There are 23 days to go until the national referendum on the CHARACTER, COMPETENCE and CREDIBILITY of the _resident, the VICE _resident and the US regimestream news media...The Bush abomination is the most illegitimate, corrupt and incompetent regime in modern US history...Here are FIVE stories that should have dominated the air waves on SeeBS Fork the Nation, AnythingButSee Week In Revision, NotBeSeen Meat The Press and SeeNotNews Lost Edition with Wolf Bluster, but they didn't...The network and cable news organizations are running away from the fact that Kerry-Edwards are 3-0 in the debates, and that there is an Electoral Uprising coming at the Ballot Box...They are, like Bush-Cheney on Iraq, in DEEP DENIAL about what is coming and what it will mean for them...It looks like they have decided to go down with the ship. If there is going to be a Caine Mutiny in the Media, it has got to happen soon...It's the Media, Stupid...They are, in large part, full partners in a Triad of shared special interests (e.g. oil, weapons, media, pharmaceuticals, tobacco, etc.) with the Bush Cabal and its wholly-owned-subsidiary-formerly-known-as-the-Republican-Party...It does not want to inform you about this presidential campaign, it wants to DISinform you...We are all crossing the Rubicon now, all of us...The life of the Republic is at stake in this election...The craven propapunditgandists and besotted anchors have, sadly, it seems, made the wrong decision about what is in their own best interest...Go to www.mediamatters.com and www.dailyhowler.com for the evidence of their complicity with the Bush abomination and their betrayal of the US Constitution and the Responsibility of the Free Press...
Phillip Sherwell, Daily Telegraph: A powerful "old guard" faction in the Central Intelligence Agency has launched an unprecedented campaign to undermine the Bush administration with a battery of damaging leaks and briefings about Iraq.
The White House is incensed by the increasingly public sniping from some senior intelligence officers who, it believes, are conducting a partisan operation to swing the election on November 2 in favour of John Kerry, the Democratic candidate, and against George W Bush.
Jim Pavitt, a 31-year CIA veteran who retired as a departmental chief in August, said that he cannot recall a time of such "viciousness and vindictiveness" in a battle between the White House and the agency...
There is anger within the CIA that it has taken all the blame for the failings of pre-war intelligence on Saddam Hussein's weapons programmes.
Former senior CIA officials argue that so-called "neo-conservative" hawks such as the vice president, Dick Cheney, the secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld, and his number three at the defence department, Douglas Feith, have prompted the ill-feeling by demanding "politically acceptable" results from the agency and rejecting conclusions they did not like. Yet Colin Powell, the less hardline secretary of state, has also been scathing in his criticism of pre-war intelligence briefings.
The leaks are also a shot across the bows of Porter Goss, the agency's new director and a former Republican congressman...
Bill Harlow, the former CIA spokesman who left with the former director George Tenet in July, acknowledged that there had been leaks from within the agency. "The intelligence community has been made the scapegoat for all the failings over Iraq," he said. "It deserves some of the blame, but not all of it. People are chafing at that, and that's the background to these leaks."
Critics of the White House include officials who have served in previous Republican administrations such as Vince Cannistraro, a former CIA head of counter-terrorism and member of the National Security Council under Ronald Reagan.
"These have been an extraordinary four years for the CIA and the political pressure to come up with the right results has been enormous, particularly from Vice-President Cheney.
"I'm afraid that the agency is guilty of bending over backwards to please the administration. George Tenet was desperate to give them what they wanted and that was a complete disaster."
With the simmering rows breaking out in public, the Wall Street Journal declared in an editorial that the administration was now fighting two insurgencies: one in Iraq and one at the CIA.
In a difficult week for President Bush leading up to Friday's presidential debate, the CIA-led Iraqi Survey Group confirmed that Saddam had had no weapons of mass destruction, while Mr Rumsfeld distanced himself from the administration's long-held assertion of ties between Saddam and the al-Qaeda terror network.
Steve Fainaru, Washington Post: Scrawled on the helmet of Lance Cpl. Carlos Perez are the letters FDNY. After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York, the Pentagon and western Pennsylvania, Perez quit school, left his job as a firefighter in Long Island, N.Y., and joined the U.S. Marine Corps.
"To be honest, I just wanted to take revenge," said Perez, 20..."Sometimes I see no reason why we're here," Perez said...
The Marines offered their opinions openly to a reporter traveling with the 1st Battalion, 2nd Marines during operations last week in Babil province, then expanded upon them during interviews over three days in their barracks at Camp Iskandariyah, their forward operating base.
The Marines' opinions have been shaped by their participation in hundreds of hours of operations over the past two months...
"I feel we're going to be here for years and years and years," said Lance Cpl. Edward Elston, 22, of Hackettstown, N.J. "I don't think anything is going to get better; I think it's going to get a lot worse. It's going to be like a Palestinian-type deal. We're going to stop being a policing presence and then start being an occupying presence. . . . We're always going to be here. We're never going to leave."
Several members of the platoon said they were struck by the difference between the way the war was being portrayed in the United States and the reality of their daily lives.
"Every day you read the articles in the States where it's like, 'Oh, it's getting better and better,' " said Lance Cpl. Jonathan Snyder, 22, of Gettysburg, Pa. "But when you're here, you know it's worse every day."
Pfc. Kyle Maio, 19, of Bucks County, Pa., said he thought government officials were reticent to speak candidly because of the upcoming U.S. elections. "Stuff's going on here but they won't flat-out say it," he said. "They can't get into it."
Agence France Press: In separate comments in The Independent on Sunday, Hans Blix, the former UN chief arms inspector until the US-British invasion in March 2003, and Scott Ritter, a senior inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998, backed a US official report concluding Iraq had no banned weapons before the war.
The authors of that report, although Bush appointees, "have had to acknowledge that the reality on the ground was totally different from the virtual reality that had been spun", Blix wrote...
Duelfer said the Iraqi leader had however hoped to renew his weapons quest if sanctions were lifted -- and both Blair and Bush have rushed to use that to argue their pre-emptive strike was necessary.
"This is the new straw to which the governments concerned have begun to cling", Blix wrote...
He questioned whether, as the Duelfer report recommends, UN inspectors would be allowed to carry out their work "in future cases, when supervision and verification will be needed, for example, in Iran, Libya and North Korea (news - web sites)".
Ritter, too, said Bush and Blair were "scrambling to re-justify" the war now that the banned weapons argument no longer held water, with claims they have made the world safer.
But Ritter charged that history would judge the leaders harshly for making the world a worse place by flouting international law and creating chaos in Iraq.
He said "the world's two greatest democracies" had undermined the legal framework of the United Nations (news - web sites) set up after World War II at exactly the time when the world needed multilateralism most, to fight a global war on terror.
"Saddam is gone, and the world is far worse for it -- not because his regime posed no threat, perceived or otherwise, but because the threat to international peace and security resulting from the decisions made by Bush and Blair to invade Iraq in violation of international law make any threat emanating from an Iraq ruled by Saddam pale in comparison," he wrote.
John Lichfield and Anne Penketh, Independent (UK): Washington and London have been accused of a concerted effort to smear France in an attempt to distract from the main conclusions of America's official report on Iraq's non-existent weapons programmes.
A section of the 1,000-page report by the chief US weapons inspector in Iraq contains allegations about Baghdad's attempts to bribe and subvert French politicians in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq last year...
The report does not suggest that such bribes were ever actually offered or accepted, but rather that Iraqi intelligence had told Saddam Hussein they had "targeted" France for treatment of this kind.
Efforts appeared to be under way yesterday to draw public attention away from the absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq by suggesting that senior figures in France and Russia - which was also anti-war - may have been paid to support Saddam's regime...
The report also partially repeats a list naming figures from all over the world - including a French oilman said to be close to the French President, Jacques Chirac - who received preferential treatment in the allocation of oil export licences.
However, unlike the first list published by the Iraqi newspaper al-Mada in January, which detailed the beneficiaries of a kickback scheme devised by Saddam, this one carries the official approval of the US authorities.
All the American names, and all but one of the UN names, have vanished. The names of US companies and individuals had been removed "because of US privacy laws".
The report - and intensive American and British official and unofficial spinning of the report - concentrated instead on the French and Russian figures on the list, including the former French interior minister Charles Pasqua and Patrick Maugein, head of the Soco International oil company, said to be a friend of President Chirac.
www.naderfactor.com: A four month review has revealed a disturbing pattern of Bush supporters providing organized assistance to the struggling campaign of Ralph Nader, almost entirely in key "battleground" states, including AZ, CO, FL, IA, NV, NH, NM, MI, OH, OR, VA, WV, and WI.
The report also detailed instances, in Florida and Arizona, where Mr. Nader has actually hired Bush supporters to lead his efforts. Nader is accepting this support despite months of public commitments to turn back cynical Bush assistance intended to use him to siphon votes from John Kerry.
Support Our Troops, Save the US Constitution,
Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,
Restore Fiscal Responsibility in the White House,
Thwart the Theft of a Second Presidential Election,
Save the Environment, Break the Corporatist
Stranglehold on the US Mainstream News Media, Rescue
the US Supreme Court from Right-Wing Radicals, Cleanse
the White House of the Chicken Hawk Coup and Its
War-Profiteering Cronies, Show Up for Democracy in
2004: Defeat the Triad, Defeat Bush (again!)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/10/10/wbush10.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/10/10/ixnewstop.html
The CIA 'old guard' goes to war with Bush
By Phillip Sherwell in Washington
(Filed: 10/10/2004)
A powerful "old guard" faction in the Central Intelligence Agency has launched an unprecedented campaign to undermine the Bush administration with a battery of damaging leaks and briefings about Iraq.
The White House is incensed by the increasingly public sniping from some senior intelligence officers who, it believes, are conducting a partisan operation to swing the election on November 2 in favour of John Kerry, the Democratic candidate, and against George W Bush.
Jim Pavitt, a 31-year CIA veteran who retired as a departmental chief in August, said that he cannot recall a time of such "viciousness and vindictiveness" in a battle between the White House and the agency.
John Roberts, a conservative security analyst, commented bluntly: "When the President cannot trust his own CIA, the nation faces dire consequences."
Relations between the White House and the agency are widely regarded as being at their lowest ebb since the hopelessly botched Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba by CIA-sponsored exiles under President John F Kennedy in 1961.
There is anger within the CIA that it has taken all the blame for the failings of pre-war intelligence on Saddam Hussein's weapons programmes.
Former senior CIA officials argue that so-called "neo-conservative" hawks such as the vice president, Dick Cheney, the secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld, and his number three at the defence department, Douglas Feith, have prompted the ill-feeling by demanding "politically acceptable" results from the agency and rejecting conclusions they did not like. Yet Colin Powell, the less hardline secretary of state, has also been scathing in his criticism of pre-war intelligence briefings.
The leaks are also a shot across the bows of Porter Goss, the agency's new director and a former Republican congressman. He takes over with orders from the White House to end the in-fighting and revamp the troubled spy agency as part of a radical overhaul of the American intelligence world.
Bill Harlow, the former CIA spokesman who left with the former director George Tenet in July, acknowledged that there had been leaks from within the agency. "The intelligence community has been made the scapegoat for all the failings over Iraq," he said. "It deserves some of the blame, but not all of it. People are chafing at that, and that's the background to these leaks."
Fighting to defend their patch ahead of the future review, anti-Bush CIA operatives have ensured that Iraq remains high on the election campaign agenda long after Republican strategists such as Karl Rove, the President's closest adviser, had hoped that it would fade from the front pages.
In the latest clash, a senior former CIA agent revealed that Mr Cheney "blew up" when a report into links between the Saddam regime and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the terrorist behind the kidnappings and beheadings of hostages in Iraq, including the Briton Kenneth Bigley, proved inconclusive.
Other recent leaks have included the contents of classified reports drawn up by CIA analysts before the invasion of Iraq, warning the White House about the dangers of post-war instability. Specifically, the reports said that rogue Ba'athist elements might team up with terrorist groups to wage a guerrilla war.
Critics of the White House include officials who have served in previous Republican administrations such as Vince Cannistraro, a former CIA head of counter-terrorism and member of the National Security Council under Ronald Reagan.
"These have been an extraordinary four years for the CIA and the political pressure to come up with the right results has been enormous, particularly from Vice-President Cheney.
"I'm afraid that the agency is guilty of bending over backwards to please the administration. George Tenet was desperate to give them what they wanted and that was a complete disaster."
With the simmering rows breaking out in public, the Wall Street Journal declared in an editorial that the administration was now fighting two insurgencies: one in Iraq and one at the CIA.
In a difficult week for President Bush leading up to Friday's presidential debate, the CIA-led Iraqi Survey Group confirmed that Saddam had had no weapons of mass destruction, while Mr Rumsfeld distanced himself from the administration's long-held assertion of ties between Saddam and the al-Qaeda terror network.
Earlier, unguarded comments by Paul Bremer, the former American administrator of Iraq who said that America "never had enough troops on the ground", had given the row about post-war strategy on the ground fresh impetus.
With just 23 days before the country votes for its next president, both sides are braced for further bruising encounters.
Posted to the web on Saturday October 9, 2004 at 12:59 PM EST
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A20794-2004Oct9.html
For Marines, a Frustrating Fight
Some in Iraq Question How and Why War Is Being Waged
By Steve Fainaru
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 10, 2004; Page A01
ISKANDARIYAH, Iraq -- Scrawled on the helmet of Lance Cpl. Carlos Perez are the letters FDNY. After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York, the Pentagon and western Pennsylvania, Perez quit school, left his job as a firefighter in Long Island, N.Y., and joined the U.S. Marine Corps.
"To be honest, I just wanted to take revenge," said Perez, 20.
Now, two months into a seven-month combat tour in Iraq, Perez said he sees little connection between the events of Sept. 11 and the war he is fighting. Instead, he said, he is increasingly disillusioned by a conflict whose origins remain unclear and frustrated by the timidity of U.S. forces against a mostly faceless enemy.
"Sometimes I see no reason why we're here," Perez said. "First of all, you cannot engage as many times as we want to. Second of all, we're looking for an enemy that's not there. The only way to do it is go house to house until we get out of here."
Perez is hardly alone. In a dozen interviews, Marines from a platoon known as the "81s" expressed in blunt terms their frustrations with the way the war is being conducted and, in some cases, doubts about why it is being waged. The platoon, named for the size in millimeters of its mortar rounds, is part of the 1st Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment based in Iskandariyah, 30 miles southwest of Baghdad.
The Marines offered their opinions openly to a reporter traveling with the 1st Battalion, 2nd Marines during operations last week in Babil province, then expanded upon them during interviews over three days in their barracks at Camp Iskandariyah, their forward operating base.
The Marines' opinions have been shaped by their participation in hundreds of hours of operations over the past two months. Their assessments differ sharply from those of the interim Iraqi government and the Bush administration, which have said that Iraq is on a certain -- if bumpy -- course toward peaceful democracy.
"I feel we're going to be here for years and years and years," said Lance Cpl. Edward Elston, 22, of Hackettstown, N.J. "I don't think anything is going to get better; I think it's going to get a lot worse. It's going to be like a Palestinian-type deal. We're going to stop being a policing presence and then start being an occupying presence. . . . We're always going to be here. We're never going to leave."
The views of the mortar platoon of some 50 young Marines, several of whom fought during the first phase of the war last year, are not necessarily reflective of all or even most U.S troops fighting in Iraq. Rather, they offer a snapshot of the frustrations engendered by a grinding conflict that has killed 1,064 Americans, wounded 7,730 and spread to many areas of the country.
Although not as highly publicized as attacks in such hot spots as Fallujah, Samarra and Baghdad's Sadr City, the violence in Babil province, south of the capital, is also intense. Since July 28, when the Marines took over operational responsibility for the region, 102 of the unit's 1,100 troops have been wounded, 85 in combat, according to battalion records. Four have been killed, two in combat.
Senior officers attribute the vast difference between the number of killed and wounded to the effectiveness of armor -- bullet-proof vests, helmets and reinforced armored vehicles, primarily Humvees -- in the face of persistent attacks. As of last week, the Marines had come upon 61 roadside bombs, nearly one a day. Forty-nine had detonated. Camp Iskandariyah was hit by mortar shells or rockets on 12 occasions; 21 other times, insurgents tried to hit the base and missed.
Realities on the Ground
Several members of the platoon said they were struck by the difference between the way the war was being portrayed in the United States and the reality of their daily lives.
"Every day you read the articles in the States where it's like, 'Oh, it's getting better and better,' " said Lance Cpl. Jonathan Snyder, 22, of Gettysburg, Pa. "But when you're here, you know it's worse every day."
Pfc. Kyle Maio, 19, of Bucks County, Pa., said he thought government officials were reticent to speak candidly because of the upcoming U.S. elections. "Stuff's going on here but they won't flat-out say it," he said. "They can't get into it."
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1538&ncid=732&e=2&u=/afp/20041010/wl_uk_afp/iraq_weapons_us_britain
Posted to the web on Saturday October 9, 2004 at 3:19 PM EST
Former UN arms inspectors slam Bush, Blair after weapons report
Sun Oct 10, 5:33 AM ET
LONDON (AFP) - Two former senior UN weapons inspectors in Iraq (news - web sites) criticized US President George W. Bush (news - web sites) and British Prime Minister Tony Blair (news - web sites) for clinging to ever-weaker arguments to justify their war on Iraq.
In separate comments in The Independent on Sunday, Hans Blix, the former UN chief arms inspector until the US-British invasion in March 2003, and Scott Ritter, a senior inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998, backed a US official report concluding Iraq had no banned weapons before the war.
The authors of that report, although Bush appointees, "have had to acknowledge that the reality on the ground was totally different from the virtual reality that had been spun", Blix wrote.
Charles Duelfer, who headed the Iraq Survey Group, said in the 1,000-page report released Wednesday that Saddam had destroyed most of his chemical and biological weapons after his 1991 Gulf War (news - web sites) defeat and that his nuclear program had "progressively decayed".
Duelfer said the Iraqi leader had however hoped to renew his weapons quest if sanctions were lifted -- and both Blair and Bush have rushed to use that to argue their pre-emptive strike was necessary.
"This is the new straw to which the governments concerned have begun to cling", Blix wrote.
A former Swedish foreign minister who led the UN hunt for banned chemical and biological weapons in Iraq, Blix said that in fact "the world succeeded in disarming Saddam (Hussein) without knowing it".
He questioned whether, as the Duelfer report recommends, UN inspectors would be allowed to carry out their work "in future cases, when supervision and verification will be needed, for example, in Iran, Libya and North Korea (news - web sites)".
Ritter, too, said Bush and Blair were "scrambling to re-justify" the war now that the banned weapons argument no longer held water, with claims they have made the world safer.
But Ritter charged that history would judge the leaders harshly for making the world a worse place by flouting international law and creating chaos in Iraq.
He said "the world's two greatest democracies" had undermined the legal framework of the United Nations (news - web sites) set up after World War II at exactly the time when the world needed multilateralism most, to fight a global war on terror.
"Saddam is gone, and the world is far worse for it -- not because his regime posed no threat, perceived or otherwise, but because the threat to international peace and security resulting from the decisions made by Bush and Blair to invade Iraq in violation of international law make any threat emanating from an Iraq ruled by Saddam pale in comparison," he wrote.
Ritter, a former intelligence officer in the US Marines, was an inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998, when he resigned, citing a lack of UN and US support for his tough disarmament methods.
Both men have been outspoken critics of Bush and Blair, and authors of books on the hunt for Saddam's weapons of mass destruction.
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politics/story.jsp?story=569949
France says report's bribe claims are bid to smear Chirac
By John Lichfield and Anne Penketh
08 October 2004
Washington and London have been accused of a concerted effort to smear France in an attempt to distract from the main conclusions of America's official report on Iraq's non-existent weapons programmes.
A section of the 1,000-page report by the chief US weapons inspector in Iraq contains allegations about Baghdad's attempts to bribe and subvert French politicians in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq last year.
The war went ahead after France, a permanent member of the UN Security Council, threatened to veto military action, saying that more time was needed for the UN inspection effort, and fearing that war would destabilise the region.
The report does not suggest that such bribes were ever actually offered or accepted, but rather that Iraqi intelligence had told Saddam Hussein they had "targeted" France for treatment of this kind.
Efforts appeared to be under way yesterday to draw public attention away from the absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq by suggesting that senior figures in France and Russia - which was also anti-war - may have been paid to support Saddam's regime. The ultra-nationalist Russian politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky, whose name is on the list, repeated his denial that he benefited from Saddam's bribes yesterday.
The report also partially repeats a list naming figures from all over the world - including a French oilman said to be close to the French President, Jacques Chirac - who received preferential treatment in the allocation of oil export licences.
However, unlike the first list published by the Iraqi newspaper al-Mada in January, which detailed the beneficiaries of a kickback scheme devised by Saddam, this one carries the official approval of the US authorities.
All the American names, and all but one of the UN names, have vanished. The names of US companies and individuals had been removed "because of US privacy laws".
The report - and intensive American and British official and unofficial spinning of the report - concentrated instead on the French and Russian figures on the list, including the former French interior minister Charles Pasqua and Patrick Maugein, head of the Soco International oil company, said to be a friend of President Chirac.
Saddam used a secret voucher system within the framework of the UN's oil-for-food programme to reward those "willing to co-operate with Iraq to subvert UN sanctions", the report notes.
The report says M. Maugein, who received vouchers for 13 million barrels of oil, was "considered a conduit to Chirac", although it adds that this was "not confirmed".
M. Pasqua, once a close associate of M. Chirac, has been a marginal figure in French politics, excluded from the President's inner councils for almost a decade. M. Maugein is an oil man who could legitimately have sought contracts under the oil-for-food programme with Iraq. Both men have previously denied taking any money from Iraqi oil export licences.
The report also says Iraqi intelligence identified "ministers and politicians, journalists, and business people" who could help Iraq in its prime goal of lifting the UN sanctions. The report also suggests that French businessmen were interested in sanctions-busting, saying that it had found evidence of procurement transactions that included "negotiations for possible WMD-related mobile laboratories".
The French government reacted angrily to the accusations in the Duelfer report yesterday. The allegations had already been denied by the individuals and companies concerned and the French government had no reason to believe that they were true, said the French foreign ministry spokesman Hervé Ladsous.
A senior official in the foreign ministry said that he thought that France was the victim of a clumsy smear campaign. "If there were French individuals who were involved in corrupt dealings with Iraq, they should be investigated," the official said. "But to suggest that there was a concerted bribing of French politicians is absurd. You only have to look at what is happening in Iraq every day of the week to see why there was no support for the war in France last year."
http://www.commondreams.org/news2004/1008-21.htm
Alliance Between Nader and Bush in Key States
WASHINGTON, DC - TheNaderFactor.com today released a comprehensive, documented report detailing one of the strangest alliances in American political history - Ralph Nader & George W. Bush. This report is the first to document, in one place, the extensive political support given to Ralph Nader by supporters of his alleged opponent, George W. Bush.
A four month review has revealed a disturbing pattern of Bush supporters providing organized assistance to the struggling campaign of Ralph Nader, almost entirely in key "battleground" states, including AZ, CO, FL, IA, NV, NH, NM, MI, OH, OR, VA, WV, and WI.
The report also detailed instances, in Florida and Arizona, where Mr. Nader has actually hired Bush supporters to lead his efforts. Nader is accepting this support despite months of public commitments to turn back cynical Bush assistance intended to use him to siphon votes from John Kerry.
"Ralph Nader has betrayed his supporters and sacrificed principle for his own personal political gain," said David Jones, President of TheNaderFactor.com.
"Nader is allowing himself to be used as a tool by surrogates of President Bush to divide the opposition to the president's reelection," Jones continued.
For a copy of the report, click the link below:
http://www.thenaderfactor.com/press/072304/
TheNaderFactor.com is a project of the National Progress Fund,a political organization based in Washington, DC dedicated to ending the destructive policies of the Bush Administration.