberal paradigm that reigned over mainstream development thinking for over two decades. Nevertheless, many US officials are doggedly trying to hold on to the Washington Consensus. The Bush administration's America First nationalism has created rifts between the US and many
[pjnews] Lawyers Ascribed Broad Power to Bush on Torture
see also: http://snipurl.com/71ly Prisoners sue Abu Ghraib security firms http://snipurl.com/71lt Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the senior U.S. military officer in Iraq, borrowed heavily from a list of high-pressure interrogation tactics used at the U.S. detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and approved letting senior officials at a Baghdad jail use military dogs, temperature extremes, reversed sleep patterns, sensory deprivation, and diets of bread and water on detainees whenever they wished, according to newly obtained documents... http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A26401-2004Jun8.html Aide says President set guidelines for interrogations, not specific techniques -- http://snipurl.com/71n5 Lawyers Ascribed Broad Power to Bush on Torture By David G. Savage and Richard B. Schmitt Times Staff Writers June 10, 2004 WASHINGTON On the eve of the war in Iraq, Bush administration lawyers spelled out a strikingly broad view of the president's power that freed the commander in chief and U.S. military from the federal law and international treaties that barred the use of torture. In past wars, presidents have claimed special powers. During the Civil War, President Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and allowed accused traitors to be tried before military courts. Shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an order authorizing the military to intern thousands of Japanese Americans. In those instances, however, the president acted with the approval of Congress. Rarely, if ever, have the president's advisors claimed an authority to ignore the law as written by Congress. The legal memo, written last year for the Defense Department and disclosed this week, did not speak for President Bush, but it claimed an extraordinary power for him. It said that as the commander in chief, he had a constitutionally superior position to Congress and an inherent authority to prosecute the war, even if it meant defying the will of Congress. Congress adopted an anti-torture law in 1994 that barred Americans abroad acting under U.S. authority from inflicting severe physical or mental pain. But the 56-page memo on Detainee Interrogation in the Global War on Terrorism maintains that the president and his military commander cannot be restrained in this way. Congress lacks authority to set the terms and conditions under which the president may exercise his authority as commander in chief to control the conduct of operations during a war, the memo asserts. Congress may no more regulate the president's ability to detain and interrogate enemy combatants than it may regulate his ability to direct troop movements on the battlefield. Accordingly, we would construe [the law] to avoid this difficulty and conclude that it does not apply to the president's detention and interrogation of enemy combatants. The memo was dated March 6, 2003, two weeks before the start of the war in Iraq. In earlier memos, administration lawyers said the president could designate even American citizens arrested within the United States as enemy combatants, and thus theoretically subject them to torture. But according to several mainstream legal scholars, this turns the Constitution on its head. The 18th century document says Congress makes the laws, and the president has the duty to carry them out. He shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed, the Constitution says of the president. Moreover, the Constitution grants Congress specific powers to set the rules in war and peace, including for captives. Congress shall have the power to declare war and make rules concerning captures on land and water to define offenses against the law of nations [and] to make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces. A broad range of legal experts, including specialists in military law, say they were taken aback by this bald assertion of presidential supremacy. It is an extraordinary claim. It is as broad an assertion of presidential authority as I have ever seen, said Michael Glennon, a war law expert at Tufts University. This is a claim of unlimited executive power. There is no reason to read the commander-in-chief power as trumping the clear power of Congress. University of Texas law professor Douglas Laycock added, It can't be right. It is just wrong to say the president can do whatever he wants, even if it is against the law. Veteran military lawyers also said they were surprised and dismayed by the memo. It's an argument I have never seen made before that the commander in chief's war-fighting powers trump the restrictions in the Geneva Convention, said Grant Lattin, a former judge advocate for the Marines who practices military law in Virginia. I am having a difficult time even following the logic, that somehow because this is a new type of war that these military commanders' authority has somehow grown larger than the restrictions that we
[pjnews] NYT on the Roots of Abu Ghraib
additional info: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A26814-2004Jun9.html The head of the interrogation center at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq told an Army investigator in February that he understood some of the information being collected from prisoners there had been requested by White House staff, according to an account of his statement obtained by The Washington Post... - The New York Times 9 June 2004 Editorial: The Roots of Abu Ghraib In response to the outrages at Abu Ghraib, the Bush administration has repeatedly assured Americans that the president and his top officials did not say or do anything that could possibly be seen as approving the abuse or outright torture of prisoners. But disturbing disclosures keep coming. This week it's a legal argument by government lawyers who said the president was not bound by laws or treaties prohibiting torture. Each new revelation makes it more clear that the inhumanity at Abu Ghraib grew out of a morally dubious culture of legal expediency and a disregard for normal behavior fostered at the top of this administration. It is part of the price the nation must pay for President Bush's decision to take the extraordinary mandate to fight terrorism that he was granted by a grieving nation after 9/11 and apply it without justification to Iraq. Since the Abu Ghraib scandal broke into public view, the administration has contended that a few sadistic guards acted on their own to commit the crimes we've all seen in pictures and videos. At times, the White House has denied that any senior official was aware of the situation, as it did with Red Cross reports documenting a pattern of prisoner abuse in Iraq. In response to a rising pile of documents proving otherwise, the administration has mounted a Wizard of Oz defense, urging Americans not to pay attention to inconvenient evidence. This week, The Wall Street Journal broke the story of a classified legal brief prepared for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in March 2003 after Guantánamo Bay interrogators complained that they were not getting enough information from terror suspects. The brief cynically suggested that because the president is protecting national security, any ban on torture, even an American law, could not be applied to interrogation undertaken pursuant to his commander-in-chief authority. Neil A. Lewis and Eric Schmitt reported yesterday in The Times that the document had grown out of a January 2002 Justice Department memo explaining why the Geneva Conventions and American laws against torture did not apply to suspected terrorists. In the wake of that memo, the White House general counsel advised Mr. Bush that Al Qaeda and the Taliban should be considered outside the Geneva Conventions. But yesterday, Attorney General John Ashcroft assured the Senate Judiciary Committee that Mr. Bush had not ordered torture. These explanations might be more comforting if the administration's definition of what's legal was not so slippery, and if the Pentagon, the Justice Department and the White House were willing to release documents to back up their explanation. Mr. Rumsfeld is still withholding from the Senate his orders on interrogation techniques, among other things. The Pentagon has said that Mr. Rumsfeld's famous declaration that the Geneva Conventions did not apply in Afghanistan was not a sanction of illegal interrogations, and that everyone knew different rules applied in Iraq. But Mr. Rumsfeld, his top deputies and the highest-ranking generals could not explain to the Senate what the rules were, or even who was in charge of the prisons in Iraq. We do not know how high up in the chain of command the specific sanction for abusing prisoners was given, and we may never know, because the Army is investigating itself and the Pentagon is stonewalling the Senate Armed Services Committee. It may yet be necessary for Congress to form an investigative panel with subpoena powers to find the answers. What we have seen, topped by that legalistic treatise on torture, shows clearly that Mr. Bush set the tone for this dreadful situation by pasting a false war on terrorism label on the invasion of Iraq.
[pjnews] The torturers among us
http://snipurl.com/71nl The torturers among us By Robert Kuttner | June 9, 2004 Boston Globe WHAT HAVE we learned so far about officially sponsored torture by the US government? First, it is unambiguously clear that the torture of prisoners in Afghanistan, at Guantanamo, and at Abu Ghraib was official policy. Lawyers for the Pentagon and the White House, reporting directly to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and President Bush, wrote contorted legal briefs trying to define a category of person immune to both due process of law and the Third Geneva Convention. As recently disclosed Pentagon memos divulge, one explicit purpose was to justify torture as a technique of interrogation. Second, the grotesque abuses at Abu Ghraib were therefore not the work of a few renegade freaks. Official policy was that coercion should be used to pry information out of prisoners. The torture techniques were at first wielded by military and CIA interrogation specialists and limited to high value captives. But as torture moved down the chain of command, it further degenerated from a twisted and illegal means of interrogation into a sadistic sport for ordinary soldiers to apply to ordinary prisoners. This deterioration is predictable. It has happened under every totalitarian regime, from Stalin to Hitler to Torquemada. When torture is official policy, ordinary soldiers and police let their frustrations and imaginations run wild. This is why civilized nations ban torture categorically. Third, as details of the freestyle tortures at Abu Ghraib reached Rumsfeld and other top officials, they treated it mainly as a potential public relations problem, not as a sign that the entire policy was flawed and illegal. Indeed, even as the then-secret report by General Taguba on Abu Ghraib was being discussed internally, the government's lawyers continued to contend that the Third Geneva Convention on prisoners of war did not apply to alleged terrorists and that even US citizens, if accused of certain crimes, could be treated outside the law. For nearly three years, the Bush administration has resorted to the most preposterous fictions to define either locales or categories of people to whom the law does not apply. If you connect the dots, the torture at Abu Ghraib is part of a larger slide toward tyranny as the Bush administration tries to exempt itself from the rule of law. White House lawyers have contended in court briefs that the US base at Guantanamo, which the United States governs in perpetuity under a treaty, is actually under Cuban sovereignty. They contend that the president's powers as commander in chief override both international and domestic laws and even constitutional due process protections for US citizens as well as aliens accused of terrorism. These legal claims are complete fabrications. The Third Geneva Convention is airtight. Its language allows for no special cases where torture is permitted and no gradations of acceptable forms of torture. Prisoners are not required to give their captors information beyond name, rank, and serial number, period. Captors are not allowed to resort to coercion, either physical or psychological. There is no category of alleged crime beyond the rule of law. Moreover, the legal protections of the US Constitution do not speak of citizens; they speak of persons. And even if there were some special justification for torturing alleged terrorists -- and there is none -- most prisoners in Iraq are not illegal combatants but POWs from a defeated army, exactly those whom the Geneva Convention was intended to protect. Indeed, the United States demands that any American captive abroad be treated with scrupulous respect. (This is the whole point of a universal agreement to ban torture -- it covers everyone.) US officials darkly mention war crimes prosecutions whenever there are hints that American captives have been abused. Yet the US government, in every official forum, tries to negotiate special exemptions so that US personnel abroad are exempt from any such prosecutions. By definition, we are the good guys; so by definition, Americans cannot be guilty of war crimes. After Abu Ghraib, even America's allies are no longer willing to grant Washington special exemptions. Major human rights groups have scheduled a national conference for June 21 on the question of how international human rights standards must be applied to the United States. This is overdue, but how shameful that America has fallen to a state where we need international constraints to protect our own liberties and rule of law. It is appalling that a few grunts are taking the fall for torture that was official government policy. Donald Rumsfeld should not just be impeached. He should be tried as a war criminal. As for Bush, he can be dispatched by the electorate while we are still a democracy. Robert Kuttner is co-editor of The American Prospect. His column appears regularly in the Globe.
[pjnews] The Bush orthodoxy is in shreds
see also: http://snipurl.com/71gw Behind the Scenes, US Tightens Grip on Iraq's Media, Future http://snipurl.com/71to A group of 26 former senior diplomats and military officials, several appointed to key positions by Republican Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, plans to issue a joint statement this week arguing that President George W. Bush has damaged America's national security and should be defeated in November. --- http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1225600,00.html The Bush orthodoxy is in shreds: A series of investigations has shattered neocon self-belief Sidney Blumenthal Thursday May 27, 2004 The Guardian At a conservative thinktank in downtown Washington, and across the Potomac at the Pentagon, FBI agents have begun paying quiet calls on prominent neoconservatives, who are being interviewed in an investigation of potential espionage, according to intelligence sources. Who gave Ahmed Chalabi classified information about the plans of the US government and military? The Iraqi neocon favourite, tipped to lead his liberated country post-invasion, has been identified by the CIA and Defence Intelligence Agency as an Iranian double-agent, passing secrets to that citadel of the axis of evil for decades. All the while the neocons cosseted, promoted and arranged for more than $30m in Pentagon payments to the George Washington manque of Iraq. In return, he fed them a steady diet of disinformation and in the run-up to the war sent various exiles to nine nations' intelligence agencies to spread falsehoods about weapons of mass destruction. If the administration had wanted other material to provide a rationale for invasion, no doubt that would have been fabricated. Either Chalabi perpetrated the greatest con since the Trojan horse, or he was the agent of influence for the most successful intelligence operation conducted by Iran, or both. The CIA and other US agencies had long ago decided that Chalabi was a charlatan, so their dismissive and correct analysis of his lies prompted their suppression by the Bush White House. In place of the normal channels of intelligence vetting, a jerry-rigged system was hastily constructed, running from the office of the vice president to the newly created Office of Special Plans inside the Pentagon, staffed by fervent neocons. CIA director George Tenet, possessed with the survival instinct of the inveterate staffer, ceased protecting the sanctity of his agency and cast in his lot. Secretary of state Colin Powell, resistant internally but overcome, decided to become the most ardent champion, unveiling a series of neatly manufactured lies before the UN. Last week, Powell declared it turned out that the sourcing was inaccurate and wrong and, in some cases, deliberately misleading. And for that I'm disappointed, and I regret it. But who had deliberately misled him? He did not say. Now the FBI is investigating espionage, fraud and, by implication, treason. A former staff member of the Office of Special Plans and a currently serving defence official, two of those said to be questioned by the FBI, are considered witnesses, at least for now. Higher figures are under suspicion. Were they witting or unwitting? If those who are being questioned turn out to be misleading, they can be charged ultimately with perjury and obstruction of justice. For them, the Watergate principle applies: it's not the crime, it's the cover-up. The espionage investigation into the neocons' relationship with Chalabi is only one of the proliferating inquiries engulfing the Bush administration. In his speech to the Army War College on May 24, Bush blamed the Abu Ghraib torture scandal on a few American troops. In other words, there was no chain of command. But the orders to use the abusive techniques came from the secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld. The trials and investigations surrounding Abu Ghraib beg the question of whether it was an extension of the far-flung gulag operating outside the Geneva conventions that has been built after September 11. The fallout from the Chalabi affair has also implicated the nation's newspaper of record, the New York Times, which published yesterday an apology for running numerous stories containing disinformation that emanated from Chalabi and those in the Bush administration funnelling his fabrications. The Washington Post, which published editorials and several columnists trumpeting Chalabi's talking points, has yet to acknowledge the extent to which it was deceived. Washington, just weeks ago in the grip of neoconservative orthodoxy, absolute belief in Bush's inevitability and righteousness, is in the throes of being ripped apart by investigations. Things fall apart: the military, loyal and lumbering, betrayed and embittered; the general in the field, General Sanchez, disgraced and cashiered; the intelligence agencies abused and angry, their retired operatives plying their craft with the press corps, seeping dangerous
[pjnews] Hugo Chavez Ready for Recall Vote
see also: http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0613-04.htm Chavez Says Bush is His Real Adversary in August 15 Recall Referendum --- http://snipurl.com/71f6 Ready for a Recall Vote By Hugo Chavez Washington Post Wednesday 26 May 2004 Caracas, Venezuela - For the first 24 hours of the coup d'etat that briefly overthrew my government on April 11, 2002, I expected to be executed at any moment. The coup leaders told Venezuela and the world that I hadn't been overthrown but rather had resigned. I expected that my captors would soon shoot me in the head and call it a suicide. Instead, something extraordinary happened. The truth about the coup got out, and millions of Venezuelans took to the streets. Their protests emboldened the pro-democracy forces in the military to put down the brief dictatorship, led by Venezuelan business leader Pedro Carmona. The truth saved my life, and with it Venezuela's democracy. This near-death experience changed me. I wish I could say it changed my country. The political divisions in Venezuela didn't start with my election in 1998. My country has been socially and economically divided throughout its history. Venezuela is one of the largest oil exporting countries in the world - the fourth-largest supplier to the United States - and yet the majority of Venezuelans remain mired in poverty. What has enraged my opponents, most of whom are from the upper classes, is not Venezuela's persistent misery and inequality but rather my efforts to dedicate a portion of our oil wealth to improving the lives of the poor. In the past six years we have doubled spending on health care and tripled the education budget. Infant mortality has fallen; life expectancy and literacy have increased. Having failed to force me from office through the 2002 coup, my opponents shut down the government oil company last year. Now they are trying to collect enough signatures to force a recall referendum on my presidency. Venezuela's constitution - redrafted and approved by a majority of voters in 1999 - is the only constitution in the Western Hemisphere that allows for a president to be recalled. Venezuela's National Electoral Council - a body as independent as the Federal Election Commission in the United States - found that more than 375,000 recall petition signatures were faked and that an additional 800,000 had similar handwriting. Having been elected president twice by large majorities in less than six years, I find it more than a little ironic to be accused of behaving undemocratically by many of the same people who were involved in the illegal overthrow of my government. The National Electoral Council has invited representatives of the Organization of American States and the Carter Center to observe a signature verification process that will be conducted during the last four days of this month. That process will determine whether the opposition has gathered enough valid signatures to trigger a recall election, which would be held this August. To be frank, I hope that my opponents have gathered enough signatures to trigger a referendum, because I relish the opportunity to once again win the people's mandate. But it is not up to me. To underscore my commitment to the rule of law, my supporters and I have publicly and repeatedly pledged to abide by the results of that transparent process, whatever they may be. My political opponents have not made a similar commitment; some have even said they will accept only a ruling in favor of a recall vote. The Bush administration was alone in the world when it endorsed the overthrow of my government in 2002. It is my hope that this time the Bush administration will respect our republican democracy. We are counting on the international community - and all Venezuelans - to make a clear and firm commitment to respect and support the outcome of the signature verification process, no matter the result.
[pjnews] Dismay at Attempt to Find Legal Justification for Torture
see also: http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0616-01.htm Bluntly contradicting the Bush administration, the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks reported Wednesday there was ``no credible evidence'' that Saddam Hussein helped al-Qaida target the United States... http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20040614-062713-8304r Waxman presses Halliburton probe Halliburton's alleged waste and fraud in Iraq including abandoning new $85,000 trucks if they got a flat tire and paying a subcontractor $45 per case of soda http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3806713.stm General Karpinski: Iraq Abuse 'Ordered From the Top' He said they are like dogs and if you allow them to believe at any point that they are more than a dog then you've lost control of them http://snipurl.com/753n The top U.S. commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, issued a classified order last November directing military guards to hide a prisoner, later dubbed Triple X by soldiers, from Red Cross inspectors and keep his name off official rosters. The disclosure, by military sources, is the first indication that Sanchez was directly involved in efforts to hide prisoners from the Red Cross, a practice that was sharply criticized by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba in a report describing abuses of detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad... -- Financial Times 10 June 2004 Dismay at Attempt to Find Legal Justification for Torture By Edward Alden Harold Hongju Koh, deanof Yale University's law school and a former US assistant secretary of state, went to Geneva in 2000 to present the first US report on its compliance with the UN 1994 Convention against Torture. He says he told the global gathering the US was unalterably committed to a world without torture. This week's revelations that Bush administration lawyers had sought to find legal justifications for torturing terrorist detainees have left him dumbfounded. They are blatantly wrong, he says. It's just erroneous legal analysis. The notion that the president has the constitutional power to permit torture is like saying he has the constitutional power to commit genocide. Mr Koh is one of the small community of top international lawyers who say they are more shocked than anyone at what their profession has wrought. Scott Horton, past chairman of the international human rights committee of the New York City bar association, says the government lawyers involved in preparing the documents could and should face professional sanctions. There are serious ethical shortcomings here, he says. Lawyers who are employed by the US government have a responsibility to uphold and enforce the laws of the United States, which include domestic and international legal prohibitions on torture. To make an argument that the president's wartime powers give him the right to avoid these statutes is preposterous. Elizabeth Rindskopf-Parker, dean of the McGeorge school of law and former general counsel to both the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency in Republican administrations, says: Several decades of work to insure that our intelligence and national security agencies as well as those of other nations operate under the rule of law have been severely undermined for benefits that are at best speculative. She says the memos appear better designed to defending criminals than to guiding the policies of the world's most powerful nation. Government lawyers have traditionally kept their clients - the president and top officials - out of trouble. Critics say the Bush administration has turned that on its head. It's the lawyers pushing the envelope, trying to eliminate restrictions rather than asserting them, says Tom Malinowski, a former lawyer for the National Security Council who works for Human Rights Watch. Several current and former administration lawyers, including Jack Goldsmith, the head of the Justice Department's office of legal counsel and a former Pentagon special counsel, and John Yoo, a former deputy in the division, argued before entering the administration that international law could not constrain executive action. Mr Yoo, now a professor at Berkeley, dismisses criticisms about the ethics of those who drew up the document as groundless and without merit. It's clear what the memo does. It explains what the law is. It tries to figure out what lines are drawn by different treaties and statutes, noting that Congress set a very high definition on what torture is. Mr Yoo denies the report was intended to free the hands of policymakers. It's an abstract analysis of the meaning of a treaty and a statute. Critics are confusing the difference between law and moral choice. Mr Goldsmith did not return a phone call. The two main documents at issue are a March 2003 Pentagon working group report on detainee interrogations and an August 2002 Justice Department memo prepared for the CIA. Both address the question of how far US interrogators can legally
[pjnews] 'I Killed Innocent People for Our Government'
see also: http://snipurl.com/752c GIs Marching Away From Re-enlistment: War may have some Fort Carson troops leaving the ranks - http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/051804A.shtml Atrocities in Iraq: 'I Killed Innocent People for Our Government' By Paul Rockwell Sacramento Bee Sunday 16 May 2004 We forget what war is about, what it does to those who wage it and those who suffer from it. Those who hate war the most, I have often found, are veterans who know it. - Chris Hedges, New York Times reporter and author of War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning For nearly 12 years, Staff Sgt. Jimmy Massey was a hard-core, some say gung-ho, Marine. For three years he trained fellow Marines in one of the most grueling indoctrination rituals in military life - Marine boot camp. The Iraq war changed Massey. The brutality, the sheer carnage of the U.S. invasion, touched his conscience and transformed him forever. He was honorably discharged with full severance last Dec. 31 and is now back in his hometown, Waynsville, N.C. When I talked with Massey last week, he expressed his remorse at the civilian loss of life in incidents in which he himself was involved. Q: You spent 12 years in the Marines. When were you sent to Iraq? A: I went to Kuwait around Jan. 17. I was in Iraq from the get-go. And I was involved in the initial invasion. Q: What does the public need to know about your experiences as a Marine? A: The cause of the Iraqi revolt against the American occupation. What they need to know is we killed a lot of innocent people. I think at first the Iraqis had the understanding that casualties are a part of war. But over the course of time, the occupation hurt the Iraqis. And I didn't see any humanitarian support. Q: What experiences turned you against the war and made you leave the Marines? A: I was in charge of a platoon that consists of machine gunners and missile men. Our job was to go into certain areas of the towns and secure the roadways. There was this one particular incident - and there's many more - the one that really pushed me over the edge. It involved a car with Iraqi civilians. From all the intelligence reports we were getting, the cars were loaded down with suicide bombs or material. That's the rhetoric we received from intelligence. They came upon our checkpoint. We fired some warning shots. They didn't slow down. So we lit them up. Q: Lit up? You mean you fired machine guns? A: Right. Every car that we lit up we were expecting ammunition to go off. But we never heard any. Well, this particular vehicle we didn't destroy completely, and one gentleman looked up at me and said: Why did you kill my brother? We didn't do anything wrong. That hit me like a ton of bricks. Q: He spoke English? A: Oh, yeah. Q: Baghdad was being bombed. The civilians were trying to get out, right? A: Yes. They received pamphlets, propaganda we dropped on them. It said, Just throw up your hands, lay down weapons. That's what they were doing, but we were still lighting them up. They weren't in uniform. We never found any weapons. Q: You got to see the bodies and casualties? A: Yeah, firsthand. I helped throw them in a ditch. Q: Over what period did all this take place? A: During the invasion of Baghdad. 'We Lit Him up Pretty Good' Q: How many times were you involved in checkpoint light-ups? A: Five times. There was [the city of] Rekha. The gentleman was driving a stolen work utility van. He didn't stop. With us being trigger happy, we didn't really give this guy much of a chance. We lit him up pretty good. Then we inspected the back of the van. We found nothing. No explosives. Q: The reports said the cars were loaded with explosives. In all the incidents did you find that to be the case? A: Never. Not once. There were no secondary explosions. As a matter of fact, we lit up a rally after we heard a stray gunshot. Q: A demonstration? Where? A: On the outskirts of Baghdad. Near a military compound. There were demonstrators at the end of the street. They were young and they had no weapons. And when we rolled onto the scene, there was already a tank that was parked on the side of the road. If the Iraqis wanted to do something, they could have blown up the tank. But they didn't. They were only holding a demonstration. Down at the end of the road, we saw some RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades) lined up against the wall. That put us at ease because we thought: Wow, if they were going to blow us up, they would have done it. Q: Were the protest signs in English or Arabic? A: Both. Q: Who gave the order to wipe the demonstrators out? A: Higher command. We were told to be on the lookout for the civilians because a lot of the Fedayeen and the Republican Guards had tossed away uniforms and put on civilian clothes and were mounting terrorist attacks on American
[pjnews] Homebuyers checked against terrorist lists
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/5131685/site/newsweek/ The 'Patriot' Search Buying a home? Prepare to pay to have your name checked against a government list of suspected terrorists By Brian Braiker, Newsweek Buying a home can be stressful, expensive and bewildering. Essentially, humorist Dave Barry wrote in his 1988 book Homes and Other Black Holes, what you must do, in the Ritual Closing Ceremony, is go into a small room and write large checks to total strangers. According to tradition, anybody may ask you for a check, for any amount, and you may not refuse. He may have been joking, but the number of checks homebuyers are being asked to write has recently increased by one. With the passage of the USA Patriot Act of 2001, which required that financial institutions create anti-money-laundering compliance programs, anyone purchasing property must be checked against a list of names of known and suspected terrorists. The list has been around since before the September 11 attacks, but increasingly the ritual closing ceremony has involved writing yet another check to the title company that runs the homebuyers name against that list. Whats behind it? The Treasury Departments Office of Foreign Assets Control maintains the specifically designated nationals (SDN) list of people blocked from participating in any transaction or dealing in property or interests within the United States. These people have been identified to have committed, or to pose a significant risk of committing, acts of terrorism, according to White House Executive Order 13224, which was issued Sept. 24, 2001. Although the blocked-persons list has been around in some form for about a decade, under the order private individuals (be they jewelers, pawnbrokers or suburban families) buying or selling property are now considered financial institutions by the government. And the responsibility has fallen to the title companies to check all parties involved in a transaction against the list. The SDN list has been around for years. Obviously, since 9/11 the use of charities and banks and different organizations for terrorists to move money have brought it more to light in recent days, says Molly Millerwise, a Treasury spokesperson, explaining why homebuyers in the heartland are considered financial institutions under the jurisdiction of the Office of Foreign Asset Control. Terrorists, she says, use property to launder money. But some lawyers and civil libertarians question that assertion. Its not a very liquid investment, says Ann von Eigen of the American Land Title Association. You would have to, if you planned on laundering money through real estate, make sure your appreciation is better than the cost of the transaction. Others charge that the search is a redundancy. Your money is already going to have been checked. Youre going to have had the background checks at the banks, says Charlie Mitchell of the ACLU. Its sort of emblematic of a lot of the Patriot Act. Some of the intentions are good, but theres just a casting too wide a net to be particularly effective and theres a lot of unintended consequences when you do that. He complained that by compelling title companies to check out each party of a transaction, the government is passing the cost of its war on terror on to the consumer, even providing some companies with an opportunity to make a little more money off their clients. Because the SDN list is a public document, many title companies charge nothing for the search, according to ALTAs von Eigen. But increasingly, firms like California-based First American Corp. are charging the buyer up to $30 for each person involved in the transaction. (So, for example, if one couple buys a condo from another couple, the buyers are charged a total of $120 for the searches, which can be done for free at the ALTA Web site.) Since performing the search is something that can be conducted for free in mere seconds on the Internet, we're concerned that title companies may be padding their bills with excessive charges and profiteering from fears regarding homeland security, says Jordana Beebe at the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse. But Larry Moringiello of Heights Abstract in Brooklyn, N.Y., says he charges $25 a search because of the paperwork, time and man-hours required of the searches his office does on the ALTA Web page throughout the week. New Jersey-based Charles Jones, LLC, charges $3 a name for each of the 100,000 Patriot Name Searches they conduct with their own software every week, according to Patrick Roe, director of marketing. But does it work? That depends on the search software. Typing Osama bin Laden into the ALTA search engine yields zero matches, but thats because the U.S. government spells his name Usama bin Laden (which gets two hits). Roe says that even though Charles Jones uses a more sophisticated search tool than ALTA (a tool that registers hits for alternative and approximate spellings), less than 1
[pjnews] Travesty of Justice
see also: http://www.oilempire.us/understanding.html Terrorist Attack Analogy -- http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/15/opinion/15KRUG.html Travesty of Justice By PAUL KRUGMAN No question: John Ashcroft is the worst attorney general in history. For this column, let's just focus on Mr. Ashcroft's role in the fight against terror. Before 9/11 he was aggressively uninterested in the terrorist threat. He didn't even mention counterterrorism in a May 2001 memo outlining strategic priorities for the Justice Department. When the 9/11 commission asked him why, he responded by blaming the Clinton administration, with a personal attack on one of the commission members thrown in for good measure. We can't tell directly whether Mr. Ashcroft's post-9/11 policies are protecting the United States from terrorist attacks. But a number of pieces of evidence suggest otherwise. First, there's the absence of any major successful prosecutions. The one set of convictions that seemed fairly significant that of the Detroit 3 appears to be collapsing over accusations of prosecutorial misconduct. (The lead prosecutor has filed a whistle-blower suit against Mr. Ashcroft, accusing him of botching the case. The Justice Department, in turn, has opened investigations against the prosecutor. Payback? I report; you decide.) Then there is the lack of any major captures. Somewhere, the anthrax terrorist is laughing. But the Justice Department, you'll be happy to know, is trying to determine whether it can file bioterrorism charges against a Buffalo art professor whose work includes harmless bacteria in petri dishes. Perhaps most telling is the way Mr. Ashcroft responds to criticism of his performance. His first move is always to withhold the evidence. Then he tries to change the subject by making a dramatic announcement of a terrorist threat. For an example of how Mr. Ashcroft shuts down public examination, consider the case of Sibel Edmonds, a former F.B.I. translator who says that the agency's language division is riddled with incompetence and corruption, and that the bureau missed critical terrorist warnings. In 2002 she gave closed-door Congressional testimony; Senator Charles Grassley described her as very credible . . . because people within the F.B.I. have corroborated a lot of her story. But the Justice Department has invoked the rarely used state secrets privilege to prevent Ms. Edmonds from providing evidence. And last month the department retroactively classified two-year-old testimony by F.B.I. officials, which was presumably what Mr. Grassley referred to. For an example of changing the subject, consider the origins of the Jose Padilla case. There was no publicity when Mr. Padilla was arrested in May 2002. But on June 6, 2002, Coleen Rowley gave devastating Congressional testimony about failures at the F.B.I. (which reports to Mr. Ashcroft) before 9/11. Four days later, Mr. Ashcroft held a dramatic press conference and announced that Mr. Padilla was involved in a terrifying plot. Instead of featuring Ms. Rowley, news magazine covers ended up featuring the dirty bomber who Mr. Ashcroft said was plotting to kill thousands with deadly radiation. Since then Mr. Padilla has been held as an enemy combatant with no legal rights. But Newsweek reports that administration officials now concede that the principal claim they have been making about Padilla ever since his detention that he was dispatched to the United States for the specific purpose of setting off a radiological `dirty bomb' has turned out to be wrong and most likely can never be used in court. But most important is the memo. Last week Mr. Ashcroft, apparently in contempt of Congress, refused to release a memo on torture his department prepared for the White House almost two years ago. Fortunately, his stonewalling didn't work: The Washington Post has acquired a copy of the memo and put it on its Web site. Much of the memo is concerned with defining torture down: if the pain inflicted on a prisoner is less than the pain that accompanies serious physical injury, such as organ failure, it's not torture. Anyway, the memo declares that the federal law against torture doesn't apply to interrogations of enemy combatants pursuant to [the president's] commander-in-chief authority. In other words, the president is above the law. The memo came out late Sunday. Mr. Ashcroft called a press conference yesterday to announce an indictment against a man accused of plotting to blow up a shopping mall in Ohio. The timing was, I'm sure, purely coincidental.
[pjnews] Republican Convention 2004 schedule
REPUBLICAN NATIONAL COMMITTEE CONVENTION SCHEDULE Here is the convention opening night schedule. 6:00 PM Opening Prayer led by the Reverend Jerry Falwell 6:30 PM Pledge of Allegiance 6:35 PM Burning of Bill of Rights (excluding 2nd amendment) 6:45 PM Salute to the Coalition of the Willing 6:46 PM Seminar #1: Getting your kid a military deferment 7:35 PM Serve Freedom Fries 7:40 PM EPA Address #1: Mercury, it's what's for dinner. 8:00 PM Vote on which country to invade next 8:10 PM Call EMTs to revive Rush Limbaugh 8:15 PM John Ashcroft Lecture: The Homos are after your children 8:30 PM Round table discussion on reproductive rights (MEN only) 8:50 PM Seminar #2: Corporations: The government of the future 9:00 PM Condi Rice sings Can't Help Lovin' That Man 9:10 PM EPA Address #2: Trees: The real cause of forest fires 9:30 PM Break for secret meetings 10:00 PM Second prayer led by Cal Thomas 10:15 PM Lecture by Karl Rove: Doublespeak made easy 10:30 PM Rumsfeld demonstration of how to squint and talk macho 10:35 PM Bush demonstration of trademark deer in headlights stare. 10:40 PM John Ashcroft demonstrates new mandatory Kevlar chastity belt 10:45 PM Clarence Thomas reads list of Black Republicans 10:46 PM Seminar #3: Education: a drain on our nation's economy. 11:10 PM Hillary Clinton Piñata 11:20 PM Second Lecture by John Ashcroft: Evolutionists: The dangerous new cult 11:30 PM Call EMTs to revive Rush Limbaugh again. 11:35 PM Blame Clinton 11:40 PM Laura serves milk and cookies 11:50 PM Closing Prayer led by Jesus Himself 12:00 PM Nomination of George W. Bush as Holy Supreme Planetary Overlord
[pjnews] 9/11 Panel Asks Cheney for Iraq / Al Qaeda Evidence
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0619-04.htm Saddam/Al Qaeda Link: Bush Team Tries to Brazen It Out ''The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and al-Qaeda'', U.S. President George W Bush told reporters Thursday, is ''because there was a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda''. This is what logicians call a tautology -- a ''useless repetition'' is how the dictionary defines it -- but it is also an indication of how the Bush administration is defending itself against a growing number of scandals and deceptions in which it is enmeshed. [...] Bush insisted ''this administration never said that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated between Saddam and al-Qaeda. We did say there were numerous contacts between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.' That rendition, of course, raises a host of questions, among them definitional -- does the existence of 'numerous contacts' amount to a 'relationship,' particularly when one side fails to respond to the other? ' When I was 15 and kept asking Mary Beth for a date, and she would always politely refuse, I think I would have been hard put to describe that as a 'relationship' as much as I wanted to brag about one,' suggested one congressional aide this week. -- http://snipurl.com/77dx June 19, 2004 Leaders of 9/11 Panel Ask Cheney for Reports By PHILIP SHENON and RICHARD W. STEVENSON WASHINGTON, June 18 The leaders of the Sept. 11 commission called on Vice President Dick Cheney on Friday to turn over any intelligence reports that would support the White House's insistence that there was a close relationship between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. The commission's chairman, Thomas H. Kean, and its vice chairman, Lee H. Hamilton, said they wanted to see any additional information in the administration's possession after Mr. Cheney, in a television interview on Thursday, was asked whether he knew things about Iraq's links to terrorists that the commission did not know. Probably, Mr. Cheney replied. Mr. Kean and Mr. Hamilton said that, in particular, they wanted any information available to back Mr. Cheney's suggestion that one of the hijackers might have met in Prague in April 2001 with an Iraqi intelligence agent, a meeting that the panel's staff believes did not take place. Mr. Cheney said in an interview with CNBC on Thursday that the administration had never been able to prove the meeting took place but was not able to disprove it either. We just don't know, Mr. Cheney said. Mr. Kean and Mr. Hamilton made the requests in separate interviews with The New York Times as the White House continued to question the findings of a staff report the commission released on Wednesday and to take exception to the way the report was characterized in news accounts. The report found that there did not appear to have been a collaborative relationship between Iraq and the terrorist network. That finding appeared to undermine one of the main justifications cited by Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney for invading Iraq and toppling Mr. Hussein. Mr. Cheney has also continued to cite a disputed report that Mohamed Atta, a ringleader of the hijacking plot, met in April, 2001, in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence officer, raising the possibility of a direct tie between Iraq and the Sept. 11 attacks, a tie that the commission's staff report found no evidence to support. Mr. Cheney also said in the television interview that after Osama bin Laden had requested terror training from Iraq, the Iraqi intelligence service responded; it deployed a bomb-making expert, a brigadier general. The commission's report concluded that Mr. bin Laden's requests went unanswered. It sounds like the White House has evidence that we didn't have, Mr. Hamilton said in an phone interview. I would like to see the evidence that Mr. Cheney is talking about. Mr. Kean, a former Republican governor of New Jersey, said in a phone interview that he was surprised by Mr. Cheney's comments and would be very disappointed if the White House had not shared intelligence information about Al Qaeda with the commission, especially about the purported meeting in Prague. Mr. Cheney's spokesman, Kevin Kellems, declined to comment on the request by Mr. Kean and Mr. Hamilton. Trent D. Duffy, a spokesman for the White House, said, This White House and this administration have cooperated fully with the commission and have provided unprecedented access to some of the most classified information, including the Presidential Daily Brief. The president wants the commission to have the information it needs to do its job. In Moscow, President Vladimir Putin of Russia said Friday that his country gave intelligence reports to the Bush administration after the Sept. 11 attacks suggesting that Saddam Hussein's government was preparing terrorist attacks in the United States or against American targets overseas. It is not clear whether Mr. Cheney was referring to those reports in citing
[pjnews] Bush Has a Lot to Answer for on Iraq Torture
http://snipurl.com/77dl A group of more than 450 professors of law, international relations, and public policy - led by Harvard Law School faculty members - today sent a letter calling on Congress to hold accountable, through impeachment and removal if appropriate, civilian officials from the top of the Executive Branch on down for policies developed at high levels that have facilitated the recent abuses at Abu Ghraib... - http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/061804E.shtml Bush Has a Lot to Answer for on Iraq Torture By Elizabeth Holtzman Newsday Wednesday 16 June 2004 At a Senate hearing last week, Attorney General John Ashcroft claimed that President George W. Bush never ordered torture in connection with abusive interrogations of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan and violated no criminal laws of the United States. But the attorney general did not describe what the president did order with respect to these interrogations - and he refused to turn over key documents to the Senate. The attorney general's self-serving sweeping denial disqualifies him from investigating and holding accountable those responsible for these interrogations. Ashcroft should appoint a special prosecutor to do so. Under a little known statute, any American involved in the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners, including the president of the United States, could be guilty of a federal crime. The War Crimes Act of 1996 punishes any U.S. national, civilian or military, who engages in a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions. A grave breach means the willful killing, torture or inhuman treatment of prisoners. If death results, the act imposes the death penalty. The possibility of prosecution must have haunted President Bush's chief lawyer, White House counsel Alberto Gonzales. In order to reduce the threat of prosecution for the brutal interrogations of Taliban and al-Qaida members, Gonzales urged President Bush (in a January 2002 memo) to opt out of the Geneva Conventions for the war in Afghanistan. Although Gonzales doesn't mention that top officials could be targets of prosecutions under the War Crimes Act, plainly that is his concern. The president followed his advice. Gonzales' logic was simple: Whenever the Geneva Conventions applied, so did the War Crimes Act of 1996. Since President Bush has repeatedly stated that the Geneva Conventions apply to Iraq, the War Crimes Act clearly applies to willful killing, torture or inhuman treatment of Iraqi prisoners. Whether the gimmick of opting out of the Geneva accords precludes War Crimes Act liability for Afghanistan remains to be seen. Clearly, U.S. personnel subjected Iraqi detainees to inhuman treatment, such as forcing hooded prisoners into stressful positions for lengthy periods of time, using dogs to intimidate and bite naked prisoners, dragging naked prisoners on the ground with a leash around their necks, forcing prisoners to engage in or simulate sexual acts, beatings and on and on. There is no shortage of evidence to document the inhuman treatment, including the notorious photos of Abu Ghraib prisoners as well as Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba's inquiry, which found sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses. The UN high commissioner for human rights recently reached similar conclusions. The International Red Cross repeatedly protested the treatment of Iraqi detainees. The key question is how high up the responsibility goes for these abhorrent acts. The War Crimes Act covers government officials who give the orders for inhuman treatment as well as those who carry them out. Since the War Crimes Act punishes for inhuman treatment alone, prosecutions under that act can by-pass any disagreement over the exact meaning of torture - and whether the Justice Department's absurdly narrow definition is correct. In addition, under international law, officials who know about the inhuman treatment and fail to stop it are also liable. We need to know what directives Bush gave for CIA and military interrogations in Iraq. We also need to know what the president and his subordinates, such as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, knew about the inhuman treatment of Iraqi prisoners - and when they knew it and what they did about it. Bush must stop claiming that the problems lie with just a few bad apples. That is simply not true. We know that orders for inhuman treatment came directly from Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the top military officer in Iraq. But we don't yet know where he got his orders. Similarly, the president should disclaim the contention that his powers as commander-in-chief override U.S. criminal laws; it smacks of President Richard Nixon's unsuccessful claim of national security during the Watergate scandal, and is baseless. We simply cannot prosecute only the small fry for this scandal that has undercut our mission in Iraq and besmirched our reputation. We have to demonstrate that the rule of law applies
[pjnews] Lynn Stewart on Trial
http://snipurl.com/78v0 21 Jun 2004 23:23:56 GMT Reuters Lawyers' rights tested in US terror cases By Gail Appleson NEW YORK, June 21 (Reuters) - A controversial case pitting a lawyer's freedom to represent clients against what many see as a Bush administration attempt to chip away at civil rights in the name of fighting terrorism will go to trial this week. The prosecution of Lynne Stewart, a well-known New York civil rights lawyer, has triggered an uproar among American defense attorneys who say it represents a dangerous strike against a lawyer's ability to fully represent a client. It strikes deep into the hearts of lawyers everywhere, said Jeffrey Fogel, legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights. It is an extraordinary attack on the legal system because it attacks the independent voice of lawyers and the cherished right for attorneys to have confidential conversations with their clients, he added. Stewart is accused of breaking the law by helping her imprisoned client, Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, a radical Muslim cleric, communicate with the Islamic Group. Prosecutors say the group is a terrorist organization that sees the cleric as its spiritual leader. Abdel-Rahman is serving a life sentence after being convicted in 1995 of urging followers to bomb U.S. landmarks, including the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. A jury of eight women and four men were selected by the end of the afternoon on Monday and opening statements are set to begin on Tuesday morning. The panel is anonymous with jurors' names and personal information being kept confidential. The charges allege that, after 1997, Stewart helped Abdel-Rahman violate prison restrictions aimed at stopping him from passing on communications that could result in violence. The measures restricted his access to mail, the media, telephones and visitors. Among the allegations is that Stewart told a Reuters reporter in 2000 that the cleric had withdrawn his support for the Islamic Group's cease-fire in Egypt. 'DEPLORABLE CONDUCT' While many lawyers are critical of the case, some say Stewart is no heroine. Sherry Colb, a Rutgers law professor, wrote an article last year saying Stewart is accused of communicating an order to kill people. This is deplorable conduct, she wrote. It further brings shame to a profession that depends on lawyers' ability to remember that no matter what anyone says of us, we are not and must never become hired guns. But others say Stewart was carrying out her pledged duty to defend her client and that evidence against her, which includes hours of government taped conversations with her imprisoned client, violates attorney client confidentiality. They also believe the 64-year-old Stewart, a familiar figure in New York courts, is being singled out because she has a reputation as a left-leaning lawyer and political activist who has represented unpopular clients. No doubt they wanted to target her because of her clients, Fogel said, adding that the case might scare other lawyers from taking terrorism-related cases. Gerald Lefcourt, a past president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, said those who do take such cases might not be as zealous as they should be. It is already having a chilling effect, he said, explaining that lawyers who take terrorism cases fear their conversations will be intercepted by the government and thus will not have frank discussions with their clients. What's the point of having an attorney if you can't have confidences, he said.
[pjnews] Fox News Spins 9/11 Commission Report
http://www.fair.org/activism/fox-commission.html Fairness Accuracy In Reporting ACTION ALERT: Fox News Spins 9/11 Commission Report June 22, 2004 The Bush administration's long-running attempts to link Iraq and Al Qaeda were dealt a serious blow when the September 11 commission's June 16 interim report indicated that there did not appear to be a collaborative relationship between Iraq and Osama bin Laden, and that there was no evidence that Iraq was involved in the September 11 attacks. But if you were watching the Fox News Channel, you saw something very different, as the conservative cable network eagerly defended the Bush administration and criticized the rest of the media for mishandling the story. On Fox's Special Report newscast (6/16/04), anchor Brit Hume charged that the media were mischaracterizing the report: The Associated Press leads off its story on a new 9/11 commission report by saying the document bluntly contradicts the Bush administration by claiming to have no credible evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the September 11 terrorist attacks. Hume maintained that the AP story was inaccurate: In fact, the Bush administration has never said that such evidence exists. In fact, it's Hume that is misrepresenting the AP story-- quoting from the story's lead, but then changing its meaning through an inaccurate paraphrase. The story actually begins: Bluntly contradicting the Bush administration, the commission investigating the September 11 attacks reported Wednesday there was 'no credible evidence' that Saddam Hussein had ties with Al Qaeda. Hume changed the allegation, from Hussein having ties with Al Qaeda to his having ties to the September 11 attacks, in order to knock it down, claiming that the Bush administration never linked Iraq to September 11. But that is not accurate either: Bush's letter to Congress formally announcing the commencement of hostilities against Iraq (3/18/03) explained that the use of force would be directed against terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations or persons who planned, authorized, committed or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001. In his Mission Accomplished speech aboard the U.S.S. Lincoln (5/1/03), Bush declared that the invasion of Iraq had removed an ally of Al Qaeda. And during an interview on NBC's Meet the Press (9/14/03), when Vice President Dick Cheney was asked if he was surprised that so many Americans connected Iraq to the 9/11 attacks, Cheney responded: No. I think it's not surprising that people make that connection You and I talked about this two years ago. I can remember you asking me this question just a few days after the original attack. At the time I said no, we didn't have any evidence of that. We've learned a couple of things. We learned more and more that there was a relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda that stretched back through most of the decade of the '90s, that it involved training, for example, on BW and CW [biological weapons and chemical weapons], that Al Qaeda sent personnel to Baghdad to get trained on the systems that are involved. The Iraqis providing bomb-making expertise and advice to the Al Qaeda organization. Clearly, Cheney was describing exactly the sort of collaborative relationship that the September 11 commission now says that Iraq did not have with Al Qaeda, and stating that this relationship makes it not surprising that people would connect Iraq with the September 11 attacks. But Fox kept advancing the notion that the commission's report actually backed up what the Bush administration has been saying. Hume explained that Bush has long denied a connection between Iraq and the 9/11 attacks, while maintaining that There's no question that Saddam Hussein had Al Qaeda ties. This is, according to Hume, an assertion the commission's report actually supports. The report indicates several meetings between Iraqi intelligence and bin Laden, who was attempting to set up training camps in Iraq and procure weapons. The Iraqis apparently did not respond to those requests. This is a far cry from what most people would call a tie or a connection. And Cheney and Bush have long argued that Iraq/Al Qaeda connections included weapons training and other high-level contacts; Bush has said directly (11/7/02) that Husssein is a threat because he's dealing with Al Qaeda. The commission's report does not support those allegations. The report also indicated that the supposed meeting between 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta and Iraqi intelligence officials in Prague probably never happened. That meeting has been cited by Bush officials, most notably Cheney, as evidence connecting Iraq to Al Qaeda and specifically to the 9/11 plot. Fox reported on the report's implicit contradictions of administration claims as if they were an invention of the media. On Hume's Special Report show (6/16/04), the anchor got the ball rolling: There were a lot of media reports today
[pjnews] Iraq War and Racism: Media Denial
http://snipurl.com/79ro Public anxiety over mounting casualties in Iraq and doubts about long-term consequences of the war continue to rise and have helped to erase President Bush's once-formidable advantage over Sen. John F. Kerry concerning who is best able to deal with terrorist threats, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll. [...] The shift is potentially significant because Bush has consistently received higher marks on fighting terrorism than on Iraq, and if the decline signals a permanent loss of confidence in his handling of the fight against terrorism, that could undermine a central part of his reelection campaign message... -- http://snipurl.com/779s This war and racism media denial in overdrive By Norman Solomon Among the millions of words that have appeared in the US press since late April about abuse and torture at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, one has been notably missing: racism. Overall, when it comes to racial aspects, the news coverage is quite PC as in Pentagon Correct. The outlook is apple pie egalitarian, with the media picture including high-profile officers who are African-American and Latino. Meanwhile, inside the policy arena, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice are frequently in front of cameras to personify Uncle Sam in blackface. The US government doesn't drop bombs on people because of their race. Washington's geopolitical agendas lead to military actions. But racial biases make the war process easier when the people being killed and maimed aren't white people. An oversize elephant in the American media's living room is a reality that few journalists talk about in public: the USA keeps waging war on countries where the victims resemble people who often experience personal and institutional racism in the United States. In the American media coverage of the uproar after the release of the Abu Ghraib photos, one of the only references to race was fleeting and dismissive, midway through a Wall Street Journal opinion piece on May 3: So far the alleged grotesqueries are more analogous to the nightmares that occur occasionally at American prisons, when rogue and jaded guards freelance to intimidate and humiliate inmates. The crime, then, first appears not so much a product of endemic ethnic, racial, or religious hatred, as the unfortunate cargo of penal institutions, albeit exacerbated by the conditions of war, the world over. That essay, by the Hoover Institution's Victor Davis Hanson, typifies media denial of what's happening in the hellish American cells populated so disproportionately by low-income blacks and Latinos. In the world of the Journal editorial page's convenient fantasy, guards occasionally choose to freelance to intimidate and humiliate inmates. In the world of prisoners' inconvenient reality, guards frequently intimidate, humiliate and brutalise. Media denial lets the US military and the US incarceration industry off the hook. Yet, it's significant that a man implicated as a ringleader in the Abu Ghraib crimes, Staff Sgt. Ivan Frederick, had also worked for six years as a guard for the Virginia Department of Corrections, according to Seymour Hersh's article in the May 10 edition of The New Yorker. A special agent in the US Army's Criminal Investigation Division, Scott Bobeck, testified that Sgt. Frederick and a corporal apparently were put in charge because they were civilian prison guards and had knowledge of how things were supposed to be run. That knowledge came from working as guards in an American system of incarceration that now has 2,033,000 people behind bars 63 per cent of them black or Latino. With racial minorities vastly overrepresented in federal and state prisons and local jails, such numbers reflect profound institutional biases that converge at the intersection of racism and unequal justice based on economic class. A public-interest group, The Sentencing Project, notes that black males have a 32 per cent chance of serving time in prison at some point in their lives; Hispanic males have a 17 per cent chance; white males have a 6 per cent chance. Most of the people sentenced to prison are poor, while the affluent and wealthy are very infrequent guests. Conditions are often inherently abusive behind bars. Many prisoners must cope with violence and duress. At the Stop Prisoner Rape organisation, executive director, Lara Stemple, points out: For women, whose abusers are often corrections officers, the rates of sexual assault are as high as one in four in some facilities. The same government that runs this prison system also conducts foreign policy that during the past four decades has resulted in bombing and invading the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Grenada, Panama, Afghanistan and Iraq. More circumscribed Pentagon missions landed in Somalia and Haiti. In 1999, a major US-led bombing campaign caused enormous suffering among civilians in Yugoslavia. Sudden missile strikes hit
[pjnews] Ashcroft's Ideological Leanings Affect Terrorist Prosecutions
http://snipurl.com/7aot New York Times June 22, 2004 Noonday in the Shade By PAUL KRUGMAN In April 2003, John Ashcroft's Justice Department disrupted what appears to have been a horrifying terrorist plot. In the small town of Noonday, Tex., F.B.I. agents discovered a weapons cache containing fully automatic machine guns, remote-controlled explosive devices disguised as briefcases, 60 pipe bombs and a chemical weapon a cyanide bomb big enough to kill everyone in a 30,000-square-foot building. Strangely, though, the attorney general didn't call a press conference to announce the discovery of the weapons cache, or the arrest of William Krar, its owner. He didn't even issue a press release. This was, to say the least, out of character. Jose Padilla, the accused dirty bomber, didn't have any bomb-making material or even a plausible way to acquire such material, yet Mr. Ashcroft put him on front pages around the world. Mr. Krar was caught with an actual chemical bomb, yet Mr. Ashcroft acted as if nothing had happened. Incidentally, if Mr. Ashcroft's intention was to keep the case low-profile, the media have been highly cooperative. To this day, the Noonday conspiracy has received little national coverage. At this point, I have the usual problem. Writing about John Ashcroft poses the same difficulties as writing about the Bush administration in general, only more so: the truth about his malfeasance is so extreme that it's hard to avoid sounding shrill. In this case, it sounds over the top to accuse Mr. Ashcroft of trying to bury news about terrorists who don't fit his preferred story line. Yet it's hard to believe that William Krar wouldn't have become a household name if he had been a Muslim, or even a leftist. Was Mr. Ashcroft, who once gave an interview with Southern Partisan magazine in which he praised Southern patriots like Jefferson Davis, reluctant to publicize the case of a terrorist who happened to be a white supremacist? More important, is Mr. Ashcroft neglecting real threats to the public because of his ideological biases? Mr. Krar's arrest was the result not of a determined law enforcement effort against domestic terrorists, but of a fluke: when he sent a package containing counterfeit U.N. and Defense Intelligence Agency credentials to an associate in New Jersey, it was delivered to the wrong address. Luckily, the recipient opened the package and contacted the F.B.I. But for that fluke, we might well have found ourselves facing another Oklahoma City-type atrocity. The discovery of the Texas cyanide bomb should have served as a wake-up call: 9/11 has focused our attention on the threat from Islamic radicals, but murderous right-wing fanatics are still out there. The concerns of the Justice Department, however, appear to lie elsewhere. Two weeks ago a representative of the F.B.I. appealed to an industry group for help in combating what, he told the audience, the F.B.I. regards as the country's leading domestic terrorist threat: ecological and animal rights extremists. Even in the fight against foreign terrorists, Mr. Ashcroft's political leanings have distorted policy. Mr. Ashcroft is very close to the gun lobby and these ties evidently trump public protection. After 9/11, he ordered that all government lists including voter registration, immigration and driver's license lists be checked for links to terrorists. All government lists, that is, except one: he specifically prohibited the F.B.I. from examining background checks on gun purchasers. Mr. Ashcroft told Congress that the law prohibits the use of those background checks for other purposes but he didn't tell Congress that his own staff had concluded that no such prohibition exists. Mr. Ashcroft issued a directive, later put into law, requiring that records of background checks on gun buyers be destroyed after only one business day. And we needn't imagine that Mr. Ashcroft was deeply concerned about protecting the public's privacy. After all, a few months ago he took the unprecedented step of subpoenaing the hospital records of women who have had late-term abortions. After my last piece on Mr. Ashcroft, some readers questioned whether he is really the worst attorney general ever. It's true that he has some stiff competition from the likes of John Mitchell, who served under Richard Nixon. But once the full record of his misdeeds in office is revealed, I think Mr. Ashcroft will stand head and shoulders below the rest.
[pjnews] Fahrenheit 9/11 open 6/25
http://snipurl.com/760x Conservatives to Counter 'Fahrenheit 9/11' from moveon.org: Last night, I got a chance to see a sneak preview of Michael Moore's new film Fahrenheit 9/11. It is an incredibly powerful movie that lays bare the cynicism and greed behind Bush's war policy. And the astonishing and revealing footage in it has the power to change the course of the 2004 election. (There's a full review below.) Given how devastating the movie is to President Bush's carefully crafted facade, it's hardly surprising that right-wing groups who call Moore a domestic enemy are using censorship and intimidation tactics to try to get it pulled from theaters. That's why we've got to do everything we can to make the opening a huge success. Today, we're asking MoveOn members to pledge to see the film on the opening night -- Friday, June 25th. (If you can't make it on Friday, pledging to go on Saturday or Sunday is fine, too). It'll be fun, of course -- you'll be watching the movie with lots of other MoveOn members. It'll also send an unmistakable message to the media and theater owners that the public is behind this movie. To see the Fahrenheit 9/11 trailer and pledge to see the movie on the opening weekend, go to: http://www.moveonpac.org/f911/?id=2949-1914492-iwhW_uPNt_XuNbLioz55_w Then please pass this message on to your friends, family, and co-workers. Fahrenheit 9/11 isn't just the most powerful and complete indictment of the Bush administration that I've ever seen - it's one of the best movies I've ever seen. It's a knockout blow: a poignant, darkly funny film that deftly interweaves footage of the President, his allies, and the Americans his policies betrayed. As Fox News' reviewer put it, the movie is a tribute to patriotism, to the American sense of duty - and at the same time an indictment of stupidity and avarice. (See http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,122680,00.html for the full review.) Despite years of television coverage on Iraq and the war on terror, most of the movie consists of footage you'd never see on TV. There are heart-breaking interviews with troops in Iraq, chilling scenes of the civilian consequences of that war, and footage of Bush so candid and revealing that it's hard to imagine how Moore got his hands on it. In one unforgettable scene from the morning of September 11th, Bush blithely reads a children's book to a classroom of kids for seven long minutes after his chief of staff quietly informs him that the second plane has hit the World Trade Center and we're under attack. The film is filled with this stuff, and it's hard to imagine seeing it and not being moved, shocked, and outraged. Fahrenheit 9/11 opens with footage of Bush administration officials putting on their TV makeup. Paul Wolfowitz sticks his comb in his mouth, slathers it with spit, brushes it through his hair, and grins a toothy grin. Colin Powell eyes the camera nervously as a makeup artist dusts his face. And, moments before President Bush goes on TV to somberly announce the beginning of the Iraq war, we see him goofing around, making funny faces at the folks behind the camera. These candid portraits encapsulate the genius of Moore's documentary. Compared to his other films, there's little pranking or moralizing. Moore basically stays out of the picture: he doesn't have to indict the Bush administration, because with powerful and indisputable video, Bush and the rest indict themselves. As Moore unravels Bush's story, he joins it with the stories of the real Americans who have shouldered the burden of the post-9/11 war policy. In Flint, Michigan, we hear from a group of inner-city kids whose only option for education and a better life is to enlist in the Army - and then, in a scene that's both humorous and deeply creepy, join two Marine recruiters as they case a local mall for possible enlistees. We watch a California peace group that was infiltrated by the local police department under the Patriot Act. And, in the final heartbreaking scenes, we witness the pain of a mother who lost her son in Iraq. In the hands of other directors, the content could easily feel exploitative. But Moore is grounded by a patriotism that rings through every frame of the film. Compassion and love of country give the film its striking authenticity: it's clear that what stings most about the President's behavior, for the subjects of the film, is Bush's betrayal of our country's soul. Fahrenheit 9/11 is a film with the power to change hearts and minds. It's brilliant, funny, moving, and authentic. And together, we can make it a huge success. Watch the trailer and pledge to see the film opening night at: http://www.moveonpac.org/f911/?id=2949-1914492-iwhW_uPNt_XuNbLioz55_w Sincerely, --Eli Pariser MoveOn PAC Wednesday, June 16th P.S. Fahrenheit 9/11 has already reaped widespread praise from critics. Here are just a few samples: Roger Ebert, Less is Moore in subdued, effective '9/11', Chicago Sun Times, May
[pjnews] One million black votes didn't count in 2000
http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=342row=1 One million black votes didn't count in the 2000 presidential election It's not too hard to get your vote lost -- if some politicians want it to be lost San Francisco Chronicle Sunday, June 20, 2004 by Greg Palast In the 2000 presidential election, 1.9 million Americans cast ballots that no one counted. Spoiled votes is the technical term. The pile of ballots left to rot has a distinctly dark hue: About 1 million of them -- half of the rejected ballots -- were cast by African Americans although black voters make up only 12 percent of the electorate. This year, it could get worse. These ugly racial statistics are hidden away in the mathematical thickets of the appendices to official reports coming out of the investigation of ballot-box monkey business in Florida from the last go-'round. How do you spoil 2 million ballots? Not by leaving them out of the fridge too long. A stray mark, a jammed machine, a punch card punched twice will do it. It's easy to lose your vote, especially when some politicians want your vote lost. While investigating the 2000 ballot count in Florida for BBC Television, I saw firsthand how the spoilage game was played -- with black voters the predetermined losers. Florida's Gadsden County has the highest percentage of black voters in the state -- and the highest spoilage rate. One in 8 votes cast there in 2000 was never counted. Many voters wrote in Al Gore. Optical reading machines rejected these because Al is a stray mark. By contrast, in neighboring Tallahassee, the capital, vote spoilage was nearly zip; every vote counted. The difference? In Tallahassee's white- majority county, voters placed their ballots directly into optical scanners. If they added a stray mark, they received another ballot with instructions to correct it. In other words, in the white county, make a mistake and get another ballot; in the black county, make a mistake, your ballot is tossed. The U.S. Civil Rights Commission looked into the smelly pile of spoiled ballots and concluded that, of the 179,855 ballots invalidated by Florida officials, 53 percent were cast by black voters. In Florida, a black citizen was 10 times as likely to have a vote rejected as a white voter. But let's not get smug about Florida's Jim Crow spoilage rate. Civil Rights Commissioner Christopher Edley, recently appointed dean of Boalt Hall School of Law at UC Berkeley, took the Florida study nationwide. His team discovered the uncomfortable fact that Florida is typical of the nation. Philip Klinkner, the statistician working on the Edley investigations, concluded, It appears that about half of all ballots spoiled in the U.S.A. -- about 1 million votes -- were cast by nonwhite voters. This no count, as the Civil Rights Commission calls it, is no accident. In Florida, for example, I discovered that technicians had warned Gov. Jeb Bush's office well in advance of November 2000 of the racial bend in the vote- count procedures. Herein lies the problem. An apartheid vote-counting system is far from politically neutral. Given that more than 90 percent of the black electorate votes Democratic, had all the spoiled votes been tallied, Gore would have taken Florida in a walk, not to mention fattening his popular vote total nationwide. It's not surprising that the First Brother's team, informed of impending rejection of black ballots, looked away and whistled. The ballot-box blackout is not the monopoly of one party. Cook County, Ill., has one of the nation's worst spoilage rates. That's not surprising. Boss Daley's Democratic machine, now his son's, survives by systematic disenfranchisement of Chicago's black vote. How can we fix it? First, let's shed the convenient excuses for vote spoilage, such as a lack of voter education. One television network stated as fact that Florida's black voters, newly registered and lacking education, had difficulty with their ballots. In other words, blacks are too dumb to vote. This convenient racist excuse is dead wrong. After that disaster in Gadsden, Fla., public outcry forced the government to change that black county's procedures to match that of white counties. The result: near zero spoilage in the 2002 election. Ballot design, machines and procedure, says statistician Klinkner, control spoilage. In other words, the vote counters, not the voters, are to blame. Politicians who choose the type of ballot and the method of counting have long fine-tuned the spoilage rate to their liking. It is about to get worse. The ill-named Help America Vote Act, signed by President Bush in 2002, is pushing computerization of the ballot box. California decertified some of Diebold Corp.'s digital ballot boxes in response to fears that hackers could pick our next president. But the known danger of black-box voting is that computers, even with their software secure, are vulnerable to low-tech spoilage games: polls opening late, locked-in votes, votes lost
[pjnews] U.S. Drops Effort to Gain Immunity for Its Troops
http://snipurl.com/7ch0 Cheney Utters 'F-Word' in Senate -- http://snipurl.com/7ch1 U.S. Immunity in Iraq Will Go Beyond June 30 The Bush administration has decided to take the unusual step of bestowing on its own troops and personnel immunity from prosecution by Iraqi courts for killing Iraqis or destroying local property after the occupation ends and political power is transferred to an interim Iraqi government, U.S. officials said. The administration plans to accomplish that step -- which would bypass the most contentious remaining issue before the transfer of power -- by extending an order that has been in place during the year-long occupation of Iraq. Order 17 gives all foreign personnel in the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority immunity from local criminal, civil and administrative jurisdiction and from any form of arrest or detention other than by persons acting on behalf of their parent states. [...] The issue of immunity for U.S. troops is among the most contentious in the Islamic world, where it has galvanized public opinion against the United States in the past. A similar grant of immunity to U.S. troops in Iran during the Johnson administration in the 1960s led to the rise of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who used the issue to charge that the shah had sold out the Iranian people. Our honor has been trampled underfoot; the dignity of Iran has been destroyed, Khomeini said in a famous 1964 speech that led to his detention and then expulsion from Iran. The measure reduced the Iranian people to a level lower than that of an American dog. Ironically, Khomeini went into exile in Iraq, where he spent 12 years in Najaf -- the Shiite holy city that is now home to Sistani and his followers and where Iraqis still remember the flap that led the shah to deport a cleric who later led Iran's 1979 Islamic revolution. -- http://snipurl.com/7cha New York Times June 23, 2004 U.S. Drops Effort to Gain Immunity for Its Troops By WARREN HOGE UNITED NATIONS, June 23 The United States bowed to broad opposition on the Security Council today and announced that it was dropping its effort to gain immunity for its troops from prosecution by the International Criminal Court. The United States has decided not to proceed further with consideration and action on the draft at this time in order to avoid a prolonged and divisive debate, the deputy American ambassador, James B. Cunningham, said on emerging from the council. The envoys from the 15-member council had spent the morning in closed session discussing a rewritten version of the American troop exemption resolution circulated among them Tuesday night to try to meet the widespread objections. A resolution granting a year's exemption had passed the council the past two years, but this year the attempt to renew it ran into difficulties because of the prisoner abuse scandal in Iraq and a strong statement of opposition from Secretary General Kofi Annan. The rare setback for American diplomacy at the United Nations came just two weeks after the Bush administration was praised in the world organization for demonstrating flexibility and a willingness to compromise in securing a unanimous vote on a resolution affirming the arrangements for the transfer of power in Iraq. Ambassador Wang Guangya of China, a country that had supported the measure the past two years, said, Clearly from the very beginning this year, China has been under pressure because of the scandals and the news coverage of the prisoner abuse, and it made it very difficult for my government to support it. My government, he added, is under particular pressure not to give a blank check to the U.S. for the behavior of its forces. Spain's ambassador, Juan Antonio Yáñez-Bernuevo, explained his country's opposition by saying, For us, the essential thing is to remain faithful to the international criminal court, which we strongly support, and also to the United Nations charter and to respect the statement made by the secretary general last week, which had a powerful effect. Last week Secretary General Annan called on the Security Council to turn back the American move, saying it was of dubious judicial value and particularly objectionable in the aftermath of the prisoner abuse cases in Iraq. In his remarks, Mr. Annan said that passing the measure would discredit the council, the United Nations and the primacy of the rule of law, and he appealed to the members to maintain the common purpose they had shown earlier this month in their unanimous vote on the Iraq resolution. Mr. Yáñez-Bernuevo said that he regretted that the Americans had not mounted the same kind of diplomatic effort that secured the June 8 unanimous vote behind the resolution covering the arrangements for the June 30 transfer of power to Iraq and its aftermath. We would have liked to see a process as we saw in the Iraq resolution, a more collective effort that would have maintained the council's
[pjnews] Worst Justice Department in Memory
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1248928,00.html US hands over power in Iraq: The US-led coalition today transferred sovereignty to the interim Iraqi government, two days ahead of the scheduled June 30 handover date. http://snipurl.com/7dha Iraq war 'will cost each US family $3,415 -- http://snipurl.com/7dhb St. Petersburg Times 20 June 2004 At Justice, worst record in memory By ROBYN E. BLUMNER, Times Perspective Columnist This week, I turn my column over to U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, whose opening remarks during the oversight hearing with Attorney General John Ashcroft on June 8 succinctly lay out the case as to why Ashcroft is among the worst attorney generals in modern history. The statement below is substantially abridged. My comments are in italic. Welcome, Mr. Attorney General. It is good to have you back before the committee. . . . It has been a long time since our last oversight hearing with you. Fifteen months have passed since your last, brief appearance in March last year. Mr. Attorney General, I must speak frankly about an issue that has emerged as a basic problem during your tenure. There are two words that succinctly sum up the Justice Department's accountability and its cooperation with congressional oversight on your watch. Those two words are sparse and grudging. Even those of us who have served through several presidents cannot recall a worse performance record when it comes to responsiveness. Just days ago we learned of Justice Department involvement in devising legal arguments to minimize our obligations under such U.S. laws and international agreements as the convention on torture. Yet a letter I wrote to you last November, well before most of these abuses came to light, went unanswered for months, and when we are lucky enough to get responses, the premium is on unresponsiveness. Few of the answers we get are worth much more than the paper they are printed on. We often learn more about what's really happening in the Justice Department in the press than we do from you. In the 1,000 days since the catastrophic attacks of Sept. 11, we have learned little from our Justice Department. We know this: The Moussaoui prosecution has bogged down because the prosecution refuses to let the defense interview witnesses in U.S. custody; A German court acquitted two 9/11 co-conspirators, in part because the U.S. government refused to provide evidence for the cases; Three defendants who you said had knowledge of the 9/11 attacks did not have such knowledge; the department retracted your statement, and then you had to apologize to the court for violating a gag order in the case; The man you claimed was about to explode a dirty bomb in the U.S. had no such intention or capability, and because he has been held for two years without access to counsel, any crimes he did commit might never be prosecuted; U.S. citizens with no connection to terrorism have been imprisoned as material witnesses for chunks of time - with an Oops, I'm sorry when a 100 percent positive fingerprint match turns out to be 100 percent wrong; Noncitizens with no connection to terrorism have been rounded up on the basis of their religion or ethnicity, held for months without charges and, in some cases, physically abused; Interrogation techniques approved by the Department of Justice have led to abuses that have tarnished our nation's reputation and likely given strength and driven hundreds, if not thousands, of new recruits to our enemies; Your department turned a Canadian citizen over to Syria who was tortured; Documents have been classified, unclassified, and reclassified to score political points rather than for legitimate national security reasons; Statistics have been manipulated to exaggerate the department's success in fighting terrorism; and The threat of another attack on U.S. soil remains high, although how high depends on who, in the administration, is talking and what audience they are addressing. We need checks and balances. There is much that has gone wrong that your administration stubbornly refuses to admit. For this democratic republic to work, we need openness and accountability. During Ashcroft's testimony he was asked to provide the committee with copies of the memorandums that had just emerged providing legal justifications for the use of torture. Ashcroft refused, even though they were widely available on the Internet. Here is part of Leahy's response: If government agencies have rationalized the use of torture, that would seem to go to the heart of what we are investigating. It is inexcusable to read about such memos in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and New York Times and then to have them denied to the Senate by the executive branch. Hiding these documents from view is the sign of a cover-up, not of cooperation. For years Ashcroft's Justice Department has refused to answer many
[pjnews] Private Military Contractors in Iraq and Reyond
PRIVATE MILITARY CONTRACTORS IN IRAQ AND BEYOND: A Question of Balance Prepared Statement by William D. Hartung Senior Research Fellow, World Policy Institute For the Briefing on An Incomplete Transition: An Assessment of the June 30th Transition and Its Aftermath American News Women's Club Washington, DC June 22nd, 2004 Let me begin by thanking Foreign Policy in Focus (http://www.fpif.org), and its two co-sponsoring organizations, the Institute for Policy Studies and the Interhemispheric Resource Center, for organizing today's briefing. With the recent passing of former President Reagan and the 60th anniversary of D-Day earlier this month, we've been doing a lot of remembering lately. We've been remembering war heroes, and we've been remembering a man who some have regarded as the greatest Republican president since Lincoln. But we haven't heard much about the one man of the past half century or so who fit both of those categories - war hero and Republican president -- most clearly and comfortably, without bragging or bravado, just by virtue of his career path: Dwight David Eisenhower. Not only was Eisenhower one of the generals who helped beat back the fascist powers in World War II, but he also had very distinct ideas about how to go about fighting the battles against communism that defined U.S. foreign policy in the wake of that war. He was all for a strong defense, but he also felt that we as citizens of a Republic needed to be alert to the dangers posed by the military-industrial complex, a term that he coined. He chose his farewell address to warn of the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power posed by this unprecedented lobby. And he underscored the need for an engaged citizenry to keep it in check to ensure that we never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. Essentially what Eisenhower was saying was that we need a defense industry, but it needs to be watched. Funding for defense should be balanced against other national needs, and decisions about military spending priorities should be subject to democratic discussion and debate. He firmly believed that it was up to the citizenry, acting through its elected representatives, to set the parameters for what should be spent to protect and defend our republic. If Eisenhower were alive today, what would he make of our current situation? Not only are private contractors raking in massive amounts of taxpayer funds under the guise of fighting terrorism, but they are involved in activities that in his day would have been considered strictly government functions. The military-industrial complex is a much smaller share of our economy than it was four decades ago, but it is in the midst of a growth spurt, and it still needs to be watched, now more than ever. Let's start by talking quantity. It's a great time to be a weapons contractor, a rebuilding contractor, an intelligence or communications contractor, or a security contractor. Since the Bush administration took office in January 2001, the annual military budget has increased from roughly $310 billion per year to over $420 billion per year and counting. In addition to these regular appropriations, the United States has overthrown two governments and occupied two nations, at a cost of $177 billion and counting. And we have increased spending on homeland security from $16 billion in 2001 per year to $47 billion per year in this year's budget request, with $39 billion of that amount occurring in agencies other than the Pentagon. While the administration would like you to believe that every penny of this is directly related to fighting what it calls the GWOT - the Global War on Terrorism - an objective assessment suggests otherwise. The results for the contractors have been stunning. In 2003, Halliburton's Pentagon contracts increased from $900 million to $3.9 billion, a jump of almost 700%. And that's just the beginning. The company how has over $8 billion in contracts for Iraqi rebuilding and Pentagon logistics work in hand, and that figure could hit $18 billion if it exercises all of its options. Computer Sciences Corporation, which does missile defense work and also owns Dyncorps, a private military contractor whose work stretches from Colombia to Afghanistan to Iraq, saw its military contracts more than triple from 2002 to 2003, from $800 million to $2.5 billion. But even as these firms involved in Iraq and Afghanistan show the fastest growth, they can't match the sheer volume of work logged by the Big Three military contractors. Lockheed Martin ($21.9 billion), Boeing ($17.3 billion) and Northrop Grumman ($16.6) billion split $50 billion in Pentagon contracts between them in 2003. That hefty sum represented almost one out of every four dollars the Pentagon doled out that year for everything from rifles to rockets. Lockheed Martin, the nation's largest weapons contractor, offers an excellent case study in how
[pjnews] Negroponte's Miserable Human Rights Record
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1248928,00.html US hands over power in Iraq Former US Administrator Paul Bremer hitches the first flight out of the country. US Embassy Open and John Negroponte becomes the new US Ambassador to Iraq -- http://snipurl.com/7ebv Jun. 27, 2004. 01:00 AM Toronto Star Negroponte `looked the other way' U.S. ambassador to Iraq under fire for rights record Twenty years ago, he served as envoy to Honduras DUNCAN CAMPBELL SPECIAL TO THE STAR Suspicious deaths in custody. Allegations of torture. Claims of a military out of control. These are some of the key issues that will face John Negroponte, the newly appointed U.S. ambassador to Iraq. Suspicious deaths in custody. Allegations of torture. Claims of a military out of control. Those were some of the key issues that faced John Negroponte 20 years ago when he was U.S. ambassador to Honduras. So it is worth examining how he reacted then when faced with evidence of extra-judicial killings, torture and human rights abuses. Central America in the early `80s was, for a few years, the centre of the world in much the way that the Middle East now is. There had been a revolution in Nicaragua in which a dictator had been removed by the Sandinistas, who had then embarked on a political path that was anathema to the U.S. The country became a magnet for the international left, who saw hopeful signs in the revolution. El Salvador and Guatemala were in turmoil as left-wing guerrillas battled with the military in their efforts to overturn years of military oppression and corruption. In those days the enemy, as far as the U.S. was concerned, was international communism rather than Al Qaeda, but the rhetoric of ``good'' versus ``evil'' took a similar pattern to today's. Into this world, in 1981, came diplomat John Negroponte as ambassador to Honduras. At the time, the U.S. was covertly backing the Contras, the counter-revolutionaries who opposed the Sandinistas. Honduras was a vital base for them. An air base was built at El Aguacate, where they could be trained and which was used, according to Honduran human rights activists, as a detention centre where torture took place. It was also used as a burial ground for 185 dissidents, whose remains were only discovered in 2001. Negroponte's predecessor, Jack Binns, was appointed by Jimmy Carter. He had made public his concerns about human rights abuses by the Honduran military. Binns has since affirmed that when he handed over to Negroponte he gave him a full briefing on the abuses. Negroponte has always denied having knowledge of such violations. A former Honduran congressman, Efrain Diaz, told the Baltimore Sun, which re-examined the behaviour of the U.S in 1995, of Negroponte and other U.S. officials: ``Their attitude was one of tolerance and silence. They needed Honduras to loan its territory more than they were concerned about innocent people being killed.'' For their co-operation with the U.S. in its long-running battle to remove the Sandinistas who, it should be remembered, won the election in Nicaragua in 1984 the Honduran government was royally rewarded. Military aid increased from $4 million (U.S.) to $77 million a year. Had Negroponte reported to the U.S. Congress that the military were engaged in human rights abuses, such aid would have been threatened. No report of such abuses was allowed to interfere with the U.S. destabilization of Nicaragua. Negroponte was one of a group of officials involved in Central America at that time who have since to the astonishment of the international diplomatic community been rehabilitated by President George W. Bush. His behaviour in Honduras would have come under scrutiny when he was appointed as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations in 2001, but his appointment hearing came in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, when there was little appetite for such an inquiry and when there was a desire to have such a key post filled speedily. ``Exquisitely dangerous,'' is how Larry Birns of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs described Negroponte this week in a conversation from Washington. He called Negroponte's role in Honduras ``eerily familiar to the Bush adminustration's present goal in Iraq.'' Reed Brody of Human Rights Watch had this to say when Negroponte was appointed ambassador to the U.N.: ``When Negroponte was ambassador [in Honduras] he looked the other way when serious atrocities were committed. One would have to wonder what kind of message the Bush administration is sending about human rights.'' The U.S. policy in Central America in the '80s was essentially that the ends justified the means, even if the ends involved misleading Congress, dealing with the supposedly hated Iran, the illegal mining of harbours and the promotion, funding and encouragement of rebel forces. Many of those involved in the atrocities in Central America were graduates of the School of the Americas (which has since changed its name to the
[pjnews] Supreme Court: Detainees Can Have Court Hearings
http://snipurl.com/7fha The European Parliament has asked the EU's highest court to annul a treaty between the EU and the United States that would allow authorities to share data about airline passengers, writes Denis Staunton in Brussels. MEPs voted against the agreement earlier this year, citing concerns about privacy and data protection, but the Council of Ministers, where national governments meet, pressed ahead with the treaty regardless. The agreement will allow US authorities to obtain information such as credit-card details, telephone numbers, addresses and travel itineraries on all transatlantic passengers... - http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/062904D.shtml Justices: Detainees Can Have Court Hearings The Associated Press Monday 28 June 2004 Washington - The Supreme Court dealt a setback to the Bush administration's war against terrorism today, ruling that both U.S. citizens and foreign nationals seized as potential terrorists can challenge their treatment in U.S. courts. The court refused to endorse a central claim of the White House since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 2001: That the government has authority to seize and detain suspected terrorists or their protectors and indefinitely deny access to courts or lawyers while interrogating them. The court did back the administration in one important respect, ruling that Congress gave President Bush the authority to seize and hold a U.S. citizen, in this case Louisiana-born Yaser Esam Hamdi, as an alleged enemy combatant. That bright spot for the administration was almost eclipsed, however, by the court's ruling that Hamdi can use American courts to argue that he is being held illegally. Foreign-born men held at a Navy prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, can also have their day in U.S. courts, the justices said. Ruling in the Hamdi case, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor said the court has made clear that a state of war is not a blank check for the president when it comes to the rights of the nation's citizens. Steven R. Shapiro, legal director of the ACLU, called the rulings a strong repudiation of the administration's argument that its actions in the war on terrorism are beyond the rule of law and unreviewable by American courts. The court sidestepped a third major terrorism case, ruling that a lawsuit filed on behalf of detainee Jose Padilla improperly named Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld instead of the much lower-level military officer in charge of the Navy brig in South Carolina where Padilla has been held for more than two years. Padilla must refile a lawsuit challenging his detention in a lower court. The court left hard questions unanswered in all three cases. The administration had fought any suggestion that Hamdi or another U.S.-born terrorism suspect could go to court, saying that such a legal fight posed a threat to the president's power to wage war as he sees fit. We have no reason to doubt that courts, faced with these sensitive matters, will pay proper heed both to the matters of national security that might arise in an individual case and to the constitutional limitations safeguarding essential liberties that remain vibrant even in times of security concerns, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote in the Hamdi case. O'Connor said that Hamdi unquestionably has the right to access to counsel. The court threw out a lower court ruling that supported the government's position fully, and Hamdi's case now returns to a lower court. O'Connor was joined by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Anthony M. Kennedy and Stephen Breyer in her view that Congress had authorized detentions such as Hamdi's in what she called very limited circumstances, Congress voted shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks to give the president significant authority to pursue terrorists, but Hamdi's lawyers said that authority did not extend to the indefinite detention of an American citizen without charges or trial. Two other justices, David H. Souter and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, would have gone further and declared Hamdi's detention improper. Still, they joined O'Connor and the others to say that Hamdi, and by extension others who may be in his position, are entitled to their day in court. Hamdi and Padilla are in military custody at a Navy brig in South Carolina. They have been interrogated repeatedly without lawyers present. In the Guantánamo case, the court said the Cuban base is not beyond the reach of American courts even though it is outside the country. Lawyers for the detainees there had said to rule otherwise would be to declare the Cuban base a legal no-man's land. The high court's ruling applies only to Guantánamo detainees, although the United States holds foreign prisoners elsewhere. The Bush administration contends that as enemy combatants, the men are not entitled to the usual rights of prisoners of war set out in the Geneva
[pjnews] GAO: Iraq is Worse Off Than Before the War Began
http://snipurl.com/7fgs U.S. Edicts Curb Power Of Iraq's Leadership http://www.smirkingchimp.com/print.php?sid=16778 Billions of dollars have disappeared: Who is stealing Iraq's oil revenues? http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0629-10.htm Published on Tuesday, June 29, 2004 by Knight-Ridder Iraq is Worse Off Than Before the War Began, GAO Reports by Seth Borenstein WASHINGTON - In a few key areas - electricity, the judicial system and overall security - the Iraq that America handed back to its residents Monday is worse off than before the war began last year, according to calculations in a new General Accounting Office report released Tuesday. The 105-page report by Congress' investigative arm offers a bleak assessment of Iraq after 14 months of U.S. military occupation. Among its findings: -In 13 of Iraq's 18 provinces, electricity was available fewer hours per day on average last month than before the war. Nearly 20 million of Iraq's 26 million people live in those provinces. -Only $13.7 billion of the $58 billion pledged and allocated worldwide to rebuild Iraq has been spent, with another $10 billion about to be spent. The biggest chunk of that money has been used to run Iraq's ministry operations. -The country's court system is more clogged than before the war, and judges are frequent targets of assassination attempts. -The new Iraqi civil defense, police and overall security units are suffering from mass desertions, are poorly trained and ill-equipped. -The number of what the now-disbanded Coalition Provisional Authority called significant insurgent attacks skyrocketed from 411 in February to 1,169 in May. The report was released on the same day that the CPA's inspector general issued three reports that highlighted serious management difficulties at the CPA. The reports found that the CPA wasted millions of dollars at a Hilton resort hotel in Kuwait because it didn't have guidelines for who could stay there, lost track of how many employees it had in Iraq and didn't track reconstruction projects funded by international donors to ensure they didn't duplicate U.S. projects. Both the GAO report and the CPA report said that the CPA was seriously understaffed for the gargantuan task of rebuilding Iraq. The GAO report suggested the agency needed three times more employees than what it had. The CPA report said the agency believed it had 1,196 employees, when it was authorized to have 2,117. But the inspector general said CPA's records were so disorganized that it couldn't verify its actual number of employees. GAO Comptroller General David Walker blamed insurgent attacks for many of the problems in Iraq. The unstable security environment has served to slow down our rebuilding and reconstruction efforts and it's going to be of critical importance to provide more stable security, Walker told Knight Ridder Newspapers in a telephone interview Tuesday. There are a number of significant questions that need to be asked and answered dealing with the transition (to self-sovereignty), Walker said. A lot has been accomplished and a lot remains to be done. The GAO report is the first government assessment of conditions in Iraq at the end of the U.S. occupation. It outlined what it called key challenges that will affect the political transition in 10 specific areas. The GAO gave a draft of the report to several different government agencies, but only the CPA offered a major comment: It said the report was not sufficiently critical of the judicial reconstruction effort. The picture it paints of the facts on the ground is one that neither the CPA nor the Bush administration should be all that proud of, said Peter W. Singer, a national security scholar at the centrist Brookings Institution. It finds a lot of problems and raises a lot of questions. One of the biggest problems, Singer said, is that while money has been pledged and allocated, not much has been spent. The GAO report shows that very little of the promised international funds - most of which are in loans - has been spent or can't be tracked. The CPA's inspector general found the same thing. When we ask why are things not going the way we hoped for, Singer said, the answer in part of this is that we haven't actually spent what we have in pocket. He said the figures on electricity make me want to cry. Steven Susens, a spokesman for the Program Management Office, which oversees contractors rebuilding Iraq, conceded that many areas of Iraq have fewer hours of electricity now than they did before the war. But he said the report, based on data that's now more than a month old, understates current electrical production. He said some areas may have reduced electricity availability because antiquated distribution systems had been taken out of service so they could be rebuilt. It's a slow pace, but it's certainly growing as far as we're concerned, Susens said. Danielle Pletka, the vice president of foreign and defense
[pjnews] A cut-and-run transition in Iraq
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=1520 A cut-and-run transition 28 June 2004 When the transition moment occurred in Baghdad -- so tightly was the secret held that not even comrade-in-arms Tony Blair knew the schedule -- George Bush, in Turkey for the NATO summit, is reported to have turned to the British Prime Minister. Stealing a glance at his watch to make sure the transfer [of sovereignty] had occurred, Bush put his hand over his mouth to guard his remarks, leaned toward Blair and then put out his hand for a shake. That was in keeping with the moment. And momentary it was. An unannounced five-minute, furtive ceremony, two days early, on half an hour's notice, in a nondescript room in the new Iraqi prime minister's office, under a blanket of security, with snipers on adjoining rooftops in the heavily fortified Green Zone, before only a handful of Iraqi and U.S. officials and journalists. A few quick, polite lies (L. Paul Bremer III: I have confidence that the Iraqi government is ready to meet the challenges that lie ahead), a few seconds of polite clapping by the attendees. That was it. Sovereignty transferred. The end. Other than L. Paul Bremer, not a significant American official was in sight, even though the President, Secretary of Defense, National Security Advisor, and Secretary of State were all in Turkey, not 90 minutes away. There were no representatives from other governments. No flags. No bands. No cheering crowds. No marching troops. No hoopla. Nothing at all. And two hours later, Bremer, the erstwhile viceroy of Baghdad, his suits and desert boots packed away, was on a C-130 out of the country. Talk about cutting and running, he didn't even stick around the extra five hours for the swearing in of the new interim administration. That's not a matter of catching a flight, but of flight itself. I'm sure Bremer is already heaving a sigh of relief and looking forward, as Time magazine tells us, to enrolling in the Academy of Cuisine in Washington. As for the psychological boost provided by the transfer of sovereignty, Prime Minister Allawi and friends are not likely to be its recipients. It looks as if the Bush administration engaged in a game of chicken with a motley group of insurgents and rebels in urban Iraq -- and at the edge of what suddenly looked like a cliff, the Bush administration flinched first. This is a victory, certainly, but not for Bush Co. or for their plan to, as they like to say, put an Iraqi face on Iraq. It may be spun here as a brilliant stratagem to outflank the Iraqi insurgency, or as Carol Williams and Alissa Rubin of the Los Angeles Times put it, a ploy to pre-empt disruptions, or as proof that the interim administration was ready ahead of schedule, but the word that most fits the moment is actually humiliation. Ignominious humiliation. Imagine if, on May 1, 2003 as George Bush landed on the USS Abraham Lincoln in color-coded triumph, someone had leaned over and, behind a cupped palm, whispered that he would not attend the crowning triumph of his first presidential term, the official recreation of an Iraqi government in our image. Imagine if someone had then told him that an insurgency, evidently without a central command, armed with nothing more powerful than Kalashnikovs and RPGs, and made up to a significant degree of ordinary, angry Iraqis (as Edward Wong of the New York Times vividly reported today,) would stop his plans in their tracks; or that our sheriff in Baghdad would, hardly a year later, flee town tossing his badge in the dirt. What would George Bush have said then? Who among his followers wouldn't have had the laugh of their lives? And yet, here we are. You won't read this in your daily paper or see it on the nightly prime-time news, but I assure you that what we're witnessing in slow motion is likely to be one of the great imperial defeats in history. Being alone In 2002, the Bush administration released the National Security Strategy of the United States in which it codified the idea of preventive, not preemptive, war -- if we even think you may be thinking we'll take you out -- and the idea that our country should feel free to act alone to preserve its unparalleled and historically unique position as sole planetary superpower. It would be the global sheriff (dead or alive), the global hyperpower, the planet's military hegemon, the New Rome. It took less than a year for that New Rome label to drop into the ashbin of history; now, the belief that nothing can stay our military might has been shown to be a hollow claim (no matter the destructive power we're capable of raining down on another land). At bottom, Bush's neocon strategists profoundly misunderstood the nature of American power; too many war movies in childhood perhaps, but they believed their own propaganda about the ability of high-tech military power to pacify and reorganize the world. They simply had no idea how hard it was for a giant to stand alone and on one foot, while
[pjnews] Who Lost Iraq?
http://snipurl.com/7g96 Who Lost Iraq? By PAUL KRUGMAN, New York Times The formal occupation of Iraq came to an ignominious end yesterday with a furtive ceremony, held two days early to foil insurgent attacks, and a swift airborne exit for the chief administrator. In reality, the occupation will continue under another name, most likely until a hostile Iraqi populace demands that we leave. But it's already worth asking why things went so wrong. The Iraq venture may have been doomed from the start but we'll never know for sure because the Bush administration made such a mess of the occupation. Future historians will view it as a case study of how not to run a country. Up to a point, the numbers in the Brookings Institution's invaluable Iraq Index tell the tale. Figures on the electricity supply and oil production show a pattern of fitful recovery and frequent reversals; figures on insurgent attacks and civilian casualties show a security situation that got progressively worse, not better; public opinion polls show an occupation that squandered the initial good will. What the figures don't describe is the toxic mix of ideological obsession and cronyism that lie behind that dismal performance. The insurgency took root during the occupation's first few months, when the Coalition Provisional Authority seemed oddly disengaged from the problems of postwar anarchy. But what was Paul Bremer III, the head of the C.P.A., focused on? According to a Washington Post reporter who shared a flight with him last June, Bremer discussed the need to privatize government-run factories with such fervor that his voice cut through the din of the cargo hold. Plans for privatization were eventually put on hold. But as he prepared to leave Iraq, Mr. Bremer listed reduced tax rates, reduced tariffs and the liberalization of foreign-investment laws as among his major accomplishments. Insurgents are blowing up pipelines and police stations, geysers of sewage are erupting from the streets, and the electricity is off most of the time but we've given Iraq the gift of supply-side economics. If the occupiers often seemed oblivious to reality, one reason was that many jobs at the C.P.A. went to people whose qualifications seemed to lie mainly in their personal and political connections people like Simone Ledeen, whose father, Michael Ledeen, a prominent neoconservative, told a forum that the level of casualties is secondary because we are a warlike people and we love war. Still, given Mr. Bremer's economic focus, you might at least have expected his top aide for private-sector development to be an expert on privatization and liberalization in such countries as Russia or Argentina. But the job initially went to Thomas Foley, a Connecticut businessman and Republican fund-raiser with no obviously relevant expertise. In March, Michael Fleischer, a New Jersey businessman, took over. Yes, he's Ari Fleischer's brother. Mr. Fleischer told The Chicago Tribune that part of his job was educating Iraqi businessmen: The only paradigm they know is cronyism. We are teaching them that there is an alternative system with built-in checks and built-in review. Checks and review? Yesterday a leading British charity, Christian Aid, released a scathing report, Fueling Suspicion, on the use of Iraqi oil revenue. It points out that the May 2003 U.N. resolution giving the C.P.A. the right to spend that revenue required the creation of an international oversight board, which would appoint an auditor to ensure that the funds were spent to benefit the Iraqi people. Instead, the U.S. stalled, and the auditor didn't begin work until April 2004. Even then, according to an interim report, it faced resistance from C.P.A. staff. And now, with the audit still unpublished, the C.P.A. has been dissolved. Defenders of the administration will no doubt say that Christian Aid and other critics have no proof that the unaccounted-for billions were ill spent. But think of it this way: given the Arab world's suspicion that we came to steal Iraq's oil, the occupation authorities had every incentive to expedite an independent audit that would clear Halliburton and other U.S. corporations of charges that they were profiteering at Iraq's expense. Unless, that is, the charges are true. Let's say the obvious. By making Iraq a playground for right-wing economic theorists, an employment agency for friends and family, and a source of lucrative contracts for corporate donors, the administration did terrorist recruiters a very big favor.
[pjnews] Bush Interviewed By Irish Television
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/06/20040625-2.html Interview of the President by Radio and Television Ireland The Library June 24, 2004 4:08 P.M. EDT Q Mr. President, you're going to arrive in Ireland in about 24 hours' time, and no doubt you will be welcomed by our political leaders. Unfortunately, the majority of our public do not welcome your visit because they're angry over Iraq, they're angry over Abu Ghraib. Are you bothered by what Irish people think? THE PRESIDENT: Listen, I hope the Irish people understand the great values of our country. And if they think that a few soldiers represents the entirety of America, they don't really understand America then. There have been great ties between Ireland and America, and we've got a lot of Irish Americans here that are very proud of their heritage and their country. But, you know, they must not understand if they're angry over Abu Ghraib -- if they say, this is what America represents, they don't understand our country, because we don't represent that. We are a compassionate country. We're a strong country, and we'll defend ourselves -- but we help people. And we've helped the Irish and we'll continue to do so. We've got a good relationship with Ireland. Q And they're angry over Iraq, as well, and particularly the continuing death toll there. THE PRESIDENT: Well, I can understand that. People don't like war. But what they should be angry about is the fact that there was a brutal dictator there that had destroyed lives and put them in mass graves and had torture rooms. Listen, I wish they could have seen the seven men that came to see me in the Oval Office -- they had their right hands cut off by Saddam Hussein because the currency had devalued when he was the leader. And guess what happened? An American saw the fact that they had had their hands cut off and crosses -- or Xs carved in their forehead. And he flew them to America. And they came to my office with a new hand, grateful for the generosity of America, and with Saddam Hussein's brutality in their mind. Look, Saddam Hussein had used weapons of mass destruction against his own people, against the neighborhood. He was a brutal dictator who posed a threat -- such a threat that the United Nations voted unanimously to say, Mr. Saddam Hussein -- Q Indeed, Mr. President, but you didn't find the weapons of mass destruction. THE PRESIDENT: Let me finish. Let me finish. May I finish? He said -- the United Nations said, disarm or face serious consequences. That's what the United Nations said. And guess what? He didn't disarm. He didn't disclose his arms. And, therefore, he faced serious consequences. But we have found a capacity for him to make a weapon. See, he had the capacity to make weapons. He was dangerous. And no one can argue that the world is better off with Saddam -- if Saddam Hussein were in power. Q But, Mr. President, the world is a more dangerous place today. I don't know whether you can see that or not. THE PRESIDENT: Why do you say that? Q There are terrorist bombings every single day. It's now a daily event. It wasn't like that two years ago. THE PRESIDENT: What was it like September the 11th, 2001? It was a -- there was a relative calm, we -- Q But it's your response to Iraq that's considered -- THE PRESIDENT: Let me finish. Let me finish, please. Please. You ask the questions and I'll answer them, if you don't mind. On September the 11th, 2001, we were attacked in an unprovoked fashion. Everybody thought the world was calm. And then there have been bombings since then -- not because of my response to Iraq. There were bombings in Madrid. There were bombings in Istanbul. There were bombings in Bali. There were killings in Pakistan. Q Indeed, Mr. President, and I think Irish people understand that. But I think there is a feeling that the world has become a more dangerous place because you have taken the focus off al Qaeda and diverted into Iraq. Do you not see that the world is a more dangerous place? I saw four of your soldiers lying dead on the television the other day, a picture of four soldiers just lying there without their flight jackets. THE PRESIDENT: Listen, nobody cares more about the death than I do -- Q Is there a point or place -- THE PRESIDENT: Let me finish, please. Please. Let me finish, and then you can follow up, if you don't mind. Nobody cares more about the deaths than I do. I care about it a lot. But I do believe the world is a safer place and becoming a safer place. I know that a free Iraq is going to be a necessary part of changing the world. Listen, people join terrorist organizations because there's no hope and there's no chance to raise their families in a peaceful world where there is not freedom. And so the idea is to promote freedom, and at the same time protect our security. And I do believe the world is becoming a better place, absolutely. Q Mr. President, you are a man who has a great faith in God. I've heard you say many
[pjnews] A Eulogy For Our Marlon Brando
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0702-14.htm A Eulogy For Our Marlon Brando by Dave Zirin Marlon Brando's death at the age of 80 will begin a battle over how the greatest actor of all time will be remembered. Some will focus on his latter day isolation, his bizarre behavior, and the many personal tragedies that befell his family. Others will focus exclusively on his iconic status, and when it comes to Brando performances, icons abound. There was the 1950s motorcycle rebel from The Wild One (1954), or the brutal Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) or Terry I Coulda Been a Contender Malloy in On the Waterfront (1954). or his performance as Vito Corleone in The Godfather. Then there is Brando's influence on acting itself. In a Hollywood built around movie stars Brando was at the vanguard of a new generation of performers in the aftermath of World War II schooled in Stanislavsky's Method acting style. Taught by Stella Adler and Lee Strasberg at the Actor's Studio in New York, The Method was a rejection of the Spencer Tracy approach to drama of Just memorize your lines and don't bump into the furniture. Emotional honesty and becoming your character were the hallmarks of this style It was an attempt to use art to break out of what was seen as a stultifying and frustration gray haze of early 1950s America. Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino, Laurence Fishburne, Sean Penn, and countless others count Brando as their primary influence. But the Brando I want to remember, especially now, is the actor who pulled back in the 1960s to focus on supporting the Civil Rights Movement and the broader struggles against war and oppression. In 1959, he was a founding member of the Hollywood chapter of SANE, an anti-nuclear arms group formed alongside African-American performers Harry Belafonte and Ossie Davis. In 1963, Brando marched arm in arm with James Baldwin at the March on Washington. He, along with Paul Newman, went down South with the freedom riders to desegregate inter-State bus lines. In defiance of state law, Native Americans protested the denial of treaty rights by fishing the Puyallup River on March 2, 1964. Inspired by the civil rights movement sit-ins, Brando, Episcopal clergyman John Yaryan from San Francisco, and Puyallup tribal leader Bob Satiacum caught salmon in the Puyallup without state permits. The action was called a fish-in and resulted in Brando's arrest. When Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in 1968, Brando announced that he was bowing out of the lead role of a major film and would now devote himself to the civil rights movement. Brando said If the vacuum formed by Dr. King's death isn't filled with concern and understanding and a measure of love, then I think we all are really going to be lost.. He gave money and spoke out in defense of the Black Panthers and counted Bobby Seale as a close friend and attended the memorial for slain prison leader George Jackson. Southern theater chains boycotted his films, and Hollywood created what became known as the 'Brando Black List' that shut him out of many big time roles. After making a comeback in Godfather, Brando won his second Oscar. Instead of accepting what he called a door prize, he sent up Native American activist Sacheen Littlefeather to refuse befuddled presenter Roger Moore and issue a scathing speech about the Federal Government's treatment of Native Americans. Even in the past several years, he has lent his name and bank account to those fighting the US war and occupation in Iraq. So how do we remember Brando? He was a celebrity, an artist, an activist, and at the end an isolated and destroyed old man. It is tragic that we live in a world where most people's talents never get to see the light of day. It is equally tragic that those like Brando who actually get the opportunity to spread their creative wings, can be consumed and yanked apart in process. Yet whether Brando was on the top of Hollywood or alone and embittered, he never forgot what side he was on. Dave Zirin is the Editor of the Prince George's Post in Prince George's County Maryland. He can be reached at [EMAIL PROTECTED] His sports writing can be read at http://www.edgeofsports.com.
[pjnews] 1/2 Gore: Democracy Itself is in Grave Danger
OUR FOUNDERS AND THE UNBALANCE OF POWER: Democracy Itself is in Grave Danger by Al Gore American Constitution Society Georgetown University Law Center June 24, 2004 When we Americans first began, our biggest danger was clearly in view: we knew from the bitter experience with King George III that the most serious threat to democracy is usually the accumulation of too much power in the hands of an Executive, whether he be a King or a president. Our ingrained American distrust of concentrated power has very little to do with the character or persona of the individual who wields that power. It is the power itself that must be constrained, checked, dispersed and carefully balanced, in order to ensure the survival of freedom. In addition, our founders taught us that public fear is the most dangerous enemy of democracy because under the right circumstances it can trigger the temptation of those who govern themselves to surrender that power to someone who promises strength and offers safety, security and freedom from fear. It is an extraordinary blessing to live in a nation so carefully designed to protect individual liberty and safeguard self-governance and free communication. But if George Washington could see the current state of his generation's handiwork and assess the quality of our generation's stewardship at the beginning of this twenty-first century, what do you suppose he would think about the proposition that our current president claims the unilateral right to arrest and imprison American citizens indefinitely without giving them the right to see a lawyer or inform their families of their whereabouts, and without the necessity of even charging them with any crime. All that is necessary, according to our new president is that he - the president - label any citizen an unlawful enemy combatant, and that will be sufficient to justify taking away that citizen's liberty - even for the rest of his life, if the president so chooses. And there is no appeal. What would Thomas Jefferson think of the curious and discredited argument from our Justice Department that the president may authorize what plainly amounts to the torture of prisoners - and that any law or treaty, which attempts to constrain his treatment of prisoners in time of war is itself a violation of the constitution our founders put together. What would Benjamin Franklin think of President Bush's assertion that he has the inherent power - even without a declaration of war by the Congress - to launch an invasion of any nation on Earth, at any time he chooses, for any reason he wishes, even if that nation poses no imminent threat to the United States. How long would it take James Madison to dispose of our current President's recent claim, in Department of Justice legal opinions, that he is no longer subject to the rule of law so long as he is acting in his role as Commander in Chief. I think it is safe to say that our founders would be genuinely concerned about these recent developments in American democracy and that they would feel that we are now facing a clear and present danger that has the potential to threaten the future of the American experiment. Shouldn't we be equally concerned? And shouldn't we ask ourselves how we have come to this point? Even though we are now attuned to orange alerts and the potential for terrorist attacks, our founders would almost certainly caution us that the biggest threat to the future of the America we love is still the endemic challenge that democracies have always faced whenever they have appeared in history - a challenge rooted in the inherent difficulty of self governance and the vulnerability to fear that is part of human nature. Again, specifically, the biggest threat to America is that we Americans will acquiesce in the slow and steady accumulation of too much power in the hands of one person. Having painstakingly created the intricate design of America, our founders knew intimately both its strengths and weaknesses, and during their debates they not only identified the accumulation of power in the hands of the executive as the long-term threat which they considered to be the most serious, but they also worried aloud about one specific scenario in which this threat might become particularly potent - that is, when war transformed America's president into our commander in chief, they worried that his suddenly increased power might somehow spill over its normal constitutional boundaries and upset the delicate checks and balances they deemed so crucial to the maintenance of liberty. That is precisely why they took extra care to parse the war powers in the constitution, assigning the conduct of war and command of the troops to the president, but retaining for the Congress the crucial power of deciding whether or not, and when, our nation might decide to go war. Indeed, this limitation on the power of the executive to make war was seen as crucially important. James Madison wrote in a letter to Thomas
[pjnews] Robert Fisk: The New, 'Free' Iraq
news odds and ends: http://snipurl.com/7lko The Sept. 11 commission, which reported no evidence of collaborative links between Iraq and al Qaeda, said on Tuesday that Vice President Dick Cheney had no more information than commission investigators to support his later assertions to the contrary. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/06/politics/06INTE.html?hp NYT: The Central Intelligence Agency was told by relatives of Iraqi scientists before the war that Baghdad's programs to develop unconventional weapons had been abandoned, but the C.I.A. failed to give that information to President Bush, even as he publicly warned of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's illicit weapons, according to government officials. http://snipurl.com/7lkp Extreme Security Precautions During Bush's Recent Trip to Ireland: This carry-on has been going on for six weeks, one exasperated citizen told The Irish Times. The amount of money being spent would keep Ennis Hospital going for 10 years. Another non-fan had this to say: This is typical of the Americans and their contempt for everything from the International Court of Human Rights to the U.N. This is how they operate. http://snipurl.com/7ll3 excerpt: U.S. soldiers and Iraqi police in Baqubah last week launched one of their first post-occupation missions: a late-night raid on a village in a palm grove south of the city. Iraqi Gen. Walid Khalid, who oversees police in Baqubah and the larger Diyala province, picked up a tip that foreign fighters were hiding in some houses in the village. The Americans organized a raid with about 80 soldiers and four Bradley fighting vehicles. Three Iraqi police officers were ordered to participate. When soldiers arrived at the first house, they broke down the front door, handcuffed bleary-eyed residents and ordered them at gunpoint into the front yard for questioning. OK, just tell them what we're doing here, a U.S. soldier told one of the Iraqi policemen, who was also serving as interpreter. The policeman - wearing a black ski mask to hide his identify - paused for a moment, and then asked the soldier, What are you doing here? Searching for foreign fighters! the exasperated soldier shot back. An hour later, more than 15 homes had been searched and no foreigners were found. It looks like we've got some bad intelligence here, Capt. Ty Johnson, leader of the Brigade Reconnaissance Troop, radioed his commanders back at the U.S. base. I suggest we finish up and leave. We're going to end up pissing the town off and making these people into insurgents. related story: http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0706-04.htm USA Today- Data Suggests Bush Administration Has Been Exaggerating Role of Foreign Insurgents in Iraq - http://www.robert-fisk.com/articles408.htm Independent-U.K. 4 July 2004 So This is What They Call the New, 'Free' Iraq: Americans hold Saddam Hussein. Americans ran the court in which he appeared. Americans censored the tapes of the hearing. Who do you think is running the country? by Robert Fisk In his last hours as US proconsul in Baghdad, Paul Bremer decided to tighten up some of the laws that his occupation authority had placed across the land of Iraq. He drafted a new piece of legislation forbidding Iraqi motorists to drive with only one hand on the wheel. Another document solemnly announced that it would henceforth be a crime for Iraqis to sound their car horns except in an emergency. That same day, three American soldiers were torn apart by a roadside bomb north of Baghdad, one of more than 60 attacks on US forces over the weekend. And all the while, Mr Bremer was worrying about the standards of Iraqi driving. It would be difficult to find a more preposterous - and chilling - symbol of Mr Bremer's failures, his hopeless inability to understand the nature of the débâcle that he and his hopeless occupation authority have brought about. It's not that the old Coalition Provisional Authority - now transmogrified into the 3,000-strong US embassy - was out of touch. It didn't even live on Planet Earth. Mr Bremer's last starring moment came when he departed Baghdad on a US military aircraft, with two US-paid mercenaries - rifles pointed menacingly at camera crews and walking backwards - protecting him until the cabin door closed. And Mr Bremer, remember, was appointed to his job because he was an anti-terrorist expert. Most of the American CPA men who have cleared out of Baghdad are doing what we always suspected they would do when they had finished trying to put a US ideological brand name on new Iraq; they have headed off to Washington to work for the Bush election campaign. But those left behind in the international zone - those we have to pretend are no longer an occupation authority - make no secret of their despair. The ideology is gone. The ambitions are gone. We've no aims left, one of them said last week. We're living from one day to the next. All we're trying to do now - our only goal - is to
[pjnews] Health Versus Wealth
http://snipurl.com/7ngj Health Versus Wealth By PAUL KRUGMAN, New York Times 9 July 2004 Will actual policy issues play any role in this election? Not if the White House can help it. But if some policy substance does manage to be heard over the clanging of conveniently timed terror alerts, voters will realize that they face some stark choices. Here's one of them: tax cuts for the very well-off versus health insurance. John Kerry has proposed an ambitious health care plan that would extend coverage to tens of millions of uninsured Americans, while reducing premiums for the insured. To pay for that plan, Mr. Kerry wants to rescind recent tax cuts for the roughly 3 percent of the population with incomes above $200,000. George Bush regards those tax cuts as sacrosanct. I'll talk about his health care policies, such as they are, in another column. Considering its scope, Mr. Kerry's health plan has received remarkably little attention. So let me talk about two of its key elements. First, the Kerry plan raises the maximum incomes under which both children and parents are eligible to receive benefits from Medicaid and the State Children's Health Insurance Program. This would extend coverage to many working-class families, who often fall into a painful gap: they earn too much money to qualify for government help, but not enough to pay for health insurance. As a result, the Kerry plan would probably end a national scandal, the large number of uninsured American children. Second, the Kerry plan would provide reinsurance for private health plans, picking up 75 percent of the medical bills exceeding $50,000 a year. Although catastrophic medical expenses strike only a tiny fraction of Americans each year, they account for a sizeable fraction of health care costs. By relieving insurance companies and H.M.O.'s of this risk, the government would drive down premiums by 10 percent or more. This is a truly good idea. Our society tries to protect its members from the consequences of random misfortune; that's why we aid the victims of hurricanes, earthquakes and terrorist attacks. Catastrophic health expenses, which can easily drive a family into bankruptcy, fall into the same category. Yet private insurers try hard, and often successfully, to avoid covering such expenses. (That's not a moral condemnation; they are, after all, in business.) All this does is pass the buck: in the end, the Americans who can't afford to pay huge medical bills usually get treatment anyway, through a mixture of private and public charity. But this happens only after treatments are delayed, families are driven into bankruptcy and insurers spend billions trying not to provide care. By directly assuming much of the risk of catastrophic illness, the government can avoid all of this waste, and it can eliminate a lot of suffering while actually reducing the amount that the nation spends on health care. Still, the Kerry plan will require increased federal spending. Kenneth Thorpe of Emory University, an independent health care expert who has analyzed both the Kerry and Bush plans, puts the net cost of the plan to the federal government at $653 billion over the next decade. Is that a lot of money? Not compared with the Bush tax cuts: the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that if these cuts are made permanent, as the administration wants, they will cost $2.8 trillion over the next decade. The Kerry campaign contends that it can pay for its health care plan by rolling back only the cuts for taxpayers with incomes above $200,000. The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, which has become the best source for tax analysis now that the Treasury Department's Office of Tax Policy has become a propaganda agency, more or less agrees: it estimates the revenue gain from the Kerry tax plan at $631 billion over the next decade. What are the objections to the Kerry plan? One is that it falls far short of the comprehensive overhaul our health care system really needs. Another is that by devoting the proceeds of a tax-cut rollback to health care, Mr. Kerry fails to offer a plan to reduce the budget deficit. But on both counts Mr. Bush is equally, if not more, vulnerable. And Mr. Kerry's plan would help far more people than it would hurt. If we ever get a clear national debate about health care and taxes, I don't see how President Bush will win it. - Teacher Arrested At New York's Kennedy Airport today, an individual later discovered to be a public school teacher was arrested trying to board a flight while in possession of a ruler, a protractor, a setsquare, a slide rule, and a calculator. At a morning press conference, Attorney General John Ashcroft said he believes the man is a member of the notorious al-gebra movement. He is being charged by the FBI with carrying weapons of math instruction. Al-gebra is a fearsome cult, Ashcroft said. They desire average solutions by means and extremes, and sometimes go off on tangents in a
[pjnews] In Place of Gunfire, a Rain of Rocks
http://snipurl.com/7op3 NYT: The Senate's report on prewar intelligence about Iraq, which asserts that warnings about its illicit weapons were largely unfounded and that its ties to Al Qaeda were tenuous, also undermines another justification for the war: that Saddam Hussein's military posed a threat to regional stability and American interests. http://www.alternet.org/story/19190/ Scott Ritter: Facing the Enemy on the Ground in Iraq http://snipurl.com/7opi AP: Iraq Insurgency Larger Than Thought http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/071104Z.shtml U.S. News Obtains All Classified Annexes to the Taguba Report on Abu Ghraib The most comprehensive view yet of what went wrong at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, based on a review of all 106 classified annexes to the report of Major General Antonio Taguba, shows abuses were facilitated - and likely encouraged - by a chaotic and dangerous environment made worse by constant pressure from Washington to squeeze intelligence from detainees... - http://snipurl.com/7opg In Place of Gunfire, a Rain of Rocks U.S. Troops in Sadr City Struggle to Help an Angry, Defiant Populace By Scott Wilson Washington Post Foreign Service Friday, July 9, 2004 BAGHDAD, July 8 -- Preparing for a morning patrol, Sgt. Adam Brantley surveyed his perch in the gunner's nest of an armored Humvee. In front of him was a machine gun mounted on a swivel. His M-4 rifle lay on the roof next to it. Brantley stepped down and stooped in the dust, searching for rocks the size of baseballs. He collected a few handfuls and piled them next to his rifle. His convoy pulled into the smoky streets of Sadr City. I don't throw unless thrown upon, said Brantley, 24, who would have cause to do so in the next few hours as rocks thrown from side streets banged against the Humvee. In the context of Iraq's continuing violence, it is perhaps a measure of progress that U.S. soldiers working in a slum on Baghdad's barren eastern edge are feeling the sting of stones more often than bullets. Only weeks ago, U.S. soldiers were fighting -- and, in some cases, dying -- to put down an armed Shiite uprising on the same streets. But the daily rock fights between U.S. soldiers and ordinary Iraqis, many of them children, highlight the mutual antipathy that has built up since the handover of political power to an Iraqi government. Although often-intense fighting continues in some regions, the U.S. military occupation of Sadr City, as observed in four days on patrol with a U.S. Army unit, has evolved into a grinding daily confrontation between frustrated American soldiers and a desperate population. After 15 months of halting progress on U.S.-funded reconstruction projects, many Iraqis who once supported the U.S. invasion are resisting the military occupation, a fight that features gangs of impoverished children as an angry, exasperating vanguard. The strain of the hostility on U.S. soldiers is palpable and poses huge risks to the completion of millions of dollars in reconstruction work designed to help stabilize Iraq. In heat that hovers near 115 degrees, troops overseeing projects to bring clean water to neighborhoods awash in raw sewage are greeted by jeering mobs. Swarms of teenagers and children pump their fists in praise of Moqtada Sadr, the Shiite cleric whose militia has killed eight soldiers and wounded scores more from the 1st Cavalry Division battalion responsible for Sadr City's security and civic improvement. In April, during an uprising in Sadr City, the division estimated that it killed hundreds of Sadr's militiamen. Candy, once gleefully accepted in this part of Baghdad, is now thrown back at the soldiers dispensing it. The military partnership with new Iraqi security forces appears to be foundering on a mutual lack of respect. The Iraqi police occasionally ignore U.S. orders, described as recommendations by U.S. commanders in the days since the handover, to conduct night patrols in troublesome districts and prohibit Sadr's militants from manning traffic checkpoints. The Iraqi National Guard has refused dangerous assignments, even when accompanied by U.S. troops. Lt. Col. Gary Volesky, commander of the division's 2nd Battalion, 5th Cavalry Regiment of the 1st Brigade in Sadr City, said there was much to be done to demonstrate to the Iraqi people that the Army has come to help them. We've been here a year and they haven't seen much progress, he said. That's our challenge. Volesky, an energetic commander admired by his troops, delivered that assessment one recent morning from the roof of the Karama police station. Bombed by Sadr militants in June, the two-story building appears at the moment to be defying gravity. The facade lies in rubble, and the exposed second-story floor sags like an old mattress. Volesky was making a keep-your-chin-up visit, and the Iraqi police officers appeared surprised to see him. They escorted him through the wreckage of the building, which has no electricity and which
