Liberation News Service

Bush Abomination’s #1 Failure: National Security

Ray McGovern, TomDispatch: For a host of good reasons -- the huge and draining commitment of U.S. forces to Iraq and Iran's ability to stir the Iraqi pot to boiling, for starters -- the notion that the Bush administration would mount a "preemptive" air attack on Iran seems insane. And still more insane if the objective includes overthrowing Iran's government again, as in 1953 -- this time under the rubric of "regime change."
But Bush administration policy toward the Middle East is being run by men -- yes, only men -- who were routinely referred to in high circles in Washington during the 1980s as "the crazies." I can attest to that personally, but one need not take my word for it.
According to James Naughtie, author of The Accidental American: Tony Blair and the Presidency, former Secretary of State Colin Powell added an old soldier's adjective to the "crazies" sobriquet in referring to the same officials. Powell, who was military aide to Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger in the early eighties, was overheard calling them "the f---ing crazies" during a phone call with British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw before the war in Iraq. At the time, Powell was reportedly deeply concerned over their determination to attack -- with or without UN approval. Small wonder that they got rid of Powell after the election, as soon as they had no more use for him.
If further proof of insanity were needed, one could simply look at the unnecessary carnage in Iraq since the invasion in March 2003. That unprovoked attack was, in my view, the most fateful foreign policy blunder in our nation's history...so far.
"The crazies" are not finished. And we do well not to let their ultimate folly obscure their current ambition, and the further trouble that ambition is bound to bring in the four years ahead.

Rupert Cornwell, Independent/UK: Today Washington's unqualified, 100 per cent loyal allies to the south of its border with Mexico are no more than one or two - El Salvador and Honduras certainly, but who else? Even Chile defied the superpower by refusing to support the 2003 invasion of Iraq, a slight not yet entirely forgotten in Washington.
Instead, a de facto center-left bloc is emerging across the continent. Its members vary greatly from Chile, the economic poster-boy, to Washington's bugbear Venezuela. One thing, however, they have in common. They may not be necessarily opposed to the US on every issue, but they are no longer beholden to it.
Their drift away is testament to an historic failure of American foreign policy. In recent years the US approach to Latin America has been hopelessly distorted by its fixation with one modest-sized island 90 miles south of the Florida Keys. In economic and military terms Cuba is of little significance, but its symbolic importance has been vastly magnified by the attentions lavished upon it by Washington.
Isolation has been the watchword - first of President Castro, and now of another regional "bad boy" in the person of Mr Chavez. But the strategy has backfired utterly. American bullying has given the Cuban leader a nationalist support he might never have had otherwise, consolidating his position as the longest-serving government leader on the planet.
The US has bullied Mr Chavez too, clumsily backing a failed coup against him in 2002, and subsequently criticizing him at every turn. Today, boosted by his state's surging oil wealth, Mr Chavez is more assertive than ever. "Washington is planning my death," he claims, using Mr Castro's tactics to mobilize supporters against an external foe.

Attacking Iran: I Know It Sounds Crazy, But...
By Ray McGovern
TomDispatch
Wednesday 02 March 2005
"'This notion that the United States is getting ready to attack Iran is simply ridiculous.'

(Short pause)

"'And having said that, all options are on the table.'

"Even the White House stenographers felt obliged to note the result: '(Laughter).'"

The Washington Post's Dan Froomkin on George Bush's February 22 press conference.
For a host of good reasons -- the huge and draining commitment of U.S. forces to Iraq and Iran's ability to stir the Iraqi pot to boiling, for starters -- the notion that the Bush administration would mount a "preemptive" air attack on Iran seems insane. And still more insane if the objective includes overthrowing Iran's government again, as in 1953 -- this time under the rubric of "regime change."
But Bush administration policy toward the Middle East is being run by men -- yes, only men -- who were routinely referred to in high circles in Washington during the 1980s as "the crazies." I can attest to that personally, but one need not take my word for it.
According to James Naughtie, author of The Accidental American: Tony Blair and the Presidency, former Secretary of State Colin Powell added an old soldier's adjective to the "crazies" sobriquet in referring to the same officials. Powell, who was military aide to Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger in the early eighties, was overheard calling them "the f---ing crazies" during a phone call with British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw before the war in Iraq. At the time, Powell was reportedly deeply concerned over their determination to attack -- with or without UN approval. Small wonder that they got rid of Powell after the election, as soon as they had no more use for him.
If further proof of insanity were needed, one could simply look at the unnecessary carnage in Iraq since the invasion in March 2003. That unprovoked attack was, in my view, the most fateful foreign policy blunder in our nation's history...so far.
It Can Get Worse
"The crazies" are not finished. And we do well not to let their ultimate folly obscure their current ambition, and the further trouble that ambition is bound to bring in the four years ahead. In an immediate sense, with U.S. military power unrivaled, they can be seen as "crazy like a fox," with a value system in which "might makes right." Operating out of that value system, and now sporting the more respectable misnomer/moniker "neoconservative," they are convinced that they know exactly what they are doing. They have a clear ideology and a geopolitical strategy, which leap from papers they put out at the Project for the New American Century over recent years.
The very same men who, acting out of that paradigm, brought us the war in Iraq are now focusing on Iran, which they view as the only remaining obstacle to American domination of the entire oil-rich Middle East. They calculate that, with a docile, corporate-owned press, a co-opted mainstream church, and a still-trusting populace, the United States and/or the Israelis can launch a successful air offensive to disrupt any Iranian nuclear weapons programs -- with the added bonus of possibly causing the regime in power in Iran to crumble.
But why now? After all, the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency has just told Congress that Iran is not likely to have a nuclear weapon until "early in the next decade?" The answer, according to some defense experts, is that several of the Iranian facilities are still under construction and there is only a narrow "window of opportunity" to destroy them without causing huge environmental problems. That window, they say, will begin to close this year.
Other analysts attribute the sense of urgency to worry in Washington that the Iranians may have secretly gained access to technology that would facilitate a leap forward into the nuclear club much sooner than now anticipated. And it is, of course, neoconservative doctrine that it is best to nip -- the word in current fashion is "preempt" -- any conceivable threats in the bud. One reason the Israelis are pressing hard for early action may simply be out of a desire to ensure that George W. Bush will have a few more years as president after an attack on Iran, so that they will have him to stand with Israel when bedlam breaks out in the Middle East.
What about post-attack "Day Two?" Not to worry. Well-briefed pundits are telling us about a wellspring of Western-oriented moderates in Iran who, with a little help from the U.S., could seize power in Tehran. I find myself thinking: Right; just like all those Iraqis who welcomed invading American and British troops with open arms and cut flowers. For me, this evokes a painful flashback to the early eighties when "intelligence," pointing to "moderates" within the Iranian leadership, was conjured up to help justify the imaginative but illegal arms-for-hostages-and-proceeds-to-Nicaraguan-Contras caper. The fact that the conjurer-in-chief of that spurious "evidence" on Iranian "moderates," former chief CIA analyst, later director Robert Gates, was recently offered the newly created position of director of national intelligence makes the flashback more eerie -- and alarming.
George H. W. Bush Saw through "the Crazies"
During his term in office, George H. W. Bush, with the practical advice of his national security adviser Gen. Brent Scowcroft and Secretary of State James Baker, was able to keep "the crazies" at arms length, preventing them from getting the country into serious trouble. They were kept well below the level of "principal" -- that is, below the level of secretary of state or defense.
Even so, heady in the afterglow of victory in the Gulf War of 1990, "the crazies" stirred up considerable controversy when they articulated their radical views. Their vision, for instance, became the centerpiece of the draft "Defense Planning Guidance" that Paul Wolfowitz, de facto dean of the neoconservatives, prepared in 1992 for then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney. It dismissed deterrence as an outdated relic of the Cold War and argued that the United States must maintain military strength beyond conceivable challenge -- and use it in preemptive ways in dealing with those who might acquire "weapons of mass destruction." Sound familiar?
Aghast at this radical imperial strategy for the post-Cold War world, someone with access to the draft leaked it to the New York Times, forcing President George H. W. Bush either to endorse or disavow it. Disavow it he did -- and quickly, on the cooler-head recommendations of Scowcroft and Baker, who proved themselves a bulwark against the hubris and megalomania of "the crazies." Unfortunately, their vision did not die. No less unfortunately, there is method to their madness -- even if it threatens to spell eventual disaster for our country. Empires always overreach and fall.
The Return of the Neocons
In 2001, the new President Bush brought the neocons back and put them in top policymaking positions. Even former Assistant Secretary of State Elliot Abrams, convicted in October 1991 of lying to Congress and then pardoned by George H. W. Bush, was called back and put in charge of Middle East policy in the White House. In January, he was promoted to the influential post (once occupied by Robert Gates) of deputy assistant to the president for national security affairs. From that senior position Abrams will once again be dealing closely with John Negroponte, an old colleague from rogue-elephant Contra War days, who has now been picked to be the first director of national intelligence.
Those of us who -- like Colin Powell -- had front-row seats during the 1980s are far too concerned to dismiss the re-emergence of the neocons as a simple case of déjà vu. They are much more dangerous now. Unlike in the eighties, they are the ones crafting the adventurous policies our sons and daughters are being called on to implement.
Why dwell on this? Because it is second in importance only to the portentous reality that the earth is running out of readily accessible oil - something of which they are all too aware. Not surprisingly then, disguised beneath the weapons-of-mass-destruction smokescreen they laid down as they prepared to invade Iraq lay an unspoken but bedrock reason for the war -- oil. In any case, the neocons seem to believe that, in the wake of the November election, they now have a carte-blanche "mandate." And with the president's new "capital to spend," they appear determined to spend it, sooner rather than later.
Next Stop, Iran
When a Special Forces platoon leader just back from Iraq matter-of-factly tells a close friend of mine, as happened last week, that he and his unit are now training their sights (literally) on Iran, we need to take that seriously. It provides us with a glimpse of reality as seen at ground level. For me, it brought to mind an unsolicited email I received from the father of a young soldier training at Fort Benning in the spring of 2002, soon after I wrote an op-ed discussing the timing of George W. Bush's decision to make war on Iraq. The father informed me that, during the spring of 2002, his son kept writing home saying his unit was training to go into Iraq. No, said the father; you mean Afghanistan... that's where the war is, not Iraq. In his next email, the son said, "No, Dad, they keep saying Iraq. I asked them and that's what they mean."
Now, apparently, they keep saying Iran; and that appears to be what they mean.
Anecdotal evidence like this is hardly conclusive. Put it together with administration rhetoric and a preponderance of other "dots," though, and everything points in the direction of an air attack on Iran, possibly also involving some ground forces. Indeed, from the New Yorker reports of Seymour Hersh to Washington Post articles, accounts of small-scale American intrusions on the ground as well as into Iranian airspace are appearing with increasing frequency. In a speech given on February 18, former UN arms inspector and Marine officer Scott Ritter (who was totally on target before the Iraq War on that country's lack of weapons of mass destruction) claimed that the president has already "signed off" on plans to bomb Iran in June in order to destroy its alleged nuclear weapons program and eventually bring about "regime change." This does not necessarily mean an automatic green light for a large attack in June, but it may signal the president's seriousness about this option.
So, again, against the background of what we have witnessed over the past four years, and the troubling fact that the circle of second-term presidential advisers has become even tighter, we do well to inject a strong note of urgency into any discussion of the "Iranian option."
Why Would Iran Want Nukes?
So why would Iran think it has to acquire nuclear weapons? Sen. Richard Lugar, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was asked this on a Sunday talk show a few months ago. Apparently having a senior moment, he failed to give the normal answer. Instead, he replied, "Well, you know, Israel has..." At that point, he caught himself and abruptly stopped.
Recovering quickly and realizing that he could not just leave the word "Israel" hanging there, Lugar began again: "Well, Israel is alleged to have a nuclear capability."
Is alleged to have...? Lugar is chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and yet he doesn't know that Israel has, by most estimates, a major nuclear arsenal, consisting of several hundred nuclear weapons? (Mainstream newspapers are allergic to dwelling on this topic, but it is mentioned every now and then, usually buried in obscurity on an inside page.)
Just imagine how the Iranians and Syrians would react to Lugar's disingenuousness. Small wonder our highest officials and lawmakers -- and Lugar, remember, is one of the most decent among them -- are widely seen abroad as hypocritical. Our media, of course, ignore the hypocrisy. This is standard operating procedure when the word "Israel" is spoken in this or other unflattering contexts. And the objections of those appealing for a more balanced approach are quashed.
If the truth be told, Iran fears Israel at least as much as Israel fears the internal security threat posed by the thugs supported by Tehran. Iran's apprehension is partly fear that Israel (with at least tacit support from the Bush administration) will send its aircraft to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities, just as American-built Israeli bombers destroyed the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak in 1981. As part of the current war of nerves, recent statements by the president and vice president can be read as giving a green light to Israel to do just that; while Israeli Air Force commander Major General Eliezer Shakedi told reporters on February 21 that Israel must be prepared for an air strike on Iran "in light of its nuclear activity."
US-Israel Nexus
The Iranians also remember how Israel was able to acquire and keep its nuclear technology. Much of it was stolen from the United States by spies for Israel. As early as the late-1950s, Washington knew Israel was building the bomb and could have aborted the project. Instead, American officials decided to turn a blind eye and let the Israelis go ahead. Now Israel's nuclear capability is truly formidable. Still, it is a fact of strategic life that a formidable nuclear arsenal can be deterred by a far more modest one, if an adversary has the means to deliver it. (Look at North Korea's success with, at best, a few nuclear weapons and questionable means of delivery in deterring the "sole remaining superpower in the world.") And Iran already has missiles with the range to hit Israel.
Israeli Prime Minister Sharon has for some time appeared eager to enlist Washington's support for an early "pre-emptive" strike on Iran. Indeed, American defense officials have told reporters that visiting Israeli officials have been pressing the issue for the past year and a half. And the Israelis are now claiming publicly that Iran could have a nuclear weapon within six months -- years earlier than the Defense Intelligence Agency estimate mentioned above.
In the past, President Bush has chosen to dismiss unwelcome intelligence estimates as "guesses" -- especially when they threatened to complicate decisions to implement the neoconservative agenda. It is worth noting that several of the leading neocons - Richard Perle, chair of the Defense Policy Board (2001-03); Douglas Feith, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy; and David Wurmser, Middle East adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney -- actually wrote policy papers for the Israeli government during the 1990s. They have consistently had great difficulty distinguishing between the strategic interests of Israel and those of the US -- at least as they imagine them.
As for President Bush, over the past four years he has amply demonstrated his preference for the counsel of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon who, as Gen. Scowcroft said publicly, has the president "wrapped around his little finger." (As Chairman of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board until he was unceremoniously removed at the turn of the year, Scowcroft was in a position to know.) If Scowcroft is correct in also saying that the president has been "mesmerized" by Sharon, it seems possible that the Israelis already have successfully argued for an attack on Iran.
When "Regime Change" Meant Overthrow for Oil
To remember why the United States is no favorite in Tehran, one needs to go back at least to 1953 when the U.S. and Great Britain overthrew Iran's democratically elected Premier Mohammad Mossadeq as part of a plan to insure access to Iranian oil. They then emplaced the young Shah in power who, with his notorious secret police, proved second to none in cruelty. The Shah ruled from 1953 to 1979. Much resentment can build up over a whole generation. His regime fell like a house of cards, when supporters of Ayatollah Khomeini rose up to do some regime change of their own.
Iranians also remember Washington's strong support for Saddam Hussein's Iraq after it decided to make war on Iran in 1980. U.S. support for Iraq (which included crucial intelligence support for the war and an implicit condoning of Saddam's use of chemical weapons) was perhaps the crucial factor in staving off an Iranian victory. Imagine then, the threat Iranians see, should the Bush administration succeed in establishing up to 14 permanent military bases in neighboring Iraq. Any Iranian can look at a map of the Middle East (including occupied Iraq) and conclude that this administration might indeed be willing to pay the necessary price in blood and treasure to influence what happens to the black gold under Iranian as well as Iraqi sands. And with four more years to play with, a lot can be done along those lines. The obvious question is: How to deter it? Well, once again, Iran can hardly be blind to the fact that a small nation like North Korea has so far deterred U.S. action by producing, or at least claiming to have produced, nuclear weapons.
Nuclear Is the Nub
The nuclear issue is indeed paramount, and we would do well to imagine and craft fresh approaches to the nub of the problem. As a start, I'll bet if you made a survey, only 20% of Americans would answer "yes" to the question, "Does Israel have nuclear weapons?" That is key, it seems to me, because at their core Americans are still fair-minded people.
On the other hand, I'll bet that 95% of the Iranian population would answer, "Of course Israel has nuclear weapons; that's why we Iranians need them" -- which was, of course, the unmentionable calculation that Senator Lugar almost conceded. "And we also need them," many Iranians would probably say, "in order to deter 'the crazies' in Washington. It seems to be working for the North Koreans, who, after all, are the other remaining point on President Bush's 'axis of evil.'"
The ideal approach would, of course, be to destroy all nuclear weapons in the world and ban them for the future, with a very intrusive global inspection regime to verify compliance. A total ban is worth holding up as an ideal, and I think we must. But this approach seems unlikely to bear fruit over the next four years. So what then?
A Nuclear-Free Middle East
How about a nuclear-free Middle East? Could the US make that happen? We could if we had moral clarity -- the underpinning necessary to bring it about. Each time this proposal is raised, the Syrians, for example, clap their hands in feigned joyful anticipation, saying, "Of course such a pact would include Israel, right?" The issue is then dropped from all discussion by U.S. policymakers. Required: not only moral clarity but also what Thomas Aquinas labeled the precondition for all virtue, courage. In this context, courage would include a refusal to be intimidated by inevitable charges of anti-Semitism.
The reality is that, except for Israel, the Middle East is nuclear free. But the discussion cannot stop there. It is not difficult to understand why the first leaders of Israel, with the Holocaust experience written indelibly on their hearts and minds, and feeling surrounded by perceived threats to the fledgling state's existence, wanted the bomb. And so, before the Syrians or Iranians, for example, get carried away with self-serving applause for the nuclear-free Middle East proposal, they will have to understand that for any such negotiation to succeed it must have as a concomitant aim the guarantee of an Israel able to live in peace and protect itself behind secure borders. That guarantee has got to be part of the deal.
That the obstacles to any such agreement are formidable is no excuse not trying. But the approach would have to be new and everything would have to be on the table. Persisting in a state of denial about Israel's nuclear weapons is dangerously shortsighted; it does nothing but aggravate fears among the Arabs and create further incentive for them to acquire nuclear weapons of their own.
A sensible approach would also have to include a willingness to engage the Iranians directly, attempt to understand their perspective, and discern what the United States and Israel could do to alleviate their concerns.
Preaching to Iran and others about not acquiring nuclear weapons is, indeed, like the village drunk preaching sobriety -- the more so as our government keeps developing new genres of nuclear weapons and keeps looking the other way as Israel enhances its own nuclear arsenal. Not a pretty moral picture, that. Indeed, it reminds me of the Scripture passage about taking the plank out of your own eye before insisting that the speck be removed from another's.
Lessons from the Past...Like Mutual Deterrence
Has everyone forgotten that deterrence worked for some 40 years, while for most of those years the U.S. and the USSR had not by any means lost their lust for ever-enhanced nuclear weapons? The point is simply that, while engaging the Iranians bilaterally and searching for more imaginative nuclear-free proposals, the U.S. might adopt a more patient interim attitude regarding the striving of other nation states to acquire nuclear weapons -- bearing in mind that the Bush administration's policies of "preemption" and "regime change" themselves create powerful incentives for exactly such striving. As was the case with Iraq two years ago, there is no imminent Iranian strategic threat to Americans -- or, in reality, to anyone. Even if Iran acquired a nuclear capability, there is no reason to believe that it would risk a suicidal first strike on Israel. That, after all, is what mutual deterrence is all about; it works both ways.
It is nonetheless clear that the Israelis' sense of insecurity -- however exaggerated it may seem to those of us thousands of miles away -- is not synthetic but real. The Sharon government appears to regard its nuclear monopoly in the region as the only effective "deterrence insurance" it can buy. It is determined to prevent its neighbors from acquiring the kind of capability that could infringe on the freedom it now enjoys to carry out military and other actions in the area. Government officials have said that Israel will not let Iran acquire a nuclear weapon; it would be folly to dismiss this as bravado. The Israelis have laid down a marker and mean to follow through -- unless the Bush administration assumes the attitude that "preemption" is an acceptable course for the United States but not for Israel. It seems unlikely that the neoconservatives would take that line. Rather...
"Israel Is Our Ally."
Or so said our president before the cameras on February 17, 2005. But I didn't think we had a treaty of alliance with Israel; I don't remember the Senate approving one. Did I miss something?
Clearly, the longstanding U.S.-Israeli friendship and the ideals we share dictate continuing support for Israel's defense and security. It is quite another thing, though, to suggest the existence of formal treaty obligations that our country does not have. To all intents and purposes, our policymakers -- from the president on down -- seem to speak and behave on the assumption that we do have such obligations toward Israel. A former colleague CIA analyst, Michael Scheuer, author of Imperial Hubris, has put it this way: "The Israelis have succeeded in lacing tight the ropes binding the American Gulliver to Israel and its policies."
An earlier American warned:
"A passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation facilitates the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, infuses into one the enmities of the other, and betrays the former into participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification.... It also gives to ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens, who devote themselves to the favorite nation, facility to betray or sacrifice the interests of their own country." (George Washington, Farewell Address, 1796)
In my view, our first president's words apply only too aptly to this administration's lash-up with the Sharon government. As responsible citizens we need to overcome our timidity about addressing this issue, lest our fellow Americans continue to be denied important information neglected or distorted in our domesticated media.
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Ray McGovern served as a CIA analyst for 27 years -- from the administration of John F. Kennedy to that of George H. W. Bush. During the early 1980s, he was one of the writers/editors of the President's Daily Brief and briefed it one-on-one to the president's most senior advisers. He also chaired National Intelligence Estimates. In January 2003, he and four former colleagues founded Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
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http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/030205B.shtml
Bush Abomination’s #2 Failure: National Security

Published on Friday, February 25, 2005 by the Guardian (UK)

Lost in Europe
President Bush has reached a dead end in his foreign policy, but he has failed to recognise his quandary

by Sidney Blumenthal

President Bush has reached a dead end in his foreign policy, but he has failed to recognise his quandary. His belief that the polite reception he received in Europe is a vindication of his previous adventures is a vestige of fantasy.
As the strains of Beethoven's Sixth Symphony, the Pastoral, filled the Concert Noble in Brussels, Bush behaved as though the mood music itself was a dramatic new phase in the transatlantic relationship. He gives no indication that he grasps the exhaustion of his policy. His reductio ad absurdum was reached with his statement on Iran: "This notion that the US is getting ready to attack Iran is simply ridiculous. And having said that, all options are on the table." Including, presumably, the "simply ridiculous".
Bush is scrambling to cobble together policies across the board. At the last minute he rescued his summit with Vladimir Putin, who refuses to soften his authoritarian measures, with a step toward safeguarding Russian plutonium that could be used for nuclear weapons production. This programme was negotiated by Bill Clinton and neglected by Bush until two weeks ago.
The European reception for Bush was not an embrace of his neoconservative world view, but an attempt to put it in the past. New Europe is trying to compartmentalise old Bush. To the extent that he promises to be different, the Europeans encourage him; to the extent that he is the same, they pretend it's not happening.
The Europeans, including the British government, feel privately that the past three years have been hijacked by Iraq. Facing the grinding, bloody and unending reality of Iraq doesn't mean accepting Bush's original premises, but getting on with the task of stability. Ceasing the finger-pointing is the basis for European consensus on its new, if not publicly articulated, policy: containment of Bush. Naturally, Bush misses the nuances and ambiguities.
Of course, he has already contained himself, or at least his pre-emption doctrine, which seems to have been good for one-time use only. None of the allies is willing to repeat the experience. Bush can't manage another such military show anyway, as his army is pinned down in Iraq.
The problem of Iran is in many ways the opposite of Iraq. The Europeans have committed their credibility to negotiations, the Iranians have diplomatic means to preclude unilateral US action, and Bush - who, according to European officials, has no sense of what to do - is boxed in, whether he understands it or not.
The secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, seeking to impress French intellectuals while in Paris, referred to Iran as totalitarian, as if the authoritarian Shia regime neatly fitted the Soviet Union model. With this rhetorical legerdemain, she extended the overstretched analogy of the "war on terrorism" as the equivalent of the cold war to Persia. Her lack of intellectual adeptness dismayed her interlocutors. One of the French told me Rice was "deaf to all argument", but no one engaged her gaffe because "good manners are back".
Regardless of Rice's wordplay, it is not a policy. Rice has vaguely threatened to refer Iran to the UN security council. The "simply ridiculous" remains on the table at the same time as the US is unengaged in diplomacy. Bush doesn't know whether to join the Europeans in guaranteeing an agreement to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons or not.
"So long as Iran remains within the non-proliferation treaty and the [UN weapons] inspectors remain on the ground there, there's nothing the US can do within the security council," John Ritch, the former US ambassador to the UN International Atomic Energy Agency, told me.
The argument for keeping the Iranians within the treaty was overwhelming, he said. "As long as they are in the inspection system it gives us maximum opportunity to evaluate every step of their nuclear development ... The US should be willing to support a European-brokered deal under which the Iranians forgo their right to build a domestic nuclear enrichment and processing capability. Ultimately, the way to promote a satisfactory outcome is to empower the Europeans by asserting that the US will back up a sound agreement."
Bush has hummed a few bars of rapprochement. With their applause, the Europeans have begun to angle him into a corner on Iran. In time Bush must either join the negotiations or regress to neoconservatism, which would wreck the European relationship. If he chooses a course that is not "simply ridiculous", on his next visit the Europeans might be willing to play Beethoven's Third Symphony, the Eroica.
Sidney Blumenthal is former senior adviser to President Clinton and author of The Clinton Wars.
© 2005 Guardian Newspapers, Ltd.
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http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0225-23.htm

Published on Tuesday, February 22, 2005 by the Baltimore Sun
Doomed to Fail
If America Keeps Marching, It Could Very Well Be in the Direction of a Nuclear Apocalypse

by Scott Ritter

North Korea's dramatic public revelation that it possesses nuclear weapons represents a stark challenge for the Bush administration.
The North Korean claim, if true, underscores the failure of President Bush's nonproliferation policies that since the beginning of his first term had been subordinated to a grander vision of regime change. That policy was intended to transform strategically vital regions of the world into Western-style democracies supportive of the United States and the Bush administration's vision of American global dominance.

The intermingling of nonproliferation and regime change policies was doomed to fail. One requires skillful multilateral diplomacy based on the principles of uniform application of international law, the other bold application of a unilateral doctrine of aggressive liberation rhetoric backed by the real threat of military power. When blended, as the Bush administration did, unilateralism trumps multilateralism every time. North Korea's announced accession to the nuclear club represents the inevitable result.

The end of America's meaningful role as a promoter of global nonproliferation can be traced to decisions made in the 1990s regarding regime change in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. The United Nations had embarked on a bold effort to roll back the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction through disarmament and, despite some initial difficulties, scored a dramatic success.

It is now clear that Iraq, under pressure from U.N. weapons inspectors, was disarmed of its WMD by 1991 and had dismantled and destroyed the last vestiges of its weapons programs by 1996. But the United States had, since 1991, committed to a policy of regime change in Iraq, which required economic sanctions-based containment linked to a continued finding of Iraqi noncompliance with its disarmament obligation.

Rather than embracing weapons inspections, three successive U.S. administrations denigrated and subverted the work of the inspectors in order to keep the primary policy objective of regime change in Iraq on track. The nail in the coffin of U.S. nonproliferation efforts came when the Bush administration willfully misstated the extent of the Iraqi WMD programs in order to justify its invasion of Iraq.

North Korea and Iran concluded from events leading to the U.S. invasion of Iraq that the Bush administration did not regard nonproliferation as an endgame but a tool designed to weaken a target state to the point that it could succumb to the grander U.S. policy objective of regime change.

Mr. Bush had stated that the world would be a better place with the regimes in Pyongyang and Tehran removed. Therefore, all diplomatic efforts - whether the six-party framework with North Korea or the European Union-brokered negotiations with Iran - were regarded as disingenuous fronts intended not to facilitate nonproliferation and stability but rather instability and regime change.

With Iraq a model of the reality of America's unilateral militaristic approach toward bringing about regime change, North Korea and Iran have embarked on the only path available to either of them - acquisition of an independent nuclear deterrent intended to forestall what they perceive as irresponsible U.S. aggression.

The Bush administration has come face to face with the reality of the failure of its policies. Rather than curtailing the proliferation of nuclear weapons, the administration's crusade against global tyranny has served as an accelerant in placing the most dangerous weapons known to man in the hands of xenophobic regimes that have been backed into a corner.

But the situation in North Korea and Iran could still be resolved in a way that promotes global nonproliferation objectives.

Real and meaningful economic incentives, backed by U.S. and allied willingness to permit North Korea and Iran to possess civilian nuclear programs operated under stringent international monitoring, could succeed in rolling back North Korea's possession of nuclear weapons and provide incentive for Iran to cease and desist in its own program.

But the key to any such salvation lies with the willingness of the Bush administration to unlink nonproliferation efforts from regime change. This is highly unlikely, given the reality of the ideological composition of those at the senior decision-making levels of the Bush national security team and the huge political investment Mr. Bush has made in support of his global crusade against tyranny.

"Freedom is on the march," Mr. Bush has said. Unfortunately for the United States, North Korea and Iran don't see it that way. And if America keeps marching, it could very well be in the direction of a nuclear apocalypse.

Scott Ritter, a former intelligence officer and U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq, is author of the forthcoming Iraq Confidential: The Untold Story of America's Intelligence Conspiracy.

© 2005 Baltimore Sun
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bal-op.policy22feb22,1,408431.story?ctrack=1&cset=true

BUSH GONE WILD

Tue Feb 8, 7:59 PM ET
By Ted Rall
Trying to Start War Against Iran
PARIS--We're already at war with Iran. The question isn't whether or not they'll fight back. The question is when and how.
Bush used his State of the Union address to signal that Iran is his next target of war, calling it "the world's primary state sponsor of terror--pursuing nuclear weapons while depriving its people of the freedom they seek and deserve." Though Condoleezza Rice (news - web sites) pledges that war against Iran "is simply not on the agenda at this point," she issued similar assurances in 2002 when, in fact, Bush had already green-lighted war against Iraq (news - web sites). "When asked [at her confirmation hearing] whether the United States' goal was to replace the Islamic Republic [of Iran]," reports the International Herald-Tribune, Rice "did not say no." And for good reason. As the White House confirms, U.S. Special Forces commandos have been operating on Iranian soil since last year, scoping out military bases as targets of future airstrikes. United Press International reports that U.S. spy jets have been deployed over Iran in order to goad defense radar stations into locking in on them, revealing their positions for the coming war. Can you imagine how Bush would react to news that Mexican ground troops were snapping souvenir photos of Los Alamos, or that the Canadian air force was jetting over the Midwestern stratosphere? There's no difference. In such a case Bush could easily get the U.N. to sign off on war. This is more than a one-time border incursion. This is invasion, under international law the ultimate justification for a declaration of war--by Iran.
Since they declared mission accomplished in Iraq a couple of years ago, the hard-right Bush Administration's most bellicose zealots have been itching to invade Iran. But Bush probably can't let Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz have their way. Afghanistan (news - web sites) and Iraq have used up all of our available troops and cash. Even cutting and running from Iraq wouldn't do the trick. If 150,000 soldiers stationed in Iraq can't defeat a few thousand resistance fighters with RPGs and IEDs, how will they fare against Iran--a nation three times the size of Iraq, whose terrain includes a range of big-ass mountains, which has a half-million-man standing army equipped with modern hardware?
Denied their longed-for ground invasion, the neocons have fallen back to the next best thing: using Israel to launch proxy airstrikes against possible WMD and other military installations in Iran's eastern desert. Placing Iran as the "top of the list" of the world's most troublesome nations during a high-profile television appearance, Dick Cheney (news - web sites) referenced Israel's 1981 preemptive bombing of an Iraqi nuclear reactor as a model for U.S. military action against Iran. "They understand that they were overly optimistic about Iraq," a person in a position to know the Administration's intentions tells me. "But they think they've learned from their mistakes, that young Iranians want democracy. If we put the mullahs off-balance, they say, the people will overthrow them."
That's a big gamble. Iran already has, in Ian Bremmer's words, "one of the most pluralist and (relatively) democratic regimes in the Middle East." Moreover, distrust of the United States--which overthrew Iran's democratic government in 1953, backed the Shah's vicious dictatorship and has worked tirelessly to ruin the Iranian economy through sanctions and covert sabotage since the 1978 Islamic revolution--can hardly be overstated. The kids may want freedom, but they don't believe the U.S. will deliver it. And they live right next door to Iraq, where American "liberation" leaves something to be desired.
In the middle to long run, "surgical" airstrikes on Iranian military infrastructure would probably be even more costly to U.S. interests than an outright ground invasion. Because Iranian officials have lived under the threat of attack for 25 years, they've taken pains to carefully conceal their extensive military infrastructure, which may include nuclear weapons. Pentagon (news - web sites) analysts concede that these efforts have been effective enough to deny Israel or the U.S. the ability to cripple Iran's ability to field fighter jets or launch missiles.
Iranian leaders already feel the squeeze between U.S.-occupied Iraq and Afghanistan. The day after an Israeli or U.S. attack, Iranian leaders would correctly surmise that failure to respond would undermine their domestic political credibility. Jumping through U.S.-imposed hoops, as Saddam did during the winter of 2002-3, would be perceived by the Bushists as an indication of weakness. Ex-president Hussein can tell you how well cooperation works.
The nightmare scenario happens to be the most likely. To stand a chance in its confrontation with the United States, Iran would require the support of neighboring Arab countries. But now that Iraq has been neutered by partition, civil war and occupation, Iran is the only large majority Shia nation in the Middle East. Since many Sunnis consider Shiaism a heretical strain of Islam, Iranians would otherwise suffer alone. Were Iran to retaliate against Israel--whether responding to an attack originating from the U.S. or Israel wouldn't matter since Iran's missiles could only reach the latter--that would change. Arab states, forced to choose between Shia Iran and the Jewish state, would yield to popular pressure to come to Iran's aid. If the Iranians have managed to build one nuke, they might use it against Tel Aviv. Cheney's half-baked rehash of 1981 could fulfill every late 20th century's worst-case scenario by setting ablaze the entire Middle East.
If war follows its own internal logic, so does the clash of words and gestures that leads up to it. The U.S. has backed Iran into a geographic and diplomatic corner, breaking the first rule of Machiavelli 101 by encouraging nuclear proliferation as the sole guarantee against U.S.-led regime change. (Kim Jung Il, President Khatami on Line 1.) Losing the wars against Afghanistan and Iraq made the Bushists Gone Wild lose face; now they need a bigger win than ever. One hopes for cool heads to prevail, but they are in short supply. The two sides are locked in a death grip in which self-perpetuation necessitates the other's destruction.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ucru/20050209/cm_ucru/bushgonewild&e=1

Published on Saturday, February 19, 2005 by CommonDreams.org
The Dangerous Implications of the Hariri Assassination and the U.S. Response
by Stephen Zunes

The broader implications of the February 14 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, who was seen by many as the embodiment of the Lebanese people’s efforts to rebuild their country in the aftermath of its 15-year civil war, are yet to unfold. A Sunni Muslim, Hariri reached out to all of Lebanon’s ethnic and religious communities in an effort to unite the country after decades of violence waged by heavily-armed militias and foreign invaders.
Hariri also had his critics, particularly among the country’s poor majority whose situation deteriorated under the former prime minister’s adoption of a number of controversial neo-liberal economic policies. A multi-billionaire businessman prior to becoming prime minister, there were widespread charges of corruption in the awarding of contracts, many of which went to a company largely owned by Hariri himself. A number of treasured historic buildings relatively undamaged from war were demolished to make room for grandiose construction projects.
There had been a growing sense of political crisis in Lebanon since September, when Syria successfully pressured the Lebanese parliament, in an act of dubious constitutionality, to extend the term of the unpopular pro-Syrian President Emile Lahoud, a move roundly condemned in the international community. Washington was particularly virulent in its criticism, which can only be considered ironic, given that the United States attempted a similar maneuver back in 1958 to extend the term of the pro-American president Camille Chamoun. The result was a popular uprising suppressed only when President Dwight Eisenhower sent in U.S. Marines.
The size and sophistication of the explosion which killed Hariri, his bodyguards, and several bystanders have led many to speculate that foreign intelligence units may have been involved. Initial speculation has focused on the Syrians, which had previously worked closely with Hariri as prime minister until their successful effort on the behest of President Lahoud, with whom Hariri had frequently clashed as prime minister. As a result, Hariri broke with Syria and was poised to lead an anti-Syrian front in the upcoming parliamentary elections in May.
Hariri made lots of other enemies as well, however, including rival Lebanese groups, the Israeli government, Islamic extremists, and powerful financiers with interests in his multi-billion dollar reconstruction efforts. A previously-unknown group calling itself “Victory and Jihad in Syria and Lebanon” claimed responsibility for the attack, citing Hariri’s close ties to the repressive Saudi monarchy. As of this writing, there is no confirmation that they were responsible for the blast or if such a group even exists.
While Syria remains the primary suspect, no evidence has been presented to support the charge. Damascus has publicly condemned the killings and denied responsibility. Syria’s regime, while certainly ruthless enough to do such a thing, is usually not so brazen. They would have little to gain from uniting the Lebanese opposition against them or for provoking the United States and other Western nations to further isolate their government.
The United States, however, has indirectly implicated Syria in the attack and has withdrawn its ambassador from Damascus.
Syria’s Role in Lebanon
Syrian forces first entered Lebanon in 1976 at the invitation of the Lebanese president as the primary component of an international peacekeeping force authorized by the Arab League to try to end Lebanon's civil war. The United States quietly supported the Syrian intervention as a means of blocking the likely victory by the leftist Lebanese National Movement and its Palestinian allies. As the civil war continued in varying manifestations in subsequent years, the Syrians would often play one faction off against another in an effort to maintain their influence. Despite this, they were unable to defend the country from the U.S.-backed Israeli invasion in 1982, the installation of the Phalangist leader Amin Gemayel as president, and the U.S. military intervention to help prop up Gemayel’s rightist government against a popular uprising. Finally, in late 1990, Syrian forces helped the Lebanese oust the unpopular interim Prime Minister General Michel Aoun, which proved instrumental in ending the 15-year civil war. (Given that General Aoun’s primary outside supporter was Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, the United States quietly backed this Syrian action as well.)
The end of the civil war did not result in the end of the Syrian role in Lebanon, however. Most Lebanese at this point resent the ongoing presence of Syrian troops and Syria’s overbearing influence on their government.
The Bush administration, Congressional leaders of both parties, and their allies in the media have increasingly made reference to “the Syrian occupation of Lebanon.” Strictly speaking, however, this is not an occupation in the legal sense of the word, such as in the case of the Morocco’s occupation of Western Sahara or Israel’s occupation of Syria’s Golan region and much of the Palestinian Gaza Strip and West Bank (including East Jerusalem), all of which are recognized by the United Nations and international legal authorities as non-self-governing territories. Lebanon has experienced direct foreign military occupation, however: from 1978 to 2000, Israel occupied a large section of southern Lebanon and – from June 1982 through May 1984 – much of central Lebanon as well, resulting in the deaths of thousands of Lebanese civilians.
A more accurate analogy to the current Syrian role would be that of the Soviets in the Warsaw Pact countries of Eastern Europe during much of the Cold War, in which these nations were allowed to maintain their independence and distinct national institutions yet were denied their right to pursue an autonomous course in their foreign and domestic policies.
Currently, Syria has only 14,000 troops in Lebanon, mostly in the Bekaa Valley in the eastern part of the country. This is a substantial reduction from the 40,000 Syrian troops present in earlier years and not a particularly overbearing military presence in a country of that size. This does not mean that calls for an immediate withdrawal of Syrian forces and an end to Syrian interference in Lebanon’s political affairs are not morally and legally justified. However, the use of the term “occupation” by American political leaders is a gross exaggeration and may be designed to divert attention from the ongoing U.S. Military, diplomatic and financial support of the real ongoing military occupations by Israel and Morocco.
In September of last year, the United States – along with France and Great Britain – sponsored a resolution before the UN Security Council which, among other things, called upon “all remaining foreign forces to withdraw from Lebanon.” UN Security Council resolution 1559 was adopted with six abstentions and no negative votes and builds upon UN Security Council resolution 520, adopted in 1982, which similarly calls for the withdrawal of foreign forces.
The Bush administration, with widespread bipartisan Congressional support, has cited Syria’s ongoing violation of these resolutions in placing sanctions upon Syria. Ironically, however, no such pressure was placed upon Israel for violating UNSC resolution 520 and nine other resolutions (the first being adopted in 1978) calling on Israel to withdraw its forces from Lebanon. In fact, during the Clinton administration, the U.S. openly called on Israel to not unilaterally withdraw from Lebanon as required, even as public opinion polls in Israel showed that a sizable majority of Israelis supported an end to the Israeli occupation, during which hundreds of Israeli soldiers were killed.
Today, many of the most outspoken supporters of a strict enforcement of UNSC resolution 1159 – such as Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer of California – were also among the most prominent opponents of enforcing similar resolutions when they were directed at Israel. In short, both Republicans and Democrats agree that Lebanese sovereignty and international law must be defended only if the government challenging these principles is not a U.S. ally.
(Israel was finally forced out of Lebanon in May 2000 as a result of attacks by the militant Lebanese Shiite group Hizballah. Four months later, the Palestinian uprising against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip began. Militant Palestinians claim they were inspired by the fact that Israel ended its 22-year occupation not because of the U.S.-led peace process and not because of the United Nations (which was blocked by the United States from enforcing its resolutions), but because of armed struggle by radical Islamists. Through, for a number of reasons, such tactics are unlikely to succeed in the occupied Palestinian territories, the support of extremist Islamist groups and their use of violence by large sectors of the Palestinian population under Israeli occupation can for the most part be attributed to the United States refusing to support an Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon through diplomatic means.)
What Next?
Whether or not the Syrians played a role in Hariri’s assassination, his death will likely escalate pressure by the Lebanese to challenge Syria's domination of their government. Once centered primarily in the country’s Maronite Christian community, anti-Syrian sentiment is growing among Lebanese from across the ethnic and ideological spectrum. Ultimately, the country's fate will be determined by the Lebanese themselves. If the United States presses the issue too strongly, however, it risks hardening Syria’s position and allowing Damascus to defend its ongoing domination of Lebanon behind anti-imperialist rhetoric.
While there are many areas in which the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad should indeed be challenged, there is a genuine fear that increased U.S. efforts to isolate the regime and the concomitant threats of military action against Syria will undermine the efforts of Lebanese and Syrians demanding change.
One major problem is that most charges against the Syrian government by the Bush administration and the Congressional leadership of both parties are rife with hyperbole and double-standards.
For example, the United States has demanded that Syria eliminate its long-range and medium-range missiles, while not insisting that pro-Western neighbors like Turkey and Israel – with far more numerous and sophisticated missiles on their territory – similarly disarm. The United States has also insisted that Syria unilaterally eliminate its chemical weapons stockpiles, while not making similar demands on U.S. allies Israel and Egypt – which have far larger chemical weapons stockpiles – to do the same. The United States has demanded an end to political repression and for free and fair elections in Syria while not making similar demands of even more repressive and autocratic regimes in allied countries like Saudi Arabia and Uzbekistan.
Contrary to U.S. charges that Syria is a major state supporter of international terrorism, Syria is at most a very minor player. The U.S. State Department has noted how Syria has played a critical role in efforts to combat Al-Qaeda and that the Syrian government has not been linked to any acts of international terrorism for nearly twenty years. The radical Palestinian Islamist groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad have political offices in Damascus, as they do in a number of Arab capitals, but they are not allowed to conduct any military activities. A number of left-wing Palestinian factions also maintain offices in Syria, but these groups are now largely defunct and have not engaged in terrorist operations for many years.
Much has been made of Syrian support for the radical Lebanese Shiite group Hizballah. However, not only has Syrian support for the group been quite minimal in recent years, the group is now a legally recognized Lebanese political party and serves in the Lebanese parliament. During the past decade, its militia have largely restricted their use of violence to Israeli occupation forces in southern Lebanon and in disputed border regions of Israeli-occupied Syria, not against civilians, thereby raising serious questions as to whether it can actually still be legally considered a terrorist group.
Currently, the Bush administration has expressed its dismay at Russia’s decision to sell Syria anti-aircraft missiles, claiming that it raises questions in regard to President Vladimir Putin’s commitment against terrorism. The administration has been unable to explain, however, how selling defensive weapons to an internationally-recognized government aids terrorists.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Congressional leaders have also accused Syria of threatening the Arab-Israeli peace process. However, Syria has pledged to provide Israel with internationally-enforced security guarantees and full diplomatic relations in return for a complete Israeli withdrawal from Syrian territory seized in the 1967 war, in concordance with UN Security Council resolutions 242 and 338, long recognized as the basis for peace. They have also called for a renewal of peace talks with Israel, which came very close to a permanent peace agreement in early 2000. However, the right-wing U.S.-backed Israeli government of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has refused to resume negotiations and pledges it will never withdraw from the Golan, thereby raising questions as to whether it is really Syria that is primarily at fault.
Another questionable anti-Syrian charge is in regard to their alleged support of Saddam Hussein and ongoing support of anti-American insurgents in Iraq. In reality, though both ruled by the Baath Party, Syria had broken diplomatic relations with Baghdad back in the 1970s and was the home of a number of anti-Saddam exile groups. Syria and Iraq backed rival factions in Lebanon’s civil war. Syria was the only country to side with Iran during the Iran-Iraq war and contributed troops to the U.S.-led Operation Desert Shield in reaction to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. Syria, as a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council in 2002, supported the U.S.-backed resolution 1441 demanding Iraqi cooperation with UN inspectors or else face “severe consequences.” The Syrian government has substantially beefed up security along its borders with Iraq and U.S. Military officials have acknowledged that relatively few foreign fighters have actually entered Iraq via Syria. Most critically, there is no reason that Syria would want the insurgents to succeed, given that the primary insurgent groups are either supporters of the old anti-Syrian regime in Baghdad or are Islamist extremists similar to those who seriously challenged the Syrian government in 1982 before being brutally suppressed. Given that Assad’s regime is dominated by Syria’s Alawite minority, which have much closer ties to Iraq’s Shiites than with Sunnis who dominate the Arab and Islamic world, and that the Shiite-dominated slate which won the recent Iraqi elections share their skepticism about the U.S. role in the Middle East, they would have every reason to want to see the newly-elected Iraqi government succeed so U.S. troops could leave.
Despite the highly-questionable assertions which form the basis of the Bush administration’s antipathy toward Syria, there have essentially been no serious challenges to Bush administration policy on Capitol Hill. Indeed, Democratic House leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid have strongly defended President George W. Bush’s policies toward Iraq and Lebanon and helped push through strict sanctions against Syria based upon these same exaggerations and double-standards. (See my article “The Syria Accountability Act and the Triumph of Hegemony,” October 30, 2003.) During the 2004 election campaign, Senator John Kerry, the Democratic presidential nominee, criticized President Bush for not being anti-Syrian enough.
Among the few dissenters is Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, who expressed his concern to Secretary of State Rice during recent hearings on Capitol Hill that the tough talk against Syria was remarkably similar to what was heard in regard to Iraq a few years earlier. One of only eight members of Congress to vote against the Syria Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act in the fall of 2003, he warned his fellow Senators that the language was broad enough that the administration might later claim it authorized military action against Syria.
As long as the vast majority of Democrats are afraid to appear “soft” toward the Syrian dictatorship and as long as so few progressive voices are willing to challenge the Democrats, the President Bush appears to have few obstacles in his way should he once again choose to lead the country to war.
Stephen Zunes is a professor of Politics and chair of the Peace & Justice Studies Program at the University of San Francisco. He serves as Middle East editor for the Foreign Policy in Focus Project and is the author of Tinderbox: U.S. Middle East Policy and the Roots of Terrorism (Common Courage Press, 2003.)
###

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Published on Tuesday, March 1, 2005 by the lndependent/UK

How Latin America Turned to the Left
Uruguay Swears in its First Left-Wing President Today, Joined by the New Wave of Leaders in the Region - and Fidel Castro; the Event Symbolizes Waning US Influence

by Rupert Cornwell

At presidential inaugurations, as at weddings, the guest list says everything. In Montevideo today, Tabare Vazquez will be sworn in as the first left-wing president in the 170-year history of Uruguay. That is noteworthy enough, but even more remarkable are the foreign dignitaries in attendance.
Luis Inacio "Lula" da Silva, the center-left President of Brazil will be there. So will Hugo Chavez, the fiery demagogue who leads Venezuela, and Argentina's Nestor Kirchner. Adding the revolutionary topping will be none other than Fidel Castro. No gathering could better symbolize the slow drift of Latin America out of the US orbit.
Until 31 October, Uruguay could be counted upon as one of Washington's staunchest friends in the hemisphere. But then Mr Vazquez, an oncologist and former mayor of Montevideo, broke the traditional two-party mold of Uruguayan politics by leading the Frente Amplio (Broad Front) leftist coalition to an overwhelming election victory.
Today Washington's unqualified, 100 per cent loyal allies to the south of its border with Mexico are no more than one or two - El Salvador and Honduras certainly, but who else? Even Chile defied the superpower by refusing to support the 2003 invasion of Iraq, a slight not yet entirely forgotten in Washington.
Instead, a de facto center-left bloc is emerging across the continent. Its members vary greatly from Chile, the economic poster-boy, to Washington's bugbear Venezuela. One thing, however, they have in common. They may not be necessarily opposed to the US on every issue, but they are no longer beholden to it.
Their drift away is testament to an historic failure of American foreign policy. In recent years the US approach to Latin America has been hopelessly distorted by its fixation with one modest-sized island 90 miles south of the Florida Keys. In economic and military terms Cuba is of little significance, but its symbolic importance has been vastly magnified by the attentions lavished upon it by Washington.
Isolation has been the watchword - first of President Castro, and now of another regional "bad boy" in the person of Mr Chavez. But the strategy has backfired utterly. American bullying has given the Cuban leader a nationalist support he might never have had otherwise, consolidating his position as the longest-serving government leader on the planet.
The US has bullied Mr Chavez too, clumsily backing a failed coup against him in 2002, and subsequently criticizing him at every turn. Today, boosted by his state's surging oil wealth, Mr Chavez is more assertive than ever. "Washington is planning my death," he claims, using Mr Castro's tactics to mobilize supporters against an external foe.
Once upon a time, the US tried to understand Latin America. In the 1930s, Franklin Roosevelt and his top Latin American adviser, Sumner Welles, realized that US military interventions in Cuba and elsewhere were counterproductive. Instead they devised the "Good Neighbor Policy". Two decades later, John Kennedy proclaimed the Alianza para el Progreso (the Alliance for Progress).
Since then, however, US diplomacy has been back-handed in the extreme. Its illogical obsession with Cuba, its insistence on seeing the world through a single prism - first the struggle with communism, then the spread of free markets and free trade, now the "war on terror" - have blinded it to the sensitivities of the region. During the Cold War, Washington backed an array of unpleasant military dictators as bastions against Soviet power. Later, the US insistence on rigorous fiscal policies (which it conspicuously fails to impose on itself) is widely blamed for a string of financial crises, culminating in the near-collapse of Argentina's economy in 2002.
"The US has suffered defeats on every front," says Larry Birns, director of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs in Washington. "The fact is that Latin America is no longer 'hemisphere-bound', just a handful of countries in America's back-yard." Today President Castro is probably in a stronger position in the region than ever before. Both Brazil's Lula and Uruguay's Vazquez were elected on left-wing platforms, but are economic realists. Closer ties with Cuba allow them to burnish their left-wing credentials and prove their independence from the US, sweetening harsh economic medicine at home.
It is unlikely the US will regain the lost ground any time soon. Neither George Bush nor Condoleezza Rice have displayed any real feel for Latin America. Policymaking has been sub-contracted to neo-conservative ideologues, notably Roger Noriega, head of Western Hemisphere affairs at the State Department, and the former White House aide Otto Reich.
Mr Birns points to the growing links between Mercosur, the rickety four-nation trade bloc grouping Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay, and the EU as a preferable alternative to the FTAA, the Free Trade Area of the Americas, that is promoted by the US. Tellingly, after his stop in Montevideo, Mr Chavez is off to India and the Middle East. Washington can but watch, and gnash its teeth in impotent fury.
© 2005 Independent News & Media (UK) Ltd

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Bush Abomination’s #2 Failure: Economic Security

PAUL KRUGMAN, New York Times: Does anyone still take Mr. Greenspan's pose as a nonpartisan font of wisdom seriously?
When Mr. Greenspan made his contorted argument for tax cuts back in 2001, his reputation made it hard for many observers to admit the obvious: he was mainly looking for some way to do the Bush administration a political favor. But there's no reason to be taken in by his equally weak, contorted argument against reversing those cuts today.

Mona Megalli, Reuters: Moves by Middle East oil exporters and Russia to switch some revenue from dollars to euros lie behind the U.S. currency's weakness, and a further rise in crude prices could prompt more declines, the billionaire investor George Soros said on Monday.
Soros told delegates to the Jeddah Economic Forum that the dollar's fall should help to lower the U.S current account and trade deficits, but warned that a fall beyond an undisclosed "tipping point" would severely disrupt markets.
The U.S. current account deficit is more than five percent of gross domestic product despite the currency's three-year slide. The dollar, however, has staged a comeback recently, gaining about 3.6 percent against the euro and three percent versus the yen so far this year.
"The oil exporting countries' central banks ... have been switching out of dollars mainly into euros and Russia also plays an important role in this. That is, I think, at the bottom of the current weakness of the dollar," Soros said.

Bush Abomination’s #2 Failure: Economic Security

________________________________________
March 4, 2005
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Deficits and Deceit
By PAUL KRUGMAN

our years ago, Alan Greenspan urged Congress to cut taxes, asserting that the federal government was in imminent danger of paying off too much debt.
On Wednesday the Fed chairman warned Congress of the opposite fiscal danger: he asserted that there would be large budget deficits for the foreseeable future, leading to an unsustainable rise in federal debt. But he counseled against reversing the tax cuts, calling instead for cuts in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
Does anyone still take Mr. Greenspan's pose as a nonpartisan font of wisdom seriously?
When Mr. Greenspan made his contorted argument for tax cuts back in 2001, his reputation made it hard for many observers to admit the obvious: he was mainly looking for some way to do the Bush administration a political favor. But there's no reason to be taken in by his equally weak, contorted argument against reversing those cuts today.
To put Mr. Greenspan's game of fiscal three-card monte in perspective, remember that the push for Social Security privatization is only part of the right's strategy for dismantling the New Deal and the Great Society. The other big piece of that strategy is the use of tax cuts to "starve the beast."
Until the 1970's conservatives tended to be open about their disdain for Social Security and Medicare. But honesty was bad politics, because voters value those programs.
So conservative intellectuals proposed a bait-and-switch strategy: First, advocate tax cuts, using whatever tactics you think may work - supply-side economics, inflated budget projections, whatever. Then use the resulting deficits to argue for slashing government spending.
And that's the story of the last four years. In 2001, President Bush and Mr. Greenspan justified tax cuts with sunny predictions that the budget would remain comfortably in surplus. But Mr. Bush's advisers knew that the tax cuts would probably cause budget problems, and welcomed the prospect.
In fact, Mr. Bush celebrated the budget's initial slide into deficit. In the summer of 2001 he called plunging federal revenue "incredibly positive news" because it would "put a straitjacket" on federal spending.
To keep that straitjacket on, however, those who sold tax cuts with the assurance that they were easily affordable must convince the public that the cuts can't be reversed now that those assurances have proved false. And Mr. Greenspan has once again tried to come to the president's aid, insisting this week that we should deal with deficits "primarily, if not wholly," by slashing Social Security and Medicare because tax increases would "pose significant risks to economic growth."
Really? America prospered for half a century under a level of federal taxes higher than the one we face today. According to the administration's own estimates, Mr. Bush's second term will see the lowest tax take as a percentage of G.D.P. since the Truman administration. And don't forget that President Clinton's 1993 tax increase ushered in an economic boom. Why, exactly, are tax increases out of the question?
O.K., enough about Mr. Greenspan. The real news is the growing evidence that the political theory behind the Bush tax cuts was as wrong as the economic theory.
According to starve-the-beast doctrine, right-wing politicians can use the big deficits generated by tax cuts as an excuse to slash social insurance programs. Mr. Bush's advisers thought that it would prove especially easy to sell benefit cuts in the context of Social Security privatization because the president could pretend that a plan that sharply cut benefits would actually be good for workers.
But the theory isn't working. As soon as voters heard that privatization would involve benefit cuts, support for Social Security "reform" plunged. Another sign of the theory's falsity: across the nation, Republican governors, finding that voters really want adequate public services, are talking about tax increases.
The best bet now is that Mr. Bush will manage to make the poor suffer, but fail to make a dent in the great middle-class entitlement programs.
And the consequence of the failure of the starve-the-beast theory is a looming fiscal crisis - Mr. Greenspan isn't wrong about that. The middle class won't give up programs that are essential to its financial security; the right won't give up tax cuts that it sold on false pretenses. The only question now is when foreign investors, who have financed our deficits so far, will decide to pull the plug.
E-mail: krugman@nytimes.com
Bob Herbert is on vacation.

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Sunday, February 27, 2005, 12:00 A.M. Pacific
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David S. Broder / Syndicated columnist
The sorry fiscal record of a "conservative" administration

WASHINGTON — Back-to-back briefings last week put a harsh spotlight on the deep hole left by the budget policies of George Bush's first term. Millions of Americans will be paying the price for the fiscal profligacy of this misnamed conservative government.
The bad news, delivered in the first report, is that the camouflaged domestic spending cuts contained in the Bush budget will — if accepted by Congress — do serious damage to education initiatives, low-income assistance and environmental programs over the next five years.
The worse news, documented in the second report, is that these cuts will not even begin to deal with the looming calamity of runaway entitlement spending on the retirement and health-care costs of the baby-boom generation.
You won't find either of these warnings spelled out in the budget message of the president. An analysis by the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities noted that for the first time since at least 1989, the White House Office of Management and Budget failed to give Congress or the news media information on the proposed spending on most domestic programs beyond the coming year.
These "domestic discretionary" programs — covering all the routine functions of government, except for defense, homeland security and international affairs, and the entitlement programs like Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare — span the gamut from national parks to medical research.
They are financed by annual appropriations from Congress. Bush gave detailed directions on how he wants $18 billion saved on these programs next year, but then urged Congress to impose spending caps for the next five years that would reduce spending in these areas by $214 billion total — without spelling out any of the specific cuts. (Savings in all cases are measured against the fiscal 2005 spending on these programs, adjusted only for inflation.)
By studying the spending caps Bush proposed for the 57 broad functions included in the domestic discretionary budget, the center's experts calculated how much would have to come out of individual programs — assuming Congress accepts Bush's priorities.
The results are startling. Elementary and secondary education programs, including the president's No Child Left Behind initiative, would be cut by $11.5 billion over the next five years to stay within the caps, with the 2010 year alone seeing a 12-percent reduction from inflation-adjusted 2005 levels.
The WIC program, which subsidizes the diets of low-income pregnant women and nursing mothers — a major preventive measure against low-weight babies — would be cut by $658 million, enough to reduce coverage in 2010 by 660,000 women. Head Start funds would be reduced $3.3 billion over five years, with 118,000 fewer youngsters enrolled in 2010.
Clean-water and clean-air funding would decline by $6.4 billion over five years, a 20-percent cut in 2010. Community-development programs used by cities to build up impoverished neighborhoods would lose $9.2 billion in five years, a 36-percent cut in 2010.
Most of these cuts would come out of state and local budgets, adding to the burdens their taxpayers would have to take up if services are to be maintained.
As Bob Greenstein, the center's director, commented, cuts of this magnitude would be bitterly contested if Congress had to justify them to the people who care about each of these programs. But by asking instead for a vote this year on enforceable five-year caps on these broad categories of spending, the administration hopes to accomplish its goals without arousing the same degree of controversy.
The irony is that even if all this were done, the biggest budget problem would still remain. Medicare and Social Security benefits for the huge demographic wave of boomers, who start to turn 62 in just three years, make the current budget policies "unsustainable" for the long-term. That was the word used repeatedly at a briefing by David Walker, the head of the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office, Congress' watchdog agency, and others.
Reform of these major entitlement programs is the pressing need to avoid a budget train wreck in the next generation, but Bush has offered little leadership on that. His Social Security plan — for individual savings accounts — does nothing to address the shortfall in that system. And his "contribution" to solving the more pressing crisis in Medicare has been to add an unaffordable prescription-drug benefit to the program.
It is a sorry record for a conservative administration, and we are just beginning to recognize its price.
David S. Broder's column appears Sunday on editorial pages of The Times. His e-mail address is davidbroder@washpost.com
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,10117,12356131-29277,00.html
Oil Exporters Behind Weak Dollar-Soros
Monday February 21, 5:23 AM EST
By Mona Megalli, Gulf Economics Correspondent

JEDDAH, Saudi Arabia (Reuters) - Moves by Middle East oil exporters and Russia to switch some revenue from dollars to euros lie behind the U.S. currency's weakness, and a further rise in crude prices could prompt more declines, the billionaire investor George Soros said on Monday.

Soros told delegates to the Jeddah Economic Forum that the dollar's fall should help to lower the U.S current account and trade deficits, but warned that a fall beyond an undisclosed "tipping point" would severely disrupt markets.

The U.S. current account deficit is more than five percent of gross domestic product despite the currency's three-year slide. The dollar, however, has staged a comeback recently, gaining about 3.6 percent against the euro and three percent versus the yen so far this year.

"The oil exporting countries' central banks ... have been switching out of dollars mainly into euros and Russia also plays an important role in this. That is, I think, at the bottom of the current weakness of the dollar," Soros said.

Soros, dubbed "The Man who broke the Bank of England" for his role as a hedge fund manager in betting the pound would drop in 1992, said he was not predicting further falls in the value of the dollar. But he linked its fate to the price of oil.

"The higher the price of oil the more the dollars there are to be switched to euro (so) the strength of oil will reinforce the weakness of the dollar," he said. "That is only one factor, but I think there is such a relationship."

U.S. crude hit a record $55.67 a barrel late last year and prices remain close to $50 a barrel.

In later comments to Reuters, Soros said the U.S. current account deficit could be financed at the current level of the dollar. "There are willing holders of the dollar. There are the Asian countries that are happy to accumulate dollar balances in order to have an export surplus and a market for their dollars," he said.

Soros would not make detailed comments on why long-term borrowing costs have fallen in the face of short-term rate increases, a development U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said on Wednesday he found difficult to explain.

"A flattening of the yield curve is usually an indication of a slowing economy, but here I don't know," Soros said.

The Hungarian-born financier, a critic of U.S. involvement in Iraq, said he was considering backing an Arab foundation to promote the ideals of civil and open societies in the region.

©2005 Reuters Limited.
http://money.iwon.com/jsp/nw/nwdt_rt_top.jsp?cat=TOPBIZ&feed=bus&src=202§ion=news&news_id=bus-n21603868&date=20050221&alias=/alias/money/cm/nw

Bush Abomination’s #3 Failure: Environmental Security

Clive Cookson, Financial Times: A leading US team of climate researchers on Friday released “the most compelling evidence yet” that human activities are responsible for global warming. They said their analysis should “wipe out” claims by sceptics that recent warming is due to non-human factors such as natural fluctuations in climate or variations in solar or volcanic activity.
Scientists from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California have been working for several years with colleagues at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to analyse the effects of global warming on the oceans. They combined computer modelling with millions of temperature and salinity readings, taken around the world at different depths over five decades.

Agence France Presse: Scientists have discovered dramatic changes in the temperature and salinity of deep waters in the Southern Ocean that they warn could have a major impact on global climate.
Expedition leader Steve Rintoul of Australia said his multinational team of researchers had found that waters at the bottom of the Southern Ocean were significantly cooler and less salty than they were 10 years ago.
He said the size and speed of the changes surprised scientists, who have long believed deep ocean waters underwent little temperature change, and could indicate a slowdown in the flow of deep water currents.
"Ocean circulation is a big influence on global climate, so it is critical that we understand why this is happening and why it is happening so quickly," Rintoul said after he and his team docked at Hobart on the Australian island state of Tasmania.
"The surprise was just how rapidly the deepest parts of the ocean are changing, at depths of four or five kilometers (13,200-16,500 feet) below the sea surface," Rintoul said.

Kelpie Wilson, www.truthout.org: Today the Kyoto Treaty on global warming goes into effect and for the first time the world has united (with the exception of the U.S. and Australia) to begin to address the greatest threat humankind has ever faced.
Tonight, in Los Angeles, former Vice President Al Gore will outline a plan for moral leadership to take on the climate change crisis and to re-engage the world's biggest polluter - the United States of America. He will call on George W. Bush to join "the coalition of the willing" and make a commitment to face the problem and take action.
In a preview of his remarks for the press, Gore called the Kyoto agreement "historic." While agreeing with the criticism that Kyoto itself falls far short of the measures that will ultimately be needed, Gore said that the value of Kyoto is that it sends a clear market signal. The cap and trade system for CO2 emissions is already in place in Europe and the response has been robust. He called the formal beginning of Kyoto "a great cause for hope," and said that it was just the beginning of a cascade of actions and policies that will quickly accelerate.
Gore believes that the market will respond because "Business has learned to watch out for bubbles that lead to warped decisions." Bubbles are inflated expectations based on wishful thinking - like the hope that oil will never run out or that pollution won't affect business. Gore said that President Bush inhabits an "un-reality bubble," created by his advisers in the oil and coal industries, that will soon burst.
In business, Gore said, those who are lulled into a false sense of security will lose out to competitors who see clearly and can adapt to new realities. Any firm that wishes to do business internationally will have to comply with Kyoto. Already, he said, companies doing business in China face more environmental restrictions than they do in the U.S.
Gore called Bush's climate change denial a "stunning display of moral cowardice," and said that Bush "has his head in the sand." Weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and social security are two false crises that Bush has promoted while he abdicates any leadership on the real crisis of global warming.

‘Global warming real’ say new studies
>By Clive Cookson in Washington
>Published: February 18 2005 14:18 | Last updated: February 18 2005 14:18
> >
A leading US team of climate researchers on Friday released “the most compelling evidence yet” that human activities are responsible for global warming. They said their analysis should “wipe out” claims by sceptics that recent warming is due to non-human factors such as natural fluctuations in climate or variations in solar or volcanic activity.
Scientists from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California have been working for several years with colleagues at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to analyse the effects of global warming on the oceans. They combined computer modelling with millions of temperature and salinity readings, taken around the world at different depths over five decades.
The researchers released their conclusions on Friday at the American Association of the Advancement of Science meeting in Washington. They found that the “warming signals” in the oceans could only have been produced by the build-up of man-made carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Non-human factors would have produced quite different effects.
Tim Barnett, the Scripps project leader, said previous attempts to show that human activities caused global warming had looked for evidence in the atmosphere. “But the atmosphere is the worst place to look for a global warming signal,” he said. “Ninety per cent of the energy from global warming has gone into the oceans and the oceans show its fingerprint much better than the atmosphere.”
Prof Barnett added: “The debate over whether there is a global warming signal is over now at least for rational people.” He urged the US administration to rethink its refusal to join the Kyoto Protocol, which took effect this week.
The Scripps scientists also looked at the likely climatic effects of the warming they observed. They highlighted the impact on regional water supplies, which would be severely reduced during the summer in places that depend on rivers fed by melting winter snow and glaciers such as western China and the South American Andes.
The conference also heard a gloomy analysis of the way the North Atlantic Ocean is reacting to global warming from Ruth Curry of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. Her new study showed that vast amounts of fresh water more than 20,000 cubic kilometres have been added to the northernmost parts of the ocean over the past 40 years because the Arctic and Greenland ice sheets are melting.
According to Dr Curry, the resulting change in the salinity balance of the water threatens to shut down the Ocean Conveyor Belt, which transfers heat from the tropics towards the polar regions through currents such as the Gulf Stream. If that happened, winter temperatures in northern Europe would fall by several degrees.
The possible failure of the North Atlantic conveyor has been discussed for several years and was fictionalised last year in the film The Day After Tomorrow. Dr Curry said the accumulation of freshwater in the upper ocean layers since the 1990s meant that the risk should be taken seriously.
>

>
>

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Published on Thursday, February 17, 2005 by Agence France Presse

Scientists Find Dramatic Changes in Southern Ocean, Fear Climate Link

HOBART, AUSTRALIA - Scientists have discovered dramatic changes in the temperature and salinity of deep waters in the Southern Ocean that they warn could have a major impact on global climate.
Expedition leader Steve Rintoul of Australia said his multinational team of researchers had found that waters at the bottom of the Southern Ocean were significantly cooler and less salty than they were 10 years ago.
He said the size and speed of the changes surprised scientists, who have long believed deep ocean waters underwent little temperature change, and could indicate a slowdown in the flow of deep water currents.
"Ocean circulation is a big influence on global climate, so it is critical that we understand why this is happening and why it is happening so quickly," Rintoul said after he and his team docked at Hobart on the Australian island state of Tasmania.
"The surprise was just how rapidly the deepest parts of the ocean are changing, at depths of four or five kilometers (13,200-16,500 feet) below the sea surface," Rintoul said.
"Whether its a natural cycle that takes place over many decades, or it's climate change, it's an indication that the deep ocean can respond much more rapidly to changes that are happening near the surface than we believed possible," he said.
The expedition sampled 3,000 kilometers of the Southern Ocean basin during an eight-week expedition aboard the Australian Antarctic Division's research ship Aurora Australis.
Their findings added new urgency to the study of climate change, Rintoul said.
"It's another indication that the climate is capable of changing and is changing now," he said.
"What we need to do is sort out if this is human-induced change and if so, how rapidly is the climate going to change and what will the impacts of that change be?" he said.
The new findings emerged a day after the UN's Kyoto Protocol on climate change came into force. The treaty aims to cut production of so-called greenhouse gases believed responsible for a warming of the Earth's climate.
During its expedition, the Australian-led team released 19 free-floating ocean robots known as Argo floats, which are designed to drift with ocean currents to better measure temperature and salinity.
The floats, part of an international ocean-monitoring effort, drift about 2,000 meters (6,600 feet) underwater and surface every 10 days to deliver findings.
Rintoul said the Argos would provide a huge boost to climate research.
"They will revolutionize how we understand the ocean, in particular to determining climate change and shorter climate cycles," he said.
"One of the real challenges for us when we try to answer the question of 'is this climate change?' is that we only have measurements from a few southern snapshots," he said.
"We haven't measured it continuously in time so it's hard for us to tell the difference between a cycle, something moving up and down, and a long-term trend. That's the real challenge."
Copyright © 2005 Agence France Presse
###
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0217-08.htm

Al Gore, Global Warming and Moral Leadership
By Kelpie Wilson
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Wednesday 16 February 2005
Today the Kyoto Treaty on global warming goes into effect and for the first time the world has united (with the exception of the U.S. and Australia) to begin to address the greatest threat humankind has ever faced.
Tonight, in Los Angeles, former Vice President Al Gore will outline a plan for moral leadership to take on the climate change crisis and to re-engage the world's biggest polluter - the United States of America. He will call on George W. Bush to join "the coalition of the willing" and make a commitment to face the problem and take action.
In a preview of his remarks for the press, Gore called the Kyoto agreement "historic." While agreeing with the criticism that Kyoto itself falls far short of the measures that will ultimately be needed, Gore said that the value of Kyoto is that it sends a clear market signal. The cap and trade system for CO2 emissions is already in place in Europe and the response has been robust. He called the formal beginning of Kyoto "a great cause for hope," and said that it was just the beginning of a cascade of actions and policies that will quickly accelerate.
Gore believes that the market will respond because "Business has learned to watch out for bubbles that lead to warped decisions." Bubbles are inflated expectations based on wishful thinking - like the hope that oil will never run out or that pollution won't affect business. Gore said that President Bush inhabits an "un-reality bubble," created by his advisers in the oil and coal industries, that will soon burst.
In business, Gore said, those who are lulled into a false sense of security will lose out to competitors who see clearly and can adapt to new realities. Any firm that wishes to do business internationally will have to comply with Kyoto. Already, he said, companies doing business in China face more environmental restrictions than they do in the U.S.
Gore called Bush's climate change denial a "stunning display of moral cowardice," and said that Bush "has his head in the sand." Weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and social security are two false crises that Bush has promoted while he abdicates any leadership on the real crisis of global warming.
When asked if he would be getting back into politics to provide the leadership he is calling for, Gore said he would not be a candidate but that he would be very active in other ways. Tonight he will announce a campaign to get U.S. automakers to drop their lawsuit against California and a number of Northeastern states that are regulating automobile CO2 emissions.
"We are going to call on U.S. automakers to innovate, not litigate, to stop suing the future and start building the future," Gore said.
The McCain-Lieberman Climate Stewardship Act came in for praise, as did Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel, a former Kyoto detractor (he called Kyoto a "kooky idea" back in 1999) who now wants to introduce his own legislation to address the problem. Hagel is an example of how minds that were formerly closed could be opened to admit the problem and deal with it.
Gore also mentioned the growing willingness of evangelical Christians to look at the moral issues involved. "It is unconscionable to condemn future generations to accelerated climate change," he said.
While emphasizing the moral dimension, Gore insists that market forces have the power to generate creative solutions for climate change problems. Many environmentalists are uneasy with a reliance on market forces. For example, UK Guardian columnist George Monbiot said in a recent column:
"The denial of climate change, while out of tune with the science, is consistent with, even necessary for, the outlook of almost all the world's economists. Modern economics, whether informed by Marx or Keynes or Hayek, is premised on the notion that the planet has an infinite capacity to supply us with wealth and absorb our pollution. The cure to all ills is endless growth. Yet endless growth, in a finite world, is impossible. Pull this rug from under the economic theories, and the whole system of thought collapses."
But promoting market solutions may be the cleverest method of proceeding. Monbiot is correct that global warming denial is powered by the almost religious belief in a growth economy. Yet, anyone who has studied the way that human beings alter their belief systems has discovered that new beliefs are much more easily adopted if they inhabit the shell of the old. The old Pagan religions of Europe were subverted by a Christianity that built its churches and cathedrals on top of the ancient sacred sites.
To speak of market (read: economic growth) solutions to a problem caused by markets (economic growth) may not be as contradictory as it seems. It all comes down to how one defines growth. It is possible to envision a growth economy that is not based on material growth but rather on cultural and spiritual growth. Services are as much a part of the economy as goods, and a cleaner environment is the most valuable service of all.
Al Gore's recipe for leadership recognizes that the initial step toward redefining the economy will take moral leadership and action. In this way, his current campaign draws on the ideas he first presented in his book, Earth in the Balance. There, he said that the preservation of the environment should become the new organizing principle for society. In other words, the new morality.
Unfortunately, Al Gore was denied the chance to exercise moral leadership as President of the United States. As he attempts, nonetheless, to pilot a new moral direction for this country, he deserves our help and support.
________________________________________
Kelpie Wilson is the t r u t h o u t environment editor. A veteran forest protection activist and mechanical engineer, she writes from her solar-powered cabin in the Siskiyou Mountains of southwest Oregon.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/021605A.shtml

The War in Iraq is Worse Than Immoral or Illegal, It is Stupid, Insanely Stupid

Australian Associated Press: Australia's involvement in Iraq would end in disaster just like Vietnam, a retired general said today.
Major General Alan Stretton said the Government would eventually bow to public pressure and withdraw the troops, leaving behind a bloody mess. Prime Minister John Howard has rejected comparisons with Vietnam, saying such analogies are misplaced.
Maj Gen Stretton, who served as chief of staff of the Australian force in Vietnam from 1969-70 but is best remembered for his role heading relief operations in Darwin following Cyclone Tracy in 1974, said there could never be democracy in Iraq.
He said the Government was being irresponsible in sending even more troops.
"I really believe it will go the same way as Vietnam," he told the John Laws radio program on 2UE.
"It will get no better – (only) worse – and eventually public opinion in both the US and Australia and elsewhere will demand our troops come back and when they do they will be pretending that the locals can handle it all themselves, and we will just leave a bloody mess."

Iraq to Be a Vietnam: Retired General
The Australian Associated Press
Thursday 24 February 2005
Australia's involvement in Iraq would end in disaster just like Vietnam, a retired general said today.
Major General Alan Stretton said the Government would eventually bow to public pressure and withdraw the troops, leaving behind a bloody mess. Prime Minister John Howard has rejected comparisons with Vietnam, saying such analogies are misplaced.
Maj Gen Stretton, who served as chief of staff of the Australian force in Vietnam from 1969-70 but is best remembered for his role heading relief operations in Darwin following Cyclone Tracy in 1974, said there could never be democracy in Iraq.
He said the Government was being irresponsible in sending even more troops.
"I really believe it will go the same way as Vietnam," he told the John Laws radio program on 2UE.
"It will get no better – (only) worse – and eventually public opinion in both the US and Australia and elsewhere will demand our troops come back and when they do they will be pretending that the locals can handle it all themselves, and we will just leave a bloody mess."
Prime Minister John Howard this week announced that Australia would send a 450-strong task force to southern Iraq to protect Japanese engineers rebuilding the largely peaceful Al Muthanna province.
Mr. Howard said Iraq was at "tilting point" following last month's democratic elections.
Maj Gen Stretton said Australia should not have been involved in Iraq in the first place as there were no weapons of mass destruction and no links with al-Qaeda.
"The whole lot of it has turned into a bloody civil war," he said.
"All we are doing is reinforcing disaster. I just cannot understand it."
Maj Gen Stretton said Iraq was already going the way of Vietnam.
"You would have noticed the Prime Minister use a new word ... tilting. That is the same as the graduated response in Vietnam," he said.
"In other words you just put a bit more in to stop it tilting the wrong way. It will end up exactly the same way. The whole thing is flawed strategy."
He said Iraq could never be democratic.
"This talk about fighting for democracy, that is absolute, to use a phrase, bullshit," he said.
"You have three different people in three virtually different areas. The most you could have would be some sort of loose confederation."
Mr. Howard said last night there was no analogy between Iraq and Vietnam.
"I don't wish to be disrespectful to a retired major-general who's fought for his country, but I think these analogies with Vietnam are misplaced, and many other people think they are, too," he told ABC's Lateline program.
"I accept the historical facts about Vietnam. I also know the historical facts about Iraq, and they are totally different situations."

Illegitimate, Incompetent, Corrupt

Halliburton Could Get $1.5bn More Iraq Work
Reuters: Halliburton, under scrutiny for its contracts in Iraq, would receive an extra $1.5 billion as part of the Bush administration's additional war spending proposal for fiscal 2005, a senior US Army budget official said.
Halliburton, once led by Vice-President Dick Cheney, is the largest corporate contractor in Iraq and has drawn fire for its no-bid contracts there, with auditors charging its Kellogg Brown and Root (KBR) unit overcharged for some work.

Los Angeles Times: Halliburton Co. received $9.4 million in bonuses for its work in Kuwait and Afghanistan, the Army said Thursday.
None of the bonuses were for work in Iraq, said Sylvia Youngman, an Army contracts specialist. Reviews of those orders will start next week, she said.
Halliburton's KBR unit, formerly known as Kellogg, Brown & Root, received its biggest bonuses, $4 million of a potential $5 million, for two projects in Bagram and Kandahar, Afghanistan...
The Army said this month that it wouldn't withhold 15% of future payments to Halliburton for its work in Iraq after a Pentagon inspector general, an Army auditor and the Defense Contract Audit Agency had recommended docking a portion of the company's payments...
Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles) alleged in August that Halliburton, which was headed for five years by Vice President Dick Cheney, was getting special treatment from the Pentagon.

Pete Yost, Associated Press: Former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge met privately with Republican pollsters twice in a 10-day span last spring as he embarked on more than a dozen trips to presidential battleground states.
Ridge's get-togethers with Republican strategists Frank Luntz and Bill McInturff during a period the secretary was saying his agency was playing no role in Bush's re-election campaign were revealed in daily appointment calendars obtained by The Associated Press under the Freedom of Information Act.
"We don't do politics in the Department of Homeland Security," Ridge told reporters during the election season.

Bob Fertik, www.democrats.com: George W. Bush, who is allegedly on a "charm offensive" across Europe, dropped the charm and was simply offensive at his NATO press conference when he once again relied on a hidden earpiece to feed him canned soundbite answers to reporters' questions.
As NASA scientist Robert Nelson proved last fall, George W. Bush relied on a wireless earpiece in all three of his debates with John Kerry during the 2004 campaign. While bloggers (including Democrats.com, IsBushWired.com, MysteryBulge, Cryptome, and BushBulge.com) have accumulated overwhelming evidence that Bush was wired, the mainstream media has consistently refused to report on any of this evidence.
Investigative reporter David Lindorff has written extensively on Bush's earpiece in Salon.com, MotherJones.com, and Counterpunch.org. On February 3, Lindorff broke new ground with an expose for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (fair.org) reporting that the NY Times had a solid story ready for publication a week before Election Day - but editors killed the story...
At today's NATO press conference, there was little chance for another "camera malfunction." Bush walked quickly in and out of the press conference, and all three cable networks relied on a single camera that was placed in front of Bush. Bush was also careful to stand square to the podium, never turning his shoulder to provide a revealing side shot.
But Bush's obvious reliance on his earpiece could be easily detected from the manner in which he delivered his answers.
There are several speaking tics that expose Bush when he is using his earpiece. First, he pauses between sentences for an extra beat, which buys him time to hear the answer he is being fed. Second, when a particular answer is different from his own train of thought, his gaze drops down as he concentrates extra hard on the voice within his ear. Third, he sometimes mumbles and speaks gibberish when his brain and tongue get out of synch. Finally his answers ramble on, going from one stray thought to another, as he "filibusters" to consume all available time.

Spiegel Online: During his trip to Germany on Wednesday, the main highlight of George W. Bush's trip was meant to be a "town hall"-style meeting with average Germans. But with the German government unwilling to permit a scripted event with questions approved in advance, the White House has quietly put the event on ice...
Neither the White House nor the German Foreign Ministry has offered any official explanation, but Foreign Ministry sources say the town hall meeting has been nixed for scheduling reasons -- a typical development for a visit like this with many ideas but very little time. That, at least, is the diplomats' line. Behind the scenes, there appears to be another explanation: the White House got cold feet. Bush's strategists felt an uncontrolled encounter with the German public would be too unpredictable.
To avoid that messy scenario, the White House requested that rules similar to those applied during Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's visit two weeks ago also be used in Mainz. Before meeting with students at Paris's Institute of Political Sciences, which preens the country's elite youth for future roles in government, Rice's staff insisted on screening and approving any questions to be asked by students. One question rejected was that of Benjamin Barnier, the 24-year-old son of France's foreign minister, who wanted to ask: "George Bush is not particularly well perceived in the world, particularly in the Middle East. Can you do something to change that?" Instead, the only question of Barnier's that got approval was the question of whether Iraq's Shiite Muslim majority might create a theocratic government based on the Iranian model?
The Germans, though, insisted that a free forum should be exactly that. Wolfgang Ischinger, Germany's Ambassador to the United States, explained to the New York Times last week: "We told them, don't get upset with us if they ask angry questions."

Ray McGovern, www.tompaine.com: The nomination of John Negroponte to the new post of director of National Intelligence (DNI) caps a remarkable parade of Bush administration senior nominees. Among the most recent:
Alberto Gonzales, confirmed as attorney general: the lawyer who advised the president he could ignore the US War Crimes Act and the Geneva Conventions on torture and create a “reasonable basis in law...which would provide a solid defense to any future prosecution.”
Michael Chertoff, confirmed as Secretary of Homeland Security: the lawyer who looked the other way when 762 innocent immigrants (mostly of Arab and South Asian descent) were swept up in a post-9/11 dragnet and held as “terrorism suspects” for several months. The dictates of PR trumped habeas corpus; the detentions fostered an image of quick progress in the “war on terrorism.”
John Negroponte: the congenial, consummate diplomat now welcomed back into the brotherhood. Presently our ambassador in Baghdad, Negroponte is best known to many of us as the ambassador to Honduras with the uncanny ability to ignore human rights abuses so as not to endanger congressional support for the attempt to overthrow the duly elected government of Nicaragua in the '80s. Negroponte’s job was to hold up the Central American end of the Reagan administration’s support for the Contra counterrevolutionaries, keeping Congress in the dark, as necessary...
The scene visualized by President Bush yesterday for his morning briefing routine, once Negroponte is confirmed, stands my hair on end...
From what President Bush said yesterday, John Negroponte, the man farthest removed from substantive intelligence analysis—not to mention the background and genesis of the briefing items chosen for a particular day—will be the president’s “primary briefer.” I am told that President Bush does not read the President’s Daily Brief, but rather has it read to him.
Who will do the reading? Who will attempt to answer the president’s questions? Will there be a senior analyst there in a supporting role? Will s/he have career protection, should it be necessary to correct Negroponte’s answers? Will Negroponte ask CIA Director Porter Goss to participate as well? Will the briefer feel constrained with very senior officials there? Will s/he be able to speak without fear of favor, drawing, for example, on what the real experts say regarding Iran’s nuclear capability and plans? These are important questions. A lot will depend on the answers.

Halliburton Could Get $1.5bn More Iraq Work
Reuters
Saturday 26 February 2005
Halliburton, under scrutiny for its contracts in Iraq, would receive an extra $1.5 billion as part of the Bush administration's additional war spending proposal for fiscal 2005, a senior US Army budget official said.
Halliburton, once led by Vice-President Dick Cheney, is the largest corporate contractor in Iraq and has drawn fire for its no-bid contracts there, with auditors charging its Kellogg Brown and Root (KBR) unit overcharged for some work.
The Army's portion of a $81.9 billion supplemental spending package earmarked the extra funding for KBR under its LOGCAP (Logistics Civil Augmentation Programme) contract to provide a wide range of services to US troops in Iraq, the official said. The contract covers food and laundry services, trash collection, mail delivery and other support services.
If approved by Congress, that would bring the total spending under KBR's LOGCAP contract to about $6 billion in fiscal year 2005, about the same amount spent a year earlier, said the offical.
He declined to estimate how much the Army would spend on the LOGCAP contract in fiscal 2006, but said the top US commander in Baghdad was putting a big emphasis on controlling costs by setting clear standards for the services provided.
Gen George Casey told a newspaper earlier this month that KBR had submitted budget estimates that exceeded the Army's proposed spending by $4 billion, adding, "someone has made assumptions that have driven the costs through the roof".
Overall, KBR has earned $7.2 billion under a massive 2001 logistics contract with the US military and could earn more than $10 billion under that deal. It has separate deals with the government for reconstruction work in Iraq.
The senior Army official said the proposed supplemental budget request included about $4 billion in spending to repair or upgrade weapons damaged or worn out by the war in Iraq.
In addition, the budget request included $570 million in funding for replacement of weapons lost in battle, including 13 AH-64 Apache helicopters built by Boeing and five UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters built by the Sikorsky Aircraft unit of United Technologies.
The budget request also included $3.3 billion for new Bradley fighting vehicles made by United Defence Industries, Abrams tanks made by General Dynamics and armored Humvees.

Army Gives Halliburton $9.4 Million in Bonuses
The Los Angeles Times
Friday 25 February 2005
Washington - Halliburton Co. received $9.4 million in bonuses for its work in Kuwait and Afghanistan, the Army said Thursday.
None of the bonuses were for work in Iraq, said Sylvia Youngman, an Army contracts specialist. Reviews of those orders will start next week, she said.
Halliburton's KBR unit, formerly known as Kellogg, Brown & Root, received its biggest bonuses, $4 million of a potential $5 million, for two projects in Bagram and Kandahar, Afghanistan.
Army Field Support Command in Rock Island, Ill., said award fee boards rated KBR's performance as "excellent" to "very good" for more than a dozen "task orders" in Kuwait and Afghanistan.
The Army said this month that it wouldn't withhold 15% of future payments to Halliburton for its work in Iraq after a Pentagon inspector general, an Army auditor and the Defense Contract Audit Agency had recommended docking a portion of the company's payments.
Some government departments have launched investigations of Halliburton's work in Iraq, including an inquiry on whether it overcharged to supply fuel to Iraqi civilians. The company has said its prices were fair.
Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles) alleged in August that Halliburton, which was headed for five years by Vice President Dick Cheney, was getting special treatment from the Pentagon.
KBR supplies, among other things, housing and daily meals for the 155,000 U.S. troops stationed in Iraq and Kuwait and 18,000 in Afghanistan. Halliburton also is helping to restore Iraq's oil infrastructure.
The awards are the first granted to Halliburton under a contract it won in 2001 to provide emergency combat logistics support worldwide for the Army. It has been paid $7.2 billion of the $10.5 billion obligated.
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http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/022605A.shtml

Published on Thursday, February 17, 2005 by the Associated Press

Ridge, Pollsters Met During Bush Campaign
by Pete Yost

WASHINGTON - Former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge met privately with Republican pollsters twice in a 10-day span last spring as he embarked on more than a dozen trips to presidential battleground states.
Ridge's get-togethers with Republican strategists Frank Luntz and Bill McInturff during a period the secretary was saying his agency was playing no role in Bush's re-election campaign were revealed in daily appointment calendars obtained by The Associated Press under the Freedom of Information Act.
"We don't do politics in the Department of Homeland Security," Ridge told reporters during the election season.
His aides resisted releasing the calendars for over a year, finally providing them to the AP three days after Ridge left office this month.
Homeland Security officials said the meeting with Luntz at department headquarters was aimed at improving public communication of the department's message, particularly on TV. Ridge declined an interview with the AP about the calendars, referring questions to former aides.
"We did not discuss homeland security in a presidential campaign context," said Susan Neely, a former assistant homeland security secretary who attended the May 17 session with Luntz and Ridge. "We asked him his impression of how well we were explaining whatever the issues were of the day. There was no follow-up meeting."
Neely said the discussion took place after Ridge and Luntz ran into each other and the homeland security secretary expressed an interest in hearing Luntz's assessment.
McInturff, who has done the polling for all of Ridge's campaigns for Congress and Pennsylvania governor, said the two meet every few months to "shoot the breeze."
Homeland security officials said the May 26 conversation between Ridge and McInturff was personal and the secretary did not discuss any homeland security-related issues.
"When you've got Secret Service protection it's a heck of a lot easier for me to meet the secretary of a major agency at the agency than it is for him to come to Old Town and have lunch," McInturff said. Old Town is a neighborhood in Alexandria, Va., home of McInturff's company, Public Opinion Strategies.
"I have zero connection with anyone doing business with homeland security, zero connection with the Bush campaign," McInturff said.
Ridge's meetings with the pollsters occurred just before the first of 16 trips, from late May to late October, to 10 states important to the president's re-election campaign. During the same period, Ridge made 20 appearances in nine uncontested states.
Four days after the meeting with Luntz, Ridge went to Missouri for appearances in Kansas City and St. Louis. In the ensuing five months, he averaged one public appearance a month in his home state of Pennsylvania, traveled three times to Florida and made one trip each to West Virginia, Iowa, Ohio, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Arizona and Washington.
Luntz helped write the 1994 "Contract With America," the issues centerpiece in the GOP's takeover of the House a decade ago. Luntz said he recalls nothing about the 45-minute discussion with Ridge. He said he received no compensation for the meeting.
Under the Hatch Act, which restricts political activity of executive branch employees, costs associated with political activity by Cabinet members may not be paid with federal funds.
Luntz is one of "dozens, hundreds" of people the department talks to about how to better communicate the complicated issues of homeland security, Neely said.
Luntz's comments were "very reinforcing" that the way Ridge and his aides were communicating the department's message "was generally working, and to continue that," said Neely.
Homeland Security Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said any assertions that politics played a part in homeland security scheduling "are absolutely inaccurate and do not reflect reality."
Ridge also participated in a number of events last year with elected Democratic leaders.
"A vast majority" of the areas Ridge visited during his nearly two-year tenure were in urban centers and border or coastal states that tend to lean Democratic, Roehrkasse said.
When Ridge was running the department, he said the war on terrorism is "about as apolitical or bipartisan as you can get. There's no Republican or Democratic way to do it. We just have to do it right, regardless of our party affiliation."
At the time of Ridge's meetings with the pollsters, President Bush's re-election campaign was reeling from the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and the news media was speculating that Ridge might replace Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, or even Vice President Dick Cheney.
Neely said Ridge's future in government did not come up in the meeting with Luntz.
© 2005 The Associated Press
###
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0217-01.htm

Bush Was Wired for NATO Press Conference
by Bob Fertik on 02/22/2005 10:29am. - revised 02/26/2005 5:03am
George W. Bush, who is allegedly on a "charm offensive" across Europe, dropped the charm and was simply offensive at his NATO press conference when he once again relied on a hidden earpiece to feed him canned soundbite answers to reporters' questions.
As NASA scientist Robert Nelson proved last fall, George W. Bush relied on a wireless earpiece in all three of his debates with John Kerry during the 2004 campaign. While bloggers (including Democrats.com, IsBushWired.com, MysteryBulge, Cryptome, and BushBulge.com) have accumulated overwhelming evidence that Bush was wired, the mainstream media has consistently refused to report on any of this evidence.
Investigative reporter David Lindorff has written extensively on Bush's earpiece in Salon.com, MotherJones.com, and Counterpunch.org. On February 3, Lindorff broke new ground with an expose for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (fair.org) reporting that the NY Times had a solid story ready for publication a week before Election Day - but editors killed the story.
Times science writer William Broad, as well as reporters Andrew Revkin and John Schwartz, got to work on the story, according to Nelson, and produced a story that he says they assured him was scheduled to run the week of October 25. "It got pushed back because of the explosives story," he says, first to Wednesday, and then to Thursday, October 28. That would still have been five days ahead of Election Day...
But on October 28, the article was not in the paper. After learning from the reporters working on the story that their article had been killed the night before by senior editors, Nelson eventually sent his photographic evidence of presidential cheating to Salon magazine, which ran the photos as the magazine’s lead item on October 29. That same day, Nelson received the following email from the Times’ Schwartz:
Congratulations on getting the story into Salon. It’s already all over the Web in every blog I’ve seen this morning. I’m sorry to have been a source of disappointment and frustration to you, but I’m very happy to see your story getting out there.
Best wishes,
John
After the Times killed its story, the Washington Post quickly followed suit:
Nelson says that the same day he learned that his story had been killed at the Times, October 28, he received a phone call from Washington Post assistant managing editor Bob Woodward, famous for his investigative reports on Watergate. "Woodward said he’d heard the Times had killed the story and asked me if I could send the photos to him," says Nelson.
The JPL scientist did so immediately, via email, noting that he had also been in touch with Salon magazine. He says Woodward then sent his photographs over to a photo analyst at the paper to check them for authenticity, which Nelson says was confirmed.
A day later, realizing time was getting short, Nelson called Woodward back. Recalls Nelson: "He told me, 'Look, I’m going to have to go through a lot of hoops to get this story published. You’re already talking to Salon. Why don’t you work with them?'" (Several emails to Woodward asking him about Nelson's account have gone unanswered.)
At that point Nelson, despairing of getting the pictures in a major publication, went with the online magazine Salon. This reporter subsequently asked Nelson to do a similar photo analysis of digital images of Bush’s back taken from the tapes of the second and third presidential debates. The resulting photos, which also clearly show the cueing device and magnetic loop harness under his jacket on both occasions, were posted, together with Nelson’s images from the first debate, on the news website of Mother Jones magazine (10/30/04).
The key evidence presented by Robert Nelson was his enhanced photos of the bulge in Bush's back, which was attached to a wire that ran along Bush's shoulder blade towards his wired ear. The photos which revealed Bush's bulge were partly an accident - Bush's debate lawyers had insisted on a rule preventing candidates from being photographed from behind. But when this rule leaked to the public, the networks decided to defy the rule. In addition, some key photos were taken while Bush lingered to shake hands on stage.
At today's NATO press conference, there was little chance for another "camera malfunction." Bush walked quickly in and out of the press conference, and all three cable networks relied on a single camera that was placed in front of Bush. Bush was also careful to stand square to the podium, never turning his shoulder to provide a revealing side shot.
But Bush's obvious reliance on his earpiece could be easily detected from the manner in which he delivered his answers.
There are several speaking tics that expose Bush when he is using his earpiece. First, he pauses between sentences for an extra beat, which buys him time to hear the answer he is being fed. Second, when a particular answer is different from his own train of thought, his gaze drops down as he concentrates extra hard on the voice within his ear. Third, he sometimes mumbles and speaks gibberish when his brain and tongue get out of synch. Finally his answers ramble on, going from one stray thought to another, as he "filibusters" to consume all available time.
These "delivery" issues have received less attention from bloggers than the photographic evidence. But they deserve far more attention now, because the White House is obviously determined to prevent cameras from revealing any more bulges.
Thanks to TIVO and video blogging, Bush's rare public appearances can now be shared over the Internet and put under close "linguistic" scrutiny. James Poling was shocked when he caught Bush in the act on 12/20/04:
This is very strange. What the hell is wrong with President Bush, and I don't mean in the "oh my God you lied and invaded a country way" I mean in, I think there's really something either mentally or physically wrong with him.
Watch this video! [Link to C-SPAN clip that no longer exists but archived here.] Go to 16:47 in the press conference and keep your eye on Bush. He is in the middle of speaking to the press and he suddenly drops his head and mumbles something and then immediately continues speaking. It is seriously one of the oddest things I've ever seen.
Can anyone tell what he says? What the hell was that?
Does he have tourettes? Is he talking into his tie? Did his shoe fall off? Seriously, I have never seen anything like this.
I challenge the blogosphere to look for similar telltale video moments - as well as knowledgable linguistic experts - to prove that Bush relies on his earpiece for nearly every public event.
http://blog.democrats.com/node/3519/print

Published on Thursday, February 24, 2005 by Spiegel Online
With a Hush and a Whisper, Bush Drops Town Hall Meeting with Germans


During his trip to Germany on Wednesday, the main highlight of George W. Bush's trip was meant to be a "town hall"-style meeting with average Germans. But with the German government unwilling to permit a scripted event with questions approved in advance, the White House has quietly put the event on ice. Was Bush afraid the event might focus on prickly questions about Iraq and Iran rather than the rosy future he's been touting in Europe this week?

US President George W. Bush arrived in Frankfurt on Wednesday morning. He won't be meeting with the people here, but he will be meeting with a handpicked bunch of Germany's future business and political leaders. The much-touted American-style "town hall" meeting the White House has been planning with "normal Germans" of everyday walks of life will be missing during his visit to the Rhine River hamlet of Mainz this afternoon. A few weeks ago, the Bush administration had declared that the chat -- which could have brought together tradesmen, butchers, bank employees, students and all other types to discuss trans-Atlantic relations -- would be the cornerstone of President George W. Bush's brief trip to Germany.

State Department diplomats said the meeting would help the president get in touch with the people who he most needs to convince of his policies. Bush's invasion of Iraq and his diplomatic handling of the nuclear dispute with Iran has drawn widespread concern and criticism among the German public. And during a press conference two weeks ago, Bush said Washington is still terribly misunderstood in Europe. All the more reason, it would seem, for him to be pleased about talking to people here.

But on Wednesday, that town hall meeting will be nowhere on the agenda -- it's been cancelled. Neither the White House nor the German Foreign Ministry has offered any official explanation, but Foreign Ministry sources say the town hall meeting has been nixed for scheduling reasons -- a typical development for a visit like this with many ideas but very little time. That, at least, is the diplomats' line. Behind the scenes, there appears to be another explanation: the White House got cold feet. Bush's strategists felt an uncontrolled encounter with the German public would be too unpredictable.

To avoid that messy scenario, the White House requested that rules similar to those applied during Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's visit two weeks ago also be used in Mainz. Before meeting with students at Paris's Institute of Political Sciences, which preens the country's elite youth for future roles in government, Rice's staff insisted on screening and approving any questions to be asked by students. One question rejected was that of Benjamin Barnier, the 24-year-old son of France's foreign minister, who wanted to ask: "George Bush is not particularly well perceived in the world, particularly in the Middle East. Can you do something to change that?" Instead, the only question of Barnier's that got approval was the question of whether Iraq's Shiite Muslim majority might create a theocratic government based on the Iranian model?

The Germans, though, insisted that a free forum should be exactly that. Wolfgang Ischinger, Germany's Ambassador to the United States, explained to the New York Times last week: "We told them, don't get upset with us if they ask angry questions."

In the end, the town hall meeting was never officially dropped from the agenda of the trip -- instead it was dealt with in polished diplomatic style -- both sides just stopped talking about it.

As an ersatz for the town hall meeting on Wednesday, Bush will now meet with a well-heeled group of so-called "young leaders." Close to 20 participants will participate in the exclusive round to be held in the opulent Mozart Hall of a former royal palace in Mainz, giving them the opportunity for a close encounter with the president. The chat is being held under the slogan: "A new chapter for trans-Atlantic relations." The aim of the meeting is to give these "young leaders" a totally different impression of George W. Bush. In order to guarantee an open exchange, the round has been closed to journalists -- ensuring that any embarrassments will be confined to a small group.

The guest list for the Wednesday afternoon gathering has been handpicked by several US organizations with offices in Germany. In recent days, the Aspen Institute and the German Marshall Fund have sent lists of possible guests to the German Foreign Ministry. The requirement was that all of the nominees had to be in their twenties or thirties and they must already have been in a leadership position at a young age. In other words: there won't be any butchers or handymen on the elite guest list, but rather young co-workers from blue chip companies like automaker DaimlerChrysler, Deutsche Bank or the consultancy McKinsey. The fact that two American organizations are the ones managing the guest list suggests that the chat won't be overly critical of Bush.

One participant in the Bush round is 31-year-old Katrin Heuel of Berlin, an employee of the conservative Aspen Institute. Just a few days ago, she received an invitation from the Protocol Office of the German Foreign Ministry. She's a bit nervous about the encounter -- after all, Bush isn't someone she's likely to encounter in her daily life in Berlin. She says she hasn't heard anything about questions being scrutinized in advance or of any kind of script for the event. "I will ask very open questions about Iran, North Korea and Russia," she said, adding that she's excited to see how the president will react to the young people's questions.

Foreign Ministry sources said Berlin wasn't planning any briefing on the course of the chat prior to the event. And it's unknown whether the American staff will make any suggestions to the young leaders. Then again, the day's issue -- a new chapter for trans-Atlantic relations, seems to ensure that things won't get out of hand -- after all, this event is supposed to focus on the future and not dwell on prickly questions about the past.

With reporting by Matthias Gebauer in Berlin and Georg Mascolo in Washington.

© Spiegel Online 2005

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0224-08.htm

Hail, Hail The Gang's All Here
Ray McGovern
February 18, 2005
The appointment of John Negroponte to be director of National Intelligence is the latest evidence that President Bush is strengthening his cabinet's capacity to mislead Congress and trample civil liberties. Ray McGovern, 27-year veteran of the CIA, examines the meaning of the Negroponte appointment and the dark trend it confirms.

Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst from 1963 to 1990, is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. He chaired National Intelligence Estimates in addition to preparing the president’s Daily Brief.

The nomination of John Negroponte to the new post of director of National Intelligence (DNI) caps a remarkable parade of Bush administration senior nominees. Among the most recent:

Alberto Gonzales, confirmed as attorney general: the lawyer who advised the president he could ignore the US War Crimes Act and the Geneva Conventions on torture and create a “reasonable basis in law...which would provide a solid defense to any future prosecution.”
Michael Chertoff, confirmed as Secretary of Homeland Security: the lawyer who looked the other way when 762 innocent immigrants (mostly of Arab and South Asian descent) were swept up in a post-9/11 dragnet and held as “terrorism suspects” for several months. The dictates of PR trumped habeas corpus; the detentions fostered an image of quick progress in the “war on terrorism.”
John Negroponte: the congenial, consummate diplomat now welcomed back into the brotherhood. Presently our ambassador in Baghdad, Negroponte is best known to many of us as the ambassador to Honduras with the uncanny ability to ignore human rights abuses so as not to endanger congressional support for the attempt to overthrow the duly elected government of Nicaragua in the '80s. Negroponte’s job was to hold up the Central American end of the Reagan administration’s support for the Contra counterrevolutionaries, keeping Congress in the dark, as necessary.
Introducing...Elliot’s Protégé

Stateside, Negroponte’s opposite number was Elliot Abrams, then assistant secretary of state for Inter-American affairs, whose influence has recently grown by leaps and bounds in the George W. Bush administration. Convicted in October 1991 for lying to Congress about illegal support for the Contras, Abrams escaped prison when he was pardoned, along with former Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger (also charged with lying to Congress), former National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane and three CIA operatives. Indeed, their pardons came cum laude , with President George H. W. Bush stressing that “the common denominator of their motivation...was patriotism.” Such “patriotism” has reached a new art form in his son’s administration, as a supine Congress no longer seems to care very much about being misled.

President George W. Bush completed Elliot Abrams’ rehabilitation in December 2002 by bringing him back to be his senior adviser for the Middle East, a position for which the self-described neoconservative would not have to be confirmed by Congress. Immediately, his influence with the president was strongly felt in the shaping and implementation of policy in the Middle East, especially on the Israel-Palestine issue and Iraq. Last month the president promoted him to deputy national security adviser, where he can be counted on to overshadow—and outmaneuver—his boss, the more mild-mannered Stephen Hadley.

It is a safe bet that Abrams had a lot to do with the selection of his close former associate to be director of National Intelligence, and there is little doubt that he passed Negroponte’s name around among neocon colleagues to secure their approval.

As mentioned above, like Abrams, Negroponte has a record of incomplete candor with Congress. Had he been frank about serious government-sponsored savagery in Honduras, the country would have forfeited U.S. aid—thwarting the Reagan administration’s use of Honduras to support the Contras. So Negroponte, too, has evidenced Abrams-style “patriotism.” Those in Congress who still care, beware.

Civil Liberties At Stake

The liberties that Gonzales, Chertoff and Negroponte have taken with human rights are warning signs enough. The increased power that will be Negroponte’s under the recent intelligence reform legislation makes the situation still more worrisome.

How many times have we heard the plaintive plea for better information sharing among the various intelligence agencies? It is important to understand that the culprit there is a failure of leadership, not a structural fault.

I served under nine CIA directors, four of them at close remove. And I watched the system work more often than malfunction. Under their second hat as director of Central Intelligence, those directors already had the necessary statutory authority to coordinate effectively the various intelligence agencies and ensure that they did not hoard information. All that was needed was a strong leader with integrity, courage, with no felt need to be a “team player,” and a president who would back him up when necessary. (Sadly, it has been 24 years since the intelligence community has had a director—and a president—fitting that bill.)

Lost in all the hand-wringing about lack of intelligence sharing is the fact that the CIA and the FBI have been kept separate and distinct entities for very good reason—first and foremost, to protect civil liberties. But now, under the intelligence reform legislation, the DNI will have under his aegis not only the entire CIA—whose operatives are skilled at breaking (foreign) law—but also a major part of the FBI, whose agents are carefully trained not to violate constitutional protections or otherwise go beyond the law. (That is why the FBI agents at Guantanamo judged it necessary to report the abuses they saw.)

This is one area that gives cause for serious concern lest, for example, the law enjoining CIA from any domestic investigative or police power be eroded. Those old enough to remember the Vietnam War and operation COINTELPRO have a real-life reminder of what can happen when lines of jurisdiction are blurred and “super-patriots” are given carte blanche to pursue citizen “dissidents”—particularly in time of war.

Aware of these dangers and eager to prevent the creation of the president’s own Gestapo, both the 9/11 Commission and Congress proposed creation of an oversight board to safeguard civil liberties. Nice idea. But by the time the legislation passed last December, the powers and independence of the “Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board” had been so watered down as to be a laughingstock. For example, the Board’s access to information from government agencies requires the approval of the DNI and the attorney general, who can withhold information from the Board for a variety of reasons—among them the familiar “national security interests.” In addition, the Board lacks subpoena power over third parties. Clearly, if the Board does not have unfettered access to information on sensitive law enforcement or intelligence gathering initiatives, the role of the Board (primarily oversight and guidance) becomes window dressing. In short, the Board has been made lame before it could take its first step.

“What the hell do we care; what the hell do we care” is the familiar second line of “Hail, Hail, the Gang’s All Here.” Suffice it to say that, with Chertoff, Abrams and now Negroponte back in town, those concerned to protect civil liberties here at home and to advance them abroad need to care a whole lot.

Corruption, Politicization of Intelligence

Gen. William Odom, one of the most highly respected and senior intelligence professionals, now retired, put a useful perspective on last summer’s politically driven rush into wholesale intelligence reform. In a Washington Post op-ed on Aug. 1, he was typically direct in saying, “No organizational design will compensate for incompetent incumbents.” I believe he would be the first to agree that the adjectives “careerist and sycophantic” should be added to “incompetence,” for incompetence often is simply the handmaiden of those noxious traits. And the failure of the 9/11 Commission and the Congress to insist that real people be held accountable is a major part of the problem.

Intelligence reform in a highly charged political atmosphere gathers a momentum of its own, and the reform bill Congress passed late last year is largely charade. The “reforms” do not get to the heart of the problem. What is lacking is not a streamlined organizational chart, but integrity. Character counts. Those who sit atop the intelligence community need to have the courage to tell it like it is—even if that means telling the president his neocon tailors have sold him the kind of suit that makes him a naked mockery (as with the fashion designed by Ahmed Chalabi).

Is John Negroponte up to that? Standing in the oval office with Gonzales and Chertoff, will Negroponte succumb to being the “team player” he has been...or will he summon the independence to speak to the president without fear or favor—the way we used to at CIA?

It is, of course, too early to tell. Suffice it to say at this point that there is little in his recent government service to suggest he will buck the will of his superiors, even when he knows they are wrong—or even when he is aware that their course skirts the constitutional prerogatives of the duly elected representatives of the American people in Congress. Will he tell the president the truth, even when the truth makes it clear that administration policy is failing—as in Iraq? Reports that, as ambassador in Baghdad, Negroponte tried to block cables from the CIA Chief of Station conveying a less rosy picture of the situation there reinforces the impression that he will choose to blend in with the white-collar, white, White House indigenous.

The supreme irony is that President Bush seems blissfully unaware that the politicization that Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and he have fostered in the intelligence community has lost them an invaluable resource for the orderly making of foreign policy. It pains me to see how many senior careerists at CIA and elsewhere have made a career (literally) of telling the White House what they think it wants to hear.

If that proves just fine with the new DNI and he contents himself with redrawing wire diagrams, the security of our country is in greater danger. If, on the other hand, Negroponte wants to ensure that he and his troops speak truth to power–despite the inevitable pressure to fall in line with existing policy—he has his work cut out for him. At CIA, at least, he will have to cashier many careerists at upper management levels and find folks with integrity and courage to move into senior positions. And he will have to prove to them that he is serious. The institutionalization of politicization over the last two dozen years has so traumatized the troops that the burden of proof will lie with Negroponte.

The President’s Daily Brief

The scene visualized by President Bush yesterday for his morning briefing routine, once Negroponte is confirmed, stands my hair on end. I did such morning briefings for the vice president, the secretaries of State and Defense, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the National Security Assistant from 1981 to 1985—each of them one-on-one. Our small team of briefers was comprised of senior analysts who had been around long enough to earn respect and trust. We had the full confidence of the CIA director; when he was in town we would brief him just before lunch, hours after we had made the rounds downtown.

When I learned a few years ago that former director George Tenet was going down to the oval office with the briefer, I asked myself, “What is that all about?” The last thing we wanted or needed was the director breathing down our necks. And didn’t he have other things to do?

We were there to tell it like it is—and, in those days, at least, we had career protection for doing so. And so we did. If, for example, one of those senior officials asked if there was good evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and we knew that the serious, honest analysts thought not, we would say “No sir.”

But you ask, “Even if the director has said it was a ‘slam dunk?’” Yes. Even after the director had said it was a slam dunk! But bear in mind that in those days the task was not so heroic. We did not have the director standing behind us to “help.”

From what President Bush said yesterday, John Negroponte, the man farthest removed from substantive intelligence analysis—not to mention the background and genesis of the briefing items chosen for a particular day—will be the president’s “primary briefer.” I am told that President Bush does not read the President’s Daily Brief, but rather has it read to him.

Who will do the reading? Who will attempt to answer the president’s questions? Will there be a senior analyst there in a supporting role? Will s/he have career protection, should it be necessary to correct Negroponte’s answers? Will Negroponte ask CIA Director Porter Goss to participate as well? Will the briefer feel constrained with very senior officials there? Will s/he be able to speak without fear of favor, drawing, for example, on what the real experts say regarding Iran’s nuclear capability and plans? These are important questions. A lot will depend on the answers.

We had a good thing going in the '80s. Ask those we briefed and whose trust we gained. It is hard to see that frittered away. Worst of all, the president appears oblivious to the difference. I wish he would talk to his earthly father. He knows.

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/hail_hail_the_gangs_all_here.php

John O’Neill Wall of Heroes Update

John Nichols, The Nation: Congress may not be prepared to hold an honest debate on when and how the United States should exit the Iraq imbroglio, but the town meetings of rural Vermont are not so constrained. Declaring that "The War in Iraq is a Local Issue," citizens in communities across the state voted of Tuesday for resolutions urging President Bush and Congress to take steps to withdraw American troops from Iraq and calling on their state legislature to investigate the use and abuse of the Vermont National Guard in the conflcit.
Spearheaded by the Vermont Network on Iraq War Resolutions, Green Mountain Veterans for Peace and the Vermont Chapter of Military Families Speak Out, the campaign to get antiwar resolutions on town meeting agendas succeeded in more than 50 communities statewide. That meant that the issue was raised in more than one fifth of the 251 Vermont towns where the annual celebrations of grassroots democracy take place. Forty-nine towns voted for the resolutions. Only three voted "no," while one saw a tie vote. In the state's largest city, Burlington, the antiwar initiative received the support of 65 percent of electors...
One of the strengths of the Vermont resolution campaign was the focus on the status of the Vermont National Guard. That brought the issue home, as 200 of the state's 251 towns have residents who have been called up to serve in Iraq. A rural state where wages are low in many regions, Vermont has traditionally had a high level of participation in the National Guard. With Guard units being so heavily used in the Iraq, several studies show that Vermont has suffered the highest per capita death toll of any state since the war began a two years ago.
"There is nothing more quintessentially local than war, and the local connection is the National Guard," explains Ben Scotch, a former director of the Vermont American Civil Liberties Union who helped draft the model resolution for the town meetings. "The guard members and their families are our first concern. Discussions over the appropriateness of their use in the war need to start in our own communities."

media@aclu.org: The Justice Department admitted today that information it had retroactively classified could be released to the public and did not pose a threat to national security. The American Civil Liberties Union said the revelation could aid government whistleblowers in their efforts to fight unlawful dismissals.
"The Justice Department’s long-overdue admission goes to the core of the ACLU’s allegations that the government is going all out to silence whistleblowers to protect itself from political embarrassment," said ACLU Associate Legal Director Ann Beeson, who is representing former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds in a lawsuit challenging her termination. "This is hardly an isolated case, as numerous national security whistleblowers can attest. The government is taking extreme steps to shield itself while gambling with our safety."
The ACLU said that the Edmonds case is part of a larger pattern by the government to silence employees who expose national security blunders. Coleen Rowley, Manny Johnson, Robert Woo, Ray McGovern, Mel Goodman, Bogdan Dzakovic, and Mike German are just a few of the other national security whistleblowers who were vilified and retaliated against.

Published on Thursday, March 3, 2005 by The Nation

Vermont Votes No to War
by John Nichols

Congress may not be prepared to hold an honest debate on when and how the United States should exit the Iraq imbroglio, but the town meetings of rural Vermont are not so constrained. Declaring that "The War in Iraq is a Local Issue," citizens in communities across the state voted of Tuesday for resolutions urging President Bush and Congress to take steps to withdraw American troops from Iraq and calling on their state legislature to investigate the use and abuse of the Vermont National Guard in the conflcit.
Spearheaded by the Vermont Network on Iraq War Resolutions, Green Mountain Veterans for Peace and the Vermont Chapter of Military Families Speak Out, the campaign to get antiwar resolutions on town meeting agendas succeeded in more than 50 communities statewide. That meant that the issue was raised in more than one fifth of the 251 Vermont towns where the annual celebrations of grassroots democracy take place. Forty-nine towns voted for the resolutions. Only three voted "no," while one saw a tie vote. In the state's largest city, Burlington, the antiwar initiative received the support of 65 percent of electors.
"Many have wondered how a town meeting could direct something on a national scale," admitted Middlebury Town Manager Bill Finger. "But it does send a message that hopefully people are listening to."
Ned Coffin, an 83-year-old retired poultry farmer in the town of Bethel agreed. "I can't think of another forum in which people can express their views on any subject, even ones of national importance," explained Coffin. "The war was a mistake and this is a way for that message to be heard."
There is no question that the message was heard by Vermont's Congressional representatives. US Rep. Bernie Sander, I-Vermont, announced his support for the resolution being considered at the town meeting in Burlington. US Senator Jim Jeffords, I-Vermont, endorsed the resolution campaign, as did US Senator Patrick Leahy, D-Vermont, the ranking member of the Senate Appropriations Committee's Subcommittee on Foreign Operations. ''This resolution has prompted the kind of constructive debate that should be happening not only in Washington but in every community in the country, and Vermonters again are setting a good example of civic responsibility and participation,'' said Leahy.
Activists hope the Vermont resolution campaign will go national. Already, Amherst, Massachusetts -- which begins city council meetings by reading aloud the names of Iraqis and US soldiers who have died in the war -- has passed a "Bring the Troops Home" resolution, as has Arcata, California.
In November, San Francisco voters endorsed Proposition N, an antiwar statement that ended with the declaration, "The Federal government should take immediate steps to end the US occupation of Iraq and bring our troops safely home now."
One of the strengths of the Vermont resolution campaign was the focus on the status of the Vermont National Guard. That brought the issue home, as 200 of the state's 251 towns have residents who have been called up to serve in Iraq. A rural state where wages are low in many regions, Vermont has traditionally had a high level of participation in the National Guard. With Guard units being so heavily used in the Iraq, several studies show that Vermont has suffered the highest per capita death toll of any state since the war began a two years ago.
"There is nothing more quintessentially local than war, and the local connection is the National Guard," explains Ben Scotch, a former director of the Vermont American Civil Liberties Union who helped draft the model resolution for the town meetings. "The guard members and their families are our first concern. Discussions over the appropriateness of their use in the war need to start in our own communities."
Nancy Lessin, a co-founder of Military Families Speak Out, a national antiwar network that includes more than 2,000 military families, agreed. The Vermont approach, Lessin says, "brings into discussion the very people who should be discussing the impact of this war: National Guard families, local politicians, police departments, school officials."
John Nichols, The Nation's Washington correspondent, has covered progressive politics and activism in the United States and abroad for more than a decade. He is currently the editor of the editorial page of Madison, Wisconsin's Capital Times. John Nichols's new book, Against the Beast: A Documentary History of American Opposition to Empire (Nation Books) was published January 30
© 2005 The Nation
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0303-25.htm

SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/212425_kyoto17.html

Seattle dreams of 'green' team
Mayor urging other U.S. cities to enact Kyoto Protocol

Thursday, February 17, 2005

By KATHY MULADY
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

The U.S. government may have turned its back on the Kyoto Protocol, but Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels said yesterday he plans to spearhead a city-by-city effort to implement the climate-protection measures that went into effect in more than 100 other countries yesterday.

RELATED STORY
Energy converts in Seattle doing their part

Nickels said he is gathering support from mayors in other cities and plans to build a "green" coalition of his counterparts at the U.S. Conference of Mayors when the group meets in Chicago in June.

"Seattle, along with other U.S. cities, will provide the leadership necessary to meet this threat," Nickels said.

He plans to introduce a resolution at the mayors conference setting up the coalition for other cities to join. To be eligible, cities would have to agree to certain steps to lower greenhouse gas emissions. The details of the resolution are still being worked out.

The Kyoto Protocol was hammered out in Kyoto, Japan, in 1997 and commits countries to reduce or limit the output of six gases, chiefly carbon dioxide, a byproduct of burning coal and oil products.

By 2012 the European Union, for example, is to reduce emissions by 8 percent below 1990 levels and Japan by 6 percent.

The United States had envisioned a 7 percent reduction, signed the protocol in 1997, but in 2001, President Bush renounced the agreement, saying compliance would cost millions of U.S. jobs.

In the meantime, many cities across the country, including Seattle, have adopted the Kyoto Protocol standards, or set even higher goals.

When the city of Seattle adopted the Kyoto Protocol four years ago, while Paul Schell was mayor, it joined nearly 100 other U.S. cities in setting reduction targets.

The 2001 resolution called for dramatically reducing greenhouse gas emissions by the city, and calling on national leaders to support targets at least as aggressive as those described in the Kyoto Protocol.

Nickels said he will work with the state Legislature to pass the clean-car bill, requiring stronger emission standards for cars sold in Washington. The legislation is based on a similar law adopted in California.

Nickels has also directed city departments to reduce paper use 30 percent by the end of 2006 and said that global warming will be a consideration in doling out neighborhood matching fund grants.

Yesterday, Nickels also announced a commission on climate protection that will be led by Denis Hayes, founder of the first Earth Day and president of the environmentally focused Bullitt Foundation. Orin Smith, president of Starbucks Coffee Co., also will lead the committee.

In making his announcement yesterday, Nickels was flanked by Hayes and Steve Howard, chief executive of the Climate Group, a non-profit based in London dedicated to slowing greenhouse gas emissions.

Hayes described the effects of global warming that are already being seen in Europe. He described small indicators such as bees that no longer hibernate and a 2003 heat wave that killed thousands in Europe.

"Early movers like Seattle have a farsighted advantage in taking a leadership position," Howard said. "It is good for business, good for the community and good for the world."

Some see evidence of global warming in the Pacific Northwest where the snowpack provides water, hydroelectricity and irrigation. According to reports, the Cascade snowpack is down 50 percent since 1950.

The city of Seattle government has reduced its emissions 60 percent since 1990, said Steve Nicholas, director of the city's Office of Sustainability and Environment. The city required more fuel efficiency in its cars and attempted to reduce the number of trips taken.

However, communitywide it is a different story, according to a report by the Puget Sound Clean Air Agency.

By 2010 emissions are expected to increase 21 percent above the 1990 number, and by 38 percent by 2020.

About 50 percent of those emissions come from vehicles.

Councilwoman Jean Godden, head of the city's energy and environmental policy committee, was in Olympia yesterday to testify in support of the proposed clean car legislation. The bill calls on manufacturers to dramatically reduce car emissions by 2012.

"Interestingly enough, by doing that it could save people about $18 a month in gasoline costs," Godden said.

She said she is excited about Nickels' plans.

"As we know, the council adopted the Kyoto Protocol in 2001, and now the mayor has taken it a step farther and is challenging other cities to do the same," she said. "I am very excited, we are going the right direction and setting the standard. "

Councilman Richard Conlin, who was also in Olympia yesterday, called Nickels' announcement "great."

"All of those things are wonderful; we are glad to have him on board," Conlin said.

K.C. Golden, policy director for Climate Solutions, said Seattle is well positioned to set the standard for other cities.

"This was ground zero for the information revolution, we have more than our share of the world's innovators here," he said. "Our contribution to the solution can be bigger than our contribution to the problem."

Mayors in some other cities have already pledged to work with Seattle.

In a statement, Portland Mayor Tom Potter said his city was the first in the country to adopt a policy for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

"We are proud that the people of Seattle share our vision for turning the crisis of global warming into an opportunity to transform our economy and leave a healthier planet for our children and grandchildren," he said.

Mayor Jerry Brown of Oakland, Calif., added his support. Oakland has set a goal of 15 percent reduction by 2010.

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

This report includes information from The Associated Press.

© 1998-2005 Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Justice Dept. Opposes Bid to Revive Case against F.B.I.
By John Files
The New York Times
Saturday 26 February 2005
Washington - The government has told a federal appeals court that a suit by an F.B.I. translator who was fired after accusing the bureau of ineptitude should not be allowed to proceed because it would cause "significant damage to the national security and foreign policy of the United States."
Lawyers for the government said in a brief filed with the court on Thursday that the suit could not continue without disclosing privileged and classified information.
The translator, Sibel Edmonds, was a contract linguist for the bureau for about six months, translating material in Azerbaijani, Farsi and Turkish. Ms. Edmonds was dismissed in 2002 after complaining repeatedly that bureau linguists had produced slipshod and incomplete translations of important terrorism intelligence before and after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Ms. Edmonds also accused a fellow Turkish linguist in the Washington field office of blocking the translation of material involving acquaintances who had come under suspicion and said the bureau had allowed diplomatic sensitivities with other nations to affect the translation of important intelligence.
"The effect of the government's posture in this case will be to discourage national security whistle-blowers," said Ben Wizner, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union who is helping Ms. Edmonds. "She is fighting for the right to prove that she was wrongfully terminated."
The case has become a lightning rod for critics who contend that the bureau retaliated against Ms. Edmonds and other whistle-blowers who have sought to expose management problems related to the antiterrorism campaign.
The A.C.L.U. joined her cause last month, when it asked the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to reinstate her suit against the government. The suit was dismissed in July after Attorney General John Ashcroft invoked a rarely used power and declared the case as falling under "state secret" privilege.
The judge who issued that ruling, Reggie B. Walton of Federal District Court, had said he was satisfied with government statements that the suit could expose intelligence-gathering methods and disrupt diplomatic relations.
The Justice Department said in its brief that the appeals court should affirm Judge Walton's decision, adding: "The district court correctly recognized what the classified declarations in the record establish: the privileged information here is fundamentally implicated by Edmonds's allegations, and the case cannot be litigated without disclosure of that information, which would damage national security."
The case touches on potential vulnerabilities for the bureau, including its ability to translate sensitive counterterrorism material, its treatment of whistle-blowers and its classification of sensitive material that critics say could embarrass the bureau.
The Justice Department retroactively classified a 2002 Congressional briefing about the case and some related letters from lawmakers, but this week it decided to permit the information to be released. The inspector general of the department concluded last month that the F.B.I. had failed to aggressively investigate Ms. Edmonds's accusations of espionage and fired her in large part for raising them.
In a report that the department sought for months to keep classified, the inspector general issued a sharp rebuke to the bureau over its handling of Ms. Edmonds's accusations. It reached no conclusions about whether her co-worker had actually engaged in espionage, and it did not give details about the espionage accusations because they remain classified.
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http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/022605Y.shtml

Administration Blinks in Sibel Edmonds Case
By WilliamPitt,

Thu Feb 24th, 2005 at 08:09:07 AM EST :: War on Terror ::

Administration Blinks; Admits Retroactively Classified Information Not Harmful to National Security

February 22, 2005

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: media@aclu.org

Decision Likely to Have Significant Impact on Sibel Edmonds’ Appeal, Says ACLU

WASHINGTON - The Justice Department admitted today that information it had retroactively classified could be released to the public and did not pose a threat to national security. The American Civil Liberties Union said the revelation could aid government whistleblowers in their efforts to fight unlawful dismissals.

"The Justice Department’s long-overdue admission goes to the core of the ACLU’s allegations that the government is going all out to silence whistleblowers to protect itself from political embarrassment," said ACLU Associate Legal Director Ann Beeson, who is representing former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds in a lawsuit challenging her termination. "This is hardly an isolated case, as numerous national security whistleblowers can attest. The government is taking extreme steps to shield itself while gambling with our safety."

In May 2004, the Justice Department retroactively classified information presented two years earlier by the FBI to the Senate Judiciary Committee during two unclassified briefings regarding Edmonds, who had repeatedly reported serious security breaches and misconduct in the agency’s translation program. An executive summary of the Justice Department’s Inspector General report into her termination concluded that Edmonds was fired for reporting the misconduct, and that her allegations, if true, could have potentially damaging consequences for the FBI. Edmonds, a former Middle Eastern language specialist hired by the FBI shortly after 9/11, challenged her retaliatory dismissal by filing a law suit in federal court, but her case was dismissed last July after Attorney General John Ashcroft invoked the so-called "state secrets privilege." It was at that time that the Justice Department retroactively classified the two-year old briefings in attempt to bolster its "state secrets" claim. The ACLU is representing Edmonds in her appeal.

The government will file its response to Edmonds’ appellate brief on February 24th, and has indicated that portions of its response will be classified and unavailable for review by Edmonds or her attorneys. The ACLU’s Beeson said that this use of secrecy is highly suspicious in light of the Justice Department’s admission that the information retroactively classified does not pose a threat to national security.

Today’s actions came as a result of a separate lawsuit filed by the Project On Government Oversight (POGO) against Attorney General Ashcroft and the Justice Department, charging that the retroactive classification in Edmonds’ case was unlawful and violated POGO’s right to free speech. When forced to defend its extreme step of retroactively classifying information, the government was unable to do so and admitted the information could be released to the public without harm to national security.

Today’s development also follows the Justice Department’s release of the full Inspector General report on Edmonds’s dismissal at 5:00 p.m. on Friday, February 18, at the beginning of a holiday weekend. The ACLU said that the executive summary released last month actually revealed more information than the full 106-page Inspector General report, as the bulk of it was redacted.

The ACLU said that the Edmonds case is part of a larger pattern by the government to silence employees who expose national security blunders. Coleen Rowley, Manny Johnson, Robert Woo, Ray McGovern, Mel Goodman, Bogdan Dzakovic, and Mike German are just a few of the other national security whistleblowers who were vilified and retaliated against.

http://forum.truthout.org/blog/story/2005/2/24/897/14465
###

Published on Wednesday, March 2, 2005 by the Los Angeles Times

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

Agence France Press: A US attempt to insert language restricting abortion rights into documents prepared by a conference marking the 10th anniversary of a meeting in Beijing has sparked a determined response from European delegates as well as representatives of non-governmental organizations...
More than 150 such groups taking part in the conference that is examining the status of women a decade after the Beijing conference issued a statement Tuesday condemning the proposed US amendment.
"The purpose of this Session of the Commission on the Status of Women - the UN body charged specifically with advancing the status of women - is to reaffirm the Beijing Platform for Action, not to move backward or undermine it," the statement said.
"We, representatives of civil society organizations from all regions of the world, celebrate the historic achievement for women's human rights that the Platform represents," the document continued.

Published on Wednesday, March 2, 2005 by the Agence France-Presse

US Demand Causes Outcry at UN Meeting

A US attempt to insert language restricting abortion rights into documents prepared by a conference marking the 10th anniversary of a meeting in Beijing has sparked a determined response from European delegates as well as representatives of non-governmental organizations.
More than 150 such groups taking part in the conference that is examining the status of women a decade after the Beijing conference issued a statement Tuesday condemning the proposed US amendment.
"The purpose of this Session of the Commission on the Status of Women - the UN body charged specifically with advancing the status of women - is to reaffirm the Beijing Platform for Action, not to move backward or undermine it," the statement said.
"We, representatives of civil society organizations from all regions of the world, celebrate the historic achievement for women's human rights that the Platform represents," the document continued. "We strongly applaud the statement by Secretary General Kofi Annan that the Platform adopted in 1995 was 'a giant step forward' and that gender equality is critical to the development and peace of every nation', and we affirm his call for specific targeted actions to realize women's rights in ALL areas.
"In this light, we urge government delegations to oppose unequivocally the amendment to the Draft Declaration proposed by the United States. Let's affirm the Platform fully and move forward!" the signatories urged.
Nicole Ameline, the French Minister of Parity and Professional Equality, pointed out that the European Union and France, in particular, were opposed to the US amendment.
"France considers the Beijing Platform an achievement," the minister said at a press conference. "We are open to dialogue, but we also remain firm. It appears important to us to be able to adopt a new declaration without giving the world the impression that we are stepping back."
Ameline said this position had been unanimously approved by all 25 members of the European Union.
An aide to the minister explained that women's reproductive rights, as formulated in the Beijing Platform allow countries to legalize abortion but do not force them to do so.
Meanwhile, the US amendment will open the door to abortion bans, the aide pointed out.
The UN-sponsored World Conference on Women in Beijing set eight millennium goals, including cutting poverty by half by 2015.
Four other goals, based on recommendations from the Beijing conference, specifically affected women: universal access to primary education; promotion of gender equality; reduction of infant mortality; and improving women's health.
On Monday, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan urged governments to pursue a comprehensive strategy aimed at guaranteeing women equal rights worldwide.
The UN head recommended improving girls' access to secondary as well as primary education, guaranteeing sexual and reproductive health and rights as well as property and inheritance rights and increasing women's share of seats in national parliaments and local government.
Copyright © 2005 Agence France-Presse
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http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0302-06.htm