Liberation News Service

Soros lashes Bush with warning of post-election blues for US economy

Yesterday, I was driving along, listening to the
Orwellian feed on am network radio news (I do not
remember if it was AnythingButSee or SeeBS), a
cheerful voice reported that economic growth last
quarter was half of what it was the previous, which
the "experts" said showed that the "recovery" was
really taking off...There is no rewind on a car
radio...But I heard what I heard...I just had to wait
for it to be repeated half an hour later...Incredibly
spooky, yes? Well, this movement to restore the
timeline, save the US Constitution and the Environment
and cleanse the US body politic of the Bush Cabal, has
many great economic thinkers and producers who names
have already been scrawled on the John O'Neill Wall of
Heroes, but none is more prominent or more vital to
the movement than multi-billionaire George Soros, the
anti-Scaife...and thanks to the British press (it has
not yet been "Huttonized") and the Internet-based
Information Rebellion (Buzzflash, in particular), here
are some remarks...

Restore Fiscal Responsibility to the White House, Show
Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush again(!)

http://news.independent.co.uk/business/news/story.jsp?story=486381

Soros lashes Bush with warning of post-election blues for US economy
By Philip Thornton Economics Correspondent
31 January 2004

The economy of the United States will "pay a penalty"
next year when the White House's politically motivated
growth boost runs out of steam, George Soros warned
yesterday.

In a vitriolic attack on George Bush, Mr Soros said
economic policy in the US was wholly devoted to
securing a second term for the President.

The blunt warning from the world's most famous
financier came as official figures showed the US
economy grew more slowly than expected over the final
months of last year, knocking US financial markets.

Speaking in London to promote a book attacking US
foreign policy, Mr Soros said he believed the US
economy would continue to show strong growth this
year.

"Right now we have a very favourable conjuncture
because the US economy is in the hands of Karl Rove,
the strategist arranging for the campaign of Bush," he
said. "Everything that could be done to pump up the
economy has been done - successfully so far."

Mr Soros said the world's largest economy had also
benefited from a rebound in the world economy and the
fall in the dollar, which had boosted US exports. "But
there will be a penalty to pay after the election, so
it looks good this year but less good from 2005."

Mr Soros - best known for betting against the pound
during the 1992 ERM crisis and "breaking" the Bank of
England - refused to be drawn on the direction of the
financial markets.

According to Wall Street speculation, Mr Soros and a
number of other wealthy business people have taken a
massive "short position" on the dollar - betting that
the US currency will fall. So far, it has fallen 18
per cent from its peak.

Mr Soros said toppling President Bush was the "central
project of my life", and he added: "I'm willing to put
my money where my mouth is."

He has donated $12.5m (£6.9m) over the past year to
fund political activities that oppose Mr Bush's
re-election.

"I think Bush is changing the character of the US and
leading it in the wrong direction," he said. "A bunch
of ideologues has captured the executive and taken
America too far to the right."

Official figures showed the US economy grew 4.0 per
cent in the fourth quarter of last year. This was
below forecasts of a 5 per cent rise, and well below
the third quarter's blistering 8.2 per cent rise.

The figures revived concerns over the strength of the
US recovery. In early trading, the Dow Jones share
index was down 66 points, or 0.6 per cent.

Economists said the growth might not be enough to lead
to the job creation that has so far been absent from
the recovery.

Patrick Franke, at Commerzbank, said: "Demand growth
of 4 per cent won't be sufficient to generate
employment growth strong enough to lower the
unemployment rate. This in turn would leave the
expansion vulnerable."

The Commerce Department said consumer spending rose
2.6 per cent, a sharp slowdown from the tax
cut-induced 6.9 per cent gain in the previous quarter.
Growth in business spending and residential investment
also slowed.

White House Holding Notes Taken by 9/11 Commission Panel May Subpoena Its Summaries of Bush Briefings

Three more US soldiers died in Iraq over night. For
what? Meanwhile...

Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,
Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64628-2004Jan30.html?nav=hptoc_p

White House Holding Notes Taken by 9/11 Commission Panel May Subpoena Its Summaries of Bush Briefings
By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, January 31, 2004; Page A02

The White House, already embroiled in a public fight
over the deadline for an independent commission's
investigation of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, is
refusing to give the panel notes on presidential
briefing papers taken by some of its own members,
officials said this week.

The standoff has prompted the 10-member commission to
consider issuing subpoenas for the notes and has
further soured relations between the Bush
administration and the bipartisan panel, according to
sources familiar with the issue. Lack of access to the
materials would mean that the information they contain
could not be included in a final report about the
attacks, several officials said.

"We're having discussions on this almost hourly or at
least daily," said the commission's vice chairman Lee
H. Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman from
Indiana. "We retain all of our rights to gain the
access we need. . . . This is a priority item for us
to resolve, and we are working to resolve it."

The disagreement is the latest obstacle to face the
National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the
United States, which is racing to complete its work by
a May 27 deadline after months of fighting over access
to government documents. The commission has asked that
the deadline be pushed back at least two months, but
the White House and leading congressional Republicans
oppose that idea.

Such a postponement would mean releasing the
potentially damaging commission report on July 26, in
the middle of the presidential campaign. Legislation
to be introduced next week in the Senate would extend
the commission's deadline until next January, avoiding
the election altogether.

The latest dispute stems from an agreement reached in
November that allowed a four-member team from the
commission to examine highly classified documents
known as the President's Daily Brief (PDB), including
a controversial August 2001 memo that discusses the
possibility of airline hijackings by al Qaeda
terrorists. The deal allowed the team -- made up of
three commission members and Executive Director Philip
D. Zelikow -- to take notes on the materials that
would be passed along to the rest of the commission,
but only after the White House gave its approval.

The team completed its work several weeks ago but has
been unable to reach an agreement with the White House
on how to share its summaries with the seven
commission members who were not privy to the material,
officials said.

The standoff has prompted commission members to
discuss using subpoenas to obtain either the summaries
or the entire catalogue of President's Daily Briefs,
several sources said.

Democratic commission member Timothy J. Roemer, a
former Indiana congressman, said that "the convoluted
and tortuous process set up by the White House has
bottlenecked. If it's not resolved within the next few
days, I believe we have to pursue other options."

Commission member Jamie S. Gorelick, a deputy attorney
general during the Clinton administration, who served
on the four-person review team, declined to comment on
the details of the impasse but said negotiations are
continuing.

"All I can say is that we have followed the procedure
that we contemplated and we are discussing with the
White House whether that can be made to work for us,"
Gorelick said. "We are trying to ensure that we get
the information we need, while at the same time
respecting the needs and desires of the White House. .
. . We have not been able yet to transmit [PDB
summaries] to the whole commission."

White House officials declined to comment on the
details of the negotiations, or to say why
administration lawyers have objected to releasing the
review team's notes.

"The administration has worked closely with the
commission, providing unprecedented access to
information and documents," said White House
spokeswoman Erin Healy. "We continue to have
discussions on a number of issues as the process moves
forward, and we will continue to do so in a spirit of
cooperation."

But Kristen Breitweiser, widow of World Trade Center
victim Ronald Breitweiser and a member of a group of
victims' families who monitor the commission's work,
called the White House position "unacceptable." She
said the panel should subpoena the documents it needs.

"The White House needs to stop being all talk and no
action," Breitweiser said. "They say they're
cooperating. It's time to show that."

After months of delays last fall, the commission
issued subpoenas for documents from the Pentagon, the
Federal Aviation Administration and the city of New
York, eventually working out agreements in all three
cases. The panel also threatened to subpoena the White
House over the PDB issue, but settled on the
compromise because officials said they did not want to
get bogged down in a court battle.

The White House indicated at the time that it would
consider asserting that the PDB documents were covered
by executive privilege and not subject to review by
outside parties.

This is a theatre of the absurd. It has left everybody I know shaking their heads in disbelief and anger. Such a performance should make us all deeply nervous about the future of Britain.

Thom Yorke, lead singer for Radiohead, will have his
name scrawled on the John O'Neil Wall of Heroes...

Break the Bush Cabal Stranglehold on the US News
Media, Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush
(again!)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1135750,00.html

This theatre of the absurd

Campbell hounded the BBC simply for doing its job

Thom Yorke
Saturday January 31, 2004
The Guardian

When the Hutton report arrived this week, I expected
Geoff Hoon to have to resign. I expected, at the very
least, a grovelling apology from Tony Blair. I had
been looking forward to this for months.
Instead, I have had to stomach the gloating and
moralising of Blair, Hoon and Alastair Campbell as the
establishment of this godforsaken country closes ranks
to protect itself, its intelligence services and the
oh so wonderful MoD.

Lord Hutton's damning report of the BBC is a
whitewash. The result will create fear at the Today
programme, where there should be pride. As so many
times before, they were there with a story that nobody
else would touch. And I still cannot see why Gavyn
Davies and Greg Dyke have had to resign. It flies in
the face of reality, ripping all evidence to shreds.

This is a theatre of the absurd. It has left everybody
I know shaking their heads in disbelief and anger.
Such a performance should make us all deeply nervous
about the future of Britain. While Blair wishes to
draw a line under the whole episode, I hope this
doesn't happen. Sometimes a story will end up being
told, no matter how many times they try to close the
book.

I am staring at a photo of Campbell at the foot of
some grand stairs, mewing and preaching about truth.
An unelected, unanswerable force who was willing to
destroy the integrity of others and make their lives
unbearable to save his skin and that of his masters.

As Andrew Gilligan submitted to Hutton, why was the
BBC singled out when other media reports questioned
the intelligence as well? Why did Campbell suddenly
give disproportionate attention to the Today
programme's story, after weeks of hoping it would go
away?

Campbell needed to deflect attention from an issue
that stood to bring down the government. He had been
told to construct a truth that would justify a
"pre-emptive" war against international law, while
voices in the wings were whispering "lies". His
response was unforgivable. He deliberately went on the
offensive, choosing his favourite soft target, one
that had dared to go beyond the embedded reporting of
the war to show it in a less than flattering light.

Campbell himself chose to become the story, using his
indignation at such a slur on the government's
"integrity", and so avoiding the substance of the
accusation itself.

He now claims the BBC, from the top down, did not tell
the truth. In what way? It didn't check out the story?
It seems, sir, your little story about WMD didn't
check out either. Are we supposed to feel sorry for
him after this sustained attack on his integrity?
Nobody cares about his integrity; they just want to
know why we went to war against international law on
weak single-source intelligence.

And are we supposed to feel sorry for Blair? He has
made a very dangerous political mistake which
endangers global stability and has sent thousands to
their deaths. He tells us that he will be judged by
his maker. Well, he certainly wasn't judged by Hutton,
was he?

It was entirely in the public interest to question the
construction of this intelligence report, even if done
rather shakily at 6.07am. That is what public service
broadcasting should be about, serving no proprietor,
not controlled by the state, and addressing the
concerns of those who pay for its existence. This is
exactly what the Today programme did in this instance.
So where was the mistake?

· Thom Yorke is the lead singer of Radiohead

radiohead.com

Justice Warns Against Civil Rights Apathy

"Not idly do the leaves of Lorien fall."

Save the US Constitution, Show Up for Democracy in
2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&cid=558&u=/ap/20040130/ap_on_go_su_co/scotus_ginsburg_2&printer=1

Justice Warns Against Civil Rights Apathy
Thu Jan 29, 9:18 PM ET

By GINA HOLLAND, Associated Press Writer

NEW YORK - Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg
(news - web sites) said Thursday that people concerned
about losing freedom to government anti-terrorism
efforts should speak out.

The Supreme Court is taking up several terror-related
cases this spring, including challenges to the
government detention of terror suspects without legal
rights.

Ginsburg, speaking to a group of women's rights
lawyers, was asked if people's rights were in danger.

"On important issues, like the balance between liberty
and security, if the public doesn't care, then the
security side is going to overweigh the other," she
said. That would change, Ginsburg said, "if people
come forward and say we are proud to live in the USA,
a land that has been more free, and we want to keep it
that way."

Ginsburg, who argued women's rights cases at the
Supreme Court several decades before former President
Clinton (news - web sites) named her to the court in
1993, said "an active public" made the difference in
the victories of feminism.

Ginsburg, now 70 and one of the more liberal justices,
won five of the six Supreme Court cases she argued.
She was reunited Thursday with some of the clients she
represented during an event held in her honor at the
Association of the Bar of the City of New York.

"She was calling to our attention that work in women's
rights, civil rights is under threat," said Lisalyn
Jacobs, who handles government relations for the
National Organization for Women (news - web sites)'s
Legal Defense and Education Fund, which co-sponsored
the event.

The Bush administration has been criticized by civil
libertarians for some of its terror-fighting strategy,
including the detentions of hundreds of foreigners at
a military prison in Cuba and some U.S. citizens in
America.

They are being held without charges or access to
attorneys, something the government maintains is
necessary for national security.

In April the Supreme Court will consider cases
involving detainees in Cuba and America.

The court has refused to take up other cases stemming
from the government's response to the Sept. 11, 2001,
terrorist attacks, including the handling of
immigrants swept up in the investigation.

___

Still, the big story isn't about Mr. Bush; it's about what's happening to America. Other presidents would have liked to bully the C.I.A., stonewall investigations and give huge contracts to their friends without oversight. They knew, however, that they co

A national disgrace...

Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,
Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0130-04.htm

Published on Friday, January 30, 2004 by the New York
Times
Where's the Apology?
by Paul Krugman

George Bush promised to bring honor and integrity back to the White House. Instead, he got rid of accountability.

Surely even supporters of the Iraq war must be
dismayed by the administration's reaction to David
Kay's recent statements. Iraq, he now admits, didn't
have W.M.D., or even active programs to produce such
weapons. Those much-ridiculed U.N. inspectors were
right. (But Hans Blix appears to have gone down the
memory hole. On Tuesday Mr. Bush declared that the war
was justified — under U.N. Resolution 1441, no less —
because Saddam "did not let us in.")

So where are the apologies? Where are the
resignations? Where is the investigation of this
intelligence debacle? All we have is bluster from Dick
Cheney, evasive W.M.D.-related-program-activity
language from Mr. Bush — and a determined effort to
prevent an independent inquiry.

True, Mr. Kay still claims that this was a pure
intelligence failure. I don't buy it: the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace has issued a damning
report on how the threat from Iraq was hyped, and
former officials warned of politicized intelligence
during the war buildup. (Yes, the Hutton report gave
Tony Blair a clean bill of health, but many people —
including a majority of the British public, according
to polls — regard that report as a whitewash.)

In any case, the point is that a grave mistake was
made, and America's credibility has been badly damaged
— and nobody is being held accountable. But that's
standard operating procedure. As far as I can tell,
nobody in the Bush administration has ever paid a
price for being wrong. Instead, people are severely
punished for telling inconvenient truths. And
administration officials have consistently sought to
freeze out, undermine or intimidate anyone who might
try to check up on their performance.

Let's look at three examples. First is the Valerie
Plame affair. When someone in the administration
revealed that Ms. Plame was an undercover C.I.A.
operative, one probable purpose was to intimidate
intelligence professionals. And whatever becomes of
the Justice Department investigation, the White House
has been notably uninterested in finding the culprit.
("We have let the earthmovers roll in over this one,"
a senior White House official told The Financial
Times.)

Then there's the stonewalling about 9/11. First the
administration tried, in defiance of all historical
precedents, to prevent any independent inquiry. Then
it tried to appoint Henry Kissinger, of all people, to
head the investigative panel. Then it obstructed the
commission, denying it access to crucial documents and
testimony. Now, thanks to all the delays and
impediments, the panel's head says it can't deliver
its report by the original May 11 deadline — and the
administration is trying to prevent a time extension.

Finally, an important story that has largely evaded
public attention: the effort to prevent oversight of
Iraq spending. Government agencies normally have
independent, strictly nonpartisan inspectors general,
with broad powers to investigate questionable
spending. But the new inspector general's office in
Iraq operates under unique rules that greatly limit
both its powers and its independence.

And the independence of the Pentagon's own inspector
general's office is also in question. Last September,
in a move that should have caused shock waves, the
administration appointed L. Jean Lewis as the office's
chief of staff. Ms. Lewis played a central role in the
Whitewater witch hunt (seven years, $70 million, no
evidence of Clinton wrongdoing); nobody could call her
nonpartisan. So when Mr. Bush's defenders demand hard
proof of profiteering in Iraq — as opposed to
extensive circumstantial evidence — bear in mind that
the administration has systematically undermined the
power and independence of institutions that might have
provided that proof.

And there are many more examples. These people
politicize everything, from military planning to
scientific assessments. If you're with them, you pay
no penalty for being wrong. If you don't tell them
what they want to hear, you're an enemy, and being
right is no excuse.

Still, the big story isn't about Mr. Bush; it's about
what's happening to America. Other presidents would
have liked to bully the C.I.A., stonewall
investigations and give huge contracts to their
friends without oversight. They knew, however, that
they couldn't. What has gone wrong with our country
that allows this president to get away with such
things?

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Bush Slips--Among Republicans

You are not alone.

End the War-Profiteering Cronyism of the Bush Cabal,
Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.thenation.com/thebeat/index.mhtml?bid=1&pid=1221

Bush Slips--Among Republicans
01/30/2004 @ 08:01am
E-mail this Post
The record-high turnout in the New Hampshire
Democratic primary -- 219,787 Granite State voters
took Democratic ballots Tuesday, shattering the
previous record of 170,000 in 1992 -- is being read as
a signal that voters in one New England state, and
most likely elsewhere, are enthusiastic about the
prospect of picking a challenger for George W. Bush.
And the turnout in the Democratic primary is not even
the best indicator of the anti-Bush fervor in New
Hampshire, a state that in 2000 gave four critical
electoral votes to the man who secured the presidency
by a razor-thin Electoral College margin of 271-267.

Many New Hampshire primary participants decided to
skip the formalities and simply vote against the
president in Tuesday's Republican primary. Thousands
of these Bush-bashing Republicans went so far as to
write in the names of Democratic presidential
contenders.

Under New Hampshire law, only Democrats and
independents were permitted to participate in
Tuesday's Democratic presidential primary. That meant
that Republicans who wanted to register their
opposition to Bush had to do so in their own party's
primary. A remarkable number of them did just that.

One in seven Republican primary voters cast ballots
for candidates other than Bush, holding the president
to just 85 percent of the 62,927 ballots cast. In some
parts of the state, such as southwest New Hampshire's
Monadnock Region, a historic bastion of moderate
Republicanism, Bush did even worse. In Swanzey, for
instance, 37 percent of GOP primary voters rejected
Bush. In nearby Surry, almost 29 percent of the people
who took Republican ballots voted against the
Republican president, while a number of other towns
across the region saw anti-Bush votes of more than 20
percent in the GOP primary.

Few of the anti-Bush votes went to the 13 unknown
Republicans whose names appeared on GOP ballots along
with the president's. Instead, top Democratic
contenders reaped write-in votes.

US Senator John Kerry, D-Massachusetts, who won the
Democratic primary, came in second to Bush in the
Republican contest, winning 3,009 votes. Kerry's name
was written in on almost 5 percent of all GOP ballots.
Who were these Republican renegades for Kerry? People
like 61-year-old retired teacher David Anderson. A
Vietnam veteran, Anderson told New Hampshire's Concord
Monitor that he wrote in Kerry's name because the
senator, also a veteran, understands the folly of
carrying on a failed war. "I feel a commander, the
president of the United States, ought to be a
veteran," explained Anderson, who says his top
priority is getting US troops out of Iraq.

Kerry wasn't the only Democrat who appealed to
Republicans. In third place on the Republican side of
the ledger was former Vermont Governor Howard Dean,
who won 1,888 votes, more than 3 percent of the GOP
total. Retired General Wesley Clark secured 1,467
Republican votes, while almost 2,000 additional
Republican primary votes were cast for North Carolina
Senator John Edwards, Connecticut Senator Joe
Lieberman, Ohio Representative Dennis Kucinich and the
Rev. Al Sharpton.

In all, 8,279 primary voters wrote in the names of
Democratic challengers to Bush on their Republican
ballots.

That's a significant number. In the 2000 general
election, Bush beat Democrat Al Gore in New Hampshire
by just 7,212 votes. Had Gore won New Hampshire, he
would have become president, regardless of how the
disputed Florida recount was resolved.

The prospect that Republicans and Republican-leaning
independent voters in New Hampshire, and nationally,
might be developing doubts about whether Bush should
be reelected is the ultimate nightmare for the Bush
political team. White House political czar Karl Rove
begins his calculations with an assumption that
Republicans will be united in their support of the
president's reelection. But the president's
deficit-heavy fiscal policies, his support for
free-trade initiatives that have undermined the
country's manufacturing sector, and growing doubts
about this Administration's military adventurism
abroad appear to have irked not just Democrats and
independents, but also a growing number of
Republicans.

The Bush White House is taking this slippage
seriously. US Senator John McCain, R-Arizona, who beat
Bush in the 2000 New Hampshire Republican primary, was
dispatched to the Granite State before Tuesday's
primary, in order to pump up the president's
prospects, as were Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney
and New York Governor George Pataki. And Bush,
himself, jetted into the state on Thursday,
effectively acknowledging that state Republican Party
chair Jane Millerick was right when she said, "What we
have recognized is that New Hampshire is a swing
state."

But can the president pull independent-minded
Republicans, and Republican- minded independents, back
to him? That task could prove to be tougher than the
job of finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

No one doubts that Democrats in New Hampshire, and
elsewhere, are angry with the president. Indeed, if
there was one message that has come through loud and
clear during the first stages of the race for the
Democratic nomination, it was that Democrats in the
first-in-the-nation primary state -- like their peers
in the first-in-the-nation caucus state of Iowa --
have proven to be less interested in ideological
distinctions between Democratic contenders than they
are in picking a candidate who will beat Bush.

Exit polls conducted on Tuesday in New Hampshire did
not merely sample the opinions of Democrats. They also
questioned independent voters, who make up almost 40
percent of the New Hampshire electorate. A Democratic
primary exit poll conducted for Associated Press and
various television networks found that nine in ten
independents were worried about the direction of the
US economy. Eight in ten told the pollsters that some
or all of the tax cuts pushed by the Bush
administration should be canceled. Forty percent of
the independents questioned in the poll said they were
angry with Bush, while another 40 percent said they
were simply dissatisfied with the president.

Bush aides are quick to dismiss the polling numbers.

But how will they dismiss the results of the New
Hampshire Republican primary, where every seventh
voter cast a ballot for anyone-but-Bush?

Evidence not included in Hutton's report

Here, compiled by The Scotsman, is some of the most
important (and DAMNING) evidence concerning the
shameful involvement of the-shell-of-a-man-formerly
known-as-Tony-Blair in the events leading to the
alleged suicide of Dr. David Kelly. These facts were
not included in the final report of "Lord"
Hutton...Remember, 2+2=4...

Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,
Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

http://news.scotsman.com/topics.cfm?tid=911&id=110792004

The Scotsman:

Evidence not included in Hutton's report

11 August

"As probably the most senior intelligence community
official working on WMD, I was so concerned about the
manner in which intelligence assessments were being
presented in the dossier that I was moved to write ...
recording and explaining my reservations.

"The existing wording is not wrong but has lots of
spin on it." - Martin Howard, chief of Defence
Intelligence, on what a senior official had written.

14 August

The inquiry heard of Tony Blair’s request to bring
back David Kelly from a training day before a trip to
Iraq for a second interview. Geoff Hoon overruled Sir
Kevin Tebbit and ordered Dr Kelly should appear in
public before the Commons’ foreign affairs committee
because a private hearing would be "presentationally
difficult". Sir Kevin had said there should be "some
regard for the man himself" (Dr Kelly). "He is not on
trial."

John Scarlett, the chairman of the Joint Intelligence
Committee, said Dr Kelly should face a "security-style
interview", evidence which went against claims that
normal MoD disciplinary procedures were followed.

Memo from Sir David Omand, Cabinet Office intelligence
and security co-ordinator ... "recorded the Prime
Minister’s view that before we decided on the next
steps that should be taken, it would be sensible to go
into a bit more detail into the difference between
what Dr Kelly had said and what Andrew Gilligan had
claimed."

18 August

An e-mail of 5 September, 2002 showed Alastair
Campbell ordered a "substantial rewrite" of the WMD
dossier after a meeting with Mr Blair.

Jonathan Powell, Mr Blair’s chief of staff, later
wrote of the dossier: "The document does nothing to
demonstrate a threat, let alone an imminent threat,
from Saddam."

Tom Kelly, one of the Prime Minister’s spokesmen,
wrote in an e-mail: "This is now a game of chicken
with the Beeb - the only way they will shift is if
they see the screw tightening."

19 August

In a memo to Alastair Campbell, John Scarlett said
that changes had been made to the text (of the
dossier) "as you proposed": "We have strengthened the
language on current concerns and plans, including the
executive summary."

An e-mail from Philip Basset, one of Mr Campbell’s
advisers: "Very long way to go, I think. Think we’re
in a lot of trouble with this (the dossier) as it
stands now."

20 August

Alastair Campbell floated the idea to Geoff Hoon, the
Defence Secretary, that Dr Kelly’s name be leaked to a
friendly newspaper - he was later persuaded this was
not a good idea.

Sir Kevin Tebbit said: "I was told the Prime Minister
was following this very closely indeed ... the
intelligence was that he wanted something done about
the individual (Dr Kelly) coming forward."

26 August

An e-mail showed Downing Street made a desperate final
plea for stronger evidence for the dossier: "No 10
wants the document to be as strong as possible within
the boundaries of the available intelligence. this is
therefore a last (!) call for any items of
intelligence that the agencies think can and should be
used."

27 August

Geoff Hoon, having heard an official had admitted
talking to the BBC, said: "It did appear that this
perhaps was an opportunity to demonstrate that
unauthorised contacts with journalists would be looked
at seriously."

1 September

Janice Kelly, Dr Kelly’s widow, said the Ministry of
Defence told her husband he would not be named and he
felt betrayed when he was.

3 September

Dr Brian Jones, head of the Defence Intelligence Staff
analysing WMD, said the "shutters came down" before
the reservations about the dossier in the intelligence
community - especially the 45-minute claim - had been
discussed. "Our reservations about the dossier were
not reflected in the final version."

Dr Jones also said a chemical weapons expert said
there was a "tendency to over-egg certain
assessments".

4 September

Geoff Hoon’s special adviser, Richard Taylor, said Mr
Hoon was present at a meeting to discuss a "naming
strategy" for Dr Kelly. Mr Hoon had not mentioned this
in his evidence.

He did not say, "hello," or even his name, just left a one-word message: "Whitewash." It came from an embattled journalist whispering from inside the bowels of a television and radio station under siege, on a small island off the coast of Ireland

The sands in the hourglass are finite, and dwindling.
We are in a race against time. The US body politic has
to be cleansed of the Bush Cabal, and the coup of 2000
has to be reversed, or before too long...even the
sources of information overseas, which we rely on here
in Orwell's America, will be compromised...

Break the Bush Cabal's Stranglehold on the US News
Media, Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush
(again!)

http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=311&row=0

BBC AT WAR: M'LORD HUTTON BLESSES BLAIR'S ATTACK ON BBC'S INVESTIGATION OF IRAQ WAR CLAIMS

By Greg Palast
Wednesday, January 28, 2004
He did not say, "hello," or even his name, just left a
one-word message: "Whitewash." It came from an
embattled journalist whispering from inside the bowels
of a television and radio station under siege, on a
small island off the coast of Ireland: from BBC
London. And another call, from a colleague at the
Guardian: "The future of British journalism is very
bleak."

However, the future for fake and farcical war
propaganda is quite bright indeed. Today, Lord Hutton
issued his report that followed an inquiry revealing
the Blair government's manipulation of
intelligence to claim that Saddam Hussein had weapons
of mass murder threatening imminent attack on London.

Based on the Blair government's claim, headlines
pumped the war hysteria: SADDAM COULD HAVE NUCLEAR
BOMB IN YEAR, screeched the London Times. BRITS 45
MINS FROM DOOM, shrieked the Sun newspaper.

Given these facts only a sissy pacifist, a lunatic or
a Saddam fellow traveler would fail to see that Prime
Minister "Winston" Blair had no choice but to
re-conquer it's former Mesopotamian colony.

But these headlines were, in fact, false, and deadly
so. Unlike America's press puppies, BBC reporters
thought it their duty to check out these life or death
claims. Reporters Andrew Gilligan
and Susan Watts contacted a crucial source, Britain's
and the United Nation's top weapons inspector. He told
reporter Watts that the Weapons of Mass Destruction
claims by Blair and our own
President Bush were, "all spin." Gilligan went
further, reporting that this spin, this "sexed up"
version of intelligence, was the result of
interventions by Blair's PR henchman, Alistair
Campbell.

Whatever reading of the source's statements, it was
clear that intelligence experts had deep misgivings
about the strength of the evidence for war.

The source? Dr. David Kelly. To save itself after the
reports by Gilligan and Watts, the government,
including the Prime Minister himself, went on an
internal crusade to out the name of
its own intelligence operative so it could then
discredit the news items.

Publishing the name of an intelligence advisor is
serious stuff. In the USA, a special criminal
prosecutor is now scouring the White House to find the
person who publicly named a CIA agent. If
found, the Bushite leaker faces jail time.

Blair's government was not so crude as to give out Dr.
Kelly's name. Rather, they hit on a subterfuge of
dropping clues then allowing reporters to play '20
questions' - if Kelly's name were
guessed, they'd confirm it. Only the thickest
reporters (I name none here) failed after more than a
couple tries.

Dr. Kelly, who had been proposed for knighthood was
named, harangued and his career destroyed by the
outing. He then took his own life.

But today is not a day of mourning at 10 Downing
Street, rather a day of self-congratulations.

There were no weapons of mass destruction, no nuclear
warheads just short of completion, no "45 minutes to
doom" bombs auguring a new London blitz. The exile
group which supplied this raw claim
now calls the 45 minute story, "a crock of shit."

Yet Blair's minions are proclaiming their vindication.

This is not just a story about what is happening "over
there" in the United Kingdom. This we must remember:
David Kelly was not only advisor to the British but to
the UN and, by extension, the
expert for George W. Bush. Our commander-in-chief
leaped to adopt the Boogey Man WMD stories from the
Blair government when our own CIA was reticent.

So M'Lord Hutton has killed the messenger: the BBC.
Should the reporter Gilligan have used more cautious
terms? Some criticism is fair. But the extraordinary
import of his and Watts' story is
forgotten: our two governments bent the information
then hunted down the questioners.

And now the second invasion of the Iraq war proceeds:
the conquest of the British Broadcasting Corporation.
Until now, this quasi-governmental outlet has refused
to play Izvestia to any prime minister, Labour or
Tory.

As of today, the independence of the most independent
major network on this planet is under attack. Blair's
government is "cleared" and now arrogantly sport their
kill, the head of Gavyn Davies, BBC's chief, who
resigned today.

"The bleak future for British journalism" portends
darkness for journalists everywhere - the threat to
the last great open platform for hard investigative
reporting. And frankly, it's a worrisome
day for me. I'm not a disinterested by-stander. My
most important investigations, all but banned from US
airwaves, were developed and broadcast by BBC
Newsnight, reporter Watts' program.

Will an iron curtain descend on the news? Before dawn
today, I was reading Churchill's words to the French
command in the hours before as the Panzers breached
the defenses of Paris. Churchill
told those preparing to surrender, "Whatever you may
do, we shall fight on forever and ever and ever." This
may yet be British journalism's Finest Hour.
*****

Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times
bestseller, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. His
reports for BBC Newsnight and The Guardian papers and
other writings may be viewed at
www.GregPalast.com.

Join Greg, Janeane Garafalo, Tom Tomorrow, and others
for the launching of the Greg Palast Non-Profit
Investigative Foundation and Release of his new CD
from Alternative Tentacles, "Greg Palast, Weapon of
Mass Instruction - Live and Uncensored." For more
details on the party check out:
http://www.gregpalast.com/store.htm

A 9/11 COVER UP? WHY WON'T BUSH COOPERATE WITH INVESTIGATORS?

"Out, out damn spot!"

Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up & the Iraq War Lies, Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.philly.com/mld/dailynews/news/opinion/7822324.htm

Posted on Thu, Jan. 29, 2004

A 9/11 COVER UP? WHY WON'T BUSH COOPERATE WITH INVESTIGATORS?

THE WHITE House doesn't want to give the commission
investigating the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks the 60
more days that it says it needs to finish its report.

Republicans are worried that a two-month extension
would inject - shudder - politics into the Sept. 11
tragedy. The report would be released in July, in the
middle of the presidential campaign.

As a shocked, but unidentified Republican
congressional aide told the New York Times, "The
Democrats will spin and spin."

Excuse us?

Where is the Republican convention scheduled?

Uh, New York?

And when?

Aug. 30-Sept. 2, later than most political
conventions, but as close as possible to the third
anniversary of the destruction of the World Trade
Center.

And wasn't that President Bush framing his entire
State of the Union address around the warning that "It
is tempting to believe that the danger [of a terrorist
attack on our soil] is behind us"?

Of course, the president's answer was an exhortation
to not "turn back" and to re-elect him to keep us
safe.

It apparently is not to find out once and for all what
mistakes were made that allowed Sept. 11 to happen in
the first place - and what changes in policies and
procedures should be made to prevent it from happening
again.

It was the Bush administration, remember, that
resisted mightily the creation of this commission and
then appointed the wildly inappropriate Henry
Kissinger to be its chair. When Kissinger was forced
to withdraw for a gazillion conflicts of interest, the
well-respected Tom Kean, former governor of New Jersey
and a Republican, took over.

Then the Bush White House proceeded to stonewall, not
turning over documents until subpoenaed.

But why? Do they know something about the runup to
Sept. 11 that we don't know?

It's already clear that the commission has found
evidence to suggest that the terrorist attacks were
not inevitable. Members of Congress who oppose
extending the deadline need to explain why they don't
want the whole story. Otherwise, you won't need
Democrats to spin and spin the fact that the
administration has something to hide, something big.

Neglecting Intelligence, Ignoring Warnings: A chronology of how the Bush Administration repeatedly and deliberately refused to listen to intelligence agencies that said its case for war was weak

Remember, 2+2=4. It is difficult sometimes not to
succumb, to lie to yourself, and to say, 2+2=5. But it
doesn't...Even though Martha Stewart is on trial
instead of Kenny Boy Lay, even though the Chairman of
the BBC has been forced to resign instead of the
shell-of-a-man-formerly-known-as-Tony Blair, even
though war heroes have their patriotism challenged
while chickenhawks are protected by the "US mainstream news media...Remember, 2+2=4...

Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,
Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=24889

Neglecting Intelligence, Ignoring Warnings: A chronology of how the Bush Administration repeatedly and deliberately refused to listen to intelligence agencies that said its case for war was weak

January 28, 2004
Updated January 29, 2004
Download: DOC, PDF, RTF

Former weapons inspector David Kay now says Iraq
probably did not have WMD before the war, a major blow
to the Bush Administration which used the WMD argument
as the rationale for war. Unfortunately, Kay and the
Administration are now attempting to shift the blame
for misleading America onto the intelligence
community. But a review of the facts shows the
intelligence community repeatedly warned the Bush
Administration about the weakness of its case, but was
circumvented, overruled, and ignored. The following is
year-by-year timeline of those warnings.

2001: WH Admits Iraq Contained; Creates Agency to
Circumvent Intel Agencies

In 2001 and before, intelligence agencies noted that
Saddam Hussein was effectively contained after the
Gulf War. In fact, former weapons inspector David Kay
now admits that the previous policy of containment –
including the 1998 bombing of Iraq – destroyed any
remaining infrastructure of potential WMD programs.

OCTOBER 8, 1997 – IAEA SAYS IRAQ FREE OF NUCLEAR
WEAPONS: "As reported in detail in the progress
report dated 8 October 1997…and based on all credible
information available to date, the IAEA's verification
activities in Iraq, have resulted in the evolution of
a technically coherent picture of Iraq's clandestine
nuclear programme. These verification activities have
revealed no indications that Iraq had achieved its
programme objective of producing nuclear weapons or
that Iraq had produced more than a few grams of
weapon-usable nuclear material or had clandestinely
acquired such material. Furthermore, there are no
indications that there remains in Iraq any physical
capability for t he production of weapon-usable
nuclear material of any practical significance."
[Source: IAEA Report, 10/8/98]

FEBRUARY 23 & 24, 2001 – COLIN POWELL SAYS IRAQ IS
CONTAINED: "I think we ought to declare [the
containment policy] a success. We have kept him
contained, kept him in his box." He added Saddam "is
unable to project conventional power against his
neighbors" and that "he threatens not the United
States." [Source: State Department, 2/23/01 and
2/24/01]

SEPTEMBER 16, 2001 – CHENEY ACKNOWLEDGES IRAQ IS
CONTAINED: Vice President Dick Cheney said that
"Saddam Hussein is bottled up" – a confirmation of the
intelligence he had received. [Source: Meet the Press,
9/16/2001]

SEPTEMBER 2001 – WHITE HOUSE CREATES OFFICE TO
CIRCUMVENT INTEL AGENCIES: The Pentagon creates the
Office of Special Plans "in order to find evidence of
what Wolfowitz and his boss, Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld, believed to be true-that Saddam Hussein had
close ties to Al Qaeda, and that Iraq had an enormous
arsenal of chemical, biological, and possibly even
nuclear weapons that threatened the region and,
potentially, the United States…The rising influence of
the Office of Special Plans was accompanied by a
decline in the influence of the C.I.A. and the D.I.A.
bringing about a crucial change of direction in the
American intelligence community." The office,
hand-picked by the Administration, specifically
"cherry-picked intelligence that supported its
pre-existing position and ignoring all the rest" while
officials deliberately "bypassed the government's
customary procedures for vetting intelligence."
[Sources: New Yorker, 5/12/03; Atlantic Monthly, 1/04;
New Yorker, 10/20/03]

2002: Intel Agencies Repeatedly Warn White House of
Its Weak WMD Case

Throughout 2002, the CIA, DIA, Department of Energy
and United Nations all warned the Bush Administration
that its selective use of intelligence was painting a
weak WMD case. Those warnings were repeatedly ignored.

JANUARY, 2002 – TENET DOES NOT MENTION IRAQ IN NUCLEAR
THREAT REPORT: "In CIA Director George Tenet's January
2002 review of global weapons-technology
proliferation, he did not even mention a nuclear
threat from Iraq, though he did warn of one from North
Korea." [Source: The New Republic, 6/30/03]

FEBRUARY 6, 2002 – CIA SAYS IRAQ HAS NO WMD, AND HAS
NOT PROVIDED AL QAEDA WMD: "The Central Intelligence
Agency has no evidence that Iraq has engaged in
terrorist operations against the United States in
nearly a decade, and the agency is also convinced that
President Saddam Hussein has not provided chemical or
biological weapons to Al Qaeda or related terrorist
groups, according to several American intelligence
officials." [Source: NY Times, 2/6/02]

APRIL 15, 2002 – WOLFOWITZ ANGERED AT CIA FOR NOT
UNDERMINING U.N. REPORT: After receiving a CIA report
that concluded that Hans Blix had conducted
inspections of Iraq's declared nuclear power plants
"fully within the parameters he could operate" when
Blix was head of the international agency responsible
for these inspections prior to the Gulf War, a report
indicated that "Wolfowitz ‘hit the ceiling’ because
the CIA failed to provide sufficient ammunition to
undermine Blix and, by association, the new U.N.
weapons inspection program." [Source: W. Post,
4/15/02]

SUMMER, 2002 – CIA WARNINGS TO WHITE HOUSE EXPOSED:
"In the late summer of 2002, Sen. Graham had requested
from Tenet an analysis of the Iraqi threat. According
to knowledgeable sources, he received a 25-page
classified response reflecting the balanced view that
had prevailed earlier among the intelligence
agencies--noting, for example, that evidence of an
Iraqi nuclear program or a link to Al Qaeda was
inconclusive. Early that September, the committee also
received the DIA's classified analysis, which
reflected the same cautious assessments. But committee
members became worried when, midway through the month,
they received a new CIA analysis of the threat that
highlighted the Bush administration's claims and
consigned skepticism to footnotes." [Source: The New
Republic, 6/30/03]

SEPTEMBER, 2002 – DIA TELLS WHITE HOUSE NO EVIDENCE OF
CHEMICAL WEAPONS: "An unclassified excerpt of a 2002
Defense Intelligence Agency study on Iraq's chemical
warfare program in which it stated that there is ‘no
reliable information on whether Iraq is producing and
stockpiling chemical weapons, or where Iraq has - or
will - establish its chemical warfare agent production
facilities.’" The report also said, "A substantial
amount of Iraq's chemical warfare agents, precursors,
munitions, and production equipment were destroyed
between 1991 and 1998 as a result of Operation Desert
Storm and UNSCOM (United Nations Special Commission)
actions." [Source: Carnegie Endowment for Peace,
6/13/03; DIA report, 2002]

SEPTEMBER 20, 2002 – DEPT. OF ENERGY TELLS WHITE HOUSE
OF NUKE DOUBTS: "Doubts about the quality of some of
the evidence that the United States is using to make
its case that Iraq is trying to build a nuclear bomb
emerged Thursday. While National Security Adviser
Condi Rice stated on 9/8 that imported aluminum tubes
‘are only really suited for nuclear weapons programs,
centrifuge programs’ a growing number of experts say
that the administration has not presented convincing
evidence that the tubes were intended for use in
uranium enrichment rather than for artillery rocket
tubes or other uses. Former U.N. weapons inspector
David Albright said he found significant disagreement
among scientists within the Department of Energy and
other agencies about the certainty of the evidence."
[Source: UPI, 9/20/02]

OCTOBER 2002 – CIA DIRECTLY WARNS WHITE HOUSE: "The
CIA sent two memos to the White House in October
voicing strong doubts about a claim President Bush
made three months later in the State of the Union
address that Iraq was trying to buy nuclear materials
in Africa." [Source: Washington Post, 7/23/03]

OCTOBER 2002 — STATE DEPT. WARNS WHITE HOUSE ON NUKE
CHARGES: The State Department’s Intelligence and
Research Department dissented from the conclusion in
the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq’s WMD
capabilities that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear
weapons program. "The activities we have detected do
not ... add up to a compelling case that Iraq is
currently pursuing what INR would consider to be an
integrated and comprehensive approach to acquiring
nuclear weapons." INR accepted the judgment by Energy
Department technical experts that aluminum tubes Iraq
was seeking to acquire, which was the central basis
for the conclusion that Iraq was reconstituting its
nuclear weapons program, were ill-suited to build
centrifuges for enriching uranium. [Source,
Declassified Iraq NIE released 7/2003]

OCTOBER 2002 – AIR FORCE WARNS WHITE HOUSE: "The
government organization most knowledgeable about the
United States' UAV program -- the Air Force's National
Air and Space Intelligence Center -- had sharply
disputed the notion that Iraq's UAVs were being
designed as attack weapons" – a WMD claim President
Bush used in his October 7 speech on Iraqi WMD, just
three days before the congressional vote authorizing
the president to use force. [Source: Washington Post,
9/26/03]

2003: WH Pressures Intel Agencies to Conform; Ignores
More Warnings

Instead of listening to the repeated warnings from the
intelligence community, intelligence officials say the
White House instead pressured them to conform their
reports to fit a pre-determined policy. Meanwhile,
more evidence from international institutions poured
in that the White House’s claims were not
well-grounded.

LATE 2002-EARLY 2003 – CHENEY PRESSURES CIA TO CHANGE
INTELLIGENCE: "Vice President Dick Cheney's repeated
trips to CIA headquarters in the run-up to the war for
unusual, face-to-face sessions with intelligence
analysts poring over Iraqi data. The pressure on the
intelligence community to document the
administration's claims that the Iraqi regime had ties
to al-Qaida and was pursuing a nuclear weapons
capacity was ‘unremitting,’ said former CIA
counterterrorism chief Vince Cannistraro, echoing
several other intelligence veterans interviewed."
Additionally, CIA officials "charged that the
hard-liners in the Defense Department and vice
president's office had 'pressured' agency analysts to
paint a dire picture of Saddam's capabilities and
intentions." [Sources: Dallas Morning News, 7/28/03;
Newsweek, 7/28/03]

JANUARY, 2003 – STATE DEPT. INTEL BUREAU REITERATE
WARNING TO POWELL: "The Bureau of Intelligence and
Research (INR), the State Department's in-house
analysis unit, and nuclear experts at the Department
of Energy are understood to have explicitly warned
Secretary of State Colin Powell during the preparation
of his speech that the evidence was questionable. The
Bureau reiterated to Mr. Powell during the preparation
of his February speech that its analysts were not
persuaded that the aluminum tubes the Administration
was citing could be used in centrifuges to enrich
uranium." [Source: Financial Times, 7/30/03]

FEBRUARY 14, 2003 – UN WARNS WHITE HOUSE THAT NO WMD
HAVE BEEN FOUND: "In their third progress report since
U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441 was passed in
November, inspectors told the council they had not
found any weapons of mass destruction." Weapons
inspector Hans Blix told the U.N. Security Council
they had been unable to find any WMD in Iraq and that
more time was needed for inspections. [Source: CNN,
2/14/03]

FEBRUARY 15, 2003 – IAEA WARNS WHITE HOUSE NO NUCLEAR
EVIDENCE: The head of the IAEA told the U.N. in
February that "We have to date found no evidence of
ongoing prohibited nuclear or nuclear-related
activities in Iraq." The IAEA examined "2,000 pages of
documents seized Jan. 16 from an Iraqi scientist's
home -- evidence, the Americans said, that the Iraqi
regime was hiding government documents in private
homes. The documents, including some marked
classified, appear to be the scientist's personal
files." However, "the documents, which contained
information about the use of laser technology to
enrich uranium, refer to activities and sites known to
the IAEA and do not change the agency's conclusions
about Iraq's laser enrichment program." [Source: Wash.
Post, 2/15/03]

FEBURARY 24, 2003 – CIA WARNS WHITE HOUSE ‘NO DIRECT
EVIDENCE’ OF WMD: "A CIA report on proliferation
released this week says the intelligence community has
no ‘direct evidence’ that Iraq has succeeded in
reconstituting its biological, chemical, nuclear or
long-range missile programs in the two years since
U.N. weapons inspectors left and U.S. planes bombed
Iraqi facilities. ‘We do not have any direct evidence
that Iraq has used the period since Desert Fox to
reconstitute its Weapons of Mass Destruction
programs,’ said the agency in its semi-annual report
on proliferation activities." [NBC News, 2/24/03]

MARCH 7, 2003 – IAEA REITERATES TO WHITE HOUSE NO
EVIDENCE OF NUKES: IAEA Director Mohamed ElBaradei
said nuclear experts have found "no indication" that
Iraq has tried to import high-strength aluminum tubes
or specialized ring magnets for centrifuge enrichment
of uranium. For months, American officials had "cited
Iraq's importation of these tubes as evidence that Mr.
Hussein's scientists have been seeking to develop a
nuclear capability." ElBaradei also noted said "the
IAEA has concluded, with the concurrence of outside
experts, that documents which formed the basis for the
[President Bush’s assertion] of recent uranium
transactions between Iraq and Niger are in fact not
authentic." When questioned about this on Meet the
Press, Vice President Dick Cheney simply said "Mr.
ElBaradei is, frankly, wrong." [Source: NY Times,
3/7/03: Meet the Press, 3/16/03]

MAY 30, 2003 – INTEL PROFESSIONALS ADMIT THEY WERE
PRESSURED: "A growing number of U.S. national security
professionals are accusing the Bush administration of
slanting the facts and hijacking the $30 billion
intelligence apparatus to justify its rush to war in
Iraq . A key target is a four-person Pentagon team
that reviewed material gathered by other intelligence
outfits for any missed bits that might have tied Iraqi
President Saddam Hussein to banned weapons or
terrorist groups. This team, self-mockingly called the
Cabal, 'cherry-picked the intelligence stream' in a
bid to portray Iraq as an imminent threat, said
Patrick Lang, a official at the Defense Intelligence
Agency (DIA). The DIA was "exploited and abused and
bypassed in the process of making the case for war in
Iraq based on the presence of WMD," or weapons of mass
destruction, he said. Greg Thielmann, an intelligence
official in the State Department, said it appeared to
him that intelligence had been shaped 'from the top
down.'" [Reuters, 5/30/03 ]

JUNE 6, 2003 – INTELLIGENCE HISTORIAN SAYS INTEL WAS
HYPED: "The CIA bowed to Bush administration pressure
to hype the threat of Saddam Hussein's weapons
programs ahead of the U.S.-led war in Iraq , a leading
national security historian concluded in a detailed
study of the spy agency's public pronouncements."
[Reuters, 6/6/03]

U.N. Spy Scandal on Iraq: Prominent Americans Support British Whistleblower

Repudiate the 9/11 Coverup and the Iraq War Lies, Show
Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.accuracy.org/press_releases/PR012904.htm

January 29, 2004
U.N. Spy Scandal on Iraq: Prominent Americans Support British Whistleblower


An array of high-profile Americans -- including Rev.
Jesse Jackson, feminist Gloria Steinem, Vietnam
veteran Ron Kovic, leaders of the ACLU and the
Newspaper Guild, and artists such as Sean Penn, Bonnie
Raitt and Martin Sheen -- released a joint statement
Thursday (Jan. 29) in support of Katharine Gun, a
British whistleblower. Ms. Gun faces two years in
prison in England for alerting the public about U.S.
spying on United Nations diplomats aimed at securing
U.N. approval for war against Iraq.

The initiator of the statement is Daniel Ellsberg, who
in 1971 leaked the Pentagon Papers exposing decades of
deception behind U.S. involvement in Vietnam. He
praises Katharine Gun for her "courageous action." Mr.
Ellsberg wrote in the Jan. 27 Guardian newspaper: "Her
revelation of a classified document urging British
intelligence to help the U.S. bug the phones of all
the members of the U.N. Security Council to manipulate
their votes on the war may have been critical in
denying the invasion a false cloak of legitimacy."

---------

AMERICANS CONCERNED ABOUT KATHARINE GUN
Should this woman go to prison for the "crime" of
telling the truth?

The following statement has been signed by:
DANIEL ELLSBERG, author/whistleblower
JAMES ABOUREZK, former U.S. senator
BARBARA EHRENREICH, writer
LINDA FOLEY, president Newspaper Guild
DANNY GLOVER, actor/director
JIM HIGHTOWER, commentator/author
REV. JESSE JACKSON, founder Rainbow/PUSH Coalition
RON KOVIC, Vietnam veteran/author
SEAN PENN, actor/director
BONNIE RAITT, musician
RAMONA RIPSTON, executive director Southern California
ACLU
MARTIN SHEEN, actor/director
GLORIA STEINEM, feminist author
(Affiliations for identification only)

As the world teetered on the edge of war in early
March 2003, with the United States and Britain
pressuring the U.N. Security Council to give up on
weapons inspections and authorize a war against Iraq,
a news story broke that made headlines in much of the
world. The story disrupted momentum toward a U.N. war
resolution.

Quoting a leaked "top secret" memo written by an
official of the U.S. National Security Agency, the
Observer newspaper in London reported that, in
furtherance of the war resolution, American spies were
"mounting a surge" of surveillance targeting countries
on the Security Council -- especially "against" six
undecided countries. The spying intercepted diplomatic
communications via home and office telephones and
emails in search of "the whole gamut of information
that could give U.S. policymakers an edge in obtaining
results favorable to U.S. goals." The NSA memo
requested the help of British intelligence in the
surveillance.

The Observer's story about U.S. dirty tricks at the
U.N. rocked much of the world, especially the
countries targeted for spying. Today, a 29-year-old
British woman, Katharine Gun, is facing two years in
prison for acting on her conscience and helping to
bring the spy memo to light.

Ms. Gun, a translator at the British intelligence
agency GCHQ, was arrested shortly after the story was
published. In November, she was charged with violating
Britain's draconian Official Secrets Act. She is being
represented by the British human rights group Liberty;
restrictions on her defense have been denounced by
Amnesty International.

Katharine Gun recently explained her actions in
written statements: "Any disclosures that may have
been made were justified on the following grounds:
because they exposed serious illegality and wrongdoing
on the part of the U.S. government which attempted to
subvert our own security services.... I will defend
the charges against me on the basis my actions were
necessary to prevent an illegal war in which thousands
of Iraqi civilians and British soldiers would be
killed or maimed. No one has suggested, nor could
they, that I set out to receive any payment. I have
only ever followed my conscience. I have been
heartened by many messages of support and
encouragement that I have received from Britain and
around the world."

There has been much talk in recent months about the
"special relationship" between the U.S. and British
governments, which led the world to war. But history
tells us of another "special relationship" -- between
people of good will in the United States and Britain
who worked together in opposition to slavery and
colonialism, and most recently against the push for
war on Iraq. It is in the spirit of friendship between
our peoples in defense of democracy that we sign this
statement.

We honor Katharine Gun as a whistleblower who bravely
risked her career and her very liberty to inform the
public about illegal spying in support of a war based
on deception. In a democracy, she should not be made a
scapegoat for exposing the transgressions of others.

We urge the U.S. media to inform the public about this
important case involving fundamental issues of
secrecy, freedom of the press and international law.

We urge our elected officials to express their
concerns over this prosecution to the British
government.

We urge Americans to express their solidarity with
Katharine Gun directly to the government of Britain
through the British Embassy, 3100 Massachusetts Ave.,
Washington, D.C. 20008. Phone: 202-588-7800. Fax:
202-588-7870. (Please cc to the address below.)

Contact: Americans Concerned about Katharine Gun
c/o Institute for Public Accuracy
915 National Press Building
Washington, D.C. 20045
solidarity@accuracy.org

For more background: www.accuracy.org/gun

For more information, contact at the Institute for
Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; David Zupan, (541)
484-9167

Sen. John Kerry (D-Mekong Delta): "In the hardest moments...I depended on the same band of brothers that I depended on some 30 years ago...we still know how to fight for our country."

Last night, in a Valhalla-like victory celebration,
with swords clanging on shields all around him, Sen.
John Kerry (D-Mekong Delta) declared: "In the hardest moments, in the hardest moments of the past month, I depended on the same band of brothers that I depended on some 30 years ago. We're a little older and a little grayer, but I'll tell you this, we still know how to fight for our country."
Most of the anti-war vote in both Iowa and New
Hampshire went to Kerry? Why? Afterall, Kerry was on
the wrong side of the _resident's Iraq resolution last
spring. Why did most of the anti-war vote in Iowa and
N.H. go to Kerry? Because the rank and file know,
because the rank and file understand...To get this
Herculean task done, to cleanse this corrupt,
incompetent and illegitmate regime from the US body
politic, we need a solider. We need someone who is not
afraid. We need someone who has a grim determination.
Yes, I am grateful to Howard Dean (D-Jeffords) for
standing up, for speaking out...But that was last
year, the struggle that we are going into is not J.D.
Salinger short story. We need a soldier...Leftists
like Noam Chomsky and Peter Camejo (California Green
Party leader) live in a dream world. Their analysis of
the problem is *almost* flawless, but they have no
clue about what to do. They are so very tragically
wrong in saying that the Democratic Party is nothing
more than an enabler of the Bush Cabal and the
Military-Industrial Complex itself. The
Military-Industrial Complex is not monolithic. It
contains the Good, the Bad and the Worst. What is
Worst *is* the Bush Cabal, and the neo-con wet
dreamers who have taken it over. Most of what is Good
is with Kerry, if still covertly. And even much of
what is Bad simply wants a return to normalcy -- from
the extreme of the Bush Cabal -- and understands that
Kerry's true bi-partisan and mulit-lateral approach to
foreign affairs and national security will restore the
balance. It all comes down to degrees. We would not
be in Iraq today if Gore had been allowed to serve in
the office to which he was elected. We would not be in
Iraq today if Sen. John Kerry (D-Mekong Delta) was
President of the United States. Hans Blix would have
been allowed to finish the job he was so ably
performing...The contrast on substantive, vital
issues, i.e. the Economy, the Environment and the
Federal Judiciary as well as National Security, is so
profound between the _resident and even a centrist Democrat like Clinton or Gore...We need a soldier.
Indeed, the LNS suggests that we need two soldiers. Kerry-Clark is now the best, strongest ticket...There are at least seven damn good reasons: 1) Clark, with his credentials as a decorated Vietnam combatant and
the Supreme NATO Commander, reinforces Kerry's
military record -- two war heroes running against two
chickhawks, 2) Clark will sway Republicans and
Independents, 3) Clark will sway Southerners, 4) Clark
is not a Washington, D.C. politician, he is not a
politician at all, he has not fed at that lobbyists'
trough, 5)Clark has been an outspoken critic and
*expert witness* on the fabrications and
miscalculations leading to the war in Iraq, 6) Clark
has been an outspoken critic and *expert witness* on
the pre-9/11 failure, the post-9/11 coverup and the
bungling of the "war on terrorism," 7)Clark provides
protection for Kerry, if something happened to Kerry,
Clark would carry the mantle and stick it where the
sun has not shone for a long time...There are several
more reasons, but I think you get the
idea...Hopefully, Kerry and Clark will both run strong
in the seven states slated for next
Tuesday...Hopefully, after next Tuesday, we will have
the moral power of a Kerry-Clark ticket will become
clear...

Repudiate the 9/11 Coverup and the Iraq War Lies, Show
Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/27/politics/campaign/text-kerry.html?ex=1075957200&en=f74a48a855a84759&ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE

Senator John Kerry's Speech to Supporters in New
Hampshire

Published: January 27, 2004

The following is text of John Kerry's victory speech
in the New Hampshire Democratic primary, as recorded
by The New York Times.

SENATOR JOHN KERRY. Well, I love New Hampshire. And I
love Iowa, too. And I hope, with your help, to have
the blessings and the opportunity to love a lot of
other states in the days to come. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you, New Hampshire for lifting up
this campaign and the cause of an America that belongs
not to the privileged, not to the few, that belongs to
all Americans. And I - and let me tell you this
victory belongs to all of you who made the phone
calls, walked the snowy cold streets, gave your
hearts, your hands and countless sleepless nights. You
stayed the course here in New Hampshire and because of
you this has been a successful and a happy campaigns.

And I make this pledge to you tonight: I have spent my
whole life fighting for what I think is right and
against powerful special interests. And I have only
just begun the fight. This is our mission. I intend
to.

So I have a message, I have a message for the
influence peddlers, for the polluters, the H.M.O.'s,
the big drug companies that get in the way, the big
oil and the special interests who now call the White
House their home: We're coming. You're going. And
don't let the door hit you on the way out.

This victory _ this victory belongs also in a special
way to the veterans who marched with us. And they
helped _ they helped to lift us up from the lowest
points to the point where we are today. I know that
all of you will join me in saying a special thank you
to Max Cleland[sp?] and Joe Brassman[sp?] [crowd
drowns Kerry out on last name]. In the hardest
moments, in the hardest moments of the past month, I
depended on the same band of brothers that I depended
on some 30 years ago. We're a little older and a
little grayer, but I'll tell you this, we still know
how to fight for our country.

And if I am president, I pledge....(Crowd: When! When!
When!)

When I am president, I pledge that those who wore the
uniform of the United States of America will have a
voice and a champion in the Oval Office.

Now this campaign goes on to places all over this
country. And I ask Democrats everywhere to join us so
that we can defeat George W. Bush and the economy of
privilege. And so that we can fulfill the ideal of
opportunity not just for some but for all Americans.

I ask you _ I ask those of you who are not yet part of
this campaign to go to JohnKerry.com. And I want you
to march with us across this land and demand a
government that's on your side again. That is the
mission of this campaign. And together we can lift our
country up, up to the America that all of us know that
we can become.

So stand with me, stand with me and together we're
going to give America back its future by repealing the
Bush tax cuts for wealthy Americans and investing in
health care and education, children. Stand with us and
together we will build a prosperity in this country
where Americans are not just working for the economy,
but the economy is working for Americans. A prosperity
where we will reduce the poverty of millions rather
than reducing the taxes of millionaires. A prosperity
where we create jobs here at home and where we shut
down every loophole, every incentive, every reward
that goes to some Benedict Arnold C.E.O. or company
that take the jobs overseas and stick Americans with
the bill. Stand with us and together we will give
America the fundamental decency of health care that is
affordable and accessible and the right and not a
privilege, that is available to all Americans, and we
will make the same plan available to all Americans
that is available to senators and congressman

Stand with us and we will fight for an America where
Medicare is protected, where health care costs are
kept down, and where your family's health care is just
as important as any politician's in Washington, D.C.
(Applause.)

"I can only admire the more timely, courageous action of Katherine Gun, the GCHQ translator who risked her career and freedom to expose an illegal plan to win official and public support for an illegal war, before that war had started. "

Those who do not understand history are condemnded to
repeat it...

Repudiate the 9/11 Coverup and the Iraq War Lies, Show
Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1132043,00.html

Comment

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Leak against this war

US and British officials must expose their leaders'
lies about Iraq - as I did over Vietnam

Daniel Ellsberg
Tuesday January 27, 2004
The Guardian

After 17 months observing pacification efforts in
Vietnam as a state department official, I laid eyes
upon an unmistakable enemy for the first time on New
Year's Day in 1967. I was walking point with three
members of a company from the US army's 25th Division,
moving through tall rice, the water over our ankles,
when we heard firing close behind us. We spun around,
ready to fire. I saw a boy of about 15, wearing
nothing but ragged black shorts, crouching and firing
an AK-47 at the troops behind us. I could see two
others, heads just above the top of the rice, firing
as well.
They had lain there, letting us four pass so as to get
a better shot at the main body of troops. We couldn't
fire at them, because we would have been firing into
our own platoon. But a lot of its fire came back right
at us. Dropping to the ground, I watched this kid
firing away for 10 seconds, till he disappeared with
his buddies into the rice. After a minute the platoon
ceased fire in our direction and we got up and moved
on.

About an hour later, the same thing happened again;
this time I only saw a glimpse of a black jersey
through the rice. I was very impressed, not only by
their tactics but by their performance.

One thing was clear: these were local boys. They had
the advantage of knowing every ditch and dyke, every
tree and blade of rice and piece of cover, like it was
their own backyard. Because it was their backyard. No
doubt (I thought later) that was why they had the
nerve to pop up in the midst of a reinforced battalion
and fire away with American troops on all sides. They
thought they were shooting at trespassers, occupiers,
that they had a right to be there and we didn't. This
would have been a good moment to ask myself if they
were wrong, and if we had a good enough reason to be
in their backyard to be fired at.

Later that afternoon, I turned to the radio man, a
wiry African American kid who looked too thin to be
lugging his 75lb radio, and asked: "By any chance, do
you ever feel like the redcoats?"

Without missing a beat he said, in a drawl: "I've been
thinking that ... all ... day." You couldn't miss the
comparison if you'd gone to grade school in America.
Foreign troops far from home, wearing helmets and
uniforms and carrying heavy equipment, getting shot at
every half-hour by non-uniformed irregulars near their
own homes, blending into the local population after
each attack.

I can't help but remember that afternoon as I read
about US and British patrols meeting rockets and mines
without warning in the cities of Iraq. As we faced
ambush after ambush in the countryside, we passed
villagers who could have told us we were about to be
attacked. Why didn't they? First, there was a good
chance their friends and family members were the ones
doing the attacking. Second, we were widely seen by
the local population not as allies or protectors - as
we preferred to imagine - but as foreign occupiers.
Helping us would have been seen as collaboration,
unpatriotic. Third, they knew that to collaborate was
to be in danger from the resistance, and that the
foreigners' ability to protect them was negligible.

There could not be a more exact parallel between this
situation and Iraq. Our troops in Iraq keep walking
into attacks in the course of patrols apparently
designed to provide "security" for civilians who,
mysteriously, do not appear the slightest bit inclined
to warn us of these attacks. This situation - as in
Vietnam - is a harbinger of endless bloodletting. I
believe American and British soldiers will be dying,
and killing, in that country as long as they remain
there.

As more and more US and British families lose loved
ones in Iraq - killed while ostensibly protecting a
population that does not appear to want them there -
they will begin to ask: "How did we get into this
mess, and why are we still in it?" And the answers
they find will be disturbingly similar to those the
American public found for Vietnam.

I served three US presidents - Kennedy, Johnson and
Nixon - who lied repeatedly and blatantly about our
reasons for entering Vietnam, and the risks in our
staying there. For the past year, I have found myself
in the horrifying position of watching history repeat
itself. I believe that George Bush and Tony Blair lied
- and continue to lie - as blatantly about their
reasons for entering Iraq and the prospects for the
invasion and occupation as the presidents I served did
about Vietnam.

By the time I released to the press in 1971 what
became known as the Pentagon Papers - 7,000 pages of
top-secret documents demonstrating that virtually
everything four American presidents had told the
public about our involvement in Vietnam was false - I
had known that pattern as an insider for years, and I
knew that a fifth president, Richard Nixon, was
following in their footsteps. In the fall of 2002, I
hoped that officials in Washington and London who knew
that our countries were being lied into an illegal,
bloody war and occupation would consider doing what I
wish I had done in 1964 or 1965, years before I did,
before the bombs started to fall: expose these lies,
with documents.

I can only admire the more timely, courageous action
of Katherine Gun, the GCHQ translator who risked her
career and freedom to expose an illegal plan to win
official and public support for an illegal war, before
that war had started. Her revelation of a classified
document urging British intelligence to help the US
bug the phones of all the members of the UN security
council to manipulate their votes on the war may have
been critical in denying the invasion a false cloak of
legitimacy. That did not prevent the aggression, but
it was reasonable for her to hope that her country
would not choose to act as an outlaw, thereby saving
lives. She did what she could, in time for it to make
a difference, as indeed others should have done, and
still can.

I have no doubt that there are thousands of pages of
documents in safes in London and Washington right now
- the Pentagon Papers of Iraq - whose unauthorised
revelation would drastically alter the public
discourse on whether we should continue sending our
children to die in Iraq. That's clear from what has
already come out through unauthorised disclosures from
many anonymous sources and from officials and former
officials such as David Kelly and US ambassador Joseph
Wilson, who revealed the falsity of reports that Iraq
had pursued uranium from Niger, which President Bush
none the less cited as endorsed by British
intelligence in his state of the union address before
the war. Both Downing Street and the White House
organised covert pressure to punish these leakers and
to deter others, in Dr Kelly's case with tragic
results.

Those who reveal documents on the scale necessary to
return foreign policy to democratic control risk
prosecution and prison sentences, as Katherine Gun is
now facing. I faced 12 felony counts and a possible
sentence of 115 years; the charges were dismissed when
it was discovered that White House actions aimed at
stopping further revelations of administration lying
had included criminal actions against me.

Exposing governmental lies carries a heavy personal
risk, even in our democracies. But that risk can be
worthwhile when a war's-worth of lives is at stake.

· Daniel Ellsberg is the author of Secrets: a Memoir
of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers.

www.ellsberg.net

"Mr Bush," said lawyer Marshall Davis Brown, "you have to admit that it’s a pretty remarkable thing for a man just to go to a hotel room door and open it and have a woman standing there and have sex with her."

The LNS is not posting this article because it reveals
some dirt on the Bush family. We do not care about
Neil Bush's family life or his sex life. We really
don't care. The LNS is posting this story -- because
it reveals the utter hypocrisy and moral bankruptcy of
the "US mainstream news media." Why? Well, this story
has received widespread coverage in the news media
outside the US. But here in US, no one in the
"mainstream" has touched this story. And if it were
Roger Clinton or Billy Carter you would have heard
every sordid detail, night after night, on SeeNotNews,
AnythingButSee, SeeBS, NotBeSeen and Faux..."It's the
Media, Stupid."

Break the Bush Cabal's Stranglehold on the US News
Media, Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush
(again!)

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/01/08/1073437410662.html

Oh, brother!

January 9, 2004

Ah, it's nice to be Neil Bush. When you’re Neil Bush,
rich people are eager to invest in your businesses,
even though your businesses have a history of crashing
in spectacular fashion.

When you're Neil Bush, you'll be sitting in a hotel
room in Thailand or Hong Kong, minding your own
business, when suddenly there's a knock at the door.
You answer it and a comely woman strolls in and has
sex with you. Life sure is fun when you’re Neil Bush,
son of one president, brother of another.

Just how much fun was revealed in a deposition taken
last March, during Bush’s nasty divorce. Asked by his
wife’s lawyer whether he’d had any extramarital
affairs, Bush told the story of his Asian hotel room
escapades.

"Mr Bush," said lawyer Marshall Davis Brown, "you have
to admit that it’s a pretty remarkable thing for a man
just to go to a hotel room door and open it and have a
woman standing there and have sex with her."

"It was very unusual," Bush replied. Actually, it
wasn't that unusual. It happened at least three or
four times during Bush's business trips to Asia, he
said. "Were they prostitutes?" asked Brown. "I don’t —
I don't know," Bush replied.

"Did you pay them?" "No." Unsurprisingly, the
revelation made headlines worldwide. Equally
unsurprisingly, the sex story overshadowed the curious
financial revelations that came out in the same
deposition.

In 2002, for instance, Bush signed a consulting
contract with Grace Semiconductor — a Shanghai
company. He is to be paid $US2 million ($A2.6 million)
in company stock over five years, plus $US10,000 for
every board meeting he attends.

"Now, you have absolutely no educational background in
semiconductors, do you, Mr Bush?" Brown asked.

"That's correct," Bush responded. Ah, it's nice to be
Neil Bush. Bush is the latest manifestation of an
American tradition: the president's embarrassing
relative.

There was Sam Houston Johnson, who used to get drunk
and blab to the press until his brother, Lyndon,
sicced the Secret Service on him. And Donald Nixon,
who dreamed of founding a fast-food chain called
Nixonburgers and who accepted, but never repaid, a
$US200,000 loan from billionaire Howard Hughes.

And Billy Carter, who drank prodigious quantities of
beer, wrote a book called Redneck Power and took
$US200,000 from the government of Libya. And Roger
Clinton, who spent a year in prison for cocaine
dealing. But Neil Bush has surpassed them all: He has
become the embarrassing relative of two presidents.

In the late ’80s and early ’90s, Bush embarrassed his
father, George Bush snr, with his dealings as board
member of the infamous Silverado Savings and Loan,
whose collapse cost American taxpayers $US1 billion.
Now Bush has embarrassed his brother George with a
divorce that featured paternity rumours, a defamation
suit and even allegations of voodoo.

Born in 1955 as third of the five Bush children, Neil
has a degree in international economics and an MBA. In
1979, while working on his father's unsuccessful
campaign for the 1980 Republican presidential
nomination, Neil met Sharon Smith. They married and
moved to Denver, where Bush got a $US30,000 job
negotiating mineral leases for Amoco.

In 1982, Neil and two co-workers quit and formed an
oil exploration company, JNB Exploration. Bush was in
charge of raising money. "Neil knew people because of
his name," one partner, Evans Nash, said later.

Among those Bush knew were two real estate barons,
Bill Walters and Ken Good. Walters invested $US150,000
and set up a $US1.75 million line of credit for JNB at
a bank he owned. Good invested $US10,000 and pledged
loans worth $US1.5 million. Good also lent Bush
$US100,000 to gamble in the commodities market and
said Neil didn't have to repay it unless he made
money.

Bush paid himself $US66,000 a year. In five years JNB
drilled 26 wells but found not a drop of exploitable
oil. It would have gone bankrupt if not for Walters
and Good.

But Bush was able to help the men who helped him. In
1985 he joined the board of Silverado Savings and
Loan. Over the next three years, Silverado lent
another $US106 million to Walters and $US35 million to
Good.

Good used some of that money to buy JNB, raising
Bush's salary and awarding him a $US22,000 bonus. He
also hired Bush as a director of one of his companies,
at a $US100,000 salary. Neither Good nor Walters ever
repaid their loans. In 1988 Silverado went belly up.

Regulators from the federal Office of Thrift
Supervision concluded in 1991 that Bush's deals with
Good and Walters constituted "multiple conflicts of
interest". Bush became a public symbol of the $US500
billion savings and loan scandal. Bush then started
Apex Energy, a methane gas exploration company. He
invested $US3000 himself and got $US2.3 million from
companies run by his father's friend Louis Marx, heir
to the Marx toy fortune.

Neil paid himself a salary of $US160,000 and sold a
Wyoming gas lease he owned to Apex. The lease proved
worthless. Apex went broke after two years.

An investigation by the House Small Business Committee
found nothing illegal or improper but noted that a
$US2 million federally guaranteed investment to an
applicant who risked only $US3000 of his own money
seemed like "a very high leveraging of funds".

For several years, Bush's main business interest has
been Ignite!, a software company he cofounded in 1999.
To fund it, Bush has raised $US23 million. Last year,
Ignite! entered into a partnership with a Mexican
company. The partnership enabled Ignite! to lay off
half of its 70 employees and outsource their jobs to
Mexico.

"That's turned out to be great," says Ignite!
president Ken Leonard.

"He's incorrigible," says historian Kevin Phillips,
author of the forthcoming book American Dynasty:
Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in the
House of Bush. "He seems to be crawling through the
underbelly of crony capitalism."

Bush vehemently denies that. "I have never used my
family name to 'cash-in'," he wrote by email.
"Unfortunately, such ridiculous charges come with the
territory of coming from a famous and public family."

The territory of divorce can be troublesome, too. In
2002, Bush told Sharon that he wanted to separate. He
took up with Maria Andrews, who was an aide to his
mother. The divorce was a candidate for the Nasty
Break-up Hall of Fame. Among claims aired was that
Sharon had yanked hair out of Bush’s head to make a
voodoo doll and put a curse on him.

These days Bush divides his time between Texas — home
of his children and Ignite! — and Paris, where Maria
lives.

Somehow, even after all his travails, it's still nice
to be Neil Bush.

This story was found at:
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/01/08/1073437410662.html

Baghdad Is Bush's Blue Dress

Six more US soldiers died in Iraq today. For what?
David Kay, who the _resident named to prove Hans Blix
wrong, has washed his hands and gone home. According
to Kay, there were/are no WMD in Iraq... Now the Bush
cabal is trying to blame the CIA for another
"intelligence breakdown," just as they have done in
regard to 9/11. But, just as there was no
"intelligence breakdown" about the 9/11 attacks, there
was no "intelligence breakdown" on Iraq. Indeed, the
CIA analysts have called it correctly all
along...That's why VICE _resident Cheney kept showing
up at Langley and pressing them to say 2+2=5. Well,
they wouldn't. So Cheney and Rumsfeld just set up a
little shop of there own in the Pentagon to just
fabricate what they needed(that's where whistleblower
Karen Kwiatowski earned her name scarwled on the John
O'Neill Wall of Heroes -- look her up in the LNS
searchable database)...Of course, the "US mainstream
news media" and its propapunditgandists refuse to
connect the dots between all of these stories. The
deaths of 500 US soldiers (and the many more to come)
have forced them to run the revelations one after
another, but so far they refuse to tell the story that
they all weave into...

Support Our Troops, Show Up for Democracy in 2004:
Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0127-07.htm
Published on Tuesday, January 27, 2004 by the Los
Angeles Times
Baghdad Is Bush's Blue Dress
by Robert Scheer

Now, can we talk of impeachment? The rueful admission
by former chief U.S. weapons inspector David Kay that
Saddam Hussein did not possess weapons of mass
destruction or the means to create them at the time of
the U.S. invasion confirms the fact that the Bush
administration is complicit in arguably the greatest
scandal in U.S. history. It's only because the
Republicans control both houses of Congress that we
hear no calls for a broad-ranging investigation of the
type that led to the discovery of Monica Lewinsky's
infamous blue dress.

In no previous instance of presidential malfeasance
was so much at stake, both in preserving
constitutional safeguards and national security. This
egregious deception in leading us to war on phony
intelligence overshadows those scandals based on
greed, such as Teapot Dome during the Harding
administration, or those aimed at political opponents,
such as Watergate. And the White House continues to
dig itself deeper into a hole by denying reality even
as its lieutenants one by one find the courage to
speak the truth.

A year after using his 2003 State of the Union address
to paint Iraq's allegedly vast arsenal of weapons of
mass destruction as a grave threat to the U.S. and the
world, Bush spent this month's State of the Union
defending the war because "had we failed to act, the
dictator's weapons of mass destruction programs would
continue to this day." Bush said officials were still
"seeking all the facts" about Iraq's weapons programs
but noted that weapons searchers had already
identified "dozens of weapons of mass
destruction-related program activities."

Vice President Dick Cheney in interviews with USA
Today and the Los Angeles Times echoed this fudging —
last year's "weapons" are now called "programs" —
declaring that "the jury's still out" on whether Iraq
had WMDs and, "I am a long way at this stage from
concluding that somehow there was some fundamental
flaw in our intelligence."

Yet three days after the State of the Union address,
Kay quit and then began telling the world what the
administration had denied since taking over the White
House: That Hussein's regime was but a weak shadow of
the military force it had been at the time of the 1991
Persian Gulf War, that he believed it had no
significant chemical, biological or nuclear weapons
programs or stockpiles in place, and that the United
Nations inspections and allied bombing in the '90s had
been more effective at eroding the remnants of these
programs than critics had thought.

"I'm personally convinced that there were not large
stockpiles of newly produced weapons of mass
destruction," Kay told the New York Times. "We don't
find the people, the documents or the physical plants
that you would expect to find if the production was
going on. I think they gradually reduced stockpiles
throughout the 1990s. Somewhere in the mid-1990s the
large chemical overhang of existing stockpiles was
eliminated…. The Iraqis say they believed that [the
U.N. inspection program] was more effective [than U.S.
analysts believed], and they didn't want to get
caught."

The maddening aspect of all this is that we haven't
needed Kay to set the record straight. The
administration's systematic abuse of the facts,
including the fraudulent link of Hussein to 9/11, has
been obvious for two years. That's why 23 former U.S.
intelligence experts — including several who quit in
disgust — have been willing to speak out in Robert
Greenwald's shocking documentary "Uncovered." The
story they tell is one of an administration that went
to war for reasons that smack of empire-building, then
constructed a false reality to sell it to the American
people. Is that not an impeachable offense?

After all, the president misled Congress into
approving his preemptive war on the grounds that our
very survival as a nation was threatened by Iraq's
weapons of mass destruction. We were told that if we
hesitated, allowing the U.N. inspectors who were in
Iraq to keep working, a mushroom cloud over New York,
to use Condoleezza Rice's imagery, might well be our
dark reward.

Now that Kay — who, it should be remembered, once
defended the war and dismissed the work of the U.N.
inspectors — has had $900 million and at least 1,200
weapons inspectors to discover what many in the CIA
and elsewhere had been telling us all along, are there
to be no real repercussions for such devastating
official deceit?

Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

###

Sen. John Kerry (D-Mekong Delta): "Yes, I do," says the candidate . "I believe this president breached faith with the lesson that I just expressed to you that we learned in Vietnam. You truly should go to war as a matter of last resort. I’m afraid this p

Those of you have been reading the LNS for awhile
probably remember that Sen. John Kerry (D-Mekong
Delta) was a candidate that both foreign correspondent
Dunston Woods and I had high hopes for...But the LNS,
over the months, turned away from Kerry as he
exhibited a failure of leadership, most notably in his
vote for the _resident's war resolution, but perhaps
even worse by refusing to acknowledge his mistake
afterwards and condemn the foolish military adventure
that the Bush cabal has dragged this country into...In
Iowa, Kerry surprises us, showing impressive political
skills and a grim determination by coming back from
near oblivion, now on the eve of the New Hampsire
primary, he has begun to demostrate the political
courage that is going to be demanded of the
anti-Bush...We could be close now to annointing a
leader...But there is more...There is a push to
deep-six Wesley Clark (D-NATO) in N.H., just as Dean
was ambushed in Iowa. But I have a feeling Clark might
surprise them with a strong second place finish. And
trust me, John Kerry (D-Mekong Delta) and Wesley Clark
(D-NATO) need each other, and the Party and the US
itself needs them both...The LNS will explain why late
Tuesday night, after the polls in New Hampshire
close...Meanwhile, Howard Dean (D-Jeffords), whatever
happens in N.H. tomorrow, has blinked in the wake of
Iowa, attempting to re-define himself as milktoast. He
is acting like Gore did in 2000, when after the first Bush-Gore debate Gore allowed the propapunditgandists to mess with his game, and stopped going after Bush aggressively in the subsequent encounters. Now Dean, like Gore has second-guessed himself, and may have proven the doubters within the Party right (yes, Gore won anyway, but Dean probably wouldn't) ...After Iowa, I said Dean deserved better, and he did. But now that Dean has blinked, everything has changed...

Support Our Troops, Elect Two Soldiers in 2004:
Kerry/Clark or Clark/Kerry...

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/01/23/60minutes/main595431.shtml
Here is Bradley's full report from 60 Minutes:

Had John Kerry, the four-term senator from
Massachusetts, not stumbled coming out of the gate and
not had trouble breaking away from the field in the
race to become the Democrats’ candidate for president,
there were those in his party who say he would have
been a runaway winner.

Now, with a win in last week’s Iowa caucus, he’s back
on track. At least, the smart money thinks he’s got a
good shot – maybe the best shot – at getting his
party’s coveted nomination. 60 Minutes Correspondent
Ed Bradley caught up with Kerry on the campaign trail.

Kerry say he thinks he's doing a better job at
connecting with people today than he did at the
beginning of his campaign. So what happened?

"It’s sometimes like spring training," says the
senator. "You kind of have to get out of Washington,
get away from the language. Get away from the sort of
formality, and break out. And that’s what I did."

But Kerry’s formality comes as much from growing up in
a patrician family as from the years spent in
Washington as a senator. Born in 1943, his mother was
a Boston blue-blood and his father was an Army Air
Corps pilot who later became a foreign service
officer, which meant that Kerry, the second of four
children, moved from place to place in the United
States and Europe.

"I can remember, as a 12-year-old kid, I actually rode
my bicycle into the East sector of Berlin – which is a
huge no-no – using my diplomatic passport, until my
dad found out and I was firmly grounded and my
passport was yanked," Kerry recalls.

In eighth grade, Kerry went to St. Paul’s, a boarding
school in New Hampshire, and then to Yale, where he
was a member, as George W. Bush was, of Skull and
Bones, an elite private club.

He enlisted in the Navy and, in 1968, he went to
Vietnam, where Lieutenant Kerry earned three Purple
Hearts, a Bronze Star and a Silver Star commanding
what were known as swift boats, patrolling the rivers
of the Mekong Delta.

How did he get the Silver Star?

"Surviving, I guess, is the best way to put it," Kerry
explains. "I think most people who walk around with
medals in this country, may be proud of the medals.
And I am. But we’re much more, sort of thoughtful and
remembering of the people who didn’t come home, who
are really the heroes. And I just am not comfortable,
sort of, going into the story."

When did he decide the war was wrong?

"Within weeks, almost, of being there," he says.

And what was it that changed your mind?

"It was the totality of the experience that I saw,"
replies the senator. "The lesser role the Vietnamese
were playing in their own country. The rules that we
were enforcing on them. The free-fire zones of
harassment and interdiction fire. The more I saw of
these missions, the more I said, 'This is a folly.'”

He came back and became part of the Vietnam veterans
who were part of the war protest movement. At one
point, in 1971, there was a march on Arlington
Cemetery. And the doors were locked. Does Kerry
remember that?

"I do remember that," he says. "It was a bitter, sad
moment for every veteran there. Because all we were
going to go do is pay tribute to the fallen. And we
were so distrusted that they barred the doors."

That very week in 1971, Lt. Kerry was invited to
testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
He said, in part: "How do you ask a man to be the last
man to die for Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the
last man to die for a mistake?"

To 60 Minutes Correspondent Bradley, Kerry says today,
"It was a huge moment in my life. I just launched into
what came from my gut and my heart. I – in a sense, it
had been building up for a long time."

For Kerry, it's still emotional after all these years.
Vietnam is something that just doesn't leave you.

Explains Kerry, "It's young people dying young for the
wrong reasons, because leaders don't do the things
that they should do to protect them."

Does he see a parallel with Iraq?

"Yes, I do," says the candidate. "I believe this
president breached faith with the lesson that I just
expressed to you that we learned in Vietnam. You truly
should go to war as a matter of last resort. I’m
afraid this president rushed to war without a plan to
win the peace."

But this was the war that the senator voted for.

"No," replies Kerry. "I think a better way to phrase
that is: I voted for a process by which war would be
the last resort. And those are the conditions which
the president himself established. He said, 'I will
build a coalition. We're going to use the United
Nations, we will inspect, and I will go to war as a
last resort.' He did not do anything three of those
things. So yes, I believe we should have stood up to
Saddam Hussein, I thought it was important for our
nation’s security. There was a right way to do it, and
there was a wrong way to do it. The president chose
the wrong way."

And for those who say Kerry should have voted no,
Kerry adds this: "If anyone believes that I would have
used that authority the way George Bush did, they
should not vote for me, period."

Wesley Clark has said that he has won a war. He has
negotiated a peace agreement: "I’m not worried about
John Kerry. He’s a lieutenant, I’m a general."

To that, Kerry says, "Well, that’s the first time I’ve
heard a general be so dismissive of lieutenants, who
bleed a lot in wars. I think that the general is
entitled to his feelings and his opinions."

Does Kerry think John Edwards has the experience?

"That’s not for me to judge, that’s for the American
people to judge." Kerry replies.

Kerry was critical of Edwards at one point, saying:
"When I came back from Vietnam in 1969, ladies and
gentleman, I’m not sure if John Edwards was out of
diapers then yet."

In response to that, Kerry tells Bradley, "I
immediately said afterwards, 'I’m only joking,' and I
said 'No, of course he wasn't.' And I then proceeded
to praise him as a very talented and capable person.
And I believe that about him. And, obviously, you
can’t joke at all, and I shouldn’t."

Kerry certainly doesn't joke about George W. Bush,
saying, "I disagree with President Bush on, number
one, his economic policy, which is driving the country
into debt and not creating jobs, giving tax cuts to
wealthy Americans at the expense of the average
American; the energy bill which has been transformed
into $50 billion of oil and gas subsidies. Almost
every policy in the environment is going backwards. I
disagree with his approach to health care, which is no
approach at all, and I disagree deeply, profoundly,
with the way he is conducting his war on terror that
is breaking our relationships around the planet,
isolating the United States. That’s what I disagree
with, for starters."

Bradley asks, "Did you leave anything out?"

And Kerry replies, "There’s more, there’s more, my
friend."

Kerry has vowed, "We will send George Bush back to
Texas, we will stand up and we will say, 'Mission
accomplished.'"

But its takes money, and lots of it, to have a chance
to give the president that pink slip. Mr. Bush is
expected to raise an unprecedented $200 million for
his re-election campaign. So how does Kerry top that?

"I’m not worried about his money," says the senator.

Because Kerry and Gov. Dean are the only Democratic
candidates to forgo public financing, there is no cap
on the amount of money they can raise.

Says Kerry, "If I win this nomination early, I will
have the ability to mobilize the full power of the
Democratic party to raise money. And unlike Al Gore’s
cycle, I’ll have the ability answer back and fight
back. They may have the money, but I think we have the
ideas, and the people."

Bradley points out some criticisms that have been
brought to bear on Kerry: "They said that you’re too
aloof, you lack a common touch, that you’re a
politician who lacks a real core. How do you respond
to them?"

"I think Iowa responded to them," Kerry says.

Kerry’s first elective office was in 1982 as
lieutenant governor to Michael Dukakis. He was elected
to the senate in 1984, where he focused on
investigations into Iran-Contra, Panamanian dictator
Manuel Noriega and joined fellow Vietnam vet John
McCain in looking into the fate of missing POWs in
southeast Asia.

But his political career took a toll on his marriage.
He separated from his first wife in 1982 and they
divorced six years later. Kerry was a single father of
two daughters when he met his current wife, Teresa
Heinz, widow of Senator John Heinz, who was killed in
a plane crash in 1991. She was left with three sons, a
half-billion dollar fortune and control of a
billion-dollar charitable foundation. Born in
Mozambique, Africa, her father was a Portuguese
doctor. She and Kerry have been married for eight
years.

What would Mrs. Heinz-Kerry's role be, as first lady?

"Keeping him honest, strong -- up when they knock him,
and real humble when they praise him too much," she
says. "And you know Washington. They always do that.
You know, you're either a devil or you're a saint.
And…none of us are either, or most of us are not."

Was she ever opposed to her husband's campaign? Was
she a tough sell?

"I was a tough sell until about a year and a half
ago."

And today?

"I support him completely."

Mrs. Heinz-Kerry says she has not been a part of even
one strategy session in her husband's campaign. So
what is her role in the campaign?

Her reply: "I just go out and do my thing. Get them
all into trouble, is what I do."

And what about her vast fortune? Bradley asks Kerry if
the money ever gets in the way. Does it cast a giant
shadow?

He replies, "At first, I was a little bit, actually,
sort of intimidated by that. I think it’s one of the
reasons I was cautious. But then, you know, emotions
and feelings take precedence, and you take what comes
with it. I’m not worried about it."

Says his wife, "I came with it."

And he continues, "No, but I mean, what I mean is,
that’s my point. That I didn’t worry. You know, just,
it doesn’t matter anymore. But I can’t tell you in an
honest way that I didn’t have to step over that kind
of barrier, sure."

By law, his wife can only contribute $2,000 of her own
money to his campaign. But the Kerrys have mortgaged
their jointly owned townhouse in Boston to pump money
into the race. And Mrs. Heinz-Kerry says she’ll spend
her own money independent of the campaign to defend
her family against negative attacks.

In an interview with 60 Minutes correspondent Morley
Safer, 33 years ago, Kerry was asked if he wanted to
be president. Bradley, reminding Kerry of his
response, says, "You laughed. You said, 'No, that’s
such a crazy question at a time like this, when there
are so many things that have to be done and so many
changes that have to be made. I just don’t think it’s
something that you plan.'"

Kerry explains, "I thought my anti-war activities
would probably disqualify me from running for office,
as he asked that, and I think that’s what I was
referring to."

Every Democrat elected president in the last 40 years
has been a southerner. Republicans say that they can’t
wait to pull out all of their Dukakis comparisons if
Kerry is indeed the nominee. Does he really think a
Massachusetts liberal can win, say, the south, for
example?

"I think what people are looking for is not regional,
where you come from," says Kerry. "They’re looking for
what’s in your gut. The people in the south that I
talk to want jobs just as much as people in the rest
of the country. They want health care. They want to
drink clean water and breathe clean air. The fact is
that Michael Dukakis didn’t lose the presidency
because he came from Massachusetts. The truth is,
Americans are going to look at your character, and
they’re going to look at your vision for the country.
And they’re going to test whether your words are real,
and whether you’ll fight for them."

He's convinced he can close this deal.

"I am convinced," he affirms. "I’m convinced I’m going
to beat George Bush and lead this country to a better
place."

© MMIII, CBS Worldwide Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Whistleblower Coming In Cold From the F.B.I.

"Out, out, damn spot!"

Repudiate the 9/11 Coverup and the Iraq War Lies, Show
Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.observer.com/pages/frontpage1.asp

Whistleblower Coming In Cold From the F.B.I.
by Gail Sheehy

Sibel Edmonds says she was shocked at the lack of
security in the F.B.I.’s counterintelligence squad
when she went to work there shortly after Sept. 11.
But when she spoke up, she was canned. Gail Sheehy
tells her story.

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

Last Friday, the four women from New Jersey who have
faced down the F.B.I. on its failures in preventing
the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, that claimed
their husbands’ lives were personally invited to the
bureau’s Hoover Building offices in Washington, D.C.,
for a second visit. Their host was none other than
F.B.I. director Robert Mueller.

Cordial and fully engaged, Mr. Mueller introduced the
newly appointed head of the Bureau’s Penttbom
investigation (Pent for Pentagon, Pen for
Pennsylvania, tt for the Twin Towers and bom for the
four planes that the government was forewarned could
be used as weapons—even bombs—but ignored).

The new Penttbom team leader, Joan-Marie Turchiano,
politely suggested the widows present their questions.

"O.K." said Kristin Breitweiser, the group’s
hammerhead, "have you solved the crime yet?"

The Penttbom leader said they had been investigating
the 19 hijackers and had run down every connection.
Ms. Breitweiser recalls her next words indelibly: "As
far as our investigations are concerned, we can say
the hijackers had no contacts in the United States."

But the scathing 800-page report on intelligence
failures produced by a joint congressional
investigation had already revealed that the F.B.I. had
open investigations on four of the 14 individuals who
allegedly had some kind of contact with the hijackers
while they were in the U.S.

The Four Moms from New Jersey, or "the girls" as they
refer to themselves, waste little time on niceties
these days. They were the firecrackers behind the
creation of the 9/11 commission, which after a year of
meager progress, is finally ready to call key
administration officials to testify in public hearings
on some of the most important questions we have before
us as a nation.

But White House delays and circumventions have
hampered the effort, and the four moms see the
commission flagging in its use of subpoena power to
call in key Clinton and Bush administration officials
for their testimony. Personal connections between
commission members—like executive director Philip
Zelikow and national security advisor Condoleezza
Rice—undermine the commission’s purported
independence. As the commission’s work draws close to
its May dissolution, it appears the main question they
were tasked to answer will remain unanswered: Did our
guardians of national security have enough information
to prevent 9/11? Why did all of our officials who
swore an oath of office to lead, protect, and serve,
fail to do so on the morning of 9/11?

Last Monday Ms. Breitweiser, along with three other
members of the Family Steering Committee, met with
commissioner John Lehman about the need for an
extension of the Commission’s May deadline-after House
Speaker Dennis Hastert had already declared such an
extension dead in the water. Exiting the meeting, the
family members were hopeful that he would join the
majority of commissioners—all five Democrats, chairman
Thomas Kean and one other Republican, Slade Gorton—in
supporting a postponement. More recently, as
Democratic presidential candidates burnish their
credentials in intelligence and national security
issues against Bush’s 2004 campaign, the extension of
that deadline is becoming a heated issue.

While fighting a mostly losing battle for a
transparent investigation, the Moms are winning on
another score: Whistleblowers from agencies culpable
in the failures of 9/11—long silent—are being
attracted to their mission.

Sibel Edmonds read an article published in these pages
last August about the 9/11 widows’ bold confrontation
with Director Mr. Mueller in a private meeting last
summer, and recognized kindred spirits.

"This was the first time I’d heard anybody ask such
direct questions to Mr. Mueller," said Ms. Edmonds, a
Turkish-American woman who answered the desperate call
of the F.B.I. in September, 2001 for translators of
Middle Eastern languages. Hired as contract employee a
week after 9/11, without a personal interview, Ms.
Edmonds was given top-secret security clearance to
translate wiretaps ordered by field offices in New
York, Los Angeles, and other cities by agents who were
working around the clock to pick up the trail of Al
Qaeda terrorists and their supporters in the U.S. and
abroad. Working in the F.B.I.’s Washington field
office, she listened to hundreds of hours of
intercepts and translated reams of e-mails and
documents that flooded into the bureau. In a series of
intimate interviews, she told her story to this
writer.

When she arrived, her enormous respect for the F.B.I.
was initially confirmed.

"The field agents are wonderful, but they were
terribly exasperated with the D.C. office," she said.

While the news was full of reports of heaps of
untranslated material languishing inside the F.B.I.’s
counterterrorism unit, Ms. Edmonds has claimed that
translators were told to let them pile up. She said
she remembers a supervisor’s instructions "to just say
no to those field agents calling us to beg for speedy
translations" so that the department could use the
pileup as evidence to demand more money from the
Senate. Another colleague she recalls saying bitterly,
"This is our time to show those assholes we are in
charge."

F.B.I. translators are the front line for information
gathered by foreign-language wiretaps, tips,
documents, e-mails, and other intercepted threats to
security. Based on what they translate and the dots
they connect, F.B.I. field agents act against targets
of investigation-or fail to act-in a timely manner. As
an agent later told the Judiciary Committee which
oversees the F.B.I., "When you hear a suspect say ‘The
flower will bloom next week,’ you can’t wait two weeks
to get it translated."

During her six months of work for the Bureau, Ms.
Edmonds said she grew increasingly horrified by the
lack of internal security she saw inside the very
agency tasked with protecting our national security.

In papers filed with the F.B.I.’s internal
investigative office, the Department of Justice, the
Senate Judiciary Committee, and most recently with the
9/11 Commission, she has reported serious ongoing
failures in the language division of the F.B.I.
Washington Field Office. They include security lapses
in hiring and monitoring of translators,
investigations that have been compromised by incorrect
or misleading translations sent to field agents; and
thousands of pages of translations falsely labeled
"not pertinent" by Middle Eastern linguists who were
either not qualified in the target language or
English, or, worse, protecting targets of
investigation.

Nothing happened. Undaunted, Ms. Edmonds took her
concerns to upper management. Soon afterward she was
fired. The only cause given was "for the convenience
of the government." The F.B.I. has not refuted any of
Ms. Edmonds’ allegations, yet they have accounted for
none of them.

On the morning Ms. Edmonds was terminated, she said,
she was escorted from the building by an agent she
remembered saying: "We will be watching you and
listening to you. If you dare to consult an attorney
who is not approved by the F.B.I., or if you take this
issue outside the F.B.I. to the Senate, the next time
I see you, it will be in jail." Two other agents were
present.

"I know about my constitutional rights, but do you
know how many translators would be intimidated?"

Shortly after her dismissal, F.B.I. agents turned up
at the door of the Ms. Edmonds’ townhouse to seize her
home computer. She was then called in to be
polygraphed—a test which, she found out later, she
passed. A few months after her dismissal, accompanied
by her lawyer on a sunny morning in May 2002, Ms.
Edmonds took her story to the Senate Judiciary
Committee. As her high heels glanced off the marble
steps of Congress she sensed two men ascending right
behind her. Turning, she recognized the agent walk,
the Ray-Bans, the outline of a weapon, and the deadest
giveaway of all—a cell phone pointed straight at her,
transmitting. "They weren’t secretive about it, they
wanted me to know they’re there," she said. After
being shadowed in plain sight many more times, she
said with dark humor, "I call them my escorts."

After her meeting, Senator Chuck Grassley, the
Republican vice-chair of the Judiciary Committee to
whom Ms. Edmonds appealed, had his investigators check
her out. Then they, along with staffers for Senator
Patrick Leahy, called for a joint briefing in the
summer of 2002. The F.B.I. sent a unit chief from the
language division and an internal security official.

In a lengthy, unclassified session that one
participant describes as bizarre, the windows fogged
up as the session finished; it was that tense, "None
of the F.B.I. officials’ answers washed, and they
could tell we didn’t believe them." He chuckles
remembering one of the Congressional investigators
saying, "You basically admitted almost all that Sibel
alleged, yet you say there’s no problem here. What’s
wrong with this picture?"

The Bureau briefers shrugged, put on their coats, and
left. There was no way the F.B.I. was going to admit
to another spy scandal only months after being
scorched by the Webster Report on one of the most
dangerous double agents in F.B.I. history, Robert
Hanssen.

"I think the F.B.I. is ignoring a very major internal
security breach," said Grassley, "and a potential
espionage breach."

Unlike those whistleblowers whose cause is redress of
personal grievances, Ms. Edmonds impressed Grassley as
passionately patriotic.

"The basic problem is, heads don’t roll," Sen.
Grassley said. "The culture of the F.B.I. is to worry
about their own public relations. If you’re going to
change that culture, somebody’s got to get fired." He
is not optimistic, however, that Congress will act
aggressively. "Nobody wants to take on the F.B.I."

The translator had filed a complaint with the
Inspector General of the Department of Justice on
March 7, 2002. She was told then that an investigation
would be undertaken and she could expect a report by
the fall of 2002. Twenty-one months later, she is
still waiting. She also filed a First Amendment case
against the Department of Justice and the F.B.I. And a
Freedom of Information case against the F.B.I. for
release of documents pertaining to her work for the
Bureau, to confirm her allegations. The F.B.I. refused
her FOIA request. Their stated reason was the pending
investigation by Justice, which, her sources in the
Senate tell her, will probably be held up until after
the November election.

When Ms. Edmonds wouldn’t go away or keep still,
F.B.I. Director Mueller asked Attorney General John
Ashcroft to assert the State Secrets Privilege in the
case of Ms. Edmonds versus Department of Justice. Mr.
Ashcroft obliged.

The State Secrets Privilege is the neutron bomb of
legal tactics. In the rare cases where the government
invokes it to withhold evidence or to block discovery
in the name of national security, it can effectively
terminate the case. According to a 1982 Appeals Court
ruling. "Once the court is satisfied that the
information poses a reasonable danger to secrets of
state, even the most compelling necessity cannot
overcome the claim of privilege ._"

In interviews conducted over recent weeks with a
senior F.B.I. agent who worked closely with Ms.
Edmonds, former F.B.I. counterterrorism agents, and
with current and former members of Congress involved
in national security issues, a picture emerged of the
dark undercurrents that run beneath our best
counterterrorism efforts, and the punishments meted
out to those who dare to expose it.

Does Ms. Edmonds pose a danger to secrets of state? Or
do the secrets buried in the nerve center of the
F.B.I.’s counterterrorism squad pose a danger to
Americans living under the politics of dread?

Edmonds was seen as a jewel when the F.B.I. found her
only a week after September 11, 2001. With reports of
stacks of untranslated "chatter" from Middle Eastern
suspects and their supporters, the embarrassed Bureau
couldn’t wait to hire this Turkish-American graduate
student who speaks four languages, not only Turkish,
Farsi (the Iranian language) and Azerbaijani, but
perfect American-English. The graduate student was
carrying five courses in preparation for her Master’s
degree and was in mourning for her father’s recent
death. "But I felt like I was being called to duty."

Inside the F.B.I.’s Washington field office roughly
200 translators sit hip to hip in one large room that
is a linguistic cacophony of chatter from 185
different countries. The few Arabic translators may be
flanked by a Farsi speaker on one side, an Urdu
speaker on the other, and a translator of Chinese
chatter behind them.

In a security briefing she was told that any documents
marked "Top Secret" had to be locked up when employees
went to lunch. Laptops had to be kept in a safe. Any
contacts with foreign people, even social, had to be
reported. She also signed a document promising to
report any suspicious activities of other translators.
She was impressed with the stringency of F.B.I. rules.

The Translation Department is treated by the F.B.I. as
highly sensitive. Yet her badge allowed her and other
translators to enter and exit the building without
passing through security, and within the sanctum
itself they could pass freely from floor to floor and
to any agent’s office. Ms. Edmonds saw several
different individuals leave the building with
documents or audio tapes in their gym bags. When she
called security to report it, nothing was done.

She was one of three Turkish translators working on
real time wiretaps, e-mails, and documents related to
9/11 investigations. One of her colleagues was an
unassuming immigrant whose first employment on
entering the U.S. was as a busboy. Ms. Edmonds was
dismayed to learn that he had been hired despite
failing to pass the English equivalency exam. When he
was chosen to go to Guantánamo Bay, to translate
interrogations with the half-dozen Turkish detainees
in America’s war on terror, she remembers with both
compassion and disgust hearing her colleague wail, "I
can’t do this!"

But it was her other colleague who gave her the
greatest cause for concern-and her reports to her
superiors as well as an alphabet soup of government
commissions and agencies remain unanswered.

Melek Can Dickerson was a very friendly Turkish woman,
married to a major in the U.S. Air Force. She liked to
be called informally "Jan."

The account that follows, which comes from extended
interviews with Ms. Edmonds, was related in testimony
to the Senate Judiciary committee.

"I began to be suspicious as early as November, 2001"
said Ms. Edmonds. "In conversation Jan mentioned these
suspects and said ‘I can’t believe they’re monitoring
these people.’"

"How would you know?" Ms. Edmonds remembers saying.
She said Dickerson told her she had worked for them in
a Turkish organization; she talked about how she
shopped for them at a Middle Eastern grocery store in
Alexandria.

Ms. Edmonds has told the Judiciary Committee that soon
after, Ms. Dickerson tried to establish social ties
with her, suggesting they meet in Alexandria and
introduce their husbands to each other.

When Sibel invited the visitors in for tea, she said,
Major Dickerson began asking Matthew Edmonds if the
couple had many friends from Turkey here in the U.S.
Mr. Edmonds said he didn’t speak Turkish, so they
didn’t associate with many Turkish people. The Air
Force officer then began talking up a Turkish
organization in Washington that he described,
according to the Edmondses, as "a great place to make
connections and it could be very profitable."

Sibel was sickened. This organization was the very one
she and Jan Dickerson were monitoring in a 9/11
investigation. Since Sibel had adhered to the rule
that an F.B.I. employee does not discuss bureau
matters with one’s mate, her husband innocently
continued the conversation. Ms. Dickerson and her
husband offered to introduce the Edmondses to people
connected to the Turkish embassy in Washington who
belonged to this organization.

"These two people were the top targets of our
investigation!" Ms. Edmonds said of the people the
Dickersons proposed to introduce them to.

"My husband keeps thinking he’s talking about
promoting business deals," Ms. Edmonds later said of
the encounter. "He has no idea the man is talking
about criminal activities with some semi-legitimate
front."

These are classic "pitch activities" to get somebody
to spy for you, according to a Judiciary Committee
staffer who investigated Ms. Edmonds’ claims.

"You’d think the F.B.I. would be jumping out of their
seats about all these red flags," the staffer said.

The targets of that F.B.I. investigation left the
country abruptly in 2002. Later, Ms. Edmonds
discovered that Ms. Dickerson had managed to get hold
of translations meant for Ms. Edmonds, forge her
signature, and render the communications useless.

"These were documents directly related to a 9/11
investigation and suspects, and they had been sent to
field agents in at least two cities." By accident, Ms.
Edmonds discovered the breach—up to 400 pages of
translations marked "not pertinent"—and insisted that
those classified translations be sent back so she
could retranslate them

"We discovered some amazing stuff," she remembered.

The first half-dozen translations were transcripts
from an F.B.I. wiretap targeting a Turkish
intelligence officer working out of the Turkish
embassy in Washington, D.C. A staff-member of the
Judiciary committee later confirmed to this writer
that the intelligence officer was the target of the
wiretap Ms. Dickerson had mistranslated, signing Ms.
Edmonds’ name to the printouts. Ms. Edmonds said she
found them to reveal that the officer had spies
working for him inside the U.S. State Department and
at the Pentagon—but that information would not have
reached field agents unless Ms. Edmonds had
retranslated them. She only got through about 100 more
pages before she was fired.

"I didn’t go out and blow the whistle," Ms. Edmonds
said. She said she first reported these breaches both
verbally and in writing to a supervisor, who assured
her that the F.B.I. had done a background check on Ms.
Dickerson, and the matter was put to an end.

Her further inquiries to counterintelligence agents
raised a small alarm. Ms. Edmonds was told that Ms.
Dickerson hadn’t disclosed any links to the Turkish
organization in her employment application. But
nothing happened. Ms. Edmonds, despairing to another
superior in the counterintelligence squad, remembers
the agent saying: "I’ll bet you’ve never worked in
government before. We do things differently. We don’t
name names, and we usually sweep the dirt under the
carpet."

She said another special agent warned: "If you insist
on this investigation, I’ll make sure in no time it
will turn around and become an investigation about
you."

The F.B.I., contacted with these allegations, would
not comment; Ms. Dickerson could not be reached for
comment, but has previously dismissed Ms. Edmonds’
story as "preposterous." The F.B.I. has also
previously said that it did not believe that Ms.
Dickerson acted maliciously, though members of the
Judiciary committee have expressed dissatisfaction
with the F.B.I.’s investigation.

Going by the book was not without personal sacrifice
for Ms. Edmonds. She remembered her erstwhile tea
companion, Ms. Dickerson, threatening: "Why would you
make such a fuss over translations? You’re not even
planning to stay here. Why would you put your life and
your family’s lives in danger?"

Ms. Edmonds said that after she reported this threat
to Dale Watson, then executive assistant director of
the F.B.I., she learned from friends in Turkey that
plainclothes agents went to her sister’s apartment in
Istanbul with an interrogation warrant.

Ms. Edmonds had already brought her sister and mother
to Washington in anticipation of such reprisals by
Turkish intelligence. But her younger sister, a
totally apolitical airline employee, hasn’t spoken to
her since.

After two years of futile efforts as an F.B.I.
whistleblower, Ms. Edmonds
figured the widows were her last resort. The former
translator had information relevant to the commission
that nobody else seemed to want to hear. Shortly after
the Christmas holidays, in the leer of a nationwide
orange alert based on a "sustained level of
intelligence chatter," she contacted Mindy Kleinberg,
the only mom whose telephone number is listed.
Kleinberg rallied her cohorts, Kristen Breitweiser and
Patty Casazza (their fourth member, Lori Van Aucken,
was taking a brief "sabbatical"). The three moms
jumped in an S.U.V. and gunned it down the Garden
State to meet up with Ms. Edmonds halfway to D.C. at
an anonymous roadside hotel. She gave them the
outlines of her story, and asked "the girls" if they
could get her an audience with the 9/11 commission.
Her letter and follow-up calls to Tom Kean, the
chairman, had gone unanswered for a year. The moms
were so disturbed by all the security lapses she
described, they slipped back into the sleepless
agitation that was so familiar from the months after
watching on TV while their husbands were turned to ash
by terrorists in the World Trade Center attack. But
they eagerly agreed to help.

Last week, Ms. Edmonds met with a New York attorney,
Eric Seiff, a veteran of both the New York District
Attorney’s office and the State Department. He finds
her case extraordinary.

"We’re familiar with people in big bureaucracies
putting job security over doing the right thing, but
not at this dramatic level—putting job security above
national security," said Seiff. He is appalled at the
invocation of State Secrets Privilege "It’s the
Attorney General saying to the judiciary, ‘Not only
don’t we answer to Ms. Edmonds, we don’t answer to
you."

The last resort, Ms. Edmonds concluded, was the
federal 9/11 commission. Maybe they would live up to
their mandate to do a truly independent investigation
of the security lapses that allowed our country to be
invaded by terrorists supported by foreign powers, who
have yet to be exposed or held accountable.

She sent a full report to one of the Democratic
commission members. When this writer asked him about
the commission’s interest in the issues raised by Ms.
Edmonds’ report, he said: "It sounds like it’s too
deep in the weeds for us to consider, we’re looking at
broader issues."

It has not deterred her. And neither snow nor sleet
nor mini child disasters could deter the moms from
keeping their dates in Washington last Friday to do
battle for Ms. Edmonds. When the 9/11 commission
seemed close-minded, they met with Judiciary Committee
staffers, echoing Sibel’s pleadings that Senator
Grassley hold his own hearings. Senator Grassley had
told this writer that his hands were tied, because,
"Senator Hatch is now chairman of the Oversight
Committee." The staffers said they had written to both
Mueller and Ashcroft several times, asking them to
come in and talk about Ms. Edmonds’ allegations. No
reply. Sibel was surprised to hear them admit,
‘Senator Hatch has been an obstacle on everything
we’ve tried to do.’

Then a brainstorm. What if the Senate Intelligence
Committee held a joint hearing with the Judiciary
Committee? Breitweiser enthused, "Great, we’ve already
talked to Senators Roberts and Rockefeller [co-chairs
of the Senate Intelligence Committee]. We were told by
Senator Roberts that the translation issue remains ‘a
serious problem.’ They said they would like to hold
hearings in February of this year."

The moms’ final meeting was their hour-and-a-half
private session at the J. Edgar Hoover Building. Ms.
Edmonds was not welcome there. But Director Mueller,
said Breitweiser, seemed genuinely interested in what
the moms had to say. Asked about the Ms. Edmonds case,
Mueller said he had handed it over to the Inspector
General’s office. Pressed, he said, "I can’t
investigate myself." Yes, but, the Moms nudged, had he
looked into problems in the translation department?
Mueller appeared to brush off the matter as anything
but important.

"Then, I don’t understand why you asked that State
Secrets Privilege be asserted here?" Kleinberg piped
up. "If her case was that important, why isn’t it
important enough to deserve a report?"

For the first time, the director did not look cordial.
So Breitweiser switched back to an earlier subject -
his cooperation with a Senate hearing on the
translation issue. "So, Director Mueller, I just want
to get you on the record," said Breitweiser. "If the
Senate asks you to testify, we have your word you’ll
go?"

The square-jawed chief spook smiled at the girls’
grasp of strategy. "You have my word," they all
remember his saying, "if Senator Hatch invites me to
testify, absolutely I will be there."

Now all they have to do is move the immovables. But
they’ve done it before. And there is one motto shared
by the Four Moms from New Jersey and the translator
from Turkey: We’re not going away.

You may reach Gail Sheehy via email at:
gsheehy@observer.com.

back to top
This column ran on page 1 in the 1/26/2004 edition of
The New York Observer.

German trial hears how Iranian agent warned US of impending al-Qaida attack

Just one more of many such stories, involving the
intelligence agencies of numerous governments. Of
course, there was no intelligence breakdown prior to
9/11. The LNS has stated this sad fact over and over
again. The failure was at the White House, in the Voal
Office and in the National Security Council...The
failure was in the political leadership...the failure
is the _resident's, the VICE _resident's, and Condi
Rice's...That's why they refuse to release the daily
briefings from those hot August days in Waco...It was gross incompetence or criminal negligence at the very least, the real question is what it something much worse...were they playing PNACkle with innocent lives and US security?

Repudiate the 9/11 Coverup and the Iraq War Lies, Show
Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/september11/story/0,11209,1130338,00.html

German trial hears how Iranian agent warned US of impending al-Qaida attack

Ben Aris in Berlin
Saturday January 24, 2004
The Guardian

The United States was warned of impending September 11
terrorist attacks by an Iranian spy, but ignored him,
German secret service agents testified yesterday in
the trial of an alleged al-Qaida terrorist.

The spy, identified as Hamid Reza Zakeri, tried to
warn the CIA after leaving Iran in 2001, but was not
believed, two German officers who interviewed him told
the Hamburg court.

Zakeri worked in the department of the Iranian secret
services responsible for "carrying out terrorist
attacks globally", one of the officers said.

Prosecutors called the spy as a surprise witness
against a Moroccan man, Abdelghani Mzoudi, who is on
trial for being a key aide to three of the September
11 hijackers.

He is said to have handled money, covered for absences
by members of the al-Qaida cell based in Hamburg and
trained in an Afghan al-Qaida camp himself.

He is charged with 3,066 counts of aiding and abetting
murder, one for each of the victims of the New York
and Washington suicide attacks.

Mzoudi is one of a clutch of suspected al-Qaida
operatives being held around the world.

Iran said for the first time yesterday it was planning
to try a dozen suspects who have been detained in the
country.

The Bush administration, which has accused Iran of
harbouring al-Qaida militants, countered by saying
Tehran should send the suspects to their home
countries for judgment.

The US has long suspected that the detainees slipped
into Iran from neighbouring Afghanistan following the
American-led invasion in 2001.

"We want to see action, and the action we want to see
is that they turn over those al- Qaida members in
their custody to their country of origin," White House
spokesman Scott McClellan said.

Western intelligence officials believe that among the
Iran-held figures could be an Egyptian, Saif al-Adel,
the security chief of Osama bin Laden's network.

A son of Bin Laden and a spokesman for the network
chief could also be in Iran, Saudi sources said.

The testimony at the Hamburg trial could heap more
embarrassment on the US state department and secret
services, which have denied allegations that they were
forewarned of the attacks.

The White House and US intelligence agencies have been
plagued by accusations of a catastrophic failure since
the four planes were hijacked to such devastating
effect in 2001.

The U.S. economy in one Whitman word? "Sucks," said Whitman, known as a straight shooter. So what's the first step to right it? "The biggest thing we have to do about it is get rid of the Republicans," said Whitman. "It's just a disaster. I'm more a use-o

Post-Standard (Syracuse, NY): The U.S. economy in one Whitman word? "Sucks," said Whitman, known as a straight shooter. So what's the first step to right it? "The biggest thing we have to do about it is get rid of the Republicans," said Whitman. "It's just a disaster. I'm more a use-of-proceeds person than I am a deficit person.

Restore Fiscal Responsibility to the White House, Show
Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

Financier full of wit and opinions
SU benefactor, Martin J. Whitman, counsels management
students.
January 23, 2004

By Bob Niedt
Staff writer

Investor Martin J. Whitman first came to Syracuse
University just after World War II, under the G.I.
Bill of Rights, a federal program conceived when the
country was running deficits that Whitman says was a
good use of taxpayer money.

Whitman, Class of '49 and nearly 80, was back in
Syracuse on Thursday, in a building with his name on
it and in an economy newly stung with word of
extensive layoffs at Kodak and a deepening federal
deficit.

The U.S. economy in one Whitman word? "Sucks," said
Whitman, known as a straight shooter. So what's the
first step to right it? "The biggest thing we have to
do about it is get rid of the Republicans," said
Whitman. "It's just a disaster. I'm more a
use-of-proceeds person than I am a deficit person.

"Deficits can be very, very constructive if the funds
so raised are used in a productive manner, such as
what brought me to Syracuse in the first place: the
G.I. Bill of Rights. But when you piss the money away
in useless wars and ill-conceived tax cuts, you're
headed toward becoming a banana republic.

"The people there are just interested in trying to
make the economy look good for the next election, but
they're not interested in the Draconian long-term
consequences."

Whitman is the first to admit he's a pessimist. That's
how he runs investment firms that made him very, very
wealthy - wealthy enough to be one of Syracuse
University's biggest contributors: millions and
millions of dollars - and why there's the Martin J.
Whitman School of Management at SU.

"I'm embarrassed by it," said Whitman, who seemed
humbled.

"The disputed election of 2000 left a lasting scar on the nation's psyche. A recent Zogby poll found that even in red states, which voted for George W. Bush, 32 percent of the public believes that the election was stolen. In blue states, the fraction is 4

Paul Krugman: Questionable programmers aside, even a
cursory look at the behavior of the major voting
machine companies reveals systematic flouting of the
rules intended to ensure voting security. Software was
modified without government oversight; machine
components were replaced without being rechecked. And
here's the crucial point: even if there are strong
reasons to suspect that electronic machines miscounted
votes, nothing can be done about it. There is no paper
trail; there is nothing to recount.

Thwart the Theft of a Second Presidential Election
(the wider Bush's margin of defeat, the harder it will
to reverse), Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat
Bush (again!)

Democracy at Risk
By Paul Krugman
The New York Times

Friday 23 January 2004

The disputed election of 2000 left a lasting scar on the nation's psyche. A recent Zogby poll found that even in red states, which voted for George W. Bush, 32 percent of the public believes that the election was stolen. In blue states, the fraction is 44 percent.

Now imagine this: in November the candidate
trailing in the polls wins an upset victory — but all
of the districts where he does much better than
expected use touch-screen voting machines. Meanwhile,
leaked internal e-mail from the companies that make
these machines suggests widespread error, and possibly
fraud. What would this do to the nation?

Unfortunately, this story is completely
plausible. (In fact, you can tell a similar story
about some of the results in the 2002 midterm
elections, especially in Georgia.) Fortune magazine
rightly declared paperless voting the worst technology
of 2003, but it's not just a bad technology — it's a
threat to the republic.

First of all, the technology has simply failed in
several recent elections. In a special election in
Broward County, Fla., 134 voters were disenfranchised
because the electronic voting machines showed no
votes, and there was no way to determine those voters'
intent. (The election was decided by only 12 votes.)
In Fairfax County, Va., electronic machines crashed
repeatedly and balked at registering votes. In the
2002 primary, machines in several Florida districts
reported no votes for governor.

And how many failures weren't caught? Internal
e-mail from Diebold, the most prominent maker of
electronic voting machines (though not those in the
Florida and Virginia debacles), reveals that
programmers were frantic over the system's
unreliability. One reads, "I have been waiting for
someone to give me an explanation as to why Precinct
216 gave Al Gore a minus 16022 when it was uploaded."
Another reads, "For a demonstration I suggest you fake
it."

Computer experts say that software at Diebold and
other manufacturers is full of security flaws, which
would easily allow an insider to rig an election. But
the people at voting machine companies wouldn't do
that, would they? Let's ask Jeffrey Dean, a programmer
who was senior vice president of a voting machine
company, Global Election Systems, before Diebold
acquired it in 2002. Bev Harris, author of "Black Box
Voting" (www.blackboxvoting.com), told The A.P. that
Mr. Dean, before taking that job, spent time in a
Washington correctional facility for stealing money
and tampering with computer files.

Questionable programmers aside, even a cursory
look at the behavior of the major voting machine
companies reveals systematic flouting of the rules
intended to ensure voting security. Software was
modified without government oversight; machine
components were replaced without being rechecked. And
here's the crucial point: even if there are strong
reasons to suspect that electronic machines miscounted
votes, nothing can be done about it. There is no paper
trail; there is nothing to recount.

So what should be done? Representative Rush Holt
has introduced a bill calling for each machine to
produce a paper record that the voter verifies. The
paper record would then be secured for any future
audit. The bill requires that such verified voting be
ready in time for the 2004 election — and that
districts that can't meet the deadline use paper
ballots instead. And it also requires surprise audits
in each state.

I can't see any possible objection to this bill.
Ignore the inevitable charges of "conspiracy theory."
(Although some conspiracies are real: as yesterday's
Boston Globe reports, "Republican staff members of the
U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee infiltrated opposition
computer files for a year, monitoring secret strategy
memos and periodically passing on copies to the
media.") To support verified voting, you don't
personally have to believe that voting machine
manufacturers have tampered or will tamper with
elections. How can anyone object to measures that will
place the vote above suspicion?

What about the expense? Let's put it this way:
we're spending at least $150 billion to promote
democracy in Iraq. That's about $1,500 for each vote
cast in the 2000 election. How can we balk at spending
a small fraction of that sum to secure the credibility
of democracy at home?

-------

Cherie [Blair] said Bush 'stole' power and tackled him on executions

Three more US soldiers were killed in Iraq this
weekend...Even Newsweak is reporting that 52% of the
US electorate does not want the _resident to remain in
power...Meanwhile...the-shell-of-a-man-formerly-known-as-Tony-Blair
is just the-shell-of-a-man-formerly-known-as-Tony-Blair, but
Cherie Blair...she now has her name scrawled on the
John O'Neill Wall of Heroes...

Repudiate the 9/11 Coverup and the Iraq War Lies, Show
Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1064270/posts

Cherie [Blair] said Bush 'stole' power and tackled him on executions
London Times | January 24, 2003 | London Times

Posted on 01/24/2004 12:38:57 AM PST by ejdrapes

January 24, 2004

2001: the visit when Cherie Blair put her views on
execution

Cherie said Bush 'stole' power and tackled him on
executions

By Nicholas Wapshott in New York, Philip Webster and
David Charter

TONY BLAIR has been embarrassed by his wife’s displays
of open animosity towards President Bush, according to
a forthcoming biography of the Prime Minister.

Cherie Blair is said to have made no secret of her
conviction that Mr Bush “stole” the presidential
election, and picked an argument with him over the
death penalty during a private dinner.

Although the Prime Minister was pragmatic about Mr
Bush’s victory, Mrs Blair was far less sanguine about
the Supreme Court decision that gave him the keys to
the White House. She believed Al Gore had been
“robbed” of the presidency and was hostile to the idea
of her husband “cosying” up to the new President.

Even as they flew to Washington for their first
meeting with the presidential couple, Mrs Blair was in
no mood to curry favour, the book Tony Blair: The
Making of a World Leader by Philip Stephens, states.
“Cherie Blair still believed that Bush had stolen the
White House from Gore,” he wrote. She asked more than
once during the journey why they had to be so nice to
“these people”.

Mrs Blair scarcely concealed her impatience as the
Blair team debated on the plane whether the gift he
had brought for the President, a bust of Winston
Churchill, was of sufficient quality for the Oval
Office. They decided to find a better one and that Mr
Blair would tell the President it was on its way. Mrs
Blair was annoyed at the fuss but was overruled.
Another bust was delivered months later.

The book’s disclosures of Mrs Blair’s forthright views
will cause embarrassment in Downing Street, because of
Mr Blair’s good working relations with Mr Bush, and
the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, although they
will not surprise officials or ministers who know her
well. She is known for expressing her views forcefully
in private.

Stephens writes that Mrs Blair behaved impeccably at
her first meeting with the President “for all her
outspoken resentment on the flight” and “to the great
relief of her husband and aides” she had been at pains
to make friends with Laura Bush.

But when the Bushes came to Britain in the summer of
2001, Mrs Blair, “more tribal in her politics than
Tony”, according to a close family friend, embarrassed
her husband. As the two couples sat down to dinner,
with the officials no longer there, Mrs Blair could
not resist an argument. She is a human rights lawyer
and turned to the death penalty, a subject on which
she has blunt views.

Judicial executions were an immoral violation of human
rights, an affront under the US Constitution as much
as under European laws to the fundamental principles
of justice, she said. This opinion was delivered to a
man who as Governor of Texas signed warrants for more
than 150 executions.

Mr Blair was reported to have “squirmed”, even though
he shares her opposition to the death penalty. The
author says that when he asked Mr Blair about the
incident during research for the book he looked
uncomfortable — all he would say was that Cherie had
raised the issue but as far as he was concerned the
United States and Britain simply had different
systems.

A Downing Street spokesman said: “She has always had a
good relationship with President Bush and has of
course discussed many issues with him, including
capital punishment. The discussions have always been
good-natured.”

Stephens also states that later in the evening Mr Bush
had been embarrassed by his wife. Laura Bush had made
it clear that her views on abortion were a great deal
more liberal than his.

Mrs Blair, who is writing a book about prime
ministers’ spouses, has made her forthright views
known several times in situations that have caused
alarm at No 10. She issued an apology after saying
during a visit to Britain by Queen Rania of Jordan in
June 2002 that young Palestinians “feel they have got
no hope but to blow themselves up”. Last month she
said that “Saudi Arabia’s image in the world is
appalling” over its treatment of women, in a speech in
front of the Saudi Ambassador.

Stephens’s book also reveals the coolness shown by
Vice- President Cheney in his early meetings with Mr
Blair and how Mr Cheney showed his hostility later on
to Mr Blair’s efforts to persuade Mr Bush to work
through the UN before war against Iraq. He made
“occasional, acid” interventions during the crucial
Camp David summit and “during the following days and
months he would be the constant disrupting force in
the Anglo-American relationship”. Stephens adds: “If
Donald Rumsfeld discomfited Blair with his public
disdain for multilateralism, Cheney sought to
undermine the Prime Minister privately.”

Stephens is a political columnist on the Financial
Times and the paper’s former political editor. His
250-page biography of Mr Blair was commissioned by the
publishers Viking to meet an urgent demand from
Americans for more information about the Prime
Minister and his family. Since Mr Blair became Mr
Bush’s closest ally in the war on terrorism he has
become universally popular with Americans, not least
for his ability to describe al-Qaeda’s threat with an
eloquence that the President cannot match.

There has been widespread concern among Americans that
Mr Blair’s intimate support for President Bush might
have damaged his prospects of re-election.

The book is published in America on February 5 and is
expected to sell well in the Anglophile cities of New
York and Washington.

Ex-U.S. Arms Hunter Kay Says No Stockpiles in Iraq

Two more US soldiers died in Iraq last night. For
what?

Support Our Troops, Show Up for Democracy in 2004:
Defeat Bush (again!)

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=578&e=1&u=/nm/20040123/ts_nm/iraq_usa_weapons_kay_dc

Ex-U.S. Arms Hunter Kay Says No Stockpiles in Iraq
Fri Jan 23, 2:20 PM ET Add Top Stories - Reuters to
My Yahoo!

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - David Kay, who stepped down as
leader of the U.S. hunt for weapons of mass
destruction, said on Friday he does not believe there
were any large stockpiles of chemical and biological
weapons in Iraq (news - web sites).

"I don't think they existed," Kay told Reuters in a
telephone interview. "What everyone was talking about
is stockpiles produced after the end of the last
(1991) Gulf War (news - web sites) and I don't think
there was a large-scale production program in the
'90s," he said.

Kay said he believes most of what is going to be found
in the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq
has been found and that the hunt will become more
difficult once America turns over governing the
country to the Iraqis.

The United States went to war against Baghdad last
year citing a threat from Iraq's weapons of mass
destruction. No actual banned arms have been found.

George W. Bush, A.W.O.L

As the truth dawns on the electorate, the commplicity
and capitulation of the "US mainstream news media"
becomes increasingly obvious, and would see almost
pitiful if it were not so very dangerous...

Break the Stranglehold of the US Mainstream News
Media, Show Up for Democracy: Defeat Bush (again!)

http://michaelmoore.com/

Friday, January 23rd 2004
George W. Bush, A.W.O.L

In last night's Democratic Presidential debate in New
Hampshire, broadcast on the Fox News (Nuisance?)
Channel and ABC's Nightline, Peter Jennings went after
Wesley Clark -- and me -- because I said I want to see
Clark debate Bush... "The General vs. The Deserter."

Jennings, referring to me as "the controversial
filmmaker," asked if Clark wanted to distance himself
from me and my "reckless" remark. Clark would not back
down, stating how "delighted" he was with my support,
and that I was entitled to say what I wanted to say --
AND that I was not the only one who had made these
charges against Bush.

The pundits immediately went berserk after the debate.
As well they should. Because they know that they --
and much of the mainstream media -- ignored this Bush
AWOL story when it was first revealed by an
investigation in the Boston Globe (in 2000). The Globe
said it appeared George W. Bush skipped out in the
middle of his Texas Air National Guard service -- and
no charges were ever brought against him. It was a
damning story, and Bush has never provided any
documents or evidence to refute the Globe's charges.

George W. Bush was missing for at least a 12 month
period. That is an undisputed fact. If you or I did
that, we would serve time.

Senator Daniel Inouye, Democrat of Hawaii and a World
War II veteran, joined with Vietnam vets Sen. Max
Cleland and Sen. Bob Kerrey to challenge Bush on the
gaps in his military record. "The question is, where
were you, Governor Bush? What would you do as
commander-in-chief if someone in the National Guard
did the same thing? At the least, I would have been
court-martialed. At the least, I would have been
placed in prison," Inouye said.

The Washington Post, the New Republic, and others also
presented the evidence that Bush had fled from duty.

The most comprehensive piece I've seen was on Tom
Paine.com with all the relevant links and documents.

There are far more important issues to deal with in
this election year. Poor Peter Jennings. What was he
doing on Fox? All that seems left of his Canadianess
is the way he pronounced my name ("Michael Moooore").
The question he posed to Clark was typical of a lazy
media looking for a way to distract the viewers from
the real issues: the war, the economy, and the
failures of the Bush administration. But if they want
to really get into the issue of Bush and his "service
record," then I say, bring it on! The facts are all
there, including the empty flyboy suit.

Yours,

Michael Moore
mmflint@aol.com
www.michaelmoore.com

PS: This is the second time I've been thrown into a
New Hampshire presidential debate. Four years ago,
Republican Alan Keyes was asked why he jumped into
Michael Moore's mosh pit to the music of Rage Against
the Machine. Now THAT was an issue of substance!

PPS: You can read the exchange between Jennings and
Clark here.

Boston Globe: Bush Let Guard Down
Boston Globe: BUSH PRESSURED ON MILITARY GAPS
Washington Post: Bush Let Guard Down
Dallas Morning News: RECORDS OF BUSH’S ALA. MILITARY
DUTY CAN’T BE FOUND
The New Republic: Notebook
TomPaine.com: FINALLY, THE TRUTH ABOUT BUSH'S MILITARY
SERVICE RECORD
Washington Post: "The General Vs. The Deserter"
TRANSCRIPT: Peter Jennings asks Wesley Clark about my
charge that George W. Bush is a deserter

ONE YEAR GAP IN BUSH'S GUARD DUTY
NO RECORD OF AIRMAN AT DRILLS FROM 1972-73

By Walter V. Robinson, Boston Globe Staff, 5/23/2000

AUSTIN, Texas - After George W. Bush became governor
in 1995, the Houston Air National Guard unit he had
served with during the Vietnam War years honored him
for his work, noting that he flew an F-102
fighter-interceptor until his discharge in October
1973.

And Bush himself, in his 1999 autobiography, ''A
Charge to Keep,'' recounts the thrills of his pilot
training, which he completed in June 1970. ''I
continued flying with my unit for the next several
years,'' the governor wrote.

But both accounts are contradicted by copies of Bush's
military records, obtained by the Globe. In his final
18 months of military service in 1972 and 1973, Bush
did not fly at all. And for much of that time, Bush
was all but unaccounted for: For a full year, there is
no record that he showed up for the periodic drills
required of part-time guardsmen.

Bush, who declined to be interviewed on the issue,
said through a spokesman that he has ''some
recollection'' of attending drills that year, but
maybe not consistently.

>From May to November 1972, Bush was in Alabama working
in a US Senate campaign, and was required to attend
drills at an Air National Guard unit in Montgomery.
But there is no evidence in his record that he did so.
And William Turnipseed, the retired general who
commanded the Alabama unit back then, said in an
interview last week that Bush never appeared for duty
there.

After the election, Bush returned to Houston. But
seven months later, in May 1973, his two superior
officers at Ellington Air Force Base could not perform
his annual evaluation covering the year from May 1,
1972 to April 30, 1973 because, they wrote, ''Lt. Bush
has not been observed at this unit during the period
of this report.''

Bush, they mistakenly concluded, had been training
with the Alabama unit for the previous 12 months. Both
men have since died. But Ellington's top personnel
officer at the time, retired Colonel Rufus G. Martin,
said he had believed that First Lieutenant Bush
completed his final year of service in Alabama.

A Bush spokesman, Dan Bartlett, said after talking
with the governor that Bush recalls performing some
duty in Alabama and ''recalls coming back to Houston
and doing [Guard] duty, though he does not recall if
it was on a consistent basis.''

Noting that Bush, by that point, was no longer flying,
Bartlett added, ''It's possible his presence and role
became secondary.''

Last night, Mindy Tucker, another Bush campaign aide,
asserted that the governor ''fulfilled all of his
requirements in the Guard.'' If he missed any drills,
she said, he made them up later on.

Under Air National Guard rules at the time, guardsmen
who missed duty could be reported to their Selective
Service Board and inducted into the Army as draftees.

If Bush's interest in Guard duty waned, as spokesman
Bartlett hinted, the records and former Guard
officials suggest that Bush's unit was lackadaisical
in holding him to his commitment. Many states, Texas
among them, had a record during the Vietnam War of
providing a haven in the Guard for the sons of the
well-connected, and a tendency to excuse shirking by
those with political connections.

Those who trained and flew with Bush, until he gave up
flying in April 1972, said he was among the best
pilots in the 111th Fighter-Interceptor Squadron. In
the 22-month period between the end of his flight
training and his move to Alabama, Bush logged numerous
hours of duty, well above the minimum requirements for
so-called ''weekend warriors.''

Indeed, in the first four years of his six-year
commitment, Bush spent the equivalent of 21 months on
active duty, including 18 months in flight school. His
Democratic opponent, Vice President Al Gore, who
enlisted in the Army for two years and spent five
months in Vietnam, logged only about a month more
active service, since he won an early release from
service.

Still, the puzzling gap in Bush's military service is
likely to heighten speculation about the conspicuous
underachievement that marked the period between his
1968 graduation from Yale University and his 1973
entry into Harvard Business School. It is speculation
that Bush has helped to fuel: For example, he refused
for months last year to say whether he had ever used
illegal drugs. Subsequently, however, Bush amended his
stance, saying that he had not done so since 1974.

The period in 1972 and 1973 when Bush sidestepped his
military obligation coincides with a well-publicized
incident during the 1972 Christmas holidays: Bush had
a confrontation with his father after he took his
younger brother, Marvin, out drinking and returned to
the family's Washington home after knocking over some
garbage cans on the ride home.

In his autobiography, Bush says that his decision to
go to business school the following September was ''a
turning point for me.''

Assessing Bush's military service three decades later
is no easy task: Some of his superiors are no longer
alive. Others declined to comment, or, understandably,
cannot recall details about Bush's comings and goings.
And as Bush has risen in public life over the last
several years, Texas military officials have put many
of his records off-limits and heavily redacted many
other pages, ostensibly because of privacy rules.

But 160 pages of his records, assembled by the Globe
from a variety of sources and supplemented by
interviews with former Guard officials, paint a
picture of an Air Guardsman who enjoyed favored
treatment on several occasions.

The ease of Bush's entry into the Air Guard was widely
reported last year. At a time when such billets were
coveted and his father was a Houston congressman, Bush
vaulted to the top of a waiting list of 500. Bush and
his father have denied that he received any
preferential treatment. But last year, Ben Barnes, who
was speaker of the Texas House in 1968, said in a
sworn deposition in a civil lawsuit that he called
Guard officials seeking a Guard slot for Bush after a
friend of Bush's father asked him to do so.

Before he went to basic training, Bush was approved
for an automatic commission as a second lieutenant and
assignment to flight school despite a score of just 25
percent on a pilot aptitude test. Such commissions
were not uncommon, although most often they went to
prospective pilots who had college ROTC courses or
prior Air Force experience. Bush had neither.

In interviews last week, Guard officials from that era
said Bush leapfrogged over other applicants because
few applicants were willing to commit to the 18 months
of flight training or the inherent dangers of flying.

As a pilot, the future governor appeared to do well.
After eight weeks of basic training in the summer of
1968 - and a two-month break to work on a Senate race
in Florida - Bush attended 55 weeks of flight school
at Moody Air Force Base in Georgia, from November 1968
to November 1969, followed by five months of full-time
training on the F-102 back at Ellington.

Retired Colonel Maurice H. Udell, Bush's instructor in
the F-102, said he was impressed with Bush's talent
and his attitude. ''He had his boots shined, his
uniform pressed, his hair cut and he said, `Yes, sir'
and `No, sir,''' the instructor recalled.

Said Udell, ''I would rank him in the top 5 percent of
pilots I knew. And in the thinking department, he was
in the top 1 percent. He was very capable and tough as
a boot.''

But 22 months after finishing his training, and with
two years left on his six-year commitment, Bush gave
up flying - for good, it would turn out. He sought
permission to do ''equivalent training'' at a Guard
unit in Alabama, where he planned to work for several
months on the Republican Senate campaign of Winton
Blount, a friend of Bush's father. The proposed move
took Bush off flight status, since no Alabama Guard
unit had the F-102 he was trained to fly.

At that point, starting in May 1972, First Lieutenant
Bush began to disappear from the Guard's radar screen.

When the Globe first raised questions about this
period earlier this month, Bartlett, Bush's spokesman,
referred a reporter to Albert Lloyd Jr., a retired
colonel who was the Texas Air Guard's personnel
director from 1969 to 1995.

Lloyd, who a year ago helped the Bush campaign make
sense of the governor's military records, said Bush's
aides were concerned about the gap in his records back
then.

On May 24, 1972, after he moved to Alabama, Bush made
a formal request to do his equivalent training at the
9921st Air Reserve Squadron at Maxwell Air Force Base
in Alabama. Two days later, that unit's commander,
Lieutenant Colonel Reese H. Bricken, agreed to have
Bush join his unit temporarily.

In Houston, Bush's superiors approved. But a higher
headquarters disapproved, noting that Bricken's unit
did not have regular drills.

''We met just one weeknight a month. We were only a
postal unit. We had no airplanes. We had no pilots. We
had no nothing,'' Bricken said in an interview.

Last week, Lloyd said he is mystified why Bush's
superiors at the time approved duty at such a unit.

Inexplicably, months went by with no resolution to
Bush's status - and no Guard duty. Bush's evident
disconnection from his Guard duties was underscored in
August, when he was removed from flight status for
failing to take his annual flight physical.

Finally, on Sept. 5, 1972, Bush requested permission
to do duty for September, October, and November at the
187th Tactical Recon Group in Montgomery. Permission
was granted, and Bush was directed to report to
Turnipseed, the unit's commander.

In interviews last week, Turnipseed and his
administrative officer at the time, Kenneth K. Lott,
said they had no memory of Bush ever reporting.

''Had he reported in, I would have had some recall,
and I do not,'' Turnipseed said. ''I had been in
Texas, done my flight training there. If we had had a
first lieutenant from Texas, I would have
remembered.''

Lloyd, the retired Texas Air Guard official, said he
does not know whether Bush performed duty in Alabama.
''If he did, his drill attendance should have been
certified and sent to Ellington, and there would have
been a record. We cannot find the records to show he
fulfilled the requirements in Alabama,'' he said.

Indeed, Bush's discharge papers list his service and
duty station for each of his first four years in the
Air Guard. But there is no record of training listed
after May 1972, and no mention of any service in
Alabama. On that discharge form, Lloyd said, ''there
should have been an entry for the period between May
1972 and May 1973.''

Said Lloyd, ''It appeared he had a bad year. He might
have lost interest, since he knew he was getting
out.''

In an effort last year to solve the puzzle, Lloyd said
he scoured Guard records, where he found two ''special
orders'' commanding Bush to appear for active duty on
nine days in May 1973. That is the same month that
Lieutenant Colonel William D. Harris Jr. and
Lieutenant Colonel Jerry B. Killian effectively
declared Bush missing from duty.

In Bush's annual efficiency report, dated May 2, 1973,
the two supervising pilots did not rate Bush for the
prior year, writing, ''Lt. Bush has not been observed
at this unit during the period of report. A civilian
occupation made it necessary for him to move to
Montgomery, Alabama. He cleared this base on 15 May
1972 and has been performing equivalent training in a
non-flying status with the 187 Tac Recon Gp, Dannelly
ANG Base, Alabama.''

Asked about that declaration, campaign spokesman
Bartlett said Bush told him that since he was no
longer flying, he was doing ''odds and ends'' under
different supervisors whose names he could not recall.

But retired colonel Martin, the unit's former
administrative officer, said he too thought Bush had
been in Alabama for that entire year. Harris and
Killian, he said, would have known if Bush returned to
duty at Ellington. And Bush, in his autobiography,
identifies the late colonel Killian as a friend,
making it even more likely that Killian knew where
Bush was.

Lieutenant Bush, to be sure, had gone off flying
status when he went to Alabama. But had he returned to
his unit in November 1972, there would have been no
barrier to him flying again, except passing a flight
physical. Although the F-102 was being phased out, his
unit's records show that Guard pilots logged thousands
of hours in the F-102 in 1973.

During his search, Lloyd said, the only other
paperwork he discovered was a single torn page bearing
Bush's social security number and numbers awarding
some points for Guard duty. But the partial page is
undated. If it represents the year in question, it
leaves unexplained why Bush's two superior officers
would have declared him absent for the full year.

There is no doubt that Bush was in Houston in late
1972 and early 1973. During that period, according to
Bush's autobiography, he held a civilian job working
for an inner-city, antipoverty program in the city.

Lloyd, who has studied the records extensively, said
he is an admirer of the governor and believes ''the
governor honestly served his country and fulfilled his
commitment.''

But Lloyd said it is possible that since Bush had his
sights set on discharge and the unit was beginning to
replace the F-102s, Bush's superiors told him he was
not ''in the flow chart. Maybe George Bush took that
as a signal and said, `Hell, I'm not going to bother
going to drills.'

''Well, then it comes rating time, and someone says,
`Oh...he hasn't fulfilled his obligation.' I'll bet
someone called him up and said, `George, you're in a
pickle. Get your ass down here and perform some duty.'
And he did,'' Lloyd said.

That would explain, Lloyd said, the records showing
Bush cramming so many drills into May, June, and July
1973. During those three months, Bush spent 36 days on
duty.

Bush's last day in uniform before he moved to
Cambridge was July 30, 1973. His official release from
active duty was dated Oct. 1, 1973, eight months
before his six-year commitment was scheduled to end.

Officially, the period between May 1972 and May 1973
remains unaccounted for. In November 1973, responding
to a request from the headquarters of the Air National
Guard for Bush's annual evaluation for that year,
Martin, the Ellington administrative officer, wrote,
''Report for this period not available for
administrative reasons.''

This story ran on page 01A of the Boston Globe on
5/23/2000. C 2000 Globe Newspaper Company.

The Boston Globe

November 3, 2000

HEADLINE: CAMPAIGN 2000 / GUARD DUTY;
BUSH PRESSURED ON MILITARY GAPS

BY SUSAN MILLIGAN

WASHINGTON - Democratic military veterans in the US
Senate lashed out yesterday at Governor George W. Bush
of Texas for failing to explain his apparent extended
absence during his tenure in the Texas Air National
Guard.

"The question is, where were you, Governor Bush?" said
Senator Daniel Inouye, Democrat of Hawaii and a World
War II veteran. "What would you do as
commander-in-chief if someone in the National Guard
did the same thing?" Inouye asked during a telephone
address to supporters of Vice President Al Gore in
Nashville yesterday.

Inouye joined several colleagues, Senators Bob Kerrey,
Democrat of Nebraska, and Max Cleland, Democrat of
Georgia, in raising harsh questions about Bush's role
during the Vietnam War.

The remarks were in response to a Globe article this
week showing that Bush stopped flying after 22 months
within his unit of the Texas Air National Guard.
Further, the article reported, Bush failed to show up
for required Guard drills during a six-month stay in
Alabama, and he was lax even after returning to
Houston.

"At the least, I would have been court-martialed. At
the least, I would have been placed in prison," Inouye
said. Bush "made a commitment to the Texas Air
National Guard, and God bless him for doing so," said
Kerrey. But "if you're going to make a commitment to
join the Guard, especially at that time, you've got to
keep that commitment," Kerrey added.

Bush has refused to be interviewed by the Globe on the
topic of his military service. His spokesman, Dan
Bartlett, yesterday called the questions about the
governor a "scurrilous charge" of a "desperate" Gore
campaign.

The Washington Post

November 3, 2000, Friday, Final Edition

2 Democrats: Bush Let Guard Down; Gore Surrogates
Revive Issue of Apparent Laxity in Candidate's
Military Service

George Lardner Jr.; Howard Kurtz , Washington Post
Staff Writers

Two high-profile surrogates for Vice President Gore,
in an 11th-hour attempt to exploit a dormant issue,
yesterday castigated George W. Bush over allegations
that he did not fulfill some of his National Guard
duties in the 1970s.

Democratic Sens. Bob Kerrey (Neb.) and Daniel Inouye
(Hawaii), both Medal of Honor winners, were drafted to
attack Bush on a 27-year-old controversy that the Gore
campaign has avoided mentioning until now. They spoke
by phone to a veterans rally in Nashville led by Sen.
Max Cleland (D-Ga.), a decorated Vietnam veteran.
Reporters were invited to listen by conference call.

Bush says he fulfilled all his obligations as a pilot
in the Air National Guard, but he has had difficulty
rebutting charges that he played hooky for a year.

"Where were you, Governor Bush?" Inouye asked. "What
about your commitment? What would you do as commander
in chief if someone in the Guard or service did the
same thing?"

Kerrey questioned how Bush immediately got into the
Guard "even though there were 500 people ahead of him"
at a time when "350 Americans were dying every single
week in Vietnam." Kerrey has been drawing a sharp
contrast with Gore, who served in Vietnam.

Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer called the attacks "the
final throes of a campaign that has now lost any
semblance of decency. The governor, of course, was
honorably discharged, and these are inventions and
fabrications. All the questions have been answered."

But Gore spokesman Mark Fabiani said the senators
"seem to have raised some very important questions . .
. that deserve an answer."

Bush signed up with the Texas National Guard for six
years in May 1968, which allowed him to avoid the
Vietnam draft. He became an F-102 pilot in 1970 but
made his last flight in April 1972 before moving to
Alabama to work on a GOP Senate campaign. The dispute
centers on what he did in the Guard between that point
and September 1973, when he entered Harvard Business
School.

Bush campaign officials say their evidence shows that
he did his duty in 1972-73, when he worked for six
months on the Senate race in Alabama and then returned
to his home base outside Houston. But other documents
in his Guard record contradict that claim, and critics
who have examined that record contend that he also
skimped on his obligations in 1973-74. It is safe to
say that Bush did very light duty in his last two
years in the Guard and that his superiors made it easy
for him.

The personnel officer in charge of Bush's 147th
Fighter Group, now-retired Col. Rufus G. Martin, says
he tried to give Bush a light load, telling him to
apply to the 9921st Air Reserve Squadron in
Montgomery, Ala.

Martin said in an interview that he knew Bush wasn't
eligible for the 9921st, an unpaid, general training
squadron that met once a week to hear lectures on
first aid and the like. "However," he said, "I thought
it was worth a try. . . . It was the least
participation of any type of unit." But Air Force
Reserve officials rejected the assignment, saying Bush
had two more years of military obligations and was
ineligible for a reserve squadron that had nothing to
do with flying airplanes. Bush spokesman Dan Bartlett
said Bush didn't know that when he applied.

Bush had been notified that he needed to take his
annual flying physical by his 26th birthday in July
1972, but the move to Alabama made that unnecessary.
He had been trained to fly F-102 fighter-interceptors,
and none of the units in Alabama had those planes. He
could have taken the physical to preserve his pilot's
status but chose not to do so. "Because he wasn't
flying," Bartlett said.

On Aug. 1, 1972, Bush's commander in Houston, Col.
Bobby W. Hodges, ordered him grounded for "failure to
accomplish annual medical examination." Some critics
say this should have triggered a formal board of
inquiry, but Hodges said in an interview that this was
unnecessary because Bush accepted the penalty and knew
"he couldn't fly again until he takes a physical."

"It happens all the time," Hodges said of the
grounding. "That is normal when a Guardsman is out of
state or out of the country."

In September, Bush was assigned to another Alabama
unit, the 187th Tactical Reconnaissance Group. Since
"Lieutenant Bush will not be able to satisfy his
flight requirements with our group," the unit told him
to report for "equivalent training"--such as
debriefing pilots--on the weekends of Oct. 7-8 and
Nov. 4-5, 1972.

There is no evidence in his record that he showed up
on either weekend. Friends on the Alabama campaign say
he told them of having to do Guard duty, but the
retired general who commanded the 187th, William
Turnipseed, and his personnel chief, Kenneth K. Lott,
say they do not remember Bush ever reporting.

The Bush campaign points to a torn piece of paper in
his Guard records, a statement of points Bush
apparently earned in 1972-73, although most of the
dates and Bush's name except for the "W" have been
torn off.

According to the torn Air Reserve Forces sheet, Bush
continued to compile service credits after returning
to Houston, winding up his fifth year with 56 points,
six above the minimum needed for retention. However,
Bush's annual effectiveness report, signed by two
superiors, says "Lt. Bush has not been observed at
this unit during the period of the report," May 1,
1972, to April 30, 1973.

Hodges also said he did not see Bush at the Texas base
again after Bush left for Montgomery. "If I had been
there on the day[s] he came out, I would have seen
him," Hodges said.

Dallas Morning News

RECORDS OF BUSH’S ALA. MILITARY DUTY CAN’T BE FOUND

By Wayne Slater
Monday, June 26, 2000; Page A06

AUSTIN –– After a thorough search of military records,
George W. Bush's presidential campaign has failed to
find any documents proving he reported for duty during
an eight-month stint in Alabama with the Texas Air
National Guard.

But a spokesman expressed confidence Saturday that
inquiries will turn up former Guard members who can
corroborate Bush's having been there.

"He specifically recalls pulling duty in Alabama,"
spokesman Dan Bartlett said of Bush. "He did his
drills."

Bartlett said the Republican governor showed up
"several" times while in Alabama, where he transferred
from his Houston Guard unit in 1972 to work for the
unsuccessful Senate campaign of Republican Winton
Blount, a friend of Bush's father.

According to Bartlett, the governor could not recall
specifically how many times he reported for duty
during his months in Alabama.

After leaving Alabama in December 1972, Bush returned
to Ellington Air Force Base near Houston, where he
made up missed time in order to complete his
obligation, said Bartlett.

Bush was a pilot in the Texas Air National Guard from
May 1968 to October 1973, primarily flying F-102
fighter-interceptors.

The focus on Bush's service in the Guard--and the
transfer to work on the Alabama political
campaign--has raised questions over whether he
received preferential treatment at a time when many
young men were seeking to avoid the Vietnam War.

Both Bush and his father, who was then a U.S.
representative from Houston, have denied that the
younger Bush received special treatment.

Bartlett said Saturday that he reviewed a 200-page
packet of documents last week from the National
Guard's records repository in Denver. He said they
largely duplicated documents the campaign already had
obtained from Texas National Guard headquarters.

"What it shows is that Governor Bush met his annual
requirements in order to fulfill his military
obligation but doesn't show the portion of the
training that took place in Alabama," he said.

While Bush was in Alabama, "most of his work was
paperwork related," said Bartlett.

Campaigning Friday in Tuscaloosa, Ala., Bush was asked
about his 1972 service in that state.

"I was there on a temporary assignment and fulfilled
my weekends at one period of time," he said. "I made
up some missed weekends."

"I can't remember what I did, but I wasn't flying
because they didn't have the same airplanes. I
fulfilled my obligations."

In May, retired Gen. William Turnipseed, the former
commander of the Alabama Guard unit, said Bush did not
report to him, although the young airman was required
to do so. His orders, dated Sept. 15, 1972, said:
"Lieutenant Bush should report to Lt. Col. William
Turnipseed, DCO, to perform equivalent training."

"To my knowledge, he never showed up," Turnipseed said
last month.

Bartlett said Bush recalls seeing then-Col.
Turnipseed. The campaign aide suggested that because
Bush was not a pilot, his commander might not remember
him.

The New Republic
NOVEMBER 13, 2000 page 10
N 0 T E B 0 0 K

MILITARY READINESS CONT'D: It's no longer news that
George W Bush, to avoid being sent to Vietnam,
enlisted in the Texas Air National Guard in 1968. Nor
is it news that Bush, contrary to assertions in his
1999 campaign autobiography A Charge to

Keep, appears not to have honored his commitment to
the Guard after moving to Alabama for a period,
apparently failing to report for duty there for a full
year, between May 1972 and May 1973. (No one who was
in the Alabama National Guard at the time recalls
encountering Bush; the only person who vouches for him
is a former girlfriend, who merely says Bush spoke of
doing Guard service in Alabama.) What is news, though,
is that the Bush campaign continues to lie about
Bush's National Guard service.

"George W Bush served as a pilot in the Texas Air
National Guard from 1968 until 1973;" reads a snippet
from the biography posted on the campaign's website.
This is demonstrably false on two counts. For one,
although Bush began his Guard service in July 1968, he
spent his first two years in basic training and flight
school and did not begin serving as a pilot with the
111th Fighter- Interceptor Squadron at Houston's
Ellington Field until June 1970. Secondly, as has been
reported in The Boston Globe and in these pages, after
Bush moved from Texas to Alabama in May 1972, he never
flew again. Nor could he, because he skipped his
annual medical exam in 1972 and was suspended from
flying.

What had been assumed is that Bush, upon returning to
Texas from Alabama in May 1973, made up for his missed
service by performing nonflying duty At least, that's
what Bush campaign spokesman Dan Bartlett told
reporters in June. But now it seems unlikely that Bush
did even that much. According to a report in the
October 31 Boston Globe, "a Bush campaign spokesman
acknowledged last week that he knows of no witnesses
who can attest to Bush's attendance at drills after he
returned to Houston in late 1972 and before his early
release from the Guard in September 1973?" That means
Bush probably skipped the final 17 months of his
National Guard commitment, a period almost as long as
the 22 months he served as an actual pilot. But, then
again, in the early '70s W. hadn't yet ushered in "the
responsibility era."

TomPaine.com
FINALLY, THE TRUTH ABOUT BUSH'S MILITARY SERVICE
RECORD: George W.'s Missing Year
By Marty Heldt

Marty Heldt is a farmer. He told us, "I spent 17 years
as a brakeman [for the railroad] before moving back to
the farm. That job had some long layovers that gave me
a lot of time to read and to educate myself." He lives
in Clinton, Iowa.

Nearly two hundred manila-wrapped pages of George
Walker Bush's service records came to me like some
sort of giant banana stuffed into my mailbox.

I had been seeking more information about his military
record to find out what he did during what I think of
as his "missing year," when he failed to show up for
duty as a member of the Air National Guard, as the
Boston Globe first reported.

The initial page I examined is a chronological listing
of Bush's service record. This document charts active
duty days served from the time of his enlistment. His
first year, a period of extensive training, young Bush
is credited with serving 226 days. In his second year
in the Guard, Bush is shown to have logged a total of
313 days. After Bush got his wings in June 1970 until
May 1971, he is credited with a total of 46 days of
active duty. From May 1971 to May 1972, he logged 22
days of active duty.

Then something happened. From May 1, 1972 until April
30, 1973 -- a period of twelve months -- there are no
days shown, though Bush should have logged at least
thirty-six days service (a weekend per month in
addition to two weeks at camp).

I found out that for the first four months of this
time period, when Bush was working on the U.S. Senate
campaign of Winton Blount in Alabama, that he did not
have orders to be at any unit anywhere.

On May 24, 1972, Bush had applied for a transfer from
the Texas Air National Guard to Montgomery, Alabama.
On his transfer request Bush noted that he was seeking
a "no pay" position with the 9921st Air Reserve
Squadron. The commanding officer of the Montgomery
unit, Lieutenant Colonel Reese R. Bricken, promptly
accepted Bush's request to do temporary duty under his
command.

But Bush never received orders for the 9921st in
Alabama. Such decisions were under the jurisdiction of
the Air Reserve Personnel Center in Denver, Colorado,
and the Center disallowed the transfer. The Director
of Personnel Resources at the Denver headquarters
noted in his rejection that Bush had a "Military
Service Obligation until 26 May 1974." As an
"obligated reservist," Bush was ineligible to serve
his time in what amounted to a paper unit with few
responsibilities. As the unit's leader, Lieutenant
Colonel Bricken recently explained to the Boston
Globe, ''We met just one weeknight a month. We were
only a postal unit. We had no airplanes. We had no
pilots. We had no nothing.''

The headquarters document rejecting Bush's requested
Alabama transfer was dated May 31, 1972. This transfer
refusal left Bush still obligated to attend drills
with his regular unit, the 111th Fighter Interceptor
Squadron stationed at Ellington Air Force Base near
Houston. However, Bush had already left Texas two
weeks earlier and was now working on Winton Blount's
campaign staff in Alabama.

In his annual evaluation report, Bush's two
supervising officers, Lieutenant Colonel William D.
Harris Jr. and Lieutenant Colonel Jerry B. Killian,
made it clear that Bush had "not been observed at" his
Texas unit "during the period of report" -- the twelve
month period from May 1972 through the end of April
1973.

In the comments section of this evaluation report
Lieutenant Colonel Harris notes that Bush had "cleared
this base on 15 May 1972, and has been performing
equivalent training in a non flying role with the
187th Tac Recon Gp at Dannelly ANG Base, Alabama" (the
Air National Guard Tactical Reconnaissance Group at
Dannelly Air Force Base near Montgomery, Alabama).

This was incorrect. Bush didn't apply for duty at
Dannelly Air Force Base until September 1972. From May
until September he was in limbo, his temporary orders
having been rejected. And when his orders to appear at
Dannelly came through he still didn't appear. Although
his instructions clearly directed Bush to report to
Lieutenant Colonel William Turnipseed on the dates of
"7-8 October 0730-1600, and 4-5 November 0730-1600,"
he never did. In interviews conducted with the Boston
Globe earlier this year, both General Turnipseed and
his former administration officer, Lieutenant Colonel
Kenneth Lott, said that Bush never put in an
appearance.

The lack of regular attendance goes against the basic
concept of a National Guard kept strong by citizen
soldiers who maintain their skills through regular
training. Bush campaign aides claim, according to a
report in the New York Times, that Bush in fact served
a single day -- November 29,1972 -- with the Alabama
unit. If this is so it means that for a period of six
weeks Lieutenant George W. Bush ignored direct
instructions from headquarters to report for duty. But
it looks even worse for Lieutenant Bush if the memory
of Turnipseed and Lott are correct and Bush never
reported at all.

After the election was over (candidate Blount lost),
Bush was to have returned to Texas and the 111th at
Ellington Air Force Base. Bush did return to Houston,
where he worked for an inner-city youth organization,
Project P.U.L.L. But, as I mentioned already, his
annual evaluation report states that he had not been
observed at his unit during the twelve months ending
May 1973. This means that there were another five
months, after he left Alabama, during which Bush did
not fulfill any of his obligations as a Guardsman.

In fact, during the final four months of this period,
December 1972 through May 29, 1973, neither Bush nor
his aides have ever tried to claim attendance at any
guard activities. So, incredibly, for a period of one
year beginning May 1, 1972, there is just one day,
November 29th, on which Bush claims to have performed
duty for the Air National Guard. There are no dates of
service for 1973 mentioned in Bush's "Chronological
Service Listing."

Bush's long absence from the records comes to an end
one week after he failed to comply with an order to
attend "Annual Active Duty Training" starting at the
end of May 1973. He then began serving irregularly
with his unit. Nothing indicates in the records that
he ever made up the time he missed.

Early in September 1973, Bush submitted a request
seeking to be discharged from the Texas Air National
Guard and to be transferred to the Air Reserve
Personnel Center. This transfer to the inactive
reserves would effectively end any requirements to
attend monthly drills. The request -- despite Bush's
record -- was approved. That fall Bush enrolled in
Harvard Business School.

Both Bush and his aides have made numerous statements
to the effect that Bush fulfilled all of his guard
obligations. They point to Bush's honorable discharge
as proof of this. But the records indicate that George
W Bush missed a year of service. This lack of regular
attendance goes against the basic concept of a
National Guard kept strong by citizen soldiers who
maintain their skills and preparedness through regular
training.

And we know that Bush understood that regular
attendance was essential to the proficiency of the
National Guard. In the Winter 1998 issue of the
National Guard Review Bush is quoted as saying "I can
remember walking up to my F-102 fighter and seeing the
mechanics there. I was on the same team as them, and I
relied on them to make sure that I wasn't jumping out
of an airplane. There was a sense of shared
responsibility in that case. The responsibility to get
the airplane down. The responsibility to show up and
do your job."

Bush has found military readiness to be a handy
campaign issue.

Bush's unsatisfactory attendance could have resulted
in being ordered to active duty for a period up to two
years -- including a tour in Vietnam. Lieutenant Bush
would have been aware of this as he had signed a
statement which listed the penalties for poor
attendance and unsatisfactory participation. Bush
could also have faced a general court martial. But
this was unlikely as it would have also meant dragging
in the two officers who had signed off on his annual
evaluation.

Going after officers in this way would have been
outside the norm. Most often an officer would be
subject to career damaging letters of reprimand and
poor Officers Effectiveness Ratings. These types of
punishment would often result in the resignation of
the officer. In Bush's case, as someone who still had
a commitment for time not served, he could have been
brought back and made to do drills. But this would
have been a further embarrassment to the service as it
would have made it semi-public that a Lieutenant
Colonel and squadron commander had let one of his
subordinates go missing for a year.

For the Guard, for the ranking officers involved and
for Lieutenant Bush the easiest and quietest thing to
do was adding time onto his commitment and placing
that time in the inactive reserves.

Among these old documents there is a single clue as to
how Bush finally fulfilled his obligations and made up
for those missed drill days. In my first request for
information I received a small three-page document
containing the "Military Biography Of George Walker
Bush." This was sent from the Headquarters Air Reserve
Personnel Center (ARPC) in Denver Colorado.

In this official summary of Bush's military service, I
found something that was not mentioned in Bush's
records from the National Guard Bureau in Arlington,
Virginia. When Bush enlisted his commitment ran until
May 26, 1974. This was the separation date shown on
all documents as late as October 1973, when Bush was
transferred to the inactive reserves at Denver,
Colorado. But the date of final separation shown on
the official summary from Denver, is November 21,
1974. The ARPC had tacked an extra six months on to
Bush's commitment.

Bush may have finally "made-up" his missed days. But
he did so not by attending drills -- in fact he never
attended drills again after he enrolled at Harvard.
Instead, he had his name added to the roster of a
paper unit in Denver, Colorado, a paper unit where he
had no responsibility to show up and do a job.

Bush has found military readiness to be a handy
campaign issue. Yet even though more than two decades
have passed since Bush left the Air National Guard,
some military sources still bristle at his service
record -- and what effect it had on readiness. "In
short, for the several hundred thousand dollars we tax
payers spent on getting [Bush] trained as a fighter
jock, he repaid us with sixty-eight days of active
duty. And God only knows if and when he ever flew on
those days," concludes a military source. "I've spent
more time cleaning up latrines than he did flying."

“The General vs. The Deserter”
By David S. Broder
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 18, 2004; Page A05

PEMBROKE, N.H., Jan. 17 -- Retired Army Gen. Wesley K.
Clark said Saturday he "has heard" charges that
President Bush was a "deserter" from his duties in the
Vietnam War-era Air National Guard but said, "I am not
going to go into the issues of what George W. Bush did
or didn't do in the past."

The term "deserter" was used by documentary filmmaker
Michael Moore in introducing Clark to an enthusiastic
rally of more than 1,000 people in this Concord suburb
Saturday afternoon.

After noting that Clark had been a champion debater at
West Point, Moore told a laughing crowd, "I know what
you're thinking. I want to see that debate" between
Clark and Bush -- "the general versus the deserter."

In a news conference after the event, Clark was asked
if he had heard those words and if he agreed. "Well,"
he said. "I've heard those charges. I don't know if
they are true or not. He was never prosecuted for it."
But Clark said, "I am delighted with Michael Moore . .
. man of conscience and courage."

Moore told reporters he was referring to published
reports that, as he put it, "Bush left and did not
show up for a year" when he transferred from Houston
in the Texas Air National Guard to temporary duty at a
unit in Alabama.

Clark said the real issue is to hold Bush "accountable
for his performance of duty as commander in chief.
That's what the issue is in this election."

The Boston Globe reported in 2000 that "there is
strong evidence that Bush performed no military
service as required when he moved from Houston to
Alabama to work on a U.S. Senate campaign from May to
November 1972."

Maj. Thomas A. Deall, an Air Force personnel officer,
was quoted as saying that "after looking at Bush's
records, he met minimal drill requirements before his
discharge."

The Dallas Morning News reported that "after a
thorough search of military records, George W. Bush's
campaign has failed to find any document proving he
reported for duty during an eight-month stint in
Alabama with the Texas Air National Guard." Bush was
quoted as saying he remembers being at drills in
Alabama.

The following is a rush transcript of the exchange
between Peter Jennings (PJ) and Wesley Clark (WC) from
this evening's debate in New Hampshire

PJ: General Clark, a lot of people say they don't know
you well, so this is really a simple question about
knowing a man by his friends. The other day you had a
rally here and one of the men who stood up to endorse
you was the controversial filmmaker Michael Moore. You
said you were delighted with him. At one point Mr.
Moore, said in front of you that President Bush, he
was saying he'd like to see a debate between you the
General and President Bush who he called a deserter.
Now that's a reckless charge not supported by the
facts so I was curious to know why you didn't
contradict him and whether or not you think it would
have been a better example of ethical behavior to have
done so.

WC: Well I think Michael Moore has the right to say
whatever he feels about this. I don't know whether
this is supported by the facts or not. I've never
looked at it. I've seen this charge bandied about a
lot but to me it wasn't material, this election is
going to be about the future, Peter, and what we have
to do is pull this country together, and I'm delighted
to have the support of a man like Michael Moore, of a
great American leader like Senator George McGovern,
and of people from Texas like Charlie Stenholm and
Former Secretary of the Navy, John Dalton. We've got
support from across the breadth of the Democratic
Party, because I believe this party is united in
wanting to change the leadership in Washington. We're
going to run an election campaign that's about the
future. We're going to hold the president accountable
for what he did in office and failed to do, and we're
going to compare who's got the best vision for
America.

PJ: Let me ask you something you mentioned then
because since this question and answer in which you
and Mr. Moore was involved, you've had a chance to
look at the facts. Do you still feel comfortable with
the fact that someone should be standing up in your
president, in your presence and calling the president
of the United States a deserter?

WC: To be honest with you, I did not look at the facts
Peter. That's Michael Moore's opinion; he's entitled
to say that, I've seen, he's not the only person who's
said that. I've not followed up on those facts, and
frankly it's not relevant to me and why I'm in this
campaign.

CLICK HERE TO CONTINUE TO MICHAELMOORE.COM

Rehnquist questioned on Cheney-Scalia trip

CNN: "When a sitting judge, poised to hear a case
involving a particular litigant, goes on a vacation
with that litigant, reasonable people will question
whether that judge can be a fair and impartial
adjudicator of that man's case or his opponent's
claims," the senators wrote.

Cleanse the US Supreme Court of Cronyism, Show Up for
Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.cnn.com/2004/LAW/01/22/scalia.cheney.trip/index.html

Rehnquist questioned on Cheney-Scalia trip

WASHINGTON (CNN) --Two leading Democratic senators
asked Chief Justice William Rehnquist on Thursday
about the propriety of a hunting trip Supreme Court
Justice Antonin Scalia took with Vice President Dick
Cheney while Cheney has a case pending before the high
court.

In a letter to Rehnquist, Sens. Patrick Leahy of
Vermont and Joe Lieberman of Connecticut asked the
chief justice to tell them what "canons, procedures
and rules" are in place to determine when justices
should recuse themselves from cases.

They also asked Rehnquist what guidance justices have
been given about accepting trips, and whether the full
court has any way to disqualify a member from hearing
a case if a justice refuses to recuse himself.

"When a sitting judge, poised to hear a case involving
a particular litigant, goes on a vacation with that
litigant, reasonable people will question whether that
judge can be a fair and impartial adjudicator of that
man's case or his opponent's claims," the senators
wrote.

"The integrity of our courts and the confidence of the
American people depend on judges acting without fear
or favor."

Leahy is the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary
Committee. Lieberman is the ranking Democrat on the
Senate Governmental Affairs Committee and a 2004
presidential candidate.

In December, the Supreme Court agreed to hear Cheney's
appeal of a lower court ruling ordering him to
disclose details of meetings between his energy policy
task force and contacts in the energy industry.

The vice president's lawyers contend that information
is protected by executive privilege.

The two groups that brought the suit, Judicial Watch
and the Sierra Club, insist the records should be made
public so they can determine whether lobbyists for the
energy industry helped craft the administration's
energy policy.

Earlier this month, Cheney invited Scalia, an old
friend, to accompany him on a hunting trip in
Louisiana.

The two also dined together along with Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld at a restaurant on
Maryland's Eastern Shore in November.

In a letter to the Los Angeles Times, which first
disclosed details of the trip, Scalia defended his
actions, saying they did not threaten his
impartiality.

He said social contacts between high-level
administration officials and judges "have never been
thought improper" in situations where a judge is
considering a case involving actions an official took
in his "official capacity," rather than his "personal
capacity."

Cheney is not personally liable in the task force case
and would not face financial damages if he loses.

The groups involved in the lawsuit question whether
the trip was proper given Cheney's business before the
court -- questions echoed by Lieberman and Leahy in
their letter to Rehnquist.

"While judges should not be isolated from the society
in which they live, they must take special care that
their extra-judicial activities do not create a
conflict with their judicial duties," they wrote.

"Setting aside any evidence of actual bias, the
ethical rules recognize that the perpetuation of an
appearance of partiality is a threat to public
confidence in our federal courts."

Members of Congress who have questions about whether
actions they are about to take might violate ethics
rules can ask for advisory opinions in advance.

The senators asked Rehnquist to tell them whether the
Supreme Court has a similar mechanism, and whether
Scalia used it before accepting the trip with Cheney.

Find this article at:
http://www.cnn.com/2004/LAW/01/22/scalia.cheney.trip/index.html

Top fiscal watchdog delivers stinging attack on deficit

Ann McFeaters, Post-Gazette (Pittsburgh, PA): The U.S.
comptroller general, David Walker, laid out a
blistering attack on the nation's growing deficit
yesterday, saying it is undermining the future of the
nation and putting an all-but-intolerable tax burden
on future generations.

Restore Fiscal Responsibility to the White House, Show
Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/04023/264717.stm

Top fiscal watchdog delivers stinging attack on deficit

Friday, January 23, 2004

By Ann McFeatters, Post-Gazette National Bureau

WASHINGTON --The U.S. comptroller general, David
Walker, laid out a blistering attack on the nation's
growing deficit yesterday, saying it is undermining
the future of the nation and putting an
all-but-intolerable tax burden on future generations.

"The path we're on is imprudent and unsustainable,''
he said.

Walker, a balding, meticulously dressed man whose
background is as a certified public accountant, does
not look like a rabble rouser. But that's what he has
become.

In a session with reporters, Walker, who also heads
the General Accounting Office, the non-partisan
watchdog arm of Congress, said he has become convinced
that neither the Bush administration nor members of
Congress nor the public understand how serious a
problem the nation's public debt and rising deficit
are becoming.

Entitlement programs such as Medicare have grown out
of control, he said, and the base spending of the
government must be overhauled.

Some popular programs are not just growing insolvent,
but are not going to be sustainable, he said. The new
prescription drug coverage for seniors through
Medicare will cost $8 trillion for the next 75 years,
costing every man, woman and child $25,000, he said.
That's in addition to $18 trillion that Medicare will
cost over that period.

He also predicted that the benefits being offered in
the new drug program, which takes full effect in 2006,
will disappoint so many people that Congress will be
pressured to make it more extensive and thus even
costlier.

Although Walker said that making President Bush's tax
cuts permanent, as he demanded in his State of the
Union speech Tuesday, would be more expensive than
anyone has publicly stated, he insisted that his
comments were not intended to be political. He only
sought to sound a "wake-up-call,'' he said. "All major
tax proposals need to be examined carefully,'' he
said.

Asked about Vice President Dick Cheney's remark --
reported by former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill,
whom Cheney had fired -- that deficits do not matter,
Walker said Cheney may believe that deficits don't
matter politically, but that the vice president can't
possibly believe that they don't matter for the
economy.

"Deficits do matter -- especially when they are large,
structural and growing,'' Walker said.

The nation now has a total debt of $7 trillion -- $4
trillion of it held by the public or foreign investors
-- and is expected to have a record deficit this year
of $500 billion.

If foreign investors decide that they don't want to
hold U.S. debt anymore, it could be catastrophic, he
said.

The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press
earlier this month conducted a poll which found that
half of those surveyed said the deficit should be a
top national priority, up from 40 percent a year ago.
Democrats in particular were concerned.

The administration of President Ronald Reagan produced
significant deficits, and they didn't hurt his
political career. But Walker said the mechanics that
eventually reduced the deficits in the 1990s are gone
now. And he said that even when surpluses were
"projected" in the 1990s, there were still long-term
deficits forecast.

Walker said there is "low-hanging fruit" everywhere,
meaning that there are dozens of federal programs that
could be cut or axed. Dozens of programs created in
the 1940s and '50s have never been subject to
re-evaluation or reassessment, he said. And there are
"billions" of dollars in the defense budget listed as
"miscellaneous,'' he said.

When Bush promises to reduce the deficit by half
within five years, Walker said, the president's
projections are "only as good as the assumptions that
underlie them.'' In five years, should Bush be
re-elected in November, he will be leaving office,
Walker said. "It's absolutely critical to consider
where we'll be in 10 years'' with current spending
levels, he said.

On the Democratic side, he said, none of the figures
cited by those seeking the party's presidential
nomination add up. Even those contenders calling for
repeal of Bush's tax cuts have ideas about where they
want to spend the money, he said.

Coroner suggests new Kelly probe

2+2=4.

The Age/Agence France Press: A British coroner is
prepared to open a new inquest into the death of David
Kelly, the weapons expert at the centre of claims the
Blair Government "sexed up" intelligence on Iraq. A
judicial inquiry, headed by senior judge Lord Hutton,
is set to report potentially explosive findings on Dr
Kelly's death next Wednesday but Nicholas Gardiner,
the Oxfordshire Coroner, believes the inquiry was
unable to examine all the evidence, The Times reported
yesterday.
Repudiate the 9/11 Coverup and the Iraq War Lies, Show
Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/01/22/1074732537993.html

Coroner suggests new Kelly probe
By Peter Fray
Europe Correspondent
London
January 23, 2004

A British coroner is prepared to open a new inquest
into the death of David Kelly, the weapons expert at
the centre of claims the Blair Government "sexed up"
intelligence on Iraq. A judicial inquiry, headed by
senior judge Lord Hutton, is set to report potentially
explosive findings on Dr Kelly's death next Wednesday
but Nicholas Gardiner, the Oxfordshire Coroner,
believes the inquiry was unable to examine all the
evidence, The Times reported yesterday.

At least five witnesses refused to release their
statements to the Hutton inquiry and police handed
Lord Hutton only 70 of the 300 witness statements they
took during their inquiries, the newspaper said.

"What their motives might be for not handing over
their statements I have no idea but I think I ought to
see them," Mr Gardiner told The Times.

Mr Gardiner - whose inquest into Dr Kelly's death in
July last year was adjourned under a law that allows a
public inquiry conducted by a judge to fulfil the
function of an inquest - intends to meet senior police
officers this week to demand access to documents
unseen by Lord Hutton, The Times said.

Dr Kelly's body was found near his Oxfordshire home
days after he was exposed as the source of a BBC
report alleging Britain had "sexed up" intelligence on
Iraq and its reported weapons of mass destruction. The
Hutton inquiry into his death is expected to severely
criticise the BBC and the British Government, which
claimed in its September 2002 dossier that Iraq's
weapons of mass destruction could be ready to use
within 45 minutes.

According to the BBC's Panorama program shown on
Wednesday night in Britain, Dr Kelly believed Saddam
Hussein's arsenal posed an immediate threat to Western
interests but could not have been deployed within
minutes, as the British Government claimed.

In an interview with the BBC nine months before he
died, Dr Kelly said that Saddam's chemical weapons
could be "filled and deployed within a matter of days
and weeks".

The Hutton inquiry into Dr Kelly's death is expected
to severely criticise the BBC and the British
Government.

Dr Kelly's previously unseen interview was made in the
month after the controversial dossier's publication.
Its broadcast by the BBC, a week before the Hutton
report, raised questions about why it had not been
shown before to defuse the increasingly heated
stand-off last year between No. 10 Downing Street and
the BBC over Iraq's weapons.

In the interview, Dr Kelly was asked if Saddam's
weapons posed an immediate threat. He replied: "Yes
they are. Even if they're not actually filled and
deployed today, the capability exists to have them
deployed within a matter of days and weeks."

The program also strongly criticised BBC bosses for
"betting the farm" on the "shaky" story by BBC radio
reporter Andrew Gilligan, which was later found to be
flawed.

Mr Gilligan's story cited claims by an unnamed senior
intelligence source, later identified as Dr Kelly,
that No.10 had "sexed up" the Iraq dossier.

- US Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Pat
Roberts said there was some concern that Iraqi weapons
of mass destruction had gone to Syria and vowed the US
would continue searching for such arms in Iraq.

"I think that there is some concern that shipments of
WMD went to Syria," Senator Roberts, a leading member
of President George Bush's Republican Party, said on
Wednesday. He did not elaborate.

- with AFP

CIA warns of civil war in Iraq: In contrast to Bush’s optimism, officers say tensions mounting between Shiites, Kurds...

2+2=4

Knight/Ridder: CIA officers in Iraq are warning that
the country might be on a path to civil war, current
and former U.S. officials said Wednesday, starkly
contradicting the upbeat assessment President Bush
gave in his State of the Union address.
Support Our Troops, Show Up for Democracy in 2004:
Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.thestate.com/mld/thestate/news/nation/7767102.htm

Posted on Thu, Jan. 22, 2004

CIA warns of civil war in Iraq: In contrast to Bush’s optimism, officers say tensions mounting between Shiites, Kurds...
By WARREN P. STROBEL and JONATHAN S. LANDAY
Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON — CIA officers in Iraq are warning that the
country might be on a path to civil war, current and
former U.S. officials said Wednesday, starkly
contradicting the upbeat assessment President Bush
gave in his State of the Union address.

The CIA officers’ bleak assessment was delivered
verbally to Washington this week, said the officials,
who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The warning echoed growing fears that Iraq’s Shiite
majority —which has until now grudgingly accepted the
U.S. occupation — could turn to violence if its
demands for direct elections are spurned.

Meanwhile, Iraq’s Kurdish minority is pressing its
demand for autonomy and shares of oil revenue.

“Both the Shiites and the Kurds think that now’s their
time,” one intelligence officer said. “They think that
if they don’t get what they want now, they’ll probably
never get it. Both of them feel they’ve been betrayed
by the United States before.”

These dire scenarios were discussed at meetings this
week by Bush, his top national security aides and the
chief U.S. administrator in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, a
senior administration official said.

Another senior official said the concerns over a
possible civil war were not confined to the CIA, but
are “broadly held within the government,” including by
regional experts at the State Department and National
Security Council.

Top officials are scrambling to save the U.S. exit
strategy after concluding that Iraq’s most powerful
Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini
al-Sistani, is unlikely to drop his demand for
elections for an interim legislature that would choose
an interim government by June 30.

Bremer would then hand over power to the interim
government.

The CIA hasn’t yet put its officers’ warnings about a
potential Iraqi civil war in writing, but the senior
official said he expected a formal report
“momentarily.”

“In the discussion with Bremer in the last few days,
several very bad possibilities have been outlined,” he
said.

Bush, in his State of the Union address Tuesday,
insisted that an insurgency against the U.S.
occupation — conducted primarily by minority Sunni
Muslims who enjoyed power under Saddam Hussein — “will
fail, and the Iraqi people will live in freedom.”

Bush did not directly address the crisis over the
Shiites’ political demands.

Shiites, who dominate the regions from Baghdad south
to the borders of Kuwait and Iran, make up 60 percent
of Iraq’s 25 million people.

Several U.S. officials acknowledged that al-Sistani is
unlikely to be “rolled,” as one put it, and as a
result Bremer’s plan for restoring Iraqi sovereignty
and ending the U.S. occupation by June 30 is in peril.

The Bremer plan, negotiated with the U.S.-installed
Iraqi Governing Council, calls for caucuses in each of
Iraq’s 18 provinces to choose the interim national
assembly, which would in turn select Iraq’s first
post-Saddam government. The first direct elections
wouldn’t be held until the end of 2005.

Al-Sistani wants the interim assembly chosen through
direct elections.

Ex-CIA Officers Ask Congress to Probe Plame Leak

Two more US soldiers have died in Iraq. For what?
The publicly stated reasons (WMDs, "democracy," etc.) are all lies.
The real reasons (e.g., neo-con wet dreams of "Empire," political cover gone bad, personal vendetta, oil, positioning for the possible collapse of the Saudi kingdom) are all ill-conceived and some perhaps treasonous... It is a national tragedy...And those brave individuals within the US and British governments who have resisted the Bush cabal have risked their lives and their careers...

Support Our Troops, Show Up for Democracy in 2004:
Defeat Bush (again!)

http://news.myway.com/top/article/id/380578|top|01-22-2004::01:29|reuters.html

Ex-CIA Officers Ask Congress to Probe Plame Leak


Jan 22, 1:25 AM (ET)

By Tabassum Zakaria
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A group of former CIA staffers
is pushing for a congressional investigation into the
"shameful" leaking of the name of undercover officer
Valerie Plame, whose husband cast doubt on the Bush
administration's claims about Iraqi weapons of mass
destruction.

In a letter to U.S. House Speaker Dennis Hastert dated
Jan. 20 and obtained by Reuters on Wednesday, 10
former CIA analysts and operatives called the
disclosure of Plame's identity a "shameful event in
American history" that had damaged national security.

"Congress must send an unambiguous message that the
intelligence officers tasked with collecting or
analyzing intelligence must never be turned into
political punching bags," the letter said, saying such
leaks jeopardized the work and safety of intelligence
professionals and their sources.

The Justice Department is conducting an investigation
into who leaked Plame's name to newspaper columnist
Robert Novak last year.

Plame's husband, former diplomat Joseph Wilson, has
accused administration officials of leaking her name
in retaliation for his challenge to one of the reasons
cited by President Bush for going to war against Iraq.

Wilson went to Niger early in 2002 at the CIA's
request to assess a report that Iraq sought to buy
uranium from Niger, but returned saying he had found
no evidence to back the claim. The Niger allegation
was later found to have been based partly on forged
documents.

But it was mentioned in Bush's State of the Union
speech in January 2003 to help build a case for war
against Iraq. The White House has since admitted that
Bush should not have included the charge, which he
attributed to British intelligence, in his speech.

In their letter, the former CIA officers said a
congressional investigation was important not only to
uncover who leaked the name but also to signal that
such behavior would not be tolerated.

U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft has stepped aside
from the Justice Department investigation and Bush has
said the inquiry did not involve him "in any way,
shape or form."

Separately, a group of Democrats led by Rep. Rush Holt
of New Jersey on Wednesday introduced a "resolution of
inquiry" that asks the president, Secretary of State,
Secretary of Defense and Attorney General to give the
House of Representatives all documents in their
possession relating to the disclosure of Plame's
identity.

The documents sought included telephone and electronic
mail records, logs and calendars, personnel records,
and records of internal discussions for the period May
6 through July 31 last year, a statement from Holt,
who is a member of the House Intelligence Committee,
said.

"Six months after a syndicated columnist disclosed the
name of an undercover CIA operative, the White House
and the Department of Justice have yet to find and
hold accountable the person or persons who revealed
her identity," Holt said.

"The Department of Justice investigation has the full
support of Congress and should be vigorously pursued,
but it is not enough," he said.

Infiltration of files seen as extensive, Senate panel's GOP staff pried on Democrats

Does this story shed light on the mysterious timidity
of many Senate Democrats? As reported in the LNS, Sen.
Paul Wellstone told a gathering of veterans in
Minnesota, prior to his death, that VICE _resident
Cheney had threatened "dire consequences" for both the
state of Minnesota and Wellstone himself -- if he voted against the Iraq war resolution, which he did...There is, also, of course, the lingering impact of the
anthrax-laden letters addressed to then Senate Majority leader Tom Duck-It (D-SD) and Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), then chairman of the Judiciary
Committee, as well as VICE _resident Cheney's personal "warning" to Duck-It not to dig to deep into 9/11. But this recent revelation, of at least a year of GOP espionage (i.e. theft of confidential, internal memoes, etc.) could explain some of the capitulation...fear, blackmail...

Rebuke the Rabid Right and Return the _resident to
Waco, Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush
(again!)

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2004/01/22/infiltration_of_files_seen_as_extensive?mode=PF
Infiltration of files seen as extensive, Senate panel's GOP staff pried on Democrats
By Charlie Savage, Globe Staff, 1/22/2004

WASHINGTON -- Republican staff members of the US
Senate Judiciary Commitee infiltrated opposition
computer files for a year, monitoring secret strategy
memos and periodically passing on copies to the media,
Senate officials told The Globe.

>From the spring of 2002 until at least April 2003,
members of the GOP committee staff exploited a
computer glitch that allowed them to access restricted
Democratic communications without a password. Trolling
through hundreds of memos, they were able to read
talking points and accounts of private meetings
discussing which judicial nominees Democrats would
fight -- and with what tactics.

The office of Senate Sergeant-at-Arms William Pickle
has already launched an investigation into how
excerpts from 15 Democratic memos showed up in the
pages of the conservative-leaning newspapers and were
posted to a website last November.

With the help of forensic computer experts from
General Dynamics and the US Secret Service, his office
has interviewed about 120 people to date and seized
more than half a dozen computers -- including four
Judiciary servers, one server from the office of
Senate majority leader Bill Frist of Tennessee, and
several desktop hard drives.

But the scope of both the intrusions and the likely
disclosures is now known to have been far more
extensive than the November incident, staffers and
others familiar with the investigation say.

The revelation comes as the battle of judicial
nominees is reaching a new level of intensity. Last
week, President Bush used his recess power to appoint
Judge Charles Pickering to the Fifth Circuit Court of
Appeals, bypassing a Democratic filibuster that
blocked a vote on his nomination for a year because of
concerns over his civil rights record.

Democrats now claim their private memos formed the
basis for a February 2003 column by conservative
pundit Robert Novak that revealed plans pushed by
Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts,
to filibuster certain judicial nominees. Novak is also
at the center of an investigation into who leaked the
identity of a CIA agent whose husband contradicted a
Bush administration claim about Iraqi nuclear
programs.

Citing "internal Senate sources," Novak's column
described closed-door Democratic meetings about how to
handle nominees.

Its details and direct quotes from Democrats --
characterizing former nominee Miguel Estrada as a
"stealth right-wing zealot" and describing the GOP
agenda as an "assembly line" for right-wing nominees
-- are contained in talking points and meeting
accounts from the Democratic files now known to have
been compromised.

Novak declined to confirm or deny whether his column
was based on these files.

"They're welcome to think anything they want," he
said. "As has been demonstrated, I don't reveal my
sources."

As the extent to which Democratic communications were
monitored came into sharper focus, Republicans
yesterday offered a new defense. They said that in the
summer of 2002, their computer technician informed his
Democratic counterpart of the glitch, but Democrats
did nothing to fix the problem.

Other staffers, however, denied that the Democrats
were told anything about it before November 2003.

The emerging scope of the GOP surveillance of
confidential Democratic files represents a major
escalation in partisan warfare over judicial
appointments. The bitter fight traces back to 1987,
when Democrats torpedoed Robert Bork's nomination to
the Supreme Court. In the 1990s, Republicans blocked
many of President Clinton's nominees. Since President
Bush took office, those roles have been reversed.

Against that backdrop, both sides have something to
gain and lose from the investigation into the computer
files. For Democrats, the scandal highlights GOP dirty
tricks that could result in ethics complaints to the
Senate and the Washington Bar -- or even criminal
charges under computer intrusion laws.

"They had an obligation to tell each of the people
whose files they were intruding upon -- assuming it
was an accident -- that that was going on so those
people could protect themselves," said one Senate
staffer. "To keep on getting these files is just
beyond the pale."

But for Republicans, the scandal also keeps attention
on the memo contents, which demonstrate the influence
of liberal interest groups in choosing which nominees
Democratic senators would filibuster. Other
revelations from the memos include Democrats'
race-based characterization of Estrada as "especially
dangerous, because . . . he is Latino," which they
feared would make him difficult to block from a later
promotion to the Supreme Court.

And, at the request of the NAACP, the Democrats
delayed any hearings for the Sixth Circuit Court of
Appeals until after it heard a landmark affirmative
action case -- though a memo noted that staffers "are
a little concerned about the propriety of scheduling
hearings based on the resolution of a particular
case."

After the contents of those memos were made public in
The Wall Street Journal editorial pages and The
Washington Times, Judiciary Chairman Orrin Hatch,
Republican of Utah, made a preliminary inquiry and
described himself as "mortified that this improper,
unethical and simply unacceptable breach of
confidential files may have occurred on my watch."

Hatch also confirmed that "at least one current member
of the Judiciary Committee staff had improperly
accessed at least some of the documents referenced in
media reports." He did not name the staffer, who he
said was being placed on leave and who sources said
has since resigned, although he had apparently already
announced plans to return to school later this year.

Officials familiar with the investigation identified
that person as a legislative staff assistant whose
name was removed from a list of Judiciary Committee
staff in the most recent update of a Capitol Hill
directory. The staff member's home number has been
disconnected and he could not be reached for comment.

Hatch also said that a "former member of the Judiciary
staff may have been involved." Many news reports have
subsequently identified that person as Manuel Miranda,
who formerly worked in the Judiciary Committee office
and now is the chief judicial nominee adviser in the
Senate majority leader's office. His computer hard
drive name was stamped on an e-mail from the National
Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League that
was posted along with the Democratic Senate staff
communications.

Reached at home, Miranda said he is on paternity
leave; Frist's office said he is on leave "pending the
results of the investigation" -- he denied that any of
the handwritten comments on the memos were by his hand
and said he did not distribute the memos to the media.
He also argued that the only wrongdoing was on the
part of the Democrats -- both for the content of their
memos, and for their negligence in placing them where
they could be seen.

"There appears to have been no hacking, no stealing,
and no violation of any Senate rule," Miranda said.
"Stealing assumes a property right and there is no
property right to a government document. . . . These
documents are not covered under the Senate disclosure
rule because they are not official business and, to
the extent they were disclosed, they were disclosed
inadvertently by negligent [Democratic] staff."

Whether the memos are ultimately deemed to be official
business will be a central issue in any criminal case
that could result. Unauthorized access of such
material could be punishable by up to a year in prison
-- or, at the least, sanction under a Senate
non-disclosure rule.

The computer glitch dates to 2001, when Democrats took
control of the Senate after the defection from the GOP
of Senator Jim Jeffords, Independent of Vermont.

A technician hired by the new judiciary chairman,
Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, apparently made a
mistake that allowed anyone to access newly created
accounts on a Judiciary Committee server shared by
both parties -- even though the accounts were supposed
to restrict access only to those with the right
password.

© Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.

A new $22 million system to allow soldiers and other Americans overseas to vote via the Internet is inherently insecure and should be abandoned, according to members of a panel of computer security experts asked by the government to review the program.

Does you remember how important the absentee ballots
from US military overseas where during the debacle of
Fraudida 2000? Even the NYTwits had to report that
hundreds of these votes were counted illegally, i.e.
after the cut-off date, etc., and therefore should
have been discarded. Do you remember the political
firestorm about it? Sen. Joe Lieberman
("D"-Sanctimonicutt), broke with Al Gore, and demanded
that these ballots be counted, and not challenged in
court. Well, as reported in the LNS, "all the
_resident's men" would probably not be so eager to
have those absentee ballots from US military counted
in 2004, because there is widespread discontent and
anger in the US military concerning the Bush cabal's
foolish military adventure in Iraq...So here's their
solution...

Thwart the Theft of a Second Presidential Election, Show Up
for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/21/technology/23CND-INTE.html

January 21, 2004
Report Says Internet Voting System Is Too Insecure to Use
By JOHN SCHWARTZ

A new $22 million system to allow soldiers and other Americans overseas to vote via the Internet is inherently insecure and should be abandoned, according to members of a panel of computer security experts asked by the government to review the program.

The system, Secure Electronic Registration and Voting
Experiment, or SERVE, was developed with financing
from the Department of Defense and will first be used
in this year's primaries and general election.

The authors of the new report noted that computer
security experts had already voiced increasingly
strong warnings about the reliability of electronic
voting systems, but they said the new voting program,
which allows people overseas to vote from their
personal computers over the Internet, raised the ante
on such systems' risks.

The system, they wrote, "has numerous other
fundamental security problems that leave it vulnerable
to a variety of well-known cyber attacks, any one of
which could be catastrophic." Any system for voting
over the Internet with common personal computers, they
noted, would suffer from the same risks.

The trojans, viruses and other attacks that complicate
modern life and allow such crimes as online snooping
and identity theft could enable hackers to disrupt or
even alter the course of elections, the report
concluded. Such attacks "could have a devastating
effect on public confidence in elections," the
report's authors wrote, and so "the best course to
take is not to field the SERVE system at all."

A spokesman for the Department of Defense said the
critique overstated the importance of the security
risks in online voting. "The Department of Defense
stands by the SERVE program," the spokesman, Glenn
Flood, said. "We feel it's right on, at this point,
and we're going to use it."

An official of Accenture, the technology services
company that is the main contractor on the project,
said the researchers drew unwarranted conclusions
about future plans for the voting project. "We are
doing a small, controlled experiment," said Meg
McLauglin, president of Accenture eDemocracy Services.

The Federal Voting Assistance Program, part of the
Department of Defense, plans to officially introduce
the program in the next few weeks. Seven states have
signed up so far to participate: Arkansas, Florida,
Hawaii, North Carolina, South Carolina, Utah and
Washington. As many as 100,000 people are expected to
use the system this year, and the total eligible
population would about one million.

A move to that larger population of voters is far from
certain, Ms. McLauglin said, and the final system
could be very different from the one being used this
year. "It will be up to Congress and the states to
determine if this gets expanded, and how," she said.`

"Without doing these experiments, we won't learn more
and we won't learn how to help these folks vote in the
future," she said.

Trying to vote overseas can be a frustrating ordeal.
And Internet voting makes intuitive sense to Americans
who have grown accustomed to buying books, banking and
even finding mates online.

But the authors of the report adamantly state that
what works for electronic commerce doesn't work for
electronic democracy: "E-commerce grade security is
not good enough for elections," they wrote. The dual
requirements of authentication and anonymity make
voting very different from most online purchases, they
wrote, and failures and fraud are covered by Internet
merchants and credit card companies. "How do we
recover if an election is compromised?" they wrote.

The report states, "We recognize that no security
system is perfect, and it would be irresponsible and
naïve to demand perfection; but we must not allow
unacceptable risks of election fraud to taint our
national elections."

They said any new system "should be as secure as
current absentee voting systems and should not
introduce any new or expanded vulnerabilities into the
election beyond those already present."

One of the authors of the report, David Wagner, an
assistant professor in the Computer Science Division
at the University of California at Berkeley, said,
"The bottom line is we feel the solution can't be a
system that introduces greater risks just to gain
convenience."

Although some of the possible attacks may sound
far-fetched or arcane, the security experts said that
each of them had already been seen in some form out on
the Internet.

"We're not making up any theoretical concepts," said
Aviel D. Rubin, an author of the report and the
technical director of the Information Security
Institute at Johns Hopkins University. "These are all
things that occur in the wild that we see all the
time."

Computers on the Internet have become ever more
vulnerable to malicious software that takes over the
machines' functions to monitor the users' activities,
scan them for private information or press them into
service to launch attacks on other computers, to send
spam or advertise Internet pornography sites online.
"And we're going to use these as voting booths?" Mr.
Rubin asked. "It just doesn't make any sense."

A major American election would be an irresistible
target for hackers, and the ability of computers to
automate tasks means that many attacks could be
carried out on a large scale, the report said.

The authors said the Federal Voting Assistance
Program, which runs SERVE, and Accenture, the main
contractor, should not be faulted for their work,
which they found innovative and conscientious. Secure
Internet voting, the panel concluded, is an
"essentially impossible task."

In fact, the panel said, "there really is no good way
to build such a voting system without a radical change
in overall architecture of the Internet and the PC, or
some unforeseen security breakthrough. The SERVE
project is thus too far ahead of its time, and should
wait until there is a much improved security
infrastructure to build upon."

The risks inherent in SERVE are likely to cripple any
system for Internet-based voting, said Barbara Simons,
a technology consultant and coauthor of the report.
"It's not just a SERVE thing," she said.

Such concerns are not new. They have formed the basis
of several recent studies of Internet voting. A report
in 2001 by the Internet Policy Institute, financed by
the National Science Foundation, concluded that
"remote Internet voting systems pose significant risk
to the integrity of the voting process and should not
be fielded for use in public elections until
substantial technical and social science issues are
addressed."

David Jefferson, an author of the new report and a
computer scientist at Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory in Northern California, also worked on a
2000 report for the California secretary of state that
reached similar conclusions. "Nothing fundamental has
changed," he said, since that report was written.

"Nothing we've seen makes us think that this can be
made secure," Mr. Jefferson said.

In attempting to play down the critique of the system,
Mr. Flood of the Defense Department called it a
"minority report," since it involved only 4 of the 10
outside experts asked to review the system. But Mr.
Rubin, the report co-author, noted that the four
authors were the only members of the group who
attended both of the three-day briefings about the
system.

There is no majority report, since the other six
experts have not taken a public stance on the project.

Ms. McLauglin of Accenture said that the company had
contacted the other six members of the outside
advisory group and that five of the six said they
would not recommend shutting down the program.

One of the other outside reviewers, Ted Selker, a
professor at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, disagreed with the report, saying it
reflected the professional paranoia of security
researchers. "That's their job," he said.

Mr. Selker, an expert in the ways people use
technology, said security is a less pressing concern
than mistakes in registration databases, poor ballot
design and inadequate polling place procedures. "Every
single election machine I've seen — including the
lever machine, including punch card machines,
including paper ballots — has vulnerabilities," he
said.

A security expert and critic of technologically
advanced voting systems who had seen an early draft of
the study applauded the group's work. "What I saw
convinced me that no one should ever vote on that
system," said David Dill, a professor of computer
science at Stanford University who has become active
in voting technology issues. "I understand the
problems that people overseas have voting, especially
if they are in the military, and I believe we have to
make it a lot easier for them," he said. "But SERVE is
the wrong solution."

Resistance to Patriot Act Gaining Ground

You are not alone.

Save the U.S. Constitution, Show Up for Democracy:
Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0120-02.htm

Published on Tuesday, January 20, 2004 by the Boston
Globe
Resistance to Patriot Act Gaining Ground
Foes organizing in communities

by Thanassis Cambanis

More than two centuries ago, the patriots of Brewster
shut down the Colonial courts on Cape Cod in one of
the first acts of resistance against the tyrannical
rule of King George III.

Also See:
Bill of Rights Defense Committee


Now, deliberately evoking its Revolutionary history,
Brewster Town Meeting has formally condemned the
antiterrorist USA Patriot Act, united against the laws
of a different leader named George.

While the act is largely symbolic -- federal law
enforcement agencies, not local governments, enforce
the Patriot Act's new search, seizure, and detention
provisions -- the grass-roots opposition has forged an
unlikely alliance of people angry at Washington's
domestic handling of the war on terror. In Brewster,
anger at the Patriot Act has drawn together
libertarians, an antitax group, and a Unitarian
congregation, as well as a more traditional coalition
of civil libertarians and antiwar activists.

A similar story has already played out in 16
Massachusetts communities, and 16 more, including
Salem, Waltham, Watertown, Gloucester, Beverly, and
Bedford are preparing measures against the Patriot Act
this spring.

Opponents of the antiterrorism measure say the nascent
bipartisan groundswell in communities across the
nation signals a growing dissatisfaction with the
expansion of federal powers -- and will reshape the
national debate if it continues to accelerate with
support from disparate groups, from gun owners to
librarians to fiscal conservatives.

The burgeoning nationwide movement has prompted three
state governments, and 236 communities in 37 states,
to pass resolutions against the Patriot Act. If the
backlash continues to grow, opponents of the Patriot
Act believe, their momentum will force Congress and
the White House to address some of the law's unpopular
elements.

"If anyone takes time to read the Patriot Act, there's
no question that our First Amendment rights are being
eroded," said James Geisler, treasurer of the Brewster
Taxpayers Association, a 52-year-old group whose
mission is to curtail government spending.

His family has been Republican "for a hundred years,"
Geisler said. But it was loyalty to the Constitution,
not party politics, that drove the Taxpayers
Association's board of directors to support the
ultimately popular Brewster resolution.

Across the Commonwealth, Republicans, gun lobbyists,
and libertarians have taken up the call against the
Patriot Act. So have a cadre of previously apolitical
people such as Jake Beal, 25, a self-described
computer nerd who is now leading the drive for a
resolution against the Patriot Act in Somerville.

"It's the first political issue I've taken an active
stand in," said Beal, an MIT graduate student who
characterizes himself as a conservative Democrat.

He was spurred to action after hearing the sheriff in
his hometown of Portland, Maine, describe the federal
government's new powers at a forum one year ago. The
sheriff said immigration officials took a detainee
suspected of terrorist activity to an undisclosed
location and never told the detainee's family -- or
local law enforcement officials -- where the suspect
was taken or what charges he faced.

The Somerville group has collected 1,200 petition
signatures and said the City Council is likely to
consider the measure next month.

"These local efforts will build up the pressure
nationally," Beal said. "Wouldn't you like to live in
a community where you know that nobody is going to get
`disappeared' by the federal government?"

Local resolutions aren't the only vehicle of
grass-roots fervor.

Dozens of Commonwealth libraries have purged lending
records -- or stopped keeping them -- to protect
patrons from federal agents newly empowered to monitor
their reading habits.

"What people read is their own business, and as
professional librarians we don't feel it's appropriate
to share that information," said Ann Montgomery Smith,
librarian at the University of Massachusetts at
Dartmouth and president of the Massachusetts
Conference of Chief Librarians of Public Higher
Educational Institutions.

At her university library, Smith changed the computer
system so that lending records are erased as soon as a
book is returned.

The US Department of Justice says that such alarm over
the Patriot Act is unfounded. Attorney General John
Ashcroft, in Boston in September on a nationwide
speaking tour to rally support for the legislation,
said critics misrepresent the law.

Federal law enforcement officials in Massachusetts
have said that they rarely, if ever, use the most
controversial provisions of the act -- such as the
measure allowing federal agents to secretly subpoena
library records, or "sneak-and-peek" warrants that
allow investigators to conduct a secret search.

Those assertions have done little to allay the
increasing anxiety over the Patriot Act, which in New
England has drawn in equal measures on strains of
Yankee independence, social libertarianism, and
liberal progressivism.

In New Hampshire last week, the Legislature began
debating a bill to nullify the Patriot Act, sponsored
by four Republican representatives who see the
legislation as part of a larger trend of federal law
overwhelming the independence of states.

The Massachusetts Civil Liberties Union is quietly
paving the way for a statewide resolution, said Nancy
Murray, who follows the issue for the union. Murray
said that as more and more municipalities pass
resolutions, state lawmakers will be compelled to
follow suit. Alice Weiss, 62, began the petition drive
that led to Brewster's resolution. She found that
people she considered politically conservative quickly
made it a common cause once they read the Patriot Act.
It was after a session in the library studying the
text of the bill with Weiss that the conservative
Taxpayers Union secretary decided to back the
anti-Patriot Act campaign.

"This is not a liberal town," Weiss said. "I was
amazed at the support we got."

© Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company

###

Pickering goes in the back door

Yes, I know the NYTwits wrote a scathing editorial
about the Pickering installation. They even wrote one
about the _resident's SOTU last night, which BTW was
chilling in its utter disconnect with reality. But,
frankly, this whole awful interlude in US history
could have turned out quite differently IF the NYTwits
had demonstrated courage (or even a grasp of simple
arithmetic) in the aftermath of Fraudida 2000, so to
Dis wit dem...Here is an editorial from a much
worthier example of a free press...Oh, and hey, where
are you today, Mr. Ralph "There's no difference
between Bush and Gore" Nada? Even one judicial appointment like this
contemptible man would have been reason enough to tell
those in battleground states where the race was close
to vote for Gore. But, no, Nada was campaigning in
Fraudida in the final days of the race, and even now,
he refuses to recant and even toys with another run...

Rebuke the Rabid Right and Return the _resident to
Waco, Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush
(again!)

http://www.berkshireeagle.com/Stories/0,1413,101%7E6267%7E1902548,00.html
Article Published: Tuesday, January 20, 2004 - 2:15:37
AM EST

Pickering goes in the back door
With the executive and legislative branches of
government dominated by the radical right, the assault
upon the judicial branch, the only check against the
abuses of the other two, has been kicked up another
notch. President Bush's decision Friday to install
Charles W. Pickering Sr. to the U.S. Court of Appeals
for the Fifth Circuit as a recess appointment puts an
unqualified man on the court and, even more
significantly, weakens the balance of powers that is
the foundation of our system of government.

Judge Pickering is an old-fashioned Mississippi
segregationist who is exactly the kind of "judicial
activist" the Republican Party ordinarily deplores. He
has no business on the bench, let alone the federal
bench, and Senate Democrats have successfully
filibustered his appointment for two years. For
President Bush to slide him in through the back door
shortly after paying token tribute to Martin Luther
King, a man who deplored everything the likes of Judge
Pickering stands for, reveals how low an opinion the
White House has of the minority community.

Other presidents have appointed judges during a
congressional recess, most recently President Clinton,
who appointed Roger Gregory to the U.S. Court of
Appeals for the Fourth Circuit through that process.
The difference between that appointment and the
Pickering appointment is that Judge Gregory was
qualified and his appointment was held up by Senate
Republicans seeking to spite President Clinton. Judge
Gregory's appointment to the appeals court by
essentially the same Republican Congress after his
name was quietly resubmitted by President Bush proves
that it was nothing but party politics that had kept
him off the federal bench.

In another example of unconscionable judicial abuse,
it was revealed over the weekend that Supreme Court
Justice Antonin Scalia spent part of last week duck
hunting with his old pal Dick Cheney, just three weeks
after the Supreme Court had agreed to take up the vice
president's appeal of lawsuits demanding he reveal the
members of the White House's energy task force. Judges
at every level of the system know enough not to pal
around with people they will see before them in court,
and federal law requires a judge to "disqualify
himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality
might be questioned."

Don't look for Justice Scalia to disqualify himself,
however, and don't expect the Supreme Court to require
Mr. Cheney to identify the oil industry barons who
help make government energy policy. Do expect Mr.
Pickering to be permanently appointed to the federal
bench a year from now should the Republicans gain a
veto-proof majority in the Senate. And do expect the
assault on the independence of the judiciary to
continue if the GOP maintains its grip on both
branches of government in November.

Martin Luther King Jr.'s 75th birthday should have been an occasion for serious reflection on his life, his teachings, his legacy and his service. Instead, in Atlanta, we were forced to deal with an insult: an uninvited, insincere visit by President Bush

The _resident is starting to act-out in very strange
ways. The day after he forced his way into Ebenezer
Baptist Church, he installed Charles Pickering as a
Federal judge. Yes, the LNS has already made note of
this appalling (and certainly quite intentional
one-two insult), but here is an powerful testimony
that deserves to be archived, and Timothy McDonal's
name is going to be scrawled on the John O'Neill Wall
of Heroes...I take one exception to what McDonald's
has written though, the _resident is not attempting to
"woo black voters," he is attempting to intimidate and
confuse the progressive forces, while shoring up his
base on the rabid Right.

Rebuke the Rabid Right and Return to the _resident to
Waco, Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush
(again!)

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0119-09.htm

Published on Monday, January 19, 2004 by the Los
Angeles Times
He Came Not to Praise King But ...
by Timothy McDonald

Martin Luther King Jr.'s 75th birthday should have been an occasion for serious reflection on his life, his teachings, his legacy and his service. Instead, in Atlanta, we were forced to deal with an insult: an uninvited, insincere visit by President Bush to lay a wreath at King's tomb.

The King Center quickly made it clear that it had not
extended the invitation, and Bush's visit caused great
consternation among King anniversary planners, who
questioned the timing, motive and intent of this
self-initiated presidential visit.

Many of us remembered that it was on King's birthday
last year that this same president, on national
television, launched his attack against affirmative
action by directing his administration to join the
legal case against the University of Michigan's
admissions policy. To follow that action by laying a
wreath on King's tomb this year represented the height
of hypocrisy for many of us in the civil rights
community. It was obviously nothing more than a photo
opportunity designed to woo black voters to the
Republican Party. Coming in an election year, it was a
blatant attempt to use King's image for political
gain.

And here's the most offensive part: After a brief
"official business" visit to the grave site — read:
taxpayers foot the bill — Bush rushed off to a
$2,000-a-plate fundraiser that same evening, picking
up a cool $1.3 million in Atlanta for his reelection
campaign.

There's a reason African American voters
overwhelmingly turn out for Democrats. King's
philosophies could not be more different from Bush's.
King, a man of peace, was one of the first to publicly
oppose the Vietnam War. Bush, by contrast, has
unilaterally and preemptively declared war upon
another country, causing hundreds of American soldiers
to lose their lives and costing the American taxpayer
hundreds of billions of dollars. You have to ask how
that is consistent with the life and teachings of
King.

Three million jobs have been lost since 2001, and 9
million Americans are out of work. How would King feel
about this? The poverty gap has widened under this
president. Tax cuts have benefited the wealthiest
Americans at the expense of the poorest, and certainly
King — who spent his final years decrying poverty in
the United States — would not support such policies.

King dedicated his life to racial harmony; Bush's
policies have caused an even greater divide between
the races.

It is time for protest, and about 1,000 people did so
at King's tomb Thursday. The greatest expression of
our commitment to King's dream is to redress our
government when we feel it to be wrong. This is what
makes our nation strong.

If President Bush was serious about honoring King, his
rhetoric would be reflected in his policies. King
would be honored by an America that not only talks
about "no child left behind" but works for smaller
classes, provides adequate funding for education,
higher salaries for teachers and a public education
system that is not treated like an unwanted stepchild.

King would be thrilled by a health-care system that
took care of all of its citizens and a livable wage
for all working Americans. King would work for
campaign finance reform that does not allow the rich
to buy elections, and he would strive to ensure that
every vote is counted. King would not risk the lives
of soldiers and use war as a pretext to secure oil.

On this 75th birthday anniversary, the veil of
deception and arrogance was uncovered, and hope was
reborn through protest, dissent and redress of our
government.

The dream lives on.

Rev. Timothy McDonald, pastor of the First Iconium
Baptist Church in Atlanta, is president of the African
American Ministers in Action program of People for the
American Way.

Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

###

Katharine Gun has a much better grasp of the true

There is little doubt that the_resident and the VICE
_resident sleep well, as souless as they have acted
for all these years, but how can
the-shell-of-a-man-formerly-known-as-Tony-Blair sleep
at night?

Repudiate the 9/11 coverup and the Iraq War Lies, Show
Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

Published on Monday, January 19, 2004 by the New York
Times
A Single Conscience v. the State
by Bob Herbert

Katharine Gun has a much better grasp of the true
spirit of democracy than Tony Blair. So, naturally,
it's Katharine Gun who's being punished.

Ms. Gun, 29, was working at Britain's top-secret
Government Communications Headquarters last year when
she learned of an American plan to spy on at least a
half-dozen U.N. delegations as part of the U.S. effort
to win Security Council support for an invasion of
Iraq.

The plans, which included e-mail surveillance and taps
on home and office telephones, was outlined in a
highly classified National Security Agency memo. The
agency, which was seeking British assistance in the
project, was interested in "the whole gamut of
information that could give U.S. policymakers an edge
in obtaining results favorable to U.S. goals."

Countries specifically targeted were Angola, Cameroon,
Chile, Bulgaria, Guinea and Pakistan. The primary goal
was a Security Council resolution that would give the
U.S. and Britain the go-ahead for the war.

Ms. Gun felt passionately that an invasion of Iraq was
wrong — morally wrong and illegal. In a move that
deeply embarrassed the American and British
governments, the memo was leaked to The London
Observer.

Which landed Ms. Gun in huge trouble. She has not
denied that she was involved in the leak.

There is no equivalent in Britain to America's First
Amendment protections. Individuals like Ms. Gun are at
the mercy of the Official Secrets Act, which can
result in severe — in some cases, draconian —
penalties for the unauthorized disclosure of
information by intelligence or security agency
employees.

Ms. Gun was fired from her job as a translator and
arrested for violating the act. If convicted, she will
face up to two years in prison.

We are not talking about a big-time criminal here. We
are not talking about someone who would undermine the
democratic principles that George W. Bush and Tony
Blair babble about so incessantly, and
self-righteously, even as they are trampling on them.
Ms. Gun is someone who believes deeply in those
principles and was willing to take a courageous step
in support of her beliefs.

She hoped that her actions would help save lives. She
thought at the time that if the Security Council did
not vote in favor of an invasion, the United States
and Britain might not launch the war. In a statement
last November she said she felt that leaking the memo
was "necessary to prevent an illegal war in which
thousands of Iraqi civilians and British soldiers
would be killed or maimed."

"I have only ever followed my conscience," she said.

In 1971, in what the historian William Manchester
described as "perhaps the most extraordinary leak of
classified documents in the history of governments,"
Daniel Ellsberg turned over to The New York Times a
huge study of U.S. involvement in Vietnam that came to
be known as the Pentagon Papers. The Nixon
administration tried to destroy Mr. Ellsberg. He was
viciously harassed. His psychiatrist's office was
burglarized. And he was charged with treason, theft
and conspiracy.

The prosecution was not successful. The charges were
thrown out due to government misconduct. In an
interview last week, Mr. Ellsberg, who was with the
Defense Department and the Rand Corporation in the
1960's and 70's, told me he wished he had blown the
whistle much earlier on the deceptions and lies and
other forms of official misconduct related to Vietnam.

He is lending his name to a campaign in support of Ms.
Gun. She took a principled stand, he said, early
enough to have a chance at altering events.

"What I've been saying since a year ago last October,"
said Mr. Ellsberg, "was that I hoped that people who
knew that we were being lied into a wrongful war would
do what I wish I had done in 1964 or 1965. And that
was to go to Congress and the press with documents.
Current documents. Don't do what I did. Don't wait
years until the bombs are falling and then put out
history."

Ms. Gun is being allowed by British courts to plead an
unusual "defense of necessity." She has said that her
disclosures were justified because they revealed
"serious wrongdoing on the part of the U.S.
government," and because she was sincerely trying to
prevent the "wide-scale death and casualties" that
would result from a war that was "illegal."

She's due in court today for a pretrial hearing.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

###

George W Bush and the Real State of the Union

Some context that the propapunditgandists of the "US
mainstream news media" will not provide for you in the
post-mortem for tonight's SOTU...

Restore the Timeline, Show Up for Democracy in 2004:
Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0120-01.htm

Published on Tuesday, January 20, 2004 by the
lndependent/UK
George W Bush and the Real State of the Union
Today the President gives his annual address. As the
election battle begins, how does his first term add
up?

232: Number of American combat deaths in Iraq between
May 2003 and January 2004

501: Number of American servicemen to die in Iraq from
the beginning of the war - so far

0: Number of American combat deaths in Germany after
the Nazi surrender to the Allies in May 1945

0: Number of coffins of dead soldiers returning home
from Iraq that the Bush administration has allowed to
be photographed

0: Number of funerals or memorials that President Bush
has attended for soldiers killed in Iraq

100: Number of fund-raisers attended by Bush or
Vice-President Dick Cheney in 2003

13: Number of meetings between Bush and Tony Blair
since he became President

10 million: Estimated number of people worldwide who
took to the streets in opposition to the invasion of
Iraq, setting an all-time record for simultaneous
protest

2: Number of nations that Bush has attacked and taken
over since coming into the White House

9.2: Average number of American soldiers wounded in
Iraq each day since the invasion in March last year

1.6: Average number of American soldiers killed in
Iraq per day since hostilities began

16,000: Approximate number of Iraqis killed since the
start of war

10,000: Approximate number of Iraqi civilians killed
since the beginning of the conflict

$100 billion: Estimated cost of the war in Iraq to
American citizens by the end of 2003

$13 billion: Amount other countries have committed
towards rebuilding Iraq (much of it in loans) as of 24
October

36%: Increase in the number of desertions from the US
army since 1999

92%: Percentage of Iraq's urban areas that had access
to drinkable water a year ago

60%: Percentage of Iraq's urban areas that have access
to drinkable water today

32%: Percentage of the bombs dropped on Iraq this year
that were not precision-guided

1983: The year in which Donald Rumsfeld gave Saddam
Hussein a pair of golden spurs

45%: Percentage of Americans who believed in early
March 2003 that Saddam Hussein was involved in the 11
September attacks on the US

$127 billion: Amount of US budget surplus in the year
that Bush became President in 2001

$374 billion: Amount of US budget deficit in the
fiscal year for 2003

1st: This year's deficit is on course to be the
biggest in United States history

$1.58 billion: Average amount by which the US national
debt increases each day

$23,920: Amount of each US citizen's share of the
national debt as of 19 January 2004

1st: The record for the most bankruptcies filed in a
single year (1.57 million) was set in 2002

10: Number of solo press conferences that Bush has
held since beginning his term. His father had managed
61 at this point in his administration, and Bill
Clinton 33

1st: Rank of the US worldwide in terms of greenhouse
gas emissions per capita

$113 million: Total sum raised by the Bush-Cheney 2000
campaign, setting a record in American electoral
history

$130 million: Amount raised for Bush's re-election
campaign so far

$200m: Amount that the Bush-Cheney campaign is
expected to raise in 2004

$40m: Amount that Howard Dean, the top fund-raiser
among the nine Democratic presidential hopefuls,
amassed in 2003

28: Number of days holiday that Bush took last August,
the second longest holiday of any president in US
history (Record holder: Richard Nixon)

13: Number of vacation days the average American
worker receives each year

3: Number of children convicted of capital offences
executed in the US in 2002. America is only country
openly to acknowledge executing children

1st: As Governor of Texas, George Bush executed more
prisoners (152) than any governor in modern US history

2.4 million: Number of Americans who have lost their
jobs during the three years of the Bush administration

221,000: Number of jobs per month created since Bush's
tax cuts took effect. He promised the measure would
add 306,000

1,000: Number of new jobs created in the entire
country in December. Analysts had expected a gain of
130,000

1st: This administration is on its way to becoming the
first since 1929 (Herbert Hoover) to preside over an
overall loss of jobs during its complete term in
office

9 million: Number of US workers unemployed in
September 2003

80%: Percentage of the Iraqi workforce now unemployed

55%: Percentage of the Iraqi workforce unemployed
before the war

43.6 million: Number of Americans without health
insurance in 2002

130: Number of countries (out of total of 191
recognized by the United Nations) with an American
military presence

40%: Percentage of the world's military spending for
which the US is responsible

$10.9 million: Average wealth of the members of Bush's
original 16-person cabinet

88%: Percentage of American citizens who will save
less than $100 on their 2006 federal taxes as a result
of 2003 cut in capital gains and dividends taxes

$42,000: Average savings members of Bush's cabinet are
expected to enjoy this year as a result in the cuts in
capital gains and dividends taxes

$42,228: Median household income in the US in 2001

$116,000: Amount Vice-President Cheney is expected to
save each year in taxes

44%: Percentage of Americans who believe the
President's economic growth plan will mostly benefit
the wealthy

700: Number of people from around the world the US has
incarcerated in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba

1st: George W Bush became the first American president
to ignore the Geneva Conventions by refusing to allow
inspectors access to US-held prisoners of war

+6%: Percentage change since 2001 in the number of US
families in poverty

1951: Last year in which a quarterly rise in US
military spending was greater than the one the
previous spring

54%: Percentage of US citizens who believe Bush was
legitimately elected to his post

1st: First president to execute a federal prisoner in
the past 40 years. Executions are typically ordered by
separate states and not at federal level

9: Number of members of Bush's defense policy board
who also sit on the corporate board of, or advise, at
least one defense contractor

35: Number of countries to which US has suspended
military assistance after they failed to sign
agreements giving Americans immunity from prosecution
before the International Criminal Court

$300 million: Amount cut from the federal program that
provides subsidies to poor families so they can heat
their homes

$1 billion: Amount of new US military aid promised
Israel in April 2003 to offset the "burdens" of the US
war on Iraq

58 million: Number of acres of public lands Bush has
opened to road building, logging and drilling

200: Number of public-health and environmental laws
Bush has attempted to downgrade or weaken

29,000: Number of American troops - which is close to
the total of a whole army division - to have either
been killed, wounded, injured or become so ill as to
require evacuation from Iraq, according to the
Pentagon

90%: Percentage of American citizens who said they
approved of the way George Bush was handling his job
as president when asked on 26 September, 2001

53%: Percentage of American citizens who approved of
the way Bush was handling his job as president when
asked on 16 January, 2004

© 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

###

Will speech lack hyperbole that 'justified' war?

OK. The Iowa Caucuses are behind us. Sen. John Kerry
(D-Mekong Delta) made one hopefully truthful declaration
last night, he bellowed "I have just begun to fight!"
Well, the LNS hopes so...Kerry, who we had great
expectations for early in this process, failed our
country and the world when a) he voted for the
_resident's Iraq war resolution, and b) he refused to
denounce the _resident's sham pretexts for war -- even after the fact,
when their utter absurdity had been verified. He has
not fought this illegitimate, incompetent and corrupt
cabal so far, so far he has only really fought Howard Dean
(D-Jeffords), who was giving voice to the outrage that
Kerry could have given voice to...Instead, for most of
the last few months, Kerry has stayed within the
precincts of Equivocation...However, Rand Beers (who
resigned from the National Security Council in protest
of the _resident's failed leadership in
counter-terrorism), former Ambassador Joseph Wilson
(who revealed the Niger yellow cake lie) and former
Sen. Max Cleland (an American war hero who was taken
down by black box voting in Georgia) are all in
Kerry's camp, and so there is still hope that Kerry
will remember where he came from...Meanwhile, yes,
Dean deserved better, and yes, he was AMBUSHED in
Iowa, by craven elements within Democractic Party
establishment and perhaps by some "new caucus goers"
who were there for the 2004 version of C.R.E.E.P. Dean
was Rove's preferred candidate before, I think he had
begun to worry Rove recently though. However, Dean's
support must have been less personal than it should
have been, otherwise he would not have ended up with
only 18%. Now the negativity will be turned on Wesley
Clark (D-NATO). Hopefully, Kerry will not participate
in the smearing and the attacks. Hopefully, he will
not stoop to what he stooped to --along with Dick
LoseHeart (D-Misery) -- in Iowa. But sadly, he
probably will...Nevertheless, Clark versus Kerry in
N.H. and beyond cannot be what Rove wants. Although he
would probably prefer an equivocating Kerry to a fiery
Clark. Now we'll see if the real John Kerry is going
to join us...
MEANWHILE, the LNS, like Wesley Clark, is going to
stay focused on the task at hand...cleansing the body
politic of this illegitimate, corrupt and incompetent
regime...Here is Ray McGovern's primer for the
SOTU...and, of course, the propapunditgandists will
not provide this context for tonight's speech, they
will follow the lead of their handlers at the White
House and the RNC and yes, of course, their own
corporate overlords -- as they desperately try to
rescue this American Mussolini from the electorate
that did not elect him the first time...

Repudiate the 9/11 coverup and the Iraq War Lies, Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/opinion/7743542.htm
Posted on Mon, Jan. 19, 2004

STATE OF THE UNION MESSAGE
Will speech lack hyperbole that 'justified' war?
BY RAY McGOVERN

Iraqi chickens are coming to roost as President Bush's
advisors attempt to draft a State of the Union Message
without the embarrassing flaws of their last try. With
last year's hyperbole -- replete with the knee-slapper
about Baghdad's seeking uranium in Africa -- forming
part of the backdrop, they have their work cut out for
them.

And the facts are not cooperating. Administration
claims originally adduced to justify war could not
withstand close scrutiny, and even the likes of
columnist George Will have disdainfully rejected
''retroactive'' justifications. The gap between
earlier claims about the Iraqi threat and last year's
experience on the ground has become a chasm too wide
to be bridged by rhetorical finesse.

Damaging information

Consider these events and revelations earlier this
month:

• The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
released an exhaustive study, which concluded:
``Administration officials systematically
misrepresented the threat from Iraq's weapons of mass
destruction and ballistic missile programs.''

• On the same day, State Secretary Colin Powell
finally conceded that there never had been any
''concrete evidence'' of Iraqi ties to al Qaeda,
contradicting himself on the ''sinister nexus'' that
he conjured up for the U.N. Security Council last
February.

• Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill has said that
during his two years in the president's cabinet, ``I
never saw anything I would characterize as evidence of
weapons of mass destruction.''

• But the most damaging revelation came from an
internal Iraqi document -- this time, happily, not a
forged one -- confirming that a high-level order to
destroy all chemical and biological weapons was
carried out in the summer of 1991 (there were no
nuclear weapons). U.S. officials learned of this in
mid-1995 from what intelligence officers would call
''a reliable source with excellent access.''
Everything else he told us has checked out.

Defector par excellence

That source was none other than the person in charge
of Iraq's nuclear, chemical, biological and missile
programs: Saddam Hussein's son-in-law Hussein Kamel --
the one who gave the order to destroy those weapons.
Kamel defected in August 1995.

Documentary corroboration that Kamel's order was
carried out surfaced this month in a handwritten
letter obtained by Barton Gelman of The Washington
Post. The letter was written by Hossam Amin, director
of the Iraqi office overseeing U.N. inspectors, five
days after Kamel's defection. It confirms that Iraq
had in fact destroyed its entire inventory of
biological weapons during the summer of 1991, before
U.N. inspectors even knew of their existence.

Does this mean that Kamel's testimony had been known
in Washington and London more than seven years before
Bush's address last January, and that during that
entire period no evidence had come to light poking
holes in the information he provided? Yes.

Well, maybe they didn't tell the president. If that is
true, ''they'' should be fired.

There is, I suppose, a chance that Bush's advisors
missed the information from Kamel's debriefing -- or
forgot it. But Newsweek on Feb. 24, 2003, reported
Kamel's assertion that the weapons of mass destruction
had been destroyed. That was more than three weeks
before our troops were sent into Iraq, ostensibly to
''disarm'' Iraq of those same weapons.

Both Bush and Vice President Cheney have accorded
Kamel fulsome praise as defector par excellence,
emphasizing his revelations about the Iraqi biological
and chemical weapons but not mentioning that Kamel
also said that those same weapons were destroyed at
his order in 1991. This brings the practice of
''cherry-picking'' intelligence information to new
heights -- or lows.

To his credit, Bush did ask the head of his Foreign
Intelligence Advisory Board, Gen. Brent Scowcroft, to
investigate how the canard about Iraq's seeking
uranium in Africa got into last year's speech.
According to press reports, Scowcroft has concluded
that it was the work of overzealous functionaries
eager to ''find something affirmative'' to support
claims like those of Cheney that Saddam Hussein had
''reconstituted'' Iraq's nuclear program.

Why not ask Scowcroft to lead an inquiry into which
government officials and members of Congress were
briefed on the full story provided by Kamel, and when?
With 500 of our sons and daughters already killed in
Iraq, we are due no less.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ray McGovern, a 27-year veteran CIA analyst, is on the
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity's
Steering Group.

9/11 Panel Unlikely to Get Later Deadline

You will not see Kristen Breitweiser's rebuke of "all
the _resident's men" on AnythingButSee (ABC), SeeBS
(CBS), SeeNotNews (CNN), NotBeSeen (NBC) or Faux News
(FOX). The propapunditgandists will not make it a
subject of their pretend analysis. The printed word is
one thing, the air waves is another...The _resident
will not turn and look up to the balcony during his
SOTU tomorrow night and call on all Americans to
applaud her courage and her determination...No, but
perhaps in January 2005, the first duly elected US
President since Bill Clinton will do so, perhaps he
will turn and look up at her and promise a thorough
investigation, a public disclosure of the conclusions
and a pursuit of consequences for those who have
failed her, her husband, the other victims of 9/11 and
the country as a whole...Remember, 2+2=4

Repudiate the 9/11 Coverup and the Iraq War Lies, Show
Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A28025-2004Jan18.html?referrer=emailarticle

washingtonpost.com
9/11 Panel Unlikely to Get Later Deadline
Hearings Being Scaled Back to Finish Work by May; Top
Officials Expected to Testify

By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 19, 2004; Page A09

President Bush and House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert
(R-Ill.) have decided to oppose granting more time to
an independent commission investigating the Sept. 11,
2001, attacks, virtually guaranteeing that the panel
will have to complete its work by the end of May,
officials said last week.

A growing number of commission members had concluded
that the panel needs more time to prepare a thorough
and credible accounting of missteps leading to the
terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon. But the White House and leading Republicans
have informed the panel that they oppose any delay,
which raises the possibility that Sept. 11-related
controversies could emerge during the heat of the
presidential campaign, sources said.

With time running short, the 10-member bipartisan
panel has already decided to scale back the number and
scope of hearings that it will hold for the public,
commission members and staffers said. The commission
is rushing to finish interviews with as many as 200
remaining witnesses and to finish examining about 2
million pages of documents related to the attacks.

Public hearings in coming months will include
testimony from key Cabinet members in the Bush and
Clinton administrations. The likely roster will
include Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, CIA
Director George J. Tenet, former secretary of state
Madeleine K. Albright, former defense secretary
William S. Cohen, and the current and former directors
of the FBI, two officials said. The next hearing,
scheduled over two days beginning Jan. 26, will focus
on border and aviation security issues.

Commission representatives are also negotiating to
secure private testimony from President Bush, former
president Bill Clinton, Vice President Cheney and
former vice president Al Gore. None of the four would
be likely to be asked to testify publicly, several
sources said.

The statute that created the panel in late 2002
requires commission members to complete a report for
the president and Congress by May 27, with another 60
days available after that to issue supplemental
documents or tie up loose ends, officials said. The
commission has been beleaguered by organizational
problems and fights with the Bush administration and
New York over access to documents.

"We need at least a few more months to complete our
work," said commission member Timothy J. Roemer, a
former Democratic congressman from Indiana who has
pushed for more time. "We have a breathtaking task
ahead of us, and we need enough time to make sure our
work is credible and thorough."

But the White House and Hastert's office made clear
during discussions over the past two weeks that they
would strongly oppose any extension of the deadline,
which would require congressional approval, officials
said. One source described the issue Friday as "dead
in the water."

White House spokeswoman Erin Healy said, "The
administration has given them an unprecedented amount
of cooperation . . . and we expect they will be able
to meet that deadline."

John Feehery, a spokesman for Hastert, said there is
little support for a delay in the
Republican-controlled Congress. "I can't imagine a
situation where they get an extension," Feehery said.
"I don't sense a lot of enthusiasm for considering
that."

As recently as December, the commission's two leaders
-- former New Jersey governor Thomas Kean (R) and
former representative Lee Hamilton (D-Ind.) -- said
the panel would have enough time to complete its work.
But commission members decided during a closed meeting
earlier this month that they should explore the idea
of a delay with the White House and Capitol Hill.

The commission's handling of the deadline has angered
a group of relatives of Sept. 11 victims, who argue
that the panel has not been aggressive enough in
demanding more time and in seeking key documents and
testimony from the Bush administration.

Several relatives have also strongly criticized the
commission's executive director, Philip Zelikow,
because of his ties to national security adviser
Condoleezza Rice and other Bush administration
officials.

Zelikow has recused himself from issues connected to
his role as an administration adviser in the early
weeks of Bush's term, but he was also interviewed
several months ago as a witness by the commission,
officials said. Commission member Jamie Gorelick, a
Democrat who served in the Clinton Justice Department,
has also been interviewed as a witness, officials
said.

Kristen Breitweiser, whose husband, Ronald, was killed
at the World Trade Center, said the interviews
underscore a conflict-of-interest problem at the
commission and cast serious doubts on the panel's
credibility.

"We've had it," said Breitweiser, who met with several
commission leaders last week. "It is such a slap in
the face of the families of victims. They are
dishonoring the dead with their irresponsible
behavior." Commission spokesman Al Felzenberg said
Zelikow and Gorelick were among more than 800
witnesses who have been interviewed so far and said
their experiences in national security are relevant to
the panel's investigation. "Whether these people were
involved in this commission or not, they may have well
made this list because of the perspective they would
have had about the work of the government during the
time in question," he said.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

Scalia-Cheney Trip Raises Eyebrows

CBS: Vice President Dick Cheney and Supreme Court
Justice Antonin Scalia spent part of last week duck
hunting together at a private camp in southern
Louisiana, just three weeks after the court agreed to
take up the vice president's appeal in lawsuits over
his handling of the administration's energy task
force, the Los Angeles Times says in its Saturday
editions.

Cleanse Cronyism from the US Supreme Court, Show Up
for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

Scalia-Cheney Trip Raises Eyebrows

WASHINGTON, Jan. 17, 2003

"At the very least, you have to start thinking about
whether disqualification is necessary"
Northwestern University Law professor Steven Lubet, to
CBS News, Radio

(CBS) Vice President Dick Cheney and Supreme Court
Justice Antonin Scalia spent part of last week duck
hunting together at a private camp in southern
Louisiana, just three weeks after the court agreed to
take up the vice president's appeal in lawsuits over
his handling of the administration's energy task
force, the Los Angeles Times says in its Saturday
editions.

While Scalia and Cheney are avid hunters and longtime
friends, several experts in legal ethics questioned
the timing of their trip and said it raised doubts
about Scalia's ability to judge the case impartially,
the newspaper pointed out.

But Scalia rejected that concern Friday, telling the
Times, "I do not think my impartiality could
reasonably be questioned."

Federal law says "any justice or judge shall
disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his
impartiality might be questioned," the Times notes.

For nearly three years, Cheney has been fighting
demands that he reveal whether he met with energy
industry officials, including Kenneth Lay when Lay was
chairman of Enron, while Cheney was formulating the
president's energy policy, the Times explains.

A lower court ruled that Cheney must turn over
documents detailing who met with his task force, but
on Dec. 15, the high court announced it would hear his
appeal. The justices are due to hear arguments in
April in the case of "in re Richard B. Cheney."

In a written response to an inquiry from the Times
about the hunting trip, Scalia said: "Cheney was
indeed among the party of about nine who hunted from
the camp. Social contacts with high-level executive
officials (including cabinet officers) have never been
thought improper for judges who may have before them
cases in which those people are involved in their
official capacity, as opposed to their personal
capacity. For example, Supreme Court Justices are
regularly invited to dine at the White House, whether
or not a suit seeking to compel or prevent certain
presidential action is pending."

Cheney does not face a personal penalty in the pending
lawsuits. He could not be forced to pay damages, for
example.

But the suits "are not routine disputes about the
powers of Cheney's office," the Times says. "Rather,
the plaintiffs — the Sierra Club and Judicial Watch —
contend that Cheney and his staff violated an
open-government measure known as the Federal Advisory
Committee Act by meeting behind closed doors with
outside lobbyists for the oil, gas, coal and nuclear
industries."

Stephen Gillers, a New York University law professor,
told the Times Scalia should have skipped going
hunting with Cheney this year.

"A judge may have a friendship with a lawyer, and
that's fine. But if the lawyer has a case before the
judge, they don't socialize until it's over. That
shows a proper respect for maintaining the public's
confidence in the integrity of the process," said
Gillers, who is an expert on legal ethics. "I think
Justice Scalia should have been cognizant of that and
avoided contact with the vice president until this was
over. And this is not like a dinner with 25 or 30
people. This is a hunting trip where you are together
for a few days."

The Times notes that pair arrived Jan. 5 on Gulfstream
jets and were guests of Wallace Carline, the owner of
Diamond Services Corp., an oil services company in
Amelia, La. The Associated Press in Morgan City, La.,
reported the trip on the day the vice president and
his entourage departed.

"They asked us not to bring cameras out there," said
Sheriff David Naquin, who serves St. Mary Parish,
about 90 miles southwest of New Orleans, referring to
the group's request for privacy. "The vice president
and the justice were there for a relaxing trip, so we
backed off."

While the local police were told about Cheney's trip
shortly before his arrival, they were told to keep it
a secret, Naquin said to the Times.

"The justice had been here several times before. I'm
kind of sorry Cheney picked that week because it was a
poor shooting week," Naquin said. "There weren't many
ducks here, which is unusual for this time of the
year."

Scalia agreed with the sheriff's assessment.

"The duck hunting was lousy. Our host said that in 35
years of duck hunting on this lease, he had never seen
so few ducks," the justice said in his written
response to the Times. "I did come back with a few
ducks, which tasted swell."

Steven Lubet, who teaches judicial ethics at
Northwestern University Law School, said he was not
convinced that Scalia must withdraw from the Cheney
case but said the trip raised a number of questions.

"At the very least, you have to start thinking about
whether disqualification is necessary," Steven Lubet,
who teaches judicial ethics at Northwestern University
Law School told CBS News, Radio.

"It's not clear this requires disqualification, but
there are not separate rules for longtime friends,"
Lubet said to the Times. "This is not like a lawyer
going on a fishing trip with a judge. A lawyer is one
step removed. Cheney is the litigant in this case. The
question is whether the justice's hunting partner did
something wrong. And the whole purpose of these rules
is to ensure the appearance of impartiality in regard
to the litigants before the court."

According to the newspaper, the code of conduct for
federal judges sets guidelines for members of the
judiciary, but it does not set clear-cut rules. A
judge should "act at all times in a manner that
promotes public confidence in the integrity and
impartiality of the judiciary," it says. "A judge
should not allow family, social or other relationships
to influence judicial conduct or judgments," it says.
Nor should a judge "permit others to convey the
impression that they are in a special position to
influence the judge."

In the lower courts, litigants may ask a judge to step
aside. And if the request is refused, they may appeal
to a higher court.

At the Supreme Court, the justices decide for
themselves whether to step aside, the Times adds.

©MMIV, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Young Republican Brown Shirts in Iowa Try Out for the Tom DeLay Beer Hall Putsch Squad

It has begun...

Save the US Constitution, Show Up for Democracy in
2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.buzzflash.com/contributors/04/01/con04023.html

January 19, 2004 CONTRIBUTOR ARCHIVES

Young Republican Brown Shirts in Iowa Try Out for the Tom DeLay Beer Hall Putsch Squad

A BUZZFLASH READER COMMENTARY

Hello BuzzFlash,

This story has me fuming. College repukes storm a Dem
event and shove women around!!!!!

"One of the bush supporters shoved Jett, and she
pushed back in anger."

I am DU-er, and this story is making the rounds there.
Below is a link to the Iowa story, with "snips" - as
well as links to the "Iowa Federation of College
republicans" including contact info for the perps. I'd
really like to see something about this on your site.
Info below, and THANKS! for what you are doing!!!!!

The story . . .

---------------------
" Political Rallies End in Brawl"
http://www.woi-tv.com/Global/story.asp?S=1605772&nav=1LFWKGNJ
[As of this posting, the following article was removed
from this television station's website]

A Democratic rally at Drake's Olmstead Center, urged
young Iowans to get out and vote. It was targeted
toward high school and college students. A group known
for not voting. The rally featured comedian Janene
Garafalo and classic rock star Joan Jett, but it got a
surprise visit from some unwanted guests.

A group of college republicans at their Midwest caucus
leadership conference heard about the rally and
stormed in.

"There are seven of us who worked really hard at
putting this conference together, said Jason Cole of
the college republicans. "so, we met, discussed and
majority ruled. We went down there."

What they didn't discuss is what to do if things get
out of hand. ONE OF THE BUSH SUPPORTERS SHOVED JETT
AND SHE PUSHED BACK IN ANGER. Ole said that was the
decision of one person, and not at all representative
of what the conference was trying to do.

Campus security did show up break things up. The
concert did resume as planned. In fact, Jett wrapped
up her day with two more performances. One in Fort
Dodge, the other in Marshalltown.
------

[END OF ARTICLE FROM TELEVISION STATION]

A BUZZFLASH READER COMMENTARY

* * *

BuzzFlash Note: This action by Iowa Young Republicans
recalls the Brown Shirt storming of the Miami-Dade
recount vote during the election of 2000 in Florida.
At that time, some Tom DeLay Congressional staff thugs
interfered with the voting process during a
presidential election by intimidating an election
board. In Iowa, apparently some Young Republican thug
wannabes decided to show their idol Tom DeLay that
they are "Brown Shirt" material for the 2004 election.

BuzzFlash message to the Republicans: If you don't
want to be called Nazis, stop acting like storm
troopers. This is a democracy, you creeps.

A BUZZFLASH READER COMMENTARY

US Stars Hail Iraq War Whistleblower: GCHQ worker Katharine Gun faces jail for exposing American corruption in the run-up to war on Saddam. Now her celebrity supporters insist it is Bush and Blair who should be in the dock.

Guardian: Gun appears in court tomorrow accused of
breaching the Official Secrets Act by allegedly
leaking details of a secret US 'dirty tricks'
operation to spy on UN Security Council members in the
run-up to war in Iraq last year. If found guilty, she
faces two years in prison. She is an unlikely heroine
and those who have met her say she would have been
happy to remain in the shadows, had she not seen
evidence in black and white that her Government was
being asked to co-operate in an illegal operation.

Repudiate the 9/11 Coverup and the Iraq War Lies, Show
Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0118-01.htm

Published on Sunday, January 18, 2004 by the
Observer/UK
US Stars Hail Iraq War Whistleblower: GCHQ worker Katharine Gun faces jail for exposing American corruption in the run-up to war on Saddam. Now her celebrity supporters insist it is Bush and Blair who should be in the dock.

by Martin Bright

She was an anonymous junior official toiling away with
4,500 other mathematicians, code-breakers and
linguists at the Government Communications
Headquarters (GCHQ) in Cheltenham.

But now Katharine Gun, an unassuming 29-year-old
translator, is set to become a transatlantic cause
célèbre as the focus of a star-studded solidarity
drive that brings together Hollywood actor-director
Sean Penn and senior figures from the US media and
civil rights movement, including the Reverend Jesse
Jackson.

Katharine Gun is a former translator at GCHQ in
Cheltenham

Gun appears in court tomorrow accused of breaching the
Official Secrets Act by allegedly leaking details of a
secret US 'dirty tricks' operation to spy on UN
Security Council members in the run-up to war in Iraq
last year. If found guilty, she faces two years in
prison. She is an unlikely heroine and those who have
met her say she would have been happy to remain in the
shadows, had she not seen evidence in black and white
that her Government was being asked to co-operate in
an illegal operation.

The leak has been described as 'more timely and
potentially more important than The Pentagon Papers by
Daniel Ellsberg, the celebrated whistleblower who
leaked papers containing devastating details of the US
involvement in Vietnam, in 1971. Ellsberg has been
vocal in support of Gun. She was arrested last March,
days after The Observer first published evidence of an
intelligence 'surge' on UN delegations, ordered by the
GCHQ's partner organization, the National Security
Agency.

Legal experts believe that her case is potentially
more explosive for the Government than the Hutton
inquiry because it could allow her defense team to
raise questions about the legality of military
intervention in Iraq. The Attorney General, Lord
Goldsmith, is likely to come under pressure to
disclose the legal advice he gave on military
intervention - something he has so far refused to do.

At a hearing last November, Gun's legal team indicated
that she would use a defense of 'necessity' to argue
that she acted to save the lives of British soldiers
and Iraqi civilians.

At the time Gun, who was sacked after her arrest and
whose case is funded by legal aid, said in a
statement: 'Any disclosures that may have been made
were justified on the following grounds: because they
exposed serious illegality and wrongdoing on the part
of the US government who attempted to subvert our own
security services; and to prevent wide-scale death and
casualties among ordinary Iraqi people and UK forces
in the course of an illegal war.'

She added: 'I have only ever followed my conscience.'

Sean Penn and Jesse Jackson have already signed a
statement of support for Gun and a broader campaign
will be launched later this year. They are joined by
Ellsberg, who is keen to travel to Britain soon to
meet Gun.

Other signatories of the statement, to be released in
the coming weeks, include Linda Foley, president of
the Newspaper Guild, and Ramona Ripston of the
American Civil Liberties Union, both in their personal
capacities.

The statement is a glowing tribute to the
publicity-shy GCHQ mole who has avoided all media
attention since her arrest: 'We honor Katharine Gun as
a whistleblower who bravely risked her career and her
very liberty to inform the public about illegal spying
in support of a war based on deception. In a
democracy, she should not be made a scapegoat for
exposing the transgressions of others.'

The statement also pays tribute to the transatlantic
opposition to the war in Iraq, which it links to
historical campaigns against oppression. 'There has
been much talk in recent months about the "special
relationship" between the US and British governments,
which led the world to war, but history tells us of
another "special relationship" - between people of
good will in the United States and Britain who worked
together in opposition to slavery and colonialism, and
most recently against the push for war on Iraq. It is
in the spirit of friendship between our peoples in
defense of democracy that we sign this statement.'

The leaked memorandum - dated 31 January 2003 - from
Frank Koza, chief of staff of the NSA's Regional
Targets section, requested British intelligence help
to discover the voting intentions of the key 'swing
six' nations at the UN. Angola, Cameroon, Guinea,
Chile, Mexico and Pakistan were under intense pressure
to vote for a second resolution authoring war in Iraq.

The disclosure of the 'dirty tricks' memo caused
serious diplomatic difficulties for the countries
involved and in particular the socialist government in
Chile, which demanded an immediate explanation from
Britain and America. The Chilean public is deeply
sensitive to dirty tricks by the American intelligence
services, which are still held responsible for the
1973 overthrow of the socialist government of Salvador
Allende. In the days that followed the disclosure, the
Chilean delegation in New York distanced itself from
the draft second resolution, scuppering plans to go
down the UN route.

Opposition politicians are already increasing pressure
on Tony Blair to release Goldsmith's legal advice.
Parliamentary answers last week to Lord Alexander of
Weedon QC, the Tory head of the all-party legal reform
group Justice, show that the Government recognizes
there are precedents for disclosure.

In 1993, government legal advice in the arms-to-Iraq
affair was disclosed to the Scott inquiry and advice
concerning the 1988 Merchant Shipping Act was
disclosed when Spanish fishermen argued that it
breached EU law. The government response of Baroness
Amos would appear to be an open invitation to Gun's
defense team: 'In both cases, disclosure was made for
the purposes of judicial proceedings.'

But she continued: 'It has been made clear in a number
of parliamentary questions that the Attorney General's
detailed advice would not be disclosed in view of a
long-standing convention, adhered to by successive
governments, that advice of law officers is not
publicly disclosed. The purpose of the convention is
to enable the Government, like everyone else, to
receive full and frank legal advice in confidence.'

A summary of the legal advice published on 17 March
last year showed that Goldsmith believed that UN
Resolution 678, which authorized force against Iraq to
eject it from Kuwait in 1990, could be used to justify
the conflict. This position has been fiercely
criticized by most experts in international law, who
argue that 678 applied specifically to the threat
posed to the region by Saddam in 1990. Alexander has
accused Goldsmith of 'scraping the bottom of the legal
barrel' and described the use of 678 as 'risible'.

When the details of the GCHQ disclosure were published
in The Observer on 2 March last year, there was
considerable media speculation that Goldsmith was set
to resign over the issue of his legal advice over the
war. Foreign Office legal experts were known to be
split on the issue.

A key figure could prove to be 54-year-old Elizabeth
Wilmshurst, deputy legal adviser to the Foreign
Secretary, Jack Straw, who stepped down on 21 March.
Wilmshurst is said to have left her post because she
would not agree to Goldmith's legal advice.

Since leaving her post she has not spoken about the
crucial discussions in the Foreign Office last March.
Many believe that a second whistleblower could prove
fatal to the Government.

· For full details, go to accuracy.org

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

Clark suggests questions remain unanswered about Bush's military service

These men understand. These men are willing to speak
truth to power. They deserve support. They will need
it. This territory is very dangerous.

Break the Bush Cabal's Strangehold on the "US
Mainstream News Media," Show Up for Democracy in 2004:
Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/news/archive/2004/01/17/politics1939EST0605.DTL

Clark suggests questions remain unanswered about Bush's military service

TOM RAUM, Associated Press Writer Saturday, January
17, 2004
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

(01-17) 16:39 PST PEMBROKE, N.H. (AP) --

Wesley Clark suggested Saturday that questions remain
about President Bush's Vietnam-era service in the
Texas Air National Guard, but the retired general
stopped short of endorsing a comment by actor-director
Michael Moore that Bush was "a deserter."

Moore, a Clark supporter, introduced the Democratic
presidential nominee at a campaign rally here by
saying he looked forward to debates between Clark, if
he wins the Democratic nomination, and Bush.

"I want to see that debate: the general versus the
deserter," Moore said to enthusiastic applause at a
packed rally in a high-school gymnasium, reiterating a
line he uses frequently. Clark, asked later by
reporters if he agreed with Moore's characterization
of Bush as a "deserter," said: "I've heard those
charges. I don't know whether they're established or
not. He was never prosecuted for it. The question in
this election is can we bring a higher standard of
leadership to America."

The exchange recalled a controversy that was an
element of the 2000 presidential campaign.

Bush served as a pilot in the Texas Air National Guard
from May 1968 to October 1973, mostly flying F-102
fighter interceptors. He did not go to Vietnam.

Bush spent most of his time in the Guard based near
Houston, but in May 1972 he received a three-month
assignment in Alabama with the 187th Tactical Recon
Unit in Montgomery while he worked on a political
campaign in the state.

Retired Gen. William Turnipseed, a commander at the
Alabama base, said during the 2000 presidential
campaign that he never saw Bush appear for duty for
that unit's drills. Bush maintains he was there, but
records have never been produced to document that Bush
was there.

At a news conference after the rally, Clark insisted,
"I'm not going to get into the issues of what George
W. Bush did or didn't do in the past."

But he also declined to criticize Moore's "deserter"
remarks.

"I'm delighted with Michael Moore, I really appreciate
his support, he's a fantastic leader. I thank him
tremendously for being here."

Clark was the only Democratic presidential candidate
campaigning in New Hampshire on Saturday. Most of his
rivals were in Iowa. Clark, a late entry, decided to
skip Iowa.

In New Hampshire, his ratings in polls were
increasing, putting him within striking distance of
former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, who remained the
front-runner here.

Earlier, in Laconia, in the lake region of central New
Hampshire, Clark said that one reason New Hampshire
property taxes are high is the state has no income or
general sales tax.

"Some of the responsibility for your high property
taxes is a function of your state government and
leadership in the state," Clark said in response to a
question at a campaign stop.

High property taxes are a perennial political issue in
New Hampshire, which holds the first presidential
primary Jan. 27. Iowa's contest on Monday involves
caucuses, rather than a primary.

In a brief interview after his appearance in Laconia,
Clark said he did not intend his remarks as criticism
of New Hampshire's tax system, which he said is the
responsibility of the state's lawmakers and voters.

"I'm not passing judgment on it one way or another,"
he said.

Clark was responding to a teacher who complained that
underfunding of the federal No Child Left Behind Act
was driving up local property taxes. Clark said he
would fully fund the act and reform it, reducing the
financial burden on communities.

"To be honest with you, in New Hampshire you don't
have a sales tax for most of your purchases, and you
don't have an income tax as most states do," he said
to a large round of applause.

Only New Hampshire and Alaska have neither general
sales nor income taxes, and Alaska has substantial oil
revenues.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
EDITORS NOTE: Associated Press reporter J.M. Hirsch,
in Laconia, N.H., contributed to this report.

Who Gets It?

The 500th US soldier has died in Iraq. For what? A
neo-con wet dream of "Empire," political cover for an
inferior product (but the cover has blown up in their
faces), profit for the Bush cabal's cronies...Nothing
more...Certainly not to make the US safer (it has done
the opposite) or to thwart terrorism (it has only
swollen the ranks of Al-Qaeda et al) or to bring
"democracy" to the Arab world ( they have little use
for it here at home)...Meanwhile, the day after
forcing himself on Coretta King and the good people of
Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, the _resident
installs Pickering on the Federsal bench with a recess
appointment. Sen. Edward Kennedy, quoted in the
Chicago Sun-Times, puts this move in context: "The
president's recess appointment of this anti-civil
rights judge the day after laying a wreath on the
grave of Martin Luther King is an insult to Dr. King,
an insult to every African American, and an insult to
all Americans who share Dr. King's great goals. It
serves only to emphasize again this administration's
shameful opposition to civil rights.''
Meanwhile, on the eve of Iowa, where Howard Dean
(D-Jeffords) may well be AMBUSHED, Paul Krugman, the
Moral Conscience of the NYTwits and the Voice of
Greater Greenspania, reveals the complicity and
banality of the propapunditgandists....

Support Our Troops, Show Up for Democracy in 2004:
Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/16/opinion/16KRUG.html?hp

OP-ED COLUMNIST
Who Gets It?
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: January 16, 2004

Earlier this week, Wesley Clark had some strong words
about the state of the nation. "I think we're at risk
with our democracy," he said. "I think we're dealing
with the most closed, imperialistic, nastiest
administration in living memory. They even put Richard
Nixon to shame."

In other words, the general gets it: he understands
that America is facing what Kevin Phillips, in his
remarkable new book, "American Dynasty," calls a
"Machiavellian moment." Among other things, this tells
us that General Clark and Howard Dean, whatever they
may say in the heat of the nomination fight, are on
the same side of the great Democratic divide.

Most political reporting on the Democratic race, it
seems to me, has gotten it wrong. Some journalists do,
of course, insist on trivializing the whole thing:
what I dread most, in the event of an upset in Iowa,
is the return of reporting about the political
significance of John Kerry's hair.

But even those who refrain from turning political
reporting into gossip have used the wrong categories.
Again and again, one reads that it's about the left
wing of the Democratic party versus the centrists; but
Mr. Dean was a very centrist governor, and his policy
proposals are not obviously more liberal than those of
his rivals.

The real division in the race for the Democratic
nomination is between those who are willing to
question not just the policies but also the honesty
and the motives of the people running our country, and
those who aren't.

What makes Mr. Dean seem radical aren't his policy
positions but his willingness — shared, we now know,
by General Clark — to take a hard line against the
Bush administration. This horrifies some veterans of
the Clinton years, who have nostalgic memories of
elections that were won by emphasizing the positive.
Indeed, George Bush's handlers have already made it
clear that they intend to make his "optimism" — as
opposed to the negativism of his angry opponents — a
campaign theme. (Money-saving suggestion: let's cut
directly to the scene where Mr. Bush dresses up as an
astronaut, and skip the rest of his expensive,
pointless — but optimistic! — Moon-base program.)

But even Bill Clinton couldn't run a successful
Clinton-style campaign this year, for several reasons.

One is that the Democratic candidate, no matter how
business-friendly, will not be able to get lots of
corporate contributions, as Clinton did. In the
Clinton era, a Democrat could still raise a lot of
money from business, partly because there really are
liberal businessmen, partly because donors wanted to
hedge their bets. But these days the Republicans
control all three branches of government and exercise
that control ruthlessly. Even corporate types who have
grave misgivings about the Bush administration — a
much larger group than you might think — are afraid to
give money to Democrats.

Another is that the Bush people really are Nixonian.
The bogus security investigation over Ron Suskind's
"The Price of Loyalty," like the outing of Valerie
Plame, shows the lengths they're willing to go to in
intimidating their critics. (In the case of Paul
O'Neill, alas, the intimidation seems to be working.)
A mild-mannered, upbeat candidate would get eaten
alive.

Finally, any Democrat has to expect not just severely
slanted coverage from the fair and balanced Republican
media, but asymmetric treatment even from the
mainstream media. For example, some have said that the
intense scrutiny of Mr. Dean's Vermont record is what
every governor who runs for president faces. No, it
isn't. I've looked at press coverage of questions
surrounding Mr. Bush's tenure in Austin, like the
investment of state university funds with Republican
donors; he got a free pass during the 2000 campaign.

So what's the answer? A Democratic candidate will have
a chance of winning only if he has an energized base,
willing to contribute money in many small donations,
willing to contribute their own time, willing to stand
up for the candidate in the face of smear tactics and
unfair coverage.

That doesn't mean that the Democratic candidate has to
be a radical — which is a good thing for the party,
since all of the candidates are actually quite
moderate. In fact, what the party needs is a candidate
who inspires the base enough to get out the message
that he isn't a radical — and that Mr. Bush is.

I’ll Be Voting For Wesley Clark: Good-Bye Mr. Bush

Michael Moore: "This is not about voting for who is
more anti-war or who was anti-war first or who the
media has already anointed. It is about backing a
candidate that shares our values AND can communicate
them to Middle America. I am convinced that the surest
slam dunk to remove Bush is with a
four-star-general-top-of-his-class-at-West-Point-Rhodes-Scholar-Medal-of-Freedom-winning-gun-owner-from-the-South
-- who also, by chance, happens to be pro-choice, pro
environment, and anti-war. You don't get handed a gift
like this very often. I hope the liberal/left is wise
enough to accept it. It's hard, when you're so used to
losing, to think that this time you can actually win.
It is Clark who stands the best chance -- maybe the
only chance -- to win those Southern and Midwestern
states that we MUST win in order to accomplish Bush
Removal. And if what I have just said is true, then we
have no choice but to get behind the one who can make
this happen. "

Support Our Troops, Save the Environment, Repudiate
the 9/11 Coverup and the Iraq War Lies, Restore Fiscal
Responsibility to the White House, Show Up for
Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0116-12.htm

Published on Wednesday, January 14, 2004 by
MichaelMoore.com
I’ll Be Voting For Wesley Clark: Good-Bye Mr. Bush
by Michael Moore

Many of you have written to me in the past months
asking, "Who are you going to vote for this year?"

I have decided to cast my vote in the primary for
Wesley Clark. That's right, a peacenik is voting for a
general. What a country!

I believe that Wesley Clark will end this war. He will
make the rich pay their fair share of taxes. He will
stand up for the rights of women, African Americans,
and the working people of this country.

And he will cream George W. Bush.

I have met Clark and spoken to him on a number of
occasions, feeling him out on the issues but, more
importantly, getting a sense of him as a human being.
And I have to tell you I have found him to be the real
deal, someone whom I'm convinced all of you would
like, both as a person and as the individual leading
this country. He is an honest, decent, honorable man
who would be a breath of fresh air in the White House.
He is clearly not a professional politician. He is
clearly not from Park Avenue. And he is clearly the
absolute best hope we have of defeating George W.
Bush.

This is not to say the other candidates won't be able
to beat Bush, and I will work enthusiastically for any
of the non-Lieberman 8 who might get the nomination.
But I must tell you, after completing my recent
43-city tour of this country, I came to the conclusion
that Clark has the best chance of beating Bush. He is
going to inspire the independents and the undecided to
come our way. The hard core (like us) already have
their minds made up. It's the fence sitters who will
decide this election.

The decision in November is going to come down to 15
states and just a few percentage points. So, I had to
ask myself -- and I want you to honestly ask
yourselves -- who has the BEST chance of winning
Florida, West Virginia, Arizona, Nevada, Missouri,
Ohio? Because THAT is the only thing that is going to
matter in the end. You know the answer -- and it ain't
you or me or our good internet doctor.

This is not about voting for who is more anti-war or
who was anti-war first or who the media has already
anointed. It is about backing a candidate that shares
our values AND can communicate them to Middle America.
I am convinced that the surest slam dunk to remove
Bush is with a
four-star-general-top-of-his-class-at-West-Point-Rhodes-Scholar-Medal-of-Freedom-winning-gun-owner-from-the-South
-- who also, by chance, happens to be pro-choice, pro
environment, and anti-war. You don't get handed a gift
like this very often. I hope the liberal/left is wise
enough to accept it. It's hard, when you're so used to
losing, to think that this time you can actually win.
It is Clark who stands the best chance -- maybe the
only chance -- to win those Southern and Midwestern
states that we MUST win in order to accomplish Bush
Removal. And if what I have just said is true, then we
have no choice but to get behind the one who can make
this happen.

There are times to vote to make a statement, there are
times to vote for the underdog and there are times to
vote to save the country from catastrophe. This time
we can and must do all three. I still believe that
each one of us must vote his or her heart and
conscience. If we fail to do that, we will continue to
be stuck with spineless politicians who stand for
nothing and no one (except those who write them the
biggest checks).

My vote for Clark is one of conscience. I feel so
strongly about this that I'm going to devote the next
few weeks of my life to do everything I can to help
Wesley Clark win. I would love it if you would join me
on this mission.

Here are just a few of the reasons why I feel this way
about Wes Clark:

1. Clark has committed to ensuring that every family
of four who makes under $50,000 a year pays NO federal
income tax. None. Zip. This is the most incredible
helping hand offered by a major party presidential
candidate to the working class and the working poor in
my lifetime. He will make up the difference by socking
it to the rich with a 5% tax increase on anything they
make over a million bucks. He will make sure
corporations pay ALL of the taxes they should be
paying. Clark has fired a broadside at greed. When the
New York Times last week wrote that Wes Clark has been
“positioning himself slightly to Dean’s left," this is
what they meant, and it sure sounded good to me.

2. He is 100% opposed to the draft. If you are 18-25
years old and reading this right now, I have news for
you -- if Bush wins, he's going to bring back the
draft. He will be forced to. Because, thanks to his
crazy war, recruitment is going to be at an all-time
low. And many of the troops stuck over there are NOT
going to re-enlist. The only way Bush is going to be
able to staff the military is to draft you and your
friends. Parents, make no mistake about it -- Bush's
second term will see your sons taken from you and sent
to fight wars for the oily rich. Only an ex-general
who knows first-hand that a draft is a sure-fire way
to wreck an army will be able to avert the inevitable.

3. He is anti-war. Have you heard his latest attacks
on Bush over the Iraq War? They are stunning and
brilliant. I want to see him on that stage in a debate
with Bush -- the General vs. the Deserter! General
Clark told me that it's people like him who are truly
anti-war because it's people like him who have to die
if there is a war. "War must be the absolute last
resort," he told me. "Once you've seen young people
die, you never want to see that again, and you want to
avoid it whenever and wherever possible." I believe
him. And my ex-Army relatives believe him, too. It's
their votes we need.

4. He walks the walk. On issues like racism, he just
doesn't mouth liberal platitudes -- he does something
about it. On his own volition, he joined in and filed
an amicus brief with the Supreme Court in support of
the University of Michigan's case in favor of
affirmative action. He spoke about his own insistence
on affirmative action in the Army and how giving a
hand to those who have traditionally been shut out has
made our society a better place. He didn't have to get
involved in that struggle. He's a middle-aged white
guy -- affirmative action personally does him no good.
But that is not the way he thinks. He grew up in
Little Rock, one of the birthplaces of the civil
rights movement, and he knows that African Americans
still occupy the lowest rungs of the ladder in a
country where everyone is supposed to have "a chance."
That is why he has been endorsed by one of the
founding members of the Congressional Black Caucus,
Charlie Rangel, and former Atlanta Mayor and aide to
Martin Luther King, Jr., Andrew Young.

5. On the issue of gun control, this hunter and gun
owner will close the gun show loophole (which would
have helped prevent the massacre at Columbine) and he
will sign into law a bill to create a federal
ballistics fingerprinting database for every gun in
America (the DC sniper, who bought his rifle in his
own name, would have been identified after the FIRST
day of his killing spree). He is not afraid, as many
Democrats are, of the NRA. His message to them: "You
like to fire assault weapons? I have a place for you.
It's not in the homes and streets of America. It's
called the Army, and you can join any time!"

6. He will gut and overhaul the Patriot Act and
restore our constitutional rights to privacy and free
speech. He will demand stronger environmental laws. He
will insist that trade agreements do not cost
Americans their jobs and do not exploit the workers or
environment of third world countries. He will expand
the Family Leave Act. He will guarantee universal
pre-school throughout America. He opposes all
discrimination against gays and lesbians (and he
opposes the constitutional amendment outlawing gay
marriage). All of this is why Time magazine this week
referred to Clark as "Dean 2.0" -- an improvement over
the original (1.0, Dean himself), a better version of
a good thing: stronger, faster, and easier for the
mainstream to understand and use.

7. He will cut the Pentagon budget, use the money thus
saved for education and health care, and he will STILL
make us safer than we are now. Only the former
commander of NATO could get away with such a
statement. Dean says he will not cut a dime out of the
Pentagon. Clark knows where the waste and the
boondoggles are and he knows that nutty ideas like
Star Wars must be put to pasture. His health plan will
cover at least 30 million people who now have no
coverage at all, including 13 million children. He's a
general who will tell those swing voters, "We can take
this Pentagon waste and put it to good use to fix that
school in your neighborhood." My friends, those words,
coming from the mouth of General Clark, are going to
turn this country around.

Now, before those of you who are Dean or Kucinich
supporters start cloggin' my box with emails tearing
Clark down with some of the stuff I've seen floating
around the web ("Mike! He voted for Reagan! He bombed
Kosovo!"), let me respond by pointing out that Dennis
Kucinich refused to vote against the war resolution in
Congress on March 21 (two days after the war started)
which stated "unequivocal support" for Bush and the
war (only 11 Democrats voted against this--Dennis
abstained). Or, need I quote Dr. Dean who, the month
after Bush "won" the election, said he wasn't too
worried about Bush because Bush "in his soul, is a
moderate"? What's the point of this ridiculous
tit-for-tat sniping? I applaud Dennis for all his
other stands against the war, and I am certain Howard
no longer believes we have nothing to fear about Bush.
They are good people.

Why expend energy on the past when we have such grave
danger facing us in the present and in the near
future? I don't feel bad nor do I care that Clark --
or anyone -- voted for Reagan over 20 years ago. Let's
face it, the vast majority of Americans voted for
Reagan -- and I want every single one of them to be
WELCOMED into our tent this year. The message to these
voters -- and many of them are from the working class
-- should not be, "You voted for Reagan? Well, to hell
with you!" Every time you attack Clark for that, that
is the message you are sending to all the people who
at one time liked Reagan. If they have now changed
their minds (just as Kucinich has done by going from
anti-choice to pro-choice, and Dean has done by
wanting to cut Medicare to now not wanting to cut it)
– and if Clark has become a liberal Democrat, is that
not something to cheer?

In fact, having made that political journey and
metamorphosis, is he not the best candidate to bring
millions of other former Reagan supporters to our side
-- blue collar people who have now learned the hard
way just how bad Reagan and the Republicans were (and
are) for them?

We need to take that big DO NOT ENTER sign off our
tent and reach out to the vast majority who have been
snookered by these right-wingers. And we have a better
chance of winning in November with one of their own
leading them to the promised land.

There is much more to discuss and, in the days and
weeks ahead, I will continue to send you my thoughts.
In the coming months, I will also be initiating a
number of efforts on my website to make sure we get
out the vote for the Democratic nominee in November.

In addition to voting for Wesley Clark, I will also be
spending part of my Bush tax cut to help him out. You
can join me, if you like, by going to his website to
learn more about him, to volunteer, or to donate. To
find out about when your state’s presidential
primaries are, visit Vote Smart.

I strongly urge you to vote for Wes Clark. Let's join
together to ensure that we are putting forth our BEST
chance to defeat Bush on the November ballot. It is,
at this point, for the sake of the world, a moral
imperative.

Yours,

Michael Moore

© MichaelMoore.com

###

"Whitewash': 9/11 Director Gave Evidence to Own Inquiry

Of course, the _resident wants to distract the
electorate with talk of Mars. There is nowhere in this
country (or in this world) -- not our environment, not
our economy, not our security, not our standing in the
world community, not even our Constitution itself --
that he can point to that does not now in some way
reflect the damage inflicted by his belligerent,
ignorant "leadership" and the greedy cabal he fronts
for...One billion dollars for space exploration, one
and a half billion to promote "marriage," and the "US
mainstream news media" reports these Rove concoctions
as if they were newsworthy initiatives. Not one
propapunditgandist has pointed out how puny those sums
are when contrasted with the 87 billion dollars he
demanded for just a few months in Iraq...But hey, as
the _resident likes to say, "it's your money."

Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-up and the Iraq Deceit, Show
Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0115-11.htm

Published on Thursday, January 15, 2004 by UPI
"Whitewash': 9/11 Director Gave Evidence to Own Inquiry
by Shaun Waterman

WASHINGTON, Jan. 15 (UPI) -- The panel set up to
investigate why the United States failed to prevent
the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, was rocked
Thursday by the bizarre revelation that two of its
senior officials were so closely involved in the
events they are investigating that they have had to be
interviewed as part of the inquiry.

Philip Zelikow, the commission's executive director,
worked on the Bush-Cheney transition team as the new
administration took power, advising his longtime
associate and former boss, national security adviser
Condoleezza Rice, on the structure of the incoming
National Security Council.

"He came forward in case he might have useful
information," said commission spokesman Al Felzenberg.

Zelikow, who the commission says has withdrawn himself
from those parts of its investigation directly
connected with the transition -- a process known as
recusal -- was also appointed to the President's
Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board in October 2001.

The board provides the White House with advice about
the quality, adequacy and legality of the whole
spectrum of intelligence activities.

Jamie S. Gorelick, one the 10 members of the
commission and the other official who has answered
investigators' questions, was a senior official under
Attorney General Janet Reno in the Clinton
administration.

"(Zelikow) recused himself from those relevant parts
of the inquiry," said Felzenberg. "Frankly, we don't
see what the fuss is about."

But the revelations have been greeted with dismay by
the commission's critics, especially survivors and
relatives of the dead, because they suggest the
investigation will be -- in the words of Kristen
Breitweiser, who lost her husband Ron in tower 2 of
the World Trade Center -- "a whitewash."

The families have said for many months that they are
unhappy with Zelikow's role, and are furious that they
were not told he would be giving evidence.

"Did he interview himself about his own role in the
failures that left us defenseless?" asked Lori Van
Auken, the widow of Kenneth. "This is bizarre.

"We entered a looking glass world on Sept. 11 and
we're still in it."

The news is a particularly sharp blow to the
commission's credibility because Gorelick and Zelikow
are the two officials to whom the White House has
granted the greatest access to the most secret and
sensitive national security documents of all, the
presidential daily briefings.

Last year, officials acknowledged that one such
briefing in August 2001, more than a month prior to
the attacks, warned that al-Qaida was determined to
strike in the United States. Some reports suggested
that hijacking -- and even the use of airplanes as
missiles -- was mentioned as the mode of assault.

The question of the transition is a significant one,
because critics of President Bush say the incoming
administration "dropped the ball" on the fight against
Osama bin Laden, which had been ramping up under
President Clinton after a suicide attack by the
al-Qaida network nearly destroyed the USS Cole in
Yemen in October 2000.

Bush's supporters counter it was Clinton's failure to
capture or kill bin Laden after his network destroyed
two U.S. embassies in east Africa in 1998 that
emboldened the extremists to attack the United States
on Sept. 11.

The families planned a meeting on the issue Thursday
evening with commission members and staff, which one
predicted would be a "slugfest."

Copyright © 2001-2004 United Press International

###

O'Neill tells all, and it's not pretty

Joe Conason: By contrast, Mr. O’Neill is unlikely to
succumb to the intimidation that apparently
overwhelmed Mr. DiIulio. As he told Mr. Suskind during
their initial conversation, he could understand why
anyone might shy away from "a 50-year battle with this
gang," because "these people are nasty, and they have
a very long memory." But, he added, "I’m an old guy,
and I’m rich. And there’s nothing they can do to hurt
me."

Restore the Timeline, Show Up for Democracy in 2004:
Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=16272

O'Neill tells all, and it's not pretty
Joe Conason - The New York Observer

01.14.04 -

The White House believes that massive deficits don’t
matter.

The White House serves the narrow interests of the
wealthiest few.

The White House diligently heeds oil men and coal
operators.

The White House willfully ignores scientists and
environmentalists.

The President and his advisers care about politics
rather than policy.

The President and his advisers prefer scripted
consensus to candid debate.

The President and his advisers jump at the command of
corporate donors.

The President won’t read any document longer than
three pages.

The President can’t discuss substantive policy issues.

The Vice President is in charge.

Few of those statements are likely to surprise
Americans who have been paying attention to their
government for the past three years. Most fall neatly
within the category of what everyone has heard or
read. But this week, a high-ranking insider with a
reputation for honesty validated all those
unflattering assessments. In The Price of Loyalty:
George W. Bush, the White House and the Education of
Paul O’Neill, the former Treasury Secretary presents a
candid portrait of the Bush administration to author
Ron Suskind.

Although he writes for a monthly magazine, Mr. Suskind
continues to unearth stories that elude the very
important daily and weekly journalists in the White
House press corps. A year ago, his searing Esquire
profile of John DiIulio, the former director of the
President’s "faith-based initiative," exposed how
cynical political calculations and right-wing ideology
had ruined "compassionate conservatism" -- and how
little serious thought supports the weak policy
process in this administration. Somehow, Mr. DiIulio
was induced to recant what he had told Mr. Suskind
after conversations with some White House officials.

By contrast, Mr. O’Neill is unlikely to succumb to the
intimidation that apparently overwhelmed Mr. DiIulio.
As he told Mr. Suskind during their initial
conversation, he could understand why anyone might shy
away from "a 50-year battle with this gang," because
"these people are nasty, and they have a very long
memory." But, he added, "I’m an old guy, and I’m rich.
And there’s nothing they can do to hurt me."

Unfortunately for the White House, the path of least
resistance is also closed. It isn’t possible to simply
ignore the Suskind book’s revelations. Topping the
list of embarrassments are Mr. O’Neill’s recollections
about "regime change" in Iraq -- which he said had
obsessed the administration from its earliest days,
without real justification based on intelligence or
policy. Privy to classified briefings and data as a
national security official, he told Mr. Suskind that
there had been only one real reason for attacking Iraq
after Sept. 11, 2001. Unlike extirpating Osama bin
Laden and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, a difficult task
that might "develop into a mess," deposing Saddam
Hussein and the corrupt Baathist regime would most
assuredly be "doable."

Long before the book appeared, administration
officials attempted to dissuade Mr. O’Neill from
cooperating in its preparation. Old friends implored
him, and officials whispered offers of sinecures and
ambassadorial posts. He didn’t want anything, and when
the book’s details began to leak out, White House
operatives decided to get tough.

They called him an embittered loser. They accused him
of belatedly attempting to justify rejected ideas. And
suddenly from his old headquarters emanated the charge
that he had disclosed "classified" information.

His successor at the Treasury Department -- a team
player of no great distinction -- announced
instantaneously and eagerly that the inspector general
would "investigate" whether Mr. O’Neill had purloined
a paper marked "Secret" that showed up during a
televised interview.

It isn’t difficult to imagine the conversation between
a Treasury aide and a White House political operative
that preceded the announcement of the O’Neill probe.
As Mr. O’Neill placidly pointed out, however, his
pursuers would have served themselves better by
inquiring about the circumstances that attended his
departure.

When he and Mr. Suskind began their literary
collaboration last year, he provided an enormous
volume of materials collected during his Treasury
tenure. This was, as Mr. Suskind explains, perfectly
legal: "O’Neill approached his former colleagues at
the Treasury Department for what he insisted was his
due: copies of every document that had crossed his
desk. One day, as he was leaving Washington for
Pittsburgh, he passed me a few unopened CD-ROMs. ‘This
is what they gave me,’ he said. When I started to open
the disks, I wondered if there was an error on my hard
drive: nineteen thousand documents were listed." In
the hands of the Pulitzer-winning reporter, those
documents will probably discourage any charges of
fabrication.

Indeed, nobody at the White House has accused Mr.
O’Neill of lying, so far. That would be hard to say
about a man who was fired for his excessive bluntness.

COPYRIGHT (c) 2003 THE NEW YORK OBSERVER

URL:
http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=16272

Wesley Clark says democracy is at risk in America

Wesley Clark: "I think we're at risk with our democracy...I think we're dealing with the most closed, imperialistic, nastiest administration in living memory. They even put Richard Nixon to shame. They are a threat to what this nation stands for, and we need to get him out of the White House. And we're going to do it."

Save the US Constitution, Show Up for Democracy in
2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/world/archives/2004/01/14/2003087572

Wesley Clark says democracy is at risk in America

NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE , DALLAS
Wednesday, Jan 14, 2004,Page 6

Democratic presidential hopeful Wesley Clark talks
with reporters as a group of school children look on
at the Museum of New Hampshire History on Monday in
Concord, New Hampshire.
PHOTO: AFP

General Wesley Clark unleashed his most blistering
attack yet on the Bush administration in the
president's home state Monday, vowing to win Texas in
November if he is the Democratic nominee.

"I think we're at risk with our democracy," Clark told
an audience of about 500 people at a fund-raiser at
the Westin Galleria hotel. "I think we're dealing with
the most closed, imperialistic, nastiest
administration in living memory. They even put Richard
Nixon to shame. They are a threat to what this nation
stands for, and we need to get him out of the White
House. And we're going to do it."

When a supporter yelled out, "Give it to him!" Clark
responded: "We're going to give it to him, and you're
going to have to take him back, right here in Texas.
Let him chop cedar." The reference was to one of
President George W. Bush's favorite leisure activities
on his ranch in Crawford, about 190km southwest of
Dallas.

Clark has been emboldened in recent days by a surge in
polls measuring voter preference in New Hampshire and
across the country. He has drawn growing crowds to
town hall meetings in New Hampshire, which holds the
nation's first primary on Jan. 27. He attracted groups
of more than 500 supporters in trips to North Dakota
and Wisconsin over the weekend. He is not competing in
the Iowa caucuses next Monday.

"I think we're dealing with the most closed,
imperialistic, nastiest administration in living
memory. They even put Richard Nixon to shame."

General Wesley Clark, presidential candidate

Clark's attacks on the Bush administration have grown
stronger since articles began to be published over the
weekend about a new book in which Paul O'Neill, the
former Treasury secretary, is critical of the
president.

Clark said Sunday that he believed the book validated
his charges, made almost daily on the campaign trail,
that the Bush administration began planning for a war
against Iraq immediately after the Sept. 11, 2001,
attacks, if not sooner.

To rousing cheers, Clark asked supporters here to help
him win the Democratic nomination by voting in the
state's March 2 primary. The campaign raised about
US$250,000 at the event, a campaign official said.
Before the fund-raiser, Clark received the endorsement
of Representative Martin Frost, a Democrat who is the
senior member of the Texas congressional delegation.

If the fight for the Democratic nomination is not
settled by March 2, as many Democrats think it will
be, it almost certainly will be decided on that day,
when California, New York, Ohio and Massachusetts also
hold their primaries.
This story has been viewed 1969 times.

Kennedy: Iraq war based on politics

While Dick LoseHeart (D-Misery) and, unfortunately,
Sen. John Kerry (D-Mekong Delta) debase themselves and
hurt the nation by criticizing Howard Dean
(D-Jeffords) and Wesley Clark (D-NATO), Sen. Edward
Kennedy (D-Camelot) and Sen. Robert Byrd (D-US
Constitution) have taken brave stands and delivered
historic speeches that will go down in the history of
this country...

Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-up and the Iraq Deceit, Show
Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/01/14/kennedy.iraq

Kennedy: Iraq war based on politics

WASHINGTON (CNN) --U.S. Sen. Edward Kennedy, an elder
statesman among liberal Democrats, slammed President
Bush and his administration for going to war in Iraq
based on political considerations.

In a speech Wednesday, Kennedy said the decision to
invade Iraq was grounded in the "gross abuse of
intelligence," an "arrogant disrespect for the United
Nations" and the GOP's desire to seize control of both
houses of Congress in 2002.

The senator from Massachusetts spoke to the Center for
American Progress, a liberal advocacy group, at the
Mayflower Hotel in Washington.

He was flanked by Brian and Alma Hart, whose son John
was killed in Iraq, and Army Sgt. Peter Damon, who
lost both arms serving in Iraq.

Kennedy called the invasion of Iraq "a war of choice,
not of necessity" and laid out what he called a
timeline of the "drumbeat to war" that he said began
in the earliest days of the Bush presidency.

In support of his criticism, Kennedy cited recent
revelations about Iraq policy by former Treasury
Secretary Paul O'Neill in the Ron Suskind book "The
Price of Loyalty" and in TV and magazine interviews.

"Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill has now
revealed what many of us have long suspected," Kennedy
said.

"Despite protestations to the contrary, the president
and his senior aides began the march to war in Iraq in
the earliest days of the administration, long before
the terrorists struck this nation on 9/11."

Bush officials have denied the administration had a
predisposition to invade Iraq, saying the White House
was continuing former President Clinton's policy of
regime change.

The senator insisted the Bush administration built the
case for war as a distraction from the failed search
for Osama bin Laden and the failure to roust al Qaeda
in the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks.

In going to war, Kennedy said, the administration made
the United States "a lesser and less respected land."

There was "no compelling reason for war," and "the war
has not made America safer," Kennedy said, adding that
there is no convincing evidence connecting Saddam
Hussein's Iraq and September 11.

Kennedy said the administration continues to be guided
by a "misguided and arrogant foreign policy" that
makes the world more dangerous because it increases
the threat of terrorism and erodes international of
support for the United States.

He said Americans will see through the
administration's failed polices and express their
anger at the voting booth in November.

"The election cannot come too soon," he said.

Kennedy has been a consistent critic of the
administration's policy toward Iraq. He was one of 23
senators who opposed the resolution authorizing Bush
to go to war.

In a September interview, the senator called the war
"a fraud" that had been cooked up in Texas.

Leading congressional Republicans denounced his
remarks. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Texas said
Kennedy went too far and called on Democrats to
repudiate his comments. (Full story)

Find this article at:
http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/01/14/kennedy.iraq

Why Is My Son Being Sent To Iraq?

The last 48 hours have been among the most depressing
in the history of the "US mainstream news media." Consider the facts: the _resident's former Treasury Secretary has questioned his leadership and competency as well as his motivations for the war in Iraq, Karen Kwiatowski (a Pentagon insider) has written a shocking eye-witness account of the Bush cabal's propaganda machine and its "intelligence" fabrication in the ramp up to the war in Iraq, the Army War College has published a scathing rebuke of the _resident's "war on terrorism" itself, Kevin Phillips (a Nixon/Reagan activist) has turned out a hard-hitting political history of the Bush family, which focues on its intimate relationship with the Saudis in general and the Bin Laden family in particular, retired Supreme Allied Commander Wesley Clark (D-NATO) has declared that the _resident dropped the ball on Al-Qaeda prior to 9/11 and demanding an investigation of why and how we went to war in Iraq...These stories are not disparate, they are not unrelated, they are not seperate from each other, aggregated with other stories (e.g. the blood of almost 500 US soldiers so far, the revelations of Joseph Wilson, Rand Beers, Richard Clarke and others, the Plame affair, the death of Dr. Kelly, the absence of WMD in Iraq, etc.) they should form a "perfect storm" politically, BUT the "US mainstream news media" is obediently following Rove's select story lines: the _resident "embracing our neighbors to the North and South," the _resident throwing billion dollars at Mars and marriage...Here is the truth...

http://www.interventionmag.com/cms/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=609
Article & Essay: Why Is My Son Being Sent To Iraq?

Unable to understand the mission in Iraq, a father
who is a miltiary veteran asks why is my son being
sent to that war?
By Alex Bellotti Jr

I saw my son off to the war in Iraq, at 7:30 a.m.
Monday. So far it is the hardest thing I have had to
do as a parent.