Laura Zuckerman, Reuters: Montana's Democratic governor has touched off a political fight with state Republicans after calling for the return of National Guard troops serving in Iraq to help out during what many fear will be a record-setting wildfire season.
Newly elected Gov. Brian Schweitzer infuriated Republican lawmakers -- the minority party in state government for the first time in more than a decade -- who see his request as a back-door way to criticize the Bush administration over Iraq.
"He's figured out how to use the wildfire season to protest the Iraq war," said Senate Minority Leader Bob Keenan said on Tuesday. "It's an anti-war statement and condemnation of Bush's actions."
The governor and his supporters deny those charges in a growing political battle that comes as weather experts say a seven-year drought and a severely reduced snowpack could lead to a devastating summer of wildfires.
Amy Feigenbaum, Weslyan Argus: Hersh forecasted a protracted war in Iraq, an obstinate president who will remain indifferent to anti-war sentiments, and an economic collapse. In his talk "Chain of Command: From 9/11 to Abu Ghraib," Hersh criticized both Republicans and Democrats, stressing the need for new faces in Congress.
Hersh is one of America's most renowned investigative journalists, currently writing for The New Yorker on military and security matters. In 2004, Hersh helped expose the Abu Ghraib abuses…
Hersh's most recent articles in January 2005 revealed that the U.S. has been conducting covert operations in Iran to identify targets for possible strikes. While both the Bush administration and the Iranian government have denied these allegations, Hersh claims that the U.S. will not stand for Iran having nuclear power.
"We'll do something in Iran," Hersh said. "The Bush administration has long been planning it. This is the worst presidency and the worst war at the worst time in history that I can see. The Congress does not stand up to Bush. Their problem is that they're down 20 IQ points a man since the 1960's."
While his lecture gave a pessimistic view of the next four years, he did offer hope for the upcoming Congressional elections. In the last election, he noted an emerging pattern in the West, which he called community building. Our government needs new leadership, he said. The people need to support better politicians and than work to get these people elected.
LLOYD AXWORTHY, Open Letter to Condi Rice, Winnipeg Free Press: I invite you to expand the narrow perspective that seems to inform your opinions of Canada by ranging far wider in your reach of contacts and discussions. You would find that what is rising in Canada is not so much anti-Americanism, as claimed by your and our right-wing commentators, but fundamental disagreements with certain policies of your government. You would see that rather than just reacting to events by drawing on old conventional wisdoms, many Canadians are trying to think our way through to some ideas that can be helpful in building a more secure world.
These Canadians believe that security can be achieved through well-modulated efforts to protect the rights of people, not just nation-states.
To encourage and advance international co-operation on managing the risk of climate change, they believe that we need agreements like Kyoto.
To protect people against international crimes like genocide and ethnic cleansing, they support new institutions like the International Criminal Court -- which, by the way, you might strongly consider using to hold accountable those committing atrocities today in Darfur, Sudan.
And these Canadians believe that the United Nations should indeed be reformed -- beginning with an agreement to get rid of the veto held by the major powers over humanitarian interventions to stop violence and predatory practices.
On this score, you might want to explore the concept of the 'Responsibility to Protect' while you're in Ottawa. It's a Canadian idea born out of the recent experience of Kosovo and informed by the many horrific examples of inhumanity over the last half-century. Many Canadians feel it has a lot more relevance to providing real human security in the world than missile defence ever will…
There is also a very strong awareness on both sides of the border of how vital Canada is to the U.S. as a partner in North America. We supply copious amounts of oil and natural gas to your country, our respective trade is the world's largest in volume, and we are increasingly bound together by common concerns over depletion of resources, especially very scarce fresh water.
Daniel Ellsberg, www.commondreams.org: The fact that Israel has a large and growing nuclear arsenal - larger than Britain's - has been recognized by the rest of the world ever since Mordechai Vanunu revealed it conclusively nineteen years ago. For demolishing his country's policy of concealment, denial and "ambiguity" of its status as a nuclear weapons state, Vanunu served eighteen years in prison, including an unprecedented period of eleven and a half years of solitary confinement in a six-by-nine foot cell.
Meanwhile, not one of the harms that some feared might result from his revelations has materialized in the slightest degree. The notion that any further details he could disclose, nineteen years later, could harm Israel's national security is absurd. Why then, after he has served his full sentence, is the State of Israel invoking British Mandate Emergency Regulations of 1945, pre-dating its own independence, to threaten him with prison for exercising his fundamental human rights to speak to foreigners and foreign journalists? Why do its leaders still insist on suppressing any open discussion in Israel itself of its real military posture and its implications for their security?
John P. O’Neil Wall of Heroes
Montana call for Iraq troop return sparks debate
12 Mar 2005 00:59:16 GMT
Source: Reuters
By Laura Zuckerman
SULA, Mont., March 11 (Reuters) - Montana's Democratic governor has touched off a political fight with state Republicans after calling for the return of National Guard troops serving in Iraq to help out during what many fear will be a record-setting wildfire season.
Newly elected Gov. Brian Schweitzer infuriated Republican lawmakers -- the minority party in state government for the first time in more than a decade -- who see his request as a back-door way to criticize the Bush administration over Iraq.
"He's figured out how to use the wildfire season to protest the Iraq war," said Senate Minority Leader Bob Keenan said on Tuesday. "It's an anti-war statement and condemnation of Bush's actions."
The governor and his supporters deny those charges in a growing political battle that comes as weather experts say a seven-year drought and a severely reduced snowpack could lead to a devastating summer of wildfires.
They also worry that limited resources stretched thinner by National Guardsmen serving overseas could make it difficult to combat the kind of massive blazes that engulfed the state in 2000 when some 2,400 wildfires torched nearly 950,000 acres of mostly public land.
"Everything right now is pointing to the possibility of a large and damaging fire season," said Bruce Thoricht, meteorologist with the federal Northern Rockies Coordination Center in Missoula.
Gov. Schweitzer ignited the firestorm last week when he said Montana, which backed Bush's re-election, would disproportionately suffer the pain of proposed cuts in the federal budget, with money targeted for firefighting slashed in half.
Democrats also say the drought-plagued, fire-prone Western state about the size of Germany never has enough resources to fight summer blazes even with all the troops at home.
"I would be remiss as chief executive of Montana not to look at the cards I'm dealt and not recognize it's not a good hand and we need new cards," the governor told Reuters earlier this week.
As fire season approaches, about 1,500 of Montana's 3,500 National Guard troops have been deployed on federal active duty, said Montana Guard spokesman Maj. Scott Smith.
Smith declined to weigh in on the governor's position but a Pentagon spokesman Lt. Colonel Mike Milord said in an e-mail on Tuesday the state's Guard force was at 56 percent and that deals with neighboring states would provide for more troops during emergencies this summer.
And the bulk of the Guard's helicopters -- critical in shuttling fire crews and equipment to blazes -- are unavailable, either because they are in Iraq or their aviation officers are absent.
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N11460046.htm
Hersh speech blasts Bush and war policy
By Amy Feigenbaum
News Editor
rebistalgn.com.ar
Seymour Hersh, one of America's most respected investigative journalists, criticizes contemporary politicians in speeches.
Seymour Hersh confirmed existing worries about Bush's next four years in office during a Tuesday night lecture in the Memorial Chapel.
Hersh forecasted a protracted war in Iraq, an obstinate president who will remain indifferent to anti-war sentiments, and an economic collapse. In his talk "Chain of Command: From 9/11 to Abu Ghraib," Hersh criticized both Republicans and Democrats, stressing the need for new faces in Congress.
Hersh is one of America's most renowned investigative journalists, currently writing for The New Yorker on military and security matters. In 2004, Hersh helped expose the Abu Ghraib abuses.
Hersh began his lecture by describing Bush's vision of the war in Iraq and the effects his beliefs will have for the future of US intervention.
"Bush thinks he's doing the right thing in Iraq," Hersh said. "He's completely committed whether it's finishing his father's work, for divine reasons, or manifest destiny. Over 1,500 body bags have come back and another 1,000 or 2,000 body bags wouldn't stop him."
The justification for the U.S. invasion, he said, is not oil or Israel as many have thought; it is Bush's uncompromising beliefs.
"It's really terrifying," Hersh said. "Street marches and demonstrations wouldn't change what he's going to do. Even when Bush was asked by a high ranking government official if the US was losing the war in Iraq, Bush said 'you mean we're not winning?'"
Professor Martha Crenshaw from the Government department questioned Hersh's opinion of Bush.
"None of us know what motivates Bush," Crenshaw said. "There are some, Professor Gergen [at the Kennedy School of Government] at Harvard [who] see Bush as a good leader, someone who is flexible and pragmatic. You get a different picture of the president from different things you read."
According to Hersh, Bush's vision has presented several negative implications for the ear in Iraq. Bush has kept the American people in the dark about what is actually going on. There are no embedded journalists and few reporters in Iraq, which allow military activity to go unchecked.
The administration's use of the word "insurgents" in Iraq gives the wrong impression of militants, making them seem unorganized and barbaric. They in fact should be called "resisters," because they are simply resisting the US occupation.
These resisters are more methodical than Bush or the media have given them credit for.
"[The resisters] are letting the Americans have Baghdad," Hersh said. "Most of the Iraqis left the city before the U.S. invaded. And the attacks that occurred during that time seemed random to us. They were taking down their existing structures systematically."
According to Hersh, the insurgent violence, along with an upcoming presidential election, created the impetus for Abu Ghraib. Bush wanted to gain the most information he could in the shortest amount of time.
"While Americans value privacy, Arabs work on shame," Hersh said. "Men cannot see men naked, it's against the Koran. The photos that were taken could be used as blackmail against these prisoners.
The President and his administration knew what was going on, according to Hersh; they had inspected Abu Ghraib and praised its work.
According to Hersh, the American troops in Abu Ghraib were deeply affected by the torture they inflicted. He compared their actions to those of the US soldiers involved in the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, which he exposed in 1969.
"I gave them a good boy," Hersh quoted one mother of a soldier involved in the My Lai massacre. "And they gave me back a murderer."
Abu Ghraib is just one example of covert military behavior, Hersh said, but it goes deeper. In recent months, the military has even been hiding where U.S. troops are located. Most troops are being killed in Romady, not Baghdad.
The new plan of attack is to take over one city at a time with the goal of making Iraqis more afraid of U.S. troops than insurgents. The military believes that this is the best way to make Iraqi's safe. The marines, however, do not have the intelligence to make this mission successful and eventually, Hersh said, it will result in a civil war.
On the subject of Afghanistan, Hersh claimed that the violence was completely unnecessary.
"More than 70% of the Taliban didn't want bin Laden as a leader," Hersh said. "Meanwhile, we have declared victory when warlords control the military bases and a mafia society is in control."
Hersh's most recent articles in January 2005 revealed that the U.S. has been conducting covert operations in Iran to identify targets for possible strikes. While both the Bush administration and the Iranian government have denied these allegations, Hersh claims that the U.S. will not stand for Iran having nuclear power.
"We'll do something in Iran," Hersh said. "The Bush administration has long been planning it. This is the worst presidency and the worst war at the worst time in history that I can see. The Congress does not stand up to Bush. Their problem is that they're down 20 IQ points a man since the 1960's."
While his lecture gave a pessimistic view of the next four years, he did offer hope for the upcoming Congressional elections. In the last election, he noted an emerging pattern in the West, which he called community building. Our government needs new leadership, he said. The people need to support better politicians and than work to get these people elected.
Most students trusted Hersh's credibility but questioned his extreme negativity of the current political situation.
"It seems like he's well connected with very powerful people," said Josh Cohen '05. "He's credible--fame allows people to confide in him and so he becomes a great source of information."
"If anything good can come out of all of this mess, maybe it will be that people will develop a more critical perspective about those in power, and military recruiting will suffer," said Mark Bray '05.
Professor Philip Pomper of the History Department has been friends with Hersh since elementary school and invited him to speak at Wesleyan.
"You never can guess when you're playing softball with someone on the south side of Chicago, what they are destined to become," Pomper said. "But when you can balance advocacy with actuary, you can make a compelling case. And that's just the kind of man he is. A man of conviction."
http://www.wesleyanargus.com/article.php?article_id=923
Missile Counter-Attack
Axworthy fires back at U.S. -- and Canadian -- critics of our BMD decision in An Open Letter to U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice
Thursday, March 3rd, 2005
By LLOYD AXWORTHY
Dear Condi,
I'm glad you've decided to get over your fit of pique and venture north to visit your closest neighbour. It's a chance to learn a thing or two. Maybe more.
I know it seems improbable to your divinely guided master in the White House that mere mortals might disagree with participating in a missile-defence system that has failed in its last three tests, even though the tests themselves were carefully rigged to show results.
But, gosh, we folks above the 49th parallel are somewhat cautious types who can't quite see laying down billions of dollars in a three-dud poker game.
As our erstwhile Prairie-born and bred (and therefore prudent) finance minister pointed out in presenting his recent budget, we've had eight years of balanced or surplus financial accounts. If we're going to spend money, Mr. Goodale added, it will be on day-care and health programs, and even on more foreign aid and improved defence.
Sure, that doesn't match the gargantuan, multi-billion-dollar deficits that your government blithely runs up fighting a "liberation war" in Iraq, laying out more than half of all weapons expenditures in the world, and giving massive tax breaks to the top one per cent of your population while cutting food programs for poor children.
Just chalk that up to a different sense of priorities about what a national government's role should be when there isn't a prevailing mood of manifest destiny.
Coming to Ottawa might also expose you to a parliamentary system that has a thing called question period every day, where those in the executive are held accountable by an opposition for their actions, and where demands for public debate on important topics such as missile defence can be made openly.
You might also notice that it's a system in which the governing party's caucus members are not afraid to tell their leader that their constituents don't want to follow the ideological, perhaps teleological, fantasies of Canada's continental co-inhabitant. And that this leader actually listens to such representations.
Your boss did not avail himself of a similar opportunity to visit our House of Commons during his visit, fearing, it seems, that there might be some signs of dissent. He preferred to issue his diktat on missile defence in front of a highly controlled, pre-selected audience.
Such control-freak antics may work in the virtual one-party state that now prevails in Washington. But in Canada we have a residual belief that politicians should be subject to a few checks and balances, an idea that your country once espoused before the days of empire.
If you want to have us consider your proposals and positions, present them in a proper way, through serious discussion across the table in our cabinet room, as your previous president did when he visited Ottawa. And don't embarrass our prime minister by lobbing a verbal missile at him while he sits on a public stage, with no chance to respond.
Now, I understand that there may have been some miscalculations in Washington based on faulty advice from your resident governor of the "northern territories," Ambassador Cellucci. But you should know by now that he hasn't really won the hearts and minds of most Canadians through his attempts to browbeat and command our allegiance to U.S. policies.
Sadly, Mr. Cellucci has been far too closeted with exclusive groups of 'experts' from Calgary think-tanks and neo-con lobbyists at cross-border conferences to remotely grasp a cross-section of Canadian attitudes (nor American ones, for that matter).
I invite you to expand the narrow perspective that seems to inform your opinions of Canada by ranging far wider in your reach of contacts and discussions. You would find that what is rising in Canada is not so much anti-Americanism, as claimed by your and our right-wing commentators, but fundamental disagreements with certain policies of your government. You would see that rather than just reacting to events by drawing on old conventional wisdoms, many Canadians are trying to think our way through to some ideas that can be helpful in building a more secure world.
These Canadians believe that security can be achieved through well-modulated efforts to protect the rights of people, not just nation-states.
To encourage and advance international co-operation on managing the risk of climate change, they believe that we need agreements like Kyoto.
To protect people against international crimes like genocide and ethnic cleansing, they support new institutions like the International Criminal Court -- which, by the way, you might strongly consider using to hold accountable those committing atrocities today in Darfur, Sudan.
And these Canadians believe that the United Nations should indeed be reformed -- beginning with an agreement to get rid of the veto held by the major powers over humanitarian interventions to stop violence and predatory practices.
On this score, you might want to explore the concept of the 'Responsibility to Protect' while you're in Ottawa. It's a Canadian idea born out of the recent experience of Kosovo and informed by the many horrific examples of inhumanity over the last half-century. Many Canadians feel it has a lot more relevance to providing real human security in the world than missile defence ever will.
This is not just some quirky notion concocted in our long winter nights, by the way. It seems to have appeal for many in your own country, if not the editorialists at the Wall Street Journal or Rush Limbaugh. As I discovered recently while giving a series of lectures in southern California, there is keen interest in how the U.S. can offer real leadership in managing global challenges of disease, natural calamities and conflict, other than by military means.
There is also a very strong awareness on both sides of the border of how vital Canada is to the U.S. as a partner in North America. We supply copious amounts of oil and natural gas to your country, our respective trade is the world's largest in volume, and we are increasingly bound together by common concerns over depletion of resources, especially very scarce fresh water.
Why not discuss these issues with Canadians who understand them, and seek out ways to better cooperate in areas where we agree -- and agree to respect each other's views when we disagree.
Above all, ignore the Cassandras who deride the state of our relations because of one missile-defence decision. Accept that, as a friend on your border, we will offer a different, independent point of view. And that there are times when truth must speak to power.
In friendship,
Lloyd Axworthy
Lloyd Axworthy is president of the University of Winnipeg and a former Canadian foreign minister.
2610442p-3026695c.html ________________________________________
© 2005 Winnipeg Free Press. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/westview/story/
Published on Wednesday, March 23, 2005 by CommonDreams.org
Daniel Ellsberg Statement on Vanunu
Statement by Daniel Ellsberg on the recent indictment of Mordechai Vanunu in Israel for his violation of restrictions banning him from speaking to foreigners or giving interviews to foreign journalists. Ellsberg has just returned from Israel, where he had been invited to testify against these restrictions on March 16 before a committee of the Knesset; the committee hearing was cancelled, evidently in secret anticipation of this indictment. Ellsberg is available for a limited number of interviews on this subject, through the Institute for Public Accuracy
The fact that Israel has a large and growing nuclear arsenal - larger than Britain's - has been recognized by the rest of the world ever since Mordechai Vanunu revealed it conclusively nineteen years ago. For demolishing his country's policy of concealment, denial and "ambiguity" of its status as a nuclear weapons state, Vanunu served eighteen years in prison, including an unprecedented period of eleven and a half years of solitary confinement in a six-by-nine foot cell.
Meanwhile, not one of the harms that some feared might result from his revelations has materialized in the slightest degree. The notion that any further details he could disclose, nineteen years later, could harm Israel's national security is absurd. Why then, after he has served his full sentence, is the State of Israel invoking British Mandate Emergency Regulations of 1945, pre-dating its own independence, to threaten him with prison for exercising his fundamental human rights to speak to foreigners and foreign journalists? Why do its leaders still insist on suppressing any open discussion in Israel itself of its real military posture and its implications for their security?
Here's one possible answer. This very month both Israel and the US are making open threats of armed attacks as early as this summer on Iran's nuclear weapons potential. For Israel to confirm openly Vanunu's revelations at this particular time - dramatically abandoning forty years of obfuscation - would attract unfavorable attention to the fact that such threats or attacks against Iran are aimed not at achieving a nuclear-weapons-free zone in the Middle East but at prolonging, indefinitely, Israel's monopoly of nuclear weapons in the region. That is an unstated aim for both the US and Israel, but a less than compelling justification for war. This may be a reason - but not a legitimate one - for returning Mordechai Vanunu to silence in solitary.
What the world needs of this prophet of the nuclear era is not his silence but his freedom to speak and travel, to inspire others to follow his example of truth-telling in their own countries, above all here in the United States.
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0323-23.htm
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