see also: A Real Senior Moment
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=17231


fwd...

Dear MoveOn member,

For years, Democratic lawmakers have been working to make sure that
seniors have access to prescription drugs and reasonable healthcare.
Now, in an attempt to score political points, the Republican
Congressional leadership is pushing through a bill that appears to
offer a solution.  Actually, the bill undermines the entire Medicare
program, pushing people into the very HMOs which contribute heavily to
Republican lawmakers and barring the government from negotiating for
lower drug prices.

Given the danger to seniors, one might expect that the millions-strong
American Association of Retired People (AARP) to be on the case.
But after huge contributions from pharmaceutical companies and HMOs,
and pressure from Republican lawmakers, the AARP is selling out its
membership and backing the bill.

In response, 85 members of Congress (so far) have canceled their AARP
memberships, or announced that they will never join (if they're not
yet old enough to be eligible). [1]  Today, we urge you to do the
same.  If the AARP won't stand up for the elderly when it comes to
health care, what good is it?  You can reach the AARP at:

   National hotline: 1-800-424-3410

If you're a member, tell them you're quitting.

If you're too young to be eligible, tell them you'll never join.

You also may want to let your Representative and Senators know that
you're keeping the AARP accountable.  You could also tell them
that you expect them to demand real health care reform -- not this
industry-backed bill.

[You can find the names and numbers of your members of Congress at:
http://www.vote-smart.org/]

The AARP has endorsed a bill that would make two fundamental changes
in Medicare:

1. First, it would force people to make a stark choice: either pay
   sharply increased premiums to stay in traditional Medicare, where
   they can choose their doctor; or be forced out, into an HMO.

   Newt Gingrich, the former House Republican leader, said in 1995
   that he wanted to let Medicare to "wither on the vine."  This
   change would lead to that result, with cost incentives driving
   people out.  (Not coincidentally, AARP CEO William Novelli
   recently wrote the forward to Gingrich's book. [2])

2. Second, it offers a prescription drug benefit, but requires people
   who want this coverage to buy it from private insurance plans.

   This part of the bill also bars the government from doing the one
   thing it could do to actually reduce the cost of these drugs --
   negotiate for lower prices, using the size of the Medicare program
   as leverage.  Drug prices are soaring now, and unless they're
   brought under control, they will eventually bankrupt Medicare.

   AARP itself sells insurance and also sells prescription drugs, so
   the group stands to reap huge financial gains from this change.

The bill has been opposed by a host of liberal groups [3] as well as
by major conservative groups, including the Club for Growth, The
Heritage Foundation, the American Conservative Union, The Cato
Institute, and the National Taxpayers Union.  It's also been assailed
by virtually every one of the Democratic presidential candidates. [4]

In endorsing this bill, the AARP has broken faith with its members. In
a recent poll, 65% of AARP members said they're opposed to it. [5]
The group has also violated its own written principles.  In July, CEO
William Novelli wrote to Congress stating the requirements for AARP's
support of a Medicare bill. [6]  Yet the bill AARP has just endorsed
fails to meet nine separate requirements stated in that letter. [7]

We need to hold the AARP responsible for selling out its members.  If
the organization sees sufficient backlash from its members and
prospective members, it could still change course and effect the
outcome of this legislation.  Please call your local AARP branch
today.

Sincerely,
--Carrie, Eli, James, Joan, Noah, Peter, Wes, and Zack
  The MoveOn.org Team
  November 20th, 2003

-----

[1] 85 Representatives wrote to Novelli, canceling their memberships:
http://www.moveon.org/HouseAARPletter.pdf

[2] From the foreword by Novelli to Gingrich's new book, "Saving Lives
    and Saving Dollars".

[3] See http://www.moveon.org/medicare.html for a complete list of
organizations.

[4] See:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54358-2003Nov17.html

[5] Poll: a majority of AARP members oppose the Medicare bill:
http://www.moveon.org/Medicaresurveypr.pdf

[6] AARP July letter on minimum acceptable standards
http://www.aarp.org/Articles/a2003-08-18-drugbenefitinmedicare.html

[7] How AARP goes back on its word
http://www.house.gov/schakowsky/Document_AARP_Priorities_11_17_03.html

[8] http://www.aarp.org/leadership/Articles/a2002-12-18-aarpfactsheet.html
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Subject: [pjnews] NYT: F.B.I. Scrutinizes Antiwar Rallies
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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 at these events. We know that
there are anarchists that are actively involved in trying to sabotage and
commit acts of violence at these different events, and we also know that
these large gatherings would be a prime target for terrorist groups."

Civil rights advocates, relying largely on anecdotal evidence, have
complained for months that federal officials have surreptitiously sought
to suppress the First Amendment rights of antiwar demonstrators.

Critics of the Bush administration's Iraq policy, for instance, have sued
the government to learn how their names ended up on a "no fly" list used
to stop suspected terrorists from boarding planes. Civil rights advocates
have accused federal and local authorities in Denver and Fresno, Calif.,
of spying on antiwar demonstrators or infiltrating planning meetings. And
the New York Police Department this year questioned many of those arrested
at demonstrations about their political affiliations, before halting the
practice and expunging the data in the face of public criticism.

The F.B.I. memorandum, however, appears to offer the first corroboration
of a coordinated, nationwide effort to collect intelligence regarding
demonstrations.

The memorandum, circulated on Oct. 15 — just 10 days before many thousands
gathered in Washington and San Francisco to protest the American
occupation of Iraq — noted that the bureau "possesses no information
indicating that violent or terrorist activities are being planned as part
of these protests" and that "most protests are peaceful events."

But it pointed to violence at protests against the International Monetary
Fund and the World Bank as evidence of potential disruption. Law
enforcement officials said in interviews that they had become particularly
concerned about the ability of antigovernment groups to exploit
demonstrations and promote a violent agenda.

"What a great opportunity for an act of terrorism, when all your resources
are dedicated to some big event and you let your guard down," a law
enforcement official involved in securing recent demonstrations said.
"What would the public say if we didn't look for criminal activity and
intelligence at these events?"

The memorandum urged local law enforcement officials "to be alert to these
possible indicators of protest activity and report any potentially illegal
acts" to counterterrorism task forces run by the F.B.I. It warned about an
array of threats, including homemade bombs and the formation of human
chains.

The memorandum discussed demonstrators' "innovative strategies," like the
videotaping of arrests as a means of "intimidation" against the police.
And it noted that protesters "often use the Internet to recruit, raise
funds and coordinate their activities prior to demonstrations."

"Activists may also make use of training camps to rehearse tactics and
counter-strategies for dealing with the police and to resolve any
logistical issues," the memorandum continued. It also noted that
protesters may raise money to help pay for lawyers for those arrested.

F.B.I. counterterrorism officials developed the intelligence cited in the
memorandum through firsthand observation, informants, public sources like
the Internet and other methods, officials said.

Officials said the F.B.I. treats demonstrations no differently than other
large-scale and vulnerable gatherings. The aim, they said, was not to
monitor protesters but to gather intelligence.

Critics said they remained worried. "What the F.B.I. regards as potential
terrorism," Mr. Romero of the A.C.L.U. said, "strikes me as civil
disobedience."
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http://lists.essential.org/pipermail/corp-focus/2003/000167.html

Howard Clinton?
By Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman

Howard Dean is a man with strong Clinton-esque tendencies.

He's a self-described triangulator.

Say good words about the environment.

Take some positive action.

Schmooze with the environmentalists.

But when push comes to shove, don't offend the powers that be.

Mark Sinclair is an senior attorney with the Conservation Law Foundation
in Vermont.

Sinclair was dismissed in 2001 from Dean's Council of Environmental
Advisers because of his criticisms of the Governor.

Sinclair says that two utilities in Vermont -- Green Mountain Power and
Central Vermont Public Service -- along with IBM -- control the state.

"Dean is in the pockets of the utilities and of IBM," Sinclair told us.
"Whatever the major economic interest, he's beholden to them."

"During his years as Governor, there was a large controversy over our
ski areas," Sinclair said. "He supported their major expansion, which
has resulted in ski mountain sprawl in places like Killington, Stowe
Mountain Resort, Stratton Mountain."

"Dean wasn't standing up for sustainable development," Sinclair said.
"During his watch, we saw a lot more sprawl and strip development."

Despite his professed love of rail transit, Dean pushed development of a
major highway project around Burlington, even though he knew it would be
disastrous for land use planners.

IBM wanted it, so Dean went along.

Why did IBM want it?

According to Sinclair, IBM has a major facility in the area and Big Blue
wanted to make the taxpayers pay for the road improvements.

This is one thing that Bush's EPA and Dean agree on -- build the beltway
around Burlington. The environmental community in Vermont is opposed.

The Burlington highway fight is typical of Dean. He actually cares about
light rail, and prefers it to more highways, according to Sinclair. But
when push came to shove, he didn't dare stand up to IBM's demands.

Sinclair says that Dean understands the problem of sprawl -- he gets it.

 But time and again, he "refused to stand up and allow his regulators to
stand up and say no to sprawl."

Dean lured a major Canadian plastics company -- the Husky Company -- to
Vermont. Governor Dean allowed them to build on farmlands outside the
town of Milton – north of Burlington.

"Instead of telling that developer to build in an industrial park, he
showed them a greenfield and allowed them to build in a greenfield,"
Sinclair said. "Convert farmfields into pavement. Once again, when there
was a conflict between sprawl and big development, the Governor Dean
sided with big development."

After Dean's tenure, the Green Mountain State came to look just like the
rest of the country.

"He doesn't believe in land use planning, and provided no funding for
Vermont's towns to do the planning they need," Sinclair said. "As a
result, Vermont reacts to development. The only reason we don't look
like Maryland is because we are a colder climate and people are just
discovering us."

Elizabeth Courtney of the Vermont Natural Resources Council also had her
run-ins with Governor Dean.

Dean dismissed Courtney in 2001 from the Governor's Council of
Environmental Advisers because of an article she wrote for the
Burlington Free Press. In the article, Courtney was critical of Governor
Dean's plan to bring a coal-powered electric generation plant to
northern Vermont. The coal powered plant never materialized.

Sinclair has had many dealings with the Governor and doesn't like his style.

"He very much knows what he thinks," Sinclair says. "He doesn't listen
very well. He's very sure of himself. He shoots from the hip a lot. He
doesn't believe in surrounding himself with a lot of strong leaders.
He's smart, so he seems to know what the public wants to hear."


Russell Mokhiber is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate Crime
Reporter, http://www.corporatecrimereporter.com. Robert Weissman is
editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Multinational Monitor,
http://www.multinationalmonitor.org. They are co-authors of Corporate
Predators: The Hunt for MegaProfits and the Attack on Democracy (Monroe,
Maine: Common Courage Press; http://www.corporatepredators.org).
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If you already read the other article I sent today, this article takes a
very different view...


http://www.truthout.org/docs_03/102203A.shtml

Anyone But Bush
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

  Wednesday 22 October 2003

  Looking at both sides of the debate over the looming 2004 Presidential
campaign, one finds weirdness on both sides of the political aisle. 
>From the mouths of those who advocate for the current administration, we
find this feigned outrage directed at those who criticize George W.
Bush.  The critics, we are told, have no substance to them.  They just
hate Bush for the sake of simple hatred.  Many who argue from the
liberal/progressive realm, conversely, cast their eyes across the nine
Democratic candidates for the office and find each and every one of them
sorely wanting in one way or another.

  In other words, liberals just hate Bush because they just hate Bush, and
simultaneously dislike all the Democratic candidates because they do not
pass the purity test.  Those within the liberal realm who argue the
'ABBA' perspective ('ABBA' being the 'Anyone But Bush Association') are
denounced by a segment of their fellow liberals for having no standards,
no morals, no integrity.

  ABBA people tend to be upfront about the fact that they would vote for a
baloney sandwich before voting Bush in 2004.  This does not pass the
smell test for many of their fellow progressives.  Has the baloney
sandwich ever held office before?  Does the baloney sandwich have a
record it can run on?  Did the baloney sandwich vote for the Iraq war? 
Did the baloney sandwich vote for the Patriot Act?  Where does the
baloney sandwich stand on the Israel/Palestine issue?

  Et cetera.

  There is no doubt that these are important issues, and there is no doubt
that ABBA advocates will have to swallow a degree of their liberal
integrity when they stand to support whomever wins the Democratic
nomination in Boston this coming summer.  Yet the conservative defenses
of Bush and his 'haters,' along with liberal denunciations of the ABBA
perspective as being without integrity, do not pass my own personal
smell test.

  The thing is, the conservative White House defenders are spot-on correct
about one thing.  I despise George W. Bush.  I despise his Vice
President, his Senior Political Advisor, his Chief of Staff, his Defense
Secretary, his Assistant Defense Secretary, his Attorney General, his
National Security Advisor, and his chosen Ambassador to the United
Nations.  Those names, in case you are confused, are Cheney, Rove, Card,
Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Ashcroft, Rice and Negroponte.

  I despise his Congressional allies, who have shredded their
constitutional duties by refusing to investigate a variety of incredible
crimes.  For the record, these crimes include the fabrication of Iraq
war evidence, the outing of a WMD-hunting CIA agent in an act of
political revenge, and the serious questions about how four commercial
aircraft fooled the entire domestic defense shield and the entire
intelligence community long enough to kill three thousand people.

  I despise any and all of his people who fanned out two years ago to
pound into the American consciousness the idea that criticizing Bush is
treason.  If you think that is over, take a gander at the first
paragraph of an editorial entitled 'Kennedy, Other Critics, Are
Traitors' that appeared today in a local Philadelphia paper called the
Daily Local.  The author, one Harlan "Buck" Ross, does an admirable job
of describing the attitude the Bush administration has about its
critics:

  "According to my dictionary a 'traitor' is a person who behaves
disloyally; one who betrays his country. What I hear from U.S. Sen.
Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., is nothing short of traitorous. The nine (10?)
would-be candidates for the presidency in 2004 are but a short distance
behind him with their ranting and raving and irresponsible blaspheming
of the president of the United States."

  Call me old-fashioned, but I could have sworn that one can only
blaspheme against God.  When criticism of this President, or any
President, is rhetorically raised to the level of blasphemy, we the
people have an enormous problem on our hands.

  Yeah, I hate them all.  Do I hate for the simple sake of hatred?  Do I
hate Bush because he is a Republican, a Texan, a white male, a
meat-eater?  Certainly not.  I hate George W. Bush and all of his people
because they have done an incredible amount of damage to this nation I
hold so dear.  I hate them because they are professional liars, thieves,
brigands without conscience.  I hate them, fully and completely, on the
record.

  They lied about the need for this war.  If you won't take it from me,
take it from an avowed conservative and Bush voter named Paul Sperry,
who wrote an editorial entitled 'Yes, Bush Lied' on October 6.  This was
published, if you can believe it, on the ultra-right-wing website
WorldNetDaily.com, the same page that carries such luminaries as Ann
Coulter.  Feast:

  "According to the consensus of Bush's intelligence services, there was
'low confidence' before the war in the views that 'Saddam would engage
in clandestine attacks against the U.S. Homeland' or 'share chemical or
biological weapons with al-Qaida.'  Their message to the president was
clear: Saddam wouldn't help al-Qaida unless we put his back against the
wall, and even then it was a big maybe. If anything, the report was a
flashing yellow light against attacking Iraq.  Bush saw the warning, yet
completely ignored it and barreled ahead with the war plans he'd
approved a month earlier (Aug. 29), telling a completely different
version of the intelligence consensus to the American people. Less than
a week after the NIE was published, he warned that 'on any given day' -
provoked by attack or not, sufficiently desperate or not - Saddam could
team up with Osama and conduct a joint terrorist operation against
America using weapons of mass destruction."

  In essence, Bush used the attacks of September 11 against the American
people to gin up fear and dread, which he then used to push a war which
did not need to be fought.  Sperry, some devastating paragraphs later,
concludes:

  "Forget that Bush lied about the reasons for putting our sons and
daughters in harm's way in Iraq; and forget that he sent 140,000 troops
there with bull's-eyes on their backs, then dared their attackers to
bring it on.  It was the height of irresponsibility to have done so in
the middle of a war on al-Qaida, the real and proven threat to America.
Bush diverted those troops and other resources - including intelligence
assets, Arabic translators and hundreds of billions of tax dollars -
from the hunt for Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaida leaders along the
Afghan-Pakistani border. And now they've regrouped and are as
threatening as ever.  That's inexcusable, and Bush supporters with any
intellectual honesty and concern for their own families' safety should
be mad as hell about it - and that's coming from someone who voted for
Bush."

  Mr. Sperry, in all likelihood, will remember these gems:

  "This is a man that we know has had connections with al-Qaida. This is a
man who, in my judgment, would like to use al-Qaida as a forward army."
- Bush, October 14, 2002

  "Yes, there is a linkage between al-Qaida and Iraq." - Defense Secretary
Rumsfeld, September 26, 2002

  "There have been contacts between senior Iraqi officials and members of
al-Qaida going back for actually quite a long time." - National Security
Advisor Rice, September 25, 2002

  The list of lies this administration told is long and distinguished. 
The number of lies told specifically about Iraq - his claim in May that
"We found the weapons of mass destruction," his claim that Iraq refused
to let the inspectors in when they demonstrably had, his claims about
Iraq procuring uranium from Niger, his claims that Iraq was a
threatening nation capable of attacking within 45 minutes, the mobile
weapons labs, the aluminum tubes story, the mushroom clouds - boggle the
mind.  A few more to consider:

  * He lied about wanting Osama bin Laden "Dead or alive" in September of
2001 because he turned around that March and claimed bin Laden was of no
importance.

  * His National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice, said, "We had no way
of predicting that terrorists would hijack planes and crash them into
buildings."  This was a lie.  I have spoken to several engineers in the
building-building business.  Large buildings, and especially large
government buildings, are constructed with a number of potential
catastrophes in mind.  A purposefully crashed airplane has been on that
hazard list for a very long time.  This, in combination with the
warnings given to this administration by foreign intelligence services
that were specifically about hijacked aircraft being used as aerial
bombs, makes the whole sordid excuse reek.

  * He lied about making America a "humble nation," and lied about
"changing the tone."  America has virtually no friends left within the
international community because we have been violently belligerent
instead of humble.  The cries of "Traitor!" against administration
critics have certainly changed the tone, but for the worse.

  * He said, "By far the vast majority of my tax cuts go to the bottom end
of the spectrum."  This was a fantastic lie.  The tax cuts benefited the
vast majority of very rich people across the entire spectrum of very
rich people.  Those truly at the bottom of the spectrum received a
pittance, and have watched the social programs they depend on die from
lack of funding, because said funding was squandered by the tax cuts. 
By the end of the decade, Bush's tax cuts will substantially increase
the tax burden on middle-class families.

  * He lied when he said he did not know Mr. Enron, Ken Lay, before 1996. 
Lay was one of Bush's most generous benefactors well before 1996.  The
number of lies told about the specifics of Bush's relationship to Lay
and Enron, and the many ways Bush tried to rescue that criminal company,
would require a list that stretches around the moon.  When Bush said,
"Ken who?" after being questioned by the press about his Enron
connections, this stretched the definition of bold lying into impressive
new shapes.

  * He lied about the reasons for the attacks of September 11.  It was
"enemies who hate our freedom," and not a constellation of foreign
policy decisions made by this administration as well as its predecessors
reaching back before 1978, that caused the attack.  This lie, in
particular, is diabolical.  An American populace who are not given the
understanding that actions have consequences is an American populace
that can be easily led into an unnecessary war in the Mideast.

  * He lied when he took credit for a Patients Bill of Rights as Governor
of Texas.  In fact, he vetoed the bill.  Likewise, he took credit for
reforms to the Texas educational system that had been put in place by
Ann Richards and Mark White, among others.

  * He lied broadly and often about his military service, despite the fact
that no one in his Texas Air National Guard unit can remember laying
eyes on him for almost two years of his tour.  "I've been to war. I've
raised twins. Given a choice, I'd rather go to war," said Bush to the
Houston Chronicle on January 27, 2002.  Cute, George.  Problem: You've
never been to war.  Liar.  The swagger across the aircraft carrier, by
default, is a nauseating lie as well.

  * He lied to the entire city of New York, and to the cops, firefighters
and EMTs in particular.  He said the air in New York was fine after 9/11
when he knew from his EPA chief that it was poison.  He promised vast
new funding to the police, fire and EMT departments in New York.  Not a
dime has been provided.  It all went to the tax cuts and the Iraq
war...which means it went to Bush's wealthy allies and friends in the
defense industry.  Fancy that.

  We would be here all day if this list were constructed to be
comprehensive.  The above is representative: George W. Bush has lied
about September 11, the Iraq war, the economy, his record as governor of
Texas, his relationship with corporate criminals, and his own military
record.  In short, he has lied day after day after day about all of the
issues he and his administration claim to hold dear.

  I do not hate George W. Bush merely for the sake of hatred, or because
he is a Republican.  I hate him because he is a cancer that is rotting
out the guts of this country.  I hate him because he would not know the
truth if it crawled up his leg and grabbed him by the nose.  Truth does
not advance the profit motive.

  For liberals who denounce the ABBA perspective as being without
integrity, my response is simple.  Voting for anyone who can remove Mr.
Bush, his administration, and all of these deadly lies from the highest
office in the land is an act of singular integrity and patriotism.  All
hail the baloney sandwich, and never mind the blasphemy.

------------------
William Rivers Pitt is the Managing Editor of truthout.org. He is a New
York Times and international best-selling author of three books - "War On
Iraq," available from Context Books, "The Greatest Sedition is Silence,"
available from Pluto Press, and "Our Flag, Too: The Paradox of
Patriotism," available in August from Context Books.
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LINKING THE OCCUPATION OF IRAQ WITH THE “WAR ON TERRORISM”
By Norman Solomon     /     Creators Syndicate

     Reuters is one of the more independent wire services. So, a recent
news story from Reuters -- flatly describing American military
activities in Iraq as part of “the broader U.S. war on terrorism” -- is
a barometer of how powerfully the pressure systems of rhetoric from top
U.S. officials have swayed mainstream news coverage.

     Such reporting, with the matter-of-fact message that the Pentagon
is fighting a “war on terrorism” in Iraq, amounts to a big journalistic
gift for the Bush administration, which is determined to spin its way
past the obvious downsides of the occupation.

     Here are the concluding words from Bush’s point man in Iraq, Paul
Bremer, during a Nov. 17 interview on NPR’s “Morning Edition” program:
“The president was absolutely firm both in private and in public that
he is not going to let any other issues distract us from achieving our
goals here in Iraq, that we will stay here until the job is done and
that the force levels will be determined by the conditions on the
ground and the war on terrorism.”

     Within hours, many of Bremer’s supervisors were singing from the
same political hymnal:

     *  On a visit to Europe, Colin Powell told a French newspaper that
“Afghanistan and Iraq are two theaters in the global war on terrorism.”

     *  In Washington, President Bush said: “We fully recognize that
Iraq has become a new front on the war on terror.”

     *  Speaking to campaign contributors in Buffalo, the vice
president pushed the envelope of deception. “Iraq is now the central
front in the war on terror,” Dick Cheney declared.

     Whether you’re selling food from McDonald’s or cars from General
Motors or a war from the U.S. government, repetition is crucial for
making propaganda stick. Bush’s promoters will never tire of depicting
the war on Iraq as a war on terrorism. And they certainly appreciate
the ongoing assists from news media.

     For the U.S. public, the mythological link between the occupation
of Iraq and the “war on terrorism” is in play. This fall, repeated
polling has found a consistent breakout of opinion. In mid-November,
according to a CBS News poll, 46 percent of respondents said that the
war in Iraq is a major part of the “war on terrorism,” while 14 percent
called it a minor part and 35 percent saw them as two separate matters.

     A shift in such perceptions, one way or another, could be crucial
for Bush’s election hopes. In large measure -- particularly at
psychological levels -- Bush sold the invasion of Iraq as a move
against “terrorism.” If he succeeds at framing the occupation as such,
he’ll get a big boost toward a second term.

     Despite the Bush administration’s countless efforts to imply or
directly assert otherwise, no credible evidence has ever emerged to
link 9/11 or Al Qaeda with the regime of Saddam Hussein.

     Now, if “terrorism” is going to be used as an umbrella term so
large that it covers attacks on military troops occupying a country,
then the word becomes nothing more than an instrument of propaganda.

     Often the coverage in U.S. news media sanitizes the human
consequences -- and yes, the terror -- of routine actions by the
occupiers. On Wednesday, the U.S. military announced that it had
dropped a pair of 2,000-pound bombs 30 miles northeast of Baghdad.
Meanwhile, to the north, near the city of Kirkuk, the U.S. Air Force
used 1,000-pound bombs -- against “terrorist targets,” an American
officer told reporters.

     Clearly, the vast majority of the people dying in these attacks
are Iraqis who are no more “terrorists” than many Americans would be if
foreign troops were occupying the United States. But U.S. news outlets
sometimes go into raptures of praise as they describe the high-tech
arsenal of the occupiers.

     On Nov. 17, at the top of the front page of the New York Times, a
color photo showed a gunner aiming his formidable weapon downward from
a Black Hawk helicopter, airborne over Baghdad. Underneath the picture
was an article lamenting the recent setbacks in Iraq for such U.S.
military aircraft. “In two weeks,” the article said, “the Black Hawks
and Chinooks and Apaches that once zoomed overhead with such grace and
panache have suddenly become vulnerable.”

     “Grace” and “panache.” Attributed to no one, the words appeared in
a prominent mash note about machinery of death from the New York Times,
a newspaper that’s supposed to epitomize the highest journalistic
standards. But don’t hold your breath for a correction to appear in the
nation’s paper of record.

___________________________________

Norman Solomon’s weekly “Media Beat” column is distributed to daily
newspapers by Creators Syndicate.
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http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=17243

22 November 2003

The 9/11 cover-up:
   What did Bush know about al Quaeda threats?
        by David Corn:

It's fortunate for George W. Bush he has a mess on his hands in Iraq;
otherwise, he might have to worry about a significant cover-up coming
undone.

As matters in Iraq - rising American casualties, helicopter mishaps, and an
abrupt Bush decision to hand off political authority to an Iraqi body to be
named later - have dominated the news, a tussle between the independent
commission investigating the 9/11 attacks and the White House did attract a
short burst of media attention. It was noted on front pages that the
bipartisan 9/11 commission and the Bush administration, after weeks of
squabbling, had forged a deal regarding the commission's access to
intelligence briefings given to Bush before September 11, 2001. But the news
reports generally did not fully explain what was at stake.

The White House had refused to turn over this material to the House and
Senate intelligence committees when they were conducting a joint
investigation of 9/11, and Bush took the same position with the 9/11
commission. But when the commission - headed by former New Jersey governor
Thomas Kean, a moderate Republican appointed to the panel by Bush - raised
the prospect of subpoenaing the documents, the Bush team worked out a
compromise. It is permitting the 10-member commission limited access to
these intelligence reports, known as the President's Daily Brief (PDB). (It
helped that family members of people killed on 9/11 had protested the White
House's lack of cooperation.) The arrangement was unprecedented; this is the
sort of stuff administrations fight to the death to keep secret. But 9/11 is
different. Two Democratic commissioners (former Senator Max Cleland and
former Representative Timothy Roemer) and the Family Steering Committee, an
association of 9/11 relatives, though, blasted the agreement for imposing
tight restrictions on how the commission can use information and, most
importantly, on what it can tell the public about the material it is allowed
to see.

The accord was a partial victory for a Bush White House that has been trying
hard to conceal a key slice of the 9/11 tale: what Bush knew of the pre-9/11
intelligence warnings that al Qaeda was planning a strike against the United
States, and what Bush did (or did not do) in response to these warnings. And
the White House's deal with the commission could well enable the
administration to maintain this stonewalling.

Some background: While the World Trade Center ashes were still glowing, Bush
and his aides told the public that they had had no reason to suspect this
type of horrific attack was about to occur. Yet, as the final report of the
joint inquiry of the House and Senate intelligence committees notes, for
years the intelligence community had collected information reporting that
terrorist outfits, including al Qaeda, were interested in mounting 9/11-like
attacks - that is, hijacking airliners and crashing them into high-profile
targets in the United States. U.S. intelligence services, the Pentagon, and
the Federal Aviation Administration during the Clinton and Bush II years
apparently did not take action in response to these reports. That was a
systemic failure. Bush has never addressed it publicly, but if pressed he
could blame the bureaucrats at the CIA, the Defense Department and the FAA
for ignoring clear-and-present hints.

Bush is more vulnerable regarding warnings about al Qaeda that were sent to
the White House during his first eight months in office. In May 2002, media
reports revealed that the August 6, 2001, PDB had included material
regarding Osama bin Laden's interest in hijacking airliners. That caused a
brief controversy for Bush. And in September 2002, the House and Senate
intelligence committees disclosed that an early July 2001 intelligence
warning had noted, "We believe that [bin Laden] will launch a significant
terrorist attack against the U.S. and/or Israeli interests in coming weeks.
The attack will be spectacular and designed to inflict mass casualties
against U.S. facilities or interests. Attack preparations have been made.
Attack will occur with little or no warning."

The questions are obvious. Was this dramatic July warning shared with Bush
and his top advisers? If so, what did they do? And what did the August 6 PDB
presented to Bush actually say? How did Bush react to it?
Such queries are not necessarily difficult to resolve. To fulfill its
mission, the 9/11 commission ought to provide the answers. But the Bush
administration, to date, has acted to stop such answers from reaching the
public. When the August 6, 2001, briefing hit the headlines 18 months ago,
National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice pooh-poohed it and told reporters
that the PDB had contained merely a general warning about al Qaeda. And when
the House and Senate intelligence committees revealed the existence of the
July 2001 warning, the Bush administration refused to allow the committees
to say whether this warning had been passed to Bush and his national
security advisers. It would only let the committees report that the warning
had been furnished to unnamed senior government officials.

With these actions, the White House blocked the public from learning what
Bush had been told about the al Qaeda threat in the weeks before 9/11, and
it hid information that could cause Americans to wonder if Bush might have
not reacted to the warnings with sufficient vigor. But the preliminary
evidence is that the White House has been protecting itself. According to
the House and Senate intelligence committees' final report on 9/11, the
committees were told by an intelligence community representative that an
August 2001 intelligence report included information that bin Laden wanted
to conduct attacks in the United States, that al Qaeda members had been
residing and traveling to the United States for years and had apparently
maintained a support structure here, that bin Laden was interested in
hijacking airliners (to trade for prisoners), that the FBI had discerned
patterns of activity consistent with preparations for hijackings, and that
bin Laden supporters were planning attacks in the United States with
explosives.

That sure is different than a general warning about al Qaeda. Did this
information appear in Bush's August 6, 2001, PDB? The committees are not in
a position to say, but their staff has told reporters they strongly believe
some - if not all - of this material was included in the PDB. That suggests
that Rice misled the public about this briefing and that Bush had been
presented with more than a routine warning about al Qaeda. And one
Democratic senator on the committee told reporters (including me) that the
July warning - the one noting a "spectacular" attack loomed - had indeed
gone to senior White House officials and the president.

The current battle over Bush's PDBs is important. They can show what Bush
knew before 9/11 about al Qaeda's designs. They can provide a foundation for
evaluating - finally - whether he and the federal government acted
responsibly and reasonably in the weeks and months before the attacks. Which
is one reason why anyone with an inquiring mind should be suspicious of a
deal that does not provide the commission unfettered access to these reports
and that grants the White House the possible means to protect a serious but
little-noticed cover-up.

David Corn is the Washington editor of The Nation.
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see also: http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,4801223-103690,00.html

International lawyers and anti-war campaigners reacted with astonishment
yesterday after the influential Pentagon hawk Richard Perle conceded that
the invasion of Iraq had been illegal.

In a startling break with the official White House and Downing Street lines,
Mr Perle told an audience in London: "I think in this case international law
stood in the way of doing the right thing."...

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

21 November 2003
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article5267.htm

Gen. Franks Doubts Constitution Will Survive WMD Attack
 John O. Edwards, NewsMax.com

Friday, Nov. 21, 2003: (NewsMax) Gen. Tommy Franks says that if the United
States is hit with a weapon of mass destruction that inflicts large
casualties, the Constitution will likely be discarded in favor of a
military form of government.

Franks, who successfully led the U.S. military operation to liberate Iraq,
expressed his worries in an extensive interview he gave to the men's
lifestyle magazine Cigar Aficionado.

In the magazine's December edition, the former commander of the military's
Central Command warned that if terrorists succeeded in using a weapon of
mass destruction (WMD) against the U.S. or one of our allies, it would
likely have catastrophic consequences for our cherished republican form of
government.

Discussing the hypothetical dangers posed to the U.S. in the wake of Sept.
11, Franks said that "the worst thing that could happen" is if terrorists
acquire and then use a biological, chemical or nuclear weapon that
inflicts heavy casualties.

If that happens, Franks said, "... the Western world, the free world,
loses what it cherishes most, and that is freedom and liberty we've seen
for a couple of hundred years in this grand experiment that we call
democracy."

Franks then offered "in a practical sense" what he thinks would happen in
the aftermath of such an attack.

"It means the potential of a weapon of mass destruction and a terrorist,
massive, casualty-producing event somewhere in the Western world - it may
be in the United States of America - that causes our population to
question our own Constitution and to begin to militarize our country in
order to avoid a repeat of another mass, casualty-producing event. Which
in fact, then begins to unravel the fabric of our Constitution. Two steps,
very, very important."

Franks didn't speculate about how soon such an event might take place.

Already, critics of the U.S. Patriot Act, rushed through Congress in the
wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, have argued that the law aims to curtail
civil liberties and sets a dangerous precedent.

But Franks' scenario goes much further. He is the first high-ranking
official to openly speculate that the Constitution could be scrapped in
favor of a military form of government.

The usually camera-shy Franks retired from U.S. Central Command, known in
Pentagon lingo as CentCom, in August 2003, after serving nearly four
decades in the Army.

Franks earned three Purple Hearts for combat wounds and three Bronze Stars
for valor. Known as a "soldier's general," Franks made his mark as a top
commander during the U.S.'s successful Operation Desert Storm, which
liberated Kuwait in 1991. He was in charge of CentCom when Osama bin
Laden's al-Qaeda attacked the United States on Sept. 11.

Franks said that within hours of the attacks, he was given orders to
prepare to root out the Taliban in Afghanistan and to capture bin Laden.

[clip]
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Subject: [pjnews] Military Draft Alert and Rumor
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A response to the e-mail I sent out several days ago warning of another
military draft
(http://lists.enabled.com/pipermail/peace-justice-news/2003-November/000904.html)...

Scott


----- Original Message -----
From: "J.E. McNeil" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Thursday, November 20, 2003 9:09 AM
Subject: Draft Alert and the Rumor that will not Die


> Dear Friend--
>
> For your information,the draft boards have been staffed sincetheearly
> 1980s. However, since the maximum amount of time that anyone can serve on
a
> draft board is 20 years by law, there are a number a vacancies due merely
> to the passage of time. No member of the miltary can be a draft board
> member. Nor can any retired military. We recommend those who feel
> comfortable and not complicite to join the draft boards.
>
> The Act that you refer to is old--it was introduced with a flurry by
Rangle
> last New Year.It has been, and remains, dead in committee. Rangle (Dem
from
> Harlem)introduced it in a misguided effort to discourage further military
> action. He continues to lobby behind the scenes but does not even have the
> ability to get it out of committee, much less to the floor for a vote.
>
> The real concern has to be, from our point of view, the possibility of a
> Doctors draft and the continuing arguments that we need a draft torelieve
> the National Guard and Reserves in Iraq.  But the more we talk about a
> draft, the more likely it is to happen. If we do want to warn people about
> the possibility, it is important to be sure we have all the facts correct.
>
> We need a multilateral force in Iraq instead of a draft until we can undo
> all of the damage we have done and the only was we willget that is if the
> US is willing to relinquish total control over the process.
>
> I am sorry if this comes on a little harsh, but I have been trying to lay
> this rumor to rest ever since that twit at Darthmoth said it was
> significant because it was "the first reconstruction of draft boards since
> Vietnam." You'd think you would want to have you name attached to accurate
> information.
>
> Since I talk with Selective Service on a regular basis and my staff spends
> a great deal of time on Capitol Hill just to follow this stuff, please
> consider us a source to verify rumors about drafts. We may not be the
first
> to know, but we know who to ask. :-)
>
> Yours for Peace and Justice,
>
> J. E. McNeil
> Executive Director
> Center on Conscience & War
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Subject: [pjnews] Thanksgiving: A National Day of Mourning for Indians
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For more info on the National Day of Mourning, see the website of the
United American Indians of New England at:
http://home.earthlink.net/%7Euainendom/


Thanksgiving: A National Day of Mourning for Indians
by Moonanum James and Mahtowin Munro

Every year since 1970, United American Indians of New England have
organized the National Day of Mourning observance in Plymouth at noon on
Thanksgiving Day. Every year, hundreds of Native people and our supporters
from all four directions join us. Every year, including this year, Native
people from throughout the Americas will speak the truth about our history
and about current issues and struggles we are involved in.

Why do hundreds of people stand out in the cold rather than sit home eating
turkey and watching football? Do we have something against a harvest
festival?

Of course not. But Thanksgiving in this country -- and in particular in
Plymouth --is much more than a harvest home festival. It is a celebration
of the pilgrim mythology.

According to this mythology, the pilgrims arrived, the Native people fed
them and welcomed them, the Indians promptly faded into the background,
and
everyone lived happily ever after.

The truth is a sharp contrast to that mythology.

The pilgrims are glorified and mythologized because the circumstances of
the first English-speaking colony in Jamestown were frankly too ugly (for
example, they turned to cannibalism to survive) to hold up as an effective
national myth. The pilgrims did not find an empty land any more than
Columbus "discovered" anything. Every inch of this land is Indian land.
The pilgrims (who did not even call themselves pilgrims) did not come here
seeking religious freedom; they already had that in Holland. They came
here as part of a commercial venture. They introduced sexism, racism,
anti-lesbian and gay bigotry, jails, and the class system to these shores.
One of the very first things they did when they arrived on Cape Cod --
before they even made it to Plymouth -- was to rob Wampanoag graves at
Corn Hill and steal as much of the Indians' winter provisions of corn and
beans as they were able to carry. They were no better than any other group
of Europeans when it came to their treatment of the Indigenous peoples
here. And no, they did not even land at that sacred shrine called Plymouth
Rock, a monument to racism and oppression which we are proud to say we
buried in 1995.

The first official "Day of Thanksgiving" was proclaimed in 1637 by Governor
Winthrop. He did so to celebrate the safe return of men from the
Massachusetts Bay Colony who had gone to Mystic, Connecticut to participate
in the massacre of over 700 Pequot women, children, and men.

About the only true thing in the whole mythology is that these pitiful
European strangers would not have survived their first several years in
"New England" were it not for the aid of Wampanoag people. What Native
people got in return for this help was genocide, theft of our lands, and
never-ending repression. We are treated either as quaint relics from the
past, or are, to most people, virtually invisible.

When we dare to stand up for our rights, we are considered unreasonable.
When we speak the truth about the history of the European invasion, we are
often told to "go back where we came from." Our roots are right here. They
do not extend across any ocean.

National Day of Mourning began in 1970 when a Wampanoag man, Wamsutta Frank
James, was asked to speak at a state dinner celebrating the 350th
anniversary of the pilgrim landing. He refused to speak false words in
praise of the white man for bringing civilization to us poor heathens.
Native people from throughout the Americas came to Plymouth, where they
mourned their forebears who had been sold into slavery, burned alive,
massacred, cheated, and mistreated since the arrival of the Pilgrims in
1620.

But the commemoration of National Day of Mourning goes far beyond the
circumstances of 1970.

Can we give thanks as we remember Native political prisoner Leonard
Peltier, who was framed up by the FBI and has been falsely imprisoned
since 1976? Despite mountains of evidence exonerating Peltier and the
proven misconduct of federal prosecutors and the FBI, Peltier has been
denied a new trial. Bill Clinton apparently does not feel that particular
pain and has refused to grant clemency to this innocent man.

To Native people, the case of Peltier is one more ordeal in a litany of
wrongdoings committed by the U.S. government against us. While the media in
New England present images of the "Pequot miracle" in Connecticut, the vast
majority of Native people continue to live in the most abysmal poverty.

Can we give thanks for the fact that, on many reservations, unemployment
rates surpass fifty percent? Our life expectancies are much lower, our
infant mortality and teen suicide rates much higher, than those of white
Americans. Racist stereotypes of Native people, such as those perpetuated
by the Cleveland Indians, the Atlanta Braves, and countless local and
national sports teams, persist. Every single one of the more than 350
treaties that Native nations signed has been broken by the U.S.
government. The bipartisan budget cuts have severely reduced educational
opportunities for Native youth and the development of new housing on
reservations, and have caused cause deadly cutbacks in health-care and
other necessary services.

Are we to give thanks for being treated as unwelcome in our own country?

Or perhaps we are expected to give thanks for the war that is being waged
by the Mexican government against Indigenous peoples there, with the
military aid of the U.S. in the form of helicopters and other equipment?
When the descendants of the Aztec, Maya, and Inca flee to the U.S., the
descendants of the wash-ashore pilgrims term them 'illegal aliens" and
hunt them down.

We object to the "Pilgrim Progress" parade and to what goes on in Plymouth
because they are making millions of tourist dollars every year from the
false pilgrim mythology. That money is being made off the backs of our
slaughtered indigenous ancestors.

Increasing numbers of people are seeking alternatives to such holidays as
Columbus Day and Thanksgiving. They are coming to the conclusion that, if
we are ever to achieve some sense of community, we must first face the
truth about the history of this country and the toll that history has
taken on the lives of millions of Indigenous, Black, Latino, Asian, and
poor and working class white people.

The myth of Thanksgiving, served up with dollops of European superiority
and manifest destiny, just does not work for many people in this country.
As Malcolm X once said about the African-American experience in America,
"We did not land on Plymouth Rock. Plymouth Rock landed on us." Exactly.


[Mahtowin Munro (Lakota) and Moonanum James (Wampanoag) are co-leaders of
United American Indians of New England.]
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THE TRUTH ABOUT THE FIRST THANKSGIVING
by James W. Loewen

[Jim Loewen teaches sociology at the University of Vermont- Burlington. 
Yje following chapter appeared in his book Lies My Teacher Told Me -
Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong.]

Over the last few years, I have asked hundreds of college students, "When
was the country we now know as the United States first settled?"

That is a generous way of putting the question. Surely "we now know as"
implies that the original settlement happened before the United States. I
had hoped that students would suggest 30,000 BC, or some other
pre-Columbian date. They did not. Their consensus answer was "1620."

Part of the problem is the word "settle." "Settlers" were white. Indians
did not settle. Nor are students the only people misled by "settle." One
recent Thanksgiving weekend, I listened as a guide at the Statue of
Liberty told about European immigrants "populating a wild East Coast." As
we shall see, however, if Indians had not already settled New England,
Europeans would have had a much tougher job of it.

Starting with the Pilgrims not only leaves out the Indians, but also the
Spanish. In the summer of 1526 five hundred Spaniards and one hundred
black slaves founded a town near the mouth of the Pedee River in what is
now South Carolina. Disease and disputes with nearby Indians caused many
deaths. Finally, in November the slaves rebelled, killed some of their
masters, and escaped to the Indians. By now only 150 Spaniards survived,
and they evacuated back to Haiti. The ex-slaves remained behind. So the
first non-Native settlers in "the country we now know as the United
States" were Africans.

The Spanish continued their settling in 1565, when they massacred a
settlement of French Protestants at St. Augustine, Florida, and replaced
it with their own fort. Some Spanish were pilgrims, seeking regions new to
them to secure religious liberty: these were Spanish Jews, who settled in
New Mexico in the late 1500s. Few Americans know that one third of the
United States, from San Francisco to Arkansas to Natchez to Floirda, has
been Spanish longer than it has been "American." Moreover, Spanish culture
left an indelible impact on the West. The Spanish introduced horses,
cattle, sheep, pigs, and the basic elements of cowboy culture, including
its vocabulary: mustang, bronco, rodeo, lariat, and so on.

Beginning with 1620 also omits the Dutch, who were living in what is now
Albany by 1614. Indeed, 1620 is not even the date of the first permanent
British settlement, for in 1607, the London Company sent settlers to
Jamestown, Virginia. No matter. The mythic origin of "the country we now
know as the United States" is at Plymouth Rock, and the year is 1620. My
students are not at fault. The myth is what their testbooks and their
culture have offered them. I examined how twelve textbooks used in high
school American history classes teach Thanksgiving. Here is the version in
one high school history book, THE AMERICAN TRADITION:

After some exploring, the Pilgrims chose the land around Plymouth Harbor
for their settlement. Unfortunately, they had arrived in December and were
not prepared for the New England winter. However, they were aided by
freindly Indians, who gave them food and showed them how to grow corn.
When warm weather came, the colonists planted, fished, hunted, and
prepared themselves for the next winter. After harvesting their first
crop, they and their Indian friends celebrated the first Thanksgiving.

My students also learned that the Pilgrims were persecuted in England for
their religion, so they moved to Holland. They sailed on the Mayflower to
America and wrote the Mayflower Compact. Times were rough, until they met
Squanto. He taught them how to put fish in each corn hill, so they had a
bountiful harvest.

But when I ask them about the plague, they stare back at me. "What plague?
The Black Plague?" No, that was three centuries earlier, I sigh.

"THE WONDERFUL PLAGUE AMONG THE SAVAGES"

The Black Plague does provide a useful introduction, however. Black (or
bubonic) Plague "was undoubtedly the worst disaster that has ever befallen
mankind." In three years it killed 30 percent of the population of Europe.
Catastrophic as it was, the disease itself comprised only part of the
horror. Thinking the Day of Judgment was imminent, farmers failed to plant
crops. Many people gave themselves over to alcohol. Civil and economic
disruption may have caused as much death as the disease itself.

For a variety of reasons --- their probable migration through cleansing
Alaskan ice fields, better hygiene, no livestock or livestock-borne
microbes --- Americans were in Howard Simpson's assessment "a remarkable
healthy race" before Columbus. Ironically, their very health now proved
their undoing, for they had built up no resistance, genetically or through
childhood diseases, to the microbes Europeans and Africans now brought
them. In 1617, just before the Pilgrims landed, the process started in
southern New England. A plague struck that made the Black Death pale by
comparison.

Today we think it was the bubonic plague, although pox and influenza are
also candidates. British fishermen had been fishing off Massachusetts for
decades before the Pilgrims landed. After filling their hulls with cod,
they would set forth on land to get firewood and fresh water and perhaps
capture a few Indians to sell into slavery in Europe. On one of these
expeditions they probably transmitted the illness to the people they met.
Whatever it was, within three years this plague wiped out between 90
percent and 96 percent of the inhabitants of southern New England. The
Indian societies lay devastated. Only "the twentieth person is scare left
alive," wrote British eyewitness Robert Cushman, describing a death rate
unknown in all previous human experience. Unable to cope with so many
corposes, survivors fled to the next tribe, carrying the infestation with
them, so that Indians died who had never seen a white person. Simpson
tells what the Pilgrims saw:

The summer after the Pilgrims landed, they sent two envoys on a diplomatic
mission to treat with Massasoit, a famous chief encamped some 40 miles
away at what is now Warren, Rhode Island. The envoys discovered and
described a scene of absolute havoc. Villages lay in ruins because there
was no one to tend them. The ground was strewn with the skulls and the
bones of thousands of Indians who had died and none was left to bury them.
During the next fifteen years, additional epidemics, most of which we know
to have been smallpox struck repeatedly. Europeans caught smallpox and the
other maladies, to be sure, but most recovered, including, in a later
century, the "heavily pockmarked George Washington." Indians usually died.
Therefore, almost as profound as their effect on Indian demographics was
the impact of the epidemics on the two cultures, European and Indian. The
English Separatists, already seeing their lives as part of a divinely
inspired morality play, inferred that they had God on their side. John
Winthrop, Governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, called the plague
"miraculous." To a friend in England in 1634, he wrote:

But for the natives in these parts, God hath so pursued them, as for 300
miles space the greatest part of them are swept away by the small pox
which still continues among them. So as God hath thereby cleared our title
to this place, those who remain in these parts, being in all not fifty,
have put themselves under our protect....
Many Indians likewise inferred that their God had abandoned them. Cushman,
our British eyewitness, reported that "those that are left, have their
courage much abated, and their countenance is dejected, and they seem as a
people affrighted." After all, neither they nor the Pilgrims had access to
the germ theory of disease. Indian healers offered no cure, their religion
no explanation. That of the whites did. Like the Europeans three centuries
before them, many Indians surrendered to alcohol or began to listen to
Christianity.

These epidemics constituted perhaps the most important single geopolitical
event of the first third of the 1600s, anywhere on the planet. They meant
that the British would face no real Indian challenge for their first fifty
years in America. Indeed, the plague helped cause the legendary warm
reception Plymouth enjoyed in its first formative years from the
Wampanoags. Massasoit needed to ally with the Pilgrims because the plague
had so weakened his villages that he feared the Narragansetts to the west.

Moreover, the New England plagues exemplify a process, which antedated the
Pilgrims and endures to this day. In 1942, more than 3,000,000 Indians
lived on the island of Haiti. Forty years later, fewer than 300 remained.
The earliest Portuguese found that Labrador teemed with hospitable Indians
who could easily be enslaved. It teems no more. In about 1780, smallpox
reduced the Mandans of North Dakota from nine villages to two; then in
1837, a second smallpox epidemic reduced them from 1600 persons to just
31. The pestilence continues; a fourth of the Yanomamos of northern Brazil
and southern Venezuela died in the year prior to my writing this sentence.

Europeans were never able to "settle" China, India, Indonesia, Japan, or
most of Africa because too many people already lived there. Advantages in
military and social technology would have enabled Europeans to dominate
the Americas, as they eventually dominated China and Africa, but not to
"settle" the New World. For that, the plague was required. Thus, except
for the European (and African) invasion itself, the pestilence was surely
the most important event in the history of America.

What do we learn of all this in the twelve histories I studied? Three
offer some treatment of Indian disease as a factor in European
colonization. LIFE AND LIBERTY does quite a good job. AMERICA PAST AND
PRESENT supplies a fine analysis of the general impact of Indian disease
in American history, though it leaves out the plague at Plymouth. THE
AMERICAN WAY is the only text to draw the appropriate geopolitical
inference about the importance of the Plymouth outbreak, but it never
discuses Indian plagues anywhere else. Unfortunately, the remaining nine
books offer almost nothing. Two totally omit the subject. Each of the
other seven furnishes only a fragment of a paragraph that does not even
make it into the index, let alone into students' minds.

Everyone knew all about the plague in colonial America. Even before the
Mayflower sailed, King James of England gave thanks to "Almighty God in
his great goodness and bounty towards us," for sending "this wonderful
plague among the savages." Today it is no surprise that not one in a
hundred of my college students has ever heard of the plague. Unless they
read LIFE AND LIBERTY or PAST AND PRESENT, no student can come away from
these books thinking of Indians as people who made an impact on North
America, who lived here in considerable numbers, who settled, in short,
and were then killed by disease or arms.

ERRAND INTO THE WILDERNESS

Instead of the plague, our schoolbooks present the story of the Pilgrims
as a heroic myth. Referring to "the little party" in their "small,
storm-battered English vessel," their story line follows Perry Miller's
use of a Puritan sermon title, ERRAND INTO THE WILDERNESS. AMERICAN
ADVENTURES even titles its chapter about British settlement in North
America "Opening the Wilderness." The imagery is right out of Star Trek:
"to go boldly where none dared go before."

The Pilgrims had intended to go to Virginia, where there already was a
British settlement, according to the texts, but "violent storms blew their
ship off course," according to some texts, or else an "error in
navigation" caused them to end up hundreds of miles to the north. In fact,
we are not sure where the Pilgrims planned to go. According to George
Willison, Pilgrim leaders never intended to settle in Virginia. They had
debated the relative merits of Guiana versus Massachusetts precisely
because they wanted to be far from Anglican control in Virginia. They knew
quite a bit about Massachusetts, from Cape Cod's fine fishing to that
"wonderful plague." They brought with them maps drawn by Samuel Champlain
when he toured the area in 1605 and a guidebook by John Smith, who had
named it "New England" when he visited in 1614. One text, LAND OF PROMISE,
follows Willison, pointing out that Pilgrims numbered only about
thirty-five of the 102 settlers aboard the Mayflower. The rest were
ordinary folk seeking their fortunes in the new Virginia colony. "The New
England landing came as a rude surpise for the bedraggled and tired
[non-Pilgrim] majority on board the Mayflower," says Promise. "Rumors of
mutiny spread quickly." Promise then ties this unrest to the Mayflower
Compact, giving its readers a uniquely fresh interpretation as to why the
colonists adopted it.

Each text offers just one of three reasons---storm, pilot error, or
managerial hijacking--to explain how the Pilgrims ended up in
Massachusetts. Neither here nor in any other historical controversy after
1620 can any of the twelve bear to admit that it does not know the
answer---that studying history is not just learning answers--that history
contains debates. Thus each book shuts students out from the intellectual
excitement of the discipline.

Instead, textbooks parade ethnocentric assertions about the Pilgrims as a
flawless unprecedented band laying the foundations of our democracy. John
Garraty presents the Compact this way in AMERICAN HISTORY: "So far as any
record shows, this was the first time in human history that a group of
people consciously created a government where none had existed before."
Such accounts deny students the opportunity to see the Pilgrims as
anything other than pious stereotypes.

"IT WAS WITH GOD'S HELP...FOR HOW ELSE COULD WE HAVE DONE IT?" Settlement
proceeded, not with God's help but with the Indians'. The Pilgrims chose
Plymouth because of its cleared fields, recently planted in corn, "and a
brook of fresh water [that] flowed into the harbor," in the words of
TRIUMPH OF THE AMERICAN NATION. It was a lovely site for a town. Indeed,
until the plague, it had been a town. Everywhere in the hemisphere,
Europeans pitched camp right in the middle of native populations---Cuzco,
Mexico City, Natchez, Chicago. Throughout New England, colonists
appropriated Indian cornfields, which explains why so many town
names---Marshfield, Springfield, Deerfield--end in "field".

Inadvertent Indian assistance started on the Pilgrims' second full day in
Massachusetts. A colonist's journal tells us:

"We marched to the place we called Cornhill, where we had found the corn
before. At another place we had seen before, we dug and found some more
corn, two or three baskets full, and a bag of beans. ..In all we had about
ten bushels, which will be enough for seed. It was with God's help that we
found this corn, for how else could we have done it, without meeting some
Indians who might trouble us. ...The next morning, we found a place like a
grave. We decided to dig it up. We found first a mat, and under that a
fine bow...We also found bowls, trays, dishes, and things like that. We
took several of the prettiest things to carry away with us, and covered
the body up again."

A place "like a grave!"

More help came from a alive Indian, Squanto. Here my students are on
familiar turf, for they have all learned the Squanto legend. LAND OF
PROMISE provides an archetypal account"

Squanto had learned their language, he explained, from English fishermen
who ventured into the New England waters each summer. Squanto taught the
Pilgrims how to plant corn, squash, and pumpkins. Would the small band of
settlers have survived without Squanto's help? We cannot say. But by the
fall of 1621, colonists and Indians could sit down to several days of
feast and thanksgiving to God (later celebrated as the first
Thanksgiving).
What do the books leave out about Squanto? First, how he learned English.
As a boy, along with four Penobscots, he was probably stolen by a British
captain in about 1605 and taken to England. There he probably spent nine
years, two in the employ of a Plymouth merchant who later helped finance
the Mayflower. At length, the merchant helped him arrange passage back to
Massachusetts. He was to enjoy home life for less than a year, however. In
1614, a British slave raider seized him and two dozen fellow Indians and
sold them into slavery in Malaga, Spain. Squanto escaped from slavery,
escaped from Spain, made his way back to England, and in 1619 talked a
ship captain into taking him along on his next trip to Cape Cod.

It happens that Squanto's fabulous odyssey provides a "hook" into the
plague story, a hook that our texts choose to ignore. For now Squanto
walked to his home village, only to make the horrifying discovery that, in
Simpson's words, "he was the sole member of his village still alive. All
the others had perished in the epidemic two years before." No wonder he
throws in his lot with the Pilgrims, who rename his village "Plymouth!"
Now that is a story worth telling! Compare the pallid account in LAND OF
PROMISE. "He had learned their language from English fishermen." What do
we make of books that give us the unimportant details--Squanto's name, the
occupation of his enslavers--while omitting not only his enslavement, but
also the crucial fact of the plague? This is distortion on a grand scale.

William Bradford praised Squanto for many services, including his
"bringing them to unknown places for their profit." "Their profit" was the
primary reason most Mayflower colonists made the trip. It too came from
the Indians, from the fur trade; Plymouth would never have paid for itself
without it. Europeans had neither the skill nor the desire to "go boldly
where none dared go before.|" They went to the Indians.

"TRUTH SHOULD BE HELD SACRED, AT WHATEVER COST"

Should we teach these truths about Thanksgiving? Or, like our textbooks,
should we look the other way? Again quoting LAND OF PROMISE. "By the fall
of 1621, colonists and Indians could sit down to several days of feast and
thanksgiving to God (later celebrated as the first Thanksgiving)."
Throughout the nation, elementary school children still enact Thanksgiving
every fall as our national origin myth, complete with Pilgrim hats made of
construction paper and Indian braves with feathers in their hair. An early
Massachusetts colonist, Colonel Thomas Aspinwall, advises us not to settle
for this whitewash of feel - good - history.

"It is painful to advert to these things. But our forefathers, though
wise, pious, and sincere, were nevertheless, in respect to Christian
charity, under a cloud; and, in history, truth should be held sacred, at
whatever cost."
Thanksgiving is full of embarrassing facts. The Pilgrims did not introduce
the Native Americans to the tradition; Eastern Indians had observed
autumnal harvest celebrations for centuries. Our modern celebrations date
back only to 1863; not until the 1890s did the Pilgrims get included in
the tradition; no one even called them "Pilgrims" until the 1870s.
Plymouth Rock achieved ichnographic status only in the nineteenth century,
when some enterprising residents of the town moved it down to the water so
its significance as the "holy soil" the Pilgrims first touched might seem
more plausible. The Rock has become a shrine, the Mayflower Compact a
sacred text, and our textbooks play the same function as the Anglican BOOK
OF COMMON PRAYER, teaching us the rudiments of the civil religion of
Thanksgiving.

Indians are marginalized in this civic ritual. Our archetypal image of the
first Thanksgiving portrays the groaning boards in the woods, with the
Pilgrims in their starched Sunday best and the almost naked Indian guests.
Thanksgiving silliness reaches some sort of zenith in the handouts that
school children have carried home for decades, with captions like, "They
served pumpkins and turkeys and corn and squash. The Indians had never
seen such a feast!" When his son brought home this "information" from his
New Hampshire elementary school, Native American novelist Michael Dorris
pointed out "the Pilgrims had literally never seen `such a feast,' since
all foods mentioned are exclusively indigenous to the Americas and had
been provided by [or with the aid of] the local tribe."

I do not read Aspinwall as suggesting a "bash the Pilgrims"
interpretation, emphasizing only the bad parts. I have emphasized untoward
details only because our histories have suppressed everything awkward for
so long. The Pilgrims' courage in setting forth in the late fall to make
their way on a continent new to them remains unsurpassed. In their first
year, like the Indians, they suffered from diseases. Half of them died.
The Pilgrims did not cause the plague and were as baffled as to its true
origin as the stricken Indian villagers. Pilgrim-Indian relations began
reasonably positively. Thus the antidote to feel-good history is not
feel-bad history, but honest and inclusive history. "Knowing the truth
about Thanksgiving, both its proud and its shameful motivations and
history, might well benefit contemporary children," suggests Dorris. "But
the glib retelling of an ethnocentric and self-serving falsehood does no
one any good." Because Thanksgiving has roots in both Anglo and Native
cultures, and because of the interracial cooperation the first celebration
enshrines, Thanksgiving might yet develop into a holiday that promotes
tolerance and understanding. Its emphasis on Native foods provides a
teachable moment, for natives of the Americas first developed half of the
world's food crops. Texts could tell this--only three even mention Indian
foods---and could also relate other contributions form Indian societies,
from sports to political ideas. The original Thanksgiving itself provides
an interesting example: the Natives and newcomers spent the better part of
three days showing each other their various recreations.

Origin myths do not come cheaply. To glorify the Pilgrims is dangerous.
The genial omissions and false details our texts use to retail the Pilgrim
legend promote Anglocentrism, which only handicaps us when dealing with
all those whose culture is no Anglo. Surely, in history, "truth should be
held sacred, at whatever cost."
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The First Thanksgiving in America

>From the Community Endeavor News, November, 1995,
as reprinted in Healing Global Wounds, Fall, 1996

The first official Thanksgiving wasn't a festive gathering of Indians
and Pilgrims, but rather a celebration of the massacre of 700 Pequot
men, women and children, an anthropologist says. Due to age and illness
his voice cracks as he talks about the holiday, but William B. Newell,
84, talks with force as he discusses Thanksgiving. Newell, a Penobscot
Indian,
has degrees from two universities, and was the former chairman of the
anthropology department at the University of Connecticut.

"Thanksgiving Day was first officially proclaimed by the Governor of the
Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1637 to commemorate the massacre of 700 men,
women and children who were celebrating their annual green corn
dance-Thanksgiving Day to them-in their own house," Newell said.

"Gathered in this place of meeting they were attacked by mercenaries and
Dutch and English. The Indians were ordered from the building and as
they came forth they were shot down. The rest were burned alive in the
building," he said.

Newell based his research on studies of Holland Documents and the 13
volume Colonial Documentary History, both thick sets of letters and
reports from colonial officials to their superiors and the king in
England, and the private papers of Sir William Johnson, British Indian
agent for the New York colony for 30 years in the mid-1600s.

"My research is authentic because it is documentary," Newell said. "You
can't get anything more accurate than that because it is first hand. It
is not hearsay."

Newell said the next 100 Thanksgivings commemorated the killing of the
Indians at what is now Groton, Ct. [home of a nuclear submarine base]
rather than a celebration with them. He said the image of Indians and
Pilgrims sitting around a large table to celebrate Thanksgiving Day was
"fictitious" although Indians did share food with the first settlers.
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Subject: [pjnews] Be Thankful You're Not Dubya
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http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2003/11/26/notes112603.DTL

Be Thankful You're Not Dubya: Craving more juicy reasons to offer up
profound gratitude this T-day? Try a few of these

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, November 26, 2003

This Thanksgiving, as you sip the wine and hug the family and toast the
friends and hoard the stuffing and curse the airport security, remember to
give thanks you are not G.W. Bush. Hey, it's important.

1) Be thankful that you do not have to suffer Dubya's massive crushing
karmic burden, as wrought by inflicting heaps of environmental disaster
and vicious unnecessary war and a stunning string of lies lies lies like a
firehose of giblet gravy splattered all over the planet.

For it really is all too plain: G.W. Bush is one of the most reviled and
openly disrespected major world leaders in modern history. America has
never been so embarrassed and reluctant to send a president abroad. We
cringe when the man takes the stage. We offer humiliated apologies to our
former allies, and to the 200,000 Bush/war protesters in London, just last
week.

In Bush's defense, it cannot be easy to be so undeservedly powerful, yet
so bumbling and inarticulate and globally loathed for your abhorrent
policies and hollow corporate agenda and baffled doofus manner. This
Thanksgiving, be grateful you are not him.

2) Thanks, you might want to give, that you are not Iraqi. Be grateful you
did not go from brutal scowling despot who at least kept the damn lights
on to brutish occupying army no one asked for that is right now laying
waste to whatever remains of your once semi-proud oil-rich nation.

Give thanks, furthermore, that you are not one of the estimated 10,000
Iraqi civilians killed to date by U.S. forces, not to mention one of the
untold tens of thousands of Iraqi soldiers who were hammered by our
million pounds of billion-dollar ordnance in the first few days of the
massacre. Be grateful you are not dead in the name of American political
and petrochemical profiteering.

3) Give thanks you are not a member of the much-abused U.S. military. Sad
but true. Be grateful you are not right now suffering that sickening
sinking feeling that you are not, in fact, protecting America from any
sort of marauding terrorists, or defending our honor, or our way of life,
or guarding innocents from swarthy evildoers and nonexistent WMDs.

But that you are, instead, a wholly disposable henchman for the BushCo
corporate regime, with the odds increasing every minute that you will soon
join the more than 9,000 U.S. wounded or more than 430 "necessary" dead
U.S. soldiers Rumsfeld mentions when he shrugs off the latest round of
guerrilla bombings that killed another batch of your friends. Support our
troops. Bring them home right now.

4) Be grateful BushCo's ratings are slipping lower than an SUV's mpg
rating, and there is only one year left until he joins his father as one
of those embarrassing historical footnotes, a jagged scar on the heart of
a wary America that other countries point to in years to come and say wow
that's a nasty scar where'd you get that, and we reply, George W. Bush,
and they go, oh my God, that's right. So sorry.

5) Be grateful you are not right now in any way related to, or serve as a
spokesperson for, or are employed as one of the apparently very deranged
or heavily drugged plastic surgeons who worked on Michael Jackson. This is
a gimme.


6) While you're at it, give thanks you're not Paris Hilton, Anna Nicole
Smith, Bennifer, Britney, Liza Minnelli, Joan Rivers, Howard Stern, Ann
Coulter, Ashton Kutcher, Bill O'Reilly, Anna Kournikova, Madonna or Mary
Hart. These are lives you probably do not want to lead. Give thanks your
soul is not all withery and Botoxed and that it still manages to radiate
cool colors like one of those funky cheesy fiber-optic lamps from the
'70s.

7) Be thankful they have yet to figure out a way to blot out the sun. Or,
for that matter, the moon.

8) Offer immense gratitude that despite a massive ongoing Herculean effort
on the part of numerous world governments to rape and pillage and pretty
much slap down most all tender offerings of the planet, Earth still
manages to produce for us an astonishing array of flora and fauna and
oxygen and edible delicacies and awe-inspiring trees and relentless
merciless beauty.

9) Be thankful the planet rather effortlessly continues to baffle
scientists and confound astronomers and completely entrance biologists and
philosophers and poets. We still, for example, have no idea why whales
sing, or how long they live, or where blue whales, the largest and most
magnificent creatures on the planet, go to mate. Be grateful for the
Mystery.

10) Kneel down, right now, for free speech. Oh yes. We must. Because it is
under severe duress. To exercise it now, to speak out against BushCo and
war and global corporate profiteering, is a true sign that you are a
traitor and an al Qaeda operative and a personal friend of Barbra
Streisand. This is what they sneer at you.

Give it up, instead, for free unfettered alt-news sources like
truthout.org. And commondreams.org. And alternet.org and counterpunch.com
and buzzflash.com and smirkingchimp.com and even Slate and the BBC and The
Onion. Cheney scowls, Rove oozes, Ashcroft would love nothing more than to
shut down the entire impious godforsaken Internet. Be grateful they can
only quiver and hiss and rattle their chains. So far.

11) Molly Ivins. Gore Vidal. Michiko Kakutani. David Foster Wallace. Don
DeLillo. Maureen Dowd. Caroline Myss. W.G. Sebald. Tom Robbins. Starhawk.
William Rivers Pitt. Rob Brezny. David Attenborough. Dave Eggers. Joseph
Campbell. Lewis Lapham. Haruki Murakami. Katha Pollitt. Et al. Thank you.

12) For baskets of locally grown organic small-farm produce delivered to
your door. For handmade whiskey-filled chocolate truffles smeared over a
lover's tailbone. For Bernese mountain dogs. For the return of Opus. For
Rufus Wainwright and Beth Orton and the Mini Cooper. L'Occitane honey
incense and the Apple iPod and "Six Feet Under." For Cate Blanchett, The
Sun magazine, The New Yorker, Peet's coffee and "Spirited Away."

13) Here is the big cliché. Here is the final praise. It cannot be
overstated: Despite an impressive assault on civil liberties, despite
savage BushCo attacks on everything from national forests to air quality
to rivers and oceans and water quality and health care, despite attempts
to numb the national consciousness overall, we must give enormous,
unfettered thanks for this incredible and kaleidoscopic America.

Ours remains the most breathtakingly beautiful, diverse, epic,
multifaceted, multiorgasmic landscape on the planet today. It's true.

We tend to forget. We take for granted. We presume it must be like this
everywhere. But one quick trip abroad will only serve to remind you and
reinforce your devout appreciation for what this country can offer, the
free expression and the religious autonomy and the clean water and the
good dentistry and the fresh produce and the space to explore.

We are deeply flawed. We are massively arrogant. We are bratty and
insolent and abusive and sloppy and violent. But we balance it with
astounding acts of love and beauty and art, nature preserves and activism
and organic awareness and sex positivism and community awareness and quiet
personal spiritual questing and lots and lots of great bookstores.

14) Here is where you make you own list. Here is where you set aside the
cynicism and the sighing and the bitterness, just for a moment, and get
quiet, look around, look inside, check the karmic inventory and offer up
heaping pies of gratefulness for what you find.

Sure it seems clichéd. Of course you don't need some holiday to be deeply
thankful for the radiance in your life. But, hey, an opportunity is an
opportunity. Just remember, big meaty drumsticks of general gratitude are
absolutely fine. But the divine, personal gravy is where the real flavor
is.

__________________
Subscribe to Mark's deeply skewed, mostly legal Morning Fix newsletter.
Mark Morford's Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday on
SF Gate, unless it appears on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which it never does.
He also writes the Morning Fix, a deeply skewed thrice-weekly e-mail
column and newsletter. Subscribe at sfgate.com/newsletters.
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Militarization in Miami: Threatening the Right to Protest
By Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman

There was a real threat to the social order on the streets of Miami last
week, during the Ministerial Meeting of the Free Trade Area of the
Americas (FTAA).

It wasn't protesters, not even those calling themselves anarchists or
even those dressed in black.

No, the threat came from the Miami police, Florida state troopers and
the other police and military forces patrolling the city.

With more than $10 million in special funding (including an $8.5 million
allocation in the federal government's Iraq appropriations bill), 2,500
or so officers -- many clad in full body armor and backed up by armored
vehicles -- turned Miami into a veritable police state.

As was almost inevitable, the police used wildly excessive force to deal
with protesters. They launched unprovoked attacks against people who
were doing nothing illegal. They sprayed tear gas and pepper spray at
protesters -- including retirees -- and shot many with rubber bullets.
They used taser guns. They knocked down peaceful protesters and held
guns to their heads. They blocked thousands of retirees and union
members on buses from joining a rally and march for which all required
permits had been obtained. They attacked journalists viewed as hostile.
They arrested approximately 250 persons, according to the best
estimates, with little or no rationale. Credible reports have emerged of
brutality and sexual harassment against several of those jailed.

At least as serious, the police deterred thousands from even considering
joining the FTAA protests -- and protests into the future.

In sunny Miami, it was a dark week for the First Amendment, for civil
liberties and for the right to dissent.

A South African activist told us how deeply frightened she was walking
down the streets of Miami. Even before the police violence erupted,
marching in the streets amidst thousands of armored police sent chills
down her spine, she said.

Last week's outrages had their roots in months of planning led by Miami
Police Chief John Timoney. He whipped the city and the police force into
a frenzy. The absurdist invocation of an anarchist threat convinced the
local media (especially television reporters) and much of the local
population that downtown would be a riot zone. That was enough to empty
the downtown, and scare many local Miamians from joining any of the
protests, no matter how tame.

We had first-hand experience with this problem. We had been involved in
a planning a small demonstration on Tuesday -- two days before the main
protests. We had obtained all requisite permits from the police. With
agreement from their teachers, hundreds of high school students were
ready to join our small action highlighting how the FTAA and trade
agreements interfere with anti-smoking and other public health measures.
But no teacher could feel comfortable sending students to a militarized
downtown, and so the students were not able to demonstrate. We turned
our rally into a news conference.

This was a small incident. Our demonstration wasn't going to change the
world. (We do, however, intend to win on our demand to exclude tobacco
products from all trade agreements.) But as an illustrative example, it
is incredibly important, for it shows how police overdeployment, scare
tactics and militarization intimidates people from marching in the
streets and opposing corporate- and state-approved policy.

It wasn't just the public and media that Timoney managed to frighten.
There's little doubt that the police themselves buy the propaganda.
After months of excessive training and hearing about the dangers posed
by protesters, and empowered by new body armor, shields, batons and
other equipment, the police were, to say the least, overeager to lunge
at protesters. (Said one of a group of 10 cops on bikes as they crossed
the street to assess the scene at our news conference, and with one of
us standing right next to them, "Let's go fuck 'em up.")

By the time of the main demonstrations on Thursday, the police couldn't
hold themselves back.

In different circumstances, it would have been funny to see the police
outnumbering the direct action protesters, or the comically attired
"undercover" agents who were a bit too well built to credibly seem part
of the ranks of the slight direct action protesters -- many of whom are
vegans.

But it wasn't funny.

Not when the police -- responding to the smallest provocations, such as
a couple small fires lit in trashcans -- went berserk and attacked large
crowds of protesters. Not when credible reports say some of those
undercover agents may have been provocateurs, and when several of them
emerged as some of the most brutal in attacking protesters.

There is immediate need now to support those who were jailed and
mistreated, and force the city to drop trumped up charges against protesters.

You can help by sending a fax to Miami Mayor Manuel Diaz protesting the
violation of constitutional rights. Public Citizen has established a
free fax site at:

http://www.citizen.org/fax/background.cfm?ID=245&source=19

Those who are facing charges will need legal help. You can donate to
support them by going to:

http://stopftaa.org/article.php?list=type&type=42 or to

http://www.unitedforpeace.org/ftaadonate

Activists, the National Lawyers Guild, the American Civil Liberties
Union and other civil liberties standard bearers must do all they can
and will do to oppose the rising repression evidenced in Miami. But
that's not enough.

There will, undoubtedly, be civil lawsuits down the road, and, if there
is any justice, they will succeed. But that's not enough, either. As
important as such litigation is, it is clear from recent crackdown on
protests around the United States that police forces are willing to
absorb the costs of these suits.

The present cycle is that the media and political establishment applaud
the police for running scare campaigns, militarizing cities, directing
violence against protesters and blatantly violating civil liberties.
Often, as details emerge, criticism emerges from those same pillars of
society.

This must change. The establishment must speak out now, immediately
after the abuses occurred. They are apparent to anyone who cares to know
about them.

In the future, the establishment -- we mean newspaper editors, political
leaders of all parties, lawyers, even corporate executives -- must
insist on appropriate police tactics in advance of large-scale protests,
and they must make clear that regular police and top officers alike will
be held personally accountable for abuses. If they fail to pursue this
course, the consequences for the right to protest will be grim indeed.


Russell Mokhiber is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate Crime
Reporter, http://www.corporatecrimereporter.com. Robert Weissman is
editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Multinational Monitor,
http://www.multinationalmonitor.org, and co-director of Essential
Action, a corporate accountability group. They are co-authors of
Corporate Predators: The Hunt for MegaProfits and the Attack on
Democracy (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press;
http://www.corporatepredators.org).

(c) Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman

This article is posted at:
<http://lists.essential.org/pipermail/corp-focus/2003/000169.html>.
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The New York Times
24 November 2003

The Other Conflict Continues to Take a G.I. Toll
    By DAVID ROHDE

LOZANO RIDGE, Afghanistan, Nov. 23 ‹ As Sgt. First Class Vernon Story's
column of Humvees climbed a desolate ridge a mile from the
Pakistan-Afghanistan border here on Sunday morning, the sergeant got the
feeling that someone was watching. The five unexploded land mines he and his
men had found along this same ridge in a firefight with Taliban rebels here
less than two months ago lingered in his mind.

"Hey, don't be driving down the tracks," Sergeant Story warned his driver.

Just after he spoke, the front of his Humvee abruptly lurched into the air
as a mine or remote-controlled bomb detonated under the right front tire. It
severed the lower left leg of a young soldier in the front passenger seat
and tossed the 6,000-pound vehicle violently on its side. Sergeant Story,
seven soldiers and four journalists traveling with them in the back of
vehicle were thrown to the ground.

Scrambling to his feet, his face cut, the sergeant cursed, suspected an
ambush and ordered his men to fire at the surrounding hillsides.

No one shot back.

So went a typical engagement in the grinding conflict for the 10,000
American soldiers stationed in Afghanistan, overshadowed by the larger
conflict in Iraq.

Casualties are not as high here, but fatal clashes with a shadowy enemy
continue.

"It's aggravating," Sergeant Story, 34, said in his southern drawl,
referring to guerrilla attacks that have killed five Americans and four
Afghan soldiers along the border with Pakistan in the last eight weeks.
"It's very frustrating."

The risks are by no means limited to ground forces. On Sunday at Bagram Air
Base north of Kabul, at least five American soldiers were killed when their
helicopter crashed.

So far this year, 9 of the 10 American combat deaths have occurred in this
area around Shkin, an isolated military base three miles from the Pakistan
border.

Sunday morning's attack on Lozano Ridge, named after an American soldier
killed here in April, was the latest in a series of strikes by pro-Taliban
fighters who launch missiles, plant mines and mount fierce ambushes against
American forces within miles of the Pakistan border, according to American
military officials. After the engagements, the gunmen are often seen
retreating toward Pakistan.

Lt. Col. Michael Howard, the commanding officer of two American bases along
the border, said that Pakistan's government was trying to control the
border, but that it was impossible to seal off such mountainous terrain.

"You've got a president who is committed; you've got a military who is
committed," Colonel Howard said, referring to Pakistan's president, Gen.
Pervez Musharraf. "They've got a lot of challenges like everybody else."

The Americans here face their own challenges. Sergeant Story and his
soldiers, stationed in Shkin, are fighting on some of the bleakest terrain
on earth. It is a jarring existence that mixes the primitive and the modern,
intense boredom and intense fear.

By day, they inhabit a world of brown earth, brown mud-brick houses and
translucent blue skies. By night, temperatures drop below freezing, and
bands of stars blaze across a sky unspoiled by man-made light.

Their battleground is a swath of dozens of miles of arid plateau, 7,000 feet
above sea level in eastern Afghanistan, lined by hills and mountains to the
east and west. They can patrol for days without incident, but then, without
warning, be ambushed by gunmen on barren hillsides covered with boulders and
bushes.

The soldiers relax only when inside their base, a bubble of Americana in a
sea of Afghan dust. On Sunday night, a few hours after the mine explosion,
Sergeant Story and other soldiers sat in a crude mud-brick mess hall
watching the Dallas Cowboys-Carolina Panthers game via satellite on a
widescreen television.

The soldiers eat burgers, fries and baked beans for dinner. They have been
watching "Bulletproof Monk" and other Hollywood movies on a DVD player, over
and over.

The desolate terrain here aids the Americans in some ways. Unlike urban
Iraq, this part of Afghanistan affords few places for guerrillas mounting
ambushes to hide.

But their effort is slowed by a problem also confounding American forces in
Iraq ‹ limited intelligence on the enemy. Military officials said villagers
generally provided little information about pro-Taliban fighters, who
threaten to kill those who collaborate with the Americans.

"They are all afraid for their lives to give us information about who is
coming over the mountains," said Sgt. Katrina Presley, 24, from New Castle,
Del., who helps run weekly meetings with local villagers.

Maj. Dennis Sullivan, the base commander, said the Taliban fighters were not
making military headway. But aid groups and United Nation officials contend
that Taliban guerrillas are now circumventing well-armed American forces and
attacking soft targets, like aid workers and Afghan policemen. They say the
attacks have slowed reconstruction projects in eastern and southern
Afghanistan.

Villagers living around Shkin complain that they are not receiving enough
aid. American military officials said two schools and a well were being
built in the area with United Nations funds.

Despite the dangers, American soldiers said they were eager to come to
Shkin. Sunday's explosion occurred while Sergeant Story was escorting a new
group of soldiers who will be replacing his unit. Most interviewed expressed
enthusiasm. Seen as the posting with the best chance to engage in combat in
Afghanistan, soldiers said coming here allowed them to "do their job."

One young soldier called Shkin a "once in a lifetime" opportunity. Asked for
what, he said "to kill."

But some soldiers who have served here for months admitted the experience
had changed them. Sgt. Christopher McGurk, a 29-year-old native of Fort
Hamilton, Brooklyn, saw one of his soldiers, Pvt. First Class Evan O'Neill,
19, of Haverhill, Mass., die in battle on Sept. 29.

In an Oct. 25 battle, a wounded American slowly bled to death as Sergeant
McGurk cared for him under fire. The son of a 28-year Army veteran, the
sergeant feels that he has done his duty and is thinking of leaving the Army
and becoming a New York City police officer. "Once you're involved in a
situation like that," he said, "you realize it's for real."

Sergeant Story, a father of three, constantly jokes and refuses to discuss
the personal risks.

"I can't answer that question," he said. "Never thought about it. Never.
Never."
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Subject: [pjnews] Purported Bush Tape Raises Fear of New Attacks
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New Purported Bush Tape Raises Fear of New Attacks
(A Parody)

by the Disassociated Press

A tape today surfaced in U.S. media outlets of someone purporting to be
George W. Bush at a U.S. military base in Baghdad.

Intelligence analysts around the world are studying the videotapes. "It
certainly looked and sounded like him, but we get so few glimpses at Bush
in real-life situations that it is hard to tell," said one operative from
a Western intelligence agency.

People who know Bush said it appeared to be him. "That's him, all right,"
said one longtime associate.

The tape shows the man claiming to be Bush praising U.S. attacks in Iraq.
"We will stay until the job is done," he threatened.

The videotape was delivered to the Baghdad bureau of FOX News by an
intermediary courier who has brought material before from the U.S.
military, according to the U.S. network.

There were calls for FOX to be banned from some Arabic countries for
broadcasting American militaristic propaganda.

While the quality of the tape was not poor, the alleged Bush did appear
tired in portions of it, prompting speculation that he is on the run.

The man claiming to be Bush said: "We did not charge hundreds of miles
into the heart of Iraq, pay a bitter cost in casualties, defeat a brutal
dictator and liberate 25 million people only to retreat before a band of
thugs and assassins."

Analysts pointed out that given the ongoing nature of the Iraqi resistance
since "the end of major combat operations," that comment could have been
recorded anytime in the past six months.

"When the man identified as Bush tells U.S. troops, 'You are defeating the
terrorists here in Iraq so we don't have to face them in our own country,'
well, it's a little hard to believe that even the Bush White House would
try to spin that," said the operative from a Western intelligence agency.

"How could anyone believe, after all that has been disclosed about the
lies and distortions used to manipulate the public into accepting this
war, that U.S. troops are defending the American people in Iraq? No major
world leader would be so obtuse or so low as to try to sell that to people
at this stage."

Members of the Iraqi Governing Council who met with the man identified as
Bush said they had met with a man identified as Bush and were delaying
comment until Paul Bremer was available to tell them what their comments
would be.

Omar Ali, an Iraqi in a poor area of Baghdad said: "I don't understand why
he didn't stay. Just because the U.S. nearly starved us with the sanctions
for 12 years, killed my cousin during the invasion, busted down my door
last week and is trying to find a way to steal our oil -- does he think
that Iraqis would want to hurt him, our great liberator?"

Private Charles Sanders, who has been stationed in Iraq since the invasion
said: "I was supposed to be back home by now. It was really getting
depressing, but this is great. Sure, I don't get to look into the eyes of
my little girl, or hold my wife tenderly in my arms, but the president
served me turkey!"

Susan Jones in Pittsburgh, who this morning was driven to tears while
watching "Dances with Wolves" on cable TV, said: "I was planning on
talking over the Thanksgiving Day table with my family about how we
slaughtered the Indians and enslaved the blacks, bullied Latin America and
bombed Vietnam, and now were occupying Iraq. I don't know, is it just me,
or do we just have this brutal aggressive side to us? But now I guess,
well, just talk about Bush's visit instead."

When asked whether she was certain the president had gone to Iraq, Laura
Bush said she hadn't noticed her husband had left the Crawford ranch. "I
assumed he was out clearing brush," the First Lady said.

Correspondents Robert Jensen and Sam Husseini contributed to this report.
(http://www.commondreams.org/views03/1128-06.htm)
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Subject: [pjnews] The Soldiers At My Front Door
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Published on Saturday, November 29, 2003 by CommonDreams.org
The Soldiers At My Front Door
by John Dear

I live in a tiny, remote, impoverished, three block long town in the
desert of northeastern New Mexico. Everyone in town--and the whole
state--knows that I am against the occupation of Iraq, that I have called
for the closing of Los Alamos, and that as a priest, I have been
preaching, like the Pope, against the bombing of Baghdad.

Last week, it was announced that the local National Guard unit for
northeastern New Mexico, based in the nearby Armory, was being deployed to
Iraq early next year. I was not surprised when yellow ribbons immediately
sprang up after the press conference.

But I was surprised the following morning to hear 75 soldiers singing,
shouting and screaming as they jogged down Main Street, passed our St.
Joseph’s church, back and forth around town for an hour. It was 6 a.m.,
and they woke me up with their war slogans, chants like “Kill! Kill!
Kill!” and “Swing your guns from left to right; we can kill those guys all
night.”

Their chants were disturbing, but this is war. They have to psyche
themselves up for the kill. They have to believe that flying off to some
tiny, remote desert town in Iraq where they will march in front of
someone’s house and kill poor young Iraqis has some greater meaning
besides cold-blooded murder. Most of these young reservists have never
left our town, and they need our support for the “unpleasant” task before
them. I have been to Iraq, and led a delegation of Nobel Peace Prize
winners to Baghdad in 1999, and I know that the people there are no
different than the people here.

The screaming and chanting went on for one hour. They would march passed
the church, down Main Street, back around the post office, and down Main
Street again. It was clear they wanted to be seen and heard. In fact, it
was quite scary because the desert is normally a place of perfect peace
and silence.

Suddenly, at 7 a.m., the shouting got dramatically louder. I looked out
the front window of the house where I live, next door to the church, and
there they were--all 75 of them, standing yards away from my front door,
in the street right in front of my house and our church, shouting and
screaming to the top of their lungs, “Kill! Kill! Kill!” Their commanders
had planted them there and were egging them on.

I was astonished and appalled. I suddenly realized that I do not need to
go to Iraq; the war had come to my front door. Later, I heard that they
had deliberately decided to do their exercises in front of my house and
our church because of my outspoken opposition to the war. They wanted to
put me in my place.

This, I think, is a new tactic. Over the years, I have been arrested some
75 times in demonstrations, been imprisoned for a “Plowshares” disarmament
action, been bugged, tapped, and harassed, searched at airports, and
monitored by police. But this time, the soldiers who will soon march
through Baghdad and attack desert homes in Iraq, practiced on me. They
confronted me personally, just as the death squad militaries did in
Guatemala and El Salvador in the 1980s, which I witnessed there on several
occasions.

I decided I had to do something. I put on my winter coat and walked out
the front door right into the middle of the street. They stopped shouting
and looked at me, so I said loudly, publicly for all to hear, “In the name
of God, I order all of you to stop this nonsense, and not to go to Iraq. I
want all of you to quit the military, disobey your orders to kill, and not
to kill anyone. I do not want you to get killed. I want you to practice
the love and nonviolence of Jesus. God does not bless war. God does not
want you to kill so Bush and Cheney can get more oil. God does not support
war. Stop all this and go home. God bless you.”

Their jaws dropped, their eyeballs popped and they stood in shock and
silence, looking steadily at me. Then they burst out laughing. Finally,
the commander dismissed them and they left.

Later, military officials spread lies around town that I had disrupted
their military exercises at the Armory, so they decided to come to my
house and to the church in retaliation. Others appealed to the archbishop
to have me kicked out of New Mexico for denouncing their warmaking. Then,
a general called the mayor and asked him to mediate “negotiations” with
me, saying he did not want the military “in confrontation” with the
church. Really, the mayor told me, they fear that I will disrupt the gala
send-off next month, just before Christmas, when the soldiers go to Iraq.

This dramatic episode is only the latest in a series of confrontations
since I came to the desert of New Mexico in the summer of 2002 to serve as
pastor of several poor, desert churches. I have spoken out extensively
against the U.S. war on Iraq, and been denounced by people, including
church people, across the state. I have organized small Christian peace
groups throughout the state. We planned a prayer vigil for nuclear
disarmament at Los Alamos on the anniversary of Hiroshima this past
August, but when the devout people of Los Alamos, most of them Catholic,
heard about it, they appealed to the archbishop to have me expelled if I
appeared publicly in their town. In the end, I did not attend the vigil,
but the publicity gave me further opportunities to call for the closing of
Los Alamos. I receive hate mail, negative phone calls and at least one
death threat for daring to criticize our country. But New Mexico is the
poorest state in the U.S. It is also number one in military spending and
number one in nuclear weapons. It is the most militarized, the most in
need of disarmament, the most in need of nonviolence. It is the first
place the Pentagon goes to recruit poor youth into the empire’s army.

If we are to change the direction of our country, and turn people against
Bush’s occupation of Iraq, we are going to have to face the ire and
persecution of our local communities. If peace people in every local
community insisted that our troops be brought home immediately, that the
U.N. be sent in to restore Iraq, that all U.S. military aid to the Middle
East be cut, and that our arsenal of weapons of mass destruction be
dismantled, then we might all find soldiers marching at our front doors,
trying to intimidate us. If we can face our soldiers, call them to quit
the military and urge them to disobey orders to kill, then perhaps some of
them will refuse to fight, become conscientious objectors and take up the
wisdom of nonviolence. If we can look them in the eye and engage them in
personal Satyagraha as Gandhi demonstrated, then we know that the
transformation has begun.

In the end, the episode for me was an experience of hope. We must be
making a difference if the soldiers have to march at our front doors. That
they failed to convert me or intimidate me, that they had to listen to my
side of the story, may haunt their consciences as they travel to Iraq. No
matter what happens, they have heard loud and clear the good news that God
does not want them to kill anyone. I hope we can all learn the lesson.


John Dear is a Catholic priest, peace activist, lecturer, and former
executive director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation. His latest books
include “Mohandas Gandhi” (Orbis) and “Mary of Nazareth, Prophet of Peace”
(Ave Maria Press). For info, see http://www.johndear.org
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1079575,00.html

Iraq is not America's to sell

International law is unequivocal - Paul Bremer's economic reforms are illegal

Naomi Klein
Friday November 7, 2003
The Guardian

Bring Halliburton home. Cancel the contracts. Ditch the deals. Rip up the
rules. Those are just a few of the suggestions for slogans that could help
unify the growing movement against the occupation of Iraq. So far,
activist debates have focused on whether the demand should be for a
complete withdrawal of troops, or for the United States to cede power to
the United Nations.
But the "troops out" debate overlooks an important fact. If every last
soldier pulled out of the Gulf tomorrow and a sovereign government came to
power, Iraq would still be occupied: by laws written in the interest of
another country; by foreign corporations controlling its essential
services; by 70% unemployment sparked by public sector layoffs.

Any movement serious about Iraqi self-determination must call not only for
an end to Iraq's military occupation, but to its economic colonisation as
well. That means reversing the shock therapy reforms that US occupation
chief Paul Bremer has fraudulently passed off as "reconstruction", and
cancelling all privatisation contracts that are flowing from these
reforms.

How can such an ambitious goal be achieved? Easy: by showing that Bremer's
reforms were illegal to begin with. They clearly violate the international
convention governing the behaviour of occupying forces, the Hague
regulations of 1907 (the companion to the 1949 Geneva conventions, both
ratified by the United States), as well as the US army's own code of war.

The Hague regulations state that an occupying power must respect "unless
absolutely prevented, the laws in force in the country". The coalition
provisional authority has shredded that simple rule with gleeful defiance.
Iraq's constitution outlaws the privatisation of key state assets, and it
bars foreigners from owning Iraqi firms. No plausible argument can be made
that the CPA was "absolutely prevented" from respecting those laws, and
yet two months ago, the CPA overturned them unilaterally.

On September 19, Bremer enacted the now infamous Order 39. It announced
that 200 Iraqi state companies would be privatised; decreed that foreign
firms can retain 100% ownership of Iraqi banks, mines and factories; and
allowed these firms to move 100% of their profits out of Iraq. The
Economist declared the new rules a "capitalist dream".

Order 39 violated the Hague regulations in other ways as well. The
convention states that occupying powers "shall be regarded only as
administrator and usufructuary of public buildings, real estate, forests
and agricultural estates belonging to the hostile state, and situated in
the occupied country. It must safeguard the capital of these properties,
and administer them in accordance with the rules of usufruct."

Bouvier's Law Dictionary defines "usufruct" (possibly the ugliest word in
the English language) as an arrangement that grants one party the right to
use and derive benefit from another's property "without altering the
substance of the thing". Put more simply, if you are a housesitter, you
can eat the food in the fridge, but you can't sell the house and turn it
into condos. And yet that is just what Bremer is doing: what could more
substantially alter "the substance" of a public asset than to turn it into
a private one?

In case the CPA was still unclear on this detail, the US army's Law of
Land Warfare states that "the occupant does not have the right of sale or
unqualified use of [non-military] property". This is pretty
straightforward: bombing something does not give you the right to sell it.
There is every indication that the CPA is well aware of the lawlessness of
its privatisation scheme. In a leaked memo written on March 26, the
British attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, warned Tony Blair that "the
imposition of major structural economic reforms would not be authorised by
international law".

So far, most of the controversy surrounding Iraq's reconstruction has
focused on the waste and corruption in the awarding of contracts. This
badly misses the scope of the violation: even if the sell-off of Iraq were
conducted with full transparency and open bidding, it would still be
illegal for the simple reason that Iraq is not America's to sell.

The security council's recognition of the United States' and Britain's
occupation authority provides no legal cover. The UN resolution passed in
May specifically required the occupying powers to "comply fully with their
obligations under international law including in particular the Geneva
conventions of 1949 and the Hague regulations of 1907".

According to a growing number of international legal experts, that means
that if the next Iraqi government decides it doesn't want to be a wholly
owned subsidiary of Bechtel and Halliburton, it will have powerful legal
grounds to renationalise assets that were privatised under CPA edicts.

Juliet Blanch, global head of energy and international arbitration for the
huge international law firm Norton Rose, says that because Bremer's
reforms directly contradict Iraq's constitution, they are "in breach of
international law and are likely not enforceable". Blanch argues that the
CPA "has no authority or ability to sign those [privatisation] contracts",
and that a sovereign Iraqi government would have "quite a serious argument
for renationalisation without paying compensation". Firms facing this type
of expropriation would, according to Blanch, have "no legal remedy".

The only way out for the administration is to make sure that Iraq's next
government is anything but sovereign. It must be pliant enough to ratify
the CPA's illegal laws, which will then be celebrated as the happy
marriage of free markets and free people. Once that happens, it will be
too late: the contracts will be locked in, the deals done and the
occupation of Iraq permanent.

Which is why anti-war forces must use this fast-closing window to demand
that the next Iraqi government be free from the shackles of these reforms.
It's too late to stop the war, but it's not too late to deny Iraq's
invaders the myriad economic prizes they went to war to collect in the
first place.

It's not too late to cancel the contracts and ditch the deals.


Naomi Klein is the author of No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies
(Picador) and, most recently, Fences and Windows: Dispatches From the Front
Lines of the Globalization Debate (Picador).
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--> 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
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Today's commentary:
http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2003-11/22schechter.cfm

The Media War Has Come Home
November 23, 2003
By Danny Schechter

During the 60's, some elements of the anti-war movement believed that it
was time to bring the war home. The idea: give America a taste of what
Vietnam was suffering by launching an armed resistance. Their "blows
against the empire" were misguided and self-destructive, as even most of
the surviving wannabe guerilla warriors now agree,

Oddly enough, the Bush Administration as well as many conservatives became
obsessed with that 60's notion and are apllying its tactics to achieve
opposite results.

They are bringing their war home-literally.

The Republican Party has just announced it is importing Doha to New York,
by reapplying the lessons learned at the Iraq War Coalition Press Center,
the centerpiece of a well crafted propaganda system to domestic politics,

This is not entirely new. During the war, corporate PR veteran and
Pentagon media Victoria Clarke told the Wall Street Journal that she was
running her operation as if it was a political campaign.

And now that we realize how specious most of the arguments for the war
were, we can see that politics and PR (along with oil and region change)
was what it was about. It wasn't much of a armed clash since the other
side folded most its tent through bribes and bullying when the invasion
began, only to reappear when it ended.

Clarke was so impressive at orchestrating the media that a media outlet
has now hired her. She joined CNN as a correspondent. (The Pentagon
briefer in chief during Gulf War 1 joined NBC News in its aftermath.)

Now, the New York Observer tells of an impending merger between military
media strategy and domestic news management. Ben Smith reports:

"We're looking at embedding reporters, we're looking at new and
interesting camera angles," Jim Wilkinson said recently in the quick,
confidential drawl reporters got used to at the U.S. Central Command in
Doha, Qatar. But while the Republican operative spent much of the year in
desert camouflage as General Tommy Franks' director of strategic
communications, he's now in Brooks Brothers mufti in foreign territory,
New York.

"Mr. Wilkinson started last month as the director of communications for
the Republican National Convention, which will take place from Aug. 30 to
Sept. 2 next year. His office, on the 18th floor over Madison Square
Garden, is furnished with the essentials: leather-bound Bible, Yankee cap,
Fox News on the flat-screen TV."

There are signs that media organizations are waking up-or more
likely-being unleashed from the handcuffs of patriotic coverage rituals
embedded in war coverage the way those 7th inning renditions of "God Bless
America" infiltrated baseball games

According to Smith, there was rage in the press corps at those Doha
briefings even if we rarely saw the, The BBC film War Spin captured it but
was not shown in America. New York Magazine media critic Michael Wolff's
on camera challenge to General Vincent Brooks did come through but only as
an isolated instance.:

Smith says he had plenty of company: "Plenty of reporters seethed at him
during the war, and not covertly. Reporters there barked and
protested-many are still brutally angry-at the "No comment" after "No
comment" they received in Doha as their embedded colleagues broke news in
the field and Mr. Rumsfeld gave press conferences at the Pentagon. Doha
was, to them, a kind of biosphere of non-news."

Now that some in the press rediscover their skepticism, the Bush
Administration is shifting strategies-from seducing journalists to
bypassing them all together. Frank Rick writes about this in New York
Times:

He begins by noting that the President himself says he doesn't not even
read the press or watch TV, He told Fox News' Brit Hume:" "The best way to
get the news is from objective sources. And the most objective sources I
have are people on my staff who tell me what's happening in the world."

After nearly three years, reporters who cover politics are realizing there
is no there there. Writes Rich: "Until recently, the administration had
often gotten what it wanted, especially on television, and not just on
afternoon talk shows. From 9/11 through the fall of Saddam, the
obsequiousness became so thick that even Terry Moran, the ABC News White
House correspondent, said his colleagues looked "like zombies" during the
notorious pre-shock-and-awe Bush news conference of March 6, 2003.'

As criticisms of his policies could no longer be contained, Bush went over
the heads of the Washington Press corps by doing interviews satellite with
local TV anchors who presumably follow the details the least. This little
trick was first used by his father during the l992 presidential campaign.
The word has now gone to his "team" not to book Administration Bigs on
hostile shows like Nightline or Frontline.

Instead they will continue to rely on the Sunday Beltway blather talk
shows as their venue du jour This prompts Rich to observe: "When an
administration is hiding in a no-news bunker, how do you find the news?
The first place to look, we're starting to learn, is any TV news show on
which Ms. Rice, Mr. Card, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld
are not appearing. If they're before a camera, you can assume that the
White House has deemed the venue a safe one - a spin zone,"

In this media war, the Administration seems to still be way ahead but the
upstart Marlins of the media could still vanquish the powerful imperial
Yankees in the next game or the one after that. Think of the upset at the
World Series as a political metaphor,

Just as Iraq policy is unraveling the Administration's media management
strategies unravel with it. Those of us with a memory remember Vietnam,
the war in which the media began as a cheerleader and ended up presiding
over its funeral.

The war has come home.

This is not a parallel that is lost on Mr. Rich of the New York Times who
concludes: "At the tender age of six months, the war in Iraq is not
remotely a Vietnam. But from the way the administration tries to manage
the news against all reality, even that irrevocable reality encased in
flag-draped coffins, you can only wonder if it might yet persuade the
audience at home that we're mired in another Tet after all. "


News Dissector Danny Schechter writes daily for Mediachannel.org. His
latest book; Embedded: Weapons of Mass Deception is out this week from
Prometheus Books.
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http://www.truthout.org/docs_03/printer_111403E.shtml

'Our Democracy is in Danger of Being Paralyzed'

  Keynote Address to the National Conference on Media Reform
  By Bill Moyers

  Saturday 08 November 2003

  Thank you for inviting me tonight. I’m flattered to be speaking to a
gathering as high-powered as this one that’s come together with an
objective as compelling as “media reform.” I must confess, however, to a
certain discomfort, shared with other journalists, about the very term
“media.” Ted Gup, who teaches journalism at Case Western Reserve,
articulated my concerns better than I could when he wrote in The
Chronicle of Higher Education (November 23, 2001)

that the very concept of media is insulting to some of us within the press
who find ourselves lumped in with so many disparate elements, as if
everyone with a pen, a microphone, a camera, or just a loud voice were all
one and the same. …David Broder is not Matt Drudge. “Meet the Press” is
not “Temptation Island.” And I am not Jerry Springer. I do not speak for
him. He does not speak for me. Yet ‘the media” speaks for us all.

  That’s how I felt when I saw Oliver North reporting on Fox from Iraq,
pressing our embattled troops to respond to his repetitive and
belittling question, “Does Fox Rock? Does Fox Rock?” Oliver North and I
may be in the same “media” but we are not part of the same message.
Nonetheless, I accept that I work and all of us live in “medialand,” and
God knows we need some “media reform.” I’m sure you know those two words
are really an incomplete description of the job ahead. Taken alone, they
suggest that you’ve assembled a convention of efficiency experts,
tightening the bolts and boosting the output of the machinery of public
enlightenment, or else a conclave of high-minded do-gooders applauding
each other’s sermons. But we need to be – and we will be – much more
than that. Because what we’re talking about is nothing less than
rescuing a democracy that is so polarized it is in danger of being
paralyzed and pulverized.

  Alarming words, I know. But the realities we face should trigger alarms.
Free and responsible government by popular consent just can’t exist
without an informed public. That’s a cliché, I know, but I agree with
the presidential candidate who once said that truisms are true and
clichés mean what they say (an observation that no doubt helped to lose
him the election.) It’s a reality: democracy can’t exist without an
informed public. Here’s an example: Only 13% of eligible young people
cast ballots in the last presidential election. A recent National Youth
Survey revealed that only half of the fifteen hundred young people
polled believe that voting is important, and only 46% think they can
make a difference in solving community problems. We’re talking here
about one quarter of the electorate. The Carnegie Corporation conducted
a youth challenge quiz of l5-24 year-olds and asked them, “Why don’t
more young people vote or get involved?” Of the nearly two thousand
respondents, the main answer was that they did not have enough
information about issues and candidates. Let me rewind and say it again:
democracy can’t exist without an informed public. So I say without
qualification that it’s not simply the cause of journalism that’s at
stake today, but the cause of American liberty itself. As Tom Paine put
it, “The sun never shined on a cause of greater worth.” He was talking
about the cause of a revolutionary America in 1776. But that revolution
ran in good part on the energies of a rambunctious, though tiny press.
Freedom and freedom of communications were birth-twins in the future
United States. They grew up together, and neither has fared very well in
the other’s absence. Boom times for the one have been boom times for the
other.

  Yet today, despite plenty of lip service on every ritual occasion to
freedom of the press radio and TV, three powerful forces are undermining
that very freedom, damming the streams of significant public interest
news that irrigate and nourish the flowering of self-determination. The
first of these is the centuries-old reluctance of governments – even
elected governments – to operate in the sunshine of disclosure and
criticism. The second is more subtle and more recent. It’s the tendency
of media giants, operating on big-business principles, to exalt
commercial values at the expense of democratic value. That is, to run
what Edward R. Murrow forty-five years ago called broadcasting’s
“money-making machine” at full throttle. In so doing they are squeezing
out the journalism that tries to get as close as possible to the
verifiable truth; they are isolating serious coverage of public affairs
into ever-dwindling “news holes” or far from prime- time; and they are
gobbling up small and independent publications competing for the
attention of the American people.

  It’s hardly a new or surprising story. But there are fresh and
disturbing chapters.

  In earlier times our governing bodies tried to squelch journalistic
freedom with the blunt instruments of the law – padlocks for the presses
and jail cells for outspoken editors and writers. Over time, with
spectacular wartime exceptions, the courts and the Constitution struck
those weapons out of their hands. But they’ve found new ones now, in the
name of “national security.” The classifier’s Top Secret stamp, used
indiscriminately, is as potent a silencer as a writ of arrest. And
beyond what is officially labeled “secret” there hovers a culture of
sealed official lips, opened only to favored media insiders: of
government by leak and innuendo and spin, of misnamed “public
information” offices that churn out blizzards of releases filled with
self-justifying exaggerations and, occasionally, just plain damned lies.
Censorship without officially appointed censors.

  Add to that the censorship-by-omission of consolidated media empires
digesting the bones of swallowed independents, and you’ve got a major
shrinkage of the crucial information that thinking citizens can act
upon. People saw that coming as long as a century ago when the rise of
chain newspaper ownerships, and then of concentration in the young radio
industry, became apparent. And so in the zesty progressivism of early
New Deal days, the Federal Communications Act of 1934 was passed (more
on this later.) The aim of that cornerstone of broadcast policy,
mentioned over 100 times in its pages, was to promote the “public
interest, convenience and necessity.” The clear intent was to prevent a
monopoly of commercial values from overwhelming democratic values – to
assure that the official view of reality – corporate or government – was
not the only view of reality that reached the people. Regulators and
regulated, media and government were to keep a wary eye on each other,
preserving those checks and balances that is the bulwark of our
Constitutional order.

  What would happen, however, if the contending giants of big government
and big publishing and broadcasting ever joined hands? Ever saw eye to
eye in putting the public’s need for news second to free-market
economics? That’s exactly what’s happening now under the ideological
banner of “deregulation.” Giant megamedia conglomerates that our
founders could not possibly have envisioned are finding common cause
with an imperial state in a betrothal certain to produce not the sons
and daughters of liberty but the very kind of bastards that issued from
the old arranged marriage of church and state.

  Consider where we are today.

  Never has there been an administration so disciplined in secrecy, so
precisely in lockstep in keeping information from the people at large
and – in defiance of the Constitution – from their representatives in
Congress. Never has the so powerful a media oligopoly – the word is
Barry Diller’s, not mine – been so unabashed in reaching like Caesar for
still more wealth and power. Never have hand and glove fitted together
so comfortably to manipulate free political debate, sow contempt for the
idea of government itself, and trivialize the people’s need to know.
When the journalist-historian Richard Reeves was once asked by a college
student to define “real news”, he answered: “The news you and I need to
keep our freedoms.” When journalism throws in with power that’s the
first news marched by censors to the guillotine. The greatest moments in
the history of the press came not when journalists made common cause
with the state but when they stood fearlessly independent of it.

  Which brings me to the third powerful force – beyond governmental
secrecy and megamedia conglomerates – that is shaping what Americans
see, read, and hear. I am talking now about that quasi-official partisan
press ideologically linked to an authoritarian administration that in
turn is the ally and agent of the most powerful interests in the world.
This convergence dominates the marketplace of political ideas today in a
phenomenon unique in our history. You need not harbor the notion of a
vast, right wing conspiracy to think this more collusion more than pure
coincidence. Conspiracy is unnecessary when ideology hungers for power
and its many adherents swarm of their own accord to the same pot of
honey. Stretching from the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal to
the faux news of Rupert Murdoch’s empire to the nattering nabobs of
no-nothing radio to a legion of think tanks paid for and bought by
conglomerates – the religious, partisan and corporate right have raised
a mighty megaphone for sectarian, economic, and political forces that
aim to transform the egalitarian and democratic ideals embodied in our
founding documents. Authoritarianism. With no strong opposition party to
challenge such triumphalist hegemony, it is left to journalism to be
democracy’s best friend. That is why so many journalists joined with you
in questioning Michael Powell’s bid – blessed by the White House – to
permit further concentration of media ownership. If free and independent
journalism committed to telling the truth without fear or favor is
suffocated, the oxygen goes out of democracy. And there is a surer way
to intimidate and then silence mainstream journalism than to be the
boss.

  If you doubt me, read Jane Kramer’s chilling account in the current New
Yorker of Silvio Berlusconi. The Prime Minister of Italy is its richest
citizen. He is also its first media mogul. The list of media that he or
his relatives or his proxies own, or directly or indirectly control,
includes the state television networks and radio stations, three of
Italy’s four commercial television networks, two big publishing houses,
two national newspapers, fifty magazines, the country’s largest movie
production-and-distribution company, and a chunk of its Internet
services. Even now he is pressing upon parliament a law that would
enable him to purchase more media properties, including the most
influential paper in the country. Kramer quotes one critic who says that
half the reporters in Italy work for Berlusconi, and the other half
think they might have to. Small wonder he has managed to put the Italian
State to work to guarantee his fortune – or that his name is commonly
attached to such unpleasant things as contempt for the law, conflict of
interest, bribery, and money laundering. Nonetheless, “his power over
what other Italians see, read, buy, and, above all, think, is
overwhelming.” The editor of The Economist, Bill Emmott, was asked
recently why a British magazine was devoting so much space to an Italian
Prime Minister. He replied that Berlusconi had betrayed the two things
the magazine stood for: capitalism and democracy. Can it happen here? It
can happen here. By the way, Berlusconi’s close friend is Rupert
Murdoch. On July 3lst this year, writes Jane Kramer, programming on
nearly all the satellite hookups in Italy was switched automatically to
Murdoch’s Sky Italia

  So the issues bringing us here tonight are bigger and far more critical
than simply “media reform.” That’s why, before I go on, I want to ask
you to look around you. I’m serious: Look to your left and now to your
right. You are looking at your allies in one of the great ongoing
struggles of the American experience – the struggle for the soul of
democracy, for government “of, by, and for the people.”

  It’s a battle we can win only if we work together. We’ve seen that this
year. Just a few months ago the FCC, heavily influenced by lobbyists for
the newspaper, broadcasting and cable interests, prepared a relaxation
of the rules governing ownership of media outlets that would allow still
more diversity-killing mergers among media giants. The proceedings were
conducted in virtual secrecy, and generally ignored by all the major
media, who were of course interested parties. In June Chairman Powell
and his two Republican colleagues on the FCC announced the revised
regulations as a done deal.

  But they didn’t count on the voice of independent journalists and
citizens like you. Because of coverage in independent outlets –
including PBS, which was the only broadcasting system that encouraged
its journalists to report what was really happening – and because
citizens like you took quick action, this largely invisible issue burst
out as a major political cause and ignited a crackling public debate.
You exposed Powell’s failure to conduct an open discussion of the rule
changes save for a single hearing in Richmond, Virginia. Your efforts
led to a real participatory discussion, with open meetings in Chicago,
Seattle, San Francisco, New York and Atlanta. Then the organizing that
followed generated millions of letters and “filings”at the FCC opposing
the change. Finally, the outcry mobilized unexpected support for
bi-partisan legislation to reverse the new rules that cleared the Senate
– although House Majority Leader Tom De Lay still holds it prisoner in
the House. But who would have thought six months ago that the cause
would win support from such allies as Senator Trent Lott or Kay Bailey
Hutchinson, from my own Texas. You have moved “media reform” to
center-stage, where it may even now become a catalyst for a new era of
democratic renewal.

  We working journalists have something special to bring to this work.
This weekend at your conference there will be plenty of good talk about
the mechanics of reform. What laws are needed? What advocacy programs
and strategies? How can we protect and extend the reach of those tools
that give us some countervailing power against media monopoly –
instruments like the Internet, cable TV, community-based radio and
public broadcasting systems, alternative journals of news and opinion.

  But without passion, without a message that has a beating heart, these
won’t be enough. There’s where journalism comes in. It isn’t the only
agent of freedom, obviously; in fact, journalism is a deeply human and
therefore deeply flawed craft – yours truly being a conspicuous example.
But at times it has risen to great occasions, and at times it has made
other freedoms possible. That’s what the draftsmen of the First
Amendment knew and it’s what we can’t afford to forget. So to remind us
of what our free press has been at its best and can be again, I will
call on the help of unseen presences, men and women of journalism’s
often checkered but sometimes courageous past.

  Think with me for a moment on the reasons behind the establishment of
press freedom. It wasn’t ordained to protect hucksters, and it didn’t
drop like the gentle rain from heaven. It was fought and sacrificed for
by unpretentious but feisty craftsmen who got their hands inky at their
own hand presses and called themselves simply “printers.” The very first
American newspaper was a little three-page affair put out in Boston in
September of 1690. Its name was Publick Occurrences Both Foreign and
Domestick and its editor was Benjamin Harris, who said he simply wanted
“to give an account of such considerable things as have come to my
attention.” The government shut it down after one issue – just one
issue! – for the official reason that printer Ben Harris hadn’t applied
for the required government license to publish. But I wonder if some
Massachusetts pooh-bah didn’t take personally one of Harris’s proclaimed
motives for starting the paper – “to cure the spirit of Lying much among
us”?

  No one seems to have objected when Harris and his paper disappeared –
that was the way things were. But some forty-odd years later when
printer John Peter Zenger was jailed in New York for criticizing its
royal governor, things were different. The colony brought Zenger to
trial on a charge of “seditious libel,” and since it didn’t matter
whether the libel was true or not, the case seemed open and shut. But
the jury ignored the judge’s charge and freed Zenger, not only because
the governor was widely disliked, but because of the closing appeal of
Zenger’s lawyer, Andrew Hamilton. Just hear him! His client’s case was:

Not the cause of the poor Printer, nor of New York alone, [but] the cause
of Liberty, and. . . every Man who prefers Freedom to a Life of Slavery
will bless and honour You, as Men who. . .by an impartial and uncorrupt
Verdict, [will] have laid a Noble Foundation for securing to ourselves,
our Posterity and our Neighbors, That, to which Nature and the Laws of our
Country have given us a Right, -- the Liberty – both of exposing and
opposing arbitrary Power…by speaking and writing – Truth.

  Still a pretty good mission statement!

  During the War for Independence itself most of the three dozen little
weekly newspapers in the colonies took the Patriot side and mobilized
resistance by giving space to anti-British letters, news of Parliament’s
latest outrages, and calls to action. But the clarion journalistic voice
of the Revolution was the onetime editor of the Pennsylvania Magazine,
Tom Paine, a penniless recent immigrant from England where he left a
trail of failure as a businessman and husband. In 1776 – just before
enlisting in Washington’s army – he published Common Sense, a
hard-hitting pamphlet that slashed through legalisms and doubts to make
an uncompromising case for an independent and republican America. It’s
been called the first best seller, with as many as 100,000 copies bought
by a small literate population. Paine followed it up with another
convincing collection of essays written in the field and given another
punchy title, The Crisis. Passed from hand to hand and reprinted in
other papers, they spread the gospel of freedom to thousands of
doubters. And why I bring Paine up here is because he had something we
need to restore – an unwavering concentration to reach ordinary people
with the message that they mattered and could stand up for themselves.
He couched his gospel of human rights and equality in a popular style
that any working writer can envy. “As it is my design,” he said, “to
make those that can scarcely read understand, I shall therefore avoid
every literary ornament and put it in language as plain as the
alphabet.”

  That plain language spun off memorable one-liners that we’re still
quoting. “These are the times that try men’s souls.” “Tyranny, like
hell, is not easily conquered.” “What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too
lightly.” “Virtue is not hereditary.” And this: “Of more worth is one
honest man to society and in the sight of God than all the crowned
ruffians that ever lived.” I don’t know what Paine would have thought of
political debate by bumper sticker and sound bite but he could have held
his own in any modern campaign.

  There were also editors who felt responsible to audiences that would
dive deep. In 1787 and ‘88 the little New-York Independent Advertiser
ran all eighty-five numbers of The Federalist , those serious essays in
favor of ratifying the Constitution. They still shine as clear
arguments, but they are, and they were, unforgiving in their demand for
concentrated attention. Nonetheless, The Advertiser felt that it owed
the best to its readers, and the readers knew that the issues of
self-government deserved their best attention. I pray your goal of
“media reform” includes a press as conscientious as the New-York
Advertiser, as pungent as Common Sense, and as public-spirited as both.
Because it takes those qualities to fight against the relentless
pressure of authority and avarice. Remember, back in l79l, when the
First Amendment was ratified, the idea of a free press seemed safely
sheltered in law. It wasn’t. Only seven years later, in the midst of a
war scare with France, Congress passed and John Adams signed the
infamous Sedition Act. The act made it a crime – just listen to how
broad a brush the government could swing – to circulate opinions
“tending to induce a belief” that lawmakers might have unconstitutional
or repressive motives, or “directly or indirectly tending” to justify
France or to “criminate,” whatever that meant, the President or other
Federal officials. No wonder that opponents called it a scheme to
“excite a fervor against foreign aggression only to establish tyranny at
home.” John Ashcroft would have loved it.

  But here’s what happened. At least a dozen editors refused to be
frightened and went defiantly to prison, some under state prosecutions.
One of them, Matthew Lyon, who also held a seat in the House of
Representatives, languished for four months in an unheated cell during a
Vermont winter. But such was the spirit of liberty abroad in the land
that admirers chipped in to pay his thousand-dollar fine, and when he
emerged his district re-elected him by a landslide. Luckily, the
Sedition Act had a built-in expiration date of 1801, at which time
President Jefferson – who hated it from the first – pardoned those
remaining under indictment. So the story has an upbeat ending, and so
can ours, but it will take the kind of courage that those early printers
and their readers showed.

  Courage is a timeless quality and surfaces when the government is
tempted to hit the bottle of censorship again during national
emergencies, real or manufactured. As so many of you will recall, in
1971, during the Vietnam War, the Nixon administration resurrected the
doctrine of “prior restraint” from the crypt and tried to ban the
publication of the Pentagon Papers by the New York Times and the
Washington Post – even though the documents themselves were a classified
history of events during four earlier Presidencies. Arthur Sulzberger,
the publisher of the Times, and Katherine Graham of the Post were both
warned by their lawyers that they and their top managers could face
criminal prosecution under espionage laws if they printed the material
that Daniel Ellsberg had leaked – and, by the way, offered without
success to the three major television networks. Or at the least,
punitive lawsuits or whatever political reprisals a furious Nixon team
could devise. But after internal debates – and the threats of some of
their best-known editors to resign rather than fold under pressure –
both owners gave the green light – and were vindicated by the Supreme
Court. Score a round for democracy.

  Bi-partisan fairness requires me to note that the Carter administration,
in 1979, tried to prevent the Progressive magazine, published right here
in Madison, from running an article called “How to Make an H-Bomb.” The
grounds were a supposed threat to “national security.” But Howard
Morland had compiled the piece entirely from sources open to the public,
mainly to show that much of the classification system was Wizard of Oz
smoke and mirrors. The courts again rejected the government’s claim, but
it’s noteworthy that the journalism of defiance by that time had
retreated to a small left-wing publication like the Progressive.

  In all three of those cases, confronted with a clear and present danger
of punishment, none of the owners flinched. Can we think of a single
executive of today’s big media conglomerates showing the kind of
resistance that Sulzberger, Graham, and Erwin Knoll did? Certainly not
Michael Eisner. He said he didn’t even want ABC News reporting on its
parent company, Disney. Certainly not General Electric/NBC’s Robert
Wright. He took Phil Donahue off MNBC because the network didn’t want to
offend conservatives with a liberal sensibility during the invasion of
Iraq. Instead, NBC brought to its cable channel one Michael Savage whose
diatribes on radio had described non-white countries as “turd-world
nations” and who characterized gay men and women as part of “the grand
plan to cut down on the white race.” I am not sure what it says that the
GE/NBC executives calculated that while Donahue was offensive to
conservatives, Savage was not.

continued...
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http://www.truthout.org/docs_03/printer_111403E.shtml

'Our Democracy is in Danger of Being Paralyzed'

  Keynote Address to the National Conference on Media Reform
  By Bill Moyers

continued...


And then there’s Leslie Moonves, the chairman of CBS. In the very week
that the once-Tiffany Network was celebrating its 75th anniversary – and
taking kudos for its glory days when it was unafraid to broadcast “The
Harvest of Shame” and “The Selling of the Pentagon” – the network’s famous
eye blinked. Pressured by a vociferous and relentless right wing campaign
and bullied by the Republican National Committee – and at a time when its
parent company has billions resting on whether the White House, Congress,
and the FCC will allow it to own even more stations than currently
permissible – CBS caved in and pulled the miniseries about Ronald Reagan
that conservatives thought insufficiently worshipful. The chief honcho at
CBS, Les Moonves, says taste, not politics, dictated his decision. But
earlier this year, explaining why CBS intended to air a series about Adolf
Hitler, Moonves sang a different tune: “If you want to play it safe and
put on milquetoast then you get criticized…There are times when as a
broadcaster when you take chances.” This obviously wasn’t one of those
times. Granted, made-for-television movies about living figures are about
as vital as the wax figures at Madame Tussaud’s – and even less authentic
– granted that the canonizers of Ronald Reagan hadn’t even seen the film
before they set to howling; granted, on the surface it’s a silly tempest
in a teapot; still, when a once-great network falls obsequiously to the
ground at the feet of a partisan mob over a cheesy mini-series that
practically no one would have taken seriously as history, you have to
wonder if the slight tremor that just ran through the First Amendment
could be the harbinger of greater earthquakes to come, when the stakes are
really high. And you have to wonder what concessions the media
tycoons-cum-supplicants are making when no one is looking.

  So what must we devise to make the media safe for individuals stubborn
about protecting freedom and serving the truth? And what do we all –
educators, administrators, legislators and agitators – need to do to
restore the disappearing diversity of media opinions? America had plenty
of that in the early days when the republic and the press were growing
up together. It took no great amount of capital and credit – just a few
hundred dollars – to start a paper, especially with a little political
sponsorship and help. There were well over a thousand of them by 1840,
mostly small-town weeklies. And they weren’t objective by any stretch.
Here’s William Cobbett, another Anglo-American hell-raiser like Paine,
shouting his creed in the opening number of his 1790s paper, Porcupine’s
Gazette. “Peter Porcupine,” Cobbett’s self-bestowed nickname, declared:

Professions of impartiality I shall make none. They are always useless,
and are besides perfect nonsense, when used by a newsmonger; for, he that
does not relate news as he finds it, is something worse than partial; and
. . . he that does not exercise his own judgment, either in admitting or
rejecting what is sent him, is a poor passive tool, and not an editor.

  In Cobbett’s day you could flaunt your partisan banners as you cut and
thrust, and not inflict serious damage on open public discussion because
there were plenty of competitors. It didn’t matter if the local gazette
presented the day’s events entirely through a Democratic lens. There was
always an alternate Whig or Republican choice handy – there were, in
other words, choices. As Alexis de Tocqueville noted, these many
blooming journals kept even rural Americans amazingly well informed.
They also made it possible for Americans to exercise one of their most
democratic habits – that of forming associations to carry out civic
enterprises. And they operated against the dreaded tyranny of the
majority by letting lonely thinkers know that they had allies elsewhere.
Here’s how de Tocqueville put it in his own words:

  It often happens in democratic countries that many men who have the
desire or directed toward that light, and those wandering spirits who
had long sought each other the need to associate cannot do it, because
all being very small and lost in the crowd, they do not see each other
and do not know where to find each other. Up comes a newspaper that
exposes to their view the sentiment or the idea that had been presented
to each of them simultaneously but separately. All are immediately in
the shadows finally meet each other and unite.

  No wandering spirit could fail to find a voice in print. And so in that
pre-Civil War explosion of humanitarian reform movements, it was a
diverse press that put the yeast in freedom’s ferment. Of course there
were plenty of papers that spoke for Indian-haters, immigrant-bashers,
bigots, jingoes and land-grabbers proclaiming America’s Manifest Destiny
to dominate North America. But one way or another, journalism mattered,
and had purpose and direction.

  Past and present are never as separate as we think. Horace Greeley, the
reform-loving editor of the New York Tribune, not only kept his pages
“ever open to the plaints of the wronged and suffering,” but said that
whoever sat in an editor’s chair and didn’t work to promote human
progress hadn’t tasted “the luxury” of journalism. I liken that to the
words of a kindred spirit closer to our own time, I.F. Stone. In his
four-page little I.F. Stone’s Weekly, “Izzy” loved to catch the
government’s lies and contradictions in the government’s own official
documents. And amid the thunder of battle with the reactionaries, he
said: “I have so much fun I ought to be arrested.” Think about that. Two
newsmen, a century apart, believing that being in a position to fight
the good fight isn’t a burden but a lucky break. How can our work here
bring that attitude back into the newsrooms?

  That era of a wide-open and crowded newspaper playing field began to
fade as the old hand-presses gave way to giant machines with press runs
and readerships in the hundreds of thousands and costs in the millions.
But that didn’t necessarily or immediately kill public spirited
journalism. Not so long as the new owners were still strong-minded
individuals with big professional egos to match their thick pocketbooks.
When Joseph Pulitzer, a one-time immigrant reporter for a
German-language paper in St. Louis, took over the New York World in 1883
he was already a millionaire in the making. But here’s his recommended
short platform for politicians:

  1.Tax luxuries

  2. Tax Inheritances

  3. Tax Large Incomes

  4. Tax monopolies

  5. Tax the Privileged Corporation

  6. A Tariff for Revenue

  7. Reform the Civil Service

  8. Punish Corrupt Officers

  9. Punish Vote Buying.

  10. Punish Employers who Coerce their Employees in Elections

  Also not a bad mission statement. Can you imagine one of today’s huge
newspaper chains taking that on as an agenda?

  Don’t get me wrong. The World certainly offered people plenty of the
spice that they wanted – entertainment, sensation, earthy advice on
living – but not at the expense of news that let them know who was on
their side against the boodlers and bosses.

  Nor did big-time, big-town, big bucks journalism extinguish the
possibility of a reform-minded investigative journalism that took the
name of muckraking during the Progressive Era. Those days of early last
century saw a second great awakening of the democratic impulse. What
brought it into being was a reaction against the Social Darwinism and
unrestrained capitalistic exploitation that is back in full force today.
Certain popular magazines made space for – and profited by – the work of
such journalists – to name only a few – as Lincoln Steffens, Ida
Tarbell, Upton Sinclair, Samuel Hopkins Adams and David Graham Phillips.
They ripped the veils from – among other things – the shame of the
cities, the crimes of the trusts, the treason of the Senate and the
villainies of those who sold tainted meat and poisonous medicines. And
why were they given those opportunities? Because, in the words of Samuel
S. McClure, owner of McClure’s Magazine, when special interests defied
the law and flouted the general welfare, there was a social debt
incurred. And, as he put it: “We have to pay in the end, every one of
us. And in the end, the sum total of the debt will be our liberty.”

  Muckraking lingers on today, but alas, a good deal of it consists of
raking personal and sexual scandal in high and celebrated places.
Surely, if democracy is to be served, we have to get back to putting the
rake where the important dirt lies, in the fleecing of the public and
the abuse of its faith in good government.

  When that landmark Communications Act of 1934 was under consideration a
vigorous public movement of educators, labor officials, and religious
and institutional leaders emerged to argue for a broadcast system that
would serve the interests of citizens and communities. A movement like
that is coming to life again and we now have to build on this momentum.

  It won’t be easy, because the tide’s been flowing the other way for a
long time. The deregulation pressure began during the Reagan era, when
then-FCC chairman Mark Fowler, who said that TV didn’t need much
regulation because it was just a “toaster with pictures,” eliminated
many public-interest rules. That opened the door for networks to cut
their news staffs, scuttle their documentary units (goodbye to “The
Harvest of Shame” and “The Selling of the Pentagon”), and exile
investigative producers and reporters to the under-funded hinterlands of
independent production. It was like turning out searchlights on dark and
dangerous corners. A crowning achievement of that drive was the
Telecommunications Act of 1996, the largest corporate welfare program
ever for the most powerful media and entertainment conglomerates in the
world – passed, I must add, with support from both parties.

  And the beat of “convergence” between once-distinct forms of media goes
on at increased tempo, with the communications conglomerates and the
advertisers calling the tune. As safeguards to competition fall, an
octopus like GE-NBC-Vivendi-Universal will be able to secure cable
channels that can deliver interactive multimedia content – text, sound
and images – to digital TVs, home computers, personal video recorders
and portable wireless devices like cell phones. The goal? To corner the
market on new ways of selling more things to more people for more hours
in the day. And in the long run, to fill the airwaves with customized
pitches to you and your children. That will melt down the surviving
boundaries between editorial and marketing divisions and create a hybrid
known to the new-media hucksters as “branded entertainment.”

  Let’s consider what’s happening to newspapers. A study by Mark Cooper of
the Consumer Federation of America reports that two-thirds of today’s
newspaper markets are monopolies. And now most of the country’s powerful
newspaper chains are lobbying for co-ownership of newspaper and
broadcast outlets in the same market, increasing their grip on community
after community. And are they up-front about it? Hear this: Last
December 3 such media giants as The New York Times, Gannett, Cox, and
Tribune, along with the trade group representing almost all the
country’s broadcasting stations, filed a petition to the FCC making the
case for that cross ownership the owners so desperately seek. They
actually told the FCC that lifting the regulation on cross ownership
would strengthen local journalism. But did those same news organizations
tell their readers what they were doing? Not all. None of them on that
day believed they had an obligation to report in their own news pages
what their parent companies were asking of the FCC. As these huge media
conglomerates increase their control over what we see, read, and hear,
they rarely report on how they are themselves are using their power to
further their own interests and power as big business, including their
influence over the political process.

  Take a look at a new book called Leaving Readers Behind: The Age of
Corporate Newspapering published as part of the Project on the State of
the American Newspaper under the auspices of the Pew Charitable Trusts.
The people who produced the book all love newspapers – Gene Roberts,
former managing editor of The New York Times; Thomas Kunkel, dean of the
Philip Merrill College of Journalism; Charles Layton, a veteran wire
service reporter and news and feature editor at the Philadelphia
Inquirer, as well as contributors such as Ken Auletta, Geneva
Overholser, and Roy Reed. Their conclusion: the newspaper industry is in
the middle of the most momentous change in its three hundred year
history – a change that is diminishing the amount of real news available
to the consumer. A generation of relentless corporatization is now
culminating in a furious, unprecedented blitz of buying, selling and
consolidating of newspapers, from the mightiest dailies to the humblest
weeklies. It is a world where “small hometown dailies in particular are
being bought and sold like hog futures. Where chains, once content to
grow one property at a time, now devour other chains whole. Where they
are effectively ceding whole regions of the country to one another,
further minimizing competition. Where money is pouring into the business
from interests with little knowledge and even less concern about the
special obligations newspapers have to democracy.” They go on to
describe the toll that the never-ending drive for profits is taking on
the news. In Cumberland, Maryland, for example, the police reporter had
so many duties piled upon him he no longer had time to go to the police
station for the daily reports. But newspaper management had a
cost-saving solution: put a fax machine in the police station and let
the cops send over the news they thought the paper should have. In New
Jersey, the Gannett chain bought the Asbury Park Press, then sent in a
publisher who slashed fifty five people from the staff and cut the space
for news, and was rewarded by being named Gannett’s Manager of the Year.
In New Jersey, by the way, the Newhouse and Gannett chains between them
now own thirteen of the state’s nineteen dailies, or seventy three
percent of all the circulation of New Jersey-based papers. Then there is
The Northwestern in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, with a circulation of 23,500.
Here, the authors report, is a paper that prided itself on being in
hometown hands since the Johnson administration – the Andrew Johnson
administration. But in 1998 it was sold not once but twice, within the
space of two months. Two years later it was sold again: four owners in
less than three years.

  You’d better get used to it, concluded Leaving Readers Behind, because
the real momentum of consolidation is just beginning – it won’t be long
now before America is reduced to half a dozen major print conglomerates.

  You can see the results even now in the waning of robust journalism. In
the dearth of in-depth reporting as news organizations try to do more
with fewer resources. In the failure of the major news organizations to
cover their own corporate deals and lobbying as well as other forms of
“crime in the suites” such as Enron story. And in helping people
understand what their government is up to. The report by the Roberts
team includes a survey in l999 that showed a wholesale retreat in
coverage of nineteen key departments and agencies in Washington. Regular
reporting of the Supreme Court and State Department dropped off
considerably through the decade. At the Social Security Administration,
whose activities literally affect every American, only the New York
Times was maintaining a full-time reporter and, incredibly, at the
Interior Department, which controls five to six hundred million acres of
public land and looks after everything from the National Park Service to
the Bureau of Indian Affairs, there were no full-time reporters around.

  That’s in Washington, our nation’s capital. Out across the country there
is simultaneously a near blackout of local politics by broadcasters. The
public interest group Alliance for Better Campaigns studied forty-five
stations in six cities in one week in October. Out of 7,560 hours of
programming analyzed, only 13 were devoted to local public affairs –
less than one-half of 1% of local programming nationwide. Mayors, town
councils, school boards, civic leaders get no time from broadcasters who
have filled their coffers by looting the public airwaves over which they
were placed as stewards. Last year, when a movement sprang up in the
House of Representatives to require these broadcasters to obey the law
that says they must sell campaign advertising to candidates for office
at the lowest commercial rate, the powerful broadcast lobby brought the
Congress to heel. So much for the “public interest, convenience, and
necessity.”

  So what do we do? What is our strategy for taking on what seems a
hopeless fight for a media system that serves as effectively as it sells
– one that holds all the institutions of society, itself included,
accountable?

  There’s plenty we can do. Here’s one journalist’s list of some of the
overlapping and connected goals that a vital media reform movement might
pursue.

  First, we have to take Tom Paine’s example – and Danny Schecter’s advice
– and reach out to regular citizens. We have to raise an even bigger
tent than you have here. Those of us in this place speak a common
language about the “media.” We must reach the audience that’s not here –
carry the fight to radio talk shows, local television, and the letters
columns of our newspapers. As Danny says, we must engage the mainstream,
not retreat from it. We have to get our fellow citizens to understand
that what they see, hear, and read is not only the taste of programmers
and producers but also a set of policy decisions made by the people we
vote for.

  We have to fight to keep the gates to the Internet open to all. The web
has enabled many new voices in our democracy – and globally – to be
heard: advocacy groups, artists, individuals, non-profit organizations.
Just about anyone can speak online, and often with an impact greater
than in the days when orators had to climb on soap box in a park. The
media industry lobbyists point to the Internet and say it’s why concerns
about media concentration are ill founded in an environment where anyone
can speak and where there are literally hundreds of competing channels.
What those lobbyists for big media don’t tell you is that the traffic
patterns of the online world are beginning to resemble those of
television and radio. In one study, for example, AOL Time Warner (as it
was then known) accounted for nearly a third of all user time spent
online. And two others companies – Yahoo and Microsoft – bring that
figure to fully 50%. As for the growing number of channels available on
today’s cable systems, most are owned by a small handful of companies.
Of the ninety-one major networks that appear on most cable systems, 79
are part of such multiple network groups such as Time Warner, Viacom,
Liberty Media, NBC, and Disney. In order to program a channel on cable
today, you must either be owned by or affiliated with one of the giants.
If we’re not vigilant the wide-open spaces of the Internet could be
transformed into a system in which a handful of companies use their
control over high-speed access to ensure they remain at the top of the
digital heap in the broadband era at the expense of the democratic
potential of this amazing technology. So we must fight to make sure the
Internet remains open to all as the present-day analogue of that
many-tongued world of small newspapers so admired by de Tocqueville.

  We must fight for a regulatory, market and public opinion environment
that lets local and community-based content be heard rather than drowned
out by nationwide commercial programming.

  We must fight to limit conglomerate swallowing of media outlets by
sensible limits on multiple and cross-ownership of TV and radio
stations, newspapers, magazines, publishing companies and other
information sources. Let the message go forth: No Berlusconis in
America!

  We must fight to expand a noncommercial media system – something made
possible in part by new digital spectrum awarded to PBS stations – and
fight off attempts to privatize what’s left of public broadcasting.
Commercial speech must not be the only free speech in America!

  We must fight to create new opportunities, through public policies and
private agreements, to let historically marginalized media players into
more ownership of channels and control of content.

  Let us encourage traditional mainstream journalism to get tougher about
keeping a critical eye on those in public and private power and keeping
us all informed of what’s important – not necessarily simple or
entertaining or good for the bottom line. Not all news is “Entertainment
Tonight.” And news departments are trustees of the public, not the
corporate media’s stockholders

  In that last job, schools of journalism and professional news
associations have their work cut out. We need journalism graduates who
are not only better informed in a whole spectrum of special fields – and
the schools do a competent job there – but who take from their training
a strong sense of public service. And also graduates who are perhaps a
little more hard-boiled and street-smart than the present crop, though
that’s hard to teach. Thanks to the high cost of education, we get very
few recruits from the ranks of those who do the world’s unglamorous and
low-paid work. But as a onetime “cub” in a very different kind of
setting, I cherish H.L. Mencken’s description of what being a young
Baltimore reporter a hundred years ago meant to him. “I was at large,”
he wrote,

  in a wicked seaport of half a million people with a front seat at every
public . . [B]y all orthodox cultural standards I probably reached my
all-time low, for the heavy reading of my teens had been abandoned in
favor of life itself. . .But it would be an exaggeration to say I was
ignorant, for if I neglected the humanities I was meanwhile laying in
all the worldly wisdom of a police lieutenant, a bartender, a shyster
lawyer or a midwife.

  We need some of that worldly wisdom in our newsrooms. Let’s figure out
how to attract youngsters who have acquired it.

  And as for those professional associations of editors they might
remember that in union there is strength. One journalist alone can’t
extract from an employer a commitment to let editors and not accountants
choose the appropriate subject matter for coverage. But what if news
councils blew the whistle on shoddy or cowardly managements? What if
foundations gave magazines such as the Columbia Journalism Review
sufficient resources to spread their stories of journalistic bias,
failure or incompetence? What if entire editorial departments simply
refused any longer to quote anonymous sources – or give Kobe Bryant’s
trial more than the minimal space it rates by any reasonable standard –
or to run stories planted by the Defense Department and impossible, for
alleged security reasons, to verify? What if a professional association
backed them to the hilt? Or required the same stance from all its
members? It would take courage to confront powerful ownerships that way.
But not as much courage as is asked of those brave journalists in some
countries who face the dungeon, the executioner or the secret assassin
for speaking out.

  All this may be in the domain of fantasy. And then again, maybe not.
What I know to be real is that we are in for the fight of our lives. I
am not a romantic about democracy or journalism; the writer Andre Gide
may have been right when he said that all things human, given time, go
badly. But I know journalism and democracy are deeply linked in whatever
chance we human beings have to redress our grievances, renew our
politics, and reclaim our revolutionary ideals. Those are difficult
tasks at any time, and they are even more difficult in a cynical age as
this, when a deep and pervasive corruption has settled upon the
republic. But too much is at stake for our spirits to flag. Earlier this
week the Library of Congress gave the first Kluge Lifetime Award in the
Humanities to the Polish philosopher Leslie Kolakowski. In an interview
Kolakowski said: “There is one freedom on which all other liberties
depend – and that is freedom of expression, freedom of speech, of print.
If this is taken away, no other freedom can exist, or at least it would
be soon suppressed.”

  That’s the flame of truth your movement must carry forward. I am older
than almost all of you and am not likely to be around for the duration;
I have said for several years now that I will retire from active
journalism when I turn 70 next year. But I take heart from the presence
in this room, unseen, of Peter Zenger, Thomas Paine, the muckrakers,
I.F. Stone and all those heroes and heroines, celebrated or forgotten,
who faced odds no less than ours and did not flinch. I take heart in
your presence here. It’s your fight now. Look around. You are not alone.
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Subject: [pjnews] It's official: Cointelpro is back
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http://www.progressive.org/webex03/wx112403.html

November 24, 2003

Ashcroft's Cointelpro
It's official: Cointelpro is back

The infamous FBI counterintelligence program of the 1960s and '70s, which
spied on Martin Luther King and Malcolm X and disrupted the Panthers and
the American Indian Movement, is being revived right now by Attorney
General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller.

FBI headquarters sent out a memo last month to local law enforcement
agencies telling them to gather intelligence on anti-war protesters who
were assembling in Washington and San Francisco, according to The New York
Times (http://tinyurl.com/w6be).

"Report any potentially illegal acts" to FBI counterterrorism task forces,
the memo said.

The basis for viewing these protesters as terrorists is flimsy, as even
the memo seems to acknowledge. The FBI "possesses no information
indicating that violent or terrorist activities are being planned as part
of the protests," the memo said.

So why are they being treated as such?

One law enforcement official suggested to the Times that some protesters
may be acting in league with terrorists by distracting the FBI with a big
demonstration while a terrorist attack is planned for somewhere else.

That's pretty far-fetched, if you ask me.

But the FBI is casting its net wide. The memo is concerned not only with
people who commit violence but who are "capable of violence," one official
said. That could be 275 million people!

The intelligence the FBI used in this memo came from FBI counterterrorism
officials, the Times said. But much of the memo cited perfectly legal
protest tactics, like using the Internet to recruit supporters, raise
funds, and coordinate activities, the Times said. The memo also noted that
protesters sometimes go to activist training camps, raise money for
lawyers, and film the police. The latter activity, the memo said, was
designed to "intimidate" law enforcement.

But the ones doing the intimidating are not the protesters but Ashcroft
and Mueller.

Protesters aren't terrorists.

And by equating the two, Ashcroft and Mueller do grievous harm to our
civil liberties.

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

from votenowar.org

Over 10,000 organizations and individuals have already signed the following
statement in support of the First Amendment and in opposition to the FBI's
targeting of the antiwar movement (over 6,000 on the first day that
VoteNoWar and A.N.S.W.E.R. began circulating this statement). Initial
signers include former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark; historian Howard
Zinn; National Lawyers Guild Executive Director Heidi Boghosian; Ron Kovic,
author Born on the Fourth of July, and others.

We want to get tens of thousands more signers and publicize this campaign to
support the First Amendment which is under attack. It is crucial that people
in the anti-war movement take strong, proactive actions to expose Bush and
Ashcroft’s efforts to intimidate and stifle political dissent. That so many
thousands of organizations and individuals immediately stepped forward to
show their support is an expression of the power of  the people to stop the
ultra-right enemies of Free Speech. Let’s keep the pressure up in the days
ahead. If you or others would like to sign the statement you can click on
the link below, underneath the statement.

In the past year the antiwar movement has grown into one of the most
important political forces in society, which is why Bush and Ashcroft have
set out to try to silence and intimidate the people of conscience across the
United States who have stepped forward to fight for justice and peace. We
will not allow the Bush administration to turn the clock back to a time of
J. Edgar Hoover and Nixon-era attacks on those who opposed the war in
Vietnam, the civil rights movement and the fight for justice. The momentum
and power of the United States anti-war and free speech movement is growing
every day. Your help is urgently needed to maintain this crucial effort.
Many have already made a contribution which has been vital to the growth of
the movement. We encourage you to consider making another badly needed
donation to support the fight for free speech today. For those who have
volunteered your time and energy but have not considered making a financial
donation please consider whether you can do so now. To make an online
donation using our secure server, or for information to write a check, go
to: http://www.votenowar.org/donate.html


Defend the First Amendment, Oppose the FBI's Targeting of the Antiwar
Movement

      We the undersigned stand in defense of the First Amendment and in
opposition to the Bush Administration's expanding effort to stifle dissent.
Confronted with a rising tide of political opposition from the people of the
United States, who are outraged at the lies used to justify a war and
occupation of Iraq, Bush and Ashcroft are resorting to crass intimidation
tactics against the anti-war movement.

The current campaign of FBI intimidation was revealed in the front-page NY
Times story of Sunday, November 23 under the headline: "F.B.I. SCRUTINIZES
ANTIWAR RALLIES - Officials Say Effort Aims at 'Extremist Elements'"
(http://tinyurl.com/w6be).  Citing an internal FBI memorandum circulated
ten days prior to the October 25 demonstrations that drew 100,000 in
Washington D.C. and 20,000 in San Francisco, this well placed "revelation"
of FBI targeting of the antiwar movement should be seen as a measure of
the desperation of an Administration that is increasingly alarmed that
people of this country are rejecting its illegal and immoral policies.

As they become isolated on Iraq, Bush and Ashcroft are borrowing a page from
the Nixon and Mitchell tenure during Vietnam: use the secret police and FBI
to disrupt and intimidate their opponents. Like Nixon they will fail because
the people of the United States will stand together to reject FBI
intimidation. Bush and Ashcroft seek to stifle dissent by making the
exercise of First Amendment rights synonymous with terrorism but the people
will defend these cherished rights today as they have been forced to in the
past. We will never be silenced!

We publicly affirm the right to express dissent and to engage in protest
free from FBI and government harassment and we vow to support the growing
efforts of the antiwar movement to end the illegal and ongoing war and
occupation of Iraq.


To SIGN the statement in defense of the First Amendment and opposition to
the FBI's targeting of the antiwar movement, go to:
http://tinyurl.com/xj6r

Your help is needed now to keep the pressure on as we organize growing
opposition against the Bush Administration to end its criminal war and
occupation of Iraq and to defend our right to free speech. Please support
this important work at this critical juncture.  You can make a donation
online through our secure server or get address information to
send a check by going to http://www.votenowar.org/donate.html

If you were forwarded this message and would like to SUBSCRIBE to receive
action alerts (low volume) please visit: http://www.capwiz.com/votenowar/mlm/
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Subject: [pjnews] Corporations Defeated in Miami
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http://lists.essential.org/pipermail/corp-focus/2003/000167.html

Corporations and Their Proxies Defeated in Miami -- But They Refuse to
Give Up

By Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman

There was good news and bad news from inside the negotiations of the
Ministerial meeting for the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), held
last week in Miami.

The good news: Brazil has succeeded in putting forward a framework that
would alleviate the worst aspects of the U.S.-backed extremist proposals
that threaten public health, the environment, and worker rights. With
mobilized populations at home demanding nothing less, Brazil, Argentina
and other countries appear to have defeated the U.S. effort to expand
NAFTA to the entire hemisphere.

In at least four separate places, the final statement of the meeting,
known as the Ministerial Declaration, reiterates the need for a
"balanced" agreement. The key phrase of the Declaration states that,
"Ministers recognize that countries may assume different levels of
commitments."

What this means in practice is that countries will not be required to
adhere to the market fundamentalist proposals advanced by the United
States in the areas of intellectual property, investment, services and
other areas.

While it would be best if there were no agreements in these areas
whatsoever -- since the agreements in various ways are designed to
subordinate public interest considerations to the commercial interests
of multinational corporations -- at least no country will be required to
agree to these proposals as a condition of participating in the FTAA.

Those countries that agree to specific commitments, in the investment
area, say, will be required to honor them. But none of the Latin
American or Caribbean countries have any real interest in doing so.
There aren't many Uruguayan or Honduran investors looking for special
protections in the U.S. market.

Brazil gained the upper hand by responding effectively to the U.S.
position that it could not negotiate key agricultural issues within the
FTAA. U.S. negotiators said they wanted to move on agricultural issues
of concern to Brazil and other countries, but these matters had to be
handled at the World Trade Organization (WTO), where they could be
negotiated as well with the European Union and Japan. Well, said Brazil,
if agriculture is a WTO issue, then so is intellectual property, which
is already covered by a WTO agreement, and so are other controversial issues.

Given this move by Brazil, the United States was happy to maintain even
opt-in agreements as part of the FTAA.

But there's no question the United States has lost its ability to impose
its maniacal NAFTA vision on the hemisphere. "This is not what we
wanted, and we have serious concerns," said Frank Vargo, U.S. National
Association of Manufacturers vice president for international economic
affairs. A good sign.

Unfortunately, the inside news from Miami wasn't all good. The United
States violated the spirit of the ministerial declaration by announcing
an intensified strategy of negotiating bilateral and mini-regional
agreements containing exactly the horrific proposals -- on intellectual
property, investment, and other areas -- that it failed to ram through
in the FTAA.

The United States has already concluded a free trade agreement with
Chile, and is scheduled to conclude negotiations over a free trade
agreement with the Central American countries next month. In Miami, U.S.
Trade Representative Robert Zoellick announced that the United States
would soon commence negotiations over trade deals with the Dominican
Republic, Panama, Colombia and Peru, as well as supposedly with Ecuador
and Bolivia.

We asked the trade minister of a small country, the Bahamas, what he
thought about the U.S. strategy of negotiating bilaterals.

"Most countries in the hemisphere have concerns" about the U.S.
approach, Bahamian Minister of Trade and Industry Leslie Miller told us.
"It's just pressure tactics. The U.S. wants to consolidate its position."

The strategy is euphemistically called "competitive liberalization" by
its advocates, but it's little more than divide and conquer. The idea is
to pit countries in the hemisphere against each other, negotiating
individual deals that offer incremental benefits of improved access to
the U.S. market, in exchange for massive concessions for U.S.
multinationals. As countries watch others enter into free trade deals,
they worry about being left behind, and agree to similar terms.

Whereas developing countries when united can stand up to U.S. pressure
and demands, in isolation and in competition with each other, they are
easy pickings.

Notwithstanding the benefits, this strategy has significant limitations
from the U.S. corporate perspective, which is why some business groups
have been publicly critical. The strategy requires too many negotiations
with too many countries, and may leave the biggest markets out. Noting
that Chile and Mexico already have free trade deals with the United
States, Mark Weisbrot of the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Economic
and Policy Research points out that 70 percent of the remaining Latin
American market (measured by economic output) is attributable to Brazil,
Argentina and Venezuela -- countries with no interest in signing on to
bilateral agreements with the United States that advance the U.S.
extremist economic agenda.

Still, there's no getting around the fact that existing trade pacts,
plus those under negotiation and those for which negotiations are
pending, will lock up a huge chunk of Latin America, and significantly
deprive countries of freedom to pursue independent economic policies.

Whether the USTR bilateral trade agreement offensive can be halted may
turn on the U.S.-Central American agreement. If brought before the U.S.
Congress next year and defeated, U.S. trade negotiators may be forced to
abandon their present approach. A victory for U.S. negotiators and their
business controllers will give renewed life to a model that has failed
by any objective measure, other than serving multinational corporate
interests.


Russell Mokhiber is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate Crime
Reporter, http://www.corporatecrimereporter.com. Robert Weissman is
editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Multinational Monitor,
http://www.multinationalmonitor.org. They are co-authors of Corporate
Predators: The Hunt for MegaProfits and the Attack on Democracy (Monroe,
Maine: Common Courage Press; http://www.corporatepredators.org).
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Subject: [pjnews] US Military: Mission Creep Hits Home
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http://tinyurl.com/whx2

American armed forces are assuming major new domestic policing and
surveillance roles.

By William M. Arkin
November 23, 2003

SOUTH POMFRET, Vt. — Preoccupied with the war in Iraq and still
traumatized by Sept. 11, 2001, the American public has paid little
attention to some of what is being done inside the United States in the
name of anti-terrorism. Under the banner of "homeland security," the
military and intelligence communities are implementing far-reaching
changes that blur the lines between terrorism and other kinds of crises
and will break down long-established barriers to military action and
surveillance within the U.S.

"We must start thinking differently," says Air Force Gen. Ralph E. "Ed"
Eberhart, the newly installed commander of Northern Command, the
military's homeland security arm. Before 9/11, he says, the military and
intelligence systems were focused on "the away game" and not properly
focused on "the home game." "Home," of course, is the United States.

Eberhart's Colorado-based command is charged with enhancing homeland
security in two ways: by improving the military's capability to defend the
country's borders, coasts and airspace — unquestionably within the
military's long-established mission — and by providing "military
assistance to civil authorities" when authorized by the secretary of
Defense or the president.

That too may sound unexceptionable: The military has long had mechanisms
to respond to a request for help from state governors. New after 9/11 are
more aggressive preparations and the presumption that local government
will not be able to carry the new homeland security load. Being the
military, moreover, contingency planners approach preparing by assuming
the worst. All of this is a major — and potentially dangerous — departure
from past policy.

The U.S. military operates under the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, which
prohibits the direct use of federal troops "to execute the laws" of the
United States. The courts have interpreted this to mean that the military
is prohibited from any active role in direct civilian law enforcement,
such as search, seizure or arrest of civilians.

"There are abundant reasons for rejecting the further expansion of the
military's domestic role," says Mackubin T. Owens, a professor of strategy
and force planning at the Naval War College. Looking at the issue
historically, Owens wrote in an August 2002 essay in the National Review's
online edition that "the use of soldiers as a posse [places] them in the
uncomfortable position of taking orders from local authorities who had an
interest in the disputes that provoked the unrest in the first place."
Moreover, Owens said, becoming more involved in domestic policing can be
"subtle and subversive … like a lymphoma or termite infestation." Though
we are far from having "tanks rumbling through the streets," he said, the
potential long-term effect of an increasing military role in police and
law enforcement activities is "a military contemptuous of American society
and unresponsive to civilian authorities."

Eberhart says his Northern Command operates scrupulously within the bounds
of the law. "We believe the [Posse Comitatus] Act, as amended, provides
the authority we need to do our job, and no modification is needed at this
time," he told the House Armed Services Committee in March.

Of course, what he knows is that amendments approved by Congress in 1996
for that earlier civilian war, the war on drugs, have already expanded the
military's domestic powers so that Washington can act unilaterally in
dispatching the military without waiting for a state's request for help.
Long before 9/11, Congress authorized the military to assist local law
enforcement officials in domestic "drug interdiction" and during terrorist
incidents involving weapons of mass destruction. Furthermore, the
president, after proclaiming a state of emergency, can authorize
additional actions.

Indeed, the military is presently operating under just such an emergency
declaration. Eberhart's command has defined three levels of operations,
each of which triggers a larger set of authorized activities. The levels
are "extraordinary," "emergency" and "temporary." At the "temporary"
level, which covers such things as the Olympic Games or the Super Bowl,
limited assistance can be provided to law enforcement agencies when a
governor requests it, primarily in such areas as logistics, transportation
and communications. During "emergencies," the military can provide similar
support, mostly in response to specific events such as the attacks on the
World Trade Center.

It is only in the case of "extraordinary" domestic operations that the
unique capabilities of the Defense Department are deployed. These include
not just such things as air patrols to shoot down hijacked planes or the
defusing of bombs and other explosives, , but also bringing in
intelligence collectors, special operators and even full combat troops.

Given the absence of terrorist attacks inside the United States since
9/11, it may seem surprising that Northern Command is already working
under the far-reaching authority that goes with "extraordinary
operations." But it is.

"We are not going to be out there spying on people," Eberhart told PBS'
NewsHour in September. But, he said, "We get information from people who
do." Some of that information increasingly comes not from the FBI or those
charged with civilian law enforcement but from a Pentagon organization
established last year, the Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA). The
seemingly innocuous CIFA was originally given the mission of protecting
the Defense Department and its personnel, as well as "critical
infrastructure," against espionage conducted by terrorists and foreign
intelligence services.

But in August, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld expanded CIFA's
mission, charging it with maintaining "a domestic law enforcement database
that includes information related to potential terrorist threats directed
against the Department of Defense." The group's Assessments and Technology
Directorate, which shares offices with the Justice Department's Foreign
Terrorist Tracking Task Force, has already identified 200 foreign
terrorist suspects in the U.S., according to a Defense Department report
to Congress.

This year, the Pentagon inspector general authorized assigning military
special agents to 56 FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force operations at FBI
field offices. These military agents will pursue leads in local
communities of potential threats to the military. Eberhart also plans to
have his own cadre of agents working with local law enforcement. Next
year, he plans to transform Joint Task Force Six, a drug interdiction unit
of 160 military personnel at Ft. Bliss, Texas, into Joint Interagency Task
Force North. The new task force will be given nationwide responsibility
for working with law enforcement agencies.

CIFA, moreover, has been given a domestic "data mining" mission: figuring
out a way to process massive sets of public records, intercepted
communications, credit card accounts, etc., to find "actionable
intelligence." "Homeland defense relies on the sharing of actionable
intelligence among the appropriate federal, state, and local agencies,"
says Lt. Gen. Edward G. Anderson III, Eberhart's deputy.

Another ambitious domestic project is being undertaken by the National
Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which is gathering "geospatial
information" about 133 cities, the borders and seaports. This "urban data
inventory" combines unclassified and classified data (including such
things as the location of emergency services, communications,
transportation and food supplies) with a high-resolution satellite map of
the United States. When the mapping efforts are completed, a national
"spatial data infrastructure" will be created down to the house level.
Intelligence analysts speak of one day being able to identify individual
occupants, as well as their national background and political
affiliations. Though the military is just getting its systems in place,
there can be no other conclusion: Domestic surveillance is back.

It's not that we're heading toward martial law. We're not. But outside the
view of most of the public, the government is daily expanding military
operations into areas of local government and law enforcement that
historically have been off-limits. And it doesn't seem far-fetched to
imagine that those charged with assembling "actionable intelligence" will
slowly start combining databases of known terrorists with seemingly
innocuous lists of contributors to charities or causes, that membership
lists for activist organizations will be folded in, that names and
personal data of anti-globalization protesters will be run through the
"data mine." After all, the mission of Northern Command and other Pentagon
agencies is to identify groups and individuals who could potentially pose
threats to Defense Department and civilian installations.

Given all this, it might be a good time for state and local governments to
ask themselves whether the federal government, through the military, is
slowly eroding their power to manage what — for very good reasons — have
always been considered local responsibilities.


William M. Arkin is a military affairs analyst who writes regularly for
Opinion. E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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CHAVEZ VERSUS THE FREE TRADE ZOMBIES OF THE AMERICAS
Greg Palast reporting from Caracas

Saturday, November 29, 2003

It's as if they were locked in a crypt for the last ten years. The
finance ministers of every Latin American nation last week signed on to
a resolution in principle to join the Free Trade Area of the Americas
(FTAA), the hemispheric expansion of NAFTA.

The walking corpse of Argentina's economy was there, as well as the
long-deceased body of Ecuador and several other South American nations
whose economies were long ago murdered and buried by the free trade and
free market nostrums of the World Bank and the IMF.

Yet on they came.  Stiff-legged, covered in rotting bandages, the
official zombies marched to Miami to pledge, one and all, to sign on
for their next dose of free market poison.

Every nation but one:  Venezuela, the single and solitary nation to say
"no thanks" at Miami's treaty of the living dead economies.  Today, I
met up with Venezuela's chief FTAA negotiator.  Victor Alvarez was
saved from zombification by his sense of humor.  He noted that while
the Bush Administration was preaching free trade to their dark-skinned
compatriots south of the border, the USA itself was facing one of the
largest penalties in World Trade Organization history for raising
tariffs on steel products.  He would have laughed out loud in Miami if
it didn't hurt so much:  the illegal US trade barriers have closed two
steel plants in Venezuela.

Venezuela's 'negociador jefe' Alvarez went through the well-known data:
in ten years of free market free-for-all, industrialization in
Venezuela dropped from 18% of GNP to 13%.  And Venezuela fared best.
Elsewhere in Latin America, economies simply imploded.  And NAFTA
created employment only in a fetid trench along the Rio Grande, the
'maquiladora' sweatshops which suck down wages on both sides of the
Mexico-US border.

We finished our conversation as the President walked in.  Hugo Chavez
is not one for subtleties.  "FTAA is the PATH TO HELL," said Chavez.

He meant this in the deepest theological sense.  What is at stake for
Chavez is Latin America's mortal soul.  "I have seen children shot to
death," said the president, "not by an invading Army but by our own
nation's soldiers."

Chavez was referring to February 27, 1989.  While the Northern
Hemisphere was celebrating the impending fall of the Berlin Wall,
"another wall was going up," he explained, "the wall of globalization."
That day, the army massacred Venezuelans, young and old, during a
demonstration against diktats of the International Monetary Fund
imposed on that nation.

The President raced through a dozen more examples, from Bolivia to
Chiapas, Mexico, where the miracle of the marketplace came out of the
barrel of a gun.

FTAA is far more than a trade document.  It's not just about fruit and
cars that we sell across borders.  FTAA is an entire new multi-state
government in the making, with courts and executives, unelected, with
the power to bless or damn any one nation's laws which impede foreign
investment, foreign sales or even foreign pollution.

FTAA is revolutionary in the sense that governments are overthrown.
And the easiest way to do that, of course, is to convince governments
to overthrow themselves.  Hence, the zombification process.

Chavez offers an alternative to FTAA.  Following a numbing one-hour
discourse on the philosophy of the nineteenth century founding fathers
of South America (I could sympathize with this former history
professor's students), he dropped the Big One.  Instead of ALCA [the
Spanish acronym for FTAA], he proposes ALBA, standing for the
Bolivarian Alternative for America.  Named after his hero Simon
Bolivar, Chavez would create a "compensation" fund, in which the
wealthier nations of North and South America would fund development in
the poorer states.

If that sounds like an Andean pipe dream, he reminds us that the
European Union created just such a redistribution fund to jump-start
the economies of its poorest nations.  (To the anger of the English, I
should add, who saw Ireland use the funds to zoom past their former
lords to a higher standard of living today.)   If Chavez' proposal
appears at first to have a snow ball's chance in NAFTA hell, I remember
when, in fact, it was accepted gospel:  John Kennedy's Alliance for
Progress.

In those years when JFK's Alliance was promising northern capital for
southern development, a strange group of well-heeled and well-armed
revolutionaries in Chicago under Milton Friedman were plotting to
overthrow Kennedy's vision.  They succeeded.

Over three decades, the Chicago Boys and their neo-liberal cohort have
ridden history's pendulum to the top, announcing that history itself
has come to an end in a free market consensus.

But when the pendulum swings back, the history professor in Caracas
will be waiting with his Bolivarian elixir to make the economic dead
rise again.

*****

Greg Palast is on assignment in Caracas for Rolling Stone Magazine.
For photos and more on Venezuela, go to http://www.GregPalast.com.  Palast
is the author of, "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy" (Penguin 2003).
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The New York Times
30 November 2003

Iraq's Shiites Insist on Democracy.
     Washington Cringes.
        By Alex Berenson

   For seven months, the United States has tried to finesse two crucial
questions about the future of Iraq: How much control will the country's
Shiite majority have over the drafting of a constitution? And how Islamic
will that constitution be?

     The answers could determine whether Iraq becomes a multiparty
democracy, an Islamic theocracy, or even slides into civil war.

     Last week, those questions took on a new urgency. Grand Ayatollah Ali
al-Sistani, the most important Shiite religious leader in Iraq and probably
the most powerful local leader of any kind, said he opposed the American
plan to turn over power to an Iraqi government next year without direct
elections.

     Ayatollah Sistani has vast influence over Iraq's 15 million Shiites,
and so far he has urged them to show patience with the occupation. But he
has insisted that delegates elected by popular vote write Iraq's
constitution and approve its new government.

     "No one has the right to appoint the members of the constitutional
assembly," he said several weeks ago, in a statement in response to written
questions. "We see no alternative but to go back to the people for choosing
their representatives."

     That view has opened a rift between the Shiite majority, roughly 60
percent of Iraq's population, and the Sunnis and Kurds, each about 20
percent of the population. (The Kurds, who dominate northern Iraq, are
themselves Sunni Muslim but have little in common with the Arab Sunnis, who
ran Iraq under Saddam Hussein and are usually referred to only as Sunnis.)
Nor can the United States afford to ignore the Shiite position, analysts
say.

     The Shiite leaders "have a tremendous amount of clout," said Kenneth
Katzman, senior Iraq analyst for the Congressional Research Service. "They
can set off major, major demonstrations of hundreds of thousands of people
at the drop of a hat."

     In addition, it is unclear whether the United States, whose motives
for invading Iraq are regarded with skepticism by many, will feel it
can oppose a clear call for popular democracy - exactly what the
United States said it wanted to bring to Iraq.

     The United States and the American-appointed Governing Council agreed
on Nov. 15 that council members and local governments would choose an
assembly next June to pick an interim Iraqi government. That government
would then draft a constitution. The process would probably mute the
influence of Ayatollah Sistani and the other three Shiite grand ayatollahs
who live in Najaf, about 100 miles south of Baghdad.

     On Wednesday, however, Ayatollah Sistani, through a spokesman, said he
would not support an interim government unless it was elected by a direct
vote. In an effort to reach a compromise, Jalal Talabani, the Kurdish
president of the Governing Council, traveled Thursday to Najaf to meet with
the ayatollah.

     A senior coalition official in Iraq, speaking on condition of
anonymity, said on Friday that the American-led coalition was not opposed
in principle to direct elections but did not believe it could be ready to
conduct one by June. But the official noted that the coalition would not
automatically approve direct elections even if the procedural problems
could be worked out. "It would be something we would talk about," he said.

     But finding a compromise may be difficult. Mr. Hussein, a Sunni,
impoverished much of Shiite southern Iraq, and jailed or killed many Shiite
leaders. Now the Shiites want power to match their numbers - which is
precisely what the Kurds and Sunnis fear. In addition, the United States is
concerned that many of Iraq's Shiite clerics are supported by the
anti-American Iranian theocracy.

     To make sure their followers understand the issue, Shiite clerics
across the south have for months proselytized about the importance of the
constitution, while mosques offer worshipers pamphlets explaining the
subject.

     Then there is the constitution itself. However they are chosen,
Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish delegates will have to balance the
conservatism of the Shiites with the relative liberalism of Sunnis
and Kurds. Critical questions include the rights of women; whether
senior clerics can overrule laws passed by an elected parliament; and
how closely Iraqi law will follow the Koranic Sharia law.

     "We totally allow women to go and work," Sheik Ali al-Najafi, the son
of and spokesman for Bashir al-Najafi, one of the grand ayatollahs, said in
an interview last month. "But to work in jobs that respect their dignity."

     The Shiite ayatollahs say they want any constitution to be based
closely on Islamic law, while still respecting individual and minority
rights. What that means in practice is less clear, and may not be entirely
to the liking of the United States.

     Ayatollah Sistani has said constitution should guarantee individual
liberties as long as they are consistent "with the religious facts and the
social values of the Iraqi people." At the same time, he said elected
leaders, not clerics, should have the final authority to make laws in a
democratic Iraq. "The authority will be for the people who will get the
majority of votes," he said in response to questions last month.

     Bridging the gap between Islamic values and Western views of human
rights will not be easy, said Noah Feldman, an assistant professor at New
York University and expert on Islamic law who is advising Iraq on the
drafting process. But Mr. Feldman said he believed the clerics would not
demand an Iranian-style theocracy.

     "It's going to be tricky and it's delicate, but it's going to be
solvable, because in the end the Shia clerics are open to a state that's a
democratic state but is also respectful of Islam," Mr. Feldman said. "No
one around Sistani is saying, `Rule of the clerics.' "

     Perhaps not, but the coalition official acknowledged that the
coalition would have little control over an elected assembly and that
it might result in a government unfriendly to the United States.

     "There are some people who I think are on principle have concern about
the Shias," he said. Still, the coalition has little choice but to move
quickly to hand over power to Iraqis, he said. "No one likes an occupation."
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--> 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
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Today's commentary:
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==================================

ZNet Commentary
Blood, Oil, Guns And Bullets
November 27, 2003
By Aziz Choudry

Terror, invasion, occupation and militarization are hallmarks of the
US-led corporate recolonisation of Iraq. But they have long been the
hallmarks of colonialism and imperialism the world over.

Neoliberal globalization and war are two sides of the same coin. So too
are oil and imperialism. Former Shell scientist Claude Ake, described
Shell's activities in Nigeria, as a process of the "militarization of
commerce and the privatization of the state". In 2003, this process is
sweeping across the world, perhaps most visibly in Iraq.

In 1999, neoconservative journalist Thomas Friedman wrote that the "hidden
hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald's
cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15. And
the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's
technologies is called the United States' Army, Air Force, and Marine
Corps."

Among today's transnational corporations, the modernday heirs of the
colonial chartered corporations, the oil and gas giants are some of the
most politically and economically powerful players in the world. The
ancestor of the Royal-Dutch Shell group was 'Royal Dutch Company for the
Exploitation of Petroleum Wells in the Netherlands East Indies'. With so
much of the world's economy dependent on oil, the colonial exploitation
and genocide continues, on an unprecedented scale. The lyrics may have
changed a little, but the tune remains much the same.

The U'wa people in Colombia believe that oil maintains the balance of the
world and is the blood of Mother Earth - to take the oil is worse than
killing your mother. To the US corporate/political/military elites, oil is
the lifeblood of capitalist expansion, a national security concern, and a
vital resource to be controlled by US corporate interests for American
economic and geopolitical dominance. As well as being central to US
imperial interests, the interests of the oil and defense sectors are
closely intertwined.

Weapons production and the maintenance of US military and economic might
across the world depends on massive consumption of oil and petroleum. In
turn, massive defense and security spending boosts an ailing US economy,
and is a boon to the profits of its defense and security corporations. We
hear a lot of talk about weapons of mass destruction.

But the so-called "war on terror" is a weapon of mass distraction away
from the growing US deficit, from the naked corporate greed and colonial
mindset that underpins the US and a model of development that is as
exploitative as it is unsustainable, lurching as it does from one crisis
of capitalism to the next. And this war kills. Before this "war on
terror", there have been other pretexts to kill for oil.

Behind the convenient cloak of "war on drugs", Plan Colombia has provided
US $98 million to train and equip Colombian military to protect an
Occidental Petroleum pipeline. With a US presidential election looming let
us remember that it was the Clinton Administration that between 1996 and
1999 quadrupled military aid for the Colombian government for the "war on
drugs", and recall the Gore family's deep financial ties to Occidental.

With making the country "safe" for US investors and regional geopolitical
goals a real priority, Occidental, and defense contractor UTC -whose
subsidiary Sikorsky's Black Hawk helicopters are used there - have lobbied
hard for increased US "aid" to Colombia. US military hardware has been
used against the U'wa who opposed oil and gas exploration by Occidental
and Shell on their lands, leftist guerrillas and many other communities.

When Conoco's Mogadishu office became the de facto US embassy before the
Marines landed in Somalia, it was not a war on terror, but supposedly a
"humanitarian mission". Protecting oil concessions to Conoco and other US
corporations was a key factor behind this invasion, after major oil finds
in Somalia. The president of the company's subsidiary in Somalia served as
the US government's volunteer "facilitator" before and during the US
invasion and occupation.

The operations of oil and gas corporations have long been characterized by
militarization, human rights abuses, economic injustice and ecological
disaster and obscene profits. Sometimes this means protection for drilling
operations and pipelines by local military, police or private security
firms, frequently backed by military aid. Increasingly it means the direct
deployment of US forces, on some other pretext, just as we can see in
Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, the Philippines, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Eight years after the execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other Ogoni
leaders who stood up to military occupation, and the ecological
devastation wrought by Shell in their territory, we should remember how,
in the Niger Delta, Shell and Chevron both directly supported military
operations against Ogoni and Ijaw communities protesting their activities,
by providing helicopters and boats to armed forces. Shell admitted to
importing weapons into Nigeria to arm the police, to paying field
allowances to Nigerian military, and to bribing witnesses to testify
against Saro-Wiwa in his military trial.

In the North and the South, oil corporations, backed by state security
forces confront Indigenous Peoples struggling for self-determination, and
control over their lands and resources. These battlefronts include the
unceded territory of the Lubicon Cree in Northern Alberta, Canada, from
which billions of dollars of oil and gas revenues have been extracted
without consent, by companies such as Shell, Norcen, Petrocanada, and
Unocal, backed by armed police, while disrupting Lubicon Cree society and
poisoning the land and people.

There is BP's Tangguh LNG project in West Papua, where a longstanding
struggle for independence from Indonesia has met with massive military
force and human rights abuses, in the name of protecting foreign
investments extracting the territory's rich resources. In Aceh, Exxon
Mobil has colluded with the Indonesian military, the beneficiaries of US
and British military aid, who have been conducting a brutal war of terror
against the Acehnese independence movement which has been challenging the
oil and gas plunder of their territory.

The Bush regime is an oiligarchy. George Bush is former CEO of Harken
Energy. Harken has lodged a claim against the Costa Rican government for
US $57 million over the cancellation of an oil exploration contract
because of serious concerns about its impact in an environmentally
sensitive area. The compensation demanded is equivalent to more than three
times the Costa Rican GDP, and 11 times larger than the annual government
budget. After serving as Bush senior's Defense Secretary, Vice President
Dick Cheney was CEO of oil services corporation Halliburton from 1995-2000
- which was awarded a massive no-bid contract in Iraq and is wellplaced to
control Iraqi oil production for US interests. Cheney also served on the
board of defense giant TRW, while his wife Lynne sat on Lockheed Martin's
board.

Donald Evans, Bush's Commerce Secretary, was with Colorado Oil's Tom Brown
Inc.

National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice is a former board director of
Chevron, and its principal expert on Kazakhstan, where Chevron has major
interests and until recently, had an oil tanker named in her honor.

Oil and defense corporations donate generously to both Republican and
Democratic party coffers. If the US was in the global South, its
governments would be slammed for corruption, crony capitalism, and
nepotism. Instead we are told that it is the world's champion of freedom,
integrity and democracy.

Meanwhile, these corporations help shape national economies and global
trade and investment rules, using the World Bank, the International
Monetary Fund (IMF), the baby banks like the Asian Development Bank, the
World Trade Organization (WTO), official development aid, and other
international economic agreements as weapons of mass extraction with which
to pursue economic warfare.

The World Bank and agencies like the US Agency for International
Development (USAID) have encouraged the expansion of oil and gas
development for export, deregulation, corporatization, privatization and
liberalization. In the name of economic development and poverty reduction
through oil and gas sector development and reform, the World Bank has
funded a number of controversial oil and gas production and pipeline
projects in areas where there is popular resistance to these activities,
and despite threats to the environment.

USAID is actively involved in promoting the interests of US oil
corporations - from its role in the so-called reconstruction of Iraq, to
its public-private alliance for enterprise development with ChevronTexaco
in Angola, to its involvement in rewriting hydrocarbon laws and
regulations to suit US companies in Central Asian republics.

Ironically the World Bank highlights Bolivia's Hydrocarbon Sector Reform
and Capitalization as a success story. The 1995 World Bank-imposed partial
privatization of the oil and gas industry forms part of the backdrop for
last month's uprising, which was largely triggered by plans by US-backed
neoliberal President Gonzales Sanchez De Lozada to export gas to the US
and Mexico. This was yet another unjust neoliberal policy which would
deliver great benefits to the latest corporate conquistadors,
Spanish-British consortium, Pacific LNG, at the expense of the peoples of
Bolivia. In the military repression against the popular revolt, scores of
people were killed.

While enjoying corporate welfare through generous subsidies and other
forms of government support at home (not least a revolving door into
politics for many big business executives), US oil gas and defense
corporations are active lobbyists for expanded trade and investment
liberalization through the WTO and other trade and investment agreements.

They seek to remove governments' ability to regulate their economies. US
oil and gas corporations seek unrestricted access to markets in the entire
range of energy services, through the further liberalization of services
and investment, and rules on competition policy. These could severely
constrain governments' ability to set energy policy, to regulate oil and
gas industry and control its own energy supply.

Through neoliberal prescriptions or outright military occupation, or both,
transnational corporations have been able to gain control over these
resources. And while markets are prised open, while social spending is
slashed, and an attractive investment climate created, there is no
shortage of funds being turned over to the police and the military, the
muscle of neoliberal globalization.

While oil literally and figuratively fuels this war - or these wars - of
terror - there is much more to it than that. The US wants to control as
much of the world's oil resources for its own use and for the power and
leverage such dominance will afford it over economic and political rivals
such as China, Russia and Europe and their oil corporations. This strategy
aims to maintain, expand and defend a 21st century colonial empire for the
US military and economic elites. A central feature of this agenda is to
attack countries and social movements which are standing up to US
imperialism and the neoliberal agenda, wherever they may be.

In the face of rising global resistance against the operations of oil and
gas corporations, war and the military-industrial complex these companies
now employ public relations firms to craft illusions of environmental and
social responsibility.

Look at the websites of the top 10 defense contractors in the US, and you
will find heartwarming stories about how these corporate killers help the
poor and disadvantaged, take care of the environment through employees'
voluntary work, or corporate contributions to various NGOs and
foundations. Lockheed Martin and Raytheon propaganda tries to sell weapons
production as a contribution to peacemaking, while Shell, BP,
ChevronTexaco and Statoil join corporate NGOs like Conservation
International and the Nature Conservancy in the Energy and Biodiversity
Initiative which aims to integrate biodiversity conservation into upstream
oil and gas development.

In October, the Guardian reported that ExxonMobil held a series of secret
meetings with selected environmental and human rights NGOs to try to
change its negative public image. Such spin reinvents Shell and ExxonMobil
as champions of human rights and defenders of the environment, and the
world's biggest defense contractors as peace activists. NGOs which collude
with such corporations should be exposed and denounced.

In our struggles for social and economic and environmental justice we must
be clear that neither war nor neoliberal globalization can be humanized or
reformed. We need to stop the economic and environmental warfare waged by
the corporations, their proxies in government and the Bretton Woods
institutions. We must oppose the militarization of the planet in all its
forms, and expose the interconnections between the hidden hand of the
market and the not-so-hidden fist. To do that we need to support the
grassroots resistance movements which are already struggling against these
injustices, and to confront the oil and war corporations in our own
backyards.

(Adapted from a talk at the Asia-Pacific Research Network 5th Annual
Conference, Beirut, 4 November 2003. See www.aprnet.org for further
details)
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Ha'aretz
23 November 2003

Twilight Zone / `I punched an Arab in the face'
   By Gideon Levy

Staff Sergeant (res.) Liran Ron Furer cannot just routinely get on with
his life anymore. He is haunted by images from his three years of military
service in Gaza and the thought that this could be a syndrome afflicting
everyone who serves at checkpoints gives him no respite. On the verge of
completing his studies in the design program at the Bezalel Academy of Art
and Design, he decided to drop everything and devote all his time to the
book he wanted to write. The major publishers he brought it to declined to
publish it. The publisher that finally accepted it (Gevanim) says that the
Steimatzky bookstore chain refuses to distribute it. But Furer is
determined to bring his book to the public's attention.

"You can adopt the most hard-line political positions, but no parent would
agree to his son becoming a thief, a criminal or a violent person," says
Furer. "The problem is that it's never presented this way. The boy himself
doesn't portray himself this way to his family when he returns from the
territories. On the contrary - he is received as a hero, as someone who is
doing the important work of being a soldier. No one can be indifferent to
the fact that there are many families in which, in a certain sense, there
are already two generations of criminals. The father went through it and
now the son is going through it and no one talks about it around the
dinner table."

Furer is certain that what happened to him is not at all unique. Here he
was - a creative, sensitive graduate of the Thelma Yellin High School of
the Arts, who became an animal at the checkpoint, a violent sadist who
beat up Palestinians because they didn't show him the proper courtesy, who
shot out tires of cars because their owners were playing the radio too
loud, who abused a retarded teenage boy lying handcuffed on the floor of
the Jeep, just because he had to take his anger out somehow. "Checkpoint
Syndrome" (also the title of his book), gradually transforms every soldier
into an animal, he maintains, regardless of whatever values he brings with
him from home. No one can escape its taint. In a place where nearly
everything is permissible and violence is perceived as normative behavior,
each soldier tests his own limits of violence impulsiveness on his victims
- the Palestinians.

His book is not easy reading. Written in terse, fierce prose, in the blunt
and coarse language of soldiers, he reconstructs scenes from the years in
which he served in Gaza (1996-1999), years that, one must remember, were
relatively quiet. He describes how he and his comrades forced some
Palestinians to sing "Elinor" - "It was really something to see these
Arabs singing a Zohar Argov song, like in a movie"; the emotions the
Palestinians aroused in him - "Sometimes these Arabs really disgust me,
especially those that try to toady up to us - the older ones, who come to
the checkpoint with this smile on their faces"; the reactions they spurred
- "If they really annoy us, we find away to keep them stuck at the
checkpoint for a few hours. They lose a whole day of work because of it
sometimes, but that's the only way they learn."

He described how they would order children to clean the checkpoint before
inspection time; how a soldier named Shahar invented a game: "He checks
someone's identity card, and instead of handing it back to him, just
tosses it in the air. He got a kick out of seeing the Arab have to get out
of his car to pick up his identity card ... It's a game for him and he can
pass a whole shift this way"; how they humiliated a dwarf who came to the
checkpoint every day on his wagon: "They forced him to have his picture
taken on the horse, hit him and degraded him for a good half hour and let
him go only when cars arrived at the checkpoint. The poor guy, he really
didn't deserve it"; how they had a souvenir picture taken with bloodied,
bound Arabs whom they'd beaten up; how Shahar pissed on the head of an
Arab because the man had the nerve to smile at a soldier; how Dado forced
an Arab to stand on four legs and bark like a dog; and how they stole
prayer beads and cigarettes - "Miro wanted them to give him their
cigarettes, the Arabs didn't want to give so Miro broke someone's hand,
and Boaz slashed their tires."

Chilling confession

The most chilling of all the personal confessions: "I ran toward them and
punched an Arab right in the face. I'd never punched anyone that way. He
collapsed on the road. The officers said that we had to search him for his
papers. We pulled his hands behind his back and I bound them with plastic
handcuffs. Then we blindfolded him so he wouldn't see what was in the
Jeep. I picked him up from the road. Blood was trickling from his lip onto
his chin. I led him up behind the Jeep and threw him in, his knees banged
against the trunk and he landed inside. We sat in the back, stepping on
the Arab ... Our Arab lay there pretty quietly, just crying softly to
himself. His face was right on my flak jacket and he was bleeding and
making a kind of puddle of blood and saliva, and it disgusted and angered
me, so I grabbed him by the hair and turned his head to the side. He cried
out loud and to get him to stop, we stepped harder and harder on his back.
That quieted him down for a while and then he started up again. We
concluded that he was either retarded or crazy.

"The company commander informed us over the radio that we had to bring him
to the base. 'Good work, tigers,' he said, teasing us. All the other
soldiers were waiting there to see what we'd caught. When we came in with
the Jeep, they whistled and applauded wildly. We put the Arab next to the
guard. He didn't stop crying and someone who understood Arabic said that
his hands were hurting from the handcuffs. One of the soldiers went up to
him and kicked him in the stomach. The Arab doubled over and grunted, and
we all laughed. It was funny ... I kicked him really hard in the ass and
he flew forward just as I'd expected. They shouted that I was a totally
crazy, and they laughed ... and I felt happy. Our Arab was just a
16-year-old mentally retarded boy."

In his sister's rooftop Tel Aviv apartment, where he is living now, Furer,
26, comes across as a thoughtful, intelligent young man. He grew up in
Givatayim, after his parents immigrated from the Soviet Union in the
1970s. Before Yitzhak Rabin's assassination, his mother was a right-wing
activist, but he says that their home was not political. He wanted to be
in a combat unit in the army, and served in two elite infantry units. He
did his entire army service in the Gaza Strip.

After the army, he traveled to India, like so many others. "Now I was
free. The crazy energies of Goa and the chakras opened my mind ... You
stuck me in this stinking Gaza and before that you brainwashed me with
your rifles and your marches, you turned me into a dishrag that didn't
think anymore," he wrote from Goa. But it was only afterward, when he was
studying at Bezalel, that the experiences from his army service really
began to affect him.

"I came to realize that there was an unchanging pattern here," he says.
"It was the same in the first intifada, in the period that I was serving,
which was quiet, and in the second intifada. It's become a permanent
reality. I started to feel very uncomfortable with the fact that such a
loaded subject was hardly mentioned at all in public. People listened to
the victim and they listened to the politicians, but this voice that says:
I did this, we did things that were wrong - crimes, actually - that's a
voice I didn't hear. The reason it wasn't being heard was a combination of
repression - just as I repressed it and ignored it - and of deep feelings
of guilt.

"As soon as you get away from army service, the political and media
reality around you is not ready to hear this voice. I remember that I was
surprised that no soldier had gone public with this yet. It all somehow
dissolved in the debate about the legitimacy of settlement in the
territories, about the occupation - for or against - and nothing connected
to the routine of maintaining the occupation appeared in the media or in
art."

Not an individual case

Furer is out to prove that this is a syndrome and not a collection of
isolated, individual cases. That's why he deleted a lot of personal
details from the original manuscript, in order to underscore the general
nature of what he describes. "During my army service, I believed that I
was atypical, because I came from a background of art and creativity. I
was considered a moderate soldier - but I fell into the same trap that
most soldiers fall into. I was carried away by the possibility of acting
in the most primal and impulsive manner, without fear of punishment and
without oversight. You're tense about it at first, but as you get more
comfortable at the checkpoint over time, the behavior becomes more
natural. People gradually test the limits of their behavior toward the
Palestinians. It gradually becomes coarser and coarser.

"The more confident I became with the situation, as soon as we reached the
conclusion - each one at his own stage - that we are the rulers, we are
the strong ones, and when we felt our power, each one started to stretch
the limits more and more, in accordance with his personality. As soon as
serving at the checkpoint became routine, all kinds of deviant behavior
became normal. It started with 'souvenir collecting': We'd confiscate
prayer beads and then it was cigarettes and it didn't stop. It became
normative behavior.

"After that came the power games. We got the message from above that we
were to project seriousness and deterrence to the Arabs. Physical violence
also became normative. We felt free to punish any Palestinian who didn't
follow the 'proper code of behavior' at the checkpoint. Anyone we thought
wasn't polite enough to us or tried to act smart - was severely punished.
It was deliberate harassment on the most trivial pretexts.

"During my army service, there wasn't a single incident that made us
understand, or made our commanders interfere. No one talked about what was
permitted and what was not. It was all a matter of routine. In retrospect,
the biggest source of guilt feelings for me didn't happen at the
checkpoint, but by the Gush Katif fence, when we caught the retarded boy.
I demonstrated the most extreme behavior. It was a chance for me to catch
one - the closest thing to catching a terrorist, a chance to vent all the
pressure and impulses that had built up in all of us. To lash out the way
we wanted to. We were used to giving slaps, to handcuffing, to a little
kicking, a little beating, and here was a situation in which it was
justified to let go entirely. Also, the officer who was with us was
himself very violent. We gave the kid a real beating and as soon as we got
to the post, I remember having a great feeling of pride, that I'd been
treated like someone strong. They said, 'What a nut you are, how crazy you
are,' which was basically like saying, 'How strong you are.'

"At the checkpoint, young people have the chance to be masters and using
force and violence becomes legitimate - and this is a much more basic
impulse than the political views or values that you bring from home. As
soon as using force is given legitimacy, and even rewarded, the tendency
is to take it as far as it can go, to exploit it much as possible. To
satisfy these impulses beyond what the situation requires. Today, I'd call
it sadistic impulses...

"We weren't criminals or especially violent people. We were a group of
good boys, a relatively 'high-quality' group, and for all of us - and we
still talk about this sometimes - the checkpoint became a place to test
our personal limits. How tough, how callous, how crazy we could be - and
we thought of that in the positive sense. Something about the situation -
being in a godforsaken place, far from home, far from oversight - made it
justified ... The line of what is forbidden was never precisely drawn. No
one was ever punished and they just let us continue.

"Today, I feel confident saying that even the most senior ranks - the
brigade commander, the battalion commander - are aware of the power that
soldiers have in this situation and what they do with it. How could a
commander not be aware of it when the more crazy and tough his soldiers
are, the quieter his sector is? The more complex picture of the long-term
effects of this violent behavior is something you only become conscious of
when you get away from the checkpoint.

"Today it's clear to me that that boy whose father we humiliated for the
flimsiest of reasons will grow up to hate anyone who represents what was
done to his father. I definitely have an understanding of their motives
now. We are cruelty, we are power. I'm sure that their response is
affected by elements related to their society - a disregard for human life
and a readiness to sacrifice lives - but the basic desire to resist, the
hatred itself, the fear - I feel are completely justified and legitimate,
even if it's risky to say so.

"It's impossible to be in such an emotional state and to go back home on
leave and detach yourself from it. I was very insensitive to the feelings
of my girlfriend at the time. I was an animal, even when I was on leave.
It also sticks with you after your service. I saw the remnants of the
syndrome in India - something about being in the Third World, among
dark-skinned people, brings out the worst of the 'ugly Israeli,' which is
as Israeli as it gets. Or the way you react to a smile: When Palestinians
would smile at me at the checkpoint, I got tense and construed it as
defiance, as chutzpah. When someone smiled at me in India, I immediately
went on the defensive.

"I was an average soldier," he says. "I was the joker of the group. Now I
see that I was often the one to take the lead in violent situations. I
often was the one who gave the slap. I'm the one who came up with all
kinds of ideas like letting the air out of tires. It sounds twisted now,
but we really admired anyone who could beat up some guy who supposedly had
it coming. The officer we admired most was the officer who fired his
weapon at every opportunity. Out of everyone I've spoken to, I've been
left with the most guilt feelings ... A friend from the army read the book
and said that I'm right, that we did bad things, but we were kids. And he
said that it's a shame that I took it too hard."


Ha'aretz is an Israeli daily newspaper, published in both Hebrew and
English versions.
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http://www.projectcensored.org/

Project Censored Alerts
Edited by Adam Stutz

Doping Kids

Adult pharmaceutical companies have been endangering children. Between 1997
and 2000 the FDA reported 7,000 cases of adverse reactions in children and
out of these 7,000 reported incidents there were 769 reported deaths due to
allergic reactions attributed to prescription drugs.

There have been a large number of children who are often receiving these
prescriptions in combination with other medications. The effects can be
devastating. Nearly a quarter of a million children took Prilosec in 2000,
according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and nearly 100,000
children were prescribed similar "proton pump inhibitors"(PPI) heart burn
drugs such as Prevacid, Nexium, Protonix, and Aciphex. None of these PPI's
were approved for pediatric use at the time (Prevacid was in 2002). The FDA
had warned that children taking Prilosec could face the risk of developing
pancreatis and liver problems. Three out of four children's prescriptions
are "off label." Drug salesmen are prohibited from this practice but it
still occurs quite commonly.

The pharmaceutical companies look at children as a very lucrative
demographic. This can be made apparent in the amount of advertising
undertaken by pharmaceutical companies at various children related
activities such as sporting events.

Source: Mother Jones, Vol. 28, No.5, Sept.-Oct. "Doping Kids" by Helen
Cordes; Synopsis by Adam Stutz


Indian Rice Feeds Cattle and not Starving Indians

The World Trade Organization is forcing the Indian government to export
food rather than feed starving people. The Indian government in complying
with WTO demands has abdicated its responsibility to feed the nation, and
instead shift the economy to food exports. The main foods being exported
are wheat and rice, which is sent to the United States to feed our cattle.
There is an estimate of 320 million people who are starving in India.

However, the Indian Government is cooperating with Monsanto and the
American company Rice X want to extract rice brand from raw rice kernals to
feed people. The process had not yet been proven safe on human and is
currently used to feed cattle. The Indian people would be the first
experiment of RiceX on humans.

Source: Gene Watch, March-April 2003, "Indian Rice and Wheat feeds American
Cattle, Rather than Starving Indians" by Devinder Sharma; Synopsis by Beth
Reiken


Sex Discrimination in Florida

Florida courts still continue to refuse medical aid to women needing
abortions this proactice is putting women's health at risk, yet Florida's
medical program provides all medical aid necessary for men's reproductive
health services Florida's Third District Court of Appeals issued an
opinion refusing to overturn Florida's ban on Medicaid-funded abortions.
The Center for Reproductive Rights challenged the ban last August in A
Choice for Women, Inc vs. Florida Agency for Health Care Administration,
charging that the ban discriminates on the basis of sex. The court ignored
the sex discrimination claim and upheld the ban as "rational," thereby
allowing the state to continue violating women's rights at the expense of
their health.

The Center for Reproductive Rights argued that it's unconstitutional to
deny low-income women Medicaid-funded abortions when their health is
threatened by a pregnancy. By covering all reproductive health services
needed by men and denying a particular reproductive health service needed
by women, Florida is discriminating against women on the basis of sex. In a
Miami health center, a woman was denied Medicaid funding for an abortion
even though she suffers from epileptic seizures and her epilepsy medication
posed a serious threat to the health of her fetus.

Without Medicaid coverage for abortions some low-income women are forced to
carry complicated pregnancies further or delay obtaining the procedure
while they seek alternative funds. Either way the law threatens the health
of these women.

Currently, 17 states cover all abortions in their Medicaid programs. While
courts in Florida deny Medicaid coverage for abortions for women receiving
low income, courts in New Mexico and Connecticut have ruled that denying
this coverage is indeed a form of sexual discrimination.

Source: People's Weekly World by V/A, "Florida Court Blocks Medicaid-Funded
Abortions"; Synopsis by Maria Kyriakos


Corporations Privatize Freedom of Speech

Corporations pose a growing threat to freedom of speech and information in
our society. In some areas, including Washington, D.C., Florida, Arizona
and California, the majority of housing units built in the past five years
have been in planned developments. Because the rules and restrictions on
behavior in planned communities are viewed by courts as voluntary
contractual agreements, corporations such as Disney, Mobil Oil and the
American Nevada Corporation, who build these communities, can write
contracts that limit the colors of exterior paint, types of grass, and
colors of drapes. In some cases clotheslines, birdbaths, and basketball
hoops are prohibited as well as parking pick-ups and campers within the
developments and posting yard signs

Corporate controlled e-mail can also be restrict freedom of speech. AOL's
e-mail servers are privately owned and are available only to the
subscribers who pay a fee for their usage. AOL can bar e-mail messages sent
by any non-AOL subscribers. AOL-Time Warner and other ISP's can limit
incoming messages and pick and choose the material seen by their
subscribers. AOL-Time Warner has censored e-mails sent by Harvard
University to applicants, informing them of their acceptance to the school.
AOL claims that it mistakenly identified the e-mails as spam. Even so, the
mistake shows that AOL is vigorously censoring their e-mails, even those
that subscribers want.

Corporations can restrict the release and distribution of internal
documents, claiming that they are copyrighted or private property; restrict
speech on corporate-owned property; terminate employees who speak out about
corporate practices; pressure the mass media to kill or alter stories with
threats of lawsuits or by withdrawing advertising dollars; or file lawsuits
against critics and activists, claming injury to their businesses as a
result of free speech.

Source: Dollars & Sense, "The Invisible Gag," by Lawrence Soley
Synopsis by Jessica Cortez


Pharmaceutical Companies Spend More on PR than on Disease

The pharmaceutical industry spends twice as much on public relations and
marketing than it does on drug research and development. During the year
2000 more than $13.2 billion was spent on pharmaceutical marketing in the
U.S. Drug companies such as Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, Merck, and Astra
Zeneca hire specialist "healthcare" PR companies to help create profits.
The leading healthcare PR companies in the U.S. are Edelman, Ruder Finn and
Chandler Chicco Agency. These groups are responsible for persuading doctors
and patients to use products from the various companies that they
represent. Patient groups are wooed to assist with "disease awareness
campaigns." They also organize medical conferences to provide a platform
for well trained "product champions" to announce promising results of drug
research. PR firms aim to create "buzz" about the new drug in order to
increased sales. Chandler Chicco Agency had much success with this when
they created the buzz over Pfizer's $1 billion-a-year impotence drug,
Viagra.

Advertising for drug companies tends to overemphasize the benefits of
medication. Other strategies for dealing with problems are ignored.
Diseases are created to create new markets for new drugs. Patient groups
are created to boost a new drug that is about to emerge from the drug
company's "pipeline." An investigation by the Journal of the American
Medical Association found that it is commonplace practice for articles to
be "ghostwritten" by PR firms for well-respected medical researchers.  This
creates a market for new products by creating dissatisfaction with existing
products.

Source: PR Watch, First Quarter 2003," Disease Mongering," by Bob Burton
and Andy Rowell; Synopsis by Erin Cossen


Do Childhood Vaccines Cause More Harm than Good?

Many childhood vaccines are known to contain excessive amounts of mercury.
Mercury contribute to neurological development disorders in children.
Autism, speech disorders and heart disease are among those that are thought
to be linked to the mercury in the thimerosal- contained in vaccines. Many
vaccines are said to exceed Federal Safety Guidelines for the amount of
mercury to be orally ingested.  Autism rates grew 800% during the 80's and
90's and there are members of the scientific community that are highly
skeptical that thimerosal vaccines are associated with the disorders.

Source: Conscious Choice, June 2003, "Childhood Vaccines: More Harm Than
Good?"; Synopsis by Kelly Bullock
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http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0312/S00006.htm

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Unanswered Questions : Thinking for ourselves.


Bush Bribes Max Cleland To Shut Up?

- Action To Get A 9/11 Family Member On The Kean Commission -
Action Alert From Nicholas Levis
Fri., Nov. 28, 2003

Call/fax Tom Daschle's office and the media today!
800 numbers for Tom Daschle: (800) 839-5276 and/or (800) 648-3516 – more
below!

Dear colleagues, associates and friends,

A month has passed since former Senator Max Cleland, member of the
National Commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks (the Kean
Commission), told the New York Times that the White House and President
Bush's re-election campaign had reason to fear what the commission was
uncovering in its investigation of intelligence and law enforcement
"failures" before Sept. 11.

"As each day goes by," Cleland said, "we learn that this government knew a
whole lot more about these terrorists before Sept. 11 than it has ever
admitted." (New York Times, Oct. 26, 2003 at http://tinyurl.com/y2xj)

In the meantime, the Kean Commission has accepted a deal to radically
limit their access to the White House documents detailing just what
high-level administration officials knew in advance of the attacks - the
Presidential Daily Briefings or PDBs, including the one we know was
entitled "BIN LADEN DETERMINED TO STRIKE IN U.S." and that warned of
imminent hijackings (Aug. 6, 2001).

The only two delegates of the Commission who will be allowed to see
*pre-edited* versions of these documents both have obvious conflicts of
interest: Philip Zelikow has advised the Bush administration and wrote a
book with Condoleeza Rice last year; whereas Jamie Gorelick is a former
high-level adviser to President Clinton, whose PDBs will also come under
scrutiny. The other commissioners will know only what Zelikow and Gorelick
report back to them, based on their notes, which the White House will also
be allowed to "edit."

Cleland and commission member Tim Roemer, a former congressman, both
objected to the deal. "A majority of the commission has agreed to a bad
deal," Cleland said in a stunning interview, reproduced below, in which he
invokes the sorry history of the Warren Commission. "It is a national
scandal... the Warren Commission blew it. I'm not going to be part of
that. I'm not going to be part of looking at information only partially.
I'm not going to be part of just coming to quick conclusions. I'm not
going to be part of political pressure to do this or not do that..."

Cleland pulls no punches about the possible darker implications of the
White House's secrecy fetish: "Let's chase this rabbit into the ground
here. They had a plan to go to war and when 9/11 happened that's what they
did; they went to war." (See below for more.)

Last week came the news that Bush suddenly appointed Cleland to the board
of the Export-Import Bank, as a result of which "he will have to leave the
commission investigating the Sept. 11 terror attacks." So far only The
Washington Times has reported details of this story; the rest of the media
have completely ignored it. (See http://tinyurl.com/wkqo)

Just when the White House invokes a Nixonian "executive privilege" in the
struggle to keep its secrets, how is it possible that Bush can simply act
to remove the most outspoken member of the Kean Commission by means of a
cushy appointment? What other inducements were applied to Cleland to get
him to leave the Commission?

This is tantamount to a confession that Cleland is right - the White House
has serious dirt to hide! And Cleland is hardly the first high-level
representative to pose these questions. I shall cite just two examples:
For asking, starting in March 2002, what the Bush administration may have
known in advance of Sept. 11, Georgia congresswoman Cynthia McKinney was
attacked from all sides and run out of Congress on a wave of millions in
Republican campaign contributions.

Later that year, Senator Bob Graham headed the congressional joint
investigation into Sept. 11. Despite its highly limited purview, the
congressional investigation was still subjected to heavy executive
censorship in its final report, including the deletion of an entire
28-page section that apparently details connections between Saudi Arabian
elites and Qaeda (and possibly of the Bush family and Bin Laden family
businesses). During his brief run for the presidency this year, Graham
said the most important facts about 9/11 have yet to be revealed to the
public.

Let us leave aside the rich and disturbing history of how the White House
has otherwise obstructed the 9/11 investigations for more than two years,
and return to the present:

Now, Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle is expected to nominate Cleland's
replacement on the Kean Commission. Other than Cleland, every other member
of the Commission has had previous close ties to the national security
establishment, oil companies, airline companies, or all three. These are
obvious vested interests! Given these vested interests, isn't it about
time there was someone on the Commission who has an obvious vested
interest not in maintaining secrecy, but in full disclosure?

Until now, the work of the Commission has been tracked by several groups
including the 9/11 Family Steering Committee, a group appointed by
relatives of people who died in the attacks. They have been among the most
outspoken advocates of disclosure. Shouldn't a member of the 9/11 Family
Steering Committee be appointed as Cleland's replacement?

Now is the time for all who support the principle of open government and
disclosure, without which democracy is impossible, to make their voice
heard. Forward this mail to everyone you can. Call or fax Daschle's office
today to urge that he appoint a member of the Family Steering Committee as
Cleland's replacement. (See below for information on contacting Daschle.)
Write and fax your media contacts to cover this story.

Do it in your own words - and be insistent!

And what if this doesn't work? What if the only supposedly independent
investigation into the events of Sept. 11 completes its descent into
farce? Then the time will have come for citizens to take this into their
own hands; if the government isn't going to let us know what it already
knows about Sept. 11, then we the people have the right to sit in
judgement on that government, and to establish our own citizens' truth
commission.

Nicholas Levis

http://www.911truth.org


***********
Appendices:

ONE -- Contact info for Daschle's offices
TWO -- Cleland interview with Eric Boehlert
THREE -- Kyle Hence of 9/11 Citizens' Watch on the latest developments,
including contact info for the National Commission


***********
APPENDIX ONE

Contact info for Daschle's offices

PLEASE call ALL of Dascle's offices (4 calls, 1 to each) to make SURE he
gets the message, AND also fax him and email him as well, see below.

DC - (202) 224-2321
Aberdeen: (605) 225-8823
Rapid City: (605) 348-7551
Sioux Falls: (605) 334-9596
800 numbers for Tom Daschle--
(800) 839-5276 and/or (800) 648-3516

Fax: (202) 224-6603; or E-mail by visiting:
http://daschle.senate.gov/webform.html


***********
APPENDIX TWO

Selected quotes from Cleland in an interview with Eric Boehlert:

"A majority of the commission has agreed to a bad deal."

"It is a national scandal."

"I say that [The President's] decision compromised the mission of the 9/11
commission, pure and simple. Far from the commissioners being able to
fulfill their obligation to the Congress and the American people, and far
from getting access to all the documents we need, the president of the
United States is cherry-picking what information is shown to that minority
of commissioners. Now this is ridiculous. That's not full and open access.

"If you trust one commissioner you should trust them all. I don't
understand it. You can say, 'I'm not going to show anything to anybody,
and take me to court.' At least that's consistent. But it's not consistent
at all to say we're going to parse out this information and we determine
how many members of the commission get to see it."

"It's all about 9/11. This is not a political witch hunt. This is the most
serious independent investigation since the Warren Commission. And after
watching History Channel shows on the Warren Commission last night, the
Warren Commission blew it. I'm not going to be part of that. I'm not going
to be part of looking at information only partially. I'm not going to be
part of just coming to quick conclusions. I'm not going to be part of
political pressure to do this or not do that. I'm not going to be part of
that. This is serious."

"Let's chase this rabbit into the ground here. They had a plan to go to
war and when 9/11 happened that's what they did; they went to war. They
pulled off their task force in Afghanistan, their Predator assets, and
shifted them over to the war in Iraq. They took their eye off the 9/11
ball and transferred it to the Iraq ball. And that's a very strategic
question that ultimately has got to be answered. I'm focused on 9/11 and
the administration is not focused on it. They don't want to share
information, and they didn't agree with the commission in the first
place."


***********
APPENDIX THREE

Compromised 9/11 Investigation a Looming National Scandal -- Demands
Congressional Action
>From Kyle Hence
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0311/S00206.htm
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The Sydney Morning Herald
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/10/29/1067233251576.html

29 October 2003

Bush no longer in control as Cheney's hawks hijack foreign policy
   By Ritt Goldstein

A former Pentagon officer turned whistleblower says a group of hawks in
the Bush Administration, including the Vice-President, Dick Cheney, is
running a shadow foreign policy, contravening Washington's official line.

"What these people are doing now makes Iran-Contra [a Reagan
administration national security scandal] look like amateur hour. . . it's
worse than Iran-Contra, worse than what happened in Vietnam," said Karen
Kwiatkowski, a former air force lieutenant-colonel.

"[President] George Bush isn't in control . . . the country's been
hijacked," she said, describing how "key [governmental] areas of
neoconservative concern were politically staffed".

Ms Kwiatkowski, who retired this year after 20 years service, was a Middle
East specialist in the office of the Undersecretary of Defence for Policy,
headed by Douglas Feith.

She described "a subversion of constitutional limits on executive power
and a co-optation through deceit of a large segment of the Congress",
adding that "in order to take that first step - Iraq - lies had to be told
to Congress to bring them on board".

Ms Kwiatkowski said the pursuit of national security decisions often
bypassed "civil service and active-duty military professionals", and was
handled instead by political appointees who shared common ideological
ties.

There was speculation earlier this year that such an ideologue group had
emerged, and that it was behind the US attack on an Iraqi convoy in Syria
in June.

The New York Times quoted Patrick Lang, a former senior Defence
Intelligence Agency (DIA) official, as saying that many in the Government
believed the incursion was an effort by ideologues to disrupt co-operation
between the US and Syria.

Ms Kwiatkowski said there was an extra-governmental network operating
outside normal structures and practices, "a network of political
appointees in key positions who felt they needed to take some action, to
make things happen in a foreign affairs, national security way". She said
Pentagon personnel and the DIA were pressured to favourably alter
assessments and reports.

In a separate interview, Chalmers Johnson, an authority on US policy, said
that the Administration's neo-conservatives had in effect seized power
from Mr Bush.

Dr Johnson said the neo-conservatives had pursued an agenda outlined in
the controversial 1992 Defence Planning Guidance. That document, drawn up
at the direction of Mr Cheney when he was defence secretary, said the
world's only superpower should not be cautious about asserting its power.
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Is this what (some) Republicans believe?
By Corey Farley

Being a drug addict is a moral failing and a crime, unless you're a
conservative radio host. Then it's an illness and you need our prayers for
your recovery.

The United States should get out of the United Nations, and our highest
national priority is enforcing U.N. resolutions against Iraq.

Government should relax regulation of Big Business and Big Money but crack
down on individuals who use marijuana to relieve the pain of illness.

"Standing Tall for America"  means firing your workers and moving their
jobs to India.

A woman can't be trusted with decisions about her own body, but
multi-national corporations can make decisions affecting all mankind
without regulation.

Jesus loves you, and shares your hatred of homosexuals and Hillary Clinton.

The best way to improve military morale is to praise the troops in
speeches while slashing veterans' benefits and combat pay.

Group sex and drug use are degenerate sins unless you someday run for
governor of California as a Republican.

If condoms are kept out of schools, adolescents won't have sex.

A good way to fight terrorism is to belittle our long-time allies, then
demand their cooperation and money.

HMOs and insurance companies have the interest of the public at
heart.

Providing health care to all Iraqis is sound policy. Providing health care
to all Americans is socialism.

Global warming and tobacco's link to cancer are junk science, but
creationism should be taught in schools.

Saddam was a good guy when Reagan armed him, a bad guy when Bush's daddy
made war on him, a good guy when Cheney did business with him and a bad
guy when Bush needed a diversion for not finding Osama bin Laden.

A president lying about an extramarital affair is an impeachable offense.
A president lying to enlist support for a war in which thousands die is
solid defense policy.

Government should limit itself to the powers named in the Constitution,
which include banning gay marriages and censoring the Internet.

The public has a right to know about Hillary's cattle trades, but George
Bush's driving and military records are none of our business.

You support states' rights, which means Attorney General John Ashcroft can
tell states what local voter initiatives they have a right to adopt.

What Bill Clinton did in the 1960s is of vital national interest, but what
Bush did in the '80s is irrelevant.

Trade with Cuba is wrong because the country is communist, but trade with
China and Vietnam is vital to a spirit of international harmony.


>--- I would, of course, print a comparable list of things you have to
>believe to be a Democrat, if I
>had one, and if it were funny, and if . . . .  No. You send one, and I'll
>print it even if hell doesn't freeze over.

> Cory Farley can be reached at (775) 788-6340 or [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/admin/emailfriend?contentId=A55816-
2003Oct20&sent=no&referrer=emailarticle

20 October 2003


Curtains Ordered for Media Coverage of Returning Coffins
   By Dana Milbank

   Since the end of the Vietnam War, presidents have worried that their
military actions would lose support once the public glimpsed the remains of
U.S. soldiers arriving at air bases in flag-draped caskets.

To this problem, the Bush administration has found a simple solution: It has
ended the public dissemination of such images by banning news coverage and
photography of dead soldiers' homecomings on all military bases.

In March, on the eve of the Iraq war, a directive arrived from the Pentagon
at U.S. military bases. "There will be no arrival ceremonies for, or media
coverage of, deceased military personnel returning to or departing from
Ramstein [Germany] airbase or Dover [Del.] base, to include interim stops,"
the Defense Department said, referring to the major ports for the returning
remains.

A Pentagon spokeswoman said the military-wide policy actually dates from
about November 2000 -- the last days of the Clinton administration -- but it
apparently went unheeded and unenforced, as images of caskets returning from
the Afghanistan war appeared on television broadcasts and in newspapers
until early this year. Though Dover Air Force Base, which has the military's
largest mortuary, has had restrictions for 12 years, others "may not have
been familiar with the policy," the spokeswoman said. This year, "we've
really tried to enforce it."

President Bush's opponents say he is trying to keep the spotlight off the
fatalities in Iraq. "This administration manipulates information and takes
great care to manage events, and sometimes that goes too far," said Joe
Lockhart, who as White House press secretary joined President Bill Clinton
at several ceremonies for returning remains. "For them to sit there and make
a political decision because this hurts them politically -- I'm outraged."

Pentagon officials deny that. Speaking on condition of anonymity, they said
the policy covering the entire military followed a victory over a civil
liberties court challenge to the restrictions at Dover and relieves all
bases of the difficult logistics of assembling family members and deciding
which troops should get which types of ceremonies.

One official said only individual graveside services, open to cameras at the
discretion of relatives, give "the full context" of a soldier's sacrifice.
"To do it at several stops along the way doesn't tell the full story and
isn't representative," the official said.

A White House spokesman said Bush has not attended any memorials or funerals
for soldiers killed in action during his presidency as his predecessors had
done, although he has met with families of fallen soldiers and has marked
the loss of soldiers in Memorial Day and Sept. 11, 2001, remembrances.

The Pentagon has previously acknowledged the effect on public opinion of the
grim tableau of caskets being carried from transport planes to hangars or
hearses. In 1999, the then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Army Gen.
Henry H. Shelton, said a decision to use military force is based in part on
whether it will pass "the Dover test," as the public reacts to fatalities.

Ceremonies for arriving coffins, not routine during the Vietnam War, became
increasingly common and elaborate later. After U.S. soldiers fell in Beirut,
Grenada, Panama, the Balkans, Kenya, Afghanistan and elsewhere, the military
often invited in cameras for elaborate ceremonies for the returning remains,
at Andrews Air Force Base, Dover, Ramstein and elsewhere -- sometimes with
the president attending.

President Jimmy Carter attended ceremonies for troops killed in Pakistan,
Egypt and the failed hostage rescue mission in Iran. President Ronald Reagan
participated in many memorable ceremonies, including a service at Camp
Lejeune in 1983 for 241 Marines killed in Beirut. Among several events at
military bases, he went to Andrews in 1985 to pin Purple Hearts to the
caskets of marines killed in San Salvador, and, at Mayport Naval Station in
Florida in 1987, he eulogized those killed aboard the USS Stark in the
Persian Gulf.

During President George H.W. Bush's term, there were ceremonies at Dover and
Andrews for Americans killed in Panama, Lebanon and aboard the USS Iowa.

But in early 1991, at the time of the Persian Gulf War, the Pentagon said
there would be no more media coverage of coffins returning to Dover, the
main arrival point; a year earlier, Bush was angered when television
networks showed him giving a news briefing on a split screen with caskets
arriving.

But the photos of coffins arriving at Andrews and elsewhere continued to
appear through the Clinton administration. In 1996, Dover made an exception
to allow filming of Clinton's visit to welcome the 33 caskets with remains
from Commerce Secretary Ronald H. Brown's plane crash. In 1998, Clinton went
to Andrews to see the coffins of Americans killed in the terrorist bombing
in Nairobi. Dover also allowed public distribution of photos of the
homecoming caskets after the terrorist attack on the USS Cole in 2000.

The photos of coffins continued for the first two years of the current Bush
administration, from Ramstein and other bases. Then, on the eve of the Iraq
invasion, word came from the Pentagon that other bases were to adopt Dover's
policy of making the arrival ceremonies off limits.

 "Whenever we go into a conflict, there's a certain amount of guidance that
comes down the pike," said Lt. Olivia Nelson, a spokeswoman for Dover. "It's
a consistent policy across the board. Where it used to apply only to Dover,
they've now made it very clear it applies to everyone."
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Turkeys on the Moon... from Michael Moore

December 8, 2003

Dear Mr. Bush,

Well, it's going on two weeks now since your surprise visit to one of the
two countries you now run and, I have to say, I'm still warmed by the
gesture. Man, take me along next time! I understand only 13 members of the
media went with you -- and it turns out only ONE of them was an actual
reporter for a newspaper. But you did take along FIVE photographers (hey,
I get it, screw the words, it's all about the pictures!), a couple wire
service guys, and a crew from the Fox News Channel (fair and balanced!).

Then, I read in the paper this weekend that that big turkey you were
holding in Baghdad (you know, the picture that's supposed to replace the
now-embarrassing footage of you on that aircraft carrier with the sign
"Mission Accomplished") -- well, it turns out that big, beautiful turkey
of yours was never eaten by the troops! It wasn't eaten by anyone! That's
because it wasn't real! It was a STUNT turkey, brought in to look like a
real edible turkey for all those great camera angles.

Now I know some people will say you are into props (like the one in the
lower extremities of your flyboy suit), but hey, I get it, this is
theater! So what if it was a bogus turkey? The whole trip was bogus, all
staged to look like "news." The fake honey glaze on that bird wasn't much
different from the fake honey glaze that covers this war. And the fake
stuffing in the fake bird was just the right symbol for our country during
these times. America loves fake honey glaze, it loves to be stuffed, and,
dammit, YOU knew that -- that's what makes you so in touch with the people
you lead!

It was also a good idea that you made the "press" on that trip to Baghdad
pull the shades down on the plane. No one in the media entourage
complained. They like the shades pulled and they like to be kept in the
dark. It's more fun that way. And, when you made them take the batteries
out of their cell phones so they wouldn't be able to call anyone, and they
dutifully complied -- that was genius! I think if you had told them to put
their hands on their heads and touch their noses with their tongues, they
would have done that, too! That's how much they like you. You could have
played "Simon Says" the whole way over there. It wouldn't have been that
much different from "Karl Says," a game they LOVE to play every day with
Mr. Rove.

Well, if you're planning any surprises for Christmas, don't forget to
include me.  When I heard last week that you wanted to send a man back to
the moon, I thought, get the fake goose ready -- that's where ol' George
is going for the holidays! I don't blame you, what with nearly 3 million
jobs disappeared, and a $281 billion surplus disappeared, and the USA
stuck in a war that will never end -- who wouldn't want to go to the moon!
This time, take ALL the media with you! Embed them on the moon! They'll
love it there! It looks just like Crawford! You can golf on the moon, too.
You'll have so much fun up there, you might not want to come back. Better
take Cheney with you, too. Pretend it's a medical experiment or something.
"That's one small step for man, one giant leap for every American who's
sick and tired of all this crap."

Yours,

Michael Moore
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
www.michaelmoore.com
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Subject: [pjnews] Bush-Hitler Ties
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News Canada
http://www.canada.com/news/world/story.asp?id=B4991F07-2A7B-49BC-A470-D14A35
5D2C9A

17 October 2003

Bush grandfather director of bank with Hitler ties: U.S. government
documents

WASHINGTON (AP) - President George W. Bush's grandfather was a director of a
bank seized by the U.S. government because of its ties to a German
industrialist who helped bankroll Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler's rise to
power, government documents show.

Prescott Bush was one of seven directors of Union Banking Corp., a New York
City investment bank owned by a bank controlled by the Thyssen family, said
recently declassified National Archives documents reviewed by The Associated
Press.

Fritz Thyssen was an early financial supporter of Hitler. The documents do
not show any evidence Bush directly aided that effort. His position with
Union Banking never was a political issue for Bush, who was elected to the
Senate from Connecticut in 1952.

Reports of Bush's involvement with the seized bank have been circulating on
the Internet for years and have been reported by some mainstream media. The
newly declassified documents provide additional details about the Union
Banking-Thyssen connection.

Trent Duffy, a spokesman for the U.S. president, declined comment.

Union Banking was owned by a Dutch bank, Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaardt
N.V., which was "closely affiliated" with the German conglomerate United
Steel Works, said an Oct. 5, 1942, report from the U.S. Office of Alien
Property Custodian. The Dutch bank and the steel firm were part of the
business and financial empire of Thyssen and his brother, Heinrich
Thyssen-Bornemisza, the report said.

The 4,000 Union Banking shares owned by the Dutch bank were registered in
the names of the seven U.S. directors, said a document signed by Homer
Jones, chief of the division of investigation and research of the Office of
Alien Property Custodian, a Second World War-era agency that no longer
exists.

Roland Harriman, the bank chairman and brother of former New York state
governor Averell Harriman, held 3,991 shares. Bush had one share.

Both Harrimans and Bush were partners in the New York investment firm Brown
Brothers, Harriman and Co., which handled the financial transactions of the
bank, as well as other financial dealings with several other companies
linked to Bank voor Handel that were confiscated by the U.S. government
during the Second World War.

Union Banking was seized by the government in October 1942 under the Trading
with the Enemy Act.

No charges were brought against Union Banking's U.S. directors. The
government was too busy trying to fight the war, said Donald Goldstein, a
professor of public and international affairs at the University of
Pittsburgh.

"We did not have the resources to do these things," Goldstein said.

Fritz Thyssen broke with the Nazis in 1938 over their persecution of Roman
Catholics and Jews and fled to Switzerland. He later was arrested and spent
1941 to 1945 in a Nazi prison. His brother lived in Switzerland from 1932 to
1947 but continued to operate businesses in Germany.

The new documents were first reported by freelance writer John Buchanan in
the New Hampshire Gazette newspaper.
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Subject: [pjnews] Sept. 11 Widow Sues President Bush
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http://www.rense.com/general45/vanishes.htm

 UN Observer and International Report
 Dec.  2, 2004
 by W.  David Kubiak

 Think you're already amazed, alarmed or appalled enough by the state of
US journalism today?  Chew on this a while and think again.

 A grieving New Hampshire widow who lost her man on 9/11 refused the
government's million dollar hush money payoff, studied the facts of the
day for nearly two years, and came to believe the White House
"intentionally allowed 9/11 to happen" to launch a so-called "War
on Terrorism" for personal and political gain.

 She retained a prominent lawyer, a former Deputy Attorney General of
Pennsylvania, who served with distinction under both Democrats and
Republicans and was once a strong candidate for the governor's  seat.

 The attorney filed a 62-page complaint in federal district court
(including 40 pages of prima facie evidence) charging that "President Bush
and officials including, but not limited to Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice,
Ashcroft and Tenet":
 1.) had adequate foreknowledge of 911 yet failed to warn the county or
attempt to prevent it;
 2.) have since been covering up the truth of that day;
 3.) have therefore abetted the murder of plaintiff's husband and violated
the Constitution and multiple laws of the United States; and
 4.) are thus being sued under the Civil RICO (Racketeering, Influence,
and Corrupt Organization) Act for malfeasant conspiracy, obstruction of
justice and wrongful death.

 The suit text goes on to document the detailed forewarnings from foreign
governments and FBI agents; the unprecedented delinquency of our air
defense; the inexplicable half hour dawdle of our Commander in Chief at a
primary school after hearing the nation was under deadly attack; the
incessant invocation of national security and executive privilege to
suppress the facts; and the obstruction of all subsequent efforts to
investigate the disaster.  It concludes that "compelling evidence will be
presented in this case through discovery, subpoena power, and testimony
[that] Defendants failed to act and prevent 9/11 knowing the attacks would
lead to an 'International War on Terror' which would benefit Defendants
both financially and politically."

 Press releases detailing these explosive allegations are sent out to 3000
journalists in the print and broadcast media, and a press conference to
announce the filing is held in front of Independence Hall in Philadelphia
on November 26th (commemorating the end of the first futile year of the
independent National 9/11 Commission).

 Imagine the world-churning implications of these charges.  Imagine the
furor if just one was proved true.  Imagine the courage of this bribe-
shunning widow and an eminent attorney with his rep on the line.  Then
imagine a press conference to which nobody came.

 (Well, more precisely, imagine a press conference at which only FOX News
appears, tapes for 40 minutes, and never airs an inch.) Now imagine the
air time, column inches and talk show hysteria that same night devoted to
the legal hassles of Michael Jackson, Kobe, and California's Scott
Peterson, and divide that by the attention paid to our little case of mass
murder, war profiteering and treason.  (OK, this is really a trick
question because no number divided by zero yields any answers whatsoever,
which evidently in this case is the result preferred.)

 When you present documented charges of official treachery behind the
greatest national security disaster in modern history and the press
doesn't show, doesn't listen, doesn't write - just what in fact is really
being communicated?  That despite all the deaths, lies, wars, and bizarre
official actions that flowed from 9/11 there's actually nothing there to
be investigated at all?  That addressing desperate victim families' still
unanswered cries for truth is not a legitimate journalistic concern?  That
news will now be what the corporate media say it will be, so drink your
infotainment Kool-Aid and kindly shut up?

 While the 9/11 blackout is the most flagrant sign of current media
dysfunction, it hardly stands alone.  Where, for example, was our free and
fearless press when Pentagon powerbroker Richard Perle confessed to a
London audience last month that yes indeed, our war on Iraq was illegal as
hell?  He calmly explained that "in this case international law stood in
the way of doing the right thing, [it] would have required us to leave
Saddam Hussein alone, and this would have been morally unacceptable."
(Guardian/UK, 11/20/03) And what news have we seen of the thousands of
Depleted Uranium deaths and birth defects now desolating Afghanis, Iraqis
and our own Gulf War troops?  And whose looking into the $1.2 trillion the
Pentagon admits is "missing" or the half trillion in laundered funds now
propping up our banks?  And how many times have you seen it reported that
unbid Iraq contracts have pushed the worth of VP Cheney's 433,333
Halliburton stock options to $26 million plus?  But to return to 9/11, the
funny business has just begun.  If you thought press performance after
JFK's death was a cynical farce, you ain't seen nothing yet.

 A few years back Harold Evans of the London Sunday Times, observed that
the challenge facing American newspapers "is not to stay in business --
it is to stay in journalism.'' As corporations' authoritarian, profit-driven
consciousness comes to dominate both media and governance, you can expect
a lot more serial celebrity scandals and even less news on the way things
work or anything that really counts.

 There is a clear method and message in this obscurantist madness.  All
this media consolidation and tightening control is strategically aligned
with deregulation, privatization, social program-gutting deficits and free
trade regimes.  They are all convergent tactics to enforce corporations'
full spectrum dominance over democratic humankind.  If your progressive or
conservative instincts bid you to arise against this coup, standing with
our 9/11 widow is a good place to start.

 Her name is Ellen Mariani, her lawyer is Phillip Berg and their complaint
is now online at
http://www.nancho.net/911/mariani.html

 Read it and weep, wail, or whack out a dozen letters to the editors
around your town, but for god's sake make some noise.  When 9/11
bombshells fall silent in the corporate media's forest it's up to us to
make them resound.

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

Ask The New York Times to Answer Lingering 9/11 Questions
http://www.petitiononline.com/jtwg126/petition.html

To:  The New York Times
Bill Keller, Executive Editor
Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., Publisher & CEO

We the people, concerned and frustrated by the ongoing lack of answers to
serious questions about 9/11 from President George W. Bush, hereby ask
that The New York Times, as the world newspaper of record, aggressively
investigate the following Top 10 Most Troubling Questions:

1) With regard to 9/11, what did the President know and when did he know
it? If he first learned about the attacks in the Florida classroom, why
did he continue reading a story to schoolchildren for another half-hour
after what he later described as “an act of war?”

2) If the President truly wants the American people and survivors and
families of the 9/11 victims to know and understand what happened on that
tragic day, why has he repeatedly done all he can to impede or block a
formal investigation?

3) Why were the 29 “redacted” pages of the 9/11 Commission Report
personally censored at your request?

4) How is it possible that so many credible and documented warnings, both
domestically and from overseas, your administration failed to address the
threat until after the attacks?

5) With regard to the anthrax attacks following 9/11, what did the
President know and when did he know it?

6) If the President did not know of the anthrax letters in advance, why
did the White House begin taking Cipro on 9/11 -- three weeks before the
first letter was received in the mail?

7) Why has the FBI made no progress in its anthrax investigation, allowing
the killer(s) of five American citizens to go free? Do you have any plans
to intensify that investigation? What is its present status?

8) Why has the investigation of the futures trading in United and American
Airlines stock not produced any information or suspects? What is the
present status of the investigation?

9) Why have the actual identities of the 19 hijackers never been properly
investigated or confirmed, given the numerous international press accounts
of the “real life” hijackers who are still living and whose identities
were stolen for 9/11?

10) Why can’t the American people and 9/11 survivors have access to the
complete air traffic control records and logs for Flight 11 and Flight 75?
Where are the cockpit voice recorders, “black boxes,” and airport
surveillance tapes that show the hijackers boarding the doomed flights?

It is up to the press, just as it was during Watergate and other moments
of national crisis, to fully investigate these questions and report the
factual answers to the American people.  Please do your part, Mr. Keller,
to begin that process in the pages of The New York Times.

Thank you.

Sincerely,

The Undersigned
(sign the petition at http://www.petitiononline.com/jtwg126/petition.html)
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Subject: [pjnews] State Dept. Foresaw Iraq Trouble
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The New York Times
19 October 2003

State Dept. Study Foresaw Trouble Now Plaguing Iraq
    By ERIC SCHMITT and JOEL BRINKLEY

WASHINGTON, Oct. 18 - A yearlong State Department study predicted many of
the problems that have plagued the American-led occupation of Iraq,
according to internal State Department documents and interviews with
administration and Congressional officials.

Beginning in April 2002, the State Department project assembled more than
200 Iraqi lawyers, engineers, business people and other experts into 17
working groups to study topics ranging from creating a new justice system to
reorganizing the military to revamping the economy.

Their findings included a much more dire assessment of Iraq's dilapidated
electrical and water systems than many Pentagon officials assumed. They
warned of a society so brutalized by Saddam Hussein's rule that many Iraqis
might react coolly to Americans' notion of quickly rebuilding civil society.

Several officials said that many of the findings in the $5 million study
were ignored by Pentagon officials until recently, although the Pentagon
said they took the findings into account. The work is now being relied on
heavily as occupation forces struggle to impose stability in Iraq.

The working group studying transitional justice was eerily prescient in
forecasting the widespread looting in the aftermath of the fall of Mr.
Hussein's government, caused in part by thousands of criminals set free from
prison, and it recommended force to prevent the chaos.

"The period immediately after regime change might offer these criminals the
opportunity to engage in acts of killing, plunder and looting," the report
warned, urging American officials to "organize military patrols by coalition
forces in all major cities to prevent lawlessness, especially against vital
utilities and key government facilities."

Despite the scope of the project, the military office initially charged with
rebuilding Iraq did not learn of it until a major government drill for the
postwar mission was held in Washington in late February, less than a month
before the conflict began, said Ron Adams, the office's deputy director.

The man overseeing the planning, Tom Warrick, a State Department official,
so impressed aides to Jay Garner, a retired Army lieutenant general heading
the military's reconstruction office, that they recruited Mr. Warrick to
join their team.

George Ward, an aide to General Garner, said the reconstruction office
wanted to use Mr. Warrick's knowledge because "we had few experts on Iraq on
the staff."

But top Pentagon officials blocked Mr. Warrick's appointment, and much of
the project's work was shelved, State Department officials said. Mr. Warrick
declined to be interviewed for this article.

The Defense Department, which had the lead role for planning postwar
operations and reconstruction in Iraq, denied that it had shunned the State
Department planning effort.

"It is flatly wrong to say this work was ignored," said the Pentagon
spokesman Larry Di Rita. "It was good work. It was taken into account. It
had some influence on people's thinking and it was a valuable contribution."

The broad outlines of the work, called the Future of Iraq Project, have been
widely known, but new details emerged this week after the State Department
sent Congress the project's 13 volumes of reports and supporting documents,
which several House and Senate committees had requested weeks ago.

The documents are unclassified but labeled "official use only," and were not
intended for public distribution, officials said. But Congressional
officials from both parties allowed The New York Times to review the
volumes, totaling more than 2,000 pages, revealing previously unknown
details behind the planning.

Administration officials say there was postwar planning at several
government agencies, but much of the work at any one agency was largely
disconnected from that at others.

In the end, the American military and civilian officials who first entered
Iraq prepared for several possible problems: numerous fires in the oil
fields, a massive humanitarian crisis, widespread revenge attacks against
former leaders of Mr. Hussein's government and threats from Iraq's
neighbors. In fact, none of those problems occurred to any great degree.

Officials acknowledge that the United States was not well prepared for what
did occur: chiefly widespread looting and related security threats, even
though the State Department study predicted them.

Senior said the Pentagon squandered a chance to anticipate more of the
postwar pitfalls by not fully incorporating the State Department
information.

"Had we done more work and more of a commitment at the front end, there
would be drastically different results now," said Senator Joseph R. Biden
Jr. of Delaware, the senior Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee.

Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Feb. 11, Marc
Grossman, the under secretary of state for political affairs, said the
working groups were "not to have an academic discussion but to consider
thoughts and plans for what can be done immediately."

But some senior Pentagon officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity,
said that while some of the project's work was well done, much of it was
superficial and too academic to be practical.

"It was mostly ignored," said one senior defense official. "State has good
ideas and a feel for the political landscape, but they're bad at
implementing anything. Defense, on the other hand, is excellent at
logistical stuff, but has blinders when it comes to policy. We needed to
blend these two together."

A review of the work shows a wide range of quality and industriousness. For
example, the transitional justice working group, made up of Iraqi judges,
law professors and legal experts, has met four times and drafted more than
600 pages of proposed reforms in the Iraqi criminal code, civil code,
nationality laws and military procedure. Other working groups, however, met
only once and produced slim reports or none at all.

"There was a wealth of information in the working group if someone had just
collated and used it," said Nasreen Barwari, who served on the economy
working group and is now the Iraqi minister of public works. "What they did
seems to have been a one-sided opinion."

Many of the working groups offered long-term recommendations as well as
short-term fixes to potential problems.

The group studying defense policy and institutions expected problems if the
Iraqi Army was disbanded quickly ‹ a step L. Paul Bremer III, the chief
American civil administrator in Iraq, took. The working group recommended
that jobs be found for demobilized troops to avoid having them turn against
allied forces as some are believed to have done.

After special security organizations that ensured Mr. Hussein's grip on
power were abolished, the working group recommended halving the
400,000-member military over time and reorganizing Iraqi special forces to
become peacekeeping troops, as well as counterdrug and counterterrorism
forces. Under the plan, military intelligence units would help American
troops root out terrorists infiltrating postwar Iraq.

"The Iraqi armed forces and the army should be rebuilt according to the
tenets and programs of democratic life," one working group member
recommended.

The democratic principles working group wrestled with myriad complicated
issues from reinvigorating a dormant political system to forming special
tribunals for trying war criminals to laying out principles of a new Iraqi
bill of rights.

It declared the thorny question of the relationship between that secular
state and Islamic religion one "only the people of Iraq can decide," and
avoided a recommendation on it.

Members of this working group were divided over whether to back a
provisional government made up of Iraqi exiles or adopt the model that
ultimately was adopted, the Iraqi Governing Council, made up of members from
a broad range of ethnic and religious backgrounds. The group presented both
options.

The transparency and anticorruption working group warned that "actions
regarding anticorruption must start immediately; it cannot wait until the
legal, legislative and executive systems are reformed."

The economy and infrastructure working group warned of the deep investments
needed to repair Iraq's water, electrical and sewage systems. The free media
working group noted the potential to use Iraq's television and radio
capabilities to promote the goals of a post-Hussein Iraq, an aim many
critics say the occupation has fumbled so far.

Encouraging Iraqis to emerge from three decades of dictatorship and embrace
a vibrant civil society including labor unions, artist guilds and
professional associations, could be more difficult than anticipated, the
civil society capacity buildup working group cautioned: "The people's main
concern has become basic survival and not building their civil society."

The groups' ideas may not have been fully incorporated before the war, but
they are getting a closer look now. Many of the Iraqi ministers are
graduates of the working groups, and have brought that experience with them.
Since last spring, new arrivals to Mr. Bremer's staff in Baghdad have
received a CD-ROM version of the State Department's 13-volume work. "It's
our bible coming out here," said one senior official in Baghdad.
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Subject: [pjnews] Will Iraq Counter-insurgency Repeat Mistakes of Vietnam?
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http://www.newyorker.com/printable/?fact/031215fa_fact

MOVING TARGETS
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
Will the counter-insurgency plan in Iraq repeat the mistakes of Vietnam?

The Bush Administration has authorized a major escalation of the Special
Forces covert war in Iraq. In interviews over the past month, American
officials and former officials said that the main target was a hard-core
group of Baathists who are believed to be behind much of the underground
insurgency against the soldiers of the United States and its allies. A new
Special Forces group, designated Task Force 121, has been assembled from
Army Delta Force members, Navy seals, and C.I.A. paramilitary operatives,
with many additional personnel ordered to report by January. Its highest
priority is the neutralization of the Baathist insurgents, by capture or
assassination.

The revitalized Special Forces mission is a policy victory for Secretary
of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who has struggled for two years to get the
military leadership to accept the strategy of what he calls “Manhunts”—a
phrase that he has used both publicly and in internal Pentagon
communications. Rumsfeld has had to change much of the Pentagon’s
leadership to get his way. “Knocking off two regimes allows us to do
extraordinary things,” a Pentagon adviser told me, referring to
Afghanistan and Iraq.

One step the Pentagon took was to seek active and secret help in the war
against the Iraqi insurgency from Israel, America’s closest ally in the
Middle East. According to American and Israeli military and intelligence
officials, Israeli commandos and intelligence units have been working
closely with their American counterparts at the Special Forces training
base at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and in Israel to help them prepare for
operations in Iraq. Israeli commandos are expected to serve as ad-hoc
advisers—again, in secret—when full-field operations begin. (Neither the
Pentagon nor Israeli diplomats would comment. “No one wants to talk about
this,” an Israeli official told me. “It’s incendiary. Both governments
have decided at the highest level that it is in their interests to keep a
low profile on U.S.-Israeli coöperation” on Iraq.) The critical issue,
American and Israeli officials agree, is intelligence. There is much
debate about whether targeting a large number of individuals is a
practical—or politically effective—way to bring about stability in Iraq,
especially given the frequent failure of American forces to obtain
consistent and reliable information there.

Americans in the field are trying to solve that problem by developing a
new source of information: they plan to assemble teams drawn from the
upper ranks of the old Iraqi intelligence services and train them to
penetrate the insurgency. The idea is for the infiltrators to provide
information about individual insurgents for the Americans to act on. A
former C.I.A. station chief described the strategy in simple terms: “U.S.
shooters and Iraqi intelligence.” He added, “There are Iraqis in the
intelligence business who have a better idea, and we’re tapping into them.
We have to resuscitate Iraqi intelligence, holding our nose, and have
Delta and agency shooters break down doors and take them”—the
insurgents—“out.”

A former intelligence official said that getting inside the Baathist
leadership could be compared to “fighting your way into a coconut—you bang
away and bang away until you find a soft spot, and then you can clean it
out.” An American who has advised the civilian authority in Baghdad said,
“The only way we can win is to go unconventional. We’re going to have to
play their game. Guerrilla versus guerrilla. Terrorism versus terrorism.
We’ve got to scare the Iraqis into submission.”

In Washington, there is now widespread agreement on one point: the need
for a new American approach to Iraq. There is also uniform criticism of
the military’s current response to the growing American casualty lists.
One former Pentagon official who worked extensively with the Special
Forces command, and who favors the new military initiative, said, “We’ve
got this large conventional force sitting there, and getting their ass
shot off, and what we’re doing is counterproductive. We’re sending mixed
signals.” The problem with the way the U.S. has been fighting the Baathist
leadership, he said, is “(a) we’ve got no intelligence, and (b) we’re too
squeamish to operate in this part of the world.” Referring to the American
retaliation against a suspected mortar site, the former official said,
“Instead of destroying an empty soccer field, why not impress me by
sneaking in a sniper team and killing them while they’re setting up a
mortar? We do need a more unconventional response, but it’s going to be
messy.”

Inside the Pentagon, it is now understood that simply bringing in or
killing Saddam Hussein and his immediate circle—those who appeared in the
Bush Administration’s famed “deck of cards”—will not stop the insurgency.
The new Special Forces operation is aimed instead at the broad middle of
the Baathist underground. But many of the officials I spoke to were
skeptical of the Administration’s plans. Many of them fear that the
proposed operation—called “preëmptive manhunting” by one Pentagon
adviser—has the potential to turn into another Phoenix Program. Phoenix
was the code name for a counter-insurgency program that the U.S. adopted
during the Vietnam War, in which Special Forces teams were sent out to
capture or assassinate Vietnamese believed to be working with or
sympathetic to the Vietcong. In choosing targets, the Americans relied on
information supplied by South Vietnamese Army officers and village chiefs.
The operation got out of control. According to official South Vietnamese
statistics, Phoenix claimed nearly forty-one thousand victims between 1968
and 1972; the U.S. counted more than twenty thousand in the same time
span. Some of those assassinated had nothing to do with the war against
America but were targeted because of private grievances. William E. Colby,
the C.I.A. officer who took charge of the Phoenix Program in 1968 (he
eventually became C.I.A. director), later acknowledged to Congress that “a
lot of things were done that should not have been done.”

The former Special Forces official warned that the problem with
head-hunting is that you have to be sure “you’re hunting the right heads.”
Speaking of the now coöperative former Iraqi intelligence officials, he
said, “These guys have their own agenda. Will we be doing hits on grudges?
When you set up host-nation elements”—units composed of Iraqis, rather
than Americans—“it’s hard not to have them going off to do what they want
to do. You have to keep them on a short leash.”

The former official says that the Baathist leadership apparently relies on
“face-to-face communications” in planning terrorist attacks. This makes
the insurgents less vulnerable to one of the Army’s most secret Special
Forces units, known as Grey Fox, which has particular expertise in
interception and other technical means of intelligence-gathering. “These
guys are too smart to touch cell phones or radio,” the former official
said. “It’s all going to succeed or fail spectacularly based on human
intelligence.”

A former C.I.A. official with extensive Middle East experience identified
one of the key players on the new American-Iraqi intelligence team as
Farouq Hijazi, a Saddam loyalist who served for many years as the director
of external operations for the Mukhabarat, the Iraqi intelligence service.
He has been in custody since late April. The C.I.A. man said that over the
past few months Hijazi “has cut a deal,” and American officials “are using
him to reactivate the old Iraqi intelligence network.” He added, “My Iraqi
friends say he will honor the deal—but only to the letter, and not to the
spirit.” He said that although the Mukhabarat was a good security service,
capable, in particular, of protecting Saddam Hussein from overthrow or
assassination, it was “a lousy intelligence service.”

The official went on, “It’s not the way we usually play ball, but if you
see a couple of your guys get blown away it changes things. We did the
American things—and we’ve been the nice guy. Now we’re going to be the bad
guy, and being the bad guy works.”

Told of such comments, the Pentagon adviser, who is an expert on
unconventional war, expressed dismay. “There are people saying all sorts
of wild things about Manhunts,” he said. “But they aren’t at the policy
level. It’s not a no-holds policy, and it shouldn’t be. I’m as tough as
anybody, but we’re also a democratic society, and we don’t fight terror
with terror. There will be a lot of close controls—do’s and don’ts and
rules of engagement.” The adviser added, “The problem is that we’ve not
penetrated the bad guys. The Baath Party is run like a cell system. It’s
like penetrating the Vietcong—we never could do it.”

The rising star in Rumsfeld’s Pentagon is Stephen Cambone, the
Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, who has been deeply involved
in developing the new Special Forces approach. Cambone, who earned a
doctorate in political science from Claremont Graduate University in 1982,
served as staff director for a 1998 committee, headed by Rumsfeld, that
warned in its report of an emerging ballistic-missile threat to the United
States and argued that intelligence agencies should be willing to go
beyond the data at hand in their analyses. Cambone, in his confirmation
hearings, in February, told the Senate that consumers of intelligence
assessments must ask questions of the analysts—“how they arrived at those
conclusions and what the sources of the information were.” This approach
was championed by Rumsfeld. It came under attack, however, when the
Administration’s predictions about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and
the potential for insurgency failed to be realized, and the Pentagon
civilians were widely accused of politicizing intelligence. (A month after
the fall of Baghdad, Cambone was the first senior Pentagon official to
publicly claim, wrongly, as it turned out, that a captured Iraqi military
truck might be a mobile biological-weapons laboratory.)

Cambone also shares Rumsfeld’s views on how to fight terrorism. They both
believe that the United States needs to become far more proactive in
combatting terrorism, searching for terrorist leaders around the world and
eliminating them. And Cambone, like Rumsfeld, has been frustrated by the
reluctance of the military leadership to embrace the manhunting mission.
Since his confirmation, he has been seeking operational authority over
Special Forces. “Rumsfeld’s been looking for somebody to have all the
answers, and Steve is the guy,” a former high-level Pentagon official told
me. “He has more direct access to Rummy than anyone else.”

As Cambone’s influence has increased, that of Douglas Feith, the
Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy, has diminished. In September, 2001,
Feith set up a special unit known as the Office of Special Plans. The
office, directed by civilians who, like Feith, had neoconservative views,
played a major role in the intelligence and planning leading up to the
March invasion of Iraq. “There is finger-pointing going on,” a prominent
Republican lobbyist explained. “And the neocons are in retreat.”

One of the key planners of the Special Forces offensive is Lieutenant
General William (Jerry) Boykin, Cambone’s military assistant. After a
meeting with Rumsfeld early last summer—they got along “like two old
warriors,” the Pentagon consultant said—Boykin postponed his retirement,
which had been planned for June, and took the Pentagon job, which brought
him a third star. In that post, the Pentagon adviser told me, Boykin has
been “an important piece” of the planned escalation. In October, the Los
Angeles Times reported that Boykin, while giving Sunday-morning talks in
uniform to church groups, had repeatedly equated the Muslim world with
Satan. Last June, according to the paper, he told a congregation in Oregon
that “Satan wants to destroy this nation, he wants to destroy us as a
nation, and he wants to destroy us as a Christian army.” Boykin praised
President Bush as a “man who prays in the Oval Office,” and declared that
Bush was “not elected” President but “appointed by God.” The Muslim world
hates America, he said, “because we are a nation of believers.”

There were calls in the press and from Congress for Boykin’s dismissal,
but Rumsfeld made it clear that he wanted to keep his man in the job.
Initially, he responded to the Times report by praising the General’s
“outstanding record” and telling journalists that he had neither seen the
text of Boykin’s statements nor watched the videotape that had been made
of one of his presentations. “There are a lot of things that are said by
people in the military, or in civilian life, or in the Congress, or in the
executive branch that are their views,” he said. “We’re a free people. And
that’s the wonderful thing about our country.” He added, with regard to
the tape, “I just simply can’t comment on what he said, because I haven’t
seen it.” Four days later, Rumsfeld said that he had viewed the tape. “It
had a lot of very difficult-to-understand words with subtitles which I was
not able to verify,” he said at a news conference, according to the
official transcript. “So I remain inexpert”—the transcript notes that he
“chuckles” at that moment—“on precisely what he said.” Boykin’s comments
are now under official review.

Boykin has been involved in other controversies as well. He was the Army
combat commander in Mogadishu in 1993, when eighteen Americans were slain
during the disastrous mission made famous by Mark Bowden’s book “Black
Hawk Down.” Earlier that year, Boykin, a colonel at the time, led an
eight-man Delta Force that was assigned to help a Colombian police unit
track down the notorious drug dealer Pablo Escobar. Boykin’s team was
barred by law from providing any lethal assistance without Presidential
approval, but there was suspicion in the Pentagon that it was planning to
take part in the assassination of Escobar, with the support of American
Embassy officials in Colombia. The book “Killing Pablo,” an account, also
by Mark Bowden, of the hunt for Escobar, describes how senior officials in
the Pentagon’s chain of command became convinced that Boykin, with the
knowledge of his Special Forces superiors, had exceeded his authority and
intended to violate the law. They wanted Boykin’s unit pulled out. It
wasn’t. Escobar was shot dead on the roof of a barrio apartment building
in Medellín. The Colombian police were credited with getting their man,
but, Bowden wrote, “within the special ops community . . . Pablo’s death
was regarded as a successful mission for Delta, and legend has it that its
operators were in on the kill.”

“That’s what those guys did,” a retired general who monitored Boykin’s
operations in Colombia told me. “I’ve seen pictures of Escobar’s body that
you don’t get from a long-range telescope lens. They were taken by guys on
the assault team.” (Bush Administration officials in the White House, the
State Department, and the Pentagon, including General Boykin, did not
respond to requests for comment.)

Morris Busby, who was the American Ambassador to Colombia in 1993 (he is
now retired), vigorously defended Boykin. “I think the world of Jerry
Boykin, and have the utmost respect for him. I’ve known him for fifteen
years and spent hours and hours with the guy, and never heard him mention
religion or God.” The retired general also praised Boykin as “one of those
guys you’d love to have in a war because he’s not afraid to die.” But, he
added, “when you get to three stars you’ve got to think through what
you’re doing.” Referring to Boykin and others involved in the Special
Forces planning, he added, “These guys are going to get a bunch of guys
killed and then give them a bunch of medals.”

The American-Israeli liaison on Iraq amounts to a tutorial on how to
dismantle an insurgency. One former Israeli military-intelligence officer
summarized the core lesson this way: “How to do targeted killing, which is
very relevant to the success of the war, and what the United States is
going to have to do.” He told me that the Americans were being urged to
emulate the Israeli Army’s small commando units, known as Mist’aravim,
which operate undercover inside the West Bank and Gaza Strip. “They can
approach a house and pounce,” the former officer said. In the Israeli
view, he added, the Special Forces units must learn “how to maintain a
network of informants.” Such a network, he said, has made it possible for
Israel to penetrate the West Bank and Gaza Strip organizations controlled
by groups such as Hamas, and to assassinate or capture potential suicide
bombers along with many of the people who recruit and train them.

On the other hand, the former officer said, “Israel has, in many ways,
been too successful, and has killed or captured so many mid-ranking
facilitators on the operational level in the West Bank that Hamas now
consists largely of isolated cells that carry out terrorist attacks
against Israel on their own.” He went on, “There is no central control
over many of the suicide bombers. We’re trying to tell the Americans that
they don’t want to eliminate the center. The key is not to have
freelancers out there.”

Many regional experts, Americans and others, are convinced that the
Baathists are still firmly in charge of the insurgency, although they are
thought to have little direct connection with Saddam Hussein. An American
military analyst who works with the American-led Coalition Provisional
Authority in Baghdad told me he has concluded that “mid-ranking Baathists
who were muzzled by the patrimonial nature of Saddam’s system have now,
with the disappearance of the high-ranking members, risen to control the
insurgency.” He added that after the American attack and several weeks “of
being like deer in headlights,” these Baathists had become organized, and
were directing and leading operations against Americans. During an
interview in Washington, a senior Arab diplomat noted, “We do not believe
that the resistance is loyal to Saddam. Yes, the Baathists have
reorganized, not for political reasons but because of the terrible
decisions made by Jerry Bremer”—the director of the C.P.A. “The Iraqis
really want to make you pay the price,” the diplomat said. “Killing Saddam
will not end it.”

Similarly, a Middle Eastern businessman who has advised senior Bush
Administration officials told me that the reorganized Baath Party is
“extremely active, working underground with permanent internal
communications. And without Saddam.” Baath party leaders, he added, expect
Saddam to issue a public statement of self-criticism, “telling of his
mistakes and his excesses,” including his reliance on his sons.

There is disagreement, inevitably, on the extent of Baathist control. The
former Israeli military-intelligence officer said, “Most of the firepower
comes from the Baathists, and they know where the weapons are kept. But
many of the shooters are ethnic and tribal. Iraq is very factionalized
now, and within the Sunni community factionalism goes deep.” He added,
“Unless you settle this, any effort at reconstruction in the center is
hopeless.”

The American military analyst agreed that the current emphasis on Baathist
control “overlooks the nationalist and tribal angle.” For example, he
said, the anti-coalition forces in Falluja, a major center of opposition,
are “driven primarily by the sheikhs and mosques, Islam, clerics, and
nationalism.” The region, he went on, contains “tens of thousands of
unemployed former military officers and enlistees who hang around the
coffee shops and restaurants of their relatives; they plot, plan, and give
and receive instructions; at night they go out on their missions.”

This military analyst, like many officials I spoke to, also raised
questions about the military’s more conventional tactics—the aggressive
program, code-named Iron Hammer, of bombings, nighttime raids, and mass
arrests aimed at trouble spots in Sunni-dominated central Iraq. The
insurgents, he told me, had already developed a response. “Their
S.O.P.”—standard operating procedure—“now is to go further out, or even to
other towns, so that American retribution does not fall on their locale.
Instead, the Americans take it out on the city where the incident
happened, and in the process they succeed in making more enemies.”

The brazen Iraqi attacks on two separate American convoys in Samarra, on
November 30th, provided further evidence of the diversity of the
opposition to the occupation. Samarra has been a center of intense
anti-Saddam feelings, according to Ahmed S. Hashim, an expert on terrorism
who is a professor of strategic studies at the U.S. Naval War College. In
an essay published in August by the Middle East Institute, Hashim wrote,
“Many Samarra natives—who had served with distinction in the Baath Party
and the armed forces—were purged or executed during the course of the
three decades of rule by Saddam and his cronies from the rival town of
Tikrit.” He went on, “The type of U.S. force structure in Iraq—heavy
armored and mechanized units—and the psychological disposition of these
forces which have been in Iraq for months is simply not conducive to the
successful waging of counter-insurgency warfare.”

The majority of the Bush Administration’s manhunting missions remain
classified, but one earlier mission, in Afghanistan, had mixed results at
best. Last November, an Al Qaeda leader named Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi
was killed when an unmanned Predator reconnaissance aircraft fired a
Hellfire missile at his automobile in Yemen. Five passengers in the
automobile were also killed, and it was subsequently reported that two
previous Predator missions in Yemen had been called off at the last moment
when it was learned that the occupants of suspect vehicles were local
Bedouins, and not Al Qaeda members.

Since then, an adviser to the Special Forces command has told me,
infighting among the various senior military commands has made it
difficult for Special Forces teams on alert to take immediate advantage of
time-sensitive intelligence. Rumsfeld repeatedly criticized Air Force
General Charles Holland, a four-star Special Forces commander who has just
retired, for his reluctance to authorize commando raids without specific,
or “actionable,” intelligence. Rumsfeld has also made a systematic effort
to appoint Special Forces advocates to the top military jobs. Another
former Special Forces commander, Army General Peter Schoomaker, was
brought out of retirement in July and named Army Chief of Staff. The new
civilian Assistant Secretary for Special Operations in the Pentagon is
Thomas O’Connell, an Army veteran who served in the Phoenix program in
Vietnam, and who, in the early eighties, ran Grey Fox, the Army’s secret
commando unit.

Early in November, the Times reported the existence of Task Force 121, and
said that it was authorized to take action throughout the region, if
necessary, in pursuit of Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, and other
terrorists. (The task force is commanded by Air Force Brigadier General
Lyle Koenig, an experienced Special Forces helicopter pilot.) At that
point, the former Special Forces official told me, the troops were
“chasing the deck of cards. Their job was to find Saddam, period.” Other
Special Forces, in Afghanistan, were targeting what is known as the
A.Q.S.L., the Al Qaeda Senior Leadership List.

The task force’s search for Saddam was, from the beginning, daunting.
According to Scott Ritter, a former United Nations weapons inspector, it
may have been fatally flawed as well. From 1994 to 1998, Ritter directed a
special U.N. unit that eavesdropped on many of Saddam Hussein’s private
telephone communications. “The high-profile guys around Saddam were the
murafaqin, his most loyal companions, who could stand next to him carrying
a gun,” Ritter told me. “But now he’s gone to a different tier—the tribes.
He has released the men from his most sensitive units and let them go back
to their tribes, and we don’t know where they are. The manifests of those
units are gone; they’ve all been destroyed.” Ritter added, “Guys like
Farouq Hijazi can deliver some of the Baath Party cells, and he knows
where some of the intelligence people are. But he can’t get us into the
tribal hierarchy.” The task force, in any event, has shifted its focus
from the hunt for Saddam as it is increasingly distracted by the spreading
guerrilla war.

In addition to the Special Forces initiative, the military is also
exploring other approaches to suppressing the insurgency. The Washington
Post reported last week that the American authorities in Baghdad had
agreed, with some reluctance, to the formation of an Iraqi-led
counter-terrorism militia composed of troops from the nation’s five
largest political parties. The paramilitary unit, totalling some eight
hundred troops or so, would “identify and pursue insurgents” who had
eluded arrest, the newspaper said. The group’s initial missions would be
monitored and approved by American commanders, but eventually it would
operate independently.

Task Force 121’s next major problem may prove to be Iran. There is a
debate going on inside the Administration about American and Israeli
intelligence that suggests that the Shiite-dominated Iranian government
may be actively aiding the Sunni-led insurgency in Iraq—“pulling the
strings on the puppet,” as one former intelligence official put it. Many
in the intelligence community are skeptical of this analysis—the Pentagon
adviser compared it to “the Chalabi stuff,” referring to now discredited
prewar intelligence on W.M.D. supplied by Iraqi defectors. But I was told
by several officials that the intelligence was considered to be highly
reliable by civilians in the Defense Department. A former intelligence
official said that one possible response under consideration was for the
United States to train and equip an Iraqi force capable of staging
cross-border raids. The American goal, he said, would be to “make the cost
of supporting the Baathists so dear that the Iranians would back off,”
adding, “If it begins to look like another Iran-Iraq war, that’s another
story.”

The requirement that America’s Special Forces units operate in secrecy, a
former senior coalition adviser in Baghdad told me, has provided an
additional incentive for increasing their presence in Iraq. The Special
Forces in-country numbers are not generally included in troop totals. Bush
and Rumsfeld have insisted that more American troops are not needed, but
that position was challenged by many senior military officers in private
conversations with me. “You need more people,” the former adviser, a
retired admiral, said. “But you can’t add them, because Rummy’s taken a
position. So you invent a force that won’t be counted.”

At present, there is no legislation that requires the President to notify
Congress before authorizing an overseas Special Forces mission. The
Special Forces have been expanded enormously in the Bush Administration.
The 2004 Pentagon budget provides more than six and a half billion dollars
for their activities—a thirty-four-per-cent increase over 2003. A recent
congressional study put the number of active and reserve Special Forces
troops at forty-seven thousand, and has suggested that the appropriate
House and Senate committees needed to debate the “proper overall role” of
Special Forces in the global war on terrorism.

The former intelligence official depicted the Delta and seal teams as
“force multipliers”—small units that can do the work of much larger ones
and thereby increase the power of the operation as a whole. He also
implicitly recognized that such operations would become more and more
common; when Special Forces target the Baathists, he said, “it’s
technically not assassination—it’s normal combat operations.”
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http://www.upi.com/print.cfm?StoryID=20031017-024617-1418r
17 October 2003

Sick, wounded U.S. troops held in squalor
       By Mark Benjamin, UPI Investigations Editor

FORT STEWART, Ga., Oct. 17 (UPI) -- Hundreds of sick and wounded U.S.
soldiers including many who served in the Iraq war are languishing in hot
cement barracks here while they wait -- sometimes for months -- to see
doctors.

The National Guard and Army Reserve soldiers' living conditions are so
substandard, and the medical care so poor, that many of them believe the
Army is trying push them out with reduced benefits for their ailments. One
document shown to UPI states that no more doctor appointments [were]
available from Oct. 14 through Nov. 11 -- Veterans Day.

"I have loved the Army. I have served the Army faithfully and I have done
everything the Army has asked me to do," said Sgt. 1st Class Willie
Buckels, a truck master with the 296th Transportation Company. Buckels
served in the Army Reserves for 27 years, including Operation Iraqi
Freedom and the first Gulf War. "Now my whole idea about the U.S. Army has
changed. I am treated like a third-class citizen."

Since getting back from Iraq in May, Buckels, 52, has been trying to get
doctors to find out why he has intense pain in the side of his abdomen
since doubling over in pain there.

After waiting since May for a diagnosis, Buckels has accepted 20 percent
of his benefits for bad knees and is going home to his family in
Mississippi. "They have not found out what my side is doing yet, but they
are still trying," Buckels said.

One month after President Bush greeted soldiers at Fort Stewart -- home of
the famed Third Infantry Division -- as heroes on their return from Iraq,
approximately 600 sick or injured members of the Army Reserves and
National Guard are warehoused in rows of spare, steamy and dark cement
barracks in a sandy field, waiting for doctors to treat their wounds or
illnesses.

The Reserve and National Guard soldiers are on what the Army calls
"medical hold," while the Army decides how sick or disabled they are and
what benefits -- if any -- they should get as a result.

Some of the soldiers said they have waited six hours a day for an
appointment without seeing a doctor. Others described waiting weeks or
months without getting a diagnosis or proper treatment.

The soldiers said professional active duty personnel are getting better
treatment while troops who serve in the National Guard or Army Reserve are
left to wallow in medical hold.

"It is not an Army of One. It is the Army of two -- Army and Reserves,"
said one soldier who served in Operation Iraqi Freedom, during which she
developed a serious heart condition and strange skin ailment.

A half-dozen calls by UPI seeking comment from Fort Stewart public affairs
officials and U.S. Forces Command in Atlanta were not returned.

Soldiers here estimate that nearly 40 percent of the personnel now in
medical hold were deployed to Iraq. Of those who went, many described
clusters of strange ailments, like heart and lung problems, among
previously healthy troops. They said the Army has tried to refuse them
benefits, claiming the injuries and illnesses were due to a "pre-existing
condition," prior to military service.

Most soldiers in medical hold at Fort Stewart stay in rows of rectangular,
gray, single-story cinder block barracks without bathrooms or air
conditioning. They are dark and sweltering in the southern Georgia heat
and humidity. Around 60 soldiers cram in the bunk beds in each barrack.

Soldiers make their way by walking or using crutches through the sandy
dirt to a communal bathroom, where they have propped office partitions
between otherwise open toilets for privacy. A row of leaky sinks sits on
an opposite wall. The latrine smells of urine and is full of bugs, because
many windows have no screens. Showering is in a communal, cinder block
room. Soldiers say they have to buy their own toilet paper.

They said the conditions are fine for training, but not for sick people.

"I think it is disgusting," said one Army Reserve member who went to Iraq
and asked that his name not be used.

That soldier said that after being deployed in March he suffered a sudden
onset of neurological symptoms in Baghdad that has gotten steadily worse.
He shakes uncontrollably.

He said the Army has told him he has Parkinson's Disease and it was a
pre-existing condition, but he thinks it was something in the anthrax
shots the Army gave him.

"They say I have Parkinson's, but it is developing too rapidly," he said.
"I did not have a problem until I got those shots."

First Sgt. Gerry Mosley crossed into Iraq from Kuwait on March 19 with the
296th Transportation Company, hauling fuel while under fire from the
Iraqis as they traveled north alongside combat vehicles. Mosley said he
was healthy before the war; he could run two miles in 17 minutes at 48
years old.

But he developed a series of symptoms: lung problems and shortness of
breath; vertigo; migraines; and tinnitus. He also thinks the anthrax
vaccine may have hurt him. Mosley also has a torn shoulder from an injury
there.

Mosley says he has never been depressed before, but found himself looking
at shotguns recently and thought about suicide.

Mosley is paying $300 a month to get better housing than the cinder block
barracks. He has a notice from the base that appears to show that no more
doctor appointments are available for reservists from Oct. 14 until Nov.
11. He said he has never been treated like this in his 30 years in the
Army Reserves.

"Now, I would not go back to war for the Army," Mosley said.

Many soldiers in the hot barracks said regular Army soldiers get to see
doctors, while National Guard and Army Reserve troops wait.

"The active duty guys that are coming in, they get treated first and they
put us on hold," said another soldier who returned from Iraq six weeks ago
with a serious back injury. He has gotten to see a doctor only two times
since he got back, he said.

Another Army Reservist with the 149th Infantry Battalion said he has had
real trouble seeing doctors about his crushed foot he suffered in Iraq.
"There are not enough doctors. They are overcrowded and they can't perform
the surgeries that have to be done," that soldier said. "Look at these
mattresses. It hurts just to sit on them," he said, gesturing to the
bunks. "There are people here who got back in April but did not get their
surgeries until July. It is putting a lot on these families."

The Pentagon is reportedly drawing up plans to call up more reserves.

In an Oct. 9 speech to National Guard and reserve troops in Portsmouth,
New Hampshire, Bush said the soldiers had become part of the backbone of
the military.

"Citizen-soldiers are serving in every front on the war on terror," Bush
said. "And you're making your state and your country proud."
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Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting
Media analysis, critiques and activism

http://www.fair.org/activism/abc-candidates.html

ACTION ALERT:
ABC Narrows the Field:
Did Kucinich's criticism of Koppel influence decision?

December 11, 2003

A day after ABC's Ted Koppel moderated a debate between the Democratic
presidential contenders, the network decided to withdraw three off-air
producers from the campaigns of Dennis Kucinich, Carol Moseley Braun and
Rev. Al Sharpton.

ABC's decision was attributed to the fact that these candidates are
perceived to have a slim chance of winning the Democratic nomination.  An
ABC spokesperson explained (Boston Globe, 12/11/03) that "as we prepare
for Iowa and New Hampshire, we are putting more resources toward covering
those events."  Appearing on CNBC with Kucinich (12/10/03), Time reporter
Jay Carney suggested that the decision could be due to the fact that "all
of the media organizations have limited resources. It's actually, I think,
pretty impressive that they had somebody on your campaign day by day by
day."

Somehow it's hard to believe that the "limited resources" of the Disney
corporation (2003 revenues: $27 billion) explains ABC's call.  ABC's
decision does seem to mirror the opinions of Koppel, who seemed frustrated
that these candidates were included in the debate at all.  According to
the New York Times (12/7/03), Koppel "said he would have preferred a
slugfest among the six leading candidates." Koppel was quoted: "You can't
have a debate among nine people.... There is no such thing. It's called a
food fight."

"How did Dennis Kucinich and Al Sharpton and Carol Moseley Braun get into
this thing?" Koppel was quoted in the Washington Post (12/10/03). "Nobody
seems to know. Some candidates who are perceived as serious are gasping
for air, and what little oxygen there is on the stage will be taken up by
one-third of the people who do not have a snowball's chance in hell of
winning the nomination."

Koppel's dismissive attitude towards those three candidates carried over
into the debate itself, as evidenced by this question:

"This is question to Ambassador Braun, Rev. Sharpton, Congressman
Kucinich. You don't have any money, at least not much. Rev. Sharpton has
almost none. You don't have very much, Ambassador Braun. The question is,
will there come a point when polls, money and then ultimately the actual
votes that will take place here, in places like New Hampshire, the
caucuses in Iowa, will there come a point when we can expect one or more
of the three of you to drop out? Or are you in this as sort of a vanity
candidacy?"

Kucinich's response to that question generated perhaps the most media
coverage his campaign has received so far:

"Ted, you know, we started at the beginning of this evening talking about
an endorsement. Well, I want the American people to see where the media
takes politics in this country. To start with endorsements, to start
talking about endorsements. Now we're talking about polls. And then we're
talking about money. Well, you know, when you do that, you don't have to
talk about what's important to the American people.

"Ted, I'm the only one up here that actually, on the stage, that actually
voted against the Patriot Act. And voted against the war. The only one on
this stage. I'm also one of the few candidates up here who's talking about
taking our healthcare system from this for-profit system to a
not-for-profit, single-payer, universal health care for all. I'm also the
only one who has talked about getting out of NAFTA and the WTO and going
back to bilateral trade conditioned on workers rights, human rights and
the environment. Now, I may be inconvenient for some of those in the
media, but I'm, you know, sorry about that."

One has to wonder whether Kucinich's rebuke of Koppel, and his criticism
of the priorities of the media, had something to do with ABC's decision to
limit coverage of these candidates.  No matter what the rationale, this
does raise a concern that ABC is making an early call on the election of
2004-- weeks before any votes have been cast.

For the record, before ABC's decision to cut back coverage, Kucinich,
Sharpton and Moseley Braun had been mentioned a combined total of ten
times this year on ABC's World News Tonight, according to a search of the
Nexis database. Only one of those mentions referred to the candidate's
position on a policy.


ACTION: Contact ABC and ask them why they have decided to limit their
coverage of Kucinich, Sharpton and Moseley Braun.  Encourage ABC to let
voters, not pundits, decide who they want to select as a presidential
nominee.

CONTACT:
ABC News
World News Tonight
Phone: 212-456-4040
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]

Nightline
202-222-7000
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]

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you maintain a polite tone. Please cc [EMAIL PROTECTED] with your
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Miami: A  Dangerous Victory
By Starhawk

For those of us who participated in the protests against the FTAA, the
Free Trade Area of the Americas, in Miami the third week in November,
it’s a bit hard to feel victorious.  We are bruised, battered, worried
about companeros still in jail, and grieving for the Jordan Feder, a
young medic who died of meningitis after the action.   We’ve been
harassed, arrested, tear gassed, pepper sprayed, hit, beaten, assaulted,
lied about, and in some cases literally tortured and sexually assaulted
in jail, and we’ve stared directly into the naked red gaze of the New
American Fascism.

Nevertheless we have had a significant victory that we need to
understand and recognize, not least because it throws us into a new and
very dangerous phase of activism.

Our victory was not tactical.  None of our own attempts to physically
enter or disrupt the conference were very effective.  I’ve heard rumors
that one group did actually take down a section of fence, but most of us
just managed to march up to it and maintain a presence close to it for
short periods of time before being driven back by police riots.  And
while I could list numerous missed opportunities and tactical errors we
made, I can’t honestly think of anything much we could have done, given
the overwhelming police presence and the physical layout of Miami, that
would have made for a significantly different tactical outcome.

We were Iraqued—that is, we were attacked not for anything we’d done but
for someone’s inflated fears of what we might do; shot, gassed, beaten
and arrested for weapons of destruction we did not have; targeted for
who we are and what we stand for, not for acts we had committed.  The
8.5 million dollars that was allocated for the policing of this event
came out of the 87 billion dollar appropriations bill for Iraq.  Miami
was the Bush policy of pre-emptive bullying brought home.

There is a certain visceral sense of satisfaction in breaching a
barricade and directly blocking a meeting, but those are not actually
the measures we should use to judge our success.  The direct action
strategy in contesting the summits is not really about physically
disrupting them.  It’s about undermining their legitimacy, unmasking
them, making visible their inherent violence and the repression
necessary to support them and undercutting public belief in their
beneficence or right to exist.  And there, we are winning, not because
of any tactical brilliance on our part, but because in truth all we had
to do was show up, to be there as a visible body of opposition and
withstand the onslaught.

Our most effective direct actions may have been those we did in the days
and weeks before the meetings: the outreach, the community gardening,
the door-to-door flyering downtown, conducted under the constant threat
of arrest by a police force acting like Nazi bully boys, arresting
protestors for walking on the street, standing on the sidewalk, talking
to people or witnessing other arrests.  In spite of the major fear
campaign and the negative propaganda being put forth by the police and
the media, just about every interaction we had with ordinary Miami folks
was positive. Locals were told by police that dangerous anarchists would
burn their shops, would shoot them with squirt guns full of urine and
feces, would smash their windows, and destroy Miami if not contained.
Nevertheless, local people were scared, but interested in what we had to
say.  The poor and immigrant populations of downtown Miami understand
the issues of underlying economic injustice.  They could quickly grasp
what the FTAA might mean for their jobs.  They told us stories of water
privatization in their home countries, of 16 hour a day workshifts on
cruise ships that unions couldn’t organize because they are registered
in other countries, of their daily struggle to survive on the streets,
of the ongoing police brutality faced by the homeless and the poor.

When we were driven back into Overtown, Miami’s black ghetto, people
smiled and waved, came forward to help us, offered places for hunted
activists to hide, sheltered our puppets in their back yards.  Other
local people came forward to offer housing and shelter, to donate food,
plants, and time to the mobilization, to hold vigils at the jail and to
provide support after most of the action had left town.  It was as if
the bulk of the population pressed the ‘mute’ button on the soundtrack
spewed by the media and the police, noticed what their own eyes were
telling them, and knew who their true allies were.

That disconnect, that gap between the reality the power structure was
attempting to construct and the actual reality of ordinary people, is
the fertile political space we need to nurture and explore in order to
move forward.  For it leaves the bullies building a more and more
elaborate fortress of control that is unsupported by any foundation of
credibility or legitimacy.  Where there should be the concrete of
credence and the rebar of faith, there is only air: and such a structure
is bound to fall.  In its fall, it may well take a lot of us with it,
and therein lies both the danger and the opportunity of this political
moment.

Miami was a clear example of the New American Fascism brought home.   I
don’t use the word ‘fascism’ lightly.  I use it to mean that combination
of brutal state power applied ruthlessly against its critics, backed by
surveillance, media distortions, hate propaganda, and lies, allied
politically and economically with those who profit from the industries
of weaponry, prisons, and war..

In "The Lord of the Rings", the evil Sauron is represented by a red,
glaring, all-seeing eye.  To be in Miami in November was to suffer that
searing, hostile gaze.  The red eye of fascism is a double-barreled
gaze:  the eye that watches, that records, that holds you under
surveillance and videos your comings and goings and compiles the
records: and the media/propaganda eye, that frames the story, that
defines and distorts you and tells everyone just what the justification
is for your repression.

For true totalitarian control, misrepresenting facts, telling a false
story, is not enough.  Total control requires control over the frame of
the story, the meaning of the language you use, the boundaries of what
it is possible to think about.  So "Violence" becomes a word whose
meaning changes radically when it is applied to protestors as opposed to
agents of the state.  ‘Violence’ is simply not applied to police by the
media or the political powers that be.  The use of sound bombs, pepper
spray, rubber, wooden and plastic bullets, wooden batons, bean bag
pellets, and tear gas, illegal arrests, beatings, deprivation of basic
human rights, medical care, food and water, overt torture and sexual
assault are properly characterized by the word, "restraint," as in "the
police acted with restraint."

Friends of mine who were watching the news on the days of action all
reported a similar experience. They saw police move in on a crowd of
peaceful protestors, swinging billy clubs and firing tear gas and rubber
bullets.  What they heard was commentary suggesting that protestors were
‘violent’, and that therefore the police were justified in whatever
measures they chose.

Applied to activists, ‘violence’ means, ‘any act of opposition to total
military and police control, any act of resistance from walking in the
wrong place to talking to the wrong people to allying with other
suspects."  Above all, any attempts to remove oneself from the
all-seeing gaze, to mask oneself, to carve out any space free of that
hostile red arc light, are evidence of violence.

Totalitarian control is deeply racist, sexist and homophobic, for it
depends on division and separation.  Police attempted to divide the
unions from the direct action folk, by pushing the action into the area
where the permitted labor march was scheduled to go, attacking the crowd
there, attacking union members and punishing them for associating with
‘potentially dangerous’ others.

Activists of color were singled out for special abuse by the police and
prison guards, subjected to brutal beatings and outright torture in
jail, in spite of solidarity efforts by other activists. Sexual assaults
were carried out on women and transgendered prisoners.  Queer prisoners
were harassed and mistreated.

The greatest victory we achieved in Miami is that these strategies of
division did not work. Instead of dividing labor and direct action,
repressive police tactics angered the unions who are now calling for a
congressional investigation.  Our solidarity with labor remains strong,
as does our commitment to stand together and support each other through
the aftermath of the brutal attacks against our fellow activists, and to
name and unmask the racism, sexism and homophobia we encountered.

The overwhelming military force and brutality of the police was a
measure of the utter bankruptcy of the policies they were defending.
Neoliberal economics, the ‘Washington consensus’ behind the various free
trade agreements and institutions, is not hard to delegitimize because
it doesn’t work.  It promises increased prosperity for all if we allow
corporations free reign over the globe, privatize all public resources,
and end government support for any arenas of human activity that
actually increase health or well being or quality of life.  Somehow the
poor are supposed to benefit from this.   But this promise has
overwhelmingly proved false.  Countries that implement these policies
have lost economic ground or gone belly-up, like Argentina. The gap
between rich and poor has grown into a vast chasm.  NAFTA has been
devastating to the US economy, costing us over 785.000 good
manufacturing jobs, allowing corporations to sue governments for loss of
their projected profits if governments pass inconvenient environmental
or labor regulations. The developing countries have not been able to use
the WTO or any of these trade agreements as platforms to reduce tariffs
for their products or persuade the US and EU to reduce the agricultural
subsidies that have devastated small farmers around the world—hence the
walkout in Cancun of countries from the global south.

No one was defending the FTAA with any passion.  In fact, brute force
seemed to be the major argument in its favor.   And the FTAA summit
ended in a glossed-over failure.  To prevent its utter collapse, the
conveners referred all controversial issues back to committee, ended a
day early, and pulled back from the original vision of an overarching
agreement to a truncated ‘FTAA-Lite’—which even in its watered-down form
has little chance of being adopted.

Their failure was a result of the years of organizing, education, truth
telling, and direct action we’ve done in the north to create and foster
that gap of belief, and perhaps even more, a result of the absolute
social disruption that the policies of the neoliberalism have spawned in
the global south, where governments have already fallen and ministers
know their populations will not tolerate more of the same.

We in the north are left confronting an alliance between economic
powers desperate to retain their advantage in a sinking economy, the
most powerful military/police force ever amassed on the planet, and a
subservient media willing to tell whatever story the rulers command.
But the more ruthless and brutal the system becomes, the wider and
deeper that gap of legitimacy may become.

Our political success and personal survival may depend on our ability to
understand and deepen that disconnect between eyes and ears, direct
experience and propaganda. At what point does it set in?  When do people
start to believe their own eyes, to question the authority of the
commentators?  How do we prevent the power structure from consolidating
a new foundation of belief?  How far does that gap extend?  How do we
widen and deepen the gap, and how do we mobilize and empower those who
have ceased to believe to take action?  And as the fortress of control
begins to crumble over our heads, where do we find shelter from the
falling debris, and what new structures will we build in its place?

If we can build on the successes of Miami: the solidarity, the deepened
alliances, the trust, if we can turn those alliances into real political
power, we will have a strong victory.  If the combined forces of the
progressive movements and the unions and the NGOs can succeed in making
the political and police powers of Miami pay a political and social
cost, we can stem the tide of repression.

There were actions we took in Miami that undoubtedly contributed to the
support we received: we waged a proactive media campaign, we planted a
community garden in Overtown and gave away dozens of trees, above all,
we went out and talked to people on the street.  In the worst moments of
police assault, there were always those who moved forward to put their
bodies on the front line and slow the assault of the storm troopers.
People helped and supported and strengthened each other, and the shock
of the violence we experienced was tempered by the sweetness of support
and the inspiration of acts of courage.

We can go further in making our actions and organizing welcoming and
friendly, can perhaps devote more of our efforts to outreach and
connection instead of obsessing on our tactics, can confront our own
vestigial racism, sexism, homophobia and the other prejudices that can
divide us, and we can frame our actions and organizing with a clear
strategic goal: to broaden and deepen that gap of belief, to make strong
alliances with the disaffected and to mobilize the political power of
dissent, to unmask the violence, repression, and sheer ugliness of the
structures of control, to counter them with the beauty and joy of our
visions brought to life.  Then we can stare back into that red,
totalitarian eye and pierce it with a white-hot gaze of truth, a spear
in the eye of the Cyclops.  And we will have the support and strength we
need to withstand the monster’s crash, and to begin the process of
building the world that we want.


Starhawk’s daily reports from Miami are achived at:
http://www.starhawk.org

________________
Starhawk is an activist, organizer, and author of Webs of Power: Notes
from the Global Uprising and eight other books on feminism, politics and
earth-based spirituality.  She teaches Earth Activist Trainings that
combine permaculture design and activist skills, and works with the RANT
trainer’s collective, http://www.rantcollective.org that offers training and
support for mobilizations around global justice and peace issues.  To
get her periodic posts of her writings, email
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Greetings to All -

The time of the year is upon us where we take stock and give thanks for the
health of family & loved ones, and for having what we need. These days,
however, there is more to think about. Over the past 2 years Americans have
seen their Constitutionally guaranteed civil liberties, once perceived as
rock solid, now being chipped away at in the name of security.

What about the right to vote, and the existence of fair, secure, and
uncorrupted elections here in the U.S.?

Before the 2000 election, we may have also considered these as virtually
guaranteed as well. The Florida controversy had its own issues, but now a
wider problem with potentially far reaching implications looms as a
daunting question mark: ELECTRONIC VOTING MACHINES

A brief summary of the issue here:

- There is NO Federal mandate requiring that these machines have a
verifiable audit trail, and those installed so far do not have one. There
is considerable evidence that such an audit trial is needed to have any
degree of confidence in future elections (see additional info and links
below), which will be using Electronic Voting Machines to a greatly
increased extent thanks to the Help America Vote Act of 2002.

-  In May 2003, New Jersey Congressman Rush Holt introduced a bill in the
House of Representatives called the Voter Confidence and Increased
Accessibility Act (VCIAA). The measure would require all voting machines to
produce an actual paper record by 2004 that voters can view to check the
accuracy of their votes. The paper records can also be used by election
officials to verify votes in the event of a computer malfunction, hacking,
or other irregularity.

-  Until [a few weeks ago], around 60 representatives has co-sponsored the
bill, but no Republicans had done so. In the words of Rep. Holt, the most
common reaction from Republicans was 'Silence'. "You know, a number of my
colleagues, Republican colleagues, have come up to me expressing some
interest in this, some concern about the voting. I've explained my bill to
them. They said that sounds good, let me go back and talk to my staff and
presumably talk to the leadership."--"And I never hear from them again.
Well, as long as the Republican leadership doesn't support it, it IS NOT
going to get to a vote on the floor. It is that simple."


    The GOOD NEWS

3 Republican congressmen [have now] signed on to co-sponsor the bill, and
the bill now has a total of 84 co-sponsors. I talked with someone on Rep.
Holt's staff today, who said the the House is planning to come back the
week of December 8th, and that the bill could potentially proceed to a
vote then if there is enough momentum [ed. note- it still hasn't as of
12/13]. If it is not passed until January or February, it may prove
difficult to implement the required changes nationwide before the election
in November.


    WHAT YOU CAN DO

Contact and pressure your representatives to support and vote for the bill
(H.R. 2239). For guidance, go to http://www.VERIFIEDVOTING.ORG/ to find
out more about the issue, HR 2239’s current status, see the positions on
the issue of yours or other representatives (What’s happening in your
State), get their contact info, and register your support for the
Resolution and Open letter the organization has put together.


    PLEASE PASS THIS INFO ON TO ANYONE YOU MAY KNOW-

Thank you for your attention to this issue. The prospect of elections
being taken out of our hands is bone chilling, to say the least. Regardless
of whether or not the present push to install more electronic voting
machines has malicious motives behind it, there is no reason to expose
ourselves to the inherent uncertainties that these voting system carry
without a paper, voter verifiable, audit record in place.

    HAPPY HOLIDAYS - PROTECT WHAT YOU CHERISH

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

    LINKS

    Suspect Code Used in State Votes
    <http://www.wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,61092,00.html>

    Did E-Vote Firm Patch Election?
    <http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,60563,00.html>

    NY TIMES: Report Raises Electronic Vote Security Issues
    <http://verifiedvoting.org/article_text.asp?articleid=140>

    Machine Politics in the Digital Age
    <http://tinyurl.com/z1xa>

    Interview with Representative Rush Holt
    <http://tinyurl.com/x2yj>

    Petition Against Electronic Voting Machines
    <http://www.workingforchange.com/activism/petition.cfm?itemid=14993>

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

    MORE INFORMATION

The Help America Vote Act, passed in 2002, authorized $3.9 billion for
'voting improvements', much of which will go to the manufacturers of
electronic voting machines. $650 million has already been disbursed to
states for this purpose.

By the end of 2002, 16.9% of votes nationwide were cast on touch screen
machines, and 31.6% were recorded using optical scanning equipment.

The code for these electronic voting systems made by the 3 dominant
suppliers (Diebold, Sequoia Voting Systems, and Election Systems &
Software) is not open to public scrutiny.

-  A study conducted this past July by professors at Johns Hopkins and Rice
Universities of the code used in Diebold's (the industry's largest supplier,
with about 50,000 machines installed in 37 states) machines found:

"no evidence of rigorous software engineering discipline"
"cryptography, when used at all, used incorrectly"
"stunning" and significant security flaws:

-  passwords embedded in the source code,
-  voter smart cards could be manipulated to cast more than one vote
-  software could be easily reconfigured to alter voter's choices
-  machines could be broken into electronically through remote access

David Dill, a computer science professor at Stanford, comments "If I was a
programmer at one of these companies and I wanted to steal an election, it
would be very easy. I could put something in the software that would be
impossible to detect, and it would change the votes from one party to
another. And you could do it so its not going to show up as a statistical
anomoly."


The three major suppliers, especially Diebold, are strong supporters of
the Republican Party, pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into party
coffers in the past few years. Diebold gave at least $195,000 to the
Republican party during a two-year period starting in 2000, and its chief
executive, Walden W. O'Dell (a longtime Republican, and member of Pres.
Bush's "Rangers & Pioneers" elite group of loyalists), once pledged in
writing that he was "committed to helping Ohio to deliver its electoral
votes to the president George W. Bush next year."  No money from Diebold or
its executives has gone to a Democratic Presidential candidate this year.


* Software used in the machines is required to be certified by state
election board. Some recent suspicious occurrences:

An investigation by California's secretary of state has revealed that
Diebold Election Systems placed uncertified software on electronic voting
machines in Alemeda county (San Francisco & Oakland). This software was
used in the recall election and the November 4th election.


Georgia's 2002 election.  A Wired article quoted a Diebold engineer as
saying that his team made no fewer than three rounds of software changes
to the machines in Georgia's 2002 election for governor--after the
machines had been certified but before the election began. (That election
"ended in a major upset that defied all polls and put a Republican in the
governor's seat for the first time in more than 130 years.")  Roy Barnes,
the incumbent Democratic Governor, leading between 9 and 11 points. In a
somewhat closer keenly watched Senate race, polls indicated Max Cleland,
the
popular Democrat up for re-election, was up 2 to 5 points against Saxby
Chambliss.

Those figures are what political experts would have expected in a state of
a long tradition of electing Democrats to statewide office. But then the
results came in and all of Georgia appeared to have been turned upside
down.

Barnes lost the governorship to the Republican, Sonny Purdue, 46% to 51%.
A swing as much as 16% from the last opinion polls and Cleland lost to
Chambliss 46%-53. A last-minute swing of 9 to 12 points.

Big swings do occur in elections sometimes. But the fact was that, you
know, with the background of the machinery and the concerns of the way
that it was done and various malfunctions on election day, including the
mysterious disappearance of 67 voting cards (containing over 3,000 votes)
from Fulton County, which is downtown Atlanta.

A second study of Diebold's software by Science Applications International
Corporation this past September (conducted as part of Maryland's review of
potential contractors) concluded that the company's systems were at a  "at
high risk of compromise" because of software flaws that could make them
vulnerable to computer hackers and voting fraud. They recommended 17 ways
that the systems could be improved, but Maryland went ahead anyway and
awarded the contract to Diebold.

In the last few months, student activists worried about potentially buggy
e-voting software--and Diebold's ties with the Republican party--have been
busily making scores of copies of Diebold's leaked correspondence
available on the Web and asking others to join them in a kind of global
keep-away game.

The wealth of Diebold e-mail, which totals about 11MB when compressed,
includes internal conversations that cast doubt on the company's ability
to sell secure software. Some messages note that lists of bugs were
"irrecoverably lost," while others complain of never having been at
another company that has been so mismanaged.

In one series of e-mails, a senior engineer dismisses concern from a
lower-level programmer who questions why Diebold lacked certification for
the operating system in touch-screen voting machines. The Federal Election
Commission requires such software to be certified by independent researchers.

In another e-mail, an executive scolded programmers for leaving software
files on an Internet site without password protection.

Diebold did not respond to interview requests, and is locked in a legal
battle to keep these files from being posted on the Internet.
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The New York Times
December 7, 2003

Tough New Tactics by U.S. Tighten Grip on Iraq Towns
    By DEXTER FILKINS

ABU HISHMA, Iraq, Dec. 6 ‹ As the guerrilla war against Iraqi insurgents
intensifies, American soldiers have begun wrapping entire villages in barbed
wire.

In selective cases, American soldiers are demolishing buildings thought to
be used by Iraqi attackers. They have begun imprisoning the relatives of
suspected guerrillas, in hopes of pressing the insurgents to turn themselves
in.

The Americans embarked on their get-tough strategy in early November, goaded
by what proved to be the deadliest month yet for American forces in Iraq,
with 81 soldiers killed by hostile fire. The response they chose is
beginning to echo the Israeli counterinsurgency campaign in the occupied
territories.

So far, the new approach appears to be succeeding in diminishing the threat
to American soldiers. But it appears to be coming at the cost of alienating
many of the people the Americans are trying to win over. Abu Hishma is quiet
now, but it is angry, too.

In Abu Hishma, encased in a razor-wire fence after repeated attacks on
American troops, Iraqi civilians line up to go in and out, filing through an
American-guarded checkpoint, each carrying an identification card printed in
English only.

"If you have one of these cards, you can come and go," coaxed Lt. Col.
Nathan Sassaman, the battalion commander whose men oversee the village,
about 50 miles north of Baghdad. "If you don't have one of these cards, you
can't."

The Iraqis nodded and edged their cars through the line. Over to one side,
an Iraqi man named Tariq muttered in anger.

"I see no difference between us and the Palestinians," he said. "We didn't
expect anything like this after Saddam fell."

The practice of destroying buildings where Iraqi insurgents are suspected of
planning or mounting attacks has been used for decades by Israeli soldiers
in Gaza and the West Bank. The Israeli Army has also imprisoned the
relatives of suspected terrorists, in the hopes of pressing the suspects to
surrender.

The Israeli military has also cordoned off villages and towns thought to be
hotbeds of guerrilla activity, in an effort to control the flow of people
moving in and out.

American officials say they are not purposefully mimicking Israeli tactics,
but they acknowledge that they have studied closely the Israeli experience
in urban fighting. Ahead of the war, Israeli defense experts briefed
American commanders on their experience in guerrilla and urban warfare. The
Americans say there are no Israeli military advisers helping the Americans
in Iraq.

Writing in the July issue of Army magazine, an American brigadier general
said American officers had recently traveled to Israel to hear about lessons
learned from recent fighting there.

"Experience continues to teach us many lessons, and we continue to evaluate
and address those lessons, embedding and incorporating them appropriately
into our concepts, doctrine and training," Brig. Gen. Michael A. Vane wrote.
"For example, we recently traveled to Israel to glean lessons learned from
their counterterrorist operations in urban areas." General Vane is deputy
chief of staff for doctrine concepts and strategy, at the United States Army
Training and Doctrine Command.

American officers here say their new hard-nosed approach reflects a more
realistic appreciation of the military and political realities faced by
soldiers in the so-called Sunni triangle, the area north and west of Baghdad
that is generating the most violence against the Americans.

Underlying the new strategy, the Americans say, is the conviction that only
a tougher approach will quell the insurgency and that the new strategy must
punish not only the guerrillas but also make clear to ordinary Iraqis the
cost of not cooperating.

"You have to understand the Arab mind," Capt. Todd Brown, a company
commander with the Fourth Infantry Division, said as he stood outside the
gates of Abu Hishma. "The only thing they understand is force ‹ force, pride
and saving face."

Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the top military commander in Iraq, announced the
get-tough strategy in early November. After the announcement, some American
officers warned that the scenes that would follow would not be pretty.

Speaking today in Baghdad, General Sanchez said attacks on allied forces or
gunfights with adversaries across Iraq had dropped to under 20 a day from 40
a day two weeks ago.

"We've considerably pushed back the numbers of engagements against coalition
forces," he said. "We've been hitting back pretty hard. We've forced them to
slow down the pace of their operations."

In that way, the new American approach seems to share the successes of the
Israeli military, at least in the short term; Israeli officers contend that
their strategy regularly stops catastrophes like suicide bombings from
taking place.

"If you do nothing, they will just get stronger," said Martin van Creveld,
professor of military history and strategy at Hebrew University in
Jerusalem. He briefed American marines on Israeli tactics in urban warfare
in September.

The problems in Abu Hishma, a town of 7,000, began in October, when the
American military across the Sunni triangle decided to ease off on their
military operations to coincide with the onset of the Islamic holy month of
Ramadan.

In Abu Hishma, as in other towns, the backing off by the Americans was not
reciprocated by the insurgents. American troops regularly came under mortar
fire, often traced to the surrounding orchards.

Meanwhile, the number of bombs planted on nearby roads rose sharply. Army
convoys regularly took fire from a house a few miles away from the village.

The last straw for the Americans came on Nov. 17, when a group of guerrillas
fired a rocket-propelled grenade into the front of a Bradley armored
personnel carrier. The grenade, with an armored piercing tip, punched
through the Bradley's shell and killed Staff Sgt. Dale Panchot, one of its
crewmen.

The grenade went straight into the sergeant's chest. With the Bradley still
smoldering, the soldiers of the First Battalion, Eighth Infantry, part of
the Fourth Infantry Division, surrounded Abu Hishma and searched for the
guerrillas. Soldiers began encasing the town in razor wire.

The next day, an American jet dropped a 500-bomb on the house that had been
used to attack them. The Americans arrested eight sheiks, the mayor, the
police chief and most members of the city council. "We really hammered the
place," Maj. Darron Wright said.

Two and a half weeks later, the town of Abu Hishma is enclosed in a
barbed-wire fence that stretches for five miles. Men ages 18 to 65 have been
ordered to get identification cards. There is only way into the town and one
way out.

"This fence is here for your protection," reads the sign posted in front of
the barbed-wire fence. "Do not approach or try to cross, or you will be
shot."

American forces have used the tactic in other cities, including Awja, the
birthplace of Saddam Hussein. American forces also sealed off three towns in
western Iraq for several days.

"With a heavy dose of fear and violence, and a lot of money for projects, I
think we can convince these people that we are here to help them," Colonel
Sassaman said.

The bombing of the house, about a mile outside the barbed wire, is another
tactic that echoes those of the Israeli Army. In Iraq, the Americans have
bulldozed, bombed or otherwise rendered useless a number of buildings which
they determined were harboring guerrillas.

In Tikrit, residents pointed out a home they said had been bulldozed by
American tanks. The occupants had already left, they said.

"I watched the Americans flatten that house," said Abdullah al-Ajili, who
lives down the road.

American officers acknowledge that they have destroyed buildings around
Tikrit. In a recent news conference, General Sanchez explained the strategy
but ignored a question about parallels to the Israeli experience.

"Well, I guess what we need to do is go back to the laws of war and the
Geneva Convention and all of those issues that define when a structure
ceases to be what it is claimed to be and becomes a military target,"
General Sanchez said. "We've got to remember that we're in a low-intensity
conflict where the laws of war still apply."

In Abu Hishma, residents complain that the village is locked down for 15
hours a day, meaning that they are unable to go to the mosque for morning
and evening prayers. They say the curfew does not allow them time to stand
in the daylong lines for gasoline and get home before the gate closes for
the night.

But mostly, it is a loss of dignity that the villagers talk about. For each
identification card, every Iraqi man is assigned a number, which he must
hold up when he poses for his mug shot. The card identifies his age and type
of car. It is all in English.

"This is absolutely humiliating," said Yasin Mustafa, a 39-year-old primary
school teacher. "We are like birds in a cage."

Colonel Sassaman said he would maintain the wire enclosure until the
villagers turned over the six men who killed Sergeant Panchot, though he
acknowledged they may have slipped far away.

Colonel Sassaman is feared by many of Abu Hishma's villagers, who hold him
responsible for the searches and razor wire around the town. But some said
they understood what a difficult job he had, trying to pick out a few bad
men from a village of 7,000 people.

"Colonel Sassaman, you should come and live in this village and be a sheik,"
Hassan Ali al-Tai told the colonel outside the checkpoint.

The colonel smiled, and Mr. Tai turned to another visitor.

"Colonel Sassaman is a very good man," he said. "If he got rid of the barbed
wire and the checkpoint, everyone would love him."
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http://msnbc.msn.com/Default.aspx?id=3660169&p1=0

Cheney and the ‘Raw’ Intelligence
By Mark Hosenball and Michael Isikoff

NewsweekDec. 15 issue - A memo written by a top Washington lobbyist for
the controversial Iraqi National Congress raises new questions about the
role Vice President Dick Cheney’s office played in the run-up to the war
in Iraq.

The memo, obtained by NEWSWEEK, suggests that the INC last year was
directly feeding intelligence reports about Iraqi weapons of mass
destruction and purported ties to terrorism to one of Cheney’s top
foreign- policy aides. Cheney staffers later pushed INC info—including
defectors’ claims about WMD and terror ties—to bolster the case that
Saddam’s government posed a direct threat to America. But the CIA and
other U.S. intelligence agencies have strongly questioned the reliability
of defectors supplied by the INC.

For months, Cheney’s office has denied that the veep bypassed U.S.
intelligence agencies to get intel reports from the INC. But a June 2002
memo written by INC lobbyist Entifadh Qunbar to a U.S. Senate committee
lists John Hannah, a senior national-security aide on Cheney’s staff, as
one of two “U.S. governmental recipients” for reports generated by an
intelligence program being run by the INC and which was then being funded
by the State Department. Under the program, “defectors, reports and raw
intelligence are cultivated and analyzed”; the info was then reported to,
among others, “appropriate governmental, non-governmental and
international agencies.” The memo not only describes Cheney aide Hannah as
a “principal point of contact” for the program, it even provides his
direct White House telephone number. The only other U.S. official named as
directly receiving the INC intel is William Luti, a former military
adviser to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich who, after working on
Cheney’s staff early in the Bush administration, shifted to the Pentagon,
where he oversaw a secretive Iraq war-planning unit called the Office of
Special Plans.

Hannah did not respond to a request for comment. But another Cheney aide
insisted that the memo was misleading, and flatly denied that the vice
president received “raw” intelligence from the INC. Hannah discussed only
Iraqi political issues with INC representatives, not intelligence, the
aide said. Francis Brooke, another D.C. lobbyist for the INC, said he
often orally discussed Iraqi issues—including claims about Iraqi weapons
of mass destruction and Saddam’s terrorist connections—with Hannah, Luti
and Cheney’s chief of staff, Lewis (Scooter) Libby. But he insisted he
talked with them only about INC intelligence matters that had already been
reported in the media. A Pentagon official also denied Luti directly got
INC intel reports, suggesting the author of the memo was just “dropping
names” to drum up support for the INC on Capitol Hill.
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Subject: [pjnews] Corporate Media Ignores US Hypocrisy on War Crimes
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Corporate Media Ignores US Hypocrisy on War Crimes

By Peter Phillips

During the first week of December 03, US corporate media reported
that American forensic teams are working to document some 41 mass
graves in Iraq to support future war crime tribunals in that country.
Broadly covered in the media, as well, was the conviction of General
Stanislav Galic by a UN tribunal for war crimes committed by Bosnian
Serb troops under his command during the siege of Sarajevo in 1992-94.

These stories show how corporate media likes to give the impression
that the US government is working diligently to root out evil doers
around the world and to build democracy and freedom. This theme is
part of a core ideological message in support of our recent wars on
Panama, Serbia, Afghanistan and Iraq. Governmental spin transmitted
by a willing US media establishes simplistic mythologies of good vs.
evil often leaving out historical context, special transnational
corporate interests, and prior strategic relationships with the
dreaded evil ones.

The hypocrisy of US policy and corporate media complicity is evident
in the coverage of Donald Rumsfeld's stop over in Mazar-e Sharif
Afghanistan December 4 to meet with regional warlord and mass killer
General Abdul Rashid Dostum and his rival General Ustad Atta
Mohammed. Rumsfeld was there to finalize a deal with the warlords to
begin the decommissioning of their military forces in exchange for
millions of dollars in international aid and increased power in the
central Afghan government.

Few people in the US know that General Abdul Rashid Dostum fought
alongside the Russians in the 1980s, commanding a 20,000-man army. He
switched sides in 1992 and joined the Mujahidin when they took power
in Kabul. For over a decade, Dostum was a regional warlord in charge
of six northern provinces, which he ran like a private fiefdom,
making millions, by collecting taxes on regional trade and
international drug sales. Forced into exile in Turkey by the Taliban
in 1998, he came back into power as a military proxy of the US during
the invasion of Afghanistan.

Charged with mass murder of prisoners of war in the mid-90s by the
UN, Dostum is known to use torture and assassinations to retain
power. Described by the Chicago Sun Times (10/21/01) as a "cruel and
cunning warlord," he is reported to use tanks to rip apart political
opponents or crush them to death. Dostum, a seventh grade dropout,
likes to put up huge pictures of himself in the regions he controls,
drinks Johnnie Walker Blue Label, and rides in an armor-plated black
Cadillac.

A documentary entitled Massacre at Mazar released in 2002 by Scottish
film producer, Jamie Doran, exposes how Dostum, in cooperation with
U.S. special forces, was responsible for the torturing and deaths of
approximately 3,000 Taliban prisoners-of-war in November of 2001. In
Doran's documentary, two witnesses report on camera how they were
forced to drive into the desert with hundreds of Taliban prisoners
held in sealed cargo containers. Most of the prisoners suffocated to
death in the vans and Dostum's soldiers shot the few prisoners left
alive. One witness told the London Guardian that a US Special Forces
vehicle was parked at the scene as bulldozers buried the dead. A
soldier told Doran that U.S. troops masterminded a cover-up. He said
the Americans ordered Dostum's people to get rid of the bodies before
satellite pictures could be taken.

Dostum admits that a few hundred prisoners died, but asserts that it
was a mistake or that they died from previous wounds. He has kept
thousands of Taliban as prisoners-of-war since 2001 and continues to
ransom them to their families for ten to twenty thousand dollars each.

Doran's documentary was shown widely in Europe, prompting an attempt
by the UN to investigate, but Dostum has prevented any inspection by
saying that he could not guarantee safety for forensic teams in the
area.

During the recent meeting with Dostum, Donald Rumsfeld is quote as
saying, "I spent many weeks in the Pentagon following closely your
activities, I should say your successful activities." (Washington
Post 12/5/03) The Post wrote how General Dostum was instrumental in
routing Taliban forces from Northern Afghanistan in the early weeks
of the war two years ago, but said nothing about General Dostum's
brutal past. Nor has US broadcast media aired Doran's documentary.

It seems that the US government's interest in addressing mass graves
and war crimes extends only to our opponents and that we tolerate
such inhuman behavior among those who support our political agendas.
The corporate media's complicity in this hypocrisy is a glaring
example of the need for widespread media reform in the US.


Peter Phillips is Department Chair and Professor of Sociology at
Sonoma State University and director of Project Censored a media
research organization (http://www.projectcensored.org/).
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Published on Monday, December 15, 2003 by the lndependent/UK
We Never Had WMD, Former President Tells Interrogators
by Chris Bunting

Saddam Hussein told his American interrogators that Iraq never had weapons
of mass destruction, claiming that they were an invention of the US
government to justify an invasion, it was reported last night.

Although Saddam was captured without a fight and was initially said to be
co-operative, US intelligence sources said that he had since been
unco-operative and defiant under questioning.

Time magazine, quoting an unnamed intelligence official, said Saddam was
taken to a cell at Baghdad airport after his capture and interrogated.
According to a transcript seen by the official, Saddam was asked: "How are
you?" He said: "I am sad because my people are in bondage". He was offered
a glass of water but refused, saying: "If I drink water I will have to go
to the bathroom and how can I use the bathroom when my people are in
bondage?"

The official said that Saddam avoided answering questions directly and at
times appeared less than coherent. But when he was asked whether Iraq had
weapons of mass destruction the official said he said: "No, of course not.
The US dreamt them up itself to have a reason to go to war with us."

One of his interrogators said: "If you had no weapons of mass destruction
then why not let the UN inspectors into your facilities?" He replied: "We
didn't want them to go into the presidential areas and intrude on our
privacy."

The interrogators asked if Saddam knew the location of Captain Scott
Speicher, a US pilot who went missing during the 1991 Gulf war.

"No," Saddam replied, "we have never kept any prisoners. I have never
known what happened."

The intelligence official said a letter from a Baghdad resistance leader,
giving details of a meeting in the capital and naming other leaders of the
pro-Saddam forces, had been found in Saddam's possession and could provide
valuable intelligence.

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

http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=303&row=0

Jessica Lynch Captures Saddam
Ex-dictator Demands Back Pay from Baker

by Greg Palast
Sunday, December 14, 2003

Former Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein was taken into custody yesterday at
approximately 8:30pm Baghdad time. Various television executives, White
House spin doctors and propaganda experts at the Pentagon are at this time
wrestling with the question of whether to claim PFC Jessica Lynch seized
the ex-potentate or that Saddam surrendered after close hand-to-hand
combat with current Iraqi strongman Paul Bremer III.

Ex-President Hussein himself told US military interrogators that he had
surfaced after hearing of the appointment of his long-time associate James
Baker III to settle Iraq's debts. "Hey, my homeboy Jim owes me big time,"
Mr. Hussein stated. He asserted that Baker and the prior Bush regime, "owe
me my back pay. After all I did for these guys you'd think they'd have the
decency to pay up."

The Iraqi dictator then went on to list the "hits" he conducted on behalf
of the Baker-Bush administrations, ending with the invasion of Kuwait in
1990, authorized by the former US secretary of state Baker.

Mr. Hussein cited the transcript of his meeting on July 25, 1990 in
Baghdad with US Ambassador April Glaspie. When Saddam asked Glaspie if the
US would object to an attack on Kuwait over the small emirate's theft of
Iraqi oil, America's Ambassador told him, "We have no opinion…. Secretary
[of State James] Baker has directed me to emphasize the instruction ...
that Kuwait is not associated with America."

Glaspie, in Congressional testimony in 1991, did not deny the authenticity
of the recording of her meeting with Saddam which world diplomats took as
US acquiescence to an Iraqi invasion.

While having his hair styled by US military makeover artists, Saddam
listed jobs completed at the request of his allies in the Carter, Reagan
and Bush administrations for which he claims back wages:

1979: Seizes power with US approval; moves allegiance from Soviets to USA
in Cold War.

1980: Invades Iran, then the "Unicycle of Evil," with US encouragement and
arms.

1982: Reagan regime removes Saddam's regime from official US list of state
sponsors of terrorism.

1983: Saddam hosts Donald Rumsfeld in Baghdad. Agrees to "go steady" with
US corporate suppliers.

1984: US Commerce Department issues license for export of aflatoxin to
Iraq useable in biological weapons.

1988: Kurds in Halabja, Iraq, gassed.

1987-88: US warships destroy Iranian oil platforms in Gulf and break
Iranian blockade of Iraq shipping lanes, tipping war advantage back to
Saddam.

In Baghdad today, the US-installed replacement for Saddam, Paul Bremer,
appeared to acknowledge his predecessor Saddam's prior work for the US
State Department when he told Iraqis, "For decades, you suffered at the
hands of this cruel man. For decades, Saddam Hussein divided you and
threatened an attack on your neighbors."

In reaction to the Bremer speech, Mr. Hussein said, "Do you think those
decades of causing suffering, division and fear come cheap?" Noting that
for half of that period, the suffering, division and threats were
supported by Washington, Saddam added, "So where's the thanks? You'd think
I'd at least get a gold watch or something for all those years on US
payroll."

In a televised address from the Oval Office, George W. Bush raised
Saddam's hopes of compensation when he cited Iraq's "dark and painful
history" under the US-sponsored Hussein dictatorship.

Saddam was also heartened by Mr. Bush's promise that, "The capture of
Saddam Hussein does not mean the end of violence in Iraq." With new
attacks by and on US and other foreign occupation forces, the former
strongman stated, "It's reassuring to know my legacy of darkness and pain
for Iraqis will continue under the leadership of President Bush."

While lauding the capture of Mr. Hussein, experts caution that the War on
Terror is far from over, noting that Osama bin Laden, James Baker and
George W. Bush remain at large.
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FBI Applies New Rules to Surveillance
Many Searches Not Subject To Regular Courts' Oversight

By Dan Eggen, Washington Post, December 13, 2003; Page A01

The FBI has implemented new ground rules that fundamentally alter
the way investigators handle counterterrorism cases, allowing
criminal and intelligence agents to work side by side and giving
both broad access to the tools of intelligence gathering for the
first time in decades.

The result is that the FBI, unhindered by the restrictions of the
past, will conduct many more searches and wiretaps that are subject
to oversight by a secret intelligence court rather than regular
criminal courts, officials said. Civil liberties groups and defense
lawyers predict that more innocent people will be the targets of
clandestine surveillance.

The new strategy -- launched in early summer and finalized in a
classified directive issued to FBI field offices in October --
goes further than has been publicly discussed by FBI officials in
the past and marks the final step in tearing down the legal wall
that had separated criminal and intelligence investigations since
the spying scandals of the 1970s, authorities said.

Senior FBI officials said the changes have already helped the
bureau disrupt plans for at least four terrorist attacks overseas
and uncover a terrorist sleeper cell in the United States, though
they declined to provide details on those cases. The approach
also has resulted in a notable surge in the number of counter-
terrorism investigations, a statistic that is classified but
currently stands at more than 1,000 cases, officials said.

"With 9/11 as the catalyst for this, what we've done is
fundamentally change the approach we take to every counterterrorism
case," FBI terrorism chief John S. Pistole said in an interview.
"This is a sea change for the FBI."

To civil libertarians and many defense lawyers, the changes
pose a threat to the privacy and due-process rights of civilians
because they essentially eliminate, rather than merely blur,
the traditional boundaries separating criminal and intelligence
investigations. As a result, these critics say, FBI agents and
federal prosecutors will conduct many more searches and seizures
in secret, as allowed under intelligence laws, rather than being
constrained by the rules of traditional criminal warrants.

"By eliminating any distinction between criminal and
intelligence classifications, it reduces the respect for the
ordinary constitutional protections that people have," said
Joshua L. Dratel, a New York lawyer who has filed legal briefs
opposing government anti-terrorism policies. "It will result in
a funneling of all cases into an intelligence mode. It's an end
run around the Fourth Amendment," which protects citizens from
unreasonable searches, he said.

The overhaul of the FBI's counterterrorism policies began
earlier this year with a classified document called the Model
Counterterrorism Investigations Strategy (MCIS), officials
said. The strategy stems from a November 2002 decision by an
intelligence appeals court, which ruled that the anti-terrorism
USA Patriot Act permits intelligence investigators and criminal
prosecutors to more easily share information about terrorism
cases.

The MCIS and other rules effectively put that finding into
practice by reworking the way terrorism cases are handled by
the FBI, and by requiring that both criminal and intelligence
investigators physically work as part of the same squads on
terrorism investigations, officials said. FBI officials declined
to release copies of the MCIS or a related Oct. 1 directive,
citing national security restrictions, but agreed to describe
the outlines of the process.

Under previous FBI protocols, terrorism probes could be opened
along two separate tracks, one for the purposes of developing
a criminal case and one for intelligence gathering. Each was
labeled with separate classification numbers, which govern the
way cases are tracked and budgeted within the FBI. Sharing
between the two categories was sharply limited, overseen by
legal mediators from the FBI and Justice Department, and
subject to scrutiny by criminal courts and the secret Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Court.

Under the new guidelines, all counterterrorism cases are opened
under the same classification number, 315, and are handled from
the outset like an intelligence or espionage investigation,
officials said. The structure allows investigators to more
easily use secret warrants and other methods that are overseen
by the surveillance court and not available in traditional
criminal probes, sources said.

All terrorism cases will also be formally run by the counter-
terrorism division at FBI headquarters in Washington, rather
than by individual field offices, officials said.

Pistole said that focusing on intelligence gathering will
improve the ability of the FBI to prevent, rather than just
investigate, terrorist attacks. He and other FBI officials
also said the new system will result in less emphasis on
bringing criminal charges against suspects in favor of longer
surveillance operations. When charges are eventually brought,
however, prosecutors will be able to use information gathered
through intelligence methods.

"We're still interested in the criminal violations that people
may be involved in," Pistole said. "But in many cases we are
going to put that in the back seat and go down the road until
we have all that we need."

Robert M. Blitzer, a former FBI counterterrorism official,
said that by merging the criminal and intelligence sides of
counterterrorism cases, investigators will be able to work
more efficiently on cases and avoid problems that were common
before Sept. 11, 2001.

"In the past, it was an absolute cardinal rule that there be
a wall between the two cases," Blitzer said. "Now, you will
have much broader access to see what is going on. You can
see the whole scope of things. . . . We were always afraid
that something could slip between the cracks on both sides
under the old system, and that did happen."

In one stark example, FBI lawyers refused to allow criminal
agents to join an August 2001 search for Khalid Almidhar,
who had entered the United States and would later help
commandeer the airliner that crashed into the Pentagon. The
lawyers said that information about Almidhar's ties to al
Qaeda obtained through intelligence channels could not be
used to launch a criminal investigation. An angry New York
FBI agent warned in an internal e-mail that was later revealed
during congressional hearings that "someday someone will die"
because of the decision.

In another case, the FBI failed to seek an intelligence
warrant to search the belongings of alleged al Qaeda
conspirator Zacarias Moussoaui, who had been detained in
Minnesota three weeks before the attacks. The legal counsel
in the FBI's Minneapolis field office said headquarters
officials limited the actions of regular FBI agents in the
case because of concerns about breaching the wall between
intelligence and criminal cases.

The FBI's new strategy is the culmination of a series of
new rules and regulations issued since the Sept. 11 attacks
to govern terrorism investigations. Attorney General John D.
Ashcroft last month issued new national security guidelines,
for example, that allow the FBI to conduct an initial "threat
assessment" of potential terrorists without firm evidence of
a threat or crime, which is required to open a full
investigation.

Ashcroft, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III and other
officials argue that such changes are necessary to transform
the FBI from a reactive law enforcement agency into one
capable of detecting and thwarting terrorist attacks before
they occur. According to a study released this week by
Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access
Clearinghouse, Justice and the FBI have sharply increased
the number of terrorism cases they are pursuing since the
2001 attacks, although most of the 6,400 people referred
to prosecutors were never charged with a crime related to
terrorism.

Several civil liberties advocates and defense lawyers said
the new FBI rules appear to encourage agents to ignore
constitutional concerns and to push the boundaries of what
is allowed by recent court rulings. Ann Beeson, a staff
attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union, said the
system will encourage prosecutors to rely too heavily on
evidence gathered by secret intelligence methods.

"They're going to use all their foreign intelligence tools,
and then they're going to prosecute people using those tools,"
Beeson said. "They're putting this whole class of criminal
cases outside the protection of the Fourth Amendment."

Michael A. Vatis, a former Justice Department and FBI official,
said the changes are necessary but acknowledged the risk that
investigators could overreach. "The principal danger is what
the old rules were designed to avoid: to make sure that the
FBI wasn't using intelligence authorities when they were
really just looking to bust bad guys," he said. "There does
need to be good oversight to make sure these new rules are
not abused."
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http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/message/index.php

We Finally Got Our Frankenstein... and He Was In a Spider Hole!
Michael Moore

December 14, 2003

Thank God Saddam is finally back in American hands! He must have really
missed us. Man, he sure looked bad! But, at least he got a free dental
exam today. That's something most Americans can't get.

America used to like Saddam. We LOVED Saddam. We funded him. We armed him.
We helped him gas Iranian troops.

But then he screwed up. He invaded the dictatorship of Kuwait and, in
doing so, did the worst thing imaginable -- he threatened an even BETTER
friend of ours: the dictatorship of Saudi Arabia, and its vast oil
reserves. The Bushes and the Saudi royal family were and are close
business partners, and Saddam, back in 1990, committed a royal blunder by
getting a little too close to their wealthy holdings. Things went downhill
for Saddam from there.

But it wasn't always that way. Saddam was our good friend and ally. We
supported his regime. It wasn’t the first time we had helped a murderer.
We liked playing Dr. Frankenstein. We created a lot of monsters -- the
Shah of Iran, Somoza of Nicaragua, Pinochet of Chile -- and then we
expressed ignorance or shock when they ran amok and massacred people. We
liked Saddam because he was willing to fight the Ayatollah. So we made
sure that he got billions of dollars to purchase weapons. Weapons of mass
destruction. That's right, he had them. We should know -- we gave them to
him!

We allowed and encouraged American corporations to do business with Saddam
in the 1980s. That's how he got chemical and biological agents so he could
use them in chemical and biological weapons. Here's the list of some of
the stuff we sent him (according to a 1994 U.S. Senate report):
* Bacillus Anthracis, cause of anthrax.
* Clostridium Botulinum, a source of botulinum toxin.
* Histoplasma Capsulatam, cause of a disease attacking lungs, brain,
spinal cord, and heart.
* Brucella Melitensis, a bacteria that can damage major organs.
* Clostridium Perfringens, a highly toxic bacteria causing systemic illness.
* Clostridium tetani, a highly toxigenic substance.

And here are some of the American corporations who helped to prop Saddam
up by doing business with him: AT&T, Bechtel, Caterpillar, Dow Chemical,
Dupont, Kodak, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM (for a full list of companies and
descriptions of how they helped Saddam, click here.

We were so cozy with dear old Saddam that we decided to feed him satellite
images so he could locate where the Iranian troops were. We pretty much
knew how he would use the information, and sure enough, as soon as we sent
him the spy photos, he gassed those troops. And we kept quiet. Because he
was our friend, and the Iranians were the "enemy." A year after he first
gassed the Iranians, we reestablished full diplomatic relations with him!

Later he gassed his own people, the Kurds. You would think that would
force us to disassociate ourselves from him. Congress tried to impose
economic sanctions on Saddam, but the Reagan White House quickly rejected
that idea -- they wouldn’t let anything derail their good buddy Saddam. We
had a virtual love fest with this Frankenstein whom we (in part) created.

And, just like the mythical Frankenstein, Saddam eventually spun out of
control. He would no longer do what he was told by his master. Saddam had
to be caught. And now that he has been brought back from the wilderness,
perhaps he will have something to say about his creators. Maybe we can
learn something... interesting. Maybe Don Rumsfeld could smile and shake
Saddam's hand again. Just like he did when he went to see him in 1983
(click here to see the photo).

Maybe we never would have been in the situation we're in if Rumsfeld,
Bush, Sr., and company hadn't been so excited back in the 80s about their
friendly monster in the desert.

Meanwhile, anybody know where the guy is who killed 3,000 people on 9/11?
Our other Frankenstein?? Maybe he's in a mouse hole.

So many of our little monsters, so little time before the next election.

Stay strong, Democratic candidates. Quit sounding like a bunch of wusses.
These bastards sent us to war on a lie, the killing will not stop, the
Arab world hates us with a passion, and we will pay for this out of our
pockets for years to come. Nothing that happened today (or in the past 9
months) has made us ONE BIT safer in our post-9/11 world. Saddam was never
a threat to our national security.

Only our desire to play Dr. Frankenstein dooms us all.

Yours,

Michael Moore
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
www.michaelmoore.com

For a look back to the better times of our relationship with Saddam
Hussein, see the following:

Patrick E. Tyler, "Officers say U.S. aided Iraq in war despite use of
gas," New York Times, August 18, 2002.

"U.S. Chemical and Biological Warfare-Related Dual Use Exports to Iraq and
their possible impact on health consequences of the Gulf War," 1994 Report
by the Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs.

William Blum's cover story in the April 1998 issue of The Progressive,
"Anthrax for Export.”

Jim Crogan's April 25-May 1, 2003 report in the LA Weekly, "Made in the
USA, Part III: The Dishonor Roll."

"Iraq: U.S. military items exported or transferred to Iraq in the 1980s,"
United States General Accounting Office, released February 7, 1994.

"U.S. had key role in Iraq buildup; trade in chemical arms allowed despite
their use on Iranians and Kurds," Washington Post, December 30, 2002.

"Iraqgate: Saddam Hussein, U.S. policy and the prelude to the Persian Gulf
War, 1980-1994," The National Security Archive, 2003
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"Capturing Saddam Hussein: Will It Mean a New Day for Iraq?"
William D. Hartung, World Policy Institute
December 15, 2003

The capture of Saddam Hussein is an historic event by any standard. But
aside from providing some dramatic footage for global TV audiences, what
has really changed, for the people of Iraq, the Middle East, the United
States, or the world?  Despite the wave of triumphalism that has seized
the Bush administration and certain U.S. media outlets, the harsh bottom
lines in Iraq remain the same.

If virtually everything about the U.S. occupation in Iraq remains the same
EXCEPT that Saddam Hussein has been found, the Bush administration is not
going to be able to "change the subject" and declare victory in the face
of the ongoing unraveling of its policy on the ground.

While the people of Iraq can breathe a sigh of relief that Saddam Hussein
will never return to power, the real questions going forward are not about
the behavior of the OLD ruler, but about what the NEW ruler-- the United
States. What is Washington going to do to fulfill its pledges to bring
security, democracy, and a decent standard of living to the Iraqi people?

·        Will U.S. troops, Iraqi police and security forces, civilian
contract personnel, and humanitarian aid workers continue to get killed on
an almost daily basis?

·        Will Iraqis continue to suffer shortages of food, fuel, safe
drinking water, housing, and jobs;

·        Will steps be taken to open up the governing process to a much
broader segment of the Iraqi public beyond the Pentagon/Paul
Bremer-approved membership of the Iraqi Governing Council and the
U.S.-selected individuals working in the ministries?

·        Will companies like Halliburton and Bechtel continue to be
allowed to overcharge for shoddy work while qualified Iraqis and companies
from allied nations are relegated to the sidelines?

·        Will Saddam Hussein and other Baathist war criminals be tried in
biased courts dominated by exiles like Ahmed Chalabi and his nephew, who
have serious political axes to grind, rather than in an internationally
recognized tribunal?

·        Will U.S. forces continue to use assassination techniques,
aggressive house raids, lock downs of entire communities, bombing raids,
and other tactics virtually guaranteed to alienate the Iraqi people?

Unless these practices change, the capture of Saddam Hussein will be a
symbolic event that has little real meaning in the day-to-day lives of the
Iraqi people going forward.

For citizens of the United States, the capture of Saddam Hussein doesn't
change the fact that, as Senator Robert Byrd said at The Nation magazine
annual dinner on December 14th, Iraq was "the wrong war, at the wrong
time, fought for the wrong reasons."

While the mainstream media focuses on what a "major league bad guy" Saddam
Hussein was, it is important to remind ourselves that Iraq is a sideshow
in the war on terrorism. The capture of Saddam Hussein does not
necessarily make us any safer. There was no significant stockpile of
weapons of mass destruction. There was no imminent threat to the United
States or its neighbors. There was no operational link to Al Qaeda. There
was no need to spend $150 billion and counting, to waste hundreds of
American lives, to kill thousands of Iraqis, and to alienate large parts
of the world, all to "get" Saddam Hussein.

While we're speaking of history, let's not forget that Saddam Hussein came
to power in 1968 with the aid of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.
Let's also acknowledge that his worst crimes occurred in the 1980s, when
the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations were supplying him with
military technology, tactical intelligence, and billions of dollars worth
of taxpayer-subsidized loans.  U.S. assistance included precursors for
chemical and biological weapons and targeting information that was used to
target Iranian troops with chemical weapons. If the United States had
adopted some "get tough" diplomacy with Iraq then-- when the crimes were
being committed-- it might not have saved tens of thousands of lives and
created conditions in which the Iraqi people themselves could have ejected
this brutal dictator from power years sooner.

Driving Saddam Hussein from power now, in a war of questionable legality
that has left thousands of Iraqis dead and destabilized the country for
months and years to come, is hardly compensation for the complicity in his
past abuses.  Given the strong U.S.-role in creating and sustaining his
regime, if there's a Jessica Lynch-style TV movie about the capture of
Saddam, it may have to be entitled "The Return of the Prodigal Son."

Even worse, in its "with us or against us," "war without end" approach to
fighting terrorism, the United States is arming and financing the next
generation of Saddam Husseins as we speak, in places like Pakistan,
Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Djibouti, Yemen, and other undemocratic regimes. 
These new age dictatorships are being propped up with U.S. tax dollars on
the dubious theory that supporting the "lesser of two evils" will somehow
stem the spread of evil, violence, danger, and war, despite overwhelming
historical evidence to the contrary.

Perhaps we need to pause in our national celebration of the capture of
Saddam Hussein to investigate how and why our government's policies so
regularly seem to help create, nurture and sustain tyrants like Saddam
Hussein in the first place.  We are a democracy, after all.  We should be
strong enough to look at our own faults and correct them, even as we
acknowledge a successful event like the capture of Saddam Hussein.

William D. Hartung, Senior Fellow at the World Policy Institute and
Director of the
Arms Trade Resource Center. www.worldpolicy.org/projects/arms

Other Good Writing on the Subject:
Hussein's Capture Is Yesterday's News
Christopher Scheer, AlterNet, December 14, 2003
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=17387

Capital Games
David Corn, The Nation, December 15, 2003
http://www.thenation.com/capitalgames/index.mhtml?bid=3&pid=1129

IRAQ: Triumph Becomes Also a Problem
Peyman Pejman, InterPress, December 15, 2003
http://www.ipsnews.net/interna.asp?idnews=21543

IRAQ: Future Uncertain as Saddam Unearthed
Jim Lobe, InterPress, December 14, 2003
http://www.ipsnews.net/interna.asp?idnews=21541

=======================

The Arms Trade Resource Center was established in 1993 to engage in public
education and policy advocacy aimed at promoting restraint in the
international arms trade.

http://www.worldpolicy.org/projects/arms
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Subject: [pjnews] Radio Consciencia is on the Air
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From: Steve Pierce <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>


RADIO CONSCIENCIA IS ON THE AIR!

        Several weeks ago, on a (mostly) balmy winter weekend in southwestern
Florida, scores of community media activists from around the country
descended on the small farming town of Immokalee to build a radio
station.  Not just any radio station-- a radio station owned and operated
by farm workers.

        Almost everywhere in the United States, radio is a medium obsessed
with delivering ears to advertisers (or underwriters).  This story is
not about radio as we have come to know it.  It's about a station
devoted to educating and organizing farm workers.

        It's peak growing season in Immokalee, Florida right now.  Every day,
workers assemble before dawn at the labor pool downtown-- ready to hire
themselves out to the crew bosses who provide contract labor to the
major growers.  If they work hard all day, picking tomatoes at the rate
of $.40 per basket, they'll make about $50 and will have handled two
tons of produce each.  They are being paid about what they made in 1980.

        A quick stroll through the compact downtown reveals Immokalee's 
political
economy.  Most of the businesses are there to service a
migrant farm worker community.  You can wire money to Mexico, Haiti, El
Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras.  You can find an immigration lawyer.
And you can get a bail bond.  Not much else.

        The storefront signs bear silent testimony to a dream-- to earn some
money and send it home.  The reality is somewhat different.  With low
wages and high expenses (a bed in a shared room in a dingy trailer runs
$200 a month or more), farm workers in Immokalee make barely enough to
survive.

        Changing this situation is  tough.  Most of the workers don't speak
English, and the immigration status for many of them is shaky.  They're
hesitant to speak out, even in the face of modern-day slavery conditions
that made the front page of the Miami Herald as recently as last month.
  That's where the new radio station fits in.  The plan is to broadcast
in Spanish, Creole, and various indigenous languages-- no English.  The
goal is to provide a channel of communication to bring a disparate
workforce together to work for change.

        The effort to organize workers in Immokalee is the local component of a
two pronged strategy: the other is to bring the struggle to the
outside world.

        Even with snow piling up outside grocery stores across the Northeast,
shoppers expect to find ripe, red tomatoes inside, at a good price.  Few
consumers trouble themselves with the details of how this minor miracle
takes place on a daily basis.

        The Coalition of Immokalee Workers wants us to know.  This
Florida-based group of immigrant farm workers from Mexico, Central
America and the Caribbean has been organizing since 1993 to raise the
standard of living for people on the bottom rung of the food production
chain-- the pickers.

        Two years ago the Coalition of Immokalee Workers approached Yum!
Brands, a purveyor of fast food around the world, for guarantees of
basic human rights and a $.01 per pound wage increase for tomato
pickers&#151;to no avail.   In response, the CIW  initiated a boycott of
their Taco Bell restaurant chain, one of the largest purchasers of
tomatoes in the United States.  More than a dozen colleges have thrown
Taco Bell franchises off campus as interfaith endorsements of the
boycott mount.  (Check http://www.ciw-online.org for more information on
the CIW and their Taco Bell boycott, and a moving photo essay on working
conditions in the tomato fields.)

        The CIW's sophisticated analysis of the labor environment in which
their members exist has led them to come out strongly against both
NAFTA and the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas.   This
political stance made them ideal partners for an alliance with the
community media movement, which has served as the communications wing
of the anti-corporate globalization struggle.  Grassroots radio, used
world-wide to reach low-income populations with limited literacy, is
particularly well-suited to the CIW's local organizing effort.

        And so it was that on the weekend of December 5-7, 2003, nearly 100
media activists from around the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico
gathered in a sprawling, vacant office building to help the Coalition
of Immokalee Workers build a low-power FM radio station.  Billed as a
"radio barnraising" by the Prometheus Radio Project (a Philadelphia-based
LPFM advocacy group that organized the event in cooperation with the CIW),
the weekend of skill-sharing drew a disparate crew: self-proclaimed
engineering "geeks" to guide tower construction, oversee installation of
the antenna and transmitter as well as coordinate wiring of a full
broadcasting studio, along with production, fundraising and administrative
types to run a full slate of informational workshops geared to the
knowledge needed to run a radio station staffed and managed by volunteers.
  On Sunday night at 7 PM, Radio Consciencia began broadcasting!

        There's a beautiful gallery of photos from the weekend at
http://www.jjtiziou.net/morepictures/200312xx_radio/ if you'd like to see
what happened.  You might also want to visit
http://www.prometheusradio.org for more information about the radio
barnraising, and the phenomenon of
low-power FM.  Don't miss the next one!
From [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tue Dec 16 23:34:20 2003
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The Baltimore Sun
December 14, 2003

FOR TELLING THE TRUTH
By Norman Solomon

Few Americans have heard of Katharine Gun, a former British intelligence
employee facing charges that she violated the Official Secrets Act. So
far, the American press has ignored her. But the case raises profound
questions about democracy and the public's right to know on both sides of
the Atlantic.

Ms. Gun's legal peril began in Britain on March 2, when the Observer
newspaper exposed a highly secret memorandum by a top U.S. National
Security Agency official. Dated Jan. 31, the memo outlined surveillance
of a half-dozen delegations with swing votes on the U.N. Security
Council, noting a focus on "the whole gamut of information that could
give U.S. policy-makers an edge in obtaining results favorable to U.S.
goals" - support for war on Iraq.

The NSA memo said that the agency had started a "surge" of spying on
diplomats at the United Nations in New York, including wiretaps of home
and office telephones along with reading of e-mails. The targets were
delegations from six countries considered to be pivotal - Mexico, Chile,
Angola, Cameroon, Guinea and Pakistan - for the war resolution being
promoted by the United States and Britain.

The scoop caused headlines in much of the world, and sparked a furor in
the "Middle Six" countries. The U.S. government and its British ally -
revealed to be colluding in the U.N. surveillance caper - were put on the
defensive.

A few days after the story broke, I contacted the man responsible for
leaking the huge trove of secret documents about the Vietnam War known as
the Pentagon Papers more than three decades ago. What was his assessment
of the U.N. spying memo?

"This leak," Daniel Ellsberg replied, "is more timely and potentially
more important than the Pentagon Papers." The exposure of the memo, he
said, had the potential to block the invasion of Iraq before it began:
"Truth-telling like this can stop a war."

Katharine Gun's truth-telling did not stop the war on Iraq, but it did
make a difference. Some analysts cite the uproar from the leaked memo as
a key factor in the U.S.-British failure to get Security Council approval
of a pro-war resolution before the invasion began in late March.

The government of British Prime Minister Tony Blair quickly arrested Ms.
Gun. In June, she formally lost her job as a translator at the top-secret
Government Communications Headquarters in Gloucester. On Nov. 13, her
name surfaced in the British news media when the Labor Party government
dropped the other shoe, charging the 29-year-old woman with a breach of
the Official Secrets Act.

She faces up to two years in prison if convicted.

Ms. Gun, who is free on bail and is to appear in court Jan. 19, has
responded with measured eloquence. Disclosure of the NSA memo, she said
Nov. 27, was "necessary to prevent an illegal war in which thousands of
Iraqi civilians and British soldiers would be killed or maimed." And Ms.
Gun reiterated something that she had said two weeks earlier: "I have
only ever followed my conscience."

All the realpolitik in the world cannot preclude the exercise of the
internal quality that most distinguishes human beings. Of all the
differences between people and other animals, Charles Darwin observed,
"the moral sense of conscience is by far the most important."

In this case, Ms. Gun's conscience fully intersected with the needs of
democracy and a free press. The British and American people had every
right to know that their governments were involved in a high-stakes dirty
tricks campaign at the United Nations. For democratic societies, a timely
flow of information is the lifeblood of the body politic.

As it happened, the illegal bugging of diplomats from three continents in
Manhattan foreshadowed the illegality of the war that was to come.
Shortly before the invasion began, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan
pointed out that - in the absence of an authorizing resolution from the
Security Council - an attack on Iraq would violate the U.N. Charter.

Ms. Gun's conspicuous bravery speaks louder than any rhetoric possibly
could. Her actions confront Britons and Americans alike with difficult
choices:

To what extent is the "special relationship" between the two countries to
be based on democracy or duplicity? How much do we treasure the substance
of civil liberties that make authentic public discourse distinct from the
hollowness of secrecy and manipulation? How badly do we want to know what
is being done in our names with our tax money? And why is it so rare that
conscience takes precedence over expediency?


Norman Solomon is executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy
in San Francisco. He is co-author of Target Iraq: What the News Media
Didn't Tell You (Context Books, 2003).
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Saddam captured - what will change?
By Donna Mulhearn in Baghdad

The gunshots are firing thick and fast.

Some are in the distance, others are just outside my window.

It's about 7pm on Sunday night, the shots have been regular since news of
the capture of Saddam Hussein started to spread around Baghdad at about
2pm this afternoon.

"Be careful Miss Donna," my Iraqi friends are saying. "Don't go outside or
a bullet might fall on your head!"

I appreciate their concern (and yours) but how can you ask a former
journalist with an ingrained news sense to stay inside when the world's
biggest story is happening outside her front door? I have to go out, but I
promise I won't stay out late!

Many Iraqis are in a state of disbelief tonight, as I was until I saw
images of a dazed, bushy-bearded Saddam willingly having his teeth checked
in a video shown at the occupier's press conference in Baghdad this
afternoon.

I stood around a television with a bunch of Iraqis and watched their jaws
drop in unison as they saw their deposed former president pose sedately
for a mug shot, his bushy-beard newly shaved and his hair neatly trimmed
for the picture.

Now many are celebrating the capture (hence the gunshots). When I first
heard the news I felt a sense of relief and laughed out loud with the
Iraqis around me. My landlord told me the gunshots will go all night.

"Do you want a gun?" he asked. "I can give you one to fire too."

I politely declined. "I'll just have a beer and a falafel," I said.

But some Iraqis are still wary, after being betrayed by so many people so
many times, they want more confirmation. Others are sad and angry: "What
is our hope now?" one man asked under his breathe as he watched the press
conference. My friends have just returned from one suburb in Baghdad where
a large pro-Saddam mob are nearing a riot - "if Saddam is gone," said one
man Mustafa, "we will fight even harder".

One philosophical young man I spoke to shrugged his shoulders.

'What does it mean?" he said. "One man is captured."

"Did so many people have to die for this? So many thousands of people--
for this?

"What will change now?"

As I walked back to my home this afternoon I wondered what would change
now. I looked at the 2-kilometre long queue for petrol along Sadoon
Street.

Iraqis with cars have to leave home early in the morning and wait seven
hours before getting to the bowser for their ration of petrol. Tensions
are rising as taxi drivers, transporters and businesses are thrown into
disarray by the delays.

This won't change overnight.

I walked past the generators that sit on the footpath outside shops and
hotels, big dirty things, chugging out clouds of black smoke with the
noise of a thousand lawnmowers. The generators are necessary for survival
here, with power only lasting a few hours a day. For those without
generators life is cold and dark.

That won't change overnight.

I thought about the 15,000 people detained in the bleak Abu Graib prison
without charge or trial. Many were taken from their homes in the middle of
the night by gunpoint and their families have not heard from them. I
wonder if tomorrow they get legal representation, a family visit and a
fair trial?

I thought about the poor family we know who live in the concrete basement
of a bombed out building. They huddle in a corner and try to hide from the
wind coming in the open doors. We've given them mattresses and blankets,
but the nights are bitter cold. I wonder what they think of the news and
what it might mean for them - husband without a job, with wife and five
small children.

I asked the philosophical young man what effect the capture of Saddam will
have on the Iraqi resistance. Will the military activity against the
occupiers decrease?

"Why?" he said patiently. "The Iraqi resistance is not about Saddam
Hussein, it is about the occupation of Iraq by foreigners."

"Less than 5 per cent of the resistance support Saddam, look at the Shia,"
he said "They hate Saddam, but are strong in the resistance."

"It will continue.

"The resistance is not about Saddam' he mused. "It's about fighting for
our country."

We talked some more about the war and the occupation and the effect it has
had on this country. Battered infrastructure, civilian deaths, bodies
maimed, orphaned children, an oil-rich country with no petrol, rows of
razor wired where gardens should be.

"The people are happy that Saddam is captured," said the young man. We
nodded in agreement.

"But do you really think any of this was about Saddam?

No one answered. I hung my head with the shame of the west on my
shoulders. With its technological wizardry I know that a capture of Saddam
could have occurred without bloodshed years ago. The Iraqis know this too.

The young man's stinging question hung in the air like an unpleasant smell.

I'll just let it hang again now.

___________________
Former Australian human shield Donna Mulhearn is currently in Baghdad
working with street kids and poor families.  A book she wrote about her
experience earlier this year in Iraq may be published soon.
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http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=17391

We Caught the Wrong Guy
By William Rivers Pitt, TruthOut.com
December 15, 2003

Saddam Hussein, former employee of the American federal government, was
captured near a farmhouse in Tikrit in a raid performed by other employees
of the American federal government. That sounds pretty deranged, right?
Perhaps, but it is also accurate. The unifying thread binding together
everyone assembled at that Tikrit farmhouse is the simple fact that all of
them – the soldiers as well as Hussein – have received pay from the United
States for services rendered.

It is no small irony that Hussein, the Butcher of Baghdad, the monster
under your bed lo these last twelve years, was paid probably ten thousand
times more during his time as an American employee than the soldiers who
caught him on Saturday night. The boys in the Reagan White House were
generous with your tax dollars, and Hussein was a recipient of their
largesse for the better part of a decade.

If this were a Tom Clancy movie, we would be watching the dramatic capture
of Hussein somewhere in the last ten minutes of the tale. The bedraggled
dictator would be put on public trial for his crimes, sentenced to several
thousand concurrent life sentences, and dragged off to prison in chains.
The anti-American insurgents in Iraq, seeing the sudden futility of their
fight to place Hussein back into power, would lay down their arms and melt
back into the countryside. For dramatic effect, more than a few would be
cornered by SEAL teams in black face paint and discreetly shot in the back
of the head. The President would speak with eloquence as the martial score
swelled around him. Fade to black, roll credits, get off my plane.

The real-world version is certainly not lacking in drama. The streets of
Baghdad were thronged on Sunday with mobs of Iraqi people celebrating the
final removal of a despot who had haunted their lives since 1979. Their
joy was utterly unfettered. Images on CNN of Hussein, looking for all the
world like a Muslim version of Charles Manson while getting checked for
head lice by an American medic, were as surreal as anything one might ever
see on a television.

Unfortunately, the real-world script has a lot of pages left to be turned.
Former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter, reached at his home on Sunday,
said, "It's great that they caught him. The man was a brutal dictator who
committed terrible crimes against his people. But now we come to rest of
story. We didn't go to war to capture Saddam Hussein. We went to war to
get rid of weapons of mass destruction. Those weapons have not been
found." Ray McGovern, senior analyst and 27-year veteran of the CIA,
echoed Ritter's perspective on Sunday. "It's wonderful that he was
captured, because now we'll find out where the weapons of mass destruction
are," said McGovern with tongue firmly planted in cheek. "We killed his
sons before they could tell us."

Indeed, reality intrudes. The push for war before March was based upon
Hussein's possession of 26,000 liters of anthrax, 38,000 liters of
botulinum toxin, 1,000,000 pounds of sarin gas, mustard gas, and VX nerve
gas, along with 30,000 munitions to deliver these agents, uranium from
Niger to be used in nuclear bombs, and let us not forget the al Qaeda
terrorists closely associated with Hussein who would take this stuff and
use it against us on the main streets and back roads of the United States.

When they found Hussein hiding in that dirt hole in the ground, none of
this stuff was down there with him. The full force of the American
military has been likewise unable to locate it anywhere else. There is no
evidence of al Qaeda agents working with Hussein, and Bush was forced some
weeks ago to publicly acknowledge that Hussein had nothing to do with
September 11. The Niger uranium story was debunked last summer.

Conventional wisdom now holds that none of this stuff was there to begin
with, and all the clear statements from virtually everyone in the Bush
administration squatting on the public record describing the existence of
this stuff looks now like what it was then: A lot of overblown rhetoric
and outright lies, designed to terrify the American people into supporting
an unnecessary go-it-alone war. Said war made a few Bush cronies rich
beyond the dreams of avarice while allowing some hawks in the Defense
Department to play at empire building, something they have been craving
for more than ten years.

Of course, the rhetoric mutated as the weapons stubbornly refused to be
found. By the time Bush did his little 'Mission Accomplished' strut across
the aircraft carrier, the occupation was about the removal of Saddam
Hussein and the liberation of the Iraqi people. No longer were we informed
on a daily basis of the "sinister nexus between Hussein and al Qaeda," as
described by Colin Powell before the United Nations in February. No longer
were we fed the insinuations that Hussein was involved in the attacks of
September 11. Certainly, any and all mention of weapons of mass
destruction ceased completely. We were, instead, embarking on some noble
democratic experiment.

The capture of Saddam Hussein, and the Iraqis dancing in the streets of
Baghdad, feeds nicely into these newly minted explanations. Mr. Bush and
his people will use this as the propaganda coup it is, and to great
effect. But a poet once said something about tomorrow, and tomorrow and
tomorrow.

"We are not fighting for Saddam," said an Iraqi named Kashid Ahmad Saleh
in a New York Times report from a week ago. "We are fighting for freedom
and because the Americans are Jews. The Governing Council is a bunch of
looters and criminals and mercenaries. We cannot expect that stability in
this country will ever come from them. The principle is based on religion
and tribal loyalties," continued Saleh. "The religious principle is that
we cannot accept to live with infidels. The Prophet Muhammad, peace be on
him, said, `Hit the infidels wherever you find them.' We are also a tribal
people. We cannot allow strangers to rule over us."

Welcome to the new Iraq. The theme that the 455 Americans killed there,
and the thousands of others who have been wounded, fell at the hands of
pro-Hussein loyalists is now gone. The Bush administration celebrations
over this capture will appear quite silly and premature when the dying
continues. Whatever Hussein bitter-enders there are will be joined by
Iraqi nationalists who will now see no good reason for American forces to
remain. After all, the new rhetoric highlighted the removal of Hussein as
the reason for this invasion, and that task has been completed. Yet
American forces are not leaving, and will not leave. The killing of our
troops will continue because of people like Kashid Ahmad Saleh. All
Hussein's capture did for Saleh was remove from the table the idea that he
was fighting for the dictator. He is free now, and the war will begin in
earnest.

The dying will continue because America's presence in Iraq is a wonderful
opportunity for a man named Osama bin Laden, who was not captured on
Saturday. Bin Laden, it has been reported, is thrilled by what is
happening in Iraq, and plans to throw as much violence as he can muster at
American forces there. The Bush administration spent hundreds of billions
of dollars on this Iraq invasion, not one dime of which went towards the
capture or death of the fellow who brought down the Towers a couple of
years ago. For bin Laden and his devotees, Iraq is better than Disneyland.

For all the pomp and circumstance that has surrounded the extraction of
the former Iraqi dictator from a hole in the ground, the reality is that
the United States is not one bit safer now that the man is in chains.

There will be no trial for Hussein, at least nothing in public, because he
might start shouting about the back pay he is owed from his days as an
employee of the American government. Because another former employee of
the American government named Osama is still alive and free, our troops
are still in mortal danger in Iraq.

Hussein was never a threat to the United States. His capture means nothing
to the safety and security of the American people. The money we spent to
put the bag on him might have gone towards capturing bin Laden, who is a
threat, but that did not happen. We can be happy for the people of Iraq,
because their Hussein problem is over. Here in America, our Hussein
problem is just beginning. The other problem – that Osama fellow we should
have been trying to capture this whole time – remains perched over our
door like the raven.


William Rivers Pitt is the managing editor of truthout.org.
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http://electroniciraq.net/news/1274.shtml

Arresting Children
Jo Wilding, Electronic Iraq, 18 December 2003

"Two days ago there was a demonstration after school finished, against the
coalition and for Saddam. Yesterday the American army came and surrounded
the whole block. They just crashed into the school, 6, 7, 8 into every
classroom with their guns. They took the name of every student and matched
the names to the photos they got from the day before and then arrested the
students. They actually dragged them by their shirts onto the floor and
out of the class."

They wouldn't give their names. The children at Adnan Kheiralla Boys'
School in the Amiriya district of Baghdad were still scared, still
seething with rage. Another boy, Hakim Hamid Naji, was taken today. "They
were kicking him," one of the pupils said. A car pulled up and a tall,
thin boy ran into the school, talked briefly with staff and left again.
The kids said the soldiers had come looking for this boy too.

The headmaster, too, was reluctant to speak. No, he said, looking down at
the desk, there were no guns. But Ahmed, an English teacher, followed the
soldiers on the raid. "The translators had masks or scarves because maybe
they are from this area. They came and they chose several students and
they took them. The demonstration started after school on Tuesday. I
advised them not to do it because I am their teacher and the Americans
don't care. The children had pictures of Saddam Hussein from their text
books and that's all, so they demonstrated and just said we want Saddam
Hussein.

"There were no leaders, this wasn't an arranged demonstration. It comes
honestly, some of the students say, we love Saddam Hussein. Some of the
students say no, we hate Saddam Hussein. I told them, it's OK, let them
love him and let them hate him, we can all express our opinions. There are
no weapons, there is no bombing."

"The American soldiers came with tanks and stopped the demonstration and
the kids sat in front of the tanks. They took pictures of the students and
they had some spy maybe, I'm not sure, maybe students in the school. I
begged the soldiers to leave these students because they are naïve, they
just believe this is a civilian demonstration, but the soldiers were very
rude to the students and treated them like soldiers. They are kids, they
are teenagers, so I begged the officer, but he didn't care.

"I told them, just calm down, but they said no, they are not kids. In Abu
Ghraib we have 16 year olds shooting at us. I said yes, but these are in
school. They have books, not weapons. And they took pictures of us, what
is your name, stand here. I am not a criminal, I am a teacher. They took
pictures of most of the teachers.

"I told them you have to educate people about freedom, not punish them,
but they brought tanks and helicopters. Yesterday they surrounded the
school and came in with weapons everywhere, soldiers everywhere and used
tear gas on the students. They fired guns to scare them, above their
heads. One student got a broken arm because of the beating. They had some
sticks, electric sticks and they hit the students. Some of them were
vomiting, some of them were crying and they were very afraid."

All the other teachers and students who talked to us backed Ahmed's
version over the headmaster's: the soldiers were armed when they came into
the classrooms. One of the arrested boys decided he trusted Ahmed enough
to talk to the people that Ahmed told him were safe, as long as he wasn't
recorded and we promised not to identify him in any way. He wouldn't give
his name or age.

"The soldiers pointed at me and I was grabbed by about 8 of them and
dragged out by my clothes and my collar. They threw me on the ground and
searched me and cocked their guns on me. We were held in chicken cages,
about two metres by a metre and a half with criss cross wire. They were
swearing at us a lot. They didn't beat us but they accused us of having
relations with Saddam Hussein, asking who organized the demonstration,
telling us anyone who is against our American interests will be arrested.

"They offered us some food but more curses. They didn't inform our parents
at all. The headmaster came with three of the fathers. Most of us were
held between 7 and 10 hours but one student is not Iraqi and he was held
for much longer and they questioned him for two hours and made him stand
outside from 10pm till 2am in the freezing cold. The youngest was 14."

The school is named after a brother-in-law of Saddam's who was popular
with both Sunni and Shia people. For this he was killed by Saddam and,
when the statues of former regime figures were being destroyed after the
invasion, both of his monuments, in Baghdad and Basra, were protected by
local people. The pupils have painted over the sign at the school's
entrance, renaming it Saddam's School. The depiction of Saddam on TV in
American hands seems to have made him a heroic symbol even to many who
disliked him.

One of the boys told me, "Only 40 kids out of all of us were on the first
demonstration but after the raid, we will all go out on Saturday after
school and demonstrate against the occupation. They have turned us all
against the American soldiers. We don't care about their tanks, we don't
care about their machine guns, we don't care about their prisons any
more."

Outside the school, Rana asked me, "Did you see the bodies in Amiriya?
There were bodies in the street, Americans and Iraqis. They stopped an
ambulance, threw in 5 bodies and said go, just go. It is a war zone. They
don't want to give the bodies to the families. Even my neighbour, he was
killed by the Americans a few days ago and they didn't receive his body
yet. When they went to the hospital the doctors said you have to go to the
Americans, bring permission from them and we will give you your son's
body."

Wasef, one of the Iraq Indymedia members, was shot in the foot while
filming the demonstration in Amiriya yesterday. He's OK, still smiling,
doesn't know who fired the bullet that hit him.

In the Abu Ghraib hospital while I was visiting someone, there was a
noise, something more than a groan but weaker than a shout, broken by
short in-breaths, aah, aah, aah: a man with a gunshot wound, a crowd of
men trying to lift him from the trolley to the bed. Outside was exploding
at frequent intervals. In the doorway they were loading a coffin onto a
pick up. A woman with a full pregnant belly told us her two children were
playing in the garden when a rocket landed in the flower bed. Another one
landed in the street outside.

The petrol queues are now about 2-3km long, two cars wide in places.
Billboards and leaflets declare the new penalty of 3 to 10 years in jail
-- yes, it does say years -- for buying or selling black market petrol.
They, like the posters advertising rewards for information, are plastered
with paint, red or black.

I have to apologise to Hamsa and Khalid -- I misunderstood. Hamsa said,
"Now you are in handcuffs, the bastards," not "you bastard" about Saddam
-- a small but significant linguistic cock-up on my part, and Khalid said
they will make him crawl over nails not that they should. I'm sorry.


See also:

Secondary School under Siege by US Forces, Dahr Jamail, Electronic Iraq
(18 December 2003)  http://electroniciraq.net/news/1271.shtml


Jo Wilding is based in Baghdad and wrote for Electronic Iraq during the war.
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,1103566,00.html

The privatisation of war
Ian Traynor

Wednesday December 10, 2003
The Guardian

Private corporations have penetrated western warfare so deeply that they
are now the second biggest contributor to coalition forces in Iraq after
the Pentagon, a Guardian investigation has established.
While the official coalition figures list the British as the second
largest contingent with around 9,900 troops, they are narrowly outnumbered
by the 10,000 private military contractors now on the ground.

The investigation has also discovered that the proportion of contracted
security personnel in the firing line is 10 times greater than during the
first Gulf war. In 1991, for every private contractor, there were about
100 servicemen and women; now there are 10.

The private sector is so firmly embedded in combat, occupation and
peacekeeping duties that the phenomenon may have reached the point of no
return: the US military would struggle to wage war without it.

While reliable figures are difficult to come by and governmental
accounting and monitoring of the contracts are notoriously shoddy, the US
army estimates that of the $87bn (£50.2bn) earmarked this year for the
broader Iraqi campaign, including central Asia and Afghanistan, one third
of that, nearly $30bn, will be spent on contracts to private companies.

The myriad military and security companies thriving on this largesse are
at the sharp end of a revolution in military affairs that is taking us
into unknown territory - the partial privatisation of war.

"This is a trend that is growing and Iraq is the high point of the trend,"
said Peter Singer, a security analyst at Washington's Brookings
Institution. "This is a sea change in the way we prosecute warfare. There
are historical parallels, but we haven't seen them for 250 years."

When America launched its invasion in March, the battleships in the Gulf
were manned by US navy personnel. But alongside them sat civilians from
four companies operating some of the world's most sophisticated weapons
systems.

When the unmanned Predator drones, the Global Hawks, and the B-2 stealth
bombers went into action, their weapons systems, too, were operated and
maintained by non-military personnel working for private companies.

The private sector is even more deeply involved in the war's aftermath. A
US company has the lucrative contracts to train the new Iraqi army,
another to recruit and train an Iraqi police force.

But this is a field in which British companies dominate, with nearly half
of the dozen or so private firms in Iraq coming from the UK.

The big British player in Iraq is Global Risk International, based in
Hampton, Middlesex. It is supplying hired Gurkhas, Fijian paramilitaries
and, it is believed, ex-SAS veterans, to guard the Baghdad headquarters of
Paul Bremer, the US overlord, according to analysts.

It is a trend that has been growing worldwide since the end of the cold
war, a booming business which entails replacing soldiers wherever possible
with highly paid civilians and hired guns not subject to standard military
disciplinary procedures.

The biggest US military base built since Vietnam, Camp Bondsteel in
Kosovo, was constructed and continues to be serviced by private
contractors. At Tuzla in northern Bosnia, headquarters for US
peacekeepers, everything that can be farmed out to private businesses has
been. The bill so far runs to more than $5bn. The contracts include those
to the US company ITT, which supplies the armed guards, overwhelmingly US
private citizens, at US installations.

In Israel, a US company supplies the security for American diplomats, a
very risky business. In Colombia, a US company flies the planes destroying
the coca plantations and the helicopter gunships protecting them, in what
some would characterise as a small undeclared war.

In Kabul, a US company provides the bodyguards to try to save President
Hamid Karzai from assassination, raising questions over whether they are
combatants in a deepening conflict with emboldened Taliban insurgents.

And in the small town of Hadzici west of Sarajevo, a military compound
houses the latest computer technology, the war games simulations
challenging the Bosnian army's brightest young officers.

Crucial to transforming what was an improvised militia desperately
fighting for survival into a modern army fit eventually to join Nato, the
army computer centre was established by US officers who structured,
trained, and armed the Bosnian military. The Americans accomplished a
similar mission in Croatia and are carrying out the same job in Macedonia.

The input from the US military has been so important that the US experts
can credibly claim to have tipped the military balance in a region ravaged
by four wars in a decade. But the American officers, including several
four-star generals, are retired, not serving. They work, at least
directly, not for the US government, but for a private company, Military
Professional Resources Inc.

"In the Balkans MPRI are playing an incredibly critical role. The balance
of power in the region was altered by a private company. That's one
measure of the sea change," said Mr Singer, the author of a recent book on
the subject, Corporate Warriors.

The surge in the use of private companies should not be confused with the
traditional use of mercenaries in armed conflicts. The use of mercenaries
is outlawed by the Geneva conventions, but no one is accusing the
Pentagon, while awarding more than 3,000 contracts to private companies
over the past decade, of violating the laws of war.

The Pentagon will "pursue additional opportunities to outsource and
privatise", the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, pledged last year
and military analysts expect him to try to cut a further 200,000 jobs in
the armed forces.

It is this kind of "downsizing" that has fed the growth of the military
private sector.

Since the end of the cold war it is reckoned that six million servicemen
have been thrown on to the employment market with little to peddle but
their fighting and military skills. The US military is 60% the size of a
decade ago, the Soviet collapse wrecked the colossal Red Army, the East
German military melted away, the end of apartheid destroyed the white
officer class in South Africa. The British armed forces, notes Mr Singer,
are at their smallest since the Napoleonic wars.

The booming private sector has soaked up much of this manpower and expertise.

It also enables the Americans, in particular, to wage wars by proxy and
without the kind of congressional and media oversight to which
conventional deployments are subject.

>From the level of the street or the trenches to the rarefied corridors of
strategic analysis and policy-making, however, the problems surfacing are
immense and complex.

One senior British officer complains that his driver was recently
approached and offered a fortune to move to a "rather dodgy outfit".
Ex-SAS veterans in Iraq can charge up to $1,000 a day.

"There's an explosion of these companies attracting our servicemen
financially," said Rear Admiral Hugh Edleston, a Royal Navy officer who is
just completing three years as chief military adviser to the international
administration running Bosnia.

He said that outside agencies were sometimes better placed to provide
training and resources. "But you should never mix serving military with
security operations. You need to be absolutely clear on the division
between the military and the paramilitary."

"If these things weren't privatised, uniformed men would have to do it and
that draws down your strength," said another senior retired officer
engaged in the private sector. But he warned: "There is a slight risk that
things can get out of hand and these companies become small armies
themselves."

And in Baghdad or Bogota, Kabul or Tuzla, there are armed company
employees effectively licensed to kill. On the job, say guarding a
peacekeepers' compound in Tuzla, the civilian employees are subject to the
same rules of engagement as foreign troops.

But if an American GI draws and uses his weapon in an off-duty bar brawl,
he will be subject to the US judicial military code. If an American guard
employed by the US company ITT in Tuzla does the same, he answers to
Bosnian law. By definition these companies are frequently operating in
"failed states" where national law is notional. The risk is the employees
can literally get away with murder.

Or lesser, but appalling crimes. Dyncorp, for example, a Pentagon
favourite, has the contract worth tens of millions of dollars to train an
Iraqi police force. It also won the contracts to train the Bosnian police
and was implicated in a grim sex slavery scandal, with its employees
accused of rape and the buying and selling of girls as young as 12. A
number of employees were fired, but never prosecuted. The only court cases
to result involved the two whistleblowers who exposed the episode and were
sacked.

"Dyncorp should never have been awarded the Iraqi police contract," said
Madeleine Rees, the chief UN human rights officer in Sarajevo.

Of the two court cases, one US police officer working for Dyncorp in
Bosnia, Kathryn Bolkovac, won her suit for wrongful dismissal. The other
involving a mechanic, Ben Johnston, was settled out of court. Mr
Johnston's suit against Dyncorp charged that he "witnessed co-workers and
supervisors literally buying and selling women for their own personal
enjoyment, and employees would brag about the various ages and talents of
the individual slaves they had purchased".

There are other formidable problems surfacing in what is uncharted
territory - issues of loyalty, accountability, ideology, and national
interest. By definition, a private military company is in Iraq or Bosnia
not to pursue US, UN, or EU policy, but to make money.

The growing clout of the military services corporations raises questions
about an insidious, longer-term impact on governments' planning, strategy
and decision-taking.

Mr Singer argues that for the first time in the history of the modern
nation state, governments are surrendering one of the essential and
defining attributes of statehood, the state's monopoly on the legitimate
use of force.

But for those on the receiving end, there seems scant alternative.

"I had some problems with some of the American generals," said Enes
Becirbasic, a Bosnian military official who managed the Bosnian side of
the MPRI projects to build and arm a Bosnian army. "It's a conflict of
interest. I represent our national interest, but they're businessmen. I
would have preferred direct cooperation with state organisations like Nato
or the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe. But we had no
choice. We had to use MPRI."
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Subject: [pjnews] Is the Search for WMDs Over?
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Published on Friday, December 19, 2003 by the Independent/UK
Is the Search for WMDs Over?
After Eight Months with No Discoveries, Mission Chief Quits

by Rupert Cornwell, Andrew Grice and Anne Penketh

After eight months of fruitless search, George Bush has in effect washed
his hands of the hunt for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, in whose
name the United States and Britain went to war last March.

David Kay, the CIA adviser who headed the US-led search for WMD, is to
quit, before submitting his assessment to the US President in February.

The departure of Mr Kay, a strong believer in the case for toppling Saddam
Hussein because of his alleged weapons, comes as a particular
embarrassment to Tony Blair. This week he maintained that Mr Kay had
uncovered "massive evidence" of a network of WMD laboratories.

For Mr Bush, the missing weapons are a politically charged issue. Pressed
to explain why his administration had asserted Saddam possessed weapons,
when at best fragmentary evidence of programs had been found, Mr Bush
replied: "So what's the difference? "If he were to acquire weapons, he
would be the danger," he said in an interview with ABC News' Diane Sawyer.

Mr Bush's public dismissal of the weapons issue is the latest move by
Washington and London to change the justification for war. Weapons of mass
destruction, and even weapons programs, are no longer being put forward as
the reason for the invasion.

Senior US and British officials now dwell almost exclusively on the
atrocities perpetrated by Saddam against his people, and the opportunity
provided by his removal for a regeneration of the Middle East.

Opinion polls point to the strategy working. The US public has forgotten
what it was being told every day only nine months ago about the "imminent
threat" the former Iraqi leader posed to the US, while the capture of
Saddam last Saturday had boosted the President's approval ratings to a
healthy 60 per cent-plus.

Mr Kay's departure as head of the Iraq Survey Group (ISG) is said to be
for family and personal reasons. He is not in Iraq at present but on
holiday in Washington.

Mr Kay himself sounds increasingly doubtful that chemical or biological
weapons will be found, and is said to be resentful that the US military
was less than helpful to his experts, preferring to prioritize the
counter-insurgency.

Publicly, Mr Kay insists, and points to his first interim report this
autumn as proof, that the ISG has already unearthed evidence of ongoing
weapons programs But he acknowledged on the BBC's Panorama program three
weeks ago he was prepared to be proved wrong that no weapons existed.

Downing Street played down reports of Mr Kay's departure as "rumor, not
fact", and denied that Mr Blair had given up hope that evidence of WMD
would be found. Privately, British ministers cling to the hope of finding
evidence of weapons programs rather than the actual chemical or biological
weapons systems. They hope Saddam's capture will end the "climate of fear"
among Iraqi scientists and enable them to be honest about his regime.

This week Mr Blair was accused by the Tories and Lib Dems of "spinning"
the ISG's interim report after he said they had "found massive evidence of
a huge system of clandestine laboratories, workings by scientists, plans
to develop long range ballistic missiles".

The ISG, set up in June, has a nominal staff of 1,400 specialists,
analysts and translators, all theoretically dedicated to the search for
WMD. But the numbers in the field have been less: two teams of 20 at most.
In October, the group's strength dwindled further when Donald Rumsfeld,
the Defense Secretary, ordered many personnel to be transferred to the
regular forces to help counter the growing rebellion.

Despite the capture and interrogation of many senior Iraqi officials,
there has been no breakthrough. Saddam is said to have told investigators
what Iraq told the UN before the invasion: that it no longer had banned
weapons.

But the seizure of Saddam has given some American officials new hope that
banned materials will be found.

Peter Kilfoyle, a former Defense minister, said Saddam's capture had not
relieved the pressure on Mr Blair for weapons to be tracked down.

The former deputy chief UN weapons inspector Charles Duelfer said: "What
is important is Saddam's intentions. The case can be made that he may not
have had existing weapons, but his intention was to outlast the inspectors
and reconstruct his weapons capabilities."
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Subject: [pjnews] 9/11 Chair: Attack Was Preventable
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http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/12/17/eveningnews/main589137.shtml

9/11 Chair: Attack Was Preventable
(CBS NEWS)

For the first time, the chairman of the independent commission
investigating the Sept. 11 attacks is saying publicly that 9/11 could have
and should have been prevented, reports CBS News Correspondent Randall
Pinkston.

"This is a very, very important part of history and we've got to tell it
right," said Thomas Kean.

"As you read the report, you're going to have a pretty clear idea what
wasn't done and what should have been done," he said. "This was not
something that had to happen."

Appointed by the Bush administration, Kean, a former Republican governor
of New Jersey, is now pointing fingers inside the administration and
laying blame.

"There are people that, if I was doing the job, would certainly not be in
the position they were in at that time because they failed. They simply
failed," Kean said.

To find out who failed and why, the commission has navigated a political
landmine, threatening a subpoena to gain access to the president's
top-secret daily briefs. Those documents may shed light on one of the most
controversial assertions of the Bush administration – that there was never
any thought given to the idea that terrorists might fly an airplane into a
building.

"I don't think anybody could have predicted that they would try to use an
airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile," said national
security adviser Condoleeza Rice on May 16, 2002.

"How is it possible we have a national security advisor coming out and
saying we had no idea they could use planes as weapons when we had FBI
records from 1991 stating that this is a possibility," said Kristen
Breitweiser, one of four New Jersey widows who lobbied Congress and the
president to appoint the commission.

The widows want to know why various government agencies didn't connect the
dots before Sept. 11, such as warnings from FBI offices in Minnesota and
Arizona about suspicious student pilots.

"If you were to tell me that two years after the murder of my husband that
we wouldn't have one question answered, I wouldn't believe it,"
Breitweiser said.

Kean admits the commission also has more questions than answers.

Asked whether we should at least know if people sitting in the
decision-making spots on that critical day are still in those positions,
Kean said, "Yes, the answer is yes. And we will."

Kean promises major revelations in public testimony beginning next month
from top officials in the FBI, CIA, Defense Department, National Security
Agency and, maybe, President Bush and former President Clinton.
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Subject: [pjnews] Letters from the troops in Iraq
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The activist website moveon.org has sponsored a competition for people to
send in their best 30 second anti-Bush ads.  The top submission-- picked
by a panel of celebrity judges-- will air on television in January during
the week of Bush's State of the Union address.  You can vote on the ads
and help narrow down the best submissions by going to
http://www.bushin30seconds.org

Here's my favorite from the ones I've seen so far:
http://tinyurl.com/3d6ax

Scott
___________________

Letters the Troops Have Sent Me... by Michael Moore

December 19, 2003

As we approach the holidays, I've been thinking a lot about our kids who
are in the
armed forces serving in Iraq. I've received hundreds of letters from our
troops in
Iraq -- and they are telling me something very different from what we are
seeing on
the evening news.

What they are saying to me, often eloquently and in heart-wrenching words,
is that
they were lied to -- and this war has nothing to do with the security of
the United
States of America.

I've written back and spoken on the phone to many of them and I've asked a
few of
them if it would be OK if I posted their letters on my website and they've
said yes.
They do so at great personal risk (as they may face disciplinary measures for
exercising their right to free speech). I thank them for their bravery.

Lance Corporal George Batton of the United States Marine Corps, who
returned from
Iraq in September (after serving in MP company Alpha), writes the following:

“You'd be surprised at how many of the guys I talked to in my company and
others
believed that the president's scare about Saddam's WMD was a bunch of
bullshit and
that the real motivation for this war was only about money.  There was
also a lot of
crap that many companies, not just marine companies, had to go through
with not
getting enough equipment to fulfill their missions when they crossed the
border.  It
was a miracle that our company did what it did the two months it was
staying in Iraq
during the war….  We were promised to go home on June 8th, and found out
that it was
a lie and we got stuck doing missions for an extra three months.  Even
some of the
most radical conservatives in our company including our company gunnery
sergeant got
a real bad taste in their mouth about the Marine corps, and maybe even
president
Bush.”:

Here's what Specialist Mike Prysner of the U.S. Army wrote to me:

“Dear Mike -- I’m writing this without knowing if it’ll ever get to
you…I’m writing
it from the trenches of a war (that’s still going on,) not knowing why I’m
here or
when I’m leaving. I’ve toppled statues and vandalized portraits, while
wearing an
American flag on my sleeve, and struggling to learn how to understand… I
joined the
army as soon as I was eligible – turned down a writing scholarship to a state
university, eager to serve my country, ready to die for the ideals I fell
in love
with. Two years later I found myself moments away from a landing onto a
pitch black
airstrip, ready to charge into a country I didn't believe I belonged in,
with your
words (from the Oscars) repeating in my head.  My time in Iraq has always
involved
finding things to convince myself that I can be proud of my actions; that
I was a
part of something just. But no matter what pro-war argument I came up with, I
pictured my smirking commander-in-chief, thinking he was fooling a nation…

An Army private, still in Iraq and wishing to remain anonymous, writes:

“I would like to tell you how difficult it is to serve under a man who was
never
elected. Because he is the president and my boss, I have to be very
careful as to
who and what i say about him. This also concerns me a great deal... to
limit the
military's voice is to limit exactly what America stands for... and the
greater
percentage of us feel completely underpowered. He continually sets my
friends, my
family, and several others in a kind of danger that frightens me beyond
belief. I
know several other soldiers who feel the same way and discuss the
situation with me
on a regular basis.”

Jerry Oliver of the U.S. Army, who has just returned from Baghdad, writes:

“I have just returned home from "Operation Iraqi Freedom". I spent 5
months in
Baghdad, and a total of 3 years in the U.S. Army. I was recently
discharged with
Honorable valor and returned to the States only to be horrified by what
I've seen my
country turn into. I'm now 22 years old and have discovered America is such a
complicated place to live, and moreover, Americans are almost oblivious to
what's
been happening to their country. America has become "1984." Homeland
security is
teaching us to spy on one another and forcing us to become anti-social.
Americans
are willingly sacrificing our freedoms in the name of security, the same
Freedoms I
was willing to put my life on the line for. The constitution is in
jeopardy. As Gen.
Tommy Franks said, (broken down of course) One more terrorist attack and the
constitution will hold no meaning.”

And a Specialist in the U.S. Army wrote to me this week about the capture
of Saddam
Hussein:

“Wow, 130,000 troops on the ground, nearly 500 deaths and over a billion
dollars a
day, but they caught a guy living in a hole. Am I supposed to be dazzled?”

There are lots more of these, straight from the soldiers who have been on
the front
lines and have seen first hand what this war is really about.

I have also heard from their friends and relatives, and from other
veterans. A
mother writing on behalf of her son (whose name we have withheld) wrote:

“My son said that this is the worst it's been since the "end" of the war. 
He said
the troops have been given new rules of engagement, and that they are to
"take out"
any persons who aggress on the Americans, even if it results in
"collateral" damage.
 Unfortunately, he did have to kill someone in self defense and was told
by his
commanding officer ‘Good kill.’

"My son replied ‘You just don't get it, do you?’

"Here we are...Vietnam all over again.”

>From a 56 year old Navy veteran, relating a conversation he had with a
young man who
was leaving for Iraq the next morning:

“What disturbed me most was when I asked him what weapons he carried as a
truck
driver. He told me the new M-16, model blah blah blah, stuff never made
sense to me
even when I was in. I asked him what kind of side arm they gave him and
his fellow
drivers. He explained, "Sir, Reservists are not issued side arms or flack
vests as
there was not enough money to outfit all the Reservists, only Active
Personnel". I
was appalled to say the least.

"Bush is a jerk agreed, but I can't believe he is this big an Asshole not
providing
protection and arms for our troops to fight HIS WAR!”

>From a 40-year old veteran of the Marine Corps:

“Why is it that we are forever waving the flag of sovereignty, EXCEPT when it
concerns our financial interests in other sovereign states?  What gives us
the right
to tell anyone else how they should govern themselves, and live their
lives?  Why
can't we just lead the world by example?  I mean no wonder the world hates
us, who
do they get to see?  Young assholes in uniforms with guns, and rich, old,
white
tourists! Christ, could we put up a worse first impression?”

(To read more from my Iraq mailbag -- and to read these above letters in
full -- go
to my website:
http://www.michaelmoore.com/books-films/dudewheresmycountry/soldierletters/index.php)

Remember back in March, once the war had started, how risky it was to make
any
anti-war comments to people you knew at work or school or, um, at awards
ceremonies?
One thing was for sure -- if you said anything against the war, you had
BETTER
follow it up immediately with this line: "BUT I SUPPORT THE TROOPS!"
Failing to do
that meant that you were not only unpatriotic and un-American, your
dissent meant
that YOU were putting our kids in danger, that YOU might be the reason
they lose
their lives. Dissent was only marginally tolerated IF you pledged your
"support" for
our soldiers.

Of course, you needed to do no such thing. Why? Because people like you
have ALWAYS
supported "the troops." Who are these troops? They are our poor, our
working class.
Most of them enlisted because it was about the only place to get a job or
receive
the guarantee of a college education. You, my good friends, have ALWAYS,
through
your good works, your contributions, your activism, your votes, SUPPORTED
these very
kids who come from the other side of the tracks. You NEVER need to be
defensive when
it comes to your "support" for the "troops" -- you are the only ones who
have ALWAYS
been there for them.

It is Mr. Bush and his filthy rich cronies -- whose sons and daughters
will NEVER
see a day in a uniform -- they are the ones who do NOT support our troops.
Our
soldiers joined the military and, in doing so, offered to give THEIR LIVES
for US if
need be. What a tremendous gift that is -- to be willing to die so that
you and I
don't have to! To be willing to shed their blood so that we may be free.
To serve in
our place, so that WE don't have to serve. What a tremendous act of
selflessness and
generosity! Here they are, these 18, 19, and 20-year olds, most of whom
have had to
suffer under an unjust economic system that is set up NOT to benefit THEM
-- these
kids who have lived their first 18 years in the worst parts of town, going
to the
most miserable schools, living in danger and learning often to go without,
watching
their parents struggle to get by and then be humiliated by a system that
is always
looking to make life harder for them by cutting their benefits, their
education,
their libraries, their fire and police, their future.

And then, after this miserable treatment, these young men and women,
instead of
coming after US to demand a more just society, they go and join the army
to DEFEND
us and our way of life! It boggles the mind, doesn't it? They not only
deserve our
thanks, they deserve a big piece of the pie that we dine on, those of us
who never
have to worry about taking a bullet while we fret over which Palm Pilot to
buy the
nephew for Christmas.

In fact, all that these kids in the army ask for in return from us is our
promise
that we never send them into harm's way unless it is for the DEFENSE of
our nation,
to protect us from being killed by "the enemy."

And that promise, my friends, has been broken. It has been broken in the
worst way
imaginable. We have sent them into war NOT to defend us, not to protect
us, not to
spare the slaughter of innocents or allies. We have sent them to war so
Bush and
Company can control the second largest supply of oil in the world. We have
sent them
into war so that the Vice President's company can bilk the government for
billions
of dollars. We have sent them into war based on a lie of weapons of mass
destruction
and the lie that Saddam helped plan 9-11 with Osama bin Laden.

By doing all of this, Mr. Bush has proven that it is HE who does not
support our
troops. It is HE who has put their lives in danger, and it is HE who is
responsible
for the nearly 500 American kids who have now died for NO honest, decent
reason
whatsoever.

The letters I've received from the friends and relatives of our kids over
there make
it clear that they are sick of this war and they are scared to death that
they may
never see their loved ones again. It breaks my heart to read these
letters. I wish
there was something I could do. I wish there was something we all could do.

Maybe there is. As Christmas approaches (and Hanukkah begins tonight), I
would like
to suggest a few things each of us could do to make the holidays a bit
brighter --
if not safer -- for our troops and their families back home.

1. Many families of soldiers are hurting financially, especially those
families of
reservists and National Guard who are gone from the full-time jobs ("just one
weekend a month and we'll pay for your college education!"). You can help
them by
contacting the Armed Forces Emergency Relief Funds at
http://www.afrtrust.org/
(ignore the rah-rah military stuff and remember that this is money that
will help
out these families who are living in near-poverty). Each branch has their
own relief
fund, and the money goes to help the soldiers and families with paying for
food and
rent, medical and dental expenses, personal needs when pay is delayed, and
funeral
expenses. You can find more ways to support the troops, from buying
groceries for
their families to donating your airline miles so they can get home for a
visit, by
going to my website, www.michaelmoore.com.

2. Thousands of Iraqi civilians have been killed by our bombs and
indiscriminate
shooting. We must help protect them and their survivors. You can do so by
supporting
the Quakers' drive to provide infant care kits to Iraqi hospitals—find out
more
here: http://www.afsc.org/iraq/relief/default.shtm. You can also help the
people of
Iraq by supporting the Iraqi Red Crescent Society—here’s how to contact them:
http://www.ifrc.org/address/iq.asp, or you can make an online donation
through the
International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies by
going here:
http://www.ifrc.org/HELPNOW/donate/donate_iraq.asp.

3. With 130,000 American men and women currently in Iraq, every community
in this
country has either sent someone to fight in this war or is home to family
members of
someone fighting in this war. Organize care packages through your local
community
groups, activist groups, and churches and send them to these young men and
women.
The military no longer accepts packages addressed to “Any Soldier,” so
you’ll have
to get their names first. Figure out who you can help from your area, and
send them
books, CDs, games, footballs, gloves, blankets—anything that may make
their extended
(and extended and extended…) stay in Iraq a little brighter and more
comfortable.
You can also sponsor care packages to American troops through the USO:
http://www.usocares.org/.

4. Want to send a soldier a free book or movie? I’ll start by making mine
available
for free to any soldier serving in Iraq. Just send me their name and
address in Iraq
(or, if they have already left Iraq, where they are now) and the first
thousand
emails I get at [EMAIL PROTECTED] will receive a free copy of
"Dude..." or a
free “Bowling…” DVD.

5. Finally, we all have to redouble our efforts to end this war and bring
the troops
home. That's the best gift we could give them -- get them out of harm's
way ASAP and
insist that the U.S. go back to the UN and have them take over the
rebuilding of
Iraq (with the US and Britain funding it, because, well, we have to pay
for our
mess). Get involved with your local peace group—you can find one near
where you live
by visiting United for Peace, at: http://www.unitedforpeace.org and the
Vietnam
Veterans Against War: http://www.vvaw.org/contact/. A large demonstration
is being
planned for March 20, check here for more details:
http://www.unitedforpeace.org/article.php?id=2136. To get a “Bring Them
Home Now”
bumper sticker or a poster for your yard, go here:
http://bringthemhomenow.org/yellowribbon_graphics/index.html. Also, back only
anti-war candidates for Congress and President (Kucinich, Dean, Clark,
Sharpton).

I know it feels hopeless. That's how they want us to feel. Don't give up.
We owe it
to these kids, the troops WE SUPPORT, to get them the hell outta there and
back home
so they can help organize the drive to remove the war profiteers from
office next
November.

To all who serve in our armed forces, to their parents and spouses and
loved ones,
we offer to you the regrets of millions and the promise that we will right
this
wrong and do whatever we can to thank you for offering to risk your lives
for us.
That your life was put at risk for Bush's greed is a disgrace and a
travesty, the
likes of which I have not seen in my lifetime.

Please be safe, come home soon, and know that our thoughts and prayers are
with you
during this season when many of us celebrate the birth of the prince of
"peace."

Yours,

Michael Moore
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
www.michaelmoore.com
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Florida Today
http://www.floridatoday.com/!NEWSROOM/localstoryN1216NELSON.htm

15 December 2003

Senators were told Iraqi weapons could hit U.S.
Nelson said claim made during classified briefing

By John McCarthy
FLORIDA TODAY

U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson said Monday the Bush administration last year told
him and other senators that Iraq not only had weapons of mass destruction,
but they had the means to deliver them to East Coast cities.

Nelson, D-Tallahassee, said about 75 senators got that news during a
classified briefing before last October's congressional vote authorizing
the use of force to remove Saddam Hussein from power. Nelson voted in
favor of using military force.

Nelson said he couldn't reveal who in the administration gave the briefing.

The White House directed questions about the matter to the Department of
Defense. Defense officials had no comment on Nelson's claim.

Nelson said the senators were told Iraq had both biological and chemical
weapons, notably anthrax, and it could deliver them to cities along the
Eastern seaboard via unmanned aerial vehicles, commonly known as drones.

"They have not found anything that resembles an UAV that has that
capability," Nelson said.

Nelson delivered the news during a half-hour conference call with
reporters Monday afternoon. The senator, who is on a seven-nation trade
mission to South America, was calling from an airport in Santiago, Chile.

"That's news," said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a
Washington, D.C.-area military and intelligence think tank. "I had not
heard that that was the assessment of the intelligence community. I had
not heard that the Congress had been briefed on this."

Since the late 1990s, there have been several reports that Iraq was
converting a fleet of Czechoslovakian jet fighters into UAVs, as well as
testing smaller drones. And in a speech in Cincinnati last October, Bush
mentioned the vehicles. "We're concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of
using these UAVs for missions targeting the United States," the president
said.

Nelson, though, said the administration told senators Iraq had gone beyond
exploring and developed the means of hitting the U.S. with weapons of mass
destruction.

Nelson wouldn't say what the original source of the intelligence was, but
said it contradicted other intelligence reports senators had received. He
said he wants to find out why there was so much disagreement about the
weapons. "If that is an intelligence failure . . . we better find that out
so we don't have an intelligence failure in the future."

Pike said any UAVs Iraq might have had would have had a range of only
several hundred kilometers, enough to hit targets in the Middle East but
not the United States. To hit targets on the East Coast, such drones would
have to be launched from a ship in Atlantic. He said it wasn't out of the
question for Iraq to have secretly acquired a tramp steamer from which
such vehicles could have been launched.

"The notion that someone could launch a missile from a ship off our shores
has been on Rummy's mind for years," Pike said, referring to Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

Sen. Bob Graham, who voted against using military force in Iraq, didn't
return phone calls concerning the briefing. Spokespersons for Reps. Dave
Weldon and Tom Feeney said neither congressman could say if they had
received similar briefings since they don't comment on classified
information.
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see also: http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/1220-03.htm

A judge presiding over the cases of free trade protesters said in court
that he saw ''no less than 20 felonies committed by police officers''
during the November demonstrations, adding to a chorus of complaints about
police conduct...

---[snip]---

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

--> 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/2003-12/18landau.cfm


FTAA: Good For Big Us Corporations; Bad For The People
By Saul Landau

As kids we swapped baseball cards, or sold them for money (10 cents). But
today trade means something very different. Indeed, every child in the
Americas should understand that those attending the Free Trade Agreement
of the Americas (FTAA) meeting in Miami do not seek to improve your
leverage in exchanging vintage Hank Aaron or Pele cards for Ted Williams
or Diego Maradona; nor will it help small Florida manufacturers of zippers
or paper boxes better sell their wares in Uruguay or Belize.

FTAA mavens envision a Hemispheric “free-trade zone,” excluding Cuba, of
course. The CEOs and government officials who see the world through
corporate lenses boast about the potential of “the world's largest free
market.” The combined gross domestic product of the countries involved
(800 million consumers) equals $13 trillion, the FTAAers assert. FTAA
would extend NAFTA (The North American Free Trade Agreement between the
US, Canada and Mexico) from Hudson Bay to the tip of Patagonia (minus
Cuba, of course).

The very thought of such a giant Latin American and Caribbean market
awaiting their entrance has led major US corporations to become the FTAA’s
biggest promoters. The FTAA looms like a temptress for corporate
acquisitiveness. A services chapter of the Agreement, for example, might
well increase already existing pressure on hemispheric governments to sell
public services to private foreign investors. US companies could then
offer expensive health care to poor Latin Americans, rid them of public
schools and offering the highest (in cost) level of private education.

Humongous corporations would also find new opportunities to take over
public transport, telephone, gas, electricity, water and sewage treatment.
FTAA would even encourage governments to privatize nursing homes and day
care centers.The public would lose its historic property, and foreign
investors would gain rights denied to local business. Indeed, after
governments cede public property to private monoliths the Treaty then
gives these foreign “investors” the right to sue governments that
interfere with their “rights” to make profits.

For these reasons and more, tens of thousands of anti-free traders will
appear in Miami to demonstrate for “fair trade.” “Free” means “free for
takeover” by a handful of US banks and corporations; freedom to invest in
nations with low-age labor and no “anti-business” barriers like taxes or
environmental and workplace safety regulations to inhibit their
profit-making proclivities.

Imperial motives have not changed over the centuries. But since they can
no longer utilize the practices of past centuries (outright looting), the
major “investors” now seek legal arrangements to obtain the same benefits.
Instead of US marines enforcing their “rights” to profits from the third
world (the Gunboat, Dollar and Good Neighbor Policies in the first part of
the 20th Century), they now prefer to go to the courts. “Trade treaties”
signify governments putting their “Good Housekeeping” seals of approval on
business arrangements that screw the poor and the environment.

FTAA presumes non-existent levels of equality between the signing
countries. During the 1993 NAFT debate, its proponents convinced Congress
that Mexico merited free trade partnership with the United States and
Canada because she had achieved a mature commitment to democracy and clean
government. Some zealous NAFTA advocates offered fantasies in place of
facts. In his July 20, 1993 Los Angeles Times column, former Secretary of
State Henry Kissinger has Mexican President Carlos Salinas turning “Mexico
on its head.” In addition to opening his country to foreign investment and
free competition, Salinas “quelled corruption.”

Shortly after Kissinger wrote these words, Salinas became the focus of
major scandals, including murder and a “$25 million a plate dinner.”
Salinas invited those who had benefited most from his privatizing schemes
to an elite dinner, where they could repay their debt to him by putting up
$25 million each for the Salinas family investment fund, of course.

Kissinger, who made no comment on this affair, waxed eloquent on “a
Western Hemisphere-wide free trade system -- with NAFTA as the initial
step.” Between 1970-3 Henry encouraged the Chilean military to unseat the
freely elected Allende government. He supported the installation of the
antithesis of freedom in Chile a military dictatorship. But for Kissinger
NAFTA represented real freedom: “a system for global free trade based on
incentives for those willing to abide by its principles and by penalties
for those nations not playing by the rules.”

In 1993, Clinton came to the presidency agnostic on free trade. Most
Americans at the time had not even heard of NAFTA. But Clinton quickly
turned missionary on the subject and regularly preached neo-liberal
doctrine at home and to Western Hemisphere leaders except for Castro, of
course. Clinton tempted them with his vision of a Free Trade Area of the
Americas. But between the 1994 onset of NAFTA and the planned next steps
to expand “free trade,” millions of people began to understand the down
side to these arrangements.

In Mexico, maquilas (foreign owned export factories) did generate growth.
But in 2000, recession hit. Some maquilas closed or reduced shifts. These
engines of development responded directly to US recession by cutting
investment in Mexico. The 9/11/01 attacks reverberated into another hit on
“free trade.” “Security” temporarily interrupted the smooth border
crossings needed for successful maquila business. Meanwhile, some of the
very investors who had sung Mexico’s praises for its cheap labor and lax
enforcement policies on environment and worker health and safety began to
move their holdings to even cheaper labor markets China.

Mexico took what the bankers call “a hit.” Tens of thousands who had left
the countryside to seek work in the maquila dominated frontier cities
found themselves jobless but now in a dangerous and polluted environment.
In places like Ciudad Juarez, air quality has gone from very bad to
absolutely terrible. Women live in a social climate dominated by the rapes
and mutilations of several hundred maquila workers.

In the Southern Cone “free trade” failed even more dramatically. On
December 20, 2001, the Argentine economy collapsed. Riots ensued. Banks
closed. The standard of living dropped catastrophically. The government
that had administered the neo-liberal model at its optimal level declared
a state of siege.

In December 1998, Venezuelans, who held bloody riots in 1989 to protest
IMF “free trade” schemes, ousted the traditional parties and elected
anti-free trader Hugo Chavez to the presidency. Similarly, in Ecuador and
Peru anti “free trade” sentiment had forced political changes.

Most importantly, Brazilians elected Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva as
president, a man skeptical about free trade’s benefits. U.S. Trade
Representative Robert Zoellick called Lula’s representatives “won’t dos.”
He referred to Brazil’s leadership role in a coalition of 22 countries
against U.S. and European positions at the September 2003 World Trade
Organization meeting in Cancun. From the Brazilian point of view,
“systematic arrogance”--an understatement--described the US position.
Until the Cancun meeting, “developed” country delegates have relied on
their ability to bribe, intimidate and distract enough representatives of
the poorer nations so as to break up any block such as the one formed in
Cancun. The standard US position “do as I say, not as I do” don’t you dare
subsidize your agriculture or steel industry as we subsidize ours --
position has begun to draw fire.

In 2004, Bush sees it as an election year necessity to continue to
subsidize US agribusiness and raise tariffs on selected third world
imports to protect uncompetitive US industries. Brazilian exports have
suffered. Bush hypocritically accused Brazil, the victim, of “dumping”
goods on the subsidized US market. The US delegates, showing imperial
chutzpah, also proposed that Brazil grant US investors even greater access
to their national economy by allowing them into the exclusive club of
government contracting. The Brazilian delegates tried to keep a veneer of
calm as they made meaningless counterproposals.

US delegates now try to induce Latin American leaders to resuscitate
Clinton’s tarnished utopian dream. This gang of neo-liberal fanatics has
ignored the basic fact: the model doesn’t work. It has taken massive
demonstrations in various cities against the very arrangements the free
traders have celebrated to dramatize that fact.

In 1999, between 50 and 100 thousand anti-free traders, union members,
environmentalists, small farmers, and just plain folk demonstrated at the
Seattle World Trade Organization summit. Following the Seattle affair, the
anti-globalization movement spread. Protests erupted at every major
meeting of the unelected trade elite.Now, this unelected elite who decide
on world economic arrangements, live in fear of demonstrators as well they
should.

In October 2003, Bolivians rose up and at a cost of more than eighty dead
kicked out their “free trade” president, Sanchez de Losada, who returned
to Miami where he belonged. Under free market arrangements foreign
companies like Bechtel owned Bolivian water, before the Bolivians said:
“basta ya!” Perhaps, the demonstrators and the presence of the pathetic
Sanchez de Losada in Miami will bring the message home to the FTAA
negotiators. The movement for global justice will counter the push for
corporate globalization. And all the Miami police force, making arrests as
they will, cannot contain the just anger of those who represent the vast
majority of the world’s population.


See Landau's essays in Spanish on http://www.rprogreso.com Landau’s new
book, THE PRE-EMPTIVE EMPIRE: A GUIDE TO BUSH’S KINGDOM, was just released
by Pluto Press. He teaches at Cal Poly Pomona University and is a fellow
of the Institute for Policy Studies.
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http://www.nypress.com/16/50/news&columns/signorile.cfm

Cruisin’ for a Bruisin’
No luxury liner can insulate the GOP from New York’s masses.

by Michelangelo Signorile


The plan by House Majority Leader, Tom "the Hammer" DeLay, to quarantine
Republican politicians, donors, delegates and assorted other GOPers out on
a cruise ship in the Hudson during next year’s Republican National
Convention has been sunk. But for Bush opponents, there sure is a lot of
blood in the water. With Democrats hooting and howling, and many fellow
Republicans quietly wincing, DeLay caved, but only after letting the
controversy play out for a while, so determined was he to have his
colleagues stay docked off Manhattan Island. The dramatic debacle revealed
that the Republicans–including Tough Guy DeLay–are wimps of the first
order, scared to death of mingling among the Clinton-loving,
sodomite-friendly masses.

What are they truly afraid of? Some have speculated about a fear of
terrorism–that new old standby–particularly since DeLay’s spokesman said
the ship would provide an "opportunity to stay in one place, in a secure
fashion." But it’s doubtful that security concerns were the main reason
for leasing the ship. Putting the Republicans on an ocean liner, after
all, only makes for a bigger target. Besides, they’d still have to
navigate the streets of the city to get to Madison Square Garden, where
the actual convention will take place. And Republican leaders, including
the folks in the White House, knew what they were getting into when they
picked New York, a major terrorist target.

The real fear is of protestors and the negative media coverage caused by
them, and for good reason: Hundreds of thousands of angry Bush opponents
could quite possibly hit the streets of Manhattan next August 30 to
September 2. With the dozens of events that usually punctuate the
Republican National Convention–events that would normally take place in
restaurants, nightclubs, bars, parks and outdoor spaces all over the
city–it will be impossible to control the swarms of demonstrators and keep
them out of the range of cameras. A few thousand protestors can be
cordoned off in fenced-in pen blocks from the convention site–as the GOP
convention planners, in cahoots with local Republican authorities, did at
their Houston convention (1992), their San Diego convention (1996) and
their Philadelphia convention (2000), all of which I covered. But a
hundred thousand people–the size of the anti-war marches here last
spring–or even a quarter of that, is a mob too big to keep back in a
relatively small, compact place like Manhattan, particularly if various
factions among the demonstrators target the different Republican events.

At the San Diego convention, I remember when the anti-abortion crowd, led
by fanatical, right-wing organizer Phyllis Schlafly, held a "Whale of the
Party" day at Sea World. T-shirts and balloons that read "Life of the
Party" were handed out. Porpoises and whales frolicked amid the
blue-haired ladies carrying dead fetus posters. Yes, it was quite lovely.
Where do you suppose they’ll have their bash here? The New York Public
Library? The Met? Union Square? And are New Yorkers, and the untold
numbers of others who might come into the city to protest, going to let
such events go on undisturbed? Not if I–or you, hopefully–can help it.
That’s why the ship idea–the 2240-room Norwegian Dawn, with 15 decks and
14 bars and lounges–was brilliant for the Republicans, if they could have
pulled it off. It would keep the protestors far away from gatherings, and
it would keep the most extreme of the wingnuts locked up, like your crazy
old aunt hidden in the attic. It would also provide a space for the
upscale fundraisers–the kind filled with glittery, supremely tacky
Texans–undeterred by chanting masses or infiltrators who might stand up
and make a peaceful but embarrassing protest.

When the Republicans decided on New York last January–and when they pushed
the convention forward a week so that it would be closer to the 9/11
anniversary, which Bush could milk for photo-ops–there weren’t supposed to
be any protestors in New York. In the neo-con hawks’ vision of the future,
by next September even New Yorkers, who were as supportive as most of the
rest of the country about the war in Afghanistan, would be thankful that
we invaded Iraq, found weapons of mass destruction and saved the world.
We’d be eternally grateful for Bush’s supposed leadership in the days
after 9/11, happy to anoint him during that terrible day’s anniversary
right after his party’s convention, believing his insinuations of a
connection between 9/11 and Saddam Hussein. Or, we wouldn’t care whether
or not there is such a connection.

Things went a vastly different way. And like Bush’s recent, long-planned
trip to London, a Republican convention that was planned here a long time
ago now seems pretty ill-considered. There’s the anger and resentment
among New Yorkers over the administration’s stalling the 9/11 commission,
which the White House resisted from the beginning. There’s the cutting of
funds for reconstruction and to fight terrorism on the domestic front.
We’ve now found out that the air quality after the attacks was pretty
horrible, but that Bush’s Environmental Protection Agency didn’t want to
tell us perhaps for fear we wouldn’t go back to work. In the lead-up to
the war came the demonizing and diminishing of the U.N., which is as much
a part of this city as, well, September 11. And then came the war in Iraq
itself, which New Yorkers have opposed with more vigor than most of the
rest of the country in part because they have been fearful of the
ramifications in the form of terrorist attacks in years to come.

In the first days after 9/11, people were comforted by Bush’s appearances
at Ground Zero, especially since he was promising to find the terrorists
who committed the mass murder and destruction, including Osama bin Laden.
But nowadays, Bush can’t even say bin Laden’s name. The thought of his
using 9/11 as the capper for his convention is enraging to many. And a lot
of people, including the families of many victims, will no doubt be making
their voices heard during Bush’s convention.

In light of all that, the ship idea made sense and was certainly a way to
do some damage control and diminish negative publicity. It wasn’t so
different from the cancellation of the traditional carriage parade through
the streets of London during Bush’s state visit to Buckingham Palace, or
his cancellation of a speech before Britain’s Parliament (where the
tradition is for opposition party members to heckle a speaker with whom
they disagree). Both were chocked up to security concerns. But you have to
wonder if speaking before Britain’s Parliament is really more dangerous
than flying into Baghdad on Thanksgiving Day, something Bush did with a
bunch of reporters at his side.

So, the Republicans’ ship may have gone down. But if Bush opponents are
smart, we’ll smell that blood in the water and make sure there’s a feeding
frenzy at next year’s convention.


Michelangelo Signorile hosts a daily radio show on Sirius Satellite Radio,
stream 149.  He can be reached at http://www.signorile.com
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The Threat From Computerized Voting Machines:
A Message from Actor Martin Sheen

I am writing to you to ask for your help in preventing a scandal that
could shake our nation to the roots of our democratic principles. Please
take a moment to send a free fax to your Representative in Congress, and
then to pass this letter on to your friends and family in the hope that
they will help too.

We start with a principle so obvious it seems strange even to write it:
For a democracy to work, the people must believe that balloting is
conducted fairly and votes are counted accurately. Americans feel
justifiable pride that our nation has created a system to ensure this,
including provisions for recounts.

In the wake of the punch card voting mess in Florida, the federal
government dedicated billions of dollars to help states purchase new
voting machines. Some pioneering states have begun purchasing a new type
of touch screen computerized voting machine. These machines register votes
on a memory chip and then digitally transmit the results via telephone
modem to election headquarters.

We can only hope that neither glitches nor tampering will change or erase
any of our votes. We all know that computers sometimes crash and lose
data. Power cords get pulled out of the wall. And what better trophy for a
hacker--or over zealous campaign worker--than to skew the outcome of the
actual election?

There is a simple solution to these problems. The California Secretary of
State has ordered that these new computerized voting machines print out a
paper copy of your vote for your approval before the vote is registered.
These printouts would then be saved in case the machines malfunction or
there is any question as to whether or not they have been tampered with.
Without them we would just have to trust the companies that make the
machines--companies like Diebold whose CEO, Walden W. O'Dell, recently
wrote in a fundraising letter for the Republicans, "I am committed to
helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the President next year."

Without a paper trail, there is no way to reliably validate an election or
conduct a reliable recount. It's that simple.

To send a fax (text below) to your Representative urging him or her to
support voting machines across the country that we can trust, just go to:
http://action.truemajority.org/ctt.asp?u=184283&l=255


POWERFUL LETTER TO THE EDITOR FEATURE

Letters to the editor are another powerful way to influence your
Congressmembers. This feature uses state-of-the-art technology to make it
really easy for you to send a letter to the editor. Click here to give it
a try: http://action.truemajority.org/ctt.asp?u=184283&l=261

TrueMajority is working on this important issue with some of our partners,
including Working Assets, The Electronic Frontier Foundation, and
MoveOn.org.  The California Voter Foundation has lots of great links to
these groups and news articles about this problem. You can find them here:
http://www.calvoter.org/votingtechnology.html

The New York Times also did a great editorial on this issue. You can find
it here: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/08/opinion/08MON1.html

So please take a moment to protect your right--our right--to make sure
every vote is counted and every election is fair.

Thanks for your help,
Martin Sheen


Here is the letter that TrueMajority will fax to your Member of Congress:

Dear Representative:

The bedrock upon which any democracy is built is confidence that elections
are free, fair and accurate. Yet companies such as Diebold are selling
machines that leave no tangible evidence of a person's vote. We all know
that computers sometimes crash and data is lost, yet the companies selling
these machines refuse to let election officials inspect the inner workings
of the machines or software.

Please support legislation that would simply require that I as a voter be
able to approve a paper copy of my choices before they are registered in
the computer. These anonymous paper copies can then be saved. If there is
ever a question about the intent of the voters the paper ballots can be
checked and both voters and candidates can be confident in the outcome.

I urge you to support this simple measure that can prevent a real crisis
in our democracy.

Sincerely,
(We will insert your name and address here.)
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Subject: [pjnews] Noam Chomsky on Saddam Hussein's Capture
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http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/1222-07.htm

Published on Monday, December 22, 2003 by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Obituaries

JAMES KNOX, 78, died peacefully on December 15, 2003.

Although born in Nebraska, he lived in Seattle for many years, enjoying
all it has to offer including his favorite, live theatre. Jim indulged his
curiosity for diverse cultures by traveling worldwide. He resided in both
Sweden and Japan, bringing home an appreciation for topless beaches but
not sushi. Jim was a man of wit, talent, and many accomplishments. He was
a respected educator, historian, and journalist. He was active in
politics, educational union development, and most recently, a decorated
crossing guard. Jim was known as a crafty bridge player, a smooth dancer,
and in his younger days, a connoisseur of fine martinis. As well as a
close circle of friends, Jim shared his life with his beautiful and most
patient wife Barbro, daughters Diane, Elise, Jules, granddaughters
Jennifer, Morelia, and Margaret, grandson Madison, and
great-granddaughters Sydney and Quinn. He will be deeply missed but
fabulously remembered as the loving, compassionate, and player of wits he
was.

In lieu of flowers, it would be Jim's wish, to donate to the campaign to
Absolutely Not Re-Elect George W. Bush.

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

http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=17435

Dictators R Us
By Noam Chomsky
December 22, 2003

All people who have any concern for human rights, justice and integrity
should be overjoyed by the capture of Saddam Hussein, and should be
awaiting a fair trial for him by an international tribunal.

An indictment of Saddam's atrocities would include not only his slaughter
and gassing of Kurds in 1988 but also, rather crucially, his massacre of
the Shiite rebels who might have overthrown him in 1991.

At the time, Washington and its allies held the "strikingly unanimous view
(that) whatever the sins of the Iraqi leader, he offered the West and the
region a better hope for his country's stability than did those who have
suffered his repression," reported Alan Cowell in the New York Times.

Last December, Jack Straw, Britain's foreign secretary, released a dossier
of Saddam's crimes drawn almost entirely from the period of firm
U.S.-British support of Saddam.

With the usual display of moral integrity, Straw's report and Washington's
reaction overlooked that support.

Such practices reflect a trap deeply rooted in the intellectual culture
generally – a trap sometimes called the doctrine of change of course,
invoked in the United States every two or three years. The content of the
doctrine is: "Yes, in the past we did some wrong things because of
innocence or inadvertence. But now that's all over, so let's not waste
anymore time on this boring, stale stuff."

The doctrine is dishonest and cowardly, but it does have advantages: It
protects us from the danger of understanding what is happening before our
eyes.

For example, the Bush administration's original reason for going to war in
Iraq was to save the world from a tyrant developing weapons of mass
destruction and cultivating links to terror. Nobody believes that now, not
even Bush's speech writers.

The new reason is that we invaded Iraq to establish a democracy there and,
in fact, to democratize the whole Middle East.

Sometimes, the repetition of this democracy-building posture reaches the
level of rapturous acclaim.

Last month, for example, David Ignatius, the Washington Post commentator,
described the invasion of Iraq as "the most idealistic war in modern
times" – fought solely to bring democracy to Iraq and the region. Ignatius
was particularly impressed with Paul Wolfowitz, "the Bush administration's
idealist in chief," whom he described as a genuine intellectual who
"bleeds for (the Arab world's) oppression and dreams of liberating it."

Maybe that helps explain Wolfowitz's career – like his strong support for
Suharto in Indonesia, one of the last century's worst mass murderers and
aggressors, when Wolfowitz was ambassador to that country under Ronald
Reagan.

As the State Department official responsible for Asian affairs under
Reagan, Wolfowitz oversaw support for the murderous dictators Chun of
South Korea and Marcos of the Philippines.

All this is irrelevant because of the convenient doctrine of change of
course.

So, yes, Wolfowitz's heart bleeds for the victims of oppression – and if
the record shows the opposite, it's just that boring old stuff that we
want to forget about.

One might recall another recent illustration of Wolfowitz's love of
democracy. The Turkish parliament, heeding its population's near-unanimous
opposition to war in Iraq, refused to let U.S. forces deploy fully from
Turkey. This caused absolute fury in Washington.

Wolfowitz denounced the Turkish military for failing to intervene to
overturn the decision. Turkey was listening to its people, not taking
orders from Crawford, Texas, or Washington, D.C.

The most recent chapter is Wolfowitz's "Determination and Findings" on
bidding for lavish reconstruction contracts in Iraq. Excluded are
countries where the government dared to take the same position as the vast
majority of the population.

Wolfowitz's alleged grounds are "security interests," which are
non-existent, though the visceral hatred of democracy is hard to miss –
along with the fact that Halliburton and Bechtel corporations will be free
to "compete" with the vibrant democracy of Uzbekistan and the Solomon
Islands, but not with leading industrial societies.

What's revealing and important to the future is that Washington's display
of contempt for democracy went side by side with a chorus of adulation
about its yearning for democracy. To be able to carry that off is an
impressive achievement, hard to mimic even in a totalitarian state.

Iraqis have some insight into this process of conquerors and conquered.

The British created Iraq for their own interests. When they ran that part
of the world, they discussed how to set up what they called Arab facades –
weak, pliable governments, parliamentary if possible, so long as the
British effectively ruled.

Who would expect that the United States would ever permit an independent
Iraqi government to exist? Especially now that Washington has reserved the
right to set up permanent military bases there, in the heart of the
world's greatest oil-producing region, and has imposed an economic regime
that no sovereign country would accept, putting the country's fate in the
hands of Western corporations.

Throughout history, even the harshest and most shameful measures are
regularly accompanied by professions of noble intent – and rhetoric about
bestowing freedom and independence.

An honest look would only generalize Thomas Jefferson's observation on the
world situation of his day: "We believe no more in Bonaparte's fighting
merely for the liberties of the seas than in Great Britain's fighting for
the liberties of mankind. The object is the same, to draw to themselves
the power, the wealth and the resources of other nations."

Political activist and author Noam Chomsky is a professor of linguistics
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His new book is "Hegemony or
Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance" (The American Empire
Project).


This piece originally appeared in The Toronto Star.
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ANNOUNCING THE P.U.-LITZER PRIZES FOR 2003

By Norman Solomon

     The P.U.-litzer Prizes were established more than a decade ago to
give recognition to the stinkiest media performances of the year.

     As usual, I have conferred with Jeff Cohen, founder of the media
watch group FAIR, to sift through the large volume of entries. In view of
the many deserving competitors, we regret that only a few can win a
P.U.-litzer.

     And now, the twelfth annual P.U.-litzer Prizes, for the foulest
media performances of 2003:

MEDIA MOGUL OF THE YEAR -- Lowry Mays, CEO of Clear Channel

     While some broadcasters care about their programming, the CEO of
America’s biggest radio company (with more than 1,200 stations) admits he
cares only about the ads. The Clear Channel boss told Fortune magazine in
March: “If anyone said we were in the radio business, it wouldn’t be
someone from our company. We’re not in the business of providing news and
information. We’re not in the business of providing well-researched
music. We’re simply in the business of selling our customers products.”

LIBERATING IRAQ PRIZE -- Tom Brokaw

     Interviewing a military analyst as U.S. jet bombers headed to
Baghdad on the first day of the Iraq war, NBC anchor Brokaw declared:
“Admiral McGinn, one of the things that we don’t want to do is to destroy
the infrastructure of Iraq, because in a few days we’re going to own that
country.”

“THE MORE YOU WATCH, THE LESS YOU KNOW” PRIZE -- Fox News Channel

     According to a University of Maryland study, most Americans who get
their news from commercial TV harbored at least one of three
“misperceptions” about the Iraq war: that weapons of mass destruction had
been discovered in Iraq, that evidence closely linking Iraq to Al Qaeda
had been found, or that world opinion approved of the U.S. invasion. Fox
News viewers were the most confused about key facts, with 80 percent
embracing at least one of those misperceptions. The study found a
correlation between being misinformed and being supportive of the war.

“CLEAR IT WITH THE PENTAGON” AWARD -- CNN

     A month after the invasion of Iraq began, CNN executive Eason Jordan
admitted on his network’s “Reliable Sources” show (April 20) that CNN had
allowed U.S. military officials to help screen its on-air analysts: “I
went to the Pentagon myself several times before the war started and met
with important people there and said, for instance -- ‘At CNN, here are
the generals we’re thinking of retaining to advise us on the air and off
about the war’ -- and we got a big thumbs-up on all of them. That was
important.”

“CONSERVATIVE TIMES FOR THE ‘LIBERAL’ MEDIA” AWARD -- ABC News

     Over the years, ABC correspondent John Stossel became known for
one-sided, often-inaccurate reporting on behalf of his pro-corporate,
“greed is good” ideology. He boasted that his on-air job was to “explain
the beauties of the free market,” received lecture fees from corporate
pressure groups, and even spoke on Capitol Hill against
consumer-protection regulation. In May of this year, when Stossel was
promoted to co-anchor of ABC’s “20/20,” a network insider told TV Guide:
“These are conservative times. ... The network wants somebody to match
the times.”

“CODDLING DONALD” PRIZE -- CBS’s Lesley Stahl, ABC’s Peter Jennings and
Others

     On the day news broke about Saddam Hussein’s capture, Stahl and
Jennings each interviewed Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. In step with
their mainstream media colleagues, both failed to ask about Rumsfeld’s
cordial 1983 meeting with Hussein in Baghdad on behalf of the Reagan
administration that opened up strong diplomatic and military ties between
the U.S. government and the dictator that lasted through seven years of
his worst brutality.

MILITARY GROUPIE PRIZE -- Katie Couric of NBC’s “Today” Show

     “Well, Commander Thompson,” said Couric on April 3, in the midst of
the invasion carnage, “thanks for talking with us at this very early hour
out there. And I just want you to know, I think Navy SEALs rock.”

NOBLESSE OBLIGE OCCUPATION AWARD -- Thomas Friedman, New York Times

     In a Nov. 30 piece, Times columnist Friedman gushed that “this war
(in Iraq) is the most important liberal, revolutionary U.S.
democracy-building project since the Marshall Plan.” He lauded the war as
“one of the noblest things this country has ever attempted abroad.”
Friedman did not mention the estimated 112 billion barrels of oil in Iraq
... or the continuous deceptions that led to the “noble” enterprise.

___________________________________

Norman Solomon is co-author of “Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn’t
Tell You.” For an excerpt and other information, go to:
www.contextbooks.com/new.html#target
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Subject: [pjnews] Internal Diebold Memos Released
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact:
Eric A. Smith
Hot Damn! Design
+81-03-3959-5371
(in Tokyo)
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

Diebold email: "Make vote printouts too costly for MD"
-- Scandals deepen for e-vote manufacturer

ANNAPOLIS, Maryland, December 12th —  An internal memo has just surfaced
suggesting e-vote manufacturer Diebold planned to overcharge the state of
Maryland and make voter printouts "prohibitively expensive".

An employee named "Ken" wrote the Jan. 3 letter suggesting the company
charge Maryland "out the yin" if legislators insisted on printouts.

Referring to a University of Maryland study critical of the company's
machines, he added: "[The State of Maryland] already bought the system. At
this point they are just closing the barn door. Let's just hope that as a
company we are smart enough to charge out the yin if they try to change
the rules now and legislate voter receipts."

He goes on to say "...any after-sale changes should be prohibitively
expensive."

Delegate Karen S. Montgomery dropped the bombshell on Thursday amid
negotiations with Diebold over its touchscreen voting machines.

Montgomery, who has written a bill mandating voter-verifiable ballots,
described pressure to drop the issue, saying "scurrilous remarks" were
being levelled against proponents of the measure. She said she believes
the cost is being driven up to prevent anyone from insisting on verifiable
printouts.

Steven T. Dennis of Gazette.net broke the story yesterday; he said
spokesman David Bear deflected criticism by claiming the comments were
"the internal discussion of one individual and [do] not reflect the
sentiments or the position of the company."

Diebold, whose primary business has until recently been ATMs and
ticket-vending machines (all of which produce paper printouts), made
headlines last week when it dropped copyright-infringement suits against
Swarthmore students who had published thousands of its internal memos on
the Internet.

Prominent among the leaked memos is a missive to Global Election Systems
(now Diebold) -- baldly stating that 16 thousand Gore votes were
"disappeared" during the 2000 election. Author Lana Hires frantically asks
how she should explain the problem to an auditor:

> I need some answers! Our department is being audited by the County. I
have been waiting for someone to give me an explanation as to why
Precinct 216 gave Al Gore a minus 16022 [votes] when it was uploaded.
Will someone please explain this so that I have the information to give
the auditor instead of standing here "looking dumb."

Additional memos are equally candid and suggestive:

> For a demonstration I suggest you fake it. Program them both so they
look the same, and then just do the upload fro [sic] the AV. That is
what we did in the last AT/AV demo.

> Right now you can open GEMS' .mdb file with MS-Access, and alter its
contents. That includes the audit log. This isn't anything new.

> Elections are not rocket science. Why is it so hard to get things right!
I have never been at any other company that has been so miss [sic]
managed.

> Johnson County, KS will be doing Central Count for their mail in
ballots. They will also be processing these ballots in advance of the
closing of polls on election day. They would like to log into the Audit
Log an entry for Previewing any Election Total Reports. They need this,
to prove to the media, as well as, any candidates & lawyers, that they
did not view or print any Election Results before the Polls closed.
However, if there is a way that we can disable the reporting
functionality, that would be even better.


Initially brought to light by activist Bev Harris, these and other
alarming disclosures have added weight to the arguments of computer
security experts and legislators nationwide, who say that Diebold's
machines (as well as those of rivals ES&S and Sequoia) pose a grave risk
to America's elections.

Harris received over 7,000 of the Diebold memos from an undisclosed source
in early September. For the past three years, she has been arguing for
greater security and accountability in electronic voting, last year
weathering a similar unsuccesful gag lawsuit from e-vote firm ES&S.

A month after Harris recieved the memos she went public with them; Diebold
immediately launched a gag lawsuit, and Harris's ISP shut down her
activist site. A group of Swarthmore students and other activists
responded by spreading the memos across the Internet.

When Diebold threatened to sue under the auspices of the DMCA, litigators
from the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the ACLU stepped in to defend
activists. Presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich added significant
support by hosting the memos on his own website. Last week, Diebold
withdrew its lawsuits.

With a new ISP, Harris has resumed her activism, and her book "Black Box
Voting: Ballot Tampering in the 21st Century," can currently be downloaded
for free from the site blackboxvoting.org.

Meanwhile, on Capital Hill, Congressman Rush Holt has also raised the
issue of security, sponsoring  the "Voter Confidence and Increased
Accountability Act of 2003" (H.R. 2239), which calls for paper ballots,
surprise recounts and auditable software in voting machines.

But while Holt's bill adds a significant level of transparency to the
process, Harris says it doesn't go far enough. In a recent Buzzflash
interview, she said:

"The problem area, and it is a whopper, is that this bill doesn't attack
the crux of the issue, which is proper auditing -- and that is something
that is needed for any computerized system, including optical scan
machines.

The very first thing we need to do is get solid input from auditors who
are experienced in fraud detection.

While we are designing amendments to the bill, we also must get some
people with a solid grasp of history, because we need a voting system that
is in keeping with the vision of our founding fathers -- and this is a
public policy issue, not a computer issue. The most important thing that
we keep forgetting is that the founders, especially Thomas Jefferson, felt
that it was critical -- not "important," but CRITICAL to democracy, to
keep the vote directly in the hands of the people themselves. Any solution
which requires us to trust a handful of experts will, sooner or later,
result in the demise of our democracy.

That means we need to retain (and enforce) policies to tally the votes at
the polls, in front of observers. In some countries, they let as many
regular citizens as can fit in the room in to watch the physical counting.
It is this neighborhood tallying, and the open and public nature of it,
that is the embodiment of democracy."


In July, Harris demonstrated just how insecure a Diebold machine could be,
showing in a step-by-step expose how to reverse a federal election. New
Zealand's Scoop Media posted the illustrated account online.

Author Faun Otter and others have also raised the issue of impartiality on
the part of Diebold's board, which has contributed hundreds of thousands
of dollars to Republican campaigns. National headlines were made when CEO
Michael O'Dell, who recently hosted a $600,000 fundraiser for Vice
President Dick Cheney, announced in a Republican fundraising letter that
he was "committed to delivering Ohio's votes to the President".

But controversy doesn't end with Diebold alone. Rival voting machine
company ES&S also came under scrutiny when it surfaced that it was run by
Chuck Hagel until two weeks before his own election. Senator Hagel won by
the biggest landslide in Nebraskan history; a victory the press
characterized as a "stunning upset". His company, ES&S, counted 83% of the
votes.

Hagel left out details of his ES&S involvement in his SEC filings, and,
when the discrepancy surfaced, two days after a closed-door meeting with
Hagel SEC legal counsel Victor Baird resigned and the matter was dropped.

And Hagel, who prior to his stewardship of ES&S was head of the Private
Sector Council for George H.W. Bush, has bigger plans: Harris says the
domain name "Bush-Hagel2004.com" was purchased last year but subsequently
released and the Senator has already bought the rights to "hagel2008.com"
and "ChuckHagel2008.com".

Meanwhile Hagel campaign manager Michael McCarthy owns over 30% of ES&S's
parent company, and even the Senator hasn't fully divested himself of
ownership -- he still has a $5 million stake in ES&S parent company the
McCarthy Group.

Harris says there are firms offering comparatively secure systems --
competitors Avante, Accupol and Vogue, for example -- but some activists
say any machine offers an opportunity for vote tampering. They're calling
for a return to simple ballots, though such a solution is unlikely --
Bush's Help America Vote Act mandates a nationwide migration to electronic
voting by 2006.

Secretary of state Kevin Shelley's recent declaration that all California
voting machines must provide printouts may prompt the rest of the country
to follow the west’s lead. But it may end up being a matter of too little,
too late, as Diebold, ES&S and Sequioa systems are already in place in 37
states.

Harris, for one, is calling for a legal injunction to halt the use of any
insecure systems prior to the 2004 primaries. If her instincts are right,
a fierce battle may loom on the horizon -- a battle for the very heart and
soul of America's democracy.

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

Officials to phone, fax and email about secure voting:

Congress
http://www.visi.com/juan/congress/

State elections boards:
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/htdocs/dcforum/DCForumID29/47.html

State Attorneys General (party affiliations listed):
http://www.naag.org/ag/full_ag_table.php

State Election Officials
http://www.nased.org/

Members, Natl. Assoc. of County Recorders, Election Officials and Clerks:
http://www.nacrc.org/leadership/st_coord.htm

Penelope Bonsall, national director of the Office of Election Administration
Office of Election Administration
Federal Election Commission
999 E Street, NW
Washington, DC 20463
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
(202) 694-1095 (phone)
(202) 219-8500 (fax)

Online e-petitions EFF and VerifiedVoting.org:
http://action.eff.org/action/index.asp?step=2&item=2821
http://www.verifiedvoting.org

Media Contacts:
http://dmoz.org/Arts/Television/News/
http://newslink.org
http://www.cantufind.com/american_newspapers.htm
http://dmoz.org/Arts/Radio/Formats/Talk_Radio/Networks/
http://dmoz.org/Arts/Radio/Formats/Talk_Radio/Stations/
http://dmoz.org/Arts/Television/Networks/Cable/
http://dmoz.org/Arts/Television/Networks/
http://dmoz.org/Computers/Internet/Broadcasting/Information/
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Folksinger John McCutcheon also wrote a famous song about this historic
event.  You can hear the song, along with an interview we did with him
last year by going to:
http://archive.webactive.com/pacifica/peacewatch/peace20021224.html

-- Scott

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

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4325510,00.html

When peace broke out
British and German soldiers made history in 1914 when they stopped
shooting and started to sing carols and play football together.

Malcolm Brown
Guardian

Monday December 24, 2001

The facts almost beggar belief. At the first Christmas of a hideous war,
Germans and British sang carols to each other, lit each other's cigarettes
in no man's land, exchanged souvenirs, took group photographs, even played
football. Some sort of accommodation with the enemy, from cheerful waves
and shouted greetings to full-scale fraternisation, took place over
two-thirds of the 30 miles of the western front held by the British
Expeditionary Force.

Far from denouncing the event, the press celebrated it with a spate of
approving headlines. Leader writers mused thoughtfully about it. Most
national and many local newspapers carried letters from soldiers who had
taken part in it. In an early example of instant history, none other than
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle saluted it in a book published in 1915 as "one
human episode among all the atrocities which have stained the memory of
the war".

And then, to all intents, the story was forgotten. It disappeared under
the gas clouds of Ypres and the colossal casualty lists of the Somme and
Passchendaele. Thus, looking back on that stunning Christmas from the
1920s, a former infantryman who had shared the camaraderie across the
lines could write: "Men who joined us later were inclined to disbelieve us
when we spoke of the incident, and no wonder, for as the months rolled by,
we who were actually there could hardly realise that it had happened,
except for the fact that every little detail stood out well in our
memory."

"Every little detail" - the devil is often said to be in the detail, but
not in this story. On Christmas Eve at Plugstreet Wood, Germans put
Christmas trees on the parapet of their front-line trench and sang Stille
Nacht (Silent Night), then largely unfamiliar to British ears but
instantly acknowledged as a carol of extraordinary beauty. Moved to
respond the territorials opposite struck up with The First Noël. So it
continued until, when the British sang O Come, All Ye Faithful, they heard
the Germans joining in with the Latin words Adeste Fideles. Recalling the
event many years later, one former soldier commented: "I thought this a
most extraordinary thing - two nations both singing the same carol in the
middle of the war."

A memorable joint burial service between the trenches on Christmas morning
offers another uplifting detail. The prayers and readings were spoken
first in English by a battalion chaplain and then in German by a young
divinity student. "It was an extraordinary and most wonderful sight,"
wrote one witness. "The Germans formed up on one side, the English on the
other, the officers standing in front, every head bared. I think it was a
sight one will never see again."

To deal decently with the dead was one powerful motive for establishing a
truce. The Christmas spirit provided another. "It doesn't seem right to be
killing each other at Xmas time," a Tommy noted in his diary. Officers as
well as men succumbed to the festive mood. Thus the commanding officer of
a guards battalion strode out to join a mixed group of British and Germans
and with the cry "Well, my lads, a Merry Christmas to you! This is damned
comic, isn't it?" handed round a bottle of best rum which, one participant
recorded, was "polished off before you could say knife".

Other lubricants assisted the event. Near Armentières the premises and
product of a brewery had fallen to the enemy. On Christmas morning, after
calling out "Don't shoot", a party of Germans rolled a barrel of best
Belgian beer into no-man's-land and indulged in a seasonal booze-up with
the British, who in this particular case were Welsh. No nonconformist
conscience inhibited these celebrations.

Details which seem almost ludicrous enrich the story. A British Tommy met
his German barber from High Holborn in London and had a
short-back-and-sides between the lines. A German who had raided an
abandoned house strutted about wearing a blouse, skirt and top hat and
sporting an umbrella. After a bout of between-the-lines photography, one
officer wrote in a letter home that another truce had been fixed for new
year's day "as the Germans want to see how the photos come out".

"Footer", a favourite recreation then as now on both sides, was an
inevitable part of the occasion, but there was not one England v Germany
fixture as such, rather a scatter of impromptu games or kickabouts,
sometimes using a tin can or a rolled-up sandbag as a ball. Here and there
a genuine leather ball was produced and a more serious contest attempted.
A German lieutenant wrote of one such effort: "We marked the goals with
our caps. Teams were quickly established for a match on the frozen mud,
and the Fritzes beat the Tommies 3-2".

Not everybody approved. One officer, ordered to prepare a more usable
pitch by filling in shell holes, angrily refused to comply. This must
surely be a very early case of a failure to create a level playing field.
The proposed match did not take place.

Some Frenchwomen, hearing of the goings-on at the front, spat at members
of one battalion next time they were in town. The medical officer of a
non-trucing unit, furious at the unsoldierly behaviour of a neighbouring
battalion, approvingly reported "a bit of a scrap" between his men and
theirs. He wrote home: "We aren't here to pal up with the enemy."

Yet the general reaction was one of amazed acceptance of a happening that
delighted far more than it dismayed. Letters home confirm the incredible
nature of the occasion. "It would have made a good chapter in Dickens's
Christmas Carol," wrote one soldier. "Just you think," mused another,
"that while you were eating your turkey I was out talking with the men I
had been trying to kill a few hours before! It was astounding."

The truce was not organised, nor, as it might be assumed, contagious, with
units catching the spark from their neighbours. Rather, it was the
spontaneous product of a mass of local initiatives. Thus peaceful areas
were interlaced with "business as usual" zones where hostilities
continued. This could have unhappy results. One sergeant crossing no man's
land to offer cigarettes to a friendly German regiment was shot by a
sniper from a regiment not observing a ceasefire. He was officially
described as "killed in action", his "action" being the distinctly
unmilitary one of attempting to carry Woodbines to the enemy. The Germans
sent across an apology.

Curious as it might seem, the truce produced no courts-martial. Some
generals and local commanders huffed, but most senior officers took a
relaxed view. A "rest from bullets", as one of their number put it,
allowed the troops to work above ground while improving their often
inadequate trenches. Both sides appreciated the opportunity. At one point
some Tommies, admiring the better progress made by the enemy opposite,
went over and asked if they could borrow some of their tools; the Germans
complied.

One famous participant who responded to the mood of the occasion was the
cartoonist Bruce Bairnsfather, creator of the archetypal British Tommy
"Ole Bill", who took part as a front-line subaltern. He later wrote:
"There was not an atom of hatred on either side that day, and yet, on our
side, not for a moment was the will to war and the will to beat them
relaxed. It was just like the interval between the rounds of a friendly
boxing match."

For clearly the war had to go on. Yet in some areas there was no instant
rush to resume hostilities. A guards CO noted in his diary on December 28:
"I don't think that they want to start more than we do as it only means a
few of each side being hit and does not affect the end of the war." A
subaltern wrote on the 30th: "At about lunchtime a message came down the
line to say that the Germans had sent across to say that their general was
coming along in the afternoon, so we had better keep down, as they might
have to do a little shooting to make things look right! And this is war!"

By early 1915, however, it became clear that the interlude was, or soon
would be, over. The Manchester Guardian spoke the necessary words in an
article of January 7: "'But they went back into their trenches,' a
perfectly enlightened and quite inhuman observer from another planet would
perhaps say, 'and are now hard at it again, slaying and being slain.'
Evidently their glimpses of the wiser and better way were interesting but
of no very great practical importance. To which, of course, we might reply
with great reason that there was very much to be done yet - that Belgium
must be freed from the hideous yoke that has been thrust upon her, that
Germany must be taught that culture cannot be carried by the sword."

And after that the story went underground for many years. The play and
film Oh! What A Lovely War revived it - to some disbelief - in the 60s.
Paul McCartney made a popular video of it to accompany his moving song The
Pipes of Peace in 1984. Before that in 1981 I directed a BBC documentary
on the subject, under the title Peace in No Man's Land. The book followed
three years later. In 1993 an illustrated children's version of the event
by Michael Foreman called War Game won a national prize.

Now at every Christmas personal accounts of the truce are regularly read
from pulpits, on television, on radio. This year sees the publication of a
new history under the title Silent Night, the author being the
distinguished American historian, Stanley Weintraub. At a time when the
world is yet again at war, this strange event of 1914 - with its message
of common humanity and goodwill between enemies - has a special relevance.
Far from losing its attraction, it is a story that seems to gain in
resonance and potency as the years go by.


Malcolm Brown, a historian at the Imperial War Museum, is a former BBC TV
producer. Christmas Truce, by Malcolm Brown and Shirley Seaton is
published by Pan Books. Silent Night, by Stanley Weintraub, is published
by Simon and Schuster.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A22922-2003Dec22.html
For Vietnam Vet Anthony Zinni, Another War on Shaky Territory

By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 23, 2003; Page C01

Anthony C. Zinni's opposition to U.S. policy on Iraq began on the
monsoon-ridden afternoon of Nov. 3, 1970. He was lying on a Vietnamese
mountainside west of Da Nang, three rounds from an AK-47 assault rifle in
his side and back. He could feel his lifeblood seeping into the ground as
he slipped in and out of consciousness.

He had plenty of time to think in the following months while recuperating
in a military hospital in Hawaii. Among other things, he promised himself
that, "If I'm ever in a position to say what I think is right, I will. . .
. I don't care what happens to my career."

That time has arrived.

Over the past year, the retired Marine Corps general has become one of the
most prominent opponents of Bush administration policy on Iraq, which he
now fears is drifting toward disaster.

It is one of the more unusual political journeys to come out of the
American experience with Iraq. Zinni still talks like an old-school Marine
-- a big-shouldered, weight-lifting, working-class Philadelphian whose
father emigrated from Italy's Abruzzi region, and who is fond of quoting
the wisdom of his fictitious "Uncle Guido, the plumber." Yet he finds
himself in the unaccustomed role of rallying the antiwar camp, attacking
the policies of the president and commander in chief whom he had endorsed
in the 2000 election.

"Iraq is in serious danger of coming apart because of lack of planning,
underestimating the task and buying into a flawed strategy," he says. "The
longer we stubbornly resist admitting the mistakes and not altering our
approach, the harder it will be to pull this chestnut out of the fire."

Three years ago, Zinni completed a tour as chief of the Central Command,
the U.S. military headquarters for the Middle East, during which he
oversaw enforcement of the two "no-fly" zones in Iraq and also conducted
four days of punishing airstrikes against that country in 1998. He even
served briefly as a special envoy to the Middle East, mainly as a favor to
his old friend and comrade Secretary of State Colin L. Powell.

Zinni long has worried that there are worse outcomes possible in Iraq than
having Saddam Hussein in power -- such as eliminating him in such a way
that Iraq will become a new haven for terrorism in the Middle East.

"I think a weakened, fragmented, chaotic Iraq, which could happen if this
isn't done carefully, is more dangerous in the long run than a contained
Saddam is now," he told reporters in 1998. "I don't think these questions
have been thought through or answered." It was a warning for which Iraq
hawks such as Paul D. Wolfowitz, then an academic and now the No. 2
official at the Pentagon, attacked him in print at the time.

Now, five years later, Zinni fears it is an outcome toward which
U.S.-occupied Iraq may be drifting. Nor does he think the capture of
Hussein is likely to make much difference, beyond boosting U.S. troop
morale and providing closure for his victims. "Since we've failed thus far
to capitalize" on opportunities in Iraq, he says, "I don't have confidence
we will do it now. I believe the only way it will work now is for the
Iraqis themselves to somehow take charge and turn things around. Our
policy, strategy, tactics, et cetera, are still screwed up."

'Where's the Threat?'


Anthony Zinni's passage from obedient general to outspoken opponent began
in earnest in the unlikeliest of locations, the national convention of the
Veterans of Foreign Wars. He was there in Nashville in August 2002 to
receive the group's Dwight D. Eisenhower Distinguished Service Award,
recognition for his 35 years in the Marine Corps.

Vice President Cheney was also there, delivering a speech on foreign
policy. Sitting on the stage behind the vice president, Zinni grew
increasingly puzzled. He had endorsed Bush and Cheney two years earlier,
just after he retired from his last military post, as chief of the U.S.
Central Command, which oversees operations in Iraq.

"I think he ran on a moderate ticket, and that's my leaning -- I'm kind of
a Lugar-Hagel-Powell guy," he says, listing three Republicans associated
with centrist foreign policy positions.

He was alarmed that day to hear Cheney make the argument for attacking
Iraq on grounds that Zinni found questionable at best:

"Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of
mass destruction," Cheney said. "There is no doubt that he is amassing
them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us."

Cheney's certitude bewildered Zinni. As chief of the Central Command,
Zinni had been immersed in U.S. intelligence about Iraq. He was all too
familiar with the intelligence analysts' doubts about Iraq's programs to
acquire weapons of mass destruction, or WMD. "In my time at Centcom, I
watched the intelligence, and never -- not once -- did it say, 'He has
WMD.' "

Though retired for nearly two years, Zinni says, he remained current on
the intelligence through his consulting with the CIA and the military. "I
did consulting work for the agency, right up to the beginning of the war.
I never saw anything. I'd say to analysts, 'Where's the threat?' " Their
response, he recalls, was, "Silence."

Zinni's concern deepened as Cheney pressed on that day at the Opryland
Hotel. "Time is not on our side," the vice president said. "The risks of
inaction are far greater than the risks of action."

Zinni's conclusion as he slowly walked off the stage that day was that the
Bush administration was determined to go to war. A moment later, he had
another, equally chilling thought: "These guys don't understand what they
are getting into."

Unheeded Advice


This retired Marine commander is hardly a late-life convert to pacifism.
"I'm not saying there aren't parts of the world that don't need their ass
kicked," he says, sitting in a hotel lobby in Pentagon City, wearing an
open-necked blue shirt. Even at the age of 60, he remains an avid
weight-lifter and is still a solid, square-faced slab of a man.
"Afghanistan was the right thing to do," he adds, referring to the U.S.
invasion there in 2001 to oust the Taliban regime and its allies in the al
Qaeda terrorist organization.

But he didn't see any need to invade Iraq. He didn't think Hussein was
much of a worry anymore. "He was contained," he says. "It was a pain in
the ass, but he was contained. He had a deteriorated military. He wasn't a
threat to the region."

But didn't his old friend Colin Powell also describe Hussein as a threat?
Zinni dismisses that. "He's trying to be the good soldier, and I respect
him for that." Zinni no longer does any work for the State Department.

Zinni's concern deepened at a Senate hearing in February, just six weeks
before the war began. As he awaited his turn to testify, he listened to
Pentagon and State Department officials talk vaguely about the
"uncertainties" of a postwar Iraq. He began to think they were doing the
wrong thing the wrong way. "I was listening to the panel, and I realized,
'These guys don't have a clue.' "

That wasn't a casual judgment. Zinni had started thinking about how the
United States might handle Iraq if Hussein's government collapsed after
Operation Desert Fox, the four days of airstrikes that he oversaw in
December 1998, in which he targeted presidential palaces, Baath Party
headquarters, intelligence facilities, military command posts and
barracks, and factories that might build missiles that could deliver
weapons of mass destruction.

In the wake of those attacks on about 100 major targets, intelligence
reports came in that Hussein's government had been shaken by the short
campaign. "After the strike, we heard from countries with diplomatic
missions in there [Baghdad] that the regime was paralyzed, and that there
was a kind of defiance in the streets," he recalls.

So early in 1999 he ordered that plans be devised for the possibility of
the U.S. military having to occupy Iraq. Under the code name "Desert
Crossing," the resulting document called for a nationwide civilian
occupation authority, with offices in each of Iraq's 18 provinces. That
plan contrasts sharply, he notes, with the reality of the Coalition
Provisional Authority, the U.S. occupation power, which for months this
year had almost no presence outside Baghdad -- an absence that some Army
generals say has increased their burden in Iraq.

Listening to the administration officials testify that day, Zinni began to
suspect that his careful plans had been disregarded. Concerned, he later
called a general at Central Command's headquarters in Tampa and asked,
"Are you guys looking at Desert Crossing?" The answer, he recalls, was,
"What's that?"

The more he listened to Wolfowitz and other administration officials talk
about Iraq, the more Zinni became convinced that interventionist
"neoconservative" ideologues were plunging the nation into a war in a part
of the world they didn't understand. "The more I saw, the more I thought
that this was the product of the neocons who didn't understand the region
and were going to create havoc there. These were dilettantes from
Washington think tanks who never had an idea that worked on the ground."

And the more he dwelled on this, the more he began to believe that U.S.
soldiers would wind up paying for the mistakes of Washington policymakers.
And that took him back to that bloody day in the sodden Que Son mountains
in Vietnam.

A Familiar Chill


Even now, decades later, Vietnam remains a painful subject for him. "I
only went to the Wall once, and it was very difficult," he says, talking
about his sole visit to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the Mall. "I was
walking down past the names of my men," he recalls. "My buddies, my troops
-- just walking down that Wall was hard, and I couldn't go back."

Now he feels his nation -- and a new generation of his soldiers -- have
been led down a similar path.

"Obviously there are differences" between Vietnam and Iraq, he says.
"Every situation is unique." But in his bones, he feels the same chill.
"It feels the same. I hear the same things -- about [administration
charges about] not telling the good news, about cooking up a rationale for
getting into the war." He sees both conflicts as beginning with deception
by the U.S. government, drawing a parallel between how the Johnson
administration handled the beginning of the Vietnam War and how the Bush
administration touted the threat presented by Iraqi weapons of mass
destruction. "I think the American people were conned into this," he says.
Referring to the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, in which the Johnson
administration claimed that U.S. Navy ships had been subjected to an
unprovoked attack by North Vietnam, he says, "The Gulf of Tonkin and the
case for WMD and terrorism is synonymous in my mind."

Likewise, he says, the goal of transforming the Middle East by imposing
democracy by force reminds him of the "domino theory" in the 1960s that
the United States had to win in Vietnam to prevent the rest of Southeast
Asia from falling into communist hands.

And that brings him back to Wolfowitz and his neoconservative allies as
the root of the problem. "I don't know where the neocons came from -- that
wasn't the platform they ran on," he says. "Somehow, the neocons captured
the president. They captured the vice president."

He is especially irked that, as he sees it, no senior officials have taken
responsibility for their incorrect assessment of the threat posed by Iraq.
"What I don't understand is that the bill of goods the neocons sold him
has been proven false, yet heads haven't rolled," he says. "Where is the
accountability? I think some fairly senior people at the Pentagon ought to
go." Who? "That's up to the president."

Zinni has picked his shots carefully -- a speech here, a "Nightline"
segment or interview there. "My contemporaries, our feelings and
sensitivities were forged on the battlefields of Vietnam, where we heard
the garbage and the lies, and we saw the sacrifice," he said at a talk to
hundreds of Marine and Navy officers and others at a Crystal City hotel
ballroom in September. "I ask you, is it happening again?" The speech,
part of a forum sponsored by the U.S. Naval Institute and the Marine Corps
Association, received prolonged applause, with many officers standing.

Zinni says that he hasn't received a single negative response from
military people about the stance he has taken. "I was surprised by the
number of uniformed guys, all ranks, who said, 'You're speaking for us.
Keep on keeping on.' "

Even home in Williamsburg, he has been surprised at the reaction. "I mean,
I live in a very conservative Republican community, and people were
saying, 'You're right.' "

But Zinni vows that he has learned a lesson. Reminded that he endorsed
Bush in 2000, he says, "I'm not going to do anything political again --
ever. I made that mistake one time."


Staff researcher Lucy Shackelford contributed to this article.
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http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040105&s=krugman

The Death of Horatio Alger
by PAUL KRUGMAN

[from the January 5, 2004 issue]

The other day I found myself reading a leftist rag that made outrageous
claims about America. It said that we are becoming a society in which the
poor tend to stay poor, no matter how hard they work; in which sons are
much more likely to inherit the socioeconomic status of their father than
they were a generation ago.

The name of the leftist rag? Business Week, which published an article
titled "Waking Up From the American Dream." The article summarizes recent
research showing that social mobility in the United States (which was
never as high as legend had it) has declined considerably over the past
few decades. If you put that research together with other research that
shows a drastic increase in income and wealth inequality, you reach an
uncomfortable conclusion: America looks more and more like a class-ridden
society.

And guess what? Our political leaders are doing everything they can to
fortify class inequality, while denouncing anyone who complains--or even
points out what is happening--as a practitioner of "class warfare."

Let's talk first about the facts on income distribution. Thirty years ago
we were a relatively middle-class nation. It had not always been thus:
Gilded Age America was a highly unequal society, and it stayed that way
through the 1920s. During the 1930s and '40s, however, America experienced
what the economic historians Claudia Goldin and Robert Margo have dubbed
the Great Compression: a drastic narrowing of income gaps, probably as a
result of New Deal policies. And the new economic order persisted for more
than a generation: Strong unions; taxes on inherited wealth, corporate
profits and high incomes; close public scrutiny of corporate
management--all helped to keep income gaps relatively small. The economy
was hardly egalitarian, but a generation ago the gross inequalities of the
1920s seemed very distant.

Now they're back. According to estimates by the economists Thomas Piketty
and Emmanuel Saez--confirmed by data from the Congressional Budget
Office--between 1973 and 2000 the average real income of the bottom 90
percent of American taxpayers actually fell by 7 percent. Meanwhile, the
income of the top 1 percent rose by 148 percent, the income of the top 0.1
percent rose by 343 percent and the income of the top 0.01 percent rose
599 percent. (Those numbers exclude capital gains, so they're not an
artifact of the stock-market bubble.) The distribution of income in the
United States has gone right back to Gilded Age levels of inequality.

Never mind, say the apologists, who churn out papers with titles like that
of a 2001 Heritage Foundation piece, "Income Mobility and the Fallacy of
Class-Warfare Arguments." America, they say, isn't a caste society--people
with high incomes this year may have low incomes next year and vice versa,
and the route to wealth is open to all. That's where those commies at
Business Week come in: As they point out (and as economists and
sociologists have been pointing out for some time), America actually is
more of a caste society than we like to think. And the caste lines have
lately become a lot more rigid.

The myth of income mobility has always exceeded the reality: As a general
rule, once they've reached their 30s, people don't move up and down the
income ladder very much. Conservatives often cite studies like a 1992
report by Glenn Hubbard, a Treasury official under the elder Bush who
later became chief economic adviser to the younger Bush, that purport to
show large numbers of Americans moving from low-wage to high-wage jobs
during their working lives. But what these studies measure, as the
economist Kevin Murphy put it, is mainly "the guy who works in the college
bookstore and has a real job by his early 30s." Serious studies that
exclude this sort of pseudo-mobility show that inequality in average
incomes over long periods isn't much smaller than inequality in annual
incomes.

It is true, however, that America was once a place of substantial
intergenerational mobility: Sons often did much better than their fathers.
A classic 1978 survey found that among adult men whose fathers were in the
bottom 25 percent of the population as ranked by social and economic
status, 23 percent had made it into the top 25 percent. In other words,
during the first thirty years or so after World War II, the American dream
of upward mobility was a real experience for many people.

Now for the shocker: The Business Week piece cites a new survey of today's
adult men, which finds that this number has dropped to only 10 percent.
That is, over the past generation upward mobility has fallen drastically.
Very few children of the lower class are making their way to even moderate
affluence. This goes along with other studies indicating that
rags-to-riches stories have become vanishingly rare, and that the
correlation between fathers' and sons' incomes has risen in recent
decades. In modern America, it seems, you're quite likely to stay in the
social and economic class into which you were born.

Business Week attributes this to the "Wal-Martization" of the economy, the
proliferation of dead-end, low-wage jobs and the disappearance of jobs
that provide entry to the middle class. That's surely part of the
explanation. But public policy plays a role--and will, if present trends
continue, play an even bigger role in the future.

Put it this way: Suppose that you actually liked a caste society, and you
were seeking ways to use your control of the government to further
entrench the advantages of the haves against the have-nots. What would you
do?

One thing you would definitely do is get rid of the estate tax, so that
large fortunes can be passed on to the next generation. More broadly, you
would seek to reduce tax rates both on corporate profits and on unearned
income such as dividends and capital gains, so that those with large
accumulated or inherited wealth could more easily accumulate even more.
You'd also try to create tax shelters mainly useful for the rich. And more
broadly still, you'd try to reduce tax rates on people with high incomes,
shifting the burden to the payroll tax and other revenue sources that bear
most heavily on people with lower incomes.

Meanwhile, on the spending side, you'd cut back on healthcare for the
poor, on the quality of public education and on state aid for higher
education. This would make it more difficult for people with low incomes
to climb out of their difficulties and acquire the education essential to
upward mobility in the modern economy.

And just to close off as many routes to upward mobility as possible, you'd
do everything possible to break the power of unions, and you'd privatize
government functions so that well-paid civil servants could be replaced
with poorly paid private employees.

It all sounds sort of familiar, doesn't it?

Where is this taking us? Thomas Piketty, whose work with Saez has
transformed our understanding of income distribution, warns that current
policies will eventually create "a class of rentiers in the U.S., whereby
a small group of wealthy but untalented children controls vast segments of
the US economy and penniless, talented children simply can't compete." If
he's right--and I fear that he is--we will end up suffering not only from
injustice, but from a vast waste of human potential.

Goodbye, Horatio Alger. And goodbye, American Dream.
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Published on Friday, December 26, 2003 by the Los Angeles Times

Antiwar Family's Conflict
Fervent peace activists sort through complex emotions as they mourn a son
killed in Iraq. He died a hero, they say -- a parents' contradiction.

by Tomas Alex Tizon

KENT, Wash. — Joe Colgan glances at it almost every time he walks into his
bedroom: a cardboard box sitting inconspicuously in a corner. It's a care
package he had prepared for his son Ben.

Inside are items Ben requested: a couple of books, pistachios, canned
salmon, beef jerky and a big bag of candy from Costco. Ben liked to pass
out candy to children in the street. Joe assembled the package on Nov. 1,
not knowing that on the same day, 6,800 miles away in Baghdad, Ben, a
second lieutenant in the Army, would be killed by a roadside bomb.

More than a month and a half later, Joe still doesn't know what to do with
the box. "I know I should give it away," he says, "but I can't seem to let
it go yet."

The grief is still settling, like a slow sinking to the bottom of the
ocean, and somehow, for Joe, the package is something to hold on to. In
the midst of their anguish, Joe and Patricia Colgan have clung tightly to
one other thing: the idea that their son Ben died a hero.

It's a simple idea born out of complicated emotions. The Colgans are
longtime peace activists who have opposed the war in Iraq from the
beginning. They marched in antiwar demonstrations before Ben was deployed
to Baghdad. Joe and Patricia Colgan still believe the war to be
"completely wrong" and "unjust."

"I know it seems like a contradiction. How can your son be a hero in an
unjust war?" Joe says. "It's the contradiction of a parent. We had a son
in the Army, and we supported him no matter what. He did what the
commander in chief wanted. He died doing what he believed in; he died
doing what he loved. That's a hero."

In the next breath, Joe Colgan, 62, holds his head in his hands.

"I'm still sorting it out," he says softly.

Patricia Colgan, 60, says she, too, has lingering questions. "After the
war started, I prayed every day on my way to work: 'Sweet Jesus, please
protect Ben; please put your arms around Ben; please don't take him yet,'
" she says. "That prayer wasn't answered. I don't know why."

Ben Colgan, 30, was slain on the first day of the deadliest month for U.S.
forces in Iraq since the war began. November saw 77 U.S. service members
killed. A total of 466 soldiers have died in Iraq, 328 of them since the
end of major combat on May 1. For families across the nation, as with the
Colgans, the war reached home.

It was a wet Sunday morning on Nov. 2 when the metallic gray pickup parked
outside the Colgan home in an older, wooded subdivision in this
working-class town south of Seattle.

Two Army chaplains got out and knocked on the front door. Even before they
spoke, Patricia spotted the gold crosses on their lapels and sensed why
they were there. She let out a cry. Joe rushed into the living room and
saw the uniformed figures in the doorway.

"I don't want to hear it," he said to the chaplains. "I don't want to hear
it." He took a few steps and raised a fist in the air as if to strike a
wall, but held back. The chaplains described the little they knew about
the circumstances of Ben's death, and informed the Colgans that the Army
had given him a posthumous promotion to first lieutenant. They said his
body would be shipped home in about a week.

As the chaplains left, the Colgan home filled with wails. Family members
took turns with the telephone to break the news. Within hours, all of
Ben's seven siblings, his eight aunts and uncles and most of his 32 first
cousins were at the house, crying and consoling one another. They told
each other Ben stories and began immediately to scour the extended network
of Colgan households for pictures of Ben. Suddenly, pictures of him became
precious.

In the days that followed, grief was overcome by the business of getting
Ben home, his body cremated, his life memorialized, his soul ushered into
heaven.

Four days after Ben's death, nearly 50 members of the Colgan family flew
to Aurora, Mo., where Ben's wife of six years, Jill, and their two young
daughters had been living with her father. Jill, who has turned down all
media interviews, gave birth to a third daughter on Dec. 19. She and the
kids had moved in with her father shortly after Ben left for Baghdad.
Ben's body was cremated in Aurora.

The Colgans returned home in mid-November to prepare Ben's memorial
service to be held at St. Philomena Catholic Church in Des Moines, Wash.,
a few miles from their home. There were hundreds of people to invite.

"I don't want the day to just pass," says Gina Johnson, Ben's oldest
sister. "I want this to be special for Ben."

The family had two weeks to send invitations and make all the
arrangements. Ben's mother and sisters feverishly set to work, keeping him
close to their hearts: Dangling from thin silver chains around each of
their necks were tear-shaped lockets containing Ben's ashes.



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

The Colgans are a picture of stability. Joe and Patricia married in 1966.
That year, Joe started working at a local utility company, where he has
remained for 37 years. They live in the same house they bought for $13,500
in 1967. And they raised all eight of the children in its confines.

The children, now ages 18 to 35, were baptized in the same church,
attended the same schools, shared many of the same teachers and, except
for Ben, lived in the same area — within a half-hour drive of Joe and
Patricia's house.

It was a raucous Irish American Catholic clan, light on niceties and heavy
on bawdy humor. The family was devoted to Christian service and activism.

Joe and Patricia protested the Vietnam War and the nuclear arms race. As
members of the Catholic peace group Pax Christi, the couple demonstrated
against the Trident nuclear submarines at nearby Bangor Naval Base, which
they considered "immoral."

Mohandas K. Gandhi and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., champions of
nonviolent protest, were held up as models. Toy guns were not allowed in
the home.

"Benny was right there with us," says Joe, recalling the protest marches
at Bangor. "He was only 12, but he understood." More than their other
children, Joe and Patricia say, Ben seemed to sympathize and accept his
parents' convictions.

At home, Ben was equal parts peacemaker and rabble-rouser. He had bright
blue eyes and blond hair that darkened as he got older. He grew to have
his father's physique: short and stocky, with muscular arms and legs. He
had a grin that seemed built in to his face.

Family members describe him as the sparkplug of the clan, the bighearted
jokester everybody loved. The free spirit who took up bull-riding on a
whim, took his parents' car on joy rides and introduced his little
brother, Nick, to whiskey. As a senior at Mount Rainier High School, Ben,
a 5-foot-7, 165-pound linebacker, helped the football team reach the Class
AA state championship. "We saw him as invincible," says sister Gina.

>From out of the blue, it seemed to his family, Ben decided to join the
Army right after high school. He respected his parents' convictions but
was also developing his own ideas. He wasn't sure what to do with his
life, and the military gave him a way to explore the world.

The decision surprised and distressed his parents. Patricia described the
period just after the decision as difficult. Their concern was allayed
somewhat when Ben said he wanted to be a medic. His mother told him
repeatedly that her constant prayer would be that he never kill another
human being.

But Ben's military career, which lasted more than 11 years, took
unexpected turns. He joined Special Forces and for a while was part of the
Army's most elite and secretive combat group, the Delta Force. He learned
to be a sniper and a paratrooper. He could shoot pistols with deadly
accuracy using either hand.

"He was a highly trained killer," says Joe, with astonishment rather than
judgment.

"Don't say 'killer,' " Gina interjects. "Just say 'highly trained.' "

It wasn't until later in his career that he decided to become an officer.
Ben's unit — Headquarters Battalion, 3rd Field Artillery Regiment, 1st
Armored Division — was assigned to Iraq just days after the first American
bombs were dropped on Baghdad.

Before the unit left, Joe and Patricia visited Ben and Jill at a U.S. base
in Giessen, Germany. The parents argued with Jill over the war, with Ben
trying to play mediator. Emotions heated up to the point that, after Joe
and Patricia went to bed, Ben and Jill stayed awake all night.

"Ben felt strongly Saddam had to go," Joe recalled. "He knew where we
stood, and he knew we supported him even if we didn't support the war."

The visit at Giessen in late March was the last time they saw him. From
then on, Ben communicated through e-mail. He wrote family members that he
was in Baghdad, working out of a palace formerly owned by one of Saddam
Hussein's sons.

For the first few months, his e-mails were optimistic, talking about
electricity restored and schools reopened. But the tone changed toward the
end. He told of seeing a vehicle in front of him in a convoy explode. In
an e-mail sent in late October, he wrote his parents that it "was getting
old and it was getting crazy." Early morning on Nov. 1, Ben Colgan wrote
his last e-mail to his father.

"We treat the people very well," he wrote. "They are just getting sick of
seeing our faces and we're sick of seeing theirs…. I see the news also.
Many of the good things are not being reported (as well as many of the
attacks we receive daily). Only time will tell and I hope it works out for
this place. I just don't care to ever visit again.

"I'll talk to you soon. Love you, Ben."

Hours after writing the e-mail, he was dead. The most complete account of
what happened came in a roundabout way, through a eulogy. Lt. Col. William
S. Rabena, Ben's commanding officer, spoke at a memorial in Baghdad four
days after Ben died, and copies of the eulogy were sent to the family.

According to Rabena, Ben's platoon patrolled one of the most dangerous
sections of the city. On his last day, Ben was in charge of a
quick-reaction force, a unit on call to respond to immediate dangers.

A call came in: U.S. soldiers were in pursuit of a man who had fired a
rocket-propelled grenade. Ben took off with three other soldiers in a
Humvee to cut off the suspect. He was in the passenger seat. On a
well-traveled section of road, just as the Humvee made a turn, it hit what
the military calls an "improvised explosive device," in this case
something resembling a land mine.

Ben was struck with shrapnel, and much of the right side of his head was
injured. He was conscious at first, able to answer questions about who and
where he was. Four hours later, he died. One other soldier in the Humvee
suffered a concussion.

"Nobody, but nobody, was more dedicated to the mission," Rabena said in
his eulogy. He described Ben as "absolutely fearless" and "the greatest
guy around — the kind of guy you want living next door to you and your
family."



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

On the day the Colgans learned of Ben's death, a family member lit a
candle and placed it beneath "Ben's tree," a Japanese maple in the
frontyard. Joe and Patricia had planted a tree for every one of their
children.

Around the tree's trunk was a yellow ribbon, which Patricia had tied
shortly after Ben left for Iraq. Just below that hung a black ribbon,
which she tied the day the chaplains came to the house. Below the ribbons,
the candle flickered in a brass-colored lantern.

Joe was vigilant about tending it.

There was talk that the candle would remain lit until the memorial
service, which took place on the cloudy afternoon of Nov. 29. In all, Ben
had three memorial services: one in Baghdad for his fellow soldiers, one
in Aurora for Jill's family, and one here, in the town that was home for
most of his life.

The vast extended family poured into St. Philomena's, as did old childhood
friends. Some 650 people filled the pews and packed the aisles. Metal
chairs from the closet were brought out to accommodate the overflow.

The service opened with a rendition of "Amazing Grace" played on bagpipes,
followed by a reading by one of Ben's aunts of Ecclesiastes 3:1-9. It
began: "For everything there is a season and a time for every matter under
heaven: a time to be born and a time to die." Quiet sobs could be heard
throughout the sanctuary.

Afterward, the crowd jammed into a nearby high school to eat, drink and
celebrate the memory of Ben — Irish-Catholic style. A slide show of Ben's
life was followed by a dance. Young children danced with elders, girls
with girls, first cousins with second cousins.

At the end of the long day, in pitch darkness, Joe and Patricia, weary
from the hectic pace of the last month, went home to the orange-yellow
glow flickering in their frontyard. The private part of grieving was upon
them.

Joe decided not to blow out the candle. He'd decided to build a small
memorial for Ben in the backyard. He didn't have the details worked out,
but he knew in the center of it would be the candle lantern.

"I think I'm going to keep it burning," he said. "I'm just going to keep
it burning for as long as we need to."

Joe said he has two other projects in mind for the start of the new year.
First, he's going to lobby the Army to give Ben a Medal of Honor, the U.S.
military's highest honor. Second, he says he is going to campaign for an
antiwar presidential candidate.

Inside the house, in his bedroom, there was still the matter of the care
package. Every so often, Joe told himself that someone else could benefit
from the contents. But the thought never went very far. Every time, and
without fully understanding why, something in his gut told him that he
needed to hang on to it for just a little while longer.

"It was for Benny," he says for explanation. "It was for my son."
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Published on Monday, December 22, 2003 by http://www.TomPaine.com
A Time For Truth On DU
by Steven Rosenfeld

The health impacts of depleted uranium (DU) munitions on soldiers who
served in the Iraq and the Persian Gulf Wars will be studied by Congress'
General Accounting Office, according to two congressmen who have requested
a new investigation into whether the Pentagon has ignored the medical
consequences of the armaments.

"We are requesting further investigation by the GAO of the study of
veterans exposed to DU during the 1991 Gulf War, and an assessment of
current DoD [Department of Defense] and DVA [Department of Veterans
Affairs] policies to identify and provide medical care for veterans
exposed to DU during Operation Iraqi Freedom," wrote Reps. Bob Filner,
D-Calif., and Ciro Rodriguez, D-Texas, in a Dec. 3 letter requesting the
congressional inquiry.

"There are many uncertainties about depleted uranium, but one thing is
clear: the Department of Defense and Department of Veterans Affairs have
refused to conduct an adequate study of veterans exposed to DU on the
battlefield," said Dan Fahey, a former board member of the National Gulf
War Resource Center, a veterans organization, who helped the congressmen
frame the GAO inquiry.

"Congressmen Filner and Rodriguez have once again demonstrated their
concern for the health of veterans by asking the GAO to investigate what
appear to be serious flaws in the VA's study of veterans exposed to DU,"
Fahey said. "The Pentagon has admitted that thousands of veterans may have
been "unnecessarily" exposed to DU during and after the 1991 war—including
approximately 900 veterans with significant exposures—but this year the VA
assessed the health status of just 32 veterans."

The GAO study of DU's health impacts on soldiers is significant because
the very dense and slightly radioactive metal is used extensively in
bullets and shells fired by U.S. tanks and jets. It is a byproduct of
making nuclear fuel and is more effective than lead bullets, making DU
bullets and warheads a key component of the military's arsenal.

DU projectiles puncture almost all metal targets. Due to its m ass and
velocity, it breaks up and vaporizes into micron-sized particles upon
impact. The Pentagon says DU is safe, but veteran advocates are skeptical,
saying the military should scientifically study the most-exposed soldiers
to see if they develop illnesses tied to low-level radiation exposure.
Such exposure would come from either inhaling or ingesting airborne DU
particles from destroyed Iraqi targets or from friendly fire accidents,
and the related emergency responses and subsequent clean up.

The health impacts of DU have been a controversial issue. Some
anti-nuclear activists say there are traces of deadly nuclear isotopes in
the metal, because it is made from spent fuel rods from nuclear power
plants. But leading medical journals in the United States and England say
more study is needed before definitive conclusions can be reached.

In Iraq, where the Christian Science Monitor last spring reported an
estimated 75 tons of the metal was used by the U.S. Air Force last winter
and remains scattered on the ground, the military has posted signs in some
places warning people to stay away from destroyed targets. Subsequent
statements by the British and American militaries lead independent
analysts to estimate that 100-to-150 metric tons of DU was used in the
Iraq War.

The congressmen, drawing on research prepared by Fahey, have asked the GAO
to study whether DU can be linked to cancers and other diseases among Iraq
and Persian Gulf War veterans. Before the Iraq War, Fahey unsuccessfully
tried to persuade the VA to independently study these same issues.

"DoD's own laboratory studies confirm DU may cause cancer, tumors,
neurological damage, and reproductive effects, but the possible connection
between DU and disease development in the vast majority of exposed
veterans remains unexamined, and therefore, unknown," the congressmen’s
letter said. "This is of particular concern because it is now almost 13
years since the war, and the latency period for the development of many
cancers possibly related to DU is 10 to 30 years."

They cited Fahey's belief that the Pentagon officials have made "false
statements" about "the existence of a rare Hodgkin's lymphoma and a bone
tumor among veterans in the DU Program, signaling a breakdown in the
integrity of the study."

"On at least two occasions in 2001, DoD spokesmen falsely claimed that no
veterans in the DU Program had developed cancer, in an apparent attempt to
dampen controversy in Europe about the use of DU munitions in the
Balkans," they wrote. "In addition, in April 2003, an Army doctor was
quoted in press stories falsely claiming that no veterans in the DU
Program had developed any tumors. These prevarications beg the question of
whether other health effects have been observed among these veterans, but
not reported."

That "army doctor" was Dr. Michael Kilpatrick of the Office of the Special
Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs, who is among the
top-raking Pentagon officials who create military health policy. Those
remarks were made at a NATO briefing.

The congressman also noted that the Pentagon "previously misled" GAO
investigators and the Department of Veterans Affairs about "the extent of
veterans' exposures to DU during the 1991 war" and said there was "cause
for concern that DoD is not providing complete and accurate information
about DU exposures in Iraq."

Fahey said this pattern of repressing information continues to this day.

"The VA is failing in its duty to assist veterans exposed to a known
carcinogen on the battlefield, but sadly, it appears that the Pentagon is
calling the shots when it comes to DU policy," Fahey said. "Even now, as
our troops continue to fight and die in Iraq, the Pentagon refuses to
disclose information about its use of DU, or release information to the
United Nations Environment Programme about the quantities and locations of
DU expenditure."

He said a serious inquiry by the GAO could clear up these and other
unknowns. "There is a serious lack of transparency and accountability when
it comes to Pentagon and VA policy on DU, but this GAO investigation is a
huge first step in understanding what—if any—health effects DU has caused
among U.S. troops."

Congressmen Filner and Rodriguez said the results of the GAO study could
lead to legislation reorganizing the military's DU health programs.

"Depending on the findings of this GAO investigation, we may wish to
introduce legislation requiring a restructuring of the DU Program and
extending service-connected benefits to veterans who develop health
conditions, such as certain types of cancer that can plausibly be caused
by a significant DU exposure," they wrote.

The GAO investigation would most likely be completed by next summer.


Steven Rosenfeld is a senior editor for http://www.TomPaine.com.
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see also:

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/1224-02.htm
First Case of Mad Cow Disease in US

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/1225-01.htm
Expert Warned That Mad Cow Was Imminent

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

http://www.free-news.org/pkaiuk01.htm

Mad Cow Disease. The Chemical Industry Plays Dirty.
By Paul Kail, PhD.

BSE (Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy), or Mad Cow Disease, and its human
form, nvCJD (New Variant Creutzfeldt-Jacob Disease), are incurable brain
disorders. Holes appear in victims' brains, then they become demented and
die. The diseases are not caused by a virus or a bacterium, but by a
mysterious type of twisted protein, known as a «prion». The prion can
propagate itself by causing other proteins to twist into the same shape.
Prions can be passed on by eating the flesh of another animal, and are
resistant to cooking and digestion.

A theory about how prions are formed suggests that organophosphate
pesticides could be partly to blame. Two people have already died
defending this theory, apparently at the hands of professional assassins
working either for the British government or the chemical industry. So the
theory needs to be taken seriously.

BSE first appeared in the UK in 1985. Since then, the disease has affected
half of the cow herds in the country. New Variant CJD also first appeared
in the UK, ten years later: to date, around 90 people have died from it.
Both BSE and CDJ are beginning to spread throughout the rest of Europe;
today, 30 European countries have had exports of their cattle banned. The
diseases have the potential to destroy the entire European cattle
industry, and kill thousands of people. The death toll from nvCJD is
increasing by 35% per year, and the disease has a gestation period of
twenty years. Some projections suggest that hundreds of thousands of
people could eventually die from it.

Given the huge amount at stake, one might expect that any credible theory
would be welcomed. Yet Mark Purdey, a British farmer from Somerset, has
suffered constant harassment and has had to support his research from his
own pocket. Purdey has a theory which might explain the mystery of why BSE
and new variant nvCJD started in the UK, and why they are so much more
serious there. However, since he went public with his ideas, some rather
unfortunate things have happened:

Both his vet and the lawyer defending his case died in suspicious road
accidents. His second lawyer also had a car crash, but survived.
When an article about his work appeared in the «Independent», a national
British newspaper, his telephone lines were cut. He was therefore unable
to take follow up calls from other papers and television stations.
His farm house was burnt down just before he was about to move in.
His science library was destroyed by a collapsing barn.
When he travels around the country to talk about his theory, he is
constantly trailed. Purdey believes that the root cause of BSE is an
imbalance of magnesium and copper, exacerbated, in the case of the UK, by
the use of a highly toxic pesticide known as phosmet. Phosphet is an
organophosphate nerve toxin, originally developed by the Nazis. It is also
related to the drug Thalidamide, which causes birth defects.

Phosmet is made by Zeneca, a subdivision of the British chemical giant
ICI. A week after the British government first announced the link between
BSE and nvCJD, Zeneca sold the patent for phosmet to a PO Box company in
Arizona, apparently to avoid potential legal action.

The theory started when Purdey noticed that his cows, unlike those of his
neighbours, were not getting BSE. Cows often suffer from a parasitic
infection known as warble fly. Since Purdey is an organic farmer, he
treated his herd with derris root powder, a natural remedy. Other farmers
were using phosmet, which was later made compulsory throughout the UK.
When Purdey bought an infected cow from another herd, he was able to
reduce the symptoms of BSE by injecting oxime, which is an antidote to
pesticide poisoning. However, officials from MAFF (the Ministry for
Agriculture, Fisheries and Food) turned up to kill the cow before the
experiment could be completed.

As well as the link to phosmet use, Purdey discovered that brain diseases
such as BSE and nvCJD appear in clusters in many places around the world.
The link seems to be a lack of copper and an excess of manganese.

For example, in some areas of Colorado and Wyoming, 4-6% of deer and elk
suffer from CWD (Chronic Wasting Disease), which is related to nvCJD.
These animals live in areas where the soils are very high in manganese. In
Slovakia, where the incidence of nvCJD is a thousand times higher than
normal, most of the victims live near a glass making plant (where
manganese is used) or else down-wind of one of two large ferro-manganese
factories.

In the UK, two factors have increased the amount of manganese which cows
consume. Until 1988, cows were fed chicken manure. The chicken had been
fed manganese to strengthen their eggs, but 98% of it ended up in the
manure. In addition, a fungicide rich in manganese was used on crops at
that time.

According to Purdey, a lack of copper and an excess of manganese causes
proteins in the nervous system of foetal cattle to change into the
abnormal prion forms found in BSE and nvCJD. Phosmet facilitates this
process by binding to copper, and therefore reducing the amount available
to brain tissues.

Recently, Dr David Brown, a chemist at Cambridge University, showed that
manganese can replace copper in brain proteins, thereby transforming them
into prions. Dr Brown lost his funding, and was not able to continue the
research.

The BSE crisis started in the UK, and that country still has the highest
rate of the disease. Purdey believes that this was because the British
government was the only one to enforce systemic phosmet at such a high
dose. Phosmet is used elsewhere, but either on a voluntary basis, or at a
much lower dose, or non-systemically.

However, there is a long lag between the peak of phosmet use and the
incidence of BSE. Purdey says that this is for two reasons. First, cows
are most susceptible to phosmet damage when they are in the womb. Second,
phosmet has to reach a certain concentration in the food-chain before it
has an effect.

Quite apart from the direct attacks on Mr Purdey, the chemical industry
have launched a media campaign to discredit his research. Although MAFF
claims that any credible theories for BSE will receive funding, Purdey has
received nothing.

The effort that the chemical industry has apparently gone to to discredit
Mark Purdey mirrors the experiences of Alice Stewart, the scientist who
first showed the link between radiation and cancer. Scientists who
supported her had their cars rammed. Maybe in this case as well, the truth
will come out in the end.


Dr. Paul Kail has a Ph.D. in neuroscience from Cambridge University and is
founder and Director of the Animal Consciousness Foundation, which can be
reached via http://www.animals.org

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

see also:
http://www.squall.co.uk/squall.cfm/ses/sq=2001061947/ct=2

MAD COW COVER UP

An organic farmer from Somerset has gathered convincing evidence to
suggest that the outbreak of BSE in the UK was a direct result of a
commercial pesticide. Si Mitchell talks to a man who despite being shot at
and having his house burnt down, persists in attempts to expose the
commercial cover-up...

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