Liberation News Service

Bush’s Abomination’s #2 Failure: Economic Security

Bush’s Abomination’s #2 Failure: Economic Security

Chris Giles, Financial Times: Central banks are shifting reserves away from the US and towards the eurozone in a move that looks set to deepen the Bush administration's difficulties in financing its ballooning current account deficit.
In actions likely to undermine the dollar's value on currency markets, 70 per cent of central bank reserve managers said they had increased their exposure to the euro over the past two years. The majority thought eurozone money and debt markets were as attractive a destination for investment as the US.
The findings emerge from a survey of central bank reserve managers published today and conducted between September and December of last year. About 65 central banks, controlling assets worth $1,700bn, took part and the results showed a marked change in attitude over the past two years.
Any rebalancing of central bank reserve portfolios has serious implications for the global financial system as the US has become increasingly dependent on official flows of funds to finance its current account deficit, estimated at $650bn in 2004.
At the end of 2003, central banks held 70 per cent of their official reserves in dollar- denominated assets and central bank purchases of US securities had financed more than 80 per cent of the the US current account deficit in 2003…

http://www.tallahassee.com/mld/tallahassee/business/10740504.htm?template=contentModules/printstory.jsp

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Posted on Wed, Jan. 26, 2005

Economist: China Loses Faith in Dollar

EDITH M. LEDERER
Associated Press
DAVOS, Switzerland - China has lost faith in the stability of the U.S. dollar and its first priority is to broaden the exchange rate for its currency from the dollar to a more flexible basket of currencies, a top Chinese economist said Wednesday at the World Economic Forum.
At a standing-room only session focusing on the world's fastest-growing economy, Fan Gang, director of the National Economic Research Institute at the China Reform Foundation, said the issue for China isn't whether to devalue the yuan but "to limit it from the U.S. dollar."
But he stressed that the Chinese government is under no pressure to revalue its currency.
China's exchange rate policies restrict the value of the yuan to a narrow band around 8.28 yuan, pegged to $1. Critics argue that the yuan is undervalued, making China's exports cheaper overseas and giving its manufacturers an unfair advantage. Beijing has been under pressure from its trading partners, especially the United States, to relax controls on its currency.
"The U.S. dollar is no longer - in our opinion is no longer - (seen) as a stable currency, and is devaluating all the time, and that's putting troubles all the time," Fan said, speaking in English.
"So the real issue is how to change the regime from a U.S. dollar pegging ... to a more manageable ... reference ... say Euros, yen, dollars - those kind of more diversified systems," he said.
"If you do this, in the beginning you have some kind of initial shock," Fan said. "You have to deal with some devaluation pressures."
The dollar hit a new low in December against the euro and has been falling against other major currencies on concerns about the ever-growing U.S. trade and budget deficits.
The U.S. currency came under some pressure Wednesday, drifting lower versus most currencies including the Japanese yen and the euro, as dealers mulled the Chinese official's statements.
Fan said last year China lost a good opportunity to do revalue its currency, in July and October.
"High pressure, we don't do it. When the pressure's gone, we forgot," Fan said, to laughter from the audience. "But this time, I think Chinese authorities will not forget it. Now people understand the U.S. dollar will not stop devaluating."
Asked how speculation about revaluation could be curbed, he noted that China imposed a 3 percent tariff on Chinese exports.
Some Chinese experts say that perhaps inflation can be reduced this year, "but I'm not that optimistic," Fan said, noting that fuel prices keep rising.
"So maybe China (will) have 4-5 percent inflation in 2005," he said.
Fan, whose nonprofit institute specializes in analyzing the Chinese economy, stressed that the country's development is a long-term process that will take decades, maybe a century.
Since China's economic modernization began over a decade ago, 120 million rural laborers have moved into cities, but another 200 million or 300 million people need to move into the cities from the countryside to spur development, he said.
"The income disparity is huge, and income disparity will stay with us for a long time, as long as those 200 to 300 million rural laborers stay in the countryside," Fan said.
Nonetheless, William Parrett, chief executive of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, told the panel that Chinese companies are making significant progress in becoming global giants, led by state-owned companies.
"It's probably at least 10 years before the objective of the government of 50 of the largest 500 companies in the world being Chinese" is achieved, he said.

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© 2005 AP Wire and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.tallahassee.com

http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/01/25/business/trade.html

Central banks shift reserves away from US
By Chris Giles
Published: January 24 2005 00:03 | Last updated: January 24 2005 00:03

Central banks are shifting reserves away from the US and towards the eurozone in a move that looks set to deepen the Bush administration's difficulties in financing its ballooning current account deficit.
In actions likely to undermine the dollar's value on currency markets, 70 per cent of central bank reserve managers said they had increased their exposure to the euro over the past two years. The majority thought eurozone money and debt markets were as attractive a destination for investment as the US.
The findings emerge from a survey of central bank reserve managers published today and conducted between September and December of last year. About 65 central banks, controlling assets worth $1,700bn, took part and the results showed a marked change in attitude over the past two years.
Any rebalancing of central bank reserve portfolios has serious implications for the global financial system as the US has become increasingly dependent on official flows of funds to finance its current account deficit, estimated at $650bn in 2004.
At the end of 2003, central banks held 70 per cent of their official reserves in dollar- denominated assets and central bank purchases of US securities had financed more than 80 per cent of the the US current account deficit in 2003.
Any reluctance to increase exposure to dollar assets further could cause the greenback to plunge on currency markets.
"The US cannot take support for the dollar for granted," said Nick Carver, one of the authors of the study conducted by Central Banking Publications, a company that specialises in reporting on central banks.
"Central banks' enthusiasm for the dollar seem to be cooling off."
In a further worrying sign for the greenback, 47 per cent of reserve managers surveyed said they expected the growth of official reserves to slow to less than 20 per cent over the next four years. Between the end of 2000 and mid-2004, official reserves had increased by 66 per cent.
Slower reserve accumulation growth implies the supply of official finance is likely to become more limited but few expect the demand from the US for finance to slow. The consensus among economists is that the US current account deficit will increase to $694bn in 2005.
More than 90 per cent of central bank reserve managers said that the income from reserve management was "important" or "very important".
In the two years since a similar survey was conducted, reserve managers had begun to seek higher returns for the money under management.
For these managers, dollar assets have become less attractive because the fall in the dollar since 2002 has reduced the yield they received and, in some cases, has led to negative real returns.
Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, warned in November that there was a limit to the willingness of foreign governments to finance the US current account deficit.
The survey was conducted on the guarantee of anonymity for the banks involved. The 65 central banks that participated control 45 per cent of global official reserves. Individually, they had up to $250bn under management.

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http://news.ft.com/cms/s/9ef63678-6d7d-11d9-9b69-00000e2511c8,ft_acl=,s01=1.html

Bush’s Abomination’s #3 Failure: Environmental Security

Bush’s Abomination’s #3 Failure: Environmental Security

FELICITY BARRINGER , New York Times: Countries from Northern and Central Europe and South America dominated the top spots in the 2005 index of environmental sustainability, which ranks nations on their success at such tasks as maintaining or improving air and water quality, maximizing biodiversity and cooperating with other countries on environmental problems.
Finland, Norway and Uruguay held the top three spots in the ranking, prepared by researchers at Yale and Columbia Universities. The United States ranked 45th of the 146 countries studied, behind such countries as Japan, Botswana and the tiny Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, and most of Western Europe.
The lowest-ranking country was North Korea. Among those near the bottom were Haiti, Taiwan, Iraq and Kuwait.

Bush’s Abomination’s #3 Failure: Environmental Security

Published on Sunday, February 6, 2005 by the lndependent/UK

Apocalypse Now: How Mankind is Sleepwalking to the End of the Earth
Floods, storms and droughts. Melting Arctic ice, shrinking glaciers, oceans turning to acid. The world's top scientists warned last week that dangerous climate change is taking place today, not the day after tomorrow. You don't believe it? Then, says Geoffrey Lean, read this...

by Geoffrey Lean

Future historians, looking back from a much hotter and less hospitable world, are likely to play special attention to the first few weeks of 2005. As they puzzle over how a whole generation could have sleepwalked into disaster - destroying the climate that has allowed human civilization to flourish over the past 11,000 years - they may well identify the past weeks as the time when the last alarms sounded.
Last week, 200 of the world's leading climate scientists - meeting at Tony Blair's request at the Met Office's new headquarters at Exeter - issued the most urgent warning to date that dangerous climate change is taking place, and that time is running out.
Next week the Kyoto Protocol, the international treaty that tries to control global warming, comes into force after a seven-year delay. But it is clear that the protocol does not go nearly far enough.

A man cycles past the cooling towers of a state-owned steel mill in Beijing. The effects of global warming are already apparent, unexpected problems are looming and there are no 'magic bullets' for tackling the peril, a top forum of climate scientists warned. (AFP/Goh Chai Hin)
The alarms have been going off since the beginning of one of the warmest Januaries on record. First, Dr Rajendra Pachauri - chairman of the official Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - told a UN conference in Mauritius that the pollution which causes global warming has reached "dangerous" levels.
Then the biggest-ever study of climate change, based at Oxford University, reported that it could prove to be twice as catastrophic as the IPCC's worst predictions. And an international task force - also reporting to Tony Blair, and co-chaired by his close ally, Stephen Byers - concluded that we could reach "the point of no return" in a decade.
Finally, the UK head of Shell, Lord Oxburgh, took time out - just before his company reported record profits mainly achieved by selling oil, one of the main causes of the problem - to warn that unless governments take urgent action there "will be a disaster".
But it was last week at the Met Office's futuristic glass headquarters, incongruously set in a dreary industrial estate on the outskirts of Exeter, that it all came together. The conference had been called by the Prime Minister to advise him on how to "avoid dangerous climate change". He needed help in persuading the world to prioritize the issue this year during Britain's presidencies of the EU and the G8 group of economic powers.
The conference opened with the Secretary of State for the Environment, Margaret Beckett, warning that "a significant impact" from global warming "is already inevitable". It continued with presentations from top scientists and economists from every continent. These showed that some dangerous climate change was already taking place and that catastrophic events once thought highly improbable were now seen as likely (see panel). Avoiding the worst was technically simple and economically cheap, they said, provided that governments could be persuaded to take immediate action.
About halfway through I realized that I had been here before. In the summer of 1986 the world's leading nuclear experts gathered in Vienna for an inquest into the accident at Chernobyl. The head of the Russian delegation showed a film shot from a helicopter, and we suddenly found ourselves gazing down on the red-hot exposed reactor core.
It was all, of course, much less dramatic at Exeter. But as paper followed learned paper, once again a group of world authorities were staring at a crisis they had devoted their lives to trying to avoid.
I am willing to bet there were few in the room who did not sense their children or grandchildren standing invisibly at their shoulders. The conference formally concluded that climate change was "already occurring" and that "in many cases the risks are more serious than previously thought". But the cautious scientific language scarcely does justice to the sense of the meeting.
We learned that glaciers are shrinking around the world. Arctic sea ice has lost almost half its thickness in recent decades. Natural disasters are increasing rapidly around the world. Those caused by the weather - such as droughts, storms, and floods - are rising three times faster than those - such as earthquakes - that are not.
We learned that bird populations in the North Sea collapsed last year, after the sand eels on which they feed left its warmer waters - and how the number of scientific papers recording changes in ecosystems due to global warming has escalated from 14 to more than a thousand in five years.
Worse, leading scientists warned of catastrophic changes that once they had dismissed as "improbable". The meeting was particularly alarmed by powerful evidence, first reported in The Independent on Sunday last July, that the oceans are slowly turning acid, threatening all marine life.
Professor Chris Rapley, director of the British Antarctic Survey, presented new evidence that the West Antarctic ice sheet is beginning to melt, threatening eventually to raise sea levels by 15ft: 90 per cent of the world's people live near current sea levels. Recalling that the IPCC's last report had called Antarctica "a slumbering giant", he said: "I would say that this is now an awakened giant."
Professor Mike Schlesinger, of the University of Illinois, reported that the shutdown of the Gulf Stream, once seen as a "low probability event", was now 45 per cent likely this century, and 70 per cent probable by 2200. If it comes sooner rather than later it will be catastrophic for Britain and northern Europe, giving us a climate like Labrador (which shares our latitude) even as the rest of the world heats up: if it comes later it could be beneficial, moderating the worst of the warming.
The experts at Exeter were virtually unanimous about the danger, mirroring the attitude of the climate science community as a whole: humanity is to blame. There were a few skeptics at Exeter, including Andrei Illarionov, an adviser to Russia's President Putin, who last year called the Kyoto Protocol "an interstate Auschwitz". But in truth it is much easier to find skeptics among media pundits in London or neo-cons in Washington than among climate scientists. Even the few contrarian climatalogists publish little research to support their views, concentrating on questioning the work of others.
Now a new scientific consensus is emerging - that the warming must be kept below an average increase of two degrees centigrade if catastrophe is to be avoided. This almost certainly involves keeping concentrations of carbon dioxide, the main cause of climate change, below 400 parts per million.
Unfortunately we are almost there, with concentrations exceeding 370ppm and rising, but experts at the conference concluded that we could go briefly above the danger level so long as we brought it down rapidly afterwards. They added that this would involve the world reducing emissions by 50 per cent by 2050 - and rich countries cutting theirs by 30 per cent by 2020.
Economists stressed there is little time for delay. If action is put off for a decade, it will need to be twice as radical; if it has to wait 20 years, it will cost between three and seven times as much.
The good news is that it can be done with existing technology, by cutting energy waste, expanding the use of renewable sources, growing trees and crops (which remove carbon dioxide from the air) to turn into fuel, capturing the gas before it is released from power stations, and - maybe - using more nuclear energy.
The better news is that it would not cost much: one estimate suggested the cost would be about 1 per cent of Europe's GNP spread over 20 years; another suggested it meant postponing an expected fivefold increase in world wealth by just two years. Many experts believe combating global warming would increase prosperity, by bringing in new technologies.
The big question is whether governments will act. President Bush's opposition to international action remains the greatest obstacle. Tony Blair, by almost universal agreement, remains the leader with the best chance of persuading him to change his mind.
But so far the Prime Minister has been more influenced by the President than the other way round. He appears to be moving away from fighting for the pollution reductions needed in favor of agreeing on a vague pledge to bring in new technologies sometime in the future.
By then it will be too late. And our children and grandchildren will wonder - as we do in surveying, for example, the drift into the First World War - "how on earth could they be so blind?"
WATER WARS
What could happen? Wars break out over diminishing water resources as populations grow and rains fail.
How would this come about? Over 25 per cent more people than at present are expected to live in countries where water is scarce in the future, and global warming will make it worse.
How likely is it? Former UN chief Boutros Boutros-Ghali has long said that the next Middle East war will be fought for water, not oil.
DISAPPEARING NATIONS
What could happen? Low-lying island such as the Maldives and Tuvalu - with highest points only a few feet above sea-level - will disappear off the face of the Earth.
How would this come about? As the world heats up, sea levels are rising, partly because glaciers are melting, and partly because the water in the oceans expands as it gets warmer.
How likely is it? Inevitable. Even if global warming stopped today, the seas would continue to rise for centuries. Some small islands have already sunk for ever. A year ago, Tuvalu was briefly submerged.
FLOODING
What could happen? London, New York, Tokyo, Bombay, many other cities and vast areas of countries from Britain to Bangladesh disappear under tens of feet of water, as the seas rise dramatically.
How would this come about? Ice caps in Greenland and Antarctica melt. The Greenland ice sheet would raise sea levels by more than 20ft, the West Antarctic ice sheet by another 15ft.
How likely is it? Scientists used to think it unlikely, but this year reported that the melting of both ice caps had begun. It will take hundreds of years, however, for the seas to rise that much.
UNINHABITABLE EARTH
What could happen? Global warming escalates to the point where the world's whole climate abruptly switches, turning it permanently into a much hotter and less hospitable planet.
How would this come about? A process involving "positive feedback" causes the warming to fuel itself, until it reaches a point that finally tips the climate pattern over.
How likely is it? Abrupt flips have happened in the prehistoric past. Scientists believe this is unlikely, at least in the foreseeable future, but increasingly they are refusing to rule it out.
RAINFOREST FIRES
What could happen? Famously wet tropical forests, such as those in the Amazon, go up in flames, destroying the world's richest wildlife habitats and releasing vast amounts of carbon dioxide to speed global warming.
How would this come about? Britain's Met Office predicted in 1999 that much of the Amazon will dry out and die within 50 years, making it ready for sparks - from humans or lightning - to set it ablaze.
How likely is it? Very, if the predictions turn out to be right. Already there have been massive forest fires in Borneo and Amazonia, casting palls of highly polluting smoke over vast areas.
THE BIG FREEZE
What could happen? Britain and northern Europe get much colder because the Gulf Stream, which provides as much heat as the sun in winter, fails.
How would this come about? Melting polar ice sends fresh water into the North Atlantic. The less salty water fails to generate the underwater current which the Gulf Stream needs.
How likely is it? About evens for a Gulf Steam failure this century, said scientists last week.
STARVATION
What could happen? Food production collapses in Africa, for example, as rainfall dries up and droughts increase. As farmland turns to desert, people flee in their millions in search of food.
How would this come about? Rainfall is expected to decrease by up to 60 per cent in winter and 30 per cent in summer in southern Africa this century. By some estimates, Zambia could lose almost all its farms.
How likely is it? Pretty likely unless the world tackles both global warming and Africa's decline. Scientists agree that droughts will increase in a warmer world.
ACID OCEANS
What could happen? The seas will gradually turn more and more acid. Coral reefs, shellfish and plankton, on which all life depends, will die off. Much of the life of the oceans will become extinct.
How would this come about? The oceans have absorbed half the carbon dioxide, the main cause of global warming, so far emitted by humanity. This forms dilute carbonic acid, which attacks corals and shells.
How likely is it? It is already starting. Scientists warn that the chemistry of the oceans is changing in ways unprecedented for 20 million years. Some predict that the world's coral reefs will die within 35 years.
DISEASE
What could happen? Malaria - which kills two million people worldwide every year - reaches Britain with foreign travelers, gets picked up by British mosquitos and becomes endemic in the warmer climate.
How would this come about? Four of our 40 mosquito species can carry the disease, and hundreds of travelers return with it annually. The insects breed faster, and feed more, in warmer temperatures.
How likely is it? A Department of Health study has suggested it may happen by 2050: the Environment Agency has mentioned 2020. Some experts say it is miraculous that it has not happened already.
HURRICANES
What could happen? Hurricanes, typhoons and violent storms proliferate, grow even fiercer, and hit new areas. Last September's repeated battering of Florida and the Caribbean may be just a foretaste of what is to come, say scientists.
How would this come about? The storms gather their energy from warm seas, and so, as oceans heat up, fiercer ones occur and threaten areas where at present the seas are too cool for such weather.
How likely is it? Scientists are divided over whether storms will get more frequent and whether the process has already begun.
© 2005 Independent News & Media (UK) Ltd.
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http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0206-01.htm

Published on Thursday, February 3, 2005 by the Independent/UK

Global Warming: Scientists Reveal Timetable
by Michael McCarthy

A detailed timetable of the destruction and distress that global warming is likely to cause the world was unveiled yesterday.
It pulls together for the first time the projected impacts on ecosystems and wildlife, food production, water resources and economies across the earth, for given rises in global temperature expected during the next hundred years.
The resultant picture gives the most wide-ranging impression yet of the bewildering array of destructive effects that climate change is expected to exert on different regions, from the mountains of Europe and the rainforests of the Amazon to the coral reefs of the tropics.

There will be a rapid increase in populations exposed to hunger, with up to 5.5 billion people living in regions with large losses in crop production, while another 3 billion people will have increased risk of water shortages. (AFP/François Anardin)
Produced through a synthesis of a wide range of recent academic studies, it was presented as a paper yesterday to the international conference on climate change being held at the UK Met Office headquarters in Exeter by the author Bill Hare, of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Germany's leading global warming research institute.
The conference has been called personally by Tony Blair as part of Britain's attempts to move the climate change issue up the agenda during the current UK presidency of the G8 group of rich nations, and the European Union. It has already heard disturbing warnings from the latest climate research, including the revelation on Tuesday from the British Antarctic Survey that the massive West Antarctic ice sheet might be disintegrating - an event which, if it happened completely, would raise sea levels around the world by 16ft (4.9 meters).
Dr Hare's timetable shows the impacts of climate change multiplying rapidly as average global temperature goes up, towards 1C above levels before the industrial revolution, then to 2C, and then 3C.
As present world temperatures are already 0.7C above the pre-industrial level, the process is well under way. In the near future - the next 25 years - as the temperature climbs to the 1C mark, some specialized ecosystems will start to feel stress, such as the tropical highland forests of Queensland, which contain a large number of Australia's endemic plant species, and the succulent karoo plant region of South Africa. In some developing countries, food production will start to decline, water shortage problems will worsen and there will be net losses in GDP.
It is when the temperature moves up to 2C above the pre-industrial level, expected in the middle of this century - within the lifetime of many people alive today - that serious effects start to come thick and fast, studies suggest.
Substantial losses of Arctic sea ice will threaten species such as polar bears and walruses, while in tropical regions "bleaching" of coral reefs will become more frequent - when the animals that live in the coral are forced out by high temperatures and the reef may die. Mediterranean regions will be hit by more forest fires and insect pests, while in regions of the US such as the Rockies, rivers may become too warm for trout and salmon.
In South Africa, the Fynbos, the world's most remarkable floral kingdom which has more than 8,000 endemic wild flowers, will start to lose its species, as will alpine areas from Europe to Australia; the broad-leaved forests of China will start to die. The numbers at risk from hunger will increase and another billion and a half people will face water shortages, and GDP losses in some developing countries will become significant.
But when the temperature moves up to the 3C level, expected in the early part of the second half of the century, these effects will become critical. There is likely to be irreversible damage to the Amazon rainforest, leading to its collapse, and the complete destruction of coral reefs is likely to be widespread.
The alpine flora of Europe, Australia and New Zealand will probably disappear completely, with increasing numbers of extinctions of other plant species. There will be severe losses of China's broadleaved forests, and in South Africa the flora of the Succulent Karoo will be destroyed, and the flora of the Fynbos will be hugely damaged.
There will be a rapid increase in populations exposed to hunger, with up to 5.5 billion people living in regions with large losses in crop production, while another 3 billion people will have increased risk of water shortages.
Above the 3C raised level, which may be after 2070, the effects will be catastrophic: the Arctic sea ice will disappear, and species such as polar bears and walruses may disappear with it, while the main prey species of Arctic carnivores, such as wolves, Arctic foxes and the collared lemming, will have gone from 80 per cent of their range, critically endangering predators.
In human terms there is likely to be catastrophe too, with water stress becoming even worse, and whole regions becoming unsuitable for producing food, while there will be substantial impacts on global GDP.
© 2005 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd
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http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0203-04.htm

EPA Says White House Flunks Mercury Safety

By JOHN HEILPRIN, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON - The Bush administration overlooked health effects and sided with the electric industry in developing rules for cutting toxic mercury pollution, the Environmental Protection Agency (news - web sites)'s inspector general said Thursday.
The agency fell short of its own requirements and presidential orders by "not fully analyzing the cost-benefit of regulatory alternatives and not fully assessing the rule's impact on children's health," the agency's internal watchdog said in a 54-page report.
Nikki L. Tinsley's report said the EPA based its mercury pollution limits on an analysis submitted by Western Energy Supply and Transmission Associates, a research and advocacy group representing 17 coal-fired utilities in eight Western states.
The Clean Air Act requires the EPA to set the limits based on the most advanced pollution controls used by industry. Tinsley said agency workers were instructed by "EPA senior management" to develop a standard compared with other regulations and a White House legislative plan, "instead of basing the standard on an unbiased determination" of the limits.
In response to the report, EPA officials said it was "not true" that the administration proposed mercury pollution standards without following requirements of the law.
Mercury from power plants settles in waterways and accumulates in fish. The toxic metal can cause neurological and developmental problems, particularly in fetuses and young children. It also is being studied for risks associated with cardiovascular diseases.
Sen. Jim Jeffords and six Democratic senators asked Tinsley in April to investigate how the EPA put together the mercury rule it proposed in December 2003.
"Unfortunately, this report confirms that the administration's proposal to regulate mercury compromises children's health for the benefit of corporate profits," said Jeffords, an independent from Vermont.
The Food and Drug Administration (news - web sites) has warned that high levels of mercury in some fish, including albacore tuna, can pose a hazard for children and for women pregnant or nursing.
The EPA estimates that about 8 percent of American women of childbearing age have enough mercury in their blood to put a fetus at risk.
EPA spokeswoman Cynthia Bergman said the rule's purpose is to protect children and women of child-bearing ages, adding that a final decision on it hasn't been made and that more analyses are being done.
She said EPA does not want its regulation to encourage utilities to switch from coal to natural gas, and pointed out that Tinsley's report noted the "wide latitude" the agency has in deciding which pollution to use.
"The proposed rule would take us from no regulation to a mandatory 70 percent cut," Bergman said. "The report improperly characterizes the process, which has been inclusive."
The pending regulation envisions a 70 percent cut in mercury emissions from coal-burning power plants by 2018, from the current 48 tons a year to 15 tons.
The EPA is expected to issue the rule by March 15 to comply with a court-approved agreement with the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group. The council agreed to that date to give the agency more time to do analysis and collect more public comments; so far, more than 500,000 have been submitted, mostly form letters.
Bergman and other EPA officials said Tinsley's report fails to consider that mercury pollution is a global problem and that most Americans are exposed to it by eating fish imported from abroad.
The environmental group sued EPA in 1992 to force the agency to regulate hazardous air pollutants from power plants. The Clinton administration in late 2000 directed EPA to regulate mercury as a toxic, hazardous substance and require "maximum achievable control technology" at hundreds of coal-fired power plants.

Since the late 1990s, the EPA had regulated mercury dumped in water and air from municipal waste and medical waste incinerators, but not from power plants.
Utilities could meet the EPA's target by switching to cleaner-burning coal or natural gas, or installing equipment to cut smog and acid rain.
The agency's favored approach is an industry-supported program that would let plants sell unused pollution rights to companies that overshoot their allowances. Under a pollution-trading system, plants unable to meet the required reductions could buy emission allowances from other plants that have exceeded the required cuts.
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On the Net:
Environmental Protection Agency's Office of Inspector General: http://www.epa.gov/oig/index.htm
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20050204/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/epa_mercury

Global Warming Is 'Twice As Bad As Previously Thought'
By Steve Connor
The Independent U.K.
Thursday 27 January 2005
Global warming might be twice as catastrophic as previously thought, flooding settlements on the British coast and turning the interior into an unrecognisable tropical landscape, the world's biggest study of climate change shows.
Researchers from some of Britain's leading universities used computer modelling to predict that under the "worst-case" scenario, London would be under water and winters banished to history as average temperatures in the UK soar up to 20C higher than at present.
Globally, average temperatures could reach 11C greater than today, double the rise predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the international body set up to investigate global warming. Such high temperatures would melt most of the polar icecaps and mountain glaciers, raising sea levels by more than 20ft. A report this week in The Independent predicted a 2C temperature rise would lead to irreversible changes in the climate.
The new study, in the journal Nature, was done using the spare computing time of 95,000 people from 150 countries who downloaded from the internet the global climate model of the Met Office's Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research. The program, run as a screensaver, simulated what would happen if carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere were double those of the 18th century, before the Industrial Revolution, the situation predicted by the middle of this century.
David Stainforth of Oxford University, the chief scientist of the latest study, said processing the results showed the Earth's climate is far more sensitive to increases in man-made greenhouse gases than previously realised. The findings indicate a doubling of carbon dioxide from the pre-industrial level of 280 parts per million would increase global average temperatures by between 2C and 11C.
Mr Stainforth said: "An 11C-warmed world would be a dramatically different world... There would be large areas at higher latitudes that could be up to 20C warmer than today. The UK would be at the high end of these changes. It is possible that even present levels of greenhouse gases maintained for long periods may lead to dangerous climate change... When you start to look at these temperatures, I get very worried indeed."
Attempts to control global warming, based on the Kyoto treaty, concentrated on stabilising the emissions of greenhouse gases at 1990 levels, but the scientists warned that this might not be enough. Mr Stainforth added: "We need to accept that while greenhouse gas levels can increase we need to limit them, level them off then bring them back down again."
Professor Bob Spicer, of the Open University, said average global temperature rises of 11C are unprecedented in the long geological record of the Earth. "If we go back to the Cretaceous, which is 100 million years ago, the best estimates of the global mean temperature was about 6C higher than present," Professor Spicer said. "So 11C is quite substantial and if this is right we would be going into a realm that we really don't have much evidence for even in the rock [geological] record."
Myles Allen, of Oxford University, said: "The danger zone is not something we're going to reach in the middle of the century; we're in it now." Each of the hottest 15 years on record have been since 1980.
-------http://www.truthout.org/docs_05/012805V.shtml
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-0501250264jan25,1,1331129.story?coll=chi-news-hed&ctrack=1&cset=true
AROUND THE WORLD
Panel: Irreversible crises loom with global warming

Items compiled from Tribune news services

January 25, 2005

LONDON, BRITAIN -- Global warming is approaching the point of no return, after which widespread drought, crop failure and rising sea levels will be irreversible, an international climate-change task force warns.

It called Monday on the Group of 8 leading industrial nations to cut carbon emissions, double their research spending on technology and work with India and China to build on the Kyoto Protocol for cuttings emissions of "greenhouse gases."

The independent report was created by the Institute for Public Policy Research in Britain, the Center for American Progress in the United States, and the Australia Institute.

Stephen Byers, co-chairman of the task force, said it is vital that U.S. cooperation in tackling climate change is secured. President Bush has rejected the Kyoto accord, arguing that the carbon emission cuts it demands would damage the U.S. economy.
Copyright © 2005, Chicago Tribune
Published on Sunday, January 23, 2005 by the lndependent/UK

Global Warming Approaching Point of No Return, Warns Leading Climate Expert
by Geoffrey Lean

Global warning has already hit the danger point that international attempts to curb it are designed to avoid, according to the world's top climate watchdog.
Dr Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the official Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), told an international conference attended by 114 governments in Mauritius this month that he personally believes that the world has "already reached the level of dangerous concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere" and called for immediate and "very deep" cuts in the pollution if humanity is to "survive".
His comments rocked the Bush administration - which immediately tried to slap him down - not least because it put him in his post after Exxon, the major oil company most opposed to international action on global warming, complained that his predecessor was too "aggressive" on the issue.
A memorandum from Exxon to the White House in early 2001 specifically asked it to get the previous chairman, Dr Robert Watson, the chief scientist of the World Bank, "replaced at the request of the US". The Bush administration then lobbied other countries in favor of Dr Pachauri - whom the former vice-president Al Gore called the "let's drag our feet" candidate, and got him elected to replace Dr Watson, a British-born naturalized American, who had repeatedly called for urgent action.
But this month, at a conference of Small Island Developing States on the Indian Ocean island, the new chairman, a former head of India's Tata Energy Research Institute, himself issued what top United Nations officials described as a "very courageous" challenge.
He told delegates: "Climate change is for real. We have just a small window of opportunity and it is closing rather rapidly. There is not a moment to lose."
Afterwards he told The Independent on Sunday that widespread dying of coral reefs, and rapid melting of ice in the Arctic, had driven him to the conclusion that the danger point the IPCC had been set up to avoid had already been reached.
Reefs throughout the world are perishing as the seas warm up: as water temperatures rise, they lose their colors and turn a ghostly white. Partly as a result, up to a quarter of the world's corals have been destroyed.
And in November, a multi-year study by 300 scientists concluded that the Arctic was warming twice as fast as the rest of the world and that its ice-cap had shrunk by up to 20 per cent in the past three decades.
The ice is also 40 per cent thinner than it was in the 1970s and is expected to disappear altogether by 2070. And while Dr Pachauri was speaking parts of the Arctic were having a January "heatwave", with temperatures eight to nine degrees centigrade higher than normal.
He also cited alarming measurements, first reported in The Independent on Sunday, showing that levels of carbon dioxide (the main cause of global warming) have leapt abruptly over the past two years, suggesting that climate change may be accelerating out of control.
He added that, because of inertia built into the Earth's natural systems, the world was now only experiencing the result of pollution emitted in the 1960s, and much greater effects would occur as the increased pollution of later decades worked its way through. He concluded: "We are risking the ability of the human race to survive."
© 2005 Independent News & Media (UK) Ltd.
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http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0123-01.htm

________________________________________
January 24, 2005
Nations Ranked as Protectors of the Environment
By FELICITY BARRINGER

ASHINGTON, Jan. 23 - Countries from Northern and Central Europe and South America dominated the top spots in the 2005 index of environmental sustainability, which ranks nations on their success at such tasks as maintaining or improving air and water quality, maximizing biodiversity and cooperating with other countries on environmental problems.
Finland, Norway and Uruguay held the top three spots in the ranking, prepared by researchers at Yale and Columbia Universities. The United States ranked 45th of the 146 countries studied, behind such countries as Japan, Botswana and the tiny Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, and most of Western Europe.
The lowest-ranking country was North Korea. Among those near the bottom were Haiti, Taiwan, Iraq and Kuwait.
The index is the second produced in collaboration with the World Economic Forum, which meets in Davos, Switzerland, this week. The first complete index, in 2002, produced outrage and soul-searching in lower-ranking countries like Belgium and South Korea, said Daniel C. Esty, the director of the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy and an author of the report.
The report is based on 75 measures, including the rate at which children die from respiratory diseases, fertility rates, water quality, overfishing, emission of heat-trapping gases and the export of sodium dioxide, a crucial component of acid rain.
In its opening chapter, the Environmental Sustainability Index report said: "Although imperfect, the E.S.I. helps to fill a long-existing gap in environmental performance evaluation. It offers a small step toward a more vigorous and quantitative approach to environmental decision making."
The report also cited a statistically significant correlation between high-ranking countries and countries with open political systems and effective governments.
The report's flaws stem largely from inadequate data, Mr. Esty said, adding that the ranking system is at best approximate, because some individual scores had to be imputed in many cases. But he said that data might improve in coming years.
He also said a system that rated Russia, whose populated western regions have undergone extraordinary environmental degradation, as having greater environmental sustainability than the United States had inherent weaknesses.
At 33, Russia's ranking, Mr. Esty said, is in large part a consequence of the country's vast size. While it "has terrible pollution problems" in the western industrial heartland, he said, its millions of unsettled or sparsely settled acres of Asian taiga mean "it has vast, untrammeled resources and more clean water than anywhere in the world." So, he added, "on average, Russia ends up looking better than it does to someone who lives in western Russia."
Because such differences make many countries inherently difficult to compare, he said, this report also analyzed seven clusters of similar countries; in this analysis, the United States ranked slightly below the halfway point among 24 members of the Organization of American States.
Another cluster ranked countries whose land is more than 50 percent desert, including Israel and much of the Arab world. In this group, Israel ranked second, after Namibia, and the best-performing Arab countries were Oman and Jordan. But some nations with considerable oil wealth, like Iran, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, ranked in the bottom third.
After Finland, Norway and Uruguay, the top 10 countries in the overall rankings were, in order, Sweden, Iceland, Canada, Switzerland, Guyana, Argentina and Austria.
Irritation at low rankings in the 2002 index spurred countries like Mexico and South Korea to improve their efforts, Mr. Esty added. Young Keun Chung, an environmental economist with South Korea's state Korea Environment Institute, agreed, saying: "The first time we were shocked. Our government wanted to improve our situation. So we concentrated on improving environmental policy, pollution problems, traffic problems and everything."
South Korea moved up 13 spots between 2002 and the new report, but was only No. 122 in the overall index, and 14th out of 21 high-density countries in which more than half the land has a population density greater than 100 people per square kilometer.

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The War of Iraq is Worse than Immoral, Illegal, It is Stupid, Insanely Stupid

The War of Iraq is Worse than Immoral, Illegal, It is Stupid, Insanely Stupid

Alison Roberts, Guardian: So far, PTSD experts have seen a mere handful of British sufferers from this latest war in Iraq - but as the violence goes on, the trickle is expected to become a flood. Late last year, the independent inquiry into Gulf war illnesses chaired by Lord Lloyd of Berwick came to the conclusion that there was "every reason" to accept the existence of a Gulf war syndrome, and that post-traumatic stress was one of several contributing factors. Though the Ministry of Defence does not publish statistical predictions, military psychiatrists in America have been warned to expect psychiatric disorder to occur in a remarkable 20% of servicemen and women returning from Iraq.
"What we've got now is a situation starting to approximate to Northern Ireland or Bosnia, to civil insurrection rather than a straight shooting war," says Jones, who runs PTSD clinics around the country and at a residential centre in north Wales."In those kinds of circumstances, where you're experiencing hatred and violence from an unpredictable civilian population, we tend to get a lot of very disturbed and damaged soldiers." In the field of trauma studies, this atmosphere of constant and random danger is known by the shorthand "no safe place".
Other surveys suggest that roughly half the servicemen who suffer psychiatric illness as a result of traumatic events do not seek medical help, or do so years later, when the psychological afterburn has irreparably damaged marriages, careers and mental wellbeing. "And there's still a stigma attached," says Leigh Skelton, director of clinical services at Combat Stress, the ex-services mental welfare charity. "PTSD is seen as a career-stopper within the army. Generally, the first line of action servicemen and women take is to bottle it up. Then they'll self-medicate, usually with alcohol, sometimes with other substances. Cries for help often come from relatives rather than from the affected person."
Symptoms range from insomnia, nausea and extreme fatigue to the classic "flashback"; aggression, feelings of alienation and irrational anger. Sometimes the disorder centres on one particular memory. A 30-year-old female ambulance driver in the Territorial Army, for example, constantly replays the moment her vehicle was blown up last year by a hand-made bomb tied to a lamp-post in Basra. One marine in his early 20s now suffering chronic PTSD remembers "the fear in the eyes of an Iraqi soldier in the window" of a building mortared by the British; and seeing that fear again when British soldiers mistakenly opened fire on a civilian vehicle.

The War of Iraq is Worse than Immoral, Illegal, It is Stupid, Insanely Stupid

We Need the Oil, Right? So What's the Problem?
By Ray McGovern
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Monday 14 February 2005
Such openness is rare; it set me back on my heels. The question came last Monday as I finished a lecture in Pewaukee, Wisconsin–the first of a handful of talks I gave for "Great Decisions 2005," a program of the Institute of World Affairs, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
With the "weapons of mass destruction" of recent memory having evaporated as casus belli for the invasion and occupation of Iraq, I had decided to experiment with a tutorial on what I believe to be the real reasons behind the war—first and foremost, oil. Passing by a phalanx of late-model gas-guzzlers on my way in, I found myself wondering how my observations on the oil factor would be received. In the end, I was more than a little surprised that none of the 250 folks in that very conservative audience seemed to have much of a problem.
The Most Recent Death
I had thought I was in for a much more difficult time. Among other things, the news had just broken that 22 year-old Lance Cpl. Travis M. Wichlacz of the Milwaukee-based Fox Company had become the fifth from that company, and the 33rd from Wisconsin overall, to be killed in action in Iraq. His stepmother told a reporter, "Travis was kicking down doors. They were going into houses and finding weapons caches and dismantling bombs." Cpl. Wichlacz died in a roadside bombing southwest of Baghdad on February 5.
We began with a moment of silence in his memory, and then imagined ourselves into the scene with the newspaper reporter who had spoken with Wichlacz' father, Dennis. We tried to anticipate questions Mr. Wichlacz might ask us:
Q. "How could our country have had such bad intelligence that President Bush was misled into starting this war?"
A. "I'm afraid it's not that simple, Dennis. The Bush administration decided to attack Iraq many months before any ‘intelligence' was adduced to ‘justify' such an attack. Yes, the intelligence conjured up was bad. But its target was Congress; even Colin Powell has admitted that. And the aim was to deceive our lawmakers into forfeiting to the Executive Congress' constitutional prerogative to authorize war."
Q. "But what about my son?... and the others who died? Why?"
A. "Oil."
Oil
Canadian writer Linda McQuaig, author of "It's the Crude, Dude", has noted that decades from now it will all seem a no-brainer. Historians will calmly discuss the war in Iraq and identify oil as one of the key factors in the decision to launch it. They will point to growing US dependence on foreign oil, the competition with China, India, and others for a world oil supply with terminal illness, and the fact that (as Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz has put it) Iraq "swims on a sea of oil." It will all seem so obvious as to provoke little more than a yawn.
But that will be then. Now is now. How best to explain the abrupt transition from early-nineties prudence to the present day recklessness of this administration? How to fathom the continued cynicism that trades throwaway soldiers for the chimera of controlling Middle East oil?
The Earlier Cheney on Our Soldiers
In August 1992, Dick Cheney, then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney under a very different President Bush, was asked to explain why US tanks did not roll into Baghdad and depose Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War. Cheney said:
"I don't think you could have done that without significant casualties... And the question in my mind is how many additional casualties is Saddam worth? And the answer is not that damned many... And we're not going to get bogged down in the problems of trying to take over and govern Iraq."
"Where the Prize Ultimately Lies"
Later, then-CEO Dick Cheney of Halliburton found himself focusing on different priorities. In the fall of 1999 he complained:
"Oil companies are expected to keep developing enough oil to offset oil depletion and also to meet new demand...So where is this oil going to come from? Governments and national oil companies are obviously in control of 90 percent of the assets... The Middle East with two-thirds of the world's oil and the lowest cost is still where the prize ultimately lies."
What had changed in the seven years between Cheney's two statements?
• The US kept importing more and more oil to meet its energy needs.
• Energy shortages drove home the need to ensure/increase energy supply.
• Oil specialists concluded that "peak oil" production was but a decade away, while demand would continue to zoom skyward.
• The men now running US policy on the Middle East appealed to President Clinton in January 1998 to overthrow Saddam Hussein or "a significant portion of the world's supply of oil will be put at hazard."
• In October 1998 Congress passed and Clinton signed a bill declaring it the sense of Congress that "it should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein."
• International sanctions left a debilitated Iraq with greatly weakened armed forces headed by an "evil dictator."
Shortly after George W. Bush entered the White House in January 2001, Vice President Cheney's energy task force dragged out the maps of Iraq's oil fields. (We now have some of the relevant documents, courtesy of a bitterly contested Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. But the courts have upheld the White House decision to keep the task force proceedings, and even the names of its members, secret.)
To be fair, taking over Middle East oil fields was not a new idea. In 1975 Henry Kissinger, using a pseudonym, wrote an article for Harpers titled "Seizing Arab Oil," outlining plans to do just that, preventing Arab countries from having absolute control over the modern world's most vital commodity. But in those days there was a USSR to put the brakes on such adventurism.
Prize Lies
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has claimed that the conflict with Iraq "has nothing to do with oil," but those who do not limit their news intake to FOX are aware that his credibility is somewhat tarnished. After all, it was Rumsfeld who assured us, among other things, that he knew where Iraq's "weapons of mass destruction" were located. And for a war supposedly not about oil, US military planners certainly gave extremely high priority to securing the oil fields—and even the Oil Ministry in Baghdad.
It will bring no consolation to young widow Angela Coakley, whom Cpl. Wichlacz married last May just before shipping out to Iraq, or to his parents to know that they are not the first to suffer immeasurable loss on false pretenses.
If any question why we died,
Tell them because our fathers lied.
Rudyard Kipling
No Static
In Pewaukee I fully expected such observations to cause some static, at least during the formal post-lecture Q&A session before most of the audience drifted off into a light snow. I was later advised not to misread the lack of demurral as concurrence, but rather to chalk it up to Mid-West reticence.
Some twenty folks did linger in a small circle that was dominated by a persistent, well dressed man (let's call him Joe), who just would not let go:
"Surely you agree that we need the oil. Then what's your problem? Some 1,450 killed thus far are far fewer than the toll in Vietnam where we lost 58,000; it's a small price to pay... a sustainable rate to bear. What IS your problem?"
I asked Joe if he would feel differently were it to have been his son that was killed, rather than Cpl. Wichlacz, but the suggestion seemed so farfetched as to be beyond Joe's ken. (And therein lies yet another important story). So I resorted to a utilitarian approach. "Joe, we're just not going to be able to control the oil in Iraq. The war is unwinnable. There are 1.3 billion Muslims, and they are very upset with us; they will not let us prevail."
But this too made little impact on Joe.
How about Because It's Wrong
I sized Joe up as one who would press for having the Ten Commandments prominently displayed in the courthouses of America. So I took a new tack, asking him, "Isn't one of those commandments about stealing... and one about killing... one about lying... and even one about coveting your neighbor's possessions? Would you think we might lop off those four and whittle the tablets down to the remaining six so as to spare ourselves potential embarrassment?"
Joe walked off to drive his gas-guzzler home.
________________________________________
Ray McGovern is on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. His 27-year career as a CIA analyst spanned administrations from John F. Kennedy to George H. W. Bush.
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http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/021405Y.shtml

Kucinich: Iraq Elections Will Be A Farce; Closest International Election Monitors Will Get Will Be Amman, Jordan
In Letter To Secretary of State Rice and Ambassador Negroponte; Kucinich Cites Lack Of International Monitors

WASHINGTON -- January 26 -- Congressman Dennis J. Kucinich (D-OH) today said that Iraqi elections, to be held on Sunday, will be a farce. In a letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and John Negroponte, the United States Ambassador to Iraq, Kucinich cites a total absence of international election monitors in Iraq for Sunday's elections. The closest international monitors will get to Iraq on Sunday will be Amman, Jordan.
In the letter, sent today, Kucinich states,
"It is clear, in just five days before the Iraqi elections are to be held, that it will be impossible to conclude anything about the extent to which corruption, voter intimidation or outright fraud will mar the results. The exercise will regrettably be a farce. The results will have no recognized legitimacy whatsoever, and surely do not merit association with the United States' notions of democracy.
"The elections will not yield certifiable results due to the pitifully small number of election observers, and the total absence of international election observers from the process. Indeed, according to the Washington Post, this is the first transitional election in the past two decades that will not have international election observers touring polling stations. As you know, international monitors have independently observed and evaluated elections throughout the world and have helped to point out when they are fraudulent and when they are legitimate."
In previous transitional elections across the world, the international community has sent teams of observers to polling sites. International observers have observed recent transitional elections in Nigeria in 1999, Haiti in 1990, East Timor in 2001-2002, and most recently in the second runoff election in the Ukraine.
No international body will have election monitors in Iraq on Sunday. The International Mission for Iraqi Elections, led by Canada's chief electoral officer, Jean-Pierre Kingsley, and comprised of less than two dozen election experts from Australia, Bangladesh, Britain, Canada, Ghana, Hungary, Indonesia, Mexico, Panama and Yemen, will monitor the elections, not in Iraq, but instead operate from Amman, Jordan.
"I hope the Administration does not engage in wishful thinking that this farce of an election can beget anything other than farce. What a disservice we do to Iraqis who risk danger to cast their votes or run for office in this irredeemable formality. And what distortion of real democracy is being done in America's name: It will surely discredit the United States in the eyes of the world," Kucinich concludes in his letter.
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http://www.commondreams.org/news2005/0126-07.htm

http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar%2FLayout%2FArticle_Type1&c=Article&cid=1107039016034

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Jan. 30, 2005. 01:00 AM

Linda McQuaig says today's charade is simply about Iraq's oil
LINDA MCQUAIG

In the weeks before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the influential New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote approvingly of "the breath-taking audacity" of the Bush administration's plans for Iraq.
Friedman noted that the invasion would lead to "a long-term U.S. occupation" and that "Iraq will be controlled by the iron fist of the U.S. Army." Apparently he didn't regard any of this as a problem — just part of the job of remaking Iraq to fit the fantasies of U.S. policymakers.
Friedman's casual acceptance of Washington's right to redesign other countries — an attitude rampant among media commentators as well as U.S. officials — sheds light on why the occupation of Iraq has been such a disaster, and why there's little reason to believe Iraq is on the path to democracy.
No matter how inspired the rhetoric, the U.S. project in Iraq has never been about democracy. It's been about getting control of Iraq's vast, virtually untouched oil reserves, and extending Washington's military reach over the region. "Think of Iraq as a military base with a very large oil reserve underneath; you can't ask for better than that," Wall Street oil analyst Fadel Gheit told me in an interview.
Bush officials never wanted to run Iraq themselves, but rather to have a loyal local do it for them. Before the invasion, their plan was simply to install the wealthy, CIA-groomed exile Ahmed Chalabi. They also drew up sweeping plans to privatize the entire Iraqi economy, including the oil sector — before the Iraqi people got to cast a single vote.
But the "iron fist of the U.S. army" has not been popular in Iraq, fuelling a resistance that has turned key parts of the country into a free-fire zone.
Among other things, this makes meaningful elections impossible. If large numbers of people are too terrified to vote, the results won't reflect the popular will — yet they'll give an aura of legitimacy to a government that may represent a tiny minority.
But while useless in advancing real democracy, the election is highly useful to George W. Bush, who will point to a "democratic" transfer of power.
Questioned last week, Bush said the U.S. would withdraw if asked by the new government. Really?
Earlier in the week, the Pentagon acknowledged plans and budgets to keep 120,000 troops there for at least two more years.
It sure looks like Washington plans to go on calling the shots in Iraq, but now there will be a plausible government to show off to the world. If Iraq's oil industry is put on the chopping block and ends up in the hands of U.S. oil companies, Washington will be off the hook; the decision will have been made by the "elected" Iraqi government.
At last — mission accomplished.

http://kennedy.senate.gov/%7ekennedy/statements/05/1/2005127703.html

SENATOR EDWARD M. KENNEDY DISCUSSES AMERICA'S FUTURE IN IRAQ AT THE JOHNS' HOPKINS SCHOOL OF INTERNATIONAL STUDIES
January 27, 2005
________________________________________
For Immediate Release
CONTACT: Melissa Wagoner
(202) 224-2633
Address Delivered at the Johns’ Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies

Thank you Dr. Fukuyama for that generous introduction.

I’m honored to be here at the School of Advanced International Studies. Many of the most talented individuals in foreign policy have benefited from your outstanding graduate program, and I welcome the opportunity to meet with you on the issue of Iraq.

Forty years ago, America was in another war in a distant land. At that time, in 1965, we had in Vietnam the same number of troops and the same number of casualties as in Iraq today.

We thought in those early days in Vietnam that we were winning. We thought the skill and courage of our troops was enough. We thought that victory on the battlefield would lead to victory in the war, and peace and democracy for the people of Vietnam.

We lost our national purpose in Vietnam. We abandoned the truth. We failed our ideals. The words of our leaders could no longer be trusted.

In the name of a misguided cause, we continued the war too long. We failed to comprehend the events around us. We did not understand that our very presence was creating new enemies and defeating the very goals we set out to achieve. We cannot allow that history to repeat itself in Iraq. //

We must learn from our mistakes. We must recognize what a large and growing number of Iraqis now believe. The war in Iraq has become a war against the American occupation.

We have reached the point that a prolonged American military presence in Iraq is no longer productive for either Iraq or the United States. The U.S. military presence has become part of the problem, not part of the solution.

We need a serious course correction, and we need it now. We must make it for the American soldiers who are paying with their lives. We must make it for the American people who cannot afford to spend our resources and national prestige protracting the war in the wrong way. We must make it for the sake of the Iraqi people who yearn for a country that is not a permanent battlefield and for a future free from permanent occupation.

The elections in Iraq this weekend provide an opportunity for a fresh and honest approach. We need a new plan that sets fair and realistic goals for self-government in Iraq, and works with the Iraqi government on a specific timetable for the honorable homecoming of our forces.

The first step is to confront our own mistakes. Americans are rightly concerned about why our 157,000 soldiers are there -- when they will come home -- and how our policy could have gone so wrong.

No matter how many times the Administration denies it, there is no question they misled the nation and led us into a quagmire in Iraq. President Bush rushed to war on the basis of trumped up intelligence and a reckless argument that Iraq was a critical arena in the global war on terror, that somehow it was more important to start a war with Iraq than to finish the war in Afghanistan and capture Osama bin Laden, and that somehow the danger was so urgent that the U.N. weapons inspectors could not be allowed time to complete their search for weapons of mass destruction.

As in Vietnam, truth was the first casualty of this war. Nearly 1400 Americans have died. More than 10,000 have been wounded, and tens of thousands of Iraqi men, women, and children have been killed. The weapons of mass destruction weren’t there, but today 157,000 Americans are.

As a result of our actions in Iraq, our respect and credibility around the world have reached all-time lows. The President bungled the pre-war diplomacy on Iraq and wounded our alliances. The label “coalition of the willing” cannot conceal the fact that American soldiers make up 80% of the troops on the ground in Iraq and more than 90% of the casualties.

The Administration also failed to prepare for the aftermath of “victory” – and so the post-war period became a new war, with more casualties, astronomical costs, and relentless insurgent attacks.

The Administration failed to establish a basic level of law and order after Baghdad fell, and so massive looting occurred.

The Administration dissolved the Iraqi army and dismissed its troops, but left their weapons intact and their ammunition dumps unguarded, and they have become arsenals of the insurgency.
The Administration relied for advice on self-promoting Iraqi exiles who were out of touch with the Iraqi people and resented by them – and the result is an America regarded as occupier, not as liberator.

The President recklessly declared “Mission Accomplished” when in truth the mission had barely begun. He and his advisors predicted and even bragged that the war would be a cakewalk, but the expected welcoming garlands of roses became an endless bed of thorns.

The Administration told us the financial costs would be paid with Iraqi oil dollars, but it is being paid with billions of American tax dollars. Another $80 billion bill for the black hole that Iraq has become has just been handed to the American people.

The cost is also being paid in shame and stain on America’s good name as a beacon of human rights. Nothing is more at odds with our values as Americans than the torture of another human being. Do you think that any Americans tell their children with pride that America tortures prisoners? Yet, high officials in the Administration in their arrogance strayed so far from our heritage and our belief in fundamental human decency that they approved the use of torture—and they were wrong, deeply wrong, to do that.

The Administration’s willful disregard of the Geneva Conventions led to the torture and flagrant abuse of the prisoners at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib and that degradation has diminished America in the eyes of the whole world. It has diminished our moral voice on the planet.

Never in our history has there been a more powerful, more painful example of the saying that those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it.

The tide of history rises squarely against military occupation. We ignore this truth at our peril in Iraq.

The nations in the Middle East are independent, except for Iraq, which began the 20th century under Ottoman occupation and is now beginning the 21st century under American occupation.

Iraq could very well be another Algeria, where the French won the military battle for Algiers, but ultimately lost the political battle for Algeria.
Despite the clear lesson of history, the President stubbornly clings to the false hope that the turning point is just around the corner.

The ending of the rule of Saddam Hussein was supposed to lessen violence and bring an irresistible wave of democracy to the Middle East. It hasn’t. Saddam Hussein’s capture was supposed to quell the violence. It didn’t. The transfer of sovereignty was supposed to be the breakthrough. It wasn’t. The military operation in Fallujah was supposed to break the back of the insurgency. It didn’t.

The 1400 Americans killed in Iraq and the 10,000 American casualties are the equivalent of a full division of our Army – and we only have ten active divisions.

The tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians killed last year included nearly a thousand members of the new Iraqi security forces, and a hundred more have been lost this year. The recent killing of a senior Iraqi judge was the 170th assassination of an Iraqi official since June of 2003.

We all hope for the best from Sunday’s election. The Iraqis have a right to determine their own future. But Sunday’s election is not a cure for the violence and instability. Unless the Sunni and all the other communities in Iraq believe they have a stake in the outcome and a genuine role in drafting the new Iraqi constitution, the election could lead to greater alienation, greater escalation, and greater death – for us and for the Iraqis.

In fact, the Central Intelligence Agency’s top official in Baghdad warned recently that the security situation is deteriorating and is likely to worsen, with escalating violence and more sectarian clashes. How could any President have let this happen?

General Brent Scowcroft, who until recently served as Chairman of President Bush’s National Intelligence Advisory Board and who also served as the first President Bush’s National Security Adviser, recently warned of an “incipient civil war” in Iraq. He said, “the [Iraqi] elections are turning out to be less about a promising transformation, and it has great potential for deepening the conflict.”

President Bush’s Iraq policy is not, as he said during last fall’s campaign, a “catastrophic success.” It is a catastrophic failure. The men and women of our armed forces are serving honorably and with great courage under extreme conditions, but their indefinite presence is fanning the flames of conflict.

The American people are concerned. They recognize that the war with Iraq is not worth the cost in American lives, prestige, and credibility. They understand that this misbegotten war has made America more hated in the world, created new breeding grounds and support for terrorists, and made it harder to win the real war against terrorism – the war against Al Qaeda and radical jihadist terrorists.

Conservative voices are alarmed as well. As Paul Weyrich, founder of the Heritage Foundation, said last November, we are “stuck in a guerrilla war with no end in sight.”

As former Coalition Provisional Authority adviser Larry Diamond recently said, “There is a fine line between Churchillian resolve and self-defeating obstinacy.” We must recognize that line and end the obstinate policy of the Administration.

A new Iraq policy must begin with acceptance of hard truths. Most of the violence in Iraq is not being perpetrated – as President Bush has claimed – by “a handful of folks that fear freedom” and “people who want to try to impose their will on people…just like Osama bin Laden.”

The war has made Iraq a magnet for terrorism that wasn’t there before. President Bush has opened an unnecessary new front in the war on terror, and we are losing ground because of it. The CIA’s own National Intelligence Council confirmed this assessment in its report two weeks ago.

The insurgency is not primarily driven by foreign terrorists. General Abizaid, head of our Central Command, said last September, “I think the number of foreign fighters in Iraq is probably below 1,000…”. According to the Department of Defense, less than two percent of all the detainees in Iraq are foreign nationals.

The insurgency is largely home-grown. By our own government’s own count, its ranks are large and growing larger. Its strength has quadrupled since the transfer of sovereignty six months ago –from 5,000 in mid-2004, to 16,000 last October, to more than 20,000 now. The Iraqi intelligence service estimates that the insurgency may have 30,000 fighters and up to 200,000 supporters. It’s clear that we don’t know how large the insurgency is. All we can say with certainty is that the insurgency is growing.

It is also becoming more intense and adaptable. The bombs are bigger and more powerful. The attacks have greater sophistication.

Anthony Cordesman, the national security analyst for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, recently wrote: “There is no evidence that the number of insurgents is declining as a result of Coalition and Iraqi attacks to date.”

An Army Reservist wrote the stark truth: “The guerillas are filling their losses faster than we can create them…. For every guerilla we kill with a smart bomb, we kill many more innocent civilians and create rage and anger in the Iraqi community. This rage and anger translates into more recruits for the terrorists and less support for us.” Our troops understand that. The American people understand it. And it’s time the Administration understand it.

Beyond the insurgency’s numbers, it has popular and tacit support from thousands of ordinary Iraqis who are aiding and abetting the attacks as a rejection of the American occupation. It is fueled by the anger of ever-larger numbers of Iraqis – not just Saddam loyalists - who have concluded that the United States is either unable or unwilling to provide basic security, jobs, water, electricity and other services.

Anti-American sentiment is steadily rising. CDs that picture the insurrection have spread across the country. Songs glorify combatants. Poems written decades ago during the British occupation after World War I are popular again.

The International Crisis Group, a widely respected conflict prevention organization, recently reported, “These post-war failings gradually were perceived by many Iraqis as purposeful,… designed to serve Washington’s interests to remain for a prolonged period in a debilitated Iraq.”

We have the finest military in the world. But we cannot rely primarily on military action to end politically inspired violence. We can’t defeat the insurgents militarily if we don’t effectively address the political context in which the insurgency flourishes. Our military and the insurgents are fighting for the same thing – the hearts and minds of the people – and that is a battle we are not winning.

The beginning of wisdom in this crisis is to define honest and realistic goals.

First, the goal of our military presence should be to allow the creation of a legitimate, functioning Iraqi government, not to dictate it.

Creating a full-fledged democracy won’t happen overnight. We can and must make progress, but it may take many years for the Iraqis to finish the job. We have to adjust our time horizon. The process cannot begin in earnest until Iraqis have full ownership of that transition. Our continued, overwhelming presence only delays that process.

If we want Iraq to develop a stable, democratic government, America must assist -- not control -- the newly established government.

Unless Iraqis have a genuine sense that their leaders are not our puppets, the election cannot be the turning point the Administration hopes.

To enhance its legitimacy in the eyes of the Iraqi people, the new Iraqi Government should begin to disengage politically from America, and we from them.

The reality is that the Bush Administration is continuing to pull the strings in Iraq, and the Iraqi people know it. We picked the date for the transfer of sovereignty. We supported former CIA operative Iyad Allawi to lead the Interim Government. We wrote the administrative law and the interim constitution that now governs Iraq. We set the date for the election, and President Bush insisted that it take place, even when many Iraqis sought delay.

It is time to recognize that there is only one choice. America must give Iraq back to the Iraqi people.

We need to let the Iraqi people make their own decisions, reach their own consensus, and govern their own country.

We need to rethink the Pottery Barn rule. America cannot forever be the potter that sculpts Iraq’s future. President Bush broke Iraq, but if we want Iraq to be fixed, the Iraqis must feel that they, not we, own it.

The Iraqi people are facing historic issues—the establishment of a government, the role of Islam, and the protection of minority rights.

The United States and the international community have a clear interest in a strong, tolerant and pluralistic Iraq, free from chaos and civil war.

The United Nations, not the United States, should provide assistance and advice on establishing a system of government and drafting a constitution. An international meeting – led by the United Nations and the new Iraqi Government -- should be convened immediately in Iraq or elsewhere in the Middle East to begin that process.

For our part, America must accept that the Shiites will be the majority in whatever government emerges. Sixty percent of the population in Iraq is Shiite, and a Shiite majority is the logical outcome of a democratic process in Iraq.

But the Shiites must understand that Iraq’s stability and security will be achieved only by safeguarding minority rights. The door to drafting the Constitution and to serving in government must be left open -- even to those who were unwilling or unable or too terrified to participate in the elections.

The Shiites must also understand that America’s support is not open-ended and that America’s role is not to defend an Iraqi government that excludes or marginalizes important sectors of Iraqi society. It is far too dangerous for the American military to take sides in a civil war.

America must adjust to the reality that not all former Baathists will be excluded from Iraqi political life in the new Iraq. After the Iron Curtain fell in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, many former communists went on to participate in the political process. The current Polish President – a strong ally of President Bush in Iraq – is a former active member of the Communist Party who served under Poland’s martial law government during the 1980’s. If communists can change in this way, there is no reason why some former members of the Baath party cannot do so.

If Iraqis wish to negotiate with insurgents who are willing to renounce their violence and join the political process, we should let them do so. Persuading Sunni insurgents to use the ballot, not the bullet, serves the interests of the Shiites too.

Second, for democracy to take root, the Iraqis need a clear signal that America has a genuine exit strategy.

The Iraqi people do not believe that America intends no long-term military presence in their country. Our reluctance to make that clear has fueled suspicions among Iraqis that our motives are not pure, that we want their oil, and that we will never leave. As long as our presence seems ongoing, America’s commitment to their democracy sounds unconvincing.

The President should do more to make it clear that America intends no long-term presence. He should disavow the permanence of our so-called “enduring” military bases in Iraq. He should announce that America will dramatically reduce the size of the American Embassy -- the largest in the world.

Once the elections are behind us and the democratic transition is under way, President Bush should immediately announce his intention to negotiate a timetable for a drawdown of American combat forces with the new Iraqi Government.

At least 12,000 American troops and probably more should leave at once, to send a stronger signal about our intentions and to ease the pervasive sense of occupation.

As Major General William Nash, who commanded the multinational force in Bosnia, said in November, a substantial reduction in our forces following the Iraqi election “would be a wise and judicious move” to demonstrate that we are leaving and “the absence of targets will go a long way in decreasing the violence."

America’s goal should be to complete our military withdrawal as early as possible in 2006.

President Bush cannot avoid this issue. The Security Council Resolution authorizing our military presence in Iraq can be reviewed at any time at the request of the Iraqi Government, and it calls for a review in June. The U.N. authorization for our military presence ends with the election of a permanent Iraqi government at the end of this year. The world will be our judge. We must have an exit plan in force by then. //

While American troops are drawing down, we must clearly be prepared to oppose any external intervention in Iraq or the large-scale revenge killing of any group. We should begin now to conduct serious regional diplomacy with the Arab League and Iraq’s neighbors to underscore this point, and we will need to maintain troops on bases outside Iraq but in the region.

The United Nations could send a stabilization force to Iraq if it is necessary and requested by the Iraqi government. But any stabilization force must be sought by the Iraqis and approved by the United Nations, with a clear and achievable mission and clear rules of engagement. Unlike the current force, it should not consist mostly of Americans or be led by Americans. All nations of the world have an interest in Iraq’s stability and territorial integrity.

Finally, we need to train and equip an effective Iraqi security force. We have a year to do so before the election of the permanent Iraqi government.

The current training program is in deep trouble, and Iraqi forces are far from being capable, committed, and effective. In too many cases, they cannot even defend themselves, and have fled at the first sign of battle.

It is not enough to tell us—as the Administration has—how many Iraqis go through training. The problem is not merely the numbers. The essential question is how many are prepared to give their lives if necessary, for a future of freedom for their country.

The insurgents have been skilled at recruiting Iraqis to participate in suicide attacks. But too often, the trained Iraqi forces do not have a comparable commitment to the Iraqi government. Recruits are ambivalent about America, unsure of the political transition, and skeptical about the credibility of their military and political institutions. The way to strengthen their allegiance is to give them a worthy cause to defend as soon as possible– a truly free, independent and sovereign Iraq.

We now have no choice but to make the best we can of the disaster we have created in Iraq. The current course is only making the crisis worse. We need to define our objective realistically and redefine both our political and our military presence.

President Bush has left us with few good choices. There are costs to staying, and costs to leaving. There may well be violence as we disengage militarily from Iraq and Iraq disengages politically from us. But there will be much more serious violence if we continue our present dangerous and reckless course. It will not be easy to extricate ourselves from Iraq, but we must begin.

Error is no excuse for its own perpetuation. Mindless determination doesn’t make a better outcome likely. Setting a firm strategy for withdrawal may not guarantee success, but not doing so will almost certainly guarantee failure. Casualties are increasing. America is tied down. Our military is stretched to the breaking point. Our capacity to respond to crises and threats elsewhere in the world has been compromised.

The book of Proverbs in the Bible teaches us that, “Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.” It’s time for President Bush to swallow his pride and end our country’s continuing failures in Iraq and in the eyes of the world. When the President delivers the State of the Union Address next week, I hope he will demonstrate his intention to do that. The danger is very real that if he does not, our leadership in the world will be permanently lost. We cannot let that happen.

There is a wiser course we can take in keeping with the best in our heritage and history –a course that will help America, at long last, to regain our rightful place of respect in the world and bring our troops home with honor. Let’s take that course, and take it now.

Thank you very much.
-30-
Published on Saturday, January 22, 2005 by the Miami Herald (Florida)

Support Our Troops: Bring Them Home
by Howard Zinn

We must withdraw our military from Iraq, the sooner the better. The reason is simple: Our presence there is a disaster for the American people and an even bigger disaster for the Iraqi people.
It is a strange logic to declare, as so many in Washington do, that it was wrong for us to invade Iraq but right for us to remain. A recent New York Times editorial sums up the situation accurately: ``Some 21 months after the American invasion, United States military forces remain essentially alone in battling what seems to be a growing insurgency, with no clear prospect of decisive success any time in the foreseeable future.''
And then, in an extraordinary non sequitur: ``Given the lack of other countries willing to put up their hands as volunteers, the only answer seems to be more American troops, and not just through the spring, as currently planned. . . . Forces need to be expanded through stepped-up recruitment.''
Here is the flawed logic: We are alone in the world in this invasion. The insurgency is growing. There is no visible prospect of success. Therefore, let's send more troops? The definition of fanaticism is that when you discover that you are going in the wrong direction, you redouble your speed.
In all of this, there is an unexamined premise: that military victory would constitute ``success.''
Conceivably, the United States, possessed of enormous weaponry, might finally crush the resistance in Iraq. The cost would be great. Already, tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, have lost their lives (and we must not differentiate between ''their'' casualties and ''ours'' if we believe that all human beings have an equal right to life.) Would that be a ``success''?
In 1967, the same arguments that we are hearing now were being made against withdrawal in Vietnam. The United States did not pull out its troops for six more years. During that time, the war killed at least one million more Vietnamese and perhaps 30,000 U.S. military personnel.
We must stay in Iraq, it is said again and again, so that we can bring stability and democracy to that country. Isn't it clear that after almost two years of war and occupation we have brought only chaos, violence and death to that country, and not any recognizable democracy?
Can democracy be nurtured by destroying cities, by bombing, by driving people from their homes?
There is no certainty as to what would happen in our absence. But there is absolute certainty about the result of our presence -- escalating deaths on both sides.
The loss of life among Iraqi civilians is especially startling. The British medical journal Lancet reports that 100,000 civilians have died as a result of the war, many of them children. The casualty toll on the American side includes more than 1,350 deaths and thousands of maimed soldiers, some losing limbs, others blinded. And tens of thousands more are facing psychological damage in the aftermath.
Have we learned nothing from the history of imperial occupations, all pretending to help the people being occupied?
The United States, the latest of the great empires, is perhaps the most self-deluded, having forgotten that history, including our own: our 50-year occupation of the Philippines, or our long occupation of Haiti (1915-1934) or of the Dominican Republic (1916-1924), our military intervention in Southeast Asia and our repeated interventions in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala.
Our military presence in Iraq is making us less safe, not more so. It is inflaming people in the Middle East, and thereby magnifying the danger of terrorism. Far from fighting ''there rather than here,'' as President Bush has claimed, the occupation increases the chance that enraged infiltrators will strike us here at home.
In leaving, we can improve the odds of peace and stability by encouraging an international team of negotiators, largely Arab, to mediate among the Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds and work out a federalist compromise to give some autonomy to each group. We must not underestimate the capacity of the Iraqis, once free of both Saddam Hussein and the U.S. occupying army, to forge their own future.
But the first step is to support our troops in the only way that word support can have real meaning -- by saving their lives, their limbs, their sanity. By bringing them home.
Howard Zinn is author of the best-selling A People's History of the United States.
© 2005 Miami Herald
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Wounded in action

Haunted by his experiences as an army medic in Iraq, David McGough couldn't cope with life after his tour of duty. Yet it took two failed suicide attempts before he was diagnosed as suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Alison Roberts on the forgotten casualties of the war

Friday February 4, 2005
The Guardian

The first symptom was sleeplessness. It was July 2003 and Lance Corporal David McGough of the Royal Army Medical Corps was just back from a five-month tour of duty in Basra, Iraq. Lots of the lads from his unit had trouble settling back to a normal routine at first, but most were OK within a fortnight or so. David, however, did not sleep for an entire month.
"My body just wouldn't switch off," he tells me, fidgeting with his hands. "All the time this tension was building, this incredibly tense restlessness. I was going for weeks without any sleep at all and then collapsing, sleeping for maybe six hours, and then starting all over again." At night, on leave, he walked around his small maisonette in a suburb of Preston, Lancashire, folding and re-folding his clothes, checking and double-checking the locks, looking over his shoulder repeatedly for imagined intruders.
McGough was vomiting every day, often bloodily. The odour of cooking or burned meat made him sick, though "the worst thing is the smell of public toilets". "That brings the PoW camps back. The stench of those places was horrendous."
Mostly it was the insomnia that started to drive him mad, that made him crash his car and almost beat his then-fiancee, that both masked and exacerbated his chronic underlying depression. The army doctor at the camp in Preston prescribed him Prozac and more or less told him to pull himself together. When Prozac failed to work, McGough was given a stronger antidepressant, citalopram, "but no sleeping tablets, and by then - Christmas - I wasn't really sleeping at all".
McGough's two attempts at suicide, both at Christmas in 2003, were more cries for help than committed bids to kill himself. On the first occasion he held a knife across his throat until his sister begged him to put it down, and on the second he put a 9mm pistol to his head but did not pull the trigger fully. Horrified by what was happening, McGough's father, a civil servant based in Northern Ireland, called Dr Alun Jones, a civilian psychiatrist who specialises in diagnosing and treating psychological problems in servicemen and women. "It was immediately clear," says Jones, "that McGough was suffering a severe case of post-traumatic stress disorder."
So far, PTSD experts have seen a mere handful of British sufferers from this latest war in Iraq - but as the violence goes on, the trickle is expected to become a flood. Late last year, the independent inquiry into Gulf war illnesses chaired by Lord Lloyd of Berwick came to the conclusion that there was "every reason" to accept the existence of a Gulf war syndrome, and that post-traumatic stress was one of several contributing factors. Though the Ministry of Defence does not publish statistical predictions, military psychiatrists in America have been warned to expect psychiatric disorder to occur in a remarkable 20% of servicemen and women returning from Iraq.
"What we've got now is a situation starting to approximate to Northern Ireland or Bosnia, to civil insurrection rather than a straight shooting war," says Jones, who runs PTSD clinics around the country and at a residential centre in north Wales."In those kinds of circumstances, where you're experiencing hatred and violence from an unpredictable civilian population, we tend to get a lot of very disturbed and damaged soldiers." In the field of trauma studies, this atmosphere of constant and random danger is known by the shorthand "no safe place".
Other surveys suggest that roughly half the servicemen who suffer psychiatric illness as a result of traumatic events do not seek medical help, or do so years later, when the psychological afterburn has irreparably damaged marriages, careers and mental wellbeing. "And there's still a stigma attached," says Leigh Skelton, director of clinical services at Combat Stress, the ex-services mental welfare charity. "PTSD is seen as a career-stopper within the army. Generally, the first line of action servicemen and women take is to bottle it up. Then they'll self-medicate, usually with alcohol, sometimes with other substances. Cries for help often come from relatives rather than from the affected person."
Symptoms range from insomnia, nausea and extreme fatigue to the classic "flashback"; aggression, feelings of alienation and irrational anger. Sometimes the disorder centres on one particular memory. A 30-year-old female ambulance driver in the Territorial Army, for example, constantly replays the moment her vehicle was blown up last year by a hand-made bomb tied to a lamp-post in Basra. One marine in his early 20s now suffering chronic PTSD remembers "the fear in the eyes of an Iraqi soldier in the window" of a building mortared by the British; and seeing that fear again when British soldiers mistakenly opened fire on a civilian vehicle.
McGough, however, identified no single trigger. Skinny and pale, when I met him in late November he was a shadow of the strong young man he was pre-Iraq - the high-flyer who studied psychology at Queen's College, Belfast, who loved to sky-dive and socialise, who was promoted within a year of joining the RAMC. For him, the pressure began the moment he and his medical unit moved into Iraq, at 2.30am on the first night of the war, four hours after the Americans began their aerial bombardment of Baghdad.
McGough was 21 years old and effectively in charge of 80 rookie soldiers fresh out of training, most of them still teenagers. As medics, they travelled in canvas-roofed trucks and were not equipped with body armour. "There was gunfire everywhere. Some of them were literally crapping themselves in the back of those trucks." That first night, there wasn't even time to pitch camp. "The worst casualty I saw was an Iraqi guy hit about 13 times, big chunks of his stomach, face and legs just gone. We intubated him and opened him up by the side of a truck. You do it on autopilot at the time because your training kicks in. It's only afterwards you start to think about what you've seen and done."
The mobile field unit, the first line of medical services, was initially established just south of Basra, but was twice relocated to escape attack. Its job was to mop up trauma cases, stabilise them and send them to field hospitals nearer the southern border. According to McGough, the medical unit received up to 1,000 wounded Iraqis during his five-and-a-half-month tour of duty, of whom perhaps 60% died and were buried in mass graves.
A large proportion of the medics' work, however, took place in the PoW camps set up on each site. "Usually we had about 150 prisoners coming in a day," says McGough, "both soldiers and civilians who'd been picked up with guns. Some had clearly been tortured by the Iraqi regime. There was one man who had thick black stuff, like goo, coming out of his penis, and said he'd been injected with something when he was a prisoner before. Others had quite infected lash wounds on their backs, or broken jaw bones." The unit also saw a number of raped women, who were treated and counselled by a female army gynaecologist.
Seemingly futile or absurd situations are known to compound wartime trauma. The unit's first location at Basra was regularly attacked by Iraqis defending a nearby ammunition dump from a maze-like system of trenches. "There was no adherence to any kind of convention on their part. Sometimes it was ridiculous. Every time we hit and wounded someone, a white flag would go up on their side and the others would bring the man we'd wounded over to the base for treatment. Then they'd go back up and start shooting at us again."
Most harrowing of all was the discovery of the corpse of a 12-year-old girl who'd been hanged in a backstreet alley in Basra. McGough was sent to confirm the death and recognised her as the child to whom he and his comrades had chatted the week before. "We heard later that she was probably hanged by the crowd because she'd been talking to our crew ... That was one of the worst things. You expect to see some nasty stuff, but seeing a little girl hanging in the street because she once spoke to you ... "
PTSD has been a recognised injury of war for more than 30 years, yet treatment in Britain is still very patchy. It took complete break-down ("my girlfriend found me one night huddled on the floor, shaking and crying") and several emergency trips to hospital in Preston before McGough was finally prescribed sleeping tablets. While a member of the British army, he was unable to access the civilian care system - and had been informed of a decision to discharge him without a pension.
"The army is not a branch of the social services," says Jones, "but I do think there is a certain duty of care, knowing what we now know about the effects of trauma. It would be reasonable to expect the army to check these lads over for psychological injury when they come back from combat, but in fact there is no obligation whatsoever to do this."
"No one rings or visits in the mornings because I'm just a horrible, nasty person before the drugs have kicked in," says McGough. He was increasingly convinced that his physical symptoms - the vomiting and chronic weight loss - are related to anthrax injections and to the Naps tablets taken to counter the potential use of enemy nerve agents. On bad days he does not get out of bed at all.
"I loved being in the army," he says. "It was supposed to be my long-term career, and I was prepared to give everything to it ... I just wish I could shake this and get on with my life again."

http://society.guardian.co.uk/mentalhealth/story/0,8150,1405859,00.html

Illegitimate, Incompetent, Corrupt

The Bush Regime: Illegitimate, Incompetent and Corrupt

Al Kamen, Washingon Post: As we begin the second Bush administration, let's take a moment to reflect upon one of the most historic episodes of the 2000 battle for the White House -- the now-legendary "Brooks Brothers Riot" at the Miami-Dade County polling headquarters.
This was when dozens of "local protesters," actually mostly Republican House aides from Washington, chanted "Stop the fraud!" and "Let us in!" when the local election board tried to move the re-counting from an open conference room to a smaller space. With help from their GOP colleagues and others, we identified some of these Republican heroes of yore in a photo of the event.
Some of those pictured have gone on to other things, including stints at the White House. For example, Matt Schlapp, No. 6, a former House aide and then a Bush campaign aide, has risen to be White House political director. Garry Malphrus, No. 2 in the photo, a former staff director of the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on criminal justice, is now deputy director of the White House Domestic Policy Council. And Rory Cooper, No. 3, who was at the National Republican Congressional Committee, later worked at the White House Homeland Security Council and was seen last week working for the Presidential Inaugural Committee.
Here's what some of the others went on to do:
No. 1. Tom Pyle, who had worked for Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Tex.), went private sector a few months later, getting a job as director of federal affairs for Koch Industries.
No. 7. Roger Morse, another House aide, moved on to the law and lobbying firm Preston Gates Ellis & Rouvelas Meeds. "I was also privileged to lead a team of Republicans to Florida to help in the recount fight," he told a legal trade magazine in a 2003 interview.
No. 8. Duane Gibson, an aide on the House Resources Committee, was a solo lobbyist and formerly with the Greenberg Traurig lobby operation. He is now with the Livingston Group as a consultant.
No. 9. Chuck Royal was and still is a legislative assistant to Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), a former House member.
No. 10. Layna McConkey Peltier, who had been a Senate and House aide and was at Steelman Health Strategies during the effort, is now at Capital Health Group…
Sources say the "rioters" proudly note their participation on résumés and in interviews. But while the original hardy band of demonstrators numbered barely a couple of dozen, the numbers apparently have grown with the legend.

Illegitimate, Incompetent, Corrupt

February 14, 2005 Issue
Copyright © 2005 The American Conservative
Hunger for Dictatorship
War to export democracy may wreck our own.
by Scott McConnell
Students of history inevitably think in terms of periods: the New Deal, McCarthyism, “the Sixties” (1964-1973), the NEP, the purge trials—all have their dates. Weimar, whose cultural excesses made effective propaganda for the Nazis, now seems like the antechamber to Nazism, though surely no Weimar figures perceived their time that way as they were living it. We may pretend to know what lies ahead, feigning certainty to score polemical points, but we never do.
Nonetheless, there are foreshadowings well worth noting. The last weeks of 2004 saw several explicit warnings from the antiwar Right about the coming of an American fascism. Paul Craig Roberts in these pages wrote of the “brownshirting” of American conservatism—a word that might not have surprised had it come from Michael Moore or Michael Lerner. But from a Hoover Institution senior fellow, former assistant secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration, and one-time Wall Street Journal editor, it was striking.
Several weeks later, Justin Raimondo, editor of the popular Antiwar.com website, wrote a column headlined, “Today’s Conservatives are Fascists.” Pointing to the justification of torture by conservative legal theorists, widespread support for a militaristic foreign policy, and a retrospective backing of Japanese internment during World War II, Raimondo raised the prospect of “fascism with a democratic face.” His fellow libertarian, Mises Institute president Lew Rockwell, wrote a year-end piece called “The Reality of Red State Fascism,” which claimed that “the most significant socio-political shift in our time has gone almost completely unremarked, and even unnoticed. It is the dramatic shift of the red-state bourgeoisie from leave-us-alone libertarianism, manifested in the Congressional elections of 1994, to almost totalitarian statist nationalism. Whereas the conservative middle class once cheered the circumscribing of the federal government, it now celebrates power and adores the central state, particularly its military wing.”
I would argue that Rockwell—who makes the most systematic argument of the three—overstates the libertarian component of the 1994 Republican victory, which could just as readily be credited to heartland rejection of the ’60s cultural liberalism that came into office with the Clintons. And it is difficult to imagine any scenario, after 9/11, that would not lead to some expansion of federal power. The United States was suddenly at war, mobilizing to strike at a Taliban government on the other side of the world. The emergence of terrorism as the central security issue had to lead, at the very least, to increased domestic surveillance—of Muslim immigrants especially. War is the health of the state, as the libertarians helpfully remind us, but it doesn’t mean that war leads to fascism.
But Rockwell (and Roberts and Raimondo) is correct in drawing attention to a mood among some conservatives that is at least latently fascist. Rockwell describes a populist Right website that originally rallied for the impeachment of Bill Clinton as “hate-filled ... advocating nuclear holocaust and mass bloodshed for more than a year now.” One of the biggest right-wing talk-radio hosts regularly calls for the mass destruction of Arab cities. Letters that come to this magazine from the pro-war Right leave no doubt that their writers would welcome the jailing of dissidents. And of course it’s not just us. When USA Today founder Al Neuharth wrote a column suggesting that American troops be brought home sooner rather than later, he was blown away by letters comparing him to Tokyo Rose and demanding that he be tried as a traitor. That mood, Rockwell notes, dwarfs anything that existed during the Cold War. “It celebrates the shedding of blood, and exhibits a maniacal love of the state. The new ideology of the red-state bourgeoisie seems to actually believe that the US is God marching on earth—not just godlike, but really serving as a proxy for God himself.”
The warnings from these three writers would have been significant even if they had not been complemented by what for me was the most striking straw in the wind. Earlier this month the New York Times published a profile of Fritz Stern, the now retired but still very active professor of history at Columbia University and one of my first and most significant mentors. I met Stern as an undergraduate in the spring of 1974. His lecture course on 20th-century Europe combined intellectual lucidity and passion in a way I had never imagined possible. It led me to graduate school, and if I later became diverted from academia into journalism, it was no fault of his. In grad school, I took his seminars and he sat on my orals and dissertation committee. As was likely the case for many of Stern’s students, I read sections of his books The Politics of Cultural Despair and The Failure of Illiberalism again and again in my early twenties, their phraseology becoming imbedded in my own consciousness.
Stern had emigrated from Germany as a child in 1938 and spent a career exploring how what may have been Europe’s most civilized country could have turned to barbarism. Central to his work was the notion that the readiness to abandon democracy has deep cultural roots in German soil and that many Europeans, not only Germans, yearned for the safeties and certainties of something like fascism well before the emergence of fascist parties. One could not come away from his classes without a sense of the fragility of democratic systems, a deep gratitude for their success in the Anglo-American world, and a wary belief that even here human nature and political circumstance could bring something else to the fore.
He is not a man of the Left. He would have been on the Right side of the spectrum of the Ivy League professoriat—seriously anticommunist, and an open and courageous opponent of university concessions to the “revolutionary students” of 1968. He might have described himself as a conservative social democrat, of the sort that might plausibly gravitate toward neoconservatism. An essay of his in Commentary in the mid-1970s drew my attention to the magazine for the first time.
But he did not go further in that direction, perhaps understanding something about the neocons that I missed at the time. One afternoon in the early 1980s, during a period when I was reading Commentary regularly and was beginning to write for it, he told me, clearly enjoying the pun, that my views had apparently “Kristolized.”
It is impossible to overstate my pleasure at being on the same side of the barricades with him today. That side is, of course, that of the antiwar movement; the side of a conservatism (or liberalism) that finds Bush’s policies reckless and absurd and the neoconservatives who inspire and implement them deluded and dangerous. In the past year, I had seen Stern’s letters to the editor in the Times (“Now the word ‘freedom’ has become a newly invoked justification for the occupation of a country that did not attack us, whose people have not greeted our soldiers as liberators. … The world knows that all manner of traditional rights associated with freedom are threatened in our own country. ... The essential element of a democratic society—trust—has been weakened, as secrecy, mendacity and intimidation have become the hallmarks of this administration. ... Now ‘freedom’ is being emptied of meaning and reduced to a slogan. But one doesn’t demean the concept without injuring the substance.”) In the profile of him in the Times, he sounds an alarm of the very phenomenon Roberts, Raimondo, and Rockwell are speaking about openly.
To an audience at the Leo Baeck Institute, on the occasion of receiving a prize from Germany’s foreign minister, Stern noted that Hitler had seen himself as “the instrument of providence” and fused his “racial dogma with Germanic Christianity.” This “pseudo–religious transfiguration of politics … largely ensured his success.” The Times’ Chris Hedges asked Stern about the parallels between Germany then and America now. He spoke of national mood—drawing on a lifetime of scholarship that saw fascism coming from below as much as imposed by elites above. “There was a longing in Europe for fascism before the name was ever invented... for a new authoritarianism with some kind of religious orientation and above all a greater communal belongingness. There are some similarities in the mood then and the mood now, although significant differences.”
This is characteristic Stern—measured and precise—but signals to me that the warning from the libertarians ought not be simply dismissed as rhetorical excess. I don’t think there are yet real fascists in the administration, but there is certainly now a constituency for them —hungry to bomb foreigners and smash those Americans who might object. And when there are constituencies, leaders may not be far behind. They could be propelled into power by a populace ever more frustrated that the imperialist war it has supported—generally for the most banal of patriotic reasons—cannot possibly end in victory. And so scapegoats are sought, and if we can’t bomb Arabs into submission, or the French, domestic critics of Bush will serve.
Stern points to the religious (and more explicitly Protestant) component in the rise of Nazism—but I don’t think the proto-fascist mood is strongest among the so-called Christian Right. The critical letters this magazine receives from self-identified evangelical Christians are almost always civil in tone; those from Christian Zionists may quote Scripture about the Israeli-Palestinian dispute in ways that are maddeningly nonrational and indisputably pre-Enlightenment—but these are not the letters foaming with a hatred for those with the presumption to oppose George W. Bush’s wars for freedom and democracy. The genuinely devout are perhaps less inclined to see the United States as “God marching on earth.”
Secondly, it is necessary to distinguish between a sudden proliferation of fascist tendencies and an imminent danger. There may be, among some neocons and some more populist right-wingers, unmistakable antidemocratic tendencies. But America hasn’t yet experienced organized street violence against dissenters or a state that is willing—in an unambiguous fashion—to jail its critics. The administration certainly has its far Right ideologues—the Washington Post’s recent profile of Alberto Gonzales, whose memos are literally written for him by Cheney aide David Addington, provides striking evidence. But the Bush administration still seems more embarrassed than proud of its most authoritarian aspects. Gonzales takes some pains to present himself as an opponent of torture; hypocrisy in this realm is perhaps preferable to open contempt for international law and the Bill of Rights.
And yet the very fact that the f-word can be seriously raised in an American context is evidence enough that we have moved into a new period. The invasion of Iraq has put the possibility of the end to American democracy on the table and has empowered groups on the Right that would acquiesce to and in some cases welcome the suppression of core American freedoms. That would be the titanic irony of course, the mother of them all—that a war initiated under the pretense of spreading democracy would lead to its destruction in one of its very birthplaces. But as historians know, history is full of ironies.
http://www.amconmag.com/2005_02_14/article.html

Published on Sunday, February 6, 2005 by CommonDreams.org
Crips, Bloods and Laura Bush
by Earl Ofari Hutchinson

President Bush wasted no time in dispatching his newly designated gangbuster, wife Laura, to the mean streets of Philadelphia. That city, like other big cities, continues to be plagued by gang killings. Laura's mission, as Bush made it clear in his State of the Union speech, is to help halt that violence. In addition to tapping Laura as his gang czar, Bush says that he'll shell out $150 million to youth education and violence prevention programs. But in the past Bush's flashy, new initiatives, unveiled with much public fanfare, have fizzled out due to lack of money, lack of political will to push them through, or lack of practicality. Bush's gang initiative may suffer the same fate. The money will be spread out over three years. That adds up to about $1 million for each state. That paltry sum will barely by hoops for one inner city youth recreation center. That is, if the money is ever appropriated. Bush has said that he will meat ax dozens of federal programs to cut the mountainous federal deficits that he created by piling on billions to wage war and reconstruction in Iraq, and his disastrous tax cuts that mostly benefit the corporate rich. The dollars would be dribbled out to Bush's pet faith based groups to push his morals and values message.
But increased dollars, Laura's inner-city treks, and Bush's moral finger wag, will do little to stop the killing. Many of the young men that tuck guns in their waistbands and shoot-up their neighborhoods feel that no one cares whether they live or die. Their belief that their lives are devalued fosters disrespect for the law and forces them to internalize anger and displace aggression onto others.
Many of them, mostly young black and Latino males, have become especially adept at acting out their frustrations at white society's denial of their "manhood" by adopting an exaggerated "tough guy" role. They swagger, boast, curse, fight and commit violent self-destructive acts. The accessibility of drugs, and guns, and the influence of misogynist, violent-laced rap songs also reinforce the deep feeling among many youth that life is cheap and easy to take, and there will be minimal consequences for their action as long as their victims are other young blacks or Latinos. And as long as the attackers regard their victims as weak, vulnerable, and easy pickings they will continue to kill and maim with impunity.
The other powerful ingredient in the deadly mix of youth violence is the drug plague. Drug trafficking not only provides illicit profits but also makes the gun play even more widespread. Gang members use their arsenals to fend off attacks, protect their profits from hostile predators, and to settle scores with rivals. Many drive-by shootings have been directly traced to busted drug deals, and competition over markets and disputes over turf. Often innocent victims are caught in gang shoot-outs thus further fortifying the conviction that inner city streets are depraved war zones.
It's not just drugs and hopelessness that drive young men, especially young black men, to kill and dodge bullets. The huge state and federal cutbacks in job training and skills programs, the brutal competition for low and semi skilled service and retail jobs from immigrants, and the refusal of many employers to hire those with criminal records have sledge hammered black communities. The unemployment rate of young black males is double, and in some parts of the country, triple that of white males. Their high unemployment rate is made worse by Bush's retrograde tax cuts, and budget slashes.
The high number of miserably failing inner-city public schools also fuels the unemployment crisis. They have turned thousands of blacks into educational cripples. These students are desperately unequipped to handle the rapidly evolving and demanding technical and professional skills in the public sector and the business world of the 21st Century. The educational meltdown has seeped into the colleges. According to an American Council of Education report, in the past decade Latino, Asian, and black female student enrollment has soared while black male enrollment has slowed down.
There's no magic formula for stopping the violence, and Bush's plan is certainly not that formula either. Federal and state officials must drastically increase funds for violence prevention and gang intervention programs. They must call on educators, health professionals, drug counselors, and gang intervention activists to devise and provide the crucial resources for more programs to keep at risk youth off the streets. The Congressional Black Caucus and Congressional Democrats must continue to relentlessly challenge the Bush administration and corporations to do more to end discrimination and create more job and training opportunities for young blacks. These measures won't make the Crips and Bloods disappear. But they'll do much more than photo-op White House inner-city jaunts and empty pocketbook promises.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is a featured columnist for Alternet and Blacknews.com and African-American newspapers nationally. He is the publisher of The Hutchinson Report Newsletter, an on-line public issues newsletter.
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http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0206-21.htm
Tapes Show Enron Arranged Plant Shutdown
By Timothy Egan
The New York Times
Friday 04 February 2005
EVERETT, Wash - In the midst of the California energy troubles in early 2001, when power plants were under a federal order to deliver a full output of electricity, the Enron Corporation arranged to take a plant off-line on the same day that California was hit by rolling blackouts, according to audiotapes of company traders released here on Thursday.
The tapes and memorandums were made public by a small public utility north of Seattle that is fighting Enron over a power contract. They also showed that Enron, as early as 1998, was creating artificial energy shortages and running up prices in Canada in advance of California's larger experiment with deregulation.
The tapes provide new details of market manipulation during the California energy crisis that produced blackouts and billions of dollars of surcharges to homes and businesses on the West Coast in 2000 and 2001.
In one January 2001 telephone tape of an Enron trader the public utility identified as Bill Williams and a Las Vegas energy official identified only as Rich, an agreement was made to shut down a power plant providing energy to California. The shutdown was set for an afternoon of peak energy demand.
"This is going to be a word-of-mouth kind of thing," Mr. Williams says on the tape. "We want you guys to get a little creative and come up with a reason to go down." After agreeing to take the plant down, the Nevada official questioned the reason. "O.K., so we're just coming down for some maintenance, like a forced outage type of thing?" Rich asks. "And that's cool?"
"Hopefully," Mr. Williams says, before both men laugh.
The next day, Jan. 17, 2001, as the plant was taken out of service, the State of California called a power emergency, and rolling blackouts hit up to a half-million consumers, according to daily logs of the western power grid.
Officials with the Snohomish County Public Utility District in Washington State, which released the tapes, said they believed Enron officials had taken similar measures with other power plants. This tape, they said, was proof of what was going on.
At the time, power plants in the greater West Coast grid were under a federal emergency order to keep their plants running.
A spokeswoman for Enron, Jennifer Lowney, would not comment on the tapes, citing a blanket policy of the energy trading company, which is operating under bankruptcy protection and facing multiple criminal and civil proceedings. "We continue to cooperate with all ongoing investigations," she said.
Conversations between energy traders and power plants were routinely recorded to give a record of transactions. The tapes were part of a large seizure of evidence by the F.B.I. The Snohomish County utility, which is in a court battle with Enron, obtained them through a legal action.
Previous tapes released by the district last summer showed Enron officials joking about how they were "stealing" more than a $1 million a day from California and fleecing "Grandma Millie" while bringing Enron record profits.
Other tapes released on Thursday showed Enron executives discussing their fear of going to jail for manipulating power markets in Canada and the United States. And memos showed that Enron practiced as early as 1998 to create artificial shortages and run up prices and extend the market manipulation to Canada.
Three former Enron traders have pleaded guilty to federal criminal charges of fraudulently manipulating the West Coast energy market. Enron's former chairman, Kenneth L. Lay, and former president, Jeffrey K. Skilling, are under federal indictment for fraud.
In cooperating with federal officials, West Coast traders have told how they devised schemes named "Death Star" and "Get Shorty" to make billions of dollars out of California's disastrous experiment with energy deregulation.
But until the tapes were released on Thursday, there had been few public details of how Enron set in motion the phony power shortages.
Company officials had long denied that they illegally shut down plants to create artificial shortages. In March 2001 - two months after the recording showed how the Nevada plant was shut down- Mr. Lay called any claims of market manipulation "conspiracy theories."
Memos uncovered by Snohomish County also show that Enron rewarded midlevel executives based on their performance in manipulating the West Coast market.
The tapes and memos were filed this week with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, as part of a broad investigation into how much money was lost by Enron market manipulation. Snohomish County is seeking to void a $122 million lawsuit by Enron over an energy contract the utility said was based on fraud.
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Published on Wednesday, January 12, 2005 by CommonDreams.org
The Imminent Demise of the Republican Party
by David W. Orr

Following the election of 2004, much has been made of the weaknesses of the Democratic Party, even its possible end. But it has escaped the notice of our blow-dry television pundits and political observers alike that the Republican Party, in the full blush of triumph in control of all the branches of government and large sections of the media, stands on the edge of certain extinction. The reasons grow daily more evident. Over the past three decades, the moderate, business-oriented party of Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Dwight Eisenhower was captured by its extreme right-wing thereby becoming a party dominated by ideologues, increasingly divorced from unmovable facts. But no organization, political party, or nation can long survive by ignoring realities of ecology, social justice, law, economics, and true security. Sooner or later, it will step off the proverbial curb into onrushing traffic of events, forces, and trends that it refused to see.
The Republican Party has already stepped into the road. The question is not whether it will survive as presently constituted, but what else will be destroyed as it collapses in ruin and ignominy, sooner than later. Beneath the noisy spin of its media echo chamber, the true platform of the Republican Party, its future epitaph, is founded on denial. The rules of the Republican Party of George Bush, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Tom Delay, and their brethren are these:
• Deny science when its findings are not agreeable to your base. Republicans, notably, are on the wrong side of the largest issue in human history: human driven, rapid climate change. They’ve chosen instead to live in a Crichton-esque science fiction fantasy in which real science has no standing and human actions have no tragic, irreversible, and global ecological consequences. This is not just boneheaded, it is a form of criminality for which we have, as yet, no adequate words.
• Deny the looming approach of peak oil extraction thereby advancing the potential of economic, political, and social chaos when global oil supply and demand diverge as soon they will.
• Deny the proven potential of superior technologies, design strategies, and policies that would move the country toward energy efficiency and a secure energy base of solar and wind power as well as the reasons of self-interest and economic advantage for doing so.
• Deny the true costs of air and water pollution thereby undermining the health of Americans.
• Deny the human and economic effects of pandering to the wealthy, thereby undermining social cohesion and the sense of fairness?historically, often a prelude to societal breakdown and revolution.
• Deny any and all mistakes, bad judgment, and corruption, relying on spin not truth and thereby building a solid reputation for mendacity and incompetence.
• Deny the limitations of military power to impose order on a recalcitrant world and thereby condemn the U.S. to a future of international isolation, conflict, and endless terrorism.
• Deny the great vulnerability of the American infrastructure to malice, malfeasance, and acts of God, thereby laying the groundwork for a future of recurring disasters.
• Deny the necessity for civil discourse, honesty, and transparency in the conduct of public life, thereby holding the citizenry in contempt and promoting a spirit of meanness.
• Deny without admitting it the democratic values of the country enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and Bill of Rights, the Gettysburg Address, and the Four Freedoms of Franklin Roosevelt, thereby undermining democracy at home while purportedly fighting for it in Iraq.
The Republican Party has chosen to deny social, ecological, cultural, religious, and economic realities which are unavoidably complicated, complex, diverse, ironic, and paradoxical. Instead they have chosen to make their own simplistic, ideological, and chauvinistic fantasy world that has little affinity for law, science, a free and independent press, fairness, true security, ecological sustainability, and the accountability that is requisite for genuine democracy.
That fantasy is on the cusp of becoming a real life nightmare. Having made the United States a large bulls’ eye for terrorists and malcontents, it may implode catastrophically taking much else with it. It may come undone more gradually, but no less catastrophically, as the economy sinks under the weight of war debt and foolish tax cuts. It may be overthrown if and when thoughtful conservatives disturbed by fiscal recklessness and imperial pretensions, all honest persons offended by mendacity, bombast, criminality, conniving, and diversion, and all Christians sufficiently alert to notice the discrepancy between the words and life of the “Prince of Peace” and our foreign and domestic policies finally shift alignments. It may take longer as the die of climate change and ecological deterioration is finally cast and we trigger adverse global changes of which we have been often warned. Unlikely as it seems, in a different scenario the Republican nightmare still could be averted by an effective, committed, agile, and strategic opposition smart enough to recognize the historic convergence of opportunity, patriotic duty, sheer necessity.
David Orr (David.Orr@oberlin.edu) is a Paul Sears Distinguished Professor at Oberlin College. Author of The Last Refuge (Island Press, 2004).
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http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0112-36.htm

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/020505A.shtml

Wednesday, January 26th, 2005
Seymour Hersh: "We've Been Taken Over by a Cult"
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http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/26/1450204

As the Senate Judiciary Committee prepares to vote today on the nomination of Alberto Gonzales for Attorney General, we hear a speech by Pulitzer-prize winning investigative reporter Seymour Hersh on torture from Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib to Vietnam. [includes rush transcript]
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Four British citizens have been released without charge from Guantanamo Bay after nearly 3 years in custody. They are suing the US government for tens of millions of dollars in damages.
Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill, the Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled to vote on the nomination of Alberto Gonzales to be Attorney General. As White House counsel, Gonzales helped lay the legal groundwork that led to the torture of detainees at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.
We turn now to Pulitzer prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh. Hersh first exposed the Abu Ghraib torture scandal in the New Yorker magazine in April 2004 and is author of "Chain of Command: The Road From 9/11 to Abu Ghraib." He spoke last month at the Steven Wise Free Synagogue in New York.
• Seymour Hersh
________________________________________
RUSH TRANSCRIPT
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AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to Seymour Hersh, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, author of the book, Chain Of Command: The Road From 9-11 to Abu Ghraib. He spoke recently at the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in New York.
SEYMOUR HERSH: About what's going on in terms of the President is that as virtuous as I feel, you know, at The New Yorker, writing an alternative history more or less of what's been going on in the last three years, George Bush feels just as virtuous in what he is doing. He is absolutely committed -- I don't know whether he thinks he’s doing God's will or what his father didn't do, or whether it's some mandate from -- you know, I just don’t know, but George Bush thinks this is the right thing. He is going to continue doing what he has been doing in Iraq. He's going to expand it, I think, if he can. I think that the number of body bags that come back will make no difference to him. The body bags are rolling in. It makes no difference to him, because he will see it as a price he has to pay to put America where he thinks it should be. So, he's inured in a very strange way to people like me, to the politicians, most of them who are too cowardly anyway to do much. So, the day-to-day anxiety that all of us have, and believe me, though he got 58 million votes, many of people who voted for him weren’t voting for continued warfare, but I think that's what we're going to have.
It's hard to predict the future. And it's sort of silly to, but the question is: How do you go to him? How do you get at him? What can you do to maybe move him off the course that he sees as virtuous and he sees as absolutely appropriate? All of us -- you have to -- I can’t begin to exaggerate how frightening the position is -- we're in right now, because most of you don't understand, because the press has not done a very good job. The Senate Intelligence Committee, the new bill that was just passed, provoked by the 9/11 committee actually, is a little bit of a kabuki dance, I guess is what I want to say, in that what it really does is it consolidates an awful lot of power in the Pentagon -- by statute now. It gives Rumsfeld the right to do an awful lot of things he has been wanting to do, and that is basically manhunting and killing them before they kill us, as Peter said. “They did it to us. We’ve got to do it to them.” That is the attitude that -- at the very top of our government exists. And so, I'll just tell you a couple of things that drive me nuts. We can -- you know, there's not much more to go on with.
I think there's a way out of it, maybe. I can tell you one thing. Let's all forget this word “insurgency”. It's one of the most misleading words of all. Insurgency assumes that we had gone to Iraq and won the war and a group of disgruntled people began to operate against us and we then had to do counter-action against them. That would be an insurgency. We are fighting the people we started the war against. We are fighting the Ba'athists plus nationalists. We are fighting the very people that started -- they only choose to fight in different time spans than we want them to, in different places. We took Baghdad easily. It wasn't because be won. We took Baghdad because they pulled back and let us take it and decided to fight a war that had been pre-planned that they're very actively fighting. The frightening thing about it is, we have no intelligence. Maybe it's -- it's -- it is frightening, we have no intelligence about what they're doing. A year-and-a-half ago, we're up against two and three-man teams. We estimated the cells operating against us were two and three people, that we could not penetrate. As of now, we still don't know what's coming next. There are 10, 15-man groups. They have terrific communications. Somebody told me, it's -- somebody in the system, an officer -- and by the way, the good part of it is, more and more people are available to somebody like me.
There's a lot of anxiety inside the -- you know, our professional military and our intelligence people. Many of them respect the Constitution and the Bill of Rights as much as anybody here, and individual freedom. So, they do -- there's a tremendous sense of fear. These are punitive people. One of the ways -- one of the things that you could say is, the amazing thing is we are been taken over basically by a cult, eight or nine neo-conservatives have somehow grabbed the government. Just how and why and how they did it so efficiently, will have to wait for much later historians and better documentation than we have now, but they managed to overcome the bureaucracy and the Congress, and the press, with the greatest of ease. It does say something about how fragile our Democracy is. You do have to wonder what a Democracy is when it comes down to a few men in the Pentagon and a few men in the White House having their way. What they have done is neutralize the C.I.A. because there were people there inside -- the real goal of what Goss has done was not attack the operational people, but the intelligence people. There were people -- serious senior analysts who disagree with the White House, with Cheney, basically, that's what I mean by White House, and Rumsfeld on a lot of issues, as somebody said, the goal in the last month has been to separate the apostates from the true believers. That's what's happening. The real target has been “diminish the agency.” I'm writing about all of this soon, so I don't want to overdo it, but there's been a tremendous sea change in the government. A concentration of power.
On the other hand, the facts -- there are some facts. We can’t win this war. We can do what he's doing. We can bomb them into the stone ages. Here's the other horrifying, sort of spectacular fact that we don't really appreciate. Since we installed our puppet government, this man, Allawi, who was a member of the Mukabarat, the secret police of Saddam, long before he became a critic, and is basically Saddam-lite. Before we installed him, since we have installed him on June 28, July, August, September, October, November, every month, one thing happened: the number of sorties, bombing raids by one plane, and the number of tonnage dropped has grown exponentially each month. We are systematically bombing that country. There are no embedded journalists at Doha, the Air Force base I think we’re operating out of. No embedded journalists at the aircraft carrier, Harry Truman. That's the aircraft carrier that I think is doing many of the operational fights. There’s no air defense, It's simply a turkey shoot. They come and hit what they want. We know nothing. We don't ask. We're not told. We know nothing about the extent of bombing. So if they're going to carry out an election and if they're going to succeed, bombing is going to be key to it, which means that what happened in Fallujah, essentially Iraq -- some of you remember Vietnam -- Iraq is being turn into a “free-fire zone” right in front of us. Hit everything, kill everything. I have a friend in the Air Force, a Colonel, who had the awful task of being an urban bombing planner, planning urban bombing, to make urban bombing be as unobtrusive as possible. I think it was three weeks ago today, three weeks ago Sunday after Fallujah I called him at home. I'm one of the people -- I don't call people at work. I call them at home, and he has one of those caller I.D.’s, and he picked up the phone and he said, “Welcome to Stalingrad.” We know what we're doing. This is deliberate. It's being done. They're not telling us. They're not talking about it.
We have a President that -- and a Secretary of State that, when a trooper -- when a reporter or journalist asked -- actually a trooper, a soldier, asked about lack of equipment, stumbled through an answer and the President then gets up and says, “Yes, they should all have good equipment and we're going to do it,” as if somehow he wasn't involved in the process. Words mean nothing -- nothing to George Bush. They are just utterances. They have no meaning. Bush can say again and again, “well, we don't do torture.” We know what happened. We know about Abu Ghraib. We know, we see anecdotally. We all understand in some profound way because so much has come out in the last few weeks, the I.C.R.C. The ACLU put out more papers, this is not an isolated incident what’s happened with the seven kids and the horrible photographs, Lynndie England. That's into the not the issue is. They're fall guys. Of course, they did wrong. But you know, when we send kids to fight, one of the things that we do when we send our children to war is the officers become in loco parentis. That means their job in the military is to protect these kids, not only from getting bullets and being blown up, but also there is nothing as stupid as a 20 or 22-year-old kid with a weapon in a war zone. Protect them from themselves. The spectacle of these people doing those antics night after night, for three and a half months only stopped when one of their own soldiers turned them in tells you all you need to know, how many officers knew. I can just give you a timeline that will tell you all you need to know. Abu Ghraib was reported in January of 2004 this year. In May, I and CBS earlier also wrote an awful lot about what was going on there. At that point, between January and May, our government did nothing. Although Rumsfeld later acknowledged that he was briefed by the middle of January on it and told the President. In those three-and-a-half months before it became public, was there any systematic effort to do anything other than to prosecute seven “bad seeds”, enlisted kids, reservists from West Virginia and the unit they were in, by the way, Military Police. The answer is, Ha! They were basically a bunch of kids who were taught on traffic control, sent to Iraq, put in charge of a prison. They knew nothing. It doesn't excuse them from doing dumb things. But there is another framework. We're not seeing it. They’ve gotten away with it.
So here's the upside of the horrible story, if there is an upside. I can tell you the upside in a funny way, in an indirect way. It comes from a Washington Post piece this week. A young boy, a Marine, 25-year-old from somewhere in Maryland died. There was a funeral in the Post, a funeral in Washington, and the Post did a little story about it. They quoted -- his name was Hodak. His father was quoted. He had written to a letter in the local newspaper in Southern Virginia. He had said about his son, he wrote a letter just describing what it was like after his son died. He said, “Today everything seems strange. Laundry is getting done. I walked my dog. I ate breakfast. Somehow I'm still breathing and my heart is still beating. My son lies in a casket half a world away.” There's going to be -- you know, when I did My Lai -- I tell this story a lot. When I did the My Lai story, more than a generation ago, it was 35 years ago, so almost two. When I did My Lai, one of the things that I discovered was that they had -- for some of you, most of you remember, but basically a group of American soldiers -- the analogy is so much like today. Then as now, our soldiers don't see enemies in a battlefield, they just walk on mines or they get shot by snipers, because It's always hidden. There's inevitable anger and rage and you dehumanize the people. We have done that with enormous success in Iraq. They're “rag-heads”. They're less than human. The casualty count -- as in Sudan, equally as bad. Staggering numbers that we're killing. In any case, you know, it's -- in this case, these -- a group of soldiers in 1968 went into a village. They had been in Vietnam for three months and lost about 10% of their people, maybe 10 or 15 to accidents, killings and bombings, and they ended up -- they thought they would meet the enemy and there were 550 women, children and old men and they executed them all. It took a day. They stopped in the middle and they had lunch. One of the kids who had done a lot of shooting. The Black and Hispanic soldiers, about 40 of them, there were about 90 men in the unit -- the Blacks and Hispanics shot in the air. They wouldn't shoot into the ditch. They collected people in three ditches and just began to shoot them. The Blacks and Hispanics shot up in the air, but the mostly White, lower middle class, the kids who join the Army Reserve today and National Guard looking for extra dollars, those kind of kids did the killing. One of them was a man named Paul Medlow, who did an awful lot of shooting. The next day, there was a moment -- one of the things that everybody remembered, the kids who were there, one of the mothers at the bottom of a ditch had taken a child, a boy, about two, and got him under her stomach in such a way that he wasn't killed. When they were sitting having the K rations -- that’s what they called them -- MRE’s now -- the kid somehow crawled up through the [inaudible] screaming louder and he began -- and Calley, the famous Lieutenant Calley, the Lynndie England of that tragedy, told Medlow: Kill him, “Plug him,” he said. And Medlow somehow, who had done an awful lot as I say, 200 bullets, couldn't do it so Calley ran up as everybody watched, with his carbine. Officers had a smaller weapon, a rifle, and shot him in the back of the head. The next morning, Medlow stepped on a mine and he had his foot blown off. He was being medevac’d out. As he was being medevac’d out, he cursed and everybody remembered, one of the chilling lines, he said, “God has punished me, and he's going to punish you, too.”
So a year-and-a-half later, I'm doing this story. And I hear about Medlow. I called his mother up. He lived in New Goshen, Indiana. I said, “I’m coming to see you. I don’t remember where I was, I think it was Washington State. I flew over there and to get there, you had to go to – I think Indianapolis and then to Terre Haute, rent a car and drive down into the Southern Indiana, this little farm. It was a scene out of Norman Rockwell's. Some of you remember the Norman Rockwell paintings. It's a chicken farm. The mother is 50, but she looks 80. Gristled, old. Way old – hard scrabble life, no man around. I said I'm here to see your son, and she said, okay. He's in there. He knows you're coming. Then she said, one of these great -- she said to me, “I gave them a good boy. And they sent me back a murderer.” So you go on 35 years. I'm doing in The New Yorker, the Abu Ghraib stories. I think I did three in three weeks. If some of you know about The New Yorker, that's unbelievable. But in the middle of all of this, I get a call from a mother in the East coast, Northeast, working class, lower middle class, very religious, Catholic family. She said, I have to talk to you. I go see her. I drive somewhere, fly somewhere, and her story is simply this. She had a daughter that was in the military police unit that was at Abu Ghraib. And the whole unit had come back in March, of -- The sequence is: they get there in the fall of 2003. Their reported after doing their games in the January of 2004. In March she is sent home. Nothing is public yet. The daughter is sent home. The whole unit is sent home. She comes home a different person. She had been married. She was young. She went into the Reserves, I think it was the Army Reserves to get money, not for college or for -- you know, these -- some of these people worked as night clerks in pizza shops in West Virginia. This not -- this is not very sophisticated. She came back and she left her husband. She just had been married before. She left her husband, moved out of the house, moved out of the city, moved out to another home, another apartment in another city and began working a different job. And moved away from everybody. Then over -- as the spring went on, she would go every weekend, this daughter, and every weekend she would go to a tattoo shop and get large black tattoos put on her, over increasingly -- over her body, the back, the arms, the legs, and her mother was frantic. What's going on? Comes Abu Ghraib, and she reads the stories, and she sees it. And she says to her daughter, “Were you there?” She goes to the apartment. The daughter slams the door. The mother then goes -- the daughter had come home -- before she had gone to Iraq, the mother had given her a portable computer. One of the computers that had a DVD in it, with the idea being that when she was there, she could watch movies, you know, while she was overseas, sort of a -- I hadn't thought about it, a great idea. Turns out a lot of people do it. She had given her a portable computer, and when the kid came back she had returned it, one of the things, and the mother then said I went and looked at the computer. She knows -- she doesn't know about depression. She doesn’t know about Freud. She just said, I was just -- I was just going to clean it up, she said. I had decided to use it again. She wouldn't say anything more why she went to look at it after Abu Ghraib. She opened it up, and sure enough there was a file marked “Iraq”. She hit the button. Out came 100 photographs. They were photographs that became -- one of them was published. We published one, just one in The New Yorker. It was about an Arab. This is something no mother should see and daughter should see too. It was the Arab man leaning against bars, the prisoner naked, two dogs, two shepherds, remember, on each side of him. The New Yorker published it, a pretty large photograph. What we didn’t publish was the sequence showed the dogs did bite the man -- pretty hard. A lot of blood. So she saw that and she called me, and away we go. There's another story.
For me, it's just another story, but out of this comes a core of -- you know, we all deal in “macro” in Washington. On the macro, we're hopeless. We're nowhere. The press is nowhere. The congress is nowhere. The military is nowhere. Every four-star General I know is saying, “Who is going to tell them we have no clothes?” Nobody is going to do it. Everybody is afraid to tell Rumsfeld anything. That's just the way it is. It's a system built on fear. It's not lack of integrity, it's more profound than that. Because there is individual integrity. It's a system that's completely been taken over -- by cultists. Anyway, what's going to happen, I think, as the casualties mount and these stories get around, and the mothers see the cost and the fathers see the cost, as the kids come home. And the wounded ones come back, and there's wards that you will never hear about. That's wards -- you know about the terrible catastrophic injuries, but you don't know about the vegetables. There's ward after ward of vegetables because the brain injuries are so enormous. As you maybe read last week, there was a new study in one of the medical journals that the number of survivors are greater with catastrophic injuries because of their better medical treatment and the better armor they have. So you get more extreme injuries to extremities. We're going to learn more and I think you're going to see, it's going to -- it's -- I'm trying to be optimistic. We're going to see a bottom swelling from inside the ranks. You're beginning to see it. What happened with the soldiers asking those questions, you may see more of that. I'm not suggesting we're going to have mutinies, but I'm going to suggest you're going to see more dissatisfaction being expressed. Maybe that will do it. Another salvation may be the economy. It's going to go very bad, folks. You know, if you have not sold your stocks and bought property in Italy, you better do it quick. And the third thing is Europe -- Europe is not going to tolerate us much longer. The rage there is enormous. I'm talking about our old-fashioned allies. We could see something there, collective action against us. Certainly, nobody -- it's going to be an awful lot of dancing on our graves as the dollar goes bad and everybody stops buying our bonds, our credit -- our -- we're spending $2 billion a day to float the debt, and one of these days, the Japanese and the Russians, everybody is going to start buying oil in Euros instead of dollars. We're going to see enormous panic here. But he could get through that. That will be another year, and the damage he’s going to do between then and now is enormous. We’re going to have some very bad months ahead.
AMY GOODMAN: Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh. This news just in: 31 Marines have died in a helicopter crash in Iraq.
To purchase an audio or video copy of this entire program, click here for our new online ordering or call 1 (800) 881-2359.

washingtonpost.com
Miami 'Riot' Squad: Where Are They Now?
By Al Kamen

Monday, January 24, 2005; Page A13
As we begin the second Bush administration, let's take a moment to reflect upon one of the most historic episodes of the 2000 battle for the White House -- the now-legendary "Brooks Brothers Riot" at the Miami-Dade County polling headquarters.
This was when dozens of "local protesters," actually mostly Republican House aides from Washington, chanted "Stop the fraud!" and "Let us in!" when the local election board tried to move the re-counting from an open conference room to a smaller space.
With help from their GOP colleagues and others, we identified some of these Republican heroes of yore in a photo of the event.
Some of those pictured have gone on to other things, including stints at the White House. For example, Matt Schlapp, No. 6, a former House aide and then a Bush campaign aide, has risen to be White House political director. Garry Malphrus, No. 2 in the photo, a former staff director of the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on criminal justice, is now deputy director of the White House Domestic Policy Council. And Rory Cooper, No. 3, who was at the National Republican Congressional Committee, later worked at the White House Homeland Security Council and was seen last week working for the Presidential Inaugural Committee.

Here's what some of the others went on to do:
No. 1. Tom Pyle, who had worked for Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Tex.), went private sector a few months later, getting a job as director of federal affairs for Koch Industries.
No. 7. Roger Morse, another House aide, moved on to the law and lobbying firm Preston Gates Ellis & Rouvelas Meeds. "I was also privileged to lead a team of Republicans to Florida to help in the recount fight," he told a legal trade magazine in a 2003 interview.
No. 8. Duane Gibson, an aide on the House Resources Committee, was a solo lobbyist and formerly with the Greenberg Traurig lobby operation. He is now with the Livingston Group as a consultant.
No. 9. Chuck Royal was and still is a legislative assistant to Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), a former House member.
No. 10. Layna McConkey Peltier, who had been a Senate and House aide and was at Steelman Health Strategies during the effort, is now at Capital Health Group.
(We couldn't find No. 4, Kevin Smith, a former GOP House aide who later worked with Voter.com, or No. 5, Steven Brophy, a former GOP Senate aide and then at consulting firm KPMG. If you know what they are doing these days, please e-mail shackelford@washpost.comso we can update our records.)
Sources say the "rioters" proudly note their participation on résumés and in interviews. But while the original hardy band of demonstrators numbered barely a couple of dozen, the numbers apparently have grown with the legend.
© 2005 The Washington Post Company

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A31074-2005Jan23?language=printer

John P. O’Neill Wall of Heroes Update

John P. O’Neill Wall of Heroes

PAUL BONNER, Herald-Sun: In the spirit of the civil rights era, black people must forge a new political vision, Cynthia McKinney, D-Ga., told members of the Durham Committee on the Affairs of Black People on Sunday.
McKinney was the keynote speaker for the Durham Committee's annual meeting at White Rock Baptist Church. The organization, one of Durham's most influential and venerable political groups, is beginning its 70th year.
McKinney, who represents Georgia's 4th Congressional District east of Atlanta, described how she had been castigated by many and betrayed by some in Washington for her insistence on calling the Bush administration to account for lapses in intelligence and security leading up to the terrorist hijackings of Sept. 11, 2001…
McKinney drew her biggest applause when she faulted "the corporate media and Uncle Toms" for not truly representing black Americans' plight.
"We need to go back to the blueprint we already have," she said, citing the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case, the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Critical mass for a new movement is in place, but it lacks "authentic" black leadership, she said.
"It's time for us to rise to greatness again," she said.

John O’Neill Wall of Heroes

Plame & Propagannon: Joe Wilson Speaks Out
by SusanG
Wed Feb 9th, 2005 at 08:45:52 PST

(From the diaries -- kos )
Yes, Kossacks, while you all were out linking to military porn sites and fraternity house pages and checking out friendster (you sordid crew, you), I've been spending my past few days in a leisurely, wide-ranging email discussion with Ambassador Joseph Wilson, asking him the questions we've all been dying to ask him.
Now did I get the better deal, or what?
Mr. Wilson has been incredibly gracious and generous with his time, and we are deeply indebted to him as a community for the insight he's offering us into our research into Gannon, Talon News and propaganda. He's a Daily Kos reader, and while not a registered user, is willing to answer additional questions we may have; I'll compile them from this thread, forward them to him and post a follow-up diary.
So without further ado, the incredible truth-speaker, Mr. Wilson:
How did the interview with Gannon come about, given that it was a small-time conservative news outlet?
Gannon called me and identified himself as the White House Correspondent from Talon News, a conservative news organization. He wanted to do a wide-ranging interview on my position on the war as well as the Niger mission and the leak.
While I had never heard his name or the name of his organization before, I was happy to do it. I have long felt that it is readers and viewers of conservative media who could benefit from a more balanced discussion of what is at stake in our policy and the actions of our government. At one point I recall Gannon as saying he was a traditional conservative (distinguishing himself from the neoconservatives, who in my judgement have totally captured our foreign policy). Speaking to the Times and other mainstream media is fine but those readers and viewers are generally better informed and often of the same perspective. It is those on the other side to whom we need to address the issues even more than to those with whom we already share views.
Did you enter the interview fearful of "landmines" being set by the other side?
I never thought that I had anything to fear from landmines. I told the truth from the beginning. There was never anything to hide.
Were you struck immediately during the course of the interview by the fact that he discussed the internal memo?
As to the memo, I knew nothing about it other than a Post journalist had told me there was one circulating which he characterized as having been written by somebody who was not at the meeting where I was asked if I would be willing to go to Niger. The fact is Valerie was not at that meeting. Neither she nor I had any ulterior motive in this. It was not until almost six months later that I began to speak out on the war question and even when I did, I always believed that WMD was a legitimate reason to be tough on Saddam. The trip to Niger is only relevant because of the 16 words and the fact that the only evidence to support the yellowcake charge the US turned over to the IAEA (as they were required by Article 10 of USUN 1441) were those forged documents relating to Niger. The only information the British apparently shared with the IAEA was a trip to the region by an Iraqi diplomat a couple of years previously. As it turned out, the CIA had told both the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the White House almost four months before the State of the Union address that it believed the British had "stretched" or "exaggerated" the yellowcake allegation. All of that was in the Senate report but unfortunately, was overlooked by the mainstream media.
Back to the memo, when Gannon mentioned it to me, I told him I knew nothing about it but
repeated that my wife was not at the meeting at which the subject of a trip to Niger was broached with me. I may have mentioned that I had heard that there was a memo out there but had no other knowledge about it. I still don't.
Are you comfortable letting it be known that you've spoken with me?
I have no problem with your saying you have spoken with me. I have no reason not to ensure that the truth is told and I am tired of the way in which the Republicans have smeared my family and myself for no reason other than to perpetuate their lies to the American people. I did not like fascists when I fought them as a diplomat for 23 years and I don't like them now in my own country.
When I mentioned landmines above, I wasn't thinking of being caught out in a lie, rather I was wondering if you were concerned about having your words twisted or taken out of context in order to add fuel to a smear campaign.
I understand what you meant by landmines, but frankly, when somebody presents himself as a journalist, even one with a conservative bent, I don't(or didn't) think that landmines (or entrapment) would be what he was about. Most journalists who have interviewed me will tell you that I am careful with my use of words any way, and I certainly try to be. Clearly, I was mistaken in that assumption, given the smear campaign that was waged against me, based on lies and distortions of what I said and wrote.
That said, if we allow ourselves to be intimidated and silenced by the liars, our democracy will not survive. We have to continue to confront them.
My complaint is not so much about the smear campaign as it is about the laziness of so-called objective journalists who failed to even do basic research. If Susan Schmidt, the Post reporter, had bothered to call the CIA or check the written record, she would have learned that mere days after the Novak article appeared, the CIA (under the guise of an unnamed senior intelligence official) told Newsday that Valerie was not responsible for the decision to send me to Niger. The CIA repeated the same thing to every reporter who bothered to ask over the subsequent year.
If reporters had bothered to read the Senate report, they would have learned that not only
the White House but also the Senate Select committee itself was told by CIA management nearly four months before the State of the Union address that American intelligence did not believe the British claim. Unless the press is prepared to work at it we will continue to be bamboozled by administrations, and people like me who are prepared to speak out will become rare species indeed.
Now that there are a lot of questions about Gannon's identity and the legitimacy of Talon News, in retrospect, do you think you were being set up?
I frankly have not followed him more than what I occasionally see in the blogs. It is possible the interview was a setup. I don't believe I spoke to him more than twice at most by phone, by the way. I don't know who all knew about the so-called memo. I heard of its supposed existence from only one other reporter. I doubt he was repeating hearsay, since only one other journalist mentioned it to me.
Why do you think he was on the subpoena list with such other prominent media players when he was so small time?
I have never seen the list. Didn't even know it was public information. Remember that the case is between the USG and whoever leaked Valerie's name. Although our names are tied to it, we are not victims, the government is.
I didn't understand why Novak used her name in the first place and I don't understand the smear campaign other than as an attempt to provide a proactive defense if a crime was committed. As to my alleged incompetence, the Senate Select intelligence report makes my bona fides for the trip clear. I had a track record, having made a previous trip to Niger on behalf of the government in 1999 to look into uranium related matters. But the truth is an unfortunate victim in this matter.
My knowledge of Africa and of Niger is almost unparalleled in US policy circles. This was not an inquiry into nuclear weapons but an inquiry into mining practices in Africa. And, whatever the administration and its hired guns try to say, the fact remains, the White House acknowledged the day after my article appeared in the Times that "the sixteen words did not rise to the level of inclusion in the State of the Union." Within days, Stephen Hadley offered
his resignation and Condi did a mea culpa since, lo and behold, they "found" memos from the CIA saying not to use the information months before the State of the Union.
When did the interview with Gannon actually take place? It was published October,28, 2003, but we're trying to nail down the precise date you talked to him.
I don't recall but it couldn't have been more than a week earlier.
On the Daily Show on July 24, 2003, you showed a letter from Bush/Cheney '04 asking you to participate in the re-election campaign. What was the date on that letter?
The date of the letter was after the appearance of my article on July 6, 2003. The point of my showing the letter was to make a joke about bygones being bygones since Cheney had signed a letter asking me to be a co-chairman of the DC committee to reelect Bush/Cheney.
As far as you are aware, was your wife's name and status "common knowledge" inside the beltway as claimed by Clifford May in the National Review Online on Sept. 29, 2003?
If it was common knowledge that could only be because the conspiracy to leak her name was broader and deeper than currently understood. I have only laid eyes on May once in my life, we are not habitués of the DC cocktail circuit (I think we have been to two so-called A list parties in seven years here and one of those was to celebrate the Declaration of Independence.) When the leak occurred nobody in our circle of friends or colleagues outside Valerie's place of employment knew what she did for a living. If our closest friends and family (my brother did not know) were unaware, the only way our political adversaries would know is if somebody from the administration spread the story.
In March 2003, you published an article in The Nation and appeared on CNN. Did these have repercussions from inside the administration?
Not to my knowledge. The first article I wrote appeared in the San Jose Mercury News in October, 2002. Brent Scowcroft called me after it appeared and asked if he could take it over to the White House and share it with officials there. I subsequently got a letter from President Bush's father (Bush 41) saying he "agreed with almost everything I wrote. My Nation article was an attack on the Neoconservatives and on the signatories of the PNAC for their misguided notions of an American Empire and how to propagate democracy around the world.
Approximately when did Chris Matthews contact you to say, "Rove says your wife is fair game?" Was it before or after Novak's July 14, 2003, article?
It was after. I think the date was July 21, 2003. The date is in my book, The Politics of Truth, which I recommend to everybody. It describes my career in American diplomacy as well as the way in which the 16 words and the subsequent leak played out.
What do you think of the process of research that's going on at Daily Kos on this issue? How does it fit into your view of the role of citizens versus the role of official media in information gathering and reporting?
I think that in the absence of a responsible national media, the blogs play an important role in trying to shed light on various issues, including the bona fides of so-called White House correspondents as well as tackling questions overlooked or ignored by the national journalists. I also believe that the nature of the profession has changed to the detriment of good investigative journalism. No longer is there a quest for the truth so much as there is this apparent need to present both sides of an issue even if one is nothing but lies and distortions. Giving the same value to fiction as to fact in the interest of so-called fairness is to mislead the American people and the press has become party to that.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/2/9/94615/61143

Soros Says Kerry's Failings Undermined Campaign Against Bush
Jan. 30 (Bloomberg) -- Billionaire investor George Soros, the biggest financial contributor to the failed effort to defeat President George W. Bush in November's election, said Democratic challenger John Kerry was a flawed candidate.
Soros, chairman of Soros Fund Management LLC, spent $26 million in last year's campaign that he said was undermined by the candidate he supported.
``Kerry did not, actually, offer a credible and coherent alternative,'' Soros, 74, said yesterday in an interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. ``That had a lot to do with Bush being re-elected.''
The comments by the Hungarian-born Soros marked his sharpest criticism of Kerry, a Vietnam War veteran who later spoke against the war and focused his campaign against Bush on the war in Iraq. Republicans gained four seats in the Senate, including the defeat of the Senate's highest-ranking Democrat, Minority Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota. Republicans have 55 seats in the 100-seat chamber.
The Kerry campaign ``tried to emphasize his role as a Vietnam War hero and downplay his role as an anti-Vietnam War hero, which he was,'' said Soros. ``Had he admitted, owned up to it, I think actually the outcome could have been different.''
Alternative Needed
Soros said he also now questions ``what the Democratic party stands for.'' Democrats need to counter ``a very effective conservative message machine,'' he said. ``There really needs to be an alternative.''
Still, Soros said the money he spent was worthwhile, and that he will remain active in U.S. politics.
``I don't feel it's an investment that's gone bad, because when you stand up for principles you have to do it whether you win or lose,'' Soros said. ``I'm distressed that Bush was re-elected, but I don't feel that I wasted my money.''
Soros donated millions to the Media Fund, a group that ran television, print and radio advertisements against Bush, and America Coming Together, a group that mobilized voters in battleground states such as Ohio and Pennsylvania.
He also personally bought anti-Bush ads in newspapers around the country, and went on a 12-city speaking tour to criticize Bush's foreign policy.
Kerry, a Massachusetts senator, said in a Newsweek interview that he lost because he failed to connect with voters, the magazine reported in its Jan. 10 issue. He also attributed his loss to Bush's head start in organizing and fund-raising, and Bush's advantage of incumbency, particularly at a time of war, the article said.
Spreading Democracy
Soros criticized Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan for cutting the benchmark U.S. interest rate to a four decade low of 1 percent, saying he gave Bush's re-elected chances a boost. ``So as far as I'm concerned, (Greenspan) lost credibility.''
Federal Reserve spokeswoman Michelle Smith declined to comment on Soros's remarks.
While he's not decided whether he'll continue to support candidates, Soros said he wants to raise the issue of America's role in the world. He questioned Bush's call in his inaugural address that the U.S. would seek to spread democracy.
``My conclusion is that America is an open society, the most successful, the most powerful in the world, that doesn't understand the first principle of an open society, namely that we may be wrong,'' he said. ``And as long as we have that position, we are not really qualified to propagate democracy all over the world.''
`Conspicuous' Absence
The Bush administration was ``conspicuous by its absence'' at the World Economic Forum, avoiding a growing consensus that much more needs to be done to alleviate world poverty, eradicate disease, and deal with global warming, Soros said.
``I think if the rest of the world succeeds in getting together to address these problems, reluctantly the Bush administration will have to go along. Because I think American public opinion will push them to do it,'' Soros said.
In a Davos speech, U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair, the closest U.S. ally in Europe, called on the U.S. to cooperate more with other nations. ``If America wants the rest of the world to be part of the agenda it has set, it must be part of their agenda, too,'' he said Jan. 26.
Soros said he's no longer actively investing and is primarily interested only in earning enough to support $300 million in annual spending on philanthropic and political projects.
Quantum Endowment
``We converted the Quantum Fund into the Quantum Endowment Fund. It's meant to be more like an endowment fund,'' Soros said. ``It's a very different objective from when I was active, trying to make money.''
Mark Schwartz, Soros Fund Management's chief executive officer, left the firm Jan. 3, the sixth senior executive to leave Soros Fund Management since 2000.
Schwartz oversaw a reorganization that involved shedding the real estate, credit and lending units and putting Soros's sons in charge. The sons, Robert, 41, and Jonathan, 34, in October were named co-deputy chairmen of the New York-based firm, which manages about $8.3 billion.
They are in charge of ``overall management, and maybe developing an internal team,'' Soros said. For now, Soros Fund Management is using outside investment managers, he said.

To contact the report on this story: Michael McKee in New York mmckee@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story; Kevin Miller
in Washington kmiller@Bloomberg.net
Last Updated: January 30, 2005 06:54 EST
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000087&sid=aqkoN4tLMDv8&refer=top_world_news

http://www.truthout.org/docs_05/012905Y.shtml

Published on Friday, January 28, 2005 by the Associated Press

Delgado Cleanly Fields Questions Regarding War Protest
by Steven Wine

Carlos Delgado is willing to stand up for his beliefs -- or, in his case, not stand up.
At his introductory news conference Thursday with the Florida Marlins, Delgado said he'll continue to not stand up this season during the playing of "God Bless America."
An opponent of the war in Iraq, Delgado refused to stand when "God Bless America" was played last season at games involving his Toronto Blue Jays. Instead, he would stay on the bench or go into the dugout tunnel.
"I wouldn't call it politics, because I hate politics," Delgado said Thursday after finalizing his $52 million, four-year contract. "The reason why I didn't stand for `God Bless America' was because I didn't like the way they tied `God Bless America' and 9-11 to the war in Iraq in baseball.
"I say God bless America, God bless Miami, God bless Puerto Rico and all countries until there is peace in the world."
Marlins officials, who gave Delgado the richest per-season contract in the team's 12-year history, made no objection to his war protest.
"The Marlins don't support it, and we don't not support it," team president David Samson said. "He's an adult. The club's position is that what he does is up to him."
Florida is mostly interested in Delgado producing runs the way he did with Toronto, where he hit at least 30 homers each of the past eight seasons. He's the kind of hitter the Marlins have long coveted -- a left-handed slugger capable of altering the balance of power in the NL East. He's also a box-office draw who boosted season-ticket sales at least fivefold this week.
The Marlins won out in the bidding over Texas, Baltimore and the New York Mets. Delgado wasn't surprised by the fervor with which he was pursued.
"What do you think I am, chopped liver?" he said with a grin.
Texas offered $48 million, then withdrew. The Mets offered $52 million and the Orioles $48 million.
"It wasn't that I came to the Marlins over the Mets. We were talking to a few different teams. It seems like the media made the Mets a bigger deal (than) what it actually was," he said. "I think this is the best fit for me to have a chance to win. And the fact that it's nice and warm here, the fact that it's only two hours from Puerto Rico, yeah, it is very nice as well, it's gravy."
His news conference took place at the Marlins' stadium in the Miami Dolphins locker room, and for a change the mood in the room was jovial. Among those in attendance were manager Jack McKeon and three of Delgado's new teammates -- Mike Lowell, Al Leiter and Jeff Conine.
As usual, McKeon drew the biggest laugh. He has lobbied for a left-handed power hitter ever since becoming the Marlins' manager in 2003.
"Jack, I guess now you know you've got the left-handed bat you want," owner Jeffrey Loria said.
"It's about time," McKeon responded with a playful grumble.
One factor influencing Delgado's choice of teams: He has yet to reach the postseason, while the Marlins own two World Series titles since 1997. The slugger said he noticed Loria's enormous 2003 championship ring.
"How can I miss it?" Delgado said. "He says he's going to make next year's bigger. ... This ballclub has a very, very good chance to make it to the playoffs. After being somewhere else for 10 years and not having the opportunity to smell the playoffs, I wanted to put myself on a team that had a chance to win."
During negotiations with the free agent, teams raised the issue of Delgado's stance regarding the Iraq war, said his agent, David Sloane. It wasn't an obstacle to a deal with any club because Delgado was willing to follow team policy regarding "God Bless America," Sloane said.
"He didn't like the politicization of baseball making use of the song," Sloane said. "But he told me, `I will never do anything to place myself above my teammates.' If you have a policy that everybody has to be on the top step, he'll be on the top step."
The Blue Jays had no such policy, and neither do the Marlins.
Even Toronto teammates who disagreed with Delgado accepted his right to refuse to rise for the song. Conine predicted there will be little reaction from Delgado's new teammates.
"That's an opinion of his, and you have to respect that," Conine said. "He's man enough to stand by it. I don't think there's going to be one thing said or one ill thought in the clubhouse."
While Delgado doesn't make a public show of his protest, he was the target of scattered jeers when he played last summer at Yankee Stadium, the only park in the majors where "God Bless America" has been played during every game since the Sept. 11 attacks.
But he said reaction to his stance has been mostly supportive.
"Probably 90 percent of the people I've talked to say they agree with that," he said. "I don't do stuff so people agree with me. But it's always nice to get some sort of support."
Regarding his war protest, Delgado fielded the questions cleanly. Word is he can also hit.
© 2005 Associated Press
###
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0128-09.htm

Democrats Oppose Torture, Republicans Endorse Torture
by Armando
Thu Feb 3rd, 2005 at 14:01:36 PST

My thanks and congratulations to the Senate Democratic Leadership, our Leader, Senator Harry Reid, our Ranking Member in the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senator Patrick Leahy, the Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sens. Kennedy, Biden, Feinstein, Durbin, Feingold, Schumer and Kohl, and the overwhelming majority of Democratic Senators.
You stood up for the values of our Democratic Party and of our Country. I salute you all.
Thanks to Senator Jeffords.
For those Democratic Senators who vote yes on Gonzales, a vote that inescapably endorses the torture policies of the Bush Administration, I can only express the deepest disappointment in your vote.
You have betrayed the ideals of the Democratic Party and of our Country. I cannot support you. This issue goes to the very heart of what we are as Democrats and Americans. I simply cannot support a person who can condone the Bush Administration policy of torture.
The Democrats voting Yes on Gonzales were:
(1) Senator Ken Salazar (Colorado).
(2) Senator Joseph Lieberman (Conn.).
(3) Senator Ben Nelson (Neb.).
(4) Senator Mary Landrieu (La.)
(5) Senator Pryor (Ark).
(6) Senator Bill Nelson (Fla.)
Some of us [formerly we] will remember.
As for the Republican Senators, who all voted yes, you merely confirm what the Republican Party has become in the era of George W. Bush - un-American.
http://dailykos.com/story/2005/2/3/17136/82734

Published on Wednesday, January 26, 2005 by The Nation

Boxer Rebellion Spreads
by John Nichols

Give Barbara Boxer credit for sparking the most engaged debate that the Senate has yet seen over the Bush Administration lies that led the United States into the quagmire that is Iraq.
Boxer, the California Democrat who has been increasingly vocal in her objections to the Administration's reign of error and excess, seized the opening provided by President Bush's nomination of Condoleezza Rice to serve as Secretary of State to try and force a necessary discussion about the misstatements, misconceptions and misdeeds that Rice and others in the Administration used to make the "case" for the invasion and occupation of Iraq. And, to the surprise even of some war foes, she got it.
Yes, of course, Rice's confirmation was certain. In a Senate where the balance is now tipped 55-45 toward a Republican caucus that for the most part puts party loyalty above duty to country, and where there are still too many Democrats who continue to preach the failed "can't-we-all-just-get-along" mantra that has relegated the party to minority status, there was never any chance that the national security advisor's record of failure and deception would prevent her from taking change of the State Department.
But Rice's road to Foggy Bottom proved to be far rockier than had been expected. Tuesday's Senate debate on her nomination was one of the most charged that the chamber has seen in recent years, and while Rice survived, she did not finish the day unscathed. Senator after Senator rose to recall what Senator Edward Kennedy, D-Massachusetts, described as Rice's "false reasons" for going to war, and to charge, as Kennedy did, that had Rice told the truth "it might have changed the course of history."
Though he and others were eloquent in their critique of Rice on Tuesday, the person who changed the course of history with regard to the debate over the Bush Administration's nominee for Secretary of State was not Kennedy, nor West Virginia's Robert Byrd, nor any of the other more senior senators who ripped Rice. Rather, it was Barbara Boxer, the diligent if not always prominent senator from the Golden State.
When Rice appeared on January 18 before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on which Boxer sits, it was the California Senator who did the heavy lifting. She began by announcing that, "I will...not shrink from questioning a war that was not built on truth." And she then detailed the role that Rice played in creating the foundation of lies for the war.
"Perhaps the most well known statement you have made was the one about Saddam Hussein launching a nuclear weapon on America, with the image of a 'mushroom cloud.' That image had to frighten every American into believing that Saddam Hussein was on the verge of annihilating them if he was not stopped," said Boxer, who then announced that, "I will be placing into the record a number of other such statements which have not been consistent with the facts nor the truth."
Then Boxer hammered home the point that really mattered: That when Rice and her team lied, people died.
"This war was sold to the American people--as Chief of Staff to President Bush Andy Card said--like a 'new product.' You rolled out the idea and then you had to convince the people, and as you made your case, I personally believe that your loyalty to the mission you were given overwhelmed your respect for the truth," Bixer calmly declared. "That was a great disservice to the American people. But worse than that, our young men and women are dying. So far, 1,366 American troops have been killed in Iraq. More than 25 percent of those troops were from California. More than 10,372 have been wounded."
When Boxer read out the statistics, it was a devastating moment -- and a rare one. Seldom do Senators accuse prospective Cabinet members of lying. Rice knew she was taking a harder hit than anyone had expected. The nominee tried to get the upper hand with classic Washington spin. "Senator," Rice whined, "I have never, ever lost respect for the truth in the service of anything. It's not in my nature. It's not in my character. And I would hope we could have this conversation...without impugning my credibility or my integrity."
Rice's problem was that her credibility and integrity had been impugned--not by Boxer but by the nominee herself. All Boxer did was bring Rice's deceptions to light and, perhaps most significantly, to link them to the continuing crisis in Iraq. In so doing, she shamed a number of her fellow Democrats into joining her in opposition not just to Rice but to the Administration's entire approach to the war.
Tuesday's Senate debate was distinguished by the bluntness of the criticism of Rice's record. "She exaggerated and distorted the facts," said Michigan's Carl Levin, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee. Minnesota Democrat Mark Dayton announced that he was opposing Rice's nomination in order to hold the Administration accountable for its lies. "I don't like impugning anyone's integrity," Dayton said. "But I really don't like being lied to--repeatedly, flagrantly, intentionally."
"My vote against this nominee is my statement that this administration's lies must stop now," the Minnesotan explained.
Other senators were equally pointed in their condemnations of the nominee.
"Dr. Rice is responsible for some of the most overblown rhetoric that the administration used to scare the American people," thundered West Virginia's Byrd, who argued that, "Her confirmation will most certainly be viewed as another endorsement of the administration's unconstitutional doctrine of preemptive war, its bullying policies of unilateralism, and its callous rejection of long-standing allies."
Byrd remarks were, as always, historically rich and intellectually powerful. But the dean of the Senate did not hesitate to give credit where credit was due.
Recalling the Senate Foreign Relations Committee session at which his colleague from California had grilled Rice, the senior Senator said, "I was particularly impressed by Senator Boxer, who tackled her role on the committee with passion and forthrightness..."
Expressing his dismay with Republicans who have accused Senate Democrats of engaging in "petty politics" by demanding a debate on Rice's nomination, Byrd argued that, "Nothing could be further from the truth. The Senate's role of advice and consent to presidential nominations is not a ceremonial exercise."
Byrd was right to assert that the Senate's constitutionally dictated "advice and consent" duty "is not a function of pomp and circumstance" and that senators must never "acquiesce mutely to the nomination of one of the most important members of the President's Cabinet."
He was equally right to recognize the critical role that Boxer played in assuring that so many Democratic senators recognized their responsibility to assume that the consideration of Rice's nomination was something more that "a ceremonial exercise."
© 2005 The Nation

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0126-32.htm

Published on Tuesday, January 25, 2005 by CommonDreams.org
"Standing for the Founding Principles of the Republic"
by US Senator Robert C. Byrd
Remarks delivered Tuesday as the Senate debated the nomination of Dr. Condoleezza Rice to be Secretary of State. The Senate is scheduled to vote on the nomination on Wednesday.

The Constitution, in Article Two, Section Two, states that the President "shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States..." Recognizing that the Senate’s role of advice and consent is one of the few legislative powers explicitly cited in the Constitution, Senator Byrd believes that it is a power that Senators of both parties must rigorously protect. It is not a ceremonial exercise.
With regard to this nomination, Senator Byrd has been particularly concerned about Dr. Rice’s role in crafting the Bush doctrine of preemption, or the first-strike war. No one denies that the President has the inherent authority to repel attacks against our country, but Senator Byrd believes that the doctrine of first-strike war against another country which does not pose an imminent threat to the United States is unconstitutional.
In Federalist Number 77, Alexander Hamilton wrote:
“It will readily be comprehended, that a man who had himself the sole disposition of offices, would be governed much more by his private inclinations and interests, than when he was bound to submit the propriety of his choice to the discussion and determination of a different and independent body, and that body an entire branch of the legislature. The possibility of rejection would be a strong motive to care in proposing.”
Although Hamilton explains the importance of the role of the Senate in the appointment of officers of the United States, neither he, nor the Constitution, is specific about what criteria Senators must use to judge the qualifications of a nominee. The Constitution only requires that the Senate give its advice and consent. It is therefore left to Senators to use their own judgment in considering their vote. The factors involved in such judgments may vary among Senators, among nominees, and may even change in response to the needs of the times.
The position of Secretary of State is among the most important offices for which the Constitution requires the advice and consent of the Senate. It is the Secretary of State that sits at the right hand of the President during meetings of the Cabinet. The Secretary of State is all the more important today, considering the enormous diplomatic challenges our country will face in the next four years.
I must commend the Foreign Relations Committee for its work in bringing the nomination of Dr. Condoleezza Rice to the Floor of the Senate. Chairman Richard Lugar conducted two days of hearings for this nominee, and the debate that began in the committee on this nomination is now being continued here on the Floor of the Senate. Senator Biden also provided a voice of great foreign policy experience during those hearings. I was particularly impressed by Senator Boxer, who tackled her role on the committee with passion and forthrightness, as did Senator Kerry.
There is no doubt that Dr. Rice has a remarkable record of personal achievement. She obtained her bachelor’s degree at the tender age of 19. Speaking as someone who did not earn a bachelor’s degree until I had reached 77 years of age, I have a special appreciation for Dr. Rice’s impressive academic achievement. She then obtained a doctorate in international studies, and quickly rose through the academic ranks to become Provost of Stanford University.
Dr. Rice has also gathered extensive experience in foreign policy matters. She is a recognized expert on matters relating to Russia and the former Soviet Union. She has twice worked on the National Security Council, once as the senior advisor on Soviet issues, and most recently, for four years as National Security Advisor. Dr. Rice has had ample exposure to the nuances of international politics, and by that measure, she is certainly qualified for the position of Secretary of State.
The next Secretary of State will have large shoes to fill. I have closely watched the career of Colin Powell since he served as National Security Advisor to President Reagan, and we worked together during the Senate consideration of the INF Treaty of 1988. He distinguished himself in his service as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, particularly during the 1991 Gulf War. When his nomination came before the Senate in 2001, I supported his confirmation based upon the strength of his record.
The vote that the Senate will conduct tomorrow, however, is not simply a formality to approve of a nominee’s educational achievement or level of expertise. I do not subscribe to the notion that the Senate must confirm a President’s nominees, barring criminality or lack of experience. The Constitution enjoins Senators to use their judgment in considering nominations.
I am particularly dismayed by accusations I have read that Senate Democrats, by insisting on having an opportunity to debate the nomination of Dr. Rice, have somehow been engaged in nothing more substantial than “petty politics” or partisan delaying tactics. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Senate’s role of advice and consent to presidential nominations is not a ceremonial exercise.
I have stood on this Senate floor more times than I can count to defend the prerogatives of this institution and the separate but equal – with emphasis on the word “equal” – powers of the three branches of government. A unique power of the Legislative Branch is the Senate’s role in providing advice and consent on the matter of nominations. That power is not vested in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee or any other committee; nor does it repose in a handful of Senate leaders. It is not a function of pomp and circumstance, and it was never intended by the Framers to be used to burnish the image of a President on inauguration day.
And yet that is exactly what Senators were being pressured to do last week – to acquiesce mutely to the nomination of one of the most important members of the President’s Cabinet without the merest hiccup of debate or the smallest inconvenience of a roll call vote.
And so we are here today to fulfill our constitutional duty to consider the nomination of Dr. Rice to be Secretary of State. Mr. President, I have carefully considered Dr. Rice’s record as National Security Advisor in the two months that have passed since the President announced her nomination to be Secretary of State. That record, I am afraid, is one of intimate involvement in a number of Administration foreign policies which I strongly oppose. These policies have fostered enormous opposition -- both at home and abroad -- to the White House’s view of America’s place in the world.
That view of America is one which encourages our Nation to flex its muscles without being bound by any calls for restraint. The most forceful explanation of this idea can be found in "The National Security Strategy of the United States," a report which was issued by the White House in September 2002. Under this strategy, the President lays claim to an expansive power to use our military to strike other nations first, even if we have not been threatened or provoked.
There is no question that the President has the inherent authority to repel attacks against our country, but this National Security Strategy is unconstitutional on its face. It takes the checks and balances established in the Constitution that limit the President’s ability to use our military at his pleasure, and throws them out the window.
This doctrine of preemptive strikes places the sole decision of war and peace in the hands of the President and undermines the Constitutional power of Congress to declare war. The Founding Fathers required that such an important issue of war be debated by the elected representatives of the people in the Legislative Branch precisely because no single man could be trusted with such an awesome power as bringing a nation to war by his decision alone. And yet, that it exactly what the National Security Strategy proposes.
Not only does this pernicious doctrine of preemptive war contradict the Constitution, it barely acknowledges its existence. The National Security Strategy makes only one passing reference to the Constitution: it states that "America’s constitution" -- that is "constitution" with a small C -- "has served us well." As if the Constitution does not still serve this country well! One might ask if that reference to the Constitution was intended to be a compliment or an obituary?
As National Security Advisor, Dr. Rice was in charge of developing the National Security Strategy. She also spoke out forcefully in support of the dangerous doctrine of preemptive war. In one speech, she argues that there need not be an imminent threat before the United States attacks another nation: "So as a matter of common sense," said Dr. Rice on October 1, 2002, "the United States must be prepared to take action, when necessary, before threats have fully materialized."
But that "matter of common sense" is nowhere to be found in the Constitution. For that matter, isn’t it possible to disagree with this “matter of common sense?” What is common sense to one might not be shared by another. What’s more, matters of common sense can lead people to the wrong conclusions. John Dickinson, the chief author of the Articles of Confederation, said in 1787, “Experience must be our only guide; reason may mislead us.” As for me, I will heed the experience of Founding Fathers, as enshrined in the Constitution, over the reason and “common sense” of the Administration’s National Security Strategy.
We can all agree that the President, any President, has the inherent duty and power to repel an attack on the United States. But where in the Constitution can the President claim the right to strike at another nation before it has even threatened our country, as Dr. Rice asserted in that speech? To put it plainly, Dr. Rice has asserted that the President holds far more of the war power than the Constitution grants him.
This doctrine of attacking countries before a threat has “fully materialized” was put into motion as soon as the National Security Strategy was released. Beginning in September 2002, Dr. Rice also took a position on the front lines of the Administration’s effort to hype the danger of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction.
Dr. Rice is responsible for some of the most overblown rhetoric that the Administration used to scare the American people into believing that there was an imminent threat from Iraq. On September 8, 2002, Dr. Rice conjured visions of American cities being consumed by mushroom clouds. On an appearance on CNN, she warned: “The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he [Saddam] can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."
Dr. Rice also claimed that she had conclusive evidence about Iraq’s alleged nuclear weapons program. During that same interview, she also said: “We do know that he is actively pursuing a nuclear weapon. We do know that there have been shipments going into… Iraq, for instance, of aluminum tubes… that are really only suited for nuclear weapons programs.”
We now know that Iraq’s nuclear program was a fiction. Charles Duelfer, the chief arms inspector of the CIA’s Iraq Survey Group, reported on September 30, 2004: “Saddam Husayn ended the nuclear program in 1991 following the Gulf war. [The Iraq Survey Group] found no evidence to suggest concerted efforts to restart the program.”
But Dr. Rice’s statements in 2002 were not only wrong, they also did not accurately reflect the intelligence reports of the time. Declassified portions of the CIA’s National Intelligence Estimate from October 2002 make it clear that there were disagreements among our intelligence analysts about the state of Iraq’s nuclear program. But Dr. Rice seriously misrepresented their disputes when she categorically stated, “We do know that [Saddam] is actively pursuing a nuclear weapon.”
Her allegation also misrepresented to the American people the controversy in those same intelligence reports about the aluminum tubes. Again, Dr. Rice said that these tubes were “really only suited for nuclear weapons programs.” But intelligence experts at the State Department and the Department of Energy believed that those tubes had nothing to do with building a nuclear weapon, and made their dissent known in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate. This view, which was at odds with Dr. Rice’s representations, was later confirmed by the International Atomic Energy Agency and our own CIA arms inspectors.
Dr. Rice made other statements that helped to build a case for war by implying a link between Iraq and September 11. On multiple occasions, Dr. Rice spoke about the supposed evidence that Saddam and Al Qaeda were in league with each other. For example, on September 25, 2002, Dr. Rice said on the PBS NewsHour:
“No one is trying to make an argument at this point that Saddam Hussein somehow had operational control of what happened on September 11, so we don’t want to push this too far, but this is a story that is unfolding, and it is getting clear, and we’re learning more…. But yes, there clearly are contact[s] between Al Qaeda and Iraq that can be documented; there clearly is testimony that some of the contacts have been important contacts and that there is a relationship there.”
What Dr. Rice did not say was that some of those supposed links were being called into question by our intelligence agencies, such as the alleged meeting between a 9-11 ringleader and an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague that has now been debunked. These attempts to connect Iraq and Al Qaeda appear to be a prime example of cherry-picking intelligence to hype the supposed threat of Iraq, while keeping contrary evidence away from the American people, wrapped up in the red tape of top secret reports.
Dr. Rice pressed the point even further, creating scenarios that threatened tens of thousands of American lives, even when that threat wasn’t supported by intelligence. On March 9, 2003, just eleven days before the invasion of Iraq, Dr. Rice appeared on “Face the Nation” and said:
“Now the al-Qaida is an organization that's quite dispersed and --and quite widespread in its effects, but it clearly has had links to the Iraqis, not to mention Iraqi links to all kinds of other terrorists. And what we do not want is the day when Saddam Hussein decides that he's had enough of dealing with sanctions, enough of dealing with, quote, unquote, "containment," enough of dealing with America, and it's time to end it on his terms, by transferring one of these weapons, just a little vial of something, to a terrorist for blackmail or for worse.”
But the intelligence community had already addressed this scenario with great skepticism. In fact, the CIA’s National Intelligence Estimate from October 2002 concluded that it had “low confidence” that Saddam would ever transfer any weapons of mass destruction – weapons that he did not have, as it turned out – to anyone outside of his control. This is yet more evidence of an abuse of intelligence in order to build the case for an unprovoked war with Iraq.
And what has been the effect of the first use of the reckless doctrine of preemptive war? In a most ironic and deadly twist, the false situation described by the Administration before the war -- namely, that Iraq was a training ground for terrorists poised to attack us -- is exactly the situation that our war in Iraq has created.
But it was this unjustified war that created the situation that the President claimed he was trying to prevent. Violent extremists have flooded into Iraq from all corners of the world. Iraqis have taken up arms themselves to fight against the continuing U.S. occupation of their country. According to a CIA report released in December 2004, intelligence analysts now see Iraq, destabilized by the Administration’s ill-conceived war, as the training ground for a new generation of terrorists. [Mapping the Global Future: Report of the National Intelligence Council’s 2020 Project, pp. 94] It should be profoundly disturbing to all Americans if the most dangerous breeding ground for terrorism shifted from Afghanistan to Iraq, simply because of the Administration’s ill-advised rush to war in March 2003.
Dr. Rice’s role in the war against Iraq was not limited to building the case for an unprecedented, preemptive invasion of a country that had not attacked us first. Her role also extends to the Administration’s failed efforts to establish peace in Iraq. In October 2003, five months after he declared "Mission Accomplished," the President created the Iraq Stabilization Group, headed by Dr. Rice. The task of the Iraq Stabilization Group was to coordinate efforts to speed reconstruction aid to help bring the violence in Iraq to an end.
But what has the Iraq Stabilization Group accomplished under the leadership of Dr. Rice? When she took the helm of the stabilization efforts, 319 U.S. troops had been killed in Iraq. That number now stands at 1,368 as of today (Tuesday 1/25). More than 10,600 troops have been wounded. The cost of the war has spiraled to $149 billion, and the White House is on the verge of asking Congress for another $80 billion. Despite the mandate of the Iraq Stabilization Group, the situation in Iraq has gone from bad to worse. More ominously, the level of violence only keeps growing, week after week, month after month, and no Administration official, whether from the White House, the Pentagon, or Foggy Bottom, has made any predictions about when the violence will finally subside.
Furthermore, of the $18.4 billion in Iraqi reconstruction aid appropriated by Congress in October 2003, the Administration has spent only $2.7 billion. With these funds moving so slowly, it is hard to believe that the Iraq Stabilization Group has had any success at all in speeding the reconstruction efforts in Iraq. For all the hue and cry about the need to speed up aid to Iraq, one wonders if there should be more tough questions asked of Dr. Rice about what she has accomplished as the head of this group.
There are also many unanswered questions about Dr. Rice’s record as National Security Advisor. Richard Clarke, the former White House counter-terrorism advisor, has leveled scathing criticism against Dr. Rice and the National Security Council for failing to recognize the threat from Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden in the months leading up to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. In particular, Mr. Clarke states that he submitted a request on January 25, 2001, for an urgent meeting of the National Security Council on the threat of al Qaeda.
However, due to decisions made by Dr. Rice and her staff, that urgent meeting did not occur until too late: the meeting was not actually called until September 4, 2001. Mr. Clarke, who is widely acknowledged as one of the leading authorities on terrorism in government at that time, told the 9-11 Commission that he was so frustrated with those decisions that he asked to be reassigned to different issues, and the Bush White House approved that request.
Dr. Rice appeared before the 9-11 Commission on April 8, 2004, but if anything, her testimony raised only more questions about what the President and others knew about the threats to New York City and Washington, D.C. in the weeks before the attacks, and whether more could have been done to prevent them.
Why wasn’t any action taken when she and the President received an intelligence report on August 6, 2001, entitled, “Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States?” Why did Dr. Rice and President Bush reassign Richard Clarke, the leading terrorism expert in the White House, soon after taking office in 2001? Why did it take nine months for Dr. Rice to call the first high-level National Security Council meeting on the threat of Osama bin Laden? As the Senate debates her nomination today, we still have not heard full answers to these questions.
In addition to Mr. Clarke’s criticism, Dr. David Kay, the former CIA weapons inspector in Iraq, also has strong words for the National Security Council and its role in the run up to the war in Iraq. When Dr. Kay appeared before the Senate Intelligence Committee on August 18, 2004, to analyze why the Administration’s pre-war intelligence was so wrong about weapons of mass destruction, he described the National Security Council as the "dog that didn’t bark" to warn the President about the weakness of those intelligence reports. Dr. Kay continued: “Every president who has been successful, at least that I know of, in the history of this republic, has developed both informal and formal means of getting checks on whether people who tell him things are in fact telling him the whole truth.… The recent history has been a reliance on the NSC system to do it. I quite frankly think that has not served this president very well.”
What Dr. Kay appears to state was his view that the National Security Council, under the leadership of Dr. Rice, did not do a sufficient job of raising doubts about the quality of the intelligence about Iraq. On the contrary, based upon Dr. Rice’s statements that I quoted earlier, her rhetoric even went beyond the questionable intelligence that the CIA had available on Iraq, in order to hype the threats of aluminum tubes, mushroom clouds, and connections between Iraq and September 11.
In light of the massive reorganization of our intelligence agencies enacted by Congress last year, shouldn’t this nomination spur the Senate to stop, look, and listen about what has been going on in the National Security Council for the last four years? Don’t these serious questions about the failings of the National Security Council under Dr. Rice deserve a more through examination before the Senate votes to confirm her as the next Secretary of State?
Accountability has become an old-fashioned notion in some circles these days, but accountability is not a negotiable commodity when it comes to the highest circles of our nation’s government. The accountability of government officials is an obligation, not a luxury. And yet, accountability is an obligation that this President and his administration appear loath to fulfill.
Instead of being held to account for their actions, the architects of the policies that led our nation into war with Iraq, policies based on faulty intelligence and phantom weapons of mass destruction, have been rewarded by the President with accolades and promotions. Instead of admitting to mistakes in the war on Iraq and its disastrous aftermath, the President and his inner circle of advisers continue to cling to myths and misconceptions. The only notion of accountability that this President is willing to acknowledge is the November elections, which he has described as a moment of accountability and an endorsement of his policies. Unfortunately, after-the-fact validation of victory is hardly the standard of accountability that the American people have the right to expect from their elected officials. It is one thing to accept responsibility for success; it is quite another to accept accountability for failure.
Sadly, failure has tainted far too many aspects of our nation’s international policies over the past four years, culminating in the deadly insurgency that has resulted from the invasion of Iraq. With respect to this particular nomination, I believe that there needs to be accountability for the mistakes and missteps that have led the United States into the dilemma in which it finds itself today, besieged by increasing violence in Iraq, battling an unprecedented decline in world opinion, and increasingly isolated from our allies due to our provocative, belligerent, bellicose, and unilateralist foreign policy.
Whether the Administration will continue to pursue these policies cannot be known to Senators today, as we prepare to cast our votes. At her confirmation hearing on January 18, Dr. Rice proclaimed that “Our interaction with the rest of the world must be a conversation, not a monologue.” But two days later, President Bush gave an inaugural address that seemed to rattle sabers at any nation that he does not consider to be free. Before Senators cast their vote, we must wonder whether we are casting our lot for more diplomacy or more belligerence? Reconciliation or more confrontation? Which face of this Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde foreign policy will be revealed in the next four years?
Although I do not question her credentials, I do oppose many of the critical decisions that Dr. Rice has made during her four years as National Security Advisor. She has a record, and the record is there for us to judge. There remain too many unanswered questions about Dr. Rice’s failure to protect our country before the tragic attacks of September 11, her public efforts to politicize intelligence, and her often stated allegiance to the doctrine of preemption.
To confirm Dr. Rice to be the next Secretary of State is to say to the American people, and the world, that the answers to those questions are no longer important. Her confirmation will most certainly be viewed as another endorsement of the Administration’s unconstitutional doctrine of preemptive war, its bullying policies of unilateralism, and its callous rejection of our long-standing allies.
The stakes for the United States are too high. I cannot endorse higher responsibilities for those who helped set our great country down the path of increasing isolation, enmity in the world, and a war that has no end. For these reasons, I shall cast my vote in opposition to the confirmation of Condoleezza Rice to be the next Secretary of State.
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http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0125-34.htm
Published on Wednesday, February 2, 2005 by CommonDreams.org
Respecting the Spirit and Letter of the Law
On the Nomination of Alberto Gonzales to be Attorney General of the United States

by U.S. Senator Robert C. Byrd

Senator Byrd delivered the following remarks regarding the nomination of Alberto Gonzales to be the nation’s next Attorney General. During the speech, Senator Byrd expressed strong concerns about Mr. Gonzales’ role in the prisoner abuse scandals that have arisen from cases in Iraq and Afghanistan and at Guantanamo Bay, and the use of torture as an approved American interrogation policy. Senator Byrd also told his colleagues that the nominee, as the White House Counsel, has been responsible for programs and policies that undermine the principles of the Constitution of the United States.
Alberto Gonzales is Counsel to the President of the United States. For the past four years, Alberto Gonzales has served as the chief legal advisor to President Bush, housed in the West Wing of the White House, a stone’s throw from the Oval Office.
The official biography of Alberto Gonzales on the White House website states that, before he was commissioned to be White House Counsel, Judge Gonzales was a Justice on the Texas Supreme Court. Prior to that, he served as the 100th Secretary of the State of Texas, where one of his many duties was to act as a senior advisor to then-Governor George W. Bush. Before that? He was General Counsel to Governor Bush for three years.
So, for over a decade, Alberto Gonzales has been a close confidante and advisor to George W. Bush, and the President has confirmed his personal and professional ties to Judge Gonzales on many occasions. The President has described him as both a “dear friend” and as “the top legal official on the White House staff.” When he nominated Alberto Gonzales to be the next Attorney General of the United States, the President began by asserting, “This is the fifth time I have asked Judge Gonzales to serve his fellow citizens, and I am very grateful he keeps saying `yes’ . . . as the top legal official on the White House staff, he has led a superb team of lawyers.”
In praising his nomination of Alberto Gonzales, the President specifically stressed the quintessential “leadership” role that Alberto Gonzales has held in providing the President with legal advice on the war on terror. The President stated specifically that it was his “sharp intellect and sound judgment” that “helped shape our policies in the war on terror.” According to the President, Alberto Gonzales is one of his closest friends who, again in the words of the President, “always gives me his frank opinion.”
Imagine, then how perplexing and disheartening it has been to review the responses, or should I say, lack thereof, that were provided by Alberto Gonzales to Members of the Senate Judiciary Committee at his confirmation hearing on January 6. It seemed as if, once seated before the committee, Judge Gonzales forgot that he had, in fact, been the President’s top legal advisor for the past four years.
It was a strangely detached Alberto Gonzales who appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Suddenly, this close friend and advisor to the President simply could not recall forming opinions on any number of key legal and policy decisions made by the Bush White House over the past four years. And this seemed particularly true when it came to decisions which, in retrospect, now appear to have been wrong.
When asked his specific recollection of weighty matters, Judge Gonzalez could provide only vague recollections of what might have been discussed in meetings of monumental importance, even during a time of war. He could not remember what he advised in discussions interpreting the U.S. law against torture, or the power of the president to ignore laws passed by Congress -- discussions which resulted in decisions that reversed over 200 years of legal and constitutional precedents relied on by 42 prior Presidents. That’s pretty hard to believe.
In fact, if one did not know the true relationship between the President and this

Kulchur War, Defense of Science, Separation of Church and State

Embrace Kulchur War, Defend Science and Preserve the Separation of Church & State

Suzanne Goldenberg, Guardian: "Somewhere along the line, the students have been told the theory of evolution is not valid," he said. "In the last few years, I've had students question my teaching about cell classification and genetics, and there have been a number of comments from students saying: 'Didn't God do that'?" In Kansas, the geographical centre of America, the heart of the American heartland, the state-approved answer might soon be Yes. In the coming weeks, state educators will decide on proposed curriculum changes for high school science put forward by subscribers to the notion of "intelligent design", a modern version of creationism. If the religious right has its way, and it is a powerful force in Kansas, high school science teachers could be teaching creationist material by next September, charting an important victory in America's modern-day revolt against evolutionary science.
Similar classroom confrontations between God and science are under way in 17 states, according to the National Centre for Science Education. In Missouri, state legislators are drafting a bill laying down that science texts contain a chapter on so-called alternative theories to evolution. Textbooks in Arkansas and Alabama contain disclaimers on evolution, and in a Wisconsin school district, teachers are required to instruct their students in the "scientific strengths and weaknesses of evolutionary theory". Last month, a judge in Georgia ordered a school district to remove stickers on school textbooks that warned: "This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things." For the conservative forces engaged in the struggle for America's soul, the true battleground is public education, the laboratory of the next generation, and an opportunity for the religious right to effect lasting change on popular culture. Officially, the teaching of creationism has been outlawed since 1987 when the supreme court ruled that the inclusion of religious material in science classes in public teaching was unconstitutional. In recent years, however, opponents of evolution have regrouped, challenging science education with the doctrine of "intelligent design" which has been carefully stripped of all references to God and religion. Unlike traditional creationism, which posits that God created the earth in six days, proponents of intelligent design assert that the workings of this planet are too complex to be ascribed to evolution. There must have been a designer working to a plan - that is, a creator.

Embrace Kulchur War, Defend Science and Preserve the Separation of Church & State

Published on Monday, February 7, 2005 by the Guardian/UK

Religious Right Fights Science for the Heart of America
Creationists Take Their Challenge to Evolution Theory into the Classroom

by in Kansas City

Al Frisby has spent the better part of his life in rooms filled with rebellious teenagers, but the last years have been particularly trying for the high school biology teacher. He has met parents who want him to teach that God created Eve out of Adam's rib, and then then adjusted the chromosomes to make her a woman, and who insist that Noah invited dinosaurs aboard the ark. And it is getting more difficult to keep such talk out of the classroom.
"Somewhere along the line, the students have been told the theory of evolution is not valid," he said. "In the last few years, I've had students question my teaching about cell classification and genetics, and there have been a number of comments from students saying: 'Didn't God do that'?" In Kansas, the geographical centre of America, the heart of the American heartland, the state-approved answer might soon be Yes. In the coming weeks, state educators will decide on proposed curriculum changes for high school science put forward by subscribers to the notion of "intelligent design", a modern version of creationism. If the religious right has its way, and it is a powerful force in Kansas, high school science teachers could be teaching creationist material by next September, charting an important victory in America's modern-day revolt against evolutionary science.
Legal debate
Similar classroom confrontations between God and science are under way in 17 states, according to the National Centre for Science Education. In Missouri, state legislators are drafting a bill laying down that science texts contain a chapter on so-called alternative theories to evolution. Textbooks in Arkansas and Alabama contain disclaimers on evolution, and in a Wisconsin school district, teachers are required to instruct their students in the "scientific strengths and weaknesses of evolutionary theory". Last month, a judge in Georgia ordered a school district to remove stickers on school textbooks that warned: "This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things."
For the conservative forces engaged in the struggle for America's soul, the true battleground is public education, the laboratory of the next generation, and an opportunity for the religious right to effect lasting change on popular culture. Officially, the teaching of creationism has been outlawed since 1987 when the supreme court ruled that the inclusion of religious material in science classes in public teaching was unconstitutional. In recent years, however, opponents of evolution have regrouped, challenging science education with the doctrine of "intelligent design" which has been carefully stripped of all references to God and religion. Unlike traditional creationism, which posits that God created the earth in six days, proponents of intelligent design assert that the workings of this planet are too complex to be ascribed to evolution. There must have been a designer working to a plan - that is, a creator.
In their campaign to persuade parents in Kansas to welcome the new version of creationism into the classroom, subscribers to intelligent design have appealed to a sense of fair play, arguing that it would be in their children's interest to be exposed to all schools of thought on the earth's origins. "We are looking for science standards that would be more informative, that would open the discussion about origins, rather than close it," said John Calvert, founder of the Intelligent Design network, the prime mover in the campaign to discredit the teaching of evolution in Kansas.
Other supporters of intelligent design go further, saying evolution is as much an article of faith as creationism. "Certainly there are clear religious implications," said William Harris, a research biochemist and co-founder of the design network in Kansas. "There are creation myths on both sides. Which one do you teach?" For Mr. Harris, an expert on fish oils and prevention of heart disease at the premier teaching hospital in Kansas City, the very premise of evolution was intolerable. He describes his conversion as a graduate student many years ago almost as an epiphany. "It hit me that if monkeys are supposed to be so close to us as relatives then what explains the incredible gap between monkeys and humans. I had a realisation that there was a vast chasm between the two types of animals, and the standard explanation just didn't fit."
Other scientists on the school board's advisory committee see no clash in values between religion and science. "Prominent conservative Christians, evangelical Christians, have found no inherent conflict between an evolutionary understanding of the history of life, and an orthodox understanding of the theology of creation," said Keith Miller, a geologist at Kansas State University, who describes himself as a practising Christian.
But in Kansas, as in the rest of America, it would seem a slim majority continue to believe God created the heaven and the earth. During the past five years, subscribers to intelligent design have assembled a roster of influential supporters in the state, including a smattering of people with PhDs, such as Mr Harris, to lend their cause a veneer of scientific credibility. When conservative Republicans took control of the Kansas state school board last November, the creationists seized their chance, installing supporters on the committee reviewing the high school science curriculum.
The suggested changes under consideration seem innocuous at first. "A minor addition makes it clear that evolution is a theory and not a fact," says the proposed revision to the 8th grade science standard. However, Jack Krebs, a high school maths teacher on the committee drafting the new standards, argues that the campaign against evolution amounts to a stealth assault on the entire body of scientific thought. "There are two planes where they are attacking. One is evolution, and one is science itself," he said.
"They believe that the naturalistic bias of science is in fact atheistic, and that if we don't change science, we can't believe in God. And so this is really an attack on all of science. Evolution is just the weak link."
It would certainly seem so in Kansas. At the first of a series of public hearings on the new course material, the audience was equally split between the defenders of established science, and the anti-evolution rebels. The breakdown has educators worried. With the religious right now in control of the Kansas state school board, the circumstances favour the creationists.
In a crowded high school auditorium, biology teachers, mathematicians, a veterinarian, and a high school student made passionate speeches on the need for cold, scientific detachment, and the damage that would be done to the state's reputation and biotechnology industry if Kansas became known as a haven for creationists. They were countered by John James, who warned that the teaching of evolution led to nihilism, and to the gates of Auschwitz. "Are we producing little Kansas Nazis?" he asked. But the largest applause of the evening was reserved for a silver-haired gentleman in a navy blue blazer. "I have a question: if man comes from monkeys, why are there still monkeys? Why do you waste time teaching something in science class that is not scientific?" he thundered.
Science teachers believe that the genteel questioning of the intelligent design movements masks a larger project to discredit an entire body of rational thought. If the Kansas state school board allows science teachers to question evolution, where will it stop? Will religious teachers bring their beliefs into the classroom?
"They are trying to create a climate where anything an individual teacher wants to include in science class can be considered science," said Harry McDonald, a retired biology teacher and president of Kansas Citizens for Science Education. "They want to redefine science."
Religious right
Young Earth creationism
God created the Earth, and all the species on it, in six days, 6,000 years ago
Old Earth creationism
The Earth is 4.5bn years old, but God created each living organism on the planet, although not necessarily in six days
Intelligent design
Emerged as a theory in 1989. Maintains that evolution is a theory, not a fact, and that Earth's complexity can be explained only by the idea of an intelligent designer - or a creator
© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005
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http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0207-04.htm